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Chapter Two (#ulink_8f364cb7-c9d8-57fb-b0c3-016e71afe7b5)
29 June, 2425
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto
United States of North America
0018 hours, EST
Koenig was back in that fire-swept passageway, the scene overlaid by flickering numbers giving ranges, angles, and power levels, and by a bright red targeting reticule slaved to Swayze’s laser rifle, centered on whatever the rifle happened to be pointed at. At the far end of the passageway, laser and plasma gunfire snapped and hissed from the makeshift barricades.
“Grossmann! Nobunaga!” Swayze was yelling. “Get that pig in action! Flame those bastards!”
Koenig recognized the term. The Marines had a PG-80 as a platoon heavy weapon—a semiportable plasma gun—nicknamed the “pig” and designed to burn through most armor.
Swayze was using his laser rifle, trying to force enemy troops back from the ambush barricade at the far end of the passageway. Two armored shapes moved up beside him, manhandling the bulky weapon’s tripod into place. One of the Marines was hit, his faceplate vaporized by a plasma bolt, so Swayze shoved Grossmann’s body aside and took up a position next to the gunner, snapping up the heavy fire shield and dragging back the charge lever. He slapped Nobunaga’s shoulder, signaling readiness to fire.
“Hit ’em!”
Blue-white fire exploded through the dark passageway, charring stone walls already black with age. The barricade at the end of the hall exploded, hurling chunks of molten debris as armored figures scattered … or collapsed and lay still.
The pig fired again, blasting a hole in the steel door beyond, and then Swayze was up and running down the stone corridor, firing from the hip, waving his men on. “Let’s go, Marines!Ooh-rah!”
“Ooh-rah!” The ancient Marine war cry rang out in answer from a dozen throats, raw sound and fury, meaningless except to announce that the USNA Marines were charging.
And the enemy troops began throwing down their weapons and raising their arms in surrender.
Koenig watched as two more Marines—Jamison and Arkwright—pushed past Swayze as he stopped to hand the prisoners over to another Marine. He then followed the pair, over the half-molten ruin of the barricade and through the gaping hole in the steel door. Swayze shouldered his way into the stone chamber beyond, arriving just behind the other two Marines, who’d come to a dead stop. A soldier in shifting black-and-gray nanoflage armor stood with his back to the far wall, clutching a tiny woman in civilian utilities in front of him like a shield.
Through Swayze’s helmet camera, Koenig recognized the woman. Ilse Roettgen, former Senate president for the Earth Confederation, struggled in the armored man’s one-arm grip, her arms zip-stripped behind her back. In his free hand, the man clutched a deadly little 5mm needler, which he kept pressed against the side of her throat.
“Stop!” the man yelled, his amplified voice booming off the stone walls. “If you value her life, stop now!”
Koenig recognized that voice instantly. It was General Korosi … the Butcher of Columbus.
Swayze ran a voice print ID through his suit’s AI, a process that took only a second or so, and came to the same conclusion. “Put the weapon down, General,” he said, his voice level, reasonable, and as cold as ice. “If you kill her, I promise you that you will die, right here, right now.”
“So … I should surrender, so you can put me on trial for war crimes?” Korosi laughed, an ugly sound. His English carried a thick Hungarian accent. “‘Crimes against humanity,’ I think is the phrase you Americans use? And then you execute me anyway? I don’t think so …”
“Let her go, General. Hurt her, and you won’t believe how much worse you’ll make it for yourself.”
“There is nothing you can threaten me with worse than what will happen if I give myself up. You understand me?”
“I can promise you won’t be executed.”
“So that I can enjoy the effects of a neural net wipe? Ha! That’s worse than a clean death in battle! No! Here is how we play this, American. Ilse here, lovely lady that she is, will come with me, as a guarantee of your good behavior. You and your men will back off. You will clear these corridors! You will permit us to leave. No interference! You will arrange to have a flyer meet us at the surface, with an AI pilot slaved to my direct neural control, and with a range of at least ten thousand kilometers. The flyer will take me to a destination of my choosing … and I may release Roettgen there, if I am satisfied that you have not followed us. Now, put your weapons down and move back!”
A red targeting reticule was centered on Korosi’s faceplate, and Koenig wondered if the Marine was going to try for a head shot, firing from his hip. Had Korosi not been wearing combat armor, Koenig knew, Swayze might have tried it … but splash off the armor’s surface could burn the unarmored Roettgen quite badly.
Of course, Swayze might choose to accept the collateral damage, injuring the hostage in order to kill the hostage taker. He might even accept the hostage’s death. According to Fallen Star’s operational orders, finding and rescuing Ilse Roettgen was secondary to taking down Janos Korosi.
So the easy solution would be to burn Korosi down now, even if it meant the former Confederation president’s death. It would not have been Koenig’s personal choice, but then Koenig was not the one linked to Swayze’s laser rifle.
“Okay, okay,” Swayze said after a long and agonizing moment. “You win.” The targeting reticule winked off, and slowly the Marine lowered his rifle, placing it on the floor at his feet. “Don’t hurt her!”
“The rest of you! Put down your weapons!”
