by Ian Douglas
“If there are any left,” Deladier replied, a low-voiced mutter. Wilson was pretty sure that Vera Cruz’s skipper hadn’t even realized he’d given voice to the thought. “Yes, my lord,” Deladier added.
“Good. Do it.”
And Vera Cruz accelerated toward the mouth of hell.
“Third Batt on me!” Colonel Becker yelled over the combat net. “We need to make a hole!”
“Make a hole” was common slang within the Navy and Marine Corps, meaning, roughly, “get out of my way, I’m coming through!” Dixon banked and accelerated to put himself just behind Becker, as the sky around him continued to explode in silent bursts of light. It looked like 3rd Battalion was forming up to literally make a hole for the Vera Cruz. Free-flying Marines in combat armor and pairs of ASF-99 Wasp fighters were concentrating in a rough cone of space directly ahead of the transport, creating a tunnel through the swarming needleships aimed directly at the tesseract.
Dixon let his onboard AI select targets for him, rolling from one side to the other to bring his M-290 laser rifle to bear. The term rifle was not a complete misnomer. Though the barrel wasn’t rifled to impart a spin to a solid projectile, of course, the weapon did give each laser bolt a variable number of helical twists that allowed him to phase-shift the photon packet to the highest possible energy density.
He charged the weapon, pushing the energy level to its maximum. With his MCA suit controls slaved to the Cruzer’s combat control system, he had just become what amounted to a self-aware gun platform. His AI triggered the weapon, and an ebon-dark needleship just over a kilometer away flared in a dazzling burst of white light that rapidly faded, leaving tumbling wreckage and a faintly glowing wisp of fast-cooling plasma. His suit rolled sharply left, and the weapon fired again, the bolt refracting off the side of another needle, melting a savage gash in the alien’s hull. Dixon began to override the controls to fire a second shot, then saw that the target was tumbling, trailing a widening spiral of glittering motes—gas or liquid freezing as it spilled into hard vacuum.
“Captain Dixon! Scale back the rifling on your beam!” Becker shouted over the platoon channel.
Damned micromanaging son of a bitch, Dixon thought, but he didn’t transmit the words. “Copy that,” he replied, and he decreased the power feed to his beam by two mental clicks. Theoretically, doing so would extend the life of his power pack somewhat . . . but it wasn’t the batt-skipper’s job to ride his people that closely.
And it wasn’t as if he was going to need to husband his energy reserves for that much longer. The sky was filled with red-and-green icons, the electronic markers for alien warships and armored Marines locked in a deadly lovers’ embrace.
At this level of intensity, the engagement couldn’t last for very much longer.
A quartet of Firestorm missiles streaked out from the Vera Cruz, hurtling down the length of the hollow cylinder of fighters in an instant. Alien needleships began firing at them, trying to knock them out of the crowded sky, but Marines peeled off from the outer regions of the cylinder, concentrating their fire on the enemy vessels, forcing them back, blocking their lines of sight, and interrupting their attack vectors. One of the missiles vanished, wiped from the sky, but the other three continued accelerating at tens of thousands of gravities, their onboard AIs guiding them along complex and unpredictable paths down the cylinder until they vanished inside the looming tesseract ahead. Close behind in their wakes came two more smaller missiles—each bearing abbreviated clones of Ad Astra’s artificial intelligence.
Unthinking, Dixon braced himself for the detonation . . . but he saw, he sensed nothing. That, he realized, was scarcely surprising. The tesseract was so large that up until now 100-megaton thermonuclear explosions had appeared as a minute twinkling of stars across its emerging surface.
“The AI department is reporting that the Newton clones have been successfully deployed into the objective,” Becker’s voice announced. “All units break off and pull back to the Vera Cruz. We need to keep the bad guys at a distance.”
Dixon reversed his grav thrusters, slowing his forward momentum. Around him, thousands of other Marines were performing the same maneuver, slowing themselves, dissolving the huge tactical cylinder into clouds of individual troops. Seconds later, the Vera Cruz flashed past just a few hundred meters distant, decelerating at full power until she was at rest relative to the nearby Marines, then slowly, slowly accelerating back up and away from the looming tesseract. Dixon increased power to his drives, matching course and velocity.
