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12 FEBRUARY 2314

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

0740 hrs, GMT

The huntership decelerated with inertialess ease, coming to a relative halt close alongside the drifting chunk of dark gray rock, almost black, dust-cloaked and cratered. Invisible energies reached forth, caressing the stony, carbonaceous chunk, a leftover tidbit from the formative period of this star system.

Within the eldritch world of the quantum, qualities such as mass, inertia, and gravity all were dictated by standing waves within the background base state of reality known as the zero-point field. Here, within an arena far below those gross and clumsily huge manifestations of matter and energy known as protons, neutrons, or electrons, virtual particles came into existence and, within an instant, vanished again. Manipulating those standing waves allowed matter to be rearranged, inertia to be banished, and gravity itself to be eliminated, reduced, or redirected. Accessing the zero-point field allowed space itself to be twisted and restructured, permitting faster-than-light travel, as well as the creation of incredible energies drawn from the vacuum of so-called empty space.

We Who Are found and wave-patterned the nameless lump of nickel-iron against the matrix of the zero-point field, then gently adjusted the parameters determining mass, inertia, and vector. Instantly, the chunk of rock hurtled off at high speed in a new direction, one taking it in-system, toward the bright blue point of light identified as the homeworld for 2420-544’s dominant sentient species.

Extending their electronic senses further afield, We Who Are located a second lump of dark stone tumbling through the night and moved to intercept it.

Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

0817 hrs, Shipboard/GMT

Escape velocity from the surface of Phobos was only a hair over ten centimeters per second. A single sharp, short burst from the Preble’s main thrusters, and the Navy transport was moving out from Mars fast enough that the tiny, potato-shaped moon rapidly dwindled to a dark speck barely visible against the orange-rust face of Mars, then vanished. General Garroway felt the sudden cessation of thrust, and the return of the falling sensation of microgravity, and wondered what was happening.

By tapping into the Preble’s common access datalink, Garroway was able to open a navigational window, which showed that the transport was in the process of rendezvousing with a high-speed AUT coming up from the Martian surface ahead. The shuttle was already in a considerably higher orbit than was the Preble, which meant the transport would soon overtake the tiny craft, now three thousand kilometers in front of them.

A further data check revealed the interesting datum that the autie was carrying thirty-two marines of Detachment Alpha, the same group whose exercise he’d just been watching from the relative comfort of the Phobos training facility.

His nephew was on board, one of five or six senior NCOs.

He resisted the temptation to link into the autie’s comm center and talk to Travis, to let him know that his uncle was on board the Preble. There would be time enough for reunion later.

Besides, the change in the RST’s status, transferring it to 1MIEU and putting it directly under his command, raised a nightmare specter—the possibility that soon, possibly very soon, General Clinton Garroway would be giving orders that meant Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway’s death.

A warning chimed within his head. Jack Bettisly, his aide, was calling for his attention.

“Damn it, what do you want?”

He felt Major Bettisly’s flinch, and immediately regretted the snap of anger. Still, there was no going back.

“Sorry to intrude, sir,” Bettisly said. “But we have a feed from three High Guard pickets. They’ve found the intruder, sir.”

“Let me see.”

A three-dimensional schematic opened in a new mental window. The intruder’s course was clearly marked, as were the last known positions of the monitor Prometheus and the patrol frigate Rasmusson, several High Guard drones, and Mars, with the Preble just beginning to get under way. A tiny white star had detached from the crimson star marking the intruder. “What’s that?”

Data unfolded in columns down the right side of the window. “Mass analyses suggests it’s a small asteroid, sir,” Bettisly told him. “About one kilometer across … mass approximately two billion tons. The intruder seems to have nudged it onto a new vector.”

Garroway studied the data with growing horror. “Two thousand kilometers per second?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s a hell of a nudge.” A cold thought gripped his heart. “Where’s it going? What’s the target?”

