GALACTIC CORPS
BOOK TWO OF THE INHERITANCE TRILOGY
IAN DOUGLAS

As always, for Brea. My light. My life. My muse.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Timeline of the Inheritance Universe

Countdown …

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

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Also by Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

Timeline of the Inheritance Universe

Years before present

50,000,000–30,000,000: Galaxy dominated by the One Mind, sentient organic superconductors with hive mentality. They create the network of stargates across the Galaxy, and build the Encyclopedia Galactica Node at the Galactic Core.

30,000,000–10,000,000: Dominance of Children of the Night, nocturnal psychovores. They replace the One Mind, which may have transcended material instrumentality.

10,000,000 TO PRESENT: Dominance of the Xul, also known as the Hunters of the Dawn. Originally polyspecific pantovores, they eventually exist solely as downloaded mentalities within artificial cybernetic complexes.

Circa 500,000 B.C.E.: Advanced polyspecific machine intelligence, later called variously the Ancients or the Builders, extends a high-technology empire across a volume of space several thousand light years in extent. Extensive planoforming of Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A, of Mars in the nearby Sol System, and of numerous other worlds. QCC networks provide instantaneous communications across the entire empire. Ultimately, the Builder civilization is destroyed by the Xul. Asteroid impacts strip away the newly generated Martian atmosphere and seas, but Earth, with no technological presence, is ignored. A Xul huntership is badly damaged in the battle over Mars; it later crashes into the Europan world-sea and is frozen beneath the ice. Survivors of the Martian holocaust migrate to Earth and upload themselves into gene-tailored primates that later will be known as Homo sapiens.

10,000 B.C.E.–7500 B.C.E.: Earth and Earth’s Moon colonized by the Ahannu, or An, who are later remembered as the gods of ancient Sumeria. Around 7500 B.C.E., asteroid strikes by the Xul destroy An colonies across their empire. Earth is devastated by asteroid strikes. One colony, at Lalande 21185, survives.

Circa 6000 B.C.E.: Amphibious N’mah visit Earth and help human survivors of Xul attack develop civilization. They are later remembered as the Nommo of the Dogon tribe of Africa, and as civilizing/agricultural gods by other cultures in the Mideast and the Americas.

Circa 6000–5000 B.C.E.: N’mah starfaring culture destroyed by the Xul. Survivors exist in low-technology communities within the Sirius Stargate and, possibly, elsewhere.

1200 B.C.E. [Speculative]: The Xul revisit Earth and discover an advanced Bronze Age culture. Asteroid impacts cause devastating floods worldwide, and may be the root of the Atlantis myth.

700 C.E.: The deep abyssal intelligence later named the Eulers fight the Xul to a standstill by detonating their own stars. The astronomical conflagration of artificial novae is seen in the skies of Earth, in the constellation Aquila, some 1,200 years later.

The Heritage Trilogy

2039–2042: Semper Mars

2040: 1st UN War. March by “Sands of Mars Garroway.” Battle of Cydonia. Discovery of the Cydonian Cave of Wonders.

2040–2042: Luna Marine

2042: Battle of Tsiolkovsky. Discovery of An base on the Moon.

2067: Europa Strike

2067: Sino-American War. Discovery of the Singer under the Europan ice.

The Legacy Trilogy

2138–2148: Star Corps

2148: Battle of Ishtar. Treaty with An of Lalande 21185. Earth survey vessel The Wings of Isis destroyed while approaching the Sirius Stargate.

2148–2170: Battlespace

2170: Battle of Sirius Gate. Contact with the N’mah, an amphibious species living inside the gate structure. Data collected electronically fills in some information about the Xul, and leads to a Xul node in Cluster Space, 30,000 light years from Sol. A Marine assault force uses the gate to enter Cluster Space and destroy this gate.

2314–2333: Star Marines

2314: Armageddonfall

2323: Battle of Night’s Edge. Destruction of Xul fleet and world in Night’s Edge Space.

The Inheritance Trilogy

2877: Star Strike

2877 [1102 M.E.]: 1MIEF departs for Puller 659. Battle of Puller 659 against Pan-Europe ans. Contact with Eulers in Cygni Space. Battle of Cygni Space. Destruction of star in Starwall Space, eliminating local Xul node.

2886: Galactic Corps

2886 [1111 M.E.]: Raid on Cluster Space by 1MIEF. Discovery of stargate path to major Xul node at Galactic Core.

2887 [1112 M.E.]: Operation Heartfire. Assault on the Galactic Core.

Countdown …

They had about ten and a half minutes yet, give or take a bit, before the expanding blast wave of the nova reached them. Plenty of time if nothing unexpected happened.

“Skipper! I’ve got a bender coming through dead ahead!”

She checked the ID. The call was from second lieutenant Trace Wayne, only thirty kilometers off Lee’s port wing. A bender was something warping space, possibly one of the Euless triggerships … but there was a chance it was something else.

It was. She saw the brilliant flash of twisted starlight, saw the Xul Type IV materialize out of empty space fifty kilometers ahead. Like humans, the Xul used the Galaxy-spanning network of stargates, but their ships also possessed FTL capability which sharply warped local space.

And the alien warship had dropped into the normal space time matrix directly between most of Lee’s squadron and the stargate.

They were going to have to fight to get through.

Prologue

They were not omnipotent.

Throughout their multi-million-year period of galactic dominance, they’d been known by many names. The Destroyers. The Hunters of the Dawn. The Enemy. The Xul. They called themselves by a thought symbol that might translate as We Who Are.

Perhaps ten million years ago, give or take some few hundreds of thousands of years, We Who Are had possessed organic bodies; as such, they’d been a species, like all heirs of flesh, shaped and constrained by the impersonal forces of evolution. In common with all products of the evolutionary process, they’d possessed a marked will to survive.

What most clearly distinguished We Who Are from most other species was simply the extremes to which that will carried them.

Early in their history, they’d survived—barely—a traumatic encounter with another species upon their home planet. That encounter left them shaken, brutalized, and monomaniacally mistrustful of the motives of anything Other.

It left the other species extinct.

That ancient struggle for dominance, ultimately for survival, imprinted itself upon the psyche of We Who Are. When, in due time, they began moving out into the Galaxy, they carried that imprint with them. No other species posing a threat, however remote, to We Who Are could be permitted to survive.

Over the course of some millions of years, We Who Are extended and expanded the range of their lonely suzerainty over the Galaxy. Eventually, however, they encountered the far-flung bastions of another starfaring species, nocturnal psychovores who styled themselves as the Children of the Night. Like We Who Are, the Children possessed as a racial trait the need to exterminate all competition. Unlike We Who Are at that time, perhaps eight million years ago, the Children were already ancient, their line extending back into a murkily remote past when they, in their season, had wrested dominance of the Galaxy from a still more remote species, a self-aware congeries of organic superconductors that called themselves the One Mind.

Young, fired with righteous ambition and an instinctive determination to crush all competition in order to be alone, and therefore safe, within their Galactic fastnesses, We Who Are eventually triumphed after a savage no-quarters war that scoured a hundred thousand worlds of life. The Children of the Night passed into the ultimate Night of extinction, as had the One Mind before them.

And with that victory, the We Who Are became the new xenophobically senticidal caretakers of the Galaxy.

More millions of years passed. Eventually, like the majority of technically oriented species before them, We Who Are chose to discard their organic bodies, uploading their consciousnesses into nearly immortal cybernetic shells. They carried with them, however, the racial traits of mind and awareness that had distinguished them as organic beings—including the blatantly Darwinian imperative to eliminate all possible competitors, all possible threats to their existence.

In fact, this radical form of natural selection had dominated the galactic scene ever since sentient life had first emerged, some eight billion years before. In any given epoch, it took only a single intelligent species with technic aptitude and a lack of empathy for anything Other to emerge from the cauldron of its birthworld and insure its survival by eliminating all possible rivals. Galactic civilizations rarely overlapped perfectly in terms of their scientific and technical levels; with each encounter, one species tended to be older than the other, usually by many thousands or tens of thousands of years, and hence far more technically advanced.

As new civilizations emerged and achieved technical capabilities permitting space flight and long-distance communication, most wondered why the skies of their worlds, which should have been humming with the signs of advanced civilizations, seemed so silent, so empty. Each time new races, new civilizations took their first tentative steps out beyond the worlds of their genesis, We Who Are, sooner or later, detected their efforts from their scattered bastions, descended upon their worlds, and relentlessly exterminated them. Hence, the silent sky.

But like the Children of the Night, the One Mind, and so many others who’d come before, We Who Are were not omnipotent. The vast, sprawling spiral of the Galaxy, possessing some three hundred billion stars, is far too large, with far too many worlds, for any one race to monitor every possible lifeworld, every emerging sentient species.

And there were so many of these. …

In the outlying regions of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm, within the dense polar jungles of the warm, inner world of a class-G5 star, a race of brachiating mollusks—morphologically, at least, they somewhat resembled certain members of that terrestrial phylum—swung from the interwoven branches of sessile thermovores not unlike Earthly trees. The species was young, as yet, but had developed an elaborate philosophy based on mating calls, territoriality, music, and mathematics. One day, they might have much to offer an evolving Galactic polylogue, but they hadn’t yet developed electronics or radio, much less the instantaneous magic of quantum-coupled communications. The huntership-communes of We Who Are had passed through this star system several times within the past ten thousand or so years, but not noticed the species’ thriving, arboreal cities.

Not yet.

Closer in toward the galactic core, within the teeming star clouds of the Sagittarius Arm, on the rugged, tide-strained volcanic moon of a superjovian gas giant, a race of armored paraholothurids built water’s-edge hive-cities of compacted excrement and composed palendromic epics celebrating their having been chosen as slaves of the sky-disk they saw as the eye of God. Natural radio emitters, they broadcast the glory of the one true religion to the stars. We Who Are had detected those signals and searched for their origin; so far, they’d not found the holothurids’ world, for they tended not to think of planetary bodies outside of the star’s liquid-water habitable zone as a possible abode of life.

That particular blind spot had given them trouble more than once in the past, and likely would again.

Closer in still toward the galactic hub, near the merging of the Norma and Scutum-Crux Arms, a fiercely radiating type A star blasted its unusual coterie of rocky worlds with intense radiation. Bathed in abundant radiant energy, Life had emerged on the innermost world and, borne by the local stellar winds, had seeded the other, outer planets of the system as well. Sentience had arisen here a few million years before, rising among several of the numerous, fast-evolving taxas of selenium-germanium chelated crystalline chemovores that constituted the local biosphere. Here, again, the manipulation of naturally occurring radio waves became the basis for communication, and, again, those manipulations had been detected in the depths of space, light-years distant.

The pace of crystalline life, however, tends to be slow, too slow for We Who Are to distinguish that life from the inorganic chemistry of accreted minerals. Those received artificial signals had caused the local We Who Are node some considerable concern, but it was clear that the problem soon would take care of itself. Type A giants are short-lived stars, their lifetimes on the main sequence lasting less than half a billion years. The local star already was showing signs of instability, and soon the abundant radiation that made life and sentience possible here would become that life’s executioner.

Twenty-three thousand light years from the Galaxy’s center, within the smear of stars and nebulae known as the Orion Arm, a world called Chiron by its most recent inhabitant, represented two distinct threads of civilization within the Galactic scene. Bathed in the yellow and orange hues of a double star, the world’s continents were battered and cratered by an intense celestial bombardment of half a million years before, and everywhere stood the somber and silent ruins of a golden civilization swept away by the firestorm. They were known by those who’d come later variously as the Ancients and, so numerous were the crumbling shells of their hell-blasted world-cities, as the Builders.

The Builder civilization had been a brilliant concord of machine intelligences arisen and evolved from various organic precursors; the asteroids that had destroyed Chiron had been flung into the planet by We Who Are, whose hunterships had sought out the Builders’ colony worlds scattered widely across perhaps a third of the Galaxy and in like manner, relentlessly and methodically exterminated each one.

Chiron was also known to its more recent colonists as Alpha Centauri A-II. Just four and a third light years away lay the G2 star called Sol, and the homeworld of an ambitious, carbon-based, oxygen-metabolizing species of sexual mammals that called itself Humankind. Within the past thousand years, an eye’s blink against the span marking the rise and extinction of myriad expressions of galactic life and sentience, humans and their artificially sentient machines had left the world of their birth to venture to the worlds of nearby stars, beginning with Chiron, and going on to assimilate numerous star systems scattered throughout an oblong realm measuring perhaps eight light centuries across at its greatest extent, four at its smallest. They’d encountered other intelligent species—the primitive An, the advanced but retiring N’mah, and the benthic species of brilliant mathematicians known to them as the Eulers—all three the shattered remnants of past encounters with We Who Are.

And, more than once within the past handful of centuries, Humankind, too, had attracted the xenocidal attention of We Who Are, and the destructiveness of those encounters was rapidly escalating. Most recently, a human battlefleet had used an ancient system of stargates to reach an important node of We Who Are near the Galactic hub, and there used Euler technology to detonate the star.

The resultant nova had finally caught the full attention of the Galaxy’s overlords.

And they moved now with blatantly uncharacteristic haste to obey their racial hard-wiring and eliminate once and for all this new and potentially serious threat to their survival.

The final clash, the final Armageddon would come soon, and, when it did, it would do so on a scale unknown since the extinction of the Builders.

1

1506.1111

First Platoon, Bravo Company
Carson Gate/Cluster Space
0540 hrs, GMT

Gunnery Sergeant Aiden Garroway wiggled a bit deeper into the bottle’s embrace as the armorer swung the dome canopy down over his head and sealed it in place. “Link check,” he heard, the Navy chief’s words forming in his mind.

The canopy was opaque, a nanosurfaced ceramic-iridium laminate impervious to almost anything up to a direct hit by a 100-gigawatt laser, but the bottle’s electronics fed the external view directly into Garroway’s brain, channeling the data through his cerebral implants. The armorer’s face leered down at him, distorted by the feed’s fisheye effect, and by the reflections from the fishbowl helmet of the man’s vacwear utilities.

“Link is on-line,” Garroway replied. “You’re going to have to fix that, though, Chief. God, you’re ugly.”

The man laughed. “Not as ugly as the Xulies. Good luck, Marine.”

“Ooh-rah.” With a thoughtclick, Garroway switched the data link to an external view, fed from the Ishtar’s outer hull.

The view here, high above the stargate, was stunning, spectacular. …

Carson was a nondescript double star near the fringe of Commonwealth space, a planetless pair of cool M-class dwarfs circling one another in a tight embrace. Two light hours out, so distant that the two suns themselves were merely bright ruby points of light against the background scattering of stars, the local stargate drifted in slow orbit, an immense, slender-rimmed hoop twenty kilometers across, gleaming silver and red in the somber light.

The Marine transport Ishtar was drifting slowly toward the gate belly-first, some fifteen kilometers above the structure’s center. Her ventral hatches were open, her forward dropdeck exposed to hard vacuum—hence the need for the armorer’s helmet and sealed utilities.

He switched the feed back to his pod’s external optics. Around him, caught in the glare of overhead lights, were the launch racks holding other bottles, and Navy and Marine personnel—armorers, deckhands, and technicians—were moving among them, prepping each for drop.

“Be sure to bring back some good suit vids, okay, Gunny?” the armorer told him. “I hear it’s real pretty over there.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Chief. But I imagine we’re going to be too busy to get anything artistic.”

“Shit, I didn’t say artistic. I just hear the view’s nice, is all. What I really want to see is some after-op combat footage of a bunch of dead Xulies!”

“You and me both, Chief.”

“Bravo Company,” another voice said, cutting in. The dry, staccato tones were those of the company commanding officer, Captain John “Blackjack” Black, though the actual speaker would be Smedley, the company AI. “Squad and section leaders, check your Marines and report status.”

Garroway was the gunnery sergeant assigned to the company HQ, and, as such, was the senior NCO in charge of the seven other enlisted Marines in the unit, under Captain Black himself. He ran through the electronic links with the other HQ personnel—two riflemen, two comm officers, two Navy hospital corpsmen, and a tech specialist/observer. All feeds showed green and ready, systems charged and go, weapons safed and ready.

“Green Tower,” he said over the company net, using the HQ section’s code name to link through to Smedley. “This is Tower Two. All Tower platforms report ready for drop.”

“Copy, Two,” Smedley replied.

Garroway chuckled. The AI was named after Major General Smedley Butler, one of the Corps’ heroes from the ancient, pre-spaceflight era of almost a thousand years ago. According to the histories, though, the original Smedley had been quite a character, often in trouble with his superiors because of his rough manner. Somehow, Garroway doubted that the guy had been quite as laconic as his artificial namesake.

There were historical simulations of the original Butler on file back on Mars, and in the library on board the Hermes. He decided he would link in some time, just to see how the two compared.

“First Platoon, ready to launch,” 2nd Lieutenant Cooper, the platoon’s commanding officer, announced over the Net.

“Second Platoon, ready to go.” That was 2nd Lieutenant Hamblet.

“Third Platoon, ready,” 2nd Lieutenant Costigan added.

“PryFly, Bravo Company,” the captain’s voice said. Garroway thought he heard some stress there. If so, it was the old man himself speaking, and not his electronic proxy. “We are ready for launch.”

“Very well,” another voice said, this one from Ishtar’s primary flight control center, or PryFly. “Bravo Company release in five … four … three … two … one … release!”

