Galactic Corps
The Marine expeditionary force was back in Carson Space.
Or most of them were, at any rate. Fighters and Marine assault pods were still coming through. Alexander opened a channel to the commanding officer of CVW-5, Samar’s fighter wing.
“How many fighters did we lose, Reg?” Alexander asked.
COCVW-5 was Colonel Regin Macalvey, a tall, lanky Marine from EarthRing’s Skyholme Sector. He was currently in his F/A-4140 Stardragon, regrouping his squadrons as they came back through the gate.
“All together, General? Or are you asking about the Shadow Hawks?”
“Both.”
“We’re still tallying, sir. Losses for the whole wing might be as high as twelve percent. We’re still waiting for some stragglers to report in.”
“And the Shadow Hawks?”
“Four ships have reported in so far, General. Out of sixteen. There may be some more, though, still on the other side of the gate.”
“I see.”
“We’ll want to go back across and have a close look, General. Once this little dust-up is settled.” He didn’t add that fighters stranded on the far side of the gate were going to have some trouble when the star over there blew. If it blew. …
“If we can, CAG,” Alexander replied. “CAG” was an ancient term for a carrier’s aerospace wing commander, a relic of the days when he was called “Commander, Air Group.”
An assessment probe was going to be vital after this op, Alexander reflected … but that assumed that the red star went nova, that the Xul node on the other side of the gate was destroyed, and that 1MIEF wasn’t going to have to destroy the gate to keep the bad guys out.
A lot of assumptions. The next few minutes were going to be very busy indeed.
“Sir, we have Marines and AIs both still on the Cluster side of the gate. Alive. We can’t leave them, there.”
“I know that, CAG. And you know there are no promises.”
“But—”
“Get your people squared away, Colonel.” Alexander was watching the data feed update itself. Every few minutes, another reconnaissance drone would slip through the gate with a tactical update to the fleet communications net. As the data flowed through Alexander’s link, he could see the Xul fleet massing on the other side, still approaching the gate. “We might have some visitors very soon, now.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Macalvey sounded bitter. Like any good Marine CO, he genuinely cared about the men and women under his command, cared even about the AIs. His personnel record mentioned that Macalvey was a member of the Church of Mind. It explained a great deal, not that explanations were required here. Alexander himself was a long-lapsed Neopag, but he had the Marine officer’s deeply ingrained concern for his people.
In any case, there were sound practical reasons for getting back into Cluster Space when this was all over. The three Euler Starblasters were still on the other side of the gate, if they’d survived, along with a large menagerie of smaller probes and drones. He wanted to recover them if at all possible. The more the Commonwealth could learn about the ways and means of blowing up stars, the better. It was their primary weapon, now, against the Xul hordes.
He sensed Admiral Taggart’s awareness. “Our fleet is in position, General,” Taggart told him. “If they come through …”
“With luck, they’ll wait to think things through,” Alexander told him. The slowness of Xul tactical responses was proverbial, though it never did to rely too much on their past performance. The enemy had been known to pull a surprise move from time to time in the past.
“Yeah. The question is whether that pipsqueak sun over there will pack enough of a bang to get them all.”
“Or if they’ll be warned by their friends closer in.” The Xul, it was known, possessed FTL communications. A base or ship close to the exploding sun might have time to transmit a warning to other Xul vessels farther out before it was engulfed.
So many unknowns.
Alexander checked the time. One minute more until the big question was answered. If the star had exploded on schedule, the nova’s wave front was nearly to the gate by now.
The last recon drone imagery showed seven of the massive Xul hunterships less than a thousand kilometers from the gate, and still closing with it. The red dwarf star continued to burn in the distance, casting a bloody glare across their sunlit surfaces. Deeper in the system were hundreds, no, well over a thousand more, pinpointed by the X-ray and gamma radiation loosed by their black-hole power plants.
If that entire enemy fleet managed to come through the gate into Carlson Space, 1MIEF would be finished.
Space within the ring of the stargate shimmered. Abruptly, with the suddenness of nightmare, the long, slender prow of a Xul Type I, gleaming gold in the light of the Carson sun, emerged from the empty space inside the gate’s ring.
“All ships!” Admiral Taggart commanded over the combat link. “Fire!”
Still emerging from the warped space of the stargate, the Xul huntership was caught in a web of high-energy beams and exploding missiles. Taggart had positioned the retreating Expeditionary Force fleet to take maximum advantage of the tactical bottleneck; the Xul ships could only emerge into Carson Space through the twenty-kilometer lumen of the stargate ring, and over a hundred combatant vessels of 1MIEF could focus all of their fire on that one tiny region of space.
