Galactic Marines #07 - Star Strike Ian Douglas

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STAR STRIKE

which in the creole-Arabic spoken throughout the Theoc-

racy meant “fortress.” Originally a vast dome half a kilome-

ter across bristling with ball turrets, each turret mounting

plasma, A.M., or hivel accelerator weapons, El Kalah had

been the first target in the pinpoint orbital bombardment

of the planet, and there was little left of the complex now

save the shattered, jagged fragments of dome enclosing a

smoking ruin open to the sky. The weapons turrets had been

neutralized in rapid succession, and the remaining complex

pounded for hours with everything from antimatter to tun-

neler rounds to knock out any deeply buried bunkers. Much

of what was left had melted in the nano-D clouds.

Close by the Fortress was an area that had been a resi-

dential zone, stone and cast ’crete housing set in orderly

rows among parkland and market squares. At least that

was how the downloaded maps described the area. Though

the region had not been deliberately targeted, it was now

an almost homogenous landscape of rubble and partially

melted stone.

As they picked their way through the wreckage, Ramsey

and Chu came upon a scene of nightmare horror.

Several Marines in armor were clearing rubble, revealing

what had been a basement. On the basement floor, dimly

visible in smoky light . . .

“Jesus,” Chu said . . . and then Ramsey heard retching

sounds as the Marine turned away suddenly. Ramsey con-

tinued staring into the pit, unable to stop looking even as he

realized that he would never be able to purge his brain of the

sight. There must have been thirty or forty people huddled

in the basement, though the nano-D cloud had made sorting

one body from another difficult. The tangled, tortured posi-

tions of the bodies suggested they’d known what was hap-

pening to them, and that death had not been quick.

They were civilians, obviously. The Islamic Theocracy

did not permit female soldiers, and there’d been children

down there as well. Clearly, they’d been trying to find shel-

ter inside the basement.

Equally clearly, the deaths had been inflicted by Theo-

crat weapons; the assault force had not employed nano-D.

IAN DOUGLAS

It was said that the life expectancy of an unarmored

person on a modern battlefield was measured in scant sec-

onds. These people had never had a chance. Ramsey felt a

sullen rage growing within—rage at the Muzzies for their

blind use of indiscriminate weaponry and their placement of

military targets close beside civilian enclaves, rage at the op

planners who’d targeted a heavily inhabited planet, rage at

the very idea of war, of doing this to innocent bystanders.

Turning away, finally, he grasped Chu’s elbow and steered

him clear of the scene.

He didn’t think he was going to be able to get rid of the

memory.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

And at the same time, he wasn’t certain he could live with

the nightmare.

4�

0507.1102

USMC Skybase

Paraspace

0946 hrs GMT

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander completed the final

download encompassing the Alighan operation. Casualties

had been God-awful high—almost twenty percent—and a

disproportionate percentage of those were irretrievables,

men and women so badly charred by heat or radiation or

so melted by nano-D that they could not be brought back to

life. Those were the tough ones, the ones requiring a virtual

visit to parents or spouses.

With a mental click, he shifted his awareness to the Map

Center, a noumenal chamber with a three-D navigable repre-

sentation of the entire Galaxy. For a moment, his mind’s eye

hovered above the broad, softly radiant spiral, taking in the

nebulae-clotted spiral arms, pale blue and white, unwinding

from the ruddier, warmer core, a vast and teeming beehive

of suns surrounded by gas-cloud ramparts, like luminous

thunderheads at the Core’s periphery. Four hundred billion

stars across a spiral a hundred thousand light-years across.

How many of those pinpoint stars making up those

banked, luminous clouds and streaming arms were suns,

with worlds and life and civilizations?

An unanswerable question.

A majority of stars had planets, of course. That fact

had been certain as far back as the twenty-first century or

IAN DOUGLAS

before, when extrasolar planets had first been discovered.

Worlds with life were common as well; wherever there was

liquid water or, more infrequently, liquid ammonia or liquid

sulfur, life, of one kind or another, seemed to arise almost

spontaneously.

How many of those worlds with life developed intelli-

gence, however, and communicative civilizations, was a

much more difficult, and darker question. Once, the answer

would have been “millions” or even “tens of millions,” a

guess based partly upon statistical analyses and partly upon

xenoarcheological discoveries within the Solar System and

elsewhere that showed technic civilization, starfaring civili-

zation, exploding across the Galaxy in wave upon wave.

But that was before the discovery of the true nature of

the Xul.

“General Alexander?”

“Yes, Herschel.”

Herschel was the artificial intelligence controlling the

Galaxy display.

“Your aide wishes to link with you.

Damn. Never a moment’s peace. “Very well.”

Cara, his electronic assistant, entered his noumenal

space, her EA icon materializing out of the void. “Excuse

the interruption, General.”

“Whatcha got?”

“Sir, we have a final plot on the Argo. And a partial synch

with the ship’s AI.”

“Only partial?”

“Whatever happened out there happened very quickly.”

“I see.” He sighed. “Okay. Feed it through. And let’s see

the plot.”

A white pinpoint winked brightly within the depths of

one of the spiral arms. At the same time, he felt the surge of

incoming data, an e-brief, only, representing the synch with

the Argo’s AI.

Perseus. The name of the AI had been Perseus.

“A group of delegates from the Defense Advisory Coun-

cil wants to link with you to discuss the Xul threat,” his aide

continued as he skimmed the brief.

STAR STRIKE

“I’ll just bet they do. Okay. When?”

“Fourteen minutes. Ten-hundred hours.”

“Huh. The Argo incident has them worried.”

“Terrified, more like it. And can you blame them, sir?

There hasn’t been another peep out of the Xul for five hun-

dred years.”

Alexander completed the brief, then stared into the sea

of teeming suns hanging before him. “I wouldn’t call the

bombardment of Earth by high-velocity asteroids a ‘peep,’

Cara. Earth was nearly destroyed.”

“Yes, sir. But they didn’t finish us. In fact, they seem to

have lost track of us entirely.”

“Garroway’s attack at Night’s Edge—” He stopped him-

self. He had a tendency, he knew, to slip into lecture mode,

and his aide knew the history of Night’s Edge as well as he

did. Better, perhaps.

“Exactly, sir,” she said. “Garroway gambled that informa-

tion about our whereabouts in the Galaxy had not been dis-

seminated yet beyond the Xul base that launched the attack

on us. And apparently his gamble paid off. Only now . . .”

“Now the Xul appear to have picked up the trail again.”

“We have to assume that if they captured the Argo, they

know where we are. And they’ll be better prepared next

time. Stronger, more careful, and in greater numbers.”

“We damned near didn’t survive their last attack,” Alex-

ander pointed out. “And that was just one Xul huntership!”

In the year 539 of the Marine Era, or in 2314 c.e. as

the Commonwealth measured the passing years, a single

kilometer-long Xul vessel had appeared out of the empti-

ness between the stars, destroyed several human ships, then

proceeded to fling small chunks of asteroidal debris at the

Earth. The fragments were small, but somehow the Intruder

had boosted them to very high velocities—on the order of

half the speed of light—giving them the kinetic energy of

much larger bodies when they struck.

Deep space facilities designed as part of the High Guard

asteroid defense network had succeeded in destroying many

of the infalling rocks, but enough pieces had struck Earth to

do terrible damage, obliterating much of Europe and eastern

IAN DOUGLAS

North America in firestorms and tidal waves and plunging

the rest of the planet into an ice age—what the histories per-

sisted in calling a “nuclear winter,” even though the impacts

were purely kinetic, and not nuclear at all.

The only thing that had saved civilization from complete

collapse had been the fact that Humankind possessed a con-

siderable off-world presence—numerous space stations, fac-

tories, colonies, and military bases in Earth orbit, on Luna

and Mars, in the Asteroid Belt, and farther out, among the

satellites of Jupiter. Billions died on the Motherworld, first

in the holocaust of falling debris, then of starvation and ex-

posure as the snows deepened and the oceans began icing

over. But technological help had begun pouring in from

the space-based colonies, especially from the orbital nanu-

factories, untouched by the devastation wrought on Earth.

Nanufactured food, power plants, and constructors had been

loaded into immense one-trip gliders by the megaton and

deorbited for recovery in the ice-free equatorial zones of

Earth’s oceans. Within another century, one, then dozens

of space elevators had been lowered into place, connecting

points along the equator with matching points in geostation-

ary orbit, after which the supplies had really begun flowing

down the pipelines from space. Ground-based agricultural

nanufactories had begun producing food locally, then, along

with nano designed to break down ice, lower the skyrocket-

ing planetary albedo, and clean up the detritus of a wrecked

technic civilization.

Slowly, then, the recovery had begun.

And five centuries later, that recovery was continuing.

New cities were growing now along the shockingly altered

Atlantic coastlines. Most of the gangs and local warlords

had long since been suppressed, or incorporated into the

new government. North America and most of Europe were

no longer dependent on supplies from space.

Of course, the former United States was now a special

protectorate of the Commonwealth, a necessary adjustment

in the face of the aggressive expansion of the Chinese Hege-

mony. And the Islamic Theocracy continued to be a peren-

nial problem, ruled from the Principiate of Allah, at Mecca.

STAR STRIKE

Sharp wars had been fought with both states to protect both

the Americas and Europe.

Alexander allowed himself an inner, unvocalized sigh.

The real enemy, as always, remained the Xul, and for half

a millennium Humankind had continued its divided, petty

squabblings among its various fragmented religious, politi-

cal and economic factions. This current unpleasantness with

the Theocracy was only the latest in eight hundred years of

bloodshed that stretched all the way back to WWIII, and

which some historians insisted went back even further, to

the Crusades of the Middle Ages.

Still adrift just above the galactic plane, Alexander gave

a mental command and allowed his mind’s eye to descend

into the sea of stars, moving out toward the spiral arms,

toward one spur of a spiral arm in particular, about 23,000

light-years from the center. The vast majority of the stars

in this simulation were approximations only, with no hard

information about the stars or the worlds that might be cir-

cling them. Some day, perhaps . . . but for now Humankind’s

knowledge of its celestial neighborhood was sharply re-

stricted to an unevenly shaped blot perhaps 800 light-years

across in its longest dimension, less than one percent of the

vast and pinwheeling whole.

Ahead, the stars embraced by the Commonwealth and

the other governments of Humankind glowed within a soft,

green haze of light. Individual star systems were labeled

with alphanumerics giving names and provenance—with

Sol imbedded roughly at the center. Another mental click,

and the green light fragmented into various shades of

yellow, blue, and green, identifying the Islamic Arm, the

Chinese Arm, the Pan-European Arm, the Latino Arm, the

Commonwealth, and the rest.

