The Complete Legacy Trilogy: Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines

“What the hell?” Carleton said, turning on the ramp ahead of her to stare back at the sight.

“It’s a volcano!” a young media rep shouted.

It was no volcano, that much was obvious. To Nichole, it looked as though the top of that far-off mountain had just peeled itself open, and now a pinpoint of light brighter than the local sun, brighter even than Earth’s sun seen from Earth, was shining out of the cavity within.

The blue-white thread of light snapped on abruptly, connecting the mountain peak with the sky at a ten-degree angle from the vertical, a beam so bright that Nichole covered her eyes as more of the watching civilians screamed or yelled.

An instant later a soundless flash blossomed in the deep green of the sky.

Long seconds passed, breathless, and then the shockwave from the mountain reached them, a dull, thundering rumble and a gust of heavy, heat-scorched air. The flash in the sky had faded to a scattering of starlike embers, slowly fading.

Only then did the enormity of what had just happened sink in. “Goddess!” she cried. “They’ve destroyed the Emissary!”

And then the panic set in atop the Pyramid of the Eye.

7

22 JUNE 2138

Briefing Room 401

White House Subbasement, Level D

Washington, D.C., Earth

1425 hours ET

“They’re coming in over the walls now!” the Marine cried, his eyes wide and staring. He couldn’t have been older than twenty. “They’re inside the compound and closing in on the pyramid!”

The young Marine’s face filled the darkened briefing room’s wallscreen, which stretched floor to ceiling across one end of the cool, wood-paneled chamber. A number of men and women sat at the long table, watching quietly. The atmosphere was heavy with emotions ranging from grim acceptance to shock.

“We got the last of the civilians out a couple hours ago,” the Marine continued. “There’s a place in the mountains east of here—an Uhsag village the scientists’ve managed to make contact with. We might be able to hold out there for quite a while.

“Of course, ten years is a long time. And maybe you guys—”

Moisture trickled down the huge face on the wallscreen. It was impossible to tell whether it was sweat or tears, but his eyes were glistening. He broke off, then shook his head.

“Screw that. Anyway, if you send relief, watch out for An-Kur. That’s the big, lone mountain ten klicks west of the compound. There’s some kind of god-weapon there, a big son of a bitch, hidden inside the top. We had no idea it was there. It picked the Emissary right out of the sky, one shot. Don’t know what the range is, but it’s at least five hundred klicks. I … I … damn it! They’re supposed to be primitives here! What are they doing with a freakin’ planetary defense system?”

A loud explosion banged nearby, and voices could be heard in the background, shouting commands, yelling response. The Marine looked around, shouted, “Right!” Then he looked back into the Eye. “They’re comin’ up the pyramid steps! Gotta go. Uh … look, remember us to our families, for those of us that got ’em, okay? Man, this really sucks vacuum.”

The Marine’s face spun away from the pickup. The quietly watching military officers and civilians in the room could make out a vertical slice of green-violet sky stained by what might have been a distant cloud of smoke, the doorway into the Chamber of the Eye, looking out across the city of New Sumer. Several sharp sounds emanating from the screen—the hiss and snap of high-powered lasers, the shrill whine of power packs—filled the air. Movement, a tumble of half-glimpsed shapes, blocked out the sliver of sky momentarily. Someone screamed.

Several moments passed, punctuated by more sounds, like the cold scrabblings of claws on stone, the clink of metal, a low-voiced grunt. For just a moment another face filled the wallscreen, flat and emotionless, a reptilian face dominated by enormous, oddly shaped eyes of metallic gold, horizontally slashed by elongated pupils. The skin was green and faintly scaled, the skull elongated and topped by a low, bony crest, the mouth a black-rimmed slash. Nictitating membranes flickered over those hypnotic eyes once … twice … and then the apparition vanished.

The wallscreen flickered, then winked out. General Haslett, Army Chief of Staff for the UFR Central Military Command, stared into the dark emptiness for a moment, shocked and afraid. My God, he thought. What are we sending our people out there to face?