“Hey!” a Marine called out. “We got company! Coming in at three-three by one-seven-one by two-zero-five!”
Dixon glanced in the indicated direction, expecting to see the Ad Astra moving in close. He’d heard the colony tug had left Tellus in Ki orbit and was on the way. What he saw, however, was not the human starship, but five . . . worlds. Four of the enormous spheres were similar to the Kroajid vessels they’d seen already, each well over four hundred kilometers in diameter.
Moon-ships.
The fifth was considerably larger. With an equatorial diameter of just over seven thousand kilometers it was bigger and more massive than the planet Mars, massive enough to support a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide and trace gasses. The heavily cratered surface was stained and streaked in various shades of red-brown and ocher, again much like Mars.
“What the hell are the damned Spiders doing here?” one Marine wanted to know.
Below him, the tesseract continued its bizarre unfolding.
And then, in an instant, the tesseract seemed to lunge up and out, filling the entire sky before winking out of existence as though it had never been there . . .
. . . and the Vera Cruz was gone with it.
“I am in communication with the Kroajid ships,” Newton told St. Clair. “Channel open.”
“Kroajid vessels!” St. Clair snapped. “What are your intentions?”
“My lord!” Symms called, interrupting. “The Vera Cruz!”
“I saw it, ExComm.” The Marine transport had just vanished, swallowed, apparently, by the titanic alien object ahead. There was no immediate response from the Kroajid moon-ships, which were drifting in open space some tens of thousands of kilometers distant.
What the hell were the Kroajid here for, anyway? To fight? Or did they expect the humans to do all of the dirty and dangerous work for them? The enemy had vanished almost as soon as those moon-ships had shown up. Did that mean the Andromedan Dark feared the Cooperative?
If so . . . why?
And if so, why did the Coop need the humans?
None of this made any sense.
Before he could try finding answers to those questions, though, St. Clair knew he had to take care of his people. Thousands of Marines were adrift in space out there now, both those in combat armor and those flying Wasps and other Marine-issue fighters.
“Recovery!” he called. “We need search-and-rescue vehicles out there stat!”
“Roger that, my lord,” Subcommander Vasilia Karinova replied over the ship’s department command channel. “We’ll be ready to drop the SAR-pods when we reach the battlespace.”
SAR-pods were large, bulky, and utilitarian vessels designed to locate Marines and damaged fighter craft adrift in the emptiness of space after a battle and recover them. Ad Astra carried two full squadrons of the ugly craft, which also served the mobile colony as workhorses for hauling supplies down to a planetary surface or transferring equipment between larger vessels, and as deep-space construction vehicles. This time they would serve as space-going ambulances, finding injured personnel and hauling them back to the Ad Astra’s sick bay, as well as rescuing Marines who’d lost their thrusters and couldn’t make their way back home.
SAR operations were going to have to take priority over everything else now.
“Lord Commander,” Newton said through St. Clair’s implants. “A representative of the Cooperative fleet is on-line.”
“‘Representative’? Not c
ommander or Speaker?” Senior Kroajid ship officers referred to themselves as Speaker, and there appeared to be a number of other, similar terms and honorifics in use within the Cooperative. So far, however, St. Clair had been unable to see a clear-cut order or chain of command.
“The Cooperative doesn’t seem to arrange personnel in hierarchies in the same way as humans,” Newton told him.
“I’ve noticed. Put him through, please.”
“Ey is Gudahk of the Principle Associative,” Newton said, carefully enunciating the Spivak pronoun. That might mean that Gudahk was truly without gender . . . or that eir species either had genders other than male and female, or other genders in addition to them. Normally during interspecies communication that sort of thing wasn’t a big issue. After all, humans could expect their AI translators to gloss things over in two-way conversations. But some species could be sensitive to perceived insults, and St. Clair wondered if this was one of those instances.
“I recommend,” the AI continued, “that you make liberal use of an honorific here.”
“What, like calling em ‘sir’?”
“Exactly. I will translate the honorific to something appropriate.”
