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

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СКАЧАТЬ stopped and her three hab modules folded back against her spine as loading work continued in microgravity. The last of Derna’s passengers arrived on board already in cybernetic hibernation and were transferred with the last few hundreds of tons of equipment and supplies. Meanwhile, cybehibe techs on board processed the last of the MIEU’s waking personnel—Colonel Ramsey and members of the unit’s command constellation—and hooked them into the ship’s nanocybernetic suspension system.

      Algol and Regulus, unmanned vessels both, were already cleared for launch.

      Across the world a half million kilometers away, humankind seemed to watch with an indrawn psychic breath. Manned expeditions to the stars had been boosting out-system for fifty years but always on missions strictly limited to science and diplomacy. The Smithsonian archeological expeditions to Chiron at Alpha Centauri and Volos at Barnard’s Star, the diplomatic and science legation at Ishtar, and the science missions at Thor and Kali had all been deployed to the stars on strictly peaceful missions. Now, for the first time, humankind was going to the stars armed and armored for war.

      Derna’s complement of 145 naval personnel remained awake, monitoring the prefire and launch systems, but the launch itself was handled entirely by the onboard AI, unofficially known as “Bruce.” The countdown, which had been running now for days, trickled down at last to zero, and the main engines of the three Cerberus tugs flared white-hot.

      Fifty thousand tons of thrust seemed barely to nudge the giant starships, but the acceleration, which lasted for all of five minutes, was enough to nudge the trio off-station and start them in a long half-million-kilometer fall toward the Earth.

      In Washington, D.C., President LaSalle delivered a speech proclaiming the need to safeguard human life and interests at Ishtar, emphasizing that Operation Spirit of Humankind was not a mission of vengeance or retaliation but one of rescue and recovery.

      Elsewhere, riots flared into what amounted to open warfare, as devotees of the An-creator gods battled with the legions of Earth First and traditional religious forces. The Catholic world, already sundered a generation earlier by the election of the Papessa Mary to the seat of St. Peter at the Holy See, was shattered by pitched battles in Asuncion and Ciudad de Mejico, in Madrid and Paris, in Roma, Manila, and even in the suburbs of Boston. The Papessa, in the Vatican, called for a holy crusade to free the human Sag-ura slaves held on Ishtar and to prove once and for all that the An were neither gods not angelic creative spirits acting as God’s agents. Pope Michael at the Counter-Vatican in Lausanne preached crusade against those who would deliberately bury the scientific evidence that humankind had been created by agencies from the stars, and urged a dialogue with the An to reveal at long last the Hidden Truth.

      Radical militant Anists, meanwhile, attacked both branches of the Church, calling for a return of man to his rightful place at the feet of the wise and powerful Universal Creators. Anist-led riots in Munich, Belgrade, and Los Angeles killed thousands. The battle in South Los Angeles alone claimed 918 lives, and the burning of both Catholic and Counter-Catholic churches triggered a wave of pro-Aztlan, antigringo demonstrations and rioting.

      Four days later Derna, Algol, and Regulus, still in close formation and with the Cerberus tugs detached, whipped past the Earth in a hyperbolic trajectory, accelerated by gravity. Ten days after that, as the trio hustled outbound past the ten-million-kilometer mark, the main drives cut in. Minute quantities of antimatter were fed into the hydrogen slush entering the aft thruster reaction chambers, triggering a pulsing chain of fusion explosions at a rate of eight per second, each one contained, then expelled by powerful magnetic fields. Thrust built steadily until the starships were accelerating at ten meters per second per second, just a nudge more than one g.

      Riding nova flares of incandescence hot with gamma radiation in the 511 keV band of positron annihilation, Derna, Algol, and Regulus accelerated out-system. Four and a half days later, traveling now at four thousand kilometers per second, they hurtled past the south pole of Jupiter, using that giant planet’s gravity for a second slingshot acceleration and to swing onto a new course, high up above the Solar ecliptic. They were aimed now at right ascension eleven hours, thirty-seven seconds, declination +36 degrees 18.3 minutes … in the southern reaches of the constellation Ursa Major.

      Three months after 1 MIEU’s departure a second, larger military force departed from the shipyards at L-5. Built around the ISTs Soares Dutra and Jules Verne, and the cargo vessels L’Esperance, Sternwind, and Teshio Maru, the International Interstellar Relief Expedition, as it was now called, followed a similar outbound course, picking up a gravitational assist from Earth and then another, stronger boost from Jupiter as they hurtled together into the interstellar night.

      Eleven months after launch the three ships of 1 MIEU were traveling at just beneath the speed of light, fast enough that time itself had slowed to a crawl. The Navy crew on board Derna had by then joined their Marine passengers in cybehibe, and the operation that followed was carried out entirely by the ships’ AIs. Together to the millisecond, the AM drives cut off and the starships fell through an interstellar void strangely distorted by their velocity, with the entire sky appearing to be crowded ahead of their mushroom-cap prows in a doughnut-shaped smear of starlight. Thanks to time dilation, a week of shipboard time was the equivalent of over two months on Earth.

      In the outside universe, time continued in its normal fashion. President LaSalle, battered by the politics of secession in the Southwest, lost the election of ’40 to John Marshal Cabot, a Boston Neodemocrat who rejected military intervention in Mejico, favored adoption of AI metacontrol of the World Bank, and advocated peaceful negotiations with the Ahannu. The MIEU flotilla by that time, however, was over half a light-year away, well beyond the range of any normal-space communications net. New orders, if any, would have to be relayed to the Marines via the FTL Pyramid of the Eye, if and when they were able to retake it.

      In fact, the Cabot administration made no official announcement of policy changes in regard to the Llalande situation. Much could still happen, both at Ishtar and back on Earth. Besides, the poll numbers did not lie. Americans still favored freeing the Ishtaran slaves, and by a whopping majority of seventy-three percent.

      Perhaps because he maintained a low political profile so far as the Llalande situation was concerned, Cabot was reelected by a narrow margin in ’44. The World Bank Crisis of ’45 and the resultant financial crash led to calls for an end to extrasolar adventurism. In fact, the archeological outposts on Chiron, Kali, and Thor were abandoned as funding for them dried up Earthside. Nothing could be done about the expeditions already outbound, however. The MIEU and the Isis Expedition to Sirius were both five light-years out, traveling in nearly opposite directions, both utterly beyond the hope of recall.

      Besides, the American public still favored freeing the slaves on Ishtar, by a majority of fifty-eight percent.

      On board the Derna, the Marines remained unaware of such political niceties, so deeply asleep now that even dreams were banished. The air within their sleep cells was chilled to a constant five degrees Celsius, just warm enough to prevent tissue damage from ice formation.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