by Ian Douglas
Around him, other Marines were suddenly engaged in savage hand- to- tentacle combat, the battle transformed into a sprawling, deadly encounter at knife-fighting range. Perhaps the Xul had figured the Marine aerospacecraft wouldn’t attack if they were mingled closely with friendly forces.
Garroway released the locking mechanism on his plasma gun, letting the useless weapon fall. In the next instant, he’d triggered both forearm-mounted slicers, extending the tough blades, each the thickness of a molecule at its edge. Snapping his left arm back, he severed three of the Xul machine’s tentacles as it tried to hold him; his second slash gouged a chunk the size of his helmet out of the Xul combot’s side.
At the same time, the Xul was firing bolt after bolt of high- energy laser light into his armor at point-blank range, rapidly overloading its energy- sink capabilities, and heating two patches on his front torso to red-hot temperatures. His armor’s nano film began trying to cope with the damage, but the Xul beams were melting through the laminate faster than the armor could repair itself, and dangerously close to cutting through.
At last he’d sliced away enough of those whiplashing tentacles that he was able to shove the Xul machine back. It spun in the air, slowing to a hover, as Garroway raised his right arm and triggered the nano-D dispenser imbedded in the wrist cuff.
The stub- snouted weapon fired a slug that burst on impact, spraying a thin mist of nano-disassemblers across the outer shell of the damaged Xul combot. Programmed to devour the nano-grown plastic-metal laminates that made up Xul armor surfaces, the mist began condensing on the surface in white swirls. Complex molecules dissolved into component atoms, which boiled off the dissolving surface like steam. The Xul machine began writhing and twisting, almost as if in agony; in another moment, the nano-D ate through to the circuitry powering its agravitic lifters, and the machine collapsed to the ground, rapidly dissolving now like a snow ball floating in hot water.
Garroway had already stooped and retrieved his primary weapon. Other Marines around him were still struggling at close quarters with enemy machines, while others, their own battles won, were turning to help their comrades. Garroway put another nano-D slug into the Xul combot grappling Corporal Fossey, then swung his plasma gun to bring a group of enemy machines under fire as they emerged from a tunnel entrance.
Another barrage of explosions flashed and hammered across the ruined base as two more Nightstars slashed low across the star-dusted sky. Garroway ducked as his suit warned him of a hurtling chunk of debris the size of a small aircar tumbling toward him end over end. The slab missed him by two meters and slammed into a ruined wall behind him. He emerged from hot rubble, shaking the pieces aside and moving forward.
“C’mon, Marines!” he screamed over the platoon net. “Drive them!”
And all along the line, the Marines advanced.
Ops Center
UCS Hermes Cluster Space 1550 hrs, GMT
Hermes remained in Cluster Space, overseeing the operation now unfolding some thirty thousand light years away, deep within the Galactic Core. Her Ops Center stayed in communication with the Intrepid—and, through her, with the Marines on the surface of S-2/I—by means of QCC field-entangled transceivers.
The equipment was still large and bulky, but ships the size of Intrepid could carry banks of Quantum-Coupled Communications gear matched to parallel units on board Hermes. Constellations of subatomic particles generated in pairs, separated, and captured in crystalline matrices remained linked through the quantum dynamics of nonlocality; change one particle, and its twin changed at the same instant, even if it had been transported to the other side of the Galaxy . . . or thirty thousand light years from the Galactic halo to the Galactic core.
General Alexander lay in one of the Ops Center link couches, immersed in the sensory flood coming from Operation Heartfire. One open mental window showed a computer graphic of the inner Core area, the spiral of the Sag A* accretion disk, and the orbit of S-2 in its dizzying plunge close around the central black hole. Another was an external camera view from one of the Tarantulas on the surface. He could see a line of Marines advancing with searing blue- white explosions in the background, hear the radio chatter as they moved, punctuated by the static shrieks caused by plasma gunfire. Marine Nightstars flashed silently past low overhead.
He turned his attention back to the simulated map. The Galactic Core, when reduced to graphic icons and symbols in a netlink display, felt small, almost cozy, with the various elements—Sag A*, the Great Annihilator, S-2, IRS-16, and all the rest—crammed into a volume of space equivalent to the C3 Deck on board the Hermes. It looked as though the Xul garrison at S-2/I could call for support from the GalCenter Dyson object by shouting.
But it was, Alexander knew, vitally important to maintain a sense of scale. The pinwheel of gas and dust circling GalCenter, he reminded himself, was twenty light years across, almost five times the distance from Sol to Alpha Centauri. IRS-16. He fed data to his implant math processors, running the numbers. The cluster of hot, young stars close to the center, IRS-16, was one- tenth of a light year from GalCenter . . . 946 billion kilometers, or almost 1,600 times the mean distance from Sol to Pluto.
A long way.
