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

help us if this goes wrong, Colonel. God help us all.”

      King, Ramsey noticed, was sweating heavily, the droplets of moisture beading up and drifting through the air like tiny, gleaming words when he moved his head. He’s terrified, Ramsey thought. What the hell is going on with this guy?

       ARLT Section Dragon Three

       Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

       1715 hours ST

      Garroway had stopped feeling much of anything. His emotions during the past few minutes had seesawed wildly between terror and elation, and Hollingwood’s death had left him feeling utterly spent. He watched in numb emptiness as a spidery-looking walker picked its way over the steaming piles of Ahannu bodies and vanished into the gateway crevice.

      “Garroway,” Valdez said. “You okay?”

      “I … think so.”

      “Brandt bought it. I’m moving Sergeant Foster to the PG team. From now on, you’re with my fire team. Understand?”

      He nodded, then realized his squad leader couldn’t see the nod in his helmet. “Uh, yes, Gunny. Aye aye.”

      “Good man.”

      The import of Valdez’s words was only now beginning to sink in. Second Squad had been organized as four fire teams of three Marines apiece. His fire team had consisted of Hollingwood and Sergeant Cheryl Foster. Lance Corporal Brandt had been teamed, along with PFC Cawley, with Honey Deere and his plasma gun. Brandt’s death put a hole in the plasma gun fire team, which needed three experienced operators—gunner, assistant gunner, and spotter/security. Foster was filling that hole, which left Garroway without a fireteam. Valdez’s trio, called the squad command team, included Dunne and Pressley. Now he was replacing Pressley in the SCT.

      The reshuffle made sense, he supposed, given the need for three experienced hands on the plasma gun. Still, he felt a nagging worry that Valdez was doing it this way just to keep a close eye on him.

      “TBC in place and ready to fire,” Valdez called over the tac net. “Fire in the hole!” An instant later the crevice in the mountainside lit up with a fierce, blue-white light. The shock wave washing over the Marines crouching outside was as thunderous as the detonation from Krakatoa’s peak.

      Rock was still clattering down the mountainside when Lieutenant Kerns shouted, “Go! Go! Go!”

      Garroway scrambled to his feet and advanced toward the crevice. “Mind the walls,” Valdez warned. “They’re still hot.”

      Hot enough, indeed, to melt any part of Garroway’s armor that happened to touch them, though the special insulation on his boots would let him cross the entrance floor without burning his feet. The rock underfoot was oddly plastic, clinging to him like heavy mud with each step. The Thermal Breaching Charge, teleoperated into the gateway by a small remote walker, had momentarily concentrated the heat of a small star against a portion of the blocking door less than a millimeter across. Much of the gate, as well as several tons of surrounding rock, had been turned into plasma and a great deal of energy, leaving behind a larger, gaping hole with walls and floor still incandescent. Air roared into the tunnel as the Marines filed through, entering the larger chamber beyond.

      “We’re looking for a control center of some kind,” Valdez told her squad. “But stay alert. These passageways’ll be full of Frogs.”

      Garroway thought-clicked his light and heat sensitivity up a few notches. It was dark in the high-vaulted cavern beyond the entrance, with only a dim, reddish glow filtering down from somewhere high overhead. With enhanced vision, he could dimly see the far walls of the place, black and rippled, as though the rock had momentarily flowed like water before hardening into something like glass.

      The TBC’s effects hadn’t reached this far inside the mountain, he knew. These chambers in the heart of Krakatoa must have been melted out of the solid volcanic rock millennia ago by a technology at least as advanced as what humankind currently possessed. He overlaid his surroundings with a virtual image drawn from the maps of the tunnel complex stored in his helmet memory, and dim green ghosts of passages and rooms and chambers floated in the darkness around him, beyond the shadowy rock walls. Hot spots from his IR sensors pinpointed places where some of those tunnels opened into the main chamber. Other Marines were already fanning out in several directions to seal those potentially lethal doorways.

      He kept looking ahead, though, wondering if some of those tunnels up there connected with the core of the mountain. Could the Frogs vent some of the titanic fury of their big weapon into these passageways? Not a pleasant thought …

      “Second Squad,” Valdez called. “With me!”

      Garroway trotted along after Valdez and Dunne, trying to look in all directions at once. This was a wonderful place for an ambush, if there was going to be one. …

      It was then that a portion of the chamber wall dissolved and the Marines were enveloped by hordes of Ahannu warriors.

      And this time they had no hope of help from air support.

       ARLT Command Section, Dragon

       One

       Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

       1725 hours ST

       “They’re coming! Open fire!”

       “Third Squad! First Squad! Form perimeter! Second Squad, get your asses the hell back here! You’re going to be cut off!”

       “Mathorne! Where’s Mathorne?”

       “Get those PGs firing, damn it!”

       “Corpsman! Marine down!”

       “Second Squad! Damn it, you’re being cut off!”

      Captain Warhurst listened to the excited shouts and commands coming from inside the mountain and wondered if he could pull the plug.

      The “plug” was a Mark XVII laser-plasma-fired backpack fusion demolition device. There were six of them assigned to the ARLT, and four were currently being worn by four different Marines inside the mountain—Gunnery Sergeants Mathorne and Valdez, Staff Sergeant Ostergaard, and Lieutenant Kerns. The remaining two were stored on the lander modules for Dragon One and Dragon Six. Any or all could be detonated by the Marine carrying one, with the appropriate firing codes provided by one of the LM AIs, by Warhurst himself from Lander One, or by the Command Constellation still on board Derna. It was believed that one device, with a yield of 0.7 megaton, detonated inside Objective Krakatoa, would collapse enough of the entire mountain to render the Ahannu planetary defense complex useless.

      The plug was decidedly an option of last resort, one to be used only if there was no other way to protect the incoming transports. The things could be given a time delay or triggered immediately. The hope, of course, was that one of the Marines could leave a warhead where it would do enough good and give the ARLT time to evacuate to a safe distance, but no one in on the planning for Operation Spirit of Humankind believed that escape would be possible. The plugs turned the ARLT assault into a suicide mission.

      Worse, from Warhurst’s point of view, only the Marines actually wearing the deadly packs knew what they carried. The rest of the Marines down there didn’t know, and that was just plain wrong, Warhurst thought. A man or woman who was going to die when a friend thought-clicked a command trigger ought to know what was going to happen … and that instantaneous incineration meant success for the rest of the invasion.

      But knowledge of the Mark XVIIs had been locked under need-to-know restrictions. Someone higher up the chain of command had decided that knowing about that part of the operation might degrade unit combat efficiency.

      That still didn’t make it right.

      Four warheads were inside the underground