by Ian Douglas
Company H was formed up within one of the Nicholas’ debarkation bays, 118 Marines in full HFR-7 Hellfire combat boarding armor facing the stark, elliptical gateway at the end of a gray steel ramp. These CBA units were a lot lighter and closer to form-fitting than the combat armor Nal had first trained with almost 900 years before. At the moment, it was actually difficult to see the individual Marines. The combat armor with which Nal had trained all those centuries ago had used a surface film of nanoflage particles which reflected the light levels, colors, and patterns of their surroundings. Hellfires, though, actually bent incoming light to create the illusion of partial invisibility.
It wasn’t perfect, of course. Nal could still see his fellow Marines standing in their quietly expectant ranks, but each suit had a fuzzy, translucent look to it, at least around the edges, and pieces of each suit—arms, legs, weapons—kept shifting in odd ways, or vanishing outright. A Marine in a Hellfire suit wouldn’t disappear completely, but if he or she held motionless in the shadows, they could become damned near invisible. And when they were moving, those suits provided a shifting, blurred, and very difficult target.
Not only that, but that light-bending facility also served to shed or deflect a lot of the energy from incoming beams and projectiles.
Hotel Company had been practicing with these suits on the voyage out from Earth, learning how best to take advantage of the cover they offered. Their actual operation was simplicity itself, with the AI resident within the helmet circuitry handling all of the real work.
The technology, Nal thought, was nothing short of astounding. And it worked.
So why was he feeling such deep misgivings over teleportation? The technology was almost as old as that of the Hellfire suits. And at least as reliable.
Technically, he knew, there were five ways to achieve teleportation, jumping from one place to another instantaneously without crossing the space in between.
With a big enough power plant, you could reach all the way down into the Quantum Sea and bypass the local topology of spacetime, allowing you to move a ship from point A to point B. That was how the big phase-shifters like the Major Samuel Nicholas did it. That was called q-teleportation, q for “quantum,” and it didn’t work on anything much smaller than a monster ship like the Sam Nick.
Another means was designated g-teleportation, g for “gravitational.” That was how the Stargates managed to link one bit of space with another, using as portals twenty-kilometer rings within which Jupiter-mass black holes orbited at near-light velocities. The gravitational tides created by paired counterrotating singularities rippled out through normal space at the speed of light, but also crossed through higher dimensions as well, bypassing normal space and interacting with other ripples from other gates. Those gravitational waves could be tuned with the tides at other, far-distant Stargates, opening a hyper-dimensional gateway between the two.
Again, though, that type of teleportation worked only on a very large scale. Originally constructed by a long-vanished galactic intelligence, using technologies still far beyond those of Humankind, Stargates formed a web of long-distance transit routes across the Galaxy and beyond. They were superb for strategic movement, and, indeed, made Galaxywide travel a reality, but they were not at all mobile, which meant they weren’t exactly useful on a tactical level.
P-or psychic-teleportation had been demonstrated in the laboratory, but never made reliable enough for practical use. It had long been known that the human mind could open pathways through higher dimensions, and mental disciplines such as the weiji-do martial arts form practiced by Marines could help some individuals achieve it, at least for relatively small masses. Some day, a company of Marines might be able to use the mind alone to step through a doorway and cross thousands of kilometers in an eye blink, but it wasn’t possible yet.
Theoretically, it was possible to break down the atoms and molecules of a man or a starship, convert them to energy, and beam them somewhere else at the speed of light for reassembly. That brute-strength method was called beam-or b-teleportation, but it had never been successfully demonstrated on anything larger and more complex than a very small diamond—pure carbon with a well-understood crystalline matrix. The computational power necessary for a b-teleport of organic matter—to say nothing of a living being—was far beyond even the most powerful Fifth Millennium AIs.
Besides, what was built back into corporeal solidity at the far end of a b-teleport transmission was essentially a copy, not the original, and that put a serious stumbling block in the way of using such a system to move humans. There were remarkably few people around who were willing to die so that their exact twin could materialize a thousand kilometers away.