And at the very center, at least according to the netlinked simulations, the star S-2 appeared to be right next to the mysterious alien structure at Sag A* . . . and twenty light hours was a mere stone’s throw when compared with light years. But twenty light hours was 21.6 billion kilometers, or roughly 144 a.u.s, three and a half times the mean distance between Sol and Pluto. Unless there’d been active FTL communications links between Objective Lima and Sag A*—and there were decent intelligence reasons for supposing there were not—any Xul at the GalCenter Dyson body could not know that Marines had landed on S-2/I for at least twenty hours.
They had that long to stabilize the situation.
“General Alexander?” Cara’s voice said in his mind. “Senator Yarlocke wishes to link with you.”
Alexander suppressed a groan. He knew this was coming. Yarlocke’s office had connected with him that morning, requesting a conference. But he’d not been looking forward to it.
“Conference room,” he told his AI assistant. “Patch her in.”
His viewpoint shifted to a conference room sim, one with large, curving viewall screens across bulkheads and overheads showing the view currently being received from the Intrepid. The planet below was in darkness as it eclipsed its red giant sun; the sky was dominated by the vast, glowing spiral of the Sag A* accretion disk, the backdrop of softly glowing star clouds, and the distant blue-white glow of the molecular cloud and its associated young stars.
“Why were we of the Senate not informed of this attack?” Yarlocke’s voice demanded.
Alexander turned and studied the woman’s icon. She wore a silver-white gown, with a personal coronae flammae gleaming in golds and silvers. Clearly she’d been going for the angelic look . . . but the expression transmitted through her face somewhat spoiled the effect. Behind her stood half a dozen men and women in more muted dress—her official entourage, he presumed, aides and staffers.
“You were, Senator,” Alexander told her. “Yesterday, before they even went in.”
“We were told you were conducting a reconnaissance, General! Not an invasion!”
“Reconnaissance in force, actually,” he replied. “We’re establishing a base close to GalCenter. From there, my people will map the local gravitational metric to the degree of precision necessary to allow the Pax Galactica to translate to the Core. They will also be standing by in case the Pax requires military intervention.”
“You are determined to see the peace effort fail. . . .”
“No, madam, I am not!” He’d been working to control his anger, to remain diplomatic, but the charge brought a rising tide of white fury. Damn it, he had had it with these people. “No one would like to see an end to the Xul conflict more than me. But I have grave doubts that the Xul see things the same way we do.�
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He expected an argument from the woman, and was startled when she seemed to slump, then nodded. “I know,” she said. “And I understand what you’re doing, that you’re doing what you think is best for the Commonwealth.”
“Do you? Let me ask you . . . did you understand that when you attempted to cut off funding for 1MIEF a year ago?”
She hesitated. The other figures standing behind her abruptly winked out as Yarlocke cut their link with the two of them. They were now, effectively, alone.
“I think so,” she told him. “I knew you thought you were doing what was right. I did think you were something of a warmonger, I suppose. But your heart was in the right place.”
He frowned. “A warmonger, Madam Senator, goes out of his way looking for a fight. I haven’t needed to do that since I accepted this billet.” Fighting the Xul, and fighting you, he thought, but he kept the words carefully to himself. I’ve had all the fighting I could possibly want.
“I know. And . . . I know you probably don’t believe me, but . . . you need to understand that I am doing what I think is right.”
“I never thought otherwise.”
“If we in the Senate thought that you were pursuing some agenda of your own—carrying on the war for your own glory or to build yourself a political power base, you would have been removed from your position a long time ago.”
It sounded like she was reminding him of just where his personal power lay. “The military arm of the Commonwealth,” he told her, “answers to the civilian administration. It’s been that way since the earliest days of the old United States. Military leaders can advise . . . but we do not dictate policy.” He wondered what she was looking for, what she wanted from him, but he decided to let her come to it on her own.
“General Alexander, it’s no secret that I will do anything . . . well, almost anything, to ensure peace. Our people, the Commonwealth . . . they’re sick of war. Sick of going on decade after decade, knowing there’s an enemy out there and never knowing when he’s going to strike. They want an end to it.”
“Do you believe me when I tell you that I want to ensure peace as well? You might not credit this, Madam Senator, but no one yearns for peace as much as the man or woman who has to actually engage the enemy in combat.”
“I’ll take your word for that.”
“Good. My job, however, is not so much to ensure peace as it is to protect the people and the government of the Commonwealth. The Xul represent a very real, very immediate, very palpable danger to the continued existence of our Commonwealth. And I will do anything . . . almost anything, to protect it.”
“So . . . tell me truthfully, General. About . . . this.” She indicated the simulation displayed upon the viewalls with a sweep of her arm. “Not a last-minute attempt to circumvent the Senate’s will?”
“Madam Senator,” he said coldly. “I am a Marine. My oath is to the Commonwealth. And that means to the people you represent.”
“Tell me why, exactly why, you sent your Marines in there, General. And why you did it without consulting us.”
“As for sending the Marines into the Core, I told you. First, we need a base from which to map the gravitational stresses on local space in close to the Core. It’s a highly chaotic, rapidly changing picture—very large masses moving very quickly. If Pax is to successfully translate into the Core, we need detailed gravitometric mapping of the region. If we don’t gather that data, the Pax does not make the trip. That’s one.”
