Galactic Corps

Still, it should have worked. Red dwarfs were smaller and cooler than other stars on the main sequence, but they were still stars, working fusion magic in the transformation of hydrogen to helium. There was another consideration as well. The Cluster Space sun was not a typical halo star—one of the thin haze of extremely ancient, cool red stars surrounding the Galaxy, but must instead be a straggler from the Galaxy’s spiral arms. Its lone attendant planet proved that much. Stars from inside the Galaxy—Population I stars, as they’d been designated since the 20th Century—possessed heavier elements besides the usual stellar components of hydrogen and helium and therefore could form planetary systems. They were considered to be metal-rich, the word metal in this instance referring to any element heavier than helium whether it was chemically considered to be a metal or not. Population II stars, the halo stars surrounding the Galaxy, were ancient survivals from an earlier galactic epoch; without heavy elements in their make-up, they couldn’t form planets.

The spectrum of the Cluster Space dwarf showed lots of carbon. Likely, Bloodlight possessed a core of carbon, a by-product of stellar fusion that must have been accumulating for tens of billions of years. The MIEF science teams felt that the rebound effect within a carbon core should result in the detonation of a nova—at least a small one—despite the star’s low mass.

Lee watched the star for a full minute, looking through her cockpit’s transparency with her naked eyes, now, rather than using the Wyvern’s electronic feed. Despite the increase in overall brightness, she could look directly into that ruby spark without discomfort, without her helmet’s optics dialing down to preserve her vision.

Possibly what had been triggered was a stellar flare; red dwarfs, especially small ones, often were unstable enough in their radiation output to earn the name flare stars. Such stars—Proxima Centauri, just 4.3 light years from Sol, was such a star—could increase in brightness by as much as two or three hundred percent, in some cases.

Whatever had happened, it was bad. The Xul fleet hadn’t even been inconvenienced by the brightening of the sun, and was continuing to move toward the stargate. The MIEF would be arrayed on the far side, now, in Carson Space, and fighting for its life. Once General Alexander decided that the Xul were going to cross over to Carson Space in force, he would detonate a number of antimatter charges on the Carson Space stargate. That would stop more Xul from crossing over.

It would also strand Lee and any other survivors from the MIEF fighter wings that might still be on this side. Again she tried to engage her ship’s auto-repair functions, tried to bring Pappy2 back on-line, tried to fire up the main drive.

Nothing.

She elected to focus all of her energy on reviving Pappy. The AI could handle electronics repairs better than she.

And it would be nice to have someone to talk to, especially someone who might be able to make sense of the screwy data coming in from the Cluster Space star. It looked like—

Abruptly, the brightening star exploded, growing much brighter, and then still brighter, until the cockpit transparency went black.

Something must’ve delayed the explosion, she thought. That, or the Euler triggerships took their sweet time getting to the star.

She tried shifting back to her Wyvern’s electronic feed, and got nothing but static. Shit! She was cut off now from the outside, unable to see with her own eyes or through the Wyvern’s electronic senses. Apparently, the radiation from the exploding star had knocked the rest of her sensors off-line. She’d been helpless before; now she was helpless and blind.

At this point there was nothing she could do but wait. She noted that the temperature of her outer hull was rising now—at minus thirty degrees Celsius, up over one hundred degrees in the past thirty seconds. She didn’t know for sure how hot it would get. Her Wyvern’s hull integrity might well hold up, and she would survive this initial pulse. The killer in a nova, at least this far away from ground zero, was the cloud of charged particles lagging behind the speed-of-light radiation front by several hours. That would kill her, no doubt about it.

She considered the suicide switch again. It would save the waiting … and possibly some pain. She wasn’t sure just how bad a dose of radiation she was getting right now, but it might be bad enough to kill her relatively quickly, over the course of several hours, say.

If she started vomiting, she would know.

