by Ian Douglas
If that red star up ahead had not been shrouded in its cocoon of red-tinted fog, he knew he would be unable to see any detail in what was there at all. As it was, enough light leaked through from the dwarf star to render the vista vanishingly faint.
He tried looking at his surroundings in different ways. Without a clear canopy on his fighter, he could only see what his fighter’s electronics fed through to him by way of his neural implant. He talked to Connie, having her “look” at different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. He had her block out the light from the local star so he could see the thing more clearly. He had her adjust both brightness and contrast, trying to better understand what he was almost seeing.
After ten minutes, the pieces were beginning to fall into place, mostly because he already thought he knew just what it was he was seeing. He’d just not expected…this.
That faint blue graininess was indeed like the Milky Way he remembered from those summer nights back home. But rather than existing as a single ragged band across the night sky, this Milky Way twisted in upon itself like a whirlpool or like the swirling clouds of a hurricane viewed from low orbit. The central core was as indistinct as were the spiral arms, but somewhat thicker, denser, and showing a faint blush of reddish or orange light. Smears of black, of red, of blue, of other shades and hues almost too faint to be seen piled up in ramparts along the core and drew converging, spiraling lanes among those crowded stars almost all the way to the center.
The core itself resembled nothing so much as an immense, flattened sphere of hazy light, grainy to the naked eye like the spiral arms, but only a step removed from invisibility.
Alexander had seen photographs of spiral galaxies, of course. And he knew that what he was seeing now must be something no human had ever before seen—his own galaxy, the Milky Way, but viewed from just outside—or above—the core.
What made it hard to recognize was its faintness. The photographs he’d seen all were the results of long time exposures, where photons from an inherently faint background could pile up on film or CCDs over a period of hours, while the human retina operated from instant to instant, with no time lag for accumulation at all.
It was also strange to see so much detail, despite the faintness of those spiral arms. They filled fully half of the sky, like the ground seen from a sharply banking aircraft, yet they seemed almost close enough to touch. He could make out the empty-seeming gaps between the far-flung spiral arms, the lanes of dust and gas, the faint color of immense nebulae.
Taken all together, the spiral face of the galaxy, the swarming suns of the cluster astern, the mind-bending emptiness of the Void beyond—it was too much to absorb all at once.
Alexander did not think of himself as a religious person.
He had been once. His parents had been Army of Christ Spiritualists, Bible fundamentalists who believed in salvation by grace, Holy Spirit baptism, and communion with the beloved dead. Alexander hadn’t been to a service or a séance since he’d been fifteen, however. The ACS taught that the world was a special creation of God that was six thousand years old, that extraterrestrials were demons bent on Humankind’s spiritual destruction, and that the stars of the night sky were a kind of illusion designed by the Creator to manifest His own glory. There were parts of that doctrine Alexander had never been able to wrap his mind around—especially the idea that God would resort to a kind of trickery to manipulate humans—and he’d pretty much stopped believing.
But he felt distinct stirrings of that old religion now, mingled with feelings of both fear and awe. The face of the galaxy—like the Face of God—was too vast to take in all at once.
If there was a God, He was far, far larger than the creature imagined by the pastor at his ACS church.
“My God…” was all Alexander could say aloud, his voice a cracked whisper. “My God….”
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
TRAP 1-2
Sirius Stargate, surface
1247 hours, Shipboard time
Only a few more meters to go.
Fire from the Wheel seemed almost nonexistent now, though whether that was part of an enemy strategy of deliberately holding back or the result of the pounding by Marine aerospace fighters and Navy starships was unclear. Garroway readied himself for the landing, gripping his laser rifle tightly in his gauntleted hands, bending his knees, trying above all to relax. The surface rushed up to meet him.
At the last instant, he passed through the gravitational gradient, dropping from free fall to nearly one G in a single, stomach-twisting instant. He didn’t have time to think about it though. A second later he hit the stargate surface, letting his knees collapse under him and allowing his armor to take the shock of the impact.
