Star Marines

by Ian Douglas

  He wasn’t sure that mattered now. The view out from the Xul station was one of inexpressable horror. Directly overhead, between the fortress and the Stargate, Garroway could see half a dozen Xul warships, designs much like the one that had bombarded Earth, though each had unique features, hull shapes, and arrangements of cupolas, domes, and sponsons. As he stared up at the armada, a tumbling piece of wreckage drifted across his line of sight, charred and broken, but looking entirely too much like the down-angled wing of a Skydragon aerospace fighter.

  There was no sign of any of the Marine aerospace wing, or of the F-8s that would have been positioned near the Stargate to recover the Marine strike force. There were only those Xul warships—six close enough to be naked-eye objects, and another fourteen visible only as red blips on his tactical display.

  Private Chanik flexed his knees and kicked off into space, spreading his arms as he triggered his backpack thrusters. “C’mon, guys!” he cried. “Let’s get off this thing!”

  Lance Corporal Osman leaped off after him. “Belay that!” Garroway snapped. “Hold your positions!”

  The two Marines overhead cut their thrusters, but continued to drift away from the station. “Sorry, Gunny,” Osman said. “You want us back there?”

  “Negative. Don’t do anything.”

  “What’s the matter, Trig?” Chrome asked.

  Garroway waited, watching as the two Marines continued to dwindle into the sky. “Nothing. I guess,” he said. “But those two idiots could get themselves fried if the fortress notices them.”

  But minutes passed, and nothing happened. “Okay,” Garroway said. “My guess is that the battlespace around us is so full of broken crap the Xul can’t track individual combat suits. So we start kicking off…but we do it irregularly, in ones and twos, not as a group, understand me?”

  “Yeah, Gunny,” several voices replied.

  “No thrusters. We don’t know what they can pick up on their sensors. We kick off, and we drift. And maintain radio silence!”

  “And then what, Gunny?” Sergeant Knowles asked.

  “And then we wait, Knowles. We wait, and we see what happens.” Another minute passed, and neither the Xul warships nor the fortress seemed to take note of the two drifting figures, now scarcely visible against the night.

  He checked his internal clock—1053 hours. It had taken just thirty minutes to get back to the Xul structure’s surface.

  “Okay, we do this alphabetically,” Garroway said. He checked his roster of the Marines with him. “Amory!”

  “Right, Gunny.”

  “You take Yount, and hang on to him. Take off!”

  “Aye, aye, Gunny.”

  He waited a beat. “Amundsen! Go!” Another Marine kicked off.

  This, Garroway thought, had always been the weakest part of the plan, getting clear of the fortress without being caught in the blast or seen and killed, but they’d known they would face this moment before they’d volunteered. The K-94 packs had been set with a detonation sequence that would trigger them either if one or more of them was disabled—disassembled by the fortress defenses, for example—or at precisely 1136 hours TFT. That meant the fortress could blow at any time…but the fact that it had not meant the nuke backpacks were still in place, still live and armed.

  If they waited on the station’s surface, they would be caught in the blast. They might be thrown clear, but there were no guarantees that they wouldn’t be killed by the shock, by the storm of hard radiation, or by the expanding cloud of plasma. If they took their chances drifting through open space, they might survive the nuclear blast, but they might be caught…or they could be spotted by the fortress sensors and burned down, one by one. The presence of the Xul fleet added a new uncertainty, on that count.

  All they could do now was drift and wait, wait for the fortress to detonate in nuclear fury behind them, or wait for the Intrepid’s arrival, whichever happened first.

  He wondered about other Marines, elsewhere within the fortress. The powerful shock of the IMAC’s detonation had also been a signal. If there were any other members of the assault force still alive, still somewhere inside, they would have felt that blast as a powerful tremor through the walls and begun to come back up to the surface.

  In any case, 1136 hours had been the absolute deadline for their return.

  A literal deadline, for that was the calculated moment for Intrepid’s arrival.

