LVTPs, and AAVs of the twentieth century had given way to various types of planetary landing and assault boats, combat shuttles, and boarding pods. IMACs were only the latest twist, derivations of the standard ship-to-ship boarding pods in use for the past century or so.
A boarding pod or an assault boat, however, had one key weakness. It had to get from here to there through enemy point-defense fire, but with the knowledge that one hit would take out the craft and every Marine packed on board—perhaps as many as fifty or more on some of the larger shuttles.
The key to survival in modern combat was dispersal. Don’t provide the enemy with a few large targets, each carrying many Marines. Instead, let each Marine have his own landing craft—many, many small targets, each with one Marine sealed into a tiny, high-tech cocoon. High-energy lasers and missiles with antimatter warheads were going to score a kill if they hit the target, no matter what. Better, then, that each warhead that struck home killed one Marine rather than fifty.
Besides, for each one-man pod in flight, there might be a dozen or more decoys which, together with the high-energy electronic jamming going on, was guaranteed to give radar technicians, airspace monitor AIs, and tracking networks complete and utter breakdowns of one kind or another.
Colonel Lee was intensely interested in this new application of LZ-acquisition technology, as the current milspeak phrased the concept. He was CO-1MarReg, the commanding officer of the 1st Regment of the 3rd Marine Division, and he’d been tasked with transforming that unit into something new—a Marine Recon Strike Team, or RST.
Or … perhaps the concept wasn’t that new after all. In an earlier era, with simpler technologies, the Regimental Landing Team had been the ground element of a Marine Expeditionary Brigade. Over the past two centuries, as the Corps had added interstellar operations to its collective repertoire, the primary measure of force deployment had been the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit (MIEU), which numbered about a thousand to twelve-hundred personnel, and which could be deployed, with all its gear and supplies, on board a couple of fleet transports.
The RST numbered only eight hundred men and women, the size of two traditional battalions, but it included a recon battalion, a special weapons battalion, an attached air element of sixteen aerospace fighters, plus a headquarters constellation. Smaller meant faster, more flexible, and more maneuverable, or, at least that was the idea. An RST could be dropped onto a hostile planet to reconnoiter ahead of an MIEU landing, or provide troop backup for the Navy’s High Guard in the Outer System. These new IMACs would increase a landing team’s chances of surviving an insertion onto a hostile planet under fire, or serve as boarding pods in ship-to-ship actions. If the new Oannan/N’mah technology worked as advertised, it would mean a whole new era in interstellar Marine force-projection. If it didn’t …
Well, Lee wasn’t going to look that far ahead, not yet. Thirty-two good men and women were riding that tech now, and their lives depended on it functioning perfectly.
He sensed other presences in the noumen around him—Major Bishop of Second Battalion, and Captain Fetterman of Bravo Company. Those were their men and women down there, too. There were some higher-ranking officers present as well. Rear Admiral Kenneth Jollett, who was in charge of the Penetrator program; Brigadier General Hudson, an Army officer assigned to the training center as a Congressional liaison; and Major General Hernandez, CO of the MMTC facility on Phobos.
And, of course, Brigadier General Clinton Vincent Garroway, CO of 1MIEU. Strictly speaking, the IMAC test didn’t directly concern his command, but there was no way he wasn’t going to be present, not with his nephew riding one of those hot tin cans down from orbit. Keeping him clear of the Phobos observation deck would have required a direct order from the Commandant … backed up by nothing less than the battlecruisers and carrier squadrons of Fifth Fleet.
Sometimes it seemed tougher watching from the rear. …
“When will we be able to get direct data again?” Hudson asked over the noumenal link. “I don’t like being in the dark up this way.”
“According to the predicted track … another thirty seconds or so,” Jollet told him. “Then we’ll have all the data we can slurp.”
“Assuming they make it through,” Hudson said.
“Don’t even think it, Walter,” Garroway growled over the link. “They’ll make it!”
“I just don’t like this reliance on alien technology,” Hudson said. “We should have developed it on our own.”
“Beggars,” Jollett told him, “can’t be choosers.”
“Well, it does look like everything’s going smoothly,” Hudson said.
“I imagine the Marines sealed inside those cans would have something to say about that,” Lee replied, wryly amused. “According to the predicted flight track data, they’re at the point of maximum turbulence in their descent. I imagine things are a bit wild, right now.”
“Roger that,” General Garroway added. “Damn, I wish I was down there with them!”
“They can handle it, General,” Admiral Jollett said.
“Damn right they can handle it, Admiral. They’re Marines.”
Lee felt the pride in the older man’s mental voice, but couldn’t detect any fear. He knew the general was close to his nephew; he honestly didn’t know how the man was handling the stress of … just watching, watching as his nephew fireballed into atmosphere at five klicks per second.
Like General Garroway, Lee’s single biggest regret was that his request to accompany the team had been unceremoniously rejected. He was a firm believer in leading from the front.
Assault Detachment Alpha
Above Olympus Mons,
Mars
1236 hrs, local
His noumenal HUD showed him the probable locations of each of the other fifteen IMACs in Alpha Section. Probable location meant just that. For the duration of the communications blackout incurred during re-entry, transponder signals were scrambled and the datalink connecting the Marines with one another and with headquarters wasn’t much more than wishful thinking. His battlesuit’s AI was taking an educated guess on the current positions of the other IMACs, based on the last recorded vector of each, and plotting them on the display imagery unfolding within his mind.
Directly below, the caldera of Olympus Mons opened like a gaping mouth—an oval eighty-five kilometers long, sixty wide, and a sheer-sided three kilometers deep. Six overlapping pit craters pocked the yawning caldera; he could see a trace of snow in the shadows. The atmospheric pressure there was too low to permit water vapor to freeze out; those white streaks must be frozen carbon dioxide.
And then the mountain was falling away behind him, the vast swelling of the mountain dropping faster than the IMAC’s descent. At his mental request, data cascaded through his noumen. Altitude now thirty-two kilometers, dropping at three hundred meters per second, velocity four point one kilometers per second. A bubble of superheated plasma was forming around him—not thick enough yet to block visibility, but fiery enough to create the illusion of blowtorch flames billowing past him.
His heart was pounding, his mouth dry. He felt like