He crumpled into a clumsy roll.
Unlike the training runs back at Earth’s L-4, there was no danger of bouncing off and drifting back into space. Standing on the stargate was like standing on solid ground back home.
It just looked weird.
The surface was heavily pocked and cratered, almost like a sponge in places, yet the structures scattered across the landscape retained an angular appearance, as though made of haphazardly piled slabs. The horizon was very close, close enough to step off of, if he wasn’t careful.
All around him, other Marines descended from the black sky, drifting down at a steady speed, then beginning to accelerate through the last few meters as they entered the gate’s oddball gravity. Both Sirius A and B were blocked by the Wheel’s structure, so, technically, it was night here; the stars were bright and achingly beautiful. He’d not even been able to see them before, because of the two nearby suns.
Which one, he wondered, was Sol?
But there was no time for wondering or for rubbernecking. Glancing up to make sure he wasn’t stepping into the path of another falling Marine, he got a bearing on his section’s rally point and started moving at a steady jog.
At least no one was shooting at him.
Not yet.
14
2 APRIL 2170
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Sirius Stargate
1248 hours, Shipboard time
HM2 Phillip Lee dropped toward the stargate, trying to keep his mind empty of everything save relaxing…knees bent…ready to drop and roll….
His stomach twisted as he fell through the gravity gradient, and then he struck, hitting hard, but letting his suit take most of the punishment. He was down.
“Corpsman on the beach,” he announced over the company channel.
“Welcome aboard, Doc,” Gunny Dunne told him. “We’re setting up Beach Ops at these coordinates.” A map location flashed up on Lee’s noumenal display. “Point Memphis. The company is forming up on the perimeter…here.”
“Copy that. I’m on my way. You got anything for me?”
“Couple of busted ankles,” was Dunne’s reply. “No one’s shooting at us, at least, thank the Goddess.”
The first set of map coordinates Gunny had given him were about five hundred meters in that direction, at the site designated Point Memphis. He started off at a slow jog, careful of his footing. He didn’t want to break an ankle of his own.
A strange kind of battle, he thought, but one suited to this eldritch landscape of black slabs and boxes. Wasps and Starhawks continued to crisscross through the star-gilt sky, loosing laser bursts and gunfire at anything that even remotely threatened the Marines. A brilliant explosion flared in the distance…bright enough and far enough off that it must have been a strike by one of the starships. He thought he felt a tremor underfoot.
He heard nothing, of course, save what was coming over the radio net. A check on the Battalion Channel located the injured men, both at the spot designated as Operations HQ—code-named Memphis.
That was where he needed to be.
Point Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1257 hours, Shipboard time
&nb
sp; Major Warhurst had jumped with Charlie Company’s Third Platoon. The unit was light, down by five on the roster, with personnel transferred to other platoons to bring them up to full strength, so there was room on one of the TRAPs for Warhurst and his three-person staff. They’d designated an open spot in the northeast quadrant of the DZ as Beachhead Operations, the nucleus for all Marine ops on the stargate.
Of course, at the moment, Beach Ops consisted of nothing more than the four of them in vac armor, plus the tripod-mounted complexity of a multibroadband laser FCT, a Field Communications Transceiver. The FCT took over all direct communications with the Chapultepec and Ranger, as well as serving as the primary local node for Cassius and lesser Battalion AI assets.
The FCT also allowed Warhurst to jack in for a full noumen connection. He sat on the “ground,” leaning against one of the odd, clifflike slabs scattered about the landscape, only marginally aware of his immediate surroundings. In his mind’s eye, he could see the entire expanse of the DZ and well beyond it, computer-modeled in exacting detail. Green pinpoints of light marked the positions of each Marine in the landing force, with platoon leaders and section sergeants marked by ID tags as well. With a thought-click he could communicate with any of them. Cassius monitored all battalion radio and laser traffic and made sure he heard anything that was tactically important. The sheer volume of data coming and going from the beachhead was utterly beyond the scope of any one human. It was here that the specialized talents of artificial intelligences truly came into their own.
