by Ian Douglas
Nal had never seen a kilogram of TNT explode, and, in fact, most of the energy in the bolt translated not as explosion, but as intense heat at the target, melting through the toughest metal, and causing the thing’s body to explode from thermal shock. The detonation was startlingly impressive, however, even with a complete lack of sound in the airless void of the passageway, and made him more cautious with his next shot. Another of the metallic beasts was grappling with Sergeant Ruehe, clinging to her back, and he hesitated, unable to fire.
Letting the laser rifle dangle from its sling, he pushed off from the wall at his back and flew in a long, flat trajectory, colliding with the tangle of pressurized armor and whiplashing tentacles.
“Get it off!” Ruehe was screaming. “It’s eating into my suit! Get it off!”
Grasping a tentacle with each hand, he pulled, hard, ripping the thing free from Ruehe’s armor. The egg-shaped Xul device, he saw, had been changing shape, molding itself to fit the curves and angles of the back and side of her armor, and the nuclear device she wore high on her shoulders. One of the glittering lens “eyes,” he saw, was emitting a dazzling point of light that was etching away at her armor—a laser cutter drilling into her suit. A sudden puff of vapor sprayed from the charred bit of armor, and the beam became sharply visible. Ruehe screamed again….
He didn’t have a knife, couldn’t attack it the way he’d taken on the armored marauder on Earth, but he could reach in with his glove and smash the lens, pushing it back into the body of the thing as the armored surface of his glove blistered and started to boil away. He felt sharp pain in his hand, and a maddeningly calm voice in his head began speaking of pressure loss and suit breach.
He ignored both, wedging himself between the sergeant and her weird attacker, levering it away from her and thrusting it clear as the tentacles loosed their grip. Another Marine fired at point-blank range, blasting the machine into molten gobbets of debris.
He grasped his hand, but his suit was already sealing itself, the nano circulating inside the skin coagulating and stiffening in a high-tech analogue of blood, a blood clot sealing a wound. Medinano in his body reduced the pain to a distant throb. Sergeant Ruehe’s suit, too, was healing.
“Thanks, Nal!” she told him.
“Dra-evidha,” he said. He saw puzzlement shade her eyes through her visor, then realized he’d answered her in the People’s Tongue. With adrenaline pounding through his system, English came clumsily to his lips. He searched for something he could say that she could understand. “Gung ho.…”
And she replied, grinning fiercely. “Semper fi!”
The attack ended as suddenly as it had begun, the strange machines melting away back into the tunnel walls, the large mass ahead torn and pocked by craters, the ragged edges still glowing red-hot.
“Let’s go, Marines!” O’Meara called from out in front. “I’ve got a lock on the rest of Alpha!”
Around them, like something from the depths of a terrifying nightmare, the tunnel walls themselves seemed to be changing shape.
Assault Group Tripoli, Force Alpha
Objective Philadelphia
Night’s Edge Star System
1003 hrs, TFT
They needed to find a way to plant their nuclear charges deep enough inside the fortress that the surface field dampers would not suppress the blasts. Guided by deep-probe soundings of the metal and ceramic walls around them, Garroway and his fellow Marines were moving deeper and deeper into the mazelike tangle of passageways that seemed to fill the skin of the fortress. The passageways around them were definitely flowing and shifting, changing shape as the Marine strike force made its way through the fortress’s interior. It was, Garroway thought, uncannily like moving through living intestines, as though the entire fortress were alive and made of flesh and blood.
Which was impossible, of course. The walls were metal and ceramic, not organic tissue…but somehow they were moving and growing around the Marines, opening up new passageways, closing others.
At first, he’d thought the thing was trying to close on them, to crush them—the word digest came unpleasantly to mind—but as they kept tracing their way deeper into the Xul structure, it became clear that the changes were actually helping the Marines more often than not, leading them in the directions their sensors told them they needed to go. This made no sense whatsoever.
