by Ian Douglas
It struck the planet’s surface kilometers from the Marine perimeter. Seconds later, Garroway felt the shock as it rippled through the ground beneath his boots. The Marines around him were cheering wildly, waving their weapons and shouting imprecations at the fallen giant.
The Xul ship continued falling even after it had struck, appearing to crumple in upon itself as its unimaginable mass kept moving, unstoppable. Pieces were flying off the top, and a tidal wave of dust was rushing out from the impact point.
Hunterships, Garroway knew, carried small gravitational singularities on board; human-designed quantum power taps did the same, using tiny, artificially generated black holes to harvest energy from the Quantum Sea. When the huntership began to crumple, the black hole inside was released, flying out of control through the heart of the giant ship, devouring everything it touched. The crumpling effect continued, the titanic mass beginning now to collapse upon itself, falling into a fast-growing rogue black hole.
The Marines continued cheering until the first Xul combots began swarming in across the plain, moving straight toward their position. “Here they come!” Captain Black called over the Net. “Commence fire!”
The last hundred plasma charges in Garroway’s weapon went fast. When the tone sounded in his helmet indicating that he was dry, he dropped the weapon and scrambled out of the crater. “I’m going to go get more ammo!” he told the others. “Chaffee! Connors! You two come with me!”
“Make it fast, Gunny!” Huerra yelled. “I’m down to my last fifty!”
A half-dozen Tarantulas were still moving slowly across the plain toward the perimeter, their belly jets throwing up impenetrable clouds of gray dust and grit. Garroway triggered his jump jets and bounded for the nearest one.
For centuries, military strategists had argued pro and con on the usefulness—and the survivability—of the tank, a weapon that had first come into service back in the twentieth century, existing in one form or another throughout most of those intervening years. Once the deciding mobile factor of the battlefield, most strategists now deemed tanks irrelevant. A single Marine could pack enough firepower in his personal weapon to destroy any of the tanks of earlier centuries, and most human combatants no longer bothered fielding them.
What did exist nowadays, however, was an odd hybrid of spacecraft and tank—vehicles like the AV-110 Tarantula, a multi-purpose vehicle that could ferry troops and equipment down to a planet’s surface from orbit, employ point plasma arcs to cut tunnels into solid rock, or deploy a variety of swap-out weapons mounted in external pods.
When military forces were deployed to other star systems, experience soon proved that fl ex i b i l i t y was what was most needed in modern weapons systems, weapons that could serve a number of roles and fill a number of billets. Tarantulas served well as armed assault craft for planetary invasions, but were too slow and cumbersome to provide traditional close aerospace cover for ground forces. However, by hovering just above the surface on ventral jets and agravs, they could take advantage of concealing terrain, maneuvering like tanks—or like the far more ancient cavalry arm of the assault force—and provide much needed mobile armored fire support.
Critics—especially armchair strategists within the Corps— liked to point out that Tarantulas represented the worst of two worlds. They were a hell of a lot bigger than tanks, and therefore better targets, while not being as fast or as maneuverable as a Wyvern or a Nightstar when they were drifting along at an altitude of two meters or less.
Garroway didn’t care about any of that at the moment. The Tarantulas were big, they were mobile, and they packed a hell of a lot of firepower, which was what the RST needed now more than anything else.
Except, possibly, ammunition. With Chaffee and Connors close behind, he jogged closer to the nearest of the Tarantulas, which hovered a few tens of meters away, almost invisible in the slashing storm of grit and jet-blasted dust. Through his implant, he linked in with the craft’s pilot. Tarantulas generally had a crew of four—pilot, two gunners, and a loadmaster, but the pilot was the vehicle’s commander.
Flying Pig was the name of this particu lar machine, and its pilot commander was Lieutenant Joash Grooms.
“Whaddaya want, Marine?” the man said when Garroway hailed him. “We’re kinda busy!”
Plasma streamed overhead, directed toward the Marine position from a ball turret high up on the Xul Behemoth’s hull. The shot lightly brushed Flying Pig’s dorsal surface, gouging out a long and molten groove.
“Yessir! But you’ve got ammo we need out here! You want close infantry support, you’ve got t’feed us! Sir!”
Flying Pig opened up with a double-pod fusillade directed against Xul weapons mounts. Had there been atmosphere, the noise would have been deafening. As it was, static shrieked inside Garroway’s skull as tightly focused magnetic fields sent the plasma bolts slashing across the intervening space into the target.
“Okay! Master Sergeant O’Malley’ll take care of you! But snap it up! I’m moving my ass just as soon—” The rest of the transmission was blasted into incoherence by static as the Tarantula’s main gun fired.
The Tarantula lifted slightly, the blast from its ventral jets slamming at Garroway’s armor and knocking him back a couple of steps. The rear ramp dropped open, spilling light into the moving dust, and the craft’s armored loadmaster appeared on the cargo deck, waving them on. “You want it? Come get it!”
Garroway, Chafee, and Connors formed a human chain, passing crates of plasma charges, power cells, and other munitions down the ramp and into a tumbled pile on the ground. Warhurst and several other Marines appeared out of the flame-shot night, helping to unload the Tarantula and picking up crates to take back to their positions.
