Star Strike

by Ian Douglas

“According to the after-action reports,” Karla told him, “orbital bombardment was restricted in that sector due to the presence of civilian noncombatants. And assaulting that tower from the ground up would have resulted in unacceptably high Marine casualties. You made the correct choice, and your platoon sergeant agreed with your assessment. In what way did you ‘screw up?’”

  “I didn’t get all the APerMs.”

  “There were other Marines in the area. In any case, APerMs are generally deployed in numbers sufficient to overwhelm individual suit countermeasures. In combat, remember, chaos effects tend to outweigh both planning and advance preparation. You did what you could, what you’d been trained to do, and you did it to the best of your ability. Unfortunately, two APerMs got through and killed Howell and Beck. What could you have done differently that would have resulted in a different outcome?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know! If I knew, I would be platoon sergeant material, okay? But I don’t know, and the Corps isn’t going to risk a platoon with someone who doesn’t know the answers.”

  “I believe, Charel, that you are setting standards for yourself that are too high, and too rigid.”

  “They’re mine to set.”

  “Not if in the setting you do harm to yourself. ‘Government property,’ remember?”

  The session continued, but Ramsey listened with only half an ear, making polite noises where necessary to convince Karla that he was paying attention.

  Or could the AI tell by monitoring his brain waves? Ramsey didn’t know, nor did he care. The depression was settling in closer, deeper, until it threatened to smother him.

  He wanted the damned AI out of his head.

  * * * *

  USMC Skybase

  Dock 27, Earth Ring 7

  1015 hrs GMT

  Lieutenant General Martin Alexander’s concept, as so-far approved by the Commonwealth Senate, had been designated Operation Gorgon. The strategic option of a strike into Xul space to delay or block a likely Xul attack against human space by drawing them off in pursuit of a large Navy-Marine task force was a go.

  Now all that remained was to come up with a viable ops plan. To that end, he’d called a general staff meeting.

  “Map Center open,” Lieutenant General Martin Alexander said. In his mind, the dome of the virtual briefing room shimmered, then deepened into the gently curved clottings of stars that made up one small section of the Orion Arm of the Galaxy. With a thought, he began rising into the mass of stars, focusing now on the amoebic blot of various-colored translucence marking the various regions of space claimed by Humankind. One star, just inside the outer periphery of one of the colored areas, was highlighted a bright green—Puller 659.

  “Our problem,” Alexander told his audience, “is primarily a political one. Puller 659 is the location of a Stargate leading to a region of Xul-controlled space designated Starwall. Intelligence says that Starwall is an important Xul nexus—and we know they have information about Earth at the base in that system. Take out Starwall, and we might arrange to have that information become lost again. Even if we don’t, Starwall is a big enough target that we know we’ll hurt the bastards if we hit them there.

  “Unfortunately, the Gate leading to Starwall, as you can see here, is located inside space claimed by the PanEuropean Republic. The Commonwealth Senate is not enthusiastic about starting a war with the Republic and opening a third front, not at a time when we’re already engaged with the Theocracy…and may be about to face a new Xul incursion as well.”

  His virtual audience was represented in the briefing area by the icons of over two hundred men, women, and artificial intelligences making up 1MIEF’s ops planning staff, which included intelligence, communications, and administrative staff constellations from all organizational levels.

  “Our best hope against the Xul, obviously,” he continued, “would be to get all of the human governments pulling together…ending the war with the Theocracy, and getting them, the PanEuropeans, the Chinese, the Hispanics, the Russians, all of them pulling together and pooling their space-military resources to fight the Xul.

  “In my estimation, our survival as a species almost certainly will depend on the human species working together.”

  “Yeah, well, good luck with that,” the rough voice of Vice Admiral Liam Taggart put in, and several in the audience chuckled. Taggart was Alexander’s opposite number in Gorgon, the commander of 1MIEF’s naval contingent.

  No one else in the virtual space would have dared to interrupt Alexander’s exposition.

