Battlespace (39 page)

Ramsey remembered a line downloaded from Berossus:
This Being in the daytime used to converse with men; but took no food at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and every kind of art.

That “took no food” had been a loudly shouted clue that Man's alien benefactors didn't possess the same biochemistry as humans. The An were enough like humans in their biochemistry that the two could eat one another's food. Indeed, human survivors from the trade mission on Ishtar had survived on local foods out in the hills for ten years, and when the An had colonized Earth, they'd survived for centuries on the “sacrifices” of native grain and animals. But the N'mah chemistry was different.

But not, Ramsey thought,
too
different. “Actually, we have enough food to supplement the diet,” he said. “Dr. Howard? Check me on this. We could take on board enough N'mah food to give our people something to chew on, but the amino problem could be held at bay with supplements.”

“Yes, that would work,” the medical officer said.

“Besides, we only need enough for however long we stay in Sirius space. On the return, we'll all be in cybehibe.”

“Even in cybehibe,” Howard pointed out, “our bodies keep replacing wornout cells and tissue. We need food during hibernation,
especially
amino acids, which go into mak
ing up the proteins we need to sustain life. That's why we have those supplements along! But…in general, you're right.”

“And if necessary,” Ramsey added, “we go on short rations. It can be done.”

“But…smashing the Xul ship with one of our starships,” Harris said. “That's kind of expensive for an anti-ship missile, isn't it?”

“And just how damned expensive does it become if they get through to Earth?” He paused as the alert for the implant call from Dominick came through. “Hold it a second, people,” he said. “I need to take this.”

Damn. He'd not
deliberately
excluded the Army mission commander from his deliberations with Harris and the others. Not exactly. But if Dominick had learned he'd been planning the upcoming battle without him, there'd be hell to pay.

“Yes, General. I was just going to flag you.”

“Oh? About what?”

“We're putting together some ideas for the assault on the Xul ship.”

“Well, I've been having some ideas too, General. I wonder…can we possibly plan on
capturing
that vessel, instead of destroying it?”

The question stunned Ramsey. He was glad the noumenon wasn't revealing his facial expression.

“General Dominick…that is the most ragged-assed sorry excuse for an idea I have heard in a
long
time.”

“Hear me out…”

“Is this about some deal you have with PanTerra?” Ramsey demanded. “I know Lymon is hot to corner the market on alien high-tech. But do you have
any
idea—”

“Profit is important, General. But this is something even you should be thinking about. What if there are prisoners—human prisoners—onboard that vessel?”

That stopped Ramsey. The question hadn't yet come up during his discussions with the others and, frankly, he'd not stopped to think about it.

“General, that seems most unlikely.”

“Is it? The images we have of the
Isis
…that Xul ship just seemed to swallow them. Maybe they're still on board. You Marines are the ones always harping about never leaving a man behind.”

Ramsey was stunned first, then furiously angry. Dominick was using that centuries-old covenant to manipulate him, and Ramsey did
not
like being manipulated.

“General, I'll remind you that that happened in August of 2148…almost twenty-two years ago. Just what are the chances that those people are still alive?”

“I have no idea, General. You tell me.”

“I can't, sir, and you know it. Nobody can.”

“Our orders include verifying that there are no survivors of the
Wings of Isis
.”

“
In the Sirius system
,” Ramsey added. “Why would the Xul keep 245 humans alive onboard ship for that long?”

“Who knows? They're aliens, damn it. Anything is possible.”

“It's also possible that the Xul will turn out to be stuffed purple bunnies who surrender when we open fire on them, but I'm not taking any bets on that happening. I find it much more likely that they offloaded any prisoners they might have taken at that planet Cassius recorded…or taken them off to another star system entirely. Nor do we know if this is the same Xul ship that took the
Isis
. We have absolutely no reason to think any of our people are still onboard that vessel.”

“And absolutely no reason to think they are not.”

Ramsey sighed. There was no way to win this argument. Technically, Dominick was right. The Marines were here for several key reasons—to investigate the Sirius Gate and secure it for further study, or else to destroy it in the event that
it posed a threat to Earth's safety; to learn more about the events that had led to the
Wings of Isis
being captured or destroyed, especially in regard to the ship that had emerged to take the
Isis
; and to rescue any among
Isis
's crew who might still be alive.

What made things tough was the priority of those orders. Earth's security, obviously, came first. There were fifty-some billion people on Earth, and there was no way to measure those lives against the lives of the 245 members of
Isis
's crew both fairly and rationally. The MIEU's mission orders were
most
specific on that point. Earth's security came first. If events had transpired in such a way that Ramsey had been forced to destroy the Sirius Star Gate
and the ten thousand N'mah living there
in order to save Earth, he would have done so, without hesitation.

