Galactic Corps
Author: Ian Douglas
Date: 2008-10-16 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Space Opera; Military Fiction; Military Science Fiction; Fiction; Aliens; Science Fiction Fantasy; Action
Description: War is foreverThe people on Earth no longer remember how the human race was nearly obliterated centuries earlier during the terror visited upon them by the merciless Xul. But the Star Marines, thirty thousand light years from home, know all too well the horror that still lives.In the year 2886, in the midst of the intergalactic war that has been raging nonstop for nearly a decade, the unthinkable has occurred. Intelligence has located the gargantuan hidden homeworld of humankind's dedicated foe, the brutal, unstoppable Xul. The time has come for the courageous men and women of the 1st Marine I

GALACTIC

C O R P S

BOOK TWO OF THE INHERITANCE TRILOGY

I A N D O U G L A S

As always, for Brea. My light. My life. My muse.

Contents

Timeline of the Inheritance Universe
vii

Prologue

They were not omnipotent.

1

1

Gunnery Sergeant Aiden Garroway wiggled
a bit deeper into the…

7

2

“Enemy targets bearing ahead and behind,”

Smedley reported in maddeningly…

22

3

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander, CO
of the 1st Marine Interstellar…

39

4

In General Alexander’s mind, 1MIEF’s battle
array resembled a kind…

53

5

“Minus three…two…one…mark!” The AI’s
voice in Alexander’s mind said, counting…

68

6

“The first wave of Penetrators is away, General.” 83

7

From General Alexander’s electronic viewpoint
on board the Hermes, it…

99

8

Garroway stepped out onto the open concourse,
enjoying the rush…

115

9

Just less than two hours after their arrival
at Freeport,…

132

10

“So where is the lost city of Atlantis?” Nikki

Armandez…

147

11

A week later, under a dazzlingly star-filled
night sky, Garroway…

162

12

“Hey!” Garroway said, startled as the realization
hit him. “Do…

177

13

“A probe’s coming back through, General,” a
technician reported. “The…

193

14

“What the hell is a Dyson sphere?” Garroway
wanted to…

209

15

It was the second time a vessel named

Intrepid had…

223

16

The flight of AV-110 Tarantulas dropped to
within scant meters…

238

17

Garroway led an ad hoc section of twenty

Marines forward…

257

18

“The way I heard it,” Lance Corporal Phil

Chaffee said,…

271

19

“She’s…gone!” a young naval officer seated
at one of the…

287

20

“Hermes is ready in all respects for Alcubierre

Drive,”

Captain…

301

21

Fire lit up the night.

315

22

“The astrogation department just checked in,”

Taggart told Alexander. “They…

329

23

In close formation, Hermes and the light
carrier Cunningham fell…

346

24

“Sir!” a Navy rating called from the comm
board. “We’ve…

362

25

There weren’t many of them left.

377

Epilogue

In the outlying regions of the Galaxy’s Perseus

Arm, within…

394

About the Author

Other Books by Ian Douglas

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Timeline of the Inheritance Universe

Years before present

50,000,000–30,000,000: Galaxy dominated by the One

Mind, sentient organic superconductors with hive mentality.

They create the network of stargates across the Galaxy, and
build the Encyclopedia Galactica Node at the Galactic

Core.

30,000,000–10,000,000: Dominance of Children of the

Night, nocturnal psychovores. They replace the One Mind,
which may have transcended material instrumentality.

10,000,000 to present: Dominance of the Xul, also known
as the Hunters of the Dawn. Originally polyspecifi c panto-
vores, they eventually exist solely as downloaded mentali-
ties within artificial cybernetic complexes.

Circa 500,000 b.c.e.: Advanced polyspecific machine intelli-
gence, later called variously the Ancients or the Builders, ex-
tends a high- technology empire across a volume of space several
thousand light years in extent. Extensive planoforming of Chi-
ron, at Alpha Centauri A, of Mars in the nearby Sol System,
and of numerous other worlds. QCC networks provide instan-
taneous communications across the entire empire. Ultimately,
the Builder civilization is destroyed by the Xul. Asteroid im-
pacts strip away the newly generated Martian atmosphere and
seas, but Earth, with no technological presence, is ignored. A

Xul huntership is badly damaged in the battle over Mars; it later
crashes into the Europan world- sea and is frozen beneath the
ice. Survivors of the Martian holocaust migrate to Earth and

viii

T I M E L I N E O F T H E I N H E R I TA N C E U N I V E R S E
upload themselves into gene-tailored primates that later will be
known as Homo sapiens.

10,000 b.c.e. –7500 b.c.e.: Earth and Earth’s Moon colo-
nized by the Ahannu, or An, who are later remembered as
the gods of ancient Sumeria. Around 7500 b.c.e., asteroid
strikes by the Xul destroy An colonies across their empire.

Earth is devastated by asteroid strikes. One colony, at La-
lande 21185, survives.

Circa 6000 b.c.e.: Amphibious N’mah visit Earth and help
human survivors of Xul attack develop civilization. They
are later remembered as the Nommo of the Dogon tribe of

Africa, and as civilizing/agricultural gods by other cultures
in the Mideast and the Americas.

Circa 6000–5000 b.c.e.: N’mah starfaring culture destroyed
by the Xul. Survivors exist in low-technology communities
within the Sirius Stargate and, possibly, elsewhere.

1200 b.c.e. [Speculative]: The Xul revisit Earth and dis-
cover an advanced Bronze Age culture. Asteroid impacts
cause devastating floods worldwide, and may be the root of
the Atlantis myth.

700 c.e.: The deep abyssal intelligence later named the Eu-
lers fight the Xul to a standstill by detonating their own
stars. The astronomical conflagration of artificial novae is
seen in the skies of Earth, in the constellation Aquila, some

1,200 years later.

The Heritage Trilogy

2039–2042: Semper Mars

2040: 1st UN War. March by “Sands of Mars Garroway.” Bat-
tle of Cydonia. Discovery of the Cydonian Cave of Wonders.

2040–2042: Luna Marine

2042: Battle of Tsiolkovsky. Discovery of An base on the

Moon.

2067: Europa Strike

T I M E L I N E O F T H E I N H E R I TA N C E U N I V E R S E
ix

2067: Sino-American War. Discovery of the Singer under
the Europan ice.

The Legacy Trilogy

2138–2148: Star Corps

2148: Battle of Ishtar. Treaty with An of Lalande 21185.

Earth survey vessel The Wings of Isis destroyed while ap-
proaching the Sirius Stargate.

2148–2170: Battlespace

2170: Battle of Sirius Gate. Contact with the N’mah, an am-
phibious species living inside the gate structure. Data col-
lected electronically fills in some information about the Xul,
and leads to a Xul node in Cluster Space, 30,000 light years
from Sol. A Marine assault force uses the gate to enter Clus-
ter Space and destroy this gate.

2314–2333: Star Marines

2314: Armageddonfall

2323: Battle of Night’s Edge. Destruction of Xul fl eet and
world in Night’s Edge Space.

The Inheritance Trilogy

2877: Star Strike

2877 [1102 m.e. ]: 1MIEF departs for Puller 659. Battle of

Puller 659 against Pan- Euro peans. Contact with Eulers in

Cygni Space. Battle of Cygni Space. Destruction of star in

Starwall Space, eliminating local Xul node.

2886: Galactic Corps

2886 [1111 m.e.]: Raid on Cluster Space by 1MIEF. Dis-
covery of stargate path to major Xul node at Galactic Core.

2887 [1112 m.e.]: Operation Heartfire. Assault on the Ga-
lactic Core.

Prologue

They were not omnipotent.

Throughout their multi-million-year period of galactic
dominance, they’d been known by many names. The De-
stroyers. The Hunters of the Dawn. The Enemy. The Xul.

They called themselves by a thought symbol that might
translate as We Who Are.

Perhaps ten million years ago, give or take some few
hundreds of thousands of years, We Who Are had possessed
organic bodies; as such, they’d been a species, like all heirs
of flesh, shaped and constrained by the impersonal forces of
evolution. In common with all products of the evolutionary
process, they’d possessed a marked will to survive.

What most clearly distinguished We Who Are from most
other species was simply the extremes to which that will
carried them.

Early in their history, they’d survived— barely— a trau-
matic encounter with another species upon their home planet.

That encounter left them shaken, brutalized, and monoma-
niacally mistrustful of the motives of anything Other.

It left the other species extinct.

That ancient struggle for dominance, ultimately for sur-
vival, imprinted itself upon the psyche of We Who Are.

When, in due time, they began moving out into the Galaxy,
they carried that imprint with them. No other species pos-
ing a threat, however remote, to We Who Are could be per-
mitted to survive.

2 I A N

D O U G L A S

Over the course of some millions of years, We Who Are
extended and expanded the range of their lonely suzerainty
over the Galaxy. Eventually, however, they encountered the
far-flung bastions of another starfaring species, nocturnal
psychovores who styled themselves as the Children of the

Night. Like We Who Are, the Children possessed as a racial
trait the need to exterminate all competition. Unlike We Who

Are at that time, perhaps eight million years ago, the Chil-
dren were already ancient, their line extending back into a
murkily remote past when they, in their season, had wrested
dominance of the Galaxy from a still more remote species,
a self-aware congeries of organic superconductors that
called themselves the One Mind.

Young, fired with righteous ambition and an instinctive
determination to crush all competition in order to be alone,
and therefore safe, within their Galactic fastnesses, We Who

Are eventually triumphed after a savage no-quarters war
that scoured a hundred thousand worlds of life. The Chil-
dren of the Night passed into the ultimate Night of extinc-
tion, as had the One Mind before them.

And with that victory, the We Who Are became the new
xenophobically senticidal caretakers of the Galaxy.

More millions of years passed. Eventually, like the ma-
jority of technically oriented species before them, We Who

Are chose to discard their organic bodies, uploading their
consciousnesses into nearly immortal cybernetic shells. They
carried with them, however, the racial traits of mind and
awareness that had distinguished them as organic beings—
including the blatantly Darwinian imperative to eliminate
all possible competitors, all possible threats to their exis-
tence.

In fact, this radical form of natural selection had domi-
nated the galactic scene ever since sentient life had first
emerged, some eight billion years before. In any given ep-
och, it took only a single intelligent species with technic
aptitude and a lack of empathy for anything Other to emerge
from the cauldron of its birthworld and insure its survival
by eliminating all possible rivals. Galactic civilizations

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

3

rarely overlapped perfectly in terms of their scientific and
technical levels; with each encounter, one species tended to
be older than the other, usually by many thousands or tens
of thousands of years, and hence far more technically ad-
vanced.

As new civilizations emerged and achieved technical ca-
pabilities permitting space flight and long-distance com-
munication, most wondered why the skies of their worlds,
which should have been humming with the signs of ad-
vanced civilizations, seemed so silent, so empty. Each time
new races, new civilizations took their first tentative steps
out beyond the worlds of their genesis, We Who Are, sooner
or later, detected their efforts from their scattered bastions,
descended upon their worlds, and relentlessly exterminated
them. Hence, the silent sky.

But like the Children of the Night, the One Mind, and so
many others who’d come before, We Who Are were not om-
nipotent. The vast, sprawling spiral of the Galaxy, possess-
ing some three hundred billion stars, is far too large, with
far too many worlds, for any one race to monitor every pos-
sible lifeworld, every emerging sentient species.

And there were so many of these. . . .

In the outlying regions of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm,
within the dense polar jungles of the warm, inner world
of a class-G5 star, a race of brachiating
mollusks—
morphologically, at least, they somewhat resembled certain
members of that terrestrial phylum— swung from the inter-
woven branches of sessile thermovores not unlike Earthly
trees. The species was young, as yet, but had developed an
elaborate philosophy based on mating calls, territoriality,
music, and mathematics. One day, they might have much to
offer an evolving Galactic polylogue, but they hadn’t yet
developed electronics or radio, much less the instanta-
neous magic of
quantum-coupled communications. The
huntership-communes of We Who Are had passed through
this star system several times within the past ten thousand
or so years, but not noticed the species’ thriving, arboreal
cities.

4 I A N

D O U G L A S

Not yet.

Closer in toward the galactic core, within the teeming star
clouds of the Sagittarius Arm, on the rugged, tide-strained
volcanic moon of a superjovian gas giant, a race of armored
paraholothurids built water’s-edge hive-cities of compacted
excrement and composed palendromic epics celebrating their
having been chosen as slaves of the sky-disk they saw as the
eye of God. Natural radio emitters, they broadcast the glory
of the one true religion to the stars. We Who Are had de-
tected those signals and searched for their origin; so far,
they’d not found the holothurids’ world, for they tended not
to think of planetary bodies outside of the star’s liquid-water
habitable zone as a possible abode of life.

That partic ular blind spot had given them trouble more
than once in the past, and likely would again.

Closer in still toward the galactic hub, near the merging
of the Norma and Scutum-Crux Arms, a fiercely radiating
type A star blasted its unusual coterie of rocky worlds with
intense radiation. Bathed in abundant radiant energy, Life
had emerged on the innermost world and, borne by the lo-
cal stellar winds, had seeded the other, outer planets of the
system as well. Sentience had arisen here a few million years
before, rising among several of the numerous, fast-evolving
taxas of selenium- germanium chelated crystalline chemo-
vores that constituted the local biosphere. Here, again, the
manipulation of naturally occurring radio waves became
the basis for communication, and, again, those manipula-
tions had been detected in the depths of space, light-years
distant.

The pace of crystalline life, however, tends to be slow,
too slow for We Who Are to distinguish that life from the
inorganic chemistry of accreted minerals. Those received
artificial signals had caused the local We Who Are node
some considerable concern, but it was clear that the prob-
lem soon would take care of itself. Type A giants are short-lived
stars, their lifetimes on the main sequence lasting less than
half a billion years. The local star already was showing
signs of instability, and soon the abundant radiation that

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

5

made life and sentience possible here would become that
life’s executioner.

Twenty-three thousand light years from the Galaxy’s cen-
ter, within the smear of stars and nebulae known as the

Orion Arm, a world called Chiron by its most recent inhab-
itant, represented two distinct threads of civilization within
the Galactic scene. Bathed in the yellow and orange hues of
a double star, the world’s continents were battered and cra-
tered by an intense celestial bombardment of half a million
years before, and everywhere stood the somber and silent
ruins of a golden civilization swept away by the firestorm.

They were known by those who’d come later variously as
the Ancients and, so numerous were the crumbling shells of
their hell-blasted world-cities, as the Builders.

The Builder civilization had been a brilliant concord of
machine intelligences arisen and evolved from various or-
ganic precursors; the asteroids that had destroyed Chiron
had been flung into the planet by We Who Are, whose hunt-
erships had sought out the Builders’ colony worlds scattered
widely across perhaps a third of the Galaxy and in like man-
ner, relentlessly and methodically exterminated each one.

Chiron was also known to its more recent colonists as

Alpha Centauri A-II. Just four and a third light years away
lay the G2 star called Sol, and the homeworld of an ambi-
tious, carbon-based, oxygen-metabolizing species of sexual
mammals that called itself Humankind. Within the past
thousand years, an eye’s blink against the span marking the
rise and extinction of myriad expressions of galactic life
and sentience, humans and their artificially sentient ma-
chines had left the world of their birth to venture to the
worlds of nearby stars, beginning with Chiron, and going
on to assimilate numerous star systems scattered through-
out an oblong realm measuring perhaps eight light centu-
ries across at its greatest extent, four at its smallest. They’d
encountered other intelligent species— the primitive An, the
advanced but retiring N’mah, and the benthic species of bril-
liant mathematicians known to them as the Eulers— all three
the shattered remnants of past encounters with We Who Are.

6 I A N

D O U G L A S

And, more than once within the past handful of centuries,

Humankind, too, had attracted the xenocidal attention of

We Who Are, and the destructiveness of those encounters
was rapidly escalating. Most recently, a human battlefleet
had used an ancient system of stargates to reach an impor-
tant node of We Who Are near the Galactic hub, and there
used Euler technology to detonate the star.

The resultant nova had finally caught the full attention of
the Galaxy’s overlords.

And they moved now with blatantly uncharacteristic haste
to obey their racial hard- wiring and eliminate once and for
all this new and potentially serious threat to their survival.

The fi nal clash, the fi nal Armageddon would come soon,
and, when it did, it would do so on a scale unknown since
the extinction of the Builders.

1

1506.1111

First Platoon, Bravo Company

Carson Gate/Cluster Space

0540 hrs, GMT

Gunnery Sergeant Aiden Garroway wiggled a bit deeper
into the bottle’s embrace as the armorer swung the dome
canopy down over his head and sealed it in place. “Link
check,” he heard, the Navy chief’s words forming in his
mind.

The canopy was opaque, a nanosurfaced ceramic-iridium
laminate impervious to almost anything up to a direct hit by
a 100-gigawatt laser, but the bottle’s electronics fed the ex-
ternal view directly into Garroway’s brain, channeling the
data through his cere bral implants. The armorer’s face leered
down at him, distorted by the feed’s fisheye effect, and by
the reflections from the fishbowl helmet of the man’s vacwear
utilities.

“Link is
on-line,” Garroway replied. “You’re going to
have to fix that, though, Chief. God, you’re ugly.”

The man laughed. “Not as ugly as the Xulies. Good luck,

Marine.”

“Ooh- rah.” With a thoughtclick, Garroway switched the
data link to an external view, fed from the Ishtar’s outer hull.

The view here, high above the stargate, was stunning,
spectacular. . . .

8 I A N

D O U G L A S

Carson was a nondescript double star near the fringe of

Commonwealth space, a planetless pair of cool M-class
dwarfs circling one another in a tight embrace. Two light
hours out, so distant that the two suns themselves were merely
bright ruby points of light against the background scattering
of stars, the local stargate drifted in slow orbit, an immense,
slender- rimmed hoop twenty kilometers across, gleaming
silver and red in the somber light.

The Marine transport Ishtar was drifting slowly toward
the gate belly-first, some fifteen kilometers above the struc-
ture’s center. Her ventral hatches were open, her forward
dropdeck exposed to hard vacuum—hence the need for the
armorer’s helmet and sealed utilities.

He switched the feed back to his pod’s external optics.

Around him, caught in the glare of overhead lights, were the
launch racks holding other bottles, and Navy and Marine
personnel—armorers, deckhands, and technicians—were mov-
ing among them, prepping each for drop.

“Be sure to bring back some good suit vids, okay, Gunny?”

the armorer told him. “I hear it’s real pretty over there.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Chief. But I imagine we’re going
to be too busy to get anything artistic.”

“Shit, I didn’t say artistic. I just hear the view’s nice, is all.

What I really want to see is some after-op combat footage of
a bunch of dead Xulies!”

“You and me both, Chief.”

“Bravo Company,” another voice said, cutting in. The dry,
staccato tones were those of the company commanding of-
ficer, Captain John “Blackjack” Black, though the actual
speaker would be Smedley, the company AI. “Squad and
section leaders, check your Marines and report status.”

Garroway was the gunnery sergeant assigned to the com-
pany HQ, and, as such, was the se nior NCO in charge of the
seven other enlisted Marines in the unit, under Captain

Black himself. He ran through the electronic links with the
other HQ personnel—two riflemen, two comm offi cers, two

Navy hospital corpsmen, and a tech specialist/observer. All

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

9

feeds showed green and ready, systems charged and go,
weapons safed and ready.

“Green Tower,” he said over the company net, using the

HQ section’s code name to link through to Smedley. “This is

Tower Two. All Tower platforms report ready for drop.”

“Copy, Two,” Smedley replied.

Garroway chuckled. The AI was named after Major Gen-
eral Smedley Butler, one of the Corps’ heroes from the ancient,
pre- spaceflight era of almost a thousand years ago. According
to the histories, though, the original Smedley had been quite a
character, often in trouble with his superiors because of his
rough manner. Somehow, Garroway doubted that the guy had
been quite as laconic as his artifi cial namesake.

There were historical simulations of the original Butler
on file back on Mars, and in the library on board the Hermes.

He decided he would link in some time, just to see how the
two compared.

“First Platoon, ready to launch,” 2nd Lieutenant Cooper,
the platoon’s commanding officer, announced over the Net.

“Second Platoon, ready to go.” That was 2nd Lieutenant

Hamblet.

“Third Platoon, ready,” 2nd Lieutenant Costigan added.

“PryFly, Bravo Company,” the captain’s voice said. Gar-
roway thought he heard some stress there. If so, it was the
old man himself speaking, and not his electronic proxy. “We
are ready for launch.”

“Very well,” another voice said, this one from Ishtar’s
primary flight control center, or PryFly. “Bravo Company
release in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . release!”

Garroway felt the sharp jolt as magnetic grapples released
his bottle, and then the Ishtar’s ventral hull was receding
against the stars. From his perspective, it appeared that the
transport had suddenly begun accelerating away from him;
in fact, Ishtar had just halted its gateward drift, allowing a
cloud of M-CAPs to emerge from her belly and continue
drifting toward the gate at a steady kilometer per second.

M-CAPs, Marine Combat Assault Pods, were only the

10 I A N

D O U G L A S
most recent means of transporting individual Marines into
battlespace, an upgrade to the Space Assault Pods, or SAPs
in wide use until only a few years ago. Somewhere between
a very large, bulky, and powerful unit of heavily armed space
armor and a very tiny, lightly armed, underpowered one-man
space craft, a CAP carried a single Marine within its claus-
trophobic core. A gravitic drive allowed the device to accel-
erate at forty
gravities—about four hundred meters per
second per second. It responded directly to a Marine’s
thoughts, through his cereblink, and provided him with con-
stantly updated information on his surroundings and the
tactical situation.

For
self-evident reasons, Marines called them bottles,
among other nastier, more vitriolic names.

“Okay, people,” Blackjack’s voice told them over the Net.

“We’re doing this by the book. We want to maintain the ele-
ment of surprise for as long as possible, so do not engage
your gravitics until I give the word. Power at ten percent
only. Magnetic shielding engaged. Optical benders on. Ev-
eryone copy?”

A chorus of voices came back over the Net, mingled calls
of “aye, aye, sir” and “copy that” and “ooh- rah.” A display
open to one side within Garroway’s mind showed the telem-
etry from each pod, all green and go.

The assault force, one hundred fifty Marines of Bravo

Company, First Marine Assault Battalion of the First Ma-
rine Interstellar Expeditionary Force was going to war.

Falling . . . falling . . . the bottles drifted into the opening
of the stargate unpowered, with just enough power trickling
through their drives to keep them from running afoul of one
another, and to keep the magnetic shields charged and ready.

Around them, unseen within the distant rim of the gate, a
pair of Jupiter-massed black holes circled along their ancient
tracks in opposite directions, at a velocity approaching that
of light. The stresses on local spacetime were somehow—the
technology was still well beyond the capability of human
physics—focused at the gate’s lumen. The frequency of those
rotating singularities had already been tuned to connect this

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

11

gate with one partic
ular other gate . . . one some twenty
thousand light years above the plane of the Galaxy.

For the briefest of instants, Garroway felt the sharp, inner
twist of tidal forces, and then he was through.

The sky wavered . . . shimmered . . . then blinked.

And he was somewhere
else, somewhere . . . astonish-
ingly else.

Not for the first time, Garroway wondered why you
couldn’t see through an open gate to the other side, or why
radio or lasercom signals could not be passed through, while
solid things like starships made the passage almost unim-
peded. The physicists said that had to do with a kind of
fl icker or stutter effect due to the period of the rotating sin-
gularities that allowed mass through in discrete, quantum
chunks, but which interfered with the wave aspect of energy.

Even so, he’d once seen the flash from a nova pass through
an open gate, and do so with power enough to destroy a Xul
huntership.

So much Humankind had yet to learn.

He looked around, studying ambient space with all the
rubbernecking fervor of a first-time tourist in EarthRing

City. An ancestor of Garroway’s had been here once, centu-
ries before. The place was known as Cluster Space, and it
was located, so far as AI navigational programs could place
it, some twenty to twenty- two thousand light years above the
plane of the Galaxy, and at least thirty thousand light years
from Earth.

From out here, of course, the microscopic yellow speck of

Earth’s sun was quite invisible, utterly lost within the vast
and milky swirl of pale light hanging in the sky, a spiral that
looked oddly like a pale-colored whirlpool frozen in an in-
stant of time. Most individual stars at this distance were
lost; only novae or the very brightest of giant suns were vis-
ible as separate stars out here. What remained was a kind of
graininess or digital noise to the light. In fact, it looked
much like the pale glow from the Milky Way seen on a pel-
lucidly clear, dark night on Earth or, better, Mars . . . and for
an obvious reason. It was the same glow, but seen from

12 I A N

D O U G L A S
the outside against the black emptiness of the intergalac-
tic voice, rather than from within one of the Galaxy’s spiral
arms.

Here, the Galaxy stretched across half of the sky, tilted at
a slightly oblique angle. Garroway could distinguish the
slight differences in hue, blue and blue-white in the spiral
arms, reddish in the swollen bulge of the central core. The
smear of nebulae, some coal-black, other emission nebulae
showing pale glows of green or red, wove among the stars
like ragged streamers in an unfelt wind.

Opposite, against the ultimate void of the intergalactic
abyss, a solitary globular star cluster hung in isolated splen-
dor, a teeming beehive of suns, spanning a breadth of sky
perhaps sixteen times as large as the full moon when seen
from Earth, glowing with an almost undetectable reddish
hue identical to the ruddy glow of the Galactic Core.

In a different direction lay the local star, a class-M red
dwarf visible solely as a bright red spark against the night.

That star, catalogued simply as CS-1, but nicknamed Blood-
light by the Marines, was the primary target of the op,
which had been tagged Clusterstrike by the mission plan-
ners.

Behind the Marines was the stargate . . . but not the gate
into which Bravo Company had just fallen. The tidal stresses
of the gate back in Carson Space had linked across the light
millennia with the gate here, allowing the swarm of Marine
bottles to come through, gate- to-gate.

A flood of radio-frequency noise washed through his bot-
tle’s exposed sensors, and Garroway set his personal AI to
screening it, sifting through for hard data on enemy posi-
tions. The enemy was here. Humankind’s ancient enemy, the

Xul . . .

Among other threats, a trio of Xul fortresses orbited here,
only a few hundred kilometers away, and those fortresses had
to be eliminated if Clusterstrike was to succeed. Trans-gate
probes had already slipped through and located each of the
three, along with every other enemy ship and station within
this system. Those probes had managed to return, apparently

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

13

unnoticed, but Marine bottles were larger and noisier than

AI probes, and they were in this instant terribly vulnerable to
attack.

Unlike the earlier Space Assault Pods, each M-CAP was
effectively invisible, the coating of nano covering each one
serving as uncounted trillions of optical relays, pulling light
from one side of the bottle around to a carefully calculated
point on the opposite side before releasing it. The effect was
to make the bottle almost invisible so that light, radar, and
other radiation was curved past the bottle rather than refl ect-
ing from it—optical bending. The various patches in each
bottle’s hull not shielded by the benders—which allowed the

Marines to see out and to communicate with one another
and with the company AI net, among other things—were so
small they were nearly invisible at any range greater than a
few meters.

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 at-
tacks.

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 intelli-
gence 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

14 I A N

D O U G L A S
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 out-
post, 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 xenosophontol-
ogists 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 civiliza-
tion, 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 thou-
sands of light years— if you knew where each gate attune-
ment led.

The Xul appeared to be very much at home with the Gate-
net, 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 fi nd, note,
and then attack every Xul gate outpost they could fi nd. 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 arm-
chair generals made elaborate bets as to how long the task

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

15

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 for-
tresses 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 ev-
erywhere, 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
fi rst of several magnetic screens. The surface nano on each
pod adjusted to let it slip through without disturbing the fi eld
and announcing the Marine assault team’s presence. Garro-
way found he was holding his breath, wondering when some-
thing 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 bot-
tles 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.

16 I A N

D O U G L A S

They hadn’t been seen so far. That, or the Xul targeting
sensors already had them locked in, and were simply wait-
ing for the order to fi re.

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 fi fty bottles in First Platoon, slowing Gar-
roway’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 deploy-
ing to the other two fortresses. Each Marine element was
now on its own.

Still under AI control, Garroway’s bottle extended its board-
ing 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 dock-
ing 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 Garro-
way’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!”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

17

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 fi tted 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 co-
ordinated with one another to disperse into the cloud, ignor-
ing 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 hap-
pened 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 begin-
ning at a dozen different starting points and swiftly working
its way out.

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

18 I A N

D O U G L A S

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 al-
ready 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 fi re.

His bottle spun wildly, tracking a Xul as it streaked past low
above the surface of the fortress. Garroway held his fi re un-
til 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 ig-
nore 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.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

19

“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 battle-
fields 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 immedi-
ately 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 fi refight was raging down there, as other Marines en-
tered 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 fi ghterbots
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 fi ght.

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 in-
terior of the Xul fortress was in hard vacuum and each bolt
of plasma, each detonating grenade, each ripping or explod-
ing alien shell did so in eerie silence. When Garroway’s

20 I A N

D O U G L A 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 horizon-
tally, pulling themselves along with powerful fl icks 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 mo-
ments, 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 shoul-
dered forward about twelve meters, taking up a fi ring posi-
tion 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 par-
tial 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 fi re,

’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 grow-
ing phalanx of Marines while their suit AIs linked in with
one another under Smedley’s guidance to coordinate their
fi re.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

21

Together, as a unit, they were far more effective in con-
centrating their fi re.

And then, almost magically, the enemy horde vanished,
seeming to melt away into deck, overhead, and the far bulk-
heads 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 back-
pack 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 dam-
age, and the resultant craters generally were patched over
within a matter of minutes by flying clouds of fi st- sized re-
pair robots. A nuke detonating deep inside a Xul ship,
though, tended to cause terrible damage, hampered auto-
mated 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 struc-
ture.

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 re-
ported 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 at-
tacks 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 fl ickering,

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

23

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 rifl emen
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 elec-
tronic life forms uploaded into the circuitry of a titanic com-
puter. When any part of the structure was damaged, robotic
devices the size of a human fist appeared in clouds swarm-
ing through the damaged area, appearing to extrude them-
selves 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 engag-
ing 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 reason-
ably 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 in-
tent of killing it.

At least in the human organism, bacteria didn’t come in

24 I A N

D O U G L A S
the form of platoons of Marines, heavily armored and carry-
ing 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 briefl y: Let’s give this fat bastard one hell
of an upset stomach! The rhythm of targeting and fi ring 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 ad-
vancing mass of Xul warriors, the other aimed into the attack-
ers 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 fi st, fl ashed
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 fi rmly 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 ma-
chines as quickly as he could target them. The microgravity

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

25

environment within the confines of the passageway, how-
ever, was becoming clogged with drifting bits of debris, ev-
erything 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 fl ashes 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 spray-
ing 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 Ma-
rine, 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 fi refight. The Ma-
rines continued putting down a devastating defensive fi re,
drawing closer to one another as their defensive perimeter
tightened up.

The special-weps gunners loosed their second rounds, fi r-
ing 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 ar-
mored legs and arms and whiplashing tentacles. Suddenly,
the defensive perimeter was broken, with dozens of the
gleaming combat machines smashing through the line and

26 I A N

D O U G L A S
grappling with the armored Marines. In an instant, the battle
went from a firing line drill to a knife fi ght.

One of the massive warrior robots collided with Garro-
way 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 be-
yond 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 Ma-
rines 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 tenta-
cles 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

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

27

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, rip-
ping open a fist- sized gash in the black sleekness. The ma-
chine bucked and jerked, like a living thing, as Armandez
twisted clear of fl ailing tentacles.

Around him, the other Marines were fighting hand- to-
hand—or, rather, hand- to- tentacle—as well, firing into en-
emy 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 ap-
peared. 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 effec-
tives 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 re-
ported over the Net.

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

Garroway and Corporal Kukovitch held their position

28 I A N

D O U G L A S
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, liv-
ing 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.

They were gathering. The next assault on the Marines
was going to be a big one.

“Medical Ontos now on final approach,” Smedley’s voice
said.

“Heads up, people,” Captain Black warned. “Medevac
coming in!”

A portion of the overhead flexed, suddenly, directly above
the center of the new Marine perimeter, then began break-
ing apart in a swirling storm of disintegrating chunks. In the
next instant, something broke through, ten meters wide and

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

29

massive, chewing its way through the tough Xul hull armor
in clouds of nano- D.

For a moment, it was difficult to see exactly what was eat-
ing its way down through the overhead. Something was there,
a dark bulk that appeared to swirl and shimmer, becoming at
times translucent, almost transparent, and which seemed to
reflect the surrounding darkness of the passageway.

Then the effect faded, and the mass solidified into a dark
gray surface displaying the Commonwealth emblem and the
word marines prominent on the curved hull. A ramp was
already lowering. That rear entrance couldn’t open wide in
the narrow confines of the fortress passageway, but light
from the vehicle’s interior spilled through a narrow opening
into the dark space, reflecting from drifting debris.

The craft was an MCA-71 Ontos, one of the bug-like

383-ton Marine workhorses that had served with the Corps
for twenty- some years. This one had been designated for
medevac. More Navy corpsmen were already descending
through the open cargo bay hatch into the Xul fortress, help-
ing to move Marine casualties out of the Xul passageway
and into the comparative safety of the rugged little trans-
port.

Garroway held his defensive position with the other Ma-
rines on the perimeter. Briefly, he tapped into the telemetry
from one of the RAM-D pods—RAM Two; a schematic
animation opened in a side window in his mind, showing a
drone’s-eye view as the device steered itself swiftly through
twisting corridors into the bowels of the Xul fortress. RAM-

Ds possessed extremely sophisticated on-
board AIs that
allowed them to operate with considerable autonomy, and
gravitics sensors that let them home on the microsingulari-
ties orbiting within the heart of Xul structures.

The image flared in a burst of static snow, then winked
out.

“RAM Two has been intercepted,” Smedley’s voice re-
ported. “RAMs One, Three, and Four are proceeding on
course.”

30 I A N

D O U G L A S

Garroway braced for a possible shockwave. If whatever
had snagged RAM Two broke the magnetic containment
field isolating the antimatter charge, in just a moment there
was going to be a very large explosion. . . .

But seconds passed, and there was no blast. Much Xul
technology was still mysterious, and at times seemed un-
evenly applied. Telemetry indicated that the other three
charges were continuing on course, moving swiftly into the
fortress’s depths. Perhaps the Xul hadn’t noticed them yet.

Or perhaps they didn’t yet know what they were, and had
just snagged the one in order to fi nd out.

And that meant the explosion could come at any time.

Tampering with a kilo of antimatter was never a good
idea. . . .

Marines and corpsmen began loading the strike force’s
dead and wounded onto the medevac Ontos. Still moving
section by section as their squadmates covered them, Ma-
rines began scrambling up into their waiting M-CAPs.

Corporal Fitzhugh yelled a warning at the same time Smed-
ley flashed a new alert—targets emerging from the passage-
way bulkheads in all directions. Again, Garroway chose a
target and commenced fire, burning down one oncoming

Xul machine . . . then another . . . then a third as the shad-
owed distance seethed with black movement. The Marines
were pumping out an incredible volume of fi re—plasma
bolts, lasers, nano- D rounds, high- velocity mass- driver
slugs, pounding and slashing away at the advancing wall of

Xul robots, filling the broad two-meter space between over-
head and deck with spinning chunks of metal and ceramic.

Garroway’s plasma gun flashed an overheat warning to his
helmet display, and he switched to his mass driver to let the
primary weapon cool. How long, he wondered, could they
keep this up? . . .

Well, it wouldn’t, it couldn’t last much longer. With the

RAM-Ds well on their way into the fortress’s interior, it
was, as the ancient adage put it, time for all of them to get
the hell out of Dodge. Garroway wasn’t sure what “Dodge”

was, but he knew the sentiment behind the expression well.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

31

The open ramp on the Ontos was closing, the slender gap
of light visible from the cargo deck narrowing to a slit, then
winking out. The shielding nano on the transport’s surface
created a shimmering effect and, once again, the massive
intrusion of the Ontos’ hull became, not invisible, but eye-
wrenchingly difficult to look at.

“Everyone clear!” 2nd Lieutenant Cooper called over the

Net. “Medevac lifting off!”

With a jarring vibration felt through the deck, the Ontos
lifted clear of the Xul fortress, leaving a swirling tumble of
debris in its wake. In twos and threes, the M-CAPs were pull-
ing free of their entry holes, following the Ontos into the void.

There were only a dozen Marines left on board the Xul
station now. This was the most deadly part of any board- and-
destroy op, with most of the assault force already off the
target, and the last few on board trying to make their escape
as the bastion’s defenders closed in.

PFC Armandez was still a bit ahead of the main Marine
line. She’d been falling back toward the M-CAPs when
the Xul attack had begun anew, and dropped down behind
one of the sheltering pillars to fire on the enemy. “Nikki!”

Garroway called. “Get the hell back here! We’ll cover
you!”

She was starting to turn toward Garroway when a pair of

Xul lasers struck her low in the back, at the seam between
her torso armor and her power pack. Part of the energy was
dissipated by her armor, but he saw a puff of vapor and that
was a sure sign her suit had been breached and was leaking
air into vacuum. She slumped and went into a tumble.

The medevac Ontos was already gone. Garroway pushed
off from the deck, diving in a flat trajectory through the nar-
row space to snag Armandez and awkwardly grapple her
into his arms. Triggering his suit gravitics, he propelled the
two of them together back past the Marine perimeter.

A solid wall of Xul warriors surrounded the handful of

Marines. “Everyone get out!” Garroway yelled. According
to his helmet electronics, he was the se nior man present, and
it now was up to him to get the last of them out.

32 I A N

D O U G L A S

“How are we gonna get Nikki out?” PFC Lauden yelled,
slashing at the oncoming tide with his mass driver.

“Never mind, damn it! Just clear out! Now!”

“Aye, aye, Gunny!”

The other Marines began clambering into their pods.

Marine histories were full of stories of valiant last stands,
of a last Marine who stayed behind to cover his squadmates
as a tide of enemy fighters rolled over his final position. Gar-
roway had no intention of becoming another.

He also wasn’t leaving Armandez behind. Towing her
along, following the homer beacon flashing in his mind, he
made his way to his M-CAP, still imbedded in the passage-
way’s overhead.

The problem was that M-CAPs were definitely one- Marine
vehicles. Two people might squeeze into one together, if
they were real friendly . . . and if neither was wearing their
bulky Type 664 combat armor.

Working quickly, Garroway stuffed the unconscious form
of the wounded Marine up into his M-CAP, literally stuffi ng
her as far up the narrow opening as he could manage. The
nearest Xul warriors were almost on him. . . .

Again, he triggered his slicers, extending the ultra-hard,
ultra- thin blades to their full extent. Positioning himself di-
rectly under the opening to his pod, he slashed hard with his
left arm . . . then his right . . .

His own legs, severed high up on the thighs, spun to either
side, trailing globules of rapidly freezing blood and lubri-
cant. The pain didn’t hit him immediately, wouldn’t hit him,
he didn’t think, for a few precious seconds, if he didn’t let
it. . . .

He did immediately feel the shock of falling pressure,
like a hammer blow to his lungs. Air shrieked out of his ar-
mor into the surrounding hard vacuum until his suit’s inner
layer, reacting automatically to the falling pressure, sealed
over the gaping stumps of his legs. Garroway was already
pulling himself up into his pod, as biting cold and
lung- searing decompression threatened to drag him back
into unconsciousness . . . and death. He had to struggle to

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

33

work his torso up past Armandez’s legs; even minus his own
legs, he wasn’t sure there was enough room inside the bottle
for two.

It was starting to hurt now. A lot. . . .

His armor’s built-in medinano dispensers were already
firing swarms of microscopic healers into his bloodstream,
however. Anodynes began dulling the sharp shriek of pain;
fluorocarbons began picking up where the near-vanished
oxygen had left off; artificial coagulants began sealing off
the wounds, stopping blood loss while cere bral monitors
blocked the onset of shock.

It was a near thing. The inside of his helmet visor was
iced over, and he was having trouble seeing. By feel, he found
the pod’s linking plate and slapped his open palm across it.

Numbers and status readouts flickered through his mind, but
he ignored them, triggering the hatch seal.

He felt the hatch iris shut just below his sealed-off stumps,
the scraping sensation threatening to override the anodynes.

A warning light flickered on in his mind, followed by a ver-
bal readout. “M-CAP hatch seal failure. M-CAP hatch seal
failure.”

Damn. Even with his legs gone, he wasn’t in far enough to
let the bottle’s hatch seal shut.

The hell with it. The bottle wasn’t supposed to accelerate
with a hatch open, but he overrode the watchdog circuit and
thought-clicked the launch command. There was a grating
rasp, then a sudden shock as the pod broke free, accelerating
clear of the Xul fortress.

For a moment, he half feared sliding out an open hatch be-
neath him as the pod accelerated on its way, but he appeared
to be well wedged into place. Exploring with his gloved hands,
he decided that the bottle’s outer hatch had, indeed, cycled
closed; it was the inner hatch that was blocked open by the
stumps of his legs, and that was what was causing the alarm.

The bottle’s rather narrow-minded AI didn’t think the craft
was sealed and ready for fl ight unless all hatches were shut,
sealed, and locked.

He dismissed the irritating alarm. There was nothing he

34 I A N

D O U G L A S
could do about the cause, and he appeared to be safe for the
moment.

Well, safe from the threat of being left behind, at least.

His warning indicators showed enemy fi re passing close by
his craft.

He goosed it, ordering full acceleration and praying the
inertial dampers were working well enough to shunt aside
the fearful pressures of a high-G boost. There was no time,
no place for subtlety in the escape. With the fortress fully
alerted to the Marine incursion, there was no hope of sneak-
ing away unseen. The M-CAP’s nano coating lowered the
craft’s visibility at all electronic wavelengths, making it
tough to see and track, but at point-blank range it was hard
not to pick it out, by the distortion it caused against the
background starfield, if nothing else.

Through his interface with the tiny craft, he could see the
fortress, looming huge as it receded astern, and a sky fi lled
with streaks of white fire. Weapons fire—whether human or

Xul—was in fact invisible in vacuum, but the pod’s com-
puter painted the tracks in as a flight aid. With a thought, he
banished the special effects; there was nothing he could do
in the way of actively dodging incoming fire, and seeing
those bolts was both distracting and terrifying. If his pod
was hit in the next few minutes, he would never feel the blast
that killed them.

He ordered the pod’s computer to establish a course con-
sisting of random jinks that would continue to bear on the
stargate.

Without the flashing lights and energy bolts, surrounding
space took on an almost surreal aspect of beauty, majesty,
and peace. The Xul bastion continued to dwindle astern, as
the stargate slowly grew larger ahead. In the distance, the
glowing spiral of the Milky Way Galaxy stretched across
half of heaven, as beautiful, as insubstantially delicate as a
dream. Green icons floated between him and the gate, a
scattering of pinpoints marking Bravo Company’s other

M-CAPs.

One pinpoint flared for an instant, a dazzling star, then

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

35

vanished. Corporal Levowsky’s pod, according to the read-
out. PFC Hollander’s pod went next. Damn! . . .

He forced himself to ignore the ongoing roll call of Ma-
rines who would not be retrieved. Some of the escaping

Marines were going to get nailed just by sheer chance, judg-
ing from the volume of hostile fire, and those Xul laser and
plasma bursts were hot enough to reduce an M-CAP and its
passenger to thin, hot gas in an instant.

At this point, it was down to sheer chance. The Marine
pods all were jostling and jinking their way toward the star-
gate. Some percentage of them would not make it. Which
ones were hit, which ones made it, that now was entirely in
the laps of the Gods of Battle.

Garroway had another alarm to contend with as well, and,
once again, it was something he couldn’t do much about.

He’d lost much of the air inside his armor when he’d breached
his own suit. In the moments since, his armor had been
struggling to replenish internal pressure from the life sup-
port system in his backpack. He was no longer chewing cold
vacuum, which was a distinct improvement . . . but by tap-
ping the rebreather source gases in his tanks, he’d sharply
lowered his stay time. His armor’s on- board computer esti-
mated that he was down to another hour or so before his
oxygen supply went critical.

And according to the telemetry from Armandez’s armor,
her LSS had been damaged as well, leaking a good eighty
percent of her gas supply to space before it had sealed off
the damage. Their rebreather filters would continue to pull
oxygen from exhaled carbon dioxide and water vapor as
they breathed, but there would be less and less free O avail-

2
able with every breath cycle as more and more of it was
locked up by his metabolism.

Again, he killed the warning.

What he couldn’t kill were the growing physical problems
brought on by his self-inflicted wounds. The pain was man-
ageable for the moment, thanks to the nano- anodynes, but it
was growing steadily worse. Shock and blood loss both had
brought him close to unconsciousness, and he’d severely

36 I A N

D O U G L A S
compounded that threat with the abrupt loss of pressure in
his suit. Again, the problems were being held at bay for the
moment—fluorocarbons were far more efficient at oxygen
and CO transport in the circulatory system than were red

2
blood cells, so you didn’t need as much of the stuff as you’d
lost, but his blood volume was dangerously low and threat-
ening still to drag him into shock, despite the medinano
churning away in his brain.

He hoped the bottle’s AI was bright enough to get them
through the gate, because he didn’t think he was going to be
awake for very much longer. . . .

“Hey, Gare?” a female voice called over the combat Net.

“Gare, you okay?”

“Yeah.” The word felt fuzzy on his tongue. He was having
some trouble focusing now. The com ID said the voice be-
longed to Sergeant Colby.

“Cut your random guidance,” Colby told him. “We’re try-
ing to rendezvous for a pick- up!”

Garroway thought-clicked the guidance control, resuming
a straight-line course. If the Xul were watching closely, they
would be able to nail him in seconds . . . but somehow that
just didn’t seem important any longer.

“Hang on, Garroway,” another voice said, a man’s voice,
this time. His helmet identified it was 2nd Lieutenant Coo-
per. “We’ve got you, buddy.”

The downloaded visual showed three other Marine bot-
tles closing on him from three sides. Magnetic grapples
emerged from their hulls, latching on. Despite the inertial
damping, he felt the slight jar as they grabbed him, then be-
gan accelerating again, four pods moving randomly now as
a single unit.

He could also hear another voice in the background, an

AI reciting a running countdown. “Eight . . . seven . . .

six . . . five . . .”

It took him a moment to realize the count was for the an-
timatter charges left on board the Xul bastion.

That woke him up, shaking off the growing lethargy, at
least for the moment. He looked back at the Xul fortress just

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

37

as the numbers ran out. “. . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

now . . . now . . . n-”

White light fi lled heaven.

The blast was soundless, of course, in the vacuum of
space, but the Xul bastion, shrunken now to something the
size of a football held at arm’s length, blossomed along one
side as three kilograms of antimatter came into direct con-
tact with the normal matter surrounding them. In an instant,
the five-kilometer-wide structure vanished, engulfed by the
deadly white bloom.

The image winked out, then, as the M-CAP’s optics shut
down to preserve the bottle’s electronics and Garroway’s op-
tical centers. His eyes were safe, since the image was being
downloaded directly into his brain, but too much energy in
the input could make his brain think it had just been blinded,
and at a certain safe level, the input was cut automatically.

For a long moment, he rode in darkness, seeing now with
his own eyes, but with nothing to look at but the darkness of
the pod’s cramped interior, and Armandez’s armored legs
and boots pressed up against his visor.

He felt the shockwave as it passed, a distant, rumbling
thunder felt rather than heard against the pod’s hull. Radia-
tion counters soared, and more warning lights flashed in his
mind and on his helmet display. He, Armandez, and the
three Marines hauling him to safety had all just received
lethal doses of hard radiation.

Well, that wouldn’t be the first time. If they got back to
the hospital ship Barton in time, they could do something
about that. His legs, too.

If . . .

The outside optic feed was restored as light levels fell to
acceptable levels. Garroway was fading fast, but he was able
to see not one, but three brilliant suns now shining in an
uneven embrace of the approaches to the stargate. All three

Xul fortresses had been successfully reduced.

And almost directly ahead, the first starships of 1MIEF
were emerging from the stargate, Ishtar, Mars, and Chiron,
followed by the fl eet carriers Chosin and Lejeune, already

38 I A N

D O U G L A S
loosing their swarms of Marine aerospace fi ghters. Sur-
rounding the vanguard was a small cloud of destroyers and
light cruisers, followed by the immense MIEF fl agship

Hermes.

Three small, purple icons were trailing along beneath the

Hermes’ lee, but as the flag completed its transit of the gate,
those icons accelerated sharply, arrowing into the Cluster

Space system and swiftly flashing into the faster-than-light
invisibility of their Alcubierre Drives.

Those, Garroway knew,
were Euler Starblasters, alien
weapons of incredibly destructive power. He tried to twist
around to follow the line of their flight, in toward Blood-
light, the distant red sun of this system . . . but within the
next second or two, everything—the M-CAPs, the distant
sprawl of the Galaxy, the trio of short-lived suns guarding
the stargate and the stargate itself—all were lost to a vast,
swelling blackness as unconsciousness claimed him at
last. . . .

3

1506.1111

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Cluster Space

0717 hrs, GMT

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander, CO of the 1st Marine

Interstellar Expeditionary Force, was linked into Hermes’

tactical command net, and from his mind’s-eye vantage
point high atop the data stream he could see the unfolding of
the entire battle. Bravo Company, chosen to spearhead this
op, was pulling out, the individual M-CAPs hurtling at
maximum acceleration for the safety of the stargate, as three
brand-new and short-lived stars burned behind them.

The virtual icon of Vice Admiral Liam Taggart hovered
next to Alexander’s awareness, backlit by the stars of the

Galaxy. “Battlenet is reporting multiple targets accelerating
toward our position,” Taggart’s voice said in Alexander’s
mind. “I’d rather not let them get too close. If I may? . . .”

“Of course, Admiral. Get those damned things out of my
sky. . . .”

Technically, the two men shared command, Taggart com-
manding 1MIEF’s naval forces and actions, while Alexan-
der commanded the Marine units, both in space and on the
ground, while supreme authority was vested with the Com-
monwealth Senate.

40 I A N

D O U G L A S

In fact, Alexander held overall command of the entire ex-
peditionary force. The Senate was some tens of thousands of
light years distant, now, and it was up to Alexander to deter-
mine how best to carry out the civilian command authority’s
directives. The 1MIEF was an extension of Alexander’s de-
termination and will, whatever the chain of command might
look like charted.

If Alexander was in overall command, Taggart’s request
for permission to engage the enemy was still little more than
a polite fiction. The two long ago had arrived at a fl exible
and efficient compromise in military authority, and Alexan-
der trusted the older man’s experience with naval tactics.

The two men worked well together, had been working well
as a superb team now for over nine years.

Usually, Alexander preferred to stand back and give Tag-
gart free rein. But Cluster Space was important, the biggest
and most strategically vital Xul node yet encountered, and

Operation Clusterstrike had been conceived as a major body
blow against the Xul.

They would take this one down by the book.

The MIEF fl eet was dispersing now as it cleared the Gate,
the ships bathed in the intense glare from the exploding for-
tresses. Xul ships were approaching from the system’s heart,
but Ishtar, Mars, and Chiron were already directing their
long-
range weaponry against them, slamming them with
long- range mass- driver fire. A cloud of smaller warships—
cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers—accelerated rapidly,
spreading out both to present more difficult targets, and to al-
low them to put the enemy vessels into a crossfire. As the big
carriers came through behind the lead battlecruisers, swarms
of Marine fighters and AI combat drones began streaming
from the launch bays, filling Alexander’s virtual sky with
hurtling, gleaming shapes.

Traditionally, Marines were intended to secure an inva-
sion beachhead, emerging from the sea to seize and hold a
landing area until regular Army troops could arrive and
take over. That, at least, had been the Corps’ tactical dogma
as far back as the twentieth century, when the Marines had

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

41

ceased being purely naval troops and come into their own as
an in de pen dent fighting force. Over the next few centuries,
the major combat role for the Corps had been as elite infan-
try, tasked with a variety of missions, from boarding, search,
and seizure to hostage rescue to combat assault.

Most recently, however, in the escalating war with the

Galaxy-wide empire of the Xul, the Marines assigned to

1MIEF had been tasked with gate-clearing, a euphemism re-
ferring to ops like this one, requiring Marine elements to melt
their way into the interior of one or more enemy bastions
guarding a stargate’s approaches, planting nuclear or antimat-
ter charges deep within the structure’s bowels, then fi ghting
their way clear as the fortresses exploded. The moment the
forts were destroyed or crippled, the main naval elements of

1MIEF could pour through the stargate and secure the gate
approaches.

And then the Euler ships would come through.

“Your people did a hell of a job,” Taggart said, indicating
the burning, new suns of the three Xul fortresses. They were
fading now, though local space was still bathed in the harsh,

511 keV radiation released by the annihilation of positron-
ium. A kilogram of antimatter detonated in each of those

Xul bastions made a hell of a bang.

“Thank you, Admiral. I’ll be happier when we know the
bursters hit their target.”

Alexander watched the straight-line trails marking the
inbound course of the three Euler Starbursters on his inter-
nal display, arrowing toward the distant pinpoint of Blood-
light. Two more minutes . . .

“I’d still like to know how a species that evolved in a deep
ocean basin could even have an idea of what the stars are,”

Taggart said, “much less develop the technology to reach
them. Doesn’t make sense.”

“Given enough years,” Alexander replied, “damned near
anything is possible. Just be glad the Eulers and their tech-
nology are on our side!”

The Eulers were the benthic inhabitants of several star
systems in Aquilan space, some twelve hundred light years

42 I A N

D O U G L A S
from the worlds of Sol. Contacted nine years before, during
the first incursion by the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary

Force into the region of space near Nova Aquila, Eulers was
the name humans had given them. Their name for them-
selves, it seemed, was a mathematical equation, an indication
of their intensely mathematical worldview, and the humans
studying them had named them after the human mathemati-
cian who’d developed that partic ular equation for human-
kind.

After nine years of study, there was still no other way to
transcribe the thought-symbol they applied to themselves, or
even to be sure they possessed language as humans under-
stood the term. The massive, tentacled beings appeared to
communicate with one another by changing colors and pat-
terns visible in their mottled skin and by the taste of chemi-
cals in the water, though direct telepathy among their own
kind had not been ruled out.

Remarkably, for an oceanic species, they did possess so-
phisticated computer implant technology, and that was how
they were, in fact, able to communicate with humans, through
shared virtual realities. Their technology, their industry, and
their material fabrication sciences all were quite advanced,
despite the apparent disadvantage of living in the ocean
deep at crushing pressures.

Like the N’mah, the Eulers defied the old xenosophonto-
logical dictum that had once declared that an intelligent
species evolving in the sea would never develop technology
because they could never make fi re. Eons ago, they’d gene-
engineered crab-like creatures to serve as their symbiotic
extensions, fi rst into the shallows of their home world, then
onto dry land and, eventually, into the depths of space, to
other worlds. Through their symbiotes, they’d developed
fire, and industry, and a faster- than-light stardrive identical
in its physics to the Alcubierre Drive employed by the Com-
monwealth. And the Eulers had traveled far.

Thousands of years ago, they’d encountered the Xul. The
details still weren’t well understood by human xenosophon-
tologists, but there’d been a war, perhaps several. The Eulers

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

43

had learned how to use their FTL ships as shockwave trig-
gers to make stars explode.

The Marines had learned that little trick from the Eulers
nine years ago, at the Battle of the Nova. The Alcubierre

Drive worked by encapsulating the starship in a bubble of
severely warped space- time. Space ahead of the vehicle was
sharply contracted, while space behind was expanded. The
ship itself didn’t move at all relative to the space-time matrix
around it, but the space moved, and carried the ship with it,
accelerating to a fair-sized multiple of the speed of light.

So far so good. Humankind used several different tech-
niques to travel FTL, now, including the mysterious stargates
scattered across the Galaxy and beyond, and the matrix tran-
sition employed by very large carriers like the Hermes.

The weapons potential, however, arose when you slammed
a bubble of Alcubierre-warped space through the core of a
star. When the already incredibly dense mass of fusing hy-
drogen at the heart of a sun was suddenly condensed by the
passage of an Alcubierre bubble, it triggered a partial col-
lapse that sent a shockwave rebounding out from the core
that blew the outer layers of the star into space in a titanic
explosion—an artificially generated nova.

Three thousand years ago, the Eulers had fought the Xul
to a standstill, albeit at horrendous cost, scorching many of
their own worlds to lifeless cinders in order to vaporize the
foe’s fleets of titanic hunterships. Now the Marine and naval
forces of 1MIEF were using the same weapon, but carrying
the attacks to the enemy in long-range strikes of annihila-
tion. A young Marine named Garroway had piloted an Euler
starcraft through the star warming a Xul-controlled system
at the Battle of the Nova nine years ago. Since a ship under

Alcubierre Drive was not, technically, in the usual
four-
dimensional matrix of space-time, it could pass clean through
the target star without actually colliding—or vaporizing. The
shockwave trailing behind it, however . . .

Since then, 1MIEF had continued using Euler technology.

Human FTL ships were much larger and, therefore, easier for
the enemy to intercept, and the Euler version of the Alcubierre

44 I A N

D O U G L A S

Drive was far more powerful, warped space more tightly, and
therefore made a bigger ripple when it hit the core of a star.

The three Euler Starbursters now streaking toward the

Bloodlight, the Cluster Space sun, were piloted by sophisti-
cated artificial intelligences, however, rather than humans
or Euler-symbiotes. It was easier that way. Unlike most
humans—those who weren’t religious fanatics, anyway—AIs
could be programmed to welcome death.

Victory required that only one Starburster reach the local
star; sending three was for insurance. Since the Euler craft
could not transit a stargate faster- than-light, however, and
since they possessed nothing in the way of defenses except
their speed, the fl eet first had to move through and seize a
volume of battlespace on the far side of the gate. To do that,
of course, it was necessary to destroy any sentry fortresses
the Xul had placed nearby . . . and that was where the Ma-
rines came in.

Someday, Alexander thought with wry amusement, some-
one might create an AI combat machine smart enough,
compact enough, and deadly enough to go into Xul forts and
sentry ships and plant antimatter devices . . . but so far, at
least, that partic ular dirty job was still best given to the Ma-
rines. Flying an Euler Starburster into the heart of a sun was
child’s play compared to fighting your way into the interior
of one of those Xul monsters and planting a bomb where it
would do the most good.

Ninety more seconds. Bloodlight, however, was ten light
minutes away, farther than Earth was from her sun. If . . .

no, Alexander corrected himself, when the star detonated, it
would be eleven and a half minutes before the Marine-naval
expeditionary force knew the op had been successful.

Which was a good thing, actually. It should give them
time to get clear.

Not for the first time, Alexander wondered if this partic u-
lar raid could succeed. There were so many unknowns . . .

not least of which was whether the Euler nova triggers would
even work on a red dwarf star. Suns targeted by the Star-
bursters over the past few years all had been larger, more

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

45

massive stars. An M-class dwarf possessed only a tiny frac-
tion of the mass of stars like Earth’s sun, and there was
some debate within the expeditionary force’s scientifi c and
technical circles as to whether such a small star as Blood-
light could even be induced to go nova.

Well, they would know one way or the other in just . . . he
checked his inner time readout again . . . another ten min-
utes, twenty- fi ve seconds.

For now, the ships of 1MIEF continued to pass through
the stargate into Cluster Space. Over the course of the past
nine years, the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force
had changed and evolved as human tacticians and strate-
gists studied past actions and tried to determine the best
mix of firepower and maneuverability for dealing with the

Xul giants. The emphasis now was on faster, more maneu-
verable ships than the lumbering battlecruisers like Mars.

The Planet-class battlecruisers massed 80,000 tons each,
but 1MIEF now numbered some two hundred starships, and
most of them massed under twelve thousand tons. Compared
to the one- and two-kilometer-long behemoths favored by the

Xul, they were minnows nibbling at the flanks of whales.

But with enough of them firing together, they could bite
hard. Smaller still, but still deadly, were the fighters of the four

Marine Aerospace wings currently embarked with the Expe-
ditionary Force. Launched from the Fleet’s flotilla of aero-
spacecraft carriers, those fighters—F/A-4140 Stardragons and
the newer F/A-4184 Wyvern—were small, fast, and highly
maneuverable. With antiship loadouts, they were deadly as
well, especially when attacking in a swarm, like now.

Focusing his attention on one of the aerospace fi ghter
icons moving within his inner display, Alexander began
tracking the attack run of the Aerospace Squadron 16, the

Reivers, as they closed on the nearest of the Xul monsters.

Brave people, he thought. Brave Marines.

If capital ships were minnows attacking Xul whales, the
fighters were mosquitos.

And they were already taking a hell of a lot of casual-
ties. . . .

46 I A N

D O U G L A S

Green One,

AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,

Cluster Space

0718 hrs, GMT

Major Tera Lee relaxed into the pilot link, watching the
mental image of the Xul warship expand within her aware-
ness from a bright star to a monster, now just two thousand
kilometers distant. A Type III, the enemy vessel was one of
the Xul huntership behemoths designated as a Nightmare-
class, a flattened spheroid two kilometers across, the largest
mobile Xul vessel yet encountered by the Commonwealth.

Lee was squadron CO of VMA-770, the Shadow Hawks.

A twelve-year veteran of Marine aviation, she was tucked
into the claustrophobic embrace of an F/A-4184 Wyvern,
one of the sharp-edged single- seaters only recently deliv-
ered to the Shadow Hawks. This would be the Wyvern’s fi rst
test of actual combat, although Lee had been practicing in
simulation for a year before she’d ever strapped on one of
the machines for real. Technically, she had over a thousand
hours of virtual flight time on the beast.

She knew better than to put too much reliance on simula-
tions, however. Sims were good, but nothing matched the
realities of combat. As she expanded her consciousness
through the Wyvern interface, however, she noted that ev-
erything was green and wide open. So far, so good. . . .

“Green Squadron, this is Green Leader,” she called. “Ev-
eryone check your phase shift frequencies and cloaking. I
don’t want anyone getting their souls eaten in there.”

The other fifteen pilots in the squadron came back at her
with electronic confirmations—seven humans, eight AIs.

That would be another fi rst this morning—going into com-
bat with half of the Shadow Hawks’ pilots consisting of so-
phisticated software instead of flesh and blood. She didn’t
care for the idea at all—and neither did the others in her
squadron—but orders were indisputably orders. It could be
that the coming scrap would settle the old issue of live pilots
versus electronics once and for all.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

47

Twelve hundred kilometers. The scale in her downloaded
imagery shifted. The Xul warship was still invisible to un-
aided, Mark I eyeballs, but the battlenet continued to feed
high- definition imagery to the AIs controlling this phase of
the engagement.

Nine hundred kilometers. She hoped that she was still as
invisible to the Xul as the enemy would have been to her un-
augmented vision. There were horror stories about what hap-
pened to ships’ crews engulfed by the monsters—about people
having their souls eaten, as the darker tales liked to put it.

In fact, the Xul rarely made use of their patterning tech-
nology as a weapon, though it wasn’t unknown. Since the
first human encounters with the Xul centuries ago, however,
there’d been reports of Xul hunterships somehow devouring
human vessels and so completely scanning their contents
that humans and AIs alike were somehow transferred to the
bowels of the Xul vessels as living, self- aware programs even
though the ships and bodies of the crew were destroyed. That
had happened to a human explorer vessel, The Wings of Isis,
at Sirius in 2148, and to the Argo, an asteroid colony vessel
hundreds of light years from Sol just nine years ago, and
there were rumors of other electronic abductions as well.

The scuttlebutt shared among Marines in late-night bar-
racks bull sessions said that humans uploaded into Xul com-
puter nets were kept alive—if that is what their virtual and
bodiless existence could be called—for centuries as they
were continually interrogated and emotionally dissected by
their captors.

By enabling a spacecraft to shift slightly out of phase
with the normal four-D plenum of space-time, Common-
wealth ship designers had found a means to make the vessel
both more diffi cult to detect going in and harder to scan for
the patterning and uploading process. That, Lee thought,
was a considerable comfort. Better to go out in a bright fl ash
of hard radiation than wake up as an eternal captive within
the virtual hell of a Xul huntership. Even if the “real” her
died with the destruction of her body, something, an elec-
tronic duplicate would awaken to that hell, and she was

48 I A N

D O U G L A S
unwilling to give the Xul demons another human analogue
to torture. Even worse from a purely personal point of view
was the possibility that her mind, her living awareness,
would somehow be transferred to the immense virtual real-
ity computers that seemed to be the bulk of the Xul star-
ships, that it would be she who awakened in the Xul hell.

Better not to think about that possibility at all. . . .

The one advantage in an aerospace fighter lay in the fact
that the Xul never seemed to think small. Fighters and
one-man boarding pods appeared to be beneath the notice of
the behemoth hunterships, and a swarm of one- or two-

Marine fighters could get in close and loose the equivalent
of a capital ship’s broadside.

Even so, casualties in this type of operation tended to be
heavy. A lot of her brother and sister Marines in the squad-
ron would not be coming back.

Better not to think about that, either.

She was closing with the Xul huntership at just under fi fty
kilometers per second. Pappy , a simplified iteration of the

2

MIEF AI, was doing the actual flying at the moment, jink-
ing and turning the hurtling Wyvern in random patterns to
avoid the patterns of antimissile fi re filling the sky now to
every side.

The Wyvern was a smaller, nimbler fighter than the
older Stardragon, massing only seventy-two tons, and with
fewer hardpoints for weapons load-outs. It was faster and
more maneuverable, however, and could phase- shift more
completely, which gave it better protection against Xul de-
fenses. Like the Stardragon, it drew power through a non-
local entrainment link from its home- base carrier, in this
case the Marine assault carrier Samar, and used quantum
field-drive acceleration, so fuel was not an issue. Within
her weapons bay, she carried four AM-98 missiles, each
with an AI brain and a 1-kilo antimatter warhead. Those
missiles had a powered range of ten thousand kilometers;
the idea, though, was to get them so close to the target they
could be released inside the Xul huntership’s defensive
screens.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

49

The trick, of course, was getting clear in time after releas-
ing the missile.

“Okay, Shadow Hawks,” Lee said over the squadron net.

“Form on me, left echelon. Maintain three hundred kilome-
ter separation.” Their AIs would be jinking them all over the
sky on the way in, and in those circumstances, it didn’t do to
get too close to your formation neighbor.

Her link with her fighter’s sensors were painting the en-
emy fire across her mental display, her IHD, or In-Head

Display, as the link was properly known. The enemy ship
continued to expand smoothly in her mind’s eye, the jitters
and jinkings of the hurtling Wyvern edited out by the AI as
they were transmitted.

To her left and astern, a dazzling sun winked on, the ex-
panding fireball of an exploding fighter. Green Three . . .

Lieutenant Costigan. A plasma bolt from the Xul huntership
had released the magnetically pent-
up antimatter within

Costigan’s four antiship missiles, loosing a storm of raw en-
ergy, and his Wyvern had simply vanished in a fi reball
equivalent to a fair- sized nuclear warhead.

At least it had been quick. There were worse ways to go
than fighting the Xul, at least according to the scuttlebutt.

One of the AI- piloted fi ghters flashed out next—Green

Nine. But then the remaining fourteen ships of the squadron
were past the red line at five hundred kilometers from the
target, putting them inside the mathematical zone promising
fifty percent survival for missiles loosed at the enemy.

Another AI- pi loted Wyvern flashed into dazzling bril-
liance, Green Twelve, the flare fading swiftly astern. Xul
plasma bolts and laser beams crisscrossed the sky, weaving
a constantly shifting net through which the surviving Com-
monwealth fighters twisted and dodged.

“Hold with me!” Lee called over the net. “Just a little
deeper in. . . .”

At less than one hundred kilometers, they plunged through
the Xul monster’s outer layers of magnetic screens, designed
to let the enemy fire-control systems pinpoint course and
speed data of incoming projectiles. Here, Lee was convinced,

50 I A N

D O U G L A S
was where flesh- and- blood pilots held the advantage over AI
software. Her tiny fighter’s controls were linked in with her
mind, taking commands both from her intent and from

Pappy . Organic pilots might not have reflexes fast enough

2
or precision sharp enough to fly a high- per for mance aero-
space fighter, but software lacked the flexibility and the scope
to maneuver through this kind of maze. The two working
together provided the best chances of survival—and a com-
pleted mission.

At fifty kilometers, she thought-clicked the missile fi ring
command, kicking two of her antimatter killers into open
space. Their drives ignited automatically, sending them
streaking toward the Xul target. She’d already applied full
lateral drive, a high-G maneuver that would have killed her
if not for the inertial dampers cocooning her within the nar-
row confines of the Wyvern’s cockpit. Behind her, the other
ships in her squadron broke formation, the better to loose
their warshots in an unpredictable cascade.

Pulling nearly two hundred gravities now, Lee swung
wide, killing her forward thrust and angling back toward the
stargate in a series of rolling, twisting maneuvers.

Her attack run had carried her deep into the volume of
space occupied by the approaching Xul hunterships. Two
more Xul vessels, both lean, needle-slim Type I’s, swung
past her prow nearly three hundred kilometers distant. She
snapped them both with targeting cursors, locking in her two
remaining AM missiles. She was not going to endure the in-
dignity of returning to the Samar with missiles still in her
weapons bay.

A thought-click, and her last two missiles flashed into the
night.

It was a night, she saw, illuminated by innumerable pulses
and flashes of light. Fighters, the Shadow Hawks and the
other attacking squadrons, were scoring hits. The main Com-
monwealth fleet was adding to the display as their long-
range weapons began striking home. Space around her was
filled by the deadly flicker and flash of short-lived suns, and
awash with the radiation of matter being annihilated.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

51

In the far distance, the Galaxy hung in silent repose, un-
moving, cold-lit, and remote.

As happened sometimes, the memories returned. . . .

Lee had been offered a memory edit, but she’d refused.

Her memories, she believed, were a part of what she was, of
who she was, and she would no more willingly part with
them than she would with one of her legs. Hell, a leg could
be regrown. . . .

Nine years ago, just before 1MIEF took the war against
the Xul to the enemy, she’d taken a small reconnaissance
spacecraft through a stargate to a Xul node. The place had
been code-named Starwall, and was located somewhere along
the outer reaches of the Galaxy’s core.

She’d been trapped there for hours. Radiation from the
core had burned her terribly before her ship’s AI had man-
aged to return her to a Marine listening post on the other side
of the gate. They’d had to regrow much of her body after that,
using medinano to excise the radiation damage cell by cell.

Later, and despite the surgery, she’d learned she would
never have children.

That had been the worst part of it by far. For a long time
afterward, she’d not been sure she even wanted to live. She’d
grown up in American Saskatchewan as part of a large
family—four fathers, five mothers, and twenty- three sibs.

She’d always expected that after her hitch with the Marines
was done, she’d marry into a big line family and have chil-
dren of her own.

Gradually, though, she’d come to grips with the issue. The

Corps was her family, and the men, women, and AIs in her
squadron her kids.

Her battlenet link painted new volleys of high-energy fi re
from the expeditionary force, streaks and lines and hurtling
spheres of green light rendering the invisible visible in her
mind.

“Shit, skipper!” Lieutenant Daniels called over the tacti-
cal channel. “We’re gonna get fried by our own people!”

“Follow procedure and trust the system,” she told him.

“Pappy knows what he’s doing.”

52 I A N

D O U G L A S

Indeed, only a massively parallel AI like the MIEF pri-
mary AI could coordinate the incredible volume of fi re and
moving spacecraft now filling the operational battlespace.

No merely human mind could have kept track of so many
variables, so many targets and energies.

“If everything is on sched,” Lieutenant Garcia’s voice put
in, “we’re going to get fried by that nova pretty quick!”

“Follow procedure,” Lee replied. “The triggerships haven’t
even reached the sun yet. There’s plenty of time. . . .”

In fact, a countdown was ticking away in a side window
open in her mind. They had about ten and a half minutes
yet, give or take a bit, before the expanding blast wave of the
nova reached them . . . assuming everything was on sched-
ule. Plenty of time if nothing unexpected happened.

“Skipper! I’ve got a bender coming through, dead
ahead!”

She checked the ID. The call was from 2nd Lieutenant

Joanna Wayne, and she was only thirty kilometers off Lee’s
port wing. A bender was something warping space, possibly
one of the Euler triggerships . . . but there was a chance it
was something else.

It was. She saw the brilliant flash of twisted starlight, saw
the Xul Type IV materialize out of empty space fi fty kilome-
ters ahead. Like humans, the Xul used the Galaxy-spanning
network of stargates, but their ships also possessed FTL ca-
pability through something like the Commonwealth’s Alcu-
bierre Drive, which sharply warped local space.

And the alien warship had dropped into the normal space-
time matrix directly between most of her squadron and the
stargate.

They were going to have to fight to get through.

4

1506.1111

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Cluster Space

0719 hrs, GMT

In General Alexander’s mind, 1MIEF’s battle array resem-
bled a kind of spreading haze of discrete ships, darting and
shifting from side to side as they moved. Fleet movements
were coordinated by the AI-controlled battlenet, which jinked
individual ships to make them harder to target without run-
ning afoul of one another. The battlenet could coordinate
fire, too, concentrating the volleys from a hundred ships on
one Xul monster at a time. Under that kind of intensive bom-
bardment, even the largest, thickest- skinned whale would be
whittled down to a cloud of tumbling debris before long.

At the moment, the fleet’s heaviest fire was concentrated
on a single Xul Type III, a monster code-named Nightmare-
class, a flattened spheroid two kilometers across. White fl ares
of light popped and strobed across the Xul vessel’s hull,
pounding at it, battering it, sending gouts and streamers of gas
and vaporizing metal spraying into space. A squadron of
aerospace fighters were closing with it as well, slamming
antimatter warheads into its shuddering bulk.

The vessel was still thirty thousand kilometers off, invis-
ible to the unaided eye, but visible in crystalline detail

54 I A N

D O U G L A S
through the battlenet datafeed, which was drawing in image
feeds from several hundred drones spreading through bat-
tlespace.

The Nightmare was hurt, trailing plumes of escaping va-
por that froze as it hit vacuum into glittering clouds of min-
ute ice crystals. Craters gaped in the monster’s hull, glowing
sullen red and orange within the shattered interior. Burn,
you bastard, Alexander thought with a silent, fi erce inten-
sity. The war with the Xul had been unrelenting and without
mercy on either side, a literal war to the death.

A moment later, something inside exploded with savage
violence, blowing out a quarter of the Xul warship’s fl ank.

What was left began to fold and crumple in upon itself. Xul
ships generated micro black holes as part of their power and
drive systems, and when their drive containment fi elds failed,
those singularities tended to eat their way through the ship’s
structure, devouring everything with which they came into
contact and releasing a flood of hard radiation in their wakes.

Alexander could hear Taggart’s thoughts as the admiral
gave orders to the fleet. Another large Xul huntership was
being targeted now, as the massed weapons of 1MIEF’s war-
ships shifted to another target—a Type II huntership a kilo-
meter long and thirty-eight thousand kilometers distant. The
fleet’s weaponry ran an impressive gamut—high-intensity
lasers at both optical and X-ray frequencies, gigavolt plasma
discharges, and a wide variety of projectiles and missile
warheads—from kinetic kill projectiles to nukes to antimat-
ter charges, with calibers ranging from a few millimeters to
several meters. A high-energy storm of devastating warshots
began slamming into this new target, scouring and ripping at
its ceramic armor like a lightning-charged hailstorm.

However, more and more Xul vessels were moving and
beginning to converge on the 1MIEF fl eet.

“Ten seconds to expected detonation,” a new voice in-
toned within Alexander’s head. Then, “Five . . . four . . .

three . . . two . . . one . . . mark.”

Alexander glanced toward the local star. Bloodstar, the
red sun of Cluster Space, continued burning as before, of

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

55

course, a sullen ember, little more than a pinpoint of ruby
light. It would be another ten long minutes before the light
from the exploding star reached them.

“Okay, Pappy,” Alexander told the disembodied voice.

Pappy was the se nior artificial intelligence in 1MIEF, named
after an early Marine aviator named Gregory “Pappy” Boy-
ington. “Give me observational data as soon as it’s available.

Tag? You heard?”

“I did, General.”

“I suggest we start falling back to the stargate.”

“Affi rmative, General.” Alexander heard him begin giv-
ing orders, sounding the tactical recall.

This was the tricky part of the operation, getting the forty-
two Commonwealth warships that had already come through
the stargate, along with over a hundred aerospace fi ghters
and minor combatants, back through to Carson Space with-
out being overwhelmed by the Xul counterattack. The Xul,
as the Commonwealth had learned over the years, tended to
be cautious. Swat their noses hard enough, and they might
not follow up on an enemy raid for years. Still, the toughest
part of any op, whether in space or on a planet’s surface, was
in the withdrawal phase, when the last few ships or men
covering a retreat were left to face overwhelming numbers
alone.

The Marines were used to that situation, the Navy less so.

The Xul Type II was collapsing upon itself, now, dwin-
dling with eerie rapidity as the black hole within swallowed
it from the inside out. But AI scans of battlespace data indi-
cated that there were as many as two thousand Xul warships
in this system. Cluster Space, as was well known, was a ma-
jor Xul node and operations center.

At the moment, the biggest question was whether or not
the Xul would try to follow 1MIEF back through the star-
gate to Carson Space.

Hermes, largest of the ships of the human fleet, as well as
the slowest and most clumsy, completed her reversal maneu-
ver and began making her way back toward the gate.

About her flashed swarms of smaller craft, including the

56 I A N

D O U G L A S
retreating Marines of the initial assault force. Alexander
flashed an order to Pappy. “Make sure you track every
damned one of those M-CAPs,” he said. “Coordinate the
withdrawal with Smedley.”

“Affi rmative, General,” Pappy’s calm voice replied. “We
will leave no one behind.”

Of course, how the hell did you guarantee something
like that? Battlespace was a bewildering soup, of ships
large and small, of retreating M-CAPs, of aerospace fi ght-
ers, Ontos transports, drones, sensor and communications
probes, missiles, and drifting chunks of white-hot wreck-
age. Many of the fighters and Marine assault capsules were
damaged, some disabled completely and adrift in empti-
ness.

But they had to try.

Green One,

AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,

Cluster Space

0722 hrs, GMT

“Pull out, Skipper! Pull out!”

Wayne’s voice shrieking in her mind wasn’t helping. Lee
blocked it off and focused instead on urging her Wyvern to
exert maximum lateral thrust, and then some, as she fl ashed
toward the loom of the Xul monster.

It was a Behemoth, the code name for the Xul Type IV
huntership. It had been noted and photographed at several

Xul node- bases, but for a long time the assumption had been
that it was a fortress, immobile.

In fact, Commonwealth Intelligence wasn’t sure whether
the Xul themselves differentiated between fortress and war-
ship. All that really was known about the Behemoth was
that it was big and deadly—a slightly flattened spheroid fi ve
kilometers across—and that it was often posted as a sentry
near Xul-controlled stargates or worlds, but that it could

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

57

move under its own power when necessary. The Xul equiva-
lent of the Alcubierre Drive gave it FTL capability, and
there was evidence that it possessed a space-matrix transla-
tion capability akin to that of the MIEF’s Hermes and other
extremely large Commonwealth ships.

