by Ian Douglas
“A lot of the people from Earth are still pretty wracked up after what happened there,” Travis told the general. He allowed himself a smile. “Maybe the boys and girls from Ishtar will be a steadying influence on the old hands.”
“I’m counting on that. Just as I’m counting on the old hands to steady them.” He hesitated. “Why did they join up, do you think?”
“Who, the Ishtarans?” Travis shrugged. “I was talking to some of them a few months ago, back on Earth. I got the feeling that…well, we seem pretty exotic to them. Bigger. Badder. Lots of high-tech toys. And we stood up to the An and made them back down. Dumu-gir Kalam was only possible because we went in and broke the Ahannu hold over their human slaves.”
“You’re suggesting hero worship?”
“Something like that. Although I get the feeling that, maybe, it’s more like I was with you.”
“Eh? How do you mean?”
“Did I ever tell you why I joined the Corps?”
The general shook his head.
“When I was small…seven, maybe eight, my family would take me out to your family’s place in Baltimore. Remember?”
“Very well. My sister—your mother—and our parents were…very close.”
“I used to love it there. Especially the horses. Anyway…you were gone, off on your first deployment out-system.”
“Poseidon.”
“Yeah. Your mom and dad both were retired by then. I used to listen to the stories your parents told…and my mother, too. Mostly stories about you, and how proud they were of you. I had it pretty bad, I guess.”
“Had what?”
“Hero worship, of course.”
“Aw, c’mon.” The general snorted. “Your old age is making you senile. I hadn’t even met you yet.”
“Yeah, how could I forget? You were twelve light-years away. But I heard all about you from my mother, and from your dad I heard all about Ishtar and Sirius and the Star Marines. Stories. Wonderful stories, about worlds more alien than anything I could have imagined. Red forests and flying gossamers and a silver hoop ten miles across gleaming in Sirian double-starlight. Ishtaran trolls and the fighting Nergals. I started downloading everything I could get hold of about the Marines. And sometimes, I’d go outside on clear nights and look up at the stars. I think I was determined to join up by the time I was ten. By the time you got back, I was already a Marine.”
“I remember the first time we met. At Quantico.”
“That’s right. I’d just made sergeant.”
“Well, I don’t really care why they enlisted,” the general said after a moment. “They’re Marines now, and the Corps is their home. More than Earth can ever be.”
“I think,” Travis said slowly, “that that is true of all of us now.”
For a long moment, the general stared into the virtual window, watching storm clouds scud through the sky above the lake.
“Famsit Corps,” he said.
Interlude
2 OCTOBER 2314 TO 15 JULY 2323
IST John A. Lejeune
En route to Sirius
The MIEU task force assembled in Mars polar orbit, the ships arriving one by one from other parts of the Solar System. Six were US/UFR Navy warships pulled in from High Guard duty, the frigates Gray, Burnham, and Roberts, the destroyers Farragut and Spruance, and the battlecruiser South California. Five more were warships belonging to other space navies, the frigates Guiyang, Chengdu, and Rajput, and the destroyers Slava and Sung Shin-lin. Four were interstellar supply transports, the Shenandoah, Acadia, Skoryy Krym, and Hongoi, and two were Marine Commandant-class LPH transports, the Archibald Henderson and the John A. Lejeune.
The last member of the eighteen-ship task force was also a supply transport—formerly the Yellowstone, but recently rechristened the Intrepid. Her crew consisted solely of an iteration of AI software, dubbed Quincy3. Her only cargo consisted of five hundred canisters of sand dug from the floor of the long-vanished Martian North-Hemisphere sea, each massing fifty metric tons.
Twenty-five thousand tons of sand.
