by Ian Douglas
In fact, sharp eyes would have noted that that ring of Sirius light was sharply brighter and thicker on one side than on the other, for Intrepid was not aimed squarely at the star itself, but at a still-invisible point just to one side.
The Sirius Stargate.
Only an artificial intelligence of considerable flexibility and power could have guided the Intrepid on so precise a course, and at so extreme a velocity, but Quincy4 felt no pride at that, either. His larger and more complex brothers might have experienced such an emotion—or at least been able to simulate it convincingly—but Quincy4’s programming simply didn’t have the depth, or the necessity, for such frills. All Quincy4 needed to do was pilot the Intrepid, from her original boost from Mars orbit, to her staging point with the task force’s arrival in the Sirius System three weeks ago, to this, her final run.
Intrepid had stopped accelerating some time ago—how much time was a matter for debate both by philosophers and physicists. She’d begun accelerating toward the Stargate from a point two light-weeks away from the Gate three weeks ago. Guided by navigational updates provided by the rest of the task force, he’d nudged the Intrepid this way and that, aligning her perfectly on the center of the Gate, a task roughly equivalent to attempting to thread a needle…when the needle was stationary in New York, and the person holding the thread was inbound on a hypersonic suborbital transport that had departed from Tokyo International an hour before.
No merely human navigator could have even attempted such a feat. There were simply too many variables, and the actual process of navigation, dependent on the precise measurement of signals and data coming from the target but strongly blue-shifted by near-c velocities, required both senses and manipulations that were, in fact, superhuman.
Eighty-three minutes objective yet to go until Gate acquisition.
Objective. At this velocity, eighty-three minutes objective passed in less than one minute subjective.
Assault Group Tripoli, Force Alpha
Objective Philadelphia
Night’s Edge Star System
1014 hrs, TFT
Travis Garroway prepared to leap into emptiness. Laser soundings of the abyss in front of them revealed a depth of nearly five kilometers, an empty drop straight into the heart of the monster.
“Damn it, Trigger,” Chrome told him over their private channel. “You don’t have to do this!”
“Yes, I do,” he replied. “I’m giving the orders, so I do the same thing I expect my people to do. I won’t lead from the rear.”
His people deserved better than that.
“Then I’m coming, too!”
“Negative! You hold the fort up here…and help us haul ass the hell out of Dodge when the time comes!”
“Damn it, Trigger!…”
“Can it!” Reaching out, he touched the shoulder of her armor. “Don’t worry, Hon. I’ll be back in just a minute.”
He didn’t add that what happened after that was still problematical. They weren’t allowing much time for a getaway.
Garroway looked to left and right. To either side, nine other Marines, similarly tethered, stood at the edge of the abyss looking back at him, ready to make the jump.
Their small group had grown to fifty-three Marines—roughly platoon strength. Ten of them carried K-94 backpack nukes. But there were no officers; Garroway was the ranking NCO. And he was not going to send them into something he would not enter himself.
“Right!” he called on the tactical channel. “Let’s go, Devil Dogs!”
“Ooh-rah!” chorused back at him. He took some strain on the monofilament line connected to his suit harness, leaned forward, then kicked off, angling himself head-down, into the gulf. In his arms he carried his K-94 boom-pack, already armed and set. A mental command triggered the thrusters on the back of his armor, accelerating him.
The rest of the nuclear-armed Marines followed, plunging into the chasm, trailing their retrieval lines like unwinding spools of thread.
None of us are getting out of this thing alive, he thought as he drifted into the fortress’s depths. He caught that thought, then, savagely, and tried to turn it around.
Survival was possible…but it also was not what concerned them at the moment.
In fact, E&E—Escape and Evasion—had always been a somewhat marginal aspect of the operational plan for the RST. It had been bad enough in the planning stages, when they could assume an orderly deployment to the fortress’s surface, and a tightly clustered landing at the planned LZ.
