Galactic Corps

Through his interface with the tiny craft, he could see the fortress, looming huge as it receded astern, and a sky filled with streaks of white fire. Weapons fire—whether human or Xul—was in fact invisible in vacuum, but the pod’s computer painted the tracks in as a flight aid. With a thought, he banished the special effects; there was nothing he could do in the way of actively dodging incoming fire, and seeing those bolts was both distracting and terrifying. If his pod was hit in the next few minutes, he would never feel the blast that killed them.

He ordered the pod’s computer to establish a course consisting of random jinks that would continue to bear on the stargate.

Without the flashing lights and energy bolts, surrounding space took on an almost surreal aspect of beauty, majesty, and peace. The Xul bastion continued to dwindle astern, as the stargate slowly grew larger ahead. In the distance, the glowing spiral of the Milky Way Galaxy stretched across half of heaven, as beautiful, as insubstantially delicate as a dream. Green icons floated between him and the gate, a scattering of pinpoints marking Bravo Company’s other M-CAPs.

One pinpoint flared for an instant, a dazzling star, then vanished. Corporal Levowsky’s pod, according to the readout. PFC Hollander’s pod went next. Damn! …

He forced himself to ignore the ongoing roll call of Marines who would not be retrieved. Some of the escaping Marines were going to get nailed just by sheer chance, judging from the volume of hostile fire, and those Xul laser and plasma bursts were hot enough to reduce an M-CAP and its passenger to thin, hot gas in an instant.

At this point, it was down to sheer chance. The Marine pods all were jostling and jinking their way toward the stargate. Some percentage of them would not make it. Which ones were hit, which ones made it, that now was entirely in the laps of the Gods of Battle.

Garroway had another alarm to contend with as well, and, once again, it was something he couldn’t do much about. He’d lost much of the air inside his armor when he’d breached his own suit. In the moments since, his armor had been struggling to replenish internal pressure from the life support system in his backpack. He was no longer chewing cold vacuum, which was a distinct improvement … but by tapping the rebreather source gases in his tanks, he’d sharply lowered his stay time. His armor’s on-board computer estimated that he was down to another hour or so before his oxygen supply went critical.

And according to the telemetry from Armandez’s armor, her LSS had been damaged as well, leaking a good eighty percent of her gas supply to space before it had sealed off the damage. Their rebreather filters would continue to pull oxygen from exhaled carbon dioxide and water vapor as they breathed, but there would be less and less free O2 available with every breath cycle as more and more of it was locked up by his metabolism.

Again, he killed the warning.

What he couldn’t kill were the growing physical problems brought on by his self-inflicted wounds. The pain was manageable for the moment, thanks to the nano-anodynes, but it was growing steadily worse. Shock and blood loss both had brought him close to unconsciousness, and he’d severely compounded that threat with the abrupt loss of pressure in his suit. Again, the problems were being held at bay for the moment—fluorocarbons were far more efficient at oxygen and CO2 transport in the circulatory system than were red blood cells, so you didn’t need as much of the stuff as you’d lost, but his blood volume was dangerously low and threatening still to drag him into shock, despite the medinano churning away in his brain.

He hoped the bottle’s AI was bright enough to get them through the gate, because he didn’t think he was going to be awake for very much longer. …

“Hey, Gare?” a female voice called over the combat Net. “Gare, you okay?”

“Yeah.” The word felt fuzzy on his tongue. He was having some trouble focusing now. The com ID said the voice belonged to Sergeant Colby.

“Cut your random guidance,” Colby told him. “We’re trying to rendezvous for a pick-up!”

Garroway thought-clicked the guidance control, resuming a straight-line course. If the Xul were watching closely, they would be able to nail him in seconds … but somehow that just didn’t seem important any longer.

“Hang on, Garroway,” another voice said, a man’s voice, this time. His helmet identified it was 2nd Lieutenant Cooper. “We’ve got you, buddy.”

