Galactic Corps

by Ian Douglas

  “Wait a second, sir,” Black said, interrupting. “There’s Sag A-Star and there’s the Great Annihilator. What do you mean by ‘all those black holes?’ ”

  “Ah,” the intelligence chief said. “Yes. We’re just starting to work up a complete survey from the data Athena brought us. Athena? Can you address the question?”

  “Of course,” the AI replied. “It has long been theorized that solar-mass black holes created elsewhere in the Galaxy would eventually move to the Galactic Hub as their orbits degraded over time. In addition, the large number and high density of giant and supergiant stars within the Hub suggests that large numbers of black holes would form as those stars reached the end of their life spans on the Main Sequence and exploded. By some estimates, there may be as many as ten thousand black holes between one and ten solar masses within the inner hundred light years of the Galactic Core. We have identified a number of these by means of radiation released as they move through the inner core dust clouds, but we believe many remain uncharted. That, in fact, will be another requirement for Heartfire—locating and tracking black holes that may pose a threat to the Pax Galactica.”

  “Frigging wonderful,” Black muttered. “As if this joy ride wasn’t already complicated enough.”

  If Loren or Pollard heard the comment, they ignored it. Garroway could understand Black’s anger. In any military operation, the simpler you could make it, the more concise its objectives, the fewer its objectives, the better the chances of the op succeeding. Unfortunately, there was always the tendency to piggyback mission upon mission, especially when politics were involved. The admonition to KISS—Keep It Simple, Stupid—was the ideal in military planning . . . but it was an ideal rarely realized in practice.

  “This is starting to sound pretty damned iffy,” Ramsey said. “I mean, we’re going in there to find a flat metric for the Pax. So far, so good. But now you’re saying that we’ve got ten thousand unmapped black holes flying around in there. You do know that all those loose singularities will play hell with the metric, right?”

  It made sense. Black holes—tiny pockets of gravitational distortion—would play havoc with the local space-time metric, and the fact that everything in close to GalCenter would be moving quickly as it orbited Sag A* wouldn’t help. The operation was beginning to sound more and more unlikely.

  “Of course, Lieutenant,” Loren replied. “And if things prove too hairy in there, we just might be able to scrub the Pax mission.”

  “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard all day,” Black said. “This op is a cluster fuck waiting to happen. Wrapped up in ribbon and tied with a bow.”

  “We answer to the civilian authority, Captain Black,” Loren said coldly. “Not the other way around.”

  And that, of course, was basic to the Marine Corps’ mission. For over a thousand years, the Corps had done what the civilian government had commanded, without criticizing that government, and without attempting to set policy. That fact was one of the absolutes that maintained Humankind’s oldest modern democracy.

  “I meant no offense, ma’am,” Black said. “But you gotta know . . . this op is a damned long shot. And our chances of coming out of there alive are somewhere between slim and non exis tent.”

  “Why did you volunteer, then?” Loren asked. “All of you are volunteers, correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “If it’s hopeless, why did you sign up?”

  Black shrugged. “Because we’re Marines. Because even if the Pax mission is complete nonsense, we might be able to bring out some good, solid intel about the Xul. And the more we know about the enemy, the better our chances of beating him.”

  Because we’re Marines . . .

  Garroway thought about what Black had said later, after he’d returned to the platoon squad bay. Nikki Armandez had met him there, and the two had made their way aft and starboard to the mess hall for some chow.

  Over nano-grown sliderloaf, he told her what he could of the meeting. Parts of that briefing had been security sealed, which meant that Garroway’s own implants would block him if he tried to talk about them, but other parts were already general knowledge.

  Like the fact that an intelligence team was about to be inserted into the Galactic Core, ahead of the Pax Galactica.

  “Is it hopeless, Gare?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “The skipper seems to think so,” he said, meaning Black. “I think the brass is going through with it because of the intel we’ll be able to bring back.”

  “If you can bring it back.” She sounded bitter.

  Both of them had volunteered for Heartfire days ago. Garroway had been accepted, but not Armandez. She’d been angry at what seemed like senseless discrimination.

  “You still mad that they didn’t take you?” he asked. “I don’t know. I just don’t want you going in there alone.” “I won’t be. It’s a big op—a regimental strike team, almost three hundred Marines. And you’ll be coming through later, with the Hermes.”

  “Yeah. If everything goes right for you.”

  They faced, Garroway thought, one of the basic dilemmas of military romances—the fact that two lovers could not be paired up all the time and, sooner or later, one would go into harm’s way while the other remained behind.

  “To tell you the truth, Nikki, I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as all that. Intelligence thinks the Xul are all but blind in the Core. We should be able to set up our OP and transmit back everything the MIEF needs to complete the mission. If anything, you’re going to be the one in the Xul crosshairs. Hermes and the Pax are pretty juicy targets, y’know? The Xul are bound to concentrate on them because they can rotate in and out of normal space.”

  “Maybe the Senate will call off the mission,” she said.

  “Maybe. Though where that one senator . . . what’s her name? Yarlocke. Where she’s concerned, I wouldn’t count on it.”

