Star Marines

by Ian Douglas

  While most of the watchers simply enjoyed the show, a few pursued their own agendas. Since the twenty-first-century revelations that nonhuman aliens had been in large part responsible for much of the original evolution and development of the human species, numerous new religions, and a fair number of old, had grappled with the question of aliens in various creative ways. For many, the Ahannu and the N’mah, the only two ET species with which any serious communication had been achieved so far, were gods…or, at the least, they played a decidedly godlike role. For others, especially the older, more conservative bastions within Islam and Christianity, they were deceivers and therefore agents of evil…not gods, but demons.

  Since the Hunters of the Dawn were still largely a mystery, but since it was now certain that Hunter ships had devastated Earth in an asteroid bombardment some 8,000 years B.C.E., most religions placed them squarely on the side of the demons in any celestial warfare, but there were a few who thought otherwise. As the light show progressed, a major riot started in San Francisco between communicants of the Grey Enlightenment and the Circle of the Celestial Illuminants. CCI dogma insisted that there could be no evil among the angelic beings of other worlds, and that rumors of aliens throwing planet-buster asteroids at the Earth must be lies, while GE belief featured the Xul as chief among Satan’s legions. Two hundred died in the resulting clash of doctrines. Similar riots were reported in Ciudad Méjico, Rouen, Oporto, and Naples. In the Vatican, in Saint Peter’s Square, similar doctrinal disputes resulted in a clash between followers of the Papess and of the counter-Pope, beginning with cobblestones and clubs, and ending with handguns and civilian laser weaponry. Fires gutted half of the Vatican offices before the Italian Army and the Swiss Guards could disperse the prowling mobs.

  But worse was to come, and swiftly. Throughout the early evening hours in the western Americas, reports began coming in of unprecedented high-energy impacts, from Hawaii east to Ukraine. Hundreds—then thousands—began crashing out of the sky, striking the empty lands between cities or out at sea, for the most part, cities being remarkably tiny targets when compared to the planet as a whole. Thunder, isolated at first, but soon becoming continuous and deafening, sounded across North America as the celestial bombardment began in earnest. There were scattered reports of damage and injuries, but nothing serious. People continued to flock to outdoor vantage points, watching the sky fall.

  At 0215 hours GMT, a large portion of Bordeaux, France, was demolished by a rock the size of a loaf of bread as it came skimming in just above the horizon and smashed into the Rue Emil Fourcand at 2,000 kilometers per second, creating a shotgun-blast effect that demolished buildings as far east as Bergerac. Three minutes later, the top half of the kilometer-high Helios Tower in the Miami Offshore Complex disintegrated in thunder and flaming fragments, at just about the same instant that the town of Pont Rouge, in Free Quebec, vanished in the equivalent of the detonation of a thirty-megaton fusion warhead.

  It didn’t help that a probable majority of the fragments entering the atmosphere actually did explode before hitting the surface. The shock waves were powerful enough to flatten cities, strip mountains bare, and punch kilometer-wide depressions into the landscape below. One large boulder massing several tons slammed into atmosphere east of Hawaii and, in an instant, punched a straight line of vacuum through the sky before vanishing again into space above the Marshall Islands. The thunder clap of its passage sent tidal waves rolling across the Pacific, deafened thousands, swatted atmospheric fliers out of the air, and shattered windows as far away as Japan.

  From orbit, Earth’s night hemisphere presented an awesome and terrifying spectacle. Observers on board the Nippon/Celestine Orbital Hotel Complex, then passing two hundred kilometers above the Gulf of Mexico, watched, stunned, as brilliant pinpoints of light flashed and strobed in random patterns among the streaks of shooting stars seen from above, each point representing an impact equal to the detonation of millions of tons of chemical high explosives. The scene was captured by the hotel’s Earth-observer cameras and uploaded to the Global Net, which preserved it when the orbital hotel itself was smashed out of existence ten minutes later.