Moments ago, this Behemoth had dropped out of FTL
almost directly between the Shadow Hawks and the star-
gate, emerging into normal space with the signature burst of
light bent and focused along its wake of warped space. Lee
had ordered her surviving fighters to disperse and acceler-
ate, getting past the Behemoth by using antimatter missiles
as screens.

Major Lee’s weapons bays were empty, but she could go
into an attack approach anyway, seeking to draw off some of
the defensive fire from the enemy batteries.

Thank God, she thought, for the AIs. . . .

AI- pi loted aerospace fighters never stretched the enve-
lope. They flew conservatively . . . and fought conservatively
as well, and here was a perfect example: the Shadow Hawks’

AI fighters still had missiles left in their weapons bays. Ex-
pending antiship missiles on distant targets with a low prob-
ability of hitting with them just so you didn’t need to take
them back to the carrier was a human way of thinking and
fighting, not one of intelligent software.

She was damned glad three AI-piloted Wyverns in her
formation had survived, though. Their remaining missiles
probably wouldn’t destroy the enemy vessel, not without
some extraordinary luck, but they would give them a chance
to get past the Behemoth. Antimatter explosions blossoming
against the Xul hull would screen the hurtling fi ghters from
enemy sensors. She had ordered Green Five to loose its two
remaining AM-98 ship-killers going in. Seconds later, twin
blue- white flares of light had erupted against the Xul hunter-
ship’s hull like a close pair of hot suns just ahead. Now,

Lee’s Wyvern was hurtling toward the fast-expanding bub-
bles of plasma and vaporizing debris as her wingman
screamed at her to pull up.

58 I A N

D O U G L A S

Her Wyvern hit the shell of fast-moving plasma with the
shock of striking a solid wall, but her inertial dampers cush-
ioned her through the worst of it. She could feel the burn of
hard radiation, though, as it seared through her shields, and
then she was in a tumble, spinning nose-for-tail a few meters
above the tortured metal and ceramic landscape of the Xul

Behemoth as alarms shrieked and flashed over the Wyvern’s
link with her brain.

The jolt had been enough to knock her out of a trajectory
that would have sent her slamming into the huntership’s hull,
however. In an instant, she was past the alien vessel’s bulk,
struggling with her ship’s mind-linked thrusters to bring the
tumbling fi ghter back under control. Damage alerts shrilled
at her, and with a thought-click she silenced them. She knew
she was in trouble, damn it, and didn’t need the irritating
reminder. . . .

The universe spun past her awareness. “Pappy!” she cried.

“Let’s have some help, here!”

The AI was already helping, and she knew it. She consid-
ered, then rejected, the idea of having him stabilize the
wildly spinning view of her surroundings being fed into her
brain. Pappy had enough on his electronic mind at the mo-

2
ment. She concentrated instead on trying to slow the fi ght-
er’s spin, letting Pappy work through her to precisely balance
the firing of her thrusters.

Two of her stabilizing thrusters were off-line, which made
it tricky. Her comnet, her connection with the other ships in
her squadron, was down as well. Other electronic systems
were beginning to fail in cascade.

And then, without further warning, Pappy went off-line
as well. It took her a few moments to realize that he was
down, and when she did, she bit off a sharp curse. Without
the AI’s help, she was going to have a hell of a time navigat-
ing to the stargate, if she could get her essential ship’s sys-
tems on-line and working again.

The damaged Wyvern continued its nose-over- tail tumble
into the night. . . .

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

59

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Cluster Space/Carson Space

0727 hrs, GMT

The distant curve of the stargate fl attened as Hermes ap-
proached the oddly distorted space at the gate’s center, until
it was a golden straight line bisecting the encircling sky. An
instant later, Alexander felt the faint, internal shiver and
disorientation as Hermes passed through the stargate.

The flattened pinwheel of the Galaxy, the reddish beehive
of the globular cluster, the advancing Xul armada all van-
ished, wiped from the sky.

The Marine expeditionary force was back in Carson Space.

Or most of them were, at any rate. Fighters and Marine
assault pods were still coming through. Alexander opened a
channel to the commanding officer of CVW-5, Samar’s
fi ghter wing.

“How many fighters did we lose, Reg?” Alexander asked.

COCVW-5 was Colo nel Regin Macalvey, a tall, lanky

Marine from EarthRing’s Skyholme Sector. He was cur-
rently in his F/A-4140 Stardragon, regrouping his squadrons
as they came back through the gate.

“All together, General? Or are you asking about the

Shadow Hawks?”

“Both.”

“We’re still tallying, sir. Losses for the whole wing might
be as high as twelve percent. We’re still waiting for some
stragglers to report in.”

“And the Shadow Hawks?”

“Four ships have reported in so far, General. Out of six-
teen. There may be some more, though, still on the other
side of the gate.”

“I see.”

“We’ll want to go back across and have a close look, Gen-
eral. Once this little dust-up is settled.” He didn’t add that
fighters stranded on the far side of the gate were going to

60 I A N

D O U G L A S
have some trouble when the star over there blew. If it
blew. . . .

“If we can, CAG,” Alexander replied. “CAG” was an an-
cient term for a carrier’s aerospace wing commander, a relic
of the days when he was called “Commander, Air Group.”

An assessment probe was going to be vital after this op,

Alexander reflected . . . but that assumed that the red star
went nova, that the Xul node on the other side of the gate
was destroyed, and that 1MIEF wasn’t going to have to de-
stroy the gate to keep the bad guys out.

A lot of assumptions. The next few minutes were going to
be very busy indeed.

“Sir, we have Marines and AIs both still on the Cluster
side of the gate. Alive. We can’t leave them, there.”

“I know that, CAG. And you know there are no promises.”

“But—”

“Get your people squared away, Colo nel.” Alexander was
watching the data feed update itself. Every few minutes,
another reconnaissance drone would slip through the gate
with a tactical update to the fleet communications net. As
the data flowed through Alexander’s link, he could see the

Xul fleet massing on the other side, still approaching the
gate. “We might have some visitors very soon, now.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Macalvey sounded bitter. Like any good Marine CO, he
genuinely cared about the men and women under his com-
mand, cared even about the AIs. His personnel record men-
tioned that Macalvey was a member of the Church of Mind.

It explained a great deal, not that explanations were required
here. Alexander himself was a long-lapsed Neopag, but he
had the Marine officer’s deeply ingrained concern for his
people.

In any case, there were sound practical reasons for getting
back into Cluster Space when this was all over. The three

Euler Starblasters were still on the other side of the gate, if
they’d survived, along with a large menagerie of smaller
probes and drones. He wanted to recover them if at all pos-
sible. The more the Commonwealth could learn about the

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

61

ways and means of blowing up stars, the better. It was their
primary weapon, now, against the Xul hordes.

He sensed Admiral Taggart’s awareness. “Our fl eet is
in position, General,” Taggart told him. “If they come
through . . .”

“With luck, they’ll wait to think things through,” Alexan-
der told him. The slowness of Xul tactical responses was
proverbial, though it never did to rely too much on their past
per for mance. The enemy had been known to pull a surprise
move from time to time in the past.

“Yeah. The question is whether that pipsqueak sun over
there will pack enough of a bang to get them all.”

“Or if they’ll be warned by their friends closer in.” The

Xul, it was known, possessed FTL communications. A base
or ship close to the exploding sun might have time to trans-
mit a warning to other Xul vessels farther out before it was
engulfed.

So many unknowns.

Alexander checked the time. One minute more until the
big question was answered. If the star had exploded on sched-
ule, the nova’s wave front was nearly to the gate by now.

The last recon drone imagery showed seven of the mas-
sive Xul hunterships less than a thousand kilometers from
the gate, and still closing with it. The red dwarf star contin-
ued to burn in the distance, casting a bloody glare across
their sunlit surfaces. Deeper in the system were hundreds,
no, well over a thousand more, pinpointed by the X-ray and
gamma radiation loosed by their black-hole power plants.

If that entire enemy fleet managed to come through the
gate into Carlson Space, 1MIEF would be fi nished.

Space within the ring of the stargate shimmered. Abruptly,
with the suddenness of nightmare, the long, slender prow of
a Xul Type I, gleaming gold in the light of the Carson sun,
emerged from the empty space inside the gate’s ring.

“All ships!” Admiral Taggart commanded over the com-
bat link. “Fire!”

Still emerging from the warped space of the stargate, the

Xul huntership was caught in a web of high-energy beams

62 I A N

D O U G L A S
and exploding missiles. Taggart had positioned the re treating

Expeditionary Force fleet to take maximum advantage of
the tactical bottleneck; the Xul ships could only emerge into

Carson Space through the
twenty-kilometer lumen of the
stargate ring, and over a hundred combatant vessels of 1MIEF
could focus all of their fire on that one tiny region of space.

The incredibly tough ceramic and metal alloy of the Xul
warship’s outer hull withered, rippled, and peeled away beneath
that blast, as high-velocity kinetic-kill projectiles slammed into
it at an appreciable fraction of light speed and plasma bolts
seared into it at star-core temperatures. Moments later, the fi rst
nuclear and antimatter warheads began slamming into it, and
the area immediately in front of the gate opening was blotted
out by expanding spheres of plasma.

Under that ferocious onslaught, no material substance
could remain intact for long. The Xul ship’s fi ercely radiat-
ing, needle-shaped hull continued moving into Carson Space,
but its drive and weapons systems were dead. Pieces of its
internal skeleton were visible now, and the remnants of its
hull cladding were softening and streaming away as metal-
lic vapor.

But even as it drifted clear, four more Xul ships were
emerging from the gate interface.

Thirty seconds to go . . . an eternity in the lightning-quick
stab and parry of space-naval combat.

Major Lee,

AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,

Cluster Space

0731 hrs, GMT

It had taken several minutes, but at last she’d been able to
stabilize her tumbling spacecraft. The vast sprawl of the

Galactic spiral was at last no longer sweeping across her
mind’s eye. Behind her, the local sun, a ruby pinpoint, con-
tinued to burn in the far distance.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

63

The situation was damned bad. Com and nav systems both
were out, as was her link with Pappy . And there was worse.

2

When she oriented her Wyvern to line up with the stargate
and thought-clicked her main drive, nothing happened.

Stifling the sharp surge of fear, she began running diagnos-
tics. Like other aerospace fighters, the Wyvern’s main drive
drew energy from a ZPF quantum power transfer unit, using
quantum entanglement to transmit power from one point to
another without actually having to cross the space between.

Enormous zero- point field taps on board large capital ships
sucked potentially unlimited power out of the sub-fabric of
space itself and routed it directly to field-entangled power re-
ceivers on board individual aerospace fi ghters.

The advantage, of course, was that fi ghters didn’t need to
carry their own power generating systems for drives or
weapons. The down side was that the carriers and big Ma-
rine transports had to be closely protected, since the de-
struction of a carrier would shut down all of her fi ghters.

Briefly, Lee wondered if the Samar had been destroyed, and
that was why she wasn’t drawing any juice.

But . . . no. Samar was back in Carson Space. She’d come
through the gate, released her fighters, then returned—safely,
so far as the battlespace telemetry could report. The prob-
lem, obviously, was on her end of things.

It was tempting to assume that something was blocking or
intercepting the energy transmission, but Lee knew that
wasn’t the way things worked. She shook her head, frus-
trated. It still felt a bit strange to her . . . knowing that she
should still be drawing energy from a Marine transport
some thirty thousand light years away.

That was part of the technological magic of zero-point
energy taps. The energy wasn’t so much transmitted as it
was simultaneously co-existent in two separate places, on
board the transport and inside the QPT receiver of her drive.

Some day, the techies claimed, that bit of quantum-physics
magic might make possible the ancient dream of teleporta-
tion from point to point; in the meantime, it was enough that

64 I A N

D O U G L A S
her fighter could draw energy from her mothership even at
this range. When it didn’t work, the human mind tended to
fall back on what felt like common sense. If energy wasn’t
coming through, something must be blocking it.

The truth was that some essential component in her own
quantum power tap receiver must be down. She might pick
up the cause through her diagnostics, but the system was
complex and a full set might take hours.

Damn it. If Pappy had been up and running, he’d be able

2
to track the information down in no time. Her own personal

AI was little more than a secretary, able to sort through in-
coming data and present it in a way that made sense, but
unable to show much in the way of initiative or creativity.

She hated feeling this helpless.

She considered the Wyvern’s suicide switch.

All Commonwealth fighters carried the things, a means
of exploding a small antimatter warhead located beneath her
seat. There were five steps to go through before the thing
could be unsafed and triggered, but once she made the fi nal
connection—a manual button accessed underneath a lock-
down cap rather than a thought-click—she would never feel
a thing. The system had been installed in all fi ghters and
most small military craft as a means of avoiding being pat-
terned by the Xul . . . or for situations such as this one,
where battle damage had rendered the craft inoperable and
there was nothing to look forward to but suffocation or ra-
diation poisoning.

She discarded the thought. She wasn’t ready to make that
decision, not just yet.

The situation was bad, but at least some of her systems
were still running—life support and, thank the gods, her
ship’s sensors, which were still feeding data over her cere bral
link. That meant she was picking up battlespace data from
the far- flung net of drones and probes still adrift on this side
of the gate. From the look of things, a lot of Xul ships were
gathering, moving toward one of several stargate icons ex-
tending across her IHD in a broad, sweeping curve.

Cluster Space was a very special target, she knew. She

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

65

and the other members of her squadron had been thoroughly
briefed before this op, and had downloaded a lot of data go-
ing all the way back to the 22nd Century.

In 2170, a Marine strike force had entered this system,
sometime after the first encounter with Xul ships at the Sirius

Stargate. Backtracking on the path followed by the Xul force,
they’d discovered the Cluster Space system, far out among the
halo stars at the outer fringe of the Galaxy, at least thirty
thousand light years from Sol. They’d emerged from a differ-
ent kind of stargate, a broad tunnel drilled into the heart of a
twenty-kilometer-wide planetoid. According to the rec ords,
the Marines had recovered a damaged fighter that had fallen
through the gate during the battle, planted antimatter charges,
and escaped back through to the Sirius Gate before the charges
had detonated, destroying the asteroid gate in Cluster Space
and erasing the path back to Sirius.

That raid, quite possibly, had prevented the Xul from dis-
covering Earth—less than nine light years from the Sirius

Gate—for another century and a half, buying Humankind pre-
cious time. Not until 2314 had the Xul discovered Sol, launch-
ing the devastating bombardment against Earth that now,
almost six centuries later, was still called Armageddonfall.

The idea now was to keep that from ever happening again.

The next time the Xul visited Sol, they might well fi nish the
job. They could destroy stars as well.

Elint—electronic intelligence—acquired by 1MIEF nine
years ago during the battles in Aquila Space and at Starwall
had revealed a wealth of various stargate connections, and
the intelligence services both of the Humankind Common-
wealth and of the Marines specifically had been mining that
data ever since, trying to assemble a useful map of gate in-
terconnections.

There were, it was estimated, some millions of stargates
scattered across the Galaxy, and each gate could be tuned to
connect with as many as several thousand other stargates. The
web of interconnections was extraordinarily complex and far-
flung, and human explorers and their AI analogues had thus far
visited only a tiny, tiny fraction of all of the possibilities.

66 I A N

D O U G L A S

But intelligence gathered during a gate reconnaissance at

Sirius four years ago had led to the discovery of the Carson

Gate, and that, in turn, had led here, to a major Xul node in

Cluster Space. Probes sent from Carson to the Cluster had
verified that this was another route to the Cluster Node; in
fact, there were no fewer than fifteen stargates in orbit around
that single tiny, red-dwarf star, making this system a major
communications and travel hub. The destruction of that one
gate in this system over seven centuries ago might have tem-
porarily delayed the Xul discovery of Sol and Earth, but it
probably hadn’t even inconvenienced the Xul, who appeared
to use the gate network to maintain their xenocidal watch
over the teeming worlds of the Galaxy.

This time, the Commonwealth possessed the technology
to close all of the gates. From experience, they knew that a
nova probably wouldn’t destroy them outright. Each gate
was distant enough from the local star that even a nova
wouldn’t seriously affect it. But the nova would destroy all or
most of the Xul ships, fortresses, and other structures orbit-
ing in the local star, as well as annihilate any bases located
on the worlds of the star’s planetary system. When 1MIEF
went back through the Carson/Cluster gatelink, Marine as-
sault teams could be dispatched to each gate in the system
with antimatter charges that would finish the job once and
for all.

Those icons appearing in her In-Head Display represented
a few of the local system’s stargates, along with hundreds of
red icons marking Xul warships within the range of the

MIEF’s battlespace sensor drones. It occurred to her that she
was about to get a ringside seat on just what happened to Xul
vessels on the nova side of a stargate during an MIEF raid.

Of course, she didn’t expect to survive the experience. Any
blast wave that seriously damaged a Xul huntership would
sweep her little fighter away like a dust mite in a hurricane.

She checked to see that her recorders were going, however.

The MIEF would be sending assessment teams through af-
terward, and if there was anything left of her Wyvern, the
automated beacon transmitted by its
rad-
shielded storage

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

67

unit would bring them in for a recovery. Of course, all of the
unmanned battlespace drones had the same sort of storage,
but there might be something unique to her viewpoint. Stan-
dard operational procedure required her to take steps to pre-
serve the electronic record of what happened, just in case.

It also gave her a chance of recording a message, with a
chance that it would reach family and friends back home in

Saskatchewan.

Of course, she’d not had much to do with them since her
radiation exposure at Starwall nine years ago. Somehow,
knowing she would never have children again, she’d drifted
apart from her blood family. The last time she’d linked with
them had been . . . when? During one of 1MIEF’s returns to

Sol for resupply, certainly. But not four months ago, the last
time she was there. Maybe two times before that, early last
year. . . .

She would have to consult her personal memories, cur-
rently inaccessible in her implant hardware, to be sure. Even
though it was her choice, she tended to follow Marine guide-
lines when it came to family memories, locking them into
hardware storage during a mission to avoid complicating dis-
tractions at an inopportune moment. Like they always said,

“If the Corps had wanted you to have a civilian family,
they’d have issued you one in boot camp.”

Hell, right now she couldn’t even remember any of her
parents’ faces.

Fuck it, she thought. Just like you’ve been saying. The

Corps is your family, all the family you’ll ever need. . . .

Tears were drifting between her eyes and the inside of her
helmet visor, tiny, silvery spheres floating in microgravity.

How much time did she have? If everything was on sched,
the blast wave from the local star should be very nearly—

Without preamble, Bloodstar began growing brighter.

5

1506.1111

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Carson Space

0731 hrs, GMT

“Minus three . . . two . . . one . . . mark!” The AI’s voice in

Alexander’s mind said, counting off the last seconds. If Blood-
light had indeed gone nova, the shock wave should just now
have reached the stargate. Depending on how the gate was
tuned, the blast could pass through an open gate, emerging
from another gate light years away.

That didn’t appear to be the case this time, however. Four

Xul hunterships were drifting just in front of the Carson

Space gate, wreathed in lances of plasma and detonating
nuclear and antimatter warheads. But nothing had emerged
from the other side, no light, no hard radiation.

Had something gone wrong over there?

It was entirely possible that red dwarf stars were simply
too low-mass for a Euler triggership to affect. That had al-
ways been one of the possibilities, one of the dangers of this
mission.

Or perhaps the triggerships had been delayed.

There was no way to tell, not from this side of the gate, or
at least not until another battlespace drone emerged to up-
date the combatnet.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

69

One of the four Xul hunterships in the kill zone, a Type I
newly emerged from the gate, was beginning to break up under
the hellacious, focused bombardment. Under the concen-
trated fire of every capital ship of the MIEF, even a kilometer-
long Xul warship couldn’t hold up for long. A portion of the
needle- sharp prow broke away, spinning rapidly end over end.

The rest of the Xul vessel was beginning to crumple, and in-
tense radiation was bathing the area. The black hole inside its
engineering spaces must have broken free, and was now eating
its way through the Xul ship’s bowels.

But the Xul ships were firing back, sending a storm of laser
energy and plasma bolts back at their tormentors. Three de-
stroyers, Foster, Johnson, and Mevernen, had been destroyed
just within the past couple of minutes, and the light cruiser

Yorktown had been badly damaged, savaged by a concen-
trated volley of Xul weaponry. Now the heavy cruiser Maine
was coming under fire, staggering as high-velocity mass-driver
rounds slammed into her in a devastating fusillade.

The Commonwealth vessels continued fi ring, however,
with unrelenting determination. As Alexander watched, the
hull of the Type I twisted and dwindled, falling in upon it-
self. There was a fi nal flash of radiation, from visible light
through X-ray and gamma wavelengths . . . and then there
was nothing remaining but drifting debris.

“Target Alpha destroyed!” someone called over the tacti-
cal net. “Pour it on, people!”

Two more Xul ships, another Type I and a Type II, were
receiving the brunt of the expeditionary force’s fi re now.

The fourth of the group, a Type II, was limping now after
receiving a barrage of antimatter warheads across its dorsal
surface, with streams of hot gas gushing from several gap-
ing rents in its hull and freezing almost immediately into
clouds of glittering ice crystals. It appeared to be trying to
reverse course back through the gate.

“Let Charlie go,” Taggart’s voice said over the net, identify-
ing the retreating vessel. “Concentrate on Bravo and Delta.”

Bravo, the Type I, was starting to come apart under the
heavy barrage, but it was also accelerating now, pushing

70 I A N

D O U G L A S
deeper into Carson Space. A suicide attack? Or simply a
breakdown in communications on board the stricken vessel?

The Commonwealth firing line tracked it, continuing to pour
fire into its shuddering, crumbling hull. It swept past the

PanEu ro pe an gunboat Delacroix at a range of less than ten
kilometers. Delacroix’s turrets spun as they followed the

Xul warship, slamming round after round of nano-D shells
into the enemy’s fl ank.

Alexander had strongly protested the integration of the

PE, Chinese, and Rus sian squadrons into what was sup-
posed to be a Commonwealth naval- Marine expeditionary
force, but the Commonwealth Senate had been . . . insistent,
primarily because of the high losses among the Common-
wealth forces over the past few years. Opposed or not, Alex-
ander believed in delivering praise when it was appropriate.

He made a mental note to mention Delacroix’s deadly ac-
curate fire when he composed his after-action report.

Assuming he survived to write it, of course. If the star
next door had not gone nova, 1MIEF would shortly be in
very serious trouble.

AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,

Cluster Space

0731 hrs, GMT

Something had happened to the red dwarf. That much was
clear simply through the Wyvern’s optical inputs. But the
effect was not what Lee had been expecting.

Within the past several seconds, the star had visibly
grown much brighter. Lee’s radiation sensors were off-line,
but she suspected there was a strong UV, X-ray, and gamma
component to the brightening as well, enough to give some
teeth to that flare of visible light.

The increase in energy was more gradual than it should
have been, however. Xul ships appeared now in sharp relief
between their sunlit and shadowed surfaces, but their hulls

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

71

weren’t softening and melting, weren’t boiling away under
the assault.

Lee knew from the pre-mission briefings that there was a
chance the local star could not be triggered into going nova.

Like other typical red dwarfs, the local star was compara-
tively low-mass—about twenty percent the mass, in this
case, of Earth’s sun. In nature, only massive stars could go
nova, and traditional novae were thought to occur only in
binary star systems, when matter from one star fell into the
other. The Euler triggerships, moving within a bubble of
sharply warped space, distorted the core of a star as they
passed through, inducing a rebound effect, it was thought,
that generated an explosion of the star’s core. The question
was whether a red dwarf, which could be anywhere from
forty percent down to about eight percent of the mass of

Earth’s sun, could be physically induced to explode. There’d
been talk of testing the theory on a red dwarf within Com-
monwealth space before actually launching this raid, but
the thought of blowing up a star, even a tiny one, simply to
test theory had been too much for a majority of the mem-
bers of the Commonwealth Senate. The request, put through
by 1MIEF’s science team, had been denied.

Still, it should have worked. Red dwarfs were smaller and
cooler than other stars on the main sequence, but they were
still stars, working fusion magic in the transformation of
hydrogen to helium. There was another consideration as
well. The Cluster Space sun was not a typical halo star—one
of the thin haze of extremely ancient, cool red stars sur-
rounding the Galaxy, but must instead be a straggler from
the Galaxy’s spiral arms. Its lone attendant planet proved
that much. Stars from inside the Galaxy—Population I stars,
as they’d been designated since the 20th Century—possessed
heavier elements besides the usual stellar components of
hydrogen and helium and therefore could form planetary
systems. They were considered to be metal-rich, the word
metal in this instance referring to any element heavier than
helium whether it was chemically considered to be a metal

72 I A N

D O U G L A S
or not. Population II stars, the halo stars surrounding the

Galaxy, were ancient survivals from an earlier galactic ep-
och; without heavy elements in their make- up, they couldn’t
form planets.

The spectrum of the Cluster Space dwarf showed lots of
carbon. Likely, Bloodlight possessed a core of carbon, a
by-product of stellar fusion that must have been accumulat-
ing for tens of billions of years. The MIEF science teams
felt that the rebound effect within a carbon core should re-
sult in the detonation of a nova—at least a small one—despite
the star’s low mass.

Lee watched the star for a full minute, looking through
her cockpit’s transparency with her naked eyes, now, rather
than using the Wyvern’s electronic feed. Despite the in-
crease in overall brightness, she could look directly into that
ruby spark without discomfort, without her helmet’s optics
dialing down to preserve her vision.

Possibly what had been triggered was a stellar fl are; red
dwarfs, especially small ones, often were unstable enough
in their radiation output to earn the name flare stars. Such
stars—Proxima Centauri, just 4.3 light years from Sol, was
such a star—could increase in brightness by as much as two
or three hundred percent, in some cases.

Whatever had happened, it was bad. The Xul fl eet hadn’t
even been inconvenienced by the brightening of the sun, and
was continuing to move toward the stargate. The MIEF would
be arrayed on the far side, now, in Carson Space, and fi ghting
for its life. Once General Alexander decided that the Xul were
going to cross over to Carson Space in force, he would deto-
nate a number of antimatter charges on the Carson Space
stargate. That would stop more Xul from crossing over.

It would also strand Lee and any other survivors from the

MIEF fighter wings that might still be on this side. Again
she tried to engage her ship’s auto-repair functions, tried to
bring Pappy back on-line, tried to fire up the main drive.

2

Nothing.

She elected to focus all of her energy on reviving Pappy.

The AI could handle electronics repairs better than she.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

73

And it would be nice to have someone to talk to, espe-
cially someone who might be able to make sense of the
screwy data coming in from the Cluster Space star. It looked
like—

Abruptly, the brightening star exploded, growing much
brighter, and then still brighter, until the cockpit transpar-
ency went black.

Something must’ve delayed the explosion, she thought.

That, or the Euler triggerships took their sweet time getting
to the star.

She tried shifting back to her Wyvern’s electronic feed,
and got nothing but static. Shit! She was cut off now from
the outside, unable to see with her own eyes or through the

Wyvern’s electronic senses. Apparently, the radiation from
the exploding star had knocked the rest of her sensors
off-line. She’d been helpless before; now she was helpless
and blind.

At this point there was nothing she could do but wait. She
noted that the temperature of her outer hull was rising
now—at minus thirty degrees Celsius, up over one hundred
degrees in the past thirty seconds. She didn’t know for sure
how hot it would get. Her Wyvern’s hull integrity might well
hold up, and she would survive this initial pulse. The killer
in a nova, at least this far away from ground zero, was the
cloud of charged particles lagging behind the speed-of-light
radiation front by several hours. That would kill her, no
doubt about it.

She considered the suicide switch again. It would save the
waiting . . . and possibly some pain. She wasn’t sure just
how bad a dose of radiation she was getting right now, but it
might be bad enough to kill her relatively quickly, over the
course of several hours, say.

If she started vomiting, she would know.

She was determined not to be trapped adrift again, helpless
and doomed to a slow death. Once had been enough, nine
years ago, at Starwall. The similarity of that incident to her
situation now was shrieking at her in the back of her mind.

It would be very easy to end things. Now.

74 I A N

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On the other hand, she was a Marine . . . and Marines
didn’t give up, not that easily, anyhow. There would always
be time to use the switch later, if things got too bad.

Almost fifteen minutes later, something hit her Wyvern’s
hull.

She felt the jar, and heard a sharp, metallic clang through
the hull from somewhere aft. It startled her so badly she al-
most started the suicide switch enable procedure. If the Xul
had grappled her fighter and were taking her on board one of
their hunterships . . .

But she also knew that the Xul patterning procedure hap-
pened quickly and electronically.

There was another clang, and a sound like metal scraping
metal. What the hell was going on back there? Damn it, she
wished she could see.

Something banged against her blacked-out canopy. She
flinched, then braced herself. If they were coming for her
through the canopy . . .

What she felt next, though, was a surge of acceleration.

Zero-gravity gave way to a definite sense of weight, pushing
her back against her acceleration couch.

Okay, someone had grabbed her and was taking her some-
place. She wondered if the Xul took prisoners in ways other
than patterning them and uploading them into a virtual real-
ity within their computer network.

Then her canopy transparency cleared and, once more,
she could look out into the emptiness of space. Three large,
utterly black shapes surrounded her Wyvern, two just off her
bow, one to port, one to starboard, and a third above and
slightly behind. That third shape, seen only in dead- black
silhouette, had positioned itself between her canopy and the
exploding sun; riding in the object’s shadow, her canopy had
once again become transparent.

The shapes, she saw with a surge of heartfelt relief, were

Wyverns—needle-prowed forward of the cockpit bulge, fl at
and disk- shaped aft. She could just make out the hull number
on the Wyvern forward and to port—identifying it as 2nd

Lieutenant Traci Wayne’s ship. The wave of relief nearly left

G A L A C T I C

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75

her trembling. Three of the Wyverns in her squadron had
come after her. The noises she’d heard were tow cables; fi red
from special ports in a Wyvern’s hull, several meters of their
free ends were coated in nano sheaths that, on contact, welded
themselves to the target hull. She was inextricably bound to
the two Wyverns forward, now, at least until a signal from the
towing vessels deactivated the nano- binder’s programming.

Her first thought was a surging rush of joy. I’m not alone,
she thought. I never was. . . .

Her second was one of anger. Idiots! They should have
returned through the gate, not hung around looking for me!

Still, she knew she would have remained.

And she was going home.

Assuming her entourage could get her through the gate,
of course. Xul ships were continuing to crowd up close to
the gate, anxious, perhaps, to escape the doomed star sys-
tem. Or anxious, perhaps, just to get at the Commonwealth
fleet waiting on the other side. Xul psychology was still
largely a matter of guesswork. They were not human, and
they did not think in the same ways humans did.

In any case, the three operable fighters and their dead-weight
tow would have to thread an unpleasant gauntlet to get
through. She could see a Type II making the passage now,
moving through the interface at the center of the ring, vanish-
ing from existence as it entered the opening. Five smaller
hunterships and one huge Type III hung near the gateway.

Her escorts were beginning to fade slightly as they
switched on their phase- shift gear. While not true invisibil-
ity, the fighters were just enough outside of normal space-
time that they appeared indistinct and somewhat blurred.

Her own phase- shift gear, like nearly everything else on
board her damaged fighter, was inoperable. At least, though,
the Xul would be tracking only one fighter on its way to the
stargate, not four.

Acceleration continued to push her back into her couch.

Along with so much else, her inertial dampers were off-line.

She hoped Wayne and the pilot of the other towing Wyvern
had guessed that, because if they started boosting at a hundred

76 I A N

D O U G L A S
gravities, they would be taking her off the couch with a sponge
back in Carson Space. It felt like they were keeping it low,
though. She guessed they were pulling about fi ve gravities
now, maybe a bit more. Her flight suit was re-conforming to
provide pressure in her extremities and gut to keep blood from
pooling there.

The acceleration increased. How much? Eight gravities?

Ten? At around ten Gs, she knew, she would black out.

Well, it wasn’t absolutely vital that she stay conscious, but
she wanted to if for no other reason than that she wanted to
see. The stargate was expanding rapidly now as the quartet
of fighters hurtled toward it. Wayne and the other pilot, she
saw, were angling toward one rim of the stargate. Smart. It
would keep them clear of those last few Xul warships jock-
eying for position near the gate’s center, and she doubted
that they would open fire on the fighters and risk damaging
the stargate.

She wondered why the Xul weren’t firing on them now.

Phase- shift gear wasn’t that good at hiding a fighter, not at
knife- fighting range, like this. Then she realized that the
enemy might well be filling the sky around her with volleys
of high-energy weapons fire and she would never know it,
not without the software that painted incoming beams and
attached icons to missiles. Without computer enhancement,
she wouldn’t see a thing until something actually hit her,
and then it would be too late.

Lee wished she could talk to Wayne and the others . . . then
thought better of it. They were very busy right at the moment,
and needed full concentration for a maneuver that made
threading a needle at arm’s length child’s play by comparison.

Closer, now, and faster. Her vision was narrowing now,
her peripheral field going black, and her arms were too
heavy to move. She wished she could have another look at
the Galaxy sprawled across heaven, but she could no longer
turn her head. All she could see was directly ahead—the
rapidly expanding stargate, with a Type III Xul huntership
approaching the gate’s center.

Well, the nova light was probably so bright by now she

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

77

wouldn’t have been able to see it, anyway. Stargate and Xul
vessel both had taken on a hard-edged, blue-white glare where
they reflected the glow of Bloodlight coming from behind
her. Come to think of it, that provided the four fi ghters with
another advantage—coming down out of the sun. Any Xul
sensors looking back that way must be fried by now.

She caught a glimpse of one curving arc of ring- surface
flattening out just to the left of dead ahead. And then . . .

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Carson Space

0748 hrs, GMT

“Four more fighters coming through, General,” Colo nel

Macalvey reported, his voice tight with excitement. Every
remaining MIEF fighter was in space, now, swarming about
the incoming Xul hunterships as they drifted in an immense
and untidy clot at the center of the stargate. “Tough to see
them in all that crap.”

Alexander didn’t reply. The debris cloud in front of the
stargate was so thick now that it was tough to see anything,
but three of the fighters were broadcasting their transponder
signals at full intensity—hoping to ward off
so-called
friendly fire as they came into the kill zone—and battlespace
drones emplaced on the stargate ring itself were picking up
and boosting those signals. The transmissions revealed the
tightly grouped icons of three . . . no, four Wyverns fl ying
scant meters off the inner side of the stargate’s ring as they
streaked through into Carson Space.

Good. A few more Marines had made it back. . . .

And with them came a burst of signal- boosted telemetry,
updating the battlenet. Alexander felt the stream of raw infor-
mation fl owing into Hermes’ computer network. From the lit-
tle he could grab, unanalyzed, Bloodlight had exploded on the
other side, though not as soon as, and not with the violence,
expected. As soon as the data were downloaded, the science

78 I A N

D O U G L A S
team AIs would be fine-combing it, updating the available in-
formation on Xul warships coming through the gate.

The big question, of course, was whether the violence of
the exploding star had damaged the enemy vessels, hurt
them enough to stop them from coming through into Car-
son Space.

So far, the battle was going well, and at least vaguely ac-
cording to plan. In any battle, the key determining factor is
the terrain. Open space has no terrain, and tactics must be
dictated by the relative technology possessed by the combat-
ants, and by numbers.

The stargate, however, impressed a type of terrain on bat-
tlespace, a bottleneck, specifically, that allowed only a few
ships to pass from one side to the other at a time, and that only
slowly. In open space, the Xul possessed staggering advan-
tages in technology and firepower, but the stargate bottleneck
allowed Admiral Taggart to mass the weaponry of the entire

MIEF against a single, tiny area and focus it all on the Xul
ships as they passed through into the Carson Space kill zone.

That kill zone was visible now, even to the unaided eye, as
a thick fog and a tangle of wreckage adrift in front of the Car-
son stargate. As volley upon volley of high-energy beam
weapons gutted each Xul ship coming through the gate, gouts
of internal gases and molten hull material erupted into space,
freezing in seconds into glittering droplets and creating a
dense haze. Nuclear and antimatter warheads added expand-
ing spheres of hot plasma to the haze, and throughout were
tangled bits of debris, much of it still glowing white-hot.

The stargate was twenty kilometers across, and already the
nebula of debris covered a volume of space much wider than
that. It was actually becoming difficult to see what was going
on at the cloud’s center. The radiation there was intense enough
to scramble most sensors, though the ring-emplaced sensors
were still doing a good job of spotting most of the stuff com-
ing through.

The Xul warships continued to emerge, visible only as large
shapes half-glimpsed through the debris cloud. They were
coming through at low speed—at eighty to ninety kilometers

G A L A C T I C

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79

per hour—and colliding with the drifting wreckage. While
they weren’t moving fast enough to cause signifi cant dam-
age to their outer hulls with the collisions, they appeared to
be disoriented, as though they weren’t expecting space to be
so crowded with wreckage and debris.

Fire continued to rain down upon each in turn, tearing
great gashes in ceramic-metal hull material that glowed red
and orange with the intensity of the bombardment. The
space in front of the stargate pulsed and strobed with the si-
lent flashes of detonating antimatter warheads, and the de-
bris haze was thick enough that plasma bolts and laser
beams had become visible to the unaided eye, illuminated
by the trails of vaporizing particles of dust and ice.

Those Xul warships that worked their way clear of the
man-made nebula found themselves at the focus of long-range
bombardment from nearly one hundred Commonwealth war-
ships, and by the short-range jab and sting of Marine aero-
space fi ghters.

Over the past twenty minutes, the battle had slowly trans-
formed into a slaughter. From his vantage point, he could
watch the Xul craft emerge from the gate, struggle to orient
themselves, and come under that highly focused, devastat-
ing fi re.

And, under that assault, one by one, the Xul hunterships
died.

But the plan called for saving one of the monsters, a big
one, if possible. . . .

Penetrator Team Savage

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Carson Space

0804 hrs, GMT

First Lieutenant Charel Ramsey brought the palm of his
hand down on the link contact, and, with a heady surge of en-
ergy pulsing through his conscious mind, he became a god.

80 I A N

D O U G L A S

Ramsey was newly arrived on board the MIEF’s fl agship.

He’d joined her after a passage through from Earth on the
heavy cruiser San Diego only four weeks ago, part of the
reinforcement and resupply convoy operation designated

Starlight III. As a new graduate of the Navy and Marine

Corps Intelligence Training Center at Sinus Medii, on Luna,
he’d been assigned to the expeditionary force’s N-2 division,
answering to General Alexander’s command constellation
directly and based here on board the Hermes. As an N-2 in-
telligence officer, he’d been assigned to a penetrator team.

And he was going in hot.

Integration complete, a voice—partially his own—said
over the Intel net. Ramsey-Thoth now ready for launch.

Ramsey’s body was lying on one of the link couches in-
side Hermes’ Combat Ops Center, or COC, but his mind
was . . . elsewhere. Linked by his neural implant system into

Hermes’ computer network, with all other input signals
blanked by his software, his mind’s eye was now residing
within a narrow, tightly bounded virtual space representing
a K-794 Spymaster probe.

Ramsey’s thoughts were integrated now with a powerful
artificial intelligence given the name “Thoth,” an apt enough
name, since the original Thoth had been the ancient Egyp-
tian god of science, writing, knowledge . . . and magic. De-
signed to operate in this curious blend of human and artifi cial
intelligence, Thoth provided Ramsey’s viewpoint with the
speed, power, precision, and data acquisition functions of an

AI. Ramsey provided purely human talents of fl exibility,
creativity, and intuition not yet possible for even the most
powerful AIs.

The subjective effect was to give Ramsey a thrilling,
deep-centered sense of truly godlike power and control, a
feeling utterly unlike any other. It felt . . . wonderful. Ad-
dictively so.

“Probe Ramsey-Thoth is clear for launch,” the voice of

Lieutenant Karen Hodges said in his mind. She would be his
link with COC Control. “At your discretion, Gunny.”

“Copy that,” Ramsey replied.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

81

“Be advised that a Type III is now transiting the gate,”

Hodges added. Images built themselves up in an open win-
dow in Ramsey’s mind. He could see the two-kilometer

Nightmare slowly emerging from the gate, its hull begin-
ning to sparkle with the impacts of incoming fire. “Could be
a good target of opportunity.”

“Copy that, COC Control. See you all back at the farm.”

With a thought-click, a powerful magnetic field hurled the
probe clear of Hermes and into empty space. The probe’s

N’mah-derived space drive switched on, and the Spymaster,
with Ramsey’s viewpoint on board, hurtled toward the fi zzy,
nebular haze gathered in front of the stargate.

Targeting the emerging Type III, Ramsey locked onto the
huge vessel and accelerated. . . .

Nine years ago, Ramsey had been a Marine gunnery ser-
geant, an enlisted grunt with twelve years of active duty be-
hind him. He’d been part of the assault team that had gone
into a planetoid hollowed out by the alien Eulers, and been
the first human to establish direct mind- to-mind contact
with them.

For another year, he’d served with the MIEF Contact

Team, helping to establish the protocols and translation soft-
ware that let humans communicate freely with the deeply
alien, benthic species known as the Eulers, and worked as
well on the design of Euler triggerships, adapting them for
human use. At the end of that year, he’d been approached by
the Office of Naval Intelligence and given the opportunity to
come on board full- time as an e-spook. His experience with
the Eulers, he’d been told, had demonstrated the levels of
flexibility and mental adaptability the intelligence services
were looking for.

Over all, it had been an interesting tour. The only down-
side was that as part of his training, he’d been sent to OCS
and emerged as an offi cer.

As a former non-commissioned officer, Gunny Ramsey had
been absolutely convinced that the true backbone of any mili-
tary service was its NCO corps, a statement that likely had
been a truism in the army of Nimrod. Becoming an offi cer had

82 I A N

D O U G L A S
been a little like defecting to the other side. He still carried the
nickname “Gunny,” and endured the good-natured teasing of
his fellow commissioned offi cers.

Part of the problem was that he was now in his mid-forties,
and literally twice the age of most of his associates. His
other nickname, though not one usually used to his face,
was “Grandpap.”

Damned kids . . .

The Spymaster probe, one of some hundreds loosed by
the MIEF capital ships, dropped through the
man-made
nebula, homing now on the emerging Nightmare. The probe’s
outer shell was growing hot now in two ways, from friction
with dust particles and from the sea of radiation bathing the
kill zone. He felt Thoth increasing the probe’s magnetic
shielding, and begin jinking the two-meter-long dart in or-
der to avoid Xul antimissile fi re.

At the last possible moment, the Spymaster decelerated
sharply, hitting nearly two hundred gravities. Ramsey didn’t
feel that, of course, since he wasn’t physically on board the
probe. Artfully arranged patterns of electrons, fortunately,
were not subject to such inconveniences as gravity or high
acceleration.

Or radiation, for that matter, so long as the probe’s hard-
ened circuits were shielded from EMP. One second before
impact, the probe’s bow shielding fired, transformed by an
antimatter charge into a spear of raw energy stabbing down
into the Xul ship’s armor. The probe struck a seething open-
ing filled with searing hot plasma and tunneled in, its lead
element revealed now as a nano- tunneler.

The Spymaster probe vanished, swallowed by the narrow-
mouthed crater of its own making.

And moments later,

Ramsey-Thoth began to hear the

Nightmare’s Song. . . .

6

1506.1111

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Carson Space

0810 hrs, GMT

“The first wave of Penetrators is away, General.”

“About damned time.”

Alexander watched the green threads of the tiny missiles
extending from Hermes and other ships in the fl eet toward
the most recent Xul ship to cross the gate interface. The fi rst
were already impacting on its hull.

This was the real heart of Operation Clusterstrike. He’d
wanted to launch the incursion earlier in the battle, but vari-
ous factors had conspired to delay things. In partic ular, the

Intel people—N-2 in the Navy and Marine lexicon—had
needed to analyze the electronic screens now being used by
the Xul fleet in order to give the Penetrators a better chance
of getting past the enemy’s defenses, both passive and ac-
tive. They’d also been holding out for a Type III or one of
the newly identified Type IV’s as a target, on the theory that
the larger Xul hunterships would have more complex, deeper,
and more valuable electronic infrastructures to tap.

And, finally, they’d needed an updated picture of what
was happening on the far side of the gate. The arrival of

84 I A N

D O U G L A S
those last four fighters and the data they’d uploaded to the
battlenet had revealed that the Xul assault was tapering off.

As they’d come through the gate, there’d been only a half-
dozen hunterships on the other side, and only one large
one—the Type III now being targeted by the Penetrators.

Alexander allowed himself a small—a very small—release
of the stress that had been riding his shoulders throughout
the battle. There’d been so many unknowns with this opera-
tion, and one of the largest and most deadly had been whether
they would be able to contain the Xul fleet. With as many as
a thousand Xul warships in Cluster Space, no one had been
able to guarantee that the MIEF line on the Carson Space
side of the gate wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

Expendable munitions stores were running low through-
out the fleet. Lasers and plasma weapons alone would not
have been enough to slow that onslaught if they’d chosen to
keep coming.

Both Alexander and Taggart possessed mental triggers
keyed to detonate a number of antimatter charges already
placed around the Carson Gate’s circumference. If the Xul
had been able to push through the bottleneck, if both Tag-
gart and Alexander had been convinced that the MIEF line
would not hold, they would have destroyed the gate.

Carson Space was located, as near as the astrographers
could determine, some eleven thousand light years from Sol,
on the outskirts of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm, a pinpoint in
the vast spiral of four hundred billion stars chosen both for
its remoteness and for the fact that a careful search of the
region had failed to turn up any signs of a Xul presence.

Of course, with the gate destroyed, the surviving ships of

1MIEF would have to be translated back to Sol a few at a
time within the vast hangar deck of the Hermes, a slow pro-
cess that wouldn’t even work with the larger ships in the
fleet. And if Hermes had been damaged or destroyed, the
journey would have taken a lot longer—a number of years
under Alcubierre Drive.

It would have been worth it however, to keep the Xul from

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

85

discovering the origin of the attack, but there would have
been a terrible danger, too. Alexander knew that 1MIEF
needed to keep moving, keep threatening the Xul from as
many different directions as possible. If the task force lost
the initiative, the Xul might recover enough to fi nd Human-
kind’s world of origin, and this time, Earth and all her colo-
nies would be obliterated.

Maintaining the initiative in this war was absolutely vital
to humanity’s survival, but it was a balancing act that was
growing more and more difficult, more deadly, with each
passing month. By now, the ancient enemy was aware that
somebody in the Galaxy was out to kill them, and given their
peculiarly paranoid way of thinking, they would be frantic by
now in their efforts to track down the threat and destroy it.

In fact, the only thing that had kept Humankind out of the

Xuls’ xenophobic eye had been the size of the Galaxy, the
sheer vast number of suns and worlds and emerging civiliza-
tions. As it was, they’d learned of Earth and its attendant
cluster of tiny interstellar communities several times already
over the past few centuries. Armageddonfall had come
within a hair of annihilating Earth herself, and the Xul cap-
ture of an asteroid colonizer ship, fleeing Sol at sublight
speeds after the bombardment of Humankind’s homeworld,
apparently had given them more precise information about
humans, their origins, and their history.

That discovery had prompted the creation of 1MIEF, the

Battle of the Nova in 1102 of the Marine Era, and the subse-
quent near-decade of raids and strikes at Xul nodes across
the Galaxy. The joint naval-Marine expeditionary force had
been tasked with the seemingly impossible—keeping the

Galaxy-wide empire of the Xul reeling and off-balance. If
the Xul were bending all of their considerable resources to-
ward finding 1MIEF instead of Earth, perhaps Earth would
be able to come up with . . . something else, a weapon, a
strategy, an alliance, something that would enable Human-
kind to survive.

A lean and desperate hope.

86 I A N

D O U G L A S

Survival would have been a lot less likely had 1MIEF
been destroyed this morning . . . or if Taggart and Alexander
had been forced to destroy the gate and return to Sol Space
by other means. But the gamble appeared to have paid off
well. According to the ongoing tally, twelve Xul hunterships
had been destroyed so far in the hellfire unleashed in front of
the Carson Gate. That had come at a high price; 1MIEF had
lost thirty-one ships of various classes, and a large percent-
age of the aerospace fighters. After this one, the expedition-
ary force would need to rearm and re-equip, either back at

Sol or at one of the other major Commonwealth bases, at 36

Ophiuchi or New Earth, perhaps.

But then it would be back into the battle line again.

Perhaps information taken by the Penetrators would pin-
point the next objective.

The fl eet’s fire was raking the newly emerged Nightmare-
class huntership now, but carefully, with exacting precision.

Certain areas of that immense, quasi-spherical hull had been
set aside as targets for the Penetrator swarm, and it wouldn’t
do to vaporize the Penetrators before they could eat their
way into the Xul hull.

A pair of Type II hunterships were emerging now, and
much of the bombardment shifted over to them. Fire contin-
ued to rain down on the Type III, however. That one Xul ship,
over two kilometers across, could wreck the Commonwealth
fleet if it got close enough. Naval gunfi re hammered away at
the monster, concentrating on weapon banks, sensor arrays,
and drive blisters. If possible, they would immobilize the

Nightmare, allowing the Penetrators to do their job without
the dangerous distraction of haste. Some Penetrators would
be destroyed, no doubt, but hundreds had been fired into that
monster precisely so that a few, at least, might survive.

And after that would come the really tricky part of Oper-
ation Clusterstrike. . . .

• • •

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

87

Penetrator Team Savage

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Carson Space

0812 hrs, GMT

Lieutenant Ramsey wasn’t really a fish. It was important,
however, to create meta phors that seemed as real and true- to-
life as possible if the Penetrator team was going to be able to
work with them.

What is software, after all, but patterns of information?

Electric charge and lack of charge, gates permitting or refus-
ing trickles of current, a flow of electrons guided this way or
that, entire networks of interconnected processors and relays,
the whole organized into complex arrays of movement, stor-
age, and potential, all according to carefully designed schema
and encodings meaningful to the designers.

Information.

Xul and human technology had that much in common, at
least. Human computer systems used binary logic coded into
electrical charges moving across microscopic threads of
gold, copper, osmium, hafnium-carbide, and other elements
and compounds layered on wafers of silicon or boron-carbon
nanolaminates; the Xul used a trinary logic generated by
triple gates etched into ceramic substrates or suspended in
gels of organic polymers.

More, Xul minds were not even remotely human, existing
as nested hierarchies of intelligence and communication
within vast networks of awareness, myriad minds in a kind
of chorus of thought blending layer by layer into a metamind
directing each huntership, the metaminds in turn intercon-
necting into higher and more remote layers of awareness
and or ga ni za tion.

Still, since the recovery and dissection of a Xul hunter-
ship within the frozen world-ocean of Europa, in Earth’s
home solar system over eight centuries before, human and
human-designed AIs had probed, analyzed, and mapped
numerous examples of Xul technology. Software, and entire

88 I A N

D O U G L A S
artificially intelligent tech-genera, had been developed to
allow human computer systems to interface with alien.

And at every opportunity, those software systems were
used to probe and penetrate Xul technologies, seeking that
most powerful, that most vital of all weapons in any war.

Again, information.

But where patterns of charge and electron flow can be mean-
ingful to an intruding software program, those patterns are
meaningless to human awareness without some fairly high-level
and sophisticated translation. In short, a kind of computer ani-
mation was playing out a movie within Lieutenant Ramsey’s
mind, through Thoth’s connection with the hardware implanted
within his brain and nervous system.

To Ramsey’s mental viewpoint, he was moving through
an ocean.

He was used to virtual spaces set to replicate marine en-
vironments. This time, though, it wasn’t the lightless abyssal
depths favored by the alien Euler, but something like the
warm shallows of a coral reef, a sparkling clear, blue-green
translucence filled with myriad swarms of brightly colored
fish representing moving patterns of data, with vast and tor-
tured landscapes of coral, seaweed forests, anemones, and
other marine life representing storage areas, quiescent mem-
ories, and hardware infrastructure.

Ramsey had been born in EarthRing, but most of his child-
hood had been spent in the Florida Reefs, not far from Lost

Miami. He’d done a lot of diving both there and in the nearby
sunken Bahama Banks, and even worked for a time on the

Atlantis Project. He’d chosen the undersea metaphor as his
preferred means of interfacing with the alien Xul system.

As the Penetrator chewed its way deeper and yet deeper
into the alien armor, its sensors had been alert to electron fl ow
and magnetic moment. Eventually, nearly forty meters down,
it detected a bundle of thallium-niobium-bromide threads in
an induced high-
temperature superconductive state and
changed direction slightly to intercept it. Once the Penetra-
tor’s access tip had been exposed and brought into contact

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

89

with the superconductor cable, Thoth had begun insinuating
himself into the alien network.

And Ramsey’s mind was piggybacked with Thoth, along
for the ride.

He could hear the Chorus . . .

Once, in a virtual reality diving simulation at the Bimini

Oceanarium, Ramsey had heard whalesong, the deep, eerie,
and echoing tones of the long-vanished humpback whale.

This was like that, a low, throbbing, and utterly compelling
pulse through his VR surroundings more felt than heard. And
with Thoth’s ability to decode the signals for him as they
came through, he could hear them as words, intelligible
words. . . .

9021:

>> . . . threat . . . <<

7365:

>> . . . failure . . . <<

4643:

>> . . . cessation . . . <<
chorus: >> . . . this is not possible! . . . <<

7365:

>> . . . possibility is self-evident . . . <<

1549:

>> . . . ending is the way of existence . . . <<
chorus: >> . . . but Mind must endure! . . . but Mind must
endure! . . . <<

8575:

>> . . . but Mind must endure . . . but the Threat is
grave . . . <<

The phrases were fragmentary and incomplete, the con-
nection like listening in on less than half of a complete con-
versation. It felt as though individuals were singing thoughts,
then joining in a chorus with other individuals to blend ideas
and, perhaps, generate new concepts.

He’d heard this type of sing-song before. There were re-
cordings of Xul exchanges from The Singer, the Xul Type III
frozen for half a million years in the ice of the Europan
ocean, and from other Xul ships electronically “boarded” by

AI probes during encounters over the centuries since. All in-
tel officer trainees listened to those recordings endlessly,
seeking to familiarize themselves with the strange timbre and
layered, roundabout reasoning that passed for Xul thought.

Individual speakers in the conversation were identifi ed by

90 I A N

D O U G L A S
four- digit numbers, felt rather than seen or heard, through a
kind of electronically enhanced intuition.

8947:

>> . . . the Mind has encountered . . . <<

4641:

>> . . . We Who Are have encountered this
species before . . . <<

3399:

>> . . . this species . . . <<

8947:

>> . . . Species 2824 . . . <<

8571:

>> . . . Species 2824 . . . System

2420– 544 . . . <<

8947:

>> . . . has been a Threat before . . . <<

2255:

>> . . . to We Who Are before . . . <<
chorus 1:

>> . . . the Threat must be eliminated . . . <<
chorus 2:

>> . . . Species 2824 must be eliminated . . . <<
chorus 1:

>> . . . System 2420– 544 must be
eliminated . . . <<
chorus all: >> . . . We Who Are must endure . . . <<

Dream on bastards, Ramsey thought. The Xul had been
trying to eliminate Humankind for a long time.

Bit by bit, modern Humankind had been piecing together
the complete history of his ancient encounters with the Xul,
a history, it turned out, that reached back to the very begin-
nings of Man as a species.

Ages ago, the Xul had wiped out the Builders, an interstel-
lar civilization—possibly a machine intelligence, though de-
tails were sketchy—that had terraformed Mars perhaps as
much as half a million years ago, left mysterious artifacts on

Earth’s moon, and apparently tampered with the genome of

Homo erectus in order to create not one but two new hominid
species . . . Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis.

The Martian colony had been destroyed and the planet’s
artificially generated atmosphere had been blasted away, but
somehow the Xul had overlooked the Builders’ gene tic labo-
ratory on Earth. Humans and Neanderthals had survived.

Sometime around 7000 b.c.e., the Xul had all but annihi-
lated the An, a technically proficient species with an inter-
stellar empire consisting of several dozen worlds, including

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

91

Earth, where Neolithic human tribes had been enslaved,
trained, and interbred to serve the colonizing masters as farm-
ers and as miners. The An and a few of their human slaves
had survived on the Earthlike moon of a gas giant at La-
lande 21185, but only by losing most of their technological
know- how. Though Earth was bombarded by asteroids and
the An population centers destroyed, the human survivors
on Earth had struggled back from the brink of extinction,
helped openly by the alien N’mah. Something of the en-
counter with destroying monsters from the stars had lin-
gered on, though, in myth, legend, and religion. It was the
ancient Sumerians who provided their word for “demon” to
the destroyers— Xul.

The Xul had almost certainly been alerted to Human-
kind’s existence sometime in the 21st Century, when The Singer
had been uncovered on Europa. A group mind housed within
the enormous spacecraft’s computer network had sent a sig-
nal starward. That fragment of the Xul overmind, however,
after half a million years of isolation beneath the Europan
ice, had been hopelessly insane. Attempts to retrieve and
translate data stored there had been less than completely
successful.

In 2148, a human explorer ship, The Wings of Isis, had
been patterned and stored by a Xul huntership at the stargate
orbiting Sirius A. In 2170, Marine and naval elements had
fought the Battle of Sirius Gate, destroying a Xul ship, and
also making contact with the alien N’mah living a low-tech,
survivalist existence inside the stargate structure itself.

And since then there’d been repeated isolated contacts
and encounters with the Xul, repeated clashes and raids.

The arrival of a Xul ship within the Sol System in 2314 had
very nearly destroyed the world of Humankind’s birth. Only
the destruction of the intruding Xul ship, made possible by a

Marine assault force actually entering the monster with
backpack nukes, had saved Earth and, quite possibly, all of
humanity.

Xenosophontologists—the researchers, human and AI—
who studied alien intelligences, had been studying the Xul

92 I A N

D O U G L A S
since the recovery of The Singer on Europa. Each electronic
penetration of a Xul ship-network taught them a little more.

According to them, the

Xul—who apparently referred to
themselves as We Who Are—possessed a kind of hardwired

Darwinian paranoia triggered by any encounter with non-Xul
intelligence. For uncounted ages, they’d watched and listened
from their base-nodes scattered across the Galaxy, noting the
emergence of life and of Mind, and eliminating that life once
it appeared to pose a threat—which generally was defi ned as
developing technology, especially star travel.

At the same time, however, it was difficult to get their at-
tention. They appeared to react strongly to the arrival of star-
ships in areas under their control, but they did not appear to
do much in the way of active patrolling. They also tended to
overlook species existing in environments outside the ex-
pected. That An colony at Lalande 21185, for instance, had
escaped the general destruction of the An’s interstellar em-
pire because it wasn’t in the so-called habitable zone encir-
cling its star. The world called Ishtar was the moon of a gas
giant in the frozen realm far from the system’s red-dwarf
primary, but parts of its surface were kept habitable by grav-
itational tidal stresses. The N’mah were amphibious, with
their adult phase living underwater; the colony contacted by

Earth had escaped Xul notice by colonizing fl ooded por-
tions of the interior of the Sirius Stargate. And then there
were the Eulers. . . .

The point was that the Xul did not think, did not react the
same way humans would to something perceived as a threat.

Their paranoia was over- the-top, a species-wide overreac-
tion that saw anything different as a threat, but their physi-
cal reaction to that threat tended to be measured and slow,
even dilatory, and often fragmentary. Human xenosophon-
tologists were as yet uncertain why this might be so; all in-
telligence officers, however, had been repeatedly instilled
with a kind of mantra when it came to spying on the Xul: we
don’t yet understand them; any scrap of information, how-
ever small, is vital.

G A L A C T I C

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93

And so Ramsey and Thoth entered the Song, listening
and recording. Using data brought back from previous pen-
etrator raids within other Xul hunterships, the Ramsey-Thoth
cooperative had woven a software emulation shell about it-
self, the digital equivalent of donning camoufl age. From

Ramsey’s perspective, he was another of the brightly col-
ored fi sh flashing above the reef. The Song itself, besides
playing out in his thoughts as words, was echoed by the move-
ments of schooling fish around him. As one of the numbered
voices sang its piece, one of the fish would brighten and dart,
followed an instant later by a swarm of its fellows. When the
chorus sang, all of the fish pulsed and throbbed and fl ashed
in unison.

Unnoticed, Ramsey-Thoth settled in with one of the lesser
swarms. The software shell reflecting the surrounding
thoughts like nanoflaged body armor rendering a Marine
invisible.

6223:

>> . . . threat . . . <<

7118:

>> . . . serious threat . . . <<

7472:

>> . . . the local Mind faces disruption . . . <<

8571:

>> . . . disruption is ending/evil . . . <<

6223:

>> . . . is ending/evil/wrong! . . . <<

8947:

>> . . . but Mind will survive . . . <<
chorus: >> . . . Mind must survive . . . <<

7472:

>> . . . query— what of MIND? . . . <<

8947:

>> . . . MIND is . . . <<

7472:

>> . . . MIND must be informed, lest the[?cancer]

spread . . . <<

9335:

>> . . . unpre ce dented . . . <<
chorus 1: >> . . . unpre ce dented . . . <<
chorus 2: >> . . . unpre ce dented! . . . <<

2221:

>> . . . the threat offered by this species is unprec -
e dented . . . <<

5294:

>> . . . the Hub should be informed . . . <<
chorus: >> . . . the Hub will be informed . . . <<
chorus 1: >> . . . that MIND may live even if Mind should
dissipate . . . <<

94 I A N

D O U G L A S
chorus: >> . . . that We Who Are survive . . . <<
chorus: >> . . . We Who Are will be/endure/survive . . . <<

Ramsey had been listening with an intuitive openness of
mind. All Marines underwent extensive training in certain
mental disciplines while in boot camp and in OCS, disciplines
such as weiji-do that increased the fl exibility, adaptability,
and psychic strength of the human mind.

Weiji-do, developed back in the 22nd and 23rd centuries
and based on some of the stranger, reality-generating as-
pects of Quantum Physics, was sometimes called the Way of

Chaos, but a better translation would have been the Way of the
embodiment of the chaotic potential of creation and reality.

The
skill-set helped Marines function with confi dence
within the virtual realities and downloaded sim-worlds of
computer-generated combat networks and information feeds,
but it also sharpened innate intuitive and psychic abilities.

The training allowed the Ramsey portion of the Ramsey-

Thoth mental fusion to relax into a deeply altered state and
follow individual threads of the alien exchange—in effect
backtracking on some of the movement patterns woven by
those flashing, colorful fish around him.

He was curious about two partic ular concepts overheard
in the alien conversation—the reference to the hub, and the
thought-symbol translated as MIND. Both ideas had rich
associations within the substrate of the Xul mentality. He
felt himself sinking into the structure of the reef itself, felt
the pulse of life around and within him.

He recorded everything, of course—images, listings of
data, sounds . . .

The Hub, he was almost certain, was an astrographical
reference. If so, it could only refer to the Galactic hub, the
very center of the Galaxy. Some of the side links and associ-
ated data stores appeared to relate to another Xul node—a
very large, very important Xul node—somehow connected
with the deep Galactic core.

The concept of MIND—his own mind supplied the sense
of all capitals—had been hinted at by other incursions into

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

95

other Xul networks. Though poorly understood, the idea ap-
peared to hinge on the notion of nested hierarchies, or meta-
gestalts.

The species humans knew as the Xul
were generally
thought of as a type of hive mind, though that phrase sug-
gested similarities to anthills or beehives on Earth, or to the
kadje nests so common on the cold, wet world of Cerridwen
that were misleading at best. Electronic sigint carried out on

Xul structures in the past, though, suggested that the lowest,
simplest components of the Xul mentality were individual
software components running Xul warriors or individual
weapons. All of those “minds” grouped together, working
together, and linked with patterns of information that might
well have been uploaded into the system from living organ-
isms eons ago, comprised the “Mind” resident within a sin-
gle Xul huntership.

All of the ship-Minds resident within a single Xul node,
one of the gated star systems where dozens or hundreds of
hunterships, fortresses, and base elements were networked
together into an metamind, usually referred to in N-2 circles
as the Node Mind.

There was a sense, here, of something higher. Logically,
if Xul mentalities were built up in hierarchic data structures,
a metamind made up of the thought processes of all Xul
ships and nodes throughout the Galaxy might form a yet
higher- level gestalt.

MIND.

But there was no time, and there were no resources here,
for analyses. The data were recorded within the molecular
computer circuits of the Spymaster probe, still sheathed
deep within the huntership’s armor.

Something else was happening as well. For an eternity in
electronic terms—but actually something on the order of
eight to ten seconds in objective time—the Xul huntership
had been under fire by the massed MIEF fl eet. While the

Commonwealth’s targeting AIs were being careful not to hit
areas probed by the cloud of Spymaster penetrators, they’d

96 I A N

D O U G L A S
been bombarding other parts of the Xul Nightmare, if only
to keep it from engaging the Commonwealth fleet at close
range and destroying it—a necessary tactical trade-off.

A part of Ramsey-Thoth was aware of cascades of data
washing through the realm of the simulated coral reef like
an incoming storm tide. Portions of the Nightmare’s hull
were failing, and the main engineering core had been seri-
ously damaged. The black hole at the heart of the hunter-
ship’s power systems would be released from its magnetic
containment at any moment. When that happened, the ship’s
structure would very swiftly fail.

Mind—the Mind of the ship—was maneuvering the huge
vessel back through the stargate.

No one knew for certain what would happen when the
bodies of fleet intelligence officers were on one side of a
stargate, and their disembodied minds were on the other.

The physics of the stargates were not well understood, but
it was known that the orbiting of pinpoint- sized microsin-
gularities within a stargate’s ring created the special discon-
tinuity that allowed passage across the gate interface, that
matter passed through easily, but that radiation—including
radio signals and visible light—did not. The only way to
communicate from one side of a gate to the other—other
than through the physical passage of message drones, of
course—was to use field-entangled QCC communications
which, theoretically, could connect with one another any-
where in the universe without traversing the space in
between. Quantum-Coupled Comm units were large and com-
plex, however, suitable for larger starships, but too large for
fighters, to say nothing of the slender, 2-meter length of a

K-794 Spymaster.

If they wanted to get their intelligence treasure- trove back
to the Hermes, they would need to transmit it before they
completed the passage back to Carson Space.

As he emerged from the depths of the reef, he was aware
of a new and ominous component of the virtual reef . . .

shadowy gray shapes circling the flashing schools of fi sh.

G A L A C T I C

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97

Sharks. The Xul were aware of attempts to penetrate their
data structures and networks, and had evolved means of
dealing with those intrusions. Within the symbology evolved
within Ramsey’s personal net, those defensive routines ap-
peared as large and hungry sharks.

It was definitely time to withdraw.

Rumor and pop
ular myth held that when an operator
linked into an enemy system was discovered, or if the alien
network itself were suddenly destroyed, or, indeed, if the
mind crossed to the other side of a stargate interface, the
shock of being cut off from his organic brain could kill him.

That was simply not true; his body was alive and well pro-
tected back within the intelligence center of the Hermes. If
his link with the Xul computer was cut off, he would simply
wake up back there, as if emerging from a deep and dream-
fi lled sleep.

But there was a danger. The organic brain could not tell
the difference between virtual reality and Reality, could not
know the difference between illusion, memory, or a data
feed and the actual input from the body’s natural senses.

The human mind required a bridge to safely extricate itself
from the alien mental environment. Sudden destruction of
the target, or an attack by enemy defenses, could so shock
the human psyche that serious damage was the result. Intel-
ligence operatives had suffered serious emotional trauma
when things went wrong on a Penetrator op.

Insanity or, at the very least, serious neurosis, was always
a possibility.

Ramsey usually tried not to think about the possibilities. He
highly valued his mind, its sharpness, its responsiveness, its
clarity, and, for him, at least, death was preferable to insanity.

The sharks had identified him. Somehow, he must have
given himself away within the embrace of the data storage
reef.

“We need to withdraw,” he told Thoth. “Now. . . .”

“The threat has been noted,” the Thoth part of his mind
replied. “I’m initiating—”

98 I A N

D O U G L A S

The sharks never reached him. Instead, the Xul ship it-
self, pounded by volley upon volley from the Common-
wealth fleet, had finally begun to collapse.

Worse, he could feel the odd sense of discontinuity as the
huntership crossed the stargate interface.

“Transmit!” he yelled, ignoring the need for stealth.

“Now! . . .”

And then his conscious world came crashing in upon
him.

7

1506.1111

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Carson Space

0816 hrs, GMT

From General Alexander’s electronic viewpoint on board
the Hermes, it appeared that the tide had defi nitely turned.

As the Xul Nightmare-class huntership began to crumple,
folding itself into its own rogue microsingularity in a burst
of hard gamma radiation, he allowed himself the exhilara-
tion of knowing the Commonwealth had won.

“There he goes,” Taggart’s voice said.

“I see him, Liam. Did our penetrators get clear?”

“Not sure yet, Marty,” Taggart replied. “Lots of telemetry
coming through.” The admiral paused, studying the streams
of incoming data. “Yeah . . . I think we hit the jackpot with
this one!”

“I want verification that our people are out of there.”

Sending human minds in virtual reality into the very bowels
of Xul hunterships seemed to Alexander to be an incredibly
high-risk proposition. If the Xul could pattern the minds of
humans on captured starships and upload them into their
own virtual realities, they could do the same with human
emulator software penetrating their own networks. Only two
factors made the idea worthwhile in his mind—the amount

100

I A N D O U G L A S
of sheer data these raids could return, and the fact that the
target ship, by his express order, was about to be destroyed
in any case. Alexander would not allow
humans—even
downloaded human copies—to endure that kind of impris-
onment, that kind of terror and pain.

“No information yet, General. We’ll need to wake them
up, take them through the usual post-mission debrief. It’ll
take time. . . .”

“Just make damned sure we get them back,” he snapped.

“Their minds as well as their bodies! And I want to see an
analysis on what they managed to pick up as soon as one is
available.”

“Right, Marty.” Taggart had that whatever-you-
say-

General tone to his mental voice, one Alexander had heard
plenty of times before. It was the tone of voice one reserved
for a micromanaging CO, or an officer who was telling his
people how to do jobs that they knew damned well how to do.

The hell with it. He didn’t care what Taggart thought, or
anyone else, for that matter. Operation Clusterstrike had been
his, suggested by him and largely planned by his command
constellation. He wanted to be in on the pay-off, wanted to
know what the Penetrators had gleaned from the Xul Night-
mare.

He also needed something to show Yarlocke and her
crowd back at Defense, something positive.

If he didn’t, 1MIEF would be recalled, and that would
have some very bad consequences indeed.

Senate Committee Deliberation Chamber

Commonwealth Government Center,

EarthRing

1025 hrs, GMT

Cyndi Yarlocke always enjoyed the view from this largest
of the deliberation chambers within the Government Center.

The walls were opaque, of course, but the entire surrounding

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

101

viewall and the room’s vaulted ceiling were set to transmit
seamless imagery from optical scanners mounted on the

Ring’s outer framework.

The effect was that of transparent walls looking out into
space. High on one wall, Earth hung against a backdrop of
stars, impossibly beautiful, impossibly fragile, a marble, il-
luminated now from the right and showing only half its
surface, of ocean- blue and intricate swirls of cloud-white.

Beyond, its half-full phase mimicking Earth’s, the Moon
hung in silvery splendor.

If you looked closely, the scattered lights of cities could be
picked out on the dark sides of both. It was dawn over eastern

North America; the megopoli of Vancouver, Portseattle, and
the two Californias drew the Pacific coastline in myriad
points of cool, white light, strung together on a luminous,
tightly woven net, like shining drops of dew on a spider’s
web.

Since the very first tentative voyages to the Moon, that
view of Earth seen from space had been an icon of fragile
and delicate beauty, of oceans and clouds, of ocher deserts
and green plains and wrinkled mountains and bright-lit cit-
ies all gathered together in a single, tiny sphere of intense
color no larger than a fist held at arm’s length.

More delicate still, though, were the Rings. . . .

They encircled Earth at roughly Geosynch, some 35,700
kilometers above the planet’s equator. Beginning as an ac-
cretion of artificial space habs and modules and orbital sta-
tions, the ring complex had been under construction since
the middle of the 24th Century, shortly after the Armaged-
don incident with the Xul huntership. Likely it would always
be under construction, as more and more of the infrastruc-
ture of Earth’s civilization moved off-planet and into space,
as more and more manufactories and power stations and
shipyards and planetoid mining centers and ecohabitats
were wired in.

The Rings were not solid structures, of course. Human
technology had not yet reached a stage where it could even

102

I A N D O U G L A S
contemplate the construction of a single ring- structure over
seventeen billion kilometers in circumference! Like the far
vaster rings of Saturn, EarthRing consisted of individual
units orbiting Earth in Geosynch; an invisible web of nano-
extruded diamondthread, each strand only a few carbon at-
oms thick, held many of the different sections together,
motionless relative to one another, though others
were
free-orbiting. Some of the units, like Commonwealth Gov-
ernment Center itself, were huge, sprawling in labyrinthine
complexities across hundreds of kilometers; others were the
size of a single small living unit, or smaller.

Together, in their billions, their lights and refl ective sur-
faces created EarthRing, just visible as a wispy streak of
light, thread- thin where it bisected Earth, brighter—like a
tightly ordered, extremely narrow Milky Way—until it seemed
to double back upon itself, growing into an immense arch to
connect with Government Center. Four space elevators con-
nected the Ring with the surface, but those were too slender
to be seen with the naked eye; Commonwealth Government

Center was close to the orbital terminus of the Quito eleva-
tor, less than eighty kilometers away, in fact, but even at that
distance the 36,000-kilometer sky-to-ground thread was
quite invisible.

As always, Yarlocke was moved by the overwhelming
sense of fragility presented by the vista stretched across the

Deliberation Chamber’s walls. More than once, EarthRing
had been called the single greatest wonder of Humankind, a
summation of the richness of human civilization and tech-
nology rendered visible.

Both as a senator of the Human Commonwealth and as
the Chair of the Senate Defense Appropriations Commit-
tee, Yarlocke considered human civilization to be her spe-
cial and personal responsibility. The seeming delicacy of
that vista, of world and far-flung gossamer Ring set against
the backdrop of stars, was far more objective than most
citizens were willing to admit. It was up to her, and a few
of her fellow senators, to keep that fragile globe and its
ecosystem safe, a charge she regarded as a sacred trust.

G A L A C T I C

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103

And that meant reining in certain se nior military person-
nel, men and women who meant well, certainly, but who did
not understand the terrible danger currently faced by all of

Humankind.

The counter to that danger, she knew, was not military
force, not Marines and warships . . . and certainly not blow-
ing up distant suns as though the very stars of heaven were
disposable!

No. The Xul threat could only be countered by under-
standing and diplomacy. Cyndi Collins Yarlocke was as cer-
tain of that one fact as she could be of anything.

“The other members of the committee are beginning to
link in, Cyndi.” Harry, her personal AI, spoke within her
thoughts.

“Let them wait,” she replied. She did know how to make
a proper entrance.

“And Senators Armandez and Tillman are waiting out-
side.”

“Go ahead and let them in,” she said after a moment. She
preferred having this glorious room to herself, but there
would be time for rubbernecking later. Word would be com-
ing back from the Marine expeditionary force very soon
now, she knew, and she needed to make sure the other mem-
bers of the Appropriations Committee knew what she was
about to do.

The Senate Committee Deliberation Chamber was domi-
nated by a long, oval table and deeply cushioned link chairs,
though the whole assembly could sink back into the fl oor
and be replaced by ranks of chairs in an auditorium setting
for meetings requiring a quorum to be physically present. A
door slid open, and Jon Armandez and Lester Tillman
walked in. “Hello, Cyndi,” Tillman said with a grin. Arman-
dez merely nodded, cold.

“Gentlemen,” she said. “Is anyone else going to be here in
the fl esh?”

“I don’t think so, Senator,” Tillman replied, shrugging.

“Bad timing. Most of the committee is off-Ring right now.

Summer holidays, you know.”

104

I A N D O U G L A S

She made an unpleasant face. “Holidays. Our world faces
utter destruction, and the people charged with her protection
go off on vacation.”

“Some would say, Madam Senator,” Armandez said
evenly, “that the Marines are doing a pretty fair job of that
already.”

“Save it for the debating floor, Jon,” Yarlocke said. “When
you have an audience that might care.”

She watched as the two senators took chairs at the table,
leaning back and placing the palms of their left hands on the
link pad embedded in each chair’s arm. Both men appeared
to be asleep.

Armandez, she thought, could be a problem. Most of the
other senators on the Appropriations Committee could be rea-
soned with, but Jon Armandez had a kid in the Commonwealth

Marines. The guy had always been a militarist—he repre-
sented Ishtar, for God’s sake!—and had squared off against

Yarlocke more than once in debates over appropriations in-
tended to keep 1MIEF up and running, but the problem had
become significantly worse since his daughter had enlisted.

Damn it, the Senate ought to enact a law excluding people
with close relatives in the military from running for public
office. It constituted a conflict of interest, and ought to be
prohibited. She’d never get a bill like that past the pro-military
clique, though. Right now, the
military—especially the

Marines—were pop ular. If she was going to ram her pro-
posal through, she was going to need to get more of those
people on her side, and that was going to be tough.

She wished Marie Devereaux were still here. The former
senator from Quebec had been a vehemently outspoken critic
of the militarists, a powerful speaker, and a persuasive ad-
vocate of the cause of peace.

Not persuasive enough, perhaps. Despite her opposition,
the Senate had approved sending 1MIEF into

Xul-owned
space, and later cheered the news of the wholesale destruction
of entire star systems. Devereaux had been voted out of offi ce
six years ago, in the elections of 2880, and had run as a candi-
date for Commonwealth President in both ’80 and in ’84.

G A L A C T I C

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105

As if any Québecois could ever attain that offi ce. There
were still too many sectarian divides within the patchwork
of states that made up the Commonwealth. Too many citi-
zens resident in the old United States mistrusted the Québe-
cois and their political agendas, and too many Québecois
remembered—or thought they did—the occupation of parts
of Quebec by the then-U.S. back in the 21st Century. Na-
tional memories, it seemed, took a long time to die.

Still, she thought, it might be worthwhile to support Dev-
ereaux’s presidential bid in exchange for some political fa-
vors. Especially in terms of moving some of the fence-sitters
in the Senate chambers over to her way of thinking. She
made a mental note to arrange a virtual meeting with the
woman, perhaps later, after the upcoming meeting.

Eight more senators wandered into the Deliberation Cham-
ber, greeting her with nods or a few words, and settling into
the link chairs. Durant. Hartov. Stevens. She knew them all.

Many were fence-sitters, uncommitted, as yet, to either side
of the debate. She needed to reach them, somehow.

Yarlocke took a last look at Earth, suspended in space in
fragile glory.

She needed their votes in order to save the Earth, and all
of human civilization.