Finally there was d-teleportation, d for “dimensional.” It used the space-bending technologies of the Alcubierre FTL drive, though on a much smaller and shorter-ranged scale, to grab two pieces of the spacetime matrix and fold them together, overlapping two distant points through one or more higher dimensions. Once an overlap was achieved, men or small vehicles could move directly from one to the other, again without traversing intervening space.
The gateway opened was only a few meters across, and the range was limited to about one hundred thousand kilometers, but it did provide military forces with an unstoppable and unpredictable means of delivering assault troops to a precise tactical location. The equipment necessary for a d-teleport massed a few thousand tons, and required a fairly large quantum power tap to generate the flood of energy necessary for the folding process, but it could be carried easily enough on a carrier-sized warship…or on board a Marine transport.
Hotel Company was organized into three thirty-six-man platoons plus a twelve-Marine headquarters constellation—one hundred and twenty in all, though in fact they were minus the two they’d lost in cybe-hibe. Nal was the senior NCO in the HQ unit, and as such was the man the entire company looked to, enlisted and officers alike, for solid, practical experience and guidance.
But he had no experience to offer here, and no guidance beyond “remember the downloads” and “don’t do anything stupid.”
He felt the faint inward shudder that meant the Nicholas was translating through the Quantum Sea, making the instantaneous passage from Waypoint Tun Tavern to Objective Samar.
And who in all the bloody hells of the Corps had chosen Samar as an inspirational name for the mission objective? The name was still remembered with reverence. Back in the opening years of the twentieth century, during the Philippine Insurrection, fighting on the island of Samar had been so fierce that for years afterward, when a veteran of that fight entered wardroom or mess deck, he would be toasted by officers and enlisted men alike with the words, “Stand, gentlemen! He served on Samar!” Both the campaign and the toast were remembered still, parts of the ever-growing legend of the Corps.
But Samar had been a literal hell of blood, jungle, malnutrition, and disease, a premonition of later wars against native uprisings and popular revolutions in the tropics. The Marine officer in charge, one Major Littleton Waller, had been accused of war crimes after ordering the execution of eleven native porters who’d attacked his men. He’d been acquitted at his trial…but the news media of the day had branded him the “Butcher of Samar.”
“Objective Samar” did not inspire Nal with any particularly heroic or gung-ho feelings. It felt, in fact, like something about to go horribly wrong.
The gate was still closed, with nothing visible within that squat ellipse of metal and ceramic at the top of the ramp except the gray bulkhead beyond. The transit opening, the interior of the ellipse, was some five meters wide and three high, big enough for Marines to go through four abreast without crowding. The thirty-five men and women of First Platoon, who would be the first ones through, stood at the bottom of the ramp in eight ranks of four, with the last three bringing up the rear. Their CO was Lieutenant Grigor Haskins. Second Platoon under Lieutenant Fellacci would be next, followed by Captain Corcoran and the HQ constellation, and with Third Plat
oon in reserve.
Their actual target was a rebel command and control center in the orbital fortress guarding the Magellanic Stargate. According to Intelligence, the compartment was large, open, and high, with at least two catwalk or promenade levels high up on the bulkheads, and banks of communications equipment. Once the alert was sounded through the Tavros-Endymion Cluster with the arrival of the Associative naval task force, the local warlord who’d styled himself Emperor Dahl would come here to oversee operations.
Hotel Company had been tasked with capturing Dahl if at all possible, with killing him if necessary, and with taking out the command-control center at the earliest possible opportunity in the assault. Each Marine had downloaded a holo of Dahl, as well as news media clips of the man taken at a recent political rally, and knew exactly what he looked like.
The strategy was simplicity. Take out the man at the top and any people under him giving orders, and the enemy’s defenses might collapse in short order.
Might. Nothing, Nal knew, was certain in combat.
