by Ian Douglas
One of the Marine close-support aerospacecraft was falling. Garroway watched it streak low over the battlefield, between his position and the distant mountain of the alien wreck. Damn . . .
There were only a couple of fighters left, and those wouldn’t last much longer. The enemy’s fire was too heavy, too accurate. Explosions flashed across Xul positions. The stricken fighter vanished over the southern horizon.
Garroway was exhausted. He’d been in combat now more or less nonstop for seven hours, and his armor had only limited supplies of the drugs used to keep faltering organics going under this level of stress. Somehow, though, he’d managed to keep going.
He could feel a slight tremor through his boots—another seismic quake. It felt like a heavy bombardment, but no one was shooting at the Marine position at the moment. Maybe the squadron had returned and was shooting up a Xul position somewhere over the horizon? It was a pleasant thought, but not one he could embrace enthusiastically. If the squadron had returned, they would have linked in with the RST’s command constellation, and every Marine on the planet would be cheering right about now.
Possibly S-2/I simply went through periods of heavy seismic activity due to tidal stress, both as it orbited its giant red sun and as it continued to swing in closer toward GalCenter.
He keyed into one of the ubiquitous Marine combat drones drifting above the ground just in front of his position, using its sensors for a view of the battlefield rather than raising his helmet above the level of the nanocrete parapet. The latest Xul charge appeared to have tapered off, but there were still small pockets of Xul combots out there, and the things never gave up. Garroway wondered, and not for the first time by far, whether the Xul combat machines were literally piloted by the real Xul, the electronic uploads of once-organic beings, or if they remained safely hidden away on their Behemoth and operated the black combots by remote control.
The drone picked up movement, and its limited AI flashed a targeting cursor over the thing, whatever it was. Zooming in provided little additional detail; Xul combots were well shielded against heat loss and didn’t show up well on IR. It was still night over this part of S-2/I, would be for several more standard days, and the combots’ surface coloration and light-drinking surfaces made them almost invisible in the deep shadows of night.
Garroway had slung and locked his plasma rifle over his shoulder, and was holding instead a Man- Portable Variable Munitions Launcher, or MP VML-44. Stubby and blunt, with a pistol grip and shoulder- armor mount, it fired a 70mm projectile—in this case a smart antiarmor nano round known popularly within the Corps as a wasp nest. Raising the weapon nearly to the zenith, he linked the drone’s target lock with the shell, then triggered it with a thought. He felt the recoil thump as the round left the weapon, traveling in a high, curving arc over the battlefield.
Within two seconds, its sensors had found the target and locked on directly. Falling, the round steered itself by using the local magnetic field; fifty meters above the target, the shell burst, releasing twelve submunitions rounds that spread out over a larger area, each seeking its own target. Xul machines on the ground opened fire with a deadly web of laser light, knocking out several of the incoming rounds, but eight, at least, got through, homing on the laser flashes, spewing deadly clouds of nano-disassemblers onto Xul machines as they floated just above the ground.
Garroway, meanwhile, was already moving, slipping farther to the left along his defensive trench, just in case the Xul had some sort of counter- battery fire working on backtracking the trajectory of the round. Seconds later, a Xul plasma bolt slammed into the spot where he’d been standing, shattering blocks of nanocrete and gouging out a ten-meter crater. Slowly, relentlessly, the nanocrete fortifications began merging, flowing, reshaping themselves, erasing the scar and returning the fortifications to their former shape.
Marines moved back and forth through those interconnecting trenches, shifting from position to position to deliver fire. Around them, surviving Tarantulas and fixed gun turrets along the firebase fortifications continued sweeping the blasted and devastated ground outside the base with white fire. The RST was down to fewer than 150, now, with another fifty incapacitated, either in the sick bay or frozen for later attempts at retrieval. The team’s handful of “docs,” the Navy corpsmen, moved back and forth endlessly, crawling up to fallen Marines, linking with their suit AIs, firing packets of medical nano into their armor ports, and dragging them back to the relative safety of the rear. Overhead, two surviving Nightstars continued their ceaseless sweeps. Both were out of plasma charges by now, but they still possessed lasers, and continued to strafe Xul formations as soon as they began gathering.
Eleven of the aerospacecraft had been destroyed in the past hours, victims of massed fire from Xul forces.
Garroway stopped to lob another VML round toward the enemy, then moved to yet another position. Another Marine was already there. An ID came up through Garroway’s link: Warhurst.
“Hey, Gunny!” Garroway said. “Good to see you’re still with us.”
“So far,” Warhurst said. He indicated the enemy with a movement of his plasma weapon. “Feels like we’ve broken the bastards.”
“I hope so. I lost track after about ten or twelve mass wave- attacks. Think they’re running out of machines?”
“I doubt it. Intel thinks they grow their own on the spot. Maybe we’re managing to kill the drivers, though.”
