by Ian Douglas
“General Hudson,” he said evenly, “I understand your sense of urgency. However, I still have Marines out there unaccounted for…men and women who put their lives on the line to destroy the intruder. I will not give them up for dead until hope for their survival is gone, or unless there is the gravest need otherwise.”
“What hope?” Hudson snapped. “General, those Marines died in the blast that destroyed the Xul ship. Tragic, yes…but I remind you that the situation on Earth is critical, critical. Almost certainly, billions have died. And there is every possibility that more Xul ships will enter the system at any moment in order to continue what the first began! I needn’t remind you that Humanity may not survive a second such attack!”
“And just what is it you would have me do, General? The Preble certainly can’t take on another Xul intruder.”
“No. But you can return me and my staff to Phobos. We have lasercom communication with the base there, and know the facility is still up and running. We also have laser-com contact with facilities on Mars, Luna, and in deep space, including the HELGA stations, the Jovian system, and bases in the Asteroid Belt.
“In short, our infrastructure throughout the Solar System appears to be intact, save for Earth itself, and the various stations and facilities in low Earth orbit.”
“Just what is your point, General?”
“My point? My point is that we need to prepare for a second Xul incursion, and the quicker we do that, the better! Even if the Xul ship was completely alone in carrying out its attack, you can’t imagine that the rest of them will ignore the fact that one of their warships has just gone missing! They’re going to send other forces in to check up on us! And we need to be ready!
“Now, we’re already planning a conference at Stickney Base. We’re also lucky to have a N’mah ship in-system…the T’krah Elessed Ev’r.” The alien name rolled off Hudson’s tongue with practiced ease, glottal stops and all. “I’m told Stickney is in contact with them, and they will be arriving at Phobos within five days. I intend to be there to meet them!”
Garroway shot a quick mathematical query uplink to Quincy2, and received a reply almost at once. The Preble was currently decelerating, on a course that would match the course and speed of the Xul vessel at the moment of its destruction in another five hours. That put them roughly halfway between the current positions of Earth and Mars, but outside of Mars’ orbit, within the inner reaches of the Asteroid Belt. To return to Mars space, they would have to continue their deceleration for five more hours, then accelerate for two days back toward Mars, then decelerate for another two days. Not even the magic of N’mah semi-inertialess drive would change the cold numbers of fact. Four days. They could not return to Mars space in less than four days, at the very best.
He did a quick review of other assets. Possibly they could rendezvous with another ship already en route for Mars.
Quincy2 assured him that there was nothing in transit now that would get Hudson back to Phobos in less than four days.
“General, if you’ll check the math and the available ship assets, you’ll see that you’re going to miss that reception.” He waited as the man’s eyes took on a distant look. Hudson did not have access to Quincy2, who was open only to members of 1MIEU’s command constellation, or Garroway’s immediate superiors with 3MARDIV.
“Nevertheless, General Garroway, I need to reach Phobos with the least possible delay. We could make it in four days if we decelerate at two gravities, then boost for Mars at two gravities instead of one. Captain Berger has refused my orders, and says he is operating under your orders, as ranking officer on board this vessel.”
“Quite right. It is my intention to take the Preble into the general area where the Xul ship was destroyed, matching course and speed with the debris cloud. From there, I intend to have Captain Berger deploy additional remote probes and drones. My AI has analyzed recordings of the Xul’s destruction, and we believe those recordings caught just a glimpse of the AUT an instant before it was hit by the blast. We believe we have enough data to extrapolate the AUT’s vector after the blast…enough, anyway, to give us a fair chance of locating them.”
“General Garroway! Face reality! Your Marines are dead! They were killed in the destruction of the Xul vessel. If any did survive, somehow, they were hit by so much radiation that, well, it must have been instantly fatal. They are dead, and nothing more can be done for them!”
Garroway drew a deep breath. “General Hudson. Those are my men and women out there, and I will determine when it is time to give up on them. The Navy hospital ship Clara Barton is two days from here, and on approach. They have the facilities to treat severe radiation poisoning.
“While I understand your need to reach that conference on Phobos, I assure you that that conference will be continuing for some time…and the Preble has everything you need to attend it electronically. By the time things get started, you won’t even have much of a time lag to work around.
“But I will not give up on my Marines. Is that understood?”
Hudson glared down at him from across the desk, hands flexing at his sides. Then the man turned on his heel and stalked out.
Garroway leaned back in his chair, sagging a little inside. Making an enemy of an NAU liaison officer was not a career-enhancing move, as they said. If things were as bad as Garroway feared back on Earth, there was no NAU left…but the man could still make trouble.
In fact, Garroway’s take on the man was that Hudson was suffering from a severe case of ambition. As an LO standing in for NAU politicians unavoidably absent—perhaps permanently so—he was in a good position to create a power base for his own political aspirations.
Garroway scowled. If true, Hudson was playing political games with the lives of Garroway’s Marines.
And that was something Garroway would not tolerate from anyone, not the Commandant, not the Chiefs of Staff, not the President of the United States.
No one.
