Kitabı oku: «Deep Time»
Only too aware, now, of the deadliness of his deceptively quiet surroundings …
… Gregory stood up.
Despite being insulated by the surrounding vacuum, he could feel his shipboard utilities—which with helmet and gloves doubled as an emergency environmental suit—stiffening around him, could feel the cold as though it literally were seeping in.
Impossible, of course. Heat was escaping his body, not cold seeping in, but that was what it undeniably felt like. His feet … he couldn’t feel his feet anymore, and his legs were starting to burn.
He felt oddly tranquil, despite the pain, despite the sudden realization that he may have just made a serious mistake. The landscape was serene, dark, utterly silent. It would have been easy to step out of the ruin of his Starblade and onto that flat, rock-strewn plain. That step, he knew, would have been lethal.
He also felt heavy. The planet’s gravity was dragging at him with almost twice the pull of home. But he managed to stand up straight … and raise his arms.
Overhead, St. Clair’s fighter descended like an unfolding blanket … the alien robots encircling it at a range of thirty meters. The blackness descended on him, scooped him up, folded him in …
And Gregory screamed with pain.
Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr 2015
Jacket layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover art by Gregory Bridges
William H. Keith, Jr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007483792
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007483839
Version: 2015-04-23
Dedication
For Deb, and, as ever, for Brea
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Epilogue
By Ian Douglas
About the Publisher
Prologue
“What the hell is that?”
“Dunno, Control,” replied the voice from Kapteyn Orbital. “It … it just popped up on our screens out of nowhere. It’s coming in fast … almost a half c. It’s—”
Commander Gerwin Dressler flinched as the projected holoscreen floating above his workstation lit up with an intense blue-white light. Something had just slammed into the research platform orbiting the local star at half the speed of light, converting five thousand tons of metal, ceramics, plastic, and organic crew members into a rapidly expanding cloud of hot plasma.
The base AI was saying that the object was in fact a diffuse cloud of particles, a cloud many astronomical units across and massing trillions of tons. There was other stuff in there, too, though … enigmatic structures, half-glimpsed constructions, things large and inexplicable shrouded within the particulate cloud.
And that cloud would be reaching Heimdall in seconds.
With a thoughtclick, Dressler sounded the base alarm.
“What is it?” the voice of Captain Roessler said in his head. He sounded groggy; it might be high noon local time, but by the base clocks, set to Greenwich Mean Time and measuring days and nights convenient to human biology, it was the wee hours of the morning.
“We’ve just lost Kapteyn Orbital, sir,” Dressler replied. “Here’s the data …”
“The Americans?”
“No, sir. Something … something else.”
Something very else.
He waited as the station’s commanding officer reviewed the scant data transmitted from the orbital. God, the sky outside was so beautiful …
The dome housing the base command and control center was set to project the view outside at the moment, showing a sky—deep blue to brilliant violet—dominated by the immense curve of the gas giant, Bifrost. Kapteyn’s Star, an M1.5 red dwarf less than a third the mass and radius of Sol, shone almost directly overhead. At a distance of 3.5 AUs, Kapteyn’s Star was shrunken to little more than a bright red pinpoint. Sharp eyes could distinguish its disk, but the much closer gas giant commanded the eastern sky at the moment, currently at half phase. The bands and swirls of pale brown, salmon, and white sweeping up from the glaciers on Heimdall’s horizon to the curve of Bifrost’s limb were clearly visible. Phantasmagorical aurorae circled the gas giant’s poles to either side and were answered by the dancing curtains of light across Heimdall’s northern sky.
Heimdall was a moon of Bifrost, circling its mammoth primary at a distance of just over 600,000 kilometers once every three days. Tidal interactions with the giant warmed Heimdall’s surface far more than did the wan and feeble sun.
God, he thought again. He could see the flare marking the death of Kapteyn Orbital with his unaided eye, a smear of white light bisected by the rim of Bifrost’s horizon. Automatically, he plotted the explosion’s position against the background stars, and the result chilled him.
“Whatever it is, Captain,” he told Roessler, “it’s coming in more or less on a vector from Omega Centauri.”
The research station’s personnel had been briefed, of course, on events out at the giant globular star cluster, the site of the enigmatic rosette of fast-circling black holes … and the Rosette Aliens. Not that it had done them much good.
The curve of Bifrost’s limb abruptly flared with blue and violet light … a rippling effect scattering out through the gas giant’s atmosphere. The aurorae at both poles brightened suddenly, then spread, engulfing the huge gas giant in seething flashes and pulses of auroral light.
“Are you sure it’s not the Americans?” Roessler demanded. “Some sort of high-velocity mass impact weapon …”
The USNA forces were notorious for their tactic of using clouds of sand released into space with speeds close to that of light. But Dressler was watching the cloud of minute particles spilling now across Bifrost’s horizon and the titanic half-glimpsed shapes behind the planet. Some of those shapes were bigger than Bifrost, measuring millions—even tens of millions—of kilometers across.
“I’m sure, sir.”
“But—”
“It’s not the Americans, sir. And yes, sir, I’m very sure.”
He checked on the position of the Confederation starships in orbit over Heimdall. One was currently above the antipodes, blocked from the alien cloud by the bulk of Heimdall itself.
“I suggest, sir,” he added, “that we dispatch the Kalmar back to Earth with a complete update.”
If, he thought, there was still time …
Chapter One
29 June, 2425
Marine 1/5
Fort Douaumont
France, European Union
0610 hours, GMT
The flight of Crocodiles shrieked out of the eastern sky, ventral thrusters hissing as they swung blunt prows toward the ancient fortress. Marine Staff Sergeant Gerald Swayze watched the stone walls below through his link with the Croc’s scanner array and prayed that this time Intel knew its ass from a hole in the ground.
