by Ian Douglas
There was a sudden thump, and a dizzying and disorienting feel of momentary zero-gravity. Tarantula 04 had just dropped free from the UCS Intrepid.
Garroway felt an instant’s burst of static in his brain, and then his mind was flooded by incoming images fed through from the Tarantula’s sensor net. Above, he could see the long, slender gold needle of the Intrepid slowly pirouetting against what looked like a solid wall of red-hued stardust and, to one side, the far smaller mote of the light carrier Cunningham. Ahead, the curve of the planet, red-ocher against the glare of a giant ruby sun. And below . . .
The Tarantula was hurtling forward and down less than one hundred kilometers above the surface of a sandblasted, alien desert. Blue and green curtains of light flared against the planet’s poles, leaping like prominences to follow the world’s invisible lines of magnetic force. Lightning flared, casting stark shadows for the instant of the flash.
Garroway could see other Tarantulas in the formation now—ungainly, bulbous machines with tightly folded legs that somewhat mimicked the landing craft’s nickname. Terrestrial tarantulas, however, didn’t mount ventral and dorsal particle-beam weapons, nor could they accelerate at an inertially damped one hundred gravities.
“Here we go!” someone yelled as the night-shrouded surface leaped toward them.
And Garroway and a dozen other Marines screamed back the ancient Corps battlecry.
“Ooh-rah!”
16
0505 .1102 Marine Regimental Strike Team
Objective Lima, S-2/I
1540 hrs, GMT
The flight of AV-110 Tarantulas dropped to within scant meters of the dusty surface and skimmed at high speed toward a stark horizon. The vehicles spread out across a hundred square kilometers, each weaving in on a separate flight path designed to confuse enemy defenses.
The Xul defenses should be disabled . . . but Marines never entirely trusted tactical elements controlled by non-Marine assets. There was always the possibility of an unpleasant surprise.
Once clear of the Intrepid, sensory input had flooded through to the Marines packed into the AV-110s’ squad bays. Garroway could see the crisp horizon ahead, with no hint of atmospheric haze to give it distance or depth. To his left, toward planetary south, auroras played against the star-dusted backdrop, curtains of yellow, green, and red-pink that wavered and shifted as though blown by the non existent wind.
Overhead, the sky had gone impossibly strange . . . dominated by a vast, three-armed spiral. Garroway was reminded of the spiral form of the Galaxy as seen from Cluster Space . . . but this one was more open, more distinct, and the colors were reversed—with sullen-glowing reds in the spiral’s outer reaches shading to an intense blue-white near the center. To one side, the central cluster, a knot of carelessly spilled, radiant blue jewels imbedded in twisted nebulae; several nearby suns showed tails like comets streaming away from the fierce radiations of that central star swarm.
Garroway’s eyes were drawn again and again to the spiral’s brilliant center, in the sky halfway up from the northern horizon. He couldn’t quite make out the details of what was in there, though it appeared to be . . . emptiness, a tiny disk of nothing at all. The Xul structure, the Dyson sphere or whatever it was, must be within that space, but still too distant to be visible to the naked eye, or even to a Marine’s enhanced helmet optics and sensory feeds from the spacecraft.
Damn it , he thought, fiercely, get your mind on the op! You can sightsee later, when the bad guys have been scragged!
Reluctantly, he dragged his attention back to the horizon, then collapsed the feed window so that he could check his weapon—a Mk. VII pulse- plasma rifle. All weapons had been electronically disabled while the Marines were on board the transport, but once the suppressor field was shut down, the rifle would become fully operational.
“Thirty seconds to target, people,” Captain Black’s voice announced. “We’ve matched onboard gravity to local. Just remember to watch your rad counters. It’s hot out there.”
Garroway opened the download window again. The program painted brackets against his vision, marking the objective that was just now beginning to slide over the horizon. S-2/I, he remembered from his briefings, was a little larger than Mars, so the horizon at this altitude was . . . what? About twenty kilometers away? That felt right. Objective Lima was supposed to be a Xul base of some kind, but it was as large as a fair- sized city, easily twenty kilometers across, covering an area as big as a stargate, and consisting of hundreds of domes, towers, and blockhouses.