  She looked at him, clearly hurting. “Why did they pick you?”

  He grinned. “Because I’m a bad ass with ten years of bad- ass experience. Because my legs are more metal and plastic than they are regrown flesh. Because—”

  “I’m serious, Aid!”

  “So am I. Radiation levels in the Core are hot enough to fry any carbon- based life form silly enough to waltz in there. Our ship shielding is pretty good . . . and the new armor is supposed to be able to shrug off anything short of a thermonuclear explosion. But they still want rad-resistant Marines in there.”

  “Bullshit. Ramsey isn’t a walking spare parts store like you are. Neither are any of the others.”

  “Mm. But they have had experience in hot zones, in high-radiation environments. Maybe it’s as simple as that. They cross-indexed all volunteers with Marines who’d played tag with novae or places like Starwall. My name checked. Yours didn’t.”

  “Maybe . . .” But she didn’t sound convinced.

  Later, after hours, the two of them made their way to a suit locker overlooking the ship’s main hangar bay. The cavernous space, over eight hundred meters deep, was kept perpetually in hard vacuum, but transparent sections of the travel ways along the towering bulkheads looked down into a gulf of shadows and blackness, where brilliant work lights and the pinpoint dazzle of welding arcs cast wavering glows against the hulls of two ships currently in the bay grapples— the light cruiser Ludwigson and the destroyer Plottel. The area was kept in zero gravity, and the space throughout the chamber was filled with drifting motes and lights—the service craft and work modules used by Hermes’ maintenance crews.

  Halfway along one vast and curving bulkhead, a travelway tube gave access to a compartment filled with vac suits and stored maintenance robots. There, they shed their uniforms and clung together, making slow love at first, but with an intensity and an urgency that built and built and built again to the final, gasping climax. Surrounded, then, by a tiny galaxy of sparkling droplets—drifting beads of sweat and other body fluids—they clung together in a drifting embrace, silent
and close.

  “It’ll be all right,” he whispered against her ear.

  “I know that,” was her reply.

  And both of them knew that both statements were well-intentioned lies.

  15

  0505 .1102 Tarantula 04,

  Regimental Strike Team,

  In transit on board UCS Intrepid

  Cluster Space

  1235 hrs, GMT

  It was the second time a vessel named Intrepid had set sail against the Xul.

  Both the Navy and the Marine Corps embraced history, the panoply of tradition and the men, women, and vessels that had gone before. The very first Intrepid in the U.S. Navy had been a ketch, originally built in Napoleon’s France and later sold to the Barbary state of Tripoli, who put her into service as the Mastico. Under that name, during the conflict known as the First Barbary War, she’d participated in the capture of an American frigate, the Philadelphia, when the latter ran aground off Tripoli in October of 1803.

  Mastico had been captured in December of that year by the schooner USS Enterprise, renamed Intrepid, and brought into the American squadron then blockading Tripoli Harbor. In February of 1804, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur had taken the Intrepid into Tripoli Harbor, and with about sixty hand- picked men—including Sergeant Solomon Wren and a Marine detachment, eight in all—had boarded and taken the Philadelphia without firing a shot. In an operation lasting all of twenty-five minutes, Decatur’s men had killed or driven off the Tripolitan crew, set fire to the frigate, and escaped without losing a man. The Philadelphia’s powder magazines had detonated a short time later, destroying the frigate before her captors could refit her and add her to their own navy.

  No less a celebrity than Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson had called the operation “the most bold and daring act of the age.”

  There had been several Intrepids serving with U.S. naval forces in the centuries after the Barbary Wars, but the next vessel by that name to become the stuff of Navy-Marine legend had been a transport commissioned in 2314—the year of Armageddonfall, the year the Xul had attacked Earth. After a nine-year passage at nearc from Sol to the Sirius system, this Intrepid had entered the stargate at Sirius and delivered her cargo—25,000 metric tons of sand lifted from the deserts of Mars—releasing it at a velocity just under the speed of light. The sand cloud had scoured the surface of a Xul-colonized world in a region called Night’s Edge, and vaporized an enemy fleet. The strike, a first and partial payback for the devastation wreaked on Earth, had provided a much-needed psychological victory for a broken and discouraged Humankind.

  And now a new Intrepid was taking a Marine scouting force into the very heart of the Xul realm.

  Unfortunately, at the moment, Garroway could see very little of the outside world. Scarcely able even to wiggle, he was stuffed into one of the newly issued Type 690 power armor units, and that, in turn, was nested within the narrow troop bay of an AV-110 Tarantula along with twenty- three other Marines in Type 690s. A dozen Tarantulas rode in a hollowed-out space in Intrepid’s alien belly, mounted in four ranks of three. He had the Regimental Strike Team’s netfeed, but at the moment that was showing nothing but static on the vid channels, and nothing but the terse conversation of the Navy bridge crew on audio. Nestled like Russian dolls, Marines in armored suits in landing craft in hastily converted troop carriers, not all of the communication amenities were working yet. From the sound of things there’d been another delay.

  Typical.