  Drifting out from the fortress like so many chunks of wreckage, their mission complete, the Marines waited.

  IST Intrepid

  Sirius Star System

  Inbound to the Stargate

  1053 hrs, TFT

  Forty-three minutes to Gate acquisition…about thirty more seconds subjective.

  Fortunately, one of the superhuman aspects of Quincy4’s abilities was his speed of operation, an advantage shared by all electronic life forms over their organic counterparts. For a computer, a single second could be an eternity, depending on the number of operations it performed within that second.

  And now Quincy4’s sensors were picking up a transmission from the Gate—a long stream of tightly packaged transmissions originally sent as long-wave maser bursts—coherent microwaves, the radio equivalent of a laser—but those waves had been blue-shifted into the visible spectrum. Quincy4 was reading them as an optical laser. Decoding the heterodyned data, Quincy4 noted the change in the tactical situation at the Gate, the situation as of forty-four objective minutes ago, at any rate, and read General Garroway’s suggestion that he employ Sequence Three.

  The larger strategic picture implicit in that tightly compressed message was largely beyond Quincy4’s cognitive abilities, which was just as well. The implications would have worried a human pilot, since the tactical situation at the Sirius Gate was now far more complex than it had been before.

  But, one way or another, Quincy and his human masters were now committed. Sequence Three required nothing of the AI at the moment but the firing of a series of explosive charges at the connector ring of Intrepid’s now-empty forward RM tanks and, simultaneously, of a slight deceleration.

  Although the surrounding universe appeared strangely reshaped by Intrepid’s speed, there was actually no other indication of the vessel’s speed. From Quincy4’s point of view, the huge, mushroom cap of the transport jolted a bit as the charges fired, then began moving forward, faster than the rest of the vessel.

  At this speed, any forward thrust was almost entirely swallowed by the relativistic increase in mass. As Quincy applied deceleration to the rest of the ship, however, the RM tank appeared to move forward more and more swiftly. In fact, it had retained its velocity from the moment of separation; the rest of Intrepid, her velocity slightly reduced, was merely falling behind.

  It was just as well that Quincy, while capable of astonishing feats of mathematical calculation, was simply not equipped to worry about the outcome of the high-speed threading of a needle, Tokyo to New York….

  23

  21 AUGUST 2323

  Assault Group Tripoli

  Near Objective Philadelphia

  Night’s Edge Star System

  1120 hrs, TFT

  For almost half an hour, the Marines had drifted out from the Xul station. Their individual vectors very quickly increased the separation of each from the rest. Garroway had leaped into the night last, but could no longer see any of the others. Their nanoflage armor was reproducing the light of their surroundings—black, for the most part, with occasional bits of starlight from the galactic spiral arms in the background—which rendered them invisible at optical wavelengths.

  Their original mission plan had counted on each IMAC pod being too small for the Xul to notice on approach. That, perhaps, had been overly optimistic on the part of the planners; they had been spotted, possibly by radar, possibly by their thruster-power signatures, possibly simply because they’d occulted some of the glow of the Milky Way in the background.

  Whatever the reason, the Xul fortress ha
d seen them and opened fire, causing them to land scattered, most of them outside the planned LZ.

  The fortress wasn’t shooting at them now, however. Not that that would make a lot of difference in the long run. With the Xul fleet parked out there, the F-8s wouldn’t be able to come in and pick them up, even if they survived the fortress’s demolition.

  How much longer? He checked his internal clock, and saw the countdown had less than fifteen minutes to run. Not long now….

  How far had they come? He didn’t want to chance using a laser rangefinder to check the distance to the fortress, not when any radiation from the drifting Marines might call down a blast of artificial lightning. But they’d jumped from the crater with an estimated speed of two meters per second, and that had been thirty-four minutes ago for Amory, twenty minutes ago for him. Call it four kilometers for PFC Amory, twice that for Chanik and Osman, since they’d used their thrusters had given them some extra momentum…and a bit under two and a half for him, bringing up the rear as tail-end Charlie.