But the thought left him feeling isolated and alone. Communications were coming back on-line across the Solar System, but the situation in near-Earth space was still fuzzy and fragmentary, at best. The most telling image was being transmitted from a telescope camera at Fra Mauro, on Luna. He called up the image in a noumenal window for another long look.
Currently, it was early morning over Greenwich, which made it night across all of North America. The image from Luna showed Earth very nearly full, so he must be looking at the hemisphere occupied by the vast sweep of Asia and the western Pacific.
But there was no way to tell what he was looking at. The Earth was a blindingly white, white globe, the surface as completely masked by impenetrable clouds as was the surface of Venus. In places—especially along the sunrise terminator, which he calculated must be eastern Europe, the eastern Med, and Africa—lightning played within the cottony, light-muffling depths of those clouds, constant, silent flickerings and strobings larger and more powerful than anything Garroway had seen in all his years of observing Earth from space. He’d seen the storm over the Atlantic some hours earlier, noted the vast, spiral sweep alive with lightning flashes. If that was Europe he was looking at now, that lightning must be the eastern rim of the storm…and the storm must have grown considerably just in the past twelve hours.
He tried to imagine what it was like right now on Earth’s surface, tried and failed. Darkness. Rain. Storm. Lightning. It was clear that something very large had gotten past the High Guard defenses and punched into the Earth. To judge from the global cloud cover, that something had been a dinosaur killer in terms of kinetic energy at the very least.
Humankind’s survival must now depend on humans living offworld…but that was a terribly slender hope. Outside of small colonies dedicated to research or to military operations on Luna and on Mars, there wasn’t much else in the Solar System at large—a few dozen mining and processing centers in the Belt, some research stations among the Jovian moons and at Titan, fifty or so orbital facilities at the L-4 and L-5 p
oints, and in solar orbit…nanufactories, for the most part, antimatter generating stations, and military bases like the HELGA stations.
That was the Solar System. There were a few bases and small colonies on worlds around other stars—most of them xenoarcheological research facilities like the one at Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A. There was a large colony now at Llalande 21185, on the Ahannu planet humans called Ishtar, numbering…what? Twenty thousand? If that.
He had no hard figures available, but the total human population off-Earth might total a few hundred thousand. That was all.
But it wasn’t just the small off-Earth population. If his guess about that planet-girdling white cloud was at all accurate, it would be getting cold on Earth, from pole to pole, very cold. This might well be the start of a new global ice age. If so, the planet’s survivors were going to be damned hard-pressed just feeding themselves.
Up until now, the majority of the food for offworld facilities had been shipped up from Earth. There were greenhouses on Luna and Mars, yes, but they were barely productive enough to feed the staffs at those sites. Most bases and orbital stations were just too small to produce their own food.
And now, somehow, those bases would not only have to feed themselves, but the Earth as well.
A daunting prospect.
Quite possibly an impossible prospect.
And all of that assumed that another Xul ship didn’t pop out of nowhere and begin flinging more rocks around. Hudson was right about that. The Xul might well be back, if only to find out what had happened to their first ship. A determined attack by even one more ship would wipe the small human communities from the faces of Mars and Luna in no time at all, would complete the destruction of Earth, would mop up the remaining orbital stations and ships almost as an afterthought…and there was nothing in the Solar System right now that could stand against them.
Humanity now faced two major problems, as Garroway saw it. The first was simple survival—pulling together whatever was left of Earth’s groundside population and ensuring that they could be fed and housed in the aftermath of the single greatest calamity ever to overtake Humankind. If the Xul hadn’t driven humanity into extinction, the ice age to come might well finish the job.
The second was just as serious, and perhaps more so. The human race was now at war with an enemy immeasurably superior in technology to its own. The Xul had faster-than-light drive. That alone gave them an insurmountable advantage in combat. A combat fleet trying to close with such a vessel would never get close enough to launch a single missile, not when the Xul could outrun light itself, at need. The Marines of Detachment Alpha had lucked out, getting as close as they had. The blasts from HELGA Three and the XEL satellites at Mars had obviously crippled the intruder enough that the AUT could close in and put the Marines on board. That was the sort of combat tactic that you could not expect to work a second time.
In combat, victory went to the lucky more than to the skilled.
And it was very possible that Earth had just used up its cosmic allotment of luck.
“General Garroway?” a soft voice spoke in his mind.
“What is it, Quincy?”
“I believe we have found them.”
That brought him sharply into the here and now. “What? The AUT?”
“Yes, sir. Radar and lidar scans of this entire volume of space identified a large number of fragments emanating from the blast that destroyed the Xul ship.”
“Yes, I know. That was part of the problem, wasn’t it?” The debris cloud had obscured much of the area, blocking both radar and laser tracking sweeps.
“Yes, sir. However, I made a careful analysis of the vector of each tracked fragment, eliminating those fragments massing less than one hundred tons.”
An AUT massed 200 tons, so Quincy had been looking for anything larger than half of an AUT. Garroway thought he saw where the AI was going with this. “Go on.”