The incredibly tough ceramic and metal alloy of the Xul warship’s outer hull withered, rippled, and peeled away beneath that blast, as high-velocity kinetic-kill projectiles slammed into it at an appreciable fraction of light speed and plasma bolts seared into it at star-core temperatures. Moments later, the first nuclear and antimatter warheads began slamming into it, and the area immediately in front of the gate opening was blotted out by expanding spheres of plasma.
Under that ferocious onslaught, no material substance could remain intact for long. The Xul ship’s fiercely radiating, needle-shaped hull continued moving into Carson Space, but its drive and weapons systems were dead. Pieces of its internal skeleton were visible now, and the remnants of its hull cladding were softening and streaming away as metallic vapor.
But even as it drifted clear, four more Xul ships were emerging from the gate interface.
Thirty seconds to go … an eternity in the lightning-quick stab and parry of space-naval combat.
Major Lee,
AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,
Cluster Space
0731 hrs, GMT
It had taken several minutes, but at last she’d been able to stabilize her tumbling spacecraft. The vast sprawl of the Galactic spiral was at last no longer sweeping across her mind’s eye. Behind her, the local sun, a ruby pinpoint, continued to burn in the far distance.
The situation was damned bad. Com and nav systems both were out, as was her link with Pappy2. And there was worse. When she oriented her Wyvern to line up with the stargate and thought-clicked her main drive, nothing happened.
Stifling the sharp surge of fear, she began running diagnostics. Like other aerospace fighters, the Wyvern’s main drive drew energy from a ZPF quantum power transfer unit, using quantum entanglement to transmit power from one point to another without actually having to cross the space between. Enormous zero-point field taps on board large capital ships sucked potentially unlimited power out of the sub-fabric of space itself and routed it directly to field-entangled power receivers on board individual aerospace fighters.
The advantage, of course, was that fighters didn’t need to carry their own power generating systems for drives or weapons. The down side was that the carriers and big Marine transports had to be closely protected, since the destruction of a carrier would shut down all of her fighters. Briefly, Lee wondered if the Samar had been destroyed, and that was why she wasn’t drawing any juice.
But … no. Samar was back in Carson Space. She’d come through the gate, released her fighters, then returned—safely, so far as the battlespace telemetry could report. The problem, obviously, was on her end of things.
It was tempting to assume that something was blocking or intercepting the energy transmission, but Lee knew that wasn’t the way things worked. She shook her head, frustrated. It still felt a bit strange to her … knowing that she should still be drawing energy from a Marine transport some thirty thousand light years away.
That was part of the technological magic of zero-point energy taps. The energy wasn’t so much transmitted as it was simultaneously co-existent in two separate places, on board the transport and inside the QPT receiver of her drive. Some day, the techies claimed, that bit of quantum-physics magic might make possible the ancient dream of teleportation from point to point; in the meantime, it was enough that her fighter could draw energy from her mothership even at this range. When it didn’t work, the human mind tended to fall back on what felt like common sense. If energy wasn’t coming through, something must be blocking it.
The truth was that some essential component in her own quantum power tap receiver must be down. She might pick up the cause through her diagnostics, but the system was complex and a full set might take hours.
Damn it. If Pappy2 had been up and running, he’d be able to track the information down in no time. Her own personal AI was little more than a secretary, able to sort through incoming data and present it in a way that made sense, but unable to show much in the way of initiative or creativity.
She hated feeling this helpless.
She considered the Wyvern’s suicide switch.
All Commonwealth fighters carried the things, a means of exploding a small antimatter warhead located beneath her seat. There were five steps to go through before the thing could be unsafed and triggered, but once she made the final connection—a manual button accessed underneath a lock-down cap rather than a thought-click—she would never feel a thing. The system had been installed in all fighters and most small military craft as a means of avoiding being patterned by the Xul … or for situations such as this one, where battle damage had rendered the craft inoperable and there was nothing to look forward to but suffocation or radiation poisoning.
She discarded the thought. She wasn’t ready to make that decision, not just yet.
The situation was bad, but at least some of her systems were still running—life support and, thank the gods, her ship’s sensors, which were still feeding data over her cerebral link. That meant she was picking up battlespace data from the far-flung net of drones and probes still adrift on this side of the gate. From the look of things, a lot of Xul ships were gathering, moving toward one of several stargate icons extending across her IHD in a broad, sweeping curve.
Cluster Space was a very special target, she knew. She and the other members of her squadron had been thoroughly briefed before this op, and had downloaded a lot of data going all the way back to the 22nd Century.
In 2170, a Marine strike force had entered this system, sometime after the first encounter with Xul ships at the Sirius Stargate. Backtracking on the path followed by the Xul force, they’d discovered the Cluster Space system, far out among the halo stars at the outer fringe of the Galaxy, at least thirty thousand light years from Sol. They’d emerged from a different kind of stargate, a broad tunnel drilled into the heart of a twenty-kilometer-wide planetoid. According to the records, the Marines had recovered a damaged fighter that had fallen through the gate during the battle, planted antimatter charges, and escaped back through to the Sirius Gate before the charges had detonated, destroying the asteroid gate in Cluster Space and erasing the path back to Sirius.
