to focus its full attention on the enemy monitor. Already,

fighters were issuing from the Lejeune’s ventral launch

bays, accelerating at high-G toward the PanEuropean behe-

moth. Clouds of tiny, robotic probes were already scattering

throughout the battlespace, each providing a steady feed of

visual and electronic data for the Commonwealth C3, allow-

ing the battle analyses staff to build up a coherent picture of

the action.

On board the Samar, the waiting Marines could only

watch the battle unfold around them, watch . . . and wonder

if they would get to take part in the battle, or if a direct hit on

Samar was about to end their careers in a single, sun-bril-

liant flash. Once, a plasma bolt struck Samar’s hull with a

savage, burning snap and an explosion of vapor into empty

space, and the transport had rolled slightly, staggered by the

shock. There were no casualties; armor and an AI-controlled

point-defense gun turret had been all that had been hit.

But the jolt had driven home the overwhelming sense

of helplessness Garroway and the other Marines were ex-

periencing right now. And it had led him to rather forcibly

remember one of the battle simulations he and the other

STAR STRIKE

243

recruits of his training platoon had experienced at Noctis

Labyrinthus, after their naked time, after they’d received

their Corp implants.

The historical battle had been at a place called Tarawa, in

Earth’s Pacific Ocean back in the late pre-spaceflight era. In

that action, the U.S. 2nd Marine Division, with elements of

the Army’s 27th Infantry Division, had made an amphibious

assault against a tiny tropical coral atoll defended by 4,500

Japanese under the command of Rear Admiral Shibasaki

Keiji.

Tarawa, according to the download data, had been a royal

cluster fuck, an operation that had come that close to being

an utter and complete military disaster. The preliminary

bombardment had transformed the atoll into a fire-blasted

landscape reminiscent of the cratered surface of the Moon,

but had utterly failed to touch the defenders, dug in to a

well-protected labyrinth of trenches, log forts, and five hun-

dred concrete bunkers. Worse, much worse, the first Marine

waves had gone in late, and the tides had been unexpectedly

low, so the incoming landing craft had gotten hung up on

the coral reef 500 yards offshore. The first waves of Ma-

rines had been forced to swim and wade ashore across a

fire-swept lagoon, ideal targets for the Japanese mortars and

machineguns.

A few amphibious tractors—amtracks—had made it over

the reef and across the lagoon, then begun shuttling back

and forth between the beach and the reef, carrying stranded

Marines ashore, but the Japanese fire had been accurate and

heavy. Within a few hours, half of the available amtracks

had been knocked out.

For the Marines huddled in those vehicles, the crossing

must have been hell. All the men could do was wait . . .

crowded together, helpless, wondering if the next incoming

round would be the one to score a hit on their wallowing

vehicle.

Garroway had been there, standing on the reef next to a

blazing landing craft, then on board an amtrack churning its

way across the lagoon as mortar shells sent geysers of spray

skyward on all sides. He’d charged bunkers with handfuls of

244

IAN DOUGLAS

Marines, had watched the battle slowly, slowly shift in the

attackers’ favor, but only after three days of savage fighting,

three days collapsed into several long hours by the simula-

tion feed at Noctis Labyrinthus.

Not until now, however, had Garroway truly felt one with

those long-ago, long-dead Marine brothers.

“Listen up, Marines,” Lieutenant Jones’ voice called

over the command channel. “We have orders. Stand by to

launch!”

“Shit,” Ramsey said. “This is it!”

“All you newbies,” Master Sergeant Barrett said. “Your

trajectories will be AI controlled. When you get on board

the target, just stay close and watch your feeds. Just like

your training sims.”

“Yeah,” Ramsey added. “And thank the Marine-green

gods of battle you’re not going up against the Xul first time

out of the gate!”

“Let’s kill the bastards!” Barrett added.

“Ooh-rah! ” chorused from the ranks of waiting

Marines.

Garroway watched the data feed coming through. Samar

was rotating to bring her SAP launch tubes to bear on the

Rommel, now 12,000 kilometers off and hammering away

at both the Morrigan and Thor. Garroway watched the num-

bers of the countdown flicker toward zero, bracing himself

. . . and then his SAP slammed into the void under nearly

twenty gravities of acceleration.

With inertial dampers on and his suit cushioned within

the narrow constraints of the pod by a thick, almost gelati-

nous liquid, he felt only a few of those twenty Gs, but they

were enough to crush the breath from his lungs and blur

his vision. When it cleared, when he could focus again on

his link feed, he could see Samar receding rapidly astern,

against a sky lit by intense but utterly silent flashes of light.

SAPs were too small to mount the heavy generators neces-

sary for phase-shifting, so each pod was fully visible to the

enemy’s fire-control radar and lidar systems. This visibility

was offset somewhat by the pods’ absorptive and energy-

scattering outer layers, and the pods were maneuverable

STAR STRIKE

245

enough to give any fire-control AI severe headaches as it

tried to predict the myriad incoming vectors . . . but the

enemy was tracking the Marine assault wave almost from

the instant it emerged from Samar’s armored belly.

Point-defense lasers snapped out, crisscrossing the gulf

between the Rommel and Samar. Those beams of intense,

coherent energy were invisible in hard vacuum, but the AI

governing the tactical feed was painting them in, presum-

ably to reassure the Marines on the grounds that a beam you

could see had already missed you.

Somehow, Garroway didn’t feel particularly reassured. It

seemed as though the entire sky ahead had lit up with flash-

ing, snapping threads of red light, that they were weaving a

web of fire so thick and complex that the incoming assault

pods couldn’t possibly avoid them all.

Then a brilliant, eye-twisting sun erupted over Rommel’s

aft hull as a small fusion warhead went off. Morrigan and

Thor both were firing everything they had at the monitor,

including nuke-tipped missiles, trying to buy precious time

for the Marine assault. The superheated plasma and EMP

from the blast would provide the SAPs with a bit of cover, at

least for a few seconds.

But the plasma cloud dissipated all too swiftly, and Rom-

mel’s own point-defenses were simply too effective to allow

more missiles to reach her. Abruptly, shockingly, PFC Du-

laney’s pod was speared by a point-defense beam, a direct

hit that vaporized half of the capsule, and sent fragments

hurtling outward from within an expanding cloud of hot gas.

An instant later, Sergeant Mendoza’s pod was hit, a glanc-

ing, slicing strike that sheared away part of the hull, and left

the remnant tumbling helplessly through the void.

One by one, the enemy fire-control systems locked onto

incoming pods. One by one, the pods were being slashed

from the sky. There’d been forty SAPs in the first wave.

Halfway across the gulf there were thirty-four left . . . then

thirty-two. Garroway felt panic rising; none of them were

going to make it across!

All he could do was hang there in space, a naked and

helpless target.

246

IAN DOUGLAS

Ontos 7

Battlespace, Puller 695 System

1953 hrs GMT

“Hang on to your lunch!” Lieutenant Kesar Eden yelled over

the intercom. “We’re punching it!”

Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst lay cradled in his fighting

position, linked into the Ontos’ combat system. There was

a savage thump, and then the John A. Lejeune’s launch bay

fell away around him, the carrier dwindling rapidly astern as

the MCA-71 Ontos accelerated at fifty gravities.

Ontos was the Greek word for “thing,” and this was the

second time in the long history of the Corps that a Marine

weapons system had borne that unlikely name. Eight hun-

dred years before, during the 1950s, the Marine Corps had

developed a light tracked vehicle specifically as a fast-

moving antitank weapon. Massing just 9 tons, and squeezing

three crew members inside a hull compartment just four feet

high, that first Ontos, designated the M50A1, had mounted

six 106mm recoilless rifles on the upper deck of the vehicle.

The idea had been to allow it to engage enemy armor with

six rapid shots, guaranteeing a kill; its speed, then, would let

it withdraw to cover, allowing the exposed recoilless rifles

to be reloaded.

No one, however, had quite known what to do with the

ugly little vehicle. In fact, the Army had cancelled their

original order when the prototype testing was complete.

The Marines, however, had accepted almost 300 of the ve-

hicles, taking them to war in a place called Vietnam—an

environment for the most part lacking enemy armor to serve

as targets.

The Marines were well known for their ability to adapt

to changing conditions and battlefield needs. The Ontos was

an awkward beast, it turned out, unable to carry much am-

munition, and requiring the crew to exit the vehicle in order

to reload, making them vulnerable to enemy fire. Even so,

it proved popular with its crews, who noted that frequently

the enemy would break and run as soon as one of the ugly

little beasts arrived in the combat zone. Those six recoilless

STAR STRIKE

247

rifles fired beehive rounds, each shell consisting of a bundle

of one hundred darts that sliced through jungle foliage with

devastating effect, turning the vehicle into what had been

called the world’s biggest shotgun. Used against bunkers and

against enemy infantry, the Ontos provided Marine riflemen

with effective close-fire support at the company level.

Always considered an ugly duckling, however, that first

Ontos had never been accepted by decision-makers above

the company level, and the weapon system was withdrawn

from service after it had seen only four years of combat ser-

vice. For decades after, the Ontos had been something of an

embarrassment to those tasked with designing and procur-

ing new weapons.

Eight centuries later, a new Marine weapons system had

been introduced to the Corps bearing the ancient Greek

name for “thing.” Part vehicle, part artillery, it was designed

to both provide close infantry support in combat—especially

in zero- and low-gravity environments, and also to serve

as transport for a Marine squad, getting them safely into

combat, then providing artillery support as they made their

assault. The new Ontos was undeniably ugly, as awkward-

looking as its ancient predecessor, flat, stubby, and mass-

ing 383 tons, with multiply jointed legs and a ball-mounted

forward blast head that gave it the appearance of a huge and

ungainly insect. Twelve armored Marines and their equip-

ment could be carried aft in the lightly armored belly. The

vehicle’s “wings” mounted a pair of hivel accelerator can-

nons that could fire antimatter rounds, tactical nukes, nano-

D canisters, or conventional high explosives.

Space was sharply limited on board the transport, how-

ever. Warhurst and one other gunner were squeezed in to

either side of the vehicle commander in a dorsal sponson

forward, behind the blast-head mount, and cyberlinked into

the Ontos’ command network. The Marines aft were as

tightly cocooned as their counterparts in the SAP pods now

being launched from the Samar. Like the ancient Ontos,

no one really knew what to do with the modern weapon of

that name, but the Corps had adapted it especially for ship-

boarding actions. Four, including Warhurst’s vehicle, had

248

IAN DOUGLAS

been accelerated from the Lejeune’s launch bay, and were

vectoring in on the PanEuropean monitor Rommel now.

