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12 FEBRUARY 2314

Assault Detachment Alpha

On Board Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

1412 hrs, local

“I want to volunteer, sir.”

The face of Lieutenant Wilkie’s icon didn’t change expression. “Request denied.”

“The hell it is. You wanted volunteers. I’m volunteering.”

“Gunny … I don’t think you understand. I can’t let you go out there.”

Garroway was startled by that. “Huh? What do you mean? Sir, we’re all going on this op.”

“You’re not. I want you to stay on board the Preble.”

“Fuck that! Do you think I’m going to watch my boys and girls vaporize themselves from a safe distance? No way! Sir.”

“Gunny … your uncle is on board the Preble.”

That stopped him for a moment. “My … uncle?”

“General Clinton Garroway, yes. He came aboard at Phobos, when they evacuated the high-ranking brass.”

Garroway gave a mental shrug. “Doesn’t change anything, Lieutenant. I am going on this op. With my people.”

He felt Wilkie hesitate. “If you buy it in there …”

“C’mon, Lieutenant. Uncle Clint didn’t order you to pull me off of this run, did he?” The very idea was ludicrous. Both Garroways were Marines. Both knew what that meant. “Are you telling me you discussed it with him, and he said no?”

“No. Of course not. But regulations—”

“If I know the General,” Garroway said, interrupting, “he’s going to be looking for an excuse to come along with us. If you want to quote regs at someone, talk to him. This is your op to lead, sir, not a goddamn general’s!”

“Roger that, Gunny.” He felt the lieutenant’s mental sigh. “Okay. Forget what I said. You’re on the op.”

“Affirmative, sir. But what I wanted to say is … I want one of the boom-packs.”

“Denied.”

“Sir, it’s my right. …”

“And it’s my right to refuse. We’re not leaving you on the Intruder.”

“Damn it, Lieutenant, how can I let five of my people volunteer to go out in a nuke fireball when I won’t do it myself? My uncle would grab one and go in a second.”

“No. Your uncle knows that a very great deal of money, time, and effort has been expended in making him a general. The days when an officer led his men by running out in front of them and shouting ‘follow me’ are long over.”

“But—”

“Furthermore, Gunny, the platoon needs you. I need you. You know as well as I do—better, maybe—that a unit’s success and efficiency both depend on the experience of its senior NCOs. I cannot afford to lose you.”

Garroway had worked with Wilkie long enough to know that tone, to know that the lieutenant was not going to give in on this. The man might be barely out of Annapolis, but he could be as gold-plated stubborn a bastard as any gunnery sergeant when he set his mind to it.

“Therefore, Gunny,” Wilkie continued, “if you insist on going along, you will go in your capacity as senior NCO, to lead the other Marines and to support me as CO. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Are your Marines ready to boost?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“Load-outs checked?”

“Yes, sir.” He resisted the temptation to add of course. “We’re going in light with expendables, but we have four extra pigs.”

“And the boom-packs.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Pass the word, then. Fifteen more minutes to launch.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Dismissed, Gunny Garroway.”

Garroway broke the link, and was again aware of his surroundings—sealed inside his CAS, squeezed into one of the chairs on the cargo deck of the autie with thirty other Marines. The lieutenant was riding this out in relative comfort up on the flight deck.

Briefly, Garroway considered uplinking through to his uncle, but decided against it almost before the thought had fully formed. No sense in risking having to disobey a direct order. Besides, once you started going around the chain of command to get what you wanted, discipline and order started to break down. There was a reason for the chain of command, and both Garroways were dedicated to upholding it.

Besides, he wasn’t sure his uncle even knew he was a part of Detachment Alpha. Generals didn’t usually pay much attention to the individual grunts, and the IMAC tests weren’t 1MIEU’s concern yet. Garroway didn’t know how his illustrious uncle had turned up on Phobos, but he doubted very much that it had anything to do with him.

Travis Garroway was a Garroway on his mother’s side, but, like several others in the family line over the past century or two, he’d chosen to take his mother’s family name at his Naming Day ceremony. His father, a psychtech applications speciatext with Dynate Systems in Atlanta named Travis Kraig, had been disappointed, understandably, but he’d understood. Travis’s father had never been in the military, but simply by marrying into the Garroway family, he’d come to learn a hell of a lot about the Corps, and what it meant to bear that name.

