Star Marines

by Ian Douglas

  A secondary window showed a graphic representation of the drones coming through like a wisp of smoke, like a cloud of microspores wafting from a mushroom’s cap. Exiting the Gate, they moved swiftly deeper into the star system on the far side until they were well clear of the structure and, presumably, any sentinels guarding against just such an intrusion.

  Following their programming, and guided by a gestalt of micro-AIs linking them all together, they spread out in a series of concentric rings, their myriad optics creating, in effect, a single telescopic lens ten kilometers across.

  Garroway had worked with such drones before. They or their predecessors had been in use for three centuries, serving to lift the obscuring fog of war on the modern battlefield and, later, in battlespace. Each was tiny—half a meter or so long—and powered by small but powerful Ev extractors. Instead of water, they used lead as reaction mass, their jets shielded and damped to relatively low-thrust plumes that allowed them to maneuver slowly but over long periods of time. Each was coated with an active nanoflage layer that drank incoming electromagnetic wavelengths, from radio waves to X-rays, with virtually no reflected signature, rendering them invisible—it was hoped—to Xul sensors.

  They worked best en masse. The resolution of any single drone’s sensors—each sampled a broad range of the EM spectrum, including radio, infrared, and optical frequencies—was relatively poor and limited. Put a thousand such drones together, however, as a VLA, or Very Large Array, and combine their signals through a process called interferometry, and you had a very powerful sensor platform indeed. For centuries, now, both radio and optical telescopes had used multiple dishes or mirrors to achieve much higher resolutions than would be possible for a single receiver.

  “Our recon cloud performed as expected. Sensor scans of the entire Edge system were stored and multiply copied. One by one, drones loaded with data were dispatched at low speed back to the Stargate.

  “And now the first of those drones have begun returning through the Gate to Sirius.”

  An image formed itself in Garroway’s mind—a confused blurring, at first, difficult to sort out and identify simply because it was so alien a starscape. He could see the Galaxy, ghost-pale, a vast, blue-hued spiral viewed from just above the sweep of the arms, the hub swollen and ruddy by contrast, a teeming swarm of distant suns.

  “These images have been cleaned up a bit by Quincy and other AI expert analysis systems,” Lee went on. “Go ahead and have a look around. Take a look at what we’re up against.”

  Computer graphics overlaid the image, making sense of the confusion. The camera angle shifted to pick out an orange star in the far distance and the tiny, concentric ellipses of a number of planets, the system’s ecliptic canted at a sharp angle to the plane of the dimly seen galaxy beyond. The sun was old, old…a type K0 cooler and redder than Sol.

  It was also a very long way off. Evidently, the Stargate in this system orbited the local sun nearly five light-hours out, roughly the average distance from the Sun out to Pluto. At this range, the orange sun was merely a very bright star, visible at all only because by chance it hung not against the star-cluttered sweep of the galactic vista, but against the emptiness above, a solitary, orange spark against the endless night.

  But the VLA arrangement of optics created an extremely versatile and powerful instrument, allowing the AI to image individual planets five light-hours—or over five billion kilometers—away. The system’s second world appeared to be the one of primary interest. Data began flowing down the right margin of Garroway’s mental window, giving readings of mass, diameter, rotation, and other minutiae.

  The world was a little larger than Earth—a diameter of some 13,500 kilometers—but with a surface gravity of only about 0.9 G. Large size and low gravity suggested a lower overall density than Earth, and a paucity of metals. The local star was Population II—Population I suns were the Galaxy’s very oldest stars, composed solely of hydrogen and helium, and therefore unlikely to possess solid planets—but it was an early Pop II, with less in the way of metals and heavy elements than relative newcomers like Earth’s sun. Hence, metal-poor worlds.