The schematic shrank in the window, showing more of the orbit of Mars … and then of Earth. A yellow line projected itself along the rock’s projected path, which passed just in front of Earth’s current position. The white star tracked down the slightly curving line as Earth moved forward. …

“Great Father in Heaven …”

“Yes, sir. The rock will hit Earth.”

“How long?”

“Nineteen hours, forty-seven minutes, thirty seconds from launch.”

“Less than a full day. Still, there’s time to intercept it.”

“Yes, sir.” Bettisly sounded uncertain.

“Talk to me.”

“Two thousand kps, sir. That’s fast. Just how are we supposed to intercept it? And the intruder appears to be closing on another small asteroid.”

On the schematic, the Hunter ship appeared to leap ahead, vaulting across several thousand kilometers within an eye’s blink. Seconds later, a second curving, yellow path drew itself across space, moving almost parallel to the first, but gently converging with it, the two lines intersecting where they crossed Earth’s orbit.

“Damn,” Garroway said quietly. “It’s going to keep throwing rocks.”

“That is Quincy’s analysis at this point, General.”

Quincy was the invisible member of Garroway’s command constellation, an AI resident at the moment in Phobos, but who could be uploaded to the Preble’s on-board computer network once the crew had things squared away. Their precipitous exit from Phobos had pretty much scrambled any hope of an orderly transition for the MIEU command group. They weren’t even supposed to be on this vessel, which was small, cramped, and possessed a frankly second-rate electronics suite.

But Marines did what they could with what was available.

Even so, Garroway felt momentarily at a loss. What could the Marines do against such a weapon? Stopping falling rocks was the Navy’s job—specifically the High Guard. At this larger scale, the mind-window schematic showed several dozen blue stars scattered across the Inner System and the near reaches of the Asteroid Belt. Many were already in motion; the rest soon would be. The World Federation was now going on full alert, at war with the Hunters of the Dawn.

Dozens of Navy warships were converging on the intruder.

But it’s not enough, Garroway thought. Not nearly enough. …

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

0850 hrs, GMT

The Lords Who Are took note of the swarm of hostile ships converging on the lone huntership, and dismissed the threat, a threat scarcely worthy even of contempt. Analysis of the local species’ technological capabilities verified the data assembled from the various local spacecraft already patterned and stored. The local species—the name We Who Are reserved for such might have translated well as “pests” or “vermin”—used spacecraft capable of sustained thrust, but at accelerations so low it would take millions of seconds to reach a meaningful percentage of the speed of light, and they did not appear to possess faster-than-light capabilities at all.

So far as weapons were concerned, it appeared unlikely that they had anything more threatening than high-energy coherent beam weapons, missiles with various types of warheads, or kinetic-kill weapons employing high-velocity masses. Some of those weapons might prove to be a minor threat, if the vermin could get close enough to the huntership to employ them.

The Lords Who Are considered the advisability of a minor demonstration to convince the vermin of their own helplessness. It would be some time, however, before the nearest of the local defenders would be close enough for the huntership to employ its own weapons against them.

They elected to continue snatching small asteroids from orbit and imparting to them new vectors, vectors that would carry them in to strike the third planet, and utterly annihilate the vermin civilization.

Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

0924 hrs, Shipboard/GMT

“That’s the fifth asteroid launched in the past hour and a half,” Admiral Jollet said. “They’re testing our defenses by brute strength, throwing enough at them to overwhelm them.”

“‘Testing?’” General Garroway said. “It looks to me like an all-out attempt to wipe us off the face of the Galaxy.”

“The intruder,” Rear Admiral Thom Bennett was saying, “appears to be trying to wipe us out as a species, using classic wave tactics.”

Bennett hadn’t heard Garroway’s comment, of course. Garroway and Jollett, both, were on board the Commodore Edward Preble, while most of the virtual conference participants were on Earth, currently seven light-minutes away. The exchange Garroway and the other brass on board the Preble were experiencing was old news—seven minutes old, to be precise. For that reason, they were out of the direct comm loop, but they could still talk among themselves.

