by Ian Douglas
“I know, I know. But I don’t have to like it.”
“One minute,” a voice said in his head.
“Okay, Kitten,” he told her. “I just got the one-minute alert. If everything goes as planned, I’ll be back in a few hours for the next set of ships.”
“I love you, Marty.”
“I love you.” He hesitated, then added, “I’ll be back before you know it.”
He could feel the hard and familiar knot of anticipation tightening in his gut. He wished this next translation was the one taking them to the Xul. He wanted to get it over with…but unfortunately Operation Lafayette had to come first. Secure the jump-off system—and get those captured Marines back—and then it would be time to deal with the much vaster threat of the Xul.
“Thirty seconds.”
What perverse insanity emanating from the gods of battle demanded that humans first tear and kill one another, when the Xul were the real threat, the most terrible and terrifying threat the human species had ever encountered?
“Ten seconds.”
“Five…four…three…two…one…systems engaged….”
The mental window through which Alexander was watching the scene suddenly turned to white snow and crashing static. Damn! He hadn’t even considered the self-evident fact that once Skybase translated, the camera on board the Aldebaran would suddenly be left far behind, and the abrupt loss of signal had jarred him. He switched to a different input channel, one connected to a camera feed from Skybase’s outer hull.
For just an instant, Skybase would have dropped through the blue-lit haze of paraspace, but Alexander had missed it. What he saw now was a view of deep space, star-strewn and empty, the constellations unrecognizable. Two hundred eighty-three light-years was far enough to distort the familiar patterns of stars in the sky into strangeness.
In fact, there was nothing much to see. Other downloads from Skybase’s command center, however, began providing a more complete picture of their surroundings as the base’s sensitive scanners began sampling the background of ambient electromagnetic and neutrino radiation. The star gate, as expected, was about 10 light-seconds in one direction, the tiny red spark of the local sun in another, the star marking Puller 659’s solitary gas giant just to one side of the star, and thirty light-minutes away.
Seconds after translation, Skybase began releasing her first riders—sixteen F/A-4140 Stardragons of VMA-980, the Sharpshooters, one of three fighter squadrons in 1MIEF’s aerospace wing. Sleek, black-hulled, and deadly, the fighters dispersed around Skybase in a globular formation, the base protectively at its center. They continued to move outward at a steady drift of nearly 4 kilometers per second relative to the Skybase, flight and combat systems shut down, drawing energy solely from their on-board batteries, watching for a sign, any sign, that the enemy knew they were there.
Skybase, too, continued sampling ambient space, building up a detailed picture of its new surroundings. One by one, PanEuropean ships were picked up by their electromagnetic signatures despite their being submerged within the hash of charged particles enveloping the Puller gas giant. In all, seven enemy vessels were picked up and identified, just over half of the expected twelve. Those five missing PE ships were a minor worry; most likely, they were simply too well masked by the gas giant’s radiation belts, or they might be hidden by the bulk of the planet itself, on the far sides of their orbits. They might even have departed the system…but it was also possible that they were closer at hand, well-shielded and effectively invisible.
If so, the fighter screen would sniff them out soon enough. Skybase’s sensors, meanwhile, scoured the surrounding sky, searching.
There were no ships close by the stargate. The tiny planetoid housing the Marine listening post, however, was spotted and identified after a few moments. A small shuttle slid from a secondary docking bay in Skybase’s hull, accelerating toward the stargate.
The first flight of starships was already being off-loaded as the shuttle departed. First to emerge from Skybase’s maw was the destroyer Morrigan, 24,800 tons and 220 meters in length overall, and with a crew of 112. Her antimatter reactors were already powering up; she would be ready to engage her primary drive within another fifteen minutes.
Alexander, meanwhile, switched to the downloaded view being recorded from the Morrigan, and was able to watch the second starship slip her magnetic moorings and exit Skybase’s hangar bay, edging gently into hard vacuum, guided by a quartet of AI-directed tugs.
