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12 FEBRUARY 2314

Assault Detachment Alpha

Battlespace

1508 hrs, GMT

Garroway felt his gut twist as the autie spun end for end. The image of the objective didn’t change, of course, since it was coming from a remote drone. At least they had an image now; from the drone’s vantage point, it looked as though the XEL lasers had burned another hole into the Xul giant, roughly amidships.

A flashing red light illuminated the autie’s cargo deck—warning that the compartment was now in vacuum. For several minutes, now, the atmosphere had been bleeding away into storage tanks belowdeck. The Marines did not want to have to deal with the explosive effects of sudden decompression when the aft hatch opened up.

Acceleration slammed again into Garroway’s chest, and he heard the stifled gasps of several other Marines on the platoon channel. The autie was decelerating hard, backing down toward the objective as it fell stern-first, killing its residual velocity.

He found himself fervently hoping that the navigational AI piloting the autie knew what it was doing. Inertialess field or no, if they hit the Xul vessel too fast, all the Oannan technology in the Solar System wouldn’t keep them all from being reduced to bloody paste inside their armor—Spam in a can, as the old saying put it.

He wondered what Spam was. It didn’t sound pleasant.

To take his mind off that claustrophobic image, he checked his Hawking 34mm chaingun—again. The Preble, fortunately, had been carrying a store of live ammo, including cases of 34mm rounds, both AP and HE, and the Navy ratings had passed what they had down into the autie en route. Unfortunately, the supplies of expendable ammo were sharply limited—only about a thousand rounds per man. That meant the Marines’ ammo bins were less than a third full.

Still, it was better than going into live combat with training rounds. And the team’s pig-gunners all had fresh power packs. His chaingun loadout gave him a standard AP-HE three-to-one ratio—three rounds of armor piercing, followed by one of high explosive, a mix guaranteed to cut through just about anything a human opponent could throw at them.

Of course, these were not human opponents. He tried not to think about the possible consequences of that, either.

The deceleration went on for a long time. At the last moment, as his vision started to blur, Garroway saw the autie on the drone feed, a tiny bright star moving fast—too fast—toward the gaping hole in the Hunter ship’s flank.

Hell, where was the external feed from the autie? There ought to be a camera up, to show them where they were going … but there was no time to think about that.

“Brace for impact!” he called over the platoon channel.

In the image window in his mind, the star vanished into the far vaster mass of the Xul ship, slicing through tangled wreckage. The jolt slammed him back against the seat, nearly driving the breath from his body. The impact was silent in hard vacuum, of course, but he could feel the shuddering, grating vibrations of hull metal sliding through whatever the hell the Xul vessel was made of, transmitted through deck and seat.

And then he felt the familiar dropping sensation of zero gravity. The seat grabbers released him, and he flexed his body, drifting into the aisle between the seats, which now felt more like a tunnel, with no up or down, no deck or overhead. “Okay, Marines! Stand up! By twos! Secure your drift!”

The tunnel began filling with armored Marines moving gently out of their seats and turning to face aft, gripping the seat backs in gauntleted hands to keep from floating free. Aft, the main hatchway was opening up, the ramp swinging slowly out of the way. Peering past the shoulders of the Marines in front of him, Garroway could see … blackness. An empty cavern.

At least the hatch is opening, he thought. If the mechanism had been damaged by the autie’s tail-first impact, they would have had to emerge one at a time from the single-man hatches forward, an awkward and deadly way of entering combat.

“Ramp down!” the autie’s crew chief yelled. “You’re clear to go!”

“Okay, Marines,” Garroway called. “It’s going to be a close-quarters tangle in there. Weapon status on safety-interrupt! Acknowledge!”

Acknowledgments came back in rapid succession. With safety-interrupt engaged in their combat suit computers, their weapons would lock each time their line of fire intersected a fellow Marine.

“Boarding party away!” Garroway called. “Gung ho!”

