Authors: Ian Douglas
Garroway pressed the second plate, reached over the rim of the vehicle, and slapped the charge against the belly. So long as the link-connect points in his glove were in contact with the CTX pack, he could access its simple-minded controls through his implant. A thought-click fired the nanoseal on the base plate, welding the pack to the armor. A second thought-click triggered the five-second countdown. He rolled off the pivoting vehicle and hit the ground with a
thud
that nearly knocked the wind out of him. He felt a wave of pins-and-needles prickles wash across his legs and up his back and realized the machine was passing directly over his prone body.
He rolled, trying to get out from under. The machine accelerated, turning to track Geisler, who was farther away and, therefore, an easier target.
Then the CTX exploded, the detonation silent in hard vacuum but dazzlingly bright to unshielded eyes, the focused blast stabbing through the vehicle's rim and up and out the upper surface like a geyser of white light. The back-blast beneath the vehicle caught Garroway and flicked him aside, at
the same time lifting the massive machine's side up and over, flipping it onto its back.
Whatever mag-lev technology the thing used to hover and move, it didn't work upside down. The war machine slammed to the uneven ground belly-up and back-broken.
Which left the third Wheel defender, the one that had been chasing Doc and the wounded Marines downslope. Garroway grabbed his laser rifle and hurried back to Cavaco and Geisler's position, dropped to his belly, and took aim at the advancing monster.
Damn
it was fast!
“Lock us on, Sissy!” Cavaco yelled.
“Insufficient firepower available to successfully engage chosen target,” Sissy replied. “Recommend immediate E and E to avoid hostile fireâ¦.”
This time the hostile vehicle was too far away to try taking it out with a CTX pack. The machine fired, its particle beam bolt slamming into the hard metal slope just below Garroway's position. The blast knocked him back from the edge of the rift, sending him sprawling once more. Stunned, he tried to get up, tried to find his laser rifle. Somehow, he'd dropped it, accidentally this time, in the explosion. Geisler and Cavaco were both down as well. The armored vehicle crested the ridge, pivoting to take aim once more. Garroway tensed, readying to dive for coverâ¦.
Hovering ten meters away, the hostile machine came apart in a violent blossom of silent white flame. The entire front half of the machine was ripped away, and the wreckage crumpled to the black metal ground.
Garroway stood where he was a moment longer, scarcely daring to believe what had just happened. How?â¦
“C'mon, Marines!” Kat's voice called over the platoon channel. “Stop gawking and get the lead out!”
Kat and Sergeant Morton emerged from behind the wreckage of the Wiggler machine Garroway had killed. Morton had just braced his Onager tube on the wreckage and sent
a 7-kilogram missile streaking into the last hostile from point-blank range.
“That was my last missile,” Morton said. “Let's vam for the inner perimeter!”
“Hold on a sec,” Garroway said. “We have some people out there.”
He pointed downslope and to the left. Doc, it seemed, was making good time across the Wheel's surface a hundred meters away, dragging two armored bodies on a bright silver blanket.
“Let's give 'em a hand,” Cavaco said. “Marines do
not
leave their own behind!”
HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1314 hours, Shipboard time
They were
his
men and he wasn't leaving them behind.
Step by agonizing step, Lee dragged the two armored men back toward the Marine lines. The thermalslick's frictionless feature wasn't perfect, and Houston's boots kept dragging on bare ground. At least it allowed him to get the heavy mass of the two wounded Marines moving, as though he were pulling them across a sheet of ice, and once they were in motion, they tended to stay in motion, gliding along behind Lee as he slogged ahead, straining at the line taut across his torso armor.
But it wasn't ice. By the time he'd gone thirty meters, the frictionless surface of the sheet was beginning to wear away and progress became slower. He pulled harder, leaning into the line, but the black underside of the blanket was losing its slippery surface.
Damn. How much farther? His helmet display was zoomed out to show the entire Cincinnati AO all the way back to the inner cordon they were forming around Memphis. Green points of light marking other Marines were clustered heavily around the second perimeter, but he was almost alone out hereâ¦a good kilometer to go to reach the HQ area and only fourâno, fiveâMarines anywhere close.
He looked up, startled. He'd not realized how close. Kat Vinton and Jeff Morton reached him first, taking hold of the tow line and adding their strength to his. Geisler, Garroway, and Cavaco arrived a moment later.
“Well done, Doc,” Cavaco told him. “We've got 'em.”
They slipped the tow line off over his helmet, and he sagged to the ground, exhausted, legs trembling.
