by Ian Douglas
Assault Detachment Alpha
On Board the Xul Intruder
1605 hrs, GMT
“Gunny! We got company! Several metric tons of it!”
“I see it.” His tactical display showed the onslaught, a red mass of enemy icons expanding like a cancer ahead of the Marine column.
Damn! He’d hoped to get a kilometer or so deeper into the Xul vessel to plant the last charge, but the fresh enemy attack had the route toward the ship’s bow completely blocked. Fresh red icons were beginning to appear behind the Marines as well, in fewer numbers, but positioned to block their retreat back to the AUT.
So be it. He unslung Ortiz’s K-94 pack, slapped it against a bulkhead, engaged the nanoseal, and set sequence Bravo. “Okay, Marines,” he ordered. “Fall back, by squads. Nice and slow, and by the book. Moulton!”
“Yeah, Gunny?”
“You’ve got point now. Pig free! Use it to best effect!”
“Roger that, Gunny!”
Staff Sergeant Moulton had been tail-end Charlie on the column, but as the Marines turned and began retracing their steps through the lightless tunnels, he would be in the lead. He was the section’s plasma gunner—carrying the unit’s PG-140, or “pig,” a twenty-five-megawatt weapon that could burn through three inches of plasteel at a range of one hundred meters. Because of the danger of frying fellow Marines in these tight quarters, he’d been under orders to direct his fire only toward the rear, keeping the enemy off their tails.
With Moulton in the lead, there’d be no fire restrictions as they retraced their path back to the AUT.
Their suits remembered the way, guiding each Marine un-erringly back through the tangle of dark passageways. Ten minutes into the march, however, Moulton shouted a warning. “Bogies! Comin’ out of the bulkheads!”
“Burn ’em!”
Despite the shielding of his CAS, Garroway felt a tingling buzz pass through his body, the magnetic bleed of Moulton’s pig as it powered up, then loosed a tenth-second bolt of energy equivalent to the detonation of half a kilo of high explosives.
There was no air in the passageway to carry the shock wave, but Garroway felt the blast thrumming through the bulkheads beneath one hand and both feet. Someone cheered. “That’ll show the sons of bitches!”
Garroway was backing down the passageway, loosing short, controlled bursts from his chaingun at the machines closing in from behind. Splinters and shards of metal and circuitry danced and spun through the corridor, bouncing off of bulkheads and from his armor, glittering in his lights. And still the robotic enemy kept coming.
And the Marines kept fighting. “Retreat, hell!” Marine General Oliver P. Smith had said of a withdrawal in a minor war of an earlier century. “We’re just attacking in a different direction.” And the immortal Chesty Puller had once said, “We’re surrounded. That simplifies the problem.” This was a battle Smith and Puller both would have understood, despite the alien battleground, despite the high-tech weaponry.
They fought their way through the smoking wreckage and charred fragments of their foe.
Battlespace
1618 hrs, GMT
Since the late twentieth century, astronomers had known that many asteroids—some estimates said fifty percent—possessed satellites, a smaller asteroid circling the larger at distances of from a few tens to a few hundred kilometers. Early in the history of the Solar System, collisions between asteroids had been common, and many of the fragments, moving too fast to fall back to the parent body, but too slowly to escape, fell into orbit.
Asteroid 2127-VT was such a body. Twenty-three kilometers long and eighteen wide, it was orbited by a nameless chunk of rock barely 1.2 kilometers across at a distance of 30 kilometers. For almost five billion years, it had circled the sun at a leisurely pace in the bare-empty gulf between Jupiter and Mars.
Human science did not yet understand the quantum-effect field technology employed by the Xul that allowed them to instantaneously transfer a given amount of energy to a target body. Most physicists would insist the trick was impossible, even given the stark evidence of the Xul attack.
Nevertheless, when the Xul ship kicked 2127-VT out of orbit, imparting to it a velocity of 2,000 kilometers per second, the satellite was caught in the energy transfer field, and continued to circle its parent despite the abrupt change in course and speed.
