by Ian Douglas
“I thought they were anti-military, sir?”
“They are, General, whatever is convenient for the moment. Whatever serves their career, their political agenda, or their immediate need. If it scratches their itch, they want it. Doesn’t matter what the words are. In a way, the Senate is a CAS, too.”
“I was aware of that, sir.” He hesitated. “May I ask why you’re supporting me? I know you’re considered pro-military—”
He waved the statement aside. “It doesn’t have to do with pro or anti-military. Every man and woman in that chamber knows the military is necessary. They just disagree on how best to employ it. No . . . partly, I agree with you that if we’re forced to fight this . . . this force of nature, it’s best done as far from Sol as possible. And, there’s a personal reason.”
“What’s that?”
“I have a daughter.”
“Yes, sir?”
“A Marine.”
“I remember, Senator.”
“She’s in love with another Marine. One of the men still back there on that planet. She . . . we would like him to come home safely.”
“I . . . understand, sir.”
“Ah! Here comes the tally.”
A total of 321 senators were voting this eve ning. As the results came in, the numbers came up on the display above the image of the Senate Chamber . . . 151 in favor of Alexander’s proposal, 165 against, with 5 abstentions.
The 1MIEF would be recalled to Sol Space. It would not be permitted to return to GalCenter.
“Don’t worry, General,” Armandez told him. “We’ll find a way. We will find a way.”
“Yes, sir.”
But would it be in time to save the people still stranded out there within the Galactic Core?
25
2606 .1102 Marine Regimental Strike Team
Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I
Core Space
0815 hrs, GMT
There weren’t many of them left.
The five Navy personnel who’d been the crew of the Tarantula had died first, one after another just a few days after the march back to Firebase Hawkins. They’d been wearing the old- style armor during that ten-kilometer march, Type 664 suits, instead of the newer Type 690s. The old suits had not been able to handle the background radiation loads and all five people were desperately sick by the time they’d staggered into the firebase.
Two of them, including Lieutenant Grooms, had gone up onto the surface and opened their own helmets before the end. The other three had lingered a while longer, as vomiting and diarrhea and the rapid disintegration of their cellular structure had slowly killed them.
The survivors’ numbers had been increased by two Marine officers early on—Lieutenants Eva Grant and Karl Mayfair, the pilots of the last two Nightstars. Over the course of the next month, however, four of the Marines had died of radiation sickness as well—Pettigrew, Davis, Grant, and Mayfair. The Marine pilots had been wearing light anti-rad protection on board their Nightstars, depending on the anti-rad nano covering their fighters for protection. They’d landed close by the ruins of Firebase Hawkins, but by the time they reached the base’s underground shelters, both had received irreparably lethal doses.
Gunny Warhurst was the se nior man present, now—not counting Ramsey in his cybernetic suspension inside the medical cocoon. There’d been some discussion about se nior ranks and who should be in command. Warhurst had been a gunnery sergeant long before Garroway, but for the past ten years he’d been a civilian, and going by their actual time in rate, Garroway had been the se nior by a matter of a few months. But if you measured from the actual date of enlistment, Warhurst had Garroway beat by ten years.
In fact, it didn’t matter. The proprieties and traditions were observed because that was how Marines kept order in a small and isolated unit. Garroway had no particular desire to lead the little group of survivors, especially since it seemed more and more likely that they all were going to succumb one by one to radiation sickness and die, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
But he would do his best to serve as Warhurst’s exec, making sure the air, food, and water were doled out appropriately, as were Doc’s dwindling rations of anti-rad nano.
For the past fifty days, they’d been surviving in a sealed bunker deep beneath the ruins of Firebase Hawkins. Excavated and nanogrown originally as a sickbay for the facility, it consisted of three rooms including sleeping quarters, a small nanoprocessing center, and a medical storeroom, though unfortunately most of the medical supplies had been taken by the rest of the RST when they’d evacuated. The quarters were crowded and utterly lacking in privacy. A single head provided basic sanitary facilities and a sonic shower, but the place stank with the accumulating miasma of unwashed bodies and the body gloves they wore under their armor.
An airlock led to the surface via a ladder up a vertical tube; a display screen pulled from the communications center had been rigged to show scenes transmitted from the various battlezone sensors still moving about the surface, their one connection with the universe outside.
Through those sensors, the surviving Marines had watched as the sky, already strange, slowly shifted into a surreal and eldritch fantasy from the hallucinations of a brain- burned sim- addict. Eventually, S-2/I’s slow, retrograde rotation had carried the central focus of the accretion spiral below the northeastern horizon, but three weeks later it had risen once more in the northwest; by chance, the point marking GalCenter was very nearly circumpolar, and dipped out of sight during the long diurnal cycle for only a relatively brief time.
By the fortieth day of their isolation, they could see the Dyson cloud, a fuzzy patch at the accretion spiral’s center, partly obscured by the ripple and flash of enigmatic lightnings at S-2/I’s north pole.
By the forty-fifth day, the cloud was much larger and more distinct, a dark and curiously regular spherical blot against the grainy glow of the background stars.
