Galactic Corps

Twelve hundred kilometers. The scale in her downloaded imagery shifted. The Xul warship was still invisible to unaided, Mark I eyeballs, but the battlenet continued to feed high-definition imagery to the AIs controlling this phase of the engagement.

Nine hundred kilometers. She hoped that she was still as invisible to the Xul as the enemy would have been to her unaugmented vision. There were horror stories about what happened to ships’ crews engulfed by the monsters—about people having their souls eaten, as the darker tales liked to put it.

In fact, the Xul rarely made use of their patterning technology as a weapon, though it wasn’t unknown. Since the first human encounters with the Xul centuries ago, however, there’d been reports of Xul hunterships somehow devouring human vessels and so completely scanning their contents that humans and AIs alike were somehow transferred to the bowels of the Xul vessels as living, self-aware programs even though the ships and bodies of the crew were destroyed. That had happened to a human explorer vessel, The Wings of Isis, at Sirius in 2148, and to the Argo, an asteroid colony vessel hundreds of light years from Sol just nine years ago, and there were rumors of other electronic abductions as well.

The scuttlebutt shared among Marines in late-night barracks bull sessions said that humans uploaded into Xul computer nets were kept alive—if that is what their virtual and bodiless existence could be called—for centuries as they were continually interrogated and emotionally dissected by their captors.

By enabling a spacecraft to shift slightly out of phase with the normal four-D plenum of space-time, Commonwealth ship designers had found a means to make the vessel both more difficult to detect going in and harder to scan for the patterning and uploading process. That, Lee thought, was a considerable comfort. Better to go out in a bright flash of hard radiation than wake up as an eternal captive within the virtual hell of a Xul huntership. Even if the “real” her died with the destruction of her body, something, an electronic duplicate would awaken to that hell, and she was unwilling to give the Xul demons another human analogue to torture. Even worse from a purely personal point of view was the possibility that her mind, her living awareness, would somehow be transferred to the immense virtual reality computers that seemed to be the bulk of the Xul starships, that it would be she who awakened in the Xul hell.

Better not to think about that possibility at all. …

The one advantage in an aerospace fighter lay in the fact that the Xul never seemed to think small. Fighters and one-man boarding pods appeared to be beneath the notice of the behemoth hunterships, and a swarm of one-or two-Marine fighters could get in close and loose the equivalent of a capital ship’s broadside.

Even so, casualties in this type of operation tended to be heavy. A lot of her brother and sister Marines in the squadron would not be coming back.

Better not to think about that, either.

She was closing with the Xul huntership at just under fifty kilometers per second. Pappy2, a simplified iteration of the MIEF AI, was doing the actual flying at the moment, jinking and turning the hurtling Wyvern in random patterns to avoid the patterns of antimissile fire filling the sky now to every side.

The Wyvern was a smaller, nimbler fighter than the older Stardragon, massing only seventy-two tons, and with fewer hardpoints for weapons load-outs. It was faster and more maneuverable, however, and could phase-shift more completely, which gave it better protection against Xul defenses. Like the Stardragon, it drew power through a non-local entrainment link from its home-base carrier, in this case the Marine assault carrier Samar, and used quantum field-drive acceleration, so fuel was not an issue. Within her weapons bay, she carried four AM-98 missiles, each with an AI brain and a 1-kilo antimatter warhead. Those missiles had a powered range of ten thousand kilometers; the idea, though, was to get them so close to the target they could be released inside the Xul huntership’s defensive screens.

The trick, of course, was getting clear in time after releasing the missile.

“Okay, Shadow Hawks,” Lee said over the squadron net. “Form on me, left echelon. Maintain three hundred kilometer separation.” Their AIs would be jinking them all over the sky on the way in, and in those circumstances, it didn’t do to get too close to your formation neighbor.

Her link with her fighter’s sensors were painting the enemy fire across her mental display, her IHD, or In-Head Display, as the link was properly known. The enemy ship continued to expand smoothly in her mind’s eye, the jitters and jinkings of the hurtling Wyvern edited out by the AI as they were transmitted.

