by Ian Douglas
21
21 AUGUST 2323
Assault Group Tripoli, Force Alpha
Objective Philadelphia
Night’s Edge Star System
0942 hrs, TFT
The passageway, clearly, was not designed for humans. It was roughly a meter and a half wide by a meter and a half tall, narrow enough that he kept bumping the sides as he moved. If there’d been gravity he would have had to crawl.
In microgravity, though, it was a simple matter to haul himself along with one hand, while clutching the grip of his gauss rifle with the other. First and foremost, he needed to find and link up with other Marines in the assault force.
There. His armor’s communications suite was picking up signals and routing them through to his tactical display. Two…no, three signals, both within fifty meters of his current position. A fourth appeared seconds later. Across the surface of the Xul fortress, other IMACs were coming to rest, bonding with the hull, drilling through, and releasing the Marines on board.
He tried to orient himself with the other signals, which were spread across an arc of nearly two hundred degrees. His computer calculated signal strengths and range, then identified that one, IDed as Corporal Tracy Fitzpatrick, as closest to the center of the group. The problem was finding a passageway leading in that direction.
And there it was. Garroway wasn’t quite sure how it happened, but the passageway he was in twisted suddenly right, then came to a branching of five tunnels, one heading in exactly the right direction. It opened wider, too, letting him propel himself from handhold to handhold more quickly. If the Xul combat machines didn’t put in an appearance…
No such luck. The surface of the passageway walls began reforming as he watched, with Xul machines seeming to grow out of the surface itself. Each was between one and two meters long, elongated egg shapes with oddly asymmetrical bulges and swellings, with slender and highly mobile tentacles, with glittering lenses that might be eyes, or which might house receptors for other senses entirely. They blocked the way ahead, interlocking their tentacles, a living wall of machines.
Bracing both feet against part of the corridor at his back, he grasped the gauss rifle in both gauntleted hands and squeezed the trigger. The weapon used powerful magnetic fields to hurl twelve-by-five-millimeter slivers of nano-coated steel sleeted from his weapon at high speed. Recoil slammed at him as the slivers accelerated from the weapon with a muzzle velocity of nearly a kilometer per second.
With a cyclic rate of ten per second, the gauss rifle acted like a chain saw in close-quarters combat. The stream of projectiles struck the nearest Xul machine with a pulsing blue-white flash of liberated kinetic energy, and the ovoid body splashed, creating a gaping crater that swiftly opened into a gaping hole all the way through, and an instant later the two halves floated apart, tentacles still wildly lashing about. Other machines were ripped apart in quick succession as Garroway swept the spray of deadly fire back and forth across the advancing crowd. Each strike by another sliver liberated a dazzling blue flash of heat and light. In seconds, the narrow opening of the corridor was filled with drifting fragments, some sparking from broken power feeds, some glowing red hot, like coals.
Garroway pushed ahead, then, shoving past the debris, moving clear of the ambush site. Where the hell was the rest of the assault force?
According to his tactical display, more and more Marines were entering the Xul fortress’s hull, some a few tens of meters away, others kilometers distant. They were all around him now, too. He continued moving toward the closest Marine, however, turning another corner, then entering a broad, open space two meters high but hundreds of meters across.
A trio of Xul machines drifted in front of him. He cut one apart with a burst from his gauss rifle, then saw the other two flash and vanish in a burst from a PPG.
“Gunny!” Private Nolan yelled, waving. “Over here!”
“Coming in!” Garroway called back. “Hold your fire!”
Half a dozen Marines had already gathered there, Corporal Fitzpatrick among them, floating in a ring in order to cover every direction. As more and more Marines arrived, the circle grew larger.
The big question now was where to start planting the backpack nukes. They were inside the outer skin of the fortress, but going deeper would be better, giving them a better chance of destroying it.
Garroway began searching for a way into the fortress’s heart.