“It looks,” Sergeant Huerra said with studied Corps aplomb, “like something puked by my girlfriend’s cat.”
“That’s supposed to be a cloud of Xul ships?” PFC Lenny Delalo said, looking at the screen. “How come they haven’t come after us, then?”
“Likely they don’t even know we’re here,” Warhurst told him. “We’ve had some overflights, remember, but they didn’t sniff us out.”
Corporal Natasha Kaminski sniffed her own armpit and made a face. “If they couldn’t fucking smell us, they don’t have a sense of smell.”
Twice, on Day 8, and again on Day 22, clouds of Xul machines had swept over the ruined base. They were like standard Xul combots—egg-shaped and mounting tentacles and glittering lenses—but larger, as large as Nightstar fighters. There’d been thousands of the devices, most passing over, a few stopping and poking around in the ruins below. The Marines, their life support powered down, had donned their armor and crouched in darkness, weapons ready for a final and apocalyptic encounter.
But either the Xul hadn’t detected them, or they’d decided the tiny party of buried Marines simply wasn’t worth the digging.
“Maybe the smell’s why they didn’t bother,” Sergeant Paul Willian suggested. “They got one whiff and decided there was something dead down here.”
That brought nervous laughter, but Garroway thought it had been a little too close to the mark for comfort. Fourteen Marines left . . . and they would be dead before much longer.
Actually, the smell wasn’t that bad. Perhaps they’d all gotten used to it by now or, as PFC Ted Bergen had suggested, their olfactory nerves had simply fried on Day 1. But, in fact, the nanoprocessors filtered the air constantly, removing water and excess carbon dioxide, along with the various organic aromatics. They were cycling their shit and piss efficiently enough, too—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen were, after all, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The processors rearranged the atoms, including those of the intestinal flora growing in the raw materials, into food bars, water, and air. The raw mat
erials were supplemented by a dwindling stock of carbon and various trace elements but, sooner rather than later, supplies would run out. They couldn’t live on their own waste products forever.
Garroway knew the numbers better than any of them. As exec, it was his job to keep track of their resources, and ration the consumables.
He estimated that within another three months they would be producing so few metabolic waste products that their daily rations would fall below the minimum necessary to keep them all alive.
There’d been some discussion early on about adding the seven bodies to the resource reserves, a kind of high- tech cannibalism that might extend the lives of the survivors by many months. Although no military unit can afford to be a democracy, Warhurst had taken a vote in order to end the morbid speculation.
The result had overwhelmingly favored leaving the bodies where they were, sealed in body bags up on the surface.
It was just as well. Those bodies were so radioactive that it was extremely unlikely that the nanoprocessors could have handled the decon without themselves becoming contaminated. Warhurst and Garroway hadn’t mentioned that to the others, though. Those bodies would be returned to the Commonwealth somehow, some day, presumably along with the bodies of the fourteen still alive in the underground bunker.
The Corps always brought home its own.
And, in fact, none of that really mattered, not in the long run. Over the course of the past seven weeks, as the Dyson cloud first appeared, then rapidly grew larger in the northwestern sky, it became more and more clear that the planet itself might well not survive much longer.
S-2/I orbited its red giant primary at a distance of over six astronomical units, farther from its sun than Jupiter was from Sol. As week followed week, S-2 appeared to be dwindling, as though the distance between world and sun was growing larger.
When S-2’s orbital path had been changed, S-2/I, gravitationally locked with its primary, had been pulled off course as well, but the planet had lagged behind somewhat, and its orbital velocity had been slowly tugging it farther and farther from its star.
The star’s leading plume of flame had dissipated weeks ago, but some tens of solar masses had been funneled up that thread of white light, acting as a titanic rocket engine. S-2’s close pass around GalCenter was now going to be a very close pass.
Exactly how close, no one—not even Athena2, the small version of Athena remaining in the RST network—could predict. The chances were good, though, that the star would pass close enough to the super-massive black hole at GalCenter to be disrupted, even torn apart. If that happened, S-2/I would likely be destroyed as well. Already, the mild seismic quakes Garroway had noticed seven weeks before were becoming stronger and more pronounced. If a microblack hole was devouring the planet from the inside, it was going to have a lot of help soon from the gravitational tides of GalCenter.
Even if S-2/I survived the passage, though, its star would not. The planet’s surface temperature was kept within tolerable limits both by the heat from its giant sun primary and by tidal forces raised by that sun. With S-2 destroyed, even if the planet was flung clear of the central maelstrom, temperatures would inevitably plunge. The background radiation might keep temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero, but the planet would freeze. When local temperatures dropped below about minus 150 or so, not even the base’s small reactor would be able to keep them warm for long.
A choice of deaths, Garroway thought. Death by malnutrition—starving to death by centimeters. Death if their world was torn apart by the central black hole and devoured. Death by freezing. Death by radiation poisoning.
The only real choice was which one would claim them first. No one was talking much about the possibility that the MIEF might come back for them. Not any longer.
“I’m going up on the surface,” he said at last.
