S T A R �
S T R I K E �
BOOK ONE OF THE INHERITANCE TRILOGY
I A N D O U G L A S �
To CJ and Garin, good friends who saw me through �
rough times. And, as always, for Brea. �
Contents�
Deep within the star clouds of the Second
Galactic
Spiral… 1
The Specters descended over the Southern
Sea, slicing north through…
5
Ramsey kicked off, his 660-ABS armor
amplifying his push and…
21
“Okay, Marines. How are we going to do this?” 34
Lieutenant General Martin Alexander completed
the final download encompassing the…
49
It was, Alexander decided, a bit like being
in
an…
62
Garroway opened his eyes, blinked, and flexed
his hands. This…
78
Lieutenant Tera Lee unlinked from the feed
and
blinked
in…
93
Lieutenant Lee watched the stream of returning
data from Chesty3,…
107
It was, Alexander thought, a less than auspicious
start
to…
120
Like Earth, Mars possessed a ring.
133
The passage from Alighan to Sol took six
weeks.
For…
148
The transport was two weeks out from Sol. For
the…
165
“General?” Cara said within his mind. “I think
the
AI…
179
“So? How does it feel?” PFC Sandre Kenyon
asked
him.
196
“What the hell were you thinking, Marines?”
Either Lieutenant Kaia…
209
Skybase drifted in empty space, alone and
unattended,
now,
as…
222
PFC Aiden Garroway could scarcely move. He
had a little…
236
Garroway had been wondering if any of the
SAPs
were…
252
The Galaxy is a hellishly big place.
267
“Recon Sword, launch door is open and you are
cleared…
282
“What the hell is that?” General Alexander
wanted to know.
296
General Alexander hadn’t gotten much sleep
that
night.
311
General Alexander was listening in on the
debriefing of the…
325
Emerging from the tube-car transport from his
office, General Alexander…
340
The side of the Euler ship cycled open as
Garroway…
355
Garroway took careful note of the time—1258
hours,
nine…
368
“Garroway? How you feeling, son?”
384
Deep within the star clouds of the Second Galactic Spiral
Arm, a sentient machine detected the blue-white shriek of
tortured hydrogen atoms, and a program hundreds of thou-
sands of years ancient switched from stand-by to active.
Something was out there . . . something massive, something
moving at very nearly the speed of light.
Even the hardest interstellar vacuum contains isolated
flecks of matter—hydrogen atoms, mostly, perhaps one
per cubic centimeter or so. The object’s high-speed pas-
sage plowed through these atoms, ionizing many, leaving
a boiling hiss in its wake easily detectable by appropriately
sensitive instrumentation. The disturbance was a kind of
wake, created by a mass of some hundreds of millions of
tons plowing through the tenuous matter of the interstellar
void at near- c .
The sentry machine had taken up its lonely vigil half a
million years before, during the desperate and no-quarter
war of extermination against the Associative, a war that
had laid waste to ten thousand suns and countless worlds
scattered across a third of the Galaxy. Occasionally, it
conversed with others of its kind—a means of staying sane
through the millennia—but for most of its existence it had
been asleep, dreaming the eldritch dreams of a being nei-
ther wholly mechanism, nor wholly biological.
The builders of the Sentry called themselves something
that might have translated, very approximately, as “We
Who Are.” Other species across light centuries of space and
hundreds of millennia called them many other things. The
2
IAN DOUGLAS
inhabitants of Earth, once, had called them “Xul,” a name
that in ancient Sumeria had come to mean “demon.”
A far older civilization had called them the Hunters of
the Dawn.
However they were known to themselves or to others,
how they were identified was less important for their view
of themselves than was their evolutionary imperative, the
drive, refined over millions of years, that made them what
they were. For the Xul, existence—more, survival —was an
absolute, the defining characteristic of their universe. In
their worldview, survival meant eliminating all potential
competition. Their culture did not have anything like re-
ligion, but if it had, their religion would have been a kind
of Darwinian dogmatism, with the fact that they had so
far survived serving as proof that they were, indeed, the
fittest.
For the Xul, the first requirement for continued survival
was the detection and identification of potential threats to
existence. An object with the mass of a fair-sized asteroid
traveling through the Galaxy at near- c velocities indicated
both sentience and a technology that might represent a seri-
ous threat.
With an analytical detachment more characteristic
of the computers in its ancestry than of organic beings,
the Sentry tracked the disturbance through local space.
A ripple twisted the fabric of space/time, and the Sentry
shifted across light-years, emerging alongside the massive
object, traveling at precisely the object’s velocity.
At this speed, a hair’s breadth short of the speed of light
itself, the universe appeared weirdly and beautifully com-
pressed, a ring of solid starlight encircling the heavens
slightly ahead of the hurtling vessels. With the patient calm
of a lifespan measured in millennia, the Sentry reached out
with myriad senses, tasting the anomalous traveler.
Outwardly, the object was an ordinary asteroid, a car-
bonaceous chondrite of fairly typical composition, with a
dusty, pocked surface of such a dark gray color as to be
nearly coal black. Outwardly, there was no indication of
intelligent design—no lights, no artificial structures on the
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3
surface, no thruster venturis or other obvious clues to the
object’s propulsive system. Even the high velocity might be
an artifact . . . a souvenir of a long-ago close-passage of a
black hole or neutron star, with the resultant slingshot effect
whipping a random, dead rock to within one percent of c .
But the Sentry’s gentle probings elicited other evidence,
proof that the fast-moving object was both the product of
technology and inhabited. A steady trickle of neutrinos
proved the presence of hydrogen fusion plants, providing
power for life-support and secondary systems. The tick and
flux of even more subtle, virtual particles revealed the op-
eration of a quantum effect power system, tapping the base
state of space itself for the energies necessary to move that
much mass at that high a speed. The drive was quiescent
now, but the potential remained, a subtle aura of shifting
energies representing fields and forces that might engage at
any moment. Perhaps most telling of all, a powerful shield
composed of interplaying gravitic and magnetic fields swept
space far ahead of the starship—for starship is what the
object was—clearing its path of stray subatomic particles
lest they strike rock and cascade into deadly secondary ra-
diation, frying the ship’s passengers as they slept away the
objective decades.
For passengers there were—some fifty thousand of them,
stored in a cybernetic hibernation that let them pass de-
cades of subjective time without the need for millions of tons
of food, water, and other expendables. At the moment, the
only member of the starship’s crew that was actually awake
was a being far more closely related, in its basic nature, to
the Sentry than it was to the slumbering beings in its care, a
sentient computer program named Perseus.
For over five hundred years, Perseus had overseen the
routine operation of the asteroid starship and her refugee
passengers, monitoring drive systems and power plant, life
support and cybe-hibe stasis capsules. The ship, christened
Argo , had fled distant Earth a few years after the devastat-
ing attack on that world by the Xul; her destination was an-
other galaxy entirely, M-31, in Andromeda, something over
two million light-years distant.
4
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The voyage as planned would take almost 2.3 million
years objective, but on board the clocks would record the
passage of barely thirty years. Argo ’s sleeping passengers,
for the most part, were members of Earth’s political and
economic elite. Many were representatives of the govern-
ments of the United States and of the American Union who’d
felt Humankind’s only hope of survival lay in avoiding all-
out war with the technologically advanced Xul, in escaping
the enemy’s notice, in fleeing to another galaxy entirely and
beginning anew.
Their decision proved to be a supreme exercise in wish-
ful thinking. The Xul sentry engaged Perseus as the sentient
program was still shifting to full operational mode. It had
time to engage a single emergency comm channel before the
Xul group-mind overwhelmed it in an electronic cascade of
incoming data.
Parts of Perseus were hijacked by the alien operating
system; others were wiped away, or simply stored for later
exploration.
And within the Argo -planetoid’s heart, fifty thousand
human minds cried out as one as they were patterned and
replicated by the intruder. Moments later, the asteroid’s im-
mense kinetic energy was instantly transformed into heat
and light, bathing the Xul Sentry in the actinic glare of a
tiny nova.
By the Xul way of thinking, the asteroid starship repre-
sented both a threat and unfinished business.
Neither could be tolerated.
0407.1102
Green 1, 1-1 Bravo
Alighan
0340/38:22 hours, local time
The Specters descended over the Southern Sea, slicing
north through turbulent air, their hulls phase-shifted so that
they were not entirely within the embrace of normal space.
Shifted, they were all but invisible to radar, and little more
than shadows to human eyes, shadows flickering across a
star-clotted night.
On board Specter One-one Bravo, Gunnery Sergeant
Charel Ramsey sat huddled pauldron-to-pauldron with the
Marines locked in to either side of him. The squad bay was
red lit and crowded, a narrow space barely large enough to
accommodate a platoon of forty-eight Marines in full Mark
660 assault battlesuits. He tried once again to access the
tacnet, and bit off a curse when all that showed within the
open mindwindow was static. They were going in blind, hot
and blind, and he didn’t like the feeling. If the Muzzies got
twitchy and started painting their southern sky with plasma
bolts or A.M. needlers, phase-shifting would not protect
them in the least.
“They’re holding off on the drones,” Master Sergeant Adel-
len said over the tac channel, almost as if she were reading his
mind. Likely she was as nervous as the rest of the Marines in
the Specter’s belly. She just hid it better than most. “They don’t
want to tip the grounders off that we’re on final.”
6
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“Yeah, but it would be nice to see where the hell we’re
going,” Corporal Takamura observed. “We can’t see shit
through the LV’s optics.”
That was not entirely true, of course. Ramsey had a
window open in his mind linked through to the feed from
the Specter’s cockpit. Menu selections gave him a choice of
views—through cameras forward or aft, in visible light, low-
light, or infrared, or a computer-generated map of the planet
that showed twelve green triangles in a double-chevron for-
mation moving toward the still-distant coastline. Ramsey
had settled on the map view, since the various optical feeds
showed little now but water, clouds, and stars.