He brought up a red icon marking the position of the lost

Argo . . . 500 light-years from Sol, and on a direct line with

the Andromedan Galaxy. She’d been well outside of human

space when the Xul had discovered her; the outer fringes of

Islamic space lay a light-century or so in her wake.

Orange pinpoints marked those outposts and garrisons

of the Xul that had been identified over the past few hun-

IAN DOUGLAS

dred years, a fuzzy and diffuse cloud outside of human

space; none lay close to Argo’s outbound route, but that was

scarcely surprising. The Xul empire spanned the Galaxy and

stretched well beyond it; Humankind thus far had identified

only a few hundred Xul outposts and bases, and the best

guess suggested that the Xul held a million star systems, or

more.

“We now have a candidate star for another Xul base,”

Herschel whispered in Alexander’s ear. “Here . . .”

A star was highlighted in blue, and Alexander zoomed

in on it. Nu Andromedae, a type B5 V blue-white sun some

440 light-years from Earth. From Earth’s perspective, the

star by chance appeared just to the east of M-31.

“The Argo must have passed quite close to Nu Androme-

dae,” Herschel added. The AI painted a red contrail stream-

ing from the Argo, like a thin, taut thread stretching all the

way back to Sol, and the line skimmed past Nu Andromedae,

almost touching it. “Less than three light-years, in fact.”

“Maybe. But that was still over a hundred years ago. Why

should the Xul wait that long before pouncing?”

“For the same reason the Xul have not found Earth, Gen-

eral. The term once in use was ‘a needle in a haystack.’”

Alexander had never seen either a sewing needle or a

haystack, but the phrase was descriptive enough in its own

right. Even the Xul, powerful and technologically advanced

as they were, couldn’t be everywhere, couldn’t watch every

star system or world where life might have evolved. The

Galaxy was far too large for that level of omnipotence,

even for beings with powers indistinguishable from those

of gods.

“Herschel’s right, General,” his aide pointed out. “The

Argo was a hollowed-out asteroid. Its passengers were

in deep cybe-hibe. Even at close to the speed of light, it

wouldn’t have been giving off much in the way of anoma-

lous radiation.”

“I don’t buy it, Cara. We know now it would have been

giving off a kind of wake as it plowed through the dust and

hydrogen atoms floating around in its path—the interstel-

lar medium. We can detect that sort of thing ourselves. If

STAR STRIKE

we can do it, the Xul can as well.” He studied the display

a moment longer, rotating the display and studying the

contrail. “Herschel . . . check distances from the contrail

to nearby stars, and correlate with the one-way time lags.

Assume radio noise expands from the Argo at the speed of

light, and a more or less immediate response from the target

star once the RF wave front reaches it.”

“Yes, General.” Angles and geometric designs flickered

from star to star, touching the contrail at various points as

the artificial intelligence searched for a better fit.

“Actually . . . that star is a better candidate,” Alexander

said after a moment, indicating a particular geometry.

“Epsilon Trianguli,” Cara said, calling up the data

window on the indicated star. “Type A2 V. Four hundred

fifty light-years from Earth—”

“And 110 lights from the contrail at its closest passage,”

Alexander said. “The Argo streaks by, disturbing the inter-

stellar medium. The radio noise spreads out, like the wake

of a boat on a calm lake, and reaches Epsilon Trianguli 110

years later. A Xul ship or base takes note and dispatches a

force to investigate.”

“There are twenty-five other stars with corresponding

distances, angles, and lag times,” Herschel told them, “albeit

with lesser probabilities.”

“Store the data, Hersch,” Alexander said. “We may want

to do a careful analysis, maybe even send a sneak-and-peek

team out there for a look around.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

For centuries, the Marines and Navy had dispatched

scouting forces out from human space—sneak-and-peek

teams, as they were popularly known—in order to try to

identify specific stars where the Xul maintained a presence.

The idea was that if Xul bases or colonies could be found,

they could be watched, with an eye to noting any sudden

activity that might presage a new assault against human

space.

The sheer vastness of space, the grains-of-sand numbers

of stars, worked both ways, however. For centuries, they’d

hidden Sol from the Xul, protecting the existence of Hu-

IAN DOUGLAS

mankind, but those same numbers allowed the vast majority

of the Xul outposts to remain hidden as well.

But the further into interstellar space Humankind probed,

the greater the chance, the more certain the inevitability,

that it would once again trip the Xul sentries, as it had on

several occasions already. And it seemed all but certain that,

when the Xul returned to the Motherworld of Humankind,

they would come with sufficient force to finish the job they’d

begun several times before.

Humans had been lucky so far . . . lucky despite the fact

that half a millennium ago Earth had so nearly been ren-

dered uninhabitable. Only during the past few centuries had

they begun piecing together the full history of human-Xul

interactions, a relationship that extended back, it was be-

lieved, as far as half a million years.

As Cara and Herschel began preparing the virtual space

for the electronic arrival of the Advisory Council, Alexan-

der allowed his implant processors to cull through the data,

reviewing past, present, and several darkly disturbing pos-

sible futures. As the data fell into place, he allowed himself

a moment’s reverie, induced by the electronic flow from the

local AI through the mingling of organic and inorganic re-

gions of his brain.

Some five hundred thousand years ago, an advanced non-

human intelligence—robotic intelligences unimaginatively

dubbed variously the “Builders” or “the Ancients” by popu-

lar histories and the entertainment and news sims—had

created an empire spanning all of today’s human space, and

presumably extending far beyond. The Builders had terra-

formed Mars, and, for a brief time, at least, employed rea-

sonably bright bipedal creatures imported from the third

planet as workers—genetically altering them to boost their

intelligence, and in doing so creating the species that later

would call itself Homo sapiens.

But the Xul had attacked the Builders, however, the

Xul or their militant predecessors. Ruins on Mars and on

Earth’s Moon, on Chiron in the Alpha Centauri system, and

on numerous other worlds attested to the violence and the

completeness of the genocidal Xul campaign. One of their

STAR STRIKE

enormous ships, part machine and part downloaded intelli-

gence, had been badly damaged in the conflict and crashed

into the ice-locked world-ocean of Europa. The Builders,

who called the invaders “The Hunters of the Dawn,” were

destroyed, their empire reduced to broken ruins and rubble

on a thousand far-strewn worlds. Of the Builders themselves,

apparently, nothing had survived. Their genetically altered

creations, however, had escaped the notice of the Xul, and

survived, even flourished, on Earth.

Half a million years later, and some ten to fifteen thou-

sand years ago, another spacefaring civilization had entered

Earth’s Solar System. The An were in the process of estab-

lishing a much smaller, more modest interstellar empire, one

embracing a few score star systems scattered across perhaps

fifty light-years. They’d planted colonies on Earth and on

Earth’s Moon, mined precious metals, and enslaved human

nomads to raise food and work the mines. In making slaves,

farms, and stone cities, they’d managed to become the pro-

totypes of the gods and goddesses of ancient Mesopotamia.

But then the An had attracted the notice of the Xul—the

name itself had survived in the Sumerian language as one

meaning “demon”—and the An, too, were annihilated.

The Xul had missed one Earthlike world populated by

the An, however. The satellite of a gas giant well outside

its sun’s habitable zone, perhaps it had been overlooked.

On Ishtar, in the Lalande 21185 system eight and a half

light-years from Sol, a few An and their human slaves had

survived, remaining unnoticed in the holocaust when their

technological infrastructure collapsed. On Earth, again, the

An all were killed, but humans had survived to wonder about

the cyclopean and monolithic ruins at places like Baalbek,

submerged Yonaguni, and Tiahuanaco, and to tell stories of

a universal deluge and the wrath of the gods.

Thousands of years passed, and humans on Earth again

developed high technologies, this time on their own, and

again they walked on other worlds. They found mysterious

ruins on Mars and on Luna, and a few devices miraculously

intact. They found the lost Xul ship, poetically dubbed “The

Singer” for its eerie and insane radio transmissions, sub-

IAN DOUGLAS

merged deep beneath the Europan ice, and on Ishtar they

found descendents of both An and humans.

From that time on, late in the twenty-second century,

Humankind had existed in a kind of secretive balance with

the Xul, who, it turned out, were still very much in exis-

tence after all those millennia. Like mice or cockroaches

living in the walls of a very large dwelling, human star-

farers sought to improve their own lot while avoiding the

notice of the heavy-footed giants living nearby. Archeo-

logical teams spread out among the nearer star systems,

seeking remnants of lost technologies left by the Builders,

by the An, and by other civilizations. Eventually, another

alien species had been discovered, the amphibian N’mah,

living within an enigmatic Ancient-built stargate in the

Sirius system.

In 2170, Marine and Navy forces at the Sirius Stargate

had destroyed a Xul ship as it came through the Gate. In

2314, another Xul ship had appeared, this time within Earth’s

solar system . . . and Earth had very nearly died. In 2323, a

Navy-Marine task force had proceeded through the Sirius

Gate to another, unknown and distant star system, Night’s

Edge, using a freighter-load of sand scooped from the sur-

face of Mars and accelerated to close to the speed of light

to eliminate a Xul fleet and planetary base. As Cara had

pointed out, the obliteration of that Xul outpost appeared

to have wiped out any data the Xul had acquired pertaining

to Humankind or Sol . . . and bought Earth a precious few

more centuries to prepare for her next encounter with the

Xul threat.

That there would be another encounter, Alexander had no

doubt whatsoever. Since the early twentieth century, Earth

had been broadcasting her presence; Sol now rested at the

center of a sphere over 1,700 light-years across, a pulsing,

restless bubble of electromagnetic radiation at radio wave-

lengths expanding outward at the speed of light—a certain

indicator of intelligent, technic life at its center.

Alexander allowed himself a mental grin at the memory

of an old joke. Perhaps it wasn’t an indicator of intelligent

life, given the nature of much of the entertainment content

of that bubble. Still, anyone with the appropriate technologi-

STAR STRIKE

cal know-how could hear that babble of noise, and know that

technic civilization was responsible.

And The Singer had broadcast something to the stars

back in 2067 when it was freed from its icy tomb. No, there

was no way Humanity could keep its existence secret much

longer.

And how was Humankind to survive in a contest against

a technology half a million years more advanced?

It was a problem the Marine Corps had been struggling

to resolve since the twenty-first century. So far, for the most

part, they’d been able to fight isolated and tightly controlled

battles, applying tactics that emphasized Marine strengths

while sidestepping Xul technology. As commanding officer

of the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, Alexan-

der was responsible for keeping on top of the Xul threat, and

keeping the Commonwealth government informed of any

changes in the situation.