Garroway felt the sharp jolt as magnetic grapples released his bottle, and then the Ishtar’s ventral hull was receding against the stars. From his perspective, it appeared that the transport had suddenly begun accelerating away from him; in fact, Ishtar had just halted its gateward drift, allowing a cloud of M-CAPs to emerge from her belly and continue drifting toward the gate at a steady kilometer per second.

M-CAPs, Marine Combat Assault Pods, were only the most recent means of transporting individual Marines into battlespace, an upgrade to the Space Assault Pods, or SAPs in wide use until only a few years ago. Somewhere between a very large, bulky, and powerful unit of heavily armed space armor and a very tiny, lightly armed, underpowered one-man space craft, a CAP carried a single Marine within its claustrophobic core. A gravitic drive allowed the device to accelerate at forty gravities—about four hundred meters per second per second. It responded directly to a Marine’s thoughts, through his cereblink, and provided him with constantly updated information on his surroundings and the tactical situation.

For self-evident reasons, Marines called them bottles, among other nastier, more vitriolic names.

“Okay, people,” Blackjack’s voice told them over the Net. “We’re doing this by the book. We want to maintain the element of surprise for as long as possible, so do not engage your gravitics until I give the word. Power at ten percent only. Magnetic shielding engaged. Optical benders on. Everyone copy?”

A chorus of voices came back over the Net, mingled calls of “aye, aye, sir” and “copy that” and “ooh-rah.” A display open to one side within Garroway’s mind showed the telemetry from each pod, all green and go.

The assault force, one hundred fifty Marines of Bravo Company, First Marine Assault Battalion of the First Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force was going to war.

Falling … falling … the bottles drifted into the opening of the stargate unpowered, with just enough power trickling through their drives to keep them from running afoul of one another, and to keep the magnetic shields charged and ready. Around them, unseen within the distant rim of the gate, a pair of Jupiter-massed black holes circled along their ancient tracks in opposite directions, at a velocity approaching that of light. The stresses on local spacetime were somehow—the technology was still well beyond the capability of human physics—focused at the gate’s lumen. The frequency of those rotating singularities had already been tuned to connect this gate with one particular other gate … one some twenty thousand light years above the plane of the Galaxy.

For the briefest of instants, Garroway felt the sharp, inner twist of tidal forces, and then he was through.

The sky wavered … shimmered … then blinked.

And he was somewhere else, somewhere … astonishingly else.

Not for the first time, Garroway wondered why you couldn’t see through an open gate to the other side, or why radio or lasercom signals could not be passed through, while solid things like starships made the passage almost unimpeded. The physicists said that had to do with a kind of flicker or stutter effect due to the period of the rotating singularities that allowed mass through in discrete, quantum chunks, but which interfered with the wave aspect of energy. Even so, he’d once seen the flash from a nova pass through an open gate, and do so with power enough to destroy a Xul huntership.

So much Humankind had yet to learn.

He looked around, studying ambient space with all the rubbernecking fervor of a first-time tourist in EarthRing City. An ancestor of Garroway’s had been here once, centuries before. The place was known as Cluster Space, and it was located, so far as AI navigational programs could place it, some twenty to twenty-two thousand light years above the plane of the Galaxy, and at least thirty thousand light years from Earth.

From out here, of course, the microscopic yellow speck of Earth’s sun was quite invisible, utterly lost within the vast and milky swirl of pale light hanging in the sky, a spiral that looked oddly like a pale-colored whirlpool frozen in an instant of time. Most individual stars at this distance were lost; only novae or the very brightest of giant suns were visible as separate stars out here. What remained was a kind of graininess or digital noise to the light. In fact, it looked much like the pale glow from the Milky Way seen on a pellucidly clear, dark night on Earth or, better, Mars … and for an obvious reason. It was the same glow, but seen from the outside against the black emptiness of the intergalactic voice, rather than from within one of the Galaxy’s spiral arms.

Here, the Galaxy stretched across half of the sky, tilted at a slightly oblique angle. Garroway could distinguish the slight differences in hue, blue and blue-white in the spiral arms, reddish in the swollen bulge of the central core. The smear of nebulae, some coal-black, other emission nebulae showing pale glows of green or red, wove among the stars like ragged streamers in an unfelt wind.

Opposite, against the ultimate void of the intergalactic abyss, a solitary globular star cluster hung in isolated splendor, a teeming beehive of suns, spanning a breadth of sky perhaps sixteen times as large as the full moon when seen from Earth, glowing with an almost undetectable reddish hue identical to the ruddy glow of the Galactic Core.

In a different direction lay the local star, a class-M red dwarf visible solely as a bright red spark against the night. That star, catalogued simply as CS-1, but nicknamed Bloodlight by the Marines, was the primary target of the op, which had been tagged Clusterstrike by the mission planners.

Behind the Marines was the stargate … but not the gate into which Bravo Company had just fallen. The tidal stresses of the gate back in Carson Space had linked across the light millennia with the gate here, allowing the swarm of Marine bottles to come through, gate-to-gate.

A flood of radio-frequency noise washed through his bottle’s exposed sensors, and Garroway set his personal AI to screening it, sifting through for hard data on enemy positions. The enemy was here. Humankind’s ancient enemy, the Xul …

Among other threats, a trio of Xul fortresses orbited here, only a few hundred kilometers away, and those fortresses had to be eliminated if Clusterstrike was to succeed. Trans-gate probes had already slipped through and located each of the three, along with every other enemy ship and station within this system. Those probes had managed to return, apparently unnoticed, but Marine bottles were larger and noisier than AI probes, and they were in this instant terribly vulnerable to attack.

Unlike the earlier Space Assault Pods, each M-CAP was effectively invisible, the coating of nano covering each one serving as uncounted trillions of optical relays, pulling light from one side of the bottle around to a carefully calculated point on the opposite side before releasing it. The effect was to make the bottle almost invisible so that light, radar, and other radiation was curved past the bottle rather than reflecting from it—optical bending. The various patches in each bottle’s hull not shielded by the benders—which allowed the Marines to see out and to communicate with one another and with the company AI net, among other things—were so small they were nearly invisible at any range greater than a few meters.

Still, the illusion was not perfect, and things like radiated heat or the spatial distortion caused by a gravitics drive could cause enough of a ripple against background stars to reveal their presence to a careful and watchful enemy. At Captain Black’s command, and under Smedley’s precise control, the school of invisible fish shifted vector as a unit, moving now slantwise across the opening of the stargate, each platoon angling toward a different target, the three Xul bastions guarding this gateway into Cluster Space.

So far, their entrance appeared to have gone unnoticed.

It would have been a mistake, though, to assume the Xul were careless or less than alert. Intelligence had reported that their defenses had been tightening up at all of their known gate outposts over the past few years, as the Xul Mind as a whole began, slowly, to react to Humankind’s attacks.

For almost nine years, now, 1MIEF had been playing a deadly game, one absolutely vital to the survival of Earth and Humankind. With both military and civilian intelligence services certain that the ancient enemy, the Xul, had learned the location of Sol and of the existence of humanity, Lieutenant General Martin Alexander, acclaimed Hero of the Battle of the Nova, had for almost a decade, now, been wielding the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force like a personal weapon. Again and again, a Xul bastion outpost, either long-known or newly discovered, would be targeted by 1MIEF for a lightning raid. Usually, the Xul bastion would be located within a system containing one or more of the ancient stargates.

Those gates were still mysteries. Human xenosophontologists and intelligence officers all agreed that the system of stargates scattered throughout the Galaxy and beyond were not, themselves, the product of Xul technology, but were leftovers from some other, much more ancient civilization, now long vanished. But the Xul, like the N’mah and humans, used the gates to their own advantage with other technologies for crossing the long, empty light years. The Gatenet provided a transport web spanning tens of thousands of light years—if you knew where each gate attunement led.

The Xul appeared to be very much at home with the Gatenet, had woven it into the fabric of their empire. Humans were still learning the shape and dimensions of that Net. But one by one, human forces continued to secretly find, note, and then attack every Xul gate outpost they could find. By keeping up a relentless assault, the hope was to keep the Xul preoccupied with tracking down and destroying 1MIEF, rather than with moving into the star systems occupied by Humanity—including Sol—and obliterating them.

Clearly, the Xul could send Humankind into extinction if they set their considerable assets toward that goal; the trick was to keep them so off balance with constant raids, each one a pinprick on its own, that they never got around to that final genocidal thrust at the worlds occupied by humanity.

How long could 1MIEF keep up the pinpricks? No one knew, though the topic was a favorite during off-watch bull sessions in the Marine squad bays on board each of the fleet’s transports. Marine and Navy sim-warriors and armchair generals made elaborate bets as to how long the task force could stay on the offensive, whether or not they’d be recalled to Sol, and how long it would be before the Xul empire collapsed.

Garroway had participated in a few of those sessions, but had refrained from joining in on the betting. If he’d started making wagers, he would have been betting against his own survival … a distinctly uncomfortable position in which to find oneself. He believed in the Marine Corps and in the Corps’ indomitable fighting spirit, but he also knew just how large the Xul presence in the Galaxy must be. Conservative estimates said the Xul hunterships outnumbered all human starships on the order of several tens of thousands to one. The Galaxy was that large.

Not good odds. Not good odds at all.

His bottle was rapidly approaching one of the Xul fortresses now, a massive, squashed sphere five kilometers across. The surface showed a platinum-silver sheen that appeared smoothly reflective from a distance but which, as his M-CAP fell closer, was revealed to be a maze of geometric shapes, angles, protrusions, towers, squared-off valleys, and raised blocks. Weapons ports and turrets revealed themselves everywhere, plasma guns and magnetic accelerators and other weapons that affected the very nature of matter itself—and which were still sheer magic in so far as human technology was concerned.

Smedley announced that they were passing through the first of several magnetic screens. The surface nano on each pod adjusted to let it slip through without disturbing the field and announcing the Marine assault team’s presence. Garroway found he was holding his breath, wondering when something would trigger, when surprise would be lost and the battle would begin. …

M-CAPs were superbly stealthy, as close-to-invisible as modern military technology could make them. Though bottles could accelerate at forty gravities, their approach so far had been deliberately low-key and unobtrusive, too slow for the automated Xul defense systems to recognize a threat.

They hadn’t been seen so far. That, or the Xul targeting sensors already had them locked in, and were simply waiting for the order to fire.

Closer now … fewer than five kilometers. His personal AI took over full control of the small ship, identifying the best place for touch-down, coordinating with the company AI and the other fifty bottles in First Platoon, slowing Garroway’s bottle with precisely timed bursts of its gravitics drive until it was hovering motionless a few meters above the surface. Gently, then, the craft lowered itself against the small but distinct gravitational attraction of the Xul fortress, until the two kissed.

“Contact,” Garroway reported. Within his mental tacsit display, other Marines were reporting a successful touch-down all around him.

According to plan, the Headquarters element had grounded with First Platoon, which had as its target the largest of the three Xul bastions. Second and Third Platoons were deploying to the other two fortresses. Each Marine element was now on its own.

Still under AI control, Garroway’s bottle extended its boarding cutter, a cylinder extruding nano-disassemblers from its business end to eat through the ceramic composites that made up the Xul structure’s hull and create a tightly sealed docking collar. The bottle should be able to eat through the outer layers of armor within a minute or so, allowing Garroway and the other Marines to drop down into the interior of the fortress.

“Incoming bogies!” a shrill voice called over the tactical net. “We’ve got incoming bogies!”

So the Xul had finally adapted to this form of attack. The pods must have triggered some sort of alarm or defensive system as soon as they’d started touching down. On Garroway’s mental tac display, a cloud of red targets was now emerging over the Xul fortress’s close horizon, bearing down on the Marine assault platoon like an angry swarm of bees.

“Perimeter defense!” Captain Black called. “Take ’em down!”

The thirty M-CAPs of First Platoon and the HQ section had set down on the Xul fortress in an AI-controlled pattern, with an outer ring along the perimeter of Marines with heavy weapons, and two inner rings intent on tunneling into the fortress. Garroway snapped on his targeting link, and felt his bottle spin within the boarding collar to bring the target cloud under his weapon.

The AP-840 M-CAP mounted a single weapon at its stern—the part of the bottle opposite the boarding collar, still raised three meters above the Xul hull. After latching on and digging in—“taking a bite,” as Marine slang put it—the M-CAP essentially became a mounted turret weapon. The gun, depending on the mission load-out, could be a V-90 Striker missile launcher, a rapid-fire magnetic pulse gun, or a Starfire plasma weapon.

Garroway’s bottle mounted the V-90. The Striker was a smart weapon that could carry a variety of warheads. The missiles filling Garroway’s ammo bins each were fitted out with ND-4 nanodisassembler pods. Tracking the incoming cloud in his mind, nudging the selector to full auto, he thoughtclicked the firing control and a stream of forty-centimeter missiles snapped from his weapon mount. The missiles coordinated with one another to disperse into the cloud, ignoring the leading elements of the enemy force and detonating deep within the attacking formation.

Each exploding pod released a cloud of its own—millions of molecule-sized nanodisassemblers traveling at high speed and programmed to begin taking apart whatever they happened to strike. Working on an atomic level, they were fast; almost immediately, red-highlighted targets on the tactical display began winking out, as though black cancers were eating through the formation from within, the decay beginning at a dozen different starting points and swiftly working its way out.

Other Marine M-CAPs around the perimeter began firing as well, adding their own clouds of nano-D to the general destruction, or lashing out with man-made bolts of plasma lightning.

Then the cloud reached the Marine perimeter.

Each target was a Xul warrior—a machine, actually, that was apparently grown within the hulls of their hunterships and forts. Two to three meters long, egg-shaped, but with smooth convolutions and bulges, each extruded a number of tentacles at seemingly random points on their shells, each possessed glittering lenses, also randomly positioned over their bodies. Some of those lenses would be eyes. Others …

Laser fire snapped across the outer hull of Garroway’s pod, generating a silvery puff of expanding vapor. Damn! The Xulies weren’t supposed to be able to see the Marine bottles with the optical benders on … but, then, no one was certain what wavelengths the Xul warriors used for vision, or what other senses they might possess.

He snapped off another burst of nano-D in response, but the Xul that had nailed him had already vaporized an instant before, caught by a flash from Sergeant Colby’s plasma gun.

“Thanks!” Garroway called to her over the tactical net.

“Don’t mention it, Gare!” was her response. She was already tracking another Xul warrior, as was Garroway. As the enemy swarmed over the Marine position, he’d switched to single shots and shoot-to-hit; the enemy was widely enough dispersed now that the Marines could no longer wipe out large numbers of the enemy combat machines with area fire. His bottle spun wildly, tracking a Xul as it streaked past low above the surface of the fortress. Garroway held his fire until his targeting cursor tracked past several nearby Marine bottles, then slammed a nano-D pod squarely into the now-fleeing machine from behind. The Xul warrior fell to pieces, a spray of dissolving parts, seconds later.

Local nano-D levels were rising sharply in the immediate battlespace. Drifting motes of disassembler were striking his pod, now, then rebounding. They were programmed to recognize the outer nano coatings of the M-CAPs and ignore them and seek other targets, but a few were beginning to burrow into his bottle at points scoured clean of nano by the Xul laser bursts. The automatic defenses on Garroway’s pod were growing erratic, and would soon fail.

“Smedley!” Garroway called, loosing another barrage at a pair of incoming Xul combat robots. “I’ve got nano-D on my pod, friendly fire! Tell the bastards to go chow down on something else!”

The company AI tweaked the electronics in Garroway’s bottle, and the errant nano-D drifted away into space like a puff of vapor, repelled by the brief, coded signal. A lot of the stuff was starting to work on the Xul fortress’s hull around the bottles, too. That might cause problems later, but there wasn’t much that could be done about it. Modern battlefields tended to soften and sludge down as random traces of nano-D, both friendly and enemy, began to accumulate in the area.

Then there was a sharp jolt, and Garroway’s bottle dropped by a meter, sliding down hard into the boarding collar. The deck he was standing on dilated open. He didn’t immediately fall in the microgravity of the Xul fortress but, setting the pod’s combat initiative on auto, he triggered a pair of battlespace drones, launching them into the emptiness at his feet.

A firefight was raging down there, as other Marines entered the enemy bastion. Garroway’s drones uplinked to his helmet, showing him images of Marines in heavy armor struggling in a low, broad passageway with Xul fighterbots coming at them tentacle to metallic tentacle. He charged his suit’s weapons, then gave a hard shove down through the open deck. Passing through the boarding collar, he entered the fight.

The passageway was two meters tall and ten to twenty wide, and the Marines were forced to stoop slightly because a Marine in Type 664 combat armor stood at nearly two and a quarter meters.

It was a Dantean scene, a circle of Hell, with Marines and Xul fighterbots struggling at knife-fighting range. It looked as though it should be unbearably noisy, but the interior of the Xul fortress was in hard vacuum and each bolt of plasma, each detonating grenade, each ripping or exploding alien shell did so in eerie silence. When Garroway’s boots touched the deck, though, he could feel the noise, a kind of steady, pounding thrum in the bulkheads and deck as the vibrations were transmitted through Xul ceramic to his combat armor.

