For Brea, who saw me through the worst of times

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

“They’ve Found the Intruder, Sir.”

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Interlude

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Epilogue

Books in the Legacy Trilogy by Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

“They’ve found the intruder, sir.”

“Let me see.”

A three-dimensional schematic opened in a new mental window. The intruder’s course was clearly marked, as were the last known positions of the monitor Prometheus and the patrol frigate Rasmusson, several High Guard drones, and Mars. A tiny white star had detached from the crimson star marking the intruder. “What’s that?”

Data unfolded in columns down the right side of the window. “Mass analyses suggests it’s a small asteroid, sir,” Bettisly told him. “About one kilometer across … mass approximately two billion tons. The intruder seems to have nudged it onto a new vector.”

Garroway studied the data with growing horror. “Two thousand kilometers per second?”

“Yes sir.”

“That’s a hell of a nudge.” A cold thought gripped his heart. “Where’s it going? What’s the target?”

The schematic shrank in the window, showing more of the orbit of Mars … and then of Earth. A yellow line projected itself along the rock’s projected path, which passed just in front of Earth’s current position. The white star tracked down the slightly curving line as Earth moved forward …

“Great Father in Heaven …”

Prologue

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 recently—several 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-emergence—and the technological evolution—of an organic species texted as Species 2824.

And not long after that, the Huntership had been tracked through the Gateway—presumably by those same intelligences—and 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 planet—third 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 matched—within a probability of ninety-plus percent—the 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.

1

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 noumenlink 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 map—all 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 floor—three 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 mountain’s 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. He’d wanted to share this with Chrome—Staff Sergeant Angelina O’Meara.

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.

By contrast, the atmospheric pressure at the top of Mt. Everest was about twenty-five percent of the pressure at sea level; the Martian atmosphere was thin—the next best thing to hard vacuum, as Captain Fetterman liked to say—but the one-third gravity meant that it didn’t get squeezed down as tightly to the surface as on Earth, but extended much farther into space. There was plenty of—thud!—atmosphere here two miles above the mountain’s caldera-cloven crest to give him a hell of a ride.

Mars Military Training Command

Stickney Base,

Phobos

1236 hrs, local

Colonel Robert Ellsworth Lee lay in a couch on the Mars Observation Deck, watching the show. In reality, the tiny, inner Martian moon was currently above Elysium, over the horizon from Olympus Mons, but his noumenal link relayed the imagery from a low-altitude robotic satellite positioned to track Alpha’s atmospheric entry and descent.

From this vantage point, unfolding within the window of his mind, the orange face of Mars, pitted and wrinkled, stretched across the entire black reach of the sky. A cloud of brilliant stars streaked across that face, trailing white fire.

Thirty-two of those stars were the IMACs of the Alpha drop. The rest were decoys, deployed to shield the insertion from enemy radar and laser sensors. IMAC—the acronym was pronounced “eye-mac”—stood for Individual Marine Assault Craft, a name that seemed a bit grandiloquent for something not much bigger than a large garbage can.

Ever since World War II, some 370 years before, the Marine Corps had searched for new and effective ways to deliver combat Marines to the beachhead. On an island atoll called Tarawa, in 1943, thousands of Marines had died because their landing craft had grounded on a reef well off an enemy-held beach, forcing the men to wade or swim ashore under devastating machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire. That near-disaster had resulted in the introduction of the Marine amphibious vehicle—the AMTRACK—and, in later years, a whole zoo of armored amphibious vehicles designed to swim Marines ashore and provide them with firepower once they got there. Other innovations had included the helicopter, the tilt-rotor Osprey, and the high-speed hovercraft.

As their battlefields began extending into the vastness of space and to the surfaces of alien worlds, those delivery systems had become more and more powerful, more and more complex. The AMTRACKs, LCACs, 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 he was getting hotter, and sternly told himself it was his overactive imagination. He’d worked with IMACs endlessly in simulation, both on Earth, and ever since he’d arrived at the Marine Corps Deep Space Training Facility at Eos Chasma. But this was his first time in one for real, his first time stuffed into a shit-can and fired out of a Marine Stealth Starfire in planetary orbit.

Another thud, a hard one, and his AI feed reported chunks of ablative falling away. From his vantage point, it looked as though he’d just loosed a salvo of flares through the fireball. He had to remind himself that that was what was supposed to happen. As the ceramic ablative material broke free of the IMAC, it helped shed some of the fierce heat building up outside, scant centimeters from his battle-armored body, and also added to the confusion of ground-based sensors and AIs.

But it was difficult to avoid the disconcerting thought that he was flying in a conventional spacecraft, and that pieces were breaking off and falling away.

Altitude twenty-five thousand meters, a voice told him in his mind. Deploy air brakes and aeroform surfaces, yes, no?

“Negative on air brakes and aeroform,” he told the AI in his head. “We’ll deploy at twelve thousand meters, with HALO deployment as automated backup.”

In other words, if something nasty happened and he was rendered unconscious or worse by high G-forces in the next few moments, the AI would still bring him safely to the surface. Or what was left of him, at any rate. The important thing was that the data from his suit be retrieved.

Very well. Backup HALO deployment confirmed. I will reconfirm at seven thousand meters.

“Nag,” he told it. There was no response. The suit AI was rather limited in its conversational abilities, or, indeed, for any thought beyond an extremely narrow purview.

Ahead, he could see three more shield volcanoes stretched across the horizon in orderly procession. Similar to Olympus Mons, but far smaller, they were, with their huge cousin, part of the ancient Tharsus Bulge, a static region of volcanic activity where magma deep beneath the planet’s surface crust had upwelled into the crust perhaps a billion years ago. From north to south they were Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsai Mons. The central mountain, he recalled, was perched almost precisely on the Martian equator. His descent would carry him above Ascraeus Mons, on the left.

Garroway gave his flight system indicators another mental glance. Everything was tracking as expected. Decoys maintained their position in a loose cloud around and ahead of him, each leaving its own meteor-trail of ionized gas.

Ascraeus Mons slid gently past below, followed moments later by the vast and tangled patchwork of rills and canyons dubbed Noctis Labyrinthus, the Labyrinth of Night. Strike Force Sierra One-one burned through the dark Martian sky.

Operation Skyfire. It was a training exercise—only a training exercise, though that didn’t mean Garroway and his fellow Marines were guaranteed a ride back to base and a hot shower when they got there. Marines trained constantly, honing skills against the day when they would be needed for actual combat. Two millennia before, the Jewish writer Josephus had observed of the Roman legions that their exercises were bloodless battles, their battles bloody exercises, and that could accurately be said of the modern U.S. Marine Corps as well … except for the fact that even training exercises could turn bloody in a single unguarded instant.

Today, a total of thirty-two Marines of Bravo Company, of the 3rd MarDiv’s 2/1, were training with the newly commissioned IMAC combat-insertion pods, launched from one of the equally new S/R F-8 Starfire deep-recon spacecraft. The mission objective was to enter the Martian atmosphere and deploy in a simulated planetary surface strike. Their intended LZ was a stretch of ancient watercourse terrain at the far end of the Vallis Marineris called Eos Chasma, not far from the Eos USMC Deep Space Training Facility.

Excitement in Bravo Company was running at damned close to lightspeed. This was the first time the IMACs had been employed outside of simulation and with human Marines—as opposed to test pilots or robotic AIs—strapped inside. Everything was going well so far, but so much was still in the hands of the Laughing Dark God, Murphy.

A very great deal could still go horribly wrong.

Beyond the Noctis Labyrinthus, the terrain split to north and south, then yawned open in the titanic chasm called the Vallis Marineris—the Valley of the Mariner Spacecraft, named for the robot that had first imaged the canyon three and a half centuries before.

If Olympus Mons was the largest volcano in the Solar System, Vallis Marineris was the largest valley—three thousand kilometers long, in places six hundred kilometers wide and as much as eight kilometers deep. The Grand Canyon on Earth could have fit comfortably in one of Marineris’s tributary valleys.

Garroway looked down at the chasm with a certain amount of proprietary fondness. A great-great-several-more-times-great grandfather of his—also a Marine—had led a march up that valley at the onset of the UN War in 2047. “Sands of Mars” Garroway had contributed a bit to the Marine legend, and three centuries later remained one of the major heroes of the Corps’ history, alongside such names as Puller, Basilone, and Ramsey. Travis Garroway enjoyed a certain amount of notoriety in the Corps today, thanks to the exploits of his illustrious ancestor … not to mention the fact that his own uncle was also a Marine, and a major general to boot.

Of course, that notoriety had a downside as well. With a name like Garroway to live up to, there were certain … expectations circulating about his character and his sense of duty, little things like needing to be the first to volunteer to be stuffed inside a shit can and fired out the launch tube of an experimental recon-raider.

That shit can continued its descent, now scarcely thirty kilometers above the gashed-open desert below. Garroway could clearly make out the banded layering of sedimentary rocks along the weathered faces of the cliffs—the final proof, if proof was needed, that Mars once had possessed a vast ocean covering nearly half of its surface and, by extension, an atmosphere thicker than the thin, cold wisp of CO2 that enveloped the planet now.

His mind flicked to the Ancients, the inevitable name for the mysterious and godlike civilization that had tried to terraform Mars half a million years ago—and failed. They’d left traces of their presence on the Red Planet—including evidence that they’d tinkered with the DNA of certain bright and promising primates on the Blue Planet, next in toward the Sun.

And there was evidence, too, that the Ancients’ colony on Mars had been destroyed by another darker, far-ranging interstellar civilization, the so-called Hunters of the Dawn. A robotic ship, nicknamed the Singer, had been discovered beneath the ice of the world-ocean of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Evidently, the Singer had taken part in the destruction of the Ancient colony.

If the Hunters of the Dawn had been limited to the Galactic stage of half a million years ago, that would have been one thing. But it was now known that the Hunters were still out there, somewhere, among the Galaxy’s myriad stars. The Hunters had crushed the reptilian An some eight thousand years ago, destroying the colony they had planted on Earth. And they’d emerged from the huge wedding-band circle known as Sirius C—the Sirian Stargate—to capture a human-crewed starship just a century and a half ago.

The blink of an eye, by the standards of the vast and slowly turning Galaxy.

For that reason, the Marines continued to train, and the science wonks continued to develop new and better and more fearsome military technologies. The Gateway through from Sirius to a nameless star system on the outskirts of the Galaxy had been closed by a Marine expeditionary force in 2170, but few in military circles believed that that had solved the problem. The Hunters of the Dawn were out there, and they now were aware that an upstart technological species known as Homo sapiens was beginning to make its presence felt on the Galactic stage.

Sooner or later, the Hunters would return.

We Who Are

Outer Solar System

0436 hrs, GMT

The Huntership had slipped quietly into the target star system designated 2420-544 on the old records, unseen, undetected, until the system’s star was just over a scant light-hour distant. One of the sources of radio emissions became aware of the Huntership’s approach, and accelerated to intercept. Radio signals and coherent light at a variety of wavelengths reached out from the challenger, evidently seeking communication.

We Who Are deliberated briefly, then extended their consciousness.

The challenger was patterned, its energies recorded, its material structure dispersed. The patterns of the primitive vessel’s occupants—confirmed as Species 2824—were dissected and questioned, all the way down to the quantum level, confirming the stored data on this system’s species acquired recently from other sources.

The Huntership continued on its implacable course inbound.

Assault Detachment Alpha

Above Olympus Mons,

Mars

1236 hrs, local

Atmospheric drag had slowed his velocity to less than a kilometer per second, and the plasma fireball was dissipating. His noumenal display began showing pinpoints of light against the sky and horizon around him—the other IMAC pods in their descent formation, imbedded in a cloud of decoys.

“Okay, boys and girls,” a voice said over his headset. The ID tag identified it as Lieutenant Wilkie, riding Alpha Flight Six and in charge of the drop. “Sound off!”

“Alpha One, copy and acknowledged,” another voice replied.

“Alpha Two, sweet and neat.” That was Chrome.

“Alpha Three, okay,” Garroway replied.

The litany continued down the roster, until all thirty-two pods had checked in. Garroway breathed a bit easier, then. These pods had been endlessly tested for their re-entry capabilities, both in sim and in actual, but there’d still been that lingering, tiny doubt that something, some design flaw, might have been overlooked. But they all had made it past the first hurdle, at least.

“Hey, Chrome,” he called on a private lasercom channel. “Did you get a load of Olympus coming down? Looked like the Solar System’s biggest tit.”

“Roger that, Trigger. But her nipple was an innie, not an outie.”

“Collapsible model, Chrome.”

“Can the chatter, people,” Wilkie said, cutting in. “Verify ECM, and release chaff.”

An alarm sounded in his mind. His pod was being tracked by ground radar. Decoys or not, the pretend enemy on the ground was watching their approach, and had just targeted him.

Not good. Garroway—“Trigger” to the other Marines in Alpha Company—engaged Level One ECM. A thought fired six chaff canisters from the outside hull. The cloud of silvered Mylar expanded around him, mingling with ablative fragments still following the pod’s descent. They might see them coming from the ground, but it would be next to impossible to know what to shoot at.

That was the idea, at least. Part of the Marines’ training involved spending time in a ground fire-control radar center, watching this sort of exercise from the other side. At times like this, it could be comforting to know that the ground techs were seeing an ungodly hash of static on their screens, not the array of sixteen crisp, sharp blips that meant a flight of incoming hostiles.

Minutes more passed. They were twelve kilometers up, and one hundred from the LZ. “Alpha Flight, Alpha Six. Deploy aeroform flight surfaces for landing.”

At a focused thought, portions of Garroway’s pod began unfolding, transforming the cylindrical pod into a blunt-nosed lifting body. The tiny craft shuddered and banged, engaging atmosphere as his rate of descent decreased. His battlesuit AI noted that the flight surfaces had deployed; there would be no need for emergency HALO systems.

Noumenal indicators showed the Oannan drive coming up to power. That was the really scary part of this exercise … working with that alien and poorly understood technology. The amphibian Oannans, or the N’mah, as they called themselves, discovered at the Sirius Stargate a century and a half ago had been working with human scientists ever since, helping them integrate bits and pieces of archeotechnology into a coherent understanding of advanced physics. Humankind had a long way to go on that road, but one bit of early payoff, if the science techs were to be believed, was that long-dreamed-of, long-unachievable Holy Grail of propulsion technology, a reactionless drive.

The Marines’ lives were quite literally riding on the gadget. If the Foureyes’ little wonder child didn’t work as advertised, there shortly would be sixteen fresh, bright, new craters in the Martian desert, and Bravo 2/1 would need to send for newbie replacements from Lejeune, stat.

“Okay, people,” Wilkie’s voice said. Was that nervousness adding a ragged edge to his voice, or just an effect of vibration as his pod slammed into heavier atmosphere? “Nice and easy, just like in the sims. Deploy inertial dampers and engage QRD.”

Inertial dampers switched on, softening the pods’ headlong plummet. They did not completely erase inertia—even the Oannans couldn’t stop their spacecraft on the proverbial dime without deceleration—but they did muffle the occupants from the effects of abrupt, high-speed maneuvering.

Of course, the thirty-two incoming pods no longer responded like dead lumps of metal dropping through atmosphere. Drag now had a much greater effect, slowing their velocity substantially.

And that meant their obscuring cloud of chaff and ablative debris now left them, racing ahead at near-terminal velocity while the pods abruptly slowed. Red light warnings flared in Garroway’s mind. The strike force was now being clearly illuminated by ground-based radar and ladar.