Like aerospace fighters, the Ontos operated off of a Sole-

nergia ZPE quantum-power transfer unit. Using the same

principle as a Quantum-Coupled Communications system,

the ZPE transfer unit used quantum entanglement to trans-

mit energy from one point to another, without actually tra-

versing the space in between. Extremely high energies were

drawn from the zero-point field taps on board the Lejeune

and the Samar, but routed directly to field-entangled power

receivers on board individual F/A-4140s and the MCA-71

Ontos transports, without the possibility of that transmis-

sion being blocked or even detected.

The system had some important trade-offs. The advan-

tage, of course, was that the massive quantum power taps

could be left back on board the capital ships. The disad-

vantage, though, was that if the Lejeune or the Samar were

knocked out of action, their orphaned offspring would

become dead in space, with only their relatively low-powered

on-board antimatter converter systems from which to draw

on for life support and maneuvering.

All of that was of less importance to Warhurst now than

was the simple fact that he was back in action at last.

When he left Recruit Training Command, there’d been

speculation that he would end up in a rifle company with

a number of his former recruits. The 1MIEF personnel de-

partment had killed that idea, however, and in fairly short

order. Marine recruits were instilled with the absolute and

unvarying principle of the Corps—Marines work together,

as a unit. However, learning that basic lesson as they go

through boot camp, most Marines reach graduation hating

their DI. Respecting him, yes, but hating him nonetheless.

It wasn’t that 1MIEF’s command constellation was

afraid that some former recruit of Warhurst’s was going

to get even some night on deployment. Platoon AIs were

good watchdogs when it came to that sort of thing. They

were conscious, though, of the need for a smoothly func-

tioning structure at the squad, platoon, and company levels.

Hatred—or fear—of a squad mate during a combat situation

STAR STRIKE

249

when everyone needed to work together smoothly, as a unit,

might get Marines killed.

So Gunny Warhurst had been assigned to an Ontos crew,

a demanding billet that required experienced combat vet-

erans, rather than newbies. The platoon’s fresh meat would

do best in assault platoons where they could draw on one

another—and on the old hands in each platoon—for support

and strength. Serving a gun station on an Ontos required

more seasoning, and the ability to link very closely indeed

with the vehicle commander, and with the other gunner on

board.

Warhurst’s relief at being in action again had more, much

more, to do with his need to get away from Mars and the

still-burning pain of having been evicted from his family.

The psych AIs at Ares RTC had tried to counsel him through

the rough parts, but he honestly couldn’t tell now if they’d

done a damned thing to help.

He knew he was still spending way too much time use-

lessly rehearsing conversations in his head. He so wanted

his family—especially Julie—to understand, to, to what? To

come to their senses and feel how he needed the Corps, to

understand that this was his family as much as the Tamalyn-

Danner line marriage, because, damn it, the Corps was a

part of who and what he was, that he could no more discard

it than he could discard his own heart.

He was beginning to realize that a lot of his grief was

centered less on losing Julie, Eric, Donal, and Callie than it

was on being rejected. Dumped. As though he meant nothing

to any of them, had contributed nothing, had been nothing.

When he thought about how they’d cast him aside, it was all

he could do to see through that haze of enveloping white pain

. . . a searing mingling of grief and loss, of fury and hatred

and broken ego and insulted honor and yearning desire.

He hated them all, now. And he still wanted them to come

back, to say it had all been a mistake.

He still wanted to love them. . . .

Damn it, he was doing it again. Focus, you idiot! he

snarled at himself, furious. Pay attention to what you’re

doing or you’ll get us all killed!

250

IAN DOUGLAS

The Ontos had vaulted through the emptiness between

the Lejeune and the enemy monitor, shifting vectors wildly

and rapidly in order to make things as difficult as possible

for the Rommel’s fire-control AIs. Drawing on the ZPE

energy tap on board the Lejeune, the Ontos could afford the

added power-hungry luxury of phase-shifting, which made

the enemy’s job even harder in terms of target acquisition

and lock, and provided some measure of defense against

beams and shrapnel.

But not complete protection, he noted, as a small hivel

slug struck the Ontos amidships. He felt the staggering

shock as a few grams of depleted uranium passed through

the ship. Most of the released kinetic energy, fortunately,

was dissipated by the Ontos’ phase-shifted state, but enough

leaked through to jar his teeth.

He stayed focused on his link, however. They were still

flying, so he ignored the impact, figuring that there was

nothing he could do about it except to keep doing his job,

which was to try to track incoming missiles or armored

enemy troops or gun or sensor emplacements on the moni-

tor’s hull and knock them out with hivel cannon fire.

The ship’s AI had already highlighted the turret that had

loosed that slug. He dragged his mental targeting cursor

over the dome and thought-clicked the number two gun

starboard, sending a stream of high-velocity rounds slash-

ing through the turret in great, pulsing gouts of white heat

before it could fire another shot.

As it neared its objective, as the Rommel loomed huge in

his downloaded mental vision, the Ontos’ hull began morph-

ing into its landing configuration, wings and weapons out-

stretched, clawed legs extended, blast head forward and

down, seeking contact.

Then the Ontos was on the monitor’s hull with a heavy,

ringing thud, its ugly blast head extending and dropping to

bring a torch of plasma energy, as hot as the core of a sun,

into contact with the monitor’s armor cladding.

Under that searing assault, the outer nanolayers rippled

and flowed as they tried to distribute the heat, then burst

away in clouds of vapor, exposing the tender ceramics and

STAR STRIKE

251

alloys beneath. The Ontos’ claws dug in and held, as the

current of vaporizing metals and composites howled past

like a hurricane wind, expending itself in vacuum. A crater

formed, then deepened, widening, as the Ontos thing con-

tinued to eat its way through the skin and into the heart of

the enemy ship.

The Rommel carried fighters—not as many as the

Lejeune, but enough to provide some measure of close de-

fense against such tactics as the Ontos was now employing.

His AI warned of two bogies swinging up and around over

the horizon of the monitor’s hull, identifying them as PanEu-

ropean Épée fighters—robotic craft that were exceptionally

fast and maneuverable because they had no flesh and blood

on board to coddle.

Warhurst was screaming as he brought both starboard-

side guns to bear on the stooping targets. . . .

18�

0112.1102

SAP 12

PanEuropean Monitor Rommel

Puller 695 System

2004 hrs GMT

Garroway had been wondering if any of the SAPs were going

to make it across the gulf between Samar and the Rommel,

as pod after pod was struck down by the enemy point de-

fenses, but then a fresh wave of blasts flashed and pulsed

across the monitor’s hull, targeting the point-defense turrets

and fire-control sensors. Morrigan was now concentrating

all of her fire against the PanEuropean monitor, attempting

to screen the Marine assault wave, giving them a precious

few seconds to complete their run, and a number of aero-

space fighters had closed enough of the gap to pour con-

centrated devastation into the shuddering hull of the huge

enemy ship. Although he hadn’t seen them, the tacsit feed

also showed three MCA–71 Ontos transports had touched

down on the monitor’s hull, and were busily tunneling into

thick armor. Another nuke, one of a salvo fired from the

Thor, got through a moment later, flaring with dazzling in-

candescence against the night.

But the Rommel was still very much in action. In seconds,

three more SAPs vaporized in white-hot flashes of energy . .

. and the tacsit showed enemy fighters as well, rising from the

monitor to engage the incoming pods.

But by now the PanEuropean monitor was looming

STAR STRIKE

253

huge just ahead, its surface rushing up to meet Garroway’s

incoming capsule. The guiding AI, Garroway noted with

an almost detached interest, was directing his pod into a

gaping crater blown open moments before by the plasma

blast head of an MCA–71. An instant later, and despite

the inertial damping, Garroway felt the savage shock as

his SAP slammed into the wreckage of what had been the

Rommel’s hull at that point.

The SAP’s squared-off prow was designed to collapse

against whatever it struck, releasing a ring of nanotech dis-

assemblers programmed to ignore the pod, but to eat through

hull metal or composite with which it was in contact. As the

pod slipped deeper into the PE ship’s armor cladding, the

SAP’s entire outer surface turned gelatinous with nano-D,

eating away at the metal and lubricating the pod’s move-

ment. Vanishing into the ship’s hull, the pod continued

burrowing forward, dissolving wreckage and armor, until

sensors within the drilling head detected an empty space

beyond.

When that happened, nano-disassemblers halted their

eating, then converted to sealant, fusing pod to hull, and the

leading end of the assault craft flashed from solid to gas in a

savage liberation of raw energy.

Garroway was waiting, gulping down air, heart pound-

ing, the flamer mounted on his 660-battlesuit’s left forearm

already aimed and armed. As the bow of the assault pod ex-

ploded into gas, he followed up with a burst from the flamer,

sending a fireball searing into the Rommel’s interior.

He was right behind the dissipating fireball, allowing

the pod mechanism to propel him forward and through the

breach into the monitor’s hull as the dampening gel around

him flashed into harmless vapor.

What followed next was pure training. Rommel pos-

sessed an artificially generated gravity field, set to about

three-quarters of a gravity—roughly equivalent to the grav-

ity of Aurore. He was entering the monitor from an unusual

angle, coming down through the overhead of one of the in-

terior decks, and the local gravity field grabbed at him as he

fell through the opening.

254

IAN DOUGLAS

There’d been no good way to predict where he would come

out, or what the local gravity would be like. Part of his brain

registered the fall, and long hours of training took over. He

twisted as he fell, landing catlike, if heavily, on his boots,

his left arm already sweeping up and around to engage any

targets that might present themselves. His helmet sensors

gave him a 360-degree view in a side mental window, but he

pivoted in any case to see for himself, checking both ways.

Several bodies of the ship’s crew lay on the deck both

ahead and behind, within a passageway choked with an im-

penetrable fog of smoke and a near-total darkness relieved

only by his battlesuit’s shoulder-mounted lights. Whether

they’d been killed by external fire, by the blast as the SAP

opened up, or by his flamer, there was no way of knowing.

Nor was it important. A Marine assault was built around

one simple concept—the employment of extreme and sudden

violence to overwhelm local defenses and secure the battle

initiative.

And to keep the initiative, he needed to keep moving. If

he stopped, if he went on the defensive, he would in minutes

be isolated, surrounded, and killed. Two of the ship’s crew

appeared from a side passage just ahead; he triggered his

flamer and saw the two writhe and struggle and then wilt

in the torchblast. Neither had been wearing armor, though

both were carrying mag-pulse rifles. In another second,

both were dead . . . probably irretrievables.

