Star Marines

by Ian Douglas

  Fifteen thousand light-years.

  He’d seen the images brought back by the drones, of course, but this was different, seeing it with his eyes, with his whole being instead of through a virtual window opened in his mind.

  Edge of Night. The poetic name was apt. Ahead, the vast sweep of the Galaxy, seen from a viewpoint just above one of the uncoiling spiral arms, stretched off into infinite vistas compressed and flattened by perspective, creating a misty blue horizon, of shorts, against the emptiness of Night Absolute. To one side, the galactic core lay imbedded within the spiral arms, swollen and red-tinged, edged with dark tendrils of interstellar gas and dust that here reflected, there obscured the ruddy glow from the Galaxy’s central heart.

  Within the emptiness beyond and above the galactic arms, isolated patches of starlight, faint wisps of light, fuzzy and insubstantial, marked the teeming spheres of globular star clusters, and the far more distant glow of other galaxies.

  For just an instant, Garroway felt a wild and terrible sensation of falling, of falling into an endless night…until he deliberately looked away, focusing instead on the internal readouts for the IMAC’s control systems.

  Steadied, he looked back. One star, he noticed, was not fuzzy or indistinct, like the faint and blurry stars marking clusters and galaxies. It was hard, sharp, and bright, with a distinct orange cast to it. It was sobering to realize that that was the central sun of this star system, the only solitary star he could see in the entire sky, and so far away its light was five hours old by the time it reached his eyes.

  Garroway shook himself, dragging his mind back from the bottomless drop into those endless depths of intergalactic space. Sightseeing could come later. Right now, he had a Death Star to kill.

  He grinned at the thought. The Powers That Were, meaning any of those higher up in the chain of command than he, really didn’t like that name, which had been slapped on the Xul monster by enlisted Marines. He wasn’t sure of the derivation—it had something to do with a centuries-old tri-V or fiction download, he’d heard—but his revered uncle and others in the command constellations evidently believed the term “death” gave the thing too much power, made it too much of a threat psychologically, and subsequently made it dangerous to Marine morale.

  Utter nonsense, of course. Most of the Marines, men and women alike, took a perversely macho pride in the idea that a few hundred of them were about to storm something that big, that threatening. Of course the damned thing was dangerous. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t have needed to send in the Marines.

  “Objective Philadelphia” indeed! It was a fucking Death Star, and the Marines were going to take it down.

  He gave the IMAC’s controls a mental nudge, and the starscape wheeled past. The assault pod had been climbing the vertical cliff of the Stargate ringwall, and his change of course swung him over the lip, bringing him parallel to the flat face outside the opening. Objective Philadelphia hung just ahead and to the right, neatly bisected by the absolutely flat horizon created by the face of the Stargate, the size of a full moon seen from Earth. On his tactical display, other Marine IMACs were reaching the Gate’s outer surface as well, swinging over the ninety-degree edge, and deploying across the Stargate’s face. Garroway adjusted his course, bringing the Death Star to the left, until it hung in the sky directly ahead. All around the Gate’s circumference, other IMACs shifted their courses, converging on the objective, now sixty to eighty kilometers away, depending upon where they’d emerged from the Gate’s opening.

  Every battle is shaped by its terrain. Hills, valleys, woods, deserts, water courses, obstacles such as cities or farmhouses, all dictate the defender’s strategy, the attacker’s approach, and the shape and course of thrust and counterthrust. Even in space combat, where there is no cover, no place to hide, engagements between spacecraft can be strongly influenced by local planetary gravity wells—the gravitational high ground of interplanetary space that determine high-and low-energy orbits.

  The Night’s Edge Stargate created its own terrain, and the Marine IMACs were using that terrain to best advantage with a very old tactic. From the earliest days of aerial combat, aircraft had flown nape-of-the-earth, “hedgehopping,” as it had been called in the first and second world wars, in order to grab a tactical advantage. Strike aircraft could fly long distances at treetop altitude without being seen, their radar images lost in the hash of ground clutter and backscatter.

