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12 FEBRUARY 2314

High Guard Monitor U.E.S. Prometheus

Trans-Saturn Space

1248 hrs, local

In the dark and lonely gulf beyond the orbit of Saturn, one light-hour from a dim and shrunken Sol, the U.E.S. Prometheus maintained her year-long vigil.

During the twenty-first century, during the UN War, an attempt had been made to shift the orbit of a bit of nickel-iron debris in order to bring it down on North America with the destructive impact of many fusion warheads—a single blow to end a savage and expensive war. The attempt had failed—mostly. The wreckage of the spacecraft engaged in the tricky maneuver had come down over Lake Michigan; the ruins of Old Chicago would remain radioactively uninhabitable for a number of centuries yet to come.

Later, as Humankind began exploring its interstellar neighborhood, unsettling discoveries came to light, discoveries to the effect that the galactic predators known as the Hunters of the Dawn used asteroids to destroy promising civilizations, including the Ancients. Exoarcheologists were still exploring the planetwide ruins on Chiron, in the Alpha Centauri system, and believed that the Ancients’ colony on Mars had failed when an asteroid impact there had stripped away much of the artificially induced atmosphere. The An colony on Earth eight millennia ago—and the nascent human civilization that served as their slaves—had been wiped out by a small asteroid dropped into what was now the Arabian Gulf.

Evidently, when it came to planet-wrecking, asteroids were the long-established weapon of choice.

To ensure that asteroids never again were used as weapons against Earth—by that world’s warring civilizations or by anyone else—the old Federal Republic of America had established the High Guard, a fleet of large warships patrolling through the emptiness from the Asteroid Belt out to beyond Saturn, tracking and monitoring all spacecraft moving into that immense zone.

The U.E. monitor Prometheus was one of the largest of the modern High Guard vessels, half a kilometer long, with a crew—Navy, Marine, and civilian—of almost three thousand. Mounting powerful batteries of high-energy lasers, missile batteries, and railgun-launched antimatter warheads, surrounded by a vast and far-flung cloud of robotic sensors, drones, and manned fighters, Prometheus was slow, but arguably the most powerful warship in the military inventory of the United Earth.

Much of the monitor’s crew was in nanosuspension, the better to conserve limited expendables like food, water, and air. At any given time, a quarter of her crew was awake and functioning; Blue Watch had the duty now.

Sensor Technician Third Class Baldwin drifted within a sphere of night, star-dusted, with brighter points of colored light marking the positions of Prometheus’s drones and patrols, of Deep System Station 39, and of Saturn, now some thirteen million kilometers to spinward. His noumenal link connected him with the assembled sensory data from all of Prometheus’s remote drones and fighters.

And there was nothing, nothing out there to threaten the almost meditational calm of the watch.

Watchstanding on a High Guard monitor generally was the very definition of the word boredom. The United Earth had been at peace now—for perhaps the first time in its recent history—for the past eighty years. The last of Earth’s wars, the abortive Central Asian Jihad of 2234, had ended almost before it had begun, and had been limited entirely to ground-based forces. The thought that anybody now possessed the technology to challenge either the U.E. or the American Confederation that dominated that world body in space—much less launch an attack from the Outer System—was laughable. In fact, more and more political voices on Earth had been calling for an end to the High Guard, for so long a frightfully expensive relic of a long-past threat.

The politicians could argue; in the meantime, the Navy continued its patrols. Tradition would be, must be, maintained. It was the Navy way.

ST/3 Baldwin first noticed something was happening when the monitor’s AI called his attention to an anomaly—a burst of high energy radiation arriving from the direction of the constellation Canis Major, close by the bright beacon of Alpha Canis Majoris—Sirius. Sensor drones in that direction responded an instant later, reporting a sizeable mass approaching at .95c.

“What the hell?” Baldwin asked, addressing no one in particular.

“Contact appears to be a ship,” Prometheus’s artificial intelligence told him. “Type unknown, propulsion system unknown, origin unknown.”

“Sound the contact alert,” Baldwin snapped. “Get the skipper on-line!”

“Whatcha got, Baldie?” the captain’s voice asked in his mind a heartbeat later.

“I don’t know, sir,” he replied. “Whatever it is, it’s big … and it’s coming in at near-c, right behind its dopplered wavefront.”

That was the trouble with sensor systems limited to the speed of light. If your target was approaching you at close to that velocity, you had damned little warning of the approach.