“Green one, one-two!” he shouted into his helmet pick-

up. “On board! Request orienteering fix!”

“One moment,” the voice of the platoon AI said. Then a

window opened in a corner of his mind, showing an anima-

tion of the corridor he was in now, and a flashing pointer

showing which way he needed to go.

That way. Strange. His instincts and his implanted hard-

ware both had been suggesting the other way . . . but he was

feeling a bit disoriented both by the shock of landing and the

drop into the Rommel’s local gravity.

But if Achilles said go that way, that was the way he

would go. The animation also showed the ghosted-out shad-

ows of other passageways around him, and moving green

STAR STRIKE

255

blips representing other Marines. The sight was deeply reas-

suring; he was alone in that corridor, but he could see other

Marines appearing one after another in other, nearby com-

partments and passageways, all of them moving in the same

general direction.

A monitor was a huge ship, a veritable city wrapped in

thick cladding, and enclosing a maze of passageways and

compartments designed to house several thousand crew

members. A few hundred Marines—to say nothing of how-

ever many members of the 55th MARS had actually survived

the passage from Samar—could not hope to kill or over-

power the entire crew, especially when a number of those

enemy personnel would be PE armored marines trained to

combat just such an assault as this.

The Commonwealth battle-command AIs had already

identified the key objectives within the Rommel, using avail-

able schematics and ship plans from Intelligence, as well as

sounding information being gathered from robotic probes

already burrowing into the ship’s thick hull. The combined

information, transmitted back to Samar and the Lejeune, al-

lowed Achilles and the AIs within the Combat Command

Center to build up a coherent picture of the Rommel’s in-

terior, and to know exactly where each Marine was at the

moment in relation to a list of possible objectives. A hand-

ful of Commonwealth Marines wandering around on their

own would have been lost in moments, easy targets for the

enemy’s counterattack. Under Achilles’ guidance, however,

they could be sure they were moving as a unit, with common

purpose.

Garroway’s primary objective was a command-and-

control center buried in the Rommel’s core. To get there,

he needed to follow this passageway for about 20 meters,

then locate a maintenance shaft in the starboard bulkhead, a

broad, open tunnel plunging into the monitor’s core.

“Here,” Achilles said in his mind, highlighting a section

of the passageway’s bulkhead in red. “There is an access

tube just beyond that partition.”

“Got it,” he said, and he turned his mag-pulse rifle on

his right arm on the bulkhead, slamming a rapid-fire stream

256

IAN DOUGLAS

of slugs into the wall. Metal and ceramplast shredded, and

then he could see through the hole and into a black empti-

ness beyond.

He used a personal drone to check the far side, tossing

the fist-sized robot sensor through the hole and watching the

feedback on a helmet display. The maintenance shaft was

a broad but narrow space descending relative to the local

gravity field. There was no artificial gravity, but his armor

thrusters ought to get him where he needed to go.

Just behind him, the overhead suddenly bulged, then ex-

ploded as another SAP broke through. Garroway decided not

to wait for a possible volley of friendly fire, but he tagged

the opening with a small transponder that would show the

bulkhead breach to anyone following him, then plunged

through himself.

The shaft interior was in complete darkness, but his ar-

mor’s shoulder lights illuminated his surroundings in harsh,

shifting patterns of white light and black shadow. A moment

later, he became aware of other lights above him, as other

Marines broke through into the shaft and began the descent

into the monitor’s core.

He was no longer alone . . . a very good feeling indeed.

Kicking off from the entrance breach, he drifted down

several meters—“down,” of course, being a relative term in

the sudden falling emptiness of microgravity. He triggered

his suit thrusters and moved more quickly, using his hands

to guide himself along the piping and tightly tied bundles of

fiber optics lining the shaft walls.

He moved through the shaft for what seemed like hours,

though his implant timer insisted it was only three minutes.

At last, though, Achilles highlighted an area of tunnel wall

just ahead. “There,” the AI told him. “That will give you

direct access to your objective.”

The tacsit feed continued to give him a ghosted overlay of

what was behind the surrounding bulkheads. Pulling him-

self up short alongside the indicated section of the tunnel, he

hung in emptiness for another few seconds until five more

Marines reached him, snagging hold of conduits and coming

to a halt at the designated level.

STAR STRIKE

257

An armored form bumped against him, steadying itself

on a conduit. The 660-armor’s surface Nanoflage made the

figure almost ghostly in the tunnel’s gloom, but a transpon-

der-relayed ID appeared on Garroway’s helmet display—

Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey. Garroway felt an almost

overwhelming sense of relief, so much so he could feel his

knees trembling. He’d not wanted to go through that bulkhead

alone.

“Hey, Gunnery Sergeant,” he said. “I guess this is it.”

“Looks that way. Wait until the others get here.”

Three more armored figures arrived down the shaft in

short order—Sergeant Richard Chu, Corporal Marin Dela-

zlo, and PFC Sandre Kenyon.

“Okay, people,” Ramsey told them, pulling a breaching

charge from an external suit pouch. “We breach and we go

through, standard one-by assault. Everyone set?”

“Ready, Gunnery Sergeant,” Garroway said. He was fo-

cusing on damping down the fear.

“Fire in the hole!” Ramsey announced, slapping the self-

sticking breaching charge to the sealed hatch. The Marines

rolled away, and an instant later an intense gout of white-hot

metal erupted from the charge, as a nano-D thermal-decou-

pler turned titanium alloy to a spray of liquid and gaseous

metal. The spray grew brighter, expanding into an oval patch

roughly 2 meters high . . . and then the metal burned through

with a brilliant flash.

Ramsey was the first Marine through the still-hot open-

ing, but Garroway crowded through just behind him. Both

Marines tumbled once more into gravity, this time within

a large and circular chamber filled with control consoles,

work stations, and a number of men and women in PE uni-

forms, reclining on link couches as they directed their side

of the battle through the ship’s Net.

Operating under Achilles’ instructions, Ramsey turned

his pulse rifle against one particular bank of instrumenta-

tion, slamming it into junk. The salvo seemed to shock the

reclining enemy officers, as their link with the Rommel’s AI

net was broken and they were dropped out of their command

virtual reality.

258

IAN DOUGLAS

Achilles identified one threat—an armored Marine

standing near the compartment’s single hatch. The guy’s

armor would be proof against flamer fire. Instead, Garro-

way triggered a burst from his mag-pulse rifle, the stream of

high-velocity slugs catching the enemy marine high in the

chest and slamming him backward into the hatch.

The other Marines were coming through the opening into

the compartment as well. One of the enemy officers pulled

an ugly handgun from a holster and fired from his couch;

the round ricocheted off Ramsey’s helmet. Chu took three

steps and placed the black muzzle of his flamer against the

man’s skull. “Drop it, monsieur,” he growled.

The chances were good that the language spoken by

Rommel’s crew was Deutsch, not Français, but the mes-

sage was unmistakable. The man, eyes bulging, dropped the

pistol and raised his hands. Other men and women in the

room were already doing the same.

Other Marines, guided by Achilles, were attaching nano-

D charges to specific consoles and link stations, and Ramsey

was jacking a small, heavily armored box into a particular

computer access relay. Garroway and Chu, gesturing with

their weapons, herded the PanEuropean personnel off of

their link couches and across the compartment, lining them

up on their knees, facing an empty bulkhead, their hands

behind their heads.

This compartment, Garroway knew, was one of three aux-

iliary control rooms buried within the Rommel. Some of the

others might be destroyed, or isolated by damage, or Marine

assault squads might already be breaking into them.

All they could do now was wait. Garroway kept the

POWs covered, while Ramsey worked his computer link

and the other three Marines kept their weapons trained on

the sealed hatch. They wouldn’t fire the nano-D charges

unless they absolutely had to. The idea was to capture the

monitor, not junk her . . . but they would render the huge ship

harmlessly inert if they couldn’t force her to surrender.

“Okay,” Ramsey said after a few moments. “Achilles has

interfaced with Rommel’s AI suite. We’re in.”

“Ooh- rah!” Garroway cried, and several of the others

STAR STRIKE

259

joined in. Sandre Kenyon was, by chance, standing close

by. Keeping his weapon still trained on the kneeling POWs,

Garroway reached out and gave Sandre an awkward one-

armed hug, their black armor clashing as it came together

like a pair of colliding tanks.

“It’s gonna be close,” Ramsey said a moment later. He

was getting things on his tactical feed that weren’t funneling

through to the rest of the squad. “We have three more enemy

ships arriving from in-system. Another destroyer . . . and it

looks like a couple of light escort cruisers, Pegasus . . . and

Sagitta. Our fighters are reforming to meet them.”

His momentary rush of enthusiasm cooled, Garroway

stood, covering the prisoners, and waited. Rommel, appar-

ently, was still in the fight, though only intermittently now

as more and more of her Net circuitry was shut down or com-

promised. Garroway tried to figure out what was going on

through the platoon tacsit feed, but gave up after a few mo-

ments. The tangle of ships out there was hopelessly confused,

now, with no fewer than thirteen major warships and well

over a hundred fighters from both sides, plus Marine Ontos

transports and shuttles, robotic sensor craft, and hundreds of

circling, target-seeking missiles. Nukes were going off every

few moments, and each blast tended to blank out the data

transmission with momentary storms of white-noise static.

Someone was at the hatch. Garroway heard the thump,

followed by a mechanical-sounding clank. Chu, Kenyon, and

Delazlo hunkered down behind consoles and link couches,

their weapons aimed at the hatch. Ramsey continued work-

ing with the computer feed relay. By now, a small army of

artificial intelligences were being beamed across from the

Lejeune and the Samar, downloading themselves into the

Rommel’s computer net. If they could capture the electronic

high ground in time. . . .

“The hatch may be a diversion,” Achilles whispered in

their minds. “I am detecting suspicious noises here.” The

AI highlighted a section of bulkhead at right angles to the

bulkhead containing the hatch.

“Right,” Chu said. “Kenyon! Keep covering the hatch!

Laz, with me!”

260

IAN DOUGLAS

Chu and Delazlo shifted positions to cover the new threat.

A moment later, the hatch flared with a dazzling white light,

metal dissolving under a high-energy assault of nano disas-

semblers. Kenyon opened up with her pulse rifle as soon as

the hatch started melting away and there was no longer a

threat of own-goal riocochets in the compartment, sending a

steady stream of high-velocity fire through the opening and

into the compartment beyond.

Five seconds later, a second gout of light and hot gases ex-

ploded from the other bulkhead, burning through a commu-

nications console. A heavily armored Sturmjäger appeared,

stepping through the gush of incandescent gasses, his dark

grey combat armor outwardly similar to the Marines’ 660-

battlesuit, but with a flatter, more complex helmet and a dif-

ferent weapons loadout.

