Galactic Corps
Page 41
The Xul fortress opened fire with plasma discharges, but only the Derna and two of her accompanying destroyers suffered slight damage before the fortress dissolved in flashes of dazzling light from multiple hivel impacts, and the ragged disintegration of its thick outer hull as nano-disassemblers swarmed across its surface.
The rest of the fleet didn’t pause to watch the destruction, but shifted to Alcubierre Drive within seconds of emerging from the Gate. Hermes, positioned near the center of the fleet, had only a glimpse of the destruction before accelerating out of optical range.
Ahead, the central reaches of the Galactic Core lay shrouded in dark molecular clouds and the gleam of hot suns.
Just for an instant, Alexander felt a surge of relief. The panorama of the central regions appeared unchanged from his last visit to the Core almost two months ago. We haven’t missed it!
Then reality reasserted itself. Of course there was no change. The fleet was still a thousand light-years out; whatever might be happening in there, the light revealing it would not reach this Stargate for another ten centuries.
Then the darkness of the Alcubierre Drive closed around the Hermes, replaced, eventually, by an AI-created sim. The light years fled past. . . .
Marine Regimental Strike Team Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I
Core Space
0858 hrs, GMT
The Dyson cloud filled half the sky.
It was growing visibly larger, though the scale of what they were watching was so vast, so tremendous, that the planet must be accelerating at an unthinkable rate for change to manifest in the sky so swiftly. Garroway tried to picture the geometry of the situation, based on schematics that Athena2 had painted for him several days before, and failed.
It was enough, he thought, just to watch. To experience. . . .
The remaining lifetime of S-2/I might be measured now in only seconds. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now but the unfolding view overhead.
“It’s beautiful . . .” Sergeant Willian said quietly.
“Fucking gorgeous,” was Kaminski’s reply.
“I wonder if the Xul know that—” Warhurst started to say. The star exploded.
Much later, it would be determined that the Xul had detonated S-2 themselves in a last-ditch effort to save the Dyson cloud. The red sun appeared to tremble, to begin to collapse inward, then, suddenly, to grow intolerably bright, shifting from sullen red to diamond-hard, crystalline blue-white brilliance as the star’s outer layers suddenly rebounded outward, flying into space.
“Shit!” Sergeant Huerra said. “They blew the star up!”
“Nah,” Warhurst said. “Look at it! The star’s being torn apart by tidal stresses as it gets in close. . . .”
“We’re dead,” PFC Enewold said. “My rad counter is off the scale.”
“What a way to go, eh?” Corporal Ann Croley said. And she laughed.
The detonation of the red giant, fewer than seven a.u.s distant, had bathed the planet in hard radiation—gamma rays traveling at the speed of light. Particulate radiation— protons and neutrons—would follow, though it would take time, as much as another day, perhaps, to reach the trailing planet.
“So . . . did the bastards save themselves?” Huerra wanted to know.
“Not hardly,” Garroway said. He pointed. “Look at the star. . . .”
The brilliant star, now a dazzling white, was almost too bright to look at even with the heavy filtering by their visor optics. They could see enough of it, though, to see that it was stretching, growing ever more and more elongated as it neared the super-massive black hole at the Galaxy’s center. It was impossible to see the Dyson cloud now, so brilliant was the dying star’s light. Had the star struck the cloud, passing through it? Or was it still outside of the cloud? Even if the tortured star remained well beyond the Dyson cloud itself, surely even Xul technology couldn’t save those trillions of structures from the heat and hard radiation of an exploding sun.
As minute followed minute, the star appeared to be stretching. The fast-expanding outer shell of its photosphere appeared to have stopped, appeared to have been grabbed by some vast and invisible hand, crumpled, and pulled back away from the Marines watching just a few astronomical units away.
Garroway could feel his skin burning. The shredding star was vomiting massive amounts of X-rays.
Yeah. What a way to go! . . .
Ops Center
UCS Hermes Core Space
1030 hrs, GMT
The joke was on the Senate, Alexander thought. They’d approved a recon probe by Hermes and the four ships she could carry, but assumed that Hermes would translate back to S-2/I. Somehow, the scientific niceties had simply escaped them. Hermes couldn’t translate back to S-2/I, because the local metric had been steadily changing over the course of seven weeks. Alexander, his aides, and a host of AIs had explained the science time after time, but they never seemed to get it.
Their ignorance had played into Alexander’s hands, though, and cleared the way for Senator Armandez’s campaign to let the MIEF enter the Core.
The biggest problem was timing. Alexander knew in a general way that S-2 was due to make its close passage around GalCenter soon—fifty days after the induction of the rocket effect in the star’s photosphere. The trouble was that there’d been no way to measure the exact effects on the star. Many solar masses had been expelled in that jet . . . but how many? How long had the effect lasted? How much had the star been slowed? Then how quickly had it accelerated in its plunge toward GalCenter? There were too many unknowns. It was possible that S-2 had swept into the Dyson cloud sometime yesterday . . . or that it was still a day out from perigalacton.
