Galactic Corps

by Ian Douglas

  She discarded the thought. She wasn’t ready to make that decision, not just yet.

  The situation was bad, but at least some of her systems were still running—life support and, thank the gods, her ship’s sensors, which were still feeding data over her cere bral link. That meant she was picking up battlespace data from the far-flung net of drones and probes still adrift on this side of the gate. From the look of things, a lot of Xul ships were gathering, moving toward one of several stargate icons extending across her IHD in a broad, sweeping curve.

  Cluster Space was a very special target, she knew. She and the other members of her squadron had been thoroughly briefed before this op, and had downloaded a lot of data going all the way back to the 22nd Century.

  In 2170, a Marine strike force had entered this system, sometime after the first encounter with Xul ships at the Sirius Stargate. Backtracking on the path followed by the Xul force, they’d discovered the Cluster Space system, far out among the halo stars at the outer fringe of the Galaxy, at least thirty thousand light years from Sol. They’d emerged from a different kind of stargate, a broad tunnel drilled into the heart of a twenty-kilometer-wide planetoid. According to the rec ords, the Marines had recovered a damaged fighter that had fallen through the gate during the battle, planted antimatter charges, and escaped back through to the Sirius Gate before the charges had detonated, destroying the asteroid gate in Cluster Space and erasing the path back to Sirius.

  That raid, quite possibly, had prevented the Xul from discovering Earth—less than nine light years from the Sirius Gate—for another century and a half, buying Humankind precious time. Not until 2314 had the Xul discovered Sol, launching the devastating bombardment against Earth that now, almost six centuries later, was still called Armageddonfall.

  The idea now was to keep that from ever happening again. The next time the Xul visited Sol, they might well finish the job. They could destroy stars as well.

  Elint—electronic intelligence—acquired by 1MIEF nine years ago during the battles in Aquila Space and at Starwall had revealed a wealth of various stargate connections, and the intelligence services both of the Humankind Commonwealth and of the Marines specifically had been mining that data ever since, trying to assemble a useful map of gate interconnections.

  There were, it was estimated, some millions of stargates scattered across the Galaxy, and each gate could be tuned to connect with as many as several thousand other stargates. The web of interconnections was extraordinarily complex and farflung, and human explorers and their AI analogues had thus far visited only a tiny, tiny fraction of all of the possibilities.

  But intelligence gathered during a gate reconnaissance at Sirius four years ago had led to the discovery of the Carson Gate, and that, in turn, had led here, to a major Xul node in Cluster Space. Probes sent from Carson to the Cluster had verified that this was another route to the Cluster Node; in fact, there were no fewer than fifteen stargates in orbit around that single tiny, red-dwarf star, making this system a major communications and travel hub. The destruction of that one gate in this system over seven centuries ago might have temporarily delayed the Xul discovery of Sol and Earth, but it probably hadn’t even inconvenienced the Xul, who appeared to use the gate network to maintain their xenocidal watch over the teeming worlds of the Galaxy.

  This time, the Commonwealth possessed the technology to close all of the gates. From experience, they knew that a nova probably wouldn’t destroy them outright. Each gate was distant enough from the local star that even a nova wouldn’t seriously affect it. But the nova would destroy all or most of the Xul ships, fortresses, and other structures orbiting in the local star, as well as annihilate any bases located on the worlds of the star’s planetary system. When 1MIEF went back through the Carson/Cluster gatelink, Marine assault teams could be dispatched to each gate in the system with antimatter charges that would finish the job once and for all.

  Those icons appearing in her In-Head Display represented a few of the local system’s stargates, along with hundreds of red icons marking Xul warships within the range of the MIEF’s battlespace sensor drones. It occurred to her that she was about to get a ringside seat on just what happened to Xul vessels on the nova side of a stargate during an MIEF raid.

  Of course, she didn’t expect to survive the experience. Any blast wave that seriously damaged a Xul huntership would sweep her little fighter away like a dust mite in a hurricane.

  She checked to see that her recorders were going, however. The MIEF would be sending assessment teams through afterward, and if there was anything left of her Wyvern, the automated beacon transmitted by its rad- shielded storage unit would bring them in for a recovery. Of course, all of the unmanned battlespace drones had the same sort of storage, but there might be something unique to her viewpoint. Standard operational procedure required her to take steps to preserve the electronic record of what happened, just in case.

  It also gave her a chance of recording a message, with a chance that it would reach family and friends back home in Saskatchewan.

  Of course, she’d not had much to do with them since her radiation exposure at Starwall nine years ago. Somehow, knowing she would never have children again, she’d drifted apart from her blood family. The last time she’d linked with them had been . . . when? During one of 1MIEF’s returns to Sol for resupply, certainly. But not four months ago, the last time she was there. Maybe two times before that, early last year. . . .

  She would have to consult her personal memories, currently inaccessible in her implant hardware, to be sure. Even though it was her choice, she tended to follow Marine guidelines when it came to family memories, locking them into hardware storage during a mission to avoid complicating distractions at an inopportune moment. Like they always said, “If the Corps had wanted you to have a civilian family, they’d have issued you one in boot camp.”

