MARINE CORPS WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES TO THEIR COUNTRY SINCE

NOVEMBER 10, 1775. Another inscription was a quote from Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, referring to the assault on the black sands of Iwo:UNCOMMON VALOR WAS A COMMON

VIRTUE.

The Memorial, though, was not just for the Marines who’d fought on Iwo. It honoredevery Marine who’d died in the service of the nation, from the American Revolution through to the eight Marines who’d died fighting Eridani separatists in the Eostre Insurrection of 2301. Garroway looked at that last entry on a very long list, and wondered if anyone would add to it. Some good Marines had died in the defense of Earth, out there in the Asteroid Belt. No. Someonewould make that addition. Somehow. He remembered that, when the flag was raised over Suribachi, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, onboard a U.S. warship several miles offshore, had reportedly told the officers with him, “The raising of that flag on Suribachi guarantees a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

He ran a couple fast subtractions through his implant coprocessor. Iwo Jima had been fought 369 years ago—with 131 years left to go in order to fulfill Forrestal’s prophecy. Perhaps it would be up to the Marines to guarantee the existence of the United States for the next few centuries. Walking around the monument, Garroway approached a plasma gun emplacement on the bluff overlooking the Potomac River. Sergeant Hathaway looked up from his position behind a sandbag barricade. “Hey, Gunny. What brings you out in the rain?”

“Perimeter check. Everything quiet?”

“So far. I think the shaggies all gave up and went home.”

“Nice, if true. Don’t count on it. Not when home is a hole in the rubble.”

“Roger that.”

Garroway took a moment to survey the landscape. The Memorial rose from a low hill overlooking what had been Theodore Roosevelt Island, in the middle of the Potomac River. Directly opposite was the center of Washington, D.C., only dimly visible through drifting clouds of mist, beneath a leaden overcast that turned early-morning into a deep and brooding twilight.

The tidal waves blasting in from the Atlantic had lost a great deal of their energy as they rolled across Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore. By the time they reached the nation’s capital, they retained only a fraction of their original destructive power, but even that had smashed buildings, utterly shattered the huge transplas dome covering the Mall between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument, and sent a tidal surge up the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River that had buried everything below the Georgetown Heights in several meters of silt.

The waters were still high, as the steady rains continued to feed them, though they’d been going down slowly. The Potomac River was still ten meters above its normal level. Directly below the Marine Corps Monument, Roosevelt Island was completely submerged, as was the badly wrecked Kennedy Center on the bank just beyond. The Watergate Metrotower still rose above the flood waters, as did the Washington Monument, somehow still intact. Exactly 5.2 kilometers to the east, according to his helmet display, the Capitol dome, badly damaged but yet standing, stood on a low island in the midst of water-drowned rubble.

Many of the more massive structures of this “City of Monuments,” as D.C. had been known in centuries past, were still standing, the dark stains on their white marble sides showing just how high the waters had risen three weeks ago, and how far down they’d dropped since. But the marble was Washington’s public face, the clean and proud and shiny part of itself that it had showed to the world since the nineteenth century. Much of the poorer reaches of the outlying city, especially to the south and east, had been leveled by the tidal hammer, and little now showed above that sea of mud stretching clear to the horizon save shattered buildings like broken teeth. Millions had died here; millions more had survived by fleeing to higher ground to the north and west, or by crowding the tops of the taller museums, hotels, metro enclaves, and monument buildings.

And in the ensuing weeks, many survivors had grown desperate. Heavily armed mobs had ranged inland, raiding farms, communities, and cities not so hard hit as the coastal regions. Stockpiles of food that had survived the fall of Armageddon were wiped out in the space of days, and there were disturbing, widespread rumors of cannibalism.

Desperation had bred insanity. Aerial transports bringing food, water, and medical support to the D.C. area from inland had been fired on. A C-980 Skyhauler on approach to Arlington had been brought down in Rock Creek Park southeast of the old Naval Observatory, the crew killed, the wreckage looted. The renegades were well-armed; the Skyhauler had been hit by antiaircraft plasma weaponry taken from a Guard armory.

The Marines of 1MarReg, 3rd Division were too few to secure the entire area. Instead, they’d set up a perimeter on the high ground west of the Potomac, from the Marine Corps headquarters complex at Henderson Hall in the south, to the Corps Monument in the north, and taking in the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery in between.

This gave them an easily defensible position with clear fields of fire in all directions, and direct access to the quagmire of the Pentagon, just one and a half kilometers east of Henderson Hall. The Pentagon was on low-lying ground, just ten meters above the old sea level; west, the ground rose steadily, and the Corps HQ was nearly forty meters higher. Efforts were now underway to clear passages through the stifling mud and silt to reach some thousands of military personnel and political leaders still alive in deep subbasements of the Pentagon. Deep tunnels gave direct access to the lowest levels of the White House, the Capitol building, and other government buildings in the area, and priority had been given to rescuing them before their supplies of food and air ran out. It had often been observed that an entire city beneath a city existed in the earth beneath the nation’s capital; the Pentagon offered rescuers their best hope of reaching the survivors trapped below the mud.

The rescue would not be easy. Using blueprints, Army Engineers had located the positions of several deep-level ventilation tubes, and were now attempting to build casements around them. Once completed, the interiors could be pumped free of mud, the ventilator shafts opened, and survivors brought up, but a lack of available heavy equipment meant the operation had to proceed by hand, using essentially nineteenth-and twentieth-century technologies.

The casement shafts had collapsed twice already.

Worse, much of the work was being done under intermittent fire from the towers to the south that once had housed the old Drug Enforcement Agency. Four times in the past week, Marines had stormed those towers and come up empty. Because the towers were half-submerged in the waters of the swollen Potomac, HQ had decided it was too dangerous to leave men in place to guard the position. And each time the Marines had pulled out, the snipers had come back in. Scuttlebutt had it that when those Skydragons arrived, their first targets would be those towers. That, however, was not Garroway’s concern. His team had been assigned to the Marine Corps Monument grounds, two and a half kilometers to the northwest. Here, the shaggies, as the renegades and looters were called, were less numerous, and less aggressive. Even so, the supplies flown in by the Marines when they established their perimeter on the Potomac’s west bank had proven irresistible. Every night, a few desperate individuals at least tried to make it through the automated security perimeter and the robot guns.

And behind those outer defenses were people like Sergeant Hathaway.

“It’s almost ten-hundred hours,” Garroway told him. “Stay alert.”

“Don’t worry aboutthat , Gunny. I’m not sure I’m ever going to sleep again. Dreams…y’know?”

“Yeah. I know what you mean. You see the Doc?”

Hathaway made a face behind his visor. “Yeah. Told me to use my implant ECs. Didn’t help.”

Lots of the Marines had been having trouble sleeping, Garroway included. No matter how tired they were, the nightmares always came.

Each Marine had a set of ECs, emotional control programs resident within his personal implant hardware, simplistic bits of software designed to help control fear and emotional trauma, to boost awareness during combat, or to serve as tranquilizers, but the Marines of 1MarReg were facing sets of trauma on a scale that the AI programmers had never envisioned, and they were facing it day after day after nerve-wracking day. Download software for their implants had been promised to help shield them from PTSD and the terror of the more disturbing dreams, but the necessary connections hadn’t yet been set up. They still only had a local Net up and running, and intermittent connections with offworld. Still, Garroway thought, it would be best over the long term if each of them somehow learned to deal with the nightmares without the help of software. None of them,none of them, had really come to grips yet with the magnitude of what had happened to Earth…which seemed to mean that the emotional trauma, the horror, the loss, the despair, the anger, the isolation that each Marine felt could only emerge during sleep.

Downloaded e-tranqs were well and good, but they would all have to face the situation squarely and on their own sooner or later.

He circled the Monument grounds, moving clockwise, checking at each gun emplacement. Morale was low, he noted, but not yet at a level severe enough to seriously compromise combat efficiency.If we can just hang tough a little longer….

Satisfied that the Monument was secure, he retraced his steps back across the Meade Walkway to the barracks at the Fairfax Center. At the parade ground, he flagged down a Marine hover transport heading for the relief distribution point at the edge of the Ring City, and hitched a ride. Once, the city had been the center of commerce, the hub for transport ways for private and commercial ground traffic, and a kind of magnet drawing people looking for work. Cities had grown, for the most part, at the nexus of key transportation lines—along navigable rivers, especially, and, later, rail lines. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, though, something had gone wrong. Increasing population pressures, rising crime, racial tensions and, more than anything else, increasing city taxes on business and industry, had driven both people and jobs out of the inner cities and into the surrounding suburbs, where the so-called ring cities had taken root and grown.

Over the succeeding centuries, the original cities had been rehabilitated to a large degree, especially as more and more of the local industry and power production was moved offplanet into orbit. The advent of nanotechnology, too, had transformed crumbling infrastructures, and allowed the cheap construction of truly enormous metroplex towers and habitats capable of housing hundreds of thousands where only a few thousand could have lived before.

But the ring cities remained—usually as independent metropolitan entities in their own right. West of Washington, D.C., Alexandria-Fairfax had begun as a dozen isolated centers of commerce in northern Virginia, ultimately fusing into a single metropolitan swath following the old track of the Washington Beltway.

Seated in the back of the hovercraft with a dozen other Marines, Garroway watched the scenery stream past on the vehicle’s cargo deck screens, walkways and parkland giving way to impressive white towers. Located on higher ground than the nation’s capital, Alexandria-Fairfax had suffered less in the way of damage from Armageddon Fall than had Washington. The waves surging up the Potomac Valley had submerged much of Old Alexandria, but the metroplex towers, for the most part, still stood. Parts of the city had burned when the looters came, but most citizens had stayed put rather than fleeing, turning city facilities into fortresses to keep the marauding hordes at bay.

They had limited food reserves, however, and even more limited clean water. When the 1MarReg had touched down at Arlington two weeks ago, they’d found vast throngs of hungry civilians, desperate for food, for water, for medical help, and most especially for defense against the marauders. The hovercraft gentled its way through a delivery entrance in the titanic wall of the Marshall Sports Complex, an enormous domed enclosure with seating for eight thousand looming above the Arlington Old City Center one kilometer west of the Monument grounds. The hovercraft grounded inside the main stadium, and the other Marines created a human chain and began offloading crate after crate of NMFEs. Garroway thanked the driver for the lift and began looking for Chrome. He found her in charge of the security element at the C-D distribution point.

“Hey, Chrome,” he called over the private chat channel. “How’s it hangin’?”

“Trigger!” She was standing alone atop a raised platform, a kind of stage, beneath a holographic banner that readCAMP HOPE RELIEF CENTER: ANNANDALE , with instructions to form a single line, maintain order, and wait your turn. “What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were scheduled for downtime this morning.”

“Screw that,” he said, clambering up the steps to join her on the platform. “Too much to do. Anyway, I’ve been getting the comjits.”

“Yeah.” She looked around the interior of the stadium, which was filling rapidly with people, both civilians, and personnel in military uniforms. The stage, raised a good three meters above the stadium’s floor, gave an excellent view over the crowd. “You and me both. The trick is knowing what’s legitimate precog, and what’s normal, healthy paranoia.”

Comjits—combat jitters—was Marine slang for the premonitions shared by every combat veteran since the armies of Sargon the Great. Military psychologists now accepted as fact the heightening of extrasensory abilities, and even worked at strengthening them through mental disciplines such as Weiji-do. But, as Chrome had just pointed out, it was impossible to differentiate between ESP and simple fear.

For Garroway, comjits were simply that feeling in the pit of his stomach that something was about to happen…an empty, gnawing, falling sensation in his gut indistinguishable from fear. His usual response, as now, was to try to find something constructive to do. If his extrasensory antennae weren’t sharp enough to pick a genuine warning out of the ether, including details of where and when the attack would come, then the best thing he could do was be ready for anything.

He looked up at the dome roof, arching 200 meters overhead and ending in a ragged edge open to the gray sky and drizzle. The eastern half of the dome had been blown away, but what remained still provided some shelter from the incessant rain. More important, it served as an easily defensible bastion from which supplies could be passed out to the locals. Every morning, civilian representatives of the local enclaves would arrive, in hydrogen-powered trucks, in jury-rigged maglev transports, even in horse-drawn wagons, to receive their community allotment of water and precious NMREs. Individual citizens, too, came to volunteer several hours of work in exchange for food for themselves and their families.

“Attention,” a loudhailer blared from somewhere overhead. “Civilian personnel will now approach the distribution stations. If you are here representing yourself, your family, or your block, please line up alphabetically, remain in single file, and maintain order. If you are here to receive distributions for your community, please move to the line identified by city or district. Attention…”

The message continued to repeat, as barriers across the entrances through the audience bleachers were lowered, and streams of civilians and civilian vehicles began separating from the amorphous mob gathered just outside the stadium’s main gate and began feeding through to the fifteen distribution points set up near the center of the stadium. Garroway unslung his carbine and stood next to Chrome, watching the crowds move.

Most of the civilians on foot were lining up in front of the alphabetically designated stations. The vehicles, though, began queuing in front of the stations identified by community—Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, Bethesda, Silver Springs, and others. His feeling of nervousness moved up a notch. If anything was going to happen, it would happen very soon.

The regiment’s primary mission had been the rescue of military and civilian leaders trapped beneath the Potomac mud, but Colonel Lee had made the determination on the spot that the Marines could help, and, more to the point, that simple humanity demanded that they do so. He’d begun by ordering extra stores of NMFEs without telling orbital HQ what he planned to do with them. By the time they caught on, he could point out, quite truthfully, that the locals were willing to help the Marines both in the work at the Pentagon, and even in the defense of the perimeter, in exchange for supplies of food and clean water. Frankly, Garroway wondered how long it would be before there were food riots—not from lack of food, but as reaction against the NMFEs.

Nanufactured Meals, Field Expedient, had been in general use in the armed forces for over a century now. The concept was simple. All food, like the organisms that consumed it, was made up of the same organic molecules, in turn formed from the same elements—chiefly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Nanobots—nano-scale machines, each less than a micron across, but working together by the hundreds of trillions—could manipulate large numbers of atoms very quickly, rearranging, say, a small hill of sludge pumped from the river, or even raw sewage, into NMFEs.

Of course, the Marines, who had to live on the stuff during waking periods on board interstellar transports or during long deployments on distant worlds with alien biochemistries had their own explanations for the acronym—many of them, in fact. “No More Fucking Excrement” was one of the most popular, but there were others.

The trouble was that the stuff, while both sterile and nourishing, didn’t have much taste, and the reason had to do with software copyright law. When nanufactured foods had first became practical late in the twenty-second century, there’d been a period of intense competition among bioprospectors, a kind of high-tech gold rush, to develop and patent specific artificially assembled aromatic molecules for flavoring foods. The haute-cuisine restaurant industry, especially, had long ago established proprietary control over the nanoprocesses that could take bland gruel and transform flavor, smell, and texture into something indistinguishable from, say,Escalopes de Saumon Gigondas , or a nice green salad made with fresh produce, croutons, and bleu cheese dressing.

Therewere freeware downloads available for programming taste into nanomeals, but those had been lost, with so much else, with the collapse of the Global Net. Copies of some freeware cuisine programs existed in the various off-world nets, and included such basic and non-copyrightable standbys as chicken flavor, beef flavor, chocolate flavor, and the like. Tracking those down in the electronic chaos of the past few weeks, however, had been impossible, especially since so much else had higher priorities. And so, the Marine relief efforts had settled for nutrition and purity, if not taste and appetizing appearance and texture. The same process purified water, and could be used to turn dirt, scrap metal, and debris into emergency nanocrete shelters, barricades, and even emergency spare parts for various pieces of standard equipment. Basic nanotechnic medicine was more specialized, but also available through all of the military nets, allowing the creation of swarms of short-lived nanomachines that could supplement and boost the human immune system, seal wounds, and serve as prophylaxes against the old killers following in the wake of disaster throughout the history of the human species—cholera, typhoid, typhus, dysentery, plague, flu, and a host of others.

Without nanotechnology, Garroway thought, the relief effort would have been doomed before it started. There was no way enough food could be grown offworld to feed Earth’s starving population, and not enough ships in the whole Solar System to move it all even if it had existed. Starvation and disease would have killed at least another twenty percent of the billions of survivors remaining on the planet, even ignoring the predicted effects of the coming long winter.

It still would have been nice, however, if they could have programmed the gruel to taste like chicken. In any case, the latest word from orbit was that the huge, solar-powered nanufactories out at the Lagrange Points, normally used for military and large-scale power plant construction, were being converted to produce emergency supplies for the Earth relief effort. Initial setup was expected to take three weeks; after that, supplies of programmed nanobots for creating food, shelter, medical supplies, and even construction equipment would be coming down by glider in megaton lots. All they needed to do was hold out until then.

Scanning the queuing crowds, Garroway noticed a number of Marines on the main deck in front of the alphabetically ordered stations. Using his helmet optics, he zoomed in for a high-mag view. They looked painfully young, and were unarmored—wearing olive-drab Marine utilities and forage caps instead of Class Ones and Mark 56s. They looked foreign to Garroway, with black hair, swarthy skin, and full lips; at first, he wondered if they were South Indian troops, possibly from the World Union. But when he queried the local MilNet over his helmet com, he saw they were new recruits from Ishtar. He’d heard about them a week ago, but had forgotten in the chaos since.

“How are the offworld newbies doing?” he asked Chrome.

“The Ishies? Okay, I guess. They need close supervision, just like little kids. They’re still recruits.”

“Yeah. They were supposed to be coming to Earth to go to Parris Island, right?”

“Right. Only Parris Island ain’t there anymore.”

Garroway felt a pang at that. No Marine reallyenjoyed the hell of recruit training, but once they were out, they tended to look back at Camp Lejeune with a kind of masochistic nostalgia. We’ve lost so much….

“So what are we supposed to do with them?”

“They’ve had Phase One of boot camp,” Chrome said, “so they’re not completely raw.” She shrugged.

“Hell, the way I see it, Trig, we need all the help we can get.”

He nodded slowly. He wished, though, they had more experienced people. There were only about twenty Marines on duty here in the stadium, assigned to maintain order while the food and water were passed out.

That nagging feeling that something was wrong was still gnawing at him, still—

A savage, hollow bang echoed across the stadium. Garroway ducked and looked up in time to see a shower of debris falling from the north side of the dome overhead, perhaps fifty meters to his right. Civilians screamed and broke out of line, scattering in all directions.

“Incoming!” someone yelled over the tactical channel.

“Bandits!” another voice cried. “Bandits at the North Gate!”

“Maintain order!” a voice boomed over the mob from a speaker somewhere overhead. “Stay where you are! Do not panic!”

And then another explosion ripped through the stadium dome high above him, followed an instant later by a far heavier, massivewhump from somewhere just outside, and all hope of restoring anything like order to the mob vanished.

14

25MARCH 2314

Near the Stadium North Gate

Marshall Sports Complex,

Relief Distribution Center

1020 hrs, EST

Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach dropped to the deck when the first explosion went off, and was very nearly killed as the queues around him disintegrated. Thousands of people were inside the stadium dome, and suddenly they wereall trying to leave at once. A loudhailer voice was booming above the crowd noise, trying to maintain calm and order, but a moment later, the second and third explosions went off, and the stampede of civilians began to take on a life of its own, surging away from the North Gate and rolling back deeper into the stadium.

Rolling to one side, he managed to get his back to a wall—actually the barrier in front of the bleacher section—and to unsling his weapon, an LR-2290 laser rifle, standard Corps issue. He still wasn’t entirely sure how to use the thing.

