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

Meanwhile, the United Federal Republic found itself fighting three nasty little wars, in South China, in New Liberia, and in Nicaragua. In 2146 the situation in Egypt, never wholly settled, exploded into the Great Jihad War, with the EU and the UFR against the Kingdom of Allah. What began as a battle to save world cultural treasures in Egypt swiftly devolved into all-out religious war, with Anists and various antislavery factions in uneasy alliance against the rabidly anti-Anist Islamic militants. The Giza Plateau remained secure in western hands once French, Ukrainian, German, and British commandos took Cairo, but the fighting merely spread to Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Turkey. Some netnews reporters began calling the conflagration a new world war. Elements of the 1st Marines were committed to fighting in Indonesia and, a year later, in the Philippines. Other Marine units reported to the moon, Mars, and Jupiter space to protect various xenoarcheological sites, including the Singer in the icy embrace of Europa. The Kingdom of Allah had minimal space capability, but the threat of infiltration and sabotage was thought to be serious.

Perhaps because of the seriousness of the military situation on Earth, interest in the MIEU was waning fast. In October of 2146, a netnews poll reported that only four percent of Americans now favored military intervention at Ishtar. Nearly ten percent felt that the expedition should refuel and return to Earth as soon as it reached the Llalande system, without even awakening the sleeping Marines.

By the middle of 2147 the Great Jihad War had officially been elevated in status to World War V, at least by the various news media. Opinion polls indicated that forty-one percent of Americans now favored military intervention in An affairs and that, significantly, seventy-three percent admitted to strong anti-An political or religious views. Some thirty-one percent felt that negotiation with the An was the better way to go, a figure that had doubled in the past ten years; almost twenty percent were unaware that human slaves were held by the An, and twenty-eight percent more knew but didn’t care. In July, President Cabot called an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the fact that a military mission was entering an alien star system intent on waging a war that no longer enjoyed a broad base of popular support at home. The only agreement reached was that the greatest threat to the mission now was the International Interstellar Relief Expedition six months behind the Derna. The troops on board included both KOA and anti-An Traditional Catholic forces from Brazil. They might well pose a greater threat to the Marines than the An, now that they were enemies in the world war raging back home. A full briefing was prepared, both for standard radio transmission and for FTL relay through the Cydonian facility on Mars.

The question was when—and if—the Marines would get the word, and whether the enemy troops in the IIRE, who would also have access to the FTL site at New Sumer’s Pyramid of the Eye, would learn of their change in status first.

Eight light-years away, the Derna, Algol, and Regulus all had spun end for end, folded their hab modules, and refired their AM drives. Backing down the acceleration curve, now, they were less than half a light-year from their destination. This was, arguably, the most dangerous point of the flight. For three years of shipboard time the crew and passengers of the Derna had been protected from high-energy impacts by the vast bulk of the reaction mass storage tank forward. Now, though, with the AM drives pointed at the destination and with the craft still moving at close to c , the hab modules were exposed to stray bits of matter incoming at relativistic speeds. The drive flare itself, together with the magnetic fields used to focus the exhaust plume, was supposed to clear the way, but the technique was still highly experimental. Inflatable balyuts—a doughnut of balloons filled with water—unfurled aft of the hab modules to provide some extra protection, but mission experts on Earth could only cross figurative fingers and wonder what was happening. Derna should be slowing now, but they wouldn’t know about it on Earth until either the Pyramid of the Eye was recaptured intact or a radio signal made it back to Earth in another eight and a half years.

The Marines remained asleep, though by now Derna ’s medical AI had begun warming the sleep cells slowly to body temperature, as nano injections prepped their brains for reawakening. The Navy crew would be revived first. They’d been lucky on this passage; out of 145 naval personnel, only seven had failed to survive the trip.

By March 2148 the Derna and her escorts were falling into the Llalande system, still decelerating at one g. Drives were focused to initiate end-course corrections that would bring the trio of vessels into Marduk space. Potential disaster was averted when Algol ’s ship AI failed to make the necessary course changes; high-speed particles had degraded elements of Algol ’s navigational software, deleting key commands. Derna ’s crew transmitted software patches over the laser communications link, however, and brought the cargo vessel back onto the proper course.

Derna , meanwhile, deployed twenty-five Argus probes—robot fliers cocooned inside ceramic-sheathed TAV transport modules. They would arrive at the objective days ahead of the hard-decelerating starships.

Another month passed, and giant Marduk loomed huge beyond the flaring drive plumes of the slowing ships. The end-course corrections had in part been designed to bring the vessels in a long, looping passage across Marduk’s day side, burning off the last of their excess velocity in an aero-braking maneuver that slung them into a tight, hard loop back into deep space, then back on an infalling path toward Ishtar’s night side. The drives switched off and the hab modules extended and began rotating, generating one g of spin gravity in the outer decks.

And on the 24th of June, 2148 by Earth time, but only a bit more than four years after launch by shipboard time, the first of Derna ’s Marine passengers began waking up.

Deck 3, Hab 3, IST Derna

12 million kilometers from Ishtar

0950 hours ST (Shipboard Time)

Strange thoughts and images flooded Garroway’s brain. I thought we weren’t supposed to dream , he thought, struggling against a thick, hot, and oppressive sense of drowning. He’d been falling … falling … falling among myriad stars toward a dazzling red beacon at the bottom of an infinitely deep well. The beacon was growing brighter with each passing moment, but somehow he never seemed to reach it. …

The strangling sensation grew sharper, and then he was awake, coughing and gasping, struggling to clear his lungs of a viscous jelly plugging nose and mouth and windpipe. He gave a final convulsive cough and hit his head against the roof of his cell. It took him a few moments to connect with where he was. His last memories were of the processing center at Seven Palms, of being led into a cavernous room with perhaps half of his graduating boot company, of being ordered to remove all clothing, jewelry, and personal adornments and log them in with a clerk, of lying down on a thin mattress on a hard, narrow metal slab that made him think about morgues and autopsies. A voice had been talking to him through his implant, having him count backward from one hundred. And then …

His arm burned slightly, and a robotic injector arm withdrew into a side compartment. “Lie still and breathe deeply,” a voice told him. “Do not try to leave your cell. A transition medical team will be with you momentarily.”

He was aware now of more and more sensations, of a growing light in his sleep cell, of the feeling of weakness pervading every muscle of his body, of the warm and wet stickiness of some kind of gel melting beneath his hips and back, of ravenous hunger in the pit of his belly, of the incredible stink filling the coffin-sized compartment. Goddess, what kind of hell was he awakening to?