by Ian Douglas
They could have stayed in FTL, of course, traveling in a straight line unaffected by the central black hole’s gravity and finding a safe haven at which to rendezvous with the other ships of the squadron somewhere beyond, among those billions of Core stars. But Operation Heartfire had not been limited to support of the failed peace mission. It was also intended to gather intelligence—in partic ular, to get a truly close look at whatever it was the Xul were building in the Galaxy’s innermost Holy of Holies.
Hermes was now just a few tens of thousands of kilometers from the outermost shell of the Dyson cloud, and moving closer every second, hurtling in on a tight, cometary path. The AI controlling the Commonwealth vessel’s course had inserted them into an approach that would take them skimming just above that enigmatic central object, giving them a close look.
“Cara?” Alexander asked. He felt trapped—anxious, but unable to show it. “Is everything set?” It was only the third or fourth time he’d asked his personal AI that question.
“Affirmative, General,” was her patient answer. “Any sign of the rest of the squadron?”
“Negative, General. Even a slight amount of scattering
would have put them well beyond visual range.”
On the main Ops display screens, the central object had taken on a distinctly fuzzy appearance—a Dyson cloud as opposed to a Dyson sphere. The objects orbiting the central black hole must number in the hundreds of trillions, a vast and staggering swarm of artificial worlds and worldlets, each apparently pursuing its own inde pen dent orbit without coming close enough to one another to risk collision. Or did each object maneuver when an intercept with another object was detected? Alexander tried to imagine the computing power necessary to keep track of such complexity, and shook his head. The sheer scale of the engineering took it beyond human ken.
He was reminded, though, of what had been happening in Earth’s Solar System over the course of the past few centuries. Already, most of Humankind resided within the rings of stations and habs circling Earth and Mars, and billions more lived in hollowed-out asteroids and cometary bodies terraformed into tiny, artificial worlds circling Sol in a haze of life and civilization. In another few millennia, Earth’s sun might well look something like the Dyson cloud ahead, completely surrounded by shells of orbiting habitats in a cloud so thick that Sol himself could no longer be seen from the outside.
As Hermes hurtled closer, he could see that the polar regions were lightly occupied, a mere dusting of orbiting objects. Stranger, though, was the narrow and empty zone around the cloud’s equator. That made no sense whatsoever in terms of traditional orbital dynamics. Since it was orbiting the center of the gravitational singularity, an object passing above the northern hemi sphere of the central black hole had to cross the equator during its orbit and pass over the southern hemisphere, then cross the equator again back to the north; it couldn’t simply circle above one hemi sphere or the other, and yet that appeared to be exactly what was happening here.
“Most of the cloud components,” Cara was whispering in his mind, “are not in orbit.”
This was getting weirder and weirder. “How the hell do they stay put, then? Antigravity?”
However they were managing the trick, Alexander could easily see why they needed to do it. The equatorial area was clear to allow infalling mass—the gas, dust, and debris that made up the twenty-light year spiral of Sagittarius A—to pass through the cloud and enter the black hole’s event horizon. From here, the gap appeared as a narrow line, illuminated from within by X-rays, bisecting the cloud and perhaps no more than a few thousand kilometers wide. This close to GalCenter, the spiraling matter of the accretion disk had been gravitationally compressed to a thin sheet of hot gas, invisible at optical wavelengths but aglow in the high ultraviolet, and no more than meters thick. The sheet streamed between the two halves of the cloud, whipping around the supermassive object hidden inside before vanishing into the event horizon with a high-energy shriek of X-rays and cosmic radiation.
“Analysis of the cloud components,” Cara said, “indicates that most of the individual objects are anchored to others. The Dyson cloud is essentially a very large and extraordinarily complex crystalline lattice arranged in two opposing hemispheres.”
Which explained how they kept the equatorial regions clear. There were two clouds, one above the black hole’s northern hemi sphere, one above the south. The two almost touched at the equator, but were rotating separately.
That didn’t explain how they kept the system stable, however. If the cloud objects were not actually in orbit around the black hole, they should fall inexorably into the event horizon and be destroyed.
“There are energetic structures anchoring the cloud sections in space,” Cara continued. “The Xul appear to be manipulating strong, local magnetic fields both in order to link individual habitats and to anchor the systems in place.”
“Anchored how?”
“The engineering details are unclear, and likely represent a level of technology far in advance of anything with which we are familiar. The anchoring structures, however, appear to extend into the Quantum Sea.”
The base state of reality. Suddenly, Alexander was reminded that everything he was seeing here represented only a tiny fraction of the whole . . . like a blind man touching a tree and missing the forest. The construction project ahead didn’t exist in only a single set of spatial dimensions.
“Here we go!” an officer at a nearby console said. Hermes was picking up speed fast as she was gravitationally accelerated along her path. Alexander had a blurred and momentary glimpse of the cloud expanding. She slammed through the thin sheet of plasma at the equator . . . and for the briefest of instants, Alexander stared into the full radiance within the cloud.
