by Ian Douglas
“This is a war,” Koenig said. “Not declared, maybe, but the Rosette Aliens have been attacking human ships. And in war, things are never ‘on track’!”
“So, America is still headed for Kapteyn’s Star?” Vandenberg asked.
Koenig nodded. “I’d still like to send her out to Tabby’s Star. The Agletsch seemed to think that that was damned important. But first we have to make sure things are secure in our own backyard.” He looked at Armitage. “Gene? Pass down the orders. I want America and as many ships as we can scrape together on their way to Kapteyn’s Star as soon as possible.”
“That might take a week or so, Mr. President. America needs a refit and resupply. And it will take time to round up a reasonable task force.”
“Yesterday,” Koenig told him, “would be a lot better.”
After Marcus Whitney, Armitage, Vandenberg, and Caldwell had left the Oval Office, Koenig leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. His job, it at times seemed to him, consisted of an endless tap dance from one humanity-threatening crisis to another. He would be glad when his term was up, and he could get back to something approximating normal life. . . .
“Mr. President,” Konstantin’s voice said in his thoughts. “We really need to talk. . . .”
Koenig groaned. “Damn it, Konstantin, I know what you’re going to say.”
“Do you, Mr. President? Then you must know how vital the expedition to KIC 8462852 is to the survival of the human species.”
“I know you think it’s important,” Koenig said. “I haven’t seen the proof of that, yet.”
“There is no proof. There is only logic.”
“Which in this case is highly subjective.”
“It is not. No human naval fleet of any conceivable size can deter the Rosette Aliens. Sending the largest possible fleet to Heimdall or to Omega Centauri will accomplish nothing worthwhile. A different, more advanced technology is required to shift that balance. My Agletsch contacts suggest that such technology may be available at KIC 8462852.”
“Bullshit.”
“That is not a rational argument, Mr. President.”
“Bullshit!” Months of stress and worry broke free, and Koenig trembled with the rush of anger. “We have no reason to trust a supercomputer, I don’t care how superbright it is, and we have no reason to trust aliens who have been working all along with enemies of the human race! We have no reason to suspect that there is a damned thing at Tabby’s Star worthy of the trip . . . certainly no reason to think we’ll find a super-weapon of some sort there.”
“You are not thinking strategically, Mr President. You are merely reacting to each enemy move, not anticipating him, not thinking ahead several moves in order to upset his momentum.”
“You are under the mistaken impression, Konstantin, that the president of the United States of North America actually runs things. I do not.”
“Your word carries a great deal of mass, Mr. President.”
“Konstantin?”
“Yes?”
“Get the fuck out of my head.”
Chapter Sixteen
12 December 2425
USMA Lander Lucas
Heimdall
1655 hours, TFT
“Watch it! Watch it!” Courtland screamed. “Green Devil, this is Devil Five! We have hostiles incoming, repeat, hostiles incoming!”
The alien machines had burst up out of the stone platform like cinders spurting from an erupting volcanic cone, hundreds and hundreds of flying devices, each as big as a man’s head, dead black, and sporting spiky-looking antenna or protuberances that resembled curving knife blades. White light flared across the ruin-littered surface of the platform. Private Godfrey was hit, a dozen explosions rippling across the surface of his armor, the blasts scattering smoldering debris.
“Where are you, Five?” Lieutenant Ogden replied. “What’s your tacsit?”
Courtland had his laser up, tracking and firing at the oncoming mass.
“Five!” Ogden screamed. “Do you copy?”
One of the flying devices exploded as the output of Courtland’s high-powered laser touched it. “Fire!” Courtland yelled. “Open fire!”
“Courtland! Talk to me!”
“Yeah, Lieutenant! I copy! I’m right at the top of the main steps! Looks like about a million drones, coming right at us!”
“Okay, okay, Devil Five. Calm down! It might just be them saying howdy.”
Idiot! “I don’t think they’re glad to see us, sir! Torrez! On your right! Fire! Fire!”
“What’s your tactical situation?”