Trust your downloads,the voice of Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz said in his head.The knowledge is there. Trust it!

Well and good, but he needed a target first. Right now, all he could see was a thundering, screaming mob trying to flee.

A fundamental fact of biology confronted Nal. Ten thousand years of genetic isolation on Ishtar had resulted in a substantial drift in the genome;everyone in this huge, domed room was taller than he was, and he couldn’t see more than a few meters.

But he could see far enough. Three meters away, Derel was struggling to remain on her feet as panicked civilians crowded past her. She fell, and he heard her scream as she was trampled.

“Make a hole!” Nal bellowed, pushing forward into the mob, wielding the stock of his laser rifle like a paddle. “Make a hole!”

It was unlikely that the crowd understood the ancient military expression, or that they even heard it. By sheer, brute strength and determination, though, Nal shoved, prodded, and beat enough people aside to create a tiny clear space around Derel long enough for her to regain her feet.

“Thanks, Nal!” she gasped.

“Hang on to my shoulder!” he yelled, turning his back on her and swinging his weapon hard. “Come on!

This way!”

Perhaps the sight of two Marines, neither more than 150 centimeters tall, charging against the flow of traffic was startling enough to get through the fog of panic spreading through the mob. Civilians moved out of their way, or tried to. A woman clinging to an infant stumbled and fell, shrieking. Nal adjusted his course to push his way in front of her, as Derel helped her up. Several men locked arms and battled the tide to create a human barrier, forcing the rest of the crowd to flow around them. Together, somehow, they fought the oncoming tide of humanity and managed to regain a measure of relative safety in the lee of the wall. The human barrier dissolved back into the sea.

“Now what?” Derel asked, panting.

“We moveup !” Nal replied. He pointed toward a set of steps going up from a break in the wall a few meters to the left. There was a gate, but the lock yielded to a sharp blow from his weapon, and they clambered into the lowest levels of the bleacher section. From there, they could make their way along an aisle to a kind of bridge spanning the broad opening of the North Gate. Looking down over the railing, Nal could see nothing but the tops of heads, as more and more people streamed through into the stadium’s interior.

“Smedley!” he thought, transmitting the mental code to access the unit AI. “What should we do?”

All he got in response was the wait light blinking in his mind’s eye. The AI was either down or overwhelmed by other requests at the moment. Nal and Derel were on their own, a bleak and terrifying thought.

Trust your training.

The thought—and the bass thunder of Wojkowiz’s remembered bellow—steadied him. Phase One Marine training, back at Gilgamesh, had consisted largely of learning how to use their new Corps-issue implants. Basic skills—such as marksmanship, basic first aid, and the standards and protocols of military life—all had been electronically downloaded into the recruits’ brains. The trouble was, the information was there, now, but the physical neural connections in his jellyware brain required to make using it automatic were not. Rather than having a datum he needed simplythere , at the instant he required it, he had to feel around in his thoughts searching for the memetic place marker that would let him access it. Phase Two of recruit training was supposed to have given them proficiency in extracting and using their downloaded training. Unfortunately, that part of training had been indefinitely postponed.

Another explosion ripped through the dome ceiling overhead, releasing a cascade of debris that showered onto the panicking mob, urging them forward. Nal could see bodies on the deck, some moving, some still, many bloodied, civilians trampled by the stampede.Someone was firing at the stadium dome, that much was certain. The question was why?

No, he corrected himself. Not “why.”The question is what do I do about it?

Other recruits who’d been out on the deck managing the queues were making it, in bedraggled twos and threes, to the shelter of the wall. As he and Derel waved and shouted, more and more found the stairs, and began coming up into the bleachers to join them…Vanet Gan-Me, Trab Jil Gar-ad, Chakar Na-il Havaay, and others.

All of them were recruit privates from Ishtar, however. There were no AIs, officers, or NCOs to tell them what to do.

It was Nal who took the initiative. “I’m in command,” he told the others, a ragged group of eight.

“Follow me!”

And the miracle was that they did.

Center Stadium Area

Marshall Sports Complex,

Relief Distribution Center

1029 hrs, EST

Garroway was trying to connect with the unit AI.Priority override! he thought.Give me a fucking channel!

All he got in reply was the please-wait icon. Quincy was locked up and out of the running. Which was one of the dangers of relying on artificial intelligences that were, by their very nature, reliant on massive parallel processing across multiply redundant communications nodes. Under normal circumstances, AIs like Quincy “lived,” if that was the word, on large-scale data nets—Global Net or the myriad military Internetworks. A smaller and simpler version of Quincy, “Quincy2,” could function reliably on the smaller number of platforms and service nodes in a single ship, like thePreble , and on the numerous computers and interconnected processors carried by individual Marines. A certain minimum complexity was required, however, to maintain a viable AI net, and 1MarReg had been working very close to that minimum for three weeks, now. Ninety percent of their processing power was still on board thePreble , in low Earth orbit. Most of the civil and military communications satellites that formerly had swarmed about the planet were gone, now, wiped away by the sleet of high-speed dust and debris sweeping in from the Asteroid Belt just before Armageddonfall, and only a handful had been replaced so far. As a result, once every ninety minutes there was a twenty-three-minute hole in their communications links with thePreble , and the AIs working on the ground were limited to the rather narrow scope of the computers in Fairfax Center, at Henderson Hall, and in the individual combat suits and helmets of the Marines on the ground.

And the attack, by sheer bad luck, had been launched halfway through the blackout in comlinks with the Preble . Right now, Quincy2still existed inside the navigational computers on board the transport, but only fragmentary pieces of him—decidedlynon -intelligent software—were working on the ground at the moment.

Unable to raise Quincy, he shifted to a straight communications channel. “Echo One! Echo One! This is Trigger!Do you copy?”

He heard nothing back but static, and bit off a curse. That loud thump he’d heard after the first couple of explosions had sounded like it came from the direction of the stadium’s main gate outside. Echo One was the security element in charge of the gate; it was possible that they’d been taken out. Giving up on the com channel, he scanned the crowd on the stadium floor, using his helmet optics to zoom in on individuals and vehicles. There was a pattern here, and a damned disturbing one. The explosions on top of the dome—arpegs, he thought—seemed designed to stampede the crowd in a specific direction—from the North Gate south through the center of the stadium. If that larger explosion had taken out the Main Gate security element, the attackers might be swarming in behind the panicked civilians any moment now.

There!He zoomed in closer on a mass of faces coming in through the stadium’s inner doors behind the fleeing civilians…hard faces,determined faces, and in the same instant he saw the weapons. The Marines called them shaggies because they needed a name, and “marauders” or “bandits” seemed too intellectual, even prissy. In fact, they were no more ragged-looking or hairy than the rest of the mob. Many wore mismatched items of military clothing taken from military surplus shops or stolen from armories. Some, not all, wore red rags tied over their upper right arms; some, not all, sported collections of animated tattoos as impressive as Chrome’s. Their weapons were a miscellany of civilian and military arms, from slug-throwing hunting rifles to hand lasers and Army-issue mass drivers. Garroway didn’t see any pigs in the mob, and was grateful for that…but the fact that he didn’t see them didn’t mean they weren’t there. That starhauler, he remembered, had been brought down by a man-portable plasma weapon.

The shaggies seemed to represent a broad cross-section of races and ethnicity, Garroway saw. There were black faces in the crowd, and Latinos, and Middle-Eastern/Semitics, and Asians, and there were plenty of blond and blue-eyed faces as well.

Desperation knew little of ethnic boundaries.

Desperate or not, this band had to be stopped. Clearly they’d come after the supplies of food and water being handed out to the civilian population, and clearly their assault had been carefully planned and timed. From what intelligence the Marines had been able to gather so far in the Greater-D.C. area, the entire region was controlled by about a dozen different warlords, each with a personal army that might number as high as a couple of thousand. The more successful a warlord was in securing supplies of food and weapons, the more fighters he attracted and the bigger his army. Those red bands on their arms, Garroway thought, probably meant this bunch was with General Tom Williams, as he styled himself, and the Red Tiger Militia, one of the biggest and most troublesome of the private armies in the area. And they were crowding into the stadium, mingling with the unarmed civilians.

“Bandits in sight!” Garroway called over the tactical channel. “Coming through the North Gate! Heads up! It’s a puppy rush!”

Puppy rushwas milspeak for using hostages, civilians, even crowds of children as human shields, herding them ahead of and around an attacking force in order to storm a defended position. The attackers were hoping the Marines would hold their fire—or at least hesitate for a critical few moments—for fear of hitting unarmed civilians.

It was a low-tech means of defeating high-tech, and one that frequently worked. Still, military technology had a trick or two that continued to give the Marines an edge.

Garroway raised his laser carbine and projected the thought-code that switched on his weapon’s CAT

function. Computer-Assisted Targeting had been around since the late twentieth century, when laser, radar, or infrared tracking had enabled so-called smart weapons to stay locked on to designated targets. The CAT scope on Garroway’s carbine was simpler. A camera bore-sighted with the weapon fed a magnified image to Garroway’s helmet visor display, with red crosshairs marking the target point. Laser pulses traveled in precisely straight lines, unaffected by gravity, by magnetic fields, by friction with the air, or by the wind, so if Garroway could see even a portion of a militiaman’s body beneath the reticule, he could hit it.

He thumbed the weapon’s selector switch to implant control, and held down the trigger as he took aim. Now the weapon would not fire until and unless he gave a single, sharp mental code, fed through his cerebral implant to the weapon’s firing control system. He magnified the image in his visor display, put the reticule on top of a red-banded marauder’s scowling face, and gave the code—now!

The computer interface allowed him to trigger the shot without risking a jerky movement that might throw off his aim. A single bolt of coherent light struck the marauder just above his left eye, vaporizing a quarter of the man’s skull in a splash of blood and red mist. Garroway smoothly shifted his aim a couple of meters to the left, targeting a second marauder, and taking him down with a clean shot through the throat. The LC-2300 fired a ten-megawatt laser pulse, which carried about the same energy—delivered as flash heating and thermal shock—as the detonation of two hundred grams of chemical high explosives. A single shot to an attacker’s head, throat, or unprotected upper chestdid end the argument, at least for that particular individual.

Other Marines throughout the stadium were opening fire as well, and the marauders were going down. Several broke suddenly, and ran, but others tried firing over the heads of their human shields, continuing to push forward.

A trio of projectiles arced high into the space beneath the dome one after another, hesitated for the space of half a second, then began to twist around toward the elevated platform. “Arpegs!” Garroway yelled. Rocket-propelled grenades—and these appeared to be smart weapons, capable of identifying people in armor and carrying weapons and homing in on them with deadly accuracy. Before Garroway could react further, however, all three projectiles flashed briefly in a trio of sharp, loud cracks, and disintegrated into clouds of falling fragments. The Marines had set up a pair of autogun towers—robot sentries—behind the stand, and these could track and target incoming projectiles faster and far more accurately than could human gunners. More RPGs streaked into the air, only to be whiplashed by invisible laser pulses from the robotic gun towers.

Garroway tried to identify the sources of the RPGs, which were coming from the thickest part of the moving crowd. That crowd was beginning to open up, however, as civilians streamed past the elevated stand and into the southern half of the stadium. As the mob parted, Garroway saw a vehicle just emerging from the north entrance—a low-riding cargo GEV heavily layered with strap-on sandbags, scrap metal, and logs. The Ground Effect Vehicle was thrusting ahead through the crowd, scattering civilians, its skirts rippling with the blast of high-pressure air emerging from its ventral thrusters.

“Technical at the North Entrance!” Chrome called over the tactical net. “Repeat! We have a technical at the North Entrance!”

“Technical” was an old term for a civilian vehicle fitted out with makeshift armor and weapons—a serious threat when the crowds of fleeing civilians in front of it precluded the use of heavy weapons. The back of the vehicle was open, and Garroway could see armored figures there, one behind what looked like a heavy plasma gun mount. Taking aim, he increased the magnification on his helmet optics, zooming in close enough to see that there were three men in back, and that they were mirror-armored. Combat armor that could adopt the local light levels and hues, becoming, in effect, actively changing camouflage, had been around for several centuries and, at first, Garroway thought that’s what he was seeing. The figures appeared to be reflecting their surroundings—mostly the grays and whites of the dome surface overhead.

He targeted one of the men, however, and fired. There was a flash, but no apparent damage.Damn!

Combat armored suits with nanoflage coatings that could both become perfectly reflective and repair themselves were more recent innovations than traditional active camo, and still expensive. Garroway didn’t know where the marauders had managed to get these suits—stolen from a Guard armory, perhaps—but he knew they meant trouble. Those coatings were as reflective as liquid mercury, scattering nearly all incoming light, and swiftly repairing areas of the coating that were charred by the small amount of energy actually absorbed. The weak point was the helmet—specifically—the optical receptor patches for the interior visor display, which were small, almost invisible, and usually programmed to shift rapidly from point to point.

Garroway put the targeting reticule over what might have been the helmet’s optical patch and triggered his weapon. As before, he saw a flash of scattering light, with no effect on the target. Other hits flashed and strobed off the slick, reflective surface, which seemed to ripple and distort as the vehicle moved slowly forward.

And now he could see two more GEVs following the first in line-ahead. The plasma gunner in the back of the GEV slewed his weapon around on its mount and fired, the bolt trailing a thunderclap as it burned through the air a meter above Garroway’s head. “Cover!” he yelled, and he and Chrome dropped flat on the platform’s steel grating. A second shot struck the platform, and the structure canted sharply to the right, throwing the two Marines to the ground. They scrambled to their feet. The mob was surging around them, fleeing the oncoming vehicles, but they were able to stand their ground as the crowd flowed past.

“C’mon!” he yelled at Chrome.

There was only one way to take on those hovercraft….

North Gate,

Marshall Sports Complex,

Relief Distribution Center

1031 hrs, EST

Nal looked down over the railing from the promenade bridging over the inner gate, and saw the hovercraft directly beneath him, slowly moving forward as it cleared the entrance. Its thrusters howled, and clouds of dust and grit swirled out from its skirts. Three men in mirrored armor were crouched on the flatbed behind the low cab, and the entire vehicle was covered with makeshift armor of sandbags, sheet metal, and wood.

He’d led his small and makeshift army out onto the walkway above the main entrance, hoping to grab a high-ground position from which he could open fire on the marauders as they rushed through eight meters beneath. The walkway gave them that vantage point, but the arrival of the hovercraft changed everything. Trab Jil Gar-ad snapped off a shot with his laser, but the bolt flashed uselessly from the shiny garment one of the marauders was wearing. Nal, too, took aim with his weapon, trying to let the downloaded information about how it worked flow through him, without having to dig for it. Aim…track…breath…hold…squeeze…

The bolt flashed harmlessly off mirrored armor.

Their download sessions back home had included a bit of factual data about lasers—that lasers were nothing but light, and, like light, were reflected from mirrored surfaces. Their laser weapons were useless here, even at almost point-blank range.

Nal had only a second to make a decision.

Dropping his laser rifle, he drew his combat knife from its sheath and vaulted over the railing. Center Stadium Area

Marshall Sports Complex,

Relief Distribution Center

1031 hrs, EST

Garroway charged forward, Chrome close by his side, rushing headlong against the flow of panicked civilians. The crowds were greatly thinned out now, with most of the civilians behind them, now, filling the southern half of the stadium. North, eight or ten scruffies were firing randomly into the crowd and, beyond them, the first of the cargo hovercraft was edging through the North Gate and onto the stadium floor. The pig gunner on the flatbed behind the cab fired his weapon again, sending a bolt whipcracking across the stadium floor and striking one of the robot sentries at Garroway’s back. He saw a tiny group of figures on the walkway bridging the stadium entrance, directly above the slow-moving hovercraft now, and then he saw one of the figures drop, neatly vaulting the railing and falling toward the back of the hovercraft.

Garroway magnified the image in time to catch a glimpse of the falling man, one of the Ishtaran recruits, wearing nothing but Marine-green utilities as he plummeted about four meters and landed squarely on the shoulders of the marauder pig-gunner. The impact drove the marauder down and out of sight; the two other armored marauders were so busy shooting fleeing civilians they didn’t appear to realize at first what was happening.

Zigzagging to avoid presenting too steady a target, Garroway ran directly toward the hovercraft. The cab’s wind-shield was completely covered over with sheet metal, leaving only a tiny slit for the driver to see through.

Garroway fired into the slit as he ran….

North Gate,

Marshall Sports Complex

Relief Distribution Center

1032 hrs, EST

Nal hit the back and shoulders of the marauder who was firing the plasma gun, the impact as hard as a fall from the branches of a reddurik tree back home. The marauder dropped to his knees underneath him, then fell full-length, twisting wildly, trying to grapple with his assailant. The Mk. XII combat knife looked much like the Marine-issue blades of centuries past, but it had some high-tech twists to it. The blade was a microgravity-bonded crystalline alloy of ceramic, titanium, tungsten carbonitrides, and molybdenum—an alloy that could cut diamond—forged and tempered by nanobots that had worked the cutting edge down to a whisper of cerametal one atom thick. The knife blade, in short, wasvery hard andvery sharp.

The marauder’s armor, however, was hard as well, and as Nal brought the blade down between the man’s shoulder blades, the knife turned and skidded across the slick, mirror-bright surface. Nal had an instant’s surreal glimpse of his own face, twisted with anger and reflecting back at him out of the man’s back. Then the reflections shifted and rippled as the man turned, trying to throw him off. All Nal could do was hang on tight with his left hand, and keep hammering at the armored form beneath him with the knife in the right. The bladedid cut the armor with each stroke, but only in shallow nicks, and he had to pull hard to yank the knife free after each blow.

The armor wasn’t all solid shell, however; when he shifted his aim to the marauder’s elbows, the keen-edged blade sank through the folded ceramplas composite with startling ease, and he heard the helmet-muffled shriek of the man beneath him.

Rough hands grabbed him from behind, lifting him. The other marauders on the GEV flatbed had seen him and were turning their attention to this sudden assault from above. Seconds later, however, Derel’s small and wiry frame landed squarely on the back of one of the other armored forms, followed in quick succession by Trab, V’jak Ra-il Gub, Vanet Gan-Me, and Chakar Na-il Havaay. One of the armored marauders spun hard, throwing V’jak against the flatbed guard rail and bringing his weapon to bear on him. The man was holding a pistol, an ugly, snub-nosed weapon that detonated small charges of chemical explosive to propel heavy metal projectiles the size of the tip of a man’s little finger. The weapon barked twice, and V’jak pitched backward over the railing, blood exploding from holes opening suddenly in his chest and back.

“No!” Nal screamed, turning sharply and slashing at the marauder’s knee with his bloodied knife. The marauder shrieked and the pistol flew from his gauntleted hand. The man jerked away, pulling the hilt from Nal’s grasp.

Nal was never clear as to exactly what happened next. For a blurred and utterly chaotic few seconds, he struggled between two of the marauders, while his friends swarmed over both, stabbing and flailing at them with combat knives. Two more Ishtaran recruits leaped off the walkway above, but the hovercraft slewed sharply to the right and both missed, landing instead on the nanocrete floor of the stadium. The hovercraft skittered sideways, wildly out of control….

