by Ian Douglas
D’Urville recorded the eddress. “Thank you, sir. And…may I ask, how long before you pass through the gate?” Damn it, the man was actually trying to be friendly. But Alexander couldn’t take the risk.
“I can’t tell you that, sir. Security.”
“I see. I wish you well, however. And I wish you all success.”
“Thank you, General. We’ll need it. We’ll all need it.”
Squad Bay, UCS Samar
Anneau orbit, Puller 659 System
1740 hrs GMT
“I got killed,” Garroway told the circle Marines in the squad bay lounge, “three fucking times this afternoon. Frankly, I’m getting a little sick of it.”
“Well, practice does make perfect,” Sandre Kenyon offered, laughing.
She was sitting next to him on the lounge, and he turned and gave her a hard, playful shove. “Hey, practice getting killed I do not need!”
Garroway was sitting with eight other Marines of First Platoon, Charlie Company, of the 55th MARS. He was beginning to feel like he was fitting in with the unit. Oh, they still called him “newbie” and “fungie”—that last derived from “FNG,” or “fucking new guy.” But he was also accepted.
Surviving his first live combat with them had helped, of course.
“What I want to know,” Corporal Marin Delazlo said, “is how they know what to program into those sims for the Xul side of things, y’know?”
“Marines have fought the Xul before,” Corporal Gonzales said. “And won.”
“Yeah, yeah, but the last time that happened was…when? Five hundred years ago?”
“Twenty-one August 2323, old-style,” Sergeant Richard Chu said.
“Five hundred fifty-four years,” Garroway added, running the numbers through his implant math processor.
“Okay, 554 years. Yeah…you’d know that, wouldn’t you, fungie? You had an ancestor or something in that battle.”
“Or something.”
“Well, my point is that in all that time, don’t you think the Xul will have evolved some new tactics? You know, they say that we’re always prepared to fight the last war, never the next one.”
“Well, if we know anything about the Xul,” Corporal Ran Allison said slowly, “we know they’re damned slow on the uptake. Static culture, like they’re locked in to how they perceive the universe, and in how they react to it. The xenopsych guys think they haven’t changed much in half a million years.”
“They think,” Delazlo said, the words almost a sneer. “And not one of them has actually met a Xul, or talked to one!”
“Well, neither have you,” Kenyon pointed out. “Or any of us.”
“Right! So what good are all the endless sims?” He reached across from his chair and rubbed Garroway’s close-shaven scalp. “Our baby-faced fungie, here, can practice getting killed until Doomsday and it’s not going to help him when the real show goes down, am I right?”
Garroway knocked the hand aside and laughed. “Fuck you very much, Corporal.”
“Thank you, I’ll take two.”
Delazlo had a point, Garroway thought. The simulations had all been much the same…variations, in fact, of the assault on the Rommel. Time after time, in a kind of free-flowing lucid dream fed to him by the platoon AI, he’d buttoned into a SAP and been fired across a flame-shot blackness toward an immense…thing, a lean golden needle 2 kilometers long, or a space base like a small moon covered with towers, turrets, and domes. Each time, his SAP had tunneled through a strange hull material that seemed to grow and shift around him, and he’d emerged inside a vast maze of inner passageways and tunnels. The Xul had been represented by elongated egg-shaped machines with multiple tentacles and glittering lenses, some serving as eyes, others as weapons.
There were always a horrific lot of the things, and beating them generally meant firing fast, firing accurately, and staying in a tight group with your fellow Marines. The first two times when he’d been rudely jolted out of the simulation as a “kill” today, it had been after he’d been separated from the other Marines in his fireteam by a sudden and unexpected influx of new Xul combat machines from an unexpected direction. Sometimes, the damned things seemed to just mold themselves right out of the surrounding bulkheads.
And Delazlo had a point. The images fed into his mind had been gleaned from implants and drone recorders at the Battle of Night’s Edge in 2323, and from other battles with the Xul before that. Suppose they had changed their tactics?