With their help, he could see that most of both companies, Alpha and Charlie, were on the stargate surface. B Section of Charlie’s First Platoon and A section of Alpha’s Third Platoon both had scattered a bit, missing the DZ by nearly two kilometers, but they’d at least managed to come down on the stargate, rather than miss and fall into empty space. Both sections of Alpha’s Fourth Platoon were still inbound.
“Steel Beach, Steel Beach,” a voice called in Warhurst’s head, using the call sign for Beach Ops. “This is Alpha Two. We are tracking unidentified movement at Sector one-threeniner delta! It looks…yeah, it looks like they’re coming right out of the ground! Do you copy, Steel Beach?”
“Alpha Two, Steel Beach, we copy,” Master Sergeant Vanya Barnes said. She was on loan from the MIEU command constellation and Warhurst was damned glad to have her. “Give us your tactical feed so we can see too.”
“Ah, sorry, Steel Beach. Here y’are.”
Whatever it was Alpha Company’s Second Platoon was tracking, it wasn’t on any of the remote sensors or probes, and Alpha’s CO, Lieutenant Gansen, had neglected to patch through the data from his own unit’s sensors.
There they were…a long line of red pinpoints crawling down a kind of valley between two sets of surface structures. No wonder they hadn’t shown on the remote sensor net. The local terrain was screening them.
“Alpha Two, this is Elvis,” Warhurst said, using his personal call sign. “Do you have a visual? Over.”
“Yessir! There must be a hundred of ’em!”
“Can we have a visual?” Damn. Whittier was scattered—not focused and he was forgetting to use his tech. The guy must be rattled, first time in combat—and first time facing unknown and alien hostiles. Warhurst made a mental note to keep an eye on him—and on his company.
“Sorry, sir. Here it is. We don’t have any sensors in that area, but you can get a pretty good image off of high-mag optical.”
The picture that opened in Warhurst’s mind was fuzzy and grainy, with frequent bursts of static and data dropouts, and it tended to jerk and wobble unpredictably. It was being relayed from the helmet optics of Lance Corporal Janet Higgins, according to the data lines running across the top of the image. She was one of the Marines in Alpha Company’s Second Platoon and was shooting the scene under extreme magnification.
It was impossible to get a good feel for the size of the objects, with nothing in the image to give a good sense of scale. It was also hard to understand what he was seeing. Each object was flat-bottomed and skimming along above the Wheel surface, probably using some type of magnetic levitation. Each was an odd blend of sharp angles and smoothly curved organic shapes and no two were the same. Each, however, did sport a decidedly phallic protuberance that almost had to be some sort of weapon.
The camera angle was high up above the line of objects, almost overhead; on his mental map, he could see that Higgins was positioned atop one of the slablike “cliffs,” looking down into the flat-bottomed valley through which the objects were now streaming.
“Higgins,” Warhurst said, opening a squad channel. “This is Warhurst. I’m linked into your visual.”
The image in his head jumped wildly, then steadied on the oncoming objects once more. “Sir! Yes, sir!”
“Easy there, Corporal. How big are those things?”
“It’s hard to say, sir. They look to be about five, maybe six times as long as a man—twelve meters, maybe—and half that wide. Can’t even guess about their mass, sir.”
“That’s okay. Just tell me what you can. What’s your impression?”
“They’re hard to see, sir. Black-on-black.” The objects appeared to be made of the same material as the Wheel itself. Perfect camouflage. “I’m getting readings of high-energy magnetics. Don’t know if that’s their weapons or their propulsion system breathing, but it’s hot. And they’re fast. They’re barreling down this valley like they’re on a mag-lev monorail.”
Warhurst glanced at the data tags on her transmission. “You’re still on passive mode—” he said.
“Aye aye, Sir. Going active.”
“No! Wait—”
His noumenal display lit up with new information…then suddenly flared, dazzlingly bright and static-blasted.
