by Ian Douglas
It had all been for nothing….
He tried calling up the collision on his tactical display, however, and immediately saw that something was wrong. There’d been a collision, yes…but the liberated energy had been too small by several orders of magnitude for a mass the size of the Intrepid—over one hundred thousand tons, plus twenty-five thousand tons of sand. Further, his suit’s electronic senses, quicker by far than his own, had detected…something emerging from the Gate a split instant behind the explosion and passing through it, leaving a ghostly trail of tattered plasma in its wake.
At infrared wavelengths, he could see the contrail clearly, emerging from the shotgun burst and aimed like an arrow toward the heart of the Edge of Night system.
“Way to go, Quincy,” he murmured, as he studied the data. Intrepid must have come through the Gate in two pieces…the jettisoned forward RM tank, two hundred meters wide and massing something like a thousand tons, followed by the rest of the starship. The RM tank had collided with a Xul warship at a hair less than light speed, converting itself and the Xul vessel into plasma and a great deal of free energy. An instant later, the rest of Intrepid, following along behind the jettisoned tank, had punched through the expanding gas cloud like a bullet through smoke.
That cloud, meanwhile, had billowed out and caught other Xul ships. At infrared wavelengths, Garroway could see them now, radiating fiercely in the energy storm, like brilliant stars. Starships couldn’t burn in space, of course, but they could glow white-hot.
They couldn’t have known what had hit them.
“Strike Force Alpha,” he called, finally breaking radio silence. “Strike Force Alpha. This is Trigger. Does anyone copy?”
Static hissed and crackled in his head. It might be that there was still too much charged plasma enveloping this region of space…or everyone’s suit electronics might have been fried by the nukes.
But Garroway kept trying. The loneliness, somehow, was lifting, but he still felt an aching need to contact others, other Marines, even if just to share with them a final ooh-rah.
“Strike Force Alpha, this is Trigger. Do you copy?…”
IST Intrepid
Sirius Star System
Inbound to the Stargate
1136 hrs, TFT
Intrepid had come through the storm…but only just. Quincy4 completed a full round of systems checks and damage control, rerouting power from the Ev banks to bypass conduits that had been burned away. The encounter had been so brief that even Quincy4’s high-speed awareness hadn’t registered more than a sudden, sharp jolt…and then systems had begun shutting down as external hull temperatures soared and the battered transport tried to shake herself to pieces.
Recorders showed what had happened. The RM tank, passing through the Sirius Gate two kilometers ahead of the rest of the ship, had emerged from the Night’s Edge Gate and immediately struck something—almost certainly a very large ship in the process of entering the gate connection from the other side.
The collision had vaporized both the tank and the ship, but even a cloud of white-hot gas is as solid as a thick lead wall when you hit it at the speed of light.
One of the peculiarities of relativity is that as an object approaches the speed of light, not only does its mass increase and the passage of time for that object slow, but the length of that object decreases along the direction of travel. In essence, the empty RM tank came through the Gate as a very, very flat pancake.
Even so, it still had thickness, as did the empty space inside, and so the impact had occurred in two distinct phases. The initial strike by the top of the RM tank had converted much of the enemy vessel into extremely hot, expanding gas; the second strike, by the bottom a flicker of an instant later, had punched through the resulting gas cloud, in effect boring a tunnel through that lead wall through which the rest of the Intrepid passed a fraction of a second later.
The whole encounter had happened so quickly that even Quincy4 hadn’t been able to follow it. The main body of the Intrepid had been two kilometers behind the RM tank, but at near-c the transport had crossed that distance in six-millionths of a single second.
Quincy4 dutifully recorded all available data and transmitted it. Any receivers on the Night’s Edge side of the stargates would pick it up. Maybe they—or the higher-level Quincys—could make sense of it.
But analyzing data was not Quincy4’s mission. At the moment, he had all he could do to hold the battered Intrepid together as the ship continued to hurtle into the Night’s Edge star system at close to the speed of light.
