by Ian Douglas
If it had been otherwise, of course, teleoperational technology would not have developed as far or as fast as it had over the past eight centuries. Thanks to QCC links, people could engage in sim-face to sim-face virtual conferences across interstellar distances . . . or look over Admiral Taggart’s shoulder as he commanded the 1MIEF squadron at the Galactic Core. If people had actually risked insanity every time they virtually linked with one another, people would still be communicating through the old- time media of telephone, holovision, and electronic mail.
If Yarlocke’s chief aide thought his boss had been injured by some sort of psychic trauma, Alexander would have to humor him. He didn’t at the moment have time to persuade the man otherwise.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “But what do you want us to do about it?”
“Break off the operation,” Stahl told him. “Some of us here believe the Xul have found a way to attack us through you. Break off and return to near-Earth space!”
“That . . . is not possible at the moment.” With a mental shrug, he disconnected the link. Commonwealth senators were one thing in the hierarchy of power, aides and secretaries something else entirely.
Could the Xul have established a link with EarthRing via the QCC? Worse, could they physically attack humans over such a link? It didn’t seem credible but, until he had hard data on Yarlocke’s physical and mental condition, he could not take chances. “Comm!” he said. “Switch off all QCC links with EarthRing!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“All ships! Stand by to execute Cometary Option OneAlpha!”
It was the best, he thought, of a very poor handful of options.
Nightstar 442 Core Space
0054 hrs, GMT
Moving at nearly three hundred kilometers per second, Ramsey’s Nightstar slammed into the tenuous blossom of one of the radioactive clouds. Minute bits of metal and debris flared as they were engulfed by his magnetic shields, shredded by the field’s passage into energy and component atoms.
Ramsey had given the fire- at- best command thirty seconds ago. The fighter was moving too fast for merely human reflexes to pick out the best instant for loosing its weapons. The aerospace craft’s AI, however, could calculate the best possible firing solution and release the weapons load at a precisely determined instant; Ramsey felt the ship kick, shudder, and jolt hard as its GV-3662 Gatling fusion gun howled, spewing thirty droplets of fusing hydrogen per second in a stream of blue-white fire.
For an instant, Ramsey saw the vast side of the Xul’s hull looming huge, the surface coming apart beneath the caress of Gatling starfire. Large chunks of hull peeled back and spun away, as vaporizing metal- plastic laminate flared up in front of him.
The Nightstar slammed through, skin temperature soaring as the tiny craft threaded its way scant meters above the Xul ship’s hull. Surface features flashed past like an alien landscape glimpsed in an instant . . . and then it was gone, falling away behind as Ramsey initiated full acceleration once more. Particle beams and lasers reached out after him; his AI was already jinking the fighter in random up-down- sideways bursts to frustrate Xul tracking and targeting.
And then he heard the recall. . . .
Ops Center
UCS Hermes Core Space
0046 hrs, GMT
“General, it’s going to take at least ninety minutes to get our fighters back on board Cunningham!”
“I know.” The admission burned in his gut. “And there are the Marines on S-2/I. But we can’t wait.”
Taggart gave him a hard look. “I thought the Marines didn’t leave their own behind. Ever.”
“Damn it, Liam, we can’t stay. But we can come back. . . .”
“If there’s anything to come back to.”
Alexander stared for a moment at the main screen, where one of the Behemoths appeared to be drifting out of control, its drives crippled. “The idea is to get them to follow us. They will, if we’re enough of a threat.”
The display changed to a different image, one transmitted from a different battlespace drone. Intrepid had swung about and was approaching the largest Xul ship, coming up from astern. So far, there’d been no reaction from the large vessel; Intrepid, a Xul hull captured and with Commonwealth drives and weaponry installed, still looked like a Xul huntership, whatever internal differences there might be now. Intrepid’s AI would be broadcasting on Xul frequencies, telling a story of communications difficulty.
The Xul monster abruptly accelerated, energy readings on board rising as she prepared to fire her weapons. Intrepid fired first. . . .
Explosions ripped through the larger ship, as inert, one- tenth-kilogram slugs accelerated to near-light velocities lanced from Intrepid’s mass drivers, shredding through the Xul vessel’s hull and interior like bullets through tissue. With such weapons, and at such close range, size alone meant very little. Intrepid continued hammering at the Xul ship with every weapon that would bear. Enough damage would release the singularity at the enemy ship’s heart and destroy her; the question was whether Intrepid could fire fast enough and hit hard enough before her opponent could get in a shot of her own. . . .
The Xul ship fired, a single bolt of plasma energy focused through intense magnetic fields until it was as bright and as hot as a piece of the Sun. The bolt burned through Intrepid’s needle- slender hull a third of the way forward from her aft end, devouring her QPT generators in a blaze of white light.