Not that their old tactics were all that bad. Victory meant holding off those swarming, glittering machine-monsters long enough to plant a satchel nuke deep enough within the bowels of the enemy ship so that the whole, huge structure was destroyed…or at least severely inconvenienced.
The trick was planting the charges and then getting out before they blew. The last time he’d been “killed” today, he’d planted a backpack nuke, then managed to get lost coming back out. He’d died within a tiny sun when his own charge had detonated.
A tall figure in Marine undress blacks walked into the squad bay—Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey. He stopped, looking the group over.
“Hey, Gunny!” Sergeant Chu said. “Join us as we solve the mysteries of the universe!”
“In a minute, Chu-chu.” He seemed preoccupied. “Garroway! A word with you?”
“Sure, Gunny.” Now what the hell?…
Ramsey led him to an alcove at the back of the squad bay, semi-private from the others behind an arms rack. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you ever since the Rommel engagement,” he said.
“Is there a problem, Gunnery Sergeant?” He swallowed. “I mean, I was damned scared—”
“You did fine, Marine. For your first live combat? You performed splendidly. I’m proud to have you in this platoon.”
“Then, what—”
“I have to ask you a question. An intensely personal question. What is your relationship with PFC Kenyon?”
Garroway hesitated, his mind not clicking immediately. “Uh…sorry?”
“When we were in that control compartment, and we found out the Rommel was surrendering, you two were hugging like old lovers.” He smiled. “Or trying to. Those battlesuits make that sort of thing a bit tough.”
Garroway played the moment back in his memory. “Oh, yeah. I guess we did. Well, uh, I guess we got a little excited. And we are good friends….”
“Son, it’s none of my business. None of the Corps’ business. Fuck each other all you want, as long as you both show up for duty and don’t fall asleep on watch. But…I lost someone recently. Someone very important to me. She got killed on Alighan, my last out-system deployment.”
“Damn. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Life happens. And in the Corps, death happens. Just a friendly word of warning, and advice.” He raised both hands and clasped them together. “The Marine Corps is a family. The Green Family. All of us together, right?”
“Sure, Gunny. I understand that.”
“You think you do. You won’t feel it until you’ve lived it a few more years, like some of the rest of us have. And maybe not until you’ve lost someone close, like a lot of us have already. A lover. A buddy. Someone we went through boot camp with, or served with on some out-of-the-way hellhole on the other side of the sky.
“I’m not telling you to break things off with Kenyon. I just want you to be aware, okay? Fuck-buddies are one thing. Romance—love—is something else. The first is fine, so long as you do your job. The second can kill you, if it hurts you badly enough.”
“That’s a damned dark way of looking at things, Gunny.”
Ramsey drew a deep breath. “Garroway, I’m only telling you this shit because I don’t want the smooth functioning of this platoon to be affected by the emotional misjudgments of two members of my squad. Lust is acceptable. Love is not.” He turned, then, and walked away, leaving Garroway in a decidedly uncomfortable frame of mind.
Did he love Sandre? Well, they’d told each other that often enough, d
uring stolen moments with the platoon AI shut out of their minds. But what did the word mean?
He decided he was going to have to think about that one.
Bemused, Garroway returned to the bull session in the squad bay.
20
0912.1102
Ontos 1, Recon Sword
Stargate
Puller 695 System/Aquila Space
1220 hrs GMT
“Recon Sword, launch door is open and you are cleared for Lejeune departure.”
“Copy that, Lejeune Pryfly. Ten seconds.”
“Good luck, Marines.”
“Thank you, Pryfly. We’ll bring you back some souvenirs.”
“Just bring yourselves back.”
“Roger that. And three…and two…and one…”
“Launch!”
With a savage thump, the Ontos accelerated down the launch rails and into hard vacuum, leaving the carrier Lejeune dwindling astern. The sudden acceleration—better than fifty gravities—would have left the humans on board battered and broken had the inertial dampers not cushioned them, bleeding off the excess force into paraspace. Ahead and around them, a flight of twelve Skydragons adjusted their vectors to match the larger Ontos. They would accompany the larger craft, flanking and preceding it in a protective hemispherical formation.
