by Ian Douglas
“Very well,” St. Clair said. “Recharge and prepare for the final jump home.”
“Fifteen minutes, my lord,” Excomm Symm reported.
The bulkheads of the bridge display showed space outside: the tumble and jostle of myriad suns and sweeping nebulae, or gleaming light and ebon shadow, an explosion of stars and color, frozen as if in an instant. Andromeda towered to port, its spiral arms showing a distinct tilt and twist as they interacted gravitationally with the Milky Way; the Milky Way, smaller, its hub distinctly barred, its arms more distorted as it was engulfed by its larger companion. It was difficult to remember that the two galaxies were sliding together as if in an intimate embrace, then passing through each other in a grand pas de deux that would take another billion years to play itself out, from entrée to coda.
“I wonder what we’ll call it?” St. Clair murmured.
“Sir?” Symm sounded confused.
“Oh, nothing, Excomm. Just wondering aloud.”
She opened a private channel. “Wondering what, Lord Commander?”
“We’ve known for a couple of centuries, now, that the Milky Way and Andromeda were going to collide, right? Meaning they’ll pass through one another completely, then reverse course and pass through one another again . . . maybe repeating several more times, scattering stars and burning up nebulae in star formation as they do so. Eventually, they’ll merge completely. Almost all of their free dust and gas will be turned into new stars, both galaxies will lose their spiral shapes, and we’ll have one huge elliptical Galaxy left. It’ll need a name.”
“I believe the astronomers refer to it as ‘Milkomeda,’ ” Symm said.
St. Clair made a sour face. “I’ve heard that. Ugly name for something so spectacularly beautiful. Shows absolutely no creativity or finesse.”
“Andromilkia?”
“Worse.”
“Well, the ‘milk’ comes from the Milky Way, and that’s a translation of the Latin via galactica. Things always sound more impressive in Latin.”
“So how did all that milk get into the sky, anyway?”
Symm chuckled. “The Romans thought the Milky Way was mother’s milk spilled from the goddess Hera’s breast when she pushed away the infant Hercules.”
“Messy. You know, I think the Greeks called it something like that first.” He checked Ad Astra’s library through his in-head. “Yeah, here it is. Galaxias Kyklos—the ‘Milky Wheel.’ Huh. The Greeks were prescient. They realized the Milky Way completely circles the sky . . . and that we therefore lived inside something like an enormous wheel.”
“Maybe we need to come up with something completely new,” Symm said. She sounded like she was enjoying the game. “Something about light. Lots and lots of light.”
“Fiat lux,” St. Clair said. “ ‘Let there be light.’ ”
They watched the spectacle for a long time. St. Clair realized that he felt a powerful awareness of Symm’s virself, as though she were seated right there at his side instead of her workstation at the far side of the bridge. The sensation was a pleasant one, a feeling of warmth and movement, as if he were sensing her breathing.
He realized that he missed Lisa.
He also realized that he wished the rules of command permitted him to link socially with Vanessa Symm. He laughed when a thought struck him. The simulant and the Symm . . .
“My Lord?”
“Nothing, Excomm. How much longer?”
“One minute, Lord Commander.”
The seconds dwindled away, and the time was up and Ad Astra leaped across dark dimensions.
THE NODE fired, myriad beams of energy lancing out from the cloud of power stations and orbital computronium structures. To unaided human vision, those beams were invisible, but they were rendered by Newton’s graphics program as intense, blue-white threads of light drawn taut against the stellar backdrop, each so brilliant that the stars paled and faded out by comparison.
Standing in his office, Adler squinted his eyes against the display playing itself out on the walls. The Kroajid, evidently, had plenty of firepower available . . . and a good thing, too. The Tellus colony had turrets mounting gamma ray lasers, but was able to muster only a tiny, tiny fraction of the total energy available to the Dyson swarm.
How the hell was a military alliance with the human colony supposed to help the Kroajid? Tellus’s entire energetic output would be a gnat bite to an elephant, at best.
“Lord Adler?” a voice said in his head. “This is Frazier.”
The Marine general? What did he want? “What is it, General?”