The CL/BC-5 Crocodile was an ugly and ungainly piece of equipment: blunt, stubby, and no-nonsense, with a nano docking collar on its squared-off prow, broadly splayed landing legs, and a pair of turrets on its back that turned the landing craft into a semimobile fortress once it had completed its primary mission. In this case, that mission was transporting forty armed and armored USNA Marines from orbit to the surface of a hostile planet.
The hostile planet in this case was Earth, the objective a massive, centuries-old stone fortress deep within the territory of the European Union … a fortress known to history as Verdun.
“Stand ready, people!” Lieutenant Widner’s voice came through their in-heads, crisp and sharp. “Fifteen seconds!”
Swayze listened for any hint of fear or indecision there, but heard none. This was Widner’s first op as platoon commander, but he didn’t seem to carry the usual newbie CO baggage of arrogance or overconfidence in doing it all by the book. Mostly, that meant he’d been paying attention to his NCO staff in general and to Swayze in particular. With an attitude like that, they might actually be able to pull this op off.
“You apes heard the el-tee,” Swayze growled over the company tactical channel. “On your feet! Face front! When the nano kicks open the door, I want to see nothing but amphibious green blurs moving through that collar!”
“Amphibious green” was an anachronism, of course, but one long beloved of the Corps. Each Marine in the assault platoon was clad in full Mark I armor—the curving, black, nanoflaged surfaces scattering back a bewildering kaleidoscope of shapes, colors, and lights from the red-lit interior of the Crocodile transport. The nanoflage picked up on lights and colors surrounding the armor and transmitted it back. In the field, it provided what amounted to functional invisibility, but within the cramped confines of the Croc’s cargo deck it just gave you a functional headache.
A shudder ran through the Croc as it nosed into the fortress wall. According to the plans Swayze had seen, the wall here was two meters thick. It would take a few seconds for the collar to eat its way through that.
Something clanged against the Crocodile’s hull, sharp and insistent. Swayze heard the whine of the landing craft’s turrets slewing to port, followed by the howl of exciters and cooling pumps as the weapons opened up with a few thousand megawatts of high-energy laser response. Up forward, the docking collar was slowly extending, growing its way into the stone of the fortress wall, converting concrete and iron into free-flowing atoms and directing them along the tunnel’s interior surfaces where they froze as an ultra-hard crust supporting the opening. In space, a nano docking collar allowed Marines to tunnel through the hull of an enemy spacecraft without losing internal pressure. Here, pressure wasn’t an issue. They just needed to burrow through those two meters of concrete and steel … and do so before the enemy had time to respond.
When they were down to the last few centimeters, the Crocodile fired a series of probes through the remaining stone, putting insect-sized battlespace drones into the interior of the fortress. Swayze’s in-head showed what those drones were seeing—a dozen heavily armored Confed soldiers crouched in a broad stone tunnel, weapons ready.
This was not going to be pretty.
“We’ve got bad guys to either side of the entrance,” he told the others, “and straight ahead. Lead fireteam, focus on the ones straight ahead. The ones to either side will be worried about scoring own-goals.”
The defense obviously had been thrown together in a hurry, with nearby soldiers rounded up and pointed at the breach site. Putting gunners on both sides of the breach was a great way to ensure that some of them would suffer friendly fire.
He didn’t envy the lead fireteam, though. Two of them were manhandling bulky mirror shields, but they would be taking fire from three sides.
“Here we go!” Widner called.
The Croc’s interior docking hatch dilated open and the waiting Marines surged forward.
“Go! Go! Go!” Swayze yelled.
The door kickers went through first, crouched behind their shields. Those mirrored surfaces—backed by energy-damping exotic-material ceramics—would give them a fair degree of protection from handheld lasers and projectiles, but not as much from plasma beams. Blocked by the armored shapes in front of him, Swayze couldn’t see what was happening up ahead; an in-head window displayed the heart rates of the lead fireteam, but not their helmet-camera feeds. He needed to be focused on the entire platoon, not just the tacsit of the four in front.
“Watch it! We’re taking fire!” That was Corporal Addison, in the lead fireteam.
“Gaynor is down! Man down!”
An explosion sounded from ahead, and the Crocodile rocked with the concussion. The Marines kept filing forward, though, smoke billowing back into the transport’s interior. Swayze stooped low as he entered the docking collar and pressed into the tunnel. He was positioned halfway back in the line, which meant there were twenty Marines—four fireteams—in front of him.
Then he was through, stepping into a narrow passageway with walls, floor, and ceiling all of stone blocks. Two Marines were down on the deck, both still moving; a dozen Confed troopers were visible in the passageways left, right, and straight ahead.
The Marines stormed the fortress.
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto
United States of North America
0012 hours, EST
For President Alexander Koenig, it was as though he was actually there.
His staff had set up the direct link, and he was riding the transmitted thoughts and sensory impressions of Lieutenant Franklyn K. Widner’s Mark I combat armor. Those neural signals were being transmitted to the complex web of circuitry grown atom by atom through Koenig’s cerebral cortex.
As far as Koenig could tell, he was inside Lieutenant Widner’s armor, moving through dark stone corridors, following the electronic maps being thrown up against his visual field by the in-head circuitry. He could hear the shouts of the men over the tactical channel, hear Widner’s orders and the rasp of his breathing; even feel the mass and give of the armor as it responded to Widner’s movements. The only limitation was his lack of somatic control; he was a passenger only, receiving sensory impressions but unable even to turn his head to see what was beside him.
“Talman! Gonzales!” Widner was shouting. “Put fire on that passageway. Two o’clock!”
