by Ian Douglas
Hell, one of the Marines who’d made it into Samar had been young Marek Garwe.
“We’ll make whatever organizational changes we need to, sir,” was all he said.
“That’s good. We’re…counting on you.”
Something about the way Rame said that last caught Garroway’s attention. The Star Lord was not being evasive, quite, but there was something he wasn’t saying.
Hell, in Garroway’s experience politicians never said everything that they were thinking. There was always another angle, another rationale, another pay-off to be made or another back to be scratched or another deal to be cut with the people who had the money, the influence, and the power.
From what Garroway had seen of politics and government so far in the forty-first century, it was now the politicians who had the lion’s share of money, influence, and power, wielding them openly, rather than acting as front-men for behind-the-scenes shadow governments as had been the case in Garroway’s day. The Star Lords ran things, made the big decisions, and the people didn’t give a damn, so long as they were relatively comfortable.
And maybe that was the way it was supposed to work.
But what wasn’t Rame telling him?
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Eh? What are you talking about?”
“There’s something you’re not telling me, my Lord. What is it? Something new about the Xul operation?” He hesitated. “Or something new from the other Star Lords? New orders?”
The image in Garroway’s mind, created by Rame’s personal AIgent, could not give anything away—no eye-blinks, frowns, widened eyes, or other unconsciously transmitted body language that might help others read Rame’s state of mind. Even so, something about the silence that followed his question suggested surprise, even shock.
“Do people of your century always read minds, General?” Rame said after a moment. “I thought only s-Humans engaged in telepathy.”
“Don’t forget your Socon Guardians.”
“What have you heard?”
Garroway sighed. “My Lord, I am a Marine major general. Once an officer reaches the rank of colonel, he spends more time fighting politicians than he spends fighting any foreign enemy.” He took another guess. “The other Star Lords have given you new orders? Concerning me and my people?”
The image in Garroway’s mind nodded. “This operation here today was…a test, in a sense. To see if your Marines were…as good as the stories surrounding them.”
“I see. And did we pass?”
“You successfully carried out the operation, General. Despite a serious initial setback, when your initial assault failed. And you showed yourself willing and able to work with local elements, the Anchors, to accomplish your mission.”
“So now they want to use us against other targets? Other missions?”
“Exactly.”
“But not the Xul.”
Again, Rame hesitated, as though searching for a mild, a politic reply. “Not everyone within the Associative leadership believes that the Xul constitute a viable threat. Or an important one. A sizeable majority believe that the Globe Marines would be best employed putting down the rise of rebellion, rioting, and discontent currently sweeping through Associative worlds.”
“I see. Where do they want to send us?”
“An artificial world in closer to the Galactic Core. A place called Kaleed. The Star Lord for that sector is Ared Goradon. He is close friends with another star lord, Lelan Veloc.”
“I remember her.” An arrogant, condescending bitch.
“You should. And she is a member of the Military Operations Bureau, which gives you your orders.”
Garroway had downloaded information on Kaleed shortly after he’d come out of cybe-hibe, part of a long list of military crises throughout human space. Goradon, it seemed, had been chased off the wheelworld, and was now in Earthring. “Right. You had nothing to do with this at all, of course.”
“I find your tone insulting, General.”
“Good. That was my intent. Why the hell are you telling me this, anyway? Where’s Socrates? I thought he was supposed to be my liaison with the Star Lords and their chain of command.”
“I am here, General,” Socrates’ voice said. “I am part of the link-gestalt that is Star Lord Rame and Star Lord Valoc and several others, linked through their personal aigents.”
The new voice startled Garroway. There were aspects of forty-first century technology with which he still wasn’t comfortable, but this was a new and even more unpleasant one. Humans had been closely linked with their implant personalities for almost two millennia. In Garroway’s day, it was frequently impossible to tell whether you were speaking to the actual mind of a friend, or to his aigent.
But people nowadays not only accepted this, they accepted a blurring of personal boundaries that Garroway’s generation found disturbing. Exactly who and what was an individual intelligence? Where did Rame stop, and Socrates begin? How much did Rame overlap with Valoc?
Worse, those boundaries, if they even existed at all, appeared to be constantly changing, depending on where the attention of the intelligences concerned were focused at the moment.
Garroway preferred to know with whom he was dealing.
“Lord Rame, Socrates…Valoc, too, if you’re in there…the Commonwealth Marines are not your personal plaything.”
The image of Star Lord Rame blurred and shifted, morphing into the high forehead and imperious manner of Lelan Valoc.
“How dare you, Garroway?” she said. “You and your…people are here on our sufferance!”
“We are here because of the provisions of the Warrington Initiative. And I believe you will find that I and my command constellation have a say in things when you give us a military operation, mission, or target.”
“‘Warrington Initiative?’”
“Ancient history to you, I’m sure. But I’m sure it’s still there for download.”
He knew it was. Among the first things Garroway had checked when he’d received his new implant software was the current standing of the legal document that had established the Marine cybe-hibe division in the first place. His orders came from the Military Operations Bureau of the Associative Conclave. But he had the right to refuse them if they seemed suicidal or otherwise destructive to his command.
