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

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 Unit. And now … hell. Ramsey was beginning to think that the man was afraid—no, terrified—and that he was using a remote and delegating command style to hide his own fear.

That did not bode well for the integrity of their mission.

“So much for command by political appointee,” Ricia’s voice said over their private link channel.

“Are you as worried as I am?” Ramsey asked her. “He hasn’t been outside of his own orbit since the Dragons launched.”

“More worried, I think. He was telling me earlier that he shouldn’t even be here, that his personal AI could’ve handled all of this in proxy. Something has him worried, and it’s not just the Ahannu.”

“The mission itself, maybe,” Ramsey suggested. “There’s a lot of political capital riding on this, including the possibility of war back home if we fail here.”

“Well, he’d better get his act together, or we’re all in deep shit,” Anderson replied. “Uh-oh. Heads up. Dragon Seven is coming over Krakatoa’s horizon.”

Ramsey wrenched his attention back to his noumenon. The attack plan had called for all of the Dragons to enter Krakatoa’s line-of-sight more or less simultaneously in completely different directions, but vagaries of wind, reentry orientation, and navigation could not be predicted with perfect accuracy, and as expected, there’d been some scattering. Dragon Four had approached from the west. Seven was coming into the mountain’s line of fire now from the north; Dragon Three would enter it from the southeast in another thirty seconds.

And the seconds continued to flutter past without an outward response from Krakatoa. Good … good! Maybe there was a delay in recharge for that damned thing. If so, they could use it to good advantage by—

Sensors in the Dragonfly landers, the reconnaissance satellites over Ishtar, and on board the Derna all picked up the sudden build and surge of an immense magnetic field pinpointed deep beneath the mountain. A surge of radiation—of fusion-hot plasma—and an instant later the blue star marking Dragonfly Seven flared and winked out. Another LM, another twenty-five Marines, gone. Twenty-five percent of the assault force lost already, and the first lander hadn’t even touched down yet.

This was going to be rough. …

Chamber of Warrior Preparation

Deeps of An-Kur

Third Period of Dawn

He felt the mountain shudder and made the gesture of gizkim-nam, the Sign of Destiny, a warning to the universe not to mismanage the affairs of the Dingir. The Enemy was upon them. The only question was which Enemy it was.

His name was Tu-Kur-La, and he was dingir-gubidir-min, a god-warrior of the second rank, of the house of In-Kur-Dru and a Keeper of the Memories. The particular memory lineage he bore was no less than that of the House of Nin-Ur-Tah herself, and so he remembered the Sag-ura of Kia, remembered the Ahannu colony there and the creation of the Sag-ura, the Blackhead slaves of that world.

Yes, he remembered. …

All around him other Ahannu god-warriors were gathering, awakened from the Sleep of Ages to once again defend the sacred vales and mountains of Enduru. Drones and males born for their purpose, they filed into the Chamber of Weapons, taking down the lesser anenkara from the racks along the bare stone walls. There were too few of the ancient devices for even one in twelve to carry one; most god-warriors, the drones who could no longer breed, would carry mitul, curved chakhul and thrusting shukur, and blunt-tipped tukul, primitive weapons, though effective when deployed in large numbers. And the Sag-ura gudibir, of course, had weapons of their own.

He ran a slender, six-fingered hand along the elegantly graven barrel of his anenkara. God-weapons. Weapons forged by the gods-who-came-before, forged and stored here in the depths of Enduru against the coming of the Hunters of the Dawn.

Yes. He remembered …

The colony cities on the fair, blue world of Kia, like vast, stone flowers unfolded in the sun, remembered especially the great capital of Eridu at the confluence of the two rivers, Buranun and fast-flowing Idigna.

He remembered the skies darkened by the Hunters when they came, remembered the battle over desolate Kingu, Kia’s solitary moon, Defender of Kia. At that time, of course, “he” was a she, a biotechnician named Lul-Ka-Tah, storing memories of the conflict for transmission back to Anu.

And he remembered the time of sadness that followed, remembered the chunk of rock, like a burning mountain, plunging out of space into the Greater Sea south of Eridu. The Hunters of the Dawn had judged the Gods of An and determined to scour them from existence.

And not just on Kia … but on Giris, on Abalsil, on Gal-Mul, even on sacred Nibir-Anu itself … on all of the worlds of the Anunnaki, flame, flood, and destruction rained from the skies.

But among the galaxy’s suns, numbering in the hundreds of billions, there were so many worlds, worlds enough that a few might be overlooked even by the Destroyers of the Gods. Here, on Enduru, the Ahannu colony had survived, overlooked by the Hunter fleets searching for them among the stars.

Had the surviving An been discovered at last? …

Lul-Ka-Tah had been dust for millennia, but her memories survived, regrown in Tu-Kur-La’s brain before his birth. In a way, she lived once again, as Tu-Kur-La would live again someday, when the need was great.

Her memories, of course, flocked like birds around the Great Destruction that had come from the stars, the Hunters of the Dawn and their sick thirst for the extinction of all who were not like them. That part of Tu-Kur-La that was Lul-Ka-Tah was certain that the attack threatening Enduru now must be the Libir-Erim, the Ancient Enemy that had smashed the far-flung empire of the gods millennia ago.

But Tu-Kur-La had last been awakened from the Sleep of Ages a mere two cycles ago, when strange Blackheads, ignorant of their place and bearing weapons of power, had descended from the skies of Enduru, demanding equal standing with the gods.

The thought was sheer foolishness, of course. None were the equal of the Dingir, not even the Ancient Enemy who, after all, had failed in his quest for the extinction of the Ahannu. And as for the former slaves of the gods, the domesticated creatures of the lost world of Kia, such could never aspire to be gods themselves. Such would be erinigargal, an utter and monstrous abomination that the universe itself could never permit to exist.

The information coming through now from the Kikig—the control center—suggested that these attackers were the wild descendants of zah-sag-ura, no more. They’d been dealt with once before, they would be dealt with again. Permanently.

“To the defenses!” A commander-of-sixties hissed the order, and the Ahannu god-warriors chanted their response and started for the door.

“Not you, Tu-Kur-La,” the commander-of-sixties said. “You are a Keeper of Memories, is it true?”

“Truth, Commander.”

“Then your place is at Kikig Kur-Urudug. They will need you there, in the Abzu.” Kur-Urudug. The Mountain of the Thunderstorm Weapon. “Give your weapon to another.”