And then Hermes was receding into space once more, its close passage so fast that human senses could neither see nor interpret what had just happened.
“We have Xul ships coming up off the cloud behind us,” Taggart told him.
“Of course.” The enemy couldn’t allow this trespass of their inner space without at least an attempt at protest. Hermes was the slowest and most clumsy of the Commonwealth ships in the squadron, so the other seven vessels must already have completed their swing-bys.
The Xul defenses would be on full alert by now.
Alexander gave thought to ordering Hermes’ weapons systems officers to open fire, but dropped the idea almost as soon as it surfaced. All of the warships in the Commonwealth’s arsenals could not have caused serious damage to that vast and hazy structure at the center. The op planners had anticipated that, and combat was not a priority in this pass, save in self-defense. They would save energy for the escape.
Just possibly the fact that the Commonwealth ships had not attacked might convey a willingness to talk.
No one seriously expected the Xul to understand that message, however. Judging from the way their ships were wafting up from the Cloud, the close passage had only succeeded in giving the hornet’s nest a good, swift kick.
And now the swarm was coming up after them.
“Tell me we got that passage,” Alexander said.
“We did, sir,” a bridge officer reported. “Athena is analyzing the images now.”
“And did we get the Spymasters away?”
“Yes, sir. Two hundred of them.”
“That won’t even begin to scratch the surface. But we’ll get some data back, at least.”
Hermes was again moving in a nearly straight line, her hairpin turn about the gravitational singularity completed. Taggart gave a mental command, and Hermes again began accelerating. Her Alcubierre Drive engaged, space warped around her, and she slipped into the ghostly otherworldliness of FTL.
Marine Regimental Strike Team Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I
Core Space
0115 hrs, GMT
Garroway rose in the crater sheltering the five Marines on the Hawkins perimeter. In the distance, he could see a lone figure—a Marine in mass
ive Type 690 armor—trudging across the rubble a hundred meters away. He was, Garroway decided, coming from one of the other perimeter positions, possibly the next one over, occupied by Bravo Company.
“Who do you think it is?” Gardner asked.
“Damfino,” Garroway replied. “I’m going to go check him out.”
“What, you think it’s a Xul sneaking upon us in Marine armor?” Huerra asked.
“No, but it looks like he’s coming from the next fighting hole over. I want to know who’s over there.”
Scrambling up out of the hole, he started to walk, making for a guestimated intercept point in front of the other Marine.
The other Marine saw him coming and turned to face him. “Hey, what’s up?”
Garroway recognized the voice even before his implant identified the speaker. “Son of a bitch! Gunny Warhurst! Change your mind about coming back in, yet?”
“Days ago, Gare. Days ago. It’s just a little late to change my mind now, y’know?”
“You’re a rock, Gunny, you know that? As in ‘dumb as a.’ You could be back in Sunken Miami with two gorgeous naked women in a hot tub.”
“Don’t rub it in, Marine. That hot tub is looking better all the time.”
“What’re you doing out here?”
“Lieutenant Whitfield sent me out looking for fresh plasma charges. You guys got any to share?”
“You’ve got to be kidding, right?” Garroway said. He slapped the side of his weapon. “I’m down to my last hundred rounds.”
“There should still be a bunch of ammo on the Tarantulas,” Warhurst told him.
“Yeah, and right now they’re as dangerous as the Xulies,” Garroway replied.
The last he’d heard, half the Tarantulas were being employed as tunnelers, digging down into the crust of S-2/I in search of surviving pockets of Xul, while the rest were carving out battlements on the surface. Rock slagged down and became plastic, glowing a sullen, black-crusted red, where those monsters plied their beams.
“So who screwed up and sent the ’rants underground without offloading the goods?” Warhurst wanted to know.
“Good question.”
“Captain Black?” Warhurst suggested.
“He’s too smart for that,” Garroway replied. “But maybe his constellation slipped on some code.”
Modern combat, he thought, was entirely too fast and too complicated for any one man to keep track of everything that was going on in a battle zone. The command constellation of an officer at any command level was made up of both human aides and AI personal assistants. Ideally, the intersection of organic with electronic was seamless, but the ideal could rarely be achieved in practice. AIs were smart— brilliant, in certain applications—but they still were essentially nothing more than sophisticated software that did what the human members of the constellation told them to do.
Someone further down the logistical chain of command must have forgotten to offload that ammo.
“C’mon,” he told Warhurst. “Let’s go together and see if we can hijack some ammo. Let me tell my people where I’m going.”
“Right.”
Thirty minutes later, the two of them entered the center of the new base, which rose black and glistening from rubble fused into volcanic glass. A pair of Tarantulas, huge and ponderous, were gnawing their way down into solid rock thirty meters away, bathed in the arc-light glare of their plasma cutters and wreathed in the steam coming off of molten rock.
“What you two apes doin’ here, sightseein’?” an armored figure bellowed from nearby. Garroway’s receiver IDed him as Sergeant Major Dulaney, and he was the LZ master. “Get the hell out of my work zone!”