Center Stadium Area

Marshall Sports Complex,

Relief Distribution Center

1031 hrs, EST

Garroway kept firing as he leaped onto the front of the hovercraft’s cab, his bolts gouging fist-sized craters in hard sheet metal. Some must have slipped through the driver’s vision slit, however, and evidently the marauder behind the slit wasn’t wearing a mirrored helmet, because the hovercraft suddenly swung out of control, going into a gentle spin as it drifted to the right on howling thruster blasts. The motion almost threw him off, but he grabbed hold of a sandbag lashed on the roof of the cab and pulled himself up, scrambling against the vehicle’s makeshift armor until he could grab the flatbed railing. The scene on the flatbed was one of utter and bloody chaos. Ishtaran recruits were swarming over three combat-suited marauders, stabbing them with knives or pounding at them with the butts of their laser rifles. Two had just succeeded in pulling a mirror-bright helmet off of one of the marauders; for a moment, the bearded man inside looked up at Garroway, horror dawning in his eyes, and then one of the recruits drove the black blade of a combat knife, far sharper than any razor, into the man’s forehead, burying it to the hilt. The man’s arms and legs jerked once, a death spasm, and then he sprawled lifeless on the deck; the recruits who’d killed him were already attacking a second marauder, who was trying to pull another knife out of his knee. The third armored scruffie was rolling on the deck, clutching both elbows with opposite hands, apparently badly hurt.

Garroway, seeing that the recruits had the situation well in hand, grabbed the plasma gun on its pintel mount, swiveled it around to face the next marauder vehicle in line, which was just coming through the gate. His thumbs pressed the butterfly trigger, and the weapon hissed and cracked, flinging a white-hot sliver of plasma into the cab of the other vehicle.

Sandbags and sheet metal couldn’t protect the driver from that onslaught, and with no civilians nearby to serve as human shields, he was a slow-moving and naked target. Garroway fired three more rounds into the vehicle for effect, aiming for the undercarriage, then watching it suddenly crumple beneath a blossoming orange fireball.

The firefight ended with startling swiftness, then. The surviving marauders inside the stadium turned and ran for the gate, rushing past the burning wreckage as Marines closed in from all sides, weapons firing. Many of the marauders threw down their own weapons and raised their hands, unwilling to face the Marine countercharge without the firepower of their technical to back them up. The second technical in line slewed to a halt when Marines killed the driver; the other ramshackle vehicles, still outside the entrance to the stadium, turned and ran, retracing their paths through sections of fence knocked over moments before.

They hadn’t gone far, however, when a shrill roar cleaved the sky, and a quartet of ugly black fliers, looking like dragonflies with sleek fuselages slung behind insect heads with bulging eyes, streaked overhead. The A-699 Skydragons had arrived, and within moments the surviving technicals had been turned into twisted and fiercely burning heaps of wreckage.

Garroway turned to one of the unarmored Marines standing in the gate. He was young, looked scared, was unarmed, and his utilities were covered with blood.

He’d also leaped into a hovercraft to attack heavily armed and armored men.

“What’s your name, son?” Garroway asked.

“Sir! Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach,sir! ”

“At ease, Marine,” Garroway said. “You men did a hell of a job.”

It seemed to take a moment for what Garroway had said to penetrate.Marine!

The Ishtaran, already at attention, seemed to grow taller by another half-meter. 15

12JUNE 2314

Henderson Hall

Ring City, Virginia, US/FRA

1020 hrs, EST

Puller Auditorium, an enormous chamber with stadium seating located in the west wing of the ancient headquarters building for the United States Marine Corps, was packed to overflowing, and at the moment it sounded as though every person there was trying to get a word in. Colonel Robert Ellsworth Lee shook his head. Eight hundred people, all talking at once, made a hell of a racket. Tom Llewellyn, the President’s national security advisor, stood on the projection dais at the front of the room, hands held high as if in surrender, trying to restore order. “Please…please…people,please !

Order!”

Gradually, the crowd noise died away. Llewellyn cleared his throat, then pushed ahead. “Gentlemen, ladies. Thank you for your attendance at this briefing. As it says in your download egendas, we will hear the report from 1MIEU first. After that, we will begin deliberations on the Andromeda Question, with a vote scheduled for 1500 hours this afternoon. While the results of this vote will not be binding, the results will be presented to the Federal Senate for final debate and vote next week.”

Which, Lee reflected, would almost certainly rubber-stamp the decisions made here this morning. Most of the senators who would be making that vote were in this room now, and he was sure that they would be payingvery close attention to the feelings expressed in this chamber. The hell of it was, this vote would override the vote made by the military council the previous February. The World Union had demanded a vote on the matter of whether or not to invest in asteroid starships for an exodus from Earth.

And the Federal Union of North America had committed itself to supporting that decision. If the WU

voted to flee to Andromeda, the Marines would support the decision.

Even if the majority of the Marines felt that that would be the wrong way to go. The Corps had a very long tradition of supporting civilian policy, not making it.

“Obviously, emotions over this question are running high,” Llewellyn continued. “We have before us essentially two possible courses of action…the Andromedan Option, and the Garroway Option. Madam Fortier, the honorable senator from the sovereign nation of Quebec, has proposed that we accept both the advice and the active help of the N’mah, construct as many asteroid starships as possible, with cybernetic hibernation facilities for as many people as possible, and use them to travel to the Andromedan Galaxy. At sublight speeds, the voyage will take some two million, three hundred thousand years, objective, though only twenty-seven years would pass on board the ships thanks to the effects of relativistic time dilation. The refugees would be revived over two million light-years away, and over two million years in the future. It is hoped that they will be able to find a new home world, and ensure the long-term survival of Humankind.

“Opposing this, the Garroway Option, as presented by General Clinton Garroway, suggests that we stay where we are, and use military means to prevent or at least to delay Xul reprisals against our planet.

“I am told that new information is available regarding the military option. Present this morning is the commanding officer of the 4th Regiment, 1st Marine Division, Colonel Robert Lee. Colonel Lee?” He stepped back off the dais. “If you would, please?”

Lee stood and walked down the steps of the aisle, then stepped up onto the scan dais at the front of Puller Auditorium. He took a moment to study the faces—expectantfaces—of the men and women in the audience. The crowd was divided about half and half between civilians and people in uniform; most of the government and military leaders freed from their long subterranean imprisonment beneath the D.C. mud flats were here in person, as well as those members of the civilian governments—U.S. and Federal Republic—who’d survived the firestorm of several months earlier. Many, including President Raleigh and her staff, were watching through the newly recreated GlobalNet—still little more than a shadow of its former self, but robust enough now, at least, to support a large number of AIs, as well as linked humans. The Navy had been working constantly over the past months to build and place constellations of communications satellites in Earth orbit, as well as Earth-based nodes and server complexes. According to the Net statistics he’d just downloaded, in fact, almost ten thousand minds were linked into this briefing so far, besides the eight hundred present physically in the auditorium, and more were linking in every second. Phobos HQ was connected, despite the long time lag, as well as the much closer virtual networks on Luna and in Earth orbit.

As was only fitting. This, he knew, would be a briefing session of historic importance. His biggest question was why he had been chosen to make the presentation. This was General Garroway’s baby, not his, and the general should have been the one to stand here and make nice to the brass and politicos. Lee felt out of place, and thoroughly inadequate. Searching through the auditorium and the watching faces, he found Garroway, ten rows back.

The bastard actuallygrinned at him, as though enjoying his discomfiture.

“Ladies,” Lee said, “gentlemen, AIs…and, of course, our distinguished guests of the N’mah. Welcome.”

He waited a moment longer as the buzz of conversation within the auditorium died down…and, he admitted to himself with wry humor, to increase the suspense, just a bit. He wanted their absolute attention.

“Thank you for attending this briefing, whether physically or virtually. I think you’ll be interested in what Intelligence has to say this afternoon, especially with the vote coming up this afternoon. In short…we know, with about sixty percent certainty, where the Xul attackers came from four months ago, what route they followed to get here, and something about their home system. We can, if we wish, launch a retaliatory strike, in accordance with the outlines of Operation Seafire as presented by General Garroway.”

That announcement, almost casually presented, raised a sudden roar from the crowd. Many were on their feet, some cheering, some shouting…but very clearly the reaction was mixed. There were still many in the government who strongly advocated a policy of no retaliation, who were in favor of evacuating as many from Earth as possible, and for seeking a new world-home, somewhere far from this region of the Galaxy, where Humankind could begin again.

Lee made a mental connection, opening a download feed. At his back, the two-story wall turned dark, then lit up with stars; at the same time, windows became available in the mind of each person at the briefing, both the physical attendees and the virtual linkers.

“I think the information can best be presented by the entity that found and correlated it in the first place—the AI of the command constellation of 1MIEU—Quincy.”

“Thank you, Colonel Lee,” Quincy’s voice said, his calm and measured tones speaking in the minds of all present. “It is good to be here.”

Lee wondered if that last sentence represented Quincy’s social programming, or if he really felt some positive emotion. The question, he realized, was meaningless; in any case, most humans would have said the same no matter what they actually felt—a polite noise to grease social wheels. AI minds might not be so different from human minds after all.

“We have completed an exhaustive analysis of data retrieved by one of my downloaded avatars during the Armageddonfall incursion,” Quincy went on. “This was carried out by linguistic AIs both at the Military Intelligence Analysis Center at Fort Meade, High Guard Headquarters at Fra Mauro, on Luna, and at the Marine Intelligence Complex at Stickney Base in Phobos. We were fortunate in being able to draw upon a great deal of archived data, going back to our first encounter with the Xul machine intelligence in the so-called Singer recovered at Europa in 2067. Translating an alien computer operating system from scratch would be all but impossible. We’ve had substantial help from the N’mah, and from the Ancients’ records found buried in the Cave of Wonders, in Cydonia, Mars.

“The images you see were stored within what we believe were the equivalents of a navigational computer system on board the Xul ship. The view here is of a portion of the sky as seen from here, within our Solar System.”

Under Quincy’s control, the scene swung sharply, the stars streaking left to right until the familiar three-in-a-row suns of Orion’s Belt came into view. The camera view then slowed, continuing to drift left and down, centering on a particularly bright star below and to the east of Orion.

“Alpha Canis Majoris,” Quincy said. “Better known as Sirius. Type A0, distance 8.6 light-years from Sol. We’re all familiar with the system as the location of the Sirius Stargate, and the current home of a surviving colony of N’mah.”

As he spoke, the viewpoint seemed to accelerate toward the star, which became markedly brighter. A second, faint pinpoint of light became visible next to the star—Sirius’s white dwarf companion, Sirius B. Then a third pinpoint appeared, which expanded into something like a titanic wedding band adrift in space. The long-suspected Sirius C had turned out to be an artificial construct, a ring twenty kilometers across housing a pair of counter-rotating black holes moving at a high percentage of the speed of light. Gravitational stresses set up by those masses were sufficient to distort local space, opening a passage through non-space, and effectively permitting instantaneous travel across distances of many light-years.

“According to the N’mah, the Xul use a network of these gates scattered throughout our Galaxy to effect near-instantaneous travel across distances of many thousands of light-years.” Quincy paused. “I hear a question?”

“Yes, Quincy,” a woman in the audience said. Lee checked the speaker’s ID, intending to suggest that questions be held for the end of the briefing. When he saw that the speaker was Dr. Elena Martin, President Raleigh’s senior science advisor, he backed off. Some people here had the power, and the right, to interrupt any time they pleased.

“Why do the Xul need the Stargates if they have FTL travel?” Martin asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“A reasonable question. According to our N’mah sources, the Xul FTL drive enables them to make use of a hyperdimensional extrusion of normal space into a higher order which they call ‘paraspace.’ By bypassing our normal four-dimensional spacetime, they can achieve velocities approaching five hundredc

. Human physicists are still debating the terminology, I should add. FTL velocities in normal space are still impossible. Perhaps I should say that the Xul achieveparavelocities of five hundred times the speed of light.

“While extremely fast, such paravelocities are still finite. The Xul ship, we now believe, emerged from the Sirius Gate approximately six and a half days before arriving in our Solar System. The N’mah still at Sirius may have transmitted a warning, but at the speed of light it will take a little more than another eight and a half years to reach us. In other words, the Xul crossed 8.6 light-years in six days, for a paravelocity of, very roughly, five hundredc .

“While the use of a paraspace drive allows for very swift travel between local star systems, such as Sol and Sirius, a ship traveling at five hundredc would still require twocenturies to traverse the diameter of our Galaxy, crossing the span of one hundred thousand light-years from one side to the other.

“Our N’mah informants know of only a handful of stargates, but believe they may be scattered throughout our Galaxy, with no gate more than approximately one hundred light-years from at least one other gate.”

“You’re saying the Xul could cross the Galaxy by traveling from gate to gate,” Admiral Jason Colby, at Fra Mauro, put in, “with no more than two to three months’ travel time between each? That doesn’t buy them anything. Still takes over two centuries to cross the Galaxy.”

“No, Admiral,” Quincy said. “We now understand that these stargates can be tuned by adjusting the vibrational frequency of the rotating black holes. Matching frequencies between two gates connects those two gates. Theoretically, each stargate can be tuned to connect with any other stargate. This means that the Xul can reach any point within our Galaxy in no more than two and a half months.”

Lee felt the shock of the audience as they tried to digest this datum. They’d all known that Xul technology was good and that the Xul had a very long reach, but no one had considered yet just how long that reach might be.

The N’mah were right. To escape the Xul threat, Humankind would have to flee to another galaxy entirely and, traveling at sublight speeds, millions of years into the future, an idea that still was daunting in the extreme.

Throughout the discussion, the elements of the Sirian star system remained on the screen at Lee’s back, and in the download window open in all of their minds—brilliant Sirius A, the small but fierce pinpoint of Sirius B, and the gleaming hoop of the Stargate. The image shifted now, moving closer to the gate, which from the new vantage point became a perfect, thread-rimmed circle of silver light.

“This one stargate,” Quincy continued, “may actually give us access to every other stargate in every part of the Galaxy. As yet, we don’t know how, exactly, the tuning of one gate in order to connect it with another specific gate is accomplished. The N’mah say they know how to interact with the gates, and are willing to share that knowledge with us.

“Judging from the navigation data we acquired from the Xul intruder, we believe the probable origin of that vessel to be…here.”

The computer-generated point of view plunged forward through the gate, the stars blurred for an instant, then snapped back into crystal clarity. Starclouds hung suspended in space, half of the field of view a teeming beehive of suns, the other half empty and dark. From this new vantage point, they appeared to be hanging above the plane of the Galaxy; ahead, the Galactic Core glowed like red-orange embers thickly streaked by the dark wisps of nebulae, while, in the foreground, the Galaxy’s spiral arms uncoiled in pale, cold, blue-and-white light.

An orange-hued sun detached itself from the background and grew larger, brighter. A crescent appeared, a bright sickle bowed away from the sun, its night side spangled with thickly clotted lights, as if from dozens of enormous cities.

“As you see,” Quincy said, “this system is located above the plane of the spiral arms of our Galaxy. Like the Cluster Space system our Marines visited a century and a half ago, this system lies on the very fringes of our Galactic neighborhood.

“We have named this system Night’s Edge,” Quincy continued. “One of the human intelligence analysts on this project seemed to feel that the romantic imagery was important. The star is located well above the Galactic plane, and is somewhat closer to the Galaxy’s core than are we. We estimate its distance from Earth to be nearly fifteen thousand light-years.

“Analysis gives us a sixty-five percent likelihood that Night’s Edge is the location of a major Xul military and transport nexus, and that it contains the base from which the intruder vessel was dispatched in February. What we propose is to send 1MIEU to Sirius. There, we will consult with the N’mah still within the Sirius system, before they abandon it entirely, and confirm this analysis with them.

“The operation would then proceed in two phases. First would be a reconnaissance, carried out by AI drones. Depending on the information these drones return to Sirius, we will then pass through the gate in force in order to implement Operation Seafire.”

Again, the room exploded into shouts, together with a smattering of applause. Again, Lee heard a distinct division in the reaction, with some in the audience cheering Quincy’s statement, and others shouting against it.

“That’s suicide!” one particularly strident voice called out. “It would just bring the entire Xul civilization down on us!”

“Yeah,” someone else called out. “Wouldn’t they know where the attack had come from? Won’t they pass it on to other bases? What does it buy us?”

“According to our N’mah advisors,” Quincy said, “communication between separate Xul bases is quite slow. The enemy is highly advanced technically, true, but we can’t overlook the fact that the Galaxy is a very large place—four hundred billion stars, and an estimated fifty billion worlds supporting life advanced enough that resident species could evolve to intelligence and technical sophistication within a few million years. The N’mah believe that there are no more than a very few hundred bases like the one at Night’s Edge.

“The Xul, for all their high-tech ability, simply cannot keep track of every planet, of every species, at least not in any detail. Each base is responsible for a very large sector containing many millions of stars, and hundreds of thousands, perhapsmillions of worlds. The Xul also move slowly by our standards, taking their time before responding to a threat. So far as the N’mah have been able to determine, the Xul have no central authority, no emperor or home government. Information filters from one Xul world to another only intermittently, with the movement of their ships, and distant outposts may be thousands of years behind in acquiring news from the more centralized regions. By the same token, Xul worlds in toward the heart of the Galaxy, where we believe they are more thickly distributed, might not learn of events in the outlying regions for millennia.

“We believe, therefore, that if we destroy the base and any Xul ships present at Night’s Edge, the Xul elsewhere will eventually learn of the attack, but not for a time…perhaps not for centuries.”

“Then all we’ve done is put off the day of reckoning,” President Raleigh observed.

“Yes, Madam President,” Quincy replied. “But…which would be better? To delay a possible Xul response by centuries? Or to simply sit back and wait for the inevitable response from the Night’s Edge base when their warship fails to return? The vessel that struck Earth is already several months overdue. We believe they will respond within ten to fifty years—”

“You believe?” Lieutenant General Clarence Armitage, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood in the audience, interrupting. “Youbelieve ? The enemy could be in Earth orbit tomorrow!”

“General, the ten-to-fifty-year estimate was based on N’mah observations of Xul behavior over the past several millennia,” Quincy replied, his voice unruffled by Armitage’s outburst. “You are quite correct, however. Given a possible flight time from Night’s Edge of six days, by way of the Sirius Stargate, they could indeed be here at any moment. Their response to perceived threats tends to be ponderously slow, however. Remember, the Singer almost certainly broadcast a signal of some sort to the stars in 2067, quite probably an announcement of our existence, but there was no evidence of Xul activity in this part of the Galaxy until one of their ships emerged from the Sirius Gate in 2148, some eight decades later. After the destruction of the second Xul intruder at Sirius in 2170, another 144 years passed before one of their warships actually found Earth.

“However, we don’tknow , not with any surety. Earth remains in terrible danger.”

“Then how does this Seafire proposal help us?” Senator Fortier demanded, her Québecois French translated into acid English in Lee’s mind. “All it will do is draw precious military resources away from Earth when we need them here most!”

“As I said, we don’t know with any surety. All we can do is look at the problem statistically, seeking the greatest—”

“Excuse me, Quincy,” Colonel Lee said, breaking in. “Perhaps I can answer this one.”

“Of course, Colonel.”

Lee turned on the dais to face Senator Fortier. She was seated near the President, and he wondered if that indicated a sharing of viewpoint. Unlikely. The President had more sense, usually. But Quincy and other expert AI systems were always at their weakest when attempting to respond to emotional arguments. For that, you needed a human mind.

“Madam President, Madam Senator,” he said. “Quincy has given us the facts, the best analysis of the information retrieved from the Xul ship possible with our current technology. What we have to decide now is beyond the purview of any artificially intelligent system, and it is why we are meeting here this morning.

“General Armitage pointed out that our use of Seafire to delay the enemy may be futile. It will take ten years, objective, for a Marine expeditionary unit to reach Sirius. We have no way of cutting down on that travel time, none. And, as the general said, a Xul follow-up expedition could have departed from Night’s Edge a week ago, emerged through the Sirius Gate, and be here in time for breakfast tomorrow.