It was time. She’d kept them waiting long enough. Taking
one of the empty chairs, she sat down, dropped the backrest
almost flat, and placed her hand over the link plate. Instantly,
the vista of Earth and Ring vanished, replaced by an inner
menu selection. At her mental command, Harry opened an
electronic door for her and she stepped into a virtual assembly.

The assembly room appeared to be in deep space, the
spiral of the Galaxy aglow with gentle light hanging in emp-
tiness. Twenty-four senators were waiting for her, visible as
a constellation of gleaming icons, each tagged with tiny
windows displaying biographical data and her personal notes
on each.

“Sorry I’m late, people,” Yarlocke said as she entered the
icon swarm. “I was in conference, couldn’t get free.”

If any in the swarm doubted her excuse, they didn’t make

106

I A N D O U G L A S
it public. As she merged with the assembly, taking up a posi-
tion at the swarm’s center, each of the twenty-four icons re-
vealed itself as a single bright star surrounded by hundreds
of lesser points of light.

The Senate Defense Appropriations Committee was a
small government within a government, consisting now of
several thousand humans and AIs, working out of their own
hab physically attached to Government Center. Out of al-
most five hundred representatives in the Commonwealth

Senate, forty-one sat on the committee. The rest of that small
army was made up of aides, Senate staffers, AI secretaries,
and the swelling bureaucracy that attended any organiza tion
of this type. Each senator had an entourage of his or her
own, from human assistants down to personal data-mining
netbots, as well as communication channels, many of them
self-aware, that extended throughout both EarthRing and
the cities of Earth herself. Those assistants were represented
here by the lesser points of light, the senators by the brighter
stars.

There were also several star clusters representing non-voting
members of the committee, notably General Dorrity, the se-
nior liaison officer with Defense. Dorrity was trouble . . . an-
other Marine, and therefore invested with an inflated sense of
loyalty to Alexander and his vandals.

With all of that communications technology, Yarlocke
thought, it ought to be possible to get a better showing at
these meetings. The Commonwealth Senate, she knew well,
tended to be a peripatetic bunch, and it could take—she
smiled inwardly at the thought—an act of Congress to get
them to show up for a physical vote. In fact, over half of
those attending this session were present within Govern-
ment Center only electronically, rather than physically. Most
were elsewhere within the Ring. A few were on Earth. This
was an election year, and most of the members of the Com-
monwealth Senate were absorbed in the necessities of get-
ting re-elected, and that meant actually being personally
present within their districts.

Yarlocke understood campaigning and the attendant de-

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

107

mands of politics, but sometimes it was difficult to get any-
thing constructive done. Only a relatively small minority
within the Senate actually recognized the danger now threat-
ening Humankind. It would be up to her to convince, fi rst,
the Appropriations Committee . . . and then present the full

Senate with a fait accompli.

But . . . it could only be done one step at a time. At least
this time she’d been able to strong- arm enough of her fellow
senators to attend—electronically, at least—to comprise a
quorum. Twenty- five out of forty-one was a clear majority of
the voting body.

The question now, though, was how many of those other
twenty-four would be siding with her this morning?

“A quorum being present,” an AI voice said within the
minds gathered in the virtual chamber, “the Senate Defense

Appropriations Committee, meeting this fifteenth day of

June, 2886 of the Common Era, is now in session. The hon-
orable Senator Cyndi Collins Yarlocke presiding. . . .”

“Thank you all for coming,” she said, addressing the group.

“By now, most of you will have seen the initial reports from

Cluster Space. General Alexander, Admiral Taggart, and the

1st MIEF are reporting another victory over the Xul.”

She sensed a stir through the gathered assembly, and
smiled to herself. Only a few had seen that news item. Good.

Perhaps she could use their surprise to her advantage.

“Gentlemen, ladies, fellow sentients . . . by now all of you
know my position concerning the current war. It is a war we
have been prosecuting now for nine years, and with little to
show for the staggering investment in money, ships, and
lives. It is a war, unfortunately, that has numerous support-
ers, thanks to misinformation and certain misconceptions.

Even more unfortunately, electronic polls demonstrate con-
clusively that the majority of Humankind cares little one
way or another about this war. They do not feel threatened
by the Xul. And, indeed, why should they? The last time the

Xul posed any threat to humanity whatsoever was in 2314,
some six centuries ago, near enough.

“Gentlemen, ladies, fellow sentients, I submit that it is

108

I A N D O U G L A S
time at last to end all funding for 1MIEF. It is time to make
peace with the Xul. And it is time to bring our young people
home from the stars.” She paused for a moment, anticipating
the storm. “The Chair will now entertain debate. . . .”

And there was a storm, as dozens of star-icons vied with
one another for the Chair’s acknowledgement. Harry indi-
cated to her that Senator James Witter, of North California,
had been first off the mark, but Witter was already solidly in

Yarlocke’s pocket. His constituency was nestled in between
the
military-heavy senatorial districts of Portseattle and

South California, and he owed her a number of favors for
her support in the Alameda Scandal two years ago.

Instead, she decided to get the worst over with fi rst. “The

Chair recognizes the Appropriations Committee liaison with
the secretary of defense, General Dorrity.”

“Madam Chairperson,” Dorrity’s voice said. “Just how in
hell do you plan on getting the Xul to sit down with us at the
peace table?”

Rather than give the answer herself, she decided to let one
of her supporters provide a response. That way, she could
maintain the image of . . . not neutrality, not when her views
on the issue were so well known . . . but of fairness. Bal-
ance. Even- handedness.

“The Chair recognizes Senator Ralston.”

“General Dorrity,” Ralston said, “how do we know they
won’t talk peace until we ask them? The Xul are intelligent
beings, members of an extremely old and sophisticated spe-
cies, one that was star-faring before the engineering of hu-
manity half a million years ago. As rational beings, they
will surely see the advantages of peaceful coexistence, now
that we have, ah, more than adequately demonstrated our
ability to defend ourselves.”

“Senator, with all due respect, the Xul are not rational,
not as humans define the word.”

“Racist paranoia, General.”

“If by ‘racist’ you mean I possess a human viewpoint,
then I plead guilty. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about
the Xul, it is that they are not human, and do not in any way

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

109

think like humans. In fact, ‘racist paranoia’ is a decent de-
scription of how they think. Any intelligence not of the Xul
must be exterminated. That simple concept appears to be a
fundamental trope for them: non-Xul are dangerous, and
must be exterminated for the survival of the race. We can
not reason with someone who has such a fundamentally dif-
ferent way of looking at the universe than we do.”

“Again, General, we have not tried! When did we last
make a genuine attempt to communicate with these people,
as opposed to going in and blowing up one of their suns?”

“The Wings of Isis attempted to communicate, Senator,”

Dorrity said coldly. “The Argo attempted to communicate.

There have been others.”

“Ancient history, General. That was before we demon-
strated that we can defend ourselves with the Euler trigger-
ships. They know we can hurt them. Now it’s time to talk
with them.”

“What passes for communication with those monsters is
to reduce the person trying to talk to a pattern of electronic
information inside one of their computers.”

Yarlocke listened with only half her awareness. The argu-
ments were old, familiar, and age-worn, the continuation of a
debate that had been going on for the better part of a decade.

Indeed, she suspected that a search of the congressional rec-
ords would turn up the same tired arguments going back fi ve
hundred years or more. The militarists, conservatives both in
the government and in the military,
were convinced you
couldn’t reason with the Xul, that they were more programmed
machine than rational and sentient lifeforms. More liberal
wings of the government, the Pax Astras and others, liked to
point out that even human-designed AIs, many of them, were
sentient and self- aware beings, and that, except where they
were deliberately restricted by their programming, often were
capable of self-determination and could rewrite their own
code. They could be convinced, in other words, by a rational
argument, just like humans. If that was true of AI software,
why wouldn’t it be true of the Xul as well?

Of course, Yarlocke had to admit that many humans in

110

I A N D O U G L A S
her experience, unlike the more advanced AIs, could not be
convinced by rational argument. Dorrity, for instance, was
driven by sentiment for his beloved Marine Corps, and by
such intangibles as duty, loyalty, and honor. Not that those
were bad things in and of themselves, necessarily. But they
could be damned inconvenient when the person you were
arguing with couldn’t let go and see the bigger picture.

Yarlocke absolutely believed in loyalty, but she never let
such niceties interfere with her duty as she saw it.

Nor was she about to let someone else’s sense of duty or
loyalty get in her way.

As the debate ground on, Yarlocke had one of her per-
sonal data hunters move through the network, polling cur-
rent vote probabilities. Out of twenty-five voting members
on the committee, ten were either committed to the Pax per-
sonally, or had promised her their vote in return for other
favors. That left her three short of a majority if a vote were
called now.

Eight in the assembly were solidly militarist, and fi ve short
of a majority. The swing votes would come from the seven
remaining members of the committee who had not yet de-
clared for either side. Calling up the files and voting rec ords
of those seven, she studied them closely. Two, Donahue and

Hernandez, were Social Democrats, with voting rec ords that
tended slightly toward the liberal side. One, Raynor, was an
outspoken member of the Church of Mind. While religion
wasn’t supposed to enter into senatorial deliberations, Yar-
locke knew that religion shaped the man. The C of M put a
heavy emphasis on the unity of all thinking creatures, and on
that basis alone Raynor might be open to reason.

The other four were Inde pen dents, and which way their
vote would go was anyone’s guess.

The data were encouraging, though. Three of the seven
might well be induced to vote her way, given the proper in-
ducement, and that would be her majority. She could reason-
ably assume that two of the four Inde pen dents might vote her
way simply out of chance, which gave her a decent margin.

She would not allow herself to feel complacent, however.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

111

A lot of work remained before she could declare victory in
this issue.

But she did feel confident of fi nal victory.

The 1MIEF would be brought home and disbanded. The
unjust war with the Xul would be ended. Humankind would
enjoy the blessings of peace for the first time in centuries.

And Senator Cyndi Collins Yarlocke would at last have
her chance at her real goal. . . .

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Carson Space

1445 hrs, GMT

“Congratulations, General.”

“Eh? For what, Cara?”

“On your victory, of course. The data are . . . promising.”

Alexander leaned back from his desk, breaking palm con-
tact with the battlenet link. He’d been going over the casu-
alty and ship loss reports for three hours straight, now, and
he needed a break.

Cara was the name of his primary EA, or Electronic

Aide, a personal secretary responsible for sorting, manipu-
lating, and storing the blizzard of downloaded electronic
information, official and personal calls, and virtual meet-
ings he faced each and every day. She’d been with him,
through numerous upgrades, ever since his days at the Acad-
emy, when he’d been a snot-nosed j.g. with more enthusiasm
than sense.

A long time ago . . .

“Thank you, Cara. That may be premature, however.”

“The final tally lists fourteen Xul hunterships destroyed
by direct combat,” Cara said, a crispness to her mental voice.

“Given the strength of the enemy forces, that compares very
favorably with the loss of thirty-three Commonwealth and
allied ships, of all types. And the probe data suggests that
the enemy has withdrawn from Cluster Space.”

112

I A N D O U G L A S

“Withdrawn, possibly,” Alexander replied. “But not de-
stroyed. Nova Bloodlight was a fi zzle.”

“The nova’s yield was not that of a larger main sequence
star, certainly,” she told him. “But our BDA probes have
picked up evidence of considerable damage in the Cluster

Space system. At least two hundred Xul hunterships appear
to be adrift and lifeless over there. And the others have
fl ed.”

“Correction,” Alexander told her. “The others appear to
have withdrawn, probably just until the local star quiets
down. They will almost certainly be back.” He sighed. “Yar-
locke and her jackals are gong to be all over this one.”

“I believe, General,” Cara told him, “that you are being
too pessimistic.”

“Time will tell. Meanwhile, we need to get the rest of
those Battle Damage Assessments turned out. I need some-
thing to show SecDef.”

“Will you be transmitting that via CQQ, sir?”

He thought about that. “No. We’ll translate Hermes back
to Earth’s L-3. We can take a few of the more badly dam-
aged fleet elements back with us, and bring back a load of
supplies. Maybe take the Barton back as well, if we have
serious casualties who need treatment at NMH EarthRing.

And I think I’m going to want to talk to both General Dor-
rity and Wilson in person.”

Wilson was SecDef, the Commonwealth’s secretary of
defense, and ultimately Alexander’s boss, at least under-
neath the supreme command of President Stiner.

The balance of political power within the Common-
wealth had swung back and forth over the years. Theoreti-
cally, the legislative, executive, and judicial checks and
balances were supposed to preserve that balance in a sys-
tem that went back over a thousand years to the original

United States of America. In practice, though, there was a
constant ebb and flow of political power. During the dark
years of the mid-27th Century, the Commonwealth Presi-
dency had evolved into the Office of the Chief Executive,
with almost dictatorial powers during the fi rst interstellar

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

113

conflict with the PanEu ro pe an- Chinese Alliance. Since
then, things had shifted the other way, and the President
now was widely seen as a figurehead only, with the real po-
litical clout vested with the Commonwealth Senate.

Someday, Alexander reflected, things would swing back
to the President . . . or to the Supreme Court . . . or even the
wagging tail of the Legislative House. As a military man
sworn to uphold the constitutions both of the United States
and the Humankind Commonwealth, he by law could have
no public opinion on the matter.

Privately, he thought the demagoguery of the Senate was
a piss-poor way to prosecute a war . . . almost as poor as
having the war run by one civilian with delusions of gran-
deur. That was why there had to be a balance, to keep any
one group or individual from acquiring too much power and
misusing it through misplaced ambition or ignorance or
both.

The problem of the moment lay with the Senate—in par-
tic
ular with the se
nior senator from Maine, Cyndi Yar-
locke . . . the Warlock, as he thought of her in strict privacy.

The woman hated the military, hated the Marines, and hated
him. She was worse than Senator Devereaux of a few years
back in her determination to shut down both 1MIEF and the

Corps. Through Dorrity and the Defense Department, a
fair- sized cadre of senators still supported 1MIEF’s efforts
against the Xul, but Alexander knew they were fi ghting a
constant rear-guard action against the Warlock and her mis-
guided personality cult.

He also knew that the Warlock’s minions were going to
hammer at what they would perceive as a failure out here in

Cluster Space—huge losses, the less- than-complete destruc-
tion of a Xul node, and the escape of a very large number of

Xul ships. They would be seeking political advantage in the
outcome of Operation Clusterstrike, of that he was certain.

Alexander would need to marshal every positive aspect of
the op to defend himself and his people.

“It does look like we have one piece of solid and useful
intel, General. From the Penetrator teams.”

114

I A N D O U G L A S

“Really? What?”

Cara opened a window in his mind. Alexander found
himself looking into a vista filled with stars, swarms of
stars, stars gathered in teeming millions, like the inside of a
globular cluster . . . no, like the Galactic Core itself. The
vista was so filled with stars and a hazy, red-hued light it
was difficult to make out individual details, but in the center
of the vista was . . . something. Something strange, and very
large.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“It’s the center of the Galaxy, General,” Cara told him.

“The Galactic Core. And it just may be the core, the very
heart, of the Xul Empire. . . .”

8

2206.1111

Freeport Tower

Bahama Banks, Earth

0914 hrs, local

Garroway stepped out onto the open concourse, enjoying
the rush of salt-laden breeze, enjoying the feeling of un-
linked openness that simply was not possible on board ship.

Gravity tugged at him more strongly than usual; most ships
maintained internal fields of one G, but they’d kept the grav-
ity at a comfortable Martian one- third on board the Barton.

The docs had warned him to take it easy during his leave

Earthside, clucking and fussing over his decision to go there
straight off the hospital ship. No matter. He was here, and
even standing up to Earth’s one standard gravity felt great
with his new legs.

In fact, the pair of legs he’d left on board the Xul fortress in

Cluster Space had not been entirely organic. Nine years ago,
at the Battle of the Nova, he’d been exposed to a killing blast
of radiation from an exploding sun. They’d had to pare away a
lot of organic tissue after his rescue; what they replaced it
with had been neither purely organic nor purely machine, but
a closely woven blend of the two grown from his own cells
and from MAT, or medinano-derived artifi cial tissue.

They acted, looked, and felt like the legs with which he’d
been born, with the same neural responses, the same strength

116

I A N D O U G L A S
and sensitivity to touch, temperature, or pain. But they also
responded directly to controlling impulses from his im-
plants, and that was especially valuable to a combat Marine.

For short periods he could boost their strength and endur-
ance, letting him run farther and jump higher. He could de-
liberately shut down feelings of pain or of exhaustion. And
they worked automatically to shut off excessive bleeding.

For some time now, he knew, the Corps had actually been
debating whether or not to encourage all Marines to have
their arms and legs both replaced with new ones grown from

MAT, but the very idea was controversial, and had several
times brought the Corps under the fire of heavy criticism
from various civilian quarters.

So far as Garroway was concerned, he doubted that he
would have been able to cut off his own legs inside that for-
tress if they hadn’t been artificial. It had still hurt like hell
until the overrides kicked in, and he’d been in serious dan-
ger of decompression until his armor had sealed itself, but
he’d known that his Corps-issued legs, as he’d referred to
them, could be replaced once they got him back to a hospital
facility like the Barton.

He flexed his legs, then did a couple of deep knee bends.

They felt good.

And it felt good to be alive. . . .

“It’s okay, Gare,” a voice said behind him. “We’re on
leave. No morning PT!”

He turned, grinning. Nikki Armandez had just emerged
from the terminal. Like him, she was wearing her Marine
dress blacks.

“So?” he told her. “You can take the Marine out of the

Corps, but you can’t take the Corps out of the Marine.”

“How are the new legs?” she asked.

“Good as new.”

“That’s because they are new.” She stepped closer, moving
into his embrace. “Have I thanked you, lately, by the way?”

“Only about a dozen times so far this morning.” He kissed
her.

They were not, strictly speaking, a couple in the usual

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

117

sense of the word. They’d been squadmates and friends be-
fore the Cluster Space op, but hadn’t become close until
they’d found themselves in adjacent recovery quarters on
board the Barton. By that time, they’d already made the
transit back to the Sol System, the hospital ship tucked away
within the cavernous hold of the immense HQ ship Hermes.

Nikki had been recovering from pulmonary damage caused
by explosive decompression when her suit had been breached
in the fortress, and Garroway was learning to use his new
legs. They’d started taking walks together in the Barton’s
arboretum. One thing had led quite naturally to another, and
several days ago they’d become lovers.

Garroway hoped it wasn’t just gratitude for his having
dragged her out of the fortress in Cluster Space. He liked to
think that he would have done as much for any fellow Marine.

The fact that she was smart and fun to talk to, easy on the
eyes, and a rambunctious delight in bed didn’t hurt at all,
however.

They stood side by side on the concourse halfway up the
side of Freeport Tower, leaning against the safety railing and
looking out across translucent azure waters. Some patches of
green and clusters of white buildings to the northeast and to
the south marked dry land.

“Why the hell would anyone build a spaceport way out
here?” Armandez wondered. “It’s the middle of the ocean!”

“Damfino, Nikki,” Garroway replied. “Maybe just for the
view.”

He did a quick check of the local datanet. There was a lot
of history stored there, but access was clumsy and primitive,
requiring nested layers of menu selections rather than a sim-
ple mental request. Earthside datanets were more primitive
than up on the Ring, or anywhere in the fleet, for that matter.

He would have to sort through the local library later.

“I gather there
were a lot of islands around
here pre-

Armageddonfall,” he volunteered. “Pretty big ones. Those is-
lands out there on the horizon would have been the high
ground. Freeport Tower is supposed to be built atop a
drowned city.”

118

I A N D O U G L A S

“Oh, like Miami?”

“Yeah. And parts of Washington, D.C., and London, and
a lot of other low-lying coastal cities all over Earth. Maybe
the locals just refused to evacuate after the sea levels rose.”

“It is gorgeous,” she said. She pointed. “Think we can
rent one of those?”

“Those” were a flotilla of sailboats slicing through the
water to the east, low, lean hulls of various designs topped by
colorful, triangular sails. Garroway and Armandez had just
arrived at Freeport on one of the regular EarthRing shuttles.

It was interesting to step from one of those silvery agrav
transport pods, representative of the very highest transport
technologies, and see people engaged in one of the most
ancient of all forms of travel, skimming the water with the
wind alone as motive force.

“Not this time through,” he told her. “We’re scheduled on
a skimmersub for Miami. Departure at 1130 hours. We won’t
have time.”

“Maybe this trip, though?” They had two weeks’ leave,
two glorious weeks, to explore ancient Earth.

“Maybe.” Garroway wasn’t entirely sure about the whole
idea of tricking the wind to take you where you wanted to
go. He knew modern sailing craft had their own on- board

AIs to do the actual sail handling, but it still seemed an un-
likely way of getting from point A to point B.

Aiden Garroway had been born in the 7-Ring orbital com-
plex up in EarthRing. Until he’d joined the Marine Corps
and gone to Noctis Labyrinthus on Mars for boot camp, he’d
never been out of EarthRing.

Since that day nearly ten years ago, now, he’d been to quite
a few other places—to special training facilities on Luna, at

AresRing, and out at Europa. He’d served a tour at Ishtar, the
habitable moon of the gas giant Marduk orbiting Lalande

21185, some eight and half light years from Earth, and a year
ago he’d made E-7—gunnery sergeant—at the orbital com-
plex over Eostre, the fourth planet of Epsilon Indi, eleven
light years out.

His fi rst tour, though, had taken him to Puller 659, several

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

119

hundred light years from Earth, then to Aquila Space, twelve
hundred light years out, and finally to Starwall, estimated at
eighteen thousand light-years from Sol.

And his last mission, with Operation Clusterstrike, had
taken him outside of the main body of the Galaxy entirely,
thirty thousand light years, more or less, from the spot where
he was standing now.

So since becoming a Marine, Garroway had been around.

But never, in his twenty-nine objective years of life, had he
been to Earth.

As a Ringer, he’d grown up with certain preconceptions
about the
blue-
and-white globe hanging eternally in the
star-dusted sky. The technologies used on Earth—especially
computer and information net technologies—were primitive
by Ring standards. From a Ringer’s perspective, the people
were . . . dirty. Not quite civilized, not quite educated, not
quite culturally attuned. The unspoken assumption was that
you had to be just a little crazy to prefer living on Earth.

Garroway doubted that the differences, if any, were all
that pronounced. Sure, Earth’s Globalnet might not be up to
spec compared to the Ring’s electronic data informational
services, communications, entertainment, and so on, but it
was still part of the electronic web spanning the entire Solar

System. It worked. It wasn’t as if Earthers sat in caves,
grunting at one another over half-gnawed mammoth bones,
whatever the jokes to that effect might claim.

As for the people, Garroway knew that a lot of Earthers
preferred a low-tech life, that some even refused cere bral
implants and the other necessities of modern existence.

From his perspective, or from the perspective of any citi-
zen of a space hab or colony, that made them a little weird.

Garroway had been forced to live for three months without
any implants or cere bral enhancement at all during his re-
cruit training, and doing without had been like kicking an
addictive drug. How anyone could want to live like
that . . .

But he tended to be easygoing about the strangenesses pre-
ferred by others, and he was at least intellectually prepared to

120

I A N D O U G L A S
accept that his prejudices were not necessarily based upon
fact.

Leaning against the railing overlooking the surging blue-
green of the ocean, he drew a deep breath. The air seemed
clean enough, though it tasted strange. Salty, with an under-
current of what he supposed was seaweed or rotting vegeta-
tion, perhaps. It wasn’t unpleasant. Just . . . different.

And the people. Most were tourists on their way up- or
down-

Ring. They wore a bizarre mix of fashion, from
high- tech jumpsuits to sheaths of liquid light to gleaming
bits of technological jewelry incompletely merged with their
flesh to complete nudity save for an oily sheen of solar-
protective nano. Hair styles varied as well, from the elabo-
rate and brightly colored decorative to complete depilation.

Local people, though,
were easily picked out from the
crowd, wearing simple textiles, their skins sun- bronzed al-
most to black. Most wore broad-brimmed hats woven from
some local plant fiber. They moved among the tourists like
shadows; the tourists, Garroway noticed, tended to move
aside to avoid them without really seeing them.

“So . . . are your folks Earthside, Gare?” Armandez
wanted to know.

“Uh- uh. They’re up in EarthRing. The Giangrecos line
family.”

“Giangrecos? I thought your name was Garroway.”

“It is. My birth mother was Estelle Garroway. She’s dead
now, but like most folks she kept her family name after mar-
rying into the line. And on my naming day, I chose Garro-
way for myself.”

She shook her head. “Naming day? I don’t . . .”

“When two people get married, and they each keep their
last names? A child of the marriage gets to choose what his
last name will be—mother’s or father’s. Usually around his
twelfth birthday.”

“Where I come from, the woman takes the man’s last
name.”

“They used to do that on Earth. That, or hyphenate the two
names. Most cultures on Earth and in EarthRing nowadays

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121

have a naming day ceremony, or something like it. Sort of
like a bar mitzvah. ‘Today I am a man.’ ‘Today I choose who

I am and how I shall be known to others.’ ”

“It must be confusing.”

“Nah. I think things drifted that way to get away from the
old idea that marriage meant own ership. Where are you
from, anyway?”

“Ishtar, originally.”

“Ah.” That explained a lot. A sizeable human colony had
been established in the Lalande 21185 system, consisting of
both emigrants from Earth and the descendents of human
slaves taken to that tiny, tide-locked world thousands of years
ago by the alien An. They’d been forcibly emancipated only
seven centuries ago, in the mid-22nd Century, when U.S. Ma-
rines had arrived and beaten the An in a sharp, short war.

Today’s human population on Ishtar consisted of a blend of
transplanted humanities, of cultures ancient and modern.

“My family came to EarthRing a few years ago, though,”

she went on. “Talk about culture shock! I’m still getting
used to it!”

He laughed. “So that’s why you joined the Marines, right?”

She punched him in the shoulder. “You!”

“Ow! But it’s true, isn’t it? The Corps has its own comfy
little microculture. We have our own way of doing things,
our own way of thinking.”

“Everyone’s different, I guess,” she said, sounding defen-
sive. “On Ishtar, we don’t see a woman taking the man’s
name as a mark of own ership.”

He shrugged. “Different cultures. On Jana women don’t
even have last names.”

“On Jana women are property, almost.”

“It’s that way on a lot of the worlds in the Theocracy.” He
thought about it a moment. The varied microcultures of

EarthRing all possessed a strong cultural bias toward the
ethic of diversity. Different was good, in other words, a prin-
ciple that encouraged social experimentation throughout the
medley of Ring cultures and among the human colonies on
other worlds.

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I A N D O U G L A S

But from a Marine’s point of view, that principle could
sometimes be taken too far—as it had with support for the

Islamic Theocracy, a product of cultural diversity that itself
tolerated diversity about as well as it tolerated free speech.

“Just because a culture is different doesn’t mean it’s good or
healthy,” he added after a moment.

“Of course. ‘Good’ is a value judgment imposed by the
culture of the person making the judgment.”

“I didn’t know you were a philos o pher.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Gare. . . . At least
not yet.”

“Mm. I’m looking forward to the download. Anyway,” he
went on, “you were asking about my family name. The Gar-
roways have been around for quite a while and both the male
and female carriers of the name have kept it going. There’ve
been Garroways in the Corps for God knows how long, go-
ing way, way back. At least, that’s what the family histories
say. How about you?”

She shook her head. “Politicians run in my family, I’m
afraid, not military.” She didn’t volunteer any further infor-
mation, and Garroway didn’t press.

“So you said your family is up on the Ring?” she asked.

“Did you get to see them yet, this time back?”

“Um . . . no.” He decided not to tell her that the Gian-
greco patriarch had kicked him out of the family when he’d
enlisted. Delano Giangreco had been a member of the Re-
formed Church of the Ascended Pleiadean Masters, and a
committed pacifist. None of his kids would be military.

“Oh, but you have to drop in and see them!”

“Why? Last time I was there, the Giangreco family had
twenty- five spouses and a hundred and eighty- three kids and
grandkids, plus a small army of cousins, in-laws, and hangers-
on. I doubt that some of them even know I’m gone, ten years
later.” He looked away, watching sunlight beam and dazzle
between the towering white mountains of cumulous clouds
above the turquoise sea. “Besides, the Corps is my family
now.”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

123

Another shuttle was coming down from EarthRing, a
brilliant, silver speck drifting in from the southwest, then
growing into a mirror- bright sphere as it approached Free-
port Tower’s upper deck landing platform.

“So,” Garroway said, jerking himself back to reality. “You
feel like getting something to eat?”

She nodded. “Sounds good. I could go with a bite of
something. My stomach’s still on Ring time.”

He consulted his inner timekeeper. EarthRing kept time
according to the ancient GMT standard, so his stomach was
insisting that it was now mid- afternoon, even though the lo-
cal time was just past 0930 hours.

“Let’s find a place then, before the hungry swarms in that
shuttle that just touched down get the same idea.”

Senate Committee Deliberation Chamber

Commonwealth Government Center,

EarthRing

1422 hrs, GMT

“What you’re saying, General,” Cyndi Yarlocke said qui-
etly, even sweetly, “is that you failed. Despite serious losses
in ships and personnel, Operation Clusterstrike failed to
make the target star explode, and left the Cluster Space sys-
tem vulnerable to Xul exploitation.”

“If you prefer to put it in those terms, Senator,” Alexander
said evenly, “yes. I would add that the operation is still under
way, and that we have several options open to us, including—”

“The star that your expeditionary force was supposed to
blow up,” Yarlocke said, interrupting, “either did not ex-
plode, or did so with far less force than you anticipated. As a
result, the massive Xul fl eet in Cluster Space escaped. I be-
lieve that pretty much sums things up?”

Alexander bit back a sharp response. Patience, he told
himself. What was it Tolstoy had written? “The strongest
warriors are these: Time and Patience.”

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I A N D O U G L A S

Tolstoy had never met Cyndi Yarlocke.

The Senate Deliberation Chamber had been chosen, Al-
exander was certain, so that his debriefing would be held on
the Defense Committee’s home ground, a bit of symbolism
giving them a psychological advantage. It created and rein-
forced the illusion that 1MIEF was answering directly to
this small group of powerful—and disapproving—men and
women. Their public e-personae glowed with their coronae
flammae, streaming auras of white and golden light projected
as emblems of status and power. Alexander was authorized
to wear the electronic emblem as well—indeed, regulations
required it in certain circumstances—but he hated image and
power games played in virtual reality even more than he
disliked them in the real world. He’d chosen to make his ap-
pearance before the subcommittee in his Marine dress
blacks, with only the rows of service ribbons on his chest
glowing.

The virtual meeting chamber had been kept deliberately
austere, perhaps to better show off the glow from all those
high-level coronae. The five senators of the Defense Appro-
priations Subcommittee appeared to be hanging in a semi-
circle suspended in empty space, with a face-on view of the

Galaxy shining behind them.

“Our science and battle damage assessment teams are
still in the Cluster Space system,” Alexander told them. “Ac-
cording to their initial reports, CS-1, the target star, did, in
fact, blow off large portions both of its photosphere and of
its outer convection zone, creating a shell of high-energy
plasma expanding out from the core. The effect was more
pronounced than a flare, but not as violent as a typical nova.

Given that CS-1 was only about fifteen percent the mass of

Earth’s sun, the results were . . . satisfactory. As good as
could be expected, let’s say.”

He flashed a quick mental request to Cara, his personal

AI, who brought up a window displaying planetary data.

“According to our BDA teams,” he continued, “CS-1 pos-
sessed a single planet, which we named Bloodlight I. Tidally

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125

locked to the primary. Diameter less than eight thousand
kilometers. Rock and ice surface. Subsolar temperature in
the 200-degree Kelvin range. Atmosphere primarily meth-
ane and nitrogen. Not exactly prime real estate.

“The Xul had a fairly large complex on the subsolar por-
tion of the planet. That base was completely destroyed by
the star’s detonation, which stripped away the atmosphere
and melted the rock and ice on which the base had been an-
chored. There is now very little of the structure left.”

“The Xul fleet escaped, General,” one of the senators
said. His electronic ID gave his name as Senator James Wit-
ter, of the Commonwealth state of North California. “The
idea, as presented to this subcommittee months ago, was
that the Xul presence in Cluster Space would be eliminated.”

“With respect, sir, the op plan we submitted to this sub-
committee suggested that we might be able to deny Cluster

Space to the enemy, and that we might cause considerable
damage to his assets there. That’s not the same as ‘elimi-
nated.’ Our best estimates suggested that the Xul maintained
an operational fleet in Cluster Space of around one thousand
starships of various masses. The expeditionary force pos-
sessed fewer than one hundred fifty vessels, not counting
fighters, drones, and minor combatants. We destroyed four-
teen enemy vessels—”

“At a cost of thirty- three of our own ships,” Senator Alan

Connelly interrupted. “A loss ration of more than two to
one. That is an unacceptable ratio, especially when some
hundreds of Xul ships escaped the battle unscathed.”

Alexander refrained from pointing out that, in terms of
tonnage, at least, 1MIEF’s losses were insignifi cant com-
pared to those of the Xul with their kilometer-long monster
hunterships. In any analyses of a battle’s success or failure,
everything depended on how you looked at it, on what sta-
tistical factors you chose to emphasize. These sharks were
determined to paint Operation Clusterstrike as a failure.

They would accept only those data that supported their pre-
conceived worldview.

126

I A N D O U G L A S

“You realize, General,” Yarlocke went on, “that 1MIEF
contains a majority of all Commonwealth military ships.

The destruction of your command would leave Earth and all
of Commonwealth space terribly vulnerable . . . not only to
the Xul, but to other human interstellar nation- states not yet
allied with us.”

She meant, of course, the Chinese Hegemony and the Is-
lamic Theocracy. A number of wars had been fought with
both states over the past few centuries, and since the Alighan

War of nine years ago, things had been simmering with the

Theocrats—no open war, but no armistice, either.

Not for the first time, Alexander wondered if Humankind
would ever get its house in order. Even the PanEuro pean

Republic, theoretically now an ally, couldn’t be completely
trusted, though they’d recently sent a contingent of heavy
warships to reinforce 1MIEF. The South American Union
had not yet committed either. The Rus sians, Japanese, and

Indians supported the Commonwealth, but all of them had
problems of their own right now—most of them involving
the Chinese Hegemony—and were unlikely to be able to
lend much in the way of support, either in fighting the Xuls
or if another intra-human war broke out.

Any long-range military strategy formulated by the Com-
monwealth needed to take into account the possibility that
they could be facing another war at any time, with the Chi-
nese, the Theocrats, or both.

She appeared to be waiting for an answer. That much, at
least, was encouraging. They might still hang him, but he’d
be allowed to speak in his own defense.

“Senators,” he said, “I’m very much aware of the current
delicate political situation. My command constellation re-
ceives daily briefs from Commonwealth Intelligence. Be-
lieve me, I am as eager as any of you to preserve 1MIEF as
a viable force, both against the Xul and against possible Is-
lamic or Chinese threats. I submit that the mere existence of
a hundred or so Commonwealth warships manned by crews
with near constant combat experience over the past decade

G A L A C T I C

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127

would give any other star nation pause before starting a
war.”

“Yes. Secretary of Defense Wilson has presented us with
the same argument,” Yarlocke said, disapproval tugging at
her mental voice. “However, many of us in the Senate be-
lieve there is another way.”

Here it comes, Alexander thought, masking the words
carefully against unwanted transmission.

“What’s coming?” Cara, his personal AI, asked.

The reason they dragged us in here for this asinine light
show. “And what would that way be, Madam Senator?” he
asked.

“It is time,” Yarlocke said, “past time, in fact, to end this
useless and dangerous confrontation with the Xul once and
for all. The Galaxy is an enormous place, three to four hun-
dred billion stars, tens of millions, even hundreds of mil-
lions of earthlike worlds, and
we’ve seen no evidence
whatsoever that the Xul even use planets like Earth. It’s big
enough that we can share.”

“Uh- huh. And does the Commonwealth Senate believe it
can convince the Xul of that?”

“That,” Senator Ralston said, “is obstructionist thinking.

Typical militarist thinking. We can’t know until
we’ve
tried.”

“I would have thought, Senator,” Alexander said quietly,

“that the Fermi Evidence was conclusive by now.”

Eight centuries before, the physicist Enrico Fermi, accord-
ing to a well-known anecdote, had asked the pregnant ques-
tion, “Where are they?” He was referring to
non-human
galactic civilizations, conspicuous, at that time, by their ab-
sence. In the decades before spaceflight, there’d been only
statistical probabilities suggesting that earthlike worlds, that
life, that mind should be common in a Galaxy of hundreds of
billions of suns, in a universe sixteen billion years old. The
sky, Fermi reasoned, should be filled with the evidence of
teeming civilizations far older than Humankind, with their
radio signals and infrared leakage from titanic construction

128

I A N D O U G L A S
projects, with their starships, with evidence of engineering
projects on an interstellar, even on a galactic scale.

Even if magical FTL drives remained forever impossible,
technologies easily envisioned by 20th Century physicists
suggested that, in the course of billions of years, the entire

Galaxy could be explored and colonized many times over by
civilizations only slightly in advance of Man.

And yet, Earth’s skies of eight centuries past had re-
mained eerily silent. The conclusion, that Humankind was
the only technic civilization in the Galaxy, perhaps in the
entire cosmos, seemed untenable simply and purely on sta-
tistical grounds. Hence, Fermi’s Paradox: Where are they?

As humans had begun venturing off their birth world
and into their own Solar System during the following cen-
tury, the answer had begun to surface, fragmentary and
incomplete at first, but chilling in its implications. Ruins
and artifacts discovered half- buried in the sands of Mars
and on the surface of Earth’s own Moon had revealed an-
cient colonizing efforts by at least two different extraterres-
trial civilizations—the Builders of half a million years
earlier, and the An of ten to fifteen thousand years ago.

The first Xul artifact, the huntership lost beneath the ice
of Europa and called “The Singer,” had been uncovered late
in the 21st Century. The first explorations beyond the Solar

System, to the worlds of Chiron at Alpha Centauri, Ishtar at

Lalande 21185, and elsewhere, had demonstrated that waves
of interstellar colonization occurred across interstellar dis-
tances in regular cycles. Each time, the colonizing civiliza-
tions had been destroyed, abruptly and with xenophobic
thoroughness.

Repeated encounters with the Xul over the past centuries
had reinforced the self-evident conclusion. The Xul, for at
least the past half-million years, and possibly for ten to
twenty times longer than that, had maintained their domi-
nance across the Galaxy by systematically destroying any
species, any world which, to their way of thinking, repre-
sented a threat. Xul xenophobia had been confirmed by nu-
merous intelligence-gathering probes into their ships and

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129

fortresses. Accepted xenosophontological theory suggested
that the original precursor species to modern Xuls had pos-
sessed a kind of hardwired Darwinian imperative: any
non-Xul life form was a potential threat, and the only ratio-
nal way to deal with it was to destroy it before it was strong
enough to become an actual threat.

Slowly, Fermi’s Paradox became Fermi’s Evidence. The
skies were silent because noisy civilizations were detected
and destroyed early in their phases of off-world growth. The
few other cultures contacted so far—the An, the N’mah, and
the Eulers—had survived by being inconspicuous, or by oc-
cupying planetary environments so far outside what the Xul
considered to be the norm that they’d been overlooked

All of which meant there was no way to reason with the

Xul . . . or to peacefully co-exist with them. Grim as the equa-
tions might be, either Humankind would wipe out the Xul,
or the Xul would wipe out Humankind. There would be no
middle ground, no basis for cooperative rapprochement, no
peace short of the final peace of genocidal annihilation.

And that was something that a lot of humans simply could
not or would not accept.

“General Alexander,” Senator Tillman was saying, “some
of us feel that the Commonwealth’s military leadership is
simply too, ah, reactionary politically. You look to the past,
rather than to the future. You are locked into old patterns of
thought that preclude your seeing future potentials.”

“With damned good reason, Senator. It was the 20th Cen-
tury philos o pher Jorge Santayana who said that those who
cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The

Xul have not exactly given us reason to trust them. And the
experiences others have had with them—the Builders of
ancient Mars and Chiron, the An, the N’mah . . . We need to
pay attention to what they’re telling us across the millen-
nia.”

“What history teaches us, General,” Yarlocke said sharply,

“is that military solutions do not work. Not the way their
proponents suggest or intend.”

“Indeed? That might be news to the Franco-UN leaders

130

I A N D O U G L A S
of the 21st Century. Or the warlords of the Japanese Empire
and the Nazi Reich a century before that. Or the British Em-
pire faced with the loss of its American colonies. Or to the
empire of Darius. Or the Carthaginians. Military solutions
might be destructive and they might be expensive, but they
do work.”

“Again, a typically militarist response,” Senator Ralston
said. “I wouldn’t expect a military leader to understand.”

“Senator, I am a military leader. For thirty years, now, I
have done my duty as I believed it was required of me. If
you—”

“General Alexander,” Tillman said, interrupting, “no one
is questioning your dedication, your honor, or your sense of
duty. We simply don’t want militarist training and attitudes
to . . . to harm Humanity by overlooking alternatives to war.”

“Senators,” Alexander said, “I suggest that this is some-
thing best taken up with SecDef and with the President. If
you’re looking for my resignation, I’m afraid I cannot and
will not accommodate you . . . not like this. My understand-
ing of the chain of command is that your committee pro-
vides oversight, advice, and can argue over my bud get . . .

but that only Mr. Wilson and President Stiner have the right
to fire me. If you disapprove of the way I’ve been carrying
out my orders, I suggest that you take it up with them.”

“General Alexander,” Yarlocke said with a frustrated
shake of her icon’s radiant head, “we didn’t ask you here to
criticize. Earlier, you invoked the words of Santayana. He
also said, ‘The wisest mind has something yet to learn.’ We,
the elected representatives of a sizeable percentage of Hu-
mankind, are facing the prospect of the interminable con-
tinuation of an endless, brutal, expensive, dangerous, and
useless war, one that has dragged on now for centuries, off
and on, with no promise or hope of an ending. We wish to
explore alternatives.”

“I can tell you what the alternative is, Madam Senator.

Senators Ralston and Tillman will probably tell me that it’s
militarist thinking, but the alternative presented by both
ancient and recent history is that Humankind will either be

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131

driven to extinction or so badly hammered by the enemy
that only Stone-Age primitives are left. The Commonwealth
military is dedicated to avoiding that alternative . . . assuming
our progressive leadership allows us.”

“That will be quite enough, General,” Yarlocke said, and
there was no missing the hostility in her mental voice. “Re-
member your place!”

“I am a Marine, Madam Senator,” Alexander said. “That
is my place. My cause is duty to the Commonwealth, which

I serve, and to my Corps.”

“Your duty, General, is to the civilian leadership of the

Commonwealth, as directed by the President, true, but with
the consent of the Commonwealth Senate. You would do
well to remember that!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Alexander replied. There was, he thought,
no point in further antagonizing these people. They were
looking for political witches to hunt, and had found a conve-
nient one in him and in 1MIEF. They would tell him, no
doubt in exquisite detail, exactly what they thought of him
and of all “militarist” thinking, and all he could do was lis-
ten and let it wash over him.

But he was going to need a thorough shower afterward.

He felt . . . unclean.

He wondered though if the Commonwealth’s civilian gov-
ernment was going to allow 1MIEF to save it, or if they
would succeed in so hamstringing the military that failure
was inevitable.

It was a situation faced by democratic societies through-
out history—the knife’s edge balance between democratic
freedoms guaranteed by the military, and military rule. Only
rarely, however, had failure in that balancing act carried
such a high ultimate cost—extinction.

That was an alternative Alexander would fi ght—bitterly
and with every weapon at his command—to the very end.

9

2206.1111

Skimmersub Shuttle

Bahama Banks, Earth

1110 hrs, local

Just less than two hours after their arrival at Freeport, their
stomachs pleasantly filled with a somewhat spicy local con-
coction called conch chowder, Garroway and Armandez sat
together in the passenger lounge of the submarine shuttle
from Freeport Tower to Miami, a sleek undersea passenger
craft with large transparencies giving them an exceptional
and unobstructed view into the undersea realm between the

Bahamas and the Florida Peninsula.

The lounge was fairly crowded both with civilians and
with military personnel, all coming Earthside like a colorful
invasion from space. The orbit- to- surface space elevators
like the one at Quito took three days to reach Earth from the

Ring. That was fi ne for cargo and people on a tight bud get,
but most tourists preferred the two-hour descent on board an
agrav shuttle.

Garroway looked out through the transparency—yes, a
real transparency, and not a viewall screen—and wondered
if he was dreaming, or caught up in a particularly rich and
detailed sim. The sheer beauty, the peace and tranquility of
his surroundings, were spectacular. It didn’t seem possible,

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

133

in fact, to imagine a bigger leap—from the galactic vistas
and savage bloodshed of Cluster Space to . . . this.

Inner space, someone once had called it.

The surrounding water was a crystalline glow of transpar-
ent, brilliant sapphire blue, with shafts of sunlight shifting
and flashing from a ceiling as dazzlingly bright as liquid mer-
cury. Ten meters below, a variegated landscape drifted past at
fifty kph, mountains and ridges of brilliantly colored coral
interspersed with vast, flat prairies of current-sculpted white
sand or waving, green fronds of seaweed. Schools of bright-
colored fi sh flashed and turned, reflecting dazzling fl ashes of
silver in the shifting light. Larger creatures, sharks, rays, and
others, moved and circled as silent shadows in the distance.

“I never knew it could be so beautiful!” Nikki was sitting in
the seat next to Garroway’s, leaning forward, holding his hand
as the shuttle glided swiftly through the marine shallows.

“It is pretty,” Garroway agreed. “Glad we came?”

“Definitely!” She started, then pointed aft. “Oh! What’s
that?”

Garroway consulted his implant, linked at the moment to
the submarine vessel’s AI. It was slower than he was used to,
but the data came through in a moment. “Dolphin,” he said.

“I think there’s a pod of them trying to follow us.”

“ ‘Trying?’ ”

Garroway grinned. “Dolphins are fast . . . but not as fast
as we are right now. They’re going to have a hell of a time
catching us.”

“How fast are they?”

“Check your implant. There’s a download available from
the local AI. Thought-click the dolphins header.”

She closed her eyes. “Oh . . . right . . .”

“Ten meters a second for sustained swimming,” Garro-
way added reading his link. “Faster dashes over shorter pe-
riods of time. Say about thirty-six kilometers per hour over
the long haul. And right now we’re doing fi fty.”

“Yeah?” She nodded toward the transparency. “They seem
to be keeping up pretty well.”

134

I A N D O U G L A S

Garroway turned, and saw a pair of streamlined gray
shapes just off the submarine’s starboard bow. They ap-
peared to be matching the vessel’s speed perfectly.

“Son of a bitch,” Garroway said. “They’re not supposed to
be able to go that fast!”

“They’re riding the bow wave,” a Marine lieutenant said
from his seat just behind them. “They’re surfing on the pres-
sure wave created by the sub.”

Garroway turned, startled, then grinned at the man.

“Good God! Have you become an expert on dolphin physics
since your, ah, elevation to godhood, sir?” His emphasis on
the word “sir” was deliberately insulting.

“Fuck you, Marine,” the lieutenant said.

“Fuck you, too, sir.”

Armandez looked confused. “Gare! You can’t say that to
an offi cer. . . .”

Lieutenant Ramsey laughed. “It’s okay, Private. This time.

I knew this snot-nose back when he was a lowly PFC.”

“And he was a lowly Marine gunnery sergeant,” Garro-
way added. “Private First Class Armandez, may I present to
you Lieutenant Charel Ramsey, USMC.”

“Nice to meet you, sir,” she said.

“A pleasure, Private.”

“This . . . this offi cer and gentleman happens to be the Ma-
rine who first established direct mind- to-mind contact with
the Eulers, out in Aquila Space,” Garroway explained. “Then
the SOB went mustang on us. Became a fucking offi cer.”

Ramsey shrugged. “Hey, seemed like the thing to do at
the time.”

“You don’t usually see such old men running around as
lieutenants.”

“Now you’re getting personal, Marine.”

“So, which shuttle did you come down on? I didn’t see
you on the zero- seven- twenty drop.”

“I was right behind you, Marine. Left Ringport Quito at
zero- eight- hundred.”

“Ah. We came out of Ringport Macapá. Welcome to

Earth, sir.”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

135

Ramsey looked through the transparency. “It’s kind of
wet down here, isn’t it?”

“Yup. Looks like we need to talk to the environmental
department about the rain.”

“Or at least submit a climate revision request to the proper
departments. So what are you doing these days, Garroway?”

“First Platoon, Bravo Company, sir. One-Four Assault

Recon. How about you? They stuck you in N-2, didn’t they?”

Ramsey glanced around the lounge at the other passen-
gers. None appeared to be listening. “I could tell you . . .” he
began.

“But then you’d have to shoot us. Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it
before. What are doing planetside? Not scouting for an inva-
sion force, I hope.”

“Visiting my folks,” Ramsey said. “They live in a beach-
tower near Orlando Beach. How about you? I seem to recall
you didn’t have a family groundside.”

“You remember a Marine named Warhurst?”

“Gunny Warhurst? Sure as hell do.”

“He’s retired. Living under Miami.”

“Son of a bitch. You got contact info on him?”

“Sure. Or tag along with us. Assuming you have time in
your crowded sched, sir.”

“Maybe I will. I haven’t seen Gunny Warhurst in God
knows how long. I thought the bastard was dead.”

“He thinks he is,” Garroway said. “I don’t think he’s been
happy since he retired.” He turned to Armandez, who was
looking more and more confused. “Gunny Warhurst was my

DI in boot camp, on Mars. Later on, he rotated to 1MIEF,
just in time for the Aquila Space op. He, um, saved my ass.

Big time.”

“Really? Where was that?”

“Nova Starwall,” Ramsey said. He grinned at her. “Did
you realize, Private, that this butt- ugly character you’re sit-
ting with is a genu-wine hero?”

She smiled. “As a matter of fact, I did. He saved my tail in

Cluster Space. Cut his own legs off so there was room for
both me and him in his assault pod.”

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I A N D O U G L A S

Ramsey’s eyebrows crept higher on his forehead, and he
looked down at Garroway’s legs. “Oh, they’re coming along
fine,” Garroway said, answering the unspoken question be-
fore it was asked. “They grew me a new set on board the

Barton, after this last dust-up in the Cluster. My second pair,
in fact.” He slapped his thigh. “Good as new.”

“Shit fire. Don’t make a habit of that, okay?” Ramsey
shook his head in mock sadness. “Cutting off your own
legs . . . that’s destruction of government property, you know?

They’ll bust you back to recruit private and have you scrub-
bing out the head for the rest of your tour.”

“I got the lecture already, sir. There was this shrink-AI on
the Barton who was sure I had some kind of self-destructive
impulse.”

“Well, hell, yeah. You joined the Marines, didn’t you?”

Ramsey looked at Armandez. “Anyway, I’m glad this char-
acter saved your tail, but that’s not why he’s a hero.” Ramsey
reached across and tapped a blue ribbon riding above the
colorful rows of ribbons on his chest. “Didn’t he ever tell
you how he got this?”

“His Medal of Honor? No. He didn’t. Every time I ask, he
changes the subject. Do you know?”

“Battle of the Nova, at Starwall. Nine, ten years ago, now.

This mental case volunteered to fly a Euler triggership FTL
through a star. Blew up the star, and wiped out a major Xul
base.”

“Lieutenant Ramsey, here, was the guy who fi gured out
how to use combat drones to find me,” Garroway explained.

“When the star blew, I was on the other side from the star-
gate, and the triggership was junked, going slower than light
just ahead of the heavy particulate crap from the nova. But
thanks to him, they found me, just ahead of the heavy stuff.

And Gunny Warhurst, the guy we’re going to visit in Miami?

He’s the one who spacewalked over and pulled me out.”

Damn. Garroway remembered now why he didn’t like
telling the story. For just a moment, he relived the memory—
including the flash of terror that always accompanied it. It
had been so fucking close.

G A L A C T I C

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137

Even nine years later, he could see that exploding star reach-
ing toward him, filling the sky with white fi re.

“As you can see, Private,” Ramsey was saying, “we have
an extremely tight-knit little community here. Gunny War-
hurst saves Garroway, Garroway saves you. . . .”

“So some day you can pull some young Marine’s ass out
of the fire, Nikki,” Garroway said. “Look, can we change
the subject? You two are making my head swell.”

“Which one?” Ramsey asked.

“Fuck you. Sir.”

“Your family’s in Orlando Beach, you said?” Armandez
asked him.

“Yup.”

“I thought most of Florida was under water since Arma-
geddonfall.”

“A lot of it is. Tidal waves from the Xul attack took out
most of the eastern coastal areas. That was followed by the
mini-ice age, Armageddon Winter. The climate control sat-
ellites and orbital solar mirrors reversed that after a century
or two, but things swung back too far the other way. People
didn’t really know what the hell they were doing, and it was
tough finding the right balance of insolation and ice. When
global temperatures finally stabilized, ocean levels
were
about fifteen meters higher than they had been. Of course, a
lot of coastlands had been slowly sinking already before the

Xul strike . . . what they used to call global warming melt-
ing the ice caps. By the time the climate was balanced, some
cities had vanished. Others had been built over even when
the original was under water. Like Freeport. Or Miami.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing Miami,” Armandez said.

“Especially the coral gardens.”

“It’s a dump,” Ramsey said with a shrug. “Like most of
the planet.”

“I take it you visit out of family obligation?” Garroway
said.

“I suppose so. I have a few friends here. And my parents.

I used to have a wife and a husband, too, but they decided I was
gone too much and kicked me out. Just like Gunny Warhurst,

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I A N D O U G L A S
in fact. That was a long time ago.” He grimaced. “Ancient
history. The Corp’s my family now.”

“Amen,” Garroway said. “A-fucking-men.”

Senate Floor

Commonwealth Government Center,

EarthRing

1637 hrs, GMT

“We must,” Senator Yarlocke thundered to the assembled
crowd, “must learn the lessons of history! If we fail, we risk
the survival of Earth, of the entire race of Humankind in its
diaspora across the stars!”

Alexander was seated in the visitor’s gallery of the Senate

Deliberation Chamber, a huge room with seats arranged in
semicircular ranks about the speaker’s dais, listening to Yar-
locke with growing amazement. Did loyalty, duty to her of-
fice, even common sense itself mean nothing to the woman?

Was that what politics did to a person? Or was she a poli-
tician because of some basic and ultimately fatal flaw in her
character?

He recognized his own anger. He would have to watch
that. . . .

“The history I have in mind,” Yarlocke went on, “is the
history of our relations with the Islamic Theocracy.

“Now, the Commonwealth has fought numerous wars
with the Theocracy over the past centuries . . . eighteen ma-
jor wars and literally hundreds of minor clashes and border
incidents. Before the Commonwealth, the United States of

America fought several major wars against the Theocracy’s
predeces sors, what was once loosely termed ‘Militant Is-
lam.’ Some historians would point out that America’s strug-
gle with Islam went back to the early nineteenth century, in
a series of clashes known as the Barbary Wars.

“A thousand years of warfare against . . . not a state, not a
country, but a religious and sociological idea. A thousand

G A L A C T I C

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139

years of warfare . . . and it accomplished nothing save for
making adherents of that idea our eternal and implacable
enemies.

“Fellow Senators of the Commonwealth of Human-
kind . . . the lesson is painfully clear. Direct military action
accomplishes nothing, nothing , save to foster hatred and
more bloodshed! . . .”

“Yarlocke is in rare form today,” the voice of General

Dorrity whispered in Alexander’s mind. The Senate-Defense
liaison was seated among the senators in the auditorium
below—Alexander could see him from his gallery seat, a
tiny figure seated next to the two representatives from

Ishtar—but a private channel let them speak as though they
were sitting side by side.

“The Warlock is always in rare form,” Alexander replied,
bitter. “Give her an audience, and she’ll play to it.”

There was seating on the Senate floor for hundreds; fewer
than a quarter, though, were physically occupied. According
to the proceedings link in a window open in his mind,
eighty-one Commonwealth senators were present physically
for this session, while another one hundred seventy were
linked in from elsewhere, attending the session via the Sen-
ate Net. The total represented just over half of the total Sen-
ate membership—enough to establish a quorum if Yarlocke
called for a vote.

The unpleasant meeting with the appropriations subcom-
mittee had ended an hour and a half ago, when Yarlocke had
informed Alexander that she was delivering a speech to the
full Senate at 1600 hours. She’d actually grinned at him
when she’d told him that she would be presenting a new mo-
tion today, one calling for the immediate recall of 1MIEF to

Solar Space and an end to the Xul War. She’d told him that
he could watch, if he wished, from the Senate Gallery over-
looking the fl oor.

She’d made it sound like she was doing him a special fa-
vor. This session, however, was open, meaning that it could
be accessed by anyone throughout the Solar System with the

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I A N D O U G L A S
appropriate download codes and addresses. According to
the figures running in an open window to one side of Alex-
ander’s mind, some six hundred million people were watch-
ing, most within EarthRing, with a few watching on Earth,

Luna,
and—with a twenty-minute time-delay due to the
limitations of the speed of light—Mars. If she hadn’t given
him the invitation, he could have tuned in and watched just
the same.

His physical presence in the chamber, however, gave an
immediacy to what he was hearing, an immediacy, he was
fully aware, that was largely psychological, but nonetheless
quite real.

So far, however, all he’d heard had been more of the
same—a recitation of the need for peace, of the need to
reach out and understand the alien, the unknown, the need
to find common ground and mutual comprehension. There’d
been nothing yet about Operation Clusterstrike being a fail-
ure, not exactly, but she had continued to hammer away at
her old theme, that sending ships and Marines to unimagin-
ably distant corners of the Galaxy to kill the Xul a few at a
time was not working, could not work. Nine years of war, of
raids by 1MIEF, and there was no indication that Human-
kind had even gotten the enemy’s attention.

She continued to speak about the Commonwealth’s ongo-
ing war with the Islamic Theocracy, and was managing a
rather blatant rewriting of history as she did so.

“Wait, wait,” Dorrity said after a moment. “What did you
call her?”

“Hm? The Warlock?”

“Yeah. Isn’t that a male witch? Why do you call her that?”

“No. The entertainment conglomerates use the word that
way in horrorsims and so forth, but it originally meant an
oath- breaker, a traitor. It’s from Old English, I think.” He
pulled down a dictionary page in his mind and double-
checked. The word “warlock” was English, but not changed
in the transition to modern Anglic over the past few centu-
ries. “Yeah. Old English Waerloga. A covenant- breaker.”

“Okay . . . so how do you figure her to be one of those?”

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141

Alexander shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I was just
playing with her name,” he said. “Helps me dismiss the
creature without blowing a pressure seal. But . . . think
about it, General. She swore an oath, a covenant, to the Con-
stitution of the Commonwealth and, by extension, to the
people she represents. The Constitution is a direct extension
of the Constitution of the old United States. To provide for
the common defense. . . .

“Now, we can sit here and argue until the heat death of
the universe whether our Xul policy is right or wrong. Some-
times, I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder my-
self whether what we’re doing is right. But that one . . .” He
shook his head. “She twists words and theories and ideas
and history itself in ways that would make a hyperdimen-
sional topologist’s stomach turn. She’s Lewis Carroll’s Queen
of Hearts, making words mean exactly what she wants them
to mean . . . and formulating policy based on her defi nitions,
and to hell with what anybody else thinks.”

“That, I thought,” Dorrity said, “was what politics is all
about.”

“Maybe. But she does it to reinforce her own power base,
to build up her own political authority, and trash her oppo-
nents.”

“Again, politics in a nutshell.”

“But she’s doing it to the detriment of that common de-
fense I mentioned. Can anyone truly believe the Xul aren’t
out to wipe us off the Galactic map?”

“Marty,” Dorrity said, with an unexpectedly familiar use
of his first name, “you’ve been out on the front lines for the
better part of nine years. In all that time, the Xul have not
launched a single attack on Earth, or against one of Earth’s
extrasolar colonies. That, my friend, is a remarkable achieve-
ment. But maybe you’ve done too good a job.”

Alexander was shocked. “Good God, you’re not serious!

You can’t be! If the Xul had managed to launch another Ar-
mageddonfall, do you think Earth would still be here? They
won’t send a single huntership next time. It’ll be a fl eet, like
the one they had in Cluster Space.”

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I A N D O U G L A S

“I know. My point is, though, that there’s something
like . . . what? Sixty billion people living in Solar Space,
now. A couple or three billion on Earth, maybe a billion
more on Luna, Mars, and the Jovians, the rest in EarthRing,

AresRing, and the solar habs and planetoids. And except for
those few actually in the military and their stay- at- home
families, not one of them really knows we’re at war. The
fleet and your Marines have managed to keep the Xul at arm’s
length. They allow those billions to enjoy a quality of life
that would seem downright magical to people living just a
few centuries ago. They don’t know the real horror of war.”

“I thought,” Alexander said quietly, “that that was why
we’re here, why the fleet is here.”

He felt the other’s shrug. “It is. Of course, it is. But that’s
also the reason that she can rewrite history to her liking in
order to further her own ambitions.”

Alexander listened to Yarlocke for a few moments. “In all
those years of conflict with Islam,” she was saying, “what
was the benefit? What was the point? Great cities vaporized
worldwide . . . Haifa . . . Tehran . . . Karachi . . . Mos-
cow . . . Paris . . . New Delhi . . . Detroit . . . cities today that
are names of horror and infamy because of the hundreds of
millions incinerated in those holocausts. Holocausts, I might
add, generated by religious intolerance, prejudice, and by a
preposterous unwillingness on both sides to accept that there
are always alternatives to war. . . .”

She did not point out that most of those cities had been
nuked by the militants, not by their enemies. Tehran had
been incinerated in retaliation for the attack on Haifa, and

Karachi had been taken out by India in exchange for New

Delhi, but the others had been random terror bombings
through the troubled years of the 21st Century.

Nor did she point out that the bombings had stopped after
the Western Alliance had unilaterally forced the separation
of church and state, literally at gunpoint, in thirty- two coun-
tries from Morocco to Uzbekistan to Indonesia. Six centu-
ries later, the resolution of the Islamic Wars was still a

G A L A C T I C

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143

controversial matter. Did any government or alliance of gov-
ernments have the right to shape or to dictate the religious
beliefs and practices of a sovereign nation?

Alexander firmly believed the answer was no . . . unless a
government-sponsored religion called for the wholesale de-
struction of other people, cities, and nations in the name of
their god. The only controversy, so far as Alexander was
concerned, lay in why the Western nations had waited as
long as they had. If they’d acted sooner, and with less inter-
nal dissent, a number of cities and some hundreds of mil-
lions of people might have lived.

And in a twisted way, Yarlocke was right about one thing.

The Islamists, beaten on Earth, had taken their absolutist
beliefs to the stars. Militant Islamists had at last succeeded
on colony worlds like Alighan, New Mecca, and ’Adali,
overthrowing the secular governments of a dozen extrasolar
worlds colonized by Islamic refugees and creating the The-
ocracy. After a thousand years, Militant Islam endured.

But not on Earth or in the Rings, where freedom of reli-
gious belief was at the heart of every constitution and pop u-
lar covenant. It had taken military force to achieve that
small miracle. Against the black- and- white, convert- or- burn
theology of Islam’s more fanatical advocates, nothing less
would have sufficed, not in ten times ten thousand years.

“After a thousand years of bitter warfare between Islam
and the so-called West,” Yarlocke was saying, “an entire
civilization still holds all non-Muslim peoples in utter con-
tempt, hatred, and fear. And can we truly say that their atti-
tude, their pain is their own fault? When it was we who
made war on them over the centuries? . . .”

“God,” Alexander said over the private channel. “Now
she’s rewriting history.”

“A specialty of hers,” Dorrity replied.

“And is the same pattern to be repeated with the Xul?”

Yarlocke continued. “You’ve all heard the arguments, I
know, that the Xul are psychologically unable to interact
with other species in any way other than with wholesale

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I A N D O U G L A S
genocide . . . but I ask you now, can we truly be certain of
this? Just because the Xul are alien does not mean they are
hopelessly irrational. . . .”

If Dorrity was right, the citizenry of the Solar System
didn’t care about Yarlocke’s casually revisionist history.

They would go along with what was convenient, or let them-
selves be swept along by the emotions raised by speeches,
slogans, and news site downloads.

How long, he wondered, after 1MIEF’s attacks ceased,
would it be before the Xul found Sol once again and wreaked
their inevitable retaliation? The city holocausts of the 21st

Century would be snuffed candles by comparison.

“My proposal before the Senate now is a binding resolu-
tion calling for the immediate cessation of hostilities against
the Xul, and the immediate recall of the Navy-Marine expe-
ditionary force to Solar Space. It also calls for the creation
of a new expeditionary force, to be called the Pax Galac-
tica, as an emissary to the Xul. Their sole mission would be
to establish peaceful contact with the Xul, and to lay the
foundations of a lasting Galactic peace.”

Yarlocke’s words provoked an explosion of noise from the

Senate fl oor, accompanied by an even noisier fl urry of elec-
tronic exchanges over the Senate Net. Gavin Fitzgerald, the

Senate Speaker, pounded on his gavel for silence. “Order!

The chamber will come to order! Senator Yarlocke, will you
yield for a question?”

“Yes, Mr. Speaker. I yield for a question.”

Fitzgerald recognized one of the raised hands on the fl oor.

“Senator Yarlocke!” Janis Gallagher, a representative
from the state of Nova Scotia said, rising. “The Xul could be
the most peaceful and inoffensive civilization in the Galaxy,
and they might still refuse to treat with us. As you’ve just
pointed out, this war with them has been going on for a long
time. There is bitterness on both sides. How do we know
this Pax Galactica force you propose wouldn’t be destroyed
as soon as it entered Xul space? The Wings of Isis, remem-
ber, back in 2148, was also unarmed, and the Xul destroyed
it, apparently without provocation.”

G A L A C T I C

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145

“Remember that we still don’t have a clear idea of what
happened to that vessel,” Yarlocke replied. “There may well
have been unintentional provocation.

“In any case, however, we know far more now than we
did then. The Pax Galactica expeditionary force would
make extensive use of AI programming and of the informa-
tion gleaned from Xul sources over the years to ensure peace-
ful electronic contact before humans ventured into Xul-
occupied space. We now know how to enter Xul electronic
systems. Our military does this routinely during their en-
counters with them. Specially programmed AI representa-
tives would be sent into Xul space ahead of the main Pax
force to initiate negotiations. Our military forces would, of
course, be ready to provide back- up if, despite our best ef-
forts, the Pax Galactica came under attack. . . .”

As the discussion continued, Alexander could only sink
back into his padded gallery seat and let out a heartfelt sigh.

Did the Warlock seriously think it was possible to negotiate
with the Xul? That the Xul in any way, shape, or form
thought like humans?

Alexander wondered, though, if Yarlocke was right, if
there was another way. The trick was in finding it without
exposing Humankind to a devastating attack.

“General Dorrity?”

“Yeah?”

“As a member of the Appropriations Committee . . . are
you allowed to address the Senate?”

“I’m a non-voting member of a Senate subcommittee,” he
said. “I can address them, not the full Senate.”

“Damn. Do you have an ally in the Senate who might be
willing to speak for you?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Senator Armandez, of Ishtar,
right here beside me. He’s a defense hardliner, and he has no
love for . . . what did you call her? The Warlock.”

“Have you seen the intel our people brought back from

Cluster Space? The stuff on the Core.”

“Yes, I did. Scary stuff.”

“It occurs to me that we might use that.”

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I A N D O U G L A S

“How?”

“Well, we need to know what the Xul are doing in there,
anyhow. And our initial analysis of the data we brought back
suggests that what we’re looking at is the closest thing we’ve
seen yet to a capital or military headquarters for the whole

Xul empire.”

“Jesus! You’re thinking of taking 1MIEF in there?”

“Why not?”

“Cluster Space will seem like R&R by comparison.”

“We’ll need to formulate an ops plan,” Alexander said,
thinking with a quick, sharp ferocity. “And it’s a hellish long
shot. But if you can get Senator Armandez to propose some-
thing for you. . . .”

“Here,” Dorrity said. “I’ve just brought the Senator
on- channel.”

Alexander felt the new presence on the e-communications
line. “Hello, Senator.”

“General. I’ve heard a lot about you. What do you have in
mind?”

“I wonder if you could suggest this to the Senate. . . .”

10

2206.1111

Seaview Gardens

Lost Miami, Earth

1250 hrs, local

“So where is the lost city of Atlantis?” Nikki Armandez
wanted to know.

“Lost,” Garroway replied, grinning.

“You know what I mean. . . .”

“The Bimini Ruins?” Ramsey asked. “We probably zipped
right over those in the ekranoplan phase of our trip.”

“Damn. I was hoping to see those.”

“Not much to see,” Garroway told her. “I’ve been there in
sim. Big flat rocks piled in long, straight walls and barri-
cades, all pretty deep underwater. Besides, that wasn’t the
real Atlantis.”

Mysterious ruins, apparently pieced together from slabs
of local beach rock, had raised speculations for centuries
about Plato’s fabled lost city just off the now-sunken island
of North Bimini, in the Bahamas. The actual identity of

Atlantis—a Bronze Age superpower in the eastern Atlantic
destroyed by a volcanic eruption around the time of the Tro-
jan War—had not been confirmed until the 2500s.

The Bimini structures, most likely, had been part of a break-
water and port system built by Atlantis as part of their North

American copper-mining franchise. When fi rst discovered, the

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I A N D O U G L A S
ruins had been located in shallow waters, less than ten me-
ters down. With the melting of the polar icecaps fi ve centu-
ries ago, the water over that region was now nearly thirty
meters deep, but archeological research continued from a
large, seafloor complex raised over what had once been the
island of North Bimini.

There was a possibility—little more than speculation even
now—that the Bronze Age trading federation of Atalan had
been deliberately destroyed by the Xul in around 1200 b.c.e.,
plus or minus fifty years. The Xul had a penchant for drop-
ping large rocks out of space onto emerging civilizations
across the Galaxy. Ancient myth and legend originating with
hundreds of disparate peoples around the globe hinted that
the famous lost continent’s demise had been a deliberate
act—a divine punishment for sins of arrogance and hubris.

If, in fact, this was true, it had far-reaching import for
modern Humankind. It was already certain that the Xul had
annihilated the An slave colonies on Earth sometime around
seven to eight thousand years b.c.e., but the An at that time
had been starfarers, with FTL drives and a highly sophisti-
cated computer technology. If the Xul had bothered to bom-
bard a Bronze Age civilization, still planet- bound, with no
technology more advanced than sailing vessels and chariots,
it suggested a xenophobic drive on their part much stronger
than had previously been imagined.

It also suggested that the apparent Xul complacence of
the past few millennia—the fact that they’d sent only a sin-
gle huntership to Earth in 2314, for example, instead of an
entire battlefleet—was temporary at best. Possibly Xul mili-
tancy ran in cycles. Possibly they’d possessed a different
form of societal organiza tion in 1200 b.c.e.

Possibly . . . no, probably . . . Humankind simply didn’t
have the full picture, even yet.

Garroway checked the skimmersub’s data link just to be
certain. In fact, they’d missed the North Bimini ruins by a
good twenty kilometers, and they had been flying at the
time. Only the beginning and ending portions of the skim-
mersub shuttle’s course were under water. Twenty minutes

G A L A C T I C

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149

after departing from Freeport Tower, they’d risen to the sur-
face, flattened out the hull below and aft of the torpedo- shaped
passenger section into something looking distinctly like a
large stingray, and lifted gently above the waves on surface
effect, skimming above the sea at nearly 150 knots. Just a
few minutes ago, the skimmersub had settled back down
into the water, gently submerged, reassumed its elongated egg
form, and continued the voyage at a slower pace beneath the
surface.

“According to the downloads I’ve seen, there’s not a lot to
see out there, anyway,” Ramsey put in. “Like Gare said—fl at
rocks marking out some walls and breakwaters. The under-
water ruins at Aguna, west of Okinawa, are a lot more im-
pressive.”

“Yeah,” Garroway said, touching her shoulder and point-
ing ahead. “You know, if you want to see a real lost city,
take a look at that.”

Armandez looked up, and gasped. Ahead, through the
transparent hull, immense ruins were rising from the sea
floor, shadowy masses slowly resolving into walls, towers,
and buildings.

Since the 19th and 20th centuries, Earth had been strug-
gling with the effects of a gradual global warming trend. In

2314, the Xul attack had sent titanic waves smashing into
coastal areas around the planet, demolishing cities world-
wide. The attack had thrown vast clouds of dust and water
vapor into the sky, blocking off sunlight at the surface and
plunging Earth into a brief, mini-ice age. Solar mirrors con-
structed in orbit had helped raise temperatures again and
melt the ice, but no one had ever tried to manage climate on
a planetary scale before, and control had been a problem.

Eventually, things had balanced out, but by then the polar
ice caps had vanished, and sea levels had risen some twenty
meters above their pre-Armageddonfall depths.

“It’s beautiful!” Armandez exclaimed.

“It’s an underwater junkyard,” Ramsey said. “But the ma-
rine growth does pretty the place up, doesn’t it?”

Tangled wreckage—iron gratings, the shapes of ancient

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I A N D O U G L A S
vehicles, piles of broken stone, glass, and steel—everywhere
emerged from a smothering blanket of silt banked and
shaped around the submerged bases of those titanic build-
ings. Coral had taken root, and in places the wreckage had
been all but swallowed by colorful masses like living, fl ow-
ering rock. Schools of fish wheeled and turned above what
once had been city streets. They could see humans out there
as well, wearing black breathersuits as they worked among
the ruins. Genegineered dolphins, Tursiops habilus, sport-
ing muscular arms and hands, assisted them. They appeared
to be clearing a foundation for new seabed construction.

The skimmersub slowed as it entered a region of deep
shadow. External lights switched on, spearing ahead into
blue- green shadows.

“Those buildings are huge,” Garroway said. “I saw some
of them in sim, but I didn’t realize they were this big in
life.”

“Hotels, most of them,” Ramsey said. “Miami Beach. This
was supposed to be a tourist hot spot five hundred years ago.

It was pretty much trashed by the tidal waves in 2314, but the
buildings remained standing, most of them. After the ice
melted, they were sticking up out of the ocean a good 200
kilometers from the nearest large land mass, so people turned
the buildings into pylons and built platforms up above the
water. Some of them are a couple of kilometers high, now.”

“Is that where Gunny Warhurst lives?” Armandez wanted
to know.

“Nah. He’s in a hab called Virginia Key Reef. Actually, I
think that may be it up ahead.”

The shuttle had passed through the looming pylons of the
partially sunken city and into a region of dazzling, shifting
light playing across brilliantly reflective sand. More ruins
loomed up out of the shadowy waters ahead, however . . .

storage tanks, forests of tangled piping, and more buildings,
most of them engulfed by mountainous reefs of coral.

In places, the coral had taken on oddly symmetrical and
geometrical shapes, due to the structure of the artifi cial
structures beneath it. A series of seafloor habitats had been

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151

anchored to the sea bed just above one particularly large
coral-encrusted amphitheater. The skimmersub was angling
now toward the lock mounted on one end of the huge, semi-
circular structure. The transport drifted above the vertical
docking sleeve, settled onto it, and nanosealed with the fa-
cility.

Ten minutes later, Garroway, Armandez, and Ramsey were
walking along a long, curving corridor, following downloaded
directions to the Warhurst apartment. They found the right
hab halfway around the curve, and Garroway palmed the an-
nounce panel.

The door slid open a moment later, and a pretty, young,
blond woman admitted them. She was quite nude, save for a
clinging flicker of holographically projected rainbow light.

“Hi!” she said brightly. “I’m Traci. Mike’s busy screaming
at the viewall right now. C’mon in! Can I get you guys any-
thing?”

“Not right now, thanks,” Garroway replied as they en-
tered the hab. Curving, transparent walls looked out into the
sunlit waters of the coral reef. The ceiling was also transpar-
ent, and the apartment was brightly illuminated by the shift-
ing patterns of azure-tinted sunlight flashing down from the
surface some ten meters overhead.

“Damn it, I think we’re overdressed, Aiden,” Armandez
whispered to him as they followed Traci into the living
room.

Garroway recalled that some of the colony worlds were a
bit on the prudish side when it came to casual social nudity.

“Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “Lots of folks here and
in the Rings go around in their skin all the time. Doesn’t
mean sex, or anything like that.”

“On Ishtar we’d’ve been eaten alive by bitewings and dril-
leribbons,” she told him. “There’s a reason the gods created
us with clothing!”

Garroway was about to ask her about that, but was inter-
rupted by a shout from the entertainment well on the far end
of the living area. “God damn those assholes!”

The E-center was curiously antique, featuring a large,

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I A N D O U G L A S
slightly curving viewall within which an illusion of three-
dimensional reality was projected. Michael Warhurst was
on the sofa with another young woman, both of them nude,
the former Marine shaking his fist and shouting at the screen.

“Hey, Gunny!” Garroway called. “What’s got you so riled
up?”

Warhurst turned in the couch, then jumped to his feet.

“Garroway, you son of a bitch! Welcome to Earth!”

“Thank you. Good to be here.”

“And it’s Lieutenant Ramsey now, is it? Welcome to my
humble abode. Sir.”

“Thanks, Gunny. What the hell are you watching?”

Warhurst waved at the viewall dismissively. “Fucking
politics. They’re about to vote on whether or not to bring
you guys back home.”

“Oh, really?” Garroway said, intrigued. “What about the

Xul?”

“That’s just it. It’s uni-fucking-lateral retreat. Declare vic-
tory and go home . . . and pray the SOBs don’t decide we’ve
gone soft and drop a few rocks in our laps.”

“So where’s it stand?” Armandez asked.

“Hard to say, yet. Things kicked off when that über- bitch

Yarlocke called for a vote.”

“On what?”

“The usual. The Xul aren’t so bad. Bring the boys and
girls home. Make kissy-face with the Xulies, and everyone’ll
be happy. But then the Senator from Ishtar dropped a bomb
on the assembly a little while ago.”

“Yay! That’s my daddy!”

“Really?” Warhurst looked surprised. “Senator Arman-
dez?”

“I’m Nikki Armandez,” she said.

“Well, I’m delighted to meet you! Your dad’s really some-
thing, let me tell you! A real ball of fi re.”

“He’s a former Marine,” she told him. “When he gets into
speech-maker mode, he can be . . . formidable.”

“I know. He was great! He told how the last MIEF op
discovered a link to the Galactic Core, and how we needed

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153

to go there—in force—to find out what the Xul are really all
about. He’s calling for a compromise—send in the Marines
and Navy, but include a peacemaking team as well. Madam

Senator Über- bitch and her puppies have been fi ghting the
proposal tooth and nail, but I think it’s going to carry. At
least it was. One of Yarlocke’s people just raised a motion to
delay.”

“Is that why you were screaming ‘assholes’ a few minutes
ago?” Ramsey wanted to know.

Warhurst grinned. “Yeah. I guess I got a little riled.”

“What good would a delay do?” Garroway asked.

“I’m not sure what her idea is. Maybe Über- bitch wants
some time to do some private arm- twisting.”