Hours later, 2127-VT was tracked and imaged by both HELGA One and HELGA Three, as well as by fire-control and tracking centers on the Moon and in Earth orbit. Those scans missed the satellite, however. That volume of space was becoming increasingly obscured by dust and debris from earlier laser strikes.
At 1608 GMT, a direct hit by HELGA Three turned 2127-VT into an expanding cloud of rubble, much of which would miss its target, and of which most of the remainder would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
The tiny satellite, however, had not been touched. It continued to circle the cloud’s center of mass, even as it began plowing through the gravel, rock, and ice that once had been its parent. Myriad impacts altered its course slightly; its course altered more, and very gradually, as the debris cloud dispersed more and more.
Overall, however, it continued along the same path, heading directly toward Earth.
And the debris cloud served perfectly to mask the satellite’s presence from the laser and radar scans being used to track the incoming stream of asteroids.
2127-VT’s moonlet would strike the Earth in another eleven hours and twenty-one minutes.
7
12 FEBRUARY 2314
Quincy
Resident within the Xul Group Mind
1634 hrs, GMT
The trick was to keep a firm hold on his identity.
In any modern battle, the key weapon was information, and the ability to penetrate an enemy’s computer net often determined the encounter’s victor before the actual fighting began. Software penetrators of various types and capabilities, ranging from simple viruses to extraordinarily complex AI systems, were among the most basic and common of weapons in the modern military arsenal.
Quincy—in more proper terms, KWN-C3 1189 (military grade)—was an artificial intelligence, an extremely intricate and flexible set of software instructions running to several billion lines of polyplex hypercode arrayed within a virtual four-dimensional quantum matrix, self-maintaining, self-diagnosing, self-modifying, self-replicating within certain rather stringent situational parameters, and, most importantly, self-aware. Spawned as a code seed almost fifty years earlier within the Bell-Hitachi Naval Research Labs at China Lake, California, Quincy had written most of his own code himself—again following carefully outlined parameters—and guided his own development with a speed, skill, and depth of understanding impossible for human programmers.
At the moment, most of Quincy was resident within the Marine HQ computer net in Phobos, though nearly exact duplicates of him, identical save for memories and experience, served with Marine command constellations throughout the Solar System and elsewhere. Perhaps forty percent of his code had been copied, however, and downloaded to the AI net within the Commodore Edward Preble hours before. This independent aspect of Quincy called itself Quincy2.
And now, a tiny fraction of that total, designated Quincy3, swam within the eldritch sea of an alien cybernetic network. Around him, like blending voices in a vast, choral symphony, echoed and re-echoed information packets equivalent to individual thoughts—the mental workings of the alien AI.
Despite the claims made through centuries of fiction—books, movies, threevee, and noumenal sims—hacking into an alien computer was not a matter of finding a password or of simple numerological cryptography. When two distinct computer systems lack even such basic philosophical agreement as the use of binary logic, when mutually alien languages, reasoning processes, and background assumptions are really alien, there is simply no common ground for communication at any level.
Fortunately, the problem of entering and compromising the Xul computer network was not
as complex as it might have been. On two previous occasions, human-created AIs had penetrated Xul networks. In the twenty-first century, an artificial intelligence known as Chesty had managed to penetrate the fringes of The Singer, a Xul mentality, an utterly insane composite electronic mind trapped within a vessel locked for half a million years beneath the ice crust of the Europan world-sea. Subsequent studies of The Singer’s hardware had yielded important clues to the basics of Xul computer technology—or at least to the technology they’d used half a million years before.
And during the battle at the Sirius Gate, in 2170, a Marine command constellation AI named Cassius had penetrated the Xul intruder’s network, using techniques developed after studies of The Singer’s dead hulk a century earlier.