“Alpha Flight, evasive pattern one!” Wilkie shouted over the laser link. “Down on the deck!”

In tight, echelon formation, the flight engaged their Quantum Reactionless Drive units, veering sharply into a near-vertical drop, plunging toward the desert. At fifteen hundred meters they pulled up sharp and hard, arrowing across the blurring ocher surface of the desert. For ninety seconds more, they held to their course, before decelerating hard and descending the final mile to the surface of the desert.

The shock wave of their passage stirred swirling clouds of dust in their wakes. With the Oannan drives on full, they slowed, then slammed into the ground, the shock—most of it, anyway—absorbed by the inertial dampers.

The black hull of Alpha Three split open, folding back on itself, and Garroway emerged, unfolding from an uncomfortable crouch. His armor, coated with chameleonic surfacing, showed the jet black of the pod’s interior, but in seconds had faded to an overall ocher-red, mirroring almost perfectly the surrounding color and shapes of desert and a pink-tinted sky. The Mark XLIV Marine CAS, or Combat Armored Suit, stood just over two meters tall, massive and blocky, a walking tank. A Hawking 34mm chaingun firing high-explosive rounds was mounted on the machine’s right forearm; an A-frame launch unit strapped to the massive back carried three Shrike-C missiles with AI guidance and tactical nuclear warheads, each packing a two-kiloton punch. The suit’s on-board AI unit was smarter than a man, with better speed, better memory, and better focus, though it lacked emotion or a sense of morals, of right and wrong. Kill-no-kill decisions still required a human wired into the decision circuit.

The Mk. XLIV—the “Fighting Forty-four”—was widely viewed in military circles as the endpoint of the evolution of individual combat armor, massive, high-powered, and lethal. Current military doctrine declared that the life expectancy of an unarmored man on the modern battlefield was to be measured in scant seconds, and the Mk. XLIV was intended to extend that lifespan to minutes, even to hours.

At the moment, there were thirty-two Marines in Mk. XLIVs scattered across the desert in a footprint twelve kilometers across. According to satellite nav data, they’d come down precisely on the planned LZ which, if all had worked as planned, put them well inside the opposing force’s perimeter, almost on top of their objective.

“Okay, Marines!” Wilkie called. “Let’s move!”

“Ooh-rah!” Garroway and the other Marines chorused, the ancient war-cry of the Corps.

The formation turned east and began moving, loping across the broken and water-eroded desert floor at a ground-eating five kilometers per hour.

We Who Are

Outer Solar System

0448 hrs, GMT

The Huntership continued its approach to the target world, sensors fully deployed, tasting the radiations and reflections of an immense volume of local space. A second artificial structure was detected, a large one—almost a quarter of the Huntership’s mass—moving in an extended orbit well above the system ecliptic.

Again, We Who Are extended their collective consciousness, almost casually reaching for this new target. …

2

12 FEBRUARY 2314

High Guard Monitor U.E.S. Prometheus

Trans-Saturn Space

1248 hrs, local

In the dark and lonely gulf beyond the orbit of Saturn, one light-hour from a dim and shrunken Sol, the U.E.S. Prometheus maintained her year-long vigil.

During the twenty-first century, during the UN War, an attempt had been made to shift the orbit of a bit of nickel-iron debris in order to bring it down on North America with the destructive impact of many fusion warheads—a single blow to end a savage and expensive war. The attempt had failed—mostly. The wreckage of the spacecraft engaged in the tricky maneuver had come down over Lake Michigan; the ruins of Old Chicago would remain radioactively uninhabitable for a number of centuries yet to come.

Later, as Humankind began exploring its interstellar neighborhood, unsettling discoveries came to light, discoveries to the effect that the galactic predators known as the Hunters of the Dawn used asteroids to destroy promising civilizations, including the Ancients. Exoarcheologists were still exploring the planetwide ruins on Chiron, in the Alpha Centauri system, and believed that the Ancients’ colony on Mars had failed when an asteroid impact there had stripped away much of the artificially induced atmosphere. The An colony on Earth eight millennia ago—and the nascent human civilization that served as their slaves—had been wiped out by a small asteroid dropped into what was now the Arabian Gulf.

Evidently, when it came to planet-wrecking, asteroids were the long-established weapon of choice.

To ensure that asteroids never again were used as weapons against Earth—by that world’s warring civilizations or by anyone else—the old Federal Republic of America had established the High Guard, a fleet of large warships patrolling through the emptiness from the Asteroid Belt out to beyond Saturn, tracking and monitoring all spacecraft moving into that immense zone.

The U.E. monitor Prometheus was one of the largest of the modern High Guard vessels, half a kilometer long, with a crew—Navy, Marine, and civilian—of almost three thousand. Mounting powerful batteries of high-energy lasers, missile batteries, and railgun-launched antimatter warheads, surrounded by a vast and far-flung cloud of robotic sensors, drones, and manned fighters, Prometheus was slow, but arguably the most powerful warship in the military inventory of the United Earth.

Much of the monitor’s crew was in nanosuspension, the better to conserve limited expendables like food, water, and air. At any given time, a quarter of her crew was awake and functioning; Blue Watch had the duty now.

Sensor Technician Third Class Baldwin drifted within a sphere of night, star-dusted, with brighter points of colored light marking the positions of Prometheus’s drones and patrols, of Deep System Station 39, and of Saturn, now some thirteen million kilometers to spinward. His noumenal link connected him with the assembled sensory data from all of Prometheus’s remote drones and fighters.

And there was nothing, nothing out there to threaten the almost meditational calm of the watch.

Watchstanding on a High Guard monitor generally was the very definition of the word boredom. The United Earth had been at peace now—for perhaps the first time in its recent history—for the past eighty years. The last of Earth’s wars, the abortive Central Asian Jihad of 2234, had ended almost before it had begun, and had been limited entirely to ground-based forces. The thought that anybody now possessed the technology to challenge either the U.E. or the American Confederation that dominated that world body in space—much less launch an attack from the Outer System—was laughable. In fact, more and more political voices on Earth had been calling for an end to the High Guard, for so long a frightfully expensive relic of a long-past threat.

The politicians could argue; in the meantime, the Navy continued its patrols. Tradition would be, must be, maintained. It was the Navy way.

ST/3 Baldwin first noticed something was happening when the monitor’s AI called his attention to an anomaly—a burst of high energy radiation arriving from the direction of the constellation Canis Major, close by the bright beacon of Alpha Canis Majoris—Sirius. Sensor drones in that direction responded an instant later, reporting a sizeable mass approaching at .95c.

“What the hell?” Baldwin asked, addressing no one in particular.

“Contact appears to be a ship,” Prometheus’s artificial intelligence told him. “Type unknown, propulsion system unknown, origin unknown.”

“Sound the contact alert,” Baldwin snapped. “Get the skipper on-line!”

“Whatcha got, Baldie?” the captain’s voice asked in his mind a heartbeat later.

“I don’t know, sir,” he replied. “Whatever it is, it’s big … and it’s coming in at near-c, right behind its dopplered wavefront.”

That was the trouble with sensor systems limited to the speed of light. If your target was approaching you at close to that velocity, you had damned little warning of the approach.

And then, the contact was there—huge, gleaming gold, needle-slender but easily packing the mass of four Titan-class High Guard monitors. It decelerated from close to light-speed to almost motionless relative to the Prometheus, hanging there in the black emptiness a scant hundred kilometers away.

“Christ and Krishna!” Captain O’Mallory rasped. Baldwin felt him trigger the dispatch release, transmitting the details of the encounter so far Earthward.

Baldwin had seen records of an identical vessel—the mile-long needle that had emerged from the Sirian Stargate over a century and a half ago to snatch up the exploratory vessel Wings of Isis, and then emerged again in 2170—or had it been a different ship? Whether the same or different, the monster intruder, positively identified as belonging to the near-mythical Hunters of the Dawn, had been destroyed in the fierce-fought Battle of Sirius.

The Hunters of the Dawn, the Xul of ancient Sumerian legend, had returned.

An instant later, Baldwin began screaming as the quantum reality ground state patterns of the Prometheus, and every soul on board her, were wrenched from material existence. The transformation took only a few seconds.

From ST/3 Baldwin’s perspective, however, the shrieking tortures of Hell engulfed him, the agony of discorporation going on … and on … and on …

Assault Detachment Alpha

Eos Chasma,

Mars

1410 hrs, local

Assault Detachment Alpha was nearly in position for the attack. They’d worked their way up a low range of rugged, eroded hills east of the LZ, and were looking down now on an enormous military base, sprawling towers, a large spaceport, and hectare upon neatly ordered hectare of warehousing. Most of the target was all in their heads—a noumenon conjured within their minds, as opposed to a phenomenon, existing in the world around them. The only material opposition were their human counterparts in this war game, Army Special Forces playing the role of OPFOR.

Still the training AI monitoring the operation was keeping track of both sides, tallying fire, casualties, and damage, even while painting the illusion of the sprawling military base in the minds of all of the human participants.

There’d been no fire yet, and no casualties on either side. The landing, much closer to the target than expected, had caught OPFOR by surprise. Space-suited figures were spilling from the image of pressurized bunkers to meet the Marines, but Assault Detachment Alpha had already grabbed the high ground. There weren’t many of them, either … only a company or so, perhaps fifty men. The rest must have already deployed deep into the desert, bypassed by Alpha’s pinpoint drop.

Garroway grinned behind the opaque shield of his helmet visor as the enemy streamed into the open below, racing for the high ground and straight into Alpha’s sights. It was going to be a slaughter—at least the way computers tallied things.

He ratcheted back the charging lever on his primary weapon, charging the Hawking. The ammunition load he was carrying was training ordnance, of course, but it would still make a most satisfying pyrotechnic display.

“A-D Alpha, Alpha Six,” Wilkie’s voice said over the net. “Let’s take ’em! …”

“Alpha Detachment, this is Stickney Base. Stand down. The exercise is terminated.”

“What the fuck?” Garroway looked up into the Martian sky—a deep ultramarine overhead, shading toward dusty pink near the horizon. Actually, Phobos was not above the horizon at the moment, though it would be soon. The tiny, potato-shaped moon orbited Mars in less than eight hours, rising in the west and setting in the east only five and a half hours later. But he stared up, anyway, as if to drag down from the sky some reason for the incomprehensible command. “What the hell’s going on?”

“All right, Marines, you heard the order,” Lieutenant Wilkie said. He stood up, sand spilling from his combat armor as its surface rippled with the rust and ocher hues of its chameleonic display. “Safe your weapons!”

In the valley below, the magical city of towers, warehouses, and bunkers shimmered and faded from view. In its place, a pair of pressure domes remained, along with a few dozen black-armored Special Forces troopers.

In single file, the Marine element began trudging down the hillside toward the waiting soldiers.

“Hey, Marines,” one of their former enemies called, raising a massively gauntleted hand. His words were light, bantering. “We were gonna kick your asses!”

“Ah, you guys were already dead,” Lance Corporal Annette DeVries said. “We had you in our sights!”

“Yeah?” another SpecFor soldier said. “We were just suckering you in, jarheads. We had two more companies out in the desert, closing on you from all sides.”

“That would have put you right where we wanted you, doggie,” Chrome observed. “We could’ve shot in every direction without hitting our own guys.”

“Quiet down, quiet down,” Wilkie ordered. “Save it. A couple of transports are inbound to haul us back to base.”

“So why the cancellation of the fun and games, Lieutenant?” Garroway asked. “Things were just getting interesting.”

“You’ll be told what you need to know when you need to know it, Gunny. Now get your ass in gear and move it!”

Garroway scowled at the back of the officer’s helmet, just ahead of him in the file. Wilkie was a newbie to Bravo Company, fresh out of Annapolis, and hadn’t yet learned the difference between leadership and bullying. Fresh meat. It would be the job of the platoon’s senior NCOs—meaning him and Chrome—to get the guy squared away.

And if he didn’t square, well, there were ways of dealing with that, too. Gentle ways, but ways. A company commander learned to work with his NCOs, his most experienced people, or he found himself transferred to a less life-and-death-oriented billet.

The fact remained, something was happening to upset the brass. He turned and looked back toward the western horizon again, where low, dun-colored hills stood out in crisp relief against the dust-laden sky. Phobos was just now rising—a tiny, misshapen disk, moving swiftly enough that he could actually track its movement by eye.

What the hell was going on up there?

Mars Military Training Command

Stickney Base,

Phobos

1455 hrs, local

“This way, General, if you please.”

Garroway followed the young Navy lieutenant commander down a corridor with rounded, padded walls and four sets of handrails placed to either side, and above and below. The surface gravity of Phobos was minute; he weighed only a few ounces here, and he could make his way with considerable speed by pulling himself along hand-over-hand. The tunnel was crowded with military personnel of all services, and a number of civilians as well, all moving in the same direction.

“Just where in hell are we going, commander?” Garroway demanded.

“Orders, sir,” she replied. “From Earth! We’re evacuating Phobos.”

“So I gather. Why?”

“Damfino … uh, sorry, sir. I don’t know. But hurry! Please!”

Like red cells crowding through a blood vessel, the crowd followed a bend in the passageway leading left, then took a new tunnel that opened in the overhead of the old. Hauling himself up against the moonlet’s feeble gravity, he soon entered a massive airlock, and recognized one of the main docking connectors giving access to the labyrinth of tunnels and rooms honeycombing Phobos. Two scared-looking naval personnel clung to the bulkheads, waving people on, and up.

Moments later, Garroway followed his escort into the main lock of the armed transport Commodore Edward Preble.

His escort threaded her way ahead through the press of bodies, leading him at last to a compartment marked COMMUNICATIONS CENTER.

“They wanted you in here, sir,” she told him. “Go to Channel Fifteen, and identify yourself. Good luck!”

“Thank you, Commander …”

But she was already gone.

Preble’s comm center was a circular room with several oversized, sharply reclined chairs set around the room’s perimeter, half of them already occupied by naval officers. Garroway picked an empty seat, lay down, and brought the palm of his hand into contact with the electronic pickup in the armrest.

“Channel Fifteen,” he said in his mind. “Garroway, Clinton. Major General. Service number seven-seven-six, three-one—”

A window opened in his mind.

He recognized the face looking out at him—an old friend, Major General Ronald Edison, CO of the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Command, and Garroway’s boss. “Good morning, Clint,” Edison said. The older man’s eyes flicked to a point offcamera, then back. “At least, it’s morning here. We have … a problem.”

Garroway didn’t respond. Edison was on Earth—probably in his office in the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia—and with the current respective positions of Earth and Mars, a lasercom signal took over fourteen minutes to pass one-way from one to the other. Edison had transmitted this message almost a quarter of an hour earlier.

“Thirty minutes ago, we received an emergency tight-beam radio communication from the Titan-class monitor Prometheus. The message was transmitted from near Saturn at zero-four-forty-eight hours Zulu—that’s just over an hour and a half ago. Here is the message in its entirety.”

The general’s face vanished, replaced by a sight Garroway knew, but had hoped never to see in his lifetime—a rapidly growing oval of pure gold, reflecting the light of a distant sun as it approached the camera. The image shifted to a different angle, this one taken from a remote drone some distance away and off to one side. The golden oval was only the end-on view of an immense vessel, shaped like a flattened needle, slim, but titanic in bulk and mass. Flickering alphanumerics on the border of the noumenal image, together with computer-generated schematics, suggested a vessel nearly two kilometers long, hundreds of meters thick, and massing somewhere in the tens of millions of tons.