The German armor appeared to flow and distort as its

surface Nanoflage blended with smoke and bulkhead, but

the elite trooper’s battlesuit could not render its wearer

completely invisible. As he moved, a general outline of the

figure could clearly be seen, and certain things like the

visual pick-ups and external sensor gear were still plainly

visible. The Sturmjäger stepped through the molten open-

ing into a double stream of high-velocity kinetic-kill rounds.

One round in ten contained a charge of nano-D, but the

impact alone was sufficient to shred the man’s plastron and

helmet, opening the suit up in a shocking blossom of bright

red blood. A second trooper came through behind the first,

and was cut down.

After that, there was silence.

Ramsey, Garroway knew, was waiting with a coded thought-

click ready. If he triggered it, the instrumentation in the com-

partment would dissolve. The enemy would hold off on using

things like grenades, thermal charges, or nano-D because they

didn’t want to destroy Rommel’s command-center electronics

any more than the Commonwealth Marines did.

Stand off.

And then, four minutes later, the incredible, the impossible

happened. A white rag appeared in the opening in the bulk-

head. “Marines?” a voice said over a standard com channel.

“Marines? Bitte. We surrender. The ship surrenders. . . .”

STAR STRIKE

261

“Stay back!” Chu demanded. “We want confirmation.”

But the confirmation came through moments later. At

the order of Kapitän Walther Hirsch, commanding officer

of the PanEuropean monitor Rommel, the ship was formally

surrendered. Garroway learned later that the electronic as-

sault AIs, feeding in through the relay, had overcome the

ship’s electronic defenses and taken control of her computer

net. Rommel’s captain, when he found he could no longer

control his ship, had safed her weapons, then announced his

capitulation.

The ship-boarding action turned the tide of the battle.

Though the Marines in the assault teams wouldn’t learn the

details until later, Rommel’s capitulation triggered a full-

scale disengagement by the other PE ships. One of the PE

frigates and a destroyer had been knocked out of action and

were now helplessly adrift, but the others had broken off the

attack and begun accelerating back in-system.

Over the course of the next hour, naval personnel arrived

from the Lejeune to try to make Rommel operational once

more, though that was clearly going to take time. The moni-

tor had been badly mauled in the fight, and many of her

weapons systems were off-line.

The situation was still extremely serious, however. Both

Thor and Morrigan had also taken heavy damage, and six

aerospace fighters out of the three squadrons engaged,

one fighter in eight, had been destroyed. Both Samar and

Lejeune had taken light damage as well. The original opera-

tional plan for Lafayette had called for at least three loads of

ship, fourteen in all, to be translated into Puller space, and

for those fourteen ships to then make a concerted assault

against the PE ships while they were still in orbit around

the gas giant. The Marine assault was to have been directed

against the cruiser Aurore, which Intelligence believed was

the enemy command ship, and which was believed to be the

vessel where the Marines captured from the Puller listening

post were being held.

A hostage-rescue assault was now out of the question,

since the advantage of surprise had been lost.

Still, the capture of Rommel had certainly changed the

262

IAN DOUGLAS

tactical balance, somewhat. Admiral Mitchell elected to

wait and see what happened next.

Some two hours after the end of the battle, Skybase trans-

lated in from distant Sol with five more ships crammed into

her flight deck, the destroyers Kali and Bellona, and three

escort gunships, Active, Amazon, and Avenger.

General Alexander entered into immediate negotiations

with the PanEuropean commander and, before much longer,

the Battle of Puller 659 officially was over.

USMC Skybase

Puller 695 System

2329 hrs GMT

General Alexander stared across the virtual table at the icon

of his opposite number in the PanEuropean fleet, an older,

diminutive, and bearded man whose personal software had

introduced as Admiral Pascal D’Urville. Intelligence records

indicated that D’Urville was better known in military circles

by the nickname “Marlon,” meaning “Little Falcon,” and the

man’s formal corona flammae actually held within it the faint

image of a bird of prey with outstretched wings. According

to the mil-history downloads, he’d won the nickname while

in command of the battlecruiser Faucon during a nasty little

naval confrontation between the PanEuropean Republic and

the Islamic Theocracy at Ubaylah twenty years before.

“We do not want to be here,” Alexander was saying. “We

have no wish to fight you. You are not our enemy. This is the

wrong war, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy.”

“But I note,” D’Urville replied with just a ghost of a

smile, “that you are here, monsieur. Fighting us.” He was

speaking Anglic, rather than having his words translated by

AI interpreters, with only rare lapses into Français.

“We fought you, yes. We will continue fighting you if

you don’t release our people.”

“What people?”

“The Marines you took from our listening post.”

“An illegal listening post, established clandestinely

within PanEuropean territory.”

STAR STRIKE

263

Alexander stared at the other’s virtual image for a long

moment. There was no way to tell what the man was really

feeling at the moment, no way to read his electronically

created persona. That faint, somewhat sardonic smile

might be reflecting what the man himself felt, or it could

be something inserted by the AIs running the simulation.

“Admiral, I’m not going to argue with you about legali-

ties. That’s for lawyers and politicians to decide. The fact

is . . . you and I are here, and the politicians are on Aurore

and on Earth hundreds of light-years distant. I suggest that

we leave the politicians out of this, just for the moment. Just

possibly, we can find a means of hammering out a peace

without their . . . help.”

He gave a deep, Gallic shrug. “You must know, sir, that

my own powers in that regard are limited. I am charged with

defending PanEuropean space. I am scarcely what you could

call a peacemaker.”

“Admiral, I am here for two reasons, and two reasons

only. I intend to free my people which you are holding as

prisoners of war, and I intend to assemble the rest of my

fleet here, in this system, and then depart through that star-

gate yonder. We offer no threat to PanEuropean sovereignty.

When we move through the gate, I doubt very much that

you’ll see us again.”

D’Urville’s eyes widened slightly. “You hope to die on

the other side?”

“No. Not if we can help it. What I hope is that we will find

other ways home, after dealing with the Xul threat. In any case,

it will take time. Quite probably years. Possibly decades.”

“A long war.”

“A large foe.”

“Monsieur . . . have you given thought to why the Re-

public has refused your fleet passage here? If you should

succeed . . . if you should find the Xul on the other side of

the gate, if you should awaken him, his planet-killer ships

might well come through here, in PanEuropean space. My

government fears your . . . your government’s impetuous

nature. You don’t know what you’re dealing with beyond

the gates. Your meddling might call down the Xul’s wrath

264

IAN DOUGLAS

upon la République. Have you given thought to the possi-

bility that it might be better, far better, simply to leave the

Xul alone . . . and pray that they never find us?”

“It’s too late for that, Admiral. You’ve seen the reports.

About the Argo. If the Xul aren’t already on the way, they

will be soon. And when they come, no matter where they

come, no human world will be safe.”

He appeared to consider this. “Your Commonwealth is

taking on a rather arrogant responsibility, you know, one in-

volving the survival of all of humanity. Some of us believe

that to be . . . short-sighted. And stupid.”

“And which is the more short-sighted, Admiral? To face

what’s coming boldly? Even go out to meet it on its own

ground? Or to hide our heads in the dirt until we’re taken

and devoured? Admiral . . . the Republic can do what it

likes, but we are not going to sit around doing nothing while

those monsters roll right over us. We’ve lived in the shadow

of fear for too long. No more.”

“Perhaps that is for the politicians to decide. We have

other matters to deal with, eh?”

“The POWs. Yes.”

“You must realize, General Alexander, that I have lim-

ited authority here. Even if we held the people you men-

tion—and we do not—I cannot simply hand over prisoners

of war without some . . . reciprocity? Yes. Something from

you in exchange.”

“Simple enough. I’m told that we hold nearly four thou-

sand men and women, crewmembers of the Rommel. Includ-

ing Captain Hirsch.”

D’Urville gave a sour expression. “Perhaps we don’t want

Captain Hirsch back.” He shrugged again. “In any case, our

main fleet shall be here within a day or two. It might be best

if you withdrew with your small fleet now, while you still

can. Details of a prisoner exchange can be handled by our

respective governments.”

Now he knew the man was bluffing. “Admiral D’Urville,

I’m not going to fucking play games with you. Perhaps you

recognize these?” With a thought-click, he opened a data-

filled window.

STAR STRIKE

265

Hours before, when the Marines had been penetrating the

Rommel’s electronic fastness, the uploaded AIs that had shut

down the PanEuropean monitor had at the same time ac-

cessed a treasure trove of data stored in the enemy vessel’s

computer net. The information included updated rosters on

all of the PE ships in-system, their operational orders, ar-

chived orders going back for weeks . . . and the complete

communications logs recording conversations between the

Rommel and the Aurore.

Lejeune’s command constellation had already prepared a

complete translation for Alexander, which included the text

of an exchange between Admiral D’Urville and a Captain

Hirsch, just before Rommel and the other PE ships had en-

gaged their Alcubierre Drives for the run out to the stargate.

We are on our own, Captain, D’Urville had told his subor-

dinate. They can send us nothing more. It is up to you, my

friend, to hold the line here.

We can do it if we can defeat them in detail, sir, Hirsch

had replied. If we can destroy this small squadron before

more Commonwealth warships arrive. If that happens, well

. . . I fear our assets are stretched too thin. We would have

to withdraw.

Do it. They are only four ships. Intelligence tells us that

the two transports carry only a handful of fighters and Ma-

rines, a token force only. Kill them now, and we will be wait-

ing for the rest when they arrive.

D’Urville was now reading those words.

Much had been written over the past few centuries re-

garding modern space tactical combat—especially the

use of Marines in ship-to-ship actions such as the one that

had taken down the Rommel. A tactic as old as the ancient

empire of Rome, combat boarding actions seemed nonsen-

sical on the face of it. Armchair strategists had repeatedly

announced that using men to storm and board enemy ships

had no more place in modern warfare than skill at swinging

a sword.

But there were times when capturing an enemy warship

was far, far more valuable in winning a battle than simply

vaporizing it. The recovery and analyses of data from enemy

266

IAN DOUGLAS

computer networks constituted one entire branch of modern

military intelligence. It was information that won battles,

not mere firepower.

“We are not at war, Admiral,” Alexander told the other

man. “Not yet. But you are not now in a position to play

games with me . . . to delay . . . or to fight back. You will

return my people to me and you will have your squadron

stand down. If you do not, my Marines will board each of

your ships in turn and shut them down.”