“You could have sent remote probes.”
“We have sent remote probes. Lots of them. Having Marines in there increases the chances of getting the data we need. Okay?”
She nodded.
“Two . . . we need a credible military force close by when Pax attempts to open negotiations. If the Xul want to talk, great. My Marines will sit tight and enjoy the show. But if the Xul perform the way they have in times past . . . we’ll be in place to provide you with cover so you can get away. Three . . . well, this may be the warmonger talking, but in my experience it’s always best to negotiate from strength. If the Xul see a well- armed party of Marines in their backyard when you arrive for your parlay, they just may be less inclined to be . . . adventurous.”
“I actually hadn’t thought of that one.”
“It’s true. We’ve delivered a number of sharp stings to the Xul apparatus over the past few centuries. They know we can hurt them. If it hasn’t had that much effect, it’s because the Xul apparatus is so big. It’s like a cloud of stinging insects attacking . . . I don’t know. An extinct mammoth or elephant. It hurts. They want us to stop.” He shrugged. “And we may someday hurt them enough that they’ll stop threatening our existence. The point is, if they see us in there, they’ll know we can hurt them again, maybe worse than they’ve ever been hurt by us before. Whatever else they are, the Xul are intelligent. They may not reason the way we do, but they do reason. Pax will be in a much better position to negotiate if you have us in there providing you with some leverage.”
She nodded. “I believe you. What about my other question?”
“Which one?”
“Why didn’t you consult with the Senate first?”
“Tell me something, Madam Senator. If I’d linked through to your office yesterday and explained all of this, just as I’ve just done, would you have authorized the operation?”
“Of course!”
“Really? Or would you have laid down conditions, tried to micromanage, tell 1MIEF what it could and couldn’t do?”
“As you yourself pointed out, General, 1MIEF is ultimately under civilian control!”
“Agreed. But we’re paid to know what the hell we’re doing. Case in point. My office did inform you. We told you we were making a reconnaissance in force. That is exactly what we are now doing.”
“I thought reconnaissance in force meant something like going in and scouting out the area.”
“Which is what we’re doing. The difference is that there are . . . nuances that you do not understand, because you haven’t been trained to understand. You’re not military. You’re not a Marine. It is your job to make policy. It is my job to carry out that policy insofar as the military applications are concerned.
“In short, you have to trust me to carry out that policy to the best of my ability, according to my training and experience, and without pursuing any personal or warmongering agendas I might have. If you don’t trust me, you need to replace me. Immediately.
“And I need to trust you, Madam Senator, that you will not try to micromanage my command, put unreasonable demands upon it, or leave my people hanging while you pursue your personal agenda. Have I made myself clear?”
She stared at him for a long moment, so long he could almost hear the thoughts turning behind her eyes. The woman wasn’t used to being talked to this way. She could easily be on the point of dismissing him on the spot.
He was, Alexander thought, taking a fearful chance. If she dismissed him, he had a number of Marines fighting for their lives at GalCenter right now, and he would no longer be able to support them. If he lost his command, he would fight like hell to protect his people, but in the long run there wouldn’t be much he could do. Take the whole affair to the news media and place it before an apathetic public? Appeal to a weak Commonwealth President?
His options would be sharply limited.
Possibly he’d let his anger and his frustration do too much of the talking. But there was no pulling back now. . . .
“You know, General,” she said at last, “I don’t think there is another person in the entire Commonwealth who would talk to me the way you are now.”
“I am not a politician, Madam Senator. Or a diplomat. I am a Marine, the CO of 1MIEF, and the government pays me, among other things, to express my concerns and to give my advice.”
“And I appreciate that. I appreciate your candor . . . and your willingness to tell me what you really think. And . . . I believe it would be best if we could work together, yo
u and I.”
“Aren’t we?”
“Not as well as we might. You’ve spoken frankly. Now it’s my turn. The Commonwealth is sick of war, and I, General, am going to give them peace. I have . . . certain ambitions. As the person who makes possible a Galactic peace, I will be able to realize those ambitions, to rise in power and in . . . in status within this government. And I can bring you up with me.”
Alexander blinked. Was she trying to bribe him with a promise of power, for God’s sake? “My oath is to the Commonwealth, Madam Senator. My first loyalty is to the Corps.”
“Help me forge this peace, General. That’s all I ask of you. Afterward, you will find me very grateful.”
“I’ll help you,” he told her, trying to keep his mental voice neutral. “That’s never been an issue. The question is whether the Xul will play along. They’re the ones who will determine whether your peace plan has a chance in hell.”
“The Xul, General? Or your Marines?”
He reopened the mental window showing images transmitted from the surface of S-2/I. Marines had reached the lip of a huge, circular crater and were pouring fire down into its depths, where thousands of black machines writhed, struggled, and died.
“The Marines, Madam Senator, have always been pretty damned good at convincing the other fellow that they should play nice. That’s why we’re here.”