The Xul combots were moving toward the Marine position now like a tidal wave.
Ops Center
UCS Hermes Point Diamond, Core Space
0151 hrs, GMT
Hermes dropped out of FTL at the point designated Diamond, the primary rendezvous zone for the squadron. As transponder signals began bouncing back to Hermes’ Ops Center, crawling in at the speed of light, other ships in the squadron began showing up on the tactical screens—the light cruiser Ludwigson, the destroyers Ardash and Plottel, the ponderous battleship Morrigen, the sleeker battlecruiser Mars, the carrier Lejeune, and the heavy fleet transport Howorth.
Hermes was the last to arrive. All of the squadron’s vessels had come through the close passage of GalCenter intact, and Alexander felt a deep-rooted blossoming of relief.
They were such a long way from home. . . .
The sky appeared to be an eerie, almost sullen deep blue, a radiant nebula, the nursery of new-born suns. In every direction, imbedded in that cloud, stars glared, blue-white and hot. Point Diamond was located near the center of a young, hot, dense- packed star cluster, the object known since the early years of radio astronomy as IRS-16. Imbedded in the far-sprawling accretion disk circling GalCenter and only a tenth of a light year from the central black hole itself, the cluster was torn by violent cosmic winds. Those winds blasted through the nebula within which the newborn stars were imbedded, reacting with the cloud and loosing a sleeting storm of hard radiation.
The squadron’s magnetic screens and their phase- shift technology would let them ride out the storm in relative safety, at least for a standard day or two. Each Commonwealth ship on the Ops Center visual display screens showed an eerie corona of light as the radiation fields and drifting nebula-dust interacted with the vessel’s screens.
“Well, General . . . no sign of the opposition,” Taggart said. His voice was subdued, even awed. The vista outside was unspeakably beautiful . . . as beautiful, perhaps, as it was dangerous.
“We’ll wait here for three hours,” Alexander told him, “and see if the Xul show up. But this is a good place to lay low for a while.”
IRS-16 was a veritable forest of closely packed stars— several hundred suns crammed into a volume of space only ten or twelve times l
arger than Earth’s Solar System. The nearest star was less than half an astronomical unit distant— about seventy million kilometers—and a dozen more were less than a hundred million kilometers away. Hermes’ outer hull must be baking by now as its active coating struggled to redirect the incoming heat. Between the fog bank of the nebula itself, the searing temperatures, and the cascade of deadly particulate radiation, Xul sensors were most likely completely blind within this tiny pocket of hell.
Of course, if I were the Xul commander, Alexander thought, staring into that blazing starscape, and an enemy squadron buzzed my Dyson cloud and then vanished off my screens, this would be the first place I’d look. . . .
How smart were the Xul, anyway?
The question was impossibly complex. There were many types of intelligence, many different ways of thinking and processing information. The Xul had shown how different, how alien their thought processes were from human many times over the past centuries. They had blind spots . . . and they seemed to have trouble thinking outside of a fairly narrow and tightly defined box. They tended not to think in terms of life evolving outside of the so-called habitable zone of a typical star, for example, which was why the An colony on Ishtar and the deep- benthic Eulers had escaped extinction.
Maybe they wouldn’t think that organic life could find shelter in this searing radiation storm cloud.
“Cara?” he said in his mind. “Initiate gravitometric mapping.”
“Aye, aye, General.”
Taggart heard the order over his link. “That’s going to be a tall order,” he suggested. “The gravitational tides inside this cluster are pretty fierce.”
“I know. But if we can get a decent picture of the local metric, we can get the whole squadron out of here in two translations . . . either to S-2 or all the way back to Sol Space.”
“Sounds good,” Taggart replied, “assuming our AIs can solve the metrics in something less than a century or two.”
“We’ve got eight platforms,” Alexander reminded him. “That will cut down on the time somewhat.”
But Taggart had a valid point. Quantum Sea translations required extremely accurate gravitometric maps of two volumes of space—where you wanted to end up, and where you were starting from. At first, it had been assumed that you needed as flat an area of space as you could manage—well out beyond the boundaries of the nearest solar system, for example.
But basic physics stated that it was impossible to get all the way out of any body’s gravitational field. Theoretically, Earth’s gravity exerted a small but non-zero tug on objects all the way out to the teeming galaxies of the Virgo Cloud, and well beyond. What was needed was not an absence of gravity, but an extremely accurate picture of how local space was bent and twisted by local gravitational fields. The AI navigators learned how to use areas that were in balance—such as the Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system back home. The Hermes had used that Earth’s L-3 point ever since her first deployment, over ten years ago, now—in Luna’s orbit around Earth, but on the other side of the Earth from the Moon.
The metric of space here within the Core was anything but flat. Hundreds of millions of stars surrounded the center, itself occupied by millions of stars more, plus several hundred million solar masses’ worth of black holes and millions of masses more of gas and dust, and all of that mass traveling at high velocity in all directions.
