Star Marines

by Ian Douglas

  It was still collapsing, in fact. Xul ships were known to incorporate small black holes as power sources, and enough damage could make the entire structure fall in upon itself and essentially disappear. That seemed to be what was happening now, as the misshapen sphere continued to shift and fold, as if being eaten away from the inside. The singularity at the heart of the thing must have been microscopic in size, perhaps no more than a few billion tons of mass, but it was growing as the fortress slowly added its own mass to the tiny but insatiable maw.

  “They contributed, all right, Admiral,” Garroway said quietly. “They took out Objective Philadelphia. Now it just remains to be seen whether it was enough.”

  “The Xul fleet is all but destroyed,” Gresham said. “Our sensor scans indicate that Intrepid successfully navigated the blast cloud and continued in-system. She must nearly be at the target by now.”

  Garroway checked his inner clock. “Twelve more minutes.”

  “So, in five and a half hours, we’ll know for sure, eh? Meanwhile, we’ll mop up what’s left of our Xul friends.”

  It could scarcely be called a battle. As the South California and her escort of destroyers and frigates had emerged from the Stargate, several Xul vessels had reacted, but sluggishly. Particle beam and laser fire from the Earth flotilla had blown one Xul ship apart, and damaged another. The others, still out of range, appeared to be trying to maneuver clear of the task force. Four Xul hulks drifted nearby, their outer hulls softened and still glowing white-hot, and there was enough debris tumbling through the battlespace area to suggest that several Xul behemoths had been ripped apart by the energies liberated by Intrepid’s fast-moving RM tank.

  Gresham had already given orders to the smaller units of the task force to deploy ahead and catch the retreating Xul vessels. Flashes of light against the night ahead marked the exchange of fire.

  If the battle out there was a walkover, Garroway thought, it was because the Marines had destroyed the fortress. Fifty kilometers off to the side of the Gate, it would not have been touched by Intrepid’s spectacular emergence into the system. It would have warned the main Xul fleet at Objective Tripoli, and ended any hope of surprise.

  As it was, much could still have gone wrong. If it had, the Xul fleet might yet show up here at the Stargate in the next few minutes, undamaged and ready to step on the annoying primitives who’d just emerged from the Sirius star system.

  “General Garroway?” Quincy’s voice said in his head.

  “Yes, Quincy. What is it?”

  “Two pieces of information. First, we are detecting visual and radio signals from a large number of Marines in the vicinity of Objective Philadelphia. It appears that a large percentage of the Marine strike force survived. We are also picking up retrieval beacons from at least five aerospace fighters, craft that are either damaged or out of fuel, but their pilots are still alive. I have taken the liberty of dispatching rescue vessels to pick them up.”

  “Excellent!”

  “What was that, General?” Gresham asked.

  Garroway hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud, and that Gresham wasn’t connected to the command constellation comm link. “Excuse me, Admiral. It appears a good portion of the Marine strike group managed to escape from the fortress. We’re picking them up now.”

  “Ah. Good. Very good.”

  “What else do you have, Quincy?” he asked silently.

  “Gunnery Sergeant Garroway transmitted a message during the operation. The transmission was delayed until they reached the surface, then received and stored by one of our reconnaissance drones. In the message, Gunnery Sergeant Garroway speculates on the quantum nature of Xul technology. He may have provided us with some useful leads.”

  Outstanding, Travis! he thought. Way to go!

  “Very well. See that the message reaches the appropriate departments.”

  “I have already routed the information, General.”

  Garroway heard a sharp exclamation, and returned his full attention to the battle display. Gresham had just vented a sharp curse. Two of his frigates, Burnham and Guiyang, had just vanished in sun-brilliant flashes of blue-white energy. The Xul were not as helpless as Gresham had believed, and the battle not at all a foregone conclusion.