She was the Thor, and she was sister to Morrigan, her masculine name notwithstanding. Both Cybele-class destroyers were fast and maneuverable, designed originally to serve with the Solar High Guard fleet, protecting worlds and habitats from incoming asteroids or cometary debris. Each possessed a powerful spinal-mount plasma gun as primary weapon, but their hull superstructures bristled with secondary laser turrets, missile batteries, and railgun accelerators, as well as automated point-defense mounts.
With the two destroyers launched and positioned a few thousand kilometers to either side of Skybase, Alexander let himself begin to breath more easily. The most dangerous part of Operation Lafayette was the possibility that PanEuropean warships would be close enough to pick up Skybase’s transition into normal space. While Skybase did possess defensive weapons, the structure was still not primarily intended for combat. The two destroyers would provide the fledgling in-system beachhead with some decent fire-support.
Third out of Skybase’s cargo deck was the Marine assault transport Samar, huge, blunt-prowed, and massive. Measuring 310 meters long, and with a beam of 85 meters, Samar massed nearly 35,000 tons. She carried a crew of 79, as well as her cargo—four companies of the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, a total of nearly 600 Marines. Half of those Marines would already be loaded into their ship assault pods, or SAPs, ready to engage in ship-to-ship boarding actions.
The final ship nestled within Skybase’s hold was the largest, the Fleet Marine Carrier John A. Lejeune, massing 87,400 tons, and measuring 324 meters, stem to stern. Cocooned within Lejeune’s hangar deck were two more squadrons of F/A-4140s, as well as a squadron of A-90 ground-support strike craft and a number of support and auxiliary vessels—ninety-eight aerospace craft in all.
The Lejeune was a tight fit inside Skybase’s hangar bay; in fact, several outriggers and deep-space communications and tracking masts had been removed in order to let her slip through Skybase’s garage door at all. Getting her out was a tediously exacting exercise in geometry and tug-facilitated maneuvering that would take nearly an hour if all went well. It was for that reason that the Lejeune had been the first ship loaded on board the Skybase, and the last out; Alexander had wanted the fleet carrier to be with the first translated load, however. Her three Stardragon squadrons—forty-eight aerospace fighters in all—would be invaluable in achieving and maintaining battlespace superiority, and greatly expanded the fleet’s reach and sensitivity.
An eighth PanEuropean ship was picked out of the radiation fields around the gas giant. By now, neutrino and electromagnetic energy emitted by the newly emergent Commonwealth vessels would have reached the vicinity of the PE fleet. The question now was how good the enemy was at picking those radiations out of the storm of particulate radiation surrounding them at the moment. The Commonwealth squadron might be detected at any moment; Alexander was gambling on the enemy—even his AIs—being less than perfectly vigilant.
Even so, every passing minute increased the chances of discovery.
And so Thor and Morrigan stood guard as Skybase slowly, even grudgingly gave birth to the John A. Lejeune, while the Samar drifted nearby, her waiting Marines encased in their SAP pods, unable to do anything but watch, fret, pray, or sleep, according to individual habit and preference.
And once Lejeune drifted free in open space, the tugs dragged her clear and, after a brief gathering of inner power, the Skybase winked out of existence once again, returned to distant Earth.
The four capital ships, a small clou
d of fighters and auxiliaries, and some twelve hundred men and women remained behind, alone, outnumbered, and expendable almost three hundred light-years from home.
And everything was riding on a single unknown: was the enemy aware of their arrival?
The question would be settled, one way or the other, within the next few hours.
17
0112.1102
SAP 12/UCS Samar
Assembly Point Yankee
Puller 695 System
1935 hrs GMT
PFC Aiden Garroway could scarcely move. He had a little bit of wiggle room inside his 660-battlesuit, but the embrace of his Ship Assault Pod made any real shift in his position impossible. His confinement was beginning to gnaw at him. He’d been sealed in here since 1700 hours, long before the Skybase had even made its translation. Two and a half hours, now.