The one advantage possessed by the Marine assault team was that they were physically shorter than the Xul machines, which, in that low corridor, were coming at them horizontally, pulling themselves along with powerful flicks of their tentacles against the deck and the overhead. As a result, the only weapons the enemy could bring to bear were those set into the tops of their egg-shaped bodies. After a few moments, the Marines, too, began leaning forward, lifting their boots off the deck, dropping prone to minimize their cross-sections as targets as they poured a devastating and concentrated fire into the attacking hordes.

Garroway mounted an MPPG-40 on the right arm of his combat armor, a rapid-fire mass driver on his left. He shouldered forward about twelve meters, taking up a firing position next to Corporal Gerad Kukovitch, a massively built fungie in the company from Spokane, Washington. Kuk was mounting a 20mm full-auto grenade launcher on his suit; he was one of the few people in the company big enough to pack one. The Marine was floating horizontally, taking partial cover behind one of a number of pillar-like structures scattered through that alien hall. They looked like massive, meter-thick bundles of rope or ceramic cabling growing like tree trunks between deck and overhead. Garroway stretched out beside him, firing from the other side of the pillar.

Side by side, the two Marines coordinated their fire, ’Vitch’s grenades silently flashing as they ripped through the enemy ranks, Garroway’s MPPG sending blinding bolts of blue-white energy arcing down the corridor, ripping deep into everything they touched. Sergeant Larissa Colby joined them a second later, adding her plasma weapon to the melee. One by one, other Marines began locking in with the growing phalanx of Marines while their suit AIs linked in with one another under Smedley’s guidance to coordinate their fire.

Together, as a unit, they were far more effective in concentrating their fire.

And then, almost magically, the enemy horde vanished, seeming to melt away into deck, overhead, and the far bulkheads of the chamber.

“Keep alert!” Captain Black called over the company Net. “They’ll be back! Special weapons forward!”

Two Marines moved up the debris-filled space, hauling massive tubes with them. Tripod legs unfolded as they planted the mounts against the deck and activated them.

For some centuries, Marine tactics against Xul ships and bastions had involved boarding the enemy and lugging backpack nukes into the structure’s depths. Nuclear explosions on the outer hull of one of the immense Xul hunterships or the even larger enemy fortresses did little permanent damage, and the resultant craters generally were patched over within a matter of minutes by flying clouds of fist-sized repair robots. A nuke detonating deep inside a Xul ship, though, tended to cause terrible damage, hampered automated repair efforts, and often loosed the microsingularities these monsters used as their power sources, and that was almost always fatal even to the largest Xul ship or structure.

Backpack nukes had been standard Corps issue until a few years ago. Now, however, the Marines had something a little better in their arsenal. …

2

1506.1111

First Platoon, Bravo Company
Cluster Space
0635 hrs, GMT

“Enemy targets bearing ahead and behind,” Smedley reported in maddeningly calm tones.

“Here they come again, boys!” Captain Black warned. “Let ’em have it!”

“Ooh-rah!” Second Lieutenant Cooper yelled over the Net. “Kill the bastards!”

The defenders of Xul ships and bases tended to act and react in predictable ways. Assaults were en masse, wave attacks with thousands of units moving forward as one in an attempt to overwhelm Marine perimeter defenses. Once the Marine defenders had killed enough of the oncoming Xul combat units—estimates suggested the number ran around twenty-five to thirty percent of the total number of the attackers—the remainder would break off and disappear, usually by vanishing back into the walls of the structure’s interior passageways and compartments. Some minutes would pass while the Xul built up their numbers once again, bringing in fresh combatants from deeper inside the target, and then the assault would be renewed.

That was what was happening now, as the passageway once again filled with black metallic egg shapes and flickering, writhing tentacles, coming in from both directions. Garroway crouched behind the pillar and aimed his weapon, thought-snapping the firing command, the plasma gun’s link with his armor electronics triggering bolt after searing bolt of man-made lightning.

Garroway let himself settle into the rhythm of combat, picking out targets and burning them down. The riflemen needed to buy a few precious minutes for the special-weapons boys, and then they would be able to withdraw.

Xul ships and space fortresses had often been compared to organic structures, like the physical bodies of immense living organisms kilometers across. While no one knew how true this might be, the comparison was unavoidable. The masses of alien circuitry making up much of their internal mass appeared to have been grown rather than constructed, and there were nothing like crew compartments or quarters on board these things. Rather, the Xul appeared to be electronic life forms uploaded into the circuitry of a titanic computer. When any part of the structure was damaged, robotic devices the size of a human fist appeared in clouds swarming through the damaged area, appearing to extrude themselves into new circuitry in the same way that medicos used nanochelation to plate out circuitry inside the human brain and nervous system, but on a much larger scale.

These tentacled combat robots the Marines were engaging now appeared to be analogues of white cells and other immune-defense systems in an organic system. If that was so, the passageways like this one, which seemed to riddle all Xul structures with labyrinthine complexity, could reasonably be compared to a body’s circulatory system, to blood vessels and lymphatic ducts serving as conduits for robotic devices designed for a variety of tasks including both repair and defense.

And to carry the uneasy comparison just a bit further, that meant that the Marines of 1MIEF were microbes, invaders penetrating the Xul’s giant circulatory system with the intent of killing it.

At least in the human organism, bacteria didn’t come in the form of platoons of Marines, heavily armored and carrying plasma and antimatter weaponry.

As with armchair discussions of 1MIEF’s strategy and tactics, the topic was often discussed in Marine squad bays during off-duty hours. For now, Garroway’s thoughts touched on the image only briefly: Let’s give this fat bastard one hell of an upset stomach! The rhythm of targeting and firing fell into an almost automatic process, guided by his training and the mental conditioning of weiji-do.

The two heavy gunners, meanwhile, rapidly completed setting up their weapons, one aiming forward, into the advancing mass of Xul warriors, the other aimed into the attackers in the opposite direction. A moment later, the weapons rocked in their mounts, and a pair of silvery shapes, each roughly the size of a big man’s forearm and fist, flashed from the muzzles and, accelerating on their microgravitics, streaked into the surrounding darkness. One slammed into the side of an advancing Xul warrior, knocking it aside and continuing to accelerate as it flashed out of sight.

Designated RD-260, the weapon was popularly known as the RAM-D, for Remote Antimatter Detonator. Each round contained nearly a kilogram of antimatter suspended in hard vacuum and an electromagnetic bubble, preventing it from coming into contact with the containment cylinder’s poly-ceramic and steel walls.

The gunners began reloading, hauling new RAM-D rounds out of the carry-satchels mounted on the hips of their armor. Tactical doctrine called for loosing three rounds apiece … if the enemy gave them that much time.

Sergeant Dixon, meanwhile, was laying down the back-up, a Mk.17 backpack nuke. He had it up against the overhead close beside one of the chamber’s pillars, holding it firmly in place while the nano coating on the device’s back formed an unbreakable bond with the surface of the alien composite. Dix’s nuke was the mission’s back-up guarantee … just in case the Xulies intercepted the other packages.

Garroway kept up a steady fire, frying Xul combat machines as quickly as he could target them. The microgravity environment within the confines of the passageway, however, was becoming clogged with drifting bits of debris, everything from glittering particles the size of grains of sand up to the three-meter shells of almost-intact Xul warriors burned out by Marine marksmanship. Clouds of nano-D adrift in the area were dissolving the larger pieces, but left behind a gritty, clinging dust that illuminated the enemy’s laser beams as they flashed and probed through the gloom.

The Marines’ armor was deflecting most of the incoming lasers, the outer layers of nano redirecting and scattering each flash harmlessly in a cascade of brilliant iridescence. Laser bolts repeatedly struck the pillar Garroway was half sheltering behind, striking with sharp, silent flashes and puffs of white vapor.

Some of the enemy fire was getting through, however, striking Marine armor on bare patches not covered by nano—on sensors and joint lines and link connector pads. Corporal Tomkins was down, air and boiling blood spraying from a severed lower arm until the suit’s autosealers and nanomedibot injectors could kick in. “Corpsman! Corpsman front!” In seconds, Doc Huston was with the wounded Marine, dragging him out of the line of fire, putting his own armor between the wounded man and the enemy as he hauled the man back toward the pods.

Then PFC White was hit, half of her visor charred, cracked and leaking air. Doc Billingsly had her in seconds, slapping a sealant patch over her visor before it could crack further, and pulling her back out of the firefight. The Marines continued putting down a devastating defensive fire, drawing closer to one another as their defensive perimeter tightened up.

The special-weps gunners loosed their second rounds, firing almost together. The leading Xul machines reached the Marine perimeter at almost the same moment, colliding headlong with Marine riflemen in a confused tangle of armored legs and arms and whiplashing tentacles. Suddenly, the defensive perimeter was broken, with dozens of the gleaming combat machines smashing through the line and grappling with the armored Marines. In an instant, the battle went from a firing line drill to a knife fight.

One of the massive warrior robots collided with Garroway as he burned down a Xul machine alongside it, and the impact drove him back like the blow from a sledgehammer. The enemy was too close for plasma weapons now, too close even for his flamer. As Garroway tumbled over backward in the embrace of a Xul attacker, he thought-clicked his slicers into place—squared-off plates extending from his suit gauntlets over the backs of his hands thirty centimeters beyond the tips of his fingertips. Each plate was nano-grown from a carbon-niobium alloy in a sheet with edges feathered down to just an atom or two thick, rigidly anchored in a quark-quark substrate. They were monofilaments made rigid, sharp enough to slice cleanly through any solid matter less dense than neutronium.

Garroway’s right arm came up and around as he shifted in his mind to weiji-do, the martial art form modern Marines trained in extensively in boot camp. Weiji-do, the Way of Manifestation, was a set of mental conditionings and downloaded training related to more ancient forms like t’ai chi. The imagery was of the essential chaos at the root of all existence out of which matter and energy were summoned, a deliberate tie-in with the principles of quantum physics that pulled energy from the base-state Quantum Sea.

Mentally drawing on the chaos of unformed reality, he focused a savage thrust of mental energy into the slicer blade as he rotated his suit sharply, sending the blade like a scalpel through the ceramic-plastic laminates of the Xul machine’s shell. Pivoting, he arrested his rotational energy and came back with his left blade; the Xul machine’s tentacles dropped away as the machine’s body gaped open with mirror-smooth surfaces at the cuts. A final thrust, and the machine snapped into two pieces, lifelessly inert. Electricity snapped and flickered across exposed alien circuits, the bolts grounded out by Garroway’s armor.

Continuing to rotate, he brought the mass driver mounted on his left arm to bear on another Xul machine as it grappled with PFC Nikki Armandez. BB-sized pellets accelerated to ultra-high velocity slashed across the machine’s shell, ripping open a fist-sized gash in the black sleekness. The machine bucked and jerked, like a living thing, as Armandez twisted clear of flailing tentacles.

Around him, the other Marines were fighting hand-to-hand—or, rather, hand-to-tentacle—as well, firing into enemy combat machines when they were a meter or two away, slicing them into tumbling, drifting chunks when they closed to within an arm’s reach.

Garroway was forcibly reminded of an ancient adage drilled into all Marines in boot camp: the most dangerous weapon in combat was a Marine. It didn’t matter whether he was armed with a plasma weapon, a mass driver, antimatter drone, forearm-mounted slicers, or his bare hands. It wasn’t the Marine’s high-tech toys that were dangerous. It was the Marine that wielded them.

In seconds, the breakthrough had been stopped, the alien machines inside the perimeter literally cut to pieces, while the rest withdrew as suddenly and as silently as they’d appeared. Four more Marines were down, their armor burned open, air and blood leaking into the chamber as a thin, icy pink haze.

Garroway did a quick mental rundown. First Company and the HQ element together totaled fifty men and women, five of them corpsmen. That left thirty-nine combat effectives on the line, now, and that included the specialist comm and computer personnel who had other things to do besides burn down enemy robots.

“Four AM-drones away!” 2nd Lieutenant Cooper reported over the Net.

“That’ll do it,” Captain Black said. “Everyone start falling back to the entry point. Bring the wounded!” A tiny point of light began winking in Garroway’s mind—the recall beacon, indicating the direction of his waiting M-CAP.

Garroway and Corporal Kukovitch held their position behind the pillar, covering several other Marines as they fell back past them toward the waiting M-CAPs, dragging along the bodies of fallen comrades.

That was a point of pride. No Marine was left behind, living or dead, and no Marine or corpsman serving with the unit assumed any Marine was dead in the field, no matter how bad the wound appeared to be. Unless someone had been smoked—literally turned to vapor by an enemy weapon—the possibility remained that they could be retrieved, even if large parts of their bodies had to be regrown or replaced.

Hell, Garroway had experienced that himself nine years back, at the Battle of Nova Space. They’d come after him, too, pulling him from a derelict alien spacecraft as a nearby star exploded. If they hadn’t, he would have been an irrie—an irretrievable—himself.

They leapfrogged back, section by section, one group of Marines providing cover as the rest fell back in moves of several meters at a time. Within a few minutes, they closed in around the tight cluster of M-CAP pods, where they’d broken through into the Xul base’s interior, creating a new, much tighter perimeter. For the moment, the Xul warrior robots were not in evidence—not out in the open, anyway, but sensors wired into Garroway’s external armor were picking up motion—vibrations detected through the Xul hull metal each time he touched it. Each Xul wave attack tended to be larger, usually by an order of magnitude, than the last.

They were gathering. The next assault on the Marines was going to be a big one.

“Medical Ontos now on final approach,” Smedley’s voice said.

“Heads up, people,” Captain Black warned. “Medevac coming in!”

A portion of the overhead flexed, suddenly, directly above the center of the new Marine perimeter, then began breaking apart in a swirling storm of disintegrating chunks. In the next instant, something broke through, ten meters wide and massive, chewing its way through the tough Xul hull armor in clouds of nano-D.

For a moment, it was difficult to see exactly what was eating its way down through the overhead. Something was there, a dark bulk that appeared to swirl and shimmer, becoming at times translucent, almost transparent, and which seemed to reflect the surrounding darkness of the passageway.

Then the effect faded, and the mass solidified into a dark gray surface displaying the Commonwealth emblem and the word marines prominent on the curved hull. A ramp was already lowering. That rear entrance couldn’t open wide in the narrow confines of the fortress passageway, but light from the vehicle’s interior spilled through a narrow opening into the dark space, reflecting from drifting debris.

The craft was an MCA-71 Ontos, one of the bug-like 383-ton Marine workhorses that had served with the Corps for twenty-some years. This one had been designated for medevac. More Navy corpsmen were already descending through the open cargo bay hatch into the Xul fortress, helping to move Marine casualties out of the Xul passageway and into the comparative safety of the rugged little transport.

Garroway held his defensive position with the other Marines on the perimeter. Briefly, he tapped into the telemetry from one of the RAM-D pods—RAM Two; a schematic animation opened in a side window in his mind, showing a drone’s-eye view as the device steered itself swiftly through twisting corridors into the bowels of the Xul fortress. RAM-Ds possessed extremely sophisticated on-board AIs that allowed them to operate with considerable autonomy, and gravitics sensors that let them home on the microsingularities orbiting within the heart of Xul structures.

The image flared in a burst of static snow, then winked out.

“RAM Two has been intercepted,” Smedley’s voice reported. “RAMs One, Three, and Four are proceeding on course.”

Garroway braced for a possible shockwave. If whatever had snagged RAM Two broke the magnetic containment field isolating the antimatter charge, in just a moment there was going to be a very large explosion. …

But seconds passed, and there was no blast. Much Xul technology was still mysterious, and at times seemed unevenly applied. Telemetry indicated that the other three charges were continuing on course, moving swiftly into the fortress’s depths. Perhaps the Xul hadn’t noticed them yet. Or perhaps they didn’t yet know what they were, and had just snagged the one in order to find out.

And that meant the explosion could come at any time. Tampering with a kilo of antimatter was never a good idea. …

Marines and corpsmen began loading the strike force’s dead and wounded onto the medevac Ontos. Still moving section by section as their squadmates covered them, Marines began scrambling up into their waiting M-CAPs. Corporal Fitzhugh yelled a warning at the same time Smedley flashed a new alert—targets emerging from the passageway bulkheads in all directions. Again, Garroway chose a target and commenced fire, burning down one oncoming Xul machine … then another … then a third as the shadowed distance seethed with black movement. The Marines were pumping out an incredible volume of fire—plasma bolts, lasers, nano-D rounds, high-velocity mass-driver slugs, pounding and slashing away at the advancing wall of Xul robots, filling the broad two-meter space between overhead and deck with spinning chunks of metal and ceramic. Garroway’s plasma gun flashed an overheat warning to his helmet display, and he switched to his mass driver to let the primary weapon cool. How long, he wondered, could they keep this up? …

Well, it wouldn’t, it couldn’t last much longer. With the RAM-Ds well on their way into the fortress’s interior, it was, as the ancient adage put it, time for all of them to get the hell out of Dodge. Garroway wasn’t sure what “Dodge” was, but he knew the sentiment behind the expression well.

The open ramp on the Ontos was closing, the slender gap of light visible from the cargo deck narrowing to a slit, then winking out. The shielding nano on the transport’s surface created a shimmering effect and, once again, the massive intrusion of the Ontos’ hull became, not invisible, but eye-wrenchingly difficult to look at.

“Everyone clear!” 2nd Lieutenant Cooper called over the Net. “Medevac lifting off!”

With a jarring vibration felt through the deck, the Ontos lifted clear of the Xul fortress, leaving a swirling tumble of debris in its wake. In twos and threes, the M-CAPs were pulling free of their entry holes, following the Ontos into the void.

