Star Strike
Author: Ian Douglas
Date: 2008-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Space Opera; Fiction; Military Science Fiction; Military Fiction; Action; Science Fiction Fantasy; Aliens
Description: Planet by planet, galaxy by galaxy, the inhabited universe has fallen to the alien Xul.Now only one obstacle stands between them and total domination: the warriors of a resilient race the world-devourers nearly annihilated centuries ago . . .A power vast, ancient, and terrifying, the mighty Xul have lost track of the insignificant humans hundreds of years after devastating their home world—which has enabled the United Star Marines to operate unnoticed and unhindered. A near-autonomous intergalactic policing force, they battle in defense of an Earth they may not live to see again. Now, followin

S T A R �

S T R I K E �

BOOK ONE OF THE INHERITANCE TRILOGY

I A N D O U G L A S �

To CJ and Garin, good friends who saw me through �
rough times. And, as always, for Brea. �

Contents�

Prologue

Deep within the star clouds of the Second

Galactic

Spiral… 1

1

The Specters descended over the Southern

Sea, slicing north through…

5

2

Ramsey kicked off, his 660-ABS armor
amplifying his push and…

21

3

“Okay, Marines. How are we going to do this?” 34

4

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander completed
the final download encompassing the…

49

5

It was, Alexander decided, a bit like being
in
an…

62

6

Garroway opened his eyes, blinked, and flexed
his hands. This…

78

7

Lieutenant Tera Lee unlinked from the feed
and
blinked
in…

93

8

Lieutenant Lee watched the stream of returning
data from Chesty3,…

107

9

It was, Alexander thought, a less than auspicious
start
to…

120

10

Like Earth, Mars possessed a ring.

133

11

The passage from Alighan to Sol took six
weeks.

For…

148

12

The transport was two weeks out from Sol. For
the…

165

13

“General?” Cara said within his mind. “I think
the

AI…

179

14

“So? How does it feel?” PFC Sandre Kenyon
asked
him.

196

15

“What the hell were you thinking, Marines?”

Either Lieutenant Kaia…

209

16

Skybase drifted in empty space, alone and
unattended,
now,
as…

222

17

PFC Aiden Garroway could scarcely move. He
had a little…

236

18

Garroway had been wondering if any of the

SAPs
were…

252

19

The Galaxy is a hellishly big place.

267

20

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

282

21

“What the hell is that?” General Alexander
wanted to know.

296

22

General Alexander hadn’t gotten much sleep
that
night.

311

23

General Alexander was listening in on the
debriefing of the…

325

24

Emerging from the tube-car transport from his
office, General Alexander…

340

25

The side of the Euler ship cycled open as

Garroway…

355

26

Garroway took careful note of the time—1258
hours,
nine…

368

Epilogue

“Garroway? How you feeling, son?”

384

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Ian Douglas

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue�

Deep within the star clouds of the Second Galactic Spiral

Arm, a sentient machine detected the blue-white shriek of
tortured hydrogen atoms, and a program hundreds of thou-
sands of years ancient switched from stand-by to active.

Something was out there . . . something massive, something
moving at very nearly the speed of light.

Even the hardest interstellar vacuum contains isolated
flecks of matter—hydrogen atoms, mostly, perhaps one
per cubic centimeter or so. The object’s high-speed pas-
sage plowed through these atoms, ionizing many, leaving
a boiling hiss in its wake easily detectable by appropriately
sensitive instrumentation. The disturbance was a kind of
wake, created by a mass of some hundreds of millions of
tons plowing through the tenuous matter of the interstellar
void at near- c .

The sentry machine had taken up its lonely vigil half a
million years before, during the desperate and no-quarter
war of extermination against the Associative, a war that
had laid waste to ten thousand suns and countless worlds
scattered across a third of the Galaxy. Occasionally, it
conversed with others of its kind—a means of staying sane
through the millennia—but for most of its existence it had
been asleep, dreaming the eldritch dreams of a being nei-
ther wholly mechanism, nor wholly biological.

The builders of the Sentry called themselves something
that might have translated, very approximately, as “We

Who Are.” Other species across light centuries of space and
hundreds of millennia called them many other things. The

2

IAN DOUGLAS
inhabitants of Earth, once, had called them “Xul,” a name
that in ancient Sumeria had come to mean “demon.”

A far older civilization had called them the Hunters of
the Dawn.

However they were known to themselves or to others,
how they were identified was less important for their view
of themselves than was their evolutionary imperative, the
drive, refined over millions of years, that made them what
they were. For the Xul, existence—more, survival —was an
absolute, the defining characteristic of their universe. In
their worldview, survival meant eliminating all potential
competition. Their culture did not have anything like re-
ligion, but if it had, their religion would have been a kind
of Darwinian dogmatism, with the fact that they had so
far survived serving as proof that they were, indeed, the
fittest.

For the Xul, the first requirement for continued survival
was the detection and identification of potential threats to
existence. An object with the mass of a fair-sized asteroid
traveling through the Galaxy at near- c velocities indicated
both sentience and a technology that might represent a seri-
ous threat.

With an analytical detachment more characteristic
of the computers in its ancestry than of organic beings,
the Sentry tracked the disturbance through local space.

A ripple twisted the fabric of space/time, and the Sentry
shifted across light-years, emerging alongside the massive
object, traveling at precisely the object’s velocity.

At this speed, a hair’s breadth short of the speed of light
itself, the universe appeared weirdly and beautifully com-
pressed, a ring of solid starlight encircling the heavens
slightly ahead of the hurtling vessels. With the patient calm
of a lifespan measured in millennia, the Sentry reached out
with myriad senses, tasting the anomalous traveler.

Outwardly, the object was an ordinary asteroid, a car-
bonaceous chondrite of fairly typical composition, with a
dusty, pocked surface of such a dark gray color as to be
nearly coal black. Outwardly, there was no indication of
intelligent design—no lights, no artificial structures on the

STAR STRIKE

3
surface, no thruster venturis or other obvious clues to the
object’s propulsive system. Even the high velocity might be
an artifact . . . a souvenir of a long-ago close-passage of a
black hole or neutron star, with the resultant slingshot effect
whipping a random, dead rock to within one percent of c .

But the Sentry’s gentle probings elicited other evidence,
proof that the fast-moving object was both the product of
technology and inhabited. A steady trickle of neutrinos
proved the presence of hydrogen fusion plants, providing
power for life-support and secondary systems. The tick and
flux of even more subtle, virtual particles revealed the op-
eration of a quantum effect power system, tapping the base
state of space itself for the energies necessary to move that
much mass at that high a speed. The drive was quiescent
now, but the potential remained, a subtle aura of shifting
energies representing fields and forces that might engage at
any moment. Perhaps most telling of all, a powerful shield
composed of interplaying gravitic and magnetic fields swept
space far ahead of the starship—for starship is what the
object was—clearing its path of stray subatomic particles
lest they strike rock and cascade into deadly secondary ra-
diation, frying the ship’s passengers as they slept away the
objective decades.

For passengers there were—some fifty thousand of them,
stored in a cybernetic hibernation that let them pass de-
cades of subjective time without the need for millions of tons
of food, water, and other expendables. At the moment, the
only member of the starship’s crew that was actually awake
was a being far more closely related, in its basic nature, to
the Sentry than it was to the slumbering beings in its care, a
sentient computer program named Perseus.

For over five hundred years, Perseus had overseen the
routine operation of the asteroid starship and her refugee
passengers, monitoring drive systems and power plant, life
support and cybe-hibe stasis capsules. The ship, christened

Argo , had fled distant Earth a few years after the devastat-
ing attack on that world by the Xul; her destination was an-
other galaxy entirely, M-31, in Andromeda, something over
two million light-years distant.

4

IAN DOUGLAS

The voyage as planned would take almost 2.3 million
years objective, but on board the clocks would record the
passage of barely thirty years. Argo ’s sleeping passengers,
for the most part, were members of Earth’s political and
economic elite. Many were representatives of the govern-
ments of the United States and of the American Union who’d
felt Humankind’s only hope of survival lay in avoiding all-
out war with the technologically advanced Xul, in escaping
the enemy’s notice, in fleeing to another galaxy entirely and
beginning anew.

Their decision proved to be a supreme exercise in wish-
ful thinking. The Xul sentry engaged Perseus as the sentient
program was still shifting to full operational mode. It had
time to engage a single emergency comm channel before the

Xul group-mind overwhelmed it in an electronic cascade of
incoming data.

Parts of Perseus were hijacked by the alien operating
system; others were wiped away, or simply stored for later
exploration.

And within the Argo -planetoid’s heart, fifty thousand
human minds cried out as one as they were patterned and
replicated by the intruder. Moments later, the asteroid’s im-
mense kinetic energy was instantly transformed into heat
and light, bathing the Xul Sentry in the actinic glare of a
tiny nova.

By the Xul way of thinking, the asteroid starship repre-
sented both a threat and unfinished business.

Neither could be tolerated.

1�

0407.1102

Green 1, 1-1 Bravo

Alighan

0340/38:22 hours, local time

The Specters descended over the Southern Sea, slicing
north through turbulent air, their hulls phase-shifted so that
they were not entirely within the embrace of normal space.

Shifted, they were all but invisible to radar, and little more
than shadows to human eyes, shadows flickering across a
star-clotted night.

On board Specter One-one Bravo, Gunnery Sergeant

Charel Ramsey sat huddled pauldron-to-pauldron with the

Marines locked in to either side of him. The squad bay was
red lit and crowded, a narrow space barely large enough to
accommodate a platoon of forty-eight Marines in full Mark

660 assault battlesuits. He tried once again to access the
tacnet, and bit off a curse when all that showed within the
open mindwindow was static. They were going in blind, hot
and blind, and he didn’t like the feeling. If the Muzzies got
twitchy and started painting their southern sky with plasma
bolts or A.M. needlers, phase-shifting would not protect
them in the least.

“They’re holding off on the drones,” Master Sergeant Adel-
len said over the tac channel, almost as if she were reading his
mind. Likely she was as nervous as the rest of the Marines in
the Specter’s belly. She just hid it better than most. “They don’t
want to tip the grounders off that we’re on final.”

6

IAN DOUGLAS

“Yeah, but it would be nice to see where the hell we’re
going,” Corporal Takamura observed. “We can’t see shit
through the LV’s optics.”

That was not entirely true, of course. Ramsey had a
window open in his mind linked through to the feed from
the Specter’s cockpit. Menu selections gave him a choice of
views—through cameras forward or aft, in visible light, low-
light, or infrared, or a computer-generated map of the planet
that showed twelve green triangles in a double-chevron for-
mation moving toward the still-distant coastline. Ramsey
had settled on the map view, since the various optical feeds
showed little now but water, clouds, and stars.

The MLV-44 Specter Marine Landing Vehicles were
large and slow, with gull wings and fusion thrusters that gave
them somewhat more maneuverability than a falling brick,
but not much. Each mounted a pair of AI-controlled high-
speed cannon firing contained micro-antimatter rounds as
defense against incoming missiles, but they relied on stealth
and surprise for survival, not firepower, and certainly not
armor. A Specter’s hull could shield those on board from the
searing heat of atmospheric entry, but a mag-driven needle
or even a stray chunk of high-energy shrapnel could punc-
ture its variform shell with shocking ease. Ramsey had seen
the results of shrapnel impact on a grounded Specter before,
on Shamsheer and on New Tariq.

The Specter jolted hard, suddenly and unexpectedly, and
someone vented a sharp curse. They were falling into denser
air, passing through the cloud deck, and things were getting
rougher.

“One more of those,” Sergeant Vallida said, her voice
bitter, “and Private Dowers gets jettisoned.”

“Hey, Sarge! I didn’t do anything!”

“Don’t pick on Dowers,” Adellen said. “He didn’t know.”

“Yeah, but he should have. Fucking nectricots. . . .”

It was rank superstition, of course. Even if it went back
over a thousand years. Maybe it was the sheer age of the tra-
dition that gave it so much power. But somehow, back in the
twentieth or twenty-first century, it had become an article
of faith that if a Marine ate the apricots in his ration pack

STAR STRIKE

7
before boarding an alligator or other armored transport, the
vehicle would break down. Over the centuries, the focus
of the curse had gradually shifted from apricots to genegi-
neered nectricots, but the principle remained the same.

And Ela Vallida had walked in on Dowers back on board
the Kelley just before the platoon had saddled up that morn-
ing, to find him happily slurping down the last of the nectri-
cots in his drop rats. Dowers was a fungie, fresh out of RTC,
and not yet fully conversant with the bewildering labyrinth
of tradition and history within which every Marine walked.

“Fucking fungie,” Vallida added.

“Belay that, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Jones growled. First

Platoon’s CO wasn’t evenly physically present on the squad
bay deck; the eltee was topside somewhere, plugged into the

C3 suite behind the Specter’s cockpit, but she obviously was
staying linked in on the platoon chat line. “Chew on him
after One-one Bravo craps out, and you have something to
bitch about.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Vallida replied. But Ramsey still heard
the anger in her voice.

Likely, he thought, it was just the stress. This was always
the roughest part of a Marine landing, the long, agonizing
wait, sealed into a tin can that was flying or swimming
toward God-knew what kind of defenses. Did the Alighani

Muzzies know the Marines were coming? What was waiting
for them at the objective?

How many of the men and women sealed into this Spec-
ter were going to be alive an hour from now? . . .

Don’t even think about that, Ramsey told himself. It’s
bad ju-ju. . . .

Not that he actually believed in luck, of course . . . or in
the power of nectricot curses. But he didn’t know anyone
who’d survived the hell of modern combat who didn’t engage
in at least a few minor superstitious behaviors, and that in-
cluded Ramsey himself. He never went into combat with-
out a neumenal image of his Marine father watching from a
minimized mindwindow. Totally irrational, he knew.

His mental gaze shifted to the tiny, mental image of

Marine Master Sergeant Danel Jostin Ramsey, resplendent

8

IAN DOUGLAS
in his dress blacks . . . an image recorded just days before the
landings on Torakara.

The Specter gave another hard lurch. According to the
feed from the cockpit, it was raining outside now, and light-
ning flared behind the clouds ahead. The mission planners
had chosen to insert through a large, tropical storm, taking
advantage of lightning and rain to shield the assault group’s
approach for a precious few seconds longer.

“Listen up, people,” Lieutenant Jones’ voice said over the
platoon net. “We’re three minutes out, and about to drop
below the cloud deck. Remember your training, remember
your mission downloads. Keep it simple! We secure the
spaceport, and we hold until relieved. Ooh-rah?”

“Ooh-rah!” the platoon chorused back at her.

Seconds later, a loud thump announced the release of
the battlezone sensor pods, and the main tactical feed came
on-line as thousands of thumb-sized microfliers were shot-
gunned into the skies ahead of the assault group. Ramsey
opened a mental window, and entered a computer-generated
panorama of ocean, and the coastline to the north. Red pin-
points illuminated the coast, marking generators, vehicles,
and other power-producing facilities or units. The spaceport
was marked in orange, the Fortress in white, with sullen red
patterns submerged within the graphics, indicating the main
power plants.

As he watched, more power sources winked on. That
might be an illusion generated by the fact that more and
more BZ pods were entering the combat area, but it also
might mean the enemy had been alerted and was waking
up.

But so far, the skies were quiet, save for the flash of light-
ning and the sweeping curtains of rain.

Remember your training. Yeah . . . as if that were a prob-
lem. Remember your downloads. Their mission parameters
had been hard-loaded into their cephlink RAM. It wasn’t
like you could freaking forget. . . .

Keep it simple. Secure the spaceport. Hold until
relieved.

Nothing new there, either.

STAR STRIKE

9

The question was whether the landings would be enough.

Alighan was a heavily populated world in the Theocracy
of Islam, with over two billion people in the ocean-girdled
world’s teeming cities. The Marine assault force codenamed

Green 1 consisted of the four companies of the 55th Marine

Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, a total of 580 men and
women . . . against an entire world.

True, they were exceptionally well armed and armored
men and women, and they seemed—for the moment at least—
to have kept the element of surprise. Even so, fewer than six
hundred Marines against a population of two billion . . .

Impossible.

Ridiculously impossible.

But the United Star Marines, once the United States Ma-
rines, specialized in the impossible, as they and their prede-
cessors had done for the past eleven hundred years.

Alighan. The name was derived from the Arabic term
for “God is Guardian,” and the name suited the place. The
system of five rocky planets orbiting a K0 star was strategi-
cally positioned along the New Dubai trade route, a chan-
nel for ninety percent of the interstellar shipping between
the Heart Worlds and the Theocracy. Control Alighan,
and you controlled access to the Islamic state . . . or to the

Heart Worlds, depending on which way your battlefleet was
headed. Scuttlebutt had it that the Terran Military Com-
mand wanted Alighan as an advance base for deeper strikes
into Theocratic space.

The key, of course, was the planetary starport, Al Meneh,

“The Port,” which doubled as the system capital. The battle-
ops plan called for the Marines to seize and hold the starport.

Within a standard day—two at the most—the Navy trans-
ports would arrive from Kresgan, bringing with them the

Army’s 104th Planetary Assault Division, the 43rd Heavy

Armored Division, and elements of the 153rd Star Artillery

Brigade and the 19th Interstellar Logistical Support Group.

And the Marines, those who’d survived, would be off to
their next planethead.

Five hundred planetary assault Marines against two bil-
lion Muslim fanatics. . . .

10

IAN DOUGLAS

Ramsey shook his head, a gesture unseen within the mas-
sive helmet of his 660-ABS. In fact, the vast majority of the
local population would not be fanatics. Most of the population
down there would be ordinary folks who wanted nothing more
than to be left alone, especially by their own government.

But experience gained so far in the present war—and
in other wars fought against the Theocracy and similar
governments over the past eleven centuries—taught that
the ones who did fight would do so with all their heart and
soul, with no thought of quarter, and with no mind for the
usual rules of war.

They would fight to the death, and they would take as
many Marines with them as they could.

So far as the Marines of the 55th MARS were concerned,
they would be happy to help the Muzzies find their longed-
for medieval paradise.

Without going with them.

USMC Recruit Training Center

Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

0455/24:20 local time, 1513 hrs GMT

“Gods and goddesses, Jesus, Buddha, and fucking Lao Tse!

Those fat-assed bastards up in Ring City are trying to fuck-
ing destroy my Corps! . . .”

Gunnery Sergeant Michel Warhurst stopped his pacing
in front of the ragged line of recruit trainees and shook his
head sadly. “You maggots are trying to fucking destroy my

Corps! My beloved Corps! And I am here this morning to let
you know that I will not stand for that!”

Recruit Private Aiden Garroway stood at a civilian’s ap-
proximation of attention, staring past the glowering drill
instructor’s shoulder and off into the velvet, star-riddled
blackness of the Martian night. After a brief flight down
from the Arean Ring, he and his fellow recruits had been
unceremoniously hustled off the shuttle, herded into line by
screaming assistant DIs, and were now being formally in-
ducted into Recruit Company 4102 by the man who would
rule their lives for the next sixteen weeks.

STAR STRIKE

11

He was actually enjoying the show, as the drill instruc-
tor paraded back and forth in front of the line of recruits.

Three assistant DIs stood a few meters away, two glower-
ing, one grinning with what could only be described as evil
anticipation.

He’d been expecting this speech, of course, or something
very close to it. For the past two years, ever since he’d de-
cided to escape a dead-end jack-in and shallow friends by
enlisting in the United Star Marines, he’d lived and breathed
the Corps. Boot camp, he knew, would be rough, and it
would begin with exactly this kind of heavy-handed polem-
ics, a strategy honed over the centuries to break down the
attitudes and preconceptions of a hundred-odd kids with ci-
vilian outlooks and build them back up into Marines. It was
part of a tradition extending back over a thousand years . . .

and it self-evidently worked.

And getting through boot camp, he’d decided, wouldn’t
be all that tough, not for him. After all, he knew what it was
all about. He knew . . .

“What the fuck are you daydreaming about, maggot!? ”

The DI’s face had appeared centimeters in front of his
own as if out of nowhere, contorted by rage, eyes staring,
mouth wide open, blasting into Garroway’s face with hur-
ricane force. The sheer suddenness and volume forced him
to take a step back. . . .

“And where the fuck do you think you’re going, you slimy
excuse for an Ishtaran mudworm? Get back here and toe that
line! I am not done with you, maggot, not by ten thousand
fucking light-years, and when I am done you will know it!

Drop to the sand! Give me fifty, right here ! ”

Startled, Garroway swallowed, looked at Warhurst, and
stammered out a “S-sorry, sir!”

The senior drill instructor’s face blended fury with thun-
derstruck. “What did you say?”

“I’m sorry, sir!”

“What did you just call me? Gods and goddesses of the

Eternal Void, I can’t believe what I just heard!” Warhurst
brought one blunt finger up a hair’s breadth away from Gar-
roway’s nose. “First of all, maggot, I did not give you per-

12

IAN DOUGLAS
mission to squeak! None of you will squeak unless I or one
of the assistant drill instructors here gives your sorry ass
permission to squeak! Is that understood?”

Garroway wasn’t sure whether a response was called for,
but suspected this was one of those cases where he would get
into trouble whether he replied or not. He remained mute,
eyes focused somewhere beyond Warhurst’s left shoulder.

“Give me an answer, recruit! ” Warhurst bellowed. “Is
that understood?”

“Yes, sir!”

“What? ”

“Yes, sir! ”

“Second of all, for your information my name is not

‘Sorry.’ So far as you putrid escapees from a toilet bowl
are concerned, I am sir!” He turned away from Garroway
and strode up the line, bellowing. “In fact, so far as you
mudworms are concerned, I am God, but you will always
address me as ‘ sir!’ If you have permission to address me
or any of the other drill instructors behind me, the first
word and the last word out of your miserable, sorry shit-
hole mouths will be ‘ sir!’ All of you! Do I make myself
abundantly clear?”

Several in the line of recruits chorused back with, “Sir,
yes, sir!” A few, however, forgot to start with the honorific,
and most said nothing at all, or else mumbled along.

“What was that? I couldn’t hear that!”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“What?! ”

“Sir, yes, sir! ”

Warhurst turned again to glower into Garroway’s face.

“Third! Recruits will not refer to themselves as ‘I’! You are
not an I! None of you rates an I! If for any reason you are
required to refer to your miserable selves, you will not use
the first person, but you will instead say ‘this recruit!’ That
goes for all of you! Is that clear? ”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Fourth! If I give you an order, you will not say ‘sir, yes,
sir!’ You will reply with the correct Marine response, and
say ‘ Sir, aye, aye, sir!’ You are not Marines and you may

STAR STRIKE

13
never be Marines, but by all the gods of the Corps you will
sound like Marines! Is that clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir! ” came back, though it was made ragged
by a few shouted “Sir, aye, aye, sirs.” The recruits were all
looking a bit wild-eyed now, as confusion and sensory over-
load began to overwhelm them.

Garroway thought Warhurst was going to explode at the
company for using the wrong response. Reaching the left
end of the line, he spun sharply and charged back to the
right. “Idiots! I ask for recruits and they give me deaf, dumb,
and blind idiots!” Turning again, he charged back to the left,
raw power and fury embodied in a spotlessly crisp Marine
dress black-C uniform. “Get the shit out of your ears! If I
ask a question requiring a response of either ‘yes’ or ‘no,’

you will say ‘sir,’ then give me a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ as required,
and then you will again say ‘sir!’ ” Stopping suddenly at the
center of the line, he turned and bellowed, “Is that clear? ”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“And when I give you an order, you will respond with ‘sir,
aye, aye, sir!’ Remember that! ‘Aye, aye’ means ‘I under-
stand and I will obey!’ Is that understood?”

“S ir, yes, sir! ”

Garroway was impressed. Under the DI’s unrelenting
barrage, the line of recruits, until moments ago a chaotic
mélange of individually mumbled responses, was actually
starting to chorus together, and with considerable feeling . . .

but then the DI was back in his face once again, eye to eye,
screaming at him. “What the hell are you doing on your
feet, maggot? I gave you a direct order! I told you to give me
fifty! That’s fifty push-ups! ”

Damn! Garroway had been as confused as the rest,
stunned into unthinking immobility by the DI’s perfor-
mance. He dropped to the ground, legs back, arms holding
his body stiffly above the sand, and started to perform the
first push-up, but then Warhurst was hauling him upright by
the scruff of his neck, dangling him one-handed above the
sand, still screaming. “I did not hear you acknowledge the
order I gave you, mudworm!”

