by Ian Douglas
No matter. It could only be a delaying maneuver. The aliens were cut off from the stargate, and could easily be pursued by hunterships. It would take only a few moments for the hunterships to come to full power and engage their drives. They would overtake the fleeing enemy ships in seconds, matching vectors.
And then…
But there was no “and then.” One by one, in-laying stations and nodal structures had been overtaken by the fast-expanding wave of raw, horrific light racing out from the central star. Sensors overloaded and burned out. Radiation soared. Electromagnetic flux burned through circuitry.
The minds of We Who Are once had been organic, but existed now as nested electromagnetic patterns within the circuitry of their ships, their base fortresses, their planet-wide cities. As circuitry melted, those minds were destroyed.
The leaders of the Xul commune, the Lords Who Are, died as the hardware supporting them overloaded, then melted, then vaporized. As they died, the metamind of which they all were composite parts, the metamind that gave shape and purpose to the local will of We Who Are, died. Some individual fragments, lone hunterships or far-outlying bases and outposts survived…but only for a short while. Fast on the heels of the dying star’s light came the more massive, deadlier onslaught of high-energy particles.
And not a single Xul huntership saw the danger in time to save itself.
Not a single one of We Who Are within the Starwall node survived….
Jonah
Cygni Space/Starwall Space
1835 hrs GMT
This, Garroway thought muzzily, is not good. I still can’t see out, and it’s been over six hours. Either I’m still going FTL, or the whole damned ship is dead.
Either way…not good….
He was just now clawing his way back to consciousness. His internal timepiece showed how much time had elapsed since his passage through the core of the star.
He felt…terrible, broken and bruised throughout his body, and he felt like he was suffering from an excruciating case of sunburn.
His stomach twisted, then heaved. His internal nano was damping down the nausea, but the treatment so far was only partially successful.
Medical sensors were reporting…no. He couldn’t have absorbed that much radiation….
“Achilles? Achilles, are you there?”
“I am here.”
“What the hell is going on? Why haven’t we dropped out of Drive?”
“Evidence suggests that we have, Private Garroway. The radiation sensors in your combat armor show an extremely high flux.”
“Shit. Did that leak through from the nova, somehow?…”
“Nothing leaked, as you put it, while we were within the star. However, we did encounter some…turbulence during the passage. Many of the ship’s systems were damaged or otherwise incapacitated. The Alcubierre Drive appears to have cut out only about ten minutes after our passage.”
“Then…we got caught in the blast?”
“Affirmative. We were fifty light-minutes from the star by that time, however, so damage was relatively minimal. At least, we were not vaporized immediately. Radiation levels were high. We are also continuing to sustain radiation damage from the stellar background.”
“Pardon?”
“The galactic core is an extremely active region, with overall high levels of particulate radiation. Lieutenant Lee was badly burned after an exposure of about forty minutes.”
“Forty minutes. And I’ve been out here for…”
“Five hours, nineteen minutes.”
Nausea clawed at him. This time, his internal nano couldn’t handle the surge, and he was achingly, desperately sick inside his armor.
A long time after, he sipped water from the helmet input valve near his mouth.
“How…long do I have?”
His suit monitors reported hard vacuum around him. Well…of course. He’d been in vacuum when they’d shoved him inside. He tried to rub his eyes, and was frustrated when his gauntlet bumped against the side of his helmet. He wasn’t thinking very well.
Garroway was seriously tempted to open his helmet. Explosive decompression would kill him pretty quick—a rush of air from his lungs, a sharp pain as he gasped for breath. A moment or two of pain and cold and growing numbness…
The thought of slowly baking to death in hard radiation was not nearly so pleasant. In his mind’s eye, he could imagine the blistering, the sloughing skin. His internal nano would fight to keep his organ systems going, though. He might linger…how long?
Achilles2 had not responded right away. Maybe the AI was balancing the psychological harm the news might impart. Hell, he knew he was going to die….
“There’s no way to be sure,” Achilles told him. “The dosage you’ve received already is fatal, and you’re picking up more rads with each passing moment. Without intervention, and depending on the efficiency of your medinano at handling things like organ system shut-down and internal hemorrhage, I estimate you will survive between twenty-four and thirty-six hours.”
A day to a day and a half of agony. He already hurt, and he knew the pain would get worse.
Better to crack his helmet while he still could, while he still had some strength.
“What did you mean by ‘intervention?”
“There remains the very real possibility of rescue,” Achilles2 told him. “Do you think your comrades will give up on you without even trying to find you?”
“No,” he said. Marines never abandoned their own. “No, but what chance is there of them finding us?”
The MIEF flotilla on this side of the stargate was poised to enter Alcubierre Drive just before the wave-front hit them. If all went according to plan, the Xul ships would have been overwhelmed and destroyed before they could pursue. The MIEF ships would have retired to a safe distance, outside of the star’s primary blast radius, then would have begun searching along our projected line of flight. They would not leave you.
“Yeah…but if what you say is right, we lost our drive fifty light-minutes out from the star. We were supposed to stay under Drive until we were over five times farther out. This is a very tiny ship. They’ll never…never…” He stopped, overwhelmed once again by savage nausea. He began vomiting, and when there was nothing left to come up he continued retching again and again and again. He lay there, wondering if that was the end of it, and then he began vomiting again…this time blood.
