by Ian Douglas
For the first time, though, Alexander found himself wondering which the worse enemy was . . . the Xul?
Or the human behind the angelic image glowing in his thoughts?
17
0505 .1102 Marine Regimental Strike Team
Hawkins Station,
Objective Lima, S-2/I
1612 hrs, GMT
Garroway led an ad hoc section of twenty Marines forward across broken rubble and steaming rock, an impossible sky overhead, silent flame and white-hot devastation ahead and below. He crouched behind a block of glowing rubble, pouring fire into the tangle of struggling Xul machines below.
To his right, one of the Tarantulas moved with them, two forward pods unfolding now as plasma blast heads, of the type used in large-scale asteroid mining. Other Tarantulas were already in place around the crater rim, playing the floor of the depression with blue-white plasma energy. As the huge machines hosed the tortured ground at the bottom of the crater, rock bubbled as black-crusted lava flowed and churned. Directly beneath the blast points of the plasma guns, rock didn’t melt, but vaporized. As the vapor cooled in hard vacuum, it solidified as frozen flecks of white powder, like minute flakes of snow sifting down across the landscape.
Another flight of Nightstars streaked silently overhead, loosing weapons loads into the crater’s center. There was very little return fire, now, and Garroway broke from cover, taking several steps forward to give him a better angle down into the half-molten pit. He was standing just inside the crater rim, on crumbling, heat- seared rubble.
Periodic explosions set off outside the Marine perimeter allowed ground sensors to continually update the images of underground passageways and chambers. Under the unrelenting assault from above, many of those chambers had been closed off or had collapsed.
A scream sounded over the Net, followed by another voice yelling, “Corpsman! Corpsman front!”
Corporal Tom Cushman was down, his right arm burned away, atmosphere gushing from his suit. In this hellish environment, there probably wouldn’t be much Doc Scott could do. The automatic first aid features built into his Type 690 armor would stop the air and blood loss in seconds, but the repairs would not be enough to protect Cushman from the deadly and immediate effects of the high background radiation. Nevertheless, HMC Scott, one of the company corpsmen, was already bending over the fallen Marine, trying to drag him back from the abyss.
“First Platoon,” Captain Black called. “Pull back! Pull back!”
That was Garroway’s unit. Almost reluctantly, he stopped firing and backed his way up the crater slope, then joined the scattering of other Marines falling back from the firing line. The gas pack on his fusion weapon was almost exhausted. He thumbed the release to drop the empty, pulled a fresh pack from an external suit pocket, and snapped it home.
“We’ve got a fresh breakthrough in the making, people,” Black told them. Fresh schematics flooded into Garroway’s in-head situation sim. “Sector two-three-niner. Let’s move it!”
On his download display, Garroway could see the indicated trouble spot, a large region a hundred meters back from the central crater, where tunnels and chambers crisscrossed underground. Movement and energy sensors were recording a lot of activity down there, just beneath the surface. Hundreds of red pinpoints appeared to be clustering in one vertical shaft that came up to within a few meters of the surface. As the Marines approached at a run, a geyser of rubble and debris erupted into the sky just ahead.
“Breakthrough, breakthrough!” one Marine called from farther up ahead. “They’re comin’ through!”
A dozen black machines emerged from the hole blasted up through the rubble, lasers and particle beams snapping into the Marine ranks. Two Marines went down, their armor holed. Garroway stopped, dropped to a crouch as he raised his Mk. VII, and mentally triggered a string of shots, slashing through the cloud of Xul robots. The cloud began to disperse, but he saw several large chunks of body and fragments of tentacles go flying, and four of the hovering machines collapsed, crashing to the ground.
“Don’t let the bastards spread out!” Garroway yelled, still firing. Static blasted the radio channels and he wondered if anyone else could hear, but the other Marines were firing as well, plasma bolts crisscrossing through the Xul cloud. “Hit them! Hit them!”
The enemy combots were trying to organize into a formation, but were taking heavy losses. Marines closed in from three sides, pouring fire into the cloud of emerging Xul machines. The firefight continued for another ten agonizing seconds at near-point-blank range. Three more Marines fell, their armor breached in the deadly alien firestorm, but then the last of the Xul machines dropped to the ground, smashed and broken.
Garroway and a handful of others were the first to reach the newly opened entrance, a gaping tunnel mouth leading into darkness.
It was a darkness out of nightmare, a darkness haunted by terror and unseen demons. It was also a direct route down into the underground levels of the Xul city—exactly what they’d been looking for. The floor of the big, central crater was mostly molten, now, and there’d be no entrance there. But here . . .
“Ops just called and said we need a software probe down there,” Black said over the Net. “Who’s got an MSP-90?”
Garroway heard Black’s words and shook his head inside his helmet. It was . . . inevitable.
“I do, sir,” Garroway replied. One in every ten Marines in the RST was carrying one of the things, designed to connect with the alien data net. Reluctantly, he pulled the device from an external pouch, a softball- sized mechanism with LED lights in a band around the equator that would switch on when he mentally activated it. “Where do you want it?”