At that velocity, it would take just over five hours to reach Tripoli objective, but as Quincy4 was experiencing the passage of time, five hours translated as about three and a half minutes. He had to work fast.
First and foremost, he needed to adjust the hurtling vessel’s course slightly; his straight line through the Stargates had brought him out on a vector close to but not precisely aligned on the planet designated as Objective Tripoli. Using some of his dwindling stores of reaction mass in the stern tanks, he gave the Intrepid a sideways nudge that, in five hours objective, would bring the spacecraft into a direct intersection with the planet…or, rather, to the point where the planet would be in another five hours, seventeen minutes, twenty-one seconds, objective.
That final nudge nearly finished the ship. Pieces were falling off, and portions of the exterior hull were molten from the brief passage through a storm of charged particles at near-c. The tunnel bored through the gas cloud by the forward RM tank had not, unfortunately, been a perfect vacuum, and a single hydrogen ion, a proton, encountered at light speed, was otherwise known as a cosmic ray.
If there’d been a human crew on board the Intrepid, they all would have been dead now. In fact, it was the danger of encountering stray atoms in the depths of interstellar space at near-c that forced starships to adopt their characteristic mushroom shapes, with most of the ship’s structure protected behind a huge, water-filled RM tank. The radiation that had blasted through the Intrepid’s main body during the encounter at the Stargate had melted down much of the outer hull, caused extensive internal damage, especially to unshielded circuitry, and would instantly have killed any organic being on board.
Quincy4, or, rather, the computer systems housing him inside Intrepid, had been well shielded—not by material walls, which would have created storms of cascade radiation when penetrated by the initial, high-speed impacts, but by a powerful electromagnetic shielding, similar to that used by vessels operating within the radiation belts encircling Jupiter or Ishtar’s super-Jovian primary, Marduk.
Once Intrepid was on course, Quincy4 began unloading her cargo. The sand loaded on board Intrepid in Mars orbit was still stored in its 500-ton canisters, fifty of them attached around the ship’s spine. Following the program set for Sequence Three, Quincy4 released half of Intrepid’s payload, firing powerful rocket engines that boosted each canister at right angles away from the transport at high acceleration. As soon as all twenty-five canisters were clear, he used up the last of his reaction mass decelerating, hard.
At that velocity, the deceleration wasn’t enough to slow him more than a fraction of a percentage point, but, as with the RM tank earlier, it was enough to let the canisters already released drift ahead of the hurtling ship. Long objective seconds followed, as the canisters moved farther out, and then explosive charges on board all of the ejected canisters fired, shredding the containers and scattering their contents in broad, rapidly expanding clouds.
When the last of the RM was gone, Intrepid was reduced to a fast-moving hulk. Quincy4 jettisoned the remaining fifty canisters, giving them just enough boost to clear the ship, then detonating those charges as well. Two clouds of sand and a dead starship were now approaching Objective Tripoli, the Xul planet, moving at better than 99.9 percent of the speed of light.
The last few seconds trickled away….
Assault Group Tripoli
Near Objective Philadelphia
Nigh
t’s Edge Star System
1638 hrs, TFT
Garroway continued to drift alone through space. According to his implant time display, it had been five hours now since Intrepid had emerged from the Gate. A faint glow still lingered there, marking the destruction of the Xul fleet…or most of it. There appeared to be a number of ships still moving in the area, but Garroway wasn’t sure if he was really seeing them, or if his eyes were playing tricks on him. With no way of judging scale, those moving points of light might be mile-long Xul behemoths…or members of the assault group just a few hundred meters away.
He decided to try again. “Strike Force Alpha, this is Trigger. Do you copy?…”
And this time, he got a response. “I…copy, Gunnery Sergeant.”
“Who is this?” His suit’s computer was behaving erratically, and wasn’t giving him an ID on the voice.
“Lance Corporal Shra-dach, Gunnery Sergeant.”
