Galactic Corps

by Ian Douglas

  If they were going to launch the Heartbreak trigger ships, it would have to be now.

  “Transmit navigational data for GalCenter space to the triggerships,” Alexander told Cara. “We want the orbital mechanics just exactly right.”

  “Extreme precision will not be possible, General,” his AI reminded him. “There are too many variables, too many unknowns in regard to S-2’s composition and dynamic equilibrium. However, the necessary data has been transmitted to Firebase Hawkins.”

  Leave it to the AIs to be on top of things. The longer he worked with them, the harder it was to think of artificial intelligences as mere software. They were smart, they were responsive, and they acted alive.

  And he was about to sentence twelve of them to the electronic equivalent of death.

  In a window open in his thoughts, Alexander saw a schematic of the S-2 system, with twelve curving trajectories rising from the night side of the planet, swinging around to the day side, and accelerating under Alcubierre Drive toward the giant sun. The first ships in line would be transmitting data about stellar density, temperature, and dynamics to the ships following, allowing for subtle course changes to take advantage of the new information.

  “Hawkins reports the Euler ships have been programmed and are ready for launch,” Taggart announced.

  Alexander drew a deep breath. Technically, he was required to consult with the Senate Military Council before firing the Euler triggerships . . . and there were unknowns enough here to pose a significant threat to Earth. If anything was guaranteed to generate a xenocidal Xul response directed against Humankind, attacking their complex at GalCenter must be it.

  On the other hand, there was opportunity here . . . the opportunity to do the Xul so much damage in one blow that the war might, at long last, be brought to a close.

  He could not let that opportunity slip away in bureaucratic wrangling or politics.

  “Do the Xul on the planet’s surface pose a threat to a triggership launch?” he asked in his mind.

  “Conceivably,” Cara told him. “Individual Xul elements are battling within the Marine trenches, and are within a kilometer of the triggership silos.”

  “Relay to Captain Black,” Alexander said. “He is clear to initiate Sunrise in order to clear the area.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And as soon as the silo area is secure, he is to launch Heartbreak,” Alexander said.

  Marine Regimental Strike Team Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

  Core Space

  0747 hrs, GMT

  The Xul combots had swept through the wreckage and into the Marine lines. His VML launcher out of rounds, Garroway had retrieved his plasma weapon and fired at the advancing black sea until they were swarming over the trench itself. For a time, he’d used the nano-D dispenser in his right arm, crouching at the bottom of the trench and firing straight up as the machines drifted overhead.

  Then they were too close even for that, and he was using his slicers.

  Combat became an endless dance of repeated movements, coordinated and executed through the mental discipline of his weiji-do training. Reach out with the left arm, hook into black ceramic-plastic and metal with one slicer, strike up and in and twist with the right, letting molecule- thin blades core and gut the struggling artificial monster.

  Exhaustion dragged at Garroway. How long could he keep this up? . . .

  “Listen up Marines!” Black’s voice came through on his regimental channel. “We’re implementing Sunrise, two counts, in fifteen seconds! Keep your heads down!”

  Garroway gutted another Xul machine, shoving the wreckage aside in a tangle of writhing tentacles. Warhurst was next to him, almost against his back. “About fucking time!” Warhurst growled.

  But Garroway was mentally running through a countdown. Twelve . . . eleven . . . ten . . .

  Another Xul combot drifted overhead, its tentacles reaching down for him. He snapped out with his arms, right, then left, severing tentacles, then plunging his left slicer into what passed for the alien machine’s belly. It tried to back off, and he felt his boots leaving the ground.

  Eight . . . seven . . . six . . .

  Warhurst fired his suit’s nano-D weapon, the round snapping past Garroway’s helmet and imbedding itself in the struggling machine. Clouds of nano-disassemblers began devouring the alien device, sparkles of blue light showing where molecular bonds were breaking.

  Garroway wrenched his right slicer free and fell back into the trench as the Xul machine began to disintegrate.

  Three . . . two . . . one . . .

  “Down !” Warhurst yelled, and then the landscape outside of the trench lit up.

  Sunrise indeed. The missiles had been fired from two of the surviving Tarantulas, each tipped with a ten-kiloton tactical nuclear warhead. Marines rarely used such weaponry—the chances of scoring friendly-fire kills, often irretrievables—was simply too great. But the nanocrete trenches grown into the fabric of Firebase Hawkins had been designed with tactical nukes in mind.

  Twin fireballs expanded like deadly, spherical blossoms. With no atmosphere, of course, there was no mushroom cloud, but the firestorms of raw, hot plasma swept out from the target points, merged, and swelled. Xul machines caught in the open were shredded, melted, and whipped away in the seething maelstrom of heat and intense EM radiation. The sky above the trench went dazzlingly white as the plasma wall swept overhead, leaving the depths of the trench in shadowed darkness.

  The shock waves arrived seconds later, blasting through solid rock and nanocrete, picking Garroway and Warhurst up from the floor of the trench and slamming them both against the back wall.