“One ship?” Lieutenant General Clarence Armitage, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said with a mental snort. “Preposterous!”

“Thom is right,” General Eva Cortez said. “If even one of those rocks gets through, it means catastrophe.”

Garroway felt the emotions of the other men and women within the noumenal briefing session. It was, he thought, less a formal briefing than a mental chat-room gabfest and sightseeing session for the Federation’s high-ranking brass.

From his point of view, he was still watching the schematic showing the intruder’s progress through the Asteroid Belt, together with the fast-multiplying knot of new vectors intersecting at the point where Earth would be in another day and a half. Icons representing some two hundred other officers hung within the schematic with him, including the various chairpersons of the Joint Chiefs, their staffs, as well as a number of senior personnel representing the Federation Joint Forces Command, both the regular Navy and the High Guard, and the U.S. Marines. More brass were dropping into the noumenon every moment, as the scope and seriousness of the threat became more and more clear. Also present were a growing number of civilian government officials—representatives and congresspersons both from the governments of the United States of America and of the American Federal Union, as well as representatives from member states of the World Union.

Garroway felt the buzz of mental conversations seven minutes past, as well as the ebb and flow of emotions. Those last ranged from genuine fear to outright disbelief; as the intruder kicked more and more kilometer-sized boulders onto intercept courses with Earth, however, outright skepticism among the observers was dwindling.

One of the officers who remained unconvinced, however, was General Armitage. “By ‘wave tactics,’ Admiral, I assume you mean an attempt to swamp our defenses.”

“Yes, General. Five … no, six bodies, now … streaming in one after the other at two thousand kilometers per second … even the High Guard planetary defense AIs can’t cope with that. They’re trying, of course, but they can’t guarantee that one or more of those rocks won’t get through.”

“By my count, there are two hundred thirty-six High Guard vessels currently in Solar orbit,” a new voice said. The noumenal icon identified the speaker as Senator Alena Fortier, of Quebec. She was speaking Québecois French, but the AIs managing the mass mindlink handled the translations easily enough. “Perhaps it’s time the military finally paid for itself in terms of some useful action.”

“Madam Senator,” Rear Admiral Karen Castellaw said. “Things are not that simple.”

Castellaw was the current commanding officer of the High Guard, technically still a branch of the Federal Navy, but operating in most respects as a distinct entity, much like the Coast Guard that still patrolled North American waters on Earth.

“They never are,” Major General Edison dryly observed.

“Indeed?” Fortier snapped. “The High Guard, according to its charter, is there to protect Earth from impacts by comets and asteroids, am I right? In half a century, they’ve done nothing but act as a drain upon the public treasury. Now, there are asteroids—small ones, anyway, on collision course with Earth. Where, I ask, is the High Guard?”

Senator Fortier had a belligerent reputation. A staunch Democratic Unionist and a leader of the World Disarmament Coalition, she was an adamant and outspoken champion of an old and cherished dream—the total and complete elimination of the military. After eighty years of unbroken peace, many both in the North American Union and within the broader scope of the World Federal Union felt that Humankind could at last dispense with military expenditures entirely, diverting the money and the mind power instead to more peaceful and profitable uses.

Of course, the military’s position on that issue was that, if nothing else, one day it would be necessary to face the Hunters of the Dawn. Garroway found it fascinating that now, confronted with the reality and the immediacy of the Hunter threat, Senator Fortier still retained her stubbornly anti-military bias.

“The physics of the situation,” Dr. Katarina Walden, of the Union government’s Office of Planetographic Studies, pointed out, “are … intimidating. Even a one-kilometer asteroid can mass something like three million tons. There are strategies for vaporizing, or, more likely, for diverting something of that size. But these bodies are moving at two thousand kilometers per second. We quite simply don’t have anything that can match their courses and speeds in … less than eighteen hours, now.”

“So?” Fortier asked with a mental shrug. “If you can’t catch them with missiles, use plasma and HEL beams.”