There were only a dozen Marines left on board the Xul station now. This was the most deadly part of any board-and-destroy op, with most of the assault force already off the target, and the last few on board trying to make their escape as the bastion’s defenders closed in.

PFC Armandez was still a bit ahead of the main Marine line. She’d been falling back toward the M-CAPs when the Xul attack had begun anew, and dropped down behind one of the sheltering pillars to fire on the enemy. “Nikki!” Garroway called. “Get the hell back here! We’ll cover you!”

She was starting to turn toward Garroway when a pair of Xul lasers struck her low in the back, at the seam between her torso armor and her power pack. Part of the energy was dissipated by her armor, but he saw a puff of vapor and that was a sure sign her suit had been breached and was leaking air into vacuum. She slumped and went into a tumble.

The medevac Ontos was already gone. Garroway pushed off from the deck, diving in a flat trajectory through the narrow space to snag Armandez and awkwardly grapple her into his arms. Triggering his suit gravitics, he propelled the two of them together back past the Marine perimeter.

A solid wall of Xul warriors surrounded the handful of Marines. “Everyone get out!” Garroway yelled. According to his helmet electronics, he was the senior man present, and it now was up to him to get the last of them out.

“How are we gonna get Nikki out?” PFC Lauden yelled, slashing at the oncoming tide with his mass driver.

“Never mind, damn it! Just clear out! Now!”

“Aye, aye, Gunny!”

The other Marines began clambering into their pods.

Marine histories were full of stories of valiant last stands, of a last Marine who stayed behind to cover his squadmates as a tide of enemy fighters rolled over his final position. Garroway had no intention of becoming another.

He also wasn’t leaving Armandez behind. Towing her along, following the homer beacon flashing in his mind, he made his way to his M-CAP, still imbedded in the passageway’s overhead.

The problem was that M-CAPs were definitely one-Marine vehicles. Two people might squeeze into one together, if they were real friendly … and if neither was wearing their bulky Type 664 combat armor.

Working quickly, Garroway stuffed the unconscious form of the wounded Marine up into his M-CAP, literally stuffing her as far up the narrow opening as he could manage. The nearest Xul warriors were almost on him. …

Again, he triggered his slicers, extending the ultra-hard, ultra-thin blades to their full extent. Positioning himself directly under the opening to his pod, he slashed hard with his left arm … then his right …

His own legs, severed high up on the thighs, spun to either side, trailing globules of rapidly freezing blood and lubricant. The pain didn’t hit him immediately, wouldn’t hit him, he didn’t think, for a few precious seconds, if he didn’t let it. …

He did immediately feel the shock of falling pressure, like a hammer blow to his lungs. Air shrieked out of his armor into the surrounding hard vacuum until his suit’s inner layer, reacting automatically to the falling pressure, sealed over the gaping stumps of his legs. Garroway was already pulling himself up into his pod, as biting cold and lung-searing decompression threatened to drag him back into unconsciousness … and death. He had to struggle to work his torso up past Armandez’s legs; even minus his own legs, he wasn’t sure there was enough room inside the bottle for two.

It was starting to hurt now. A lot. …

His armor’s built-in medinano dispensers were already firing swarms of microscopic healers into his bloodstream, however. Anodynes began dulling the sharp shriek of pain; fluorocarbons began picking up where the near-vanished oxygen had left off; artificial coagulants began sealing off the wounds, stopping blood loss while cerebral monitors blocked the onset of shock.

It was a near thing. The inside of his helmet visor was iced over, and he was having trouble seeing. By feel, he found the pod’s linking plate and slapped his open palm across it. Numbers and status readouts flickered through his mind, but he ignored them, triggering the hatch seal.

He felt the hatch iris shut just below his sealed-off stumps, the scraping sensation threatening to override the anodynes. A warning light flickered on in his mind, followed by a verbal readout. “M-CAP hatch seal failure. M-CAP hatch seal failure.”

Damn. Even with his legs gone, he wasn’t in far enough to let the bottle’s hatch seal shut.

The hell with it. The bottle wasn’t supposed to accelerate with a hatch open, but he overrode the watchdog circuit and thought-clicked the launch command. There was a grating rasp, then a sudden shock as the pod broke free, accelerating clear of the Xul fortress.

For a moment, he half feared sliding out an open hatch beneath him as the pod accelerated on its way, but he appeared to be well wedged into place. Exploring with his gloved hands, he decided that the bottle’s outer hatch had, indeed, cycled closed; it was the inner hatch that was blocked open by the stumps of his legs, and that was what was causing the alarm. The bottle’s rather narrow-minded AI didn’t think the craft was sealed and ready for flight unless all hatches were shut, sealed, and locked.

He dismissed the irritating alarm. There was nothing he could do about the cause, and he appeared to be safe for the moment.

Well, safe from the threat of being left behind, at least. His warning indicators showed enemy fire passing close by his craft.

He goosed it, ordering full acceleration and praying the inertial dampers were working well enough to shunt aside the fearful pressures of a high-G boost. There was no time, no place for subtlety in the escape. With the fortress fully alerted to the Marine incursion, there was no hope of sneaking away unseen. The M-CAP’s nano coating lowered the craft’s visibility at all electronic wavelengths, making it tough to see and track, but at point-blank range it was hard not to pick it out, by the distortion it caused against the background starfield, if nothing else.

Through his interface with the tiny craft, he could see the fortress, looming huge as it receded astern, and a sky filled with streaks of white fire. Weapons fire—whether human or Xul—was in fact invisible in vacuum, but the pod’s computer painted the tracks in as a flight aid. With a thought, he banished the special effects; there was nothing he could do in the way of actively dodging incoming fire, and seeing those bolts was both distracting and terrifying. If his pod was hit in the next few minutes, he would never feel the blast that killed them.

He ordered the pod’s computer to establish a course consisting of random jinks that would continue to bear on the stargate.

Without the flashing lights and energy bolts, surrounding space took on an almost surreal aspect of beauty, majesty, and peace. The Xul bastion continued to dwindle astern, as the stargate slowly grew larger ahead. In the distance, the glowing spiral of the Milky Way Galaxy stretched across half of heaven, as beautiful, as insubstantially delicate as a dream. Green icons floated between him and the gate, a scattering of pinpoints marking Bravo Company’s other M-CAPs.

One pinpoint flared for an instant, a dazzling star, then vanished. Corporal Levowsky’s pod, according to the readout. PFC Hollander’s pod went next. Damn! …

He forced himself to ignore the ongoing roll call of Marines who would not be retrieved. Some of the escaping Marines were going to get nailed just by sheer chance, judging from the volume of hostile fire, and those Xul laser and plasma bursts were hot enough to reduce an M-CAP and its passenger to thin, hot gas in an instant.

At this point, it was down to sheer chance. The Marine pods all were jostling and jinking their way toward the stargate. Some percentage of them would not make it. Which ones were hit, which ones made it, that now was entirely in the laps of the Gods of Battle.

Garroway had another alarm to contend with as well, and, once again, it was something he couldn’t do much about. He’d lost much of the air inside his armor when he’d breached his own suit. In the moments since, his armor had been struggling to replenish internal pressure from the life support system in his backpack. He was no longer chewing cold vacuum, which was a distinct improvement … but by tapping the rebreather source gases in his tanks, he’d sharply lowered his stay time. His armor’s on-board computer estimated that he was down to another hour or so before his oxygen supply went critical.

And according to the telemetry from Armandez’s armor, her LSS had been damaged as well, leaking a good eighty percent of her gas supply to space before it had sealed off the damage. Their rebreather filters would continue to pull oxygen from exhaled carbon dioxide and water vapor as they breathed, but there would be less and less free O2 available with every breath cycle as more and more of it was locked up by his metabolism.

Again, he killed the warning.

What he couldn’t kill were the growing physical problems brought on by his self-inflicted wounds. The pain was manageable for the moment, thanks to the nano-anodynes, but it was growing steadily worse. Shock and blood loss both had brought him close to unconsciousness, and he’d severely compounded that threat with the abrupt loss of pressure in his suit. Again, the problems were being held at bay for the moment—fluorocarbons were far more efficient at oxygen and CO2 transport in the circulatory system than were red blood cells, so you didn’t need as much of the stuff as you’d lost, but his blood volume was dangerously low and threatening still to drag him into shock, despite the medinano churning away in his brain.

He hoped the bottle’s AI was bright enough to get them through the gate, because he didn’t think he was going to be awake for very much longer. …

“Hey, Gare?” a female voice called over the combat Net. “Gare, you okay?”

“Yeah.” The word felt fuzzy on his tongue. He was having some trouble focusing now. The com ID said the voice belonged to Sergeant Colby.

“Cut your random guidance,” Colby told him. “We’re trying to rendezvous for a pick-up!”

Garroway thought-clicked the guidance control, resuming a straight-line course. If the Xul were watching closely, they would be able to nail him in seconds … but somehow that just didn’t seem important any longer.

“Hang on, Garroway,” another voice said, a man’s voice, this time. His helmet identified it was 2nd Lieutenant Cooper. “We’ve got you, buddy.”

The downloaded visual showed three other Marine bottles closing on him from three sides. Magnetic grapples emerged from their hulls, latching on. Despite the inertial damping, he felt the slight jar as they grabbed him, then began accelerating again, four pods moving randomly now as a single unit.

He could also hear another voice in the background, an AI reciting a running countdown. “Eight … seven … six … five …”

It took him a moment to realize the count was for the antimatter charges left on board the Xul bastion.

That woke him up, shaking off the growing lethargy, at least for the moment. He looked back at the Xul fortress just as the numbers ran out. “… three … two … one … now … now … n-”

White light filled heaven.

The blast was soundless, of course, in the vacuum of space, but the Xul bastion, shrunken now to something the size of a football held at arm’s length, blossomed along one side as three kilograms of antimatter came into direct contact with the normal matter surrounding them. In an instant, the five-kilometer-wide structure vanished, engulfed by the deadly white bloom.

The image winked out, then, as the M-CAP’s optics shut down to preserve the bottle’s electronics and Garroway’s optical centers. His eyes were safe, since the image was being downloaded directly into his brain, but too much energy in the input could make his brain think it had just been blinded, and at a certain safe level, the input was cut automatically.

For a long moment, he rode in darkness, seeing now with his own eyes, but with nothing to look at but the darkness of the pod’s cramped interior, and Armandez’s armored legs and boots pressed up against his visor.

He felt the shockwave as it passed, a distant, rumbling thunder felt rather than heard against the pod’s hull. Radiation counters soared, and more warning lights flashed in his mind and on his helmet display. He, Armandez, and the three Marines hauling him to safety had all just received lethal doses of hard radiation.

Well, that wouldn’t be the first time. If they got back to the hospital ship Barton in time, they could do something about that. His legs, too.

If …

The outside optic feed was restored as light levels fell to acceptable levels. Garroway was fading fast, but he was able to see not one, but three brilliant suns now shining in an uneven embrace of the approaches to the stargate. All three Xul fortresses had been successfully reduced.

And almost directly ahead, the first starships of 1MIEF were emerging from the stargate, Ishtar, Mars, and Chiron, followed by the fleet carriers Chosin and Lejeune, already loosing their swarms of Marine aerospace fighters. Surrounding the vanguard was a small cloud of destroyers and light cruisers, followed by the immense MIEF flagship Hermes.

Three small, purple icons were trailing along beneath the Hermes’ lee, but as the flag completed its transit of the gate, those icons accelerated sharply, arrowing into the Cluster Space system and swiftly flashing into the faster-than-light invisibility of their Alcubierre Drives.

Those, Garroway knew, were Euler Starblasters, alien weapons of incredibly destructive power. He tried to twist around to follow the line of their flight, in toward Bloodlight, the distant red sun of this system … but within the next second or two, everything—the M-CAPs, the distant sprawl of the Galaxy, the trio of short-lived suns guarding the stargate and the stargate itself—all were lost to a vast, swelling blackness as unconsciousness claimed him at last… .

3

1506.1111

UCS Hermes
Stargate
Cluster Space
0717 hrs, GMT

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander, CO of the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, was linked into Hermes’ tactical command net, and from his mind’s-eye vantage point high atop the data stream he could see the unfolding of the entire battle. Bravo Company, chosen to spearhead this op, was pulling out, the individual M-CAPs hurtling at maximum acceleration for the safety of the stargate, as three brand-new and short-lived stars burned behind them.

The virtual icon of Vice Admiral Liam Taggart hovered next to Alexander’s awareness, backlit by the stars of the Galaxy. “Battlenet is reporting multiple targets accelerating toward our position,” Taggart’s voice said in Alexander’s mind. “I’d rather not let them get too close. If I may? …”

“Of course, Admiral. Get those damned things out of my sky. …”

Technically, the two men shared command, Taggart commanding 1MIEF’s naval forces and actions, while Alexander commanded the Marine units, both in space and on the ground, while supreme authority was vested with the Commonwealth Senate.

In fact, Alexander held overall command of the entire expeditionary force. The Senate was some tens of thousands of light years distant, now, and it was up to Alexander to determine how best to carry out the civilian command authority’s directives. The 1MIEF was an extension of Alexander’s determination and will, whatever the chain of command might look like charted.

If Alexander was in overall command, Taggart’s request for permission to engage the enemy was still little more than a polite fiction. The two long ago had arrived at a flexible and efficient compromise in military authority, and Alexander trusted the older man’s experience with naval tactics. The two men worked well together, had been working well as a superb team now for over nine years.

Usually, Alexander preferred to stand back and give Taggart free rein. But Cluster Space was important, the biggest and most strategically vital Xul node yet encountered, and Operation Clusterstrike had been conceived as a major body blow against the Xul.

They would take this one down by the book.

The MIEF fleet was dispersing now as it cleared the Gate, the ships bathed in the intense glare from the exploding fortresses. Xul ships were approaching from the system’s heart, but Ishtar, Mars, and Chiron were already directing their long-range weaponry against them, slamming them with long-range mass-driver fire. A cloud of smaller warships—cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers—accelerated rapidly, spreading out both to present more difficult targets, and to allow them to put the enemy vessels into a crossfire. As the big carriers came through behind the lead battlecruisers, swarms of Marine fighters and AI combat drones began streaming from the launch bays, filling Alexander’s virtual sky with hurtling, gleaming shapes.

Traditionally, Marines were intended to secure an invasion beachhead, emerging from the sea to seize and hold a landing area until regular Army troops could arrive and take over. That, at least, had been the Corps’ tactical dogma as far back as the twentieth century, when the Marines had ceased being purely naval troops and come into their own as an independent fighting force. Over the next few centuries, the major combat role for the Corps had been as elite infantry, tasked with a variety of missions, from boarding, search, and seizure to hostage rescue to combat assault.

Most recently, however, in the escalating war with the Galaxy-wide empire of the Xul, the Marines assigned to 1MIEF had been tasked with gate-clearing, a euphemism referring to ops like this one, requiring Marine elements to melt their way into the interior of one or more enemy bastions guarding a stargate’s approaches, planting nuclear or antimatter charges deep within the structure’s bowels, then fighting their way clear as the fortresses exploded. The moment the forts were destroyed or crippled, the main naval elements of 1MIEF could pour through the stargate and secure the gate approaches.

And then the Euler ships would come through.

“Your people did a hell of a job,” Taggart said, indicating the burning, new suns of the three Xul fortresses. They were fading now, though local space was still bathed in the harsh, 511?keV radiation released by the annihilation of positronium. A kilogram of antimatter detonated in each of those Xul bastions made a hell of a bang.

“Thank you, Admiral. I’ll be happier when we know the bursters hit their target.”

Alexander watched the straight-line trails marking the inbound course of the three Euler Starbursters on his internal display, arrowing toward the distant pinpoint of Bloodlight. Two more minutes …

“I’d still like to know how a species that evolved in a deep ocean basin could even have an idea of what the stars are,” Taggart said, “much less develop the technology to reach them. Doesn’t make sense.”

“Given enough years,” Alexander replied, “damned near anything is possible. Just be glad the Eulers and their technology are on our side!”

The Eulers were the benthic inhabitants of several star systems in Aquilan space, some twelve hundred light years from the worlds of Sol. Contacted nine years before, during the first incursion by the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force into the region of space near Nova Aquila, Eulers was the name humans had given them. Their name for themselves, it seemed, was a mathematical equation, an indication of their intensely mathematical worldview, and the humans studying them had named them after the human mathematician who’d developed that particular equation for humankind.

After nine years of study, there was still no other way to transcribe the thought-symbol they applied to themselves, or even to be sure they possessed language as humans understood the term. The massive, tentacled beings appeared to communicate with one another by changing colors and patterns visible in their mottled skin and by the taste of chemicals in the water, though direct telepathy among their own kind had not been ruled out.

Remarkably, for an oceanic species, they did possess sophisticated computer implant technology, and that was how they were, in fact, able to communicate with humans, through shared virtual realities. Their technology, their industry, and their material fabrication sciences all were quite advanced, despite the apparent disadvantage of living in the ocean deep at crushing pressures.

Like the N’mah, the Eulers defied the old xenosophontological dictum that had once declared that an intelligent species evolving in the sea would never develop technology because they could never make fire. Eons ago, they’d gene-engineered crab-like creatures to serve as their symbiotic extensions, first into the shallows of their home world, then onto dry land and, eventually, into the depths of space, to other worlds. Through their symbiotes, they’d developed fire, and industry, and a faster-than-light stardrive identical in its physics to the Alcubierre Drive employed by the Commonwealth. And the Eulers had traveled far.