To her left and astern, a dazzling sun winked on, the expanding fireball of an exploding fighter. Green Three … Lieutenant Costigan. A plasma bolt from the Xul huntership had released the magnetically pent-up antimatter within Costigan’s four antiship missiles, loosing a storm of raw energy, and his Wyvern had simply vanished in a fireball equivalent to a fair-sized nuclear warhead.

At least it had been quick. There were worse ways to go than fighting the Xul, at least according to the scuttlebutt.

One of the AI-piloted fighters flashed out next—Green Nine. But then the remaining fourteen ships of the squadron were past the red line at five hundred kilometers from the target, putting them inside the mathematical zone promising fifty percent survival for missiles loosed at the enemy.

Another AI-piloted Wyvern flashed into dazzling brilliance, Green Twelve, the flare fading swiftly astern. Xul plasma bolts and laser beams crisscrossed the sky, weaving a constantly shifting net through which the surviving Commonwealth fighters twisted and dodged.

“Hold with me!” Lee called over the net. “Just a little deeper in. …”

At less than one hundred kilometers, they plunged through the Xul monster’s outer layers of magnetic screens, designed to let the enemy fire-control systems pinpoint course and speed data of incoming projectiles. Here, Lee was convinced, was where flesh-and-blood pilots held the advantage over AI software. Her tiny fighter’s controls were linked in with her mind, taking commands both from her intent and from Pappy2. Organic pilots might not have reflexes fast enough or precision sharp enough to fly a high-performance aerospace fighter, but software lacked the flexibility and the scope to maneuver through this kind of maze. The two working together provided the best chances of survival—and a completed mission.

At fifty kilometers, she thought-clicked the missile firing command, kicking two of her antimatter killers into open space. Their drives ignited automatically, sending them streaking toward the Xul target. She’d already applied full lateral drive, a high-G maneuver that would have killed her if not for the inertial dampers cocooning her within the narrow confines of the Wyvern’s cockpit. Behind her, the other ships in her squadron broke formation, the better to loose their warshots in an unpredictable cascade.

Pulling nearly two hundred gravities now, Lee swung wide, killing her forward thrust and angling back toward the stargate in a series of rolling, twisting maneuvers.

Her attack run had carried her deep into the volume of space occupied by the approaching Xul hunterships. Two more Xul vessels, both lean, needle-slim Type I’s, swung past her prow nearly three hundred kilometers distant. She snapped them both with targeting cursors, locking in her two remaining AM missiles. She was not going to endure the indignity of returning to the Samar with missiles still in her weapons bay.

A thought-click, and her last two missiles flashed into the night.

It was a night, she saw, illuminated by innumerable pulses and flashes of light. Fighters, the Shadow Hawks and the other attacking squadrons, were scoring hits. The main Commonwealth fleet was adding to the display as their long-range weapons began striking home. Space around her was filled by the deadly flicker and flash of short-lived suns, and awash with the radiation of matter being annihilated.

In the far distance, the Galaxy hung in silent repose, unmoving, cold-lit, and remote.

As happened sometimes, the memories returned. …

Lee had been offered a memory edit, but she’d refused. Her memories, she believed, were a part of what she was, of who she was, and she would no more willingly part with them than she would with one of her legs. Hell, a leg could be regrown. …

Nine years ago, just before 1MIEF took the war against the Xul to the enemy, she’d taken a small reconnaissance spacecraft through a stargate to a Xul node. The place had been code-named Starwall, and was located somewhere along the outer reaches of the Galaxy’s core.

She’d been trapped there for hours. Radiation from the core had burned her terribly before her ship’s AI had managed to return her to a Marine listening post on the other side of the gate. They’d had to regrow much of her body after that, using medinano to excise the radiation damage cell by cell.

Later, and despite the surgery, she’d learned she would never have children.