The MLV-44 Specter Marine Landing Vehicles were
large and slow, with gull wings and fusion thrusters that gave
them somewhat more maneuverability than a falling brick,
but not much. Each mounted a pair of AI-controlled high-
speed cannon firing contained micro-antimatter rounds as
defense against incoming missiles, but they relied on stealth
and surprise for survival, not firepower, and certainly not
armor. A Specter’s hull could shield those on board from the
searing heat of atmospheric entry, but a mag-driven needle
or even a stray chunk of high-energy shrapnel could punc-
ture its variform shell with shocking ease. Ramsey had seen
the results of shrapnel impact on a grounded Specter before,
on Shamsheer and on New Tariq.
The Specter jolted hard, suddenly and unexpectedly, and
someone vented a sharp curse. They were falling into denser
air, passing through the cloud deck, and things were getting
rougher.
“One more of those,” Sergeant Vallida said, her voice
bitter, “and Private Dowers gets jettisoned.”
“Hey, Sarge! I didn’t do anything!”
“Don’t pick on Dowers,” Adellen said. “He didn’t know.”
“Yeah, but he should have. Fucking nectricots. . . .”
It was rank superstition, of course. Even if it went back
over a thousand years. Maybe it was the sheer age of the tra-
dition that gave it so much power. But somehow, back in the
twentieth or twenty-first century, it had become an article
of faith that if a Marine ate the apricots in his ration pack
STAR STRIKE
7
before boarding an alligator or other armored transport, the
vehicle would break down. Over the centuries, the focus
of the curse had gradually shifted from apricots to genegi-
neered nectricots, but the principle remained the same.
And Ela Vallida had walked in on Dowers back on board
the Kelley just before the platoon had saddled up that morn-
ing, to find him happily slurping down the last of the nectri-
cots in his drop rats. Dowers was a fungie, fresh out of RTC,
and not yet fully conversant with the bewildering labyrinth
of tradition and history within which every Marine walked.
“Fucking fungie,” Vallida added.
“Belay that, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Jones growled. First
Platoon’s CO wasn’t evenly physically present on the squad
bay deck; the eltee was topside somewhere, plugged into the
C3 suite behind the Specter’s cockpit, but she obviously was
staying linked in on the platoon chat line. “Chew on him
after One-one Bravo craps out, and you have something to
bitch about.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Vallida replied. But Ramsey still heard
the anger in her voice.
Likely, he thought, it was just the stress. This was always
the roughest part of a Marine landing, the long, agonizing
wait, sealed into a tin can that was flying or swimming
toward God-knew what kind of defenses. Did the Alighani
Muzzies know the Marines were coming? What was waiting
for them at the objective?
How many of the men and women sealed into this Spec-
ter were going to be alive an hour from now? . . .
Don’t even think about that, Ramsey told himself. It’s
bad ju-ju. . . .
Not that he actually believed in luck, of course . . . or in
the power of nectricot curses. But he didn’t know anyone
who’d survived the hell of modern combat who didn’t engage
in at least a few minor superstitious behaviors, and that in-
cluded Ramsey himself. He never went into combat with-
out a neumenal image of his Marine father watching from a
minimized mindwindow. Totally irrational, he knew.
His mental gaze shifted to the tiny, mental image of
Marine Master Sergeant Danel Jostin Ramsey, resplendent
8
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in his dress blacks . . . an image recorded just days before the
landings on Torakara.
The Specter gave another hard lurch. According to the
feed from the cockpit, it was raining outside now, and light-
ning flared behind the clouds ahead. The mission planners
had chosen to insert through a large, tropical storm, taking
advantage of lightning and rain to shield the assault group’s
approach for a precious few seconds longer.
“Listen up, people,” Lieutenant Jones’ voice said over the
platoon net. “We’re three minutes out, and about to drop
below the cloud deck. Remember your training, remember
your mission downloads. Keep it simple! We secure the
spaceport, and we hold until relieved. Ooh-rah?”
“Ooh-rah!” the platoon chorused back at her.
Seconds later, a loud thump announced the release of
the battlezone sensor pods, and the main tactical feed came
on-line as thousands of thumb-sized microfliers were shot-
gunned into the skies ahead of the assault group. Ramsey
opened a mental window, and entered a computer-generated
panorama of ocean, and the coastline to the north. Red pin-
points illuminated the coast, marking generators, vehicles,
and other power-producing facilities or units. The spaceport
was marked in orange, the Fortress in white, with sullen red
patterns submerged within the graphics, indicating the main
power plants.
As he watched, more power sources winked on. That
might be an illusion generated by the fact that more and
more BZ pods were entering the combat area, but it also
might mean the enemy had been alerted and was waking
up.
But so far, the skies were quiet, save for the flash of light-
ning and the sweeping curtains of rain.
Remember your training. Yeah . . . as if that were a prob-
lem. Remember your downloads. Their mission parameters
had been hard-loaded into their cephlink RAM. It wasn’t
like you could freaking forget. . . .
Keep it simple. Secure the spaceport. Hold until
relieved.
Nothing new there, either.
STAR STRIKE
9
The question was whether the landings would be enough.
Alighan was a heavily populated world in the Theocracy
of Islam, with over two billion people in the ocean-girdled
world’s teeming cities. The Marine assault force codenamed
Green 1 consisted of the four companies of the 55th Marine
Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, a total of 580 men and
women . . . against an entire world.
True, they were exceptionally well armed and armored
men and women, and they seemed—for the moment at least—
to have kept the element of surprise. Even so, fewer than six
hundred Marines against a population of two billion . . .
Impossible.
Ridiculously impossible.
But the United Star Marines, once the United States Ma-
rines, specialized in the impossible, as they and their prede-
cessors had done for the past eleven hundred years.
Alighan. The name was derived from the Arabic term
for “God is Guardian,” and the name suited the place. The
system of five rocky planets orbiting a K0 star was strategi-
cally positioned along the New Dubai trade route, a chan-
nel for ninety percent of the interstellar shipping between
the Heart Worlds and the Theocracy. Control Alighan,
and you controlled access to the Islamic state . . . or to the
Heart Worlds, depending on which way your battlefleet was
headed. Scuttlebutt had it that the Terran Military Com-
mand wanted Alighan as an advance base for deeper strikes
into Theocratic space.
The key, of course, was the planetary starport, Al Meneh,
“The Port,” which doubled as the system capital. The battle-
ops plan called for the Marines to seize and hold the starport.
Within a standard day—two at the most—the Navy trans-
ports would arrive from Kresgan, bringing with them the
Army’s 104th Planetary Assault Division, the 43rd Heavy
Armored Division, and elements of the 153rd Star Artillery
Brigade and the 19th Interstellar Logistical Support Group.
And the Marines, those who’d survived, would be off to
their next planethead.
Five hundred planetary assault Marines against two bil-
lion Muslim fanatics. . . .
10
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Ramsey shook his head, a gesture unseen within the mas-
sive helmet of his 660-ABS. In fact, the vast majority of the
local population would not be fanatics. Most of the population
down there would be ordinary folks who wanted nothing more
than to be left alone, especially by their own government.
But experience gained so far in the present war—and
in other wars fought against the Theocracy and similar
governments over the past eleven centuries—taught that
the ones who did fight would do so with all their heart and
soul, with no thought of quarter, and with no mind for the
usual rules of war.
They would fight to the death, and they would take as
many Marines with them as they could.
So far as the Marines of the 55th MARS were concerned,
they would be happy to help the Muzzies find their longed-
for medieval paradise.
Without going with them.
USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
0455/24:20 local time, 1513 hrs GMT
“Gods and goddesses, Jesus, Buddha, and fucking Lao Tse!
Those fat-assed bastards up in Ring City are trying to fuck-
ing destroy my Corps! . . .”
Gunnery Sergeant Michel Warhurst stopped his pacing
in front of the ragged line of recruit trainees and shook his
head sadly. “You maggots are trying to fucking destroy my
Corps! My beloved Corps! And I am here this morning to let
you know that I will not stand for that!”
Recruit Private Aiden Garroway stood at a civilian’s ap-
proximation of attention, staring past the glowering drill
instructor’s shoulder and off into the velvet, star-riddled
blackness of the Martian night. After a brief flight down
from the Arean Ring, he and his fellow recruits had been
unceremoniously hustled off the shuttle, herded into line by
screaming assistant DIs, and were now being formally in-
ducted into Recruit Company 4102 by the man who would
rule their lives for the next sixteen weeks.
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11
He was actually enjoying the show, as the drill instruc-
tor paraded back and forth in front of the line of recruits.
Three assistant DIs stood a few meters away, two glower-
ing, one grinning with what could only be described as evil
anticipation.
He’d been expecting this speech, of course, or something
very close to it. For the past two years, ever since he’d de-
cided to escape a dead-end jack-in and shallow friends by
enlisting in the United Star Marines, he’d lived and breathed
the Corps. Boot camp, he knew, would be rough, and it
would begin with exactly this kind of heavy-handed polem-
ics, a strategy honed over the centuries to break down the
attitudes and preconceptions of a hundred-odd kids with ci-
vilian outlooks and build them back up into Marines. It was
part of a tradition extending back over a thousand years . . .
and it self-evidently worked.
And getting through boot camp, he’d decided, wouldn’t
be all that tough, not for him. After all, he knew what it was
all about. He knew . . .
“What the fuck are you daydreaming about, maggot!? ”
The DI’s face had appeared centimeters in front of his
own as if out of nowhere, contorted by rage, eyes staring,
mouth wide open, blasting into Garroway’s face with hur-
ricane force. The sheer suddenness and volume forced him
to take a step back. . . .
“And where the fuck do you think you’re going, you slimy
excuse for an Ishtaran mudworm? Get back here and toe that
line! I am not done with you, maggot, not by ten thousand
fucking light-years, and when I am done you will know it!
Drop to the sand! Give me fifty, right here ! ”
Startled, Garroway swallowed, looked at Warhurst, and
stammered out a “S-sorry, sir!”
The senior drill instructor’s face blended fury with thun-
derstruck. “What did you say?”
“I’m sorry, sir!”
“What did you just call me? Gods and goddesses of the
Eternal Void, I can’t believe what I just heard!” Warhurst
brought one blunt finger up a hair’s breadth away from Gar-
roway’s nose. “First of all, maggot, I did not give you per-
12
IAN DOUGLAS
mission to squeak! None of you will squeak unless I or one
of the assistant drill instructors here gives your sorry ass
permission to squeak! Is that understood?”
