[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

initial ops planning. The only real question had been what the butcher s bill
would be how many Marines would be lost in the assault.
The two Marines were walking across the ferrocrete in front of one of the
shuttle hangars at the spaceport, still buttoned up in their 660 combat cans.
Off in the distance, an enormous APA drifted slowly toward the captured
starport, hovering on shrill agravs. Another APA had already touched down;
columns of soldiers were still filing down the huge transport s ramps.
Smoke billowed into the sky from a dozen fires. The damage throughout this
area was severe, and they had to be careful picking their way past piles of
rubble and smoldering holes melted into the pavement.
Nano-D clouds had drifted through on the wind hours before, leaving ragged,
half-molten gaps in the curving walls and ceiling, and the shuttle itself had
been reduced to junk. A large area of the floor had been cleared away,
however, and the structure was being used as a temporary field hospital, a
gathering point for casualties awaiting medevac to orbit. Several naval
corpsmen were working in the hangar s shadowed interior, trying to stabilize
the more seriously injured.
Staff Sergeant Thea Howell was in there someplace. After that last firefight
atop the tower, Ramsey had crouched beside his wounded friend until a combat
medevac shuttle had arrived, then helped load her aboard. That had been three
hours ago. As soon as Army troops had started filtering in from the starport,
Ramsey and the others from 1-1 Bravo had hiked back to the port. Ramsey had
located Howell on the platoon Net, and was hoping to see her.
 Ram! Chu! What the hell are you guys doing here?
The two Marines turned, startled. Captain Baltis had a way of appearing out of
nowhere.  Sir! Ramsey said. Neither he nor Chu saluted, or even came to
attention; standard Marine doctrine forbade ritual in the field that might
identify officers to enemy snipers.  One of our buddies, sir. Howell. We d
like to know if 
 Haul your ass clear of here and let the docs do their work, Baltis snapped.
 We ll post the status of the wounded when we get back to the ship.
 Yes, sir, but 
 We will post their status when we get back aboard ship.
Ramsey sagged.  Aye, aye, sir.
 Get your asses over to the Fortress. We ll be disembarking from there.
Page 26
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
 Aye, aye, sir!
The Fortress what was left of it loomed above the skyline of Meneh not far
from the ocean. It was called El Kalah, which in the creole-Arabic spoken
throughout the Theocracy meant  fortress. Originally a vast dome half a
kilometer across bristling with ball turrets, each turret mounting plasma,
A.M., or hivel accelerator weapons, El Kalah had been the first target in the
pinpoint orbital bombardment of the planet, and there was little left of the
complex now save the shattered, jagged fragments of dome enclosing a smoking
ruin open to the sky. The weapons turrets had been neutralized in rapid
succession, and the remaining complex pounded for hours with everything from
antimatter to tunneler rounds to knock out any deeply buried bunkers. Much of
what was left had melted in the nano-D clouds.
Close by the Fortress was an area that had been a residential zone, stone and
cast  crete housing set in orderly rows among parkland and market squares. At
least that was how the downloaded maps described the area. Though the region
had not been deliberately targeted, it was now an almost homogenous landscape
of rubble and partially melted stone.
As they picked their way through the wreckage, Ramsey and Chu came upon a
scene of nightmare horror.
Several Marines in armor were clearing rubble, revealing what had been a
basement. On the basement floor, dimly visible in smoky light&
 Jesus, Chu said& and then Ramsey heard retching sounds as the Marine turned
away suddenly.
Ramsey continued staring into the pit, unable to stop looking even as he
realized that he would never be able to purge his brain of the sight. There
must have been thirty or forty people huddled in the basement, though the
nano-D cloud had made sorting one body from another difficult. The tangled,
tortured positions of the bodies suggested they d known what was happening to
them, and that death had not been quick.
They were civilians, obviously. The Islamic Theocracy did not permit female
soldiers, and there d been children down there as well. Clearly, they d been
trying to find shelter inside the basement.
Equally clearly, the deaths had been inflicted by Theocrat weapons; the
assault force had not employed nano-D.
It was said that the life expectancy of an unarmored person on a modern
battlefield was measured in
scant seconds. These people had never had a chance. Ramsey felt a sullen rage
growing within rage at the Muzzies for their blind use of indiscriminate
weaponry and their placement of military targets close beside civilian
enclaves, rage at the op planners who d targeted a heavily inhabited planet,
rage at the very idea of war, of doing this to innocent bystanders.
Turning away, finally, he grasped Chu s elbow and steered him clear of the
scene.
He didn t think he was going to be able to get rid of the memory.
He wasn t sure he wanted to.
And at the same time, he wasn t certain he could live with the nightmare.
4
0507.1102
USMC Skybase
Paraspace
0946 hrs GMT
Lieutenant General Martin Alexander completed the final download encompassing
the Alighan operation.
Casualties had been God-awful high almost twenty percent and a
disproportionate percentage of those were irretrievables, men and women so
badly charred by heat or radiation or so melted by nano-D
that they could not be brought back to life. Those were the tough ones, the
ones requiring a virtual visit to parents or spouses.
Page 27
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
With a mental click, he shifted his awareness to the Map Center, a noumenal
chamber with a three-D
navigable representation of the entire Galaxy. For a moment, his mind s eye
hovered above the broad, softly radiant spiral, taking in the nebulae-clotted
spiral arms, pale blue and white, unwinding from the ruddier, warmer core, a
vast and teeming beehive of suns surrounded by gas-cloud ramparts, like
luminous thunderheads at the Core s periphery. Four hundred billion stars
across a spiral a hundred thousand light-years across.
How many of those pinpoint stars making up those banked, luminous clouds and
streaming arms were suns, with worlds and life and civilizations?
An unanswerable question.
A majority of stars had planets, of course. That fact had been certain as far
back as the twenty-first century or before, when extrasolar planets had first [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]