Star Marines

by Ian Douglas

  The recon drone cloud, apparently, had managed to do just that, and its success told the Earth force something about the limits of Xul capabilities. Very small, very slow, and very stealthy vessels could slip through the gate-link from Sirius to Edge of Night undetected; how large could the assault force become before stealth became impossible?

  Colonel Lee was discussing that now. “The assault group’s approach must remain completely covert for as long as possible, and precise timing is imperative. I don’t need to emphasize our largest disadvantage in this operation…the fact that the enemy possesses faster-than-light capabilities, while we do not. If the fortress is alerted to our presence too soon, the entire Xul fleet could be at the stargate in moments, and that would spell almost certain disaster for the entire op.

  “Stealth in the initial deployment will be of absolute paramount importance.”

  The new IMACs, Garroway decided, were about to get their true baptism of fire.

  IST Henderson

  Stargate, Sirius Star System

  2030 hrs, TFT

  Stealth and timing were the two elements most on the mind of General Garroway as well. Certain aspects of Operation Seafire had already been set in motion over three weeks earlier, but they’d been initiated before the recon probes had been launched, before the expeditionary force had learned of the existence of the Xul fortress. Since receiving word of the fortress’s existence at 1300 hours GMT, and now, he’d been linked in with the brigade AIs and his command constellation in a marathon planning session looking for holes in the plan, looking for a reason, any reason, to abort the op.

  It wasn’t that he wanted to abort. Far from it. Earth’s survivors, all save those fleeing the Galaxy, had placed their expectations and their confidence in Task Force Seafire. It was too late to back down now.

  But he and his ops planners did have an important decision to make, and one that had to be made now. If their initial reconnaissance of the Night’s Edge system turned up intel that made mission failure a likely outcome, there was a lesser operational goal they could fall back upon, a lesser and more temporary victory.

  Their orders, if an assault upon Night’s Edge proved impractical, were to destroy the Sirian Stargate.

  The complicating factor there, of course, was the presence of the N’mah. Several million of the aliens lived inside the warren of chambers and passageways and vaults inside the immense stargate structure, had lived there for over three thousand years, since before the Xul had destroyed their star-spanning trade empire. The N’mah had been planning on leaving Sirius. According to their ambassadors back on Earth—several of whom had accompanied Task Force Seafire—the Sirian N’mah population had been constructing several asteroid starships in Sirius space, a project that had begun over eighty years ago. Those starships were now nearing completion, but most of the stargate population were still dwelling in the shallow seas and canal-linked cities inside the Gate’s twenty-kilometer ring. Three weeks ago, the N’mah emissaries on board the Henderson had communicated with their fellows inside the Gate, ascertaining that fact; the N’mah fleet was not yet loaded, and would not be ready for departure for at least another ten Earth years.

  And that was very, very bad news indeed.

  Garroway had already decided that he would find another way, any way, than the one presented by his orders. In the event that the assault on the Xul-occupied star system beyond the Sirian Gate proves impractical, those orders had read, Task Force Seafire will undertake the destruction of the Sirian Gate regardless of the presence of a local population. This destruction is to be considered absolutely necessary for the security of Earth and of Humankind….

  Bullshit, Garroway thought. Bullshit, pure and simple. The N’mah population at Sirius was the only N’mah population known. There might be other surviving groups elsewhere in the Galaxy, but this group knew of no others.

  It was possible that the Sirian N’mah were the very last of their kind.

  And, damn it, the N’mah were humanity’s friends. Thousands of years ago, they’d come to Earth and helped the shattered and barbarous survivors of the Xul-An war to regain their feet, teaching primitive tribes along the shores of the Arabian Gulf the essentials of agriculture, science, hygiene, and literacy, essentials lost with the destruction of Earth’s Ahannu overlords.