  Despite that, the target world was clearly a hive of high-tech civilization. Viewed at extremely high magnification through the VLA lens, the nightside was ablaze with light—clotted masses of city-glow centered in gleaming, crisscrossing threads like spider webs of light. Three planetary diameters out, rings of light encircled the planet at the equator, with slender threads connecting them with the surface. Garroway at once recognized the old idea of space elevators, long dreamed of as a means of getting from planetary surface to orbit cheaply and efficiently along super-strong cables reaching from equator to well beyond geosynch. The ring would be positioned at geosynchronous orbit, so that a given point on the ring exactly matched the daily rotation of a matching point on the ground below. Plans to build such a system had been circulating on Earth since the midtwentieth century, but war and other diseases of international politics had prevented any of them from being implemented.

  The Xul, evidently, had no such problem. The planet revealed by the thousand linked eyes of the drone cloud had been knitted together by light into a single, unified entity.

  Literally a single entity, if human understanding of the Xul, of the concept of their group minds was at all accurate. Garroway tried to imagine how many individual minds must be cybernetically linked together within those continent-spanning constellations reaching across the curve of the planet’s surface.

  The question, he quickly realized, was meaningless. How many AI minds can coinhabit a single computer network? One might as well calculate how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

  “As we expected,” Colonel Lee’s voice went on, “we are facing an extremely advanced technology, one literally many thousands of years in advance of our own. Just how much more advanced, we don’t know…and in any case the question is probably meaningless. We know now, from N’mah records, that the Xul have maintained their stellar empire for at least two million years—four times longer than the entire span of Homo sapiens, and there are hints that the Xul, or their predecessors, go back as far as a hundred million years.

  “Fortunately for us, Xul society, if that’s the word for it, appears to be based on a near static growth model. They don’t change, and they don’t innovate, save very, very slowly over extremely long periods of time. That’s why they are, at best, a few thousand years ahead of us, and not several million.”

  The difference, Garroway thought with wry amusement, wasn’t likely to mean a hell of a lot if it came to all-out war between humans and Xul. With powers, the energies, the technologies they controlled even just a few millennia beyond human capabilities, they would be indistinguishable from sheerest magic, to draw from the old aphorism concerning a sufficiently advanced technology.

  And a couple of thousand Marines were about to try to challenge them on their own home ground.

  The very idea, Garroway thought, was spectacularly and breathtakingly foolhardy.

  After all, the argument that low-tech could overcome high worked both ways. If you were an animal being hunted by a technically capable predator, it didn’t matter if you got whacked over the head with a stone ax or vaporized by an X-ray laser. Either way, you were still dead. Whether the Xul were a thousand years ahead or a million, in the long run, made no difference. Magic was still magic.

  “Let me take this opportunity to emphasize to all of you,” Lee continued, “that the Xul can be beaten. We’ve proven that twice, now. They are not omnipotent. They are not gods. Not only are they fallible, they have managed to demonstrate a truly serious tendency to really fuck up, big time.”

  That drew a burst of laughter from the Marines in the common area. “They are old. They are set in their ways. They respond to new threats slowly, and often in a slipshod or half-hearted manner. And that gives us our big military advantage in this conflict.”

  Colonel Lee, Garroway thought, was blowing a con
siderable quantity of smoke, but in a good cause. Morale among the Marines in Alpha Company, he’d noticed, was—not low, exactly, but shaky. Brittle. The Marines would go where they were told, give everything they had, and do their best and then some…but if pushed too far they were likely to shatter. Most were still coping with the emotional trauma of Armaggedonfall and the situation that had ensued on Earth immediately afterward. Lee was reminding the Marines that they could win, that the Xul enemy was not invincible.

  However things might look at the moment.

  “VLA interferometry has let us image Xul ships in orbit about the second planet of the system,” Lee went on. As he spoke, computer graphics were picking out isolated motes of light now adrift in space outside the planet’s ring system, marking them with small, glowing circles and giving readouts of data. Each, Garroway saw, was a Xul starship at least as big as the monster that had devastated the Earth, and the data readings for some indicated vessels—if that was the appropriate word for such leviathans—so large they would have trouble fitting through the twenty-kilometer opening of a stargate.