“And Senator Fortier, you are right, as well. A Marine expeditionary force consists of a thousand Marines, several hundred naval personnel, and at least eight to ten major ships—transports, mostly, but we would want a significant fleet presence along as well—say, a battlecruiser and a couple of destroyers, at least.

“But ask yourselves this. Wouldn’t it be better to take the fight to the enemy—even if it did not delay him by a single hour—rather than just sitting here and waiting for the end? Isn’t it better to go down fighting, than to close our eyes and hope it’s all just a bad dream, or that the bogeyman will go away?

Isn’t it better to strike back than to flee to some other galaxy in the hope—quite possibly the misguided hope—that the enemy will never be able to find us…or that he won’t be there waiting for us when we finally arrive a couple of million years objective from now? We’ve been discussing the possibility of building asteroid starships and departing for M-31 in Andromeda at the speed of light.” He shrugged.

“The N’mah don’t know of any Xul presence outside our Galaxy. The refugeesmight be safe.

“Or it could be that the Xul have been there for a million years already, or that within the next two million years, they’ll decide to go there and be waiting to meet us. The point is, no matter what we decide here in this chamber today, there are no guarantees…none, except for one. If we decide to wait here for the Xul to return, if we try to face even one of their FTL starships with military might, even our entire Navy and High Guard combined, wewill be destroyed. While no accurate estimation is possible, Xul technology is atleast a thousand years ahead of ours, and the tech-level difference might well be measured in hundreds of thousands, evenmillions of years. If we try to stand up to them on their terms, we will lose. And losing, I remind you all, means the extinction ofHomo sapiens.

“So why the hellnot invest ten ships and a couple of thousand volunteers in the possibility, however slight, that striking back, that hurting them, badly, will hide our location a few more centuries? The Xul are convinced that we’re some sort of a threat to them, long term? Then let’s prove it to them, and hurt them bad enough that they stop and really think about whether trying to eliminate us is a good idea?” Lee thought again of the computer animation General Garroway had shown them when he’d first proposed Seafire—the caveman sneaking up behind the combat-armored soldier and walloping him with a stone ax. “Right now, standing up to the Xul, for us, is like a Stone-Age primitive going it toe-to-toe with a fully armed and armored Marine. We try to fight him one-on-one, and we get killed. But if we do the unexpected, find a way to slip in under their defensive radar and get in just one, good, killing blow, we might win for ourselves the time to rebuild the Earth…and to bring our military technology up to a level that really gives us a fighting chance!”

He didn’t add a bit of history, something he’d downloaded from the net archives just last night. As the political debate over whether to flee or fight had continued to unfold over the past four months, a small group of military officers, here on Earth and in near-Earth space, had begun making reference to what they called the Doolittle Option.

Three and a half centuries before, during the Second World War, the United States had found itself at a serious disadvantage in fighting the Japanese Empire in the Pacific. At the war’s beginning, the Japanese actually enjoyed several significant technological advantages—better torpedoes, better surface warships—than the Americans, and their unexpected strike at the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor had savaged the American Pacific Fleet, leaving it vastly outnumbered in battleships, aircraft carriers, and other major fleet elements as well.

But four months after Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle had organized and led a raid against the Japanese home islands with sixteen medium bombers, aircraft normally flown from land bases but which, with special training on the part of the crews, could be flown off the deck of an aircraft carrier. The raid had been a resounding success, though none of the aircraft made it through to their planned landings in China, and the actual damage inflicted on the Japanese had been trivial. The true value of the Doolittle Raid, as it came to be called, had been not in military advantage but in stirring the resolve of Americans at home, civilians stunned by news of an uninterrupted string of Japanese victories, from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines to the Dutch East Indies.

Military historians had convincingly argued since then that the raid had forced the Japanese to step up their attempts to annihilate the American carrier fleet—which had escaped the attack against Pearl Harbor—in order to prevent another such attack.

And that had led to the turning-point Battle of Midway two months later, when the enemy’s naval juggernaut in the Pacific had at last been decisively stopped, allowing U.S. superiority in production to begin to catch up with, then surpass, the Japanese.

Operation Seafire shared certain elements with the Doolittle Raid. It stood no chance of seriously harming the enemy, and it depended on makeshift means to overcome Xul technological superiority. But it had the potential to make a serious strategic difference, giving Earth the time it needed to rebuild, rearm, and develop a credible defense.

The audience had again erupted into shouting, and Lee tried to make a guess as to which side had the numbers—or, at the very least, which was shouting loudest. A vote had been promised for that afternoon. From the sound of things, the vote would be close.

A substantial number of people still wanted to opt for leaving Earth, even though the best studies conducted so far suggested that at most only a few hundreds of thousands of people might be saved in a handful of asteroid starships—a tiny, tiny fraction of several billion survivors. Over the past weeks, word of the deliberations outside of Washington had leaked to the rest of the nation, then to the world, and thousands had died in the riots that followed. Both Canton and North China had threatened war against the Federal Republic, and the World Union, meeting at their new provisional capital in Sydney, had as their first official act passed a condemnation of both the Federal Union and the United States for

“unilateral acts to the detriment of Humanity.”

If the U.S. or the FR decided to jump ship, the rest of the world wanted to jump as well.

“If I might have your attention a moment more,” Lee said, then waited. Gradually, the noise subsided, and each member of the audience again was looking at him.

“Thank you,” he said. “I just wanted to add that, as of two weeks ago, the selection process has begun within the 1st Marine Division. We already have more than enough volunteers to create our expeditionary force. We have also begun sequestering the supplies necessary at L-4, and begun necessary updates and modifications of several starships in anticipation of a mission to Night’s Edge.

“I would urge you, the civilian leadership that will make the final decision here today…even if you decide to save a few thousand souls and leave Earth forever, remember thatbillions will remain behind, and deserve a fighting chance. Send the Marines to Night’s Edge! Those who remain on Earth will not have a better chance for survival!

“This concludes my presentation this morning.”

Lee left the dais and walked up an aisle to an empty seat as the chamber around him thundered with argument and counterargument. Tom Llewellyn took his place on the projection dais. In the window open in his mind, Llewellyn’s face appeared as the science advisor again pleaded for order. The vote, Lee knew, was going to be damned close…but now there was a good chance that the government would do what Leeknew to be the right thing. Some of Earth’s survivors—the rich, the powerful, the governing elite—might well pursue the Andromedan Proposal as presented by Senator Fortier. With their power and economic bases on Earth wrecked by Armageddonfall, they might well conclude that they had nothing to lose and everything to gain by getting as far away from Earth as possible in space and in time and starting all over again. After all, they would still be in charge once they’d founded the new human colony.

Good riddance to them all, Lee thought, and he was surprised at how much bitterness rode with the thought.We don’t need them.

But, before they left, they would agree to give those they left behind a fighting chance, even if it meant sacrificing some of their military assets.

Only time, possibly a great deal of time, would tell which decision was truly right, or even whether Humankind would survive at all.

Colonel Lee knew where he stood.

The Marines, he knew, men and women who’d sworn oaths to the United States and to the Federal Republic, for the most part stood with him.

And that was with General Clinton Garroway, the man who’d created Operation Seafire, and a man anyone in the Corps would have followed anywhere in the Galaxy.

16

25MARCH 2314

Camp Hope

Ring City, Virginia, US/FRA

1815 hrs, EST

Garroway carried his tray to an unoccupied table, took a seat, and again contemplated the lump of dried, brown mud in a bowl that was dinner.

“Can I join you?” a familiar voice asked from behind his shoulder.

“Hey, Chrome,” he said. “Sure. Grab an ass support.”

“You look like you just lost your last friend.”

“Just giving thanks.” He touched the plastic covering, and watched it peel open and begin to cook. “‘For what we are about to receive…’”

“Can the grouching,” Chrome told him. “In prehistoric times, Marines had to hunt and kill their own mud.”

“True. You think we’d get a better selection if we went down to the Potomac and dug our own?”

She made a face. “With all those dead lawyers and politicians carried away by the flood?”

“You’re right. Bottom feeders aren’t that appetizing.”

“Affirmative. I prefer to take my sustenance from higher up on the food chain. Eat your porridge.”

Barracks humor, Garroway thought, had taken a grim turn of late. Lots of jokes about cannibalism and the end of the world. Maybe that kind of insanity was the only way sane people had of remaining sane. He picked up a spoon and took a bite. In fact, it wasn’t bad…kind of bland, a little gritty. If you didn’t think too much about it, not bad at all.

“So whadja think of those kids in the amptheater this morning?” Chrome asked him.

“The Ishies?” He nodded. “They did good.” He took another bite. “I put the bunch of them in for the Navy Cross.”

“They won’t get it. Has to be an officer to recommend them. They don’t take the word of grunts for stuff like that.”

“Hanes said he’d back me.” Captain Theodore Hanes was their company commander here at Fairfax Center. “I played him my combat mems in the debrief this afternoon. He was impressed.”

“Cool. Might go through, then.”

“They deserve the recognition. Shit, they’re all still kids, wet behind the ears and barely through Phase One of boot camp. More than that, they don’t even have a handle on civilized life, yet.”

“You callthis civilization?” Chrome asked.

“You know what I mean. These people were primitives living out in the jungle on Ishtar. Biggest city they’d ever seen was New Sumer. They probably signed on out there because the Marines they saw looked like demigods, or something.”

“Maybe they saw joining the Corps as a way out of the jungle. Or it was a way to say thanks for the liberation.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t care why they did it. I just think it was pretty spectacular the way they took on that technical this morning. That took sheer, raw guts.”

“Roger that.” She looked thoughtful. “You know, it seems to me there’s too much emphasis on them being ‘primitives,’ whatever the hell that is.”

“What do you mean?”

“The point is…they’re human. Exactly like you and me. Different upbringing, sure. Different culture, different take on technology. But they’re just as smart as we are. Maybe more, since they haven’t had the fancy hardware…” She tapped the side of her skull. “Implants, downloads, all of that. They’ve made do with less their whole lives.”

“Could be. You know, there’s a lot of talk lately about how ancient peoples needed so much help from extraterrestrials. You know, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, how they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the N’mah giving them a leg up.”

“Pretty good, since the N’mah don’t have legs. The adult ones, anyway.”

“Right. But our ancestors were as smart, as capable, as adaptable as we are today. The N’mah might have helped get civilization started, but our ancestors had already managed to survive when the Xul mopped up the An.”

“And now we get to survive again.”

“Maybe that’s what humans are best at.”

Another Marine, wearing green utilities, came up beside them, tray in hand. “Mind if I join you?” he said. Garroway looked up, saw the silver bars on the man’s collar, and started to stand up. “Sir!”

“Sit down, sit down,” the lieutenant sounded tired. He also looked very young, in his mid-twenties, Garroway thought. “I just need a place to park.”

The mess hall, Garroway saw, was pretty full. A line of other officers was filing through past the galley window, each receiving their ration of NMFEs.

“No room at the BOQ, sir?” Chrome asked him.

“No. They sent us down here.”

The Fairfax Center’s Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, Garroway recalled, were small and tight on space. The NCO barracks had more room.

“Just got shipped in, sir?” Garroway asked.

He gave a wry grin. “Just passing through. We’re in from Twentynine Palms.”

Understanding dawned. “You’re one of those Skydragons from this morning!”

“A-ffirmative.” He held out a hand. “Handle’s Maverick.”

“Good to meet you, sir,” Garroway shook hands, accepting with the touch the download package that included the man’s name, rank, and unit—his electronic business card. “VMA-412?”

“Yup. Just in from Mars.”

Chrome nodded. “We were out that way last deployment.”

Maverick digested the electronic ID packet Garroway had passed him with the handshake. “You’re 1MarReg! You were the guys who took out the Xul?”

“That was us,” Garroway said.

“Good job, Gunny!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“They scrambled the 412 when the Intruder came in,” Maverick told them. “Had us boosting out to meet them, but you folks took out the bad guys before we could launch. I can’t tell you how damned happy we were to hear we weren’t going up against a Xul capital ship!”

“Yeah?” Chrome cocked her head to the side. “Excuse my saying so, sir, but that’s not quite the image I thought you fast-movers wanted to present.”

“What, you mean all the macho crap? Up, up and away? That’s for the zoomies.”

Zoomy was centuries-old slang for Aerospace Force pilots, and was usually meant as a pejorative. Marine aerospacecraft were generally referred to as fast movers, among other things. Marines had a special love for their ground-attack personnel, however. Ever since WWII, Marine pilots had excelled at close air support of their comrades on the ground, at least in part because of the remarkable esprit that bound them together.

“‘Every Marine a rifleman,’” Garroway said, quoting. It was an old expression, a reflection of the fact that all Marines were considered to be riflemen first, even if their MOS—their Military Occupational Specialty—had them serving chow in the mess hall, or strapped into the acceleration couch of a high-performance aerospace fighter.

“Roger that,” Maverick said.

“You guys kicked ass this morning,” Chrome said.

“Kicked ass and took numbers, ’cause you were moving too fast to take names.”

Maverick chuckled. “Wasn’t like we had any tough opposition. What was it…civilian trucks?”

“It was tough enough from where we were,” Chrome said. “I imagine the local warlords’ll think twice before trying that shit again.”

Maverick nodded. “Our orders are to redeploy out here, at least for the time being. They have us sitting on the old Reagan Aerospaceport, just south of here.”

“Well, it’s great to have you aboard, sir,” Garroway said. “What do you think of the chow?”

Maverick had opened and heated his meal as they talked, and was just now taking his first bite. He made a face. “Gods! What is it?”

“Recycled lawyers, politicians, and other bottom feeders. Sir.”

“Figures. Put ’em to best use.” He looked at Chrome. “Hey, maybe you two can help me out.”

“With what, sir?”

“Xul tech. Is it as hairy as they say?”

Garroway shrugged. “We got through it, okay.” He tried not to think about those last moments, with Xul combat robots swarming around the transport as they boosted clear. He didn’t think he had ever been so scared in his life…not even later, when they were adrift in deep space, with no real hope of rescue. That had been something he’d been able to accept. But those swarms of machines coming after them…

He shook himself, trying to rid himself of the dark memories. “The way I see it, sir, a lot of their stuff is more developed, but it’s really just variations of what we already have. Particle beams. Lasers. Nanotechnology. While we were inside the Intruder, I saw this huge swarm of…I don’t know. Machines. Pieces. They were moving like they were under intelligent control, repairing the hole in the side of the Xul ship.”

“G-2 thinks they have at least a limited ability to regrow their big spacecraft,” Chrome added, referring to division-level intelligence. “They probably grow them in the first place by reshaping asteroids, or whatever is handy. If they’re damaged, they just grow a plug in the hole. We have limited abilities along those lines now.”

“Huh. I wonder what their cities look like?”

“Maybe they don’t have cities,” Garroway suggested. “Or maybe they just reshape the whole damned planet to suit themselves.That’d be a sight!”

“The biggest tech-gap,” Garroway said, “seems to be what they do with cupie.”

“Say again?”

“Cupie? Q-P. Quantum physics. G-2 says they actually rewrite the laws of physics, at least in a very elementary way.”

“No shit! Like what?”

“Like that trick they pulled throwing rocks at Earth,” Chrome told him. “The N’mah know how to reduce the inertia in a discrete lump of mass, right?”

Maverick nodded.

“Okay. The Xul do the same thing…only they can give the mass any inertia they want. Like a brand-new vector of two thousand kps.”

“How the hell could they do that?”

“If we knew that,” Garroway said with a shake of his head, “we wouldn’t be so worried about these bastards. The smart money, though, says they know how to manipulate virtual particles in the Quantum Sea.”

That, at least, was what knowledgeable scuttlebutt had to say about it. For at least three centuries, since the development of quantum physics in the mid-twentieth century, scientists had recognized that hard vacuum was not really empty, that at a very deep, very fundamental level of existence, so-called empty-space was a kind of continually bubbling and churning froth of elementary particles popping magically into existence in pairs—particle and antiparticle—and almost immediately vanishing as the paired particles canceled one another out. So long as there was no net increase in mass or energy, the laws of conservation were observed, and you didn’t have something coming out of nothing. Notreally . While seeming to violate laws of common sense, the existence of these so-called virtual particles had been proven in the twentieth century. Two metal plates placed parallel and very, very close together registered a slight attractive force between them, called the Casimir Effect, which was the result of a slight excess of energy materializing outside the plates, compared with what materialized between them. The twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman had calculated that the virtual energy contained within a single cubic centimeter of hard vacuum would, if liberated, boil all of the oceans of Earth. Evpower plants made use of the Casimir Effect to draw energy—a minute fraction of what potentially was available—from hard vacuum, sufficient to accelerate starships to near-c, making relativistic flight between the stars possible.

But quantum physics had suggested more than that unimaginable amounts of energy were free for the taking from hard vacuum, much more. That background of virtual particles, the base state, or, as it was more poetically known, the Quantum Sea, was also responsible fornon -virtual particles as well. An electron, for instance, could be understood as asuccession of particle-pairs popping in and out of existence very, very swiftly, creating a kind of standing wave that defined it and gave it substance. It had long been accepted that both matter and energy were not the substantial, thump-the-table-top solidity assumed by Newtonian physics. Matter, it turned out, was as insubstantial as a dream; an atom not only was mostly empty space, but even the particles that made it up—electrons, protons, and neutrons—were more like information than like the layman’s idea of what matter should be. Quantum particles might act like particles…but look at them another way and they acted like waves. In fact, how you measured them, or even thought about them, seemed to be what determined what form they took. Matter, at the deepest level of reality, was anidea , and as insubstantial as a thought.

“What they’re saying,” Chrome added, building on Garroway’s explanation, “is that if matter is really nothing more than standing waves in the Quantum Sea, as information, really, then it ought to be possible to reach down in there and change the information. Part of the information would be everything that makes up the block of data we call inertia…the particle’s mass, its vector, how much kinetic energy is wrapped up inside it.”

“They say that’s what the N’mah dampers do,” Maverick said. He grinned. “If it weren’t for that little bit of techno wizardry, I’d be turned into a thin layer of red jelly every time I boosted my ’dragon up to full throttle.”

“Sure,” Garroway said. “The Quantum Sea idea also explains nonlocality, since all points in our universe correspond with this base-state universe in a way that doesn’t involve space or distance. So that gives us a clue as to how the Ancients could build that bank of communications screens beneath the Cydonian Face on Mars…with real-time connections to screens on planets in other star systems. Seems to be faster-than-light, but that’s an illusion. Nonlocal phenomena bypass space, so they can’t be said to have a speed of faster than anything.”

“It might also be how the Xul manage their faster-than-light stardrive,” Chrome pointed out. “You just reach down to the quantum level of reality, rewrite the informational content for the standing waves of a certain mass—a starship, say—and in this universe it instantly vanisheshere , and reappearsthere

…light-years away.”

“Yeah. So how do they manage that?” Maverick asked.

Garroway shrugged. “Like I said, sir. If we knew how, the bastards wouldn’t have us with our backs up against the wall.”

“We had an AI inside the Intruder before we pulled the plug on them,” Chrome said. “Maybe he got some technical data…like how they work their magic.”

“That would be good,” Maverick said. He looked thoughtful. “I wonder.”

“Wonder what, sir?”

“You guys went through the usual Weiji-do courses, right?”

“In boot camp,” Garroway said. “Sure.”