“The motion was just defeated, Mike,” said the other
woman in the apartment, still seated on the sofa.

“Oh? Great! Shit, you gotta excuse me. Manners. You’ve
met Traci, there. And this is Kath.”

“Hi!” Kath said. She was a striking redhead. “Mike’s told
us all about Aiden! Why don’t you guys shuck your skins
and get comfortable?”

Armandez elected to keep her underpants on, a conces-
sion to deeply ingrained Ishtaran modesty taboos, but Gar-
roway and Ramsey stripped down to match their hosts. Their
uniforms and shoes vanished into a hopper that would disas-
semble them into component atoms and grow them anew,
without travel grime or wrinkles.

“There’s going to be a public vote!” Traci called out. “You
want to chime in?”

“Oh, good,” Warhurst said, taking his seat next to Kath.

“About fucking time! Binding?”

“No. But I guess the Senate wants to know who’s going to
be pissed off by what decision.”

Warhurst sighed. “The Net. The best and the worst thing
ever to happen to Commonwealth politics.”

“How do you figure, Gunny?” Garroway asked.

“The best because it allowed a true representative democracy.

The entire electorate—whoever happens to be linked into the
debate, anyway—can cast their votes and have them tabulated

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I A N D O U G L A S
immediately. The Senators up there in the Ring can see in a few
minutes which way the political winds are blowing.”

“Wetting their fingers and sticking them into the wind,”

Ramsey suggested.

“That’s about it. But it’s the worst thing because a few
hundred years ago it got so slick they decided they didn’t
need the House of Representatives to balance out the Sen-
ate. That happened, oh, gods. Long time ago. Twenty-fi ve,
twenty- six hundreds? Back when it was the United States of

America running things, the legislative branch of the gov-
ernment was divided between House and Senate. A law
passed by one might get shot down by the other, so there
was a great balance of power going on . . . and they acted as
a check against the power of the executive branch, right?”

“If you say so,” Garroway replied. “I’ve never really fi g-
ured out how they got anything done in pre-Commonwealth
times.”

“Yeah, well, once the citizens could vote on any resolu-
tion, they decided having a two-house legislature was re-
dundant. The House split off and became a regulatory body
just for the individual states, while the Senate passed laws
concerning the entire Commonwealth. Over the years, the

Senate became way too powerful. Hell, there’s talk about
the President being little more than a figurehead now, kind
of like British royalty, back when they still had them.”

“You think things would be better with House and Senate
still battling it out with each other?” Ramsey asked. “Mak-
ing back-room deals, that sort of thing?”

Warhurst shrugged. “Maybe. So far as I’m concerned,
anything that paralyzes the government, keeps it from pass-
ing new laws and raising new taxes, is good!”

“Mike is a bit of a reactionary,” Traci put in.

“Yeah, but he’s my kind of reactionary,” Garroway said,
laughing. “How do we vote on this damned thing? And what
are we voting on, again?”

Warhurst indicated a palm contact on the arm of the sofa.

“Slap your hand down there. Your AI will access the Net for
you. The vote is on . . . let’s see . . . ‘Should 1MIEF be sent to

G A L A C T I C

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155

the Galactic Core, together with a peace envoy in an attempt
to end the current state of hostilities? Yes, no, or protest.’ ”

Garroway was used to voting through a full-immersion
e-connect, rather than this antique viewall connection, but
when he placed his hand on the palm connect, a window
came up in his mind, just as it would have with a full- sim
link. But the thought-click key that would register his vote
was blocked.

“Wait a sec,” he said, reading the message scrolling past
his awareness. “There’s another motion up.”

“Yeah, I see,” Warhurst said, eyes narrowing. “Damn the
bitch!”

“What?” Armandez asked.

“She’s calling for a motion to block all votes from active-
duty military. That means you guys.”

Ramsey chuckled. “Well, it wouldn’t do to have active-duty
personnel vote on whether or not they’re going to go into
battle, would it?”

“Yeah,” Garroway said. He laughed. “ ‘Do you jarheads
want to charge up that fucking hill and take it away from
some very nasty and well- armed customers, yes or no?’ ”

“Yeah, except that the über-
bitch knows the military
would vote a resounding yes,” Warhurst said. “She’s hell- bent
on shutting down 1MIEF, one way or another.”

“Well, sure,” Ramsey said. “The military knows how
happy the Xul at the Core will be to see our peace envoy.”

“And how long the peace would last afterward,” Garro-
way added. “Whatcha guys think? Twenty minutes?”

“If that,” Ramsey replied.

“Okay,” Warhurst said. “That measure passed. So you
guys don’t get to vote. Sorry.”

“Well, you vote for us,” Armandez said. “Five or six times
apiece!”

“Wish I fucking could.” He put his palm down on the
connector, then motioned to the women. “C’mon, girls. You
get to vote, too. Civic duty, and all that.”

“If we vote ‘yes,’ ” Traci said, “does that mean you’ll be
going back out there?”

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I A N D O U G L A S

“No, honey, it doesn’t.” He sighed. “I wish to hell it did.

But I put in my twenty, and I’d need a special waiver to re-
enlist.”

Traci, then Kath registered their votes. A recess for din-
ner, meanwhile, had been declared on the Senate fl oor.

“This’ll take a while,” Warhurst told them. “Hey! Let me
show you around the place!”

The tour of the apartment didn’t take long, since they’d
already seen all there was to see except for the bedroom,
bath, and storage areas. When they returned to the main liv-
ing area, which included the entertainment center, a small
galley, and sitting and eating areas, Armandez walked into
the center of the room, looking up at the ocean surface visi-
ble through the overhead transparency. “This is simply gor-
geous!” she said. “Is it expensive?”

“It’s free. Veterans’ benefits.” He shrugged. “Anyway, the
expensive real estate is up on shore.”

“Tell me about it,” Ramsey put in. “My parents are at

Orlando Beach.”

Warhurst winced. “Ouch.”

“They’re rich. They can afford it.”

“Well, they’re putting up more and more of these com-
plexes out here at sea, especially on places flooded after the
icecap melt. The individual apartments are grown as single
units ashore, hauled out to a submerged platform with pon-
toon ballast tanks, and fastened down.” He waved a hand at
the transparent wall, and a vast, shadowy depression in the
sea floor lined with coral. “Like the view?”

“It’s certainly not what I thought of as Earth,” Armandez
said.

“There’s a hell of lot more ocean on Earth than there is
dry land,” Warhurst told her. “This view is more typical of
the place than, oh, central Iowa, say.”

“Is that a crater out there?” Garroway asked, pointing.

“Maybe a souvenir from 2314?”

“Nah. This area used to be an island right off the southern
tip of Miami Beach proper. There was a seaquarium here . . .

kind of like a theme park with trained whales. The historical

G A L A C T I C

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157

downloads say that that pit over there used to be a public
amphitheater for performances.”

“Ha!” Ramsey exclaimed. He pointed to a cloud of color-
ful reef fish descending past the transparency. “So now it’s a
terrarium where fi sh watch you.”

“Never thought of it that way,” Warhurst said, “but, yeah.

Exactly.”

“We saw them building something on the sea fl oor out-
side of Miami,” Armandez said. “Was that more living
habs?”

“You probably saw where they’re building the new big
fish-farm complex up at Fisher Reef. The ocean’s still recov-
ering, you know, not only from Armageddonfall, but from
what humans did to it in the centuries before. They say some-
thing like eighty percent of all marine species had been
wiped out or were on the point of extinction when the Xul
attacked, and the mini-ice age that followed must have killed
a lot more. Nowadays, they’re using sea farms more for rein-
troducing genegineered species than for food. Most of our
food comes from nanufactories now, just like up in the

Rings.”

After a light meal, they ended up in a hot tub. Kath elected
to stay in the entertainment center, watching the Senate
channel, but Nikki finally overcame her modesty enough to
lose the last of her clothing and join Garroway, Warhurst,

Ramsey, and Traci in a large tub of scalding hot water.

“I just can’t get over how gorgeous all of this is,” she said,
leaning back and looking up through the ceiling at wheeling
fish and dancing light. “I never knew Earth was like this.”

“First time down?” Warhurst asked.

She nodded. “I got as far as EarthRing when my father
got elected a few years ago. Then I joined the Marines, boot
camp on Mars, and duty stations all over this part of the
galaxy ever since.”

“Well, this is how the other half lives.”

“Gare said you don’t like it here.”

He shrugged. “It’s pleasant enough, I guess.”

“He misses all of his old Marine buddies,” Traci said,

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I A N D O U G L A S
moving close to him and taking hold of his arm with a play-
ful pout. “ We’re not good enough for him!”

“Fuck, it’s not that, baby,” he said, putting an arm around
her shoulders. “You know that. But I do miss the Corps,
yeah.” He grinned at Garroway and winked. “Screaming at
maggot- recruits like this guy.”

“Fuck you, Gunny.”

“Ah. You turned out okay. Medal of Honor? Yeah, you’re
doing all right.”

“If they bring 1MIEF home,” Garroway said, “maybe
we’ll all be retired.”

“You know that won’t happen,” Ramsey told him. “This
peace initiative of Yarlocke’s has about as much chance of
success as making peace with a gorgonette.”

“A gorgonette?” Traci asked. “What’s that?”

“Oh, a little critter that lives on the major southern conti-
nent of Nu Columbae IV,” Ramsey told her. He held his
hand out, palm down, half a meter off the deck. “Stands about
yea high. All tentacles, muscle, claws, and teeth. A dozen
feeding mouths, each on a separate neck, like a bundle of
snakes. When they’re migrating, a pack of ’em will shred a
man down to bare bones in a minute or two.”

“They’re herbivores, actually,” Garroway added. He’d
never deployed to Nu Columbae IV, a marginally Earthlike
world out on the fringes of the Chinese Hegemony, some 72
light years from Sol. Experiencing sims of the vicious local
ecology, however, had been part of a Corps survival training
program he’d gone through in boot camp. “They don’t eat
you so much as grate you into little bloody bits if they feel
threatened.”

“Lovely.”

“Right,” Warhurst said. “Just like the Xuls. A
hyper-
developed xenophobic protective reflex. And a very short
temper! I hope that peace envoy they’re talking about is wear-
ing decent armor!”

“You think that’s how the Xul started out, a few million
years ago?” Ramsey asked. “Kill everything else before it

G A L A C T I C

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159

kills you would be a reasonable survival strategy on Nu

Columbae, and on a few other worlds I’ve seen as well.”

“That’s what the Excesses think,” Garroway said. The
name was derived from “XS,” which in turn came from xe-
nosociology, the science of nonhuman species, how they
thought and acted, and why. “If they took that kill-or-be-
killed mindset to the stars, maybe they never got rid of it.

The Fermi Evidence, y’know?”

“If so, this peace initiative isn’t going to go very far,”

Ramsey said.

“Sure it is!” Warhurst replied cheerfully. “It’ll go all the
way to the Galactic Core! And die there! . . .”

“Hey, wet people!” Kath called from the entertainment
center. “The vote is being announced!”

“Okay,” Warhurst said, standing up, dripping, stepping
out of the deck-level tub. “Let’s go check out the fucking

BDA.”

“Yeah,” Garroway said. “This I’ve got to see.”

Senate Committee Deliberation Chamber

Commonwealth Government Center,

EarthRing

1925 hrs, GMT

Cyndi Yarlocke watched the tabulation fi gures fl ickering
into a window opened in her mind, and scowled. Damn Ar-
mandez and his
short-sighted, disloyal interference. And
damn Alexander. She turned and looked up, searching the
visitor’s gallery. Yes, there he was, sitting alone, leaning
forward, fingers steepled in front of his chin, staring straight
back at her. This was his doing. It had to be.

Armandez had a daughter in the Marines, in 1MIEF, in
fact. Didn’t the short-sighted bastard want to see her safely
home from the stars, from constant warfare with the Xul?

But then, Armandez was an ex-Marine himself, and the
bond between Marines sometimes seemed to transcend that

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I A N D O U G L A S
of family. Yarlocke didn’t understand that, but she recog-
nized that it was true. Alexander must be using a back-channel
communications link with Armandez, must have suggested
the bare bones of the Armandez Proposal.

The hell of it was, Armandez’s conservatism was being
reflected by the electorate, apparently. The votes were still
coming in, but, so far, nearly a billion citizens from the in-
ner Solar System had electronically registered their votes on
the issue. So far, it was running over seventy percent in favor
of the Armandez Proposal, and just twenty-fi ve percent
against.

She could dismiss the lopsided tally easily enough. Many
of those seven hundred million voters were most likely con-
fused, thinking that by supporting the Pax Galactica going
to the Core with the MIEF, they were voting for peace. They
didn’t realize that, if the Marines went along, there would be
no peace. Alexander, the militarist bastard, would fi nd a
way to continue his war.

More crucial by far was the Senate vote. Two hundred
fifty-one senators were present, either physically or in
sim—a quorum. Twelve had abstained, a surprisingly small
number, actually, given how politically charged this issue
was. She’d thought a greater number would hesitate to asso-
ciate their names and public voting rec ords with either side
of the question.

Of the rest, 121 had voted in favor of Senator Armandez’s
proposal, and 118 had voted against it. The measure had car-
ried by three votes.

Three votes! . . .

It was frustrating, yes, but it was also, she was beginning
to realize, encouraging. A three vote difference, with twelve
fence-sitters? There were plenty of ways she could use that
to her political advantage—calling in favors, twisting some
arms, and a bit of simple, old-fashioned, out-shouting of the
opposition. She could use the closeness of this vote to bring
pressure to bear on the Appropriations Committee, and
maybe find a way to further hamstring the MIEF’s logistical
support, or the fleet itself. . . .

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

161

And there was the matter of non-Commonwealth stellar
nations, and their participation in anti-Xul operations.

Yes. That would do the trick.

It was clear that the electorate simply didn’t understand
what was truly at stake, here . . . nor did they understand
just how enormous, how complex the Galaxy actually was.

There was no way Humankind could grasp the size of the
thing, much less rule it.

Yarlocke was ambitious, but she was also a realist. With
just a little more support within her party, she would be able
to take the final steps to eliminate the Presidency of the

Commonwealth. The Senate would rule . . . and she would
rule the Senate. With the battle-hardened Marines of 1MIEF
under her direct authority, she would bring the other star na-
tions of Humankind into line.

Let the Xul have the rest of the Galaxy. Humans would
reign supreme within their own small, comfortable pocket
of colony worlds . . . and Cyndi Collins Yarlocke would
reign supreme over Humankind. It would happen.

For a moment, across the gulf of the Senate floor, her eyes
locked with Alexander’s. I’m going to bring you down, she
promised him in her thoughts. I’m going to bring you down,
the electorate will side with me, and there will be a new way
of managing this tired, old planet, I swear to you!

No, it wouldn’t be much longer. . . .

11

2906.1111

Orlando Beach

Florida, Earth

2225 hrs, local

A week later, under a dazzlingly star-filled night sky, Gar-
roway lay with Nikki on the beach, holding her, tasting her,
savoring this time with her. Towers ablaze with lights lined
the northern skyline two kilometers away.

Much of the seacoast metropolis of Orlando was raised
on networks of pylons extending far out over the ocean.

Once, five centuries before, the Florida Peninsula had been
twice its current length and breadth, stretching into the Gulf
of Mexico for another full 350 kilometers almost all the way
to the Commonwealth state of Cuba.

Numerous Floridian cities, including the surface portions
of Miami, St. Petersburg, and Jacksonville, had been built
up atop broad, nano-grown pylons anchored in shallow wa-
ter, usually on the foundations of the long- sunken buildings
of earlier cities. Orlando had the distinction of being built
both on solid land and over the water. A region once occu-
pied by a sprawling entertainment complex was now given
over to public housing, and glowed against the skyline to the
north. The narrow knife of the Glades Peninsula stretched to-
ward the southeast, once the highland spine of South Florida

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

163

and now given over mostly to mangrove swamps and iso-
lated sand dunes facing the boom and rumble of the surf.

High in the southern sky, the lights of EarthRing looked
like a dusting of stars compressed into a slender thread
stretched up and over from the western horizon to the east, a
gossamer strand impossibly remote and delicate.

Garroway and Armandez lay on the sand above the lap of
the waves and gently explored each other’s bodies.

It had been a good week. Expensive, but a good week . . .

and they still had another week to go before their leave ex-
pired. They’d spent most of the time at Gunny Warhurst’s
place, with side trips to see some of the more spectacular
sights on old Earth.

Together, they’d stood atop the Verrzano Dike, the 25th-

Century engineering marvel holding back the cold waters of
the Atlantic from ancient, sacred Manhattan, and they’d
visited the even more ancient Great Wall, stretching through
the heart of the Hegemony’s homeland. They’d played tour-
ist and purchased a lowest- highest tour package, exploring
the Marianas Abyss in a submarine, and, later that same
day, flying to the visitor’s pavilion at the top of Everest, where
glaciers still gleamed beneath a dazzling, empty blue sky.

Three days ago, Nikki had finally talked him into renting
a sailboat. They’d been in Egypt, visiting the Common-
wealth Protectorate that included the awesome stone monu-
ments on the Giza Plateau, and they’d taken a side trip to

Siwa, on the shores of the Sahara Sea. The experience, Gar-
roway thought, had been as close to flying as it was possible
to come without an aerospace craft or being in zero-G. The
waters of the manmade sea were crystalline, the bottom a
surreal landscape of sculpted banks and dunes racing past
beneath the AI-controlled vessel’s keel.

Politics—even the ongoing cold war with the Islamic

Theocracy that still embraced the rest of Egypt—had seemed
remote indeed on that crystal sea. The citizens of the Theoc-
racy in Egypt had been only too happy to sell the off-world
tourists overpriced tour packages, exotic food, and expensive

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I A N D O U G L A S
trinkets. The same in North China. Off-world, ancient po-
litical stresses still lay just beneath the surface, but the ordi-
nary people continued to do business with tourists coming
down- Ring.

As for the Xul, politics had seemed impossibly distant.

For the fi rst time in a long time, Garroway had felt himself
relaxing.

There’d not been a fl ight direct from Egypt to Miami, so
they’d flown in to Orlando Beach instead, arriving just yes-
terday and getting an invitation from Lieutenant Ramsey to
come see him at his folks’ place. They were staying in a
guestroom there now, and planned to stay for another couple
of days before choosing their next tourist destination. Peru,
possibly . . . or maybe the huge, undersea ruins at Aguna,
off the coast of Okinawa. Garroway was fascinated by Ter-
ran archeology as it related to the long history of Human-
kind’s interactions with extrasolar civilizations—Sumeria
and the An, Atlantis and the N’mah, the Xul strikes against

Earth scattered across the planet’s prehistory. Baalbek, Tia-
huanaco, Titicaca. This seemed like a great opportunity to
see at least a few of these legendary places for himself.

But best of all had been getting to know Nikki better. . . .

Sexual liaisons between Marines of differing ranks and
experience—in this case a private first class only recently
out of boot camp and a gunnery sergeant who’d been in for
ten years—were not encouraged within the Corps. There
was the very basic issue of an imbalance of power, where a
junior might sleep with a se nior either out of fear, or for pur-
poses of manipulation. Either could seriously disrupt the
cohesion of a unit.

Still, it was acknowledged that liaisons did happen. Ser-
vice personnel were urged to use common sense and to
avoid entanglements that put a strain on morale, good order,
and discipline.

It would have been simpler, perhaps, simply to exclude
women from combat duty, or, at the very least, to maintain
sexually segregated units. Simpler . . . but impractical.

No one questioned the right of women to fight for their

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

165

nation or to serve in the military, but the presence of women
in combat units had been an issue for debate for the past
eight centuries. The advent of nanotechnic enhancements
and prostheses and the widespread use of power armor in
combat had long ago torpedoed complaints that females lacked
the upper body strength or the endurance to compete with
males. Reliable contraceptives for both sexes had long since
ended the inconvenient need to discharge women who’d be-
come pregnant; deliberately allowing pregnancy while on
active duty was a violation of the enlistment contract and
grounds for dismissal or even legal action. And within Com-
monwealth society as a whole, the widespread accep tance of
casual social nudity had long ago ended privacy issues on
board cramped transports or space-limited bases.

But one issue remained, and it was the one issue that sci-
ence and technology could not address without changing
people into something other than human. In Garroway’s ex-
perience, men in the military, especially unattached men in
the military, tended to focus on just two things— fi ghting
and fucking. They were trained to be proficient at the fi rst;
they inevitably preferred the second. When they were en-
gaged in the first, it was often at least subconsciously a route
to the second; one’s exploits in combat, told with suitable
embellishment in mixed company around a table in a bar or
in the squad bay after hours, might easily lead to a happy
partnering with a comely squadmate . . . or at least it was
perceived that way by the “no-shit- there-I-was” story-tellers
in question.

In point of fact, men’s behavior changed when women
were around in what appeared to be a basic and incontro-
vertible fact of human sexual psychology. Training tempered
the change, to be sure. Professionalism could overcome the
instincts of basic biology. Concepts like honor, duty, and
dedication to the Corps were deeply ingrained in every Ma-
rine, and guided every thought.

But always there were Marines, men and women both,
who managed to overcome training and conditioning and
act like idiots in their constant search of a good lay.

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I A N D O U G L A S

In the Corps’ history, there’d been plenty of attempts to
alter the sexual equation, from draconian regulations to
drugs to suppress libido to using a Marine’s cere bral im-
plant to monitor his behavior. None worked well or consis-
tently. Regulations could be ignored; drugs tended to
suppress the very qualities in combat personnel the Corps
needed; technology was susceptible to ingenious tamper-
ing. Garroway had done his share of that sort of thing back
when he’d been a PFC, learning the codes that shut his
personal AI monitor down when he wanted to break or
bend the rules.

Control issues came and went in cycles. Ten years ago,
when Garroway had joined the Corps, there’d been a lot of
effort put into using platoon AIs to observe and report the
behavior of individual Marines; now, Marines were simply
warned not to screw up, to be careful, and to be discreet. No
doubt it would come full-circle again some day, as yet an-
other technological fix was applied to the problem.

Most individual Marines of both sexes and all ranks felt,
however, that the issue was self-correcting. Hell, Marines
didn’t like micromanagement to begin with, and attempts to
use technology to control the way they thought and acted
and, especially, how they interacted with their fellow Ma-
rines would simply lead to more and more clever attempts to
circumvent whatever strategy the powers- that-were had in
mind.

None of this particularly mattered to Garroway as he
drew Nikki Armandez close and kissed her, his left hand
holding the back of her head, his right gently cupping her
buttocks. Rules didn’t matter, not here, not now. They were
on leave and what they did with one another during their
down time was their own damned business. The kiss deep-
ened . . .

“Attention, all 1MIEF personnel!”

The voice, transmitted through his implant, sounded
like a shout in his ear. He jumped, releasing Armandez at
the same moment she pushed back from him. He saw her

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

167

widening eyes, and knew she was receiving the same trans-
mission.

“All leave and liberty is hereby cancelled. Effective im-
mediately, all 1MIEF personnel are to return to the trans-
port Hermes , currently at Dock Three, SupraQuito Complex,

EarthRing, by the most expeditious transport available.”

“Shit!” Garroway exclaimed.

“And double shit,” Armandez added, her chest heaving,
her face flushed. “They can’t do this to us!”

Garroway sighed. “They can and they will, love. Let’s see
what the hell’s going on.”

Using his personal AI to initiate an uplink, he tapped into
the platoon net back on board the Hermes. Orders, he saw,
had just come through. The expeditionary force was return-
ing to Cluster Space. And then . . .

“My God,” he said aloud.

“What is it, Aiden?”

“We’re going to the Core. Xul Central. . . .” Eyes closed,
he continued to scan the posted data. “The damned idiots
want us to make peace! . . .”

She was linking in now. “Debarkation in two more days,”

she said.

“Yeah. But they want us on deck as soon as we can get
our asses up to the Ring. Wait a sec. . . .”

He opened another window and pulled down another
page . . . a listing of departure times for Ringport shuttles.

“It’ll have to be a transport,” he told her. “The elevator
takes three days. Let’s see what’s available. . . .”

There were, in fact, a steady stream of shuttles bound for
the Ring from various sites all over Earth. There was noth-
ing from Orlando Beach, he saw. No Ringport. But a shuttle
was leaving in two hours from Freeport, and in three from

Atlanta. Passenger bookings were already starting to fi ll
them both up as other Marines logged in.

“Looks like a lot of service personnel are all reserving

Ringbound seats in a hurry,” he said. “It’s going to be a
zoo.” He wondered just how many Marines were ashore

168

I A N D O U G L A S
right now, on leave from the Hermes. Eight or ten thousand
at the very least, he guessed. He skipped ahead through the
listings. The next Freeport shuttle was scheduled to leave in
nineteen hours . . . at 1820 hours tomorrow. They could
catch a local flier down to Miami, then take the skimmersub
back to Freeport. That meant leaving Orlando Beach . . . he
did a quick back-calculation . . . by 1200 hours tomorrow.

No problem. He entered data into the reservation pages,
waited for confirmation, then relaxed.

“Okay, Nikki. We’re booked for an up- shuttle to the Ring
tomorrow.”

“Damn, it, Aiden! We had another week coming!”

He shrugged. “Hey, that’s the Corps. We belong to them.

They say ‘jump,’ we say ‘aye, aye,’ and ‘how high?’ In this
case, all the way up to the Ring.”

It was just as well, he told himself. Booking that passage
had just pulled a lot of credit from his financial storage. The

Corps would reimburse him for expenses, but he was run-
ning just a little tight right now; that Marianas-Trench- to-

Everest-Peak tour had been a bit on the expensive side, as
had been the sailboat rental. His personal credit was boosted
automatically by 150 points each day—his particular ser-
vice pay grade—and Nikki’s by 55, but neither of them had
much saved up for big-ticket items like taking a suborbital
out to Okinawa to see the underwater Aguna ruins.

In fact, the two of them would have had to put themselves
on a pretty tight leash to make their credit reserves last for
another week, even if they stayed with Lieutenant Ramsey
or Gunny Warhurst.

He looked up at the stars overhead. Yeah, and truth to tell,
he didn’t like Earth all that much. The people didn’t even
know they were at war, though they were happy enough to
drain a serviceman’s credit. It was time to get back to his
world, the Corps.

Nikki seemed to be reading his thoughts. She reached for
him, sliding her hand along his side, from ribs to thigh. “At
least that means we don’t have to go back right away. We
have some time for us.”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

169

Again, he drew her close. “My thought exactly, Ma-
rine. . . .”

3006.1111

UCS Hermes

Dock Three, SupraQuito,

EarthRing

0805 hrs, GMT

“They’re starting to check in,” Cara told General Alexan-
der. “It may be a while before they can all book passage
back, though.”

“And lots of them will try to squeeze in a few more hours
of freedom.” Alexander thought for a moment. “You may
need to establish a muster- aboard time.”

“We could also send some aerospace transports down,
and pick them up directly.”

“True. If I know my Marines, though, they’ll be spread
all over the planet right now, seeing the sights, getting into
trouble, and drinking and simming themselves senseless.”

An image of Earth, minus the swaths and swirls of cloud
cover, opened in his mind. Thousands of green pinpoints
appeared, scattered across the globe. “The majority of our
personnel are in time zones Zulu minus five through minus
eight,” Cara said, “which means it’s the middle of the night
for most of them.”

Briefly, Alexander considered the
link-
simmed globe.

Damn, he thought. A little leave time . . .

He dismissed the thought, as though slamming a door. It
had been . . . how long since he’d set foot on Earth’s surface,
on the surface of any world, for that matter? He knew he
could check his personal log and find out in an instant, but
chose not to do so. Electronic simulations and virtual reali-
ties made it possible to feel as though he’d left the labyrin-
thine passageways and compartments of the Hermes and
was walking the open surface of a planet, but the illusion, he
knew, was not, could never be, reality.

170

I A N D O U G L A S

Someday, perhaps . . .

“We’ll give them twelve hours,” he told Cara, “and see
where we are. I don’t want to send the transports down un-
less we have to.”

“Aye, aye, General.”

Alexander felt the AI depart from his consciousness.

Cara had been with him for decades, first as his personal

AI secretary, and later as personal aide within his command
constellation, the group of humans and AIs who ran 1MIEF.

Currently, she—he’d always thought of the genderless pro-
gram as “she”—occupied what amounted to the MIEF’s

Executive Officer billet, handling all of the internal details
of his command. AIs were good at the routine and picky
details.

In some ways, Alexander preferred AIs to people. Their
logic, their clean rationality, their essential lack of random
emotion coupled with their programmed commitment to such
concepts as loyalty and duty made them ideal both as subor-
dinates and as companions. The thought brought with it a
pang of memory, of the sort that people said faded with
time . . . but never swiftly enough.

He took the memory out once again, examining it, feeling
it. For over two decades, he’d been partnered with a lovely
and keenly intellectual woman named Tabatha, but she’d
left him five years back. That had been just after the Battle
of Krulak Space, and the destruction of a Xul base in the
firestorm of a double star nova. Hermes had translated back
to Sol Space for replacements and supplies . . . and Tabatha
had simply packed her things and shuttled down to Earth.

He’d tried to find her, but his attempts to link with her had
been blocked. Her own personal secretary, imitating per-
fectly her voice and mannerisms, had told him only that she
needed time and space to grow on her own . . . and to have a
relationship with someone who would be there for her.

Well, they said the memories would fade. He’d seen pre-
cious little evidence of that as yet.

Five years. . . .

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

171

He shoved the memory aside. The trouble with artifi cial
intelligences, he thought, lay in the deeper moral implica-
tions. They were nothing more than complex software, epi-
phenomena arising from the interplay of positive and negative
charges within the networks interconnecting massively par-
allel sets of hardware.

But they certainly acted as though they felt—the more
advanced ones, anyway—and most cyberneticists believed
that they did possess a genuine sense of self, of self- awareness,
and that they were sentient within any reasonable meaning
of that still poorly understood word. It brought into question
a lot of attitudes and assumptions about AIs that had existed
since their first, crude incarnations eight centuries ago—
programming them to accept self-immolation, for example,
which was routine now in the case of the AIs piloting Euler

Starbursters into the cores of stars to detonate them.

As a Marine general, Alexander had given countless or-
ders that had, one way or another, meant death for men and
women under his command, but those Marines were volun-
teers, all of them, and often they were asked specifi cally to
volunteer a second time for particularly hazardous missions.

Giving human beings orders that might result in their deaths
seemed quite different from accessing the mind of a being
every bit as intelligent and self- aware as a person and writ-
ing in lines of code that made it accept suicide as a right and
proper action.

The orders being prepared now for what was evolving
into Operation Heartfire were like that. The AIs that would
precede 1MIEF and Pax Galactica into the Core would
have no choice in the matter. Lines of code would dictate
their choices, and they would choose to enter the Xul fast-
ness at the Galaxy’s center in a mission at least as suicidal
as diving an FTL starship through a sun. The humans in

Heartfire would at least be able to make a more or less in-
formed choice freely. . . .

Maybe he simply envied the emotionless aspects of artifi -
cial intelligences and their relationships with humans.

172

I A N D O U G L A S

Damn it, why had Tabatha left him? The two of them had
shared so much together for over twenty years. It just didn’t
make logical sense. Why? . . .

There did not appear to be any answers.

He was still studying the simulated image of Earth mo-
ments later. “General?” a familiar voice said in his thoughts.

“Am I interrupting?”

“Of course you are, Liam. That’s your job, isn’t it?”

Admiral Taggart’s icon unfolded in Alexander’s mind,
dress Navy uniform, medals, and corona. He wondered what
the admiral really looked like at the moment. With icons
and simulated realities, Liam Taggart could be in his bath-
robe and slippers at the moment, and Alexander would never
know it.

“I wanted to know what you think about this Pax thing.”

Alexander gave a mental shrug. “Hardly matters what we
think, does it? We have our orders. . . .”

“The hell with that. Yarlocke is playing politics with you
and the MIEF, and she’s going to get us all killed.”

“I think she has her own agenda.”

“Yeah. Big surprise. What is it?”

“Damned if I know. I think the important point, though,
is that she has a lot of people on her side. Most of them
well-meaning, whatever her issues might be. We’re on the
front lines, you and I, and we tend to look at things in a
rather black-and-white way. We exterminate the Xul, or the

Xul exterminate us.”

“Isn’t that the way it is?”

“Maybe. Probably. But a lot of people in the Senate, and
the people they represent, think that peace is the best op-
tion.”

Taggart snorted. “Peace is the best option . . . when it is
an option. Do you think the Xul are going to go for this?”

“Frankly, I don’t think we know the Xul well enough yet
to know what they’ll do. But the evidence of the past few
centuries suggests that . . . no. They literally don’t know
what ‘peace’ or ‘co-existence’ are. Hell, the xenosophontology

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

173

people can’t even make up their minds about whether or not
the word ‘sentience’ applies to the Xul. Did you see that last
downloaded report?”

Taggart nodded. “Yeah. They think the Xul mentality
may be a hive mind, intelligent, but without conscious voli-
tion. I don’t see how nonsentient beings could build star-
ships, though.”

“It’s a matter of defi nitions. Semantics.”

“Like . . . how do you defi ne intelligence?”

“Exactly. Or self- awareness. Ants, bees, and termites per-
form incredible feats of engineering and design, but as far as
we know there’s no consciousness to it. Hell, we think we’re
self- aware, but what does that mean, precisely?”

“I’ve heard the arguments,” Taggart said. “There’s still
debate as to whether our own AIs are truly self- aware and
sentient, or just putting on a very good act through their
programming.”

“Right. And if that’s the case, if we only imagine our AIs
are self- aware because we’ve made them to act that way,
maybe the Xul are the same. Acting on programmed guide-
lines laid down millions of years ago, like an anthill or a
termite mound, but not truly conscious in the same way we
are.”

“In the way we think we are,” Taggart said, and he chuck-
led. “Some of the mind mechanics don’t think we’re truly
self- aware, either. We just imagine we are. This whole mind
thing is just an illusory epiphenomenon arising from our
neurochemistry.”

“Too deep for me.”

“So . . . do we have an AI for the initial core probe?” Tag-
gart wanted to know.

“Yes. Pappy.”

“The primary 1MIEF AI?”

“That’s the one. We’ve been reconfiguring him by merg-
ing him with Thoth, the Spymaster AI that brought back
that intel coup from the Xul Nightmare.”

In fact, Thoth had been derived from Pappy in the fi rst

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I A N D O U G L A S
place, a copy of the original administrative software updated
and expanded to meet the special needs of his Penetrator
mission in Cluster Space. He’d returned from that mission
with a great deal of specialized knowledge—experiences
from within the Xul virtual environment—and that data
could now be folded directly into Pappy’s expanded matrix.

Thoth’s penetrator algorithms had been incorporated in the
update as well, as had everything learned from the Spymas-
ter mission in the way of Xul operating frequencies, data
channels, and security routines.

“Pappy-Thoth?” Taggart asked. “Sounds like some sort of
culinary masterpiece.”

“Well, at the moment we’re calling him Pappy 2.0. But
the upgrade is serious enough that N-2 is suggesting a whole
new persona.”

“A new name?”

“Yeah. Athena. The Greek goddess of wisdom.”

“And with a bit of a martial air as well. I like it.”

“We’re readying a new Spymaster probe.” He opened a
new link window for Taggart. “Here are the specs. We’re
hoping to send it through as soon as we translate back to

Cluster Space . . . say, in another week.”

“Sounds good. What do our friends in the Senate think of
this?”

“Why should they even know about it?”

“I don’t know. This whole idea of treating the Xul nice. I
presume being nice to the sons of bitches doesn’t include
spying on them.”

“Our op- plan—the general op- plan we share with Con-
gress, at any rate—includes site reconnaissance and gravito-
metric readings,” Alexander said with studied indifference.

“We have to know about the area we’re entering. Gravity
and radiation readings. Local stellar populations, planetary
positions and masses, presence and locations of local tech-
nic infrastructures. Not knowing all that stuff before we
send humans through is not an option. Hell, that’s one rea-
son we have military AIs in the fi rst place.”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

175

“Scout recon then.”

“Standard operating procedure. And if the Warlock
doesn’t like it, the whole operation is off. We have to know
what the local picture is before we barge in there.”

“Don’t preach to me. I’m one of the choirboys. What hap-
pens if Yarlocke doesn’t like it and the mission is scrubbed?”

“We send the Spymaster through anyway. This is too
good an opportunity to fi ll in the blank pages. We know so
damned little about the Xul, about what they are and how
they think. Liam, that Xul node at the Galactic Core may be
able to provide us with a hell of a lot of answers.”

“And the Pax Galactica?”

Another mental shrug. “Hell, they can tag along if they
want. Just so they don’t get in the way when the shooting
starts.”

“You assume there will be shooting then?”

“Assume? I’m counting on it. We’ve been fi ghting the
bastards for a long, long time, and others have been fi ghting
them as long or even longer. The Eulers. The N’mah. The

An. The Builders. We might not understand how they think,
or even if they think . . . but one thing we do know is that
peace is not a part of their philosophical worldview. When
we step through that gate in Cluster Space and appear at the

Core, it’s going to be like jamming a stick into a hornet’s
nest. All hell is going to break loose.” He expanded the im-
age of Earth, still hanging in his mind. The pinpoints mark-
ing personnel on shore leave were gone. What was left was

Earth as it appeared now far beneath the SupraQuito Ring

Complex, a bit less than half-full, city lights dusting the con-
tinental areas of the night hemi sphere, sunlight glaring off
streaks and swirls of cloud on the day side.

“I just hope we have what it takes to see it through, to end
the threat, the break the Xul, once and for all.”

“Well, one thing’s sure,” Taggart said. “One way or the
other, Yarlocke will get what she wants. Peace, or . . .” He
broke off the thought.

“ ‘Or?’ ”

176

I A N D O U G L A S

“I was going to say peace, or an end to 1MIEF. But I’d
hate to see Earth trying to hold out against what the Xul
could send out this way, once we kick over the hornet’s
nest.”

“No,” Alexander said, still looking at the impossibly
beautiful, infinitely delicate blue and white apparition of the

Earth. “No, I wouldn’t like to see that at all. . . .”

12

0407.1111

Atlantis Grotto

Sunken Miami, Earth

0125 hrs, local

“Hey!” Garroway said, startled as the realization hit him.

“Do you guys know what the date is?”

“Oh-four-oh-
seven,” Armandez told him. “Why? You
having a problem with your internal timekeeper?”

“The Fourth of July,” Warhurst said. He lifted his glass.

“Happy birthday, United States of America!”

“United States?” Kath said, wrinkling her nose. “What’s
that . . . like the Commonwealth?”

“Not quite,” Lieutenant Ramsey told her. “The original

United States was the forerunner of the Commonwealth,
yeah. After it grew to sixty, seventy-some states, though, it
was getting too big and unwieldy to be easily governed. The

Commonwealth was created as a kind of over-government
for the old U.S. and for the new states and territories that
were coming in, especially out-system. Eventually, the sov-
ereignty of the U.S. kind of faded as the power of the Com-
monwealth grew.”

“The Marines still remember, though,” Garroway said.

The alcohol was wrapping itself around his brain, he real-
ized, bringing feelings normally deep-buried to the surface.

If this continued, he thought, he’d have to kick in the sobering

178

I A N D O U G L A S
circuitry pretty soon. “The Fourth of July . . . and the Tenth
of November.”

“What’s the Tenth of November?” Traci wanted to know.

“You’re hanging out with this character,” Garroway said,
nodding toward Warhurst, “and you don’t know?”

“It’s the anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Marine

Corps,” Warhurst told her. “The Corps’ birthday.”

“Yup,” Ramsey said. “This coming November the Corps’ll
be eleven hundred twelve years young. So there, Mr. For-
restal!”

Garroway and Warhurst both chuckled. Nine hundred
forty-one years before, during a fiercely contested battle on
a volcanic scrap of an island in the Pacific Ocean called Iwo

Jima, five Marines and a Navy hospital corpsman raising
the U.S. flag atop a mountain named Suribachi had been im-
mortalized in the act by a chance- snapped photograph. Sec-
retary of the Navy James Forrestal, then on the beach at the
base of the mountain, had turned to Marine General Hol-
land Smith and told him that the raising of that fl ag meant
that there would be a Marine Corps for the next fi ve hundred
years.

The incident, experienced in sim by all Marine recruits,
was a point of Corps pride. Five hundred years? The Corps
had endured over twice that, now.

One hundred eleven years ago, there’d been a mammoth
party throughout the Corps celebrating the Marines’ one
thousandth birthday—a thousand years since the Marine

Corps had begun signing up recruits at the Tun Tavern in

Philadelphia, in the year 1775. There was talk of an even
more enthusiastic Corps-wide celebration in fi fty-nine more
years, one thousand years after the raising of the fl ag on

Suribachi.

Garroway wondered if he would still be here to join in the
festivities. It was distinctly possible; he would only be
eighty- seven then, and with nanoanagathics most people
nowadays lived to be two hundred or more.

Most civilians, he thought, correcting himself. Unless he

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

179

followed Gunny Warhurst’s example and retired, he stood a
good chance of taking the Long Orbit—burial in space, as-
suming they’d recovered his body.

Of course, with the Xul threat, the same could be said of
any one of the civilians here in the Atlantis Grotto. Earth
and its delicate deep- space infrastructure and far-fl ung colo-
nies remained horrifically vulnerable to a Xul strike.

He shook himself, thrusting the sudden and unexpected
flow of gloom aside. He wondered if he should use his per-
sonal med implants to adjust his brain chemistry, then de-
cided against it. Good friends and a pleasant eve ning out on
the town should provide all the attitude adjustment he
needed. He was actually feeling pretty good, though his new
legs were sore. A full Earth gravity dragged at him, wore at
his leg muscles, as the artificial gravity on board ship—
usually set to around a half-G compromise between Earth
and Mars—never did.

The six of them had come to the Grotto for a fi nal eve ning
together. Up- Ring transport had been so thoroughly snarled
for the past thirty- six hours that there was no way they were
going to make it to SupraQuito before noon tomorrow. They’d
dressed up for the eve ning. Garroway, Armandez, and Ram-
sey were in Marine full-dress. Warhurst wore a pattern of
fluorescent, animated tattoos, while Kath and Traci wore
complementary, sensually shifting patches of liquid light.

The Atlantis Grotto, in keeping with the dinner, dance,
and sex club’s theme, was murkily lit by shifting patterns of
undersea color. The main dining area was a domed trans-
parency, some ten meters beneath the surface, on the coral-
encrusted sea floor southeast of the central Miami pylons.

Faux-Greek architecture had been erected around the dome—
huge marble columns and pillars, many of them collapsed,
and the eerie shadows of sunken temples, all lit from below
by colored lights. By daylight, Garroway understood, the
place looked quite different; at night, the light show was
spectacular, but the subdued illumination meant that the
light worn by the civilians was all the more brilliant. He

180

I A N D O U G L A S
could have read printed text by the silvery glow streaming
off of Traci’s breasts.

High overhead, within the cavernous space beneath the
dome, a focused and self-contained agrav fi eld had been set
up within a shifting, boiling sphere of green light. Couples,
trios, and larger groups danced to the sensuous background
music inside the sphere, or swam, or engaged in enthusiasti-
cally public sex. The figures twisted and turned and moved
against the background of the aquatic glow.

Technically, Garroway, Ramsey, and Armandez
were
stranded. They’d tried to catch the up- Ring shuttle as sched-
uled on the 30th, and found the civilian transport had over-
booked and they’d been bumped. Miami and Orlando, both,
were crowded with Navy and Marine personnel trying to get
back to the Hermes at Ring SupraQuito.

Yesterday, the Hermes had left the dock at SupraQuito and
moved to L-3, a gravitationally stable zone at Lunar orbit,
directly opposite the Moon from Earth. From there, she was
beginning the time-consuming process of shuttling 1MIEF
warships and transports back out to Cluster Space, three and
four at a time tucked into her cavernous cargo bay.

“So . . . you think we’re going to get into trouble for being

AWOL?” Armandez asked.

“We may get an ass-chewing,” Garroway said. “Captain

Black has been known to chow down on green Marine tail
from time to time when they pushed recall too close to the
wire.”

“Hell,” Ramsey said. “There must be three thousand Ma-
rines in the same fix right now, all trying to get back up- Ring
at once. We all checked in on the Net. It’ll be all right.”

“Maybe if you’re lucky,” Warhurst growled, “they’ll leave
without you!”

“I wouldn’t call that lucky,” Garroway said. “We could be
looking at a captain’s mast—maybe even a general court.”

“Again, us and three thousand other Marines,” Ramsey
said. “They won’t leave without us.”

“Why do you say we’d be lucky, Gunny?” Armandez
asked Warhurst.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

181

He shrugged. “Jesus. Dropping in on Xul Central? That’s
not my idea of fun. It’s more like suicide, especially if you’re
on board the first ship into battlespace. Have you seen an
op- plan yet?”

“No,” Garroway replied.

“You think they’d tell us?” Ramsey said, laughing. “The
grunts are always the last to know!”

“A couple of days ago I linked with a guy I know in Per-
sonnel,” Garroway said. “He said the plan was still holding
on getting data back from our AIs. They’re supposed to send
a bunch of probes through to the Core from Cluster Space.

When they come back, if they come back, we’ll better know
what to expect.”

“Makes sense,” Warhurst said. “Assuming this peace ini-
tiative of the Senate’s doesn’t get in the way.”

“It already has,” Ramsey said. He sounded bitter. “That
ship should have been ours.”

“I heard the Pax is almost complete,” Armandez said.

“She’s a sister to the Hermes. Just as big, with FTL capabil-
ity and she can translate.”

Translation was the big advantage possessed by Hermes-
class transports. Originally, a decade before, Hermes had
been an immense military facility called Skybase, designed
to lurk unobserved in the little-understood hyperdimen-
sional realm variously called paraspace or the Quantum Sea.

She had station-keeping drives and agravitics just powerful
enough to nudge her slowly through normal space.

With a solid enough understanding of the metrics of local
space and of those of a desired destination, however, Hermes
could phase-shift—translate, in mathematical terms—from
one point in normal space through paraspace to another
point, even if those points were separated by tens of thou-
sands of light years. The maneuver was called a Quantum

Space Translation, or QST, and it had proven to be the most
efficient means to bridge intragalactic distances, bypassing
the usually guarded choke points of the stargates.

Enormous amounts of Zero- Point energy torn from the

Quantum Sea were required for each translation, and only

182

I A N D O U G L A S
truly huge mobile facilities like the Hermes- Skybase could
manage the feat. Hermes massed two million tons, a face- to-
face double saucer structure measuring over fi ve hundred
meters from rim to rim, with an enormous, open docking
bay giving the appearance of a deep bite taken from the
edge. Similar to some of the mining bases and colonies used
in Sol’s planetoid belt and out in the dark, cold reaches of
the Oort Cloud, the UCS Hermes possessed ZPE power taps
massive enough to manage QST travel.

A major upgrade eight years ago had installed an Alcubi-
erre Drive module as well, so she was no longer a tug-towed
hulk with translation capabilities. All things considered,

Hermes gave the Commonwealth one of its few advantages
in the war against the Xul.

The trouble was, 1MIEF needed more such monster ships.

Hermes could tuck three or four warships into her docking
bay—more if they were as small as escorts or patrol
vessels—and make the translation to a battle zone. She would
drop her ships off as though she were a titanic fl eet carrier,
then translate back to her origin point to take on another load
of warships.

But there were currently 135 vessels of all types in 1MIEF,
so each full fleet translation required twenty or more sepa-
rate trips to transport the entire fleet, an operation that could
take several days. The requirement sharply limited the fl eet’s
tactical options. Those first three or four drop-offs would be
all alone in hostile battlespace once Hermes phase- shifted
out for the second load, so long-range fleet ops had to be
staged through secure rendezvous points.

And no Marine enjoyed the thought of being in that fi rst
combat drop.

Ever since the first use of QST transport ten years before,
the Corps had been urging the Senate to approve the con-
struction of at least ten more fleet transports, of Hermes’

mass or better. Six years ago, the Senate—after lengthy
battles in the Appropriations

Committee—had approved
two new hulls, to be named Brynhldr and Anubis.

The ship names were those of mythological psychopomps

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

183

or “guides of souls”—deities or angelic beings, like the

Greek Hermes, charged with conducting the souls of the
dead to the afterlife. The Brynhldr had been scheduled to
enter service this month, but, just weeks ago, the Senate had
announced that she would be launched under direct senato-
rial command, and that her name would be changed to Pax

Galactica.

Like Ramsey, most Marines felt bitter about what seemed
to be a betrayal by the government. As Ramsey had said,
that ship should have gone straight from the AresRing ship-
yards to service with 1MIEF, to cut translation times for the
fleet in half.

“Tell me something, Gunny,” Garroway said to Warhurst.

“Shoot.”

“Why’d you get out? I mean, I hear you griping about the

Pax shit and the government and all of that, but that’s no dif-
ferent from just about every other Marine I know. Back
when I was in boot camp, you seemed to me to be about the
most gung- ho Marine ever spawned, the official image of a
fighting Marine. I just can’t picture you retired.”

“Jesus, Gare!” Armandez laughed. “He’s sitting there na-
ked between Traci and Kath and you ask him that? The guy
might be a Marine, but he’s not crazy!”

“Hell, I thought being crazy was part of the Marine job
description,” Ramsey put in.

“You don’t have to be crazy to join up,” Armandez said,
taking a sip of her drink, “but it sure helps.”

But Warhurst was looking thoughtful. “I guess you could
say it was a crisis of faith,” Warhurst said after a moment.

“Living the Corps life, I was . . . I don’t know. Falling out of
touch with the people back home. We have our own little
microsociety in the Corps, you know.”

Garroway noticed Warhurst’s casual use of the present
tense, but said nothing. An ancient adage had it that there were
plenty of former active-duty Marines, but no ex- Marines.

“I found I don’t have much use for the Ringers,” he contin-
ued. “The fucking down- Ring tourists. Native Earthers, though,
they’re something different.”

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I A N D O U G L A S

Garroway looked up at the illuminated air overhead. Fif-
teen or twenty dancers had apparently abandoned the music
and were engaging in a mass orgy. “Different how?” he
asked. “These people seem as much in love with themselves
as any Ringer.”

“Who . . . them?” Warhurst said, indicating the tangle of
limbs and smooth bodies writhing overhead. “Those are

Ringers. Most native locals can’t afford a tourist Mecca like
the Grotto.”

“Figures,” Ramsey said. “Business and capital has been
flowing off-planet ever since Armageddonfall.”

“Right. Earth’s whole population now is less than . . . I
don’t know. Two, three billion? Five hundred years ago, be-
fore Armageddonfall, it was something like sixteen bil-
lion.”

“I heard the people left on Earth are called The Caretak-
ers, ” Armandez said.

Warhurst snorted. “As if they could do a damned thing to
protect Earth if the Xul showed up tomorrow. The Belt and
the Rings are where most of the system’s population lives,
now, and that’s where the money and the major corporate
facilities and the big population centers all are.”

“Stands to reason,” Ramsey said. “Commerce follows op-
portunity. The Inner Belt is where things are happening
now.”

“Yeah, there, and more and more out in the Kuiper Belt
and Oort Cloud. If the Xul ever do show up, they’ll have
their job cut out trying to track down millions of individual
habs and orbital colony complexes.”

“Do you think they couldn’t?” Garroway asked.

“Of course they could,” Warhurst said with a shrug. “Next
time won’t be 2314. They’ll be here in force.”

“Which beings us back to the question. Why are you
here?”

“Maybe I’m trying to remember Earth the way it was.

Before all the damned tourists started coming down- Ring.

Or maybe I just figure the natives need someone to speak up

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

185

for ’em. They’re not as wedded to high tech down here as up
in the Ring, and sometimes the techie- toys from orbit tend
to drown them out.”

“Our savior,” Traci said with mockingly overstated grati-
tude, like a ste reo typical damsel in distress.

“What would we ever have done without him?” Kath
added, putting her head on his shoulder.

“Aw, knock it off,” Warhurst growled. “Happens I like

Earth and Earth locals, okay?”

“It’s the Ringers he can’t stand,” Ramsey said.

“Well, speaking as a Ringer,” Garroway said, grinning,

“fuck you very much.”

“You’re not a Ringer, Garroway,” Warhurst told him.

“You’re a Marine. There’s a difference, or hadn’t you no-
ticed?”

“Oh, I’ve noticed.” Garroway continued to watch the erotic
show overhead. “Those people don’t even know they’re at
war.”

“When it comes down to it,” Ramsey observed, “isn’t that
why we’re here? To keep them safe enough that they can
enjoy at least the illusion of peace?”

“That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.”

“What the hell?” Ramsey said. He looked around the
room. “Someone’s snooping.”

“Interrogator?”

“Yeah. I think I see him. Over there.”

Every person with an implant and a personal secretary
possessed a cache of public data, which could be accessed
by anyone else through an implant function called an inter-
rogator. If you saw someone you were interested in, you could
interrogate their cache electronically without approaching
them, learning a name, a contact code, or anything else you
didn’t mind giving to strangers on the street. Most Marines
kept their caches empty or nearly so. Garroway’s read gny-
sgt. garroway, ucmc and the legend semper fi. If anyone
wanted to know more, he reasoned, they could come up and
ask him in person.

186

I A N D O U G L A S

Ramsey fed him a targeting cursor marking the source of
the interrogation, one of two young men seated at a table on
the far side of the Grotto.

“Hey!” Armandez said. “He just pinged me, too.”

“Curious civilian, you think?” Warhurst asked.

“More than that. He just sent me an e,” she said.

“What does he want.”

“Me,” Armandez said. “In bed with him. I’ve locked him
out.”

“Mm. Maybe we should call it an eve ning, folks,” Ram-
sey said.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll have my dinner and a pleasant eve-
ning interrupted by a damned snoop,” Warhurst said. “Uh-
oh. He’s coming over.”

“Low profile, people,” Ramsey said. “We don’t want
trouble.”

“And if that character does?” Garroway asked.

As he strutted toward them, the guy made an impressive
display. He was essentially nude, but with most of the left
side of his body, from scalp to boots, covered by implanted
decoration, nanotechnically grown whorls and loops and
filigree in gleaming silver, like liquid metal, and ebon
black. The style, Garroway had heard, was called technorg,
and emphasized the blend of the natural organic with the
artifi cial.

The effect was somewhat clumsily highlighted by the size
of the man’s penis, gene tically enhanced so that, in its fl accid
state, it hung nearly to the guy’s knees. The organ was purely
for show, of course. No human female could have accommo-
dated that thing sexually. When aroused, the outsized mem-
ber was actually designed to shrink to more normal, though
still generous, proportions. At least that was the theory.

This casual biological reworking of the human body was
something Garroway found vaguely disturbing. His own
body possessed hundreds of upgrades, of course, from his
cerebral implants to his partly machine, partly biological
new legs, to artificial pigments in his skin that helped shed
ionizing radiation, to buckytube carbon weave grown around

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

187

each of his bones to make them stronger. Every one of those
enhancements, however, was Marine Corps issue, designed
to make him a better

Marine—faster, smarter, stronger,
harder to kill. This guy’s hardware—not to mention his gro-
tesquely oversized software—were purely for ego gratifi ca-
tion and for show.

“Well, well,” the kid said as he approached the table.

“What’ve we got here . . . pretty- boy marines? And a very
pretty girl Marine!” He reached for Armandez. “How about
you and me blow this hab and find us some privacy, baby?”

“Get lost, civilian,” Armandez said. Garroway was amazed
at how much disinterest mingled with nitrogen ice Nikki
could pack into those three words. As his hand reached for
her shoulder, she shifted slightly, and pushed it aside.

“Don’t be like that, baby! I can show you a real good
time!”

“Back off, kid,” Garroway told him. “You don’t know
what you’re messing with.”

“Don’t I? Fuck off, jarhead. This little gyrene slut de-
serves to find out what a real man is like!”

Garroway sighed, stood up, and turned to face the civil-
ian. He’d run into this kind of testosterone-sodden display
before, and always with the same outcome. There were ci-
vilians who just felt they had to prove their machismo by
taking on a Marine. The surprise was that each time one of
the idiots was shown the error of his ways, three more
seemed to pop up and try the same nonsense.

“Don’t, Gare,” Armandez told him, standing up as well.

“I need the practice.”

“You?” The civilian snickered, leering at her. “What’s a
pretty bit of fl uff like you gonna do?”

“Well,” she said thoughtful, “I could jam that ugly thing
dangling between your legs so far up your ass it comes out
your nose, then tie a knot in the end to hold it in place in
case you need a blow job. But I really don’t want to get your
slime on my hands. . . .”

The civilian’s leer turned to a snarl, but before he could
move, Armandez snapped her arm out too fast for the eye to

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I A N D O U G L A S
follow, two slim fingers thumped against the civilian’s fore-
head, above and squarely between his eyes. The weiji-do
strike, backed by the Marine’s augmented physiology, deliv-
ered the energy of a hammer’s blow. The civilian, who out-
massed Armandez by at least two and a half to one, staggered
backward, arms flailing, and collapsed across a nearby table
with a crash. The two elegantly clad diners at the table
screamed and knocked their chairs over trying to get back.

Stooping next to him, Garroway touched his left palm to
the man’s wrist. Public access data fl owed—name, address,
health status. Lennis Tarwhalen. SupraSingapore Complex,

EarthRing 1.

“He’s just unconscious,” Garroway told the others. “Nice
targeting, Nikki.”

“Thanks.”

“The little shit’s from EarthRing!”

“You sound surprised,” Warhurst said.

Garroway shrugged. “I figured he was a local.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, the locals are pretty laid back
and, like I was saying, most of ’em don’t have the money for
fancy electronics. Look at that metalwork. That guy has
tribal affiliations. He’s down- Ring slumming.”

“Slumming?” Garroway had not heard the word before.

“Some of the tribes like to come down- Ring and play
tourist,” Warhurst said. “They get kicks making trouble, go-
ing after targets of opportunity. They cruise joints like this,
pick up girls for some fast sex, pick fights, bust places up,
and they know their tech is far enough ahead of Earth stan-
dard that it’ll warn them if the local police are on the way.”

“So what’s the idiot doing rousting Marines?” Garroway
asked.

“Interesting,” Ramsey observed, “that the little SOB ze-
roed in on Nikki. Not Traci or Kath.”

“That display wasn’t about sex,” Warhurst pointed out.

“The jerk was cruising on ego and testosterone. If he could
put the moves on Nikki, he’d have bragging rights with his
tribe. He’s bound to have visual and physiological recorders
worked into that fancy metalware. He was either recording

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

189

for later playback, or transmitting to his buddies. Most likely
both.”

Garroway scanned for the kid’s companion, but the table
was now empty. He did see another civilian, however, a
powerfully muscled civilian in black armor, bearing down
on them like an incoming hovertank. “Heads up,” he warned.

“Trouble! . . .”

“What do you jarhead grunts think you’re doing to my
place?” the man screamed, his face a bright red. “You think
you can just come in and bust it up like it was nothin’?”

“The guy was getting out of line with one of my people,
sir,” Ramsey said. “He started it. We fi nished it.”

“What are you, some kind of smart mouth? Who’s gonna
pay for the damage? Eh?”

Garroway saw three other men in armor moving in from
different directions. The speed of the response and the fact
that they were wearing a civilian grade of light combat ar-
mor both were interesting. It suggested a set- up, probably a
deliberate plan to shake credits out of the Marines. A quick
interrogation of the Grotto own er identified him as Jerard

Usher, and indicated that the fl orid-faced man was, indeed,
the own er of the Atlantis Grotto. His address, however, was
listed as an apartment in Ring 5.

Music and conversation in the Grotto had ceased. Even
the orgy overhead had, momentarily, at least, come to a halt
as the revelers peered down at the confrontation on the main
fl oor.

“We’re going quietly,” Garroway said. “We don’t want
any trouble.”

“Yeah? Well, you got trouble, gyrene! You owe me fi ve
thousand for that busted table!”

“What . . . for this cheap crap?” His leg moved, a blind-
ingly fast side kick into the central support of the table they’d
been sitting at. The material was a tough, nanopolymer, but it
tended to shatter under a strong enough impact. It shattered
now, toppling the table and sending their drinks crashing to
the fl oor.

Warhurst stepped up close to Usher, grasping the front of

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I A N D O U G L A S
the man’s armored vest and lifting him off the deck one-
handed. In his other hand, he brandished a shard of black
plastic from the table. “Perhaps you weren’t aware, sir, that
while this stuff looks like mahogany, it is, in fact, a kind of
plastic easily and cheaply grown from landfill mines. See?

No splinters. At a guess, I’d say your table is worth no more
than, oh, five newdollar creds or so.”

The two Grotto employees, tough-looking bouncers, ap-
proached the tableau, but they stopped as Garroway, Ar-
mandez, and Ramsey dropped into weiji-do combat stances,
facing them.

“Now, I can understand your trying to take advantage of
some simple Marines visiting your establishment on lib-
erty,” Warhurst went on, his growl loud enough to carry
throughout the listening room. “Watered-down drinks, the
meat nanoconstituted from seaweed and scraps . . . and
maybe you figure your hired help can pick a fight with ’em
and shake ’em down for a few newdollars, right? But I’m a
civilian, and I live right here in Miami. I know you, Usher . . .

and I know the local law enforcement monitors.”

“Hey, boss?” one of the bouncers said. He evidently didn’t
like the cold look he was getting from Armandez. “Whatta
we do?”

“Uh . . . maybe . . .” Usher gurgled. “Maybe there was . . .

a misunderstanding? We . . . uh . . . we thought the Marines
here had started a fi ght.”

“No, the Marines did not start a fight. As the lieutenant
there told you, they finished it, but they didn’t start it.

Now . . . do you want to start a fight with us?”

“N-no.”

“What?”

“No . . . sir.”

Warhurst dropped the plastic shard, then slapped his free
hand across a data pad on the man’s left arm, triggering a
credit transfer. “There’s ten creds,” he said. “To pay for two
tables. I suggest you take it out of Mr. Tarwhalen’s paycheck.

He is one of your employees, yes?”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

191

“Uh . . . no . . . I mean . . . I don’t know . . .”

“We’re leaving, now,” Warhurst told him. Gently, almost
lovingly, he lowered the man back to the deck. “We’ll be
passing the word to our friends that the Grotto doesn’t care
for service personnel as clientele.”

“But . . . wait! No!” Usher’s eyes went wide. “I . . . uh . . .

told you, there was just a misunderstanding!”

“Well, there won’t be any more of those, will there?

C’mon, people.”

Warhurst led the others out of the club.

“I think he really wanted to apologize,” Armandez said.

“Of course he did. When the fleet’s in, half his revenues
must come from Marines and Navy personnel down- Ring
on liberty. He can’t afford to lose us.”

“So why the shake-down?”

Warhurst shrugged. “Hell, it’s always been that way. Navy
towns, Army towns, they grow up outside of bases like
weeds, and their main source of income is military. Some
treat their guests good. Others figure they can roust you be-
cause you don’t want trouble, don’t want the SPs hauling
your ass off to the brig, don’t want to maybe face a captain’s
mast for conduct prejudicial. Damned civilians . . . what?

What’s happening?

Garroway, Armandez, and Ramsey all had suddenly fro-
zen in mid- stride, far-away looks on their faces. Garroway
listened for a moment to a message streaming in through his
implant.

“Sorry, Gunny,” he said. “We’re getting a special recall.”

“Yeah,” Ramsey said. “A transport is touching down out-
side of Miami. They want us aboard now.”

Warhurst nodded. “Sent you an official ride, did they?

Well . . . thanks for coming down and looking me up, Ma-
rines.”

“Thanks for your hospitality,” Ramsey replied. “Gunny . . .

ladies . . .”

“Hey, come back next time you rotate through,” Traci told
them. “Please?”

192

I A N D O U G L A S

She sounded . . . not scared, exactly, but very, very earnest.

Like she genuinely wanted to see them again, but knew
there was a chance that they would not be coming back.

“We’ll take you up on that, Traci,” Ramsey told her. He
grinned. “Right now, we have some Xul to take down. After
the Atlantis Grotto, it should be easy!”

They boarded a local commuter submarine that would get
them to Miami proper in ten minutes.

And Garroway wondered if he would ever feel the tiring
drag of Earth’s gravity again.

13

0412.1102

Combat Center,

UCS Hermes

Cluster Space

0810 hrs, GMT

“A probe’s coming back through, General,” a technician re-
ported. “The first one. Athena is coming on-line. We have a
data stream.”

Alexander was standing in Hermes’ battle command cen-
ter, a cavernous compartment dominated by large display
screens, and by the ranks of couches occupied by men and
women linked into 1MIEF’s computer net. Most of the
screens showed views, from various angles, of Cluster Space,
where Hermes drifted amidst a cloud of smaller warships.

The local star, now a slow-dimming nova, still burned fi ercely,
bright enough to banish into invisibility the pale glory of the
galactic spiral far beyond, but it was shrunken now to an
arc- brilliant pinpoint of harsh light imbedded in the twists
and shining folds of its own atmosphere, shells of gas blasted
into space by the star’s recent detonation. The light, cold and
blue-white, gave a sharp edge to the nearest stargate, a vast
hoop of tarnished gold.

On the far side of that ring lay the Galactic center.

He considered linking in. Generally, he preferred to be
on-line for raw feeds such as this one. The incoming data

194

I A N D O U G L A S
were cleaner that way, more coherent, better ordered, and with
full access to ancillary data as it was required. Still, it was
good to appear in person once in a while, rather than solely
by virtual presence icon.

But to get a good understanding of the incoming data, he
would need to link in, at least superficially. There was sim-
ply no other way to understand even a fraction of what would
be coming through. In pre-network days, of course, scout/
recon data would have been compiled by an intelligence
team, analyzed, then condensed into a report delivered by
staff officers—an excellent way to lose the subtle nuances,
or for the commanding officer to be fed only that informa-
tion he wished to hear.

“I’m going to take this,” he told Liam Taggart.

“You want full-im?” the admiral asked. “We can scare up
an extra couch.”

“Not necessary.” For full-immersion, he would need a
couch, entering what amounted to unconsciousness as he
stepped into the link’s virtual world. “I just want the over-
view.”

Taggart grunted. “I think I’ll wait for the briefi ng.” And
there would be briefings, of course, after the data had been
thoroughly analyzed. But Alexander had been waiting for this
moment with growing anticipation. To hell with command
patience. He wanted to see what the Spymasters had found.

The Galactic Core. The expeditionary force’s astronomers
and physicists would be waiting for this feed even more ea-
gerly. The realm at the Galaxy’s center was still largely mys-
terious, holding riddle upon riddle, enigma upon enigma.

On a nearby console was a palmlink. Placing his hand fl at
against the smooth plastic, he brought the myriad threads
interlaced through the skin of his palm into contact with the
link network. A password and automatic DNA check opened
the security gate, and the data fl ooded through.

A window opened in his mind, showing a picket ship’s
external camera view of the incoming Spymaster, a blunt
torpedo drifting in front of the nearest stargate. He repressed
a start at the sight. They’d sent the probe through fewer than

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

195

forty hours ago; it was returning worn and battered, the once
pristine blue and white paint of the Commonwealth logo on
its hull sandblasted almost completely down to bare metal
and plastic, the black surface beneath burnt, scored, dented,
and even peeled away in places as though it had been through
a savage fi refi ght.

Perhaps it had been. He would know in a moment.

“Looks like it’s been in a fight,” Admiral Taggart said in
his mind. “Could mean they know we’re here.”

“We’ll keep the fleet on full alert,” Alexander told him.

He didn’t add the words of course. “But that might not be
battle damage. We know that conditions at the Galactic core
are . . . extreme.”

“Gas and dust, high radiation levels,” Taggart said. “Yeah,
if we go in there, we’ll be using everything we’ve learned in
the past ten years dealing with novae. But if the Xul did spot
it . . .”

“I know. And they’ll have tracked it, and know where we
are.”

The Spymaster had been designed to slip into an enemy-
occupied system and remain undetected, using various
stealth-cloaking technologies as Athena, the on- board AI,
probed local computer nets and virtual realities.

But the environment existing at the center of the Galaxy,
as Alexander had suggested, was extraordinary, still largely
unknown and unmapped, but definitely not conducive to life
as Humankind understood it. It was a realm of hot gases and
plasmas, powerful magnetic fi elds, and peculiar objects un-
like anything found elsewhere in the Galaxy.

There might be other dangers to spacecraft within the

Core besides lurking Xul.

At the moment, Athena—or a copy of the program, at any
rate—was being downloaded into Hermes’ computer net-
work, where it was being assimilated by Pappy. Essentially,

Athena was a smaller, more compact version of one aspect
of Pappy, but with large quantities of matching code that
were now being compared, line by line, with the incoming
information. Data acquired in the Core—Athena’s memory,

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I A N D O U G L A S
basically—could be stored and analyzed as it came through.

Thousands of subroutines, called code spiders, were going
through the data now, cataloguing it and marking the most
critical bits for immediate study. Although the data were
raw—meaning only another AI could read and understand
them at the moment—some of them consisted of camera
and sensor imagery, which could be split off from the main
stream and sampled by humans.

Alexander let himself enter one of those side streams . . .

struggling to understand just what it was he was seeing.

At first, all he could make out was a bewildering wash of
red and blue-white.

The human brain actually needs to learn to see, and see-
ing, of course, takes place in the brain, not the eyes. If the
image being transmitted from the eyes is so strange, so alien
as to be outside of human experience, it can take time for the
brain to interpret the image in any meaningful way.

Gradually, though, Alexander was able to pick meaning
out of the blurred and confused tumble of color.

He appeared to be looking into the center of a hollow
shell, with shining walls composed of myriad stars and in-
terwoven strands of soft-glowing dust and gas. The stars
were as densely packed, it seemed, as the beehive stars
within a globular cluster, like the one dominating the skies
of Cluster Space. It looked much like the vista of another
realm he’d seen—a region called Starwall just outside the
vast, flattened sphere of suns and nebulae comprising the

Galactic hub.

It was tough to judge distances by eye. Those stars were
hundreds, perhaps thousands of light years away, but there
was no way to judge that from the image in his mind. But
the star- enclosed volume felt huge, intertwined by glowing
nebulae and bathed in soft light.

Over all, that light held a distinctly reddish hue; the stars
of the Galactic Core were old, old . . . red giants, among the
most ancient suns of the Galaxy. Once they’d been thought
to have been spawned in an epoch before supernovae had
scattered transmuted elements across the heavens, and,

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

197

therefore, metal poor of the type known as Population I. Later
research had proven, though, that many generations of stars
had come and gone within the Galactic Core, with barrages
of supernovae flooding the region with heavier and heavier
elements from which new generations of stars had been
born.

How many of those massed red stars, Alexander won-
dered, had planets, had life? The entire galactic hub was
bathed in intense radiation fields—they’d proven that with a
military operation at Starwall a decade ago, just outside the

Hub—and most xenobiologists assumed that life could not
evolve under such extreme, such violent conditions.

But he knew that Life always was stronger, more surpris-
ing, more unpredictable, and less amenable to being stuffed
into a box for easy categorization than humans ever were
able to credit or accept.

So very many suns.

So many possible worlds. . . .

At first, that curving wall of stars was all Alexander could
really see, and much of that was lost in a distinct haze that
fi lled the star- hollow. As he adjusted to the scale and scope
of the strange panorama, however, he began to notice other
things, things that helped put the scene into perspective,
helped reveal its true size and depth. As he kept looking,
other features began to separate from the background, to
make themselves known. He could pick out the gas-delineated
bubbles of ancient supernovae, and several rings of gas
clouds encircling the very center.

That central region of the image was dominated by a
number of objects. Distance and scale made them all seem
tiny, almost toy-like, and Alexander had to employ a zoom
function in the download window to better see. Brightest
and most obvious was a tight-packed but ragged cluster of
brilliant, diamond- hard stars emerging from the tatters of a
blue-lit nebula. Several of the stars were particularly bright,
so bright that Alexander found himself mentally squinting
at them, trying to see through their glare. Assuming that all
had been born from the same nebula at about the same

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I A N D O U G L A S
time, they should all be of about the same mass and bright-
ness. Those most brilliant of the stars were exploding super-
novae. He could see the delicately sculpted folds and hollows
of the nebula, where radiation pressure from the exploding
stars were working the clouds of dust and gas like sculptor’s
clay.

Nearby burned a bright red star, its crystalline ruby color
sharply contrasting with the blue light of the cluster; a tail,
like a comet’s tail, streamed from the red giant directly
away from the hot glare of the cluster. And a few degrees
from that was something so strange that Alexander kept try-
ing to focus on it, and kept failing, as though his eyes were
sliding right off of it. He had to focus sharply to make him-
self see the thing, which appeared to be imbedded in a
three-armed spiral of gas like a miniature galaxy.

Elsewhere were other objects—things like comets smeared
across light years, and something, well off to the side, that
looked like another, smaller miniature galaxy, its spiral
arms tightly wound into a flat accretion disk, and with bril-
liant shafts of luminescence, like searchlight beams, ex-
tending out from the poles of its central hub. That peculiar
object, at least, had been known to Earth astronomers for
many centuries. The searchlight beams
were streams of
positrons emerging from a black hole; their interaction with
normal matter hundreds of light years from the singular-
ity filled the Core with radio noise—the 511 keV shriek of
positronium annihilating its normal-matter counterpart—
electrons. That particular object, Alexander knew, had been
dubbed “The Great Annihilator” by Earth astronomers, but
it remained one of the deeper mysteries of the galactic Core.

Measure ments of the velocity of gas within the accretion
disk showed that the singularity—probably originally a col-
lapsed star—was equivalent to about ten to fi fteen solar
masses. Astronomers had been looking for a black hole at
the Galaxy’s center . . . but the Great Annihilator, paradoxi-
cally, was nowhere near massive enough to power all of the
strange goings-on in that eldritch region, and it was also
offset a bit—by perhaps 350 light years—from the actual

G A L A C T I C

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199

center of the Galaxy. In other words, the Great Annihilator
was a black hole, but not the black hole, the one that scien-
tists expected to mass at several million solar masses and to
occupy the exact dead center of the Galaxy’s gravitational
system.

And there
were other strangenesses as well. Perhaps
weirdest optically were a number of streaks of light arcing
across the gulf, where gas or dust had been smeared into
vast, curving, and
inter-nested bands or ring segments.

Looking at these, Alexander was reminded forcibly of dem-
onstrations he’d seen as a child of the existence of magnetic
lines of force, using a magnet, a piece of paper, and iron fi l-
ings to make the invisible fields of force visible. He had no
doubt that he was looking at the effects of powerful mag-
netic fields here, as they reshaped clouds of ionized gas.

Alexander was still having trouble with scale as he stud-
ied the image, but the hollow within the central star cloud
appeared to be filled with a faint mist, thin to the point of
invisibility in some areas, so thick as to appear solid in oth-
ers. Like a planetary atmosphere, the Core’s haze shrouded
things in the distance, like the far wall of Hub stars, and the
curious artifact near the red sun was also blurred slightly by
the haze, making it feel distant, and therefore titanic.

“I’m having some trouble with the scale,” Taggart’s voice
said in Alexander’s thoughts. “Just what the hell are we
looking at?”

“The Galactic Core,” Alexander said, speaking not so
much in answer to Taggart’s question as to release some of
the pent- up awe he was feeling at the sight unfolding within
his mind. He shook himself, then added, “What we’re see-
ing matches the old radiotelescopy data. But it’s different
seeing it all by visible wavelengths, isn’t it?”

“Amen to that. The question is, how much of that stuff is
natural, and how much artificial? It looks to me like we may
be seeing some evidence of engineering, but if so it’s on a
galactic scale. If that thing in the spiral is some kind of huge

Xul base or fortress, how the hell can we hope to fi ght some-
thing that damned big?”

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I A N D O U G L A S

Alexander gave a wan grin, though Taggart couldn’t see it
in the sim. “We’re not supposed to fight them, remember?

Peace. That’s the watchword now.”

“Peace . . . with something so big and so advanced we’re
like insects by comparison? You know, Martin, I really don’t
like this.”

“Me, either,” Alexander replied. “But we’re in the chain
of command. Since when did whether or not we liked some-
thing have anything to do with what we did?”

“Yeah. Let’s have a full three-sixty, okay?”

“Right.”

The image data stream included information to recon-
struct the view in all directions. With a thought, Alexander
rotated their shared point of view, allowing the vista ahead
to swing to the right. The Spymaster’s vantage point, appar-
ently, was in close to the center of the vast, empty hollow
within the starclouds of the Hub. The wall of close-packed
reddish suns extended in all directions, more or less equally
blurred everywhere by the gas filling the central void. Be-
hind the Spymaster probe, a stargate orbited in slow maj-
esty, a golden hoop twenty kilometers across, the doorway
leading into the Galactic Core from Cluster Space. Nearby,
like tiny, metallic toys suspended in space, several struc-
tures hung near the Gate—the flattened sphere of a Xul
fortress, and several tinier objects that were probably Type I
or Type II hunterships.

Alexander never thought he would use the word tiny when
thinking of typical Xul structures.

He studied that Xul outpost. Strange. Alexander had been
expecting a much larger Xul presence here. The data gleaned
from a Xul ship in Cluster Space had seemed pretty specifi c,
indicating some sort of major complex here, something big-
ger than anything Humankind had yet encountered. One
fort and a few ships might serve as pickets for the stargate,
but not much else.

Taggart and others, though, believed the real Xul pres-
ence here lay much closer to the center.

There was an uncomfortable possibility, though, and that

G A L A C T I C

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201

was that some of what they were seeing at GalCenter was
artificial, structures built by the Xul.

A chilling possibility. The ancient enemy of Humankind
tended to build on a truly massive scale. But here, within the

Galactic Core, against that staggering vista, even the largest

Xul complexes appeared reduced to near insignifi cance.

If, however, Taggart was right, if the enigmatic structures
near the Galactic Center were in fact Xul artifacts, then the

Xul were capable of building on a titanic scale that Human-
kind had never before even imagined was possible.

They would need to study the Spymaster data closely if
they were to have a chance in hell of understanding just
what it was they were up against here.

He found himself dreading the experience, dreading what
they would actually fi nd.

0414.1102

Combat Ops Center,

UCS Hermes

1545 hrs, GMT

Charel Ramsey entered the COC with Lieutenants Cosgriff
and Shea. Their boss, the head of 1MIEF N-2, was waiting
for them, already in a couch but not yet linked into the sys-
tem. He was Navy captain Felix Pollard, a rough-edged
son-of- a-bitch who’d been in the Navy for almost three de-
cades now, but who’d passed on a number of promotions to
flag rank because his love was intelligence work. Informal,
even rude to the point of eccentricity in a service that tended
to emphasize uniforms, decorum, and appearance, Pollard
was perhaps the one man in the entire Commonwealth who
best knew the Xul and their capabilities.

“Gentlemen,” he said with gruff acknowledgment to

Ramsey and Shea, then added, “and Lieutenant Cosgriff.

About damned time.”

“We came down as soon as they passed the word for us,
sir,” Shea said.