  And then there was a long, black silence.

  “All clear,” Black’s voice reported. “We have the bastards on the run! Pour it on, people!”

  Unsteadily, Garroway got to his feet, retracting his slicers and extending a gauntlet to Warhurst to help the older Marine up. Beyond the trench, two hundred-meter craters still glowed white-hot in the aftermath of the strike. Picking up his plasma rifle, Garroway brought it to his shoulder, locked in with his implant, and began picking off individual Xul machines— survivors overlooked by the blast because, by chance, they’d been in shadowed corners, craters, or crevices where the nukes had overlooked them.

  The few still afloat appeared to be straggling toward the fallen Behemoth, breaking off the attack at last.

  A kind of madness had overtaken Garroway, lifting the exhaustion, giving him new, if momentary, strength. “Burn ’em!” he yelled. “Burn ’em! Burn ’em down!”

  “All units,” Black’s voice said over the Net. “Heartbreak has been initiated and deployed. You people might want to see this. . . .”

  “Hey!” Warhurst called from Garroway’s side. “They’re launching!”

  Garroway turned, lowering his weapon. The nearest triggership’s bunker was over a kilometer away, and there wasn’t a lot to see, but Garroway and Warhurst stood in their trench watching as the slender craft rose above the nanogrown base. The tiny ship, curiously organic, egg-shaped, but with sculpted flutes and swellings and blisters, drove skyward on its agravitics and was rapidly lost to sight.

  That explained the use of the nukes. Marine command constellations were super-cautious when it came to the nuclear option, simply because even a ten kiloton warhead was so damnably indiscriminate, but nothing less could have swept the battlefield clear enough of Xuls to allow the triggerships to get away.

  He found himself wondering if any Marines or docs had been caught in the open just now. If they had been, their bodies would never be found for retrieval.

  Elsewhere across the base, other black Euler vessels were rising and following, streaking toward the western horizon before vanishing into darkness.

  Garroway dropped his gaze to the western horizon. The red sun would be rising there on this backward- turning world in another few standard days, but it was lost for the moment beneath the bulk of the planet. That was just as well, considering wha
t was about to happen.

  He watched the last of the Euler triggerships vanish into the western sky. He was devoutly, almost insanely glad that he wasn’t piloting one. He never wanted to be in that position, that role, again.

  His heart was racing, his respiration elevated. All too well he could remember being crammed inside an identical ship a decade earlier, plunging into the core of a star. The thought always brought with it a throat-clutching fear on the ragged verge of panic.

  Memories of that close, confining interior of the alien starship mingled with other, more recent memories. For a moment, he flashed back to the nightmare terror of the fight underground hours ago. Damn . . . was he becoming a claustrophobic? Mental and emotional traumas could be as debilitating as physical injury, and frequently were a hell of a lot harder to treat.

  He swallowed the fear. He didn’t want to alert any of the Network AIs and have his name reported. That could get him pulled off the line in short order. Something like claustrophobia could get him pulled off of combat duty entirely.

  For a moment, he let himself be teased by the thought. A psych downcheck might get him sent home. The thought was damned tempting.

  And then he shook his head, angry again. What home? Where? EarthRing? He was home here, with his buddies. With his Corps. . . .

  And he would not let them down.

  •••

  Heartbreak Flight S-2 System,

  Core Space

  0748 hrs, GMT

  Accelerating hard, the first of the Euler-designed triggerships emerged from the planet’s shadow, plunging into dazzling red sunshine. As it approached the speed of light, S-2/I vanished astern, swept away as if by some titanic, cosmic hand. Ahead, S-2 grew brighter, its edges distorting with the bizarre optical effects of supraluminal travel, then blacked out entirely as the Alcubierre field so completely warped the surrounding space that light could not penetrate to the tiny vessel within.

  On board, a sub-program drawn from Athena directed the craft’s course and speed. Normally, triggerships were designed to plunge directly into the heart of a star. As the Alcubierre Drive field moved into the high-density realm of the stellar core, a considerable volume of space ahead of the vessel was enormously compressed, vastly increasing that density. Astern, space was stretched out, and here the density of the star’s interior dropped sharply. The result was a rebound that collapsed the star’s core, creating a shock wave that blew the star’s outer layers into space—a nova.

  This time, though, the triggerships’ AI pilots were aiming well to one side, arrowing in toward one limb of the blazing red star ahead. Each vessel had a slightly different target point, one calculated to cut a chord through a circular cross- section of the star.

  Physics calculations and endless simulations had suggested the probable result. Still, with so many unknowns, no one could be sure of what the exact result would be, not until the string of triggerships had actually completed their passage, and Commonwealth ships and probes had had a chance to record and evaluate the data.

  Moving at ten times the speed of light, the lead triggership plunged through the stellar photosphere and deep into the lower levels of the star’s atmosphere. Not even the senses of the AI pilot could record that instant. Besides, the AI couldn’t see out, and was piloting now entirely on programming that assumed the star would be where it was supposed to be at the instant of passage.

