by Ian Douglas
“Teleport department reports we’ve begun bringing Marines back on board,” Carter reported.
“And Weapons Department reports the special package is ready for launch.”
“Good.” Now it was in the laps of the gods. He turned to Rame. “How about it, Lord Rame? What do your Conclave friends say? Are we going to do this or not?”
Rame drew in a ragged breath. Although they weren’t being IDed through Garroway’s implant, Garroway could sense other minds, other eyes, watching through Rame’s. How many? There was no way to tell.
“I’ve not been able to reach everyone within the Conclave,” he said. “Only a few thousand…perhaps twelve percent?”
“Okay. And how do they vote?”
“Forty-three percent are in favor of delivering the antimatter warhead, as you suggest, General. Thirty-nine percent are against. Eight percent either have no opinion, or they are still debating the matter.”
Garroway wondered how any intelligent being could not have an opinion about the possibility of destroying all of Reality. Some of the intelligences with whom Humankind had made contact across the Galaxy were pretty strange, with a philosophical detachment or simply with an alien point of view Garroway found difficult to understand, but even so….
Democracy, an ancient politician had once humorously noted, was absolutely the worst form of government in existence…except for all of the others. It had the advantage of being confused and disorganized enough that the freedoms of its citizens could be more easily preserved. The disadvantage, though, was that when something had to be done, and done quickly, it was almost impossible to create a consensus in time to do anything about it.
Historically, the Marines had carried out the government policies set by others, but this time, in the face of a clear and present danger as the ancient formula had it, Garroway was going to give the orders he knew to be right. “Forty-three to thirty-nine,” he said. “Time’s up, Lord Rame. The ayes have it.”
Rame hesitated, then nodded. “I agree. What else can we do?”
“We could do nothing and die.” He turned to Carter. “How are we doing?”
“It’s going to take a while, General. We have a lot of men out there, and not all of them are back at the surface.”
“Ten minutes,” Garroway said. “Then we launch.”
The order to teleport the antimatter warhead into the Xul worldlet might well be the death sentence for more Marines than Garroway cared to think about now.
The volume of fire from the Xul planet was greatly reduced, now, but still fierce. Nicholas was taking numerous hits as she drifted slowly toward the Xul base. The surviving ships of the squadron continued to fire as they moved slowly out toward the Nicholas, and began maneuvering to be taken aboard. Nicholas targeted the Xul batteries one after another, pounding them into hot plasma, and the enemy fire was reduced still more.
Garroway thought about other targets of the Marine Corps over the past two thousand years. There seemed to be a sharp escalation built into the history of the human-Xul war.
In 2170, a Naval task force with a Marine element embarked had gone through the Sirius stargate to emerge in Cluster Space, at a Xul node out beyond the rim of the Galaxy. They’d destroyed an asteroid there which housed another stargate, in order to keep the Xul from discovering Earth.
In 2323, another Navy-Marine task force had accelerated a transport filled with Martian sand to close to the speed of light, releasing the cargo to literally sandblast an entire planet, and the Xul fleet nearby, at Night’s Edge.
In 2877, with the help of the alien Eulers, Marines had used a faster-than-light ship to disrupt the core of a star, creating a supernova that wiped out a Xul node in Starwall Space.
And just ten years later, in 2887, Marines and a naval squadron had assaulted the Galactic Core itself, collapsing the Xul Dyson sphere into the supermassive black hole at the Galaxy’s center, and initiating the Core Detonation itself.
With that kind of history, it seemed almost inevitable that now, twelve hundred years later, the Marines would be poised to end all of Reality itself….
Blue Seven
Objective Reality
0949 hours, GMT
Garwe struggled on across the broken metal-rock-crystal of the cavern floor. The boots built into the feet of his pressure suit were not thick-soled, and though the material was too tough to tear on the rough surface, fortunately, it was not comfortable to walk on. All of the War Dogs were slowing, as exhaustion and blistered feet became harder and harder to ignore.
