Star Strike: Book One of the Inheritance Trilogy (The Inheritance Trilogy, Book 1)

by Ian Douglas

  “It’s Lieutenant Lee’s Night Owl,” Chesty told him in maddeningly even tones. “I am linking with my uploaded counterpart now…”

  “Well? What does he say, damn it?”

  “Lieutenant Lee’s mission was successful. They electronically penetrated a Xul huntership and have confirmed that news of Argo’s capture had extended to the Xul base at Starwall, at the very least. They have also made contact with the AI from the Argo, which should prove to be informative. Lieutenant Lee is a casualty.”

  “Oh, Christ. How bad?”

  “Not good. The radiation flux within the Starwall system is—”

  “I know, damn it! How is she?”

  “Alive. Barely. My counterpart informs me she may be near death….”

  “Well, scramble a work pod, damn it! Drag her in here!”

  “Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, I must advise against that. The Night Owl is itself highly radioactive. We could contaminate the entire—”

  “Chesty, I’ve got the watch, okay? That puts me in command of this listening post. Patch a Class-One emergency NL call through to Major Tomanaga. Upload the data Tera brought back, and tell him I’ve gone out to retrieve the lieutenant’s ship.”

  “But—”

  “That’s a goddamn fucking order!”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the AI replied, with rigidly correct service protocol.

  Fitzpatrick knew he could buck the decision up to the Old Man—Major George Tomanaga at the LP’s main station two light-hours away. Either Tomanaga would immediately order him to send out robotic tugs to bring the lieutenant in—in which case, why the hell wait? Or he would delay while he conferred with his superiors at paraside HQ, which could mean hours of delay, hours that Lieutenant Lee did not have. Or he would say no, order Fitzpatrick to sit tight until properly equipped tugs could arrive from the main base, and that would take God-knew how long. Work tugs with rad screening were not exactly interplanetary greyhounds.

  And Fitzpatrick was going out after her now, no matter what. This way, if the Old Man flashed back an order to him to sit tight, he wouldn’t have to disobey it.

  A small but very guilt-feeling part of him was telling him that he should have gone on the sneak-and-peek, not her. Damn it, if she died….

  In a way, things had been easier in the old days, before the widespread introduction of nonlocal communications. A few centuries ago, he would have flashed off his intent to go pick up Tera, gone, and been back at the LP long before his message had even reached HQ. Having faster-than-light communications was a royal pain in the ass, since it invited micromanagement by the jerk-off remfies in their comfortable habitats far from the point of action.

  Well, the hell with orders, and the hell with the remfs. Marines did not leave their own behind….

  USMC Skybase

  Paraspace

  2355 hrs GMT

  “General Alexander. Please wake up.”

  Cara’s voice brought Alexander upright in bed. “This had better be goddamned important,” he mumbled aloud.

  Tabatha rolled over at his side. “Mmph. Martin? What is it?”

  “Call from the office, Tabbie,” he said, caressing her thigh. “Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.”

  “I’ll get us caff.” Nude, she slid out of bed and made her way in the near darkness to the bedchamber door.

  He sighed. “Thanks, kitten.” Though they’d not formally married, Tabatha Sahir had been his domestic partner for a good many years, now, and she knew what a call from his assistant at this hour almost certainly meant.

  “We have an upload coming in NL from one of our Xul listening posts, General,” Cara told him. “It sounds serious.”

  “Tell me.”

  Briefly, Cara filled him in on the bare bones of what had happened. Listening Post Puller 659 had noted the loss of some automated probes at a targeted Stargate. A Marine lieutenant and an AI had gone through to check things out up close and personal, and encountered a Xul huntership. The AI had successfully linked with the Xul, and they’d brought some hot data out.

  As Alexander listened to a précis of that data, he felt his gut constrict, a hard, cold knot. Damn! The bastards found us….

  “Put that Marine down for a medal,” he told Cara. “We owe him a lot.”