His helmet systems drained much of the mess, keeping him from drowning, but he wore a mask of foul slime, and the pain was nearly unbearable. He was so weak that each breath was a struggle. The stench…the stench alone made him long for death.
“Even…if they find us…” he said at last. “I’m an irrie.”
“Not true, Private. What is it you humans like to say…‘where there’s life, there’s hope’? The medical facilities aboard the Samar are quite good. The facilities on the Barton are even better. Radiation poisoning is well understood. There are nanomedical techniques that—”
“They’re not fucking going to find us, damn it! We are a very small grain of sand lost in a very large ocean.” He paused, gasping for a moment for his next breath. When he had strength again, he added, “Take over, Achilles. If they do find us, they’ll want a complete download of all of this. I’m cracking my helmet.”
“I recommend that you do nothing, Private.”
“Who are you to give me orders?”
“I believe there is a genuine chance that help might come. It is my duty to preserve your life, if possible.”
“Fuck you….”
He reached for the lever on the side of his neck coupling that would release the helmet lock, but he couldn’t move his arm.
“Achilles? Is that you?”
“I have overridden your armor’s power systems, Private. Help is on the way.”
He struggled for a moment, trying to move his leaden right arm, without success.
There was another way. He brought to mind a particular mental code, the code
that would let him switch Achilles off. He wasn’t entirely sure it would work. The code Sandre had taught him essentially caused the AI to overlook him without realizing he couldn’t be seen, but that was for when Achilles was running in the hardware of a platoon of a hundred or so Marines. If there was just one Marine, and the AI was resident inside his internal hardware, what would happen?
He thought-clicked the code.
“Achilles?”
There was no response. Garroway tried moving his arm. It moved, sliding heavily across the surface of the Euler ship’s cockpit deck. His glove hit the side of his helmet, and he fumbled for a moment, trying to find the lever.
He thought about Sandre.
He thought about the Corps….
Ontos 7
Aquila Space
1842 hrs GMT
“Got him!” Warhurst cried. “Haul him in, gently!”
Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst, armor clad, was clinging to the flame-scoured hull of the Euler triggership with one hand and both legs, his other hand gripping the line extending from the Ontos cargo deck.
The long, desperate search had paid off. Every ship in the MIEF had been looking for him, including Samar, Chosin, Lejeune, two wings of aerospace fighters, and fifty human-piloted Euler triggerships that had come across just as soon as it had been verified that the stargate was still operating. The smaller ships couldn’t search for long in the hellishly high radiation fields here, but they’d contributed…mostly by patrolling along the blast front to make sure there were no surviving Xul in the system.
It had been Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey, back at RFS Alpha, who’d suggested using clouds of NeP probes, firing them at high velocity along the projected line of Garroway’s flight path out from the star. There was no radio signal to track, and the Euler triggership’s infrared signature was lost in the far greater heat-glare of the exploding star.
But by chance alone, some few of those millions of nano e-penetrators, their antenna-nets flung wide, had passed through the shadow cast by the triggership, detected the faintest fall-off of light from the star, and homed on the source.
One had struck the triggership’s hull, and transmitted back to the Mars the triggership’s hull composition and its location.
Moments later, Mars and Lejeune were closing on the spot, far deeper into the deadly white blossom of the exploding star than anyone had guessed.
Ontos 7 had been back on board the Lejeune. Warhurst, Eden, and Galena had emerged from the battered carrier’s launch bay to make the actual capture.
The Euler triggership was too large to winch into the Ontos’ cargo bay. Instead, Warhurst had emerged with a tow cable and used a nanolock to fuse it to the tiny vessel’s hull.
“The controls aren’t working,” he said after a moment’s trying to link with the triggership’s AI. “It won’t respond to the codes. I’ll have to melt through the hull.” He brought his fist down on the hull, hard, several times. “Hey, in there!” he called on the assigned frequency. “Garroway! Do you hear me? We’re going to get you out!”
There was no response, which could mean that Garroway’s radio was out. Or, judging from the look of that hull, and the levels of background radiation, it could mean—
No. Don’t think about that.
Warhurst had been Garroway’s DI. He still thought of the kid as one of his Marines.
He could feel the mad tingle, the burn of the radiation. The nova was an intensely brilliant blaze of light that blotted out one entire half of the universe, and turned his visor opaque every time he twisted in that direction. He’d learned to keep his back to the star. Even then, the reflection off the triggership’s hull was so bright he could scarcely see anything at all.
He pulled a squeeze tube from a thigh pouch and began squeezing the contents out onto the Euler vessel’s hull.
“Warhurst?” Eden’s voice said from inside the Ontos. “You’ve got five minutes.”
“I know, I know.” The Ontos’ magnetic screens provided some shielding, at least, from particulate radiation. Out here, there was nothing but his armor. He knew he was being badly burned, but he tried not to think about that. His 660-armor was deflecting the worst of the hard stuff, especially the heavier particles, but he only had another five minutes or so out here before he started suffering physical effects—nausea and vomiting, sloughing skin, weakness, bleeding….
