by Ian Douglas
“Engaged. We’re moving. . . .”
“Gate interface in twenty seconds . . .”
“If it’s hopeless,” Garroway said at last, “why the hell did you come? You could be back in Miami right now, soaking in your hot tub and alternating turns with Kath and Traci.”
“I didn’t say it was hopeless,” Warhurst told him. “After all, we’re Marines. . . .”
This was the man, Garroway remembered, who’d come after him ten years ago after his flight through an exploding star, who’d risked everything to pull him out of a burning, radioactive hell, just because he was a fellow Marine.
Perhaps there didn’t need to be any deeper explanation than that.
“Well, it’s good to have you aboard again, Gunny. Even if I did hate your guts back in boot camp.”
A shudder passed through Garroway’s body. “Hey! I think we just went through the Gate!”
“Yup,” Warhurst replied. “We’re in the Core, now.” With a fine sense of understatement, he added, “Here’s where it starts to get interesting. . . .”
Nightstar 442,
Flight Deck, UCS Cunningham In Transit aboard UCS Intrepid Core Space
1252 hrs, GMT
Unlike the grunts on board the Tarantula transports, Lieutenant Ramsey had a full sensory link with Intrepid’s C3, or Combat Command Center. The slender needle of the captured huntership had just threaded through the twenty-kilometer- wide hoop of one of the Cluster Space stargates, with the soft, spiral glow of the Galaxy dominating the starscape, and was emerging now into a very different, very alien realm.
Cluster Space had been dark, the glow of the Galaxy just barely discernable against the vast and ultimate blackness of endless night. Core Space was very nearly a photographic negative of that, a universe of pure light, with very little darkness visible anywhere against that softly radiant background. From Ramsey’s vantage point, it felt as though he was just emerging into the interior of an immense bubble, a bubble with walls composed of gleaming, red-hued stardust, and woven through and through with the pastel glow of streaming, clotted nebulae.
He could see GalCenter in the distance, a knot of nebulosity ablaze with hotter, younger, bluer suns, with streamers of gas looping through space along the force lines of powerful magnetic fields. Data streamed into his consciousness from myriad sensors, monitoring numerous wavelengths. Besides visible light, he could see the background glow of radiation at ultraviolet, X-ray, and cosmic-ray wavelengths, as well as the sullen glow of infrared and radio-source objects. The Great Annihilator was a dazzling, twin- beamed beacon, as lesser black holes left curving tracks of hard radiation against the dust clouds through which they were plowing. From here, seven hundred light years out, GalCenter was partially blocked by the expanding molecular cloud, which resembled a large, big-holed doughnut, black and brown-red on the outside, gleaming blue-white on the inside. Shafts of light glowed through the openings at top and bottom; what Ramsey could see of the center itself resembled a furball of dust, gas, stars, black-hole tracks, and point sources of radiation.
High and to one side, beyond the arc of the stargate ring, the Xul fortress kept watch, a flattened sphere five kilometers across, bristling with towers, sponsons, and turrets.
Ramsey gave his Nightstar a final diagnostic run- through, reassuring himself that all systems were powered up and combat ready. The F/A-4041 Nightstar was the most recent spacecapable fighter to be added to the Corps inventory—a heavy, powerful, hard- hitter massing almost 120 tons, it was capable of an acceleration of almost two hundred gravities. Slots for weapons pods allowed it to tailor load-outs for every mission from planetary bombardment and close ground support to battlespace superiority and orbital-fortress suppression. Mounting the new generation of pocket on- board QPT generators, they could operate inde pen dently from quantumentangled power transmission, the smallest spacecraft to do so.
All systems were go. Ramsey and fifteen other Nightstar pilots of Raptor Squadron waited in dark silence as the Intrepid slid clear of the Core stargate. In his mind’s eye, he could see the fortress some fifty kilometers distant.
“We are being probed,” a voice said—Athena, the AI running both Intrepid and the Marine assets hidden within Intrepid’s bowels. “I am engaging the enemy in dialogue.”
Ramsey wished he could actually hear that conversation, but knew that it was beyond any merely human ken, a rapid- fire exchange of electronic queries and replies in Xul trinary code, and completely non-verbal. He found himself tensing, holding his breath, waiting for a high-energy fusillade from the alien fortress.
When nothing happened in the next fifteen seconds, he gradually allowed himself to breathe. Athena, he knew, would be presenting Intrepid as a Xul huntership caught by the nova in Cluster Space and badly damaged, its memory, weapons systems, and electronic population all but obliterated. The kilometer-long vessel’s exterior certainly supported that story. The ship’s normally gleaming gold surface was scoured, blasted, and blackened where the exploding star’s touch had seared the incredibly tough Xul metal-and-plastic alloys. Some dozens of Xul derelicts had been recovered from Cluster Space, and were being converted into Commonwealth warships; Intrepid, though, had been marked for special duty.
Most Xul warships and defense structures were almost entirely solid, their interiors packed with the Xul equivalent of electronic circuits and processors and riddled by shafts and tunnels used for access by the ship’s robotic maintenance and defense units. Most of that circuitry, apparently, was used to support the billions of individual patterns of data that represented uploaded Xul personalities.