“Senator, do you have any idea how much energy is required to completely vaporize a rock one kilometer in diameter?” Walden sounded exasperated. Garroway was impressed, however, by her reserve. “We will need to target each rock in such a way that a burst of plasma from the weapon strike acts as a kind of jet to shove it aside. If we do that early enough, the rock could be nudged aside enough that it might miss Earth. Might. If we can hit it early enough on its trajectory. At that kind of velocity, however, the rock might well not be shoved aside in time.”

“Then I would suggest that the sooner you begin, the greater the chance of success,” Fortier said.

“You’re right, Senator,” Admiral Castellaw said. “Of course. Our best and most immediate hope is the HELGA system, and I’ve already issued the necessary orders. All three weapons platforms have lines of sight on the incoming targets. They should be able to commence firing within two hours.”

HELGA stood for High-Energy Laser Gun Array. The word “Gun” in that acronym was often challenged by purists as redundant, but the Navy retained the age-old distinction of a gun as a very large and long-ranged shipboard weapon, as artillery rather than, say, a rifle. There were three HELGA stations, all sharing a single orbit around the sun between the orbits of Earth and Venus and spaced 120 degrees apart. Solar collector panels nearly ten square kilometers in gleaming expanse captured sunlight—far brighter and more energetic than the stuff that reached Earth—and stored it in the enormous high-capacity, high-discharge batteries that made up much of each orbital station’s bulk.

The HELGA stations, administered by the High Guard, had been designed with only one purpose in mind—to vaporize any asteroid or comet found to be on an intercept path with Earth. Since the twenty-first century, when an attempt had actually been made to destroy the United States through the deliberate manipulation of a ten-kilometer asteroid’s orbit, various Skyfall scenarios had remained the single biggest nightmare facing both military and civilian leaders. In the forty-seven years since the completion of Station One, they’d not once been necessary, though of course they’d been extensively tested against selected target asteroids in the Belt.

“Well … those big laser cannons won’t have any trouble with one-kilometer rocks, will they?” People’s Representative Gardenez, of the North American Federal Republic asked.

Castellaw sighed. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t answer that yet. It takes time between each laser discharge to store up enough energy for the next shot. We’re also programming twelve XEL satellites to contribute their fire as well. Between the two systems … maybe …”

“If the Hunters don’t put so many rocks into the stream,” General Dumont, the Marine Corps Commandant, added, “that neither the HELs or the XELs can handle them all.”

XELs—pronounced “zels” and standing for X-ray Emission Lasers—were unmanned weapons positioned at strategic points throughout the inner Asteroid Belt. When triggered, a nuclear detonation provided an intense pulse of X-rays, which were focused into a very brief, but very powerful burst of coherent X-ray energy. For obvious reasons, they were single-shot weapons, but the energy each released in a fraction of a second, while substantially less than that of a three-second burst from a HELGA platform, could still vaporize large rocks.

“All available fleet elements are being deployed toward the intruder,” Admiral Bennett said. “Unfortunately, it will take time to get there, and we run the risk of having them arrive piecemeal. What’s worse, the intruder appears capable of accelerating at incredible rates … possibly enough to reach the speed of light within moments.” He indicated the schematic, where the red star of the Hunter vessel suddenly winked out, to reappear tens of thousands of kilometers away. “We don’t know how the hell that could be possible, but he seems to be providing a demonstration, just for us.”

“An application of inertialess technology, obviously,” Representative Logan, of the Federal Union observed. “Have we discussed this with the Oannans?”

“There hasn’t been time yet, sir,” Bennett said. “We have a call in to their delegation on Earth. Not that it can do us any good now.”

“Maybe they can tell us how to hit the enemy’s propulsive system. Cripple it, somehow.”

“I doubt it, Senator,” Garroway put in. “Remember that the N’mah have been running and hiding from the Hunters for at least five thousand years. If they possessed any weapon or any tactic that could stop the Hunters, they would have done so by now.”