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I A N D O U G L A S

Pollard grunted. “Strap in. You three need to see this.”

The three junior intelligence officers took link couches
side by side, settling back in their embrace as connector
grips grew from the couch frameworks to embrace hands,
arms, and heads. Ramsey felt the familiar tingle at the back
of his skull, then the fl are of light and sensation as data be-
gan fl ooding through.

The COC briefing center was wiped away, and he was im-
mersed within the spectacular, mind- bending vastness of
the Galactic Core . . .

“We’re still analyzing the data,” Pollard told them, his
voice a growl in their minds. “Enough came back to keep an
army of analysts busy for the next few centuries. But we
have to move on this, fast. General Alexander wants to be-
gin fleet ops in here within the week. And we’re going to
need you three to bring us back some specifi cs fi rst.”

All three of them had seen “rushes,” the unedited and
unannotated images sent back by the first Spymaster to re-
turn to Cluster Space. What they were looking at now was
far cleaner, more detailed, and more highly interactive. A
thought would call up blocks of data describing a partic ular
object—or at least best-guess theories about what it might
be—as well as hard data such as distances, size, and mass.

The four officers—three Navy and Ramsey, the lone Marine
in the group—could move through the simulated volume of
space quite freely with a simulated velocity many times that
of light, observing and examining everything. It was much
like immersing within one of the interactive planetariums
he’d seen and enjoyed as a kid.

Their briefing tour began, however, not at the Galactic

Core, but from a vantage point high above the Galactic spi-
ral, looking down on the Hub from some tens of thousands
of light years out. Every Marine who’d been out to Cluster

Space had seen this view with his own eyes, and not just in
downloaded sim, and the basic structure of the Galaxy was
comfortably familiar—a flattened, central mass of dense-packed
suns perhaps ten thousand light years across and six thousand
thick. From here, the central bar of the nucleus was clearly

G A L A C T I C

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203

visible. Like many others scattered across the cosmos, the

Galaxy of Humankind was a barred spiral, with a central
core about twice as long, nearly 20,000 light years, as it was
wide, imbedded in a glowing, fl attened-sphere, beehive
swarm of red-hued stars.

Out from the Hub, past banked cliffs of fast-moving dust
and light-obscuring molecular clouds, the galaxy’s spiral
arms stretched out into the intergalactic Gulf, two major
arms—the Sagittarius Arm and the Norma-Scutum Arm—
coming off the ends of the hub bar, and three lesser arcs and
arms—the Scutum-Crux Arm, the Perseus Arm, the Local
or Orion Arm—in between. Those arms were strikingly
distinct against the velvet black of the background space.

The appearance, Ramsey reminded himself, was an illusion.

The number and density of stars within the spiral arms was
actually only about ten percent higher than in the apparently
empty voids between. The effect was due to the density pat-
tern moving out through the interstellar medium from the
central Core, triggering star formation delineating standing
waves. The arms, where interstellar material was being
bunched up into stellar nurseries by those waves, were rich
with young, hot, and therefore highly visible stars, and the
brighter stars in turn illuminated vast fields of interstellar
nebulae, which together gave the appearance of distinct spi-
ral arms.

But the illusion was powerful and compelling.

It was startling to see just how dramatically thin the over-
all galactic disk actually was. The entire disk of stars stretched
nearly 100,000 light years from one side to the other, yet the
main portions of the spiral arms were never more than about
two thousand light years thick, even in toward the Core.

“We’ve had a general idea of the topology of GalCenter
for a long time,” Pollard said. A point of green light winked
on within the Orion Arm, between the Sagittarius and Per-
seus Arms, marking the solar system of Earth. “From

Earth-Sol Space, of course, the Core region is blocked by
the intervening clouds of dust, gas, and stars. Astronomers
estimate that for every one hundred billion photons coming

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I A N D O U G L A S
toward us from the Galactic Core, one actually reaches us.

We’ve been hampered in our studies of just what’s in there
by the barrier presented by thousands of light years of ob-
scuring dust and gas.”

As Pollard spoke, the angle of view changed, so that it
seemed as though the quartet of viewpoints were zooming
in on the spiral arm toward the microscopic point of light
representing the Sol system, then flashing in toward the star
clouds of Sagittarius, piercing vast, high-banked clouds of
light, of myriad shining stars, of streams and blobs and masses
of obscuring dust hundreds of light years long on the way in
toward the Hub.

“Back in the 20th Century,” Pollard continued, “we
couldn’t see the Galactic Center optically, but we were able
to kind of peer through all the crap and into the core region
using radio telescopes and devices sensitive to infrared and

X-ray wavelengths. Even from twenty- six thousand light years
out from the center, out in the galactic suburbs, we could
manage a resolution of objects as small as twenty astro-
nomical units across—say, the size of Saturn’s orbit.

“Since then, we’ve been able to get a better look at things
in there from new vantage points, like Cluster Space. But
until now, we’ve never actually seen the central region at
optical wavelengths.”

Their viewpoints emerged from a vast, curving wall of
stars. “The innermost core of the Galactic Hub,” Pollard
went on, “is hollow. The gulf in here is about fi fteen hundred
light years across. Turns out it’s filled with gas.”

“Are you saying there’s an atmosphere in here, sir?” Ram-
sey asked.

“It’s still a pretty hard vacuum by Earth standards, Lieu-
tenant, but the gas is denser at the Core, more concentrated,
than in any other region of the Galaxy we’ve been able to
measure. They estimate there’s enough hydrogen here to
form a hundred million new stars. Look there. . . .”

Ahead, a vast ring of nebula stretched across the center of
the inner gulf, a thousand light years across and tilted some
twenty degrees to the galactic plane, broken and lumpy in

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

205

places, but giving the impression of great velocity even
though it was visually frozen by its sheer scale. Data read-
outs showed Ramsey that the ring was expanding at 150
kilometers per second. The cloud was cold, at about ten de-
grees Kelvin; Ramsey’s readouts began describing the
cloud’s composition—simple carbon monoxide and hydroxyl
molecules, as well as more complex compounds, formalde-
hyde and formamide, acetaldehyde and ethanol . . .

“That ring, the astrophysicists say, must have been gener-
ated by an incredible explosion in the Galactic Core about
one million years ago,” Pollard explained. “It’s a witches’

brew of organic molecules.”

“Ethanol, I see,” Ramsey put in. “At least the fl eet will
have a great liberty when it arrives.”

“Well, the Galaxy is a barred spiral,” Lieutenant Shea
added. “I think we just found the bar.”

“Quiet, you two,” Pollard growled. Their viewpoints con-
tinued to descend into the Galaxy’s heart, flashing past the
rapidly expanding smoke ring of nebulae. GalCenter was
now five hundred light years ahead.

At four hundred light years from the center they passed
an even thicker mass of molecular clouds, a vast and far-fl ung
doughnut shape, dark on the outside, brilliant with shining
nebulae and handfuls of bright,
new-born stars within.

Masers—lasers at microwave wavelengths—howled birth
pangs into the cosmos.

“That expanding ring,” Pollard told them, “which is pass-
ing outward through the hydrogen gas in here, is triggering
massive star formation. The radio noise was part of the
original radio source discovered at the Galactic Center back
in the earliest days of radio telescopy. It’s called Sagittarius

B2.”

Closer to GalCenter, now. Though still relatively empty,
the gulf was occupied by numerous infrared sources and
objects that defied description. Off to one side, 340 light
years from the center, was the Great Annihilator, a fi ercely
white-burning accretion disk spewing antimatter search-
lights into the void. A hundred light years above the center,

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I A N D O U G L A S
the Arc reached up like a solar prominence, a streamer of
gas smeared into parallel arcs by unimaginably powerful
magnetic fields and magnetic flux tubes. The ungraspable
scale of what he was seeing continued to surprise Ramsey.

Each of those lines, according to his readouts, was half a
light year wide.

Farther in still. Gas clouds concentrated and twisted, with
velocities ten times higher than would have been expected
from gravity alone. Stars swarmed in hot, young clusters.

Within the embrace of the Arc, the gas was denser still,
dense enough that even the tidal forces here could not dis-
rupt it, but there was no evidence of new star formation.

Possibly the storm of energies here was so great that stars
couldn’t form. Or perhaps something else was in control. . . .

Twenty light years from the Center, the gas organized it-
self into a massive accretion disk, circling an innermost void.

The young stars were thicker here, clumped in blue-white
swarms. A soft glow of X-rays and cosmic rays fi lled radiant
space.

The mechanism at the center was a complex one, its pieces
identified centuries ago by radio telescopes but never well
understood. The radio source at the Galaxy’s precise center
was called Sagittarius A. Sag A East was off to one side, a
bubble of hot gas marking a supernova that must have ex-
ploded thousands of years ago. Sag A West was that spiral-
shaped, twenty-light year cloud of warm but non-ionized
gas at the center, while Sagittarius A* marked the exact cen-
ter. Close by—just one light year out from GalCenter, a su-
pergiant star, ruby-hued and streaming a comet’s tail into
emptiness—cast a bloody hue over surrounding streamers
and curtains of gas. The tail was stretched out and away, not
from Sag A*, but from a nearby cluster of intense, blue-white
stars newly emerged from a tattered nebula. That nebula
was extremely close to the exact center of the system—a
tenth of a light year, perhaps, and the gas and dust compris-
ing it were twisted into bizarre swirls and fragments that
gave mute testimony to the violence of what was going on in
there.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

207

Ramsey tried to understand what he was seeing. The pro-
gram he was using supplied labels for the various objects at
his request, as well as data like mass and velocity. The clus-
ter of intensely blue stars near the center was IRS-16—for

“Infra-

Red Source.” Gas speeds within the cluster ap-
proached 1,000 kilometers per second. The red star was

IRS- 7.

Closer in still, a tortured red star labeled S-2 appeared to
be hanging at the very edge of the central object.

“S-2,” Pollard told them, “has been known for a long
time. Its orbit was first tracked from Earth seven or eight
hundred years ago, and it provided the first hard data prov-
ing that there was a supermassive black hole at the Galaxy’s
center.” Which made sense, Ramsey thought. That was the
beauty of Kepler’s laws of motion. Know an object’s orbit
and its velocity along that orbit, and you knew the mass of
what it was orbiting. “S-2’s orbit is highly eccentric,” Pol-
lard went on. “But at perigalacton, at its closest approach to
the center, it’s only seventeen light hours out, and traveling
at better than 5,000 kilometers per second.

“The math works out to something like two million solar
masses in the surrounding stars, gas, and accretion disk, and
another two million to three million suns inside that thing at
the center. It has to be a black hole . . . given that much mass
in such a tiny volume of space.”

“So what’s the problem, then?” Ramsey asked. “We’ve
known about black holes for centuries.”

“Right,” Cosgriff added. She’d studied to be a theoretical
cosmologist, Ramsey knew, until she’d decided to join the

Corps. “Once a star just a few times more massive than Sol
goes into gravitational collapse, nothing can stop it from
falling into a singularity . . . a black hole. Two million solar
masses? Yeah, that would make a nice, fat one.”

“The problem,” Pollard told them, “is that whatever we’re
seeing there at the exact center, it isn’t a black hole. We
ought to be seeing something like a much larger version of
the Great Annihilator, which is over there. What we’re see-
ing instead . . . well, here, look . . .”

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I A N D O U G L A S

Pollard zoomed the simulation in even closer, and Ram-
sey peered hard into the veils of tortured gas and dust. Un-
fortunately, the program linking him into the simulation
appeared to have reached the limit of its resolution. He
would have expected to see something at the center match-
ing his expectations of a typical, if very massive, black hole—
a spot of emptiness, perhaps, at the center of that swirling,
three-armed spiral of gas just outside.

What he saw, what little he could make out, was quite . . .

different. Its shape overall appeared vaguely spherical, but
details eluded him in strangeness and in the shroud of mist.

Eventually, though, he could make out shadows and inter-
penetrating geometric shapes which gave it a decidedly arti-
fi cial feel . . . and yet the thing must be enormous, some
millions of kilometers across.

“What the hell are we looking at?” Ramsey asked.

“We’re not entirely sure, Lieutenant,” Pollard replied.

“We know from S-2’s orbit that there’re about two million
solar masses packed into that tiny, central volume, and, as

Cosgriff pointed out, that means it must be a galactic black
hole. But if so, then the reason we’re not seeing something
like the Great Annihilator is that this black hole is shrouded
or surrounded by something, as though it’s walled up inside
an artifi cial shell.

“We think—and this is quite tentative at this point—but
we think that what we’re looking at is a kind of Dyson
sphere. Nothing else we’ve been able to come up with would
explain the facts.

“And if we’re right, it means that the Xul may be a lot
further along technologically than we ever dreamed, and
that means that we, all of Humankind, may be in very seri-
ous trouble indeed. . . .”

14

0415.1102

Company Office, Bravo Company

UCS Hermes

Cluster Space

0910 hrs, GMT

“What the hell is a Dyson sphere?” Garroway wanted to
know. Even as he asked the question, he was already open-
ing a channel to Hermes’ computer net and beginning to
download the data.

“Named after the pre- space physicist who first thought of
it,” Captain Maria Loren told him. “Freeman Dyson. The
idea was that an advanced civilization, one trying to create a
lot of living space for itself, or one that wanted to utilize
every erg of energy from its sun, might do so by disassem-
bling its planets and building a hollow shell around the local
star.”

“Got it,” Garroway said as he followed the downloaded
information streaming through his awareness, scanning rap-
idly through reams of data. “The shell would capture most
of the heat, light, and other radiation from the star for indus-
trial purposes. People could live on the inside of the shell if
they had a means of generating artificial gravity. Or instead
of a solid shell, it might be a Dyson cloud, with trillions and
trillions of separate habitats and industrial complexes envel-
oping the star.”

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I A N D O U G L A S

“I wouldn’t want to be the AI that had to keep track of
that many separate hab orbits,” Lieutenant Ramsey put in.

The meeting was taking place in Captain Loren’s offi ce
on board the Hermes. Two entire bulkheads plus the over-
head had been set to display a view of outside. The local star
continued to dominate the sky, an intensely hot, arc- brilliant
pinpoint encased in shells of rapidly expanding nebula. The

Galaxy hung in the far distance, the subtle tones and shad-
ings of its spiral arms nearly lost in the glare from the nova.

In a different direction, outward, a nearby globular cluster
hung against Night Absolute, a frozen swarm of red-hued
suns. More remote galaxies were lost in the novalight, but
the nearest stargate spanned a quarter of heaven.

Present were Captain Black and his command constella-
tion, including Garroway and a dozen other Marines, volun-
teers for a secret op, a sneak-and-peek, that had been dubbed

Operation Heartfire. The N-2 contingent, Ramsey and six
other men and women from 1MIEF’s intelligence division,
including Captain Pollard, had joined them, as had Captain

Loren and several members of General Alexander’s com-
mand group.

Maria Loren was a naval officer with fifteen years’ expe-
rience, a member of 1MIEF’s se nior command constella-
tion, and the officer in charge of the expeditionary force’s

Tactical Operations Division. She’d summoned the others to
her office just abaft Hermes’ combat center to brief them on

Heartfi re.

Also present
were the artificial intelligences Smedley,

Cara, Thoth, and Athena, though these last were necessarily
invisible, and spoke to the humans present within their minds.

A large viewall at the far end of the chamber displayed an im-
age of the Galactic Center, a swarm of teeming suns, a spiral
of gas and dust, and the enigmatic, vaguely spherical struc-
ture at the precise center of the Galaxy’s heart.

“The Dyson sphere or cloud at GalCenter,” Athena
pointed out, “cannot be enclosing a star. Studies of mass
distribution force the conclusion that it encases a black

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

211

hole of two to three million solar masses, and with an event
horizon radius of approximately 7.8 million kilometers.”

Eight million kilometers—between five and six times the
diameter of Earth’s sun. Large, perhaps, so far as pipsqueak
dwarf stars like Sol were concerned, but a pinpoint along-
side giant stars like Antares, which had a diameter fi fty
times greater.

And within that relatively tiny volume of space, com-
pressed by the inexorable laws of gravitation, the mass of
two million or more stars warped the laws of space and time
into bizarre and wildly twisted new shapes.

The external shell, the Dyson sphere, appeared to span
some ten million kilometers, just large enough to accom-
modate the super-massive object inside.

“Okay, so why a Dyson sphere around a black hole?”

Garroway wanted to know.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Loren told them. “One
idea, going way back, suggests that an advanced civilization
might build a complex of cities and factories around a large
black hole in order to solve all of its energy problems. By
dropping mass into the black hole—whether that mass is
pieces of planet, stray asteroids, or their house hold garbage—
they generate a flash of energy, X-rays, mostly, that could be
captured and stored.”

“I don’t buy that,” Captain John Black said. “Not in this
case. They have QPT technology, probably better than we
have.”

Garroway nodded. “Exactly. They wouldn’t need some-
thing that elaborate just to raise energy.”

QPT—the acronym stood for quantum power tap—had
been the preferred means of generating large amounts of
energy, both on and off-planet, for centuries. The so-called

Quantum Sea, a kind of base state for all matter and energy,
was envisioned as a froth of elemental paired particles con-
stantly coming into existence and immediately annihilating
one another. Artificially generated micro-black holes were
used to capture a fraction of these particles before they

212

I A N D O U G L A S
could snuff out their mates, a process that appeared to
liberate large amounts of free energy out of apparently empty
vacuum.

“Don’t be too sure of that, gentlemen,” Pollard told them.

“A two-million- solar-mass black hole might raise vacuum
energy on a literally astronomical scale. And that’s what has
the brass worked up into a lather. Here. Check this.”

Pollard opened a window for them, containing a brief
historical file. Centuries before, it seemed, a physicist named

Richard Feynman had estimated that within every single
cubic centimeter of empty space lurked energy enough to
boil all of the oceans of Earth. John Wheeler, one of Feyn-
man’s colleagues, had disagreed, suggesting that the actual
amount of energy was something like 1080 times greater . . .

enough, perhaps, and if a way could be found to apply it, to
annihilate the entire Galaxy.

Perhaps, Garroway thought, it was just as well that Human-
kind hadn’t yet learned how to generate or wield that kind of
power. By harvesting a tiny, tiny fraction of the vacuum en-
ergy theoretically available in an empty cubic centimeter of
space, he could accelerate ships to close to light speed,
phase- shift into quantum space or bypass normal space at

FTL velocities, and generate antimatter by the metric ton . . .

all very useful, and all deadly on a planetary scale.

Garroway thought about the Commonwealth Senate with
the power to destroy hundreds of millions of stars, and sup-
pressed a shudder.

But if humans weren’t to be trusted with that kind of
power . . . what about the Xul?

“Sir, you’re saying the Xul are using the Galactic black
hole to generate really big amounts of energy?” Garroway
asked. “Like . . . enough to destroy the Galaxy?”

“It’s a distinct possibility, Gunny,” Pollard told him. He
opened another explanatory window. “Another possibility is
that they’re trying to access the base- state reality for the
entire Galaxy.”

The second window shocked Garroway even more deeply.

In the 23rd Century, physicist Alaina Mauldin had pointed

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213

out that it might be possible to tamper with the Quantum

Sea in such a way as to literally change reality . . . or to erase
it. Within the froth of virtual particles that made up the

Quantum Seas, she’d argued, were standing waves—regions
where particle-anti-particle pairs came and went with a per-
sistence that preserved information, if not material reality.

Those information waves represented mass and energy in
the more familiar universe of human experience—electrons
and protons and photons and everything else that was. What
humans were pleased to call “solid reality” was, in fact, an
illusion; electrons, neutrons, and protons were not funda-
mental pieces of matter so much as they were persis tent pat-
terns of information.

Given enough energy, Mauldin had suggested, it should
be possible to cancel out large numbers of those standing
waves . . . and in so doing simply blink civilizations, worlds,
stars, even entire galaxies out of existence.

Certain mental disciplines—notably the weiji-do martial
arts discipline practiced by Marines and some other elite
units—could shift reality on a small scale, guiding Marines
through the maze of a Xul huntership, for example, or mesh-
ing together the individual members of a combat team for
greater efficiency. What Pollard was suggesting was far more
deadly and far-reaching than that. Given control over the
black hole at GalCenter, perhaps the Xul could control real-
ity on an infinitely greater scale, deleting worlds, suns, and
civilizations at a whim.

The thought was chilling.

“Sir,” Staff Sergeant Ivan Tomlinson said, “the xenosoph
people have been saying for years that the Xul have a kind of
hard-wired fear or hatred of anyone or anything who might
be a competitor. If that’s true, if they have the power to
change reality on that grand a scale . . .”

“Precisely,” Captain Loren said, nodding. “We don’t know
exactly what the Xul are doing in there, but any of the possi-
bilities we’ve been able to imagine would be bad, very bad. It
might be a doomsday device, and if the bastards get paranoid
enough, they blow up the entire Galaxy, themselves with it,

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I A N D O U G L A S
just to wipe us out. Or they might have a way of targeting just
our planetary systems, and vaporize them all at once from
twenty- five thousand light years away. Or they have a way to
push a button, and Earth and all of Earth’s colonies and all
humans everywhere simply cease to exist.”

“The hell of it is,” Pollard added, “we don’t know what
they’re up to.” He sounded unhappy with the situation, as
though it were a personal affront. Intelligence offi cers were
supposed to know—or at least be able to make a good guess
about—what the enemy was up to.

Pollard gestured toward the viewall, and the image of the

Galaxy’s center. Newborn stars, some of them supernovae,
gleamed in blue-white splendor. With a thought, he shifted
the frequency of the displayed light, sliding down into the
infrared. Blue stars glowed orange, then in somber reds; the
background of gas and dust became sharply visible, a thick
mist almost obscuring the enigmatic objects at the center.

Starkly visible, now, were a number of beams of light
stretching out and away from the Dyson sphere. At infrared
wavelengths, they took on a solid appearance, rigid, straight,
and extending across tens of light years in a complex spi-
der’s web of energy.

“The images brought back by Athena suggest they’re
building something enormous in there,” Pollard went on,

“something utterly beyond human comprehension. But we’d
damned well better learn how to comprehend it and fi gure it
the hell out . . . because if and when they get it working,
whatever it is, we’re not going to like it!”

“That . . . that structure,” Lieutenant Ramsey said. “The
beams of light? It looks like it covers a pretty large area.”

“Almost seventy light years,” Pollard told them. “And we
think those energy beams are anchored somehow in the

Quantum Sea.” The view zoomed in on the Dyson object at
the center, fuzzy behind the thick haze. “Our best guess is
that the sphere, or whatever it is, is locked in place. It’s actu-
ally in two halves. You can see the accretion disk—that spi-
ral of dust and gas—circling in from the outside. It passes
through that gap between the two sections to reach the black

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215

hole inside. The Xul probably control the infall of matter
somehow, so that they can feed that monster at a steady
rate.”

“How in the hell do we fight something like that?” Gar-
roway wanted to know. “The entire MIEF would be a dust
mote next to that thing!”

“We’re not going to fight it,” Captain Loren said. “A least,
not at first, and not unless we absolutely have to. There’s the

Senate’s peace mission to consider, after all.”

“Why do I get the feeling,” Sergeant Carl Gonzales asked
with grim humor, “that we’re going to be in the position of
fl eas trying to bargain for peace with a Great Dane? If they
decide to scratch, there won’t be much we can do about it.”

“Right,” Captain Black agreed. “If we’re lucky, they won’t
even notice us!”

“Actually,” Loren said, “we’re hoping that that is literally
true. . . .”

Black raised his eyebrows. “What, going in under their
radar?”

“More or less,” Pollard told them. “The environment in-
side the Core is . . . unusual. And extreme. We’re looking at
ways in which we can take advantage of it.”

“Here,” Loren added, “is the plan so far as TacOps has
worked it out for Operation Heartfire. . . .”

The plan, Garroway noted, was both complicated and
daring. Essentially, a Navy- Marine ITF, an intelligence task
force designated Group Henderson, was to be inserted into
the Galactic Core. The insertion would be covert, requiring
the unit to slip in past numerous Xul bases, ships, and for-
tresses to reach S-2/I, where they would dig in and establish
a long-range observation post.

Heartfire incorporated three mission objectives. Their
first would be to take a close look at Sag A*, in hopes of de-
termining exactly what the Xul were building there. At the
same time, they would be taking very precise gravitometric
and radiation readings of Core Space, providing the data
necessary to allow the Pax Galactica and her escort to trans-
late into the area.

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I A N D O U G L A S

Their third mission would begin as soon as the Pax ap-
peared, providing back- up support for the peace mission just
in case the Xul decided to attack. If they encountered any-
thing in the deep core that would preclude Pax’s mission,
they would warn the Senatorial ship off.

Or try to. Garroway and the other enlisted Marines hadn’t
seen much of General Alexander in the past couple of weeks,
but the scuttlebutt was that he was locked in an ongoing
battle with elements of the Commonwealth Senate over the
supposed peace mission. Senator Yarlocke, in partic
ular,
was rumored to be pushing the general hard.

The details didn’t matter, and the politics, thank the
gods of battle, were up to others higher in the Corps hier-
archy. Fighting the Xul, Garroway reflected, might be pref-
erable in some ways to facing the demons of Commonwealth
politics.

Of more pressing concern was how the ITF was going to
carry out its mission.

“Just how the hell,” Garroway asked, “are we supposed to
get to S-2/I without being spotted by every Xul huntership
in the Core?”

“Yeah,” Ramsey said. “Does this have anything to do
with our new toy parked alongside the Hermes?”

That “new toy” had been the object of speculation and
scuttlebutt for days now, ever since Navy tugs had brought
it alongside. Almost one kilometer long and less than eighty
meters abeam at its widest point, it was a Type I Xul hunter-
ship, one among some hundreds of enemy vessels found
adrift within Cluster Space after the MIEF had detonated the
local star. The ship appeared to be relatively intact, but was
quite dead, its computer network burned out by the radia-
tion wave front blasting out from the nova, its Xul crew—once
resident patterns of data stored on that network—gone to
wherever it was that data went when a system crashed so
completely that the data were irrecoverable.

The captured huntership, with a typical Marine sense of
history, had been named the Intrepid, but so far, details of
what was intended for the prize, as well as an explanation

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217

for the repair yard now embracing the derelict, had been
kept a close secret.

“Obviously,” Loren told them, “we’re going to have to ap-
proach the deep core in stages. We can’t translate the Hermes
or the Pax into the area until we have detailed readings on
the local grav metrics.”

A window opened in their minds, displaying a schematic
view of the principle Core structures, the view pulling back
until Sagittarius A* and the various objects in the deep Core
had dwindled to a single, distant point.

“That means,” Loren continued, “that we have to go in
through a stargate, but the closest gate to the center of which
we’re aware is this one, designated Gate Hub-1. It’s con-
nected to at least one of the stargates here in Cluster Space,
so we have a straight shot in to the galactic hub. However,
it’s still over seven hundred light years from Hub-1 in to Sag

A-Star. Hub-1, of course, has a Xul fortress nearby, and is
heavily defended.”

Garroway struggled to maintain in his mind the scale of
what he was watching. The gulf between Gate Hub-1 and

Sagittarius A* was more than twice the span of the entirety
of Human-colonized space. The most distant Common-
wealth colony was a research outpost on Madoc, two hun-
dred fifty light years from Sol. The Islamic Theocracy was
thought to have some colonies even farther away, out in the
direction of Scorpius and Libra, but for obvious reasons they
tended not to share galactographic details of their empire
with the Commonwealth.

The scale of the spaces and objects they were dealing
with at the Core was huge.

“As Lieutenant Ramsey has suggested,” Loren said, “the

Intrepid is going to be our ticket past the outer Xul defenses.

The shipfitters are going through her now, hollowing out a
portion of her interior and wiring in life support for a human
crew. They’re also installing a carrier bay for a squadron of

AV- 110 Tarantulas.”

“Our penetrator missions have recorded extensive sequenc-
es of Xul ship-to-ship communications,” Cara added over their

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I A N D O U G L A S
internal link with the ship’s net. “We believe that we can enter
the stargate, inform the Xul fortress at Gate Hub-1 that we are
damaged and experiencing communications diffi culties, and
proceed under FTL to the deep inner core. Once there, we
can approach S-2/I and debark the Marine and Navy OP per-
sonnel.”

“What do we know about this planet?” Black wanted to
know.

“Very little, so far,” Pollard told him. “We haven’t seen it
at optical wavelengths, and inferred its existence from
anomalies in the background radiation. S-2/I itself is a red
giant trapped in a close and highly elliptical orbit around

Sagittarius A-Star. The planet, we can assume, will be hot in
at least two senses of the word . . . with a daytime surface
temperature above the boiling point of water, and a back-
ground radiation count high enough to fry any unprotected
life forms or circuitry. That whole inner core region is bathed
in high-energy cosmic rays and X-ray radiation, both from
frequent supernovae and from the effects of all of those
black holes.”

“Wait a second, sir,” Black said, interrupting. “There’s

Sag A-Star and there’s the Great Annihilator. What do you
mean by ‘all those black holes?’ ”

“Ah,” the intelligence chief said. “Yes. We’re just starting
to work up a complete survey from the data Athena brought
us. Athena? Can you address the question?”

“Of course,” the AI replied. “It has long been theorized
that solar-mass black holes created elsewhere in the Gal-
axy would eventually move to the Galactic Hub as their or-
bits degraded over time. In addition, the large number and
high density of giant and supergiant stars within the Hub
suggests that large numbers of black holes would form as
those stars reached the end of their life spans on the Main

Sequence and exploded. By some estimates, there may be as
many as ten thousand black holes between one and ten solar
masses within the inner hundred light years of the Galactic

Core. We have identified a number of these by means of ra-
diation released as they move through the inner core dust

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219

clouds, but we believe many remain uncharted. That, in
fact, will be another requirement for Heartfire— locating
and tracking black holes that may pose a threat to the Pax

Galactica.”

“Frigging wonderful,” Black muttered. “As if this joy ride
wasn’t already complicated enough.”

If Loren or Pollard heard the comment, they ignored it.

Garroway could understand Black’s anger. In any military
operation, the simpler you could make it, the more concise
its objectives, the fewer its objectives, the better the chances
of the op succeeding. Unfortunately, there was always the
tendency to piggyback mission upon mission, especially
when politics were involved. The admonition to KISS—Keep

It Simple, Stupid—was the ideal in military planning . . .

but it was an ideal rarely realized in practice.

“This is starting to sound pretty damned iffy,” Ramsey
said. “I mean, we’re going in there to find a flat metric for
the Pax. So far, so good. But now you’re saying that we’ve
got ten thousand unmapped black holes flying around in
there. You do know that all those loose singularities will
play hell with the metric, right?”

It made sense. Black holes—tiny pockets of gravitational
distortion—would play havoc with the local
space-time
metric, and the fact that everything in close to GalCenter
would be moving quickly as it orbited Sag A* wouldn’t help.

The operation was beginning to sound more and more un-
likely.

“Of course, Lieutenant,” Loren replied. “And if things
prove too hairy in there, we just might be able to scrub the

Pax mission.”

“That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard all day,” Black
said. “This op is a cluster fuck waiting to happen. Wrapped
up in ribbon and tied with a bow.”

“We answer to the civilian authority, Captain Black,”

Loren said coldly. “Not the other way around.”

And that, of course, was basic to the Marine Corps’ mis-
sion. For over a thousand years, the Corps had done what the
civilian government had commanded, without criticizing

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I A N D O U G L A S
that government, and without attempting to set policy. That
fact was one of the absolutes that maintained Humankind’s
oldest modern democracy.

“I meant no offense, ma’am,” Black said. “But you gotta
know . . . this op is a damned long shot. And our chances of
coming out of there alive are somewhere between slim and
non ex is tent.”

“Why did you volunteer, then?” Loren asked. “All of you
are volunteers, correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“If it’s hopeless, why did you sign up?”

Black shrugged. “Because we’re Marines. Because even
if the Pax mission is complete nonsense, we might be able to
bring out some good, solid intel about the Xul. And the
more we know about the enemy, the better our chances of
beating him.”

Because we’re Marines . . .

Garroway thought about what Black had said later, after
he’d returned to the platoon squad bay. Nikki Armandez had
met him there, and the two had made their way aft and star-
board to the mess hall for some chow.

Over nano-grown sliderloaf, he told her what he could of
the meeting. Parts of that briefing had been security sealed,
which meant that Garroway’s own implants would block
him if he tried to talk about them, but other parts were al-
ready general knowledge.

Like the fact that an intelligence team was about to be
inserted into the Galactic Core, ahead of the Pax Galac-
tica.

“Is it hopeless, Gare?” she asked.

He shrugged. “The skipper seems to think so,” he said,
meaning Black. “I think the brass is going through with it
because of the intel we’ll be able to bring back.”

“If you can bring it back.” She sounded bitter.

Both of them had volunteered for Heartfire days ago. Gar-
roway had been accepted, but not Armandez. She’d been
angry at what seemed like senseless discrimination.

“You still mad that they didn’t take you?” he asked.

G A L A C T I C

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221

“I don’t know. I just don’t want you going in there alone.”

“I won’t be. It’s a big op—a regimental strike team, al-
most three hundred Marines. And you’ll be coming through
later, with the Hermes.”

“Yeah. If everything goes right for you.”

They faced, Garroway thought, one of the basic dilemmas
of military romances—the fact that two lovers could not be
paired up all the time and, sooner or later, one would go into
harm’s way while the other remained behind.

“To tell you the truth, Nikki, I don’t think it’s going to be
as bad as all that. Intelligence thinks the Xul are all but
blind in the Core. We should be able to set up our OP and
transmit back everything the MIEF needs to complete the
mission. If anything, you’re going to be the one in the Xul
crosshairs. Hermes and the Pax are pretty juicy targets,
y’know? The Xul are bound to concentrate on them because
they can rotate in and out of normal space.”

“Maybe the Senate will call off the mission,” she said.

“Maybe. Though where that one senator . . . what’s her
name? Yarlocke. Where she’s concerned, I wouldn’t count
on it.”

She looked at him, clearly hurting. “Why did they pick
you?”

He grinned. “Because I’m a bad ass with ten years of
bad- ass experience. Because my legs are more metal and
plastic than they are regrown fl esh. Because—”

“I’m serious, Aid!”

“So am I. Radiation levels in the Core are hot enough to
fry any carbon- based life form silly enough to waltz in there.

Our ship shielding is pretty good . . . and the new armor is
supposed to be able to shrug off anything short of a thermo-
nuclear explosion. But they still want rad-resistant Marines
in there.”

“Bullshit. Ramsey isn’t a walking spare parts store like
you are. Neither are any of the others.”

“Mm. But they have had experience in hot zones, in
high-radiation environments. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

They cross-indexed all volunteers with Marines who’d

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I A N D O U G L A S
played tag with novae or places like Starwall. My name
checked. Yours didn’t.”

“Maybe . . .” But she didn’t sound convinced.

Later, after hours, the two of them made their way to a
suit locker overlooking the ship’s main hangar bay. The cav-
ernous space, over eight hundred meters deep, was kept
perpetually in hard vacuum, but transparent sections of the
travel ways along the towering bulkheads looked down into
a gulf of shadows and blackness, where brilliant work lights
and the pinpoint dazzle of welding arcs cast wavering glows
against the hulls of two ships currently in the bay grapples—
the light cruiser Ludwigson and the destroyer Plottel. The
area was kept in zero gravity, and the space throughout the
chamber was filled with drifting motes and lights—the ser-
vice craft and work modules used by Hermes’ maintenance
crews.

Halfway along one vast and curving bulkhead, a travel-
way tube gave access to a compartment filled with vac suits
and stored maintenance robots. There, they shed their uni-
forms and clung together, making slow love at first, but with
an intensity and an urgency that built and built and built
again to the final, gasping climax. Surrounded, then, by a
tiny galaxy of sparkling droplets—drifting beads of sweat
and other body fluids—they clung together in a drifting em-
brace, silent and close.

“It’ll be all right,” he whispered against her ear.

“I know that,” was her reply.

And both of them knew that both statements were
well- intentioned lies.

15

0505.1102

Tarantula 04,

Regimental Strike Team,

In transit on board UCS Intrepid

Cluster Space

1235 hrs, GMT

It was the second time a vessel named Intrepid had set sail
against the Xul.

Both the Navy and the Marine Corps embraced history,
the panoply of tradition and the men, women, and vessels
that had gone before. The very fi rst Intrepid in the U.S.

Navy had been a ketch, originally built in Napoleon’s France
and later sold to the Barbary state of Tripoli, who put her into
service as the Mastico. Under that name, during the confl ict
known as the First Barbary War, she’d participated in the
capture of an American frigate, the Philadelphia, when the
latter ran aground off Tripoli in October of 1803.

Mastico had been captured in December of that year by
the schooner USS Enterprise, renamed Intrepid, and brought
into the American squadron then blockading Tripoli Har-
bor. In February of 1804, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur had
taken the Intrepid into Tripoli Harbor, and with about sixty
hand- picked men—including Sergeant Solomon Wren and a

Marine detachment, eight in all—had boarded and taken the

Philadelphia without firing a shot. In an operation lasting

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I A N D O U G L A S
all of twenty-five minutes, Decatur’s men had killed or
driven off the Tripolitan crew, set fire to the frigate, and es-
caped without losing a man. The Philadelphia’s powder
magazines had detonated a short time later, destroying the
frigate before her captors could refit her and add her to their
own navy.

No less a celebrity than Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson had
called the operation “the most bold and daring act of the
age.”

There had been several Intrepid s serving with U.S. naval
forces in the centuries after the Barbary Wars, but the next
vessel by that name to become the stuff of Navy-Marine
legend had been a transport commissioned in 2314—the
year of Armageddonfall, the year the Xul had attacked Earth.

After a nine-year passage at near- c from Sol to the Sirius
system, this Intrepid had entered the stargate at Sirius and
delivered her cargo—25,000 metric tons of sand lifted from
the deserts of Mars—releasing it at a velocity just under the
speed of light. The sand cloud had scoured the surface of a

Xul-colonized world in a region called Night’s Edge, and
vaporized an enemy fleet. The strike, a first and partial pay-
back for the devastation wreaked on Earth, had provided a
much-needed psychological victory for a broken and dis-
couraged Humankind.

And now a new Intrepid was taking a Marine scouting
force into the very heart of the Xul realm.

Unfortunately, at the moment, Garroway could see very
little of the outside world. Scarcely able even to wiggle, he
was stuffed into one of the newly issued Type 690 power
armor units, and that, in turn, was nested within the narrow
troop bay of an AV-110 Tarantula along with twenty- three
other Marines in Type 690s. A dozen Tarantulas rode in a
hollowed- out space in Intrepid’s alien belly, mounted in four
ranks of three. He had the Regimental Strike Team’s net-
feed, but at the moment that was showing nothing but static
on the vid channels, and nothing but the terse conversation
of the Navy bridge crew on audio. Nestled like Russian
dolls, Marines in armored suits in landing craft in hastily

G A L A C T I C

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225

converted troop carriers, not all of the communication ame-
nities were working yet. From the sound of things there’d
been another delay.

Typical.

“Always the same story,” Sergeant Willem Shelby said
over the platoon net. “Hurry up and wait.”

“Welcome to the Marine Corps, Shelby,” Captain Black
said.

“That’s right,” Corporal Michael Fossey added. “For ev-
ery minute you spend in the Corps, it’s fifty-nine and a half
seconds of unimaginable boredom . . .”

“. . . and half a second of stark terror,” Garroway said,
completing the old joke.

“Watch it, people,” Staff Sergeant Tomas Vincent growled.

“That’s my Corps you’re putting down. Every day an adven-
ture! Every meal a banquet! Every alien life form another
opportunity for target practice! . . .”

Garroway listened to the banter, amused, but also feeling
the tug of conflicting emotions. It had been a month since
his aborted leave Earthside, but he was still digesting some
of his experiences. Out here, existence, life, took on a harsh
illumination, an interplay of starkest black and white. A

Marine’s entire being was focused on his fellow Marines
and, on a grander scale, on the War. On Earth, and in the
teeming hive of EarthRing, people were barely aware that
there was a war . . . or that Earth and all of Humankind might
be snuffed out at any moment.

At the moment, Garroway’s view was limited to his suit’s
primary optical input, which meant that all he could see was
the red-lit near-darkness of the Tarantula’s troop bay, where
a twenty-four-Marine section was packed in shoulder to ar-
mored shoulder, unable to move, unable to even see if the
transport was under attack. They were still in Cluster Space,
evidently, but any moment now they would be transiting
across about twenty-five thousand light years, to emerge in
what might well be the most heavily defended Xul strong-
hold in the Galaxy.

Damn it, how much longer?

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I A N D O U G L A S

Garroway opened a private channel. “Hey, Gunny?”

“Yeah?” Gunnery Sergeant Michel Warhurst replied over
the link. Garroway’s former DI was in another Tarantula,

08, elsewhere within Intrepid’s belly.

“Why the hell did you come back?”

Warhurst’s return to the Corps had been a complete and
utter surprise to Garroway. He’d seen how the man had been
living Earthside—that beautiful undersea apartment with
its view of Sunken Miami, two gorgeous and loving fuck-
buddies, and a hot tub that stopped just two decimals short
of absolute hedonism.

He also remembered what Warhurst had said about this

Galactic Core op. That’s not my idea of fun. It’s more like
suicide, especially if you’re on board the first ship into bat-
tlespace. . . .

“Right now,” Warhurst replied after a moment’s hesita-
tion, “I’m kind of wondering that myself.”

Warhurst had re-enlisted less than forty-eight hours after

Garroway, Armandez, and Ramsey had returned up-ring
and reported back on board the Hermes. Still well under the

Corp’s mandatory retirement age of ninety, he’d been sent to
the Corp’s Camp Helicon on Luna’s Mare Imbrium, where
his implants and personal software had been upgraded to
current military standards. A two-week physical refresher
course had followed, during which time he’d put in a request
for duty with 1MIEF.

Normally, an older Marine who’d been out of the Corps
for that long would have received a planetside billet, possi-
bly embassy duty, possibly at a recruiting office or logistical
base. Since Warhurst had been a former drill instructor, with
a skill-set much in demand, they’d intended to send him to a

DI billet on Mars to train new recruits. The way Warhurst
had told the story, though, he’d made a loud enough noise
that the powers- that- be had assigned him to Delta Company,

First Marine Assault Battalion, then seconded him to the
newly created Regimental Strike Team.

The truth of the matter was that losses had been heavy,
and new recruits hard to come by. Personnel was so happy to

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

227

get another warm body—a trained warm body, no less—that

Warhurst likely could have written his own ticket.

The question was why he wanted to when he’d already
served his time, and more, and had had it so good as a re-
tiree back on Earth.

“I guess,” Warhurst said after another long pause, “I just
couldn’t stand the thought of you young puppies going out
there without my sage advice and years of experience and
getting yourselves killed.”

“I think you didn’t want to miss the big one,” Garroway
said. “The last op against the Xul.”

Warhurst chuckled, but it sounded bitter. “You think this
is the last?”

Garroway performed a mental shrug. “Isn’t it? We’re go-
ing in against what looks like their main base. Either the

Senate’s Pax mission will do its thing and we’ll have peace,
or we’ll kick the bastards right where it hurts them most.”

“You’re full of shit, Garroway. There’ll never be peace.

Not with the Xul. You know that. The Senate doesn’t, but
anyone who’s been up against the Xul knows better.”

“Then we take out their cozy little nest at GalCenter.”

“And what makes you think that will end the Xul threat?

These . . . these critters have been kicking ass all over the

Galaxy for at least ten million years, maybe longer. At last
estimate, the Xul have major bases in something like half a
million star systems, and control at least that many stargates.

In the last five hundred years, we’ve investigated . . . what?

Maybe two-tenths of one percent of that number of gates
and systems. Jesus, Garroway! There may be tens of billions
of hunterships in our Galaxy, as many hunterships as there
are human beings! Do you think they’re all going to stop
working just because we shut down their operations in the

Core? And that, of course, assumes we can shut them down.

It may just be too big.”

Garroway was silent for a moment. In the background, he
could hear the low-voiced murmur of conversation from In-
trepid’s bridge. “Engage primary drive.”

“Engaged. We’re moving. . . .”

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I A N D O U G L A S

“Gate interface in twenty seconds . . .”

“If it’s hopeless,” Garroway said at last, “why the hell did
you come? You could be back in Miami right now, soaking
in your hot tub and alternating turns with Kath and Traci.”

“I didn’t say it was hopeless,” Warhurst told him. “After
all, we’re Marines. . . .”

This was the man, Garroway remembered, who’d come
after him ten years ago after his flight through an exploding
star, who’d risked everything to pull him out of a burning,
radioactive hell, just because he was a fellow Marine.

Perhaps there didn’t need to be any deeper explanation
than that.

“Well, it’s good to have you aboard again, Gunny. Even if

I did hate your guts back in boot camp.”

A shudder passed through Garroway’s body. “Hey! I think
we just went through the Gate!”

“Yup,” Warhurst replied. “We’re in the Core, now.” With
a fine sense of understatement, he added, “Here’s where it
starts to get interesting. . . .”

Nightstar 442,

Flight Deck, UCS Cunningham

In Transit aboard UCS Intrepid

Core Space

1252 hrs, GMT

Unlike the grunts on board the Tarantula transports, Lieu-
tenant Ramsey had a full sensory link with Intrepid’s C3, or

Combat Command Center. The slender needle of the captured
huntership had just threaded through the twenty-kilometer-
wide hoop of one of the Cluster Space stargates, with the
soft, spiral glow of the Galaxy dominating the starscape, and
was emerging now into a very different, very alien realm.

Cluster Space had been dark, the glow of the Galaxy just
barely discernable against the vast and ultimate blackness of
endless night. Core Space was very nearly a photographic

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negative of that, a universe of pure light, with very little
darkness visible anywhere against that softly radiant back-
ground. From Ramsey’s vantage point, it felt as though he
was just emerging into the interior of an immense bubble, a
bubble with walls composed of gleaming, red-hued stardust,
and woven through and through with the pastel glow of
streaming, clotted nebulae.

He could see GalCenter in the distance, a knot of nebu-
losity ablaze with hotter, younger, bluer suns, with streamers
of gas looping through space along the force lines of power-
ful magnetic fields. Data streamed into his consciousness from
myriad sensors, monitoring numerous wavelengths. Besides
visible light, he could see the background glow of radiation
at ultraviolet, X-ray, and cosmic-ray wavelengths, as well as
the sullen glow of infrared and radio-source objects. The

Great Annihilator was a dazzling, twin- beamed beacon, as
lesser black holes left curving tracks of hard radiation against
the dust clouds through which they were plowing. From
here, seven hundred light years out, GalCenter was partially
blocked by the expanding molecular cloud, which resembled
a large, big-holed doughnut, black and brown-red on the
outside, gleaming blue-white on the inside. Shafts of light
glowed through the openings at top and bottom; what Ram-
sey could see of the center itself resembled a furball of dust,
gas, stars, black-hole tracks, and point sources of radiation.

High and to one side, beyond the arc of the stargate ring,
the Xul fortress kept watch, a flattened sphere fi ve kilometers
across, bristling with towers, sponsons, and turrets.

Ramsey gave his Nightstar a final diagnostic run- through,
reassuring himself that all systems were powered up and com-
bat ready. The F/A-4041 Nightstar was the most recent space-
capable fighter to be added to the Corps inventory—a heavy,
powerful, hard- hitter massing almost 120 tons, it was capable
of an acceleration of almost two hundred gravities. Slots for
weapons pods allowed it to tailor load-outs for every mission
from planetary bombardment and close ground support to bat-
tlespace superiority and orbital-fortress suppression. Mounting

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I A N D O U G L A S
the new generation of pocket on- board QPT generators, they
could operate in de pen dently from quantum- entangled power
transmission, the smallest spacecraft to do so.

All systems were go. Ramsey and fi fteen other Nightstar
pilots of Raptor Squadron waited in dark silence as the In-
trepid slid clear of the Core stargate. In his mind’s eye, he
could see the fortress some fifty kilometers distant.

“We are being probed,” a voice said—Athena, the AI
running both Intrepid and the Marine assets hidden within

Intrepid’s bowels. “I am engaging the enemy in dialogue.”

Ramsey wished he could actually hear that conversation,
but knew that it was beyond any merely human ken, a rapid-
fire exchange of electronic queries and replies in Xul trinary
code, and completely non-verbal. He found himself tensing,
holding his breath, waiting for a high-energy fusillade from
the alien fortress.

When nothing happened in the next fifteen seconds, he
gradually allowed himself to breathe. Athena, he knew, would
be presenting Intrepid as a Xul huntership caught by the
nova in Cluster Space and badly damaged, its memory,
weapons systems, and electronic population all but obliter-
ated. The kilometer-long vessel’s exterior certainly supported
that story. The ship’s normally gleaming gold surface was
scoured, blasted, and blackened where the exploding star’s
touch had seared the incredibly tough Xul metal-and-plastic
alloys. Some dozens of Xul derelicts had been recovered
from Cluster Space, and were being converted into Com-
monwealth warships; Intrepid, though, had been marked for
special duty.

Most Xul warships and defense structures were almost
entirely solid, their interiors packed with the Xul equivalent
of electronic circuits and processors and riddled by shafts
and tunnels used for access by the ship’s robotic mainte-
nance and defense units. Most of that circuitry, apparently,
was used to support the billions of individual patterns of data
that represented uploaded Xul personalities.

In Intrepid, several hundred thousand tons of support cir-
cuitry had been gutted, replaced by a small command center

G A L A C T I C

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231

occupied by the ship’s human crew and its life- support mod-
ule, plus the Marine light transport Cunningham carrying
sixteen Nightstar fi ghters, a single Euler-derived starburster
triggership, and twelve AV-110 Tarantulas with 288 combat

Marines already packed on board. Xul weaponry, much of
which was still not understood by human xenotechnologists,
had been replaced by human weapons—mass drivers, high-
energy lasers, and plasma cannon. If the fortress detected
something amiss, if it opened fire on the disguised intruder,
the Intrepid would be able to return fi re.

Not that she would be able to engage that monster for very
long. Estimates suggested that Intrepid might survive as
much as two seconds in the holocaust that would ensue.

The feeling that he was being watched, personally and
microscopically, became an intolerable itch between Ram-
sey’s shoulder blades.

“The fortress appears to have accepted us,” Athena said
over the link. “I am detecting no change in weaponry power
levels or scanner frequencies.”

Past the first hurdle. One of the very few advantages Hu-
mankind possessed in the war with the Xul was in the speed
and adaptability of human-designed AIs. With every suc-
cessful penetrator probe, the human computer technologists
and xenosoph experts learned a bit more.

Very gradually, under Athena’s guidance, Intrepid began
to accelerate. Pushing at nearly three hundred gravities,
her speed increased enormously, as her inertial dampers
shrouded the fragile flesh and blood on board, protecting it
from the crushing acceleration.

Light exploded around Intrepid’s needle-slim prow, as the
gas and dust filling the cavernous void at the Galaxy’s core
slammed into the ship’s protective screens. At nearly eight-tenths
of light speed, the massive vessel’s FTL drive switched on.

The Xul had developed a faster- than-light technology that
operated on a completely different principle from Humankind’s

Alcubierre Drive. Rather than encapsulating the ship within a
highly distorted bubble of space-
time, the Xul hunterships
engaged in a rapid-fire sequence of jumps between normal space

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I A N D O U G L A S
and the Quantum Sea, each jump bypassing light minutes of
space in a timeless instant.

That, at least, was the theory. Commonwealth xenotech-
nologists were still unraveling the secrets of Xul FTL the-
ory. Athena could operate the drive, however, even if the
exact mechanism of the vessels’

space-devouring jumps
through the Quantum Sea were not yet fully understood.

Ramsey had no partic ular qualms about this; he didn’t un-
derstand how a viewall or an agrav lift engine worked, ei-
ther, but he used the technology every day.

The Xul ship hurtled deeper into the Core. Hours passed,
and the ship dropped through Sagittarius B2, the expanding
molecular cloud interacting with the surrounding medium.

Sensory input received each instant that the ship was in nor-
mal space was stitched together within Ramsey’s brain, giv-
ing the illusion that stars, dust clouds, and other objects
were drifting slowly past, like towering thunderheads viewed
from the cockpit of an atmospheric fl ier.

Dark clots of nebulae slid past . . . and then, four hun-
dred light years from GalCenter, Intrepid emerged from a
shining wall of light into the inner gulf. Ahead, IRS-16, the
cluster of blue suns at GalCenter, grew sharply brighter.

Intrepid’s computer was adjusting the data pouring in through
the sensory inputs, correcting for relativistic distortion. The
interior of the Core, everywhere, gleamed in dazzling light.

And yet more hours passed. Slowly, the tangle of objects
just visible at GalCenter began to sort themselves out, un-
tangling from the central knot of dust and light and drifting
apart. From Ramsey’s technically enhanced perspective,
thousands of black holes, ranging in size from one or two
solar masses to the Great Annihilator itself, were marked by
icons showing the position and relative motion of each. They
formed a cloud about the innermost Core, like a globular
cluster . . . but with each member invisible at optical wave-
lengths, detectable only by its individual signature of X-rays
and harder radiations.

Ramsey sincerely hoped that all of those gravitational

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233

singularities had been spotted and mapped. If Intrepid hap-
pened to strike one, or even simply skimmed too close to an
unseen event horizon, this operation would be over almost
before it had begun.

A sudden jar shuddered through the length of the In-
trepid. Athena had just performed a sharp and unforeseen
maneuver, possibly to avoid striking just such an obstacle as
one of those black holes orbiting GalCenter. For the shock of
the maneuver to be felt through the Xul vessel’s inertial damp-
ers meant that it had been a violent one. A moment later, one
of the black-hole icons separated from the knot ahead and
slipped past to starboard.

A close one. . . .

The stars of the central cluster were opening up now, and

Ramsey could see the broad, flat spiral of the central black
hole’s accretion disk, like a whirlpool twenty light years
across, red at the outer regions, brilliant blue at the heart.

Several stars hung within that maelstrom, many showing
cometary tails pointed away from IRS-16. A single bright red
star burned just above the accretion disk, illuminating part
of it like moonlight upon clouds. His mental software identi-
fied the star as the mission objective—S-2.

Deeper still. Athena was highlighting Xul ships and struc-
tures now, bracketing them in red within his mind. Gods,
they were everywhere! None of them, however, seemed to
be paying much attention to the Intrepid as she plunged
deeper into the Core. Ramsey could see the tracks of other

Xul ships as they moved at FTL through the dust clouds of
the center. Each time a ship dropped into normal space, its
screens slammed into drifting grains of dust and molecules
of gas at relativistic speeds, with the result that starships
here scratched contrails against the sky in X-rays and hard
radiation. He had to remind himself that the nearest of those
ship contrails was a good ten light years distant, and marked,
therefore, a ship that had been passing ten years ago. Most
of those contrails were even more remote in both space and
time.

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I A N D O U G L A S

But it was a reminder of how crowded this region was
with Xul ships and orbital structures.

S-2 was growing larger, now, showing a distinct disk as

Intrepid slowed and moved closer.

Athena made some final adjustments to the starship’s
course, then dropped into normal space, dumping velocity.

The AI’s timing was perfect. In an instant, the planet S-2/I
appeared, a slender, red-ocher-white crescent bowed away
from the red glare of the star, swelling rapidly from tiny
crescent to a red-illumined scythe slicing across heaven.

Relative velocities matched, Intrepid dropped into plane-
tary orbit. Below, the world’s night side blotted out half of
the swollen glare of the red giant beyond, but the surface,

Ramsey noted, was not completely black. The planet pos-
sessed magnetic fields, and there was a dazzling display of
auroras playing about both poles.

This in itself represented a major planetological mystery.

Auroras, as Ramsey understood them, occurred when solar
radiation, channeled by a planet’s magnetic fi elds, interacted
with atoms of the planetary atmosphere at high altitudes,
causing them to glow in the same way that the gas in a neon
light tube fluoresced when electricity flowed through it.

According to the readouts coming through the link from

Intrepid’s bridge, however, the planet below had no atmo-
sphere to speak of, and its rotation was so slow—it was ro-
tating retrograde at the rate of one revolution every three
months—that it was difficult to understand why it had any
magnetic field at all . . . or where the intense auroral glows
were coming from.

Those glows, however, illuminated the planet’s night
side—it was probably bright enough down there to read by
the glow in the sky—and the glow was amplified by peri-
odic and frequent discharges of electricity, powerful arcs
playing across the world’s polar regions.

From low orbit, though, there didn’t appear to be much to
see beneath the auroras and the lightning. Planet S-2/I had
for eons been sandblasted by a constant rain of dust and gas
molecules as it moved through the cloudy haze of the Galactic

G A L A C T I C

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235

Center. The constant bombardment must have stripped away
the atmosphere eons ago, laying the surface bare to the con-
stant fl ood of cosmic radiation. There was no sign of craters
below, and even the highest mountain ranges appeared to
have been sculpted smooth by the steady celestial bombard-
ment.

The planet was as far from its red giant primary as Jupiter
was from Sol. At that distance, the mean substellar tem-
perature should have been around the freezing point of wa-
ter, while the mean temperature on the night side plummeted
to nearly two hundred below. In fact, though, the surface ap-
peared uniformly warm, ranging from minus twenty de-
grees Centigrade near the equator to well above the boiling
point of water at the poles.

Again, physical planetary science couldn’t address the
observed data. The anomalously high surface temperatures
were probably related to the high background radioactivity
and to heat caused by the steady rain of cosmic dust, but there
was nothing in human experience with which this world’s
surface environment could be compared. Those fl aring po-
lar lightnings and high temperatures probably, probably,
had their origin in the interplay of the planet’s magnetic
field with those of the local galacticneighborhood—especially
the powerful magnetic fields emanating from Sagittarius

A*—but so far as terrestrial planetary science was con-
cerned, S-2/I shouldn’t even have a magnetic field of its
own . . . to say nothing of auroras in the absence of an atmo-
sphere.

But all of those questions would have to wait for a follow-
on team of planetologists. The immediate concern was the
local Xul presence. S-2 was nearing perigalacton—its clos-
est point to Sag A*—now just thirty light hours distant.

Intrepid dropped into a lower orbit, scanning the alien
world’s surface closely. Ten minutes later, she released the Cun-
ningham, and the two craft slowly separated, flying in forma-
tion. Clouds of remote sensors and battlespace drones began to
spread through local space, gather data at all wavelengths.

On the third orbit, they spotted the Xul base.

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Tarantula 04, UCS Intrepid

Core Space

1523 hrs, GMT

“How the hell are we supposed to fight it if we can’t see
it?” Sergeant Vic Maler complained.

“What’s the problem?” Garroway told him. “We disem-
bark . . . and if it’s moving and not a Marine, we kill it.”

“Sweet and simple,” Master Sergeant Clara Gardner added.

She sounded nervous. “The Navy knows what the hell it’s
doing.”

“Since when?” Sergeant Milo Huerra said, challenging
her. “It might be sweet and simple, but Mal’s right. Someone
fucked up with the data link. What else did they miss, eh?”

“Quiet down, Marines,” Lieutenant Cooper called over
the link. He’d been promoted from one bar to two back at

EarthRing, and he’d been slamming his mass around ever
since. “Attention to orders, damn it!”

“We should have a decent picture once we drop from the

Intrepid,” Captain Black’s voice told them. “Right now, all I
can tell you is that the target looks like a small base on the
surface of the planet, code name Objective Lima. There will
be more extensive works underground, but we’ll worry about
that once we take the surface facility.

“I’ve just had word that our penetrator AIs have entered
the facility and are coping with the local defenses. The idea
is to kill the enemy’s communications and control networks.

Once they’re down, the local Xulies won’t be able to call for
help, and the bad boys next door at Sag A-Star won’t even
know we’re here.

“So move fast and keep moving. Remember . . . if you
stand still the Xulies will nail you. Move fast—amphibious
green blurs—and you’ll keep the bastards off balance. We
should be coming up on . . .”

There was a sudden thump, and a dizzying and disorient-
ing feel of momentary zero-gravity. Tarantula 04 had just
dropped free from the UCS Intrepid.

Garroway felt an instant’s burst of static in his brain, and

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

237

then his mind was flooded by incoming images fed through
from the Tarantula’s sensor net. Above, he could see the long,
slender gold needle of the Intrepid slowly pirouetting against
what looked like a solid wall of red-hued stardust and, to
one side, the far smaller mote of the light carrier Cunning-
ham. Ahead, the curve of the planet, red-ocher against the
glare of a giant ruby sun. And below . . .

The Tarantula was hurtling forward and down less than
one hundred kilometers above the surface of a sandblasted,
alien desert. Blue and green curtains of light fl ared against
the planet’s poles, leaping like prominences to follow the
world’s invisible lines of magnetic force. Lightning fl ared,
casting stark shadows for the instant of the fl ash.

Garroway could see other Tarantulas in the formation
now—ungainly, bulbous machines with tightly folded legs
that somewhat mimicked the landing craft’s nickname. Ter-
restrial tarantulas, however, didn’t mount ventral and dorsal
particle-beam weapons, nor could they accelerate at an iner-
tially damped one hundred gravities.

“Here we go!” someone yelled as the night-shrouded sur-
face leaped toward them.

And Garroway and a dozen other Marines screamed back
the ancient Corps battlecry.

“Ooh- rah!”

16

0505.1102

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Objective Lima, S-2/I

1540 hrs, GMT

The flight of AV-110 Tarantulas dropped to within scant
meters of the dusty surface and skimmed at high speed to-
ward a stark horizon. The vehicles spread out across a hun-
dred square kilometers, each weaving in on a separate fl ight
path designed to confuse enemy defenses.

The Xul defenses should be disabled . . . but Marines never
entirely trusted tactical elements controlled by non-Marine
assets. There was always the possibility of an unpleasant sur-
prise.

Once clear of the Intrepid, sensory input had fl ooded
through to the Marines packed into the AV-110s’ squad bays.

Garroway could see the crisp horizon ahead, with no hint of
atmospheric haze to give it distance or depth. To his left, to-
ward planetary south, auroras played against the star-dusted
backdrop, curtains of yellow, green, and red-pink that wa-
vered and shifted as though blown by the non existent wind.

Overhead, the sky had gone impossibly strange . . . domi-
nated by a vast, three-armed spiral. Garroway was reminded
of the spiral form of the Galaxy as seen from Cluster

Space . . . but this one was more open, more distinct, and

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239
the colors were reversed—with sullen-glowing reds in the
spiral’s outer reaches shading to an intense blue-white near
the center. To one side, the central cluster, a knot of care-
lessly spilled, radiant blue jewels imbedded in twisted nebu-
lae; several nearby suns showed tails like comets streaming
away from the fierce radiations of that central star swarm.

Garroway’s eyes were drawn again and again to the spi-
ral’s brilliant center, in the sky halfway up from the north-
ern horizon. He couldn’t quite make out the details of what
was in there, though it appeared to be . . . emptiness, a tiny
disk of nothing at all. The Xul structure, the Dyson sphere
or whatever it was, must be within that space, but still too
distant to be visible to the naked eye, or even to a Marine’s
enhanced helmet optics and sensory feeds from the space-
craft.

Damn it, he thought, fi ercely, get your mind on the op! You
can sightsee later, when the bad guys have been scragged!

Reluctantly, he dragged his attention back to the horizon,
then collapsed the feed window so that he could check his
weapon—a Mk. VII pulse- plasma rifle. All weapons had
been electronically disabled while the Marines
were on
board the transport, but once the suppressor field was shut
down, the rifle would become fully operational.

“Thirty seconds to target, people,” Captain Black’s voice
announced. “We’ve matched onboard gravity to local. Just
remember to watch your rad counters. It’s hot out there.”

Garroway opened the download window again. The pro-
gram painted brackets against his vision, marking the objec-
tive that was just now beginning to slide over the horizon.

S-2/I, he remembered from his briefings, was a little larger
than Mars, so the horizon at this altitude was . . . what?

About twenty kilometers away? That felt right. Objective

Lima was supposed to be a Xul base of some kind, but it was
as large as a fair- sized city, easily twenty kilometers across,
covering an area as big as a stargate, and consisting of hun-
dreds of domes, towers, and blockhouses.

He felt a solid thump through the Tarantula’s deck as the

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I A N D O U G L A S
landing craft took the objective under fire. On the down-
load, he could see the flashes, like threads of quicksilver,
flickering toward the enemy base.

A trio of savage explosions bracketed the area. In sec-
onds, Garroway’s download began feeding him an overlay
showing tunnel systems and chambers under ground out-
lined in red, as sensors on board the Tarantulas picked up
the seismic readings from the blasts. He suppressed the un-
derground display. He wouldn’t need the subsurface level
maps until he was on the ground.

At first, there was no response of any kind from the tar-
get. The AI penetrator mission, Garroway thought, must
have screwed up the enemy response enough to delay any
return fire. The return came though, seconds after the Ta-
rantulas began strafing the Xul base. Tarantula 06 exploded
in a white fl are of detonating antimatter and a burst of hard
radiation. The Xul gun position, pinpointed by AIs, fl ared
and vanished an instant later. Several awkward-looking Xul
machines were beginning to emerge from the base, now—
mobile gun platforms of some sort—but the Tarantulas
burned them down as quickly as they appeared.

Then the incoming transports reached the objective, cir-
cling in from different directions, their deployment timed so
that all arrived within a second or two of one another. Garro-
way’s Tarantula settled in toward the circle of alien struc-
tures, main weapons pulsing with blue-white lightning,
chewing through the enemy walls, domes, and towers with
searing flashes of devastation. Drifting slowly, the Tarantula
moved across the edge of the complex, where a nano-grown
wall now lay in shattered, smoking chunks and the build-
ings beyond gaped open to the alien sky.

Six massive legs extended, grasping at charred debris and
bare rock, and seemed to draw the craft down into the wreck-
age’s embrace.

“Okay, Marines!” Cooper yelled. “Go! Go! Go!”

“Amphibious green blurs, people!” Captain Black added,
as the clamshell doors in the Tarantula’s rear lower belly slid

G A L A C T I C

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241

open and the heavily armored Marines began spilling out
onto the eldritch landscape.

Garroway was fifth out the gaping door, hitting the ground
hard, but letting his armor’s musculature absorb the shock
with flexing knees. The Tarantula slowly raised its body on
its widely straddled legs, continuing to lay down a heavy fi re
at any movement or flicker of energy within its sensors’ range.

A blast of plasma energy melted through a portion of molded
wall just ahead, showering molten droplets on Garroway as
he pressed forward.

He felt the drops splatter off his back and helmet, but suf-
fered no damage. Type 690 Power Armor was the heaviest
and newest battlesuit in the Marine inventory, designed after
the fi rst battles fought in high-radiation environments a de-
cade before. Each unit massed over half a ton; a Marine could
move at all only because of the direct neuromuscular link-
age between his brain and the suit’s actuators. Garroway
moved his arm, and the firing of neurons in brain, back, and
shoulder that would have raised it triggered instead the rais-
ing of the suit’s massively gauntleted arm, and the heavy

Mk. VII nanosealed to it. A piece of wall collapsed on his
left. He swung his left arm in a block, and the massive
chunks of rubble smashed and scattered, scarcely felt by the
suit’s occupant. When he jumped, his suit’s computer made
a fast calculation and triggered his jump jets, sending him
sailing forward in a low, fl at trajectory.

His landing sent up an explosive shower of dust and rub-
ble. S-2/I’s surface gravity registered about the same as

Mars . . . a third of a G, or perhaps a bit more. It meant he
had to be careful of the inertia he built up moving fast or
when jumping. He might fall more slowly here than on Earth’s
surface, but he still carried that half- ton of battlesuit mass
with him. Once he got moving, stopping could be a problem.

He brought up the underground map, noting several tun-
nel openings within a few tens of meters of his position. He
started working toward the nearest one. The Marines needed
to carry their assault underground as swiftly as possible . . .

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I A N D O U G L A S
and those openings were also the likeliest exit points for the

Xul combat machines that would be arriving on the surface
any second now.

“Heads up, Marines!” Staff Sergeant Vincent warned. “I’ve
got movement and energy leakage at Sierra one-niner-fi ve!”

“Shit, there’s movement everywhere!” Shelby replied.

“Watch it!” Sergeant Randy Douglas called. “They’re
coming up outta the holes!”

The first Xul combot appeared almost directly in front of

Garroway, rising from the hidden tunnel entrance, high-
energy laser fire already snapping into his armor.

The black surface of his armor drank down the energy
and dissipated it in a blast of released heat. Garroway was
already dragging his Mk. VII into line with the enemy ma-
chine, triggering it with his mind. The weapon bucked, and
radio frequencies shrieked as the plasma bolt cracked through
vacuum and slammed into the Xul machine.

He heard it scream as radio circuits fried.

But more Xul combots were arriving every second, drift-
ing in across the tortured landscape from several direc-
tions.

Garroway had encountered Xul warrior-types many times
before, both in simulation and in combat. Each was two to
three meters long, an elongated egg shape smoothly sculpted
with sponsons, swellings, and concavities, its ebon surface
imbedded with scattered
lenses—some serving as eyes,
some as weapons. Each was unique, no two precisely alike
in form. Tentacles writhed, as few as three, as many as doz-
ens emerging from random points on each smooth, black
shell.

After centuries of combat, Marine xenosophontologists
still weren’t sure if the warrior forms were pure robots, or if
they were controlled by Xul uploaded intelligences, either
resident within the combat machines or teleoperating them
from somewhere within the base. Likeliest was a mix of the
three possibilities, with most of the machines operating un-
der fairly simplistic programming, but with others piloted

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

243

directly by individual Xul. The machines appeared to use
agravitic repulsion to hover, and maneuvered by interacting
with local magnetic fields. In tight quarters, they could haul
themselves along with sinuous, powerful fl icks of their me-
tallic tentacles.

Garroway pivoted left, burning down a second . . . then a
third. Orange light geysered from the center of the base as

Intrepid, ninety kilometers overhead, added her particle
beams to the ongoing bombardment.

And then the fighters arrived. . . .

Nightstar 442,

Raptor Flight

Over Objective Lima

Core Space

1550 hrs, GMT

“Raptors, this is Raptor Leader!” Major Steve Treverton
called over the squadron net. “Release by the numbers, in
five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . go!”

The sixteen F/A-4041s of Raptor Flight were lined up in

Cunningham’s launch bay in four rows of four. The fi rst four
aerospace fighters slammed out of their launch tubes in rapid
succession . . . and then it was Ramsey’s turn, Raptor Seven.

His Nightstar dropped clear of the Cunningham, its mas-
sive, compact body unfolding to reveal weapons and drive
pods, its vector already aligned with the night side of the
objective planet, just below the brilliant ocher slash of the
sunlit limb. With a series of practiced thoughts, he engaged
the agrav, the inertial dampers, and, finally, the main drive,
kicking the ship into a sharp, steep plunge toward the plan-
etary surface.

“Damn the bastards,” Ramsey snapped.

He wasn’t referring to the Xul.

Since the earliest days of Marine aviation, back in the fi rst
half of the war-torn twentieth century, the primary purpose

244

I A N D O U G L A S
of military aircraft—and, later, of spacecraft—so far as the

Corps was concerned had been close air support. The prime
dictate of all Marines throughout history had always been
that every man was a rifleman, whether they were front-line
infantry, clerks, mess cooks . . . or fi ghter pilots.

Marines on the ground enjoyed a close and special rela-
tionship with the close- support pilots, who took pride in
weaving in through heavy fi re to place their warheads with
devastating precision—often scant tens of meters from em-
battled Marine positions.

And that was why Ramsey was angry now. The squadron
of F/A-4041 Nightstars should have been dropped an hour
ago, should be over the target now reducing it to red-hot
rubble. Someone, he thought, had screwed up. The aero-
space strike fighters should have gone in first and leveled the
place.

In fact, that had been the gist of the op orders; they’d been
changed only hours ago, when word had come down from

Ops Command that the Tarantulas would be going in fi rst,
without preliminary bombardment, in order to preserve the
advantage of surprise.

Ramsey shook his head at the thought. Surprise in mod-
ern combat was a short-lived advantage, one measured in
microseconds from the instant the enemy first detected in-
coming troop transports or strike fighters. He very much
doubted that the advantage gained by rewriting the op plans
would be worth the price paid in blood.

The dark landscape tilted wildly beneath his Nightstar.

Symbols representing targeting pippers, angle of attack lad-
ders, and scales for pitch, yaw, and roll drifted swiftly
through Ramsey’s vision, painted in his visual field by the
ship’s AI. Guiding the Nightstar with his mind, he brought
the nose up, centering Objective Lima within the targeting
cursor of his primary weapon and locking it on. As the
landscape rapidly swelled larger, green pinpoints appeared,
tiny emerald stars scattered across the alien base, each one
marking friendly forces—the Marines of the Regimental

Strike Team moving in from the periphery. Red points of

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

245

light marked anything moving or giving off energy that
didn’t have a friendly IFF signal riding it.

There were far more red stars down there than green. . . .

Aiming for the center of Objective Lima, he mentally
triggered his primary weapon, a massive GV-3662 Gatling
fusion gun. Spinning barrels brought thumb-sized capsules
of highly compressed metallic hydrogen into the fi ring cham-
ber one by one, where each was further compressed, laser-
heated, and magnetically accelerated to near- c velocities.

Each charge massed less than a gram, but fired at that speed,
thirty rounds per second, the recoil nearly overwhelmed

Ramsey’s inertial dampers, slamming against the hurtling
strike fighter like staccato sledgehammer blows. Though si-
lent in the airless sky of S-2/I, the vibration sounded like a
thunderous howl within the narrow confines of the Night-
star’s cockpit.

Flares of fusing hydrogen leapt from sky to ground in a
solid- seeming stream, flashing into brilliant detonations
within the central wreckage of the Xul base. He kept the
fighter pointed at the center of the objective, hosing the area
until the flashes merged into a burgeoning fi reball engulfi ng
several of the dome- shaped structures below.

Drawing back in his mind, Ramsey brought the Night-
star’s nose up, cutting the Gatling’s shriek. An instant later,
the aerospace craft plunged through the rising fi reball, climb-
ing hard, now, as he fought for altitude.

Warning tones sounded. Xul defensive batteries
were
tracking him, snapping off bolts of white-hot plasma, fi lling
the sky around him with deadly light. Above and behind
him, other Nightstars twisted in from different directions,
each weaving through the blossoming fire and past other

Marine fighters in a complex pattern possible only to the
squadron’s directing AI.

A flash detonated above and behind Ramsey’s craft; his
data feed gave the grim news: Raptor 11—Lieutenant Randi

Schactman—had taken a direct, 20-kiloton hit, the blast
vaporizing half of the fighter and sending the rest hurtling
toward the surface in a shower of white-hot fragments.

246

I A N D O U G L A S

Ramsey took his fighter high . . . high enough that the red
sun burst suddenly above the western horizon, bathing his
craft in ruby light. His display showed the other fi ghters in
the sky around him, some completing their attack runs,
some just beginning to make their fi rst pass.

He rolled hard left, bringing his nose around for his next
attack. . . .

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Objective Lima, S-2/I

1552 hrs, GMT

Garroway dropped to the ground as searing blasts of light
and radiation flared just ahead. Rubble, much of it half-
molten, showered over him, and he felt the ground hammer
at his armor as shock waves rippled out from the blast.

Modern combat presented fi ghters with the most deadly
environment ever encountered by living organisms, a sear-
ing storm of radiation and heat and hurtling debris that even
the best suit of armor couldn’t completely block.

The close- support fighters of Raptor Squadron had hit the
center of Objective Lima with pinpoint precision, pounding it
with antimatter rounds, bolts of fusing plasma, X-ray lasers,
and high-velocity slugs. The attack had wiped out the fi rst
wave of emerging defenders, but even as he started to rise, red
stars appeared on his in- head display, marking more of the
seemingly endless hosts of Xul combat machines as they
emerged from their holes and tunnel entrances. They moved
swiftly, seeking to close with the leading elements of advanc-
ing Marines. As Garroway stood, three of the gleaming, black
monsters closed with him, scrabbling across the broken rubble
with wildly lashing tentacles. He burned one . . . then another,
but the third slammed against him, driving him backward, too
close, now, for him to bring his weapon to bear.

Around him, other Marines were suddenly engaged in
savage hand- to- tentacle combat, the battle transformed into

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

247

a sprawling, deadly encounter at knife-fighting range. Per-
haps the Xul had figured the Marine aerospacecraft wouldn’t
attack if they were mingled closely with friendly forces.

Garroway released the locking mechanism on his plasma
gun, letting the useless weapon fall. In the next instant, he’d
triggered both forearm-mounted slicers, extending the tough
blades, each the thickness of a molecule at its edge. Snap-
ping his left arm back, he severed three of the Xul machine’s
tentacles as it tried to hold him; his second slash gouged a
chunk the size of his helmet out of the Xul combot’s side.

At the same time, the Xul was firing bolt after bolt of high-
energy laser light into his armor at point-blank range, rap-
idly overloading its
energy-
sink capabilities, and heating
two patches on his front torso to red-hot temperatures. His
armor’s nano film began trying to cope with the damage, but
the Xul beams were melting through the laminate faster than
the armor could repair itself, and dangerously close to cut-
ting through.

At last he’d sliced away enough of those whiplashing ten-
tacles that he was able to shove the Xul machine back. It
spun in the air, slowing to a hover, as Garroway raised his
right arm and triggered the nano-D dispenser imbedded in
the wrist cuff.

The stub- snouted weapon fired a slug that burst on im-
pact, spraying a thin mist of nano-disassemblers across the
outer shell of the damaged Xul combot. Programmed to de-
vour the nano-grown plastic-metal laminates that made up

Xul armor surfaces, the mist began condensing on the sur-
face in white swirls. Complex molecules dissolved into com-
ponent atoms, which boiled off the dissolving surface like
steam. The Xul machine began writhing and twisting, almost
as if in agony; in another moment, the nano-D ate through to
the circuitry powering its agravitic lifters, and the machine
collapsed to the ground, rapidly dissolving now like a snow
ball floating in hot water.

Garroway had already stooped and retrieved his primary
weapon. Other Marines around him were still struggling at

248

I A N D O U G L A S
close quarters with enemy machines, while others, their own
battles won, were turning to help their comrades. Garroway
put another nano-D slug into the Xul combot grappling Cor-
poral Fossey, then swung his plasma gun to bring a group of
enemy machines under fire as they emerged from a tunnel
entrance.

Another barrage of explosions flashed and hammered
across the ruined base as two more Nightstars slashed low
across the star-dusted sky. Garroway ducked as his suit warned
him of a hurtling chunk of debris the size of a small aircar
tumbling toward him end over end. The slab missed him by
two meters and slammed into a ruined wall behind him. He
emerged from hot rubble, shaking the pieces aside and mov-
ing forward.

“C’mon, Marines!” he screamed over the platoon net.

“Drive them!”

And all along the line, the Marines advanced.