Hell, most of why he’d chosen the Garroway name was due to his Uncle Clint, who’d been a lieutenant and, later, a captain running a platoon in 1MarDiv when he’d still been in his early teens. Some of the stories he’d heard back then about the Corps had fired his passions … but even more he’d been hooked by the historical stuff involving his own family, Major Mark “Sands of Mars” Garroway, Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway, Corporal John Esteban Garroway, and others. Many others. It certainly wasn’t true that all Garroways ended up in the Marines, but there were enough ghosts looking over their shoulders to make anyone in the family think twice about joining—for instance, and perish the thought—the Navy.

He sighed. Wilkie was right, of course. He didn’t belong on the suicide squad. But he didn’t have to like the alternative.

Suicide squad. That was what some of the Marines in the platoon were calling it, of course, though Garroway, Chrome, and the other senior people were trying to discourage that idea. This would be a team effort … gung ho. Everyone pulling together.

No one would be left behind.

Even so, it was hard to imagine hauling a thirty-one kilo pack containing a 120-kiloton nuclear device into the bowels of an alien starship without thinking in terms of suicide. No one knew what kind of close-in defenses the Hunter of the Dawn warships possessed. No one knew for certain what the crew was like. Xul starships appeared to be crewed, or at least defended, by mobile machines … though the vessels seemed also to be little more than bodies housing titanic and very alien artificial intelligences.

Did they possess other means for discouraging enemy troops from coming onboard and leaving unpleasant surprises behind, surprises such as a quintet of K-94s?

No one knew. But the Marines of RST-1 would be finding out for themselves very soon now.

“Equipment check,” Garroway called. “Everybody check your buddy.”

The Marines were paired off, each with a partner … except for Garroway, the platoon gunny. He watched the others check one another, moving down the crowded aisle. “Chien! Check your starboard-side harness. You’re dangling.”

“Right, Gunny.”

“Tomasek! Shorten up that strap on your ’thirty.”

“Aye, aye, Gunny Garroway.”

He continued making his way among the men, checking equipment, but mostly letting them see that he was there with them. Twelve of the thirty were newbies straight out of boot camp. And two of those, he saw—Istook and Lowey—had volunteered to backpack a couple of the ’94s.

Both were sitting next to each other on the starboard side aft, and their vitals readouts showed they both were scared. Well, hell. So was Garroway.

“Hey, Marines,” he said over a private channel. “How’s it going?”

PFC Gwyneth Istook was a pale, red-headed youngster from Sebree, Kentucky. Private Randolph C. Lowey was a black kid from Manchester, Georgia. “Doin’ okay, Gunny,” Lowey said.

“Yeah,” Istook added. “Ooh-rah!”

“I want you both to stick close to me, understand? No heroics. No wandering off.”

“Right, Gunny.”

“Okay, Gunny.”

“This is not a suicide mission. You will follow me in, place your devices, and follow me out. Got it?”

“Got it, Gunny.” Istook’s mental voice was level and hard.

“Good.”

He wished he could be as sure of that as he sounded.

“Uh … Gunny?” Lowey asked. “What if that thing collapses while we’re in there?”

It was a question for which there was no answer. Marines had boarded a disabled Xul huntership once before … and escaped moments before the black hole that apparently powered the thing had devoured the entire mile-long hulk.

“Then we’re dead,” he replied, his voice cold. “But we’ll be dead so fast we won’t even know what hit us. And we know the bastards won’t take the rest of humanity with ’em. Right?”

“Right, Gunny. It’ll be quick?”

“Faster than an eye-blink.”

He didn’t add that it would also be quick if they all went out in their own nuclear fireballs. They knew. In a way, it was a kind of blessing. Most Marines Garroway knew were more afraid of being seriously wounded or mutilated than they were of a fast and clean death. There was scuttlebutt—only scuttlebutt, he reminded himself—that if the Xul captured you, it was neither fast nor clean.

Casualties in the unforgiving vacuum of space tended to be fatal, and rapidly so, in any case. But right now, he thought, every man and woman in the autie must be thinking about the alternatives.