  “Her,” Cara corrected him. “And the LP reports she is seriously injured. She may not survive.”

  “Shit. Keep me informed of her condition,” he said. “Okay. Pass the data up the line, Intel and the Joint Chiefs.”

  “Very well.”

  “And give me a map. Where the hell is this place, anyway?”

  Currently, the bedchamber’s walls and domed ceiling were set to display the dark and murky blue fog of paraspace. Other Marines, he knew, tended to display scenes from Earth or Earth’s Rings, or generic starfields, or even keeping the displays blank and neutral, but he’d always found the shifting blue murk to be relaxing, a definite inducement to sleep.

  As well as to wonder. Paraspace, more poetically known as the Quantum Sea, lay at the very foundation of what modern physics was pleased to call reality, whatever the hell that was. It was here that, in accord with the laws of quantum physics, particles and antiparticles popped into existence for too brief a space of time to measure, then winked out again, where standing waves of virtual particles formed the basis of matter and energy at higher reality levels. The two-million-ton bulk of Skybase had been constructed in Mars orbit, then phase-shifted into the Quantum Sea, so the station could not be said to have a location in normal space/ time at all. The idea had been to put the main operational headquarters for the U.S. Marine Corps outside the reach of any possible sneak attack, either by human foes or by the Xul.

  He checked the hour, and groaned. Since there was no day or night here—indeed, no means of measuring time at all save by instruments brought through from normal space—by old, old tradition, the station operated on Greenwich Mean Time. As commanding general of the station, he could set any personal schedule he wished, and so several hours ago had turned in with Tabbie for the “night,” whatever that might mean here in this eldritch space-that-was-not-space. By Greenwich Mean, it was just before midnight.

  But the CO of any ship, base, or station was always on call. Always.

  At his thought-click, the blue murk faded to dark, and a three-dimensional representation of human space hung high in the dome over the bedchamber. Sol glowed bright yellow at the center, surrounded by a thin haze of other stars in a many-lobed blob stretching across eight hundred light-years at its greatest extent, perhaps three hundred light-years at its smallest.

  The amoebic shape of human space had been dictated by the uneven expansion of colonizing expeditions outbound from Sol over the course of the past six or eight centuries. Colony ships searched for worlds as close to Earth in terms of climate and habitability as possible, bypassing hundreds of frozen or poisonous rock balls in favor if those rare worlds that could be made livable with a minimum of terraforming. The statistics appeared in a window to one side of the display. All told, human space embraced roughly 120 million cubic light-years containing some 10 to 12 million stars.

  Of those millions, however, about five hundred systems, all told, contained a human presence, ranging from tiny mining or military outposts to a scant handful of systems like Sol or Chiron, with populations numbering in the tens of billions. Of those 500, roughly a quarter—128, to be precise—were members of the Terran Commonwealth. All of the rest belonged to the nonaligned governments—the Islamics, the PanEuropeans, the Chinese, the Hispanics, the Russians.

  “Drop in the known Gates, please,” he told Cara. Instantly, seventeen of the fainter stars on the display turned bright and purple. Four were in space claimed by the Commonwealth. The other thirteen belonged to other stellar governments.

  The closest Gate to Sol, of course, was Sirius C, the Gateway orbiting in the planetless Sirius star system 8.6 light-years from Sol. Over the centuries, though, as human colonies reached
farther and farther out, other Gates had been discovered; the second closest Gate was at Gamma Piscium, a Type K0 giant 91 light-years from Sol. The Gates were unevenly sprinkled across human space with a randomness that suggested that the network, if it had ever possessed an order to begin with, had been distorted over the eons by the natural drift of the stars in their individual orbits about the galactic center.

  Probes and research conducted at each of the seventeen gates located within human space had demonstrated that none of those seventeen linked with one another, that all available destinations were other Gates scattered across the Galaxy at extremely long ranges indeed—usually on the order of several thousand to several tens of thousands of light-years. Many, in fact, like the Gate nexus in Cluster Space, were well outside of the Galaxy proper, out in the thin halo of dim and distant stars thinning out endlessly into intergalactic space.

