Puller in custody, but that some of them are still loose and
lying low.”
“That’s right, sir.” Alexander thought-clicked an anima-
tion into view, showing the tiny, red Puller sun, the orbit
of the system’s lone gas giant, and the wider orbit of the
stargate. “Our covert base in that system consisted of two
facilities. The larger, main base is dug into the surface of an
ice-covered moon of this gas giant, here. The giant’s radia-
tion belts mask any electronic leakage. The smaller facility
is out here, dug into the interior of a 10-kilometer asteroid
that’s in orbit around the stargate itself.
“Lieutenant Lee reemerged from the Gate on 2410. One
month later, on 1911, a PanEuropean battlefleet arrived
in-system—we think from the base at Aurore. Assault
troops landed on the gas giant moon and took over our facil-
ity there. The LP commander, Major Tomanaga, reported
PE troops inside the base, and then all communication with
the unit was lost.
“Our best guess is that the PEs had a small, probably ro-
botic probe in the Puller system, and that it detected and
tracked the ships Tomanaga sent out to pick up Lieutenant
Lee when her Night Owl reemerged from the Gate. It would
take about a month for Republic ships to get out there.
“Apparently, however, the Republican forces did not
detect the asteroid LP near the Gate. There are still five Ma-
rines there, under the command of a Lieutenant Fitzpatrick.
Fitzpatrick has been sending us regular updates via QCC.”
QCC, Quantum-Coupled Communications, possessed
two singular advantages over any other form of long-range
communication. It was instantaneous, and there was no way
an enemy could tap into the transmission because there was
no beam or wave to tap. A message spoken or typed at one
console simply appeared at the designated receiver without
passing through the intervening space, a satisfyingly practi-
cal application of what the long-dead Einstein had called
“spooky action at a distance.”
“So Fitzpatrick and his people are still undetected?” Mc-
Culloch asked.
“As of their last report, yes, sir. He was able to tell us that
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the PE squadron consisted of twelve ships, including the fast
cruiser Aurore, a heavy monitor identified as Rommel, and a
fleet carrier, Le Guerrier.”
“I saw the list,” McCulloch said. “They came loaded for
bear, didn’t they?”
“I’m not sure what ‘bear’ is, but, yeah. They came in with
their heavies. Our best guess is that Tomanaga, Lee, and
thirty-five other Marines and naval personnel are now being
held on board the Aurore. She will be our chief target.”
McCulloch nodded. “I just had some intel passed down
from I-squared. You’re going to have help when you get
there.”
Alexander felt an internal twist of hard suspicion. “What
kind of help?”
“You’re aware of the religious problems in the French
sectors?”
Alexander nodded. “Somewhat. I don’t understand
them. . . .”
“The Republic’s French sectors are officially Reformed
Catholic. But there’s a strong Traditionalist Catholic element
in their fleet. DCI2 tells us that the T.C. is set to mutiny if
and when our forces appear. If they can take over the French
warships before we can deploy, they will . . . and they’ve
promised to try to protect our people.”
Alexander groaned. “Gods. . . .”
“What’s the matter?”
“That complicates things, General. You realize that,
don’t you?”
“I know.”
“We’re going to need to go in hot and hard. We do not
need a bunch of friendlies running around, getting in our
way and maybe taking friendly fire. That could get real
nasty, real fast.”
“Affirmative. But we work with what we’ve got.”
“Ooh-rah.” Alexander looked at the animation of the
Puller star system for a moment. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and
the PE fleet will pull out before we get our act together.”
“Don’t count on that, General. So far, they haven’t ad-
mitted that they have our people . . . and we haven’t ad-
STAR STRIKE
195
mitted that we know they have our people. Their safest bet
is to sit tight at the Puller system, especially since they’re
probably questioning our people on exactly what Lee saw on
the other side of the Gate.”
“Starwall. Right. Okay, General. We’ll take them down
and we’ll get our people out. But . . .”
“ ‘But?’ ”
“Nothing. But when we go in, those so-called friendlies
in the PE fleet had better stay the hell out of our way. Our
Marines are going to be moving fast and kicking ass, and
they will not have the time to find out what church their
targets attend.”
“Understood. Just do your best.”
Damn, Alexander thought. It’s going to be a
cluster-fuck.
And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.
2611.1102
Suit Locker
UCS Samar
Dock 27, Earth Ring 7
1315 hrs GMT
“So? How does it feel?” PFC Sandre Kenyon asked him.
Garroway blinked, testing the mental currents. “It feels . . .
empty. Kind of like back in boot camp. When we didn’t have
our implants activated, y’know?”
She nodded. “That’s exactly what it’s like. Because that’s
what it is, at least up to a point. You still have Net access,
comm access—”
“But we can get Achilles back?”
“Oh, sure! He’s still there,” she reassured him. She
laughed and nudged Garroway in the ribs with an elbow.
“He just doesn’t know what he’s missing!”
They were sitting side by side on one of the benches
in the locker, surrounded by the silent, hanging shapes of
emergency pressure suits. All of his attention, however,
was focused inward as he took a self-inventory of his
electronic systems. His implant software was still run-
ning. Achilles, however, the platoon AI, did not appear
to be on-line.
He shook his head, partly in confusion, partly in admira-
tion. “How the hell did you learn this, Sandre?”
She shrugged. “I’m a vir-simmer, remember? Back in
my misspent civilian youth, I programmed the micro-AIs
STAR STRIKE
197
in sensory helms. I knew there had to be a back door. I just
needed to find it.”
“It’s still amazing.”
Garroway continued testing the feel of his internal hard-
ware. In a way, it was like that horrible stretch of time in
boot camp, the empty time, when he’d been deprived of any
cereblink hardware at all. He still had most of his connec-
tions for communication, for linking into other computers,
or for downloading data off the Net. What was missing was
Achilles, the AI Electronic Assistant that served both as
guide through the military cyberworld and as an unofficial
tattletale and voice of authority.
“Yeah, well, I had some expert help, too,” Sandre told
him. “Did a favor for Vince, down in the 660 maintenance
shack back at RTC Mars. He uploaded some secure code for
me, gave me a head start.”
“Vince? Staff Sergeant Gamble?”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t think that old son-of-a-bitch ever had a help-
ful thing to say to anyone!” He made a face, and imitated
Gamble’s acid tones. “Especially puke-recruits.”
She laughed. “You never tried, um, feminine wiles on
the poor dear. Besides, we’re not recruits any more. We’re
Marines.”
“Ooh-rah.” He said it automatically, almost sarcastically,
but he still felt a small, sharp chill of excitement as he spoke.
Boot camp was over, the initiation complete, the metamor-
phosis from civilian to Marine accomplished.
Even so, he’d been feeling a bit of anticlimax. For almost
two weeks after their graduation ceremony on the tenth
of November, Garroway and the rest of the newly minted
Marines had sat around in a temporary barracks at Noctis
Labyrinthus. The forty survivors of Recruit Company 4102
had expected to be shipped out to different units almost im-
mediately, but when their orders didn’t come, speculation
and rumor—“scuttlebutt” in ancient Marine and naval par-
lance—had fast become their primary, if highly unreliable,
source of intel. Day after day, they’d stood watch, held prac-
tice drills, and carried out field days in various buildings
198
IAN DOUGLAS
across the compound, scrubbing, mopping, waxing, and
polishing, “doing the bright work” until, as Ami Danvers
had put it, the rising albedo of the base threatened them all
with blindness. Robots and nanocleaning aerosol fumigants,
Garroway had observed, could have done the job with far
greater, microscopic precision; all of the hard manual labor,
it was patently obvious, was make-work, designed to keep
them busy and out of trouble.
They’d still had plenty of free time, though, and a lot
of the conversation in the squad bay had turned naturally
enough to their new life as Marines, in addition to the more
traditional topics like sex, liberty ports, and more sex. The
fact that they all now housed an artificial intelligence—
Achilles—griped a lot of them. Achilles was, in effect, the
eyes and ears of their superiors, always watching, always
listening. When they were busy, Achilles’ presence didn’t
bother them much; when they were practicing a combat evo-
lution, he was treated as a part of the company, linking them,
all together and guiding their movements, warning them of
danger, and linking them into the larger combat net.
But when they were just sitting around the squad bay
talking, Achilles’ presence became a constant stressor, in-
visible, not discussed, but always there.
And morale had plummeted.
But Sandre, evidently, had decided to do something about
it. She’d struck up a friendly acquaintance with one of the
base personnel, and learned how to switch Achilles off.
A few days later, Company 4102 had been loaded on
board a tiny military intersystem transport and shuttled to
Earth Ring, where they’d been hustled across to their new
duty station, a titanic assault transport named Samar. The
word around the squad bay was that Samar had just returned
from Alighan with the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental
Strikeforce on board, or what was left of it, and that the forty
new Marines were destined to fill out the 55th’s combat-
depleted ranks.
But their orders still hadn’t arrived.
A short time before, Sandre had approached Garroway
on the mess deck, with the suggestion that he accompany
STAR STRIKE
199
her down to the emergency suit locker after chow. He’d read-
ily agreed; the two of them had snuck some playtime sev-
eral times during the long stretch in the holding barracks at
Noctis, and he’d been hoping to pursue the relationship.
With Achilles blocked, he would be able to continue his
trysts with Sandre. Not that the AI had caused them any
trouble at Noctis. Their platoon commander had probably
been informed of all of their meetings up until he’d received
the software that let him disconnect from the AI, but had
chosen not to intervene—quite probably because morale
had been so bad, and disciplining a couple of Marines be-
cause they’d been having sex after hours would have made
things a whole lot worse.
Still, so far as Garroway was concerned, it would be a
lot better if Achilles was out of the picture entirely, at least
once in a while. After sixteen weeks of boot camp, he valued
his privacy more than ever, and grated under the knowledge
that anything he did, from scratching his balls in the head
to just thinking about how he hated Gunny Warhurst could
be recorded and fed up the chain of command. And almost
everyone else in Company 4102 he’d talked to felt the same
way.
“You’re sure Achilles doesn’t know he’s being cut out?”
Garroway asked. He was trying to imagine the AI’s point
of view. Wouldn’t he know that he wasn’t getting data from
certain members of the company, and become suspicious?
“The way it was explained to me,” Sandre told him, “is
that he’s only programmed to respond to certain situations,
thoughts, or words. We don’t know what those triggers are,
of course, but as long as he doesn’t receive them, he’s con-
tent. Artificial intelligences aren’t curious unless they’re
programmed to be curious.”
“Or suspicious, I guess.”
“Exactly.”