But there was a damned big gray area here, and no way to be completely safe, when it came to Earth's security, or completely sure, when it came to the
Isis
crew. He needed to find a reasonably safe middle ground.

But where the hell was that?

He thought for a moment. They'd already discussed several plans. Maybe using a freighter with an antimatter war-head on board was just a
little
on the side of overkill.

But they would have to be sure.

“General,” he said at last, “Earth's safety comes first. You know that. But we may possibly have a viable plan that'll at least let us find out about the
Isis
and her crew.”

“That's all I'm looking for, General,” Dominick replied.

Like hell, you bastard,
Ramsey thought.
You're looking for a way to capture Xul hardware.

But even that was legitimate. If Operation Battlespace brought home some tech that would give Earth a chance against the Xul in the future—a working interstellar drive, say?—then almost any risk would be worth it.

If
that risk didn't extend to Earth's teeming billions.

“I suggest you join our discussion, General,” Ramsey said. “C'mon in and join the crowd.” He shifted channels. “Okay, I'm back, people. I'm tabling the idea of a freighter with an AM warhead. General Dominick has made some
very
good points about that.

“So, as I see it now, to do this right we're going to need an old-fashioned Marine CBSS….”

Corporal Garroway
TRAP 1-2
Sirius Stargate
2345 hours, Shipboard time

Once again, Garroway was strapped into place in the sardine-can closeness of a TRAP packed with a section of twenty Marines. Once again, it was the waiting…and waiting…and
waiting
.

“Buddha's hairy balls!” Womicki said. “How much longer are they going to keep us in here?”

“As long as they have to, Womicki,” Dunne replied. “Now shut your trap and vacseal it!”

The stress within the section had been steadily growing. They'd crammed into the TRAP almost four hours ago. A four-hour wait was nothing if you were going somewhere…but they were just sitting here, and had been the whole time, adrift some ten kilometers above the surface of the Wheel.

At least, that's what they'd been told. As usual, they did not have a visual feed from outside. “You'd be too damned busy gawking at the sights,” Dunne had explained. “You start lollygagging like a goddamned tourist and
then
where would you be?”

“The probe hasn't returned,” Major Warhurst's voice told them. “It should have been back twenty minutes ago. I think we can assume that means action is imminent.”

Garroway drew a deep breath. He was glad the major was listening in, though he knew that would put a damper on the conversation. It meant that the battalion CO cared about them.

And right now, that counted for a hell of a lot.

General Ramsey
Command Control Center
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
2345 hours, Shipboard time

Ramsey
could
see what was going on. From his noumenal vantage point, in fact, he was drifting in space some twenty kilometers from the Wheel. The vessels of the MIEU were in place, positioned in a circle around the Wheel's center far enough out that they were out of the reach of the gravitationally strange space within the Gate's central opening, their spacing staggered in such a way that no ship had its drive venturi aimed at any other ship. All main drive thrusters were aimed at the center of the Wheel, however.

An old, old saying within the Corps had it that the Marines always did more with less. Mass restrictions dictated that MIEU-1 couldn't bring its own artillery, so the seven remaining vessels of the fleet were being drafted into service.

Seeing his battle plan laid out like this was less than reassuring. Over the past several days, Ramsey had become used to seeing the Wheel hanging in space, a black wedding band adrift against the stars. It was easy, however, to lose sight of just how
big
the thing was.

Chapultepec
was the largest of the fleet's ships with a length-overall of 622 meters, pencil-slender behind the 100-meter spread of her forward R-M tank and shield.
Ranger
was a hair shorter, at 604 meters, but with a larger and deeper reaction-mass dome. The three robot transports, bulkier and more massive than the manned vessels, were each 570 me
ters long, while
New Chicago
had loa of 510 meters. Even the little
Daring
was still over three times the length of a football field, longer, in fact, than the old supercarriers that had been the mainstay of the U.S. wet-Navy two centuries before.

They were, in fact, the largest manned structures capable of moving under their own power in human history. Seen against the backdrop of the Wheel, however, even
Chapultepec
looked like a metallic child's toy. The Sirius Gate spanned over twenty kilometers, almost forty times
Chapultepec
's length. From out here, the Marine interstellar transport looked tiny and harmlessly insignificant.

Minutes slipped past, one following the next. How much longer?

Damn it, it should
not
be much longer, one way or another. Well over forty minutes earlier, a recon AI, another SF/A-2 Starhawk outfitted with a Cassius download had passed through the gate. The idea was to have it emerge from the Cluster Gate, decelerate for ten minutes while noting the position of the Xul ship and any other pertinent tactical data, then accelerate back through the gate with the information.