The size of the task force had grown dramatically over the past month. Originally, only five vessels had been assigned to the mission—a supply ship, the Lejeune, and three escorts—but lately governments loath to see fleet assets stripped away from the High Guard and planetary defense had begun to change their minds. With no additional Xul attacks within the months immediately following Armageddonfall, they seemed more willing now to embrace the idea of an active defense, of taking the fight to the enemy, rather than waiting for the enemy to return to Earth. There was, after all, a chance that Seafire would work as advertised. Pulling off a second upset victory against a Xul intruder—or, as was more likely, an entire fleet of Xul intruders this time—seemed a much more remote likelihood.
On 5 October 2324, the last of the Marines entered cybe-hibe. Naval personnel would join them once the fleet was under way. The vessels of Task Force Seafire aligned themselves with the brilliant, blue-white spark that was the star Sirius, and fired their main engines.
All starships were built along the same basic design—a mushroom shape with the RM storage tank forward, in the broad cap, holding reaction mass for the drives—water. The water also served as shielding for the hab modules, folded now against each ship’s spine during the drive phase of the flight. A second water tank was located well aft, providing additional reaction mass, and protection for the hab modules when the ship flipped end-for-end at the midphase of its boost and began decelerating.
Aft of the second tank were the Kerr-Winston Ev extractors, drawing vacuum energy from the quantum fluctuations of so-called empty-space and channeling it to the main drives where it converted water to a starcore-hot plasma and directed it astern in a dazzling flare of light.
Until the past fifty years, human-crewed starships had, for the sake of their crews, limited their acceleration to one gravity, which brought them to near-light velocity in something just under one year. The introduction of N’mah inertial field technology, however, allowed significantly higher accelerations. The eighteen ships of Task Force Seafire boosted outbound at just under ten gravities, sufficient to begin crowding the lightspeed in a little over one month. Within their hab modules, folded away with the decks directed aft, only one gravity was permitted to leak through.
By the end of October, the task force was well beyond the arbitrary boundary of Sol’s planetary system, and into the Oort Cloud beyond, moving at within one percent or so of lightspeed itself.
On Earth, temperatures continued to drop as snowfields blanketed over seventy percent of the land surface, from Patagonia to Canada, from northern Europe to Australia. Nanoconstruction efforts were under way everywhere, hollowing out vast caverns beneath the snow and ice. Several times, during ice ages of the past, Humankind had survived by living in caves. This time would be no different.
Thirty-five days after boosting clear of Mars orbit, the ship drives went silent. They were now moving only a hair less than light itself, but with the drives down they fell through space, weightless, the sky around them turned eldritch, distorted into a ring of stars compressed by relativistic effects encircling the task force, with emptiness both dead ahead and dead astern. Four hab modules onboard each ship pivoted on their mounts ninety degrees until they stood out from the vessel’s central spine, though still protected from stray atoms transformed by speed into high-energy radiation by the forward RM tank and several million liters of water. Those habitats, carefully balanced, began rotating about each vessel’s spine, creating an out-is-down spin gravity of half a G. The Navy crews, then, their duties complete for the time being, entered their own cybe-hibe tubes and the theoretically dreamless void of hibernation.
In April of 2316, after well over two years of bitter wrangling, the Federal Union voted to go through with the construction of five arks, built from asteroids and loaded with cybe-hibe tubes in order to rescue as large a number of Earth’s survivors as possible.
Fears that the announcement would mean an outbreak of war worldwide proved unfounded. There were protests and riots across much of the planet, true, and a brief war between Canton and the Federal Union, fought primarily in space and on Luna, but resources were too sharply stretched for it to last long. The following month, North China, Canton, and the Republic of Andhra Pradesh signed into an unlikely alliance, and announced their plans to build a sixth ark jointly.
The arks actually made very little difference in the day-today reality that was now life on the planet Earth. Everyone knew that a single asteroid-ark would be unable to carry more than a few tens of thousands of souls, together with the supplies necessary for starting a colony on the other end of the trek.
The rest of humanity focused on simple survival.