“So,” Garroway said, with just a trace of hesitation in his
voice, “this means you and I could? . . .”
“Of course. Why do you think I did it?”
“Just checking.” He slipped his arm over her shoulders,
drawing her closer.
200
IAN DOUGLAS
And the next hour or so was the most pleasant and unfet-
tered hour Garroway had yet enjoyed in the Marine Corps.
The Comet Fall
Terraview Plaza, Earth Ring 7
2226 hrs GMT
“So, did y’hear the latest scuttlebutt?” Staff Sergeant Shari
Colver asked.
“About what?” Ramsey asked.
“Yeah,” Sergeant Vesco Aquinas said. “The rumor mill’s
been grinding overtime lately. Everything from peace with
the Xul to war with the PEzzles.”
“It’d damned well be better than your last butt-load of
scuttlebutt,” Sergeant Richard Chu said. “I didn’t like that
one at all.”
“Roger that,” Ramsey said. “They fucking gave it away. . . .”
The entire platoon had been grumbling since their ar-
rival back in the Sol system, with morale at absolute rock-
bottom. The word was—still unconfirmed but apparently
solid—that the Commonwealth was giving back Alighan.
Two hundred five Marines hit, Ramsey thought with dark
emotion, over half of them irries . . . and they fucking go and
give that shit hole back to the Muzzies. . . .
Colver leaned forward at the table in approved conspira-
torial fashion. “It’s war with the PanEuropeans,” she said
in a throaty half-whisper. “They’re shipping us out next
week.”
“And how do you happen to be privy to that little tidbit?”
Ramsey asked.
“Yeah,” Sergeant Ela Vallida added. “You been talking
with the commandant lately?”
“No, but I have been talking with Bill Walsh.” Walsh was
a staff sergeant over in Ops Planning. “He says it’s already
decided. They’re pulling together the battlefleet now. And
the 55th is on the ship-out list.”
“Aw, shit!” Corporal Franklo Gonzales said.
Chu shook his head. “Well, our luck’s true to form, isn’t
it?”
STAR STRIKE
201
“Shit,” Ramsey said. “Can’t be. We just freakin’ got back
from Alighan!” Even as he spoke the words, though, he
knew how hollow they were. The Corps could do anything
it damned well wanted.
“Fuckin’-A, Gunnery Sergeant,” Corporal Marin Delazlo
put in. “We’re due some freakin’ down time!”
“Maybe,” Ramsey said, taking in the noise and bustle of
their surroundings with a grin, “just maybe this is it!”
The six of them were in the Comet Fall, a popular bar
and nightlife center on the Seventh Ring Grand Concourse.
It was large, murkily red-lit, and crowded; perhaps half of
the other tables had privacy fields up, making them look
like hazy, translucent ruby domes. The house dancers on-
stage and the wait staff navigating among the tables all were
stylishly nude, with eye-tugging displays of light and color
washing across every square centimeter of exposed skin. The
club patrons, both those at non-shielded tables and up on the
stage with the professional dancers, wore everything from
nothing at all to elaborate formal costumes. Music throbbed
and pounded, though you needed a sensory helm for the full
effect. Ramsey and the other Marines had elected not to
wear helms, preferring unfiltered conversation instead.
His mind drifting, Ramsey found himself following the
gyrations of one young woman on-stage wearing what looked
like a swirling, deck-sweeping cloak of peacock feathers, a
glittering gold sensory helm, and a dazzling corona flam-
mae; she’d been enhanced either genetically or through
prosthetics with an extra pair of arms, and her dance move-
ments were eerily and compellingly graceful.
He was feeling wretchedly out of place. Aquinas and
Gonzales both were wearing fairly conservative civvie skin-
suits, but the rest of them were in undress blacks. Both sets
of attire, by regulations, were acceptable wear for liberty,
but it tended to make them stand out somewhat against the
gaudy and sometimes extravagant background of evening
wear sported by the other patrons in the establishment.
“Like hell,” Gonzales said after a long moment. “I don’t
know about you clowns, but me, I’m just getting started! I’m
not ready to redeploy!”
202
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“That’s right,” Chu said. “I have a lot of catching up to do
in the drinking and socializing departments before my next
deployment!”
“Ooh-rah!” the others chorused, and Colver raised her
glass in salute. “To downtime!”
“Downtime and down the hatch!” Ramsey added, lifting
his own glass, then tossing it off. “Semper fi!”
The drink was called a solar flare, and the name was apt.
He felt the burn going down, then the kick, and finally the
rolling swell of expanding consciousness as the drink’s nano
activators kicked in.
If his platoon implant AI had been activated, he thought,
it would be screaming at him by now. Marines were not
supposed to imbibe implant-activators, for fear it would
scramble their hardware and invalidate their government
warranties or whatever. He didn’t care. After Alighan, he
needed this. Hell, they all did.
How the hell could they just give it away, after what we
went through out there?
“Well, the brass is ramping up for something big,”
Ramsey told the others, perhaps three or four flares later.
He had to focus on each word as he brought it to mind, then
tried to say it. He was pleased. No slurring of speech at all,
at least that he could detect. “I just heard this morning that
we’re getting a shuttle load of fungies in from RTC Mars.”
“Yeah,” Delazlo said, nodding. His speech was slurred,
but it didn’t matter. “’Sh’right. I heard that, too.”
“Shit. Check your daily downloads, guys, why don’t ya?”
Vallida put in. “The fungies arrived yesterday. Forty of
them, straight out of Noctis Labyrinthus.”
“No shit?” Ramsey asked. He hadn’t heard about that.
Still, Samar was such a huge vessel, and she was swarming
right now with technicians, computer personnel, cargo han-
dlers, mechs, and shipwrights. A freaking regiment could
have come on board and he wouldn’t have noticed.
“No shit,” Vallida said. “Seems they want all units up to
full strength, even if we have to raid a nursery to do it.”
“Shee-it,” Gonzales said with considerable feeling. He
was looking a bit the worse for the wear as multiple solar
STAR STRIKE
203
flares continued to burn their way through his circulatory
system. “Just what we need. Babies to baby-sit.”
“Hey,” Colver said with a shrug. “Fresh meat. Don’t
knock it.”
“We all had to start somewhere,” Chu said, the words
slurring slightly.
“The Corps is home, the Corps is family,” Ramsey re-
cited. It was an old mantra focused on the belonging of Ma-
rines. “And to hell with the politicians.”
A waitress walked up to their table, her face a brilliant,
sapphire blue, with rainbow luminescence rippling across
the rest of her body. “You folks with the 55th MARS?” she
asked.
“Yeah,” Ramsey said. He felt a cold chill prickling at the
back of his neck, and some of the drunken haze began evap-
orating from his mind. The Comet Fall was one of hundreds
of nightspots along this stretch of Ring Seven. How the hell
could they have tracked the six of them?
“You heard about us, eh, babe?” Gonzalez said, leering
as he reached for her.
“Nope,” the waitress said, slapping his hand away. “Can’t
say that I have. But your CO sure has. You’re wanted back
at your ship, immediately. All of you. What’d you do, switch
off your AIs?”
“How about another round for the table?” Aquinas
asked.
“To hell with that,” the waitress said, as she began col-
lecting empty and half-empty glasses. “I could get fired and
the boss could lose his license! You people just move on
now, before the SPs show up.”
“So, what have we here?” a young man seated at the next
table over exclaimed. “Pretty-boy Muh- rines?”
The atmosphere turned suddenly cold. That next table
was a big one, with fifteen tough-looking men seated around
it, all of them with similar patterns of blue-white luminous
tattoos on the left sides of their faces—which meant either
a punk gang or a fraternity. The privacy screen had been up
until a few moments ago, but now it looked like they’d just
taken an unhealthy interest in the party next to them.
204
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“You’d better go,” the waitress told the Marines, drop-
ping her voice.
“The lady’s right,” Ramsey told his friends, pressing his
palm to the credit reader on the table to pay the outstanding
bill, then standing. “Let’s move on. We don’t want trouble.”
“Yeah!” a civilian called from the next table. He snig-
gered. “Run home to mommy and daddy!”
“Back off, mister,” Ramsey growled. “This isn’t your
business.”
“Not my business, Muh-rine?” the kid said, standing and
turning to face Ramsey. “I’ll fucking make it my business if
I want. You freaks aren’t wanted here.”
“That’s right,” another of the punks said. “You pretty-boy
gyrines’re nothin’ but trouble. Who let you out without your
keepers, huh?”
“You lousy little civilian shit—” Aquinas said, starting
forward.
Ramsey put a hand on his arm. “Belay that, Marine. Out-
side. Now.”
A moment later, they stepped onto the plaza beneath
the Comet Fall’s strobing sign. The concourse was a wide,
sweeping mall lined with multi-tiered shops, bars and eat-
eries, with a vast arch of transparency stretched overhead.
Earth, half-full, hung directly overhead.
Chu looked up at the blue and white-mottled orb, frown-
ing through his alcoholic haze. “Why aren’t we falling?”
The question, though garbled, wasn’t as drunken-wrong
as it sounded. Each structure within the Rings circled Earth
once in twenty-four hours, maintaining geostationary posi-
tion. They should all have been in free fall, but the gravity
here was roughly equivalent to the surface gravity on Mars,
about three-tenths of a G.
Vallida laughed at him. “Jesus! You just now noticing,
Chu-chu?”
“Gravity . . .” Ramsey started to say, then tripped over a
hiccup. “Gravity engineering,” he finally said. “Quantum-
state phase change in the . . . in the . . .” He stamped his foot.
“Down there. Subdeck infrastructure. Haven’t you ever been
to th’ Rings?”
STAR STRIKE
205
“Nope. Born’n raised on Mars. Never left until I joined
up, and they fuckin’ send me to Alighan. . . .”
“There they are!”
Harsh voices sounded behind them. Ramsey turned, and
saw the gang from the Comet Fall spilling out into the street.
They were looking for trouble, looking for a fight.
“Heads up, Marines,” Ramsey said. He was fumbling
through the mental commands that would revive his per-
sonal AI. If he could connect with the watch on board Samar
. . . or even with the nearest Shore Patrol base. . . .
“You pretty-boys need to be taught a lesson!” one of the
gangers growled. He was big, heavily muscled, and evidently
having some trouble focusing. “You pretty-boys shouldn’t be
coming into our part of th’Ring. . . .”
“They ain’t all pretty-boys,” another civilian said. He
pointed at Colver and Vallida. “Them two are kinda cute,
for Muh-rines.”
“Then we’ll be gentle with them,” the first said, with a
nasty laugh.
