Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

off-world, to orbital cities and to extrasolar colonies, where they would not be a threat to the Pax Confoederata.

Another Choctaw drifted down out of the orange overcast, accompanied by its gunship escort. Landing legs grew from its flat belly, splaying wide as it settled onto the landing field, cargo doors dilating, ramps extending. The next load of Marines was already lined up in ranks at the edge of the field, ready to embark. At this rate, the evacuation would be complete well within the eight hours allotted for the operation.

“Muslims weren’t the only ones who didn’t like the Covenant,” Gorman said at last. “Most of my family were Baptists.” He didn’t add that he, personally, was a Covenant Reformed Baptist, and would no more preach the Gospel to someone who didn’t want to hear it than he would denounce the Corps.

“The Covenant was a gun aimed at Islam!” Hamid snapped back. “Not at American evangelicals! Not at Zionists!”

“It applied to all religions. All cultures. All belief systems. It had to, to be fair.”

“It denied the commandments of Allah to bring light to the unenlightened! It was not fair. It was blasphemy!”

“I am not going to stand here and argue bad theology with you, Mr. Hamid,” Gorman said. The capacity for members of various fundamentalist and extremist sects for clinging to battles, grudges, and wrongs done hundreds, even thousands of years ago was astonishing to him. “Seven thousand of your people can get off this rock if they want to.”

“I will…make the announcement,” Hamid said, his words and his manner stiff. “I imagine, though, that most of us will stay.”

“That’s your call. I recommend that that you let women and children have what space on the transports we can find.”

“The male children, certainly,” Hamid said. He sounded thoughtful.

The statement chilled Gorman. Traditional Islam-in particular the extremist sects, the Rafaddeen who’d rejected the White Covenant-still often valued men more than women, boys more than girls, an artifact of certain ancient tribal cultures more than of the Qu’ran itself. That, as much as the suicide bombers and the tactical nukes, had been a major part of the extremist Muslim doctrine that had led to so much bloodshed in the mid-and late twenty-first century. Most modern Islamic states back on Earth had embraced full equality of the sexes, but out here…

“All of your children,” Gorman said, putting iron into his voice. “Girls too. And the women as well. To care for them.”

To the Rafadeen, childcare was women’s work. Perhaps he could use that bit of sixth-century logic to force the issue.

Hamid gave Gorman a hard look. “You needn’t moralize at us. Our faith has served us well for over seventeen centuries, despite your Western preaching and your Crusades.”

Gorman took a step closer, towering above the smaller man. “All of the children, and the women,” he said. “As well as any men who want to go. My Marines will enforce this, Mr. Hamid. At gunpoint, if they have to.”

Hamid’s expression clouded, as though he was going to argue. Then he shrugged, backed down. “It scarcely matters. Allah has judged, and found us lacking.”

On the landing field, more columns of Marines were filing on board the open shuttle. He would need to talk with Simmons, the MEF’s executive officer, to make sure he stayed on top of a phased and orderly withdrawal. The trick, Gorman thought, was going to be keeping enough Marines behind, on the ground, to oversee the evacuation of six or seven thousand colonists, to make sure that the women and children were evacuated first, to prevent the men, however dedicated they might be to staying now, from panicking and attempting to rush the shuttles…then pull those last Marines out without triggering a deadly riot.

And all of that was assuming the Turusch stayed out of the picture.

Gorman watched the shuttle lift off, to be replaced by another dropping from the orange-yellow sky.

He saw a group of locals gathered off to one side, near the enlisted mess hall. They weren’t doing anything in particular; they were simply…watching, silent, anonymous in their e-suits.

If Gorman remembered accurately, fifteen thousand locals had made it inside the Marine perimeter from the nearby colonial capital of Jahuar when the Turusch first appeared overhead weeks ago, roughly a third of them women and children. The refugees had been crowded in with the Marines ever since, occupying supply warehouses turned into huge open dormitories. There’d been no incidents, fortunately. The biggest problem the Marines had faced had been simply getting their work done with so many civilians in the way.

If that mob down there turned on the dwindling number of remaining Marines, they could end up being just as deadly as the Turusch.

MEF HQ

Marine Sick Bay

Eta Bootis IV

1720 hours, TFT

For Gray, it was as though he were deep within the folds of a lucid dream.

He knew he was dreaming, but the reality of the scene was startlingly crisp and real, like being inside a VR threevee. There was nothing automatic or canned about it. He could choose to turn his head, looking north, toward the skeletal towers of Central Manhattan looming against the night. Or he could turn and look south, to the submerged and tumbled-down ruins of the ancient financial district projecting above the surf, the warning lights and buoys winking in the dark.

He was standing on a rooftop above something that had once been called East 32nd Street, just north of the drowned section of the old city. He could hear the gentle susurration of the surf fifty meters below.

A UT-84 utility hopper, with Periphery Authority markings showing in blue and white light against all three black wings, hovered overhead, eerily silent, faintly illuminated by the sky-glow of the New City, twenty kilometers to the northeast. Then a shaft of dazzling light speared down from the aircraft’s belly and he could not see anything at all. “Halt!” a sharp, neutrally inflected voice called, amplified and immense. “Stay where you are, in the open, your hands clearly visible! Authority peaceforcers will be there momentarily!”

The scene was a virtual reality, a near-perfect replay of events that had occurred five years earlier.

In fact, there were software programs available commercially that acted exactly like this-fed directly into the brain through a marginal AI. You closed your eyes…and could go anywhere, see anything, engage in any sport, have sex with any celebrity, and have it all be just like being there.

“What are you feeling right now?” a woman’s voice said in his mind. It was, he knew, the voice of Dr. Anna George, a psytherapist with the 1^st MEF. She was linked into the program with him, seeing everything he was seeing, experiencing his memories, and his decisions.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. He spoke aloud, the voice sounding distant, somewhere off in his mind, somewhere behind the silently hovering hopper, the ruins of the old city. “Fear, I guess.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Them. The peaceforcers.”

“But you know they’re there to help you.”

“No. I don’t. They’ve always been the enemy!”

“Who has been the enemy, Lieutenant?”

“The Authority. The peaceforcers. Watching us. Hassling us. Telling us what to do, what not to do. They call us squatties. Squatters and primitives. And ferals. To them, we’re not people. We’re just…pests. Problems to be dealt with.”

“But they got help for your wife.”

“And they turned her against me. She’s not my wife anymore.”

“You sound…bitter.”

“Am I?” He laughed. “Just because they swept me up, wrecked my life, turned my life-partner against me? Why the hell should I be bitter?”