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IAN DOUGLAS

“So, Gunnery Sergeant,” Danvers said conversationally.

“Now that 4102 has flown the nest, will you be taking on a

new boot company?”

“Negative, Danvers. I’ve had it with diaper duty and bab-

ysitting. I’ve put in for 1MIEF.”

“Maybe we’ll be serving together, then,” Garroway said.

“Our orders are for 1MIEF, too!”

“I know,” Warhurst said, nodding. “The whole com-

pany. God help me. I thought I was free of you clowns.” He

shrugged. “But, hey, who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and

they’ll stick me on a listening post on some God-forsaken

asteroid at the other end of the galaxy instead. Then at least

I wouldn’t have to look at the likes of you two!”

“We love you, too, Gunnery Sergeant,” Danvers said.

“Where do we go around here to get a drink?”

Garroway pointed to a bar at the other side of the near-

est swimming pool. “They’ve got booze there. Or there’s a

bigger bar inside.”

“Marines, I’m going to attach myself to you two—just

temporarily—because I am using you for protective cover.

Shall we perform a reconnaissance in force?”

Garroway grinned. “Yes, sir, Gunnery Sergeant, sir!”

Together they entered the house.

The mansion’s interior was, if anything, more decadently

luxurious than outside. The rooms were large and sprawl-

ing, most with soft-carpeted floors that rearranged with a

thought into any size or shape or design of furniture imagin-

able. Most walls and ceilings were taken up by projection

screens, some showing outdoor or undersea views, other

showing erotic scenes with such high resolution it was pos-

sible to bump into a wall that looked like an archway into yet

another bed- or playroom. Food was everywhere, available

at small buffets, or straight out of niches in the walls. Many

of the guests wore sensory helmets, which picked up and en-

hanced sights, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells according

to preset programming. He noticed that most of those folks

had bypassed the food, and gone straight to the caressing

and sex.

One large, circular room, in fact, proved to be the source

STAR STRIKE

145

of several of the erotica projections they’d seen on various

walls. A dozen people of various sexes were grappling with

one another in an impromptu orgy. The three Marines had to

carefully pick their way over and past a number of thrashing

bare limbs to reach the doorway on the other side.

The house wasn’t entirely devoted to orgies, however.

One room they passed through had been set up with sim pro-

jectors, so that people walking in saw and heard and smelled

the claustrophobic bustle of the Tun Tavern late in the year

1775, with Samuel Nichols seated behind a large wooden

barrel, puffing at a long-stemmed pipe as a recruiter regaled

the listeners with the benefits of service with the Marines.

The lines about bounty payments and a ration of grog brought

amused chuckles from the twenty-ninth-century spectators . . .

especially the handful of men and women in uniform.

That raised a question, though. Warhurst wondered why

most of the people he was encountering were in civilian

clothing, or no clothing at all. This was supposed to be a

Marine function, after all.

Or were the Marines all shucking their uniforms to join

in the orgies? A disquieting thought.

“So . . . Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst?” Garroway asked.

“Yeah?”

“This is the Commonwealth way of life we’re supposed

to be fighting for?”

“Well, you won’t find it in the Theocracy or the

Hegemony.”

“Sure, you would,” Danvers said. “They’re just not as bla-

tant about it.”

“Bullshit,” Garroway said.

“No, it’s true. The prudes of every age in history had

orgies. They just didn’t admit to them.”

Warhurst bent over and dragged one white-gloved

finger up the curve of a naked, heaving female butt cheek.

The owner didn’t seem to notice the touch. He looked at

the fingertip critically. “Dust. They need to field-day this

barracks.”

Warhurst was feeling a little giddy, and he wasn’t sure

why. He always felt a bit up-tight around civilians, espe-

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IAN DOUGLAS

cially in this sort of social milieu. Damn it, they just weren’t

Marines.

And that, he thought, explained the giddiness. He’d seen

and recognized two of his erstwhile recruits, and the relief

he’d felt had been palpable.

“Good evening, gentlemen.”

They’d found the inside bar and been making their way

toward it when a silver-haired man wearing a golden glow

and little else greeted them. Warhurst did a fast ID check,

and almost came to attention. “Senator Sloan?”

“Correct. And you are . . . Gunnery Sergeant War-

hurst, and Privates Danvers and Garroway. Welcome to my

home.”

“It was good of you to host this party, sir.”

“Not at all, not all. Least I could do. I, ah, see by your

public data, you’re on your way to the MIEF.”

“I’ve requested the transfer, sir, yes. Don’t know yet that

they’ll give it to me.”

“Mm. Yes. A Marine goes where he’s sent. Still, I should

think that a man with your record will get that billet, es-

pecially since the MIEF is going to be rather dramatically

expanded over the next few months.”

“Sir?” He’d heard scuttlebutt, but nothing certain.

“General Alexander’s proposal did pass, Gunnery Ser-

geant. A reinforced Marine Expeditionary Force is going to

be sent into Xul space.” Sloan gave Warhurst an appraising

look. “What do you think about that, anyway?”

“As you say, sir. A Marine goes where he’s sent.”

“Yes, but . . . against the Xul? That’s a tall order if I ever

heard one.”

“The Xul are not invincible, Senator. We’ve proven that

several times over.”

“What do you think about General Alexander?”

“I don’t know the man, sir.”

“Yes, but you must have an opinion.”

Warhurst shrugged. “From everything I’ve heard, he’s an

excellent officer. And a good Marine.”

“Good enough to take on the Xul?”

“Why are you asking me this, sir?”

STAR STRIKE

147

“Oh, just taking advantage of an opportunity. I have sev-

eral hundred Marines in my home for the day. Seemed like a

good opportunity to get a feel for their morale, their caliber.

Their esprit. How about you, Ms. Danvers? What do you

think about fighting the Xul?”

“Sir! The Marines are gonna kick Xul ass. Sir!”

Sloan laughed. “And you, Private Garroway?”

“Doesn’t much matter what I think, sir. It’s all up to you

people in the government.”

“How’s that?”

“Sir, the Marines will do their job, no matter what. Their

job is whatever the government tells them to do.”

“Yes?”

“So, the way it seems to me . . . the government just needs

to make up its collective mind, if it has one, about just who

the enemy is, what it wants done to him, and give the appro-

priate order. And we’ll do the rest.”

“In other words,” Warhurst added, “you start it. The Ma-

rines will finish it. Sir.”

Sloan looked serious for a moment, then nodded. “That,

Gunnery Sergeant, is not as easy as that. But we’ll do the

best we can.” He studied his drink. “My question for you

is, though . . . the Xul are so far ahead of us in technology.

Ahead of us in numbers, too, if they’re really spread across

the entire Galaxy, the way it appears they are. The MIEF

is going to be horrifically outnumbered, outgunned, out-

classed, right from the start. Do you really think you have a

chance in hell of pulling this off?”

Warhurst pulled himself up straighter. “Sir. Like the pri-

vate here said . . . we will kick Xul ass. Assuming, of course,

that they have one.”

“I sincerely hope you’re right, Gunnery Sergeant,” Sloan

said. “I sincerely hope you’re right.”

11�

1811.1102

UCS Samar

In transit, Alighan to Sol

1430 hrs GMT

The passage from Alighan to Sol took six weeks. For most

of that time, the Marines on board the Marine assault trans-

port Samar would be in cybe-hibe; four companies of Ma-

rines required a lot of consumables—air, food, water—and

took up a lot of space. It was far more economical to ship

them in electronic stasis, sealed inside narrow tubes and

stacked ten-high in the cavernous vessel’s cargo holds, the

meat lockers as they were known to the men and women

who traveled in them.

Escorted by the destroyer Hecate, the Marine transport

Samar had departed Alighan three weeks earlier, engaging

her Alcubierre Drive as soon as she was clear of the bent

spacetime in the vicinity of the local star. Almost three hun-

dred men and women were in meat-locker storage, passing

the voyage in blessed unconsciousness.

For Gunnery Sergeant Charel Ramsey, however, sleep—

or at least the dreamless emptiness of cybernetic hibernation

that mimicked real sleep—had been deferred. He was one

of seventeen Marines in the 55th Marine Regimental Aero-

space Strikeforce designated as psych casualties.

And they weren’t going to let him sleep until he was cured.

“We can edit the memories, you know,” Karla told him

gently. “That would be the easiest course for you, I think.”

STAR STRIKE

149

“Fuck that,” Ramsey said. “I don’t want to forget. . . .”

“I understand. But it’s going to mean a lot of work on

your part. Very difficult, even painful work.”

“So what are we waiting for?” He took a deep breath.

“Tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

In Ramsey’s mind he was in a forest in eastern North

America, back on Earth—oaks, tulip trees, and maples; rho-

dodendrons, ferns, and mountain laurel, and a fast-moving

stream splashing down across tumbled piles of limestone

boulders, many thickly blanketed with moss. The sky

glimpsed through the leaf canopy was bright blue, with sun-

light slanting through the branches at a low angle, as if in

the late afternoon.

It didn’t matter that the woods scene was an illusion.

Within his external reality, he knew, he was in Samar’s

sick bay, in one of the compartments reserved for this type

of treatment. Karla was the ship’s psychiatric specialist AI;

“Karla” was derived from Karl Jung, the name given the

feminine ending because Ramsey found it easier to talk with

women than with men. The AI appeared to be a handsome,

middle-aged woman in a blue jumpsuit, seated on a boulder

next to him. With her dark and lively eyes, black hair, and

square jaw, she actually looked a bit like his mother, going

back to perhaps twenty years before she’d died; he wondered

if that detail was deliberate.

Probably. The Corps’ psych AIs didn’t miss very much.

“You can start,” Karla told him, “by telling me about

your relationship with Thea Howell.”

“We met about a year and a half ago. She was in the 55th

MARS already, Alpha Company, First Platoon . . . though

she hadn’t gotten promoted to staff sergeant yet, and been

moved up to the platoon sergeant’s billet. I was transferred

in from 2/1. . . .”

He went on to tell the AI about how they’d met, how the

relationship had developed. He was a bit nervous about that.

Talking to a medical AI was exactly like talking to a human

medical officer, and a serious breach of regulations would

be reported.

