The Legacy Trilogy - 02 - Battlespace by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780380818259
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

13

2 APRIL 2170

Alpha Company, First Platoon,

B Section

TRAP 1-2

Approaching release point

1220 hours, Shipboard time

This time it was different.

Again Garroway was suited up in full battle armor, squeezed shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee with nineteen other Marines, waiting for whatever was about to happen. They’d wedged themselves into place four hours earlier and had been waiting ever since.

Just like the dry hump last time, when they’d sat out the battle in the TRAPs. Just like a dozen training sessions before that, back at Earth’s L-4.

But this time it was different. Two days before, they’d not known for sure that they were going in. They’d not known for sure that the enemy, the vague and amorphously indistinct presumptive owner of the stargate, was even an enemy, that he would fight back.

And the Marines had had no idea what they were up against.

Now, at least, they knew there was a war on. The Wiggles had fought back and every man and woman in the TRAP knew they were at the gate now, waiting for the Marines to get there.

The Wiggles. Garroway smiled behind his helmet visor at that. Everyone in the company had looked at the new material that had come online the other day. At least they’d downloaded the pictures, the comp-graphic simulations of what the enemy might look like. Kat had pronounced them cute, which had led to much laughter and derision, of course. Regi Lobowski had called them marshwiggles, from a character in an old children’s fantasy story, and the name, shortened to Wiggles, had stuck.

Putting a face, even a purely theoretical one, to the enemy had transformed the Marines’ attitudes in a number of ways. Until that defining moment, the Wiggles had been nameless, faceless, monstrous…the indistinct and dread stuff of nightmares. The closest the enemy had come to having a distinct identity was when the Marines would speculate about whether or not they were the fearfully mysterious Hunters of the Dawn.

What we’re scared of most is what we don’t know, he thought.

Of course, soldiers from the time of Sargon the Great had worked hard to depersonalize the enemy. Gooks, krauts, rebs, slopes, lobsterbacks, slants, a thousand other derogatory names all were aimed at making the guy in your sights a thing, not a person. Maybe Wiggle was just more of the same.

The ridiculous name certainly seemed to steal some of the mystery and dread from an enemy none of the Marines had as yet actually seen in person.

It helped, somehow, knowing that Alpha Company was packed into its TRAPs in order to go fight the damned Wiggles.

“Final systems check, everybody,” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne announced. “Five minutes to go/no-go.”

Five minutes. The CTV-300 transfer pod had already been positioned for the drop and was drifting slowly toward the Wheel at a scant five meters per second. The cargo bay clamshell doors were opening now, flooding the waiting Marines with cold starlight. Garroway leaned back so he could look out through the widening opening, could see the Wheel with his own eyes instead of through his implant, silhouetted against the stars.

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