  If there was anything like a large-scale order to the galactic network of Stargates, human research had not yet been able to determine what it was. Neither was it known yet whether the Gate network had been built by the Xul in the first place, by the Builders, or by someone else entirely. That the Xul used the network was definite. Of nearly five thousand gateway possibilities so far investigated among those seventeen Gates, almost two hundred opened into star systems occupied by Xul bases. Marine Listening Posts had been established at each of those systems, in order to attempt to monitor Xul activities on the far side.

  That strategy had just paid off, thank God.

  But at a damned high cost.

  “Which one is Puller 659?” he asked.

  One of the purple points of light flared brighter on the display. Puller 659, he saw, officially Ringstar in the PanEuropean ephemera according to the windowed description, was a red dwarf star near the fringes of human-explored space, 283 light-years from Sol and located within the misshapen lobe of habitation known as the PanEuropean Arm. The star system was nondescript and otherwise unimportant—possessing a single gas giant, Ring, and its coterie of moons, a few dwarf-planet rock-and-ice balls, and a large population of asteroids and comets.

  And the base there was illegal as hell. “Shit!” he said aloud, with some feeling.

  Human politics had just shoved its ugly nose under the tent flap.

  This was not going to be easy.

  9

  0511.1102

  Senate of the Terran Commonwealth

  Earth Ring

  1445 GMT

  It was, Alexander thought, a less than auspicious start to his mission to Earth. He’d expected the Commonwealth Senate to debate his plan for combating the Xul threat. That much went without saying. He’d not expected that the Marine Corps itself would be within the Senate’s sights, that they would actually be debating whether or not to bring the Corps’ eleven-hundred-year history to a close.

  After reviewing the data transmitted back from Puller 659, he’d routed the full text back to Earth, to USMC-HQ, to the Military Intelligence Agency, and, as required by regulations, to the Senate Military Oversight Committee. The reaction of that last was uncharacteristically swift; he’d been ordered to return to Earth Ring in person, to face a full Senate meeting and to present his recommendations.

  To that end, he’d taken the somewhat unusual step of pulling Skybase out of its paraspace anchorage and returning it to the Sol System. The Quantum Sea, existing outside of the normal boundaries of four-dimensional space/time, did not relate to space/time with a point-to-point correspondence. If you had a well-plotted set of special coordinates, it was possible to use paraspace as a means to bypass enormous distances in 4D space.

  Dropping into Sol space had enabled him to get back to Earth Ring much more quickly than an FTL shuttle. He was wondering, however, if the trip had been worth it. He’d delivered his recommendation—a carefully parsed blueprint for action by the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force—1MIEF—minutes ago.

  And already the vultures were descending like harpies, scenting blood and eager for a meal.

  Madam Marie Devereaux drew herself up to her full 150 centimeters, chin held high, defiant. She was standing at her seat in the Commonwealth Senate, an enclosed box high up within one of the ascending ranks of Senatorial platforms, but her repeater holo image stood at the chamber’s center, towering over the Senate Chamber pit, matching each move, each dramatic pose, each gesture and expression. Alexander wondered if the holo was projecting the woman’s personal e-filters to achieve that seeming perfection of face and form, or if what he was seeing reflected reality.

  Not that reality had that much to do with this charade. He grimaced. Devereaux was putting on the show of her life. She appeared to be relishing this moment.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate,” she declaimed. “We’ve heard the arguments in favor of striking at the Xul, heard them endlessly in round upon round of discussion within these sacred halls, both in open debate and in closed committee. Is anyone else here as tired as I am, as sick to death as I am, I wonder, of hearing yet more excuses for this collection of odd bits and pieces of military technology and tradition and self-serving alarmist brinksmanship that calls itself the U.S. Marine Corps?”

