Galactic Corps

Still, the illusion was not perfect, and things like radiated heat or the spatial distortion caused by a gravitics drive could cause enough of a ripple against background stars to reveal their presence to a careful and watchful enemy. At Captain Black’s command, and under Smedley’s precise control, the school of invisible fish shifted vector as a unit, moving now slantwise across the opening of the stargate, each platoon angling toward a different target, the three Xul bastions guarding this gateway into Cluster Space.

So far, their entrance appeared to have gone unnoticed.

It would have been a mistake, though, to assume the Xul were careless or less than alert. Intelligence had reported that their defenses had been tightening up at all of their known gate outposts over the past few years, as the Xul Mind as a whole began, slowly, to react to Humankind’s attacks.

For almost nine years, now, 1MIEF had been playing a deadly game, one absolutely vital to the survival of Earth and Humankind. With both military and civilian intelligence services certain that the ancient enemy, the Xul, had learned the location of Sol and of the existence of humanity, Lieutenant General Martin Alexander, acclaimed Hero of the Battle of the Nova, had for almost a decade, now, been wielding the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force like a personal weapon. Again and again, a Xul bastion outpost, either long-known or newly discovered, would be targeted by 1MIEF for a lightning raid. Usually, the Xul bastion would be located within a system containing one or more of the ancient stargates.

Those gates were still mysteries. Human xenosophontologists and intelligence officers all agreed that the system of stargates scattered throughout the Galaxy and beyond were not, themselves, the product of Xul technology, but were leftovers from some other, much more ancient civilization, now long vanished. But the Xul, like the N’mah and humans, used the gates to their own advantage with other technologies for crossing the long, empty light years. The Gatenet provided a transport web spanning tens of thousands of light years—if you knew where each gate attunement led.

The Xul appeared to be very much at home with the Gatenet, had woven it into the fabric of their empire. Humans were still learning the shape and dimensions of that Net. But one by one, human forces continued to secretly find, note, and then attack every Xul gate outpost they could find. By keeping up a relentless assault, the hope was to keep the Xul preoccupied with tracking down and destroying 1MIEF, rather than with moving into the star systems occupied by Humanity—including Sol—and obliterating them.

Clearly, the Xul could send Humankind into extinction if they set their considerable assets toward that goal; the trick was to keep them so off balance with constant raids, each one a pinprick on its own, that they never got around to that final genocidal thrust at the worlds occupied by humanity.

How long could 1MIEF keep up the pinpricks? No one knew, though the topic was a favorite during off-watch bull sessions in the Marine squad bays on board each of the fleet’s transports. Marine and Navy sim-warriors and armchair generals made elaborate bets as to how long the task force could stay on the offensive, whether or not they’d be recalled to Sol, and how long it would be before the Xul empire collapsed.

Garroway had participated in a few of those sessions, but had refrained from joining in on the betting. If he’d started making wagers, he would have been betting against his own survival … a distinctly uncomfortable position in which to find oneself. He believed in the Marine Corps and in the Corps’ indomitable fighting spirit, but he also knew just how large the Xul presence in the Galaxy must be. Conservative estimates said the Xul hunterships outnumbered all human starships on the order of several tens of thousands to one. The Galaxy was that large.

Not good odds. Not good odds at all.

His bottle was rapidly approaching one of the Xul fortresses now, a massive, squashed sphere five kilometers across. The surface showed a platinum-silver sheen that appeared smoothly reflective from a distance but which, as his M-CAP fell closer, was revealed to be a maze of geometric shapes, angles, protrusions, towers, squared-off valleys, and raised blocks. Weapons ports and turrets revealed themselves everywhere, plasma guns and magnetic accelerators and other weapons that affected the very nature of matter itself—and which were still sheer magic in so far as human technology was concerned.

Smedley announced that they were passing through the first of several magnetic screens. The surface nano on each pod adjusted to let it slip through without disturbing the field and announcing the Marine assault team’s presence. Garroway found he was holding his breath, wondering when something would trigger, when surprise would be lost and the battle would begin. …

M-CAPs were superbly stealthy, as close-to-invisible as modern military technology could make them. Though bottles could accelerate at forty gravities, their approach so far had been deliberately low-key and unobtrusive, too slow for the automated Xul defense systems to recognize a threat.

