Point-defense lasers snapped out, crisscrossing the gulf between the Rommel and Samar. Those beams of intense, coherent energy were invisible in hard vacuum, but the AI governing the tactical feed was painting them in, presumably to reassure the Marines on the grounds that a beam you could see had already missed you.
Somehow, Garroway didn’t feel particularly reassured. It seemed as though the entire sky ahead had lit up with flashing, snapping threads of red light, that they were weaving a web of fire so thick and complex that the incoming assault pods couldn’t possibly avoid them all.
Then a brilliant, eye-twisting sun erupted over Rommel’s aft hull as a small fusion warhead went off. Morrigan and Thor both were firing everything they had at the monitor, including nuke-tipped missiles, trying to buy precious time for the Marine assault. The superheated plasma and EMP from the blast would provide the SAPs with a bit of cover, at least for a few seconds.
But the plasma cloud dissipated all too swiftly, and Rommel’s own point-defenses were simply too effective to allow more missiles to reach her. Abruptly, shockingly, PFC Dulaney’s pod was speared by a point-defense beam, a direct hit that vaporized half of the capsule, and sent fragments hurtling outward from within an expanding cloud of hot gas. An instant later, Sergeant Mendoza’s pod was hit, a glancing, slicing strike that sheared away part of the hull, and left the remnant tumbling helplessly through the void.
One by one, the enemy fire-control systems locked onto incoming pods. One by one, the pods were being slashed from the sky. There’d been forty SAPs in the first wave. Halfway across the gulf there were thirty-four left … then thirty-two. Garroway felt panic rising; none of them were going to make it across!
All he could do was hang there in space, a naked and helpless target.
Ontos 7
Battlespace, Puller 695 System
1953 hrs GMT
“Hang on to your lunch!” Lieutenant Kesar Eden yelled over the intercom. “We’re punching it!”
Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst lay cradled in his fighting position, linked into the Ontos’ combat system. There was a savage thump, and then the John A. Lejeune’s launch bay fell away around him, the carrier dwindling rapidly astern as the MCA-71 Ontos accelerated at fifty gravities.
Ontos was the Greek word for “thing,” and this was the second time in the long history of the Corps that a Marine weapons system had borne that unlikely name. Eight hundred years before, during the 1950s, the Marine Corps had developed a light tracked vehicle specifically as a fast-moving antitank weapon. Massing just 9 tons, and squeezing three crew members inside a hull compartment just four feet high, that first Ontos, designated the M50A1, had mounted six 106mm recoilless rifles on the upper deck of the vehicle. The idea had been to allow it to engage enemy armor with six rapid shots, guaranteeing a kill; its speed, then, would let it withdraw to cover, allowing the exposed recoilless rifles to be reloaded.
No one, however, had quite known what to do with the ugly little vehicle. In fact, the Army had cancelled their original order when the prototype testing was complete. The Marines, however, had accepted almost 300 of the vehicles, taking them to war in a place called Vietnam—an environment for the most part lacking enemy armor to serve as targets.
The Marines were well known for their ability to adapt to changing conditions and battlefield needs. The Ontos was an awkward beast, it turned out, unable to carry much ammunition, and requiring the crew to exit the vehicle in order to reload, making them vulnerable to enemy fire. Even so, it proved popular with its crews, who noted that frequently the enemy would break and run as soon as one of the ugly little beasts arrived in the combat zone. Those six recoilless rifles fired beehive rounds, each shell consisting of a bundle of one hundred darts that sliced through jungle foliage with devastating effect, turning the vehicle into what had been called the world’s biggest shotgun. Used against bunkers and against enemy infantry, the Ontos provided Marine riflemen with effective close-fire support at the company level.
Always considered an ugly duckling, however, that first Ontos had never been accepted by decision-makers above the company level, and the weapon system was withdrawn from service after it had seen only four years of combat service. For decades after, the Ontos had been something of an embarrassment to those tasked with designing and procuring new weapons.
Eight centuries later, a new Marine weapons system had been introduced to the Corps bearing the ancient Greek name for “thing.” Part vehicle, part artillery, it was designed to both provide close infantry support in combat—especially in zeroand low-gravity environments, and also to serve as transport for a Marine squad, getting them safely into combat, then providing artillery support as they made their assault. The new Ontos was undeniably ugly, as awkward-looking as its ancient predecessor, flat, stubby, and massing 383 tons, with multiply jointed legs and a ball-mounted forward blast head that gave it the appearance of a huge and ungainly insect. Twelve armored Marines and their equipment could be carried aft in the lightly armored belly. The vehicle’s “wings” mounted a pair of hivel accelerator cannons that could fire antimatter rounds, tactical nukes, nano-D canisters, or conventional high explosives.
Space was sharply limited on board the transport, however. Warhurst and one other gunner were squeezed in to either side of the vehicle commander in a dorsal sponson forward, behind the blast-head mount, and cyberlinked into the Ontos’ command network. The Marines aft were as tightly cocooned as their counterparts in the SAP pods now being launched from the Samar. Like the ancient Ontos, no one really knew what to do with the modern weapon of that name, but the Corps had adapted it especially for ship-boarding actions. Four, including Warhurst’s vehicle, had been accelerated from the Lejeune’s launch bay, and were vectoring in on the PanEuropean monitor Rommel now.
Like aerospace fighters, the Ontos operated off of a Solenergia ZPE quantum-power transfer unit. Using the same principle as a Quantum-Coupled Communications system, the ZPE transfer unit used quantum entanglement to transmit energy from one point to another, without actually traversing the space in between. Extremely high energies were drawn from the zero-point field taps on board the Lejeune and the Samar, but routed directly to field-entangled power receivers on board individual F/A-4140s and the MCA-71 Ontos transports, without the possibility of that transmission being blocked or even detected.
The system had some important trade-offs. The advantage, of course, was that the massive quantum power taps could be left back on board the capital ships. The disadvantage, though, was that if the Lejeune or the Samar were knocked out of action, their orphaned offspring would become dead in space, with only their relatively low-powered on-board antimatter converter systems from which to draw on for life support and maneuvering.
All of that was of less importance to Warhurst now than was the simple fact that he was back in action at last.
When he left Recruit Training Command, there’d been speculation that he would end up in a rifle company with a number of his former recruits. The 1MIEF personnel department had killed that idea, however, and in fairly short order. Marine recruits were instilled with the absolute and unvarying principle of the Corps—Marines work together, as a unit. However, learning that basic lesson as they go through boot camp, most Marines reach graduation hating their DI. Respecting him, yes, but hating him nonetheless.
It wasn’t that 1MIEF’s command constellation was afraid that some former recruit of Warhurst’s was going to get even some night on deployment. Platoon AIs were