“Yeah,” another said. “We’ll give them special treatment.
But the rest of ’em—”
Ramsey slammed the heel of his palm into the kid’s
nose before he completed the statement, snapping his
head sharply back. The other Marines flowed into action
in the same instant; Ramsey heard the crack of one punk’s
arm as Vallida broke it, heard another ganger choke and
gurgle as Gonzales drove stiffened fingers into his larynx,
but he was already stepping across the body of the one
he’d downed to block a punch thrown by a screaming
punk, guiding the fist harmlessly past his head, locking
the wrist, and breaking it. The kid shrieked in pain, then
went silent and limp as Ramsey hammered the back of his
head with an elbow.
The whole encounter was over within five seconds. The
six Marines stood above fourteen bodies, some of them
unconscious, some writhing and groaning as they cradled
injured limbs or heads or groins. A fifteenth punk was dis-
appearing down the street, running as fast as his legs could
carry him.
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“Not bad, Marines,” Colver said. “Considering our, uh,
slowed reaction times.”
“Slowed, nothin’,” Ramsey said. He reached down and
extracted a tingler from the unconscious grip of one of the
civilians. He checked it, switched it off, then snapped the
projector in half, flinging the pieces across the street. Sev-
eral of the punks were armed, and the other Marines pro-
ceeded to similarly disable the weapons. “We just gave them
the first shot . . . to be . . . to be fair. Right?”
“Whatever you say, Gunnery Sergeant,” Gonzalez said.
“But maybe we should hightail it before the SPs show up.”
“Yeah,” Vallida said. “Someone’s bound to’ve reported
this.”
“Roger that.” He looked around. She was right. Habitats,
even extraordinarily large ones like the Ring habs orbiting
Earth, tended to have lots of cameras and other unobtru-
sive sensor devices, both to monitor the environment and to
watch for trouble of a variety of types—including crime. He
didn’t see any cameras, but that meant nothing; most covert
surveillance cameras, such as the ones the Marines them-
selves used to monitor battlespace, tended to be smaller than
BBs, floating along on silent repulsor fields.
As he completed a full three-sixty of the concourse ter-
rain, he became aware of another problem, one more imme-
diate than having the local police watching the Marines mop
up with some local thugs. “Uh . . . which way?”
His hardware included navigational systems, but he’d not
bothered to engage them when they left the Samar earlier
that evening. He suddenly realized that, in his current some-
what befogged state, he had no idea as to which way Dock
27 and the Samar might be.
“I think, boys,” Colver said, “we’d better switch on our
AIs. Otherwise we’re going to be going in circles.”
That was easier said than done.
Most enlisted Marines learned how to disable their com-
pany AIs temporarily within days of leaving boot camp, and
some probably figured out how to do it while they were still
boots. Hell, for that matter, Garroway was pretty sure that
officers did it, too, right out of OCS or the Naval Academy.
STAR STRIKE
207
No one ever talked openly about it, of course, because it
was against regs. Getting caught was at the very least worth
“office hours,” as commanding officer’s nonjudicial punish-
ment had long been known in the Corps, and in some situa-
tions, like combat or while embarked on board ship, it could
get you a general court and a world of hurt.
The process was simple enough, and involved visualiz-
ing a certain set of code numbers and phrases, which you
brought to mind one by one and held for a second or so.
It provided a kind of back door to the AI’s programming.
It saw and recorded the code, then promptly forgot about
having seen it, or anything at all about the person doing the
coding, until another set of codes was visualized to reset the
software.
The problem was that you needed to have a clear and
highly disciplined mind to be able to pull the visualization
trick off. At the moment, all six of the MARS Marines
were somewhat less than clear in the mental department.
Not only were their minds sluggish with alcohol, but under
the influence of the nano activators in their drinks they
were having trouble focusing on anything with much clar-
ity or discipline, much less memorized strings of alphanu-
meric characters.
“Wait a sec,” Chu said. He was standing still, eyes closed,
arms outstretched. “I almost have it. . . .”
They waited, expectant.
“No. I guess I don’t.”
“Someone write the code down. We can focus on that.”
“No . . . no . . .” Colver said. “I’ve got it. Yeah! There. . . .”
She was silent for a moment, as the other Marines waited.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Gonzales said. “We gotta move! . . .”
“Okay,” Colver said. “Dock 27 is that way.”
“I coulda told you that,” Chu said miserably.
“And I have the recall coming through. Shit. I think we’re
all gonna be AWOL. They passed the word at 1830 hours.
We were supposed to check in at 2000.”
Absent without leave meant NJP for sure. The six of them
had checked out at Samar’s quarterdeck at 1800 hours, and
switched off the company AI minutes after that. It was now
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just past 2300 hours, three hours after they were supposed
to be back on board.
“Well, let’s get the hell back there, then,” Ramsey said.
“We’ll just have to face the music.”
“Sure,” Colver said. “What can they do to us . . . ship us
back to Alighan?”
“Don’t even joke about that, Staff Sergeant!” Delazlo
scolded.
Unsteadily, the Marines began making their way back
toward Dock 27 and the Samar.
Unfortunately, as soon as Colver’s AI was switched back
on, the Shore Patrol had a fix on her, and her name was
flagged as being AWOL.
And so the six Marines of 55th MARS ended up spend-
ing the rest of the local night in the brig at Shore Patrol
headquarters.
2811.1102
Platoon Commander’s Office
UCS Samar
Dock 27, Earth Ring 7
0910 hrs GMT
“What the hell were you thinking, Marines?” Either Lieu-
tenant Kaia Jones was furious, or she was one hell of an
actress. The muscles were standing out like steel rods up
the sides of her neck, and the anger behind her words could
have melted through Type VII hull composite. “Switching
off your AI contacts like that?” She paused, sweeping the
six Marines standing in front of her desk with a gaze like a
gigawatt combat laser. “Well?”
“Sir, we were not thinking, sir!” Ramsey snapped back,
his reply militarily crisp.
“No, I should think the hell you weren’t.”
The six of them stood at attention in Jones’ office on
board the Samar. After an uncomfortable night in the SP
brig ashore, they’d been escorted back to the ship by a pair
of square-jawed Navy petty officers with no-nonsense at-
titudes and little to say. Master Sergeant Adellen had met
them at the quarterdeck, signed off on them, and ordered
them to stay in the squad bay, except for meals, until they
could see the Old Man.
“Old Man,” in this case, was a woman; long usage in the
Corps retained certain elements of an ancient, long-past era
when most Marines were male. The commanding officer
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IAN DOUGLAS
was the Old Man no matter what his or her sex. Just as a
superior officer was always sir, never ma’am.
Of course, the joke in Alpha Company was that in
Jones’ case, you couldn’t really tell. She’d been a Marine
for twenty-three years—fifteen of them as enlisted. She’d
been a gunnery sergeant, like Ramsey, before applying
for OCS and going maverick, and her face was hard and
sharp-edged enough that she looked like she’d been a
Marine forever.
Rumor had it that she’d been a DI at RTC Mars, and
Ramsey was prepared to believe it.
“What about the rest of you?” Jones demanded. “Any of
you have anything to say?”
“Sir . . .”
“Spit it out, Chu.”
“I mean, sir, everyone does it. If we didn’t have some
privacy once in a while, we’d all go nuts!”
Jones leaned back in her chair and watched them for a
moment, her gaze flicking from one to the next.
“Privacy to jack yourself on nanostims,” Jones said at
last.
“Sir!” Gonzales looked shocked. “We would never—”
“Spare me, Gonzo,” Jones said, raising her hand. “You
were all medscanned at the Shore Patrol HQ, and I’ve down-
loaded the reports. You were all buzzed. The wonder of it
was that you were still able to stand up . . . much less inca-
pacitate that group of . . . young civilians.”
“Sir, you . . . know about that, too?” Ramsey asked.
“Of course. Your little escapade was captured on three
different mobile habcams, as well as through the EAs of two
of your . . . targets the other night. As it happens, you single-
handedly took out half of the hab’s local militia.”
“What?” Colver exclaimed. “Those punks? Sir! There’s
no way!”
“Don’t give me that, Colver. You’ve been in the Corps
long enough to know about gangcops.”
Ramsey digested this. He’d run into the practice at several
liberty ports, but he’d not been expecting it at a high-tech,
high-profile facility like Earth Ring 7. Gangcops and police
STAR STRIKE
211
militias were widely tolerated and accepted as a means of
ensuring the safety of the larger cities and orbital habs.
It was the modern outgrowth of an old problem. Police en-
forcement could not be left entirely to AIs, neither practically
nor, in most places, by the law. When local governments had
problems recruiting a police force, they sometimes resorted
to enlisting one or another of the youth gangs that continued
to infest the more shadowy corners of most major popula-
tion centers. The idea was to clean them up and give them a
modicum of training—“rehabilitate them,” as the polite fic-
tion had it—and send them out with limited-purview elec-
tronic assistants tagging along in their implants. Whatever
they observed was transmitted to a central authority, usually
an AI with limited judgment, keyword response protocols,
and a link to city recorders that stored the data for use in
later investigations or as evidence in criminal trials.
Defenders of the policy pointed out that crime in targeted
areas did indeed tend to drop; its critics suggested that the
drop was due less to crime than to less reporting of crime;
paying criminals to act as police militias was, they said,
nothing less than sanctioned and legalized corruption.
In any case, a certain amount of graft, of intimidation,
even of violence was unofficially tolerated, so long as the
peace was kept. Wherever humans congregated in large and
closely packed numbers, there was the danger of panic and
widespread violence. Political fragmentation, religious fa-
naticism, rumors about the Xul or about government con-
spiracies all spread too quickly and with too poisonous an
effect when every citizen was jacked in to the electronic net-
work designed to allow a near instantaneous transmission
of information and ideas, especially within tightly knit and
semi-isolated e-communities.
Most citizens accepted the minor threat of being hassled
by street-punk militias if it meant the authorities could iden-
tify and squash a major threat to community peace quickly.
The Earthring Riots of 2855—in Corps reckoning the year
had been 1080, just twenty-two years before—were still far
too fresh in the memories of too many, especially within the
orbital habitats where a cracked seal or punctured pressure
212
IAN DOUGLAS
hull could wipe out an entire population in moments. The
Riots had begun less than twenty hours after the appearance
of a rumor to the effect that the Third and Fourth Ring food
supplies had been contaminated by a Muzzie nanovirus. That
rumor, as it turned out, had been false—a hoax perpetrated
by an anti-Muzzie fundamentalist religious group—but over
eight hundred had died when the main lock seals had been
overridden and breached in the panic.