Everything was noise and confusion. Briefly, Koenig considered pulling back to the feed from one of the battlespace drones, but he preferred to hold on to the connection with the platoon commander. He could transmit messages to Widner over the tactical channel, but Koenig was a Navy veteran himself, and knew how frustrating—and outright deadly—micromanagement was. Widner didn’t need his input, and certainly wouldn’t appreciate it. Koenig continued to simply ride the boil and tumble of the firefight.
Besides, what Koenig was witnessing now was only a tiny part of the whole of Operation Fallen Star. Three other platoons of Alfa Company were inserting by Crocodile nearby, and a flight of ponderous Choctaw UC-154 shuttles—each carrying two hundred Marines—were coming in behind the Croc first wave. Fallen Star was an orbit-to-ground insertion of a full battalion: more than a thousand Marines, plus their support personnel.
And still, Koenig wondered if it would be enough. Verdun had a nasty reputation.
Verdun, a city on the Meuse River in northeastern France that had repulsed Attila the Hun, had by the early twentieth century become a defensive complex of twenty-eight forts. The meat-grinder battles of 1916 had slaughtered something like 150,000 Frenchmen and very nearly that many Germans. Fort Douaumont had been the largest of the French strongholds, with outer walls four hundred meters long, and comprising two underground levels, multiple casements and turrets, and living spaces for hundreds of men. After the war, Douaumont had become a war museum and remained so … until the beginning of the Sh’daar conflict in 2367. At that point, the Pan-European Union enlarged and deepened the facility, adding missile silos and plasma beam turrets and turning it into a planetary defense base.
The intent had been to protect the European Union from a Sh’daar attack, a scenario that had become all too possible when the Turusch had penetrated Earth’s outer system defenses in 2404, slamming a high-velocity kinetic-kill impactor into the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody, Koenig thought, had ever imagined that the ancient fortress at Douaumont would become the last-ditch refuge of the followers of General Janos Matonyi Korosi, the Butcher of Columbus and the leader of the Earth Confederation.
Events had proceeded in a chaotic tumble since the civil war between Confederation and the United States of North America had begun. Korosi, the USNA intelligence services believed, had been responsible for the nano-D strike against Columbus, D.C., formerly the USNA capital, an attack that constituted an almost unthinkably vicious war crime. Roettgen, the Confederation’s president, had vanished not long after—either a prisoner or murdered by Korosi’s thugs. A new president of the Confederation had been appointed from the Confederation Senate, Christian Denoix de Saint Marc, but smart money said he was either an innocent dupe or a corrupt front man for Korosi.
Then the USNA computer net facility at Cheyenne Mountain had launched Operation Luther, using the science of recombinant memetics to introduce a new religion into the Confederation’s electronic networks and social infrastructure. The new religion, called Starlight, had caught hold with astonishing speed, bringing with it a popular revulsion against a government that could condone the nano-disassembly of a city center, including hundreds of thousands of its civilians. A grassroots revolution had swept the ruling Globalist Party from power, and almost brought the civil war to an end.
Almost …
Geneva, the Confederation capital, had fallen to Starlightist rebel forces just two weeks ago. Working through electronic back doors put in place during Operation Luther, USNA Intelligence had been searching for the fallen regime’s leaders, and for Ilse Roettgen. They now believed that both Denoix and Korosi were in Douaumont, and the chances were good that Roettgen, if she was still alive, was there as well.
Catch Korosi and his stooges, and the war might be over for good.
And so, Koenig had authorized Fallen Star, a high-risk assault with the sole purpose of killing or capturing Korosi and Denoix, rescuing Ilse Roettgen, and bringing the nasty little war to a close.
Once that was done, Koenig reflected, all that was needful was to end the Sh’daar War, figure out what the Rosette Aliens wanted, and bring half of Earth back under a legitimate, reasonable, democratic, and above all peaceful government, one that would both recognize USNA independence and work with the United States to strengthen Humankind’s interests, both on Earth and throughout North America’s far-flung interstellar colonies.
Nothing to it.
“Concentrate on twelve o’clock! Hit ’em! Hit ’em!”
“Marine down! Marine down! Corpsman front!”
“Move, move, move …”
“First Section!” That was Widner’s voice, both on audio and transmitted in-head over the tactical channel. “With me!”
A passageway yawned ahead, with gray stone slabs underfoot and to either side. There was something up ahead, at the end of the corridor, but Widner’s helmet AI was having trouble parsing it out. What the hell was that?
Armored shapes rose from behind the object, which revealed itself now as an impromptu barricade: a jumble of furniture, concrete blocks, and steel drums blocking the stone corridor.
And behind it …
“Watch it! Damn it, watch it!”
Something slammed into Koenig’s chest, staggering him. It took him a dazed moment to recognize that he’d not been hit, but that a white-hot plasma bolt had slammed into Widner’s combat armor. Widner’s heart and respiration readouts went ragged, then dropped toward flatline. Koenig felt trapped, staring at the stone slabs of the corridor’s ceiling, unable to move, unable to do anything but lie there.
Widner died, and his armor began shutting him down for medevac and resuss …
VFA-96, Black Demons
LEO
0014 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Megan Connor rolled her fresh-grown Starblade until Earth’s vast sweep hung suspended in sun-kissed splendor above her head. The sunrise terminator stretched across the sky ahead of her now, out over central Europe, a razor-thin crescent of light across the black. It was just past midnight on the east coast of the USNA, a few minutes past six in the morning over France and most of the European Union. The Black Demons were in low Earth orbit, drifting southeast two hundred kilometers above the west coast of Europe. Below, city lights illumined the broken clouds over England. Sunrise at Verdun had occurred less than thirty minutes ago … but at this altitude she could see considerably farther into the new day than the Marines on the ground.