Garroway wasn’t sure whether a response was called for,
but suspected this was one of those cases where he would get
into trouble whether he replied or not. He remained mute,
eyes focused somewhere beyond Warhurst’s left shoulder.
“Give me an answer, recruit! ” Warhurst bellowed. “Is
that understood?”
“Yes, sir!”
“What? ”
“Yes, sir! ”
“Second of all, for your information my name is not
‘Sorry.’ So far as you putrid escapees from a toilet bowl
are concerned, I am sir!” He turned away from Garroway
and strode up the line, bellowing. “In fact, so far as you
mudworms are concerned, I am God, but you will always
address me as ‘ sir!’ If you have permission to address me
or any of the other drill instructors behind me, the first
word and the last word out of your miserable, sorry shit-
hole mouths will be ‘ sir!’ All of you! Do I make myself
abundantly clear?”
Several in the line of recruits chorused back with, “Sir,
yes, sir!” A few, however, forgot to start with the honorific,
and most said nothing at all, or else mumbled along.
“What was that? I couldn’t hear that!”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“What?! ”
“Sir, yes, sir! ”
Warhurst turned again to glower into Garroway’s face.
“Third! Recruits will not refer to themselves as ‘I’! You are
not an I! None of you rates an I! If for any reason you are
required to refer to your miserable selves, you will not use
the first person, but you will instead say ‘this recruit!’ That
goes for all of you! Is that clear? ”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“Fourth! If I give you an order, you will not say ‘sir, yes,
sir!’ You will reply with the correct Marine response, and
say ‘ Sir, aye, aye, sir!’ You are not Marines and you may
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13
never be Marines, but by all the gods of the Corps you will
sound like Marines! Is that clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir! ” came back, though it was made ragged
by a few shouted “Sir, aye, aye, sirs.” The recruits were all
looking a bit wild-eyed now, as confusion and sensory over-
load began to overwhelm them.
Garroway thought Warhurst was going to explode at the
company for using the wrong response. Reaching the left
end of the line, he spun sharply and charged back to the
right. “Idiots! I ask for recruits and they give me deaf, dumb,
and blind idiots!” Turning again, he charged back to the left,
raw power and fury embodied in a spotlessly crisp Marine
dress black-C uniform. “Get the shit out of your ears! If I
ask a question requiring a response of either ‘yes’ or ‘no,’
you will say ‘sir,’ then give me a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ as required,
and then you will again say ‘sir!’ ” Stopping suddenly at the
center of the line, he turned and bellowed, “Is that clear? ”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“And when I give you an order, you will respond with ‘sir,
aye, aye, sir!’ Remember that! ‘Aye, aye’ means ‘I under-
stand and I will obey!’ Is that understood?”
“S ir, yes, sir! ”
Garroway was impressed. Under the DI’s unrelenting
barrage, the line of recruits, until moments ago a chaotic
mélange of individually mumbled responses, was actually
starting to chorus together, and with considerable feeling . . .
but then the DI was back in his face once again, eye to eye,
screaming at him. “What the hell are you doing on your
feet, maggot? I gave you a direct order! I told you to give me
fifty! That’s fifty push-ups! ”
Damn! Garroway had been as confused as the rest,
stunned into unthinking immobility by the DI’s perfor-
mance. He dropped to the ground, legs back, arms holding
his body stiffly above the sand, and started to perform the
first push-up, but then Warhurst was hauling him upright by
the scruff of his neck, dangling him one-handed above the
sand, still screaming. “I did not hear you acknowledge the
order I gave you, mudworm!”
“Sir, yes, sir! Uh, I mean, aye, aye, sir!”
14
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“What was that? ”
“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”
Warhurst released him. “Gimme those fifty goddamn
push-ups! ”
“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”
Garroway dropped again and began cranking out the
push-ups. He’d worked out a lot over the past couple of years,
knowing that this sort of thing would be routine. He’d also
spent a lot of time recently working in the Recovery Projects
back on Earth. There he massed a full 85 kilos, so he had a
bit of an advantage of some of the other kids in the line. On
Mars, he only weighed 32 kilos, compared to the 60 kilos he
carried at his home level in the Ring.
So right now he weighed half what he normally did, and
was feeling pretty strong, even competent. The push-ups
came swiftly and easily as Warhurst continued to parade
up and down the line of recruits, finding fault everywhere,
screaming invectives at the other recruits. Before long, Gar-
roway wasn’t the only one doing push-ups. He completed his
count and stood at attention once more, surprised to find he
was breathing harder, now. In fact, his chest was burning.
The Martian air was painfully thin, despite the nano-
chelates in his lungs that increased the efficiency of his
breathing. The terraformers had been reshaping Mars for
almost four centuries, now, hammering it with icebergs to
begin with, but more recently using massive infusions of
nanodecouplers to free oxygen from the planet-wide rust
and restore the ancient Martian atmosphere. For the past
two centuries, the air had been breathable, at least with
nanotechnic augmentation, but it was still thin, cold, and
carried a harsh taste of sand and chemicals.
Abruptly, as if at the throw of a switch, Gunnery Ser-
geant Warhurst’s fury was gone. Instead, he seemed relaxed,
almost paternal. “Very well, children,” he said, standing
before them with his hands on his hips. “You have just had
your first fifteen minutes of Marine indoctrination and
training . . . an ancient and hallowed tradition we refer to as
‘boot camp.’ Each of you has volunteered for this. Presum-
ably, that means each of you wants to be here. I certainly
STAR STRIKE
15
understand that desire. The Marines are the best there are,
no question about it.
“However, I want each and every one of you to take a
moment and think very hard about this decision you’ve
made. Behind you is the shuttle that brought you down from
the Arean Ring. If for any reason you are having second
thoughts, I want you to turn around right now and plant
your ass back on board that shuttle. You will be flown back
up to the Arean Ring, where you can retrieve your civilian
clothing, have a nice hot meal, and make arrangements to
go home. No questions asked. No one will think the less of
you.” He paused. “How about it? Any takers?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Garroway sensed movement
down the line to his left. Someone was wavering . . . and
then he heard the sound of footsteps in the sand, moving
toward the rear. He didn’t dare look, however. The formation
was still at attention, and he had a feeling that if he turned
his head to look, Warhurst’s sudden nice-guy persona would
vanish as abruptly as it had begun.
“Smart boy,” Warhurst said, nodding. “Anybody else?
This will be your last chance. If you miss that shuttle . . .
then for the next sixteen weeks you will be mine.”
Garroway thought he heard someone else leave the line,
but he wasn’t sure. He knew he wasn’t going to quit, not now.
He was going to be a Marine. . . .
“Handley!” Warhurst snapped, addressing one of the re-
cruits. “Eyes front!”
“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”
A long silence passed. Warhurst stood before them, his
head down, as if he were listening to something. Then he
looked up. “I want each of you to open your primary inputs.
Full immersion.”
Garroway did so. His neurocranial link implants opened
to a local feed coming down from the Martian Ring. It was
coded, but each had received the appropriate clearances up
at the receiving station.
There was a moment’s mental static, followed by the
always odd feeling of standing in two places at once . . .
. . . and then Garroway was standing on another world.
16
IAN DOUGLAS
It was night there, as it was at Noctis Labyrinthus. It was
also raining, though the link was not transmitting the feel of
the rain on his skin, or the bluster of the wind.
He could see, however, a formation of Marine landing
vehicles skimming in a few meters above the surf and spray
of a beach, their black hulls shimmering as they phased
into full solidity, their variform shells unfolding into land-
ing configuration. Lightning flared . . . or perhaps it was a
plasma bolt fired from the shore. It was tough sorting out
exactly what was happening, because there was a great deal
of noise and movement.
One of the landing vehicles crumpled with nightmare sud-
denness in midair, flame engulfing its gull-winged form, the
wreckage tumbling out of the sky and slamming into the surf
in a crashing fountain of spray and steam. Plasma bolt, Gar-
roway thought. An instant later, a beam of dazzling incan-
descence struck down out of the black overcast, a white flash
starkly illuminating the beach and the incoming formation as
it lanced the squat building from which the plasma bolt had
been fired. The explosion further lit the night, as the first of
the shape-shifting landing craft began touching down.
In his mind, Garroway turned, watching as other craft
passed overhead. There was a city behind the beach . . . and
what looked like a large and sprawling spaceport. Beams of
light continued to spear out of the angry heavens, vaporizing
enemy hardpoints.
And now, individual Marines were appearing in their
cumbersome combat armor, bounding through flame and
smoldering wreckage and sand dunes to close with the
enemy.
“This,” Warhurst’s voice said in Garroway’s head, “is
taking place on a world called Alighan, about four hundred
light-years from where you’re standing right now. There’s
a slight delay in the feed, but, within the uncertainties im-
posed by the physics of FTL simultaneity and the time lag
down from the Arean Ring, it is happening more or less as
you see it. The image is being relayed from our battlefleet
straight back to HQ USMC. Colonel Peters thought you
should see this.”
STAR STRIKE
17
More Marines surged across the beach, sweeping toward
the outer Alighan beach defenses. Other landing craft had
passed over those bunkers and gun emplacements and were
settling to ground on the spaceport itself. Fire continued to
lance out of the sky, pinpoint bombardments called down by
Marine spotters. Garroway found he could hear some of the
chatter in the background, a babble of call signs, orders, and
acknowledgments.
“The Islamic Theocracy,” Warhurst went on, “has blocked
several key trade routes into their territory. Worse, they have
supported terrorist incursions into Commonwealth Space,
seized Commonwealth vessels, and are suspected of holding
Commonwealth citizens as slaves.
“As you should know by now, the sole purpose of the
U.S. Marine Corps is to protect Commonwealth worlds and
Commonwealth citizens. To that end, a naval battlefleet
and a Marine Expeditionary Force have been dispatched to
effect a change in the Theocrat government. Their first step
is to capture the spaceport you see in the distance, so that
Army troops can land and occupy the planet.
“The politics of the situation are unimportant, however.