Weiji-do—the Way of Manifestation—was billed as a form of martial arts and taught as such in the Marines, though physical combat had little to do with it. Wei Chi was the name of one of the hexagrams in the ancient divination tool known as the I Ching. According to that system, a particular pattern of cast coins or yarrow stalks represented incompletion or emptiness…but it was the emptiness, the chaos, from which order could be called forth. Even complete chaos, according to that way of thinking, was more accurately portrayed aspossibility . Aspotential .

And that, according to the modern science of quantum physics, was exactly what the Quantum Sea was…a state of disorder or chaos that held within it unlimited potential. All that was needed was for Mind to reach in and bring it forth, to literally manifest reality.

Garroway had never been sure how much of that pseudo-mysticism to swallow. There was a whole modern school of philosophy based on the idea that the human mind actually created reality from moment to moment in Godlike fashion simply by observing it, an extension of the old Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of quantum physics, that said thatnothing was real, that everything was overlapping wave forms and possibility until an Observer with a capitalO observed those waves and made them collapse into Reality.

Reality. Whatever the hellthat was.

In fact, Garroway was convinced that just believing something, or wishing it was real, was a hell of a long way from making it so. All you needed to do was look at the incredible diversity of human religious belief. Which one was “right?” Did the fact that members of the Gray Redeemer Church thought little gray aliens with big black eyes were God make it so?

Still, the Corps had taught Weiji-do for about the past century or so as a discipline designed to help recruits think. So much of the Corp’s modern technology, from battle suits to laser weapons, from communication links to aerospace fighters, depended on clarity and precision of thought when working through personal nanotech implants. A Marine couldn’t afford to let his mind wander when he was in a firefight, or trying to pull out of a dive in a fighter pulling ten Gs. Weiji-do involved meditation techniques and mental exercises, coupled with complex and dancelike moving meditations drawn from the far older martial discipline of Tai Chi, to precisely control thought. One part of the discipline, Garroway remembered, was rooted in the idea that each individual created his own reality, through thought and belief, by calling it forth from the Unmanifest Chaos of the Quantum Sea. The better you controlled your thinking, his teacher had told him, the better the Reality you create.

“Boot camp and a few training sessions afterward,” Chrome added. “Real woo-woo stuff.”

“I’ve often wondered,” Maverick told them, “if Weiji-do really was what they said, some kind of key to manifesting reality. But it says the same thing as quantum physics, right? Somehow, our minds affect the nature of our reality, by operating down there at thebase reality, the Quantum Sea. We believe. It happens.”

“If that were really true,” Chrome pointed out reasonably, “we could all believe together that the Xul were all gone. And they would be.”

“What if the Xul believe they’renot gone?” Garroway asked, grinning. “Maybe their belief trumps our belief.”

“So what does that mean? That reality is the result of a fuckingvote ?”

“Physicists say reality is consensual,” Maverick said. “Something we all create together. So maybe so.”

“You know,” Garroway said, “there’s plenty of evidence that psychic phenomena are real. That they are nonlocal effects. And nonlocal means they occur at the level of the Quantum Sea.”

“What’s your point?”

“Well, you know the old saying? ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?’”

“Sure. Clarke. A twentieth-century philosopher.”

“Okay. Maybe the Xul can rework the Quantum Sea to their exact specifications, just bythinking about it. You want to go to another star FTL? You think you’re there andpoof! There you are. You want to send a rock flying? You think about it, and it does.”

“Scary thought,” Chrome said. “How the hell do you fight someone that powerful?”

“Well, the Xul aren’t omnipotent,” Maverick said. “If they were, all they’d need to do is think about it and we’d vanish. Or our sun would explode, or we all fall into another dimension, or whatever. Why muck about with throwing rocks when you can click your fingers, or whatever you use for fingers, and zap us all into nonexistence?”

“There have to be limits,” Garroway said, still thoughtful. “Maybe Chrome’s right. Itis a vote. Sixteen billion of us to fifteen point nine-nine-nine billion of them, we win. More likely, though, it’s something a lot more subtle than that. Maybe it has to do with the way we think, or the fact that even when we believe something, there’s a huge pile of un-belief lurking just below the surface, no matter what we do. But it gives an interesting take on ESP, magic,all of that woo-woo stuff, as Chrome calls it.”

Most Marines believed completely in extrasensory phenomena through personal experience; comjits were a case in point. Military psychologists had long sought to bend the subtle effects of ESP to the military will, but with less than complete success. Mental techniques like remote viewing were provably real, but inconsistent enough that technology—remote drones, for instance—did the job better and more reliably.

“How does the N’mah inertial damper work?” Chrome asked Maverick. “Magic? Wishful thinking?”

“We have no idea. The physics boys are still trying to figure that out, but even with working models to take apart and tinker with, there are still too many gaps in our understanding of quantum physics theory. It’s a field effect, they say, something that affects every atom in the target mass together…which is a fancy way of saying they don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”

“Might as well be wishful thinking, then,” Garroway said. “The thing is, I wonder if the Xul pull off their high-tech magic by rewriting information at the base reality…but they don’t really know that that’s what they’re doing.”

“Why do you say that?” Chrome asked.

“Look…they can do things like change the inertia in an asteroid and make it zip off toward Earth at two thousand klicks per second, but they couldn’t stop us from planting a few backpack nukes inside their ship and blowing them all to hell. They can cross light-years in the blink of an eye—again, presumably, by rewriting their base reality somehow—but our X-ray lasers surprised them, crippled their ship, and blinded them so that we could get on board. It’s like they have pieces of the whole, big picture, but only pieces, and they don’t have them put together yet.”

“Huh,” Chrome said. “Maybe they’re too advanced. They don’t know how their own tech works.”

“Could be,” Maverick said. “They might have inherited their technology, rather than built it themselves.”

“That almost makes sense, sir,” Chrome told him. “We think they’re inorganic. Machines. Well, somebody had to’ve invented the damned things in the first place. Somebody organic. Rocks and metal ores don’t rearrange themselves into a working computer, complete with a few terabytes of data in mem.”

“So our Xul friends have all of these gadgets created by their organic predecessors, but don’t understand how it all fits together. How reality, how the universe, really works.”

“Don’t understand?” Maverick asked. “Or don’t care?”

“Either way,” Garroway said. “I just wonder if we can use it somehow.”

“I sure don’t see how,” Chrome said.

Maverick looked at his bowl of porridge, still steaming. “Well, if I could change reality by thinking about it, I’d wish for a steak dinner. Medium rare…with spring potatoes and green beans. Red wine…the ’98

vintage, I think.”

“How about Earth?” Chrome asked. “We believe Earth is healed. The cities still standing. Our families intact.”

That got a reaction from Maverick. Garroway saw the sharp stab of pain, the slight glisten in his eye.

“You okay, sir?”

“Yeah.”

“You lose someone?”

“I…don’t know yet.” He put his spoon down. “Maybe you can help me. Either of you hear about survivors out of Miami?”

“No, sir,” Garroway said. “But then, we haven’t heard much of anything, yet.”

“They’re supposed to be trying to put up casualty records on the new GlobalNet,” Chrome told him.

“But that’s going to take a long time.”

“I’ve heard there are some big emergency camps down in Georgia,” Garroway told him. “Sounds like half of Florida is there. Who are you looking for? Where were they?”

“Miami Complex,” Maverick said. “Helios Towers, in fact.”

Garroway struggled to keep his face impassive. The Helios Towers had been a monster engineering project created in response to the slow encroachment of rising sea levels throughout the past few centuries of global warming. Much of Old Miami was under water, had been for decades, save for the walled portions and the towers. Helios Towers had been built farther out at sea, a skyward-reaching series of condominia erected in defiance of a steadily worsening climate. But since arriving on Earth, he’d heard scuttlebutt—onlyrumors, but rumors nonetheless—that the Helios Towers had taken a direct hit during the firestorm preceding Armageddonfall…and that the rest of Miami had pretty much washed away in the tidal wave that followed.

He exchanged glances with Chrome, and saw that she was thinking the same thing. Should they tell him?

Or let him keep hoping?

“I don’t know what to tell you, sir,” Garroway said after an uncomfortable moment. “Florida got hit pretty bad. Who is it. Your wife? A girlfriend?”

“Both of my wives,” he replied. “And our husband. My daughter. Two sons. A couple of in-laws. We had our own compound down there, on Helios West. Gorgeous terraces. Our own flitterport.” He seemed to shake himself. “Well, maybe all I can do is keep hoping.”

“We’ll hope with you, sir,” Garroway said. “Miracles happen.”

But at the moment, he wasn’t at all sure he believed that.

17

16AUGUST 2314

Marine Training Command

Camp Pendleton, California

1005 hrs, PST

“…and acting in the very best traditions of the United States Marine Corps, Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach did take command of a small group of fellow recruits and lead them against the marauder force that had penetrated the Marine perimeter. Realizing his weapon was useless against the enemy’s personal armor, and without thought for his own safety, he leaped from an elevated walkway onto the deck of a heavily armed transport hovercraft passing below his position, and engaged one of the marauders there in hand-to-hand combat. Despite the fact that the marauder wore combat armor and Private Shra-dach did not, he managed to seriously wound the marauder, while his companions, following his lead, attacked other marauders in the same vehicle and killed or overpowered them all.

“As a direct result of Recruit Private Shra-dach’s actions, the small and badly outnumbered security element stationed at the relief distribution center was able to repulse the marauder attack. Intelligence gathered from prisoners taken in the action was instrumental in organizing follow-up air-and ground strikes over the next several weeks which broke the power of marauder forces in the Washington, D.C.-Ring City area of operations.

“It is, then, my very great privilege to award Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach the Silver Star for heroism. In addition, the Navy Department has authorized his immediate promotion to lance corporal.”

The officer standing in front of him leaned forward, pinning the medal on Nal’s tunic. Nal remained rigidly at attention as the award was snapped into place, then—as he’d been carefully coached—he shook the man’s hand when it was offered. “Congratulations, Lance Corporal Shra-dach!”

“Sir!Thank you, sir!”

When the man released his hand, he rendered a crisp salute, which the general returned, then did a sharp about-face and returned to the waiting ranks.

It seemed as though the entire Marine Corps had gathered here under the foul-weather dome over Camp Pendleton’s RTC grinder. Nal had never seen so many Blue Dress A uniforms, the traditional blue and red high-necked jackets worn with medals, over sky blue trousers. Having them all here to see him get this medal was a bit overwhelming.

So, too, was getting the medal and the promotion from the hand of none other than General John R. Dumont, the 210th Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, who’d flown out to California specifically for this awards ceremony.

About-facing again, he stood once more in the front rank between Chakar Na-il Havaay, on his left, and Derel ti-Haj Vah-gur, who appeared to be trying to stifle a large grin on his right.“Way to go,” she whispered in his mind…an Earth colloquialism she enjoyed using at every opportunity.“The Ishtar Marines have landed!”

“Roger that,”Chakar added.

“Stow it, you two,”he transmitted over the private channel.“We’ll talk later.”

Commandant Dumont was standing before them now, hands clasped behind his back, as he talked about valor, commitment, and the traditions of the Corps. Behind him, several hundred meters away, Nal could see the transparency of the sheltering dome, and the falling snow outside. It had been snowing now for weeks, but he was still fascinated by the phenomenon. Back on Enduru—Ishtar, rather; he was still having trouble getting used to the English name—the human enclaves and cities, like the Anu cities, all were located in the so-called twiheat zone between fire and ice. Ishtar was an Earth-sized satellite of a super-Jovian gas giant. The day-night cycle of light and dark was provided by a wan and distant red dwarf sun—Lalande 21185, according to the Earth-human naming conventions—but heat came partly from tidal forces flexing the world’s crust, and partly from the infrared radiation of the gas giant, which hung suspended forever just above the western horizon of the rugged, heavily forested uplands where Nal and the others had been born.

Since it was tidally locked, Ishtar always turned the same face toward Marduk, as the Earth-humans called the gas giant primary. That face, the Hot Face, was desert, utterly dry and barren, with temperatures running well above 40 degrees Celsius. The Ice Face, on the other hand, was continually locked in a hemisphere-wide sheet of ice, and temperatures there never reached above the freezing point of water. According to offworlders, snow—frozen rain—fell over the icecap which, as it slowly moved into the twiheat zone, melted, creating Ishtar’s shallow, world-girdling seas. But Ishtar’s twiheat zones were tropically warm, for the most part, and Nal and his friends had never seen anything like those huge, fluffy white flakes that fell and fell and kept falling from lead-gray skies. Earth-born Marines had told the Ishtaran recruits that what they were seeing here was definitely out of the ordinary, that itnever snowed in this part of California save on the upper elevations of the very highest mountains, and never in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere summer. Nal was still getting used to so much that was, not just different, but spectacularlyalien about this world so far from his home. For the most part, Nal had enjoyed the second and third phases of his training. The Marines had flown the Ishtaran contingent to California from D.C. a few weeks after the action that had won him this ribbon with its pendant five-pointed star now hanging from his blue tunic. The original Recruit Training Center at Camp Pendleton had been badly damaged by tidal waves rolling in off the Pacific, but new boot camp facilities had been set up farther inland, south of Lake O’Neil, in a place called Rattlesnake Canyon. Eager to learn all he could about his new home, as soon as he’d arrived Nal had downloaded files describing the local fauna, including the creature known as a rattlesnake. There was nothing like it back home and he’d been eager to meet one. His Earth-born friends had had to point out to him that rattlers didnot do well in snow.

Because of the snow, and the subzero temperatures, most of his boot training had been done indoors. Underground tunnels and high-speed tube transports got them around from dome to dome throughout the base facilities. His boot company had made a couple of long-distance marches, though, slogging through knee-deep snow wearing heavy armor. Both excursions were outings he would never forget, simply for their sheer, stark, exotic beauty.

Snow!…

His boot camp class had graduated on 5 August, and they’d been transferred to a holding company with new barracks just above the aerospace field. Every Ishtaran had graduated, and received the much anticipated promotion to private first class.

Nal had received the special honor of remaining PFC for less than two weeks before receiving his meritorious promotion to lance corporal. He still wasn’t a noncom—that wouldn’t come until he made corporal—and therefore still couldn’t wear the coveted “blood stripe” down the outside seam of his dress blue trousers. But the promotion did bring with it a slightly increased degree of trust and responsibility, his first real step up the long career level. Nal was already determined to make the Corps his home for the next thirty Earth years.

Thirty years subjective, of course. Nal had already volunteered for Operation Seafire, and been accepted.

He was going to the stars.

Near the Face Complex

Cydonia, Mars

1745 hrs, GMT

Travis Garroway stood on the crest of a low ridge, watching the teleoperated machines toil in the ocher sands below. A dust plume hung above the construction pit, casting a long shadow. Chrome was at his side. Both wore light pressurized armor with bubble helmets, the suits sealed against the thin, cold breath of carbon dioxide that was all Mars could claim as an atmosphere. A billion years ago, an ocean had rolled here, and the air had been almost as thick as Earth’s. The air had thinned, the world had grown cold and dry…though, again, and very briefly, open water had flowed here a scant half million years ago. Turning to his right, Garroway studied the rugged profile of a lone mesa on the eastern horizon.They had done that, though it hadn’t lasted.

“Your ancestor fought here, didn’t he?” Chrome asked. “‘Sands of Mars Garroway?’”

“Yes. Yes, he did. World War IV. Though at the time they called it the UN War.”

“You excited to be back on the same spot?”

Garroway shrugged, then realized the gesture didn’t translate well through a pressure suit. “I suppose. Sometimes I think the name’s a lot to try to live up to, y’know?”

“Hell with that,” Chrome said. “You live for yourself, and you stay true to yourself. Not your ancestors. Or your relatives.”

He glanced at her, wondering if she knew he’d been wrestling with the fact of his powerful uncle, or merely guessed. Sometimes, the lady was damned near psychic in what she could pick up out of the ether around her.

“You’re right, of course. But sometimes I want to change my name.”

“Why focus more attention on it? Just let it go. Ah!” She took his elbow with one hand, pointed with the other. “They’re loading up another shot.”

Several kilometers away, just visible in the distance, a monorail track began close by the cluster of pyramidal mountains known as the City, running almost directly due south—and so long that the far end lay somewhere invisibly over the horizon. The launch rail had been grown only a few weeks ago, using specially programmed constructionano that had pulled iron from the rust that made Mars the Red Planet and molded it into shape. From here, you could see where the iron oxide had been leached from the soil for thirty meters to either side of the rail, creating a long, silver-white strip through the desert. Nearby, the robotic tractors and diggers below were shoveling desert sand into huge plastic cargo containers bound in iron hoops. One of those containers was being gentled onto the monorail now. Superconducting circuits trapped current and created a powerful levitation effect, with the cargo container hovering centimeters above the rail.

“Looks like they’re about to fire off another one,” Chrome observed.

“Yeah,” Garroway said. “Ah! There’s the signal.”

A flare burst silently overhead, accompanied by a mental alert downloaded to every person in the open. Thirty seconds to launch.

The two Marines were several kilometers from the launch rail at its closest. Plenty of room. For the moment, the vehicles in the pit ceased operation, giving the dust cloud they’d raised time to drift slowly downwind, dispersing. Their operators, in the dome at Cydonia City, had unlinked for the moment—ostensibly to let the dust clear from the air, but actually to watch the pod launch. A Marine A-40 Gyrfalcon flier streaked south ten meters above the rail, the wan sun glinting from its cockpit canopy. The Marine at the controls would be checking the length of the rail to make sure no human or machine had missed getting the word and strayed into the danger zone. In the almost-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere, there would be no warning sound when the pod began to accelerate. The seconds trickled past as the Gyrfalcon, now far down near the southern horizon beyond the pyramidal loom of D&M Mountain, suddenly swung left and circled back, gaining altitude.Ten seconds’

warning, the mental voice announced.Five seconds. Four…three…two…one…launch. Down on the monorail, immensely powerful magnetic fields gathered, then started moving. The hovering white cargo pod moved with them, slowly at first, then faster…then still faster, until it was hurtling silently down the track at over five hundred kilometers per hour, and still accelerating. Garroway heard a sharp click moments later—the equivalent here of a sonic boom in the painfully thin Martian atmosphere, the shock wave moving more slowly than it would with an air pressure of one atmosphere. They turned as it silently hurtled past, watching it flash through the long shadow cast by D&M Mountain, its red and green acquisition lights pulsing brightly. Somewhere over the horizon to the south, the rail began climbing into the increasingly rugged and jumbled uplands of the Deuteronillus Mensa. In the vicinity of the crater Curie, the rail began curving gently but steadily upward, gently bending the pod’s trajectory toward the sky, and space. When it reached three kilometers per second—orbital velocity for Mars, the pod’s sustaining fields switched off and it truly took flight, arrowing into the southern sky…and polar orbit.

But by then it was well out of sight of the workers at Cydonia. The machines had already returned to their grubbing in the sands that once had been an ancient Martian beach. Nearby, several dozen more white canisters waited in silent ranks to be filled in turn. So far, five of the canisters, each massing fifty tons, had been slammed into polar orbit, where tugs and transport vessels were gathering them in at a single orbital complex and loading them on board an interstellar cargo vessel recently renamedIntrepid . The project was moving ahead well. Two days ago, one container launch had failed when an electrical fault had resulted in the container not reaching orbital velocity. The canister had gone suborbital, leaving the atmosphere but bursting as it started back down, treating the inhabitants of a small research outpost at Argyre Planitia, in the Southern Hemisphere, to a spectacular fireworks display as fifty tons of sand burned up on re-entry.

