Battlespace

by Ian Douglas

  You are still in the clear, a voice whispered in his consciousness. Move in closer. The command was accompanied by data describing an optimal close-approach vector.

  The voice, relayed by a tight point-to-point laser communications beam, belonged to Cassius Prime, with the command constellation nexus onboard the Chapultepec.

  Acknowledged, he replied over the tight beam. Complying. He flexed his control interface and felt the thump as thrusters adjusted his course by half a degree, and accelerated his approach velocity to 2.75 kps. Four of the Argus probes changed course and speed as well, spreading out a bit, and accelerating at different rates. One, a sacrificial probe on point—boosted to a close rate of 8.0 kps. It would approach the objective in another twelve seconds. He slowed his perception of time by a factor of two. If something happened to the probe, he wanted to see it, and to see it in detail.

  He expanded the window showing the point probe’s POV in his field of perception. The objective, a ring canted at a sharp angle so that it appeared as a highly flattened ellipse, grew slowly larger…and larger…and larger still, until it no longer fit within the probe’s field of view without down-shifting the magnification factor. Cassius opened a second window, the one to show close-up detail, the other to show the entire alien structure. The Argus probe’s scanners were picking up a flood of data now and Cassius I-2 relayed every bit back to Cassius Prime as quickly as it came through—data on infrared hotspots, on mass and mass movement, on a sharply curving gravitational gradient, on powerful magnetic fields…

  Twelve-point-seven kilometers out, the point probe vanished in a sudden, bright flare of silent light.

  Battle analyses, the voice of Cassius Prime demanded. Weapon evaluation.

  Unknown, he replied. Radiation backscatter suggests the 511 ke V line consistent with positron annihilation, however.

  He waited out the two and a half second time lag as his reply crawled up the laser com beam to the fleet and an answer crawled back: Agreed. Continue approach.

  Two more Argus probes vectored closer to the objective. Positron annihilation meant the objective was using antimatter—specifically positrons, the positively charged AM opposite of negatively charged electrons—as a weapon. The Marines used antimatter warheads, of course, but the technology of creating and firing a beam of positrons was considerably in advance of current Earth military technology.

  At 5 kps, the two Argus probes drew closer. Twelve-point-seven kilometers out, both vanished once again. This time, Cassius I-2 caught to distinct spectra of positronic beams directed from the objective’s surface.

  Cassius I-2 slowed his approach velocity, but continued his approach.

  Combat Command Center

  UFR/USS Chapultepec

  1936 hours, Shipboard time

  Chapultepec’s Combat Command Center was a cramped space at the best of times, a compartment seemingly cluttered with monitors and communications stations. Its single saving grace was that it was located in a nonrotating module on the ship’s spine, actually inside the R-M tank. Zero gravity allowed those working inside to take advantage of a three-dimensional volume instead of a two-dimensional deck, which allowed for a bit more breathing room, at least.

  Still, Ramsey’s command constellation took up most of that space, which they claustrophobically shared with Admiral Harris and the onboard naval personnel of the flotilla’s command group. Though the data they were viewing appeared on various of the flatscreen monitors, most of them were in fact watching it noumenally, through windows opened by their implants within their minds. If the others attending the meeting electronically—General Dominick and his command constellation and the four civilians present on the expedition—had all been physically present in that compartment, the crowding would have been impossible. Even with just the eight naval personnel and the five Marines of the MIEU’s CC present, it was tough to move without finding someone’s elbow—or some other protruding body part—in your face.

  So while Ramsey and his constellation shared the cramped volume of the CCC with Admiral Harris and his people, the rest tuned in on the shared noumenon, Dominick and his staff linked in from the flotilla’s flagship, Ranger; the civilians from their quarters on Chapultepec’s Hab One module; and the command staffs of the other manned starships.