“Well … what does the military plan to do?” Fortier demanded. “You can’t just allow them to walk right over us!”

Garroway felt bitter amusement at her anger, but was textening with only half an ear. He had an idea, but it depended on coming up with some fresh IMAC pods. He opened a download of logistical data, checking the manifests of several military transports in the general vicinity of Mars. Yes … the Cunningham was in position to rendezvous with the Preble.

“There is one possibility,” Garroway said, opening his own comm link to the conference and tagging his comments to a windowed playback of the relevant part of the conversation. They would hear his contribution in another seven minutes.

He didn’t like making the suggestion, but every possibility had to be aired.

“We have a Marine VBSS team on board the Preble, en route for the battlespace now,” he continued, speaking over the muted voices of the Earth-bound participants. VBSS stood for Vessel Boarding Search and Seizure, a boarding party, in other words. “They were carrying training load-outs, but I’ve already given orders to begin transferring live ammo from the Preble’s stores.

“I see here on the manifest text that there is a section of IMACs on board the transport Cunningham. If Preble can rendezvous with Cunningham and effect an in-flight transfer of those assault pods, we might be able to board the Hunter ship.”

He continued speaking, laying out the rudiments of an operational plan. The biggest single difficulty he could see was the fact that the Xul intruder spacecraft clearly possessed both a technology far in advance of anything humans possessed, and a mobility to match. Still, there was a way to at least attempt to overcome the second of those problems. Maybe. …

Fourteen minutes later, the sounds and images Garroway, Jollett, and the other officers on board the Preble were experiencing suddenly reacted to Garroway’s suggestion.

“You must be kidding!” Fortier said into the sudden mental silence that followed.

“No, Madam Senator,” General Dumont said quietly. “I do not believe he is.”

“How do you expect those assault pods to get anywhere close to the enemy?” Armitage asked. “An enemy this powerful …”

“IMAC pods have quite an extensive bag of tricks for getting in close, sir,” Dumont replied. “It’s what they’re designed to do. I’m wondering, too, if we might not be able to divert some of the HEL and XEL firepower against the enemy ship at a tactically appropriate moment. That much energy, applied in a single burst … we might at least blind them, and we could get lucky.”

Garroway smiled. Dumont, 131 million kilometers away, had immediately grasped the essence of Garroway’s plan, including his suggestion for—momentarily, at least—overcoming the intruder’s technological superiority.

“Absolutely not!” Fortier said. “Those weapons are Earth’s only hope of stopping the asteroid attack!”

“Madam Senator, we can either chase that damned intruder all over the Solar System, trying to play catch-up … or we can find a way to immobilize it. If we can immobilize it, we have a chance, a small one, of getting some Marines on board.”

“And what would be the point of that?”

“Madam Senator, the Marines would be armed with backpack K-94 nuclear devices. If just one of those goes off on board the Hunter vessel—or even if we can detonate it up against its hull—well, I doubt very much that even their technology could stand up to that kind of blast.”

There was another silence as the Marine Commandant’s words sank in.

“Are you aware, General,” Armitage said quietly at last, “that you are proposing what is tantamount to a suicide mission?”

“Yes, sir. It will be volunteers only, of course. I’m sure that’s what General Garroway has in mind.”

It was. And Garroway had no doubt that there would be plenty of volunteers from the assault detachment. He knew what these Marines were like.

“Very noble, General, I’m sure,” Logan said. “But Senator Fortier is right. If the HELGA platforms are firing at the enemy ship, they can’t be firing at the asteroids threatening the Earth.”

“Sir, I submit that by the time Preble has picked up the assault pods and reached striking range of the intruder, the matter will already have been settled, one way or another.”

Garroway nodded in silent, unseen agreement. He didn’t add that a Marine assault on the Hunter warship could only take place if some way could be found to immobilize it. So long as it could slip away at the speed of light any time it felt threatened, no human weapon or vessel was going to be able to touch it. They would have to disable the intruder, at least temporarily, or they would never be able to catch it.