He didn’t add that Commonwealth AIs had followed

communications pathways in from the Rommel to other

ships in the PanEuropean fleet. It would take time for them

to compromise the entire PE data net, but, like an insidious

invasion of computer viruses, they were already piggyback-

ing into the enemy’s network. At the very least, Alexander

would know within another few hours exactly where any

Commonwealth POWs were being held. He would target

that vessel first; once the POWs were freed, he would take

down the rest.

With luck, it would be simpler still. A single command

from him would shut down the enemy fleet cold.

“You wouldn’t dare!” D’Urville declared. “As you said,

there is no war, yet! You would not . . . would not . . .”

“Admiral, I am a Commonwealth Marine . . . a direct

line descendent of the original United States Marine Corps.

I do not make threats. And I do not make a request a second

time. Surrender here, now, and retain the integrity of your

fleet . . . or surrender to my Marines when they board your

ship.”

The two men locked gazes for a long several seconds.

Then, reluctantly, D’Urville broke eye contact. “You win,”

he said.

And the negotiations were over, the war ended before it

had even been declared.

19�

0412.1102

USMC Skybase

Anneau orbit, Puller 695 System

0950 hrs GMT

The Galaxy is a hellishly big place.

Even that minute backwater pocket of the Galaxy that

held all of the worlds of Humankind was immense beyond

all human reckoning. Not even faster-than-light travel or the

quantum miracle of instantaneous communications could

make that volume of emptiness and thinly scattered suns

small enough for any mere government to truly claim to own

or actually to control it.

Admiral D’Urville was the local PanEuropean military

commander, and while he continued to receive orders from

Aurore, he was the man who had to determine how best to

implement them in the distant and out-of-the-way cosmic

speck that was the Puller system—or Anneau, as the PanEu-

ropeans called it. Aurore might suggest—even order—but

D’Urville, simply by virtue of his isolation, was the one who

would decide policy here.

General Alexander stood on Skybase’s main observation

deck, looking up at the world called Ring with something

approaching religious awe. He’d assumed—like nearly ev-

eryone else within the Commonwealth who’d heard the

name—that the world had been named Anneau, or Ring,

and the red dwarf sun Ringstar, because of the location of

the Stargate in the system’s lonely outer reaches. Clearly

268

IAN DOUGLAS

though, that was not the case . . . or else the presence of

the Stargate was a coincidence that permitted an amusing

double meaning.

Like many gas giants, the world of Ring was, in fact,

ringed, surrounded by broad, knife-edge-thin bands of icy

particles. And like Uranus in Earth’s solar system, the planet

had an extreme axial tilt—85 degrees—so that it seemed to

be lying on its side in respect to the plane of its orbit about

Étoile d’Anneau.

As a result, twice in Anneau’s brief, twenty-two-week

year, its rings were face-on to the light of its star, and by

chance that was the case now. The Commonwealth fleet had

maneuvered in-system to approach Anneau and its circling

moons, and from this vantage point, half a million kilo-

meters out, the red-hued light of the tiny sun was diffused

through the glittering plane of the rings, transforming them

into a dazzling series of nested ruby arcs, transparently deli-

cate, spectacularly beautiful.

The Republican fleet had gathered close by the PanEuro-

pean base, constructed on one of the shepherd moons orbit-

ing Anneau just outside the outermost band of sparkling red

light. The Commonwealth fleet, clustered about Skybase,

was maintaining a position farther out, on the gravitational

high ground, so to speak, well clear of the deeper reaches of

Anneau’s gravity well and outside the worst of the planet’s

radiation belts.

A dozen other Commonwealth ships had been dispatched

to the Stargate, where Marines were reclaiming the captured

listening post and preparing, upon the successful completion

of Operation Lafayette, to initiate Operation Gorgon.

With friendly artificial intelligences now resident

throughout the local PanEuropean computer net, the Com-

monwealth fleet had been monitoring a steady stream of

FTL communications between the two Aurores—the PE

flagship and the distant Republican capital. Alexander had

felt considerable compassion for Admiral D’Urville as he’d

been castigated by his superiors for his surrender . . . but the

electronic eavesdropping had proven conclusively that there

would be no help forthcoming for the PanEuropeans in the

STAR STRIKE

269

Anneau system, and it appeared that the Auroran govern-

ment would indeed be forced to accept the fait accompli of

the Marine victory in the sharp little engagement at Puller

659. For one thing, and against all expectations, there had

been a small but significant mutiny within the PE fleet;

as promised, Traditionalist Catholic elements had tried to

seize control of several PE ships, including the Sagitta, the

Détroyat, and the frigate Drogou. As nearly as could be

learned from intercepted comm messages transmitted back

to Aurore, the mutinies all had been suppressed, but the mo-

mentary confusion within the PanEuropean ranks had evi-

dently contributed to their decision to withdraw—and to not

re-engage once additional Commonwealth fleet elements

began making their appearance.

It left Alexander wondering just how close-run the battle

actually had been. It was now clear that by putting their own

special forces troops into the listening post, the PanEuro-

peans had known exactly when the Skybase had first trans-

lated into the Anneau system, and been able to strike when

the Commonwealth forces had been at their weakest. But for

the uncertainties of the promised religious uprising on the

Republican ships—coupled with the valiant assault by the

55th MARS on the Rommel, Operation Lafayette might well

have been a military disaster from the first.

And it also left him wondering what weakness might be

buried within the Gorgon op plan, what overlooked aspect

of the battle plan or key lack of intel on the enemy might be

waiting to undo all of that planning in a single nightmare

orgy of flame, death, and destruction somewhere beyond the

Stargate.

Well, insofar as that went, they’d planned the best they

could. Everything that could be taken into account had

been. The op would succeed, or it would fail . . . but either

way they’d done everything possible.

And Alexander remained convinced that Gorgon was the

only means available to keep the Xul from finally devouring

the worlds of Humankind.

And they would be making the Stargate transit with a

solid victory under their belts. Yesterday, shortly after they’d

270

IAN DOUGLAS

arrived in orbit around Anneau, a PE shuttle had flown up

and out of the gas giant’s gravity well and approached the

Skybase. On board was Major George Tomanaga, Lieuten-

ants Fitzpatrick and Lee, and the other Marine personnel

captured when the PanEuropeans had discovered and taken

over the listening post. Lee had been in a medical stasis tube,

still undergoing treatment from her radiation exposure in

the Starwall system. She was on board the medical support

ship Barton now, and the doctors and med AIs all promised

a rapid recovery. Evidently, she’d already, and with some ve-

hemence, volunteered to join the MIEF’s aerospace wing.

She would be welcome. The final butcher’s bill, the ir-

recoverables, for the Puller system engagement had not

been bad, considering the scope of the victory—76 naval

personnel on board the Thor and the Morrigan, and 92

Marines—most of those last picked off during their ap-

proach to the Rommel. Fifteen Marines, though, had been

aerospace fighter pilots killed in the engagement against

Rommel and her fighters, and 1MIEF would be entering

the next phase of operations with a serious weakness in her

complement of ASF flight officers.

Damn, but that fight had been a near-run thing. If the

Marine boarding parties had not been able to take down the

Rommel, the monitor would have pounded the Common-

wealth ships into scrap, and the PanEuropeans would have

been sitting there waiting when Skybase had reemerged

from paraspace. The warships she carried couldn’t fight

from inside the base’s hangar bay, and Skybase would have

been helpless under Rommel’s powerful, long-range accel-

erator guns.

But Rommel had surrendered, though her ownership still

had to be determined by negotiation. The PanEuropeans,

naturally enough, wanted the monitor back. The MIEF had

returned her crew as part of the general post-battle exchange

of POWs, but, frankly, Alexander was hoping to be able to

incorporate the Rommel into the expeditionary force. Cer-

tainly, there was plenty of historical precedent in naval his-

tory regarding the incorporation of captured warships into

the victor’s fleet. According to his last report from Earth,

STAR STRIKE

271

however, the politicians were going at it hot and heavy now,

arguing the fine points of the battle, and trying to hammer

out a peace before the situation could deteriorate any

further.

Alexander didn’t really care what the outcome was,

so long as 1MIEF had free access through the Puller 659

system to the Stargate.

He could see much of that fleet now, from his vantage

point on the Skybase observation deck. For three days after

the battle, Skybase had been shuttling back and forth be-

tween the carefully measured metrics of Assembly Point

Yankee and the equally precisely measured volume of space

at the Earth-Moon L-3 point. In threes and in fours and in

fives, depending on the masses of the vessels involved, Sky-

base had taken on board the ships of 1MIEF and brought

them across the light-years to this system, eighty ships,

ranging from sleek corvettes to massive assault carriers,

attack transports, and the three centerpieces of the MIEF

naval task force, the 80,000-ton planet-class battlecruisers,

Mars, Ishtar, and Chiron.

The largest ship in the fleet, of course—with the word

“ship” used somewhat advisedly—was Skybase itself. Four

Atlas-class fleet tugs had been solidly anchored to the

structure’s hull; their gravitic drives would provide a small

measure of maneuverability for the huge space-going base.

Unofficially, at least, Skybase had been tagged with a new

name that had tended to transform the MIEF headquarters

from an “it” to a “her,” from a military orbital base to an

active warship.

The name was Hermes, and it had no doubt originally

been proposed, Alexander thought, with tongue firmly in

cheek. Hermes had been the swift messenger god of the an-

cient Greeks, to be sure. With its—no, her—ability to trans-

late back into Solar space, the UCS Hermes would certainly

fit the role of messenger in this coming campaign, but the

huge structure was anything but swift.

Alexander was still questioning his own decision to in-

clude Skybase— Hermes—on the fleet roster. She was so

damned slow that she would be of very little help in a major

fleet action, and by providing the enemy with an easy target,

272

IAN DOUGLAS

she might even prove to be a serious liability. What had

tipped the scales in so far as making the decision was the

fact that including Hermes did have some important posi-

tives. Hermes could maintain instant communication with

Earth no matter where in the Galaxy she ended up, and she

was big enough to carry the gravitometric measuring gear

necessary for establishing new translation points elsewhere.

With that facility, Hermes could slip back to Earth and pick

up reinforcements—personnel, ships, and supplies—no

matter where among the stars the MIEF might find itself.

But there was more. Hermes had also been a trickster

god, the god of thieves, the god of travelers, and the god of

cunning, all traits that the MIEF was going to need when it

came up against the Xul. In myth, Hermes had been the god

who’d lulled Argus, Hera’s hundred-eyed guardian monster,

to sleep in order to free the captive maiden Io.