The ancient battle cry was a contraction of a Chinese phrase, gung-ya hod-za, meaning “everyone pull together,” a beloved relic of the Corps’ deployment into China during the early twentieth century. In this case, pull together was meant literally. Gripping the seatbacks, the twin line of Marines had to haul themselves along, everyone moving in perfect unison to avoid colliding with one another. The bulky, two-meter suits, heavy with external armament and ammo bins, were tricky to maneuver in zero-G. By all pulling at the same time, the two lines of Marines propelled themselves forward, looking, as Garroway liked to think of it, like an enormous black millipede.

They exploded from the open rear ramp, exiting the claustrophobic confines of the AUT and emerging in a vast and partly empty volume of space. The shuttle had backed into the crater burned into the Xul vessel, pushing in through a tangle of what looked like girders or struts and coming to rest in a spider web of twisted beams. Whatever had been in here had largely been reduced to wreckage and debris. Huge masses remained, but so blasted and melted that it was impossible to tell what those masses had been.

At optical wavelengths, the space was in complete darkness, but Garroway’s infrared sensors showed the walls and debris within the hole still glowing in eerie reds and oranges. Some of the wreckage was still molten, in fact, and it looked as though the white-hot plasma from the autie’s thrusters had added to the fiery destruction. Beyond the trapped autie, through the gaping hole in the Xul ship’s side, he could see the stars outside.

“Now that’s what I call a fucking preliminary bombardment!” Chrome yelled over the platoon channel. “Section Two! Follow me!”

They’d sketched out their tactical deployment during the hours of transit as part of the Preble’s cargo. Half of the Marines peeled off and began moving aft within the Xul wreckage, hauling their way through the debris where they had to, using their suit thrusters in open space. Daugherty and Hoyer were with her, hauling two of the nukes.

“Section One!” Garroway called out. “With me!” His suit’s AI oriented him with the forward end of the Xul vessel, painting a targeting cursor on the cavern wall in that direction. He pushed off from a twisted, sullenly glowing girder. On his tactical readout, he saw fifteen of the Marines following him. Lowey, Istook, and Sergeant Ortiz were close behind him, carrying first section’s allotment of nukes. They had a long boost through relatively empty space—almost two hundred meters—to reach the charred and twisted ruin of the cavern’s forward wall. For a long moment, they drifted through empty space. Then, using a much-practiced maneuver, they tucked and twisted, turning so that they were drifting feet-first.

ZGM—Zero-Gravity Maneuvering—was endlessly practiced by Marines assigned to space billets; arguably, that was what distinguished Fleet Marines from the ground-pounders. Garroway’s boots hit the wall, and he allowed himself to crumple with the impact, absorbing the energy in his legs and back to avoid rebounding back into the cavern.

The other Marines came in around him, silently falling into the wall; two, Atkins and Freemont, bounced, drifting back into the cavern, but their buddies grabbed hold of their harnesses before they floated out of reach and hauled them in. Garroway made a mental note to talk to them later about scheduling additional ZGM training.

If there is a later, he reminded himself. So far, the Xuls hadn’t paid any attention to the tiny force of Marines crawling around in the savaged bowels of their ship. But that would change.

“Istook, Ortiz, Lowey,” he said. “Texten up! Engage triggering sequence Alpha. Confirm!”

“Trigger sequence Alpha confirmed,” Ortiz told him.

“Alpha confirmed,” Lowey said.

“Sequence Alpha, confirmed,” Istook added.

Sequence Alpha was controlled by their individual suit AIs. It armed the backpack nukes, setting them to detonate if—and only if—Garroway or Chrome, or Wilkie back on board the autie, or General Garroway back on board the Preble, transmitted a coded radio signal. It was a form of mission insurance. If every member of the boarding party was somehow and suddenly killed, the nukes in their CAS backpacks could still be fired.

