by Ian Douglas
But that technology could be overcome. The ship that had emerged through the Sirius stargate had been protected by an electromagnetic force field of some kind, designed to divert charged particles, but it had been crippled by the field expedient of turning the plasma drives of seven starships against it. That concentration of charged particles had evidently overwhelmed the Xul vessel’s shielding and breached the hull, allowing a small Marine boarding party to enter.
A boarding party, Garroway thought with a dark smile, that had included one of his Marine ancestors—his great-granduncle Corporal John Esteban Garroway.
According to the records, studied in almost obsessive detail by generations of Marines since, the Xul starship had been destroyed by a rogue micro-black-hole released by its own disabled drive, literally collapsing into a gravitational singularity of its own manufacture. Before that collapse, however, the Marine boarding party had been able to tap into the equivalent of the Xul’s computer net, information that was still being studied, translated, and argued over.
This time, the Marines would be going in to make sure the Xul monster was destroyed.
The big question was whether they would even be able to get on board. Intelligence data suggested that the Xul’s outer hull was a nanufactured synthetic tougher than diamond, resistant to nuclear explosions and other forms of large-scale mayhem. IMAC pods were designed to use special nanodisassembler docking cuffs that would eat through anything, even Xul hulls. In the absence of fresh IMACs, though, the Marine RST was going to have to wing it. Four Marines were equipped with portable disassemblers; it would be a lot simpler if whatever had disabled the Xul starship had also burned a hole through it.
What had they used? The XEL pods orbiting Mars, and in the Asteroid Belt? The HELGA platforms in solar orbit? Or had someone gotten lucky with an antimatter warhead?
Well, they would know in a few more minutes. If the Xul were disabled enough not to be aware of their approach.
Damn it, this op was suicide…or close enough as made no difference.
We Who Are
Asteroid Belt
1417 hrs, GMT
The Lords Who Are were…frustrated.
The group mind that comprised the guiding intelligence for the huntership did not understand, could not understand, emotional responses such as fear or anxiety, any more than it could comprehend concepts such as individuality. From their studies of various organic beings—the vermin that infested so many planetary bodies—they understood that there were such things, but they could never experience emotions for themselves.
But the Lords Who Are did understand that peculiarly unpleasant inward disturbance, that inner conflict of desire and acceptance, that arose when a planned and expected outcome was thwarted by unforeseen events. Indeed, that might be the closest We Who Are could ever come to experiencing anything like emotion.
They experienced it now, however, as they took stock of the current situation. The local system’s vermin had somehow managed to overwhelm the huntership’s shielding, and blind it as well. Analyses of the vectors of several nearby vermin spacecraft suggested that the locals were going to try for an intercept. That could not be permitted.
Another concept We Who Are rarely needed to deal with was the idea of hurry. Time, generally, was simply another factor to be worked into the equations of the moment. But it was imperative, now, that repairs be completed in a very great hurry indeed. Clearly, the locals should be classified as a’amv’yet, meaning a serious threat to We Who Are.
A threat requiring the immediate sterilization of this entire star system.
Assault Detachment Alpha
Autie Navy Sierra 1-1
1417 hrs, GMT
“Three…two…one…grapple release.”
Garroway felt the jolt as the autie was cast clear of the Commodore Edward Preble. They were falling free through empty space once more.
“We’re clear,” the mental voice continued. “And…primary ignition in five…four…three…two…one…ignition!”
A giant’s hand slammed down on Garroway’s chest, pressing him back into the thinly padded seat. The AUTs—like the Preble, and like most human-crewed spacecraft nowadays—made use of Oannan drivefield technology, but that only reduced the effects of inertia, allowing higher accelerations and more violent maneuvering than would otherwise be possible with a human payload. The effects of acceleration were still felt, and they were still unpleasant.
The autie boosted hard for two minutes before the blessed relief of zero-G again enfolded him.
“C’mon!” one Marine griped over the platoon channel. “When do we get to see where we’re going?”
“Belay that,” Garroway snapped. Every Marine on the autie was keyed to the breaking point. It was the platoon gunnery sergeant’s job, his job, to make sure they didn’t actually snap. “When they have a feed, they’ll give it to us. For now, keep hitting your weapons checklist. Ooh-rah?”
“Ooh-rah.” But the response was scattered and weak.
In fact, the team had been over its weapons and equipment checks time and time again already. They were as ready as they could be…as ready as any military strike force could be flying blind into an unknown tactical situation.
“How about it, Lieutenant?” he asked, using the private command channel. Wilkie was on board the autie, though he wasn’t on the cargo deck with the rest of the Marines. As CO of the op, he would monitor things from a console-couch in the AUT’s cockpit. “They haven’t told us a fucking thing. Right now, morale sucks and our performance is going to suffer for it. When do we at least get to see where we’re going?”
“Like you just told them, Gunny,” Wilkie said. “When they decide to give us something to look at. In the meantime, we have to be patient.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, ‘patience,’” Garroway replied, falling back on an old joke. “How long will that take?”
Wilkie didn’t reply, however.