And the situation certainly had changed now, with the

taking of the Argo.

“General?” Cara said, interrupting increasingly grim

thoughts. “Will you want your full filters for the meeting?”

“Eh? What was that?”

“Your e-comm filters, sir. The delegates will begin link-

ing in before too long. How do you want to be dressed?”

He grimaced. Personal filters were an important part of

modern electronic communications. Within a noumenal set-

ting—literally inside the participants’ heads—your personal

icon could take on any appearance desired, anything within

the programming range of the AIs giving the encounter sub-

stance. Filters allowed the image projected into the group

mind’s virtual space to be of your own choosing, with ap-

parent dress, body language, even inflection of voice under

your control.

He didn’t like it, though. He never had. Though e-filters

had been around for centuries, a necessary outgrowth of

noumenal projection, they still seemed . . . dishonest, some-

how, a kind of social white lie.

“You can’t,” Cara told him, a disapproving tone to her

words, “receive the Defense Advisory Council like that.”

IAN DOUGLAS

Mentally, he looked down at himself. As usual, he was

projecting his real-world appearance into the galactic im-

agery . . . which, at the moment, was of a lean, middle-aged

man with graying hair and a dour expression. He was also

naked.

Causal nudity was perfectly acceptable within most

modern social situations, but Cara was right. This was not

the proper appearance to put before twenty-four of the more

powerful and important of the arbiters of Commonwealth

government policy.

“What do you suggest?” he asked her.

“Something,” she said, “more like this.” She gave his sim

an electronic tweak, and his body morphed into something

leaner, tauter, and with more presence, and wearing Marine

full dress, his upper left chest ablaze in luminous decora-

tions and campaign holos. The brilliant gold Terran Sun-

burst, awarded for his role at the Battle of Grellsinore as a

very raw lieutenant, was emblazoned on his right breast. His

head and shoulders were encased within a lambent corona

flammae, another social convention granted to officially

designated Heroes of the Commonwealth.

“I think we can lose the decorations,” he said. He gave

a commanding thought, and the medals vanished. His uni-

form dwindled a bit into plain dress blacks. “And the damned

light show.” The corona faded away.

“With respect, sir,” Cara told him, “you need the bric-a-

brac. The council’s chairperson is Marie Devereaux. She is

impressed by proper formal presentation, and you will need

to enlist her support for your plan.”

He sighed. “Okay. Medals, yes. But not that damned

glow. Makes me look like an ancient religious icon, com-

plete with halo.”

“The corona flammae is part of your sanctioned uniform,

sir. For your service at and after the twenty-third Chinese

War. And the delegation members will have their own.”

“Fucking trappings of power. I hate this.”

“Indeed, sir,” Cara said as the light came back on . . . but

a trifle subdued, this time. “But how many times have you

lectured me on the need to blend in with the local social

STAR STRIKE

environment? To do otherwise will elicit disapproval, and

might well send conflicting signals or, worse, could alienate

your audience.”

Alexander looked sharply at Cara’s icon—which was pre-

senting itself, as usual, as an attractive, dark-haired woman

of indeterminate years wearing a Marine undress uniform.

It was tough at times to remember that “Cara” was, in fact,

an electronic artifice, an AI serving as his personal mili-

tary aide and electronic office manager. A resident of the

noumenon and virtual workplaces, she had no physical real-

ity at all.

“Okay, boss,” he said at last. “Light me. But no parade or

fireworks, okay? Even heroes of the Commonwealth should

be granted a little dignity.”

“I’ll see what I can do, sir,” she told him. “But no

promises!”

And then, with Cara serving as gatekeeper and an-

nouncer, the first of the council delegates began linking in.

5�

0507.1102

USMC Skybase

Paraspace

1005 hrs GMT

It was, Alexander decided, a bit like being in an enormous

fish tank. The delegates of the Defense Advisory Council

appeared in the simulation as small and relatively unob-

trusive icons, until one or another spoke. At that point, the

icon unfolded into what appeared to be a life-sized image,

standing on emptiness and aglow with its own corona. With

a swarm of golden icons surrounding him, together with

a larger swarm of smaller, dimmer icons representing the

group’s cloud of digital secretaries and personal electronic

assistants, he felt as though he were a large and somewhat

clumsy whale immersed within a school of fish.

There was also the feeling that the entire school was

studying him intently, and not a little critically. They in-

cluded, Cara had reminded him, eight delegates from the

Commonwealth Senate, ten senior military officers from the

Bureaus of Defense, five members of the President’s Intel-

ligence Advisory Group, and Marie Devereaux, the Presi-

dent’s personal advisor and representative.

Alexander shrugged off the feeling, and continued with

his presentation. They were adrift in an absolute blackness

relieved only by a fuzzy circle of light surrounding them all,

a ring dividing the darkness into two unequal parts. Within

STAR STRIKE

the smaller part, the ring shaded into blue, the leading edge.

The trailing edge shaded into red.

This was how space had looked from the point of view of

Perseus, the AI commanding the colony asteroid ship Argo

during her flight across the Galaxy. The luminous ring was

the bizarre and beautiful relativistic compression of space

as seen at near- c velocities, a three-dimensional panorama

overlaid here and there by the flickering alphanumerics of

Perseus’s functional displays.

“We don’t have a lot to go on,” Alexander was telling the

watching delegates. “From the time the Xul ship material-

ized alongside the Argo, to the moment of Argo’ s destruc-

tion, less than five seconds elapsed. The AI in command of

the vessel was in time-extended mode. He did not have time

to fully react.”

Artificial sentients like Perseus were designed to control

their own subjective passage of time. For machine intelli-

gences that could note the passage of millionths of a second,

the passage of a truly long period of relative inactivity—such

as the subjective decades necessary for interstellar flight—

could literally drive the AI insane. That, it was believed,

was what had happened to The Singer, the Xul huntership

trapped for half a million years beneath the ice of the Eu-

ropan ocean.

Perseus had been experiencing time at roughly a thou-

sand to one—meaning that a year was the same as roughly

nine hours for a human. At that setting, though, those four

and a half seconds after the appearance of the Xul ship had

been the human equivalent of 4.5 thousandths of a second;

it was amazing that Perseus had managed to do as much as

he had.

In Alexander’s mind, and in the minds of the watching

delegates, those last seconds played out in slow motion.

“As you see,” Alexander continued, indicating one of

the numeric readouts, “the time scale has been altered so

that we can experience the encounter at a ratio of about

ten to one . . . four seconds becomes forty. Perseus would

have been perceiving this about one hundred times more

slowly.”

IAN DOUGLAS

Abruptly, a shadow appeared against the eldritch starlight.

One moment there was nothing; the next, it was there, im-

mense against the luminous ring. With its velocity matched

perfectly to that of Argo, the Xul huntership appeared undis-

torted, a convolute and complex mountain of curves, swell-

ings, angles, spires, and sheer mass, the whole only slightly

less black than the empty space ahead and behind, forbidding

and sinister.

In fact, Alexander reminded himself, the Intruder was

somewhat smaller than the Argo—perhaps 2 kilometers

long and one wide, according to the data now appearing on

the display, where the Argo was a potato-shaped rock over

8 kilometers thick along its long axis. But most of Argo was

dead rock. The totality of her living and engineering areas,

command and defense centers, storage tanks, and drive sys-

tems occupied something like three percent of the asteroid’s

total bulk. The asteroid-shell of the Argo itself was invisible

in the data simulation. Without the asteroid as a reference,

the Intruder, slowly drifting closer, felt enormous.

“That looks nothing like the Intruder,” Senator Dav

Gannel said. “The ship that attacked Earth . . . and the hunt-

erships we encountered at the Sirius Stargate, they were

shaped like huge needles. That thing is . . . I don’t know

what the hell it is, but it’s a lot fatter, more egg-shaped. How

do we know it’s Xul?”

Alexander didn’t answer. The slow-motion seconds

dragged by as the monster drew closer, until it blotted out a

quarter of the light ring. The flickering alphanumerics indi-

cated that Perseus was aware of the threat, and attempting to

open a communications channel.

“They’re not responding,” another Council delegate said.

“Of course they might not understand Anglic.”

“English, Senator,” Alexander said. “When Argo was

launched, the principal language of trade and government

was English. Perseus is signaling on several million chan-

nels, using microwave, infrared, and optical laser wave-

lengths. Remember, we’ve at least partially interfaced with

a number of Xul vessels, and we were able to study The

Singer, the one we recovered on Europa eight centuries ago.

We know the frequencies they use, and some of their lin-

STAR STRIKE

guistic conventions. You can be sure the Intruder hears, and

it understands enough to know Argo is trying to communi-

cate. It’s just not listening.”

“Shouldn’t the Argo be trying to get away?” Devereaux

asked.

“Madam Devereaux, the Argo is traveling at within

a tenth of a percent of the speed of light. At that velocity,

it would take a staggering amount of additional power to

increase speed by even one kilometer per hour. She could

decelerate or try moving laterally, adding a new vector to

her current course and speed, but that means rotating the

entire asteroid, and that would take time. And . . . the In-

truder clearly possesses some type of faster-than-light drive,

to have been able to overtake Argo so easily. No, Madam

Chairman, there’s not a whole lot Perseus can do right now

but try to talk.”

“Does she have any weapons at all?”

“A few. Beam weapons, for the most part, designed to

reduce stray rocks and bits of debris in her path to charged

plasmas that can be swept aside by the vessel’s protective

mag fields. But if any of you have seen the recordings of

the defense of Earth in 2314, you know that huntership

shrugged off that kind of weaponry without giving it a

thought. It took whole batteries of deep-space anti-asteroid

laser cannons just to damage the Intruder, plus a Marine

combat boarding party to go in and destroy it from the

inside.”

“At the Battle of Sirius Gate,” General Regin Samuels

pointed out, “the Earth forces used the thrusters from their

capital ships as huge plasma cannons. What if—”

“No,” Alexander said. “Argo is employing a magnetic

field drive we picked up from the N’mah, not plasma

thrusters.” He didn’t add the obvious—that this wasn’t a

problem-solving exercise, damn it, and it wasn’t happen-

ing in real time. What was revealed by this data sim had

already happened.

The government delegates, he reflected, were a little too

used to, and perhaps a little too reliant on, instantaneous

communications.