Garroway considered this. The Xul possessed a technology similar to and in many ways more advanced than Humankind’s nanotech. Damaged ships were repaired by clouds of flying devices that fit together like pieces in a 3D jigsaw, and they always seemed to have inexhaustible supplies of combots. The best guess Intel had come up with was that they manufactured them as they needed them, with Xul software “pilots” controlling each until it was destroyed, then shifting to another, fresh machine.
If true, sooner or later the tiny pocket of Marines would be worn down and overrun.
But the good news was that the wave attacks had stopped, at least for now. There were still large numbers of Xul machines prowling about in the darkness, but they were in isolated and noncooperating groups, and they seemed unwilling to test the Marine battle line again.
“It would be nice to think we’re doing something to them,” he said. “I’m about dead on my feet.”
“Me, too. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“When that Behemoth crashed, it lost control of its on- board singularity. I think whatever mechanism they used on board for creating new combots was destroyed, and what’s left is an empty shell.”
Garroway raised his helmet above the parapet, studying the distant fallen huntership. It had come down at a fortyfive-degree angle, flattening much of its five-kilometer breadth into the landscape. The far end, though, still extended well over a kilometer above the ground. The upper surface was scarred and cratered now, after repeated bombing and strafing runs by the Marine aerospace fighters, and much of the structure appeared to be sagging, as though it were collapsing from the inside.
“You may be right,” Garroway said. “Doesn’t look like it has a lot holding it up. If that black hole got away, though, where is it now?”
“Think about it, Gare. A black hole—even one the size of an atom—breaks free of its restraining fields, it falls, moving toward the nearest gravitational mass, right?”
“Straight down into the planet.”
“Exactly. Eating as it goes. It would pass through solid rock as easily as through air, almost. Momentum would carry it past the center of the planet almost to the other side, and then it would fall back.”
“And repeat. And repeat. Shit, Gunny. The core of this planet must look like Swiss cheese by now.” That explained the quakes he’d been feeling over the past few hours. A sub-microscopic black hole was bouncing around the core of the planet, eating rock, spewing radiation, and generating shock waves felt at the surface as small earthquakes.
; “Hey, all a black hole like that can do is get bigger,” Garroway said. “How long before it eats the whole planet?”
“A while, would be my guess. It’s probably no bigger than a hydrogen atom right now, and the tunnels it’s leaving probably close up behind it right away. It would take a long time to swallow the whole planet.”
“Oh.” Garroway felt a surge of relief. Xul he could fight against. A black hole, even a tiny one, was a force of nature with which no human could contend, not without some pretty sophisticated technology.
“So what’s it like under General Alexander?” Warhurst wanted to know.
“Hell, you’ve served with him.”
“Yeah, but that was nine, ten years ago. Men change.”
Garroway shook his head. “Not this one. Scuttlebutt has it he’s been standing up for us against the Senate the whole time, fighting them more than he’s had to fight the Xulies, I think.”
“So he’s not going to leave us here on this rock.”
“Huh? Hell, no! What makes you think he would?”
Warhurst didn’t reply. Garroway knew the older man had been wrestling for a long time with personal issues—in partic ular, a line family that had kicked him out a long time ago. Things like that could shake a person’s trust in other people. And in himself.
Maybe that’s why he’d retired from the Corps.
What, Garroway wondered, had brought him back?
The simplest explanation, he decided, was that Warhurst had felt a need to stand between Earth and the Xul demons. Everything was at stake, after all, including all of Humankind’s survival. In Garroway’s experience, though, warriors rarely faced death for something as ungraspably vast as human survival.
In that moment, he realized why Warhurst had returned. Garroway, Ramsey, and Armandez had visited him in Miami, and a few days later he’d returned to the Corps. He’d come back for them.
“Gunny Warhurst?”
“What?”
“Thanks.”
“Huh? For what?”
“For being here.”
“Shit. I’m here to save Humankind, not your sorry ass.”
“Right. But—”
“Shut up! We’ve got company! Bearing one-niner-five!”
One of the battlefield sensor drones had picked them up, a long, ragged column of Xul combats moving out from the fallen Behemoth. Maybe the machinery was still working inside that hulk after all.
“Get ready to move,” Garroway said, locking in on the target. The Xul were getting smart, stringing their fighting machines out in a long line instead of bunching them up. But the VML submunitions rounds were smart enough to counter. He triggered the first round, dropped the muzzle a bit, and triggered another. “Okay!” he snapped. “Go!”
The two Marines crouched low and trotted to the right. A dazzling light engulfed them, and the shockwave, blasting through the floor of the trench, picked them both up and flung them down.
And a fresh tidal wave of Xul combots surged toward the Marine positions.
Ops Center
UCS Hermes
Point Diamond, S-2/I, Core Space
0735 hrs, GMT
“All departments report ready for translation in all respects,” Taggart said. “We are at battle stations, and with all power taps generating at 105 percent. At your command, General.”
How the hell do you ever get ready for something like this? Alexander thought, but he left it unspoken. “Very well. I want Lejeune out of the docking bay first when we drop in. I want her fighters out to screen us in case there are hostiles in- system. And Howorth next.”