“What the hell for?” Warhurst demanded. His eyes widened. “Wait a sec, Gare. You’re not—”
“No,” Garroway told him. “I’m not taking a walk.”
Taking a walk had become the accepted euphemism these past weeks for what Lieutenant Grooms had done—going up to the surface and opening your helmet visor to vacuum.
“The rads’ll kill you,” O’Neill said.
“Kill me faster, you mean. I just want to look at the sky for a while, okay?”
With space at a premium, the Marines’ armor had been stowed inside the airlock, at the base of the surface access tunnel. He had to take one of the suits on top, though, rather than finding his own, because 690s were heavy and tough to manhandle alone.
It didn’t matter if he got someone else’s suit, though; Marine armor, with nanotechnic appliances that adjusted the fit, was definitelyone-size-fits-all.
Well, almost. The suit he picked had Kaminski’s name stenciled on the chest, and the crotch had been configured for female plumbing. No problem. He didn’t plan to be on the surface long enough for that partic ular need to assert itself.
Slowly, almost ritually, he donned the armor, letting it adjust itself to his size and shape, feeling the seals close, the connections with his implant open. He took a plasma rifle simply because a Marine would not go into a potential hostile zone without a weapon, cycled through the lock, and started up the ladder.
He was struck by the utter stillness of the surface, and by the eerie, icy light. The Dyson cloud hung suspended in the northwestern sky. In the west, the red-giant star S-2 was rising just above the horizon, blood red, appearing a little larger than Sol looked from Earth, though it was more than six times farther off. Pale lightnings played along the horizon, beneath a shimmering, almost invisible haze of auroral light.
According to Athena2, S-2 was close to perigalacton, its close passage of the Galactic Core. S-2/I dutifully was tagging along, pulling away slightly from its parent sun, but still moving toward GalCenter at a velocity well above five thousand kilometers per second. S-2’s speed had been slowed significantly by the triggership-induced stellar rocket effect, but it had picked up all that lost velocity and more as it fell deeper and deeper into the gravity well of the central black hole.
Athena2 was unable to tell him just how fast the planet was moving now. There were no celestial landmarks, no rangefinders, no instrumentation that could make such a reading, not now, not from here.
But as Garroway stared up at the Dyson cloud, he could have sworn he could actually see it moving, see it growing, second by passing second.
“What the hell are you doing up here, Gunny?” Huerra said, clambering out of the open access tunnel. Garroway glanced at him, then turned back to face that awesome celestial panorama.
“Hey, if S-2/I is going to be eaten by that thing, I don’t want to wait for it down a hole, know what I mean?”
“I hear you, Gunny. I think the others agree. They’re all putting on their armor.”
“Yeah, Gare,” Warhurst said, climbing out of the tunnel. “You seem to have started a stampede.”
“At least it looks like we’re going to have a front-row-center seat.”
Warhurst chuckled. “That it does, my friend. That it does. . . .”
The other Marines began spreading out on the surface. If there were Xul machines about, they might be spotted and attacked, but Garroway doubted that to be the case. Any Xul in the area must be as transfixed by that sky as the humans were . . . assuming they could react to wonder in a human manner.
Interesting thought. Could the Xul feel something like wonder?
Did they feel fear at what was metaphorical ly thundering down upon their cloud of habitations, there at GalCenter?
“Someone record this,” he said. “They’ll want to see, back home.”
Ops Center
UCS Hermes Core Space
0850 hrs, GMT
They’d made it through at last.
The Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force had passed through the stargate in Cluster Space, emerging through another gate a thousand light years from GalCenter. There mig
ht be, must be other stargates closer to the super-massive black hole and its attendant Dyson cloud, but there’d not been time to locate them, or to map alternate gate routes among the stars. Alexander stood in the Ops Center on board the flagship Hermes, watching the passage.
Ralston and the other antimilitarist senators were going to be damned pissed, he thought. They’d given permission for a reconnaissance raid into Core Space, specifying that Hermes and “select support vessels and troops” could make the jump. The assumption had been that Hermes would translate from Cluster Space to the region close by S-2/I, with four naval warships on board. They’d not imagined this, some three hundred Commonwealth warships, passing through the Stargate almost en masse.
Well, Alexander thought with wry satisfaction, I said Hermes and her supporting vessels would be making the passage at zero-eight fifty hours Zulu. I just didn’t tell them how many “supporting vessels” were coming along. . . .
Three of the new Navy heavy monitors were among the first vessels through the Gate, positioned to emerge with their primary weapons already aimed at the Xul fort drifting a few kilometers from the Gate’s rim. Derna, Chapultepec, and Tarawa had been designed as Xul fortress- busters, with names drawn from especially significant battles in the Corps’ history, with high-velocity mass drivers and turret- mounted antimatter accelerators augmented by massive 300mm cannon firing two-ton nano-D shells. As the three monitors emerged from the Gate’s lumen, their weapons began hammering at the fortress with savage, rolling fusillades, the rounds smashing in with unerring accuracy, guided by the swarm of battlespace sensor drones that had preceded the fleet.