And then, the contact was there—huge, gleaming gold, needle-slender but easily packing the mass of four Titan-class High Guard monitors. It decelerated from close to light-speed to almost motionless relative to the Prometheus, hanging there in the black emptiness a scant hundred kilometers away.

“Christ and Krishna!” Captain O’Mallory rasped. Baldwin felt him trigger the dispatch release, transmitting the details of the encounter so far Earthward.

Baldwin had seen records of an identical vessel—the mile-long needle that had emerged from the Sirian Stargate over a century and a half ago to snatch up the exploratory vessel Wings of Isis, and then emerged again in 2170—or had it been a different ship? Whether the same or different, the monster intruder, positively identified as belonging to the near-mythical Hunters of the Dawn, had been destroyed in the fierce-fought Battle of Sirius.

The Hunters of the Dawn, the Xul of ancient Sumerian legend, had returned.

An instant later, Baldwin began screaming as the quantum reality ground state patterns of the Prometheus, and every soul on board her, were wrenched from material existence. The transformation took only a few seconds.

From ST/3 Baldwin’s perspective, however, the shrieking tortures of Hell engulfed him, the agony of discorporation going on … and on … and on …

Assault Detachment Alpha

Eos Chasma,

Mars

1410 hrs, local

Assault Detachment Alpha was nearly in position for the attack. They’d worked their way up a low range of rugged, eroded hills east of the LZ, and were looking down now on an enormous military base, sprawling towers, a large spaceport, and hectare upon neatly ordered hectare of warehousing. Most of the target was all in their heads—a noumenon conjured within their minds, as opposed to a phenomenon, existing in the world around them. The only material opposition were their human counterparts in this war game, Army Special Forces playing the role of OPFOR.

Still the training AI monitoring the operation was keeping track of both sides, tallying fire, casualties, and damage, even while painting the illusion of the sprawling military base in the minds of all of the human participants.

There’d been no fire yet, and no casualties on either side. The landing, much closer to the target than expected, had caught OPFOR by surprise. Space-suited figures were spilling from the image of pressurized bunkers to meet the Marines, but Assault Detachment Alpha had already grabbed the high ground. There weren’t many of them, either … only a company or so, perhaps fifty men. The rest must have already deployed deep into the desert, bypassed by Alpha’s pinpoint drop.

Garroway grinned behind the opaque shield of his helmet visor as the enemy streamed into the open below, racing for the high ground and straight into Alpha’s sights. It was going to be a slaughter—at least the way computers tallied things.

He ratcheted back the charging lever on his primary weapon, charging the Hawking. The ammunition load he was carrying was training ordnance, of course, but it would still make a most satisfying pyrotechnic display.

“A-D Alpha, Alpha Six,” Wilkie’s voice said over the net. “Let’s take ’em! …”

“Alpha Detachment, this is Stickney Base. Stand down. The exercise is terminated.”

“What the fuck?” Garroway looked up into the Martian sky—a deep ultramarine overhead, shading toward dusty pink near the horizon. Actually, Phobos was not above the horizon at the moment, though it would be soon. The tiny, potato-shaped moon orbited Mars in less than eight hours, rising in the west and setting in the east only five and a half hours later. But he stared up, anyway, as if to drag down from the sky some reason for the incomprehensible command. “What the hell’s going on?”

“All right, Marines, you heard the order,” Lieutenant Wilkie said. He stood up, sand spilling from his combat armor as its surface rippled with the rust and ocher hues of its chameleonic display. “Safe your weapons!”

In the valley below, the magical city of towers, warehouses, and bunkers shimmered and faded from view. In its place, a pair of pressure domes remained, along with a few dozen black-armored Special Forces troopers.

In single file, the Marine element began trudging down the hillside toward the waiting soldiers.

“Hey, Marines,” one of their former enemies called, raising a massively gauntleted hand. His words were light, bantering. “We were gonna kick your asses!”

“Ah, you guys were already dead,” Lance Corporal Annette DeVries said. “We had you in our sights!”

“Yeah?” another SpecFor soldier said. “We were just suckering you in, jarheads. We had two more companies out in the desert, closing on you from all sides.”

“That would have put you right where we wanted you, doggie,” Chrome observed. “We could’ve shot in every direction without hitting our own guys.”

“Quiet down, quiet down,” Wilkie ordered. “Save it. A couple of transports are inbound to haul us back to base.”

“So why the cancellation of the fun and games, Lieutenant?” Garroway asked. “Things were just getting interesting.”

