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

they recapture the Pyramid of the Eye,” Gal-Irim-Let said. “They could call for help immediately then, as they did before.”

      “Perhaps. But their ships sail more slowly than the pictures in the Pyramid. They still require a two-cycle trip.

      “And long before then, the last of these Marines will be dead.”

       ARLT Section Dragon Three

       Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

       1644 hours ST

      A bullet spanged into Garroway’s chest armor, staggering him back a step, but he leaned forward and kept moving. From what he’d heard and downloaded so far about the Ahannu, they were supposed to be armed with spears, damn it, not guns. Someone’s intel about this rock was seriously out of date.

      At least most of the incoming rounds were small stuff, gauss-gun projectiles accelerated by powerful magnetic fields. The monster high-velocity, high-mass rounds like the one that had taken Tom Pressley apart were pretty rare, thank the Goddess, and most of those were being aimed at the LMs and at the circling air support.

      The Dragonfly TAL-S transports, relieved of the burden of their lander modules, were lighter now by fifteen tons each and far more nimble, darting about above the LZ much like their terrestrial namesakes above an insect-infested swamp. Swooping in close to the black mountainside, chin turrets pivoting sharply, they sent fusillades of pulsed laser bursts into each crevice, outcrop, and ledge that might hold enemy gunners. Weapons pods slung under their down-canted wings loosed clouds of high-velocity needles, microrockets, and target seekers. Rock shattered as explosions detonated across the cliff face, sending showers of rock cascading down to the ledge below. The Marine pilots of those Dragons were throwing everything they had on the line to give the ground-pounders below a chance to clear the kill zone.

      As he watched, one of the Dragons shuddered from a hit, its left wing and arched tail boom crumpling as black smoke began boiling from the dorsal drive unit. The aircraft banked sharply, then began tumbling, smashing into the side of the mountain. The other Dragons stooped from the glowering sky, electronically noting the location of the gauss launcher that had felled their comrade and searing it with pulsing laser flame.

      The fire from the mountainside half a kilometer ahead was slackening now, he thought. Either the air support was doing its job or the defenders were pulling out. “Heads up, Marines,” Valdez’s voice said over the tactical link. “The Ahannu gunners are pulling back. That could be good … or it could mean—”

      “Hit the deck, Marines!” Colonel Ramsey’s voice shouted in the noumenal, overriding Valdez’s words. “We’ve got a mag reading off the scale. They’re going to—”

      Garroway fell full-length on the ground. He could feel the rocky surface of the ledge trembling through his torso armor as inconceivable energies deep within the mountain built higher and higher. His audio pickups relayed a shuddering rumble, like far-off thunder.

      Then a dazzling blue-white light illuminated the rocks, the murky twilight replaced by blazing high noon. As the light faded he looked up, just in time to see a wall of white mist rushing down the slope from the mountain’s peak.

      “Shock wave!” Valdez shouted. “Stay down and hang on!”

      And then the wave front hit him like an oncoming hurricane. Once when he was a kid, a tropical storm had hit Baja and the Sonoran coast, lashing inland with 160-kilometer winds. This was like that, only worse, much worse, as the howling wind suddenly seemed to turn solid, smashing at the Marines scattered across the storm-seared landscape. The external temperature, he saw on his helmet display readouts, was nearly one hundred degrees Celsius, and the atmospheric pressure had momentarily surged to well over fifteen atmospheres.

      Garroway felt himself being lifted, felt himself sliding back across the rock. Reaching out with both gauntleted hands, he grabbed hold of a crack in the rocky grounds and hung on. The wind slammed him down then, rattling him inside his armor.

      The pressure wave passed over in another second, leaving Garroway and the other Marines gasping but more or less unscathed. He picked up his laser rifle, checking the settings. “What the hell was that?” someone yelled over the tactical link.

      “The bastards downed another Dragon,” someone else shouted back.

      Garroway looked up into the turbulent overcast. The blast had wiped the circling Dragons from the sky. Four were returning now, but one other had vanished.

      “Move in, Marines!” Valdez ordered. “Hit that gateway, bearing two-one-five!”

      Garroway turned his helmet, watching the bearing indicator numbers sweep around to the indicated direction. There was something there. …

      He thought-clicked his helmet magnification to ten times and could make out the gateway Valdez was talking about. It looked as though a portion of the rock wall above the ledge LZ had been cut away with a high-energy beam of some sort, leaving a deep crevice. Rock had flowed like water there before cooling and hardening once more, leaving smoothly shaped basaltic flowstone. Within that smooth-walled break in the cliff, a high, narrow, rectangular opening plunged into blackness. His helmet radar confirmed that it was indeed a gateway of some sort, open for at least twenty meters back into the mountain. Elsewhere on the cliff face, to either side of the gate, red light gleamed from slit windows cut into rock—gun ports, he guessed, from which the defenders were sweeping the LZ with deadly fire.

      Basic tactical doctrine downloaded into Garroway’s implant during boot camp was clear. When you’re in the open and in danger of getting your ass shot off, move! NNTs sang in his blood, his brain, his thoughts. He thought-clicked his fear down another notch and started running, pounding across the scorched and broken rock surface of the ledge toward the gate.

      The other Marines in the ARLT were sweeping forward as well, armored figures to his left and right. His helmet warned of movement ahead. …

      He was only a few meters away from the gateway in the rock when figures began boiling out of the tunnel and from openings in the ground to either side. It took him a chilling moment to realize that the shapes were not human.

      Humanoid, certainly … but shorter than men, most of them, with oddly articulated arms and legs and an odd, forward-leaning manner of holding themselves as they leaped into battle. They didn’t run so much as bound, with powerful leaps driven by strongly muscled legs. What he noticed about them most, though, was their eyes, large and gold, with horizontally and jaggedly slit pupils. They wore an oddly mismatched collection of armor, those that wore anything at all, primitive armor almost laughably clumsy and piecemeal compared with the Marines’ Mark VIIs. And though a few carried odd-looking guns, most were armed with spears, razor-tipped lances, swords, and even war clubs. It was like stepping from a twenty-third-century battlefield into something out of the Middle Ages … worse, like a fantasy in some virtual role-playing sim.

      Primitive they might be, but there were a hell of a lot of them, too many to count.

      And they were rushing to meet the Marine charge head-on.

      17

       25 JUNE 2148

       ARLT Command Section, Dragon

       One

       Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

       1645 hours ST

      Another Dragon gone, snapped out of the air by a burst of plasma from that damned mountaintop. Four aircraft left out of the original eight.

      Warhurst thought he saw the pattern, though. The mountain fortress could fire at targets in any direction and within about 140 degrees of straight up. That meant that targets within a few kilometers of the mountain’s base, including the entire LZ, were safe from direct fire. Dragonfly Two, however, had circled far enough away from the