Marines go where they’re sent. They do what they’re told to
do. They do so at the behest of the United Star Common-
wealth, and the Commonwealth Command Authority. All
very nice, neat, and clean. . . .
“But this, children, is what modern combat really is.”
The scene around Garroway was rapidly becoming a
burning nightmare out of some primitive religion’s hell.
With a mental command, his point of view drifted up
from the beach toward the spaceport, where the heavi-
est fighting was now taking place. The landing craft all
were down now—those that had survived the approach.
Upon touching down, their fuselages had broken into sec-
tions, becoming automated mobile gun platforms; the
wing, cockpit, and spine assemblies then each had lifted
off once more, becoming airborne gunships that darted
across the scene like immense, spindly insects, spewing
plasma bolts and blazing streams of autocannon fire. And
individual Marines, forty-eight to each LV, fanned out
18
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across the flame-tortured landscape, hunting down the
enemy one gun position or hardpoint at a time. Overhead,
Marine A-90 Cutlass sky-support attack craft darted and
swooped like hideously visaged black hornets, locking
in on ground targets and blasting them with devastating
fire.
Clouds of gray fog swept over the landscape from differ-
ent directions—combat nano and counternano, waging their
submicroscopic battles in the air and on the ground. Disas-
semblers released by the Muzzies were seeking out Marines
and vehicles, while the counter-clouds roiling off Marine
armor and vehicles sought to neutralize them. The result
was a deadly balance; in places, the ground was melting, the
rain hissing into steam.
Almost in front of him, a Marine bounded in for a land-
ing, his combat suit making him seem bulky and awkward,
but the impression was belied by the grace of movement on
the suit’s agrav packs. The Marine touched down lightly,
aimed at an unseen target with the massive field-pulse rifle
mounted beneath his right arm, then bounded again.
The armor itself, Garroway saw, was mostly black, but
the surface had a shimmering, illusive effect that rendered
it nearly invisible, an illusion due to the nanoflage coating
which continually adapted to incoming light. In places, he
saw blue sparks and flashes where enemy nano-D was trying
to eat into the suit’s defenses, but was—so far—being suc-
cessfully blocked by the suit’s counters.
Neither near-invisibility nor nanotechnic defenses could
help this Marine, however. As he grounded again, some-
thing flashed nearby, and the man’s midsection vanished in
a flare of blue-white light. Legs collapsed to one side, head
and torso to the others, the arms still, horribly, moving. Gar-
roway thought he heard a spine-chilling shriek over the link,
mercifully cut off as the armored suit died. Rain continued
to drench the hot ruin of the combat suit, steaming in the
flare-lit night, and the armor itself, exposed to the relentless
embrace of airborne nanodisassemblers, began to soften,
curdle, and dissolve.
The arms had stopped moving. There was a great deal
STAR STRIKE
19
of blood on the ground, however, and slowly dissolving wet
chunks of what might be . . .
Gods. . . .
Garroway struggled not to be sick. He would not be sick.
He wrenched his mental gaze away from the feed, and stood
once more in the Martian night.
“Being a Marine is one of the greatest honors, one of the
greatest responsibilities available to the Commonwealth cit-
izenry,” Warhurst said, his voice still speaking in his mind
over the implant link. “But it is not for everyone. It requires
the ultimate commitment. Fortitude. Courage. Character.
Commitment to duty and to fellow Marines. Sometimes, it
requires the ultimate sacrifice . . . for the Commonwealth.
For your brother and sister Marines. For the Corps.
“You’ve all just seen what modern combat is like . . . what
it’s really like, not what the entertainment feeds would have
you believe. Do any of you want to see this thing through?”
Garroway heard others leaving the line; he didn’t know
how many. He also heard someone retching off to his left.
After a long pause, Warhurst nodded. “Okay,” he said.
“Get ’em out of here.”
With a whine, the agrav shuttle at Garroway’s back lifted
into the Martian night. He felt the flutter of wind as it passed
overhead, and he watched its drive field grow brighter as
it accelerated back to orbit, back to the Arean Rings that
stretched now across the zenith like a slender, taut-pulled
thread of pure silver.
“You maggots,” Warhurst growled, his former tough-DI
persona slowly re-emerging, “you mudworms are even more
stupid than I was led to believe. All right. Show’s over. Like
I said earlier, from this point on, you are mine. I personally
am going to eat you alive, chew you up, and spit your worth-
less carcasses out on these sands.
“But maybe, maybe, a few of you will have what it takes
to be Marines.” Turning, he addressed one of the assis-
tants—the evil-grinning one. “Sergeant Corrolly!”
“Yes, Drill Instructor Warhurst!”
“We need to find out what these worms are really made
of. Let’s take them on a little run before breakfast!”
20
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The evil grin grew wider. “Yes, Drill Instructor!”
“Move out!”
“Aye, aye, Drill Instructor!” The assistant DI turned to
face the waiting survivors of the morning’s muster. “You
heard the Drill Instructor! Recruit platoon . . . lef’ face!
For’ard, harch! And . . . double time! Hut! Hut! Hut! . . .”
Garroway began to hut.
And within twenty minutes, as he dragged screaming leg
muscles through the fine, clinging, ankle-deep sand of the
Martian desert, he was wondering if he was going to be up
for this after all.
What the hell had he been thinking when he’d volun-
teered? . . .
0407.1102
Green 1
Meneh, Alighan
0512/38:20 hours, local time
Ramsey kicked off, his 660-ABS armor amplifying his push
and sending him in a low, flat trajectory across bubbling
ground. Maneuvers like this always carried a damned-if-
you-do, damned-if-you-don’t risk. Jump too high and your
hang time made you an ideal target; jump too low and flat
and a miscalculation could slam you into an obstacle.
He came down next to a ferrocrete wall, his momentum
carrying him into the half-collapsed structure with force
enough to bring more of it down on top of him, but he was
unhurt. A quick check around—he was a kilometer from the
city’s central plaza. All around him, the skeletal frameworks
of skyscrapers rose like a ragged forest, a clean, modern city
reduced in minutes to ruin and chaos. Some of the damage
was due to the Marine bombardment, certainly, and to the
firefight raging now through the enemy capital, but much,
too, had been self-inflicted by Muzzie nano-D.
In fact, Ramsey’s biggest tactical concern at the moment
were the nano-D clouds, which were highlighted by his
helmet display as ugly purple masses drifting low across
the battlefield. Where they touched the ground or sur-
viving fragments of building, rock, earth, and ferrocrete
began dissolving in moments, as the submicroscopic dis-
assemblers in the death clouds began pulling atom from
22
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atom and letting it all melt into a boiling and homogenous
gray paste.
Where the cloud hit counter-nano, sparks flashed and
snapped in miniature displays of lightning. Nano-D, much
of it, possessed intelligence enough to attempt to avoid
most countermeasures; victory generally went to the cloud
with both the most numbers and the most sophisticated
programming.
A Muzzie field-pulse gun opened up from a ferrocrete
bunker two hundred meters ahead, sending a stream of
dazzling flashes above his head. Almost automatically,
Ramsey tagged the structure with a mental shift of icons
on his noumenal display, which hung inside his thoughts
like a glowing movie screen. His suit AI melded data from
a wide range of sensory input into a coherent image. In his
mind’s eye, he could see the bunker overlaid by the ghostly
images of human figures inside, and the malevolent red
glow of active power systems.
“Skyfire, I have a target,” he said, and he mentally keyed
the display skyward, tagged with precise coordinates.
Seconds later, a voice in his head whispered what he’d
been waiting to hear. “Target confirmed. Sniper round on
the way.”
Several seconds more slipped past, and then the cloud
deck overhead flared sun-bright, and a beam of light so bril-
liant it appeared to be made of solid, mirror-bright metal
snapped on, connecting clouds with the bunker.
At the beam’s touch, the bunker exploded, ferrocrete and
field-pulse gun and Theocrat soldiers all converted to fast-
expanding vapor, blue-white heat, and a sharp surge of
gamma radiation. The ground-support gunners out in
Alighan orbit had just driven a sliver of mag-stabilized ura-
nium-cladded antimatter into that gun emplacement at half
the speed of light. The resulting explosion had vaporized an
area half the size of a city block, leaving very little behind
but hard radiation and a smoking hole in the ground.
Unfortunately, the enemy had weapons just as power-
ful, and as minute followed bloody minute, more and more
of them were coming on-line. He needed to move . . . but
STAR STRIKE
23
first, this looked like a good place to leave one of his mobile
weapons.
Working quickly, Ramsey pulled a KR-48 pack out of
a storage compartment on his hip, extended its tripod legs
with a thought, and placed the device atop what was left of
the wall. Through its optics, the image relayed through his
helmet AI to his brain, he checked its field of fire, giving it
a clear view toward the city’s central plaza.
His 660-ABS had more than once been compared to a one-
man tank, but so shallow an image wildly missed the point,
and in fact was insulting to the battlesuit. In fact, tanks had
become obsolete centuries ago thanks primarily to the rise
of battlesuit technology. Wearing an ABS, a Marine could
walk, run, or soar for distances of up to a kilometer, could
engage a wide range of targets on the ground and in the air
with a small but powerful arsenal of varied weaponry, and
could link with every other ABS in the battle zone to coor-
dinate attacks and share intelligence. An ABS allowed its
wearer to shrug off the detonation of a small tactical nuke
less than a hundred meters away, to survive everything from
shrapnel to radiation to heavy-caliber projectiles to clouds
of nano-D, and to function in any environment from hard
vacuum to the bottom of the sea to the boiling hell-cauldron
of modern combat.
In fact, any contest between a lone Marine in a 660
battlesuit and a whole platoon of archaic heavy tanks could
have only one possible outcome.
What was important, however, was why, after a thousand
years, individual and small-unit tactics were still of vital
importance in combat. For centuries, virtual-sim generals
had been predicting the end of the rifleman as the center-
piece of combat. The energies employed by even small-scale
weapons were simply too deadly, too powerful, and too in-
discriminate in their scope to permit something as vulner-
able as a human being to survive more than seconds in a
firefight.
