Star Strike

by Ian Douglas

  “That is a large part of it,” Achilles agreed. “One aspect of moral character is the ability to rely on yourself rather than on technology.”

  Carefully, Garroway took another bite of faux steak and chewed, thoughtful. Achilles seemed to be a bit more dominant than Aide had been. And the damned thing was reading his thoughts, rather than waiting for him to encode them as mindspeak.

  “You will simply have to learn to trust me, Garroway,” Achilles told him. “Trust that I am not sharing your thoughts with others.”

  “Unless I deserve it.”

  “Do you always talk to yourself?” Sandre asked him.

  Achilles, tell her I’m holding a conversation with you.

  A moment later, Sandre’s eyes grew very large. “Did you send that?”

  He nodded. “Pretty slick, huh?”

  “Damn it, Garroway!” she snapped. “Get out of my head!” Abruptly, she stood, picked up her tray, and walked away. Garroway considered calling to her, but decided that using telepathy would just make matters worse.

  They were all going to have to work with the new technology for a bit, in order to get used to it.

  Exactly, Achilles told him. He could have sworn the AI sounded smug.

  * * * *

  Married Enlisted Housing

  USMC Recruit Training Center

  Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

  1924/24:20 local time, 0620 hrs GMT

  Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst stepped out of the flyer and onto the landing deck outside his home. It was a small place, but with lots of exterior spaces and enclosed garden patios surrounding a double plasdome growing from a canyon wall. Other base housing modules were visible up and down the canyon, extruded from the ancient sandstone walls.

  A billion years ago, this part of Mars had been under a sea a kilometer deep; the relentless rise of the Tharsis Bulge, however, had lifted the Noctis Labyrinthus high and dry; as the water drained away, it had carved the maze of channels from the soft stone. The northern ocean had rolled again, briefly, under the touch of the Builders half a million years ago, but by that time the Noctis Labyrinthus was far above mean sea level.

  Apparently, the Builders had not colonized this part of Mars, restricting their activities to Cydonia, far to the north, to Chryse Planitia, and to Utopia on the far side of the planet. Some of the base personnel spent off hours pacing up and down the canyon with metal detectors, however. A handful of people out here had made fortunes with the chance find of a fragment of cast-off xenotech.

  Warhurst never bothered with that sort of thing, however. His career—the Corps—was everything.

  A fact that was making things difficult at home.

  “Honey?” He stepped in off the deck, dropping his cover on a table. “I’m home.”

  The place seemed empty, and he queried the house AI. “Where is everybody?”

  Julie and Eric are home, the house’s voice whispered in his mind. Donal and Callie are still at the base.

  Warhurst was part of a group marriage and, as was increasingly the case nowadays, all of the other partners in the relationship were also Marines. It was simpler that way …and the partners tended to be more understanding than civilians. Usually.

  A door hissed open and Julie emerged from the bedroom. She was naked, and she looked angry. “Well, well. The prodigal is home. Decided to come visit the family for a change?”

  “Don’t start, Julie.”

  “Don’t start what?”

  “Look, I know I haven’t been home much lately—”

  “I know that too.” She ran a hand through her short hair. “Look, Marine, I’m having sex with Eric, so give us some privacy. Fix yourself dinner. When Don and Cal get home, we need to talk, the five of us.”

  “What do you—”

  But she’d already turned away and padded back into the bedroom.

  Damn.

  It had been a few days since he’d come home. How long? He pulled a quick check of his personal calendar, and saw the answer. Eight days.

  Damn it, Julie knew the score. When a new recruit company started up, he spent all of his time with the company, at least for the first few weeks. After that, he shared the duty with the other DIs, sleeping in the DI shack, or in one of the senior NCO quads across the grinder one night out of four. But even late in the training regime, there were particular times when it was important that he be there. This past week had been the last week for the recruits of 4102 in naked time, without their civilian headware, a time when lots of them came close to cracking. He needed to be there, to see them through. He’d almost stayed over tonight as well, but Corrolly had insisted that he and Amanate could handle things.