Garroway wasn’t sure he entirely trusted Wilkie’s mental thumb on the destruct switch. He hated admitting that to himself, but … there it was. The idea of having a nested set of destruct sequence go/no-go triggers was so that if Chrome and Garroway both bought it in the next few minutes, Wilkie could decide whether or not to trigger the nukes immediately, based on the status of the rest of the assault force. If the AUT was destroyed in the next few moments, and Wilkie with it, the decision would revert to Uncle Clint.

He trusted his uncle. Wilkie, he did not … not entirely. It wasn’t that Garroway thought the guy would push the button on the RST deliberately, but the guy could panic. If he did, he might transmit the firing code before the rest of the Marines could get clear of the Xul vessel, might trigger the nukes even before the autie got clear. That, in fact, was his responsibility if it looked like the mission would otherwise fail.

Cool heads were needed to make that kind of call. And Garroway just wasn’t convinced that the twenty-seven-year-old Wilkie had the prerequisite chill to the organic component of what was stuffed into his skull. He worried too much.

And this wasn’t the time to worry about Wilkie’s worrying. “Lowey!” he said. “Plant your boom-pack here. The rest of you, look for an entrance, some way to get into the ship.”

“Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant.”

He helped Lowey fasten the backpack nuke to the cavern wall, using a nano sealant that bonded tighter than any weld. “Okay. Set the timer. Sequence Bravo.”

He watched as he placed his left gauntlet on the pack’s contact plate and fed the Bravo code into the weapon’s computer.

“Charge ‘Whiskey’ is in place,” Garroway announced over the platoon channel. “The clock is running.”

The five nukes had been given the last five letters in the phonetic alphabet—Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, and Zulu. The Bravo sequence would detonate the weapon in two hours, unless it received a coded order to revert to Alpha, or to proceed to Charlie.

“Hey, Gunny!” Corporal Hoeffel called. “We got movement!”

Direction was indicated on his tactical feed. Garroway rotated his CAS in space, searching the indicated direction. Yes … there it was.

He wasn’t at first sure of what he was seeing, exactly. It looked as though some of the masses of half-molten metal, the remnants of hull and bulkheads, were growing, with new pieces being extruded from the old. And … he could see a cloud moving past the stars visible through the opening in the hull, like a swarm of gnats or locusts. As he watched, the swarm appeared to solidify in places, filling in gaps and emptiness.

Swiftly, inexorably, the Xul ship was repairing itself.

Battlespace

1537 hrs, GMT

The HELGA facility, its fire mission against the Xul ship complete, had returned to its original task—tracking and destroying each of the stream of rocks now hurtling in past the orbit of Mars, bound for Earth. Every forty-eight minutes, its recharge was complete, and Kali would loose another brief but deadly stream of invisible fire at another of the distant, fast-moving asteroids. After several shots, HELGA One came on-line as well and began adding its three-second bolts to the ongoing barrage.

HELGA One was directed by a fire-control AI named Durga, after the Hindu mother-goddess destroyer of demons. As soon as she came on-line, Durga began coordinating her fire patterns with Kali, ensuring that two bolts were not loosed toward one target when a single bolt would suffice. There were too many targets, and too little time, for duplication of effort.

Unfortunately, the radar and laser imaging scans that allowed Kali and Durga to identify and target fast-moving rocks light-minutes distant were rapidly becoming less and less reliable. Each time multimegaton bursts of energy vaporized mountain-sized chunks of rock and ice, a great deal of debris was left over, ranging in mass from dust and grains of sand to pieces the size of a large house. Each single piece had received its own new vector component when it was blasted from the parent body, causing the debris cloud to expand as it moved, but each piece also retained the original two-thousand-kilometers-per-second velocity of the original vector.

Toward Earth.