Thousands of years ago, they’d encountered the Xul. The details still weren’t well understood by human xenosophontologists, but there’d been a war, perhaps several. The Eulers had learned how to use their FTL ships as shockwave triggers to make stars explode.

The Marines had learned that little trick from the Eulers nine years ago, at the Battle of the Nova. The Alcubierre Drive worked by encapsulating the starship in a bubble of severely warped space-time. Space ahead of the vehicle was sharply contracted, while space behind was expanded. The ship itself didn’t move at all relative to the space-time matrix around it, but the space moved, and carried the ship with it, accelerating to a fair-sized multiple of the speed of light.

So far so good. Humankind used several different techniques to travel FTL, now, including the mysterious stargates scattered across the Galaxy and beyond, and the matrix transition employed by very large carriers like the Hermes.

The weapons potential, however, arose when you slammed a bubble of Alcubierre-warped space through the core of a star. When the already incredibly dense mass of fusing hydrogen at the heart of a sun was suddenly condensed by the passage of an Alcubierre bubble, it triggered a partial collapse that sent a shockwave rebounding out from the core that blew the outer layers of the star into space in a titanic explosion—an artificially generated nova.

Three thousand years ago, the Eulers had fought the Xul to a standstill, albeit at horrendous cost, scorching many of their own worlds to lifeless cinders in order to vaporize the foe’s fleets of titanic hunterships. Now the Marine and naval forces of 1MIEF were using the same weapon, but carrying the attacks to the enemy in long-range strikes of annihilation. A young Marine named Garroway had piloted an Euler starcraft through the star warming a Xul-controlled system at the Battle of the Nova nine years ago. Since a ship under Alcubierre Drive was not, technically, in the usual four-dimensional matrix of space-time, it could pass clean through the target star without actually colliding—or vaporizing. The shockwave trailing behind it, however …

Since then, 1MIEF had continued using Euler technology. Human FTL ships were much larger and, therefore, easier for the enemy to intercept, and the Euler version of the Alcubierre Drive was far more powerful, warped space more tightly, and therefore made a bigger ripple when it hit the core of a star.

The three Euler Starbursters now streaking toward the Bloodlight, the Cluster Space sun, were piloted by sophisticated artificial intelligences, however, rather than humans or Euler-symbiotes. It was easier that way. Unlike most humans—those who weren’t religious fanatics, anyway—AIs could be programmed to welcome death.

Victory required that only one Starburster reach the local star; sending three was for insurance. Since the Euler craft could not transit a stargate faster-than-light, however, and since they possessed nothing in the way of defenses except their speed, the fleet first had to move through and seize a volume of battlespace on the far side of the gate. To do that, of course, it was necessary to destroy any sentry fortresses the Xul had placed nearby … and that was where the Marines came in.

Someday, Alexander thought with wry amusement, someone might create an AI combat machine smart enough, compact enough, and deadly enough to go into Xul forts and sentry ships and plant antimatter devices … but so far, at least, that particular dirty job was still best given to the Marines. Flying an Euler Starburster into the heart of a sun was child’s play compared to fighting your way into the interior of one of those Xul monsters and planting a bomb where it would do the most good.

Ninety more seconds. Bloodlight, however, was ten light minutes away, farther than Earth was from her sun. If … no, Alexander corrected himself, when the star detonated, it would be eleven and a half minutes before the Marine-naval expeditionary force knew the op had been successful.

Which was a good thing, actually. It should give them time to get clear.

Not for the first time, Alexander wondered if this particular raid could succeed. There were so many unknowns … not least of which was whether the Euler nova triggers would even work on a red dwarf star. Suns targeted by the Starbursters over the past few years all had been larger, more massive stars. An M-class dwarf possessed only a tiny fraction of the mass of stars like Earth’s sun, and there was some debate within the expeditionary force’s scientific and technical circles as to whether such a small star as Bloodlight could even be induced to go nova.

Well, they would know one way or the other in just … he checked his inner time readout again … another ten minutes, twenty-five seconds.

For now, the ships of 1MIEF continued to pass through the stargate into Cluster Space. Over the course of the past nine years, the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force had changed and evolved as human tacticians and strategists studied past actions and tried to determine the best mix of firepower and maneuverability for dealing with the Xul giants. The emphasis now was on faster, more maneuverable ships than the lumbering battlecruisers like Mars.

The Planet-class battlecruisers massed 80,000 tons each, but 1MIEF now numbered some two hundred starships, and most of them massed under twelve thousand tons. Compared to the one-and two-kilometer-long behemoths favored by the Xul, they were minnows nibbling at the flanks of whales.

But with enough of them firing together, they could bite hard. Smaller still, but still deadly, were the fighters of the four Marine Aerospace wings currently embarked with the Expeditionary Force. Launched from the Fleet’s flotilla of aerospacecraft carriers, those fighters—F/A-4140 Stardragons and the newer F/A-4184 Wyvern—were small, fast, and highly maneuverable. With antiship loadouts, they were deadly as well, especially when attacking in a swarm, like now.

Focusing his attention on one of the aerospace fighter icons moving within his inner display, Alexander began tracking the attack run of the Aerospace Squadron 16, the Reivers, as they closed on the nearest of the Xul monsters.

Brave people, he thought. Brave Marines.

If capital ships were minnows attacking Xul whales, the fighters were mosquitos.

And they were already taking a hell of a lot of casualties. …

Green One,
AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,
Cluster Space
0718 hrs, GMT

Major Tera Lee relaxed into the pilot link, watching the mental image of the Xul warship expand within her awareness from a bright star to a monster, now just two thousand kilometers distant. A Type III, the enemy vessel was one of the Xul huntership behemoths designated as a Nightmare-class, a flattened spheroid two kilometers across, the largest mobile Xul vessel yet encountered by the Commonwealth.

Lee was squadron CO of VMA-770, the Shadow Hawks. A twelve-year veteran of Marine aviation, she was tucked into the claustrophobic embrace of an F/A-4184 Wyvern, one of the sharp-edged single-seaters only recently delivered to the Shadow Hawks. This would be the Wyvern’s first test of actual combat, although Lee had been practicing in simulation for a year before she’d ever strapped on one of the machines for real. Technically, she had over a thousand hours of virtual flight time on the beast.

She knew better than to put too much reliance on simulations, however. Sims were good, but nothing matched the realities of combat. As she expanded her consciousness through the Wyvern interface, however, she noted that everything was green and wide open. So far, so good. …

“Green Squadron, this is Green Leader,” she called. “Everyone check your phase shift frequencies and cloaking. I don’t want anyone getting their souls eaten in there.”

The other fifteen pilots in the squadron came back at her with electronic confirmations—seven humans, eight AIs. That would be another first this morning—going into combat with half of the Shadow Hawks’ pilots consisting of sophisticated software instead of flesh and blood. She didn’t care for the idea at all—and neither did the others in her squadron—but orders were indisputably orders. It could be that the coming scrap would settle the old issue of live pilots versus electronics once and for all.

Twelve hundred kilometers. The scale in her downloaded imagery shifted. The Xul warship was still invisible to unaided, Mark I eyeballs, but the battlenet continued to feed high-definition imagery to the AIs controlling this phase of the engagement.

Nine hundred kilometers. She hoped that she was still as invisible to the Xul as the enemy would have been to her unaugmented vision. There were horror stories about what happened to ships’ crews engulfed by the monsters—about people having their souls eaten, as the darker tales liked to put it.

In fact, the Xul rarely made use of their patterning technology as a weapon, though it wasn’t unknown. Since the first human encounters with the Xul centuries ago, however, there’d been reports of Xul hunterships somehow devouring human vessels and so completely scanning their contents that humans and AIs alike were somehow transferred to the bowels of the Xul vessels as living, self-aware programs even though the ships and bodies of the crew were destroyed. That had happened to a human explorer vessel, The Wings of Isis, at Sirius in 2148, and to the Argo, an asteroid colony vessel hundreds of light years from Sol just nine years ago, and there were rumors of other electronic abductions as well.

The scuttlebutt shared among Marines in late-night barracks bull sessions said that humans uploaded into Xul computer nets were kept alive—if that is what their virtual and bodiless existence could be called—for centuries as they were continually interrogated and emotionally dissected by their captors.

By enabling a spacecraft to shift slightly out of phase with the normal four-D plenum of space-time, Commonwealth ship designers had found a means to make the vessel both more difficult to detect going in and harder to scan for the patterning and uploading process. That, Lee thought, was a considerable comfort. Better to go out in a bright flash of hard radiation than wake up as an eternal captive within the virtual hell of a Xul huntership. Even if the “real” her died with the destruction of her body, something, an electronic duplicate would awaken to that hell, and she was unwilling to give the Xul demons another human analogue to torture. Even worse from a purely personal point of view was the possibility that her mind, her living awareness, would somehow be transferred to the immense virtual reality computers that seemed to be the bulk of the Xul starships, that it would be she who awakened in the Xul hell.

Better not to think about that possibility at all. …

The one advantage in an aerospace fighter lay in the fact that the Xul never seemed to think small. Fighters and one-man boarding pods appeared to be beneath the notice of the behemoth hunterships, and a swarm of one-or two-Marine fighters could get in close and loose the equivalent of a capital ship’s broadside.

Even so, casualties in this type of operation tended to be heavy. A lot of her brother and sister Marines in the squadron would not be coming back.

Better not to think about that, either.

She was closing with the Xul huntership at just under fifty kilometers per second. Pappy2, a simplified iteration of the MIEF AI, was doing the actual flying at the moment, jinking and turning the hurtling Wyvern in random patterns to avoid the patterns of antimissile fire filling the sky now to every side.

The Wyvern was a smaller, nimbler fighter than the older Stardragon, massing only seventy-two tons, and with fewer hardpoints for weapons load-outs. It was faster and more maneuverable, however, and could phase-shift more completely, which gave it better protection against Xul defenses. Like the Stardragon, it drew power through a non-local entrainment link from its home-base carrier, in this case the Marine assault carrier Samar, and used quantum field-drive acceleration, so fuel was not an issue. Within her weapons bay, she carried four AM-98 missiles, each with an AI brain and a 1-kilo antimatter warhead. Those missiles had a powered range of ten thousand kilometers; the idea, though, was to get them so close to the target they could be released inside the Xul huntership’s defensive screens.

The trick, of course, was getting clear in time after releasing the missile.

“Okay, Shadow Hawks,” Lee said over the squadron net. “Form on me, left echelon. Maintain three hundred kilometer separation.” Their AIs would be jinking them all over the sky on the way in, and in those circumstances, it didn’t do to get too close to your formation neighbor.

Her link with her fighter’s sensors were painting the enemy fire across her mental display, her IHD, or In-Head Display, as the link was properly known. The enemy ship continued to expand smoothly in her mind’s eye, the jitters and jinkings of the hurtling Wyvern edited out by the AI as they were transmitted.

To her left and astern, a dazzling sun winked on, the expanding fireball of an exploding fighter. Green Three … Lieutenant Costigan. A plasma bolt from the Xul huntership had released the magnetically pent-up antimatter within Costigan’s four antiship missiles, loosing a storm of raw energy, and his Wyvern had simply vanished in a fireball equivalent to a fair-sized nuclear warhead.

At least it had been quick. There were worse ways to go than fighting the Xul, at least according to the scuttlebutt.

One of the AI-piloted fighters flashed out next—Green Nine. But then the remaining fourteen ships of the squadron were past the red line at five hundred kilometers from the target, putting them inside the mathematical zone promising fifty percent survival for missiles loosed at the enemy.

Another AI-piloted Wyvern flashed into dazzling brilliance, Green Twelve, the flare fading swiftly astern. Xul plasma bolts and laser beams crisscrossed the sky, weaving a constantly shifting net through which the surviving Commonwealth fighters twisted and dodged.

“Hold with me!” Lee called over the net. “Just a little deeper in. …”

At less than one hundred kilometers, they plunged through the Xul monster’s outer layers of magnetic screens, designed to let the enemy fire-control systems pinpoint course and speed data of incoming projectiles. Here, Lee was convinced, was where flesh-and-blood pilots held the advantage over AI software. Her tiny fighter’s controls were linked in with her mind, taking commands both from her intent and from Pappy₂. Organic pilots might not have reflexes fast enough or precision sharp enough to fly a high-performance aerospace fighter, but software lacked the flexibility and the scope to maneuver through this kind of maze. The two working together provided the best chances of survival—and a completed mission.

At fifty kilometers, she thought-clicked the missile firing command, kicking two of her antimatter killers into open space. Their drives ignited automatically, sending them streaking toward the Xul target. She’d already applied full lateral drive, a high-G maneuver that would have killed her if not for the inertial dampers cocooning her within the narrow confines of the Wyvern’s cockpit. Behind her, the other ships in her squadron broke formation, the better to loose their warshots in an unpredictable cascade.

Pulling nearly two hundred gravities now, Lee swung wide, killing her forward thrust and angling back toward the stargate in a series of rolling, twisting maneuvers.

Her attack run had carried her deep into the volume of space occupied by the approaching Xul hunterships. Two more Xul vessels, both lean, needle-slim Type I’s, swung past her prow nearly three hundred kilometers distant. She snapped them both with targeting cursors, locking in her two remaining AM missiles. She was not going to endure the indignity of returning to the Samar with missiles still in her weapons bay.

A thought-click, and her last two missiles flashed into the night.

It was a night, she saw, illuminated by innumerable pulses and flashes of light. Fighters, the Shadow Hawks and the other attacking squadrons, were scoring hits. The main Commonwealth fleet was adding to the display as their long-range weapons began striking home. Space around her was filled by the deadly flicker and flash of short-lived suns, and awash with the radiation of matter being annihilated.

In the far distance, the Galaxy hung in silent repose, unmoving, cold-lit, and remote.

As happened sometimes, the memories returned. …

Lee had been offered a memory edit, but she’d refused. Her memories, she believed, were a part of what she was, of who she was, and she would no more willingly part with them than she would with one of her legs. Hell, a leg could be regrown. …

Nine years ago, just before 1MIEF took the war against the Xul to the enemy, she’d taken a small reconnaissance spacecraft through a stargate to a Xul node. The place had been code-named Starwall, and was located somewhere along the outer reaches of the Galaxy’s core.

She’d been trapped there for hours. Radiation from the core had burned her terribly before her ship’s AI had managed to return her to a Marine listening post on the other side of the gate. They’d had to regrow much of her body after that, using medinano to excise the radiation damage cell by cell.

Later, and despite the surgery, she’d learned she would never have children.

That had been the worst part of it by far. For a long time afterward, she’d not been sure she even wanted to live. She’d grown up in American Saskatchewan as part of a large family—four fathers, five mothers, and twenty-three sibs. She’d always expected that after her hitch with the Marines was done, she’d marry into a big line family and have children of her own.

Gradually, though, she’d come to grips with the issue. The Corps was her family, and the men, women, and AIs in her squadron her kids.

Her battlenet link painted new volleys of high-energy fire from the expeditionary force, streaks and lines and hurtling spheres of green light rendering the invisible visible in her mind.

“Shit, skipper!” Lieutenant Daniels called over the tactical channel. “We’re gonna get fried by our own people!”

“Follow procedure and trust the system,” she told him. “Pappy knows what he’s doing.”

Indeed, only a massively parallel AI like the MIEF primary AI could coordinate the incredible volume of fire and moving spacecraft now filling the operational battlespace. No merely human mind could have kept track of so many variables, so many targets and energies.

“If everything is on sched,” Lieutenant Garcia’s voice put in, “we’re going to get fried by that nova pretty quick!”

“Follow procedure,” Lee replied. “The triggerships haven’t even reached the sun yet. There’s plenty of time… .”

In fact, a countdown was ticking away in a side window open in her mind. They had about ten and a half minutes yet, give or take a bit, before the expanding blast wave of the nova reached them … assuming everything was on schedule. Plenty of time if nothing unexpected happened.

“Skipper! I’ve got a bender coming through, dead ahead!”

She checked the ID. The call was from 2nd Lieutenant Joanna Wayne, and she was only thirty kilometers off Lee’s port wing. A bender was something warping space, possibly one of the Euler triggerships … but there was a chance it was something else.

It was. She saw the brilliant flash of twisted starlight, saw the Xul Type IV materialize out of empty space fifty kilometers ahead. Like humans, the Xul used the Galaxy-spanning network of stargates, but their ships also possessed FTL capability through something like the Commonwealth’s Alcubierre Drive, which sharply warped local space.

And the alien warship had dropped into the normal spacetime matrix directly between most of her squadron and the stargate.

They were going to have to fight to get through.

4

1506.1111

UCS Hermes
Stargate
Cluster Space
0719 hrs, GMT

In General Alexander’s mind, 1MIEF’s battle array resembled a kind of spreading haze of discrete ships, darting and shifting from side to side as they moved. Fleet movements were coordinated by the AI-controlled battlenet, which jinked individual ships to make them harder to target without running afoul of one another. The battlenet could coordinate fire, too, concentrating the volleys from a hundred ships on one Xul monster at a time. Under that kind of intensive bombardment, even the largest, thickest-skinned whale would be whittled down to a cloud of tumbling debris before long.

