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12 FEBRUARY 2314

Battlespace

1156 hrs, GMT

In the four and a quarter hours since the huntership had boosted that first small planetoid toward Earth, the rock had traveled almost 31 million kilometers which, on the vaster scale used to measure distances across something as large as a solar system, translated to a little more than one and a half light-minutes. HELGA Platform 3, in solar orbit 132 million kilometers from the Sun, currently and by chance, was five light-minutes from the rock that was its first target.

At their current respective positions, rock, HELGA Three, and Earth formed a triangle with slightly unequal legs—five light-minutes from HELGA to the rock, six from the rock to Earth, four and a half from Earth to HELGA. In physics, one watt of power delivered in one second equaled one joule. The HELGA laser—actually a battery of twenty-five lasers fired as an array—had an output of some 50 billion joules. The three-second beam, then, carried 150 thousand megajoules, the equivalent of 750 twenty-megaton nuclear warheads.

Some five minutes after Kali triggered the HELGA discharge, then, the kilometer-wide rock was struck by the laser energy streaming out from the distant military base between the orbits of Earth and Venus. The beam itself was invisible, of course; there was no air to ionize, no mist of dust or water vapor in the vacuum of space to call the beam into visibility. The tumbling mountain of rock, however, abruptly flared sun-hot, as a brilliant, blindingly intense star-point of white light ignited at the planetoid’s limb.

In fact, the targeting was less than perfect; tiny uncertainties about the rock’s precise position and vector meant that the strike was not dead-center on the target, and, though the three-second beam was tracking along the asteroid’s calculated inward-bound path, it actually connected with the rock for less than half a second before the rock tumbled out of the beam.

That half-second, however, was sufficient to pour the wrath of over a hundred detonating twenty-megaton fusion bombs into one very small section of the rock’s surface. The asteroid was of the type designated a carbonaceous chondrite—the most common of planetoid bodies—and some twenty percent of its make-up was actually water ice. One side of the asteroid was still at the temperature of deep planetary space—nearly one hundred degrees below zero Celsius—while the other half in one dazzling instant attained a temperature close to that of the surface of the Sun.

White-hot plasma erupted from the planetoid’s surface, stabbing into space like a rocket’s jet. An instant later, the temperature differential shattered ice and stone alike, and the rock mountain disintegrated into an expanding cloud of debris, ranging in size from sand grains to chunks the size of a house.

And, of course, every piece of debris, from dust mote to ten-meter boulder, continued on a vector only very slightly modified by the impact’s plasma thrust, still moving at over seven million kilometers per hour.

Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

1215 hours

The virtual conference had continued uninterrupted throughout the morning hours, though some participants had dropped out to attend to other duties, while new ones logged on. Such conferences, Garroway thought, often took on a kind of life of their own, changing, growing, dynamic, as the individual cells left the system and new ones joined.

Garroway himself had logged out in order to concentrate on writing orders for the RST, but then returned in time to watch, with nearly four hundred other men and women, the results of the first firing of the HELGA Three array. Participants were attending from all over the Earth, with the heaviest concentrations in Washington, New York, and Stockholm, the capitals, respectively, of the United States, the North American, and the World Unions. Perhaps ten percent were in space—on Earth’s Moon, on Mars or Phobos, in Earth orbit, or in various spacecraft scattered from the Jovian moons to the orbit of Mercury.

Not all of those last could participate in any meaningful, real-time manner, of course. The fourteen-minute time lag between a signal being sent from the Preble and an answer being received was annoying; the Jovian system was on the far side of the Sun at the moment, over six AUs distant, with a total there-and-back signal time of ninety-eight minutes. Admiral Hargreave, CO of the Union’s First Fleet, was currently at Caltexto, and effectively out of the conversation, though his icon was showing.

As it was, Garroway was only able to participate in the background of the conference, his words and ideas coming through almost a quarter hour after the statements that had elicited them. At the moment, though, the attention of most of the participants was focused on the schematic that showed events unfolding in battlespace somewhat closer to Mars than to Earth, in the general region between the Inner Belt and the orbit of Mars. Sensor drones and fighters in the area had picked up images of the first of the asteroidal missiles suddenly brightening to intolerable brilliance, then vanishing. Garroway had seen those images before they reached Earth, and the Earth-bound observers’ reaction hadn’t reached him until seven minutes after that.

The cheers and shouts, however, clearly marked the moment when they saw those scenes as well.

“Gentlemen!” General Armitage was calling over the chaos. “Ladies, gentlemen! The celebration is premature!”