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Cluster Space

1550 hrs, GMT

Hermes remained in Cluster Space, overseeing the opera-
tion now unfolding some thirty thousand light years away,
deep within the Galactic Core. Her Ops Center stayed in
communication with the Intrepid—and, through her, with
the Marines on the surface of S-2/I—by means of QCC
fi eld-entangled transceivers.

The equipment was still large and bulky, but ships the
size of Intrepid could carry banks of Quantum-Coupled

Communications gear matched to parallel units on board

Hermes. Constellations of subatomic particles generated in
pairs, separated, and captured in crystalline matrices re-
mained linked through the quantum dynamics of non-
locality; change one particle, and its twin changed at the
same instant, even if it had been transported to the other

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

249

side of the Galaxy . . . or thirty thousand light years from
the Galactic halo to the Galactic core.

General Alexander lay in one of the Ops Center link
couches, immersed in the sensory flood coming from Oper-
ation Heartfire. One open mental window showed a com-
puter graphic of the inner Core area, the spiral of the Sag A*
accretion disk, and the orbit of S-2 in its dizzying plunge
close around the central black hole. Another was an external
camera view from one of the Tarantulas on the surface. He
could see a line of Marines advancing with searing blue-
white explosions in the background, hear the radio chatter as
they moved, punctuated by the static shrieks caused by
plasma gunfire. Marine Nightstars flashed silently past low
overhead.

He turned his attention back to the simulated map. The

Galactic Core, when reduced to graphic icons and symbols
in a netlink display, felt small, almost cozy, with the various
elements—Sag A*, the Great Annihilator, S-2, IRS-16, and
all the rest—crammed into a volume of space equivalent to
the C3 Deck on board the Hermes. It looked as though the

Xul garrison at S-2/I could call for support from the Gal-

Center Dyson object by shouting.

But it was, Alexander knew, vitally important to maintain
a sense of scale. The pinwheel of gas and dust circling Gal-

Center, he reminded himself, was twenty light years across,
almost five times the distance from Sol to Alpha Centauri.

IRS-16. He fed data to his implant math processors, running
the numbers. The cluster of hot, young stars close to the cen-
ter, IRS-16, was one- tenth of a light year from GalCenter . . .

946 billion kilometers, or almost 1,600 times the mean dis-
tance from Sol to Pluto.

A long way.

And at the very center, at least according to the netlinked
simulations, the star S-2 appeared to be right next to the
mysterious alien structure at Sag A* . . . and twenty light
hours was a mere stone’s throw when compared with light
years. But twenty light hours was 21.6 billion kilometers, or
roughly 144 a.u.s, three and a half times the mean distance

250

I A N D O U G L A S
between Sol and Pluto. Unless there’d been active FTL com-
munications links between Objective Lima and Sag A*—and
there were decent intelligence reasons for supposing there
were not—any Xul at the GalCenter Dyson body could not
know that Marines had landed on S-2/I for at least twenty
hours.

They had that long to stabilize the situation.

“General Alexander?” Cara’s voice said in his mind.

“Senator Yarlocke wishes to link with you.”

Alexander suppressed a groan. He knew this was com-
ing. Yarlocke’s office had connected with him that morn-
ing, requesting a conference. But he’d not been looking
forward to it.

“Conference room,” he told his AI assistant. “Patch her in.”

His viewpoint shifted to a conference room sim, one with
large, curving viewall screens across bulkheads and over-
heads showing the view currently being received from the

Intrepid. The planet below was in darkness as it eclipsed its
red giant sun; the sky was dominated by the vast, glowing
spiral of the Sag A* accretion disk, the backdrop of softly
glowing star clouds, and the distant blue-white glow of the
molecular cloud and its associated young stars.

“Why were we of the Senate not informed of this attack?”

Yarlocke’s voice demanded.

Alexander turned and studied the woman’s icon. She wore
a silver-white gown, with a personal coronae fl ammae gleam-
ing in golds and silvers. Clearly she’d been going for the
angelic look . . . but the expression transmitted through her
face somewhat spoiled the effect. Behind her stood half a
dozen men and women in more muted dress—her offi cial
entourage, he presumed, aides and staffers.

“You were, Senator,” Alexander told her. “Yesterday, be-
fore they even went in.”

“We were told you were conducting a reconnaissance,

General! Not an invasion!”

“Reconnaissance in force, actually,” he replied. “We’re
establishing a base close to GalCenter. From there, my people

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

251

will map the local gravitational metric to the degree of pre-
cision necessary to allow the Pax Galactica to translate to
the Core. They will also be standing by in case the Pax re-
quires military intervention.”

“You are determined to see the peace effort fail. . . .”

“No, madam, I am not!” He’d been working to control his
anger, to remain diplomatic, but the charge brought a rising
tide of white fury. Damn it, he had had it with these people.

“No one would like to see an end to the Xul confl ict more
than me. But I have grave doubts that the Xul see things the
same way we do.”

He expected an argument from the woman, and was star-
tled when she seemed to slump, then nodded. “I know,” she
said. “And I understand what you’re doing, that you’re doing
what you think is best for the Commonwealth.”

“Do you? Let me ask you . . . did you understand that when
you attempted to cut off funding for 1MIEF a year ago?”

She hesitated. The other figures standing behind her
abruptly winked out as Yarlocke cut their link with the two
of them. They were now, effectively, alone.

“I think so,” she told him. “I knew you thought you were
doing what was right. I did think you were something of a
warmonger, I suppose. But your heart was in the right place.”

He frowned. “A warmonger, Madam Senator, goes out of
his way looking for a fight. I haven’t needed to do that since

I accepted this billet.” Fighting the Xul, and fighting you, he
thought, but he kept the words carefully to himself. I’ve had
all the fi ghting I could possibly want.

“I know. And . . . I know you probably don’t believe me,
but . . . you need to understand that I am doing what I think
is right.”

“I never thought otherwise.”

“If we in the Senate thought that you were pursuing some
agenda of your own—carrying on the war for your own
glory or to build yourself a political power base, you would
have been removed from your position a long time ago.”

It sounded like she was reminding him of just where his

252

I A N D O U G L A S
personal power lay. “The military arm of the Commonwealth,”

he told her, “answers to the civilian administration. It’s been
that way since the earliest days of the old United States.

Military leaders can advise . . . but we do not dictate policy.”

He wondered what she was looking for, what she wanted
from him, but he decided to let her come to it on her own.

“General Alexander, it’s no secret that I will do any-
thing . . . well, almost anything, to ensure peace. Our people,
the Commonwealth . . . they’re sick of war. Sick of going on
decade after decade, knowing there’s an enemy out there
and never knowing when he’s going to strike. They want an
end to it.”

“Do you believe me when I tell you that I want to ensure
peace as well? You might not credit this, Madam Senator,
but no one yearns for peace as much as the man or woman
who has to actually engage the enemy in combat.”

“I’ll take your word for that.”

“Good. My job, however, is not so much to ensure peace
as it is to protect the people and the government of the Com-
monwealth. The Xul represent a very real, very immediate,
very palpable danger to the continued existence of our Com-
monwealth. And I will do anything . . . almost anything, to
protect it.”

“So . . . tell me truthfully, General. About . . . this.” She
indicated the simulation displayed upon the viewalls with a
sweep of her arm. “Not a last-minute attempt to circumvent
the Senate’s will?”

“Madam Senator,” he said coldly. “I am a Marine. My
oath is to the Commonwealth. And that means to the people
you represent.”

“Tell me why, exactly why, you sent your Marines in
there, General. And why you did it without consulting us.”

“As for sending the Marines into the Core, I told you.

First, we need a base from which to map the gravitational
stresses on local space in close to the Core. It’s a highly cha-
otic, rapidly changing picture—very large masses moving
very quickly. If Pax is to successfully translate into the

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

253

Core, we need detailed gravitometric mapping of the region.

If we don’t gather that data, the Pax does not make the trip.

That’s one.”

“You could have sent remote probes.”

“We have sent remote probes. Lots of them. Having Ma-
rines in there increases the chances of getting the data we
need. Okay?”

She nodded.

“Two . . . we need a credible military force close by when

Pax attempts to open negotiations. If the Xul want to talk,
great. My Marines will sit tight and enjoy the show. But if
the Xul perform the way they have in times past . . . we’ll be
in place to provide you with cover so you can get away.

Three . . . well, this may be the warmonger talking, but in
my experience it’s always best to negotiate from strength. If
the Xul see a well- armed party of Marines in their backyard
when you arrive for your parlay, they just may be less in-
clined to be . . . adventurous.”

“I actually hadn’t thought of that one.”

“It’s true. We’ve delivered a number of sharp stings to the

Xul apparatus over the past few centuries. They know we
can hurt them. If it hasn’t had that much effect, it’s because
the Xul apparatus is so big. It’s like a cloud of stinging in-
sects attacking . . . I don’t know. An extinct mammoth or
elephant. It hurts. They want us to stop.” He shrugged. “And
we may someday hurt them enough that they’ll stop threaten-
ing our existence. The point is, if they see us in there, they’ll
know we can hurt them again, maybe worse than they’ve
ever been hurt by us before. Whatever else they are, the Xul
are intelligent. They may not reason the way we do, but they
do reason. Pax will be in a much better position to negotiate if
you have us in there providing you with some leverage.”

She nodded. “I believe you. What about my other ques-
tion?”

“Which one?”

“Why didn’t you consult with the Senate fi rst?”

“Tell me something, Madam Senator. If I’d linked through

254

I A N D O U G L A S
to your office yesterday and explained all of this, just as I’ve
just done, would you have authorized the operation?”

“Of course!”

“Really? Or would you have laid down conditions, tried
to micromanage, tell 1MIEF what it could and couldn’t do?”

“As you yourself pointed out, General, 1MIEF is ulti-
mately under civilian control!”

“Agreed. But we’re paid to know what the hell we’re do-
ing. Case in point. My office did inform you. We told you we
were making a reconnaissance in force. That is exactly what
we are now doing.”

“I thought reconnaissance in force meant something like
going in and scouting out the area.”

“Which is what we’re doing. The difference is that there
are . . . nuances that you do not understand, because you
haven’t been trained to understand. You’re not military. You’re
not a Marine. It is your job to make policy. It is my job to
carry out that policy insofar as the military applications are
concerned.

“In short, you have to trust me to carry out that policy to
the best of my ability, according to my training and experi-
ence, and without pursuing any personal or warmongering
agendas I might have. If you don’t trust me, you need to re-
place me. Immediately.

“And I need to trust you, Madam Senator, that you will
not try to micromanage my command, put unreasonable
demands upon it, or leave my people hanging while you
pursue your personal agenda. Have I made myself clear?”

She stared at him for a long moment, so long he could al-
most hear the thoughts turning behind her eyes. The woman
wasn’t used to being talked to this way. She could easily be
on the point of dismissing him on the spot.

He was, Alexander thought, taking a fearful chance. If
she dismissed him, he had a number of Marines fi ghting for
their lives at GalCenter right now, and he would no longer
be able to support them. If he lost his command, he would
fight like hell to protect his people, but in the long run there
wouldn’t be much he could do. Take the whole affair to the

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

255

news media and place it before an apathetic public? Appeal
to a weak Commonwealth President?

His options would be sharply limited.

Possibly he’d let his anger and his frustration do too much
of the talking. But there was no pulling back now. . . .

“You know, General,” she said at last, “I don’t think there
is another person in the entire Commonwealth who would
talk to me the way you are now.”

“I am not a politician, Madam Senator. Or a diplomat. I
am a Marine, the CO of 1MIEF, and the government pays
me, among other things, to express my concerns and to give
my advice.”

“And I appreciate that. I appreciate your candor . . . and
your willingness to tell me what you really think. And . . . I
believe it would be best if we could work together, you and I.”

“Aren’t we?”

“Not as well as we might. You’ve spoken frankly. Now it’s
my turn. The Commonwealth is sick of war, and I, General,
am going to give them peace. I have . . . certain ambitions. As
the person who makes possible a Galactic peace, I will be able
to realize those ambitions, to rise in power and in . . . in status
within this government. And I can bring you up with me.”

Alexander blinked. Was she trying to bribe him with a
promise of power, for God’s sake? “My oath is to the Com-
monwealth, Madam Senator. My first loyalty is to the Corps.”

“Help me forge this peace, General. That’s all I ask of
you. Afterward, you will find me very grateful.”

“I’ll help you,” he told her, trying to keep his mental voice
neutral. “That’s never been an issue. The question is whether
the Xul will play along. They’re the ones who will deter-
mine whether your peace plan has a chance in hell.”

“The Xul, General? Or your Marines?”

He reopened the mental window showing images trans-
mitted from the surface of S-2/I. Marines had reached the
lip of a huge, circular crater and were pouring fire down into
its depths, where thousands of black machines writhed, strug-
gled, and died.

“The Marines, Madam Senator, have always been pretty

256

I A N D O U G L A S
damned good at convincing the other fellow that they should
play nice. That’s why we’re here.”

For the first time, though, Alexander found himself won-
dering which the worse enemy was . . . the Xul?

Or the human behind the angelic image glowing in his
thoughts?

17

0505.1102

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Hawkins Station,

Objective Lima, S-2/I

1612 hrs, GMT

Garroway led an ad hoc section of twenty Marines forward
across broken rubble and steaming rock, an impossible sky
overhead, silent flame and white-hot devastation ahead and
below. He crouched behind a block of glowing rubble, pour-
ing fire into the tangle of struggling Xul machines below.

To his right, one of the Tarantulas moved with them, two
forward pods unfolding now as plasma blast heads, of the
type used in large-scale asteroid mining. Other Tarantulas
were already in place around the crater rim, playing the
floor of the depression with blue-white plasma energy. As
the huge machines hosed the tortured ground at the bottom
of the crater, rock bubbled as black-crusted lava fl owed and
churned. Directly beneath the blast points of the plasma
guns, rock didn’t melt, but vaporized. As the vapor cooled
in hard vacuum, it solidified as frozen flecks of white pow-
der, like minute flakes of snow sifting down across the land-
scape.

Another flight of Nightstars streaked silently overhead,
loosing weapons loads into the crater’s center. There was
very little return fire, now, and Garroway broke from cover,

258

I A N D O U G L A S
taking several steps forward to give him a better angle down
into the half-molten pit. He was standing just inside the cra-
ter rim, on crumbling, heat- seared rubble.

Periodic explosions set off outside the Marine perimeter
allowed ground sensors to continually update the images of
underground passageways and chambers. Under the unrelent-
ing assault from above, many of those chambers had been
closed off or had collapsed.

A scream sounded over the Net, followed by another voice
yelling, “Corpsman! Corpsman front!”

Corporal Tom Cushman was down, his right arm burned
away, atmosphere gushing from his suit. In this hellish envi-
ronment, there probably wouldn’t be much Doc Scott could
do. The automatic first aid features built into his Type 690
armor would stop the air and blood loss in seconds, but the
repairs would not be enough to protect Cushman from the
deadly and immediate effects of the high background radia-
tion. Nevertheless, HMC Scott, one of the company corps-
men, was already bending over the fallen Marine, trying to
drag him back from the abyss.

“First Platoon,” Captain Black called. “Pull back! Pull
back!”

That was Garroway’s unit. Almost reluctantly, he stopped
firing and backed his way up the crater slope, then joined the
scattering of other Marines falling back from the fi ring line.

The gas pack on his fusion weapon was almost exhausted.

He thumbed the release to drop the empty, pulled a fresh
pack from an external suit pocket, and snapped it home.

“We’ve got a fresh breakthrough in the making, peo-
ple,” Black told them. Fresh schematics flooded into Gar-
roway’s in-head situation sim. “Sector two-three-niner. Let’s
move it!”

On his download display, Garroway could see the indi-
cated trouble spot, a large region a hundred meters back
from the central crater, where tunnels and chambers criss-
crossed underground. Movement and energy sensors were
recording a lot of activity down there, just beneath the sur-
face. Hundreds of red pinpoints appeared to be clustering in

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259

one vertical shaft that came up to within a few meters of the
surface. As the Marines approached at a run, a geyser of
rubble and debris erupted into the sky just ahead.

“Breakthrough, breakthrough!” one Marine called from
farther up ahead. “They’re comin’ through!”

A dozen black machines emerged from the hole blasted
up through the rubble, lasers and particle beams snapping
into the Marine ranks. Two Marines went down, their armor
holed. Garroway stopped, dropped to a crouch as he raised
his Mk. VII, and mentally triggered a string of shots, slash-
ing through the cloud of Xul robots. The cloud began to
disperse, but he saw several large chunks of body and frag-
ments of tentacles go flying, and four of the hovering ma-
chines collapsed, crashing to the ground.

“Don’t let the bastards spread out!” Garroway yelled, still
firing. Static blasted the radio channels and he wondered if
anyone else could hear, but the other Marines were fi ring as
well, plasma bolts crisscrossing through the Xul cloud. “Hit
them! Hit them! ”

The enemy combots were trying to organize into a forma-
tion, but were taking heavy losses. Marines closed in from
three sides, pouring fire into the cloud of emerging Xul ma-
chines. The fi refight continued for another ten agonizing
seconds at near-point-blank range. Three more Marines fell,
their armor breached in the deadly alien firestorm, but then
the last of the Xul machines dropped to the ground, smashed
and broken.

Garroway and a handful of others were the first to reach
the newly opened entrance, a gaping tunnel mouth leading
into darkness.

It was a darkness out of nightmare, a darkness haunted by
terror and unseen demons. It was also a direct route down
into the underground levels of the Xul city—exactly what
they’d been looking for. The floor of the big, central crater
was mostly molten, now, and there’d be no entrance there.

But here . . .

“Ops just called and said we need a software probe down
there,” Black said over the Net. “Who’s got an MSP-90?”

260

I A N D O U G L A S

Garroway heard Black’s words and shook his head inside
his helmet. It was . . . inevitable.

“I do, sir,” Garroway replied. One in every ten Marines in
the RST was carrying one of the things, designed to connect
with the alien data net. Reluctantly, he pulled the device
from an external pouch, a softball- sized mechanism with

LED lights in a band around the equator that would switch
on when he mentally activated it. “Where do you want it?”

“As far down that hole as you can manage. Ops says they
want it planted in contact with the Xul infrastructure, not
just dropped randomly into a hole.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Holding the probe in his left gauntlet, his
plasma pulse rifle ready in his right, he moved to the rim of
the hole. He hesitated, trying to pierce the darkness at infra-
red wavelengths. He didn’t want to go down there. . . .

“Douglas! Gardner! Maler! Get down there with him and
keep him covered!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Master Sergeant Gardner and Sergeant Maler went in
first, weapons at the ready. “Okay!” Gardner called back.

“We’re on the bottom, in a large tunnel running east and
west. It’s clear!”

Garroway took a deep breath. “Coming down,” he said.

His helmet radar showed a drop of about ten meters. “Watch
my boots!”

He slid from cold light into darkness, his helmet auto-
matically adjusting to full- spectrum infrared as he entered
deep shadow. A two-second fall carried him to the bottom,
where he hit solid rock with both boots, absorbing the shock
through his armor’s heavily shielded boots and legs.

He’d come down between the other two Marines; the tun-
nel ran off in opposite directions, the walls smooth-polished
and featureless. Gardner and Maler had already switched on
the lamps mounted on their shoulders. Even at IR wave-
lengths, the tunnel was nearly black, and the lights cast
weirdly clashing shadows across the smooth and somewhat
shiny walls of the tunnel.

Sergeant Douglas arrived at the bottom of the hole a moment

G A L A C T I C

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261

later, landing heavily at Garroway’s side. “Watch that fi rst
step,” Garroway warned him.

“It’s not the fall that kills ya,” Douglas told him. “It’s the
sudden stop at the end.”

Garroway held up the MSP and switched it on with a
thought. The two halves popped apart from the equator,
where green lights winked readiness.

Grasping the two hemi spheres, he pulled the device apart,
then, reaching high above his head, he pushed the fl at face
of one half against the wall of open shaft leading back up
into the light. That flat, black surface, coated with a nanoad-
hesive, welded itself to the solid rock. A slender black ten-
dril continued to connect the two halves of the device.

“Okay,” Garroway announced. “Relay is in place. Let’s
find some circuitry,”

The MSP-90 had been designed after long experience
with AI probes deployed on penetrator missions into Xul
bases and ships. While such missions could be carried out
over radio frequencies from a distance, things worked a lot
better—and with less risk of discovery and blocking—if
hardware could be physically planted in direct contact with

Xul computer circuitry. The tunnel walls here were solid
rock, smoothly polished and unbroken. They would have to
go deeper to find a good place to plant the MSP’s business
end.

Guided by the seismic readouts coming through on the
tactical channel, the four Marines began following one of
the tunnels. It led down a steep incline, then leveled off.

According to the seismic charts, this tunnel opened into a
broad, subterranean chamber about fifty meters up ahead.

The hemi sphere in Garroway’s hand continued to play out a
single strand, unimaginably tough, of black thread, connect-
ing it to its twin back at the entrance to this chthonic world.

He held it over his helmet; that thread was dangerous, and
could nick through armor as cleanly as his slicers if he was
careless.

“Watch it, down there,” Captain Black warned them over
a radio channel increasingly fogged by static and break-ups.

262

I A N D O U G L A S

“We’re reading Xul activity in that big room ahead, moving
into your tunnel fast!”

“Copy that,” Gardner replied. “Watch it, people! Here
they come!”

A dozen shapes appeared out of the darkness farther
down the tunnel, illuminated by the Marines’ lights, drag-
ging themselves along the tunnel walls with almost lazy fl icks
of their metallic tentacles. Gardner and Maler opened fi re
immediately, while Douglas turned and kept watch toward
the rear.

After several moments, it became clear that the Xul com-
bat machines were not advancing, but appeared to have po-
sitioned themselves to prevent the Marines from penetrating
more deeply into their sanctum. The two Marines on point
continued burning them down, but more kept swarming in
from the chamber beyond. They appeared to be locking them-
selves together, forming a wall blocking the way.

“I think they’re trying to keep us out of the big room,”

Garner said.

“Might be a control center, or an important C3 node,”

Garroway suggested. “How about it, Skipper? Should we try
to see what they’re guarding?”

“Negative,” was Black’s reply. “Just plant the MSP and
get the hell out of there! We’re reading more bogies moving
in on your position!”

“What do you say, Gunny?” Gardner asked him. She ges-
tured with the hot barrel of her plasma weapon at the ceiling
almost directly overhead. “That looks like an electrical feed
up there.”

She was indicating one of the organic-looking growths
common to the interior of Xul bases and ships, like a slender
black root or tentacle growing within living rock.

“That’ll do,” he replied. The ceiling of the tunnel here
was low—just over seven feet. He reach up and slapped the
flat face of the remaining hemi sphere against the cavern
roof, directly next to the electrical conduit.

Immediately, the hemi sphere appeared to melt, reducing
itself to what looked like a puddle of black tar adhering to the

G A L A C T I C

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263

ceiling, reflecting Garroway’s armor lights with a wet gleam.

Myriad threads whipped from the viscous liquid and began
to embrace the conduit, growing along it in both directions.

The Xul power distribution net, he knew, would be inti-
mately entangled with the circuitry that carried both Xul
data and their uploaded intelligences. Back at the tunnel en-
trance, more threads would be growing up the wall to reach
the upper surface, where they would become an antenna.

Athena or other, specially created artifi cial intelligences
could use the MSP, then, to access the Xul computer network
directly.

“Okay, people,” Black’s voice called to them. The static
was quite bad now, his words almost unintelligible even af-
ter being filtered through their implant AIs. “We’re getting a
clear signal. Get the hell out of there!”

The Marines began pulling back toward the tunnel en-
trance, firing as they moved. More Xul machines were com-
ing in from the other direction, now, and the four of them
shuffled along in a small clump, two firing ahead, two be-
hind. All of them had taken hits to their armor but, so far,
damage was light. They waded on, burning down combot
after combot, as more and more of the infernal devices
swarmed in after them.

The MSP they left behind had begun eating its way into
the electrical conduit’s insulation and the surrounding rock,
stretching itself out until each strand was only a molecule or
two in thickness and impossible to remove without vaporiz-
ing the entire ceiling, conduit and all.

At last they reached the opening. This was the tricky part,
since there was only room for two Marines in combat armor
to move up the shaft at a time. Douglas triggered his armor’s
jump jets and rocketed up the opening first. Garroway pre-
pared to follow, but then a fresh surge of enemy battle ma-
chines rushed in, firing wildly with every weapon they
carried. Garroway took a hit in his left shoulder, a blow that
slammed him back a step, but not enough to breach the suit.

“Maler’s hit!” Gardner cried over the netlink. “He’s down!

There’re too many of them!”

264

I A N D O U G L A S

Garroway turned back, wading back into the melee. The
fight was too close now for plasma weapons, so he locked
his Mk. VII over his back, erected his slicers, and powered
up the nano-D dispenser on his left arm.

For several nightmarish seconds, the two Marines strug-
gled there in the darkness above Maler’s collapsed form,
surrounded by a jostling mob of black, metal- plastic shapes
pressing in close. As tentacles fell across their armor, they
used their slicers to cut themselves free, and both of them
continued to pump nano- D rounds into the enemy at liter-
ally point- blank range.

Garroway was hit again. His helmet indicator showed he
was losing atmosphere, and that the radiation levels inside
his suit were rising. Fortunately, the background rad count
was lower down here beneath the surface—still deadly, but
not as immediately deadly as up above. His armor was
pumping anti-rad nano into his bloodstream, so all he could
do was keep fi ghting.

It was a more desperate, more immediate struggle, he
thought, than that fight in Cluster Space a year ago, when
he’d sacrifi ced his own legs. Garroway felt panic clawing at
his mind . . . and then he was battling two enemies, the
swarming Xul and his own terror.

He was screaming as he continued to pour nano-D slugs
into the advancing mass of black shells, glittering lenses,
and snapping tentacles. Laser beams struck his right leg,
and his suit sealed the holes. He felt pain, and the shock of
dropping air pressure, then a jolt as his suit sealed the holes
over. Another beam struck him in the chest. . . .

Somehow, Gardner managed to drag the unconscious

Maler back to the circle of light at the bottom of the shaft
leading to the surface, as Garroway tried to cover them in all
directions.

A line was dropped from the surface, and Gardner se-
cured it to Maler’s armor. “Okay, Gunny!” she yelled, slap-
ping the back of Garroway’s shoulder to get his attention.

“Maler’s on the way up! Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge!”

Garroway pumped out a barrage of nano- D slugs as Xul

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

265

combat machines dissolved and crumbled all around him.

Some of the nano-D, losing its programming, was starting
to gnaw on his armor as well. He stepped back alongside

Gardner, and together the two of them crouched, kicked off,
and triggered their jump jets, vaulting up the shaft and into
cold- frosted starlight.

The Xul machines did not follow.

Garroway collapsed at the top, trying to control a violent
trembling. The air leaks in his armor all were sealed off; the
shaking appeared to be purely an emotional reaction to the
close fi ghting down there in the alien tunnels. He wondered
if he could ever forget the dark and claustrophobic terror. . . .

“Garroway!” Someone was shaking him by one shoulder.

“You okay?”

It was Black. Garroway nodded, then realized the skipper
couldn’t see his head behind his helmet’s rad shielding.

“Yeah. Yessir, I’m okay.”

“Good job down there, Marine. Can you move?”

“An amphibious green blur, sir.”

“Good. All of you, good work!” Black said. “Athena just
uploaded a copy of herself into the alien net.”

“Have the bastards found the MSP?” Douglas wanted to
know.

“Of course they have, but there’s nothing to grab hold of
by now. They can’t stop it unless they melt down the walls
and ceiling of that tunnel.”

The nanotechnic goo in the MSP would have started dis-
persing as soon as it was activated, individual molecules
slipping into minute crevices within the rock wall and fl ow-
ing along the length of the alien power conduit.

“Good news!” Black added. “We’re getting word down
from Ops! Looks like they’re shutting down. . . .”

“Gods! You mean the bastards are surrendering?” Lieu-
tenant Cooper asked.

“Negative. The Xul don’t surrender. But Athena is isolat-
ing them.”

It was a strategy that had worked before, but only in highly
specialized situations. The Xul intelligences “lived”—if that

266

I A N D O U G L A S
was the appropriate word—on their equivalent of computer
hardware; the dialogue between individual groups of Xul,
like choruses echoed back and forth, served as a kind of
democratic poll of intent and thought, and led to a consensus
that resulted in specific actions. Athena, evidently, had man-
aged to shut down the connections between separate Xul
nodes, isolating individual units so that they couldn’t chorus
back and forth.

In essence, the Marines had just taken a large number of

POWs.

“Hermes,” Black called, “Hawkins Station is operational.”

“Copy that,” replied a voice. “Excellent work! I have
members of the Commonwealth Senate with me here. We’ve
been following the action closely. Congratulations, Marines!

You’ve just made this whole thing possible! . . .”

The voice, Garroway saw on a com readout, was that of

General Alexander himself, linking in from Cluster Space.

Well, it stood to reason. Heartfire might well determine
the outcome of the whole damned Xul war. Garroway could
feel the almost electric effect, however, as realization passed
through the RST’s ranks. “Jesus and Buddha! ” one Marine
whispered aloud. “The Old Man himself’s on-line! . . .”

Garroway found it amusing that the Marines were more
excited about having General Alexander looking over their
collective shoulder than they were about the visiting senators.

But official notice or not, the Regimental Strike Team’s
work was far from done just yet. In some respects it had only
just begun. Efforts to continue to root out the last Xul intel-
ligences housed within the complex beneath the ruined base
would continue, as would efforts to find any other Xul nests
on the planet. At all costs, those had to be shut down before
they could warn any other Xul assets in the
vicinity—
particularly those just twenty light hours away, at the Sag A*

Dyson structure.

For the moment, though, those measures were largely
electronic actions, carried out by highly specialized artifi cial
intelligences within the nonphysical realm of cyberspace. In
the world of knock-wood reality, the Marines and a small

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

267

army of robotic devices armed with nano material processors
began digging into the rubble- strewn surface of S-2/I, work-
ing around the heat- tempered rim of the central crater.

And new structures began to grow above the ruins of the
old.

Hawkins Station had been named for another ancient hero
of the Corps—Lieutenant Deane Hawkins.

In November of 1943, Lieutenant Hawkins had led a team
of Marine combat engineers and scout-snipers ashore on the
fire- torn coral sands of Betio in the desperate and bloody
struggle for Tarawa Atoll. With his face badly scarred by a
fire as a child, the Army had rejected Hawkins as “disfi g-
ured.” The Marine Corps of the day, apparently, had had
fewer scruples . . . or a quite different idea of what consti-
tuted disability. Hawkins had served with distinction at an-
other Pacific
island—Guadalcanal—where he’d earned a
battlefield commission and transformed his
scout-sniper
unit into a deadly force.

On Betio’s Red Beach Two, Hawkins had conducted a
one-Marine offensive against the interlocking pillbox for-
mations that secured the heart of the Japanese defenses.

Armed only with a satchel full of grenades, Hawkins had
attacked bunker after bunker, stuffing hand grenades through
firing slits, down ventilator tubes, and through rear doors.

Hit time after time, he’d continued his assault, until a Japa-
nese machine-gunner put a Nambu round through his arm-
pit and into his chest. He’d died ten minutes later, telling his
scout-snipers, “I sure hate to leave you boys like this.”

That one Marine had diverted enough enemy fi re, how-
ever, to enable a battalion pinned down on the beach to
move forward, cutting Betio in two and seizing the Japanese
airfield in the island.

For his action, Hawkins won a posthumous Medal of

Honor, and the captured airstrip became known as Hawkins

Field—he’d been the only Marine infantryman to be hon-
ored in that way. The commander of the Marine assault
regiment at Betio, Colo nel David Shoup, credited Hawkins
with winning the battle.

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I A N D O U G L A S

Garroway had been at Tarawa with Hawkins and his men
in- sim, had run with him from pillbox to pillbox across
fire- swept patches of beach littered with burning vehicles
and dead and dying Marines. Modern Corps training ses-
sions included hyper-realistic link simulations allowing per-
sonnel to experience historical battles, to feel as though they
were present at key battles in the Corps’ history. Derna and

Chapultepec, Peking and Belleau Wood, Tarawa and the
peak of Mount Suribachi, Chosin and Hue, Guaymas and

Vladivostok, Mars, Ishtar, Sirius Gate, and Night’s Edge—
the blood- hallowed list of honor ran on for dozens of names,
and all had been reproduced in sharp, bullet- snapping reso-
lution for training simulations.

He wondered if future Marine recruits would one day
link in and find themselves crawling down into that damned,
black hellhole with him. What, he wondered, would they
learn? That some Marines were dumb as rocks, he decided.

The Marines of the RST maintained a vigilant watch, but

Xul re sistance appeared to have collapsed completely. They
dug in, established a perimeter, and did what Marines al-
ways did after taking a heavily defended beachhead.

They waited.

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Cluster Space

1820 hrs, GMT

On board Hermes, General Alexander continued to moni-
tor the situation on distant S-2/I. Yarlocke and her entourage
had vanished several hours earlier, leaving him with reas-
surances that they would not interfere with the Heartfi re
operation, coupled with warnings that 1MIEF was expected
to do all it could to make sure that the Pax mission would
succeed.

Visible on the main screen in Ops Center, the Pax Galactica

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

269

hung in empty space, bathed in the harsh light of the nearby
exploded star. She was Hermes’ twin, a pair of saucers
joined hub to hub, half a kilometer across with what looked
like a squared-off bite from the rim giving access to her
cavernous docking bay.

Alexander had dealt with obtuse civilian authority more
than once during his career, but the Warlock, he thought,
brought new meaning to the term “clueless.” He’d gone so
far as to play for her a Marine training download, a sim of
the first Xul encounter back in 2148, when a human explora-
tion ship, The Wings of Isis, had approached the Sirius Star-
gate. “Pure conjecture,” Yarlocke had told him. “We don’t
know what really happened. . . .”

Years later, an AI penetrator probe had picked echoes of
the Wings of Isis encounter within the data matrices of a Xul
huntership . . . uploaded copies of the human passengers
and crew of that vessel held in a kind of perpetual, virtual
hell- sim. Human personalities, somehow read, copied, and
uploaded into the Xul computer net, to serve as sources of
data for their captors.

Whether those uploads were the literal, imprisoned mem-
bers of the human ship’s crew, or extremely sophisticated
copies uploaded an instant before the humans were vapor-
ized was immaterial, a question, perhaps, for philosophical
sophontologists. Those copies thought of themselves as liv-
ing, breathing humans, shrieking out their existence in un-
ending pain.

Alexander had tried reminding Yarlocke of the fact. “Do
you really want to risk ending up like the crew of The Wings
of Isis?” he’d asked her.

“Didn’t anyone tell you?” she’d asked in reply, apparently
surprised. “I won’t be there. Neither will any other senator.

We’ll be sending AI counterparts . . . like our personal
assistants. There will be a Navy crew, of course, but the ac-
tual negotiations will be carried out with us linking through
from EarthRing. . . .”

She apparently cared not a bit that there would be humans

270

I A N D O U G L A S
on board the Pax . . . or that humans, the Marines of the

RST, were already deep within the Galactic Core, where
capture might well mean the same sort of virtual nightmare
as that suffered by the Isis crew and passengers.

Was her attitude one, then, of simple self-centeredness?

Or appalling ignorance coupled with a refusal to face real-
ity?

Alexander didn’t know . . . but he was sure that Yarlocke’s
fucking attitude was going to cost a lot of Marine lives.

18

0505.1102

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins,

Objective Lima, S-2/I

1945 hrs, GMT

“The way I heard it,” Lance Corporal Phil Chaffee said, “is
the Xul have a weapon, a machine of some kind, that eats
your soul. . . .”

“Bullshit,” Garroway said. “That’s squad- bay rot- brain bull-
session bullshit.”

Four of them—Garroway, Chaffee, Sergeant Milo Huerra,
and Master Sergeant Clara Gardner were sitting in a hole on
the surface of S-2/I, passing the time in time-honored Ma-
rine fashion—exchanging scuttlebutt.

Behind them, Firebase Hawkins rose slowly but relent-
lessly from the plasma- baked rubble of the ravaged Xul
base. Nanoconstructors, injected deep into the rock by the
trillions, were devouring rock and reproducing, extruding
as a by-product fast-growing shells of nanocrete. King-
fisher heavy transports, massive and bulbous- hulled, had
been descending from the Intrepid for the past several
hours, bringing down heavy weapons and life- support equip-
ment, turning the captured site into a Marine fortress. Nu-
merous Xul caverns and underground facilities had already

272

I A N D O U G L A S
been converted into deep, well-protected bunkers. The word

“invulnerable” had been floating around on the Net a lot.

There was considerable speculation within the ranks as to
just how invulnerable the firebase might be. The Xul could
bombard planets with asteroids, could annihilate worlds,
detonate stars. Against that kind of firepower, the Marine
base was just about as invulnerable as a stick of butter be-
neath the flame of a blowtorch. The only thing Firebase

Hawkins really had going for it was the fact that it was so
close to Sag A* that turning S-2 into a supernova wasn’t a
good option for the enemy . . . that and the fact, the hope,
really, that the Xul didn’t yet know the Marines were there.

In a nameless crater on the base perimeter, the four Ma-
rines had begun discussing Xul weaponry, and the chances
that 1MIEF might be able to carry this thing off.

“But they were tellin’ me back at the holding company
after boot camp,” Chaffee was saying, “that the Xul could
just kind of reach out and . . . snick! Grab a ship and the
souls of everyone inside!”

“Not quite, Lance Corporal,” Gardner said, chuckling. “I
think someone was having some fun playing with the new
meat.”

“That’s right,” Garroway said. “Soul-eaters? That’s right
up there with skyhooks and left-handed blivits. Stuff with
which to haze the new kid in the platoon.”

“But the master sergeant at the barracks said—”

“Look,” Gardner told him, patiently, but with an edge to
her voice, “if humans have something that answers to a soul,
the Xul can’t steal it, okay? What we think they do is elec-
tronically pattern or copy the state of every neuron, every
electrical charge in a person’s brain and nervous system.

That gets stored inside a kind of computer subsystem that
can translate things like language and memory. They can go
in and question it, get information from it. It might even still
think it’s a whole person. But it’s just . . . information.

See?”

“But there was The Wings of Isis incident six, seven hun-
dred years ago. . . .”

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C O R P S

273

“Drop it, Chaffee,” Garroway told him. “I don’t think any
of us want to think about alien soul-eaters right now!”

That drew some laughter from the others, but it was hu-
mor strained and on-edge.

The conversation had him wondering, though . . . and he
imagined the others were thinking the same things. What
was a human being, really, other than patterns of informa-
tion? An organism made up of various organ systems and
tissues, which in turn were made up of molecules, which
were collections of atoms . . . and atoms themselves, accord-
ing to the laws of quantum physics, were nothing more than
standing wave patterns in the chaos of virtual particles fi ll-
ing the reality substrate known as the Quantum Sea. Human
beings, so far as their individual molecules and atoms were
concerned, were in a constant state of flux. Every cell in the
body died—some in years, most in weeks or months—and
was replaced. He thought he remembered having down-
loaded something once about even bone cells being replaced
every seven years or so. The Aiden Garroway sitting here in
a hole on S-2/I was a completely different being, in terms of
his material make-up, than the Aiden Garroway who’d trig-
gered a supernova a decade ago.

And yet he was still himself, still remembered cramming
himself into the narrow constraints of the Euler triggership,
still remembered the feelings of relief and trembling release
when Gunny Warhurst had cut him free, as an exploding
star filled heaven with radiant light. . . .

The individual molecules and atoms of his body all had
been replaced, most of them many times over . . . and that
wasn’t even counting the fact that in those years he’d lost
two sets of legs and had them regrown. All that connected
the Garroway of today with the Garroway of ten years ago
was . . . patterns of information.

A quietly disturbing thought. If there were such things as
souls, they would have to be informational patterns as well,
impressed somehow among those standing waves in the

Quantum Sea. Patterns, perhaps, that survived the death and
breakdown of the physical body.

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I A N D O U G L A S

Just what was it that the Xuls patterned when they took
human prisoners?

He shouldered the thought aside, angry. Damn it, if the

Xul did pattern him, copy him, it would be the copy that ended
up in the Xul computers, right? Not . . . him, the quintessen-
tial Aiden Garroway. It would be someone else, someone
with all the memories and feelings of Aiden Garroway, but a
doppelganger, screaming out eternity in the depths of a

Xul-manufactured cybernetic hell. . . .

Still, the thought that there would be an Aiden Garroway
imprisoned on the Xul system, together, maybe, with thou-
sands or millions of other such copies . . . the fact that they
were copies didn’t make it right.

“Okay, okay,” Chaffee was saying. “But the rec ords still
say they could take something like The Wings of Isis—and
she was a pretty big ship, remember—and break her down in
an instant. Disintegrate her, I guess. And there have been a
few other times that’s happened, right? How do they do it?”

“We don’t know,” Garroway said.

“We think— think—they can reach down into the Quan-
tum Sea and . . . change things,” Gardner added. “Erase
matter. But we don’t really know.”

“Apparently they can’t erase whole planets,” Garroway
pointed out. “Ships, yeah. But not something as big as a
planet . . . or a solar system.”

“So they could come here to this planet and erase maybe
just the fi rebase?”

“Maybe.”

“The good news,” Huerra pointed out, “is that, if they can
do it, they don’t do it often. They seem to rely on pretty con-
ventional energy weapons most of the time . . . and on
throwing asteroids around when they need to bombard a
planet.”

“Very reassuring,” Gardner said. “They probably won’t
erase us, but they can drop rocks on us.”

“The way I heard it,” Garroway said, “is they only use
their patterning technology when they need to gather intel-

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275

ligence about an enemy. And the Xul are, well, conservative
in how they think. Very conservative.”

“Stands to reason, doesn’t it?” Huerra said. “The xeno-
soph people say the Xul are over a million years old as a race,
maybe ten million. Once they uploaded themselves into
their computers a million years or so ago, they stopped
changing, stopped evolving at all. What worked for great-
great-grand pap works for me, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fi x
it. I guess a race as old as theirs survives by becoming pretty
static. No growth, and no new ideas.”

“That may be our one big advantage over the Xul,” Gard-
ner said. “They may be millions of years ahead of us in
evolution, but their technology isn’t. They don’t change. ”

“Right,” Garroway added. “You know, for a long time,
people wondered why the Xul didn’t just come in and stomp
all over Humankind. At Armageddonfall, back in 2314, they
sent one ship to destroy the Earth. We destroyed that ship,
and then went nuts waiting for a follow- up fleet that never
showed. On the one hand, the Xul have some kind of xeno-
cidal hard-wired phobia of other intelligent species, to the
point that they think any other space-faring species is a
threat that has to be destroyed. On the other hand, they’re
damned slow in responding to a threat.”

“Yeah,” Huerra said. “If they’d ever invented FTL com-
munications and wired the whole Galaxy into a comm net-
work, they’d have figured out where we are and stepped on
us eight hundred years ago. But information travels slowly
from one Xul node to the next. Maybe it’s by conventional
radio, moving at the speed of light. Or maybe it’s just car-
ried by their hunterships, so it’s FTL, but it only reaches a
few of their nodes at a time.”

“Right,” Garroway said. “And each time we take out one
of their nodes—Cluster Space, Starwall, Night’s Edge—we
screw up their internal comm system. They lose track of us
and have to start over.”

“A damned inefficient way to run a war of galactic con-
quest,” Chaffee pointed out.

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I A N D O U G L A S

“Yeah,” Garroway said. “Lucky for us. Thing is, they already
own the Galaxy, so it’s not a matter of conquest. We’re more
like . . . I dunno. Rats in the walls.”

“Squeak,” Gardner said.

“Dangerous rats,” Huerra added. “Rats who’ve fi gured
out how to blow up stars!”

Garroway laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Gardner asked him.

“I just remembered something I downloaded once . . . an
old image, maybe a frame from a short sim, I don’t remem-
ber. Anyway, it shows this maze, right? Like they used to
use to test the intelligence of rats? You put a lab rat in the
door one side, and see how long it takes him to fi gure out
how to get to the cheese.”

“Yeah?”

“So the entrance is down in one corner, the cheese is in
the corner diagonally opposite . . . and the rat has chewed a
straight path from entrance to cheese, right through all the
intervening walls of the maze. The image was titled ‘Marine

Corps rat.’ ”

“I’ve seen that,” Gardner said. “It’s old. Maybe pre- spacefl ight.

They haven’t used lab rats and mazes in centuries.”

“So what? I tell you, it’s us.”

“Ooh- rah.”

“Anyway,” Garroway continued, “most of the time, we’re
beneath the Xul’s notice. They may honestly not even be
aware of us, day to day, the way we are of them. When they
sent that ship to Sol five hundred years ago, they were
scratching an itch, a reflex, not trying to commit genocide.”

“Well, Gunny,” Gardner said, “you’ve certainly managed
to step on my self-esteem for the day!”

“You’re too ugly to have self-esteem, Master Sergeant,”

Huerra told her.

“Not true,” Garroway said. “She has esteem d’Corps.

What else do jarheads need?”

Gardner laughed. “Semper fi, Gunny.”

Chaffee was leaning back, his opaque helmet visor turned
skyward. Overhead, the vast, delicately colored spiral of

G A L A C T I C

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277

Sagittarius A arched across the night sky, glowing a sullen
red out in the outskirts, but hardening to a definite blue to-
ward the middle. A quarter of it was below the eastern hori-
zon, but the rest dominated the entire sky, filling it despite
the competing blue-white glare from the IRS-16 star cluster,
and the overall backdrop of gas arcs, clusters, molecular
clouds, and stars. A very busy sky, and yet, at the moment,
impossibly serene.

Everything up there, Garroway knew, was moving one
way or another at literally astronomical velocities, but the scale
was so immense that you couldn’t actually see any move-
ment at all. According to the downloads he’d reviewed, the
star S-2 was heading toward GalCenter at almost fi ve thou-
sand kilometers per hour, dragging the planet they were now
occupying with it. Both would swing around the Dyson

Sphere at the Galaxy’s center in another thirty- some days.

By then, of course, the RST would be long gone, though
he imagined they would leave behind robotic sensors to re-
cord and transmit S-2’s actual close approach and passage.

What a ride that would be! . . .

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Chaffee asked, pointing at a spot half-
way up from the eastern horizon. “The Center?”

He was pointing at the place where the three vast, fl at
arms of the Sagittarius A spiral appeared to converge. You
couldn’t see a thing naked-eye, or even with IR imaging, but
right there, twenty light hours away, was the Dyson Sphere
enclosing the super-massive black hole at the Galaxy’s exact
center.

If the black hole was walled off behind some kind of
shell, how did the infalling matter of the accretion disk, the

Sag A spiral, reach it?

“That’s the center,” Garroway told him.

“You think they know we’re here?”

Garroway shrugged, then remembered the gesture couldn’t
be seen through the embrace of his armor. “Who knows?

Like Huerra said a while ago, they don’t seem to have anything
like faster-than-light QCC. We have to assume the bad guys
here got off a radio message before their network collapsed . . .

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I A N D O U G L A S
but it’ll be twenty hours before they hear about it at Gal-

Center.”

“More like seventeen hours, thirty minutes, now,” Gard-
ner reminded him.

“Okay, okay. But we’ve got time.”

“A little time,” Huerra put in.

“Right. And long before they hear, the Pax Galactica will
be here starting the peace talks, right? And we either talk . . .

or we fight. Either way, it doesn’t matter whether they’ve
heard we’re here or not.”

“What do you guys think is gonna happen?” Chaffee
asked. “Peace or fi ght?”

“Fight,” Gardner said.

“Fight, definitely,” Garroway said. “The politicians don’t
know what the fuck they’re dealing with here. They don’t
know the Xul like we do.”

“I dunno,” Huerra said. “We’ve kind of got the bastards
by the balls, sitting here on their planet with an Euler trig-
gership, don’t we?”

The triggership had been brought down from orbit an
hour ago, gentled in on its agravs into a deep and thick-walled
bunker near the center of Firebase Hawkins. The idea was
that a casual Xul probe might spot the triggership if it was
still in orbit with the Intrepid and the Cunningham, but
wouldn’t notice it shielded and sheltered underground.

Of course, so little was still known about Xul technical
capabilities.

“That’s what’s scary,” Garroway said. “Up until now, we
haven’t been much of a problem for the Xul. Not on a big
scale. Like I said, they were just kind of automatically
scratching an itch when they hit us before. Now we’re about
to really bite ’em right where it hurts.”

“It’ll make them sit up and take notice, that’s for damned
sure,” Gardner said. “You think they’re going to roll over
without a fi ght, Al?”

“A guy can dream, right?”

“It’s a good dream,” Garroway said. “But I wouldn’t bet
on it. Look at it from the Xul point of view.”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

279

“Is that even possible?” Gardner said with a laugh.

“Maybe not. But what I think their point of view is . . . is
the rats in the walls get to scratching and squeaking every
now and then. They go in, kill a few, watch the rest scurry
back into the walls, and say, ‘What the hell. It’s only rats.’ ”

“Yeah,” Gardner added, warming to the meta phor, “and
that’s just the Xul out on the back deck. The ones in the living
room, the bedroom, the kitchen, they don’t even know the rats
are there.”

“Right,” Garroway went on. “Then one day, the rats show
up with an AV-110 Tarantula, complete with a weapons pod
load-out of K-772 particle beam weapons, programmed nano-
disassembler dispensers, and a dozen tactical nukes, and
say . . . ‘Hi, there! Now that we have your full attention,
please sign a peace treaty with us or we level your house!’

What do you think they’ll do?”

“I dunno,” Chaffee admitted. “I guess it depends on what
they have in the garage in the way of pest control.”

“Exactly. We don’t know what they have. We do know,
though, that they don’t seem to think the same way we do.

They don’t think in terms of surrender, or of taking prisoners.”

“Except for the patterning thing,” Chaffee said.

“Except for that, which we don’t understand, and which
they don’t use often. They probably don’t think of us as fel-
low sapient beings, certainly not as fellow sapient beings
who are their equals.”

“You have to be on a more or less equal footing to negoti-
ate,” Gardner pointed out. “Each side has to understand and
respect the other. Not like them, necessarily, but know what
they’re capable of, and know that they’re going to do what
they say they’re going to do.”

“My point exactly,” Garroway said. “All they know is . . .

the rats have become a threat, and something has to be done
about them, once and for all.”

“Sheesh, Gunny,” Chaffee said. “You sure know how to
build up a guy’s morale.”

“Hey, it beats magic soul-eaters,” Gardner told him.

“What religion are you, anyway, Chaff?” Garroway asked.

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I A N D O U G L A S

“You have one?” He was curious. There were so many reli-
gions among the teeming billions of Humankind. Their
number and their diversity seemed to be defi ning character-
istics of the species.

“RQH. Why?”

“RQH . . . Reformed Quantum Humanist?”

“That’s right.”

“So . . . no such thing as God, everything is wave-particle
dualities, but the human intellect survives death in the Quan-
tum Sea.”

“I guess. We see God as what all Mind everywhere is
evolving into, the Omega Transformation, we call it. The
intellect—the soul, I
guess—but we call it the personal
omega, is the part of us in the Quantum Sea that survives
death, and maybe inhabits a succession of bodies as it evolves.

But while we’re here, on this plane, we can’t really see the
whole picture.”

“Fair enough. I see why you don’t like the idea of the Xul
stealing people’s souls. Excuse me. Personal omegas.”

“They’re kind of like demons in my church,” Chaffee said.

“Other religions have the Devil, or Entropy, or bad God- aliens
who fight the good God- aliens. We have the Xul.”

“Jesus Christ, Chaffee,” Gardner said, surprised. “If you
believe that, why the fuck did you join the Corps?”

“To fi ght them, Master Sergeant. To stop them from
devouring or killing every human everywhere. To stand
between them and Home. Isn’t that a good enough rea-
son?”

“It’ll do,” Garroway said.

“Why?” Chaffee asked. “What god do you believe in,

Gunny?”

“The God of Battles,” Garroway said. “The Marine’s God
of Battles. . . .”

• • •

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

281

Ops Center

UCS Pax Galactica

Cluster Space/Core Space

2120 hrs, GMT

The Pax hung in empty space near one of the stargates in
the Cluster Space system, actinic blue-white light gleaming
from the smooth lines of her saucer hulls.

“Telemetry from the Intrepid is coming through, Madam

Senator,” the voice of Pax’s commanding offi cer said in her
mind. “They have successfully mapped the gravitational ma-
trix of an area in S-2 space. We are cleared to proceed with
translation.”

“Very well, Admiral,” she replied. “Take us to the Galac-
tic Center.”

“It will take a few moments, Madam Senator. We’re still
coordinating with the other ships in the squadron.”

“There’s only the Hermes, damn it.”

“There is the Hermes, Madam Senator, and there are eight
warships loaded on both the Hermes and the Pax, which
will be disembarking as soon as we complete the maneuver.

There are also the Cunningham and the Intrepid, already in

Core Space, along with a number of fighters and supply ves-
sels. We need to be careful we don’t translate into a volume
of space already occupied by someone else.”

She sighed. Another delay. These military types didn’t
know what the hell they were doing. Or maybe they did . . .

and were being deliberately obstructionist. Well, they couldn’t
put it off much longer.

The QCC link with the Intrepid was transmitting to her
mind the view at the Galactic Core—the twenty-light year
spiral of the accretion disk, a point of ruby light marking the
central Dyson sphere, other icons and symbols indicating

S-2 and its planet, the positions of various Commonwealth
ships and probes, gas clouds, debris fields, and black
holes . . .

It looked damned crowded in there.

282

I A N D O U G L A S

In reality, of course, and as she’d explained to General

Alexander, Cyndi Yarlocke was not on board the Pax, was
not even in Cluster Space at all. Physically, she was still in
her private office in EarthRing, attended by machines and
by a small army of human servants as her mind followed the
unfolding of events at the Galactic Core.

The mastery of Quantum-Coupled Communications had
been the technological advance of millennia, greater, even,
than FTL travel itself. Originally, QCC instruments had been
discovered on Mars, at Chiron, and scattered across a few of
the other worlds so far visited by humans. They’d repre-
sented one of the great problems of modern physics—obvi-
ously linking together two points separated by light years
with no time lag whatsoever. Apparently, they operated
through the mechanism of entanglement, a principle of
quantum mechanics dismissed by no less an authority than

Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” yet one that had
repeatedly been demonstrated in the laboratory.

It had taken centuries to unlock the secrets of those com-
municators, ansibles, as one pre-spaceflight author had called
them. Not until the 25th-Century overthrow of the so-called

Quantum No-Cloning Principle, which insisted that entan-
glement could not be used to transmit information because
such would violate causality, had it become possible to build

FTL communicators. Until then, humans had communi-
cated faster than light only by borrowing the machines left
behind and still working by the Builders of half a million
years before.

As a politician, Yarlocke knew that if you controlled com-
munications, you controlled the ultimate power in the uni-
verse. You could know what was happening on the far side
of the Galaxy, could coordinate planning among your most
widely dispersed forces, could even rewrite history to order,
all by knowing the trick to instantaneous communications.

It was that, she knew, that would prove to be the eventual
undoing of the Xul. Information exchange for them was
slow, its dissemination limited to the movement of their
starships, which appeared to happen randomly, rather than

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

283

by plan. Pax would arrive at the Galactic Center, bypassing
the bases, fortresses, and other defenses the Xul had erected
farther out in the Core, and offer to deal with the Xul leader-
ship directly. With a Commonwealth Navy squadron at the

Core, the Xul would have no choice but to negotiate.

The peace, Yarlocke knew, would not last. It couldn’t,
because of the dynamic of History. The Xul, by all xenoso-
phontological reports, were static, possibly even in decline,
with no innovation, no growth, and quite possibly no social
motivation to drive them forward. Humankind technology
was constantly growing, changing, evolving; the Xul were
advanced, but there was no sign that they’d changed at all.

The Xul ships that had attacked Euler space some twelve
hundred years ago, apparently, were identical to the ships
they used today. Flat growth. Stagnant.

All Earth and her colonies needed was a little breathing
room, and the Peace would ensure that. Within another cen-
tury or so, Humankind would have developed so far in weap-
onry and engineering that the Xul would be left behind.

Cyndi Yarlocke, meanwhile, would use her new title as
peacemaker to secure her own power in the Commonwealth,
and go on to at last bring all of Humankind under the same
government. That step, too, was necessary; General Alexan-
der would be her principal tool in that, whether he agreed
with her or not.

He was the revered leader of the Marine Interstellar Ex-
peditionary Force, all but worshipped by every Marine
alive.

And if she owned Alexander, she would own his Marine

Corps. As simple as that.

“Madam Senator,” Admiral Brooke’s voice said, “we are
beginning translation.”

She pulled her awareness back out of Core Space, and
watched from the bridge of the Pax Galactica. Young men
and women sat at their consoles, while on the viewall panels
at the far end of the compartment, the vista of Earth’s Gal-
axy shimmered, faded, and then was replaced by a new and
quite alien backdrop.

284

I A N D O U G L A S

There were no symbols or icons this time. She saw, as if
with her physical eyes, the strange brilliance of the innermost
volume of the Galactic Core, the red- to- blue spiral of Sagit-
tarius A, the banked masses of star clouds in the remote
distance, the nearer glow of dust clouds and arching jets of
plasma within fiercely twisted magnetic fi elds.

Magnifi cent, she thought. . . .

The red-giant sun S-2 glowed sullenly to her left, close by
the ocher-red crescent of S-2/I. The Intrepid, a red-gold il-
lumined needle, was just visible between the planet and the

Pax. On the other side of the sky, she could make out the
shape of the Hermes, a tiny toy gleaming in red light.

The two transports floated silently in space for nearly
three hours, as each unloaded the warships carried in their
cargo bays—two light fleet carriers, the battleship The Mor-
rigen, two battlecruisers, two destroyers, and a heavy trans-
port. A tiny fleet, almost insubstantial . . . but a strong enough
force to make the Xul think twice before attacking, surely.

Moments after The Morrigen completed her disembarka-
tion from the Pax Galactica’s hold, Admiral Brooke an-
nounced their readiness to proceed.

“Do it, Admiral,” she told him. Her viewpoint stood by
him on the Pax’s bridge, watching as he gave orders power-
ing up the Alcubierre Drive.

The process took some moments. The Hermes- class
transport, originally designed not as a ship but as a
semi-mobile base, had not originally been designed to travel

FTL, save through its translation trick through the Quantum

Sea. The Alcubierre Drive had been an add-on to the

Hermes, and had been incorporated into the Pax’s design
only belatedly, while she was still in the Ares Yard space
dock as the Brynhldr.

But the drive was powered now by the full output of Pax

Galactica’s banks of QPT generators, and space around
her was bending inexorably as the power rose. She was
moving. . . .

Then the
star-clotted vista through the viewall panels
blurred, then turned brilliant with unimaginable velocity. At

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

285

several hundred times the speed of light, the Pax skipped in
across the intervening light hours.

Abruptly, the view ahead cleared. Yarlocke was looking
at . . . gods. What was she looking at? A cloud, perhaps, but
in two halves, and dark as soot, but with an impossibly
fierce white gleam peeking out from between. The soot, the
cloud, whatever it was, appeared to have shape and sub-
stance, but in an oddly fluid manner. She was having trouble
making out individual shapes; it was as though the eye kept
resting on that . . . thing, then sliding off.

“Is that the Dyson sphere they’ve been talking about?”

she asked Brooke.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I was expecting, I don’t know. A shell or something.”

“It’s composed of some trillions of discrete . . . pieces,”

he told her. “Spacecraft. Worlds the size of asteroids. There
may be whole planets in there bigger than Earth. They’re in
orbit around the central black hole, but they’re held together
in a semi-rigid structure by some sort of magnetic or
energy- fi eld network.”

“But what—”

“Madam Senator, not now, please. We’re . . . busy . . .”

She could see the other ship on the Pax’s screens . . .

something that appeared to detach itself from the GalCenter
cloud and move out toward the Humankind vessel at high
speed. Very high speed. At first, she thought it was one of
the big Xul vessels . . . one of the ones they called Behemoth
class.

As the seconds passed, however, and the oncoming vessel
grew larger, she realized that this was an entirely new class
of Xul ship.

It was enormous. . . .

“Transmit the AI message,” she ordered. An artifi cial in-
telligence programmed with everything Humankind knew
about Xul language, technology, and computer net protocols
would initiate contact.

“Already transmitted, Senator.”

How big is that thing? she wondered.

286

I A N D O U G L A S

Her personal AI, linked into the combat network, pro-
vided an answer. “Approximately twenty kilometers across,

Senator, and fifteen thick. We have never encountered a
mobile Xul ship of this size.”

“It’s too close!” Admiral Brooke said. “It’s going to hit
us!”

“Turn us around!” she yelled. “Back us off! . . .”

. . . but then something blinked, as though the universe
itself had just winked out.

And Cyndi Yarlocke was awake on the link couch back in
her office in SupraQuito EarthRing, as Reality itself twisted
and tore within her mind.

She was shrieking mindlessly as machines and servants
rushed to her side. . . .

19

0605.1102

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Core Space

0040 hrs, GMT

“She’s . . . gone!” a young naval officer seated at one of the Ops

Center consoles said. She sounded shocked beyond reason.

“What do you mean, ‘gone?’ ” Alexander demanded.

“What’s happening?”

“Sir! A large ship was coming out from that thing at the
center . . . and then we lost all signal!”

Alexander watched over her shoulder as she replayed the
image, transmitted back to the Hermes via Pax’s on- board

QCC network.

“Damn. Looks like The Wings of Isis all over again, Gen-
eral,” Admiral Taggart said.

“We have to assume so,” Alexander said. “Do we have
other viewpoints in the area?”

“Pax should have released drones, General,” the commu-
nications officer said. “But they’re not QCC. We won’t get
an image for another . . . nineteen minutes, twenty seconds.”

“They must know what direction the Pax came in from,”

Alexander said. “They’ll have FTL ships on the way by now.

Pass the word, Admiral. Everyone stand ready, full alert.”

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I A N D O U G L A S

“Aye, aye, General.”

“Make sure our fighter screen gets the word. They’ll be in
line to spot incoming hunterships fi rst.”

“Right.”

A minute dragged past. “Um, General?” Taggart asked at
last. “Are you implementing Starfi re?”

“Not yet. I want confirmation that the Pax is destroyed.”

“Christ, what more confi rmation do you need? That ship
coming out of the Core must have been twenty kilometers
across!”

“Right. And it might have swallowed the Pax and cut off
her signal.”

“May I remind the General,” Taggart said carefully, “that
there is no signal transmission in Quantum-Coupled Com-
munications? No signal to be cut off, and it can’t be screened
or blocked.”

“I know that, Admiral.” The words snapped. “Damn it.

Sorry, Liam. But everything is riding on this encounter. I
don’t want to start the shooting if what we have here is some
kind of misunderstanding.”

“Marty, you can’t be serious. You can’t believe that!”

“Not really. But we’re going to be sure.” He was still
churning through the possibilities. Maybe Pax’s QCC gear
had simply gone down. Maybe the Xul knew something
humans didn’t, something along the lines of how to screen
off QCC communications. Maybe the Pax had been de-
stroyed, but only because the Xul had been late in getting
the AI peace message, and even now were composing an
apology. . . .

Yeah, right, he thought. If the damned Xul even knew
what the word peace meant, he’d be the most surprised Ma-
rine in the fl eet.

But he had to know. Hell, Cyndi Yarlocke must be fuming
back in EarthRing, wondering why she’d been cut off, maybe
even suspecting the Marines of having pulled the plug. The

QCC link with Earth was still open. They would be watch-
ing, watching and recording everything.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

289

He didn’t want to bring Yarlocke into this. As of a minute
ago, this had become a purely military operation, and the
responsibility to shoot or to stand pat was his.

But she should be in on this. “Cara,” he said, summoning
his personal AI aide. “Patch me through to Senator Yar-
locke’s private link channel, via QCC. She probably would
like to know what’s going down.”

“Right away, General.”

“Patience, Admiral,” he said aloud. “We’re going to wait
until we see the bastards and know they’re gunning for us. I
don’t want to give Cyndi Yarlocke ammunition for my fi ring
squad.”

“I hear you there.”

“But pass the word to Starfire. Stand by to launch.”

They wouldn’t have long to wait now.

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

0043 hrs GMT

“Word just came down from Ops,” Gardner said. “They’re
getting the triggership ready for fi ring.”

“Shit!” Huerra said. “They’re gonna do it! They’re really
fuckin’ gonna do it!”

“What does it mean?” Chaffee asked.

“It means,” Garroway said quietly, “that the Xul decided
not to talk peace. There’s a good chance the Pax just got
vaporized, and that there’s a major shooting war starting a
few hundred kilometers above our heads!”

“God . . .”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“No such things as atheists in foxholes,” Gardner told
him. “You should know that.”

“Yeah. Only too well. . . .”

The alert was spreading now throughout the regimental

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I A N D O U G L A S
command net. Behind the four Marines, several large, black
spheres rotated smoothly in deep sockets, elevating the
business ends of multiple hypervelocity mass cannons into
line with the zenith. Elsewhere, smaller weapons—particle
guns, plasma weapons, and high-energy lasers began pow-
ering up.

If the Xul came down on S-2/I, they’d find the Marines
ready and waiting for them.

How long the Marines would be able to hold out, how-
ever, was anyone’s guess.

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Core Space

0043 hrs, GMT

“Here they come!” Admiral Taggart cried.

Alexander saw the Xul vessels on the main Ops screen,
three of them decelerating out of FTL so abruptly they
seemed simply to appear out of empty space. In the center
was the monster glimpsed by the Pax seconds before her
disappearance, a squat, flattened sphere that looked quite
similar to Xul fortresses encountered in the past in both
shape and surface structures, but which obviously had been
improved by the addition of both normal- space and FTL
drives.

“All stations!” Alexander snapped. “Hold fi re!”

Technically, the squadron was commanded by Admiral

Taggart, but as commanding officer of 1MIEF, Alexander
had a certain amount of leeway in the orders he gave. Offi -
cially, he could advise, and holding fire until the Xul inten-
tions were known for certain was the best advice he had to
give at the moment. They could sort out the difference be-
tween a suggestion and a direct order later . . . if there was a
later. . . .

The other two Xul ships were Type IV Behemoths, each a
quarter the size of the monster they accompanied. The trio

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

291

were moving toward the Hermes now, closing at a thousand
kilometers per second, and still fifty thousand kilometers
distant.

They were closer to the light carrier Chosin, released by
the Pax just before she’d set off for GalCenter. One of the

Behemoths was only ten thousand kilometers away as it
drew abreast of the Chosin, and still the Xul held their fi re.

Maybe. . . .

And then lances of white plasma speared from the Xul
ship, savaging Chosin. . . .

Nightstar 442

Core Space

0045 hrs, GMT

Lieutenant Charel Ramsey saw the Xul giants drop out of

FTL only a few thousand kilometers ahead. Gods, they were
close . . . and big! His orders were to observe, report, and
hold fire . . . but to be ready for an attack at any second.

Then one of the Behemoths opened fire on the Chosin,
spearing the light carrier with beams of starcore fury. Cho-
sin returned fire, launching a salvo of high-velocity missiles
armed with thermonuclear warheads. Most of those missiles
were intercepted by the enemy vessel’s defenses well short
of the target, but three detonated within ten kilometers of
the Xul warship’s hull—one of them very close, at a range of
perhaps half a kilometer—and white suns pulsed into harsh
radiance, one after another flaring, brightening and expand-
ing, then fading away.

“That’s our cue,” Major Steve Treverton, the Raptor’s
squadron leader, announced. The engage order was fl ooding
through the squadron’s tactical net. “Hit the bastards!”

Aerospace fighters operating in vacuum couldn’t peel off
and dive the way aircraft operating in atmosphere could. They
had to kill their forward velocity by fl ipping end for end and
applying full thrust in the direction of their drift, then align
themselves with the target and accelerate again. Nightstars,

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I A N D O U G L A S
however, with full inertial damping and GTE-5660 main
drives, made ultra-high-G maneuvers appear nearly as effort-
less as those of any atmospheric fighter. Four of the Raptor

Nightstars were traveling in formation within a thousand ki-
lometers of one another. As the nuclear blasts hammered at
the Behemoth’s hull, all four began simultaneously killing
their forward velocity and accelerating toward the Xul mon-
ster.

“Those explosions have thrown up a hell of a lot of space
fluff,” Treverton told the others. “We’ll come in behind the
blast screen where they can’t see us.”

“Shit, doesn’t that mean flying through the rad zone, skip-
per?” Lieutenant Karl Mayfair pointed out. “We’re gonna
get cooked!”

“What’s the matter, Mayfly?” Ramsey asked him, using
his squadron handle. “Forget your radiation screening?”

“Nah . . . but the background count is redlining now.”

“That won’t be anything compared to what it’ll read if

Hermes or Cunningham get fried,” Treverton told him, “and
we have to stay out here.”

“Point,” Mayfair said. “Sir.”

The nuclear detonations from Chosin’s salvo had thrown
out huge, blossoming clouds of highly radioactive debris . . .

most of it in the form of tiny bits of radioactively hot metal
vaporized in the blasts and
re-cooled as micron-
sized
flecks. As they thinned, the clouds became invisible at opti-
cal wavelengths, but they played hell with most sensors,
especially those operating at radio or infrared wavelengths.

Ramsey’s own sensors showed little ahead but a uniform
haze of white-noise snow, as he navigated on the Xul Behe-
moth’s expected position. The enemy ships were decelerat-
ing, which meant that the screening radioactive clouds would
drift on ahead of them in another moment; the Raptors
needed to hit the enemy ship before the screening effect was
lost.

Linked in with the three other Nightstars, Ramsey accel-
erated at full boost.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

293

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Core Space

0046 hrs, GMT

“Battle has been joined, General,” Taggart told him.

“Yes.”

What else was there to say? Battlespace drones relayed
intimate details of the struggle back to the Hermes’ Ops

Center—the Chosin adrift and found ering, her squat hull
nearly cut in two by Xul high- energy weapons; the nuclear
detonations alongside the nearest Xul huntership; the plunge
of Marine aerospace fighters into the melee . . .

There was a horrid inevitability to it all—Yarlocke’s peace
offer, the instant and deadly Xul response, and now eleven

MIEF capital ships, a handful of fighters, and a few hundred

Marines faced utter annihilation.

Alexander was cycling through the options in his mind,
even as the battle unfolded in strobing flashes of nuclear
light on the Ops Center’s main screens.

The destruction of the Pax Galactica had sharply limited
his viable choices. Pax and Hermes together had brought
eight smaller warships into the S-2 system, while the In-
trepid had brought
one—the Cunningham. Out of those
nine transported vessels, four, at least, were doomed without
the Pax if the battle in Core Space turned against them.

While they could travel faster than light on their Alcubierre

Drives, flying back to Commonwealth space under their own
power would take years, and they didn’t have the on- board
supplies necessary for such a voyage.

They possessed, therefore, only two options for getting
back home in less than decades; either they went out through
a stargate—and the gates in Core Space appeared to be very
well defended, or they had to leave as they’d arrived, trans-
lating out on board a larger, translation-capable vessel, like
the vanished Pax. Now there was only Hermes, and she
would require two jumps, at least, to take them all out.

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I A N D O U G L A S

As for Intrepid, her kilometer-long bulk would not fi t on
board the Hermes. She had to get out either through a gate,
or by means of a long, long FTL voyage. She, at least, was
large enough to be able to manufacture nanoassemblers in
numbers enough to convert carbonaceous asteroids into food
and water for the humans on board.

All of this had been anticipated in the planning for Heart-
fire, of course. Very few in the operational planning constel-
lation had seriously believed that the Xul would agree to
peace terms, and the possibility that Pax would be destroyed
in the first few seconds of the encounter phase of her mis-
sion had always loomed quite large in their minds. The
squadron’s principle options were two . . . fight or run. If the
choice was running, the plan called for losing any pursuing

Xul vessels in the starclouds and nebulae of the Core, fi nd-
ing a place where Hermes or the Intrepid could carry out the
delicate gravitometric readings necessary to measure the
shape of local space. Once that happened, Hermes could
make as many translations back and forth between Core and

Sol as were necessary to get all of the ships except In-
trepid—but including Intrepid’s crew—back to safety.

It was that or launch an assault on the fortress guarding
the stargate through which they’d entered Core Space. With

Intrepid’s firepower plus several capital ships, it might be
possible to destroy the fort and allow the survivors to escape
through the gate.

Might . . .

Alexander tried not to think about yet another alternative.

In a battle with these gargantuan Xul vessels, not all of the

Commonwealth warships were going to survive. Chosin was
already crippled, leaking atmosphere and losing power. Much
more of that and Hermes might be able to take all of the
survivors back to Sol in one translation . . . if, of course,

Hermes herself survived what was coming.

One of the Xul behemoths was reeling beneath an attack
by Marine aerospace fighters. They still had a chance . . .

He considered ordering a full and immediate launch of

Heartbreak, but shoved the thought aside. Patience. . . .

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

295

The ops plan as currently running had been worked out in
long simulations back in AresRing over the past year.

Dubbed “the Cometary Option,” it offered the squadron a
slender chance of survival, and promised to draw Xul forces
away from the Marines guarding the triggerships on S-2/I.

It had been his suggestion, originally—drawing off any

Xul ships in the system by directly threatening GalCenter,
and, just incidentally, picking up some badly needed intel on
the way. As the trio of Xul vessels continued approaching, it
was becoming a better and better option . . . one on which
he was going to have to stake his life, and the survival of the
squadron, in one throw of the dice.

“General,” Cara said in his mind. “You have an incom-
ing communication from EarthRing.”

“Right,” he said. “The Warlock . . .”

“No, sir. Senator Yarlocke appears to be . . . indisposed.

The communication is from George Stahl, her chief aide.”

Curious. “Put him through.”

“General Alexander?” Stahl’s virtual icon appeared in

Alexander’s mind, a radiant nimbus with a lined, human
face.

“Yes, Mr. Stahl. You must understand that we’re a little
busy out here right now.”

“I understand that. General . . . the Senator appears to
have been . . . attacked.”

“Attacked? How? What do you mean?”

“She was linked with the Pax Galactica when a large
spacecraft emerged from the GalCenter Dyson cloud. The
connection was broken somewhat abruptly. The Senator ap-
pears to have suffered some sort of massive psychic trauma.”

“I . . . see . . .” Alexander held back his initial, dismissive
thought. Massive psychic trauma was a kind of pop ular
catch phrase long common in entertainment sims and even
the news media, but which had no place in real life. The as-
sumption was that when a person was linked through their
cere bral implants to a remote location, occupying a teleop-
erated sensory unit, for example, or jacked into a distant
computer net, they ran a partic ular risk. If that connection

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I A N D O U G L A S
was suddenly snapped, the person could literally lose his or
her mind—as if the person’s mind had actually been occu-
pying the distant net.

Fictional sims made heavy duty use of the notion, but the
whole idea was nonsense. The optic nerves that brought sen-
sory data to the back of the human brain were several centi-
meters long; the chains of neurons carrying information from
a person’s left foot could be almost two meters long. Tele-
operation and cere bral linkage had long ago demonstrated
that it didn’t matter how long the distance was between
sensor—whether eye or camera—and the brain that assem-
bled the data into a coherent picture. A person who lost his
eyesight didn’t also lose his mind; nor did a person who suf-
fered an interruption in his sim-link with a teleoperated
submarine at the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench or while
remotely probing the sulfuric, high-pressure hell of the sur-
face of Venus. The remote explorer simply woke up back on
his or her link couch, confused, perhaps, but none the worse
for wear.

If it had been otherwise, of course, teleoperational tech-
nology would not have developed as far or as fast as it had
over the past eight centuries. Thanks to QCC links, people
could engage in sim-face to sim-face virtual conferences
across interstellar distances . . . or look over Admiral Tag-
gart’s shoulder as he commanded the 1MIEF squadron at
the Galactic Core. If people had actually risked insanity ev-
ery time they virtually linked with one another, people would
still be communicating through the old- time media of tele-
phone, holovision, and electronic mail.

If Yarlocke’s chief aide thought his boss had been injured
by some sort of psychic trauma, Alexander would have to
humor him. He didn’t at the moment have time to persuade
the man otherwise.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “But what do you want
us to do about it?”

“Break off the operation,” Stahl told him. “Some of us
here believe the Xul have found a way to attack us through
you. Break off and return to near-Earth space!”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

297

“That . . . is not possible at the moment.” With a mental
shrug, he disconnected the link. Commonwealth senators
were one thing in the hierarchy of power, aides and secretar-
ies something else entirely.

Could the Xul have established a link with EarthRing via
the QCC? Worse, could they physically attack humans over
such a link? It didn’t seem credible but, until he had hard
data on Yarlocke’s physical and mental condition, he could
not take chances. “Comm!” he said. “Switch off all QCC
links with EarthRing!”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“All ships! Stand by to execute Cometary Option One-

Alpha!”

It was the best, he thought, of a very poor handful of op-
tions.

Nightstar 442

Core Space

0054 hrs, GMT

Moving at nearly three hundred kilometers per second,

Ramsey’s Nightstar slammed into the tenuous blossom of
one of the radioactive clouds. Minute bits of metal and debris
flared as they were engulfed by his magnetic shields, shred-
ded by the field’s passage into energy and component atoms.

Ramsey had given the fire- at- best command thirty sec-
onds ago. The fighter was moving too fast for merely human
reflexes to pick out the best instant for loosing its weapons.

The aerospace craft’s AI, however, could calculate the best
possible firing solution and release the weapons load at a
precisely determined instant; Ramsey felt the ship kick, shud-
der, and jolt hard as its GV-3662 Gatling fusion gun howled,
spewing thirty droplets of fusing hydrogen per second in a
stream of blue-white fi re.

For an instant, Ramsey saw the vast side of the Xul’s hull
looming huge, the surface coming apart beneath the caress
of Gatling starfire. Large chunks of hull peeled back and

298

I A N D O U G L A S
spun away, as vaporizing metal- plastic laminate flared up in
front of him.

The Nightstar slammed through, skin temperature soar-
ing as the tiny craft threaded its way scant meters above the

Xul ship’s hull. Surface features flashed past like an alien
landscape glimpsed in an instant . . . and then it was gone,
falling away behind as Ramsey initiated full acceleration
once more. Particle beams and lasers reached out after him;
his AI was already jinking the fighter in random up-down-
sideways bursts to frustrate Xul tracking and targeting.

And then he heard the recall. . . .

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Core Space

0046 hrs, GMT

“General, it’s going to take at least ninety minutes to get our
fighters back on board Cunningham!”

“I know.” The admission burned in his gut. “And there
are the Marines on S-2/I. But we can’t wait.”

Taggart gave him a hard look. “I thought the Marines
didn’t leave their own behind. Ever.”

“Damn it, Liam, we can’t stay. But we can come back. . . .”

“If there’s anything to come back to.”

Alexander stared for a moment at the main screen, where
one of the Behemoths appeared to be drifting out of control,
its drives crippled. “The idea is to get them to follow us.

They will, if we’re enough of a threat.”