  Other orbital facilities were destroyed as well—communications stations, orbital factories and nanufactory centers, naval yards and orbital depots, solar power stations with their far-flung, gossamer-fragile photocell wings. The French freighter Garonne, the Cantonese asteroid miner Fushun, and the North Indian frigate Godavari all were wiped from the sky before they could power up and move clear of the planet.

  Of the actual impacts, most were over water, of course, but those were no less destructive than those fragments falling over land. A twenty-ton rock came down in the Gulf of Maine, and the tidal wave obliterated Nova Scotia, all of coastal Maine, and flooded the tide barriers around Boston, washing away much of the city, and submerging the rest. The offshore tourist and shopping complex of Pacifica simply vanished—probably carried away by the same tidal wave that scoured Baja and flooded San Diego.

  For the past three centuries, all of the world’s established coastal cities had been battling the effects of global warming—including rising sea levels. Some, like Charleston, had followed the ancient example of Holland and built extensive sea walls, creating safe havens and new land behind them that were for the most part below sea level. Others, like the Manhatten Megaplex, continued building up as the sea waters flooded in, controlling the effects of storm surges and high tide through the use of concentric rings of tidal barriers, while protecting the central portions of each metropolis beneath enormous transplas domes. Most domed cities faired well through the bombardment, save for those, like Houston, which took a direct hit. Most cities protected only by tidal barriers or flood-control walls were overwhelmed by the repeated impacts of fifty-and eighty-meter-high waves.

  In the first three hours of the bombardment, an estimated six hundred thousand people died.

  And even worse was soon to come.

  Thanks to the vast, obscuring cloud of asteroidal debris, it wasn’t until the orphan moonlet of 2127-VT passed the orbit of the Moon that this singularly cataclysmic threat to Earth was finally detected by the deep space tracking facility at Fra Mauro. At a distance of 400,000 kilometers, however, the hurtling mountain was only three minutes and twenty seconds away from impact when the warning was flashed back to Earth.

  The three cis-Lunar High Guard facilities had been designed as a kind of last line of defense against Earth-threatening asteroids. As long ago as the late twentieth century, astronomers had discovered several potential planet-killers as they passed within a few hundred thousand kilometers of Earth—sometimes after they’d already made their closest approach and were on their way back into interplanetary space once more. Since it was possible that a rogue nation seeking to bombard Earth with an asteroid might do so by changing the orbit of one of these Earth grazers, leaving too little time to bring the HELGA facilities on-line, it was decided to create three inner-sanctum bastions—large X-ray lasers orbiting at the points of an equilateral triangle midway between Earth and Moon. Since each could only be fired once—firing involved the detonation of a small fusion warhead to pump the laser, vaporizing the satellite—they’d been held out of the original battle against the possibility that one or more large bodies made it past the HELGAs and into near-Earth space.

  The three stations, and the artificial intelligences operating them, were named Verdande, Urda, and Skuld—the three Fates of Norse mythology who measured the span of a man’s life, and who also guarded the World-Tree of Life.

  Almost certainly, the trio of satellites saved Earth from total destruction. The body, the orphaned satellite of 2127-VT that entered cis-Lunar space at 0526:35 GMT, massed 2.35 × 1012 tons. At 2,000 kilometers per second, it carried a kinetic energy of 4.69 × 1021 joules…the explosive equivalent of close to one billion megatons.

  Verdande, Urda, and Skuld all were on-line and ready when Alexander, the AI running the Pentagon Combat Center, flash
ed the warning to them. It took over two minutes for the individual tracking systems to locate the intruder, and rotate the satellites into position. As the asteroid flashed past the Moon’s orbit and on toward Earth, they would have to pan very quickly to hit their fast-moving target.

  The falling rock was one hundred fifty-two thousand kilometers out—seventy-six seconds from impact when all three stations fired.

  Verdande missed. Of the three, that station was closest to the target, the lateral displacement as the planetoid passed the greatest and, at the last instant before detonation, meteoric fragments—dust-and sand-grain-sized remnants of 2127-VT—sandblasted the station, puncturing its solar cell array and minutely affected its aim. Both Urda and Skuld, however, burned as brightly as tiny suns, loosing two micro-second bolts of invisible X-ray radiation that converged on the rock from two directions nearly eighty degrees apart.