Alexander knew enough cultural anthropology, however,

to know something else about Hermes the god. He’d been a

psychopomp—a kind of divine escort who guided the souls

of the dead down to the underworld.

And that association was just a little too close to the mark

to bear thinking about. A lot of Marines and naval person-

nel were going to end up passing to whatever afterlife there

might be within the next months and years, and it had been

the UCS Hermes that had brought them here to the stargate

to make that possible.

Senior commanders, Alexander thought wryly, should

not be permitted such thoughts. The perils of too damned

much education . . .

“General Alexander?” Cara’s voice cut in.

“Yes?”

“A message incoming from Major Tomanaga on the

LP—conventional lasercom. Would you care to see it?”

“Please.”

A communications window opened in his mind. After a

momentary burst of radiation-induced snow, the face of Major

Tomanaga appeared, making his report. The major had asked

that he be allowed to again take command of the LP, as soon

as his debriefing on board the Hermes had been complete.

STAR STRIKE

273

“Status report,” Tomanaga said, “Operation Gorgon,

at oh-nine-thirty hours GMT, day oh-four, month twelve.

Expected time delay thirty-one minutes, twelve seconds.

The xenotexpert AIs have completed retuning the Puller

Stargate. We have successfully recovered three unmanned

gate probes sent through earlier this morning, and verified

that we now have access to the region designated as Aquila

Space. So far, we have detected no indication of a Xul pres-

ence on the other side. Just maybe we’ve lucked out on this

one.

“At your direction, we are ready to send through manned

units, and then to commence movement of the fleet.

“Tomanaga, Major, commanding officer of Listening

Post Puller, out.

“This message will repeat automatically. . . .”

The speed-of-light time delay for normal-space messages

meant that reports like this one were monologues, trans-

mitted without expectation of a back-and-forth discussion.

Tomanaga had transmitted the message thirty minutes ago,

and it had taken that long for the laser light carrying it to

crawl down in-system.

“Acknowledge message receipt,” Alexander told Cara.

“And pass the word to the rest of the fleet, will you? They

should know.”

“Yes, General.”

One of Alexander’s chief concerns now was the issue of

morale. Platoon AIs had been unanimous in their reports

from the squad bays throughout the fleet. The MIEF Ma-

rines knew that the PanEuropean Republic was not their

primary target now, and they begrudged the fact that ninety-

two fellow Marines were dead for no good reason.

Damn it, the whole political situation with the Republic

should never have come up in the first place; Operation

Gorgon was, first and foremost, an action by all of Hu-

mankind against the Galaxy’s ancient masters. Humans

should not be killing humans. Not now. The MIEF Marines

wanted to get into action, they were eager to get into the

fight, but against the Xul threat which had held Human-

kind hostage now for eight centuries, not their misguided

fellow humans.

274

IAN DOUGLAS

They would welcome the news that the way was open for

the invasion of a Xul-dominated Galaxy.

“Another call, General,” Cara said. “Admiral D’Urville.”

“Put it through.”

Another communications window opened. Since

D’Urville was on board the Aurore now, this could actually

be a communications exchange, with a time delay of less

than a second.

D’Urville’s bearded face appeared in the window. “Gen-

eral Alexander?” Again, he spoke in perfect Anglic.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“I’ve just received an FTL transmission from Aurore, and

I thought you should know about it.”

“Yes?”

“Apparently, the Commonwealth Senate has agreed to

return the Rommel to the Republic fleet. Something about

‘creating an atmosphere of cooperation and sensibility in

these trying times,’ I believe was how they worded it.”

Alexander had, frankly, been expecting as much.

There was within the Senate a strong undercurrent of ap-

peasement—as though the good will of enemies could be

purchased through concession.

In Alexander’s experience, the reverse was always

true.

“Very well. I will await my own orders before returning

the vessel. I’m sure you understand.” He made a mental note

to check with Intelligence, to see if they could confirm that

message from Aurore.

“Of course. Actually, however, General, I had something

else in mind.”

“Eh?”

D’Urville sighed. “I was wondering, sir, if you would

accept a foreign contingent within your expeditionary

force?”

Alexander blinked, momentarily taken aback. “Let me

get this straight. You want to come along?”

“Some of us do, General.” He glanced left and right, as

though looking to see if anyone else was close by in the com-

partment he was transmitting from. “You must be aware,

STAR STRIKE

275

your intelligence service must have told you, of the schism

within our fleet.”

“Sir, I cannot comment on matters of fleet intelligence,

either to confirm or deny. You must know that.”

“Of course, of course. One must always follow the rules,

non? But we do regard your intelligence services with

considerable respect. I would be very surprised to find

out that you were unaware of the split between Tradition-

alist Catholic and Reformed Catholic elements within our

fleet.”

“What does all this have to do with a . . . with the foreign

contingent you mentioned?”

“A number of us happen to agree with you, General.

About who, or, rather, about what the real enemy is. And we

want to help.”

“I . . . see. And just how many of you feel this way?”

“I don’t have exact figures. But several thousand, at

least. Enough, perhaps, to man several ships. Including

the Rommel.” He hesitated. “A number of the Traditional-

ist Catholics have expressed an interest in . . . serving else-

where, for the duration of the emergency. And others of us,

well, our services may no longer be required by the govern-

ment at Theta Bootis IV.”

Alexander considered this for a long moment. D’Urville

seemed sincere . . . even eager.

But . . .

“Admiral, I’m going to have to refuse.”

“But . . .”

“This is an issue for our respective governments to work

out. Not a couple of old warhorses like us.”

“Governments, monsieur, can rarely see past the ends of

their noses.” He sounded bitter. “And some of us . . . no

longer have the favor of their government.”

D’Urville, Alexander thought, must have been ca-

shiered—or felt it was about to happen . . . the penalty for

failure.

“Are you saying you’re in trouble with your superiors?”

D’Urville shrugged. “

‘Trouble’ is one way to say it,

General.”

Damn. But Alexander was in no position to accept

276

IAN DOUGLAS

the man’s offer. The PanEuropeans were the enemy, or,

at least, an enemy, despite grand words and declara-

tions to the contrary. Besides, folding a PE force into

the combined Naval-Marine task force would bring its

own nightmare of logistical and political problems. The

1MIEF was a team, trained, honed, and experienced.

Nothing would screw that balance faster than adding

outsiders to the mix.

The thought did give Alexander pause, however. The

supreme hope of passing through the Puller gate to Aquila

Space was the possibility that there was someone there, an

alien someone—the ultimate outsiders—who might join

with Humankind to fight the Xul. Any civilization 1MIEF

found in Aquila Space would be infinitely more difficult to

communicate with, to work with, would be far more alien

than the PanEuropeans ever could be.

But . . . he couldn’t risk it. Not for the possible gain of a

few ships. Even the Rommel.

“There will be plenty for all of us to do in this war, Ad-

miral,” Alexander told the man. “It may fall upon you to

defend your homeworlds, if we fail.”

“I . . . understand.” He shook his head. “The problem is,

General, that most in my government will not be interested

in helping you. They fear repercussions should you fail, and

the Xul find us.”

“My government has its own share of people like that.

Believe me, you have my sympathy. Here.” He transmitted

an eddress. “That will connect you with the personal AI of

Danis Sloan.”

“Ah! Your Defense Advisory Council, yes?”

“He was chairperson of the Council, yes,” Alexander

said. “Four years ago he was ousted by Marie Devereaux.

She holds the position now.

“Now, I don’t think Devereaux will be interested in your

joining in with the crusade against the Xul, either. In fact,

I suspect that she’s in pretty tight with some people in the

PanEuropean Republic. I do know she doesn’t care much for

the idea of Marines poking around in Xul space. The Treaty

of Chiron must stand, and all of that.”

STAR STRIKE

277

“We call them hommes du l’apaisement,” D’Urville said.

“The Appeasers.”

Alexander chuckled, the sound harsh. “I think every

government has them. But every government has good men

as well. Sloan still has considerable power, and if he can’t

help you, he’ll know who in the Commonwealth government

can.”

D’Urville recorded the eddress. “Thank you, sir. And . . .

may I ask, how long before you pass through the gate?” Damn

it, the man was actually trying to be friendly. But Alexander

couldn’t take the risk.

“I can’t tell you that, sir. Security.”

“I see. I wish you well, however. And I wish you all

success.”

“Thank you, General. We’ll need it. We’ll all need it.”

Squad Bay, UCS Samar

Anneau orbit, Puller 659 System

1740 hrs GMT

“I got killed,” Garroway told the circle Marines in the squad

bay lounge, “three fucking times this afternoon. Frankly,

I’m getting a little sick of it.”

“Well, practice does make perfect,” Sandre Kenyon of-

fered, laughing.

She was sitting next to him on the lounge, and he turned

and gave her a hard, playful shove. “Hey, practice getting

killed I do not need!”

Garroway was sitting with eight other Marines of First

Platoon, Charlie Company, of the 55th MARS. He was

beginning to feel like he was fitting in with the unit. Oh,

they still called him “newbie” and “fungie”—that last de-

rived from “FNG,” or “fucking new guy.” But he was also

accepted.

Surviving his first live combat with them had helped, of

course.

“What I want to know,” Corporal Marin Delazlo said, “is

how they know what to program into those sims for the Xul

side of things, y’know?”

278

IAN DOUGLAS

“Marines have fought the Xul before,” Corporal Gonza-

les said. “And won.”

“Yeah, yeah, but the last time that happened was . . .

when? Five hundred years ago?”

“Twenty-one August 2323, oldstyle,” Sergeant Richard

Chu said.

“Five hundred fifty-four years,” Garroway added, run-

ning the numbers through his implant math processor.

“Okay, 554 years. Yeah . . . you’d know that, wouldn’t you,

fungie? You had an ancestor or something in that battle.”

“Or something.”

“Well, my point is that in all that time, don’t you think

the Xul will have evolved some new tactics? You know, they

say that we’re always prepared to fight the last war, never

the next one.”

“Well, if we know anything about the Xul,” Corporal

Ran Allison said slowly, “we know they’re damned slow

on the uptake. Static culture, like they’re locked in to how

they perceive the universe, and in how they react to it. The

xenopsych guys think they haven’t changed much in half a

million years.”

“They think,” Delazlo said, the words almost a sneer.

“And not one of them has actually met a Xul, or talked to

one!”

“Well, neither have you,” Kenyon pointed out. “Or any

of us.”

“Right! So what good are all the endless sims?” He

reached across from his chair and rubbed Garroway’s close-

shaven scalp. “Our baby-faced fungie, here, can practice

getting killed until Doomsday and it’s not going to help him

when the real show goes down, am I right?”