“It’s like it wants us deeper inside,” Corporal Collesco said after a yawning passageway opened to their left, leading in exactly the direction they needed to move.
“Not quite,” Garroway said. “it’s more like we’re getting what we want close around us, but the Xul mind is controlling things farther away. Shit….”
“What?”
“Consensual reality.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Keep moving!”
The thought nagged at him. When the Marines needed a particular route to open, it did…though the walls kept disgorging various types of enemy combat machines, creating a moving firefight as they penetrated the monster. He was remembering, though, a conversation he’d had in a mess hall with Chrome and a Marine flier back on Earth an age or two ago…about quantum physics, and how the Xul performed their magic.
Belief?
Yeah, he thought. I want a tunnel to open up heading at one-eight-five relative…and it does. Wild.
And suddenly, it seemed completely plausible.
But he needed to test it.
“Force Bravo is coming in, one-eight-five relative!” Sergeant Giambastiani called suddenly. “Got ’em on deep sensor probe!”
“I see them.” He saw the green blips on his tactical display, about twenty meters behind them, but separated from the rest of them still by that much solid tunnel wall. They were picking up the vibrations of their movements, the heat from their suits, but they couldn’t communicate with them directly.
“Try something, everybody! We need a tunnel between us and Bravo! There’s got to be one. Imagine it opening up for us!”
“Whiskey Tango Fox?” Valdez said, using the old phonetic alphabet query—an ancient military joke—meaning “What the fuck?”
“Never mind! Just believe it!”
And the wall of the twisting corridor behind them began to melt, pieces moving, sliding out of the way, rearranging themselves as a new tunnel opening appeared. Moments later, an armored figure appeared, striding out of the opening—her ID revealing her as Chrome. More Marines followed behind her, weapons at the ready.
“Thank God!” Chrome called. “We thought we’d never get through to you!”
“That’s why you were having trouble,” Garroway said.
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Form a perimeter!”
Yeah. It worked….
“Quincy!” he called in his mind, uplinking to the platoon AI. “Quincy! Are you there? Do you copy?”
Quincy5 was little more than a local net spider, a tiny fragment of the original command constellation’s AI resident within the computers of the Marines’ combat armor and the weld-docked IMACs, far too limited in memory to be truly intelligent or self-aware.
But it did have access to a fair amount of data, and could draw conclusions within certain very narrowly focused parameters. Its primary purpose was to help to electronically connect and coordinate the Marines scattered across the fortress drop zone, and to serve as a communications link with the rest of the task force, but a secondary assignment involved penetrating what passed for a Xul computer system, the electronic and virtual world of this station, seeking data files to rifle, systems to shut down, sabotage to inflict. Quincy5, in that regard, was an extremely sophisticated and complex computer virus.
“Ready.” Garroway heard the flat and uninflected voice in his head.
“Quincy!” Garroway said. “Record for transmission!”
“Ready.”
“The Xul have some way of reaching down to the base state of reality to directly change matter and energy! It’s some kind of fi
eld or quantum effect that works on belief! Or maybe desire! Whatever it is, it changes the shape of matter locally. It’s like it rewrites the base program for matter!”
As he thought about it, the effect had been evident when they’d penetrated the Xul intruder in the Solar System last February-subjective. It had seemed like luck at the time, but they’d been able to plant their charges and extricate themselves ahead of that swarm of Xul combat machines and escape.
Well, almost escape….
“Do you copy that Quincy? Can you correlate with any of your data?”
“Copy. Correlation will require connection with higher-level host-avatars.”
“Transmit this when you get the chance. Flag it urgent!”
“Acknowledged.”
As expected, the walls around them were blocking their communications channels. His message, though, would be stored inside the suit computers of all Marines within range, and the first time one got close enough to make automatic connection with one of the IMACs up on the roof, the entire message would be burst-transmitted to every other Marine in range, including the aerospace craft outside, and any F-8 Penetrators maintaining station close to the Gate.