  There were no trees on the Stargate’s face, no hedges to hop, but there were hills and valleys, irregular bits of sharp-edged terrain elevations and depressions that created a mosaic of light and shadow beneath the glow of that distant orange sun. Garroway assumed manual control from the IMAC computer, and began negotiating that irregular terrain.

  Stargates, artificial structures created eons before by some unknown and long vanished intelligence—quite possibly the fabled Ancients who’d created Homo sapiens in the first place—were extremely massive. The two black holes hurtling through their internal tracks each massed as much as a very small star or a large planet, and much of the rest of the ring structure appeared to be manufactured from condensed matter. The surface gravity of the thing, however, which should have been several Gs, was shielded and somehow redirected by some still-unknown technology. The gravitational focus at the center of the Gate opening amounted to some hundreds of Gs, though objects passing through were in freefall and felt nothing. The gravitational attraction toward the faces and along the outer rim of the structure, however, and within the corridors and chambers inside, amounted to something just under one gravity.

  Garroway’s IMAC was flying just above the Gate’s surface, now, staying aloft by interacting with the powerful magnetic fields surrounding the entire structure. The question was whether the Gate’s guardians, in that flattened sphere up ahead, could pick up the disturbances in that field as two hundred fifty Marine assault pods moved through it.

  A calculated risk. For all practical purposes, the IMAC pods were invisible at all optical, infrared, and radio wavelengths, at least at ranges of more than a kilometer or two. A century of monitoring the fields projected by the Sirius Gate showed that magnetic anomalies did occur within them, apparently at random intervals and with no obvious outside cause. If the Gatekeepers, as the fortress guards had come to be known, were aware of subtle ripples in the Gate’s magnetic fields, they so far had not sounded the alarm.

  Of course, Garroway added in a wry aside to himself, how would the Marines know if the alarm had been sounded? Quite possibly, there’d be no warning at all, until the approaching IMACs were winked out of existence by some unknown but highly advanced alien technology.

  There was no use in worrying about it. The assault group was committed.

  His pod swept over the outer edge of the Stargate rim, and he was in open space once more, approaching the Death Star at a slow and unobtrusive creep of half a kilometer per second.

  A second risk appeared to have been justified: assaulting the fortress first, and the Stargate itself second.

  Trying to second-guess alien thought processes was always a risky proposition, but the rational had gone something like this. If the Edge of Night Stargate was inhabited by Xul—as the Gate at Sirius was inhabited by N’mah—then there really was no need for a fortress standing off by itself. If it was inhabited by non-Xul—another N’mah population, for instance—and if they had sensors capable of monitoring the Marine assault, they would probably watch and wait rather than warn the fortress.

  Probably. In either case, trying to penetrate the Stargate first would certainly alert the Gatekeepers in the Death Star. Trying to take down both at the same time held too many uncertainties in timing, and would not buy the team assaulting Philadelphia any extra time. Hitting Philadelphia first, and worrying about mopping up the gate second, seemed to offer the best hope for complete surprise.

  They were past the Stargate now, and well out into the fifty-kilometer gulf between gate and fortress. There’d been no reacti
on from the enemy so far.

  No outward reaction, at any rate.

  Forty kilometers to go. Eighty more seconds….

  And then his link with the IMAC’s computer erupted in the mental equivalent of red lights and warning buzzers. The pod’s sensors had detected a surge of powerful energies ahead. Exactly what those energies represented was unknown, but it looked like the signature of a battery of high-energy particle weapons coming on-line.

  There was nothing Garroway could do about this, however, but wait it out. That energy surge would have been detected by Wing Shadow, however, and Captain Belkin’s people would be going into action now.

  Wing Shadow was the code name for the Delphinus, the F-8 Penetrator that had accompanied the first wave of IMACs through the Stargate, bringing up the rear. If all had gone according to plan, Delphinus should have swung up and over the Gate’s rim and grounded on the face, safely nestled away among those enigmatic mesas and canyons, undetectable by Xul radar or its equivalents. Probes similar to those that had initially come through to scout Edge of Night space were electronically linked with the Delphinus by tight-beam IR laser, watching the fortress, the Gate, and the distant Xul fleet next to Objective Tripoli.