But five for six was not a bad score, and the work was continuing, with the Marine teleoperators relieving one another in six-hour shifts.

“We’d better get back,” Chrome warned. “Another load of FNGs is coming in at sunset.”

“Yeah. Just a sec, though.”

Turning about again, he stared across red-ocher sands toward the northeast. The Face was just visible from here.

Even yet, xenoarcheologists disagreed as to whether or not the Face on Mars actually represented aface

, meaning that it was, in fact, artificial, and not an accident of nature. The original photographs, taken by the Viking Orbiter spacecraft in 1976, seemed to show an eerily human, Sphinx-like face a mile across peering up out of the Martian desert toward the sky. Planetary scientists studying the photos as they were transmitted back to Earth had dismissed the object as an amusing but natural accident, ayardang , as it was known in the Sahara of Earth, an isolated mesa carved by wind and sand over millions of years. Any similarity to a deliberately carved face was due solely to the peculiarities of the human brain, hardwired to recognize faces in otherwise random patterns of light and dark.

The Face had captured the public imagination, however, when the photos were released in the early 1980s, and speculation had run wild over the idea of a titanic, obviously artificial sculpture on the Martian surface—and on the question of what the government might be trying to cover up by claiming otherwise. Other oddly shaped and positioned geoforms were identified nearby, and many discussed the possibility of an ancient, lost Martian city.

In 1998, another orbiting robot spacecraft had taken more photos of the Face with a resolution ten times better than that possible for Viking, and the scientists had reveled in a brief bit of I-told-you-so pride; the new photographs showed very little on the top of the mesa that was facelike. It was just what we said all along, the scientists said with self-satisfied aplomb: a trick of nature, an accident of light, shadow, and human suggestibility.

And yet…

When human explorers finally arrived at Cydonia in the first half of the twenty-first century, theydid find evidence of ancient civilization and of large-scale planetary engineering. The City Complex included mountains partially hollowed out by artificial means, though all had been smashed and damaged in what looked like a large-scale attack. The empty, blast-savaged and sand-worn shell of a spacecraft had been found, together with a great deal of other wreckage. The Face—whether it was a face or not—had been artificially shaped; those sloping sides at the base were too geometrically perfect to be otherwise. Eventually, a door had been found, and deep beneath the Face had been discovered the Cave of Wonders.

Slowly, xenoarcheologists began piecing together the whole story.

It was true. Intelligent beings from somewhere else, beings perhaps inevitably called “the Ancients,” had come to Mars half a million years before. They’d hollowed out habitats inside pyramidal mountains. They’d built an underground chamber filled with what seemed to be viewscreens, most inoperative, but a few showing realtime images of other worlds—images that apparently bypassed the usual rules concerning the speed of light. They’d tinkered with the Martian climate, making it warmer and wetter until a sea that had vanished perhaps a billion years before again filled the Northern Hemisphere basin, transforming the Red Planet into blue and green. More interesting still, they’d brought hominids from the third planet in the system, members of a tool-using, fire-building species men would one day callHomo erectus.

Skeletons of bothHomo erectus and of earlyHomo sapiens had been found at Cydonia and elsewhere on the planet in considerable numbers, wearing tailored uniforms and often holding high-tech gadgets in mummified hands. Studies of the remains, including exhaustive DNA testing, proved beyond any reasonable doubt an old and often hotly debated hypothesis.Someone from elsewhere in the Galaxy had not only reworked the Martian climate, but they’d tinkered with the genetic structure ofHomo erectus , a creature that previously had been evolving on Earth slowly and steadily over the course of one to two million years. Virtually overnight, two new species had appeared on the scene—the hominids that one day would be called Neanderthal, and the Neanderthals’ close cousins, an archaic version ofHomo sapiens .

Modern man, in other words, was a product of genetic engineering.

Then, a few thousand years later, perhaps, disaster had struck. The spacecraft of yet another starfaring species—the Hunters of the Dawn—had found the Ancients’ colony on Mars. Judging from the skeletal remains, the end had come with horrific suddenness. An asteroid strike had stripped much of the newly generated atmosphere away from the planet. The reborn sea had evaporated once more, and all life on the planet had died. The Ancients had managed to cripple one of the intruders—the Singer—trapping it beneath the ice of Europa.

Curiously, no skeletal remains had been found of the Ancients themselves, either on Mars, or on any of several other worlds of a half-dozen nearby stars, including Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A. Tens of thousands of crumbling shells of ceramic and metal that might once have been robotic machines had been discovered among the ruins of several dead but once-inhabited worlds, and one theory held that the Ancients had actually been highly advanced AIs, machine intelligences that had outlived their original creators.

But no one knew for sure. The Ancients, whoever or whatever they might have been, appeared to have vanished forever.

Garroway wondered if Humanity was destined to follow them.

“Not on my watch,” he murmured.

“What’d you say?” Chrome asked.

“Nothing,” Garroway said. “Let’s get back inside.”

A long time later, he lay in bed with Chrome, holding her. The base at Cydonia was large and fairly luxurious by Martian standards—the better to house the small army of xenoarcheologists who rotated in and out of assignments at the site. Nano construction techniques had grown hundreds of interconnected pressurized domes, complete with interior furnishings, and it was standard practice here for senior NCOs to have individual quarters. The rooms were small and Spartan, but theywere private. And if anyone else knew that Garroway and Chrome were sleeping together…well, there was a lot of that going on now, a lot of pairing off, a lot of sexual liaisons that would not have been condoned before the arrival of the Xul ship. Everyone was aware of it. Armageddonfall had brought every human here, Marines, Navy, Army, and civilians alike, face to face with the mortality of the species, and that tended to bring people together.

“Suppose the Xul come back before we can get to the objective?” she asked him, her voice much smaller than was usual for her.

“Then we carry out the mission, and then we see if there’s anything we can do back here.” He shrugged.

“One problem at a time.”

“They say they’re building a fleet of asteroid starships, anyway. Arks.”

“I wish them well. But our duty lies here. And at Night’s Edge.”

“I wonder what they’ll find at Andromeda?”

“Why? You want to go with them?”

“We still could. Seafire is volunteers only. You heard the general’s order yesterday. If we want to back out, we can. And they need Marines for the arks.”

Garroway pulled back from her. “What the hell are you saying? Youwant to run to M-31?”

“I…I don’t know if we can do any good. Maybe they’re right. The Terns, I mean.” As the debate had raged across Earth and through space, the two factions had taken on distinct names and personalities. Those advocating flying off to M-31 in Andromeda were the Terns—a reference to that bird’s astonishing long-range migrations. Those urging a military strike against the Xul were the Hawks, that bird having a very old association with militarism.

“We’ve been over all of this, Chrome,” Garroway said. Damn it, her change of heart and mind was scaring him. He’d thought he knew her better than this. “It’s the surviving population on Earth we need to protect, not a few hundred thousand bureaucrats and politicians.”

That startled her. “They’re talking about a selection process for choosing a cross-section of Humankind, Trigger. To make sure they have representatives of all the arts, all the sciences….”

“Sure they are. Buteveryone is going to want a cybe-hibe pod for the trip out. And the ones controlling the selection process will be—”

“The political leaders,” she said, completing the thought.

“Affirmative. Chrome, if Humankind is going to be saved, we have to saveall of it. Otherwise, we’re facing the Edelstein theory. Fringies. Remember Eostre?”

She nodded slowly, thoughtful.

For the better part of three hundred years, Humankind had been migrating to the stars. But that migration had not been taking place in the way most visionaries of the past had predicted. And forty years ago, Victor Edelstein had shown why.

During the mid-to late-twenty-first century, most explorations both within and beyond the Solar System had been focused on the Origins Problems. Humanity had been created—or, at least, tailored—from Homo erectus half a million years ago. Later extrasolar visitors had further shaped human prehistory and early history. The An had colonized parts of Earth, built titanic stone structures in places as far removed from one another as Lake Titicaca, on coastlines now submerged off the coasts of Okinawa and India, in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and on the surface of the Moon, and they had created about themselves a god cult to control their human slaves. The Xul had destroyed the An colonies and much of humanity at the end of the last Ice Age. Then the N’mah had arrived, helping the survivors rebuild with the basic underpinnings of science and technology—agriculture, math, literacy, and medicine. Yet another Xul incursion had destroyed the promise of the N’mah Renaissance, and planted the legends of lost Atlantis.

Human colonies had been founded offworld first and foremost to support the archeological missions and research outposts. When a surviving colony of the An had been discovered at Ishtar, human outposts had been planted there to further trade and peaceful contact; other colonies had been planted on a number of Earthlike worlds at nearby stars—at Chiron, at Tau Ceti, at Epsilon Eridani, even at the hell that was Wolf 359, and elsewhere.

But the social order on Earth was changing. The World Bank Crisis of 2145 had brought about a new centralization of control, and a call to end “interstellar adventurism,” as the out-system colonization effort was known. Several colony worlds had been abandoned, when Earth no longer was willing to foot the high cost of keeping them supplied. A few colonies remained to support the xenotechnoarcheologists, but those were pared back to outpost status. There would be no growing interstellar colonial empire centered on Earth.

The majority of Earth’s population supported this notion with surprising enthusiasm. Earth was overcrowded, resources were scarce, and wars frequent…but it washome , and the vast majority of people preferred struggling to survive or prosper in the known, to braving eldritch biohorrors beyond the grasp of any human imagination, atmospheres that ranged anywhere from marginal to deadly, and extremes of environment unimaginable to the typical urban citizen of an Earth-born human. Always, however, in every culture, in every social milieu, there were exceptions, the people who didn’t fit in, the people who were different, who wouldn’t go along with the crowd, who insisted on being individuals in a global culture that increasingly dictated what was normal, and what was not. They were the rugged individualists, the outcasts, the rebels and, as in every period of history before, they were the ones who dared face the dangers at whatever the price in order to create new societies and explore new means of building new social systems.

Though the governments of Earth couldn’t afford to support such colonies, they encouraged the exodus of their founders. It was safer that way, having the rebels and the malcontents conducting their social experiments five or ten or twenty light-years away, unable to contaminate the population that accepted things as they were and supported the government’s ideas of order and stability. With sixteen billion people on Earth, the planet increasingly needed a safety valve, a means of bleeding off the extremist elements that might threaten a delicate status quo.

In 2158, the first Free Colony had departed for Poseidon, a marginally Earthlike world once the site of an archeological outpost, but now long abandoned. Their ship was theNew Hope , a former military interstellar transport purchased by the underwriting efforts of Green Party activists in California. The settlers in theNew Hope ’s cybe-hibe tubes—over a thousand of them—had been dedicated to the principles of Green Ecofundamentalism, and intended to found a new society based on living in harmony with nature.

The colony had thrived for thirty-seven years before being obliterated by one of Poseidon’s mammoth coriolis storms, a hurricane which, in a world with a global ocean and higher temperatures than Earth, had been nearly as powerful as the superstorm still centered over the eastern Atlantic on Earth. But other Free Colonies had continued to depart from Earth, determined to find better homes and better futures elsewhere. As it happened, most were religious colonies, or colonies founded with experimental social or philosophical doctrines. A Neocommunist collective headed for Rhiannon, at Epsilon Eridani, in 2175. The Reformed Catholics were trying to make a go of Janus, out at Chi Draconis, while the First Church of the Gray Redeemer had set its sights on Dagda, the third world of Eta Cassiopeiae A. Islamic fundamentalists, still seething after the disaster of the Jihad War of the 2140s, had purchased a transport and departed for Idun—now renamed Janni—at DM+6 398.

And the Foundation of Reason had departed for Eostre in 2250, determined to build a new society along strict principles of scientific rationality and eugenics.

What Edelstein, a psychosociologist at the Institute for the Advancement of Humankind at Bern, had demonstrated was that Earth’s colonies, her new frontier, tended to be populated by small and relatively homogenous groups dedicated to ideologies, philosophies, and religious practice far removed from those crammed into the hodgepodge of belief and culture still occupying the Earth. In most cases, they represented fringe elements of belief—“the Fringies,” as those who stayed on Earth liked to call them—and they tended to be extremist in those beliefs. Isolated and isolationist, maintaining little or no contact with a mother world light-years distant, they tended to develop in unexpected and unpredictable ways, in accordance with Edelstein’s Chaos Mathematics of Social Dynamics. That, at least, was the best explanation going for what had happened on Eostre. Both Garroway and Chrome had been on Eostre fourteen objective years ago, in 2300, their last deployment before the IMAC training session on Mars. The expeditionary unit had been deployed to Epsilon Indi IV to deal with the Foundation of Reason and their eugenically pure Elect. Normally, a Free Colony was expected to make it or not on its own, but in this case, the Eostrean government had begun slaughtering the inhabitants of Kuei-Hui, the Cantonese colony on Eostre’s southern continent, in the name of racial purity. Since a PanTerran trade delegation was also involved, the Marines had been dispatched to restore order. By the time they got there, thirteen years later, most of the Cantonese colonists were dead…but orderhad been restored.

“You know,” Garroway told Chrome, “we have to think about who’s going to speak for us. If Earth is destroyed, if the Xul miss any of the colonies, the way they missed the Ahannu on Ishtar, it’ll be Fringies like the Foundation of Reason bastards who survive and propagate. The thought makes me a little sick, y’know? As for the Terns, well, they’re going to be Fringies, too. Bureaucrats. Lawyers. Politicos. Anyone sharp enough or rich enough to wangle a cybe-hibe tube. Youcan’t have a true cross-section of humanity with only a few tens of thousands of people.” He tried to make it a joke. “I hate to think what kind of societythey would evolve.”

“Is it really our responsibility, Trig?”

“It is if wemake it our responsibility. The folks on Earth deserve a chance to get back on their feet.”

“Damn it! How do we know we won’t just bring the Xul down on top of them?”

She shuddered suddenly, and then she was in his arms again, crying. And Garroway didn’t know how to answer her question.

18

30SEPTEMBER 2314

NCO Rec/Com Deck

ISTJohn A. Lejeune

1430 hrs, GMT

Travis Garroway floated into the compartment, using the handholds fastened along the bulkhead. The Lejeune was still rigged for freefall, the better to facilitate the loading of supplies and deadhead Marines. Marines had been coming in to the mission assembly point for weeks, now, making the transit out from Earth, or the shorter haul up from the Martian surface, most of them already prepped, packed, and sealed inside their cybernetic hibernation tubes. They did it that way to save on consumables; Operation Seafire, once envisioned as a few hundred Marines escorting a couple of transports, had been growing lately out of all recognition. The Marines stowed away in their cybe-hibe tubes on board theLejeune and her sister ship, theArchibald Henderson, now numbered over 1,800, and more were coming in all the time. LeavingLejeune ’s rotating hab levels folded up and in microgravity made it easier to manhandle all of those capsules in through the hatches and into their receptacles, where they would sleep away the next ten objective years on the voyage out to Sirius.

Garroway had shuttled up to theLejeune fully conscious on board an AUT, however, to take care of some organizational preliminaries—meaning the archaic and anachronistic hell of the physical paperwork necessary to get Alpha Company, First Battalion of 1RST into operational shape…at least insofar as Corps bureaucracy was concerned. Every few years, someone proposed that the Corps would at long last become paperless—meaningall forms, requisitions, plans of the day, and orders would be handled electronically. So far, each attempt had only resulted inmore paperwork, not less. Paper-worshipping bureaucrats, no doubt, were now pointing out that the disaster of Armageddonfall had proven them right. When the GlobalNet had gone down, much electronic data had gone with it…but the storage vaults holding records going back for centuries were still intact.

One of the saving graces of out-system deployment, so far as Garroway was concerned, was the fact that there would be no paperwork out there. Storage space was simply at too much of a premium. Fortunately, paperwork could be handled virtually…meaning that the record-keeping and form-filling could be done through a cerebral interface. Garroway had come up to the NCO Rec/Com deck on board theLejeune to get access to a virtual office. He pulled himself into a reclined chair, strapped himself in, and made the palm contact that immediately linked him in withLejeune ’s datanet, giving him access to 1RST’s electronic world.

“Hello, Gunnery Sergeant Garroway,” Quincy’s calm voice said in his mind as he linked in. “I have an important message for you.”

Interesting that it was waiting on the net, and hadn’t come to him through his implants. “Who sent it, Quincy?”

“General Clinton Garroway.”

That startled him. His uncle, he knew, was working on getting Seafire under way. The operation washis baby, and he’d only recently been confirmed as joint commander of the expedition—together with Admiral Hugh Gresham. Though they’d exchanged a few electronic notes over the past few months, they hadn’t really talked.

“Accept.”

“Travis!” General Garroway’s voice said in his mind. “Good to see you! Hang on while I connect.”

Garroway’s acceptance had opened a direct commlink with his uncle, who was now entering his own virtual reality in order to conduct a conversation. A window opened in his mind, and then the window expanded, pulling him into a detailed virtual setting. He appeared to be in a richly appointed office—mahogany paneling on the walls, thick carpet on the deck, and an expensive commdesk in front of a wallscreen showing a sunny afternoon at a peaceful wooded lake. Obviously, his uncle was not actually back on Earth. The current time lag between Earth and Mars was over ten minutes. But this was the carefully designed virtual setting where his uncle received electronic visitors.

Clinton Vincent Garroway was seated in the reclining lounger behind the desk. He stood, walked around the desk, and offered Travis his hand. “Good to see you again, son! I’ve been looking forward to getting a chance to chat! I’ve been wanting to get over to see you, but I’ve just been too damned busy.”

Despite calling him “son,” the older Garroway was actually about the same age as the younger chronologically, a bit of temporal paradox created by the nature of relativistic star travel. Clinton Garroway, according to personal records, had been born in 2201, one of two sons of John Esteban Garroway and Kat Vinton. Travis had been born in 2228 to Clinton’s older sister, Katrin, so, going by objective time, Clinton was 113 and Travis was 86.

Both men were Marines, however, and both had been on interstellar deployments, which meant long periods of flight at near-light speed, with time slowing to a crawl. A one-way journey to Sirius took ten years objective, meaning ten years from the viewpoint of those left behind on Earth, but, depending on how close the transport could pushc , only two to four years passed objectively, meaning from the point of view of the Marines onboard the transport. To further complicate matters, their actual aging was further slowed by the effects of cybe-hibe.

In all, General Garroway had spent almost sixty-five years of his career on round-trip interstellar voyages to Ishtar, to Sirius, and to Poseidon. Gunnery Sergeant Garroway had only made two out-system deployments—a twenty-five-year flight—objective—to Eostre and back, and a ten-year round-trip hop to Chiron. As a result, thanks to time dilation, both men now had a chronological age of around fifty, no matter what their respective birth certificates might claim. In fact, if you ignored the slight aging effects of cybe-hibe time, the uncle was now forty-eight biological/subjective years old, while the nephew was fifty-one, not an impossible situation, but certainly an unlikely one.

Garroway knew of cases of Marines who’d spent so much time in cybe-hibe, they were biologically younger than their children.

“It’s good to see you again, sir.”

“Can the ‘sir’ crap, Travis. At least while we’re in here. This isn’t an official link, and it’s not a briefing. Or…” He cocked his head, quizzical. “Maybe it could be. How’s your company shaping up?”

“Well, except for lacking a CO, we’re in pretty good shape. We took the old Alpha Detachment, what was left of it, and perked it up with replacements…including some of the new kids from Ishtar. But Captain Fetterman didn’t volunteer, and Lieutenant Wilkie…” He left the thought unfinished.

“Yeah. Fetterman lost his whole family when Florida went underwater. His wife, two husbands, two kids, birth parents. He’s not in real good shape right now.”