That had been the worst part of it by far. For a long time afterward, she’d not been sure she even wanted to live. She’d grown up in American Saskatchewan as part of a large family—four fathers, five mothers, and twenty-three sibs. She’d always expected that after her hitch with the Marines was done, she’d marry into a big line family and have children of her own.

Gradually, though, she’d come to grips with the issue. The Corps was her family, and the men, women, and AIs in her squadron her kids.

Her battlenet link painted new volleys of high-energy fire from the expeditionary force, streaks and lines and hurtling spheres of green light rendering the invisible visible in her mind.

“Shit, skipper!” Lieutenant Daniels called over the tactical channel. “We’re gonna get fried by our own people!”

“Follow procedure and trust the system,” she told him. “Pappy knows what he’s doing.”

Indeed, only a massively parallel AI like the MIEF primary AI could coordinate the incredible volume of fire and moving spacecraft now filling the operational battlespace. No merely human mind could have kept track of so many variables, so many targets and energies.

“If everything is on sched,” Lieutenant Garcia’s voice put in, “we’re going to get fried by that nova pretty quick!”

“Follow procedure,” Lee replied. “The triggerships haven’t even reached the sun yet. There’s plenty of time… .”

In fact, a countdown was ticking away in a side window open in her mind. They had about ten and a half minutes yet, give or take a bit, before the expanding blast wave of the nova reached them … assuming everything was on schedule. Plenty of time if nothing unexpected happened.

“Skipper! I’ve got a bender coming through, dead ahead!”

She checked the ID. The call was from 2nd Lieutenant Joanna Wayne, and she was only thirty kilometers off Lee’s port wing. A bender was something warping space, possibly one of the Euler triggerships … but there was a chance it was something else.

It was. She saw the brilliant flash of twisted starlight, saw the Xul Type IV materialize out of empty space fifty kilometers ahead. Like humans, the Xul used the Galaxy-spanning network of stargates, but their ships also possessed FTL capability through something like the Commonwealth’s Alcubierre Drive, which sharply warped local space.

And the alien warship had dropped into the normal spacetime matrix directly between most of her squadron and the stargate.

They were going to have to fight to get through.

4

1506.1111

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Cluster Space

0719 hrs, GMT

In General Alexander’s mind, 1MIEF’s battle array resembled a kind of spreading haze of discrete ships, darting and shifting from side to side as they moved. Fleet movements were coordinated by the AI-controlled battlenet, which jinked individual ships to make them harder to target without running afoul of one another. The battlenet could coordinate fire, too, concentrating the volleys from a hundred ships on one Xul monster at a time. Under that kind of intensive bombardment, even the largest, thickest-skinned whale would be whittled down to a cloud of tumbling debris before long.

At the moment, the fleet’s heaviest fire was concentrated on a single Xul Type III, a monster code-named Nightmare-class, a flattened spheroid two kilometers across. White flares of light popped and strobed across the Xul vessel’s hull, pounding at it, battering it, sending gouts and streamers of gas and vaporizing metal spraying into space. A squadron of aerospace fighters were closing with it as well, slamming antimatter warheads into its shuddering bulk.

The vessel was still thirty thousand kilometers off, invisible to the unaided eye, but visible in crystalline detail through the battlenet datafeed, which was drawing in image feeds from several hundred drones spreading through battlespace.

The Nightmare was hurt, trailing plumes of escaping vapor that froze as it hit vacuum into glittering clouds of minute ice crystals. Craters gaped in the monster’s hull, glowing sullen red and orange within the shattered interior. Burn, you bastard, Alexander thought with a silent, fierce intensity. The war with the Xul had been unrelenting and without mercy on either side, a literal war to the death.

A moment later, something inside exploded with savage violence, blowing out a quarter of the Xul warship’s flank. What was left began to fold and crumple in upon itself. Xul ships generated micro black holes as part of their power and drive systems, and when their drive containment fields failed, those singularities tended to eat their way through the ship’s structure, devouring everything with which they came into contact and releasing a flood of hard radiation in their wakes.