“Sir, yes, sir! Uh, I mean, aye, aye, sir!”

14

IAN DOUGLAS

“What was that? ”

“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”

Warhurst released him. “Gimme those fifty goddamn
push-ups! ”

“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”

Garroway dropped again and began cranking out the
push-ups. He’d worked out a lot over the past couple of years,
knowing that this sort of thing would be routine. He’d also
spent a lot of time recently working in the Recovery Projects
back on Earth. There he massed a full 85 kilos, so he had a
bit of an advantage of some of the other kids in the line. On

Mars, he only weighed 32 kilos, compared to the 60 kilos he
carried at his home level in the Ring.

So right now he weighed half what he normally did, and
was feeling pretty strong, even competent. The push-ups
came swiftly and easily as Warhurst continued to parade
up and down the line of recruits, finding fault everywhere,
screaming invectives at the other recruits. Before long, Gar-
roway wasn’t the only one doing push-ups. He completed his
count and stood at attention once more, surprised to find he
was breathing harder, now. In fact, his chest was burning.

The Martian air was painfully thin, despite the nano-
chelates in his lungs that increased the efficiency of his
breathing. The terraformers had been reshaping Mars for
almost four centuries, now, hammering it with icebergs to
begin with, but more recently using massive infusions of
nanodecouplers to free oxygen from the planet-wide rust
and restore the ancient Martian atmosphere. For the past
two centuries, the air had been breathable, at least with
nanotechnic augmentation, but it was still thin, cold, and
carried a harsh taste of sand and chemicals.

Abruptly, as if at the throw of a switch, Gunnery Ser-
geant Warhurst’s fury was gone. Instead, he seemed relaxed,
almost paternal. “Very well, children,” he said, standing
before them with his hands on his hips. “You have just had
your first fifteen minutes of Marine indoctrination and
training . . . an ancient and hallowed tradition we refer to as

‘boot camp.’ Each of you has volunteered for this. Presum-
ably, that means each of you wants to be here. I certainly

STAR STRIKE

15
understand that desire. The Marines are the best there are,
no question about it.

“However, I want each and every one of you to take a
moment and think very hard about this decision you’ve
made. Behind you is the shuttle that brought you down from
the Arean Ring. If for any reason you are having second
thoughts, I want you to turn around right now and plant
your ass back on board that shuttle. You will be flown back
up to the Arean Ring, where you can retrieve your civilian
clothing, have a nice hot meal, and make arrangements to
go home. No questions asked. No one will think the less of
you.” He paused. “How about it? Any takers?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Garroway sensed movement
down the line to his left. Someone was wavering . . . and
then he heard the sound of footsteps in the sand, moving
toward the rear. He didn’t dare look, however. The formation
was still at attention, and he had a feeling that if he turned
his head to look, Warhurst’s sudden nice-guy persona would
vanish as abruptly as it had begun.

“Smart boy,” Warhurst said, nodding. “Anybody else?

This will be your last chance. If you miss that shuttle . . .

then for the next sixteen weeks you will be mine.”

Garroway thought he heard someone else leave the line,
but he wasn’t sure. He knew he wasn’t going to quit, not now.

He was going to be a Marine. . . .

“Handley!” Warhurst snapped, addressing one of the re-
cruits. “Eyes front!”

“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”

A long silence passed. Warhurst stood before them, his
head down, as if he were listening to something. Then he
looked up. “I want each of you to open your primary inputs.

Full immersion.”

Garroway did so. His neurocranial link implants opened
to a local feed coming down from the Martian Ring. It was
coded, but each had received the appropriate clearances up
at the receiving station.

There was a moment’s mental static, followed by the
always odd feeling of standing in two places at once . . .

. . . and then Garroway was standing on another world.

16

IAN DOUGLAS

It was night there, as it was at Noctis Labyrinthus. It was
also raining, though the link was not transmitting the feel of
the rain on his skin, or the bluster of the wind.

He could see, however, a formation of Marine landing
vehicles skimming in a few meters above the surf and spray
of a beach, their black hulls shimmering as they phased
into full solidity, their variform shells unfolding into land-
ing configuration. Lightning flared . . . or perhaps it was a
plasma bolt fired from the shore. It was tough sorting out
exactly what was happening, because there was a great deal
of noise and movement.

One of the landing vehicles crumpled with nightmare sud-
denness in midair, flame engulfing its gull-winged form, the
wreckage tumbling out of the sky and slamming into the surf
in a crashing fountain of spray and steam. Plasma bolt, Gar-
roway thought. An instant later, a beam of dazzling incan-
descence struck down out of the black overcast, a white flash
starkly illuminating the beach and the incoming formation as
it lanced the squat building from which the plasma bolt had
been fired. The explosion further lit the night, as the first of
the shape-shifting landing craft began touching down.

In his mind, Garroway turned, watching as other craft
passed overhead. There was a city behind the beach . . . and
what looked like a large and sprawling spaceport. Beams of
light continued to spear out of the angry heavens, vaporizing
enemy hardpoints.

And now, individual Marines were appearing in their
cumbersome combat armor, bounding through flame and
smoldering wreckage and sand dunes to close with the
enemy.

“This,” Warhurst’s voice said in Garroway’s head, “is
taking place on a world called Alighan, about four hundred
light-years from where you’re standing right now. There’s
a slight delay in the feed, but, within the uncertainties im-
posed by the physics of FTL simultaneity and the time lag
down from the Arean Ring, it is happening more or less as
you see it. The image is being relayed from our battlefleet
straight back to HQ USMC. Colonel Peters thought you
should see this.”

STAR STRIKE

17

More Marines surged across the beach, sweeping toward
the outer Alighan beach defenses. Other landing craft had
passed over those bunkers and gun emplacements and were
settling to ground on the spaceport itself. Fire continued to
lance out of the sky, pinpoint bombardments called down by

Marine spotters. Garroway found he could hear some of the
chatter in the background, a babble of call signs, orders, and
acknowledgments.

“The Islamic Theocracy,” Warhurst went on, “has blocked
several key trade routes into their territory. Worse, they have
supported terrorist incursions into Commonwealth Space,
seized Commonwealth vessels, and are suspected of holding

Commonwealth citizens as slaves.

“As you should know by now, the sole purpose of the

U.S. Marine Corps is to protect Commonwealth worlds and

Commonwealth citizens. To that end, a naval battlefleet
and a Marine Expeditionary Force have been dispatched to
effect a change in the Theocrat government. Their first step
is to capture the spaceport you see in the distance, so that

Army troops can land and occupy the planet.

“The politics of the situation are unimportant, however.

Marines go where they’re sent. They do what they’re told to
do. They do so at the behest of the United Star Common-
wealth, and the Commonwealth Command Authority. All
very nice, neat, and clean. . . .

“But this, children, is what modern combat really is.”

The scene around Garroway was rapidly becoming a
burning nightmare out of some primitive religion’s hell.

With a mental command, his point of view drifted up
from the beach toward the spaceport, where the heavi-
est fighting was now taking place. The landing craft all
were down now—those that had survived the approach.

Upon touching down, their fuselages had broken into sec-
tions, becoming automated mobile gun platforms; the
wing, cockpit, and spine assemblies then each had lifted
off once more, becoming airborne gunships that darted
across the scene like immense, spindly insects, spewing
plasma bolts and blazing streams of autocannon fire. And
individual Marines, forty-eight to each LV, fanned out

18

IAN DOUGLAS
across the flame-tortured landscape, hunting down the
enemy one gun position or hardpoint at a time. Overhead,

Marine A-90 Cutlass sky-support attack craft darted and
swooped like hideously visaged black hornets, locking
in on ground targets and blasting them with devastating
fire.

Clouds of gray fog swept over the landscape from differ-
ent directions—combat nano and counternano, waging their
submicroscopic battles in the air and on the ground. Disas-
semblers released by the Muzzies were seeking out Marines
and vehicles, while the counter-clouds roiling off Marine
armor and vehicles sought to neutralize them. The result
was a deadly balance; in places, the ground was melting, the
rain hissing into steam.

Almost in front of him, a Marine bounded in for a land-
ing, his combat suit making him seem bulky and awkward,
but the impression was belied by the grace of movement on
the suit’s agrav packs. The Marine touched down lightly,
aimed at an unseen target with the massive field-pulse rifle
mounted beneath his right arm, then bounded again.

The armor itself, Garroway saw, was mostly black, but
the surface had a shimmering, illusive effect that rendered
it nearly invisible, an illusion due to the nanoflage coating
which continually adapted to incoming light. In places, he
saw blue sparks and flashes where enemy nano-D was trying
to eat into the suit’s defenses, but was—so far—being suc-
cessfully blocked by the suit’s counters.

Neither near-invisibility nor nanotechnic defenses could
help this Marine, however. As he grounded again, some-
thing flashed nearby, and the man’s midsection vanished in
a flare of blue-white light. Legs collapsed to one side, head
and torso to the others, the arms still, horribly, moving. Gar-
roway thought he heard a spine-chilling shriek over the link,
mercifully cut off as the armored suit died. Rain continued
to drench the hot ruin of the combat suit, steaming in the
flare-lit night, and the armor itself, exposed to the relentless
embrace of airborne nanodisassemblers, began to soften,
curdle, and dissolve.

The arms had stopped moving. There was a great deal

STAR STRIKE

19
of blood on the ground, however, and slowly dissolving wet
chunks of what might be . . .

Gods. . . .

Garroway struggled not to be sick. He would not be sick.

He wrenched his mental gaze away from the feed, and stood
once more in the Martian night.

“Being a Marine is one of the greatest honors, one of the
greatest responsibilities available to the Commonwealth cit-
izenry,” Warhurst said, his voice still speaking in his mind
over the implant link. “But it is not for everyone. It requires
the ultimate commitment. Fortitude. Courage. Character.

Commitment to duty and to fellow Marines. Sometimes, it
requires the ultimate sacrifice . . . for the Commonwealth.

For your brother and sister Marines. For the Corps.

“You’ve all just seen what modern combat is like . . . what
it’s really like, not what the entertainment feeds would have
you believe. Do any of you want to see this thing through?”

Garroway heard others leaving the line; he didn’t know
how many. He also heard someone retching off to his left.

After a long pause, Warhurst nodded. “Okay,” he said.

“Get ’em out of here.”

With a whine, the agrav shuttle at Garroway’s back lifted
into the Martian night. He felt the flutter of wind as it passed
overhead, and he watched its drive field grow brighter as
it accelerated back to orbit, back to the Arean Rings that
stretched now across the zenith like a slender, taut-pulled
thread of pure silver.

“You maggots,” Warhurst growled, his former tough-DI
persona slowly re-emerging, “you mudworms are even more
stupid than I was led to believe. All right. Show’s over. Like

I said earlier, from this point on, you are mine. I personally
am going to eat you alive, chew you up, and spit your worth-
less carcasses out on these sands.

“But maybe, maybe, a few of you will have what it takes
to be Marines.” Turning, he addressed one of the assis-
tants—the evil-grinning one. “Sergeant Corrolly!”

“Yes, Drill Instructor Warhurst!”

“We need to find out what these worms are really made
of. Let’s take them on a little run before breakfast!”

20

IAN DOUGLAS

The evil grin grew wider. “Yes, Drill Instructor!”

“Move out!”

“Aye, aye, Drill Instructor!” The assistant DI turned to
face the waiting survivors of the morning’s muster. “You
heard the Drill Instructor! Recruit platoon . . . lef’ face!

For’ard, harch! And . . . double time! Hut! Hut! Hut! . . .”

Garroway began to hut.

And within twenty minutes, as he dragged screaming leg
muscles through the fine, clinging, ankle-deep sand of the

Martian desert, he was wondering if he was going to be up
for this after all.

What the hell had he been thinking when he’d volun-
teered? . . .

2�

0407.1102

Green 1

Meneh, Alighan

0512/38:20 hours, local time

Ramsey kicked off, his 660-ABS armor amplifying his push
and sending him in a low, flat trajectory across bubbling
ground. Maneuvers like this always carried a damned-if-
you-do, damned-if-you-don’t risk. Jump too high and your
hang time made you an ideal target; jump too low and flat
and a miscalculation could slam you into an obstacle.

He came down next to a ferrocrete wall, his momentum
carrying him into the half-collapsed structure with force
enough to bring more of it down on top of him, but he was
unhurt. A quick check around—he was a kilometer from the
city’s central plaza. All around him, the skeletal frameworks
of skyscrapers rose like a ragged forest, a clean, modern city
reduced in minutes to ruin and chaos. Some of the damage
was due to the Marine bombardment, certainly, and to the
firefight raging now through the enemy capital, but much,
too, had been self-inflicted by Muzzie nano-D.

In fact, Ramsey’s biggest tactical concern at the moment
were the nano-D clouds, which were highlighted by his
helmet display as ugly purple masses drifting low across
the battlefield. Where they touched the ground or sur-
viving fragments of building, rock, earth, and ferrocrete
began dissolving in moments, as the submicroscopic dis-
assemblers in the death clouds began pulling atom from

22

IAN DOUGLAS
atom and letting it all melt into a boiling and homogenous
gray paste.

Where the cloud hit counter-nano, sparks flashed and
snapped in miniature displays of lightning. Nano-D, much
of it, possessed intelligence enough to attempt to avoid
most countermeasures; victory generally went to the cloud
with both the most numbers and the most sophisticated
programming.

A Muzzie field-pulse gun opened up from a ferrocrete
bunker two hundred meters ahead, sending a stream of
dazzling flashes above his head. Almost automatically,

Ramsey tagged the structure with a mental shift of icons
on his noumenal display, which hung inside his thoughts
like a glowing movie screen. His suit AI melded data from
a wide range of sensory input into a coherent image. In his
mind’s eye, he could see the bunker overlaid by the ghostly
images of human figures inside, and the malevolent red
glow of active power systems.

“Skyfire, I have a target,” he said, and he mentally keyed
the display skyward, tagged with precise coordinates.

Seconds later, a voice in his head whispered what he’d
been waiting to hear. “Target confirmed. Sniper round on
the way.”

Several seconds more slipped past, and then the cloud
deck overhead flared sun-bright, and a beam of light so bril-
liant it appeared to be made of solid, mirror-bright metal
snapped on, connecting clouds with the bunker.

At the beam’s touch, the bunker exploded, ferrocrete and
field-pulse gun and Theocrat soldiers all converted to fast-
expanding vapor, blue-white heat, and a sharp surge of
gamma radiation. The ground-support gunners out in

Alighan orbit had just driven a sliver of mag-stabilized ura-
nium-cladded antimatter into that gun emplacement at half
the speed of light. The resulting explosion had vaporized an
area half the size of a city block, leaving very little behind
but hard radiation and a smoking hole in the ground.

Unfortunately, the enemy had weapons just as power-
ful, and as minute followed bloody minute, more and more
of them were coming on-line. He needed to move . . . but

STAR STRIKE

23
first, this looked like a good place to leave one of his mobile
weapons.

Working quickly, Ramsey pulled a KR-48 pack out of
a storage compartment on his hip, extended its tripod legs
with a thought, and placed the device atop what was left of
the wall. Through its optics, the image relayed through his
helmet AI to his brain, he checked its field of fire, giving it
a clear view toward the city’s central plaza.

His 660-ABS had more than once been compared to a one-
man tank, but so shallow an image wildly missed the point,
and in fact was insulting to the battlesuit. In fact, tanks had
become obsolete centuries ago thanks primarily to the rise
of battlesuit technology. Wearing an ABS, a Marine could
walk, run, or soar for distances of up to a kilometer, could
engage a wide range of targets on the ground and in the air
with a small but powerful arsenal of varied weaponry, and
could link with every other ABS in the battle zone to coor-
dinate attacks and share intelligence. An ABS allowed its
wearer to shrug off the detonation of a small tactical nuke
less than a hundred meters away, to survive everything from
shrapnel to radiation to heavy-caliber projectiles to clouds
of nano-D, and to function in any environment from hard
vacuum to the bottom of the sea to the boiling hell-cauldron
of modern combat.

In fact, any contest between a lone Marine in a 660
battlesuit and a whole platoon of archaic heavy tanks could
have only one possible outcome.

What was important, however, was why, after a thousand
years, individual and small-unit tactics were still of vital
importance in combat. For centuries, virtual-sim generals
had been predicting the end of the rifleman as the center-
piece of combat. The energies employed by even small-scale
weapons were simply too deadly, too powerful, and too in-
discriminate in their scope to permit something as vulner-
able as a human being to survive more than seconds in a
firefight.

Somehow, though, the venerable rifleman had survived,
his technology advancing to extend his effectiveness and
his chances of survival. The truth was, a planetary ground-

24

IAN DOUGLAS
assault unit like the 55th MARS could drop out of orbit,
seize the starport, and hold it, where larger, faster, and
more powerful AI-directed weaponry would simply have
vaporized it.

Of course, by the time the Muzzies were through defend-
ing the port, most of it would be vaporized, wrecked, or
otherwise rendered unusable anyway. That was the problem
with war. It was so damned destructive . . . of personnel, of
property, of entire cultures and societies. . . .

He completed setting up the KR-48 and keyed it to his
helmet display. He switched on the weapon’s power shields,
to keep it from being directly targeted by roving enemy
combat drones or smart hunters, then bounded clear, making
his way around the perimeter of the city plaza. Gunfire con-
tinued to crack and spit from the surrounding buildings,
those that hadn’t been demolished yet, but the accuracy of
the Marines’ orbital sniper fire seemed to be having a telling
effect on the defenses. The instant a Marine came under fire,
the attack was noted by Skyfire command and control, and
the attacker would in moments be brought under counterfire,
either by high-velocity rounds chucked from orbit, or from
the A-90 ground-support aerospace craft now crisscrossing
the skies above the port complex, or from other Marines
on the ground linked into the combat net.

“Bravo one-one-five,” a voice whispered in his mind. His

AI identified the speaker as Captain Baltis, his platoon com-
mander, but he recognized the dry tones without his suit’s
comm ID function. “Hostile gun position at six-one-three-

Sierra. Can you neutralize it, Ram?”

He zoomed in on the indicated coordinates on his map
window. The enemy fire was coming from the top of a forty-
story structure two kilometers ahead. A drone feed showed
the Muzzie gunners, clustered on a rooftop overlooking
the plaza, clustered around a tripod-mounted high-velocity
sliver gun.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Ramsey replied. “Why can’t we
leave it to Sniper?”

“Because that would bring that whole tower down,” Baltis
replied, “and we have civilians in there.”

STAR STRIKE

25

Shit. The Muzzies didn’t seem to care whether their own
civilians were caught in the line of fire or not. But the Ma-
rines were under standing orders to minimize collateral
damage, and that meant civilian casualties.

“Okay. I’m on it.”

Rising, he bounded forward, covering the ground in long,
low, gliding strides that carried him both toward the objec-
tive building and around toward the right. He was trying
to take advantage of the cover provided by some smaller
buildings between him and the target. As he drew closer,
someone on the rooftop spotted him and swung the heavy-
barreled weapon around to bear on him. He felt the snap of
hivel rounds slashing through the air above his head, felt
the impacts as they punched into the pavement nearby with
bone-jarring hammerings and raised a dense cloud of pow-
dered ferrocrete.

Dropping behind a plasteel wall, he connected with the

KR-48 he’d left behind, using his suit’s link with the weapon
to pivot and elevate the blunt snout toward the target build-
ing. On the window inset in his mind, he saw the KR-48’s
crosshairs center over the top of the building; a mental com-
mand triggered a burst, sending a stream of thumb-sized
missiles shrieking toward the rooftop gun emplacement.

The missiles vaporized chunks of cast stone, but the

Muzzies’ armor damped out the blast effects. He’d been ex-
pecting it; he was using the weapon as a diversion, not for
the kill.

Instantly, the Muzzie gunners swung their weapon back
to the south, searching for the source of incoming fire.

Ramsey watched the shift in their attention, and chose that
moment to leap high into the air.

A mental command cut in his jump jets in midair, and he
soared skyward, clearing the upper ramparts of the building,
cutting the jets, and dropping onto a broad, open rooftop.

He used the flamer connected to his left wrist to spew
liquid fire into the gun emplacement. The enemy troops
were shielded against tactical heat, of course, but the sud-
denness of his appearance, arcing down out of the sky,
surprised and startled them, and the torch blast melted the

26

IAN DOUGLAS
plastic mountings of the hivel gun and toppled it over onto
its side.

Shifting his aim, he torched the floor of the rooftop en-
closure, cutting open a gaping crater. Two of the Muzzie in-
fantrymen were caught in the collapse of the roof, falling
through in a shower of flaming debris; Ramsey shifted to
the mag-pulse rifle mounted on his right arm and hammered
away at five more Theocrat soldiers who were busily crowd-
ing back and away from his landing point.

One of the hostiles managed to open fire with a sliver
gun at Ramsey, and the Marine felt the hammer of high-
speed rounds thudding into his chest and helmet armor, but
he held his ground and completed his targeting sweep with
the pulse rifle, watching the barrage smash through enemy
armor like a rapid-fire pile driver, shredding, rending, turn-
ing titanium laminate carballoy into bloody scrap.

The last of the hostiles collapsed on the blazing rooftop,
or toppled through the gaping hole in front of them. The
entire engagement had taken perhaps three seconds.

“Bravo one, Bravo one-one-five,” he reported. “Target
neutralized.”

“Good deal,” Baltis replied. “Now get your ass forward!

You’re behind sched!”

“On my way.”

Another leap, and he sailed off the burning building’s
upper story, using his jump jets to brake his fall.

His suit AI was flagging another gun position just
ahead. . . .

USMC Recruit Training Center

Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

0720/24:20 local time, 1738 hrs GMT

“Fall in! Fall in!”

Panting hard, Garroway stumbled up to the yellow line
painted on the pavement. The run, which Warhurst had
lightly declared to be a shake-down cruise, had lasted two
hours and, according to his implant, had covered nearly

14 kilometers. A number of the recruits hadn’t made it; at

STAR STRIKE

27
least, they’d not kept up with the main body. Presumably,
they were still straggling along out in the desert someplace,
unless Warhurst had sent a transport out to pick them up.

Garroway had assumed that the meager third-G of Mars’

surface gravity would make calisthenics—no, PT, in the

Marine vernacular—easy. He’d been wrong. Gods, he’d been
wrong. The run across the rugged highlands of the Noctis

Labyrinthus had left him at the trembling edge of collapse.

His skinsuit, newly grown for him when he’d checked in at
the Arean Ring receiving station, was saturated with sweat,
the weave of microtubules straining to absorb the moisture
and chemicals now pouring from his body. His leg muscles
were aching, his lungs burning. He’d thought the implants
he’d purchased two weeks ago would have handled the extra
stress.

This was not going to be easy.

The worst of it was, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst had ac-
companied them on that run, and so far as Garroway could
tell, the guy wasn’t breathing hard, hadn’t even broken
a sweat. His uniform was still crisp, the flat-brimmed

“Smokey Bear” hat of ancient Corps tradition still precisely
squared above those hard, cold eyes.

“Okay, children,” he said, planting his hands on his
hips. “Now that we’ve warmed up a bit, it’s time we got
down to work. Hit the deck, push-up position! And one!

And two! . . .”

By now, the sun was up, though much of the run had been
through the foggy, pre-dawn darkness. Mars was a tangle
of mismatched terrain, rendered both beautiful and twisted
by the centuries of terraforming. The sky was a hard, deep,
almost violet-blue, the sun shrunken and cold compared to
back home. The ground was mostly sand, though patches of
gene-tailored mosses and coldleaf added startling accents of
green and blue. The run had brought them in a broad circle
back to Marine RTC Noctis Labyrinthus, a lonely huddle of
domes and quick-grown habs in a rocky desert. East, the tor-
tured terrain of the Vallis Marineris glowed banded red and
orange beneath the morning sun, and open water gleamed
where the Mariner Sea had so far taken hold.

28

IAN DOUGLAS

Damn it, he couldn’t breathe. . . .