  The South California was already turning her considerable firepower on the Xul ship that had engaged the frigates, however. Antimatter missiles streaked from the battlecruiser’s flanks, twisting in broad arcs that brought them slamming home into the Xul warship’s side. Explosions churned through the Xul vessel’s guts, opening gaping craters in its hull and sending debris tumbling through space. What was left of the wreckage began folding and twisting, deforming as it collapsed into the black hole at the doomed vessel’s heart.

  Garroway checked his clock. It was now 1652 hours, and seconds remained before the Intrepid was due to reach its target. He found he was holding his breath, half expecting the balance of the enemy fleet to materialize suddenly before them, magical weapons set to sweep the presumptuous Earth flotilla out of the sky.

  So far there was nothing…nothing but the Xul already here…and then the task force was in sole possession of the battlespace.

  They would know for sure in another five hours, seventeen minutes.

  IST Intrepid

  Night’s Edge Star System

  Inbound to the Stargate

  1653 hrs, TFT

  Zero Hour…Zero Minute…Zero Second…

  The leading cloud of sand had dispersed across a volume of space some fifteen thousand kilometers across, and each individual grain of sand, traveling at over ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, possessed incredible kinetic energy.

  How much depended, of course on the original mass of the grain. Sand particles range from .06 millimeter to about 2.1 millimeters in diameter. Quartz has a density of 2.67, so the mass of a grain of sand ranges anywhere from three-tenths of a milligram to about 13 milligrams.

  A particle massing 8 milligrams, however—fairly typical—released approximately 360 gigajoules—360 billion joules of energy—when it hit something solid.

  Three hundred sixty thousand megajoules. That translated to about 72,000 kilograms of high explosive—seventy-two tons.

  And there were 12,500 tons of the stuff in the first cloud.

  William Blake had written of a world in a grain of sand; he hadn’t intended that to mean a world of hurt….

  And based on mass, a single metric ton of sand might contain something on the order of ten to the eleventh individual grains, and pack the equivalent of a 7.2 megaton nuclear explosion. Twelve and a half thousand tons of sand moving at near-c carried the destructive power of 90,000 megatons…though this first volley was dispersed over a very large area.

  And nothing in that volume of space was safe from the incoming storm.

  We Who Are

  Star System 9113-104

  1653 hrs, TFT

  The workings of the group mind inhabiting this system high above the Galactic plane were intricate, diverse, far reaching, and extremely sophisticated. If the group mind inhabiting a single Xul huntership was powerful, how much more so was the Mind embracing a world.

  Existing both as separate intelligences and as a group gestalt, this local manifestation of We Who Are was stretched across some tens of thousands of kilometers of space, inhabited nearly the entirety of the surface of the planet, the more than two hundred enormous starships orbiting some forty thousand kilometers out, and, most especially, they inhabited the rings, those intricately woven patterns of light and delicate traceries, like a spider’s web that circled the world above its equator, at a distance designed so that orbit kept pace with the planet’s slow rotation.

  This system, numbered 104th in Galactic Sector 9113, was not the original home of the Xul; far from it. The original organic Progenitors had evolved on a world so far away in both space and time that the modern Xul no longer remembered anything about it, not even its original location. In any case, they were above such
meaningless trivia, considering the Galaxy as a whole to be their domain, their home.

  Quite simply, the Xul never saw the attack coming. They couldn’t, since the light that would have warned them of the attacker’s approach—or the reflected radar or laser beams scanning local space—was traveling only slightly faster than the enemy vessel itself. As it happened, the Xul did not possess faster-than-light communications, and so could not have been warned by the Xul vessels dispatched to the Stargate hours before. The fact that they’d been dispatched to the Gate shortly after the assault on the Guardian Monitor there by warriors of Species 2824 had been due entirely to that most implacable of the gods of the battlefield—chance.