“We need ammo on the perimeter defense, Sergeant Major,” Garroway told him. “Plasma pellets, slugs, missiles, everything. And as near as we can figure, everything’s still on board the damned ’rants!”
“Tough shit. We’re not stopping work for you people!”
Garroway sighed. The Corps was a brotherhood, closer than family. And sometimes he wanted to kick certain family members in the ass.
The Net came back on, data streaming in . . . an alert. Shit. . . .
“You there,” Dulaney was shouting, pointing with one of his extended slicers. “Get those nano canisters in there now!”
Those canisters would inject assemblers deep into solid rock, growing the complex of bunkers and fortifications that had been programmed into them.
“Sergeant Major?”
“What the fuck! Are you still here?”
“You’d better let us get that ammo. Now.”
“Why the fuck should I?”
“That’s why.” Garroway pointed. In the sky, off beyond the perimeter at Dulaney’s back, a hard-edged shadow was moving against the background stars . . . a flattened sphere, huge and menacing, growing slowly larger as it descended.
“Jesus!”
21
0605 .1102 Marine Regimental Strike Team
Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I
Core Space
0125 hrs, GMT
Fire lit up the night.
Firebase Hawkins, bringing every battery to bear, loosed bolt after bolt at the incoming Xul huntership. Armored Marines raced toward the perimeter beneath the salvos, some skimming low across the tortured terrain on bursts from their jump jets. To either side, Tarantulas, huge and ponderous, drifted on straining ventral jets and agravitic lifters, moving apart to position themselves to lay down a crossfire on the enemy. Above the horizon, the Xul huntership looked as huge as a mountain, drifting slowly toward the surface.
Garroway triggered his jump jets and sailed in a low, flat trajectory, swinging his legs as he flew so that he came down with his boots well ahead of him, sending up a spray of powdery dust when he hit. The crater with his companions was just ahead.
Plasma bolts from the main firebase batteries were smashing into the descending Xul ship; Garroway could see the hits as twinkling sparkles flaring briefly against the artificial mountain of that hull. The Xul monster was injured; he could see craters and tears along its flanks. But he had no doubt that its weapons were still quite effective.
He found himself tensing against the anticipated strike of the Xul patterning weapon. What would it feel like?
For that matter, had they already fired the thing? People said that if you were patterned, you might not even know you’d been hit. The brain took any information fed to it as Gospel, whether from the real world outside your head or an imaginal world existing within a sophisticate computer. He could be living a virtual life already, an electronic prisoner, and never know it.
What, though, would be the point of capturing digital reproductions of humans and keeping them in a cage they didn’t know existed? Reaching the fighting hole, he leaped in, landing heavily beside Gardner and Huerra. He had to assume this was real, and not try to second-guess the universe.
The other Marines had their weapons up, but weren’t firing. The Xul ship was still fifty kilometers away, and the beams fired by man-portable plasma weapons tended to bloom and dissipate within a tenth of that distance—especially within the twisted magnetic fields here in the Core.
“How do you think they found us?” Huerra asked.
“Shit, does it matter?” Gardner asked. “They did . . . and they’re gonna be damned sorry they did, too!”
Garroway charged his weapon. He could think of no finer epitaph for the RST.
Nightstar 442 Core Space
0131 hrs, GMT
“Okay, people!” Major Treverton called. “Stay dispersed, and let your AIs handle the approach! Unload every damned thing you’ve got, ’cause we’re not going to get another pass!”
Ramsey felt the shudder as his Nightstar hurtled through something . . . not atmosphere, not here, but a patch of hydrogen gas or drifting debris, something that slammed against his fighter’s magnetic screens and vaporized, transmitting enough kinetic energy as it shredded into subatomic particles to shake the hurtling aerospace
craft as it passed.
He’d drifted alone in silence for only about ten minutes before a Xul Behemoth had appeared, moving toward the planet below. Treverton had brought the squadron’s net back on line, then. The Marines on S-2/I needed some close aerospace support, and the Raptors were the only fighters in the area.
One by one, the fighters of Raptor Squadron had boosted into an approach vector that brought them in behind the Behemoth. The Xul ship appeared to be damaged; defensive fire snapped out at the incoming fighters, but it was scattered and badly aimed. Off to the right, Lieutenant Jamison’s Nightstar was hit by a sun- bright ball of blue-white light that struck him bow-on, turning his Raptor into a hurtling mass of flaming debris.
Ramsey kept his attention focused on the Xul huntership as it loomed larger and larger ahead and below. His AI brought up the target lock icon in his mind, and he triggered the Raptor’s Gatling cannon.
Marine Regimental Strike Team Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I
Core Space
0133 hrs, GMT
The optical feed in Garroway’s helmet blacked out momentarily as light seared across the landscape. Marine aerospace fighters—where the hell had they come from?—stooped silently out of the sky, each in turn pouring streams of blue-white flame into the drifting Xul monster. As his vision cleared, he could see the Behemoth lurch to one side, hesitate, then begin descending more quickly.