“Blanket stretcher!” Garroway said. He appeared to have lost his rifleâa sin for a Marineâbut he grabbed one corner of the foil blanket, liftedâ¦and almost fell when it slipped through his gloved fingers like water.
“You've got to roll the edges over,” Lee told him. “Like this.”
There was enough buckyball surface on the edges of the blanket to make it tough to hold, but by rolling a corner over on itself, silver side out, it was possible to hang onto the stuff. A moment later, Garroway, Cavaco, Vinton, and Morton each had a corner of the blanket and were hauling the two armored forms toward friendly lines, with Lee and Geisler to either side, gripping the middle and trying to take on some of the weight. The load was heavy, and movement awkward, but they made good progress.
The good news was that the Wheel's defenders appeared to have broken off their attack. There were no red pinpoints on their HUD map displays, no more enemy machines drifting up out of the valley behind them.
And ten minutes later a detachment of twelve more Marines met them, providing an armed escort back to safety.
Marines do take care of their own.
AO MemphisâBeachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1340 hours, Shipboard time
“The attack appears to have broken off,” Warhurst told Ramsey. “At least for now.”
“Well done,” Ramsey's voice said over the link. He could hear the relief in the man's voice. “
Very
well done.”
“Wasn't me, General. But I'll pass that on to the guys and gals who did it.”
“Do that. What's the bill?”
“Right now⦔ He reached up through his implant and pulled down the latest casualty figures off the command net. “Thirty-seven dead. And fifteen wounded.”
“Fourteen percent.”
“It could have been worse, General.
Much
worse.”
“Roger that.”
It was frankly surprising that there'd been as many wounded as that. Combat in the vacuum of space is relentlessly unforgiving. Even with advanced suit technology, even a minor wound was all too often fatal.
“Tell me something, though. According to the data we have here, the enemy didn't retreat. Did you knock out all of them? A one hundred percent kill?”
“That's the damnedest thing, sir. No. We counted a total of ninety-seven enemy tanks. We knocked out every one that broke through at Milwaukee and Cincinnati. There was another column threatening AO Toledo. We took out about ten of those machines before they reached our linesâthat was, we're guessing, thirty percent of that column. The rest of
them, General, I swear, they just faded away into the ground. No retreat. They're justâ¦gone.”
“That does not exactly fill me with confidence, Major. You've checked to make sure they're not just dug in, I take it.”
“Yes, sir.” He did not add “of course.” The general was operating in a zone staff officers detestedânot enough informationâand he had to explore every possibility. “I've had teams out there looking at what's left. I don't think the Wigglers manufacture their tanks. I think they
grow
them.”
“Nanufacture?”
“That, or a process just like it, sir.”
“Then you and your people ought to be dead, Major. How do you account for that?”
“Sir, at this point I don't. There's just not enough data to make even a half-assed guess. Still, my teams have examined a number of the vehicles we killed. Hereâ¦take a look at this.”
He uploaded imagery from the helmet sensors of one of his recon teams. They watched the scene unfold noumenallyâone of the enemy vehicles, its front half sheared off, exposing the interior.
There was no internal compartment, no place for a crew. Various silvery mechanisms and components appeared to be imbedded within jet-black metal. The metal had a spongy look to it, as though it had been a bubble-filled liquid that had solidified unevenly around the gas pockets.
“No two are exactly alike,” Warhurst explained, “but they all possess the same components. A mag-lev drive system. A power plant. A particle accelerator weapon. And a distributed electronics system that probably serves as both communications and control.”
“You're telling me these things are robots.”
“Yes, sirâ¦that, or they're teleoperated from somewhere inside the Wheel. I'd like it if Cassius could take a look at some of these things and see what he can pick up.”
“Done.”
“Our guess is that the Wiggles take manufactured components, like the drive system, and use some variant of nanotechnology to take the Wheel's surface material and close the shells of these things around them. Quick and dirty.”
“So the ones that got away?⦔
“Either they were reabsorbed into the surface, guns, drives, and all, or they passed through the surface and into the underground regions of the Wheel. There may be tunnels or some sort of highway system down there.”
Ramsey grunted. “With technology like thatâ¦why didn't they just grow a few hundred of the things out of the Wheel's surface smack in the middle of your perimeter?”
“I don't know, sir. I'm just glad they didn't. Best guess? The manufactured components are positioned at widely separated points, scattered all over the face of the Wheel. They grow the shells around the innards in place, then have to assemble the completed vehicles into larger groupsâ¦the columns they sent after us.”
“Yeah, but if those things can pass right through solid nickel-iron, they could've grown the things underground, assembled them underneath Point Memphis, and surfaced them all at once.”