The downloaded visual showed three other Marine bottles closing on him from three sides. Magnetic grapples emerged from their hulls, latching on. Despite the inertial damping, he felt the slight jar as they grabbed him, then began accelerating again, four pods moving randomly now as a single unit.

He could also hear another voice in the background, an AI reciting a running countdown. “Eight … seven … six … five …”

It took him a moment to realize the count was for the antimatter charges left on board the Xul bastion.

That woke him up, shaking off the growing lethargy, at least for the moment. He looked back at the Xul fortress just as the numbers ran out. “… three … two … one … now … now … n-”

White light filled heaven.

The blast was soundless, of course, in the vacuum of space, but the Xul bastion, shrunken now to something the size of a football held at arm’s length, blossomed along one side as three kilograms of antimatter came into direct contact with the normal matter surrounding them. In an instant, the five-kilometer-wide structure vanished, engulfed by the deadly white bloom.

The image winked out, then, as the M-CAP’s optics shut down to preserve the bottle’s electronics and Garroway’s optical centers. His eyes were safe, since the image was being downloaded directly into his brain, but too much energy in the input could make his brain think it had just been blinded, and at a certain safe level, the input was cut automatically.

For a long moment, he rode in darkness, seeing now with his own eyes, but with nothing to look at but the darkness of the pod’s cramped interior, and Armandez’s armored legs and boots pressed up against his visor.

He felt the shockwave as it passed, a distant, rumbling thunder felt rather than heard against the pod’s hull. Radiation counters soared, and more warning lights flashed in his mind and on his helmet display. He, Armandez, and the three Marines hauling him to safety had all just received lethal doses of hard radiation.

Well, that wouldn’t be the first time. If they got back to the hospital ship Barton in time, they could do something about that. His legs, too.

If …

The outside optic feed was restored as light levels fell to acceptable levels. Garroway was fading fast, but he was able to see not one, but three brilliant suns now shining in an uneven embrace of the approaches to the stargate. All three Xul fortresses had been successfully reduced.

And almost directly ahead, the first starships of 1MIEF were emerging from the stargate, Ishtar, Mars, and Chiron, followed by the fleet carriers Chosin and Lejeune, already loosing their swarms of Marine aerospace fighters. Surrounding the vanguard was a small cloud of destroyers and light cruisers, followed by the immense MIEF flagship Hermes.

Three small, purple icons were trailing along beneath the Hermes’ lee, but as the flag completed its transit of the gate, those icons accelerated sharply, arrowing into the Cluster Space system and swiftly flashing into the faster-than-light invisibility of their Alcubierre Drives.

Those, Garroway knew, were Euler Starblasters, alien weapons of incredibly destructive power. He tried to twist around to follow the line of their flight, in toward Bloodlight, the distant red sun of this system … but within the next second or two, everything—the M-CAPs, the distant sprawl of the Galaxy, the trio of short-lived suns guarding the stargate and the stargate itself—all were lost to a vast, swelling blackness as unconsciousness claimed him at last… .

3

1506.1111

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Cluster Space

0717 hrs, GMT

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander, CO of the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, was linked into Hermes’ tactical command net, and from his mind’s-eye vantage point high atop the data stream he could see the unfolding of the entire battle. Bravo Company, chosen to spearhead this op, was pulling out, the individual M-CAPs hurtling at maximum acceleration for the safety of the stargate, as three brand-new and short-lived stars burned behind them.

The virtual icon of Vice Admiral Liam Taggart hovered next to Alexander’s awareness, backlit by the stars of the Galaxy. “Battlenet is reporting multiple targets accelerating toward our position,” Taggart’s voice said in Alexander’s mind. “I’d rather not let them get too close. If I may? …”

“Of course, Admiral. Get those damned things out of my sky. …”

Technically, the two men shared command, Taggart commanding 1MIEF’s naval forces and actions, while Alexander commanded the Marine units, both in space and on the ground, while supreme authority was vested with the Commonwealth Senate.