The display changed to a different image, one transmitted
from a different battlespace drone. Intrepid had swung about
and was approaching the largest Xul ship, coming up from
astern. So far, there’d been no reaction from the large vessel;

Intrepid, a Xul hull captured and with Commonwealth
drives and weaponry installed, still looked like a Xul hunt-
ership, whatever internal differences there might be now.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

299

Intrepid’s AI would be broadcasting on Xul frequencies,
telling a story of communications diffi culty.

The Xul monster abruptly accelerated, energy readings
on board rising as she prepared to fire her weapons. Intrepid
fi red first. . . .

Explosions ripped through the larger ship, as inert, one-
tenth-kilogram slugs accelerated to
near-light velocities
lanced from Intrepid’s mass drivers, shredding through the

Xul vessel’s hull and interior like bullets through tissue.

With such weapons, and at such close range, size alone
meant very little. Intrepid continued hammering at the Xul
ship with every weapon that would bear. Enough damage
would release the singularity at the enemy ship’s heart and
destroy her; the question was whether Intrepid could fi re
fast enough and hit hard enough before her opponent could
get in a shot of her own. . . .

The Xul ship fired, a single bolt of plasma energy focused
through intense magnetic fi elds until it was as bright and as
hot as a piece of the Sun. The bolt burned through Intrepid’s
needle- slender hull a third of the way forward from her aft
end, devouring her QPT generators in a blaze of white
light.

“Communications,” Alexander said. “Make to all vessels
and commands. Tell them that the squadron is going to exe-
cute the Cometary Option. Deployed fighters and any ves-
sels that cannot initiate the Alcubierre Drive sequence due
to battle damage are to drop into deep black mode and await
our return. Forces on the planet will maintain their perime-
ter, and wait for a signal from Hermes to execute Heart-
break. Get me an acknowledgement from all commands.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the communications offi cer replied.

“Ah . . . General?”

“What?”

“EarthRing is attempting to initiate contact via QCC.”

“Do not acknowledge. Our QCC is temporarily down.

Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

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I A N D O U G L A S

“Good.”

Once the squadron pulled back to Sol—even just back to

Cluster Space—the chances were good to excellent that they
would not be allowed to come back for the ships and men
left behind at S-2.

And they would be coming back.

Somehow.

20

0605.1102

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Core Space

0106 hrs, GMT

“Hermes is ready in all respects for Alcubierre Drive,” Cap-
tain Robeson, the ship’s commanding offi cer, reported.

“Very well,” Admiral Taggart replied. “General? At your
command.”

Alexander gave his various data channels a last check.

Chosin was badly damaged and unable to accelerate; In-
trepid was completely out of communication and might well
be dead. Thirteen fighters had survived the unequal battle
against the Xul super-ships and were now en route to Cun-
ningham.

Seven other warships, along with Hermes, had reported
readiness for FTL drive. Moore, Cunningham’s skipper, had
received and acknowledged his orders. He was to remain
and recover his remaining fighters, attempting to avoid Xul
notice by dropping into deep- black stealth mode, powering
down all but absolutely essential power systems to remain
unobserved by Xul sensors. If that didn’t work, and the Xul
spotted Cunningham and began closing, he was to break off
and accelerate to FTL, attempting to reach safety within one
of the surrounding molecular clouds.

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I A N D O U G L A S

Any fi ghters Cunningham was forced to leave behind
would simply have to take their chances, either down on the
planet’s surface with the RST or powered down and adrift in
stealth mode until Commonwealth ships could get back to

S-2.

Of the three Xul ships ahead, one of the Behemoths was
definitely crippled. The big one savaged by the Intrepid was
damaged, but still maneuvering, still deadly, and the second

Behemoth hadn’t even been touched.

Worse, more Xul hunterships were arriving now, drop-
ping out of FTL in a teeming swarm.

It was time to leave.

“Make a final call to all units remaining in- system,” Al-
exander said. “Tell them, ‘Stay low and stay out of trouble.

We’ll be back. Good luck . . . and semper fi.’ ”

“Message transmitted, General. We have acknowledg-
ment from all units.”

“Very well. Admiral? Initiate the Cometary Option.”

“Aye, aye, General. Hermes to Heartfire Squadron. All
vessels able to respond, engage Alcubierre Drive on my
command . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . initiate!”

As the Xul armada closed on the eight Commonwealth
vessels, those ships began accelerating. One by one, the im-
ages of those moving ships began to shimmer and distort, as
bubbles of space around them warped.

And then they were plunging toward the Galactic Center
at ten times the speed of light.

Nightstar 442

Core Space

0107 hrs, GMT

“Shit!” Lieutenant Mara Cosgriff shouted over the link.

“They’re leaving us! They’re fucking leaving us!”

“Easy, Mar,” Ramsey told her. “It’s not like they have a hell
of a lot of choice.”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

303

More and more Xul ships
were dropping out of their
equivalent of Alcubierre Drive, obviously attempting to cor-
ner the tiny squadron of Commonwealth warships. Those
warships were winking out of normal space, now, in rapid
succession, leaving energy trails of tortured hydrogen atoms
pointing like arrows toward GalCenter. Hermes, requiring
more time to power up her Alcubierre Drive, was the very
last to fl ash out of normal space, and into the twisted realm
of FTL.

Slowly, ponderously, the Xul giants began coming about,
killing their forward velocity and aligning themselves on

GalCenter. Yes! They were following the squadron.

Or most of them were. Five of the newcomers descended
instead on the crippled Intrepid, and five more on the Cho-
sin, which appeared to be completely dead now. They hesi-
tated as they pulled alongside Intrepid, possibly fooled by
her hull into thinking she was a damaged Xul huntership.

Chosin, however, blazed into a blue-white glare of light as
five Xul warships speared her with particle beams and high-
energy lasers. The glare expanded, faded . . . and nothing
was left of Chosin but coalescing particles the size of grains
of sand.

And in another moment, the remnant fragment of Intrepid
vanished as well, cleanly and instantaneously, a victim, ap-
parently of the Xul patterning weapon. It made sense. If you
didn’t know whether a vessel was occupied by humans or

Xul, copy them and upload them all, and let the Xul com-
puter network sort them out.

“Stealth mode,” Treverton told them all. “Execute! . . .”

And then the squadron net was silent.

At Ramsey’s thought, his Nightstar powered down, leaving
only a trickle of energy flowing from the batteries to his life
support and to a few key external sensors. Massing just under

120 tons and sheathed in absorbing layers of active nanofl age,
the Nightstar carried very little signature for the Xul monsters
to spot. Even at close range, they were likely to dismiss one of
the inert heavy fighters as a drifting bit of wreckage.

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I A N D O U G L A S

At least . . . that was the idea, and the hope that sustained
the thirteen surviving members of Raptor Squadron now.

The fi ghter didn’t have a transparent canopy, of course—
not with the local background radiation count being what it
was—but sensory data flowed through Ramsey’s cere bral
implants, giving him a magnificent, and supremely lonely
viewpoint. With no links to the other Raptors, he felt com-
pletely alone.

Hell, at this point, he couldn’t even see the Xul ships any
longer. All that was out there was that impossible and sur-
real sky dominated by the spiral of Sag A, the ruby gleam of

S-2, and the ocher crescent that was the planet, now some
fifty thousand kilometers, low and on his port side, the entire
vista slowly turning as his Nightstar tumbled.

Xul hunterships were large enough that some of those
stars out there might be the enemy . . . but if so he couldn’t
pick them out from the millions of naked-eye stars that
made up the distant walls of the Galactic Core. He would
have to be looking in exactly the right spot to catch a glimpse
of movement contrary to the background drift.

He checked his life support readout. His air generators
would keep him going for a week or more—food and water
about the same. His biggest limitation was his radiation shield-
ing.

His magnetic screens were off. Those would be spotted
by any passing Xul as easily as a flare. His Nightstar’s phase
shift was still engaged, however. Phase shift allowed him to
occupy a hazy niche half a step out of the usual three physi-
cal dimensions. Since it leaked very little power, the system
actually contributed to his invisibility, as well as greatly cut-
ting down on the amount of radiation he was encountering.

More radiation was blocked by the active nanoflage on his
outer hull, which absorbed all radiation, from radar to X-rays,
and transmitted it to the chargers that kept his batteries go-
ing. Some radiation, though, was still getting through.

According to his med readouts, he would start getting sick
within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and that was allow-
ing for the anti-rad nano already coursing through his blood.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

305

He would have acquired a fatal dose perhaps forty hours
after that.

Long before that happened, Ramsey knew, he would
switch off his phase- shift unit entirely. There was enough
background radiation out there now to kill him more or less
instantly.

But he had time, yet.

He waited.

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

0110 hrs, GMT

“I don’t believe the bastards went and left us!” PFC James

Connors said. The young Marine had showed up a few min-
utes ago, wandering across the blasted plain toward the Ma-
rine perimeter, apparently lost. Gardner had ordered him
into the hole. “What the fuck happened to ‘no man left be-
hind?’ ”

“They’ll be back,” Gardner told him. But she didn’t sound
hopeful.

“Hey, if it’s a choice between a few hundred Marines buy-
ing it,” Huerra said, “and those same Marines and the squad-
ron getting scragged, I guess we know what the brass is
going to do, huh?”

“Yeah,” Chaffee added, “and tough shit if those ‘few hun-
dred Marines’ happen to be us, huh?”

“Hey, welcome to the Corps,” Garroway told him. “You
volunteered. No one told you it would be easy. Or safe.”

He looked up at the alien sky, at the silent, motionless
pinwheel of Sag A. Word had been passed down the line
moments ago that the squadron was leaving—promising to
return, but leaving.

The Marines on S-2/I were on their own.

The perimeter seemed eerily quiet. Not that anyone was
particularly expecting trouble out here. The biggest threat

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I A N D O U G L A S
right now was from undiscovered pockets of Xul combat
machines still buried somewhere beneath Firebase Hawk-
ins, perhaps as deep as a kilometer or two. So far as any of
the sensor drones sent out around the planet had been able to
determine, this had been the only Xul outpost on an other-
wise empty and lifeless world.

But Marine regs demanded a defensive perimeter for a
firebase on a hostile beachhead, and so half of the Marines
had been scattered along a broad circle surrounding the
center of the base. If the Xul did come from outside, they’d
hit the perimeter defenses first . . . and maybe, maybe, the
perimeter would hold long enough for heavier forces to ar-
rive.

At least they would hold while the ammo held out. The
fighting earlier had drained everyone’s expendables—slugs
for the mass drivers, hydrogen ice rounds for the plasma
guns, fresh power units for plasma guns and lasers. So far,
no one had bothered to issue fresh expendables, and that
meant a screw-up somewhere.

At the moment, though, the Net—which normally would
have allowed them to communicate their needs back to HQ
with a thought—was down, switched off to keep the Xul
from homing on it. Marines in the field were limited now to
their back- up suit comms, which had a range of only a few
meters.

He hoped the powers- that- be would remember to switch
on the Net if there was anything the Marines on the perim-
eter needed to know . . . like an immanent Xul attack.

Two hundred
sixty-some Marines, not counting those

KIA and wounded during the landing assault, or ganized
into two companies—half a regiment—under a captain’s
command.

If the Xul found them here, they wouldn’t be much more
than a minor distraction.

Garroway just hoped to hell the squadron came back as
promised, and soon.

He was feeling a bit exposed out here. . . .

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

307

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Galactic Center

0110 hrs, GMT

They dropped out of FTL, decelerating hard, their Alcu-
bierre Drive clawing at surrounding space to reduce Hermes’

headlong plunge into the Galactic Center to velocities that
would let them swing around the supermassive black hole.

They could have stayed in FTL, of course, traveling in a
straight line unaffected by the central black hole’s gravity
and finding a safe haven at which to rendezvous with the
other ships of the squadron somewhere beyond, among those
billions of Core stars. But Operation Heartfire had not been
limited to support of the failed peace mission. It was also
intended to gather intelligence—in partic ular, to get a truly
close look at whatever it was the Xul were building in the

Galaxy’s innermost Holy of Holies.

Hermes was now just a few tens of thousands of kilome-
ters from the outermost shell of the Dyson cloud, and mov-
ing closer every second, hurtling in on a tight, cometary
path. The AI controlling the Commonwealth vessel’s course
had inserted them into an approach that would take them
skimming just above that enigmatic central object, giving
them a close look.

“Cara?” Alexander asked. He felt trapped—anxious, but
unable to show it. “Is everything set?” It was only the third
or fourth time he’d asked his personal AI that question.

“Affi rmative, General,” was her patient answer.

“Any sign of the rest of the squadron?”

“Negative, General. Even a slight amount of scattering
would have put them well beyond visual range.”

On the main Ops display screens, the central object had
taken on a distinctly fuzzy appearance—a Dyson cloud as
opposed to a Dyson sphere. The objects orbiting the central
black hole must number in the hundreds of trillions, a vast
and staggering swarm of artificial worlds and worldlets,

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I A N D O U G L A S
each apparently pursuing its own inde pen dent orbit without
coming close enough to one another to risk collision. Or did
each object maneuver when an intercept with another object
was detected? Alexander tried to imagine the computing
power necessary to keep track of such complexity, and shook
his head. The sheer scale of the engineering took it beyond
human ken.

He was reminded, though, of what had been happening in

Earth’s Solar System over the course of the past few centu-
ries. Already, most of Humankind resided within the rings
of stations and habs circling Earth and Mars, and billions
more lived in hollowed-out asteroids and cometary bodies
terraformed into tiny, artificial worlds circling Sol in a haze
of life and civilization. In another few millennia, Earth’s sun
might well look something like the Dyson cloud ahead, com-
pletely surrounded by shells of orbiting habitats in a cloud
so thick that Sol himself could no longer be seen from the
outside.

As Hermes hurtled closer, he could see that the polar re-
gions were lightly occupied, a mere dusting of orbiting ob-
jects. Stranger, though, was the narrow and empty zone
around the cloud’s equator. That made no sense whatsoever in
terms of traditional orbital dynamics. Since it was orbiting the
center of the gravitational singularity, an object passing above
the northern hemi sphere of the central black hole had to cross
the equator during its orbit and pass over the southern hemi-
sphere, then cross the equator again back to the north; it
couldn’t simply circle above one hemi sphere or the other, and
yet that appeared to be exactly what was happening here.

“Most of the cloud components,” Cara was whispering in
his mind, “are not in orbit.”

This was getting weirder and weirder. “How the hell do
they stay put, then? Antigravity?”

However they were managing the trick, Alexander could
easily see why they needed to do it. The equatorial area was
clear to allow infalling mass—the gas, dust, and debris that
made up the twenty-light year spiral of Sagittarius A—to
pass through the cloud and enter the black hole’s event hori-

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

309

zon. From here, the gap appeared as a narrow line, illumi-
nated from within by X-rays, bisecting the cloud and perhaps
no more than a few thousand kilometers wide. This close to

GalCenter, the spiraling matter of the accretion disk had been
gravitationally compressed to a thin sheet of hot gas, invisi-
ble at optical wavelengths but aglow in the high ultraviolet,
and no more than meters thick. The sheet streamed between
the two halves of the cloud, whipping around the super-
massive object hidden inside before vanishing into the event
horizon with a high-energy shriek of X-rays and cosmic ra-
diation.

“Analysis of the cloud components,” Cara said, “indi-
cates that most of the individual objects are anchored to
others. The Dyson cloud is essentially a very large and ex-
traordinarily complex crystalline lattice arranged in two
opposing hemispheres.”

Which explained how they kept the equatorial regions
clear. There were two clouds, one above the black hole’s
northern hemi sphere, one above the south. The two almost
touched at the equator, but were rotating separately.

That didn’t explain how they kept the system stable, how-
ever. If the cloud objects were not actually in orbit around
the black hole, they should fall inexorably into the event
horizon and be destroyed.

“There are energetic structures anchoring the cloud sec-
tions in space,” Cara continued. “The Xul appear to be ma-
nipulating strong, local magnetic fields both in order to link
individual habitats and to anchor the systems in place.”

“Anchored how?”

“The engineering details are unclear, and likely repre-
sent a level of technology far in advance of anything with
which we are familiar. The anchoring structures, however,
appear to extend into the Quantum Sea.”

The base state of reality. Suddenly, Alexander was re-
minded that everything he was seeing here represented only
a tiny fraction of the whole . . . like a blind man touching a
tree and missing the forest. The construction project ahead
didn’t exist in only a single set of spatial dimensions.

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I A N D O U G L A S

“Here we go!” an officer at a nearby console said. Hermes
was picking up speed fast as she was gravitationally acceler-
ated along her path. Alexander had a blurred and momen-
tary glimpse of the cloud expanding. She slammed through
the thin sheet of plasma at the equator . . . and for the brief-
est of instants, Alexander stared into the full radiance within
the cloud.

And then Hermes was receding into space once more, its
close passage so fast that human senses could neither see
nor interpret what had just happened.

“We have Xul ships coming up off the cloud behind us,”

Taggart told him.

“Of course.” The enemy couldn’t allow this trespass of
their inner space without at least an attempt at protest. Hermes
was the slowest and most clumsy of the Commonwealth
ships in the squadron, so the other seven vessels must al-
ready have completed their swing-bys.

The Xul defenses would be on full alert by now.

Alexander gave thought to ordering Hermes’ weapons
systems officers to open fire, but dropped the idea almost as
soon as it surfaced. All of the warships in the Common-
wealth’s arsenals could not have caused serious damage to
that vast and hazy structure at the center. The op planners
had anticipated that, and combat was not a priority in this
pass, save in self-defense. They would save energy for the
escape.

Just possibly the fact that the Commonwealth ships had
not attacked might convey a willingness to talk.

No one seriously expected the Xul to understand that
message, however. Judging from the way their ships were
wafting up from the Cloud, the close passage had only suc-
ceeded in giving the hornet’s nest a good, swift kick.

And now the swarm was coming up after them.

“Tell me we got that passage,” Alexander said.

“We did, sir,” a bridge officer reported. “Athena is analyz-
ing the images now.”

“And did we get the Spymasters away?”

“Yes, sir. Two hundred of them.”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

311

“That won’t even begin to scratch the surface. But we’ll
get some data back, at least.”

Hermes was again moving in a nearly straight line, her
hairpin turn about the gravitational singularity completed.

Taggart gave a mental command, and Hermes again began
accelerating. Her Alcubierre Drive engaged, space warped
around her, and she slipped into the ghostly otherworldli-
ness of FTL.

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

0115 hrs, GMT

Garroway rose in the crater sheltering the five Marines on
the Hawkins perimeter. In the distance, he could see a lone
figure—a Marine in massive Type 690
armor—trudging
across the rubble a hundred meters away. He was, Garroway
decided, coming from one of the other perimeter positions,
possibly the next one over, occupied by Bravo Company.

“Who do you think it is?” Gardner asked.

“Damfino,” Garroway replied. “I’m going to go check
him out.”

“What, you think it’s a Xul sneaking upon us in Marine
armor?” Huerra asked.

“No, but it looks like he’s coming from the next fi ghting
hole over. I want to know who’s over there.”

Scrambling up out of the hole, he started to walk, making
for a guestimated intercept point in front of the other Ma-
rine.

The other Marine saw him coming and turned to face
him. “Hey, what’s up?”

Garroway recognized the voice even before his implant
identified the speaker. “Son of a bitch! Gunny Warhurst!

Change your mind about coming back in, yet?”

“Days ago, Gare. Days ago. It’s just a little late to change
my mind now, y’know?”

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I A N D O U G L A S

“You’re a rock, Gunny, you know that? As in ‘dumb as a.’

You could be back in Sunken Miami with two gorgeous na-
ked women in a hot tub.”

“Don’t rub it in, Marine. That hot tub is looking better all
the time.”

“What’re you doing out here?”

“Lieutenant Whitfield sent me out looking for fresh
plasma charges. You guys got any to share?”

“You’ve got to be kidding, right?” Garroway said. He
slapped the side of his weapon. “I’m down to my last hun-
dred rounds.”

“There should still be a bunch of ammo on the Tarantu-
las,” Warhurst told him.

“Yeah, and right now they’re as dangerous as the Xulies,”

Garroway replied.

The last he’d heard, half the Tarantulas were being em-
ployed as tunnelers, digging down into the crust of S-2/I in
search of surviving pockets of Xul, while the rest were carv-
ing out battlements on the surface. Rock slagged down and
became plastic, glowing a sullen, black-crusted red, where
those monsters plied their beams.

“So who screwed up and sent the ’rants underground
without offloading the goods?” Warhurst wanted to know.

“Good question.”

“Captain Black?” Warhurst suggested.

“He’s too smart for that,” Garroway replied. “But maybe
his constellation slipped on some code.”

Modern combat, he thought, was entirely too fast and too
complicated for any one man to keep track of everything
that was going on in a battle zone. The command constella-
tion of an officer at any command level was made up of both
human aides and AI personal assistants. Ideally, the inter-
section of organic with electronic was seamless, but the
ideal could rarely be achieved in practice. AIs were smart—
brilliant, in certain applications—but they still were essen-
tially nothing more than sophisticated software that did what
the human members of the constellation told them to do.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

313

Someone further down the logistical chain of command
must have forgotten to offload that ammo.

“C’mon,” he told Warhurst. “Let’s go together and see if
we can hijack some ammo. Let me tell my people where I’m
going.”

“Right.”

Thirty minutes later, the two of them entered the center of
the new base, which rose black and glistening from rubble
fused into volcanic glass. A pair of Tarantulas, huge and
ponderous, were gnawing their way down into solid rock
thirty meters away, bathed in the arc-light glare of their
plasma cutters and wreathed in the steam coming off of
molten rock.

“What you two apes doin’ here, sightseein’?” an armored
figure bellowed from nearby. Garroway’s receiver IDed him
as Sergeant Major Dulaney, and he was the LZ master. “Get
the hell out of my work zone!”

“We need ammo on the perimeter defense, Sergeant Ma-
jor,” Garroway told him. “Plasma pellets, slugs, missiles,
everything. And as near as we can figure, everything’s still
on board the damned ’rants!”

“Tough shit. We’re not stopping work for you people!”

Garroway sighed. The Corps was a brotherhood, closer
than family. And sometimes he wanted to kick certain fam-
ily members in the ass.

The Net came back on, data streaming in . . . an alert.

Shit. . . .

“You there,” Dulaney was shouting, pointing with one of
his extended slicers. “Get those nano canisters in there
now!”

Those canisters would inject assemblers deep into solid
rock, growing the complex of bunkers and fortifi cations that
had been programmed into them.

“Sergeant Major?”

“What the fuck! Are you still here?”

“You’d better let us get that ammo. Now.”

“Why the fuck should I?”

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I A N D O U G L A S

“That’s why.” Garroway pointed. In the sky, off beyond
the perimeter at Dulaney’s back, a hard-edged shadow was
moving against the background stars . . . a fl attened sphere,
huge and menacing, growing slowly larger as it descended.

“Jesus!”

21

0605.1102

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

0125 hrs, GMT

Fire lit up the night.

Firebase Hawkins, bringing every battery to bear, loosed
bolt after bolt at the incoming Xul huntership. Armored

Marines raced toward the perimeter beneath the salvos, some
skimming low across the tortured terrain on bursts from
their jump jets. To either side, Tarantulas, huge and ponder-
ous, drifted on straining ventral jets and agravitic lifters,
moving apart to position themselves to lay down a crossfi re
on the enemy. Above the horizon, the Xul huntership looked
as huge as a mountain, drifting slowly toward the surface.

Garroway triggered his jump jets and sailed in a low, fl at
trajectory, swinging his legs as he flew so that he came
down with his boots well ahead of him, sending up a spray
of powdery dust when he hit. The crater with his compan-
ions was just ahead.

Plasma bolts from the main firebase batteries were smash-
ing into the descending Xul ship; Garroway could see the
hits as twinkling sparkles fl aring briefly against the artifi -
cial mountain of that hull. The Xul monster was injured; he

316

I A N D O U G L A S
could see craters and tears along its flanks. But he had no
doubt that its weapons were still quite effective.

He found himself tensing against the anticipated strike of
the Xul patterning weapon. What would it feel like?

For that matter, had they already fired the thing? People
said that if you were patterned, you might not even know
you’d been hit. The brain took any information fed to it as

Gospel, whether from the real world outside your head or an
imaginal world existing within a sophisticate computer. He
could be living a virtual life already, an electronic prisoner,
and never know it.

What, though, would be the point of capturing digital re-
productions of humans and keeping them in a cage they
didn’t know existed? Reaching the fighting hole, he leaped
in, landing heavily beside Gardner and Huerra. He had to
assume this was real, and not try to second-guess the uni-
verse.

The other Marines had their weapons up, but weren’t fi ring.

The Xul ship was still fifty kilometers away, and the beams
fired by man-portable plasma weapons tended to bloom and
dissipate within a tenth of that distance—especially within
the twisted magnetic fields here in the Core.

“How do you think they found us?” Huerra asked.

“Shit, does it matter?” Gardner asked. “They did . . . and
they’re gonna be damned sorry they did, too!”

Garroway charged his weapon. He could think of no fi ner
epitaph for the RST.

Nightstar 442

Core Space

0131 hrs, GMT

“Okay, people!” Major Treverton called. “Stay dispersed,
and let your AIs handle the approach! Unload every damned
thing you’ve got, ’cause
we’re not going to get another
pass!”

Ramsey felt the shudder as his Nightstar hurtled through

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

317

something . . . not atmosphere, not here, but a patch of hy-
drogen gas or drifting debris, something that slammed
against his fighter’s magnetic screens and vaporized, trans-
mitting enough kinetic energy as it shredded into subatomic
particles to shake the hurtling aerospace craft as it passed.

He’d drifted alone in silence for only about ten minutes
before a Xul Behemoth had appeared, moving toward the
planet below. Treverton had brought the squadron’s net back
on line, then. The Marines on S-2/I needed some close aero-
space support, and the Raptors were the only fi ghters in the
area.

One by one, the fi ghters of Raptor Squadron had boosted
into an approach vector that brought them in behind the Be-
hemoth. The Xul ship appeared to be damaged; defensive
fire snapped out at the incoming fighters, but it was scat-
tered and badly aimed. Off to the right, Lieutenant Jami-
son’s Nightstar was hit by a sun- bright ball of blue-white
light that struck him bow-on, turning his Raptor into a hur-
tling mass of fl aming debris.

Ramsey kept his attention focused on the Xul huntership
as it loomed larger and larger ahead and below. His AI
brought up the target lock icon in his mind, and he triggered
the Raptor’s Gatling cannon.

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

0133 hrs, GMT

The optical feed in Garroway’s helmet blacked out mo-
mentarily as light seared across the landscape. Marine aero-
space fighters—where the hell had they come from?—stooped
silently out of the sky, each in turn pouring streams of
blue- white flame into the drifting Xul monster. As his vision
cleared, he could see the Behemoth lurch to one side, hesi-
tate, then begin descending more quickly.

It struck the planet’s surface kilometers from the Marine

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I A N D O U G L A S
perimeter. Seconds later, Garroway felt the shock as it rip-
pled through the ground beneath his boots. The Marines
around him were cheering wildly, waving their weapons and
shouting imprecations at the fallen giant.

The Xul ship continued falling even after it had struck,
appearing to crumple in upon itself as its unimaginable mass
kept moving, unstoppable. Pieces were flying off the top,
and a tidal wave of dust was rushing out from the impact
point.

Hunterships, Garroway knew, carried small gravitational
singularities on board; human-designed quantum power taps
did the same, using tiny, artificially generated black holes to
harvest energy from the Quantum Sea. When the huntership
began to crumple, the black hole inside was released, fl ying
out of control through the heart of the giant ship, devouring
everything it touched. The crumpling effect continued, the
titanic mass beginning now to collapse upon itself, falling
into a fast-growing rogue black hole.

The Marines continued cheering until the first Xul com-
bots began swarming in across the plain, moving straight
toward their position. “Here they come!” Captain Black called
over the Net. “Commence fi re!”

The last hundred plasma charges in Garroway’s weapon
went fast. When the tone sounded in his helmet indicating
that he was dry, he dropped the weapon and scrambled out
of the crater. “I’m going to go get more ammo!” he told the
others. “Chaffee! Connors! You two come with me!”

“Make it fast, Gunny!” Huerra yelled. “I’m down to my
last fi fty!”

A half-dozen Tarantulas were still moving slowly across
the plain toward the perimeter, their belly jets throwing up
impenetrable clouds of gray dust and grit. Garroway trig-
gered his jump jets and bounded for the nearest one.

For centuries, military strategists had argued pro and con
on the usefulness—and the survivability—of the tank, a
weapon that had first come into service back in the twentieth
century, existing in one form or another throughout most of

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

319

those intervening years. Once the deciding mobile factor of
the battlefield, most strategists now deemed tanks irrelevant.

A single Marine could pack enough firepower in his per-
sonal weapon to destroy any of the tanks of earlier centu-
ries, and most human combatants no longer bothered fi elding
them.

What did exist nowadays, however, was an odd hybrid of
spacecraft and tank—vehicles like the AV-110 Tarantula, a
multi-purpose vehicle that could ferry troops and equipment
down to a planet’s surface from orbit, employ point plasma
arcs to cut tunnels into solid rock, or deploy a variety of
swap-out weapons mounted in external pods.

When military forces were deployed to other star sys-
tems, experience soon proved that fl exibility was what was
most needed in modern weapons systems, weapons that
could serve a number of roles and fill a number of billets.

Tarantulas served well as armed assault craft for planetary
invasions, but were too slow and cumbersome to provide
traditional close aerospace cover for ground forces. How-
ever, by hovering just above the surface on ventral jets and
agravs, they could take advantage of concealing terrain,
maneuvering like tanks—or like the far more ancient cav-
alry arm of the assault force—and provide much needed
mobile armored fi re support.

Critics—especially armchair strategists within the Corps—
liked to point out that Tarantulas represented the worst of
two worlds. They were a hell of a lot bigger than tanks, and
therefore better targets, while not being as fast or as maneu-
verable as a Wyvern or a Nightstar when they were drifting
along at an altitude of two meters or less.

Garroway didn’t care about any of that at the moment.

The Tarantulas were big, they were mobile, and they packed
a hell of a lot of firepower, which was what the RST needed
now more than anything else.

Except, possibly, ammunition. With Chaffee and Connors
close behind, he jogged closer to the nearest of the Tarantu-
las, which hovered a few tens of meters away, almost invisible

320

I A N D O U G L A S
in the slashing storm of grit and jet-blasted dust. Through
his implant, he linked in with the craft’s pilot. Tarantulas
generally had a crew of four—pilot, two gunners, and a
loadmaster, but the pilot was the vehicle’s commander.

Flying Pig was the name of this particu lar machine, and
its pilot commander was Lieutenant Joash Grooms.

“Whaddaya want, Marine?” the man said when Garroway
hailed him. “We’re kinda busy!”

Plasma streamed overhead, directed toward the Marine
position from a ball turret high up on the Xul Behemoth’s
hull. The shot lightly brushed Flying Pig’s dorsal surface,
gouging out a long and molten groove.

“Yessir! But you’ve got ammo we need out here! You
want close infantry support, you’ve got t’feed us! Sir!”

Flying Pig opened up with a double-pod fusillade di-
rected against Xul weapons mounts. Had there been atmo-
sphere, the noise would have been deafening. As it was,
static shrieked inside Garroway’s skull as tightly focused
magnetic fi elds sent the plasma bolts slashing across the in-
tervening space into the target.

“Okay! Master Sergeant O’Malley’ll take care of you! But
snap it up! I’m moving my ass just as soon—” The rest of the
transmission was blasted into incoherence by static as the

Tarantula’s main gun fi red.

The Tarantula lifted slightly, the blast from its ventral jets
slamming at Garroway’s armor and knocking him back a
couple of steps. The rear ramp dropped open, spilling light
into the moving dust, and the craft’s armored loadmaster
appeared on the cargo deck, waving them on. “You want it?

Come get it!”

Garroway, Chafee, and Connors formed a human chain,
passing crates of plasma charges, power cells, and other
munitions down the ramp and into a tumbled pile on the
ground. Warhurst and several other Marines appeared out of
the flame-shot night, helping to unload the Tarantula and
picking up crates to take back to their positions.

The Xul combots were moving toward the Marine posi-
tion now like a tidal wave.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

321

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Point Diamond,

Core Space

0151 hrs, GMT

Hermes dropped out of FTL at the point designated Dia-
mond, the primary rendezvous zone for the squadron. As
transponder signals began bouncing back to Hermes’ Ops

Center, crawling in at the speed of light, other ships in the
squadron began showing up on the tactical screens—the
light cruiser Ludwigson, the destroyers Ardash and Plottel,
the ponderous battleship Morrigen, the sleeker battlecruiser

Mars, the carrier Lejeune, and the heavy fl eet transport Ho-
worth.

Hermes was the last to arrive. All of the squadron’s ves-
sels had come through the close passage of GalCenter intact,
and Alexander felt a deep-rooted blossoming of relief.

They were such a long way from home. . . .

The sky appeared to be an eerie, almost sullen deep blue,
a radiant nebula, the nursery of new-born suns. In every di-
rection, imbedded in that cloud, stars glared, blue-white and
hot. Point Diamond was located near the center of a young,
hot, dense- packed star cluster, the object known since the
early years of radio astronomy as IRS-16. Imbedded in the
far-sprawling accretion disk circling GalCenter and only a
tenth of a light year from the central black hole itself, the
cluster was torn by violent cosmic winds. Those winds
blasted through the nebula within which the newborn stars
were imbedded, reacting with the cloud and loosing a sleet-
ing storm of hard radiation.

The squadron’s magnetic screens and their phase- shift
technology would let them ride out the storm in relative
safety, at least for a standard day or two. Each Common-
wealth ship on the Ops Center visual display screens showed
an eerie corona of light as the radiation fields and drifting
nebula-dust interacted with the vessel’s screens.

“Well, General . . . no sign of the opposition,” Taggart

322

I A N D O U G L A S
said. His voice was subdued, even awed. The vista outside
was unspeakably beautiful . . . as beautiful, perhaps, as it
was dangerous.

“We’ll wait here for three hours,” Alexander told him,

“and see if the Xul show up. But this is a good place to lay
low for a while.”

IRS-16 was a veritable forest of closely packed stars—
several hundred suns crammed into a volume of space only
ten or twelve times larger than Earth’s Solar System. The
nearest star was less than half an astronomical unit distant—
about seventy million kilometers—and a dozen more were
less than a hundred million kilometers away. Hermes’ outer
hull must be baking by now as its active coating struggled to
redirect the incoming heat. Between the fog bank of the
nebula itself, the searing temperatures, and the cascade of
deadly particulate radiation, Xul sensors were most likely
completely blind within this tiny pocket of hell.

Of course, if I
were the Xul commander, Alexander
thought, staring into that blazing starscape, and an enemy
squadron buzzed my Dyson cloud and then vanished off my
screens, this would be the first place I’d look. . . .

How smart were the Xul, anyway?

The question was impossibly complex. There were many
types of intelligence, many different ways of thinking and
processing information. The Xul had shown how different,
how alien their thought processes were from human many
times over the past centuries. They had blind spots . . . and
they seemed to have trouble thinking outside of a fairly nar-
row and tightly defined box. They tended not to think in
terms of life evolving outside of the so-called habitable zone
of a typical star, for example, which was why the An colony
on Ishtar and the deep- benthic Eulers had escaped extinc-
tion.

Maybe they wouldn’t think that organic life could fi nd
shelter in this searing radiation storm cloud.

“Cara?” he said in his mind. “Initiate gravitometric map-
ping.”

“Aye, aye, General.”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

323

Taggart heard the order over his link. “That’s going to be
a tall order,” he suggested. “The gravitational tides inside
this cluster are pretty fi erce.”

“I know. But if we can get a decent picture of the local
metric, we can get the whole squadron out of here in two
translations . . . either to S-2 or all the way back to Sol

Space.”

“Sounds good,” Taggart replied, “assuming our AIs can
solve the metrics in something less than a century or two.”

“We’ve got eight platforms,” Alexander reminded him.

“That will cut down on the time somewhat.”

But Taggart had a valid point. Quantum Sea translations
required extremely accurate gravitometric maps of two vol-
umes of space—where you wanted to end up, and where you
were starting from. At first, it had been assumed that you
needed as flat an area of space as you could manage—well
out beyond the boundaries of the nearest solar system, for
example.

But basic physics stated that it was impossible to get all the
way out of any body’s gravitational fi eld. Theoretically,

Earth’s gravity exerted a small but non-zero tug on objects all
the way out to the teeming galaxies of the Virgo Cloud, and
well beyond. What was needed was not an absence of gravity,
but an extremely accurate picture of how local space was bent
and twisted by local gravitational fields. The AI navigators
learned how to use areas that were in balance—such as the

Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system back home. The

Hermes had used that Earth’s L-3 point ever since her fi rst
deployment, over ten years ago, now—in Luna’s orbit around

Earth, but on the other side of the Earth from the Moon.

The metric of space here within the Core was anything
but flat. Hundreds of millions of stars surrounded the center,
itself occupied by millions of stars more, plus several hun-
dred million solar masses’ worth of black holes and millions
of masses more of gas and dust, and all of that mass travel-
ing at high velocity in all directions.

Alexander hoped, though—and Cara had informed him
weeks ago that it should be possible—that the gravitational

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I A N D O U G L A S
effects of the stars of the IRS-16 cluster would pretty much
overwhelm everything else, at least within this one, tiny
volume of space. The nebula, with the stars imbedded within
it, was moving very swiftly indeed as it orbited GalCenter,
and the gravitational tides of the central black hole a tenth of
a light year distance were smearing the cluster out into an
almost cometary shape. The distances involved, however,
still were so large that local space, while badly warped by
all of those conflicting gravitational fields, was not changing
rapidly . . . not by human standards.

It should be possible to take a snapshot of the local metric
and use it for starship translation before the picture changed
signifi cantly.

“General? Admiral?” Cara said, breaking into Alexan-
der’s thoughts. “Captain Pollard has the first images from
the Spymaster probes. You wanted to see them.”

“Good,” Alexander said. “Link him in.”

The expeditionary force’s head of N-2 entered Alexan-
der’s shared command link with Taggart and the rest of their
shared constellation. “General Alexander,” he said. “Admi-
ral. I think you’re both going to be interested in this.”

“Let’s see it, Felix,” Alexander told him.

“The data damned near flooded our system out,” Pollard
said. “A real overload. And we’re going to be sorting this
stuff for the next fifty years at least. But we have some pre-
liminary results.”

A window opened in Alexander’s mind, and he felt him-
self falling through. . . .

At first, he thought he was seeing stars—clouds of stars
massed together by the hundreds of billions, by the trillions.

But the stars were gray and dark, and as he plunged into the
cloud, he experienced a shift in his perception. Not stars . . .

but worlds. . . .

As each of the eight starships of the squadron had rounded
the central Dyson cloud, it had fired a barrage of some hun-
dreds of K-794 Spymaster probes, spraying them more or less
at random into the cloud’s depths. As each probe accelerated

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

325

at two hundred gravities, it started transmitting on a number
of wavelengths, radio, optical, and ultraviolet, sending back
detailed images of everything it encountered.

Many of the probes encountered Xul constructs and, en-
gaging their nano- tunneler elements, plowed into the struc-
tures to connect with Xul electronics. Others, bypassing the

Xul structures, plunged all the way through toward the event
horizon of the monster singularity within.

As each Commonwealth ship had dropped out of FTL
and rounded the Dyson cloud, it had sampled the returning
transmissions from all of those myriad spy probes. Athena
and various AIs under her command had sorted through that
bewildering sea of information and begun piecing it to-
gether, bit by electronic bit, into a coherent whole.

Worlds. Trillions upon trillions of worlds. . . .

The largest, Alexander noted, were actually planet- sized,
up to about 6,500 kilometers, roughly the diameter of Mars.

The smallest, and there were billions of these, were the size
of basketballs.

The vast majority, however, fell between these two ex-
tremes, measuring a few tens or hundreds of kilometers
across and massing a few billion billion tons. Most likely,
each was an asteroid transformed by the Xul equivalent of
nanotechnology, though to have so many they must have
been importing asteroids from thousands of far-fl ung star
systems. As Alexander’s roving viewpoint moved closer to
one, he could see its surface was mingled black and dark
gray in geometric patterns. In fact, it appeared identical to

Xul fortresses he’d encountered guarding various stargates
throughout the Galaxy, roughly spherical, flattened at the
poles, with bulges, sponsons, blisters, turrets, and towers
creating an artificial and highly geometric terrain of hills
and straight- line canyons.

Within the outer layers of the cloud the sky was dark,
heavily shadowed by thunderheads composed of drifting

Xul fortresses in their massed billions. As Alexander’s point
of view fell farther and farther into the cloud, however, the

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I A N D O U G L A S
sky ahead grew lighter, taking on sunset hues of gold, red,
and blue as the intervening mists thinned.

Abruptly, the cloud turned ragged, then cleared away as if
blown by a cosmic wind, and the central black hole of the

Galaxy was revealed. The light, Alexander saw, came not
from the singularity, of course, but from a constant sharp
glow emanating from the blue spiral of the inner accretion
disk. Flaring pinpoints like tiny, blue-white stars dropped in
long, curving arcs into the event horizon in evenly spaced
groups, each growing brighter as it neared the gravitational
point of no return.

Those flares, he thought, were too evenly spaced to be
natural. The Xul, operating through the Dyson cloud, were
feeding the central black hole, sending in packets of debris
and star stuff in neatly patterned and regulated streams.

He was witnessing, he realized, cosmic engineering on an
inconceivably vast scale.

The point of that engineering remained elusive. Not the
mere generation of energy, surely . . . though the steady
pulse and flash of X-rays released by matter spiraling in past
the event horizon was being absorbed by the cloud, accord-
ing the readings from the Spymaster sensors. No wonder the
astronomers of past centuries hadn’t been able to confi rm
the existence of a super-massive black hole at the Galactic
center; the Dyson cloud was effectively blocking all radia-
tion from the enigmatic central object.

He thought back to the various briefi ngs he’d attended or
given. The possibility that the Xul were using the Core sin-
gularity for something extremely far-reaching indeed seemed
more and more plausible. To be able to edit Reality across
the Galaxy might justify such a gargantuan technological
effort.

Whatever the Xul were doing here had to be stopped.

But the implementation was the problem. A direct attack
on the cloud by the squadron was clearly and utterly impos-
sible. A million, a billion starships wouldn’t be enough.

But S-2 still offered them one slim hope. . . .

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

327

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

0220 hrs, GMT

Garroway found he was glad to be out in the open for a
change. In ten years of fighting the Xul, the vast majority of
his encounters had been below ground or within the close
corridor- tunnels of their giant spacecraft and gate fortresses.

That last underground fight in the buried city earlier had
nearly pushed him past his limits with its claustrophobic ter-
ror. It felt cleaner out here, somehow, though he knew that
distinction made no rational sense. He leaned up against the
lip of the fighting hole and targeted the oncoming black ma-
chines as they drifted in from the downed Xul Behemoth.

Every Marine position was firing now, both along the pe-
rimeter and from the hard points grown in the city to the
rear, hundreds of weapons pouring a devastating fusillade
into the approaching black tide. The black sky above that
tortured landscape flashed and sparked with hellfi re volleys
of Marine
weaponry—rapid-fire plasma weapons, lasers,

Gatling cannon, pulse rifles,
high-velocity mass drivers,
mortars, shoulder-launched missiles. Nightstar fi ghters con-
tinued to streak overhead in flights of two, scant tens of me-
ters above the ground, strafing and bombing the sea of Xul
machines. Plasma bolts from the Tarantulas snapped over-
head between each fly-by, vaporizing oncoming Xul com-
bots by the hundreds . . . by the thousands. . . .

And still there were enough of them to sweep past and
through the Marine perimeter, firing wildly as they came.

Garroway held his position, firing with cool, almost de-
tached precision. When his plasma gun again showed empty,
he dropped the weapon and drew his pistol. Xul machines
floated into the fighting hole, tentacles snaking out. He fi red
into one point-blank as it grappled with Chaffee, then ex-
tended his slicers and began carving up a second machine as
it tried to grab him.

328

I A N D O U G L A S

Master Sergeant Gardner twisted and screamed as three

Xul machines targeted her together, slamming bolt after bolt
of high-energy laser fire into her armor, vaporizing a ragged
emptiness in her left shoulder and the side of her helmet as
her atmosphere blasted free and instantly froze into glitter-
ing crystals of blood- tinged ice.

Chaffee was dead a moment later, his armor holed squarely
through his chest and out his back. PFC Connors crumpled
and fell, shrieking. . . .

Breaking free of the enemy, Garroway dropped and
rolled, snatching up Chaffee’s plasma gun and pouring fi re
into the advancing mob. “This is Perimeter Three! Perime-
ter Three!” he yelled over the regimental net. “We need
close support here! Perimeter Three!”

With no atmosphere, he couldn’t hear the approach of the

Nightstar fighters, but he felt the shudder traveling through
the ground as it rippled beneath his boots. An instant later,
he was tumbling across the rocky ground, as white fi re en-
gulfed the rim of the fi ghting hole.

“All perimeter teams!” an AI’s voice said, speaking in his
mind. “Fall back to secondary positions!”

“About fucking time!” Garroway snapped back. Standing,
he cut down three more Xul forms as they drifted out of the
haze of light and falling dust beyond the position. “Huerra!

Grab Connors and let’s get the hell out of here!” He was al-
ready checking Gardner and Chaffee. Both Marines were
dead, but there was always the possibility of bringing them
back if their brains weren’t badly chewed up.

Half of Clara Gardner’s skull was missing. Chaffee, though,
had taken a small, high-energy slug through his chest, losing
atmosphere and a lot of blood, but it might be possible to re-
cover him . . . if they could get him to a hospital ship or facil-
ity in time. Stooping, he hoisted the Marine’s body over his
shoulder, then started sprinting toward the rear.

Behind him, another close pass by the Nightstars lit up
the shadow-cloaked landscape for kilometers around.

22

0605.1102

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Point Diamond,

Core Space

0445 hrs, GMT

“The astrogation department just checked in,” Taggart told

Alexander. “They should have the local metric nailed within
the next couple of hours.”

“Thank God.”

“Commander Warnke didn’t sound too enthusiastic about
it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got the impression he would like to keep the AIs chew-
ing on the data for the next ten years or so, before risking an
actual translation, that’s all. He didn’t sound happy with the
simulations.”

“We don’t have ten years.”

“That’s what I told him.”

Alexander frowned, considering alternatives. S-2 was
only about a tenth of a light year away from IRS-16—roughly
the same distance as the Dyson cloud, or close enough. They
could make the run under Alcubierre Drive, and be there
within an hour or so.

But he didn’t want to risk it. Ships moving under Alcubierre

330

I A N D O U G L A S

Drive left wakes in the surrounding interstellar medium, as
the space-distorting bubble of the drive field alternately com-
pressed, then stretched space-time around the moving vessel.

Xul instrumentation might well detect the little squadron as it
made its way from the star cluster back to S-2.

Besides, every Xul ship within a thousand light years of

GalCenter must be on alert by now, and half of them must
be swooping in toward the Core’s innermost realm—S-2,
the Dyson cloud, and

IRS-16. It was going to get very
crowded around here, and damned quickly.

“So what do you have in mind, exactly?” Taggart asked
him. His voice was patient, but carried a slight edge. Alex-
ander could hear the unspoken question: Just what do you
plan to do with my squadron?

And it was a fair question. Sure, Alexander might com-
mand the entire MIEF, ships and all, but Admiral Taggart
still carried the primary responsibility for the naval vessels
within the group. Liam tended to think of them all as his
children, to be as fiercely protective as any parent.

“I want to load four of the squadron ships onto Hermes,”

he told the admiral. “Ludwigson, Plottel, Lejeune . . . and
especially the Howorth. We leave the others here for now.

When things quiet down, we can come back for them, or
they can get to S-2 under their Alcubierre Drives.

“We translate to S-2 and drop the ships off. If there are

Xul ships
in-
system, we neutralize them. Howorth goes
down to pick up the RST, after they initiate Operation Heart-
break.”

“You want to leave Morrigen here?” Taggart asked. “Her
firepower would be damned useful if the Xul are occupy-
ing S-2.”

“I know . . . but she’s a big-assed bitch. And so are Ho-
worth and Lejeune. We can’t fit all three of them on board

Hermes at once. We need Howorth to lift our Marines off
the planet . . . and I want Lejeune so we can take our fi ghters
on board, if Cunningham didn’t make it.”

“Of course. I should have thought of that.”

“No, you’re thinking in terms of concentrating fi repower

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

331

where we need it, which is exactly what you should be
thinking about. I wish we could have Morrigen along . . .

but this is going to be a recovery mission, not a strike.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Cara? Pass the word to begin maneuvering Howorth,

Lejeune, Plottel, and Ludwigson in for docking with Hermes.

Admiral? I suggest Mars, Ardash, and Morrigen be de-
ployed farther out, on perimeter defense.”

“We call it picket duty in the Navy, General. But, yes. I
concur.”

Alexander ignored Taggart’s gentle jab. Both the admiral
and he were stressed to the limit at this point. An argument,
a turf war, would serve no one, save, possibly, the Xul.

“So what are we going to do about Earth?” Taggart asked
him. “And the Senate?”

“I don’t know,” Alexander conceded. “I was hoping to
bring in the rest of the MIEF through the nearest Core star-
gate as support. At this point, I doubt the Senate will release
them.”

“The fleet’s still in Cluster Space.”

“It was.” He checked his time sense. It had been roughly
four hours since the Pax Galactica had vanished, and since

Hermes had suddenly developed “communications diffi cul-
ties” and cut the connection with George Stahl back in Earth-

Ring. Yarlocke’s people must be frantic by now, and sending

QCC messages to every naval vessel they could reach. “If the

Senate is panicking, they may have already ordered it back to

Sol, and if we translate back, either to Cluster Space or Sol

Space, we may find ourselves under direct orders not to re-
turn to the Core . . . even if we still have ships and personnel
here. I don’t want to see that happen.”

“True,” Taggart said. “But it takes time to get the MIEF
ready to move. And without orders from you, well, prep
time could be a lot longer . . . if you know what I mean.”

Alexander gave a wry grin. “And I should have thought of
that.”

Taggart shrugged. “Remember, sir. You’re Alexander the

Great.”

332

I A N D O U G L A S

Alexander snorted, a dismissive sound. All military com-
manders, he was certain, picked up nicknames in the course
of their careers. During the past few years, General Alexan-
der hadn’t so much acquired a nickname as he had a per-
sona . . . an assumed connection with the historical fi gure of

Alexander the Great.

The comparison, he thought, while distinctly fl attering,
had little enough connection with reality. Like the historical

Alexander, he was leading his nation’s military forces against
a far larger empire that threatened that nation’s very exis-
tence. Like the original Alexander, his campaign thus far
had been remarkably successful, successfully striking node
after node of Xul control just as Alexander of Macedon had
taken on the individual Persian satraps.

But where Alexander of Macedon had ended up conquer-
ing a large portion of the known world, Martin Alexander
had not been engaged in a war of conquest. Alexander the

Great might have demolished Tyre and burned Persepolis,
but he hadn’t been in the habit of blowing up Persian star
systems.

He decided that if he, Martin Alexander, ever began
showing signs of acute alcoholism and mental instability—to
the point of killing his closest friends and
advisors—it
would be time to retire. That would be pushing the absurd
connection much too far.

“Your people adore you at least as much as Alexander’s
men loved him. They damned near followed him to the end
of the Earth . . . they were willing, at any rate. And your
people feel the same about you. Or were you aware of that?”

“I was aware that Alexander’s men mutinied when he
tried to push them too far,” Alexander reminded the admi-
ral. He’d experienced a rather lengthy and detailed enter-
tainment sim on the life of Alexander of Macedon a few
years before—at right about the time he realized the person-
nel of 1MIEF were making that comparison. “That’s why he
turned back from India.” Alexander the Great had pushed
the boundaries of his empire east to within the borders of

India, only to turn back at last when his army simply refused

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

333

to go farther. He’d died—probably of the combined effects
of disease, drink, and dementia—at Babylon during the re-
turn.

“That’s beside the point,” Taggart said. “He also drank
himself to death at the age of thirty- three, and you’re well
past that milestone.”

Alexander grimaced, a
good-natured jibe. “Thanks so
much for reminding me.”

“Any time. Point is, Klass is going to take his sweet time
withdrawing the MIEF from Cluster Space if the order
doesn’t come from you. And if he did, he’d have a real fi ght
on his hands with Pierce.”

Rear Admiral Regin Klass was Taggart’s exec, and had
been left in command of the rest of the MIEF back at Clus-
ter Space. Brigadier General Timothin Pierce was in com-
mand of the rest of the MIEF’s Marine contingent currently
stationed in Cluster Space.

Taggart, he knew, was right. The MIEF’s personnel would
follow him before they would follow the orders of anyone in
the Senate hierarchy. The idea left Alexander somewhat un-
comfortable. The Commonwealth military in general and

1MIEF in par tic u lar were supposed to answer to the Com-
monwealth Senate, not to any partic ular officer. Once, the
ultimate command authority would have been the President,
but the steady and long- term erosion of the executive branch’s
power had left the military solidly under the control of the

Senate’s Military Council . . . and that meant Senator Yar-
locke and a handful of others.

He wondered again what the hell had happened to the
woman.

He was facing, he realized, the ultimate crisis in any na-
tion’s hierarchy of command and control. The forces of

1MIEF answered to him, were loyal to him, and it was,
therefore, up to him and to him alone to maintain the chain
of loyalty with the constitutionally designated command au-
thority. If he wanted to overthrow the Commonwealth gov-
ernment and establish himself as a military dictator, he
could probably do it; 1MIEF constituted less than a quarter

334

I A N D O U G L A S
of the Commonwealth’s total military might, but it was by
far the best quarter and, properly led . . . sure. He could see
several possible ways to seize the EarthRing government
centers swiftly enough that the Army and other services
would be presented with a fait accompli.

That thought made him even more uncomfortable. He’d
sworn an oath to the Commonwealth Constitution and to the

Senate. Hell, he didn’t even want to be a dictator.

But what if he became convinced—absolutely and deter-
minedly convinced—that to save the Commonwealth he
would have to overthrow the Senate?

A new thought startled him. Was that why Yarlocke hated
him so much? Why she kept trying to dismantle the MIEF?

Because she was afraid of what he, Alexander, might do?

He’d never even considered that possibility.

He realized Taggart was watching him, waiting for some
comment. “Pierce and Klass had damned well better follow
any legal orders they get,” he said. “The Expeditionary

Force is not my private army . . . and it’s just possible that
the Senate might have need of it some day.”

“Maybe. But we only developed our ‘communications
problems’ four hours ago. They’ll try to get in touch with us
with courier drones, if nothing else.”

Which meant that they needed to get done what needed to
be done quickly, before they found themselves in the posi-
tion of having to directly and deliberately disobey orders.

Of one thing Alexander was certain. No matter what or-
ders the Senate managed to transmit to the squadron, they
would not be leaving personnel behind at S-2/I.

Nightstar 442

Surface of S-2/I

Core Space

0505 hrs, GMT

Lieutenant Ramsey pulled his Nightstar around and lined
up for yet another pass over the battlefield. His plasma

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

335

weapons were long since empty, but so long as he possessed
power taps he could keep flying and keep his lasers charged.

There were only two real variables in the equation—how
long the Nightstar would hold together as hour followed
pounding hour of combat, and how long the pilot could keep
flying under the unrelenting punishment.

Flying an aerospace fighter in vacuum was utterly unlike
flight within a planetary atmosphere, where the pilot could
bank, roll, and use lift and drag to maneuver his craft. Even
close to a planetary surface like that of S-2/I, the only con-
stants of flight dynamics were thrust and gravity. Once he’d
over- flown the target, he had to flip the Nightstar end for end
and use his agravitics to decelerate, killing his forward ve-
locity, then build up acceleration once more for another pass
at the target. While he could jink a little with his lateral
thrusters, his approaches and attack runs tended to be strictly
ballistic, virtually straight-line and entirely predictable.

It was that predictability that was wearing down the
squadron. With each pass over the Xul hosts, powerful pulses
of laser light snapped across the sky, weaving deadly webs
attempting to snag the onrushing fighters. Major Treverton
had died an hour ago as he streaked low above a mass of
enemy combots. Lieutenants Handley, Baker, and Smeth all
had been killed since. Only three Nightstars remained in the
sky now: Eva Grant, Karl Mayfair, and Ramsey.

Since the other two were newbies, only recently commis-
sioned, Ramsey had taken command, leading each pass
across the battlefield through ever- shifting three- dimensional
mazes of deadly laser light. Each time, they came from a
different direction, lining up on different sets of targets, al-
ways trying to keep the enemy fire controllers guessing.

Each time, their Nightstars took more damage—mostly
through high-velocity collisions with bits of grit, rubble, and
shrapnel flying above the battlefield. Ramsey’s ship was fail-
ing rapidly, its magnetic rad shielding degrading with each
pass, its phase- shift protection working now only intermit-
tently.

Just a few more passes. There were so damned many of

336

I A N D O U G L A S
the Xul combots. From up here they resembled black seas
flowing out from the wreckage of the fallen Behemoth. The
three fighters targeted the largest masses with their lasers,
but also continued to hammer at the wreckage. There were
gaping, town- sized craters in the alien’s hull, now, and maybe,
just maybe, they could yet score a hit that would stop the
march of those black hordes.

He put his targeting cursor over one of the larger craters
on the Xul hulk. Enemy laser fi re flicked past him, made
visible by his AI’s computer graphics. Initiating the thought-
code sequence that triggered his primary lasers, he directed
a stream of invisible, high- energy fire into the depths of the
target.

And then, shockingly, he was tumbling, half of his Night-
star sheared away by a Xul weapon—probably a plasma
bolt. Sky and ground merged in a wild, frantic whirl as he
tried to trigger the cockpit eject sequence.

“Mayday! Nightstar 442 . . . I’m hit! I’m going in! . . .”

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

0507 hrs, GMT

One of the Marine close-support aerospacecraft was fall-
ing. Garroway watched it streak low over the battlefi eld, be-
tween his position and the distant mountain of the alien
wreck. Damn . . .

There
were only a couple of fighters left, and those
wouldn’t last much longer. The enemy’s fi re was too heavy,
too accurate. Explosions flashed across Xul positions. The
stricken fighter vanished over the southern horizon.

Garroway was exhausted. He’d been in combat now more
or less nonstop for seven hours, and his armor had only lim-
ited supplies of the drugs used to keep faltering organics
going under this level of stress. Somehow, though, he’d man-
aged to keep going.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

337

He could feel a slight tremor through his boots—another
seismic quake. It felt like a heavy bombardment, but no one
was shooting at the Marine position at the moment. Maybe
the squadron had returned and was shooting up a Xul posi-
tion somewhere over the horizon? It was a pleasant thought,
but not one he could embrace enthusiastically. If the squad-
ron had returned, they would have linked in with the RST’s
command constellation, and every Marine on the planet
would be cheering right about now.

Possibly S-2/I simply went through periods of heavy seis-
mic activity due to tidal stress, both as it orbited its giant red
sun and as it continued to swing in closer toward GalCenter.

He keyed into one of the ubiquitous Marine combat
drones drifting above the ground just in front of his posi-
tion, using its sensors for a view of the battlefi eld rather
than raising his helmet above the level of the nanocrete
parapet. The latest Xul charge appeared to have tapered off,
but there were still small pockets of Xul combots out there,
and the things never gave up. Garroway wondered, and not
for the first time by far, whether the Xul combat machines
were literally piloted by the real Xul, the electronic uploads
of once-organic beings, or if they remained safely hidden
away on their Behemoth and operated the black combots by
remote control.

The drone picked up movement, and its limited AI fl ashed
a targeting cursor over the thing, whatever it was. Zooming
in provided little additional detail; Xul combots were well
shielded against heat loss and didn’t show up well on IR. It
was still night over this part of S-2/I, would be for several
more standard days, and the combots’ surface coloration
and light-drinking surfaces made them almost invisible in
the deep shadows of night.

Garroway had slung and locked his plasma rifle over his
shoulder, and was holding instead a Man- Portable Variable

Munitions Launcher, or MP VML-44. Stubby and blunt,
with a pistol grip and shoulder- armor mount, it fired a 70mm
projectile—in this case a smart antiarmor nano round known
popularly within the Corps as a wasp nest. Raising the weapon

338

I A N D O U G L A S
nearly to the zenith, he linked the drone’s target lock with
the shell, then triggered it with a thought. He felt the recoil
thump as the round left the weapon, traveling in a high, curv-
ing arc over the battlefi eld.

Within two seconds, its sensors had found the target and
locked on directly. Falling, the round steered itself by using
the local magnetic fi eld; fifty meters above the target, the
shell burst, releasing twelve submunitions rounds that spread
out over a larger area, each seeking its own target. Xul ma-
chines on the ground opened fire with a deadly web of laser
light, knocking out several of the incoming rounds, but eight,
at least, got through, homing on the laser fl ashes, spewing
deadly clouds of nano-disassemblers onto Xul machines as
they floated just above the ground.

Garroway, meanwhile, was already moving, slipping far-
ther to the left along his defensive trench, just in case the Xul
had some sort of counter- battery fire working on backtrack-
ing the trajectory of the round. Seconds later, a Xul plasma
bolt slammed into the spot where he’d been standing, shatter-
ing blocks of nanocrete and gouging out a ten-meter crater.

Slowly, relentlessly, the nanocrete fortifi cations began merg-
ing, flowing, reshaping themselves, erasing the scar and re-
turning the fortifications to their former shape.

Marines moved back and forth through those intercon-
necting trenches, shifting from position to position to deliver
fire. Around them, surviving Tarantulas and fixed gun tur-
rets along the fi rebase fortifi cations continued sweeping the
blasted and devastated ground outside the base with white
fire. The RST was down to fewer than 150, now, with an-
other fi fty incapacitated, either in the sick bay or frozen for
later attempts at retrieval. The team’s handful of “docs,” the

Navy corpsmen, moved back and forth endlessly, crawling
up to fallen Marines, linking with their suit AIs, fi ring pack-
ets of medical nano into their armor ports, and dragging
them back to the relative safety of the rear. Overhead, two
surviving Nightstars continued their ceaseless sweeps. Both
were out of plasma charges by now, but they still possessed

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

339

lasers, and continued to strafe Xul formations as soon as
they began gathering.

Eleven of the aerospacecraft had been destroyed in the
past hours, victims of massed fire from Xul forces.

Garroway stopped to lob another VML round toward the
enemy, then moved to yet another position. Another Marine
was already there. An ID came up through Garroway’s link:

Warhurst.

“Hey, Gunny!” Garroway said. “Good to see you’re still
with us.”

“So far,” Warhurst said. He indicated the enemy with a
movement of his plasma weapon. “Feels like we’ve broken
the bastards.”

“I hope so. I lost track after about ten or twelve mass
wave- attacks. Think they’re running out of machines?”

“I doubt it. Intel thinks they grow their own on the spot.

Maybe we’re managing to kill the drivers, though.”

Garroway considered this. The Xul possessed a technology
similar to and in many ways more advanced than Human-
kind’s nanotech. Damaged ships were repaired by clouds of
flying devices that fit together like pieces in a 3D jigsaw, and
they always seemed to have inexhaustible supplies of com-
bots. The best guess Intel had come up with was that they
manufactured them as they needed them, with Xul software

“pilots” controlling each until it was destroyed, then shifting
to another, fresh machine.

If true, sooner or later the tiny pocket of Marines would
be worn down and overrun.

But the good news was that the wave attacks had stopped,
at least for now. There were still large numbers of Xul ma-
chines prowling about in the darkness, but they were in iso-
lated and noncooperating groups, and they seemed unwilling
to test the Marine battle line again.

“It would be nice to think we’re doing something to them,”

he said. “I’m about dead on my feet.”

“Me, too. You know what I think?”

“What?”

340

I A N D O U G L A S

“When that Behemoth crashed, it lost control of its on- board
singularity. I think whatever mechanism they used on board
for creating new combots was destroyed, and what’s left is an
empty shell.”

Garroway raised his helmet above the parapet, studying
the distant fallen huntership. It had come down at a forty-
five-degree angle, flattening much of its
fi ve-kilometer
breadth into the landscape. The far end, though, still ex-
tended well over a kilometer above the ground. The upper
surface was scarred and cratered now, after repeated bomb-
ing and strafing runs by the Marine aerospace fi ghters, and
much of the structure appeared to be sagging, as though it
were collapsing from the inside.

“You may be right,” Garroway said. “Doesn’t look like it
has a lot holding it up. If that black hole got away, though,
where is it now?”

“Think about it, Gare. A black hole—even one the size of
an atom—breaks free of its restraining fields, it falls, mov-
ing toward the nearest gravitational mass, right?”

“Straight down into the planet.”

“Exactly. Eating as it goes. It would pass through solid
rock as easily as through air, almost. Momentum would
carry it past the center of the planet almost to the other side,
and then it would fall back.”

“And repeat. And repeat. Shit, Gunny. The core of this
planet must look like Swiss cheese by now.” That explained
the quakes he’d been feeling over the past few hours. A
sub-microscopic black hole was bouncing around the core
of the planet, eating rock, spewing radiation, and generating
shock waves felt at the surface as small earthquakes.

“Hey, all a black hole like that can do is get bigger,” Gar-
roway said. “How long before it eats the whole planet?”

“A while, would be my guess. It’s probably no bigger than
a hydrogen atom right now, and the tunnels it’s leaving prob-
ably close up behind it right away. It would take a long time
to swallow the whole planet.”

“Oh.” Garroway felt a surge of relief. Xul he could fi ght
against. A black hole, even a tiny one, was a force of nature

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

341

with which no human could contend, not without some
pretty sophisticated technology.

“So what’s it like under General Alexander?” Warhurst
wanted to know.

“Hell, you’ve served with him.”

“Yeah, but that was nine, ten years ago. Men change.”

Garroway shook his head. “Not this one. Scuttlebutt has it
he’s been standing up for us against the Senate the whole
time, fi ghting them more than he’s had to fi ght the Xulies, I
think.”

“So he’s not going to leave us here on this rock.”

“Huh? Hell, no! What makes you think he would?”

Warhurst didn’t reply. Garroway knew the older man had
been wrestling for a long time with personal issues—in par-
tic ular, a line family that had kicked him out a long time
ago. Things like that could shake a person’s trust in other
people. And in himself.

Maybe that’s why he’d retired from the Corps.

What, Garroway wondered, had brought him back?

The simplest explanation, he decided, was that Warhurst
had felt a need to stand between Earth and the Xul demons.

Everything was at stake, after all, including all of Human-
kind’s survival. In Garroway’s experience, though, warriors
rarely faced death for something as ungraspably vast as hu-
man survival.

In that moment, he realized why Warhurst had returned.

Garroway, Ramsey, and Armandez had visited him in Mi-
ami, and a few days later he’d returned to the Corps. He’d
come back for them.

“Gunny Warhurst?”

“What?”

“Thanks.”

“Huh? For what?”

“For being here.”

“Shit. I’m here to save Humankind, not your sorry ass.”

“Right. But—”

“Shut up! We’ve got company! Bearing one-niner-fi ve!”

One of the battlefield sensor drones had picked them up, a

342

I A N D O U G L A S
long, ragged column of Xul combats moving out from the
fallen Behemoth. Maybe the machinery was still working
inside that hulk after all.

“Get ready to move,” Garroway said, locking in on the
target. The Xul were getting smart, stringing their fi ghting
machines out in a long line instead of bunching them up.

But the VML submunitions rounds were smart enough to
counter. He triggered the first round, dropped the muzzle a
bit, and triggered another. “Okay!” he snapped. “Go!”

The two Marines crouched low and trotted to the right. A
dazzling light engulfed them, and the shockwave, blasting
through the floor of the trench, picked them both up and
flung them down.

And a fresh tidal wave of Xul combots surged toward the

Marine positions.

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Point Diamond, S-2/I,

Core Space

0735 hrs, GMT

“All departments report ready for translation in all re-
spects,” Taggart said. “We are at battle stations, and with all
power taps generating at 105 percent. At your command,

General.”

How the hell do you ever get ready for something like
this? Alexander thought, but he left it unspoken. “Very well.

I want Lejeune out of the docking bay first when we drop in.

I want her fighters out to screen us in case there are hostiles
in- system. And Howorth next.”

“Yes, sir.”

The big question was whether there would be a Xul fl eet
waiting for them in orbit over S-2/I, or close enough to de-
tect them when they dropped in.

They would know soon enough.

“Initiate translation,” he said.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

343

For a moment, the universe around him felt . . . blurred,
and he felt the inward, sinking sensation he always felt when
going completely out of phase. The Hermes and her cargo of
four warships fell through the cracks between Reality, rotat-
ing through the eldritch continuum of the Quantum Sea, and
emerging . . . somewhere else.

The blue clouds and dazzling beacons of the IRS-16 clus-
ter were wiped away. In their place, the vast and awe-inspiring
spiral of the outer accretion disk, Sagittarius A, dominated a
sky once again filled with the distant wall of stars shrouding
this inner pocket within the Core. Streamers of plasma fl ame,
frozen by size and distance, arced high above and far below
the Core, following lines of magnetic force. S-2 gleamed like
a brilliant, ruby- hued beacon high and to one side.

There was no sign of S-2/I.

“Damn it!” he shouted. “Where’s the planet?”

“Checking,” Commander Warnke told him. The Hermes
astrogational officer was linked in with the command con-
stellation, and Alexander felt him following strands of AI
input.

“Belay the launch order on Lejeune,” he said. There was
no point in releasing the carrier and her fighters if they were
going to need to move again almost at once. For a long min-
ute, Hermes drifted in open space, alone and vulnerable.

“It’s the metric,” Warnke announced a moment later. “I
was afraid of this. It’s changing too quickly! We’re a couple
of a.u.s away from where we ought to be!”

Two astronomical units . . . about three hundred million
kilometers, or twice the distance between Earth and Earth’s
sun, a gulf of roughly sixteen light minutes. A small enough
error when you were dealing with distances measured in
light years, but potentially deadly in a game of cat and
mouse at the Galactic Core.

“Put us back where we’re supposed to be,” Alexander told

Warnke. “Fast. ”

“It’ll have to be under Alcubierre Drive,” Taggart told
him. “We can’t recalculate the metric.”

“Do it.”

344

I A N D O U G L A S

What had gone wrong? Through his link with Hermes’

navigational feeds, he could see the location of S-2 marked
by brackets, and a number of icons marking gravitational
anomalies . . . a few of those thousands of black holes orbit-
ing GalCenter. The movements of the nearest of those sin-
gularities must have literally changed the shape of local
space, resulting in Hermes overshooting its target and com-
ing out somewhere else.

They were lucky, Alexander thought, that they hadn’t
popped out somewhere farther out, out there among those
teeming star clouds, for instance.

The starfield on the Ops Center display rotated, bringing
the red jewel of S-2 and the nearby bracket marking its sin-
gle planet dead center. He felt the faintly queasy sensation as
the Alcubierre Drive field began gathering about the ship,
and then the red star swelled brighter, a slender crescent
growing out of invisibility close beside it.

As the Hermes dropped back to non- FTL velocities, Al-
exander snapped off another series of orders.

“Scans! If there are Xul ships in here, I want to know it!

Release the Lejeune. Any sign of Cunningham? ”

Icons were appearing on the display . . . some of them

Xul vessels, but all of those, he was relieved to see, were
dead and aimlessly adrift.

“General! We have contact with the Cunningham! Cap-
tain Duquesne reports they left the system under FTL, then
returned an hour ago. He reports the S-2 system is clear of

Xul ships!”

“Excellent.” It was better than he’d dared hope. “Liam? Close
with the Cunningham, please. As soon as Lejeune is away.”

“Aye, sir.” Taggart hesitated. “Sir, we’re also in touch now
with Captain Black on the planet’s surface. He reports his
command under heavy ground attack . . . but he’s holding.”

“Any sign of the enemy in space?”

“No sir,” Taggart said, relief in his voice. “Lots of wreck-
age, but it looks like all the live Xul ships followed us when
we headed toward GalCenter!”

Which meant they had a time, a very short time, before

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

345

those ships, possibly, returned. There might be Xul sensor
drones out there now, reporting on Hermes’ arrival, or the

Xul Black was fighting on the planet might see them and
call for help.

Now was the time. Before the enemy regrouped.

“Pass the word to Captain Black,” he said. “Initiate Heart-
break. I say again . . . initiate Heartbreak.”

They would fi nish this. Now. And no matter what was
about to happen to the MIEF squadron.

23

0605.1102

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Orbiting S-2/I,

Core Space

0747 hrs, GMT

In close formation, Hermes and the light carrier Cunning-
ham fell in low orbit about the barren ruggedness that was

S-2/I. Scans of the surface had proven what Captain Duquesne
on the Cunningham had already reported, that Xul combots
were attacking the Marine fi rebase on the surface, but that,
for the moment, at least, there were no other Xul forces
within detection range.

Likely, the Marines of the Regimental Strike Team hadn’t
attracted much in the way of Xul attention directly. The at-
tack being reported from the surface sounded like an
afterthought—Xul machines swarming out of a downed Be-
hemoth and attacking the Marine positions simply because
they were there. For now, the squadron could operate freely
within the S-2 system.

If they were going to launch the Heartbreak trigger ships,
it would have to be now.

“Transmit navigational data for GalCenter space to the
triggerships,” Alexander told Cara. “We want the orbital me-
chanics just exactly right.”

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

347

“Extreme precision will not be possible, General,” his AI
reminded him. “There are too many variables, too many
unknowns in regard to S-2’s composition and dynamic equi-
librium. However, the necessary data has been transmitted
to Firebase Hawkins.”

Leave it to the AIs to be on top of things. The longer he
worked with them, the harder it was to think of artifi cial intel-
ligences as mere software. They were smart, they were respon-
sive, and they acted alive.

And he was about to sentence twelve of them to the elec-
tronic equivalent of death.

In a window open in his thoughts, Alexander saw a sche-
matic of the S-2 system, with twelve curving trajectories rising
from the night side of the planet, swinging around to the day
side, and accelerating under Alcubierre Drive toward the giant
sun. The first ships in line would be transmitting data about
stellar density, temperature, and dynamics to the ships follow-
ing, allowing for subtle course changes to take advantage of
the new information.

“Hawkins reports the Euler ships have been programmed
and are ready for launch,” Taggart announced.

Alexander drew a deep breath. Technically, he was re-
quired to consult with the Senate Military Council before fi r-
ing the Euler triggerships . . . and there
were unknowns
enough here to pose a significant threat to Earth. If anything
was guaranteed to generate a xenocidal Xul response directed
against Humankind, attacking their complex at GalCenter
must be it.

On the other hand, there was opportunity here . . . the op-
portunity to do the Xul so much damage in one blow that the
war might, at long last, be brought to a close.

He could not let that opportunity slip away in bureau-
cratic wrangling or politics.

“Do the Xul on the planet’s surface pose a threat to a trig-
gership launch?” he asked in his mind.

“Conceivably,” Cara told him. “Individual Xul elements
are battling within the Marine trenches, and are within a
kilometer of the triggership silos.”

348

I A N D O U G L A S

“Relay to Captain Black,” Alexander said. “He is clear to
initiate Sunrise in order to clear the area.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And as soon as the silo area is secure, he is to launch

Heartbreak,” Alexander said.

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

0747 hrs, GMT

The Xul combots had swept through the wreckage and
into the Marine lines. His VML launcher out of rounds,

Garroway had retrieved his plasma weapon and fi red at the
advancing black sea until they were swarming over the
trench itself. For a time, he’d used the nano-D dispenser in
his right arm, crouching at the bottom of the trench and fi r-
ing straight up as the machines drifted overhead.

Then they were too close even for that, and he was using
his slicers.

Combat became an endless dance of repeated movements,
coordinated and executed through the mental discipline of
his weiji-do training. Reach out with the left arm, hook into
black ceramic-plastic and metal with one slicer, strike up
and in and twist with the right, letting molecule- thin blades
core and gut the struggling artifi cial monster.

Exhaustion dragged at Garroway. How long could he keep
this up? . . .

“Listen up Marines!” Black’s voice came through on his
regimental channel. “We’re implementing Sunrise, two
counts, in fifteen seconds! Keep your heads down!”

Garroway gutted another Xul machine, shoving the wreck-
age aside in a tangle of writhing tentacles. Warhurst was
next to him, almost against his back. “About fucking time!”

Warhurst growled.

But Garroway was mentally running through a count-
down. Twelve . . . eleven . . . ten . . .

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

349

Another Xul combot drifted overhead, its tentacles reach-
ing down for him. He snapped out with his arms, right, then
left, severing tentacles, then plunging his left slicer into
what passed for the alien machine’s belly. It tried to back
off, and he felt his boots leaving the ground.

Eight . . . seven . . . six . . .

Warhurst fired his suit’s nano-D weapon, the round snap-
ping past Garroway’s helmet and imbedding itself in the
struggling machine. Clouds of nano-disassemblers began
devouring the alien device, sparkles of blue light showing
where molecular bonds were breaking.

Garroway wrenched his right slicer free and fell back into
the trench as the Xul machine began to disintegrate.

Three . . . two . . . one . . .

“Down!” Warhurst yelled, and then the landscape outside
of the trench lit up.

Sunrise indeed. The missiles had been fired from two of
the surviving Tarantulas, each tipped with a ten-kiloton tactical
nuclear warhead. Marines rarely used such weaponry—the
chances of scoring friendly-fi re kills, often irretrievables—was
simply too great. But the nanocrete trenches grown into the
fabric of Firebase Hawkins had been designed with tactical
nukes in mind.

Twin fireballs expanded like deadly, spherical blossoms.

With no atmosphere, of course, there was no mushroom cloud,
but the firestorms of raw, hot plasma swept out from the target
points, merged, and swelled. Xul machines caught in the open
were shredded, melted, and whipped away in the seething
maelstrom of heat and intense EM radiation. The sky above the
trench went dazzlingly white as the plasma wall swept over-
head, leaving the depths of the trench in shadowed darkness.

The shock waves arrived seconds later, blasting through
solid rock and nanocrete, picking Garroway and Warhurst
up from the floor of the trench and slamming them both
against the back wall.

And then there was a long, black silence.

“All clear,” Black’s voice reported. “We have the bastards
on the run! Pour it on, people!”

350

I A N D O U G L A S

Unsteadily, Garroway got to his feet, retracting his slicers
and extending a gauntlet to Warhurst to help the older Marine
up. Beyond the trench, two hundred-meter craters still glowed
white-hot in the aftermath of the strike. Picking up his plasma
rifle, Garroway brought it to his shoulder, locked in with his
implant, and began picking off individual Xul machines—
survivors overlooked by the blast because, by chance, they’d
been in shadowed corners, craters, or crevices where the
nukes had overlooked them.

The few still afloat appeared to be straggling toward the
fallen Behemoth, breaking off the attack at last.

