Battlespace

by Ian Douglas

  And it kept coming, emerging completely from the Gate, apparently none the worse for wear….

  23

  5 APRIL 2170

  General Ramsey

  Command Control Center

  UFR/USS Chapultepec

  0007 hours, Shipboard time

  Fire in the night.

  The seven converging beams of plasma, moving at near-c velocities, were invisible in the vacuum of space, but when they played across the electromagnetic shielding of the Xul starship they elicited a dazzling splash of blue and violet radiance, highlighted by flickering arcs of lightning. Ripples of blue light seemed to flow across the target’s golden surface. In spots, that gold sheen seemed to be breaking down, blackening and crumpling under that torrent of high-energy particles.

  The ships added their own firepower to the barrage. Both Daring and the New Chicago opened fire with their spinal-mount rail guns, sending high-velocity projectiles ripping into the target.

  Ramsey could only watch as the bombardment continued, a battle completely beyond his hands, beyond any human hands. In the background, he heard the radio chatter from the Navy vessels, from bridge and gun crews, but the battle proper was being managed by Sissy and Cassius.

  Everything, everything depended on whether the trick with the starship Kemper Drives would overwhelm the Xul EM defenses, and do so within a period of a very few seconds. If the Xul vessel was able to return fire, the battle might well be over almost before it was begun. Xul military technology must be pure magic from the human point of view. Their one hope was that the Xul wouldn’t be able to fire with its shields up, and, logically, those shields had to stay up so long as the human ships kept up their attack.

  Logically. The word meant nothing now. Even the N’mah didn’t know much about Xul military technology, or the capabilities of their warships.

  As soon as they opened fire, the seven human ships began backing away from the target at over one gravity; the particle beams were their main propulsion drives, after all, and the Daring and the New Chicago added to that acceleration by keeping up steady bombardments from the railguns mounted in tandem with their forward thrusters.

  With sickening suddenness, New Chicago died. Her mushroom-cap RM-tank appeared to simply crumple, collapsing upon itself, and, an instant later, with her drive still running and the forward thruster destroyed, the antimatter stores used to charge the plasma came into contact with matter and engulfed the entire ship in a dazzling, white hot sun punctuated, according to his sensor data, by an intense burst of X-ray radiation.

  Ramsey, uselessly, braced himself. Presumably, New Chicago had been targeted because she was also the larger source of the high-velocity rail-gun bolts tearing into the Xul’s hull, but the largest of the attackers, Chapultepec and Ranger, must be next on the enemy’s target list.

  At three spots along the Xul’s hull, the flickering blue radiance coalesced into blinding miniature suns, spots of brilliance that appeared to be eating into hull metal.

  The Xul warship was slowing…slowing…

  Damn. How much punishment could she take? Six starships continued to spray the two-kilometer monster with streams of high-energy fire, and the little Daring kept punching away with her rail gun despite the spectacular death of the much larger New Chicago.

  Damn it, we should’ve gone with the AMB option, Ramsey thought. If rail gun projectiles were getting through the target’s defenses, a five-hundred-meter missile with an antimatter warhead would certainly have been able to punch through the Xul’s hull and detonate inside.

  The blue flickering across the Xul ship died, and for an instant, her naked hull lay exposed to the starcore fury of her assailants.

  All six Navy ships ceased acceleration in the same instant, their helms under Sissy’s control. They wouldn’t have been able to keep firing for more than another second or two anyway; all were racing out from the Wheel now at several hundred meters per second.

  The Xul vessel hung motionless now, relative to the Star Gate, her golden hull blackened in some places, and fiercely radiating in others. A cloud of debris slowly expanded from amidships.

  He was astonished to note that the entire fight had lasted only seven seconds.

  “Target appears to be neutralized,” Cassius said, and Ramsey allowed himself a long, drawn-out sigh of relief. They’d done it. They’d done it.

  “Send in the Marines,” was all he said.

  Corporal Garroway

  TRAP 1–2

  Sirius Stargate

  0008 hours, Shipboard time

  “We’ve got the word,” Warhurst told the waiting Marines over their implants. “CBSS is go.”

  “Wonder if there’s even anything left of the target to board?” Arhipov asked.