“The ship appears to be identical to the one we encountered at Sirius in 2170!” a new voice was saying. Static hissed and blasted, distorting the words. The intruder must be putting out some sort of high-energy field, interfering with the transmission. “We have just lost contact with the High Guard patrol frigate Rasmusson, which … well, their last known position would have been pretty close to this monster’s line of approach.

“It’s coming from just about right ascension six hours, forty-five minutes, declination minus sixteen degrees, forty-three minutes … in Canis Major. Pretty much bang-on the position of Sirius. I think this thing popped through the Stargate out there, and came straight to us. It’s getting closer …”

Fresh static washed across the message, and the image shivered and flickered. Garroway strained to hear the next few words. “… ters of … Dawn … huge … no communications …” Image and sound garbled out for a few seconds, then, eerily, came back, momentarily clear. “Get the word out!” the speaker said. “They’re back!”

Then the image flared white with interference snow, turned ragged, and was gone.

General Edison’s face stared again into Garroway’s noumenal gaze. “The Hunter ship approached the Prometheus at point nine-five c before slowing to a relative stop in seconds. We can assume that after destroying the monitor, it has continued into the inner system at near-light speed. It may reach Earth at any moment.

“The President has alerted all commands to the threat. As of this moment, we are on a full war alert. I’ve ordered the evacuation of Phobos, on the assumption that the invaders will be able to detect the communications nexus there, and may strike there as well. In ships, you might have a chance.

“This is what we’ve been dreading for a century and a half, Clint. It’s finally happened. They’ve found us. Somehow, God knows how, we’ve got to stop them.

“I am hereby authorizing full implementation of the RST, and transferring command to 1MIEU. If you can stop that monster, Clint … do it! We’re counting on you. All of us.”

And the image blinked out, replaced by the words TRANSMISSION ENDS, and the globe-and-anchor logo of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Garroway opened his eyes, staring up at the green-painted overhead. Stop that monster? Gods … how? That thing was a mile long, tossed black holes as missiles, and—if the data recovered at Sirius was correct—capable of blowing up a sun.

They’d be damned lucky if any of them simply survived the next couple of hours.

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

0658 hrs, GMT

The huntership didn’t need to proceed all the way in-system to the primary target within 2420-544, a typical rocky, life-infested world three-quarters covered by water, and enveloped in an atmosphere consisting of nitrogen, oxygen, and various trace gases. We Who Are were never hasty, and never took unnecessary risks. Judging from the explosion of increased radio traffic now beginning to ripple out from the principle technological centers of this civilization, the dominant species here was aware of the Hunters’ presence, and were in the process of responding. From the Huntership’s vantage point, they’d just thrust a stick into a hive of swarming, stinging fliers. Until this Species 2824’s technology—in particular their military capability—could be fully assessed, caution was warranted.

But closing with the infested planet was not necessary. Most solar systems contained the leftover debris of their formation, and this one was no exception. Between the orbits of the fourth and fifth planets, especially, a number of asteroids, ranging from gravel to objects the size of mountains to fair-sized worldlets hundreds of standard units across, drifted in their individual orbits about the local star. It would only be necessary to capture a few of these and sling them into new orbits, targeting the infested worlds. How the primitives dealt with the situation would tell We Who Are much about their technical and military capabilities.

Intelligent civilizations, the group mind of We Who Are had concluded, were pernicious, like life itself popping up everywhere and anywhere, given the least bit of provocation. The majority, actually, were atechnic and harmless; some were actively useful in the greater scheme of things, candidates for patterning and inclusion within the college of minds comprising We Who Are. These, the far-ranging cultivators of We Who Are watched, tended, and occasionally weeded with clarity and dispassion.

A few, however, developed material technology early in their careers. As had the original progenitors of We Who Are a billion years in the remote past, these swiftly mastered primitive chemical energy-producing systems, nuclear power and nanotechnology, and finally the ultimate mysteries of quantum energy and the zero-point field. For such civilizations, anything was possible, including, inevitably, a direct challenge to the existence of We Who Are.

A billion years in the past, the Progenitors had survived a hostile and highly competitive world through the simple expedient of eliminating all possible rivals. It was a lesson in Darwinian realities that became virtually hard-wired into the species, a basic assumption of how the universe worked that, even when they began redesigning their own existence, they did not examine or question.

Any species, any civilization, any organism, any idea that posed a threat to the survival of We Who Are would be eliminated, immediately and by the most efficient and expeditious manner possible.

With some situations, it was necessary to induce the local star to go nova. That was definitely a last-resort option, however. Habitable planets were rare enough, and useful enough, that it was wasteful to reduce one to a seared and airless cinder. That option was reserved for alien civilizations that had advanced too far for a simple bombardment to be effective.

For most nascent technic civilizations, however, a few high-velocity asteroids slammed into the crust eliminated the pests without rendering the world permanently uninhabitable. Members of the species that survived the actual impacts—even those individuals belonging to space-faring cultures stranded on other worlds, tended to eliminate themselves in short order as they fought over dwindling resources, or died as their technological infrastructures—always so precariously in the balance!—failed.

That approach would certainly be adequate in the case of the infestation in the planetary system of 2420-544. We Who Are adjusted the vector of the huntership, closing with a likely asteroid. …

Assault Detachment Alpha

Eos Chasma,

Mars

1523 hrs, local

“Here they come!”

Garroway looked up into the deep ultramarine of the Martian sky. A trio of bright stars shone almost directly overhead, slowly growing brighter.

Two hundred meters away, the Special Forces troopers had already set out landing beacons, which pulsed brightly at both optical and infrared wavelengths. They would guide the shuttles down to the LZ.

“Assault Detachment Alpha, this is Navy Sierra One-one,” a voice said over Garroway’s headphones. “You boys are cleared for first dust-off. Stand ready.”

“Ah, roger that, Sierra One-one,” Wilkie replied over the same channel. “We’re ready.”

The voice of the shuttle pilot sounded tight and dry. What the hell was happening, anyway? Every one was stressed to the nines about something, and no one had bothered to tell the grunts what it was they had to worry about.

Typical. In fact, chances were that those Navy pilots up there didn’t know either, that they were simply reacting to the sudden avalanche of worry and stress from higher up the chain of command, like everyone else.

Wilkie was right. They would be told when they needed to know. But it griped him all the same.

One of the stars separated from formation with the other two, swiftly growing brighter, then resolving into an AUT-84 Cambria-class transport, all knobby modules, outriggers, and sponsons behind a bulky, insect-faced command module. A bright landing light shone from beneath the nose, and red and green running lights winked to port, starboard, and astern. Tiltjet thrusters were angled for a vertical touchdown, stirring up a swirling storm of dust and sand as the shuttle deployed its landing gear and gentled itself toward the ground. The landing was eerily silent, of course. The thin pretense that masqueraded as the Martian atmosphere wasn’t thick enough to carry sound.

The AUT—Armored Utility Transport, and called an “autie” for short—touched down with a slight bounce, the cargo ramp in its belly already deploying.

“Okay, Marines!” Wilkie yelled over the command channel. “Double file, and haul ass! Hut! Hut! Hut!”

The twin columns of Marines jogged ponderously down a slight rise, passing through the cloud of yellow dust still billowing around the utility craft, then up the ramp and into the darkened troop bay.

A Navy chief in a lightweight pressure suit and bubble helmet waved them on. “Let’s go, Leathernecks!” he called. “We’re on the meter, here! Drop your loads and grab a chair!”

The double row of seats along either side of the troop bay were specially designed to accommodate Mark XLIV CAS-clad Marines. Garroway hit the release for his backpack with its Shrike-C dummies, and passed it forward with the stream of other CAS packs. He found a seat and settled into it, feeling the automatic grabbers take hold, anchoring him in place. As his gauntlet came into contact with a pad on the armrest, he felt the mental connection with the shuttle’s AI, and the flow of data between it and his suit. A moment later, a window opened in his mind, giving him a clear view of the Martian landscape outside. The Special Forces were gathered in small knots well clear of the LZ, watching.

The autie was already climbing, boosting clear of the ground on its quad of outrigger tiltjets. There was a slight vibration as the jets began angling forward, repositioning for normal flight. The autie’s nose tipped up, and then they were accelerating with surprising speed for so clumsy looking a vehicle.

Garroway watched the LZ dwindle, saw the dark and wrinkled gash of the Vallis Marineris opening up on the horizon to the west like a vast wound on the planet’s dusky face. The sense of urgency remained. Someone wanted the Marines of Detachment Alpha someplace else in one hell of a hurry. At first, he thought they were shaping an approach vector to Phobos, which was rising in the west, now, well behind the accelerating autie. After a few more moments, though, it became clear that they were climbing beyond the orbit of Phobos, some 9,400 kilometers above the Martian surface, that the shuttle pilots had another rendezvous in mind.

For the first time, Garroway began to consider the obvious, the possibility that something had happened requiring a combat-ready Marine detachment.

No one had passed the word yet, but it felt like the Marines were going to war.

3

12 FEBRUARY 2314

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

0740 hrs, GMT

The huntership decelerated with inertialess ease, coming to a relative halt close alongside the drifting chunk of dark gray rock, almost black, dust-cloaked and cratered. Invisible energies reached forth, caressing the stony, carbonaceous chunk, a leftover tidbit from the formative period of this star system.

Within the eldritch world of the quantum, qualities such as mass, inertia, and gravity all were dictated by standing waves within the background base state of reality known as the zero-point field. Here, within an arena far below those gross and clumsily huge manifestations of matter and energy known as protons, neutrons, or electrons, virtual particles came into existence and, within an instant, vanished again. Manipulating those standing waves allowed matter to be rearranged, inertia to be banished, and gravity itself to be eliminated, reduced, or redirected. Accessing the zero-point field allowed space itself to be twisted and restructured, permitting faster-than-light travel, as well as the creation of incredible energies drawn from the vacuum of so-called empty space.

We Who Are found and wave-patterned the nameless lump of nickel-iron against the matrix of the zero-point field, then gently adjusted the parameters determining mass, inertia, and vector. Instantly, the chunk of rock hurtled off at high speed in a new direction, one taking it in-system, toward the bright blue point of light identified as the homeworld for 2420-544’s dominant sentient species.

Extending their electronic senses further afield, We Who Are located a second lump of dark stone tumbling through the night and moved to intercept it.

Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

0817 hrs, Shipboard/GMT

Escape velocity from the surface of Phobos was only a hair over ten centimeters per second. A single sharp, short burst from the Preble’s main thrusters, and the Navy transport was moving out from Mars fast enough that the tiny, potato-shaped moon rapidly dwindled to a dark speck barely visible against the orange-rust face of Mars, then vanished. General Garroway felt the sudden cessation of thrust, and the return of the falling sensation of microgravity, and wondered what was happening.

By tapping into the Preble’s common access datalink, Garroway was able to open a navigational window, which showed that the transport was in the process of rendezvousing with a high-speed AUT coming up from the Martian surface ahead. The shuttle was already in a considerably higher orbit than was the Preble, which meant the transport would soon overtake the tiny craft, now three thousand kilometers in front of them.

A further data check revealed the interesting datum that the autie was carrying thirty-two marines of Detachment Alpha, the same group whose exercise he’d just been watching from the relative comfort of the Phobos training facility.

His nephew was on board, one of five or six senior NCOs.

He resisted the temptation to link into the autie’s comm center and talk to Travis, to let him know that his uncle was on board the Preble. There would be time enough for reunion later.

Besides, the change in the RST’s status, transferring it to 1MIEU and putting it directly under his command, raised a nightmare specter—the possibility that soon, possibly very soon, General Clinton Garroway would be giving orders that meant Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway’s death.

A warning chimed within his head. Jack Bettisly, his aide, was calling for his attention.

“Damn it, what do you want?”

He felt Major Bettisly’s flinch, and immediately regretted the snap of anger. Still, there was no going back.

“Sorry to intrude, sir,” Bettisly said. “But we have a feed from three High Guard pickets. They’ve found the intruder, sir.”

“Let me see.”

A three-dimensional schematic opened in a new mental window. The intruder’s course was clearly marked, as were the last known positions of the monitor Prometheus and the patrol frigate Rasmusson, several High Guard drones, and Mars, with the Preble just beginning to get under way. A tiny white star had detached from the crimson star marking the intruder. “What’s that?”

Data unfolded in columns down the right side of the window. “Mass analyses suggests it’s a small asteroid, sir,” Bettisly told him. “About one kilometer across … mass approximately two billion tons. The intruder seems to have nudged it onto a new vector.”

Garroway studied the data with growing horror. “Two thousand kilometers per second?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s a hell of a nudge.” A cold thought gripped his heart. “Where’s it going? What’s the target?”

The schematic shrank in the window, showing more of the orbit of Mars … and then of Earth. A yellow line projected itself along the rock’s projected path, which passed just in front of Earth’s current position. The white star tracked down the slightly curving line as Earth moved forward. …

“Great Father in Heaven …”

“Yes, sir. The rock will hit Earth.”

“How long?”

“Nineteen hours, forty-seven minutes, thirty seconds from launch.”

“Less than a full day. Still, there’s time to intercept it.”

“Yes, sir.” Bettisly sounded uncertain.

“Talk to me.”

“Two thousand kps, sir. That’s fast. Just how are we supposed to intercept it? And the intruder appears to be closing on another small asteroid.”

On the schematic, the Hunter ship appeared to leap ahead, vaulting across several thousand kilometers within an eye’s blink. Seconds later, a second curving, yellow path drew itself across space, moving almost parallel to the first, but gently converging with it, the two lines intersecting where they crossed Earth’s orbit.

“Damn,” Garroway said quietly. “It’s going to keep throwing rocks.”

“That is Quincy’s analysis at this point, General.”

Quincy was the invisible member of Garroway’s command constellation, an AI resident at the moment in Phobos, but who could be uploaded to the Preble’s on-board computer network once the crew had things squared away. Their precipitous exit from Phobos had pretty much scrambled any hope of an orderly transition for the MIEU command group. They weren’t even supposed to be on this vessel, which was small, cramped, and possessed a frankly second-rate electronics suite.

But Marines did what they could with what was available.

Even so, Garroway felt momentarily at a loss. What could the Marines do against such a weapon? Stopping falling rocks was the Navy’s job—specifically the High Guard. At this larger scale, the mind-window schematic showed several dozen blue stars scattered across the Inner System and the near reaches of the Asteroid Belt. Many were already in motion; the rest soon would be. The World Federation was now going on full alert, at war with the Hunters of the Dawn.

Dozens of Navy warships were converging on the intruder.

But it’s not enough, Garroway thought. Not nearly enough. …

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

0850 hrs, GMT

The Lords Who Are took note of the swarm of hostile ships converging on the lone huntership, and dismissed the threat, a threat scarcely worthy even of contempt. Analysis of the local species’ technological capabilities verified the data assembled from the various local spacecraft already patterned and stored. The local species—the name We Who Are reserved for such might have translated well as “pests” or “vermin”—used spacecraft capable of sustained thrust, but at accelerations so low it would take millions of seconds to reach a meaningful percentage of the speed of light, and they did not appear to possess faster-than-light capabilities at all.

So far as weapons were concerned, it appeared unlikely that they had anything more threatening than high-energy coherent beam weapons, missiles with various types of warheads, or kinetic-kill weapons employing high-velocity masses. Some of those weapons might prove to be a minor threat, if the vermin could get close enough to the huntership to employ them.

The Lords Who Are considered the advisability of a minor demonstration to convince the vermin of their own helplessness. It would be some time, however, before the nearest of the local defenders would be close enough for the huntership to employ its own weapons against them.