“But we’ve destroyed the first missile, General!” Senator Kenichi Kondo said. “We’ve proven that it can be done!”

“One missile … and there currently are eight more still en route to Earth. And there will be more, unless we stop the intruder. Otherwise, that bastard will keep throwing rocks faster than we can burn them down.”

“But how—”

“People,” General Dumont said, “we simply must implement General Garroway’s suggestion. There is no other alternative.”

“Redirect the HELGA platforms to fire on the Intruder?” Senator Fortier said, her voice conveying her shock at the idea. “That is tantamount to planetary suicide!”

“The data, Madam Senator, suggest that it will be planetary suicide if we simply try to play catch-up with the Intruder.”

“There is also the option, General, of trying to communicate with those people. We have the language … or a language … from our studies of the Singer, and from AI contacts with Hunter ships.”

“The Prometheus attempted to signal the Intruder,” Dumont told her. “You saw how well they textened.”

“Then we should try again!”

“Senator Fortier, right now these ‘people’ as you call them are doing their level best to destroy all life on our home planet! I submit that this is not the time to try to use diplomacy!”

“And if these beings are as advanced and as powerful as you suggest, General, perhaps diplomacy is our one and only hope!”

Damn the woman, Garroway thought. Someone put a lid on her and shut her the hell up! This was not the time to argue the matter. Whether she realized it or not, the entire human race was engaged in battle at this moment, a battle that very well might determine whether Humankind survived, or became extinct.

On the schematic, the red star marking the position of the Hunter warship winked out, reappearing almost immediately in a new position.

Garroway stared at the new strategic configuration. “Ken!” he called out over the virtual conference link within the Preble’s computer net. “Do you see that?”

“I do,” Rear Admiral Jollett replied. “If we could hold them there. …”

The intruder had just leaped to a new location less than eight hundred thousand kilometers from the Preble, and on a general line with Preble’s course—two and a half light-seconds away, instead of several light-minutes.

“We can,” Garroway said. “At least we can try. Will you back me?”

It was, to say the least, a fascinating problem in international military chain of command.

The battle with the Hunter intruder was being directed from Earth. The three HELGA platforms were under the jurisdiction of the High Guard and Rear Admiral Karen Castellaw, but her bosses were Lieutenant General Armitage, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the North American Union, and General of the Union Eva Cortez, of the Joint Chiefs of the World Union.

The governments of the world existed in nested series, like Russian Matryoshka dolls—with the World Union above the North American Union above the government of the United States of America. Technically, the United States Marines, though still in direct U.S. service, “belonged” to the North American Union. Technically, too, the World Union did not have its own military, but relied on the military of the NAU to provide protection and order. According to the World Constitution, the WU civilian authority superceded the NAU and gave the orders; in practice, the NAU military had the guns, and, therefore, under the control of the NAU and U.S. civil authorities, the power.

Who was really in charge, who gave the orders, had never, until now, been tested. Clearly, Senator Fortier thought she and the WU civil authority did; there was no president of the World Union; leadership was vested in a rotating speakership within the WU Senate. Fortier was not the current Speaker. That privilege was currently vested in Senator Ivan Danikov, of the Russian Union, but Danikov had not yet logged on to the discussion, and Fortier had assumed control of the battle.

Or so she thought. The actual orders were being given by Armitage and Cortez.

But on an even more practical level, it was Garroway and Jollett who were going to have to make the necessary call. Jollett was the second-in-command of the NAU’s First Planetary Fleet; Admiral Hargreave was in command, but currently out of the loop at Caltexto.

Garroway, CO of 1MIEU, was the ranking Marine officer on the Preble. Jollett outranked him, but technically could not command Marine units unless they were part of the First Fleet’s TO&E … and 1MIEU was not currently assigned to his command.

But Jollett and First Fleet could give orders to High Guard units … like HELGA Three.

“You want me to redirect HELGA Three’s targeting routine,” he said.

“There are two XELs in Mars orbit,” Garroway pointed out. “You could fire them as well. I suggest you order all three to fire. We don’t know what the effect on the Intruder is going to be.”

“Agreed.” He sounded glum. “You know, Clint, this is not a career-enhancing situation.”

“Fuck that,” Garroway said with a bluntness calculated to shock, to startle. “You and I are both at the apex of our careers, anyway. Where else can we go? Except retirement.”

“Speak for yourself. Anyway, I was thinking of the court-martial.”

Garroway sighed. “Ken, they’ll only court-martial us if this doesn’t work. And if it doesn’t, who’s going to be left to head up the court?”