  Hell, right now she couldn’t even remember any of her parents’ faces.

  Fuck it, she thought. Just like you’ve been saying. The Corps is your family, all the family you’ll ever need. . . .

  Tears were drifting between her eyes and the inside of her helmet visor, tiny, silvery spheres floating in microgravity.

  How much time did she have? If everything was on sched, the blast wave from the local star should be very nearly—

  Without preamble, Bloodstar began growing brighter.

  5

  1506 .1111 UCS Hermes

  Stargate

  Carson Space

  0731 hrs, GMT

  “Minus three . . . two . . . one . . . mark!” The AI’s voice in Alexander’s mind said, counting off the last seconds. If Bloodlight had indeed gone nova, the shock wave should just now have reached the stargate. Depending on how the gate was tuned, the blast could pass through an open gate, emerging from another gate light years away.

  That didn’t appear to be the case this time, however. Four Xul hunterships were drifting just in front of the Carson Space gate, wreathed in lances of plasma and detonating nuclear and antimatter warheads. But nothing had emerged from the other side, no light, no hard radiation.

  Had something gone wrong over there?

  It was entirely possible that red dwarf stars were simply too low-mass for a Euler triggership to affect. That had always been one of the possibilities, one of the dangers of this mission.

  Or perhaps the triggerships had been delayed.

  There was no way to tell, not from this side of the gate, or at least not until another battlespace drone emerged to update the combatnet.

  One of the four Xul hunterships in the kill zone, a Type I newly emerged from the gate, was beginning to break up under the hellacious, focused bombardment. Under the concentrated fire of every capital ship of the MIEF, even a kilometerlong Xul warship couldn’t hold up for long. A portion of the needle- sharp prow broke away, spinning rapidly end over end. The rest of the Xul vessel was beginning to crumple, and intense radiation was bathing the area. The black hole inside its en
gineering spaces must have broken free, and was now eating its way through the Xul ship’s bowels.

  But the Xul ships were firing back, sending a storm of laser energy and plasma bolts back at their tormentors. Three destroyers, Foster, Johnson, and Mevernen, had been destroyed just within the past couple of minutes, and the light cruiser Yorktown had been badly damaged, savaged by a concentrated volley of Xul weaponry. Now the heavy cruiser Maine was coming under fire, staggering as high-velocity mass-driver rounds slammed into her in a devastating fusillade.

  The Commonwealth vessels continued firing, however, with unrelenting determination. As Alexander watched, the hull of the Type I twisted and dwindled, falling in upon itself. There was a final flash of radiation, from visible light through X-ray and gamma wavelengths . . . and then there was nothing remaining but drifting debris.

  “Target Alpha destroyed!” someone called over the tactical net. “Pour it on, people!”

  Two more Xul ships, another Type I and a Type II, were receiving the brunt of the expeditionary force’s fire now. The fourth of the group, a Type II, was limping now after receiving a barrage of antimatter warheads across its dorsal surface, with streams of hot gas gushing from several gaping rents in its hull and freezing almost immediately into clouds of glittering ice crystals. It appeared to be trying to reverse course back through the gate.

  “Let Charlie go,” Taggart’s voice said over the net, identifying the retreating vessel. “Concentrate on Bravo and Delta.”

  Bravo, the Type I, was starting to come apart under the heavy barrage, but it was also accelerating now, pushing deeper into Carson Space. A suicide attack? Or simply a breakdown in communications on board the stricken vessel? The Commonwealth firing line tracked it, continuing to pour fire into its shuddering, crumbling hull. It swept past the PanEuropean gunboat Delacroix at a range of less than ten kilometers. Delacroix’s turrets spun as they followed the Xul warship, slamming round after round of nano-D shells into the enemy’s flank.

  Alexander had strongly protested the integration of the PE, Chinese, and Rus sian squadrons into what was supposed to be a Commonwealth naval-Marine expeditionary force, but the Commonwealth Senate had been . . . insistent, primarily because of the high losses among the Commonwealth forces over the past few years. Opposed or not, Alexander believed in delivering praise when it was appropriate. He made a mental note to mention Delacroix’s deadly accurate fire when he composed his after-action report.

  Assuming he survived to write it, of course. If the star next door had not gone nova, 1MIEF would shortly be in very serious trouble.

  AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks, Cluster Space

  0731 hrs, GMT

  Something had happened to the red dwarf. That much was clear simply through the Wyvern’s optical inputs. But the effect was not what Lee had been expecting.

  Within the past several seconds, the star had visibly grown much brighter. Lee’s radiation sensors were off-line, but she suspected there was a strong UV, X-ray, and gamma component to the brightening as well, enough to give some teeth to that flare of visible light.

  The increase in energy was more gradual than it should have been, however. Xul ships appeared now in sharp relief between their sunlit and shadowed surfaces, but their hulls weren’t softening and melting, weren’t boiling away under the assault.