She was determined not to be trapped adrift again, helpless and doomed to a slow death. Once had been enough, nine years ago, at Starwall. The similarity of that incident to her situation now was shrieking at her in the back of her mind.

It would be very easy to end things. Now.

On the other hand, she was a Marine … and Marines didn’t give up, not that easily, anyhow. There would always be time to use the switch later, if things got too bad.

Almost fifteen minutes later, something hit her Wyvern’s hull.

She felt the jar, and heard a sharp, metallic clang through the hull from somewhere aft. It startled her so badly she almost started the suicide switch enable procedure. If the Xul had grappled her fighter and were taking her on board one of their hunterships …

But she also knew that the Xul patterning procedure happened quickly and electronically.

There was another clang, and a sound like metal scraping metal. What the hell was going on back there? Damn it, she wished she could see.

Something banged against her blacked-out canopy. She flinched, then braced herself. If they were coming for her through the canopy …

What she felt next, though, was a surge of acceleration. Zero-gravity gave way to a definite sense of weight, pushing her back against her acceleration couch.

Okay, someone had grabbed her and was taking her some-place. She wondered if the Xul took prisoners in ways other than patterning them and uploading them into a virtual reality within their computer network.

Then her canopy transparency cleared and, once more, she could look out into the emptiness of space. Three large, utterly black shapes surrounded her Wyvern, two just off her bow, one to port, one to starboard, and a third above and slightly behind. That third shape, seen only in dead-black silhouette, had positioned itself between her canopy and the exploding sun; riding in the object’s shadow, her canopy had once again become transparent.

The shapes, she saw with a surge of heartfelt relief, were Wyverns—needle-prowed forward of the cockpit bulge, flat and disk-shaped aft. She could just make out the hull number on the Wyvern forward and to port—identifying it as 2nd Lieutenant Traci Wayne’s ship. The wave of relief nearly left her trembling. Three of the Wyverns in her squadron had come after her. The noises she’d heard were tow cables; fired from special ports in a Wyvern’s hull, several meters of their free ends were coated in nano sheaths that, on contact, welded themselves to the target hull. She was inextricably bound to the two Wyverns forward, now, at least until a signal from the towing vessels deactivated the nano-binder’s programming.

Her first thought was a surging rush of joy. I’m not alone, she thought. I never was. …

Her second was one of anger. Idiots! They should have returned through the gate, not hung around looking for me!

Still, she knew she would have remained.

And she was going home.

Assuming her entourage could get her through the gate, of course. Xul ships were continuing to crowd up close to the gate, anxious, perhaps, to escape the doomed star system. Or anxious, perhaps, just to get at the Commonwealth fleet waiting on the other side. Xul psychology was still largely a matter of guesswork. They were not human, and they did not think in the same ways humans did.

In any case, the three operable fighters and their dead-weight tow would have to thread an unpleasant gauntlet to get through. She could see a Type II making the passage now, moving through the interface at the center of the ring, vanishing from existence as it entered the opening. Five smaller hunterships and one huge Type III hung near the gateway.

Her escorts were beginning to fade slightly as they switched on their phase-shift gear. While not true invisibility, the fighters were just enough outside of normal spacetime that they appeared indistinct and somewhat blurred. Her own phase-shift gear, like nearly everything else on board her damaged fighter, was inoperable. At least, though, the Xul would be tracking only one fighter on its way to the stargate, not four.

Acceleration continued to push her back into her couch. Along with so much else, her inertial dampers were off-line. She hoped Wayne and the pilot of the other towing Wyvern had guessed that, because if they started boosting at a hundred gravities, they would be taking her off the couch with a sponge back in Carson Space. It felt like they were keeping it low, though. She guessed they were pulling about five gravities now, maybe a bit more. Her flight suit was re-conforming to provide pressure in her extremities and gut to keep blood from pooling there.

The acceleration increased. How much? Eight gravities? Ten? At around ten Gs, she knew, she would black out.