  He felt almost overwhelmingly lonely. Once before in recent memory—a few months objective—he’d been adrift in space and certain he was going to die. Then, at least, he’d been inside the shattered hulk of a transport, with other Marines close by for company. They’d known they were going to die, but knew they would die together.

  Dying like this, however, utterly alone, adrift in space…

  He wished he dared open a channel to Chrome. He needed to talk to her…maybe tell her he was sorry. For a while, there, last spring, objective, she’d wanted to stay and work with the Terns, the advocates of a long-range relativistic migration to Andromeda, but when he’d insisted on volunteering for Seafire, she’d changed her mind and volunteered as well.

  And now she was out there in the night, somewhere, as alone and as scared as he.

  Carefully, he maneuvered himself around so that he was facing the fortress, which still filled the sky below—or in front of him now, rather, since there was no up or down, above or below, in zero-G. There was a lot of debris in the sky; he could see several fragments drifting between him and the illuminated portion of the fortress, black specks against the dark gray of the monster’s hull.

  A flash against the fortress’s surface, well off toward his left, startled him. It had just been a pinpoint of light, so quick he thought for a moment he’d imagined it. Using his helmet optics to magnify the area, though, he could see a small pockmark against the surface—a crater like the one they’d created by blowing Brunelli’s IMAC in place.

  So other Marines in the assault group had survived, and were escaping now. How many? There was no way to tell. It was even possible that some of those isolated specks of debris were other Marines, drifting out into the night.

  The fact that so much time had passed, though, suggested that they, too, had planted their charges before pulling their E&E. That bunch had certainly waited for the last possible moment, though. When the station exploded, they would be damned close to the inferno. Good luck, guys, he thought. Semper fi!

  Six minutes to go.

  Carefully, so as not to put himself into an uncontrolled tumble, he maneuvered his suit once more in a slow half-turn, stopping the move by extending an arm and putting in some counter-rotation. When the explosion came, he wanted to be facing away from it, with his suit’s backpack between the blast and his torso.

  And why the hell am I bothering with that? he wondered. According to his suit link, he had about ten hours left of air, a bit more of power. If he survived the detonation of an unknown but large number of kiloton-sized tactical nukes within a few kilometers of his position, if he wasn’t killed by hurtling debris or the expanding bubble of hot plasma, is he wasn’t spotted and picked off by a Xul warship, he could look forward to ten hours of empty loneliness, followed by suffocation as his air gave out.

  Better, perhaps, to open an air valve and try breathing vacuum. It would be quick. And quicker still would be dying in the destruction of the Xul fortress.

  But…he also wanted to live. While he was alive, there was hope, even if it was hope of a chance at odds that made winning the billion-newdollar lottery back before Armageddonfall look like an everyday occurrence.

  And he found he was intensely interested in what would happen when Intrepid came through that gate, if she came through, if the truncated AI navigating her had pulled off its long-range bull’s-eye and threaded through the Sirius Gate. It was hard to tell, but the Xul fleet appeared to be slowly reforming itself in front of the Night’s Edge Stargate.

  They would certainly have a grand view of Intrepid’s emergence in just another few minutes.

  If they survived the destruction of Objective Philadelphia.

  The light of a brilliant sun burned at his back, felt rather than seen, so bright the light leaked through his visor and through closed eyelids and tingled inside his armor-sheathed body. Early! he thought. It blew five minutes early! One of the planted charges must have sensed the Xul repair system tinkering with its structure, and detonated.

  And then thought itself was swept away by the silently intensifying light….

