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

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 a few kilometers away, as well as claw starships out of orbit? No one knew. Was the beam generated, as most analyses suggested, by matter-antimatter interaction? Pure conjecture, based on the fact that no one knew of another energy source with the same star-hot output. Was there a recycle time on the beam, meaning a force could slip in after it fired once, while it was still recharging? No one knew. So far as anyone on Earth was aware, the An-Kur beam had fired exactly once. Hell, there was a possibility that the thing was a one-shot weapon, like the old X-ray laser technique that used the detonation of a nuclear weapon to generate the needed X rays, destroying the gun as it fired. The Marines might get to Objective Krakatoa and find nothing left there but a ten-year-old glass-bottomed crater.

      But they couldn’t count on that, not with so much riding on the question.

      Damn it all! How the hell was he supposed to train himself and his company for an assault when next to nothing was known about the target?

      Warhurst’s stomach rumbled, and he realized again how hungry he was. He didn’t notice it when he was in sim, but once he was back in the real world, he wanted to eat, and he didn’t care what his implants told him he was supposed to feel. This fasting business, he thought, was strictly for the religious fanatics. The thought made him smile, though. He was going to get to see the An in person, which was more than most of Earth’s fanatics could hope for, whether they were with the Human Dignity League or the Anist Creators Church.

      He just wished he didn’t have to starve to do it.

      Warhurst covered his face with his hands, thinking. “Okay,” he said at last. “If I only have one company, that’s all I have. The best approach we’ve tried was Scenario Five. We only lost one Dragonfly that way. Splitting up over the horizon and angling in from all directions is bound to scatter the enemy’s defenses somewhat and may keep our casualties down. The only other possible approach is to land farther out and make the approach on foot.”

      “Which runs up against the time problem,” Anderson put in.

      “Agreed.”

      “I’d throw in a tactical reserve if we had one,” Ramsey said, thoughtful. “But we’re stretched way too thin as it is. Trying to invade a whole damned planet with twelve hundred Marines … it’s like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. We just don’t have the assets to spare, in personnel or in logistical transport.”

      “Don’t I know it. I’ve been thinking about this lots, Colonel. If my people don’t take Krakatoa, we’re pretty much screwed no matter what … unless the whole thing is a paper tiger anyway. And I’m not betting the farm on that possibility.”

      “Nor am I, Martin. Nor am I. Doesn’t make sense to turn a mountain into a gun that’s only good for one shot.”

      “Unless, of course, they have lots of mountains around New Sumer, each with its own superpopgun,” Anderson said.

      “Lovely thought,” Ramsey told her. “I’ll recommend you for command of the World Pessimists Legion.”

      “No thanks. I probably wouldn’t like that.”

      “Fortunately,”