Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Chapter Nine

26 September 2404

MEF HQ

Mike-Red Perimeter

Eta Boötis System

1612 hours, TFT

Major General Gorman stood on the HQ elevated walk and looked up. For the first time in weeks, the shields were fully down and he could see the landscape directly, with his own eyes, rather than through electronic feeds. With a scream, four Marine Rattlesnake fighters passed nearby, boosting clear from the landing field and accelerating hard, their passage drawing thin lines of vapor in their wakes as their drive singularities shocked the thick air.

The Rattlesnakes were distinctly old tech-distinctive and non-variable delta shapes that seemed downright primitive in comparison to the more modern Navy Starhawks and Nightmare strike fighters. A single squadron of Marine Rattlesnakes was attached to I MEF for close air support, but sending them out during the siege would have been tantamount to murder. Rattlesnakes simply couldn’t stand up to Turusch military technology in an open fight. Their Marine pilots called them rattletraps, a reflection of their technological inadequacy.

But they served now to help secure the perimeter against infiltrators and small enemy ground units that might try to take advantage of the lowered shields as the Navy transports were coming down.

It was past the middle of the daylight hours at this latitude and time of year, the short day already half over. A low, churning overcast blocked the sky, moving swiftly with a stiff westerly wind.

Gorman was struck by the gray, bleak desolation surrounding the base, a plain stretching off to the horizon in every direction, scorched-bare rock intermingled with circular craters with black-glass bottoms. When the Marines had landed and set up Red Mike five weeks ago, the land surrounding the low plateau had been shrouded in orange growth, and there’d been a city-the largest Mufrid colony, right there…a few kilometers to the west.

Nothing remained now but rock and glass. From up here, he could even see places where the rock had run liquid, bubbled, then frozen in mid-boil. There was a high background rad count now, though the EM screens were keeping most of the hard stuff out. In the darkness, parts of that landscape now glowed with an eerie, pale blue light.

The capacity for technic intelligence to devastate a world was shocking, nightmarish.

Another flight of gravfighters howled through the thick air, following the Rattlers. These were Navy Starhawks, their black outer hulls shifting and morphing as they passed, preparing to transition from atmospheric flight to space. A kilometer from the Marine perimeter, they brought their noses up, then accelerated almost vertically, punching through the orange-red overcast. A moment later, four mingled sonic booms echoed and rumbled across the plain.

The Turusch did indeed appear to have given up the fight and fled with the arrival of the carrier battlegroup, but Gorman was under no illusions about their eventual, inevitable return.

The Confed force’s immediate problem was not the Turusch…but another problem somewhat closer to home.

A transport shuttle lifted from the landing area at the center of the Marine base, huge, its black skin shifting as it absorbed landing legs and other shore-side protuberances, streamlining itself for the flight to orbit. Navigation lights strobed at its blunt prow, its sides, top, and bottom. A Choctaw Type UC-154 shuttle, it carried nearly two hundred Marines on board. A second Choctaw remained on the landing field, cargo-bay ramps lowered at bow and sides as long columns of Marines, like black ants at this distance, filed on board.

The first Choctaw was accompanied by four Nightshade grav-assault gunships, reduced to black toy minnows dwarfed by the eighty-meter-long shuttle. There was no thunderclap this time; the shuttle and its escorts would reach orbit at a more sedate pace.

“General Gorman?”

He didn’t turn at the voice. “Yes, Mr. Hamid.”

Jamel Saeed Hamid joined him on the walkway. “You wanted to see me?”

“I wanted to discuss the…situation.”

“I don’t see that there is anything to discuss, General.”

“I’ve been going over the numbers with Admiral Koenig, the CO of the Confederation battlegroup. We estimate that we could take on board between six and seven thousand additional people. They would be packed in with our crews, stacked up like cordwood. Water and food will be rationed. The nanorecyclers will be pushed to their limits. But we can make room for them.”

“I suspect that most of us will choose to remain here, General.”

“God, why? The Turusch will be back. You know that.”

“And there is nothing for us back on Earth, or on any of the other colonies.”

“The Turusch will almost certainly kill you,” Gorman said, blunt, hard. “They are not known for their religious sensibilities.”

