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

“Mathorne! Where’s Mathorne?”

“Get those PGs firing, damn it!”

“Corpsman! Marine down!”

“Second Squad! Damn it, you’re being cut off!”

Captain Warhurst listened to the excited shouts and commands coming from inside the mountain and wondered if he could pull the plug.

The “plug” was a Mark XVII laser-plasma-fired backpack fusion demolition device. There were six of them assigned to the ARLT, and four were currently being worn by four different Marines inside the mountain—Gunnery Sergeants Mathorne and Valdez, Staff Sergeant Ostergaard, and Lieutenant Kerns. The remaining two were stored on the lander modules for Dragon One and Dragon Six. Any or all could be detonated by the Marine carrying one, with the appropriate firing codes provided by one of the LM AIs, by Warhurst himself from Lander One, or by the Command Constellation still on board Derna. It was believed that one device, with a yield of 0.7 megaton, detonated inside Objective Krakatoa, would collapse enough of the entire mountain to render the Ahannu planetary defense complex useless.

The plug was decidedly an option of last resort, one to be used only if there was no other way to protect the incoming transports. The things could be given a time delay or triggered immediately. The hope, of course, was that one of the Marines could leave a warhead where it would do enough good and give the ARLT time to evacuate to a safe distance, but no one in on the planning for Operation Spirit of Humankind believed that escape would be possible. The plugs turned the ARLT assault into a suicide mission.

Worse, from Warhurst’s point of view, only the Marines actually wearing the deadly packs knew what they carried. The rest of the Marines down there didn’t know, and that was just plain wrong, Warhurst thought. A man or woman who was going to die when a friend thought-clicked a command trigger ought to know what was going to happen … and that instantaneous incineration meant success for the rest of the invasion.

But knowledge of the Mark XVIIs had been locked under need-to-know restrictions. Someone higher up the chain of command had decided that knowing about that part of the operation might degrade unit combat efficiency.

That still didn’t make it right.

Four warheads were inside the underground complex now, totaling 2.8 megatons. If he was ordered to fire those warheads in the next few minutes … could he? No problem if everyone inside was dead when he punched it, but combat rarely worked out that neatly. There would be survivors in there, not to mention the Marines still outside the mountain who might be caught in the blast. None of them would know. …

And as the battle inside the mountain increased in fury, Warhurst knew the moment of decision was almost on him.

Damn the waiting … and damn the fact that he was stuck out here, instead of inside that mountain with his people.

18

25 JUNE 2148

ARLT Section Dragon Three

Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

1727 hours ST

Second Squad had been ahead of the others when the Ahannu warriors began boiling out of hidden entrances on all sides of the underground chamber. As a black sea of leaping, thronging figures swirled around them, they were in serious danger of being cut off from the ARLT main body.

Garroway dropped to one knee between Well Dunne and Gunny Valdez, pumping 20mm grenades into the horde of attackers, using single shots to conserve his dwindling ammo. Many of these new Ahannu, he noticed, were different from the ones outside—taller, more muscular, and much darker in color, the green-black of their skin making their large, golden eyes even more prominent in the dim light.

These attackers, in fact, were quite different from those he’d studied in downloads on board the Derna. A different species? There wasn’t any data on the topic one way or another. Their body armor looked heavier, more ornate … and seemed to provide better protection from shrapnel and laser bursts.

But they could still be killed. Explosions chopped and tore through the packed ranks of the attackers. The onslaught wavered as the Ahannu in the lead ranks hesitated, unwilling to press in closer to the deadly ring of fire laid down by the hard-pressed Marines.

Then Garroway’s M-12 chimed a tone indicating it was out of rounds.

He reached for his belt pack and pulled out his last forty-round magazine. “I’m almost out of grenades,” he told the others. “One mag left!”

“Same here,” Vinita added.

“I’m out,” Chuck Cawley said. “Nothing left but light!”

The attacking wall surged closer. And beyond the massed ranks, Garroway saw a larger shadow, a hulking, humanoid form rising above the smaller Ahannu like a giant, with massive forearms, stooped shoulders, and gold eyes tiny compared to the broad swath of face, almost hidden deep within bony sockets. It carried a long and clumsy-looking weapon, another gauss gun of some kind, but so long that no smaller Ahannu could have wielded it.

“My God!” Garvey screamed. “What the hell is that?”

“Just kill it!” Foster barked. “Pour it on!”

Laser fire snapped and flashed across the monster’s heavily armored form, eliciting a scream like doomsday. It raised its weapon; Garroway felt the high-velocity round shriek low overhead, felt the concussion behind him.

“Second Squad!” Honey Deere yelled. “Hit the deck!”

Garroway threw himself forward, landing facedown on the rock floor. An instant later lightning snapped and glared overhead with a stuttering burst of thunder. Outside, he’d not noticed the squad’s plasma gun in action in all the swirling noise and confusion. Inside this enclosed chamber, however, the rapid-fire bolts of charged plasma banished darkness in a dazzling explosion of light and sound.

Garroway felt the noise fade out as his helmet compensated, and his visual feed darkened as the input filters snapped in. Deere’s plasma gun loosed bolts in such rapid succession that the effect was of a single flickering bolt of lightning.

And whatever that lightning touched vanished, exploding in clouds of vapor and sprays of blood and charred tissue. The giant Ahannu collapsed in a heap; smaller Ahannu were scrambling back, falling over one another in their rush to escape.