by Ian Douglas
A more promising track, however, was to destroy the hostile vessel imbedded in one of the aft cargo holds. The intruder had almost certainly projected itself into the net from that vehicle, and depended upon it to remain connected with the universe outside.
Unfortunately, destroying the intruder would also take time. Until the huntership’s external sensors were repaired, the enemy craft could not be targeted by either weapons or the quantum energy transference field used to manipulate the vectors of asteroids. We Who Are could fire into the area blindly, of course, but that would almost certainly be self-destructively counter-productive.
Some hundreds of thousands of defenders were in the area now, however, and they could be remotely programmed to seek out the enemy vessel and disassemble it.
That option carried the best chance for rapid success.
Assault Detachment Alpha
On Board the Xul Intruder
1705 hrs, GMT
“C’mon! C’mon! C’mon!” Garroway yelled. “Move it, Marines!”
The last of the combat-armored Marines grabbed hold of safety lines and hauled themselves up the gaping ramped entrance to the AUT. Garroway, firing his braking thrusters wildly, nearly careened off the transport’s hull, but Chrome and Bauer were waiting for him, reaching out and snagging his suit as he tumbled past and hauling him back within reach of a line.
The black clouds—swarms of Xul combat machines—were getting closer.
“We’re all on board!” Chrome yelled over the tactical net. “Kick us the hell outa here!”
The ramp was still down, the Marines not yet in their seats as the Navy pilot fired the AUT’s main plasma thrusters and brought them up to full power. Garroway was jolted to the deck as acceleration slammed him down and back. Black tentacles snapped and writhed above his head, but for a stunned moment he couldn’t process what he was seeing.
“The Xuls are on the ship!” Chrome yelled. “They’re goddamn boarding us!”
Hood and Ortiz opened up with their chain guns, firing past other Marines still crowded into the aft end of the transport’s cargo deck. Garroway started to rise, but another lurch knocked him down. Gravity twisted and shifted in odd directions; it felt as though the AUT was tumbling, falling end over end, and adding a centrifugal component to the acceleration.
“What the hell’s going on up there?” Garroway demanded over the command channel.
“It’s the Xul defenders!” Wilkie shot back. “They’re all over the autie, clinging to the hull!”
Garroway looked at his data feed from the AUT. According to the numbers, the transport had cleared the Xul ship by about three hundred meters.
“Lieutenant!” he yelled. “We need to go to Sequence Charlie!”
Now it was use it or lose it, with no other options. The three remaining nukes on board the Xul vessel wouldn’t detonate on their own for another thirty minutes…and by then the enemy might well have found and disarmed them all.
And if the defenders on the AUT’s hull broke through….
“Lieutenant! Do you copy?”
There was no answer…and suddenly the data stream from the AUT cockpit was gone as well. The enemy machines might already have entered the cockpit.
He wanted to find Chrome, but the cargo deck was a chaotic tangle of Marine armor in tumbling darkness. He had to make the decision, and he had to do it now….
Closing his eyes, he formed the triggering code in his mind, verified the sequence, and launched it.
At first, nothing happened, and he wondered if he’d been, after all, too late.
And then a giant’s hand slammed the AUT, and a searing, blue-white glare seared through the still open aft cargo hatch.
Still in the utter silence of hard vacuum, the AUT rode the expanding plasma wavefront of a nuclear detonation.
Commodore Edward Preble
Outbound from Mars
1707 hours GMT
General Clinton Garroway was in the stateroom set aside as a command center for him and his staff, watching a noumenal image of the Xul intruder, the view downloaded from a combat drone less than fifty kilometers out, when the nuclear weapons detonated. Instrumentation on the drone confirmed that at least two separate explosions had triggered simultaneously—and possibly three, though precise measurements could not be taken.
In the image window in his mind, however, the entire aft end of the gold, needle-slender Xul vessel suddenly vanished in a tiny sun, a sun that expanded almost too quickly for the eye to follow. He saw the forward half of the ship crumple, then shred away as the sun engulfed it. Bits of flotsam and debris spun ahead of the blast wave, which continued its rapid expansion…and then the image winked out as the blast caught the drone and annihilated it.
Garroway inwardly stared into the empty window for a long time after that.
The Preble had been receiving continual updates from Wilkie on board the AUT. Garroway knew that the Xul, somehow, had disarmed at least two nukes, and he’d heard at least a garbled report that the AUT was boosting clear of the Xul vessel, but that something was wrong.
What? What had gone wrong? Whatever it was must have been damned serious, because evidently Wilkie or one of the section leaders had decided to execute Sequence Charlie, detonating the remaining weapons immediately…and before the AUT could accelerate clear of the Xul ship.
His nephew was dead….
Garroway was having some trouble wrapping his mind around that one. He’d given the orders that had sent Travis into harm’s way, sent him on what had amounted to a suicide mission, but still he’d held out hope that the Marines would overcome as they always seemed able to do. That they would survive.
The AUT had been no more than two hundred meters from the detonation point when the nukes had triggered. There seemed to be little chance that anyone had survived.
“Major Bettisly,” he called over the constellation com net.