She adjusted her in-head view, connecting more closely with her fighter’s long-range senses.
Gods this new fighter is a dream!
Theoretically, with nanufacturing processes that could grow a new fighter from raw materials provided by asteroids in a matter of hours, there should have been no problem with constantly updating the USNA fighter fleet, discarding older designs like the SG-92 Starhawks and SG-101 Velociraptors and replacing them with the latest technology—in this case the SG-420 Starblade. The problem was not in the materials nanufacturing, but in retraining human pilots whose wetware—the organic tissue beneath the cerebral electronic implants and software—had already been shaped to control older designs.
The SG-420s, though, incorporated uprated AI components that could embrace Starhawk or Velociraptor training and experience as iterations within the larger pilot program. Still, what the star carrier America lacked was people to sit inside these new fighters: the campaigns of the past eight months—Arianrhod and Osiris and Vulcan—had killed too many good pilots. Replacements were coming on board from the training center at Oceana, but too few and too slowly, to bring the carrier up to full strength.
And yet, as Connor felt the sensuous flow of data streaming in through her fighter’s sensors and AI, she suppressed an exultant urge to shout for pure joy. Beauty exploded around her as the sun rose beyond the horizon ahead; blue water, the green patchwork of agricultural land, and the sweep of dazzlingly white cloud drifted beneath her. With the new system, it was easy to forget that you were flesh-and-blood wired into a cockpit barely large enough to receive you. Quite literally, she was the fighter; she stretched out an arm, and performed a graceful roll, the crescent of Earth rotating in front of her.
“Careful there, Demon Five,” the voice of Commander Mackey said inside her mind. “Let’s not get carried away.”
“Hard not to, Skipper,” she told the squadron’s CO. “This is incredible!”
“Maybe so, but stay focused on the mission. We’re coming up on Verdun and we don’t want to miss anything, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Not that they were likely to miss anything. VFA-96, the Black Demons, was actually at full squadron strength—twelve fighters—though only Connor, Mackey, and two others were in this flight. Aerospace control meant stretching your assets out across an entire orbit so that at any given moment there were at least some fighters positioned to respond to threats from below. The other Demons were spread out four thousand kilometers ahead and behind, and two more of America’s squadrons were covering the rest of the orbit. Adjustments were made from orbit to orbit so that four strike fighters were always passing over Verdun every ten minutes or so.
“So how’s the fight going down there anyway, Skipper?” That was Lieutenant Enrique Martinez, one of the squadron’s newbies fresh up from Oceana.
“According to plan,” Mackey replied. “The first LCs hit the fortress walls a few minutes ago. The big Choctaws are touching down now.”
“But when will we know?”
“When someone decides to tell us, Lieutenant. And until then, stay sharp and stay connected. The rebels aren’t going to take this lying down.”
The rebels. It sounded strange, the way Mackey used the term. Confusing, even. Until recently, the USNA had been the rebels, fighting for independence from the Earth Confederation. But since the Confederation government had fallen to the Starlighters, rebels now meant the holdouts in the original government—Korosi’s people.
“I’m not getting anyone down there but ’Pactors,” Connor said, reading her ship’s long-range scan. Six fighters from VFA-31, the Impactors, had deployed into the atmosphere over an hour ago, taking out the big planetary defense turrets mounted on the fort’s upper surfaces with high-velocity KK projectiles accelerated in from space. The strike had been the second phase of Operation Fallen Star, necessary to allow the transports to get in without being vaporized.
The first phase had been initiated by the Virtual Combat Center in Colorado Springs, an all-out electronic assault by former pilots linked in through the Confederation’s computer nets, opening backdoor channels and covert access feeds either discovered or, in many cases, created by the super-AI Konstantin from its base on the far side of Earth’s moon.
“Hang on a sec,” Lieutenant Junior Grade Chris Dobbs said. Another newbie, he’d been in the squadron less than seventy-two hours. “I’ve got multiple launches … dead ahead. Range, twenty-six hundred kilometers!”
Damn, the kid was right. The range put the launch site somewhere in central or southern Turkey, close to the Mediterranean … and Turkey was still part of the Confederation. Those fighters might well be rebels—pro-Korosi forces. They’d certainly timed their launch nicely … moments after the lead element of the Black Demons had passed overhead in their orbit.
Connor let the data flood through her. How many spacecraft … and what kind? Were they after the lead element, coming up on them from behind? Or were they going counter-orbit and closing with her?
“They’re firing!” Mackey warned.
Eight fighters—Confederation Todtadlers—and they were closing with Connor and her fellows at a very high acceleration. They’d just loosed a sand cloud, whose pellets were now hurtling toward the four fighters like the blast from an old-fashioned shotgun.
And in seconds, the battle was joined.
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto
United States of North America
0016 hours, EST
Koenig thoughtclicked an in-head icon and emerged inside his own body, gasping for air, stretched out on a recliner in his own office in Toronto. Marcus Whitney, his chief of staff and senior aide, was leaning over him with a worried look on his face. “Mr. President?”
“I’m okay, Marcus.”
“Your vitals took a real jump just now.”
“Nothing like the vitals on Lieutenant Widner.”
As an admiral in command of a carrier battlegroup twenty years before, Koenig had had a lot of trouble giving the orders that sent young men and women to their deaths.
It wasn’t any easier now.
“I’m going back in,” Koenig said. “Link me in with … let’s see …” He ran through a mental list of the Marines in Alfa Platoon, the ones still on their feet. “Staff Sergeant Gerald Swayze.” He was Widner’s senior NCO, and would be commanding the platoon now.