  He wished he’d stayed.

  Julie’s flat statement about a family meeting probably meant an ultimatum, and that probably meant a formal request that he move back into the BOQ, the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters.

  In other words, a divorce.

  It had been coming for a long time. He knew she’d been wanting to talk to him about the marriage, and his part in it, for a long time, but he’d been hoping to postpone it, at least until after 4102 had graduated. Damn it, he didn’t have time for this nonsense, for all this sturm und drang, and Julie ought to know that. He didn’t have the emotional stamina to deal with it now, either. There was just too much on his plate. Angry, he walked into the kitchen unit and punched up a meal.

  Warhurst was the most recent addition to the Tamalyn-Danner line marriage, having been invited in by Julie just fifteen months ago. Like many Corps weddings taking place on Mars, the vows had been declared, posted, and celebrated at Garroway Hall, at Cydonia, and half of RTC command had attended.

  Marriages outside the Corps were discouraged. Not forbidden…but discouraged. A Marine might be at any given duty station for a year or two, but then he or she might be deployed across a hundred light-years, or end up on board a Navy ship plying a slow run between stargates. The routine played merry hell with traditional relationships.

  At that, it was better than in the bad old days, before FTL and stargates, when a 4.3 light-year hop to Chiron took five and a half years objective, which meant a couple of years subjective spent in cybe-hibe stasis. Back then, Marines were assigned on the basis of their famsits, their family situations—whether or not they were married, had parents or other close relatives, and how closely tied they were psychologically to the Motherworld.

  Long ago, the Corps had adopted the habit of assigning command staff as discrete groups, called command constellations, to avoid breaking up good working teams through transfers and redeployments. A similar set of regulations now governed marital relationships. While the Corps couldn’t promise to keep everyone in the family together—especially in group marriages that might number ten or more people—the AIs overseeing deployments did their best, even shuffling personnel from one MarDiv to another, when necessary, to make the numbers come out even. The tough part was when kids were involved. Each major base had its own crèche, nurseries, and schools, but Navy ships on deep survey or remote listening outposts at the fringes of known Xul systems didn’t have the resources for that kind of luxury. Those assignments still required Marines with Famsits of two or better.

  What none of this took into account was the workload at established bases like Noctis-L. Training a company of raw recruits, breaking them out of their smug little civilian molds and building Marines out of what was left—that was a full-time job, and then some. Warhurst and five assistant DIs supervised Company 4102, now down to just forty-three recruits, and still it was never enough.

  He closed his eyes. That one kid, Collins. After six weeks without her implants, she’d just…snapped. The messy and very public suicide had hit everyone hard, and the DI staff especially had been badly stressed. Damn it, he should have been there….

  Warhurst leaned back in his chair, his meal half finished but unwanted. He summoned a cup of coffee, though, and waited while a servo extended it to him from a nearby wall-mar. He knew th
ere was nothing he could have done, and the board of inquiry had almost routinely absolved him and his staff of blame. But…he should have been there. Collins had stolen that thermite grenade one evening from a malfunctioning training arms locker when he’d been here, at home.

  Angrily, he pushed the thought aside, then mentally clocked on the wallscreen, looking for the evening news. He wanted an external distraction, rather than an internal feed, telling himself he needed to keep his internal channels clear, in case there was a call from the base.

  Which was pure theriashit, and he knew it. An emergency call would override any feed he had going. And either Achilles, the company AI, or Hector, who was reserved for the training staff, could talk to him at any time. He was avoiding the real issue, which was the strain within his marriage.

  Damned right I’m avoiding it, he thought. And a good job I’m doing of it, too.

  The news was dominated by the war, of course. The capture of Alighan was being hailed in the Senate as the defining victory of the war, the victory that would bring the Theocrats to their senses and bring them to the conference table.