In fact, Alexander held overall command of the entire expeditionary force. The Senate was some tens of thousands of light years distant, now, and it was up to Alexander to determine how best to carry out the civilian command authority’s directives. The 1MIEF was an extension of Alexander’s determination and will, whatever the chain of command might look like charted.

If Alexander was in overall command, Taggart’s request for permission to engage the enemy was still little more than a polite fiction. The two long ago had arrived at a flexible and efficient compromise in military authority, and Alexander trusted the older man’s experience with naval tactics. The two men worked well together, had been working well as a superb team now for over nine years.

Usually, Alexander preferred to stand back and give Taggart free rein. But Cluster Space was important, the biggest and most strategically vital Xul node yet encountered, and Operation Clusterstrike had been conceived as a major body blow against the Xul.

They would take this one down by the book.

The MIEF fleet was dispersing now as it cleared the Gate, the ships bathed in the intense glare from the exploding fortresses. Xul ships were approaching from the system’s heart, but Ishtar, Mars, and Chiron were already directing their long-range weaponry against them, slamming them with long-range mass-driver fire. A cloud of smaller warships—cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers—accelerated rapidly, spreading out both to present more difficult targets, and to allow them to put the enemy vessels into a crossfire. As the big carriers came through behind the lead battlecruisers, swarms of Marine fighters and AI combat drones began streaming from the launch bays, filling Alexander’s virtual sky with hurtling, gleaming shapes.

Traditionally, Marines were intended to secure an invasion beachhead, emerging from the sea to seize and hold a landing area until regular Army troops could arrive and take over. That, at least, had been the Corps’ tactical dogma as far back as the twentieth century, when the Marines had ceased being purely naval troops and come into their own as an independent fighting force. Over the next few centuries, the major combat role for the Corps had been as elite infantry, tasked with a variety of missions, from boarding, search, and seizure to hostage rescue to combat assault.

Most recently, however, in the escalating war with the Galaxy-wide empire of the Xul, the Marines assigned to 1MIEF had been tasked with gate-clearing, a euphemism referring to ops like this one, requiring Marine elements to melt their way into the interior of one or more enemy bastions guarding a stargate’s approaches, planting nuclear or antimatter charges deep within the structure’s bowels, then fighting their way clear as the fortresses exploded. The moment the forts were destroyed or crippled, the main naval elements of 1MIEF could pour through the stargate and secure the gate approaches.

And then the Euler ships would come through.

“Your people did a hell of a job,” Taggart said, indicating the burning, new suns of the three Xul fortresses. They were fading now, though local space was still bathed in the harsh, 511?keV radiation released by the annihilation of positronium. A kilogram of antimatter detonated in each of those Xul bastions made a hell of a bang.

“Thank you, Admiral. I’ll be happier when we know the bursters hit their target.”

Alexander watched the straight-line trails marking the inbound course of the three Euler Starbursters on his internal display, arrowing toward the distant pinpoint of Bloodlight. Two more minutes …

“I’d still like to know how a species that evolved in a deep ocean basin could even have an idea of what the stars are,” Taggart said, “much less develop the technology to reach them. Doesn’t make sense.”

“Given enough years,” Alexander replied, “damned near anything is possible. Just be glad the Eulers and their technology are on our side!”

The Eulers were the benthic inhabitants of several star systems in Aquilan space, some twelve hundred light years from the worlds of Sol. Contacted nine years before, during the first incursion by the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force into the region of space near Nova Aquila, Eulers was the name humans had given them. Their name for themselves, it seemed, was a mathematical equation, an indication of their intensely mathematical worldview, and the humans studying them had named them after the human mathematician who’d developed that particular equation for humankind.

After nine years of study, there was still no other way to transcribe the thought-symbol they applied to themselves, or even to be sure they possessed language as humans understood the term. The massive, tentacled beings appeared to communicate with one another by changing colors and patterns visible in their mottled skin and by the taste of chemicals in the water, though direct telepathy among their own kind had not been ruled out.