  “Thank you, Liam,” Alexander replied. “Fortunately, uniting Humankind is a job for the politicians, not the military. While they’re working on that, we need to consider our strategic alternatives for Gorgon, and—just as with the original gorgons of Greek myth—so far we have three.

  “The first, and least desirable in my opinion, is that we wait…hold back and wait for the political situation to resolve itself. The advantage is that we don’t have to commit ourselves at once. The downside is that we can’t assume that the Xul are going to give us the luxury of waiting. Our intel from Puller 659 is solid; we know the Xul know where we are and how to get at us. We can assume they’re gathering their forces for a strike as we speak. Absolutely the only unknown factor in the equation is how long we actually have.

  “Second, we trespass into PanEurope space, take the whole MIEF right through the Republic, and the hell with the consequences. We might win Aurore’s approval and support…but no one’s betting money on that.” Aurore was Theta Bootes IV, the capital of the PanEuropean Republic.

  “Now, the Senate won’t approve a head-on invasion…but they might allow us to pull an end run. Puller 659 is close to the outer periphery of Republican space. We might swing out this way…” As he spoke, a yellow course line moved out through Commonwealth space from Sol, leaping from star system to star system to enter an as-yet unexplored region beyond the frontier, then looping back and around to come in to the Puller system from outside human space. “Technically, this would still constitute an invasion of Republican space…but we might be able to slip the whole MIEF into the Puller system and out through the gate to Starwall before the Republicans know what’s going down. The downside: if Aurore finds out and gets ticked off, the Commonwealth might find itself at war with the Theocracy, the Xul, and the Republic.

  “Third.” Four white pinpoints lit up within Commonwealth space. “We forget about Puller 659 and Starwall entirely. There are a total of seventeen known Stargates, offering a total of about two hundred known routes into Xul systems, all of them now being actively monitored by Marine or Navy listening posts. Four of those Gates lie inside Commonwealth space—Sirius, of course, Mu Cygni, Gamma Piscium, and Lambda Capricorni.” Each pinpoint on the map display brightened as he named it.

  “These four gates offer us a total of twenty-nine routes into star systems we know to be occupied by the Xul. We select one of those twenty-nine potential paths and send the MIEF there.

  “The disadvantage of this choice is that we know the space controlled by the Xul is unimaginably vast…so vast that what happens in one part might simply not matter to the rest of it.”

  At Alexander’s command, the viewpoint of the watchers’ assembled minds seemed to pull back sharply. The gleaming starscape of near-Sol space dwindled into the distance, revealing the entire sweep of the Galaxy, three milky-haze arms wrapped tightly about a bulging, ruddy-hued central core. In an instant, the patch of space occupied by Humankind vanished, a dust speck lost against that teeming backdrop of stars.

  “For instance,” Alexander continued, “if we go through the Sirius Gate, we could strike here…” A white nova flared near a globular star cluster above the galactic plane.

  “Those of you who’ve studied your Corps history remember the Marine incursion at a system designated Cluster Space, about five hundred years ago—a single star system in the galactic halo that possessed very large collection of multiple star gates, a kind
of switching station for tens of thousands of different gate routes. That route was slammed shut when the Marines destroyed the Cluster Space end of that gatepath…but we’ve found similar systems elsewhere. This is one—designated CS-Epsilon. According to our listening post at Sirius, it possesses five separate gates in the same star system. Obviously a high-value target.

  “Unfortunately, we’re really in the dark as to just how important any one stargate nexus is to the Xul. Remember, they didn’t build these things, so far as we’ve been able to determine. They just use them…and guard as many as they can. Like us, really, but on a much larger scale.

  “So…if we hit CS-Epsilon, we don’t know that the news would reach any other Xul base, or that it would make the slightest difference to them or their plans.” Two hundred more stars lit up, scattered from one end of the Galaxy to the other. “Remember that we only know of about two hundred systems with a Xul presence. There may be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of other Xul bases. The MIEF might rampage across the Galaxy and take out every single known Xul strongpoint…then return to Sol in a few years and find all of the worlds of Humankind reduced to blackened cinders because nothing we did really hurt the Xul badly enough to attract their attention. If Operation Gorgon is to succeed, we must hit the Xul in a vital spot, hurt them so badly they send everything they have after us, and leave our worlds alone, at least for the time being.