“Call me ‘Gunny.’ Shra-dach. You’re the Ishtaran who led the attack on that marauder technical.” He remembered the young outworlder, how proud he’d been at Garroway’s praise.
“Yes, Gunny.”
“How you holding up?”
There was a long hesitation. “My suit systems are failing, I think. I still have air and power, but my computers seem to be down.”
“Yeah. They probably got fried by the nukes. How about you? Are you hurt?”
“I’m not injured.” There was another pause. “Gunny? I’m scared. I don’t want to die out here.”
“I know,” he told the Ishtaran Marine. “I’m scared, too.”
“Gunny…I want to go home….”
“So do I…Nal? You’re Nal, right?”
“Yes, Gunny.”
“Don’t worry, Nal. We’re not going to die.” He wasn’t sure he believed that, yet, but he wanted to. “Not just yet.”
“Fucking right we’re not going to die,” another voice, a woman’s voice, a very familiar voice, cut in.
“Chrome?”
“Didn’t think I’d leave you alone out here, did you?”
“I’ve been calling for five hours. Where the hell were you?”
“Right here, trying to call you. I think the plasma cloud just finally dispersed enough for our radios to work. Or maybe the suit repair nano finally got around to the burned-out wiring. Dunno.”
“It’s good to hear you. Is anyone else on the channel?”
“Brunelli here, Gunny. So, we’re secured from radio silence?”
“Yeah. We’re secured. Anyone else? Sound off, everyone who can hear me!”
“Easley, reporting for duty.”
“Ruehe.”
“Lippert.”
One by one, Marines started checking in. Garroway kept track in his head. Fifty answered the roll. Yount was still with Amory, still unconscious.
And when the last of the fifty sounded off, other voices began chorusing in, the names coming too fast and jumbled for Garroway to keep track. Anderson. Shuster. Danner. Menendez. Hong. Vah-gur. It sounded like a couple of hundred in all. More Marines had escaped the inferno of the Xul fortress’s destruction than he’d dared hope.
“So it looks like we did it,” Chrome observed. “Objective Philadelphia is a mess.”
“So’s their fleet,” Collesco said. “Didja see when Intrepid smashed through? Man, what a show!”
“It’s been five hours,” Chrome said. “Do you think?…”
“The actual strike time won’t be for fifteen minutes, yet,” he reminded her, “and we won’t know how it went for another five hours and seventeen minutes after that. It’ll take that long for the light to come all the way back out here.”
“So what’s the story with Philadelphia?” a nameless voice called from the night. “Why’d they name the fortress that?”
“Yeah,” another voice said. “I’m from Philly. What…the brass doesn’t like that town?”
“Don’t you jarheads download any military history?” Garroway said. “Barbary Wars. North African coast, in the early 1800s.”
“‘To the shores of Tripoli,’” Brunelli said. “Like in our anthem.”
“That’s where it came from,” Garroway agreed, “though that line referred to a later action. Early in the fighting, while the U.S. Navy was blockading the Barbary port of Tripoli, our biggest frigate, the U.S.S. Philadelphia, ran aground while chasing shallow-draft pirates. The Berbers captured her and took her into Tripoli Harbor, tucked away up close under their fortress walls and shore batteries.
“Our people put together a plan to destroy the Philadelphia before she could be used against us. A captured pirate vessel, a sixty-four-ton ketch renamed Intrepid, was loaded with sailors—and probably a few Marines—and taken into the harbor, disguised as a local coasting vessel. She pulled up alongside the Philadelphia, the boarding party took out the watch, and they set fire to her. Intrepid escaped, bringing every man out with her. I think they got away with only one man wounded in the action.”
“So that’s why they called the Xul station Philadelphia? And we waxed it, didn’t we.”
“That we did.”
Garroway decided not to add the second part of the story. Six months later, the Navy had sent the Intrepid back into Tripoli harbor, under the command of Lieutenant Richard Somers, loaded to the gunwales with explosives. The idea had been to take her in under the walls of the fort, light the fuses, and escape in a small boat. Something had gone wrong, however, and Intrepid had blown to bits while she was still out in the middle of the harbor, killing Somers and his twelve-man crew.