They hadn’t been seen so far. That, or the Xul targeting sensors already had them locked in, and were simply waiting for the order to fire.

Closer now … fewer than five kilometers. His personal AI took over full control of the small ship, identifying the best place for touch-down, coordinating with the company AI and the other fifty bottles in First Platoon, slowing Garroway’s bottle with precisely timed bursts of its gravitics drive until it was hovering motionless a few meters above the surface. Gently, then, the craft lowered itself against the small but distinct gravitational attraction of the Xul fortress, until the two kissed.

“Contact,” Garroway reported. Within his mental tacsit display, other Marines were reporting a successful touch-down all around him.

According to plan, the Headquarters element had grounded with First Platoon, which had as its target the largest of the three Xul bastions. Second and Third Platoons were deploying to the other two fortresses. Each Marine element was now on its own.

Still under AI control, Garroway’s bottle extended its boarding cutter, a cylinder extruding nano-disassemblers from its business end to eat through the ceramic composites that made up the Xul structure’s hull and create a tightly sealed docking collar. The bottle should be able to eat through the outer layers of armor within a minute or so, allowing Garroway and the other Marines to drop down into the interior of the fortress.

“Incoming bogies!” a shrill voice called over the tactical net. “We’ve got incoming bogies!”

So the Xul had finally adapted to this form of attack. The pods must have triggered some sort of alarm or defensive system as soon as they’d started touching down. On Garroway’s mental tac display, a cloud of red targets was now emerging over the Xul fortress’s close horizon, bearing down on the Marine assault platoon like an angry swarm of bees.

“Perimeter defense!” Captain Black called. “Take ’em down!”

The thirty M-CAPs of First Platoon and the HQ section had set down on the Xul fortress in an AI-controlled pattern, with an outer ring along the perimeter of Marines with heavy weapons, and two inner rings intent on tunneling into the fortress. Garroway snapped on his targeting link, and felt his bottle spin within the boarding collar to bring the target cloud under his weapon.

The AP-840 M-CAP mounted a single weapon at its stern—the part of the bottle opposite the boarding collar, still raised three meters above the Xul hull. After latching on and digging in—“taking a bite,” as Marine slang put it—the M-CAP essentially became a mounted turret weapon. The gun, depending on the mission load-out, could be a V-90 Striker missile launcher, a rapid-fire magnetic pulse gun, or a Starfire plasma weapon.

Garroway’s bottle mounted the V-90. The Striker was a smart weapon that could carry a variety of warheads. The missiles filling Garroway’s ammo bins each were fitted out with ND-4 nanodisassembler pods. Tracking the incoming cloud in his mind, nudging the selector to full auto, he thoughtclicked the firing control and a stream of forty-centimeter missiles snapped from his weapon mount. The missiles coordinated with one another to disperse into the cloud, ignoring the leading elements of the enemy force and detonating deep within the attacking formation.

Each exploding pod released a cloud of its own—millions of molecule-sized nanodisassemblers traveling at high speed and programmed to begin taking apart whatever they happened to strike. Working on an atomic level, they were fast; almost immediately, red-highlighted targets on the tactical display began winking out, as though black cancers were eating through the formation from within, the decay beginning at a dozen different starting points and swiftly working its way out.

Other Marine M-CAPs around the perimeter began firing as well, adding their own clouds of nano-D to the general destruction, or lashing out with man-made bolts of plasma lightning.

Then the cloud reached the Marine perimeter.

Each target was a Xul warrior—a machine, actually, that was apparently grown within the hulls of their hunterships and forts. Two to three meters long, egg-shaped, but with smooth convolutions and bulges, each extruded a number of tentacles at seemingly random points on their shells, each possessed glittering lenses, also randomly positioned over their bodies. Some of those lenses would be eyes. Others …

Laser fire snapped across the outer hull of Garroway’s pod, generating a silvery puff of expanding vapor. Damn! The Xulies weren’t supposed to be able to see the Marine bottles with the optical benders on … but, then, no one was certain what wavelengths the Xul warriors used for vision, or what other senses they might possess.

He snapped off another burst of nano-D in response, but the Xul that had nailed him had already vaporized an instant before, caught by a flash from Sergeant Colby’s plasma gun.