  And since contact had been made anew with Humankind’s ancient benefactors, the N’mah had proven their friendship time and time again. That initial recent contact had resulted in a sharp, short battle inside the Sirius Gate—the result of mistaken identities and mutual fear. General Garroway’s father, in fact, had been instrumental in stopping the firefight and initiating peaceful contact.

  And in the one and one-third century since, the N’mah had provided Humankind with assistance as vital to human survival as the gift of literacy eight thousand years earlier. They’d helped human scientists begin to make sense of the yottabytes of data recovered from the Ancient cities on Mars and from the Xul Singer on Europa, data which would help Humankind determine at last the truth of his origins and his place in the Galaxy. They’d known some tricks in nanotechnology that had streamlined and improved human construction and nanufacture technologies, vastly improved Ev extraction techniques allowing almost unlimited amounts of energy to be pulled from hard vacuum, and shown human physicists how to manipulate that most basic quality of mass—inertia—permitting manned starships to achieve accelerations that would have otherwise killed their crews.

  Besides which, the N’mah Garroway had met were intelligent, rational, civilized, and downright decent beings, more decent than lots of humans he’d known.

  General Clinton Garroway was damned if he was going to go down in history as the human who’d committed genocide on a nonhuman species with no better reason than that he was “just following orders.” Hell, as he read the mission plans, destruction of the Sirius Stargate would not be enough to save the Earth. The Xul possessed faster-than-light technology independent of the stargates, and they would be able to figure out what had happened to the Sirius Gate. They would come hunting for the culprits, and sooner or later they would return to Earth and destroy every human they could find within a fifty light-year radius.

  His orders to destroy the Sirius Gate sounded like an ass-covering move by some Earth-bound politico—quite possibly one of the world leaders now planning on fleeing for Andromeda. Well, fuck that, and fuck the man who’d thought it. There had to be another way.

  When the first recon probes had returned with word of the Gate Fortress waiting on the other side, he’d begun to think he was going to have to find it.

  For decades, now, military engineers had been at work inside the Gate, looking for a way to shut it down that would not involve destroying the entire structure. So far, they’d come up empty. The Gate’s operation depended on two counter-rotating black holes moving at close to the speed of light; if those things got loose from their magnetic containment torus, they would wreak incredible destruction on the way out, and any imbalance of those precisely balanced gravitational fields might well tear the giant ring to pieces.

  But they were still looking. The chances that they would come up with something now, however, after years of study, were vanishingly small.

  Their only hope was to find a way to neutralize the Xul fortress so that Operation Seafire would succeed.

  And now, after careful review, General Garroway was willing to concede that there was a chance of success.

  He just wished it wasn’t so small, that there weren’t so damnably many ways that the whole thing could collapse and fail.

  In a download window in his mind, he could see a 3-D computer graphic of the current disposition of forces. The entire task force was clustered about the Sirian Gate with one exception.

  A month ago, while Task Force Seafire was still backing down into the system, one of the ships had altered course slightly, separating from the rest of the group. That lone ship was in position now far removed form the rest of
the fleet—almost four hundred billion kilometers away from the Sirian Gate. That distance—about fifteen light-days—was the minimum distance necessary for the ship’s acceleration run.

  “Are we in agreement, then?” Garroway asked the assembled conference of minds, human and AI, linked with his own.

  “I’d say so,” Admiral Gresham said. “Do we have any choice?”

  “There are always choices,” Quincy’s mental voice said. “The question is whether they are palatable or not.”

  “We’ll have two weeks to abort, if we have to,” Colonel Lee pointed out. “But God help us if we have to.”

  “Roger that,” Garroway said. “Very well. Operation Seafire, Phase One…execute.”

  The command dispatched a laser-com message, directed outward toward the lone, waiting starship.