Even so, it was tough to resist the urge to break into a run. Purple-blue light was shining up ahead—a tiny patch marking the cavern opening.
The Xul began emerging from the walls and floor around them.
Garwe raised his carbine and began firing, burning down the black, biomechanical tentacles growing out of solid rock, a fast-growing mass of tendrils trying to reach the struggling Marines. The outer perimeter of armored Marines took the brunt of the first assault, but then the floor seemed to soften, to melt into the consistency of thick tar, and tentacles and less identifiable appendages began growing from the plastic mass at their feet.
For a time the battle was at knife-fighting range, as tentacles wrapped around individual Marines, lifting them from the ground, as Marines fired at the Xul mechanicals at point-blank range, as Xul plasma beams snapped and burned from the nearby walls with shrill bursts of static over the radios. One of the armored Marines was grabbed and pulled down by a mass of finger-thick tentacles like the business end of a sea anemone. As more and more tentacles closed over the Marine, they began merging together, encasing the armored form in a black mass that seemed to be dissolving back into the cavern floor. Garwe took three steps and reached the struggling Marine, firing his carbine into the black mass with his right hand, while using his left arm to haul the man free. Another armored Marine came up beside Garwe, and together they pulled the trapped man up and out of the tarry ooze.
Then, with blinding suddenness, Misek Bollan was lifted off the ground by a black, jointed tentacle as thick as Garwe’s thigh, growing up out of the ground itself. For a horrible instant, Bollan was suspended above the other Marines, screaming, as his squadmates turned their fire on the shimmering thing coiled about his hips…and then the tentacle convulsed and tightened, pinching the Marine in half. It gave a shake, and Bollan’s body flew apart, legs going one way, torso, arms and head the other, trailing blood and gore.
Before he could react to the sight, something grabbed Garwe by his right ankle and yanked him hard to the side, hoisting him. The biomechanical tentacle had flowed up out of the ground itself and wrapped itself around him, jerking him bodily from the ground. Dangling upside down, he tried to bring his weapon to bear, but the slender black arm writhed and pulsed and twisted, impossible to target. Garwe hesitated. If he fired too close to his own leg, he could breach his suit, and then it would be all over.
Then one of the armored Marines was there, throwing his arms around the lurching tentacle, using his suit’s flamer to burn through the black, metallic coil. With a shock, the tentacle parted, and Garwe landed on his arm and shoulder. The piece of tentacle wrapped around his leg continued to move and tighten with a life of its own. The other Marine burned it away with an expertly timed pass of the flamer, melting most of the coil, but leaving Garwe’s suit intact.
“Thanks!” Garwe called. Terror clutched at him. His heart was pounding; he was having trouble breathing.
“Not a problem,” the other replied. For the first time, Garwe was close enough to the other man to read the name stenciled on the chest of his armor: NAL, S.
He would remember that name, Garwe promised himself, so he could buy the guy a drink when this was over.
The Xul assault appeared to be breaking off, as more and more of the biomechanical appendages and robotic machines were melted into slag or vaporized in high-energy bursts from lasers or plasma weapons. Garwe decided the fighting at Nassau had b
een a hell of a lot easier. At least there the enemy didn’t ooze up through solid rock and assemble itself in front of you.
Bollan, horribly, was still alive. The interior of his bubble helmet was smeared with blood, and air was bubbling through the opening in his suit where it had been torn apart, but his arms and torso were still twitching, still soundlessly writhing. If he’d still been in a Starwraith, the assault pod’s medical suite might have plugged into him and kept him alive—at the very least his implant would have been able to pull off a mindkeeping save.
There was nothing they could do for him now, however, save the final peace. Garwe shoved the muzzle of his carbine against the side of the blood-smeared helmet and pulled the trigger. Bollan gave a final, convulsive shudder, then lay still.
Two Marines were dead—Bollan, and one of the armored Globe Marines. garcia, f was the name on the second man’s armor. He’d been disabled by a volley of plasma fire, completely enveloped in living black tar, pulled down against the rock floor, and finally crushed to death.