“Thanks!” Garroway called to her over the tactical net.

“Don’t mention it, Gare!” was her response. She was already tracking another Xul warrior, as was Garroway. As the enemy swarmed over the Marine position, he’d switched to single shots and shoot-to-hit; the enemy was widely enough dispersed now that the Marines could no longer wipe out large numbers of the enemy combat machines with area fire. His bottle spun wildly, tracking a Xul as it streaked past low above the surface of the fortress. Garroway held his fire until his targeting cursor tracked past several nearby Marine bottles, then slammed a nano-D pod squarely into the now-fleeing machine from behind. The Xul warrior fell to pieces, a spray of dissolving parts, seconds later.

Local nano-D levels were rising sharply in the immediate battlespace. Drifting motes of disassembler were striking his pod, now, then rebounding. They were programmed to recognize the outer nano coatings of the M-CAPs and ignore them and seek other targets, but a few were beginning to burrow into his bottle at points scoured clean of nano by the Xul laser bursts. The automatic defenses on Garroway’s pod were growing erratic, and would soon fail.

“Smedley!” Garroway called, loosing another barrage at a pair of incoming Xul combat robots. “I’ve got nano-D on my pod, friendly fire! Tell the bastards to go chow down on something else!”

The company AI tweaked the electronics in Garroway’s bottle, and the errant nano-D drifted away into space like a puff of vapor, repelled by the brief, coded signal. A lot of the stuff was starting to work on the Xul fortress’s hull around the bottles, too. That might cause problems later, but there wasn’t much that could be done about it. Modern battlefields tended to soften and sludge down as random traces of nano-D, both friendly and enemy, began to accumulate in the area.

Then there was a sharp jolt, and Garroway’s bottle dropped by a meter, sliding down hard into the boarding collar. The deck he was standing on dilated open. He didn’t immediately fall in the microgravity of the Xul fortress but, setting the pod’s combat initiative on auto, he triggered a pair of battlespace drones, launching them into the emptiness at his feet.

A firefight was raging down there, as other Marines entered the enemy bastion. Garroway’s drones uplinked to his helmet, showing him images of Marines in heavy armor struggling in a low, broad passageway with Xul fighterbots coming at them tentacle to metallic tentacle. He charged his suit’s weapons, then gave a hard shove down through the open deck. Passing through the boarding collar, he entered the fight.

The passageway was two meters tall and ten to twenty wide, and the Marines were forced to stoop slightly because a Marine in Type 664 combat armor stood at nearly two and a quarter meters.

It was a Dantean scene, a circle of Hell, with Marines and Xul fighterbots struggling at knife-fighting range. It looked as though it should be unbearably noisy, but the interior of the Xul fortress was in hard vacuum and each bolt of plasma, each detonating grenade, each ripping or exploding alien shell did so in eerie silence. When Garroway’s boots touched the deck, though, he could feel the noise, a kind of steady, pounding thrum in the bulkheads and deck as the vibrations were transmitted through Xul ceramic to his combat armor.

The one advantage possessed by the Marine assault team was that they were physically shorter than the Xul machines, which, in that low corridor, were coming at them horizontally, pulling themselves along with powerful flicks of their tentacles against the deck and the overhead. As a result, the only weapons the enemy could bring to bear were those set into the tops of their egg-shaped bodies. After a few moments, the Marines, too, began leaning forward, lifting their boots off the deck, dropping prone to minimize their cross-sections as targets as they poured a devastating and concentrated fire into the attacking hordes.

Garroway mounted an MPPG-40 on the right arm of his combat armor, a rapid-fire mass driver on his left. He shouldered forward about twelve meters, taking up a firing position next to Corporal Gerad Kukovitch, a massively built fungie in the company from Spokane, Washington. Kuk was mounting a 20mm full-auto grenade launcher on his suit; he was one of the few people in the company big enough to pack one. The Marine was floating horizontally, taking partial cover behind one of a number of pillar-like structures scattered through that alien hall. They looked like massive, meter-thick bundles of rope or ceramic cabling growing like tree trunks between deck and overhead. Garroway stretched out beside him, firing from the other side of the pillar.

