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Andromedan Dark

Page 27

by Ian Douglas


  Dixon raised his weapon, a megajoule pulse-laser carbine and engaged his helmet optics, throwing up a bright red targeting reticule at whatever his weapon was pointed at. He slued the weapon around until the reticule centered over one of the dimensional openings and the horror squirming within and triggered it . . .

  . . . to no effect! The pulse stream passed through the alien attacker without touching it, and somehow vanished into the twisted dimensions beyond the gateway.

  “Change your angle, LT!” Sergeant Janice Klein shouted at him.

  “What?”

  “Your angle! Your fire only touches them from certain angles! Like this!” She swung her laser rifle and snapped off three quick shots at the alien that Dixon had been trying to hit. From her vantage point, off to his right, in some way that he did not understand, her fire connected. Greasy smoke billowed out of the gateway, as a glistening and irregular black slab of meat dropped steaming to the floor.

  Something wasn’t right. If he could see the alien, then light was traveling from the alien to his optics. Sending a pulse of coherent light back the same way ought to be simplicity itself.

  But this wasn’t the time for figuring out the hyperdimensional geometry of these things. Three black spheres had just emerged out of nothingness, closing on Private Chang. He sent a burst of laser pulses into one of the spheres, and this time they managed to connect. The three spheres opened and pulled back, then vanished, conveying the almost comical impression of a disembodied hand snatched back from a flame.

  Higher-dimensional openings were twisting into existence in all directions. There could be nothing like a front line here, no control of the battlefield, no coordination or coherent organization of strategy and tactics—except for one.

  “Fall back!” Dixon yelled. “Everyone fall back to the tunnel entrance!” He switched channels. “Bronkowsky! This is Dixon!”

  Bronk was the skipper of Fourth Platoon.

  “Yeah, LT!”

  “We’re coming out. Meet us at the entrance with a Toad!”

  “On our way, Lieutenant!”

  The tilt-jet FPCs were ungainly, squat, ugly fliers, AAT-2440 flying personnel carriers popularly called Devil Toads. They’d been named for a prehistoric beast—a frog with the Latin name Beelzebufo (literally “devil toad” or “devil frog”)—that had lived during the time of the dinosaurs. They were ugly, massive, the size of a basketball, and they possessed demonic-looking spikes on their heads and backs. The ship didn’t look much better. Marines had carried the nickname “Devil Dogs” for more than 240 years, now. It was only right that Devil Toads now carried them into battle.

  “Kemmerer!” She was CO of Second Platoon.

  “Yessir!”

  “Where the hell is the skipper?”

  “Captain Hanson is . . . he’s a casualty, sir. We don’t know what happened!”

  Shit!

  “We need to get the hell out of Dodge! Start loading our people on board the Toads! Be ready for an emergency dust-off!”

  “Copy that, Lieutenant!”

  They needed to get all of the Marines together back at the Bone Pile, then get airborne.

  If these ghostly attackers let them.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  A dimensional gateway opened up directly ahead, blocking the way through to the tunnel leading out of this underground chamber. Dixon opened fire and once more saw his burst pass through the forming apparition.

  He didn’t have time to worry about it.

  “Fire in the hole!” Sergeant Kirtland yelled behind him, and a small, round object flew past Dixon’s shoulder and vanished into the swirling vortex.

  He didn’t see the grenade’s explosion. He felt it, however, as a swift, hard punch inside his body—perhaps the strangest and most jarring sensation he had ever experienced in his life. The air whooshed from his lungs, leaving him gasping and shaking.

  But the tunnel vortex snapped shut and the way was open. “C’mon, Marines!” he yelled. “We’re pulling a fucking Smith!”

  Two hundred twelve years earlier (plus or minus a few billion years), 1st MarDiv Marines at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea had found themselves the focus of an attack from all sides by no fewer than eight Chinese divisions. The Marines had turned around and fought their way out. “Retreat, hell!” Major General Oliver Smith had declared to the news media. “We’re attacking in a different direction!”