General Dahlstrom, the National Security Council’s senior briefing officer, stood as the lights came up.

“Madam President,” she said, “Gentlemen, ladies, that was the last transmission monitored by our ICLI station on Mars. Since about ten hundred hours our time yesterday there has been no further transmission from the Llalande system—only the usual open-channel carrier wave. We still have a visual of the Chamber of the Eye, but there’s been no activity that we can make out.”

“Then the rebels haven’t destroyed the Builder FTL unit,” President Katharine LaSalle mused aloud. “That’s one good break for us, at least.”

Dahlstrom nodded. “Yes, Madam President. However, our xenosoc analysts believe that it would be extremely unlikely for them to damage the unit in any case. The Eye is as sacred to Geremelet’s faction as it is to the High Emperor.”

“Right,” Admiral Knudson, the head of the Joint Chiefs, said. He was a brusque, hard-bitten man with long service in the Naval Space Forces. “Part of their campaign, remember, was to liberate the Eye from the evil offworlders.”

“Just what the hell happened out there, anyway?” the President demanded.

“The situation is … complicated, ma’am,” Samantha Van Horne, Director of Central Intelligence, said. She gestured at the empty wallscreen. “It’s hard enough to get good intel on human opponents, let alone aliens. In this case, we have only the tiniest glimmer of how the Ahannu think and, in particular, what they think of us.”

“They can’t still be thinking of us as escaped slaves,” General Karl Voekel, the Aerospace Force representative of the Joint Chiefs, said. He gave David Billingsworth, the SecState, a hard look. “The State Department has been working on that issue for the past five years!”

“This is hardly the time for recriminations,” Billingsworth said. He looked across at Warren Boland, the Secretary of Science. “Besides, we worked with what DepSci gave us.”

Boland shrugged. “As Samantha said, it’s tough reading nonhumans or guessing how they’ll react to anything we do.”

“Every report coming through my data feed indicated that relations with the God-Emperor and his court were good and getting better,” Billingsworth said.

“Its court,” Dahlstrom reminded him. “The Ahannu have no sex.”

“It must make their Saturday nights damned boring,” Haslett observed dryly. “No wonder they’re so riled up. In any case, this—this Destiny Faction, as they call themselves, appeared to be a minor nuisance, nothing more.”

Voekel chuckled. “Jesus, General, a minor nuisance? It’s a damned civil war, and it’s been brewing for years! How did we miss it coming?”

“It’s not exactly a civil conflict,” Van Horne said. “The Ahannu God-Emperor seems to be waiting to see whether it should openly support Geremelet’s horde. It hasn’t come out with a public disavowal, at any rate.”

“So is the Destiny group working for the Emperor?” the President asked. “Or against it?”

Billingsworth shook his head. “We just don’t know, ma’am.”

“Our best reports suggest that the Destiny Faction is independent of the Ahannu government,” Van Horne added, “but that the imperial court is tolerating it and possibly even helping it along privately.” She shrugged. “Maybe the God-Emperor is just letting Geremelet do what the Emperor itself can’t do.”

“Playing both ends against the middle,” Haslett said. “With us as the middle.”

“Something like that,” Billingsworth said. “Now that the Legation compound has been overrun, we have to assume that the God-Emperor will bring Geremelet into the government formally and probably adopt Geremelet’s foreign policy as well.”

“Do we know what that will be?” President LaSalle asked.

“No, ma’am, but we can take a guess. Geremelet’s faction came to power on the platform that humans were renegade slaves … uh, what was the word?”

“‘Sag-ura,’” Van Horne told him. “It means, roughly, ‘foreign slaves.’”

“Right. They don’t have the technology to strike at Earth, of course, but that’s probably just rhetoric. What they do want is us off of Ishtar, permanently.”

“Ishtar for Ishtarans,” Knudson said with a sneer. “Is that it?”

“Basically, Admiral, yes. They feel they were shamed as a people by appearing inferior to us technologically. Remember, they still think of us as their property, slaves or pets that they domesticated thousands of years ago. If we’re not around to remind them, they can feel better about themselves.”