Garroway was concerned about the lieutenant. He was almost as new to the Marines as Lowey, Atkins, and a couple of the other newbies were. According to the man’s personnel files, he’d commanded a platoon Earthside out of Annapolis, but that had only been for three months, until he’d been assigned to SCS, Space Combat School. After that, he’d been sent straight to RST-1, and that had been just two months ago. Garroway had no doubts whatsoever about Wilkie’s technical qualifications. But he did wonder about his ability to lead Marines. In his two months with the RST, Wilkie had seemed…remote, somehow. Nothing Garroway could really put on the table and criticize, but his abrupt manner was worrisome, sometimes. Distracted. And inflexible. A good Marine officer listened to his senior NCOs carefully, even let himself be guided by them. Wilkie, somehow, seemed driven by his own agenda, with a single-mindedness that had won him the nickname “Will-kill.”
The joke was that no one knew who his single-mindedness would kill—the enemy, or the Marines under his command.
But that was outside of Garroway’s control. A good platoon gunny got his people through all kinds of obstacles and problems—including those presented by obstinate or know-it-all junior officers.
Damn it, though, this time it was worse than usual. No information was coming down from the top…and that made Garroway’s job a hell of a lot tougher.
The minutes dragged by, as stress—measured by the bio readouts for each member of the platoon—grew to near-intolerable levels.
Only in the last couple of minutes did the Marines see what was awaiting them.
The datafeed, according to the peripheral alphanumerics, was coming from an unmanned drone approaching the Intruder. That, he thought, is why the delay. We didn’t have anything close enough to send us a picture.
The alien was definitely a twin of the Xul starship that had come through the stargate at Sirius a century and a half ago—two kilometers long, a slender needle forward, gently swelling into bulges and protuberances of unknown purpose farther aft, the whole gleaming gold in the weak light o
f a distant Sol.
And—the God of Battle be praised—it looked dead.
Looked. That was the operative word. The HELGA lasers had slashed into the rear quarter of the ship, leaving that end raggedly truncated and surrounded by a slowly expanding cloud of dust, frozen mist, and debris. Much of the golden hull forward was scorched and blackened.
Still, he’d studied recordings made at the Battle of Sirius, and this didn’t look as bad as the damage that had taken out the other Hunter vessel. The Marines would have to assume that whatever passed for crew over there were very much alive and ready to defend their property.
Garroway heard the mingled comments of several of the watching Marines.
“Jesus! Look at the size of that thing.”
“Hey, Cowboy. Size doesn’t matter. You should know that!”
“What are we gonna do…fly up its ass?”
“You got a better way to goose that bitch?”
Abruptly, the image winked out, raising an angry chorus of complaints and grousings.
“Hey! Who turned it off?”
“Let us see, damn it!”
“Listen up, people,” Wilkie said over the platoon channel, overriding the grumblings. “They just passed the word that they’re going to trigger two XELs in a minute. It’ll be like a preliminary bombardment, giving us some cover going in. They switched off the drone’s feed to save its optics.”
The grumbling abated somewhat, but not entirely. For Garroway, though, that was good news. Hitting the Xul intruder again, moments before the RST boarded it, might make the difference between survival and death.
And if we’re real lucky, he thought, they’ll overdo it and the damned thing will be vaporized! He found he didn’t mind at all the possibility that this operation would be aborted at the last minute.
Battlespace
1443 hrs, GMT
The X-ray laser platforms in extended orbit about Mars were under the control of an artificial intelligence named Artemis. She was, in fact, a software clone identical in most respects to Kali, who was handling the long-range targeting of the Xul intruder at HELGA Three, but she was resident in the military computer network that embraced Mars, Deimos, and Phobos, as well as several of the warships currently within a few light-seconds of the Red Planet.
Her name was apt. In Greek mythology, Artemis was half sister to Ares, the God of War who became Mars when the Romans acquired him, and she was a huntress, expert with the bow. Artemis wasn’t using a bow now, of course, but she was having to take very careful aim at a target several light-seconds distant…which meant she had to take into account the target’s residual velocity of several kilometers per second relative to the planet.
The XEL satellites could deliver only a fraction of the energy yield of a single HELGA shot, but every indication seemed to suggest that the Xul ship’s energy screens were down. If so, Humankind might have just lucked out; XELs were designed to vaporize mountain-sized boulders on an intercept course with Earth, or at least vaporize enough of them that they were nudged, hard, into a new path.
Artemis was about to nudge the Intruder…hard.
Her targeting task was made more difficult by the fact that the XELs were on opposite sides of Mars, and separated by almost two light-seconds. Artemis had to time the triggering as well as take into account the time it would take the bursts of X-ray energy to reach the target. For optimum effect, one X-ray laser pulse should hit the target no less than half a second after the other.
She was also at a disadvantage because there was only one drone within imaging range of the target right now, and she’d just switched that off in order to give her something by which to make a damage assessment after she fired.
Like the expert software system that she was, Artemis took all into account, made the necessary calculations—adjusting even for the slight bend in space created by both the Arean gravity well and the much smaller gravity well created by the black hole inside the target’s drive system. She delayed the shot as long as possible so that the Marine shuttle now approaching the target would enjoy the maximum effect, but not so long that she risked catching the AUT in the two beams of coherent X-rays.