“Five minutes!” sounded over the command channel. “Everybody strap in!”

Garroway made his way back to his seat, squeezing the bulk of his CAS into the bucket between Corporal Visclosky and Sergeant Bonilla.

“Think they’ll have the front door open for us?” Chrome asked him over a private channel.

“Damfino,” he replied as the grabbers snugged him in. “Wish we’d had time to load on some IMACs.”

“Roger that. This whole fucking op feels like the brass is making it up as they go along.”

“Yeah. What if we can’t breach the objective’s hull?”

“Then we’ll do it the Marine way,” Garroway told her. “Improvise, overcome, and adapt.”

“We can use Will-kill’s head as a battering ram.”

Garroway let that pass … and hoped, for Chrome’s sake, that Wilkie wasn’t monitoring the private channels. Chances were, though, that the lieutenant had other things on his mind right now.

Like how the hell the RST was going to get inside the Intruder if its hull hadn’t been breached.

Garroway, along with most of the Marines in this compartment, had studied the intelligence data gleaned from studies of the Singer, found almost three centuries before beneath the ice of the Europan world-ocean, and from the battle with a Hunter-of-the-Dawn starship at the Sirius stargate 144 years ago. The Xul Hunters possessed a technology that made human starships look like stone axes by comparison.

But that technology could be overcome. The ship that had emerged through the Sirius stargate had been protected by an electromagnetic force field of some kind, designed to divert charged particles, but it had been crippled by the field expedient of turning the plasma drives of seven starships against it. That concentration of charged particles had evidently overwhelmed the Xul vessel’s shielding and breached the hull, allowing a small Marine boarding party to enter.

A boarding party, Garroway thought with a dark smile, that had included one of his Marine ancestors—his great-granduncle Corporal John Esteban Garroway.

According to the records, studied in almost obsessive detail by generations of Marines since, the Xul starship had been destroyed by a rogue micro-black-hole released by its own disabled drive, literally collapsing into a gravitational singularity of its own manufacture. Before that collapse, however, the Marine boarding party had been able to tap into the equivalent of the Xul’s computer net, information that was still being studied, translated, and argued over.

This time, the Marines would be going in to make sure the Xul monster was destroyed.

The big question was whether they would even be able to get on board. Intelligence data suggested that the Xul’s outer hull was a nanufactured synthetic tougher than diamond, resistant to nuclear explosions and other forms of large-scale mayhem. IMAC pods were designed to use special nanodisassembler docking cuffs that would eat through anything, even Xul hulls. In the absence of fresh IMACs, though, the Marine RST was going to have to wing it. Four Marines were equipped with portable disassemblers; it would be a lot simpler if whatever had disabled the Xul starship had also burned a hole through it.

What had they used? The XEL pods orbiting Mars, and in the Asteroid Belt? The HELGA platforms in solar orbit? Or had someone gotten lucky with an antimatter warhead?

Well, they would know in a few more minutes. If the Xul were disabled enough not to be aware of their approach.

Damn it, this op was suicide … or close enough as made no difference.

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

1417 hrs, GMT

The Lords Who Are were … frustrated.

The group mind that comprised the guiding intelligence for the huntership did not understand, could not understand, emotional responses such as fear or anxiety, any more than it could comprehend concepts such as individuality. From their studies of various organic beings—the vermin that infested so many planetary bodies—they understood that there were such things, but they could never experience emotions for themselves.

But the Lords Who Are did understand that peculiarly unpleasant inward disturbance, that inner conflict of desire and acceptance, that arose when a planned and expected outcome was thwarted by unforeseen events. Indeed, that might be the closest We Who Are could ever come to experiencing anything like emotion.

They experienced it now, however, as they took stock of the current situation. The local system’s vermin had somehow managed to overwhelm the huntership’s shielding, and blind it as well. Analyses of the vectors of several nearby vermin spacecraft suggested that the locals were going to try for an intercept. That could not be permitted.

Another concept We Who Are rarely needed to deal with was the idea of hurry. Time, generally, was simply another factor to be worked into the equations of the moment. But it was imperative, now, that repairs be completed in a very great hurry indeed. Clearly, the locals should be classified as a’amv’yet, meaning a serious threat to We Who Are.