  “In other military news,” the announcer said, her three-meter-tall face filling the wall, “the Interstellar News Web have received an as yet unconfirmed report of hostile contact with what may be a Xul huntership outside of the Humankind Frontier. If true, this will be the first contact with the Xul in over 550 years.

  “For this report, we go livefeed to Ian Castriani at Marine Corps Skybase headquarters in paraspace. Ian?”

  The announcer’s face faded away, replaced by a young man standing in the Public Arena of the headquarters station. He looked intense, determined, and excited.

  And what he had to say brought a cold, churning lump to the pit of Warhurst’s gut.

  7

  2410.1102

  Marine Listening Post

  Puller 659 Stargate

  1554 hrs GMT

  Lieutenant Tera Lee unlinked from the feed and blinked in the dim light of the comdome. “Shit,” she said, and made a face. “Shit!”

  “What’s the problem, sweetheart?” Lieutenant Gerard Fitzpatrick, her partner on the watch, asked.

  She ignored the familiarity. Fitzie was a jerk, but a reasonably well meaning one. She hadn’t had to deck him yet. Yet….

  “That’s four transgate drones we’ve lost contact with in the past ten minutes,” she said, checking the main board, then rechecking the communications web for a fault. Everything on this side of the Gate was working perfectly. “Something’s going down over there. I don’t like it.”

  “You link through to the old man?”

  “Chesty’s doing that now,” she told him. She wrinkled her nose. “I smell another sneakover.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s your turn,” he said, shrugging. Then he brightened. “Unless you wanna—”

  “Fuck you, Fitzie,” she said, keeping her voice light.

  “Exactly.”

  “Forget it, Marine. I have standards.”

  He sighed theatrically. “You wound me, sweetheart.”

  “Call me ‘sweetheart’ again and you’ll know what being wounded is like, jerkface. If you survive.”

  She dropped back into the linknet before he could make another rejoinder.

  The star system known to Marine Intelligence as Puller 659 was about as nondescript as star systems could get—a cool, red dwarf sun orbited by half a dozen rock-and-ice worlds scarcely worthy of the name, and a single Neptune-sized gas giant. The French astronomers who’d catalogued the system had named the world Anneau, meaning Ring, and the red dwarf Étoile d’Anneau, Ringstar. None of Ringstar’s planets possessed native life or showed signs of ever having been life-bearing. And despite frequent sweeps, no one had ever found any xenoarcheological tidbits, none whatsoever, save one.

  And that one was why the Marine listening post was here. As Lee linked through to another teleoperated probe, she could see it in the background—a vast, gold-silver ring resembling a wedding band out of ancient tradition, but twenty kilometers across.

  Just who or what had created the Stargates remained one of the great unanswered riddles of xenoarcheological research. Most academics, striving for the simplest possible view of things, assumed that the Builders—that long-vanished federation of starfaring civilizations half a million years ago—had created them, but there was no proof of that. It was equally likely that the things were millions of years old, that they’d been old already when the Builders had first come on the scene…back about the same time that the brightest creature on Earth was a clever tool-user that someday would receive the name Homo erectus.

  Whoever or whatever had built the things evidently had scattered them across the entire Galaxy. Gates were known to exist in systems outside the Galactic plane; Night’s Edge was such a place, where the sweep of the Galaxy’s spiral arms filled half the sky. Gate connected Gate in a network still neither understood nor mapped. Each Gate possessed a pair of Jupiter-massed black holes rotating in opposite directions at close to the speed of light; shifting tidal stresses set up by the counter-rotating masses opened navigable pathways from one Gate to another, allowing passage across tens of thousands of light-years in an eye’s blink. More, the vibrational frequencies of those planetary masses could be tuned, allowing one Gate to connect with any of several thousand alternate Gates.