“You’ll be told what you need to know when you need to know it, Gunny. Now get your ass in gear and move it!”

Garroway scowled at the back of the officer’s helmet, just ahead of him in the file. Wilkie was a newbie to Bravo Company, fresh out of Annapolis, and hadn’t yet learned the difference between leadership and bullying. Fresh meat. It would be the job of the platoon’s senior NCOs—meaning him and Chrome—to get the guy squared away.

And if he didn’t square, well, there were ways of dealing with that, too. Gentle ways, but ways. A company commander learned to work with his NCOs, his most experienced people, or he found himself transferred to a less life-and-death-oriented billet.

The fact remained, something was happening to upset the brass. He turned and looked back toward the western horizon again, where low, dun-colored hills stood out in crisp relief against the dust-laden sky. Phobos was just now rising—a tiny, misshapen disk, moving swiftly enough that he could actually track its movement by eye.

What the hell was going on up there?

Mars Military Training Command

Stickney Base,

Phobos

1455 hrs, local

“This way, General, if you please.”

Garroway followed the young Navy lieutenant commander down a corridor with rounded, padded walls and four sets of handrails placed to either side, and above and below. The surface gravity of Phobos was minute; he weighed only a few ounces here, and he could make his way with considerable speed by pulling himself along hand-over-hand. The tunnel was crowded with military personnel of all services, and a number of civilians as well, all moving in the same direction.

“Just where in hell are we going, commander?” Garroway demanded.

“Orders, sir,” she replied. “From Earth! We’re evacuating Phobos.”

“So I gather. Why?”

“Damfino … uh, sorry, sir. I don’t know. But hurry! Please!”

Like red cells crowding through a blood vessel, the crowd followed a bend in the passageway leading left, then took a new tunnel that opened in the overhead of the old. Hauling himself up against the moonlet’s feeble gravity, he soon entered a massive airlock, and recognized one of the main docking connectors giving access to the labyrinth of tunnels and rooms honeycombing Phobos. Two scared-looking naval personnel clung to the bulkheads, waving people on, and up.

Moments later, Garroway followed his escort into the main lock of the armed transport Commodore Edward Preble.

His escort threaded her way ahead through the press of bodies, leading him at last to a compartment marked COMMUNICATIONS CENTER.

“They wanted you in here, sir,” she told him. “Go to Channel Fifteen, and identify yourself. Good luck!”

“Thank you, Commander …”

But she was already gone.

Preble’s comm center was a circular room with several oversized, sharply reclined chairs set around the room’s perimeter, half of them already occupied by naval officers. Garroway picked an empty seat, lay down, and brought the palm of his hand into contact with the electronic pickup in the armrest.

“Channel Fifteen,” he said in his mind. “Garroway, Clinton. Major General. Service number seven-seven-six, three-one—”

A window opened in his mind.

He recognized the face looking out at him—an old friend, Major General Ronald Edison, CO of the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Command, and Garroway’s boss. “Good morning, Clint,” Edison said. The older man’s eyes flicked to a point offcamera, then back. “At least, it’s morning here. We have … a problem.”

Garroway didn’t respond. Edison was on Earth—probably in his office in the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia—and with the current respective positions of Earth and Mars, a lasercom signal took over fourteen minutes to pass one-way from one to the other. Edison had transmitted this message almost a quarter of an hour earlier.

“Thirty minutes ago, we received an emergency tight-beam radio communication from the Titan-class monitor Prometheus. The message was transmitted from near Saturn at zero-four-forty-eight hours Zulu—that’s just over an hour and a half ago. Here is the message in its entirety.”

The general’s face vanished, replaced by a sight Garroway knew, but had hoped never to see in his lifetime—a rapidly growing oval of pure gold, reflecting the light of a distant sun as it approached the camera. The image shifted to a different angle, this one taken from a remote drone some distance away and off to one side. The golden oval was only the end-on view of an immense vessel, shaped like a flattened needle, slim, but titanic in bulk and mass. Flickering alphanumerics on the border of the noumenal image, together with computer-generated schematics, suggested a vessel nearly two kilometers long, hundreds of meters thick, and massing somewhere in the tens of millions of tons.

“The ship appears to be identical to the one we encountered at Sirius in 2170!” a new voice was saying. Static hissed and blasted, distorting the words. The intruder must be putting out some sort of high-energy field, interfering with the transmission. “We have just lost contact with the High Guard patrol frigate Rasmusson, which … well, their last known position would have been pretty close to this monster’s line of approach.