  “We have designated Planet Two, its artificial ring system, and the ships in orbit there, as Objective Tripoli. So far, we have recorded the images of 267 starships with masses of more than approximately one thousand tons,” Lee told them. “With one exception, all are in extended orbit about the planet, outside of the geosynch rings. Some of the larger objects, we believe, may be orbital fortresses rather than actual vessels. That makes sense. If this is the Xul equivalent of some kind of naval yard or military facility, it stands to reason they’d have some fair-sized planetary defenses up and running.”

  For a dizzying moment, Garroway tried assimilating what he was seeing, and extrapolating that for a starfaring culture that evidently spanned some billions of stars. How many other Xul bases of this size might be scattered across the Galaxy? Even if there were only a handful, all told, the Xul obviously mustered firepower on a scale unimaginable on a merely human scale.

  The image, meanwhile, continued to pan about the system. Garroway watched the local stargate drift past his line of sight, dwindled by distance, now, but magnified by the VLA-optics into a vast hoop. The stargate Marines had visited out in Cluster Space, also outside the Galaxy proper, but in a completely different direction, had been bored into the side of a fair-sized asteroid. This one, however, was more like the Sirian Gate…a vast hoop with a slender rim many kilometers across.

  And then the camera image moved on to the Fortress.

  There was no other obvious term for the thing. It hung in space close by the Stargate, obviously sharing the Gate’s orbit about its wan and distant sun. It was large, though scale was difficult to judge with any certainty, and roughly spherical but visibly flattened at the poles. The surface was dark, but reflective, and with a metallic luster—suggesting an immense and heavily armored spacecraft, perhaps, or a large orbital base. The data printing itself out to one side described an artificial structure fifteen kilometers across, as large as a fair-sized asteroid. Perhaps it had once been an asteroid, with the surface totally refashioned by the Xul to their own requirements. Unlike the distant planet, there were no lights, no indication of life or intelligence other than the simple fact of the thing’s existence. Nearly as large as the Stargate itself, and far bulkier, it was almost certainly a base or military outpost designed to monitor spacecraft entering the system through the Gate. Garroway noticed that it was hanging well clear of the Gate’s opening and off to the side, perhaps fifty kilometers away from the Gate at its closest point.

  And that meant that a particularly nasty wrench had been thrown into the planning of Operation Seafire, a wrench that necessitated sending in the Marines.

  Damn, he thought.

  In the seat next to his, Chrome caught his thought on their private channel, and knew why he’d thought it. “Hey. No one said it would be easy.”

  “No, but the law of averages says we ought to get a break once in a while.”

  “Sure. Once a century sounds about right. Hey, that’s why they dragged us out here, right? They don’t need us to hit Tripoli. They need us to clear out the opposition around the Gate so the Navy can get through.”

  “Yeah. Hush, now. I want to hear this.”

  “What we’re seeing now,” Lee told them, “is the single large Xul structure not in orbit about the second planet. It appears to be a sentinel, a kind of guard post keeping watch over the local stargate. You can see for yourselves the data our probes retrieved. This thing is going to be a very tough target.

  “However, it must be taken out if Operation Seafire is to have a chance of succeeding. We have designated it as Objective Philadelphia.

  “Due to the changes imposed on tactical planning by the presence of Objective Philadelphia, the Force’s TO&E is being altered. First and Third battalions will have the task of taking down Philadelphia, with support from the 3rd Aerospace Wing. Second Battalion will secure the Stargate, while Fourth Battalion provides reinforcements for First and Third bat, if necessary. We will be moving through the Gate in light battalion strength, with HQ units remaining on the Sirius side of the Gate, and company commanders in operational control on the far side, at least for the initial phases of the operation.

  “Now…the bad news.”