“Do as he says, Marines,” Swayze told the others. He shifted to the general tactical frequency. “Listen up, Marines! Clear the passageways. Korosi is coming up … with a hostage.”
“Transport, Staff Sergeant,” Korosi said. “Arrange for us a flight out of here.”
“Okay, okay,” Swayze said. “Meteor! This is Marine One-Five! I want a Chipper on the ground on top of this fort ASAP!”
Meteor was the code name for the battalion HQ running this op, while Chipper was military slang for a C-28 Chippewa robot transport. Definitely long-range enough for the ten-thousand-kilometer range Korosi specified. Koenig contemplated that requirement. Ten thousand klicks was enough to reach any of the three space elevators—in Ecuador, Kenya, or Singapore. But what then? Korosi had to know that he would be tracked. No doubt he had confederates waiting for him someplace.
Koenig turned the problem over in his mind. They wouldn’t be waiting for him off-world; the space elevators were too easily blocked, too easily powered down, isolating him. The likeliest scenario would be to touch down very briefly someplace on Earth along a direct line of flight to one of the elevators … and effectively disappear as the robotic transport continued its flight.
Damn it, it was imperative that Korosi not be allowed to escape. If he did, the war might grind on for years more, a guerilla action fought in jungles and villages and mountains from South America to Africa to Southeast Asia.
Koenig wasn’t linked in directly to Swayze’s thoughts, his internal monologue. That degree of electronic telepathy required more sophisticated equipment than was available here … and wasn’t desirable in any case. But he couldn’t help but wonder what the Marine had in mind. Clearly, the man was working toward an idea …
Swayze, unarmed now, raised both gauntleted hands. “Look, General … take me instead, okay? She’ll be nothing but trouble. I’ll promise to behave …”
Korosi laughed. “What … you? You’re an NCO, a foot soldier! What makes something like you as valuable as the former president of the Earth Confederation?”
Swayze took a couple of steps forward, his hands still raised. “Simple: I know the full deployment of the Marines for this assault … and I know the plans that were set in motion to trap you here, to keep you penned up. I know the troop deployments topside here, and I know what naval assets we have in orbit. General Korosi, I could help you. A lot.”
Another cautious step …
“No closer!” The Confederation general gestured with the needler, warning Swayze back.
It was enough.
Since the first half of the twenty-first century, military armor had incorporated feedback cybernetics that allowed the wearer to lift and carry far greater loads than were possible for an unarmored individual. Neural augmentation—new circuitry nanochelated throughout the living brain—made it possible for an armored man to react and move more quickly as well. Clad in their Mark I armor, Marines possessed both superhuman strength and speed.
Janos Korosi was almost certainly enhanced as well … but not enough.
Swayze’s gloved hand snapped down and out with blinding speed, closing around the needler, the glove’s palm blocking the weapon’s muzzle. Korosi’s hand clenched convulsively: he fired and Swayze screamed. The needler’s power pack gave it the ability to shoot eight pulsed bursts of coherent light or a single beam lasting a few seconds. Korosi had the weapon set for a beam, and the five-millimeter thread of laser light melted through the glove, Swayze’s hand, and the top side of the glove within perhaps half a second.
By then, though, the Marine had twisted Korosi’s arm out and back so that the weapon was no longer pointed at the hostage. Swayze crowded forward, grappling with the Confederation general, continuing to grip the smothered weapon with his terribly injured hand as he knocked Roettgen aside and interposed his own body between the two. He kept squeezing, too, for as long as his armor’s glove could exert the pressure, crumpling the needler’s tough plastic body in his grip even as molten metal and ceramic charred the palm of his hand. In-head readouts showed Swayze’s doloric levels—the amount of pain he was enduring—shooting up at first, then beginning to fall … either as Swayze’s enhanced brain stifled the pain response, or as the nerves in the more sensitive parts of his hand burned away and shock began to set in.
Korosi struggled in Swayze’s grip. The laser failed—either crushed to uselessness or its power pack drained—and Swayze wrestled the general to the ground. The other Marines were leaping forward now and piling on, grabbing Korosi’s thrashing legs and arms.
“Nem!Nem!Engedj el!” Korosi screamed, his native Magyar immediately translated by Swayze’s in-head. “No! No!Let me go!”
Swayze subdued the man at last through the simple expedient of sitting on Korosi’s chest, cradling his wounded hand as his armor’s med units began treating him.
And with that, Koenig knew that the fight for Fort Douamont was over.
VFA-96, Black Demons
LEO
0019 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Connor threw her Starblade into a hard-left roll and engaged her forward grav projector. A brief burst of acceleration at twenty thousand gravities and she was hurtling past the incoming projectiles, several of which flared into vapor as she brushed them with the intensely warped pucker of space just ahead of her fighter. Two of the Todtadlers ahead and below twisted around to meet her, but she caught one in a target lock with her PBP-8 and slammed it with a high-energy particle beam, flashing the fighter into star-hot vapor.