“Sir,” Whitney said, “it’s not like you can affect the outcome of the fight …” He sounded worried. “Damn it, you’re flirting with VRSD.”
The acronym was pronounced “ver-sid,” and stood for virtual reality stress disorder. What it really stood for was a whole spectrum of neurological injuries, addictions, and pathologies, including—most important—perceptual neural shock, or PNS. Though not common, some had suffered heart attacks, strokes, or slipped into comas when they “died,” even though their physical bodies were perfectly safe and healthy.
Koenig knew there was a risk, but he’d been in combat before, and experience tended to reduce the psychological impact of even the most traumatic experiences. Too, there were electronic safeguards designed to cut him from the circuit if monitors showed that his body back in the Emergency Presidential Command Post was reacting too strongly.
“I don’t think so,” Koenig told Whitney. He raised his voice slightly. “Health monitor? What say you?”
“Your heart rate peaked at one twenty-six,” the voice of the medical AI in the presidential complex told them. “Respiration peaked at thirty-five. Both are well within tolerable limits.”
“See, Marcus? I’m fine.”
“I still don’t like it, Mr. President. You could just let your intelligence people brief you after the fact, like a normal president.”
“Well, damn. Where’s the fun in that? I don’t think that—”
He stopped in mid-sentence. An alert was coming through from the suite of artificial intelligences overseeing the entire battle. It was data relayed from the star carrier America or, more specifically, from one of her squadrons. Eight Confed fighters had just boosted at high velocity from central Turkey and launched an attack on four of America’s fighters in low Earth orbit. The AI running the intelligence side of the operation was tagging the attackers as Korosi rebels.
Interesting. There was no way eight Todtadler fighters could seriously challenge three USNA strike fighter squadrons for space superiority, especially if they had to claw their way up out of Earth’s gravity well. Even if they got through the orbiting fighters, there were three USNA destroyers and four frigates farther out, providing in-depth support. Earth was bottled up tight right now against any attempt to break away.
What the hell were they trying to accomplish?
“Take them out,” Koenig ordered. “And keep me informed.”
A new icon had appeared within Koenig’s in-head a moment before, labeled with Staff Sergeant Swayze’s name. He thoughtclicked it … and opened his eyes, once again, in the shrieking, noisy hell of combat.
Chapter Two
29 June, 2425
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto
United States of North America
0018 hours, EST
Koenig was back in that fire-swept passageway, the scene overlaid by flickering numbers giving ranges, angles, and power levels, and by a bright red targeting reticule slaved to Swayze’s laser rifle, centered on whatever the rifle happened to be pointed at. At the far end of the passageway, laser and plasma gunfire snapped and hissed from the makeshift barricades.
“Grossmann! Nobunaga!” Swayze was yelling. “Get that pig in action! Flame those bastards!”
Koenig recognized the term. The Marines had a PG-80 as a platoon heavy weapon—a semiportable plasma gun—nicknamed the “pig” and designed to burn through most armor.
Swayze was using his laser rifle, trying to force enemy troops back from the ambush barricade at the far end of the passageway. Two armored shapes moved up beside him, manhandling the bulky weapon’s tripod into place. One of the Marines was hit, his faceplate vaporized by a plasma bolt, so Swayze shoved Grossmann’s body aside and took up a position next to the gunner, snapping up the heavy fire shield and dragging back the charge lever. He slapped Nobunaga’s shoulder, signaling readiness to fire.
“Hit ’em!”
Blue-white fire exploded through the dark passageway, charring stone walls already black with age. The barricade at the end of the hall exploded, hurling chunks of molten debris as armored figures scattered … or collapsed and lay still.
The pig fired again, blasting a hole in the steel door beyond, and then Swayze was up and running down the stone corridor, firing from the hip, waving his men on. “Let’s go, Marines! Ooh-rah!”
“Ooh-rah!” The ancient Marine war cry rang out in answer from a dozen throats, raw sound and fury, meaningless except to announce that the USNA Marines were charging.
And the enemy troops began throwing down their weapons and raising their arms in surrender.
Koenig watched as two more Marines—Jamison and Arkwright—pushed past Swayze as he stopped to hand the prisoners over to another Marine. He then followed the pair, over the half-molten ruin of the barricade and through the gaping hole in the steel door. Swayze shouldered his way into the stone chamber beyond, arriving just behind the other two Marines, who’d come to a dead stop. A soldier in shifting black-and-gray nanoflage armor stood with his back to the far wall, clutching a tiny woman in civilian utilities in front of him like a shield.
Through Swayze’s helmet camera, Koenig recognized the woman. Ilse Roettgen, former Senate president for the Earth Confederation, struggled in the armored man’s one-arm grip, her arms zip-stripped behind her back. In his free hand, the man clutched a deadly little 5mm needler, which he kept pressed against the side of her throat.
“Stop!” the man yelled, his amplified voice booming off the stone walls. “If you value her life, stop now!”
Koenig recognized that voice instantly. It was General Korosi … the Butcher of Columbus.
Swayze ran a voice print ID through his suit’s AI, a process that took only a second or so, and came to the same conclusion. “Put the weapon down, General,” he said, his voice level, reasonable, and as cold as ice. “If you kill her, I promise you that you will die, right here, right now.”
“So … I should surrender, so you can put me on trial for war crimes?” Korosi laughed, an ugly sound. His English carried a thick Hungarian accent. “‘Crimes against humanity,’ I think is the phrase you Americans use? And then you execute me anyway? I don’t think so …”
“Let her go, General. Hurt her, and you won’t believe how much worse you’ll make it for yourself.”
“There is nothing you can threaten me with worse than what will happen if I give myself up. You understand me?”
“I can promise you won’t be executed.”