And there were regulations about having sex with some-

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IAN DOUGLAS

one in your own platoon, and even stronger ones about sleep-

ing with your leading NCO—with anyone higher or lower

on the chain of command, in fact. The fact was, though, that

everyone did it, and for the most part the powers-that-were

turned a blind eye to casual sex between fellow enlisted

Marines.

The emphasis was on the word casual and on the word

enlisted. If two Marines became so close that they wanted

to establish a formal contract, one was generally transferred

to a different platoon, because no Marine could be permit-

ted to show favoritism to a sex partner over another fellow

Marine in combat. If jealousy became an issue, the Marine

with the problem would have to enter therapy, possibly to

have the possessive aspects of his or her libido adjusted.

And officers never slept with enlisted personnel. That

particular sin could lead to a general court and dismissal

from the Corps for both parties, as it had since women had

first entered the Corps in 1918. The same went for preg-

nancy or sexually transmitted disease, though neither issue

was the problem it had been before the advent of medinano

late in the twenty-first century.

The fact that Ramsey had been sleeping with his platoon

sergeant for ten months might well be reported, and it could

come back to bite him. Hell, he thought, as another wave of

depression surged up from the blacker corners of his mind,

it had already bitten him. He’d damned near been incapaci-

tated when Thea had been hit on Alighan. They never had

let him see her; her wounds were serious enough that she’d

been popped straight into cybe-hibe and loaded into a medi-

cal support capsule for medevac back to Mars.

Two months afterward, word had finally trickled back

down the chain of command to the 55th MARS, still de-

ployed in mopping up Muzzie resistance on the planet. At

the Naval Hospital in the Arean Ring, on 3007, Staff Ser-

geant Thea Howell had been declared an irretrievable.

She was dead, and he hadn’t even been able to tell her

goodbye.

“What was that?” Karla asked him.

“What was what?”

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151

“You just registered an extremely strong surge of emotion

while you were speaking—extremely depressive emotion.

Was it thinking about Staff Sergeant Howell that triggered

it?”

He sighed, leaning back on the boulder and closing

his eyes. “Of course. What did you think it was? Fucking

indigestion?”

“Emotion does not map linguistically . . . at least, not

with one-to-one correspondence. I can easily sense the emo-

tion within you, but the source, the triggering thought or

thoughts, can be numerous and they can be subtle.”

“Look, it’s not complicated,” he told the AI. “I was in

love with Thea—with Staff Sergeant Howell, okay? She

was my platoon leader, but we had a . . . a thing. We were

sex partners, yeah, but we also cared for each other. A lot.

We’d been—” He stopped himself. He’d felt as though once

the words started flowing, he wouldn’t be able to hold them

back, wouldn’t be able to hold back the emotion, or the

memories that caused them.

“You’d been what?”

“We’d started talking about a long-term contract. Mar-

riage.” He said the words with an almost defiant edge to

them.

“I see.” The program paused for a moment, as though

considering the best way to reply. That, Ramsey knew, was

sheer nonsense. Even expert software as complex as a psych

AI ran so much faster than human thought that any pause in

the conversation at all would be for the program the equiva-

lent of waiting hours before responding.

No, the hesitation, he knew, was a tool the AI was using

to let him better respond to it as if it were a human.

“Charel, I know you must be concerned about telling me

this. Regulations prohibit relationships of this sort, particu-

larly when they result in harm to the Marines involved, to

general productivity, good order, and discipline, and espe-

cially to the mission.”

“Yeah.” He thought about it. “You know, I had a buddy

once, a PFC, who fell asleep while sunbathing, back on

Earth. Second-degree burns over half his body. When he

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IAN DOUGLAS

got out of the hospital, he got a court-martial. The charge

was ‘damaging government property,’ meaning him.”

“What happened to him?”

Ramsey shrugged. “A slap on the wrist. I think they fined

him part of his pay for three months. And he got himself a

new asshole drilled by his platoon sergeant.”

She nodded. “Legally, Charel, Marines are not ‘govern-

ment property,’ as you put it. But regulations do allow mili-

tary personnel to be charged and punished if their actions,

inattention, or irresponsibility causes them bodily or psy-

chological harm, or causes others to be harmed.

“However, I do not foresee that to be the case in this in-

stance. Others in your company have suffered psychologi-

cal injury simply from the fact that many of you had close

friends and comrades irretrievably killed on Alighan.”

Again, a human-sounding pause. “Five hundred eighty

Marines of the 55th MARS made the combat assault on

Alighan. During the assault, they suffered two hundred

five casualties—and one hundred twelve of those were

irretrievables. That’s over nineteen point three percent

killed, Charel.”

He shrugged. “We knew it would be rough going in.”

“For most military units throughout history, losses of

anything above ten or twelve percent were considered crip-

pling. The unit in question effectively ceased to operate as a

fighting group, especially when it was a company-sized unit

or smaller, where most of the personnel actually knew one

another, where the losses represented friends or, at the least,

acquaintances.

“In your assault on the Theocrat position on top of the

building, two of the ten involved were killed. Twenty per-

cent. And the ten of you knew one another, were close to one

another, on a personal level.”

“So? Allison said we’d be lucky if it was twenty-five.

What’s your point?”

“That everyone in your unit suffered considerable loss.

You would not be human if all of you weren’t grieving.”

“None of the others in my squad are here, I notice,” he said.

“Maybe they’re grieving, but they’re handling it, right?”

STAR STRIKE

153

“Each person handles grief differently. How are you han-

dling it, Charel?”

He shrugged again. “I don’t know. Mostly, I guess I’m

not. I was thought-clicking stim releases off my implants

for a while, to kind of keep me going, get me moving in the

morning, y’know? But after a couple of weeks my software

reported me.”

“Yes. And for a good reason. Nanostims are not addictive

physically, but it is very easy to become psychologically reliant

on them. And that would reduce your usefulness to the Corps.”

“Yes. Always the Corps. First, last, and always.”

“You sound bitter.”

“About being one tiny circuit in a very large board? A

number, one among hundreds of thousands? Now, why

would that make me bitter?”

“I will assume that you mean that sarcastically. You

knew when you enlisted that the needs of the Corps came

first, that you would surrender certain rights and privileges

in order to become a Marine.”

“Yes. . . .”

“That the good of the mission comes first, then the good

of the Marine Corps, then that of your own unit . . . and only

then can your personal good be considered.”

“I know all that.”

“Good.” Another hesitation. “Were you aware that Lieu-

tenant Johnson, your platoon CO, has recommended you for

platoon sergeant?”

That startled him. “Shit. No. . . .”

“It’s true. The decision has been deferred, pending my

recommendation.”

“Don’t defer on my account. I don’t want it.”

“Why not?”

He had to think about that one for a moment. He’d wanted

the slot once. He and Thea had joked frequently about him

gunning for her billet, and how he would have to transfer to

a different platoon to get it.

“I’m not sure,” he said after a moment. Where the hell

was Karla going with all of this? “I think . . .” He stopped.

He didn’t want to go there.

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IAN DOUGLAS

“What do you think, Charel?”

“I think I don’t deserve the slot.”

“Why not?”

“I screwed up. It was my idea, mounting up on Specter guns

and going up the outside of the building like that. If we’d gone

in another way . . . or called down sniper fire from orbit . . .”

“According to the after-action reports,” Karla told him,

“orbital bombardment was restricted in that sector due to

the presence of civilian noncombatants. And assaulting that

tower from the ground up would have resulted in unaccept-

ably high Marine casualties. You made the correct choice,

and your platoon sergeant agreed with your assessment. In

what way did you ‘screw up?’”

“I didn’t get all the APerMs.”

“There were other Marines in the area. In any case,

APerMs are generally deployed in numbers sufficient to

overwhelm individual suit countermeasures. In combat, re-

member, chaos effects tend to outweigh both planning and

advance preparation. You did what you could, what you’d

been trained to do, and you did it to the best of your ability.

Unfortunately, two APerMs got through and killed Howell

and Beck. What could you have done differently that would

have resulted in a different outcome?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know! If I knew, I would be platoon

sergeant material, okay? But I don’t know, and the Corps

isn’t going to risk a platoon with someone who doesn’t know

the answers.”

“I believe, Charel, that you are setting standards for your-

self that are too high, and too rigid.”

“They’re mine to set.”

“Not if in the setting you do harm to yourself. ‘Govern-

ment property,’ remember?”

The session continued, but Ramsey listened with only

half an ear, making polite noises where necessary to con-

vince Karla that he was paying attention.

Or could the AI tell by monitoring his brain waves?

Ramsey didn’t know, nor did he care. The depression was set-

tling in closer, deeper, until it threatened to smother him.

He wanted the damned AI out of his head.

STAR STRIKE

155

USMC Skybase

Dock 27, Earth Ring 7

1015 hrs GMT

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander’s concept, as so-far

approved by the Commonwealth Senate, had been desig-

nated Operation Gorgon. The strategic option of a strike

into Xul space to delay or block a likely Xul attack against

human space by drawing them off in pursuit of a large Navy-

Marine task force was a go.

Now all that remained was to come up with a viable ops

plan. To that end, he’d called a general staff meeting.

“Map Center open,” Lieutenant General Martin Alexan-

der said. In his mind, the dome of the virtual briefing room

shimmered, then deepened into the gently curved clottings

of stars that made up one small section of the Orion Arm of

the Galaxy. With a thought, he began rising into the mass of

stars, focusing now on the amoebic blot of various-colored

translucence marking the various regions of space claimed

by Humankind. One star, just inside the outer periphery of

one of the colored areas, was highlighted a bright green—

Puller 659.

“Our problem,” Alexander told his audience, “is primar-

ily a political one. Puller 659 is the location of a Stargate

leading to a region of Xul-controlled space designated Star-

wall. Intelligence says that Starwall is an important Xul

nexus—and we know they have information about Earth at

the base in that system. Take out Starwall, and we might

arrange to have that information become lost again. Even if

we don’t, Starwall is a big enough target that we know we’ll

hurt the bastards if we hit them there.

“Unfortunately, the Gate leading to Starwall, as you can

see here, is located inside space claimed by the PanEuro-

pean Republic. The Commonwealth Senate is not enthusi-

astic about starting a war with the Republic and opening a

third front, not at a time when we’re already engaged with

the Theocracy . . . and may be about to face a new Xul incur-

sion as well.”