A threat requiring the immediate sterilization of this entire star system.

Assault Detachment Alpha

Autie Navy Sierra 1-1

1417 hrs, GMT

“Three … two … one … grapple release.”

Garroway felt the jolt as the autie was cast clear of the Commodore Edward Preble. They were falling free through empty space once more.

“We’re clear,” the mental voice continued. “And … primary ignition in five … four … three … two … one … ignition!”

A giant’s hand slammed down on Garroway’s chest, pressing him back into the thinly padded seat. The AUTs—like the Preble, and like most human-crewed spacecraft nowadays—made use of Oannan drivefield technology, but that only reduced the effects of inertia, allowing higher accelerations and more violent maneuvering than would otherwise be possible with a human payload. The effects of acceleration were still felt, and they were still unpleasant.

The autie boosted hard for two minutes before the blessed relief of zero-G again enfolded him.

“C’mon!” one Marine griped over the platoon channel. “When do we get to see where we’re going?”

“Belay that,” Garroway snapped. Every Marine on the autie was keyed to the breaking point. It was the platoon gunnery sergeant’s job, his job, to make sure they didn’t actually snap. “When they have a feed, they’ll give it to us. For now, keep hitting your weapons checktext. Ooh-rah?”

“Ooh-rah.” But the response was scattered and weak.

In fact, the team had been over its weapons and equipment checks time and time again already. They were as ready as they could be … as ready as any military strike force could be flying blind into an unknown tactical situation.

“How about it, Lieutenant?” he asked, using the private command channel. Wilkie was on board the autie, though he wasn’t on the cargo deck with the rest of the Marines. As CO of the op, he would monitor things from a console-couch in the AUT’s cockpit. “They haven’t told us a fucking thing. Right now, morale sucks and our performance is going to suffer for it. When do we at least get to see where we’re going?”

“Like you just told them, Gunny,” Wilkie said. “When they decide to give us something to look at. In the meantime, we have to be patient.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, ‘patience,’” Garroway replied, falling back on an old joke. “How long will that take?”

Wilkie didn’t reply, however.

Garroway was concerned about the lieutenant. He was almost as new to the Marines as Lowey, Atkins, and a couple of the other newbies were. According to the man’s personnel files, he’d commanded a platoon Earthside out of Annapolis, but that had only been for three months, until he’d been assigned to SCS, Space Combat School. After that, he’d been sent straight to RST-1, and that had been just two months ago. Garroway had no doubts whatsoever about Wilkie’s technical qualifications. But he did wonder about his ability to lead Marines. In his two months with the RST, Wilkie had seemed … remote, somehow. Nothing Garroway could really put on the table and criticize, but his abrupt manner was worrisome, sometimes. Distracted. And inflexible. A good Marine officer textened to his senior NCOs carefully, even let himself be guided by them. Wilkie, somehow, seemed driven by his own agenda, with a single-mindedness that had won him the nickname “Will-kill.”

The joke was that no one knew who his single-mindedness would kill—the enemy, or the Marines under his command.

But that was outside of Garroway’s control. A good platoon gunny got his people through all kinds of obstacles and problems—including those presented by obstinate or know-it-all junior officers.

Damn it, though, this time it was worse than usual. No information was coming down from the top … and that made Garroway’s job a hell of a lot tougher.

The minutes dragged by, as stress—measured by the bio readouts for each member of the platoon—grew to near-intolerable levels.

Only in the last couple of minutes did the Marines see what was awaiting them.

The datafeed, according to the peripheral alphanumerics, was coming from an unmanned drone approaching the Intruder. That, he thought, is why the delay. We didn’t have anything close enough to send us a picture.

The alien was definitely a twin of the Xul starship that had come through the stargate at Sirius a century and a half ago—two kilometers long, a slender needle forward, gently swelling into bulges and protuberances of unknown purpose farther aft, the whole gleaming gold in the weak light of a distant Sol.

And—the God of Battle be praised—it looked dead.

Looked. That was the operative word. The HELGA lasers had slashed into the rear quarter of the ship, leaving that end raggedly truncated and surrounded by a slowly expanding cloud of dust, frozen mist, and debris. Much of the golden hull forward was scorched and blackened.