  After sixteen days of constant fighting and bitter cold, the Marines—with their dead, their equipment, and three Army battalions they’d rescued along the way—reached the sea, and safety. As the legend became hallowed by time, “pulling a Smith” had been enshrined in Marine lore: if you’re surrounded, you attack, and keep on attacking, until the situation is resolved.

  Ooh-rah, Dixon thought.

  Charlie Company made its way through the main tunnel in good order, though dimensional portals kept opening up inside the rock to left and right. Corporal Paulson was grabbed by something, his armored form jerked into the air and then into invisibility.

  “Use grenades!” Dixon ordered. He thumbed the trigger on one and tossed it into a vortex opening directly beside him. Again, there was no visible sign of the explosion, but he felt the shock internally, an inner thump spreading out from the very center of his body.

  Paulson rematerialized—his legs buried inside solid rock, his head, arms, and torso dangling obscenely from the ceiling overhead. Fortunately, the Marine was already dead.

  “Keep firing!” Dixon yelled. “Work the angles! Work the angles! Try to get effective shots!”

  He wasn’t sure yet how that worked, how you could see a target and not hit it from one angle, and see it and score a hit from another. But Klein had fed him what she had discovered, and the trick seemed to be to position yourself at around a forty-five degree angle, left or right from straight-on. Do that, and the laser burned through the nightmare-black worms in a messy explosion of charred organics.

  Usually.

  “Lieutenant Dixon.” A new voice came over Dixon’s in-head. “This is Lord Commander St. Clair. We’ve been following the situation from out here. How can we assist you?”

  “Dunno, my lord!” Dixon yelled back. Black spheres materialized in front of him. He sprayed them with bursts of high-energy coherent light and they jerked back into nothingness once more. A sudden terror filled him. “I think the Bone Pile may be under attack! They said Captain Hanson is down!”

  “We’ve lost telemetry from Captain Hanson,” St. Clair’s voice replied. “We don’t know anything else. Until the situation resolves itself, you are in charge in there.”

  Great, Dixon thought. Just fucking great.

  A RED circle appeared on the image of the slow-turning habitat. “That is your target, Mr. Webb,” St. Clair told the Weapons Officer. “Can we cut through?”

  “We can cut through, my lord,” Webb replied, “but it may take a while. Our sensors report that the substrate is a hundred meters thick right there. Unless you want to risk blowing up that whole end of the habitat.”

  “Absolutely not. See if you can punch a small hole through . . . no more than a hundred meters wide or so.”

  “We’ll do our best, my lord.”

  St. Clair wondered if that best would be good enough.

  “Lord Commander!”

  That was Symm. “What is it, Excomm?”

  “Our electronic networks are under attack.”

  “What kind of attack?”

  “Cyber attack, my lord. Extensive . . . and very fast. Newton says the dark matter entity is aware of us, and widening its attack exponentially.”

  The thought chilled. He would rather have heard about a physical attack by grasers or antimatter beams.

  “When did this start?” Damn it, he’d just been talking with Newton a couple of minutes ago.

  “About twenty seconds ago, Lord Commander.”

  And as St. Clair thought about it, twenty seconds was an eternity when it c
ame to computer AIs wrestling with one another for electronic advantage.

  St. Clair was about to ask how the attack was playing out—what was the hostile AI doing—when Symm added, “My lord! It’s coming in through the network!”

  St. Clair had already called up a schematic showing Ad Astra’s network, a kind of CGI cartoon representing where data was flowing, where processors were engaged, where the system was drawing power. Priority at that moment was being given to weapons and communications, of course, with AI network integrity a very close third. Newton evidently was struggling against something far larger and more powerful than himself.

  Unfortunately, that left little to aid the organics linked in to the network, and they were coming under attack as well. He heard Symm’s mental scream just before he saw her link to the Net go down. Others were being attacked as well: Seibert, the shield officer; Hargrove, the senior comm officer; Denisova, in the sensor department. When he brought up a schematic of the entire ship, with colored icons identifying each station and duty officer, he was appalled to see more and more green icons flashing to red.