Assault Group Tripoli, Strikeforce Wing
Stargate, Edge of Night Star System
0952 hrs, TFT
All thirty-two A-699 Skydragons of the strikeforce aerospace wing had slipped through the Gate in dispersed formation, spread out over an area almost twenty kilometers across. After the shock of transition, they wheeled together into an open cone and began closing with Objective Philadelphia. Battle had already been joined as they entered the battlespace; as he spun his dragon on her axis and went full throttle-up, a brilliant flash close to the surface of the gate marked the destruction of the penetrator Delphinus.
“Okay, chicks,” said the voice of the wing leader, Major Griffith. “Green Squadron on overwatch. Blue on strike. Hit it!”
Maverick, more formally known as Lieutenant Thomas K. Elliott, shoved his ’dragon’s virtual thruster control all the way forward and felt the answering slam of acceleration as his fighter boosted toward the flattened sphere of black metal ahead. “TK” to his friends, Elliott was known as “Maverick” in the cockpit, a handle reflecting his west Texas birthplace and his notoriously independent, even unmilitary attitude.
“Oh-five, boosting,” he called over the squadron command link. Other members of the squadron added their confirmations. Blue Squadron would make an attack run on Objective Philadelphia first, with Green Squadron hanging back just in case the bad guys popped a surprise. Elliott was Blue-five.
He’d joined the Marines in 2306—eight years ago, subjective—and after training and several duty stations on Earth and in Earth orbit, been assigned to VMA-412, a Marine aerospace attack squadron based on Mars. He’d been completing his first two-year space deployment there when the Intruder had suddenly shown up and begun flinging rocks at Earth.
The events of that day, of that week, still were burned into his soul. VMA-412 had scrambled, boosting for orbit where they’d rendezvoused with the Marine IST Henderson; the attempt to intercept the Xul intruder…and the stunningly welcome news that the Marines operating off the Preble had gotten there first and destroyed the monster.
Days later, after being redeployed to Earth to provide aerospace security for relief forces operating there, Elliott had learned that his entire family had been killed when the Helios Tower megaplex in Miami had been struck by a fragment and destroyed.
Elliott had been granted leave that spring, and over the course of two weeks had gone through extensive deep-psych counseling. He’d never been sure how well the reprogramming had taken, however. It certainly had felt touch-and-go at the time. He’d never discussed the matter with his AI-generated virtual therapists, but he’d been damnably close to suicide more often than he cared to admit even to himself, including at least three occasions after the AIs had pronounced him fit for duty.
He was pretty sure his therapists knew; it was tough to hide stuff like that from their deep probes of both his brain chemistry and his nano-neural implants. But they’d said nothing, and neither had he. He didn’t want to make an admission that would end with him being summarily dismissed from the Corps.
In fact, Elliott was pretty sure they wouldn’t have done that. The Corps had lost a lot of personnel Earthside with Armageddonfall, and simply didn’t have the manpower to dismiss trained and experienced Marines—especially aerospace pilots—on something as relatively minor as psychological trauma.
That thought forced a hard-edged grin from him. Marine medico-AIs did not consider psychological trauma as minor, ever, but with the shortage of pilots they might well have insisted that he be assigned someplace on Earth or in Eart
h orbit…perhaps with an eye to helping him overcome his trauma by helping the survivors on the home planet directly. They would not have risked him on a two-decade interstellar mission into Xul space, where the top functioning of every Marine was vital to the mission’s success.
But he’d been able to bury a lot of what he’d felt, to bury it deeply enough, he thought, to give him a shot at being accepted for Operation Seafire. By early summer, as plans for Seafire solidified and received a final go from the World Union and Federal Senate votes, he had done his grieving, come to grips with his personal demons, and was out for blood. Xul blood…or whatever electromagnetic ichors passed for blood in that mechanistic and bloodless collection of group minds and ship-born gestalts humans called the Xul.
He was going to make the bastards pay.
“Blue Squadron!” Griffith called, as the Xul fortress loomed large dead ahead. “Spread out! We’ve got a power surge building!”
The A-699 was streamlined for atmospheric work, but still possessed an ungainly, droop-nosed appearance, more vulture, as one wag had put it, than dragon. Delta wings stretched out aft, angled sharply down as if clutching something precious to its breast, enclosing a clutch of plug-and-play wing-mount hard-point pods that could carry anything from EM sensors to AG-40 mass-homers with 20KT tactical nuke warheads.