And so the authorities had begun cultivating various
street gangs and civil militias, with the idea that the more
people there were on the streets with reporting software in
their heads, the sooner rumors like the one about a terror-
nanovirus one could be defused.
“Sir,” Ramsey said, “we didn’t know those . . . people
were militia.”
“That’s right,” Delazlo added. “They came after us, not
the other way around! Started hassling us. They started it!”
“I don’t give a shit who started it,” Jones said. “As it
happens, I agree that hiring young thugs off the streets as
peacekeepers is about as stupid an idea as I’ve seen yet. Poli-
ticians in action. However, the Ring Seven Authority has
requested that you be turned over to the civil sector for trial.
The charges are aggravated assault and battery.”
Shit. Ramsey swallowed, hard. In most cases, civil law
took precedence over military law, at least within Common-
wealth territory. They could be looking at bad conduct dis-
charges, followed by their being turned over to the civilian
authority.
No . . . wait a moment. That wasn’t right. A BCD was a
punishment that a court-martial board could hand out, not a
commanding officer.
“Before we go any further with this . . . do any of you
want to ask for a full court?”
That was their right under regulations. They could accept
whatever judgment—and punishment—Jones chose to give
them under nonjudicial punishment, or they could demand
a court-martial.
But there was absolutely no point in that. They’d all been
caught absolutely dead to rights—AWOL and fighting with
STAR STRIKE
213
the civilian authorities. Better by far to take whatever Jones
chose to throw at them; whatever it was, it wouldn’t be as
bad as a general court, which could hand out BCDs or hard
time.
“How about it? Ramsey?”
“Sir,” Ramsey said, “I accept nonjudicial punishment.”
“That go for the rest of you yahoos?”
There was a subdued chorus of agreement.
“Very well. You all are confined to the ship for . . . three
days. Dismissed!”
Outside the lieutenant’s office, the six Marines looked at
one another. “That,” Colver said, “was a close one!”
“She could have come down on us like an orbital bar-
rage,” Chu added. “Three days?”
“I don’t get it,” Delalzlo said, shaking his head. “A slap
on the wrists. What’s it mean, anyway?”
“What it means,” Ramsey told them, “is she’s keeping
us out of worse trouble. Two days from now we’re shipping
out.”
They’d learned that fact yesterday, shortly after coming
back on board the Samar, but with other things on their
minds, they’d not made the connection. The civil authori-
ties might request that the six miscreants be turned over to
them for trial, but unless and until they were handed over,
they were part of Samar’s company. The needs of the ship
and of the mission always came first; by restricting them to
quarters, Lieutenant Jones was making sure that the civilian
authorities didn’t get them.
Marines always took care of their own.
USMC Skybase
Dock 27, Earth Ring 7
1030 hrs GMT
General Alexander floated against the backdrop of the
Galaxy, surrounded by the icons of the Defense Advisory
Council. Despite the naggingly unpleasant presence of
Marie Devereaux, it was actually a bit of a relief to be here.
“Operation Lafayette,” he told them, “is on sched, with T-
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for-Translation Day now set for three days from now.”
For days, now, Alexander had been submerged in the
minutiae of ops preparation. The actual strategic planning
he tended to enjoy, with a sense of roll-up-the-sleeves and
get things moving accomplishment. Going over the endless
downloaded lists of logistical preparations and supply mani-
fests, however, was sheer torture, and he found he was will-
ing to endure even Devereaux’s acidly uninformed tongue to
escape it, even if only for a little while.
“I don’t understand your use of the word ‘translation,’ ”
Devereaux put in. “What does language have to do with
it?”
“It has to do with a mathematical concept, Madam De-
vereaux, not with language,” he replied. “You can download
the details here.” He paused, ordering his thoughts. How to
explain the inconceivable? “Any point in space can be pre-
cisely defined in terms of its local gravitational matrix. If
it can be so defined, it can be given a set of detailed spatial
coordinates.
“Now, the paraspace plenum we call the Quantum Sea
is co-existent with . . . or, rather, think of it as adjacent to
every portion of four-dimensional space-time. Practically
speaking, that’s where we draw vacuum energy from . . . the
realm of quantum fluctuations and zero-point energy. If we
know the precise special and gravitational coordinates of
where we are, and the precise coordinates of where we want
to go, we can translate one set of coordinates to another by
rotating through paraspace.”
“General, that makes no sense whatsoever.”
He sighed. “In simple terms, Madam Devereaux, the
Quantum Sea allows us direct, point to point access through
paraspace to any place in the entire universe.”
“This is something naval vessels can do?”
“Not naval vessels, Madam, no. I don’t know the engi-
neering specifics, but in essence the translation requires
enormous amounts of energy. Skybase is large enough to
accommodate the zero-point energy taps necessary to effect
a translation . . . but nothing smaller could pull down that
much power.
STAR STRIKE
215
“So what we’ve worked out is a kind of shuttle plan. We
take on board as many of the 1MIEF heavies as we can . . .
the first load will consist of a Marine fleet strike carrier, a
Marine assault transport, and either three destroyers or a de-
stroyer and a light missile cruiser for fire support. We make
the first translation from Sol to the Puller system, drop those
four or five ships off, then translate immediately back to Sol
to take on board the next load of ships, which will be queued
up and waiting. It will take, we’re now estimating, a total of
sixteen such transitions to get all eighty vessels of 1MIEF
shifted out to Puller. Obviously, we can take on more light
ships in one load, or fewer heavies. We’re only limited by
the docking storage space on Skybase’s main hangar deck.”
“Essentially,” Admiral Orlan Morgan added, explaining,
“they intend to use Skybase as an enormous fleet carrier.”
His icon grinned. “In the case of a fleet strike carrier like
the Chosin, Skybase becomes a carrier-carrier!”
“If you’ll recall,” Alexander continued, “Skybase was de-
signed to reside in paraspace. It’s a fairly simple operation
to move out of paraspace and into 4D space at any point of
our choosing, if we have the proper field metrics and coordi-
nates to make the transfer.”
“Why weren’t we told this before?” Senator Gannel put
in. He sounded irritated. “It seems to me that this represents
a significant strategic advantage, not only in war against
other human stellar nations, but against the Xul.”
“That’s right,” Senator Kalin put in. “It also means we
could send your battlefleet straight to Starwall or to Nova
Aquila or wherever we want to go without having to pass
through the Puller gate, without trespassing in PanEuropean
territory!”
It was an effort not to lose patience with them. “To trans-
late from one point to another,” he told them, “we need
extremely exact coordinates for both points. We know the
metric throughout Sol-space quite well, of course. We know
the Puller system because we’ve had Marines out there for
several years, now, and one of the things they’ve been doing,
besides watching the Xul on the other side of the Stargate
there, is taking gravitometric readings on local space . . .
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IAN DOUGLAS
just in case. The stargates all put a considerable dimple into
space-time, thanks to the pair of high-speed black holes
each one has racing around inside its structural torus, and
we take those measurements as a matter of course so that we
can better understand the local matrix.
“We do not, however, have gravitational readings on
places like Starwall. We’ve had Marine recon probes out
there, but they had other things to keep them busy than flit
around taking gravity readings. As for Nova Aquila, we
have not yet had any probes out there, either manned or AI.
We have absolutely no data on the local matrix out there.
“Does that answer your objections, Senator?”
“Adequately.”
“And have I answered your questions, Madam
Devereaux?”
“Yes. You’re saying you can get the fleet to Puller, but not
to any place on the other side of the Puller Gate?”
“Exactly. We are fairly confident we can make the trans-
lation to Puller, and each successful translation would give
us additional data on the metric. We would not even be able
to attempt a translation to Nova Aquila, however. We simply
don’t have the requisite information.”
“We will be able to use Skybase translations out to both
Nova Aquila and to Starwall once we have secured them,”
Admiral Morgan added. “We simply need to have the time
and equipment out there to make the necessary readings.”
“We think,” Alexander said. “The gravimetric situation
at Starwall is pretty complicated. When I say we need exact
readings, that’s not a matter of measuring the gravity from
the local star and a couple of the closest planets. Starwall is
close to the outer fringes of the Galactic Core, and literally
millions of nearby stars are affecting the local picture. As
for Nova Aquila . . . well, we’ll know more when we actu-
ally get some instrumentation out there. For now, though,
it’s first things first. We need to secure the Puller system,
and that we can do using Skybase as our transparaspace
shuttle. We have the queue orders drawn up and transmitted.
According to our current schedule, we will begin loading
the first ships on board Skybase later today, using L-3 as our
STAR STRIKE
217
rendezvous point. The first translation to Puller space is now
set for 1800 hours GMT, on 0112, three days from now. Op-
eration Lafayette will commence as soon as the first ships
are released at the Puller Gate. Any questions?”
“Yes, sir,” General Regin Samuels said. “I note in your
plans that this operation will be depending heavily on a Tra-
ditionalist Catholic mutiny in the Puller system. Just how
reliable is this element, anyway?”
“I believe I can answer that, Regie,” Navin Bergenhal,
of the Intelligence Advisory Group, said. “We have good,
solid intelligence assets throughout PanEuropean space, in-
cluding inside both the DST and the DGSE. Those assets,
in fact, are how we determined that the French are indeed
holding some of our people for questioning.”
Not entirely true, Alexander thought. The initial data had
come from Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, still watching and listen-
ing quietly from the hidden asteroid base orbiting the Puller
stargate. But the Commonwealth’s DCI2 had developed that
intelligence further, and brought home a lot of data concern-
ing both the political and the military situations inside Re-
public space.
“From the Marines’ point of view, General Samuels,” Al-
exander said, “we will welcome help from local forces if it
is available. We will not count on it.”
And that was the final decision made after a very long
series of discussions and ops planning sessions, includ-
ing many hours of virtual-reality simulations playing out
each aspect of the mission. Most Marine officers, from
the MIEF’s platoon commanders up to Alexander himself,
felt the possibility of Traditionalist assistance at Puller was
going to be more trouble than it was worth. The situation
presented endless possibilities for targeting the wrong PE
units, for friendly fire incidents, and for outright deception
by the Republic’s defensive forces.
“So, are you saying you don’t trust the Catholics, Gen-
eral?” Devereaux asked.
“I’m saying, Madam Devereaux, that the MIEF will have
the greatest chance for success if we welcome any help that’s
offered, but go in prepared for no help at all. As a matter of
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IAN DOUGLAS
fact, our defensive stature will assume that the T.C. mutiny
is actually a PanEuropean deception, a trick. We would be
foolish to act in any other way, or to lower our guard without
very solid reasons to do so.”