  Not for the first time, Garroway wished human or N’mah science had come up with a means for faster-than-light communication. That such was possible was definitely proven. He remembered that discussion, so long ago, in the chow hall at Fairfax Center with Chrome and that Marine flier. Quantum physics showed how such things should work. The Cave of Wonders on Mars housed hundreds of open communication channels with other worlds in other star systems, apparently in real-time, without speed-of-light delay. But after three centuries of study, all that could be said with certainty was that the Ancients had been able to talk across interstellar gulfs without a time lag thanks to a direct application of quantum entanglement and nonlocality, and so far no one, human or N’mah, had figured out how to duplicate the trick. Humans on Mars could talk with humans at the Pyramid of the Eye on Ishtar as easily as speaking with them face-to-face, but it would take over two weeks for the execute order to crawl from the Henderson all the way out to the IST Intrepid in deep space.

  Such were the constraints inherent in the laws of physics.

  But the execute order also put things in motion here in the rest of the task force. The Marines were committed now.

  And everything, everything depended on their success.

  20

  21 AUGUST 2323

  Assault Group Tripoli, Force Alpha

  Stargate, Sirius Star System

  0930 hrs, TFT

  “Okay, boys and girls,” Colonel Lee’s mental voice said through the group’s link. Time to roll. Good luck, and God-speed!”

  “First Platoon,” Captain Mehler’s voice said over the net. “Accelerating.”

  Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway scanned the tactical display in his link window, a final check of all personnel. They were as ready as they would ever be.

  In the TO&E for 1MIEU—its Table of Organization and Equipment—a squad consisted of twelve Marines arranged in three four-man fireteams. Two squads made a section, and two sections with two commissioned officers made a fifty-man Marine platoon. Under normal circumstances, the sections were led by a lieutenant and a lieutenant j.g., with the lieutenant in overall command of the platoon.

  Two platoons were organized as a company—a hundred Marines plus a twenty-man support and headquarters element led by a captain—and four companies, plus another headquarters element, numbering five hundred Marines, made up a battalion, under the command of a major.

  That, at least, was the ideal organization of a Marine battalion.

  Things were never ideal, however. Since Lieutenant Wilkie had not yet been replaced, Garroway, as the senior NCO of First Platoon, was pulling double duty. He was the acting platoon leader of First Platoon, Alpha Company, and he was serving on Captain Mehler’s company command constellation as his senior NCO advisor.

  And, inevitably, the unit breakdown became a bit more complicated because of the special needs of this operation. The first assault force through the Gate was designated as Strike Team Alpha. It consisted of two assault companies—1st and 3rd—operating under the command of Captain Mehler, since Major Benton, of First Battalion, would be staying behind at the Sirius side with the rest of the battalion HQ element. Captain Padgett would be coming through the Gate at 0950 hours with the second wave—2nd Company plus the HQ and support elements, as strategic reserve.

  In essence, Garroway was senior NCO for a half-battalion’s worth of firepower going through the Gate on the initial strike. Two hundred fifty Marines would be on this initial deployment, with two hundred more set to come through in twenty minutes.

  Unless something went terribly wrong.

  Garroway, and his fellow assault force personnel, was once again tucked into the cozy closeness of an IMAC pod.

  Normally, fifty IMACs, an entire platoon, would have been loaded on board a Marine S/R F-8 Starfire, a thousand-ton spacecraft designed as a stealth penetrator. In more conventional space battles, a fleet of F-8s would approach a target planet or space station in full stealth mode, release the IMACs, and return to the fleet. The IMACs, as Garroway and others had demonstrated over Mars, would enter the planetary atmosphere and deploy the Marines at the designated LZ.

  But there was a special option this time presented by the unique battlefield terrain. The IMACs, two hundred fifty of them, had been launched on the Sirian side of the Gate, and were now under computer control, gently accelerating into the twenty-kilometer-wide opening. Their inbound courses had been carefully planned to send them in a broad ring encircling the entire inner Gate, with each pod skimming through less than ten meters from the ringwall.

  Evenly spaced around a ring with a circumference of almost 315 kilometers, each pod was a little over 1.2 kilometers from its two nearest neighbors.