  Groans sounded from around the compartment, and Garroway wondered what could be worse than what he was seeing already.

  “We’re still learning about our enemy, still learning about his technology. Those of you on the initial strike are going to get to learn a lot about his capabilities, close up. Data recovered from our electronic penetration of the Intruder strongly suggest that the Xul are able to generate some sort of suppressive field around their large spacecraft and structures, something that can damp out the effects of large-scale explosions, the way the N’mah inertial dampers can reduce the effects of inertia. We will, of course, precede the IMAC approach with a bombardment by both nuclear and antimatter warheads, but our best modeling suggests that this will result only in superficial damage, rapidly repaired by Xul nanotechnic damage-control systems.

  “What this means is, if we’re going to take out Objective Philadelphia, we need to get several nuclear devices as deep inside the thing as possible. The only way we have of doing this, is to equip a boarding party of Marines with K-94s, drop them onto the surface in IMAC pods, and have them hand-deliver the packages.

  “Needless to say, this will be extremely dangerous, and for volunteers only. We will do our best to ensure a means of escape and retrieval, but coordination of this op will be difficult in the extreme, and the possibility for friendly fire—and by this I mean some of our people being trapped inside the station when it blows—is high. Very high.”

  Colonel Lee continued to speak in their minds, laying out the details of the mission as they’d been developed so far. Garroway had been in on the preliminary briefings for senior NCOs before the task force had embarked, and had a good idea of what was coming. He felt a bit of a mental jolt, though, when he realized that ten years had passed since those earlier sessions, and not, as it felt, just a few days. Operation Seafire, from the very beginning, had been conceived as a naval operation, despite the fact that a Marine brigadier had come up with it.

  However, Marines had always been part of the plan. Those first looks at Seafire had assumed that at least a battalion—typically three to five hundred Marines—would be needed to seize the Stargate on the Xul side. Unless the Gate was secure, the Navy ships could not safely pass through.

  According to Marine doctrine, a battalion, a major’s command, was the smallest unit capable of independent operations of limited duration and scope, both tactically and administratively self-sufficient. The Marine planning staff at Quantico had decided that two battalions, plus an aerospace fighter element, was the absolute minimum necessary for an operation so very far from home, and with no hope of reinforcement or support. Colonel Lee’s newly reorganized Regimental Strike Team exactly fit
the bill.

  During the weeks of preparation before the departure from Mars, however, the 1MIEF/RST concept had gone through a number of further changes and upgrades, as had the plan itself. The Marines would have to secure two stargates—the one at Night’s Edge and the one at Sirius. If things went sour at Night’s Edge, Marines at Sirius would be placed to destroy any Xul vessels coming through the Gate, and if things got really bad, they could destroy the gate with a series of carefully placed nuclear munitions. With mission added to mission, the regimental strike team had grown to become a full Marine expeditionary brigade, consisting of four combat battalions and an aerospace wing, together with headquarters, logistical, and engineering support elements, and numbering some eighteen hundred Marines. Another three hundred naval and civilian personnel had been attached as well, most of them scientists—xenoarcheologists, xenotechnologists, linguists, and alien liaison and contact specialists.

  Garroway had some deep reservations about the change. Originally, the idea had been to get in, hold the far-side gate while the Navy did its thing, and get out again, a quick hop-and-pop op with minimum scope for major screwups. Now that a full brigade was involved, things were a lot more complicated.

  Still, he had to admit that he was glad for one aspect for the change. The small version of the strike might not have been large enough, or flexible enough, to cope with that unexpected Xul gate fortress.

  What worried him, though, was the fact that more men and more equipment meant a much greater chance of discovery at the wrong time once they went through to the other side. Ever since Operation Seafire had been first discussed, the number-one operational element had been security. Squared off against an enemy with unknown but definitely extremely advanced technologies, the Marines’ best hope was to slip into the Xul backyard unseen, undetected.