Somehow, though, the venerable rifleman had survived,
his technology advancing to extend his effectiveness and
his chances of survival. The truth was, a planetary ground-
24
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assault unit like the 55th MARS could drop out of orbit,
seize the starport, and hold it, where larger, faster, and
more powerful AI-directed weaponry would simply have
vaporized it.
Of course, by the time the Muzzies were through defend-
ing the port, most of it would be vaporized, wrecked, or
otherwise rendered unusable anyway. That was the problem
with war. It was so damned destructive . . . of personnel, of
property, of entire cultures and societies. . . .
He completed setting up the KR-48 and keyed it to his
helmet display. He switched on the weapon’s power shields,
to keep it from being directly targeted by roving enemy
combat drones or smart hunters, then bounded clear, making
his way around the perimeter of the city plaza. Gunfire con-
tinued to crack and spit from the surrounding buildings,
those that hadn’t been demolished yet, but the accuracy of
the Marines’ orbital sniper fire seemed to be having a telling
effect on the defenses. The instant a Marine came under fire,
the attack was noted by Skyfire command and control, and
the attacker would in moments be brought under counterfire,
either by high-velocity rounds chucked from orbit, or from
the A-90 ground-support aerospace craft now crisscrossing
the skies above the port complex, or from other Marines
on the ground linked into the combat net.
“Bravo one-one-five,” a voice whispered in his mind. His
AI identified the speaker as Captain Baltis, his platoon com-
mander, but he recognized the dry tones without his suit’s
comm ID function. “Hostile gun position at six-one-three-
Sierra. Can you neutralize it, Ram?”
He zoomed in on the indicated coordinates on his map
window. The enemy fire was coming from the top of a forty-
story structure two kilometers ahead. A drone feed showed
the Muzzie gunners, clustered on a rooftop overlooking
the plaza, clustered around a tripod-mounted high-velocity
sliver gun.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Ramsey replied. “Why can’t we
leave it to Sniper?”
“Because that would bring that whole tower down,” Baltis
replied, “and we have civilians in there.”
STAR STRIKE
25
Shit. The Muzzies didn’t seem to care whether their own
civilians were caught in the line of fire or not. But the Ma-
rines were under standing orders to minimize collateral
damage, and that meant civilian casualties.
“Okay. I’m on it.”
Rising, he bounded forward, covering the ground in long,
low, gliding strides that carried him both toward the objec-
tive building and around toward the right. He was trying
to take advantage of the cover provided by some smaller
buildings between him and the target. As he drew closer,
someone on the rooftop spotted him and swung the heavy-
barreled weapon around to bear on him. He felt the snap of
hivel rounds slashing through the air above his head, felt
the impacts as they punched into the pavement nearby with
bone-jarring hammerings and raised a dense cloud of pow-
dered ferrocrete.
Dropping behind a plasteel wall, he connected with the
KR-48 he’d left behind, using his suit’s link with the weapon
to pivot and elevate the blunt snout toward the target build-
ing. On the window inset in his mind, he saw the KR-48’s
crosshairs center over the top of the building; a mental com-
mand triggered a burst, sending a stream of thumb-sized
missiles shrieking toward the rooftop gun emplacement.
The missiles vaporized chunks of cast stone, but the
Muzzies’ armor damped out the blast effects. He’d been ex-
pecting it; he was using the weapon as a diversion, not for
the kill.
Instantly, the Muzzie gunners swung their weapon back
to the south, searching for the source of incoming fire.
Ramsey watched the shift in their attention, and chose that
moment to leap high into the air.
A mental command cut in his jump jets in midair, and he
soared skyward, clearing the upper ramparts of the building,
cutting the jets, and dropping onto a broad, open rooftop.
He used the flamer connected to his left wrist to spew
liquid fire into the gun emplacement. The enemy troops
were shielded against tactical heat, of course, but the sud-
denness of his appearance, arcing down out of the sky,
surprised and startled them, and the torch blast melted the
26
IAN DOUGLAS
plastic mountings of the hivel gun and toppled it over onto
its side.
Shifting his aim, he torched the floor of the rooftop en-
closure, cutting open a gaping crater. Two of the Muzzie in-
fantrymen were caught in the collapse of the roof, falling
through in a shower of flaming debris; Ramsey shifted to
the mag-pulse rifle mounted on his right arm and hammered
away at five more Theocrat soldiers who were busily crowd-
ing back and away from his landing point.
One of the hostiles managed to open fire with a sliver
gun at Ramsey, and the Marine felt the hammer of high-
speed rounds thudding into his chest and helmet armor, but
he held his ground and completed his targeting sweep with
the pulse rifle, watching the barrage smash through enemy
armor like a rapid-fire pile driver, shredding, rending, turn-
ing titanium laminate carballoy into bloody scrap.
The last of the hostiles collapsed on the blazing rooftop,
or toppled through the gaping hole in front of them. The
entire engagement had taken perhaps three seconds.
“Bravo one, Bravo one-one-five,” he reported. “Target
neutralized.”
“Good deal,” Baltis replied. “Now get your ass forward!
You’re behind sched!”
“On my way.”
Another leap, and he sailed off the burning building’s
upper story, using his jump jets to brake his fall.
His suit AI was flagging another gun position just
ahead. . . .
USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
0720/24:20 local time, 1738 hrs GMT
“Fall in! Fall in!”
Panting hard, Garroway stumbled up to the yellow line
painted on the pavement. The run, which Warhurst had
lightly declared to be a shake-down cruise, had lasted two
hours and, according to his implant, had covered nearly
14 kilometers. A number of the recruits hadn’t made it; at
STAR STRIKE
27
least, they’d not kept up with the main body. Presumably,
they were still straggling along out in the desert someplace,
unless Warhurst had sent a transport out to pick them up.
Garroway had assumed that the meager third-G of Mars’
surface gravity would make calisthenics—no, PT, in the
Marine vernacular—easy. He’d been wrong. Gods, he’d been
wrong. The run across the rugged highlands of the Noctis
Labyrinthus had left him at the trembling edge of collapse.
His skinsuit, newly grown for him when he’d checked in at
the Arean Ring receiving station, was saturated with sweat,
the weave of microtubules straining to absorb the moisture
and chemicals now pouring from his body. His leg muscles
were aching, his lungs burning. He’d thought the implants
he’d purchased two weeks ago would have handled the extra
stress.
This was not going to be easy.
The worst of it was, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst had ac-
companied them on that run, and so far as Garroway could
tell, the guy wasn’t breathing hard, hadn’t even broken
a sweat. His uniform was still crisp, the flat-brimmed
“Smokey Bear” hat of ancient Corps tradition still precisely
squared above those hard, cold eyes.
“Okay, children,” he said, planting his hands on his
hips. “Now that we’ve warmed up a bit, it’s time we got
down to work. Hit the deck, push-up position! And one!
And two! . . .”
By now, the sun was up, though much of the run had been
through the foggy, pre-dawn darkness. Mars was a tangle
of mismatched terrain, rendered both beautiful and twisted
by the centuries of terraforming. The sky was a hard, deep,
almost violet-blue, the sun shrunken and cold compared to
back home. The ground was mostly sand, though patches of
gene-tailored mosses and coldleaf added startling accents of
green and blue. The run had brought them in a broad circle
back to Marine RTC Noctis Labyrinthus, a lonely huddle of
domes and quick-grown habs in a rocky desert. East, the tor-
tured terrain of the Vallis Marineris glowed banded red and
orange beneath the morning sun, and open water gleamed
where the Mariner Sea had so far taken hold.
28
IAN DOUGLAS
Damn it, he couldn’t breathe. . . .
“Come on, kiddies!” Warhurst shouted. “You can give
me more than that! There’s plenty of oh-two in the air! Suck
it down!”
What sadist, Garroway wondered, had decided that this
was where Marine recruits would come to train? Centuries
ago, of course, RTC had been on Earth . . . at a place called
Camp Pendleton, and at another place called Camp Lejeune.
Those places were no more, of course. The Xul Apocalypse
had wrecked both bases, when tidal waves from the oceanic
asteroid strikes had come smashing ashore. For a time, Ma-
rines had been trained on Luna, and then at one of the new
LaGrange orbital bases, but almost two centuries ago, with
the completion of the Arean Ring, the Corps had transferred
much of its training command to Mars. The first recruits on
the surface at Noctis Labyrinthus, Garroway had heard, had
done their PT wearing coldsuits and oxygen masks. He was
beginning to think someone had jumped the gun in deciding
to forego the support technology.
“Okay! Okay! On your feet!” Warhurst clapped his hands.
“How are we doing, kids? Eyes bright? Hearts pumping?
Good! We have a very special treat in store for you now.” He
pointed. “See that building? Fall in, single file, in front of
that door! Move it! Move it! ”
The platoon scrambled to obey, running fifty meters
across the ’crete pavement and lining up outside the door. A
sign beside the doorframe read sickbay.
That puzzled Garroway. They’d pumped him full of me-
dinano at the receiving station, enough, he’d thought, to kill
everything in his system that wasn’t nailed down. He’d al-
ready had several thorough physicals, back on Earth Ring,
and in Mars orbit. What were they going to . . .
Realization hit him just as Warhurst began addressing
the formation.
“This, children, is where we separate the real men and
women from the sheep. You were all informed that this
would be part of your recruit training, and you all agreed
when you thumbed your enlistment contract. However . . . if
any of you, for any reason, feel you cannot go through with
STAR STRIKE
29
this, you will fall out and line up over there.” He pointed
across the grinder at one of the assistant DIs, who was stand-
ing in front of a transport skimmer. “You will be returned
to the receiving station, and there you may make arrange-
ments for going home. No one will think the less of you. You
will simply have proven what everybody knows—that the
Marine Corps is not for everyone. Do I have any takers?”
Again, Garroway thought he felt some of the recruits in
line around him wavering. The terror was almost palpable.
“If you file through that door,” Warhurst continued, a
tone of warning giving his edge a voice, “you will be given
a shot of decoupling nano. It won’t hurt . . . not physically, at
any rate. But after the shot takes effect, you will be unable
to access your personal cerebral implants. Right now, each
of you needs to think about what that means, and decide if
being a Marine is worth the cost.”