  A chorus of boos and shouted catcalls sounded from the surrounding rings of seats…but Alexander heard cheers and applause as well. It was impossible at this point in the proceedings to calculate whether the Senate was going to go along with his recommendation…or side with the newly constituted Peace Party.

  What he’d not anticipated, though, was that this session was going to become a referendum on the very survival of the Corps.

  “The Marines,” Devereaux continued, “may once have had a place in history, a role to play within the disparate collection of military services that once served the United States of America.” The huge, holographically projected face smiled down beatifically at the watching senators. “They were very good, I understand, at scrambling up into the rigging of ancient warships, back in the Age of Sail, and shooting enemy officers on other ships. Some centuries later, they served as a kind of police force on American wet-navy vessels, and as ceremonial guards at American embassies in other countries. I suspect they were chosen because of how pretty their red, white, and blue dress uniforms were….”

  Chuckles and isolated bits of laughter rose from several quarters, and Alexander scowled. Damn the woman. Playing politics with the Corps at a deadly time like this….

  “Many of us love and admire the Marines, admire them for their sense of duty, their sense of tradition going back over eleven hundred years, now. But even as we admire them, we must admit to ourselves that these Marines have never really fitted in with their brothers-at-arms in the other services…the Army, the Air Force, even with the Navy, though historically they draw their strongest support from them. The Marines, admittedly, have served us well in the past, but we see from this incident just brought to our attention that the U.S. Marines are…extremist in their views. And this is not a time, Senators, for extremists.

  “You see, the Marines, as we have seen repeatedly in the past, are not…not team players, as the old expression puts it. They take a disproportionate share of scarce resources and financing for their own service needs—for training, for supply, for transport, for administration—and give nothing back.

  “They do nothing that the Army could not do just as well. Once, perhaps, the argument could be made that the Marines served a vital role as a ready amphibious landing force. In the days of wet navies, they could land on any beach, anywhere in the world, creating a beachhead through which regular Army forces could arrive and deploy.

  “But the day of amphibious landings is long, long past, Senators. Marines have for centuries deployed through suborbital transports or orbit-to-surface landing craft, not wet-navy boats. Their very name—Marines—reflects a bygone age when ‘marine soldiers’ could be deployed on Navy ships to carry out missions on Earth’s seas. Why, I wonder, deploy them into space? Because the Navy builds and operates the major
ity of our military spacecraft? Is that reason enough to keep them…like aging pets? Marines, I submit, are anachronisms, a piece of our past as anachronistic as armored knights on horseback.

  “But more than being military anachronisms, I submit, Senators, that Marines are political anachronisms. Ask any Marine. Ask General Alexander, up there in the visitor’s gallery, who brought this affair to our attention. Their first loyalties are not to Humankind, nor to our Commonwealth, but to an outmoded political concept called America, and to the Marine Corps itself.

  “And that, Senators, that makes them, to my way of thinking, just a little dangerous.”

  Again, that smattering of applause. Alexander closed his eyes, trying to feel the emotion in the room. How many supported Devereaux? How many supported the lame duck administration?

  How many simply hadn’t yet made up their minds?

  “Senators,” Devereaux went on, “the Marines like to present themselves as being the guardians of our liberty. But when their heavily armed mobile base appears off our Ring docking ports, when Marines in their pretty uniforms and with their steely expressions suddenly walk the corridors of our orbital habitats…how safe, how free can we actually feel?”

  Alexander’s fist closed. He nearly stood, nearly shouted protest, but forced himself to remain in his seat. Damn it,

  He’d ordered Skybase to transit out of paraspace and dock at Earth Ring. It was unusual, but it was the fastest means of getting here. Strictly speaking, Skybase was not a space craft, but a deep space habitat, similar to the colony facilities in use in the Asteroid Belt and the mining settlements out in the Oort Cloud. It had no motive power of its own, other than station-keeping thrusters, and it required a small fleet of tractor tugs to move it around in normal space. The bulky structure was designed to dock periodically at major port facilities—those large enough to receive it—for resupply and maintenance.