  He wanted to talk to Newton, to find out how best to combat this sudden electronic invasion, but Newton looked pretty busy at the moment, so busy that talking to a human might knock him down a crucial few nanoseconds of processor speed and result in even more damage being done.

  Instead, he began entering commands through his own in-head processor, directing ship systems across the board to shut down or to throttle themselves down drastically. The more processor power he could free up for Newton to use, the better. . . .

  And then the attack hit him.

  DIXON EMERGED into the larger habitat interior just as the Fourth Platoon Devil Toad gentled down out of a hazy sky, its ventral turret sluing around to snap off a burst of particle-beam fire at approaching hostiles. Its belly ramp dropped, and Lieutenant Bronkowsky stepped onto the treading, waving them on. “C’mon, Marines! We’re illegally parked!”

  The Marines pounded up the Toad’s ramp, the last aboard backing up as they fired at the oncoming terrors.

  “Everyone on board?”

  “Affirmative, Bronk,” Dixon yelled. “Get us the hell out of here!” The Toad lifted off while the ramp was still coming up. Dixon crowded in with the other Marines on the cargo deck. “What’s the butcher’s bill?”

  “Eight killed, sir,” Gunny Paxton reported. Dixon was already seeing the figures coming through his in-head from his secretary. “No wounded.”

  In this sort of action, wounded too easily became killed. They’d been lucky. But there was also sharp pain. Marines prided themselves on never leaving anyone behind, not even dead comrades, but it wasn’t always possible to recover the bodies. Some of the dead this time around had been left behind—the one materialized inside the cavern ceiling among them. What was his name? Paulson, that was it. . . .

  There’d been no way. No way.

  Ahead, the perimeter around the Bone Pile was clearly visible on the ground half a kilometer from the tunnels.

  “Topeka!”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.” Topeka was the AI running Bronkowksy’s FPC, and in charge of that flier’s communications.

  “Give me a taclink to the other Toads,” Dixon ordered. He needed to coordinate the lift-off and withdrawal of all four FPCs.

  “Tactical link o—”

  The attack came so swiftly, Dixon scarcely had the time to react. A red line winked on within his in-head, though, warning of a major cyber breach, and Dixon cut the link even as it was established. Topeka had bought him a few fractions of a second; the Toad’s AI had been compromised within a nanosecond, far too short a time for merely human reflexes, but the artificial mind had fought long enough to give Dixon the chance to cut the link.

  “Lieutenant!” Bronkowsky shouted. “We just lost our AI!”

  “I know! Take us in on manual!”

  “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to thread the needle without an AI! Or find our way out on the other side!”

  At least, Dixon thought, he now had a good idea about what had happened to Hanson. A cyber attack—probably like the one that had killed Francesca on board the Ad Astra—must have killed him or taken him out of the picture.

  That put the Marine landing team in a desperate situation, however. To reach the Bone Pile, the four Toads had flown in through the rent in the side of the darkened habitat next door, flown for kilometers above the crystal forest, then reached the airlock at the habitat’s axis—a set of two massive airtight doors sealing the two habs from each other. Access had been automatic; despite the power loss in the hab next door, the first airlock had opened for them as they approached, then sealed behind them. They’d threaded their way through a long, dark corridor hundreds of meters wide, and then another airtight door had slid open at their approach, giving them admittance to this habitat, with its cold, purple forest and piles of alien bones.

  Getting out again was going to be tricky—requiring a flight path that ideally would be the reverse of the one they’d used coming in, but the trip would be a lot easier if they could lock the four Toads together electronically so that their AIs could pool resources and data. Once inside the darkened, powered-down hab, they would have to find the rip in the habitat shell that led to the outside, which would require an AI analysis of radar and lidar data . . . or else a hell of a lot of luck.

  Perhaps only the one Devil Toad’s AI had been compromised back at the Bone Pile, but Dixon wasn’t going to trust his in-head electronics and his organic brain to that slender hope. Hell no!