At the moment, the fleet’s heaviest fire was concentrated on a single Xul Type III, a monster code-named Nightmare-class, a flattened spheroid two kilometers across. White flares of light popped and strobed across the Xul vessel’s hull, pounding at it, battering it, sending gouts and streamers of gas and vaporizing metal spraying into space. A squadron of aerospace fighters were closing with it as well, slamming antimatter warheads into its shuddering bulk.

The vessel was still thirty thousand kilometers off, invisible to the unaided eye, but visible in crystalline detail through the battlenet datafeed, which was drawing in image feeds from several hundred drones spreading through battlespace.

The Nightmare was hurt, trailing plumes of escaping vapor that froze as it hit vacuum into glittering clouds of minute ice crystals. Craters gaped in the monster’s hull, glowing sullen red and orange within the shattered interior. Burn, you bastard, Alexander thought with a silent, fierce intensity. The war with the Xul had been unrelenting and without mercy on either side, a literal war to the death.

A moment later, something inside exploded with savage violence, blowing out a quarter of the Xul warship’s flank. What was left began to fold and crumple in upon itself. Xul ships generated micro black holes as part of their power and drive systems, and when their drive containment fields failed, those singularities tended to eat their way through the ship’s structure, devouring everything with which they came into contact and releasing a flood of hard radiation in their wakes.

Alexander could hear Taggart’s thoughts as the admiral gave orders to the fleet. Another large Xul huntership was being targeted now, as the massed weapons of 1MIEF’s warships shifted to another target—a Type II huntership a kilometer long and thirty-eight thousand kilometers distant. The fleet’s weaponry ran an impressive gamut—high-intensity lasers at both optical and X-ray frequencies, gigavolt plasma discharges, and a wide variety of projectiles and missile warheads—from kinetic kill projectiles to nukes to antimatter charges, with calibers ranging from a few millimeters to several meters. A high-energy storm of devastating warshots began slamming into this new target, scouring and ripping at its ceramic armor like a lightning-charged hailstorm.

However, more and more Xul vessels were moving and beginning to converge on the 1MIEF fleet.

“Ten seconds to expected detonation,” a new voice intoned within Alexander’s head. Then, “Five … four … three … two … one … mark.”

Alexander glanced toward the local star. Bloodstar, the red sun of Cluster Space, continued burning as before, of course, a sullen ember, little more than a pinpoint of ruby light. It would be another ten long minutes before the light from the exploding star reached them.

“Okay, Pappy,” Alexander told the disembodied voice. Pappy was the senior artificial intelligence in 1MIEF, named after an early Marine aviator named Gregory “Pappy” Boyington. “Give me observational data as soon as it’s available. Tag? You heard?”

“I did, General.”

“I suggest we start falling back to the stargate.”

“Affirmative, General.” Alexander heard him begin giving orders, sounding the tactical recall.

This was the tricky part of the operation, getting the forty-two Commonwealth warships that had already come through the stargate, along with over a hundred aerospace fighters and minor combatants, back through to Carson Space without being overwhelmed by the Xul counterattack. The Xul, as the Commonwealth had learned over the years, tended to be cautious. Swat their noses hard enough, and they might not follow up on an enemy raid for years. Still, the toughest part of any op, whether in space or on a planet’s surface, was in the withdrawal phase, when the last few ships or men covering a retreat were left to face overwhelming numbers alone.

The Marines were used to that situation, the Navy less so.

The Xul Type II was collapsing upon itself, now, dwindling with eerie rapidity as the black hole within swallowed it from the inside out. But AI scans of battlespace data indicated that there were as many as two thousand Xul warships in this system. Cluster Space, as was well known, was a major Xul node and operations center.

At the moment, the biggest question was whether or not the Xul would try to follow 1MIEF back through the stargate to Carson Space.

Hermes, largest of the ships of the human fleet, as well as the slowest and most clumsy, completed her reversal maneuver and began making her way back toward the gate.

About her flashed swarms of smaller craft, including the retreating Marines of the initial assault force. Alexander flashed an order to Pappy. “Make sure you track every damned one of those M-CAPs,” he said. “Coordinate the withdrawal with Smedley.”

“Affirmative, General,” Pappy’s calm voice replied. “We will leave no one behind.”

Of course, how the hell did you guarantee something like that? Battlespace was a bewildering soup, of ships large and small, of retreating M-CAPs, of aerospace fighters, Ontos transports, drones, sensor and communications probes, missiles, and drifting chunks of white-hot wreckage. Many of the fighters and Marine assault capsules were damaged, some disabled completely and adrift in emptiness.

But they had to try.

Green One,
AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,
Cluster Space
0722 hrs, GMT

“Pull out, Skipper! Pull out!”

Wayne’s voice shrieking in her mind wasn’t helping. Lee blocked it off and focused instead on urging her Wyvern to exert maximum lateral thrust, and then some, as she flashed toward the loom of the Xul monster.

It was a Behemoth, the code name for the Xul Type IV huntership. It had been noted and photographed at several Xul node-bases, but for a long time the assumption had been that it was a fortress, immobile.

In fact, Commonwealth Intelligence wasn’t sure whether the Xul themselves differentiated between fortress and warship. All that really was known about the Behemoth was that it was big and deadly—a slightly flattened spheroid five kilometers across—and that it was often posted as a sentry near Xul-controlled stargates or worlds, but that it could move under its own power when necessary. The Xul equivalent of the Alcubierre Drive gave it FTL capability, and there was evidence that it possessed a space-matrix translation capability akin to that of the MIEF’s Hermes and other extremely large Commonwealth ships.

Moments ago, this Behemoth had dropped out of FTL almost directly between the Shadow Hawks and the stargate, emerging into normal space with the signature burst of light bent and focused along its wake of warped space. Lee had ordered her surviving fighters to disperse and accelerate, getting past the Behemoth by using antimatter missiles as screens.

Major Lee’s weapons bays were empty, but she could go into an attack approach anyway, seeking to draw off some of the defensive fire from the enemy batteries.

Thank God, she thought, for the AIs. …

AI-piloted aerospace fighters never stretched the envelope. They flew conservatively … and fought conservatively as well, and here was a perfect example: the Shadow Hawks’ AI fighters still had missiles left in their weapons bays. Expending antiship missiles on distant targets with a low probability of hitting with them just so you didn’t need to take them back to the carrier was a human way of thinking and fighting, not one of intelligent software.

She was damned glad three AI-piloted Wyverns in her formation had survived, though. Their remaining missiles probably wouldn’t destroy the enemy vessel, not without some extraordinary luck, but they would give them a chance to get past the Behemoth. Antimatter explosions blossoming against the Xul hull would screen the hurtling fighters from enemy sensors. She had ordered Green Five to loose its two remaining AM-98 ship-killers going in. Seconds later, twin blue-white flares of light had erupted against the Xul huntership’s hull like a close pair of hot suns just ahead. Now, Lee’s Wyvern was hurtling toward the fast-expanding bubbles of plasma and vaporizing debris as her wingman screamed at her to pull up.

Her Wyvern hit the shell of fast-moving plasma with the shock of striking a solid wall, but her inertial dampers cushioned her through the worst of it. She could feel the burn of hard radiation, though, as it seared through her shields, and then she was in a tumble, spinning nose-for-tail a few meters above the tortured metal and ceramic landscape of the Xul Behemoth as alarms shrieked and flashed over the Wyvern’s link with her brain.

The jolt had been enough to knock her out of a trajectory that would have sent her slamming into the huntership’s hull, however. In an instant, she was past the alien vessel’s bulk, struggling with her ship’s mind-linked thrusters to bring the tumbling fighter back under control. Damage alerts shrilled at her, and with a thought-click she silenced them. She knew she was in trouble, damn it, and didn’t need the irritating reminder. …

The universe spun past her awareness. “Pappy!” she cried. “Let’s have some help, here!”

The AI was already helping, and she knew it. She considered, then rejected, the idea of having him stabilize the wildly spinning view of her surroundings being fed into her brain. Pappy2 had enough on his electronic mind at the moment. She concentrated instead on trying to slow the fighter’s spin, letting Pappy work through her to precisely balance the firing of her thrusters.

Two of her stabilizing thrusters were off-line, which made it tricky. Her comnet, her connection with the other ships in her squadron, was down as well. Other electronic systems were beginning to fail in cascade.

And then, without further warning, Pappy went off-line as well. It took her a few moments to realize that he was down, and when she did, she bit off a sharp curse. Without the AI’s help, she was going to have a hell of a time navigating to the stargate, if she could get her essential ship’s systems on-line and working again.

The damaged Wyvern continued its nose-over-tail tumble into the night. …

UCS Hermes
Stargate
Cluster Space/Carson Space
0727 hrs, GMT

The distant curve of the stargate flattened as Hermes approached the oddly distorted space at the gate’s center, until it was a golden straight line bisecting the encircling sky. An instant later, Alexander felt the faint, internal shiver and disorientation as Hermes passed through the stargate.

The flattened pinwheel of the Galaxy, the reddish beehive of the globular cluster, the advancing Xul armada all vanished, wiped from the sky.

The Marine expeditionary force was back in Carson Space.

Or most of them were, at any rate. Fighters and Marine assault pods were still coming through. Alexander opened a channel to the commanding officer of CVW-5, Samar’s fighter wing.

“How many fighters did we lose, Reg?” Alexander asked.

COCVW-5 was Colonel Regin Macalvey, a tall, lanky Marine from EarthRing’s Skyholme Sector. He was currently in his F/A-4140 Stardragon, regrouping his squadrons as they came back through the gate.

“All together, General? Or are you asking about the Shadow Hawks?”

“Both.”

“We’re still tallying, sir. Losses for the whole wing might be as high as twelve percent. We’re still waiting for some stragglers to report in.”

“And the Shadow Hawks?”

“Four ships have reported in so far, General. Out of sixteen. There may be some more, though, still on the other side of the gate.”

“I see.”

“We’ll want to go back across and have a close look, General. Once this little dust-up is settled.” He didn’t add that fighters stranded on the far side of the gate were going to have some trouble when the star over there blew. If it blew. …

“If we can, CAG,” Alexander replied. “CAG” was an ancient term for a carrier’s aerospace wing commander, a relic of the days when he was called “Commander, Air Group.”

An assessment probe was going to be vital after this op, Alexander reflected … but that assumed that the red star went nova, that the Xul node on the other side of the gate was destroyed, and that 1MIEF wasn’t going to have to destroy the gate to keep the bad guys out.

A lot of assumptions. The next few minutes were going to be very busy indeed.

“Sir, we have Marines and AIs both still on the Cluster side of the gate. Alive. We can’t leave them, there.”

“I know that, CAG. And you know there are no promises.”

“But—”

“Get your people squared away, Colonel.” Alexander was watching the data feed update itself. Every few minutes, another reconnaissance drone would slip through the gate with a tactical update to the fleet communications net. As the data flowed through Alexander’s link, he could see the Xul fleet massing on the other side, still approaching the gate. “We might have some visitors very soon, now.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Macalvey sounded bitter. Like any good Marine CO, he genuinely cared about the men and women under his command, cared even about the AIs. His personnel record mentioned that Macalvey was a member of the Church of Mind. It explained a great deal, not that explanations were required here. Alexander himself was a long-lapsed Neopag, but he had the Marine officer’s deeply ingrained concern for his people.

In any case, there were sound practical reasons for getting back into Cluster Space when this was all over. The three Euler Starblasters were still on the other side of the gate, if they’d survived, along with a large menagerie of smaller probes and drones. He wanted to recover them if at all possible. The more the Commonwealth could learn about the ways and means of blowing up stars, the better. It was their primary weapon, now, against the Xul hordes.

He sensed Admiral Taggart’s awareness. “Our fleet is in position, General,” Taggart told him. “If they come through …”

“With luck, they’ll wait to think things through,” Alexander told him. The slowness of Xul tactical responses was proverbial, though it never did to rely too much on their past performance. The enemy had been known to pull a surprise move from time to time in the past.

“Yeah. The question is whether that pipsqueak sun over there will pack enough of a bang to get them all.”

“Or if they’ll be warned by their friends closer in.” The Xul, it was known, possessed FTL communications. A base or ship close to the exploding sun might have time to transmit a warning to other Xul vessels farther out before it was engulfed.

So many unknowns.

Alexander checked the time. One minute more until the big question was answered. If the star had exploded on schedule, the nova’s wave front was nearly to the gate by now.

The last recon drone imagery showed seven of the massive Xul hunterships less than a thousand kilometers from the gate, and still closing with it. The red dwarf star continued to burn in the distance, casting a bloody glare across their sunlit surfaces. Deeper in the system were hundreds, no, well over a thousand more, pinpointed by the X-ray and gamma radiation loosed by their black-hole power plants.

If that entire enemy fleet managed to come through the gate into Carlson Space, 1MIEF would be finished.

Space within the ring of the stargate shimmered. Abruptly, with the suddenness of nightmare, the long, slender prow of a Xul Type I, gleaming gold in the light of the Carson sun, emerged from the empty space inside the gate’s ring.

“All ships!” Admiral Taggart commanded over the combat link. “Fire!”

Still emerging from the warped space of the stargate, the Xul huntership was caught in a web of high-energy beams and exploding missiles. Taggart had positioned the retreating Expeditionary Force fleet to take maximum advantage of the tactical bottleneck; the Xul ships could only emerge into Carson Space through the twenty-kilometer lumen of the stargate ring, and over a hundred combatant vessels of 1MIEF could focus all of their fire on that one tiny region of space.

The incredibly tough ceramic and metal alloy of the Xul warship’s outer hull withered, rippled, and peeled away beneath that blast, as high-velocity kinetic-kill projectiles slammed into it at an appreciable fraction of light speed and plasma bolts seared into it at star-core temperatures. Moments later, the first nuclear and antimatter warheads began slamming into it, and the area immediately in front of the gate opening was blotted out by expanding spheres of plasma.

Under that ferocious onslaught, no material substance could remain intact for long. The Xul ship’s fiercely radiating, needle-shaped hull continued moving into Carson Space, but its drive and weapons systems were dead. Pieces of its internal skeleton were visible now, and the remnants of its hull cladding were softening and streaming away as metallic vapor.

But even as it drifted clear, four more Xul ships were emerging from the gate interface.

Thirty seconds to go … an eternity in the lightning-quick stab and parry of space-naval combat.

Major Lee,
AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,
Cluster Space
0731 hrs, GMT

It had taken several minutes, but at last she’d been able to stabilize her tumbling spacecraft. The vast sprawl of the Galactic spiral was at last no longer sweeping across her mind’s eye. Behind her, the local sun, a ruby pinpoint, continued to burn in the far distance.

The situation was damned bad. Com and nav systems both were out, as was her link with Pappy2. And there was worse. When she oriented her Wyvern to line up with the stargate and thought-clicked her main drive, nothing happened.

Stifling the sharp surge of fear, she began running diagnostics. Like other aerospace fighters, the Wyvern’s main drive drew energy from a ZPF quantum power transfer unit, using quantum entanglement to transmit power from one point to another without actually having to cross the space between. Enormous zero-point field taps on board large capital ships sucked potentially unlimited power out of the sub-fabric of space itself and routed it directly to field-entangled power receivers on board individual aerospace fighters.

The advantage, of course, was that fighters didn’t need to carry their own power generating systems for drives or weapons. The down side was that the carriers and big Marine transports had to be closely protected, since the destruction of a carrier would shut down all of her fighters. Briefly, Lee wondered if the Samar had been destroyed, and that was why she wasn’t drawing any juice.

But … no. Samar was back in Carson Space. She’d come through the gate, released her fighters, then returned—safely, so far as the battlespace telemetry could report. The problem, obviously, was on her end of things.

It was tempting to assume that something was blocking or intercepting the energy transmission, but Lee knew that wasn’t the way things worked. She shook her head, frustrated. It still felt a bit strange to her … knowing that she should still be drawing energy from a Marine transport some thirty thousand light years away.

That was part of the technological magic of zero-point energy taps. The energy wasn’t so much transmitted as it was simultaneously co-existent in two separate places, on board the transport and inside the QPT receiver of her drive. Some day, the techies claimed, that bit of quantum-physics magic might make possible the ancient dream of teleportation from point to point; in the meantime, it was enough that her fighter could draw energy from her mothership even at this range. When it didn’t work, the human mind tended to fall back on what felt like common sense. If energy wasn’t coming through, something must be blocking it.

The truth was that some essential component in her own quantum power tap receiver must be down. She might pick up the cause through her diagnostics, but the system was complex and a full set might take hours.

Damn it. If Pappy2 had been up and running, he’d be able to track the information down in no time. Her own personal AI was little more than a secretary, able to sort through incoming data and present it in a way that made sense, but unable to show much in the way of initiative or creativity.

She hated feeling this helpless.

She considered the Wyvern’s suicide switch.

All Commonwealth fighters carried the things, a means of exploding a small antimatter warhead located beneath her seat. There were five steps to go through before the thing could be unsafed and triggered, but once she made the final connection—a manual button accessed underneath a lock-down cap rather than a thought-click—she would never feel a thing. The system had been installed in all fighters and most small military craft as a means of avoiding being patterned by the Xul … or for situations such as this one, where battle damage had rendered the craft inoperable and there was nothing to look forward to but suffocation or radiation poisoning.

She discarded the thought. She wasn’t ready to make that decision, not just yet.