“It’s coming from just about right ascension six hours, forty-five minutes, declination minus sixteen degrees, forty-three minutes … in Canis Major. Pretty much bang-on the position of Sirius. I think this thing popped through the Stargate out there, and came straight to us. It’s getting closer …”

Fresh static washed across the message, and the image shivered and flickered. Garroway strained to hear the next few words. “… ters of … Dawn … huge … no communications …” Image and sound garbled out for a few seconds, then, eerily, came back, momentarily clear. “Get the word out!” the speaker said. “They’re back!”

Then the image flared white with interference snow, turned ragged, and was gone.

General Edison’s face stared again into Garroway’s noumenal gaze. “The Hunter ship approached the Prometheus at point nine-five c before slowing to a relative stop in seconds. We can assume that after destroying the monitor, it has continued into the inner system at near-light speed. It may reach Earth at any moment.

“The President has alerted all commands to the threat. As of this moment, we are on a full war alert. I’ve ordered the evacuation of Phobos, on the assumption that the invaders will be able to detect the communications nexus there, and may strike there as well. In ships, you might have a chance.

“This is what we’ve been dreading for a century and a half, Clint. It’s finally happened. They’ve found us. Somehow, God knows how, we’ve got to stop them.

“I am hereby authorizing full implementation of the RST, and transferring command to 1MIEU. If you can stop that monster, Clint … do it! We’re counting on you. All of us.”

And the image blinked out, replaced by the words TRANSMISSION ENDS, and the globe-and-anchor logo of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Garroway opened his eyes, staring up at the green-painted overhead. Stop that monster? Gods … how? That thing was a mile long, tossed black holes as missiles, and—if the data recovered at Sirius was correct—capable of blowing up a sun.

They’d be damned lucky if any of them simply survived the next couple of hours.

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

0658 hrs, GMT

The huntership didn’t need to proceed all the way in-system to the primary target within 2420-544, a typical rocky, life-infested world three-quarters covered by water, and enveloped in an atmosphere consisting of nitrogen, oxygen, and various trace gases. We Who Are were never hasty, and never took unnecessary risks. Judging from the explosion of increased radio traffic now beginning to ripple out from the principle technological centers of this civilization, the dominant species here was aware of the Hunters’ presence, and were in the process of responding. From the Huntership’s vantage point, they’d just thrust a stick into a hive of swarming, stinging fliers. Until this Species 2824’s technology—in particular their military capability—could be fully assessed, caution was warranted.

But closing with the infested planet was not necessary. Most solar systems contained the leftover debris of their formation, and this one was no exception. Between the orbits of the fourth and fifth planets, especially, a number of asteroids, ranging from gravel to objects the size of mountains to fair-sized worldlets hundreds of standard units across, drifted in their individual orbits about the local star. It would only be necessary to capture a few of these and sling them into new orbits, targeting the infested worlds. How the primitives dealt with the situation would tell We Who Are much about their technical and military capabilities.

Intelligent civilizations, the group mind of We Who Are had concluded, were pernicious, like life itself popping up everywhere and anywhere, given the least bit of provocation. The majority, actually, were atechnic and harmless; some were actively useful in the greater scheme of things, candidates for patterning and inclusion within the college of minds comprising We Who Are. These, the far-ranging cultivators of We Who Are watched, tended, and occasionally weeded with clarity and dispassion.

A few, however, developed material technology early in their careers. As had the original progenitors of We Who Are a billion years in the remote past, these swiftly mastered primitive chemical energy-producing systems, nuclear power and nanotechnology, and finally the ultimate mysteries of quantum energy and the zero-point field. For such civilizations, anything was possible, including, inevitably, a direct challenge to the existence of We Who Are.

A billion years in the past, the Progenitors had survived a hostile and highly competitive world through the simple expedient of eliminating all possible rivals. It was a lesson in Darwinian realities that became virtually hard-wired into the species, a basic assumption of how the universe worked that, even when they began redesigning their own existence, they did not examine or question.

Any species, any civilization, any organism, any idea that posed a threat to the survival of We Who Are would be eliminated, immediately and by the most efficient and expeditious manner possible.

With some situations, it was necessary to induce the local star to go nova. That was definitely a last-resort option, however. Habitable planets were rare enough, and useful enough, that it was wasteful to reduce one to a seared and airless cinder. That option was reserved for alien civilizations that had advanced too far for a simple bombardment to be effective.