Garwe noticed that Kaddy had left Xander’s head behind, somewhere.
It seemed better that way.
In a very real sense, the entire minor planet was a single Xul organism. The Xul intelligences had reworked the rock itself with their equivalent of nanotechnology, creating a near-infinite maze of channels, ducts, and pathways throughout the world’s volume through which sub-microscopic machines could flow like liquid. The analogy made Garwe think of himself and his fellow Marines as bacteria, as microscopic invaders fighting a macroscopic life-form’s immune responses.
“Wait a second,” Garwe said. He stooped, putting his gloved hand to the ground. “You feel that?”
“Feel what?” Nal asked. In that heavy armor, he wouldn’t be able to feel it…a kind of faint, trembling vibration coming up through the rock.
“I’m not sure,” Garwe said, “but we need to get out of here. Now!”
Turning, he looked back over his shoulder in the direction they’d come from. There was something there, something huge, massive, and moving swiftly toward them out of the darkness down the tunnel.
Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
0959 hours, GMT
“Ninety percent of the Marines are on board,” Carter reported.
“And the last of the ships is being brought in now,” Admiral Ranser added. “Our teleport crews report bringing the last of the Poseidon’s crew on board as well.”
Ninety percent. Did that reflect Marine casualties in the assault, Garroway wondered, or were there still substantial numbers of Marines inside the Xul planet, their radio signals and tracking IFFs blocked by tens of meters of rock?
“Is there any indication that we still have people over there?” he asked.
“D-teleport crew 10 reports a weak signal,” Major Kyle reported. “It appears to be being relayed through several combat drones from a large cavern on the surface.”
“Get them!”
“Working on it, sir!”
Garroway felt a shudder run through the Nicholas’ deck. Time was running out. With the naval squadron now safely inside the phase-shift transport, the Xul had only a single target. The Nicholas would not be able to endure this punishment for much longer.
Garroway used his implant link to slip through Nicholas’ internal network, focusing in on the d-teleport department, and finding team 10. In a moment, he was looking over the navy techs’ shoulders at the squat ellipse of one of the teleport gates.
He could see movement, but it was dark and confused, a flashing of bright suit lights and deep shadow. It looked like people, and they were running.
And suddenly, Garroway was somewhere else…somewhen else. He was Gunnery Sergeant Robert Lowery, and he was clinging to the gunwale of a small, open boat plunging ahead through the surf. A geyser of white water erupted ten yards to the left, threatening to capsize the landing craft and drenching the already soaking men on board in a cascade of spray.
Then the Higgins boat hit the reef, the bow lunging up and out of the water. The ramp dropped, and the Marines on board surged forward, jumping down off the dangling ramp and onto the exposed reef.
Everything was going wrong, Lowery thought, everything. The pre-landing bombardment was supposed to have eliminated the Japanese shore batteries and machine guns, but both were still very much alive. The tide was supposed to have been high enough to let the landing craft pass over the reef that encircled Tarawa’s landing beaches, but it was not.
Lowery hit the reef, then dropped into the water of the lagoon beyond. Ahead and to left and right, hundreds of Marines were moving forward, rifles held high above their heads as they struggled to reach the beaches. Everywhere, men were falling in ones, in twos, in whole lines as gouts of water snapped up with the impact of machine-gun bullets slashing out from the jungle-masked pillboxes behind the beaches.
Slightly to his right, Lowery saw a long, spindle-legged pier jutting out into the water, and he began angling toward it. A mortar round went off to his left, a thunderous blast with a savage underwater concussion that pounded his chest.
He kept moving….
No! He was not Lowery! He was Trevor Garroway, General Trevor Garroway, and the thunder and blood around him was an illusion…an illusion….
Gasping, he dropped to the deck of the Ops Center, landing on his hands and knees. Ranser and the others stared at him, startled and worried. “General!” Ranser said. “You just vanished and came back!”