  All of the flatscreens—and the noumenal displays opened in their minds—had been showing the same view at the moment—a split-screen close-up of the stargate from two vantage points, with an inset window in the upper left showing the entire ring. The data, relayed by Cassius I-2, was coming from the two Argus probes now closing to within a few kilometers of the objective.

  And then, as sudden as a punch to the gut, all three windows had just flashed white with snow, then gone blank.

  The view from Cassius I-2’s Starhawk reappeared, a long-range magnified view of the enigmatic stargate ring.

  “Well,” General Dominick said. “That, I would say, is pretty conclusive. That thing is inhabited and the inhabitants are not friendly.”

  “It does make our job a damned sight tougher,” Admiral Harris observed.

  “Antimatter beams,” Ramsey said. “Our people won’t stand a chance.”

  “There’s got to be a way to get closer,” Major Ricia Anderson said. She was Ramsey’s chief-of-staff in the MIEU’s CC, a tough, no-nonsense Marine who’d refused a promotion to lieutenant colonel to be on General Kinsey’s staff at USMCSPACCOM in order to stay with the MIEU. “We know the Goldies came through unharmed.”

  Goldies was what they’d taken to calling the huge ship—its hull gleaming like polished gold—that had emerged from the gate and destroyed or swallowed the Wings of Isis. It was assumed that the Goldies were the builders—or, at least, the current owners—of the stargate, though, of course, no one could know for sure that that was the case. They were operating in a hard data vacuum here and the first attempt to fill that vacuum in a bit had just been met by a positron beam.

  “Obviously we don’t have the right IFF codes,” Colonel Frank Hunter said. Hunter was Army, a member of Dominick’s command staff. “We may have to do a high-speed rush-and-dump, and eat the casualties.”

  “Not acceptable, Colonel,” Ramsey said. “My Marines are not Mahdis.”

  The Kingdom of Allah, back on Earth, was led by a coalition of governments built around a man claiming to be the Mahdi, supposedly a kind of Shi’ite messiah. Since the fighting in Egypt in 2138, Marines had attached the name to the Mahdi’s more fanatical troops…the ones who’d used human wave tactics in suicidal battles from Cairo to Kirghiz.

  “We didn’t come eight and a half light-years to stand off at a distance and watch, General,” Dominick told him.

  “Might I make an observation?” the voice of Cassius said within their noumenal awareness. Cassius was, in fact, the sixth member of Ramsey’s constellation, the one member who was not a Marine—or even human.

  “Of course, Cassius,” Ramsey said. “What’ve you got?”

  “All three probes were destroyed at a range from the nearest surface of the objective of exactly 12,763.8 meters. This strongly suggests that the antimatter beam weapons are under automatic control.”

  “So?” Dominick growled. “All that says is we need to broadcast the right code going in. And we don’t have it.”

  “Not necessarily, General,” Cassius told him. “We may be looking at a meteor defense system. It is possible that we are simply approaching at too great a velocity.”

  “Huh?” Dominick sounded startled. “Do you to say mean that if our people go in slowly enough, the stargate’s defenses won’t see them?”

  “It’s a possibility,” the AI’s voice went on, “and one I suggest we investigate.”

  An hour later they had proof that Cassius Prime’s suggestion was right. Cassius I-2 had vectored eight more Argus probes in toward the stargate ring one by one, and one by one the first seven had been vaporized by tightly focused beams of antielectrons. The eighth, with an approach velocity
of only 7 meters per second, had slipped past the magic 12.7 kilometer line and actually drifted across the entire width of the ring at an “altitude” of less than 3 meters.

  There was absolutely no indication of a response by anyone onboard…at least, not until the Argus probe drifted past the inside edge of the ring. Suddenly, its onboard instrumentation began registering an extremely powerful gravitational field and the little robot was inexorably dragged down into the ring’s central opening.

  And then it was gone, as though a huge and invisible hand had yanked it from the sky. No explosion, no positron beam, just…gone.