That raid, quite possibly, had prevented the Xul from discovering Earth—less than nine light years from the Sirius Gate—for another century and a half, buying Humankind precious time. Not until 2314 had the Xul discovered Sol, launching the devastating bombardment against Earth that now, almost six centuries later, was still called Armageddonfall.
The idea now was to keep that from ever happening again. The next time the Xul visited Sol, they might well finish the job. They could destroy stars as well.
Elint—electronic intelligence—acquired by 1MIEF nine years ago during the battles in Aquila Space and at Starwall had revealed a wealth of various stargate connections, and the intelligence services both of the Humankind Commonwealth and of the Marines specifically had been mining that data ever since, trying to assemble a useful map of gate interconnections.
There were, it was estimated, some millions of stargates scattered across the Galaxy, and each gate could be tuned to connect with as many as several thousand other stargates. The web of interconnections was extraordinarily complex and far-flung, and human explorers and their AI analogues had thus far visited only a tiny, tiny fraction of all of the possibilities.
But intelligence gathered during a gate reconnaissance at Sirius four years ago had led to the discovery of the Carson Gate, and that, in turn, had led here, to a major Xul node in Cluster Space. Probes sent from Carson to the Cluster had verified that this was another route to the Cluster Node; in fact, there were no fewer than fifteen stargates in orbit around that single tiny, red-dwarf star, making this system a major communications and travel hub. The destruction of that one gate in this system over seven centuries ago might have temporarily delayed the Xul discovery of Sol and Earth, but it probably hadn’t even inconvenienced the Xul, who appeared to use the gate network to maintain their xenocidal watch over the teeming worlds of the Galaxy.
This time, the Commonwealth possessed the technology to close all of the gates. From experience, they knew that a nova probably wouldn’t destroy them outright. Each gate was distant enough from the local star that even a nova wouldn’t seriously affect it. But the nova would destroy all or most of the Xul ships, fortresses, and other structures orbiting in the local star, as well as annihilate any bases located on the worlds of the star’s planetary system. When 1MIEF went back through the Carson/Cluster gatelink, Marine assault teams could be dispatched to each gate in the system with antimatter charges that would finish the job once and for all.
Those icons appearing in her In-Head Display represented a few of the local system’s stargates, along with hundreds of red icons marking Xul warships within the range of the MIEF’s battlespace sensor drones. It occurred to her that she was about to get a ringside seat on just what happened to Xul vessels on the nova side of a stargate during an MIEF raid.
Of course, she didn’t expect to survive the experience. Any blast wave that seriously damaged a Xul huntership would sweep her little fighter away like a dust mite in a hurricane.
She checked to see that her recorders were going, however. The MIEF would be sending assessment teams through afterward, and if there was anything left of her Wyvern, the automated beacon transmitted by its rad-shielded storage unit would bring them in for a recovery. Of course, all of the unmanned battlespace drones had the same sort of storage, but there might be something unique to her viewpoint. Standard operational procedure required her to take steps to preserve the electronic record of what happened, just in case.
It also gave her a chance of recording a message, with a chance that it would reach family and friends back home in Saskatchewan.
Of course, she’d not had much to do with them since her radiation exposure at Starwall nine years ago. Somehow, knowing she would never have children again, she’d drifted apart from her blood family. The last time she’d linked with them had been … when? During one of 1MIEF’s returns to Sol for resupply, certainly. But not four months ago, the last time she was there. Maybe two times before that, early last year. …
She would have to consult her personal memories, currently inaccessible in her implant hardware, to be sure. Even though it was her choice, she tended to follow Marine guidelines when it came to family memories, locking them into hardware storage during a mission to avoid complicating distractions at an inopportune moment. Like they always said, “If the Corps had wanted you to have a civilian family, they’d have issued you one in boot camp.”
Hell, right now she couldn’t even remember any of her parents’ faces.
Fuck it, she thought. Just like you’ve been saying. The Corps is your family, all the family you’ll ever need. …
Tears were drifting between her eyes and the inside of her helmet visor, tiny, silvery spheres floating in microgravity.
How much time did she have? If everything was on sched, the blast wave from the local star should be very nearly—
Without preamble, Bloodstar began growing brighter.
5
1506.1111
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Carson Space
0731 hrs, GMT
“Minus three … two … one … mark!” The AI’s voice in Alexander’s mind said, counting off the last seconds. If Bloodlight had indeed gone nova, the shock wave should just now have reached the stargate. Depending on how the gate was tuned, the blast could pass through an open gate, emerging from another gate light years away.