“So that I can enjoy the effects of a neural net wipe? Ha! That’s worse than a clean death in battle! No! Here is how we play this, American. Ilse here, lovely lady that she is, will come with me, as a guarantee of your good behavior. You and your men will back off. You will clear these corridors! You will permit us to leave. No interference! You will arrange to have a flyer meet us at the surface, with an AI pilot slaved to my direct neural control, and with a range of at least ten thousand kilometers. The flyer will take me to a destination of my choosing … and I may release Roettgen there, if I am satisfied that you have not followed us. Now, put your weapons down and move back!”
A red targeting reticule was centered on Korosi’s faceplate, and Koenig wondered if the Marine was going to try for a head shot, firing from his hip. Had Korosi not been wearing combat armor, Koenig knew, Swayze might have tried it … but splash off the armor’s surface could burn the unarmored Roettgen quite badly.
Of course, Swayze might choose to accept the collateral damage, injuring the hostage in order to kill the hostage taker. He might even accept the hostage’s death. According to Fallen Star’s operational orders, finding and rescuing Ilse Roettgen was secondary to taking down Janos Korosi.
So the easy solution would be to burn Korosi down now, even if it meant the former Confederation president’s death. It would not have been Koenig’s personal choice, but then Koenig was not the one linked to Swayze’s laser rifle.
“Okay, okay,” Swayze said after a long and agonizing moment. “You win.” The targeting reticule winked off, and slowly the Marine lowered his rifle, placing it on the floor at his feet. “Don’t hurt her!”
“The rest of you! Put down your weapons!”
“Do as he says, Marines,” Swayze told the others. He shifted to the general tactical frequency. “Listen up, Marines! Clear the passageways. Korosi is coming up … with a hostage.”
“Transport, Staff Sergeant,” Korosi said. “Arrange for us a flight out of here.”
“Okay, okay,” Swayze said. “Meteor! This is Marine One-Five! I want a Chipper on the ground on top of this fort ASAP!”
Meteor was the code name for the battalion HQ running this op, while Chipper was military slang for a C-28 Chippewa robot transport. Definitely long-range enough for the ten-thousand-kilometer range Korosi specified. Koenig contemplated that requirement. Ten thousand klicks was enough to reach any of the three space elevators—in Ecuador, Kenya, or Singapore. But what then? Korosi had to know that he would be tracked. No doubt he had confederates waiting for him someplace.
Koenig turned the problem over in his mind. They wouldn’t be waiting for him off-world; the space elevators were too easily blocked, too easily powered down, isolating him. The likeliest scenario would be to touch down very briefly someplace on Earth along a direct line of flight to one of the elevators … and effectively disappear as the robotic transport continued its flight.
Damn it, it was imperative that Korosi not be allowed to escape. If he did, the war might grind on for years more, a guerilla action fought in jungles and villages and mountains from South America to Africa to Southeast Asia.
Koenig wasn’t linked in directly to Swayze’s thoughts, his internal monologue. That degree of electronic telepathy required more sophisticated equipment than was available here … and wasn’t desirable in any case. But he couldn’t help but wonder what the Marine had in mind. Clearly, the man was working toward an idea …
Swayze, unarmed now, raised both gauntleted hands. “Look, General … take me instead, okay? She’ll be nothing but trouble. I’ll promise to behave …”
Korosi laughed. “What … you? You’re an NCO, a foot soldier! What makes something like you as valuable as the former president of the Earth Confederation?”
Swayze took a couple of steps forward, his hands still raised. “Simple: I know the full deployment of the Marines for this assault … and I know the plans that were set in motion to trap you here, to keep you penned up. I know the troop deployments topside here, and I know what naval assets we have in orbit. General Korosi, I could help you. A lot.”
Another cautious step …
“No closer!” The Confederation general gestured with the needler, warning Swayze back.
It was enough.
Since the first half of the twenty-first century, military armor had incorporated feedback cybernetics that allowed the wearer to lift and carry far greater loads than were possible for an unarmored individual. Neural augmentation—new circuitry nanochelated throughout the living brain—made it possible for an armored man to react and move more quickly as well. Clad in their Mark I armor, Marines possessed both superhuman strength and speed.
Janos Korosi was almost certainly enhanced as well … but not enough.
Swayze’s gloved hand snapped down and out with blinding speed, closing around the needler, the glove’s palm blocking the weapon’s muzzle. Korosi’s hand clenched convulsively: he fired and Swayze screamed. The needler’s power pack gave it the ability to shoot eight pulsed bursts of coherent light or a single beam lasting a few seconds. Korosi had the weapon set for a beam, and the five-millimeter thread of laser light melted through the glove, Swayze’s hand, and the top side of the glove within perhaps half a second.
By then, though, the Marine had twisted Korosi’s arm out and back so that the weapon was no longer pointed at the hostage. Swayze crowded forward, grappling with the Confederation general, continuing to grip the smothered weapon with his terribly injured hand as he knocked Roettgen aside and interposed his own body between the two. He kept squeezing, too, for as long as his armor’s glove could exert the pressure, crumpling the needler’s tough plastic body in his grip even as molten metal and ceramic charred the palm of his hand. In-head readouts showed Swayze’s doloric levels—the amount of pain he was enduring—shooting up at first, then beginning to fall … either as Swayze’s enhanced brain stifled the pain response, or as the nerves in the more sensitive parts of his hand burned away and shock began to set in.
Korosi struggled in Swayze’s grip. The laser failed—either crushed to uselessness or its power pack drained—and Swayze wrestled the general to the ground. The other Marines were leaping forward now and piling on, grabbing Korosi’s thrashing legs and arms.
“Nem! Nem! Engedj el!” Korosi screamed, his native Magyar immediately translated by Swayze’s in-head. “No! No! Let me go!”