“I see. And what is appropriate with Gudahk?”
“I will render ‘sir’ as ‘Living God,’ or something similar.”
St. Clair hesitated. It would pay to tread carefully here.
“Okay,” he said. “And just what the hell is the Principle Associative?”
“A member of the Galactic Cooperative,” Newton replied. “Apparently a very important member, though I have been unable to determine any kind of clear ranking from the data available to me.”
“Okay. I’ll keep that in mind, Put em through.”
A window opened within St. Clair’s mind, revealing an imposing figure. It was impossible, of course, to judge scale in a transmitted image, but St. Clair had the feeling that he was in the presence of a being considerably bulkier, more massive than a human. Only the top of the being was visible—a quartet of vertical bulbs or flower buds. With three in a triangle around a larger, central mass, which was a scaly dark gray in appearance, the surrounding buds were smaller, perched on the ends of slender stalks and constantly moving about. The small buds were, St. Clair decided after a moment, sensory organs of some sort, but he had no idea what it was that they might be sensing. He was nagged by an odd sense of familiarity. Had he seen the being before?
“I am Lord Commander St. Clair of the Earth starship Ad Astra,” he said, transmitting the thought over the open channel moderated by Newton. He hesitated, then added, “Sir.”
“The gods know who you are, Commander St. Clair,” the being replied. The voice, of course, was being supplied by Newton. St. Clair wondered how it communicated with its own kind; he couldn’t see any sign of a mouth or speaking orifice. Might it use telepathy?
It was then that St. Clair remembered where he’d seen the odd-looking being before: within the sterile world of the Ki Ring, where he and the others with him had watched the parade of disparate beings through that vast, open plaza. It had reminded him of a three-meter-tall plant hauling itself along on massive, naked, many-branched roots. Seen up close like this, it was clear there was nothing of botany about em. The swaying bulbs were held aloft on powerfully muscled tentacles.
“We have driven off the Dhalat K’graal,” Gudahk said, “and you are no longer in danger. You will approach my vessel now.”
St. Clair’s eyes widened at the blunt command. With his physical eyes he could see Symms at her command station in front of him, scowling. Evidently, she had heard the order as well.
“No,” St. Clair replied.
He could almost feel the alien being’s confusion, a palpable force emanating from the image within St. Clair’s mind. “We are having difficulty with the translation,” ey said.
“No, we are not,” St. Clair replied, deliberately blunt.
“You will rendezvous your vessel with mine,” Gudahk repeated.
“I don’t think so. We have a number of Marines—our warriors—adrift in open space. Their ship was destroyed. They will die if we don’t recover them.”
“Their ship was not destroyed. It is still there . . . but rotated through the k’graal. Do you understand this?”
Gudahk sounded as though he were lecturing a particularly obtuse child.
“‘K’graal,’” St. Clair repeated. “That means something like ‘higher angles,’ or maybe ‘higher dimensions.’”
“Of course. We do understand, Human, that the mathematics of this concept are well beyond your understanding.”
Arrogant . . . and patronizing as well. “Nevertheless, our people are stranded in space. I intend to initiate recovery efforts. And if you don’t like it, well, you can just go to whatever hell you might believe in.”
St. Clair couldn’t tell how Gudahk was taking his explanation. He didn’t know how Newton was translating what he was saying—or if it even bothered to translate all of his message anyway. Either way, the being did not appear to be pleased. The three small, stalked bulbs circling the central massive head twisted left and right, and St. Clair had the impression that it might be consulting with others unseen nearby. He wondered if the apparently eyeless creature had a 360-degree field of vision; if so, it suggested a truly alien central nervous system . . . and perhaps an alien way of looking at the cosmos as well.
“You will . . .” The translation broke off for a moment. Then, “You will retrieve your remotes, then rendezvous with me.”
St. Clair was about to respond, but Newton interrupted, its voice colored by urgency. “I would suggest,” the AI said, “a conciliatory response.”
“Thank you, sir,” St. Clair said. After all, it cost nothing to be polite. “Recovery efforts should require . . .” He checked the data feed from Karinova’s SAR department, then doubled the time required. “Make it eight hours.”