“Communications,” Alexander said. “Make to all vessels and commands. Tell them that the squadron is going to execute the Cometary Option. Deployed fighters and any vessels that cannot initiate the Alcubierre Drive sequence due to battle damage are to drop into deep black mode and await our return. Forces on the planet will maintain their perimeter, and wait for a signal from Hermes to execute Heartbreak. Get me an acknowledgement from all commands.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the communications officer replied. “Ah . . . General?”
“What?”
“EarthRing is attempting to initiate contact via QCC.”
“Do not acknowledge. Our QCC is temporarily down. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.”
Once the squadron pulled back to Sol—even just back to Cluster Space—the chances were good to excellent that they would not be allowed to come back for the ships and men left behind at S-2.
And they would be coming back.
Somehow .
20
0605 .1102 Ops Center
UCS Hermes
Core Space
0106 hrs, GMT
“Hermes is ready in all respects for Alcubierre Drive,” Captain Robeson, the ship’s commanding officer, reported.
“Very well,” Admiral Taggart replied. “General? At your command.”
Alexander gave his various data channels a last check. Chosin was badly damaged and unable to accelerate; Intrepid was completely out of communication and might well be dead. Thirteen fighters had survived the unequal battle against the Xul super-ships and were now en route to Cunningham.
Seven other warships, along with Hermes, had reported readiness for FTL drive. Moore, Cunningham’s skipper, had received and acknowledged his orders. He was to remain and recover his remaining fighters, attempting to avoid Xul notice by dropping into deep- black stealth mode, powering down all but absolutely essential power systems to remain unobserved by Xul sensors. If that didn’t work, and the Xul spotted Cunningham and began closing, he was to break off and accelerate to FTL, attempting to reach safety within one of the surrounding molecular clouds.
Any fighters Cunningham was forced to leave behind would simply have to take their chances, either down on the planet’s surface with the RST or powered down and adrift in stealth mode until Commonwealth ships could get back to S-2.
Of the three Xul ships ahead, one of the Behemoths was definitely crippled. The big one savaged by the Intrepid was damaged, but still maneuvering, still deadly, and the second Behemoth hadn’t e
ven been touched.
Worse, more Xul hunterships were arriving now, dropping out of FTL in a teeming swarm.
It was time to leave.
“Make a final call to all units remaining in- system,” Alexander said. “Tell them, ‘Stay low and stay out of trouble. We’ll be back. Good luck . . . and semper fi.’ ”
“Message transmitted, General. We have acknowledgment from all units.”
“Very well. Admiral? Initiate the Cometary Option.”
“Aye, aye, General. Hermes to Heartfire Squadron. All vessels able to respond, engage Alcubierre Drive on my command . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . initiate!”
As the Xul armada closed on the eight Commonwealth vessels, those ships began accelerating. One by one, the images of those moving ships began to shimmer and distort, as bubbles of space around them warped.
And then they were plunging toward the Galactic Center at ten times the speed of light.
Nightstar 442 Core Space
0107 hrs, GMT
“Shit!” Lieutenant Mara Cosgriff shouted over the link. “They’re leaving us! They’re fucking leaving us!”
“Easy, Mar,” Ramsey told her. “It’s not like they have a hell of a lot of choice.”
More and more Xul ships were dropping out of their equivalent of Alcubierre Drive, obviously attempting to corner the tiny squadron of Commonwealth warships. Those warships were winking out of normal space, now, in rapid succession, leaving energy trails of tortured hydrogen atoms pointing like arrows toward GalCenter. Hermes, requiring more time to power up her Alcubierre Drive, was the very last to flash out of normal space, and into the twisted realm of FTL.
Slowly, ponderously, the Xul giants began coming about, killing their forward velocity and aligning themselves on GalCenter. Yes! They were following the squadron.
Or most of them were. Five of the newcomers descended instead on the crippled Intrepid, and five more on the Chosin, which appeared to be completely dead now. They hesitated as they pulled alongside Intrepid, possibly fooled by her hull into thinking she was a damaged Xul huntership. Chosin, however, blazed into a blue-white glare of light as five Xul warships speared her with particle beams and high- energy lasers. The glare expanded, faded . . . and nothing was left of Chosin but coalescing particles the size of grains of sand.
And in another moment, the remnant fragment of Intrepid vanished as well, cleanly and instantaneously, a victim, apparently of the Xul patterning weapon. It made sense. If you didn’t know whether a vessel was occupied by humans or Xul, copy them and upload them all, and let the Xul computer network sort them out.
“Stealth mode,” Treverton told them all. “Execute! . . .”
And then the squadron net was silent.
At Ramsey’s thought, his Nightstar powered down, leaving only a trickle of energy flowing from the batteries to his life support and to a few key external sensors. Massing just under 120 tons and sheathed in absorbing layers of active nanoflage, the Nightstar carried very little signature for the Xul monsters to spot. Even at close range, they were likely to dismiss one of the inert heavy fighters as a drifting bit of wreckage.
