Star Corps - Ian Douglas

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way into the Deeps beyond the orbit of Mars, voyaging to the coterie of moons circling Jupiter. The Singer might be dead, but the kilometer-wide corpse was a solid mass of advanced alien technologies, an immense computer, essentially, that once had housed a self-aware intelligence far exceeding humankind’s. For seven decades human science had been plumbing the depths of the Singer, gleaning a host of technological tricks, arts, and secrets. There were endless promises of new and near-magical means of generating limitless power, of bending gravity to human will, of generating nucleomagnetic fields powerful enough to block a thermonuclear blast and sever the fabric of space itself, of new structural materials millennia beyond current manufacturing understanding, of computers and AIs of superhuman speed and capability, even—whisper the mere possibility softly—of the chance that one day humans might venture to the stars at speeds vastly exceeding that of light.

      Such were the promises of the inert Singer … promises still far from being realized. In seventy-two years, Earth’s best scientists had barely begun to catalog the wonders still locked away inside that dead and ice-bound hulk. It might be centuries more before hints, guesses, speculations, and grueling work in the frozen hell of Europa’s 140-degree-Kelvin embrace generated useful technology.

      Those promises, however, were so golden that accredited scientists were not the only mammals scavenging through the Singer’s dark, cold corridors. Five years ago a couple of research assistants with a Pakistani archeotechnological team had been caught by Marine security personnel with nearly forty kilos of Singer material—bits and pieces of structural support members and paneling, the equivalent of computer circuit boards, dozens of the fist-sized crystals believed to be used as memory storage media, and several oddly shaped artifacts of completely alien design and unknown purpose.

      That hadn’t been the first time site robbers managed to infiltrate the legitimate science teams and smuggle out pieces of the alien ship. Bits of Singer technology had been appearing on Earth for at least the past ten years. Collectors reportedly had paid as much as fifteen million newdollars for fragments mounted and privately displayed as … art. The most startling case on record was the three-meter-wide slice of alien hull metal found hanging behind the altar of the Church of the Gray Redeemers in Los Angeles. When that had been smuggled back to Earth, and how, was anybody’s guess.

      The U.S. Marines had been the guarantors of the Singer archeological site’s security ever since the end of the Sino-Confederation War. Once it was realized that covert looters were making off with fragments of the alien ship and selling them as curios, as art, and even as religious relics, the newly formed Confederation Department of Archeotechnology authorized the use of military AIs as sentries. Cassius had been assigned to Outwatch duty eight months ago, when the rest of his constellation—the twelve Marine officers and NCOs of cybergroup Delta Sierra 219—had been deployed to Cydonia. There was little need of team AIs on Mars, where the duty was routine and the local net provided reliable data and technoumetic access. On Europa his considerable skills and more-than-human senses could be put to good use patrolling the Singer artifact, protecting it and the Confederation science teams.

      In eight months there’d been no incidents. Everything was strictly routine … which was, after all, the best way for things to be. Another sixteen months, and he would be able to rejoin his constellation back on Earth. Though it was difficult to say whether what he felt for his teammates was truly akin to human emotion, he did miss them… .

      A radio signal caught his attention, and he instantly shifted back to standard temporal perception. The sun stopped its rapid drift across the sky, coming to a halt just above the golden-orange crescent of Jupiter. The shadows froze motionless in the patterns of mid-afternoon.

      A Navy lander was descending from the west, balancing itself down gently with plasma thrusters against Europa’s 131-centimeters-per-second-squared gravitational tug. IFF tagged the dull black and silver sphere as a lander from the Outwatch frigate Kamael, currently in Europa orbit.

      And a radio transmission from the Singer main base was already calling him in. “Cassius, this is Outwatch Europa. RTB, repeat, RTB.”

      Return to base? He was not scheduled to leave Listening Post 14 for another 105 hours.

      But more so than for a human, even for a human Marine, orders were decidedly orders. He extended his spider legs to full length and began picking his way down the icy slope of the Singer’s hull, making his way rapidly toward the main base.

      The lander had been sent for him. He wondered why.

       Giza Complex

       Kingdom of Allah, Earth

       1815 hours Zulu

      “Here they come!” Captain Warhurst yelled. A thousand armed men, at least, sprinted into the open, screaming and firing wildly. Most were on foot, but a number of vehicles were mixed in with the surging mob—open-topped flatbed trucks with gun crews in the back, and light cargo hovercraft of various sizes and descriptions. “Commence firing!”

      Warhurst leaned forward against the low wall of sandbags, moving his weapon to drag the targeting reticle into line with one of the charging Mahdi shock troops, a big man in mismatched pieces of Chinese and Persian armor, carrying a K-90 assault rifle. A touch of the firing stud, and the LR-2120 hummed, the vibration of the charge cycler flywheel barely perceptible through his armor.

      There was no flash or visible pulse of light. Such wasteful displays of pyrotechnics belonged solely to the noumenal fantasies of VR thrillers. The laser pulse lasted for only one hundredth of a second, far too brief a period to register on the human eye even if there’d been dust or smoke in the atmosphere to make the light visible. The LR-2120 had a pulse output of fifty megawatts; one watt for one second equals one joule, so the energy striking the target equaled half a million joules—equivalent to the explosive power released by the detonation of fifty grams of CRX-80 blasting compound, or a tenth of a stick of old-fashioned dynamite.

      The pulse explosively vaporized a fist-sized chunk of the man’s polylam breastplate as well as the cloth, flesh, and bone underneath, slamming him back a step before he crumpled to the sand. Warhurst shifted targets and fired again … and again …

      The attack had been gathering all day. Kingdom of Allah troops and Mahdi fanatics had begun spilling across the Giza and Duqqi bridges out of Cairo early that morning, shortly after the Marines secured their slender perimeter about the Giza complex, but they stayed within the cluttered, narrow streets between Giza and the river, mingling with a fast-swelling crowd of civilians who chanted and waved banners. The Marines found it amusing. The signs and banners, for the most part, were in English, as were the chants. Clearly, the demonstration was for the benefit of the net news services and their floating camera eyes, which by now saturated the battlefield area as completely as the Marines’ own recon probes.

      By mid-afternoon, however, the demonstrators had dwindled away, most of them crossing the Nile bridges back into Cairo proper. The shock troops and militia had remained, and the Marines braced themselves, knowing what to expect.

      The attack finally came, boiling out from among the ramshackle buildings and narrow streets and into open ground. The Marines had orders not to fire on civilian structures, but they had deployed a line of RS-14 picket ’bots fifteen hundred meters from the Marine perimeter. The baseball-sized devices had buried themselves in the sand and emerged now to transmit data on the range, numbers, and composition of the attacking force, and to paint larger targets, like trucks and hovercraft, with lasers.

      With accurate ranging data transmitted from the pickets, Marines inside the perimeter began firing 20mm smartround mortars, sending the shells arcing above the oncoming charge, where they detonated, raining special munitions across the battlefield. Laser-homing antiarmor shells zeroed in on the vehicles. Shotgun fléchette rounds exploded twenty meters above the ground, spraying clouds of high-velocity slivers across broad stretches of the battlefield. Concussion rounds buried themselves in the sand, then detonated, hurling geysers of sand mixed with screaming, kicking bodies into the air.

      Only one TAV was airborne at the moment. They were being kept up one at a time to conserve dwindling supplies of the liquid hydrogen

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