“General, we just don't know enough about the alien technology. The fact that they didn't suggests that they can't, and for that I am profoundly grateful.”
“Roger that, Major. Roger that.”
Warhurst knew just how lucky the Marine landing force had been. Out of almost a hundred defending machines, the Marines had knocked out at least sixty. But if the survivors had gotten loose inside the perimeter as a unit instead of in scattered twos and threes, Marine casualties would have been much higher than fourteen percent.
“When can we expect to be reinforced, General?”
“We're loading the follow-on forces on the TRAPs now,
Major.
Daring
and
New Chicago
are en route now, to take up positions for close fire support, should that be necessary. Ten hours. You'll have fighter support back within five hours, however.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you hold?”
“I guess we'll have to, General. We've expended most of the available Onagers. However, some of our Marines developed some rather up-close and personal techniques for dealing with enemy tanks. We may be able to⦔ Warhurst broke off. A flashing light in his noumenal awareness indicated an important message incoming on a different channel. “Excuse me, General. An urgent message.”
“Take it.”
He switched mental channels. “Go.”
“Major? This is Giotti. Sirâ¦I thought you should know. We're almost through the surface. Five minutes.”
Warhurst checked his internal clock. The engineering team had estimated forty-five minutes and taken only thirty-five. They were padding their estimates again, damn them.
“Well done!” He shifted channels again. “General? That was my engineering squad. They're almost through the Wheel's surface. I need to issue orders to deploy my recon company.”
“Keep me patched in.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
Analyses of the battle would wait. Right now, a whole new battle was about to unfold.
And this time, the Marines would be taking the fight to the enemy.
Inside
the Wheel.
2
APRIL
2170
CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1350 hours, Shipboard time
“Recon Company, First Platoon! Saddle up, boys and girls! We're movin' out!”
The fact that Dunne had called them
Recon Company
instead of Alpha told Garroway something special was up. Long, long ago and very far away, Alpha had been designated as MIEU-1's reconnaissance company, which meant they would be going into the Wheel's interior first.
He'd only just staggered into the frenzy of activity that marked the HQ area at Point Memphis, surrendering Houston and Tremkiss to Chief Mattingly and three other company corpsmen. They were organizing a field hospital next to the headquarters, preparatory to bringing in a medevac TRAP. Around them, Marines were busily creating prepared positions, delineating a new, inner defensive perimeter with a radius of less than two hundred meters encircling Point Memphis.
Nearby, a number of Marines were completing the emplacement of a set of RW-42 sentry guns. These were twin
barreled pulse laser weapons with a cyclic rate of 10 shots per second, mounted on three-meter-high towers and remotely controlled by the CCN AI. They took time to unship and set up, which was why they hadn't played a part in the first battle, but they would increase the landing force's fire-power considerably.
In all the bustle, it was tough finding any one Marine. He used the ID locator on his HUD map to spot Gunnery Sergeant Dunne.
There he was, at the center of a growing team of Alpha Company Marines.
“Hey, Gunny!” he called, approaching the group.
“What?”
“Corporal Garroway, reporting as ordered. But, uh, I kind of lost my weapon.”
Dunne turned and picked up an LR-2120 from a small pile of weapons nearby. “Gonna make you sleep with it, Marine,” he growled. Traditionally, recruits in boot camp who dropped their weapons during training were required to take them to bed with them. The Marine creed
My Rifle
, memorized by generations of recruits for the past two centuries, emphasized the very special relationship between a Marine and his weapon. Dunne started to hand the weapon to Garroway, then stopped. “Belay that. You checked out with the pig-ninety?”
“Sure thing, Gunny.” Of course he was. Every Marine in the company had drilled endlessly with the things, back at L-4.
“Then take this.” Replacing the laser rifle on the stack, he picked up instead a larger, longer, heavier weapon, a PG-90. It was connected by a cable to a backpack battery unit. “Watch the fringe-bleed and watch the splash. It's gonna be close-quarters down there.”
“Aye
aye
, Gunnery Sergeant!”
“Try not to lose it.”
Garroway accepted the weapon, snicking back the bolt-feed access, checking the power pack, and linking to the
computer for a fast diagnostic. According to the ID data that appeared as he powered up, the weapon had belonged to a Sergeant Graff, Charlie Company.
He didn't know the man, and didn't ask what had happened to him.