His virtual audience was represented in the briefing area

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IAN DOUGLAS

by the icons of over two hundred men, women, and artificial

intelligences making up 1MIEF’s ops planning staff, which

included intelligence, communications, and administrative

staff constellations from all organizational levels.

“Our best hope against the Xul, obviously,” he contin-

ued, “would be to get all of the human governments pulling

together . . . ending the war with the Theocracy, and get-

ting them, the PanEuropeans, the Chinese, the Hispanics,

the Russians, all of them pulling together and pooling their

space-military resources to fight the Xul.

“In my estimation, our survival as a species almost cer-

tainly will depend on the human species working together.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that,” the rough voice of

Vice Admiral Liam Taggart put in, and several in the audi-

ence chuckled. Taggart was Alexander’s opposite number in

Gorgon, the commander of 1MIEF’s naval contingent.

No one else in the virtual space would have dared to in-

terrupt Alexander’s exposition.

“Thank you, Liam,” Alexander replied. “Fortunately,

uniting Humankind is a job for the politicians, not the mili-

tary. While they’re working on that, we need to consider

our strategic alternatives for Gorgon, and—just as with the

original gorgons of Greek myth—so far we have three.

“The first, and least desirable in my opinion, is that we

wait . . . hold back and wait for the political situation to re-

solve itself. The advantage is that we don’t have to commit

ourselves at once. The downside is that we can’t assume that

the Xul are going to give us the luxury of waiting. Our intel

from Puller 659 is solid; we know the Xul know where we

are and how to get at us. We can assume they’re gathering

their forces for a strike as we speak. Absolutely the only un-

known factor in the equation is how long we actually have.

“Second, we trespass into PanEurope space, take the

whole MIEF right through the Republic, and the hell with

the consequences. We might win Aurore’s approval and sup-

port . . . but no one’s betting money on that.” Aurore was

Theta Bootes IV, the capital of the PanEuropean Republic.

“Now, the Senate won’t approve a head-on invasion . . .

but they might allow us to pull an end run. Puller 659 is close

STAR STRIKE

157

to the outer periphery of Republican space. We might swing

out this way . . .” As he spoke, a yellow course line moved out

through Commonwealth space from Sol, leaping from star

system to star system to enter an as-yet unexplored region

beyond the frontier, then looping back and around to come

in to the Puller system from outside human space. “Techni-

cally, this would still constitute an invasion of Republican

space . . . but we might be able to slip the whole MIEF into

the Puller system and out through the gate to Starwall before

the Republicans know what’s going down. The downside:

if Aurore finds out and gets ticked off, the Commonwealth

might find itself at war with the Theocracy, the Xul, and the

Republic.

“Third.” Four white pinpoints lit up within Common-

wealth space. “We forget about Puller 659 and Starwall

entirely. There are a total of seventeen known Stargates,

offering a total of about two hundred known routes into

Xul systems, all of them now being actively monitored by

Marine or Navy listening posts. Four of those Gates lie

inside Commonwealth space—Sirius, of course, Mu Cygni,

Gamma Piscium, and Lambda Capricorni.” Each pinpoint

on the map display brightened as he named it.

“These four gates offer us a total of twenty-nine routes

into star systems we know to be occupied by the Xul. We

select one of those twenty-nine potential paths and send the

MIEF there.

“The disadvantage of this choice is that we know the

space controlled by the Xul is unimaginably vast . . . so vast

that what happens in one part might simply not matter to the

rest of it.”

At Alexander’s command, the viewpoint of the watchers’

assembled minds seemed to pull back sharply. The gleam-

ing starscape of near-Sol space dwindled into the distance,

revealing the entire sweep of the Galaxy, three milky-haze

arms wrapped tightly about a bulging, ruddy-hued central

core. In an instant, the patch of space occupied by Human-

kind vanished, a dust speck lost against that teeming back-

drop of stars.

“For instance,” Alexander continued, “if we go through

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IAN DOUGLAS

the Sirius Gate, we could strike here . . .” A white nova flared

near a globular star cluster above the galactic plane.

“Those of you who’ve studied your Corps history re-

member the Marine incursion at a system designated Cluster

Space, about five hundred years ago—a single star system

in the galactic halo that possessed very large collection of

multiple star gates, a kind of switching station for tens of

thousands of different gate routes. That route was slammed

shut when the Marines destroyed the Cluster Space end of

that gatepath . . . but we’ve found similar systems elsewhere.

This is one—designated CS-Epsilon. According to our lis-

tening post at Sirius, it possesses five separate gates in the

same star system. Obviously a high-value target.

“Unfortunately, we’re really in the dark as to just how

important any one stargate nexus is to the Xul. Remember,

they didn’t build these things, so far as we’ve been able to

determine. They just use them . . . and guard as many as they

can. Like us, really, but on a much larger scale.

“So . . . if we hit CS-Epsilon, we don’t know that the

news would reach any other Xul base, or that it would make

the slightest difference to them or their plans.” Two hundred

more stars lit up, scattered from one end of the Galaxy to the

other. “Remember that we only know of about two hundred

systems with a Xul presence. There may be thousands, even

hundreds of thousands of other Xul bases. The MIEF might

rampage across the Galaxy and take out every single known

Xul strongpoint . . . then return to Sol in a few years and

find all of the worlds of Humankind reduced to blackened

cinders because nothing we did really hurt the Xul badly

enough to attract their attention. If Operation Gorgon is to

succeed, we must hit the Xul in a vital spot, hurt them so

badly they send everything they have after us, and leave our

worlds alone, at least for the time being.

“I’m ready to entertain any ideas any of you might

have. . . .”

“Sir,” Colonel Holst, of 3rd Brigade Intelligence, ven-

tured after a long moment’s silence . . .

“Go ahead.”

“Sir . . . with respect, this is just flat-out impossible! How

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159

do we know if any of the systems we can reach are impor-

tant enough to get the Xuls’ attention if we hit it? Like you

said, we could blow their bases from now until Doomsday,

and they might not take any more notice of it than we would

of a fleabite. How do we know? . . .”

“We don’t, Colonel. Hell, even with a human enemy,

ninety percent of intelligence work is WAG—wild-assed

guesses. You probably know that better than I do. And with

. . . entities like the Xul, it’s a lot worse.”

“We do know the Xul are xenophobic in the extreme,”

Major General Austin pointed out quietly. He was the CO of

the MIEF’s ground combat division, but he’d put in a bunch

of years in Intelligence on his way up. “In fact, that appears

to be their defining characteristic. Anything, any species,

that poses a threat to them, even a potential threat, they take

notice. The Fermi Answer, remember.”

Eight hundred years before, according to legends rooted

in Earth’s pre-spaceflight era, a physicist named Enrico

Fermi had wondered why, in a galaxy where advanced tech-

nical life ought to be common, and the radio emissions and

other evidence of their existence ought to be easily detected

. . . there was nothing. Humankind had appeared to be alone

in the cosmos. That contradiction had become known as the

Fermi Paradox.

Only gradually had the answer to that paradox revealed

itself. When humans first ventured out to other worlds within

their own Solar System, they’d found ample evidence of ex-

trasolar intelligence—evidence even of the large-scale colo-

nization of Earth, the Moon, and Mars in the remote past.

Later, when they began exploring beyond the Solar System,

they found the blasted, wind-blown ruins of planet-embrac-

ing cities on Chiron and elsewhere. The Fermi Answer, evi-

dently, was that intelligence did evolve, and frequently, but

that someone was already out there, waiting and watching

for any sign of technological evolution.

In all the history of the Milky Way Galaxy, among all

those hundreds of billions of stars, if even one species

evolved with the in-born Darwinian imperative to survive

by eliminating all possible competitors, and if that species

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IAN DOUGLAS

survived long enough to achieve an advanced enough tech-

nology, they would be in the perfect position to wipe out any

nascent species long before it became a serious threat.

The Fermi Answer. Humankind was alone because the

Xul had killed everyone else.

There were exceptions, of course. The An Empire had

been destroyed thousands of years before, but a few had sur-

vived on Ishtar, overlooked when they lost any technology

that might attract Xul notice—like radio. The N’mah had

survived by giving up star travel and living quietly inside

the Sirius Stargate—the strategy now known as “rats-in-the-

walls.” And there might be other exceptions out there among

the stars as well.

Humankind had so far avoided destruction thanks to a

combination of luck and the fact that the Xul appeared to re-

spond to threats in a cumbersome and unwieldy manner; the

sheer size and scope of their Galaxy-wide presence worked

against them.

But that unwieldiness now would be working against the

Marine MIEF.

“General Austin is correct,” Alexander said. “Basic strat-

egy 101: use the enemy’s weaknesses against him. Xul weak-

nesses, at least in so far as we’ve been able to determine over

the past few centuries, include their xenophobia and their

glacial slowness in responding or adapting to threats. The

xenophobia makes them predictable, after a fashion. Their

slow response time gives us a chance to hit them multiple

times before they land on us with their full weight.

“But we do need to identify those systems that will make

them sit up and take notice if we hit them. Ideas?”

“Starwall,” a major in the 55th MARS intelligence group

said after a moment. “We know it’s a major Xul transport

nexus, and we know the intel they took from the Argo is

there. Option B, going into Republic Space and through the

Puller gate to Starwall is our best option.”

And with that, the discussion was off and running, with

various members of the planning staff contributing thoughts

and suggestions, others offering objections and criticisms.

Alexander stepped back mentally, listening to the debate.

STAR STRIKE

161

After a few moments, he assigned Cara the job of monitor-

ing the discussion, while he focused on the far more boring

topic of Expeditionary Force logistics.

Gorgon represented a God-awful mess when it came to

supply. An MIEF was an enormous and sprawling organiza-

tion, so intricate and complex that dozens of specialist AIs

were required simply to maintain internal communications,

logistics, and routine administration. It was a joint-service

unit, comprised of some 52,000 Marine and Navy person-

nel and eighty ships. The Marine component included a full

Marine division—16,000 men and women—plus a Marine

Aerospace Wing and a force service support group.