Enough accelerative force leaked through the dampers to make all three Marines on board the Ontos grunt, hard.
“God!” Lieutenant Eden gasped over the in-ship comm. “I’m never going to get used to that!”
“I hear it’s rougher on the guys in the ASFs,” Warhurst said conversationally as the pressure eased somewhat. Within his mental window-link, he could see the green blips marking the fighters all around them. “Smaller power taps. We can goose it harder than them.”
In fact, all thirteen spacecraft were now accelerating in perfect unison, their drives under the control of a single AI, named Chesty.
Chesty, he’d been told, had been the AI linking the Marine recon force hidden within the Puller 659 system—“Chesty” having orignally been the nickname for General Lewis A. Puller, a twentieth-century Marine officer, and the only Marine ever to win five Navy Crosses. Evidently, the Chesty AI had made several trips through the Puller Stargate—most notably into the region called Starwall, near the Galactic center. Later, Chesty downloads had piloted unmanned probes into Aquila Space, looking for signs of a Xul presence, or anything else of potential interest.
Chesty knew this Gate, and would be coordinating the activities of the entire recon formation, codenamed Recon Sword.
“Lejeune Pryfly, Recon Sword,” Eden said. “Patrol vector established. Switching to Hermes flight ops.”
“Roger that, Recon Sword.”
Pryfly was the ancient aviator’s name for Primary Flight Control, tasked with launching aircraft from the old seagoing flattops, and, in more recent centuries, with launching small spacecraft from larger ones. From now on, the mission would be directed from the Ops Center located on the Hermes—formerly Skybase. Warhurst imagined that every high-ranking piece of gold braid in the fleet must either be there now, or linked in, watching the tiny flotilla hurtle toward the Stargate.
They would reach the Gate in twenty minutes.
“Are we sure this thing is going to work over there?” Sergeant Aren Galena, the number two Ontos gunner, asked. “I mean, on the other side….”
“Now’s a hell of a time to wonder about that,” Warhurst said with a chuckle.
“Yeah, well, I’m just not sure I trust the quantum-whatzis,” Galena said. “How do we know we’re not going to be flat out of juice when we pass through…that.”
“That,” of course, was the Stargate, visible now within their inner link windows as a perfect circle of dark and ruddy gold against a star-strewn night up ahead. For several days, now, the MIEF fleet had been redeploying back out from the inner-system gas giant to a staging/departure zone near the Gate, and the Samar had reached the jump-off point just yesterday. The gate was expanding swiftly as the recon patrol approached it at 3 kilometers per second.
“Distance doesn’t make any difference, Sergeant,” Eden said. “We’ll still get power, even if we’re on the far side of the galaxy.”
“Yeah…but that just don’t make sense.”
Warhurst could understand the younger man’s anxiety. Hell, he didn’t understand the science any better than did Galena. It was hard not to picture the ZPE quantum power transfer technology as a means of beaming energy from the Lejeune to the Ontos and the fighters, when in fact the system did no such thing. Energy called into being from the Zero Point Field in the carrier’s massive power taps simultaneously appeared in the Ontos’ Solenergia field-entangled receivers. There was no energy beam to be tapped or intercepted by an enemy, or to be lost during violent maneuvers. And the lieutenant was right. Theoretically, they could be a hundred thousand light-years away—or even millions of light-years away, in another galaxy entirely, and still be able to tap into that power flow—exactly as though there were no intervening distance between the two at all.
That was the point of quantum-entangled technologies: power here was instantly and simultaneously there, just as with quantum FTL communications, through the application of the immortal Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.” Theoretically, the only thing that could cut the energy flow on board an Ontos or an aerospace fighter was the destruction of the Lejeune…and there were back-up entanglement receivers keyed to other carriers and transports in the fleet, and to Skybase itself.
No problem.
But while he’d downloaded the explanation and knew the words, Warhurst, like most Marines he knew, still had some trouble when it came to accepting seemingly magical technologies. After all, there was a universe of difference between the theoretical and the practical. What if passing through a stargate affected the quantum-entangled link in unpredictable ways?
