by Ian Douglas
According to the numbers, if the thing worked, if they were actually able to change S-2’s orbital path about GalCenter enough, the star would reach perigalacton—and the supermassive black hole’s event horizon—in thirty days more.
There was no way, no way at all, to speed things up.
“The Xul are going to get to have a crack at it,” Taggart said. He might have been reading Alexander’s thoughts. “They have fifty days to try to intercept that thing.”
That thing. Not “star” or “sun” but “that thing.” Perhaps, like Alexander, Taggart was having some trouble with the sheer scale of what they were trying to do here, as well.
“It’ll take time, Liam,” Alexander replied. “Time for them to figure out what’s happening here. And unless they are able to rewrite Reality on a pretty damned big scale, the only thing they can do is induce a nova.”
“We know the Xul can blow up stars,” Taggart pointed out.
“Yes. But they can’t . . . just wink them out. As far as we know.” He nodded toward the red giant with its brilliant, leading thread of light. “If they explode that star, the pieces of it—all the gas and particulate radiation, and whatever is left of its core, all of it, will still be moving on the new course.”
“True. But the Xul may have been detonating stars in here already. There’s Sagittarius A East. . . .”
Alexander nodded. Sag A East was the vast, empty bubble marking an ancient supernova remnant close to GalCenter. It was at least conceivable that the Xul had blown the star up deliberately, perhaps in such a way as to change its orbital path about the center, rather than allow it to get too close to their construction project at Sag A*.
Then again, supernovae were common occurrences, relatively speaking, within the crowded heart of the Galaxy’s core. Sag A East might not have been artificially induced.
“The Xul are bound to hesitate,” he said. “I’d think the last thing they would want in close proximity to their Dyson cloud is a nova. It’s less than twenty light hours to GalCenter from here. Even if S-2 detonates now, it would cause terrific damage in there.”
“I just hope it’s enough,” Taggart observed.
“General?” one of his human aides called over the net. “Lejeune is clear of the Hermes.”
“Thank God. Tell Lejeune to launch fighters. And get the Howorth out into space and down to the planet. Fast!”
He hoped that would be enough, too.
Nightstar 442 Surface of S-2/I Core Space
1020 hrs, GMT
Charel Ramsey struggled back to consciousness. He was surprised to find that he was still alive, that despite a variety of sharp aches and bruises, he even seemed to be more or less intact. His cockpit had separated from the crashing Nightstar, as it had been designed to do, and managed a landing on emergency thrusters.
Landing, he decided, surveying the damage, was probably too kind a word. His Nightstar had been moving fast when it had been hit—over eighteen hundred kph—and he’d been at keel- scraping altitude to boot. The cockpit’s inertial dampers had cut in and spared him the worst of the impact, but he’d still hit fast enough and hard enough to knock him out. According to his implant timepiece, he’d been out for over five hours.
His instruments all were dead. He had no idea how far he was from Marine positions, or if they knew where he was. Without screens or phase- shifting, he must be taking a hell of a dose of radiation right now. He doubted that he had more than a few hours more to live.
And with radiation poisoning, they would be extremely unpleasant hours. Slowly, he raised his gloved hand to the latch on his helmet. He could end things quickly, by opening up his helmet to hard vacuum. The alternative was to tough out the inevitable pain and nausea for those few hours in hopes that someone was coming to get him.
His hand was on the catch mechanism for a long and trembling few minutes as he wrestled with the decision.
At last, though, he shook his head and dropped his hand. Marines tried always to recover their own, and if they found him out here and could get him to a Commonwealth military medical facility, he had at least a fair chance of recovery. Garroway had been more badly burned ten years ago, when he’d flown that first triggership mission at Starwall.
Besides, he wasn’t feeling too bad just yet. The absorptive nano on the exterior of his cockpit was keeping the internal radiation levels to manageable levels, and his suit’s medipacks were injecting him regularly with anti-rad nano. If things got . . . bad, really bad later on, he could always open his helmet then.
The cockpit escape unit included a powerful automatic radio beacon, which was already beaming a distress message into space. The signals might not reach Firebase Hawkins, somewhere over the northern horizon, but any Commonwealth ships in orbit over S-2/I ought to pick it up.
Yeah, they might have someone on the way already.
Ramsey leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, settling down for the wait.
•••
Marine Regimental Strike Team Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I
Core Space
1038 hrs, GMT
Howorth was easing her way down toward Firebase Hawkins, her massive cigar-shape hanging dark in the sky, silhouetted by the glow of the spiral arms of the accretion disk far beyond. Garroway stood in the trench next to Warhurst, watching her come in. They were going to make it. They were actually going to get the hell off this rock.
Five Tarantulas were still operational, and three of those were already lifting off, carrying wounded up to the Hermes, in planetary orbit overhead. The other two were parked nearby, providing cover as the Marines came in off the perimeter. There’d been no new Xul attacks for some hours, now, but the RST Marines remained on guard. Another Xul ship could appear at any moment, arrowing in from the invisible monster there, halfway up the sky at the center of the accretion spiral.