At the same time as construction on the arks began, and as the world’s cities began to delve into the planet’s depths, high-tech efforts were being made to raise Earth’s ambient temperature. Enormous mirrors—mylar sheets, kilometers across and coated with aluminum a few atoms thick, would serve to focus the Sun’s light and warmth on Earth’s cooling surface.
Unfortunately, little could be done until the clouds enveloping the Earth finally broke. The mirrors served to warm the upper atmosphere, however, paradoxically adding energy to the storm cells ravaging the planet, but—it was hoped—speeding the breakup of the enveloping, heat-reflecting cloud layers.
In July of 2317, nearly three years after the task force’s departure, the titanic storm cell anchored over the eastern Atlantic finally detached from the still-boiling patch of sea where the main asteroid impact had occurred. Following the sweeping track of a major coriolis storm, the cell tracked across the Atlantic, drowned the remnants of islands that once had marked the borders of the Caribbean Sea, and swung northwest into the North American mainland.
Unlike mere hurricanes, the disturbance was named simply “the Storm.” For a week it dumped rain and then snow on an already ice-locked continent before finally dispersing over Greenland. With the Storm’s death, the clouds at last began to disperse, allowing sunlight to reach the surface for the first time in three years. The change was small, at first, with the planet still under an eighty percent cloud cover, but it was a beginning.
And now the orbital mirrors could begin their proper job of terraforming an ice-locked Earth at last.
Nine years objective after departure—but only about twenty months of shipboard time after launch—the leading edge of the ring of compressed starlight encircling Task Force Seafire was glowing brilliantly, though only the AIs guiding the fleet were awake and watching. Sirius lay dead ahead, its light sharply blue-shifted by the task force’s speed until optical sensors were registering infrared and short radio wavelengths as visible light, its image compressed into the front rim of the ring of starlight. Beneath that eerie glow, the supremely competent AIs directing the task force vessels executed a flawless series of maneuvers, stopping the hab rotation, folding the hab modules back alongside the crafts’ spines, rotating the ships 180 degrees, then waking up their Navy crews. After performing thorough checks of all systems, the human crews fired up the main drives once more. At ten gravities, traveling now tailfirst, the starships backed down into the Sirius system on dazzling thrust plumes, slowing to match velocities with the gravitational anomaly of Sirius C. Again, the N’mah field dampers reduced ten gravities to one, as the vessels decelerated throughout the next thirty days.
By the time Sirius C was visible to the naked eye, a tiny, silvery ring growing slowly larger, the first of the Marines were waking up to an electronic reveille.
Eight point six light-years from Earth, the task force rendezvoused with the Stargate.
And battle was about to be joined.
19
7 AUGUST 2323
IST Lejeune
Stargate, Sirius Star System
1545 hrs, TFT
Technically, it was midafternoon on board the Lejeune. Though the ships’ clocks had been keyed to Greenwich Mean Time back in the Solar System, the instant they’d begun acceleration, all vessels in the task force had switched over to TFT—Task Force Time—since their internal temporal reference had been increasingly subject to relativistic effects as they approached the speed of light.
The shipboard clocks now, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with Greenwich time, or with any other time zone on Earth, and, in any case, time of day onboard a ship in space was entirely arbitrary.
But, according to shipboard routine, Travis Garroway had been up for over nine hours, now, checking weapons inventories and working with Chrome on personnel records for their platoon.
And now, they’d been ordered to attend the electronic briefing being held by Colonel Lee.
“Gentlemen, ladies,” Lee said without preamble, “the first of the probes has returned, and we have our first views of the Night’s Edge system.”
The briefing, ordered by General Garroway that morning, was being held in one of Lejeune’s common decks, a large compartment that served as a recreation area when it wasn’t being used as a mess hall. The area was circular, with a high overhead, filled with comfortable seats each equipped with downlink attachments. About three hundred Marines were present—something like a quarter of Lejeune’s entire war-load. Three other hab modules on Lejeune had identical common decks, and were also crowded with listening, watching Marines.