“You’ve got a point. Of course. Very well. Do you know what you’re doing with your Marines?”

Garroway thought for a moment. “We’re still two hours away from rendezvous with the Cunningham. We’re going to have to give up on that … send them in straight up. I don’t like that …”

“Too many unknowns, anyway,” Jollett put in. “Like whether an IMAC pod could cut through whatever the Intruder is made of.”

“Agreed. Anyway … call it another hour to launch, and maybe another hour … no, call it two hours to intercept and boarding.”

“And we have to hope that HELGA and the XELs will make that thing stand still for it.”

“Exactly.”

He felt Jollett shaking his head, and at first thought the admiral was refusing him. “It’s a gamble, General,” Jollett said. “But the stakes are a damned sight higher than our careers. You have my backing. I’ll transmit the orders for the targeting change.”

“Thanks, Ken.”

He felt a rush of relief.

But he also had to stifle the sense of dread that rose, knowing the probable result of the orders he was about to give.

High Guard HEL Facility 3

Solar Orbit

1231 hrs, GMT

Captain Gupta Narayanan looked up at the big time readout in the HELGA Three control room. Time was an interesting concept when a control system was spread across an area measured in light-minutes. Deliberations in the virtual conferencing taking place in Earth space, as well as the clocks of all Earth spacecraft, were set to the common denominator of Zulu time—also known as GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time, back on Earth.

Damn politics! Damn the confusion binding the current chain of command! And, above all, damn the laws of physics!

His situation, he reflected, was not an enviable one.

Narayanan stared again at the words, translated into his native Urdu Hindi, glowing in empty space in the air next to his chair. This new set of orders had just arrived from the general vicinity of Mars, which at the moment was a full light-minute closer than Earth, given with the current configuration of the planets in relation to HELGA. He glanced at another screen, showing a plot-chart schematic. If the Sun was at six o’clock from HELGA’s current position, Earth lay at nine o’clock, four and a half light-minutes away, while Mars was at one o’clock, and only three and a half light-minutes away.

Narayanan’s take on the politics of the situation was that, by rights, the World Union controlled the military of the lesser NAU and U.S., and he served the World Union. Orders should then, by rights, come to him from Stockholm and the WU.

He was currently in command, however, of a High Guard installation which was under the direct control of the North American Union and the NAU fleet. Under that TO&E, Rear Admiral Jollett was his commanding officer.

Gupta Narayanan was devoted to World Unionism … Earth’s only hope, as he saw it, to end the so-far endless cycle of national rivalries, militant pride, and warfare. The World Union must take precedence over the various assemblies of nation-states that dominated the planet now—the European Union, the Russian Federation, and most especially the North American Union, which dominated world politics now purely on the strength of its military.

His avowed World-Unionist feeling was in fact the reason he’d been chosen for the rotating command roster for HELGA Three in the first place.

But if Narayana was a devoted planetary Unionist, he was also a Material Rationatext. Though Andhra Pradesh was officially a Reformed Neo-Hindu state, and his family had been Vaishnava for uncounted generations, Narayanan, at least, took pride in thinking for himself. The excavations, two centuries earlier, of vast undersea ruins off the coasts of Sri Lanka and in the shallow Gulf of Khambhat had proven—to him, at least, if not to his father—that the hero tales, myths, and legends of most world religions rested in the colonization efforts of several extraterrestrial spacefaring species arriving on Earth eight to ten thousand years ago.

It was now known definitely that the Ahannu had established colonies at several points on the Earth, that those colonies had been annihilated by the Hunters of the Dawn, and that the Oannan/N’mah had at least visited the planet after the Hunter attack, helping scattered and disorganized tribes of primitive humans to reacquire the rudiments of civilization. There was no need to assume the intervention of deities when it was clear that star-traveling aliens had interacted with humans in the remote past.

Nor was it necessary, as so many of the newer world religions did nowadays, to grant those aliens divine status—either as gods, or as demons.

The point was that Narayanan thought for himself. What was happening now in near-Arean space transcended world politics or the philosophies of government and power.

His operational orders from Stockholm emphasized the need to keep the World Union tightly in the loop when it came to conflicts of orders or authority, and to consult with them closely if there were any conflicts. They would expect him to link through to the Senate in Stockholm and to General Linden at the Bureau of the Military and ask their opinion.

But the clock was running. It was now 1231 hours, GMT. If he put a call through immediately, it would be 1235 before they received the message on Earth, and 1240 at the earliest before he would have an answer.