Remarkably, for an oceanic species, they did possess sophisticated computer implant technology, and that was how they were, in fact, able to communicate with humans, through shared virtual realities. Their technology, their industry, and their material fabrication sciences all were quite advanced, despite the apparent disadvantage of living in the ocean deep at crushing pressures.

Like the N’mah, the Eulers defied the old xenosophontological dictum that had once declared that an intelligent species evolving in the sea would never develop technology because they could never make fire. Eons ago, they’d gene-engineered crab-like creatures to serve as their symbiotic extensions, first into the shallows of their home world, then onto dry land and, eventually, into the depths of space, to other worlds. Through their symbiotes, they’d developed fire, and industry, and a faster-than-light stardrive identical in its physics to the Alcubierre Drive employed by the Commonwealth. And the Eulers had traveled far.

Thousands of years ago, they’d encountered the Xul. The details still weren’t well understood by human xenosophontologists, but there’d been a war, perhaps several. The Eulers had learned how to use their FTL ships as shockwave triggers to make stars explode.

The Marines had learned that little trick from the Eulers nine years ago, at the Battle of the Nova. The Alcubierre Drive worked by encapsulating the starship in a bubble of severely warped space-time. Space ahead of the vehicle was sharply contracted, while space behind was expanded. The ship itself didn’t move at all relative to the space-time matrix around it, but the space moved, and carried the ship with it, accelerating to a fair-sized multiple of the speed of light.

So far so good. Humankind used several different techniques to travel FTL, now, including the mysterious stargates scattered across the Galaxy and beyond, and the matrix transition employed by very large carriers like the Hermes.

The weapons potential, however, arose when you slammed a bubble of Alcubierre-warped space through the core of a star. When the already incredibly dense mass of fusing hydrogen at the heart of a sun was suddenly condensed by the passage of an Alcubierre bubble, it triggered a partial collapse that sent a shockwave rebounding out from the core that blew the outer layers of the star into space in a titanic explosion—an artificially generated nova.

Three thousand years ago, the Eulers had fought the Xul to a standstill, albeit at horrendous cost, scorching many of their own worlds to lifeless cinders in order to vaporize the foe’s fleets of titanic hunterships. Now the Marine and naval forces of 1MIEF were using the same weapon, but carrying the attacks to the enemy in long-range strikes of annihilation. A young Marine named Garroway had piloted an Euler starcraft through the star warming a Xul-controlled system at the Battle of the Nova nine years ago. Since a ship under Alcubierre Drive was not, technically, in the usual four-dimensional matrix of space-time, it could pass clean through the target star without actually colliding—or vaporizing. The shockwave trailing behind it, however …

Since then, 1MIEF had continued using Euler technology. Human FTL ships were much larger and, therefore, easier for the enemy to intercept, and the Euler version of the Alcubierre Drive was far more powerful, warped space more tightly, and therefore made a bigger ripple when it hit the core of a star.

The three Euler Starbursters now streaking toward the Bloodlight, the Cluster Space sun, were piloted by sophisticated artificial intelligences, however, rather than humans or Euler-symbiotes. It was easier that way. Unlike most humans—those who weren’t religious fanatics, anyway—AIs could be programmed to welcome death.

Victory required that only one Starburster reach the local star; sending three was for insurance. Since the Euler craft could not transit a stargate faster-than-light, however, and since they possessed nothing in the way of defenses except their speed, the fleet first had to move through and seize a volume of battlespace on the far side of the gate. To do that, of course, it was necessary to destroy any sentry fortresses the Xul had placed nearby … and that was where the Marines came in.

Someday, Alexander thought with wry amusement, someone might create an AI combat machine smart enough, compact enough, and deadly enough to go into Xul forts and sentry ships and plant antimatter devices … but so far, at least, that particular dirty job was still best given to the Marines. Flying an Euler Starburster into the heart of a sun was child’s play compared to fighting your way into the interior of one of those Xul monsters and planting a bomb where it would do the most good.