He felt a solid thump through the Tarantula’s deck as the landing craft took the objective under fire. On the download, he could see the flashes, like threads of quicksilver, flickering toward the enemy base.
A trio of savage explosions bracketed the area. In seconds, Garroway’s download began feeding him an overlay showing tunnel systems and chambers under ground outlined in red, as sensors on board the Tarantulas picked up the seismic readings from the blasts. He suppressed the underground display. He wouldn’t need the subsurface level maps until he was on the ground.
At first, there was no response of any kind from the target. The AI penetrator mission, Garroway thought, must have screwed up the enemy response enough to delay any return fire. The return came though, seconds after the Tarantulas began strafing the Xul base. Tarantula 06 exploded in a white flare of detonating antimatter and a burst of hard radiation. The Xul gun position, pinpointed by AIs, flared and vanished an instant later. Several awkward-looking Xul machines were beginning to emerge from the base, now— mobile gun platforms of some sort—but the Tarantulas burned them down as quickly as they appeared.
Then the incoming transports reached the objective, circling in from different directions, their deployment timed so that all arrived within a second or two of one another. Garroway’s Tarantula settled in toward the circle of alien structures, main weapons pulsing with blue-white lightning, chewing through the enemy walls, domes, and towers with searing flashes of devastation. Drifting slowly, the Tarantula moved across the edge of the complex, where a nano-grown wall now lay in shattered, smoking chunks and the buildings beyond gaped open to the alien sky.
Six massive legs extended, grasping at charred debris and bare rock, and seemed to draw the craft down into the wreckage’s embrace.
“Okay, Marines!” Cooper yelled. “Go! Go! Go!”
“Amphibious green blurs, people!” Captain Black added, as the clamshell doors in the Tarantula’s rear lower belly slid open and the heavily armored Marines began spilling out onto the eldritch landscape.
Garroway was fifth out the gaping door, hitting the ground hard, but letting his armor’s musculature absorb the shock with flexing knees. The Tarantula slowly raised its body on its widely straddled legs, continuing to lay down a heavy fire at any movement or flicker of energy within its sensors’ range. A blast of plasma energy melted through a portion of molded wall just ahead, showering molten droplets on Garroway as he pressed forward.
He felt the drops splatter off his back and helmet, but suffered no damage. Type 690 Power Armor was the heaviest and newest battlesuit in the Marine inventory, designed after the first battles fought in high-radiation environments a decade before. Each unit massed over half a ton; a Marine could move at all only because of the direct neuromuscular linkage between his brain and the suit’s actuators. Garroway moved his arm, and the firing of neurons in brain, back, and shoulder that would have raised it triggered instead the raising of the suit’s massively gauntleted arm, and the heavy Mk. VII nanosealed to it. A piece of wall collapsed on his left. He swung his left arm in a block, and the massive chunks of rubble smashed and scattered, scarcely felt by the suit’s occupant. When he jumped, his suit’s computer made a fast calculation and triggered his jump jets, sending him sailing forward in a low, flat trajectory.
His landing sent up an explosive shower of dust and rubble. S-2/I’s surface gravity registered about the same as Mars . . . a third of a G, or perhaps a bit more. It meant
he had to be careful of the inertia he built up moving fast or when jumping. He might fall more slowly here than on Earth’s surface, but he still carried that half- ton of battlesuit mass with him. Once he got moving, stopping could be a problem.
He brought up the underground map, noting several tunnel openings within a few tens of meters of his position. He started working toward the nearest one. The Marines needed to carry their assault underground as swiftly as possible . . . and those openings were also the likeliest exit points for the Xul combat machines that would be arriving on the surface any second now.
“Heads up, Marines!” Staff Sergeant Vincent warned. “I’ve got movement and energy leakage at Sierra one-niner-five!”