“Quite right, General,” Samuels said, and other military
officers in the assembled council murmured agreement.
It was impossible to get a feel for what Devereaux ac-
tually thought. Her Net persona was well filtered, her icon
image emotionlessly bland in affect. When she’d asked if
he didn’t trust Catholics, however, it had been impossible
not to get the idea that she was fishing for something—a
weakness, perhaps, or an opening for an attack. She was, he
knew from her public records, from a Traditionalist Catholic
family, but he also knew she wasn’t herself a believer . . . at
least not to the extent of going to Mass or accepting the word
of the Papess in Rome as law.
What the hell was her game?
He didn’t trust the woman, not after her attempt to shut
down the Marine Corps. He still wished he knew what her
personal stake was in the Corps—why she seemed to hate it
so. Further searches of available public data had turned up
nothing more on her background. So far as he could tell, she
was simply a political opportunist who saw in the current
situation a possible way of making political capital at the
Corps’ expense.
That made her no less of a viper, however. She would
need to be watched, and carefully, by the few friends the
Marines still had within the Senate. He did not think it
impossible that she might even be working for the PanEu-
ropeans; the Québecois link, certainly, suggested that pos-
sibility. Quebec and France had been in each other’s pockets
for centuries, since the First UN War at least, and possibly
even well before that.
At least the chances were good that the woman wasn’t
working for the Xul. The Xul, Alexander thought with a wry
and inward grin, didn’t work with anyone unless they were
Xul, and even Madam Devereaux wasn’t capable of bridging
a gap like that.
“My ops planning staff has put together an assault plan,”
STAR STRIKE
219
Alexander continued, addressing the group at large. As he
spoke, an animated diagram unfolded in the assembled
minds of the audience. “The first ships in will act to set up
a local defended space into which we can continue to drop
ships and men. As you see here, there are two primary cen-
ters of interest within the Puller 659 system . . . here at the
stargate, where our covert listening post is still in opera-
tion . . . and far in-system, here, at one of the moons of this
lone gas giant. As of our last set of reports from the LP, the
French fleet is in orbit around the gas giant. So far they’ve
made no move at all to investigate the stargate.
“We will materialize here. . . .” He indicated an area
some 10 light-seconds away from the stargate, and nearly 30
light-minutes from the gas giant’s current orbital position.
“With luck, we’ll be able to bring the entire MIEF into posi-
tion before the PEs even know we’re in-system.”
“Won’t they be aware of your ships when they arrive?”
General Samuels asked. “Neutrino emissions from your
ships’ reactors.”
Samuels had a valid point. The QPTs or Quantum Power
Taps utilized by Commonwealth naval vessels required
massive input from conventional antimatter power plants
to open the zero-point channels. Once those channels were
open and functioning, energy from the zero-point field itself
was more than sufficient to keep those channels open and
working, but the power-up procedure required a lot of initial
seed energy . . . and they wouldn’t be able to go through the
paraspace translation with their power taps on. That, any
good QPT engineer knew all too well, was an excellent way
to release a very great deal of energy into a small volume of
space in an accident—a “casualty,” in naval parlance—that
would almost certainly result in the complete vaporization
of Skybase.
With a thought, Alexander switched on a doughnut-
shaped swath of red light surrounding the glowing point of
light that marked the Jovian gas giant. “We hope that the
answer to that, General, is ‘no.’ At the moment the PE fleet
is deep inside the radiation fields of the Puller Jovian. If
their sensors are finely tuned enough, they might pick up
220
IAN DOUGLAS
our reactor leakage, but they would have to know exactly
where to look to have much of a chance of picking us up.
We’re hoping that the radiation belts in this area—and their
own shields against that radiation—are going to keep them
pretty well blind to our approach.”
“Isn’t that a rather slender hope, General?” Devereaux
demanded.
“Not at all. According to our LP, the Republic forces have
been paying no attention at all to the Gate. Even if they do
pick up on what’s happening before our fleet is fully in place
and ready to deploy, we anticipate being able to achieve
local battlespace superiority in relatively short order. Their
current fleet in the system consists of twelve ships. Of those,
only two could properly be considered heavies—a monitor
and a fleet carrier. The flagship appears to be a fast cruiser,
and the rest of the ships are destroyers, escorts, frigates, and
three supply-cargo vessels.
“Because we’re trying to rescue our own personnel and
because we wish to limit the scale of destruction, we intend
to use Marine boarding tactics rather than ship-to-ship
combat. That will give us our best chance to capturing the
ships, freeing our people, and resolving the situation with
relatively low casualties.”
He kept to himself the corollary . . . that saving the lives
of naval personnel on the ships of both sides meant spending
the lives of a number of Marines, possibly a large number.
The tactical situation, however, demanded it.
“This is one instance where we absolutely need the Ma-
rines and their special capability in naval engagements,” he
continued. He looked at Devereaux’s icon as he spoke, look-
ing for a reaction, wishing again that he could read the emo-
tion behind that bland, corona-haloed projection. “Modern
space warfare is a notoriously all-or-nothing affair. Most
missiles mount thermonuclear warheads. Beam weapons
are designed to overpower shields and pick off point-defense
batteries, so the nukes can get through. When a nuke gets
through, usually, only a single one is necessary to obliterate
the target vessel and everyone on board. That sort of thing
would be very hard on the POWs we hope to rescue, and
STAR STRIKE
221
on the T.C. mutineers if they happen to be in the way. The
Marines give us an alternative—the ability to burn our way
onboard, capture or knock out the command centers, hijack
their AI nets, and force each ship’s surrender.
“We could launch a Marine strike solely with the person-
nel on board the strike carrier and on the assault transport,
the assets that we will be sending through in the first trans-
lation. Tactical prudence, however, suggests that we wait
until we have sufficient ships in place to provide us with
decent fire support.
“With that in mind, we will begin deploying our Marine
strike forces immediately upon entry into the Puller system.
We will not commit ourselves to the assault, however, until
we have a naval force in-system that at least matches the
PanEuropean fleet already present . . . say, a total of two to
three translation runs. Are there any questions?”
There were questions . . . most of them small and nagging
and micromanaging bits of annoyance. The council appeared
for the most part to have accepted at least the broad outlines
of the plan. Technically, they couldn’t dictate strategy or tac-
tics, but technically, also, the President could, in his guise as
commander in chief of the Commonwealth’s armed forces.
The council sought to understand the plan well enough to
give the President decent feedback. And, slowly, thanks in
part to the military and ex-military personnel within their
number, and to their EA links to the Net, that understanding
was forthcoming.
But Alexander had tangled with politicians often enough
to know that it was never that simple.
Especially, he thought, when one of those politicians was
Marie Devereaux.
0112.1102
USMC Skybase
LaGrange-3/Puller 695
1750 hrs GMT
Skybase drifted in empty space, alone and unattended, now,
as the last of the supply and shuttle vessels pulled back to a
safe distance. Most ships, and most especially the cis-Lunar
tugs and more massive cargo vessels that had been servicing
Skybase, used gravitic engineering both for their drives and
to maintain artificial gravity on board. Such units warped
and wrinkled the fabric of space, rendering useless the Sky-
base’s mathematical understanding of the local metric. From
a distance of 10 kilometers, though, with drives switched
off, the minor warping from the argrav generators was triv-
ial enough to ignore.
General Alexander was in his office on board Skybase,
awaiting the translation to Puller 659, but he was linked in
to the scene transmitted from the transport Aldebaran, the
image electronically unfolded in his mind. From this van-
tage point, some 10 kilometers off, Skybase looked like a
huge pair of dark gray dishes fastened face to face, rim to
rim, with one side flattened, the other deeper and capped
by a truncated dome. The structure’s surface looked smooth
from this distance, but Alexander knew that up close its skin
was a maze of towers, weapons mounts, sponsons, surface
buildings, and trenches laid out in geometric patterns that
gave it a rough and heavily textured look.
STAR STRIKE
223
The perimeter of the double saucer was broken in one
place as though a squared-off bite had been taken from its
rim, at the broad opening leading into Skybase’s hangar
deck, a deep and gantry-lined entryway nearly 100 meters
wide jokingly referred to as the garage door. Harsh light
spilled from that opening, illuminating the gantry cranes
and the massive shapes of the starships nestled inside.
“Ten minutes,” an AI’s voice announced in his head. It
wasn’t Cara, this time, but one of the battalion of artificial
intelligences resident within the MIEF net, tasked with co-
ordinating the entire operation.
Was there anything else that needed to be done, anything
forgotten? God help them all if there was. Alexander expected
no serious trouble with the PanEuropeans at Puller, but after
that, when they jumped through to Nova Aquila. . . .
Three days earlier, a fleet of gravitic tugs had gentled the
behemoth clear of Dock 27 and into open space well beyond
the outer ramparts of the outermost Earthring. Hours later,
Skybase had translated to the fleet rendezvous area to begin
the final loading. The gravimetric picture was complicated
close to Earth and to the artificial gravity-twisting engineer-
ing of the Rings themselves, but the translation was a tiny
one, only about a quarter of a million miles, from geosynch
out to the Moon’s orbit. There’d been the faintest of shud-
ders, and Skybase had quietly vanished from Earth synchor-
bit, to reappear a heartbeat later at L-3.
L-3, the third of the five Earth-system LaGrange points,
was located at the Moon’s orbit, but on the far side of Earth
from the Moon’s current position, so that Luna was perpetu-
ally masked from view by the larger disk of Terra. The point
was gravitationally metastable; the gravitational metric was
relatively flat, here, with Earth and Moon always positioned
in a straight and unchanging line, but ships or structures
parked at L-3 still tended to drift away after a few-score
days due to perturbations by the Sun and by other planets,
especially Jupiter.
However, that metastability would not affect Skybase,
which wouldn’t be there long enough to be perturbed by
much. The important thing was that local space was flat
224
IAN DOUGLAS
enough in terms of gravitational balances, providing a good
starting point for the coordinate calculations that would
allow Skybase to transit through a much, much longer jump,
not through but past the Void.
A jump of some 283 light-years, all the way out to Puller
659.
For that transition, local space had to be as flat as could be
managed, with a metric far less complex than the scramble
of interpenetrating gravity fields found in geosynch. There
could be no drift of Moon relative to the Earth, no hum of
nearby artificial agrav fields, no space-bending pulse of
a passing ship under Alcubierre Drive. L-3 was ideal as a
jump-off point, as ideal as could be found, at any rate, this
deep inside the Solar System.