That Starhawk should have returned to the Sirian side of the gate half an hour ago. The fact that it had not was, itself, a pertinent datum. A malfunction or some other unforeseen occurrence was always a possibility, of course, but likeliest was that the Xul vessel was approaching the gate, had noted the Starhawk's emergence and had swatted it like a fly.

According to N'mah data, the Xul possessed a type of magnetic shielding as a defense against particle beam attacks. The focused output of seven starships, however, ought to be enough to overwhelm their screens.

Ought
to be, There was still so much about this new enemy that was unknown.

He wished the recon A-2 had returned. Waiting like this, with no information at all about what was happening on the
other side…damn it! How much longer? He checked his implant time sense. Past midnight, ship's time, not that schedules out here paid any attention to day or night.

Perhaps they should try again, another probe. Perhaps…

Something was emerging from the Gate.

It happened quickly, far too quickly for merely human response. The Xul ship, needle-slim forward, but with asymmetrical bulges and sponsons aft, slipped out of nothingness a bit off-center within the Wheel's embrace. One instant there was nothing; the next, the Xul vessel was growing out of empty space faster than the eye could follow.

But human eyes and human reactions were not the first line of defense. Sissy—the Combat Command Network linking the ships of the MIEU—together with Cassius as the tactical component, reacted at computer speeds and efficiency, correcting the seven ships' aim and triggering the starship drives simultaneously. The Xul vessel was struck by seven streams of star-hot plasma.

And it kept coming, emerging completely from the Gate, apparently none the worse for wear….

5
APRIL
2170

General Ramsey
Command Control Center
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
0007 hours, Shipboard time

Fire in the night.

The seven converging beams of plasma, moving at near-c velocities, were invisible in the vacuum of space, but when they played across the electromagnetic shielding of the Xul starship they elicited a dazzling splash of blue and violet radiance, highlighted by flickering arcs of lightning. Ripples of blue light seemed to flow across the target's golden surface. In spots, that gold sheen seemed to be breaking down, blackening and crumpling under that torrent of high-energy particles.

The ships added their own firepower to the barrage. Both
Daring
and the
New Chicago
opened fire with their spinal-mount rail guns, sending high-velocity projectiles ripping into the target.

Ramsey could only watch as the bombardment continued, a battle completely beyond his hands, beyond any human hands. In the background, he heard the radio chatter from the Navy vessels, from bridge and gun crews, but the battle proper was being managed by Sissy and Cassius.

Everything,
everything
depended on whether the trick with the starship Kemper Drives would overwhelm the Xul EM defenses, and do so within a period of a very few seconds. If the Xul vessel was able to return fire, the battle might well be over almost before it was begun. Xul military technology must be pure magic from the human point of view. Their one hope was that the Xul wouldn't be able to fire with its shields up, and, logically, those shields had to
stay
up so long as the human ships kept up their attack.

Logically. The word meant nothing now. Even the N'mah didn't know much about Xul military technology, or the capabilities of their warships.

As soon as they opened fire, the seven human ships began backing away from the target at over one gravity; the particle beams
were
their main propulsion drives, after all, and the
Daring
and the
New Chicago
added to that acceleration by keeping up steady bombardments from the railguns mounted in tandem with their forward thrusters.

With sickening suddenness,
New Chicago
died. Her mushroom-cap RM-tank appeared to simply
crumple
, collapsing upon itself, and, an instant later, with her drive still running and the forward thruster destroyed, the antimatter stores used to charge the plasma came into contact with matter and engulfed the entire ship in a dazzling, white hot sun punctuated, according to his sensor data, by an intense burst of X-ray radiation.

Ramsey, uselessly, braced himself. Presumably,
New Chicago
had been targeted because she was also the larger source of the high-velocity rail-gun bolts tearing into the Xul's hull, but the largest of the attackers,
Chapultepec
and
Ranger
, must be next on the enemy's target list.

At three spots along the Xul's hull, the flickering blue radiance coalesced into blinding miniature suns, spots of brilliance that appeared to be eating into hull metal.

The Xul warship was slowing…slowing…

Damn. How much punishment could she take? Six starships continued to spray the two-kilometer monster with streams of high-energy fire, and the little
Daring
kept punching away with her rail gun despite the spectacular death of the much larger
New Chicago
.

Damn it, we should've gone with the AMB option
, Ramsey thought. If rail gun projectiles were getting through the target's defenses, a five-hundred-meter missile with an antimatter warhead would certainly have been able to punch through the Xul's hull and detonate inside.