“Then, if it be God’s will, we will die. That has been our choice from the beginning, you understand.”

“No, sir. I do not understand.”

Hamid sighed. “The White Covenant? We will not sign that…that document. It is an affront against God.”

“Earthstar has said nothing about you signing the Covenant, Mr. Hamid. I’m sure there’s room for negotiation.”

“What you mean is that we will go back into the camps until we either sign or they find another…solution.” He sounded bitter.

On the landing field, the second Choctaw was buttoning up, the ramps pulling in, the openings slowly irising shut. Four more Nightshade gunships hovered overhead, waiting for the shuttle to lift off.

“There are…an infinity of worlds out here, Mr. Hamid,” Gorman said quietly. “You’ll be able to find another world, found a new colony.”

“Not an infinity. Many, perhaps. But still a finite number…and it’s a number made considerably more finite by the Shaitans.”

“You know what I mean, damn it. You may be back in the camps for a time, sure, but there’s plenty of new real estate available, and a lot of it is a damned sight better than this!” He waved his arm, taking in the desolate, flame-barren landscape, the poisonous and sulfur-laden cloud deck, the full orange light and heat.

“You do not understand.”

“Try me! Make me understand!”

“That is not easy.” Hamid thought for a moment. “We-the colonists of Haris-are called Mufrideen. Do you know why?”

“Of course. Mufrid is one of the names for this star, for Eta Boötis. Arabic, like the name for this planet, Al Haris al Sama. Your people were great astronomers back twelve, fifteen hundred years ago or so. Most named stars in Earth’s sky have Arabic names.”

“But we do not apply the name to our sun. Only to ourselves. The word mufrid means “alone.” Solitary. Within our religion, it has the special meaning of one who undertakes the hajj alone.”

“Hajj. That’s the Muslims’ pilgrimage to Mecca?”

Hamid nodded. “One of the five sacred pillars of Islam. And the one, of course, that we have been forbidden by your Confederation to observe.”

Your Confederation. Gorman started to respond, then thought better of it. Before 1 MEF’s deployment, representatives from the Confederation Bureau of Religious Affairs had briefed him on the Haris colonists, and he’d been warned that emotions among the colonists continued to be harsh and bitter.

The Eta Boötean colonists were the ragtag end of a longtime and seemingly unsolvable problem, one going back to the Islamic Wars of the twenty-first century and, arguably, even further back in history than that, to the Crusades and Jihads of the Middle Ages. With the end of the Islamic Wars, the newly formed Confederation had presented the world with the White Covenant, a document of basic human rights that included strong prohibitions of certain religious practices and activities. In short, all adherents of all religions had the right to believe what they wished so long as that belief did not harm others. Proselytizing, missionary work, and conversion by force or by threat all were proscribed as violations of basic human rights and dignity.

By the end of the twenty-first century, the Muslim nation-states of the world lay in ruins, their armies destroyed, their populations starving. Most Islamic leaders signed the White Covenant, if only to allow the beginning of relief efforts and food shipments.

Millions of Muslims, however, point-blank refused to accept the White Covenant’s terms, seeing them as a direct denial of God’s holy word. Numerous groups sprang up among the survivors, especially within the many relocation camps across Africa and the Middle East, calling themselves Rafaddeen, “Refusers,” because their leaders continued to refuse to sign the document.

That had been more than three centuries ago, and the Rafaddeen continued to be a thorn in the side of the Confederation. Most had chosen to remain in relocation camps that had eventually grown into small, self-contained and self-governing cities, each under the watchful eye of Confederation peaceforcers. Tens of thousands had moved off-world, to orbital cities and to extrasolar colonies, where they would not be a threat to the Pax Confoederata.

Another Choctaw drifted down out of the orange overcast, accompanied by its gunship escort. Landing legs grew from its flat belly, splaying wide as it settled onto the landing field, cargo doors dilating, ramps extending. The next load of Marines was already lined up in ranks at the edge of the field, ready to embark. At this rate, the evacuation would be complete well within the eight hours allotted for the operation.

“Muslims weren’t the only ones who didn’t like the Covenant,” Gorman said at last. “Most of my family were Baptists.” He didn’t add that he, personally, was a Covenant Reformed Baptist, and would no more preach the Gospel to someone who didn’t want to hear it than he would denounce the Corps.

