The attack finally came, boiling out from among the ramshackle buildings and narrow streets and into open ground. The Marines had orders not to fire on civilian structures, but they had deployed a line of RS-14 picket ’bots fifteen hundred meters from the Marine perimeter. The baseball-sized devices had buried themselves in the sand and emerged now to transmit data on the range, numbers, and composition of the attacking force, and to paint larger targets, like trucks and hovercraft, with lasers.
With accurate ranging data transmitted from the pickets, Marines inside the perimeter began firing 20mm smart-round mortars, sending the shells arcing above the oncoming charge, where they detonated, raining special munitions across the battlefield. Laser-homing antiarmor shells zeroed in on the vehicles. Shotgun fléchette rounds exploded twenty meters above the ground, spraying clouds of high-velocity slivers across broad stretches of the battlefield. Concussion rounds buried themselves in the sand, then detonated, hurling geysers of sand mixed with screaming, kicking bodies into the air.
Only one TAV was airborne at the moment. They were being kept up one at a time to conserve dwindling supplies of the liquid hydrogen used to fuel them. One was sufficient, however, to stoop like a hawk out of the sun, scattering a cloud of special munitions bomblets in a long, precisely placed footprint through the middle of the crowd. A truck and two hovercraft exploded, sending a trio of orange fireballs into the intense blue of the late afternoon sky.
All of the Marines along the northeastern sector of the perimeter were firing now, along with robot sentries and gunwalkers. Warhurst switched his weapon to burst fire; laser rifles had to recycle between each shot, so true full-auto wasn’t possible, but he could trigger up to six bursts at a cyclic rate of two per second before the weapon had to take a three-second pause to recharge. Another truck exploded.
Dozens of KOA troops were falling, caught in a devastating fire from the Marine positions and from directly overhead. The front ranks wavered, hesitating in the face of that deadly wind as those farther back kept pressing forward. In another moment the attack had dissolved into a bloody, thrashing tangle of people, some holding their ground, most trying desperately to flee to the rear and the imagined safety waiting for them back across the Nile.
“Cease fire!” Warhurst called over the command channel. “All squads, cease fire. They’ve had it.”
The attackers continued to flee, leaving several hundred dead and wounded in the desert; none had come within twelve hundred meters of the Marine lines. Most had fallen well beyond the range of their own weapons. No Marines had been hit.
“Good old Yankee high-tech scores again!” Private Gordon called over the tac channel. “They didn’t even touch us!”
“Belay the chatter,” Warhurst warned. “Keep alert. Petro? Anything in front of you?”
He had to assume that the brash, frontal rush had been a feint, something to pin the Marines’ attention to the northeast while the real attack was staged from another quarter.
“Negative, sir,” Gunny Petro replied. She was in charge of the northwest sector. “No targets.”
“Rodriguez?”
“All clear, Skipper.”
“Cooper?”
“Nothing on my front, sir.”
The robot sentries out in the desert were very sensitive, fully able to detect the approach of a single man by his body heat, his movement, his radar signature, even his scent. When Warhurst called up a tactical overhead view of the perimeter, he could see his own troops huddled in their fighting positions…but no sign of enemy troops closer than three kilometers.
But there would be another attack, and soon. He looked up into the early evening sky and wondered what the hell was happening to their relief.
Esteban Residence
Guaymas, Sonora Territory
United Federal Republic, Earth
1545 hours PT
“The Marines?” his mother cried. “Goddess, why would you want to join the Marines?”
John Garroway Esteban stood a little straighter, fists clenched at his side. “You had no right!” he said, shouting at his father, defiant. “My noumen is mine!”
“It’s my house, you’re my son!” his father shouted back, raging. The elder Esteban had been drinking, and his words were slurred. “I paid for your implant, and I can goddamn do anything in, to, or through your goddamn noumen I goddamn want!”
“Carlos, please,” John’s mother said. She was crying now. This was going to be a bad one.
They’d had this argument before, many times. John’s Sony implant created the inner, virtual world through which he could access the World Net, communicate with friends, and even operate noumenally keyed devices, from thought-clicked doors to the family flyer. Noumenon was the conceptual opposite to phenomenon; where a phenomenon was something that happened outside a person’s thoughts, in the real world, a noumenon was entirely a creation of thought and imagination, a virtual reality opened within his mind…but the one was no less real than the other. As the saying went, just because it was all in your head didn’t mean it wasn’t real.