He couldn’t tell if Valoc had checked the history or not. Her expression was unreadable, the creation of software rather than of flesh, blood, and emotion.
“General. You were awakened in the first place because of Ared Goradon’s request. You wouldn’t be here at all if not for him.”
“No, we would be asleep in cybe-hibe, waiting for a real war.”
“Why do you say that? What would a ‘real war’ be?”
“It wouldn’t be pissing out small fires like this.” He gestured, in his mind, at the Stargate hanging suspended beyond the overhead dome, and the Associative ships still coming through one after another. “My Lord, we’re here to fight your wars. We volunteered as a deep-time ready unit, and we owe the future…and I guess that means we owe you, two years of active duty, subjective time. You’ve got us. But for God’s sake, don’t waste us. We went into cybe-hibe under the provisions of the Warrington Initiative. That’s what we’re here for…not your fucking little brushfire wars and uprisings, not tin-plated wannabes like ‘Emperor Dahl,’ or displaced idiots like Ared Goradon!”
“You,” Valoc said, “are out of line, General!” Or was it Rame? Or Socrates?
And an instant later, the Stargate, the stars beyond, the gorgeous sheets and streamers of the Tarantula Nebula, all were blotted out by a burst of impossibly brilliant light.
And Garroway knew that something had just gone horribly wrong.
14
1002.2229
Command Deck
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
0612 hours, GMT
For an instant, the sky burned a dazzling,
searing white…and then the dome overhead went black, either through a deliberate circuit interrupt to preserve human vision, or because the optical receptors on the Nicholas’ hull had just burned out.
“What happened?” Garroway demanded.
The image of Valoc blurred and wavered. “General! What—”
“Get the hell off this link!” Garroway ordered. Internally, he closed a connection, severing the AI link with his visitors. “Lofty! What was that?”
“Still assessing the situation, General,” his essistant told him, “but it appears that the local Stargate has exploded.”
Garroway sensed the streams of communication moving through the Fleet, reports of ship damage, of ships lost, of Dahl Empire ships now moving to the attack.
He also sensed the aivatar representing Rame and Valoc still hovering on the fringes of his cybernetic awareness, unwilling to be summarily banished, demanding to speak. He cut that channel entirely. There would be time later for talk—and, if necessary, for his court-martial.
Right now was not the time.
Then the overhead lit up once more. The Stargate now was in fragments, each of several dozen huge, curved segments glowing white-hot and tumbling as it hurtled away from the others in a raggedly expanding cloud of plasma. The two micro-black holes that had powered the thing were hurtling now in opposite directions at close to the speed of light, detectable by the stark trails of ionization they’d ripped through the thin soup of dust and gas permeating local space.
“Sharp spikes in gamma radiation and analyses of debris trajectories indicate at least three sizeable and simultaneous antimatter explosions inside the Stargate. The destruction was deliberate sabotage.”
Garroway’s immediate concern was for his Marines, Golf and Hotel Companies, plus an Anchor Marine strike element, which had been on board the fortress orbiting the gate moments before.
“What’s the situation on Samar?” he demanded.
“Still trying to re-establish communications, General,” Lofty told him. “Objective Samar appears to be structurally sound, but is tumbling now.”
He closed his eyes. “How many of our people are over there?”
“Two platoons of Golf Company, Second Regiment. Two platoons plus the headquarters element of Hotel. The HQ section had just completed transiting to Samar when the explosion occurred.”
At least that meant senior command and communications staff were already over there. He pulled down the relevant data in his mind. Captain Corcoran. A decent officer, with a very good command constellation.
“Keep trying to raise them.”
“Yes, sir. We are also receiving telemetry indicating an impending attack. It appears that the Dahlist surrender was a ruse.”
“No. You think?”
His mock-surprise tone was lost on the AI, however. “Affirmative. The Associate fleet has taken heavy losses. The battlecruiser Pleiadean was emerging from the Gate at the moment of detonation, and has been lost with all hands. Three cruisers and six destroyers were close enough to the blast to have been destroyed or incapacitated. Numerous other ships are reporting major damage, and at least five have been disabled.”
“I assume both Admiral Dravid and Admiral Ranser are on this.”
“Affirmative, General.”
Both men had their own command centers on board the Nicholas. At this point, the battle had become a purely naval engagement, and there was little Garroway could add or do. Except…
“Lofty, patch through to Admiral Ranser, back channel. Tell him the Marines are available for d-teleport deployment into the enemy vessels, should that become a viable tactic. Then pass the word to First and Third Battalions. Have them stand ready for possible ship-to-ship action, both offensive and defensive.”
“Aye, aye, General.”
And that, quite simply, was all that he could do. In the ancient days of sailing ships, a vessel’s Marines would take to the rigging and mastheads and pour sniper fire down on the decks of enemy vessels, attempting to take out their senior officers. A century later, ships no longer had rigging, and the Marines were there solely as an amphibious assault force, ready to storm ashore and take an objective beachhead, but all but useless in a ship-to-ship action.