Alexander could hear Taggart’s thoughts as the admiral gave orders to the fleet. Another large Xul huntership was being targeted now, as the massed weapons of 1MIEF’s warships shifted to another target—a Type II huntership a kilometer long and thirty-eight thousand kilometers distant. The fleet’s weaponry ran an impressive gamut—high-intensity lasers at both optical and X-ray frequencies, gigavolt plasma discharges, and a wide variety of projectiles and missile warheads—from kinetic kill projectiles to nukes to antimatter charges, with calibers ranging from a few millimeters to several meters. A high-energy storm of devastating warshots began slamming into this new target, scouring and ripping at its ceramic armor like a lightning-charged hailstorm.

However, more and more Xul vessels were moving and beginning to converge on the 1MIEF fleet.

“Ten seconds to expected detonation,” a new voice intoned within Alexander’s head. Then, “Five … four … three … two … one … mark.”

Alexander glanced toward the local star. Bloodstar, the red sun of Cluster Space, continued burning as before, of course, a sullen ember, little more than a pinpoint of ruby light. It would be another ten long minutes before the light from the exploding star reached them.

“Okay, Pappy,” Alexander told the disembodied voice. Pappy was the senior artificial intelligence in 1MIEF, named after an early Marine aviator named Gregory “Pappy” Boyington. “Give me observational data as soon as it’s available. Tag? You heard?”

“I did, General.”

“I suggest we start falling back to the stargate.”

“Affirmative, General.” Alexander heard him begin giving orders, sounding the tactical recall.

This was the tricky part of the operation, getting the forty-two Commonwealth warships that had already come through the stargate, along with over a hundred aerospace fighters and minor combatants, back through to Carson Space without being overwhelmed by the Xul counterattack. The Xul, as the Commonwealth had learned over the years, tended to be cautious. Swat their noses hard enough, and they might not follow up on an enemy raid for years. Still, the toughest part of any op, whether in space or on a planet’s surface, was in the withdrawal phase, when the last few ships or men covering a retreat were left to face overwhelming numbers alone.

The Marines were used to that situation, the Navy less so.

The Xul Type II was collapsing upon itself, now, dwindling with eerie rapidity as the black hole within swallowed it from the inside out. But AI scans of battlespace data indicated that there were as many as two thousand Xul warships in this system. Cluster Space, as was well known, was a major Xul node and operations center.

At the moment, the biggest question was whether or not the Xul would try to follow 1MIEF back through the stargate to Carson Space.

Hermes, largest of the ships of the human fleet, as well as the slowest and most clumsy, completed her reversal maneuver and began making her way back toward the gate.

About her flashed swarms of smaller craft, including the retreating Marines of the initial assault force. Alexander flashed an order to Pappy. “Make sure you track every damned one of those M-CAPs,” he said. “Coordinate the withdrawal with Smedley.”

“Affirmative, General,” Pappy’s calm voice replied. “We will leave no one behind.”

Of course, how the hell did you guarantee something like that? Battlespace was a bewildering soup, of ships large and small, of retreating M-CAPs, of aerospace fighters, Ontos transports, drones, sensor and communications probes, missiles, and drifting chunks of white-hot wreckage. Many of the fighters and Marine assault capsules were damaged, some disabled completely and adrift in emptiness.

But they had to try.

Green One,

AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,

Cluster Space

0722 hrs, GMT

“Pull out, Skipper! Pull out!”

Wayne’s voice shrieking in her mind wasn’t helping. Lee blocked it off and focused instead on urging her Wyvern to exert maximum lateral thrust, and then some, as she flashed toward the loom of the Xul monster.

It was a Behemoth, the code name for the Xul Type IV huntership. It had been noted and photographed at several Xul node-bases, but for a long time the assumption had been that it was a fortress, immobile.