The data tags winked out, replaced by the harshly accusing words TRANSMISSION TERMINATED. The green pinpoint on the map marking Lance Corporal Higgins’s position was gone.
“Damn!” he exclaimed aloud. “Damn! Damn!”
“Sir?” Vanya Barnes asked him.
He didn’t reply. Damn it, he was acting as unfocused as Lieutenant Gansen. A moment’s carelessness in what he’d said, a misinterpretation of his words by a too-eager Marine…
So long as the Marines used their armor’s passive sensors only, they were invisible to the enemy. Higgins had switched on her active sensors, bathing the approaching objects in low-energy laser light and radar.
Which, of course, had instantly lit her up like a white-hot flare on the enemy’s sensors. Their reaction time was startlingly quick.
Warhurst blamed himself for Higgins’s death, but could not afford the luxury of self-recrimination now. “Whittier!”
“Sir!”
“Fall back on Topeka and form on the battalion perimeter. Order your people not to engage, repeat, do not engage. They are to remain on passive sensors only.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
“Move out.”
Higgins’s death had provided one bonus for the landing force, however…a better idea of the enemy’s nature. That instant’s backscatter of laser light had provided plenty of information for Cassius and the other battalion AIs and he knew now that each of those objects measured anywhere between six and ten meters in length. Higgins’s eyeball guestimate had been a bit high, understandably enough.
The landing force was facing the equivalent of tanks—armored but highly mobile behemoths each mounting at least one heavy weapon…a particle beam, from the look of the data, though not an antiparticle beam, at least. The burst that had killed Higgins appeared to be a short pulse of high-energy electrons, not positrons.
Though the Marines had trained to face them, tanks were, if not obsolete, somewhat quaintly old-fashioned in modern warfare. When tanks first had appeared on the battlefield, some two and a half centuries before, the .50-caliber bullet had been developed as the first antitank round. The subsequent arms race of tank armor versus tank killers had eventually been decided in favor of l
ight, portable antitank weapons and highly maneuverable tank-killing aircraft. A single Marine with an M-30D7 Onager was a lot cheaper, more easily replaced, and more easily fielded in large numbers than the most heavily armored tank.
The MIEU had fifty Onagers in its inventory, half of them with the first drop, with five warshots per weapon. Warhurst just wished they had a few hundred more. Besides Onager AT rounds, all they had that might even slow those monsters were CTX-5 demo packs and massed CCN-coordinated laser or plasma weapon fire.
“All platoon leaders, listen up!” he said over the platoon leader private channel. “We have the equivalent of a column of tanks coming in from one-three-niner delta. Deploy your Onager teams forward. Let’s see if we can get some kills.”
As the platoon leaders acknowledged, Warhurst wondered what he might have missed. Damn it, what other tricks might the enemy pull?
One Warhurst had already thought of was starting to nag at him, a nightmare unrealized, but potent. Somehow the aliens could control gravity, as was obvious from the way the face of the Wheel was pulling them at something less than 1G, while over the center or above the rim gravitational acceleration was closer to 12 Gs. What was to stop them from switching off that shielding, pinning the entire MIEU flat to the surface with twelve times the Earth-normal weight of their bodies and equipment? They wouldn’t be able to move. Hell, they wouldn’t be able to remain conscious.
Or could the somehow reverse gravity and fling everyone off into space?
It all depended on whether or not they could turn gravity on and off like a light. If the apparent gravity control was somehow part of the structure, built into the structure somehow, the Marines were probably safe from that form of attack, at least. If not, they were dead. As simple as that.
The fact that the enemy hadn’t switched off the gravity yet or flattened them all into armored pancakes suggested that they couldn’t pull off that particular type of magic. They hadn’t done anything of the sort to block the surveillance probes earlier—or the fighters. The longer the Marines were able to move around normally on the Wheel’s surface, the likelier that the gravitational shielding was not something the enemy could switch on or off.