Well, it wasn’t absolutely vital that she stay conscious, but she wanted to if for no other reason than that she wanted to see. The stargate was expanding rapidly now as the quartet of fighters hurtled toward it. Wayne and the other pilot, she saw, were angling toward one rim of the stargate. Smart. It would keep them clear of those last few Xul warships jockeying for position near the gate’s center, and she doubted that they would open fire on the fighters and risk damaging the stargate.

She wondered why the Xul weren’t firing on them now. Phase-shift gear wasn’t that good at hiding a fighter, not at knife-fighting range, like this. Then she realized that the enemy might well be filling the sky around her with volleys of high-energy weapons fire and she would never know it, not without the software that painted incoming beams and attached icons to missiles. Without computer enhancement, she wouldn’t see a thing until something actually hit her, and then it would be too late.

Lee wished she could talk to Wayne and the others … then thought better of it. They were very busy right at the moment, and needed full concentration for a maneuver that made threading a needle at arm’s length child’s play by comparison.

Closer, now, and faster. Her vision was narrowing now, her peripheral field going black, and her arms were too heavy to move. She wished she could have another look at the Galaxy sprawled across heaven, but she could no longer turn her head. All she could see was directly ahead—the rapidly expanding stargate, with a Type III Xul huntership approaching the gate’s center.

Well, the nova light was probably so bright by now she wouldn’t have been able to see it, anyway. Stargate and Xul vessel both had taken on a hard-edged, blue-white glare where they reflected the glow of Bloodlight coming from behind her. Come to think of it, that provided the four fighters with another advantage—coming down out of the sun. Any Xul sensors looking back that way must be fried by now.

She caught a glimpse of one curving arc of ring-surface flattening out just to the left of dead ahead. And then …

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Carson Space

0748 hrs, GMT

“Four more fighters coming through, General,” Colonel Macalvey reported, his voice tight with excitement. Every remaining MIEF fighter was in space, now, swarming about the incoming Xul hunterships as they drifted in an immense and untidy clot at the center of the stargate. “Tough to see them in all that crap.”

Alexander didn’t reply. The debris cloud in front of the stargate was so thick now that it was tough to see anything, but three of the fighters were broadcasting their transponder signals at full intensity—hoping to ward off so-called friendly fire as they came into the kill zone—and battlespace drones emplaced on the stargate ring itself were picking up and boosting those signals. The transmissions revealed the tightly grouped icons of three … no, four Wyverns flying scant meters off the inner side of the stargate’s ring as they streaked through into Carson Space.

Good. A few more Marines had made it back. …

And with them came a burst of signal-boosted telemetry, updating the battlenet. Alexander felt the stream of raw information flowing into Hermes’ computer network. From the little he could grab, unanalyzed, Bloodlight had exploded on the other side, though not as soon as, and not with the violence, expected. As soon as the data were downloaded, the science team AIs would be fine-combing it, updating the available information on Xul warships coming through the gate.

The big question, of course, was whether the violence of the exploding star had damaged the enemy vessels, hurt them enough to stop them from coming through into Carson Space.

So far, the battle was going well, and at least vaguely according to plan. In any battle, the key determining factor is the terrain. Open space has no terrain, and tactics must be dictated by the relative technology possessed by the combatants, and by numbers.

The stargate, however, impressed a type of terrain on battlespace, a bottleneck, specifically, that allowed only a few ships to pass from one side to the other at a time, and that only slowly. In open space, the Xul possessed staggering advantages in technology and firepower, but the stargate bottleneck allowed Admiral Taggart to mass the weaponry of the entire MIEF against a single, tiny area and focus it all on the Xul ships as they passed through into the Carson Space kill zone.

That kill zone was visible now, even to the unaided eye, as a thick fog and a tangle of wreckage adrift in front of the Carson stargate. As volley upon volley of high-energy beam weapons gutted each Xul ship coming through the gate, gouts of internal gases and molten hull material erupted into space, freezing in seconds into glittering droplets and creating a dense haze. Nuclear and antimatter warheads added expanding spheres of hot plasma to the haze, and throughout were tangled bits of debris, much of it still glowing white-hot.