  “Always the same story,” Sergeant Willem Shelby said over the platoon net. “Hurry up and wait.”

  “Welcome to the Marine Corps, Shelby,” Captain Black said.

  “That’s right,” Corporal Michael Fossey added. “For every minute you spend in the Corps, it’s fifty-nine and a half seconds of unimaginable boredom . . .”

  “. . . and half a second of stark terror,” Garroway said, completing the old joke.

  “Watch it, people,” Staff Sergeant Tomas Vincent growled. “That’s my Corps you’re putting down. Every day an adventure! Every meal a banquet! Every alien life form another opportunity for target practice! . . .”

  Garroway listened to the banter, amused, but also feeling the tug of conflicting emotions. It had been a month since his aborted leave Earthside, but he was still digesting some of his experiences. Out here, existence, life, took on a harsh illumination, an interplay of starkest black and white. A Marine’s entire being was focused on his fellow Marines and, on a grander scale, on the War. On Earth, and in the teeming hive of EarthRing, people were barely aware that there was a war . . . or that Earth and all of Humankind might be snuffed out at any moment.

  At the moment, Garroway’s view was limited to his suit’s primary optical input, which meant that all he could see was the red-lit near-darkness of the Tarantula’s troop bay, where a twenty-four-Marine section was packed in shoulder to armored shoulder, unable to move, unable to even see if the transport was under attack. They were still in Cluster Space, evidently, but any moment now they would be transiting across about twenty-five thousand light years, to emerge in what might well be the most heavily defended Xul stronghold in the Galaxy.

  Damn it, how much longer?

  Garroway opened a private channel. “Hey, Gunny?”

  “Yeah?” Gunnery Sergeant Michel Warhurst replied over the link. Garroway’s former DI was in another Tarantula, 08, elsewhere within Intrepid’s belly.

  “Why the hell did you come back?”

  Warhurst’s return to the Corps had been a complete and utter surprise to Garroway. He’d seen how the man had been living Earthside—that beautiful undersea apartment with its view of Sunken Miami, two gorgeous and loving fuck- buddies, and a hot tub that stopped just two decimals short of absolute hedonism.

  He also remembered what Warhurst had said about this Galactic Core op. That’s not my idea of fun. It’s more like suicide, especially if you’re on board the first ship into battlespace. . . .

  “Right now,” Warhurst replied after a moment’s hesitation, “I’m kind of wondering that myself.”

  Warhurst had re-enlisted less than forty-eight hours after Garroway, Armandez, and Ramsey had returned up-ring and reported back on board the Hermes. Still well under the Corp’s mandatory retirement age of ninety, he’d been sent to the Corp’s Camp Helicon on Luna’s Mare Imbrium, where his implants and personal software had been upgraded to current military standards. A two-week physical refresher course had followed, during which time he’d put in a request for duty with 1MIEF.

  Normally, an older Marine who’d been out of the Corps for that long would have received a planetside billet, possibly embassy duty, possibly at a recruiting office or logistical base. Since Warhurst had been a former drill instructor, with a skill-set much in demand, they’d intended to send him to a DI billet on Mars to train new recruits. The way Warhurst had told the story, though, he’d made a loud enough noise that the powers- that- be had assigned him to Delta Company, First Marine Assault Battalion, then seconded him to the newly created Regimental Strike Team.

  The truth of the matter was that losses had been heavy, and new recruits hard to come by. Personnel was so happy to get another warm body—a trained warm body, no less—that Warhurst likely could have written his own ticket.

  The question was why he wanted to when he’d already served his time, and more, and had had it so good as a retiree back on Earth.

  “I guess,” Warhurst said after another long pause, “I just couldn’t stand the thought of you young puppies going out there without my sage advice and years of experience and getting yourselves killed.”

  “I think you didn’t want to miss the big one,” Garroway said. “The last op against the Xul.”

  Warhurst chuckled, but it sounded bitter. “You think this is the last?”

  Garroway performed a mental shrug. “Isn’t it? We’re going in against what looks like their main base. Either the Senate’s Pax mission will do its thing and we’ll have peace, or we’ll kick t
he bastards right where it hurts them most.”

  “You’re full of shit, Garroway. There’ll never be peace. Not with the Xul. You know that. The Senate doesn’t, but anyone who’s been up against the Xul knows better.”

  “Then we take out their cozy little nest at GalCenter.”

  “And what makes you think that will end the Xul threat? These . . . these critters have been kicking ass all over the Galaxy for at least ten million years, maybe longer. At last estimate, the Xul have major bases in something like half a million star systems, and control at least that many stargates. In the last five hundred years, we’ve investigated . . . what? Maybe two-tenths of one percent of that number of gates and systems. Jesus, Garroway! There may be tens of billions of hunterships in our Galaxy, as many hunterships as there are human beings! Do you think they’re all going to stop working just because we shut down their operations in the Core? And that, of course, assumes we can shut them down. It may just be too big.”

  Garroway was silent for a moment. In the background, he could hear the low-voiced murmur of conversation from Intrepid’s bridge. “Engage primary drive.”