“We’ve been discussing our situation with the spider,” he said. “It—he wants us to deploy the Marines, and we’ve been gaming different ways to do it. I think we have a way we can help, but I need your say-so to initiate it.”
Adler wasn’t used to finding military solutions to problems, and he felt completely out of his depth with this sudden alien threat bearing down on Tellus and the galactic node. “Do it,” he told Frazier. “Whatever the alien wants, do it!”
“Aye, aye, my lord,” Frazier said. Adler could hear the man’s acid disdain.
No matter. He would deal with military insubordination later. Right now, he needed to make good on his promise to the Kroajid. Having the spiders as allies—being able to trade with them, perhaps for advanced technology—it was worth it. Adler was still hoping, deep down, that the Kroajids might be able to provide Tellus Ad Astra with time travel, to get them back to the epoch where they belonged.
He hoped that the cost would not be too high.
AD ASTRA dropped into normal space a few astronomical units short of their destination. On high magnification, the Node 495 Dyson swarm showed as a dark gray sphere blotting out the background stars. At this range, of course, Tellus was invisible.
“Take us in, Helm,” St. Clair said. “Accelerate to point five cee.”
“Yes, my lord.”
He wanted to reach the Dyson swarm in short order . . . but didn’t want to startle the spiders by barreling in at close to the speed of light. A half-c approach seemed to be a reasonable compromise between the two. Ad Astra’s gravitational drive switched on, and the ship began falling toward the swarm.
ON BOARD the Inchon, LPS-21, Lieutenant General William Frazier clambered into his control sphere and accepted the caress of a dozen connectors, silver cables snaking from the surrounding surfaces and attaching to his head, his cybernetic outer shell, and what was left of his spine. Data flooded in, icons winked on, and the virpresence of the Marine Corps AI came to life at the back of his skull.
“Good afternoon, Chesty,” he said.
“Good afternoon, General Frazier,” the AI replied, its voice almost maddeningly calm and self-assured. “Inchon, Saipan, and Vera Cruz all report themselves fully operational and ready for deployment.”
Chesty was named for a legendary Marine, Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, the only Marine ever to win five Navy Crosses, and one of the most highly decorated Marines in the Corps. Toward the end of his career, in 1954, he’d commanded the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina—and the 2nd MARDIV was one of the two units stationed on board Tellus Ad Astra.
Frazier sometimes thought that this version of Chesty was convinced that it was a direct upload of the original Marine.
“Show me,” he said. Frazier was a hands-on CO and always wanted to be shown. He would accept a subordinate’s word for something when he had to—the sheer volume of data associated with the job meant that a certain amount of delegation was absolutely necessary—but he checked for himself whenever it was at all possible.
In his mind’s eye, the three Marine LPS transports rode in gentle stellar orbit a few kilometers from the massive double cylinders of Tellus. Those transports were enormous, each almost a kilometer long and massing three quarters of a million tons apiece, but Ad Astra was so much larger they could have served as ship’s boats. The joke on board Inchon was that she doubled as Lord Commander St. Clair’s gig.
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nbsp; He checked through the readiness reports on all three transports, then checked the incoming alien cloud. The sliver swarm was still headed directly toward the Dyson node; Kroajid beam weapons were boiling the oncoming ships away by the hundreds, by the thousands, but still they kept coming, the high-tech ultimate in an all-out wave attack.
“Fighters,” Frazier said.
“All twelve squadrons ready for immediate launch,” Chesty replied.
Frazier hesitated. Any Marine fighter that managed to get in between the oncoming aliens and the spider energy beams would be toast, quite literally. Before long, however, that numberless horde of needle-shapes would be penetrating the Dyson swarm itself, its ships too close for the spiders to target them without hitting their own orbitals.
“Have them stand by,” Frazier said. “I don’t want to launch until the bastards are inside of knife-fighting range.”
“Affirmative, General.”
“How about the free-flight Marines?”
“We have about three thousand loading into the firing chambers, and another eight thousand are suited up and ready for launch. We’re still printing flight packs for the rest, however. I estimate another two hours before we can have both divisions space-combat ready.”