The decoupler shot. Yeah, they’d told him about it, but
he’d already known about it, of course. It was one of the
things that set the Marines and a few other highly special-
ized elite military units apart from the Army, Navy, or the
High Guard. Wonderingly, Garroway looked down at his
right hand, catching the glint of gold and silver wires im-
bedded in the skin at the base of his thumb and running in
rectilinear patterns across his palm.
He was going to lose his implants.
The vast majority of humans had cereblink implants,
including palm interface hardware, quantum-phase neuro-
circuitry, and a complex mesh of Micronics grown layer by
layer throughout the brain, especially in the cerebral sulci
and around the hypothalamus. The first nano injections gen-
erally were given to the fetus while it was still in womb or
in vitro, so that the initial base linkages could begin che-
lating out within the cerebral cortex before birth. Further
injections were given to children in stages, at birth, when
they were about two standard years old, and again when
they were three. By the time they were four, they already
possessed the hardware to let them palm-interface with a
bewildering variety of computers, input feeds, e-pedias,
and machines. Most basic education came in the form of
30
IAN DOUGLAS
electronic downloads fed directly into the student’s cerebral
hardware. Adults depended utterly on hardware links for
everything from flying skimmers to paying bills to experi-
encing the news to opening doors to talking to friends more
than a few meters distant. The cereblink was one of the ab-
solutely basic elements of modern society, the ultimate piece
of technology that allowed humans to interface with their
world, and interact with their tools.
And now, the recruits of Company 4102 were about to
lose that technology and, for the first time in their lives,
would face the world without it.
The thought was terrifying.
“Okay, recruits! First five in line! Through the hatch, on
the double!”
The first five recruits stumbled up the steps as the door
cycled open for them and vanished into the building. Gar-
roway watched them go.
He thought about quitting.
This was the one part of recruit training that he’d won-
dered about, wondered whether or not he could make it
through. Oh, he knew he would survive, certainly. Millions
did, and most went on to be U.S. Marines. And if he could
get through these next few weeks, his old hardware would
be reconnected and he would get new implants as well. Ma-
rines were hardwired with internal gadgetry and high-tech
enhancements that most civilians didn’t even know existed.
But the thought of being cut off like that . . .
Many of the humans now living on Earth, he understood,
were pre-tech . . . meaning they went through their lives,
from birth to grave, as completely organic beings. No tech-
nological chelates cradling their brains and brain stems, no
nanocircuitry growing through their neural pathways.
No EM telepathy, so no way to talk to those around you
unless you were actually in their presence or you happened
to have a portable comm unit with you. No translator soft-
ware; if your friend didn’t happen to speak your language,
you were out of luck. No e-conferencing in noumenal or vir-
tual space. No e-Net linking you with every other person
and every electronic service across the Solar System.
STAR STRIKE
31
No way to access news, or weather—assuming you were
on Earth which actually had weather—or med access, or
e-pedia information feeds, or travel directions, or life jour-
nals, or any of the hundreds of other data downloads neces-
sary in today’s fast-paced life.
No sims. No download entertainment. No way to interact
with either the stored or broadcast simvids that let you take
the role of hero or villain or both.
No way to buy the most basic necessities. Or to find them,
since most shops now were on-line.
No driving ground cars, piloting mag skimmers, or ac-
cessing public transit.
No books, unless you could find the old-fashioned
printed variety . . . and that was assuming you could read
them. No more educational feeds . . . and no access to per-
sonal e-memory. Gods, how was he going to remember
anything? . . .
And there was Aide. For Garroway, that felt like the
worst . . . losing access to Aide, the AI mentor, secretary,
and personal electronic assistant he’d had since he was a
kid.
Without his hardware, the world was suddenly going to
be a much smaller, much more difficult, much narrower
place . . . and knowing that he would survive that narrowing
did not make the prospect any more bearable.
Cut off from technological civilization, from society,
from everything that made life worth the living. . . .
“I know it seems extreme, kids,” Warhurst said, using a
telepathic feed to whisper inside their minds. “You feel like
we’re cutting you off from the universe. In boot camp we
call it the empty time.”
Garroway wondered whether the DIs had some secret
means of accessing their implants and hearing their
thoughts . . . or if he just knew and understood what the
recruits would be thinking now. Probably the latter. It was
against the law to sneak into another’s private thoughts and
eavesdrop, wasn’t it?
“The thing is,” Warhurst went on, “there will be times as
a Marine when you won’t have the Net to rely on. Imagine
32
IAN DOUGLAS
if you’re on a combat drop and something goes wrong. You
end up a thousand kilometers behind enemy lines. You don’t
have the local Net access codes. Worse, if you try to link
in, the local authorities will spot you. Somehow, you have
to survive without the Net until you can make contact with
your sibling Marines.
“Or maybe you just have to go into a hot DZ on a planet
with no Net at all, and there’s a screw-up and the battlefleet
Net isn’t up and running for, oh, a standard day or two or ten.
Believe me, it happens. What can go wrong will go wrong.
What are you going to do then?
“The answer, of course, is that you will be Marines, and
you will act like Marines. You will be able to draw upon your
own resources, your training, your experience, and you will
survive. More than survive, you will kick ass and emerge
victorious, because victory is the tradition of the Corps!”
Garroway felt a little better after Warhurst’s speech. Not
good . . . but better. He gave a mental click to increase neural
serotonin levels and help lift his mood. Hell, that was an-
other thing he’d be missing in the next few weeks—the abil-
ity to alter his own emotional state as necessary. He felt a
tiny, sharp stab of fear, and instantly suppressed it.
How did Marines control the fear if they didn’t have
access to neural monitoring software or the ability to delib-
erately tailor their emotional state? Or were the wild stories
true, stories to the effect that Marine combat feeds elimi-
nated fear and boosted such emotions as rage and hatred for
the enemy? He’d always assumed those tales were nonsense,
the product of civilian ignorance. Still . . .
“If you children want to be Marines,” Warhurst’s whisper
continued, “we have to know who and what you are. How
you react under stress. We need to know your character. And
we need to take you, all of you, down to your most basic,
most elementary level and build you up, one painful layer
at a time. At the end of these sixteen weeks, you will not
be the men and women you were. You will be Marines . . .
if you make it through.”
It made sense, of course, what Warhurst was saying. Boot
camp always had required an initial breaking down, so that
STAR STRIKE
33
the drill instructors could mold recruits into Marines. And
there were other factors besides . . . like cutting the recruits
off from outside sources of information so that they were ut-
terly dependent on their instructors. Like taking away any-
thing that would distract them from the grueling physical
and intellectual training ahead.
Like getting them to rely upon themselves.
“Believe me,” Warhurst added, and Garroway swore he
could hear a grin in the man’s inner voice, “for the next few
weeks you children won’t need your tech-toys, and you’ll
be way too busy to miss ’em! Besides, you’ll have me to tell
you what you need to know! Next five in line! Through the
hatch!”
Garroway thought one last time about quitting, and
shoved the thought aside.
“Don’t worry, Aiden,” his inner AI whispered in his mind.
“I’ll be back. You’ll see.”
Together with four other recruits, he bounded up the steps
and into the unknown.
0407.1102
Green 1, 1-1 Bravo
Meneh, Alighan
0824/38:22 hours, local time
“Okay, Marines. How are we going to do this?”
Ramsey considered the question. Staff Sergeant Thea
Howell rarely asked for advice. When she did, the problem
was certain to be a certified bitch.
With the vantage point of the gods, he looked down on
the city. In the noumenon, the imaginal inner space of his
mind’s eye, he was hovering above the city center and star-
port as if from a giant’s towering perspective. Physically, in
fact, he was crouched in what had been a basement, shielded
from view by several tons of rubble, and the closest Marine
to his current position was nearly five hundred meters
away, but he was only distantly aware of any of that. His
cereblink and the fleet’s SkyNet, however, allowed them to
share a noumenal conference space, complete with tiny red
icons marking the position of each known Muzzie soldier,
gun, and vehicle, green for Marines, white for civilians or
unknowns.
The tacsit was clear enough. Theocrat riflemen had holed
up in another skyscraper, an eighty-three-floor tower at the
edge of the central plaza, and they’d turned the place into a
fortress, with portable rocket launchers and at least one light
plasma cannon. Life scans had revealed a heavy concentra-
tion of civilians in the smaller buildings clustered about the
STAR STRIKE
35
tower’s base; smash the tower with close-air ground support
or orbital fire, and several hundred civilians would die.
So rather than standing off and bombing the Theocrats,
the Marines would have to do this the old-fashioned away,
with a direct CQB assault.
And it was going to get damned messy.
“From the top down,” Ramsey said after a moment, an-
swering Howell’s question. Under his control, green lines of
light flicked across the imaginal landscape, taking advantage
of available cover, then vaulting into the sky to converge on
the tower roof from four directions. “Has to be. Otherwise
we fight our way up that tower one floor at a time.”
“Agreed,” Howell said. “But that rooftop is over 250
meters straight up. Too far for jumpjets.”
“Then we’ll need to ride Specter guns,” Sergeant Chu
pointed out. “And we’ll need to move straight up and fast.”
“Roger that,” Corporal Ran Allison said. “Looks like a
lucky two-fiver.”
The slang referred to twenty-five percent casualties . . .
if they were lucky. It was a grim and chillingly sobering
assessment.
“Ten of us,” Howell said, noting the green icons sur-
rounding the tower, a kilometer distant. The icons flashed,
one after another, as she ran through the names. “Me, Beck,
and Santiago on one. Hearst and Daley on two. Rodriguez
and Gertz on three. Ramsey, Allison, and Chu on four. Co-
ordinate on me. I’ve put the call out, and our rides will be
here in two mikes. Everyone get set.”
Ramsey dropped out of the noumenal link and began
shouldering upward through the layer of debris above him,
his combat suit’s paramusculature allowing him to move
aside several tons of debris as he climbed. Heaving aside
a 3-meter chunk of ferrocrete, he emerged again into the
smoke-stained light of the Alighan morning.