“The Covenant was a gun aimed at Islam!” Hamid snapped back. “Not at American evangelicals! Not at Zionists!”

“It applied to all religions. All cultures. All belief systems. It had to, to be fair.”

“It denied the commandments of Allah to bring light to the unenlightened! It was not fair. It was blasphemy!”

“I am not going to stand here and argue bad theology with you, Mr. Hamid,” Gorman said. The capacity for members of various fundamentalist and extremist sects for clinging to battles, grudges, and wrongs done hundreds, even thousands of years ago was astonishing to him. “Seven thousand of your people can get off this rock if they want to.”

“I will…make the announcement,” Hamid said, his words and his manner stiff. “I imagine, though, that most of us will stay.”

“That’s your call. I recommend that that you let women and children have what space on the transports we can find.”

“The male children, certainly,” Hamid said. He sounded thoughtful.

The statement chilled Gorman. Traditional Islam-in particular the extremist sects, the Rafaddeen who’d rejected the White Covenant-still often valued men more than women, boys more than girls, an artifact of certain ancient tribal cultures more than of the Qu’ran itself. That, as much as the suicide bombers and the tactical nukes, had been a major part of the extremist Muslim doctrine that had led to so much bloodshed in the mid-and late twenty-first century. Most modern Islamic states back on Earth had embraced full equality of the sexes, but out here…

“All of your children,” Gorman said, putting iron into his voice. “Girls too. And the women as well. To care for them.”

To the Rafadeen, childcare was women’s work. Perhaps he could use that bit of sixth-century logic to force the issue.

Hamid gave Gorman a hard look. “You needn’t moralize at us. Our faith has served us well for over seventeen centuries, despite your Western preaching and your Crusades.”

Gorman took a step closer, towering above the smaller man. “All of the children, and the women,” he said. “As well as any men who want to go. My Marines will enforce this, Mr. Hamid. At gunpoint, if they have to.”

Hamid’s expression clouded, as though he was going to argue. Then he shrugged, backed down. “It scarcely matters. Allah has judged, and found us lacking.”

On the landing field, more columns of Marines were filing on board the open shuttle. He would need to talk with Simmons, the MEF’s executive officer, to make sure he stayed on top of a phased and orderly withdrawal. The trick, Gorman thought, was going to be keeping enough Marines behind, on the ground, to oversee the evacuation of six or seven thousand colonists, to make sure that the women and children were evacuated first, to prevent the men, however dedicated they might be to staying now, from panicking and attempting to rush the shuttles…then pull those last Marines out without triggering a deadly riot.

And all of that was assuming the Turusch stayed out of the picture.

Gorman watched the shuttle lift off, to be replaced by another dropping from the orange-yellow sky.

He saw a group of locals gathered off to one side, near the enlisted mess hall. They weren’t doing anything in particular; they were simply…watching, silent, anonymous in their e-suits.

If Gorman remembered accurately, fifteen thousand locals had made it inside the Marine perimeter from the nearby colonial capital of Jahuar when the Turusch first appeared overhead weeks ago, roughly a third of them women and children. The refugees had been crowded in with the Marines ever since, occupying supply warehouses turned into huge open dormitories. There’d been no incidents, fortunately. The biggest problem the Marines had faced had been simply getting their work done with so many civilians in the way.

If that mob down there turned on the dwindling number of remaining Marines, they could end up being just as deadly as the Turusch.

MEF HQ

Marine Sick Bay

Eta Boötis IV

1720 hours, TFT

For Gray, it was as though he were deep within the folds of a lucid dream.

He knew he was dreaming, but the reality of the scene was startlingly crisp and real, like being inside a VR threevee. There was nothing automatic or canned about it. He could choose to turn his head, looking north, toward the skeletal towers of Central Manhattan looming against the night. Or he could turn and look south, to the submerged and tumbled-down ruins of the ancient financial district projecting above the surf, the warning lights and buoys winking in the dark.

He was standing on a rooftop above something that had once been called East 32nd Street, just north of the drowned section of the old city. He could hear the gentle susurration of the surf fifty meters below.