But they hadn’t been able to coordinate the assault, not with the incoming IMACs so badly scattered by the Xul defenses. Once down, it had been a scramble for individual Marines to link up with other Marines…and they hadn’t been able to find any surviving officers; Mehler had died in the approach, and there was no sign of either Lieutenant Costigan or Lieutenant Ford. So far as Garroway knew, forty-six Marines of Assault Force Alpha and seven of Bravo were all that were left out of an original combined strike group of four hundred fifty.
Fifty-some Marines against the Xul fortress. Not good odds at all.
But right now, absolutely the only thing that counted was to plant as many nuclear devices as deep within the Xul fortress as possible. If they could manage an E&E at the end of it, so much the better…but every Marine in the assault group had known going in that survival here would be a long shot.
As had been explained in their briefings, deep penetration of the Xul fortress gave them their best chance of destroying the thing. He remembered what he’d glimpsed on the way in, from his IMAC—how craters punched in the side of the Xul monster by Marine strike craft apparently had begun closing over and repaired themselves, and how some kind of field seemed to reduce those explosions’ effects. Like the Xul intruder in the Asteroid Belt, the fortress could shrug off nuclear explosions at or near its hull, rendering long-range bombardment ineffective.
But ten nukes going off a hundred meters or more down should cause so much damage to the surrounding structure that repair would be impossible…or, at the very least, it would take a long time to effect.
How much of that, he wondered, was due to his belief that it would happen.
And would believing make their escape any less impossible?…
Belief mingling with fear and with determination, Garroway and nine other Marine volunteers sailed deeper into the darkness of the abyss, drifting head-first, clutching their boom-packs like magical talismans. He wished there were a way to plant the charges way deep…like five or six kilometers down, but that was begging for trouble. The Xul defense so far had been spotty and disjointed—possibly because they were busy with the attacking aerospace craft outside—but the Marines couldn’t count on that happy situation lasting for long.
The descent was eerily dreamlike. The walls of the chasm were sparkling with some indefinable energy, and seemed to be flowing and shifting as he watched. The cliff side was smoothly irregular and peppered with large, geometrically angular polygons of various shapes and sizes that appeared to float, move, and overlap one another in a weird and ever-changing parody of living organisms.
He was moving too fast, however, to see any details. His suit, he knew, was recording everything he saw. He hoped the science people could make something of it.
Assuming he could get the suit back to them in one piece.
Ahead, a kind of ledge extended out from the wall, apparently encircling the chasm, though it vanished into darkness to either side. Twisting in his fall until he was dropping feet-first, he triggered his thrusters for a brief, sharp deceleration, then reached out, snagging the ledge and scrambling to a full halt. The other Marines grappled with the narrow walkway, which shifted and oozed beneath their gloves and boots.
“Chrome! How deep are we?”
“Two hundred meters, Trig.”
“Okay,” Garroway said, turning his body to face the wall. “We plant ’em here.”
“Trigger!” Chrome called from overhead. “Hurry it up! You’ve g
ot company!”
He checked his tactical display, then turned, looking out into the gulf. There were things out there, dimly reflecting light from the Marines above…egg-shaped machines, and other, larger devices, with glittering eye-lenses. And they were moving in closer.
“Give us cover!” Garroway yelled, and bright sparks and flashes began strobing in the darkness, as plasma guns, lasers, and kinetic-kill rounds from Chrome’s group began marking down individual fliers. Garroway paid no more attention; his team had their hands full planting their weapons.
But first they had to dig holes for them, using nano-D tunneler packs. They slapped these on the side of the cliff and fired them with a mental command. Instantly, nano disassemblers in each pack began eating into the diamond-tough material, breaking it down into gently expanding clouds of elemental dust and various gasses.
PFC Thomas Yount, working over his disassembler pack, suddenly jerked and screamed, as white-hot plasma engulfed his legs. He pushed off from the wall, arms flailing.