“Come on, kiddies!” Warhurst shouted. “You can give
me more than that! There’s plenty of oh-two in the air! Suck
it down!”

What sadist, Garroway wondered, had decided that this
was where Marine recruits would come to train? Centuries
ago, of course, RTC had been on Earth . . . at a place called

Camp Pendleton, and at another place called Camp Lejeune.

Those places were no more, of course. The Xul Apocalypse
had wrecked both bases, when tidal waves from the oceanic
asteroid strikes had come smashing ashore. For a time, Ma-
rines had been trained on Luna, and then at one of the new

LaGrange orbital bases, but almost two centuries ago, with
the completion of the Arean Ring, the Corps had transferred
much of its training command to Mars. The first recruits on
the surface at Noctis Labyrinthus, Garroway had heard, had
done their PT wearing coldsuits and oxygen masks. He was
beginning to think someone had jumped the gun in deciding
to forego the support technology.

“Okay! Okay! On your feet!” Warhurst clapped his hands.

“How are we doing, kids? Eyes bright? Hearts pumping?

Good! We have a very special treat in store for you now.” He
pointed. “See that building? Fall in, single file, in front of
that door! Move it! Move it! ”

The platoon scrambled to obey, running fifty meters
across the ’crete pavement and lining up outside the door. A
sign beside the doorframe read sickbay.

That puzzled Garroway. They’d pumped him full of me-
dinano at the receiving station, enough, he’d thought, to kill
everything in his system that wasn’t nailed down. He’d al-
ready had several thorough physicals, back on Earth Ring,
and in Mars orbit. What were they going to . . .

Realization hit him just as Warhurst began addressing
the formation.

“This, children, is where we separate the real men and
women from the sheep. You were all informed that this
would be part of your recruit training, and you all agreed
when you thumbed your enlistment contract. However . . . if
any of you, for any reason, feel you cannot go through with

STAR STRIKE

29
this, you will fall out and line up over there.” He pointed
across the grinder at one of the assistant DIs, who was stand-
ing in front of a transport skimmer. “You will be returned
to the receiving station, and there you may make arrange-
ments for going home. No one will think the less of you. You
will simply have proven what everybody knows—that the

Marine Corps is not for everyone. Do I have any takers?”

Again, Garroway thought he felt some of the recruits in
line around him wavering. The terror was almost palpable.

“If you file through that door,” Warhurst continued, a
tone of warning giving his edge a voice, “you will be given
a shot of decoupling nano. It won’t hurt . . . not physically, at
any rate. But after the shot takes effect, you will be unable
to access your personal cerebral implants. Right now, each
of you needs to think about what that means, and decide if
being a Marine is worth the cost.”

The decoupler shot. Yeah, they’d told him about it, but
he’d already known about it, of course. It was one of the
things that set the Marines and a few other highly special-
ized elite military units apart from the Army, Navy, or the

High Guard. Wonderingly, Garroway looked down at his
right hand, catching the glint of gold and silver wires im-
bedded in the skin at the base of his thumb and running in
rectilinear patterns across his palm.

He was going to lose his implants.

The vast majority of humans had cereblink implants,
including palm interface hardware, quantum-phase neuro-
circuitry, and a complex mesh of Micronics grown layer by
layer throughout the brain, especially in the cerebral sulci
and around the hypothalamus. The first nano injections gen-
erally were given to the fetus while it was still in womb or
in vitro, so that the initial base linkages could begin che-
lating out within the cerebral cortex before birth. Further
injections were given to children in stages, at birth, when
they were about two standard years old, and again when
they were three. By the time they were four, they already
possessed the hardware to let them palm-interface with a
bewildering variety of computers, input feeds, e-pedias,
and machines. Most basic education came in the form of

30

IAN DOUGLAS
electronic downloads fed directly into the student’s cerebral
hardware. Adults depended utterly on hardware links for
everything from flying skimmers to paying bills to experi-
encing the news to opening doors to talking to friends more
than a few meters distant. The cereblink was one of the ab-
solutely basic elements of modern society, the ultimate piece
of technology that allowed humans to interface with their
world, and interact with their tools.

And now, the recruits of Company 4102 were about to
lose that technology and, for the first time in their lives,
would face the world without it.

The thought was terrifying.

“Okay, recruits! First five in line! Through the hatch, on
the double!”

The first five recruits stumbled up the steps as the door
cycled open for them and vanished into the building. Gar-
roway watched them go.

He thought about quitting.

This was the one part of recruit training that he’d won-
dered about, wondered whether or not he could make it
through. Oh, he knew he would survive, certainly. Millions
did, and most went on to be U.S. Marines. And if he could
get through these next few weeks, his old hardware would
be reconnected and he would get new implants as well. Ma-
rines were hardwired with internal gadgetry and high-tech
enhancements that most civilians didn’t even know existed.

But the thought of being cut off like that . . .

Many of the humans now living on Earth, he understood,
were pre-tech . . . meaning they went through their lives,
from birth to grave, as completely organic beings. No tech-
nological chelates cradling their brains and brain stems, no
nanocircuitry growing through their neural pathways.

No EM telepathy, so no way to talk to those around you
unless you were actually in their presence or you happened
to have a portable comm unit with you. No translator soft-
ware; if your friend didn’t happen to speak your language,
you were out of luck. No e-conferencing in noumenal or vir-
tual space. No e-Net linking you with every other person
and every electronic service across the Solar System.

STAR STRIKE

31

No way to access news, or weather—assuming you were
on Earth which actually had weather—or med access, or
e-pedia information feeds, or travel directions, or life jour-
nals, or any of the hundreds of other data downloads neces-
sary in today’s fast-paced life.

No sims. No download entertainment. No way to interact
with either the stored or broadcast simvids that let you take
the role of hero or villain or both.

No way to buy the most basic necessities. Or to find them,
since most shops now were on-line.

No driving ground cars, piloting mag skimmers, or ac-
cessing public transit.

No books, unless you could find the old-fashioned
printed variety . . . and that was assuming you could read
them. No more educational feeds . . . and no access to per-
sonal e-memory. Gods, how was he going to remember
anything? . . .

And there was Aide. For Garroway, that felt like the
worst . . . losing access to Aide, the AI mentor, secretary,
and personal electronic assistant he’d had since he was a
kid.

Without his hardware, the world was suddenly going to
be a much smaller, much more difficult, much narrower
place . . . and knowing that he would survive that narrowing
did not make the prospect any more bearable.

Cut off from technological civilization, from society,
from everything that made life worth the living. . . .

“I know it seems extreme, kids,” Warhurst said, using a
telepathic feed to whisper inside their minds. “You feel like
we’re cutting you off from the universe. In boot camp we
call it the empty time.”

Garroway wondered whether the DIs had some secret
means of accessing their implants and hearing their
thoughts . . . or if he just knew and understood what the
recruits would be thinking now. Probably the latter. It was
against the law to sneak into another’s private thoughts and
eavesdrop, wasn’t it?

“The thing is,” Warhurst went on, “there will be times as
a Marine when you won’t have the Net to rely on. Imagine

32

IAN DOUGLAS
if you’re on a combat drop and something goes wrong. You
end up a thousand kilometers behind enemy lines. You don’t
have the local Net access codes. Worse, if you try to link
in, the local authorities will spot you. Somehow, you have
to survive without the Net until you can make contact with
your sibling Marines.

“Or maybe you just have to go into a hot DZ on a planet
with no Net at all, and there’s a screw-up and the battlefleet

Net isn’t up and running for, oh, a standard day or two or ten.

Believe me, it happens. What can go wrong will go wrong.

What are you going to do then?

“The answer, of course, is that you will be Marines, and
you will act like Marines. You will be able to draw upon your
own resources, your training, your experience, and you will
survive. More than survive, you will kick ass and emerge
victorious, because victory is the tradition of the Corps!”

Garroway felt a little better after Warhurst’s speech. Not
good . . . but better. He gave a mental click to increase neural
serotonin levels and help lift his mood. Hell, that was an-
other thing he’d be missing in the next few weeks—the abil-
ity to alter his own emotional state as necessary. He felt a
tiny, sharp stab of fear, and instantly suppressed it.

How did Marines control the fear if they didn’t have
access to neural monitoring software or the ability to delib-
erately tailor their emotional state? Or were the wild stories
true, stories to the effect that Marine combat feeds elimi-
nated fear and boosted such emotions as rage and hatred for
the enemy? He’d always assumed those tales were nonsense,
the product of civilian ignorance. Still . . .

“If you children want to be Marines,” Warhurst’s whisper
continued, “we have to know who and what you are. How
you react under stress. We need to know your character. And
we need to take you, all of you, down to your most basic,
most elementary level and build you up, one painful layer
at a time. At the end of these sixteen weeks, you will not
be the men and women you were. You will be Marines . . .

if you make it through.”

It made sense, of course, what Warhurst was saying. Boot
camp always had required an initial breaking down, so that

STAR STRIKE

33
the drill instructors could mold recruits into Marines. And
there were other factors besides . . . like cutting the recruits
off from outside sources of information so that they were ut-
terly dependent on their instructors. Like taking away any-
thing that would distract them from the grueling physical
and intellectual training ahead.

Like getting them to rely upon themselves.

“Believe me,” Warhurst added, and Garroway swore he
could hear a grin in the man’s inner voice, “for the next few
weeks you children won’t need your tech-toys, and you’ll
be way too busy to miss ’em! Besides, you’ll have me to tell
you what you need to know! Next five in line! Through the
hatch!”

Garroway thought one last time about quitting, and
shoved the thought aside.

“Don’t worry, Aiden,” his inner AI whispered in his mind.

“I’ll be back. You’ll see.”

Together with four other recruits, he bounded up the steps
and into the unknown.

3�

0407.1102

Green 1, 1-1 Bravo

Meneh, Alighan

0824/38:22 hours, local time

“Okay, Marines. How are we going to do this?”

Ramsey considered the question. Staff Sergeant Thea

Howell rarely asked for advice. When she did, the problem
was certain to be a certified bitch.

With the vantage point of the gods, he looked down on
the city. In the noumenon, the imaginal inner space of his
mind’s eye, he was hovering above the city center and star-
port as if from a giant’s towering perspective. Physically, in
fact, he was crouched in what had been a basement, shielded
from view by several tons of rubble, and the closest Marine
to his current position was nearly five hundred meters
away, but he was only distantly aware of any of that. His
cereblink and the fleet’s SkyNet, however, allowed them to
share a noumenal conference space, complete with tiny red
icons marking the position of each known Muzzie soldier,
gun, and vehicle, green for Marines, white for civilians or
unknowns.

The tacsit was clear enough. Theocrat riflemen had holed
up in another skyscraper, an eighty-three-floor tower at the
edge of the central plaza, and they’d turned the place into a
fortress, with portable rocket launchers and at least one light
plasma cannon. Life scans had revealed a heavy concentra-
tion of civilians in the smaller buildings clustered about the

STAR STRIKE

35
tower’s base; smash the tower with close-air ground support
or orbital fire, and several hundred civilians would die.

So rather than standing off and bombing the Theocrats,
the Marines would have to do this the old-fashioned away,
with a direct CQB assault.

And it was going to get damned messy.

“From the top down,” Ramsey said after a moment, an-
swering Howell’s question. Under his control, green lines of
light flicked across the imaginal landscape, taking advantage
of available cover, then vaulting into the sky to converge on
the tower roof from four directions. “Has to be. Otherwise
we fight our way up that tower one floor at a time.”

“Agreed,” Howell said. “But that rooftop is over 250
meters straight up. Too far for jumpjets.”

“Then we’ll need to ride Specter guns,” Sergeant Chu
pointed out. “And we’ll need to move straight up and fast.”

“Roger that,” Corporal Ran Allison said. “Looks like a
lucky two-fiver.”

The slang referred to twenty-five percent casualties . . .

if they were lucky. It was a grim and chillingly sobering
assessment.

“Ten of us,” Howell said, noting the green icons sur-
rounding the tower, a kilometer distant. The icons flashed,
one after another, as she ran through the names. “Me, Beck,
and Santiago on one. Hearst and Daley on two. Rodriguez
and Gertz on three. Ramsey, Allison, and Chu on four. Co-
ordinate on me. I’ve put the call out, and our rides will be
here in two mikes. Everyone get set.”

Ramsey dropped out of the noumenal link and began
shouldering upward through the layer of debris above him,
his combat suit’s paramusculature allowing him to move
aside several tons of debris as he climbed. Heaving aside
a 3-meter chunk of ferrocrete, he emerged again into the
smoke-stained light of the Alighan morning.

The pace of the battle had slowed considerably, now that
the defenders had been reduced to a few isolated pockets
of resistance scattered across a ruined city. In less than the
promised two minutes, a Specter gun hissed overhead, an
awkward-looking fragment of one of the landing vehicles that

36

IAN DOUGLAS
had brought the Marines down to the planet’s surface hours
before. Piloted by an independent AI, kept aloft by agrav pods
and protected by a ball-turret plasma gun, the flier looked like
a black insect, complete with gangly, slender legs equipped
with powerful grapples. Reaching up, he grabbed hold of one
of those legs and locked on; the jointed member retracted par-
tially, pulling him clear of the wreckage and into the air.

Corporal Allison and Sergeant Chu were already on board
the tactical carrier, grappled to the aircraft’s other legs and
retracted up into the partial shelter of the machine’s body.

The rubble dropped away as the vehicle swiftly ascended,
rotating and banking toward the distant tower.

The helplessness and the sense of being exposed were
sharper now than during the landing craft descent earlier.

The gun was sharply maneuverable, however, and the arti-
ficial intelligence piloting it possessed inhumanly fast re-
flexes. It was easier on the stomach not to watch. Ramsey
closed his eyes and merged with the assault team gestalt,
watching again from the gods’ perspective as four green
icons representing the fast-moving Specter guns converged
on the objective.

All four aircraft street-skimmed in toward the tower,
zig-zagging all the way to take every possible advantage
of buildings, trees, and rubble. Hivel rounds snapped past
the flier, and once Ramsey felt the solid shock of a heavy
detonation close by. His helmet readout warned of a gamma
pulse; someone was firing antimatter rounds at them. He felt
another thump as the gun’s plasma weapon fired, knocking
down an incoming rocket that had targeted them.

He saw a sudden flare as one of the incoming Specter
guns took a direct hit despite its evasive maneuvering. Ac-
cording to his link, both Daley and Hearst jumped clear as
the aircraft crumpled and slammed into the rubble-clogged
street below.

The remaining three tactical carriers reached the base of
the skyscraper at the same instant, changing vectors to travel
straight up the sides of the tower in a stomach-wrenching
maneuver that was only partly eased by the inertial dampers
in Ramsey’s armor.

STAR STRIKE

37

Three seconds, the pilot AI whispered in his mind, and
he opened his eyes in time to see of blur of ferrocrete and
structural ornamentation flashing past.

Two seconds . . . one second . . .

Another gut-twisting shift in vector, and the Specter gun
slipped over the rampart encircling the top of the tower. A
mental command, and he was released from the craft’s un-
folding leg, dropping onto the roof, striking, rolling, coming
up with his mag-pulse rifle raised, his helmet electronics al-
ready tracking the nearest threat. The weapon was set to AI
control, and he let his suit guide him; the weapon triggered
as soon as it had a solid targeting lock.

The first Muzzie rifleman went down, his armor ham-
mered by a rapid-fire barrage of magnetic pulses. The top
of the building became a bewildering and rapidly unfolding
blur of motion and weapons fire, as two of the other Specter
guns came up over the ramparts and released their payloads
of Marines.

The Specter gun carrying Howell, Beck, and Santiago
took a direct hit as it hovered above the rampart, an antimatter
blast flashing with deadly brilliance at the edge of the tower.

Ramsey overrode his weapon control and shifted aim to the

Muzzie gunner—a low threat because he was facing away
from Ramsey as he manhandled the massive A.M. accelera-
tor for a second shot, but he was trying to target the three

Marines on that side of the tower as they fell from the burning
transport. Ramsey triggered his weapon, and the enemy sol-
dier folded backward around the kinetic impulse slamming
into his spine, his weapon cartwheeling across the roof with
the impact.

A warning went off in his mind; gunners were targeting
him. He cut in his jumpjets and sailed across the roof, pivot-
ing in midair to target one of the Muzzie gunners who was
standing up behind a waist-high ferrocrete barrier, tracking

Ramsey as he sailed through the air.

The stricken Specter gun slammed into the edge of the
tower, metal burning furiously, catching and holding for a
moment before rocking back and off the roof, crashing to
the street eighty-four-stories below. The remaining two guns

38

IAN DOUGLAS
hovered above opposite sides of the building, ninety meters
apart, coordinating their plasma weaponry with the fire
from the eight Marines now fanning out across the roof.

A transparent wall overlooked the rooftop, a penthouse or
upper story of some sort, enveloped in hanging plants, and
with a sunken interior that formed a well-protected redoubt.

The transparency—plastic and shatterproof—melted as
someone inside detonated a thermal charge. An instant later,
a swarm of APerMs emerged and arced into the sky before
descending on hissing contrails—antipersonnel missiles,
each the size of a man’s forefinger, each with an on-board

AI smart enough to identify an enemy’s armor signature and
home on it relentlessly, each with a dust-speck’s worth of
antimatter in magnetic containment. Ramsey’s armor fired
a countermeasures charge, and flashes of actinic brilliance
from the hovering guns picked individual missiles out of the
air with hivel kinetic-kill rounds each the size of a grain of
sand. The sky turned to white fire. . . .

At first he thought the threat had been neutralized, and
he started moving forward once more. In the next instant,
his helmet display flashed warning; there were still APerMs
in the air.

He triggered another countermeasure burst . . . but it was
too little, too late, and he couldn’t get them all. APerMs
slashed into Howell and Beck, who was bounding along-
side her, blasting gouts of molten laminate from their armor,
knocking the two Marines backward.

“Thea! ” Ramsey screamed, and then he was stand-
ing twenty meters from the open penthouse, hosing the
low, cavern-like opening in front of him with his flamer.

One of the hovering Specter guns with a good line of sight
added lance after flaring lance of plasma energy to his fire;

Ramsey could see figures writhing and incinerating within
the flames.

Turning, he bounded across the rooftop to the two fallen

Marines. Corporal Gerry Beck was dead, his helmet punc-
tured, then exploded from within. There was a lot of blood,
and only smoking, blackened shards remained of helmet and
skull.

STAR STRIKE

39

Staff Sergeant Thea Howell, however, was still alive. The

AP round had struck her in the chest, shattering ribs, rupturing
a lung, flooding her torso with hard radiation, but her diagnos-
tic feed showed she was still alive as her armor struggled to
control the damage. She was already deep in medical support
stasis.

Thea. . . .

Crouching above her body, he turned his fire against a
last remaining clump of Muzzie gunners behind a ferrocrete
wall. One of the Specter guns burned down the last of them,
and the firefight came to an abrupt end.

But Ramsey continued to hold the broken body of Thea

Howell, letting his own armor make automatic feed connec-
tions and linkages so that he could bolster her suit’s dam-
aged support systems.

Besides being a fellow Marine and the platoon’s senior

NCO, Thea was an old friend, and frequently his lover.

She was family.

And he didn’t want to see her die. . . .

USMC Recruit Training Center

Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

1045/24:20 local time, 2003 hrs GMT

Garroway felt . . . alone. Alone and utterly empty.

And he couldn’t even mind-click himself a serotonin jolt
to lift the settling black mist of depression . . . or ask Aide for
help.

“I know you’re all feeling a bit low right now,” Gunnery

Sergeant Warhurst said, smiling. “But I have just the ticket!

We’re going to run. Comp’ney, lef’ face! For’ard harch!

Double time, harch! . . .”

Garroway still felt dazed and lost. After his ten-minute
session with the Navy corpsmen in the sickbay, he’d been
led back out into the weak sunshine of the Martian morning
and marched to chow.

He’d barely tasted the food, and ate it automatically. After
that there’d been an indoctrination class, with an assistant

DI lecturing the company on Corps tradition, and on what it
meant to be a Marine.

40

IAN DOUGLAS

And now, they were out in the cold once more, running.

Who the hell was he trying to kid? His first six hours in the

Corps, and already he wanted to quit.

Something, though, was keeping him going . . . one tired
foot after the other.

Aiden Garroway had been born and raised in the 7-Ring
orbital complex in Earth orbit, a son of an extended line
marriage, the Giangrecos; on his Naming Day, he’d taken
his name from Estelle Garroway, the woman who’d also
passed on to him his fascination with the Corps.

It had been Estelle who’d told him about other Garroways
who’d been Marines. There was one, a real character who’d
fought in the UN War of the mid-twenty-first century, who
was still remembered in Marine histories. “Sands of Mars

Garroway,” he was known as, and he’d led a grueling march
up the Vallis Marineris only a couple of thousand kilome-
ters from this spot to attack a French invasion force.

And later there’d been John Garroway, a gunnery ser-
geant who’d made first contact with the N’mah, an alien
civilization at the Sirius Stargate a century later . . . and

General Clinton Vincent Garroway who’d fought and won
the critical Battle of Night’s Edge against the Xul in 2323.

And other Garroways had served in the Corps with distinc-
tion ever since, first in the old United States Marines, then,
with the gradual assimilation of the old U.S. into the United

Star Commonwealth, in the old Corps’ modern successor,
the United Star Marine Corps.

It had been Estelle who’d suggested he join the Corps.

She’d known how unhappy he was at home.

Not that home life had been abusive or anything like that.

Most of his mothers and fathers were okay, and he deeply
loved his birth mother. But with twenty-five spouses and one
hundred eighty-three children and grandchildren underfoot,
along with numerous aunts, uncles, in-laws, and cousins, the
living quarters allotted to the Giangreco line family, though
spacious enough, tended to be something of a zoo. There
was always someone to put him down, tell him what to do,
or shove him out of the way. His job in the aquaculture farms
was boring and dead-end. There were no better options for

STAR STRIKE

41
educational downloads until he specialized in a career, and
farming water hyacinths for the Ring filtration matrices de-
cidedly was not what he intended to do for the next century
or two. Hell, life at home with that many parents and sibs
was like life in a barracks, anyway; the Marines seemed a
logical option.

The problem was Delano Giangreco, the patriarch of the
line, and a committed pacifist. A member of the Reformed

Church of the Ascended Pleiadean Masters, he didn’t quite
insist that everyone in the family follow Church doctrine
regarding diet, luminous tattoos, or ritual nudity, but he did
insist on observance of the Masters’ Pax. No mention of
war within the house, no downloads touching on military
history, battles, or martial arts. Garroway had been twelve
before he’d even heard of the Marines, and then only because
of the electronic emancipation laws. Once you were twelve
and had chosen your name, no one else could censor your
thoughts or your data feeds, even for religious purposes.

But those feeds could be monitored by parents or guard-
ians until a person was eighteen, and Garroway had received
almost weekly lectures on the evils of war and the falsity of
such historical lies as military glory, honor, or duty.

Somehow, though, the lectures had only increased his
determination to learn about the Corps, and about all those
other Garroways who’d served country and, later, Common-
wealth. By the time he was sixteen, he’d picked up some
semi-intelligent software, with Aide’s help, which let him
partition his personal memory storage, and keep parts of
it secret from even the most determined morals-censoring
probes.

But the need to do so, to keep his guard up against his
senior father’s intrusions, had been a powerful incentive to
get himself out of the home and off on his own.

His senior father had disowned him when he learned Gar-
roway had enlisted. No matter. He had a new family now. . . .

If he could keep up with it. If he quit, if he gave up, he
would be right back in the Rings looking for work—prob-
ably in one of the environmental control complexes or, pos-
sibly, the nanufactories.

42

IAN DOUGLAS

Hell, he’d rather run himself to death.

“Christ,” Mustafa Jellal muttered at Garroway’s side. “Is
the bastard gonna run us all the way up Olympus?”

The recruit company had been running steadily west for
almost an hour, now, slogging uphill almost all the way.

Somewhere over the western horizon was the staggering
mass of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar

System, though its peak was still far over the curve of the

Martian horizon. Jellal’s mutterings were purely fictional,
of course. The mountain known as Olympus Mons was five
hundred kilometers across at the base, and reached twenty-
one kilometers above the surrounding terrain; the raw, new,
artificially generated atmosphere on Mars was still only a
step removed from hard vacuum at the summit.

