Ian Douglas - Star Marines (The Legacy Trilogy, Book 3)

S TAR M ARINES

B OOK T HREE OF THE L EGACY T RILOGY

Ian Douglas

v1.0 (2011.05)

C ONTENTS

They were called the Hunters of the Dawn.

He was sealed inside a windowless carbotitanium laminate alloy canister

In the dark and lonely gulf beyond the orbit of

The huntership decelerated with inertialess ease, coming to a relative

In the four and a quarter hours since the huntership

I want to volunteer, sir.

Garroway felt his gut twist as the autie spun end

The trick was to keep a firm hold on his

It began as a rain of fire.

Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway lay in a tangled jumble of

Colonel Robert Ellsworth Lee entered the conference chamberdoing so in

We are not going to abandon Earth! Admiral Marcia Thomas

It took Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach a long time

Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway hadnt been able to sleep. The

Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach dropped to the deck when

Puller Auditorium, an enormous chamber with stadium seating located in

Garroway carried his tray to an unoccupied table, took a

and acting in the very best traditions of the United

Travis Garroway floated into the compartment, using the handholds fastened

The MIEU task force assembled in Mars polar orbit, the

Technically, it was midafternoon on board the Lejeune. Though the

Okay, boys and girls, Colonel Lees mental voice said through

The passageway, clearly, was not designed for humans. It was

It was, General Garroway thought, now down to a race,

For almost half an hour, the Marines had drifted out

General Garroway stood on Hendersons command deck, watching the battle

Damn, but its good to be home, Travis Garroway said,

P ROLOGUE

They were called the Hunters of the Dawn.

Their own name for themselves did not translate well into the languages of lesser beings. It might have been rendered, very approximately, as the Sentient Ones, or even, more approximately, as Living Ones, or simply as We Who Are.

All who were not We Who Are were lesser life forms, scarcely worthy of notice save when they became threats. When that happened, they became prey.

The name Hunters of the Dawn had been applied to them by others long ago, members of an interstellar cooperative now long extinct. More recentlyseveral thousand years before, another species had named them Xul a word that translated, again approximately, as Demons.

What other species called them, or thought of them, scarcely mattered. The Ones Who Are obeyed Darwinian dictates hard-wired into the genome of their distant ancestors a billion years in the past, dictates that drove them to seek out and eliminate any civilization capable of posing a threat to their eons-long dominion over the Galaxy.

Lately, a star system at the edge of a minor branching on one of the galactic spiral arms had become of particular interest to We Who Are. A signal from a Living Ones Seekership long believed lost had been received, indicating that intelligence once again had developed space-faring technology in Sector 2420. More recently, a Huntership had taken samples from a primitive interstellar vessel at the Gateway designated 2420-001, confirming the re-emergenceand the technological evolutionof an organic species listed as Species 2824.

And not long after that, the Huntership had been tracked through the Gatewaypresumably by those same intelligencesand destroyed.

This was not to be tolerated, could not be tolerated, without violating the genetic coding that formed the social dynamic of We Who Are.

The ancient records had been consulted. The system designated 2420-544 had been of interest at least twice before in the past three hundred thousand cycles, and there were indications of contact and annihilation within that star system even farther back than that. The Lords Who Are had consulted together, drawn their conclusions, and generated their plans.

A Huntership had been dispatched.

That vessel emerged now from paraspace, six light-hours from the target primary. That primary, a bright star only at this distance, was a fairly typical yellow sun possessing a number of planets. Samplings of the electromagnetic spectrum revealed a cloud of structures, vessels, and transmitting objects swarming about the inner system. Most were clustered around one particular planetthird from the sun, blue with liquid water, the spectra rich with the absorption lines of chlorophyll, and humming with the electronic signature of technic life.

The system matchedwithin a probability of ninety-plus percentthe system described by the creatures taken at Gateway 2420-001 a hundred cycles ago. Dissected, patterned, and absorbed, those creatures had yielded a wealth of information about their nascent civilization and origins. That Gateway, about eight light-years distant from this system, was called Sirius in the language of these creatures. Species 2824 called this star system Sol and their homeworld, the third planet, Earth. The Lords Who Are within the Huntership examined the data, and reached consensus. Species 2824 posed a threat to We Who Are.

This species, therefore, would die.

Ponderously, and with cool and unemotional deliberation, the Huntership began moving sunward.

12 February 2314

Assault Detachment Alpha

Above Olympus Mons, Mars

1235 hrs, local

He was sealed inside a windowless carbotitanium laminate alloy canister so tiny there was scarcely room to breathe, much less move, but his noumen link gave him a complete three-sixty on the view outside. Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway, USMC, was streaking through thin atmosphere, hitting it hard enough to scratch a searing contrail of ionized gas across the night-black sky. His entry pod was surrounded by a faint haze of plasma, but he could still see the surface of Mars spread out beneath him like a mapall ochers and tans and rust-reds, desert colors achingly reminiscent of the American Southwest back home.

Ahead, Olympus Mons rose against the curve of the Martian horizon, enormous, stunning in its size and sweep and grandeur. The crest of Olympus Mons reached twenty-seven kilometers above the Martian desert floorthree times the height of Everest above sea level. As big as the state of Missouri, it was the largest volcano in the Solar System.

Garroway had stood at the base of that mountain three months earlier, playing tourist, and hoping to get a look at it from ground level. The results, however, had been disappointing. Olympus Mons was so large that the curve of the Martian horizon actually hid the peak from an observer standing at the mountains base. The only way to see, to really feel the size of that monster shield volcano was to see it from orbit, or as Garroway was doing now, on a hot-trajectory re-entry forty kilometers up.

Alpha Two, Alpha Three, he called. Do you copy? Over.

Static hissed in his earphones.

Alpha Two, Alpha Three. Chrome, are you hearing me?

Still nothing. The re-entry ionization was still too heavy to permit radio communications. Damn. Hed wanted to share this with ChromeStaff Sergeant Angelina OMeara.

A jolt caught the entry capsule, punching the breath from his lungs and eliciting a sharp, bitten-off curse. There was a popular misconception going the rounds at Eos Chasma, the Martian equivalent of an urban legend, to the effect that Olympus Mons was so tall the crest actually extended above the Martian atmosphere. He wished the idiots spreading that nonsense were with him now, enjoying the ride. The average surface pressure on Mars was only about one percent of Earth-normal, and at the top of Olympus Mons, the pressure dropped to two percent of that.