The pace of the battle had slowed considerably, now that
the defenders had been reduced to a few isolated pockets
of resistance scattered across a ruined city. In less than the
promised two minutes, a Specter gun hissed overhead, an
awkward-looking fragment of one of the landing vehicles that
36
IAN DOUGLAS
had brought the Marines down to the planet’s surface hours
before. Piloted by an independent AI, kept aloft by agrav pods
and protected by a ball-turret plasma gun, the flier looked like
a black insect, complete with gangly, slender legs equipped
with powerful grapples. Reaching up, he grabbed hold of one
of those legs and locked on; the jointed member retracted par-
tially, pulling him clear of the wreckage and into the air.
Corporal Allison and Sergeant Chu were already on board
the tactical carrier, grappled to the aircraft’s other legs and
retracted up into the partial shelter of the machine’s body.
The rubble dropped away as the vehicle swiftly ascended,
rotating and banking toward the distant tower.
The helplessness and the sense of being exposed were
sharper now than during the landing craft descent earlier.
The gun was sharply maneuverable, however, and the arti-
ficial intelligence piloting it possessed inhumanly fast re-
flexes. It was easier on the stomach not to watch. Ramsey
closed his eyes and merged with the assault team gestalt,
watching again from the gods’ perspective as four green
icons representing the fast-moving Specter guns converged
on the objective.
All four aircraft street-skimmed in toward the tower,
zig-zagging all the way to take every possible advantage
of buildings, trees, and rubble. Hivel rounds snapped past
the flier, and once Ramsey felt the solid shock of a heavy
detonation close by. His helmet readout warned of a gamma
pulse; someone was firing antimatter rounds at them. He felt
another thump as the gun’s plasma weapon fired, knocking
down an incoming rocket that had targeted them.
He saw a sudden flare as one of the incoming Specter
guns took a direct hit despite its evasive maneuvering. Ac-
cording to his link, both Daley and Hearst jumped clear as
the aircraft crumpled and slammed into the rubble-clogged
street below.
The remaining three tactical carriers reached the base of
the skyscraper at the same instant, changing vectors to travel
straight up the sides of the tower in a stomach-wrenching
maneuver that was only partly eased by the inertial dampers
in Ramsey’s armor.
STAR STRIKE
37
Three seconds, the pilot AI whispered in his mind, and
he opened his eyes in time to see of blur of ferrocrete and
structural ornamentation flashing past.
Two seconds . . . one second . . .
Another gut-twisting shift in vector, and the Specter gun
slipped over the rampart encircling the top of the tower. A
mental command, and he was released from the craft’s un-
folding leg, dropping onto the roof, striking, rolling, coming
up with his mag-pulse rifle raised, his helmet electronics al-
ready tracking the nearest threat. The weapon was set to AI
control, and he let his suit guide him; the weapon triggered
as soon as it had a solid targeting lock.
The first Muzzie rifleman went down, his armor ham-
mered by a rapid-fire barrage of magnetic pulses. The top
of the building became a bewildering and rapidly unfolding
blur of motion and weapons fire, as two of the other Specter
guns came up over the ramparts and released their payloads
of Marines.
The Specter gun carrying Howell, Beck, and Santiago
took a direct hit as it hovered above the rampart, an antimatter
blast flashing with deadly brilliance at the edge of the tower.
Ramsey overrode his weapon control and shifted aim to the
Muzzie gunner—a low threat because he was facing away
from Ramsey as he manhandled the massive A.M. accelera-
tor for a second shot, but he was trying to target the three
Marines on that side of the tower as they fell from the burning
transport. Ramsey triggered his weapon, and the enemy sol-
dier folded backward around the kinetic impulse slamming
into his spine, his weapon cartwheeling across the roof with
the impact.
A warning went off in his mind; gunners were targeting
him. He cut in his jumpjets and sailed across the roof, pivot-
ing in midair to target one of the Muzzie gunners who was
standing up behind a waist-high ferrocrete barrier, tracking
Ramsey as he sailed through the air.
The stricken Specter gun slammed into the edge of the
tower, metal burning furiously, catching and holding for a
moment before rocking back and off the roof, crashing to
the street eighty-four-stories below. The remaining two guns
38
IAN DOUGLAS
hovered above opposite sides of the building, ninety meters
apart, coordinating their plasma weaponry with the fire
from the eight Marines now fanning out across the roof.
A transparent wall overlooked the rooftop, a penthouse or
upper story of some sort, enveloped in hanging plants, and
with a sunken interior that formed a well-protected redoubt.
The transparency—plastic and shatterproof—melted as
someone inside detonated a thermal charge. An instant later,
a swarm of APerMs emerged and arced into the sky before
descending on hissing contrails—antipersonnel missiles,
each the size of a man’s forefinger, each with an on-board
AI smart enough to identify an enemy’s armor signature and
home on it relentlessly, each with a dust-speck’s worth of
antimatter in magnetic containment. Ramsey’s armor fired
a countermeasures charge, and flashes of actinic brilliance
from the hovering guns picked individual missiles out of the
air with hivel kinetic-kill rounds each the size of a grain of
sand. The sky turned to white fire. . . .
At first he thought the threat had been neutralized, and
he started moving forward once more. In the next instant,
his helmet display flashed warning; there were still APerMs
in the air.
He triggered another countermeasure burst . . . but it was
too little, too late, and he couldn’t get them all. APerMs
slashed into Howell and Beck, who was bounding along-
side her, blasting gouts of molten laminate from their armor,
knocking the two Marines backward.
“Thea! ” Ramsey screamed, and then he was stand-
ing twenty meters from the open penthouse, hosing the
low, cavern-like opening in front of him with his flamer.
One of the hovering Specter guns with a good line of sight
added lance after flaring lance of plasma energy to his fire;
Ramsey could see figures writhing and incinerating within
the flames.
Turning, he bounded across the rooftop to the two fallen
Marines. Corporal Gerry Beck was dead, his helmet punc-
tured, then exploded from within. There was a lot of blood,
and only smoking, blackened shards remained of helmet and
skull.
STAR STRIKE
39
Staff Sergeant Thea Howell, however, was still alive. The
AP round had struck her in the chest, shattering ribs, rupturing
a lung, flooding her torso with hard radiation, but her diagnos-
tic feed showed she was still alive as her armor struggled to
control the damage. She was already deep in medical support
stasis.
Thea. . . .
Crouching above her body, he turned his fire against a
last remaining clump of Muzzie gunners behind a ferrocrete
wall. One of the Specter guns burned down the last of them,
and the firefight came to an abrupt end.
But Ramsey continued to hold the broken body of Thea
Howell, letting his own armor make automatic feed connec-
tions and linkages so that he could bolster her suit’s dam-
aged support systems.
Besides being a fellow Marine and the platoon’s senior
NCO, Thea was an old friend, and frequently his lover.
She was family.
And he didn’t want to see her die. . . .
USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
1045/24:20 local time, 2003 hrs GMT
Garroway felt . . . alone. Alone and utterly empty.
And he couldn’t even mind-click himself a serotonin jolt
to lift the settling black mist of depression . . . or ask Aide for
help.
“I know you’re all feeling a bit low right now,” Gunnery
Sergeant Warhurst said, smiling. “But I have just the ticket!
We’re going to run. Comp’ney, lef’ face! For’ard harch!
Double time, harch! . . .”
Garroway still felt dazed and lost. After his ten-minute
session with the Navy corpsmen in the sickbay, he’d been
led back out into the weak sunshine of the Martian morning
and marched to chow.
He’d barely tasted the food, and ate it automatically. After
that there’d been an indoctrination class, with an assistant
DI lecturing the company on Corps tradition, and on what it
meant to be a Marine.
40
IAN DOUGLAS
And now, they were out in the cold once more, running.
Who the hell was he trying to kid? His first six hours in the
Corps, and already he wanted to quit.
Something, though, was keeping him going . . . one tired
foot after the other.
Aiden Garroway had been born and raised in the 7-Ring
orbital complex in Earth orbit, a son of an extended line
marriage, the Giangrecos; on his Naming Day, he’d taken
his name from Estelle Garroway, the woman who’d also
passed on to him his fascination with the Corps.
It had been Estelle who’d told him about other Garroways
who’d been Marines. There was one, a real character who’d
fought in the UN War of the mid-twenty-first century, who
was still remembered in Marine histories. “Sands of Mars
Garroway,” he was known as, and he’d led a grueling march
up the Vallis Marineris only a couple of thousand kilome-
ters from this spot to attack a French invasion force.
And later there’d been John Garroway, a gunnery ser-
geant who’d made first contact with the N’mah, an alien
civilization at the Sirius Stargate a century later . . . and
General Clinton Vincent Garroway who’d fought and won
the critical Battle of Night’s Edge against the Xul in 2323.
And other Garroways had served in the Corps with distinc-
tion ever since, first in the old United States Marines, then,
with the gradual assimilation of the old U.S. into the United
Star Commonwealth, in the old Corps’ modern successor,
the United Star Marine Corps.
It had been Estelle who’d suggested he join the Corps.
She’d known how unhappy he was at home.
Not that home life had been abusive or anything like that.
Most of his mothers and fathers were okay, and he deeply
loved his birth mother. But with twenty-five spouses and one
hundred eighty-three children and grandchildren underfoot,
along with numerous aunts, uncles, in-laws, and cousins, the
living quarters allotted to the Giangreco line family, though
spacious enough, tended to be something of a zoo. There
was always someone to put him down, tell him what to do,
or shove him out of the way. His job in the aquaculture farms
was boring and dead-end. There were no better options for
STAR STRIKE
41
educational downloads until he specialized in a career, and
farming water hyacinths for the Ring filtration matrices de-
cidedly was not what he intended to do for the next century
or two. Hell, life at home with that many parents and sibs
was like life in a barracks, anyway; the Marines seemed a
logical option.
The problem was Delano Giangreco, the patriarch of the
line, and a committed pacifist. A member of the Reformed
Church of the Ascended Pleiadean Masters, he didn’t quite
insist that everyone in the family follow Church doctrine
regarding diet, luminous tattoos, or ritual nudity, but he did
insist on observance of the Masters’ Pax. No mention of
war within the house, no downloads touching on military
history, battles, or martial arts. Garroway had been twelve
before he’d even heard of the Marines, and then only because
of the electronic emancipation laws. Once you were twelve
and had chosen your name, no one else could censor your
thoughts or your data feeds, even for religious purposes.