The Noctis Labyrinthus lay at the eastern rim of the

Tharsis Bulge, the vast, volcano-crested dome marking
a cataclysmic upwelling of the Martian mantle 3.5 billion
years before. The broken, canyon-laced terrain of the Noctis

Labyrinthus—the “Labyrinth of Night”—was the result of
floods released by the sudden melting of permafrost during
that long-ago event. The ground, as a result, was a difficult
tangle of rocks and channels that made footing treacherous
and the climb exhausting.

“Save your . . . wind . . . for running,” Garroway muttered
between pants for breath. His side was starting to shriek pain
at him, and the thinness of the incompletely terraformed at-
mosphere was dragging at his lungs and his endurance. How
much farther? . . .

Jellal suddenly fell out of the formation, stepping to the
side, hands on his knees as he started to vomit. Garroway
maintained his pace, staring straight ahead. Behind him, he
could hear one of the assistant DIs talking to Jellal, though
he couldn’t hear what was being said. In a moment, the
column had continued up a dusty hill covered in patches of
gene-tailored dunegrass, and passed well beyond earshot of
what was being said.

A minute or two later, however, just over the crest of that
hill, Warhurst bellowed for the company to halt. The recruits
had become strung out over a half kilometer of ground, and

STAR STRIKE

43
it took minutes more for the trailing runners to catch up with
the main body. Garroway stood at attention as more and
more recruits fell in to either side, breathing hard, savoring
the chance to suck down cold gulps of air and try to will his
racing heart to slow.

After a few heavy-breathing minutes, he was glad to see

Jellal jog past and take a place farther up the line. He’d met
the young Ganymedean Arab at the receiving station up in
the Arean Ring. Mustafa Jellal had been friendly, cheerful,
and outgoing, and seemed like a good guy. Garroway had
started talking with him at chow last night, partly out of a
sense of isolation kinship. There was a lot of anti-Muslim
sentiment throughout the Sol System right now, had been
ever since the outbreak of hostilities against the Theocracy,
and during the conversation Garroway had had the sense
that Jellal was feeling lonely, a bit cut off.

Garroway had been wrestling with loneliness as well—he
wasn’t prepared to call it homesickness just yet—and felt a
certain kinship with the dark-skinned Ganymedean recruit.

After chow, they’d gone back to the center’s temporary bar-
racks, and there they’d opened a noumenal link and shared
bits of home with each other—Jellal taking him on a virtual
tour of the Jellal freestead complex at Galileo, on Gany-
mede, with Jupiter looming banded and vast just above the
horizon, and Garroway showing him Sevenring, with Earth
huge and blue and white-storm-swirled through the arc of
the Main Gallery’s overhead transparency.

He wondered how the guy was feeling now, with his im-
plants switched off.

It was actually a pleasant respite, a chance to simply stand
and breathe. Warhurst waited a few minutes more, until the
last tail-end Charlie straggled over the top of the ridge and
took his place in line.

“Glad you could join us, Dodson,” the DI said with a sour
growl to his voice. “Okay, recruits, listen up. A few hours
ago, we let you see a Marine action now taking place on

Alighan, a few hundred light-years from here. We’ve just
received a feed from USMC Homeport. The Marines on

Alighan report both the starport and planet’s capital city are

44

IAN DOUGLAS
secure. Army troops are now deploying to the surface to
take over the perimeter.

“Lieutenant General Alexander, in command of the

Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, has reported that
the op went down according to plan and by the book. He sin-
gled out the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce,
which spearheaded the assault on the planethead, saying
that despite heavy casualties, they distinguished themselves
in the very best traditions of the Corps.

“So let’s give a Marine Corps war-yell for the Fighting

Fifty-fifth! Ooh-ra!”

“Ooh-ra!” the company yelled back, but the response
was ragged and weak, the recruits still panting and out of
breath.

“What the hell kind of war-yell is that?” Warhurst de-
manded. “The Marines fight! They overcome! They im-
provise! And they fucking kick ass! Let me hear your
war-yell!”

“Ooh-ra!”

“A good war-yell focuses your energy and terrifies your
opponent! Again!”

“Ooh-ra!”

“Again! ”

“Ooh-ra! ”

“Oh, I am so terrified.” He sighed, shaking his head.

“Children, I can tell we have a lot of work to do. Down on
the deck! One hundred push-ups! Now!”

The respite was over.

Green 1, 1-1 Bravo

Meneh Spaceport, Alighan

1158/38:22 hours, local time

An enemy sniper round cracked overhead, striking the
side of a building a hundred meters away with a brilliant
flash and a puff of white smoke. Ramsey looked up without
breaking stride, then glanced at Chu. “Five,” he said. “Four

. . . three . . . two . . .”

Before he could reach “one,” a blue-white bar of light flashed

STAR STRIKE

45
out of the heavily overcast sky and speared a building nearly
two kilometers away. Six seconds passed . . . and then another,
much louder crack sounded, a thunderous boom with a time
delay. By this time, remote drones and battlefield sensors had
scattered across some hundreds of square kilometers, and any
hostile fire or movement was instantly pinpointed, tracked, and
dealt with—usually with a high-velocity KK round from orbit.

“You’re a little off on your timing,” Chu told him. “Count
faster.”

“Ah, the guys in orbit just want to make liars out of us.”

“Not guys,” Chu said, correcting him. “AIs. That re-
sponse was too fast for organics.”

“Even worse. We’re into the game-sim phase of the op,
now. No combat. Just electronic gaming. The bad guys poke
a nose out of hiding, the AIs in orbit draw a bead and lop it
off.”

“You sound bitter.”

“Nah. I just wonder how long it’ll be before they don’t
need us down here on the ground at all. Just park a task force
in orbit and pop bad guys from space, one nose at a time.”

“Never happen,” Chu said. “Someone’s gotta take and
hold the high ground, y’know?”

“That’s what they taught us in boot camp,” Ramsey
agreed. “But that doesn’t mean things won’t change.”

Despite the scattered sniper fire, the worst of the fighting
appeared to be over, and the Marines of the 55th MARS had
emerged victorious. Not that there’d been doubt about the
outcome, of course. The enemy’s technological inferiority,
tactical and logistical restrictions, surprise, and morale all
had been factored into the initial ops planning. The only real
question had been what the butcher’s bill would be—how
many Marines would be lost in the assault.

The two Marines were walking across the ferrocrete in
front of one of the shuttle hangars at the spaceport, still but-
toned up in their 660 combat cans. Off in the distance, an
enormous APA drifted slowly toward the captured starport,
hovering on shrill agravs. Another APA had already touched
down; columns of soldiers were still filing down the huge
transport’s ramps.

46

IAN DOUGLAS

Smoke billowed into the sky from a dozen fires. The
damage throughout this area was severe, and they had to
be careful picking their way past piles of rubble and smol-
dering holes melted into the pavement. Nano-D clouds had
drifted through on the wind hours before, leaving ragged,
half-molten gaps in the curving walls and ceiling, and the
shuttle itself had been reduced to junk. A large area of the
floor had been cleared away, however, and the structure
was being used as a temporary field hospital, a gathering
point for casualties awaiting medevac to orbit. Several naval
corpsmen were working in the hangar’s shadowed interior,
trying to stabilize the more seriously injured.

Staff Sergeant Thea Howell was in there someplace.

After that last firefight atop the tower, Ramsey had crouched
beside his wounded friend until a combat medevac shuttle
had arrived, then helped load her aboard. That had been
three hours ago. As soon as Army troops had started fil-
tering in from the starport, Ramsey and the others from 1-

1 Bravo had hiked back to the port. Ramsey had located

Howell on the platoon Net, and was hoping to see her.

“Ram! Chu! What the hell are you guys doing here?”

The two Marines turned, startled. Captain Baltis had a
way of appearing out of nowhere. “Sir!” Ramsey said. Nei-
ther he nor Chu saluted, or even came to attention; stan-
dard Marine doctrine forbade ritual in the field that might
identify officers to enemy snipers. “One of our buddies, sir.

Howell. We’d like to know if—”

“Haul your ass clear of here and let the docs do their
work,” Baltis snapped. “We’ll post the status of the wounded
when we get back to the ship.”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“We will post their status when we get back aboard
ship.”

Ramsey sagged. “Aye, aye, sir.”

“Get your asses over to the Fortress. We’ll be disembark-
ing from there.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

The Fortress—what was left of it—loomed above the sky-
line of Meneh not far from the ocean. It was called El Kalah,

STAR STRIKE

47
which in the creole-Arabic spoken throughout the Theoc-
racy meant “fortress.” Originally a vast dome half a kilome-
ter across bristling with ball turrets, each turret mounting
plasma, A.M., or hivel accelerator weapons, El Kalah had
been the first target in the pinpoint orbital bombardment
of the planet, and there was little left of the complex now
save the shattered, jagged fragments of dome enclosing a
smoking ruin open to the sky. The weapons turrets had been
neutralized in rapid succession, and the remaining complex
pounded for hours with everything from antimatter to tun-
neler rounds to knock out any deeply buried bunkers. Much
of what was left had melted in the nano-D clouds.

Close by the Fortress was an area that had been a resi-
dential zone, stone and cast ’crete housing set in orderly
rows among parkland and market squares. At least that
was how the downloaded maps described the area. Though
the region had not been deliberately targeted, it was now
an almost homogenous landscape of rubble and partially
melted stone.

As they picked their way through the wreckage, Ramsey
and Chu came upon a scene of nightmare horror.

Several Marines in armor were clearing rubble, revealing
what had been a basement. On the basement floor, dimly
visible in smoky light . . .

“Jesus,” Chu said . . . and then Ramsey heard retching
sounds as the Marine turned away suddenly. Ramsey con-
tinued staring into the pit, unable to stop looking even as he
realized that he would never be able to purge his brain of the
sight. There must have been thirty or forty people huddled
in the basement, though the nano-D cloud had made sorting
one body from another difficult. The tangled, tortured posi-
tions of the bodies suggested they’d known what was hap-
pening to them, and that death had not been quick.

They were civilians, obviously. The Islamic Theocracy
did not permit female soldiers, and there’d been children
down there as well. Clearly, they’d been trying to find shel-
ter inside the basement.

Equally clearly, the deaths had been inflicted by Theo-
crat weapons; the assault force had not employed nano-D.

48

IAN DOUGLAS

It was said that the life expectancy of an unarmored
person on a modern battlefield was measured in scant sec-
onds. These people had never had a chance. Ramsey felt a
sullen rage growing within—rage at the Muzzies for their
blind use of indiscriminate weaponry and their placement of
military targets close beside civilian enclaves, rage at the op
planners who’d targeted a heavily inhabited planet, rage at
the very idea of war, of doing this to innocent bystanders.

Turning away, finally, he grasped Chu’s elbow and steered
him clear of the scene.

He didn’t think he was going to be able to get rid of the
memory.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

And at the same time, he wasn’t certain he could live with
the nightmare.

4�

0507.1102

USMC Skybase

Paraspace

0946 hrs GMT

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander completed the final
download encompassing the Alighan operation. Casualties
had been God-awful high—almost twenty percent—and a
disproportionate percentage of those were irretrievables,
men and women so badly charred by heat or radiation or
so melted by nano-D that they could not be brought back to
life. Those were the tough ones, the ones requiring a virtual
visit to parents or spouses.

With a mental click, he shifted his awareness to the Map

Center, a noumenal chamber with a three-D navigable repre-
sentation of the entire Galaxy. For a moment, his mind’s eye
hovered above the broad, softly radiant spiral, taking in the
nebulae-clotted spiral arms, pale blue and white, unwinding
from the ruddier, warmer core, a vast and teeming beehive
of suns surrounded by gas-cloud ramparts, like luminous
thunderheads at the Core’s periphery. Four hundred billion
stars across a spiral a hundred thousand light-years across.

How many of those pinpoint stars making up those
banked, luminous clouds and streaming arms were suns,
with worlds and life and civilizations?

An unanswerable question.

A majority of stars had planets, of course. That fact
had been certain as far back as the twenty-first century or

50

IAN DOUGLAS
before, when extrasolar planets had first been discovered.

Worlds with life were common as well; wherever there was
liquid water or, more infrequently, liquid ammonia or liquid
sulfur, life, of one kind or another, seemed to arise almost
spontaneously.

How many of those worlds with life developed intelli-
gence, however, and communicative civilizations, was a
much more difficult, and darker question. Once, the answer
would have been “millions” or even “tens of millions,” a
guess based partly upon statistical analyses and partly upon
xenoarcheological discoveries within the Solar System and
elsewhere that showed technic civilization, starfaring civili-
zation, exploding across the Galaxy in wave upon wave.

But that was before the discovery of the true nature of
the Xul.

“General Alexander?”

“Yes, Herschel.”

Herschel was the artificial intelligence controlling the

Galaxy display.

“Your aide wishes to link with you.

Damn. Never a moment’s peace. “Very well.”

Cara, his electronic assistant, entered his noumenal
space, her EA icon materializing out of the void. “Excuse
the interruption, General.”

“Whatcha got?”

“Sir, we have a final plot on the Argo. And a partial synch
with the ship’s AI.”

“Only partial?”

“Whatever happened out there happened very quickly.”

“I see.” He sighed. “Okay. Feed it through. And let’s see
the plot.”

A white pinpoint winked brightly within the depths of
one of the spiral arms. At the same time, he felt the surge of
incoming data, an e-brief, only, representing the synch with
the Argo’s AI.

Perseus. The name of the AI had been Perseus.

“A group of delegates from the Defense Advisory Coun-
cil wants to link with you to discuss the Xul threat,” his aide
continued as he skimmed the brief.

STAR STRIKE

51

“I’ll just bet they do. Okay. When?”

“Fourteen minutes. Ten-hundred hours.”

“Huh. The Argo incident has them worried.”

“Terrified, more like it. And can you blame them, sir?

There hasn’t been another peep out of the Xul for five hun-
dred years.”

Alexander completed the brief, then stared into the sea
of teeming suns hanging before him. “I wouldn’t call the
bombardment of Earth by high-velocity asteroids a ‘peep,’

Cara. Earth was nearly destroyed.”

“Yes, sir. But they didn’t finish us. In fact, they seem to
have lost track of us entirely.”

“Garroway’s attack at Night’s Edge—” He stopped him-
self. He had a tendency, he knew, to slip into lecture mode,
and his aide knew the history of Night’s Edge as well as he
did. Better, perhaps.

“Exactly, sir,” she said. “Garroway gambled that informa-
tion about our whereabouts in the Galaxy had not been dis-
seminated yet beyond the Xul base that launched the attack
on us. And apparently his gamble paid off. Only now . . .”

“Now the Xul appear to have picked up the trail again.”

“We have to assume that if they captured the Argo, they
know where we are. And they’ll be better prepared next
time. Stronger, more careful, and in greater numbers.”

“We damned near didn’t survive their last attack,” Alex-
ander pointed out. “And that was just one Xul huntership!”

In the year 539 of the Marine Era, or in 2314 c.e. as
the Commonwealth measured the passing years, a single
kilometer-long Xul vessel had appeared out of the empti-
ness between the stars, destroyed several human ships, then
proceeded to fling small chunks of asteroidal debris at the

Earth. The fragments were small, but somehow the Intruder
had boosted them to very high velocities—on the order of
half the speed of light—giving them the kinetic energy of
much larger bodies when they struck.

Deep space facilities designed as part of the High Guard
asteroid defense network had succeeded in destroying many
of the infalling rocks, but enough pieces had struck Earth to
do terrible damage, obliterating much of Europe and eastern

52

IAN DOUGLAS

North America in firestorms and tidal waves and plunging
the rest of the planet into an ice age—what the histories per-
sisted in calling a “nuclear winter,” even though the impacts
were purely kinetic, and not nuclear at all.

The only thing that had saved civilization from complete
collapse had been the fact that Humankind possessed a con-
siderable off-world presence—numerous space stations, fac-
tories, colonies, and military bases in Earth orbit, on Luna
and Mars, in the Asteroid Belt, and farther out, among the
satellites of Jupiter. Billions died on the Motherworld, first
in the holocaust of falling debris, then of starvation and ex-
posure as the snows deepened and the oceans began icing
over. But technological help had begun pouring in from
the space-based colonies, especially from the orbital nanu-
factories, untouched by the devastation wrought on Earth.

Nanufactured food, power plants, and constructors had been
loaded into immense one-trip gliders by the megaton and
deorbited for recovery in the ice-free equatorial zones of

Earth’s oceans. Within another century, one, then dozens
of space elevators had been lowered into place, connecting
points along the equator with matching points in geostation-
ary orbit, after which the supplies had really begun flowing
down the pipelines from space. Ground-based agricultural
nanufactories had begun producing food locally, then, along
with nano designed to break down ice, lower the skyrocket-
ing planetary albedo, and clean up the detritus of a wrecked
technic civilization.

Slowly, then, the recovery had begun.

And five centuries later, that recovery was continuing.

New cities were growing now along the shockingly altered

Atlantic coastlines. Most of the gangs and local warlords
had long since been suppressed, or incorporated into the
new government. North America and most of Europe were
no longer dependent on supplies from space.

Of course, the former United States was now a special
protectorate of the Commonwealth, a necessary adjustment
in the face of the aggressive expansion of the Chinese Hege-
mony. And the Islamic Theocracy continued to be a peren-
nial problem, ruled from the Principiate of Allah, at Mecca.

STAR STRIKE

53

Sharp wars had been fought with both states to protect both
the Americas and Europe.

Alexander allowed himself an inner, unvocalized sigh.

The real enemy, as always, remained the Xul, and for half
a millennium Humankind had continued its divided, petty
squabblings among its various fragmented religious, politi-
cal and economic factions. This current unpleasantness with
the Theocracy was only the latest in eight hundred years of
bloodshed that stretched all the way back to WWIII, and
which some historians insisted went back even further, to
the Crusades of the Middle Ages.

Still adrift just above the galactic plane, Alexander gave
a mental command and allowed his mind’s eye to descend
into the sea of stars, moving out toward the spiral arms,
toward one spur of a spiral arm in particular, about 23,000
light-years from the center. The vast majority of the stars
in this simulation were approximations only, with no hard
information about the stars or the worlds that might be cir-
cling them. Some day, perhaps . . . but for now Humankind’s
knowledge of its celestial neighborhood was sharply re-
stricted to an unevenly shaped blot perhaps 800 light-years
across in its longest dimension, less than one percent of the
vast and pinwheeling whole.

Ahead, the stars embraced by the Commonwealth and
the other governments of Humankind glowed within a soft,
green haze of light. Individual star systems were labeled
with alphanumerics giving names and provenance—with

Sol imbedded roughly at the center. Another mental click,
and the green light fragmented into various shades of
yellow, blue, and green, identifying the Islamic Arm, the

Chinese Arm, the Pan-European Arm, the Latino Arm, the

Commonwealth, and the rest.

He brought up a red icon marking the position of the lost

Argo . . . 500 light-years from Sol, and on a direct line with
the Andromedan Galaxy. She’d been well outside of human
space when the Xul had discovered her; the outer fringes of

Islamic space lay a light-century or so in her wake.

Orange pinpoints marked those outposts and garrisons
of the Xul that had been identified over the past few hun-

54

IAN DOUGLAS
dred years, a fuzzy and diffuse cloud outside of human
space; none lay close to Argo’s outbound route, but that was
scarcely surprising. The Xul empire spanned the Galaxy and
stretched well beyond it; Humankind thus far had identified
only a few hundred Xul outposts and bases, and the best
guess suggested that the Xul held a million star systems, or
more.

“We now have a candidate star for another Xul base,”

Herschel whispered in Alexander’s ear. “Here . . .”

A star was highlighted in blue, and Alexander zoomed
in on it. Nu Andromedae, a type B5 V blue-white sun some

440 light-years from Earth. From Earth’s perspective, the
star by chance appeared just to the east of M-31.

“The Argo must have passed quite close to Nu Androme-
dae,” Herschel added. The AI painted a red contrail stream-
ing from the Argo, like a thin, taut thread stretching all the
way back to Sol, and the line skimmed past Nu Andromedae,
almost touching it. “Less than three light-years, in fact.”

“Maybe. But that was still over a hundred years ago. Why
should the Xul wait that long before pouncing?”

“For the same reason the Xul have not found Earth, Gen-
eral. The term once in use was ‘a needle in a haystack.’”

Alexander had never seen either a sewing needle or a
haystack, but the phrase was descriptive enough in its own
right. Even the Xul, powerful and technologically advanced
as they were, couldn’t be everywhere, couldn’t watch every
star system or world where life might have evolved. The

Galaxy was far too large for that level of omnipotence,
even for beings with powers indistinguishable from those
of gods.

“Herschel’s right, General,” his aide pointed out. “The

Argo was a hollowed-out asteroid. Its passengers were
in deep cybe-hibe. Even at close to the speed of light, it
wouldn’t have been giving off much in the way of anoma-
lous radiation.”

“I don’t buy it, Cara. We know now it would have been
giving off a kind of wake as it plowed through the dust and
hydrogen atoms floating around in its path—the interstel-
lar medium. We can detect that sort of thing ourselves. If

STAR STRIKE

55
we can do it, the Xul can as well.” He studied the display
a moment longer, rotating the display and studying the
contrail. “Herschel . . . check distances from the contrail
to nearby stars, and correlate with the one-way time lags.

Assume radio noise expands from the Argo at the speed of
light, and a more or less immediate response from the target
star once the RF wave front reaches it.”

“Yes, General.” Angles and geometric designs flickered
from star to star, touching the contrail at various points as
the artificial intelligence searched for a better fit.

“Actually . . . that star is a better candidate,” Alexander
said after a moment, indicating a particular geometry.

“Epsilon Trianguli,” Cara said, calling up the data
window on the indicated star. “Type A2 V. Four hundred
fifty light-years from Earth—”

“And 110 lights from the contrail at its closest passage,”

Alexander said. “The Argo streaks by, disturbing the inter-
stellar medium. The radio noise spreads out, like the wake
of a boat on a calm lake, and reaches Epsilon Trianguli 110
years later. A Xul ship or base takes note and dispatches a
force to investigate.”

“There are twenty-five other stars with corresponding
distances, angles, and lag times,” Herschel told them, “albeit
with lesser probabilities.”

“Store the data, Hersch,” Alexander said. “We may want
to do a careful analysis, maybe even send a sneak-and-peek
team out there for a look around.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

For centuries, the Marines and Navy had dispatched
scouting forces out from human space—sneak-and-peek
teams, as they were popularly known—in order to try to
identify specific stars where the Xul maintained a presence.

The idea was that if Xul bases or colonies could be found,
they could be watched, with an eye to noting any sudden
activity that might presage a new assault against human
space.

The sheer vastness of space, the grains-of-sand numbers
of stars, worked both ways, however. For centuries, they’d
hidden Sol from the Xul, protecting the existence of Hu-

56

IAN DOUGLAS
mankind, but those same numbers allowed the vast majority
of the Xul outposts to remain hidden as well.

But the further into interstellar space Humankind probed,
the greater the chance, the more certain the inevitability,
that it would once again trip the Xul sentries, as it had on
several occasions already. And it seemed all but certain that,
when the Xul returned to the Motherworld of Humankind,
they would come with sufficient force to finish the job they’d
begun several times before.

Humans had been lucky so far . . . lucky despite the fact
that half a millennium ago Earth had so nearly been ren-
dered uninhabitable. Only during the past few centuries had
they begun piecing together the full history of human-Xul
interactions, a relationship that extended back, it was be-
lieved, as far as half a million years.

As Cara and Herschel began preparing the virtual space
for the electronic arrival of the Advisory Council, Alexan-
der allowed his implant processors to cull through the data,
reviewing past, present, and several darkly disturbing pos-
sible futures. As the data fell into place, he allowed himself
a moment’s reverie, induced by the electronic flow from the
local AI through the mingling of organic and inorganic re-
gions of his brain.

