The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas
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need for a smoothly functioning structure at the squad, platoon, and company levels. Hatred—or fear—of a squad mate during a combat situation when everyone needed to work together smoothly, as a unit, might get Marines killed.
So Gunny Warhurst had been assigned to an Ontos crew, a demanding billet that required experienced combat veterans, rather than newbies. The platoon’s fresh meat would do best in assault platoons where they could draw on one another—and on the old hands in each platoon—for support and strength. Serving a gun station on an Ontos required more seasoning, and the ability to link very closely indeed with the vehicle commander, and with the other gunner on board.
Warhurst’s relief at being in action again had more, much more, to do with his need to get away from Mars and the still-burning pain of having been evicted from his family. The psych AIs at Ares RTC had tried to counsel him through the rough parts, but he honestly couldn’t tell now if they’d done a damned thing to help.
He knew he was still spending way too much time uselessly rehearsing conversations in his head. He so wanted his family—especially Julie—to understand, to, to what? To come to their senses and feel how he needed the Corps, to understand that this was his family as much as the Tamalyn-Danner line marriage, because, damn it, the Corps was a part of who and what he was, that he could no more discard it than he could discard his own heart.
He was beginning to realize that a lot of his grief was centered less on losing Julie, Eric, Donal, and Callie than it was on being rejected. Dumped. As though he meant nothing to any of them, had contributed nothing, had been nothing. When he thought about how they’d cast him aside, it was all he could do to see through that haze of enveloping white pain … a searing mingling of grief and loss, of fury and hatred and broken ego and insulted honor and yearning desire.
He hated them all, now. And he still wanted them to come back, to say it had all been a mistake.
He still wanted to love them. …
Damn it, he was doing it again. Focus, you idiot! he snarled at himself, furious. Pay attention to what you’re doing or you’ll get us all killed!
The Ontos had vaulted through the emptiness between the Lejeune and the enemy monitor, shifting vectors wildly and rapidly in order to make things as difficult as possible for the Rommel’s fire-control AIs. Drawing on the ZPE energy tap on board the Lejeune, the Ontos could afford the added power-hungry luxury of phase-shifting, which made the enemy’s job even harder in terms of target acquisition and lock, and provided some measure of defense against beams and shrapnel.
But not complete protection, he noted, as a small hivel slug struck the Ontos amidships. He felt the staggering shock as a few grams of depleted uranium passed through the ship. Most of the released kinetic energy, fortunately, was dissipated by the Ontos’ phase-shifted state, but enough leaked through to jar his teeth.
He stayed focused on his link, however. They were still flying, so he ignored the impact, figuring that there was nothing he could do about it except to keep doing his job, which was to try to track incoming missiles or armored enemy troops or gun or sensor emplacements on the monitor’s hull and knock them out with hivel cannon fire.
The ship’s AI had already highlighted the turret that had loosed that slug. He dragged his mental targeting cursor over the dome and thought-clicked the number two gun starboard, sending a stream of high-velocity rounds slashing through the turret in great, pulsing gouts of white heat before it could fire another shot.
As it neared its objective, as the Rommel loomed huge in his downloaded mental vision, the Ontos’ hull began morphing into its landing configuration, wings and weapons outstretched, clawed legs extended, blast head forward and down, seeking contact.
Then the Ontos was on the monitor’s hull with a heavy, ringing thud, its ugly blast head extending and dropping to bring a torch of plasma energy, as hot as the core of a sun, into contact with the monitor’s armor cladding.
Under that searing assault, the outer nanolayers rippled and flowed as they tried to distribute the heat, then burst away in clouds of vapor, exposing the tender ceramics and alloys beneath. The Ontos’ claws dug in and held, as the current of vaporizing metals and composites howled past like a hurricane wind, expending itself in vacuum. A crater formed, then deepened, widening, as the Ontos thing continued to eat its way through the skin and into the heart of the enemy ship.
The Rommel carried fighters—not as many as the Lejeune, but enough to provide some measure of close defense against such tactics as the Ontos was now employing. His AI warned of two bogies swinging up and around over the horizon of the monitor’s hull, identifying them as PanEuropean Épée fighters—robotic craft that were exceptionally fast and maneuverable because they had no flesh and blood on board to coddle.
Warhurst was screaming as he brought both starboard-side guns to bear on the stooping targets. …
0112.1102
SAP 12
PanEuropean Monitor Rommel
Puller 695 System
2004 hrs GMT
Garroway had been wondering if any of the SAPs were going to make it across the gulf between Samar and the Rommel, as pod after pod was struck down by the enemy point defenses, but then a fresh wave of blasts flashed and pulsed across the monitor’s hull, targeting the point-defense turrets and fire-control sensors. Morrigan was now concentrating all of her fire against the PanEuropean monitor, attempting to screen the Marine assault wave, giving them a precious few seconds to complete their run, and a number of aerospace fighters had closed enough of the gap to pour concentrated devastation into the shuddering hull of the huge enemy ship. Although he hadn’t seen them, the tacsit feed also showed three MCA–71 Ontos transports had touched down on the monitor’s hull, and were busily tunneling into thick armor. Another nuke, one of a salvo fired from the Thor, got through a moment later, flaring with dazzling incandescence against the night.
But the Rommel was still very much in action. In seconds, three more SAPs vaporized in white-hot flashes of energy … and the tacsit showed enemy fighters as well, rising from the monitor to engage the incoming pods.
But by now the PanEuropean monitor was looming huge just ahead, its surface rushing up to meet Garroway’s incoming capsule. The guiding AI, Garroway noted with an almost detached interest, was directing his pod into a gaping crater blown open moments before by the plasma blast head of an MCA–71. An instant later, and despite the inertial damping, Garroway felt the savage shock as his SAP slammed into the wreckage of what had been the Rommel’s hull at that point.
The SAP’s squared-off prow was designed to collapse against whatever it struck, releasing a ring of nanotech disassemblers programmed to ignore the pod, but to eat through hull metal or composite with which it was in contact. As the pod slipped deeper into the PE ship’s armor cladding, the SAP’s entire outer surface turned gelatinous with nano-D, eating away at the metal and lubricating the pod’s movement. Vanishing into the ship’s hull, the pod continued burrowing forward, dissolving wreckage and armor, until sensors within the drilling head detected an empty space beyond.
When that happened, nano-disassemblers halted their eating, then converted to sealant, fusing pod to hull, and the leading end of the assault craft flashed from solid to gas in a savage liberation of raw energy.
Garroway was waiting, gulping down air, heart pounding, the flamer mounted on his 660-battlesuit’s left forearm already aimed and armed. As the bow of the assault pod exploded into gas, he followed up with a burst from the flamer, sending a fireball searing