“Listen up, Marines!” Captain Black’s voice cut in over the regimental link. “We’ve got a situation!”
“Shit,” Warhurst grumbled. “It’s always something!”
“We’ve got a Marine pilot down, people,” Black’s voice went on. “He’s alive, but trapped in his ejection pod on the ground 156 kilometers south of the firebase. I need volunteers to go pick him up.”
Garroway keyed his own link, putting his name up on the board back at RST HQ. A Marine down in that radiation- blasted wasteland? Hell, yeah, he’d volunteer.
Other Marines were volunteering as well. Black had to cut off the flood of responses. “Okay, okay. We’ve got all we need.” Garroway’s implant put up an icon indicating that his name had been chosen. He took a deep breath. They always said never volunteer, but . . .
“I’ve tagged twelve of you,” Black went on. “You’ll board Flying Pig, Lieutenant Grooms, and provide perimeter security for the doc flying out there with them. From there, you’ll bounce straight up to orbit and rendezvous with the Hermes. Understand?”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Garroway, Warhurst, and a number of other voices chorused.
“We’ve IDed the downed pilot. He’s Lieutenant Charel Ramsey. . . .”
“Shit!” Garroway said.
“Old home week, ain’t it?” Warhurst added. “All we need now is your girlfriend, Gare.”
“She’s not here,” Garroway said. “Thank God!”
“Then you have someone to go home to. C’mon. Let’s go pick up the lieutenant.”
They jogged toward one of the waiting Tarantulas. Nearby, Howorth had touched down, her vast bulk crushing nanocrete defenses and other structures that happened to be in her way. Marines were streaming up a ramp that had lowered from her belly. In another hour or two, this desolate little world would be empty of human life once more.
The twelve Marines trotted up Flying Pig’s ramp and strapped themselves into the cargo deck seats. Thank God Ramsey’s alive, Garroway thought as he activated the magnetic clamps. This’ll be simple. In and out. Grab him and boost to orbit. . . .
He tried not to thi
nk about how the simple missions rarely turned out that way. The evil god Murphy was always all too ready to step in and change the situation beyond all recognition, and always for the worse.
The Tarantula was rising before the rear ramp had even cycled shut.
And the actual pick- up was simple, much to Garroway’s surprise. The Flying Pig made a low, suborbital bounce over the southern horizon, coming down a few tens of meters away from the groove carved into the ground by the cockpit escape pod as it plowed into the surface and at last came to rest. An optical beacon winked from an extended antenna. The Marines raced down the ramp, spreading out, dropping belly-down in a broad circle facing out, weapons ready.
But there were no Xul here. The landscape was utterly desolate, utterly empty and silent. At their backs, a couple of Flying Pig’s flight crew used a plasma cutter to slice into the cockpit. Hospitalman 1st Class Dan O’Neill was there, helping to pull Ramsey from the embrace of his cockpit, administering medinano and packing the man into a rad- shielded transport tube. Ten minutes . . . and at Grooms’ order, the Marines began pulling back, reboarding the transport and buckling themselves in.
They began rising, accelerating to orbit. . . .
And then something struck the Flying Pig in the side, a savage, ringing blow that put the awkward transport into a wild tumble. Her agravitics were out, her thrusters firing madly in an attempt to stabilize her.
She’d not been accelerating long enough to build up to anything close to orbital velocity.
Helplessly, she was falling back toward the surface of S-2/I.
24
0605 .1102 Ops Center
UCS Hermes
Orbiting S-2/I,
Core Space
1135 hrs, GMT
“Sir!” a Navy rating called from the comm board. “We’ve lost one of the Tarantulas!”
Alexander brought up the data, opening a new window in his mind. Cara pointed out the location, on the planet’s surface. “What the hell happened?”
“We’re still checking,” Cara told him. “But it seems probable that the Tarantula struck a piece of orbital debris.”
Space around S-2/I was filled with hurtling junk— fragments left over from the Chosin and the Intrepid, from a number of Nightstar aerospace fighters, and from the Xul giants hammered by the Commonwealth squadron. With no atmosphere around S-2/I to burn up the debris, some of those pieces could orbit at quite a low altitude.
“What were they doing that far south of the base?”
“Captain Black dispatched one Tarantula to recover an aerospacecraft pi lot shot down by the Xul,” Cara told him.
“General!” Taggart’s voice called, interrupting.
“Just a minute, Liam.” Alexander was checking the trajectories of other craft leaving the planet. The Howorth was boosting clear of the surface already, while the other Tarantulas were already en route. It would be risky to redirect one of them to go back and pick up the fallen Tarantula’s occupants, but—”
“General!” Taggart’s and Cara’s voices sounded together.
“What?”
“We have hostiles inbound!” Taggart said.
Alexander’s attentions snapped back to the primary link channel. Xul ships, lots of Xul ships, were materializing out of FTL a few tens of light seconds away. Radiation trails scratched through the hydrogen and dust cloud pervading local space showed they were coming from the direction of the Dyson cloud.
“Sensors have detected nearly one thousand Xul hunterships,” Cara told him, her voice maddeningly calm.