Some five hundred thousand years ago, an advanced non-
human intelligence—robotic intelligences unimaginatively
dubbed variously the “Builders” or “the Ancients” by popu-
lar histories and the entertainment and news sims—had
created an empire spanning all of today’s human space, and
presumably extending far beyond. The Builders had terra-
formed Mars, and, for a brief time, at least, employed rea-
sonably bright bipedal creatures imported from the third
planet as workers—genetically altering them to boost their
intelligence, and in doing so creating the species that later
would call itself Homo sapiens.

But the Xul had attacked the Builders, however, the

Xul or their militant predecessors. Ruins on Mars and on

Earth’s Moon, on Chiron in the Alpha Centauri system, and
on numerous other worlds attested to the violence and the
completeness of the genocidal Xul campaign. One of their

STAR STRIKE

57
enormous ships, part machine and part downloaded intelli-
gence, had been badly damaged in the conflict and crashed
into the ice-locked world-ocean of Europa. The Builders,
who called the invaders “The Hunters of the Dawn,” were
destroyed, their empire reduced to broken ruins and rubble
on a thousand far-strewn worlds. Of the Builders themselves,
apparently, nothing had survived. Their genetically altered
creations, however, had escaped the notice of the Xul, and
survived, even flourished, on Earth.

Half a million years later, and some ten to fifteen thou-
sand years ago, another spacefaring civilization had entered

Earth’s Solar System. The An were in the process of estab-
lishing a much smaller, more modest interstellar empire, one
embracing a few score star systems scattered across perhaps
fifty light-years. They’d planted colonies on Earth and on

Earth’s Moon, mined precious metals, and enslaved human
nomads to raise food and work the mines. In making slaves,
farms, and stone cities, they’d managed to become the pro-
totypes of the gods and goddesses of ancient Mesopotamia.

But then the An had attracted the notice of the Xul—the
name itself had survived in the Sumerian language as one
meaning “demon”—and the An, too, were annihilated.

The Xul had missed one Earthlike world populated by
the An, however. The satellite of a gas giant well outside
its sun’s habitable zone, perhaps it had been overlooked.

On Ishtar, in the Lalande 21185 system eight and a half
light-years from Sol, a few An and their human slaves had
survived, remaining unnoticed in the holocaust when their
technological infrastructure collapsed. On Earth, again, the

An all were killed, but humans had survived to wonder about
the cyclopean and monolithic ruins at places like Baalbek,
submerged Yonaguni, and Tiahuanaco, and to tell stories of
a universal deluge and the wrath of the gods.

Thousands of years passed, and humans on Earth again
developed high technologies, this time on their own, and
again they walked on other worlds. They found mysterious
ruins on Mars and on Luna, and a few devices miraculously
intact. They found the lost Xul ship, poetically dubbed “The

Singer” for its eerie and insane radio transmissions, sub-

58

IAN DOUGLAS
merged deep beneath the Europan ice, and on Ishtar they
found descendents of both An and humans.

From that time on, late in the twenty-second century,

Humankind had existed in a kind of secretive balance with
the Xul, who, it turned out, were still very much in exis-
tence after all those millennia. Like mice or cockroaches
living in the walls of a very large dwelling, human star-
farers sought to improve their own lot while avoiding the
notice of the heavy-footed giants living nearby. Archeo-
logical teams spread out among the nearer star systems,
seeking remnants of lost technologies left by the Builders,
by the An, and by other civilizations. Eventually, another
alien species had been discovered, the amphibian N’mah,
living within an enigmatic Ancient-built stargate in the

Sirius system.

In 2170, Marine and Navy forces at the Sirius Stargate
had destroyed a Xul ship as it came through the Gate. In

2314, another Xul ship had appeared, this time within Earth’s
solar system . . . and Earth had very nearly died. In 2323, a

Navy-Marine task force had proceeded through the Sirius

Gate to another, unknown and distant star system, Night’s

Edge, using a freighter-load of sand scooped from the sur-
face of Mars and accelerated to close to the speed of light
to eliminate a Xul fleet and planetary base. As Cara had
pointed out, the obliteration of that Xul outpost appeared
to have wiped out any data the Xul had acquired pertaining
to Humankind or Sol . . . and bought Earth a precious few
more centuries to prepare for her next encounter with the

Xul threat.

That there would be another encounter, Alexander had no
doubt whatsoever. Since the early twentieth century, Earth
had been broadcasting her presence; Sol now rested at the
center of a sphere over 1,700 light-years across, a pulsing,
restless bubble of electromagnetic radiation at radio wave-
lengths expanding outward at the speed of light—a certain
indicator of intelligent, technic life at its center.

Alexander allowed himself a mental grin at the memory
of an old joke. Perhaps it wasn’t an indicator of intelligent
life, given the nature of much of the entertainment content
of that bubble. Still, anyone with the appropriate technologi-

STAR STRIKE

59
cal know-how could hear that babble of noise, and know that
technic civilization was responsible.

And The Singer had broadcast something to the stars
back in 2067 when it was freed from its icy tomb. No, there
was no way Humanity could keep its existence secret much
longer.

And how was Humankind to survive in a contest against
a technology half a million years more advanced?

It was a problem the Marine Corps had been struggling
to resolve since the twenty-first century. So far, for the most
part, they’d been able to fight isolated and tightly controlled
battles, applying tactics that emphasized Marine strengths
while sidestepping Xul technology. As commanding officer
of the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, Alexan-
der was responsible for keeping on top of the Xul threat, and
keeping the Commonwealth government informed of any
changes in the situation.

And the situation certainly had changed now, with the
taking of the Argo.

“General?” Cara said, interrupting increasingly grim
thoughts. “Will you want your full filters for the meeting?”

“Eh? What was that?”

“Your e-comm filters, sir. The delegates will begin link-
ing in before too long. How do you want to be dressed?”

He grimaced. Personal filters were an important part of
modern electronic communications. Within a noumenal set-
ting—literally inside the participants’ heads—your personal
icon could take on any appearance desired, anything within
the programming range of the AIs giving the encounter sub-
stance. Filters allowed the image projected into the group
mind’s virtual space to be of your own choosing, with ap-
parent dress, body language, even inflection of voice under
your control.

He didn’t like it, though. He never had. Though e-filters
had been around for centuries, a necessary outgrowth of
noumenal projection, they still seemed . . . dishonest, some-
how, a kind of social white lie.

“You can’t,” Cara told him, a disapproving tone to her
words, “receive the Defense Advisory Council like that.”

60

IAN DOUGLAS

Mentally, he looked down at himself. As usual, he was
projecting his real-world appearance into the galactic im-
agery . . . which, at the moment, was of a lean, middle-aged
man with graying hair and a dour expression. He was also
naked.

Causal nudity was perfectly acceptable within most
modern social situations, but Cara was right. This was not
the proper appearance to put before twenty-four of the more
powerful and important of the arbiters of Commonwealth
government policy.

“What do you suggest?” he asked her.

“Something,” she said, “more like this.” She gave his sim
an electronic tweak, and his body morphed into something
leaner, tauter, and with more presence, and wearing Marine
full dress, his upper left chest ablaze in luminous decora-
tions and campaign holos. The brilliant gold Terran Sun-
burst, awarded for his role at the Battle of Grellsinore as a
very raw lieutenant, was emblazoned on his right breast. His
head and shoulders were encased within a lambent corona
flammae, another social convention granted to officially
designated Heroes of the Commonwealth.

“I think we can lose the decorations,” he said. He gave
a commanding thought, and the medals vanished. His uni-
form dwindled a bit into plain dress blacks. “And the damned
light show.” The corona faded away.

“With respect, sir,” Cara told him, “you need the bric-a-
brac. The council’s chairperson is Marie Devereaux. She is
impressed by proper formal presentation, and you will need
to enlist her support for your plan.”

He sighed. “Okay. Medals, yes. But not that damned
glow. Makes me look like an ancient religious icon, com-
plete with halo.”

“The corona flammae is part of your sanctioned uniform,
sir. For your service at and after the twenty-third Chinese

War. And the delegation members will have their own.”

“Fucking trappings of power. I hate this.”

“Indeed, sir,” Cara said as the light came back on . . . but
a trifle subdued, this time. “But how many times have you
lectured me on the need to blend in with the local social

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61
environment? To do otherwise will elicit disapproval, and
might well send conflicting signals or, worse, could alienate
your audience.”

Alexander looked sharply at Cara’s icon—which was pre-
senting itself, as usual, as an attractive, dark-haired woman
of indeterminate years wearing a Marine undress uniform.

It was tough at times to remember that “Cara” was, in fact,
an electronic artifice, an AI serving as his personal mili-
tary aide and electronic office manager. A resident of the
noumenon and virtual workplaces, she had no physical real-
ity at all.

“Okay, boss,” he said at last. “Light me. But no parade or
fireworks, okay? Even heroes of the Commonwealth should
be granted a little dignity.”

“I’ll see what I can do, sir,” she told him. “But no
promises!”

And then, with Cara serving as gatekeeper and an-
nouncer, the first of the council delegates began linking in.

5�

0507.1102

USMC Skybase

Paraspace

1005 hrs GMT

It was, Alexander decided, a bit like being in an enormous
fish tank. The delegates of the Defense Advisory Council
appeared in the simulation as small and relatively unob-
trusive icons, until one or another spoke. At that point, the
icon unfolded into what appeared to be a life-sized image,
standing on emptiness and aglow with its own corona. With
a swarm of golden icons surrounding him, together with
a larger swarm of smaller, dimmer icons representing the
group’s cloud of digital secretaries and personal electronic
assistants, he felt as though he were a large and somewhat
clumsy whale immersed within a school of fish.

There was also the feeling that the entire school was
studying him intently, and not a little critically. They in-
cluded, Cara had reminded him, eight delegates from the

Commonwealth Senate, ten senior military officers from the

Bureaus of Defense, five members of the President’s Intel-
ligence Advisory Group, and Marie Devereaux, the Presi-
dent’s personal advisor and representative.

Alexander shrugged off the feeling, and continued with
his presentation. They were adrift in an absolute blackness
relieved only by a fuzzy circle of light surrounding them all,
a ring dividing the darkness into two unequal parts. Within

STAR STRIKE

63
the smaller part, the ring shaded into blue, the leading edge.

The trailing edge shaded into red.

This was how space had looked from the point of view of

Perseus, the AI commanding the colony asteroid ship Argo
during her flight across the Galaxy. The luminous ring was
the bizarre and beautiful relativistic compression of space
as seen at near- c velocities, a three-dimensional panorama
overlaid here and there by the flickering alphanumerics of

Perseus’s functional displays.

“We don’t have a lot to go on,” Alexander was telling the
watching delegates. “From the time the Xul ship material-
ized alongside the Argo, to the moment of Argo’ s destruc-
tion, less than five seconds elapsed. The AI in command of
the vessel was in time-extended mode. He did not have time
to fully react.”

Artificial sentients like Perseus were designed to control
their own subjective passage of time. For machine intelli-
gences that could note the passage of millionths of a second,
the passage of a truly long period of relative inactivity—such
as the subjective decades necessary for interstellar flight—
could literally drive the AI insane. That, it was believed,
was what had happened to The Singer, the Xul huntership
trapped for half a million years beneath the ice of the Eu-
ropan ocean.

Perseus had been experiencing time at roughly a thou-
sand to one—meaning that a year was the same as roughly
nine hours for a human. At that setting, though, those four
and a half seconds after the appearance of the Xul ship had
been the human equivalent of 4.5 thousandths of a second;
it was amazing that Perseus had managed to do as much as
he had.

In Alexander’s mind, and in the minds of the watching
delegates, those last seconds played out in slow motion.

“As you see,” Alexander continued, indicating one of
the numeric readouts, “the time scale has been altered so
that we can experience the encounter at a ratio of about
ten to one . . . four seconds becomes forty. Perseus would
have been perceiving this about one hundred times more
slowly.”

64

IAN DOUGLAS

Abruptly, a shadow appeared against the eldritch starlight.

One moment there was nothing; the next, it was there, im-
mense against the luminous ring. With its velocity matched
perfectly to that of Argo, the Xul huntership appeared undis-
torted, a convolute and complex mountain of curves, swell-
ings, angles, spires, and sheer mass, the whole only slightly
less black than the empty space ahead and behind, forbidding
and sinister.

In fact, Alexander reminded himself, the Intruder was
somewhat smaller than the Argo—perhaps 2 kilometers
long and one wide, according to the data now appearing on
the display, where the Argo was a potato-shaped rock over

8 kilometers thick along its long axis. But most of Argo was
dead rock. The totality of her living and engineering areas,
command and defense centers, storage tanks, and drive sys-
tems occupied something like three percent of the asteroid’s
total bulk. The asteroid-shell of the Argo itself was invisible
in the data simulation. Without the asteroid as a reference,
the Intruder, slowly drifting closer, felt enormous.

“That looks nothing like the Intruder,” Senator Dav

Gannel said. “The ship that attacked Earth . . . and the hunt-
erships we encountered at the Sirius Stargate, they were
shaped like huge needles. That thing is . . . I don’t know
what the hell it is, but it’s a lot fatter, more egg-shaped. How
do we know it’s Xul?”

Alexander didn’t answer. The slow-motion seconds
dragged by as the monster drew closer, until it blotted out a
quarter of the light ring. The flickering alphanumerics indi-
cated that Perseus was aware of the threat, and attempting to
open a communications channel.

“They’re not responding,” another Council delegate said.

“Of course they might not understand Anglic.”

“English, Senator,” Alexander said. “When Argo was
launched, the principal language of trade and government
was English. Perseus is signaling on several million chan-
nels, using microwave, infrared, and optical laser wave-
lengths. Remember, we’ve at least partially interfaced with
a number of Xul vessels, and we were able to study The

Singer, the one we recovered on Europa eight centuries ago.

We know the frequencies they use, and some of their lin-

STAR STRIKE

65
guistic conventions. You can be sure the Intruder hears, and
it understands enough to know Argo is trying to communi-
cate. It’s just not listening.”

“Shouldn’t the Argo be trying to get away?” Devereaux
asked.

“Madam Devereaux, the Argo is traveling at within
a tenth of a percent of the speed of light. At that velocity,
it would take a staggering amount of additional power to
increase speed by even one kilometer per hour. She could
decelerate or try moving laterally, adding a new vector to
her current course and speed, but that means rotating the
entire asteroid, and that would take time. And . . . the In-
truder clearly possesses some type of faster-than-light drive,
to have been able to overtake Argo so easily. No, Madam

Chairman, there’s not a whole lot Perseus can do right now
but try to talk.”

“Does she have any weapons at all?”

“A few. Beam weapons, for the most part, designed to
reduce stray rocks and bits of debris in her path to charged
plasmas that can be swept aside by the vessel’s protective
mag fields. But if any of you have seen the recordings of
the defense of Earth in 2314, you know that huntership
shrugged off that kind of weaponry without giving it a
thought. It took whole batteries of deep-space anti-asteroid
laser cannons just to damage the Intruder, plus a Marine
combat boarding party to go in and destroy it from the
inside.”

“At the Battle of Sirius Gate,” General Regin Samuels
pointed out, “the Earth forces used the thrusters from their
capital ships as huge plasma cannons. What if—”

“No,” Alexander said. “Argo is employing a magnetic
field drive we picked up from the N’mah, not plasma
thrusters.” He didn’t add the obvious—that this wasn’t a
problem-solving exercise, damn it, and it wasn’t happen-
ing in real time. What was revealed by this data sim had
already happened.

The government delegates, he reflected, were a little too
used to, and perhaps a little too reliant on, instantaneous
communications.

66

IAN DOUGLAS

There was no indication that the alien vessel even heard

Perseus’ communications attempts. One point seven three
seconds after the Intruder appeared, large portions of the

AI’s circuitry began to fail—or, rather, it appeared to begin
working for another system, as though it had been massively
compromised by a computer virus.

“At this point,” Alexander explained, “the Argo is being
penetrated by the alien’s computer network. It is very fast,
and apparently evolving microsecond to microsecond,
adapting in order to mesh with Perseus’s operating system.

The pattern is identical to that employed by Xul hunterships
in other engagements.”

It was as though the alien virus could trace the layout of

Perseus’ myriad circuits, memory fields, and get a feel for
the programs running there, to sense the overall pattern of
the operating system before beginning to change it.

Beams and missiles stabbed out from the Argo, focusing
on a relatively small region within the huge Intruder’s mid-
ship area. So far as those watching could tell, the result was
exactly zero. Beams and missiles alike seemed to vanish
into that monster structure without visible effect.

More alphanumerics appeared, detailing massive failures
in the Argo’s cybe-hibe capsules. The Intruder was now in-
fecting the colony ship’s sleeping passengers by way of their
cybernetic interfaces.

“We’re not sure yet how the Xul manage this trick,” Al-
exander went on, “but we’ve seen them do it before. The first
time was with an explorer vessel, Wings of Isis, at the Sirius

Stargate in 2148. It apparently patterns or replicates human
minds and memories, storing them as computer data. We be-
lieve the Xul are able to utilize this data to create patterned
humans as virtual sentients or sims.”

Three point one seconds after the attack had begun,

Perseus realized that all of its electronic barriers and de-
fenses were failing, that electronic agents spawned by the

Intruder’s operating system were spilling in over, around,
and through every firewall and defensive program Perseus
could bring into play. Perseus immediately released a highly
compressed burst of data—a complete record of everything

STAR STRIKE

67
stored thus far—through Argo’s QCC, the FTL Quantum-

Coupled Comm system that kept Argo in real-time contact
with Earth.

Abruptly, the record froze, the alphanumeric columns
and data blocks halted in mid-flicker.

“Four point zero one seconds,” Alexander said. “At this
point, Perseus flashed the recording of Argo’s log back to

Earth.”

“But . . . but everyone has been assuming that the Argo
was destroyed,” Senator Kalin said, a mental sputter. “We
don’t know that. They could still all be alive. . . .”

“Unlikely, Senator,” Alexander replied dryly. “First of
all, of course, there’s been no further contact with the Argo
during the past three days. There is also this. . . .”

Mentally, he highlighted one data block set off by
itself—an indication of Argo’s physical status. Two lines in
particular stood out—velocity and temperature. The aster-
oid starship’s velocity had abruptly plummeted by nearly
point one c, and its temperature had risen inexplicably by
some 1,500 degrees.

“When Perseus sent off the burst transmission, these two
indicators had begun changing during the previous one one-
thousandth of a second. We’re not sure, but what the physi-
cists who’ve studied this believe is happening is that Argo’s
forward velocity was somehow being directly transformed
into kinetic energy. A very great deal of kinetic energy. And
liberated as heat. A very great deal of heat.”

“These data show Argo is still completely intact,” Marie

Devereaux noted. She sounded puzzled. “Senator Kalin is
right. That doesn’t prove that the Argo was destroyed.”

“Look here, and here,” Alexander said, indicating two
other inset data blocks. “The temperature increase is still
confined to a relatively small area—a few hundred meters
across, it looks like . . . but the temperature there in that
one spot has risen 1,500 degrees Kelvin in less than a thou-
sandth of a second. The physics people think the Xul simply
stopped the Argo in mid-flight—and released all of that
kinetic energy, the energy of a multi-billion-ton asteroid
moving at near- c, as heat in one brief, intense blast. Believe

68

IAN DOUGLAS
me, Senator. That much energy all liberated at once would
have turned the Argo into something resembling a pocket-
sized supernova.”

“But why?” Kalin wanted to know.

“Evidently because the Xul had copied all of the data
they felt they needed. They’re not known, remember, for
taking physical prisoners.”

There was evidence enough, though, of their having up-
loaded human personalities and memories, however, and
using those as subjects for extended interrogation. He’d seen
some of the records taken from a Xul huntership, of what
had happened to the crew of the Wings of Isis in 2148. He
suppressed a cold shudder.

“If it’s the Xul,” Devereaux added.

He hesitated, wondering how forceful to make his re-
sponse. It was vital, vital that these people understand.

“Madam Chairperson, Senator Gannel asked a while ago
how we could know that Argo was destroyed by a Xul hunt-
ership. The answer is we don’t.” He indicated the vast, con-
voluted ovoid hovering close by Argo in the frozen noumenal
projection. “It’s not as though they’ve hung banners out an-
nouncing their identity. But I’ll tell you this. If that vessel is
not Xul, then it’s being operated by someone just as smart,
just as powerful, just as technologically advanced, and just
as xenophobic as the Xul. If they’re not Xul, they’ll do until
the real thing comes along, wouldn’t you say?”

“If it’s Xul,” Devereaux continued, “how much does this

. . . incident hurt us?”

He sighed. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Fifty thousand
twenty-fourth century politicians, plutocrats, bureaucrats,
specialists, and technicians. How much damage could they
do?”

That asteroid colony ship presented an interesting window
into the politics of Humankind’s past. Shortly after the Xul
attack on Earth, many of the survivors—especially those
wealthy enough or politically powerful enough to buy the
privilege—had elected to flee the Motherworld rather than
remain behind to face a second attack that all knew to be
inevitable. At that time, Humankind had not yet unraveled

STAR STRIKE

69
the secrets of faster-than-light travel. With N’mah help and
technology, however, they’d constructed four asteroid star-
ships each capable of carrying tens of thousands of refugees
and which could accelerate to nearly the speed of light using
the reactionless N’mah space drive.

From Alexander’s point of view, the decision to flee the

Galaxy entirely, to travel over two million light-years to
reach another galaxy, seemed to be a bit of overkill. Still,
he had to admit that, judging by the interstellar vistas re-
corded at Night’s Edge and elsewhere, the Xul did appear to
have a presence embracing much of the Galaxy. Two of their
known bases—Night’s Edge and a Stargate nexus known
only as Cluster Space—were actually located well outside
of the Galactic plane, where the Galaxy’s spiral arms curved
across the sky much as they did in Alexander’s noumenal
simulation. Their empire, if that’s what it could be called,
might well extend across the entire Milky Way—four hun-
dred billion suns, and an unknown hundreds of billions of
worlds.

The refugees of the twenty-fourth century had desper-
ately hoped to find a new home well beyond even the Xul’s
immensely long reach through space and time. It would take
over two million years to make the trip, but relativistic time
dilation would reduce that to something like thirty years;
with the prospective colonists in cybe-hibe stasis, even that
brief subjective time would vanish as they fled into the
remote future.

The only question had been whether or not the refugee
ships could slip out of the Galaxy without being spotted by
the Xul. That hope, unfortunately, had failed.

“Our problem, of course,” Alexander went on, “is that
we must assume that the Xul now know exactly where we
are, and who we are. Most of the people on board probably
didn’t have useful information that would lead the Xul back
to Earth. A few would have, however, though I’m actually
more concerned about the data Perseus might have been car-
rying. He probably had a complete record of the 2314 attack,
for instance, and would have had the galactic coordinate
system we use for navigation.

70

IAN DOUGLAS

“The Xul are smart. They’ll put that data together with
the elimination of their base at Night’s Edge, and know we
were responsible. They might also be able to see enough of
the stellar background in any visual records to positively
locate Sol. And . . . there’s also Argo’s path. The refugee
ships were supposed to make a course correction or two on
the way out, so they didn’t draw a line straight back to Earth,
but doing that sort of thing at relativistic speeds is time con-
suming and wastes energy. I doubt the changes were enough
to throw the Xul off by very much. At the very least, they’ll
figure the Argo set out from someplace close to the Sirius

Stargate. That bit of data alone might be enough. It’s only
eight and a half light-years from Earth.”

In fact there was so much Humankind didn’t know about
the Xul or how they might reason things through. No one
could explain why, for instance, they didn’t share data more
freely among themselves. The only reason the Xul hadn’t
identified Humankind as a serious threat centuries ago was
the fact that the Night’s Edge raid did appear to have oblit-
erated any record of the Xul operation against Earth nine
years earlier.

“What about the other three refugee ships?” Navin Ber-
genhal, one of the Intelligence Advisory Group members,
asked. “They’re all in danger now.”

“We’ll need to send out QCC flashes to them, of course,”

Alexander said. “I doubt there’s anything they can do,
though, since it’ll take a year of deceleration for them to
slow down, and another year to build back up to near- c
for the return trip. If they wanted to return.” He shrugged.

“Their escapist philosophy may prove to be the best after
all. If the Xul find Earth and the rest of our worlds, the only
hope for Man’s survival might well rest in one or more of
those surviving colony ships making it to M-31.”