  “I’m ready to entertain any ideas any of you might have….”

  “Sir,” Colonel Holst, of 3rd Brigade Intelligence, ventured after a long moment’s silence…

  “Go ahead.”

  “Sir…with respect, this is just flat-out impossible! How do we know if any of the systems we can reach are important enough to get the Xuls’ attention if we hit it? Like you said, we could blow their bases from now until Doomsday, and they might not take any more notice of it than we would of a fleabite. How do we know?…”

  “We don’t, Colonel. Hell, even with a human enemy, ninety percent of intelligence work is WAG—wild-assed guesses. You probably know that better than I do. And with…entities like the Xul, it’s a lot worse.”

  “We do know the Xul are xenophobic in the extreme,” Major General Austin pointed out quietly. He was the CO of the MIEF’s ground combat division, but he’d put in a bunch of years in Intelligence on his way up. “In fact, that appears to be their defining characteristic. Anything, any species, that poses a threat to them, even a potential threat, they take notice. The Fermi Answer, remember.”

  Eight hundred years before, according to legends rooted in Earth’s pre-spaceflight era, a physicist named Enrico Fermi had wondered why, in a galaxy where advanced technical life ought to be common, and the radio emissions and other evidence of their existence ought to be easily detected…there was nothing. Humankind had appeared to be alone in the cosmos. That contradiction had become known as the Fermi Paradox.

  Only gradually had the answer to that paradox revealed itself. When humans first ventured out to other worlds within their own Solar System, they’d found ample evidence of extrasolar intelligence—evidence even of the large-scale colonization of Earth, the Moon, and Mars in the remote past. Later, when they began exploring beyond the Solar System, they found the blasted, wind-blown ruins of planet-embracing cities on Chiron and elsewhere. The Fermi Answer, evidently, was that intelligence did evolve, and frequently, but that someone was already out there, waiting and watching for any sign of technological evolution.

  In all the history of the Milky Way Galaxy, among all those hundreds of billions of stars, if even one species evolved with the inborn Darwinian imperative to survive by eliminating all possible competitors, and if that species survived long enough to achieve an advanced enough technology, they would be in the perfect position to wipe out any nascent species long before it became a serious threat.

  The Fermi Answer. Humankind was alone because the Xul had killed everyone else.

  There were exceptions, of course. The An Empire had been destroyed thousands of years before, but a few had survived on Ishtar, overlooked when they lost any technology that might attract Xul notice—like radio. The N’mah had survived by giving up star travel and living quietly inside the Sirius Stargate—the strategy now known as “rats-in-the-walls.” And there might be other exceptions out there among the stars as well.

  Humankind had so far avoided destruction thanks to a combination of luck and the fact that the Xul appeared to respond to threats in a cumbersome and unwieldy manner; the sheer size and scope of their Galaxy-wide presence worked against them.

  But that unwieldiness now would be working against the Marine MIEF.

  “General Austin is correct,” Alexander said. “Basic strategy 101: use the enemy’s weaknesses against him. Xul weaknesses, at least in so far as we’ve been able to determine over the past few centuries, include their xenophobia and their glacial slowness in responding or adapting to threats. The xenophobia makes them predictable, after a fashion. Their slow response time gives us a chance to hit them multiple times before they land on us with their full weight.

  “But we do need to identify those systems that will make them sit up and take notice if we hit them. Ideas?”

  “Starwall,” a major in the 55th MARS intelligence group said after a moment. “We know it’s a major Xul transport nexus, and we know the intel they took from the Argo is there. Option B, going into Republic Space and through the Puller gate to Starwall is our best option.”