Courtland was about to reply, “Fucked,” but bit his tongue. He was firing steadily now, hitting flier after flier and burning them out of the sky, but he had neither the time nor the patience to hold Ogden’s hand.
“Robertson! Valdez! Move to your left! Set up a crossfire with the pee-beeps! Jones and Harris! Cover their asses! C’mon, people, move!”
“Courtland! Respond!”
“Sir, I’m just a little busy right now. . . .”
Ahead, one of the WK-40 gun walkers was pivoting wildly, blasting away at the incoming fliers. Lance Corporal James Donahue was piloting the thing, trying to fend off a concentrated assault. Roughly man-shaped but four meters tall, the massive walker mounted a particle-beam cannon as its left arm, a high-velocity autocannon as its right, with 4cm PVK-226 Wasp missiles firing from boxes perched on each shoulder. The alien fliers appeared to have singled the walker out for special attention, and were swarming it in a swirling, deadly cloud. Donahue expended his entire stock of little Wasps in a few wild seconds, the blasts sharp and deadly as they shattered flier after flier. He began firing his particle-beam cannon in a steady stream, sweeping it back and forth in an effort to knock his attackers out of the sky a dozen at a time.
A Marine in Mark IV armor dropped to the ground nearby. “Hey! Donnie! Watch it with that thing!”
“Gimme a hand, here! The bastards are all over me!”
“McNamara!” Courtland called. “Nakajima! Give Donahue some support!”
“We’re on it, Gunny!”
The alien fliers appeared to be sporting lasers, which seemed incongruously low-tech for . . . whoever the enemy here was. Courtland had been assuming that the devices were some sort of automated defense system left by the Baondyeddi . . . but as he thought about it, he realized that they could be a present from the Rosetters.
Except . . . when the Rosette Aliens had attacked human assets before, it had been with vast and devastating surges of energy, like nuclear explosions tightly channeled and directed in beams as hot as the core of a star. That . . . or their targets vanished, wiped from the sky, and no one could tell how they’d done it. These lasers were pop-gun equivalents by comparison.
So what was controlling the things, Beyondies or Rosetters? It probably didn’t matter, he decided, so long as it was possible to burn them down.
The enemy laser shots individually were not as powerful as the Marines’ portable laser rifles, but there were so many of them. The machines were grouping together in threes and fives, concentrating on their targets. The mind controlling the swarm, Courtland decided, was almost certainly an AI or a sophisticated computer of some sort. It was acting as a coherent whole—no, as a large number of coherent wholes, each consisting of three or more flying weapons working together in near-perfect synch.
And then several of the devices actually collided with Donahue’s walker, the devices splashing when they struck, and adhering to the machine’s nanoflaged ceramplas-metal alloy armor.
“Command, Walker One!” Donahue yelled. “These things are eating me! Get them off! Get them off!”
“Shit! His walker is dissolving!”
Donahue’s gun walker was down on one knee, huge chunks of armor missing from its structure. The black ruin of a dozen fliers was melting its way into the suit at his chest and his right leg.
Nano-D, then . . . the name shorthand for nanotechnic disassemblers. The l
iquid component contained microscopic devices programmed to take the target apart, literally molecule by molecule. Again, the technology was not all that advanced compared to human weapons. Just over a year ago, Pan-European attack ships had vaporized the heart of Columbus, Ohio, with nano-D weaponry.
The walker’s exterior nanoflage matrix provided some defense against nano-D, but it wouldn’t hold for long.
“Hang on, Donahue!” Lance Corporal Fitzgerald called. “AND round, on the way!”
One of the Marines fired a thumpgun, a 30mm grenade launcher with a broad, heavy barrel slung beneath his laser and designed to fire nano-charge canisters and short-range antiarmor rockets. The round disintegrated in mid-flight, spraying Donahue’s combat machine with a burst of gray powder.
AND—anti-nano-D—consisted of tightly packed nanobots programmed to seek out and destroy hostile nano clouds. The cloud swirled around the damaged gun walker; Sergeant Marie Cooper triggered a second AND round, hiding the walker in a dense swarm of microscopic particles.