Briefly, he wondered if wishing there were a direct channel would work…and made a brief experimental attempt to link with his IMAC pod…but without result. The effect really did seem to be limited to the immediate area—within a few tens of meters or so.
“Listen up, everybody,” he called over the tactical channel. “We can make these passageways come and go by thinking about them. Tap into your Weiji-do training. Focus on opening a wide, clear corridor into the heart of this thing!”
And then, just ahead, the wall dissolved, melting away into emptiness. Beyond lay the approach to a vast chasm, an archway opening on emptiness. At their feet, the chamber yawned into a canyon half a kilometer wide, with the bottom lost in darkness far below.
“This,” Garroway said, “is exactly what we were looking for. Okay, Marines! Plant ’em!”
Of course, the Xul might be able to suppress the blast effects throughout the fortress interior…but there was only one way to find out.
Assault Group Tripoli, Strikeforce Wing
Stargate, Edge of Night Star System
1008 hrs, TFT
Maverick’s Skydragon had at last responded to his gentle urgings, losing its spin and boosting once more back toward the now-tiny ring of the Edge-of-Night Stargate. He could see both the Gate and its attendant fortress, now, made tiny by distance, and silhouetted against the infinitely complex and richly star-dusted background of the Galaxy’s spiral arms. That, he decided, was how the IMACs had been spotted during their approach. They must have occulted enough background stars to make their movement obvious to the fortress’s electronic senses.
He thought he had enough reaction mass to make it back to the Gate, but there would be damned little to spare. He would have to nurse it carefully. From the look of things, the battle around the fortress was in full voice; silent flashes marked X-ray laser blasts against the fortress…or the smaller, brief puffs of light marking the death of Marine fighters.
He had to get back there….
But a warning notice winked in his mind, and he opened a new window, downloading information coming from the far-flung sensory net of battlespace sensor drones.
They must be tracking this same data in the Penetrators back at the Gate…but, just in case they were too busy to notice…
“Tripoli Control, this is Blue-Oh-Five! Do you copy?”
There was no answer. Yeah, they were busy all right.
“Tripoli Control, this is Blue-Oh-Five! Do you copy?”
“Blue-Oh-Five, this is Tripoli Control.” The words were static blasted, almost unrecognizable. “Go ahead.”
“Take a look at your perimeter watch!” he called. “We’ve got trouble inbound!”
“Blue-Oh-Five, what is your situation? Over.”
“Not my situation. Yours! Take a look at Objective Tripoli! It’s the Xul fleet! They’ve left Tripoli and are moving in on you fast!”
Xul warships, at least a score of them, were materializing out of nothingness kilometers away, and closing on the Stargate like cavalry come to the rescue.
The enemy’s cavalry….
22
21 AUGUST 2323
Tripoli Command HQ,
IST Henderson
Stargate, Sirius Star System
1010 hrs, TFT
It was, General Garroway thought, now down to a race, and one with hellish consequences for the loser.
The news that Xul fleet elements were now just on the other side of the linked Stargates was, if not welcome, then at least anticipated. The grand plan for Operation Seafire, first introduced by naval and Marine strategists objective months ago but endlessly refined once the drones had sent back their images of the enemy’s tactical disposition on the other side, had assumed that some portion of the Xul fleet would move once they received word that the Gate fortress was under attack.
Communications drones coming up out of the Gate reported twenty-three Xul ships now approaching the Night’s Edge Gate and fortress. A tactical window open in his mind showed their relative positions—a rough cone formation, the tip aimed straight at the Gate. The fighters of VFA-412, tiny sparks, drifted away in all directions, scattered by the behemoths’ arrival. They had no role to play in the coming encounter. There was nothing they could do to even slow the Xul monsters, and Garroway was unwilling for them to throw their lives away to no purpose. As it was, those green sparks were flaring white and vanishing in ones and twos, as Xul weapons sought them out and destroyed them, relentless and implacable.