“Shit, there’s movement everywhere!” Shelby replied.
“Watch it!” Sergeant Randy Douglas called. “They’re coming up outta the holes!”
The first Xul combot appeared almost directly in front of Garroway, rising from the hidden tunnel entrance, high- energy laser fire already snapping into his armor.
The black surface of his armor drank down the energy and dissipated it in a blast of released heat. Garroway was already dragging his Mk. VII into line with the enemy machine, triggering it with his mind. The weapon bucked, and radio frequencies shrieked as the plasma bolt cracked through vacuum and slammed into the Xul machine.
He heard it scream as radio circuits fried.
But more Xul combots were arriving every second, drifting in across the tortured landscape from several directions.
Garroway had encountered Xul warrior-types many times before, both in simulation and in combat. Each was two to three meters long, an elongated egg shape smoothly sculpted with sponsons, swellings, and concavities, its ebon surface imbedded with scattered lenses—some serving as eyes, some as weapons. Each was unique, no two precisely alike in form. Tentacles writhed, as few as three, as many as dozens emerging from random points on each smooth, black shell.
After centuries of combat, Marine xenosophontologists still weren’t sure if the warrior forms were pure robots, or if they were controlled by Xul uploaded intelligences, either resident within the combat machines or teleoperating them from somewhere within the base. Likeliest was a mix of the three possibilities, with most of the machines operating under fairly simplistic programming, but with others piloted directly by individual Xul. The machines appeared to use agravitic repulsion to hover, and maneuvered by interacting with local magnetic fields. In tight quarters, they could haul themselves along with sinuous, powerful flicks of their metallic tentacles.
Garroway pivoted left, burning down a second . . . then a third. Orange light geysered from the center of the base as Intrepid, ninety kilometers overhead, added her particle beams to the ongoing bombardment.
And then the fighters arrived. . . .
Nightstar 442,
Raptor Flight
Over Objective Lima Core Space
1550 hrs, GMT
“Raptors, this is Raptor Leader!” Major Steve Treverton called over the squadron net. “Release by the numbers, in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . go!”
The sixteen F/A-4041s of Raptor Flight were lined up in Cunningham’s launch bay in four rows of four. The first four aerospace fighters slammed out of their launch tubes in rapid succession . . . and then it was Ramsey’s turn, Raptor Seven.
His Nightstar dropped clear of the Cunningham, its massive, compact body unfolding to reveal weapons and drive pods, its vector already aligned with the night side of the objective planet, just below the brilliant ocher slash of the sunlit limb. With a series of practiced thoughts, he engaged the agrav, the inertial dampers, and, finally, the main drive, kicking the ship into a sharp, steep plunge toward the planetary surface.
“Damn the bastards,” Ramsey snapped.
He wasn’t referring to the Xul.
Since the earliest days of Marine aviation, back in the first
half of the war-torn twentieth century, the primary purpose of military aircraft—and, later, of spacecraft—so far as the Corps was concerned had been close air support. The prime dictate of all Marines throughout history had always been that every man was a rifleman, whether they were front-line infantry, clerks, mess cooks . . . or fighter pilots.
Marines on the ground enjoyed a close and special relationship with the close- support pilots, who took pride in weaving in through heavy fire to place their warheads with devastating precision—often scant tens of meters from embattled Marine positions.
And that was why Ramsey was angry now. The squadron of F/A-4041 Nightstars should have been dropped an hour ago, should be over the target now reducing it to red-hot rubble. Someone, he thought, had screwed up. The aerospace strike fighters should have gone in first and leveled the place.
In fact, that had been the gist of the op orders; they’d been changed only hours ago, when word had come down from Ops Command that the Tarantulas would be going in first, without preliminary bombardment, in order to preserve the advantage of surprise.
Ramsey shook his head at the thought. Surprise in modern combat was a short-lived advantage, one measured in microseconds from the instant the enemy first detected incoming troop transports or strike fighters. He very much doubted that the advantage gained by rewriting the op plans would be worth the price paid in blood.