Side by side, the two Marines coordinated their fire, ’Vitch’s grenades silently flashing as they ripped through the enemy ranks, Garroway’s MPPG sending blinding bolts of blue-white energy arcing down the corridor, ripping deep into everything they touched. Sergeant Larissa Colby joined them a second later, adding her plasma weapon to the melee. One by one, other Marines began locking in with the growing phalanx of Marines while their suit AIs linked in with one another under Smedley’s guidance to coordinate their fire.

Together, as a unit, they were far more effective in concentrating their fire.

And then, almost magically, the enemy horde vanished, seeming to melt away into deck, overhead, and the far bulkheads of the chamber.

“Keep alert!” Captain Black called over the company Net. “They’ll be back! Special weapons forward!”

Two Marines moved up the debris-filled space, hauling massive tubes with them. Tripod legs unfolded as they planted the mounts against the deck and activated them.

For some centuries, Marine tactics against Xul ships and bastions had involved boarding the enemy and lugging backpack nukes into the structure’s depths. Nuclear explosions on the outer hull of one of the immense Xul hunterships or the even larger enemy fortresses did little permanent damage, and the resultant craters generally were patched over within a matter of minutes by flying clouds of fist-sized repair robots. A nuke detonating deep inside a Xul ship, though, tended to cause terrible damage, hampered automated repair efforts, and often loosed the microsingularities these monsters used as their power sources, and that was almost always fatal even to the largest Xul ship or structure.

Backpack nukes had been standard Corps issue until a few years ago. Now, however, the Marines had something a little better in their arsenal. …

2

1506.1111

First Platoon, Bravo Company
Cluster Space
0635 hrs, GMT

“Enemy targets bearing ahead and behind,” Smedley reported in maddeningly calm tones.

“Here they come again, boys!” Captain Black warned. “Let ’em have it!”

“Ooh-rah!” Second Lieutenant Cooper yelled over the Net. “Kill the bastards!”

The defenders of Xul ships and bases tended to act and react in predictable ways. Assaults were en masse, wave attacks with thousands of units moving forward as one in an attempt to overwhelm Marine perimeter defenses. Once the Marine defenders had killed enough of the oncoming Xul combat units—estimates suggested the number ran around twenty-five to thirty percent of the total number of the attackers—the remainder would break off and disappear, usually by vanishing back into the walls of the structure’s interior passageways and compartments. Some minutes would pass while the Xul built up their numbers once again, bringing in fresh combatants from deeper inside the target, and then the assault would be renewed.

That was what was happening now, as the passageway once again filled with black metallic egg shapes and flickering, writhing tentacles, coming in from both directions. Garroway crouched behind the pillar and aimed his weapon, thought-snapping the firing command, the plasma gun’s link with his armor electronics triggering bolt after searing bolt of man-made lightning.

Garroway let himself settle into the rhythm of combat, picking out targets and burning them down. The riflemen needed to buy a few precious minutes for the special-weapons boys, and then they would be able to withdraw.

Xul ships and space fortresses had often been compared to organic structures, like the physical bodies of immense living organisms kilometers across. While no one knew how true this might be, the comparison was unavoidable. The masses of alien circuitry making up much of their internal mass appeared to have been grown rather than constructed, and there were nothing like crew compartments or quarters on board these things. Rather, the Xul appeared to be electronic life forms uploaded into the circuitry of a titanic computer. When any part of the structure was damaged, robotic devices the size of a human fist appeared in clouds swarming through the damaged area, appearing to extrude themselves into new circuitry in the same way that medicos used nanochelation to plate out circuitry inside the human brain and nervous system, but on a much larger scale.

These tentacled combat robots the Marines were engaging now appeared to be analogues of white cells and other immune-defense systems in an organic system. If that was so, the passageways like this one, which seemed to riddle all Xul structures with labyrinthine complexity, could reasonably be compared to a body’s circulatory system, to blood vessels and lymphatic ducts serving as conduits for robotic devices designed for a variety of tasks including both repair and defense.

And to carry the uneasy comparison just a bit further, that meant that the Marines of 1MIEF were microbes, invaders penetrating the Xul’s giant circulatory system with the intent of killing it.