The PG-90 was a full-automatic squad-support plasma weapon, 1.2 meters long and massing 10.3 kilograms, while the battery and charger unit massed another 14.1 kilos. It took centimeter-long bolts of a ferrous-lead-mercury alloy and used a powerful surge of electromagnetic energy to both accelerate it and convert it into a thumb-sized packet of white-hot plasma. The weapon had a cyclic rate of about four hundred rounds per minute, though in vacuum, even with the radiator vanes installed, the practical rate of fire was reduced to about 150 rounds per minute, and with frequent barrel changes to avoid overheating.
Marines called it the “thundergun,” or, more usually, “pig.”
“Ooh-rah!” Garroway said as the diagnostics showed the weapon powered up and at optimum.
“Vinton!” Dunne snapped. “Arhipov! You're with the pig.”
“Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”
“Sure thing, Gunny.”
“You three deploy with me, Deek, and Lobowski.”
That was a startling bit of information. Plasma guns were fielded in three-Marine teams, two riflemen supporting the squad automatic weapon as assistant gunner and spotter/security. Generally, there was one pig to a twelve-man squad. Staff Sergeant Eugene Deek and Reg Lobowski both, however, were also pig-gunners. Having two thunderguns in one squad was decidedly unusual; having
three
was unheard of.
“We're not going to have the manpower for CCN linkups down there,” Dunne explained, as though reading Garroway's surprise. “I want as much firepower packed into as small an area as we can manage. Just don't get in one another's way. Copy that?”
“Aye-firmative, Gunny.”
“Now move it. The Nergs've got an appointment below with the Wiggles and we don't want to be late.”
Garroway moved it.
Engineering Section
Breakthrough Point
AO Memphis, Sirius Stargate
1352 hours, Shipboard time
Staff Sergeant Ernest Giotti watched as the three-meter cutout settled a bit. The nanotunneler had vanished into the ring-shaped hole, leaving the cutout precariously balanced. Using his implant, he was carefully monitoring the tunneler's descent. Now, centimeters from cutting through, he ordered the device to halt.
“Cutting suspended, sir,” he told Warhurst. “Ready to proceed on your order.”
“Hang tight,” Warhurst told him over their private channel. “How's the pressurization going?”
He checked the data. Air had been bleeding through into the bubble. The working space had gradually been pressurizing through the test hole over the past half hour and now stood at nearly 9 psi. He could now even hear sounds in the chamber through his helmet as he and the other engineers worked.
“We're at 8.8 psi,” he said. “Internal pressure inside the Wheel reads out at about 11.5. Temperature 23 Celsius. Compositionâ¦oxygen, nitrogen⦔
“I've got all that,” Warhurst snapped. “Stand by. Recon's going to start cycling through into the bubble.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The inner hatch of the airlock hissed open and armored Marines stepped into the bubble's interior, their armor chameleonics rapidly fading from black to a dark mottled
gray, matching the interior of the portable airlock dome. One of them closed the hatch. Minutes passed, and then the hatch opened again, admitting four more Marines. The outer lock was only large enough to admit four men at a time, and it took a while to bring in an entire forty-man platoon.
The ID on one of the first men through indicated he was Lieutenant Gansen, the platoon's CO. “Lieutenant Gansen?”
“What is it?” He sounded tightâ¦even scared.
“Uh, sir? I was just wondering. The Wiggles've had plenty of time to know exactly what we're doing up here and where we're going to break through.”
“Do you think I don't know that, Staff Sergeant?”
“No, sir.”
“Damned cluster fuck, is what it is. A
cluster fuck
.”
Giotti edged a bit farther away from Gansen. The man was
not
happy and Giotti didn't want to be in position to take the hit if the guy exploded.
As the Marines came in, the first eight took position around the three-meter circle on the deck, facing out. Eight more Marines stood in an outer circle, facing their counterparts, holding a tether from their armor, with the free end nanofused to the deck. Two of the first eight held PG-90s, muzzles up; the rest carried LR-2120s in one hand, and gripped the tether in the other.
More and more Marines squeezed through the lock, taking up waiting positions around the sixteen men and women in the center. “Don't bunch up, guys, or one grenade could get us all,” one joked and another said something about taking turns breathing, but for the most part they were silent, waiting.
“Major Warhurst,” Gansen said after the last four Marines cycled inside, “we are ready to board.”
“Very well, Lieutenant,” Warhurst replied. “Staff Sergeant Giotti! Pull the plug on that damned thing!”
Giotti gave the thought-clicked command and the nano
tunneler fired up to full dig once more. An anxious moment passed, and then, suddenly, the central core of the cutout portion of the deck vanished, dropping away into the shaft. A final blast of air came through, equalizing the pressure and accompanied by a mushroom of dust on the updraft.