  And with that, the discussion was off and running, with various members of the planning staff contributing thoughts and suggestions, others offering objections and criticisms. Alexander stepped back mentally, listening to the debate. After a few moments, he assigned Cara the job of monitoring the discussion, while he focused on the far more boring topic of Expeditionary Force logistics.

  Gorgon represented a God-awful mess when it came to supply. An MIEF was an enormous and sprawling organization, so intricate and complex that dozens of specialist AIs were required simply to maintain internal communications, logistics, and routine administration. It was a joint-service unit, comprised of some 52,000 Marine and Navy personnel and eighty ships. The Marine component included a full Marine division—16,000 men and women—plus a Marine Aerospace Wing and a force service support group.

  Currently, 1MIEF drew on 1MarDiv for personnel and support, but ever since the Commonwealth Senate’s vote to accept Alexander’s operational proposal, both units had been heavily reinforced, both by drawing personnel and assets from other Marine divisions, and from newly graduating classes out of the recruit training centers, both on Mars and at Earth/Luna. When 1MIEF departed for the stars—the date of embarkation was now tentatively scheduled for mid-January, eight weeks hence—it would be fully staffed independently of 1MarDiv, which would remain in the Sol System as part of the standing defense against a possible Xul strike.

  The sheer logistical complexity of Operation Gorgon meant that a small army of planners were needed to work out each detail before embarkation. Vast quantities of expendables were already being routed to the Deimos Yards over Mars—most of them in the form of water ice, methane, and ammonia, with lesser amounts of trace elements. The ice would serve both as shielding and as a water supply; nanoassemblers would pull carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen from the raw materials and rearrange them as needed to create air and food. Resupply during the mission would be accomplished by mining outer-system worlds and asteroids each time they entered another star system. The supply lines back to Sol would be too long and tenuous to permit cargo ships to keep the fleet supplied.

  But even if the MIEF was able to “live off the land,” as some wag had put it already—meaning picking up all necessary elements in other star systems for reassembly as needed—the Expeditionary Fleet needed to have robot miners and transports enough to collect the raw materials, storage tankers to hold them, and mobile processing plants to convert and distribute the finished consumables. Besides that, there were crit
ical decisions to be made concerning mechanical spares and replacement parts, especially for complex electronic components that couldn’t be batch grown in the fleet’s repair ships.

  And there were the weapons, the Mark 660 battlesuits, the ammunition, the power cores and converters…the list seemed endless, the storage space for it all sharply limited. Alexander and his planning staff were still hard at work determining if the thing was even possible. It wasn’t enough simply to add an extra few AKs, ANs, and AEs to the fleet roster, because each of those vessels—cargo ships, nanufactory transports, and ammunition ships—in turn needed their own small mountains of spare parts and extra equipment.

  Where 1MIEF was going was a long, long way out into the dark, and resupply was going to be a bitch. The situation was made even tougher by the fact that Alexander couldn’t even begin to guess how long 1MIEF would be deployed starside.

  “No!” a voice in his mind called, rising above the others. “You young rock! We do that and we leave our lines of retreat wide open and vulnerable! Doing that would be tantamount to suicide!”

  Judging from the acrimony of the debate going on within the staff planning group, it might be a while before the MIEF could depart in the first place. Rock was an old, old Corps epithet for a particularly dumb Marine—as in “dumb as a rock.”

  “With respect…sir,” another voice came back, biting. “How the hell are we going to maintain our lines of retreat across twenty thousand light-years? The EF will be cut off as soon as it goes through the first Gate!”

  “People!” Alexander cut in. “Let’s keep it civil.” A webwork of varicolored lines and brightly lit stars now stretched across the Galaxy map, showing alternate routes and objectives, known Stargate links, and known Xul bases. Cara had been tagging and color-coding each idea as it was presented, attaching to each lists of pros and cons.

  As Alexander looked at the tangle, a new surety began to make itself felt. Leadership styles differed, of course, from officer to officer, and since the beginning of his career Alexander had tried to be democratic in his approach, soliciting the ideas and opinions of his subordinates and giving each due consideration.