The situation was bad, but at least some of her systems were still running—life support and, thank the gods, her ship’s sensors, which were still feeding data over her cerebral link. That meant she was picking up battlespace data from the far-flung net of drones and probes still adrift on this side of the gate. From the look of things, a lot of Xul ships were gathering, moving toward one of several stargate icons extending across her IHD in a broad, sweeping curve.

Cluster Space was a very special target, she knew. She and the other members of her squadron had been thoroughly briefed before this op, and had downloaded a lot of data going all the way back to the 22nd Century.

In 2170, a Marine strike force had entered this system, sometime after the first encounter with Xul ships at the Sirius Stargate. Backtracking on the path followed by the Xul force, they’d discovered the Cluster Space system, far out among the halo stars at the outer fringe of the Galaxy, at least thirty thousand light years from Sol. They’d emerged from a different kind of stargate, a broad tunnel drilled into the heart of a twenty-kilometer-wide planetoid. According to the records, the Marines had recovered a damaged fighter that had fallen through the gate during the battle, planted antimatter charges, and escaped back through to the Sirius Gate before the charges had detonated, destroying the asteroid gate in Cluster Space and erasing the path back to Sirius.

That raid, quite possibly, had prevented the Xul from discovering Earth—less than nine light years from the Sirius Gate—for another century and a half, buying Humankind precious time. Not until 2314 had the Xul discovered Sol, launching the devastating bombardment against Earth that now, almost six centuries later, was still called Armageddonfall.

The idea now was to keep that from ever happening again. The next time the Xul visited Sol, they might well finish the job. They could destroy stars as well.

Elint—electronic intelligence—acquired by 1MIEF nine years ago during the battles in Aquila Space and at Starwall had revealed a wealth of various stargate connections, and the intelligence services both of the Humankind Commonwealth and of the Marines specifically had been mining that data ever since, trying to assemble a useful map of gate interconnections.

There were, it was estimated, some millions of stargates scattered across the Galaxy, and each gate could be tuned to connect with as many as several thousand other stargates. The web of interconnections was extraordinarily complex and far-flung, and human explorers and their AI analogues had thus far visited only a tiny, tiny fraction of all of the possibilities.

But intelligence gathered during a gate reconnaissance at Sirius four years ago had led to the discovery of the Carson Gate, and that, in turn, had led here, to a major Xul node in Cluster Space. Probes sent from Carson to the Cluster had verified that this was another route to the Cluster Node; in fact, there were no fewer than fifteen stargates in orbit around that single tiny, red-dwarf star, making this system a major communications and travel hub. The destruction of that one gate in this system over seven centuries ago might have temporarily delayed the Xul discovery of Sol and Earth, but it probably hadn’t even inconvenienced the Xul, who appeared to use the gate network to maintain their xenocidal watch over the teeming worlds of the Galaxy.

This time, the Commonwealth possessed the technology to close all of the gates. From experience, they knew that a nova probably wouldn’t destroy them outright. Each gate was distant enough from the local star that even a nova wouldn’t seriously affect it. But the nova would destroy all or most of the Xul ships, fortresses, and other structures orbiting in the local star, as well as annihilate any bases located on the worlds of the star’s planetary system. When 1MIEF went back through the Carson/Cluster gatelink, Marine assault teams could be dispatched to each gate in the system with antimatter charges that would finish the job once and for all.

Those icons appearing in her In-Head Display represented a few of the local system’s stargates, along with hundreds of red icons marking Xul warships within the range of the MIEF’s battlespace sensor drones. It occurred to her that she was about to get a ringside seat on just what happened to Xul vessels on the nova side of a stargate during an MIEF raid.

Of course, she didn’t expect to survive the experience. Any blast wave that seriously damaged a Xul huntership would sweep her little fighter away like a dust mite in a hurricane.

She checked to see that her recorders were going, however. The MIEF would be sending assessment teams through afterward, and if there was anything left of her Wyvern, the automated beacon transmitted by its rad-shielded storage unit would bring them in for a recovery. Of course, all of the unmanned battlespace drones had the same sort of storage, but there might be something unique to her viewpoint. Standard operational procedure required her to take steps to preserve the electronic record of what happened, just in case.

It also gave her a chance of recording a message, with a chance that it would reach family and friends back home in Saskatchewan.

Of course, she’d not had much to do with them since her radiation exposure at Starwall nine years ago. Somehow, knowing she would never have children again, she’d drifted apart from her blood family. The last time she’d linked with them had been … when? During one of 1MIEF’s returns to Sol for resupply, certainly. But not four months ago, the last time she was there. Maybe two times before that, early last year. …

She would have to consult her personal memories, currently inaccessible in her implant hardware, to be sure. Even though it was her choice, she tended to follow Marine guidelines when it came to family memories, locking them into hardware storage during a mission to avoid complicating distractions at an inopportune moment. Like they always said, “If the Corps had wanted you to have a civilian family, they’d have issued you one in boot camp.”

Hell, right now she couldn’t even remember any of her parents’ faces.

Fuck it, she thought. Just like you’ve been saying. The Corps is your family, all the family you’ll ever need. …

Tears were drifting between her eyes and the inside of her helmet visor, tiny, silvery spheres floating in microgravity.

How much time did she have? If everything was on sched, the blast wave from the local star should be very nearly—

Without preamble, Bloodstar began growing brighter.

5

1506.1111

UCS Hermes
Stargate
Carson Space
0731 hrs, GMT

“Minus three … two … one … mark!” The AI’s voice in Alexander’s mind said, counting off the last seconds. If Bloodlight had indeed gone nova, the shock wave should just now have reached the stargate. Depending on how the gate was tuned, the blast could pass through an open gate, emerging from another gate light years away.

That didn’t appear to be the case this time, however. Four Xul hunterships were drifting just in front of the Carson Space gate, wreathed in lances of plasma and detonating nuclear and antimatter warheads. But nothing had emerged from the other side, no light, no hard radiation.

Had something gone wrong over there?

It was entirely possible that red dwarf stars were simply too low-mass for a Euler triggership to affect. That had always been one of the possibilities, one of the dangers of this mission.

Or perhaps the triggerships had been delayed.

There was no way to tell, not from this side of the gate, or at least not until another battlespace drone emerged to update the combatnet.

One of the four Xul hunterships in the kill zone, a Type I newly emerged from the gate, was beginning to break up under the hellacious, focused bombardment. Under the concentrated fire of every capital ship of the MIEF, even a kilometer-long Xul warship couldn’t hold up for long. A portion of the needle-sharp prow broke away, spinning rapidly end over end. The rest of the Xul vessel was beginning to crumple, and intense radiation was bathing the area. The black hole inside its engineering spaces must have broken free, and was now eating its way through the Xul ship’s bowels.

But the Xul ships were firing back, sending a storm of laser energy and plasma bolts back at their tormentors. Three destroyers, Foster, Johnson, and Mevernen, had been destroyed just within the past couple of minutes, and the light cruiser Yorktown had been badly damaged, savaged by a concentrated volley of Xul weaponry. Now the heavy cruiser Maine was coming under fire, staggering as high-velocity mass-driver rounds slammed into her in a devastating fusillade.

The Commonwealth vessels continued firing, however, with unrelenting determination. As Alexander watched, the hull of the Type I twisted and dwindled, falling in upon itself. There was a final flash of radiation, from visible light through X-ray and gamma wavelengths … and then there was nothing remaining but drifting debris.

“Target Alpha destroyed!” someone called over the tactical net. “Pour it on, people!”

Two more Xul ships, another Type I and a Type II, were receiving the brunt of the expeditionary force’s fire now. The fourth of the group, a Type II, was limping now after receiving a barrage of antimatter warheads across its dorsal surface, with streams of hot gas gushing from several gaping rents in its hull and freezing almost immediately into clouds of glittering ice crystals. It appeared to be trying to reverse course back through the gate.

“Let Charlie go,” Taggart’s voice said over the net, identifying the retreating vessel. “Concentrate on Bravo and Delta.”

Bravo, the Type I, was starting to come apart under the heavy barrage, but it was also accelerating now, pushing deeper into Carson Space. A suicide attack? Or simply a breakdown in communications on board the stricken vessel? The Commonwealth firing line tracked it, continuing to pour fire into its shuddering, crumbling hull. It swept past the PanEuropean gunboat Delacroix at a range of less than ten kilometers. Delacroix’s turrets spun as they followed the Xul warship, slamming round after round of nano-D shells into the enemy’s flank.

Alexander had strongly protested the integration of the PE, Chinese, and Russian squadrons into what was supposed to be a Commonwealth naval-Marine expeditionary force, but the Commonwealth Senate had been … insistent, primarily because of the high losses among the Commonwealth forces over the past few years. Opposed or not, Alexander believed in delivering praise when it was appropriate. He made a mental note to mention Delacroix’s deadly accurate fire when he composed his after-action report.

Assuming he survived to write it, of course. If the star next door had not gone nova, 1MIEF would shortly be in very serious trouble.

AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,
Cluster Space
0731 hrs, GMT

Something had happened to the red dwarf. That much was clear simply through the Wyvern’s optical inputs. But the effect was not what Lee had been expecting.

Within the past several seconds, the star had visibly grown much brighter. Lee’s radiation sensors were off-line, but she suspected there was a strong UV, X-ray, and gamma component to the brightening as well, enough to give some teeth to that flare of visible light.

The increase in energy was more gradual than it should have been, however. Xul ships appeared now in sharp relief between their sunlit and shadowed surfaces, but their hulls weren’t softening and melting, weren’t boiling away under the assault.

Lee knew from the pre-mission briefings that there was a chance the local star could not be triggered into going nova. Like other typical red dwarfs, the local star was comparatively low-mass—about twenty percent the mass, in this case, of Earth’s sun. In nature, only massive stars could go nova, and traditional novae were thought to occur only in binary star systems, when matter from one star fell into the other. The Euler triggerships, moving within a bubble of sharply warped space, distorted the core of a star as they passed through, inducing a rebound effect, it was thought, that generated an explosion of the star’s core. The question was whether a red dwarf, which could be anywhere from forty percent down to about eight percent of the mass of Earth’s sun, could be physically induced to explode. There’d been talk of testing the theory on a red dwarf within Commonwealth space before actually launching this raid, but the thought of blowing up a star, even a tiny one, simply to test theory had been too much for a majority of the members of the Commonwealth Senate. The request, put through by 1MIEF’s science team, had been denied.

Still, it should have worked. Red dwarfs were smaller and cooler than other stars on the main sequence, but they were still stars, working fusion magic in the transformation of hydrogen to helium. There was another consideration as well. The Cluster Space sun was not a typical halo star—one of the thin haze of extremely ancient, cool red stars surrounding the Galaxy, but must instead be a straggler from the Galaxy’s spiral arms. Its lone attendant planet proved that much. Stars from inside the Galaxy—Population I stars, as they’d been designated since the 20th Century—possessed heavier elements besides the usual stellar components of hydrogen and helium and therefore could form planetary systems. They were considered to be metal-rich, the word metal in this instance referring to any element heavier than helium whether it was chemically considered to be a metal or not. Population II stars, the halo stars surrounding the Galaxy, were ancient survivals from an earlier galactic epoch; without heavy elements in their make-up, they couldn’t form planets.

The spectrum of the Cluster Space dwarf showed lots of carbon. Likely, Bloodlight possessed a core of carbon, a by-product of stellar fusion that must have been accumulating for tens of billions of years. The MIEF science teams felt that the rebound effect within a carbon core should result in the detonation of a nova—at least a small one—despite the star’s low mass.

Lee watched the star for a full minute, looking through her cockpit’s transparency with her naked eyes, now, rather than using the Wyvern’s electronic feed. Despite the increase in overall brightness, she could look directly into that ruby spark without discomfort, without her helmet’s optics dialing down to preserve her vision.

Possibly what had been triggered was a stellar flare; red dwarfs, especially small ones, often were unstable enough in their radiation output to earn the name flare stars. Such stars—Proxima Centauri, just 4.3 light years from Sol, was such a star—could increase in brightness by as much as two or three hundred percent, in some cases.

Whatever had happened, it was bad. The Xul fleet hadn’t even been inconvenienced by the brightening of the sun, and was continuing to move toward the stargate. The MIEF would be arrayed on the far side, now, in Carson Space, and fighting for its life. Once General Alexander decided that the Xul were going to cross over to Carson Space in force, he would detonate a number of antimatter charges on the Carson Space stargate. That would stop more Xul from crossing over.

It would also strand Lee and any other survivors from the MIEF fighter wings that might still be on this side. Again she tried to engage her ship’s auto-repair functions, tried to bring Pappy₂ back on-line, tried to fire up the main drive.

Nothing.

She elected to focus all of her energy on reviving Pappy. The AI could handle electronics repairs better than she.

And it would be nice to have someone to talk to, especially someone who might be able to make sense of the screwy data coming in from the Cluster Space star. It looked like—

Abruptly, the brightening star exploded, growing much brighter, and then still brighter, until the cockpit transparency went black.

Something must’ve delayed the explosion, she thought. That, or the Euler triggerships took their sweet time getting to the star.

She tried shifting back to her Wyvern’s electronic feed, and got nothing but static. Shit! She was cut off now from the outside, unable to see with her own eyes or through the Wyvern’s electronic senses. Apparently, the radiation from the exploding star had knocked the rest of her sensors off-line. She’d been helpless before; now she was helpless and blind.

At this point there was nothing she could do but wait. She noted that the temperature of her outer hull was rising now—at minus thirty degrees Celsius, up over one hundred degrees in the past thirty seconds. She didn’t know for sure how hot it would get. Her Wyvern’s hull integrity might well hold up, and she would survive this initial pulse. The killer in a nova, at least this far away from ground zero, was the cloud of charged particles lagging behind the speed-of-light radiation front by several hours. That would kill her, no doubt about it.

She considered the suicide switch again. It would save the waiting … and possibly some pain. She wasn’t sure just how bad a dose of radiation she was getting right now, but it might be bad enough to kill her relatively quickly, over the course of several hours, say.

If she started vomiting, she would know.

She was determined not to be trapped adrift again, helpless and doomed to a slow death. Once had been enough, nine years ago, at Starwall. The similarity of that incident to her situation now was shrieking at her in the back of her mind.

It would be very easy to end things. Now.

On the other hand, she was a Marine … and Marines didn’t give up, not that easily, anyhow. There would always be time to use the switch later, if things got too bad.

Almost fifteen minutes later, something hit her Wyvern’s hull.

She felt the jar, and heard a sharp, metallic clang through the hull from somewhere aft. It startled her so badly she almost started the suicide switch enable procedure. If the Xul had grappled her fighter and were taking her on board one of their hunterships …

But she also knew that the Xul patterning procedure happened quickly and electronically.

There was another clang, and a sound like metal scraping metal. What the hell was going on back there? Damn it, she wished she could see.

Something banged against her blacked-out canopy. She flinched, then braced herself. If they were coming for her through the canopy …

What she felt next, though, was a surge of acceleration. Zero-gravity gave way to a definite sense of weight, pushing her back against her acceleration couch.

Okay, someone had grabbed her and was taking her some-place. She wondered if the Xul took prisoners in ways other than patterning them and uploading them into a virtual reality within their computer network.

Then her canopy transparency cleared and, once more, she could look out into the emptiness of space. Three large, utterly black shapes surrounded her Wyvern, two just off her bow, one to port, one to starboard, and a third above and slightly behind. That third shape, seen only in dead-black silhouette, had positioned itself between her canopy and the exploding sun; riding in the object’s shadow, her canopy had once again become transparent.

The shapes, she saw with a surge of heartfelt relief, were Wyverns—needle-prowed forward of the cockpit bulge, flat and disk-shaped aft. She could just make out the hull number on the Wyvern forward and to port—identifying it as 2nd Lieutenant Traci Wayne’s ship. The wave of relief nearly left her trembling. Three of the Wyverns in her squadron had come after her. The noises she’d heard were tow cables; fired from special ports in a Wyvern’s hull, several meters of their free ends were coated in nano sheaths that, on contact, welded themselves to the target hull. She was inextricably bound to the two Wyverns forward, now, at least until a signal from the towing vessels deactivated the nano-binder’s programming.

Her first thought was a surging rush of joy. I’m not alone, she thought. I never was. …

Her second was one of anger. Idiots! They should have returned through the gate, not hung around looking for me!

Still, she knew she would have remained.

And she was going home.

Assuming her entourage could get her through the gate, of course. Xul ships were continuing to crowd up close to the gate, anxious, perhaps, to escape the doomed star system. Or anxious, perhaps, just to get at the Commonwealth fleet waiting on the other side. Xul psychology was still largely a matter of guesswork. They were not human, and they did not think in the same ways humans did.

In any case, the three operable fighters and their dead-weight tow would have to thread an unpleasant gauntlet to get through. She could see a Type II making the passage now, moving through the interface at the center of the ring, vanishing from existence as it entered the opening. Five smaller hunterships and one huge Type III hung near the gateway.

Her escorts were beginning to fade slightly as they switched on their phase-shift gear. While not true invisibility, the fighters were just enough outside of normal spacetime that they appeared indistinct and somewhat blurred. Her own phase-shift gear, like nearly everything else on board her damaged fighter, was inoperable. At least, though, the Xul would be tracking only one fighter on its way to the stargate, not four.