They elected to continue snatching small asteroids from orbit and imparting to them new vectors, vectors that would carry them in to strike the third planet, and utterly annihilate the vermin civilization.

Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

0924 hrs, Shipboard/GMT

“That’s the fifth asteroid launched in the past hour and a half,” Admiral Jollet said. “They’re testing our defenses by brute strength, throwing enough at them to overwhelm them.”

“‘Testing?’” General Garroway said. “It looks to me like an all-out attempt to wipe us off the face of the Galaxy.”

“The intruder,” Rear Admiral Thom Bennett was saying, “appears to be trying to wipe us out as a species, using classic wave tactics.”

Bennett hadn’t heard Garroway’s comment, of course. Garroway and Jollett, both, were on board the Commodore Edward Preble, while most of the virtual conference participants were on Earth, currently seven light-minutes away. The exchange Garroway and the other brass on board the Preble were experiencing was old news—seven minutes old, to be precise. For that reason, they were out of the direct comm loop, but they could still talk among themselves.

“One ship?” Lieutenant General Clarence Armitage, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said with a mental snort. “Preposterous!”

“Thom is right,” General Eva Cortez said. “If even one of those rocks gets through, it means catastrophe.”

Garroway felt the emotions of the other men and women within the noumenal briefing session. It was, he thought, less a formal briefing than a mental chat-room gabfest and sightseeing session for the Federation’s high-ranking brass.

From his point of view, he was still watching the schematic showing the intruder’s progress through the Asteroid Belt, together with the fast-multiplying knot of new vectors intersecting at the point where Earth would be in another day and a half. Icons representing some two hundred other officers hung within the schematic with him, including the various chairpersons of the Joint Chiefs, their staffs, as well as a number of senior personnel representing the Federation Joint Forces Command, both the regular Navy and the High Guard, and the U.S. Marines. More brass were dropping into the noumenon every moment, as the scope and seriousness of the threat became more and more clear. Also present were a growing number of civilian government officials—representatives and congresspersons both from the governments of the United States of America and of the American Federal Union, as well as representatives from member states of the World Union.

Garroway felt the buzz of mental conversations seven minutes past, as well as the ebb and flow of emotions. Those last ranged from genuine fear to outright disbelief; as the intruder kicked more and more kilometer-sized boulders onto intercept courses with Earth, however, outright skepticism among the observers was dwindling.

One of the officers who remained unconvinced, however, was General Armitage. “By ‘wave tactics,’ Admiral, I assume you mean an attempt to swamp our defenses.”

“Yes, General. Five … no, six bodies, now … streaming in one after the other at two thousand kilometers per second … even the High Guard planetary defense AIs can’t cope with that. They’re trying, of course, but they can’t guarantee that one or more of those rocks won’t get through.”

“By my count, there are two hundred thirty-six High Guard vessels currently in Solar orbit,” a new voice said. The noumenal icon identified the speaker as Senator Alena Fortier, of Quebec. She was speaking Québecois French, but the AIs managing the mass mindlink handled the translations easily enough. “Perhaps it’s time the military finally paid for itself in terms of some useful action.”

“Madam Senator,” Rear Admiral Karen Castellaw said. “Things are not that simple.”

Castellaw was the current commanding officer of the High Guard, technically still a branch of the Federal Navy, but operating in most respects as a distinct entity, much like the Coast Guard that still patrolled North American waters on Earth.

“They never are,” Major General Edison dryly observed.

“Indeed?” Fortier snapped. “The High Guard, according to its charter, is there to protect Earth from impacts by comets and asteroids, am I right? In half a century, they’ve done nothing but act as a drain upon the public treasury. Now, there are asteroids—small ones, anyway, on collision course with Earth. Where, I ask, is the High Guard?”

Senator Fortier had a belligerent reputation. A staunch Democratic Unionist and a leader of the World Disarmament Coalition, she was an adamant and outspoken champion of an old and cherished dream—the total and complete elimination of the military. After eighty years of unbroken peace, many both in the North American Union and within the broader scope of the World Federal Union felt that Humankind could at last dispense with military expenditures entirely, diverting the money and the mind power instead to more peaceful and profitable uses.

Of course, the military’s position on that issue was that, if nothing else, one day it would be necessary to face the Hunters of the Dawn. Garroway found it fascinating that now, confronted with the reality and the immediacy of the Hunter threat, Senator Fortier still retained her stubbornly anti-military bias.

“The physics of the situation,” Dr. Katarina Walden, of the Union government’s Office of Planetographic Studies, pointed out, “are … intimidating. Even a one-kilometer asteroid can mass something like three million tons. There are strategies for vaporizing, or, more likely, for diverting something of that size. But these bodies are moving at two thousand kilometers per second. We quite simply don’t have anything that can match their courses and speeds in … less than eighteen hours, now.”

“So?” Fortier asked with a mental shrug. “If you can’t catch them with missiles, use plasma and HEL beams.”

“Senator, do you have any idea how much energy is required to completely vaporize a rock one kilometer in diameter?” Walden sounded exasperated. Garroway was impressed, however, by her reserve. “We will need to target each rock in such a way that a burst of plasma from the weapon strike acts as a kind of jet to shove it aside. If we do that early enough, the rock could be nudged aside enough that it might miss Earth. Might. If we can hit it early enough on its trajectory. At that kind of velocity, however, the rock might well not be shoved aside in time.”

“Then I would suggest that the sooner you begin, the greater the chance of success,” Fortier said.

“You’re right, Senator,” Admiral Castellaw said. “Of course. Our best and most immediate hope is the HELGA system, and I’ve already issued the necessary orders. All three weapons platforms have lines of sight on the incoming targets. They should be able to commence firing within two hours.”

HELGA stood for High-Energy Laser Gun Array. The word “Gun” in that acronym was often challenged by purists as redundant, but the Navy retained the age-old distinction of a gun as a very large and long-ranged shipboard weapon, as artillery rather than, say, a rifle. There were three HELGA stations, all sharing a single orbit around the sun between the orbits of Earth and Venus and spaced 120 degrees apart. Solar collector panels nearly ten square kilometers in gleaming expanse captured sunlight—far brighter and more energetic than the stuff that reached Earth—and stored it in the enormous high-capacity, high-discharge batteries that made up much of each orbital station’s bulk.

The HELGA stations, administered by the High Guard, had been designed with only one purpose in mind—to vaporize any asteroid or comet found to be on an intercept path with Earth. Since the twenty-first century, when an attempt had actually been made to destroy the United States through the deliberate manipulation of a ten-kilometer asteroid’s orbit, various Skyfall scenarios had remained the single biggest nightmare facing both military and civilian leaders. In the forty-seven years since the completion of Station One, they’d not once been necessary, though of course they’d been extensively tested against selected target asteroids in the Belt.

“Well … those big laser cannons won’t have any trouble with one-kilometer rocks, will they?” People’s Representative Gardenez, of the North American Federal Republic asked.

Castellaw sighed. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t answer that yet. It takes time between each laser discharge to store up enough energy for the next shot. We’re also programming twelve XEL satellites to contribute their fire as well. Between the two systems … maybe …”

“If the Hunters don’t put so many rocks into the stream,” General Dumont, the Marine Corps Commandant, added, “that neither the HELs or the XELs can handle them all.”

XELs—pronounced “zels” and standing for X-ray Emission Lasers—were unmanned weapons positioned at strategic points throughout the inner Asteroid Belt. When triggered, a nuclear detonation provided an intense pulse of X-rays, which were focused into a very brief, but very powerful burst of coherent X-ray energy. For obvious reasons, they were single-shot weapons, but the energy each released in a fraction of a second, while substantially less than that of a three-second burst from a HELGA platform, could still vaporize large rocks.

“All available fleet elements are being deployed toward the intruder,” Admiral Bennett said. “Unfortunately, it will take time to get there, and we run the risk of having them arrive piecemeal. What’s worse, the intruder appears capable of accelerating at incredible rates … possibly enough to reach the speed of light within moments.” He indicated the schematic, where the red star of the Hunter vessel suddenly winked out, to reappear tens of thousands of kilometers away. “We don’t know how the hell that could be possible, but he seems to be providing a demonstration, just for us.”

“An application of inertialess technology, obviously,” Representative Logan, of the Federal Union observed. “Have we discussed this with the Oannans?”

“There hasn’t been time yet, sir,” Bennett said. “We have a call in to their delegation on Earth. Not that it can do us any good now.”

“Maybe they can tell us how to hit the enemy’s propulsive system. Cripple it, somehow.”

“I doubt it, Senator,” Garroway put in. “Remember that the N’mah have been running and hiding from the Hunters for at least five thousand years. If they possessed any weapon or any tactic that could stop the Hunters, they would have done so by now.”

“Well … what does the military plan to do?” Fortier demanded. “You can’t just allow them to walk right over us!”

Garroway felt bitter amusement at her anger, but was textening with only half an ear. He had an idea, but it depended on coming up with some fresh IMAC pods. He opened a download of logistical data, checking the manifests of several military transports in the general vicinity of Mars. Yes … the Cunningham was in position to rendezvous with the Preble.

“There is one possibility,” Garroway said, opening his own comm link to the conference and tagging his comments to a windowed playback of the relevant part of the conversation. They would hear his contribution in another seven minutes.

He didn’t like making the suggestion, but every possibility had to be aired.

“We have a Marine VBSS team on board the Preble, en route for the battlespace now,” he continued, speaking over the muted voices of the Earth-bound participants. VBSS stood for Vessel Boarding Search and Seizure, a boarding party, in other words. “They were carrying training load-outs, but I’ve already given orders to begin transferring live ammo from the Preble’s stores.

“I see here on the manifest text that there is a section of IMACs on board the transport Cunningham. If Preble can rendezvous with Cunningham and effect an in-flight transfer of those assault pods, we might be able to board the Hunter ship.”

He continued speaking, laying out the rudiments of an operational plan. The biggest single difficulty he could see was the fact that the Xul intruder spacecraft clearly possessed both a technology far in advance of anything humans possessed, and a mobility to match. Still, there was a way to at least attempt to overcome the second of those problems. Maybe. …

Fourteen minutes later, the sounds and images Garroway, Jollett, and the other officers on board the Preble were experiencing suddenly reacted to Garroway’s suggestion.

“You must be kidding!” Fortier said into the sudden mental silence that followed.

“No, Madam Senator,” General Dumont said quietly. “I do not believe he is.”

“How do you expect those assault pods to get anywhere close to the enemy?” Armitage asked. “An enemy this powerful …”

“IMAC pods have quite an extensive bag of tricks for getting in close, sir,” Dumont replied. “It’s what they’re designed to do. I’m wondering, too, if we might not be able to divert some of the HEL and XEL firepower against the enemy ship at a tactically appropriate moment. That much energy, applied in a single burst … we might at least blind them, and we could get lucky.”

Garroway smiled. Dumont, 131 million kilometers away, had immediately grasped the essence of Garroway’s plan, including his suggestion for—momentarily, at least—overcoming the intruder’s technological superiority.

“Absolutely not!” Fortier said. “Those weapons are Earth’s only hope of stopping the asteroid attack!”

“Madam Senator, we can either chase that damned intruder all over the Solar System, trying to play catch-up … or we can find a way to immobilize it. If we can immobilize it, we have a chance, a small one, of getting some Marines on board.”

“And what would be the point of that?”

“Madam Senator, the Marines would be armed with backpack K-94 nuclear devices. If just one of those goes off on board the Hunter vessel—or even if we can detonate it up against its hull—well, I doubt very much that even their technology could stand up to that kind of blast.”

There was another silence as the Marine Commandant’s words sank in.

“Are you aware, General,” Armitage said quietly at last, “that you are proposing what is tantamount to a suicide mission?”

“Yes, sir. It will be volunteers only, of course. I’m sure that’s what General Garroway has in mind.”

It was. And Garroway had no doubt that there would be plenty of volunteers from the assault detachment. He knew what these Marines were like.

“Very noble, General, I’m sure,” Logan said. “But Senator Fortier is right. If the HELGA platforms are firing at the enemy ship, they can’t be firing at the asteroids threatening the Earth.”

“Sir, I submit that by the time Preble has picked up the assault pods and reached striking range of the intruder, the matter will already have been settled, one way or another.”

Garroway nodded in silent, unseen agreement. He didn’t add that a Marine assault on the Hunter warship could only take place if some way could be found to immobilize it. So long as it could slip away at the speed of light any time it felt threatened, no human weapon or vessel was going to be able to touch it. They would have to disable the intruder, at least temporarily, or they would never be able to catch it.

Unfortunately, Fortier, Logan, and the other civilian leaders had managed to hijack the informal planning session, turning it into a government-sponsored briefing session. That was one of the problems of chat-room technology; anyone with the appropriate codes and clearance could drop in. He would need to discuss things privately with Jollett, Castellaw, and Armitage.

And with Colonel Lee.

“General Garroway is right,” Armitage said, thoughtful. “First things first. Let’s see if HELGA and the XEL satellites can stop the asteroids already en route to Earth. After that …”

Of course, if Earth’s high-energy defenses failed, it was quite possible that there would be no after that to worry about.

High Guard HEL Facility 3

Solar Orbit

1151 hrs, GMT

Captain Gupta Narayanan burst out of the access tunnel, propelling himself with long, easy strokes onto the main control deck. Microgravity had its advantages, he decided, at least once you were used to it.

“Captain, we are at power,” Kali, the station’s AI, announced over his mindlink. “We are ready to commence the firing program.”

Narayanan pulled himself into the control deck’s command chair and strapped himself in. The targeting schematic came on-line, flooding into a newly opened window within his mind.

There were now seven asteroids en route from various points in the Belt, all on paths that converged on Earth.

A targeting curser tracked and locked on to the lead asteroid in the stream … or, rather, on the place where that rock would be in another five minutes. It would take that long for the HEL burst to cross the intervening space to the target.

Actually hitting that rock, Narayanan mused, was roughly akin to shooting at and hitting the base of a 10mm cartridge with a BB-sized pellet at a range of one kilometer—an accomplishment made even more astonishing by the fact that the cartridge actually moved six hundred meters between the moment the BB was fired and the moment it reached its target. Targeting such small objects across such vast distances required inhuman precision and accuracy—which, in point of fact, was why the actual aiming and firing were carried out by an artificial intelligence resident within the HELGA platform’s computer net.

“Shall I request final confirmation from SPACDEFCOM?” Kali asked him.

Briefly, he considered making the request; standing orders required that formality. In fact, he could be court-martialed for failing to do so.

But it was formality only, and his immediate orders—and his duty—were clear. Those asteroids possessed among their number kinetic energy enough to scour every scrap of life from the planet several times over. At HELGA Three’s current position relative to Earth, a radio signal would take four and a half minutes to reach Earth, and the reply would take another four and a half. The sooner he initiated the sequence, the better Earth’s chances for survival.

The problem was that the HELGA platforms, though designed to protect Earth from asteroid and comet impacts, were deadly weapons of mass destruction in their own right. One three-second beam from HELGA Three striking New York, for instance, would release the energy of ten thousand Hiroshimas, and obliterate the city.

The weapons had been designed and deployed by the United States, but in accordance with the Jerusalem Treaty of 2270, control of the weapon was vested not in the Federal Union of the United States, or in the American Union. The World Union, though still embryonic and with uncertain authority, alone held the firing button for the three satellites. Crews were rotated on and off the stations on six-month schedules, and were drawn from nation states all over the world with histories of non-aggression or neutrality—Sweden, Switzerland, Tuamotu, and Narayanan’s own Republic of Andhra Pradesh.