Corporal Easley pushed off after him, snagged him by his combat harness, then used his thruster to pull back to the wall. In the same instant, Sergeant Crocker and Lance Corporal Hutchinson both were hit by separate blasts, their armor shredding in intense heat, the air inside their suits suddenly expanding into hard vacuum, mingled with bloody mist and molten fragments.
“Keep working!” Garroway yelled. “Get the charges planted!”
For a nightmare moment, Xul combat machines pressed in upon them, ripping Groneman and Keenan away from the cliff wall. Corporal Tracy Fitzpatrick shoved her K-94 into the gaping crater before Garroway, then shrieked and twisted as her right arm and shoulder were engulfed in plasma flame.
Garroway planted his own boom-pack, then turned and grabbed Fitzpatrick, pulling her down with his left hand while he used his right to aim his gauss rifle past the wounded Marine. A mental command sent a stream of 5mm rounds spraying into the oncoming swarm, splashing machines apart in silent bursts of high-velocity nano-coated slivers. The nano-D began eating what was left. Invisible clouds of the stuff sprayed past the original targets and began contaminating other Xul machines in the swarm, eating into their black and glossy metallo-ceramic shells.
Gunfire from the ledge two hundred meters overhead continued to flare and flash within the Xul swarm. The swarm was thinning now, the destruction accelerating.
And then the gulf again was empty, save for the surviving Marine raiders.
“Okay, Chrome!” Garroway yelled. “Bring us up! Fast!”
The monofilament threads on their harnesses began to contract, reeling them back up the side of the cliff. Easley clung to Yount, and Garroway to Fitzpatrick, bringing the now mercifully unconscious Marines back from the abyss.
Marines did not abandon their own.
Assault Group Tripoli, Strikeforce Wing
Stargate, Edge of Night Star System
1018 hrs, TFT
What fucking idiot thought we could take on Xul tech and win? Maverick thought, the ferocity catching him by surprise. Skydragons were dying around him one after the other, swatted from the sky by invisible energies sleeting from the alien warships.
It was, he thought, a strange kind of battle, with the Marine aerospace fighters literally dogfighting with battleships. The Xul formation had begun breaking up, with several of their number attempting to pursue individual fighters.
Two were following him, slowly but inexorably.
“Maverick!” Hunter was yelling over his comm channel. “Get clear! You’ve got two on your tail!”
“I see ’em, damn it….”
Accelerating hard, he put his ’dragon into a trajectory that sent him skimming low across the surface of the Xul fortress, as the pair of Xul behemoths followed above and behind. Evidently, they were holding their fire, unable to shoot at him without hitting the fortress.
He would use that.
Firing his thrusters in sharp, short bursts, he rolled closer to the fortress and angled down behind its horizon, putting the structure between him and his pursuers. The trouble was, he was almost out of reaction mass. His long burn to bring him back from his drift in toward the Night’s Edge sun had depleted his reserves. At the rate he was using his water at the moment, he would only be able to stay in the fight for another few seconds.
But then, the way the Xul fleet was smashing up the wing, he wasn’t likely to survive more than another few seconds in any case.
He spun his fighter end-for-end, hurtling tailfirst away from the fortress, his electronic focus licked on the structure’s horizon as it receded. A moment later, the nose of one of the mile-long Xul battlewagons appeared, edging out from behind the fortress, and Maverick triggered his KKR, sending a stream of compmat needles ripping into the alien ship. As the Xul monster continued to emerge from behind the fortress, his point of aim moved down its belly, opening the thing as if he’d pulled down a zipper.
Fragments and debris spilled into space, but Maverick could see the damage was already closing over as the enemy’s hull repaired itself. He kept firing, however, trying to cut the monster in half, watching explosions flare and pulse within its depths…and then the Xul fired back.