  “That certainly supports the notion that the thing is a transport device,” Ricia Anderson observed. “You fly into the center of the ring and you vanish. Do you think the probe ended up at some other star?”

  “Well, Colonel, we’re not getting signals from it now, that’s for damned sure,” a Command Center technician said. She was Sergeant Major Vanya Barnes, and she was the senior enlisted component of Ramsey’s command constellation. “It’s either been ripped to shreds or it’s someplace else. Take your pick.”

  “At least we’re getting decent data now,” Ramsey observed. He was watching a pair of secondary windows open in his mind, where data streams from seven probes were being displayed simultaneously.

  “I don’t know about the word decent, General,” Barnes told him. “Those gravitational readings are decidedly weird. It’s like normal gravity…about a tenth of a G…over the outer surface of the ring, nice and stable, y’know? But when you go over the sides, the fluctuations are totally screwed. I can’t make heads or asses out of these readings.”

  “Shielding,” the voice of Dr. Marie Valle suggested. “My God, maybe they have some means of shielding against gravity!”

  Valle was Dr. Franz’s expert on xenotechnology and Ramsey could hear the excitement in her voice. After over a century of studying ancient alien artifacts, there were few hard leads on some pretty astounding technologies—including instantaneous communications across interstellar distances and traveling faster than the speed of light—other than the simple fact that they were possible.

  “We know that gravity control on a large scale is possible,” Dr. Franz’s voice put in. “We’ve seen it done. We just don’t know how.”

  Ramsey nodded to himself. Franz’s biography said he’d spent the ten years before coming onboard the Chapultepec leading the science team out on Europa, the colony of scientists and xenoarcheotechnologists studying the wreckage of the Singer.

  In 2067 the Singer, the huge robotic Hunter ship trapped for half a million years in the depths of the ice-capped Europan world-ocean, had demonstrated what appeared to be antigravity when it attempted—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—to break free of its crypt, but how it had accomplished the feat was a complete mystery. After a century of intensive research in the ship’s icebound ruins, human scientists now had more questions than answers as to how the city-sized vessel had been able to move its incredible mass without thrusters or other visible propulsion systems.

  “These people may have the trick,” Dominick observed. “That suggests an unfortunate tech balance in their favor.”

  “We knew that going in, General,” Ramsey pointed out. “Anyone who can play with black holes to create an interstellar rapid transit system is definitely a bit ahead of us in the technology department.”

  “We need to know more about that thing. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s manned. It could be entirely automated.”

  “Permission to deploy Cassius for a beach recon,” Ramsey said.

  In fact, he’d already thought-clicked the order to Cassius I-2. Proper military etiquette required he get the mission commander’s permission, but the next step was obvious.

  “‘Beach recon,’ General?” Franz asked. “There isn’t a beach within light-years of here.”

  Ramsey grinned. “Force of habit, Doctor. On Earth, we would send a small special forces team—or robots—ashore before a landing. Same principle here, even if the ‘beach’ is steel.”

  They needed someone at the planned LZ looking for defenses and defenders. And the AI was expendable…or as close to expendable as any sentient being could be this far from home.

  SF/A-2 Starhawk Cassius

  Approaching Stargate Sirius

  2115 hours, Shipboard time

  Cassius I-2 made the final approach to the objective dead slow…drifting in at a bare half meter per second relative. Possibly velocity alone determined whether or not an approaching spacecraft would be blasted by antimatter beams, but it might also be a combination of velocity and mass. The Starhawk was considerably more massive than an Argus probe.

  There was still no response from the huge structure ahead. Tentatively, Cassius guided the fighter closer with gentle bursts from its maneuvering thrusters, until the craft was less than five meters away.

  “I am reading a gravitational field of point one three nine gravities,” he reported, a verbal amplification to the data automatically streaming back to the task force. “I am having no trouble holding position above the surface.”