“I am not going anywhere!” he replied, rising to his feet with Adri Carter’s help. “How long was I gone?”
“Only a second or two, General,” Carter told him.
It had seemed like forever.
He considered unplugging his implant. He was not going to let them drag him away now! But without the implant he wouldn’t be able to link through to the other departments on the Nicholas, would be effectively out of the battle.
He would stay linked. He could feel the simulation still running, a kind of ghost in the back of his brain. If he let himself, he could still hear the roar of heavy artillery, feel the spray and the surge of the seawater through which he was wading, smell the—
No! He pushed the sim aside, focusing instead on the d-teleport crew that was trying to lock on to his Marines.
“Shit!” one of the techs said. “We’ve got something coming up the tunnel!”
Garroway saw something at the far end of the Xul tunnel, big enough to blot out the faint light coming from the far end. “Get those Marines on board!” he said over the link.
“Yes, sir!” a startled tech replied.
“Ranser!” Garroway said, switching channels. “There’s a Xul ship coming out of that tunnel. Be ready for it.”
“I see it.” Ranser had linked into the combat net as well. “Tracking…”
Blue Seven
Objective Reality
0959 hours, GMT
Garwe stumbled and fell. Someone in armor grabbed his arm and lifted him to his feet. “Double time, Marine!”
He double-timed.
Although the rock of the Xul world was laced with pathways and conduits for flows of microscopic nano-machines, there were still numerous larger caverns and tunnels, like the one they were moving through now, which allowed the larger Xul combat machines—their warships, some two kilometers long—to pass in and out. This tunnel was only about fifty meters wide—far too small for the largest Xul needleships—but it was large enough, just barely, for something big coming up out of the darkness behind them.
They weren’t going to make it. A Xul ship of some sort was barreling up the tunnel behind them, and they weren’t going to fucking make it. He considered turning and opening fire on the thing, but hand-held weapons wouldn’t even scratch the outer nanocoating of a starship, so he did the only thing he could do and kept running.
And suddenly the cavern floor dropped out from beneath Garwe’s feet and he tumbled head first int
o dazzling light, along with the other Marines.
“Got them!” a voice nearby yelled. “Kill the gate! Kill the gate!”
Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
0959 hours, GMT
“Got them!” a technician yelled, as Marines tumbled through the ellipse and into an untidy tangle on the deck. Some wore heavy Hellfire armor, while the others were in lightweight pressure suits with bubble helmets. “Kill the gate! Kill the gate!”
The large something flashing toward the d-teleport gate winked out as the dimensional twist linking the teleport crew with the interior of the Xul world vanished, and just in time. Garroway wondered what would have happened if that huge, black machine had tried to come crashing through the ellipse into the Nicholas. Only part of it would have fit through the gate, but there would have been a lot of kinetic energy in the part that made it.
“Our people are on board, Admiral,” Garroway said. “Fire the warhead.”
“Teleport Three!” Ranser called. “Send the package!”
“Package is released,” a voice called back.
“I suggest,” Garroway said, “that we back out of here.”
“I think you’re right.” Ranser began giving orders.
And Nicholas’ bridge crew began making the final preparations to translate back into four-D space.
24
1902.2229
Objective Reality
1001 hours, GMT
Within the throat of the funnel-shaped pit beneath the Xul worldlet’s surface, an elliptical opening winked on, seemingly hanging unsupported in space. A moment later, a canister some four meters long and two wide emerged from the gateway and, in the low gravity of the planet, began to drift downward.
The ellipse winked out. The canister began picking up speed, dropping faster and faster into the heart of the Xul world. Below it, an enigmatic, artificial sun less than one kilometer across gleamed brilliant behind the black opaque armor of the shell surrounding it.
The Xul became aware of the danger scant seconds before the detonation. Amanda Karr in all of her iterations lurking within the Xul world’s ring heard the alarm, saw the sudden focus of attention. Five digital Amanda Karrs emerged from hiding at that instant, disrupting communications channels and taking several banks of internal weaponry off-line.
