Authors: Ian Douglas
2
APRIL
2170
CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1307 hours, Shipboard time
“Here they come!” Gunny Dunne yelled. “Check your CCN locks!”
Garroway's helmet display showed a positive Combat Coordination Net link, and a glowing red triangle centered on one of the Wheel vehicles. He moved his laser rifle until the targeting curser slipped inside the triangle, then thought-clicked an okay. For the next second or two, he tried only to keep the curser inside the triangle, despite the erratic movement of the target. The enemy vehicle was now 150 meters distant and even a slight lateral slew translated as a major jump on Garroway's targeting picture.
Apparently of its own volition, his LR-2120 fired. A white flash obliterated the target. When his vision cleared, Garroway saw the vehicle with an orange-glowing crater on the glacis, just where he'd been holding the targeting curser. The vehicle wobbled, then nosed down into the angular black terrain beneath its belly, plowing forward, then tumbling, spewing bits of wreckage.
One of CCN's particular values in combat was its ability to coordinate a large number of individual soldiers, to truly have them fight as one. At this moment, Sissy, the CCN's aggregate AI, was selecting those targets that posed the most immediate and direct threat to the Marines and painting them with the target markers that showed as red triangles in their helmet displays, or in their noumenal imaging if they were downloading combat data directly through their implants.
The video imaging system of a Marine weapon marked its exact aim point with a red target dot. Once all of the Marines in a given firing group had their weapons trained on the same spot, Sissy triggered the weapons in unison.
A Marine LR-2120 had a .01 second pulsed output of fifty megawatts, which translated on-target to an explosive release of half a million joules, about the same as the detonation of fifty grams of chemical high explosive. Sissy allowed ten Marines to fire at the same spot on the target at the same instant, delivering the equivalent of half a kilogram of HE, definitely a force multiplier in every sense of the phrase.
A flashing red arrow in Garroway's visor showed him which way to look to acquire the next target on Sissy's list. He shifted, found the red triangle, and acquired the new target.
CCN's advantages in combat were clear; the disadvantages were less obvious. Chief among them was that individual Marines had to ignore other potential threats while they focused on the target selected by the combat AI. It was a real test of a Marine's trust in the AI to surrender his or her judgment to the judgment of the expert system software. If enough Marines decided a different target was more important or if they panicked and couldn't hold their weapons on-target for the critical second or two it took to coordinate a number of aim-points, the whole system fell apart.
More subtle than that, however, was the psychological impact on men and women who were being subordinated by a
sophisticated computer program, who in a very real sense were being turned into small cogs in a very large machine. Tests run back on Earth had demonstrated that the system could seriously and adversely affect a unit's morale.
Marines usually pointed out that those tests had been run on Army and Aerospace Force personnel, and didn'tâ
couldn't
âtap into the reality of modern combat. From the Corps' perspective, a lone Marine could easily be lost in the fog of war; a team, functioning together with machinelike precision, dispelled the fog and controlled the battlefield. Hell, Marines had been voluntary small cogs in a big machine for centuries and were quite proud of the fact. Fighting closely with brother and sister Marines, both on the ground and in the aerospace theater, was what the famous Marine
esprit
was all about.
Ooh-rah
!
Garroway aimed, Sissy fired. Another Wheel defender tumbled, bits of hot metal spalling from its flank.
Garroway had never used CCN in anything other than training simulations. The system had been new and experimental when he'd shipped out for Ishtar thirty-two years objective ago, and had then been employed only by Marine Recon and a few other specialist units. But his training, all Marine training, emphasized working as part of a larger team, and it hadn't been hard to learn the ins and outs of CCN methodology and tactics.
A red arrow flashed in his helmet display and he shifted to Sissy's next target.
Point MemphisâBeachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1308 hours, Shipboard time
“I think we're holding them,” Warhurst said. “Barely, but we're holding them.”
“Is it my imagination,” Ramsey asked, “or is the enemy somewhat lacking in tactical ingenuity?”
“We haven't seen anything from him yet but brute force and very fast reaction times. Those vehicles seem to be trying to force breakthroughs at three distinct points in the perimeterâ¦here, hereâ¦and over here.” He indicated the threatened sectors with mental highlightings.
“So CCN is turning our infantry into tank-killer teams.”
“That's pretty much it, sir.”
Sissy, working together with Cassius's much larger overview of the situation, had determined that the combined fire of eight to ten Marines was sufficient to disable one Wheel combat machine. That black metal drank the laser light from a single 2120, apparently redistributing the energy throughout a large patch of the hull, with the end result that the target area wasn't more than slightly warmed. Five hundred megawatts of energy, however, hitting a single small area within the same fraction of a second, was more than the alien armor could handle. It heated suddenly, then exploded with force enough to disable the machine. At the moment, three sectionsâactually about 50 Marines all togetherâwere actively engaging the enemy, which meant that Sissy could kill five enemy vehicles at a time. And if that had been all there was to it, simple mathematics would have won the battle for the Marines within the next few minutes.
Unfortunately, combat was
never
that simple.
Warhurst was listening to the communications coming through the company channels, a steady stream of conversation, blasted by intermittent static, ragged with the emotions of men and women in combat.
“Watch it! Wiggles are coming through the defile!”
“Fire support! We need fire support, target Charlie-one-one-niner by Echo five-zero-three! Multiple hostiles coming through the perimeter! Repeat, multiple hostiles comingâ”
“We're taking fire! We're taking fire!”
Those shouted calls gave lie to the sense of detachment Warhurst felt as he watched the patterns of colored lights shift and drift within his noumenal display. Some of those lights were winking out moment by moment, and the casualty list was growing.
“The enemy doesn't appear able to concentrate his fire the way our CCN does,” Warhurst told Ramsey, “but there're more targets than our people can shoot at and they're concentrating on these three points.”