  “Set us down by the Bone Pile,” Dixon told Bronkowsky. “We need to figure out how to get out of this hole.”

  “Looks to me like we’re not gonna get the chance, Dix,” Bronkowksky replied. “Look astern!”

  Dixon took a look aft through the Toad’s external imaging system. The whole series of hillsides below the endcap mountains appeared to be alive, as dimensional gates opened in fast-rippling succession, and extradimensional nightmares oozed down the rocks and across the jungle terrain toward the Marine perimeter.

  No, they didn’t have much time at all.

  ST. CLAIR DIDN’T know what it was, but it was big, and it was vastly, supremely powerful, an overwhelming force—a hurricane of Mind. No, a god, nothing less—a god mad with anger, with a nova-hot rage.

  And in that instant it was aware of him.

  He wanted to freeze, wanted to run, wanted to somehow escape that cold and Olympian gaze. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing, or how he was seeing it, but it felt like the cold glare of a madman suddenly aware of a mosquito on his arm. He thought he saw eyes, slit-pupiled and alien, but the dark-matter god didn’t have eyes, not as humans understood them, so what was St. Clair seeing?

  And he thought he saw a hand descending . . . or something like a hand. He felt something, an icy movement inside his skull, and that shouldn’t have been happening either, since the brain didn’t contain sensory nerves. But the freezing sensation continued to work its way along his skull, and he realized that the thing was draining energy from the nanochelated circuitry layering portions of his cerebral cortex.

  St. Clair heard himself screaming.

  He broke the connection and woke up in his command chair, gasping, short of breath, bathed in sweat, and terrified.

  St. Clair wasn’t sure how he’d managed to survive. That thing had had him dead to rights. Had been about to swat him like a fucking insect. . . .

  On the displays in front of his command seat, the schematics showing Ad Astra’s network integrity were slowly, slowly shifting back to green. The red tide had invaded the ship, had come that close to swallowing it, and now was pulling back.

  “What the hell happened?” St. Clair demanded.

  “An alien SAI, Lord Commander,” Jablonsky said. “It was coming in at us through our network links. I think Newton held it off long enough for us to get clear.”

  “Most of us,” St. Clair said. According to the t
elemetry, a number of people had been badly hurt. He flashed an alert to Ad Astra’s medical department, then began trying to pick up the pieces. “Excomm! Are you okay?”

  “Y-yes,” Symm said. “Yes, I think so. . . .”

  “Damn it, snap to!” He was already testing the link. The monster was . . . gone. At least for now. “Are you able to link?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Good. Do it. Mr. Webb!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Are the grasers still on-line?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Do it! Put a hole in that fuzzball!”

  “Target lock!” Subcommander Webb called. “Turrets two through nine are linked and at full power.”

  “Fire.”

  The converging beams of gamma ray energy were invisible in open space, but appeared as an intolerably brilliant flare of visible light against the carefully chosen patch of targeted hull. Ad Astra’s AI, working with the compartmentalized fragment of the torus knot’s resident AI, had identified a single ten-meter patch five kilometers from the Marine perimeter at the Bone Pile. Gigawatts of coherent energy focused into such a tiny area released heat equivalent to that of a tiny sun, instantly vaporizing the thick hull material and rock substrate of the colony habitat.

  “Dixon,” St. Clair said. “You people okay?”

  “Affirmative, Lord Commander. We’re being pursued by . . . oh, my God . . .”

  “We’ve broken through, Lord Commander,” Webb told him.

  “Cease fire. Be ready to help them when they come through.”

  “. . . OH, MY GOD . . .”

  From Dixon’s vantage point in the Toad, flying half a kilometer above the violet forest, the ground up ahead appeared to be dissolving trees, rock, and earth in a maelstrom of brilliant light. It was a sunrise . . . but with the sun emerging from inside the ground, not behind the horizon.

  “We are picking up a strong flux of X-ray and gamma radiation,” the Toad’s pilot reported. In the next instant, a shockwave traveling out from the blast point at the speed of sound struck the flier, rocking it savagely.

 

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