  And as soon as those probes picked up evidence of a Xul response…

  As Garroway’s assault pod fell through the gulf between Stargate and fortress, his tactical display lit up with a spread of twelve K-440 high-acceleration missiles streaking through the widely scattered IMAC formation. Driving forward at over one hundred gravities, those missiles, fired from the Delphinus, flashed low across the Stargate face and out into the gulf.

  Garroway tensed, then found he was unconsciously holding his breath and had to concentrate for a moment to make himself breathe slowly and regularly. Those missiles had been programmed to pass through the widely dispersed formation of IMACs. So long as each assault pod was exactly where it was supposed to be….

  Thirty kilometers to go. One minute….

  In traditional Marine landings, carried out across open water against a defended beach, heavy naval gunfire provided cover for the assault craft and amphibious vehicles by taking out enemy gun positions, forcing enemy gunners to take cover, and by providing a screen of smoke and hurtling debris. Instead of open water, the Marines were falling through hard vacuum, and instead of a beach they were approaching an armored deep-space fortress, but the principle otherwise was the same.

  Garroway’s tactical display flared white, and warning readouts described a heavy flux of charged particles sleeting past the IMAC’s outer hull. Half of the missiles launched from the Delphinus had carried tactical nukes, with about 10 kilotons of firepower apiece. The rest carried chaff warheads set to detonate one kilometer in front of the fortress station’s hull.

  There was always the chance that one or more of the nukes might penetrate the enemy station’s hull and complete the job the Marines had come here to do. But the Marines were here, and moving in first, because of the possibility that Xul technology could shield the fortress from nuclear blasts.

  Garroway couldn’t tell if the nukes had been effective or not. The fortress was still there…growing huge in his forward display, but masked now by clouds of plasma and radar-scattering bits of reflective material.

  Thirty kilometers….

  Twenty….

  More missiles streaked past, slamming into the target. He felt the buffeting, now, of hot plasma as the IMAC plunged through them, and heard the hiss and chatter of small flecks of debris as they struck his outer hull.

  The fortress was definitely still there, though there did appear to be some superficial damage. The outer surface seemed to shimmer and flow…possibly as it repaired itself. He wished he could see better, wished he understood what he was seeing. According to his tactical display, though, Delphinus was gone. The Xul must have returned fire and taken out the Marine penetrator.

  Ten Marines had just died, but in dying they’d opened the way for their comrades in the IMAC assault wave. With luck, the Xul had been distracted for a critical few seconds by nuclear warheads and the F-8 hovering above the Stargate’s face, and hadn’t spotted the incoming pods.

  Other signals were emerging from the Stargate now…the Marine fighters of the 3rd Aerospace Wing attached to 1MIEU. Delphinus must have summoned them with a probe sent back through the Gate to the Sirius side. He could see other F-8s emerging as well, intermingled with the smaller, one-man A-699 Skydragon aerospace strike fighters.

  Ten kilometers. Twenty seconds….

  On his tactical view, he could see a flashing green circle superimposed over the objective’s surface, the planned LZ for all of the incoming IMACs just visible through the thinning cloud of plasma.

  Then IMACs were exploding in the sky all around him, as static howled and beams of charged particles crisscrossed his sky. The fortress seemed to erupt in flickering lightnings, as a storm of destruction smashed through the IMAC formation.

  Garroway left evasive maneuvers to his IMAC’s computer, which could anticipate fire patterns and initiate evasive maneuvers far more swiftly and accurately than he. He felt a savage jolt as his pod fired its side thrusters, rolling clear as lightning flared through the space it had just occupied.

  More IMACs flared and vanished, as the rest entered a violent series of evasive maneuvers.