  “Don’t you fucking worry about that, youngster,” Dunne told him. “Just keep your head and go by the download.”

  “Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant.”

  Garroway felt a hard thump and a surge of motion. The TRAP was moving.

  “Disembarkation in six minutes,” Dunne said. “Lock and load, people.”

  Garroway checked the safety on his PG-90, ratcheting back the bolt-feed access to check the mass injector, checked the power pack and the cable connector, checked the diagnostics. Good to go. The weapon was weightless in zero-G, but still possessed over ten kilos of mass, a solid, reassuring inertia resting in his grasp.

  “Okay, people, listen up,” Dunne snapped. “Like the download says, we’re not doing a dropout. Word is there’s lots of jagged metal over there and lots of floating debris. The TRAP’ll slip in as close as the pilot can take us, the clamshells open up, and me and Cavaco’ll shoot tethers onto the hull or into the wreck, whatever we can manage. Each of you then hook to a tether and pull yourself over. Move cautious, but move. We don’t know what’s waiting for us over there, and we don’t know what kind of weapons they have. Be careful of jagged edges. They might be sharp enough to cut through your armor at a joint. Keep your IR up and watch for hot spots. Word is some spots over there are still white-hot.

  “The mission is short, sweet, and simple. We go onboard and see if anybody is alive over there. If we can get prisoners, fine…but no heroics. We don’t know their capabilities, so shoot first and download second. Do you copy?”

  “Copy, Gunnery Sergeant!” eighteen voices chorused back.

  “We secure the objective—or as much of it as we can manage—and wait for the civilians to come across. We’ll also be trying to link the unit AI in, to see if he can access the thing’s computer.

  “Watch your backs, watch your fire, watch your buddies, and give the bastards some good old-fashioned Devil Dog hell! Do you copy?”

  “Copy, Gunnery Sergeant!”

  “Ooh-rah!”

  “Ooh-rah!”

  Garroway became aware of a new sound, a kind of irregular pinging and clatter, like gravel bouncing off a tin roof. The TRAP’s cargo bay was in vacuum, so the sound was being transmitted through the transport’s hull and up through Garroway’s boots. It took him a moment to figure out what the sound was…metallic debris striking the TRAP’s hull as they approached the objective.

  “Two minutes, Marines! Brace for impact!”

  Garroway braced….

  General Ramsey

  Command Control Center

  UFR/USS Chapultepec

  0012 hours, Shipboard time

  Ramsey watched as four TRAPs approached the Xul ship from four quarters, edging slowly closer. He had to have them highlighted in his noumenal imagery; a CTV-300 series transfer pod, eighteen meters long, was invisibly tiny next to the two-kilometer bulk of the objective. The size difference helped drive home the sheer audacity of what they were attempting here. Eighty Marines, against a monster a mile and a half long.

  “General,” Cassius said, “I am picking up a moderate X-ray source at the target.”

  “X-rays? What is it? What’s causing it?”

  “Unknown. I have pinpointed the source in wha
t I assume is the Xul vessel’s power plant. It appears to be growing stronger, but at a slow rate.”

  Ramsey considered this. It might be a weapon powering up. It might be the crew attempting to refire the engines or light up a reactor. It might be a damaged power plant about to go into meltdown. It might be many things, and there was no way to guess what.

  “Keep an eye on it, Cass,” he said. “We continue with the mission.”

  There was nothing else to do, at least, not until they had more information to work with.

  He thought-clicked to a close-in view—TRAP 1-1 drifting slowly through a blizzard of debris, edging ever closer to a gaping hole in the wounded Xul ship’s hull, maneuvering gently until its blunt nose actually poked inside.

  The dorsal clamshell doors swung open….

  Corporal Garroway

  TRAP 1–2

  Sirius Stargate

  0010 hours, Shipboard time

  “And three and two and one and…”

  Garroway felt the shock, a crumpling, grating noise transmitted through the hull, a gentle surge of deceleration. Overhead, the clamshell doors slowly opened up, sweeping aside the debris drifting immediately above the TRAP.