Unfortunately, Fortier, Logan, and the other civilian leaders had managed to hijack the informal planning session, turning it into a government-sponsored briefing session. That was one of the problems of chat-room technology; anyone with the appropriate codes and clearance could drop in. He would need to discuss things privately with Jollett, Castellaw, and Armitage.

And with Colonel Lee.

“General Garroway is right,” Armitage said, thoughtful. “First things first. Let’s see if HELGA and the XEL satellites can stop the asteroids already en route to Earth. After that …”

Of course, if Earth’s high-energy defenses failed, it was quite possible that there would be no after that to worry about.

High Guard HEL Facility 3

Solar Orbit

1151 hrs, GMT

Captain Gupta Narayanan burst out of the access tunnel, propelling himself with long, easy strokes onto the main control deck. Microgravity had its advantages, he decided, at least once you were used to it.

“Captain, we are at power,” Kali, the station’s AI, announced over his mindlink. “We are ready to commence the firing program.”

Narayanan pulled himself into the control deck’s command chair and strapped himself in. The targeting schematic came on-line, flooding into a newly opened window within his mind.

There were now seven asteroids en route from various points in the Belt, all on paths that converged on Earth.

A targeting curser tracked and locked on to the lead asteroid in the stream … or, rather, on the place where that rock would be in another five minutes. It would take that long for the HEL burst to cross the intervening space to the target.

Actually hitting that rock, Narayanan mused, was roughly akin to shooting at and hitting the base of a 10mm cartridge with a BB-sized pellet at a range of one kilometer—an accomplishment made even more astonishing by the fact that the cartridge actually moved six hundred meters between the moment the BB was fired and the moment it reached its target. Targeting such small objects across such vast distances required inhuman precision and accuracy—which, in point of fact, was why the actual aiming and firing were carried out by an artificial intelligence resident within the HELGA platform’s computer net.

“Shall I request final confirmation from SPACDEFCOM?” Kali asked him.

Briefly, he considered making the request; standing orders required that formality. In fact, he could be court-martialed for failing to do so.

But it was formality only, and his immediate orders—and his duty—were clear. Those asteroids possessed among their number kinetic energy enough to scour every scrap of life from the planet several times over. At HELGA Three’s current position relative to Earth, a radio signal would take four and a half minutes to reach Earth, and the reply would take another four and a half. The sooner he initiated the sequence, the better Earth’s chances for survival.

The problem was that the HELGA platforms, though designed to protect Earth from asteroid and comet impacts, were deadly weapons of mass destruction in their own right. One three-second beam from HELGA Three striking New York, for instance, would release the energy of ten thousand Hiroshimas, and obliterate the city.

The weapons had been designed and deployed by the United States, but in accordance with the Jerusalem Treaty of 2270, control of the weapon was vested not in the Federal Union of the United States, or in the American Union. The World Union, though still embryonic and with uncertain authority, alone held the firing button for the three satellites. Crews were rotated on and off the stations on six-month schedules, and were drawn from nation states all over the world with histories of non-aggression or neutrality—Sweden, Switzerland, Tuamotu, and Narayanan’s own Republic of Andhra Pradesh.

The firing protocols were so complex, the joke was that if a stray asteroid ever did threaten Earth, the dinosaurs would take care of it … after the clearance to fire came through from their HQ sixty-five million years before.

Politics, he thought, the word an obscenity.

“Negative on confirmation,” he told the AI. “Initiate firing sequence.”

“Firing one,” Kali told him. “Time Zulu 1151 hours, seventeen seconds.”

There was no flash, no sound, no dimming of the station’s lights, no evidence at all of the titanic release of power save for the data stream appearing in the targeting window in Narayanan’s head. For three seconds, an inconceivable torrent of laser energy streamed into space. Then, the station’s massive capacitors drained, the system began recharging for the next shot.

Recharge would take just over forty-five minutes.