The blue flickering across the Xul ship died, and for an instant, her naked hull lay exposed to the starcore fury of her assailants.

All six Navy ships ceased acceleration in the same instant, their helms under Sissy's control. They wouldn't have been able to keep firing for more than another second or two anyway; all were racing out from the Wheel now at several hundred meters per second.

The Xul vessel hung motionless now, relative to the Star Gate, her golden hull blackened in some places, and fiercely radiating in others. A cloud of debris slowly expanded from amidships.

He was astonished to note that the entire fight had lasted only seven seconds.

“Target appears to be neutralized,” Cassius said, and Ramsey allowed himself a long, drawn-out sigh of relief. They'd done it.
They'd done it
.

“Send in the Marines,” was all he said.

Corporal Garroway
TRAP 1–2
Sirius Stargate
0008 hours, Shipboard time

“We've got the word,” Warhurst told the waiting Marines over their implants. “CBSS is
go
.”

“Wonder if there's even anything left of the target to board?” Arhipov asked.

“Don't you fucking worry about
that
, youngster,” Dunne told him. “Just keep your head and go by the download.”

“Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant.”

Garroway felt a hard thump and a surge of motion. The TRAP was moving.

“Disembarkation in six minutes,” Dunne said. “Lock and load, people.”

Garroway checked the safety on his PG-90, ratcheting back the bolt-feed access to check the mass injector, checked the power pack and the cable connector, checked the diagnostics. Good to go. The weapon was weightless in zero-G, but still possessed over ten kilos of mass, a solid, reassuring inertia resting in his grasp.

“Okay, people, listen up,” Dunne snapped. “Like the download says, we're not doing a dropout. Word is there's lots of jagged metal over there and lots of floating debris. The TRAP'll slip in as close as the pilot can take us, the clamshells open up, and me and Cavaco'll shoot tethers onto the hull or into the wreck, whatever we can manage. Each of you then hook to a tether and pull yourself over. Move cautious, but
move
. We don't know what's waiting for us over there, and we don't know what kind of weapons they have. Be careful of jagged edges. They might be sharp enough to cut through your armor at a joint. Keep your IR up and watch for hot spots. Word is some spots over there are still white-hot.

“The mission is short, sweet, and simple. We go onboard and see if anybody is alive over there. If we can get prisoners, fine…but no heroics. We don't know their capabilities, so shoot first and download second. Do you copy?”

“
Copy, Gunnery Sergeant
!” eighteen voices chorused back.

“We secure the objective—or as much of it as we can manage—and wait for the civilians to come across. We'll also be trying to link the unit AI in, to see if he can access the thing's computer.

“Watch your backs, watch your fire, watch your buddies, and give the bastards some good old-fashioned Devil Dog hell! Do you copy?”

“
Copy, Gunnery Sergeant
!”

“Ooh-rah!”

“
Ooh-rah
!”

Garroway became aware of a new sound, a kind of irregular pinging and clatter, like gravel bouncing off a tin roof. The TRAP's cargo bay was in vacuum, so the sound was being transmitted through the transport's hull and up through Garroway's boots. It took him a moment to figure out what the sound was…metallic debris striking the TRAP's hull as they approached the objective.

“Two minutes, Marines! Brace for impact!”

Garroway braced….

General Ramsey
Command Control Center
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
0012 hours, Shipboard time

Ramsey watched as four TRAPs approached the Xul ship from four quarters, edging slowly closer. He had to have them highlighted in his noumenal imagery; a CTV-300 series transfer pod, eighteen meters long, was invisibly tiny next to the two-kilometer bulk of the objective. The size difference helped drive home the sheer audacity of what they were attempting here. Eighty Marines, against a monster a mile and a half long.

“General,” Cassius said, “I am picking up a moderate X-ray source at the target.”

“X-rays? What is it? What's causing it?”

“Unknown. I have pinpointed the source in what I assume is the Xul vessel's power plant. It appears to be growing stronger, but at a slow rate.”

Ramsey considered this. It might be a weapon powering up. It might be the crew attempting to refire the engines or light up a reactor. It might be a damaged power plant about to go into meltdown. It might be
many
things, and there was no way to guess what.

“Keep an eye on it, Cass,” he said. “We continue with the mission.”

There was nothing else to do, at least, not until they had more information to work with.

He thought-clicked to a close-in view—TRAP 1-1 drifting slowly through a blizzard of debris, edging ever closer to a gaping hole in the wounded Xul ship's hull, maneuvering gently until its blunt nose actually poked inside.

The dorsal clamshell doors swung open….