He snorted to himself. Maybe Marines were just so damned used to having to go it alone and rely on their own resources that they had trouble with the concept of accepting anything for free or on faith…even high-tech magic.
“You know, Sergeant, it doesn’t have to make sense,” Warhurst said. “Tap into your weiji-do training. Focus….”
“You know, Gunny, I never did buy into all that weird shit,” Galena said.
“You’d damned well better. The Corps teaches that stuff for a reason.”
“Yeah, well, I always had trouble understanding stuff that I couldn’t wrap my brain around, y’know?” Warhurst could sense his shrug.
“Most of us don’t know how an ordinary wallscreen monitor works, either,” Warhurst said. “But that doesn’t stop us from using our own wetware as well as the hardware, right?”
“If you say so, Gunny.”
He didn’t sound convinced. Galena was, in Warhurst’s experience, a stereotypical “rock,” a dumb-as-a-rock Marine. Sergeant Galena was a good man—there was no question about the man’s credentials. The word was he’d distinguished himself on Alighan by charging a Muzzie position guarded by a dug-in battery of APerM launchers and taking them out at point-blank range with his flamer, and the guy was in line to get a Silver Star for that little action.
But he was also opinionated, mule-stubborn, and unwilling to stretch when it came to trying to understand anything that wasn’t bloody self-obvious. Warhurst wished he’d had the guy in one of his boot companies back at Noctis Labyrinthus. Maybe a few extra after-hours rounds of being pitted would have opened up some willingness to dig in the man’s stubborn shell. According to the guy’s personnel records, he’d done acceptably in his T’ai Chi training in boot camp…but had gone into it as a means of hand-to-hand combat, and never, apparently, picked up on the system’s more subtle, purely mental aspects.
And according to those records, he’d never really gotten the hang of the weiji-do exercises at all. Those, however, were not requirements for graduation since, frankly, some recruits could handle them, and some never
could.
Warhurst would have felt better if Galena had been able to run through a basic T’ai chi/weiji-do kata in boot camp, though. During a recon op, as in combat, you needed to know you were tuned in with your buddies, a part of them, all acting together as one.
The Stargate continued to expand ahead, the far-flung hoop now stretched across a full third of the sky.
Probes sent through to Aquila Space had returned without detecting Xul ships or fortresses. That, at least, was a blessing. But Warhurst wished the brass had been more specific about what the probes had detected. There were rumors, but the data had not been released to the people who needed it most—the Marines going in on point.
Why were the probe reports being hushed up? The official word was that signals had been detected on the other side—RF noise which might mean technology—but that the data were still being analyzed.
Maybe so. But Warhurst was suspicious of any ops briefing that began with the words, “This one should be easy.”
They had been shown visual downloads from Aquila Space, at least, so they had an idea of what they would be seeing. Twelve hundred light-years was not far, as galactic distances go, and the stellar backdrop—the number of background stars—seemed about the same as in circumsolar space. The local Stargate appeared to be in orbit around an A-class star imbedded in a flat disk of dust and asteroidal debris.
The big question, of course, was whether anything unpleasant might be lurking in that debris field. That was why the Ontos was going through first, in its role as scout-recon. The Ontos carried a QCC radio, allowing real-time communications with the Skybase, and—instead of a squad of Marines—its payload bay carried a very special miniature spacecraft. Warhurst, besides serving in his usual role as starboard-side gunner, had also been assigned as loadmaster for the mission. He performed a quick mental check of the craft loaded into the MCA–71’s aft bay. All green.
“Ten seconds,” Eden warned them. Ahead, the lead Skydragon fighter passed into the plane of curiously disturbed space at the center of the Stargate…and winked out of existence. Four seconds later, the three fighters spread out behind the leader reached the interface and vanished as well. The rim of the Gate cut the sky in half, now, a thread of gold light. Warhurst tried to imagine two Jupiter masses shrunken to marble-sized black holes, hurtling through the ring structure at near-c velocities, the gravitational stresses somehow focused on the space here, at the ring’s center. Whoever—whatever—had constructed the Stargates had been the master of technologies still incomprehensible to Humankind.