The stargate was twenty kilometers across, and already the nebula of debris covered a volume of space much wider than that. It was actually becoming difficult to see what was going on at the cloud’s center. The radiation there was intense enough to scramble most sensors, though the ring-emplaced sensors were still doing a good job of spotting most of the stuff coming through.

The Xul warships continued to emerge, visible only as large shapes half-glimpsed through the debris cloud. They were coming through at low speed—at eighty to ninety kilometers per hour—and colliding with the drifting wreckage. While they weren’t moving fast enough to cause significant damage to their outer hulls with the collisions, they appeared to be disoriented, as though they weren’t expecting space to be so crowded with wreckage and debris.

Fire continued to rain down upon each in turn, tearing great gashes in ceramic-metal hull material that glowed red and orange with the intensity of the bombardment. The space in front of the stargate pulsed and strobed with the silent flashes of detonating antimatter warheads, and the debris haze was thick enough that plasma bolts and laser beams had become visible to the unaided eye, illuminated by the trails of vaporizing particles of dust and ice.

Those Xul warships that worked their way clear of the man-made nebula found themselves at the focus of long-range bombardment from nearly one hundred Commonwealth warships, and by the short-range jab and sting of Marine aerospace fighters.

Over the past twenty minutes, the battle had slowly transformed into a slaughter. From his vantage point, he could watch the Xul craft emerge from the gate, struggle to orient themselves, and come under that highly focused, devastating fire.

And, under that assault, one by one, the Xul hunterships died.

But the plan called for saving one of the monsters, a big one, if possible. …

Penetrator Team Savage

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Carson Space

0804 hrs, GMT

First Lieutenant Charel Ramsey brought the palm of his hand down on the link contact, and, with a heady surge of energy pulsing through his conscious mind, he became a god.

Ramsey was newly arrived on board the MIEF’s flagship. He’d joined her after a passage through from Earth on the heavy cruiser San Diego only four weeks ago, part of the reinforcement and resupply convoy operation designated Starlight III. As a new graduate of the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center at Sinus Medii, on Luna, he’d been assigned to the expeditionary force’s N-2 division, answering to General Alexander’s command constellation directly and based here on board the Hermes. As an N-2 intelligence officer, he’d been assigned to a penetrator team.

And he was going in hot.

Integration complete, a voice—partially his own—said over the Intel net. Ramsey-Thoth now ready for launch.

Ramsey’s body was lying on one of the link couches inside Hermes’ Combat Ops Center, or COC, but his mind was … elsewhere. Linked by his neural implant system into Hermes’ computer network, with all other input signals blanked by his software, his mind’s eye was now residing within a narrow, tightly bounded virtual space representing a K-794 Spymaster probe.

Ramsey’s thoughts were integrated now with a powerful artificial intelligence given the name “Thoth,” an apt enough name, since the original Thoth had been the ancient Egyptian god of science, writing, knowledge … and magic. Designed to operate in this curious blend of human and artificial intelligence, Thoth provided Ramsey’s viewpoint with the speed, power, precision, and data acquisition functions of an AI. Ramsey provided purely human talents of flexibility, creativity, and intuition not yet possible for even the most powerful AIs.

The subjective effect was to give Ramsey a thrilling, deep-centered sense of truly godlike power and control, a feeling utterly unlike any other. It felt … wonderful. Addictively so.

“Probe Ramsey-Thoth is clear for launch,” the voice of Lieutenant Karen Hodges said in his mind. She would be his link with COC Control. “At your discretion, Gunny.”

“Copy that,” Ramsey replied.

“Be advised that a Type III is now transiting the gate,” Hodges added. Images built themselves up in an open window in Ramsey’s mind. He could see the two-kilometer Nightmare slowly emerging from the gate, its hull beginning to sparkle with the impacts of incoming fire. “Could be a good target of opportunity.”

