Battlespace

by Ian Douglas

  Garroway wondered if that were true. The Wheel’s automated defenses apparently didn’t see spacecraft—or armored men—approaching at velocities of only a few meters per second, but if there were any organic defenders in there—Wiggles or otherwise—they surely wouldn’t ignore a company of Marines incoming, no matter how slowly they moved.

  Even more worrisome than Wiggle defenders, though, was the knowledge that in combat nothing was certain—and anything could go wrong. He remembered the training session back in Sol space, at Earth’s L-4…and nearly dying when Houston had accidentally hit his visor with a round from his pistol.

  “One minute! Stand up!”

  He rose in place, gripping his LR-2120 in his right hand, grasping a hand-hold on the Marine to his left with the other. They were in zero-G, of course, but kept their boots anchored to brackets set into the deck.

  Garroway remembered the botched release at L-3 that had scattered Marines all over the sky. Please don’t let that happen, he thought. Not here, not this time. There were no fighters or work pods standing by to pick up anyone who missed the DZ and drifted into space.

  They’re just Wiggles, he thought. Oversized salamanders that can hardly stand up to hold a weapon.

  He knew he was fooling himself. Hell, they couldn’t even know that it was the Wiggles who they were up against, and if it was, there was no assurance that they were the weak and comic creatures in Dr. Franz’s simulation.

  “Thirty seconds! Release foot holds! Steady, now! Just like in training!…”

  SF/A-2 Starhawk Talon Three

  Approaching Sirius Stargate

  1225 hours, Shipboard time

  From out here, ten kilometers from the faceon surface of the Wheel, Captain Alexander had a magnificent balcony’s view of the entire panorama of the assault. Closer in, sixteen TRAPs, carrying the eight platoons of Alpha and Charlie companies—about 350 Marines all together—were drifting slowly toward the Wheel broadside. Invisible optically, but marked by drifting green icons on his noumenal display, sixteen Wasps drifted back and forth a scant few hundred meters above the Wheel, loosing rockets and chain-gun fire.

  The Wasps of 7-MAS, the Black Reapers, had been sent in first. The Starhawks of 5-MAS had remained at a distance, drifting slowly toward the Wheel at five meters per second, as a combat reserve. If the Wasps stirred up anything too hot for them to handle, the Starhawks were in position to ride down to the rescue.

  The enemy’s response had been scattered and slow, but they were opening fire from hard points on the Wheel’s surface. So far, as hoped, they’d ignored the sixteen TRAPs inbound, concentrating instead on the Marine Wasps and on a small cloud of decoy drones and surveillance probes filling the volume of space between the Wheel and the release point eight kilometers out.

  “Angel Five, Angel Five!” a voice called over the Sky Net, the web of lasercom communications linking 5-MAS with 7-MAS and with CIC onboard the Chapultepec. “I’ve got a cluster of positron batteries at Hotel-Echo Three-three-niner! Give me some help here!”

  “On your four, Angel Eight! I got the ones to the right!”

  “Copy that! I’m on the left!…”

  “Fox three! Fox three!”

  Explosions of static punctuated each burst of positron fire as the powerful electromagnetic pulse accompanying each shot momentarily interrupted radio communications.

  “This is Angel One-three! I’m getting heavy fire from the DZ’s southwest quadrant! We need some support fire in here!”

  “CIC copies, Angel One-three,” another voice said. Starwatch was the handle for the Marine Aerospace CIC, back onboard the Ranger. “Talon Flight, this is Starwatch. Close with the objective and support Angel Flight.”

  “Copy that, Starwatch,” Major Gauthier replied. “That’s our cue, people. Let’s move it!”

  Alexander thought-clicked an icon and his plasma drive gave a short, hard burn, momentarily squeezing him back into his couch. Then he was in zero-G again, angling in toward the fight. In his noumenal vision, the sixteen TRAPs spread apart, growing larger, then flashed past and dwindled astern.

  He kept checking his readout feeds. At the halfway point, he would flip his Starhawk end for end and give a sharp deceleration burn, timing things so that he would arrive close to the Wheel’s surface with only a small lateral vector component remaining. He would be able then to maneuver above the DZ with only small bursts from his thrusters.

