Ian Douglas - The Complete Legacy Trilogy - Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines

Colonel Ramsey was completing the mission briefing. “That’s it, then,” he said. He gestured, and lines of green light flared against the map of the city, outlining perimeters, zones of fire, and LZs. “The initial landings will seize control of the city of New Sumer and the immediate area, with special attention paid to gaining control of the Pyramid of the Eye. That will be the Regimental Landing Team HQ.” Another window opened, enlarging the map area around a prominent rise west of the city. “Before that happens, however, we will need to neutralize Mount An-Kur. That will be the particular task of your Advance Recon Landing Team, Captain Warhurst.”

The briefing room, if it could be called that, was being projected inside the minds of the participants, some of whom were at Quantico, others as far away as the Derna , in high Earth orbit. The icon representing Captain Martin Warhurst wore Marine grays, which were somewhat outmoded on the fashion front. Just three weeks back from Egypt, he’d not had time to update his personal software, what with endless rounds of debriefings and the work he was putting into his latest assignment—the Llalande Relief Expedition ARLT. In contrast, most of the others at the virtual briefing flaunted the latest Marine officer’s fashion, duotone white and gold tunics over blue trousers, both with red trim, and with a holographic globe-and-anchor projected above the left breast. Ramsey wondered how many of them wore the new uniforms outside of virtual reality. They looked peacock-gaudy in the briefing feed; few field commanders, however, bothered with the game of fashion keep-up so popular with the stateside Corps brass.

“I’d still feel better about this if we just rocked ’em from orbit,” Warhurst said. “This giant gun or whatever it is they have inside the mountain … if it can claw starships out of the sky, how the hell are we going to even get close?”

Colonel Ramsey nodded. “I know. But we have very specific orders on this one. I already tried to sell the commandant on a bombardment from space, but his orders are to deliver that weapons system to our experts … intact. If we reduce that mountain to a crater, the Joint Chiefs are not going to be happy with us.”

“So?” Major Ricia Anderson said, grinning, her voice just low enough that the colonel could convincingly ignore it. “They’ll be ten years away! What are they gonna do, write us a nasty e-note?”

“Fortunately,” Ramsey went on, “the Annies don’t know we have to take that mountain instead of flattening it. That gives us a possible edge tactically, a slim one. From the description provided in the last transmission from the pyramid, we estimate that the beam weapon hidden inside An-Kur must generate a bolt of energy measuring at least 10 16joules.

“Now, we don’t know how they generate that kind of power. Like all of the Ahannu god-weapons, it’s pretty much magic so far as we or they are concerned. But that much energy takes time to generate and store, even if they have some kind of antimatter generator down there. We’re counting on the fact that they’ll have a limited number of shots, with a goodly recharge time between each one. That, Captain, will operate in your favor.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Ramsey smiled. What else could Warhurst say? The man had volunteered for this mission as soon as it had been described to him. The chance to deploy to another star system … hell, don’t quibble. The chance at an assignment with a Career 3 rating meant promotion points as well as a whopping big combat-hardship pay bonus. If Warhurst survived this op, his career would be made .

“Our biggest problem right now,” Ramsey told his staff, “is manpower. Volunteers only, of course … and because of the objective mission duration, the pick is limited to Famsit One and Two. Our original TO and E called for a full regimental MEU … about two thousand people. With the logistical limitations of a Derna -class IST, we’re reconfiguring that as an MIEU, a Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit, with a roster of twelve hundred. Even with that, though, we may have trouble filling out the roster.”

Lieutenant Colonel Lyle Harper, the Regimental Landing Team’s CO, raised a hand. “We could put in a special request at Camp Lejeune, Colonel. There are sixteen companies in training right now, and a fair percentage of those people won’t have close family ties. Hell, they might see it as an adventure.”

“Not to mention returning to Earth with five years objective under their belts,” Major Lyssa DuBoise, commander of the MIEU’s aerospace element, said. “Eligible for discharge and a hell of a lot of hardship pay!”

“Since when did the Corps become a mercenary unit?” Major Samuel C. Ross, the Regimental G-2, said. He was in charge of mission intelligence—a particular bastard of a job, Ramsey thought, since no one knew exactly what was happening on Ishtar right now, and there was no way in hell they could guess what it would be like ten years hence.

“Our people will do their jobs because that’s the way they were trained,” Ramsey said. “As for the rest, it’s about time they got some financial recognition for what they do. There’s little enough material gratification in the peacetime Corps.”

“Amen to that,” someone in the watching group muttered aloud.

“In any case,” Ramsey continued, “Major Anderson will be responsible for recruiting volunteers at Lejeune. Because of the mission’s subjective length, we’ll need a high percentage of young men and women right out of boot camp. They’ll all be eligible for sergeant’s stripes and better by the time they get home.”

Subjective versus objective time was becoming more and more of a problem in the modern military, especially in the Navy and the Marines. While career-military officers and senior NCOs were “lifers”—meaning they expected to be in the service for a full twenty or thirty years, at least—the vast majority of enlisted personnel signed up for an initial four-year hitch. Some small percentage of those opted to extend their enlistment for an additional six years, to “ship-for-six,” as the old saying went, and a smaller percentage of ten-year veterans decided to go the full twenty or more to retirement.

If a young Marine rotated through various duty stations on Earth, or even on the moon or one of the orbital stations, there was no problem. That’s the way things had been run in the military for centuries. But it was expensive to ship large numbers of men and women plus their equipment to other worlds within the Solar system, and so time on-station offworld tended to be measured in years rather than months.

And now that Marines were being sent to the worlds of other stars, the problem of finding unattached personnel who didn’t mind leaving Earth and all they knew there for years, even decades at a time, was becoming critical. Nanohibernation technology and time dilation might make subjective time on board the Marine transport seem like days or weeks, at most, but objectively the voyage would last a decade—two before the mission personnel saw the Earth again. Those young Marine men and women would return to an Earth aged twenty years or more. And even the most optimistic mission planners expected the deployment to the Llalande system to require no fewer than two years of ground-time at the objective.

Finding the best Marines who were also Famsit One—no close family ties on Earth—or Famsit Two—FOO, or Family-of-Origin only—was becoming damned near impossible. If anyone could deal with the details and the delicacies of such a search, Ramsey knew it was Ricia.

“I have one final piece of business for this briefing,” Ramsey said. He thought-clicked a new connection, allowing another image to form within the shared noumenal conference space. “Ladies, gentlemen, may I present our mission commander, Brigadier General Phillip King.”