IAN DOUGLAS

There was no indication that the alien vessel even heard

Perseus’ communications attempts. One point seven three

seconds after the Intruder appeared, large portions of the

AI’s circuitry began to fail—or, rather, it appeared to begin

working for another system, as though it had been massively

compromised by a computer virus.

“At this point,” Alexander explained, “the Argo is being

penetrated by the alien’s computer network. It is very fast,

and apparently evolving microsecond to microsecond,

adapting in order to mesh with Perseus’s operating system.

The pattern is identical to that employed by Xul hunterships

in other engagements.”

It was as though the alien virus could trace the layout of

Perseus’ myriad circuits, memory fields, and get a feel for

the programs running there, to sense the overall pattern of

the operating system before beginning to change it.

Beams and missiles stabbed out from the Argo, focusing

on a relatively small region within the huge Intruder’s mid-

ship area. So far as those watching could tell, the result was

exactly zero. Beams and missiles alike seemed to vanish

into that monster structure without visible effect.

More alphanumerics appeared, detailing massive failures

in the Argo’s cybe-hibe capsules. The Intruder was now in-

fecting the colony ship’s sleeping passengers by way of their

cybernetic interfaces.

“We’re not sure yet how the Xul manage this trick,” Al-

exander went on, “but we’ve seen them do it before. The first

time was with an explorer vessel, Wings of Isis, at the Sirius

Stargate in 2148. It apparently patterns or replicates human

minds and memories, storing them as computer data. We be-

lieve the Xul are able to utilize this data to create patterned

humans as virtual sentients or sims.”

Three point one seconds after the attack had begun,

Perseus realized that all of its electronic barriers and de-

fenses were failing, that electronic agents spawned by the

Intruder’s operating system were spilling in over, around,

and through every firewall and defensive program Perseus

could bring into play. Perseus immediately released a highly

compressed burst of data—a complete record of everything

STAR STRIKE

stored thus far—through Argo’s QCC, the FTL Quantum-

Coupled Comm system that kept Argo in real-time contact

with Earth.

Abruptly, the record froze, the alphanumeric columns

and data blocks halted in mid-flicker.

“Four point zero one seconds,” Alexander said. “At this

point, Perseus flashed the recording of Argo’s log back to

Earth.”

“But . . . but everyone has been assuming that the Argo

was destroyed,” Senator Kalin said, a mental sputter. “We

don’t know that. They could still all be alive. . . .”

“Unlikely, Senator,” Alexander replied dryly. “First of

all, of course, there’s been no further contact with the Argo

during the past three days. There is also this. . . .”

Mentally, he highlighted one data block set off by

itself—an indication of Argo’s physical status. Two lines in

particular stood out—velocity and temperature. The aster-

oid starship’s velocity had abruptly plummeted by nearly

point one c, and its temperature had risen inexplicably by

some 1,500 degrees.

“When Perseus sent off the burst transmission, these two

indicators had begun changing during the previous one one-

thousandth of a second. We’re not sure, but what the physi-

cists who’ve studied this believe is happening is that Argo’s

forward velocity was somehow being directly transformed

into kinetic energy. A very great deal of kinetic energy. And

liberated as heat. A very great deal of heat.”

“These data show Argo is still completely intact,” Marie

Devereaux noted. She sounded puzzled. “Senator Kalin is

right. That doesn’t prove that the Argo was destroyed.”

“Look here, and here,” Alexander said, indicating two

other inset data blocks. “The temperature increase is still

confined to a relatively small area—a few hundred meters

across, it looks like . . . but the temperature there in that

one spot has risen 1,500 degrees Kelvin in less than a thou-

sandth of a second. The physics people think the Xul simply

stopped the Argo in mid-flight—and released all of that

kinetic energy, the energy of a multi-billion-ton asteroid

moving at near- c, as heat in one brief, intense blast. Believe

IAN DOUGLAS

me, Senator. That much energy all liberated at once would

have turned the Argo into something resembling a pocket-

sized supernova.”

“But why?” Kalin wanted to know.

“Evidently because the Xul had copied all of the data

they felt they needed. They’re not known, remember, for

taking physical prisoners.”

There was evidence enough, though, of their having up-

loaded human personalities and memories, however, and

using those as subjects for extended interrogation. He’d seen

some of the records taken from a Xul huntership, of what

had happened to the crew of the Wings of Isis in 2148. He

suppressed a cold shudder.

“If it’s the Xul,” Devereaux added.

He hesitated, wondering how forceful to make his re-

sponse. It was vital, vital that these people understand.

“Madam Chairperson, Senator Gannel asked a while ago

how we could know that Argo was destroyed by a Xul hunt-

ership. The answer is we don’t.” He indicated the vast, con-

voluted ovoid hovering close by Argo in the frozen noumenal

projection. “It’s not as though they’ve hung banners out an-

nouncing their identity. But I’ll tell you this. If that vessel is

not Xul, then it’s being operated by someone just as smart,

just as powerful, just as technologically advanced, and just

as xenophobic as the Xul. If they’re not Xul, they’ll do until

the real thing comes along, wouldn’t you say?”

“If it’s Xul,” Devereaux continued, “how much does this

. . . incident hurt us?”

He sighed. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Fifty thousand

twenty-fourth century politicians, plutocrats, bureaucrats,

specialists, and technicians. How much damage could they

do?”

That asteroid colony ship presented an interesting window

into the politics of Humankind’s past. Shortly after the Xul

attack on Earth, many of the survivors—especially those

wealthy enough or politically powerful enough to buy the

privilege—had elected to flee the Motherworld rather than

remain behind to face a second attack that all knew to be

inevitable. At that time, Humankind had not yet unraveled

STAR STRIKE

the secrets of faster-than-light travel. With N’mah help and

technology, however, they’d constructed four asteroid star-

ships each capable of carrying tens of thousands of refugees

and which could accelerate to nearly the speed of light using

the reactionless N’mah space drive.

From Alexander’s point of view, the decision to flee the

Galaxy entirely, to travel over two million light-years to

reach another galaxy, seemed to be a bit of overkill. Still,

he had to admit that, judging by the interstellar vistas re-

corded at Night’s Edge and elsewhere, the Xul did appear to

have a presence embracing much of the Galaxy. Two of their

known bases—Night’s Edge and a Stargate nexus known

only as Cluster Space—were actually located well outside

of the Galactic plane, where the Galaxy’s spiral arms curved

across the sky much as they did in Alexander’s noumenal

simulation. Their empire, if that’s what it could be called,

might well extend across the entire Milky Way—four hun-

dred billion suns, and an unknown hundreds of billions of

worlds.

The refugees of the twenty-fourth century had desper-

ately hoped to find a new home well beyond even the Xul’s

immensely long reach through space and time. It would take

over two million years to make the trip, but relativistic time

dilation would reduce that to something like thirty years;

with the prospective colonists in cybe-hibe stasis, even that

brief subjective time would vanish as they fled into the

remote future.

The only question had been whether or not the refugee

ships could slip out of the Galaxy without being spotted by

the Xul. That hope, unfortunately, had failed.

“Our problem, of course,” Alexander went on, “is that

we must assume that the Xul now know exactly where we

are, and who we are. Most of the people on board probably

didn’t have useful information that would lead the Xul back

to Earth. A few would have, however, though I’m actually

more concerned about the data Perseus might have been car-

rying. He probably had a complete record of the 2314 attack,

for instance, and would have had the galactic coordinate

system we use for navigation.

IAN DOUGLAS

“The Xul are smart. They’ll put that data together with

the elimination of their base at Night’s Edge, and know we

were responsible. They might also be able to see enough of

the stellar background in any visual records to positively

locate Sol. And . . . there’s also Argo’s path. The refugee

ships were supposed to make a course correction or two on

the way out, so they didn’t draw a line straight back to Earth,

but doing that sort of thing at relativistic speeds is time con-

suming and wastes energy. I doubt the changes were enough

to throw the Xul off by very much. At the very least, they’ll

figure the Argo set out from someplace close to the Sirius

Stargate. That bit of data alone might be enough. It’s only

eight and a half light-years from Earth.”

In fact there was so much Humankind didn’t know about

the Xul or how they might reason things through. No one

could explain why, for instance, they didn’t share data more

freely among themselves. The only reason the Xul hadn’t

identified Humankind as a serious threat centuries ago was

the fact that the Night’s Edge raid did appear to have oblit-

erated any record of the Xul operation against Earth nine

years earlier.

“What about the other three refugee ships?” Navin Ber-

genhal, one of the Intelligence Advisory Group members,

asked. “They’re all in danger now.”

“We’ll need to send out QCC flashes to them, of course,”

Alexander said. “I doubt there’s anything they can do,

though, since it’ll take a year of deceleration for them to

slow down, and another year to build back up to near- c

for the return trip. If they wanted to return.” He shrugged.

“Their escapist philosophy may prove to be the best after

all. If the Xul find Earth and the rest of our worlds, the only

hope for Man’s survival might well rest in one or more of

those surviving colony ships making it to M-31.”

“The destruction of the Argo is tragic, yes,” Devereaux

said. “But I still don’t see an immediate threat. This all took

place five hundred light-years away, after all. And the Xul

have always been glacially slow in their military responses.”

Alexander nodded. “Agreed. If they behave as they have

in the past, it might be some time before that information

STAR STRIKE

disseminates across all of Xul-controlled space. But, Madam

Devereaux, we would be foolish to assume they won’t dis-

seminate it, or that they won’t act upon it eventually. Our best

xenopsych profiles so far suggest that the Xul are extreme

xenophobes, that they destroy other technic races as a kind

of instinctive defense mechanism. We’ve bloodied them a

couple of times now, at Sirius, at Night’s Edge, and at Sol, so

you can bet that they’re going to sit up and take notice.”

“We’re going to need to . . . consider this,” Devereaux

said. “In light of the current difficulties with the Islamic

Theocracy, we must proceed . . . circumspectly. Perhaps In-

telligence can run some simulations plots, and come up with

some realistic probabilities.”

Damn. He was going to have to turn up the heat. “With

all due respect, Madam Devereaux,” he said, “that is fuck-

ing irresponsible. It’s also stupid, playing politics with the

whole of Humankind at stake!”

There was a long pause. Devereaux’s head cocked to one

side. “With all due respect what, General Alexander?”

“Eh?”

“Your filter blocked you,” Cara whispered in his mind.

“Oh, for the love of . . .” Angrily, he cleared part of the

filter program, dropping it to a lower level. The software had

decided that his choice of language left a lot to be desired,

and had edited it.