  Even if they’d possessed the FTL communicators of the Ancients, however, the Xul would have been in trouble. Though the Mind inhabiting the planetary environs couldn’t know it, their flotilla had been overwhelmed by the shotgun blast of energy emerging from the Gate; they were aware that they’d lost contact with the ships dispatched to the Gate, but that had been expected. Those vessels were on their way elsewhere in the Galaxy, to spread to other Xul nodes information collected over the past few cycles…including, as it happened, a report on the resurgence of a particularly unpleasant, upstart organic species…the one labeled 2824.

  Ships and fortresses in orbit about the planet felt the effects first, as savage explosions began to blossom across those portions of their hulls facing the distant Stargate. Within a fraction of a second, sand grains began impacting the delicate tracery of artificial rings encircling it in synchronous orbit and then, another fraction of a second later, the surface of the planet itself.

  Starship hulls instantly turned white hot, and the minds within them cried out at the sudden failure of the electronic systems that sustained them. The ring structure began to shred almost at once, as particles traveling at close to light speed detonated with the concussion of over seventy tons of chemical explosive.

  The planet itself began to glow.

  Normally something the size of a grain of sand would vaporize high above such a world’s surface, as friction with the atmosphere set it ablaze. Moving at close to the speed of light, however, these particles had passed all the way through the thin envelope of air before they had time to grow hot. Each liberated to the atmosphere a small amount of its energy—a few percent, perhaps—as heat, and expelled the rest in a single, devastating blast when it encountered solid rock, water, or the nanotechnically converted construction materials making up the cities that occupied so much of the world’s surface.

  From space, it appeared that an entire hemisphere of the world had just caught fire.

  Starships in orbit began to dissolve, their massive armored hulls stripped away in that cascade of fiery destruction. The rings, a titanic feat of engineering, trembled, rippling as if in a high wind as blossoming death ripped through them, and then dissolved in white-hot flame.

  And across the surface of the world, cities died, not in a single blast, but in billions of smaller detonations, coming too quickly to be counted or even understood as anything but a continuous eruption of devastation.

  By chance, the planet at this point in its orbit about its sun was between the sun and the Stargate, but well to one side; about three-quarters of the incoming particles struck on the planet’s nightside, swiftly engulfing the brilliant patterns of city lights on the surface in fast-spreading seas of white energy.

  More and more heat was being dumped into the atmosphere with each passing second. Shock and soaring temperatures began stripping the atmosphere from the planet, creating what looked like a glowing cometary tail as gases were blasted out into space, or became so hot and moving so swiftly the individual atoms easily escaped the world’s gravity.

  On the predominantly day side of the stricken world, the bulk of the planet itself protected the cities, but the air itself seemed to catch fire as a firestorm engulfed the entire hemisphere, sweeping in from the antipodes at many times the speed of sound. At the same time, air on the day side began rushing around the curve of the planet to fill the near vacuum left by the loss of atmosphere on the night side, until the winds howled through rapidly thinning skies at thousands of kilometers per hour, burning as they shrieked.

  Within the space of just a handful of seconds, the group Mind of We Who Are had ceased to be. Survivors clung to existence—in deeply buried structures on the day side, and in a very few ships that had been sheltered from the storm by the intervening bulk of the planet.

  So stunning, so overwhelming had that onslaught been that those survivors couldn’t even begin to piece together what had happened. Five ships out of almost three hundred had, by chance, been saved by the planet’s shadow, and they began to accelerate now, coming around the curve of the planet to investigate the nature of this unprecedented disaster.

  And seconds later, the second volley arrived….

  IST Intrepid

  Night’s Edge Star System

  Inbound to Objective Tripoli

  1653 hrs, TFT

  Quincy4 recorded and transmitted all he could in the final fraction of a second subjective. He couldn’t really see very much, as distorted as the heavens were by his speed, and, in any case most of his external sensors had been melted away by this passage through the plasma cloud at the Gate.

  Still, he continued to transmit as radio and infrared radiation from just ahead blue-shifted into a dazzling ring of white radiance far brighter than the local sun.