Alexander hoped, though—and Cara had informed him weeks ago that it should be possible—that the gravitational effects of the stars of the IRS-16 cluster would pretty much overwhelm everything else, at least within this one, tiny volume of space. The nebula, with the stars imbedded within it, was moving very swiftly indeed as it orbited GalCenter, and the gravitational tides of the central black hole a tenth of a light year distance were smearing the cluster out into an almost cometary shape. The distances involved, however, still were so large that local space, while badly warped by all of those conflicting gravitational fields, was not changing rapidly . . . not by human standards.
It should be possible to take a snapshot of the local metric and use it for starship translation before the picture changed significantly.
“General? Admiral?” Cara said, breaking into Alexander’s thoughts. “Captain Pollard has the first images from the Spymaster probes. You wanted to see them.”
“Good,” Alexander said. “Link him in.”
The expeditionary force’s head of N-2 entered Alexander’s shared command link with Taggart and the rest of their shared constellation. “General Alexander,” he said. “Admiral. I think you’re both going to be interested in this.”
“Let’s see it, Felix,” Alexander told him.
“The data damned near flooded our system out,” Pollard said. “A real overload. And we’re going to be sorting this stuff for the next fifty years at least. But we have some preliminary results.”
A window opened in Alexander’s mind, and he felt himself falling through. . . .
At first, he thought he was seeing stars—clouds of stars massed together by the hundreds of billions, by the trillions. But the stars were gray and dark, and as he plunged into the cloud, he experienced a shift in his perception. Not stars . . . but worlds. . . .
As each of the eight starships of the squadron had rounded the central Dyson cloud, it had fired a barrage of some hundreds of K-794 Spymaster probes, spraying them more or less at random into the cloud’s depths. As each probe accelerated at two hundred gravities, it started transmitting on a number of wavelengths, radio, optical, and ultraviolet, sending back detailed images of everything it encountered.
Many of the probes encountered Xul constructs and, engaging their nano- tunneler elements, plowed into the structures to connect with Xul electronics. Others, bypassing the Xul structures, plunged all the way through toward the event horizon of the monster singularity within.
As each Commonwealth ship had dropped out of FTL and rounded the Dyson cloud, it had sampled the returning transmissions from all of those myriad spy probes. Athena and various AIs under her command had sorted through that bewildering sea of information and begun piecing it together, bit by electronic bit, into a coherent whole.
Worlds. Trillions upon trillions of worlds. . . .
The largest, Alexander noted, were actually planet- sized, up to about 6,500 kilometers, roughly the diameter of Mars. The smallest, and there were billions of these, were the size of basketballs.
The vast majority, however, fell between these two extremes, measuring a few tens or hundreds of kilometers across and massing a few billion billion tons. Most likely, each was an asteroid transformed by the Xul equivalent of nanotechnology, though to have so many they must have been importing asteroids from thousands of far-flung star systems. As Alexander’s roving viewpoint moved closer to one, he could see its surface was mingled black and dark gray in geometric patterns. In fact, it appeared identical to Xul fortresses he’d encountered guarding various stargates throughout the Galaxy, roughly spherical, flattened at the poles, with bulges, sponsons, blisters, turrets, and towers creating an artificial and highly geometric terrain of hills and straight-line canyons.
Within the outer layers of the cloud the sky was dark, heavily shadowed by thunderheads composed of drifting Xul fortresses in their massed billions. As Alexander’s point of view fell farther and farther into the cloud, however, the sky ahead grew lighter, taking on sunset hues of gold, red, and blue as the intervening mists thinned.
Abruptly, the cloud turned ragged, then cleared away as if blown by a cosmic wind, and the central black hole of the Galaxy was revealed. The light, Alexander saw, came not from the singularity, of course, but from a constant sharp glow emanating from the blue spiral of the inner accretion disk. Flaring pinpoints like tiny, blue-white stars dropped in long, curving arcs into the event horizon in evenly spaced groups, each growing brighter as it neared the gravitational point of no return.
Those flares, he thought, were too evenly spaced to be natural. The Xul, operating t
hrough the Dyson cloud, were feeding the central black hole, sending in packets of debris and star stuff in neatly patterned and regulated streams.
He was witnessing, he realized, cosmic engineering on an inconceivably vast scale.
The point of that engineering remained elusive. Not the mere generation of energy, surely . . . though the steady pulse and flash of X-rays released by matter spiraling in past the event horizon was being absorbed by the cloud, according the readings from the Spymaster sensors. No wonder the astronomers of past centuries hadn’t been able to confirm the existence of a super-massive black hole at the Galactic center; the Dyson cloud was effectively blocking all radiation from the enigmatic central object.
He thought back to the various briefings he’d attended or given. The possibility that the Xul were using the Core singularity for something extremely far-reaching indeed seemed more and more plausible. To be able to edit Reality across the Galaxy might justify such a gargantuan technological effort.
Whatever the Xul were doing here had to be stopped.
But the implementation was the problem. A direct attack on the cloud by the squadron was clearly and utterly impossible. A million, a billion starships wouldn’t be enough.