Swayze subdued the man at last through the simple expedient of sitting on Korosi’s chest, cradling his wounded hand as his armor’s med units began treating him.
And with that, Koenig knew that the fight for Fort Douamont was over.
VFA-96, Black Demons
LEO
0019 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Connor threw her Starblade into a hard-left roll and engaged her forward grav projector. A brief burst of acceleration at twenty thousand gravities and she was hurtling past the incoming projectiles, several of which flared into vapor as she brushed them with the intensely warped pucker of space just ahead of her fighter. Two of the Todtadlers ahead and below twisted around to meet her, but she caught one in a target lock with her PBP-8 and slammed it with a high-energy particle beam, flashing the fighter into star-hot vapor.
The Pan-European Todtadlers—Death Eagles—were highly advanced, modern fighters. They easily matched USNA fighters like the SG-101 Velociraptor, but they were utterly outclassed by the newer Starblades. Connor could feel her mind pervading every part of her ship’s consciousness, directing weapons, power, thrust, and attitude together in a rapturous dance. Her fighter shuddered as a KK projectile passed through one temporary wing … but the nanomatrix hull flowed around the slug as it passed through, directing it harmlessly past the pilot compartment and other vital elements, and back into space. Connor didn’t need to spin the craft. Rather, she simply reformed it in flight, bringing weapons to bear on the second target and vaporizing it in a flare of radiation and plasma.
“Demon Five!” she called over the tac channel. “Two kills!”
“Demon Seven! Scratch one Toddy Velocicrapper!”
And the fighters merged in an angry tangle of fire and destruction …
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto
United States of North America
0020 hours, EST
Koenig emerged again from his virtual connection. A chorus of screams and yells filled the Presidential Command Center and rang off the walls—a roomful of military officers, civilian officials, aides, and technicians jumping and shouting and hugging one another and slapping hands together, congratulating each other. In a smaller room just off from the center’s main control room, Koenig blinked against the overhead lights. “What the hell is that noise?” he asked.
“The guys are going a little nuts, sir,” Whitney replied. “They got Korosi!”
“I know,” Koenig said, sitting up. “I was there. And it was the One-Five Marines who got the bastard, not us.”
“It was a group effort, Mr. President.” He gestured toward the other room. “They found Korosi, and they tracked him to Verdun. And you gave the order …”
“And the Marines dug him out, and rescued Roettgen. Tell them to knock it off and get back on the job. We still have to withdraw our people.”
“Yes, sir.”
Whitney’s attempt to spread credit for the success around irritated him. Koenig had a particular and heartfelt disdain for the type of national leader who assumed the credit for his or her military’s successes. I directed … I ordered … We attacked … Bullshit. It was the men and women who were boots-on-the-ground in-theater—the ones getting shot at and taking the risks—who should get the credit, not the damned REMFs peering over their shoulders through drone cameras, satellites, or in-head links.
Admiral Eugene Armitage, the head of the Joint Chiefs, grinned at him. “But we did get the bastard, Mr. President.”
“Yes,” Koenig said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “We got him.”
Whitney nodded. “There’s more, Mr. President. You might have missed it, but they just flashed the word back. They’ve captured Denoix as well, trying to leave the perimeter by air car.”
Koenig smiled. His chief of staff was scolding him, mildly, by letting him know that the information he’d wanted had come through to the command post just as quickly as Koenig could have gotten it from a direct link. “Outstanding, Marcus.” He glanced at Armitage. “Admiral?” he said. “Please flash Meteor a ‘well done’ from me, personally.”
Armitage nodded. “As you wish, Mr. President.”
“There’s … ah … there is still one part unresolved, sir,” Whitney told him.
“The recovery, yes. I assume you have the heavy transports on the way.”
“Yes, sir. But it’s not that.”
“What, then?”
“Eight Todtadlers launched a few minutes ago from a site in southern Turkey … a city called Adana.”
“Adana? What do they have there?”
“It’s one of Turkey’s larger cities, sir … and the site of a small spaceport. Incirlik.”
Koenig nodded as data flowed through his in-head. “Got it.”
Once, Incirlik had been a joint U.S. and Turkish military air base, back in the days of the old NATO alliance. After the mid-2100s and the beginnings of the Pax Confeoderata, the facilities had been developed as a local spaceport for Pan-Europe’s burgeoning asteroid mining initiatives. Turkey, geographically astride both Europe and Asia, had been an ideal region for economic development after both the Islamic Wars and the more recent Sino-Western Wars.
But the rise of the space elevators—first at SupraQuito, then in Kenya and in Singapore—had perhaps already doomed such antiquated assets as national spaceports. There wasn’t much at Incirlik now, save for a small military base.
But why were they attacking the USNA fighters in LEO?
For a moment, Koenig watched the data flow describing the slash and stab of aerospace fighters in low orbit. That why was becoming an increasingly important question. With the fighting at the Verdun planetary defense center all but over, there was no reason to challenge American space superiority, none at all.
Unless …
He called up a holographic map display, the board hanging transparent in midair showing the orbit of America’s space superiority fighters southeast across the Balkans, Turkey, the Arabian Peninsula, and out over the Indian Ocean. A red dot flashed at the northeastern corner of the Med, marking Incirlik. Four of America’s fighters had just shot down the last of the Todtadlers from the base; four more USNA Starblades were four thousand kilometers ahead … coming up now on the southern tip of India.
“A second launch, Mr. President,” Armitage reported. “More Death Eagles.”
“How many?”
“Five, sir. No … make that six …”
“From where?”