For most nascent technic civilizations, however, a few high-velocity asteroids slammed into the crust eliminated the pests without rendering the world permanently uninhabitable. Members of the species that survived the actual impacts—even those individuals belonging to space-faring cultures stranded on other worlds, tended to eliminate themselves in short order as they fought over dwindling resources, or died as their technological infrastructures—always so precariously in the balance!—failed.

That approach would certainly be adequate in the case of the infestation in the planetary system of 2420-544. We Who Are adjusted the vector of the huntership, closing with a likely asteroid. …

Assault Detachment Alpha

Eos Chasma,

Mars

1523 hrs, local

“Here they come!”

Garroway looked up into the deep ultramarine of the Martian sky. A trio of bright stars shone almost directly overhead, slowly growing brighter.

Two hundred meters away, the Special Forces troopers had already set out landing beacons, which pulsed brightly at both optical and infrared wavelengths. They would guide the shuttles down to the LZ.

“Assault Detachment Alpha, this is Navy Sierra One-one,” a voice said over Garroway’s headphones. “You boys are cleared for first dust-off. Stand ready.”

“Ah, roger that, Sierra One-one,” Wilkie replied over the same channel. “We’re ready.”

The voice of the shuttle pilot sounded tight and dry. What the hell was happening, anyway? Every one was stressed to the nines about something, and no one had bothered to tell the grunts what it was they had to worry about.

Typical. In fact, chances were that those Navy pilots up there didn’t know either, that they were simply reacting to the sudden avalanche of worry and stress from higher up the chain of command, like everyone else.

Wilkie was right. They would be told when they needed to know. But it griped him all the same.

One of the stars separated from formation with the other two, swiftly growing brighter, then resolving into an AUT-84 Cambria-class transport, all knobby modules, outriggers, and sponsons behind a bulky, insect-faced command module. A bright landing light shone from beneath the nose, and red and green running lights winked to port, starboard, and astern. Tiltjet thrusters were angled for a vertical touchdown, stirring up a swirling storm of dust and sand as the shuttle deployed its landing gear and gentled itself toward the ground. The landing was eerily silent, of course. The thin pretense that masqueraded as the Martian atmosphere wasn’t thick enough to carry sound.

The AUT—Armored Utility Transport, and called an “autie” for short—touched down with a slight bounce, the cargo ramp in its belly already deploying.

“Okay, Marines!” Wilkie yelled over the command channel. “Double file, and haul ass! Hut! Hut! Hut!”

The twin columns of Marines jogged ponderously down a slight rise, passing through the cloud of yellow dust still billowing around the utility craft, then up the ramp and into the darkened troop bay.

A Navy chief in a lightweight pressure suit and bubble helmet waved them on. “Let’s go, Leathernecks!” he called. “We’re on the meter, here! Drop your loads and grab a chair!”

The double row of seats along either side of the troop bay were specially designed to accommodate Mark XLIV CAS-clad Marines. Garroway hit the release for his backpack with its Shrike-C dummies, and passed it forward with the stream of other CAS packs. He found a seat and settled into it, feeling the automatic grabbers take hold, anchoring him in place. As his gauntlet came into contact with a pad on the armrest, he felt the mental connection with the shuttle’s AI, and the flow of data between it and his suit. A moment later, a window opened in his mind, giving him a clear view of the Martian landscape outside. The Special Forces were gathered in small knots well clear of the LZ, watching.

The autie was already climbing, boosting clear of the ground on its quad of outrigger tiltjets. There was a slight vibration as the jets began angling forward, repositioning for normal flight. The autie’s nose tipped up, and then they were accelerating with surprising speed for so clumsy looking a vehicle.

Garroway watched the LZ dwindle, saw the dark and wrinkled gash of the Vallis Marineris opening up on the horizon to the west like a vast wound on the planet’s dusky face. The sense of urgency remained. Someone wanted the Marines of Detachment Alpha someplace else in one hell of a hurry. At first, he thought they were shaping an approach vector to Phobos, which was rising in the west, now, well behind the accelerating autie. After a few more moments, though, it became clear that they were climbing beyond the orbit of Phobos, some 9,400 kilometers above the Martian surface, that the shuttle pilots had another rendezvous in mind.

For the first time, Garroway began to consider the obvious, the possibility that something had happened requiring a combat-ready Marine detachment.

No one had passed the word yet, but it felt like the Marines were going to war.