Nal wondered why Dahl had declared war on the local non-human culture, the Tarantulae. From all accounts, they were peaceful enough, and offered Humankind a valuable source of informational exchange—new art, new culture, new technologies, a new worldview…all of the good reasons to embrace a new sentient contact.
The Marine briefings hadn’t gone into the politics of the situation, however. There was no need. The Marines would take out Dahl, knock out the Imperial defenses, and open the way for the Associative Fleet to move in and take over.
“Marines, stand ready!” the sharp-edged voice of Lofty Henderson, the divisional AI, sounded in Nal’s head. “We have successfully translated to our assault point. Objective Samar is five thousand kilometers ahead, and has just gone on full alert. We are making the final calibrations on the d-teleport system now. We estimate gateway opening within three minutes….”
No merely human mind, Nal knew, could handle the calculations involved in a d-teleport. Not even the superintelligent s-humans could handle that level of math. There were far too many variables of mass, gravity, and magnetic moment, and each one had to be addressed with better than ten-place decimal accuracy. He wondered if Lofty had absorbed the skills necessary to make the critical transition calculations, or if the entire show was being run by AI minds native to this era. In a way, Nal hoped that Lofty was in charge; he wasn’t sure he trusted the AIs of the forty-first century, and Lofty was a fellow 3MarDiv Marine.
Briefly, he thought about the other Marines on board the Sam Nick, waiting to begin the assault. They included a large number of these so-called “Anchor Marines,” Marines recruited and trained in this era. Like fellow Marines throughout the recorded history of the Corps, Nal was imbued with the sense that the Marines of his day had been tough, well trained, superbly experienced…and that, frankly, they just didn’t make them like that any more. The technology was shiny, to be sure. But how good were the Marines of this pacifistic and—it seemed to him—degenerate future epoch?
They would know soon enough. Globe Marines were being teleported in to the inner sanctums of Dahl’s imperium, but Anchor Marines would be using RS/A-91 Starwraith pods to secure Imperial gun emplacements and sensor emplacements throughout Tavros-Endymion battlespace.
Don’t worry about them, he told himself savagely. Worry about your objectives, about what you have to do!
With startling abruptness, the empty space within the flattened ellipse ahead changed. Instead of a gray metal bulkhead, Nal could see into a large compartment with a high overhead, banks of instrument consoles, and a large number of people, most wearing distinctive black and gold uniforms. The image appeared to be unsteady, shivering and jolting even as the people on the other side began reacting to the appearance of the d-teleport gateway in their midst.
“Go!” Lieutenant Haskins screamed over the company com channel. “Go! Go!”
“Belay that!” The sharp command was Lofty’s, echoed closely by Captain Corcoran, but it was too late. The First Platoon was already going through.
And it was a bloody disaster from the very start.
Strike Squadron 340, Blue Flight
Objective Samar
Tavros-Endymion Stargate
0513 hours, GMT
Lieutenant Garwe felt the sharp acceleration as his Starwraith pod snapped off its accelerator rail and into empty space. As always, he struggled to suppress the surge of fear as space exploded around him.
His body, he knew, was safely back on board the Sam Nick, strapped into a link couch, but there was absolutely no way of telling that from the sensations flooding his brain. The vast bulk of the phase-shift transport dropped away astern, dwindling into the distance in an instant. Ahead and in all directions, the sky was filled with a dazzling, jewel-like array of tightly clustered stars enmeshed within the filaments and tendrils and twisted sheets of clotted, blue-white luminosity that were the Tarantula Nebula.
“Stay tight, War Dogs,” Captain Xander warned. “They can’t see us.”
Not yet, Garwe thought, but he adjusted his pod’s gravitic drive slightly, edging into closer formation with the other fifteen Starwraiths of Blue Flight. Myriad glowing specks drew multicolored contrails across his field of view, marking other Starwraiths, as well as the ships of the task force translated in on board the Nicholas, along with other remote-piloted combat and reconnaissance craft. Ahead, bracketed in bright red, a slender ring floated against the backdrop of stars and starstuff, growing swiftly as his pod dropped closer.