  Lee knew from the pre-mission briefings that there was a chance the local star could not be triggered into going nova. Like other typical red dwarfs, the local star was comparatively low-mass—about twenty percent the mass, in this case, of Earth’s sun. In nature, only massive stars could go nova, and traditional novae were thought to occur only in binary star systems, when matter from one star fell into the other. The Euler triggerships, moving within a bubble of sharply warped space, distorted the core of a star as they passed through, inducing a rebound effect, it was thought, that generated an explosion of the star’s core. The question was whether a red dwarf, which could be anywhere from forty percent down to about eight percent of the mass of Earth’s sun, could be physically induced to explode. There’d been talk of testing the theory on a red dwarf within Commonwealth space before actually launching this raid, but the thought of blowing up a star, even a tiny one, simply to test theory had been too much for a majority of the members of the Commonwealth Senate. The request, put through by 1MIEF’s science team, had been denied.

  Still, it should have worked. Red dwarfs were smaller and cooler than other stars on the main sequence, but they were still stars, working fusion magic in the transformation of hydrogen to helium. There was another consideration as well. The Cluster Space sun was not a typical halo star—one of the thin haze of extremely ancient, cool red stars surrounding the Galaxy, but must instead be a straggler from the Galaxy’s spiral arms. Its lone attendant planet proved that much. Stars from inside the Galaxy—Population I stars, as they’d been designated since the 20th Century—possessed heavier elements besides the usual stellar components of hydrogen and helium and therefore could form planetary systems. They were considered to be metal-rich, the word metal in this instance referring to any element heavier than helium whether it was chemically considered to be a metal or not. Population II stars, the halo stars surrounding the Galaxy, were ancient survivals from an earlier galactic epoch; without heavy elements in their make- up, they couldn’t form planets.

  The spectrum of the Cluster Space dwarf showed lots of carbon. Likely, Bloodlight possessed a core of carbon, a by-product of stellar fusion that must have been accumulating for tens of billions of years. The MIEF science teams felt that the rebound effect within a carbon core should result in the detonation of a nova—at least a small one—despite the star’s low mass.

  Lee watched the star for a full minute, looking through her cockpit’s transparency with her naked eyes, now, rather than using the Wyvern’s electronic feed. Despite the increase in overall brightness, she could look directly into that ruby spark without discomfort, without her helmet’s optics dialing down to preserve her vision.

  Possibly what had been triggered was a stellar flare; red dwarfs, especially small ones, often were unstable enough in their radiation output to earn the name flare stars. Such stars—Proxima Centauri, just 4.3 light years from Sol, was such a star—could increase in brightness by as much as two or three hundred percent, in some cases.

  Whatever had happened, it was bad. The Xul fleet hadn’t even been inconvenienced by the brightening of the sun, and was continuing to move toward the stargate. The MIEF would be arrayed on the far side, now, in Carson Space, and fighting for its life. Once General Alexander decided that the Xul were going to cross over to Carson Space in force, he would detonate a number of antimatter charges on the Carson Space stargate. That would stop more Xul from crossing over.

  It would also strand Lee and any other survivors from the MIEF fighter wings that might still be on this side. Again she tried to engage her ship’s auto-repair functions, tried to bring Pappy2 back on-line, tried to fire up the main drive.

  Nothing.

  She elected to focus all of her energy on reviving Pappy.

  The AI could handle electronics repairs better than she. And it would be nice to have someone to talk to, especially someone who might be able to make sense of the screwy data coming in from the Cluster Space star. It looked like—

  Abruptly, the brightening star exploded, growing much brighter, and then still brighter, until the cockpit transparency went black.

  Something must’ve delayed the explosion, she thought. That, or the Euler triggerships took their sweet time getting to the star.

  She tried shifting back to her Wyvern’s electronic feed, and got nothing but static. Shit! She was cut off now from the outside, unable to see with her own eyes or through the Wyvern’s electronic senses. Apparently, the radiation from the exploding star had knocked the rest of her sensors off-line. She’d been helpless before; now she was helpless and blind.

  At this point there was nothing she could do but
wait. She noted that the temperature of her outer hull was rising now—at minus thirty degrees Celsius, up over one hundred degrees in the past thirty seconds. She didn’t know for sure how hot it would get. Her Wyvern’s hull integrity might well hold up, and she would survive this initial pulse. The killer in a nova, at least this far away from ground zero, was the cloud of charged particles lagging behind the speed-of-light radiation front by several hours. That would kill her, no doubt about it.

  She considered the suicide switch again. It would save the waiting . . . and possibly some pain. She wasn’t sure just how bad a dose of radiation she was getting right now, but it might be bad enough to kill her relatively quickly, over the course of several hours, say.

  If she started vomiting, she would know.

  She was determined not to be trapped adrift again, helpless and doomed to a slow death. Once had been enough, nine years ago, at Starwall. The similarity of that incident to her situation now was shrieking at her in the back of her mind.

  It would be very easy to end things. Now.

  On the other hand, she was a Marine . . . and Marines didn’t give up, not that easily, anyhow. There would always be time to use the switch later, if things got too bad.