Acceleration continued to push her back into her couch. Along with so much else, her inertial dampers were off-line. She hoped Wayne and the pilot of the other towing Wyvern had guessed that, because if they started boosting at a hundred gravities, they would be taking her off the couch with a sponge back in Carson Space. It felt like they were keeping it low, though. She guessed they were pulling about five gravities now, maybe a bit more. Her flight suit was re-conforming to provide pressure in her extremities and gut to keep blood from pooling there.

The acceleration increased. How much? Eight gravities? Ten? At around ten Gs, she knew, she would black out.

Well, it wasn’t absolutely vital that she stay conscious, but she wanted to if for no other reason than that she wanted to see. The stargate was expanding rapidly now as the quartet of fighters hurtled toward it. Wayne and the other pilot, she saw, were angling toward one rim of the stargate. Smart. It would keep them clear of those last few Xul warships jockeying for position near the gate’s center, and she doubted that they would open fire on the fighters and risk damaging the stargate.

She wondered why the Xul weren’t firing on them now. Phase-shift gear wasn’t that good at hiding a fighter, not at knife-fighting range, like this. Then she realized that the enemy might well be filling the sky around her with volleys of high-energy weapons fire and she would never know it, not without the software that painted incoming beams and attached icons to missiles. Without computer enhancement, she wouldn’t see a thing until something actually hit her, and then it would be too late.

Lee wished she could talk to Wayne and the others … then thought better of it. They were very busy right at the moment, and needed full concentration for a maneuver that made threading a needle at arm’s length child’s play by comparison.

Closer, now, and faster. Her vision was narrowing now, her peripheral field going black, and her arms were too heavy to move. She wished she could have another look at the Galaxy sprawled across heaven, but she could no longer turn her head. All she could see was directly ahead—the rapidly expanding stargate, with a Type III Xul huntership approaching the gate’s center.

Well, the nova light was probably so bright by now she wouldn’t have been able to see it, anyway. Stargate and Xul vessel both had taken on a hard-edged, blue-white glare where they reflected the glow of Bloodlight coming from behind her. Come to think of it, that provided the four fighters with another advantage—coming down out of the sun. Any Xul sensors looking back that way must be fried by now.

She caught a glimpse of one curving arc of ring-surface flattening out just to the left of dead ahead. And then …

UCS Hermes
Stargate
Carson Space
0748 hrs, GMT

“Four more fighters coming through, General,” Colonel Macalvey reported, his voice tight with excitement. Every remaining MIEF fighter was in space, now, swarming about the incoming Xul hunterships as they drifted in an immense and untidy clot at the center of the stargate. “Tough to see them in all that crap.”

Alexander didn’t reply. The debris cloud in front of the stargate was so thick now that it was tough to see anything, but three of the fighters were broadcasting their transponder signals at full intensity—hoping to ward off so-called friendly fire as they came into the kill zone—and battlespace drones emplaced on the stargate ring itself were picking up and boosting those signals. The transmissions revealed the tightly grouped icons of three … no, four Wyverns flying scant meters off the inner side of the stargate’s ring as they streaked through into Carson Space.

Good. A few more Marines had made it back. …

And with them came a burst of signal-boosted telemetry, updating the battlenet. Alexander felt the stream of raw information flowing into Hermes’ computer network. From the little he could grab, unanalyzed, Bloodlight had exploded on the other side, though not as soon as, and not with the violence, expected. As soon as the data were downloaded, the science team AIs would be fine-combing it, updating the available information on Xul warships coming through the gate.

The big question, of course, was whether the violence of the exploding star had damaged the enemy vessels, hurt them enough to stop them from coming through into Carson Space.

So far, the battle was going well, and at least vaguely according to plan. In any battle, the key determining factor is the terrain. Open space has no terrain, and tactics must be dictated by the relative technology possessed by the combatants, and by numbers.

The stargate, however, impressed a type of terrain on battlespace, a bottleneck, specifically, that allowed only a few ships to pass from one side to the other at a time, and that only slowly. In open space, the Xul possessed staggering advantages in technology and firepower, but the stargate bottleneck allowed Admiral Taggart to mass the weaponry of the entire MIEF against a single, tiny area and focus it all on the Xul ships as they passed through into the Carson Space kill zone.

That kill zone was visible now, even to the unaided eye, as a thick fog and a tangle of wreckage adrift in front of the Carson stargate. As volley upon volley of high-energy beam weapons gutted each Xul ship coming through the gate, gouts of internal gases and molten hull material erupted into space, freezing in seconds into glittering droplets and creating a dense haze. Nuclear and antimatter warheads added expanding spheres of hot plasma to the haze, and throughout were tangled bits of debris, much of it still glowing white-hot.

The stargate was twenty kilometers across, and already the nebula of debris covered a volume of space much wider than that. It was actually becoming difficult to see what was going on at the cloud’s center. The radiation there was intense enough to scramble most sensors, though the ring-emplaced sensors were still doing a good job of spotting most of the stuff coming through.

The Xul warships continued to emerge, visible only as large shapes half-glimpsed through the debris cloud. They were coming through at low speed—at eighty to ninety kilometers per hour—and colliding with the drifting wreckage. While they weren’t moving fast enough to cause significant damage to their outer hulls with the collisions, they appeared to be disoriented, as though they weren’t expecting space to be so crowded with wreckage and debris.

Fire continued to rain down upon each in turn, tearing great gashes in ceramic-metal hull material that glowed red and orange with the intensity of the bombardment. The space in front of the stargate pulsed and strobed with the silent flashes of detonating antimatter warheads, and the debris haze was thick enough that plasma bolts and laser beams had become visible to the unaided eye, illuminated by the trails of vaporizing particles of dust and ice.

Those Xul warships that worked their way clear of the man-made nebula found themselves at the focus of long-range bombardment from nearly one hundred Commonwealth warships, and by the short-range jab and sting of Marine aerospace fighters.

Over the past twenty minutes, the battle had slowly transformed into a slaughter. From his vantage point, he could watch the Xul craft emerge from the gate, struggle to orient themselves, and come under that highly focused, devastating fire.

And, under that assault, one by one, the Xul hunterships died.

But the plan called for saving one of the monsters, a big one, if possible. …

Penetrator Team Savage
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Carson Space
0804 hrs, GMT

First Lieutenant Charel Ramsey brought the palm of his hand down on the link contact, and, with a heady surge of energy pulsing through his conscious mind, he became a god.

Ramsey was newly arrived on board the MIEF’s flagship. He’d joined her after a passage through from Earth on the heavy cruiser San Diego only four weeks ago, part of the reinforcement and resupply convoy operation designated Starlight III. As a new graduate of the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center at Sinus Medii, on Luna, he’d been assigned to the expeditionary force’s N-2 division, answering to General Alexander’s command constellation directly and based here on board the Hermes. As an N-2 intelligence officer, he’d been assigned to a penetrator team.

And he was going in hot.

Integration complete, a voice—partially his own—said over the Intel net. Ramsey-Thoth now ready for launch.

Ramsey’s body was lying on one of the link couches inside Hermes’ Combat Ops Center, or COC, but his mind was … elsewhere. Linked by his neural implant system into Hermes’ computer network, with all other input signals blanked by his software, his mind’s eye was now residing within a narrow, tightly bounded virtual space representing a K-794 Spymaster probe.

Ramsey’s thoughts were integrated now with a powerful artificial intelligence given the name “Thoth,” an apt enough name, since the original Thoth had been the ancient Egyptian god of science, writing, knowledge … and magic. Designed to operate in this curious blend of human and artificial intelligence, Thoth provided Ramsey’s viewpoint with the speed, power, precision, and data acquisition functions of an AI. Ramsey provided purely human talents of flexibility, creativity, and intuition not yet possible for even the most powerful AIs.

The subjective effect was to give Ramsey a thrilling, deep-centered sense of truly godlike power and control, a feeling utterly unlike any other. It felt … wonderful. Addictively so.

“Probe Ramsey-Thoth is clear for launch,” the voice of Lieutenant Karen Hodges said in his mind. She would be his link with COC Control. “At your discretion, Gunny.”

“Copy that,” Ramsey replied.

“Be advised that a Type III is now transiting the gate,” Hodges added. Images built themselves up in an open window in Ramsey’s mind. He could see the two-kilometer Nightmare slowly emerging from the gate, its hull beginning to sparkle with the impacts of incoming fire. “Could be a good target of opportunity.”

“Copy that, COC Control. See you all back at the farm.”

With a thought-click, a powerful magnetic field hurled the probe clear of Hermes and into empty space. The probe’s N’mah-derived space drive switched on, and the Spymaster, with Ramsey’s viewpoint on board, hurtled toward the fizzy, nebular haze gathered in front of the stargate.

Targeting the emerging Type III, Ramsey locked onto the huge vessel and accelerated. …

Nine years ago, Ramsey had been a Marine gunnery sergeant, an enlisted grunt with twelve years of active duty behind him. He’d been part of the assault team that had gone into a planetoid hollowed out by the alien Eulers, and been the first human to establish direct mind-to-mind contact with them.

For another year, he’d served with the MIEF Contact Team, helping to establish the protocols and translation software that let humans communicate freely with the deeply alien, benthic species known as the Eulers, and worked as well on the design of Euler triggerships, adapting them for human use. At the end of that year, he’d been approached by the Office of Naval Intelligence and given the opportunity to come on board full-time as an e-spook. His experience with the Eulers, he’d been told, had demonstrated the levels of flexibility and mental adaptability the intelligence services were looking for.

Over all, it had been an interesting tour. The only downside was that as part of his training, he’d been sent to OCS and emerged as an officer.

As a former non-commissioned officer, Gunny Ramsey had been absolutely convinced that the true backbone of any military service was its NCO corps, a statement that likely had been a truism in the army of Nimrod. Becoming an officer had been a little like defecting to the other side. He still carried the nickname “Gunny,” and endured the good-natured teasing of his fellow commissioned officers.

Part of the problem was that he was now in his mid-forties, and literally twice the age of most of his associates. His other nickname, though not one usually used to his face, was “Grandpap.”

Damned kids …

The Spymaster probe, one of some hundreds loosed by the MIEF capital ships, dropped through the man-made nebula, homing now on the emerging Nightmare. The probe’s outer shell was growing hot now in two ways, from friction with dust particles and from the sea of radiation bathing the kill zone. He felt Thoth increasing the probe’s magnetic shielding, and begin jinking the two-meter-long dart in order to avoid Xul antimissile fire.

At the last possible moment, the Spymaster decelerated sharply, hitting nearly two hundred gravities. Ramsey didn’t feel that, of course, since he wasn’t physically on board the probe. Artfully arranged patterns of electrons, fortunately, were not subject to such inconveniences as gravity or high acceleration.

Or radiation, for that matter, so long as the probe’s hardened circuits were shielded from EMP. One second before impact, the probe’s bow shielding fired, transformed by an antimatter charge into a spear of raw energy stabbing down into the Xul ship’s armor. The probe struck a seething opening filled with searing hot plasma and tunneled in, its lead element revealed now as a nano-tunneler.

The Spymaster probe vanished, swallowed by the narrow-mouthed crater of its own making.

And moments later, Ramsey-Thoth began to hear the Nightmare’s Song. …

6

1506.1111

UCS Hermes
Stargate
Carson Space
0810 hrs, GMT

“The first wave of Penetrators is away, General.”

“About damned time.”

Alexander watched the green threads of the tiny missiles extending from Hermes and other ships in the fleet toward the most recent Xul ship to cross the gate interface. The first were already impacting on its hull.

This was the real heart of Operation Clusterstrike. He’d wanted to launch the incursion earlier in the battle, but various factors had conspired to delay things. In particular, the Intel people—N-2 in the Navy and Marine lexicon—had needed to analyze the electronic screens now being used by the Xul fleet in order to give the Penetrators a better chance of getting past the enemy’s defenses, both passive and active. They’d also been holding out for a Type III or one of the newly identified Type IV’s as a target, on the theory that the larger Xul hunterships would have more complex, deeper, and more valuable electronic infrastructures to tap.

And, finally, they’d needed an updated picture of what was happening on the far side of the gate. The arrival of those last four fighters and the data they’d uploaded to the battlenet had revealed that the Xul assault was tapering off. As they’d come through the gate, there’d been only a half-dozen hunterships on the other side, and only one large one—the Type III now being targeted by the Penetrators.

Alexander allowed himself a small—a very small—release of the stress that had been riding his shoulders throughout the battle. There’d been so many unknowns with this operation, and one of the largest and most deadly had been whether they would be able to contain the Xul fleet. With as many as a thousand Xul warships in Cluster Space, no one had been able to guarantee that the MIEF line on the Carson Space side of the gate wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

Expendable munitions stores were running low throughout the fleet. Lasers and plasma weapons alone would not have been enough to slow that onslaught if they’d chosen to keep coming.

Both Alexander and Taggart possessed mental triggers keyed to detonate a number of antimatter charges already placed around the Carson Gate’s circumference. If the Xul had been able to push through the bottleneck, if both Taggart and Alexander had been convinced that the MIEF line would not hold, they would have destroyed the gate.

Carson Space was located, as near as the astrographers could determine, some eleven thousand light years from Sol, on the outskirts of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm, a pinpoint in the vast spiral of four hundred billion stars chosen both for its remoteness and for the fact that a careful search of the region had failed to turn up any signs of a Xul presence.

Of course, with the gate destroyed, the surviving ships of 1MIEF would have to be translated back to Sol a few at a time within the vast hangar deck of the Hermes, a slow process that wouldn’t even work with the larger ships in the fleet. And if Hermes had been damaged or destroyed, the journey would have taken a lot longer—a number of years under Alcubierre Drive.

It would have been worth it however, to keep the Xul from discovering the origin of the attack, but there would have been a terrible danger, too. Alexander knew that 1MIEF needed to keep moving, keep threatening the Xul from as many different directions as possible. If the task force lost the initiative, the Xul might recover enough to find Humankind’s world of origin, and this time, Earth and all her colonies would be obliterated.

Maintaining the initiative in this war was absolutely vital to humanity’s survival, but it was a balancing act that was growing more and more difficult, more deadly, with each passing month. By now, the ancient enemy was aware that somebody in the Galaxy was out to kill them, and given their peculiarly paranoid way of thinking, they would be frantic by now in their efforts to track down the threat and destroy it.

In fact, the only thing that had kept Humankind out of the Xuls’ xenophobic eye had been the size of the Galaxy, the sheer vast number of suns and worlds and emerging civilizations. As it was, they’d learned of Earth and its attendant cluster of tiny interstellar communities several times already over the past few centuries. Armageddonfall had come within a hair of annihilating Earth herself, and the Xul capture of an asteroid colonizer ship, fleeing Sol at sublight speeds after the bombardment of Humankind’s homeworld, apparently had given them more precise information about humans, their origins, and their history.

That discovery had prompted the creation of 1MIEF, the Battle of the Nova in 1102 of the Marine Era, and the subsequent near-decade of raids and strikes at Xul nodes across the Galaxy. The joint naval-Marine expeditionary force had been tasked with the seemingly impossible—keeping the Galaxy-wide empire of the Xul reeling and off-balance. If the Xul were bending all of their considerable resources toward finding 1MIEF instead of Earth, perhaps Earth would be able to come up with … something else, a weapon, a strategy, an alliance, something that would enable Humankind to survive.

A lean and desperate hope.

Survival would have been a lot less likely had 1MIEF been destroyed this morning … or if Taggart and Alexander had been forced to destroy the gate and return to Sol Space by other means. But the gamble appeared to have paid off well. According to the ongoing tally, twelve Xul hunterships had been destroyed so far in the hellfire unleashed in front of the Carson Gate. That had come at a high price; 1MIEF had lost thirty-one ships of various classes, and a large percentage of the aerospace fighters. After this one, the expeditionary force would need to rearm and re-equip, either back at Sol or at one of the other major Commonwealth bases, at 36 Ophiuchi or New Earth, perhaps.

But then it would be back into the battle line again.

Perhaps information taken by the Penetrators would pinpoint the next objective.

The fleet’s fire was raking the newly emerged Nightmare-class huntership now, but carefully, with exacting precision. Certain areas of that immense, quasi-spherical hull had been set aside as targets for the Penetrator swarm, and it wouldn’t do to vaporize the Penetrators before they could eat their way into the Xul hull.

A pair of Type II hunterships were emerging now, and much of the bombardment shifted over to them. Fire continued to rain down on the Type III, however. That one Xul ship, over two kilometers across, could wreck the Commonwealth fleet if it got close enough. Naval gunfire hammered away at the monster, concentrating on weapon banks, sensor arrays, and drive blisters. If possible, they would immobilize the Nightmare, allowing the Penetrators to do their job without the dangerous distraction of haste. Some Penetrators would be destroyed, no doubt, but hundreds had been fired into that monster precisely so that a few, at least, might survive.

And after that would come the really tricky part of Operation Clusterstrike. …

Penetrator Team Savage
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Carson Space
0812 hrs, GMT

Lieutenant Ramsey wasn’t really a fish. It was important, however, to create metaphors that seemed as real and true-to-life as possible if the Penetrator team was going to be able to work with them.

What is software, after all, but patterns of information? Electric charge and lack of charge, gates permitting or refusing trickles of current, a flow of electrons guided this way or that, entire networks of interconnected processors and relays, the whole organized into complex arrays of movement, storage, and potential, all according to carefully designed schema and encodings meaningful to the designers.

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