Ian Douglas - Battlespace

Even within Garroway’s own Wiccan tradition—as easygoing and nonjudgmental faith as existed anywhere—there were bewildering new branches and offshoots disagreeing over such burning issues as whether or not the An were ancient gods, whether use of nanotechnology for special effects within ritual circles could be considered true magic or not, whether or not Christians should be held accountable for the Burning Times, and over the Rede-ethics of weather-witching, using magic to control the weather.

And finally there were the wars. Everywhere wars and more wars. Any Marine of the forty-fourth who did end up staying on Earth—if he didn’t take an early out—was going to find himself much in demand. Temperature extremes were driving many inhabitants of far-northern or equatorial regions into the somewhat more habitable latitudes in between. Anti-migration laws had resulted in open warfare and in border massacres. In just the past thirty years, Marines had deployed to Mexico and Egypt, to Siberia and the Chinese coast, to a dozen other shores and climes, fighting at one time or another troops of the Kingdom of Allah, the Chinese Hegemony, the European Federation, the Ukrainian Nationalists, Mexicans, Québecois, Brazilians, Colombians, and forces of the Pan-African Empire. The Great Jihad War of 2147 was now being called World War V. Already there was talk of a World War VI, as migrating populations, spreading famine and disease, and the collapse of national economies propelled desperate people into paradoxically suicidal bids for a better life.

The black forces of War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death were abroad in the world, and it seemed that not even the UFR/US Marines could possibly hold them in check much longer.

Earth had become as scary and as strange a place as Ishtar … worse, perhaps, since Garroway and his fellow Marines thought it was as familiar as, well, as home .

Sirius couldn’t possibly be any more alien—or more disappointing—than Earth.

Garroway was ready to go. He wanted to go, since the only people he knew—his brother and sister Marines—were also going, or most of them were. The one thing standing in his way was what he was thinking of now as unfinished business with his father.

“Hey, Gare?” Kat Vinton said, interrupting black thoughts. “What’s with the ten-thousand-meter stare?”

He blinked, then looked up at her. “Hey, Kat.”

“Hey yourself. What’s going on? Why the intense glare?”

“Sorry. I’m feeling … a bit torn.”

“Your girlfriend was onboard the Isis , I know. You told me. I’m sorry. …”

He nodded. He looked past her at the other Marines in the barracks. He felt as though he were barely holding on.

“Thanks, Kat. I still can’t believe she’s dead.” Trying to conceal the unsteady emotions within, he turned his attention, part of it, at any rate, back to the disassembled laser rifle before him. He’d already cleaned the optical connector heads and replaced both the pulse-timer chip and the circuit panel pinpointed as dead by his initial diagnostic check. All that remained was to put the thing together, a task Marine recruits were drilled at until they could do it, quite literally, blindfolded.

“Maybe she isn’t. We rescued the Marines and scientists on Ishtar after they’d been hiding out in the mountains for ten years, right?”

“I guess,” he told her. He concentrated for a moment on connecting the barrel to the charge assembly. “Pretty grim stuff.”

“But this is different. You saw those downloads.”

“Yeah.” he snapped home the final piece, the pistol grip clicking firmly into the base housing. He set the completed rifle aside. “Grim isn’t half of it. If we haven’t heard from them in all this time, I don’t think we ever will.”

She reached out and touched his shoulder. “Oh, Gare. I’m so sorry.”

It was passing strange, talking to Kat about this. Lynnely had been his lover, and they’d reached the point of discussing marriage before he’d shipped out onboard the Derna for Ishtar. Kat had been his fuck-buddy since Ishtar … his lover, yes, but without the romantic overtones or plans for a serious long-term social connection. When your entire list of social contacts—those you could talk to, at any rate—were fellow Marines, such arrangements became common. Standing regulations frowned on sexual fraternization among enlisted personnel, but in practice both officers and NCOs alike ignored the affairs and relationships that inevitably blossomed among the lower ranks.

Marines were only human, after all, even if they rarely cared to admit it.

“Well, at least we can go out there and kick the ass of whoever did it,” Garroway told her.

“Assuming they have asses to kick,” Kat replied. “Yes.” She cocked her head to one side. “What else is going on behind those gray eyes of yours?”

She knew him too well.

“I told you about my father, right?” Damn it, the place was just too damned crowded for this kind of conversation, Garroway thought.

“Ah. The light dawns.” Kat looked around the crowded barracks, then at Garroway, and seemed to read his mind. “Say, Gare?” She jerked her head toward the door. “As long as we have some downtime, I need to show you something. Outside.”

“’Kay.”

He returned the assembled LR-2120 to its position in a rack with forty-seven other laser rifles, then followed her down the steps, through the building lobby to the front desk where they checked out with a bored sergeant and then out through the front doors into the harsh glare of the sun. It was midafternoon and Garroway felt his exposed skin tingling as the nano imbedded there began reacting to the influx of ultraviolet. The glare lessened to comfortable levels as his eye implants darkened.

The sunlight reminded Garroway once again—and forcefully—of all of the recent barracks chatter about Earth’s worsening climate. Every religion was different, of course, but his own Wiccan beliefs held that the Earth herself was alive, the Goddess in material form, Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis of two centuries earlier given spiritual shape and meaning. To see the Earth in Her current condition genuinely hurt. Could he turn and walk away for another twenty years or more? What would She be like upon his return?

Could She be dying and was it his responsibility to stay with Her and try to help?

But what could one person do to stop the drawn-out ecological death of a planet?

“Where the hell are you taking me?” he asked her as he followed her down the front steps.

“I just wanted to find a place where we could talk,” she replied. “I thought the LVP ready line. …”

Across from the gleaming white building housing the barracks, a number of vehicles had been drawn up in a rigidly straight line along the side of a paved parade ground. The large hangars housing vehicle maintenance and the flight assembly building rose around the perimeter of the field.

The vehicles were LVPs, the acronym standing for landing vehicle, personnel. Specifically, they were M-990 Warhammers, so called for the blunt, crescent-shaped nose assemblies, like the business end of a double-headed hammer, mounting plasma guns housed in turret blisters at each tip.

The vehicles were ugly, their hulls behind the nose section heavily armored and as streamlined as a misshapen brick. Though they could fly, in an ungainly fashion, they were designed to be ferried from orbit to ground slung from the wasp-waist belly of a TAL-S Dragonfly, one of the Corps’ space-capable transatmospheric landing vehicles. They were heavily armed, too; besides the plasma guns, they had laser point-defense weapons, and turreted railgun mounts at the chin and aft-dorsal hardpoints. Each Warhammer was designed to carry two squads—twenty men—plus their weapons and gear, with a two-man/one-AI crew up front.