Corporal Garroway
TRAP 1–2
Sirius Stargate
0010 hours, Shipboard time

“And
three
and
two
and
one
and…”

Garroway felt the shock, a crumpling, grating noise transmitted through the hull, a gentle surge of deceleration. Overhead, the clamshell doors slowly opened up, sweeping aside the debris drifting immediately above the TRAP.

Harsh light spilled into the TRAP's cargo bay. Sirius A was visible through the center of the Wheel, intolerably bril
liant, the light illuminating the golden hull of the Xul and picking out the dust-mote debris like snowflakes in a blizzard. From his vantage point in the cargo bay, Garroway could see part of the Xul ship, like a smooth-sided golden mountain, and a ragged, blackened tear engulfing the forward end of the TRAP.

Cavaco and Dunne edged themselves halfway up out of the bay, braced themselves, and aimed stubby line-shooters into the opening forward. Tethers unreeled from the spools attached to the guns, tipped by a nanoseal projectile that would adhere solidly to whatever it hit. The two Marines gave the tethers hard tugs, making sure they were firmly anchored, then attached the reels to the edge of the TRAP's cargo bay hatch.

“Let's go, Marines!” Dunne ordered. The first man in line, Eagleton, popped a D-ring attached to his suit tether over a boarding line and began pulling himself out of the bay, hand-over-hand. Garcia was next…then Arhipov.

Garroway followed, clumsily with the bulk of his PG-90, hooked up, and pulled himself out.

The sharply enclosed space of the TRAP cargo bay dropped away, and Garroway found himself lost in an impossible immensity. During his drop onto the Wheel two days ago, the only objects he could see besides stars were the Wheel itself and the occasional pinpoints of fighters and other Marines in the distance. He'd felt very small and very isolated then, but the sky around him was just a sky, and he'd worked and trained in space before.

This time, though, space was
crowded
. Using his own mental set of reference points to bring order to the chaos of zero-G, the TRAP was beneath him, the side of the Xul starship ahead, looming as huge as a mountain adrift in space. Beyond, much larger, was the arc of the Wheel, its size enhanced, somehow, by the relatively diminutive size of the four Navy ships Garroway could see from this perspective.
Taken all together, the encircling vista gave scale to the surroundings, leaving Garroway and the other vac-armored Marines edging toward the objective feeling very tiny indeed; two lines of ants crawling toward a boulder as big as a house.

Can that
! he snapped to himself.
Concentrate on the job
!

The pig-ninety gripped in his right hand, he used his left to pull himself along, careful not to get himself moving so fast that he would collide with Arhipov's feet just ahead. Forcibly, he made himself narrow his focus to Arhipov's boots at the ragged hole in the Xul ship's side, now just meters ahead. He could see long, hard shadows cast by the advancing Marines etched against the TRAP's forward hull; Sirius, high and off to his left, was too bright to look at, even through filtered visors. They'd told him that he could survive direct exposure to Sirius A's light for a short time—thirty minutes or so, plenty of time to get across the Xul ship and back. Nonetheless, he kept checking his suit's dosimeter. Pieces of metal, some black, some mirror-bright, drifted past, some clinking against his helmet.

Ahead, he saw Eagleton unhook and vanish inside, followed closely by Garcia, then by Arhipov.

Then it was his turn. The plunge into shadow was startling, and it took his eyes and his helmet visor both a moment to recover.

He was in an enormous, mostly enclosed space, the opening partially blocked by the TRAP's nose and forward thruster tanks. The volume revealed by his suit lights and by reflected Sirius light from outside was roughly spherical and outlined by unrecognizably fused, blackened and twisted masses that might have been decks or machinery or almost anything at all.

With his left hand, he unhooked his D-ring, then gave himself a gentle shove off the nearest piece of bulkhead, drifting deeper into the wreckage. He hit what might have once been a deck, broken and twisted, and anchored himself, holding
his plasma gun ready, trying to penetrate the encircling darkness with every sense at his command.

Other Marines followed. Gomez, coming in behind Garroway. Lobowski with the section's other pig. Kat Vinton, Tomlinson, and Womicki. Geisler, Morton, Weis, and Donegal. Deek with a third pig, and a replacement from Bravo Company, Wu, with the fourth. HM2 Lee, the company's Corpsman, and two other new replacements, Delaguet and Somdal. Cavaco and Dunne bringing up the rear, where they could steady any Marine who might be having second thoughts about attempting the impossible. Twenty men and women, friends, comrades, and fellow Marines. Garroway didn't know the newbies well, but he'd faced death with all them, and they were as close now as family. Closer.