The firing protocols were so complex, the joke was that if a stray asteroid ever did threaten Earth, the dinosaurs would take care of it … after the clearance to fire came through from their HQ sixty-five million years before.

Politics, he thought, the word an obscenity.

“Negative on confirmation,” he told the AI. “Initiate firing sequence.”

“Firing one,” Kali told him. “Time Zulu 1151 hours, seventeen seconds.”

There was no flash, no sound, no dimming of the station’s lights, no evidence at all of the titanic release of power save for the data stream appearing in the targeting window in Narayanan’s head. For three seconds, an inconceivable torrent of laser energy streamed into space. Then, the station’s massive capacitors drained, the system began recharging for the next shot.

Recharge would take just over forty-five minutes.

4

12 FEBRUARY 2314

Battlespace

1156 hrs, GMT

In the four and a quarter hours since the huntership had boosted that first small planetoid toward Earth, the rock had traveled almost 31 million kilometers which, on the vaster scale used to measure distances across something as large as a solar system, translated to a little more than one and a half light-minutes. HELGA Platform 3, in solar orbit 132 million kilometers from the Sun, currently and by chance, was five light-minutes from the rock that was its first target.

At their current respective positions, rock, HELGA Three, and Earth formed a triangle with slightly unequal legs—five light-minutes from HELGA to the rock, six from the rock to Earth, four and a half from Earth to HELGA. In physics, one watt of power delivered in one second equaled one joule. The HELGA laser—actually a battery of twenty-five lasers fired as an array—had an output of some 50 billion joules. The three-second beam, then, carried 150 thousand megajoules, the equivalent of 750 twenty-megaton nuclear warheads.

Some five minutes after Kali triggered the HELGA discharge, then, the kilometer-wide rock was struck by the laser energy streaming out from the distant military base between the orbits of Earth and Venus. The beam itself was invisible, of course; there was no air to ionize, no mist of dust or water vapor in the vacuum of space to call the beam into visibility. The tumbling mountain of rock, however, abruptly flared sun-hot, as a brilliant, blindingly intense star-point of white light ignited at the planetoid’s limb.

In fact, the targeting was less than perfect; tiny uncertainties about the rock’s precise position and vector meant that the strike was not dead-center on the target, and, though the three-second beam was tracking along the asteroid’s calculated inward-bound path, it actually connected with the rock for less than half a second before the rock tumbled out of the beam.

That half-second, however, was sufficient to pour the wrath of over a hundred detonating twenty-megaton fusion bombs into one very small section of the rock’s surface. The asteroid was of the type designated a carbonaceous chondrite—the most common of planetoid bodies—and some twenty percent of its make-up was actually water ice. One side of the asteroid was still at the temperature of deep planetary space—nearly one hundred degrees below zero Celsius—while the other half in one dazzling instant attained a temperature close to that of the surface of the Sun.

White-hot plasma erupted from the planetoid’s surface, stabbing into space like a rocket’s jet. An instant later, the temperature differential shattered ice and stone alike, and the rock mountain disintegrated into an expanding cloud of debris, ranging in size from sand grains to chunks the size of a house.

And, of course, every piece of debris, from dust mote to ten-meter boulder, continued on a vector only very slightly modified by the impact’s plasma thrust, still moving at over seven million kilometers per hour.

Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

1215 hours

The virtual conference had continued uninterrupted throughout the morning hours, though some participants had dropped out to attend to other duties, while new ones logged on. Such conferences, Garroway thought, often took on a kind of life of their own, changing, growing, dynamic, as the individual cells left the system and new ones joined.

Garroway himself had logged out in order to concentrate on writing orders for the RST, but then returned in time to watch, with nearly four hundred other men and women, the results of the first firing of the HELGA Three array. Participants were attending from all over the Earth, with the heaviest concentrations in Washington, New York, and Stockholm, the capitals, respectively, of the United States, the North American, and the World Unions. Perhaps ten percent were in space—on Earth’s Moon, on Mars or Phobos, in Earth orbit, or in various spacecraft scattered from the Jovian moons to the orbit of Mercury.

Not all of those last could participate in any meaningful, real-time manner, of course. The fourteen-minute time lag between a signal being sent from the Preble and an answer being received was annoying; the Jovian system was on the far side of the Sun at the moment, over six AUs distant, with a total there-and-back signal time of ninety-eight minutes. Admiral Hargreave, CO of the Union’s First Fleet, was currently at Caltexto, and effectively out of the conversation, though his icon was showing.

As it was, Garroway was only able to participate in the background of the conference, his words and ideas coming through almost a quarter hour after the statements that had elicited them. At the moment, though, the attention of most of the participants was focused on the schematic that showed events unfolding in battlespace somewhat closer to Mars than to Earth, in the general region between the Inner Belt and the orbit of Mars. Sensor drones and fighters in the area had picked up images of the first of the asteroidal missiles suddenly brightening to intolerable brilliance, then vanishing. Garroway had seen those images before they reached Earth, and the Earth-bound observers’ reaction hadn’t reached him until seven minutes after that.

The cheers and shouts, however, clearly marked the moment when they saw those scenes as well.

“Gentlemen!” General Armitage was calling over the chaos. “Ladies, gentlemen! The celebration is premature!”

“But we’ve destroyed the first missile, General!” Senator Kenichi Kondo said. “We’ve proven that it can be done!”

“One missile … and there currently are eight more still en route to Earth. And there will be more, unless we stop the intruder. Otherwise, that bastard will keep throwing rocks faster than we can burn them down.”

“But how—”

“People,” General Dumont said, “we simply must implement General Garroway’s suggestion. There is no other alternative.”

“Redirect the HELGA platforms to fire on the Intruder?” Senator Fortier said, her voice conveying her shock at the idea. “That is tantamount to planetary suicide!”

“The data, Madam Senator, suggest that it will be planetary suicide if we simply try to play catch-up with the Intruder.”

“There is also the option, General, of trying to communicate with those people. We have the language … or a language … from our studies of the Singer, and from AI contacts with Hunter ships.”

“The Prometheus attempted to signal the Intruder,” Dumont told her. “You saw how well they textened.”

“Then we should try again!”

“Senator Fortier, right now these ‘people’ as you call them are doing their level best to destroy all life on our home planet! I submit that this is not the time to try to use diplomacy!”

“And if these beings are as advanced and as powerful as you suggest, General, perhaps diplomacy is our one and only hope!”

Damn the woman, Garroway thought. Someone put a lid on her and shut her the hell up! This was not the time to argue the matter. Whether she realized it or not, the entire human race was engaged in battle at this moment, a battle that very well might determine whether Humankind survived, or became extinct.

On the schematic, the red star marking the position of the Hunter warship winked out, reappearing almost immediately in a new position.

Garroway stared at the new strategic configuration. “Ken!” he called out over the virtual conference link within the Preble’s computer net. “Do you see that?”

“I do,” Rear Admiral Jollett replied. “If we could hold them there. …”

The intruder had just leaped to a new location less than eight hundred thousand kilometers from the Preble, and on a general line with Preble’s course—two and a half light-seconds away, instead of several light-minutes.

“We can,” Garroway said. “At least we can try. Will you back me?”

It was, to say the least, a fascinating problem in international military chain of command.

The battle with the Hunter intruder was being directed from Earth. The three HELGA platforms were under the jurisdiction of the High Guard and Rear Admiral Karen Castellaw, but her bosses were Lieutenant General Armitage, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the North American Union, and General of the Union Eva Cortez, of the Joint Chiefs of the World Union.

The governments of the world existed in nested series, like Russian Matryoshka dolls—with the World Union above the North American Union above the government of the United States of America. Technically, the United States Marines, though still in direct U.S. service, “belonged” to the North American Union. Technically, too, the World Union did not have its own military, but relied on the military of the NAU to provide protection and order. According to the World Constitution, the WU civilian authority superceded the NAU and gave the orders; in practice, the NAU military had the guns, and, therefore, under the control of the NAU and U.S. civil authorities, the power.

Who was really in charge, who gave the orders, had never, until now, been tested. Clearly, Senator Fortier thought she and the WU civil authority did; there was no president of the World Union; leadership was vested in a rotating speakership within the WU Senate. Fortier was not the current Speaker. That privilege was currently vested in Senator Ivan Danikov, of the Russian Union, but Danikov had not yet logged on to the discussion, and Fortier had assumed control of the battle.

Or so she thought. The actual orders were being given by Armitage and Cortez.

But on an even more practical level, it was Garroway and Jollett who were going to have to make the necessary call. Jollett was the second-in-command of the NAU’s First Planetary Fleet; Admiral Hargreave was in command, but currently out of the loop at Caltexto.

Garroway, CO of 1MIEU, was the ranking Marine officer on the Preble. Jollett outranked him, but technically could not command Marine units unless they were part of the First Fleet’s TO&E … and 1MIEU was not currently assigned to his command.

But Jollett and First Fleet could give orders to High Guard units … like HELGA Three.

“You want me to redirect HELGA Three’s targeting routine,” he said.

“There are two XELs in Mars orbit,” Garroway pointed out. “You could fire them as well. I suggest you order all three to fire. We don’t know what the effect on the Intruder is going to be.”

“Agreed.” He sounded glum. “You know, Clint, this is not a career-enhancing situation.”

“Fuck that,” Garroway said with a bluntness calculated to shock, to startle. “You and I are both at the apex of our careers, anyway. Where else can we go? Except retirement.”

“Speak for yourself. Anyway, I was thinking of the court-martial.”

Garroway sighed. “Ken, they’ll only court-martial us if this doesn’t work. And if it doesn’t, who’s going to be left to head up the court?”

“You’ve got a point. Of course. Very well. Do you know what you’re doing with your Marines?”

Garroway thought for a moment. “We’re still two hours away from rendezvous with the Cunningham. We’re going to have to give up on that … send them in straight up. I don’t like that …”

“Too many unknowns, anyway,” Jollett put in. “Like whether an IMAC pod could cut through whatever the Intruder is made of.”

“Agreed. Anyway … call it another hour to launch, and maybe another hour … no, call it two hours to intercept and boarding.”

“And we have to hope that HELGA and the XELs will make that thing stand still for it.”

“Exactly.”

He felt Jollett shaking his head, and at first thought the admiral was refusing him. “It’s a gamble, General,” Jollett said. “But the stakes are a damned sight higher than our careers. You have my backing. I’ll transmit the orders for the targeting change.”

“Thanks, Ken.”

He felt a rush of relief.

But he also had to stifle the sense of dread that rose, knowing the probable result of the orders he was about to give.

High Guard HEL Facility 3

Solar Orbit

1231 hrs, GMT

Captain Gupta Narayanan looked up at the big time readout in the HELGA Three control room. Time was an interesting concept when a control system was spread across an area measured in light-minutes. Deliberations in the virtual conferencing taking place in Earth space, as well as the clocks of all Earth spacecraft, were set to the common denominator of Zulu time—also known as GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time, back on Earth.

Damn politics! Damn the confusion binding the current chain of command! And, above all, damn the laws of physics!

His situation, he reflected, was not an enviable one.

Narayanan stared again at the words, translated into his native Urdu Hindi, glowing in empty space in the air next to his chair. This new set of orders had just arrived from the general vicinity of Mars, which at the moment was a full light-minute closer than Earth, given with the current configuration of the planets in relation to HELGA. He glanced at another screen, showing a plot-chart schematic. If the Sun was at six o’clock from HELGA’s current position, Earth lay at nine o’clock, four and a half light-minutes away, while Mars was at one o’clock, and only three and a half light-minutes away.

Narayanan’s take on the politics of the situation was that, by rights, the World Union controlled the military of the lesser NAU and U.S., and he served the World Union. Orders should then, by rights, come to him from Stockholm and the WU.

He was currently in command, however, of a High Guard installation which was under the direct control of the North American Union and the NAU fleet. Under that TO&E, Rear Admiral Jollett was his commanding officer.

Gupta Narayanan was devoted to World Unionism … Earth’s only hope, as he saw it, to end the so-far endless cycle of national rivalries, militant pride, and warfare. The World Union must take precedence over the various assemblies of nation-states that dominated the planet now—the European Union, the Russian Federation, and most especially the North American Union, which dominated world politics now purely on the strength of its military.

His avowed World-Unionist feeling was in fact the reason he’d been chosen for the rotating command roster for HELGA Three in the first place.

But if Narayana was a devoted planetary Unionist, he was also a Material Rationatext. Though Andhra Pradesh was officially a Reformed Neo-Hindu state, and his family had been Vaishnava for uncounted generations, Narayanan, at least, took pride in thinking for himself. The excavations, two centuries earlier, of vast undersea ruins off the coasts of Sri Lanka and in the shallow Gulf of Khambhat had proven—to him, at least, if not to his father—that the hero tales, myths, and legends of most world religions rested in the colonization efforts of several extraterrestrial spacefaring species arriving on Earth eight to ten thousand years ago.

It was now known definitely that the Ahannu had established colonies at several points on the Earth, that those colonies had been annihilated by the Hunters of the Dawn, and that the Oannan/N’mah had at least visited the planet after the Hunter attack, helping scattered and disorganized tribes of primitive humans to reacquire the rudiments of civilization. There was no need to assume the intervention of deities when it was clear that star-traveling aliens had interacted with humans in the remote past.

Nor was it necessary, as so many of the newer world religions did nowadays, to grant those aliens divine status—either as gods, or as demons.

The point was that Narayanan thought for himself. What was happening now in near-Arean space transcended world politics or the philosophies of government and power.

His operational orders from Stockholm emphasized the need to keep the World Union tightly in the loop when it came to conflicts of orders or authority, and to consult with them closely if there were any conflicts. They would expect him to link through to the Senate in Stockholm and to General Linden at the Bureau of the Military and ask their opinion.

But the clock was running. It was now 1231 hours, GMT. If he put a call through immediately, it would be 1235 before they received the message on Earth, and 1240 at the earliest before he would have an answer.

And he knew General Linden, and he knew the WU Senate. It might be hours before they decided to get back to him with a yes-no decision.

The HELGA array would be ready to fire at 1243. In fact, he could fire the weapon now, though the capacitors would not be up to full power for another fourteen minutes.

The Preble was seven light-minutes away, which meant that a request for a clarification of those orders would not be answered before 1245 hours. And any delay was serious.

It is of the utmost importance that HELGA Three take the Intruder under fire at the earliest possible opportunity, as it may move from its new location at any moment. So read the orders just downloaded to Kali from Admiral Jollett.

It was, he thought, what the Americans liked to call a “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” situation. If he obeyed Jollett’s direct order, he could be court-martialed by the Bureau. At the very least, he would lose his command, and his future career with the nascent WU military organization would be questionable at best. If he waited to consult with Stockholm, he would never be trusted by New York again, or by the military arms of the United States.

But worse by far—and the deciding factor—was the tactical situation. The Intruder would be in an ideal position for only a few moments, at best, and might leave at any instant. The sooner he targeted the Hunter vessel, the better Humankind’s chances in this fight.

“Kali?”

“Yes, Captain Narayanan?”

“Retarget and reconfigure targeting schedule. We are taking the Intruder under fire.”

“That is in violation of your orders from Stockholm, Captain. You are required to consult with Stockholm.”

“I am well aware of that. I believe the situation warrants this action.”

“Very well. I am retargeting the array.”

Retargeting required only an adjustment of the primary mirror, a change of a couple of degrees. There was no sensation of movement or of acceleration within the microgravity of the control deck.

“Retargeting is complete. We are locked onto the coordinates provided by the Commodore Edward Preble.”