The Pan-European Todtadlers—Death Eagles—were highly advanced, modern fighters. They easily matched USNA fighters like the SG-101 Velociraptor, but they were utterly outclassed by the newer Starblades. Connor could feel her mind pervading every part of her ship’s consciousness, directing weapons, power, thrust, and attitude together in a rapturous dance. Her fighter shuddered as a KK projectile passed through one temporary wing … but the nanomatrix hull flowed around the slug as it passed through, directing it harmlessly past the pilot compartment and other vital elements, and back into space. Connor didn’t need to spin the craft. Rather, she simply reformed it in flight, bringing weapons to bear on the second target and vaporizing it in a flare of radiation and plasma.
“Demon Five!” she called over the tac channel. “Two kills!”
“Demon Seven! Scratch one Toddy Velocicrapper!”
And the fighters merged in an angry tangle of fire and destruction …
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto
United States of North America
0020 hours, EST
Koenig emerged again from his virtual connection. A chorus of screams and yells filled the Presidential Command Center and rang off the walls—a roomful of military officers, civilian officials, aides, and technicians jumping and shouting and hugging one another and slapping hands together, congratulating each other. In a smaller room just off from the center’s main control room, Koenig blinked against the overhead lights. “What the hell is that noise?” he asked.
“The guys are going a little nuts, sir,” Whitney replied. “They got Korosi!”
“I know,” Koenig said, sitting up. “I was there. And it was the One-Five Marines who got the bastard, not us.”
“It was a group effort, Mr. President.” He gestured toward the other room. “They found Korosi, and they tracked him to Verdun. And you gave the order …”
“And the Marines dug him out, and rescued Roettgen. Tell them to knock it off and get back on the job. We still have to withdraw our people.”
“Yes, sir.”
Whitney’s attempt to spread credit for the success around irritated him. Koenig had a particular and heartfelt disdain for the type of national leader who assumed the credit for his or her military’s successes. I directed … I ordered … We attacked … Bullshit. It was the men and women who were boots-on-the-ground in-theater—the ones getting shot at and taking the risks—who should get the credit, not the damned REMFs peering over their shoulders through drone cameras, satellites, or in-head links.
Admiral Eugene Armitage, the head of the Joint Chiefs, grinned at him. “But we did get the bastard, Mr. President.”
“Yes,” Koenig said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “We got him.”
Whitney nodded. “There’s more, Mr. President. You might have missed it, but they just flashed the word back. They’ve captured Denoix as well, trying to leave the perimeter by air car.”
Koenig smiled. His chief of staff was scolding him, mildly, by letting him know that the information he’d wanted had come through to the command post just as quickly as Koenig could have gotten it from a direct link. “Outstanding, Marcus.” He glanced at Armitage. “Admiral?” he said. “Please flash Meteor a ‘well done’ from me, personally.”
Armitage nodded. “As you wish, Mr. President.”
“There’s … ah … there is still one part unresolved, sir,” Whitney told him.
“The recovery, yes. I assume you have the heavy transports on the way.”
“Yes, sir. But it’s not that.”
“What, then?”
“Eight Todtadlers launched a few minutes ago from a site in southern Turkey … a city called Adana.”
“Adana? What do they have there?”
“It’s one of Turkey’s larger cities, sir … and the site of a small spaceport. Incirlik.”
Koenig nodded as data flowed through his in-head. “Got it.”
Once, Incirlik had been a joint U.S. and Turkish military air base, back in the days of the old NATO alliance. After the mid-2100s and the beginnings of the Pax Confeoderata, the facilities had been developed as a local spaceport for Pan-Europe’s burgeoning asteroid mining initiatives. Turkey, geographically astride both Europe and Asia, had been an ideal region for economic development after both the Islamic Wars and the more recent Sino-Western Wars.
But the rise of the space elevators—first at SupraQuito, then in Kenya and in Singapore—had perhaps already doomed such antiquated assets as national spaceports. There wasn’t much at Incirlik now, save for a small military base.
But why were they attacking the USNA fighters in LEO?
For a moment, Koenig watched the data flow describing the slash and stab of aerospace fighters in low orbit. That why was becoming an increasingly important question. With the fighting at the Verdun planetary defense center all but over, there was no reason to challenge American space superiority, none at all.
Unless …
He called up a holographic map display, the board hanging transparent in midair showing the orbit of America’s space superiority fighters southeast across the Balkans, Turkey, the Arabian Peninsula, and out over the Indian Ocean. A red dot flashed at the northeastern corner of the Med, marking Incirlik. Four of America’s fighters had just shot down the last of the Todtadlers from the base; four more USNA Starblades were four thousand kilometers ahead … coming up now on the southern tip of India.
“A second launch, Mr. President,” Armitage reported. “More Death Eagles.”
“How many?”
“Five, sir. No … make that six …”
“From where?”
“Surat, Mr. President. North India.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Koenig said, thoughtful. Surat was a large city on India’s northwestern coast, next to the Gulf of Khambhat. “I think those Death Eagles are trying to punch a hole through our orbiting squadron,” Koenig said.
“For what possible purpose, sir?” Whitney asked.
“For an escape. Admiral Armitage?”
“Sir!”
“I suggest you order the Elliot and the Hawes down from their perch for a closer look.”
“Right away, sir.”