  In the ship’s wake, the predicted shockwave spread through the star.

  The star designated S-2 was nearly two hundred times the diameter of distant Sol and, like other red giants, was correspondingly less dense, especially within its outer regions. The passage did not trigger a nova.

  It did, however, cause a rebound effect that sent nearly a quarter of a Solar mass hurtling out ahead of the star, blasting up and out through the photosphere in a geyser of mass and energy that momentarily outshone the entire star. It was, in fact, a stellar flare, but of unprecedented size and force and volume. As that mass erupted from the red sun’s deeper levels, the shock rebounded against the entire star, visibly flattening it along its direction of travel. The flare persisted, growing broader, longer, more powerful . . . in short acting like a gigantic rocket blast with power enough to slightly slow the onrushing star’s velocity . . . and subtly change its course.

  That first stellar flare would linger for hours . . . perhaps for days, swelling out into space like a fast-expanding pillar of fire. But scant seconds after the first triggership passage, the second triggership in line passed through the star, striking at a slightly sharper, slightly deeper angle.

  A second flare, even larger than the first, erupted into space, merging with the first, strengthening it, burning so brightly now that the entire red giant’s light output seemed sullen and subdued.

  The third triggership increased the force of the stellar rocket even more, extending the growing prominence some forty million kilometers put into space.

  Then came the fourth, the fifth . . .

  One after another, the Euler triggerships dove into the star’s limb, each passage unleashing titanic and unimaginable forces from the star’s depths. There was terrible danger here. Shockwaves were rippling through the star’s photosphere and core, both from the explosions themselves and from the shock of deceleration, and the AIs had suggested that there was a chance that the huge star would tear itself into pieces.

  Gravity, however, continued to hold sway. The star had a rotational period of some twenty standard days; had it been faster—some giants, younger, hotter, and without planets, rotated in a matter of a few hours—the star might indeed have disintegrated under that ferocious bombardment, though, of course, the individual pieces, the entire mass of the star, would continue moving on its original path.

  The impact points had been precisely calculated. The geysering pulses of erupting star stuff were pushing against the star from the direction of its travel as it looped in toward GalCenter. The thrust of those jets acted to slow the star somewhat in its mad, five thousand kilometerpersecond plunge. As the star lost energy, its orbit decayed.

  As the artificial flares continued to explode from the depths of S-2’s atmosphere, they were acting like retro- rockets on a titanic orbital spacecraft. . . .

  Ops Center

  UCS Hermes Near S-2/I,

  Core Space

  1015 hrs, GMT

  Alexander watched the savaging of the giant star. Because of the scales of distance and size involved, everything was happening in slow motion. It had taken hours for the stellar prominence to develop, brightening as it grew until it outshone the rest of the star. From here, the jet appeared as a dazzlingly bright blue-white thread sticking straight out from the much larger sphere of the star. The star was visibly deformed, flattened somewhat, and concave in the region of the super-flares, with concentric rings of shadow showing against the sullen ruby glow of the star’s photosphere.

  “My God,” Alexander said, whispering. “Cara, are you getting all of this?”

  “We are recording the operation from the vantage points of over seven hundred remote battlespace probes, General,” his AI told him.

  “Of course. . . .”

  It had been a needless question. Of course the AIs would be recording this for later study. And for replay back in the Sol System, as a historical record.

  Cyndi Yarlocke and her crowd would make a lot of that record, he thought. For the past ten years, the MIEF had been blowing up entire stars in the war to keep the Xul at bay. Now, they’d refined the process somewhat, found a way, not to destroy the star outright, but to move it, to use an entire star as a colossal projectile weapon.

  That, to Alexander’s mind, seemed more obscene, somehow, than the mere destruction of a star with its attendant planets in an artificially generated nova. Yarlocke, he thought, would have agreed, would have seen this as a forbidden tampering with the natural order on a cosmic scale.

  Besides, this was really going to piss off the Xul. . . .

&nbs
p; A fragment of history nagged at his thoughts. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Who had said that? He ran a search, and his link with Hermes’ data banks brought back the result almost at once.

  The quote, technically, was from the ancient Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita, the speaker the god Vishnu. The passage had become famous in the West when it had been quoted by Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of the Manhattan Project, in July of 1945, on the occasion of the first detonation of a primitive nuclear device. According to the download, Oppenheimer had first mentioned thinking that passage—he’d been fluent in Sanskrit and knew the Bhagavad Gita well—in an interview in 1965, twenty years after the event. According to Oppenheimer’s brother, who’d been present at the time, what he’d actually said after that first, test detonation, was, “It worked!”

  It would be some time before they would know if this had worked, using a giant star as a weapon. They’d been running calculations and simulations for months, now, trying to refine the basic idea. The Eulers themselves, that deep- sea race of superb mathematicians, had contributed to the calculations.