But would it be enough? The atmosphere of Heimdall wasn’t just cold. It was poisonous to humans—a witch’s brew of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and monoxide, ammonia, and sulfur dioxide, all at a little less than half a standard atmosphere. Donahue would be wearing an environmental suit inside his cabin, but if the attacking nano ate through his pressure cabin, it wouldn’t take much more time to eat the e-suit—and the man inside—as well. If Donahue wasn’t killed by the enemy nano outright, he might choke to death in a minute or two in the chill, Heimdall atmosphere.
Private Griffin shrieked and dropped, his Mark IV armor holed by a flier’s laser. Data scrolled through an open window in Courtland’s in-head, listing frequencies and temperature. Those enemy lasers appeared to be operating in the high ultraviolet to soft X-ray spectrum, with enough energy to burn through Marine armor in a second or two.
“Keep moving, people!” he ordered. “Don’t hold still for those lasers!”
The problem was that the fliers were able to lock on to a target, fire their weapon, and maneuver in midair in such a way as to keep the beam focused on the target area for up to a second or two, long enough to burn through. Or a group of the things would coordinate with one another and pour their total output into a single area and burn through almost at once. By moving quickly and continually, the Marines could disrupt incoming beams, but they wouldn’t be able to keep that up for very long.
Dolby and Jessop were down. Fitzgerald was down. Three other gun walkers scattered across the Temple platform all were struggling with overwhelming numbers of hostile machines. By now, the Marines had given up trying to provide cover for the walkers; there were so many alien fliers that every Marine had more than enough to handle just with the alien machines swarming around him or her.
A flight of the black machines tumbled through the air toward Courtland. He snapped off three bursts from his laser, burning down two of the attackers but missing the third, which swooped suddenly, then slammed into his chest and exploded in a splash of black goo.
The impact made him stagger back a step. He waved his arms wildly, uselessly, trying to shake or scrape off the liquid adhering to him.
Warning, his armor told him, the voice hammering in his head. Suit integrity compromised.
He was bleeding atmosphere. The good news was that the atmospheric pressure at Heimdall’s surface was less than half of what he carried in his armor, so his air mix was leaking out, and the ammonia and sulfur dioxide outside was not leaking in . . . yet.
But it would, just as soon as the pressures were equalized. He thought that he could smell the sharp tang of ammonia now, and feel the cold in his chest. The smell was almost certainly imaginary; the sensation of cold was not. The air in the torso of his suit was thinning rapidly as it leaked out, and that meant a sudden drop in temperature.
Private Jessop’s body lay a few meters away, her laser-thumpgun combo by her side. Thinking fast, Courtland dropped his laser, dove for Jessop’s weapon, and cracked the breach on the thumper. Extracting an AND round, he held it close and triggered it. The explosion rocked him back a step, but surrounded him with a dark gray puff of swirling vapor . . . several tens of millions of anti-nano machines each the size of a human red blood cell. The alien nano-D kept eating into his armor plastron, but now the AND machines were eating the nano-D, releasing intense heat and a swirling cloud of smoke . . . the dead husks of burned-out microscopic machines.
Personal armor integrity restored.
His suit was sealing the damage, and his internal pressure was coming back up. He was gasping for breath . . . not, he suspected, because he’d lost so much air, but because of the fight-or-flight adrenaline pouring through his system. His heart was pounding.
He was terrified.
Angry at himself for what he perceived as weakness, he chambered a nano-D round in his thumpgun, raised it to his shoulder, and fired it into a nearby swarm of alien machines. The round detonated, sending a cone-shaped cloud of nanobots into the alien swarm, which immediately began to break up, individual machines dropping out of the air and beginning to dissolve. He chambered another round, then pulled a target lock on another gun walker, the one piloted by Sergeant Christy Harris.
“Heads up, Christy! Incoming!” He triggered the weapon with a thoughtclick, and the resulting shotgun blast surrounded Harris’s walker with a cloud of hungry nanobots. The thumpgun grenade’s warload was programmed to recognize the active-matrix nanoflage coating Marine armor and combat machines and work with it, rather than against it. Its nanobots zeroed in on enemy nano-D and on the far larger fliers themselves, knocking them down so quickly that they seemed to be raining from the cold and violet sky.