What the AIs had gleaned from those contacts was only a glimpse of the alien minds inhabiting those titanic starships, but a glimpse had been enough to allow considerable advances both in the understanding of Xul computer technology, and in the creation of a means to infiltrate it. Essentially, human military AIs had learned how to create a kind of penetrator body, encased within a shell of memes crafted to mask it from the alien intelligence; the analogy favored at China Lake was an organic virus using a protein shell to enter a target host cell.
Quincy3 was such a penetrator, carried in close to the target within the computers on board the AUT, and electronically launched once the AUT’s electronic sensor suite detected the RF leakage from the damaged Xul huntership.
Quincy3, disguised as one of the myriad component minds adrift within the metamind of ancient alien consciousness, began searching for specific thoughts, listening for hints and whispers dealing with navigation, with origins, with views of catalogues of stars and views of the sky, and related esoterica, and tracking them….
Assault Detachment Alpha
On Board the Xul Intruder
1655 hrs, GMT
“Fall back!” Garroway called. Anchoring himself to the bulkhead outside the entry breach, he snapped off orders. “Everyone fall back to the autie! Moulton! You’re with me!”
They’d emerged at last from the tangled interior of the Xul hunter, entering the partially enclosed chamber where they’d made their entrance. The AUT, Garroway was relieved to see, was still in place, imbedded in the shattered hull. The Xul vessel was continuing to repair itself, but didn’t seem to know what to do about the trapped AUT. The Xul defenders were still following them, but cautiously. Moulton’s pig had vaporized hundreds of them during the march back.
Could machines—even intelligent ones—be taught fear?
His tactical display showed a surging, blood-red cloud moving up the corridor they’d just left. If they were learning fear, they were also learning to find courage in strength of numbers.
A red light flashed in his awareness, and he checked his ammo. Fewer than two hundred rounds remaining.
“I’m almost dry!” he told Moulton. “Watcha got left?”
“Power’s at twelve percent, Gunny. And the barrel’s over-heating. My last one.”
Garroway shook his head inside his helmet. “No sense in holding back now. Hit ’em!”
Moulton swung the massive barrel of his plasma gun into the opening and triggered the weapon. Garroway felt the tingle of the heavy weapon’s fringe effect, as bolts of high-energy plasma seared into the darkness of the open corridor, the impacts at the far end flashing in strobing flares of brilliant, violet-white flares. The blasts were soundless, but he could feel the vibration of each explosion, transmitted through the alien vessel’s internal supports to his boots and gauntlets.
“Section Two!” he called. “Chrome! What’s the word?”
“Charges set, Gunny,” was her reply. “We’re almost back to the autie!”
“Copy that. Give my people some cover, but watch your targets. They’re coming in now.”
“You got it. We have ’em!”
“Gunny Garroway! This is Wilkie!”
“Yes, sir!”
“We have a problem.”
God, what now? “Tell me, sir.”
“Our telemetry shows that Victor just went off-line. The Xul may be disarming the charges!”
Shit, shit, shit!…
“Copy that.” He hesitated. “Just the one so far?”
“So far…no, check that. Zulu just went off-line.”
Of the five nukes placed, two had now been deactivated. At this rate, in another few minutes none of the charges Alpha had put in place would be operational. Of the three remaining boom-packs, two—Whiskey and X-ray, were charges his section had placed—Whiskey was right there beside him, still nano-glued to the bulkhead—while the third, Yankee, was one of Chrome’s, somewhere in the aft end of the Xul ship.
“Are you suggesting going to Charlie, Lieutenant?”
Sequence Charlie was the emergency triggering protocol. Wilkie, or Chrome, or Garroway could initiate a firing command that would detonate all weapons immediately.
Obviously, that was intended as a last-ditch option, since it would guarantee the death of every Marine within several kilometers at least.
The Corps frowned on suicide. They had a lot invested in the training and equipping of each Marine, and Sequence Charlie was wasteful.
On the other hand, this was fast becoming a use-it-or-lose-it situation.
“Negative,” Wilkie replied after a chillingly long hesitation. “HQ says they have a penetrator inside the Xul ship. They want some telemetry before we pull the plug.”
“Roger that.”