And he knew General Linden, and he knew the WU Senate. It might be hours before they decided to get back to him with a yes-no decision.

The HELGA array would be ready to fire at 1243. In fact, he could fire the weapon now, though the capacitors would not be up to full power for another fourteen minutes.

The Preble was seven light-minutes away, which meant that a request for a clarification of those orders would not be answered before 1245 hours. And any delay was serious.

It is of the utmost importance that HELGA Three take the Intruder under fire at the earliest possible opportunity, as it may move from its new location at any moment. So read the orders just downloaded to Kali from Admiral Jollett.

It was, he thought, what the Americans liked to call a “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” situation. If he obeyed Jollett’s direct order, he could be court-martialed by the Bureau. At the very least, he would lose his command, and his future career with the nascent WU military organization would be questionable at best. If he waited to consult with Stockholm, he would never be trusted by New York again, or by the military arms of the United States.

But worse by far—and the deciding factor—was the tactical situation. The Intruder would be in an ideal position for only a few moments, at best, and might leave at any instant. The sooner he targeted the Hunter vessel, the better Humankind’s chances in this fight.

“Kali?”

“Yes, Captain Narayanan?”

“Retarget and reconfigure targeting schedule. We are taking the Intruder under fire.”

“That is in violation of your orders from Stockholm, Captain. You are required to consult with Stockholm.”

“I am well aware of that. I believe the situation warrants this action.”

“Very well. I am retargeting the array.”

Retargeting required only an adjustment of the primary mirror, a change of a couple of degrees. There was no sensation of movement or of acceleration within the microgravity of the control deck.

“Retargeting is complete. We are locked onto the coordinates provided by the Commodore Edward Preble.”

“Initiate firing sequence.”

“Capacitors are not yet up to—”

“The target is not solid rock. Fire. Now. If you please.”

“Firing.”

If the AI governing HELGA Three’s systems was chagrined, it showed no sign of the fact. The energy of multiple fusion bombs streamed into space.

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

1236 hrs, GMT

The Lords Who Are had directed the huntership to approach the fourth planet of this system. They’d detected a high concentration of electromagnetic signals emerging from several points on the planet’s surface, and from the inner of the planet’s two small moons, and there were a number of spacecraft in the vicinity as well. The Lords Who Are felt it necessary to examine the world more closely, especially in regard to its military capabilities and potential.

The blast of coherent energy that struck the huntership, then, caught the Lords Who Are somewhat by surprise. Their approach had been cautious, with EM shields fully up and powered, but they were prepared for an attack from the planet in question, or from one of the tiny spacecraft swarming through this region; the laser beam arrived from a different direction and source entirely—from a base circling this system’s star between the orbits of the second and third planets.

That orbital base had fired once, a few tanut earlier, and at least partially annihilated the first of the asteroids already set in motion toward the third planet. The Lords Who Are had analyzed the data, and concluded that the laser array was designed to intercept and destroy small asteroids, but that it was not primarily a military weapon. The array’s output, based on the reflected light from the laser strike against the rock, suggested that the array was not capable of seriously threatening the huntership in any case.

It was clear now that the analyses of the beam’s power was understated by at least eighty percent. Possibly, much of that initial beam had actually missed the hurtling asteroid, and been lost in deep space, a possibility that the Lords Who Are had not considered.

They considered it now, as the beam struck the huntership’s shields, overwhelmed them, and drove them down. Star-hot radiation struck the living surface of the huntership, flash-boiling vast quantities into the vacuum. The power plant and the reactionless drives, both those that maneuvered the huntership through normal space, and those that made faster-than-light travel possible, began boiling away an instant later, as heat exchangers and quantum dampers strove to compensate for the torrent of coherent EM radiation.

Worse, optical and other sensors located in the huntership’s skin were seared into uselessness. New ones could be grown, but, for the moment, at least, the ship and the Lords Who Are were blind, deaf, and helpless.

Given the technology of the species inhabiting system 2420-544, this was not a serious situation, but it was irritating. And frustrating. Vermin were not supposed to fight back.

There would be no more experimentation with the locals’ defenses. The damage to sensors, power plant, weapons, and drives would be repaired, the huntership restored to full operational capacity, and the worlds of this star system would be sterilized.

Once and for all.

Assault Detachment Alpha

On Board Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

1308 hrs, GMT

“All right, Marines,” Garroway bellowed over the platoon channel. He was standing in the central aisle of the crowded autie, gauntleted hands braced on seatbacks on either side. The CAS helped him stand, but it still wasn’t pleasant. They were pulling, according to the telemetry coming through his link, two and a half gravities. “Noumie briefing in five! Check your contacts!”