“Initiate firing sequence.”

“Capacitors are not yet up to—”

“The target is not solid rock. Fire. Now. If you please.”

“Firing.”

If the AI governing HELGA Three’s systems was chagrined, it showed no sign of the fact. The energy of multiple fusion bombs streamed into space.

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

1236 hrs, GMT

The Lords Who Are had directed the huntership to approach the fourth planet of this system. They’d detected a high concentration of electromagnetic signals emerging from several points on the planet’s surface, and from the inner of the planet’s two small moons, and there were a number of spacecraft in the vicinity as well. The Lords Who Are felt it necessary to examine the world more closely, especially in regard to its military capabilities and potential.

The blast of coherent energy that struck the huntership, then, caught the Lords Who Are somewhat by surprise. Their approach had been cautious, with EM shields fully up and powered, but they were prepared for an attack from the planet in question, or from one of the tiny spacecraft swarming through this region; the laser beam arrived from a different direction and source entirely—from a base circling this system’s star between the orbits of the second and third planets.

That orbital base had fired once, a few tanut earlier, and at least partially annihilated the first of the asteroids already set in motion toward the third planet. The Lords Who Are had analyzed the data, and concluded that the laser array was designed to intercept and destroy small asteroids, but that it was not primarily a military weapon. The array’s output, based on the reflected light from the laser strike against the rock, suggested that the array was not capable of seriously threatening the huntership in any case.

It was clear now that the analyses of the beam’s power was understated by at least eighty percent. Possibly, much of that initial beam had actually missed the hurtling asteroid, and been lost in deep space, a possibility that the Lords Who Are had not considered.

They considered it now, as the beam struck the huntership’s shields, overwhelmed them, and drove them down. Star-hot radiation struck the living surface of the huntership, flash-boiling vast quantities into the vacuum. The power plant and the reactionless drives, both those that maneuvered the huntership through normal space, and those that made faster-than-light travel possible, began boiling away an instant later, as heat exchangers and quantum dampers strove to compensate for the torrent of coherent EM radiation.

Worse, optical and other sensors located in the huntership’s skin were seared into uselessness. New ones could be grown, but, for the moment, at least, the ship and the Lords Who Are were blind, deaf, and helpless.

Given the technology of the species inhabiting system 2420-544, this was not a serious situation, but it was irritating. And frustrating. Vermin were not supposed to fight back.

There would be no more experimentation with the locals’ defenses. The damage to sensors, power plant, weapons, and drives would be repaired, the huntership restored to full operational capacity, and the worlds of this star system would be sterilized.

Once and for all.

Assault Detachment Alpha

On Board Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

1308 hrs, GMT

“All right, Marines,” Garroway bellowed over the platoon channel. He was standing in the central aisle of the crowded autie, gauntleted hands braced on seatbacks on either side. The CAS helped him stand, but it still wasn’t pleasant. They were pulling, according to the telemetry coming through his link, two and a half gravities. “Noumie briefing in five! Check your contacts!”

“Damn it, Gunny,” Corporal Kevin Yancey said. “When can we peel out of these tin cans? It’s getting freakin’ ripe in here.”

“Stew in it, Yancey. ‘Your combat armor is the Marine’s skin. Your combat armor will keep you alive and able to kill your enemies. You will care for your combat armor as though it was your own body. …’”

The old litany out of boot camp raised a chorus of groans from the Marines, which had been Garroway’s intent. A griping Marine wasn’t necessarily a happy Marine, but he was an alert and attentive one. And he needed their attention now.

He didn’t blame them, though. They’d been suited up for the better part of nine hours, now, ever since they’d prepped for the IMAC launch at zero-dark-thirty that morning, Zulu. The Marine CAS was a flexible and remarkably versatile instrument. It had its own water supply, and a ready cache of combat rations, which, of course, the more inventive Marines stocked with candy bars and other gedunk. It had attachments to let you piss and shit, too … all the comforts of home.

Well, most of them. The trouble was, after a few hours sealed in the thing, the best filtering and air scrubbing cyclers in the world couldn’t keep up with the canned stink of excrement and sweat. They said you got used to it after a while. Once, Garroway had been on a training exercise where he’d donned a CAS and kept it donned for fifty-three hours. “They” were wrong.

“Man, I don’t see why we have to stay suited up either, Gunny!” Sergeant Roderick Franks said. “This stink ain’t never comin’ out!”

“Don’t worry, Roddy,” Chrome told him. “You couldn’t get a date, anyway.”

“Says you. Anyway, we all know the brass is just jerking us around.”

“Jack in and ice it, people,” Garroway said. “The word is we’re on another op. We stay in the cans until the Man says otherwise. Ooh-rah?”

“Ooh-rah!” several Marines chorused back … but not many, and not with a lot of enthusiasm. Morale was not good.

Lieutenant Wilkie had passed the word coming down from higher up on the chain of command. The RST had been ordered both to stay suited up and to remain on board the dust-off autie, which had been swallowed whole a few hours ago by the transport Preble. Now they were going somewhere in one hell of a hurry. Two point five Gs was about max for a Patriot-class transport.

That told Garroway that they wanted the Marines ready to go at an instant’s notice. Unfortunately, no one had yet bothered to tell any of them what the hell was going on.

But maybe that was about to change. Wilkie had just passed the word that there would be a noumenal briefing in five more minutes. About damned time, he thought fiercely. Marines never liked operating in the dark … at least, not the kind of political-situational darkness that even Mk.XC night-vision equipment simply could not penetrate.

The minutes dragged past. Then the noumenal link alert flashed on. Garroway took his seat, making the connections with his armor gauntlets on his seat.

Lieutenant Wilkie’s virtual image appeared in the window that opened in his mind. The face looked a lot like Wilkie’s real face, Garroway thought, but had obviously been aged a bit, to give it a more experienced and commanding presence. Garroway didn’t like playing that sort of game with the noumenon, though he knew a lot of officers who did.

“Texten up, people,” Wilkie said. “We have new orders. Approximately four hours ago, an alien spacecraft entered our solar system and destroyed several of our ships, including a Titan-class High Guard cruiser. It then proceeded to accelerate several small asteroids on new courses, apparently in an attempt to bombard the Earth.

“A few moments ago, the alien changed its position, moving to a point less than eight hundred thousand kilometers from the Preble. At that point, the High Guard heavy laser arrays took it under fire, and appear to have disabled it. We have been ordered to board the alien, and destroy it.”

Garroway textened, reserving judgment, but waiting for the proverbial second shoe to drop. Clearly there was a lot that Wilkie wasn’t saying … though whether that was because he was withholding information from the entexted personnel, or because no one had bothered to tell him the whole story, there was no way of knowing.

The biggest question was … what could thirty-two Marines do against an alien warship capable of flinging asteroids at the Earth? It sounded like it must be one of the fabled Hunters of the Dawn … something like the two-kilometer-wide Singer discovered three centuries ago on Europa, or the Hunter ship that had come through at Sirius … and those things were huge.

The only way a handful of Marines could take out something that big was …

“In order to effect the target’s destruction,” Wilkie’s image went on, “the RST is being issued all available K-94 packs on board the Preble. I need five volunteers to actually deliver the weapons into the enemy spacecraft.”

That was the other boot.

Five Marines were being asked to commit suicide.

And the rest almost certainly would die with them.

5

12 FEBRUARY 2314

Assault Detachment Alpha

On Board Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

1412 hrs, local

“I want to volunteer, sir.”

The face of Lieutenant Wilkie’s icon didn’t change expression. “Request denied.”

“The hell it is. You wanted volunteers. I’m volunteering.”

“Gunny … I don’t think you understand. I can’t let you go out there.”

Garroway was startled by that. “Huh? What do you mean? Sir, we’re all going on this op.”

“You’re not. I want you to stay on board the Preble.”

“Fuck that! Do you think I’m going to watch my boys and girls vaporize themselves from a safe distance? No way! Sir.”

“Gunny … your uncle is on board the Preble.”

That stopped him for a moment. “My … uncle?”

“General Clinton Garroway, yes. He came aboard at Phobos, when they evacuated the high-ranking brass.”

Garroway gave a mental shrug. “Doesn’t change anything, Lieutenant. I am going on this op. With my people.”

He felt Wilkie hesitate. “If you buy it in there …”

“C’mon, Lieutenant. Uncle Clint didn’t order you to pull me off of this run, did he?” The very idea was ludicrous. Both Garroways were Marines. Both knew what that meant. “Are you telling me you discussed it with him, and he said no?”

“No. Of course not. But regulations—”

“If I know the General,” Garroway said, interrupting, “he’s going to be looking for an excuse to come along with us. If you want to quote regs at someone, talk to him. This is your op to lead, sir, not a goddamn general’s!”

“Roger that, Gunny.” He felt the lieutenant’s mental sigh. “Okay. Forget what I said. You’re on the op.”

“Affirmative, sir. But what I wanted to say is … I want one of the boom-packs.”

“Denied.”

“Sir, it’s my right. …”

“And it’s my right to refuse. We’re not leaving you on the Intruder.”

“Damn it, Lieutenant, how can I let five of my people volunteer to go out in a nuke fireball when I won’t do it myself? My uncle would grab one and go in a second.”

“No. Your uncle knows that a very great deal of money, time, and effort has been expended in making him a general. The days when an officer led his men by running out in front of them and shouting ‘follow me’ are long over.”

“But—”

“Furthermore, Gunny, the platoon needs you. I need you. You know as well as I do—better, maybe—that a unit’s success and efficiency both depend on the experience of its senior NCOs. I cannot afford to lose you.”

Garroway had worked with Wilkie long enough to know that tone, to know that the lieutenant was not going to give in on this. The man might be barely out of Annapolis, but he could be as gold-plated stubborn a bastard as any gunnery sergeant when he set his mind to it.

“Therefore, Gunny,” Wilkie continued, “if you insist on going along, you will go in your capacity as senior NCO, to lead the other Marines and to support me as CO. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Are your Marines ready to boost?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“Load-outs checked?”

“Yes, sir.” He resisted the temptation to add of course. “We’re going in light with expendables, but we have four extra pigs.”

“And the boom-packs.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Pass the word, then. Fifteen more minutes to launch.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Dismissed, Gunny Garroway.”

Garroway broke the link, and was again aware of his surroundings—sealed inside his CAS, squeezed into one of the chairs on the cargo deck of the autie with thirty other Marines. The lieutenant was riding this out in relative comfort up on the flight deck.

Briefly, Garroway considered uplinking through to his uncle, but decided against it almost before the thought had fully formed. No sense in risking having to disobey a direct order. Besides, once you started going around the chain of command to get what you wanted, discipline and order started to break down. There was a reason for the chain of command, and both Garroways were dedicated to upholding it.

Besides, he wasn’t sure his uncle even knew he was a part of Detachment Alpha. Generals didn’t usually pay much attention to the individual grunts, and the IMAC tests weren’t 1MIEU’s concern yet. Garroway didn’t know how his illustrious uncle had turned up on Phobos, but he doubted very much that it had anything to do with him.

Travis Garroway was a Garroway on his mother’s side, but, like several others in the family line over the past century or two, he’d chosen to take his mother’s family name at his Naming Day ceremony. His father, a psychtech applications speciatext with Dynate Systems in Atlanta named Travis Kraig, had been disappointed, understandably, but he’d understood. Travis’s father had never been in the military, but simply by marrying into the Garroway family, he’d come to learn a hell of a lot about the Corps, and what it meant to bear that name.

Hell, most of why he’d chosen the Garroway name was due to his Uncle Clint, who’d been a lieutenant and, later, a captain running a platoon in 1MarDiv when he’d still been in his early teens. Some of the stories he’d heard back then about the Corps had fired his passions … but even more he’d been hooked by the historical stuff involving his own family, Major Mark “Sands of Mars” Garroway, Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway, Corporal John Esteban Garroway, and others. Many others. It certainly wasn’t true that all Garroways ended up in the Marines, but there were enough ghosts looking over their shoulders to make anyone in the family think twice about joining—for instance, and perish the thought—the Navy.

He sighed. Wilkie was right, of course. He didn’t belong on the suicide squad. But he didn’t have to like the alternative.

Suicide squad. That was what some of the Marines in the platoon were calling it, of course, though Garroway, Chrome, and the other senior people were trying to discourage that idea. This would be a team effort … gung ho. Everyone pulling together.

No one would be left behind.

Even so, it was hard to imagine hauling a thirty-one kilo pack containing a 120-kiloton nuclear device into the bowels of an alien starship without thinking in terms of suicide. No one knew what kind of close-in defenses the Hunter of the Dawn warships possessed. No one knew for certain what the crew was like. Xul starships appeared to be crewed, or at least defended, by mobile machines … though the vessels seemed also to be little more than bodies housing titanic and very alien artificial intelligences.

Did they possess other means for discouraging enemy troops from coming onboard and leaving unpleasant surprises behind, surprises such as a quintet of K-94s?

No one knew. But the Marines of RST-1 would be finding out for themselves very soon now.

“Equipment check,” Garroway called. “Everybody check your buddy.”

The Marines were paired off, each with a partner … except for Garroway, the platoon gunny. He watched the others check one another, moving down the crowded aisle. “Chien! Check your starboard-side harness. You’re dangling.”

“Right, Gunny.”

“Tomasek! Shorten up that strap on your ’thirty.”

“Aye, aye, Gunny Garroway.”

He continued making his way among the men, checking equipment, but mostly letting them see that he was there with them. Twelve of the thirty were newbies straight out of boot camp. And two of those, he saw—Istook and Lowey—had volunteered to backpack a couple of the ’94s.

Both were sitting next to each other on the starboard side aft, and their vitals readouts showed they both were scared. Well, hell. So was Garroway.

“Hey, Marines,” he said over a private channel. “How’s it going?”

PFC Gwyneth Istook was a pale, red-headed youngster from Sebree, Kentucky. Private Randolph C. Lowey was a black kid from Manchester, Georgia. “Doin’ okay, Gunny,” Lowey said.

“Yeah,” Istook added. “Ooh-rah!”

“I want you both to stick close to me, understand? No heroics. No wandering off.”

“Right, Gunny.”

“Okay, Gunny.”

“This is not a suicide mission. You will follow me in, place your devices, and follow me out. Got it?”

“Got it, Gunny.” Istook’s mental voice was level and hard.

“Good.”

He wished he could be as sure of that as he sounded.

“Uh … Gunny?” Lowey asked. “What if that thing collapses while we’re in there?”

It was a question for which there was no answer. Marines had boarded a disabled Xul huntership once before … and escaped moments before the black hole that apparently powered the thing had devoured the entire mile-long hulk.

“Then we’re dead,” he replied, his voice cold. “But we’ll be dead so fast we won’t even know what hit us. And we know the bastards won’t take the rest of humanity with ’em. Right?”

“Right, Gunny. It’ll be quick?”

“Faster than an eye-blink.”

He didn’t add that it would also be quick if they all went out in their own nuclear fireballs. They knew. In a way, it was a kind of blessing. Most Marines Garroway knew were more afraid of being seriously wounded or mutilated than they were of a fast and clean death. There was scuttlebutt—only scuttlebutt, he reminded himself—that if the Xul captured you, it was neither fast nor clean.

Casualties in the unforgiving vacuum of space tended to be fatal, and rapidly so, in any case. But right now, he thought, every man and woman in the autie must be thinking about the alternatives.

“Five minutes!” sounded over the command channel. “Everybody strap in!”

Garroway made his way back to his seat, squeezing the bulk of his CAS into the bucket between Corporal Visclosky and Sergeant Bonilla.