  At least that was the way they’d simmed it back onboard the Ranger.

  Of course, no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy….

  Alpha Company, First Platoon,

  B Section

  TRAP 1-2

  Approaching release point

  1226 hours, Shipboard time

  The TRAP’s dorsal thrusters fired, cutting its velocity toward the Wheel, and Alpha Company’s second section drifted free, sailing through open space at five meters per second. Emerging suddenly into the harsh light of the two Sirian suns, Garroway squinted until his visor polarizers could darken the input a bit.

  Things seemed anomalously quiet with little to suggest that a battle was raging around him. Five kilometers away, in closer to the Wheel, something flared brightly in a silent, deadly blossom of flame. Garroway couldn’t see the enemy’s positron beams or the laser fire from the Marine fighters, but he was aware of individual explosions that popped into view and as quickly winked out, one every few seconds or so. They must have been bright indeed to be seen through his polarized visor.

  What the hell are they shooting? he wondered. We only have thirty-two fighters!

  No, fewer than that. He’d heard 5-MAS had lost four in the battle the other day.

  Then he realized that the space between him and the Wheel must be filled with decoys and battle area surveillance drones. Lots of targets.

  I just hope there are enough targets that they end up ignoring us. He was relying on the ancient principle of safety in numbers.

  A pair of bright stars sailed past on Garroway’s right, flashing past almost too swiftly for the eye to register their passage, but seeming to slow as they dropped toward the Wheel. The slowing, he realized, was an effect of distance. Those were missiles fired from one of the support ships, still a hundred kilometers or so away. Daring and New Chicago were keeping up a steady bombardment of the objective with lasers, missiles, and railgun projectile fire.

  Twin gouts of white light appeared on the Wheel, bright enough to momentarily blot out perhaps a quarter of the DZ. The Wiggles were taking a hell of a pounding. That knowledge was oddly comforting, even though Garroway knew that there was no way the Marines could be sure that the bombardment was having any effect on the enemy whatsoever.

  Odd. It didn’t feel as though he or the other Marines were moving at all. He released his grip on Eagleton, the Marine on his left, and felt Anna Garcia let go of him on his right. The twenty Marines of Bravo Section, First Platoon, slowly drifted apart, but there was nothing about their surroundings to suggest they were otherwise in motion. The TRAP seemed to have suddenly dropped away from their feet. Ahead—“above”—the Wheel was fully visible now, covering most of that side of the sky, but not appearing to get any closer.

  They were still eight kilometers from the Wheel’s surface. From this vantage point, the Drop Zone—highlighted by a green rectangle overlaying his vision—was located at about seven o’clock on the Wheel’s circle. It was a large enough target; the Wheel was a kilometer wide, or a bit more, so they were looking at about a million square meters of potential landing space.

  From where he was at the moment, though, it didn’t look like very much at all. Garroway remembered a historical allusion, used by aerospace aviators coming in to land on seagoing aircraft carriers a couple of centuries ago. To them, touching down on a carrier deck was like trying to land on a postage stamp in the middle of the ocean. Garroway wasn’t sure what a “postage stamp” was, but the comparison made it sound like something very small and very precari
ous in the middle of a great deal of emptiness.

  Exactly like Alpha Company’s DZ.

  He checked his dosimeter reading…a pair of red-highlighted numbers in the lower right corner of his noumenal vision. That made him as nervous as the thought of actual combat. This volume of Sirius space had a relatively high background radiation count—as high or higher than on Europa, which circled Jupiter just beyond that giant’s van Allen belts. On Europa, most human activities were restricted to portions of the worldlet naturally shielded from particulate radiation by the moon itself, and all ships and surface buildings were protected by magnetic fields to shunt aside incident radiation.

  The ships of the MIEU squadron were similarly protected, but a man outside in vac armor picked up a steady dose of hard particulate radiation, poured out by the two fiercely hot stars in the vicinity. That dosage was small, but it was cumulative. The Marines had been given a four-hour exposure limit. After that, they would have to get under cover—back onboard the Chapultepec or the heavily shielded TRAPs, or inside the stargate structure itself where, presumably, the habitable spaces were kept that way by unknown high-tech means.