The fleet might be too late to save the Marines on S-2/I. The planet might have been swallowed by the monster hours ago.
They wouldn’t know until they dropped out of FTL. Hermes and the rest of the MIEF were decelerating now, angling toward the spot where S-2/I ought to be, based on the best astrogational guesses possible.
The darkness evaporated, and the sky grew suddenly brilliant.
“My God! . . .” Taggart said at Alexander’s side.
Together, the two men looked down into the annihilation of a star.
Marine Regimental Strike Team Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I
Core Space
1104 hrs, GMT
The radiation was catching up with all of them. Garroway had vomited several times already, and was feeling the deadly weakness that he knew must mean a lethal dose of hard rad. Most of the others had been vomiting as well, despite the best efforts of the last of Doc O’Neill’s anti-rad drugs.
The Marines had been spelling themselves in their vigil, either by clambering back down into the bunker, or by taking shelter on board an AV-110 Tarantula left behind by the evacuating Marines. This particular Tarantula, it turned out, had been damaged by a Xul plasma bolt and was immobile, but still offered a pressurized cabin and enough active nano on its outer hull to cut down on the storm of radiation sleeting across the planet’s surface.
But after a few moments of relative comfort, each Marine found him or herself drawn again to the deadly ringside seats outside, staring up into a maelstrom of incandescent destruction. They were dying moment by moment.
But the view, all of them agreed, was worth it.
Ops Center
UCS Hermes Core Space
1120 hrs, GMT
The view, actually, was better on board the ships of 1MIEF as they approached the hurtling planet. The starships’ sensors were more sensitive, their optical screening filters more discriminating, their AIs more powerful than anything possessed by the handful of Marines still on S-2/I. As the fleet slowly adjusted its vector to close with the planet, they recorded everything.
Alexander remained with Taggart in the Ops Center, watching the drama unfold on the main display. The red giant had an overall diameter of perhaps thirty million kilometers—three times that of the Xul Dyson cloud. The exact size of the incoming star was difficult
to determine, however, for the outer layers were expanding swiftly, a dazzling white shell of gas, as the star exploded. As that shell expanded, however, it was being warped by the insatiable gravity well created by the central black hole. As hour followed hour, what had been a red giant was being twisted and stretched into something entirely different.
The star had been, roughly, three times larger than the Dyson cloud, and it plunged through the near side of the Dyson cloud at something like ten thousand kilometers per second. As it passed the suddenly revealed black hole, it was drawn more and more into an elongated, curving sausage, then into a ribbon meeting itself and merging into a rapidly spinning torus, a doughnut shape melding with the accretion disk and spiraling into the black hole’s bottomless maw.
There was too much stellar mass for the black hole to consume at one sitting. The excess, well over half of the star’s bulk, was funneled off the black hole’s north and south poles as intensely brilliant beams of violet-white radiation. The Dyson cloud was swept away, as insubstantial against that onslaught of matter and energy as cobwebs. Soon, even the best of the MIEF’s optical filters could perceive nothing but the intolerable glare.
Curious, Alexander had downloaded more of the Bhagavad Gita during the fifty days since the triggerships had first assaulted that star, searching for the verses that had inspired Oppenheimer all those centuries before. In the original story, Arjuna, a prince fearful of the outcome of an upcoming battle with a superior foe, had asked to see the god Vishnu in his full glory. Vishnu’s reply had been recorded in Chapter 11, verses 32 and 33.
“The Supreme Lord said: I am death, the mighty destroyer of the world, out to destroy. Even without your participation all the warriors standing arrayed in the opposing armies shall cease to exist.
“Therefore, get up and attain glory. Conquer your enemies and enjoy a prosperous kingdom. All these warriors have already been destroyed by Me. You are only an instrument, Oh Arjuna.”
The verses seemed especially fitting in the current setting, as Alexander watched radiance fill the Galactic Core. I am death . . .
Marine Regimental Strike Team Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I
Core Space
1120 hrs, GMT
It would be determined, much later, that the planet passed within half an a.u. of the black hole’s event horizon, slingshotted by that intense gravitational field to a velocity high enough to send it hurtling past perigalacton and out into the gulfs of empty space once more. Garroway wasn’t able to even guess when the closest approach actually took place. The sky was twisting in an odd way as gravity accelerated the planet, twisting it into a tumble. The star, on a path that took it much closer, had smashed through the vaporizing remnants of the Dyson cloud, stretched like taffy, and whiplashed down the gravitational maw into the unknowable depths beneath the event horizon.
For just an instant, Garroway saw the black hole itself, twice as big across as the Sun appeared from Earth, but black, black, a bottomless emptiness drinking light, seated at the precise center of a vortex of blue- to-violet whirlpool of light, spiraling into oblivion. And then the brief vision was blotted out in exploding star- stuff.
The black hole was receding now, quickly. The planet was already far out beyond the Monster’s reach.
Garroway heard cheering.