At precisely the appointed moments, the two XELs detonated in nuclear fury, a hair over a second apart. In each, a 10 megaton fusion explosion generated an intense pulse of X-rays, which were shaped into coherence and given an aim point by powerful magnetic fields a stark instant before the generators of those fields were vaporized.
Two pulses of X-ray energy, each a tenth of a light-second long, flashed across intervening space. Both were invisible, both due to the airlessness of space and to the fact that X-rays are invisible to the human eye, but at the last instant both showed as dazzlingly bright threads of light as they seared through the cloud of dust and gas now surrounding the target. For another instant, though no one was present to see it, an intolerably brilliant point of light dazzled off the Xul ship’s side.
One point. The other shot had missed. Even the best AI expert system wasn’t perfect.
But when Artemis switched on the drone image feed again, it was clear that the first shot had hit, and with good effect. The target had not vaporized, unfortunately…but it had been badly holed amidships.
Artemis transmitted a brief signal to the approaching AUT. “You are clear to board.”
The Marines were going in.
6
12 FEBRUARY 2314
Assault Detachment Alpha
Battlespace
1508 hrs, GMT
Garroway felt his gut twist as the autie spun end for end. The image of the objective didn’t change, of course, since it was coming from a remote drone. At least they had an image now; from the drone’s vantage point, it looked as though the XEL lasers had burned another hole into the Xul giant, roughly amidships.
A flashing red light illuminated the autie’s cargo deck—warning that the compartment was now in vacuum. For several minutes, now, the atmosphere had been bleeding away into storage tanks belowdeck. The Marines did not want to have to deal with the explosive effects of sudden decompression when the aft hatch opened up.
Acceleration slammed again into Garroway’s chest, and he heard the stifled gasps of several other Marines on the platoon channel. The autie was decelerating hard, backing down toward the objective as it fell stern-first, killing its residual velocity.
He found himself fervently hoping that the navigational AI piloting the autie knew what it was doing. Inertialess field or no, if they hit the Xul vessel too fast, all the Oannan technology in the Solar System wouldn’t keep them all from being reduced to bloody paste inside their armor—Spam in a can, as the old saying put it.
He wondered what Spam was. It didn’t sound pleasant.
To take his mind off that claustrophobic image, he checked his Hawking 34mm chaingun—again. The Preble, fortunately, had been carrying a store of live ammo, including cases of 34mm rounds, both AP and HE, and the Navy ratings had passed what they had down into the autie en route. Unfortunately, the supplies of expendable ammo were sharply limited—only about a thousand rounds per man. That meant the Marines’ ammo bins were less than a third full.
Still, it was better than going into live combat with training rounds. And the team’s pig-gunners all had fresh power packs. His chaingun loadout gave him a standard AP-HE three-to-one ratio—three rounds of armor piercing, followed by one of high explosive, a mix guaranteed to cut through just about anything a human opponent could throw at them.
Of course, these were not human opponents. He tried not to think about the possible consequences of that, either.
The deceleration went on for a long time. At the last moment, as his vision started to blur, Garroway saw the autie on the drone feed, a tiny bright star moving fast—too fast—toward the gaping hole in the Hunter ship’s flank.
Hell, where was the external feed from the autie? There ought to be a camera up, to show them where they were going…but there was no time to think about t
hat.
“Brace for impact!” he called over the platoon channel.
In the image window in his mind, the star vanished into the far vaster mass of the Xul ship, slicing through tangled wreckage. The jolt slammed him back against the seat, nearly driving the breath from his body. The impact was silent in hard vacuum, of course, but he could feel the shuddering, grating vibrations of hull metal sliding through whatever the hell the Xul vessel was made of, transmitted through deck and seat.
And then he felt the familiar dropping sensation of zero gravity. The seat grabbers released him, and he flexed his body, drifting into the aisle between the seats, which now felt more like a tunnel, with no up or down, no deck or overhead. “Okay, Marines! Stand up! By twos! Secure your drift!”
The tunnel began filling with armored Marines moving gently out of their seats and turning to face aft, gripping the seat backs in gauntleted hands to keep from floating free. Aft, the main hatchway was opening up, the ramp swinging slowly out of the way. Peering past the shoulders of the Marines in front of him, Garroway could see…blackness. An empty cavern.
At least the hatch is opening, he thought. If the mechanism had been damaged by the autie’s tail-first impact, they would have had to emerge one at a time from the single-man hatches forward, an awkward and deadly way of entering combat.
“Ramp down!” the autie’s crew chief yelled. “You’re clear to go!”
“Okay, Marines,” Garroway called. “It’s going to be a close-quarters tangle in there. Weapon status on safety-interrupt! Acknowledge!”
Acknowledgments came back in rapid succession. With safety-interrupt engaged in their combat suit computers, their weapons would lock each time their line of fire intersected a fellow Marine.
“Boarding party away!” Garroway called. “Gung ho!”