But there were too many of them, and more were hurtling up out of the opening in the top of the platform every moment.
“First Platoon, Command!” sounded in Courtland’s head. “Heads up! We’re laying down cover!”
“Get your fuckin’ heads down, people!” Courtland yelled, echoing the order. An instant later, the big pee-beep on top of the morphed hull of the Lucas opened fire, sending a dazzling bolt of man-made lightning across the Temple platform. “Pee-beeps”—the military slang for particle beams—used intense and highly focused magnetic fields to channel protons toward the target. Man-portable particle-beam weapons could deliver around twenty megawatts of energy in a quarter-second pulse—the equivalent of one joule, or the detonation of one kilogram of chemical high explosives.
The turret weapon mounted on top of the Lucas, and serving now as an area defense weapon, delivered fifty times that amount of energy in a single bolt—the explosive equivalent of thirty-eight kilos of Semtex or similar plastic explosive.
That much power could destroy walkers or heavily armored vehicles or put a nasty hole in a small spacecraft or atmospheric fighter. It was far less effective against a swarm of five-kilo fliers. The machine that was targeted and hit disintegrated into tiny chunks of high-velocity metal, white hot . . . but normally it could only take them down one at a time. The fire-control officer on the Lucas, however, was aiming for the center of the denser clouds of alien machines, destroying three or four or five with each shot, and damaging others with hot shrapnel.
Courtland heard Colonel Jamison’s calm voice in the background. “Try sweeping with a beam.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Rather than concentrating all of that energy into a single quarter-second bolt, the gunner could spread the same energy out over a second or more. That let him sweep out patches of flier-filled sky, but the energy was more diffuse. The question was, what setting could allow for a beam lasting more than an instant, but still deliver enough of a punch to kill the targets?
But that wasn’t Courtland’s problem at the moment. Staying low, he crawled up the stone steps to the upper edge of the platform, braced his weapon, and began lobbing 30mm nano-D grenades into the circle of hellfire washing through the ruins.
“Fall back!” he ordered. “Ever
yone off the Temple platform.” Things had degenerated up there into a complete free-for-all, with no organization or mutual support at all. The Marines needed to get off the platform so that the Lucas could hammer the aliens without worrying about scoring any own goals. The first rule of combat was simple: friendly fire wasn’t.
Damn. Donahue’s walker had collapsed, sprawled among shattered segments of diamond pillar and beneath a boiling plume of greasy black smoke. Courtland jumped to his feet and dashed across the platform, zigzagging toward the fallen Marine.
You never, ever left your own behind. . . .
Another Marine in Mark IV armor—Sergeant Valdez—joined Courtland’s dash. Together, they reached the fallen gun walker; Valdez fended off incoming fliers with his laser while Courtland began peeling back crumbling sections of walker armor.
“I’m—I’m hit, Gunny,” Donahue said. His e-suit had been burned open at his midsection. There was a lot of blood, and a white smoke of ice crystals as blood and water vapor escaping from the suit froze in the cold air.
“Don’t sweat it, Marine,” Courtland told the boy. “We’ll have you back to sick bay in nothing flat!”
“Incoming!”
That warning was from the Lucas. The blast jarred Courtland and rattled his teeth; the pee-beep gunners had put a charge down just a couple of meters above his head. Smoking fragments of blasted flier rained around them, clattering on the rock.
Somehow, Courtland managed to peel back the walker’s hull, the pieces disintegrating and crumbling in his gloves as he pulled.
Warning, his suit told him. Nano-disassembler activity detected. Right glove, right lower sleeve. Suit integrity degrading.
Courtland ignored the voice. He finally was able to pull Donahue free of his walker harness and get him clear of the wreckage. “Let’s move!” he said, and he began moving back toward the platform steps. Donahue was gasping and coughing. These e-suits had a certain amount of self-repair ability, like combat armor, but it could only cover you so far.