Garroway listened to the colonel’s mental voice and tried to suppress the rising excitement—and the fear riding with it. He always felt this way before a big op, when you didn’t know what was waiting for you, and what you didn’t know could kill you. Briefings like this one were especially rough. So much information incoming, and the details were totally beyond your ken.
One entire, curving bulkhead of the compartment, and the overhead, had been set to display an exterior view—the velvet black of space, with most stars banished by the arc-light glare of Sirius A and the tinier spark that was the white-dwarf Sirius B. A faint, silvery haze hung in ambient space, diffusing the glow, somewhat. The camera optics, he reasoned, must be mounted on the skin of the RM tank forward; the view of the surrounding heavens were not turning, as would have been the case had the view been from one of the hab modules that were now rotating to provide spin gravity.
Much closer at hand than the two brilliant star-points, so close its entire structure was not visible at once from this angle, the Stargate hung in solitary, silver-limned glory, a slender band like a wedding ring, but twenty kilometers across.
Garroway stared into the ring’s opening, trying to imagine the distortions to space and time twisting within its heart, and failed.
Lots of the Marines sitting in this compartment this afternoon would be going through that Gate soon…and they would not be coming back.
That was the hell of this kind of premission brief. Men and women gathered and linked in, listening to the details of the operation, the objectives, the risks, the possible enemy responses, all while trying to ignore the cold fact that those risks and responses were likely to kill many of those present.
Most, Garroway knew from long experience, would simply make the blanket assumption that they, personally, were immortal, that if it happened to anyone, it would be to someone else.
The older hands tended to be a bit more matter of fact about things. If it happens, let it be quick.
Space combat was particularly final in its effects on frail human physiology. Ninety percent or more of all combat injuries were fatal, as opposed to ten percent or so of injuries sustained in combat on Earth, and death tended to come swiftly in hard vacuum.
Most deaths in space were quick—a flash of energy, an explosion of escaping air, the black, muffling shrouds of shock and suffocation killing the brain almost before it had time to register the pain. That was the accepted wisdom, at least.
It was the waiting ahead of time that was agony.
“Since our arrival in the Sirius system twenty-two days ago,” Lee’s voice con
tinued, “our miltech specialists and xenoliaison officers have been working with our N’mah hosts.”
Garroway looked again at the image of the Stargate floating in space near the Lejeune. Somewhere within that slender hoop, he knew, an entire civilization had remained hidden from the Xul menace for thousands of years—like rats hiding inside the high-tech walls.
He searched for the N’mah asteroid arks, rumored to be nearing completion somewhere in the vicinity of the Gate. He could see several of the other vessels in the task force, like needle-stemmed mushrooms, toy-tiny in comparison to the backdrop of the Gate, but he couldn’t see anything that might be a hollowed-out asteroid-turned-starship.
“Our N’mah friends,” Lee’s voice continued, “taught us…or, rather, they taught our AI proxies how to access the Gate controls, how to access the Gate’s astrogational computers, and how to enter and interpret the data we recovered from the Xul intruder back at Sol. They were able to show us how to tune the Sirius Gate to one of several thousand possible destinations.”
Colonel Lee was not present in the briefing room, Garroway noted. He was linked in up in the ship’s ops center, and was addressing the entire Marine contingent over the ship’s Net—not just the Marines on board the Lejeune, but the ones on the Henderson as well.
Eighteen hundred Marines, waiting to hear the details of the mission they’d volunteered for ten years ago, objective.
Eighteen hundred Marines hearing how they might soon die.
A window opened in Garroway’s mind, providing a graphic display illustrating the colonel’s words as he addressed them. “Using the data retrieved from the Xul ship during the attack on Earth, the N’mah were able to ascertain the enemy’s probable path, and probable origin—the star system our astrogators have named Night’s Edge. Twenty days ago, we dispatched a cloud of stealth recon drones through the Gate, sending them through slowly and in small groups in order to avoid, if possible, detection on the other side.”