“The destruction of the Argo is tragic, yes,” Devereaux
said. “But I still don’t see an immediate threat. This all took
place five hundred light-years away, after all. And the Xul
have always been glacially slow in their military responses.”

Alexander nodded. “Agreed. If they behave as they have
in the past, it might be some time before that information

STAR STRIKE

71
disseminates across all of Xul-controlled space. But, Madam

Devereaux, we would be foolish to assume they won’t dis-
seminate it, or that they won’t act upon it eventually. Our best
xenopsych profiles so far suggest that the Xul are extreme
xenophobes, that they destroy other technic races as a kind
of instinctive defense mechanism. We’ve bloodied them a
couple of times now, at Sirius, at Night’s Edge, and at Sol, so
you can bet that they’re going to sit up and take notice.”

“We’re going to need to . . . consider this,” Devereaux
said. “In light of the current difficulties with the Islamic

Theocracy, we must proceed . . . circumspectly. Perhaps In-
telligence can run some simulations plots, and come up with
some realistic probabilities.”

Damn. He was going to have to turn up the heat. “With
all due respect, Madam Devereaux,” he said, “that is fuck-
ing irresponsible. It’s also stupid, playing politics with the
whole of Humankind at stake!”

There was a long pause. Devereaux’s head cocked to one
side. “With all due respect what, General Alexander?”

“Eh?”

“Your filter blocked you,” Cara whispered in his mind.

“Oh, for the love of . . .” Angrily, he cleared part of the
filter program, dropping it to a lower level. The software had
decided that his choice of language left a lot to be desired,
and had edited it.

“Excuse me, Ms. Devereaux,” he said as the program
shifted to a lower level. He glanced down at himself. At least
he was still in uniform. “Social convention required that I
have my e-filters in place, lest I . . . give offense. But we
don’t have time for that nonsense now. What I said, ma’am,
was that delay, any delay—giving the matter further study,
running numbers, whatever you wish to call it—is irrespon-
sible and stupid. I believe the term my e-filter didn’t like was

‘fucking irresponsible.’ ”

“I see.” Her own e-filters were in place of course, but
they didn’t stop a certain amount of disapproval from slip-
ping through in those two short words. “And just what do
you expect us to do about this, General Alexander?”

“A raid, Madam Devereaux.” At a thought, the frozen

72

IAN DOUGLAS
view from the Argo at the moment of the ship’s destruc-
tion vanished, and was replaced by the galactic map he’d
been studying before the delegates had arrived. The view-
point zoomed in on the irregular green glow of human
space, on the path of the Argo, and on a tight scattering of
red pinpoints marking the nearby systems from which the
huntership might have emerged—Nu Andromeda, Epsi-
lon Trianguli, and a few others. “What the Marines call a
sneak-and-peek.”

The display continued to animate as he spoke, the view-
point zooming in until Epsilon Trianguli showed as a hot,
white sphere rather than as another star. An A2 type star,

Epsilon Trianguli appeared imbedded in a far-flung corona
of luminous gas, and even in simulation was almost too bril-
liant to look at directly.

A hypothetical planet swung into view, a sharp-edged
crescent bowed away from the star, attended by a clutter of
sickle-shaped moons. A swarm of dark gray and metallic
slivers materialized out of emptiness and scattered across
the system. Other planets appeared in the distance, along
with the gleaming, wedding-band hoop of a stargate.

“First in are AI scouts, to show us the terrain. We also
need to know if there’s a stargate in the target system. The
scouts will find out if there is a Xul presence in the system,
and map it out so we’re not going in blind.”

Obedient to his lecture, a Xul station revealed itself,
menacing and black, positioned to guard the stargate. A
swarm of new objects entered the scene, dull-black ovoids,
descending toward the Xul structure in waves. Pinpoints of
white light flickered and strobed against the surface in a
silent representation of space combat.

“The Marines go in hot, wearing marauder armor and
accompanied by highly specialized penetrator AIs,” Alex-
ander went on. “Details depend on what the scouts turn up,
of course, but the idea will be to insert a Marine raiding
party into the Xul, grab as much information as we can, and
blow the thing to hell.”

On cue, the camera point of view pulled back sharply,
just as the Xul base in the scene, in complete silence, det-

STAR STRIKE

73
onated—a searing, fast-expanding ball of white light that
briefly outshone the brilliant local sun.

“Very pretty,” Devereaux said as the display faded into
darkness once more. The noumenal scene flowed and shifted
once more, becoming a more conventional virtual encounter
space. “But just what would be the point?”

They now appeared to be seated around the perimeter of
a sunken conversation pit three meters across, the represen-
tation of the Galaxy as seen from above spiraled about itself
at their feet. Here, the individual icons all expanded into
images of people, though their electronic secretaries and

EAs remained visible only as tiny, darting icons of yellow
light orbiting their human masters. The walls and ceiling of
the room appeared lost in darkness.

“The point, Madam Devereaux, is to avoid being put on
the defensive again. We were on the defensive in 2314. You
know what happened.”

‘Yes,” General Samuels said. “We beat them.”

“At a terrible cost, sir. Earth’s population in 2314 was . . .

what?” Alexander pulled the data down from the Net. “Fif-
teen point seven billion people. Four billion died within the
space of a few hours during the Xul bombardment. Four
billion. Exact numbers were never available, given the chaos
of the next few decades, but an estimated one to two billion
more froze during the Endless Winter, or starved to death,
or died of disease or internal electronics failure or just plain
despair.”

“We know our history, General,” Devereaux said.

“Then you should know that the human race came within
a hair’s breadth of becoming extinct. Over a third of the
human race died, murdered by one Xul huntership. One! We
were lucky to be able to destroy it. And if General Garroway
hadn’t backtracked the Intruder through the Sirius Stargate
to Night’s Edge and found a way to take out the base there,
we wouldn’t be sitting here now discussing it!”

“And you know, General,” Devereaux said, “that the cur-
rent political situation may preclude a major operation such
as you seem to be suggesting. The Monists and the Starborn
both are threatening to side with the Islamic Theocracy. If

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IAN DOUGLAS
they do, the Commonwealth will fall.” She spread her hands.

“If that happens, how are we supposed to defend ourselves
if the Xul do come?”

“I submit, Madam Devereaux, that the Human species
right now has more to worry about than the exact nature
of God. If we do not take a stand, an active stand, against
the Xul threat, if we don’t deal with it now, while we have a
chance of doing so, then none of the rest matters. We’ll be
settling the question of God’s nature by meeting Him face
to face!”

“He does have a point, Marie,” another delegate in the
circle said. He wore the uniform and the corona of a Fleet
admiral, and the alphanumerics that popped up when Al-
exander looked at him identified him as Admiral Joseph

Mason. As he spoke, the light brightened around him, draw-
ing the eye. “We can’t ignore what’s happened out there.”

“Five hundred light-years, Admiral. It’s so far away.”

“It’s a very short step for the Xul, Marie. We’ve survived
so far only because we’ve been lost within . . . what? Ten
million stars, or so. Even the Xul can’t pay close attention to
every one. But we know the Xul. We know what they did to
the Builders. And to the An. And probably to some ungodly
number of other civilizations and species scattered across
the Galaxy over the past half million years or so. If they
locate Sol and the other worlds of human space, they will do
the same to us.”

The light brightened around another delegate. “And I
concur, Madam Devereaux.” The speaker was a civilian, his
noumenal presentation wearing the plain white robes of a

Starborn Neognostic.

“You do, Ari?” Devereaux said, surprised. “I’d have
thought you would be solidly opposed to this kind of . . . of
interstellar adventurism.”

“I may be a Starborn,” Arimalen Daley said, inclining
his head, “but I’m not stupid. Lieutenant General Alexander
is right. We need to be careful in setting our priorities. I
believe even our Theocrat friends would agree that there are
times when religious or philosophical differences must be
set aside for the sake of simple survival.”

STAR STRIKE

75

Alexander was startled by Daley’s statement, but pleased.

He had little patience with religion, and tended to see it as
a means of denying or avoiding responsibility. Daley’s re-
sponse was . . . refreshing.

He opened a private window in his mind, accessed an e-
pedia link, and downloaded a brief background on the Star-
born, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. No . . .

he’d remembered correctly. The Starborn had been around
for two or three centuries, but had arisen out of several ear-
lier belief systems centered on The Revelation. For them,
all intelligence was One . . . and that included even the Xul.

They opposed all war in general, and most especially war
based on a clash between opposing faiths. Within the Com-
monwealth Senate, they’d been the most vocal of the oppo-
nents of the military action against the Islamist Theocracy,
for just that reason.

Alexander wondered why Daley had sided with him.

For himself, Alexander had no patience whatsoever
with religion of any type. Beginning in the twentieth cen-
tury, Humankind had been wracked by religious mania of
the most divisive and destructive sort. World War III had
been brought on by Islamic fundamentalism, but other sects
and religions demanding rigid boundaries and unquestion-
ing obedience to what was imagined to be God’s will had
added their share of terror, insanity, and blood to the chaos
of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And
then had come the discoveries on Mars, of buried cities
and the Builders, of the mummified bodies of anatomically
modern humans beneath the desiccated sands of Cydonia
and Chryse.

Science fiction and the more sensationalist writers of
pop-science had long speculated that extraterrestrials had
created humans, but now there was proof. The Builders had
tinkered with the genetics of Homo erectus in order to create
a new species— Homo sapiens. It had always been assumed
that if such proof was ever uncovered, it would once and for
all end the tyranny and the comfort of religion. If God was a
spaceman, there scarcely was need for His church. Religion
would die.

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IAN DOUGLAS

Surprisingly, the opposite had happened. Though the
older, traditional faiths had been badly shaken, the discover-
ies on Mars and elsewhere, far from destroying religion, had
before long fostered new sects, religions, cults, and philoso-
phies by the dozens, by the hundreds, some of them bizarre
in the extreme. Throughout the first half of the new millen-
nium, new faiths had spawned and vied and warred with one
another, some accepting the vanished Builders or even the
still-extant An or N’mah as gods, creators of Humankind,
if not the cosmos. Others—in particular the stricter, more
fundamentalist branches of Christianity and Islam—had
adhered even more closely to the original texts, and con-
demned the nonhumans as demons.

Things had stabilized somewhat over the past few centu-
ries. The attack on Earth had killed so many, had so terribly
wounded civilization as a whole, that few religions, old or
new, could deal with it, save in apocalyptic terms. And when

Earth had, after all, survived, when Humankind began to
rebuild and the expected second Xul attack had not materi-
alized, many of the more extreme and strident of the sects
had at last faded away.

There remained, however, some thousands of religions

. . . but for the most part they fell into one of two major
branches of organized spirituality, defined by their attitude
toward the Xul. The Transcendents, who represented most
of the older faiths plus a number of newer religions empha-
sizing the nature of the Divine as separate and distinct from

Humankind, either ignored the Xul entirely, or associated
them with the Devil, enemies of both Man and God.

The Emanists embraced religions and philosophies em-
phasizing that god arose from within Man, as a metasentient
emanation arising from the minds of all humans, or even of
all intelligence everywhere in the universe. For them, the

Xul were a part of the Divine . . . or, at the least, His instru-
ment for bringing about the evolution of Humankind. For
most Emanists, the key to surviving the Xul was to follow
the lead of the An on Ishtar—keep a low profile, roll with
the punches, abjure pride and any technological activity that
might attract Xul notice. The hope was that, like the Biblical

STAR STRIKE

77

Angel of Death, the Xul would “pass over” humanity once
more, as it had before in both recent and ancient history.

While not as widespread as the Transcendents, Emanist
religions were popular with large segments of the population
on Earth, especially with the Antitechnics and the various

Neoprimitive and Back-to-Earth parties. Neognostics like

Daley even advocated a complete renunciation of all activi-
ties off the surface of the Earth, especially now that the ice
was retreating once more.

That was why Alexander—and Devereaux too, evi-
dently—were surprised at his position.

As Alexander closed the e-pedia window, he realized

Daley was still speaking, and that he was looking at him as
he did so. “Whatever the tenets of my faith might be,” the

Neognostic was saying, “Humankind cannot evolve, cannot
grow to meet its potential, and can never contribute to the
idea we know as God if we as a species become extinct.

So long as we remained beneath Xul notice, survival and
growth both were possible. But now?” He spread his hands.

“I dislike the idea. My whole being rebels against the very
idea of war. But . . . if there is to be war, better it be out there,
five hundred light-years away, than here among the worlds
of Man.”

“Good God,” General Samuels said in the silence that fol-
lowed this speech. “I thought it was nuts including a Paxist
on the Advisory Council, Ari.” The Paxists included those
who believed in peace-at-any-price. “But you’re okay!”

“The Paxists,” Devereaux said sternly, “were invited be-
cause they represent the views of a large minority of the

Commonwealth population. Very well. General Alexander,
thank you for your presentation. The Council will retire now
to its private noumenon and vote the question.”

And the Council was gone, leaving Alexander alone in
the imaginal room.

If the reaction to Daley’s speech was any indication,
though, he would need to begin preparations.

The Marines would be going to war.

6�

0810.1102

USMC Recruit Training Center

Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

1512/24:20 local time, 0156 hrs GMT

Garroway opened his eyes, blinked, and flexed his hands.

This was . . . wonderful. The crisp reality of the sensa-
tions coursing through his imaginal body was almost
overwhelming.

The hellish empty time was over.

“Pay attention, recruit! This is important!”

Warhurst’s order snapped his attention back to the exer-
cise. He tried to let the feelings flow through his mind, but
to keep his focus on the scene around him.

The landscape was barren and unforgivingly rugged, a
volcanic mountain of black rock and sand cratered and torn
by a devastating firestorm and draped in drifting patches
of smoke. He was standing in the middle of a battle . . . an
ancient battle, one with unarmored men carrying primitive
firearms as they struggled up the mountain’s flank. Gun-
fire thundered—not the hiss and crack of lasers and plasma
weapons, but the deeper-throated boom and rattle of slug-
throwers, punctuated moment to moment by the heavy thud
of high explosives.

Something—a fragment of high-velocity metal—whined
past his ear, the illusion so realistic he flinched. He reminded
himself that he had nothing to fear, however. This panorama
of blood, confusion, and noise was being downloaded into

STAR STRIKE

79
his consciousness from the RTC historical network, the
sights and sounds real enough to convince him he really
was standing on that tortured mountainside. But the Ma-
rines around him were noumenal simulations—literally all
in Garroway’s head. Two days earlier he’d received the nano
injections which had swiftly grown into his new Corps-issue
headware, and this was his first test of its capabilities.

“Move on up the slope,” Warhurst whispered in his ear.

He obeyed, feeling the gritty crunch of black gravel beneath
his feet. A Marine lay on his back a few meters away, eyes
staring into the sky, a gaping, bloody hole in his chest. Gar-
roway could see bare ribs protruding from the wound.

It’s not real, he told himself. It’s a sim.

“Yeah, it’s a simulation, recruit,” Warhurst told him. Gar-
roway started. He hadn’t realized that the DI could hear him.

“But it is real, or it was. These Marines are members of the

28th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division. They really
lived—and died—to take this island.”

From the crest of the volcanic mountain, Garroway could
see the whole island, a roughly triangular sprawl of black
sand, rock, and jungle extending toward what his inner com-
pass told him was the north to northeastern horizon. Off-
shore, hundreds of ships—old-style seagoing ships, rather
than military spacecraft—lay along the eastern horizon.

A few moved closer in, periodically spewing orange flame
and clouds of smoke from turret-mounted batteries, and the
beaches near the foot of the mountain were littered with
hundreds of small, dark-colored craft like oblong boxes that
had the look of so many ugly beetles slogging through the
surf.

“The date,” Warhurst told him, “is 2302, in the year 170
of the Marine Era. That’s 23 February 1945, for you people
who still think in civilian. The mountain is Suribachi, a dor-
mant volcanic cone 166 meters high at the southern end of
a place called Sulfur Island—Iwo Jima in Japanese. For the
past four days the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions, plus two
regiments of the 3rd, have been assaulting this unappeal-
ing bit of real estate in order to take it away from the Japa-
nese Empire. For two years, now, the United States has been

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IAN DOUGLAS
island-hopping across the Pacific Ocean, closing toward

Japan. Iwo Jima is the first territory they’ve reached that is
actually a prefecture of Japan; the mayor of Tokyo is also the
mayor of Iwo. That means that for the Japanese defending
this island, this is the first actual landing on the sacred soil
of their homeland. They are defending every meter in one of
the fiercest battles in the war to date.

“Yesterday, the 28th Marines started up the slope of Su-
ribachi which, as you can see, has a commanding view of
the entire island, and looks straight down on the landing
beaches. In an entire day of fighting, they advanced per-
haps 200 meters, then fended off a Japanese charge during
the night. They’ve suffered heavy casualties. Lieutenant

General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander,
has honeycombed the entire island, which measures just 21
square kilometers, with tunnels, bunkers, and spider holes.

The defenders, 22,000 of them, have been ordered to fight to
the death . . . and most of them will.

“This battle will go down as one of the most famous ac-
tions in the history of the Corps. In all of World War II, it
was the only action in which the Americans actually suf-
fered more casualties than the enemy—26,000, with 6,825
of those KIA. The Japanese have 22,000 men on the island.

Out of those, 1081 will survive.

“The battle will last until 2503, a total of thirty-seven
days, before the island is declared secure. Almost one quar-
ter of all of the Medals of Honor awarded to Marines during

World War II—twenty-seven in all—were awarded to men
who participated in this battle.

“Ah. There’s what we came up here to see. . . .”

Warhurst led the recruits farther up the shell-blasted
slope. At the landward side of the summit, a small number
of Marines were working at something, huddled along a
length of pipe.

“The mountain now, after a fierce naval and air bom-
bardment, appears cleared of enemy soldiers, and several
patrols have reached the top. Half an hour ago, a small flag
was raised on the summit of the mountain to demonstrate
that the mountain has been secured, but now a larger flag

STAR STRIKE

81
has been sent to the top. The men you see over there are part
of a forty-man patrol from E Company, Second Battalion,

28th Marines, of the 5th Marine Division, under the com-
mand of Lieutenant Harold Schrier.

“Those men over there are Sergeant Michael Strank,

Corporal Harlon Block, PFC Rene Gagnon, PFC Ira Hayes,
and PFC Franklin Sousley, all United States Marines. The
sixth man is Navy, a Pharmacy Mate—what they later called

Navy Hospital Corpsmen, P.M./2 John Bradley.

“Of those six men, three—Strank, Block, and Sousley—
will be killed a few days from now, in heavy fighting at the
north end of the island. P.M./2 Bradley will be wounded by
shrapnel from a mortar round.”

The men completed doing whatever it was they were
doing to the pipe. Grasping it, moving together, they dug one
end into a hole in the gravel and lifted the other end high.

A flag unfurled with the breeze; nearby, one man turned
suddenly and snapped an image with a bulky, old-style 2-D
camera, while another man stood filming the scene.

The whole flag raising took only seconds. As the flag
fluttered from the now upright pipe, however, Garroway
could hear the cheering—from other Marines on the crest
of Suribachi and, distantly, from men on the lower reaches
of the island to the north. The rattle of gunfire seemed to
subside momentarily, replaced by a new thunder . . . the low,
drawn-out roar from thousands of voices, so faint it nearly
was lost on the wind.

“Have a peek down there on that beach,” Warhurst told
them. As Garroway turned and looked, it seemed as though
his vision became sharply telescopic, zooming in precipi-
tously, centering on a party of men wading ashore from one
of the boxlike landing craft. Two of the figures appeared to
be important; they were unarmed, though they wore helmets
and life preservers like the others around them. One took the
elbow of the other, pointing up the slope toward Garroway’s
position. He appeared jubilant.

“That,” Warhurst continued, “is the secretary of the

Navy, James Forrestal, just now coming ashore with Marine

General Holland ‘Howlin’ Mad’ Smith. When they see the

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IAN DOUGLAS
flag up here, Forrestal turns to the general and says ‘Hol-
land, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine

Corps for the next five hundred years.’ ”

There was a surreal aspect to this history lesson—espe-
cially in the way Warhurst was describing events in the pres-
ent and in the future tense, as though these scenes Garroway
was experiencing weren’t AI recreations of something that
had happened 937 years ago, but were happening now.

“As it happens, the future of the Marine Corps was far
from secure,” Warhurst told them. “Only a couple of years
after this battle, the President of the United States attempted
to enact legislation that would have closed the Corps down.

He referred to the Marines as ‘the Navy’s police force,’ and
sought to merge them with the Army. The public outcry over
this plan blocked it . . . but from time to time, cost-cutting
politicians looked for ways to slash the military budget by
eliminating the Marines.”

The simulation had continued as Warhurst spoke, the
primitively armed and equipped Marines on that volcanic
slope continuing to move about as the flag, an archaic scrap
of cloth with red and white stripes and ranks of stars on a
blue field, continued to flutter overhead.

Gradually, though, the scene began to fade in Garroway’s
mind. He was sitting once again in a simcast amphitheater
back at the training center on Mars, his recliner moving up-
right along with all of the others arrayed in circles about a
central stage. The image of six men raising a flag continued
to hover overhead, a holographic projection faintly luminous
in the theater’s dim light.

Warhurst paced the stage, lecturing, but with an animated
passion. This, Garroway thought, was not just information
to be transmitted to another class of recruits, but something
burning in Warhurst’s brain and heart.

“As Forrestal predicted, however,” Warhurst went on,

“the Corps did endure for the next five hundred years—and
then for over three hundred years after that. For most of that
time, the politicians tended to dislike us . . . or at least they
never seemed to know what to do with us. We’ve been on the
budgetary chopping block more times than we can count.

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83

Civilians tend to like us, however. They see us as the holders
of an important legacy—one embracing duty, honor, faith-
fulness. Semper fi. Always faithful.

“In fact, though, the raising of the flag on Suribachi prob-
ably had less to do with the Corps’ survival than did certain
other factors. A century after the Battle of Iwo Jima, we left
the shores of our home planet, and discovered the Ancient
ruins on Mars and on Earth’s moon, and later at places like

Chiron and Ishtar. Both the Builders and the An left a lot
of high-tech junk lying around on worlds they visited in the
past . . . the Xul, too, for that matter, if you count what we
found out on Europa. Started something like a twenty-first-
century gold rush, as every country on Earth with a space
capability tried to get people out there to see what they could
find. Xenoarcheology became the hot science, since it was
thought that reverse-engineering some of that stuff could
give us things like faster-than-light travel or FTL radio. The

Navy, logically enough, became the service branch that ran
the ships to get out here . . . and where the Navy went, the

Marines came along. The Battle of Cydonia. The Battle of

Tsiolkovsky. The Battle of Ishtar. The Battles of the Sirius

Gate, and of Night’s Edge. ‘From the Halls of Montezuma,
to the ocher sands of Mars.’ We’ve written our legacy in
blood across a thousand years and on battlefields across two
hundred worlds.

“And in all that time, and on all those worlds, the Marine

Corps has done one thing . . . what we’ve always done. We
win battles!

“And you, recruits, have come here to Mars in order to
learn how to do just that.”

Garroway felt a stirring of pride at that—not at the prom-
ise that they would win battles, but at the way Warhurst was
addressing them now. This was now the twelfth week of
training, with just four more weeks to go. At some point
during the last couple of months—and Garroway honestly
could not remember when—Warhurst had stopped calling
the men and women of Recruit Company 4102 children, and
started calling them recruits.

Step by step, their civilian individuality had been broken

84

IAN DOUGLAS
down; step by step Warhurst and the other DIs had been
building them back up, forging them into . . . something
new. Garroway wasn’t sure what the difference was yet, but
he felt the difference, a sense of confidence, of belonging
that he’d never before known.

The feeling that he belonged had just taken a major boost
skyward, of course. The nano injected into his system on

0710 had grown into standard-Corps issue cereblink hard-
ware, and now, for the first time in three months, he was
again connected.

It had been a rough time without connections—no down-
loads, no direct comm. Or, rather, downloads and incoming
comm messages had entered his brain via his ears and his
eyes, without mediation or enhancement by AI software. It
had been like starting all over again, learning how to learn,
rather than allowing headware and resident AIs to sort and
file his memories for him.

