Ramsey checked a small, hand-drawn map taped to the console in lieu of a noumenal map feed. The streets around the Pyramid of the Eye had been given names for ease of navigation—Souseley, Block, Cagnon, Hayes, Strank, Bradley. Those six were the names of the men—a PFC, three corporals, a sergeant, and a Navy corpsman—who’d raised the famous flag on Suribachi on 23 February 1945. Rosenthal was Joe Rosenthal, the Associated Press photographer who’d snapped the icon photo. Other streets—Schrier, Thomas, Michelis, Charlo, Lindberg, Hansen—were named for the Marines who’d raised the first flag on Suribachi, before Rosenthal had arrived on the scene.
Marines remembered their own, with a body of histories, parables, and mythologies as passionate as that of any religion.
Ramsey felt a small shiver of presentiment at that thought. Men of Third Platoon, E Company, of the 28th Marines, had raised both flags on Suribachi. Of forty men in the company, only four had avoided being wounded or killed in the fighting. Three of the six photographed by Rosenthal that morning—PFC Souseley, Corporal Block, and Sergeant Strank—were later killed on Iwo. Of the six who’d raised the first flag, three had been killed and two wounded; only Lieutenant Schrier emerged from the fighting unscathed.
A small bit of Corps trivia, that…and a testament to the ferocity of the fighting on Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest amphibious assaults of World War II. But a bit of superstitious worry gnawed at Ramsey as well. The Pyramid of the Eye was a natural defensive position.
Might that damned pyramid turn out to be a second Suribachi, in bloody kind as well as in name?
Something clanged from the side of Walker Seven, sending the image lurching heavily to the side. “Contact!” the technician announced. “We have hostiles inbound, moving in from north, east, and south.”
The monitor image jarred again, nearly falling over, then pivoted sharply, the crosshairs locking onto a running, human figure. The Gatling fired with a shrill whine, and the running figure exploded in a gory red spray.
“Walkers One, Three, Five, and Six, move to block east and south,” Ramsey ordered. “Two, Four, and Seven…keep moving north, double-time. Punch through them!”
One of the technicians gave a loud exclamation, something between a curse and a groan, and threw up her hands as her screen went dead. “Walker Two is down!”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Ramsey told her. “Stand by your station, please.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Walker Six is out of the running, Colonel,” another technician said. “They’re nailing us with high-velocity gauss rifles.”
“Understood.”
“This is too expensive,” General King said. “We don’t have the gunwalkers to spare for this sort of thing.”
Ramsey looked at King. “Better this than sending Marines out there, sir. I do not want to send in the airmobile detachment without seeing the east side of Suribachi.”
“Agreed,” King said, though with some reluctance. “But they’re a damned expensive substitute for floater remotes.”
Ramsey smiled. King was painfully aware of the logistical limitations 1 MIEU faced. With a small supply of teleoperated gunwalkers on hand, there were none left when those were gone.
After flirting with robotic weaponry for almost three hundred years, the American military still maintained a remarkably tentative relationship with military robots. Arguing that only a human could make kill-or-spare decisions in combat, true robot soldiers, running sentient AI programs, had never been wholeheartedly embraced, even though robot mines, robot bombs, antimissile guns, even robotic fighter aircraft all had been employed in combat since the end of the twentieth century. The fact of the matter was that robotic senses were far superior to those of human warriors in the smoke and confusion of a firefight, their reaction times were far shorter, and they were unaffected by shortcomings such as fear, pain, anger, or traumatic shock. Fearful that general purpose military robots could be hijacked by a technically proficient enemy and turned on their creators, the Pentagon had rejected sentient robotic soldiers time after time. The closest thing to a true robot so far adopted were robot sentries, which guarded set fields of fire and couldn’t move, and hunter-killer gunwalkers, which had only a limited decision-making capacity. Walkers had extremely quick reactions and a deadly aim, but they were best employed as teleoperated weapons…with a human driver behind the lines, piloting the machine through a link via the net.
With the net down, of course, they’d lost full function on the walkers, but by posting Marines on the far northern and southern portions of the compound’s east wall, they were able to maintain line-of-sight communications with the walkers. The reception was good enough that they were running seven walkers at about eighty percent of their usual performance capacity.