Assault Detachment Alpha

On Board the Xul Intruder

1545 hrs, GMT

The Marines of Detachment Alpha had been moving through the blast-tangled guts of the Xul ship for thirty minutes, now, exploring the nearest passageways in the glare of the lights mounted on the shoulders of their battle armor. X-ray backscatter imaging scanners had identified areas behind intact bulkheads that might be passageways and others that appeared to be packed with the Xul equivalent of electronics and heavy machinery. Nanodisassembler packs slapped against portions of the bulkhead walling off rooms or passageways had given them entrance into the bowels of the alien ship. The passageways were in vacuum—which might mean the ship’s air supply had bled away, or might simply mean the Xul didn’t need air. Researchers were still arguing over whether what humans knew as the Xul even possessed an organic component. They might well be a pure artificial intelligence—as good a term as any to apply to near-immortal beings apparently comprised of vast arrays of separate minds somehow downloaded from many sources.

It was the strangest combat Garroway had ever experienced, either in live action or in sim. The passageways, not meant for humans, were triangular in cross-section, the walls strangely folded and wrinkled, lined with almost organic-seeming masses of resin or extruded nanalloy that had a positively organic look to it. In places, the walls appeared sharp-cornered, crenellated, and neatly ordered; in others, they were lined with shapeless blocks, swellings, depressions, and bulges, often wet and oozing, with the result that moving through them felt like a nightmare journey through the intestines of some inconceivably vast beast.

The tunnels ranged anywhere from less than a meter to over six meters in height. Even in the larger corridors, the converging walls seemed tailor-made to induce feelings of claustrophobia, together with a gut-felt sense that something was simply wrong with the perspective of the place. They were not lit, not in the spectrum visible to humans, though in some the bulkheads glowed at infrared wavelengths. Backscatter examinations of the walls showed that many of the passageways, despite the fact that their interior walls were anything but smooth, were almost certainly transport tubes, which used magnetic induction coils hidden within the bulkheads to impel cargos or vehicles along their lengths at high speed.

Needless to say, the thought that an alien version of an elevator car or subway capsule might come hurtling at them out of the darkness at any moment did not at all help matters.

When Garroway led his team through a gap in the bulkhead, however, carefully picking his way past edges still glowing and dribbling off molten gobbets of hot metal from the thermal effects of the ND charge, it was not to face Xul subway vehicles, but the first onslaught of the alien vessel’s defense network.

Humans had encountered the Xul defenders before, in the battle at the Sirius Gate, and the scanty information acquired during that encounter had been endlessly studied, back-engineered, and extrapolated in sim. Like the soldiers of a terrestrial ant or termite colony—or the leucocytes in the human bloodstream—they responded to threats within the ship, appearing first in handfuls, then in greater and greater numbers. It was hypothesized that the Xul vessel was nanufacturing them somewhere in its depths, deploying them to the point of attack via the internal system of tubes and tunnels.

Garroway first became aware that the detachment was under attack when Corporal Visclosky, four behind him in the queue, screamed and his icon on Garroway’s noumenal tactical display window flashed from green to blue, then winked out. Dozens of red icons suddenly popped into existence on the same display, seeming to literally grow out of the walls on all sides.

“Man down! Man down!” Dulaney was yelling. High-speed autofire lit up the tunnel walls, casting flickering, eldritch shadows. “Shit, shit, shit! They got Visky!”

A second scream, a second light winked out. “Ortiz’s down! We lost Sergeant Ortiz!”

“Someone grab Ortiz’s boom-pack!” Garroway ordered. A brutally harsh command, but necessary. Ortiz’s telemetry showed he was dead, but the tactical nuke he’d been packing was still live and set to sequence Alpha.

It wouldn’t do to let the enemy get hold of it.

The thought elicited a derisive snort. Idiot! he thought. What would they want with it? Xul technology makes nuke-packs look like stone axes!