  Indeed the surface gravity in this area was no more than a gentle tug. Deftly maneuvering the Starhawk for maximum dispersal, Cassius I-2 began deploying BMS drones—Battlefield Micro-Sensors—in a fast-expanding cloud. Each sensor, a sphere only ten millimeters thick, was set to pick up heat, electromagnetic signals, even vibrations transmitted through the ring’s hull from inside. Fired from the Starhawk’s special munitions dispensers, they scattered across several square kilometers of the ring surface before the low gravity brought them to rest.

  A staggering wealth of new data began pouring in, and Cassius I-2 became quite busy indeed recording and retransmitting it all for analysis back in the fleet.

  TRAP-1

  UFR/USS Chapultepec

  2142 hours, Shipboard time

  The Marines had been waiting for hours in the tiny red-lit compartment, fully suited up, weapons ready, emotions fully charged. Sergeant Garroway sat wedged in with nineteen other Marines, all in full battle dress, shoulder touching shoulder of the Marines to either side, armored knees separated from the knees of the Marine facing him by less than a meter.

  Zero gravity made little difference to his discomfort. Transfer pods were not designed with spaciousness in mind, but efficiency, compactness, and a brutal lack of frills. The enforced immobility was wearing at him, cramping the muscles of back, shoulders, and legs, while globules of sweat escaped from under his headband and drifted around inside his battle helmet like tiny, silvery and out-of-focus planets.

  And the day some designer of military hardware came up with a suit of battle armor that could scratch where it itched…

  They said the waiting was the hardest part, and Garroway was in heartfelt agreement. Fifty-two hours ago he’d been sound asleep—a better word was comatose—in cybehibe, no worries, no cares, no discomfort, not even any dreams, save for some fuzzy fragments now more felt than remembered. Now he was…here.

  He wished he knew what was happening. The platoon had been disconnected from the intel feed from the probes now scouting the stargate. No reason had been given, though Garroway guessed there were several. For one thing, if a lot of data was coming back from the robot scouts, they needed to conserve bandwidth. For another, Garroway knew from experience that speculating on incomplete information was an excellent way to screw things up royally. Better that the rankers be handed just what they needed to know to function…and not so much that they started making wild and half-assed guesses—and possibly panicking as a result.

  And there was always the possibility, he told himself wryly, that even calm and fully assed information would be so scary they would panic anyway—and with perfectly good reason.

  Sometimes, he knew, ignorance was bliss.

  That didn’t make the waiting and the not-knowing any easier to endure, however.

  At least this time the section wasn’t under radio silence, as had be
en the case in so many of the training runs, and there was a ragged and occasional exchange of background chatter over the Alpha Platoon channel. Most of the Marines remained silent, however, each alone with his or her thoughts.

  Waiting….

  “Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait,” a voice said. An ID tag appeared at the top of Garroway’s HUD, identifying the speaker as PFC Stefan Arhipov, one of the platoon newbies. “That’s the fucking Marines for ya, huh?”

  Garroway ignored the comment, as did the others. It sounded like an attempt to talk to someone, to start a conversation just for the comfort.

  “Hey, Corp?” Arhipov persisted. It took Garroway a moment to realize the man was talking to him. “They say you were one of the guys out on Ishtar.”

  You couldn’t tell who was speaking to you by body language when everyone was encased in Mark VIII vac armor, but the name ARHIPOV, S. was painted across the helmet of the man sitting opposite him in a dark gray just barely lighter than the helmet’s current neutral black.

  “I was there,” Garroway replied, laconic.

  “Yeah? What was fighting the Annies like, anyway?”

  “Not fun.”

  An uncomfortable silence followed. “Uh, Corporal?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why’d they pack us into this sewer pipe, anyway? The way I heard it, we were going to check out the stargate with robots. They’re not planning on sending us in to capture the thing yet, are they?”

  “When they tell me, I’ll tell you,” Garroway replied and left it at that.

  “They didn’t TRAP us t’start the invasion, kid,” Sergeant Cavaco said. “Didn’t you hear?”