Still, he’d studied recordings made at the Battle of Sirius, and this didn’t look as bad as the damage that had taken out the other Hunter vessel. The Marines would have to assume that whatever passed for crew over there were very much alive and ready to defend their property.

Garroway heard the mingled comments of several of the watching Marines.

“Jesus! Look at the size of that thing.”

“Hey, Cowboy. Size doesn’t matter. You should know that!”

“What are we gonna do … fly up its ass?”

“You got a better way to goose that bitch?”

Abruptly, the image winked out, raising an angry chorus of complaints and grousings.

“Hey! Who turned it off?”

“Let us see, damn it!”

“Texten up, people,” Wilkie said over the platoon channel, overriding the grumblings. “They just passed the word that they’re going to trigger two XELs in a minute. It’ll be like a preliminary bombardment, giving us some cover going in. They switched off the drone’s feed to save its optics.”

The grumbling abated somewhat, but not entirely. For Garroway, though, that was good news. Hitting the Xul intruder again, moments before the RST boarded it, might make the difference between survival and death.

And if we’re real lucky, he thought, they’ll overdo it and the damned thing will be vaporized! He found he didn’t mind at all the possibility that this operation would be aborted at the last minute.

Battlespace

1443 hrs, GMT

The X-ray laser platforms in extended orbit about Mars were under the control of an artificial intelligence named Artemis. She was, in fact, a software clone identical in most respects to Kali, who was handling the long-range targeting of the Xul intruder at HELGA Three, but she was resident in the military computer network that embraced Mars, Deimos, and Phobos, as well as several of the warships currently within a few light-seconds of the Red Planet.

Her name was apt. In Greek mythology, Artemis was half sister to Ares, the God of War who became Mars when the Romans acquired him, and she was a huntress, expert with the bow. Artemis wasn’t using a bow now, of course, but she was having to take very careful aim at a target several light-seconds distant … which meant she had to take into account the target’s residual velocity of several kilometers per second relative to the planet.

The XEL satellites could deliver only a fraction of the energy yield of a single HELGA shot, but every indication seemed to suggest that the Xul ship’s energy screens were down. If so, Humankind might have just lucked out; XELs were designed to vaporize mountain-sized boulders on an intercept course with Earth, or at least vaporize enough of them that they were nudged, hard, into a new path.

Artemis was about to nudge the Intruder … hard.

Her targeting task was made more difficult by the fact that the XELs were on opposite sides of Mars, and separated by almost two light-seconds. Artemis had to time the triggering as well as take into account the time it would take the bursts of X-ray energy to reach the target. For optimum effect, one X-ray laser pulse should hit the target no less than half a second after the other.

She was also at a disadvantage because there was only one drone within imaging range of the target right now, and she’d just switched that off in order to give her something by which to make a damage assessment after she fired.

Like the expert software system that she was, Artemis took all into account, made the necessary calculations—adjusting even for the slight bend in space created by both the Arean gravity well and the much smaller gravity well created by the black hole inside the target’s drive system. She delayed the shot as long as possible so that the Marine shuttle now approaching the target would enjoy the maximum effect, but not so long that she risked catching the AUT in the two beams of coherent X-rays.

At precisely the appointed moments, the two XELs detonated in nuclear fury, a hair over a second apart. In each, a 10 megaton fusion explosion generated an intense pulse of X-rays, which were shaped into coherence and given an aim point by powerful magnetic fields a stark instant before the generators of those fields were vaporized.

Two pulses of X-ray energy, each a tenth of a light-second long, flashed across intervening space. Both were invisible, both due to the airlessness of space and to the fact that X-rays are invisible to the human eye, but at the last instant both showed as dazzlingly bright threads of light as they seared through the cloud of dust and gas now surrounding the target. For another instant, though no one was present to see it, an intolerably brilliant point of light dazzled off the Xul ship’s side.

One point. The other shot had missed. Even the best AI expert system wasn’t perfect.

But when Artemis switched on the drone image feed again, it was clear that the first shot had hit, and with good effect. The target had not vaporized, unfortunately … but it had been badly holed amidships.

Artemis transmitted a brief signal to the approaching AUT. “You are clear to board.”

The Marines were going in.