  “Assault Force!” Captain Mehler’s voice called over the tactical channel. There was no point now in radio silence. “Get down any way you can! Assault Control! Launch Force Bravo!”

  This was bad. Alpha had lost so many Marines in the past few seconds that Mehler was bringing in reinforcements already. All hope for a coordinated strike had just vanished, as individual IMACs tumbled through the lightning-blasted sky above the Death Star.

  “All units!” Mehler’s voice called. “All units, form—”

  And then static blasted through Mehler’s voice and the rest of his order was lost. Mehler’s IMAC was now an expanding cloud of white-hot plasma and debris.

  And then Garroway was through the plasma and chaff clouds. Objective Philadelphia filled his forward view, now, a towering cliff of black metal, torn in places by nuclear detonations. He gave the mental command that jettisoned the nose cap, exposing the docking ring. Forward thrusters fired, sharply slowing the fast-drifting IMAC, and then he slammed into the face of the cliff.

  The forward edge of the docking ring was coated with several types of nano. Sealers bonded with the fortress hull, welding the IMAC in place and forming an airtight seal. Sampler pads tasted the alien metal, immediately confirming that it was the same exotic blend of ceramic, plastic, and metal as had been found in the hull of the Xul ship that had attacked Earth. Clouds of disassemblers were released, chewing through molecular bonds and turning hull metal into a fine grit of carbon, iron, and other elemental solids, while releasing hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other gases and recombining them into liquids like water and ammonia. His scanners were showing a sharp increase in radioactivity.

  Well, one way or another, he wouldn’t be here for long.

  The intruder vessel’s apparently automated repair response in Sol’s Asteroid Belt had proven that the Xul used nanotechnics on a large scale. The damage Garroway’s IMAC was causing would swiftly be detected, and there would be a response. How rapid and how drastic a response that might be was unknown, but he knew he didn’t have much time…a few minutes, at most.

  His link with his combat armor provided a steady flow of data. The disassembler nano was breaking through into emptiness at several points. The chambers beyond were in vacuum. Gravity was slight—a couple of hundredths of a G—so the Xul apparently weren’t using any kind of artificial gravity. Vibrational data suggested something was moving around in there, though what that something might be, and how close, were unknowns.

  Come on! Come on!

  And then his telemetry indicated that the way was open. He made a mental connection over his control link, and the close confines of the pod life sup
port capsule around his head exploded open, and he was propelled forward into darkness.

  He drifted four meters and landed in an untidy heap, rebounding from an uneven deck in microgravity. “Alpha One-five!” he called over the company command channel, identifying himself. “I’m through! I’m on board Objective Philadelphia!”

  There was no response, and he didn’t know if that was because the channel was being blocked by meters of alien hull metal, because he was the first Marine on board the enemy construct…or because he was the only Marine left in the assault wave.

  That last was unlikely, but it was a sobering thought, nonetheless. Sobering, too, was the realization that the Marine formation had been badly scattered in those last few seconds of the approach. Instead of landing in a tightly clustered group with other Marines, he’d come down well outside the planned LZ. The nearest Marine in the assault force could be two meters away on the other side of that wall…or kilometers distant, fighting for his life.

  He cleared and charged his weapon, a 5mm gauss rifle with disassembler rounds, mounted to his right forearm. He also checked his K-94 nuclear device, riding in his backpack. The unit was intact and its diagnostics clear.

  Now all he needed to do was find a way deeper into this thing.

  He was in some kind of low, uneven passageway in total darkness, but he could see well enough by infrared. The bulkheads were glowing in IR—registering a temperature of around 5 degrees Celsius. He switched on his armor’s lights and checked the passageway on optical wavelengths.

  He appeared to be alone.

  What he needed now was more Marines. A series of vibrations through the bulkhead suggested something was happening that way. He began to haul his near-weightless mass along through the passageway, pulling himself along one-handed, to keep his weapon arm ready for immediate action, moving in the indicated direction.

  Believe in yourself, he thought. It was like they taught you in Weiji-do. You create order out of chaos!…