  Harsh light spilled into the TRAP’s cargo bay. Sirius A was visible through the center of the Wheel, intolerably brilliant, the light illuminating the golden hull of the Xul and picking out the dust-mote debris like snowflakes in a blizzard. From his vantage point in the cargo bay, Garroway could see part of the Xul ship, like a smooth-sided golden mountain, and a ragged, blackened tear engulfing the forward end of the TRAP.

  Cavaco and Dunne edged themselves halfway up out of the bay, braced themselves, and aimed stubby line-shooters into the opening forward. Tethers unreeled from the spools attached to the guns, tipped by a nanoseal projectile that would adhere solidly to whatever it hit. The two Marines gave the tethers hard tugs, making sure they were firmly anchored, then attached the reels to the edge of the TRAP’s cargo bay hatch.

  “Let’s go, Marines!” Dunne ordered. The first man in line, Eagleton, popped a D-ring attached to his suit tether over a boarding line and began pulling himself out of the bay, hand-over-hand. Garcia was next…then Arhipov.

  Garroway followed, clumsily with the bulk of his PG-90, hooked up, and pulled himself out.

  The sharply enclosed space of the TRAP cargo bay dropped away, and Garroway found himself lost in an impossible immensity. During his drop onto the Wheel two days ago, the only objects he could see besides stars were the Wheel itself and the occasional pinpoints of fighters and other Marines in the distance. He’d felt very small and very isolated then, but the sky around him was just a sky, and he’d worked and trained in space before.

  This time, though, space was crowded. Using his own mental set of reference points to bring order to the chaos of zero-G, the TRAP was beneath him, the side of the Xul starship ahead, looming as huge as a mountain adrift in space. Beyond, much larger, was the arc of the Wheel, its size enhanced, somehow, by the relatively diminutive size of the four Navy ships Garroway could see from this perspective. Taken all together, the encircling vista gave scale to the surroundings, leaving Garroway and the other vac-armored Marines edging toward the objective feeling very tiny indeed; two lines of ants crawling toward a boulder as big as a house.

  Can that! he snapped to himself. Concentrate on the job!

  The pig-ninety gripped in his right hand, he used his left to pull himself along, careful not to get himself moving so fast that he would collide with Arhipov’s feet just ahead. Forcibly, he made himself narrow his focus to Arhipov’s boots at the ragged hole in the Xul ship’s side, now just meters ahead. He could see long, hard shadows cast by the advancing Marines etched against the TRAP’s forward hull; Sirius, high and off to his left, was too bright to look at, even through filtered visors. They’d told him that he could survive direct exposure to Sirius A’s light for a short time—thirty minutes or so, plenty of time to get across the Xul ship and back. Nonetheless, he kept checking his suit’s dosimeter. Pieces of metal, some black, some mirror-bright, drifted past, some clinking against his helmet.

  Ahead, he saw Eagleton unhook and vanish inside, followed closely by Garcia, then by Arhipov.

  Then it was his turn. The plunge into shadow was startling, and it took his eyes and his helmet visor both a moment to recover.

  He was in an enormous, mostly enclosed space, the opening partially blocked by the TRAP’s nose and forward thruster tanks. The volume revealed by his suit lights and by reflected Sirius light from outside was roughly spherical and outlined by unrecognizably fused, blackened and twisted masses that might have been decks or machinery or almost anything at all.

  With his left hand, he unhooked his D-ring, then gave himself a gentle shove off the nearest piece of bulkhead, drifting deeper into the wreckage. He hit what might have once been a deck, broken and twisted, and anchored himself, holding his plasma gun ready, trying to penetrate the encircling darkness with every sense at his command.

  Other Marines followed. Gomez, coming in behind Garroway. Lobowski with the section’s other pig. Kat Vinton, Tomlinson, and Womicki. Geisler, Morton, Weis, and Donegal. Deek with a third pig, and a replacement from Bravo Company, Wu, with the fourth. HM2 Lee, the company’s Corpsman, and two other new replacements, Delaguet and Somdal. Cavaco and Dunne bringing up the rear, where they could steady any Marine who might be having second thoughts about attempting the impossible. Twenty men and women, friends, comrades, and fellow Marines. Garroway didn’t know the newbies well, but he’d faced death with all them, and they were as close now as family. Closer.

  Someone in his family shrieked in agony….