A UT-84 utility hopper, with Periphery Authority markings showing in blue and white light against all three black wings, hovered overhead, eerily silent, faintly illuminated by the sky-glow of the New City, twenty kilometers to the northeast. Then a shaft of dazzling light speared down from the aircraft’s belly and he could not see anything at all. “Halt!” a sharp, neutrally inflected voice called, amplified and immense. “Stay where you are, in the open, your hands clearly visible! Authority peaceforcers will be there momentarily!”

The scene was a virtual reality, a near-perfect replay of events that had occurred five years earlier.

In fact, there were software programs available commercially that acted exactly like this-fed directly into the brain through a marginal AI. You closed your eyes…and could go anywhere, see anything, engage in any sport, have sex with any celebrity, and have it all be just like being there.

“What are you feeling right now?” a woman’s voice said in his mind. It was, he knew, the voice of Dr. Anna George, a psytherapist with the 1^st MEF. She was linked into the program with him, seeing everything he was seeing, experiencing his memories, and his decisions.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. He spoke aloud, the voice sounding distant, somewhere off in his mind, somewhere behind the silently hovering hopper, the ruins of the old city. “Fear, I guess.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Them. The peaceforcers.”

“But you know they’re there to help you.”

“No. I don’t. They’ve always been the enemy!”

“Who has been the enemy, Lieutenant?”

“The Authority. The peaceforcers. Watching us. Hassling us. Telling us what to do, what not to do. They call us squatties. Squatters and primitives. And ferals. To them, we’re not people. We’re just…pests. Problems to be dealt with.”

“But they got help for your wife.”

“And they turned her against me. She’s not my wife anymore.”

“You sound…bitter.”

“Am I?” He laughed. “Just because they swept me up, wrecked my life, turned my life-partner against me? Why the hell should I be bitter?”

“This will go a lot easier, Lieutenant, a lot faster, if you let go of the sarcasm.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“The hopper has you spotted on top of that building. What will you do now?”

“I don’t know. Do you mean what do I want to do now? Or what I did then?”

“Either one. This program lets you explore all possibilities. What happened. What might have happened. Good choices. Bad choices. It’s all up to you.”

In his dream, he looked away from the glare overhead, looked at the broom at his feet.

It wasn’t literally a broom, of course, but a Mitsubishi-Rockwell gravcycle. Three meters long and gleaming dull silver, it was mostly a straight, lightweight keel, with compact grav-impeller blocks front and back, braces for his feet, a long, narrow saddle for his torso, and a small virtual control suite. In street slang they were called gimps, pogo sticks, or brooms, and they were hard to come by on the Periphery. He’d found his eight years earlier in an abandoned, burned-out shop up in Old Harlem, somehow overlooked in a storage room for a century and a half, still in its manufactory-sealed packaging.

Okay. His choice? Well, he remembered what he had done that night.

The peaceforcers probably had weapons on him-stunners and a tangleweb, if nothing more. He had to do this fast….

He dropped to his belly, landing on the saddle full length, his legs stretched out behind, his feet slipping into the foot-brace stirrups, his hands grasping the handles to either side of the control suite. Gripping hard with hands and knees, he rolled hard to the left, throwing himself and the broom out of that hard, tightly focused circle of illumination, off the roof of the building, and into the darkness below.

For a giddy moment he was in free fall, the sudden blast of air triggering his helmet safety protocols and snapping down the visor. He felt the brush of something insubstantial across his leg…and then the sensation was gone, a near-miss by the hopper’s tangleweb projector.

“Citizen Gray, this is the Periphery Authority. Land your vehicle at once.”

But he’d already twisted on the handles, engaged the cycle’s grav-field, and brought the pogo around, pointing toward the southwest, out over the encroaching sea. Both feet moved, pointing his toes back and down, and the impellers caught with a sudden surge of acceleration.

“Where do you think you’re going, Lieutenant?” George’s voice asked. It wasn’t judgmental, not condemning. It was simply…curious.

“Anywhere,” he replied. “Nowhere. Away from them.”

