The Complete Legacy Trilogy: Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ It’s supposed to do that. Think about it. For the next ten years, you’re going to be lying here, breathing, eating, drinking, eliminating, filtering your blood, all through these IV tubes. Medical nano and the AI doctor built into these walls are going to be monitoring and handling all of your body functions. The one thing these machines can’t do is safely turn you over every couple of hours for ten years. Can you imagine the problems you’d have with bedsores if you just laid on your ass for that long? By the time you’re asleep, the pad will have turned into a kind of gel bath. It’ll support you gently, just like you were in a pool of water … and the gel gives the medical nano access to your back so it can rebuild skin cells and keep your circulation going, keep your blood from pooling, y’know?”

      “It feels … like I’m sinking.” Thoughts of drowning tugged at her mind. She wasn’t thinking clearly, and she was having trouble formulating the questions she wanted to ask. “Will … I dream?”

      “Maybe a little, when you’re going under, and when you’re coming out. The AI doc will be initiating REM sleep as it takes you down. But most of the time? No.”

      One of the other techs laughed. “I know I wouldn’t care to have to deal with a decade’s worth of dreams,” she said, “especially knowing I couldn’t wake up!”

      “I … think the Ahannu sergeant is Cydonia at the Institute. Ahannu Buckner is a real bastard. Manipulative. Make me rich …”

      “I’m sure that’s true, Doctor. Would you mind counting backward from a hundred for me?”

      “Counting … backward? Sure. Saves power. But what about the Hunters of the Dawn? They won’t have to wait in line, not with PanTerra. A hunnerd … ninety … uh, no … ninety-seven. Eight … nine … Ishtar. It’s beautiful there, I understand. …”

      “You’ll be able to see that for yourself, Doctor, very, very soon now.”

      Hab 3, Deck 1, IST Derna

       Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

       1405 hours Zulu

      The surface of the world of Ishtar blurred beneath the hurtling Dragonfly, jagged mountains and upthrust volcanic outcroppings among gentler rivers of gleaming ice. This was Ishtar’s anti-Marduk side, the hemisphere held in the grip of perpetual winter as the moon circled its primary in tidal lock-step.

      But the ice was thinning, the land greening. New Sumer lay just beyond the curve of the red-purple horizon up ahead, another hundred kilometers or so. …

      “Black Dragons,” Warhurst announced over the tactical net, using the assault force’s new call sign. “Stand by … three minutes.”

      One by one the other dragons responded. Six Dragonfly reentry vehicles, laden with APC landers, hugged the terrain as they swung into the final approach, skimming scant meters above the boulders and ice whipping past below. Abruptly, rocks and ice gave way to open water, and the sextet of deadly black skimmers howled over the sea, raising rooster tails of spray in their sonic-boom footprints.

      Ahead, just visible now, the black, conical mountain designated Objective Krakatoa lifted slowly above the horizon. Following plans logged with their onboard AIs, the shrieking aerospacecraft began weaving back and forth, spreading out to make themselves harder targets to hit.

      Forty kilometers from the target the sky exploded in dazzling, blue-white radiance. Dragonfly Three, touched by that nova heat, melted away in an instant. Dragonfly Five, jolted by the blast’s shock wave, lost control and struck the water in a cartwheeling spray of foam and metallic debris.

      Damn, he thought. Not again!

      It just wasn’t working. …

      And then the mountain was rising to meet them, vast and black and ominous. Dragons One and Two flared nose-high, dumping forward velocity, then hovering briefly above flash-blasted rock and cinder, before releasing their saucer-shaped payloads—“personnel deployment packages” in mil-speak. Dragons Four and Six howled low overhead, reaching farther up the mountain slope before settling with their PDPs.

      Each saucer lander, cradled in the gap behind the Dragonfly’s bulging nose and intakes and the tail-boom mounted rear plasma thrusters, carried a section of twenty-five Marines and their equipment—two to a fifty-man platoon. The Marines, strapped into wire-basket shock frames, were jolted hard back and forth within their harnesses as the saucers plowed into the burned-over side of the mountain.

      Then the pilot AIs released the harnesses and cracked open the side hatchways, and the Marines spilled out into the dim red twilight of Ishtar.

      Warhurst followed, though his proper post was the HQ command center in Dragon One’s lander. They’d already lost, and there was no sense in continuing. …

      “End program,” he called, and in a flicker of blurred motion the towering mountain, the red and purple sky, the charging Marines, all vanished, and he was again in the simulation couch in his office on Deck One, Hab Three, of the IST Derna.

      The simulated attack had failed the moment he’d lost a third of his assault team to Krakatoa’s searing, antimatter-powered beam.

      “You should have continued the assault, Martin,” Major Anderson’s voice said over his link. “You might have learned something.”

      “I really don’t care to get killed again, Major,” he said. “Neither do my people. That sort of thing can’t be good for morale.”

      Actually, he was more concerned with his troops picking up careless habits than about poor morale. Losing your life in a VR simulation like this one was no worse than losing a game sim, but Warhurst wondered if too much reliance on painless simulations led to Marines taking chances on the battlefields of the real world … chances that could leave them dead and jeopardize a critical mission.

      “So what happened?” Colonel Ramsey asked over the link.

      “Same as before, Colonel. We lost two of the Dragonflies going in. We can’t take that whole damned mountain with only a hundred Marines.”

      “Mmm. And we won’t have the resources to use human wave tactics. The troops or the equipment.”

      “No, sir,” Warhurst replied. Colonel Ramsey wasn’t serious about human wave tactics, of course. Marine tactical doctrine emphasized finesse rather than brute force. Ramsey was gently pointing out that this particular tactical problem was not one that could be solved by throwing more troops at it.

      “Recommendations?”

      “Hard to make any, sir, since we don’t really know what to expect. But if these worst-case scenarios prove out, then we’re screwed. We need to hit Objective Krakatoa with at least two full companies to be sure of getting through with one.”

      The only information they had about the An planetary defense weapon had been based on the account FTL-transmitted by a young Marine at the New Sumer compound moments before it was overrun by the An rebel forces. They knew that the An facility, hidden in the mountain they called An-Kur, could shoot down a spacecraft in orbit, and that it could shift the aim of the beam by as much as ten degrees out of the vertical to aim at a specific target.

      Could that beam be aimed at a target hugging the surface of Ishtar only СКАЧАТЬ