“That,” Gudahk replied, “is not acceptable.”
The five world-ships accelerated, vanishing almost literally within the space of an eye’s blink. Their rate of acceleration was astonishing; all five worlds were moving at close to the speed of light within seconds of their departure . . . and then they all went superluminal and winked out.
“All right, then,” Symms said after a breath-holding moment.
“I guess that could have gone better,” St. Clair said. “How about it, Newton? Did I piss em off?”
“I do not as yet understand Tchagar emotive responses,” Newton replied.
“Tchagar? That’s Gudahk’s species?”
“An umbrella term indicating several related species,” Newton replied. “I am searching the Roceti Encyclopedia for an entry, but have not yet found one.”
“But you said they’re an important part of the Cooperative.”
“So my Kroajid contacts tell me.”
“Maybe they can tell you where to look.”
“They seem reticent to do so. One might even say that they seem afraid.”
“Of ‘gods’? Imagine that.”
“Commander, I occasionally have difficulty determining whether or not you are being facetious.”
“So do I. I’m more concerned as to whether or not I just made Gudahk angry.”
“You were, perhaps, not as diplomatic as you might have been, Commander.”
“I do better at diplomacy if the other guy is at least making an attempt to be diplomatic as well.”
“In this case, Lord Commander, the ‘other guy’ is a representative of a civilization many orders of magnitude more powerful and more accomplished than your own.”
“Meaning . . . what? We should accept trade beads and trinkets? Ask em to send us missionaries?” St. Clair shook his head. “Frankly, Newton, this alliance is looking worse and worse.”
“That may be true. However, try to keep in mind that this alliance, however one-sided it might seem, may be Humankind’s sole chance for survival in this epoch.”
“Gr
anted,” St. Clair said. “But survival at what cost?”
Chapter Thirteen
Gunnery Sergeant Roger Kilgore couldn’t tell what had happened. One moment, the Vera Cruz, with his company still tucked away inside her number-five drop bay, had been decelerating just above the massive, shifting world dubbed IO-1. Surrounding space was a vast and utterly alien starscape—Andromeda and the Milky Way filling the sky, with the local star a shrunken, brilliant point of light 10 astronomical units distant. And then, in an instant, the Vera Cruz was in darkness, the sun and the galaxies wiped away, leaving the Marine transport hanging between absolute black above, and a seemingly infinite, glowing blue-white plain below.
That plain, Kilgore knew, wasn’t truly infinite. It was the surface of the object dubbed IO-1, India Oscar One, or, more euphoniously, Bluestar. The surface no longer appeared to be turning itself inside out, thank God.
That solid bright plain was reassuring in a way. It meant that, despite its size, the object wasn’t a Jovian gas giant, but instead possessed a solid surface. His readouts, however, were showing a surface gravity of only about one G, perhaps a bit less, which seemed impossibly low for such a titanic mass. The thing possessed a volume equivalent to almost fifteen hundred Earths.
Which led Kilgore to wonder if the Vera Cruz had fallen into one of those higher dimensions favored by the Andromedan Dark. From this angle, as opposed to “outside,” back in normal space, Bluestar appeared to be an iridescent sphere larger than Jupiter. Through the visual data feeds from the Cruzer’s external cameras, he could see what looked like markings on that surface, rectilinear and geometric shapes and lines all but lost in a thin, brightly glowing haze.
The members of First Platoon, Bravo Company, 1/3, were wired up inside their cages on the drop bay deck, waiting for the final order to drop and boost. They’d been on track to drop in another sixty seconds as the Vera Cruz approached the mysterious Bluestar alien, but everything had gone on hold when the rest of the outside universe had vanished. As Kilgore glanced at the waiting Marines around him, he realized that something was wrong with what he was seeing with his physical eyes, something wrong enough to make him wonder if his helmet optics had wonked out. He was looking at Staff Sergeant Kari Rees, and, just for a moment, his gaze had gone past the open framework of her acceleration cage, past her Marine Combat Armor, past the tangle of electronics and coolant tubes until he’d glimpsed her uniform inside.