He had a new personal electronic assistant, too . . . or,
rather, a Corps platoon EA guide he shared with everyone
else in the company. The EA’s name was Achilles; Warhurst
had told them to think of him as a kind of narrowly focused
platoon sergeant. Achilles was a bit short in the personality
department, but the system was very fast, very efficient, and
was working hard at its first task, helping him learn how to
get the most out of the new headware.

Later, at evening chow, he discovered one down side to

Achilles.

“So, whatcha think of the new headware?” he asked

Sandre Kenyon, a recruit who’d been born and raised in one
of the new arcologies off the coast of Pennsylvania. She’d
been a vir-simmer, a programmer of simulation AIs, before
she’d joined the Corps. He followed her out of the chow
line and toward a couple of empty seats at one of the tables.

Noise clattered and echoed around them; meals were among
the very few times when recruits were free to socialize with
other recruits, at least after the first month of training.

“It’s okay, I guess,” she said. “It’s gonna take some get-
ting used to, though.”

“I know. It’s so damned fast. . . .”

STAR STRIKE

85

“It’s also damned creepy,” she told him.

“What do you mean?”

“Having your platoon sergeant perched on your shoulder
every minute of every day? Watching everything you do?

Even everything you think? And reporting it all back to HQ-

RTC, complete with images in glorious color and infrared?

I don’t know about you, Aiden, but there are a few things I
do or think about doing that I don’t care to share with half
the base, y’know?”

“Oh . . .”

He’d not thought about that aspect of things, at least not
before now.

In fact, privacy was an alien concept in boot camp. Male
and female recruits trained together, shared the same bar-
racks, and used the same head. Toilets had stalls but no
doors, and no recruit was ever really alone for more than a
few moments at a time. In fact, come to think of it, standing
barracks fire watch in the middle of the night was probably
the closest any recruit came to having some private time—
but then you never knew when the sergeant of the guard was
going to show up on one of his rounds.

Mostly, it wasn’t a hardship. The recruits were too damned
busy, moving at a flat run from reveille to taps every day, for
it to be a problem . . . and most human cultures accepted
casual social nudity as the norm.

“Is Achilles listening to you gripe about it now?”

She shrugged. “I asked it. It told me it monitored everyone
in the company for breaches of regulations and compliance
to orders . . . but that it didn’t record or transmit anything
else. It . . . it’s a machine. A program, rather, so I guess it
shouldn’t bother me. Still . . . how do we know?”

Garroway began digging into his meal—a nanassembled
steak indistinguishable in taste and texture from live steaks
culture-grown in the Ring agros. One thing you had to say
about the Marines: they fed well.

He assumed Sandre was talking about sex. Technically,
fraternization between recruits was forbidden, though in
fact the authorities didn’t seem to pay much attention to oc-
casional and harmless breaches of the rules. If a recruit on

86

IAN DOUGLAS
fire watch was caught in the rack with a fuck buddy, they
both would probably be bounced out of the Corps and back
to Earth or wherever they’d come from so fast their eyes
would be spinning in their heads, but Garroway knew that
several recruits in Company 4102 were enjoying one anoth-
er’s physical companionship—at least if their break-time
war stories could be believed.

His only question was how they found the time—or the
energy—with the daily schedule that ruled their lives—up
at zero-dark thirty, followed by eighteen hours of marching,
drilling, classroom work, lectures, testing, and download-
ing, with lights out at 2200 hours.

Having a personal daemon was nothing new. Most
humans had them, the only hold-outs being the various neo-
luddite or neoprimitive cultures which had abandoned high-
tech for religious, esthetic, or artistic reasons. Achilles was
a daemon, nothing more. In fact, he seemed just like Aide,
except that he was more powerful, faster, and he linked all
of the recruits in Company 4102 into a close-knit electronic
network.

But he had to admit that Sandre had a point. Having

Achilles watching him was just like having Warhurst
watching him, except that the watching was taking place
every second of every day. His stomach tightened at the
thought.

“Recruit Kenyon is correct,” a voice whispered in his
mind.

Garroway looked up, startled. “Achilles?”

“What?” Sandre asked. Garroway hadn’t realized he’d
spoken the name aloud. He waved his hand back and forth,
requesting her silence.

“Affirmative, ” the voice continued. “Think of me as a
part of yourself, not as a spy for your superiors. ”

But you do report to the DI shack, don’t you? This time,

Garroway thought the question silently, employing the
mindspeak he’d always used with Aide.

“Technically, yes, but only in matters involving gross
negligence of duty. In any case, Marines are supposed to be
of superior moral character. By this point in your training,

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87
those with serious moral flaws have already been weeded
out. ”

“Oh . . .”

Company 4102 had dwindled a lot in the past few weeks,
it was true. Only forty-five recruits remained out of the over
one hundred who’d originally mustered at Noctis Laby-
rinthus. But he’d assumed the DORs—the Drop Out Re-
quests—had quit because they couldn’t get along without
their headware.

“That is a large part of it, ” Achilles agreed. “One aspect
of moral character is the ability to rely on yourself rather
than on technology. ”

Carefully, Garroway took another bite of faux steak and
chewed, thoughtful. Achilles seemed to be a bit more domi-
nant than Aide had been. And the damned thing was read-
ing his thoughts, rather than waiting for him to encode them
as mindspeak.

“You will simply have to learn to trust me, Garroway, ”

Achilles told him. “Trust that I am not sharing your thoughts
with others. ”

“Unless I deserve it.”

“Do you always talk to yourself?” Sandre asked him.

Achilles, tell her I’m holding a conversation with you.

A moment later, Sandre’s eyes grew very large. “Did you
send that?”

He nodded. “Pretty slick, huh?”

“Damn it, Garroway!” she snapped. “Get out of my
head!” Abruptly, she stood, picked up her tray, and walked
away. Garroway considered calling to her, but decided that
using telepathy would just make matters worse.

They were all going to have to work with the new tech-
nology for a bit, in order to get used to it.

Exactly, Achilles told him. He could have sworn the AI
sounded smug.

* * *

88

IAN DOUGLAS

Married Enlisted Housing

USMC Recruit Training Center

Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

1924/24:20 local time, 0620 hrs GMT

Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst stepped out of the flyer and
onto the landing deck outside his home. It was a small
place, but with lots of exterior spaces and enclosed garden
patios surrounding a double plasdome growing from a
canyon wall. Other base housing modules were visible up
and down the canyon, extruded from the ancient sandstone
walls.

A billion years ago, this part of Mars had been under a
sea a kilometer deep; the relentless rise of the Tharsis Bulge,
however, had lifted the Noctis Labyrinthus high and dry; as
the water drained away, it had carved the maze of channels
from the soft stone. The northern ocean had rolled again,
briefly, under the touch of the Builders half a million years
ago, but by that time the Noctis Labyrinthus was far above
mean sea level.

Apparently, the Builders had not colonized this part of

Mars, restricting their activities to Cydonia, far to the north,
to Chryse Planitia, and to Utopia on the far side of the planet.

Some of the base personnel spent off hours pacing up and
down the canyon with metal detectors, however. A handful
of people out here had made fortunes with the chance find
of a fragment of cast-off xenotech.

Warhurst never bothered with that sort of thing, however.

His career—the Corps—was everything.

A fact that was making things difficult at home.

“Honey?” He stepped in off the deck, dropping his cover
on a table. “I’m home.”

The place seemed empty, and he queried the house AI.

“Where is everybody?”

Julie and Eric are home, the house’s voice whispered in
his mind. Donal and Callie are still at the base.

Warhurst was part of a group marriage and, as was in-
creasingly the case nowadays, all of the other partners in
the relationship were also Marines. It was simpler that way

STAR STRIKE

89

. . . and the partners tended to be more understanding than
civilians. Usually.

A door hissed open and Julie emerged from the bed-
room. She was naked, and she looked angry. “Well, well.

The prodigal is home. Decided to come visit the family for
a change?”

“Don’t start, Julie.”

“Don’t start what?”

“Look, I know I haven’t been home much lately—”

“I know that too.” She ran a hand through her short hair.

“Look, Marine, I’m having sex with Eric, so give us some
privacy. Fix yourself dinner. When Don and Cal get home,
we need to talk, the five of us.”

“What do you—”

But she’d already turned away and padded back into the
bedroom.

Damn.

It had been a few days since he’d come home. How long?

He pulled a quick check of his personal calendar, and saw
the answer. Eight days.

Damn it, Julie knew the score. When a new recruit com-
pany started up, he spent all of his time with the company,
at least for the first few weeks. After that, he shared the duty
with the other DIs, sleeping in the DI shack, or in one of the
senior NCO quads across the grinder one night out of four.

But even late in the training regime, there were particular
times when it was important that he be there. This past week
had been the last week for the recruits of 4102 in naked time,
without their civilian headware, a time when lots of them
came close to cracking. He needed to be there, to see them
through. He’d almost stayed over tonight as well, but Cor-
rolly had insisted that he and Amanate could handle things.

He wished he’d stayed.

Julie’s flat statement about a family meeting probably
meant an ultimatum, and that probably meant a formal re-
quest that he move back into the BOQ, the Bachelor Of-
ficers’ Quarters.

In other words, a divorce.

It had been coming for a long time. He knew she’d been

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IAN DOUGLAS
wanting to talk to him about the marriage, and his part in it,
for a long time, but he’d been hoping to postpone it, at least
until after 4102 had graduated. Damn it, he didn’t have time
for this nonsense, for all this sturm und drang, and Julie
ought to know that. He didn’t have the emotional stamina
to deal with it now, either. There was just too much on his
plate. Angry, he walked into the kitchen unit and punched
up a meal.

Warhurst was the most recent addition to the Tamalyn-

Danner line marriage, having been invited in by Julie just
fifteen months ago. Like many Corps weddings taking place
on Mars, the vows had been declared, posted, and celebrated
at Garroway Hall, at Cydonia, and half of RTC command
had attended.

Marriages outside the Corps were discouraged. Not for-
bidden . . . but discouraged. A Marine might be at any given
duty station for a year or two, but then he or she might be
deployed across a hundred light-years, or end up on board a

Navy ship plying a slow run between stargates. The routine
played merry hell with traditional relationships.

At that, it was better than in the bad old days, before FTL
and stargates, when a 4.3 light-year hop to Chiron took five
and a half years objective, which meant a couple of years
subjective spent in cybe-hibe stasis. Back then, Marines
were assigned on the basis of their famsits, their family situ-
ations—whether or not they were married, had parents or
other close relatives, and how closely tied they were psycho-
logically to the Motherworld.

Long ago, the Corps had adopted the habit of assign-
ing command staff as discrete groups, called command
constellations, to avoid breaking up good working teams
through transfers and redeployments. A similar set of regu-
lations now governed marital relationships. While the Corps
couldn’t promise to keep everyone in the family together—
especially in group marriages that might number ten or
more people—the AIs overseeing deployments did their
best, even shuffling personnel from one MarDiv to another,
when necessary, to make the numbers come out even. The
tough part was when kids were involved. Each major base

STAR STRIKE

91
had its own crèche, nurseries, and schools, but Navy ships
on deep survey or remote listening outposts at the fringes of
known Xul systems didn’t have the resources for that kind of
luxury. Those assignments still required Marines with Fam-
sits of two or better.

What none of this took into account was the workload
at established bases like Noctis-L. Training a company of
raw recruits, breaking them out of their smug little civilian
molds and building Marines out of what was left—that was
a full-time job, and then some. Warhurst and five assistant

DIs supervised Company 4102, now down to just forty-three
recruits, and still it was never enough.

He closed his eyes. That one kid, Collins. After six weeks
without her implants, she’d just . . . snapped. The messy and
very public suicide had hit everyone hard, and the DI staff
especially had been badly stressed. Damn it, he should have
been there. . . .

Warhurst leaned back in his chair, his meal half finished
but unwanted. He summoned a cup of coffee, though, and
waited while a servo extended it to him from a nearby wall-
mar. He knew there was nothing he could have done, and
the board of inquiry had almost routinely absolved him and
his staff of blame. But . . . he should have been there. Col-
lins had stolen that thermite grenade one evening from a
malfunctioning training arms locker when he’d been here,
at home.

Angrily, he pushed the thought aside, then mentally
clocked on the wallscreen, looking for the evening news. He
wanted an external distraction, rather than an internal feed,
telling himself he needed to keep his internal channels clear,
in case there was a call from the base.

Which was pure theriashit, and he knew it. An emergency
call would override any feed he had going. And either Achil-
les, the company AI, or Hector, who was reserved for the
training staff, could talk to him at any time. He was avoid-
ing the real issue, which was the strain within his marriage.

Damned right I’m avoiding it, he thought. And a good
job I’m doing of it, too.

The news was dominated by the war, of course. The cap-

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IAN DOUGLAS
ture of Alighan was being hailed in the Senate as the de-
fining victory of the war, the victory that would bring the

Theocrats to their senses and bring them to the conference
table.

“In other military news,” the announcer said, her three-
meter-tall face filling the wall, “the Interstellar News Web
have received an as yet unconfirmed report of hostile con-
tact with what may be a Xul huntership outside of the Hu-
mankind Frontier. If true, this will be the first contact with
the Xul in over 550 years.

“For this report, we go livefeed to Ian Castriani at Marine

Corps Skybase headquarters in paraspace. Ian?”

The announcer’s face faded away, replaced by a young
man standing in the Public Arena of the headquarters sta-
tion. He looked intense, determined, and excited.

And what he had to say brought a cold, churning lump to
the pit of Warhurst’s gut.

7�

2410.1102

Marine Listening Post

Puller 659 Stargate

1554 hrs GMT

Lieutenant Tera Lee unlinked from the feed and blinked in
the dim light of the comdome. “Shit,” she said, and made a
face. “Shit!”

“What’s the problem, sweetheart?” Lieutenant Gerard

Fitzpatrick, her partner on the watch, asked.

She ignored the familiarity. Fitzie was a jerk, but a
reasonably well meaning one. She hadn’t had to deck him
yet. Yet. . . .

“That’s four transgate drones we’ve lost contact with in
the past ten minutes,” she said, checking the main board,
then rechecking the communications web for a fault. Ev-
erything on this side of the Gate was working perfectly.

“Something’s going down over there. I don’t like it.”

“You link through to the old man?”

“Chesty’s doing that now,” she told him. She wrinkled
her nose. “I smell another sneakover.”

“Yeah, well, it’s your turn,” he said, shrugging. Then he
brightened. “Unless you wanna—”

“Fuck you, Fitzie,” she said, keeping her voice light.

“Exactly.”

“Forget it, Marine. I have standards.”

He sighed theatrically. “You wound me, sweetheart.”

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IAN DOUGLAS

“Call me ‘sweetheart’ again and you’ll know what being
wounded is like, jerkface. If you survive.”

She dropped back into the linknet before he could make
another rejoinder.

The star system known to Marine Intelligence as Puller

659 was about as nondescript as star systems could get—a
cool, red dwarf sun orbited by half a dozen rock-and-ice
worlds scarcely worthy of the name, and a single Neptune-
sized gas giant. The French astronomers who’d catalogued
the system had named the world Anneau, meaning Ring, and
the red dwarf Étoile d’Anneau, Ringstar. None of Ringstar’s
planets possessed native life or showed signs of ever having
been life-bearing. And despite frequent sweeps, no one had
ever found any xenoarcheological tidbits, none whatsoever,
save one.

And that one was why the Marine listening post was
here. As Lee linked through to another teleoperated probe,
she could see it in the background—a vast, gold-silver ring
resembling a wedding band out of ancient tradition, but
twenty kilometers across.

Just who or what had created the Stargates remained
one of the great unanswered riddles of xenoarcheological
research. Most academics, striving for the simplest possible
view of things, assumed that the Builders—that long-van-
ished federation of starfaring civilizations half a million
years ago—had created them, but there was no proof of that.

It was equally likely that the things were millions of years
old, that they’d been old already when the Builders had first
come on the scene . . . back about the same time that the
brightest creature on Earth was a clever tool-user that some-
day would receive the name Homo erectus.

Whoever or whatever had built the things evidently had
scattered them across the entire Galaxy. Gates were known
to exist in systems outside the Galactic plane; Night’s Edge
was such a place, where the sweep of the Galaxy’s spiral
arms filled half the sky. Gate connected Gate in a network
still neither understood nor mapped. Each Gate possessed a
pair of Jupiter-massed black holes rotating in opposite direc-
tions at close to the speed of light; shifting tidal stresses set

STAR STRIKE

95
up by the counter-rotating masses opened navigable path-
ways from one Gate to another, allowing passage across
tens of thousands of light-years in an eye’s blink. More, the
vibrational frequencies of those planetary masses could be
tuned, allowing one Gate to connect with any of several
thousand alternate Gates.

The alien N’mah, first contacted in 2170, had been
living inside the Gate discovered in the Sirius system, 8.6
light-years from Earth. Though they’d lost the technology
required for faster-than-light drives, they’d learned a little
about Gate technology, and they’d taught Humankind how
to use the Gates—at least after a fashion. Thanks to them,

Marines had scored important victories over the Xul, in

Cluster Space, and at Night’s Edge.

If it had simply been a matter of destroying Stargates to
keep the Xul out of human space, things would have been
far simpler. Unfortunately, it turned out that there was more
than one way to outpace light. The Xul used the Gates ex-
tensively—indeed, a large minority of those academics felt
that the Xul were the original builders of the Stargates—but
their hunterships could also slip from star to star in days or
weeks without benefit of the Gates.

In the past five centuries, Humans had learned at last
how to harness quantum-state vacuum energies and liber-
ate inconceivable free energy, and how to apply that energy
to the Quantum Sea in order to achieve trans- c pseudove-
locities—high multiples of the speed of light. They’d located
some dozens of separate Stargates, and sent both robotic and
manned probes through to chart the accessible spaces on the
far side.

Most probes found only another Stargate, usually cir-
cling a distant star, like Puller 659, with lifeless worlds or
no worlds at all. A few led to planetary systems possessing
earthlike worlds, though, so far, no other sentient species
had been found this way, and, in accord with the Treaty of

Chiron, none had been opened to human colonization.

A very few, mercifully few, opened into star systems oc-
cupied by the Xul.

The Ringstar Gate at Puller 659 was one such. One of the

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IAN DOUGLAS
regions accessed through the Puller Gate was in a system
dominated by a hot, type A star, seething with deadly radia-
tion burning off the galactic core, and host to a major Xul
base.

As was the case every time a Xul base was discovered,
a Marine listening post had been constructed close by the

Puller 659 Gate, and a careful watch kept. Periodically,

AI-controlled probes were sent through the Gate to record
signals and images from the Xul base. The probes were
tiny—the size of volleyballs—and virtually undetectable.

The probes would slip through, make their recordings, then
double back through the Gate to make their reports.

The usual routine was to send one probe through at a
time, to minimize the chances of the reconnaissance being
detected. Faults and failures happened, however, and losing
contact with one or even two was not unusual, especially
through the turbulent gravitic storms and tides swirling
about the mouth of a Gate. But Lee had just sent the third
probe in a row through to check on number one, and its
lasercom trace—kept tight and low-power to avoid detec-
tion—had been cut off within twenty seconds of passing the

Gate interface.

Not good. Not good at all . . . especially since the laser-
com threads carried no data about what was going on down
range, save that the probe was functional.

And standing orders described in considerable detail
what happened in such cases.

It was time for a sneak-and-peek.

“Package up the log,” she told Chesty over the telence-
phalic link. “Beam it out NL. And recommend to Major To-
managa that we go on full alert.”

“Major Tomanaga is already doing so,” the base AI told
her, “and he has just authorized a level-2 reconnaissance
through to Starwall.”

“Excellent.” Starwall was the name of the system on the
other side of the Gate, the location of the Xul base.

“Will you be taking an FR-100 through the interface?”

“Yeah. Prep one for me, please.”

“Number Three is coming on-line now.”

STAR STRIKE

97

In a larger base, there would have been a standby pool
of Marine fighter pilots ready to fly recon, but the listening
post was manned by six Marines at a time, standing watch-
in-three. The main base complex was a space station orbiting
the system’s gas giant, camouflaged from detection by the
planet’s far-flung radiation belts and now almost two light-
hours away. Non-local com webs bridged that gulf instantly,
but it would be hours before fighters could get here.

Marine listening posts like Puller 659 were deliberately
kept tiny and unobtrusive; Fitzie was right, damn him. It
was her turn.

She dropped out of the link and rose from her couch.

Leaving Fitzpatrick in his commlink couch at the monitor
station, she caught an intrastation pod and dropped to the
fighter bay, two decks down. The uniform of the day was

Class-One VS, a black skinsuit that served as her vacsuit in
a depressurization emergency, so she needed only to pick up
a helmet, gloves, and LS pack on the way.

Her FR-100 Night Owl was warmed and ready for her
when she arrived.

The Night Owl was dead black, pulling at the eye, a
flat, smooth ovoid with teardrop sponsons and swellings
for drives and sensor equipment, its sleek hull designed to
absorb or safely redirect everything on the EM spectrum
from long-wave radar to short-wave x-rays. It was sophisti-
cated enough to fly itself without a human at the controls,
but Corps doctrine still emphasized the need for a human at
the controls in any situation where things might go suddenly
and catastrophically wrong. The craft was tiny—three flu-
idly streamlined meters, with a cockpit barely large enough
to receive her vacsuited body as it folded itself closely about
her and automatically made the necessary neural links.

“Link me in, Chesty,” she thought, and felt the connec-
tions open in her mind. The Night Owl’s AI was technically
a Chesty , a smaller, much more compact version of the soft-

2
ware running on the station proper. She felt a slight thump
as the Owl slid down on magnetic rails through a deck hatch
and into its launch lock.

“You are linked and ready for boost, Lieutenant,”

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IAN DOUGLAS

Chesty told her. “Lock evacuated. Station clearance for exit
granted.”

She ran through a final check on her instrument feeds,
and let the hull embracing her fade away into invisibility.

This was always the scary part, the feeling that she was
being dumped naked into hard vacuum. No amount of train-
ing, no thousands of hours of flight time could ever entirely
override that deep-seated, thoroughly human terror of the
ultimate night outside.

All systems cleared green. “Let’s do it, then.”

The drop hatch yawned and the sleek, tiny fragment of
night fell into darkness.

In her mind, Lee was flying through space unencumbered
by such incidentals as a ship or vacsuit. Above and behind
her—though such notions as up and down were suddenly
meaningless as she fell clear of the LP’s grav field—the lis-
tening post hung against the stars, a small asteroid, dust-
shrouded and almost lost in the wan light from the distant,
red pinpoint of the local sun. Ahead, the Stargate appeared
as a vast, red-gold hoop, canted at a sharp angle to the lis-
tening post, which stayed well clear of the entrance. In the

112 years that Puller 659 had been in operation, nothing
had ever emerged from that gateway other than returning

Marine probes.

But there was always that inevitable first time. . . .

Under Chesty’s guidance, the Owl’s N’mah reactionless
drive switched on, propelling it toward the Gate, which filled

Lee’s view forward now, an immense, flattened band that,
from this distance, appeared perfectly smooth and seamless.

As moments passed, however, that illusion faded, as lines
and geometric shapes became visible by the shadows cast by
the distant, bloody sun.

At ninety gravities, the Owl shot forward, and the Gate
swiftly grew larger, larger, then larger still. Shielded from
the brutal acceleration inside the tiny craft, Lee told Chesty
to maneuver closer to the ring wall as the FR-100 crossed
into the tidal field, then turned sharply, falling into the ring’s
turbulent lumen.

At the last possible moment, Chesty cut the drive, and the

STAR STRIKE

99

Owl dropped through the Gate, the red-gold-gray wall flash-
ing past Lee’s awareness, the sudden gut-twisting wrench of
gravitational tides clutching at her. . . .

And then she was through, an explosion of light bathing
her wide-open mental windows. Starwall . . .