  The second cloud of sand had been designed to catch any Xul warships that might have been tucked in close enough behind the planet that they were protected from the sandstorm by the world’s bulk. Farther out, out at the synchronous orbit occupied by the rings, there was no escape from the high-energy sandstorm, for the planet’s axial tilt with respect to the distant Stargate was steep enough that the entire expanse of the rings had been exposed to the incoming cloud. The use of high-acceleration rockets to disperse the sand canisters before detonating them, and the fact that the cloud had been expanding like the pattern of pellets fired from a shotgun, had ensured that the sand’s footprint would be large enough to sweep the rings from one side to the other. The mission planners had not, of course, known that the rings existed when they made their calculations, but they’d sought to sweep the entire volume of space that might be occupied by orbiting Xul starships, orbital bases, or communications satellites.

  Quincy4 couldn’t tell how effective those measures had been. Coming in only a few seconds behind the first barrage of sand, he would not have been able to adjust Intrepid’s course even if he’d been able to get accurate and updated targeting data.

  In any case, the second volley was not nearly so dispersed as the first. It fell in on the devastated planet in a fairly compact cloud a few thousand kilometers across, only a little wider than the planet itself. And in the midst of that cloud was the hundred-thousand-ton mass of the Intrepid.

  Quincy4 had just time enough to send a final burst transmission out-system before the Intrepid struck the planet with a total yield of almost 5 × 1024 joules…force enough to gouge a continent-sized chunk of rock from the world’s limb and send it spraying into space.

  Tripoli Command HQ,

  IST Henderson

  Stargate, Night’s Edge Star System

  2218 hrs, TFT

  “Any second now,” Admiral Gresham said. “Watch close….”

  General Garroway was already watching, as, indeed, was every man and woman on Henderson’s bridge. A pattern of recon drones had been sent out and deployed into another huge lens, using interferometry to image the distant planet.

  Objective Tripoli appeared at first-quarter phase, a bright crescent bowed away from the orange sun, which was offscreen to the right. The rings were visible as a broad ellipse about three planetary diameters out from the surface.

  It was a little eerie, knowing that if Intrepid had hit its target, the distant planet was already devastated, had been devastated for over five hours, now, as
the light bearing news of the outcome had crawled back out to the Stargate.

  And if Intrepid had failed…

  No, Operation Seafire must have worked. Had it not, the FTL starships of the Xul would be out here by now, mopping up on the task force from Earth.

  He smiled at the thought…not at the image of disaster, but at the operation name. Seafire was in part an atrocious pun which he’d tacked on to the outline of his original plan when he’d first submitted it.

  The sand they were throwing at Objective Tripoli had come from one of the dead sea bottoms of Mars. That planet had been chosen in part because it had a lot of easily accessible sand, and in part because it had a much lower surface gravity than Earth—about one-third G—making it possible to boost the stuff into orbit with an electromagnetic railgun.

  But there was also a poetic, a fitting justice in the fact that the sand had been dredged from the general area of Cydonia, where the Ancients had built a colony half a million years ago.

  A colony then destroyed by the Xul.

  The Ancients, through the intelligent species they had engineered, had struck back at the Xul.

  As for the pun…that lay in the play of the word “sea” with the mathematical symbol “c,” the speed of light. Seafire, c-fire…Martian sea-sand hurled at the enemy at the speed of light, bringing down upon the Xul a literal rain of fire.

  The dark side of the planet in the holographic display lit up.

  “Look at that!” The technician at the display controls was exultant. “My God, look at that!”

  In fact, it happened too quickly for Garroway to be sure of exactly what he was seeing. The strike occurred in two quick pulses. With the first, the entire face of the planet lit up with rapidly spreading patterns of brilliant stars that grew, coalesced, and spread until the entire disk appeared to be on fire, with constant flickerings and flarings of star-bright flashes, light lightning. The ring system also ignited, and appeared to be wafting away into the distance like spider silk above a flame. Just outside of the rings, a pattern of new stars appeared, brightened, faded…