No matter what, it would be medical cybe-hibe and nano-reconstruction on board the Barton for him, no question….
But that was a small enough price to pay, if he could bring Garroway with him.
The paste outlined a rectangle 2 meters long and a meter wide. He pulled a nanocharge release from another pouch, stuck it in the paste, and pulled his hand away. “Fire in the hole.”
There was no actual fire, of course. The nano was nano-D, designed to eat quickly through various composites. A quick test had already verified that it worked on Euler ship hulls.
Something like white talcum exploded from the strip, and the hull section floated free, opening up the craft’s interior. There was no need for his armor lights. The dying sun behind him illuminated the interior clearly. Reaching in, he grabbed Garroway’s arm.
“Garroway? You okay?”
At first there was no reaction, and he thought—
Garroway moved. He couldn’t turn his helmet, but Warhurst could see movement behind the vomit smeared visor. The Marine’s hand reached out and grabbed Warhurst’s wrist, weak…but alive. Alive.
“I’ve got him, people,” Warhurst said. “I’m bringing him in….”
Epilogue
1501.1103
UCS Barton
Cygni Space
0915 hrs GMT
“Garroway? How you feeling, son?”
Garroway opened his eyes, trying to focus. There was a tall man standing next to him. A tall man in a Marine dress uniform.
“Terrible,” he replied. He managed to focus on the apparition’s rank tabs, and his eyes opened wider. “Uh…terrible, sir!” He tried to sit up, and failed. He was pinned to the bed by a labyrinth of tubes, conduits, and data feeds.
“At ease, at ease,” the apparition said. “I’m General Alexander. They told me they were bringing you out of medical cybe-hibe this morning. I wanted to stop by and see you.”
“Uh, yes, sir.” He blinked. The last thing he remembered…
“You have every right to feel terrible. I gather they’ve been practically regrowing you from scratch. Right now, I think you have more medical nano inside you than you have cells, snipping out the bad bits and weaving together the good!”
“I…was going to kill myself. I was trying to kill myself….”
“I know. Your platoon AI told us all about it.” Alexander folded his arms. “I suppose I should chew you a new one for trying to destroy government property. But under the circumstances, you had every right. I’m just glad you didn’t carry it through.”
“I tried, sir. I really did. But I couldn’t find the catch on my helmet.”
He grinned. “Yeah. I heard, Achilles said when you shut him out, he couldn’t freeze your arm actuators any longer, but he could still overload the sensory feedback circuits in the sleeve of your armor. Not lock them, but feed extra energy through them, burn them out. You thought you were reaching for the release lever, but you couldn’t control the arm of your 660 well enough to find it.”
“I…know. I kept hitting my helmet, scraping at the side. Couldn’t figure why I couldn’t hit it. Such a simple thing. Then…then I heard a thump on the ship’s hull. I thought God was knocking.”
“Almost,” Alexander said, nodding. “Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst. Now Staff Sergeant Warhurst, by the way. He’s in the next compartment over, next to yours. You’ll be able to thank him in person in a day or two, I’m told.”
“‘Next compartment?’ Where are we, anyway, sir?”
“You’re on board the medical ship Barton. You’ve been a long time healing. So has he, though he wasn’t
nearly as burned to a crisp as you were!”
“How…long?”
“About a month. It’s now 15 January, in this, the Year of our Corps 1103.”
“A month! And…did it work? The mission, I mean.”
“Perfectly. Complete success. You followed your mission profile down to the letter, the star blew, and as near as we can tell, every Xul in the system was vaporized.” His face showed a sudden sadness. “We lost a lot of ships before it was all over. A lot of people. But most of the MIEF came through.”
“So…what happens now, sir?”
“Operation Gorgon continues. We rest, we refit. We make up our losses, both in men and ships. And we plan where to hit the Xul next.”
“We have a weapon that can kick ’em right where it hurts, General.”
“And allies,” Alexander added. “Damned if I know how we’re going to incorporate them into a Marine unit, but we have allies. The Eulers, definitely. And maybe some others as well.”
“Uh, where are we now, anyway? Back at Earth? Or at Puller 659?”
“Actually, we’re in Aquila Space, though we have pickets rotating out at Starwall, watching for the Xul. We’ve been in contact with Earth, though, with QCC…and with Aurore, too, and there’s been some ship traffic back and forth. You’ll be interested to know that we might have some unexpected reinforcements coming through the Gate soon. The PEs are joining us. The Rommel and some of the other ships at Puller have already come through. I guess the PanEuropeans were rather impressed by your little escapade at Starwall. Or…” He shrugged. “Maybe they just don’t want us to have the technology for blowing up stars all to ourselves. The politics of this are going to be damned interesting.”
“Shit, sir. Who the hell needs them? We can take on the Xul ourselves!”
Alexander grinned. “That’s the spirit, Marine.” Bending over, he clapped Garroway’s shoulder, then reached into a belt pouch. “Oh, by the way. I’ve got something for you here….”
He pulled out two felt-covered gray cases, and opened them one after another, then set them on the pillow by Garroway’s head. Garroway turned his head, trying to focus on them.