“Okay. Deploy the Marines that are ready for launch. And see what you can do about stepping up the production of the MX-40s.”
“Aye, aye, General.”
Until Tellus Ad Astra had been deployed to the Coadunation rendezvous, the US Marine Corps had been an elite military unit in search of a mission. The creation of the First Directorate, sixty-seven years before, theoretically had united the planet’s warring factions. In practice, of course, the Directorate hadn’t even come close to achieving that, but there’d still been the inevitable calls for the elimination of Frazier’s beloved Corps.
But the Marine Corps had received a new lease on life when the Directorate had made contact with the Coadunation. Two full divisions, the 1st and 2nd MARDIVs, had been embarked on board Tellus Ad Astra—first, to provide security for the million or so human civilians embarked with the expedition to the galactic core, and second, to serve as bargaining chips for Earth’s negotiations with the Coad. If the Coadunation required military help in their conflict with the mysterious Deniers, the Marines were ready.
Frazier disliked—he disliked strongly and in no uncertain terms—the idea that the Corps would be sent to fight a war that humans didn’t even understand, and he disliked on general principles the idea of transferring control of two divisions from the former United States to the international Earth Protectorate Force. But if the alternative was to see the Corps disbanded and sent home after almost four centuries of honorable service, he’d take option one. He’d volunteered to lead the combined unit to the core.
He watched the deployment on his in-head display as hundreds, then thousands of Marines in black, adaptive-optic armor spilled from open hatchways along the flanks of all three Marine transports. He was reminded forcibly of a vid he’d seen when he’d been twelve . . . something about a locust swarm devouring a large chunk of Africa—the black, chitinous creatures drifting into emptiness. Individual Marines began forming up into companies—about 120 men and women in each company—and accelerating toward the fuzzy non-surface of the Dyson cloud. In open space, they would be horrifically vulnerable; tucked in close among the Dyson statites, they would be all but invisible.
Still vulnerable, but—God willing—invisibly so.
“The first companies are accelerating, Lord General,” Chesty told him. “They’ll reach the statite cloud in approximately twenty minutes.”
“Very well.” He hoped that wouldn’t be too long. Those alien weapons, antimatter beams, annihilated any normal matter with which they came into contact. “How are the flight packs holding up?”
“MX-40 operation is nominal. And the training implants are holding well.”
The MX-40 was a remote descendent of the manned maneuvering unit, the MMU, briefly employed during the US space program in the late twentieth century. Worn as a large and bulky backpack attached to the astronaut’s life-support module, the MMU had carried 11.8 kilograms of highly pressurized nitrogen, squirted through a total of 24 thrusters positioned at various orientations to move and turn the free-flying astronaut, effectively turning him into a tiny, self-contained spacecraft. The total delta-v capability for the unit was about 25 meters per second . . . so the backpacks were flown slowly to conserve reaction mass.
The MX-40 was also a backpack unit, designed to embrace a Marine’s Mk. III MCA armor. When activated, two wings spanning three meters opened and locked above the shoulders, each housing a Martin-Teller gravitic thruster. Power was supplied by a Coadunation generator, a seemingly magical device that drew energy from hard vacuum like a quantum power tap, but within a cell the size of a man’s head.
A Marine wearing an MX-40 became, in effect, a man-sized space fighter. On a planetary surface, it gave him a partial and temporary freedom from gravity, allowing him to make 100-meter jumps across the battlefield. In space, it let him deploy from one spacecraft to another, or across empty space to an orbital facility like an O’Neill colony. The 5th Marines had used a battalion wearing MX-40s in the assault on the Al Mina colony in Saturn orbit in 2125 . . . and six years later, the 9th Marine Regiment had used them during the Az-Zahra Revolt. By using the 3-D printers in the transports’ logistical suites, the packs and their power plants could be turned out by the thousands in fairly short order. So long as there was a substantial source of rawmat, the printers could keep turning out flight packs, just like they nanufactured Marine weapons, MCA units, and everything else necessary to keep the Marines going.
The trouble, of course, was that the human Marines themselves couldn’t be reproduced quite that easily.