“There is something I do not understand,” Cara said as he
watched the view of Skybase from the transport.
“What’s that?”
“The QST appears to be a highly efficient means of cross-
ing interstellar distances,” the AI said. “I’m curious why
more mobile habitats like Skybase have not been built.”
Alexander let the comment about being curious pass.
From his first introduction to the EA years ago, Cara
had continued to surprise him with what seemed to be
a genuinely human range of behaviors. AIs weren’t sup-
posed to exhibit curiosity, but the more powerful ones did,
indisputably.
“Well, there are plans on the drawing boards,” Alexander
said, “for true starships using Quantum Space Translation . . .
but I don’t think any of them are funded for development yet.
At least, not beyond the wouldn’t-it-be-nice stage.”
“I have seen some of those plans on the Net,” Cara told
him. “But you’re right. None has been funded past the initial
research stage.”
“The Arean Advanced Physics Institute has been using
Skybase as a testbed to study paraspace,” Alexander said,
“both to improve energy tap technology and to investigate
the possibility of very long-range transport. But ships built
around translation technology . . . they’d be damned expen-
sive. They’d also have to be huge, to accommodate the nec-
STAR STRIKE
225
essary power taps and the translation drive itself. A lot of
military decision-makers don’t think it’s feasible.”
“Skybase is still considerably smaller than a typical Xul
huntership,” the AI pointed out. “And it would be simple
enough to mount gravitic drives to provide the neces-
sary maneuverability for combat and in-system travel. A
fleet of such vessels equipped as warships would be most
formidable.”
“And you want to know why we’re not developing such
ships more . . . aggressively?”
“Exactly. It is as though human governments, the people
who make such decisions, do not realize the gravity of the
Xul threat.”
Alexander sighed. It was almost embarrassing admit-
ting to the non-human artificial intelligence in his head
what most senior military officers had lived with for their
entire careers, worse, what humankind had lived with for
centuries.
“That’s a complicated question, Cara. I guess the short
answer is . . . they know the Xul are a threat, sure, but after
five centuries, they don’t seem to be an urgent threat. There
are always more important things to attend to closer at
hand.”
“Even after the Xul incursion of 2314, when humankind
was nearly annihilated?”
Alexander shrugged. “But we weren’t, were we? Humans
have a lot of trouble connecting with something that hap-
pened centuries ago . . . or that might not happen until
centuries in the future. Download the history. Remember
global warming? The fossil fuel crisis? The e-trans crisis?
The genetic prosthesis crisis? The chaos of the nanotech-
nic revolution? If it doesn’t threaten us, immediately and
personally, it’s someone else’s problem—especially if it’s
government that has to take action to fix it. Hell, politi-
cians have trouble keeping their focus on problems just
from one election to the next. The Roman Senate probably
had the same problem with the barbarian crisis three thou-
sand years ago.”
“But it is the politicians—specifically the Senate Mili-
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IAN DOUGLAS
tary Appropriations Committee—that would be responsible
for funding a fleet capable of fighting the Xul, is it not?”
Cara sounded genuinely confused, and Alexander won-
dered how much of that was personality software miming
human patterns, how much was genuine perplexity. There
was no way to tell.
“That’s right,” he said. “And they’re not eager to increase
taxes just so the military can have some expensive new toys.”
He hesitated. While Cara was his electronic assistant alone,
she did share data with many other people, both civilian and
military, and with innumerable other AIs. How well could
he trust her not to share with the wrong people?
The hell with it. They would be gone, soon, gone and
far beyond the reach of anyone—officious bureaucrat, ass-
covering general, or self-serving politician—who might
object to him giving voice to his opinions. “The truth is,
Cara, it’s not just the civilians who are a little slow on the
uptake, sometimes. In fact, if the military really pushed for
it, we would probably get those fancy new ships. The al-
locations for the designing, for the building . . . hell, the
shipyards at Earthring, at the Arean Rings, at Luna, at L-5,
they’d all be falling all over themselves to win those con-
tracts. And the civilian sector would profit with a whole new
means of traveling between star systems.”
“You’re saying the work would stimulate the economy.”
“Definitely. Military contracts have always been a big
factor in keeping the economy going. That’s one reason war
was so hard to get rid of over the centuries.”
“Why, then, would the military sector not wish to see
these ships developed?”
“Because the military sector has always been extremely
conservative. They don’t trust new technology.”
“But advanced technology has always won wars. The
development of nuclear weapons to end World War II, for
instance, would be a case in point.”
“Which actually began as a civilian initiative, instigated
by the U.S. President at the time when he learned that the
enemy had a chance of developing those weapons first. But
check your historical files. Naval vessels continued to have
STAR STRIKE
227
masts for decades after the steam engine made sails obso-
lete. When General Custer’s command was wiped out at the
Little Bighorn, the native forces attacking him were armed
with repeating rifles; most of Custer’s men were not, be-
cause the military bureaucracy of the time was convinced
that repeaters wasted ammunition. Custer also left behind a
couple of Gatling guns—primitive machine guns—because
they slowed up his column. In other words . . . he refused to
change his tactics to take advantage of new technological
developments.
“Later, navies continued to cling to the battleship even
after repeated demonstrations that they didn’t stand a chance
against carrier-based aircraft. Then they clung to carriers
after orbital railguns and microcruise missiles made those
monsters into fat, wallowing targets. Two centuries after
that, Marines were still being issued slug-throwers as stan-
dard weapons because of concerns about the reliability
of lasers and man-portable batteries under combat condi-
tions. As a rule, military leaders don’t like anything new or
different.”
“But why would that be, given that change is the essence
of history?”
“Major changes in how we do things usually means
waiting around until the last generation dies off. It’s a basic
truism of military history: we’re always ready to fight the
last war, and the methods and tactics of the next war always
catch us by surprise.”
“That would seem to be a depressing philosophy for
someone in your line of work, General,” Cara told him. “Or
do you embrace such conservative viewpoints as well?”
He thought about that one for a moment. “There are never
any absolutes in this business,” he told the AI. “No blacks
or whites. In point of fact, space-combat doctrine right now
favors lights over heavies.”
“You refer to the tactical doctrine of using many small,
cheap, and expendable spacecraft, rather than a few large
and expensive ones.”
“Exactly. A Skydragon masses less than a hundred tons,
and can still carry a dozen long-range missiles with thermo-
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IAN DOUGLAS
nuclear warheads. One such warhead can cripple or even de-
stroy a hundred-thousand-ton battlecruiser, if it gets through
the point defense field. The powers-that-be are perfectly
happy to sacrifice a few Skydragon squadrons in exchange
for a high-value heavy, no problem.” He felt his own bitter-
ness rising as he said that. “It remains to be seen if being
able to translate ships as big as Skybase makes it worthwhile
changing tactical doctrines.”
“It seems that there is a certain inertia resident within
any given approach to warfare,” Cara observed. “Once a
government is committed to a given way of doing things, it
is difficult to change.”
“You could say that.” He sighed. “In fact, the conserva-
tive factions are usually right in holding on to the tried and
true . . . up to a point. We know what works, so we stick to
that. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, don’t risk creating a real
mess.
“But . . . and this may be the single most important ‘but’
in any military leader’s lexicon, we must be aware that
change—technological change, social and cultural change,
demographic change, religious change, political change—
all of them are going on around us all the time, even when
we don’t actually see it happening. If we get so mired in the
past that we don’t see the next new wave coming, if we can’t
recognize it in time to adapt, then we’re doomed to go the
way of the dodo, the elephant, and the blue whale, a dead-
end trap and ultimate extinction.”
“It still seems short-sighted to ignore the potential for
this type of interstellar transport,” Cara observed.
“Cara, I couldn’t agree more. Maybe, if Operation Lafay-
ette and Operation Gorgon are both successful, if Skybase
really shows her stuff out there, that by itself will nudge
things along in a positive direction. At least we can hope.”
“Hope is one aspect of humanity I’ve never been able to
fully understand,” Cara told him.
“Three minutes,” another AI’s voice announced. Pure
imagination, really, but to Alexander it seemed that he could
sense the gathering of energy within the bulk of Skybase.
Windows open to one side in his mind showed that all of
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229
the base systems were standing ready, all personnel at battle
stations, the antimatter reactors at the station’s core already
pouring terawatts of energy into the slender channel now
opening into the Quantum Sea.
“Cara,” he said in his mind, “has there been any word
from the Puller listening post?”
“Not for eight days, five hours, twenty-seven minutes,”
the AI told him. “Lieutenant Fitzpatrick’s last report indi-
cated a possibility of failing power systems, however. He
may not be able to communicate.”
“QCC units don’t need much power,” Alexander said.
“And they can’t be tapped or intercepted. If he’s not able
to communicate, it’s because the PEs found him . . . or his
life-support systems failed.” He watched the inner pan-
orama, of Skybase adrift against a star-scattered emptiness,
for another moment. “I don’t like jumping into an unknown
tacsit,” he said at last.
“We’ve known there would be considerable risk, Gen-
eral. The connection with Lieutenant Fitzpatrick has been
tenuous and intermittent ever since the PanEuropean fleet
entered the Puller system.”
“I know.” He was thinking about the ancient military
maxim: no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy.
During ops planning, they’d considered putting a hold
on the actual translation to Puller 659 until they actually
received an all-clear from Fitzpatrick and the listening post.
That idea had been dropped, however. There were reasons,
psychological as well as engineering, that Skybase could not
be kept on perpetual alert waiting for the next contact from
the distant Marine listening post.
So they would make the jump, and simply try to be ready
for whatever they found at the other end.
“Two minutes.”
He opened another window, sending out a connect call.
“Tabbie?”
There was a brief pause.
“Hi, hon,” was her reply. “Almost up to the big
jump-off?”
The link was via conventional lasercom relays, so there
230
IAN DOUGLAS
was a speed-of-light time lag of about three seconds be-
tween the moment he spoke, and the moment he heard her
reply.
“Yeah. But I do hate leaving you behind.”
“I hate it, too. But . . . you’ll be back. And I’ll be here
waiting for you.”
They’d talked about that aspect of things a lot during the
weeks before this. Normally, Skybase was home not only
to nearly eight hundred Marines and naval personnel, but
also to some five hundred civilians. Most of them were ex-
military, or the children of military families, or the spouses
of military personnel serving on Skybase. Most worked a
variety of jobs on the base, ranging from administration and
clerical duties to specialized technical services to drivers
and equipment operators in the docking bay.