“Yes, sir.” Bettisly sounded subdued. He must have been watching the feed as well.
“I want a search launched for the AUT. Immediately.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I also want drones sent in to check out the Xul ship. It doesn’t look like there’ll be much left, but we need to be sure.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any word on Quincy?”
“The software penetrator? Not yet, sir, but I’ll check.”
“Quincy Sub-three was not able to disengage from the Xul group mind before the explosion,” another voice, steady and measured, said in Garroway’s head. “I have been attempting to re-integrate with him.”
“You have no contact at all?” he asked the AI.
“That is correct, General. However, Quincy Sub-three was transmitting data as he uncovered it, and I have stored it within Preble’s main memory. I believe Quincy Sub-three successfully carried out his assigned mission.”
Could an AI feel pride? Garroway thought he could detect that emotion—just a hint—behind the calm and precisely articulated words.
And…if self-aware software could feel pride, did it feel grief, or pain, or anything over the loss of a part of itself?
He wanted to ask, but decided to wait until he had a private channel. “That’s good,” he told Quincy2. “I want backups made of everything, and multiple copies transmitted both to Phobos and to the Pentagon immediately. Flag them for intelligence analyses.”
“Yes, General. I have already done that.”
As always, Quincy was a quick three steps ahead.
“What…what are the chances that the AUT survived the blast?” he asked.
“Unknown, General. And the debris and plasma in that sector make radar searches for something as small as Cambria-class transport problematical, as does the fact that we do not have a precise vector on Detachment Alpha’s craft.
“An estimated two-to four-kiloton nuclear detonation, however, creates a fireball of approximately one-to two-hundred meters’ diameter. In vacuo, of course, the fireball’s expansion is
considerably greater, perhaps as much as half a kilometer, but it is conceivable that the plasma front had cooled significantly by the time it reached the AUT, and that the transport survived both the impact and the thermal radiation.
“A greater danger is represented by the radiation flux, which, two hundred meters from a four-kiloton blast would have generated between ten to the fifth and ten to the sixth REMs—instantly fatal to unshielded organic life forms. Armored Utility Transports have significant magnetic shielding, however, and should have helped minimize exposure.”
“So…you’re saying there’s a chance?”
“A chance. I do not have sufficient data to estimate a numerical value for that chance, however.”
“We’ll take anything we can get.”
“General,” the AI said in a mental voice that sounded puzzled, “the loss of Quincy Sub-three is of relatively minor importance. True, re-integrating with him might yield additional contextual data for Intelligence, but its loss is not significant within the broader context.”
“Actually, Quincy, I was thinking about the Marines on board the AUT.”
“Of course. Your nephew is on board.”
“There were thirty-two Marines in Detachment Alpha,” he snapped, angry. “And a Navy crew of four on board the transport. All of them deserve every chance we can give them!”
“I understand, General.”
Garroway wondered if that were true. AIs like Quincy were programmed to simulate human emotions and speech patterns, and to show an interest in topics of interest to the humans around them, but what they really felt—assuming they could experience anything a human would recognize as emotion—was always tough to pin down. Not for the first time, Garroway wondered how humanity would deal with alien species like the Xul when they didn’t even yet understand the thought processes of their own intelligent offspring.
Or how human thought worked, for that matter.
He focused again on the replay of the data feed from the drone, playing it through slowly, at extreme magnification. It was tough to tell, but it looked like a tiny, oblong speck glittering in the light of a distant sun, had been captured moving away from the Xul vessel. At extreme magnification, it might be an AUT. Again and again, he watched as the nuclear fireball expanded, blocking the tiny object from the drone’s view.
Quincy might be able to make more of the imagery. There was no way the unaided human eye could tell if that was the AUT, or if it might have survived. Still, it was something. If that was the AUT, analyses of the images might give a clue to its vector when it was hit by the plasma wavefront. And that could cut down tremendously on search time.
Well done, people, he thought, staring at the anonymous fleck of light. Very well done.
Only now was Garroway beginning to appreciate what had just happened. The Xul intruder, so far as could be determined from several thousand kilometers away, had been destroyed. The attack it had launched on Humankind’s homeworld had been interrupted, and the XEL and HELGA defense complexes should be able to take care of the asteroids the enemy vessel had already accelerated toward Earth.
A tiny detachment of thirty-two Marines, assaulting an alien vessel two kilometers long from a transport that was a rowboat by comparison, had just helped save the Earth.
If those Marines and sailors had died in the saving, as seemed probable, theirs had been a truly heroic sacrifice, the stuff of legend. And if any of them were still alive…
He turned sharply from the thought. Drones and rescue vessels were already en route. All that could be done was being done.
Earth and her billions had been saved.
But he couldn’t help wondering if his nephew still lived.
High Guard HEL Facility 3
Solar Orbit
1805 hrs, GMT
Captain Gupta Narayanan studied the mental readout, paying special attention to Kali’s projection on the elimination of the remaining Earth-threatening asteroids. Eight more bodies remained to be targeted, and eight and a half hours remained before the first of those bodies—now reduced to a cloud of dust and rubble—would have struck the planet. Between HELGA Three and HELGA One, each of those remaining bodies could easily be engaged and destroyed long before they reached the vicinity of Earth.