Piloting an MX-40 was fairly simple—requiring a kind of in-head point-and-click protocol that could be downloaded to an individual Marine’s in-head RAM in a few seconds. Some training and practice were necessary to transfer the knowledge into muscle memory and instinct, but that was one of the purposes of Marine boot camp. Frazier was more concerned about the possibility of the enemy infiltrating human electronics—such as the neural links connecting human Marines with their equipment. So far, there was no sign of such an attack, however.
Perhaps the biggest question Frazier had was arguably the most crucial. Just how effective would Marine lasers be against alien armor? Would the Marines be able to count for anything in this battle? Or would they be relegated to the unenviable status of cannon fodder?
That remained to be seen.
STAFF SERGEANT David Ramirez had always dreamed of flying. As a teenager, he’d owned a Rossy jetsuit, a flying wing that let him take to the skies over the mountains of his native Prescott, Arizona. The suit used Meta—cryogenically stabilized He64—as fuel and could stay aloft for forty minutes or so with careful nursing, a reasonable flight time for a civilian-sport flying suit.
Then he’d joined the Marine Corps and found out what flying was really all about.
His wings spread and locked, his thrusters pulsing in perfect synch, he accelerated gently at half a G with the other members of his platoon. Second Lieutenant Mulholland was their butterbar, the platoon CO, and that meant for all intents and purposes that Staff Sergeant Ramirez, the senior NCO, was the actual leader of the unit.
Ramirez actually felt sorry for Mulholland. The kid was fresh out of OCS, and had been assigned to Second Platoon, Alfa Company, just eight weeks before the division had received its orders to ship out for the galactic core. That was scarcely enough time to find your rack somewhere in the maze that was the Inchon and unpack, never mind getting acquainted with the forty men and women who made up Second Platoon. When the word had come down from Ad Astra’s bridge that the expedition had somehow been flung forward in time, Mulholland had very nearly lost it. Ramirez had talked him down one evening by appealing to honor, duty, and the Corps, ooh-rah . . . and how the platoon was
looking to him for leadership.
Yeah, right. For most, he was still a “cherry butterbar” and a “nugget”—both of the terms derived from the single gold bar that proclaimed his rank. He’d never been in combat, and that was going to count against him if this light show shaping up around the Dyson swarm got as ugly as Ramirez thought it would.
It meant Ramirez would have to keep a close eye on the kid, to make sure he didn’t get into trouble.
“Coming up on the umbrellas,” Captain Lytton warned. “Cool your jets. Stand by for deceleration.”
They’d launched from Inchon and the other two transports in clouds of individual Marines, guiding themselves across the intervening gulf toward the nearest sails. The Marine AI, Chesty, was guiding them company by company, seeking to spread them out across the largest possible area of the outer statite layer.
As far as the eye could see, dark gray statite sails floated in the darkness. There must have been hundreds of billions of them, each a slightly convex disk nearly three thousand kilometers across, supporting a comparatively minute hanging structure beneath—a complex and vaguely organic cylinder kilometers long, extending from the center of the disk and pointed at the local star. Most were a kilometer or two in length; some measured fifty kilometers or more.
A statite—a static satellite—was a device employing a solar sail to remain motionless, or nearly so, above a star, holding its position against gravity by using a large sail floating on the star’s radiation. According to the briefings Ramirez had downloaded, the Dyson swarm consisted of several dozen shells of statites; only the innermost ones, far in toward the buried star below, were supported directly by sunlight. Those farther out were supported by directed radiation from the lower shells, the whole in a precarious balance between gravity, radiation pressure, and Newton’s third law.
Somehow, they all stayed up, maneuvering when they needed to, controlled by the massive AI that ran the entire swarm. Each cylinder housed different facilities—power plants extracting energy from the vacuum, masses of pure computronium serving as unimaginably vast and powerful computers, and—disturbingly—the majority of the Kroajid species. Some wag had christened the inhabited statites “habistats”; some of the spiders were in deep hibernation and dreaming of whatever it was that giant hairy spiders dreamed about, others digitized and uploaded into the virtual reality of their AI. Only a few hundred million Kroajids were actually awake and aware of what was going on in the universe outside.
