He hoped the relief force came fast. Right now they were terribly exposed—eighty-four Marines, twelve lightly armored CPCs, and three TAVs, holding a few hundred hectares of sand and stone monuments that just hours ago had been swarming with screaming, religious-fanatic mobs.
And those mobs would be back. Guaranteed.
In the east the sun flared above the flat horizon, an explosion of golden light illuminating the dunes and casting long, undulating shadows that filled each depression and indentation in the sand. Warhurst settled his helmet back over his head, resealing the latches.
The counterattack, when it came, would come soon and from the direction of Cairo, fourteen kilometers to the northeast.
Esteban Residence
Guaymas, Sonora Territory
United Federal Republic, Earth
1055 hours PT
John Garroway Esteban relaxed in the embrace of his sensory couch, opening himself to the images flooding through his mind. Gunfire snapped and crackled in the distance, as a mob of swarthy men in a mix of military uniforms and civilian clothing swarmed across a bridge, some in trucks or cargo floaters, most on foot. The news anchor’s voice-over described the scene as data windows opened with sidebar data. LIVE FROM CAIRO floated in blue letters above the confused and chaotic panorama.
“Demonstrations began in Cairo three days ago,” the anchor was saying, “when the Mahdi declared that the monuments of Giza existed to declare God’s glory and that attempts to excavate them in order to prove extraterrestrial influences in ancient human affairs were blasphemous and, therefore, illegal under the religious laws of the Kingdom of Allah. All archeological excavations in Egypt were ordered halted when—”
With a focused thought, John shifted feeds. Show me the Marines.
It felt as though he were drifting above the desert. It was mid-morning, and men in chamelearmor almost indistinguishable from the sand around them crouched in holes scratched into the shelter of a dune. Robot sentries, solitary pylons capped by laser turrets, scanned the horizon, as an American flag fluttered in the breeze from a makeshift pole. In the background the scarred and age-smoothed face of the Sphinx looked over the desert, and behind it rose the golden apex of one of the pyramids. A velvet-black, stub-winged aircraft circled overhead. “Silim,” he whispered, an Ahannu word currently in vogue with the xenophilic set, meaning “good” or “with it.”
“Just before dawn this morning,” the narrator said, “elements of the 3rd Marine Division were suborbited into Giza, neutralizing local forces and setting up a defensive perimeter, establishing what President LaSalle called ‘a safe zone to protect both American and Confederation interests in the region.’”
For minutes more, he took in the scenes relayed from the battlefield, views of American Marines crouched under cover, of robotic fliers patrolling sandy wastes, of a team of Confederation archeologists debarking from a transatmospheric lander and being escorted by Marines to the base of the Great Pyramid.
The scene blurred and shifted, and John found himself sitting in a folding chair in the White House Rose Garden. President LaSalle stood behind a podium a few meters away, her face drawn and tired, as though she’d been up all night. “One of my predecessors,” she said, “called the U.S. Marines the Navy’s police force. In fact, for the past 150 years they have been the President’s police force, the first of this nation’s military forces to be deployed to any spot on the globe where our vital interests are being threatened. I did not make the decision to deploy our young men and women to this region lightly. Ongoing excavations at Giza are in the process of uncovering remarkable discoveries of inestimable value in understanding our past and the nature of repeated extraterrestrial interventions upon this world of ours thousands of years ago. It is vital to all of us that these discoveries remain intact, that they not fall into the hands of radical religious extremists….”
For John, it was as though he were sitting right there with the reporters, listening to the President’s speech. The clarity and realism of the noumen’s sensory input were nearly as sharp as real life. His implant was an expensive, high-end set, with almost two thousand protein processor nodes grown from microscopic nanoseeds scattered throughout his cerebral cortex and clustered within the nerve bundles of the corpus callosum. His father had insisted on a top-of-the-line Sony-TI 12000 Series Two Cerebralink, complete with social interactive icon selection, high-speed interfaces, emotional input, and multiple net search demons, and for once John was happy that his father was who and what he was, able to pull that much thrust. The 12000 was an executive model, the sort of cranialink nanohardware favored by high-powered CEOs and techers, light-years beyond what the other kids had had for schoolinks.