Garroway wondered if the Xul ships would turn those weapons on their own fortress. There was still so much about the enemy utterly unknown, a weakness even more serious, to his way of thinking, than the vast discrepancy in technologies. Clearly, they didn’t think like humans. They acted more like machines—or like the gestalt of a beehive or termite mound, and annihilating the Gate fortress in order to kill a few hundred Marines on board might well seem a perfectly reasonable exchange from their eldritch point of view.
Still, they appeared to be hesitating. If their advance could be slowed by just a few more minutes….
He wished he could know what was happening to the Philadelphia Assault Group. Those Marines, though, were completely on their own. No message had been received from any of them since they’d penetrated the hull of the Xul fortress, and that, too, had been expected. Xul hull metal—or perhaps it was some other aspect of their formidable technology—completely blocked all communications.
He checked the Earth fleet’s deployment. Green icons representing the vessels of Task Force Seafire hung motionless on the Sirius side of the Gate, arrayed in a ring matching the sweep of the Gate’s vast circle. All were in place, well clear of the Gate’s opening, but positioned with their sterns aimed directly at the Sirian Gate’s center.
The Battle of the Sirius Gate in 2170 had demonstrated that one weapon, at least, could destroy even a mile-long Xul warship…and it was a makeshift weapon at that. The drives employed by human starships took reaction mass—water—and used the effectively unlimited magic of energy drawn from hard vacuum to transform it into a plasma accelerated aft at close to the speed of light.
Those charged particles, besides supplying the thrust necessary to accelerate starships over a period of months to close to light speed, also served as deadly weapons in their own right. The center of the Sirian Gate now lay at Ground Zero, the focus of the main drives of seventeen starships, carefully positioned to lay down an intense high-energy crossfire on any Xul vessels that decided to poke their nose through from Beyond.
The N’mah asteroid ships were clear as well, almost two hundred kilometers distant. There were still N’mah on the Sirius Gate, he knew, but as many as possible had been evacuated over the past few weeks to the incomplete living spaces within their ark.
Despite Garr
oway’s good intentions concerning Humankind’s N’mah benefactors, the coming engagement might well result in the Sirius Gate being utterly destroyed…not from deliberate sabotage by Marines, but as a direct result of the unimaginable destructive energies about to be released there. If the Xul came through and the Earth ships engaged them, the Sirius Gate itself might well be among the first casualties.
“Quincy,” he said. “Package the tacsit and transmit to Intrepid. Recommend Sequence Three.”
“I have been keeping Intrepid informed,” Quincy’s calm voice replied. “Your recommendation has just been transmitted. There has been no reply as yet, of course.”
“How long? Until they get here, I mean.”
“Gate acquisition in five thousand forty seconds.”
Eighty-four minutes. Damn this was going to be close….
IST Intrepid
Sirius Star System
Inbound to the Stargate
1013 hrs, TFT
Quincy4 ran through yet another set of systems checks. Things were not good. The Intrepid, stressed far, far beyond her original design parameters, was fast reaching the point of complete system failure.
If the abbreviated AI that was Quincy4 had been capable of human emotion—and the computers on board the Intrepid simply didn’t have the operational capacity for anything that complex—he would have felt pride at how well the aging vessel had held together so far…and possibly some concern over whether she would be able to carry out the short list of tasks yet awaiting execution.
To Quincy4’s sensors, the universe appeared very strange indeed. Pushed for three weeks by a new, inertially damped drive at some hundreds of gravities, Intrepid now was moving at just a hair below the speed of light, within a hundredth of one percent of that ultimate velocity unobtainable to any entity composed of mass. The entire visible universe had been compressed into a ring encircling her bow, the light of all of the stars compressed into a narrow band; the innermost edge of that band was exceptionally brilliant at optical wavelengths—the radio and far-infrared light coming from the star Sirius itself, blue-shifted into visible light.