At least . . . that was the idea, and the hope that sustained the thirteen surviving members of Raptor Squadron now.
The fighter didn’t have a transparent canopy, of course— not with the local background radiation count being what it was—but sensory data flowed through Ramsey’s cere bral implants, giving him a magnificent, and supremely lonely viewpoint. With no links to the other Raptors, he felt completely alone.
Hell, at this point, he couldn’t even see the Xul ships any longer. All that was out there was that impossible and surreal sky dominated by the spiral of Sag A, the ruby gleam of S-2, and the ocher crescent that was the planet, now some fifty thousand kilometers, low and on his port side, the entire vista slowly turning as his Nightstar tumbled.
Xul hunterships were large enough that some of those stars out there might be the enemy . . . but if so he couldn’t pick them out from the millions of naked-eye stars that made up the distant walls of the Galactic Core. He would have to be looking in exactly the right spot to catch a glimpse of movement contrary to the background drift.
He checked his life support readout. His air generators would keep him going for a week or more—food and water about the same. His biggest limitation was his radiation shielding.
His magnetic screens were off. Those would be spotted by any passing Xul as easily as a flare. His Nightstar’s phase shift was still engaged, however. Phase shift allowed him to occupy a hazy niche half a step out of the usual three physical dimensions. Since it leaked very little power, the system actually contributed to his invisibility, as well as greatly cutting down on the amount of radiation he was encountering.
More radiation was blocked by the active nanoflage on his outer hull, which absorbed all radiation, from radar to X-rays, and transmitted it to the chargers that kept his batteries going. Some radiation, though, was still getting through.
According to his med readouts, he would start getting sick within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and that was allowing for the anti-rad nano already coursing through his blood.
He would have acquired a fatal dose perhaps forty hours after that.
Long before that happened, Ramsey knew, he would switch off his phase- shift unit entirely. There was enough background radiation out there now to kill him more or less instantly.
But he had time, yet.
He waited.
Marine Regimental Strike Team Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I
Core Space
0110 hrs, GMT
“I don’t believe the bastards went and left us!” PFC James Connors said. The young Marine had showed up a few minutes ago, wandering across the blasted plain toward the Marine perimeter, apparently lost. Gardner had ordered him into the hole. “What the fuck happened to ‘no man left behind?’ ”
“They’ll be back,” Gardner told him. But she didn’t sound hopeful.
“Hey, if it’s a choice between a few hundred Marines buying it,” Huerra said, “and those same Marines and the squadron getting scragged, I guess we know what the brass is going to do, huh?”
“Yeah,” Chaffee added, “and tough shit if those ‘few hundred Marines’ happen to be us, huh?”
“Hey, welcome to the Corps,” Garroway told him. “You volunteered. No one told you it would be easy. Or safe.”
He looked up at the alien sky, at the silent, motionless pinwheel of Sag A. Word had been passed down the line moments ago that the squadron was leaving—promising to return, but leaving.
The Marines on S-2/I were on their own.
The perimeter seemed eerily quiet. Not that anyone was particularly expecting trouble out here. The biggest threat right now was from undiscovered pockets of Xul combat machines still buried somewhere beneath Firebase Hawkins, perhaps as deep as a kilometer or two. So far as any of the sensor drones sent out around the planet had been able to determine, this had been the only Xul outpost on an otherwise empty and lifeless world.
But Marine regs demanded a defensive perimeter for a firebase on a hostile beachhead, and so half of the Marines had been scattered along a broad circle surrounding the center of the base. If the Xul did come from outside, they’d hit the perimeter defenses first . . . and maybe, maybe, the perimeter would hold long enough for heavier forces to arrive.
At least they would hold while the ammo held out. The fighting earlier had drained everyone’s expendables—slugs for the mass drivers, hydrogen ice rounds for the plasma guns, fresh power units for plasma guns and lasers. So far, no one had bothered to issue fresh expendables, and that meant a screw-up somewhere.
At the moment, though, the Net—which normally would have allowed them to communicate their needs back to HQ with a thought—was down, switched off to keep the Xul from homing on it. Marines in the field were limited now to their back- up suit comms, which had a range of only a few meters.
He hoped the p
owers- that- be would remember to switch on the Net if there was anything the Marines on the perimeter needed to know . . . like an immanent Xul attack.
Two hundred sixty-some Marines, not counting those KIA and wounded during the landing assault, or ganized into two companies—half a regiment—under a captain’s command.
If the Xul found them here, they wouldn’t be much more than a minor distraction.
Garroway just hoped to hell the squadron came back as promised, and soon.
He was feeling a bit exposed out here. . . .
Ops Center
UCS Hermes Galactic Center 0110 hrs, GMT
They dropped out of FTL, decelerating hard, their Alcubierre Drive clawing at surrounding space to reduce Hermes’ headlong plunge into the Galactic Center to velocities that would let them swing around the supermassive black hole.
