Star Corps(106)
The literally unearthly beauty of this place, Garroway thought, was hypnotic, supremely compelling. It was possible to lose yourself in that sky….
“So what’s on the agenda, Gunny?” Gerrold Garvey asked. “Are we out of the war yet?”
“You wish,” Valdez said, and the others laughed.
“I don’t think the Frogs beat that easy,” Deere added.
“You call that easy?” Garroway asked sharply, looking up. “We got kicked in the ass today!”
“We won, kid,” Sergeant Dunne told him. “Right now, that’s what counts.”
Garroway stared at his hands. They were trembling, the adrenaline-laced aftershocks of the NNTs he’d ridden.
“You okay, Garroway?” Valdez asked. She sounded concerned.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay.” The mental image of Pressley’s arm dangling in his hand flashed before him only briefly, but bearing with it all the shock and horror of that nightmare moment. He wondered if he would ever be able to forget….
“We wait for orders,” Valdez told them, with a sidelong look at Garroway. “The next assault’ll be on New Sumer. We hold this mountain and the BFG for the techies…and move to reinforce the main attack if they need us.”
“Hurry up and wait,” Deere said, grinning. “That’s the Corps for you, all the way!”
“BFG?” Garvey asked. “What’s that?”
Deere grinned wolfishly. “‘Big fuckin’ gun,’ kid. A big fuckin’ gun.”
“We’ve pulled the fangs on the Frog planetary defenses,” Valdez added. “Now we watch the rest of the MIEU mop up!”
Garroway leaned back against a boulder and picked at his meal, watching his squad mates as he did so. Their reactions, he thought, were interesting. The vets among them all seemed to be taking this pretty casually, though he suspected that some of the bravado was a kind of verbal protective shell. Of all of them, Valdez seemed to have the most genuine and matter-of-fact responses—those of a professional doing an unpleasant but necessary job.
The two other newbies left in the squad, though, were taking wildly different tacks. Garvey seemed to be doing his best to imitate the veterans in the outfit, cracking jokes and laughing. Kat Vinita, on the other hand, had said very little since the end of the battle and seemed to be withdrawing into herself. He’d seen Valdez sitting with her, talking quietly a while ago, but she hadn’t joined in the banter.
Most of the time she was staring into that incredible, glowing sky.
A bit self-consciously, Garroway got up and walked over to Kat, dropping down next to her. “Can I join you?”
She shrugged, still looking into the sky.
“You okay?”
“What’s it to you?”
It was his turn to shrug. “Self-therapy, I guess. I got the whim-whams a bit, back there. I thought talking to someone else might help.”
She sagged inside her armor. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to bite your head off.”
“No problem. Chewy or crunchy?”
“Huh?”
“My head.”
“Oh.” She looked up into the sky again. After a long time she said, “Why does it glow like that?”
“What, the sky? Auroras. Ishtar has a pretty strong magnetic field.” He’d already accessed the Derna’s noumenal net, wondering the same thing. “And a good thing too, or we wouldn’t be able to uncork our armor. Marduk throws off a hell of a lot of radiation. Ishtar’s magnetic field traps a lot of it up there, where it excites free atoms of oxygen and other stuff and gives off that glow. If it wasn’t for that—”
“We’d be fried, I know. But I thought planets had to rotate to generate a magnetic field. Ishtar is tide-locked to Marduk. It rotates, but slowly, once in six days. And it has a strong one too, almost five gauss. A lot stronger than Earth’s.”
“I never thought of that.” He reached into the net for an answer but found none.
“I already did a search,” she said, sensing his uplink. “Some planetologists think the tidal flexing that keeps Ishtar at livable temperatures also stirs up the core enough to generate the mag field. But nobody knows for sure. There’s so much we don’t know….”
He was surprised. She didn’t talk like a Marine…certainly not like a private. Of course, neither did he—or Lynnley either, for that matter—but her quiet intelligence seemed out of place. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, the Marines still bore the unpleasant stereotype of all muscle, no brains.
“Shit!” Dunne snapped from the other side of the circle. “What do those bastards think they’re doing?”