“Think they’ll have the front door open for us?” Chrome asked him over a private channel.

“Damfino,” he replied as the grabbers snugged him in. “Wish we’d had time to load on some IMACs.”

“Roger that. This whole fucking op feels like the brass is making it up as they go along.”

“Yeah. What if we can’t breach the objective’s hull?”

“Then we’ll do it the Marine way,” Garroway told her. “Improvise, overcome, and adapt.”

“We can use Will-kill’s head as a battering ram.”

Garroway let that pass … and hoped, for Chrome’s sake, that Wilkie wasn’t monitoring the private channels. Chances were, though, that the lieutenant had other things on his mind right now.

Like how the hell the RST was going to get inside the Intruder if its hull hadn’t been breached.

Garroway, along with most of the Marines in this compartment, had studied the intelligence data gleaned from studies of the Singer, found almost three centuries before beneath the ice of the Europan world-ocean, and from the battle with a Hunter-of-the-Dawn starship at the Sirius stargate 144 years ago. The Xul Hunters possessed a technology that made human starships look like stone axes by comparison.

But that technology could be overcome. The ship that had emerged through the Sirius stargate had been protected by an electromagnetic force field of some kind, designed to divert charged particles, but it had been crippled by the field expedient of turning the plasma drives of seven starships against it. That concentration of charged particles had evidently overwhelmed the Xul vessel’s shielding and breached the hull, allowing a small Marine boarding party to enter.

A boarding party, Garroway thought with a dark smile, that had included one of his Marine ancestors—his great-granduncle Corporal John Esteban Garroway.

According to the records, studied in almost obsessive detail by generations of Marines since, the Xul starship had been destroyed by a rogue micro-black-hole released by its own disabled drive, literally collapsing into a gravitational singularity of its own manufacture. Before that collapse, however, the Marine boarding party had been able to tap into the equivalent of the Xul’s computer net, information that was still being studied, translated, and argued over.

This time, the Marines would be going in to make sure the Xul monster was destroyed.

The big question was whether they would even be able to get on board. Intelligence data suggested that the Xul’s outer hull was a nanufactured synthetic tougher than diamond, resistant to nuclear explosions and other forms of large-scale mayhem. IMAC pods were designed to use special nanodisassembler docking cuffs that would eat through anything, even Xul hulls. In the absence of fresh IMACs, though, the Marine RST was going to have to wing it. Four Marines were equipped with portable disassemblers; it would be a lot simpler if whatever had disabled the Xul starship had also burned a hole through it.

What had they used? The XEL pods orbiting Mars, and in the Asteroid Belt? The HELGA platforms in solar orbit? Or had someone gotten lucky with an antimatter warhead?

Well, they would know in a few more minutes. If the Xul were disabled enough not to be aware of their approach.

Damn it, this op was suicide … or close enough as made no difference.

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

1417 hrs, GMT

The Lords Who Are were … frustrated.

The group mind that comprised the guiding intelligence for the huntership did not understand, could not understand, emotional responses such as fear or anxiety, any more than it could comprehend concepts such as individuality. From their studies of various organic beings—the vermin that infested so many planetary bodies—they understood that there were such things, but they could never experience emotions for themselves.

But the Lords Who Are did understand that peculiarly unpleasant inward disturbance, that inner conflict of desire and acceptance, that arose when a planned and expected outcome was thwarted by unforeseen events. Indeed, that might be the closest We Who Are could ever come to experiencing anything like emotion.

They experienced it now, however, as they took stock of the current situation. The local system’s vermin had somehow managed to overwhelm the huntership’s shielding, and blind it as well. Analyses of the vectors of several nearby vermin spacecraft suggested that the locals were going to try for an intercept. That could not be permitted.

Another concept We Who Are rarely needed to deal with was the idea of hurry. Time, generally, was simply another factor to be worked into the equations of the moment. But it was imperative, now, that repairs be completed in a very great hurry indeed. Clearly, the locals should be classified as a’amv’yet, meaning a serious threat to We Who Are.

A threat requiring the immediate sterilization of this entire star system.

Assault Detachment Alpha

Autie Navy Sierra 1-1

1417 hrs, GMT

“Three … two … one … grapple release.”

Garroway felt the jolt as the autie was cast clear of the Commodore Edward Preble. They were falling free through empty space once more.

“We’re clear,” the mental voice continued. “And … primary ignition in five … four … three … two … one … ignition!”

A giant’s hand slammed down on Garroway’s chest, pressing him back into the thinly padded seat. The AUTs—like the Preble, and like most human-crewed spacecraft nowadays—made use of Oannan drivefield technology, but that only reduced the effects of inertia, allowing higher accelerations and more violent maneuvering than would otherwise be possible with a human payload. The effects of acceleration were still felt, and they were still unpleasant.

The autie boosted hard for two minutes before the blessed relief of zero-G again enfolded him.

“C’mon!” one Marine griped over the platoon channel. “When do we get to see where we’re going?”

“Belay that,” Garroway snapped. Every Marine on the autie was keyed to the breaking point. It was the platoon gunnery sergeant’s job, his job, to make sure they didn’t actually snap. “When they have a feed, they’ll give it to us. For now, keep hitting your weapons checktext. Ooh-rah?”

“Ooh-rah.” But the response was scattered and weak.

In fact, the team had been over its weapons and equipment checks time and time again already. They were as ready as they could be … as ready as any military strike force could be flying blind into an unknown tactical situation.

“How about it, Lieutenant?” he asked, using the private command channel. Wilkie was on board the autie, though he wasn’t on the cargo deck with the rest of the Marines. As CO of the op, he would monitor things from a console-couch in the AUT’s cockpit. “They haven’t told us a fucking thing. Right now, morale sucks and our performance is going to suffer for it. When do we at least get to see where we’re going?”

“Like you just told them, Gunny,” Wilkie said. “When they decide to give us something to look at. In the meantime, we have to be patient.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, ‘patience,’” Garroway replied, falling back on an old joke. “How long will that take?”

Wilkie didn’t reply, however.

Garroway was concerned about the lieutenant. He was almost as new to the Marines as Lowey, Atkins, and a couple of the other newbies were. According to the man’s personnel files, he’d commanded a platoon Earthside out of Annapolis, but that had only been for three months, until he’d been assigned to SCS, Space Combat School. After that, he’d been sent straight to RST-1, and that had been just two months ago. Garroway had no doubts whatsoever about Wilkie’s technical qualifications. But he did wonder about his ability to lead Marines. In his two months with the RST, Wilkie had seemed … remote, somehow. Nothing Garroway could really put on the table and criticize, but his abrupt manner was worrisome, sometimes. Distracted. And inflexible. A good Marine officer textened to his senior NCOs carefully, even let himself be guided by them. Wilkie, somehow, seemed driven by his own agenda, with a single-mindedness that had won him the nickname “Will-kill.”

The joke was that no one knew who his single-mindedness would kill—the enemy, or the Marines under his command.

But that was outside of Garroway’s control. A good platoon gunny got his people through all kinds of obstacles and problems—including those presented by obstinate or know-it-all junior officers.

Damn it, though, this time it was worse than usual. No information was coming down from the top … and that made Garroway’s job a hell of a lot tougher.

The minutes dragged by, as stress—measured by the bio readouts for each member of the platoon—grew to near-intolerable levels.

Only in the last couple of minutes did the Marines see what was awaiting them.

The datafeed, according to the peripheral alphanumerics, was coming from an unmanned drone approaching the Intruder. That, he thought, is why the delay. We didn’t have anything close enough to send us a picture.

The alien was definitely a twin of the Xul starship that had come through the stargate at Sirius a century and a half ago—two kilometers long, a slender needle forward, gently swelling into bulges and protuberances of unknown purpose farther aft, the whole gleaming gold in the weak light of a distant Sol.

And—the God of Battle be praised—it looked dead.

Looked. That was the operative word. The HELGA lasers had slashed into the rear quarter of the ship, leaving that end raggedly truncated and surrounded by a slowly expanding cloud of dust, frozen mist, and debris. Much of the golden hull forward was scorched and blackened.

Still, he’d studied recordings made at the Battle of Sirius, and this didn’t look as bad as the damage that had taken out the other Hunter vessel. The Marines would have to assume that whatever passed for crew over there were very much alive and ready to defend their property.

Garroway heard the mingled comments of several of the watching Marines.

“Jesus! Look at the size of that thing.”

“Hey, Cowboy. Size doesn’t matter. You should know that!”

“What are we gonna do … fly up its ass?”

“You got a better way to goose that bitch?”

Abruptly, the image winked out, raising an angry chorus of complaints and grousings.

“Hey! Who turned it off?”

“Let us see, damn it!”

“Texten up, people,” Wilkie said over the platoon channel, overriding the grumblings. “They just passed the word that they’re going to trigger two XELs in a minute. It’ll be like a preliminary bombardment, giving us some cover going in. They switched off the drone’s feed to save its optics.”

The grumbling abated somewhat, but not entirely. For Garroway, though, that was good news. Hitting the Xul intruder again, moments before the RST boarded it, might make the difference between survival and death.

And if we’re real lucky, he thought, they’ll overdo it and the damned thing will be vaporized! He found he didn’t mind at all the possibility that this operation would be aborted at the last minute.

Battlespace

1443 hrs, GMT

The X-ray laser platforms in extended orbit about Mars were under the control of an artificial intelligence named Artemis. She was, in fact, a software clone identical in most respects to Kali, who was handling the long-range targeting of the Xul intruder at HELGA Three, but she was resident in the military computer network that embraced Mars, Deimos, and Phobos, as well as several of the warships currently within a few light-seconds of the Red Planet.

Her name was apt. In Greek mythology, Artemis was half sister to Ares, the God of War who became Mars when the Romans acquired him, and she was a huntress, expert with the bow. Artemis wasn’t using a bow now, of course, but she was having to take very careful aim at a target several light-seconds distant … which meant she had to take into account the target’s residual velocity of several kilometers per second relative to the planet.

The XEL satellites could deliver only a fraction of the energy yield of a single HELGA shot, but every indication seemed to suggest that the Xul ship’s energy screens were down. If so, Humankind might have just lucked out; XELs were designed to vaporize mountain-sized boulders on an intercept course with Earth, or at least vaporize enough of them that they were nudged, hard, into a new path.

Artemis was about to nudge the Intruder … hard.

Her targeting task was made more difficult by the fact that the XELs were on opposite sides of Mars, and separated by almost two light-seconds. Artemis had to time the triggering as well as take into account the time it would take the bursts of X-ray energy to reach the target. For optimum effect, one X-ray laser pulse should hit the target no less than half a second after the other.

She was also at a disadvantage because there was only one drone within imaging range of the target right now, and she’d just switched that off in order to give her something by which to make a damage assessment after she fired.

Like the expert software system that she was, Artemis took all into account, made the necessary calculations—adjusting even for the slight bend in space created by both the Arean gravity well and the much smaller gravity well created by the black hole inside the target’s drive system. She delayed the shot as long as possible so that the Marine shuttle now approaching the target would enjoy the maximum effect, but not so long that she risked catching the AUT in the two beams of coherent X-rays.

At precisely the appointed moments, the two XELs detonated in nuclear fury, a hair over a second apart. In each, a 10 megaton fusion explosion generated an intense pulse of X-rays, which were shaped into coherence and given an aim point by powerful magnetic fields a stark instant before the generators of those fields were vaporized.

Two pulses of X-ray energy, each a tenth of a light-second long, flashed across intervening space. Both were invisible, both due to the airlessness of space and to the fact that X-rays are invisible to the human eye, but at the last instant both showed as dazzlingly bright threads of light as they seared through the cloud of dust and gas now surrounding the target. For another instant, though no one was present to see it, an intolerably brilliant point of light dazzled off the Xul ship’s side.

One point. The other shot had missed. Even the best AI expert system wasn’t perfect.

But when Artemis switched on the drone image feed again, it was clear that the first shot had hit, and with good effect. The target had not vaporized, unfortunately … but it had been badly holed amidships.

Artemis transmitted a brief signal to the approaching AUT. “You are clear to board.”

The Marines were going in.

6

12 FEBRUARY 2314

Assault Detachment Alpha

Battlespace

1508 hrs, GMT

Garroway felt his gut twist as the autie spun end for end. The image of the objective didn’t change, of course, since it was coming from a remote drone. At least they had an image now; from the drone’s vantage point, it looked as though the XEL lasers had burned another hole into the Xul giant, roughly amidships.

A flashing red light illuminated the autie’s cargo deck—warning that the compartment was now in vacuum. For several minutes, now, the atmosphere had been bleeding away into storage tanks belowdeck. The Marines did not want to have to deal with the explosive effects of sudden decompression when the aft hatch opened up.

Acceleration slammed again into Garroway’s chest, and he heard the stifled gasps of several other Marines on the platoon channel. The autie was decelerating hard, backing down toward the objective as it fell stern-first, killing its residual velocity.

He found himself fervently hoping that the navigational AI piloting the autie knew what it was doing. Inertialess field or no, if they hit the Xul vessel too fast, all the Oannan technology in the Solar System wouldn’t keep them all from being reduced to bloody paste inside their armor—Spam in a can, as the old saying put it.

He wondered what Spam was. It didn’t sound pleasant.

To take his mind off that claustrophobic image, he checked his Hawking 34mm chaingun—again. The Preble, fortunately, had been carrying a store of live ammo, including cases of 34mm rounds, both AP and HE, and the Navy ratings had passed what they had down into the autie en route. Unfortunately, the supplies of expendable ammo were sharply limited—only about a thousand rounds per man. That meant the Marines’ ammo bins were less than a third full.

Still, it was better than going into live combat with training rounds. And the team’s pig-gunners all had fresh power packs. His chaingun loadout gave him a standard AP-HE three-to-one ratio—three rounds of armor piercing, followed by one of high explosive, a mix guaranteed to cut through just about anything a human opponent could throw at them.

Of course, these were not human opponents. He tried not to think about the possible consequences of that, either.

The deceleration went on for a long time. At the last moment, as his vision started to blur, Garroway saw the autie on the drone feed, a tiny bright star moving fast—too fast—toward the gaping hole in the Hunter ship’s flank.

Hell, where was the external feed from the autie? There ought to be a camera up, to show them where they were going … but there was no time to think about that.

“Brace for impact!” he called over the platoon channel.

In the image window in his mind, the star vanished into the far vaster mass of the Xul ship, slicing through tangled wreckage. The jolt slammed him back against the seat, nearly driving the breath from his body. The impact was silent in hard vacuum, of course, but he could feel the shuddering, grating vibrations of hull metal sliding through whatever the hell the Xul vessel was made of, transmitted through deck and seat.

And then he felt the familiar dropping sensation of zero gravity. The seat grabbers released him, and he flexed his body, drifting into the aisle between the seats, which now felt more like a tunnel, with no up or down, no deck or overhead. “Okay, Marines! Stand up! By twos! Secure your drift!”

The tunnel began filling with armored Marines moving gently out of their seats and turning to face aft, gripping the seat backs in gauntleted hands to keep from floating free. Aft, the main hatchway was opening up, the ramp swinging slowly out of the way. Peering past the shoulders of the Marines in front of him, Garroway could see … blackness. An empty cavern.

At least the hatch is opening, he thought. If the mechanism had been damaged by the autie’s tail-first impact, they would have had to emerge one at a time from the single-man hatches forward, an awkward and deadly way of entering combat.

“Ramp down!” the autie’s crew chief yelled. “You’re clear to go!”