“I paid particular attention to debris tracked in a cone extending out from the blast point along the general probable heading of the object we identified in the drone images. One fragment, massing an estimated two hundred tons, possessed a velocity component to its vector significantly greater than the rest.”
“Ah!” Of course. The AUT had already been accelerating out from the Xul ship when the explosion occurred. The blast front had pushed it along faster, essentially adding to its velocity the same velocity imparted to all of the other fragments.
Through that sort of analysis, the AUT would have stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.
“Well done, Quincy!”
“Thank you, sir. The application of basic physics seemed obvious.” But, Garroway swore, the AI still sounded, well…smug.
“What do we have that can reach them?”
“I have already taken the liberty of directing several reconnaissance drones into intercept vectors. The Clara Barton can rendezvous with them in two days. The Preble could do so in nineteen hours.”
“Put me through to Captain Berger!”
“Yes, General. On-line.”
There was still a chance…small, but a fighting chance.
And fighting was what Marines did best.
10
18 FEBRUARY 2314
Mars Military Training Command
Stickney Base,
Phobos
1412 hrs, local
Colonel Robert Ellsworth Lee entered the conference chamber—doing so in a less than dignified manner, he thought, as he pulled himself along the guideline, half-adrift in the Martian moon’s microgravity. His staff trailed along behind, the command constellation for 3MarDiv’s 1RST, formally the 1st Regment of the 3rd Marine Division, and now officially the First Marine Recon Strike Team. The large, bowl-shaped auditorium was already filling up with high-ranking brass, to judge by the mass of gold and silver braid on so many full-dress uniforms, enough so as to leave him feeling distinctly on the peon side of things. He could see a few majors within the personal staffs of various flag officers, and a smattering of Navy captains and Army and Marine colonels, but by far the majority of officers wore the heavy gold braid of admirals and generals. There were, he guessed, a couple of hundred people there; he hadn’t realized there was that much military brass in Mars space.
There were quite a few civilians present as well, which made Lee uncomfortable. Until they identified themselves, you never knew who or what the suits might be—politicians, spooks, or civilian intelligence analysts.
Given the situation that had generated this unprecedented session, there likely were fair numbers of all three, and chances were that meant trouble, one way or another, for the professional military personnel in the room.
Lee found his seat in one of the back, higher tiers and strapped himself in. Chairs, of course, weren’t strictly necessary; you could stand all day in Phobos’s whisper of a gravity field and not feel the need to sit down. But seated ranks of attendees carried with them order and tradition, both; it simply wouldn’t do to have a forest of generals and admirals all standing in a mob, at slightly diverging angles, trying to see past one another to the stage.
The central stage was occupied by a podium, and by a large holoprojection disk. Smaller disks were set in a circle around the stage; not all of the attendees to the conference could be present physically, and arrangements had been made for them to attend electronically instead.
But it was the large projection disk that particularly interested Lee. If the scuttlebutt floating about throughout the Phobos facility was true….
Lee didn’t let himself think about that. Instead, he directed his attention up, or what passed for up in this near weightless environment. Though the conference room was buried deep beneath the moonlet’s surface, the dome was set to show the view outside as though the structure literally rested on the surface, at the rim of Stickney Crater. The view was…spectacular.
Once, eons ago, a collision with another large body had very nearly shattered Phobos, leaving it looking like a gra
y potato with a deep, smooth chunk gouged out of one end. That gouge was Stickney, a crater ten kilometers wide on a moonlet that itself measured only twenty by twenty-seven kilometers. Called after the maiden name of Asaph Hall’s wife—Hall was the American astronomer who discovered Phobos in 1877—Stickney provided an awesome panorama of the Phobos surface, simply by virtue of its size compared to the moon itself. Outside the dome, the dusty surface of Phobos appeared to drop away in a deep and shadow-etched gulf; ten kilometers away, the far rim stretched across the horizon, bisecting the enormous rust-orange face of Mars. Scattered boulders half-submerged in dust cast long, fast-moving shadows. Some of those rocks, ejecta from the original impact, were fifty meters across.
Though naturally a dark, dark gray in color, the surface of Phobos at this moment was bathed in a ruddy wash of Mars-light. The tiny satellite circled the planet at an altitude of just six thousand kilometers, so the planet’s face filled much of the sky; with the moon orbiting the planet three times in a single Martian day, surface features on Mars were visibly moving, drifting slowly from east to west. At the moment, the dark, charcoal sprawl of Syrtis Major was rising slowly above Stickney’s far rim, its borders marked by thickly overlapping craters, dark ravines, and bright highlands.
The choice of that particular surface view, Lee thought, had most likely been accidental…but he wondered if other people at the conference were looking at the seemingly bottomless gulf of Stickney, thinking about the ancient asteroidal impact that had gouged it…and connecting with the realization of what had happened to Earth.
Early reports were finally starting to filter in. The situation on Earth was as grim and as desperate as many had feared. At this time, only the governments of Japan, North China, and Australia had been able to jury-rig computer and communications links capable of reconnecting with the System Net, going through the nodes at Fra Mauro and at Crisium, on Luna.