Garroway knocked the hand aside and laughed. “Fuck

you very much, Corporal.”

“Thank you, I’ll take two.”

Delazlo had a point, Garroway thought. The simulations

had all been much the same . . . variations, in fact, of the

assault on the Rommel. Time after time, in a kind of free-

flowing lucid dream fed to him by the platoon AI, he’d but-

toned into a SAP and been fired across a flame-shot black-

STAR STRIKE

279

ness toward an immense . . . thing, a lean golden needle

2 kilometers long, or a space base like a small moon cov-

ered with towers, turrets, and domes. Each time, his SAP

had tunneled through a strange hull material that seemed to

grow and shift around him, and he’d emerged inside a vast

maze of inner passageways and tunnels. The Xul had been

represented by elongated egg-shaped machines with mul-

tiple tentacles and glittering lenses, some serving as eyes,

others as weapons.

There were always a horrific lot of the things, and beat-

ing them generally meant firing fast, firing accurately, and

staying in a tight group with your fellow Marines. The first

two times when he’d been rudely jolted out of the simula-

tion as a “kill” today, it had been after he’d been sepa-

rated from the other Marines in his fireteam by a sudden

and unexpected influx of new Xul combat machines from

an unexpected direction. Sometimes, the damned things

seemed to just mold themselves right out of the surrounding

bulkheads.

And Delazlo had a point. The images fed into his mind

had been gleaned from implants and drone recorders at

the Battle of Night’s Edge in 2323, and from other battles

with the Xul before that. Suppose they had changed their

tactics?

Not that their old tactics were all that bad. Victory meant

holding off those swarming, glittering machine-monsters

long enough to plant a satchel nuke deep enough within the

bowels of the enemy ship so that the whole, huge structure

was destroyed . . . or at least severely inconvenienced.

The trick was planting the charges and then getting out

before they blew. The last time he’d been “killed” today, he’d

planted a backpack nuke, then managed to get lost coming

back out. He’d died within a tiny sun when his own charge

had detonated.

A tall figure in Marine undress blacks walked into the

squad bay—Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey. He stopped, look-

ing the group over.

“Hey, Gunny!” Sergeant Chu said. “Join us as we solve

the mysteries of the universe!”

280

IAN DOUGLAS

“In a minute, Chu-chu.” He seemed preoccupied. “Gar-

roway! A word with you?”

“Sure, Gunny.” Now what the hell? . . .

Ramsey led him to an alcove at the back of the squad

bay, semi-private from the others behind an arms rack. “I’ve

been meaning to talk to you ever since the Rommel engage-

ment,” he said.

“Is there a problem, Gunnery Sergeant?” He swallowed.

“I mean, I was damned scared—”

“You did fine, Marine. For your first live combat?

You performed splendidly. I’m proud to have you in this

platoon.”

“Then, what—”

“I have to ask you a question. An intensely personal ques-

tion. What is your relationship with PFC Kenyon?”

Garroway hesitated, his mind not clicking immediately.

“Uh . . . sorry?”

“When we were in that control compartment, and we

found out the Rommel was surrendering, you two were hug-

ging like old lovers.” He smiled. “Or trying to. Those battle-

suits make that sort of thing a bit tough.”

Garroway played the moment back in his memory. “Oh,

yeah. I guess we did. Well, uh, I guess we got a little excited.

And we are good friends. . . .”

“Son, it’s none of my business. None of the Corps’ busi-

ness. Fuck each other all you want, as long as you both show

up for duty and don’t fall asleep on watch. But . . . I lost

someone recently. Someone very important to me. She got

killed on Alighan, my last out-system deployment.”

“Damn. I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Life happens. And in the Corps, death

happens. Just a friendly word of warning, and advice.” He

raised both hands and clasped them together. “The Marine

Corps is a family. The Green Family. All of us together,

right?”

“Sure, Gunny. I understand that.”

“You think you do. You won’t feel it until you’ve lived it a

few more years, like some of the rest of us have. And maybe

not until you’ve lost someone close, like a lot of us have

already. A lover. A buddy. Someone we went through boot

STAR STRIKE

281

camp with, or served with on some out-of-the-way hellhole

on the other side of the sky.

“I’m not telling you to break things off with Kenyon. I

just want you to be aware, okay? Fuck-buddies are one thing.

Romance— love—is something else. The first is fine, so

long as you do your job. The second can kill you, if it hurts

you badly enough.”

“That’s a damned dark way of looking at things,

Gunny.”

Ramsey drew a deep breath. “Garroway, I’m only telling

you this shit because I don’t want the smooth functioning of

this platoon to be affected by the emotional misjudgments of

two members of my squad. Lust is acceptable. Love is not.”

He turned, then, and walked away, leaving Garroway in a

decidedly uncomfortable frame of mind.

Did he love Sandre? Well, they’d told each other that

often enough, during stolen moments with the platoon AI

shut out of their minds. But what did the word mean?

He decided he was going to have to think about that one.

Bemused, Garroway returned to the bull session in the

squad bay.

20�

0912.1102

Ontos 1, Recon Sword

Stargate

Puller 695 System/Aquila Space

1220 hrs GMT

“Recon Sword, launch door is open and you are cleared for

Lejeune departure.”

“Copy that, Lejeune Pryfly. Ten seconds.”

“Good luck, Marines.”

“Thank you, Pryfly. We’ll bring you back some

souvenirs.”

“Just bring yourselves back.”

“Roger that. And three . . . and two . . . and one . . .”

“Launch!”

With a savage thump, the Ontos accelerated down the

launch rails and into hard vacuum, leaving the carrier Lejeune

dwindling astern. The sudden acceleration—better than fifty

gravities—would have left the humans on board battered and

broken had the inertial dampers not cushioned them, bleeding

off the excess force into paraspace. Ahead and around them, a

flight of twelve Skydragons adjusted their vectors to match the

larger Ontos. They would accompany the larger craft, flanking

and preceding it in a protective hemispherical formation.

Enough accelerative force leaked through the dampers to

make all three Marines on board the Ontos grunt, hard.

“God!” Lieutenant Eden gasped over the in-ship comm.

“I’m never going to get used to that!”

STAR STRIKE

283

“I hear it’s rougher on the guys in the ASFs,” Warhurst

said conversationally as the pressure eased somewhat.

Within his mental window-link, he could see the green blips

marking the fighters all around them. “Smaller power taps.

We can goose it harder than them.”

In fact, all thirteen spacecraft were now accelerating in

perfect unison, their drives under the control of a single AI,

named Chesty.

Chesty, he’d been told, had been the AI linking the

Marine recon force hidden within the Puller 659 system—

“Chesty” having orignally been the nickname for General

Lewis A. Puller, a twentieth-century Marine officer, and the

only Marine ever to win five Navy Crosses. Evidently, the

Chesty AI had made several trips through the Puller Star-

gate—most notably into the region called Starwall, near

the Galactic center. Later, Chesty downloads had piloted

unmanned probes into Aquila Space, looking for signs of a

Xul presence, or anything else of potential interest.

Chesty knew this Gate, and would be coordinating the

activities of the entire recon formation, codenamed Recon

Sword.

“Lejeune Pryfly, Recon Sword,” Eden said. “Patrol vector

established. Switching to Hermes flight ops.”

“Roger that, Recon Sword.”

Pryfly was the ancient aviator’s name for Primary Flight

Control, tasked with launching aircraft from the old seago-

ing flattops, and, in more recent centuries, with launching

small spacecraft from larger ones. From now on, the mis-

sion would be directed from the Ops Center located on the

Hermes—formerly Skybase. Warhurst imagined that every

high-ranking piece of gold braid in the fleet must either

be there now, or linked in, watching the tiny flotilla hurtle

toward the Stargate.

They would reach the Gate in twenty minutes.

“Are we sure this thing is going to work over there?” Ser-

geant Aren Galena, the number two Ontos gunner, asked. “I

mean, on the other side. . . .”

“Now’s a hell of a time to wonder about that,” Warhurst

said with a chuckle.

284

IAN DOUGLAS

“Yeah, well, I’m just not sure I trust the quantum-

whatzis,” Galena said. “How do we know we’re not going to

be flat out of juice when we pass through . . . that.”

“That,” of course, was the Stargate, visible now within

their inner link windows as a perfect circle of dark and

ruddy gold against a star-strewn night up ahead. For sev-

eral days, now, the MIEF fleet had been redeploying back

out from the inner-system gas giant to a staging/departure

zone near the Gate, and the Samar had reached the jump-off

point just yesterday. The gate was expanding swiftly as the

recon patrol approached it at 3 kilometers per second.

“Distance doesn’t make any difference, Sergeant,” Eden

said. “We’ll still get power, even if we’re on the far side of

the galaxy.”

“Yeah . . . but that just don’t make sense.”

Warhurst could understand the younger man’s anxiety.

Hell, he didn’t understand the science any better than did

Galena. It was hard not to picture the ZPE quantum power

transfer technology as a means of beaming energy from

the Lejeune to the Ontos and the fighters, when in fact the

system did no such thing. Energy called into being from the

Zero Point Field in the carrier’s massive power taps simul-

taneously appeared in the Ontos’ Solenergia field-entangled

receivers. There was no energy beam to be tapped or inter-

cepted by an enemy, or to be lost during violent maneuvers.

And the lieutenant was right. Theoretically, they could be

a hundred thousand light-years away—or even millions of

light-years away, in another galaxy entirely, and still be able

to tap into that power flow—exactly as though there were no

intervening distance between the two at all.

That was the point of quantum-entangled technologies:

power here was instantly and simultaneously there, just as

with quantum FTL communications, through the applica-

tion of the immortal Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.”

Theoretically, the only thing that could cut the energy flow

on board an Ontos or an aerospace fighter was the destruc-

tion of the Lejeune . . . and there were back-up entanglement

receivers keyed to other carriers and transports in the fleet,

and to Skybase itself.

STAR STRIKE

285

No problem.

But while he’d downloaded the explanation and knew

the words, Warhurst, like most Marines he knew, still had

some trouble when it came to accepting seemingly magical

technologies. After all, there was a universe of difference

between the theoretical and the practical. What if passing

through a stargate affected the quantum-entangled link in

unpredictable ways?

He snorted to himself. Maybe Marines were just so

damned used to having to go it alone and rely on their own

resources that they had trouble with the concept of accepting

anything for free or on faith . . . even high-tech magic.

“You know, Sergeant, it doesn’t have to make sense,”

Warhurst said. “Tap into your weiji-do training. Focus. . . .”