“Okay, Marines,” Garroway called. “It’s going to be a close-quarters tangle in there. Weapon status on safety-interrupt! Acknowledge!”

Acknowledgments came back in rapid succession. With safety-interrupt engaged in their combat suit computers, their weapons would lock each time their line of fire intersected a fellow Marine.

“Boarding party away!” Garroway called. “Gung ho!”

The ancient battle cry was a contraction of a Chinese phrase, gung-ya hod-za, meaning “everyone pull together,” a beloved relic of the Corps’ deployment into China during the early twentieth century. In this case, pull together was meant literally. Gripping the seatbacks, the twin line of Marines had to haul themselves along, everyone moving in perfect unison to avoid colliding with one another. The bulky, two-meter suits, heavy with external armament and ammo bins, were tricky to maneuver in zero-G. By all pulling at the same time, the two lines of Marines propelled themselves forward, looking, as Garroway liked to think of it, like an enormous black millipede.

They exploded from the open rear ramp, exiting the claustrophobic confines of the AUT and emerging in a vast and partly empty volume of space. The shuttle had backed into the crater burned into the Xul vessel, pushing in through a tangle of what looked like girders or struts and coming to rest in a spider web of twisted beams. Whatever had been in here had largely been reduced to wreckage and debris. Huge masses remained, but so blasted and melted that it was impossible to tell what those masses had been.

At optical wavelengths, the space was in complete darkness, but Garroway’s infrared sensors showed the walls and debris within the hole still glowing in eerie reds and oranges. Some of the wreckage was still molten, in fact, and it looked as though the white-hot plasma from the autie’s thrusters had added to the fiery destruction. Beyond the trapped autie, through the gaping hole in the Xul ship’s side, he could see the stars outside.

“Now that’s what I call a fucking preliminary bombardment!” Chrome yelled over the platoon channel. “Section Two! Follow me!”

They’d sketched out their tactical deployment during the hours of transit as part of the Preble’s cargo. Half of the Marines peeled off and began moving aft within the Xul wreckage, hauling their way through the debris where they had to, using their suit thrusters in open space. Daugherty and Hoyer were with her, hauling two of the nukes.

“Section One!” Garroway called out. “With me!” His suit’s AI oriented him with the forward end of the Xul vessel, painting a targeting cursor on the cavern wall in that direction. He pushed off from a twisted, sullenly glowing girder. On his tactical readout, he saw fifteen of the Marines following him. Lowey, Istook, and Sergeant Ortiz were close behind him, carrying first section’s allotment of nukes. They had a long boost through relatively empty space—almost two hundred meters—to reach the charred and twisted ruin of the cavern’s forward wall. For a long moment, they drifted through empty space. Then, using a much-practiced maneuver, they tucked and twisted, turning so that they were drifting feet-first.

ZGM—Zero-Gravity Maneuvering—was endlessly practiced by Marines assigned to space billets; arguably, that was what distinguished Fleet Marines from the ground-pounders. Garroway’s boots hit the wall, and he allowed himself to crumple with the impact, absorbing the energy in his legs and back to avoid rebounding back into the cavern.

The other Marines came in around him, silently falling into the wall; two, Atkins and Freemont, bounced, drifting back into the cavern, but their buddies grabbed hold of their harnesses before they floated out of reach and hauled them in. Garroway made a mental note to talk to them later about scheduling additional ZGM training.

If there is a later, he reminded himself. So far, the Xuls hadn’t paid any attention to the tiny force of Marines crawling around in the savaged bowels of their ship. But that would change.

“Istook, Ortiz, Lowey,” he said. “Texten up! Engage triggering sequence Alpha. Confirm!”

“Trigger sequence Alpha confirmed,” Ortiz told him.

“Alpha confirmed,” Lowey said.

“Sequence Alpha, confirmed,” Istook added.

Sequence Alpha was controlled by their individual suit AIs. It armed the backpack nukes, setting them to detonate if—and only if—Garroway or Chrome, or Wilkie back on board the autie, or General Garroway back on board the Preble, transmitted a coded radio signal. It was a form of mission insurance. If every member of the boarding party was somehow and suddenly killed, the nukes in their CAS backpacks could still be fired.

Garroway wasn’t sure he entirely trusted Wilkie’s mental thumb on the destruct switch. He hated admitting that to himself, but … there it was. The idea of having a nested set of destruct sequence go/no-go triggers was so that if Chrome and Garroway both bought it in the next few minutes, Wilkie could decide whether or not to trigger the nukes immediately, based on the status of the rest of the assault force. If the AUT was destroyed in the next few moments, and Wilkie with it, the decision would revert to Uncle Clint.

He trusted his uncle. Wilkie, he did not … not entirely. It wasn’t that Garroway thought the guy would push the button on the RST deliberately, but the guy could panic. If he did, he might transmit the firing code before the rest of the Marines could get clear of the Xul vessel, might trigger the nukes even before the autie got clear. That, in fact, was his responsibility if it looked like the mission would otherwise fail.

Cool heads were needed to make that kind of call. And Garroway just wasn’t convinced that the twenty-seven-year-old Wilkie had the prerequisite chill to the organic component of what was stuffed into his skull. He worried too much.

And this wasn’t the time to worry about Wilkie’s worrying. “Lowey!” he said. “Plant your boom-pack here. The rest of you, look for an entrance, some way to get into the ship.”

“Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant.”

He helped Lowey fasten the backpack nuke to the cavern wall, using a nano sealant that bonded tighter than any weld. “Okay. Set the timer. Sequence Bravo.”

He watched as he placed his left gauntlet on the pack’s contact plate and fed the Bravo code into the weapon’s computer.

“Charge ‘Whiskey’ is in place,” Garroway announced over the platoon channel. “The clock is running.”

The five nukes had been given the last five letters in the phonetic alphabet—Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, and Zulu. The Bravo sequence would detonate the weapon in two hours, unless it received a coded order to revert to Alpha, or to proceed to Charlie.

“Hey, Gunny!” Corporal Hoeffel called. “We got movement!”

Direction was indicated on his tactical feed. Garroway rotated his CAS in space, searching the indicated direction. Yes … there it was.

He wasn’t at first sure of what he was seeing, exactly. It looked as though some of the masses of half-molten metal, the remnants of hull and bulkheads, were growing, with new pieces being extruded from the old. And … he could see a cloud moving past the stars visible through the opening in the hull, like a swarm of gnats or locusts. As he watched, the swarm appeared to solidify in places, filling in gaps and emptiness.

Swiftly, inexorably, the Xul ship was repairing itself.

Battlespace

1537 hrs, GMT

The HELGA facility, its fire mission against the Xul ship complete, had returned to its original task—tracking and destroying each of the stream of rocks now hurtling in past the orbit of Mars, bound for Earth. Every forty-eight minutes, its recharge was complete, and Kali would loose another brief but deadly stream of invisible fire at another of the distant, fast-moving asteroids. After several shots, HELGA One came on-line as well and began adding its three-second bolts to the ongoing barrage.

HELGA One was directed by a fire-control AI named Durga, after the Hindu mother-goddess destroyer of demons. As soon as she came on-line, Durga began coordinating her fire patterns with Kali, ensuring that two bolts were not loosed toward one target when a single bolt would suffice. There were too many targets, and too little time, for duplication of effort.

Unfortunately, the radar and laser imaging scans that allowed Kali and Durga to identify and target fast-moving rocks light-minutes distant were rapidly becoming less and less reliable. Each time multimegaton bursts of energy vaporized mountain-sized chunks of rock and ice, a great deal of debris was left over, ranging in mass from dust and grains of sand to pieces the size of a large house. Each single piece had received its own new vector component when it was blasted from the parent body, causing the debris cloud to expand as it moved, but each piece also retained the original two-thousand-kilometers-per-second velocity of the original vector.

Toward Earth.

Assault Detachment Alpha

On Board the Xul Intruder

1545 hrs, GMT

The Marines of Detachment Alpha had been moving through the blast-tangled guts of the Xul ship for thirty minutes, now, exploring the nearest passageways in the glare of the lights mounted on the shoulders of their battle armor. X-ray backscatter imaging scanners had identified areas behind intact bulkheads that might be passageways and others that appeared to be packed with the Xul equivalent of electronics and heavy machinery. Nanodisassembler packs slapped against portions of the bulkhead walling off rooms or passageways had given them entrance into the bowels of the alien ship. The passageways were in vacuum—which might mean the ship’s air supply had bled away, or might simply mean the Xul didn’t need air. Researchers were still arguing over whether what humans knew as the Xul even possessed an organic component. They might well be a pure artificial intelligence—as good a term as any to apply to near-immortal beings apparently comprised of vast arrays of separate minds somehow downloaded from many sources.

It was the strangest combat Garroway had ever experienced, either in live action or in sim. The passageways, not meant for humans, were triangular in cross-section, the walls strangely folded and wrinkled, lined with almost organic-seeming masses of resin or extruded nanalloy that had a positively organic look to it. In places, the walls appeared sharp-cornered, crenellated, and neatly ordered; in others, they were lined with shapeless blocks, swellings, depressions, and bulges, often wet and oozing, with the result that moving through them felt like a nightmare journey through the intestines of some inconceivably vast beast.

The tunnels ranged anywhere from less than a meter to over six meters in height. Even in the larger corridors, the converging walls seemed tailor-made to induce feelings of claustrophobia, together with a gut-felt sense that something was simply wrong with the perspective of the place. They were not lit, not in the spectrum visible to humans, though in some the bulkheads glowed at infrared wavelengths. Backscatter examinations of the walls showed that many of the passageways, despite the fact that their interior walls were anything but smooth, were almost certainly transport tubes, which used magnetic induction coils hidden within the bulkheads to impel cargos or vehicles along their lengths at high speed.

Needless to say, the thought that an alien version of an elevator car or subway capsule might come hurtling at them out of the darkness at any moment did not at all help matters.

When Garroway led his team through a gap in the bulkhead, however, carefully picking his way past edges still glowing and dribbling off molten gobbets of hot metal from the thermal effects of the ND charge, it was not to face Xul subway vehicles, but the first onslaught of the alien vessel’s defense network.

Humans had encountered the Xul defenders before, in the battle at the Sirius Gate, and the scanty information acquired during that encounter had been endlessly studied, back-engineered, and extrapolated in sim. Like the soldiers of a terrestrial ant or termite colony—or the leucocytes in the human bloodstream—they responded to threats within the ship, appearing first in handfuls, then in greater and greater numbers. It was hypothesized that the Xul vessel was nanufacturing them somewhere in its depths, deploying them to the point of attack via the internal system of tubes and tunnels.

Garroway first became aware that the detachment was under attack when Corporal Visclosky, four behind him in the queue, screamed and his icon on Garroway’s noumenal tactical display window flashed from green to blue, then winked out. Dozens of red icons suddenly popped into existence on the same display, seeming to literally grow out of the walls on all sides.

“Man down! Man down!” Dulaney was yelling. High-speed autofire lit up the tunnel walls, casting flickering, eldritch shadows. “Shit, shit, shit! They got Visky!”

A second scream, a second light winked out. “Ortiz’s down! We lost Sergeant Ortiz!”

“Someone grab Ortiz’s boom-pack!” Garroway ordered. A brutally harsh command, but necessary. Ortiz’s telemetry showed he was dead, but the tactical nuke he’d been packing was still live and set to sequence Alpha.

It wouldn’t do to let the enemy get hold of it.

The thought elicited a derisive snort. Idiot! he thought. What would they want with it? Xul technology makes nuke-packs look like stone axes!

In the darkness ahead of him, Garroway saw movement, a flicker of black tentacles, a wink of reflected light, a shape emerging from shapelessness less than five meters away. Without thinking, he triggered his Hawking chaingun, sending a stream of 34mm slugs smashing into the half-glimpsed target. The recoil slammed him backward and tried to give him a left-to-right tumble, but his suit’s thrusters compensated automatically. He kept firing. Rounds sparked and flashed along the bulkheads with each ricochet; the shape flared white and came apart, half shattering into ragged fragments, the rest tumbling end-for-end back into the shadows.

Other targets appeared, seeming to separate from the strangely folded and crenellated walls, and he pivoted with the new motion, continuing to squeeze the firing contact inside his right gauntlet. His suit’s targeting system painted a crosshair reticule at the Hawking’s aim point, the image glowing bright in his visual field.

He could see very little of what he was fighting, even at what amounted to knife-fighting range. From intelligence gathered at Sirius Gate, he knew each Xul soldier was a teleoperated robot linked in with the ship’s controlling intelligence. Each was an elongated ovoid between a meter and two meters in length, obsidian-black, the smoothly sculpted body swollen and bulging in places, indented and concave in others, with no apparent matching of the details of its shape with others of its kind. Crystalline lenses like fist-sized rubies were set here and there in the body, again with no single design plan evident, and tentacles, as few as one and as many as twenty, sprouted from random points, helping the device to propel its way through the passageways in the zero-gravity of the Xul vessel’s interior.

Its weaponry was varied, but usually consisted of a microparticle accelerator designed to fire very tiny but very high-energy bolts of charged particles along an intense magnetic field. They also used laser technology … and in direct hand-to-hand combat, those tentacles possessed superhuman strength.

The good news was that they were not heavily armored. Even handgun fire could punch through those paper-thin shells and wreak havoc with the quantum circuitry within. The stream of 34mm slugs from the chaingun slashed through them with explosive effect, sending chunks and fragments spinning wildly through the corridor.

Garroway’s Marines had been spread out along a three-meter-wide corridor when the Xul defenders began emerging from the bulkheads, literally appearing out of nowhere right in their midst. Pivoting in mid-passageway, Garroway saw Gwyneth Istook struggling in the grasp of a forest of black tentacles that seemed to grow from the nearest of the three enclosing walls.

Sending a stream of chaingun fire down that passageway would kill more of his Marines than Xul robots, despite the weapon’s safety-interrupt; he mentally thumbed his weapon selection to CQC and fired.

Close-Quarters Combat called for a change in ammo as well as a change in tactics. The mental selector switched his Hawking loadout to SX, low-velocity safety-explosive rounds that detonated on impact and would neither ricochet off the walls nor pass through the target to kill someone in the line of fire beyond. It also switched his fire selector to single-shot. He raised his right arm, dragging the reticule in his visual field onto the black mass entangling Istook, and squeezed the firing switch. Nothing happened; Istook’s struggles had pulled her around until her suit entered Garroway’s line of fire, and the safety-interrupt in his combat computer had blocked the shot. Cursing under his breath, Garroway shifted his aim into the shadowy mass farther from the jerking form of Ishtook’s CAS and fired three quick-spaced rounds. Tentacles whiplashed, then came apart. Ishtook tumbled backward out of the thing’s grasp, bouncing hard off the opposite bulkhead. “Th-thanks, Gunny!”

“Not a problem,” he said, snagging the arm of her suit and stopping her rebound. “Stay close!”

“Gunny! The black-hats are on the run!”

It was true. The attackers were vanishing from the tactical display—destroyed, or retreating back into countless small, hidden side passages.

“Section! Who has Oritz’s boom-pack?”

“Right here, Gunny,” Corporal Hood called.

“Give it here.” They needed to plant these last two charges, then get the hell out of Dodge. “C’mon! In here!”

His suit lights had revealed a side passageway leading off at an odd angle from the main one. Ducking inside, they found themselves in a small, elongated room with gtextening walls. “Place your weapon there,” he told her, pointing. He watched her back as she set her K-94 against one wall and release the nanoseal in its base, anchoring it solidly in place. “Set sequence Bravo.”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.