In fact, they represented the way the Marine Corps, in
particular, had over the centuries evolved its own microcul-
ture. The retired Marine staff sergeant or colonel, the spouse
of a Marine pilot, the child of Marine parents both stationed
at Skybase, all shared the same cultural background, lan-
guage, and worldview that made them a single, very large
and extended family.
But Skybase was about to take part in an operation ut-
terly unlike anything tried in the past. This time, the MIEF’s
headquarters would be traveling with the expeditionary
force. It would be the target of enemy assaults, and it would
likely be gone for many years.
Active duty Marines at Skybase had been given their
orders. The civilians, however, had been given a choice—a
choice to be worked out by both civilian and military mem-
bers of each family. Many civilians had preferred to stay
behind at Earthring, though the decisions of many had been
swayed by the military members of those families, who’d
wanted loved ones to be safe.
According to the final muster roster, two hundred five
civilians were accompanying the Marines and naval person-
nel to the stars on board Skybase. Among them were the
research team from the Arean Advanced Physics Institute,
crucial members of the technician cadre, and a number of
STAR STRIKE
231
civilian family members who’d refused to be separated from
loved ones.
Tabbie, though, was staying at Earthring. She had family
there . . . and though she’d not wanted to stay at first, Alex-
ander had finally convinced her that she would be better off
making a home for herself there, rather than enduring the
hardships—and the danger—of life aboard the base during
this new deployment.
“I still don’t entirely agree with your reasoning,” she told
him after a moment.
“You mean about Earth not being safe?”
“You’ve said it often enough yourself,” she replied after
the three-second delay. “If the Xul come to Earth again,
when they come, there won’t be any behind-the-lines. Ev-
erybody will be taking the same risks.”
In fact, the original rationale behind giving Skybase its
paraspace capability was to ensure that the MIEF headquar-
ters would survive if the Xul did manage to find and slag
the Earth. It would be a terrible irony, Alexander thought, if
Skybase survived the coming campaign . . . and Tabbie and
the other civilians left at Earthring were killed.
“Yeah, well, there’s a big difference between the Xul
coming to Earth again, and us going out hunting for the bas-
tards,” he told her. “We’ll be out there looking for trouble,
and we’re going to find it. And if we’re successful, we’ll
shake the Xulies up enough that they won’t come to Earth.”
“I know, I know. But I don’t have to like it.”
“One minute,” a voice said in his head.
“Okay, Kitten,” he told her. “I just got the one-minute
alert. If everything goes as planned, I’ll be back in a few
hours for the next set of ships.”
“I love you, Marty.”
“I love you.” He hesitated, then added, “I’ll be back
before you know it.”
He could feel the hard and familiar knot of anticipation
tightening in his gut. He wished this next translation was the
one taking them to the Xul. He wanted to get it over with . . .
but unfortunately Operation Lafayette had to come first. Secure
the jump-off system—and get those captured Marines back—
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IAN DOUGLAS
and then it would be time to deal with the much vaster threat
of the Xul.
“Thirty seconds.”
What perverse insanity emanating from the gods of battle
demanded that humans first tear and kill one another, when
the Xul were the real threat, the most terrible and terrifying
threat the human species had ever encountered?
“Ten seconds.”
“Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . systems en-
gaged. . . .”
The mental window through which Alexander was watch-
ing the scene suddenly turned to white snow and crashing
static. Damn! He hadn’t even considered the self-evident
fact that once Skybase translated, the camera on board
the Aldebaran would suddenly be left far behind, and the
abrupt loss of signal had jarred him. He switched to a dif-
ferent input channel, one connected to a camera feed from
Skybase’s outer hull.
For just an instant, Skybase would have dropped through
the blue-lit haze of paraspace, but Alexander had missed
it. What he saw now was a view of deep space, star-strewn
and empty, the constellations unrecognizable. Two hundred
eighty-three light-years was far enough to distort the famil-
iar patterns of stars in the sky into strangeness.
In fact, there was nothing much to see. Other downloads
from Skybase’s command center, however, began providing
a more complete picture of their surroundings as the base’s
sensitive scanners began sampling the background of ambi-
ent electromagnetic and neutrino radiation. The star gate, as
expected, was about 10 light-seconds in one direction, the
tiny red spark of the local sun in another, the star marking
Puller 659’s solitary gas giant just to one side of the star, and
thirty light-minutes away.
Seconds after translation, Skybase began releasing her
first riders—sixteen F/A-4140 Stardragons of VMA-980, the
Sharpshooters, one of three fighter squadrons in 1MIEF’s
aerospace wing. Sleek, black-hulled, and deadly, the fighters
dispersed around Skybase in a globular formation, the base
protectively at its center. They continued to move outward
STAR STRIKE
233
at a steady drift of nearly 4 kilometers per second relative to
the Skybase, flight and combat systems shut down, drawing
energy solely from their on-board batteries, watching for a
sign, any sign, that the enemy knew they were there.
Skybase, too, continued sampling ambient space, build-
ing up a detailed picture of its new surroundings. One by
one, PanEuropean ships were picked up by their electro-
magnetic signatures despite their being submerged within
the hash of charged particles enveloping the Puller gas giant.
In all, seven enemy vessels were picked up and identified,
just over half of the expected twelve. Those five missing PE
ships were a minor worry; most likely, they were simply too
well masked by the gas giant’s radiation belts, or they might
be hidden by the bulk of the planet itself, on the far sides of
their orbits. They might even have departed the system . . .
but it was also possible that they were closer at hand, well-
shielded and effectively invisible.
If so, the fighter screen would sniff them out soon enough.
Skybase’s sensors, meanwhile, scoured the surrounding sky,
searching.
There were no ships close by the stargate. The tiny plan-
etoid housing the Marine listening post, however, was spot-
ted and identified after a few moments. A small shuttle slid
from a secondary docking bay in Skybase’s hull, accelerat-
ing toward the stargate.
The first flight of starships was already being off-loaded
as the shuttle departed. First to emerge from Skybase’s maw
was the destroyer Morrigan, 24,800 tons and 220 meters
in length overall, and with a crew of 112. Her antimatter
reactors were already powering up; she would be ready to
engage her primary drive within another fifteen minutes.
Alexander, meanwhile, switched to the downloaded
view being recorded from the Morrigan, and was able to
watch the second starship slip her magnetic moorings and
exit Skybase’s hangar bay, edging gently into hard vacuum,
guided by a quartet of AI-directed tugs.
She was the Thor, and she was sister to Morrigan, her
masculine name notwithstanding. Both Cybele-class de-
stroyers were fast and maneuverable, designed originally to
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IAN DOUGLAS
serve with the Solar High Guard fleet, protecting worlds and
habitats from incoming asteroids or cometary debris. Each
possessed a powerful spinal-mount plasma gun as primary
weapon, but their hull superstructures bristled with second-
ary laser turrets, missile batteries, and railgun accelerators,
as well as automated point-defense mounts.
With the two destroyers launched and positioned a few
thousand kilometers to either side of Skybase, Alexander let
himself begin to breath more easily. The most dangerous part
of Operation Lafayette was the possibility that PanEuropean
warships would be close enough to pick up Skybase’s transi-
tion into normal space. While Skybase did possess defensive
weapons, the structure was still not primarily intended for
combat. The two destroyers would provide the fledgling in-
system beachhead with some decent fire-support.
Third out of Skybase’s cargo deck was the Marine assault
transport Samar, huge, blunt-prowed, and massive. Measur-
ing 310 meters long, and with a beam of 85 meters, Samar
massed nearly 35,000 tons. She carried a crew of 79, as well
as her cargo—four companies of the 55th Marine Aerospace
Regimental Strikeforce, a total of nearly 600 Marines. Half
of those Marines would already be loaded into their ship as-
sault pods, or SAPs, ready to engage in ship-to-ship board-
ing actions.
The final ship nestled within Skybase’s hold was the
largest, the Fleet Marine Carrier John A. Lejeune, mass-
ing 87,400 tons, and measuring 324 meters, stem to stern.
Cocooned within Lejeune’s hangar deck were two more
squadrons of F/A-4140s, as well as a squadron of A-90
ground-support strike craft and a number of support and
auxiliary vessels—ninety-eight aerospace craft in all.
The Lejeune was a tight fit inside Skybase’s hangar bay;
in fact, several outriggers and deep-space communications
and tracking masts had been removed in order to let her slip
through Skybase’s garage door at all. Getting her out was a
tediously exacting exercise in geometry and tug-facilitated
maneuvering that would take nearly an hour if all went well.
It was for that reason that the Lejeune had been the first ship
loaded on board the Skybase, and the last out; Alexander
STAR STRIKE
235
had wanted the fleet carrier to be with the first translated
load, however. Her three Stardragon squadrons—forty-eight
aerospace fighters in all—would be invaluable in achieving
and maintaining battlespace superiority, and greatly ex-
panded the fleet’s reach and sensitivity.
An eighth PanEuropean ship was picked out of the ra-
diation fields around the gas giant. By now, neutrino and
electromagnetic energy emitted by the newly emergent
Commonwealth vessels would have reached the vicinity of
the PE fleet. The question now was how good the enemy was
at picking those radiations out of the storm of particulate
radiation surrounding them at the moment. The Common-
wealth squadron might be detected at any moment; Alexan-
der was gambling on the enemy—even his AIs—being less
than perfectly vigilant.
Even so, every passing minute increased the chances of
discovery.
And so Thor and Morrigan stood guard as Skybase slowly,
even grudgingly gave birth to the John A. Lejeune, while the
Samar drifted nearby, her waiting Marines encased in their
SAP pods, unable to do anything but watch, fret, pray, or
sleep, according to individual habit and preference.
And once Lejeune drifted free in open space, the tugs
dragged her clear and, after a brief gathering of inner power,
the Skybase winked out of existence once again, returned to
distant Earth.
The four capital ships, a small cloud of fighters and aux-
iliaries, and some twelve hundred men and women remained
behind, alone, outnumbered, and expendable almost three
hundred light-years from home.
And everything was riding on a single unknown: was the
enemy aware of their arrival?
The question would be settled, one way or the other,
within the next few hours.
0112.1102
SAP 12/UCS Samar
Assembly Point Yankee
Puller 695 System
1935 hrs GMT
PFC Aiden Garroway could scarcely move. He had a little
bit of wiggle room inside his 660-battlesuit, but the embrace
of his Ship Assault Pod made any real shift in his position
impossible. His confinement was beginning to gnaw at him.
He’d been sealed in here since 1700 hours, long before the
Skybase had even made its translation. Two and a half hours,
now.