White globes of incandescence began appearing across the starscape, flashing and expanding as the enemy batteries began opening up.
And the War Dogs vectored in on the Tarantula Stargate.
Company H, 2/9
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
0513 hours, GMT
“Belay that! First Platoon, pull back! Pull back!”
But the assault had already tumbled into bloody chaos. One of the Marines at the extreme left of the front rank bumped against the Marine to his right, stumbled, and fell sideways against the edge of the elliptical gateway. Nal heard the shrill scream as the man’s left arm, legs, and lower torso vanished, his body sliced through as cleanly as if by the touch of a plasma torch. The room beyond the gateway gave another lurch, and three more Marines tumbled off the ramp and across the threshold.
From his vantage point far back in the assault formation, Nal could see what was going wrong. The two volumes of space, each a few meters across, which should have overlapped in order to allow the Marines to step smoothly from one into the other, were imperfectly aligned. The space within the objective control center appeared to be throbbing or pulsing, and was drifting back and forth erratically.
The Marines of First Platoon were too close to the gate to clearly see what was happening. Those in the front ranks were trying to move back, away from the yawing gateway into the enemy command center; those behind were still pushing forward, jostling, shoving, and the resultant collision was spilling Marines off the ramp.
A few fell to either side just in front of the open gateway, and appeared to be all right. Others, though, were being shoved forward into the gate by the press from behind. Some appeared to be landing intact on the other side, but several fell partway through the invisible, three-dimensional interface of hyperdimensional space with the space of the Sam Nick’s debarkation bay, and were hideously mangled. With horror and disbelief, Nal watched one Marine appear to step through an instrument console on the enemy command deck, then abruptly jerk and thrash as the atoms of his body became inextricably mingled with the atoms of the enemy console.
Men and women were screaming. Blood, shockingly scarlet, splashed across the deck and the vaguely outlined Hellfire armor of struggling Marines. On the far side of the gate, black and gold-clad troopers were turning to face the threat, raising their weapons.
Abruptly, the scene glimpsed through the open gate flipp
ed upside down, then reversed, right switching with left. Corporal Regin Devrochik—“Chickie” to his squadmates—was caught partway into the gate interface when it shifted, and the front half of his body, from weapon and Hellfire armor to internal organs and blood vessels, all the way down to his individual cells all turned suddenly and horribly inside-out. What was left collapsed backward onto the ramp, still flailing as what was left of Chickie’s brain tried to make sense of what had just happened. Sergeant Cori Ryack fired a single bolt from her plasma rifle, incinerating the bloodily twitching horror on the deck.
The Dahl troopers on the far side of the gate were firing, now, their upside-down images moving closer to the opening, but not stepping through. Plasma beams snapped through First Platoon’s ranks; some didn’t pass through the shifting dimensional interface, while others were absorbed or refracted by Marine armor, but a few more Marines on the embarkation deck went down.
“Return fire!” Lieutenant Haskins was screaming over the command net. “Return fire!”
But the Marines in the rear ranks were blocked by those in the front, and no one could even be sure the plasma bolts were getting through the strangely twisted geometries between the two spaces, the Nick’s embarkation bay and the enemy command deck. Another man fell through, fell up as he dropped through the dimensional interface and landed on the enemy’s deck. Dahl Imperium troops were pouring into the compartment on the other side, now, many of them in black and silver armor similar to the Hellfire armor worn by the Marines.
There was a sudden new danger…that if the gateway was stabilized, the enemy troops might actually storm through onto the Sam Nick’s embarkation bay deck, and try to take the ship from within. With the narrow field of view offered by the elliptical gateway, it was impossible to tell how many Dahl troops were over there, but there appeared to be several hundred at least.
