the drumming, off to the east, as the crowds gathered at the Pyramid of the Eye. It was, he thought, going to be a very long night indeed.
“How’s it going, Master Sergeant?”
Aiken didn’t turn, not when he was linked in with the sentry. His battle feed had warned him of Captain Pearson’s approach.
“All quiet on the perimeter, Captain,” he replied. “Sounds like the Frogs’re pretty riled up down in the ’ville, though.”
“Word just came through from the embassy compound,” Pearson said. “The rebel abos have seized control in a hundred villages. The ‘High Emperor of the Gods’ is calling for calm and understanding from his people.” The way he said it, the title was a sneer.
Abos, abs, aborigines; Frogs, or Froggers. All were terms for the dominant species of Ishtar … ways of dehumanizing them.
Which was a damned interesting idea when you realized how not human the Ahannu were.
“Do you think they’ll attack us?”
“It could happen. The ambassador still hasn’t answered Geremelet’s ultimatum.”
A gossamer flitted in the ruby light, twisting and shifting, a delicate ribbon of iridescence. Aiken lifted the muzzle of his 2120 and caught the frail creature, watching it quiver against the hard black plastic of the weapon’s barrel in bursts of rainbow color. Other gossamers danced and jittered in the gathering darkness, delicate sparkles of bioluminescence.
“They’re not talking about … surrendering, are they?”
“Not that I’ve heard, Master Sergeant. Don’t worry. It won’t come to that.”
“Yeah. The Marines never surrender.”
“That’s what they say. Keep a sharp watch. There’ve been reports of frogger slaves trying to gain entrance at some of the other bases. They might be human, but we can’t trust them.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The Ahannu slaves, descendants of humans taken from Earth millennia ago, gave Aiken the creeps. No way was he letting them through his part of the perimeter.
“Good man. Give a yell if you need help.”
“You don’t need to worry about that, sir.” He hesitated, looking up at the vast and seething globe of Marduk. “Hey, Captain?”
“What?”
“Some of the guys were having a friendly argument the other night. Is Ishtar a planet or a freakin’ moon?”
Pearson chuckled. “Look it up on the local net.”
“I did. Didn’t understand that astrological crap.”
“Astronomy, not astrology. And it’s both. Marduk is a gas giant, a planet circling the Llalande sun. Ishtar is a moon of Marduk … but if it’s planet-sized and has its own internally generated magnetic field and atmosphere and everything else, might as well call it a planet, right?”
“I guess. Thanks, sir.”
Pearson walked off into the gloom, leaving Aiken feeling very much alone. He turned and looked into the southern sky, where the first stars were beginning to appear. Eight light-years from home had not much altered the familiar constellations, though the dome of the sky was strangely canted against the cardinal directions. There was a bright star, however, in the otherwise dim and unremarkable constellation Scutum, not far from the white beacon of Fomalhaut. Aiken might not know astronomy from astrology, but he’d pulled downloads enough to know what he was looking at now.
Sol. Earth’s sun. As always, the sight of that star sent a small shiver down Aiken’s spine. So far away, in both space and time …
Eight point three light-years. Help from home could not possibly arrive in time.
1
2 JUNE 2138
Giza Complex
Kingdom of Allah, Earth
0525 hours Zulu
The trio of TAV Combat Personnel Carrier transports came in low across the Mediterranean Sea, avoiding the heavily populated coastal areas around El Iskandariya by crossing the beach between El Hammam and El Alamein. Skimming the Western Desert at such low altitudes that their slipstreams sent rooster tails of sand exploding into the pale predawn sky, the TAVs swung sharply south of the isolated communities huddled along the Wadi El Natrun, dumping velocity in a series of weaving banks and turns. Ahead, silhouetted against the brightening eastern horizon and the lights of Cairo, their objective rose like three flat-sided mountains above the undulating dunes.
The defenders would know that something was happening; even with stealth architecture, the three transatmospheric vehicles had scorched their radar signatures in ion reentry trails across the skies of Western Europe as they’d descended from suborbit, and the mullahs of the True Mahdi had been expecting something of the sort. The only question was how long it would take them to react.
Captain Martin Warhurst, CO of Bravo Company, sat hunched over in his travel seat in the rear of CPC Delta’s red-lit troop compartment, crowded torso to armored torso with the men and women of 1st Squad, First Platoon. There were no windows in the heavily armored compartment, no viewscreens or news panels, but a data feed painted a small, brightly colored image within his Helmet Data Overlay, showing the outside world as viewed through a camera in the TAV’s blunt nose.
There wasn’t a lot to see, in fact—abstract patterns of light and darkness wheeling this way and back with the TAV’s approach maneuvers. The area beyond the Giza complex, along the west bank of the Nile, was brightly lit. The extensive archeological digs behind the Sphinx and between the two northern pyramids, those of Khufu and Khafre, were bathed in harsh spotlights reflected from aerostats hovering high above the ground-based beam projectors.
He knew the mission orders, knew the lay of the land and the location of the company’s objectives, but it was almost impossible to make sense of what he was seeing on his HDO display. Balls of yellow and red light floated up from the ground—fire from enemy antiaircraft positions. Colored lines and symbols glowed among alphanumerics identifying targets, way points, ranges, and bearings. His cranialink provided analysis, based on data jacked through from the CPC’s combat computer. He could see the area marked as the platoon’s drop-off point, midway between the Sphinx and Khafre’s pyramid.
“Captain Warhurst,” the phlegmatic, female voice of the TAV’s AI pilot said in his helmet receiver. “Thirty seconds. Hot LZ.”
“I see it,” Warhurst replied. His grip tightened on his weapon, a General Electric LR-2120 Sunbeam pulse laser, with its M-12 underbarrel 20mm RPG launcher and data hotlink to his Mark VII armor. He’d been in the Marines for six years and made captain two years ago, but this would be his first time in combat, his first hot drop, his first time in command with a live enemy.
God, don’t let me screw it up. …
The TAVs made a final course adjustment, shrieking low above the sands between the middle