Worst of all he couldn’t scratch. There was a point
midway up his back, below his shoulder blades and on the
left, that had been tingling and prickling for the past hour,
and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Theoreti-
cally, he could have used his system nano to anesthetize
the spot—a process that happened automatically if he
was wounded—but so far his thought-clicks hadn’t done a
damned thing. In fact, when he tried to isolate the itch in
his mind, it moved, shifting one way or another until it was
impossible to really pin it down.
The failure of the anesthetic release probably meant the
sensation was purely psychosomatic, but that made it no
easier to bear. In any case, he’d experienced worse. In boot
camp, any unauthorized movement or wiggling when the
recruit platoon had been ordered to hold position, had been
STAR STRIKE
237
punished by a session in the sand pit, taken through a gruel-
ing set of exercises by a screaming Gunny Warhurst or one
of the assistant DIs.
At least Warhurst wasn’t going to reach him in here,
sealed away deep in the belly of Samar’s launch bay. His
former DI was in another SAP, possibly right next door, but
as helplessly cocooned as was Garroway.
At least he had the squad data feed to keep him from
going completely nuts. An open window in his mind showed
an animated schematic of the tacsit, centered on Samar,
with the Lejeune, Thor, and Morrigan spread across several
thousand kilometers of empty space, and with the fighters
farther out yet.
By pulling back on the viewpoint within his mind, the
Commonwealth squadron dwindled to a bright, green dot,
and he could see the icon representing the stargate falling
in from the right. Pulling back still more, he could see the
icons representing the enemy; zooming in on that tightly
grouped pack of glowing red icons revealed seven capital
ships just visible in a pale, red fog representing the radiation
belts around the system’s gas giant. All seven vessels were
evidently in orbit about the giant, and gave no indication
that they were aware, yet, of the presence of the small Com-
monwealth squadron.
But they would be.
Garroway kept turning inward, inspecting closely his
own emotions. He wasn’t sure about what he was looking
for. Fear? Anticipation? Excitement? Impatience?
Maybe he was feeling something of all four. Boot camp
had taken him through so many simulations of combat he
couldn’t begin to number them. In virtual reality simulations
he’d sat inside the close, unyielding embrace of an SAP many
times, until he knew exactly what to expect—the long wait,
the gut-punching jolt of launch, the sweaty palmed anxiety
of the approach, the strike, the penetration, the entry.
Except that, he knew very well, you could never know for
sure what was coming. Simulations were just that, simula-
tions, and the real world was certain to contain more than its
fair share of the unexpected.
238
IAN DOUGLAS
Marine Listening Post
Puller 659 Stargate
1935 hrs GMT
In fact, the unexpected had already happened. Seven days
earlier, guided by intelligence provided by the DGSE— Di-
rection Général de la Sécurité Extraterrestrial—the light
cruisers Sagitta and Pegasus and the destroyer Détroyat had
approached the Marine listening post beside the stargate
under Alcubierre Drive, slowing to sublight velocities at
the last possible moment. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick had noted
the ships powering up, but they arrived at the stargate long
before the light carrying news of their departure from their
orbit around the gas giant.
Seconds after dropping back into unwarped space, Dé-
troyat had released a 10-megaton thermonuclear warhead
which had detonated at the asteroid’s surface; the shock-
wave had wrecked the listening post, and incapacitated or
killed the Marines inside.
Before the fireball had fully dispersed, Pegasus had de-
ployed an anticommunications nanocharge, a warhead releas-
ing a cloud of molecule-sized disassemblers that had sought
out the internal wiring and optical networks interlaced through
the asteroid’s heart and followed it to the listening post’s QCC
unit, reducing it to inert plastic, ceramcomposite, and metal
in seconds. QCC signals could not be intercepted—or even
detected—without a second unit containing elements quantum-
entangled with those of the first, but disassembler nano could
be smart enough to identify an FTL unit and destroy it.
Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and the other five Marines still
within the listening post never had a chance even to alert
Skybase that they were under attack. Within a few more
moments, FMEs—the elite French Fusilier Marin Extra-
terrestrienne—and German Sturmjäger had broken in and
secured what was left of the facility. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick—
badly injured but alive—and the other Marines had been
taken prisoner.
They killed eight FMEs before they were taken, though,
and wounded five more.
STAR STRIKE
239
For the next week, then, the former Marine listening post
had been occupied by a small reconnaissance unit of PanEu-
ropean special forces. The asteroid’s antennae and other sur-
face structures had been vaporized by the nuke, but the base
was now linked to the PE flagship Aurore by QCC, and the
French troops inside had been monitoring the deployment
of the Commonwealth squadron almost from the moment
Skybase had translated into the Puller battlespace.
And starward, in orbit around the gas giant, Aurore and
her sister ships were already preparing to spring the trap.
SAP 12/UCS Samar
Assembly Point Yankee
Puller 695 System
1948 hrs GMT
“Fifty newdollars,” Gunnery Sergeant Charel Ramsey said
over the squad com channel, “that the whole thing is called
off and we get told to stand down.”
“There speaks the voice of experience,” Master Sergeant
Paul Barrett said. “Didn’t you make the same bet on the way
in to Alighan?”
“Well, hey. Cut me some slack, okay? I’m bound to hit it
right some day.”
“You wish,” Corporal Takamura put in.
Still packed into his SAP, Garroway listened to the banter
among the waiting Marines, and wondered if the old hands
in his new platoon were as confident, as relaxed as they
seemed. He certainly wasn’t able to hear any stress in their
voices.
But then, perhaps they had more experience in masking it.
Shit. Did Marines ever admit that they were terrified? . . .
“Uh-oh,” Ramsey said. “Take a look at the tacsit feed.
There’s something—”
A second before, the space around the squadron had been
empty of all but Commonwealth ships. Now, though, some-
thing like a ripple spread across the electronic representation
of the background starfield . . . and then the PanEuropean
ships were there, in the Commonwealth squadron’s midst.
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There were six of them. Alphanumerics appearing
alongside each red icon identified them by name, class, and
tonnage. Largest was the monitor Rommel, an 81,000-ton
weapons platform mounting multiple plasma cannon banks,
high-energy lasers, three massive turret-mounted antimatter
accelerators, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of mis-
siles with high-yield nuclear warheads. A trio of frigates and
two destroyers followed, minnows to the monitor’s shark.
Garroway stared into the feed for a moment, confused.
The tacsit download now showed those six vessels in two
places at once—here at AP Yankee, and still in orbit around
the gas giant.
Then realization hit him. Of course. The gas giant was
thirty light-minutes distant; the six PE warships had out-
paced the radiations they’d been emitting in orbit, using
their Alcubierre Drives to cross thirty light-minutes in an
instant. As he watched, Samar’s AI updated the tacsit, eras-
ing the obsolete data.
“Are we going to launch?” Sergeant Chu demanded.
“When the hell are we going to launch?”
“Take it easy, Chu-chu,” Barrett said. “I don’t think any
of us want to go out into that.”
The master sergeant indicated the tacsit feed, which now
showed a confused tangle of ships as the two fleets engaged.
Though spread across almost 200,000 kilometers, the view
compressed battlespace to a small globe filled with moving
ships, the rigidly straight lancings of plasma and laser fire,
the arcing trajectories of missiles. In particular, the Com-
monwealth Marine fighters were plunging into the heart of
battlespace under high acceleration. At the instant the PE
ships had materialized, the carefully drawn globe of Marine
aerospace fighters had dissolved like a swarming cloud of
insects, sweeping out, around, and in toward the intruding
vessels.
Each F/A-4140 massed 94 tons, most of that divided be-
tween its powerful Consolidated Aerospace KV-1050 plasma
drive and the Solenergia ZPE quantum power transfer unit.
Two Marines, a pilot and a weapons operator, were squeezed
into a tiny dual cockpit forward. The Stardragon mounted a
STAR STRIKE
241
variety of weapons, interchangeable depending on the mis-
sion profile, but its primary was its spinal mount, running
forward all the way from the aft thrusters to become the dis-
tinctive needle-slim lance extending for 10 meters beyond
the nose.
That lance was a plasma accelerator capable of hurling
tiny masses of fusing hydrogen at near- c velocities, iner-
tia-shielded to bleed off the incredible recoil energies that
otherwise would have torn the fighter to shreds. Range was
limited to about 120,000 kilometers—less than half a light-
second—but the combination of fusion temperatures and
high-velocity kinetic impact could be turned against almost
any target with devastating effect.
In terms of both tonnage and firepower, however, the
PanEuropeans held the advantage. Both Samar and the
Lejeune, while sizeable vessels, possessed only relatively
lightweight armament—primarily point-defense lasers to
engage incoming missiles or enemy fighters. Thor and Mor-
rigan were more heavily armed, but they were two against
six, and the enemy monitor was a behemoth, slow-moving
and clumsy, but possessing a devastating long-range punch
in its trio of turret-mounted antimatter accelerators.
The one advantage held by the Commonwealth lay in
the sixteen Stardragons of VMA-980. The fighter squad-
ron already was beginning to live up to their nickname, the
Sharpshooters, a proud name born by other Marine aviation
squadrons across the centuries. As soon as each fighter was
aligned with a PE target, its on-board AI, closely linked with
the Weapons Officer’s mind, calculated range and speed, ad-
justing the spacecraft’s attitude to permit interception shots
across a range of almost 100,000 kilometers. Like miniature
suns, packets of fast-expanding fusing hydrogen snapped
across the void, penetrating magnetic shielding, slicing
through hull composites, liberating flashes of starcore fury
with each strike. The outer hull of the immense Rommel
seemed to sparkle with the impacts.
The Rommel was clearly the key to the battle, the equiva-
lent of the proverbial high ground in a conventional surface
battle. The Commonwealth destroyers and Lejeune’s fighter
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squadrons could deal with the enemy frigates and destroyers
easily enough . . . if the PanEuropean monitor could be neu-
tralized. And if not, the monitor’s heavy weaponry would
make short work of all of the Commonwealth vessels.
From the PanEuropean perspective, it was vital to knock
out the two Commonwealth destroyers quickly, before they
could combine their considerable firepower and cripple the
monitor. Neither Lejeune nor Samar possessed heavy weap-
ons—they were transports, after all, the first of Marine
aerospace fighters, the second of Marines, and while they
mounted considerable point-defense capabilities and some
high-energy lasers for ship-to-ship actions, they lacked the
more devastating firepower of antimatter accelerators or
large plasma cannon.
Admiral Edan Mitchell was in command of the Common-
wealth fleet, operating from his combat command center on
board the Lejeune. He would be linked in to the battlenet
now, Garroway thought, directing the Commonwealth fleet