  The planetoid body, like most of its class, possessed an extremely low density—1.5 grams per cubic centimeter, which made it only a little denser than Styrofoam. Much of it was composed of water ice, mixed with a kind of carbon soot.

  Shock heating shattered the rock, but unevenly. Had it been traveling at more reasonable planetary velocities, the cloud of fragments might have expanded enough that few would have hit the planet.

  Unfortunately, seventy-six seconds after firing the cloud hit atmosphere, the fragments, many glowing white hot and all still moving at 2,000 kilometers per second. The largest chunk, two hundred meters wide and massing eight million tons, tunneled a straight line through atmosphere at an oblique angle high above the Atlantic Ocean, its shock wave thundering across the surface and shattering the above-water sea-farm complex at the Grand Banks.

  Had it been deflected by another degree or two, it would have missed the surface entirely. Descending across the ocean in an instant, it plowed into the water on a trajectory that was very nearly flat.

  The impact vaporized a hole in the water three miles across and a mile deep, all the way to the sea floor, with a blast cloud that actually ballooned well above the atmosphere and into space. For a seeming eternity, the wound in the tortured sea gaped open, held at bay by the bubble of superheated steam and the fiercely radiating molten rock exposed on the naked sea bed; as the steam rose and cooled, the ocean walls collapsed and the ocean came crashing in, but slowly, the boiling water still held back by the steam.

  Some of the remaining fragments missed the Earth entirely, passing above the horizon and heading back into space. Others struck in a vast footprint from Bermuda to Spain, like the blast from a titanic shotgun, adding to the general devastation. A wall of flame seared across much of Europe, setting cities and forests ablaze.

  Tens of millions died from the immediate effects of the strike.

  Worse, far worse, tidal waves rippled out from each impact, like ripples from a rock thrown into a pond. These ripples, however, carried a significant fraction of the kinetic energy released by the strikes, and, as they neared land and the sea floor grew shallow, waves bulked into towering walls hundreds of meters high. Because the largest fragment had been traveling west to east and struck at such a shallow angle, the majority of the displaced water traveled east, smashing into Portugal and Spain first, the French Atlantic coast minutes later. The mountains saved much of Iberia, though the coast from La Coruña to Cadiz was devastated, and the flood boiled up the Douro River as far inland as Valladolid. The French Atlantic coast, however, was completely submerged for two hundred kilometers inland, and the narrowing of the English Channel created a monstrous wave that scoured everything between London and Paris flat.

  At the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow gap between the mountains of Spain and of Morocco served as a similar bottleneck, focusing the incoming tidal surge into a deadly hammer’s blow that rolled across the entire Mediterranean from end to end, simultaneously drowning and smashing ancient and populous cities from Barcelona to Rome to Athens to the Levant.

  Only within the past two centuries had archeology—helped along by the studies of records kept by the extraterrestrial N’mah—finally acknowledged that the myriad stories about a lost continent in the Atlantic Ocean had actually been based on fact. Drowned Atlantis had not been a continent, in fact, nor had it been, as debunkers supposed, the island of Thera in the Aegean, destroyed by volcanic eruption.

  Instead, there had indeed been a low-lying island the size of Iceland some hundreds of kilometers off the coast of southwestern Spain, opposite the Pillars of Hercules, just as Plato had recorded, and the site of a thriving Bronze Age culture first planted and nurtured by the N’mah in the aftermath of the last Xul incursion into the Solar System several thousand years before. That culture—and many others throughout the Mediterranean—had vanished in 1197 B.C.E. when a fragment of comet struck the sea floor nearby, coincidentally less than a thousand kilometers from the site of this new major impact.

  The fragment that destroyed fabled Atlantis had been somewhat larger, but moving at only a tiny fraction of the newcomer’s speed. That time, earthquakes and tidal waves had collapsed much of the offshore island, leaving only the Madeira Archipelago and the Canary Islands above water, and sent a tidal wave blasting through the Mediterranean that had toppled megalithic structures in Malta, wiped out the civilizations of the Hittites and the Achaean Greeks, and left behind countless tales to add to the growing body of myths telling of a worldwide flood.