He took the broom down to the deck, skimming now a scant meter and a half above the waters rolling between the steel and concrete cliffs of ruined skyscrapers to either side. Late in the twenty-first century, rising sea levels and the final insult of Hurricane Cynthia had battered through the Verrazano-Narrows Dam and sent the waters of the Atlantic Ocean surging past the Narrows into Upper New York Bay and across the lower half of Manhattan. The total mean rise in sea level across the island and nearby Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey had been over twelve meters-nearly forty feet. For decades after, there’d been plans to rebuild, even plans to transform lower Manhattan into an enormous artificial island rising above the intruding sea…but somehow the money had never been there. Eventually, the New City had arisen to the northeast, in the heights of Riverdale, Yonkers, and the Bronx.

Within a century, water damage, subsidence, erosion, and lack of maintenance had begun to bring the towering skyline of Old Manhattan’s downtown section down. Many of the buildings now were eerie mounds covered by kudzu, porcelain-berry, oriental bittersweet, and other ground cover that transformed them into steep-sided, fuzzy green islands. In places, skeletal towers still emerged from the water or from piles of vegetation-choked rubble. Elsewhere, some of the older stone buildings, as opposed to those of mere steel and concrete, stood still like solitary monoliths, monuments to the long-vanished city, windows long ago blown out, stone surfaces partly covered by vines and moss, slowly crumbling.

Those buildings and mounds lay just ahead of Gray now, a tangled maze of obstacles above the water. The broom’s radar and infrared optics were feeding images to his helmet display, highlighting the dangers-the cliffs, the walls, the mounds-in red, the safe passages between in green. He swerved left, then angled right, ducking past the tangled mounds of Soho Island and on toward the crumbling ruins of the old TriBeCa Tower.

Behind him, the hovering utility hopper dropped its nose and darted forward in pursuit. The Authority aircraft was highly maneuverable, more maneuverable, even, than the broom, and certainly faster. Gray held the advantage, though, because he knew Manhattan, all of it.

He nudged the broom even closer to the water; the slipstream of his passage roiled the surface behind him in a rooster tail of spray even though he wasn’t touching the water itself. He hurtled along the Broadway Canyon, pushing close to Mach 1, then braking sharply and swerving right up the Franklin Gap. Directly ahead, the TriBeCa Tower loomed vast against the darkness. Once a self-contained city in its own right, one of several arcologies to arise from central Manhattan during the mid-twenty-first century, it shrugged up into the sky nearly half a kilometer, mushroom-shaped, dome-topped, the vertical sides crenellated and textured by balconies, landing pads, overlooks, and walkways.

Accelerating again, he passed underneath the building’s massive overhang, deftly avoiding the outstretched claws of severed piping reaching from places where the concrete had fallen away and exposed the rotting and corroded infrastructure. He was home free now. The bastards couldn’t follow him under here.

And home was just up ahead.

He wasn’t going to go home, though. That was what he’d done wrong originally. There were peaceforcer officers waiting for him there…though how the hell they’d known where one anonymous squatter was living within all of this labyrinthine wreckage he didn’t know.

No…of course he knew. He hadn’t thought about it before, but he saw it now. Angela had told them.

But he wasn’t going to the suite of former apartments and shops that he called home. Slowing again, he scanned the surface of the overhang meters above his head, then spotted the place where, about a century ago, a hundred-meter chunk of reinforced concrete had dropped away, exposing a large and ragged hole in the floor of the tower’s amphitheater. Pulling back on the handgrips, he angled up and through the hole, emerging within a dark warren of passageways and rooms.

Slowing just enough to navigate those twisting hallways and corridors, he moved through the tower’s inner ruin, working his way higher, working back toward the north. There was a cluster of elevator shafts over there on the north side, empty now, with water below and empty sky above, where a part of the dome had collapsed. He would be able to rise through a shaft to a spot right at the surface of the main dome, a place where he could look for the pursuing Authority ship.

If the coast was clear, he could hightail it across the Hudson and the drowned expanse of Hoboken, and into the wilds of Jersey City Island.

“Halt, Citizen Gray!”

The voice, the sudden human shadow looming in front of him, brought him rearing back. His broom skidded out from beneath him and clattered along the wall, out of control. He hit the floor of the passageway, bounced, and rolled.

“That’s not fair!” he screamed. “That’s not the way it happened!”

But the Authority troops were already slapping the restraints on his wrists.