In fact, Commonwealth Intelligence wasn’t sure whether the Xul themselves differentiated between fortress and warship. All that really was known about the Behemoth was that it was big and deadly—a slightly flattened spheroid five kilometers across—and that it was often posted as a sentry near Xul-controlled stargates or worlds, but that it could move under its own power when necessary. The Xul equivalent of the Alcubierre Drive gave it FTL capability, and there was evidence that it possessed a space-matrix translation capability akin to that of the MIEF’s Hermes and other extremely large Commonwealth ships.

Moments ago, this Behemoth had dropped out of FTL almost directly between the Shadow Hawks and the stargate, emerging into normal space with the signature burst of light bent and focused along its wake of warped space. Lee had ordered her surviving fighters to disperse and accelerate, getting past the Behemoth by using antimatter missiles as screens.

Major Lee’s weapons bays were empty, but she could go into an attack approach anyway, seeking to draw off some of the defensive fire from the enemy batteries.

Thank God, she thought, for the AIs. …

AI-piloted aerospace fighters never stretched the envelope. They flew conservatively … and fought conservatively as well, and here was a perfect example: the Shadow Hawks’ AI fighters still had missiles left in their weapons bays. Expending antiship missiles on distant targets with a low probability of hitting with them just so you didn’t need to take them back to the carrier was a human way of thinking and fighting, not one of intelligent software.

She was damned glad three AI-piloted Wyverns in her formation had survived, though. Their remaining missiles probably wouldn’t destroy the enemy vessel, not without some extraordinary luck, but they would give them a chance to get past the Behemoth. Antimatter explosions blossoming against the Xul hull would screen the hurtling fighters from enemy sensors. She had ordered Green Five to loose its two remaining AM-98 ship-killers going in. Seconds later, twin blue-white flares of light had erupted against the Xul huntership’s hull like a close pair of hot suns just ahead. Now, Lee’s Wyvern was hurtling toward the fast-expanding bubbles of plasma and vaporizing debris as her wingman screamed at her to pull up.

Her Wyvern hit the shell of fast-moving plasma with the shock of striking a solid wall, but her inertial dampers cushioned her through the worst of it. She could feel the burn of hard radiation, though, as it seared through her shields, and then she was in a tumble, spinning nose-for-tail a few meters above the tortured metal and ceramic landscape of the Xul Behemoth as alarms shrieked and flashed over the Wyvern’s link with her brain.

The jolt had been enough to knock her out of a trajectory that would have sent her slamming into the huntership’s hull, however. In an instant, she was past the alien vessel’s bulk, struggling with her ship’s mind-linked thrusters to bring the tumbling fighter back under control. Damage alerts shrilled at her, and with a thought-click she silenced them. She knew she was in trouble, damn it, and didn’t need the irritating reminder. …

The universe spun past her awareness. “Pappy!” she cried. “Let’s have some help, here!”

The AI was already helping, and she knew it. She considered, then rejected, the idea of having him stabilize the wildly spinning view of her surroundings being fed into her brain. Pappy2 had enough on his electronic mind at the moment. She concentrated instead on trying to slow the fighter’s spin, letting Pappy work through her to precisely balance the firing of her thrusters.

Two of her stabilizing thrusters were off-line, which made it tricky. Her comnet, her connection with the other ships in her squadron, was down as well. Other electronic systems were beginning to fail in cascade.

And then, without further warning, Pappy went off-line as well. It took her a few moments to realize that he was down, and when she did, she bit off a sharp curse. Without the AI’s help, she was going to have a hell of a time navigating to the stargate, if she could get her essential ship’s systems on-line and working again.

The damaged Wyvern continued its nose-over-tail tumble into the night. …

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Cluster Space/Carson Space

0727 hrs, GMT

The distant curve of the stargate flattened as Hermes approached the oddly distorted space at the gate’s center, until it was a golden straight line bisecting the encircling sky. An instant later, Alexander felt the faint, internal shiver and disorientation as Hermes passed through the stargate.

The flattened pinwheel of the Galaxy, the reddish beehive of the globular cluster, the advancing Xul armada all vanished, wiped from the sky.