Currently, 1MIEF drew on 1MarDiv for personnel and

support, but ever since the Commonwealth Senate’s vote

to accept Alexander’s operational proposal, both units had

been heavily reinforced, both by drawing personnel and

assets from other Marine divisions, and from newly grad-

uating classes out of the recruit training centers, both on

Mars and at Earth/Luna. When 1MIEF departed for the

stars—the date of embarkation was now tentatively sched-

uled for mid-January, eight weeks hence—it would be fully

staffed independently of 1MarDiv, which would remain in

the Sol System as part of the standing defense against a pos-

sible Xul strike.

The sheer logistical complexity of Operation Gorgon

meant that a small army of planners were needed to work

out each detail before embarkation. Vast quantities of ex-

pendables were already being routed to the Deimos Yards

over Mars—most of them in the form of water ice, methane,

and ammonia, with lesser amounts of trace elements. The ice

would serve both as shielding and as a water supply; nanoas-

semblers would pull carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitro-

gen from the raw materials and rearrange them as needed to

create air and food. Resupply during the mission would be

accomplished by mining outer-system worlds and asteroids

each time they entered another star system. The supply lines

back to Sol would be too long and tenuous to permit cargo

ships to keep the fleet supplied.

But even if the MIEF was able to “live off the land,”

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IAN DOUGLAS

as some wag had put it already—meaning picking up all

necessary elements in other star systems for reassembly

as needed—the Expeditionary Fleet needed to have robot

miners and transports enough to collect the raw materials,

storage tankers to hold them, and mobile processing plants

to convert and distribute the finished consumables. Besides

that, there were critical decisions to be made concerning me-

chanical spares and replacement parts, especially for com-

plex electronic components that couldn’t be batch grown in

the fleet’s repair ships.

And there were the weapons, the Mark 660 battlesuits,

the ammunition, the power cores and converters . . . the

list seemed endless, the storage space for it all sharply lim-

ited. Alexander and his planning staff were still hard at

work determining if the thing was even possible. It wasn’t

enough simply to add an extra few AKs, ANs, and AEs

to the fleet roster, because each of those vessels—cargo

ships, nanufactory transports, and ammunition ships—in

turn needed their own small mountains of spare parts and

extra equipment.

Where 1MIEF was going was a long, long way out into

the dark, and resupply was going to be a bitch. The situation

was made even tougher by the fact that Alexander couldn’t

even begin to guess how long 1MIEF would be deployed

starside.

“No!” a voice in his mind called, rising above the others.

“You young rock! We do that and we leave our lines of re-

treat wide open and vulnerable! Doing that would be tanta-

mount to suicide!”

Judging from the acrimony of the debate going on within

the staff planning group, it might be a while before the

MIEF could depart in the first place. Rock was an old, old

Corps epithet for a particularly dumb Marine—as in “dumb

as a rock.”

“With respect . . . sir,” another voice came back, biting.

“How the hell are we going to maintain our lines of retreat

across twenty thousand light-years? The EF will be cut off

as soon as it goes through the first Gate!”

“People!” Alexander cut in. “Let’s keep it civil.” A web-

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163

work of varicolored lines and brightly lit stars now stretched

across the Galaxy map, showing alternate routes and objec-

tives, known Stargate links, and known Xul bases. Cara had

been tagging and color-coding each idea as it was presented,

attaching to each lists of pros and cons.

As Alexander looked at the tangle, a new surety began to

make itself felt. Leadership styles differed, of course, from

officer to officer, and since the beginning of his career Al-

exander had tried to be democratic in his approach, solicit-

ing the ideas and opinions of his subordinates and giving

each due consideration.

But in the final analyses, the Marine Corps was not a de-

mocracy, any more than was the chain of command on board

a Navy warship. One voice was needed to give the orders;

one mind was required to make the necessary decisions.

He wanted their input, but ultimately, this decision was

his, and his alone.

“Okay, people,” he said, speaking into the hard, new si-

lence. “It’s clear that what we lack more than anything else

is decent intel. We need to identify, and quickly, the best

way to hit the Xul, and to hit them hard, hard enough to

draw their interest away from human space.

“To that end, I’m authorizing increased surveillance on

known Xul bases, with an emphasis on astrogational map-

ping. We need to know where these bases are relative to one

another, and how they interconnect.”

“Sir,” General Austin asked. “Does that include Stargates

outside the Commonwealth?”

“You’re damned straight it does. Keep the ops black. We

don’t need any more political problems, here. I’ll get the au-

thorization we need. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I am also authorizing an AI search of all known

astronomical databases. I want to compile every bit of data

possible that might reveal unexpected or unknown links be-

tween known Stargates and known areas of deep space.” He

thought a moment, then added, “Include in that search any

deep space anomalies or unexplained phenomena that might

indicate a Xul presence or interest.” A number of agencies

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IAN DOUGLAS

kept track of such data, he knew, though he wasn’t sure if

anyone ever actually used it.

But the data were there, and AI agents could find it, com-

pile it, and present it to the ops planning team. Reports of

gamma or x-ray ray bursts, for example, from a particular

star system might indicate a normal and natural process—

stellar material from a companion star falling onto the sur-

face of a neutron star, for example—or it could indicate the

presence of a Xul fleet.

“So far as ops planning goes, we need to pick one mode

of approach and focus on that. So here’s what we’re going

to do. . . .”

12�

2311.1102

UCS Samar

In transit, Alighan to Sol

0730 hrs GMT

The transport was two weeks out from Sol. For the past four

weeks, Ramsey’s sessions with Karla had continued, with

hours out of each ship’s day passing in virtual conversations

with the AI in a variety of imagined “safe” environs.

Slowly, he was coming to grips with his ghosts.

It hadn’t been easy.

“I don’t know how the Navy pukes stand it, man,” Staff

Sergeant Shari Colver told him. “The boredom would drive

me straight out the nearest airlock ricky-tick.”

“Hey, that’s why they spend most of their time in cybe-

hybe,” Ramsey said with a shrug.

They were sitting in the ship’s lounge, a small and

Spartan compartment that combined rec hall with mess

deck and was normally reserved for the use of the ship-

board in-transit watch. The domed overhead showed a

backdrop of stars; if one studied the star patterns closely

enough, individual stars appeared to move from hour to

hour—the nearest ones, at any rate . . . but the effect was

a lie, an illusion generated by the Samar’s navigational

AI.

The fact of the matter was that it was impossible to

see outside of a starship traveling within an Alcubierre

spacetime bubble.

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IAN DOUGLAS

In 1994, a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre had first

laid the groundwork for the space drive that later bore his

name, when his equations demonstrated that—in theory,

at least—a wave of distorted spacetime, expanding behind

and contracting ahead, could carry a spacecraft along at

faster-than-light speeds. No basic physics were violated in

the movement; Einstein’s prohibitions against FTL had been

directed at mass and energy, not at the fabric of space itself,

and, in fact, it was eventually determined that the entire uni-

verse had naturally expanded faster than the speed of light

in the opening moments of its own birth. A ship in the warp

of the Alcubierre Metric might slip quietly across flat spa-

cetime at the rate of nine light-years per day, but since it

was motionless relative to the encapsulated spacetime im-

mediately around it, it avoided completely such inconvenient

effects as acceleration, relativistic mass increase, or time

dilation.

But by the nature of the space-bending field around it, a

vessel under Alcubierre Drive, also was effectively cut off

from the universe outside. There were no navigational vid

views outside the hull for the simple reason that there was

nothing to see out there save the enveloping black. Encased

within a bubble of severely distorted space and time, Samar

and her passengers remained completely deaf and blind to

their surroundings, and the slow-drifting stars electronically

painted on the lounge overhead represented the navigational

AI’s best guess as to what should be visible outside. It was,

in fact, little more than an elaborate planetarium display.

But even the display of an educated guess was essentially

boring, the patterns of stars changing so slowly the novelty

wore off after a very few hours.

Still, Ramsey and the other waking psych-wounded on

board tended to spend a lot of their off-hours here. The cool,

K0 star circled by Alighan was located in the constellation

Ophiuchus, as seen from Sol, and after the first three weeks

or so, star patterns in the sky opposite Ophiuchus, ahead

of the Samar, had begun to drift into recognizable constel-

lations, albeit shrunken and distorted. Day by day, those

constellations opposite Ophiuchus in Earth’s sky, including

STAR STRIKE

167

the easily recognizable sprawl of Orion with the prominent

three-in-a-row suns of his belt, became more and more

evident.

Ramsey and Colver were sitting in one of the double

lounge recliners, a side-by-side seat that let them watch the

stars. They’d been watching Orion, and wondering if Sol was

visible yet somewhere within that dusting of stars ahead.

No wonder, Ramsey thought, passengers and crew alike

in A.D. ships spent the passage in cybe-hibe, save for a

small, rotating watch. The planetarium display did little

but emphasize just how tiny Samar was within a very large

galaxy. That sort of thing could wear unpleasantly on the

healthiest of minds.

“Did you ever wonder,” Colver asked him after a long

while, “why we’re doing our therapy time shipboard? Why

didn’t they just pack us away with everyone else, and start

unscrambling our brains once we get home?”

Ramsey looked around. Three Navy enlisted ratings were

playing cards at a table on the other side of the compart-

ment. They didn’t appear to be listening to the two Marines,

though the space was small enough that they could have, had

they wanted.

“I never thought about it, no,” Ramsey replied. “I mean,

they have the psych AI resident in the ship’s Net, so it’s there

and available. They’d need it for ship’s crew, just because the

isolation could drive people off the deep end. So, as long as

the software’s there anyway . . .” He shrugged. “Why, is it

important?”

“I dunno. I’ve just been in the Corps long enough to know

they do everything for a reason, even if that reason doesn’t

make a whole lot of sense up front. I was just wondering if they

do it in-transit because we are so isolated out here. No distrac-

tions. Nothing to do but count the days until we get home.”

Ramsey managed a chuckle. “Well, hell. I can just imag-

ine Karla trying to talk to me back at the Ring, and all I want

to do is put on my civvies and hit the airlock. The Arean

Ring is pretty good for liberty.”

“You call it Karla?” she asked. “Mine is Karl. For Karl

Jung.”

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IAN DOUGLAS

“Yeah. Depends on whether the patient relates better

to men or women. You know, another possible reason for

shrinking us out here . . . they can control what they put in

our heads.”

“How do you mean?”

“Think about it. Out here, it’s just us and our . . . our

memories, right?”