“Copy that, COC Control. See you all back at the farm.”

With a thought-click, a powerful magnetic field hurled the probe clear of Hermes and into empty space. The probe’s N’mah-derived space drive switched on, and the Spymaster, with Ramsey’s viewpoint on board, hurtled toward the fizzy, nebular haze gathered in front of the stargate.

Targeting the emerging Type III, Ramsey locked onto the huge vessel and accelerated. …

Nine years ago, Ramsey had been a Marine gunnery sergeant, an enlisted grunt with twelve years of active duty behind him. He’d been part of the assault team that had gone into a planetoid hollowed out by the alien Eulers, and been the first human to establish direct mind-to-mind contact with them.

For another year, he’d served with the MIEF Contact Team, helping to establish the protocols and translation software that let humans communicate freely with the deeply alien, benthic species known as the Eulers, and worked as well on the design of Euler triggerships, adapting them for human use. At the end of that year, he’d been approached by the Office of Naval Intelligence and given the opportunity to come on board full-time as an e-spook. His experience with the Eulers, he’d been told, had demonstrated the levels of flexibility and mental adaptability the intelligence services were looking for.

Over all, it had been an interesting tour. The only downside was that as part of his training, he’d been sent to OCS and emerged as an officer.

As a former non-commissioned officer, Gunny Ramsey had been absolutely convinced that the true backbone of any military service was its NCO corps, a statement that likely had been a truism in the army of Nimrod. Becoming an officer had been a little like defecting to the other side. He still carried the nickname “Gunny,” and endured the good-natured teasing of his fellow commissioned officers.

Part of the problem was that he was now in his mid-forties, and literally twice the age of most of his associates. His other nickname, though not one usually used to his face, was “Grandpap.”

Damned kids …

The Spymaster probe, one of some hundreds loosed by the MIEF capital ships, dropped through the man-made nebula, homing now on the emerging Nightmare. The probe’s outer shell was growing hot now in two ways, from friction with dust particles and from the sea of radiation bathing the kill zone. He felt Thoth increasing the probe’s magnetic shielding, and begin jinking the two-meter-long dart in order to avoid Xul antimissile fire.

At the last possible moment, the Spymaster decelerated sharply, hitting nearly two hundred gravities. Ramsey didn’t feel that, of course, since he wasn’t physically on board the probe. Artfully arranged patterns of electrons, fortunately, were not subject to such inconveniences as gravity or high acceleration.

Or radiation, for that matter, so long as the probe’s hardened circuits were shielded from EMP. One second before impact, the probe’s bow shielding fired, transformed by an antimatter charge into a spear of raw energy stabbing down into the Xul ship’s armor. The probe struck a seething opening filled with searing hot plasma and tunneled in, its lead element revealed now as a nano-tunneler.

The Spymaster probe vanished, swallowed by the narrow-mouthed crater of its own making.

And moments later, Ramsey-Thoth began to hear the Nightmare’s Song. …

6

1506.1111

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Carson Space

0810 hrs, GMT

“The first wave of Penetrators is away, General.”

“About damned time.”

Alexander watched the green threads of the tiny missiles extending from Hermes and other ships in the fleet toward the most recent Xul ship to cross the gate interface. The first were already impacting on its hull.

This was the real heart of Operation Clusterstrike. He’d wanted to launch the incursion earlier in the battle, but various factors had conspired to delay things. In particular, the Intel people—N-2 in the Navy and Marine lexicon—had needed to analyze the electronic screens now being used by the Xul fleet in order to give the Penetrators a better chance of getting past the enemy’s defenses, both passive and active. They’d also been holding out for a Type III or one of the newly identified Type IV’s as a target, on the theory that the larger Xul hunterships would have more complex, deeper, and more valuable electronic infrastructures to tap.