  IST Intrepid

  Sirius Star System

  Inbound to the Stargate

  1131 hrs, TFT

  At Intrepid’s light-dogging speed, five minutes of objective time translated to about three and a half seconds. Plenty of time. For a piece of high-speed software emulating but not copying human thought, three and a half seconds was time enough for some millions of separate routines…including a final check of all navigational parameters and a final subtle nudge with the side thrusters to adjust for the latest update on the Sirius Gate’s position. The near-empty RM tank was now well ahead of the Intrepid’s main body, but Quincy4 adjusted its vector as well through a maser link, using small thrusters mounted around the tank’s rim.

  He was picking up a steady stream of far-blue-shifted signals from the task force, now, each discrete packet giving very precise navigational data that allowed him to make constant updates to precise course and speed. The toughest part was extracting useable navigational data from the ring of starlight encircling the Intrepid’s bow; individual stars were smeared into the circle, and it required some sophisticated computer gymnastics to determine an accurate plot for each.

  The Sirius Gate was still quite invisible. Five minutes objective meant he was still five light-minutes out, about half the average distance between Earth and Mars, or between three hundred and four hundred times the distance between Earth and the Moon. The Gate was still invisibly small.

  Quincy4 was incapable of worry, however, as the last couple of objective seconds trickled away. He completed his final correction, then waited….

  Assault Group Tripoli

  Near Objective Philadelphia

  Night’s Edge Star System

  1135 hrs, TFT

  The light had faded almost immediately, but seconds later, something like a powerful gust of wind had caught Garroway from behind and set him tumbling. His suit’s external sensors detected a sudden rise in temperature and in radiation.

  As he’d hoped, however, his backpack had provided some protection, and he’d drifted far enough that his radiation exposure had been minimal—120 REMs, according to his health monitors. Eventually, with some carefully timed bursts from his maneuvering thrusters, he was able to halt the tumble. The expanding plasma cloud had given him a bit of a shove. Just how much of a shove, how much faster he was moving now, was impossible to judge.

  Ahead lay the Night’s Edge Stargate. It appeared to be growing larger as he flew toward it, but very slowly. The only way to tell for sure how fast he was going was to bounce a laser rangefinder off of it…and he didn’t dare with the Xul warships still hanging in the sky.

  Instead, he rotated himself once more, looking back at the Xul fortress. The structure had been…transformed.

  Fully one-third of the sphere had been blown open, and the sky was filled with tumbling, half-molten debris. The
remainder of the fortress lay imbedded in a cloud of white-hot plasma, still expanding in utter and deathly silence, and much of the structure appeared to be collapsing in upon itself.

  Mission accomplished.…

  He didn’t know how many of the nuclear backpacks had actually detonated. The explosion of one would have automatically triggered the explosion of others, but whether the effects were added together or cancelled one another out was largely a matter of chance. The end result, though, was most satisfactory. The Xul fortress, clearly, had been critically damaged.

  Moving his arms and twisting, he turned once more to face the Stargate. The next part of the show was something he definitely wanted to see.

  In fact, when it happened, he wasn’t certain exactly what he did see. One moment, he was looking at the Gate and a half dozen Xul warships, perhaps forty kilometers away. The ships appeared to be maneuvering closer to the opening, were perhaps preparing to move through to the Sirius side.

  And then a small sun appeared in empty space, several kilometers from the gate’s opening, and in the midst of the Xul fleet. The sun expanded swiftly, intolerably bright, so bright Garroway tried to turn away even as his helmet’s optics blanked out the cascade of blinding light.

  When he could see again, the Xul ships in front of the Stargate were…gone. In their place was a glowing white haze with contrails etched against the black of space, a kind of high energy splash that had exploded out from the Gate’s mouth like the blast from a shotgun.

  It took a few moments for him to piece together what had happened. Intrepid must have emerged from the Stargate at close to the speed of light and collided with one of the Xul battleships. The release of kinetic energy with that collision must have been incalculable….

  It also meant that Seafire had failed. The Marines had gone in to Objective Philadelphia to make sure the converted transport cleared the Gate and made the passage in to the planet five light-hours further in-system, but the Intrepid had collided with a Xul ship.