“Yes, sir.”
The big question was whether there would be a Xul fleet waiting for them in orbit over S-2/I, or close enough to detect them when they dropped in.
They would know soon enough.
“Initiate translation,” he said.
For a moment, the universe around him felt . . . blurred, and he felt the inward, sinking sensation he always felt when going completely out of phase. The Hermes and her cargo of four warships fell through the cracks between Reality, rotating through the eldritch continuum of the Quantum Sea, and emerging . . . somewhere else.
The blue clouds and dazzling beacons of the IRS-16 cluster were wiped away. In their place, the vast and awe-inspiring spiral of the outer accretion disk, Sagittarius A, dominated a sky once again filled with the distant wall of stars shrouding this inner pocket within the Core. Streamers of plasma flame, frozen by size and distance, arced high above and far below the Core, following lines of magnetic force. S-2 gleamed like a brilliant, ruby- hued beacon high and to one side.
There was no sign of S-2/I.
“Damn it!” he shouted. “Where’s the planet?” “Checking,” Commander Warnke told him. The Hermes
astrogational officer was linked in with the command constellation, and Alexander felt him following strands of AI input.
“Belay the launch order on Lejeune,” he said. There was no point in releasing the carrier and her fighters if they were going to need to move again almost at once. For a long minute, Hermes drifted in open space, alone and vulnerable.
“It’s the metric,” Warnke announced a moment later. “I was afraid of this. It’s changing too quickly! We’re a couple of a.u.s away from where we ought to be!”
Two astronomical units . . . about three hundred million kilometers, or twice the distance between Earth and Earth’s sun, a gulf of roughly sixteen light minutes. A small enough error when you were dealing with distances measured in light years, but potentially deadly in a game of cat and mouse at the Galactic Core.
“Put us back where we’re supposed to be,” Alexander told
Warnke. “ Fast.”
“It’ll have to be under Alcubierre Drive,” Taggart told
him. “We can’t recalculate the metric.”
“Do it.”
What had gone wrong? Through his link with Hermes’
navigational feeds, he could see the location of S-2 marked
by brackets, and a number of icons marking gravitational
anomalies . . . a few of those thousands of black holes orbiting GalCenter. The movements of the nearest of those singularities must have literally changed the shape of local
space, resulting in Hermes overshooting its target and coming out somewhere else.
They were lucky, Alexander thought, that they hadn’t
popped out somewhere farther out, out there among those
teeming star clouds, for instance.
The starfield on the Ops Center display rotated, bringing
the red jewel of S-2 and the nearby bracket marking its single planet dead center. He felt the faintly queasy sensation as
the Alcubierre Drive field began gathering about the ship,
and then the red star swelled brighter, a slender crescent
growing out of invisibility close beside it.
As the Hermes dropped back to non- FTL velocities, Alexander snapped off another series of orders.
“Scans! If there are Xul ships in here, I want to know it!
Release the Lejeune. Any sign of Cunningham?” Icons were appearing on the display . . . some of them
Xul vessels, but all of those, he was relieved to see, were
dead and aimlessly adrift.
“General! We have contact with the Cunningham! Captain Duquesne reports they left the system under FTL, then
returned an hour ago. He reports the S-2 system is clear of
Xul ships!”
“Excellent.” It was better than he’d dared hope. “Liam? Close
with the Cunningham, please. As soon as Lejeune is away.” “Aye, sir.” Taggart hesitated. “Sir, we’re also in touch now
with Captain Black on the planet’s surface. He reports his
command under heavy ground attack . . . but he’s holding.” “Any sign of the enemy in space?”
“No sir,” Taggart said, relief in his voice. “Lots of wreckage, but it
looks like all the live Xul ships followed us when
we headed toward GalCenter!”
Which meant they had a time, a very short time, before those ships, possibly, returned. There might be Xul sensor drones out there now, reporting on Hermes’ arrival, or the Xul Black was fighting on the planet might see them and
call for help.
Now was the time. Before the enemy regrouped. “Pass the word to Captain Black,” he said. “Initiate Heartbreak. I say again . . . initiate Heartbreak.”
They would finish this. Now. And no matter what was
about to happen to the MIEF squadron.
23
0605 .1102 Ops Center
UCS Hermes
Orbiting S-2/I,
Core Space
0747 hrs, GMT
In close formation, Hermes and the light carrier Cunningham fell in low orbit about the barren ruggedness that was S-2/I. Scans of the surface had proven what Captain Duquesne on the Cunningham had already reported, that Xul combots were attacking the Marine firebase on the surface, but that, for the moment, at least, there were no other Xul forces within detection range.
Likely, the Marines of the Regimental Strike Team hadn’t attracted much in the way of Xul attention directly. The attack being reported from the surface sounded like an afterthought—Xul machines swarming out of a downed Behemoth and attacking the Marine positions simply because they were there. For now, the squadron could operate freely within the S-2 system.