The plasma bolt seared past, meters from Maverick’s Skydragon. He rolled clear, seeking again the cover provided by the Xul fortress, but an alarm was sounding and the ship refused to respond to his mental command. A dozen systems had been fried by the near-miss, and his computer was down. With a jolt, he realized his own implants were off-line as well. He felt…alone, utterly cut off from the rest of the universe.
Shifting to manual control, he engaged his thrusters…and they failed as well. He couldn’t tell if he was finally out of go-juice, or if a critical electronic component had been fried by the Xul shot.
Most of the other Skydragons in the wing, he saw, had already been destroyed.
It wouldn’t be much longer now….
Assault Group Tripoli, Force Alpha
Objective Philadelphia
Night’s Edge Star System
1023 hrs, TFT
Fitzpatrick had died on the ride back up.
Garroway reached the top of the cliff where the rest of the Marines were waiting for him. Unhooking his tether, he looked around, still a bit dazed from the intensity of the firefight in the depths.
Ten Marines had gone down that cliff face just minutes earlier. Five had returned, one terribly wounded. Yount’s suit had sealed off his legs, and the medinano in his blood would have rendered him unconscious and begun healing the wound, but he needed to be in a sickbay, and the sooner the better.
“Let’s get the hell out of Dodge,” he told Chrome.
“Roger that. I think the natives are getting restless.” The vibrations felt through the corridor walls were growing more insistent, more powerful. Clearly, the fortress was mustering some sort of supreme effort…though whether that was to be directed against the Marines or against some external threat there was no way of knowing.
Yet.
The sooner they all escaped from this madhouse, the better, so far as Garroway was concerned.
“Okay, people,” he said. “Let’s get topside and blow an egress.”
His suit computer had kept careful track of every twist, turn, and advance he’d made since leaving his IMAC. Since all of the suits were talking with one another, via Quincy, the AI was able to paint a three-dimensional diagram in Garroway’s mind, showing their position nearly eighty meters beneath the surface of the Xul fortress, and the positions of some fifty-two IMACs where they’d been left scattered about on the fortress’s outer hull.
Unfortunately, those eighty meters of ceramic and metal were blocking all radio contact with any of the IMAC pods. They needed to reach the uppermost deck of the fortress so they could again communicate with one of the pods, any of them. If they couldn’t, they would be trapped.
Quincy, of course, had kept track of their movements, and of the open passageways they’d traversed to rea
ch this point. Going back the way they’d come wasn’t exactly that simple, since the corridors continued to change and shift, even as they hurried through them.
But they made good progress. Once again, when they needed an opening, an opening usually presented itself, almost as though the structure were reading their minds. That, Garroway decided, was just a little too weird for him.
He tried not to think of the packages now metaphorically ticking away in the darkness of the abyss. If the fortress was alive, and if it could somehow sense the presence of those ten nukes…
Don’t think about it! he thought. Just focus on getting out of here. Believe you’re going to get out of here!
And then a shaft that hadn’t been there before opened above them. Using their suit thrusters they jetted upward in the station’s microgravity. They reached the top deck thirty seconds later, and just fifty meters from one of the IMACs.
It was Lance Corporal Brunelli’s IMAC. “I hope you’re not thinking of using your pod again, Brunelli,” he told her.
“Wouldn’t do me much good, would it, Gunny?”
“Not glued to the roof that way. But now it’ll help all of us.”
He gave a mental command to Quincy and, seconds later, light flared up ahead, and a shock wave rippled through the corridor, thumping hard against the soles of Garroway’s boots. “Move it, Marines! On the double!”
The Marines scrambled for the place where Brunelli’s IMAC had been moments before…and which now was occupied by a gaping hole five meters across. The ruin of the corridor partly blocked their way, but they were able to use nano-D tunneler packs to burn through, emerging once again beneath the cold, hard light of the stars.
“Your message has been transmitted,” Quincy told Garroway. He didn’t remember, at first, what the AI was talking about. Then he recalled his brief report on the quantum-effect field within the fortress.