“Shit. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Lots of cases just like his.” The general shook his head. “Actually, he wouldn’t have qualified for an out-system mission. Famsit-5.”

A Marine’s famsit described his familial ties to Earth—spouses, parents, and other close relatives. Corps policy was to select men and women for interstellar deployments with as few such ties as possible—ideally famsit-1 or -2—since a typical mission lasted twenty years or more objective.

“The bad part is that Fetterman’s famsit-1 now, but he’s in no condition to go on deployment. But we do have a new CO coming in from Earth. Captain Mehler. He’ll take over Fetterman’s slot.”

“How much experience?”

The virtual image of the general pursed its lips, thoughtful. “Nothing out-system. He’s seen combat, though. Argentina in ’08. And before that, Harbin.”

“Well, that’s something, anyway. But offworld deployments arenothing like Earthside.”

“That’s why we have experienced NCOs. To ride herd on the officers.”

Which was fine, Travis thought, if the officer in question paid attention to what the NCOs had to say.

“Affirmative.”

“I’ll want you and Staff Sergeant O’Meara to take him in hand, keep a close eye on him.”

It took a beat for Garroway to translate O’Meara’s name. Chrome. Of course. “Aye, aye, General.”

“The other thing I wanted to check on with you, son. We’re pulling a Sullivan on this one. Do you have a problem with that?”

He shrugged. “No. The point of the Sullivan Regs is to keep the folks back home from losing everyone. Outside of…what? Cousin Lou and a few others? It’s just you and me now, Uncle Clint. Right?”

In 1942, five brothers—Albert, Francis, George, Joseph, and Madison Sullivan—all were serving on board the same ship, the light cruiserJuneau . Three of them, in fact, had enlisted with the stipulation that they serve aboard the same vessel as their older brothers. When theJuneau was torpedoed and sunk later that year in one of the naval actions around the island of Guadalcanal, all five Sullivan brothers had been killed.

Contrary to popular belief, no official or Congressional act or set of regulations was ever passed prohibiting the assignment of close family members to the same ship or overseas duty station. However, as the years passed, unofficial policy within both the Navy and the Marine Corps was to avoid posting siblings or parents and children to the same duty station during time of war, and this became known as the Sullivan Regs. “To pull a Sullivan” meant to find a way to circumvent this policy. In fact, the Corps, especially, generally had to work hard to find unattached personnel—people with no close family on Earth—in order to fill billets on out-system missions. There were a number of cases of close family being sent off on interstellar deployments when they were otherwise famsit-1, with no one close left behind.

Even in those cases, though, there was official resistance to such deployments, when an entire family line could be snuffed out in one action. One of the Marines involved could invoke Sullivan policy if he or she feared that possibility. According to accessible records on the Net, that had happened eight times in the past century.

This time around, though, all bets were off. Many more Marines had lost close family on Earth during Armageddonfall than the other way around.

“At least the Ishtarans are all already low-famsit,” the general said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be here. How are they shaping up?”

“Good,” Travis replied. “Verygood, in fact. Some of them performed exceptionally well against the marauders in Ring City. Normally, I’d be concerned about deploying them out-system without a lot more combat experience.” He shrugged. “Of course, from their point of view, they’realready out-system. Ishtar is a long way from here.”

“And even farther when we’re at Sirius.” He didn’t add the obvious. Both Sirius and the Lalande system—and Sol as well—would be over fifteen thousand light-years away once 1MIEU passed through the Sirius Gate.

“You know,” Travis said, thoughtful, “I think the Ishtarans are living examples of famsit Corps. The Corps is their family. As much as it is for any of us now.”

Famsit Corps. The concept had been floating around through unofficial channels and in late-night bull sessions for a couple of centuries, now. One of the worst problems men and women on interstellar deployment faced was culture drift, and the psych people were beginning to suspect that it was as serious a problem as losing close family members to time dilation effects.

No one was immune. A Marine entered a cybe-hibe tube and slept all the way to another star—Sirius, say—at the speed of light. The voyage might take nine or ten years, objective, though between time dilation and cybe-hibe, the Marine missed it all.

He’s awakened at the other end, pulls his tour of duty—typically a year—then enters cybe-hibe for the trip back home.

The Marine returns to Earth having experienced only his year’s duty at the Sirius Stargate, but he finds Earth has aged twenty or more. If he’d stayed behind and experienced those twenty years, he would have noticed only minor change, because change happened gradually.

But coming home to a culture with social systems, political events, electronic systems and data access, even language all bumped ahead by twenty years could mean a terrible shock, even psychological displacement. Very few Star Marines, as those with out-system deployment time were known, now, felt wholly at home on Earth.

Travis Garroway had been born on Earth, in Pennsylvania, in 2228. He’d grown up there, and joined the Marine Corps when he turned eighteen, in 2246.

His father, separated from his mother long before, had never been close, nor had he been particularly close to either of two stepfathers. His mother had died two years after he’d joined up, which left him as famsit-3, and he’d been able to get a waiver reducing him to famsit-2 so he could apply for out-system duty.

In 2249, he’d served his first interstellar deployment—at Chiron, 4.3 light-years from Earth. He’d returned to Earth early in 2260.

All of his cultural indoctrination—the way he related to society and the world around him—had been set down between the years 2228 and 2249. When he’d returned to Earth, peelies and gaffers were long gone, quaint bits of history now considered passé. Virtual sex had been around for centuries, of course, but by 2260 you could engage in virtual memming, whichhis generation thought shocking and just a bit obscene. The idea of buying a person’s memories of their private sex life was just a bit too voyeuristic for his tastes, even yet. And sibbing was even worse. There were new security controls on downloads off the Net, and new ways of interacting with Net agents. It was no longer possible, for instance, to tell if you were linking with a person, or with a very good personal AI secretary, one that perfectly mimicked a person’s speech, manner, and attitudes.

And the religions…especially those religions inspired by contact with the Ahannu, the N’mah, and the Xul. Those had continued to explode in number and in diversity of belief, defining whole new worlds of doctrine and dogma, and shaping the background culture as a whole. To those men and women who actually deployed to the alien worlds of Ishtar or the Sirius Stargate, the An and the N’mah were exotic, but scarcely divine. To the teeming billions on Earth, they represented the unknown, the transcendent, and the awe-inspiring power of the unseen world. And their belief was driving the changes behind a fast-changing cultural dynamic.

So much change in just twenty years.

For the next twenty-seven years Travis had served in the Corps—sometimes offworld, on Mars, Luna, Europa, and on deployments aboard various High Guard vessels, but usually back on Earth. He’d been a DI at Camp Lejeune from ’80 to ’83; that had been when he’d met Chrome. In 2287, the two of them had boarded the ISTVandergrift for the deployment to Epsilon Indi, 11.8 light-years away. Twenty-five years objective later, in early 2313, they’d returned to an Earth now in some ways almost weirdly alien. Travis could only wonder what his uncle had gone through, with sixty-five years away from the rapidly evolving social culture of Earth.His first deployment out-system had been in 2225, three years before Travis had even been born, and he’d probably felt much more intensely the alienation, the strangeness, the lack of belonging experienced by all of those sundered from home and family by impossible gulfs of distance and time.

It was no wonder, then, that most Star Marines found themselves much more closely connected with the Marine Corps itself as a culture, than they did with the civilian cultures of Earth. The Marines left behind in the Solar System changed with the changing culture, true, since they were still a part of the changing attitudes and beliefs of the home world, but first and foremost they wereMarines, and the actual drift in social connections and attitude tended to be small.

Even Marines stationed on Earth tended to hang together, enclosed in their own world, with their own language, their own customs, their own rituals.

In fact, that had been true for as long as there’d been a Marine Corps. Marine tradition was strong, the sense of family and belonging, ofgung ho —pull together!—of duty and honor and loyalty and, above all, ofesprit d’corps all served to set the Marine apart, in his mind, from the civilian world, and even from other military services.The Corps was father and mother, spouse and sib. Famsit Corps.

In that regard, the new recruits from Ishtar were a bit of an unknown, and a bit of a gamble. Their home culture, the values and ideals and even technology with which they’d grown up were already markedly alien from Earth’s overall background culture. They were more family-oriented, in many ways, more relaxed about casual sex than most people on Earth, less prone to infection by religious memes. At the same time, they had nothing like the nanotechnic implants carried by most Earth-born humans, and no experience at all with unlimited mind-to-mind communication or data access. The idea of simply thinking a question, any question, and having it answered immediately was as strange to them as the idea of flying to Mars would have been to Columbus.

“A lot of the people from Earth are still pretty wracked up after what happened there,” Travis told the general. He allowed himself a smile. “Maybe the boys and girls from Ishtar will be a steadying influence on the old hands.”

“I’m counting on that. Just as I’m counting on the old hands to steady them.” He hesitated. “Why did they join up, do you think?”

“Who, the Ishtarans?” Travis shrugged. “I was talking to some of them a few months ago, back on Earth. I got the feeling that…well, we seem pretty exotic to them. Bigger. Badder. Lots of high-tech toys. And we stood up to the An and made them back down.Dumu-gir Kalam was only possible because we went in and broke the Ahannu hold over their human slaves.”

“You’re suggesting hero worship?”

“Something like that. Although I get the feeling that, maybe, it’s more like I was with you.”

“Eh? How do you mean?”

“Did I ever tell you why I joined the Corps?”

The general shook his head.

“When I was small…seven, maybe eight, my family would take me out to your family’s place in Baltimore. Remember?”

“Very well. My sister—your mother—and our parents were…very close.”

“I used to love it there. Especially the horses. Anyway…you were gone, off on your first deployment out-system.”

“Poseidon.”

“Yeah. Your mom and dad both were retired by then. I used to listen to the stories your parents told…and my mother, too. Mostly stories about you, and howproud they were of you. I had it pretty bad, I guess.”

“Had what?”

“Hero worship, of course.”

“Aw, c’mon.” The general snorted. “Your old age is making you senile. I hadn’t even met you yet.”

“Yeah, how could I forget? You were twelve light-years away. But I heard all about you from my mother, and from your dad I heard all about Ishtar and Sirius and the Star Marines. Stories.Wonderful stories, about worlds more alien than anything I could have imagined. Red forests and flying gossamers and a silver hoop ten miles across gleaming in Sirian double-starlight. Ishtaran trolls and the fighting Nergals. I started downloading everything I could get hold of about the Marines. And sometimes, I’d go outside on clear nights and look up at the stars. I think I was determined to join up by the time I was ten. By the time you got back, I was already a Marine.”

“I remember the first time we met. At Quantico.”

“That’s right. I’d just made sergeant.”

“Well, I don’t really care why they enlisted,” the general said after a moment. “They’re Marines now, and the Corps is their home. More than Earth can ever be.”

“I think,” Travis said slowly, “that that is true of all of us now.”

For a long moment, the general stared into the virtual window, watching storm clouds scud through the sky above the lake.

“Famsit Corps,” he said.

Interlude

2OCTOBER 2314TO 15JULY 2323

ISTJohn A. Lejeune

En route to Sirius

The MIEU task force assembled in Mars polar orbit, the ships arriving one by one from other parts of the Solar System. Six were US/UFR Navy warships pulled in from High Guard duty, the frigatesGray , Burnham, andRoberts , the destroyersFarragut andSpruance, and the battlecruiserSouth California . Five more were warships belonging to other space navies, the frigatesGuiyang, Chengdu, andRajput , and the destroyersSlava andSung Shin-lin . Four were interstellar supply transports, theShenandoah ,Acadia, Skoryy Krym, andHongoi , and two were Marine Commandant-class LPH transports, theArchibald Henderson and theJohn A. Lejeune .

The last member of the eighteen-ship task force was also a supply transport—formerly theYellowstone , but recently rechristened theIntrepid . Her crew consisted solely of an iteration of AI software, dubbed Quincy3. Her only cargo consisted of five hundred canisters of sand dug from the floor of the long-vanished Martian North-Hemisphere sea, each massing fifty metric tons. Twenty-five thousand tons of sand.

The size of the task force had grown dramatically over the past month. Originally, only five vessels had been assigned to the mission—a supply ship, theLejeune, and three escorts—but lately governments loath to see fleet assets stripped away from the High Guard and planetary defense had begun to change their minds. With no additional Xul attacks within the months immediately following Armageddonfall, they seemed more willing now to embrace the idea of an active defense, of taking the fight to the enemy, rather than waiting for the enemy to return to Earth. There was, after all, a chance that Seafire would work as advertised. Pulling off a second upset victory against a Xul intruder—or, as was more likely, an entirefleet of Xul intruders this time—seemed a much more remote likelihood. On 5 October 2324, the last of the Marines entered cybe-hibe. Naval personnel would join them once the fleet was under way. The vessels of Task Force Seafire aligned themselves with the brilliant, blue-white spark that was the star Sirius, and fired their main engines. All starships were built along the same basic design—a mushroom shape with the RM storage tank forward, in the broad cap, holding reaction mass for the drives—water. The water also served as shielding for the hab modules, folded now against each ship’s spine during the drive phase of the flight. A second water tank was located well aft, providing additional reaction mass, and protection for the hab modules when the ship flipped end-for-end at the midphase of its boost and began decelerating. Aft of the second tank were the Kerr-Winston Evextractors, drawing vacuum energy from the quantum fluctuations of so-called empty-space and channeling it to the main drives where it converted water to a starcore-hot plasma and directed it astern in a dazzling flare of light. Until the past fifty years, human-crewed starships had, for the sake of their crews, limited their acceleration to one gravity, which brought them to near-light velocity in something just under one year. The introduction of N’mah inertial field technology, however, allowed significantly higher accelerations. The eighteen ships of Task Force Seafire boosted outbound at just under ten gravities, sufficient to begin crowding the lightspeed in a little over one month. Within their hab modules, folded away with the decks directed aft, only one gravity was permitted to leak through.

By the end of October, the task force was well beyond the arbitrary boundary of Sol’s planetary system, and into the Oort Cloud beyond, moving at within one percent or so of lightspeed itself. On Earth, temperatures continued to drop as snowfields blanketed over seventy percent of the land surface, from Patagonia to Canada, from northern Europe to Australia. Nanoconstruction efforts were under way everywhere, hollowing out vast caverns beneath the snow and ice. Several times, during ice ages of the past, Humankind had survived by living in caves. This time would be no different. Thirty-five days after boosting clear of Mars orbit, the ship drives went silent. They were now moving only a hair less than light itself, but with the drives down they fell through space, weightless, the sky around them turned eldritch, distorted into a ring of stars compressed by relativistic effects encircling the task force, with emptiness both dead ahead and dead astern. Four hab modules onboard each ship pivoted on their mounts ninety degrees until they stood out from the vessel’s central spine, though still protected from stray atoms transformed by speed into high-energy radiation by the forward RM tank and several million liters of water. Those habitats, carefully balanced, began rotating about each vessel’s spine, creating an out-is-down spin gravity of half a G. The Navy crews, then, their duties complete for the time being, entered their own cybe-hibe tubes and the theoretically dreamless void of hibernation. In April of 2316, after well over two years of bitter wrangling, the Federal Union voted to go through with the construction of five arks, built from asteroids and loaded with cybe-hibe tubes in order to rescue as large a number of Earth’s survivors as possible.

Fears that the announcement would mean an outbreak of war worldwide proved unfounded. There were protests and riots across much of the planet, true, and a brief war between Canton and the Federal Union, fought primarily in space and on Luna, but resources were too sharply stretched for it to last long. The following month, North China, Canton, and the Republic of Andhra Pradesh signed into an unlikely alliance, and announced their plans to build a sixth ark jointly.

The arks actually made very little difference in the day-today reality that was now life on the planet Earth. Everyone knew that a single asteroid-ark would be unable to carry more than a few tens of thousands of souls, together with the supplies necessary for starting a colony on the other end of the trek. The rest of humanity focused on simple survival.

At the same time as construction on the arks began, and as the world’s cities began to delve into the planet’s depths, high-tech efforts were being made to raise Earth’s ambient temperature. Enormous mirrors—mylar sheets, kilometers across and coated with aluminum a few atoms thick, would serve to focus the Sun’s light and warmth on Earth’s cooling surface.

Unfortunately, little could be done until the clouds enveloping the Earth finally broke. The mirrors served to warm the upper atmosphere, however, paradoxically adding energy to the storm cells ravaging the planet, but—it was hoped—speeding the breakup of the enveloping, heat-reflecting cloud layers. In July of 2317, nearly three years after the task force’s departure, the titanic storm cell anchored over the eastern Atlantic finally detached from the still-boiling patch of sea where the main asteroid impact had occurred. Following the sweeping track of a major coriolis storm, the cell tracked across the Atlantic, drowned the remnants of islands that once had marked the borders of the Caribbean Sea, and swung northwest into the North American mainland.

Unlike mere hurricanes, the disturbance was named simply “the Storm.” For a week it dumped rain and then snow on an already ice-locked continent before finally dispersing over Greenland. With the Storm’s death, the clouds at last began to disperse, allowing sunlight to reach the surface for the first time in three years. The change was small, at first, with the planet still under an eighty percent cloud cover, but it was a beginning.

And now the orbital mirrors could begin their proper job of terraforming an ice-locked Earth at last. Nine years objective after departure—but only about twenty months of shipboard time after launch—the leading edge of the ring of compressed starlight encircling Task Force Seafire was glowing brilliantly, though only the AIs guiding the fleet were awake and watching. Sirius lay dead ahead, its light sharply blue-shifted by the task force’s speed until optical sensors were registering infrared and short radio wavelengths as visible light, its image compressed into the front rim of the ring of starlight. Beneath that eerie glow, the supremely competent AIs directing the task force vessels executed a flawless series of maneuvers, stopping the hab rotation, folding the hab modules back alongside the crafts’ spines, rotating the ships 180 degrees, then waking up their Navy crews. After performing thorough checks of all systems, the human crews fired up the main drives once more. At ten gravities, traveling now tailfirst, the starships backed down into the Sirius system on dazzling thrust plumes, slowing to match velocities with the gravitational anomaly of Sirius C. Again, the N’mah field dampers reduced ten gravities to one, as the vessels decelerated throughout the next thirty days.

By the time Sirius C was visible to the naked eye, a tiny, silvery ring growing slowly larger, the first of the Marines were waking up to an electronic reveille.

Eight point six light-years from Earth, the task force rendezvoused with the Stargate. And battle was about to be joined.

19

7AUGUST 2323

ISTLejeune

Stargate, Sirius Star System

1545 hrs, TFT

Technically, it was midafternoon on board theLejeune . Though the ships’ clocks had been keyed to Greenwich Mean Time back in the Solar System, the instant they’d begun acceleration, all vessels in the task force had switched over to TFT—Task Force Time—since their internal temporal reference had been increasingly subject to relativistic effects as they approached the speed of light. The shipboard clocks now, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with Greenwich time, or with any other time zone on Earth, and, in any case, time of day onboard a ship in space was entirely arbitrary. But, according to shipboard routine, Travis Garroway had been up for over nine hours, now, checking weapons inventories and working with Chrome on personnel records for their platoon. And now, they’d been ordered to attend the electronic briefing being held by Colonel Lee.

“Gentlemen, ladies,” Lee said without preamble, “the first of the probes has returned, and we have our first views of the Night’s Edge system.”

The briefing, ordered by General Garroway that morning, was being held in one ofLejeune ’s common decks, a large compartment that served as a recreation area when it wasn’t being used as a mess hall. The area was circular, with a high overhead, filled with comfortable seats each equipped with downlink attachments. About three hundred Marines were present—something like a quarter ofLejeune ’s entire war-load. Three other hab modules onLejeune had identical common decks, and were also crowded with listening, watching Marines.