  That flood had carried a tiny fraction of the power and destructive force of this one.

  To the west, the tidal waves were smaller and less energetic than those that overwhelmed Europe and the Mediterranean, and reduced in destructive force by the greater distance they’d traveled, but inconceivably fast and powerful mountains of water still rose eighty meters above the beaches as they thundered into North America at three hundred kilometers per hour.

  The wave swept across all of Florida and most of the Gulf Coast without stopping, and rolled inland as far as the western reaches of the Piedmont from Georgia to Virginia. Cities that had withstood the celestial bombardment thus far were crushed, overwhelmed, and submerged. Miami vanished almost without a trace, its dome crushed and its offshore office and housing towers swept away like twigs.

  Cuba and the other Caribbean islands were inundated, only the highest mountains remaining above the waves as they roared past, from northeast to southwest. The surge swallowed much of the Amazon Basin, submerging farmlands as far south as the Matto Grosso. North, the Atlantic coast, already savaged by the impact in the Gulf of Maine, went under again, the waves this time reaching as far inland as the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Farther north, the waves broke against the Monts Notre-Dame, sent a tidal surge up the St. Lawrence as far as Lake Ontario, and spread north to flood the eerily circular formation of Lake Manicouagan—itself the crater marking an ancient asteroid strike that had struck Québec Libre 120 million years in the past.

  Far to the east, the steam bubble at last collapsed, sending out a second set of ripples. Hours after the first tidal waves had exploded over dry land, the second waves, smaller but still destructive, struck. They added little to the overall levels of death and devastation, however.

  The waves from the first impact had already scoured bare almost an eighth of the Earth’s surface.

  One additional result of what soon would be known as Armageddonfall was not at first apparent in the chaos and devastation immediately following the Atlantic impact. During the hours leading up to the major impact, as more and more population centers had felt the sting of incoming high-velocity projectiles, major nodes of the Global Net—communications centers like Atlanta, Boston, Washington, and New York had begun dropping offline. Electronic traffic had been automatically rerouted to avoid blacked-out regions, but affected areas were rapidly spreading as the damage intensified.

  Then the tidal waves had rolled in off the ocean, scraping entire cities off the coasts and plunging a third of the planet into a complete power blackout. All of North and South Amer
ica, all of Europe, most of Africa, and parts of Asia, especially around the Pacific Rim, all found themselves knocked off the global power grid, and the computer networks in those regions collapsed.

  Millions among the watching throngs across Earth’s night side had noticed the effects first when they could no longer use their personal implant hardware to access the Net. Questions uplinked to local nodes went unanswered, and individuals found their mind-to-mind communication links with friends, families, businesses, and civil services abruptly cut off. Artificial intelligences—hundreds of millions of them, serving as personal secretaries, e-librarians, and electronic assistants of every kind and permanently resident within the Net—were suddenly gone or inaccessible. Alexander, the powerful AI operating as a command program within the Department of the Chiefs of Staff and responsible for the coordination of all American military forces, continued to exist within a fragment of the military’s net in the sealed sub-basements of the Pentagon, but the Pentagon itself, and the nearby city of Washington, all were now submerged beneath ten meters of mud and water, and it would be a long time before survivors—human and electronic—could be rescued.

  The majority of civilians across the planet depended on their links with the Net—for communication with others, for information retrieval, for operating vehicles and machinery, for nearly every aspect of modern technological life. They received their first basic nano implants shortly after birth, and these grew with the individual according to his needs. It wasn’t widely advertised, but during training, U.S. Marines and other elite military personnel were deliberately deprived of their intracranial hardware links, in part to demonstrate that they could function without them. Many recruits, however, were unable to adjust and washed out before receiving their military-issue upgrades. Others backed out before their civilian gear could be neutralized, unwilling to try life disconnected from the Net. The experience was traumatic and disorienting in the extreme, the electronic equivalent of dropping a civilized man into the wilderness, naked, without tools or weapons, and utterly, utterly alone.