“As far down that hole as you can manage. Ops says they want it planted in contact with the Xul infrastructure, not just dropped randomly into a hole.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Holding the probe in his left gauntlet, his plasma pulse rifle ready in his right, he moved to the rim of the hole. He hesitated, trying to pierce the darkness at infrared wavelengths. He didn’t want to go down there. . . .
“Douglas! Gardner! Maler! Get down there with him and keep him covered!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Master Sergeant Gardner and Sergeant Maler went in first, weapons at the ready. “Okay!” Gardner called back. “We’re on the bottom, in a large tunnel running east and west. It’s clear!”
Garroway took a deep breath. “Coming down,” he said. His helmet radar showed a drop of about ten meters. “Watch my boots!”
He slid from cold light into darkness, his helmet automatically adjusting to full- spectrum infrared as he entered deep shadow. A two-second fall carried him to the bottom, where he hit solid rock with both boots, absorbing the shock through his armor’s heavily shielded boots and legs.
He’d come down between the other two Marines; the tunnel ran off in opposite directions, the walls smooth-polished and featureless. Gardner and Maler had already switched on the lamps mounted on their shoulders. Even at IR wavelengths, the tunnel was nearly black, and the lights cast weirdly clashing shadows across the smooth and somewhat shiny walls of the tunnel.
Sergeant Douglas arrived at the bottom of the hole a moment later, landing heavily at Garroway’s side. “Watch that first step,” Garroway warned him.
“It’s not the fall that kills ya,” Douglas told him. “It’s the sudden stop at the end.”
Garroway held up the MSP and switched it on with a thought. The two halves popped apart from the equator, where green lights winked readiness.
Grasping the two hemi spheres, he pulled the device apart, then, reaching high above his head, he pushed the flat face of one half against the wall of open shaft leading back up into the light. That flat, black surface, coated with a nanoadhesive, welded itself to the solid rock. A slender black tendril continued to connect the two halves of the device.
“Okay,” Garroway announced. “Relay is in place. Let’s find some circuitry,”
The MSP-90
had been designed after long experience with AI probes deployed on penetrator missions into Xul bases and ships. While such missions could be carried out over radio frequencies from a distance, things worked a lot better—and with less risk of discovery and blocking—if hardware could be physically planted in direct contact with Xul computer circuitry. The tunnel walls here were solid rock, smoothly polished and unbroken. They would have to go deeper to find a good place to plant the MSP’s business end.
Guided by the seismic readouts coming through on the tactical channel, the four Marines began following one of the tunnels. It led down a steep incline, then leveled off. According to the seismic charts, this tunnel opened into a broad, subterranean chamber about fifty meters up ahead. The hemi sphere in Garroway’s hand continued to play out a single strand, unimaginably tough, of black thread, connecting it to its twin back at the entrance to this chthonic world. He held it over his helmet; that thread was dangerous, and could nick through armor as cleanly as his slicers if he was careless.
“Watch it, down there,” Captain Black warned them over a radio channel increasingly fogged by static and break-ups. “We’re reading Xul activity in that big room ahead, moving into your tunnel fast!”
“Copy that,” Gardner replied. “Watch it, people! Here they come!”
A dozen shapes appeared out of the darkness farther down the tunnel, illuminated by the Marines’ lights, dragging themselves along the tunnel walls with almost lazy flicks of their metallic tentacles. Gardner and Maler opened fire immediately, while Douglas turned and kept watch toward the rear.
After several moments, it became clear that the Xul combat machines were not advancing, but appeared to have positioned themselves to prevent the Marines from penetrating more deeply into their sanctum. The two Marines on point continued burning them down, but more kept swarming in from the chamber beyond. They appeared to be locking themselves together, forming a wall blocking the way.
“I think they’re trying to keep us out of the big room,” Garner said.
“Might be a control center, or an important C3 node,” Garroway suggested. “How about it, Skipper? Should we try to see what they’re guarding?”
“Negative,” was Black’s reply. “Just plant the MSP and get the hell out of there! We’re reading more bogies moving in on your position!”
“What do you say, Gunny?” Gardner asked him. She gestured with the hot barrel of her plasma weapon at the ceiling almost directly overhead. “That looks like an electrical feed up there.”
She was indicating one of the organic-looking growths common to the interior of Xul bases and ships, like a slender black root or tentacle growing within living rock.
“That’ll do,” he replied. The ceiling of the tunnel here was low—just over seven feet. He reach up and slapped the flat face of the remaining hemi sphere against the cavern roof, directly next to the electrical conduit.
Immediately, the hemi sphere appeared to melt, reducing itself to what looked like a puddle of black tar adhering to the ceiling, reflecting Garroway’s armor lights with a wet gleam. Myriad threads whipped from the viscous liquid and began to embrace the conduit, growing along it in both directions.
The Xul power distribution net, he knew, would be intimately entangled with the circuitry that carried both Xul data and their uploaded intelligences. Back at the tunnel entrance, more threads would be growing up the wall to reach the upper surface, where they would become an antenna. Athena or other, specially created artificial intelligences could use the MSP, then, to access the Xul computer network directly.