She nodded. Ramsey didn’t know exactly what had hap-

pened to Colver on Alighan, but it was probably one of a

relatively few but common problems. Stress shock—what

once had been called post-traumatic stress syndrome—or

survivor guilt or anxiety attacks or, like Ramsey, she’d lost

someone important to her and was dealing now with the de-

pression. Whatever it was, he could see echoes of grief, fear,

and sadness in her eyes.

He wondered if his own eyes betrayed his inner demons

that clearly.

“Well,” he went on, “if we were back on the Ring—unless

they quarantined us all—we’d be going out on liberty and

visiting family, getting drunk, getting simmed—”

“Getting laid,” she put in.

“Sure, that, too. We’d probably get ten kinds of advice

from family and friends back there, all about how to put all

the bad memories away, get over it, forget about it, and move

on, y’know?”

“And what they’re telling us here, Karl and Karla, I mean,

is that we have to look at the memories. Deal with them.”

“Yeah. Something like that. Unless we let them mem-

wipe us, we’ve got to deal with our shit. We can delay it, we

can play all kinds of games, we can pretend it never hap-

pened, but, sooner or later, we’ve got to face it.”

“You sound like Karl.” She smiled.

“I wonder why?”

“So you think they don’t want us contaminating our

minds with input from our families?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, but they let us talk together. They don’t have us

isolated from all human contact. They even have the group

sessions, where all of us get together and talk.”

STAR STRIKE

169

“True. But then . . . we’re all in the same boat, literally,

right? Same general experiences. Same problems. And

Karla, Karl, I mean, is there to facilitate.” He thought about

it a moment. “It’s kind of like being in the Corps. We’re all

Marines. Family, y’know?”

“The Green Family.”

“Yeah. Semper fi. . . .”

Green Family was a term out of the days before FTL,

when Marines deployed starside might be gone for decades,

objective. Over the course of the past eight centuries, the

Marine Corps had been strongly shaped in certain key ways

by the physics of interstellar travel.

Back at the dawn of Humankind’s migration into

space, all that had been known for sure about faster-

than-light travel was that it was impossible. Einstein and

relativity had convincingly demonstrated that converting

all of the mass in the universe into energy would not be

enough to accelerate a single atom to the speed of light,

much less pass it. If humans wanted to travel to the stars,

they would have to settle for decades-long voyages in

cybernetic hibernation, on board ships that approached,

but could never actually reach, the magic velocity of c.

Relativistic time dilation slowed the passage of subjective

time, but the fundamental way in which the universe was

put together forbade the FTL warp drives of the popular

fiction of the time.

As a result, Marines deployed to the worlds of other stars

would return to a culture that had changed dramatically

during the intervening decades. Time dilation meant that

the Marines might have aged five or six years, subjective,

while twenty or thirty years objective had passed on Earth.

The resultant temporal isolation had guaranteed that large

numbers of Marines simply couldn’t fit in with the civil-

ians they were sworn to protect; while they were out-system,

most of the cultural markers they’d known and grown up

with had changed. Music, language, fashion, art, politics,

technology, everything that connected them with others had

transformed, while the people they’d left behind were dead

or changed by age.

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IAN DOUGLAS

More and more, Marines had relied on the Corps as

family. A Marine might return from the stars and find that

Marines back on Earth possessed a different cultural back-

ground, true, but they were still Marines. Somehow, the

similarities always outweighed the differences.

Eventually, of course, Einstein was proved to be a spe-

cial case within the broader scope of quantum physics, just

as Newton had been a special case within the mathemat-

ics of relativity. The Stargates had demonstrated that it was

possible to bypass enormous gulfs of interstellar space. En-

counters with the Xul proved that FTL travel was possible

without the Gates, though for centuries no one could figure

out how they did it.

What no one had ever imagined was that, when the prob-

lem was finally cracked, there would be not one solution,

but many. It was still not known how the Xul hunterships

bypassed light, but humans now possessed not one but two

non-Gate modes of FTL travel of their own—the Alcubierre

Drive and the much more recent paraspace phase-shift tran-

sitions, or PPST, used by large structures such as the Corps’

Skybase. And there were suggestions within the wilderness

of theoretical physics that promised other modes of FTL

travel as well.

Neither the Alcubierre Drive nor PPST involved accel-

eration, and, therefore, time dilation didn’t enter into the

equation. Voyages between the stars now required weeks

or months rather than decades. It was with some surprise,

then, that Marine psychologists noted that Marines, enlisted

Marines, especially, still failed to connect with the cultures

from which they’d emerged.

There were some who joked that Marines weren’t human

to begin with, but the problem was becoming worse and

needed to be addressed. The Marines possessed their own

culture, their own societal structure, language, calendar and

timekeeping system, heroes, economy, history, goals, and

concerns.

Most Marines would have pointed out that this had

always been the case, going at least as far back as the global

wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The psychs

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171

didn’t need to invoke star travel to suggest that Marines were

different . . . or that most of them gloried in the difference.

As an ancient Corps aphorism had it, there are only two

kinds of people: Marines, and everyone else.

Ramsey leaned back in his chair, watching the almost

imperceptible drift of the nearest stars on the overhead.

Thea’s death still burned in his gut, hot, sullen, and he still

tended to flinch when he let his mind slip back to the final

moments of the firefight on the skyscraper roof, to the sight

of her battlesuit torn open and bloody as he cradled her, as

he watched her consciousness slip away. He didn’t know if

he could ever heal. . . .

Awkwardly, he lifted his arm and placed it along the

back of the reclining seat, behind Colver’s head. She moved

a little closer to him, her leg touching his, and he let his arm

drape over her shoulders. They continued to watch the illu-

sion of stars.

Whatever happened, he knew he had family—the Green

Family—and, for the moment, at least, that was enough.

PanEuropean Military Hospital Facility

1530/31:05 hours, local time

“Lieutenant?” a woman’s voice said in her head. “Lieutenant

Lee? Can you hear me?”

Lieutenant Tera Lee opened her eyes—then squeezed

them tight once more as the blast of light speared its way

into her skull. “Where the hell am I?”

“You’re in the medical facility at Port-de-Paix.”

“Where . . . where is that? . . .”

“You’re at Aurore. Perhaps you know it as Theta Bootes

IV? Actually, we’re on Aurore’s inner moon. We brought

you here from the star system you call Puller.”

The words were spoken within Lee’s mind, coming

through her cranial implants, and that fact alone was . . .

disturbing.

Aurore, Lieutenant Lee knew, was deep in the heart of

the PanEuropean Republic, the fourth planet circling a hot,

F7 V star some 48 light-years from Sol, a world of broad

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IAN DOUGLAS

oceans, rugged mountains, stunning auroral displays from

which it took its name, and a trio of large moons. At least,

that’s how it was described on the Worlds of Humankind

database she’d studied back in the Naval Academy.

It was also the capital of the Republic . . . and what the

hell was she doing here when her last memories were of

being adrift at Starwall, umpteen thousands of light-years

from the listening post at Puller 659?

“How . . . long? . . .” Her lips were cracked and dry, and

her throat was sore. She was aware of terrible pain, but at a

distance, held at bay, she imagined, by whatever anodynano-

meds they’d given her.

“Please don’t try to talk,” the woman’s voice said. “I’m

using your implant channels to communicate with you di-

rectly. If you focus your words in your mind, I will hear

you.”

The security implications of that were ominous. How had

the PEs gotten hold of her personal comchannels?

For that matter, what the hell was she doing at the PE

capital in the first place?

“How long have you been here?” the voice in her head

continued. “You were brought on board the Sagitta, one of

our light cruisers, on the third of November. That was about

three weeks ago. You arrived at the Theta Bootes system

yesterday. You’ve been in deep cybernetic hibernation since

your . . . exposure to radiation somewhere beyond the Puller

Stargate.

“You were very, very badly burned. I’m told your condi-

tion was beyond the scope of the small base where you were

stationed. If our task force had not arrived when it did, if

your commanding officer had not chosen to communicate

with us, your condition would have deteriorated to the point

where you would have been an irretrievable.”

Major Tomanaga had called in the Europeans? That

didn’t sound right.

“Who are you?” Lee asked. “And why the hell should I

want to talk to you?”

“I am Monique Sainte-Jean. You may think of me as

your . . . your therapist. You have been unconscious for a

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173

very long time, and we want to be sure you awake with your

mind, memories, and personality intact, non?”

Alarm bells were figuratively ringing in Lee’s mind,

now. As a rule, she’d paid scant attention to interstellar poli-

tics, but she had been thoroughly briefed before her deploy-

ment to the Puller star system. The Puller system, she knew,

was uninhabited and of zero importance to anyone, with the

single exception of the Puller Gate.

The Gate’s connections had been explored in the half-

dozen years following its discovery, some three decades

earlier. A total of twelve established gatepaths had been un-

covered there, one of them the route to the large Xul base at

Starwall.

The problem with the stargates was that the multiple paths

to other stars they provided never seemed to go to anyplace

known or useful. All appeared to open at gates circling other

stars scattered across the Galaxy, from the outer halo to the

Galactic Core itself, but until more was known about those

possible destinations—and whether or not entering them

would alert the Xul to Humankind’s presence—it had been

decided to avoid using them entirely.

Ever since the discovery of the very first gate at Sirius,

astronomers, cosmologists, and physicists from every human

starfaring government had been clamoring for the chance to

use the Gates as research tools—opportunities to explore

close-up such cosmic wonders and enigmas as black holes,

neutron stars, the large-scale structure of the entire Galaxy,

and the weird zoo of mysterious phenomena ticking away

at the Galaxy’s heart. Since a significant number of those

paths—two-hundred or so—led to Xul-occupied systems,

and since the Xul appeared to use the far-flung network

of Gate connections for their own long-range movement

through the Galaxy, the various interstellar governments

had agreed at the Treaty of Chiron in 2490 not to permit any

human movement through the gates for any reason, without

the fully informed consent of all starfaring governments.

And that was why the Puller Listening Post, and all of the

others like it, were illegal, at least within the often murky

arena of international treaty law. Under the auspices of the

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IAN DOUGLAS

DCI2, the Department of Commonwealth Interstellar Intelli-

gence, the Marines had been tapped to build and operate the

system of listening posts . . . and as part of that operation,

they routinely sent robotic probes and even—upon occasion

and when necessary—manned surveillance spacecraft to

keep an eye on the various identified Xul bases.