  The alien N’mah, first contacted in 2170, had been living inside the Gate discovered in the Sirius system, 8.6 light-years from Earth. Though they’d lost the technology required for faster-than-light drives, they’d learned a little about Gate technology, and they’d taught Humankind how to use the Gates—at least after a fashion. Thanks to them, Marines had scored important victories over the Xul, in Cluster Space, and at Night’s Edge.

  If it had simply been a matter of destroying Stargates to keep the Xul out of human space, things would have been far simpler. Unfortunately, it turned out that there was more than one way to outpace light. The Xul used the Gates extensively—indeed, a large minority of those academics felt that the Xul were the original builders of the Stargates—but their hunterships could also slip from star to star in days or weeks without benefit of the Gates.

  In the past five centuries, Humans had learned at last how to harness quantum-state vacuum energies and liberate inconceivable free energy, and how to apply that energy to the Quantum Sea in order to achieve trans-c pseudovelocities—high multiples of the speed of light. They’d located some dozens of separate Stargates, and sent both robotic and manned probes through to chart the accessible spaces on the far side.

  Most probes found only another Stargate, usually circling a distant star, like Puller 659, with lifeless worlds or no worlds at all. A few led to planetary systems possessing earthlike worlds, though, so far, no other sentient species had been found this way, and, in accord with the Treaty of Chiron, none had been opened to human colonization.

  A very few, mercifully few, opened into star systems occupied by the Xul.

  The Ringstar Gate at Puller 659 was one such. One of the regions accessed through the Puller Gate was in a system dominated by a hot, type A star, seething with deadly radiation burning off the galactic core, and host to a major Xul base.

  As was the case every time a Xul base was discovered, a Marine listening post had been constructed close by the Puller 659 Gate, and a careful watch kept. Periodically, AI-controlled probes were sent through the Gate to record signals and images from the Xul base. The probes were tiny—the size of volleyballs—and virtually undetectable. The probes would slip through, make their recordings, then double back through the Gate to make their reports.

  The usual routine was to send one probe through at a time, to minimize the chances of the reconnaissance being detected. Faults and failures happened, however, and losing contact with one or even two was not unusual, especially through the turbulent gravitic storms and tides swirling about the mouth of a Gate. But Lee had just sent the third probe in a row through to check on num
ber one, and its lasercom trace—kept tight and low-power to avoid detection—had been cut off within twenty seconds of passing the Gate interface.

  Not good. Not good at all…especially since the lasercom threads carried no data about what was going on down range, save that the probe was functional.

  And standing orders described in considerable detail what happened in such cases.

  It was time for a sneak-and-peek.

  “Package up the log,” she told Chesty over the telencephalic link. “Beam it out NL. And recommend to Major Tomanaga that we go on full alert.”

  “Major Tomanaga is already doing so,” the base AI told her, “and he has just authorized a level-2 reconnaissance through to Starwall.”

  “Excellent.” Starwall was the name of the system on the other side of the Gate, the location of the Xul base.

  “Will you be taking an FR-100 through the interface?”

  “Yeah. Prep one for me, please.”

  “Number Three is coming on-line now.”

  In a larger base, there would have been a standby pool of Marine fighter pilots ready to fly recon, but the listening post was manned by six Marines at a time, standing watchin-three. The main base complex was a space station orbiting the system’s gas giant, camouflaged from detection by the planet’s far-flung radiation belts and now almost two light-hours away. Non-local com webs bridged that gulf instantly, but it would be hours before fighters could get here.

  Marine listening posts like Puller 659 were deliberately kept tiny and unobtrusive; Fitzie was right, damn him. It was her turn.

  She dropped out of the link and rose from her couch. Leaving Fitzpatrick in his commlink couch at the monitor station, she caught an intrastation pod and dropped to the fighter bay, two decks down. The uniform of the day was Class-One VS, a black skinsuit that served as her vacsuit in a depressurization emergency, so she needed only to pick up a helmet, gloves, and LS pack on the way.