It had been a near thing. Had the intruder continued launching asteroids, no possible application of the firepower available to the High Guard would have been able to engage them all. Senator Danikov himself had already transmitted a brief message of congratulations; few on Earth, it seemed, had even been aware of the attack, but those who were—chiefly in the various government military branches—had broken into jubilant celebration.
The Xul intruder was destroyed. Earth was safe.
Narayana wasn’t so sure.
It was an absolute and inviolable dictum of physics: matter, like energy, could not be created or destroyed. Multimegaton bursts of laser and X-ray energy could vaporize large chunks of those tumbling boulders into harmlessness, but the majority of that very considerable mass was going to continue on course, reduced to dust and gravel, perhaps, but still bearing most of the original mass on multiple paths that would begin intercepting Earth in another eight and a half hours.
Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. Rocks the size of gravel would burn up in the atmosphere. But this wasn’t normally. Those rocks were moving at truly astonishing velocities. When they reached the Earth, they would punch through the planet’s slim envelope of air so quickly they wouldn’t have time to vaporize.
Earth—perhaps even the survival of Humankind—remained in the balance. The luminaries back at Space Command and the Pentagon didn’t seem to realize the danger.
Yet. Narayanan had no doubt that they would recognize their error very soon, now. He’d sent off a message after Danikov’s transmission. So far, there’d been no reply.
All the High Guard could do, of course, was try to intercept each threat as swiftly as it could be detected and tracked, and destroy it. When these next eight flying mountains had been reduced to rubble, Narayanan would direct Kali to begin searching for smaller pieces of rock remaining in the expanding, fast-moving clouds and begin targeting them as well, from the largest down to the smallest.
They wouldn’t be able to get them all. Of that he was certain.
No matter what they did, Earth was in for a hell of a bombardment, beginning just eight and a half hours from now….
8
13 FEBRUARY 2314
Earth
0529 hrs, GMT
0029 hrs, EST
It began as a rain of fire.
For three hours, now, the nightside skies of Earth had provided spectacular entertainment. What approached Earth now, some twenty-three hours after the Xul intruder nudged the first one-kilometer rock out of its eons-old orbit, was a series of expanding, cone-shaped clouds of fragments.
Dust and debris flashed into the planetary atmosphere at 2,000 kilometers per second, flaring in an instant into dazzling incandescence. At 0229 hours GMT, the night sky first exploded into dazzling brilliance, a meteor shower of unprecedented size and brilliance. At any given instant, the sky was streaked by hundreds of threads of light, all radiating from a single point in the sky, the overall light bright enough to read by. In Ukraine and western Russia, already past the dawn terminator, bright streaks of light and occasional vapor trails could be seen rising like streams from a celestial fountain from the western horizon even in full daylight.
The most dramatic sky appeared with the swarm’s origin at the zenith, in the constellation Gemini, directly above the American west coast where it was 2000 hours, and fully dark. There, meteors appeared second by second in uncounted thousands, flashing out from the origin and raining like white fire to the horizon.
After less than half an hour, the first debris field began to fade, but then the second cloud of fragments intercepted the Earth, and the fireworks began anew. Since each asteroid had been kicked out of its original orbit at a different point in
the Asteroid Belt, this new light show seemed to originate from a slightly different part of the sky, this time appearing to emanate from the constellation Taurus.
Fortunately, due to the clouds’ scattering, most entered the atmosphere at an oblique angle; their speed was so great that even fragments the size of peas would survive all the way to the ground, their passage so swift that they didn’t have time to vaporize completely. Pieces entering the shell of atmosphere at a flat angle tended to skip back into space, or to fragment and vaporize. Smaller pieces, dust motes and fragments the size of grains of sand, were slowed enough as they struck atmosphere that they did burn up, and the result was a light show more spectacular than anything seen in the sky during the span of Homo sapiens on the planet. Vast throngs of people gathered outdoors to witness the spectacle; the skies were clear across most of North America, the mid-February temperature in this age of advanced global warming a pleasant 15 degrees or more.
Larger pieces, however, punched through the atmosphere in an instant, heating white-hot, but losing very little of their mass in the transit. Gravel-sized chunks were reported falling in sparsely populated areas from Saskatchewan to Sonora, from Hawaii to Florida.
Few of the planet’s inhabitants were aware of the danger, of course, at least initially. Many knew that an alien spacecraft—rumored to be a Xul vessel like the one destroyed at Sirius a century and a half before—had entered the Solar System, and that High Guard forces were battling with it. Such was the information easily and immediately accessible on the global data net, and rumor and word-of-mouth spread variations of that basic theme throughout the growing crowds.
But none of the governments involved—the North American Federation, the World Union, the European Union, or the United States of America—had as yet issued an official statement—or a warning. What was the point? There was no time to evacuate cities…and when the entire planet was the target, no one place was any safer than any other. Earth’s entire combined off-world cargo and passenger transport capacity might have sufficed to lift a few hundred, perhaps even a few thousand people off of the planet, if there’d been sufficient warning.