That didn’t appear to be the case this time, however. Four Xul hunterships were drifting just in front of the Carson Space gate, wreathed in lances of plasma and detonating nuclear and antimatter warheads. But nothing had emerged from the other side, no light, no hard radiation.
Had something gone wrong over there?
It was entirely possible that red dwarf stars were simply too low-mass for a Euler triggership to affect. That had always been one of the possibilities, one of the dangers of this mission.
Or perhaps the triggerships had been delayed.
There was no way to tell, not from this side of the gate, or at least not until another battlespace drone emerged to update the combatnet.
One of the four Xul hunterships in the kill zone, a Type I newly emerged from the gate, was beginning to break up under the hellacious, focused bombardment. Under the concentrated fire of every capital ship of the MIEF, even a kilometer-long Xul warship couldn’t hold up for long. A portion of the needle-sharp prow broke away, spinning rapidly end over end. The rest of the Xul vessel was beginning to crumple, and intense radiation was bathing the area. The black hole inside its engineering spaces must have broken free, and was now eating its way through the Xul ship’s bowels.
But the Xul ships were firing back, sending a storm of laser energy and plasma bolts back at their tormentors. Three destroyers, Foster, Johnson, and Mevernen, had been destroyed just within the past couple of minutes, and the light cruiser Yorktown had been badly damaged, savaged by a concentrated volley of Xul weaponry. Now the heavy cruiser Maine was coming under fire, staggering as high-velocity mass-driver rounds slammed into her in a devastating fusillade.
The Commonwealth vessels continued firing, however, with unrelenting determination. As Alexander watched, the hull of the Type I twisted and dwindled, falling in upon itself. There was a final flash of radiation, from visible light through X-ray and gamma wavelengths … and then there was nothing remaining but drifting debris.
“Target Alpha destroyed!” someone called over the tactical net. “Pour it on, people!”
Two more Xul ships, another Type I and a Type II, were receiving the brunt of the expeditionary force’s fire now. The fourth of the group, a Type II, was limping now after receiving a barrage of antimatter warheads across its dorsal surface, with streams of hot gas gushing from several gaping rents in its hull and freezing almost immediately into clouds of glittering ice crystals. It appeared to be trying to reverse course back through the gate.
“Let Charlie go,” Taggart’s voice said over the net, identifying the retreating vessel. “Concentrate on Bravo and Delta.”
Bravo, the Type I, was starting to come apart under the heavy barrage, but it was also accelerating now, pushing deeper into Carson Space. A suicide attack? Or simply a breakdown in communications on board the stricken vessel? The Commonwealth firing line tracked it, continuing to pour fire into its shuddering, crumbling hull. It swept past the PanEuropean gunboat Delacroix at a range of less than ten kilometers. Delacroix’s turrets spun as they followed the Xul warship, slamming round after round of nano-D shells into the enemy’s flank.
Alexander had strongly protested the integration of the PE, Chinese, and Russian squadrons into what was supposed to be a Commonwealth naval-Marine expeditionary force, but the Commonwealth Senate had been … insistent, primarily because of the high losses among the Commonwealth forces over the past few years. Opposed or not, Alexander believed in delivering praise when it was appropriate. He made a mental note to mention Delacroix’s deadly accurate fire when he composed his after-action report.
Assuming he survived to write it, of course. If the star next door had not gone nova, 1MIEF would shortly be in very serious trouble.
AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,
Cluster Space
0731 hrs, GMT
Something had happened to the red dwarf. That much was clear simply through the Wyvern’s optical inputs. But the effect was not what Lee had been expecting.
Within the past several seconds, the star had visibly grown much brighter. Lee’s radiation sensors were off-line, but she suspected there was a strong UV, X-ray, and gamma component to the brightening as well, enough to give some teeth to that flare of visible light.
The increase in energy was more gradual than it should have been, however. Xul ships appeared now in sharp relief between their sunlit and shadowed surfaces, but their hulls weren’t softening and melting, weren’t boiling away under the assault.
Lee knew from the pre-mission briefings that there was a chance the local star could not be triggered into going nova. Like other typical red dwarfs, the local star was comparatively low-mass—about twenty percent the mass, in this case, of Earth’s sun. In nature, only massive stars could go nova, and traditional novae were thought to occur only in binary star systems, when matter from one star fell into the other. The Euler triggerships, moving within a bubble of sharply warped space, distorted the core of a star as they passed through, inducing a rebound effect, it was thought, that generated an explosion of the star’s core. The question was whether a red dwarf, which could be anywhere from forty percent down to about eight percent of the mass of Earth’s sun, could be physically induced to explode. There’d been talk of testing the theory on a red dwarf within Commonwealth space before actually launching this raid, but the thought of blowing up a star, even a tiny one, simply to test theory had been too much for a majority of the members of the Commonwealth Senate. The request, put through by 1MIEF’s science team, had been denied.