“Excuse me, Ms. Devereaux,” he said as the program

shifted to a lower level. He glanced down at himself. At least

he was still in uniform. “Social convention required that I

have my e-filters in place, lest I . . . give offense. But we

don’t have time for that nonsense now. What I said, ma’am,

was that delay, any delay—giving the matter further study,

running numbers, whatever you wish to call it—is irrespon-

sible and stupid. I believe the term my e-filter didn’t like was

‘fucking irresponsible.’ ”

“I see.” Her own e-filters were in place of course, but

they didn’t stop a certain amount of disapproval from slip-

ping through in those two short words. “And just what do

you expect us to do about this, General Alexander?”

“A raid, Madam Devereaux.” At a thought, the frozen

IAN DOUGLAS

view from the Argo at the moment of the ship’s destruc-

tion vanished, and was replaced by the galactic map he’d

been studying before the delegates had arrived. The view-

point zoomed in on the irregular green glow of human

space, on the path of the Argo, and on a tight scattering of

red pinpoints marking the nearby systems from which the

huntership might have emerged—Nu Andromeda, Epsi-

lon Trianguli, and a few others. “What the Marines call a

sneak-and-peek.”

The display continued to animate as he spoke, the view-

point zooming in until Epsilon Trianguli showed as a hot,

white sphere rather than as another star. An A2 type star,

Epsilon Trianguli appeared imbedded in a far-flung corona

of luminous gas, and even in simulation was almost too bril-

liant to look at directly.

A hypothetical planet swung into view, a sharp-edged

crescent bowed away from the star, attended by a clutter of

sickle-shaped moons. A swarm of dark gray and metallic

slivers materialized out of emptiness and scattered across

the system. Other planets appeared in the distance, along

with the gleaming, wedding-band hoop of a stargate.

“First in are AI scouts, to show us the terrain. We also

need to know if there’s a stargate in the target system. The

scouts will find out if there is a Xul presence in the system,

and map it out so we’re not going in blind.”

Obedient to his lecture, a Xul station revealed itself,

menacing and black, positioned to guard the stargate. A

swarm of new objects entered the scene, dull-black ovoids,

descending toward the Xul structure in waves. Pinpoints of

white light flickered and strobed against the surface in a

silent representation of space combat.

“The Marines go in hot, wearing marauder armor and

accompanied by highly specialized penetrator AIs,” Alex-

ander went on. “Details depend on what the scouts turn up,

of course, but the idea will be to insert a Marine raiding

party into the Xul, grab as much information as we can, and

blow the thing to hell.”

On cue, the camera point of view pulled back sharply,

just as the Xul base in the scene, in complete silence, det-

STAR STRIKE

onated—a searing, fast-expanding ball of white light that

briefly outshone the brilliant local sun.

“Very pretty,” Devereaux said as the display faded into

darkness once more. The noumenal scene flowed and shifted

once more, becoming a more conventional virtual encounter

space. “But just what would be the point?”

They now appeared to be seated around the perimeter of

a sunken conversation pit three meters across, the represen-

tation of the Galaxy as seen from above spiraled about itself

at their feet. Here, the individual icons all expanded into

images of people, though their electronic secretaries and

EAs remained visible only as tiny, darting icons of yellow

light orbiting their human masters. The walls and ceiling of

the room appeared lost in darkness.

“The point, Madam Devereaux, is to avoid being put on

the defensive again. We were on the defensive in 2314. You

know what happened.”

‘Yes,” General Samuels said. “We beat them.”

“At a terrible cost, sir. Earth’s population in 2314 was . . .

what?” Alexander pulled the data down from the Net. “Fif-

teen point seven billion people. Four billion died within the

space of a few hours during the Xul bombardment. Four

billion. Exact numbers were never available, given the chaos

of the next few decades, but an estimated one to two billion

more froze during the Endless Winter, or starved to death,

or died of disease or internal electronics failure or just plain

despair.”

“We know our history, General,” Devereaux said.

“Then you should know that the human race came within

a hair’s breadth of becoming extinct. Over a third of the

human race died, murdered by one Xul huntership. One! We

were lucky to be able to destroy it. And if General Garroway

hadn’t backtracked the Intruder through the Sirius Stargate

to Night’s Edge and found a way to take out the base there,

we wouldn’t be sitting here now discussing it!”

“And you know, General,” Devereaux said, “that the cur-

rent political situation may preclude a major operation such

as you seem to be suggesting. The Monists and the Starborn

both are threatening to side with the Islamic Theocracy. If

IAN DOUGLAS

they do, the Commonwealth will fall.” She spread her hands.

“If that happens, how are we supposed to defend ourselves

if the Xul do come?”

“I submit, Madam Devereaux, that the Human species

right now has more to worry about than the exact nature

of God. If we do not take a stand, an active stand, against

the Xul threat, if we don’t deal with it now, while we have a

chance of doing so, then none of the rest matters. We’ll be

settling the question of God’s nature by meeting Him face

to face!”

“He does have a point, Marie,” another delegate in the

circle said. He wore the uniform and the corona of a Fleet

admiral, and the alphanumerics that popped up when Al-

exander looked at him identified him as Admiral Joseph

Mason. As he spoke, the light brightened around him, draw-

ing the eye. “We can’t ignore what’s happened out there.”

“Five hundred light-years, Admiral. It’s so far away.”

“It’s a very short step for the Xul, Marie. We’ve survived

so far only because we’ve been lost within . . . what? Ten

million stars, or so. Even the Xul can’t pay close attention to

every one. But we know the Xul. We know what they did to

the Builders. And to the An. And probably to some ungodly

number of other civilizations and species scattered across

the Galaxy over the past half million years or so. If they

locate Sol and the other worlds of human space, they will do

the same to us.”

The light brightened around another delegate. “And I

concur, Madam Devereaux.” The speaker was a civilian, his

noumenal presentation wearing the plain white robes of a

Starborn Neognostic.

“You do, Ari?” Devereaux said, surprised. “I’d have

thought you would be solidly opposed to this kind of . . . of

interstellar adventurism.”

“I may be a Starborn,” Arimalen Daley said, inclining

his head, “but I’m not stupid. Lieutenant General Alexander

is right. We need to be careful in setting our priorities. I

believe even our Theocrat friends would agree that there are

times when religious or philosophical differences must be

set aside for the sake of simple survival.”

STAR STRIKE

Alexander was startled by Daley’s statement, but pleased.

He had little patience with religion, and tended to see it as

a means of denying or avoiding responsibility. Daley’s re-

sponse was . . . refreshing.

He opened a private window in his mind, accessed an e-

pedia link, and downloaded a brief background on the Star-

born, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. No . . .

he’d remembered correctly. The Starborn had been around

for two or three centuries, but had arisen out of several ear-

lier belief systems centered on The Revelation. For them,

all intelligence was One . . . and that included even the Xul.

They opposed all war in general, and most especially war

based on a clash between opposing faiths. Within the Com-

monwealth Senate, they’d been the most vocal of the oppo-

nents of the military action against the Islamist Theocracy,

for just that reason.

Alexander wondered why Daley had sided with him.

For himself, Alexander had no patience whatsoever

with religion of any type. Beginning in the twentieth cen-

tury, Humankind had been wracked by religious mania of

the most divisive and destructive sort. World War III had

been brought on by Islamic fundamentalism, but other sects

and religions demanding rigid boundaries and unquestion-

ing obedience to what was imagined to be God’s will had

added their share of terror, insanity, and blood to the chaos

of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And

then had come the discoveries on Mars, of buried cities

and the Builders, of the mummified bodies of anatomically

modern humans beneath the desiccated sands of Cydonia

and Chryse.

Science fiction and the more sensationalist writers of

pop-science had long speculated that extraterrestrials had

created humans, but now there was proof. The Builders had

tinkered with the genetics of Homo erectus in order to create

a new species— Homo sapiens. It had always been assumed

that if such proof was ever uncovered, it would once and for

all end the tyranny and the comfort of religion. If God was a

spaceman, there scarcely was need for His church. Religion

would die.

IAN DOUGLAS

Surprisingly, the opposite had happened. Though the

older, traditional faiths had been badly shaken, the discover-

ies on Mars and elsewhere, far from destroying religion, had

before long fostered new sects, religions, cults, and philoso-

phies by the dozens, by the hundreds, some of them bizarre

in the extreme. Throughout the first half of the new millen-

nium, new faiths had spawned and vied and warred with one

another, some accepting the vanished Builders or even the

still-extant An or N’mah as gods, creators of Humankind,

if not the cosmos. Others—in particular the stricter, more

fundamentalist branches of Christianity and Islam—had

adhered even more closely to the original texts, and con-

demned the nonhumans as demons.

Things had stabilized somewhat over the past few centu-

ries. The attack on Earth had killed so many, had so terribly

wounded civilization as a whole, that few religions, old or

new, could deal with it, save in apocalyptic terms. And when

Earth had, after all, survived, when Humankind began to

rebuild and the expected second Xul attack had not materi-

alized, many of the more extreme and strident of the sects

had at last faded away.

There remained, however, some thousands of religions

. . . but for the most part they fell into one of two major

branches of organized spirituality, defined by their attitude

toward the Xul. The Transcendents, who represented most

of the older faiths plus a number of newer religions empha-

sizing the nature of the Divine as separate and distinct from

Humankind, either ignored the Xul entirely, or associated

them with the Devil, enemies of both Man and God.

The Emanists embraced religions and philosophies em-

phasizing that god arose from within Man, as a metasentient

emanation arising from the minds of all humans, or even of

all intelligence everywhere in the universe. For them, the

Xul were a part of the Divine . . . or, at the least, His instru-

ment for bringing about the evolution of Humankind. For

most Emanists, the key to surviving the Xul was to follow

the lead of the An on Ishtar—keep a low profile, roll with

the punches, abjure pride and any technological activity that

might attract Xul notice. The hope was that, like the Biblical

STAR STRIKE

Angel of Death, the Xul would “pass over” humanity once

more, as it had before in both recent and ancient history.

While not as widespread as the Transcendents, Emanist

religions were popular with large segments of the population

on Earth, especially with the Antitechnics and the various

Neoprimitive and Back-to-Earth parties. Neognostics like

Daley even advocated a complete renunciation of all activi-

ties off the surface of the Earth, especially now that the ice

was retreating once more.

That was why Alexander—and Devereaux too, evi-

dently—were surprised at his position.

As Alexander closed the e-pedia window, he realized

Daley was still speaking, and that he was looking at him as

he did so. “Whatever the tenets of my faith might be,” the

Neognostic was saying, “Humankind cannot evolve, cannot

grow to meet its potential, and can never contribute to the

idea we know as God if we as a species become extinct.