“My therapist, huh?” Lee replied. “Since when is the Di-

rection Général interested in the emotional health of junior

Marine officers?”

The DGSE— Direction Général de la Sécurité Extrater-

restrial—was the Franco-PanEuropean counterpart to the

DCI2. It was a guess on Lee’s part, but Ste.-Jean had to be

either military or Federal-Republic civilian intelligence,

and the DGSE was the largest and best funded of all of the

Republic’s intelligence organizations.

The long silence that followed her jab suggested that

she’d been on-target, or close to it. She might be consulting

with her superiors on a different channel, or with a military

intelligence AI.

“Very well,” Ste.-Jean said after a moment. “Perhaps we

should play this in a more, ah, straightforward fashion. As

it happens, I am DST, not DGSE, but it was a good guess on

your part.”

The DST was the Direction de la Surveillance du Ter-

ritoire, a kind of civil police intelligence unit tasked with

keeping tabs on people, organizations, and traffic within

French territory that could pose a threat to the government.

Other Terran nationalities within the PanEuropean Repub-

lic had their own intelligence organizations, the Germans

and British especially, but the French held the lion’s share

of planetary colonies within the Republic, and they claimed

the Puller system as their own, even if the place wasn’t

populated.

“Yeah, well,” Lee said in her mind. “I don’t think I have

anything to say to you.”

“Not even in exchange for our medical assistance?” Ste.-

Jean said. “Look. I will be honest with you. We know all

about your observation post at the Puller gas giant. And we

know that you went through the stargate in that system to

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investigate a Xul base. Your government, it seems, has much

to answer for . . . beginning with the arrogant breaking of

solemn interstellar treaty, and with placing the security,

even the very survival of all human worlds at grave risk.

You needn’t worry, Lieutenant. We have brought no charges

against you . . . at least, not yet. We recognize that you were

simply doing what your superiors told you to do . . . and were

caught in the middle, yes?”

“If you say so.”

“However, we do require your cooperation. We want to

know exactly what you saw and experienced on the other

side of the gate. And we want your cooperation in identi-

fying Marine installations that we suspect are imbedded

within other Stargate systems in sovereign PanRépublique

space.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

That response elicited another long silence.

Lee managed to open her eyes, and this time she could

keep them open. She was lying in what obviously was a hos-

pital bed, her body completely enclosed in a plastic sheath

that left only her face exposed. Unable to move, she couldn’t

see much of the room, but it appeared to be sterile, white,

and lacking in any amenities whatsoever. She couldn’t even

see a door.

Presumably, they had her body hooked up with tubes for

feeding, for medication, and for waste removal, though she

couldn’t feel much of anything from her neck down save for

that general, far-off-in-the-background sense of pain. Pre-

sumably, too, her bloodstream was now crawling with nano-

agents—microscopic devices programmed to busily swarm

through her circulatory system and repair the damage caused

by her exposure to the Galactic Core’s radiation fields, but

they might be programmed for other things as well.

The big question of the moment was how they’d managed

to tap into her private internal communications channel.

If they could manage that, then theoretically they should

be able to download her entire on-board memory. They

wouldn’t need to ask her questions or elicit her cooperation;

all they’d need to do was pull a full memory dump.

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IAN DOUGLAS

Okay, girl, she thought. Think it through. But keep it low-

channel, in case they’re listening in . . .

If they hadn’t pulled a memory dump, then they didn’t

have access to her cerebral link hardware. Tentatively, she

tried to connect with Terry, her personal software EA, but

the AI resident in her hardware remained silent. She tried

again, searching for Chesty or any of his iterations. Again,

nothing.

Okay, that suggested they’d deliberately disabled Terry . . .

or that he’d been fried by the Core radiation. Chesty was too

large a program to reside within her personal hardware, so he

might be off-line because of range. Had her cereblink been

damaged on the other side of the Gate?

She ran a fast diagnostic, ignoring the fact that her cap-

tors—she thought of them in those terms, now—would be

able to monitor what she was doing. There was damage, but

her hardware appeared to be more or less complete. The

software was running at about forty percent efficiency.

Her personal software might have been taken off-line

in order to facilitate her treatment. More likely, her captors

had tried to access the software directly while she was un-

conscious, and either botched it, or caused some physical

damage in the retrieval process. If the former, questioning

her would be the only alternative they had in order to get

the information they wanted. If the latter, they might have a

partial memory dump already in-hand, and simply wanted

to confirm what they had, or to fill in some missing blanks.

Either way, Lee was in no mood to be helpful.

“That is . . . unfortunate,” the woman’s voice said, and

Lee cursed to herself. Apparently, the PEs had managed to

establish quite a deep communications link through her im-

plants, enabling them to read most of her surface thoughts.

If Terry or Chesty had been operational, they would have

been able to block the intruding channel; hell, Terry would

have not only been able to block the intrusion, he’d have

been able to impersonate Lee so closely over an electronic

net that her interrogators would never have been able to tell

the difference. That, after all, was what personal AI secre-

taries did, among other things.

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177

“We have quite a few different means of getting the in-

formation we want,” the woman’s voice went on, relentless.

“And we will have it. If you choose to voluntarily cooperate,

you will be permitted to return to your people within a few

weeks, at most.

“If you refuse, the alternatives could be . . . distressful.

Just think about it. We could vivisect you very slowly, peel-

ing away your skin, your muscles, your tissue bit by bit, and

with enough control of your nervous system that you would

not be able to lose consciousness at any point in the proce-

dure. And throughout it all, you would never know if what

was happening was a virtual simulation being played into

your brain . . . or a horrible and very bloody reality. That is

the nature of direct mental feeds, you know. You have no

way of knowing what is simulated, and what is real.

“The trouble is, such techniques also violate interstellar

treaty, as you know well. Sooner or later you would break

and beg us to let you tell us what we wanted to know . . . but

either way, whether we’d tortured you only in your mind or

actually cut your body to pieces, we could never allow you

to return to your own people. Even a total mindwipe would

not remove all of the emotional scarring from such torture.

“Or . . . consider this. We could fashion for you an elabo-

rate simulated fantasy . . . one involving you being rescued

by your comrades. You would be freed, be taken back to

Earth, and there you would undergo a perfectly natural de-

briefing by your superiors. Again, how could you tell if what

you experienced was real, or a simulation downloaded into

your brain?

“And there are other alternatives as well. We have me-

dinano that could suppress your own will and hijack your

implants. We could rape your mind and your memory, take

from you what we want by force. Unfortunately, I very much

doubt that Lieutenant Tera Lee would have much of a per-

sonality left when we were done. And, again, that entity, that

living shell, could not be permitted to return to Earth, ever.

I imagine that shooting it would be a mercy.

“So, think about it, my dear. Imagine the possibilities.

Cooperate voluntarily and you will see your home and

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IAN DOUGLAS

family again. We might even see our way clear to recom-

pense you generously. The alternatives, you must agree, are

far more . . . unpleasant.”

And then Lee was alone in the hospital room, alone with

her thoughts, and her fears.

Where were Major Tomanaga and the rest of the Marines

stationed at Puller? Where was Fitzie?

And there was something else, something her interroga-

tor had omitted . . . and it was suddenly vitally important

that Lieutenant Lee not think about it, given that they might

well be monitoring her thoughts. . . .

13�

2411.1102

USMC Skybase

Dock 27, Earth Ring 7

0950 hrs GMT

“General?” Cara said within his mind. “I think the AI search

has found something.”

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander had been seated

at his office desk, going over an unsettling report from In-

telligence. A Marine—specifically, the Marine who’d gone

through the Puller Stargate and discovered that the Xul

at Starwall knew of Humankind’s recent activities—was

missing.

Worse, it seemed likely that the PanEuropeans were

behind the disappearance.

But Cara would not have interrupted his work if this

hadn’t been something important. The MIEF staff con-

stellations had been hard at it for almost a week, now. Six

days ago, at the ops planning session, he’d given them the

outlines of what he wanted, but they still had to churn out

the hard data. Actually, he’d not expected any real progress

for another week or two yet, so complex was this strategic

problem.

“Okay,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Whatcha got?”

“You requested an AI search of astronomical databases,

specifically seeking information that might reveal unex-

pected or unknown links between known Stargates and

known areas of deep space.”

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IAN DOUGLAS

“Yes.”

The worst problem the planning team faced at the

moment was the lack of hard data on stargates and exactly

how they interconnected across the Galaxy. Several ongo-

ing database studies were being carried out by astronomical

institutes on dozens of worlds, both in the Commonwealth

and elsewhere. Alexander had hoped that the staff planning

constellations might be able to mine data from those stud-

ies, acquiring a better understanding of just how the various

stargates were linked together.

“You also requested,” Cara went on, “a list of anoma-

lies associated with areas we researched . . . anomalies that

might indicate Xul presence or interest.”

“Yes. What did you come up with?”

“The Aquila Anomaly. The information is very old . . .

pre-spaceflight, in fact.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“The name is relatively recent. The information, however,

was first gleaned from an astronomical compilation known

as the Norton Star Atlas before such information was even

available on electronic media. While we can’t be certain at

this point in the research, the anomaly is significant enough

that we felt it necessary to bring it to human attention.”

“Show me.”

A window opened in his mind, opening on to a view of

deep space, scattered with stars—one bright star, five or

six somewhat dimmer stars, and a background scattering of

stardust.

“This is the constellation of Aquila, as seen from Earth,”

Cara told him.

“The Eagle,” Alexander said, nodding. He hadn’t recog-

nized the pattern of stars when it first appeared, but he knew

the name.

Lines appeared in the window connecting the brighter

stars—a parallelogram above, a triangle below, both slant-

ing off to the right. With great imagination, an observer

might imagine a bird of prey, wings raised in flight.

“As with all constellation groupings,” Cara told him, “the

identification with a person, animal, or object is problem-

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181

atical, at least from the AI perspective. But an eagle is the

historical designation, yes.”

“Beauty, and eagles, are in the eye of the beholder,” Alex-

ander quipped. “That bright star is Altair—Alpha Aquilae.”

It was, he knew, a shade over sixteen and a half light-years

from Earth, and was one of the nearest outposts of the

PanEuropean Republic. Commonwealth military planners

had been working on contingency plans focused on how to

fight a war with the Republic if things came to that unpleas-

ant juncture. If the Commonwealth went to war with the

PanEuropeans, getting past Altair would be their first big

strategic requirement.