The dark landscape tilted wildly beneath his Nightstar. Symbols representing targeting pippers, angle of attack ladders, and scales for pitch, yaw, and roll drifted swiftly through Ramsey’s vision, painted in his visual field by the ship’s AI. Guiding the Nightstar with his mind, he brought the nose up, centering Objective Lima within the targeting cursor of his primary weapon and locking it on. As the landscape rapidly swelled larger, green pinpoints appeared, tiny emerald stars scattered across the alien base, each one marking friendly forces—the Marines of the Regimental Strike Team moving in from the periphery. Red points of light marked anything moving or giving off energy that didn’t have a friendly IFF signal riding it.
There were far more red stars down there than green. . . . Aiming for the center of Objective Lima, he mentally triggered his primary weapon, a massive GV-3662 Gatling fusion gun. Spinning barrels brought thumb-sized capsules of highly compressed metallic hydrogen into the firing chamber one by one, where each was further compressed, laser- heated, and magnetically accelerated to nearc velocities. Each charge massed less than a gram, but fired at that speed, thirty rounds per second, the recoil nearly overwhelmed Ramsey’s inertial dampers, slamming against the hurtling strike fighter like staccato sledgehammer blows. Though silent in the airless sky of S-2/I, the vibration sounded like a thunderous howl within the narrow confines of the Nightstar’s cockpit.
Flares of fusing hydrogen leapt from sky to ground in a
so lid- seeming stream, flashing into brilliant detonations within the central wreckage of the Xul base. He kept the fighter pointed at the center of the objective, hosing the area until the flashes merged into a burgeoning fireball engulfing several of the dome- shaped structures below.
Drawing back in his mind, Ramsey brought the Nightstar’s nose up, cutting the Gatling’s shriek. An instant later, the aerospace craft plunged through the rising fireball, climbing hard, now, as he fought for altitude.
Warning tones sounded. Xul defensive batteries were tracking him, snapping off bolts of white-hot plasma, filling the sky around him with deadly light. Above and behind him, other Nightstars twisted in from different directions, each weaving through the blossoming fire and past other Marine fighters in a complex pattern possible only to the squadron’s directing AI.
A flash detonated above and behind Ramsey’s craft; his data feed gave the grim news: Raptor 11—Lieutenant Randi Schactman—had taken a direct, 20-kiloton hit, the blast vaporizing half of the fighter and sending the rest hurtling toward the surface in a shower of white-hot fragments.
Ramsey took his fighter high . . . high enough that the red sun burst suddenly above the western horizon, ba
thing his craft in ruby light. His display showed the other fighters in the sky around him, some completing their attack runs, some just beginning to make their first pass.
He rolled hard left, bringing his nose around for his next attack. . . .
Marine Regimental Strike Team Objective Lima, S-2/I
1552 hrs, GMT
Garroway dropped to the ground as searing blasts of light and radiation flared just ahead. Rubble, much of it halfmolten, showered over him, and he felt the ground hammer at his armor as shock waves rippled out from the blast.
Modern combat presented fighters with the most deadly environment ever encountered by living organisms, a searing storm of radiation and heat and hurtling debris that even the best suit of armor couldn’t completely block.
T he close- support fighters of Raptor Squadron had hit the center of Objective Lima with pinpoint precision, pounding it with antimatter rounds, bolts of fusing plasma, X-ray lasers, and high-velocity slugs. The attack had wiped out the first wave of emerging defenders, but even as he started to rise, red stars appeared on his in- head display, marking more of the seemingly endless hosts of Xul combat machines as they emerged from their holes and tunnel entrances. They moved swiftly, seeking to close with the leading elements of advancing Marines. As Garroway stood, three of the gleaming, black monsters closed with him, scrabbling across the broken rubble with wildly lashing tentacles. He burned one . . . then another, but the third slammed against him, driving him backward, too close, now, for him to bring his weapon to bear.