Worst of all he couldn’t scratch. There was a point midway up his back, below his shoulder blades and on the left, that had been tingling and prickling for the past hour, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Theoretically, he could have used his system nano to anesthetize the spot—a process that happened automatically if he was wounded—but so far his thought-clicks hadn’t done a damned thing. In fact, when he tried to isolate the itch in his mind, it moved, shifting one way or another until it was impossible to really pin it down.
The failure of the anesthetic release probably meant the sensation was purely psychosomatic, but that made it no easier to bear. In any case, he’d experienced worse. In boot camp, any unauthorized movement or wiggling when the recruit platoon had been ordered to hold position, had been punished by a session in the sand pit, taken through a grueling set of exercises by a screaming Gunny Warhurst or one of the assistant DIs.
At least Warhurst wasn’t going to reach him in here, sealed away deep in the belly of Samar’s launch bay. His former DI was in another SAP, possibly right next door, but as helplessly cocooned as was Garroway.
At least he had the squad data feed to keep him from going completely nuts. An open window in his mind showed an animated schematic of the tacsit, centered on Samar, with the Lejeune, Thor, and Morrigan spread across several thousand kilometers of empty space, and with the fighters farther out yet.
By pulling back on the viewpoint within his mind, the Commonwealth squadron dwindled to a bright, green dot, and he could see the icon representing the stargate falling in from the right. Pulling back still more, he could see the icons representing the enemy; zooming in on that tightly grouped pack of glowing red icons revealed seven capital ships just visible in a pale, red fog representing the radiation belts around the system’s gas giant. All seven vessels were evidently in orbit about the giant, and gave no indication that they were aware, yet, of the presence of the small Commonwealth squadron.
But they would be.
Garroway kept turning inward, inspecting closely his own emotions. He wasn’t sure about what he was looking for. Fear? Anticipation? Excitement? Impatience?
Maybe he was feeling something of all four. Boot camp had taken him through so many simulations of combat he couldn’t begin to number them. In virtual reality simulations he’d sat inside the close, unyielding embrace of an SAP many times, until he knew exactly what to expect—the long wait, the gut-punching jolt of launch, the sweaty palmed anxiety of the approach, the strike, the penetration, the entry.
Except that, he knew very well, you could never know for sure what was coming. Simulations were just that, simulations, and the real world was certain to contain more than its fair share of the unexpected.
* * * *
Marine Listening Post
Puller 659 Stargate
1935 hrs GMT
In fact, the unexpected had already happened. Seven days earlier, guided by intelligence provided by the DGSE—Direction Général de la Sécurité Extraterrestrial—the light cruisers Sagitta and Pegasus and the destroyer Détroyat had approached the Marine listening post beside the stargate under Alcubierre Drive, slowing to sublight velocities at the last possible moment. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick had noted the ships powering up, but they arrived at the stargate long before the light carrying news of their departure from their orbit around the gas giant.
Seconds after dropping back into unwarped space, Détroyat had released a 10-megaton thermonuclear warhead which had detonated at the asteroid’s surface; the shockwave had wrecked the listening post, and incapacitated or killed the Marines inside.
Before the fireball had fully dispersed, Pegasus had deployed an anticommunications nanocharge, a warhead releasing a cloud of molecule-sized disassemblers that had sought out the internal wiring and optical networks interlaced through the asteroid’s heart and followed it to the listening post’s QCC unit, reducing it to inert plastic, ceramcomposite, and metal in seconds. QCC signals could not be intercepted—or even detected—without a second unit containing elements quantum-entangled with those of the first, but disassembler nano could be smart enough to identify an FTL unit and destroy it.
Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and the other five Marines still within the listening post never had a chance even to alert Skybase that they were under attack. Within a few more moments, FMEs—the elite French Fusilier Marin Extra-terrestrienne—and German Sturmjäger had broken in and secured what was left of the facility. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick—badly injured but alive—and the other Marines had been taken prisoner.
They killed eight FMEs before they were taken, though, and wounded five more.