Centuries later, Marine boarding parties had again come into their own, with specially designed assault craft—and eventually one-man assault pods—that could carry Marines up to an enemy ship, breach her hull, and allow the Marines to carry the ship by storm. With the advent of teleport technology, Marine boarding parties could jump straight from the deck of one ship to another, bypassing force fields and point-defense batteries entirely.
Garroway also wanted to have the Marines on board the Samuel Nicholas ready in case the enemy tried the same tactic. The Nicholas was a huge and inviting target, would be the principal target for the Dahlists in the coming battle, and they might well have large numbers of troops ready to teleport into the transport’s cavernous bays and passageways.
Either way, there were over fifteen thousand Marines still on board the Nicholas, and they would be a powerful weapon in any fleet engagement, not simply as shore parties or a landing force. The tactics of ship-to-ship action, however, were entirely in the hands of the naval command, in this case Pol Ranser, the CO of the Associative Task Force.
Which left Garroway as little better than a passive observer, a tourist along for the ride. “Lofty! Damn it, can you raise our people on Samar?”
“Negative, General.” Lofty’s voice was infuriatingly calm. “Still trying.”
The enemy squadron was approaching fast, twelve ships to the twenty the Associative had already put through the Gate…but half of those twenty were crippled to one degree or another, and several appeared dead in space.
Garroway sensed the storm of communications sweeping through the Associative Fleet, and in moments more the battle was joined.
Company H, 2/9
Command Deck
Objective Samar
0617 hours, GMT
“What the hell happened?” Corcoran demanded.
Nal clung to a twisted stanchion emerging from one bulkhead as the compartment very slowly, almost lazily rolled over. Down was no longer toward the deck with a pull of roughly one gravity. It was that way, toward the opposite bulkhead, a weak tug barely felt. He was in the dark, a darkness relieved only by the lights on the Marines’ Hellfire suits, a hundred moving gleams, mostly at the down end of the compartment, throwing weird and shifting shadows across bulkheads and shattered equipment.
So the lights, all power, were out. Artificial gravity was out, and the rotation of the Dahl orbital fortress was creating a weak spin-gravity as it tumbled through space. The acceleration wasn’t more than a few centimeters per second squared—Nal could easily hang on one-handed against its pull—but it was a long way down through a compartment filled with torn and broken wreckage, jagged sheets of metal, and ripped-open consoles. Even at a hundredth of a gravity, a fall through that maze could be deadly if you landed badly. Some of the loose material in the compartment—chairs, personal effects and weapons, pieces of armor, fragments of debris, dead bodies, living Marines—were still striking the opposite bulkhead in a stately and drawn-out clatter.
A portion of Nal’s mind registered the fact that there was sound. The hurricane of air escaping the compartment had ceased some time ago. No doubt Samar’s automated damage-control systems had sealed off the breaches in the station’s hull. And whatever had just happened apparently had not ripped the hull open further.
He was trembling inside at how close it had been. Nal and the rest of the HQ section had only just come through the d-teleport gateway when suddenly all contact with the universe outside of Objective Samar had been cut off, when lights, power, and gravity had vanished with a sudden, jarring shock, and the fortress had begun its slow tumble. He felt the pounding of his heart, the sickness at the pit of his stomach. Had the teleport doorway been interrupted while he or one of his Marines had been making t
he transit…
“Damn it, Master Sergeant!” Corcoran snapped. “I asked you what happened?”
Nal dragged his mind back from the emptiness of numbing shock. “We’re…working on it,” he told the platoon commander. They didn’t have QCC units with them, and any FTL comm units here on Objective Samar were off-line at the moment. “We’re obviously cut off from Fleet. I suggest, sir, that we deploy our people for a possible counterattack. If the Dahlies are responsible for this…”
“Point taken, Master Sergeant. See to it.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The Marines were off the Fleet Net, but still had communication at company levels. Nal began issuing orders to the Marines of Hotel and Golf Companies, using Corcoran’s electronic persona, while Corcoran continued to try to re-establish contact with other electronic networks higher up on the chain of command.
Nal had a feeling, though, that he knew what had happened. The blast—there was no better word for it—had come as a sharp, violent shock accompanied by a surge in gamma radiation, but with no sound. If there’d been an explosion somewhere within the Samar fortress, they would have heard it, the sound conducted through both the air and the orbital base’s internal structure.
The utter silence, however, save for a deep-voiced background thunder, almost a gong’s tone that had emerged from the deck and bulkheads with the shock as the shockwave smashed through Objective Samar, suggested that there’d been a titanic explosion, not within the base, but in the Stargate next door.
Stargates, Nal knew, contained tens of thousands of kilometers of tunnels and inner chambers within their ring-shaped structures. Besides the twin racetracks that channeled the two Jupiter-mass black holes in their space-twisting, light-speed circles, there were plenty of empty spaces within which one or more antimatter bombs or large nuclear devices could be hidden.