“Okay, people,” Black’s voice called to them. The static was quite bad now, his words almost unintelligible even after being filtered through their implant AIs. “We’re getting a clear signal. Get the hell out of there!”
The Marines began pulling back toward the tunnel entrance, firing as they moved. More Xul machines were coming in from the other direction, now, and the four of them shuffled along in a small clump, two firing ahead, two behind. All of them had taken hits to their armor but, so far, damage was light. They waded on, burning down combot after combot, as more and more of the infernal devices swarmed in after them.
The MSP they left behind had begun eating its way into the electrical conduit’s insulation and the surrounding rock, stretching itself out until each strand was only a molecule or two in thickness and impossible to remove without vaporizing the entire ceiling, conduit and all.
At last they reached the opening. This was the tricky part, since there was only room for two Marines in combat armor to move up the shaft at a time. Douglas triggered his armor’s jump jets and rocketed up the opening first. Garroway prepared to follow, but then a fresh surge of enemy battle machines rushed in, firing wildly with every weapon they carried. Garroway took a hit in his left shoulder, a blow that slammed him back a step, but not enough to breach the suit.
“Maler’s hit!” Gardner cried over the netlink. “He’s down! There’re too many of them!”
Garroway turned back, wading back into the melee. The fight was too close now for plasma weapons, so he locked his Mk. VII over his back, erected his slicers, and powered up the nano-D dispenser on his left arm.
For several nightmarish seconds, the two Marines struggled there in the darkness above Maler’s collapsed form, surrounded by a jostling mob of black, metal- plastic shapes pressing in close. As tentacles fell across their armor, they used their slicers to cut themselves free, and both of them continued to pump nano- D rounds into the enemy at literally point-blank range.
Garroway was hit again. His helmet indicator showed he was losing atmosphere, and that the radiation levels inside his suit were rising. Fortunately, the background rad count was lower down here beneath the surface—still deadly, but not as immediately deadly as up above. His armor was pumping anti-rad nano into his bloodstream, so all he could do was keep fighting.
It was a more desperate, more immediate struggle, he thought, than that fight in Cluster Space a year ago, when he’d sacrificed his own legs. Garroway felt panic clawing at his mind . . . and then he was battling two enemies, the swarming Xul and his own terror.
He was screaming as he continued to pour nano-D slugs into the advancing mass of black shells, glittering lenses, and snapping tentacles. Laser beams struck his right leg, and his suit sealed the holes. He felt pain, and the shock of dropping air pressure, then a jolt as his suit sealed the holes over. Another beam struck him in the chest. . . .
Somehow, Gardner managed to drag the unconscious Maler back to the circle of light at the bottom of the shaft leading to the surface, as Garroway tried to cover them in all directions.
A line was dropped from the surface, and Gardner secured it to Maler’s armor. “Okay, Gunny!” she yelled, slapping the back of Garroway’s shoulder to get his attention. “Maler’s on the way up! Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge!”
Garroway pumped out a barrage of nano- D slugs as Xul combat machines dissolved and crumbled all around him. Some of the nano-D, losing its programming, was starting to gnaw on his armor as well. He stepped back alongside Gardner, and together the two of them crouched, kicked off, and triggered their jump jets, vaulting up the shaft and into cold-frosted starlight.
The Xul machines did not follow.
Garroway collapsed at the top, trying to control a violent trembling. The air leaks in his armor all were sealed off; the shaking appeared to be purely an emotional reaction to the close fighting down there in the alien tunnels. He wondered if he could ever forget the dark and claustrophobic terror. . . .
“Garroway!” Someone was shaking him by one shoulder. “You okay?”
It was Black. Garroway nodded, then realized the skipper couldn’t see his head behind his helmet’s rad shielding. “Yeah. Yessir, I’m okay.”
“Good job down there, Marine. Can you move?”
“An amphibious green blur, sir.”
“Good. All of you, good work!” Black said. “Athena just uploaded a copy of h
erself into the alien net.”
“Have the bastards found the MSP?” Douglas wanted to know.
“Of course they have, but there’s nothing to grab hold of by now. They can’t stop it unless they melt down the walls and ceiling of that tunnel.”
The nanotechnic goo in the MSP would have started dispersing as soon as it was activated, individual molecules slipping into minute crevices within the rock wall and flowing along the length of the alien power conduit.
“Good news!” Black added. “We’re getting word down from Ops! Looks like they’re shutting down. . . .”
“Gods! You mean the bastards are surrendering?” Lieutenant Cooper asked.
“Negative. The Xul don’t surrender. But Athena is isolating them.”
It was a strategy that had worked before, but only in highly specialized situations. The Xul intelligences “lived”—if that was the appropriate word—on their equivalent of computer hardware; the dialogue between individual groups of Xul, like choruses echoed back and forth, served as a kind of democratic poll of intent and thought, and led to a consensus that resulted in specific actions. Athena, evidently, had managed to shut down the connections between separate Xul nodes, isolating individual units so that they couldn’t chorus back and forth.