  At their leisurely approach velocity of five meters per second, they would cover the remaining eight kilometers in twenty-six and a half minutes. That would leave them with three and a half hours on the surface.

  During combat, of course, twenty-six minutes was a very long eternity indeed.

  And there was not a damned thing in the universe they could do in that time, save wait, watch, and hope the Wiggles didn’t see them.

  SF/A-2 Starhawk Talon Three

  Sirius Stargate Drop Zone

  1245 hours, Shipboard time

  For long minutes, now, Alexander had maneuvered his Starhawk above the Wheel’s face, locating targets and raking them with laser and chain-gun fire. Besides his Starhawk’s standard 800-Megawatt chin laser, he was using a Mark XXVII pod load-out locked in beneath his starboard wing, mounting twin 2-K Mw pulse lasers and an M-82 Thorhammer 30mm high-velocity chain gun, firing 280-gram high-explosive rounds at ten rounds per second.

  Against infantry in the open, or even standard bunkers and redoubts, the Starhawk’s surface-strike capabilities were awesome. Unfortunately, it was tough to gauge just how effective the strike fighter bombardment against the Wheel’s defenses actually were.

  By now, the surface of the Wheel had been extensively mapped and even parts of the interior structure had been unveiled by the sensors scattered throughout the combat area. Computer graphics overlaid Alexander’s noumenal vision, marking gun turrets, heat vents, ports, and various structures of unknown purpose.

  Of particular interest were the oddly shaped turrets—like elongated, angular observatory domes—housing the positron beam projectors. Those stood out as bright red triangles in his mind’s eye, marked by the powerful flux of magnetic forces focused within each one.

  “Talon Six, Talon Three,” he called, dropping across the DZ from rim toward the gate’s vast, central opening. “I’ve got a target, Sector one-five. I’m on it.”

  “Copy Three. Mind the bumps.”

  “Roger that.” Thought-clicking on a weapons turret, he opened fire with his pod lasers. Light flared from the target, as metallic vapor exploded into hard vacuum.

  His spacecraft slanted across the alien landscape, then passed over the inner edge of the Wheel’s structure, entering the volume of space above the eighteen-kilometer-wide central opening. Alexander’s stomach gave a sudden lurch as he crossed a gravity gradient—one of the “bumps” Six had warned him to mind. Suddenly the Starhawk was falling, accelerating at almost 120 meters per second squared. He fired his ventral thrusters, compensating.

  Those things had been giving the aerospace fighter squadrons fits since they approached the Wheel. The entire stargate possessed the mass of a small star, something like eight percent of Sol, with a gravitational tug of about twelve gravities. Somehow, though, the gate’s builders had partially shielded the structure’s gravitational field. Over the face of the Wheel, where the Marines hoped to land, surface gravity was only a bit over one G and that seemed somehow restricted to within a few meters of the structure itself. Entering the gravitationally stressed region above the central opening of the Wheel, or passing the boundary between one gravity and twelve, could be a bit rough.

  We don’t know what the hell we’re up against, Alexander thought, cutting in his main drive, boosting hard.

  Suddenly, a blast of static shrilled in his head and his drive went dead. He was still falling, but now his plasma drive was useless.

  Panic clawed at him. Still accelerating in free fall at twelve gravities, the Starhawk plunged into the Sirius Stargate.

  Alpha Company, First Platoon,

  B Section

  Above the Sirius Stargate

  1246 hours, Shipboard time

  Almost there….

  Garroway had long since positioned himself feet “down,” though, technically, he was still in zero-G and there was no such thing as down. Still, the surface of the stargate was now spread out beneath his feet like an eerie, black, and blasted landscape, swiftly rising to meet him.