At least in the human organism, bacteria didn’t come in the form of platoons of Marines, heavily armored and carrying plasma and antimatter weaponry.

As with armchair discussions of 1MIEF’s strategy and tactics, the topic was often discussed in Marine squad bays during off-duty hours. For now, Garroway’s thoughts touched on the image only briefly: Let’s give this fat bastard one hell of an upset stomach! The rhythm of targeting and firing fell into an almost automatic process, guided by his training and the mental conditioning of weiji-do.

The two heavy gunners, meanwhile, rapidly completed setting up their weapons, one aiming forward, into the advancing mass of Xul warriors, the other aimed into the attackers in the opposite direction. A moment later, the weapons rocked in their mounts, and a pair of silvery shapes, each roughly the size of a big man’s forearm and fist, flashed from the muzzles and, accelerating on their microgravitics, streaked into the surrounding darkness. One slammed into the side of an advancing Xul warrior, knocking it aside and continuing to accelerate as it flashed out of sight.

Designated RD-260, the weapon was popularly known as the RAM-D, for Remote Antimatter Detonator. Each round contained nearly a kilogram of antimatter suspended in hard vacuum and an electromagnetic bubble, preventing it from coming into contact with the containment cylinder’s poly-ceramic and steel walls.

The gunners began reloading, hauling new RAM-D rounds out of the carry-satchels mounted on the hips of their armor. Tactical doctrine called for loosing three rounds apiece … if the enemy gave them that much time.

Sergeant Dixon, meanwhile, was laying down the back-up, a Mk.17 backpack nuke. He had it up against the overhead close beside one of the chamber’s pillars, holding it firmly in place while the nano coating on the device’s back formed an unbreakable bond with the surface of the alien composite. Dix’s nuke was the mission’s back-up guarantee … just in case the Xulies intercepted the other packages.

Garroway kept up a steady fire, frying Xul combat machines as quickly as he could target them. The microgravity environment within the confines of the passageway, however, was becoming clogged with drifting bits of debris, everything from glittering particles the size of grains of sand up to the three-meter shells of almost-intact Xul warriors burned out by Marine marksmanship. Clouds of nano-D adrift in the area were dissolving the larger pieces, but left behind a gritty, clinging dust that illuminated the enemy’s laser beams as they flashed and probed through the gloom.

The Marines’ armor was deflecting most of the incoming lasers, the outer layers of nano redirecting and scattering each flash harmlessly in a cascade of brilliant iridescence. Laser bolts repeatedly struck the pillar Garroway was half sheltering behind, striking with sharp, silent flashes and puffs of white vapor.

Some of the enemy fire was getting through, however, striking Marine armor on bare patches not covered by nano—on sensors and joint lines and link connector pads. Corporal Tomkins was down, air and boiling blood spraying from a severed lower arm until the suit’s autosealers and nanomedibot injectors could kick in. “Corpsman! Corpsman front!” In seconds, Doc Huston was with the wounded Marine, dragging him out of the line of fire, putting his own armor between the wounded man and the enemy as he hauled the man back toward the pods.

Then PFC White was hit, half of her visor charred, cracked and leaking air. Doc Billingsly had her in seconds, slapping a sealant patch over her visor before it could crack further, and pulling her back out of the firefight. The Marines continued putting down a devastating defensive fire, drawing closer to one another as their defensive perimeter tightened up.

The special-weps gunners loosed their second rounds, firing almost together. The leading Xul machines reached the Marine perimeter at almost the same moment, colliding headlong with Marine riflemen in a confused tangle of armored legs and arms and whiplashing tentacles. Suddenly, the defensive perimeter was broken, with dozens of the gleaming combat machines smashing through the line and grappling with the armored Marines. In an instant, the battle went from a firing line drill to a knife fight.

One of the massive warrior robots collided with Garroway as he burned down a Xul machine alongside it, and the impact drove him back like the blow from a sledgehammer. The enemy was too close for plasma weapons now, too close even for his flamer. As Garroway tumbled over backward in the embrace of a Xul attacker, he thought-clicked his slicers into place—squared-off plates extending from his suit gauntlets over the backs of his hands thirty centimeters beyond the tips of his fingertips. Each plate was nano-grown from a carbon-niobium alloy in a sheet with edges feathered down to just an atom or two thick, rigidly anchored in a quark-quark substrate. They were monofilaments made rigid, sharp enough to slice cleanly through any solid matter less dense than neutronium.