“Surat, Mr. President. North India.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Koenig said, thoughtful. Surat was a large city on India’s northwestern coast, next to the Gulf of Khambhat. “I think those Death Eagles are trying to punch a hole through our orbiting squadron,” Koenig said.
“For what possible purpose, sir?” Whitney asked.
“For an escape. Admiral Armitage?”
“Sir!”
“I suggest you order the Elliot and the Hawes down from their perch for a closer look.”
“Right away, sir.”
The Elliot was a destroyer massing eight thousand tons, the Hawes a smaller frigate, a light escort of about three thousand tons. The two had recently been assigned to America’s carrier group and were now deployed in HEO—high Earth orbit, about thirty thousand kilometers out.
“Who would be trying to escape, Mr. President?” Whitney asked. “If we have both Denoix and Korosi—”
“Might be members of Korosi’s staff,” Koenig said. “Or it might be the real architects of Columbus.”
“The real architects, Mr. President?” Whitney shook his head. “We already know Korosi was behind that, don’t we?”
“No, Marcus, we don’t. He’s a nasty character, I’ll admit, but the Confederation really didn’t have reason to eat a city, not when they had to take that big of a public-relations hit.”
As Koenig had noted, the attack by the Confederation ship Estremadura—awful as it had been—had done more damage by far to the Confederation than to North America. Nation states that had been sitting on the sidelines of the fast-evolving civil war—the Chinese Hegemony and the Islamic Theocracy, especially—had openly come into the war against the Confederation. Perhaps just as important, members of the Confederation—including Russia, North India, and England—had immediately distanced themselves from the world state, with Russia and North India both seceding from the Geneva government.
But the politics over there were still murky. One of the Confederation ships escorting the Estremadura on her deadly mission, Koenig remembered, had been the North Indian heavy cruiser Brahmaputra. At least some within the North Indian government, clearly, had known about the nature of the attack that had destroyed Columbus … and approved of it. If fighters were coming up from Surat, they might well be piloted by officers still loyal to Korosi, even if New Delhi had disowned the guy since the attack.
And knowing if that was true was crucial. With the takedown of the last major fortress controlled by Korosi forces, Koenig knew it was vital to maintain the momentum; handled properly, Korosi’s capture might end the war.
So the question remained: Who the hell was trying to escape the USNA’s tightening noose?
VFA-96, Black Demons
LEO
0022 hours, TFT
Megan Connor thoughtclicked a symbol, sending two VG-10 Krait missiles streaking toward the last Confederation fighter. At a range of just two hundred kilometers, the missiles detonated in twin flares of dazzling, silent light … and the enemy Todtadler disintegrated in tumbling, half-molten fragments.
Elsewhere in the sky, soft-glowing clouds of expanding hot plasma and debris marked the passings of the other fighters; one had re-entered the atmosphere below, a streak of ablating hull material scratched across the intense blue of the Indian Ocean.
Through her communications link, Connor could hear the chatter among the other pilots in her squadron.
“Nice shot, Five! That’s a kill!”
“The last one! Hot damn, and we didn’t loose a single damned ship!”
That was pretty spectacular, Connor thought. Eight fighters in that first launch out of Turkey … and six more from North India. Fourteen fighters against four of the new Starblades, and every single one of them shot down without a single loss. That was worth a hot damn in anyone’s flight log.
“Hey, Skipper? Demon Six. My scanners weren’t picking up any people in those ships!”
“Copy that, Six. America’s S-2 concurs. They were all on AI.”
“Shit, why? Aren’t we good enough for them?”
For centuries, the debate had continued to natter back and forth over the need for human pilots in fighter cockpits. Undeniably, artificial intelligences were faster than humans, sharper, more immediately aware, and surer in their assessment of data … but humans seemed to add a degree of creativity and inspired improvisation to the mix. So far, at least, the best tactical advantage seemed to rest with human brains cybernetically wired into AI-controlled spacecraft.
And the 14-and-0 victory they’d just won was a resounding validation of that … that and the fact that the new Starblade design left even the most advanced Confederation spacecraft chewing hard vacuum. But maybe the unbalanced outcome wasn’t so surprising after all, since it had involved enhanced humans fighting machines.
Especially machines on some sort of preset program …
“Skipper?” she said, running through her sensor feeds. “See that, to the north?”
“What the hell?”
“That’s a fucking starship!” she exclaimed. “Running hot and under escort!”
And now the Confederation’s plan was clear. The attack rising from a spaceport in Turkey had served to scatter the four fighters riding that part of the space superiority orbit—not badly, but a little. The second wave of enemy fighters, coming south from Surat, had scattered the flight even further; the nearest other fighter to Connor’s right now was Mackey’s … a good fifteen hundred kilometers to her southeast.
And with the four Starblades scattered all over the sky, now was when the enemy was launching something big … and escorted by twelve more Todtadlers.
“The ship is cloaked,” Connor reported. “But I’m getting a mass of around four thousand tons.”
“Small,” Lieutenant Ruxton said. “Frigate size.”
“Fleet Combat Command is designating the target as Charlie One,” Mackey said.
“Where the hell is our capship backup?” Dobbs was referring to the two capital ships, the Hawes and the Elliot, which had been ordered down to LEO to support the USNA fighters.
“On the way, Demon Six,” Mackey replied. “In the meantime, let’s see what we can do.”
Connor was trying to read through the enemy’s cloaking, which was an offshoot of gravitic screening. The technology to bend light around a ship, affording partial invisibility, had been around for several centuries, but the effort generally wasn’t worth the power consumption … or the fact that a cloaked ship couldn’t see out any more than others could see in. There really was little point in doing it at all … unless there was something about that small starship that the Confederation didn’t want the Americans to see.
Now what the hell, she wondered, were the bastards trying to hide?
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