glance. Everything was tracking as expected. Decoys maintained their position in a loose cloud around and ahead of him, each leaving its own meteor-trail of ionized gas.
Ascraeus Mons slid gently past below, followed moments later by the vast and tangled patchwork of rills and canyons dubbed Noctis Labyrinthus, the Labyrinth of Night. Strike Force Sierra One-one burned through the dark Martian sky.
Operation Skyfire. It was a training exercise—only a training exercise, though that didn’t mean Garroway and his fellow Marines were guaranteed a ride back to base and a hot shower when they got there. Marines trained constantly, honing skills against the day when they would be needed for actual combat. Two millennia before, the Jewish writer Josephus had observed of the Roman legions that their exercises were bloodless battles, their battles bloody exercises, and that could accurately be said of the modern U.S. Marine Corps as well … except for the fact that even training exercises could turn bloody in a single unguarded instant.
Today, a total of thirty-two Marines of Bravo Company, of the 3rd MarDiv’s 2/1, were training with the newly commissioned IMAC combat-insertion pods, launched from one of the equally new S/R F-8 Starfire deep-recon spacecraft. The mission objective was to enter the Martian atmosphere and deploy in a simulated planetary surface strike. Their intended LZ was a stretch of ancient watercourse terrain at the far end of the Vallis Marineris called Eos Chasma, not far from the Eos USMC Deep Space Training Facility.
Excitement in Bravo Company was running at damned close to lightspeed. This was the first time the IMACs had been employed outside of simulation and with human Marines—as opposed to test pilots or robotic AIs—strapped inside. Everything was going well so far, but so much was still in the hands of the Laughing Dark God, Murphy.
A very great deal could still go horribly wrong.
Beyond the Noctis Labyrinthus, the terrain split to north and south, then yawned open in the titanic chasm called the Vallis Marineris—the Valley of the Mariner Spacecraft, named for the robot that had first imaged the canyon three and a half centuries before.
If Olympus Mons was the largest volcano in the Solar System, Vallis Marineris was the largest valley—three thousand kilometers long, in places six hundred kilometers wide and as much as eight kilometers deep. The Grand Canyon on Earth could have fit comfortably in one of Marineris’s tributary valleys.
Garroway looked down at the chasm with a certain amount of proprietary fondness. A great-great-several-more-times-great grandfather of his—also a Marine—had led a march up that valley at the onset of the UN War in 2047. “Sands of Mars” Garroway had contributed a bit to the Marine legend, and three centuries later remained one of the major heroes of the Corps’ history, alongside such names as Puller, Basilone, and Ramsey. Travis Garroway enjoyed a certain amount of notoriety in the Corps today, thanks to the exploits of his illustrious ancestor … not to mention the fact that his own uncle was also a Marine, and a major general to boot.
Of course, that notoriety had a downside as well. With a name like Garroway to live up to, there were certain … expectations circulating about his character and his sense of duty, little things like needing to be the first to volunteer to be stuffed inside a shit can and fired out the launch tube of an experimental recon-raider.
That shit can continued its descent, now scarcely thirty kilometers above the gashed-open desert below. Garroway could clearly make out the banded layering of sedimentary rocks along the weathered faces of the cliffs—the final proof, if proof was needed, that Mars once had possessed a vast ocean covering nearly half of its surface and, by extension, an atmosphere thicker than the thin, cold wisp of CO2 that enveloped the planet now.
His mind flicked to the Ancients, the inevitable name for the mysterious and godlike civilization that had tried to terraform Mars half a million years ago—and failed. They’d left traces of their presence on the Red Planet—including evidence that they’d tinkered with the DNA of certain bright and promising primates on the Blue Planet, next in toward the Sun.
And there was evidence, too, that the Ancients’ colony on Mars had been destroyed by another darker, far-ranging interstellar civilization, the so-called Hunters of the Dawn. A robotic ship, nicknamed the Singer, had been discovered beneath the ice of the world-ocean of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Evidently, the Singer had taken part in the destruction of the Ancient colony.
If the Hunters of the Dawn had been limited to the Galactic stage of half a million years ago, that would have been one thing. But it was now known that the Hunters were still out there, somewhere, among the Galaxy’s myriad stars. The Hunters had crushed the reptilian An some eight thousand years ago, destroying the colony they had planted on Earth. And they’d emerged from the huge wedding-band circle known as Sirius C—the Sirian Stargate—to capture a human-crewed starship just a century and a half ago.
The blink of an eye, by the standards of the vast and slowly turning Galaxy.
For that reason, the Marines continued to train, and the science wonks continued to develop new and better and more fearsome military technologies. The Gateway through from Sirius to a nameless star system on the outskirts of the Galaxy had been closed by a Marine expeditionary force in 2170, but few in military circles believed that that had solved the problem. The Hunters of the Dawn were out there, and they now were aware that an upstart technological species known as Homo sapiens was beginning to make its presence felt on the Galactic stage.
Sooner or later, the Hunters would return.
We Who Are
Outer Solar System
0436 hrs, GMT
The Huntership had slipped quietly into the target star system designated 2420-544 on the old records, unseen, undetected, until the system’s star was just over a scant light-hour distant. One of the sources of radio emissions became aware of the Huntership’s approach, and accelerated to intercept. Radio signals and coherent light at a variety of wavelengths reached out from the challenger, evidently seeking communication.
We Who Are deliberated briefly, then extended their consciousness.
The challenger was patterned, its energies recorded, its material structure dispersed. The patterns of the primitive vessel’s occupants—confirmed as Species 2824—were dissected and questioned, all the way down to the quantum level, confirming the stored data on this system’s species acquired recently from other sources.
The Huntership continued on its implacable course inbound.
Assault Detachment Alpha
Above Olympus Mons,
Mars
1236 hrs, local
Atmospheric drag had slowed his velocity to less than a kilometer per second, and the plasma fireball was dissipating. His noumenal display began showing pinpoints of light against the sky and horizon around him—the other IMAC pods in their descent formation, imbedded in a cloud of decoys.
“Okay, boys and girls,” a voice said over his headset. The ID tag identified it as Lieutenant Wilkie, riding Alpha Flight Six and in charge of the drop. “Sound off!”
“Alpha One, copy and acknowledged,” another voice replied.
“Alpha Two, sweet and neat.” That was Chrome.
“Alpha Three, okay,” Garroway replied.
The litany continued down the roster, until all thirty-two pods had checked in. Garroway breathed a bit easier, then. These pods had been endlessly tested for their re-entry capabilities, both in sim and in actual, but there’d still been that lingering, tiny doubt that something, some design flaw, might have been overlooked. But they all had made it past the first hurdle, at least.
“Hey, Chrome,” he called on a private lasercom channel. “Did you get a load of Olympus coming down? Looked like the Solar System’s biggest tit.”