Garroway’s right arm came up and around as he shifted in his mind to weiji-do, the martial art form modern Marines trained in extensively in boot camp. Weiji-do, the Way of Manifestation, was a set of mental conditionings and downloaded training related to more ancient forms like t’ai chi. The imagery was of the essential chaos at the root of all existence out of which matter and energy were summoned, a deliberate tie-in with the principles of quantum physics that pulled energy from the base-state Quantum Sea.

Mentally drawing on the chaos of unformed reality, he focused a savage thrust of mental energy into the slicer blade as he rotated his suit sharply, sending the blade like a scalpel through the ceramic-plastic laminates of the Xul machine’s shell. Pivoting, he arrested his rotational energy and came back with his left blade; the Xul machine’s tentacles dropped away as the machine’s body gaped open with mirror-smooth surfaces at the cuts. A final thrust, and the machine snapped into two pieces, lifelessly inert. Electricity snapped and flickered across exposed alien circuits, the bolts grounded out by Garroway’s armor.

Continuing to rotate, he brought the mass driver mounted on his left arm to bear on another Xul machine as it grappled with PFC Nikki Armandez. BB-sized pellets accelerated to ultra-high velocity slashed across the machine’s shell, ripping open a fist-sized gash in the black sleekness. The machine bucked and jerked, like a living thing, as Armandez twisted clear of flailing tentacles.

Around him, the other Marines were fighting hand-to-hand—or, rather, hand-to-tentacle—as well, firing into enemy combat machines when they were a meter or two away, slicing them into tumbling, drifting chunks when they closed to within an arm’s reach.

Garroway was forcibly reminded of an ancient adage drilled into all Marines in boot camp: the most dangerous weapon in combat was a Marine. It didn’t matter whether he was armed with a plasma weapon, a mass driver, antimatter drone, forearm-mounted slicers, or his bare hands. It wasn’t the Marine’s high-tech toys that were dangerous. It was the Marine that wielded them.

In seconds, the breakthrough had been stopped, the alien machines inside the perimeter literally cut to pieces, while the rest withdrew as suddenly and as silently as they’d appeared. Four more Marines were down, their armor burned open, air and blood leaking into the chamber as a thin, icy pink haze.

Garroway did a quick mental rundown. First Company and the HQ element together totaled fifty men and women, five of them corpsmen. That left thirty-nine combat effectives on the line, now, and that included the specialist comm and computer personnel who had other things to do besides burn down enemy robots.

“Four AM-drones away!” 2nd Lieutenant Cooper reported over the Net.

“That’ll do it,” Captain Black said. “Everyone start falling back to the entry point. Bring the wounded!” A tiny point of light began winking in Garroway’s mind—the recall beacon, indicating the direction of his waiting M-CAP.

Garroway and Corporal Kukovitch held their position behind the pillar, covering several other Marines as they fell back past them toward the waiting M-CAPs, dragging along the bodies of fallen comrades.

That was a point of pride. No Marine was left behind, living or dead, and no Marine or corpsman serving with the unit assumed any Marine was dead in the field, no matter how bad the wound appeared to be. Unless someone had been smoked—literally turned to vapor by an enemy weapon—the possibility remained that they could be retrieved, even if large parts of their bodies had to be regrown or replaced.

Hell, Garroway had experienced that himself nine years back, at the Battle of Nova Space. They’d come after him, too, pulling him from a derelict alien spacecraft as a nearby star exploded. If they hadn’t, he would have been an irrie—an irretrievable—himself.

They leapfrogged back, section by section, one group of Marines providing cover as the rest fell back in moves of several meters at a time. Within a few minutes, they closed in around the tight cluster of M-CAP pods, where they’d broken through into the Xul base’s interior, creating a new, much tighter perimeter. For the moment, the Xul warrior robots were not in evidence—not out in the open, anyway, but sensors wired into Garroway’s external armor were picking up motion—vibrations detected through the Xul hull metal each time he touched it. Each Xul wave attack tended to be larger, usually by an order of magnitude, than the last.