  The trick was…each IMAC was sheathed in energy-absorbing nano to reduce its detectable signature to nearly zero, and once they were through the Gate there would be no communication whatsoever between pods. The readout Garroway was studying now showed the presumed position of each of the IMAC pods as determined by their controlling AI. If everyone in the assault force was where he or she was supposed to be, well and good.

  But if even one of them screwed up…

  Ahead, the immense ring of the Stargate loomed enormous, less than two kilometers away now. He checked his position, and decided that the IMAC’s computer had everything well in hand. He was on course, on time. There was nothing for him to do but wait. The ringwall drifted steadily closer, until it took on the aspect of a titanic white-gray cliff. The stars ahead, viewed through the lumen of the Gate, were those of local space, constellations little changed by the task force’s 8.6 light-year trek out from Earth’s solar system.

  As his IMAC drew closer, however, it began to respond to the gravitational tug of the Gate, or, to be more precise, to the space-distorting gravitational field created by its internal pair of black holes zipping around its circumference at very close to the speed of light. He was in free fall, now, so he didn’t feel acceleration, but he could see the Cliffside suddenly begin to move, as he fell faster and faster into the Gate.

  And then, the sky ahead blinked….

  Tripoli Command HQ,

  IST Henderson

  Stargate, Sirius Star System

  0935 hrs, TFT

  Linked in through the command-communications suite on board the Henderson, General Garroway watched the IMACs moving into the Stargate.

  What he was seeing was a computer simulation, of course. Individual IMACs were too small, too black, too invisible with distance and nanoflage as they crept along the inner ramparts of the Sirian Stargate for the human eye to pick them out. He hoped that applied for Xul optics as well….

  But the computer showed the ring of two hundred fifty IMAC pods, marking where they should be as they slipped deeper into the Gate’s gravity well, picking up speed as they fell, then blurred suddenly, seeming to leap forward under high acceleration before vanishing completely. God speed….

  Next through was the F-8 Penetrator Delphinus, Captain Belkin, commanding. Forty meters long and massing eight hundred tons, she was neither fighter nor starship, but a landing transport pressed into special service as a missile carrier. Delphinus was also co
ated in nanoflage to reduce her signature on the other side of the Gate, but she was large enough that Garroway could see her optically, a cigar-shaped shadow with awkward bulges and sponsons, black against a brightly lit patch of the Stargate’s smooth, inner-rim wall, her shadow close alongside.

  “Delphinus, Tripoli Control,” a voice said over the command net. “Check your drift.”

  “Roger that, Control.” The shadow slowed, holding position against the gravitational tug of the Gate.

  And behind the Delphinus were two more Penetrators—the Aquila and the Lyra—and the MIEU’s full compliment of thirty-two Marine aerospace fighters, all visible by their electronic markers, but invisible optically.

  Would it be enough?

  Garroway scowled at the thought. It had to be enough, because it was way too late for second-guessing either the plan or the plan’s execution now. He checked a side window, and noted that Intrepid was also in position—now two light-hours out.

  They were committed, and Humankind’s survival depended now on both the implementation of Operation Seafire, and on a host of unknowables—the strength of the Xul fortress, the speed of their response and the resilience and flexibility of their fleet, and, most especially, the evil out-workings of Murphy’s Law.

  It was an axiom of combat that the side that made the fewest mistakes usually won. The mission planners had done all that they could.

  Now it was up to a handful of Marines in their Spam-in-a-can assault pods.

  Good luck, Travis, he thought. We’ll all come through this…or none of us will.

  Delphinus blurred and vanished, following the first wave through the Gate.

  Assault Group Tripoli, Force Alpha

  Stargate, Night’s Edge Star System

  0935 hrs, TFT

  One moment, Garroway was seeing familiar stars and constellations ahead, and then, in an instant, the background blurred, rippled, and suddenly changed, as if the channel had been changed on a video wallscreen. He felt an internal shift as well, an inner tremor as he crossed a subtle disjunct in spacetime, and bridged in an instant fifteen thousand light-years.