In Intrepid, several hundred thousand tons of support circuitry had been gutted, replaced by a small command center occupied by the ship’s human crew and its life- support module, plus the Marine light transport Cunningham carrying sixteen Nightstar fighters, a single Euler-derived starburster triggership, and twelve AV-110 Tarantulas with 288 combat Marines already packed on board. Xul weaponry, much of which was still not understood by human xenotechnologists, had been replaced by human weapons—mass drivers, high- energy lasers, and plasma cannon. If the fortress detected something amiss, if it opened fire on the disguised intruder, the Intrepid would be able to return fire.
Not that she would be able to engage that monster for very long. Estimates suggested that Intrepid might survive as much as two seconds in the holocaust that would ensue.
The feeling that he was being watched, personally and microscopically, became an intolerable itch between Ramsey’s shoulder blades.
“The fortress appears to have accepted us,” Athena said over the link. “I am detecting no change in weaponry power levels or scanner frequencies.”
Past the first hurdle. One of the very few advantages Humankind possessed in the war with the Xul was in the speed and adaptability of human-designed AIs. With every successful penetrator probe, the human computer technologists and xenosoph experts learned a bit more.
Very gradually, under Athena’s guidance, Intrepid began to accelerate. Pushing at nearly three hundred gravities, her speed increased enormously, as her inertial dampers shrouded the fragile flesh and blood on board, protecting it from the crushing acceleration.
Light exploded around Intrepid’s needle-slim prow, as the gas and dust filling the cavernous void at the Galaxy’s core slammed into the ship’s protective screens. At nearly eight-tenths of light speed, the massive vessel’s FTL drive switched on.
The Xul had developed a faster- than-light technology that operated on a completely different principle from Humankind’s Alcubierre Drive. Rather than encapsulating the ship within a highly distorted bubble of space- time, the Xul hunterships engaged in a rapid-fire sequence of jumps between normal space and the Quantum Sea, each jump bypassing light minutes of space in a timeless instant.
That, at least, was the theory. Commonwealth xenotechnologists were still unraveling the secrets of Xul FTL theory. Athena could operate the drive, however, even if the exac
t mechanism of the vessels’ space-devouring jumps through the Quantum Sea were not yet fully understood. Ramsey had no partic ular qualms about this; he didn’t understand how a viewall or an agrav lift engine worked, either, but he used the technology every day.
The Xul ship hurtled deeper into the Core. Hours passed, and the ship dropped through Sagittarius B2, the expanding molecular cloud interacting with the surrounding medium. Sensory input received each instant that the ship was in normal space was stitched together within Ramsey’s brain, giving the illusion that stars, dust clouds, and other objects were drifting slowly past, like towering thunderheads viewed from the cockpit of an atmospheric flier.
Dark clots of nebulae slid past . . . and then, four hundred light years from GalCenter, Intrepid emerged from a shining wall of light into the inner gulf. Ahead, IRS-16, the cluster of blue suns at GalCenter, grew sharply brighter. Intrepid’s computer was adjusting the data pouring in through the sensory inputs, correcting for relativistic distortion. The interior of the Core, everywhere, gleamed in dazzling light.
And yet more hours passed. Slowly, the tangle of objects just visible at GalCenter began to sort themselves out, untangling from the central knot of dust and light and drifting apart. From Ramsey’s technically enhanced perspective, thousands of black holes, ranging in size from one or two solar masses to the Great Annihilator itself, were marked by icons showing the position and relative motion of each. They formed a cloud about the innermost Core, like a globular cluster . . . but with each member invisible at optical wavelengths, detectable only by its individual signature of X-rays and harder radiations.
Ramsey sincerely hoped that all of those gravitational singularities had been spotted and mapped. If Intrepid happened to strike one, or even simply skimmed too close to an unseen event horizon, this operation would be over almost before it had begun.
A sudden jar shuddered through the length of the Intrepid. Athena had just performed a sharp and unforeseen maneuver, possibly to avoid striking just such an obstacle as one of those black holes orbiting GalCenter. For the shock of the maneuver to be felt through the Xul vessel’s inertial dampers meant that it had been a violent one. A moment later, one of the black-hole icons separated from the knot ahead and slipped past to starboard.
A close one. . . .
The stars of the central cluster were opening up now, and Ramsey could see the broad, flat spiral of the central black hole’s accretion disk, like a whirlpool twenty light years across, red at the outer regions, brilliant blue at the heart. Several stars hung within that maelstrom, many showing cometary tails pointed away from IRS-16. A single bright red star burned just above the accretion disk, illuminating part of it like moonlight upon clouds. His mental software identified the star as the mission objective—S-2.
Deeper still. Athena was highlighting Xul ships and structures now, bracketing them in red within his mind. Gods, they were everywhere! None of them, however, seemed to be paying much attention to the Intrepid as she plunged deeper into the Core. Ramsey could see the tracks of other Xul ships as they moved at FTL through the dust clouds of the center. Each time a ship dropped into normal space, its screens slammed into drifting grains of dust and molecules of gas at relativistic speeds, with the result that starships here scratched contrails against the sky in X-rays and hard radiation. He had to remind himself that the nearest of those ship contrails was a good ten light years distant, and marked, therefore, a ship that had been passing ten years ago. Most of those contrails were even more remote in both space and time.