“I suggest, Major, that you move to Plan Bravo.”
“Already initiated, sir. But it's going to take time.”
Plan Bravo required Marines from the nonthreatened portions of the perimeter to begin creating a second, smaller perimeter inside the first, then having the outer perimeter Marines fall back, covered by their fellows. Withdrawal in the face of an enemy attack, however, was never easy, was always dangerous.
And there simply was no
time
â¦.
“We've got bogies coming out of the main valley! Get on them! Get on them!”
“Fire support! We need fire support
now
!⦔
“Where's our damned aerospace close support?”
“Gone, gyrine. Out of go-juice. It's knife work, now!”
“Multiple bogies! Multiple bogies! Pour it on 'em, Marines!”
Sergeant Wes Houston
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1308 hours, Shipboard time
Houston, Lance Corporal Roger Eagleton, and PFC Randy Tremkiss made up a fire team assigned to the sector
their pre-drop briefing had designated as the Cincinnati AO, the Area of Operations. The area was a bit more built up, if that language could be applied to this alien and lifeless artificial terrain, than the flatter region around Memphis. Flat-topped ridges and plateausâwalls, almost, with sloping sidesâcrisscrossed the region and in the direction arbitrarily designated as “north” by the operation planners lay a broad, open, and flat-bottomed valley running toward the northeast.
That valley, as it happened, had become a highway for one of the advancing columns of Wheel defenders. The drifting icons and symbols on his helmet display had revealed a full two dozen of them moments ago, and the team had been busy methodically targeting one after another with CCN.
Then the Starhawks had stooped over the valley, slamming the remaining attackers with plasma fire and high explosives, reducing all to scattered and twisted lumps of dead metal, radiating fiercely at infrared wavelengths.
The respite had been a brief one, however. Five more of the hovering black monsters had appeared. Whether they were survivors of the original twenty-four or new arrivals on the battlefield, Houston didn't know. He and the others had taken aim at the nearest, however, letting Sissy guide their aimed fire with deadly accuracy.
One advantage of the CCN system was the fact that each vehicle was knocked out by eight to ten converging pulses of laser light arriving from at least three directions. The defenders did not appear to be as well coordinated as the Marines in their fire control, and generally chose only one of the firing groups of Marines as counter-fire targets.
Sissy triggered their weapons, and they immediately ducked back and shifted position to the right in order to avoid enemy return fire.
This time it almost worked. Houston hadn't even waited to
see the results of that last joint shot; that kind of rubbernecking was begging for trouble. He'd taken no more than three steps, however, when his earphones were blasted by static, and a monster sledgehammer had slammed him in his left leg and side, hurling him back and down.
“We're taking fire!” Tremkiss screamed over the radio link. “We're taking fire!”
Houston felt completely numb from the waist down, and couldn't move. “I'm hit!” With a final burst of static, his radio faltered and died, plunging him into a cocoon of death-still silence.
And then the pain hit, a searing, raging white-hot
burn
eating into his left side, and all he could hear was his own screaming.
He never heard Tremkiss shouting, “Marine down! Corpsman!
Corpsman
!”
HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1308 hours, Shipboard time
“We're taking fire! We're taking fire!”
“I'm hit!”
“Marine down! Corpsman!
Corpsman
!”
HM2 Lee IDed the call for help. It was in Cincinnati, his operational area, and he started moving forward. After rendezvousing at Point Memphis, he'd stationed himself about fifty meters behind Alpha Company's position on the perimeter, ready to move if he was needed.
There were five Corpsmen assigned to Alpha Company. The senior CorpsmanâChief Mattinglyâstayed with the HQ section, while the other four each took a platoon. Lee
was assigned to Alpha Company, though technically, he wasn't on the company's roster. According to the TO&E, the corpsmen belonged to the Battalion Medical Officer, Captain Howard, who was watching the whole operation from his station in
Ranger
's sick bay.
But so far as Lee and the Marines of Alpha Company were concerned, they were
his
Marines, he was
their
corpsman, and TO&E be damned.
He covered the ground in long, loping strides, keeping himself bent over even though no one seemed to be shooting at him. Yet. Alpha Company's sector had been pretty hot in the last few minutes, judging from the radio calls he'd overheard. He hadn't actually seen any of the Wheel defenders yet, save as colored icons on his helmet display. He hadn't tapped into the main battle data net, yet, because he needed to stay focused on the job at hand, not electronically rubber-neck on the battlefield.
As he moved, he downloaded data from the CANâthe casualty assessment net running as part of the company AI software. Based on information transmitted by the men's armor, it was classifying Sergeant Houston as a class-one, PFC Tremkiss as class-three. Class-three indicated the wounded man was not in immediate danger; his suit systems were coping with the damage, at least so far.
A class-one was life-threatening and urgent. He homed in on Houston's position, following the CAN's flashing guide arrows.
He was aware of several Marines on the high ground to either side, intent on aiming their weapons at something beyond the heights. Once a bright flash of light washed through the sky to his left, accompanied by a burst of static over his radio, but he saw no other indications of a major firefight. Not that he could do much about it if he did.
“Houston!” he called. “Houston, this is Doc Lee. Do you copy?”
There was no reply. Either the man was unconscious or his com gear had been damaged.
Houston's vac-armor beacon guided him for the last thirty meters. It was tough even seeing a Marine in camelearmor if the man didn't want to be seen, but the beacon acted like an IFF signal, guiding Lee close enough to be able to see a flop of movement on the lip of a long, narrow crater.
There he is
! The crater looked like a heavy weapon burn-through on the flank of one of the low, angular plateaus, half a meter deep. Houston was lying at the crater's edge; Tremkiss was lying next to him, waving feebly.