“General Alexander!” Taggart added. “We must leave!”
Alexander felt as though the operation were unraveling around him.
“How many people are on board that Tarantula?”
“Five Navy crew,” Cara reported. “One Navy corpsman. Thirteen Marines, including the rescued man. We’re also missing two other pilots. Twenty-one total.”
Twenty-one Marine and Navy personnel.
We never leave our own behind.
But there were times when a few Marines had to be sacrificed for the survival of many. That was, in fact, the nature of warfare despite the fine- sounding words and principles— the need to pick and choose and make key strategic decisions, all the while knowing that those decisions would result in some Marines dying, while others lived.
We never leave our own behind .
But sometimes we have to, for the sake of completing the mission.
“Radio them,” Alexander said. “Tell them we’ll be back!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Admiral? Get us the hell out of here.”
“Where to, General?”
It scarcely mattered. Back to Earth? No, the rest of the fleet ought to be still at Cluster Space. “Rejoin the MIEF, Admiral.”
“Make to Cunningham and Howorth,” Taggart said. His words were leaden. “Order them to make their own way back to friendly space by the best means they can determine. Astrogation! Initiate translation to Cluster Space.”
“Aye, aye, sir. It’ll take a few. . . .”
“We don’t have a few, Commander. Do it.”
Alexander snapped his awareness back to the Ops Center. On the main display, the star still glowed a brilliant ruby hue, but the light was dimmed, somewhat, by the fiercely radiating white thread extending from its surface. The crescent of the planet bowed away from the star; at visual wavelengths there was no sign of the approaching horde of enemy ships.
Then Hermes’ AI put up the graphic icons, red brackets each marking an invisibly distant Xul ship. A mass of intertangled brackets spread across the visual display, moving out from the focus of the accretion spiral. Range data appeared next to the mass. The nearest enemy ships were five light seconds away, and fast moving closer.
The MIEF squadron had done all it could—setting the star S-2 onto a new orbital path. Sensor drones in battlespace would record the star’s passage fifty days hence . . . but there was nothing more the Commonwealth ships or Marines could do.
Including rescuing the nineteen people stranded on the planet’s surface.
“We don’t even know for sure they survived the crash,” Taggart told him.
“No. But we should have checked.”
“There’s no time, sir,” Cara said.
“I know.” Alexander drew himself up a little straighter. Cunningham and Howorth were under full acceleration now, looping around the planet and engaging their Alcubierre Drives. They had a chance, at least, of making it back to human-occupied space, though the journey would take months, even years. Both were large enough that their onboard nanoprocessors should keep their crews well supplied with oxygen, water, and food no matter how long the trip. All they would need do is stop, occasionally, to harvest raw materials from comets or carbonaceous asteroids.
“I know,” he said again. “But we will be coming back. . . .”
And then Hermes shifted phase, dropping into the Quantum Sea and translating through the dimensions and across a spatial gulf of twenty-five thousand light years.
Marine Regimental Strike Team
10 kilometers from Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I Core Space
1210 hrs, GMT
Garroway pulled himself free of tangled wreckage. Broken power cables hung sparking from the overhead, and the deck was sharply canted. Other Marines were struggling to their feet as well. Their link feed from the Tarantula’s cockpit had cut off with the crash.
“Anyone hurt?” Doc O’Neill called, moving down the cargo deck aisle, checking on the Marines. “Is everyone okay?”
The landing, clearly, had been a rough one, but the Marines, well padded within the cocooning embrace of their armor, had ridden out the crash without injuries more serious than bumps and bruises. Someone blew out an emergency hatch on the starboard side forward, and the Marines began scrambling out of the fallen transport.
“Where the hell are we?” Warhurst wanted to know. The terrain was the same as at the pick- up site—broken ro
ck, radiation- baked dust, all beneath that impossible and dramatic three-armed spiral filling a sky of stardust.
“We’re about ten kilometers south of Firebase Hawkins,” a young Navy rating—one of the Tarantula’s crew—told him. She pointed at the horizon. “That way.”
“Yeah,” Lieutenant Aviles, the craft’s pilot, added. “I was trying to make it back to the base. Damn it, we almost made it back.”
“It looks like you’re in command, sir,” Warhurst told him. “We’d better get ourselves sorted out if we want to have a chance of getting rescued.”
“Right, Gunny.”
Garroway heard the conversation, but his attention was elsewhere—on helping Doc O’Neil get Ramsey’s cocoon out of the crashed Tarantula. “How is he?” Garroway asked.
“One step above dead,” O’Neill told him. “I dropped him intocybehibe.”
Cybernetic hibernation had been the first means by which humans had gone to the stars, back when transports were limited by the speed of light and voyages to even the nearest stars took ten years objective. The cere bral implants grown within the brains of Marines and starship personnel could be set to take the man or woman into deep unconsciousness— as O’Neill had said, “one step above dead.” Medical nano swarmed through the circulatory and lymphatic systems, slowing cell growth and metabolic processes to a near stop, removing toxins building up slowly over time, repairing cell damage as tissue inevitably broke down.