“Cassius!” he called. “Cassius! Are you online?”
There was no answer. He tried to rise, but the normal spin-gravity of the hab module was complicated now by the additional vector of Derna’s tumble. It made navigation almost impossible in the darkness. A chair broke free of a deck fitting and slammed against a bulkhead a few meters away.
“God damn it!” That was General King. “What the hell happened?”
“We took a piece of the Algol, sir,” Ramsey replied.
“Lights!” Ricia called in the darkness. “Someone hit the emergency lights!”
Shit. They should have come on automatically. How bad was the Derna hit?
And how long before the Ahannu fired their weapon a second time…and finished the job?
20
26 JUNE 2148
Lander Dragon Three
Krakatoa LZ, Ishtar
0004 hours ST
“Everyone back to your landers,” Captain Warhurst called, his voice coming over straight radio now instead of the netlink. “Emergency evac, everyone but Task Force Kerns! Move! Move!”
Garroway froze in place for a moment, uncertain what to do, where to go. His squad and platoon leaders were headed for the gateway leading into the mountain, along with a dozen other Marines from several different squads. Task Force Kerns? Valdez had told him he wasn’t trained for this. With a sudden, sharp presentiment, he realized what Task Force Kerns was trying to accomplish.
Private Vinita stood nearby, obviously as lost at the moment as he. “C’mon, Kat. Back to the LM.” Overhead, Dragon Three was circling toward the lander, strobes flashing brilliantly on belly and wing tips.
“Where are they going?” she asked.
“At a guess, I’d say to blow up that damned mountain. Our orders are to evac. Now.”
“I can’t reach the net….”
“Worry about that later. Run!”
Together, he and Vinita jogged toward Lander Three. Womicki, Dunne, and Garvey were the only other members of their squad there. Deere must have gone with Valdez, Garroway and Vinita banged up one of the open ramps, along with several Marines from a different platoon just as the ramps began to slowly close.
The net was definitely down, and he felt an aching loneliness nearly as acute as when they’d yanked his implant in boot camp. Radio messages were coming through on his helmet’s communications suite, but they were scattered and erratic, requiring his active concentration to make any sense out of what was being said. The words no longer simply materialized in his head, already filed and processed.
“Move! Move! Get those ramps up!
“Kerns to ARLT Command! We’re inside the first tunnel. We’ve got bandits in here, Captain. Lots of ’em!”
“Kerns, Warhurst! Don’t stop to play. Keep moving to Waypoint One!”
“Roger that. Moving!”
The Dragon nestled down over the landing module with a metallic clang and the thump of grapples slamming home. With a lurch, the module was plucked from the ground, the shock sending close-packed Marines staggering into one another, armor clashing against armor. Garroway tried to uplink to get an image from an outside camera and got the system error signal again. Damn. He’d forgotten.
The next minute was an eternity, crowded into the lander, standing room only, unable to move, unable to see out, unable to know what was happening outside. The comm channels were flooded with radio chatter as other Marines tried to find out what was going down.
“Does anybody have a link connect?”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“Gunny! Gunny Kendrick!”
“Did the bastards nail the Derna?”
“They’ll target us next.”
“Nah. They’ll be busy picking the starships out of orbit. Shit!”
“All right, people! Ice it down! Can the chatter!”
“This is Captain Warhurst. Now hear this. Our communications and data nets are down. As near as we can tell, one of the supply transports was hit by a shot from that Frog cannon, but we have also lost direct contact with the Derna. Our AI says she’s still in orbit but possibly damaged. I’ll give you more news as it comes through.
“In the meantime, do not panic. We are Marines. We improvise. We adapt. We overcome, whatever the situation. Right now our greatest enemy is panic.
“You will also remain silent. Do not access the net until I pass the word that it is safe to do so. Keep radio silence except in the strict line of duty. Now stand by. We may be in for a bit of a rough ride here.”
And that, Garroway thought, was a sure bet.
Lander Dragon One
In flight, Ishtar
0005 hours ST
Warhurst was struggling to get a partial Net back on-line.
Any net, from the first DARPA Net two centuries before to the GlobalNet that currently enmeshed Earth and various Solar colonies and expeditions in a complex web of computing nodes, linked by data-sharing protocols. Those links could be copper or optical cable, broadband radio, maser, IR laser, or polyphasic quantum entanglement; the important thing was the transmission of data. Until moments before, the fledgling Ishtar Net had consisted of the AI systems on three starships, the relay nodes of two communications satellites, and several hundred smaller processors, from the AIs of the lander modules and TAL-S Dragonflies, to the thumbnail-sized digital assistants in the helmet of each Marine, to the even tinier mesh of nanochelated conductors grown inside each Marine’s cerebral cortex.