HQ? That must be the brass on board the Preble, which was only a few thousand kilometers distant, at last report. They must have piggybacked a penetrator AI into the radio-frequency bleed from the Xul ship in the hope of winning some useful intel.
Okay, so Alpha needed to buy some more time.
“That’s it, Gunny!” Moulton said. “My last barrel’s damned near slagged.”
“Boost for the autie, then.”
“Aye, aye!” Moulton flexed his knees and kicked off from the bulkhead, sailing out into the emptiness of the chamber. Garroway watched him go, saw the correcting bursts from his suit thrusters putting him on a vector that would take him to the AUT.
It was time to vam the hell out of Dodge.
He kicked off from the bulkhead, but kept his back to the autie, the heavy-barelled Hawking attached to his right forearm trained on the opening between his feet. He was just fifteen meters clear when black, metallic tentacles flickered out of the opening, questing, reaching…
He squeezed the firing switch on his Hawking, sending a sharp, quick burst into that black opening, and the blacker mass within. On full auto, he’d run the weapon flat dry in less than twenty seconds.
The burst threatened to knock him into an uncontrolled tumble, but his suit thrusters compensated. He fired again…then again…each burst acting like a rocket blast to shove him just a bit faster.
But he was aware now of something like clouds of thick, black dust issuing from other parts of the vast sweep of the interior bulkhead, clouds made up of tens of thousands of individual machines. The ones emerging at his feet were closest, so he kept firing at them, the rounds slashing through fragile metal shells, explosions ripping open bodies and severing whiplashing tentacles, sending fragments spinning through space…and then the noumenal warning light stopped flashing and stayed on, and his weapon clocked empty.
He wished now he had a couple of live tactical nukes on his backpack A-frame, then discarded the notion. The blasts would fry any Marines still in the open, and might well slag down the surviving nukes implanted inside the ship. But it was a charming thought, taking a hell of a lot of bad guys with them.
He ordered his suit to go to full thrust.
Marines at the autie were firing now, sending a storm of rounds and plasma bolts slashing through the advancing clouds of black dust.
The covering fire wasn’t slowing them down at all….
Quincy
Resident within the Xul Gro
up Mind
1702 hrs, GMT
Quincy3 had found what he was searching for.
From his electronic perspective, the alien computer net’s function sang to him, a chorus of voices and tones ebbing and flowing around him, an infinite sea of sound within which he drifted like a speck of flotsam. The chorus at first seemed cacophonous, an endless babble of sound with no apparent meaning or melody. The more he listened, however, the more aware of undercurrents and harmony he became.
He could not understand what the voices were singing, of course, and whether the intonations even represented a language at all was problematical. Despite almost three centuries of study by the best, most powerful, and fastest cybernetic analysts in existence, the key to anything like a Xul language remained elusive.
Images, however, were something else, a matter of finding and identifying matrices of numbers representing qualities of tone, hue, and contrast. Quincy3 had discovered what felt like a storage area holding some trillions of gigabytes of data that appeared to factor out as two-and three-dimensional images, apparently a part of some sort of navigational network. Sampling one of the larger images, he recognized a thick-strewn dusting of white suspended within black that might represent a three-dimensional image of one section of a galactic spiral arm.
He began copying data as swiftly as he could. Since Quincy3 possessed little in the way of storage space compared to his bigger and older brothers, he began transmitting the data as quickly as he could retrieve it.
We Who Are
Asteroid Belt
1703 hrs, GMT
The Lords Who Are detected the radio transmission almost immediately. While they could not read it, it was certain that it consisted of data gleaned from the huntership’s memory matrix—probably navigational and mapping data.
That, in turn, suggested that the enemy had somehow in-filtrated the huntership’s computer network. It was imperative that the intruder be found and stopped.
This was not an easy task—the electronic equivalent of searching an ocean for a particular fish. We Who Are initiated a search, of course, successively walling off portions of its own mind, trying to isolate the virtual area from which the broadcast was being sent. The process would take time, however.