Cara ignored his sally—AIs had trouble understanding

certain concepts, like “beauty”—and continued. “You are

aware of the astronomical phenomenon of novae,” the AI

said.

“Of course. Stars that explode—become much, much

brighter in a short period of time. They’re not as violent as

supernovae, of course, but they’re violent enough to cook

any planets they might have. A handful are reported every

year. Most aren’t naked-eye visible, but there have been a

few bright ones.”

“Correct. Most novae appear to occur in close-double

star systems, where material from one star is falling into the

other. At least, that is the conventional theory, which seems

to hold for a majority of the novae studied so far. And, as

you say, novae are observed and recorded every year. My AI

colleagues went through all such lists, among many others,

in pursuance of your authorization for a data search on 1811,

six days ago.”

“What did you find?”

“An intriguing fact. During a single thirty-seven-year

period in the early twentieth century, a total of twenty bright

novae—exploding stars—were observed from Earth.”

“Go on.”

“Five of those twenty novae occurred within the arbitrary

boundaries of the constellation Aquila.”

It took a few seconds for the import to sink in. “My

God—”

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IAN DOUGLAS

“Twenty-five percent of all observed and recorded novae,

in other words, occurred within point two-five percent of

the entire sky. This, we feel, is statistically important.

“One of these novae,” Cara went on, as a bright, new star

appeared on the skymap just to the west of Altair, “was Nova

Aquila. It appeared in the year 1918, and was the brightest

nova ever recorded until Nova Carina, almost six centuries

later. Two of the other novae appeared in the same year—

1936—here, and here.” Two more bright stars appeared as

Cara spoke, followed a moment later by two more. “And the

last two, here in 1899, and here in 1937.”

“Five novae, though,” Alexander said slowly. He didn’t

want to jump to unreasonable conclusions. “That’s still too

small a number to be statistically significant.”

“It could be a random statistical clustering, true,” Cara

told him. “Statistical anomalies do occur. But the extremely

small area of sky involved—one quarter of one percent—

seems to argue strongly against coincidence as a factor. And

there is this, as well, a datum not available to twentieth-cen-

tury cosmologists.”

The group of stars showing in Alexander’s mind rotated.

The geometric figures of parallelogram and triangle shifted

and distorted, some lines becoming much longer, others

growing shorter.

A constellation was purely a convenience for Earth-based

observers, a means of grouping and identifying stars in the

night sky that had nothing to do with their actual locations

in space. With a very few exceptions, stars that appeared to

be close by one another in Earth’s sky—all members of the

same constellation, in other words— appeared to be neigh-

bors only because they happened to lie along the same line

of sight. That was the fatal flaw in the ancient pseudosci-

ence of astrology; one might as well say that a building on

a distant hill, or the sun rising behind it, were physically

connected to a house three meters away—or to one’s own

hand—simply because they all appeared from a certain

viewpoint to overlap.

Rotating the volume of space that included Aquila dem-

onstrated this fact clearly. On a 2D map, the stars of Aquila

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183

appeared close together—the three brightest, Altair, Als-

hain, and Tarazed, for example, lay almost directly side by

side in a short, straight line. Viewed from the side, however,

Altair—Alpha Aquilae—was only 16.6 light-years from

Earth, while Alshain, Beta Aquilae, was 46.6 light-years

distant. Both, in fact, were quite close to Sol as galactic dis-

tances went. Gamma Aquilae, however, the third brightest

star in the constellation and better known as Tarazed, was

330 light-years from Earth. Epsilon was 220 light-years dis-

tant; a few others were extremely distant; Eta Aquilae, for

instance, was 1,600 light-years away, while dim Nu Aquilae,

so distant it vanished off the window to the left when the

display rotated, was actually a type F2 Ib supergiant 2,300

light-years distant.

The novae could be expected to show a similar range of

distances, but this, Alexander saw, was not the case. They

were clustered; Nova Aquila was about 1,200 light-years

from Earth. The other four were all positioned at roughly

the same distance, though they were spread across the con-

stellation like a sheet, defining a flat region of space roughly

fifty light-years deep and perhaps 200 to 300 light-years

wide, some 800 light-years beyond the borders of human-

colonized space.

Alexander felt a stirring of awe as he examined the 3D

rotation. “Just when did these novae actually light off?” he

asked.

“That represents a second anomaly,” Cara told him. “The

light from all five novae arrived at Earth within that single

thirty-eight-year period between 1899 and 1937. Again, that

might have been coincidence, but, as you see, they actually

are located in relatively close proximity to one another. All

of them, we estimate, exploded within a few years of one

another, right around the year 700 c.e.”

In the year 700, Alexander knew, Byzantines and Franks

had been battling it out with the Arabs for control of the

Mediterranean world on Earth, and the most startling ad-

vance in military technology was the stirrup. Twelve hun-

dred light-years away, meanwhile, someone had been

blowing up suns.

184

IAN DOUGLAS

Random statistical anomalies happened, yes . . . but as

Alexander studied the 3D constellation map, rotating it back

and forth for a better feel of the thing’s volume and the re-

lationship of the stars within it, he was dead certain that

something more than chance was at work here.

“If this is . . . artificial,” he told Cara, “if this is deliber-

ate . . .”

“We estimate a probability in excess of sixty percent

that this clustering of novae is the direct result of intelligent

action.”

“Intelligent action.” Alexander snorted. “Funny term for

something on this scale.”

“We know of several sapient species with technologies

sufficiently high to effect engineering on such a scale,” Cara

told him. “The Builders, the Xul . . . and possibly the N’mah

of several thousand years ago, though they would not be ca-

pable of such activities now. The artificial detonation of a

star is certainly feasible, given what we know of the three

species.”

“I wasn’t questioning that,” Alexander said. “It’s just,

well, I see three possibilities here, assuming that those

novae were artificially generated. One, of course, is that the

star-destroyers were the Xul.”

“Possibly. We have no evidence that they have blown up

stars in the past.”

“No. I agree, it’s just not their style.” The Xul’s usual

modus operandi was to pound a target planet with high-

velocity asteroids, quite literally bombing the inhabitants

back into the Stone Age . . . or into extinction. “But the

Xul have been around for at least half a million years, now,

and if anyone has the technology to blow up a star, they

should.”

“Agreed. What are your other two possibilities?”

“One, and the most intriguing one, I think, is the pos-

sibility that another technic species was detonating stars out

there in Aquila over two thousand years ago.”

“That is the possibility that we noted when we uncovered

this data,” Cara said. “Another high-technic species fighting

a war to the death with the Xul. If we could make contact

STAR STRIKE

185

with such a species, ally with them, it might mean the differ-

ence between survival and extinction for Humankind. I do

not see a third alternative, however.”

“It’s possible that what happened in Aquila had nothing

to do with the Xul,” Alexander told the AI. “It was a civi-

lization busy destroying itself. It might even have been an

accident.”

“What kind of accident could—”

“An industrial accident on a colossal scale. Or an engi-

neering accident . . . an attempt to manipulate whole stars

gone terribly wrong?”

“I have no data that will permit me to evaluate these

ideas.”

“Of course you don’t. We’re not used to thinking about

engineering on an interstellar . . . on a galactic scale. But it

is a possibility.”

“Perhaps the data was not as useful as we first believed,”

Cara told him. The AI sounded almost crestfallen, and Al-

exander smiled. Artificial intelligences were superhumanly

fast and possessed a range and scope and depth of knowl-

edge that far surpassed anything humans were capable of,

even with the most sophisticated cybernetic implant tech-

nology. Where they had trouble matching their human coun-

terparts was in creativity and in imagination. Being able to

imagine a cosmic engineering project on a scale that could

annihilate stars was for the most part still beyond their op-

erational parameters.

“No, Cara,” he told the AI. “The data are tremendously

useful. This is exactly what we’re looking for . . . a focus, a

direction in which we can work.” He thought for a moment.

“The question is how to get out there. It’s a long way.”

“Which brings up the second bit of information our re-

search has uncovered. Look at this.” The image changed,

showing what appeared to be a photograph of open space.

A number of stars were visible, but one in particular stood

out—a dazzling, white beacon. “That is the star Eta Aqui-

lae,” Cara told him. “A star’s spectrum is unique, as unique

as human fingerprints. There is no doubt as to the star’s

identity.”

186

IAN DOUGLAS

“Right. You just pointed that one out on the constellation

image.”

“Actually, this image is in our files from one of our early

Gate explorations. Our probes moved through a particular

Gate pathway, took a series of photographs for later analy-

ses, and returned.”

“Ah! And which Gate? . . .”

“As it happens . . . Puller 659.”

“God. . . .”

“This pathway appears to open into a star system four

hundred light-years from Eta Aquilae.”

“Four hundred . . . Then, the other end might be close to

the area of novae?”

“A distinct possibility. Further, there did not appear to

be a Xul presence there. For that reason, we have not been

monitoring that path, but the original photographs were still

on file.”

“Out stand ing,” Alexander said with feeling. He was

seeing all kinds of possibilities here.

“You concur that an expedition to this region of space

might allow us to contact another technic species, one suf-

ficiently powerful enough to help us withstand the Xul?”

“Yes, although we seem to be back to needing to enter

Republic space. Again . . . we have several possibilities in

front of us.”

“Perhaps you should list them,” Cara said. “I don’t seem

to be seeing as many options and outcomes as are you.”

“Well . . . the big possibility is that there’s someone out

there who beat the Xul two thousand years ago. If we can

make contact with them, ally with them, like you said, we

might have a chance to beat the Xul on their own terms.”

“Yes. This was the possibility we had noted when the

data first turned up in our research. But . . . you also said

the novae could have been caused by the Xul. If so, the spe-

cies we’d hoped to ally with might have been wiped out two

thousand years ago. A mission to the Nova Aquila region

would be futile if that was the case.”

“Not at all. If the Xul resorted to blowing up stars—in-

cinerating whole star systems—then they must have been

STAR STRIKE

187

up against someone or something that scared the liver out

of them . . . assuming they have livers to begin with. Even

if this hypothetical technic species is now extinct, we might

find remnants . . . like the ruins on Chiron and elsewhere.