  The battle, silent and almost peaceful in its unfolding, continued around him. Radio chatter was the only sound to be heard, punctuated occasionally by blasts of static. There’d been casualties; TRAP 2-2 had taken a direct hit, mercifully several minutes after it had released its cargo of Marines. According to the company data feed, three Marines—Busch, Nicholson, and Briley, all in A Section—had been hit…or, at least, their suit transponders and netlinks had stopped communicating.

  To his right, toward the emptiness within the stargate’s circle, Garroway watched with cold horror as a Starhawk fighter fell toward the gate, entered it…and vanished.

  The poor bastard….

  The Marines had spent a lot of time these past few days discussing what would happen if they missed the Wheel and fell through the gateway itself, an open gate leading…where?

  No one knew, though theories abounded. All knew that a downloaded copy of the MIEU’s CC AI had fallen through the gate two days earlier and not reappeared. There were also rumors that the brass had already fired a number of probes through the open gate deliberately, in hopes of getting a few, at least, back with memories intact of the other side.

  If true, no one had reported the results to the Marines.

  For some minutes, Garroway had wondered if the Navy pilot onboard TRAP 1-2 had misjudged. His landing point, clearly, was going to be ominously close to the inner edge of the Wheel. Now, as he closed the last hundred meters, he could see that he was not going to end up finding out for himself. His touchdown point was a good fifty meters or more away from the edge, and the relief he felt, like an incoming wave of giddiness, wiped away fear and horror and even excitement. I’m going to make it.

  And for the moment, that was enough.

  He did wonder if that Marine Starhawk pilot had been alive when he went through the gate and, if so, what he was seeing now….

  SF/A-2 Starhawk Talon Three

  Place unknown

  Time unknown

  At first, Alexander was blind.

  Well, not blind, exactly. He could see the stars, could see a planet and…and things. The problem was putting exactly what he was seeing together into something coherent. Something recognizable.

  He’d heard, once, in a download on quantum physics, that when Columbus’s tiny fleet of exploration had first arrived in the New World, the Taino peoples living in the Bahamas at the time literally could not see the Spanish ships. One, a medicine man or shaman for the tribe, did notice some unusual ripples on the water offshore, and wondered what could possibly be causing them. For several days in succession, he came down to the beach and looked, staring at the horizon, studying the water, trying to see…something.

  Finally, according to the story, he was able to see three vessels, three “great canoes with white wings” utterly unlike anything he’d ev
er seen before. Once he’d seen them, he was able to tell others and, because they trusted him, in time the other people of the tribe could see them as well.

  Alexander had no idea if the story was literally true. It seemed too utterly, weirdly fantastic to be fact. At the same time, the science of quantum physics had long ago established that “reality” was a slippery critter, one determined more inside the brain than outside of it. If the brain had nothing whatsoever to relate to in the flood of impressions coming in, then perhaps partial blindness was the result.

  That was what he was facing now. He knew he was seeing stars in this strange, alien place, but he was having considerable difficulty sorting out the patterns around him. Behind him was…what? A planetoid, its surface densely cluttered by…things that looked more grown than constructed…an artificial moon or an enormous space station of some kind. An elliptical hole opening deep into the surface revealed the maw of the stargate through which he’d just emerged.

  Ahead was a star, shrunken and bloody in color, shrouded behind something like a red-hued haze or fog. Between him and the star, a planet showed a sharp-rimmed black disk against the fog, edged by a slim, reddish crescent.

  To the left and above, the sky was largely empty, a black gulf with only a very thin scattering of faint stars or the fuzzy nebulosities of distant galaxies or globular star clusters. Empty…except for there, behind him and high to the left, partially blocked by the stargate from which he’d just emerged, where an explosion of stars appeared frozen in midburst.

  Scoop up a million suns or so. Pack them together within a volume of space two hundred light-years across, a fuzzy snowball of stars. That was what he was seeing, the thronging, dense star-swarm of a globular cluster.

  And to the right and below…

  That was strangeness. Stars were crowed upon stars, billions of them, but so faint and so distant as to present a kind of dim blue graininess rather than a vista comprised of distinct stars. It was very much like looking at the track of the Milky Way across the summer’s sky back home, as seen from the relatively pollution-free clarity above the mountains of Montana, or far out at sea.