But those feeds could be monitored by parents or guard-
ians until a person was eighteen, and Garroway had received
almost weekly lectures on the evils of war and the falsity of
such historical lies as military glory, honor, or duty.
Somehow, though, the lectures had only increased his
determination to learn about the Corps, and about all those
other Garroways who’d served country and, later, Common-
wealth. By the time he was sixteen, he’d picked up some
semi-intelligent software, with Aide’s help, which let him
partition his personal memory storage, and keep parts of
it secret from even the most determined morals-censoring
probes.
But the need to do so, to keep his guard up against his
senior father’s intrusions, had been a powerful incentive to
get himself out of the home and off on his own.
His senior father had disowned him when he learned Gar-
roway had enlisted. No matter. He had a new family now. . . .
If he could keep up with it. If he quit, if he gave up, he
would be right back in the Rings looking for work—prob-
ably in one of the environmental control complexes or, pos-
sibly, the nanufactories.
42
IAN DOUGLAS
Hell, he’d rather run himself to death.
“Christ,” Mustafa Jellal muttered at Garroway’s side. “Is
the bastard gonna run us all the way up Olympus?”
The recruit company had been running steadily west for
almost an hour, now, slogging uphill almost all the way.
Somewhere over the western horizon was the staggering
mass of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar
System, though its peak was still far over the curve of the
Martian horizon. Jellal’s mutterings were purely fictional,
of course. The mountain known as Olympus Mons was five
hundred kilometers across at the base, and reached twenty-
one kilometers above the surrounding terrain; the raw, new,
artificially generated atmosphere on Mars was still only a
step removed from hard vacuum at the summit.
The Noctis Labyrinthus lay at the eastern rim of the
Tharsis Bulge, the vast, volcano-crested dome marking
a cataclysmic upwelling of the Martian mantle 3.5 billion
years before. The broken, canyon-laced terrain of the Noctis
Labyrinthus—the “Labyrinth of Night”—was the result of
floods released by the sudden melting of permafrost during
that long-ago event. The ground, as a result, was a difficult
tangle of rocks and channels that made footing treacherous
and the climb exhausting.
“Save your . . . wind . . . for running,” Garroway muttered
between pants for breath. His side was starting to shriek pain
at him, and the thinness of the incompletely terraformed at-
mosphere was dragging at his lungs and his endurance. How
much farther? . . .
Jellal suddenly fell out of the formation, stepping to the
side, hands on his knees as he started to vomit. Garroway
maintained his pace, staring straight ahead. Behind him, he
could hear one of the assistant DIs talking to Jellal, though
he couldn’t hear what was being said. In a moment, the
column had continued up a dusty hill covered in patches of
gene-tailored dunegrass, and passed well beyond earshot of
what was being said.
A minute or two later, however, just over the crest of that
hill, Warhurst bellowed for the company to halt. The recruits
had become strung out over a half kilometer of ground, and
STAR STRIKE
43
it took minutes more for the trailing runners to catch up with
the main body. Garroway stood at attention as more and
more recruits fell in to either side, breathing hard, savoring
the chance to suck down cold gulps of air and try to will his
racing heart to slow.
After a few heavy-breathing minutes, he was glad to see
Jellal jog past and take a place farther up the line. He’d met
the young Ganymedean Arab at the receiving station up in
the Arean Ring. Mustafa Jellal had been friendly, cheerful,
and outgoing, and seemed like a good guy. Garroway had
started talking with him at chow last night, partly out of a
sense of isolation kinship. There was a lot of anti-Muslim
sentiment throughout the Sol System right now, had been
ever since the outbreak of hostilities against the Theocracy,
and during the conversation Garroway had had the sense
that Jellal was feeling lonely, a bit cut off.
Garroway had been wrestling with loneliness as well—he
wasn’t prepared to call it homesickness just yet—and felt a
certain kinship with the dark-skinned Ganymedean recruit.
After chow, they’d gone back to the center’s temporary bar-
racks, and there they’d opened a noumenal link and shared
bits of home with each other—Jellal taking him on a virtual
tour of the Jellal freestead complex at Galileo, on Gany-
mede, with Jupiter looming banded and vast just above the
horizon, and Garroway showing him Sevenring, with Earth
huge and blue and white-storm-swirled through the arc of
the Main Gallery’s overhead transparency.
He wondered how the guy was feeling now, with his im-
plants switched off.
It was actually a pleasant respite, a chance to simply stand
and breathe. Warhurst waited a few minutes more, until the
last tail-end Charlie straggled over the top of the ridge and
took his place in line.
“Glad you could join us, Dodson,” the DI said with a sour
growl to his voice. “Okay, recruits, listen up. A few hours
ago, we let you see a Marine action now taking place on
Alighan, a few hundred light-years from here. We’ve just
received a feed from USMC Homeport. The Marines on
Alighan report both the starport and planet’s capital city are
44
IAN DOUGLAS
secure. Army troops are now deploying to the surface to
take over the perimeter.
“Lieutenant General Alexander, in command of the
Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, has reported that
the op went down according to plan and by the book. He sin-
gled out the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce,
which spearheaded the assault on the planethead, saying
that despite heavy casualties, they distinguished themselves
in the very best traditions of the Corps.
“So let’s give a Marine Corps war-yell for the Fighting
Fifty-fifth! Ooh-ra!”
“Ooh-ra!” the company yelled back, but the response
was ragged and weak, the recruits still panting and out of
breath.
“What the hell kind of war-yell is that?” Warhurst de-
manded. “The Marines fight! They overcome! They im-
provise! And they fucking kick ass! Let me hear your
war-yell!”
“Ooh-ra!”
“A good war-yell focuses your energy and terrifies your
opponent! Again!”
“Ooh-ra!”
“Again! ”
“Ooh-ra! ”
“Oh, I am so terrified.” He sighed, shaking his head.
“Children, I can tell we have a lot of work to do. Down on
the deck! One hundred push-ups! Now!”
The respite was over.
Green 1, 1-1 Bravo
Meneh Spaceport, Alighan
1158/38:22 hours, local time
An enemy sniper round cracked overhead, striking the
side of a building a hundred meters away with a brilliant
flash and a puff of white smoke. Ramsey looked up without
breaking stride, then glanced at Chu. “Five,” he said. “Four
. . . three . . . two . . .”
Before he could reach “one,” a blue-white bar of light flashed
STAR STRIKE
45
out of the heavily overcast sky and speared a building nearly
two kilometers away. Six seconds passed . . . and then another,
much louder crack sounded, a thunderous boom with a time
delay. By this time, remote drones and battlefield sensors had
scattered across some hundreds of square kilometers, and any
hostile fire or movement was instantly pinpointed, tracked, and
dealt with—usually with a high-velocity KK round from orbit.
“You’re a little off on your timing,” Chu told him. “Count
faster.”
“Ah, the guys in orbit just want to make liars out of us.”
“Not guys,” Chu said, correcting him. “AIs. That re-
sponse was too fast for organics.”
“Even worse. We’re into the game-sim phase of the op,
now. No combat. Just electronic gaming. The bad guys poke
a nose out of hiding, the AIs in orbit draw a bead and lop it
off.”
“You sound bitter.”
“Nah. I just wonder how long it’ll be before they don’t
need us down here on the ground at all. Just park a task force
in orbit and pop bad guys from space, one nose at a time.”
“Never happen,” Chu said. “Someone’s gotta take and
hold the high ground, y’know?”
“That’s what they taught us in boot camp,” Ramsey
agreed. “But that doesn’t mean things won’t change.”
Despite the scattered sniper fire, the worst of the fighting
appeared to be over, and the Marines of the 55th MARS had
emerged victorious. Not that there’d been doubt about the
outcome, of course. The enemy’s technological inferiority,
tactical and logistical restrictions, surprise, and morale all
had been factored into the initial ops planning. The only real
question had been what the butcher’s bill would be—how
many Marines would be lost in the assault.
The two Marines were walking across the ferrocrete in
front of one of the shuttle hangars at the spaceport, still but-
toned up in their 660 combat cans. Off in the distance, an
enormous APA drifted slowly toward the captured starport,
hovering on shrill agravs. Another APA had already touched
down; columns of soldiers were still filing down the huge
transport’s ramps.
46
IAN DOUGLAS
Smoke billowed into the sky from a dozen fires. The
damage throughout this area was severe, and they had to
be careful picking their way past piles of rubble and smol-
dering holes melted into the pavement. Nano-D clouds had
drifted through on the wind hours before, leaving ragged,
half-molten gaps in the curving walls and ceiling, and the
shuttle itself had been reduced to junk. A large area of the
floor had been cleared away, however, and the structure
was being used as a temporary field hospital, a gathering
point for casualties awaiting medevac to orbit. Several naval
corpsmen were working in the hangar’s shadowed interior,
trying to stabilize the more seriously injured.
Staff Sergeant Thea Howell was in there someplace.
After that last firefight atop the tower, Ramsey had crouched
beside his wounded friend until a combat medevac shuttle
had arrived, then helped load her aboard. That had been
three hours ago. As soon as Army troops had started fil-
tering in from the starport, Ramsey and the others from 1-
1 Bravo had hiked back to the port. Ramsey had located
Howell on the platoon Net, and was hoping to see her.
“Ram! Chu! What the hell are you guys doing here?”
The two Marines turned, startled. Captain Baltis had a
way of appearing out of nowhere. “Sir!” Ramsey said. Nei-
ther he nor Chu saluted, or even came to attention; stan-
dard Marine doctrine forbade ritual in the field that might
identify officers to enemy snipers. “One of our buddies, sir.
Howell. We’d like to know if—”
“Haul your ass clear of here and let the docs do their
work,” Baltis snapped. “We’ll post the status of the wounded
when we get back to the ship.”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“We will post their status when we get back aboard
ship.”
Ramsey sagged. “Aye, aye, sir.”
“Get your asses over to the Fortress. We’ll be disembark-
ing from there.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
The Fortress—what was left of it—loomed above the sky-
line of Meneh not far from the ocean. It was called El Kalah,