So long as we remained beneath Xul notice, survival and

growth both were possible. But now?” He spread his hands.

“I dislike the idea. My whole being rebels against the very

idea of war. But . . . if there is to be war, better it be out there,

five hundred light-years away, than here among the worlds

of Man.”

“Good God,” General Samuels said in the silence that fol-

lowed this speech. “I thought it was nuts including a Paxist

on the Advisory Council, Ari.” The Paxists included those

who believed in peace-at-any-price. “But you’re okay!”

“The Paxists,” Devereaux said sternly, “were invited be-

cause they represent the views of a large minority of the

Commonwealth population. Very well. General Alexander,

thank you for your presentation. The Council will retire now

to its private noumenon and vote the question.”

And the Council was gone, leaving Alexander alone in

the imaginal room.

If the reaction to Daley’s speech was any indication,

though, he would need to begin preparations.

The Marines would be going to war.

6�

0810.1102

USMC Recruit Training Center

Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

1512/24:20 local time, 0156 hrs GMT

Garroway opened his eyes, blinked, and flexed his hands.

This was . . . wonderful. The crisp reality of the sensa-

tions coursing through his imaginal body was almost

overwhelming.

The hellish empty time was over.

“Pay attention, recruit! This is important!”

Warhurst’s order snapped his attention back to the exer-

cise. He tried to let the feelings flow through his mind, but

to keep his focus on the scene around him.

The landscape was barren and unforgivingly rugged, a

volcanic mountain of black rock and sand cratered and torn

by a devastating firestorm and draped in drifting patches

of smoke. He was standing in the middle of a battle . . . an

ancient battle, one with unarmored men carrying primitive

firearms as they struggled up the mountain’s flank. Gun-

fire thundered—not the hiss and crack of lasers and plasma

weapons, but the deeper-throated boom and rattle of slug-

throwers, punctuated moment to moment by the heavy thud

of high explosives.

Something—a fragment of high-velocity metal—whined

past his ear, the illusion so realistic he flinched. He reminded

himself that he had nothing to fear, however. This panorama

of blood, confusion, and noise was being downloaded into

STAR STRIKE

his consciousness from the RTC historical network, the

sights and sounds real enough to convince him he really

was standing on that tortured mountainside. But the Ma-

rines around him were noumenal simulations—literally all

in Garroway’s head. Two days earlier he’d received the nano

injections which had swiftly grown into his new Corps-issue

headware, and this was his first test of its capabilities.

“Move on up the slope,” Warhurst whispered in his ear.

He obeyed, feeling the gritty crunch of black gravel beneath

his feet. A Marine lay on his back a few meters away, eyes

staring into the sky, a gaping, bloody hole in his chest. Gar-

roway could see bare ribs protruding from the wound.

It’s not real, he told himself. It’s a sim.

“Yeah, it’s a simulation, recruit,” Warhurst told him. Gar-

roway started. He hadn’t realized that the DI could hear him.

“But it is real, or it was. These Marines are members of the

28th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division. They really

lived—and died—to take this island.”

From the crest of the volcanic mountain, Garroway could

see the whole island, a roughly triangular sprawl of black

sand, rock, and jungle extending toward what his inner com-

pass told him was the north to northeastern horizon. Off-

shore, hundreds of ships—old-style seagoing ships, rather

than military spacecraft—lay along the eastern horizon.

A few moved closer in, periodically spewing orange flame

and clouds of smoke from turret-mounted batteries, and the

beaches near the foot of the mountain were littered with

hundreds of small, dark-colored craft like oblong boxes that

had the look of so many ugly beetles slogging through the

surf.

“The date,” Warhurst told him, “is 2302, in the year 170

of the Marine Era. That’s 23 February 1945, for you people

who still think in civilian. The mountain is Suribachi, a dor-

mant volcanic cone 166 meters high at the southern end of

a place called Sulfur Island—Iwo Jima in Japanese. For the

past four days the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions, plus two

regiments of the 3rd, have been assaulting this unappeal-

ing bit of real estate in order to take it away from the Japa-

nese Empire. For two years, now, the United States has been

IAN DOUGLAS

island-hopping across the Pacific Ocean, closing toward

Japan. Iwo Jima is the first territory they’ve reached that is

actually a prefecture of Japan; the mayor of Tokyo is also the

mayor of Iwo. That means that for the Japanese defending

this island, this is the first actual landing on the sacred soil

of their homeland. They are defending every meter in one of

the fiercest battles in the war to date.

“Yesterday, the 28th Marines started up the slope of Su-

ribachi which, as you can see, has a commanding view of

the entire island, and looks straight down on the landing

beaches. In an entire day of fighting, they advanced per-

haps 200 meters, then fended off a Japanese charge during

the night. They’ve suffered heavy casualties. Lieutenant

General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander,

has honeycombed the entire island, which measures just 21

square kilometers, with tunnels, bunkers, and spider holes.

The defenders, 22,000 of them, have been ordered to fight to

the death . . . and most of them will.

“This battle will go down as one of the most famous ac-

tions in the history of the Corps. In all of World War II, it

was the only action in which the Americans actually suf-

fered more casualties than the enemy—26,000, with 6,825

of those KIA. The Japanese have 22,000 men on the island.

Out of those, 1081 will survive.

“The battle will last until 2503, a total of thirty-seven

days, before the island is declared secure. Almost one quar-

ter of all of the Medals of Honor awarded to Marines during

World War II—twenty-seven in all—were awarded to men

who participated in this battle.

“Ah. There’s what we came up here to see. . . .”

Warhurst led the recruits farther up the shell-blasted

slope. At the landward side of the summit, a small number

of Marines were working at something, huddled along a

length of pipe.

“The mountain now, after a fierce naval and air bom-

bardment, appears cleared of enemy soldiers, and several

patrols have reached the top. Half an hour ago, a small flag

was raised on the summit of the mountain to demonstrate

that the mountain has been secured, but now a larger flag

STAR STRIKE

has been sent to the top. The men you see over there are part

of a forty-man patrol from E Company, Second Battalion,

28th Marines, of the 5th Marine Division, under the com-

mand of Lieutenant Harold Schrier.

“Those men over there are Sergeant Michael Strank,

Corporal Harlon Block, PFC Rene Gagnon, PFC Ira Hayes,

and PFC Franklin Sousley, all United States Marines. The

sixth man is Navy, a Pharmacy Mate—what they later called

Navy Hospital Corpsmen, P.M./2 John Bradley.

“Of those six men, three—Strank, Block, and Sousley—

will be killed a few days from now, in heavy fighting at the

north end of the island. P.M./2 Bradley will be wounded by

shrapnel from a mortar round.”

The men completed doing whatever it was they were

doing to the pipe. Grasping it, moving together, they dug one

end into a hole in the gravel and lifted the other end high.

A flag unfurled with the breeze; nearby, one man turned

suddenly and snapped an image with a bulky, old-style 2-D

camera, while another man stood filming the scene.

The whole flag raising took only seconds. As the flag

fluttered from the now upright pipe, however, Garroway

could hear the cheering—from other Marines on the crest

of Suribachi and, distantly, from men on the lower reaches

of the island to the north. The rattle of gunfire seemed to

subside momentarily, replaced by a new thunder . . . the low,

drawn-out roar from thousands of voices, so faint it nearly

was lost on the wind.

“Have a peek down there on that beach,” Warhurst told

them. As Garroway turned and looked, it seemed as though

his vision became sharply telescopic, zooming in precipi-

tously, centering on a party of men wading ashore from one

of the boxlike landing craft. Two of the figures appeared to

be important; they were unarmed, though they wore helmets

and life preservers like the others around them. One took the

elbow of the other, pointing up the slope toward Garroway’s

position. He appeared jubilant.

“That,” Warhurst continued, “is the secretary of the

Navy, James Forrestal, just now coming ashore with Marine

General Holland ‘Howlin’ Mad’ Smith. When they see the

IAN DOUGLAS

flag up here, Forrestal turns to the general and says ‘Hol-

land, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine

Corps for the next five hundred years.’ ”

There was a surreal aspect to this history lesson—espe-

cially in the way Warhurst was describing events in the pres-

ent and in the future tense, as though these scenes Garroway

was experiencing weren’t AI recreations of something that

had happened 937 years ago, but were happening now.

“As it happens, the future of the Marine Corps was far

from secure,” Warhurst told them. “Only a couple of years

after this battle, the President of the United States attempted

to enact legislation that would have closed the Corps down.

He referred to the Marines as ‘the Navy’s police force,’ and

sought to merge them with the Army. The public outcry over

this plan blocked it . . . but from time to time, cost-cutting

politicians looked for ways to slash the military budget by

eliminating the Marines.”

The simulation had continued as Warhurst spoke, the

primitively armed and equipped Marines on that volcanic

slope continuing to move about as the flag, an archaic scrap

of cloth with red and white stripes and ranks of stars on a

blue field, continued to flutter overhead.

Gradually, though, the scene began to fade in Garroway’s

mind. He was sitting once again in a simcast amphitheater

back at the training center on Mars, his recliner moving up-

right along with all of the others arrayed in circles about a

central stage. The image of six men raising a flag continued

to hover overhead, a holographic projection faintly luminous

in the theater’s dim light.

Warhurst paced the stage, lecturing, but with an animated

passion. This, Garroway thought, was not just information

to be transmitted to another class of recruits, but something

burning in Warhurst’s brain and heart.

“As Forrestal predicted, however,” Warhurst went on,

“the Corps did endure for the next five hundred years—and

then for over three hundred years after that. For most of that

time, the politicians tended to dislike us . . . or at least they

never seemed to know what to do with us. We’ve been on the

budgetary chopping block more times than we can count.

STAR STRIKE

Civilians tend to like us, however. They see us as the holders

of an important legacy—one embracing duty, honor, faith-

fulness. Semper fi. Always faithful.

“In fact, though, the raising of the flag on Suribachi prob-

ably had less to do with the Corps’ survival than did certain

other factors. A century after the Battle of Iwo Jima, we left

the shores of our home planet, and discovered the Ancient

ruins on Mars and on Earth’s moon, and later at places like

Chiron and Ishtar. Both the Builders and the An left a lot

of high-tech junk lying around on worlds they visited in the

past . . . the Xul, too, for that matter, if you count what we

found out on Europa. Started something like a twenty-first-

century gold rush, as every country on Earth with a space

capability tried to get people out there to see what they could

find. Xenoarcheology became the hot science, since it was

thought that reverse-engineering some of that stuff could

give us things like faster-than-light travel or FTL radio. The

Navy, logically enough, became the service branch that ran

the ships to get out here . . . and where the Navy went, the

Marines came along. The Battle of Cydonia. The Battle of

Tsiolkovsky. The Battle of Ishtar. The Battles of the Sirius

Gate, and of Night’s Edge. ‘From the Halls of Montezuma,

to the ocher sands of Mars.’ We’ve written our legacy in

blood across a thousand years and on battlefields across two

hundred worlds.