So “Intrepid” was not exactly an auspicious name for Operation Seafire, though the transport’s mission was similar in spirit, if not in technology. He wondered who’d thought up that name…and if they’d bothered to research the actual history at all.
Or maybe they’d felt it important to give Intrepid a second shot at Tripoli.
He looked toward the orange spark that was the Night’s Edge sun, and wondered if they would be able to see the fireworks when Intrepid’s payload struck the planet.
But so much could still go wrong. If the remaining Xul ships around the distant world had been warned of Intrepid’s approach, they could easily use their FTL capability to intercept and destroy her, long before she could threaten the planet.
And for the second time in history, Intrepid would be blown up before reaching her target.
“Hey, Gunny?” someone said.
“What?”
“Take a look at the Gate! Something’s happening there!”
He looked, blinked, and looked harder. A line of brilliant stars was emerging from the Gate. Some of the other moving stars nearby—Xul ships, almost certainly—appeared to be turning to meet them.
Garroway felt a sharp thrill as he realized what it was he was seeing. That biggest, brightest star must be the South California. The others—ten of them—were the frigates and destroyers of the international combined task force. Evidently, they’d sent drones through to reconnoiter after Intrepid’s passage, and decided to risk coming through themselves.
Silent flashes of light flared and faded as tactical nukes and antimatter missiles detonated in the vacuum. The surviving Xul ships must have been badly damaged, all of them, because the battle didn’t last long at all. Garroway saw one grow suddenly bright, a tiny sun, then swiftly fade to invisibility.
And other ships were coming through now…the Marine transports Lejeune and Henderson, and a number of F-8 Penetrators.
“Switch on your running lights, people,” Garroway called, as cheering began breaking out among the widely scattered Marines. Immediately, two hundred strobe lights began pulsing in the night ahead and around him, beacons guiding the Penetrators in for retrieval.
“Looks like we get to go home after all,” Chrome told him.
“Looks like.”
The Marines never left their own behind.
Never.
24
21 AUGUST 2323
&nb
sp; Tripoli Command HQ,
IST Henderson
Stargate, Night’s Edge Star System
1640 hrs, TFT
General Garroway stood on Henderson’s command deck, watching the battle as it unfolded through the main combat control linkage. Battlespace was laid out both within their internal displays and in a holographic projection at the forward end of the compartment, looking much like a traditional viewscreen. The display did not show optical objects, however, but computer-generated graphics suggesting what they might have seen with the aid of superhuman vision, with telescopic magnification, and the ability to see non-optical wavelengths.
The image of Admiral Hugh Gresham stood at his side, hands clasped behind his back. In fact, Gresham was on board the South California, several kilometers ahead of the Henderson, but the two joint commanders were linked by a special communications net that allowed each to imagine the other was standing on his bridge.
“Satisfactory,” Gresham said, seeming to scan the battlespace display. “Most satisfactory. Who’d have guessed that it would have been this easy?”
Garroway turned and looked at the holographic projection of his cocommander, eyebrows rising. “Easy? I don’t think I would choose to use that word to describe this operation, Admiral.”
Gresham waved a careless hand. “I mean no disrespect. The contribution by your Marines has been noted. It certainly appears that they succeeded in their part of the mission.”
The man, Garroway thought, had a peculiarly irritating manner—pompous and condescending—but perhaps he couldn’t help it. Hugh Gresham was a ring-knocker out of Annapolis and the scion of a wealthy Virginia dynasty. Political connections had placed him in joint command of Task Force Seafire but, so far, he hadn’t been able to do much damage.
He seemed to be taking the devastation Intrepid had wrought on this side of the gate as a personal military victory.
Garroway looked at the graphic image marking the Xul space station, fifty kilometers from the ring of the Stargate. Drones were already returning detailed scans of the wreckage, which appeared to have blown open, then collapsed in upon itself.