Ninety more seconds. Bloodlight, however, was ten light minutes away, farther than Earth was from her sun. If … no, Alexander corrected himself, when the star detonated, it would be eleven and a half minutes before the Marine-naval expeditionary force knew the op had been successful.

Which was a good thing, actually. It should give them time to get clear.

Not for the first time, Alexander wondered if this particular raid could succeed. There were so many unknowns … not least of which was whether the Euler nova triggers would even work on a red dwarf star. Suns targeted by the Starbursters over the past few years all had been larger, more massive stars. An M-class dwarf possessed only a tiny fraction of the mass of stars like Earth’s sun, and there was some debate within the expeditionary force’s scientific and technical circles as to whether such a small star as Bloodlight could even be induced to go nova.

Well, they would know one way or the other in just … he checked his inner time readout again … another ten minutes, twenty-five seconds.

For now, the ships of 1MIEF continued to pass through the stargate into Cluster Space. Over the course of the past nine years, the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force had changed and evolved as human tacticians and strategists studied past actions and tried to determine the best mix of firepower and maneuverability for dealing with the Xul giants. The emphasis now was on faster, more maneuverable ships than the lumbering battlecruisers like Mars.

The Planet-class battlecruisers massed 80,000 tons each, but 1MIEF now numbered some two hundred starships, and most of them massed under twelve thousand tons. Compared to the one-and two-kilometer-long behemoths favored by the Xul, they were minnows nibbling at the flanks of whales.

But with enough of them firing together, they could bite hard. Smaller still, but still deadly, were the fighters of the four Marine Aerospace wings currently embarked with the Expeditionary Force. Launched from the Fleet’s flotilla of aerospacecraft carriers, those fighters—F/A-4140 Stardragons and the newer F/A-4184 Wyvern—were small, fast, and highly maneuverable. With antiship loadouts, they were deadly as well, especially when attacking in a swarm, like now.

Focusing his attention on one of the aerospace fighter icons moving within his inner display, Alexander began tracking the attack run of the Aerospace Squadron 16, the Reivers, as they closed on the nearest of the Xul monsters.

Brave people, he thought. Brave Marines.

If capital ships were minnows attacking Xul whales, the fighters were mosquitos.

And they were already taking a hell of a lot of casualties. …

Green One,

AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,

Cluster Space

0718 hrs, GMT

Major Tera Lee relaxed into the pilot link, watching the mental image of the Xul warship expand within her awareness from a bright star to a monster, now just two thousand kilometers distant. A Type III, the enemy vessel was one of the Xul huntership behemoths designated as a Nightmare-class, a flattened spheroid two kilometers across, the largest mobile Xul vessel yet encountered by the Commonwealth.

Lee was squadron CO of VMA-770, the Shadow Hawks. A twelve-year veteran of Marine aviation, she was tucked into the claustrophobic embrace of an F/A-4184 Wyvern, one of the sharp-edged single-seaters only recently delivered to the Shadow Hawks. This would be the Wyvern’s first test of actual combat, although Lee had been practicing in simulation for a year before she’d ever strapped on one of the machines for real. Technically, she had over a thousand hours of virtual flight time on the beast.

She knew better than to put too much reliance on simulations, however. Sims were good, but nothing matched the realities of combat. As she expanded her consciousness through the Wyvern interface, however, she noted that everything was green and wide open. So far, so good. …

“Green Squadron, this is Green Leader,” she called. “Everyone check your phase shift frequencies and cloaking. I don’t want anyone getting their souls eaten in there.”

The other fifteen pilots in the squadron came back at her with electronic confirmations—seven humans, eight AIs. That would be another first this morning—going into combat with half of the Shadow Hawks’ pilots consisting of sophisticated software instead of flesh and blood. She didn’t care for the idea at all—and neither did the others in her squadron—but orders were indisputably orders. It could be that the coming scrap would settle the old issue of live pilots versus electronics once and for all.