“And in all that time, and on all those worlds, the Marine

Corps has done one thing . . . what we’ve always done. We

win battles!

“And you, recruits, have come here to Mars in order to

learn how to do just that.”

Garroway felt a stirring of pride at that—not at the prom-

ise that they would win battles, but at the way Warhurst was

addressing them now. This was now the twelfth week of

training, with just four more weeks to go. At some point

during the last couple of months—and Garroway honestly

could not remember when—Warhurst had stopped calling

the men and women of Recruit Company 4102 children, and

started calling them recruits.

Step by step, their civilian individuality had been broken

IAN DOUGLAS

down; step by step Warhurst and the other DIs had been

building them back up, forging them into . . . something

new. Garroway wasn’t sure what the difference was yet, but

he felt the difference, a sense of confidence, of belonging

that he’d never before known.

The feeling that he belonged had just taken a major boost

skyward, of course. The nano injected into his system on

0710 had grown into standard-Corps issue cereblink hard-

ware, and now, for the first time in three months, he was

again connected.

It had been a rough time without connections—no down-

loads, no direct comm. Or, rather, downloads and incoming

comm messages had entered his brain via his ears and his

eyes, without mediation or enhancement by AI software. It

had been like starting all over again, learning how to learn,

rather than allowing headware and resident AIs to sort and

file his memories for him.

He had a new personal electronic assistant, too . . . or,

rather, a Corps platoon EA guide he shared with everyone

else in the company. The EA’s name was Achilles; Warhurst

had told them to think of him as a kind of narrowly focused

platoon sergeant. Achilles was a bit short in the personality

department, but the system was very fast, very efficient, and

was working hard at its first task, helping him learn how to

get the most out of the new headware.

Later, at evening chow, he discovered one down side to

Achilles.

“So, whatcha think of the new headware?” he asked

Sandre Kenyon, a recruit who’d been born and raised in one

of the new arcologies off the coast of Pennsylvania. She’d

been a vir-simmer, a programmer of simulation AIs, before

she’d joined the Corps. He followed her out of the chow

line and toward a couple of empty seats at one of the tables.

Noise clattered and echoed around them; meals were among

the very few times when recruits were free to socialize with

other recruits, at least after the first month of training.

“It’s okay, I guess,” she said. “It’s gonna take some get-

ting used to, though.”

“I know. It’s so damned fast. . . .”

STAR STRIKE

“It’s also damned creepy,” she told him.

“What do you mean?”

“Having your platoon sergeant perched on your shoulder

every minute of every day? Watching everything you do?

Even everything you think? And reporting it all back to HQ-

RTC, complete with images in glorious color and infrared?

I don’t know about you, Aiden, but there are a few things I

do or think about doing that I don’t care to share with half

the base, y’know?”

“Oh . . .”

He’d not thought about that aspect of things, at least not

before now.

In fact, privacy was an alien concept in boot camp. Male

and female recruits trained together, shared the same bar-

racks, and used the same head. Toilets had stalls but no

doors, and no recruit was ever really alone for more than a

few moments at a time. In fact, come to think of it, standing

barracks fire watch in the middle of the night was probably

the closest any recruit came to having some private time—

but then you never knew when the sergeant of the guard was

going to show up on one of his rounds.

Mostly, it wasn’t a hardship. The recruits were too damned

busy, moving at a flat run from reveille to taps every day, for

it to be a problem . . . and most human cultures accepted

casual social nudity as the norm.

“Is Achilles listening to you gripe about it now?”

She shrugged. “I asked it. It told me it monitored everyone

in the company for breaches of regulations and compliance

to orders . . . but that it didn’t record or transmit anything

else. It . . . it’s a machine. A program, rather, so I guess it

shouldn’t bother me. Still . . . how do we know?”

Garroway began digging into his meal—a nanassembled

steak indistinguishable in taste and texture from live steaks

culture-grown in the Ring agros. One thing you had to say

about the Marines: they fed well.

He assumed Sandre was talking about sex. Technically,

fraternization between recruits was forbidden, though in

fact the authorities didn’t seem to pay much attention to oc-

casional and harmless breaches of the rules. If a recruit on

IAN DOUGLAS

fire watch was caught in the rack with a fuck buddy, they

both would probably be bounced out of the Corps and back

to Earth or wherever they’d come from so fast their eyes

would be spinning in their heads, but Garroway knew that

several recruits in Company 4102 were enjoying one anoth-

er’s physical companionship—at least if their break-time

war stories could be believed.

His only question was how they found the time—or the

energy—with the daily schedule that ruled their lives—up

at zero-dark thirty, followed by eighteen hours of marching,

drilling, classroom work, lectures, testing, and download-

ing, with lights out at 2200 hours.

Having a personal daemon was nothing new. Most

humans had them, the only hold-outs being the various neo-

luddite or neoprimitive cultures which had abandoned high-

tech for religious, esthetic, or artistic reasons. Achilles was

a daemon, nothing more. In fact, he seemed just like Aide,

except that he was more powerful, faster, and he linked all

of the recruits in Company 4102 into a close-knit electronic

network.

But he had to admit that Sandre had a point. Having

Achilles watching him was just like having Warhurst

watching him, except that the watching was taking place

every second of every day. His stomach tightened at the

thought.

“Recruit Kenyon is correct,” a voice whispered in his

mind.

Garroway looked up, startled. “Achilles?”

“What?” Sandre asked. Garroway hadn’t realized he’d

spoken the name aloud. He waved his hand back and forth,

requesting her silence.

“Affirmative, ” the voice continued. “Think of me as a

part of yourself, not as a spy for your superiors. ”

But you do report to the DI shack, don’t you? This time,

Garroway thought the question silently, employing the

mindspeak he’d always used with Aide.

“Technically, yes, but only in matters involving gross

negligence of duty. In any case, Marines are supposed to be

of superior moral character. By this point in your training,

STAR STRIKE

those with serious moral flaws have already been weeded

out. ”

“Oh . . .”

Company 4102 had dwindled a lot in the past few weeks,

it was true. Only forty-five recruits remained out of the over

one hundred who’d originally mustered at Noctis Laby-

rinthus. But he’d assumed the DORs—the Drop Out Re-

quests—had quit because they couldn’t get along without

their headware.

“That is a large part of it, ” Achilles agreed. “One aspect

of moral character is the ability to rely on yourself rather

than on technology. ”

Carefully, Garroway took another bite of faux steak and

chewed, thoughtful. Achilles seemed to be a bit more domi-

nant than Aide had been. And the damned thing was read-

ing his thoughts, rather than waiting for him to encode them

as mindspeak.

“You will simply have to learn to trust me, Garroway, ”

Achilles told him. “Trust that I am not sharing your thoughts

with others. ”

“Unless I deserve it.”

“Do you always talk to yourself?” Sandre asked him.

Achilles, tell her I’m holding a conversation with you.

A moment later, Sandre’s eyes grew very large. “Did you

send that?”

He nodded. “Pretty slick, huh?”

“Damn it, Garroway!” she snapped. “Get out of my

head!” Abruptly, she stood, picked up her tray, and walked

away. Garroway considered calling to her, but decided that

using telepathy would just make matters worse.

They were all going to have to work with the new tech-

nology for a bit, in order to get used to it.

Exactly, Achilles told him. He could have sworn the AI

sounded smug.

* * *

IAN DOUGLAS

Married Enlisted Housing

USMC Recruit Training Center

Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

1924/24:20 local time, 0620 hrs GMT

Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst stepped out of the flyer and

onto the landing deck outside his home. It was a small

place, but with lots of exterior spaces and enclosed garden

patios surrounding a double plasdome growing from a

canyon wall. Other base housing modules were visible up

and down the canyon, extruded from the ancient sandstone

walls.

A billion years ago, this part of Mars had been under a

sea a kilometer deep; the relentless rise of the Tharsis Bulge,

however, had lifted the Noctis Labyrinthus high and dry; as

the water drained away, it had carved the maze of channels

from the soft stone. The northern ocean had rolled again,

briefly, under the touch of the Builders half a million years

ago, but by that time the Noctis Labyrinthus was far above

mean sea level.

Apparently, the Builders had not colonized this part of

Mars, restricting their activities to Cydonia, far to the north,

to Chryse Planitia, and to Utopia on the far side of the planet.

Some of the base personnel spent off hours pacing up and

down the canyon with metal detectors, however. A handful

of people out here had made fortunes with the chance find

of a fragment of cast-off xenotech.

Warhurst never bothered with that sort of thing, however.

His career—the Corps—was everything.

A fact that was making things difficult at home.

“Honey?” He stepped in off the deck, dropping his cover

on a table. “I’m home.”

The place seemed empty, and he queried the house AI.

“Where is everybody?”

Julie and Eric are home, the house’s voice whispered in

his mind. Donal and Callie are still at the base.

Warhurst was part of a group marriage and, as was in-

creasingly the case nowadays, all of the other partners in

the relationship were also Marines. It was simpler that way

STAR STRIKE

. . . and the partners tended to be more understanding than

civilians. Usually.

A door hissed open and Julie emerged from the bed-

room. She was naked, and she looked angry. “Well, well.

The prodigal is home. Decided to come visit the family for

a change?”

“Don’t start, Julie.”

“Don’t start what?”

“Look, I know I haven’t been home much lately—”

“I know that too.” She ran a hand through her short hair.

“Look, Marine, I’m having sex with Eric, so give us some

privacy. Fix yourself dinner. When Don and Cal get home,

we need to talk, the five of us.”

“What do you—”

But she’d already turned away and padded back into the

bedroom.

Damn.

It had been a few days since he’d come home. How long?

He pulled a quick check of his personal calendar, and saw

the answer. Eight days.

Damn it, Julie knew the score. When a new recruit com-

pany started up, he spent all of his time with the company,

at least for the first few weeks. After that, he shared the duty

with the other DIs, sleeping in the DI shack, or in one of the

senior NCO quads across the grinder one night out of four.

But even late in the training regime, there were particular

times when it was important that he be there. This past week

had been the last week for the recruits of 4102 in naked time,

without their civilian headware, a time when lots of them

came close to cracking. He needed to be there, to see them

through. He’d almost stayed over tonight as well, but Cor-

rolly had insisted that he and Amanate could handle things.