  “Man down! Man down!” Lucia Velasquez shouted. “Corpsman!”

  Instantly, everything was chaos, shouting, and fear. Tommy Tomlinson was cartwheeling slowly through space, a chunk of his right side missing, a brilliant scarlet swirl of blood spiraling out from the breach in his armor. Doc Lee launched himself from a bulkhead, sailing through empty space, colliding with the wounded man, and carrying him on across to the opposite bulkhead.

  Garroway couldn’t see a threat with his unaided eyes, but his helmet optics were highlighting a half-dozen hot spots, moving hot spots, twenty meters away, high up in the side of the cavern. “Bogies!” he yelled. “Firing!”

  He opened up with his pig, sending a rapid-fire burst of plasma bolts snapping into the darkness. The recoil—plasma bolts did have mass, unlike the pulse from a laser weapon—nudged him backward, but he held the PG-90 low, beside his center of mass, hooked his left leg around a piece of twisted metal, and kept firing.

  The trick was to keep the recoil from setting him tumbling, but as long as he was well-anchored it was no different than firing under a full one-G. He shifted aim, following the aim-point reticle the gun’s targeting optics were painting on his visor, aligning it with one of the moving hot spots. Was the target in the open or behind a thin barrier of metal? He couldn’t tell, but the deadly burst from his pig seared through the space, shredding wreckage and bulkhead material in a cloud of metallic vapor and white-hot chunks of shrapnel.

  Deek exploded, the upper half of his armor vaporized in a white-violet flash, his helmet, arms, lower body, and PG-90 spinning in different directions, trailing blood, entrails, and bloody chunks of flesh. Garroway realized suddenly that the pig-gunners would be the primary targets, since their weapons were bigger and nastier than the lasers carried by the others. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, save laying down a devastating curtain of fire that would let the others win through the gauntlet safely.

  A piece of the decking Garroway was anchored to suddenly flared in a silent violet flash and the shock knocked him hard to the left. He kept on firing, even when he found himself adrift, his shots steadily pushing him back from the target. IR was no help now; that patch of bulkhead was glowing red-hot now under the combined fire of three pigs and a dozen LR-2120s. Someone triggered their M-12 and an RPG streaked ac
ross the chamber on a thread of flame, striking the bulkhead and exploding in a messy blast of hurtling metal fragments.

  “Cease fire! Follow me!” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne yelled and his armored form launched itself into space, sailing across toward the target area.

  It seemed just a trifle arrogant that he would assume the Marines would hear him and stop shooting, thus avoiding a friendly fire incident, but the volley of high-energy destruction stopped, and then other Marines began hurtling through space after the platoon’s senior NCO, Garroway among them.

  A pitch-black corridor opened into the cavernous chamber. There was no sign of the sniper, but, then, the area was so cluttered with twisted, drifting debris it was tough to tell exactly what was there. Half of their number were detailed to remain behind, guarding the way out. The rest moved on. Single-file, picking their way past blasted wreckage, the Marines pushed deeper into the depths of the Xul warship.

  And then it was hand-to-hand. The enemy seemed to emerge from the bulkheads around them, black-armored things like smooth, oblong, abstract sculptures two meters tall, with whiplash tentacles and glittering red crystals that might have been eyes.

  Or camera lenses. Garroway smashed one aside with the butt of his pig, then fired. Half of the thing exploded in white vapor, and the rest was all circuitry and cables and bits of melted plastic.

  “Check your fire! Check your fire!” Cavaco yelled. Shit! PG-90s were too deadly to use in such an enclosed space—the fringe bleed would fry friends as well as foes. But the Marines all carried sidearms, special issue for close-quarters combat—15mm Colt M-2149A1 Puller slug-throwers like the one that had nearly cracked Garroway’s visor open during that training accident back at Earth’s L-4. Those who could drew the holstered weapons and opened fire. The rest used their lasers. For such fearsome bad guys, given stature and status by the threat of the technology they wielded, the Xul proved less of a threat in hand-to-hand. Bullets punched through paper-thin armor; laser pulses burned out crystal lenses and melted through delicate internal circuits. If these were aliens in armor, the armor was crap. If they were robots, they were not designed for combat.