For the next week, then, the former Marine listening post had been occupied by a small reconnaissance unit of PanEuropean special forces. The asteroid’s antennae and other surface structures had been vaporized by the nuke, but the base was now linked to the PE flagship Aurore by QCC, and the French troops inside had been monitoring the deployment of the Commonwealth squadron almost from the moment Skybase had translated into the Puller battlespace.
And starward, in orbit around the gas giant, Aurore and her sister ships were already preparing to spring the trap.
* * * *
SAP 12/UCS Samar
Assembly Point Yankee
Puller 695 System
1948 hrs GMT
“Fifty newdollars,” Gunnery Sergeant Charel Ramsey said over the squad com channel, “that the whole thing is called off and we get told to stand down.”
“There speaks the voice of experience,” Master Sergeant Paul Barrett said. “Didn’t you make the same bet on the way in to Alighan?”
“Well, hey. Cut me some slack, okay? I’m bound to hit it right someday.”
“You wish,” Corporal Takamura put in.
Still packed into his SAP, Garroway listened to the banter among the waiting Marines, and wondered if the old hands in his new platoon were as confident, as relaxed as they seemed. He certainly wasn’t able to hear any stress in their voices.
But then, perhaps they had more experience in masking it.
Shit. Did Marines ever admit that they were terrified?…
“Uh-oh,” Ramsey said. “Take a look at the tacsit feed. There’s something—”
A second before, the space around the squadron had been empty of all but Commonwealth ships. Now, though, something like a ripple spread across the electronic representation of the background starfield…and then the PanEuropean ships were there, in the Commonwealth squadron’s midst.
There were six of them. Alphanumerics appearing alongside each red icon identified them by name, class, and tonnage. Largest was the monitor Rommel, an 81,000-ton weapons platform mounting multiple plasma cannon banks, high-energy lasers, three massive turret-mounted antimatter accelerators, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of missiles with high-yield nuclear warheads. A trio of frigates and two destroyers followed, minnows to the monitor’s shark.
Garroway stared into the feed for a moment, confused. The tacsit download now showed those six vessels in two places at once—here at AP Yankee, and still in orbit around the gas giant.
Then realizatio
n hit him. Of course. The gas giant was thirty light-minutes distant; the six PE warships had outpaced the radiations they’d been emitting in orbit, using their Alcubierre Drives to cross thirty light-minutes in an instant. As he watched, Samar’s AI updated the tacsit, erasing the obsolete data.
“Are we going to launch?” Sergeant Chu demanded. “When the hell are we going to launch?”
“Take it easy, Chu-chu,” Barrett said. “I don’t think any of us want to go out into that.”
The master sergeant indicated the tacsit feed, which now showed a confused tangle of ships as the two fleets engaged. Though spread across almost 200,000 kilometers, the view compressed battlespace to a small globe filled with moving ships, the rigidly straight lancings of plasma and laser fire, the arcing trajectories of missiles. In particular, the Commonwealth Marine fighters were plunging into the heart of battlespace under high acceleration. At the instant the PE ships had materialized, the carefully drawn globe of Marine aerospace fighters had dissolved like a swarming cloud of insects, sweeping out, around, and in toward the intruding vessels.
Each F/A-4140 massed 94 tons, most of that divided between its powerful Consolidated Aerospace KV-1050 plasma drive and the Solenergia ZPE quantum power transfer unit. Two Marines, a pilot and a weapons operator, were squeezed into a tiny dual cockpit forward. The Stardragon mounted a variety of weapons, interchangeable depending on the mission profile, but its primary was its spinal mount, running forward all the way from the aft thrusters to become the distinctive needle-slim lance extending for 10 meters beyond the nose.
That lance was a plasma accelerator capable of hurling tiny masses of fusing hydrogen at near-c velocities, inertia-shielded to bleed off the incredible recoil energies that otherwise would have torn the fighter to shreds. Range was limited to about 120,000 kilometers—less than half a light-second—but the combination of fusion temperatures and high-velocity kinetic impact could be turned against almost any target with devastating effect.
