The LM gave another lurch, then dropped sharply, like a string-cut puppet.
Fists clenched in carbon-fiber gauntlets, sweat dribbling incessantly and maddeningly down his unreachable face, Garroway wondered if he was going to be sick inside his armor.
Lander Dragon One
Ishtar, approaching Krakatoa LZ
1625 hours ST
They’d dropped at last below the cloud deck, and Warhurst shifted to his tactical noumenon. A composite image generated by the lander’s AI presented the visible spectrum overlaid by infrared and a 3D contour map showing elevations, targets, and way points in lines and symbols of white light. Dragon One was over Ishtar’s night side, but the lander’s chin cameras rendered the scene with near-noontime illumination; some of the contour lines didn’t quite match up with the landforms rushing past below, however. Either the terrain had changed a bit in ten years, or the first expedition’s mapping satellites had transmitted less than precise data on Ishtar’s topography.
At the moment—and thanks to careful work by the MIEU’s planning staff, both human and cybernetic—Ishtar’s night side was also the side forever tide-locked, facing away from the super giant planet Marduk. The red dwarf star Llalande 21185 provided Ishtar’s daylight, but the heat came from the sullenly glowing super-Jovian gas giant called Marduk and from the friction of internal tidal stresses. According to the briefing information downloaded to Warhurst’s implant, surface temperatures on Ishtar ranged from over forty degrees Celsius on the side facing Marduk, to minus fifty on the anti-Marduk side, temperatures only slightly affected by the cycles of night and day induced by the distant red-dwarf sun.
The landscape below was one of glaciers and ice-locked mountains. Volcanoes glowed and thundered on the horizon in every direction, and in some places rivers of lava encountered ice in searing explosions of steam and molten rock. In a flash, a tortured plain of cracked and fractured ice-rimed rock gave way to water, huge, dark swells thick with drifting mountains of ice. Alphanumerics in the corner of Warhurst’s noumenal vision identified the water as the western edge of the Abgal, the Great Sea that bordered Ishtar’s habitable belt between ice and fire.
None of the other Dragonflies was visible, again according to plan. The eight landers had scattered across half a hemisphere as they entered Ishtar’s atmosphere, with the idea that the more scattered the targets, the tougher it would be for the ground defenses to target them. Warhurst was gladder than ever now that he’d insisted on the additional landers and troops. So much could go wrong, and they faced odds that made the Giza Plateau look like a pleasant afternoon in a sandbox.
Lightning flared ahead, illuminating the bellies of thickening clouds. The imbalance of temperatures in the opposite hemispheres, hot and cold, meant lots of energy in Ishtar’s weather systems, and that meant large and frequent storms across the habitable belt. Maybe that storm ahead would scramble the enemy’s tracking system.
Maybe … maybe …
The trouble was, so little was known about the modern Ahannu, and even less about the ancient An who’d built Ishtar’s defenses. Ten thousand years ago they’d forged an interstellar empire and colonized parts of Earth with a technology humankind had yet to match. They’d already thrown a nasty surprise at the first expedition; what other surprises were hidden down there, in clouds and darkness?
The lander gave a savage jolt, rolling hard to the left and dropping sharply. The AI pilot extended the stubby wings a bit, angling them to grab the air, and increased the power to the plasma thrusters in the Dragonfly’s belly. Four minutes to the target …
Ishtar’s planetary defenses were almost certainly automated, running on programs written thousands of years ago. That was both a major problem and a slender hope for the assault team. Automated weapons would have faster than human reflexes and responses; at the same time, they would lack the flexibility of a living mind at the trigger.
That, at least, was the hope. And there was the hope too that after ten thousand years the weapon inside Objective Krakatoa had only one shot in it.
None of the Marines was counting on that, though.
Light flared in the distance far to the north, a momentarily day-bright snap of radiance. Warhurst blinked. Had that been lightning?
The shock wave hit minutes later, slamming the Dragonfly to the right and nearly knocking it out of the sky. The AI boosted power to the rear thrusters, however, and clawed for altitude as the waves below surged past the lander’s belly. A quick check of the team’s telemetry confirmed the worst: Dragonfly Four had just vanished in a torrent of energy directed from up ahead.
The assault force was under fire.
Combat Information Center
IST Derna, approaching Ishtar orbit
1632 hours ST
“Dragonfly Four is down,” Cassius said in maddeningly even tones. “I repeat, Dragonfly Four is down.”
Ramsey had seen the point of bright blue light representing Dragonfly Four wink out in his noumenal feed, had read the cascade of data describing energy levels, bearings, azimuth, and angle. Krakatoa had fired a second time and taken one of the Dragonflies out with a burst of raw energy roughly equivalent to a thousand-megaton thermonuclear explosion. The lander and twenty-five Marines must have evaporated like a snowflake caught in the flame of a blowtorch.
So Krakatoa was still very much operational. The question now was … how long did it take to warm up for another shot?
“Fuck!”
The explicative startled Ramsey, and he turned to look at General King, floating in harness next to him. Derna’s CIC was a relatively small and cluttered compartment located in the ship’s spine, aft of the centrifuge coupler, and housed an impressive array of communications consoles and displays. Most of the men and women micro-g floating there at the moment, however—each wearing a harness to keep them from drifting into equipment or other Marines—were linked directly into the ship’s noumenal feeds. Ramsey could see in his mind’s eye the incoming data from the Black Dragon assault group, could watch the eight—no, now seven—blue stars moving across the multispectral map representation of Ishtar’s night side, and he could hear Cassius’s dry commentary in his mind.
At the same time, however, he could still hear the voices of the people in the compartment around him with his phenomenal—as opposed to noumenal—ears, and with an inner thought-click he could push the visual feeds into the background and see with his real-world eyes. Despite his immersion in the noumenon, General King’s verbal anger had fully captured his attention.
“We expected losses, sir,” he said quietly. Indeed, the Dragonflies had gotten a lot closer to the objective than anyone on the planning staff imagined possible before drawing fire. Dragon Four had been less than forty kilometers from the LZ. That suggested there was only one defense complex on Ishtar like Krakatoa, and that its line of fire was limited to targets above its horizon.
“That strike force had better take that thing down,” King said with a growl, “or we are dead. Dead.”
Major Anderson was floating near a console on the other side of King, obviously aware of the conversation. Ramsey exchanged a dark glance with her before she shrugged and looked away.
General King was still something of an enigma, a strange fact given that they’d met him ten years ago objective. Between time dilation and their long cybehibe nap, it felt as though they’d welcomed him aboard only a few days ago, and the only times they’d worked with him were in the various staff planning sessions, where he tended to be remote, almost disinterested. So far as the mission was concerned, it might as well have been Ramsey and his command constellation who were actually bossing this mission. King had a managerial style better suited to a major corporation than to a Marine Expeditionary