A kind of madness had overtaken Garroway, lifting the
exhaustion, giving him new, if momentary, strength. “Burn

’em!” he yelled. “Burn ’em! Burn ’em down!”

“All units,” Black’s voice said over the Net. “Heartbreak
has been initiated and deployed. You people might want to
see this. . . .”

“Hey!” Warhurst called from Garroway’s side. “They’re
launching!”

Garroway turned, lowering his weapon. The nearest trig-
gership’s bunker was over a kilometer away, and there wasn’t
a lot to see, but Garroway and Warhurst stood in their trench
watching as the slender craft rose above the nanogrown
base. The tiny ship, curiously organic, egg-shaped, but with
sculpted flutes and swellings and blisters, drove skyward on
its agravitics and was rapidly lost to sight.

That explained the use of the nukes. Marine command
constellations were super-cautious when it came to the nu-
clear option, simply because even a ten kiloton warhead was
so damnably indiscriminate, but nothing less could have
swept the battlefield clear enough of Xuls to allow the trig-
gerships to get away.

He found himself wondering if any Marines or docs had
been caught in the open just now. If they had been, their
bodies would never be found for retrieval.

Elsewhere across the base, other black Euler vessels were
rising and following, streaking toward the western horizon
before vanishing into darkness.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

351

Garroway dropped his gaze to the western horizon. The
red sun would be rising there on this
backward-
turning
world in another few standard days, but it was lost for the
moment beneath the bulk of the planet. That was just as
well, considering what was about to happen.

He watched the last of the Euler triggerships vanish into
the western sky. He was devoutly, almost insanely glad that
he wasn’t piloting one. He never wanted to be in that posi-
tion, that role, again.

His heart was racing, his respiration elevated. All too well
he could remember being crammed inside an identical ship
a decade earlier, plunging into the core of a star. The thought
always brought with it a throat-clutching fear on the ragged
verge of panic.

Memories of that close, confining interior of the alien star-
ship mingled with other, more recent memories. For a mo-
ment, he flashed back to the nightmare terror of the fi ght
underground hours ago. Damn . . . was he becoming a claus-
trophobic? Mental and emotional traumas could be as debili-
tating as physical injury, and frequently were a hell of a lot
harder to treat.

He swallowed the fear. He didn’t want to alert any of the

Network AIs and have his name reported. That could get
him pulled off the line in short order. Something like claus-
trophobia could get him pulled off of combat duty entirely.

For a moment, he let himself be teased by the thought. A
psych downcheck might get him sent home. The thought
was damned tempting.

And then he shook his head, angry again. What home?

Where? EarthRing? He was home here, with his buddies.

With his Corps. . . .

And he would not let them down.

• • •

352

I A N D O U G L A S

Heartbreak Flight

S-2 System,

Core Space

0748 hrs, GMT

Accelerating hard, the first of the Euler-designed trigger-
ships emerged from the planet’s shadow, plunging into
dazzling red sunshine. As it approached the speed of light,

S-2/I vanished astern, swept away as if by some titanic, cos-
mic hand. Ahead, S-2 grew brighter, its edges distorting
with the bizarre optical effects of supraluminal travel, then
blacked out entirely as the Alcubierre field so completely
warped the surrounding space that light could not penetrate
to the tiny vessel within.

On board, a sub-program drawn from Athena directed the
craft’s course and speed. Normally, triggerships were de-
signed to plunge directly into the heart of a star. As the Al-
cubierre Drive field moved into the high-density realm of
the stellar core, a considerable volume of space ahead of the
vessel was enormously compressed, vastly increasing that
density. Astern, space was stretched out, and here the den-
sity of the star’s interior dropped sharply. The result was a
rebound that collapsed the star’s core, creating a shock wave
that blew the star’s outer layers into space—a nova.

This time, though, the triggerships’ AI pilots were aiming
well to one side, arrowing in toward one limb of the blazing
red star ahead. Each vessel had a slightly different target
point, one calculated to cut a chord through a circular cross-
section of the star.

Physics calculations and endless simulations had sug-
gested the probable result. Still, with so many unknowns, no
one could be sure of what the exact result would be, not until
the string of triggerships had actually completed their pas-
sage, and Commonwealth ships and probes had had a chance
to record and evaluate the data.

Moving at ten times the speed of light, the lead triggership
plunged through the stellar photosphere and deep into the

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

353

lower levels of the star’s atmosphere. Not even the senses of
the AI pilot could record that instant. Besides, the AI
couldn’t see out, and was piloting now entirely on program-
ming that assumed the star would be where it was supposed
to be at the instant of passage.

In the ship’s wake, the predicted shockwave spread
through the star.

The star designated S-2 was nearly two hundred times the
diameter of distant Sol and, like other red giants, was cor-
respondingly less dense, especially within its outer regions.

The passage did not trigger a nova.

It did, however, cause a rebound effect that sent nearly a
quarter of a Solar mass hurtling out ahead of the star, blast-
ing up and out through the photosphere in a geyser of mass
and energy that momentarily outshone the entire star. It was,
in fact, a stellar flare, but of unprecedented size and force
and volume. As that mass erupted from the red sun’s deeper
levels, the shock rebounded against the entire star, visibly
flattening it along its direction of travel. The fl are persisted,
growing broader, longer, more powerful . . . in short acting
like a gigantic rocket blast with power enough to slightly
slow the onrushing star’s velocity . . . and subtly change its
course.

That first stellar flare would linger for hours . . . perhaps
for days, swelling out into space like a fast-expanding pillar
of fire. But scant seconds after the first triggership passage,
the second triggership in line passed through the star, strik-
ing at a slightly sharper, slightly deeper angle.

A second flare, even larger than the first, erupted into
space, merging with the first, strengthening it, burning so
brightly now that the entire red giant’s light output seemed
sullen and subdued.

The third triggership increased the force of the stellar
rocket even more, extending the growing prominence some
forty million kilometers put into space.

Then came the fourth, the fifth . . .

One after another, the Euler triggerships dove into the

354

I A N D O U G L A S
star’s limb, each passage unleashing titanic and unimagina-
ble forces from the star’s depths. There was terrible danger
here. Shockwaves were rippling through the star’s photo-
sphere and core, both from the explosions themselves and
from the shock of deceleration, and the AIs had suggested
that there was a chance that the huge star would tear itself
into pieces.

Gravity, however, continued to hold sway. The star had a
rotational period of some twenty standard days; had it been
faster—some giants, younger, hotter, and without planets,
rotated in a matter of a few hours—the star might indeed
have disintegrated under that ferocious bombardment,
though, of course, the individual pieces, the entire mass of
the star, would continue moving on its original path.

The impact points had been precisely calculated. The
geysering pulses of erupting star stuff were pushing against
the star from the direction of its travel as it looped in toward

GalCenter. The thrust of those jets acted to slow the star
somewhat in its mad, five thousand kilometer- per- second
plunge. As the star lost energy, its orbit decayed.

As the artifi cial flares continued to explode from the
depths of S-2’s atmosphere, they were acting like retro-
rockets on a titanic orbital spacecraft. . . .

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Near S-2/I,

Core Space

1015 hrs, GMT

Alexander watched the savaging of the giant star.

Because of the scales of distance and size involved, ev-
erything was happening in slow motion. It had taken hours
for the stellar prominence to develop, brightening as it grew
until it outshone the rest of the star. From here, the jet ap-
peared as a dazzlingly bright blue-white thread sticking

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

355

straight out from the much larger sphere of the star. The star
was visibly deformed, flattened somewhat, and concave in the
region of the super-flares, with concentric rings of shadow
showing against the sullen ruby glow of the star’s photo-
sphere.

“My God,” Alexander said, whispering. “Cara, are you get-
ting all of this?”

“We are recording the operation from the vantage points
of over seven hundred remote battlespace probes, General,”

his AI told him.

“Of course. . . .”

It had been a needless question. Of course the AIs would
be recording this for later study. And for replay back in the

Sol System, as a historical record.

Cyndi Yarlocke and her crowd would make a lot of that
record, he thought. For the past ten years, the MIEF had
been blowing up entire stars in the war to keep the Xul at
bay. Now, they’d refined the process somewhat, found a way,
not to destroy the star outright, but to move it, to use an en-
tire star as a colossal projectile weapon.

That, to Alexander’s mind, seemed more obscene, some-
how, than the mere destruction of a star with its attendant
planets in an artificially generated nova. Yarlocke, he thought,
would have agreed, would have seen this as a forbidden tam-
pering with the natural order on a cosmic scale.

Besides, this was really going to piss off the Xul. . . .

A fragment of history nagged at his thoughts. I am be-
come Death, the destroyer of worlds. Who had said that? He
ran a search, and his link with Hermes’ data banks brought
back the result almost at once.

The quote, technically, was from the ancient Sanskrit

Bhagavad Gita, the speaker the god Vishnu. The passage
had become famous in the West when it had been quoted by

Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of the Man-
hattan Project, in July of 1945, on the occasion of the fi rst
detonation of a primitive nuclear device. According to the
download, Oppenheimer had first mentioned thinking that

356

I A N D O U G L A S
passage—he’d been fluent in Sanskrit and knew the Bhaga-
vad Gita well—in an interview in 1965, twenty years after
the event. According to Oppenheimer’s brother, who’d been
present at the time, what he’d actually said after that fi rst,
test detonation, was, “It worked!”

It would be some time before they would know if this had
worked, using a giant star as a weapon. They’d been running
calculations and simulations for months, now, trying to re-
fine the basic idea. The Eulers themselves, that deep- sea
race of superb mathematicians, had contributed to the calcu-
lations.

According to the numbers, if the thing worked, if they were
actually able to change S-2’s orbital path about GalCenter
enough, the star would reach perigalacton—and the
super-
massive black hole’s event horizon—in thirty days more.

There was no way, no way at all, to speed things up.

“The Xul are going to get to have a crack at it,” Taggart
said. He might have been reading Alexander’s thoughts.

“They have fifty days to try to intercept that thing.”

That thing. Not “star” or “sun” but “that thing.” Perhaps,
like Alexander, Taggart was having some trouble with the
sheer scale of what they were trying to do here, as well.

“It’ll take time, Liam,” Alexander replied. “Time for them
to figure out what’s happening here. And unless they are
able to rewrite Reality on a pretty damned big scale, the
only thing they can do is induce a nova.”

“We know the Xul can blow up stars,” Taggart pointed
out.

“Yes. But they can’t . . . just wink them out. As far as we
know.” He nodded toward the red giant with its brilliant, lead-
ing thread of light. “If they explode that star, the pieces of
it—all the gas and particulate radiation, and whatever is left
of its core, all of it, will still be moving on the new course.”

“True. But the Xul may have been detonating stars in here
already. There’s Sagittarius A East. . . .”

Alexander nodded. Sag A East was the vast, empty bubble
marking an ancient supernova remnant close to GalCenter.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

357

It was at least conceivable that the Xul had blown the star up
deliberately, perhaps in such a way as to change its orbital
path about the center, rather than allow it to get too close to
their construction project at Sag A*.

Then again, supernovae
were common occurrences,
relatively speaking, within the crowded heart of the Gal-
axy’s core. Sag A East might not have been artifi cially in-
duced.

“The Xul are bound to hesitate,” he said. “I’d think the last
thing they would want in close proximity to their Dyson cloud
is a nova. It’s less than twenty light hours to GalCenter from
here. Even if S-2 detonates now, it would cause terrifi c dam-
age in there.”

“I just hope it’s enough,” Taggart observed.

“General?” one of his human aides called over the net.

“Lejeune is clear of the Hermes.”

“Thank God. Tell Lejeune to launch fighters. And get the

Howorth out into space and down to the planet. Fast!”

He hoped that would be enough, too.

Nightstar 442

Surface of S-2/I

Core Space

1020 hrs, GMT

Charel Ramsey struggled back to consciousness. He was
surprised to find that he was still alive, that despite a variety
of sharp aches and bruises, he even seemed to be more or
less intact. His cockpit had separated from the crashing

Nightstar, as it had been designed to do, and managed a
landing on emergency thrusters.

Landing, he decided, surveying the damage, was probably
too kind a word. His Nightstar had been moving fast when it
had been hit—over eighteen hundred kph—and he’d been at
keel- scraping altitude to boot. The cockpit’s inertial dampers
had cut in and spared him the worst of the impact, but he’d still

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I A N D O U G L A S
hit fast enough and hard enough to knock him out. According
to his implant timepiece, he’d been out for over fi ve hours.

His instruments all were dead. He had no idea how far he
was from Marine positions, or if they knew where he was.

Without screens or phase- shifting, he must be taking a hell
of a dose of radiation right now. He doubted that he had
more than a few hours more to live.

And with radiation poisoning, they would be extremely
unpleasant hours. Slowly, he raised his gloved hand to the
latch on his helmet. He could end things quickly, by opening
up his helmet to hard vacuum. The alternative was to tough
out the inevitable pain and nausea for those few hours in
hopes that someone was coming to get him.

His hand was on the catch mechanism for a long and
trembling few minutes as he wrestled with the decision.

At last, though, he shook his head and dropped his hand.

Marines tried always to recover their own, and if they found
him out here and could get him to a Commonwealth mili-
tary medical facility, he had at least a fair chance of recov-
ery. Garroway had been more badly burned ten years ago,
when he’d flown that first triggership mission at Starwall.

Besides, he wasn’t feeling too bad just yet. The absorptive
nano on the exterior of his cockpit was keeping the internal
radiation levels to manageable levels, and his suit’s medi-
packs were injecting him regularly with anti-rad nano. If
things got . . . bad, really bad later on, he could always open
his helmet then.

The cockpit escape unit included a powerful automatic
radio beacon, which was already beaming a distress message
into space. The signals might not reach Firebase Hawkins,
somewhere over the northern horizon, but any Common-
wealth ships in orbit over S-2/I ought to pick it up.

Yeah, they might have someone on the way already.

Ramsey leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, set-
tling down for the wait.

• • •

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

359

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

1038 hrs, GMT

Howorth was easing her way down toward Firebase

Hawkins, her massive cigar-shape hanging dark in the sky,
silhouetted by the glow of the spiral arms of the accretion
disk far beyond. Garroway stood in the trench next to War-
hurst, watching her come in. They were going to make it.

They were actually going to get the hell off this rock.

Five Tarantulas were still operational, and three of those
were already lifting off, carrying wounded up to the Hermes,
in planetary orbit overhead. The other two
were parked
nearby, providing cover as the Marines came in off the pe-
rimeter. There’d been no new Xul attacks for some hours,
now, but the RST Marines remained on guard. Another Xul
ship could appear at any moment, arrowing in from the in-
visible monster there, halfway up the sky at the center of the
accretion spiral.

“Listen up, Marines!” Captain Black’s voice cut in over
the regimental link. “We’ve got a situation!”

“Shit,” Warhurst grumbled. “It’s always something!”

“We’ve got a Marine pilot down, people,” Black’s voice
went on. “He’s alive, but trapped in his ejection pod on the
ground 156 kilometers south of the firebase. I need volun-
teers to go pick him up.”

Garroway keyed his own link, putting his name up on the
board back at RST HQ. A Marine down in that radiation-
blasted wasteland? Hell, yeah, he’d volunteer.

Other Marines were volunteering as well. Black had to
cut off the flood of responses. “Okay, okay. We’ve got all we
need.” Garroway’s implant put up an icon indicating that his
name had been chosen. He took a deep breath. They always
said never volunteer, but . . .

“I’ve tagged twelve of you,” Black went on. “You’ll board

Flying Pig, Lieutenant Grooms, and provide perimeter
security for the doc flying out there with them. From there,

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I A N D O U G L A S
you’ll bounce straight up to orbit and rendezvous with the

Hermes. Understand?”

“Aye, aye, sir!” Garroway, Warhurst, and a number of other
voices chorused.

“We’ve IDed the downed pilot. He’s Lieutenant Charel

Ramsey. . . .”

“Shit!” Garroway said.

“Old home week, ain’t it?” Warhurst added. “All we need
now is your girlfriend, Gare.”

“She’s not here,” Garroway said. “Thank God!”

“Then you have someone to go home to. C’mon. Let’s go
pick up the lieutenant.”

They jogged toward one of the waiting Tarantulas. Nearby,

Howorth had touched down, her vast bulk crushing nano-
crete defenses and other structures that happened to be in
her way. Marines were streaming up a ramp that had low-
ered from her belly. In another hour or two, this desolate
little world would be empty of human life once more.

The twelve Marines trotted up Flying Pig’s ramp and
strapped themselves into the cargo deck seats. Thank God

Ramsey’s alive, Garroway thought as he activated the mag-
netic clamps. This’ll be simple. In and out. Grab him and
boost to orbit. . . .

He tried not to think about how the simple missions rarely
turned out that way. The evil god Murphy was always all too
ready to step in and change the situation beyond all recogni-
tion, and always for the worse.

The Tarantula was rising before the rear ramp had even
cycled shut.

And the actual pick- up was simple, much to Garroway’s
surprise. The Flying Pig made a low, suborbital bounce over
the southern horizon, coming down a few tens of meters
away from the groove carved into the ground by the cockpit
escape pod as it plowed into the surface and at last came to
rest. An optical beacon winked from an extended antenna.

The Marines raced down the ramp, spreading out, dropping
belly-down in a broad circle facing out, weapons ready.

But there were no Xul here. The landscape was utterly

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

361

desolate, utterly empty and silent. At their backs, a couple of

Flying Pig’s flight crew used a plasma cutter to slice into the
cockpit. Hospitalman 1st Class Dan O’Neill was there, help-
ing to pull Ramsey from the embrace of his cockpit, admin-
istering medinano and packing the man into a rad- shielded
transport tube. Ten minutes . . . and at Grooms’ order, the

Marines began pulling back, reboarding the transport and
buckling themselves in.

They began rising, accelerating to orbit. . . .

And then something struck the Flying Pig in the side, a
savage, ringing blow that put the awkward transport into a
wild tumble. Her agravitics were out, her thrusters fi ring
madly in an attempt to stabilize her.

She’d not been accelerating long enough to build up to
anything close to orbital velocity.

Helplessly, she was falling back toward the surface of

S-2/I.

24

0605.1102

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Orbiting S-2/I,

Core Space

1135 hrs, GMT

“Sir!” a Navy rating called from the comm board. “We’ve
lost one of the Tarantulas!”

Alexander brought up the data, opening a new window in
his mind. Cara pointed out the location, on the planet’s sur-
face. “What the hell happened?”

“We’re still checking,” Cara told him. “But it seems prob-
able that the Tarantula struck a piece of orbital debris.”

Space around S-2/I was filled with hurtling junk—
fragments left over from the Chosin and the Intrepid, from a
number of Nightstar aerospace fighters, and from the Xul
giants hammered by the Commonwealth squadron. With no
atmosphere around S-2/I to burn up the debris, some of
those pieces could orbit at quite a low altitude.

“What were they doing that far south of the base?”

“Captain Black dispatched one Tarantula to recover an
aerospacecraft pi lot shot down by the Xul,” Cara told him.

“General!” Taggart’s voice called, interrupting.

“Just a minute, Liam.” Alexander was checking the tra-
jectories of other craft leaving the planet. The Howorth was

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

363

boosting clear of the surface already, while the other Taran-
tulas were already en route. It would be risky to redirect one
of them to go back and pick up the fallen Tarantula’s occu-
pants, but—”

“General! ” Taggart’s and Cara’s voices sounded together.

“What?”

“We have hostiles inbound!” Taggart said.

Alexander’s attentions snapped back to the primary link
channel. Xul ships, lots of Xul ships, were materializing out
of FTL a few tens of light seconds away. Radiation trails
scratched through the hydrogen and dust cloud pervading
local space showed they were coming from the direction of
the Dyson cloud.

“Sensors have detected nearly one thousand Xul hunter-
ships,” Cara told him, her voice maddeningly calm.

“General Alexander!” Taggart added. “We must leave!”

Alexander felt as though the operation were unraveling
around him.

“How many people are on board that Tarantula?”

“Five Navy crew,” Cara reported. “One Navy corpsman.

Thirteen Marines, including the rescued man. We’re also
missing two other pilots. Twenty-one total.”

Twenty-one Marine and Navy personnel.

We never leave our own behind.

But there were times when a few Marines had to be sacri-
ficed for the survival of many. That was, in fact, the nature
of warfare despite the fine- sounding words and principles—
the need to pick and choose and make key strategic deci-
sions, all the while knowing that those decisions would
result in some Marines dying, while others lived.

We never leave our own behind.

But sometimes we have to, for the sake of completing the
mission.

“Radio them,” Alexander said. “Tell them we’ll be back!”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Admiral? Get us the hell out of here.”

“Where to, General?”

It scarcely mattered. Back to Earth? No, the rest of the

364

I A N D O U G L A S
fleet ought to be still at Cluster Space. “Rejoin the MIEF,

Admiral.”

“Make to Cunningham and Howorth,” Taggart said. His
words were leaden. “Order them to make their own way
back to friendly space by the best means they can deter-
mine. Astrogation! Initiate translation to Cluster Space.”

“Aye, aye, sir. It’ll take a few. . . .”

“We don’t have a few, Commander. Do it.”

Alexander snapped his awareness back to the Ops Center.

On the main display, the star still glowed a brilliant ruby hue,
but the light was dimmed, somewhat, by the fi ercely radiat-
ing white thread extending from its surface. The crescent of
the planet bowed away from the star; at visual wavelengths
there was no sign of the approaching horde of enemy ships.

Then Hermes’ AI put up the graphic icons, red brackets
each marking an invisibly distant Xul ship. A mass of inter-
tangled brackets spread across the visual display, moving
out from the focus of the accretion spiral. Range data ap-
peared next to the mass. The nearest enemy ships were fi ve
light seconds away, and fast moving closer.

The MIEF squadron had done all it could—setting the
star S-2 onto a new orbital path. Sensor drones in battlespace
would record the star’s passage fifty days hence . . . but there
was nothing more the Commonwealth ships or Marines
could do.

Including rescuing the nineteen people stranded on the
planet’s surface.

“We don’t even know for sure they survived the crash,”

Taggart told him.

“No. But we should have checked.”

“There’s no time, sir,” Cara said.

“I know.” Alexander drew himself up a little straighter.

Cunningham and Howorth were under full acceleration now,
looping around the planet and engaging their Alcubierre

Drives. They had a chance, at least, of making it back to
human-occupied space, though the journey would take
months, even years. Both were large enough that their onboard

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

365

nanoprocessors should keep their crews well supplied with
oxygen, water, and food no matter how long the trip. All
they would need do is stop, occasionally, to harvest raw ma-
terials from comets or carbonaceous asteroids.

“I know,” he said again. “But we will be coming back. . . .”

And then Hermes shifted phase, dropping into the Quan-
tum Sea and translating through the dimensions and across
a spatial gulf of twenty-five thousand light years.

Marine Regimental Strike Team

10 kilometers from Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

1210 hrs, GMT

Garroway pulled himself free of tangled wreckage. Bro-
ken power cables hung sparking from the overhead, and the
deck was sharply canted. Other Marines were struggling to
their feet as well. Their link feed from the Tarantula’s cock-
pit had cut off with the crash.

“Anyone hurt?” Doc O’Neill called, moving down the
cargo deck aisle, checking on the Marines. “Is everyone
okay?”

The landing, clearly, had been a rough one, but the Ma-
rines, well padded within the cocooning embrace of their
armor, had ridden out the crash without injuries more seri-
ous than bumps and bruises. Someone blew out an emer-
gency hatch on the starboard side forward, and the Marines
began scrambling out of the fallen transport.

“Where the hell are we?” Warhurst wanted to know. The
terrain was the same as at the pick- up site—broken rock,
radiation- baked dust, all beneath that impossible and dra-
matic three-armed spiral filling a sky of stardust.

“We’re about ten kilometers south of Firebase Hawkins,” a
young Navy rating—one of the Tarantula’s crew—told him.

She pointed at the horizon. “That way.”

“Yeah,” Lieutenant Aviles, the craft’s pilot, added. “I was

366

I A N D O U G L A S
trying to make it back to the base. Damn it, we almost made
it back.”

“It looks like you’re in command, sir,” Warhurst told him.

“We’d better get ourselves sorted out if we want to have a
chance of getting rescued.”

“Right, Gunny.”

Garroway heard the conversation, but his attention was
elsewhere—on helping Doc O’Neil get Ramsey’s cocoon
out of the crashed Tarantula. “How is he?” Garroway asked.

“One step above dead,” O’Neill told him. “I dropped him
into cybe- hibe.”

Cybernetic hibernation had been the first means by which
humans had gone to the stars, back when transports were
limited by the speed of light and voyages to even the nearest
stars took ten years objective. The cere bral implants grown
within the brains of Marines and starship personnel could
be set to take the man or woman into deep unconsciousness—
as O’Neill had said, “one step above dead.” Medical nano
swarmed through the circulatory and lymphatic systems,
slowing cell growth and metabolic processes to a near stop,
removing toxins building up slowly over time, repairing cell
damage as tissue inevitably broke down.

With the advent of Alcubierre FTL Drive and, better still,
the quantum translation effect used by the largest ships, ma-
rines no longer had to hibernate across the gulfs between
even neighboring stars. The medical department, though, still
used cybe-hibe in serious cases, when a Marine was so
badly wounded that he or she would die within hours or
days, and the nearest hospital facility was too far away for
an immediate medevac.

“Is he gonna be okay, Doc?” Garroway asked.

“I don’t know, Gunny,” O’Neill replied. “I’ve got him
doped full of anti-rads, but there’s been a lot of cell dam-
age already. And it’s still happening. Cybe-hibe doesn’t stop
radiation. I guess it depends on how long it takes to get
him to a hospital. Here, give me a hand with him, okay?”

An hour later, the line of armored Marines and naval

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

367

personnel had left the crashed Tarantula and was making
its way north across the broken plain. They would have a
better chance of pick-up, Lieutenant Aviles had decided,
back at Firebase Hawkins—not to mention power, intact
communications gear, and functioning nanoprocessors to
provide water, air, and food. The Tarantula might keep
them alive for a few more days . . . but twenty-one people
could live indefinitely at the fi rebase, if they could reach it.

Garroway and a Marine sergeant named Jennings carried

Ramsey’s cocoon, with Doc O’Neill walking alongside, keep-
ing an eye on the cocoon’s readouts. They’d laid a sheet of
metal cut from the Tarantula’s hull over the cocoon; the ac-
tive nano surface provided a little extra in the way of radia-
tion protection for the unconscious offi cer.

Readings were high for all of them, though. Some of them
were going to be sick by the time they made it back to the
base.

“They couldn’t have left us,” Milo Alvarez said, his boots
kicking up small puffs of dust as he trudged along.

“They could and they did, Sergeant,” Warhurst replied.

“The damned Xul must’ve jumped them about the time we
crashed.”

“So . . . is that it?” Alvarez asked. “They’re just gonna
leave us here to die?”

“Nah,” Garroway told the younger Marine. “They always
come back for their own. We just have to hold on until that
happens.”

But the sky overhead, the dramatic sweep of the accretion
disk spiral, the distant clotting of stars and nebulae, only
emphasized how very small and how very alone they actu-
ally were in a very large and very hostile cosmos.

• • •

368

I A N D O U G L A S

1105.1102

Senate Committee Deliberation Chamber

Commonwealth Government Center,

EarthRing

1417, GMT

“. . . and for those reasons,” Alexander was saying, “I for-
mally request permission to return to the Galactic Core im-
mediately, with the full strength of the MIEF.”

He was present at the Senate hearing in person rather than
electronically, wearing his full-dress Marine blacks with the
blue and red trim. He’d even allowed Cara to convince him
to wear a personal corona projector, which imitated the radi-
ant nimbus projected by people present in simulation. He
disliked this concession to what he considered to be
dim-witted fashion nonsense, but was willing to play along
if the golden light playing about his head and shoulders con-
vinced even one senator that he should be heard.

He stood at the speaker’s podium; at his back, a three-
story-tall visual display mirrored the downloaded images
he’d just played for the assembly through their cere
bral
links—the red sun with its intolerably brilliant jet, the ocher
curve of S-2/I’s planetary crescent, the hundreds of tightly
packed brackets marking the approaching swarm of Xul
hunterships.

He’d emphasized, of course, the need to recover the
twenty-one people left on the surface of S-2/I as well as the
starships left behind . . . but the primary thrust of his argu-
ment had been on the need to go back and see what was ac-
tually happening now at the Galactic Core. That the Xul had
been responding to the squadron’s close passage about Gal-

Center there could be no doubt. That they knew that the star

S-2 had been tampered with, slowed in its orbital passage of

GalCenter in order to put it onto a new and closer path was
certain as well. The question was how the Xul had responded
to the decelerating star . . . and exactly what they’d been
able to do about it.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

369

He’d been trying to read the emotional presence of the

Commonwealth Senate for the last three days as he’d deliv-
ered his pre sentation and, so far, at least, he had no idea
where things stood. Senator Yarlocke, he’d learned, was still
in a deep coma, her body kept technically alive in cyber-
netic suspension, but her mind, apparently, gone. Senator

Gerrad Ralston was now head of the Senate Military Com-
mittee in Yarlocke’s place.

Ralston, Alexander knew, was a member of Yarlocke’s
camp, one of the bitch’s puppies, as he thought of her coterie
of hangers-on, an ultra-liberal anti-militarist, and one of the
authors of the misbegotten Pax Galactica peace proposal.

“General Alexander,” one of the senators in the curving
rows of seats before him said. His link IDed the man as

Senator Jeofri Dunford, of South Michigan, and a political
moderate. “You stressed just now the need to understand

Xul technological capabilities, and gave that as a principal
reason for returning to the Galactic Core. Could you elabo-
rate on that, please? If the Xul are as technologically supe-
rior as you’ve been painting them, what chance would our
fleet have against them?”

“A good question, Senator. I wish I had as good an an-
swer. The best I can do is to say that, in military terms, we
can engage a technologically superior enemy if we’re care-
ful about choosing the time and place of that engagement.

History is full of instances where groups took on superior
technology and won, or, at least, held out for long enough
that they could win a political victory, if not a military one.

The classic examples are Vietnam in the 20th Century, or the
various Islamic terrorist groups of the 21st. And that has
been our grand strategy against the Xul for some centuries,
now.”

“Indeed. But we don’t seem to have much hope of a politi-
cal victory, here. We’re not engaging the Xul in a political
dialogue.”

“No, sir. And that is a problem, not being able to talk with
them.

“But since we can’t talk to them, it may be that military

370

I A N D O U G L A S
actions of the type we’ve been employing—quick, sharp
raids against targets small enough to give us a good chance
of short-term success—that those give us our best long- term
option in dealing with the Xul, and for protecting ourselves.

We’ve been saying all along that to be able to talk with
them, we need to get their attention. But, just maybe, we’ve
been going about it in completely the wrong way. It may be
that, so far as the Xul are concerned, there’s no one there for
us to talk to. The Xul, as a collective entity, are not intelli-
gent. . . .”

Several senators came to their feet, shouting.

“What are you talking about?”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“General Alexander! Explain yourself!”

He’d already put his conclusions into a written report, but
doubted that many here in this chamber had actually both-
ered to read it.

“For centuries,” Alexander went on, “we’ve been dealing
with the Xul on the assumption that they are intelligent, ra-
tional beings. We’ve learned, slowly, that they’re quite dif-
ferent from us, that they think differently, that they react
differently to various stimuli. But because they are a techno-
logical species, building spacecraft and colonizing worlds,
we’ve assumed that they are intelligent . . . meaning that
they are capable of reason and of rational discourse, the same
as us.

“We now believe that we were wrong in making that as-
sumption.”

Alexander waited for a moment, as shouts echoed through
the chamber. Gradually, the noise died away; he had their
full attention now.

“Our most recent probes of Xul ships, and of their complex
at the heart of the Galaxy, has convinced the xenosophon-
tologists with the MIEF that the Xul are, in fact, a CAS.”

There was a long pause. “Can you explain that term, Gen-
eral?” Senator Tillman ventured.

“A CAS, ladies and gentlemen, is a Complex Adaptive

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

371

System. We’ve known about them for a long time—since the
dawn of our relationship with artificial intelligences, in
fact.

“A CAS is any system made up of many independent op-
erators, or agents. Each agent operates on a fairly simplistic
level, doing one or two things inde pen dently. A good exam-
ple is a termite nest.”

“We’ve already determined that the Xul do not have a
hive mind, General,” Senator Ralston said.

“I’m not talking about a hive mind,” Alexander said. “At
least, not in the sense that most humans understand the
term. Most people think that an ant hill or a termite mound
are analogues of human cities . . . that there are soldiers to
defend them and workers to build and, somewhere down
inside the mound, there’s a queen termite telling all of the
other termites what to do.

“Termite nests do have queens—and kings as well, unlike
ant hills—but their sole contribution to the colony is repro-
duction. They don’t give orders or control the nest. In fact,
no one ‘gives orders.’ Each termite goes about its daily life,
doing termite things. Thousands of termites—certain spe-
cies of them, anyway, together build incredibly complex

‘cities’ six meters high, which regulate the internal tempera-
ture to within one degree Centigrade over the course of a
day. A colony of a million termites working together creates
the impression of a single organized and intelligent mind.

“In fact, each termite is a CAS agent with a very simple
set of behaviors. The termite colony has its own pattern of
behavior—far more complex, interesting, and apparently in-
telligent than that of a single insect. One termite is rigid in
its behavior, and it dies when its surroundings aren’t appro-
priate for that behavior. The entire colony, however, is highly
resilient and adaptive, can survive a wide range of threats
and conditions, and in some ways mimics what we humans
think of as intelligent behavior.”

“General Alexander,” Senator McLeod, of Ontario, said,

“are you saying the Xul are termites?”

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I A N D O U G L A S

Alexander sighed. How to get through to them? Senators
were as rigid and as predictable in their behavior, in some
ways, as individual termites.

“No, sir. I’m saying they are a complex adaptive system.

Nature is full of them. A hurricane is a CAS, with numerous
chaotic agents that work together to create a storm that
appears to have conscious volition. Individual agents can be
anything. Termites in a termite colony. Humans in the Com-
monwealth. Machines. AIs or more simplistic software. Cor-
porations spread across the Commonwealth and in other
nation- states. Cancer cells are CAS agents. The Common-
wealth economy . . . that’s made up of hundreds of billions
of individual agents, from banking laws and the rules of
supply and demand to individual Commonwealth citizens
earning and spending credit. We have government bureau-
cracies tasked with maintaining and regulating our econ-
omy, but no one is in charge. It just happens. City air traffi c
in a congested environment like New Chicago. Schools of
fish in the Atlantic sea farms. Antibodies in the human
body. They work together because they grew and evolved
together, and what they do was streamlined along the way
until it appears to be a seamless, an intelligent whole.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate, we’ve been puzzled
for a long time about Xul behavior . . . about why we couldn’t
communicate with them, about why they didn’t seem to
show curiosity about us or anything else in the cosmos.

They seemed to react to us in a simplistic fashion—as radi-
cal xenophobes—but we couldn’t understand why their ef-
forts to hunt us down and exterminate were so sporadic and
more or less ineffectual. We assumed they were a machine
intelligence . . . and yet our own AIs show more intelligence
than a Type IV huntership carrying billions of Xul uploaded
minds.

“Now we understand. Or we’re beginning to. Their be-
havior is starting to make sense. Individual Xul, we think,
are the conscious minds of once-organic beings uploaded
into computer networks. Maybe the original organic Xul, a
few million years ago, were xenophobic and built starships

G A L A C T I C

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373

and wiped out other species . . . or maybe those behaviors
developed later when individual Xul stopped thinking for
themselves.

“But they did stop thinking. Groups of Xul arrive at a
consensus by echoing thoughts back and forth—what we
call ‘singing’ or ‘choruses.’ But the evidence suggests that
they are only rarely aware of what’s going on in the larger
world around them. They may have created the Xul equiva-
lent of paradise- simulations inside their computer networks,
and don’t bother with what we think of as the ‘real world’

any longer.

“In our culture, we have people who are addicted to
simulations—game sims, simulated sex, simulated relation-
ships. I submit that the Xul, the real Xul, have taken this
process several steps further. They interact with reality around
them as rarely as possible. And the blind interaction of tril-
lions of Xul ships and nodes scattered across the Galaxy
takes on a life, a personality of its own.”

“What are you saying then, General?” Senator Ralston
asked. “That they’re not a threat?”

“Oh, no. They’re very much a threat. When buildings
were made primarily of wood, termites could destroy them.

The best-regulated national economy can react to market
forces in unexpected ways to unexpected conditions and col-
lapse. For millions of years, the Xul CAS has more or less
systematically hunted down and exterminated emerging
sentient species, star-faring cultures, alien intelligences.

And there is a distinct possibility that the CAS is reacting in
a startlingly high- tech way at GalCenter to erase Reality,
thereby insuring that the Xul survive in their tight little elec-
tronic paradises. We can’t permit that to happen, because to
do so would mean our extinction . . . and quite possibly the
extinction of every sentient species in the universe.”

“Then what are you suggesting, General?” Ralston said,
pushing. He spread his hands. “You’re saying we can’t talk
to them, we can’t fight them . . .”

“We can learn more about them, Senator. Information,
right now, is our most precious asset. We have set events in

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I A N D O U G L A S
motion at the Galactic Core that may well fundamentally
change Xul behavior, because the Xul CAS has never in its
existence faced a threat quite like this. If we’re lucky, we’re
going to eliminate so many of the individual Xul agents that
the total number may drop below some critical mass, some
necessary level below which their CAS doesn’t function. To
continue the termite analogy, if you reduce the number of
termites from a million to a few hundred, the mound will
stop acting as though it’s got a mind of its own. I can’t prom-
ise this, now, but I do promise that Xul behavior is about to
change.

“If we want to have it change in our favor, we need to be
there.”

“General,” Senator Tillman said, rising, “we’ve seen the
rec ords you brought back. A thousand Xul hunterships were
coming toward your squadron. The entire MIEF, a fl eet con-
sisting of every warship in human-controlled space wouldn’t
be enough to stop them all. You acted rightly in breaking off
the action and returning here. To take our only defense
against the Xul back into that . . . that cauldron would be to
squander it, to throw it away. An unthinking militarist re-
sponse is not what is called for now.”

“No, sir, but perhaps a thinking militarist response is
what’s necessary. Let me go back in there, with enough
ships to make a difference. We will recover our people from

S-2/I before the world is destroyed . . . and we will be in
place to take action should we see an opportunity to make a
positive difference.

“Maybe, Senator, when the Xul stop reacting as a non-
sentient CAS to external stimuli, maybe the real Xul intelli-
gence will poke its head up, look around . . . and try to talk
with us. Isn’t that worth a try?”

The session, the questions, the answers, the pleading went
on for another two hours, and at the end, Alexander, ex-
hausted, left the podium and retired to a side chamber, there
to watch the debate, the speechmaking pro and con by a
number of individual senators. He listened for nearly another

G A L A C T I C

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375

hour to senators urging an adoption of the proposal inter-
spersed with others urging it be rejected. One senator—

Alexander never caught his name—insisted that the Navy
and the Marines were not in existence to destroy termites at
the Galactic Center.

Eventually, it was time for the vote.

“General Alexander?”

He rose. “Senator Armandez! It’s good to see you.”

“Hello, General. I wanted to stop in and tell you . . . thank
you. I appreciate what you’ve tried to do.”

Alexander grinned, shaking the man’s hand. “Shouldn’t
you be on the fl oor voting?”

“Already did, General. We gave it our best shot. I don’t
know what else we can do.”

“You don’t sound too confi dent, sir.”

Armandez shrugged. “It’s going to be close. As usual,
things are divided pretty evenly between the established
party positions, conservative and liberal, militarist and anti-
militarist. I don’t know how many of the antis are going to
let your speech persuade them. They all have some pretty
heavy political baggage, reasons to see the proposal fail.”

The proposal was Alexander’s suggestion, that the full

MIEF be allowed to return to the Core and watch events
transpire.

“I still don’t understand what they think they have to lose,
sir.”

“Political face, in part. And a fair- sized minority would
like to have your MIEF at its beck and call. You’d be posted
here in the Sol System in case the Xul came here. Eventu-
ally, you might find yourself being used in little wars and
land grabs elsewhere—in the Islamic Theocracy, or against
the PanEu ro pe ans.”

“I thought they were anti- military, sir?”

“They are, General, whatever is convenient for the moment.

Whatever serves their career, their political agenda, or their im-
mediate need. If it scratches their itch, they want it. Doesn’t
matter what the words are. In a way, the Senate is a CAS, too.”

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I A N D O U G L A S

“I was aware of that, sir.” He hesitated. “May I ask why you’re
supporting me? I know you’re considered pro-military—”

He waved the statement aside. “It doesn’t have to do with
pro or anti-military. Every man and woman in that chamber
knows the military is necessary. They just disagree on how
best to employ it. No . . . partly, I agree with you that if
we’re forced to fight this . . . this force of nature, it’s best
done as far from Sol as possible. And, there’s a personal
reason.”

“What’s that?”

“I have a daughter.”

“Yes, sir?”

“A Marine.”

“I remember, Senator.”

“She’s in love with another Marine. One of the men still
back there on that planet. She . . . we would like him to
come home safely.”

“I . . . understand, sir.”

“Ah! Here comes the tally.”

A total of 321 senators were voting this eve ning. As the
results came in, the numbers came up on the display above
the image of the Senate Chamber . . . 151 in favor of Alex-
ander’s proposal, 165 against, with 5 abstentions.

The 1MIEF would be recalled to Sol Space. It would not
be permitted to return to GalCenter.

“Don’t worry, General,” Armandez told him. “We’ll fi nd
a way. We will find a way.”

“Yes, sir.”

But would it be in time to save the people still stranded
out there within the Galactic Core?

25

2606.1102

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

0815 hrs, GMT

There weren’t many of them left.

The five Navy personnel who’d been the crew of the Ta-
rantula had died first, one after another just a few days after
the march back to Firebase Hawkins. They’d been wearing
the old- style armor during that ten-kilometer march, Type

664 suits, instead of the newer Type 690s. The old suits had
not been able to handle the background radiation loads and
all five people were desperately sick by the time they’d stag-
gered into the fi rebase.

Two of them, including Lieutenant Grooms, had gone up
onto the surface and opened their own helmets before the
end. The other three had lingered a while longer, as vomit-
ing and diarrhea and the rapid disintegration of their cellular
structure had slowly killed them.

The survivors’ numbers had been increased by two Ma-
rine officers early
on—Lieutenants Eva Grant and Karl

Mayfair, the pilots of the last two Nightstars. Over the course
of the next month, however, four of the Marines had died of
radiation sickness as well—Pettigrew, Davis, Grant, and

Mayfair. The Marine pilots had been wearing light anti-rad

378

I A N D O U G L A S
protection on board their Nightstars, depending on the
anti-rad nano covering their fighters for protection. They’d
landed close by the ruins of Firebase Hawkins, but by the
time they reached the base’s underground shelters, both had
received irreparably lethal doses.

Gunny Warhurst was the se nior man present, now—not
counting Ramsey in his cybernetic suspension inside the
medical cocoon. There’d been some discussion about se nior
ranks and who should be in command. Warhurst had been a
gunnery sergeant long before Garroway, but for the past ten
years he’d been a civilian, and going by their actual time in
rate, Garroway had been the se nior by a matter of a few
months. But if you measured from the actual date of enlist-
ment, Warhurst had Garroway beat by ten years.

In fact, it didn’t matter. The proprieties and traditions
were observed because that was how Marines kept order in
a small and isolated unit. Garroway had no particular desire
to lead the little group of survivors, especially since it seemed
more and more likely that they all were going to succumb
one by one to radiation sickness and die, and there was noth-
ing anyone could do about it.

But he would do his best to serve as Warhurst’s exec,
making sure the air, food, and water were doled out appro-
priately, as were Doc’s dwindling rations of anti-rad nano.

For the past fifty days, they’d been surviving in a sealed
bunker deep beneath the ruins of Firebase Hawkins. Exca-
vated and nanogrown originally as a sickbay for the facility,
it consisted of three rooms including sleeping quarters, a
small nanoprocessing center, and a medical storeroom,
though unfortunately most of the medical supplies had been
taken by the rest of the RST when they’d evacuated. The
quarters were crowded and utterly lacking in privacy. A sin-
gle head provided basic sanitary facilities and a sonic
shower, but the place stank with the accumulating miasma
of unwashed bodies and the body gloves they wore under
their armor.

An airlock led to the surface via a ladder up a vertical

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

379

tube; a display screen pulled from the communications center
had been rigged to show scenes transmitted from the vari-
ous battlezone sensors still moving about the surface, their
one connection with the universe outside.

Through those sensors, the surviving Marines had watched
as the sky, already strange, slowly shifted into a surreal and el-
dritch fantasy from the hallucinations of a brain-
burned
sim-
addict. Eventually, S-2/I’s slow, retrograde rotation had
carried the central focus of the accretion spiral below the north-
eastern horizon, but three weeks later it had risen once more
in the northwest; by chance, the point marking GalCenter was
very nearly circumpolar, and dipped out of sight during the
long diurnal cycle for only a relatively brief time.

By the fortieth day of their isolation, they could see the

Dyson cloud, a fuzzy patch at the accretion spiral’s center,
partly obscured by the ripple and flash of enigmatic light-
nings at S-2/I’s north pole.

By the forty-fifth day, the cloud was much larger and more
distinct, a dark and curiously regular spherical blot against
the grainy glow of the background stars.

“It looks,” Sergeant Huerra said with studied Corps
aplomb, “like something puked by my girlfriend’s cat.”

“That’s supposed to be a cloud of Xul ships?” PFC Lenny

Delalo said, looking at the screen. “How come they haven’t
come after us, then?”

“Likely they don’t even know we’re here,” Warhurst told
him. “We’ve had some overflights, remember, but they didn’t
sniff us out.”

Corporal Natasha Kaminski sniffed her own armpit and
made a face. “If they couldn’t fucking smell us, they don’t
have a sense of smell.”

Twice, on Day 8, and again on Day 22, clouds of Xul ma-
chines had swept over the ruined base. They were like stan-
dard Xul combots—egg-shaped and mounting tentacles and
glittering lenses—but larger, as large as Nightstar fi ghters.

There’d been thousands of the devices, most passing over, a
few stopping and poking around in the ruins below. The

380

I A N D O U G L A S

Marines, their life support powered down, had donned their
armor and crouched in darkness, weapons ready for a fi nal
and apocalyptic encounter.

But either the Xul hadn’t detected them, or they’d decided
the tiny party of buried Marines simply wasn’t worth the
digging.

“Maybe the smell’s why they didn’t bother,” Sergeant Paul

Willian suggested. “They got one whiff and decided there
was something dead down here.”

That brought nervous laughter, but Garroway thought it
had been a little too close to the mark for comfort. Fourteen

Marines left . . . and they would be dead before much longer.

Actually, the smell wasn’t that bad. Perhaps they’d all
gotten used to it by now or, as PFC Ted Bergen had sug-
gested, their olfactory nerves had simply fried on Day 1.

But, in fact, the nanoprocessors filtered the air constantly,
removing water and excess carbon dioxide, along with the
various organic aromatics. They were cycling their shit and
piss efficiently enough,
too—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
and nitrogen were, after all, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and
nitrogen. The processors rearranged the atoms, including
those of the intestinal flora growing in the raw materials,
into food bars, water, and air. The raw materials were sup-
plemented by a dwindling stock of carbon and various trace
elements but, sooner rather than later, supplies would run
out. They couldn’t live on their own waste products for-
ever.

Garroway knew the numbers better than any of them. As
exec, it was his job to keep track of their resources, and ra-
tion the consumables.

He estimated that within another three months they would
be producing so few metabolic waste products that their
daily rations would fall below the minimum necessary to
keep them all alive.

There’d been some discussion early on about adding the
seven bodies to the resource reserves, a kind of high- tech
cannibalism that might extend the lives of the survivors by
many months. Although no military unit can afford to be a

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

381
democracy, Warhurst had taken a vote in order to end the
morbid speculation.

The result had overwhelmingly favored leaving the bod-
ies where they were, sealed in body bags up on the surface.

It was just as well. Those bodies were so radioactive that
it was extremely unlikely that the nanoprocessors could have
handled the decon without themselves becoming contami-
nated. Warhurst and Garroway hadn’t mentioned that to the
others, though. Those bodies would be returned to the Com-
monwealth somehow, some day, presumably along with the
bodies of the fourteen still alive in the underground bunker.

The Corps always brought home its own.

And, in fact, none of that really mattered, not in the long run.

Over the course of the past seven weeks, as the Dyson cloud
first appeared, then rapidly grew larger in the northwestern
sky, it became more and more clear that the planet itself might
well not survive much longer.

S-2/I orbited its red giant primary at a distance of over six
astronomical units, farther from its sun than Jupiter was
from Sol. As week followed week, S-2 appeared to be dwin-
dling, as though the distance between world and sun was
growing larger.

When S-2’s orbital path had been changed, S-2/I, gravita-
tionally locked with its primary, had been pulled off course
as well, but the planet had lagged behind somewhat, and its
orbital velocity had been slowly tugging it farther and far-
ther from its star.

The star’s leading plume of flame had dissipated weeks
ago, but some tens of solar masses had been funneled up
that thread of white light, acting as a titanic rocket engine.

S-2’s close pass around GalCenter was now going to be a
very close pass.

Exactly how close, no one—not even Athena , the small

2
version of Athena remaining in the RST network—could
predict. The chances were good, though, that the star would
pass close enough to the super-massive black hole at Gal-

Center to be disrupted, even torn apart. If that happened,

S-2/I would likely be destroyed as well. Already, the mild

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I A N D O U G L A S
seismic quakes Garroway had noticed seven weeks before
were becoming stronger and more pronounced. If a micro-
black hole was devouring the planet from the inside, it was
going to have a lot of help soon from the gravitational tides
of GalCenter.

Even if S-2/I survived the passage, though, its star would
not. The planet’s surface temperature was kept within toler-
able limits both by the heat from its giant sun primary and
by tidal forces raised by that sun. With S-2 destroyed, even
if the planet was flung clear of the central maelstrom, tem-
peratures would inevitably plunge. The background radia-
tion might keep temperatures a few degrees above absolute
zero, but the planet would freeze. When local temperatures
dropped below about minus 150 or so, not even the base’s
small reactor would be able to keep them warm for long.

A choice of deaths, Garroway thought. Death by
malnutrition—starving to death by centimeters. Death if
their world was torn apart by the central black hole and de-
voured. Death by freezing. Death by radiation poisoning.

The only real choice was which one would claim them
first. No one was talking much about the possibility that the

MIEF might come back for them. Not any longer.

“I’m going up on the surface,” he said at last.

“What the hell for?” Warhurst demanded. His eyes wid-
ened. “Wait a sec, Gare. You’re not—”

“No,” Garroway told him. “I’m not taking a walk.”

Taking a walk had become the accepted euphemism these
past weeks for what Lieutenant Grooms had done—going
up to the surface and opening your helmet visor to vacuum.

“The rads’ll kill you,” O’Neill said.

“Kill me faster, you mean. I just want to look at the sky
for a while, okay?”

With space at a premium, the Marines’ armor had been
stowed inside the airlock, at the base of the surface access
tunnel. He had to take one of the suits on top, though, rather
than finding his own, because 690s were heavy and tough to
manhandle alone.

It didn’t matter if he got someone else’s suit, though; Marine

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

383

armor, with nanotechnic appliances that adjusted the fi t, was
definitely one- size- fi ts-all.

Well, almost. The suit he picked had Kaminski’s name
stenciled on the chest, and the crotch had been confi gured
for female plumbing. No problem. He didn’t plan to be on the
surface long enough for that partic ular need to assert itself.

Slowly, almost ritually, he donned the armor, letting it
adjust itself to his size and shape, feeling the seals close, the
connections with his implant open. He took a plasma rifl e
simply because a Marine would not go into a potential hos-
tile zone without a weapon, cycled through the lock, and
started up the ladder.

He was struck by the utter stillness of the surface, and by
the eerie, icy light. The Dyson cloud hung suspended in the
northwestern sky. In the west, the red-giant star S-2 was ris-
ing just above the horizon, blood red, appearing a little
larger than Sol looked from Earth, though it was more than
six times farther off. Pale lightnings played along the hori-
zon, beneath a shimmering, almost invisible haze of auroral
light.

According to Athena , S-2 was close to perigalacton, its

2
close passage of the Galactic Core. S-2/I dutifully was tag-
ging along, pulling away slightly from its parent sun, but
still moving toward GalCenter at a velocity well above fi ve
thousand kilometers per second. S-2’s speed had been
slowed significantly by the triggership-induced stellar rocket
effect, but it had picked up all that lost velocity and more as
it fell deeper and deeper into the gravity well of the central
black hole.

Athena was unable to tell him just how fast the planet was

2
moving now. There were no celestial landmarks, no rangefi nd-
ers, no instrumentation that could make such a reading, not
now, not from here.

But as Garroway stared up at the Dyson cloud, he could
have sworn he could actually see it moving, see it growing,
second by passing second.

“What the hell are you doing up here, Gunny?” Huerra
said, clambering out of the open access tunnel. Garroway

384

I A N D O U G L A S
glanced at him, then turned back to face that awesome ce-
lestial panorama.

“Hey, if S-2/I is going to be eaten by that thing, I don’t
want to wait for it down a hole, know what I mean?”

“I hear you, Gunny. I think the others agree. They’re all
putting on their armor.”

“Yeah, Gare,” Warhurst said, climbing out of the tunnel.

“You seem to have started a stampede.”

“At least it looks like we’re going to have a front-row-center
seat.”

Warhurst chuckled. “That it does, my friend. That it
does. . . .”

The other Marines began spreading out on the surface. If
there were Xul machines about, they might be spotted and
attacked, but Garroway doubted that to be the case. Any Xul
in the area must be as transfi xed by that sky as the humans
were . . . assuming they could react to wonder in a human
manner.

Interesting thought. Could the Xul feel something like
wonder?

Did they feel fear at what was metaphorical ly thundering
down upon their cloud of habitations, there at GalCenter?

“Someone record this,” he said. “They’ll want to see,
back home.”

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Core Space

0850 hrs, GMT

They’d made it through at last.

The Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force had passed
through the stargate in Cluster Space, emerging through
another gate a thousand light years from GalCenter. There
might be, must be other stargates closer to the super-massive
black hole and its attendant Dyson cloud, but there’d not
been time to locate them, or to map alternate gate routes

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

385
among the stars. Alexander stood in the Ops Center on
board the fl agship Hermes, watching the passage.

Ralston and the other antimilitarist senators were going
to be damned pissed, he thought. They’d given permission
for a reconnaissance raid into Core Space, specifying that

Hermes and “select support vessels and troops” could
make the jump. The assumption had been that Hermes
would translate from Cluster Space to the region close by

S-2/I, with four naval warships on board. They’d not imag-
ined this, some three hundred Commonwealth warships,
passing through the Stargate almost en masse.

Well, Alexander thought with wry satisfaction, I said

Hermes and her supporting vessels would be making the
passage at zero-eight fifty hours Zulu. I just didn’t tell them
how many “supporting vessels” were coming along. . . .

Three of the new Navy heavy monitors were among the
first vessels through the Gate, positioned to emerge with
their primary weapons already aimed at the Xul fort drift-
ing a few kilometers from the Gate’s rim. Derna, Chapulte-
pec, and Tarawa had been designed as Xul fortress- busters,
with names drawn from especially significant battles in the

Corps’ history, with high-velocity mass drivers and turret-
mounted antimatter accelerators augmented by massive

300mm cannon firing two-ton nano-D shells. As the three
monitors emerged from the Gate’s lumen, their weapons
began hammering at the fortress with savage, rolling fusil-
lades, the rounds smashing in with unerring accuracy,
guided by the swarm of battlespace sensor drones that had
preceded the fl eet.

The Xul fortress opened fi re with plasma discharges, but
only the Derna and two of her accompanying destroyers
suffered slight damage before the fortress dissolved in fl ashes
of dazzling light from multiple hivel impacts, and the ragged
disintegration of its thick outer hull as nano-disassemblers
swarmed across its surface.

The rest of the fleet didn’t pause to watch the destruction,
but shifted to Alcubierre Drive within seconds of emerging
from the Gate. Hermes, positioned near the center of the

386

I A N D O U G L A S
fleet, had only a glimpse of the destruction before accelerat-
ing out of optical range.

Ahead, the central reaches of the Galactic Core lay
shrouded in dark molecular clouds and the gleam of hot
suns.

Just for an instant, Alexander felt a surge of relief. The
panorama of the central regions appeared unchanged from
his last visit to the Core almost two months ago. We haven’t
missed it!

Then reality reasserted itself. Of course there was no
change. The fl eet was still a thousand light-years out; what-
ever might be happening in there, the light revealing it would
not reach this Stargate for another ten centuries.

Then the darkness of the Alcubierre Drive closed around
the Hermes, replaced, eventually, by an AI-created sim. The
light years fled past. . . .

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

0858 hrs, GMT

The Dyson cloud filled half the sky.

It was growing visibly larger, though the scale of what
they were watching was so vast, so tremendous, that the
planet must be accelerating at an unthinkable rate for change
to manifest in the sky so swiftly. Garroway tried to picture
the geometry of the situation, based on schematics that Ath-
ena had painted for him several days before, and failed.

2

It was enough, he thought, just to watch. To experi-
ence. . . .

The remaining lifetime of S-2/I might be measured now
in only seconds. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now but
the unfolding view overhead.

“It’s beautiful . . .” Sergeant Willian said quietly.

“Fucking gorgeous,” was Kaminski’s reply.

“I wonder if the Xul know that—” Warhurst started to say.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

387

The star exploded.

Much later, it would be determined that the Xul had deto-
nated S-2 themselves in a last-ditch effort to save the Dyson
cloud. The red sun appeared to tremble, to begin to collapse
inward, then, suddenly, to grow intolerably bright, shifting
from sullen red to diamond-hard, crystalline blue-white bril-
liance as the star’s outer layers suddenly rebounded out-
ward, flying into space.

“Shit!” Sergeant Huerra said. “They blew the star up!”

“Nah,” Warhurst said. “Look at it! The star’s being torn
apart by tidal stresses as it gets in close. . . .”

“We’re dead,” PFC Enewold said. “My rad counter is off
the scale.”

“What a way to go, eh?” Corporal Ann Croley said. And
she laughed.

The detonation of the red giant, fewer than seven a.u.s
distant, had bathed the planet in hard radiation—gamma
rays traveling at the speed of light. Particulate radiation—
protons and neutrons—would follow, though it would take
time, as much as another day, perhaps, to reach the trailing
planet.

“So . . . did the bastards save themselves?” Huerra wanted
to know.

“Not hardly,” Garroway said. He pointed. “Look at the
star. . . .”

The brilliant star, now a dazzling white, was almost too
bright to look at even with the heavy filtering by their visor
optics. They could see enough of it, though, to see that it
was stretching, growing ever more and more elongated as it
neared the super-massive black hole at the Galaxy’s center.

It was impossible to see the Dyson cloud now, so brilliant
was the dying star’s light. Had the star struck the cloud,
passing through it? Or was it still outside of the cloud? Even
if the tortured star remained well beyond the Dyson cloud
itself, surely even Xul technology couldn’t save those tril-
lions of structures from the heat and hard radiation of an
exploding sun.

As minute followed minute, the star appeared to be

388

I A N D O U G L A S
stretching. The fast-expanding outer shell of its photosphere
appeared to have stopped, appeared to have been grabbed
by some vast and invisible hand, crumpled, and pulled back
away from the Marines watching just a few astronomical
units away.

Garroway could feel his skin burning. The shredding star
was vomiting massive amounts of X-rays.

Yeah. What a way to go! . . .

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Core Space

1030 hrs, GMT

The joke was on the Senate, Alexander thought. They’d
approved a recon probe by Hermes and the four ships she
could carry, but assumed that Hermes would translate back
to S-2/I. Somehow, the scientific niceties had simply es-
caped them. Hermes couldn’t translate back to S-2/I, be-
cause the local metric had been steadily changing over the
course of seven weeks. Alexander, his aides, and a host of

AIs had explained the science time after time, but they never
seemed to get it.

Their ignorance had played into Alexander’s hands,
though, and cleared the way for Senator Armandez’s cam-
paign to let the MIEF enter the Core.

The biggest problem was timing. Alexander knew in a
general way that S-2 was due to make its close passage
around GalCenter soon—fifty days after the induction of
the rocket effect in the star’s photosphere. The trouble was
that there’d been no way to measure the exact effects on the
star. Many solar masses had been expelled in that jet . . . but
how many? How long had the effect lasted? How much had
the star been slowed? Then how quickly had it accelerated in
its plunge toward GalCenter? There
were too many un-
knowns. It was possible that S-2 had swept into the Dyson

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

389

cloud sometime yesterday . . . or that it was still a day out
from perigalacton.

The fleet might be too late to save the Marines on S-2/I.

The planet might have been swallowed by the monster hours
ago.

They wouldn’t know until they dropped out of FTL.

Hermes and the rest of the MIEF were decelerating now,
angling toward the spot where S-2/I ought to be, based on
the best astrogational guesses possible.

The darkness evaporated, and the sky grew suddenly bril-
liant.

“My God! . . .” Taggart said at Alexander’s side.

Together, the two men looked down into the annihilation
of a star.

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

1104 hrs, GMT

The radiation was catching up with all of them. Garroway
had vomited several times already, and was feeling the
deadly weakness that he knew must mean a lethal dose of
hard rad. Most of the others had been vomiting as well, de-
spite the best efforts of the last of Doc O’Neill’s anti-rad
drugs.

The Marines had been spelling themselves in their vigil,
either by clambering back down into the bunker, or by tak-
ing shelter on board an AV-110 Tarantula left behind by the
evacuating Marines. This particular Tarantula, it turned out,
had been damaged by a Xul plasma bolt and was immobile,
but still offered a pressurized cabin and enough active nano
on its outer hull to cut down on the storm of radiation sleet-
ing across the planet’s surface.

But after a few moments of relative comfort, each Marine
found him or herself drawn again to the deadly ringside seats

390

I A N D O U G L A S
outside, staring up into a maelstrom of incandescent de-
struction. They were dying moment by moment.

But the view, all of them agreed, was worth it.

Ops Center

UCS Hermes

Core Space

1120 hrs, GMT

The view, actually, was better on board the ships of 1MIEF
as they approached the hurtling planet. The starships’ sen-
sors were more sensitive, their optical screening fi lters more
discriminating, their AIs more powerful than anything pos-
sessed by the handful of Marines still on S-2/I. As the fl eet
slowly adjusted its vector to close with the planet, they re-
corded everything.

Alexander remained with Taggart in the Ops Center,
watching the drama unfold on the main display. The red
giant had an overall diameter of perhaps thirty million
kilometers—three times that of the Xul Dyson cloud. The
exact size of the incoming star was diffi cult to determine,
however, for the outer layers were expanding swiftly, a daz-
zling white shell of gas, as the star exploded. As that shell
expanded, however, it was being warped by the insatiable
gravity well created by the central black hole. As hour fol-
lowed hour, what had been a red giant was being twisted and
stretched into something entirely different.

The star had been, roughly, three times larger than the

Dyson cloud, and it plunged through the near side of the

Dyson cloud at something like ten thousand kilometers per
second. As it passed the suddenly revealed black hole, it
was drawn more and more into an elongated, curving sau-
sage, then into a ribbon meeting itself and merging into a
rapidly spinning torus, a doughnut shape melding with the
accretion disk and spiraling into the black hole’s bottomless
maw.

There was too much stellar mass for the black hole to

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

391

consume at one sitting. The excess, well over half of the
star’s bulk, was funneled off the black hole’s north and south
poles as intensely brilliant beams of violet-white radiation.

The Dyson cloud was swept away, as insubstantial against
that onslaught of matter and energy as cobwebs. Soon, even
the best of the MIEF’s optical filters could perceive nothing
but the intolerable glare.

Curious, Alexander had downloaded more of the Bhaga-
vad Gita during the fifty days since the triggerships had fi rst
assaulted that star, searching for the verses that had inspired

Oppenheimer all those centuries before. In the original story,

Arjuna, a prince fearful of the outcome of an upcoming
battle with a superior foe, had asked to see the god Vishnu
in his full glory. Vishnu’s reply had been recorded in Chap-
ter 11, verses 32 and 33.

“The Supreme Lord said: I am death, the mighty de-
stroyer of the world, out to destroy. Even without your
participation all the warriors standing arrayed in the
opposing armies shall cease to exist.

“Therefore, get up and attain glory. Conquer your
enemies and enjoy a prosperous kingdom. All these
warriors have already been destroyed by Me. You are
only an instrument, Oh Arjuna.”

The verses seemed especially fitting in the current set-
ting, as Alexander watched radiance fill the Galactic Core. I
am death . . .

Marine Regimental Strike Team

Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I

Core Space

1120 hrs, GMT

It would be determined, much later, that the planet passed
within half an a.u. of the black hole’s event horizon, sling-
shotted by that intense gravitational field to a velocity high

392

I A N D O U G L A S
enough to send it hurtling past perigalacton and out into the
gulfs of empty space once more. Garroway wasn’t able to
even guess when the closest approach actually took place.

The sky was twisting in an odd way as gravity accelerated
the planet, twisting it into a tumble. The star, on a path that
took it much closer, had smashed through the vaporizing
remnants of the Dyson cloud, stretched like taffy, and whip-
lashed down the gravitational maw into the unknowable
depths beneath the event horizon.

For just an instant, Garroway saw the black hole itself,
twice as big across as the Sun appeared from Earth, but
black, black, a bottomless emptiness drinking light, seated
at the precise center of a vortex of blue- to-violet whirlpool
of light, spiraling into oblivion. And then the brief vision
was blotted out in exploding star- stuff.

The black hole was receding now, quickly. The planet was
already far out beyond the Monster’s reach.

Garroway heard cheering.

“What’s going on?” he asked. He looked around for War-
hurst. “Michael?”

“They’re back!” Warhurst shouted. “They’re fucking back!”

“Huh? Who? . . .”

“The Marines, stupid! Now who’s a rock, as in ‘dumb as
a?’ Huh?”

Garroway had tuned out his RST channel. As he brought
it back on-line, he heard the radio chatter of dozens of men
and women. In the sky overhead, a pair of Nightstars fl ashed
past, blue Core-light gleaming from their fl anks.

Despite his weakness, the dizziness, the wrenching nau-
sea, Garroway joined in with the cheers, waving his plasma
rifle above his head, shouting “Ooh- rah!” and “Semper fi!”

as the lead elements of 1MIEF began descending from the
sky.

And still no response from the Xul. They couldn’t all have
been killed, could they? Perhaps the shock of S-2’s assault
on their inner fastness had simply stunned them into immo-
bility.

Or maybe other processes were at work.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

393

Perhaps the Xul had been beaten after all.

The transport Howorth again hung in S-2/I’s sky, gentling
down on carefully balanced agravs. He would learn later
that the MIEF warships left behind when Hermes translated
back to Cluster
space— Howorth and Cunningham—had
rendezvoused with the Lejeune, Plottel, and Ardash at Point

Diamond. Technically, they’d disobeyed their orders to re-
turn to human space, waiting there within the star cluster a
tenth of a light year away until they’d received a QCC mes-
sage from the MIEF, then joined the main body over S-2/I
after the planet’s
hair-raising close passage of the black
hole.

Semper fidelis. Always faithful. We don’t leave our own
behind. . . .

He must have lost consciousness. When he could see
again, brother and sister Marines off the Howorth had
crowded around, helping him stumble up the ramp and into
the safety of the huge ship’s belly. Radiation sickness tore at
him, much worse than ten years ago.

At that moment, Garroway didn’t know if he was going to
survive the massive rad overdose he’d picked up in the past
hours, but he accepted the not knowing with a calm equa-
nimity. It wasn’t that he didn’t care if he lived or died. He
wanted to live, there was no doubt about that. But somehow
the events of those hours had left him utterly drained, until
only a single thought, a single emotion remained.

Home.

He was going home.

Epilogue

In the outlying regions of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm, within
the dense polar jungles of the warm, inner world of a
class-G5 star, a race of brachiating mollusks swung from
the interwoven branches of sessile thermovores not unlike

Earthly trees. The species was young, as yet, but one of its
best known musician- philosophers had just sung an impor-
tant dream- song.

It spoke of other worlds, of other forests among the stars,
of other singers who one day might join the race in new and
alien harmonies.

They were closer now to the realization of that dream-song
than they could possibly have imagined.

Closer in toward the galactic core, within the teeming star
clouds of the Sagittarius Arm, on the rugged, tide-strained
volcanic moon of a superjovian gas giant, a race of armored
paraholothurids built water’s-edge hive-cities of compacted
excrement and composed palindromic epics celebrating
their having been chosen as slaves of the sky-disk they saw
as the eye of God. On this day, they recited a new palin-
drome, one announcing the revelation of a new messiah,
latest in a long line of messiahs proclaiming the Vision of
the Eye of God.

God’s message was that there were countless other be-
ings living on alien worlds scattered across the vastness of
the sky, that some of these beings Knew the glory of God,
and many did not.

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

395

But there might one day soon be a means of taking God’s

Vision to the stars.

Closer in still toward the galactic hub, near the merging
of the Norma and Scutum-Crux Arms, a fiercely radiating

Type A star blasted its unusual coterie of rocky worlds with
intense radiation. Bathed in abundant radiant energy, Life
had emerged on the innermost world and, borne by the lo-
cal stellar winds, had seeded the other, outer planets of the
system as well. On one of those radiation-baked worlds,
sentient crystalline chemovores had just discovered the
principle of the solar sail, and had now within their grasp
the ability to reach other nearby stars. The voyages would
take centuries . . . but what was that to a species whose
member beings lived for millennia?

The race, perhaps, would survive, even if their increas-
ingly unstable sun did not.

1507.1102

Warhurst Residence, Seaview Gardens

Lost Miami, Earth

1540 hrs, local

Garroway leaned back in the hot tub, savoring the bliss-
fully scalding swirl of water across his shoulders. Nikki

Armandez snuggled against his side, as naked as he was
despite her Ishtaran upbringing. Opposite, Warhurst sat be-
tween the delightfully bobbing charms of Traci and Kath.

“Too bad Charel can’t be here with us,” Warhurst said.

“You heard anything about him, Gare?”

“Only that he’s doing well. The regrow’s just taking lon-
ger with him. He was burned a lot worse than either of us.”

“But he’ll be okay?”

“Doc O’Neill said so.” Garroway shrugged. “That’s good
enough for me.”

All fourteen of the surviving Marines stranded for so
long at the Galactic Core had made it, though it had been

396

I A N D O U G L A S
desperately close for a few of them. Seven, including Ramsey,
were still in the Marine hospital in EarthRing. Garroway
had been released only two days earlier. Much of his body
had been either regrown from scratch or replaced by exotic
nano-chelated materials. It was sobering to realize that less
than a third of his total body now was organic in the tradi-
tional sense.

But he was alive. Alive. He could even still have sex, as
he’d enthusiastically proved several times now both with

Nikki, and in one memorable five-way last night that had
included Kath and Traci. He would never have children of
his own, not in the traditional way, at least.

It didn’t matter to him in the least. Aiden Garroway had
all the family he needed. He’d checked out on a two-week
leave and come down-ring with Nikki to Miami. Warhurst
had checked out of the hospital almost a week earlier, and
was spending it back home with his partners.

“So!” Traci said brightly. “Have either of you boys seen
the latest from the encyclopedia? It just came through this
morning!”

“Hell, no,” Warhurst said. “You three kept me up all
night, remember? I’ve been getting my hard-earned beauty
sleep.”

“Which you definitely need,” Garroway told him. “No,

Traci. What came through now?”

“Have a look!”

With a thought, a large display rose from the deck behind
the tub and switched on. She could have given him a direct
link, of course, but apparently she wanted to see his reaction
as he watched with his eyes instead of his mind.

“My God,” Garroway said, looking at the image on the
screen. “What is it?”

“According to the Translators, it’s a living rock. A kind of
complex crystalline solid that processes stellar energy on
some planets around an A-class star maybe twenty thousand
light years from here. The planet’s surface is so bathed in
radiation that—”

“Ah . . . I don’t think I want to hear about that,” Garroway

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

397

said, holding up a dripping hand. “I’ve had enough radiation
baths to last me, thank you very much.”

“How many alien species does that make now?” Warhurst
wanted to know.

“Two hundred seventy-three . . . and according to the

Translators, more are turning up every day. Looks like the

Galaxy’s a pretty crowded place after all.”

It had been an astonishing end to an astonishing adven-
ture, Garroway thought. When S-2 had crashed through the

Dyson cloud surrounding the central black hole, many of
those trillions of structures had been vaporized outright in
the heat of the exploding sun. Others, their magnetic sup-
port structure fatally damaged, had collapsed into the re-
lentless pull of the black hole.

The Xul, the ancient Hunters of the Dawn, still survived,
of course. There were, N-2 estimated, some tens of thou-
sands of Xul nodes still scattered across the Galaxy. But the
vast majority of their total numbers had perished in the cata-
clysm at the Galactic Core. There was some question as to
whether the survivors could even function now, given the
possibility that they’d needed a critical mass in terms of
numbers in order to act.

Whatever had happened to the Xul, one startling change
had manifested almost as soon as the Dyson cloud was
swept away from the region encircling GalCenter. Someone,
some thing, was using the Galaxy’s black hole as a colossal
communications and information storage device. The Xul
cloud had been blocking the signals from that device. With
the Xul gone from the Core, now, the signals had resumed.

Black holes, large and small, were doorways of sorts into
the Quantum Sea, the base state of reality. Technically,
nothing could escape a black hole, a gravitational singular-
ity that held captive everything that passed its event horizon,
even light.

And yet, it seemed now, black holes could communicate
with one another, instantly, via the Quantum Sea. Fluctua-
tions of their event horizons as matter fell through them
created gravitational distortions that served as carrier waves.

398

I A N D O U G L A S

Modulations impressed upon those distortions carried infor-
mation. A lot of information.

The nature of those waves had been detected by the MIEF
hours after the collapse of the Dyson cloud; nested signals,
layer upon layer of them,
were captured, recorded, and
routed through powerful artificial intelligences programmed
as translators. The surface data in those layers, it turned out,
were mathematical formulae designed as a linguistic and
technical primer, allowing for a relatively simple translation
of the deeper layers of data.

In a month, the Translators had barely begun their work.

Still, public fascination with the news had forced the gov-
ernment to release some data as it became available. Every
so often, a description of a new and utterly alien race was
gleaned from the ocean of electronic data, condensed into
an entertaining format, and broadcast over the GlobalNet.

Centuries before, radio astronomers had speculated on
the possibility of a Galaxy-wide network of stored informa-
tion bearing data on myriad worlds and civilizations. They’d
called it the Encyclopedia Galactica, and assumed it would
be presented as information encoded into radio signals
broadcast from star to star. The fact that in years of pains-
taking searching they’d never found such a thing had been
part of the enduring mystery of the Fermi Paradox. Where
was everyone?

And now the Encyclopedia Galactica had been found . . .

its signals masked by the Xul cloud at the Galactic Core. No
one yet knew whether the Xul had been reading those im-
bedded messages, or were so intent on their tinkering with

Reality that they’d not even seen them. Another mystery.

Another Unknown.

The primary broadcast center was the Galactic Core, but
it turned out that every black hole was linked into the Net-
work. While the central black hole was off-line, as it were,
no signals had come through any of them. Now, though . . .

There were hints that the Network was more than Galac-
tic in scale, hints that galactic black holes across the entire

G A L A C T I C

C O R P S

399

universe might be talking with one another . . . and in real
time, not the crawl of eons endured by slow-paced light.

“Well, it’s good to know the Xul didn’t wipe out everyone
in the Galaxy,” Garroway said. “It was starting to feel a bit
lonely, you know?”

Not as lonely, perhaps, as the surface of S-2/I. But every
indicator suggested that the Galaxy should be humming
with life, while Humankind’s explorations so far had uncov-
ered so few—the An, the N’mah, the Eulers.

And the Xul.

Within the titanic elliptical galaxy called M-87, located in
what Earth astronomers described as the Virgo Cluster
some sixty million light years from Sol, Mind considered
the new data. For some millions of years, a partic ular mod-
est spiral galaxy within the outlying reaches of the Virgo
supercluster had been unaccountably silent, the singularity
within its central core somehow shrouded and muffled,
blocking Mind.

And now, the shroud had been lifted.

Mind considered the implications. Presumably, the in-
habitants of that galaxy had chosen to isolate themselves
from the rest of the cosmos. It happened sometimes, for re-
ligious or philosophical or emotional reasons. There were
so many, many different types of mind, so many forms of
thought.

The collective sentience that called itself Mind had not
interfered, of course, but it was curious.

And it wondered now at just what had changed in that
insignificant spiral, sixty million light years distant. . . .

Perhaps further investigation would be necessary.

Much later, Garroway awoke, cuddled between Nikki and

Traci, while Warhurst and Kath snored gently nearby. The
overhead had been set to show the star-clotted night sky.

After the Galactic Core, the sky seemed dark and empty
with its scant handful of bright stars, its almost non existent

400

I A N D O U G L A S
dusting of dimmer ones. The Milky Way stretched across
the zenith.

I wonder if we really made a difference?

Sagittarius. In that direction, he thought, lay the Core.

Energy shredded from the dying sun S-2 and from the in-
falling trillions of Xul habitats had been blasted outward in
an explosion that would likely continue for millennia. Most
of the debris had been swallowed by the central black hole,
but much, too, had escaped. In a few centuries, the out-
rushing blast would intercept those molecular gas clouds
ringing the center, and the shock wave would trigger a burst
of star formation that in twenty- some thousand years would
turn the Galactic center brilliant, even out here in the stellar
suburbs.

Oh, yeah. The Marines had made a difference. No one
knew, yet, if the Xul War was over. Probably it wasn’t . . .

but the balance of things had most certainly changed.

Things would be different. Changed. Perhaps in ways
now unguessable.

As he drifted back into sleep, Aiden Garroway thought
about the Marine Corps, and the difference the Corps had
always made in the vaster scheme of things.

Semper fi. . . .

About the Author

IAN DOUGLAS
is the author of the popular military

SF series The Heritage Trilogy and

The Legacy Trilogy. A former naval
corpsman, he lives in Pennsylvania.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information
on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Ian Douglas

Books in the Inheritance Trilogy

Star Strike: Book One

Galactic Corps: Book Two

Books in the Legacy Trilogy

Star Corps: Book One

Battlespace: Book Two

Star Marines: Book Three

Books in the Heritage Trilogy

Semper Mars: Book One

Luna Marine: Book Two

Europa Strike: Book Three

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters,
incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s
imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to actual events or persons, living or
dead, is entirely coincidental.

GALACTIC CORPS. Copyright © 2008 by William H.

Keith, Jr. All rights reserved under International and

Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of
the required fees, you have been granted the non-
exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the
text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may
be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled,
reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any
information storage and retrieval system, in any form
or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical,
now known or hereinafter invented, without the
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