But it was a reminder of how crowded this region was with Xul ships and orbital structures.
S-2 was growing larger, now, showing a distinct disk as Intrepid slowed and moved closer.
Athena made some final adjustments to the starship’s course, then dropped into normal space, dumping velocity. The AI’s timing was perfect. In an instant, the planet S-2/I appeared, a slender, red-ocher-white crescent bowed away from the red glare of the star, swelling rapidly from tiny crescent to a red-illumined scythe slicing across heaven.
Relative velocities matched, Intrepid dropped into planetary orbit. Below, the world’s night side blotted out half of the swollen glare of the red giant beyond, but the surface, Ramsey noted, was not completely black. The planet possessed magnetic fields, and there was a dazzling display of auroras playing about both poles.
This in itself represented a major planetological mystery. Auroras, as Ramsey understood them, occurred when solar radiation, channeled by a planet’s magnetic fields, interacted with atoms of the planetary atmosphere at high altitudes, causing them to glow in the same way that the gas in a neon light tube fluoresced when electricity flowed through it.
According to the readouts coming through the link from Intrepid’s bridge, however, the planet below had no atmosphere to speak of, and its rotation was so slow—it was rotating retrograde at the rate of one revolution every three months—that it was difficult to understand why it had any magnetic field at all . . . or where the intense auroral glows were coming from.
Those glows, however, illuminated the planet’s night side—it was probably bright enough down there to read by the glow in the sky—and the glow was amplified by periodic and frequent discharges of electricity, powerful arcs playing across the world’s polar regions.
From low orbit, though, there didn’t appear to be much to see beneath the auroras and the lightning. Planet S-2/I had for eons been sandblasted by a constant rain of dust and gas molecules as it moved through the cloudy haze of the Galactic Center. The constant bombardment must have stripped away the atmosphere eons ago, laying the surface bare to the constant flood of cosmic radiation. There was no sign of craters below, and even the highest mountain ranges appeared to have been sculpted smooth by the steady celestial bombardment.
The planet was as far from its red giant primary as Jupiter was from Sol. At that distance, the mean substellar temperature should have been around the freezing point of water, while the mean temperature on the night side plummeted to nearly two hundred below. In fact, though, the surface appeared uniformly warm, ranging from minus twenty degrees Centigrade near the equator to well above the boiling point of water at the poles.
Again, physical planetary science couldn’t address the observed data. The anomalously high surface temperatures were probably related to the high background radioactivity and to heat caused by the steady rain of cosmic dust, but there was nothing in human experience with which this world’s surface environment could be compared. Those flaring polar lightnings and high temperatures probably, probably, had their origin in the interplay of the planet’s magnetic field with those of the local galactic neighborhood—especially the powerful magnetic fields emanating from Sagittarius A*—but so far as terrestrial planetary science was concerned, S-2/I shouldn’t even have a magnetic field of its own . . . to say nothing of auroras in the absence of an atmosphere.
But all of those questions would have to wait for a follow- on team of planetologists. The immediate concern was the local Xul presence. S-2 was nearing perigalacton—its closest point to Sag A*—now just thirty light hours distant.
Intrepid dropped into a lower orbit, scanning the alien world’s surface closely. Ten minutes later, she released the Cunningham, and the two craft slowly separated, flying in formation. Clouds of remote sensors and battlespace drones began to spread through local space, gather data at all wavelengths.
On the third orbit, they spotted the Xul base.
Tarantula 04, UCS Intrepid Core Space
1523 hrs, GMT
“How the hell are we supposed to fight it if we can’t see it?” Sergeant Vic Maler complained.
“What’s the problem?” Garroway told him. “We disembark . . . and if it’s moving and not a Marine, we kill it.”
“Sweet and simple,” Master Sergeant Clara Gardner added. She sounded nervous. “The Navy knows what the hell it’s doing.”
“Since when?” Sergeant Milo Huerra said, chall
enging her. “It might be sweet and simple, but Mal’s right. Someone fucked up with the data link. What else did they miss, eh?”
“Quiet down, Marines,” Lieutenant Cooper called over the link. He’d been promoted from one bar to two back at EarthRing, and he’d been slamming his mass around ever since. “Attention to orders, damn it!”
“We should have a decent picture once we drop from the Intrepid,” Captain Black’s voice told them. “Right now, all I can tell you is that the target looks like a small base on the surface of the planet, code name Objective Lima. There will be more extensive works underground, but we’ll worry about that once we take the surface facility.
“I’ve just had word that our penetrator AIs have entered the facility and are coping with the local defenses. The idea is to kill the enemy’s communications and control networks. Once they’re down, the local Xulies won’t be able to call for help, and the bad boys next door at Sag A-Star won’t even know we’re here.
“So move fast and keep moving. Remember . . . if you stand still the Xulies will nail you. Move fast—amphibious green blurs—and you’ll keep the bastards off balance. We should be coming up on . . .”