“Grenades!” Gansen yelled. Half a dozen M-780 grenades sailed into the pit, detonating seconds later in a stuttering burst of multiple blasts and flashes. If anyone or anything was waiting for them down there, that should have distracted them for a precious instant or two.
Next into the pit was an AR-7 Argus reconnaissance probe, configured for atmospheric operations. Little more than a meter-long pallet supporting a power plant, reaction mass, and a highly sophisticated sensor suite, it lowered itself into the hold on sharp-hissing thrusters, transmitting a full three-sixty of its surroundings at both optical and infrared wavelengths.
And when the Argus took no defensive fire, Warhurst gave the final order. “Lieutenant Gansen, deploy your Marines.”
“Go!” Gansen yelled. “Go-go-go!”
The eight Marines on the inner circle leaned back, taking up the strain on their tethers, then stepped back as one and dropped into darkness.
CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Wheel Entry Breach, Sirius Stargate
1425 hours, Shipboard time
Garroway was one of the first Marines in. With the PG-90 snapped to a weapons mount on the side of his torso armor, he rappelled down the shaft, entering a vast, empty space and landing a moment later atop the canted plug of surface material that had dropped down from above.
The tunnel was dark at optical wavelengths, a murky green on infrared. The space was huge, a cavernous passageway almost four meters high and six wide, with rounded walls and water dripping from the ceiling. The first thing that entered Garroway's mind was that he'd just entered the intestines of some enormous beastâ¦an image he wished immediately he could forget.
He was receiving video from the Argus probe, which appeared inside a window within his noumenal vision. The image was low-res, but gave him enough information to let him orient himself once he hit bottom.
In a moment, he stood in a circle with seven other Marines, facing outward. Vinton and Arhipov on his fire team, standing to either side of him; Lobowski, Baxter, and Weis in the other; and Dunne and Womicki completing the team as the command/communication element.
The Argus probe was already moving down the tunnel toward arbitrary “north,” and was already vanishing into the dark. From his OP in the bubble on the surface, Gansen gave a command and running lights snapped on, illuminating the probe and some of the tunnel surrounding it. The enemy already knew the Marines were there; they might as well have a target they could see, one that did not have a Marine inside.
As the circle of Marines expanded slightly, eight more Marines dropped down at their backs. Dunne rasped an order and the first eight redeployed, moving into two columns of four, following the slow-drifting Argus toward the north. The second group of eight immediately set up a defensive position, facing south. They would hold the entry pointâ¦just in case it became necessary to turn it into an exit point instead.
The water here was knee deep and slowly growing deeper.
“Ugh,” Vinton said, pushing her way forward at Garroway's back. “You think this is part of their sewer system?”
“I don't know, Kat,” Lobowski replied from Garroway's right. “At least if it is, we don't have to smell it.”
“Maybe it's coolant for some kind of power plant,” Arhipov suggested.
“Can the chatter, Marines,” Dunne snapped. “Lobowski! Weis! Baxter! On point!”
“Aye aye, Gunny.”
Lobowski and the two riflemen supporting him detached themselves from the other five and moved forward a few meters. They took a couple of stumbling steps, then righted themselves. The water was now up to their waists.
“Shit, Gunny!” Lance Corporal Weis called. “If it gets any deeper, we're gonna be swimming!”
“Gunny?” Garroway said.
“What?”
“If it
does
get deeperâ¦2120s don't work for shit underwater.”
He surveyed the black water around him uneasily. The pigs ought to work okay submerged, at least for short ranges. A high-velocity plasma bolt would flash the surrounding water to steam. Friction and cooling would slow it, but it would retain a deadly punch for at least several hundred meters.
Laser bolts, however, were nothing but pulses of coherent light, and water drank light, scattering and absorbing it completely within a distance of a few meters. Blue-green lasers, emitted at wavelengths of 500 to 540 nanometers, were best able to penetrate water, but LR-2120s operated at a wavelength of 640 nanometersâa deep red, chosen because red light didn't scatter as easily in atmosphere as shorter wavelengths.
For that matter, water would hamper both communications and data feeds, both radio and lasercom. This was
not
good.
Under the lights of their armor, the water's surface appeared to be actingâ¦peculiar. It was crisscrossed by myriad tiny ripples, as though from some vibration coming through the tunnel walls.
Not surprising, really. The readout on ambient gravity was
jittering back and forth between 9.132 and 9.133 gravities, a tiny shift that was probably related to the spinning of those mini-black holes somewhere beneath their feet.
Probably. The truth was, they just didn't know what they were facing here, and that knowledgeâthe lack of it, ratherâmade each step forward a struggle.
“Gunny!” Baxter screamed. “There's something in the water!”