He wished he’d stayed.

Julie’s flat statement about a family meeting probably

meant an ultimatum, and that probably meant a formal re-

quest that he move back into the BOQ, the Bachelor Of-

ficers’ Quarters.

In other words, a divorce.

It had been coming for a long time. He knew she’d been

IAN DOUGLAS

wanting to talk to him about the marriage, and his part in it,

for a long time, but he’d been hoping to postpone it, at least

until after 4102 had graduated. Damn it, he didn’t have time

for this nonsense, for all this sturm und drang, and Julie

ought to know that. He didn’t have the emotional stamina

to deal with it now, either. There was just too much on his

plate. Angry, he walked into the kitchen unit and punched

up a meal.

Warhurst was the most recent addition to the Tamalyn-

Danner line marriage, having been invited in by Julie just

fifteen months ago. Like many Corps weddings taking place

on Mars, the vows had been declared, posted, and celebrated

at Garroway Hall, at Cydonia, and half of RTC command

had attended.

Marriages outside the Corps were discouraged. Not for-

bidden . . . but discouraged. A Marine might be at any given

duty station for a year or two, but then he or she might be

deployed across a hundred light-years, or end up on board a

Navy ship plying a slow run between stargates. The routine

played merry hell with traditional relationships.

At that, it was better than in the bad old days, before FTL

and stargates, when a 4.3 light-year hop to Chiron took five

and a half years objective, which meant a couple of years

subjective spent in cybe-hibe stasis. Back then, Marines

were assigned on the basis of their famsits, their family situ-

ations—whether or not they were married, had parents or

other close relatives, and how closely tied they were psycho-

logically to the Motherworld.

Long ago, the Corps had adopted the habit of assign-

ing command staff as discrete groups, called command

constellations, to avoid breaking up good working teams

through transfers and redeployments. A similar set of regu-

lations now governed marital relationships. While the Corps

couldn’t promise to keep everyone in the family together—

especially in group marriages that might number ten or

more people—the AIs overseeing deployments did their

best, even shuffling personnel from one MarDiv to another,

when necessary, to make the numbers come out even. The

tough part was when kids were involved. Each major base

STAR STRIKE

had its own crèche, nurseries, and schools, but Navy ships

on deep survey or remote listening outposts at the fringes of

known Xul systems didn’t have the resources for that kind of

luxury. Those assignments still required Marines with Fam-

sits of two or better.

What none of this took into account was the workload

at established bases like Noctis-L. Training a company of

raw recruits, breaking them out of their smug little civilian

molds and building Marines out of what was left—that was

a full-time job, and then some. Warhurst and five assistant

DIs supervised Company 4102, now down to just forty-three

recruits, and still it was never enough.

He closed his eyes. That one kid, Collins. After six weeks

without her implants, she’d just . . . snapped. The messy and

very public suicide had hit everyone hard, and the DI staff

especially had been badly stressed. Damn it, he should have

been there. . . .

Warhurst leaned back in his chair, his meal half finished

but unwanted. He summoned a cup of coffee, though, and

waited while a servo extended it to him from a nearby wall-

mar. He knew there was nothing he could have done, and

the board of inquiry had almost routinely absolved him and

his staff of blame. But . . . he should have been there. Col-

lins had stolen that thermite grenade one evening from a

malfunctioning training arms locker when he’d been here,

at home.

Angrily, he pushed the thought aside, then mentally

clocked on the wallscreen, looking for the evening news. He

wanted an external distraction, rather than an internal feed,

telling himself he needed to keep his internal channels clear,

in case there was a call from the base.

Which was pure theriashit, and he knew it. An emergency

call would override any feed he had going. And either Achil-

les, the company AI, or Hector, who was reserved for the

training staff, could talk to him at any time. He was avoid-

ing the real issue, which was the strain within his marriage.

Damned right I’m avoiding it, he thought. And a good

job I’m doing of it, too.

The news was dominated by the war, of course. The cap-

IAN DOUGLAS

ture of Alighan was being hailed in the Senate as the de-

fining victory of the war, the victory that would bring the

Theocrats to their senses and bring them to the conference

table.

“In other military news,” the announcer said, her three-

meter-tall face filling the wall, “the Interstellar News Web

have received an as yet unconfirmed report of hostile con-

tact with what may be a Xul huntership outside of the Hu-

mankind Frontier. If true, this will be the first contact with

the Xul in over 550 years.

“For this report, we go livefeed to Ian Castriani at Marine

Corps Skybase headquarters in paraspace. Ian?”

The announcer’s face faded away, replaced by a young

man standing in the Public Arena of the headquarters sta-

tion. He looked intense, determined, and excited.

And what he had to say brought a cold, churning lump to

the pit of Warhurst’s gut.

7�

2410.1102

Marine Listening Post

Puller 659 Stargate

1554 hrs GMT

Lieutenant Tera Lee unlinked from the feed and blinked in

the dim light of the comdome. “Shit,” she said, and made a

face. “Shit!”

“What’s the problem, sweetheart?” Lieutenant Gerard

Fitzpatrick, her partner on the watch, asked.

She ignored the familiarity. Fitzie was a jerk, but a

reasonably well meaning one. She hadn’t had to deck him

yet. Yet. . . .

“That’s four transgate drones we’ve lost contact with in

the past ten minutes,” she said, checking the main board,

then rechecking the communications web for a fault. Ev-

erything on this side of the Gate was working perfectly.

“Something’s going down over there. I don’t like it.”

“You link through to the old man?”

“Chesty’s doing that now,” she told him. She wrinkled

her nose. “I smell another sneakover.”

“Yeah, well, it’s your turn,” he said, shrugging. Then he

brightened. “Unless you wanna—”

“Fuck you, Fitzie,” she said, keeping her voice light.

“Exactly.”

“Forget it, Marine. I have standards.”

He sighed theatrically. “You wound me, sweetheart.”

IAN DOUGLAS

“Call me ‘sweetheart’ again and you’ll know what being

wounded is like, jerkface. If you survive.”

She dropped back into the linknet before he could make

another rejoinder.

The star system known to Marine Intelligence as Puller

659 was about as nondescript as star systems could get—a

cool, red dwarf sun orbited by half a dozen rock-and-ice

worlds scarcely worthy of the name, and a single Neptune-

sized gas giant. The French astronomers who’d catalogued

the system had named the world Anneau, meaning Ring, and

the red dwarf Étoile d’Anneau, Ringstar. None of Ringstar’s

planets possessed native life or showed signs of ever having

been life-bearing. And despite frequent sweeps, no one had

ever found any xenoarcheological tidbits, none whatsoever,

save one.

And that one was why the Marine listening post was

here. As Lee linked through to another teleoperated probe,

she could see it in the background—a vast, gold-silver ring

resembling a wedding band out of ancient tradition, but

twenty kilometers across.

Just who or what had created the Stargates remained

one of the great unanswered riddles of xenoarcheological

research. Most academics, striving for the simplest possible

view of things, assumed that the Builders—that long-van-

ished federation of starfaring civilizations half a million

years ago—had created them, but there was no proof of that.

It was equally likely that the things were millions of years

old, that they’d been old already when the Builders had first

come on the scene . . . back about the same time that the

brightest creature on Earth was a clever tool-user that some-

day would receive the name Homo erectus.

Whoever or whatever had built the things evidently had

scattered them across the entire Galaxy. Gates were known

to exist in systems outside the Galactic plane; Night’s Edge

was such a place, where the sweep of the Galaxy’s spiral

arms filled half the sky. Gate connected Gate in a network

still neither understood nor mapped. Each Gate possessed a

pair of Jupiter-massed black holes rotating in opposite direc-

tions at close to the speed of light; shifting tidal stresses set

STAR STRIKE

up by the counter-rotating masses opened navigable path-

ways from one Gate to another, allowing passage across

tens of thousands of light-years in an eye’s blink. More, the

vibrational frequencies of those planetary masses could be

tuned, allowing one Gate to connect with any of several

thousand alternate Gates.

The alien N’mah, first contacted in 2170, had been

living inside the Gate discovered in the Sirius system, 8.6

light-years from Earth. Though they’d lost the technology

required for faster-than-light drives, they’d learned a little

about Gate technology, and they’d taught Humankind how

to use the Gates—at least after a fashion. Thanks to them,

Marines had scored important victories over the Xul, in

Cluster Space, and at Night’s Edge.

If it had simply been a matter of destroying Stargates to

keep the Xul out of human space, things would have been

far simpler. Unfortunately, it turned out that there was more

than one way to outpace light. The Xul used the Gates ex-

tensively—indeed, a large minority of those academics felt

that the Xul were the original builders of the Stargates—but

their hunterships could also slip from star to star in days or

weeks without benefit of the Gates.

In the past five centuries, Humans had learned at last

how to harness quantum-state vacuum energies and liber-

ate inconceivable free energy, and how to apply that energy

to the Quantum Sea in order to achieve trans- c pseudove-

locities—high multiples of the speed of light. They’d located

some dozens of separate Stargates, and sent both robotic and

manned probes through to chart the accessible spaces on the

far side.

Most probes found only another Stargate, usually cir-

cling a distant star, like Puller 659, with lifeless worlds or

no worlds at all. A few led to planetary systems possessing

earthlike worlds, though, so far, no other sentient species

had been found this way, and, in accord with the Treaty of

Chiron, none had been opened to human colonization.

A very few, mercifully few, opened into star systems oc-

cupied by the Xul.

The Ringstar Gate at Puller 659 was one such. One of the

IAN DOUGLAS

regions accessed through the Puller Gate was in a system

dominated by a hot, type A star, seething with deadly radia-

tion burning off the galactic core, and host to a major Xul

base.

As was the case every time a Xul base was discovered,

a Marine listening post had been constructed close by the

Puller 659 Gate, and a careful watch kept. Periodically,

AI-controlled probes were sent through the Gate to record

signals and images from the Xul base. The probes were

tiny—the size of volleyballs—and virtually undetectable.

The probes would slip through, make their recordings, then

double back through the Gate to make their reports.

The usual routine was to send one probe through at a

time, to minimize the chances of the reconnaissance being

detected. Faults and failures happened, however, and losing

contact with one or even two was not unusual, especially

through the turbulent gravitic storms and tides swirling

about the mouth of a Gate. But Lee had just sent the third

probe in a row through to check on number one, and its

lasercom trace—kept tight and low-power to avoid detec-

tion—had been cut off within twenty seconds of passing the

Gate interface.

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