We might learn why the Xul feared them that much.” He

shrugged. “At least it’s a damned good place to start.”

“That possibility had not occurred to me.”

“Here’s another one. Imagine you’re the Xul, hard-wired

to be paranoid about anyone different or advanced enough

to be a threat. Two thousand years ago, someone in that one

region of space gives you such a damned bad scare that you

detonate stars to get rid of them. You think they’re all dead,

wiped out when their worlds were incinerated . . . but two

thousand years later, someone with a large battle fleet shows

up in that same region and starts nosing around the wreck-

age of those stars. What do you think?”

“Either that the old enemy has reappeared, and is still a

threat,” Cara said, “or, somewhat more likely, that another

technic species is examining the wreckage of that former

civilization—”

“And might learn something from the ruins. Exactly.”

“At the briefing, you emphasized that we needed to find

a means of getting the Xul’s full attention,” Cara said. “A

means of getting them to follow the MIEF off into the

Galaxy instead of striking into Humankind space. The per-

ceived threat posed by the MIEF at Nova Aquila might be

sufficient for this.” The AI paused. “But suppose the Xul

are not involved at all? You mentioned the possibility of a

cosmic engineering or industrial accident involving some

other species.”

“If all we find are the leftovers of a colossal cosmic en-

gineering experiment gone bad,” Alexander said, “it still

might help us. Even a mistake on that scale, something ca-

pable of detonating multiple suns, would represent an ex-

tremely advanced, extremely powerful technology. I would

be willing to bet my pension that the Xul keep a watch on

any such system, just in case.”

“Unless the system in question was so completely obliter-

ated that, literally, nothing remains.”

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IAN DOUGLAS

Alexander shook his head. “Not possible. A supernova

might vaporize any inner planets the star once had, and

even then, I wonder if there wouldn’t be rubble of some sort

left over, moving outward with the outer shell of explosion

debris.”

“According to current astrophysical theory, supernovae

are generated only by extremely massive stars,” Cara told

him. “Stars that massive do not have planetary families, and

in any case would be too young and short-lived to support

the evolution of life, much less advanced technology.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He waved the remark aside. “That wasn’t

my point. In Aquila we’re dealing with ordinary novae, not

supernovae. The explosion blows off the outer layers of the

star’s surface, and what’s left collapses down to a white

dwarf. Any planets in the system would be cooked, maybe

have their outer crusts stripped away, but the planetary cores

would remain.”

“I fail to see how that helps us. Surely, the wreckage

of any advanced technology would be obliterated by any

wave front energetic enough to strip away a planet’s crust.

Buildings, power generators, spacecraft, they all would be

vaporized.”

“But the Xul watching the system, wouldn’t know that

every trace had been vaporized,” Alexander replied. “Not

with one-hundred-percent certainty. And with a spacefar-

ing technic culture, there might be asteroids or outer-system

moons with high-tech bases on them or inside them, or star-

ships or large space habitats that rode out the nova’s expand-

ing wave front relatively undamaged, or bases hidden inside

some sort of long-lived stasis field.” He shrugged. “Endless

possibilities. The chances of our going in and actually find-

ing anything like that are remote in the extreme, granted,

but the Xul won’t know for sure why we’re there, or what we

might find. If they’re as paranoid as our xenosapientologists

think they are, they’ll by God have to respond.”

“I take your point.” The AI hesitated. “It must be com-

forting to know—or at least to have a good idea—how the

enemy will react in a given situation.”

He grunted. “There are still too damned many variables,

STAR STRIKE

189

and we still just don’t know the Xul well enough to predict

how they’ll respond, not with any degree of certainty. The

idea of them being xenophobes certainly fits with what

we’ve seen of them up until now, as does the idea that they

are extremely conservative, and don’t change much, if at

all, over large periods of time. But, damn it, we don’t know.

They’re still aliens . . . which means they don’t think the

same way we do, don’t see the universe the same way we

do, and we’d be arrogance personified if we thought we

understood their motives or their worldview at this point in

time.”

“But this gives us a starting point,” Cara observed.

“That it does,” Alexander agreed. “I’m actually more

concerned—”

“Just a moment,” Cara said, interrupting. “Just a moment. . . .”

Alexander waited. He knew the AI well enough to rec-

ognize that she was momentarily distracted by something

entering her electronic purview. Whatever it was, it had to

be a very large something to so completely monopolize her

awareness, even for just a few seconds.

“General McCulloch’s EA is requesting connect time,”

Cara told him. “Will you accept?”

“Damn it, Cara, when the Commandant of the Marine

Corps requests an electronic conversation with a mere lieu-

tenant general . . .” Alexander replied, letting the statement

trail off.

“Will you accept?”

He sighed. AIs could be narrowly literal to the point of

obsession. “Of course I will.”

“General McCulloch’s EA states that the general will be

on-line momentarily, and to please hold.”

“Then I guess we’ll hold.

“Give me a quick update,” he told the AI. “I’m actually

a lot more concerned about the PanEuropeans and how

they’re reacting to the political situation than I am about

the Xul right now. Is there anything new this morning on

NetNews?”

“I’ve prepared your regular daily digest, which you

can download at your convenience,” Cara told him. “Two

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IAN DOUGLAS

hundred ninety-five articles and postings concerning the

PanEuropean crisis. Most of those are classified as opinion

pieces or commentary, and most tend to be alarmist or sen-

sationalist in nature.”

“Nothing I need to be briefed on before I talk to the

commandant?”

“In my estimation, no.”

“The usual crap, then.” He sighed. “Why do we have

more trouble understanding ourselves and those like us than

we do entities as alien as the Xul?”

“Human history suggests that this has always been a

factor in human politics.”

“Mm. Yes. Agreed.”

“I am opening a virtual room for your conference with

General McCulloch.”

“Thank you.” Alexander felt the familiar, lightly tingling

surge across his scalp as the external reality of his office on

board Skybase was swept away, replaced by a star-strewn

void. The poly-lobed sprawl of human space filled his visual

field; Puller 659, near the outer fringes of PE space, was

highlighted as an unnaturally brilliant white beacon, out-

shining the strew of other stars.

“It appears General McCulloch is concerned about

PanEuropean reaction if 1MIEF enters Republic space,”

Cara told him.

Alexander snorted. “I’m concerned that we’re, both of

us, Republic and Commonwealth, acting like apes around

the water hole, thumping our chests, shrieking and grimac-

ing at each other, and all the while the leopard is watching

from the underbrush, getting ready to pounce. We should

be working together, damn it, working toward the common

cause, not clawing at each other’s throats.”

“Again, this appears to be a common pattern in human

history. I submit that it represents a hard-wired feature of

human psychology, and no doubt derives from the pre-tribal

evolutionary period you refer to. Humans are apes, remem-

ber, and still possess the ape’s instincts regarding territory,

protectiveness, threat, and strangers.”

“Tell me about it.” He realized Cara would take his words

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191

literally, and hastily added, “Belay that. Don’t tell me. The

question is whether or not we’re going to have to go to war

with the PanEuropean Republic in order to force them to

help us against the Xul.”

“Would their cooperation be worth the effort?” Cara

asked.

“Good question. They have a large fleet, and we’re going

to need warships, both to protect the home front, and to

carry out 1MIEF’s long-range mission. Their ground forces

aren’t as good as ours, though.” He didn’t add that PE plan-

etary assault units in particular didn’t measure up to U.S.

Marine standards. “But the stargates they control could be

the key to hurting the Xul. Especially the Puller Gate . . . and

Starwall. There’s also the alert flashed from Tomanaga’s LP.

That, I imagine, is what General McCulloch is going to want

to discuss.”

“I have an incoming data feed from his EA, which I’ve

been processing as we speak,” Cara told him. “It includes

intelligence reports concerning PanEuropean fleet elements

and activities within the Puller 659 system, which supports

your supposition.” There was a brief hesitation. “Channel

opening from General McCulloch.”

And General Vinton McCulloch appeared, his icon bright

with his official corona flammae, his full-dress uniform

bright with luminous decorations and awards. “Good morn-

ing, General,” McCulloch said, voice gravel-rough. “Sorry

to keep you waiting.”

“Not at all, sir.” In fact, Alexander suspected that the

higher the rank, the more you needed to keep subordinates

waiting, just to keep them aware of who they were dealing

with.

“We have a final go from the Senate,” McCulloch said.

“It was damned close, but Operation Lafayette has been

approved.”

“Lafayette?”

“Obscure historical reference, I’m told—‘ Lafayette, we

are here.’ Don’t ask me. I just work here.”

“But we’re going in to get our people.”

“Ay-firmative.”

192

IAN DOUGLAS

“When?”

“Riki-damned-tick. As soon as you can get an assault

team together.”

“I’ve tapped the 55th MARS,” Alexander told him.

“They’re only just back from Alighan, but that means they

haven’t scattered to the four corners yet. The platoon COs

are authorizing liberty, but no leave.”

“Tough break for them.”

Alexander shrugged. “They’re Marines. They’re squared

away and set to boost. We just need to load their AT with

fresh supplies and expendables. We have some more data,

though, that you should see. I’m uploading to you now.”

He waited as General McCulloch assimilated the data.

“It seems Puller 659 has become doubly important,” the

older man said after a moment.

“Yes, sir. A bit of serendipity, actually. It gives us a

choice from the same Stargate . . . Starwall, which appears

to be a major Xul base, or the Nova Aquila region.” He

briefly outlined his ideas about the Aquilae novae, and

why they might be important. “I was recommending Star-

wall,” he concluded. “I need to study this data from the AI

research team, but right now my inclination is to try that

route instead.”

“Have you considered both options?”

“Not yet. I will. Of course, we’re so badly outnumbered

and outgunned as it is. Splitting my force in the face of the

enemy might not be the brightest of ideas.”

“Well, it’s going to be your call,” McCulloch told him,

“pending Senate approval, of course. Just keep me in the

loop.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“I actually came down here to see what you could tell me

about the Puller situation. What’s the latest on that front?”

Alexander lifted his eyebrows. “I’d think you would

know more about the situation out there than me.”

“Hell, son, no one tells me anything. By the time the EAs

finish filtering out the news they think I shouldn’t be bur-

dened with, there’s not enough left to let me ask intelligent

questions. I just know the PEs have some of our people at

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