For this op, the squadron was packing a mix of AG-12 kinetic-kill rockets and FGX-4 missile pods; tactical nukes were definitely contraindicated this time around, with Marines swarming around inside the target. As he twisted the Skydragon into line with the objective, he noted the area—highlighted in green on his visual display—where his fellow Marines had landed, and took aim at a stretch of metal terrain nearby. His mental command triggered a burst of KKRs, meter-long needles of compmat, compressed matter electromagnetically stabilized at a density some five times greater than depleted uranium. Accelerating at nearly 100 gravities, those deadly slivers smashed into the Xul station’s hull, punching through in gouts of light, intense heat, and sprays of molten metal.
Static howled across his link connection, a shriek of EMP. Ahead, two of his comrades, Steelgirl and Ripper, vanished in silent bursts of white-hot plasma, and his sensors tracked the passage of an intense beam of magnetically accelerated charged particles. He hadn’t even seen the Xul weapon that killed them, but he twisted hard to port and accelerated, hoping his violent jinking would throw off the aim of any Xul gunners who might now have him in their sights.
A second beam fired, and another Blue Squadron Marine died—Hammer, one of the squadron’s newbies. Damn.…
Fighter combat in microgravity was entirely different from atmospheric engagements. Once moving in a given direction, you kept moving in that direction. To turn, you killed your forward movement while simultaneously applying a sideways vector. There was no atmosphere in which to bank, brake, or swoop. There were only the cold, hard hand of Newton, and the equations of mass, thrust, and vector.
Elliott’s long burst of kinetic-kill rockets had acted like forward thrust, sharply slowing him. Yawing left, he applied fifty Gs of thrust to boost him at an angle from his original course, carrying him low across the enemy fortress’s surface. The maneuver would have rendered him unconscious if not for the N’mah inertial damper humming away just behind his acceleration couch.
Still another Skydragon vanished in white light as static howled. The Xul station was using powerful PPGs, magnetic weapons directing beams of charged particles, at the swarming fighters.
Skimming past the dark surface of the fortress, Elliott flipped his fighter end for end, streaking into the night tail-first, keeping his craft’s blunt nose pointed at the enemy. Interesting. The surface of the fortress sphere was shifting, as though the individual slabs that made up its outer armor were sliding, interpenetrating, and changing shape. Briefings had indicated that Xul ships and constructs could repair themselves, and he wondered if that was what he was witnessing.
Ten kilometers out, he armed and triggered an FGX-4. The missile lurched away from beneath his port wing, hurtling toward the target on white fire. A kilometer above the surface of the flattened sphere, the missile detonated, an utterly silent 10 kiloton fission burst that pumped a powerful X-ray laser focused as a tight FGX beam—the letters standing for Fission Generated X-ray.
Elliott didn’t see the effect of his shot; his optics blacked out as the sensors overloaded and, moments later, the expanding shell of plasma from the explosion caught his Skydragon and sent it tumbling. The sky pinwheeled past his head, alternating the massed, clotted stars of the galactic spiral with the emptiness of intergalactic space.
He scarcely cared. He’d hit the bastards back, and he’d hit them hard.
There was little more that he could do, now, save try to get his ship back into the fray.
Assault Group Tripoli, Force Bravo
Objective Philadelphia
Night’s Edge Star System
0958 hrs, TFT
His IMAC burst open and Lance Corporal Nal il-En Shra-dach spilled headfirst into the bowels of the alien craft. Clumsily, he rose to his knees while unshipping his laser rifle. He was wearing Mark XLIII CAS, an older version of combat armor than the Fighting Forty-four used by the first-wave Marines, and that meant his weapon was not integral to the armor.
No matter. He’d not had time to train with the more complicated CAS system, and it simply meant that he needed to be careful not to lose his weapon.