“Damn it, Gunny,” Corporal Kevin Yancey said. “When can we peel out of these tin cans? It’s getting freakin’ ripe in here.”

“Stew in it, Yancey. ‘Your combat armor is the Marine’s skin. Your combat armor will keep you alive and able to kill your enemies. You will care for your combat armor as though it was your own body. …’”

The old litany out of boot camp raised a chorus of groans from the Marines, which had been Garroway’s intent. A griping Marine wasn’t necessarily a happy Marine, but he was an alert and attentive one. And he needed their attention now.

He didn’t blame them, though. They’d been suited up for the better part of nine hours, now, ever since they’d prepped for the IMAC launch at zero-dark-thirty that morning, Zulu. The Marine CAS was a flexible and remarkably versatile instrument. It had its own water supply, and a ready cache of combat rations, which, of course, the more inventive Marines stocked with candy bars and other gedunk. It had attachments to let you piss and shit, too … all the comforts of home.

Well, most of them. The trouble was, after a few hours sealed in the thing, the best filtering and air scrubbing cyclers in the world couldn’t keep up with the canned stink of excrement and sweat. They said you got used to it after a while. Once, Garroway had been on a training exercise where he’d donned a CAS and kept it donned for fifty-three hours. “They” were wrong.

“Man, I don’t see why we have to stay suited up either, Gunny!” Sergeant Roderick Franks said. “This stink ain’t never comin’ out!”

“Don’t worry, Roddy,” Chrome told him. “You couldn’t get a date, anyway.”

“Says you. Anyway, we all know the brass is just jerking us around.”

“Jack in and ice it, people,” Garroway said. “The word is we’re on another op. We stay in the cans until the Man says otherwise. Ooh-rah?”

“Ooh-rah!” several Marines chorused back … but not many, and not with a lot of enthusiasm. Morale was not good.

Lieutenant Wilkie had passed the word coming down from higher up on the chain of command. The RST had been ordered both to stay suited up and to remain on board the dust-off autie, which had been swallowed whole a few hours ago by the transport Preble. Now they were going somewhere in one hell of a hurry. Two point five Gs was about max for a Patriot-class transport.

That told Garroway that they wanted the Marines ready to go at an instant’s notice. Unfortunately, no one had yet bothered to tell any of them what the hell was going on.

But maybe that was about to change. Wilkie had just passed the word that there would be a noumenal briefing in five more minutes. About damned time, he thought fiercely. Marines never liked operating in the dark … at least, not the kind of political-situational darkness that even Mk.XC night-vision equipment simply could not penetrate.

The minutes dragged past. Then the noumenal link alert flashed on. Garroway took his seat, making the connections with his armor gauntlets on his seat.

Lieutenant Wilkie’s virtual image appeared in the window that opened in his mind. The face looked a lot like Wilkie’s real face, Garroway thought, but had obviously been aged a bit, to give it a more experienced and commanding presence. Garroway didn’t like playing that sort of game with the noumenon, though he knew a lot of officers who did.

“Texten up, people,” Wilkie said. “We have new orders. Approximately four hours ago, an alien spacecraft entered our solar system and destroyed several of our ships, including a Titan-class High Guard cruiser. It then proceeded to accelerate several small asteroids on new courses, apparently in an attempt to bombard the Earth.

“A few moments ago, the alien changed its position, moving to a point less than eight hundred thousand kilometers from the Preble. At that point, the High Guard heavy laser arrays took it under fire, and appear to have disabled it. We have been ordered to board the alien, and destroy it.”

Garroway textened, reserving judgment, but waiting for the proverbial second shoe to drop. Clearly there was a lot that Wilkie wasn’t saying … though whether that was because he was withholding information from the entexted personnel, or because no one had bothered to tell him the whole story, there was no way of knowing.

The biggest question was … what could thirty-two Marines do against an alien warship capable of flinging asteroids at the Earth? It sounded like it must be one of the fabled Hunters of the Dawn … something like the two-kilometer-wide Singer discovered three centuries ago on Europa, or the Hunter ship that had come through at Sirius … and those things were huge.

The only way a handful of Marines could take out something that big was …

“In order to effect the target’s destruction,” Wilkie’s image went on, “the RST is being issued all available K-94 packs on board the Preble. I need five volunteers to actually deliver the weapons into the enemy spacecraft.”

That was the other boot.

Five Marines were being asked to commit suicide.

And the rest almost certainly would die with them.