“What’s going on?” he asked. He looked around for Warhurst. “Michael?”
“They’re back!” Warhurst shouted. “They’re fucking back!”
“Huh? Who? . . .”
“The Marines, stupid! Now who’s a rock, as in ‘dumb as a?’ Huh?”
Garroway had tuned out his RST channel. As he brought it back on-line, he heard the radio chatter of dozens of men and women. In the sky overhead, a pair of Nightstars flashed past, blue Core-light gleaming from their flanks.
Despite his weakness, the dizziness, the wrenching nausea, Garroway joined in with the cheers, waving his plasma rifle above his head, shouting “Ooh-rah!” and “Semper fi!” as the lead elements of 1MIEF began descending from the sky.
And still no response from the Xul. They couldn’t all have been killed, could they? Perhaps the shock of S-2’s assault on their inner fastness had simply stunned them into immobility.
Or maybe other processes were at work.
Perhaps the Xul had been beaten after all.
The transport Howorth again hung in S-2/I’s sky, gentling down on carefully balanced agravs. He would learn later that the MIEF warships left behind when Hermes translated back to Cluster space—Howorth and Cunningham—had rendezvoused with the Lejeune, Plottel, and Ardash at Point Diamond. Technically, they’d disobeyed their orders to return to human space, waiting there within the star cluster a tenth of a light year away until they’d received a QCC message from the MIEF, then joined the main body over S-2/I after the planet’s hair-raising close passage of the black hole.
Semper fidelis . Always faithful. We don’t leave our own behind. . . .
He must have lost consciousness. When he could see again, brother and sister Marines off the Howorth had crowded around, helping him stumble up the ramp and into the safety of the huge ship’s belly. Radiation sickness tore at him, much worse than ten years ago.
At that moment, Garroway didn’t know if he was going to survive the massive rad overdose he’d picked up in the past hours, but he accepted the not knowing with a calm equanimity. It wasn’t that he didn’t care if he lived or died. He wanted to live, there was no doubt about that. But somehow the events of those hours had left him utterly drained, until only a single thought, a single emotion remained.
Home.
He was going home.
Epilogue
In the outlying regions of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm, within the dense polar jungles of the warm, inner world of a class-G5 star, a race of brachiating mollusks swung from the interwoven branches of sessile thermovores not unlike Earthly trees. The species was young, as yet, but one of its best known musician- philosophers had just sung an importantdream-song.
It spoke of other worlds, of other forests among the stars, of other singers who one day might join the race in new and alien harmonies.
They were closer now to the realization of that dream-song than they could possibly have imagined.
Closer in toward the galactic core, within the teeming star clouds of the Sagittarius Arm, on the rugged, tide-strained volcanic moon of a superjovian gas giant, a race of armored paraholothurids built water’s-edge hive-cities of compacted excrement and composed palindromic epics celebrating their having been chosen as slaves of the sky-disk they saw as the eye of God. On this day, they recited a new palindrome, one announcing the revelation of a new messiah, latest in a long line of messiahs proclaiming the Vision of the Eye of God.
God’s message was that there were countless other beings living on alien worlds scattered across the vastness of the sky, that some of these beings Knew the glory of God, and many did not.
But there might one day soon be a means of taking God’s Vision to the stars.
Closer in still toward the galactic hub, near the merging of the Norma and Scutum-Crux Arms, a fiercely radiating Type A star blasted its unusual coterie of rocky worlds with intense radiation. Bathed in abundant radiant energy, Life had emerged on the innermost world and, borne by the local stellar winds, had seeded the other, outer planets of the system as well. On one of those radiation-baked worlds, sentient crystalline chemovores had just discovered the principle of the solar sail, and had now within their grasp the ability to reach other nearby stars. The voyages would take centuries . . . but what was that to a species whose member beings lived for millennia?
The race, perhaps, would survive, even if their increasingly unstable sun did not.
1507.1102
Warhurst Residence, Seaview Gardens Lost Miami, Earth
1540 hrs, local
Garroway leaned back in the hot tub, savoring the blissfully scalding swirl of water across his shoulders. Nikki Armandez snuggled against hi
s side, as naked as he was despite her Ishtaran upbringing. Opposite, Warhurst sat between the delightfully bobbing charms of Traci and Kath.
“Too bad Charel can’t be here with us,” Warhurst said. “You heard anything about him, Gare?”
“Only that he’s doing well. The regrow’s just taking longer with him. He was burned a lot worse than either of us.”
“But he’ll be okay?”
“Doc O’Neill said so.” Garroway shrugged. “That’s good enough for me.”
All fourteen of the surviving Marines stranded for so long at the Galactic Core had made it, though it had been desperately close for a few of them. Seven, including Ramsey, were still in the Marine hospital in EarthRing. Garroway had been released only two days earlier. Much of his body had been either regrown from scratch or replaced by exotic nano-chelated materials. It was sobering to realize that less than a third of his total body now was organic in the traditional sense.