“You know, Gunny, I never did buy into all that weird

shit,” Galena said.

“You’d damned well better. The Corps teaches that stuff

for a reason.”

“Yeah, well, I always had trouble understanding stuff

that I couldn’t wrap my brain around, y’know?” Warhurst

could sense his shrug.

“Most of us don’t know how an ordinary wallscreen

monitor works, either,” Warhurst said. “But that doesn’t stop

us from using our own wetware as well as the hardware,

right?”

“If you say so, Gunny.”

He didn’t sound convinced. Galena was, in Warhurst’s ex-

perience, a stereotypical “rock,” a dumb-as-a-rock Marine.

Sergeant Galena was a good man—there was no question

about the man’s credentials. The word was he’d distin-

guished himself on Alighan by charging a Muzzie position

guarded by a dug-in battery of APerM launchers and taking

them out at point-blank range with his flamer, and the guy

was in line to get a Silver Star for that little action.

But he was also opinionated, mule-stubborn, and un-

willing to stretch when it came to trying to understand

anything that wasn’t bloody self-obvious. Warhurst wished

he’d had the guy in one of his boot companies back at

Noctis Labyrinthus. Maybe a few extra after-hours rounds

286

IAN DOUGLAS

of being pitted would have opened up some willingness

to dig in the man’s stubborn shell. According to the guy’s

personnel records, he’d done acceptably in his T’ai Chi

training in boot camp . . . but had gone into it as a means of

hand-to-hand combat, and never, apparently, picked up on

the system’s more subtle, purely mental aspects.

And according to those records, he’d never really gotten

the hang of the weiji-do exercises at all. Those, however,

were not requirements for graduation since, frankly, some

recruits could handle them, and some never could.

Warhurst would have felt better if Galena had been able

to run through a basic T’ai chi/weiji-do kata in boot camp,

though. During a recon op, as in combat, you needed to

know you were tuned in with your buddies, a part of them,

all acting together as one.

The Stargate continued to expand ahead, the far-flung

hoop now stretched across a full third of the sky.

Probes sent through to Aquila Space had returned without

detecting Xul ships or fortresses. That, at least, was a bless-

ing. But Warhurst wished the brass had been more specific

about what the probes had detected. There were rumors, but

the data had not been released to the people who needed it

most—the Marines going in on point.

Why were the probe reports being hushed up? The of-

ficial word was that signals had been detected on the other

side—RF noise which might mean technology—but that the

data were still being analyzed.

Maybe so. But Warhurst was suspicious of any ops brief-

ing that began with the words, “This one should be easy.”

They had been shown visual downloads from Aquila

Space, at least, so they had an idea of what they would be

seeing. Twelve hundred light-years was not far, as galactic

distances go, and the stellar backdrop—the number of back-

ground stars—seemed about the same as in circumsolar

space. The local Stargate appeared to be in orbit around an

A-class star imbedded in a flat disk of dust and asteroidal

debris.

The big question, of course, was whether anything un-

pleasant might be lurking in that debris field. That was why

STAR STRIKE

287

the Ontos was going through first, in its role as scout-recon.

The Ontos carried a QCC radio, allowing real-time com-

munications with the Skybase, and—instead of a squad of

Marines—its payload bay carried a very special miniature

spacecraft. Warhurst, besides serving in his usual role as

starboard-side gunner, had also been assigned as loadmaster

for the mission. He performed a quick mental check of the

craft loaded into the MCA–71’s aft bay. All green.

“Ten seconds,” Eden warned them. Ahead, the lead Sky-

dragon fighter passed into the plane of curiously disturbed

space at the center of the Stargate . . . and winked out of

existence. Four seconds later, the three fighters spread out

behind the leader reached the interface and vanished as

well. The rim of the Gate cut the sky in half, now, a thread

of gold light. Warhurst tried to imagine two Jupiter masses

shrunken to marble-sized black holes, hurtling through the

ring structure at near- c velocities, the gravitational stresses

somehow focused on the space here, at the ring’s center.

Whoever— whatever—had constructed the Stargates had

been the master of technologies still incomprehensible to

Humankind.

And perhaps to the Xul as well. The Xul certainly used

the Gates, as did both humans and N’mah from time to time,

but most xenosapientologists were of the opinion that the

Xul had not originally built the things, that they had discov-

ered them in place whenever they began spreading across

the Galaxy . . . how long ago? A million years, at least. . . .

Warhurst felt the sharp, inner twist as the Ontos passed

through the gravitationally distorted interface. This was his

first time through a Stargate, but he’d been through plenty of

sims, and knew to expect that wrenching sensation as, just

for an instant, part of his body was here, dropping through

the Puller Gate, and the rest emerging from another Gate

twelve hundred light-years distant.

“Woof!” Galena said, with feeling. “Is it always like

that?”

“Damfino,” Lieutenant Eden said. “First time for all of us.”

“A slight feeling of discontinuity, like an inner jolt or

twisting, appears characteristic of human physiological re-

288

IAN DOUGLAS

sponse when passing through a Gate,” Chesty said, the AI

voice even and measured.

“Yeah, well, it felt to me like a hard kick in the ass,”

Galena said.

“Heads up, people,” Eden told them. “Sensors to on.

Chesty is on-line. Listen for the signal, now. . . .”

Warhurst studied the downloaded imagery now feeding

in from the Ontos’ forward cameras and other sensors. So

far, no surprises. The local sun burned in the distance, some

fifty light-minutes away, as a bright, blue-white beacon

imbedded in a faint and far-flung haze of zodiacal light.

Despite the name for this region of space, the star, listed

as HD387136 on the star catalogues, had never gone nova;

Nova Aquila, or that star’s white dwarf remnants, were re-

portedly located perhaps ten light-years distant. The star

itself was invisible at that distance, but a smear of light was

visible in one part of the sky—the glowing shell of ejecta

blasted away when Nova Aquila had detonated, some four-

teen hundred years ago.

As for HD387136, it appeared to be a normal, unremark-

able A4-class star, though it did not appear to have a family

of planets. The zodiacal light was, in fact, a glow off a cloud

of asteroidal debris circling the star in a broad, flat plane.

The material, ranging in size from minor planets a few hun-

dred kilometers across down to sand grains and dust motes,

created a thin smear of light encircling the star.

No planets . . . and no fortress bases, such as those fa-

vored by the Xul. Some, small, fear-stubborn piece of him

had halfway been expecting to find a Xul monster-ship or

orbital fortress base waiting for them on this side, despite

earlier negative sweeps by unmanned probes.

But there was nothing. He saw the low-grade radio-

frequency noise, which might have been leakage from a

shielded, high-tech source, but which could just as easily

be something natural—a hiss of radio noise from the star as

its magnetic fields interacted with the orbiting ring of aster-

oidal debris. The lack of full-sized worlds made the system

seem an unlikely place to find intelligent life, or any life, for

that matter.

STAR STRIKE

289

The fighter screen was spreading out, now, covering as

large a volume of space as possible. Linked together through

Chesty, each vessel became one component in an array of

linked receivers, creating, in effect, an enormous and ex-

tremely sensitive radio telescope.

“So what do you hear, Chesty?” Warhurst asked the AI.

The program was powerful enough, he knew, to hold mul-

tiple separate conversations without affecting its primary

mission.

“The signal is almost certainly of intelligent origin,”

Chesty whispered in his thoughts. Small mental windows

opened to show gain and frequency, as well as a simplified

map of local space. “The origin appears to be numerous

multiple points within the local star’s asteroid field.”

“Radios, then?”

“More likely a variety of electronic equipment,” Chesty

replied. “Possibly from large-scale manufacturing centers,

or from the nodes of a widely distributed computer network.

The signals are extremely faint—as though they have been

shielded.”

“Is it Xul?” Lieutenant Eden asked.

“Unknown. However, the frequencies do not match pre-

viously recorded Xul data intercepts. I believe this may be

someone new.”

“Right, then,” Eden said. “Warhurst? Let’s drop our

package.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

A thought-click, and the aft-ventral cargo hatch cycled

open. He did a final systems check, and then, a moment later,

the EWC–9 Argus/NeP Entruder dropped into vacuum and

began slowly accelerating out ahead of the Ontos.

The spacecraft was designated the EWC–9 Argus, after

the hundred-eyed guardian monster—no relative of “Argo,”

the mythical ship for which the lost asteroid starship had

been named. One of the Marine weapons technicians who’d

designed the system on board Skybase reportedly had sug-

gested the name after hearing that Skybase was being re-

named Hermes, and there’d already been a fair amount of

good-natured ribbing back and forth about Hermes boring

290

IAN DOUGLAS

hundred-eyed Argus into a coma. “EWC” referred to the

vehicle type—Electronic Warfare Craft.

Working closely with Chesty, Warhurst began feeding a

list of potential targets into the EWC’s navigational system.

There were hundreds of targets to choose from; all were

locked in, though the emphasis was on one particular RF

source that, according to parallax measurements, was con-

siderably closer than the rest—less than 100,000 kilometers

distant.

The Aquila Space stargate orbited the local star at the

ragged, outer fringe of the system’s broad planetoid belt. The

RF sources were widely scattered through the belt, but there

were so many that a few, at least, were within easy range

of the Argus’ payload. Once the best targets were locked

in, Warhurst gave another mental command, and the craft

began accelerating under its own gravitic drive, pushing

swiftly up to over two hundred Gs. Once clear of the guard-

ian hemisphere of Skydragon fighters, the forward half of

the cylindrical craft unfolded, exposing thousands of pencil-

sized launch tubes, each now tracking a separate target. At

a precisely calculated instant, the tubes fired, releasing a

cloud of fast-moving nano e-penetrators, NePs in the jargon

of the Marine technicians who’d grown them.

The Entruder was the software that constituted the EWC-

9’s principle payload, and was a neologism drawn from elec-

tronic intruder, or e-intruder, a term that had already been

applied to a whole range of AI-driven electronic monitoring,

warfare, and subversion software. Marines had won past en-

gagements with the Xul by slipping complex, artificially

intelligent software into the equivalent of Xul operating sys-

tems, piggybacking the software into Xul ships or fortresses

by using RF leakage—exactly like the radio noise emanat-

ing now from the asteroid field ahead.

Chesty had done this sort of work at Starwall, burrow-

ing like a self-aware computer virus into the Xul system,

picking up and transmitting data on the Xul presence in that

system, and ascertaining that the Xul forces there, tens of

thousands of light-years from human space, knew about the

captured Argos. In fact, a great deal of Chesty—including

STAR STRIKE

291

everything he’d learned in his penetration of the Xul ship