The mantra etched into his mind by a succession of DIs droned in his thoughts. This is the General Electric/Mitsubishi LR-2303 laser rifle, the current standard-issue personal infantry weapon of the U.S. Marine Corps! It is a one-tenth-second fifty-megawatt pulse laser weapon, delivering five megajoules of energy on-target, with the equivalent destructive power of the detonation of one kilogram of TNT or a similar chemical explosive….
Nal rose as though he were trapped in a dream, witnessing things, including his own movements, as though from a distance, and in painfully slow motion. He checked the safety on his laser rifle, and checked his noumenal indicators to make sure the weapon was at full power and the auto-interrupts engaged. By the book, recruit! By the fucking book!
His training over the past months had been exhaustive and, unfortunately, the vast majority of it had been through noumenal downloads, rather than by direct real-world experience. It still seemed like nothing short of pure magic that the Kia-people—the humans of lost Earth—could pour knowledge into his head as though filling a tub with water by pouring it in from buckets. Incredible.…
But everyone from Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz back on Ishtar to the small army of drill instructors, proctors, and teachers at the Marine training facilities on Earth all had emphasized again and again that downloaded knowledge had to be reinforced by real-world experience before it could be truly his. It wasn’t enough to know it; it had to become a part of you.
So Nal still felt awkward and clumsy with such basic items of equipment as the IMAC, his combat armor, and his laser. He knew how to use them, but he hadn’t yet had the time to practice that knowledge.
This, he’d been told by an Earth Marine in the chow line one evening, was what you called major on-the-job training.
As he’d been trained, he checked his tactical display, looking for the nearest Marines. This type of landing was tricky, since it involved the incoming landing force being scattered all across the map, and the first thing he needed to do was rendezvous with other Marines. There was a concentration of green blips that way, behind him and to the left, and the passageway he was in ran more or less in that direction.
Swallowing his dry-mouthed fear, he started moving.
Perhaps the two things in all the universe he most desperately desired, most desperately believed, was to find other Marines and to not find the enemy. He felt totally un-prepared for an encounter with the Xul, alone and in the dark.
And, somehow, the gods he no longer believed in were listening. He turned several corners, followed the le
ft-hand path in a branching corridor, and heard a challenge from up ahead. “Who’s there?”
He was so scared he almost answered in his home tongue. “Lance Corporal Shra-dach!” he managed to say. “I’m with you!”
“Come on in, Nal,” another voice, a woman’s voice, said. It was Staff Sergeant O’Meara, and he felt an almost embarrassing rush of relief and happiness. “Any sign of Xul activity that way?” she asked him.
“N-no, Staff Sergeant. Nothing.”
“Damned peculiar,” she said. “We should’ve run into something by now.”
Something hammered at the soles of his boots. “Gods! What was that?”
“Don’t sweat it, kid. Our aerospace wing is hammering the station from the outside. Giving it an A-one shellacking, from the sound of it. C’mon. We need to make tracks.”
Nal fell into line with the others—about twenty other Marines, led by the staff sergeant. It felt good to be with O’Meara again. He didn’t really know her, but he knew she’d been nearby at the battle outside Washington, and somehow that counted for a lot.
They descended several levels, then turned another corridor. Suddenly, the Xul combat machines were there, all around them, dropping out of the overhead and emerging from the passageway walls. Nal brought his laser rifle up and began firing, his aim wild, but his suit computer helped compensate, letting him fire when the muzzle of his weapon actually happened to be on one of the Xul machines, and cutting the power when his movements dragged his point of aim across a fellow Marine.
It was without doubt the most desperate moment in Nal’s life, far more terrifying than the hand-to-hand fight atop the Marauder technical. A huge thing of shadows and snakes was moving in the darkness ahead, and most of the Marines were concentrating their fire on that, but other, smaller attackers were already among them, seeking to grapple them one-on-one. A meter-long ovoid of black ceramic and metal clasped his legs with slender, flexibly twining tentacles, dragging him close. He lashed out with his weapon, smashing the butt against glittering lenses, then pounding away indiscriminately, breaking the thing’s grip. He fired as it tumbled backward, and the laser bolt blew the thing into half-molten fragments, its tentacles still writhing and twisting like living things.