In the darkness ahead of him, Garroway saw movement, a flicker of black tentacles, a wink of reflected light, a shape emerging from shapelessness less than five meters away. Without thinking, he triggered his Hawking chaingun, sending a stream of 34mm slugs smashing into the half-glimpsed target. The recoil slammed him backward and tried to give him a left-to-right tumble, but his suit’s thrusters compensated automatically. He kept firing. Rounds sparked and flashed along the bulkheads with each ricochet; the shape flared white and came apart, half shattering into ragged fragments, the rest tumbling end-for-end back into the shadows.

Other targets appeared, seeming to separate from the strangely folded and crenellated walls, and he pivoted with the new motion, continuing to squeeze the firing contact inside his right gauntlet. His suit’s targeting system painted a crosshair reticule at the Hawking’s aim point, the image glowing bright in his visual field.

He could see very little of what he was fighting, even at what amounted to knife-fighting range. From intelligence gathered at Sirius Gate, he knew each Xul soldier was a teleoperated robot linked in with the ship’s controlling intelligence. Each was an elongated ovoid between a meter and two meters in length, obsidian-black, the smoothly sculpted body swollen and bulging in places, indented and concave in others, with no apparent matching of the details of its shape with others of its kind. Crystalline lenses like fist-sized rubies were set here and there in the body, again with no single design plan evident, and tentacles, as few as one and as many as twenty, sprouted from random points, helping the device to propel its way through the passageways in the zero-gravity of the Xul vessel’s interior.

Its weaponry was varied, but usually consisted of a microparticle accelerator designed to fire very tiny but very high-energy bolts of charged particles along an intense magnetic field. They also used laser technology … and in direct hand-to-hand combat, those tentacles possessed superhuman strength.

The good news was that they were not heavily armored. Even handgun fire could punch through those paper-thin shells and wreak havoc with the quantum circuitry within. The stream of 34mm slugs from the chaingun slashed through them with explosive effect, sending chunks and fragments spinning wildly through the corridor.

Garroway’s Marines had been spread out along a three-meter-wide corridor when the Xul defenders began emerging from the bulkheads, literally appearing out of nowhere right in their midst. Pivoting in mid-passageway, Garroway saw Gwyneth Istook struggling in the grasp of a forest of black tentacles that seemed to grow from the nearest of the three enclosing walls.

Sending a stream of chaingun fire down that passageway would kill more of his Marines than Xul robots, despite the weapon’s safety-interrupt; he mentally thumbed his weapon selection to CQC and fired.

Close-Quarters Combat called for a change in ammo as well as a change in tactics. The mental selector switched his Hawking loadout to SX, low-velocity safety-explosive rounds that detonated on impact and would neither ricochet off the walls nor pass through the target to kill someone in the line of fire beyond. It also switched his fire selector to single-shot. He raised his right arm, dragging the reticule in his visual field onto the black mass entangling Istook, and squeezed the firing switch. Nothing happened; Istook’s struggles had pulled her around until her suit entered Garroway’s line of fire, and the safety-interrupt in his combat computer had blocked the shot. Cursing under his breath, Garroway shifted his aim into the shadowy mass farther from the jerking form of Ishtook’s CAS and fired three quick-spaced rounds. Tentacles whiplashed, then came apart. Ishtook tumbled backward out of the thing’s grasp, bouncing hard off the opposite bulkhead. “Th-thanks, Gunny!”

“Not a problem,” he said, snagging the arm of her suit and stopping her rebound. “Stay close!”

“Gunny! The black-hats are on the run!”

It was true. The attackers were vanishing from the tactical display—destroyed, or retreating back into countless small, hidden side passages.

“Section! Who has Oritz’s boom-pack?”

“Right here, Gunny,” Corporal Hood called.

“Give it here.” They needed to plant these last two charges, then get the hell out of Dodge. “C’mon! In here!”

His suit lights had revealed a side passageway leading off at an odd angle from the main one. Ducking inside, they found themselves in a small, elongated room with gtextening walls. “Place your weapon there,” he told her, pointing. He watched her back as she set her K-94 against one wall and release the nanoseal in its base, anchoring it solidly in place. “Set sequence Bravo.”