Garroway listened to the colonel’s mental voice and tried to suppress the rising excitement—and the fear riding with it. He always felt this way before a big op, when you didn’t know what was waiting for you, and what you didn’t knowcould kill you. Briefings like this one were especially rough. So much information incoming, and the details were totally beyond your ken.

One entire, curving bulkhead of the compartment, and the overhead, had been set to display an exterior view—the velvet black of space, with most stars banished by the arc-light glare of Sirius A and the tinier spark that was the white-dwarf Sirius B. A faint, silvery haze hung in ambient space, diffusing the glow, somewhat. The camera optics, he reasoned, must be mounted on the skin of the RM tank forward; the view of the surrounding heavens were not turning, as would have been the case had the view been from one of the hab modules that were now rotating to provide spin gravity. Much closer at hand than the two brilliant star-points, so close its entire structure was not visible at once from this angle, the Stargate hung in solitary, silver-limned glory, a slender band like a wedding ring, but twenty kilometers across.

Garroway stared into the ring’s opening, trying to imagine the distortions to space and time twisting within its heart, and failed.

Lots of the Marines sitting in this compartment this afternoon would be going through that Gate soon…and they would not be coming back.

That was the hell of this kind of premission brief. Men and women gathered and linked in, listening to the details of the operation, the objectives, the risks, the possible enemy responses, all while trying to ignore the cold fact that those risks and responses were likely to kill many of those present. Most, Garroway knew from long experience, would simply make the blanket assumption that they, personally, were immortal, that ifit happened to anyone, it would be to someone else. The older hands tended to be a bit more matter of fact about things.If it happens, let it be quick . Space combat was particularly final in its effects on frail human physiology. Ninety percent or more of all combat injuries were fatal, as opposed to ten percent or so of injuries sustained in combat on Earth, and death tended to come swiftly in hard vacuum.

Most deaths in space were quick—a flash of energy, an explosion of escaping air, the black, muffling shrouds of shock and suffocation killing the brain almost before it had time to register the pain. That was the accepted wisdom, at least.

It was the waiting ahead of time that was agony.

“Since our arrival in the Sirius system twenty-two days ago,” Lee’s voice continued, “our miltech specialists and xenoliaison officers have been working with our N’mah hosts.”

Garroway looked again at the image of the Stargate floating in space near theLejeune . Somewhere within that slender hoop, he knew, an entire civilization had remained hidden from the Xul menace for thousands of years—like rats hiding inside the high-tech walls.

He searched for the N’mah asteroid arks, rumored to be nearing completion somewhere in the vicinity of the Gate. He could see several of the other vessels in the task force, like needle-stemmed mushrooms, toy-tiny in comparison to the backdrop of the Gate, but he couldn’t see anything that might be a hollowed-out asteroid-turned-starship.

“Our N’mah friends,” Lee’s voice continued, “taught us…or, rather, they taught our AI proxies how to access the Gate controls, how to access the Gate’s astrogational computers, and how to enter and interpret the data we recovered from the Xul intruder back at Sol. They were able to show us how to tune the Sirius Gate to one of several thousand possible destinations.”

Colonel Lee was not present in the briefing room, Garroway noted. He was linked in up in the ship’s ops center, and was addressing the entire Marine contingent over the ship’s Net—not just the Marines on board theLejeune , but the ones on theHenderson as well.

Eighteen hundred Marines, waiting to hear the details of the mission they’d volunteered for ten years ago, objective.

Eighteen hundred Marines hearing how they might soon die.

A window opened in Garroway’s mind, providing a graphic display illustrating the colonel’s words as he addressed them. “Using the data retrieved from the Xul ship during the attack on Earth, the N’mah were able to ascertain the enemy’s probable path, and probable origin—the star system our astrogators have named Night’s Edge. Twenty days ago, we dispatched a cloud of stealth recon drones through the Gate, sending them through slowly and in small groups in order to avoid, if possible, detection on the other side.”

A secondary window showed a graphic representation of the drones coming through like a wisp of smoke, like a cloud of microspores wafting from a mushroom’s cap. Exiting the Gate, they moved swiftly deeper into the star system on the far side until they were well clear of the structure and, presumably, any sentinels guarding against just such an intrusion.

Following their programming, and guided by a gestalt of micro-AIs linking them all together, they spread out in a series of concentric rings, their myriad optics creating, in effect, a single telescopic lens ten kilometers across.

Garroway had worked with such drones before. They or their predecessors had been in use for three centuries, serving to lift the obscuring fog of war on the modern battlefield and, later, in battlespace. Each was tiny—half a meter or so long—and powered by small but powerful Evextractors. Instead of water, they used lead as reaction mass, their jets shielded and damped to relatively low-thrust plumes that allowed them to maneuver slowly but over long periods of time. Each was coated with an active nanoflage layer that drank incoming electromagnetic wavelengths, from radio waves to X-rays, with virtually no reflected signature, rendering them invisible—it was hoped—to Xul sensors. They worked best en masse. The resolution of any single drone’s sensors—each sampled a broad range of the EM spectrum, including radio, infrared, and optical frequencies—was relatively poor and limited. Put a thousand such drones together, however, as a VLA, or Very Large Array, and combine their signals through a process called interferometry, and you had a very powerful sensor platform indeed. For centuries, now, both radio and optical telescopes had used multiple dishes or mirrors to achieve much higher resolutions than would be possible for a single receiver.

“Our recon cloud performed as expected. Sensor scans of the entire Edge system were stored and multiply copied. One by one, drones loaded with data were dispatched at low speed back to the Stargate.

“And now the first of those drones have begun returning through the Gate to Sirius.”

An image formed itself in Garroway’s mind—a confused blurring, at first, difficult to sort out and identify simply because it was so alien a starscape. He could see the Galaxy, ghost-pale, a vast, blue-hued spiral viewed from just above the sweep of the arms, the hub swollen and ruddy by contrast, a teeming swarm of distant suns.

“These images have been cleaned up a bit by Quincy and other AI expert analysis systems,” Lee went on. “Go ahead and have a look around. Take a look at what we’re up against.”

Computer graphics overlaid the image, making sense of the confusion. The camera angle shifted to pick out an orange star in the far distance and the tiny, concentric ellipses of a number of planets, the system’s ecliptic canted at a sharp angle to the plane of the dimly seen galaxy beyond. The sun was old,old …a type K0 cooler and redder than Sol.

It was also avery long way off. Evidently, the Stargate in this system orbited the local sun nearly five light-hours out, roughly the average distance from the Sun out to Pluto. At this range, the orange sun was merely a very bright star, visible at all only because by chance it hung not against the star-cluttered sweep of the galactic vista, but against the emptiness above, a solitary, orange spark against the endless night. But the VLA arrangement of optics created an extremely versatile and powerful instrument, allowing the AI to image individual planets five light-hours—or over five billion kilometers—away. The system’s second world appeared to be the one of primary interest. Data began flowing down the right margin of Garroway’s mental window, giving readings of mass, diameter, rotation, and other minutiae. The world was a little larger than Earth—a diameter of some 13,500 kilometers—but with a surface gravity of only about 0.9 G. Large size and low gravity suggested a lower overall density than Earth, and a paucity of metals. The local star was Population II—Population I suns were the Galaxy’s very oldest stars, composed solely of hydrogen and helium, and therefore unlikely to possess solid planets—but it was anearly Pop II, with less in the way of metals and heavy elements than relative newcomers like Earth’s sun. Hence, metal-poor worlds.

Despite that, the target world was clearly a hive of high-tech civilization. Viewed at extremely high magnification through the VLA lens, the nightside was ablaze with light—clotted masses of city-glow centered in gleaming, crisscrossing threads like spider webs of light. Three planetary diameters out, rings of light encircled the planet at the equator, with slender threads connecting them with the surface. Garroway at once recognized the old idea of space elevators, long dreamed of as a means of getting from planetary surface to orbit cheaply and efficiently along super-strong cables reaching from equator to well beyond geosynch. The ring would be positioned at geosynchronous orbit, so that a given point on the ring exactly matched the daily rotation of a matching point on the ground below. Plans to build such a system had been circulating on Earth since the midtwentieth century, but war and other diseases of international politics had prevented any of them from being implemented. The Xul, evidently, had no such problem. The planet revealed by the thousand linked eyes of the drone cloud had been knitted together by light into a single, unified entity. Literallya single entity, if human understanding of the Xul, of the concept of their group minds was at all accurate. Garroway tried to imagine how many individual minds must be cybernetically linked together within those continent-spanning constellations reaching across the curve of the planet’s surface. The question, he quickly realized, was meaningless. How many AI minds can coinhabit a single computer network? One might as well calculate how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

“As we expected,” Colonel Lee’s voice went on, “we are facing an extremely advanced technology, one literally many thousands of years in advance of our own. Just how much more advanced, we don’t know…and in any case the question is probably meaningless. We know now, from N’mah records, that the Xul have maintained their stellar empire for atleast two million years—four times longer than the entire span ofHomo sapiens, and there are hints that the Xul, or their predecessors, go back as far as a hundred million years.

“Fortunately for us, Xul society, if that’s the word for it, appears to be based on a near static growth model. They don’t change, and they don’t innovate, save very,very slowly over extremely long periods of time. That’s why they are, at best, a few thousand years ahead of us, and not several million.”

The difference, Garroway thought with wry amusement, wasn’t likely to mean a hell of a lot if it came to all-out war between humans and Xul. With powers, the energies, the technologies they controlled even just a few millennia beyond human capabilities, they would be indistinguishable from sheerest magic, to draw from the old aphorism concerning a sufficiently advanced technology. And a couple of thousand Marines were about to try to challenge them on their own home ground. The very idea, Garroway thought, was spectacularly and breathtakingly foolhardy. After all, the argument that low-tech could overcome high worked both ways. If you were an animal being hunted by a technically capable predator, it didn’t matter if you got whacked over the head with a stone ax or vaporized by an X-ray laser. Either way, you were still dead. Whether the Xul were a thousand years ahead or a million, in the long run, made no difference. Magic was still magic.

“Let me take this opportunity to emphasize to all of you,” Lee continued, “that the Xulcan be beaten. We’ve proven that twice, now. They are not omnipotent. They are not gods. Not only are they fallible, they have managed to demonstrate a truly serious tendency to really fuck up, big time.”

That drew a burst of laughter from the Marines in the common area. “They areold. They are set in their ways. They respond to new threats slowly, and often in a slipshod or half-hearted manner. And that gives us our big military advantage in this conflict.”

Colonel Lee, Garroway thought, was blowing a considerable quantity of smoke, but in a good cause. Morale among the Marines in Alpha Company, he’d noticed, was—not low, exactly, but shaky. Brittle. The Marines would go where they were told, give everything they had, and do their best and then some…but if pushed too far they were likely to shatter. Most were still coping with the emotional trauma of Armaggedonfall and the situation that had ensued on Earth immediately afterward. Lee was reminding the Marines that theycould win, that the Xul enemy was not invincible. However things might look at the moment.

“VLA interferometry has let us image Xul ships in orbit about the second planet of the system,” Lee went on. As he spoke, computer graphics were picking out isolated motes of light now adrift in space outside the planet’s ring system, marking them with small, glowing circles and giving readouts of data. Each, Garroway saw, was a Xul starship atleast as big as the monster that had devastated the Earth, and the data readings for some indicated vessels—if that was the appropriate word for such leviathans—so large they would have trouble fitting through the twenty-kilometer opening of a stargate.

“We have designated Planet Two, its artificial ring system, and the ships in orbit there, as Objective Tripoli. So far, we have recorded the images of 267 starships with masses of more than approximately one thousand tons,” Lee told them. “With one exception, all are in extended orbit about the planet, outside of the geosynch rings. Some of the larger objects, we believe, may be orbital fortresses rather than actual vessels. That makes sense. If this is the Xul equivalent of some kind of naval yard or military facility, it stands to reason they’d have some fair-sized planetary defenses up and running.”

For a dizzying moment, Garroway tried assimilating what he was seeing, and extrapolating that for a starfaring culture that evidently spanned some billions of stars. How many other Xul bases of this size might be scattered across the Galaxy? Even if there were only a handful, all told, the Xul obviously mustered firepower on a scale unimaginable on a merely human scale.

The image, meanwhile, continued to pan about the system. Garroway watched the local stargate drift past his line of sight, dwindled by distance, now, but magnified by the VLA-optics into a vast hoop. The stargate Marines had visited out in Cluster Space, also outside the Galaxy proper, but in a completely different direction, had been bored into the side of a fair-sized asteroid. This one, however, was more like the Sirian Gate…a vast hoop with a slender rim many kilometers across. And then the camera image moved on to the Fortress.

There was no other obvious term for the thing. It hung in space close by the Stargate, obviously sharing the Gate’s orbit about its wan and distant sun. It was large, though scale was difficult to judge with any certainty, and roughly spherical but visibly flattened at the poles. The surface was dark, but reflective, and with a metallic luster—suggesting an immense and heavily armored spacecraft, perhaps, or a large orbital base. The data printing itself out to one side described an artificial structure fifteen kilometers across, as large as a fair-sized asteroid. Perhaps it had once been an asteroid, with the surface totally refashioned by the Xul to their own requirements. Unlike the distant planet, there were no lights, no indication of life or intelligence other than the simple fact of the thing’s existence. Nearly as large as the Stargate itself, and far bulkier, it was almost certainly a base or military outpost designed to monitor spacecraft entering the system through the Gate. Garroway noticed that it was hanging well clear of the Gate’s opening and off to the side, perhaps fifty kilometers away from the Gate at its closest point. And that meant that a particularly nasty wrench had been thrown into the planning of Operation Seafire, a wrench that necessitated sending in the Marines.

Damn, he thought.

In the seat next to his, Chrome caught his thought on their private channel, and knew why he’d thought it. “Hey. No one said it would be easy.”

“No, but the law of averages says we ought to get a break once in a while.”

“Sure. Once a century sounds about right. Hey, that’s why they dragged us out here, right? They don’t need us to hit Tripoli. They need us to clear out the opposition around the Gate so the Navy can get through.”

“Yeah. Hush, now. I want to hear this.”

“What we’re seeing now,” Lee told them, “is the single large Xul structure not in orbit about the second planet. It appears to be a sentinel, a kind of guard post keeping watch over the local stargate. You can see for yourselves the data our probes retrieved. This thing is going to be a very tough target.

“However, itmust be taken out if Operation Seafire is to have a chance of succeeding. We have designated it as Objective Philadelphia.

“Due to the changes imposed on tactical planning by the presence of Objective Philadelphia, the Force’s TO&E is being altered. First and Third battalions will have the task of taking down Philadelphia, with support from the 3rd Aerospace Wing. Second Battalion will secure the Stargate, while Fourth Battalion provides reinforcements for First and Third bat, if necessary. We will be moving through the Gate in light battalion strength, with HQ units remaining on the Sirius side of the Gate, and company commanders in operational control on the far side, at least for the initial phases of the operation.

“Now…the bad news.”

Groans sounded from around the compartment, and Garroway wondered what could be worse than what he was seeing already.

“We’re still learning about our enemy, still learning about his technology. Those of you on the initial strike are going to get to learn alot about his capabilities, close up. Data recovered from our electronic penetration of the Intruder strongly suggest that the Xul are able to generate some sort of suppressive field around their large spacecraft and structures, something that can damp out the effects of large-scale explosions, the way the N’mah inertial dampers can reduce the effects of inertia. We will, of course, precede the IMAC approach with a bombardment by both nuclear and antimatter warheads, but our best modeling suggests that this will result only in superficial damage, rapidly repaired by Xul nanotechnic damage-control systems.

“What this means is, if we’re going to take out Objective Philadelphia, we need to get several nuclear devices as deep inside the thing as possible. The only way we have of doing this, is to equip a boarding party of Marines with K-94s, drop them onto the surface in IMAC pods, and have them hand-deliver the packages.

“Needless to say, this will be extremely dangerous, and for volunteers only. We will do our best to ensure a means of escape and retrieval, but coordination of this op will be difficult in the extreme, and the possibility for friendly fire—and by this I mean some of our people being trapped inside the station when it blows—is high.Very high.”

Colonel Lee continued to speak in their minds, laying out the details of the mission as they’d been developed so far. Garroway had been in on the preliminary briefings for senior NCOs before the task force had embarked, and had a good idea of what was coming. He felt a bit of a mental jolt, though, when he realized that ten years had passed since those earlier sessions, and not, as it felt, just a few days. Operation Seafire, from the very beginning, had been conceived as anaval operation, despite the fact that a Marine brigadier had come up with it.

However, Marines had always been part of the plan. Those first looks at Seafire had assumed that at least a battalion—typically three to five hundred Marines—would be needed to seize the Stargate on the Xul side. Unless the Gate was secure, the Navy ships could not safely pass through. According to Marine doctrine, a battalion, a major’s command, was the smallest unit capable of independent operations of limited duration and scope, both tactically and administratively self-sufficient. The Marine planning staff at Quantico had decided that two battalions, plus an aerospace fighter element, was the absolute minimum necessary for an operation so very far from home, and with no hope of reinforcement or support. Colonel Lee’s newly reorganized Regimental Strike Team exactly fit the bill. During the weeks of preparation before the departure from Mars, however, the 1MIEF/RST concept had gone through a number of further changes and upgrades, as had the plan itself. The Marines would have to secure two stargates—the one at Night’s Edge and the one at Sirius. If things went sour at Night’s Edge, Marines at Sirius would be placed to destroy any Xul vessels coming through the Gate, and if things gotreally bad, they could destroy the gate with a series of carefully placed nuclear munitions. With mission added to mission, the regimental strike team had grown to become a full Marine expeditionary brigade, consisting of four combat battalions and an aerospace wing, together with headquarters, logistical, and engineering support elements, and numbering some eighteen hundred Marines. Another three hundred naval and civilian personnel had been attached as well, most of them scientists—xenoarcheologists, xenotechnologists, linguists, and alien liaison and contact specialists. Garroway had some deep reservations about the change. Originally, the idea had been to get in, hold the far-side gate while the Navy did its thing, and get out again, a quick hop-and-pop op with minimum scope for major screwups. Now that a full brigade was involved, things were a lot more complicated. Still, he had to admit that he was glad for one aspect for the change. The small version of the strike might not have been large enough, or flexible enough, to cope with that unexpected Xul gate fortress. What worried him, though, was the fact that more men and more equipment meant amuch greater chance of discovery at the wrong time once they went through to the other side. Ever since Operation Seafire had been first discussed, the number-one operational element had been security. Squared off against an enemy with unknown but definitely extremely advanced technologies, the Marines’ best hope was to slip into the Xul backyard unseen, undetected.

The recon drone cloud, apparently, had managed to do just that, and its success told the Earth force something about the limits of Xul capabilities. Very small, very slow, and very stealthy vessels could slip through the gate-link from Sirius to Edge of Night undetected; how large could the assault force become before stealth became impossible?

Colonel Lee was discussing that now. “The assault group’s approach must remain completely covert for as long as possible, andprecise timing is imperative. I don’t need to emphasize our largest disadvantage in this operation…the fact that the enemy possesses faster-than-light capabilities, while we do not. If the fortress is alerted to our presence too soon, the entire Xul fleet could be at the stargate in moments, and that would spell almost certain disaster for the entire op.

“Stealth in the initial deployment will be of absolute paramount importance.”

The new IMACs, Garroway decided, were about to get their true baptism of fire.