An apt enough name. Ringstar, Puller 659, was located
in a relatively sparsely populated area of space, out in the

Orion Spur of the Cygnus Galactic Arm, just a few hundred
light-years from Sol. The Starwall system, however, was an
estimated eighteen thousand light-years closer in toward the

Galaxy’s central hub. From here, inside the dense banks of
interstellar dust and gas that enclosed the Hub and shrouded
its glow from the suburbs of the spiral arms, the galactic
core literally appeared to be a near-solid wall of stars, pre-
senting a vista like the heart of a globular cluster, but on
an impossibly vaster scale, a teeming beehive of billions of
closely packed suns, their clotted masses wreathed through
with twisted and tattered ribbons of both dark and incandes-
cent nebulae. That mass of stars had an overall reddish tinge
to it; most of the stars of the Hub were ancient Population

II suns, poor in metals, cooler than the predominantly hot,
metal-rich and spendthrift blue stars of the spiral arms.

Lee’s warning systems began their steady and expected
drumbeat. Radiation levels on this side of the Gate were
high—high enough to fry an unprotected human in seconds,
high enough to overwhelm even the Night Owl’s protective
shielding within an hour or two at most. For safety’s sake,
the clock was running; Lee had a stay-time of forty minutes
on this side of the Gate, a quite literal deadline by which she
had to return to the listening post, or die.

She scarcely noticed those warnings, however, for her at-
tention had been grabbed by a danger far more immediate.

Movement and proximity snatched at her awareness, and she
looked up, relative to her own alignment. . . .

It was a Xul huntership. Of that, there could be no doubt.

It appeared small, thanks to its distance, but her sensor
inputs were giving her a mental download giving the thing’s
range, size, mass . . . gods, it was huge.

The Xul warhsips encountered by Humankind so far had

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IAN DOUGLAS
come in a variety of sizes and configurations, but all were
enormous, well over a kilometer in length, and more often
two. The Xul, for whatever reason, liked to build big.

This model had been named the Type III by Marine Intel-
ligence, and was designated as the Nightmare class. Unlike
the slender needles of Types I and II, the Nightmare was an
immense flattened and elongated spheroid two kilometers
across, its surface pocked and marked by countless struc-
tures and surface irregularities laid out in geometric arrays
of almost fractal complexity. The Singer, discovered eight
centuries before beneath the ice of Europa’s world-ocean,
had been of this type. The monster was larger than the aster-
oid shrouding the Puller listening post . . . but was entirely
artificial, apparently grown through the Xul equivalent of
nanotechnology.

Just why they built their ships and bases on such a large
scale remained one of the deeper mysteries of Xul technol-
ogy. Encounters with the Xul over the past eight centuries
had demonstrated that they almost certainly did not possess
an organic component; as near as the various human intel-
ligence services could determine, the Xul was a gestalt of
myriad machine intelligences, some of them artificial like

AIs, but some possibly originally recorded and uploaded
into machine bodies from the organic originals millions of
years ago.

These UIs, as they were now known, Uploaded Intel-
ligences, were virtually immortal. Imbedded within the
tightly meshed and folded circuitry that filled most of the
huge Xul ships, they couldn’t be said to be truly alive, not in
the human sense, and they certainly didn’t require the life-
support systems found on any human-manned spacecraft.

Lee watched the complicated surface of the Xul mon-
ster glide slowly past—nearly ten kilometers away, near the
center of the Gate opening, but large enough even at that
range to occult the massed stars beyond like an ink-black
shadow, sharp enough and detailed enough that she felt like
she could reach up and touch it. It took her a moment to
realize that she was on a parallel course; like her, it had
only recently emerged from the Stargate behind her and was

STAR STRIKE

101
also moving into the Starwall system, but at a slightly slower
speed so that she was catching up with and slowly passing
it. From her perspective, it seemed to her that the Xul vessel
was standing still, or even moving past her in the other di-
rection, toward the Gate.

The Nightmare’s presence suggested answers to several
questions. This side of the Gate must have been retuned by
the Xul to another Gate, one other than the one at Puller 659.

As a result, the four missing probes had been lost either be-
cause they’d passed through the returned Gate to that other
system . . . or just possibly because they’d been in the pro-
cess of returning and been brushed aside by this giant just as
it emerged into the Starwall system.

To a monster like the Xul Nightmare, those probes must
have been insignificant, dismissed as drifting fragments
of meteoric debris. On that scale, Lee’s FR-100 was little
larger; so long as she didn’t change her vector, she should
be ignored.

Should be. So much about the Xul—both the limits of
their technology and the leadings of their psychology—still
were utter unknowns.

But it’s so far, so good, she thought, watching the mon-
ster slide past in the distance. She was glad she’d told Chesty
to steer her closer to the ringwall, though. Had she emerged
from the Gate near the center of its opening, she might well
have slammed headlong into the ass end of that thing.

That didn’t let her out of the woods, though. If she applied
power to decelerate in order to reverse course and return to
the Gate, the Xul monster might easily pick up her energy
signature; scraps of interstellar debris did not reverse course
on their own, nor did they radiate the clouds of neutrinos
that were the waste product of tapping the virtual energy of
the Quantum Sea.

Lee felt a small shiver at the base of her neck, a prick-
ling warning of danger. If she couldn’t reverse course, she
would die of radiation poisoning in short order. And, even
if she did reverse course . . . the Xul Nightmare’s presence
suggested that the Stargate on this side was now attuned to
a different star system. If she went through, she would not

102

IAN DOUGLAS
emerge at Puller 659, but in some other unguessable but ab-
solutely guaranteed remote location. Chesty could retune
the Gate for a return, of course; the Puller 659 Gate’s coor-
dinates were programmed into him.

But that would be a rather nasty give-away to the Xul here
at Starwall, who would certainly be monitoring the Gate’s
settings. Regulation One-alpha, drilled into every Marine
standing duty at a Gate listening post, was to lay low and
keep a low profile, to not attract Xul attention to human ac-
tivities. Humankind had survived for the past eight centuries
only because they’d managed, on the whole, to stay off the
metaphorical Xul radar.

“Chesty?” she asked. “Are you picking anything up from
over there? Can you piggyback it?”

“We are intercepting the usual RF leakage,” the AI re-
plied. “I am attempting to locate a viable frequency with
which to establish a tap.”

Xul ships leaked, at least at radio frequencies. The mil-
lions of kilometers of nanoelectronic circuitry and processors
packed into each of those immense hulls gave off a constant
hiss and murmur of radio noise as a kind of metabolic by-
product, and the Xul never seemed to bother with shield-
ing. Some theorists suggested that the radio noise served an
almost organic function, helping to reassure individual Xul
ship-entities that others of their kind were near.

Ever since the first studies carried out on the Singer eight
centuries before, humans had looked for ways to turn this
fact to their advantage. It was possible, for instance, to use
some Xul frequencies as carrier waves, allowing human-de-
veloped AI programs to upload into a Xul computer network
and have a look around. The technique was called piggy-
backing, and Marine listening posts often used it in attempts
to gather yet more intelligence on the poorly understood and
still mysterious Xul.

There was an ancient aphorism, something all Marines
learned in boot camp, something from the writings of Sun

Tzu in The Art of War. It stated that if the warrior knew
himself, but not the enemy, he would be victorious only half
the time. If he knew the enemy, but not himself, he would,

STAR STRIKE

103
again, be victorious only one battle out of two. Only if the
warrior knew the enemy and himself could he hope to win
every battle. . . .

The Marine philosophy, begun in the crucible of recruit
training, was designed to create a sure knowledge of self.

Unfortunately, even after eight centuries, the Xul were still
largely an utterly alien quantity. Xenocultural theorists were
still divided as to whether the Xul could properly be called
living beings . . . or even whether they were self-aware, both
sentient and conscious in the same way that humans under-
stood the terms. In most ways, they appeared to be machine
intelligences, like human-designed AIs, but on a far vaster
and more powerful scale.

There were hints, however, that each Xul ship contained
hundreds, perhaps thousands of organic minds patterned
and downloaded into the vessel’s circuitry, separate identi-
ties arrayed in a gestalt, a group mind, in an interconnected
collection referred to—ever since the discovery of The

Singer—as a chorus.

There were hints, too, that a Xul chorus included the
downloaded minds both of the original, biological Xul,
beings whose organic bodies had died and decayed count-
less millennia ago, and the minds of other intelligent beings
captured and incorporated into the Xul matrix for purposes
of interrogation . . . the Xul version of knowing both self
and adversary. So far, the Xul definitely had the advantage
in the arena of knowing, but progress had been made in that
direction during the past eight centuries.

As Chesty was about to demonstrate. . . .

2

Chesty2

Starwall System

1608 hrs GMT

Unlike humans, the artificial intelligence, dubbed “Chesty”

after the nickname of a legendary Marine of long ago, did
not rely exclusively on vision to model his surroundings.

Merging with the data streams flowing like myriad streams
and rivers through the tightly packed and tangled electronic

104

IAN DOUGLAS
pathways of the alien vessel, the closest sensory analogue he
possessed was that of sound.

Human understanding of Xul mentalities had actually
taken an enormous leap forward in the twenty-fourth cen-
tury, when communications breakthroughs with dolphins in

Earth’s oceans had helped forge a new understanding of how
they perceived their watery surroundings as magical, some-
how crystalline panoramas of sound rendered palpable.

From Chesty’s point of view, he was slipping deeper into
a vast and hauntingly resonant meshing of rhythms and har-
monies, a blending of tones and pulses and throbbings and
even voices in a shifting, ever changing whole that felt both
self-directing and self-contained, but which also felt like a
fragment, a discrete but dependent shard of something far
larger, tantalizingly beyond the reach and scope of Chesty’s
awareness.

The trick was twofold—remaining invisible within that
harmonic chorus while retaining the ability to probe and
peer and penetrate, winkling out useable data from the
incoherent ocean of information pulsing around him and
recording it for later analyses. As he slipped into the Xul
data stream, Chesty manifested a data shell around the es-
sential core of his operating software, taking on the virtual
appearance of a minor counterpoint to the thronging choral
harmony about him. So long as he played the part and kept
it low-key, he should be able to remain undetected. His dis-
tant ancestors would have recognized the technique at once.

Chesty was, for all intents and purposes, a computer virus

3
slipping in through an unguarded back door.

Key to the strategy, of course, was compatibility. The Xul
was the ultimate in an alien operating system. Fortunately,
there were only so many ways to encode and manipulate
data, and both modern human computer technology and
that of the ancient predecessors of the Xul shared essential
basics. Both had begun, in their infancy, with the yes/no, on/
off simplicity of binary, but Xul systems had later evolved
the more adaptable yes/no/yes-and-no flexibility of trinary,
similar in many ways to the fuzzy logic of the most powerful
human systems.

STAR STRIKE

105

As a result, and beginning with the extensive code-
breaking and reverse engineering projects carried out on the
recovered corpse of The Singer centuries ago, human com-
puter technicians had learned enough of the Xul operating
system, communications protocol, and essential language
to understand perhaps twenty percent of a rich-content Xul
data stream.

Twenty percent . . . one word in five. In some ways it
wasn’t much.

But it was all Humankind had if it was ever to understand
the nature of its Enemy.

Moving through vast caverns of sound, then Chesty sam-

2
pled the currents, seeking matches for certain known con-
cepts. In effect, he was listening for key words and phrases

. . . most importantly among them the identifier phrases “Spe-
cies 2824,” “System 2420–544,” or “Gateway 2420–001.”

Thanks to the painstaking analyses of data brought back
by other AI probes of Xul hunterships, Intelligence now un-
derstood that System 2420–544 referred to none other than

Earth’s solar system, evidently the 544th star system within
a galactic sector designated 2420. Gateway 2420–001 was
a particular Stargate—the gate at Sirius through which Xul
hunterships had first entered human space, and through
which humans had attacked Xul bases at Night’s Edge and,
earlier, in Cluster Space.

Species 2824, it was now known, was none other than

Humanity.

If Humankind had survived this long, it was because the

Xul had lost track of those identifiers within the incalcu-
lable, unfathomable immensities of a Galaxy of four hun-
dred billion stars. Xul memories appeared to have noted

Earth and Humankind a long time ago indeed, in records
that quite possibly went back to the time of the Builders and
their genetic tinkerings creating Homo sapiens out of Homo
erectus half a million years before, but more recent informa-
tion had, thankfully, been destroyed at Night’s Edge.

If there was new information on Species 2824, however . . .

And there was. With an inward shock, Chesty felt the

2
match-up of duplicated chunks of code.

106

IAN DOUGLAS

Briefly, he heard the interweaving voices of the Xul
choral harmonies. . . .

“ . . . Species 2824 has been noted in the past . . . .”

“ . . . Species 2824 has been of interest in the past. . . .”

“ . . . Species 2824 has been of significant danger in the
past. . . .”

“ . . . Survival remains the first and only law. . . .”

“ . . . Species 2824 may well pose a threat to We Who

Are. . . .”

“ . . . Survival remains the first and only law. . . .”

“ . . . Species 2824 shall not be allowed to circumvent the
first and only law. . . .”

“ . . . Species 2824. . . .”

Each line of code was linked by threads of coded logic
to other lines, and as verse followed verse, Chesty probed

2
and listened and recorded, gathering a treasure trove of raw
data, cascades of data, most of it too intricately complex to
permit analyses or even translation here and now.

But everything he heard, he recorded and transmitted,
sending it back over the initial carrier wave as a weak, low-
frequency, and highly directional modulation just strong
enough to reach the FR-100 Night Owl, some ten kilometers
distant.

Chesty , as an artificially sentient software package, was

2
both powerful and sophisticated in terms of creative scope,
but there was no room in his coding matrix for such data-
extravagant luxuries as emotion. He could not feel fear or
excitement as the chorus sounded and resounded about him,
speaking of the patterning of a host of alien soul-minds
from an artifact identified as Argo. He couldn’t even feel
the thrill of recognition when he touched a familiar pattern
of code indeed . . . another artificial intelligence that called
itself Perseus.

But Chesty could and did recognize the seriousness of
the encounter, and its importance to Humankind.

Earth had to be warned, and swiftly . . .

. . . or “Species 2824” might very soon become extinct.

8�

2410.1102

Lieutenant Tera Lee

Starwall System

1609 hrs GMT

Lieutenant Lee watched the stream of returning data from

Chesty , her alarm growing with each fresh revelation. She

3
could only hear what Chesty was able to translate, but he’d
picked several “voices” out of the background chorus and
singled them out for special attention.

And now Lee and Chesty listened to the ebb and flow of

2
harmonies from the huntership now drifting a few kilome-
ters away, an eerie symphony of voices crying out, echoing
one another, merging, branching, merging once more. The

Xul knew of Humankind’s modest pocket of habitation in
the Orion Arm, knew that it had destroyed several of their
hunterships in the past, knew it represented a threat, at least
in principle, to Xul long-term survival.

This last made absolutely no sense to Lee. How could
beings as powerful and as technologically advanced as the

Xul feel threatened by the insignificant likes of Homo sapi-
ens? Still, the fact that they believed it was significant.

It was vital that she get this data back to the listening
post.

But actually pulling that off was going to be a bit more
difficult than thinking it. The Night Owl was falling directly
away from the Stargate at a relative velocity of 217 meters
per second—a bit over 700 kph. To return to the other side of

108

IAN DOUGLAS
the local Gate, she needed to kill that speed, then accelerate
back the way she’d come. But as soon as Chesty powered up

2
the Owl’s drive, they risked immediate detection.

Normally, this wouldn’t have been a problem. The main

Xul base in the Starwall system was some twelve light-
seconds distant, ten times the distance between Earth and

Earth’s moon. Lee could have reversed course and slipped
back through the gate before the Xul ever realized she’d
been there.

That was not a good option, though, with a Xul huntership
ten kilometers off her beam. For long seconds, she watched
that other ship as it slowly drifted farther and farther astern,
willing it to switch on its own drive and vanish into the blaze
of starlight ahead. Damn it, what were they playing at over
there? They’d come through the Gate from the gods alone
knew where; why didn’t they now move in-system, to dock
with the Xul base here?

The longer she waited, though, the more she wondered
if the Xul huntership had been deliberately parked there,
squarely above the center of the Gate’s opening, as a sen-
tinel, as a guard on perimeter watch. It made sense; if the

Xul were now suddenly concerned about Species 2824, they
might be taking extra security precautions at all of their
gateway bases. Or, worse, they might already know that
humans possessed a listening post accessible through this
gate—659—and be guarding against exactly such recon-
naissance missions as Lee was now carrying out.

“Chesty reports that he cannot access more deeply with-

3
out risking discovery,” Chesty told her, a whisper in her

2
mind. “He suggests that he remain in place as a rear guard
while we attempt the vector change. He will wait to dissoci-
ate until after we pass through the Gate.”

Lee thought about this, but didn’t like it. Like most Ma-
rines, she thought of the Chesty iterations as sentient and
autonomous life forms—artificial, perhaps, but as much
alive and aware in terms of their thought processes as any
organic life form. There were cybernetic tech specialists and
theoreticians who would have disagreed with her, of course;
the debate over whether a string of software commands and

STAR STRIKE

109
associated data clusters was alive or merely mimicking life
through clever responses had been raging unabated in those
circles for the entirety of the current millennium. The Turing

Test, that ancient assessment of machine intelligence, said
far more about human programming skills than it did about
the presence or the nature of sentience itself.

Leaving Chesty behind was tantamount, in her mind, to

3
leaving behind a fellow Marine.

“It’s not the same, Lieutenant Lee,” Chesty whispered in

2
her thoughts, apparently reading them. “We would have left
him in any case. Beaming a data package requires duplica-
tion. What remains behind must dissociate in order to avoid
detection.”

“I know, I know,” she snapped, angry. “I understand all
that. But it’s not as though I have to like it.”

“I do not understand the distinction.”

“No.” She sighed. “No, you wouldn’t. Damned soulless
machine. . . .”

Chesty had been an exact copy of Chesty , beamed into

3

2
the Xul huntership as a subtle modulation of an existing RF
carrier wave. That identity had ended, of course, the instant

Chesty began to experience—and to record—events differ-

3
ent from those experienced by Chesty back on board the

2

Night Owl, but Chesty was being brought up to speed as

2
the data from Chesty continued to stream back across the

3
ten-kilometer gap between them.

From the points of view of the two AIs, there was no point
to “rescuing” Chesty from the Xul ship. Neither Chesty nor

3

2
his duplicate possessed significant information about Sol
or humanity, but it was good technique to leave behind no
traces of the recon. Intelligence work was all about assem-
bling small bits of discrete data from many discrete sources,
like a jigsaw puzzle, to build a coherent picture of enemy
plans or activities, and no one knew just how good the Xul
were at that ancient game.

“Chesty suggests we move quickly,” Chesty told her. “I

3

2
concur. We are already beginning to push the safety factor
for organic systems in respect to the local radiation fields.”

She checked the time readout. The AI was right, damn

110

IAN DOUGLAS
him. She’d been on this side of the Gate for nearly twelve
minutes now. Depending on how hard she decelerated, then
boosted for the Stargate, she might well be up against the
forty-minute stay time allowed for this mission.

“There’s some wiggle room in the safety factor,” she
said. “And we can’t do this suddenly, or our Xul friends
over there will have us nailed to the wall. Here’s what I
want to try. . . .”

In swift, concise thoughts, Lee explained what she
wanted to do. The AI sounded dubious. “Shutting down
life support could expose you to a fatal dose of radiation. I
cannot comply.”

“Nonsense. The hull will shield me long enough. As long
as we get back through the Gate in, oh, half an hour or so.”

“I trust you are aware of the old military aphorism, Lieu-
tenant, the one declaring that no plan survives contact with
the enemy.”

“And Murphy’s Law applies too. I know, Chesty. But if
we just cut and run, that huntership over there will be on top
of us before we move three meters.”

“I am required to protect you from—”

“You are required, Chesty, to see to it that the mission
succeeds. Right now, that is your only directive. Is that
understood?”

“Understood.” The inflection of Chesty’s mental voice
was neutral, but she could still hear a certain reluctance. Or
was that her projection of emotions into an AI interface?

It didn’t matter. She didn’t like the possible ramifications
of her idea, either, but right now it was all they had to work
with.

“Systems are ready for implementation, Lieutenant. At
your word.”

“Very well. Implement. Now. . . .”

An instant later, the surface of the Night Owl began to
shift, blur, and change.

Nanoflage had been a standard technology within the
human military inventory for centuries. Beginning with
photoreactive paints late in the twentieth century, objects
like body armor or vehicles could be set to reflect ambi-

STAR STRIKE

111
ent light and color in such a way that the article in ques-
tion blended in nearly seamlessly with its surroundings, no
matter what the current lighting conditions. At night, it was
black; by daylight, it reflected the surrounding colors of
desert, jungle, or ocean.

Eventually, camouflage paint became a thin layer of
smart molecules that rearranged themselves to change the
object’s color, reflectivity, and even texture in response to
the surroundings. With sufficient processing power, pro-
vided by long-chain molecules designed to process data like
submicroscopic computers, light could actually be absorbed
by the paint on one side of the object and re-emitted at the
correct angle on the other, providing effective invisibility.

There were still serious limitations inherent in that bit
of technological trickery, however. It worked well for small
objects at long range and for long wavelengths only; the old
dream of rendering a man invisible was still pure fantasy.

The outer surface of the Night Owl was indeed invisible at
microwave and radar wavelengths, but the technique still
couldn’t be applied to larger craft. Phase-shifting was an-
other high-tech bit of protective camouflage, but that took
a hell of a lot of power, and was not one hundred percent
effective, either as camouflage or as shielding.

But what the Night Owl could do was rearrange the outer
layers of its hull, transforming that sleek and light-drinking
surface into something rough, rugged, and dusty-looking,
giving it an appearance radically different from the sleek,
black set of curves it exhibited now.

At the same time, Lee applied a full one hundred gravi-
ties of thrust for a fraction of a second, killing the Owl’s
forward momentum and putting it on a new vector, moving
back toward the Stargate at a bit over 500 kilometers per
hour. As an added bit of camouflage, she put the FR-100 into
a gentle tumble, setting the blazing panorama of stars and
nebulae into a slow spin about her head. Then she shut down
all power, including shielding and even her life support.

She had enough air inside the cockpit to last for several
hours. More serious was the lack of magnetic shielding.

The adaptable nanosurface of the ship would handle some

112

IAN DOUGLAS
of the radiation sleeting across the hull, but not all of it,
and not for long. She was already being burned, though she
felt nothing . . . yet.

To any observer on the outside, however, the tiny space-
craft now looked precisely like a three-meter-long plan-
etoid—a dusty, cracked, and rugged lump of nickel iron
adrift in space. That sudden burst of energy would have been
detected by the Xul, of course; the question was how closely
they’d been monitoring their immediate surroundings. In its
earlier configuration, the FR-100 would have been invisible
at a range of 10 kilometers, but by changing vector she’d just
done the equivalent of sending up a flare.

The question now was just how paranoid the Xul actually
were—and how observant. Would they dismiss that brief
burst of neutrinos as an anomaly, the random product of that
brilliant background of massed stars? Or would they associ-
ate it with what appeared on the surface to be a lifeless and
tumbling bit of rock?

She waited. The Owl’s computer network used only a
trickle of energy, as easily shielded as the electrical field of
her own body, so she was able to continue watching through

Chesty ’s electronic senses, monitoring the Xul huntership.

2

So far, there’d been no response . . . not yet . . .

The tumble threatened to make her dizzy. “Can you
adjust the visual input for the spin?”

“Affirmative.” And the tumble seemed to cease from her
vantage point, though the Night Owl continued to fall end
over end. She was facing the Stargate, now fifteen kilome-
ters ahead and slowly growing larger. The Xul huntership
was a flattened oval in the distance, slowly passing her on
her left. There’d been no reaction whatsoever that she could
detect.

“A message from Chesty ,” Chesty told her. “The Xul—”

3

2

She never heard the message, because suddenly the alien
machine was there, twenty meters away, a flattened ovoid
sprouting unevenly planted tentacles like black whips. Three
of those tentacles snapped out and grasped the Night Owl,
and with the inertial damping fields down, she felt the gut-
wrenching jolt as the ship’s tumble was arrested, and as the
alien machine decelerated.

STAR STRIKE

113

On several occasions, Marines had fought Xul combat
machines—in the bowels of hunterships at Sirius and at

Sol, and within the depths of a Xul space station at Night’s

Edge—and always they seemed to be variations on this
same theme, egg-shaped, with bumps and swellings and
convolutions, with sensory lenses and implanted tentacles
in patterns that appeared to differ from one individual to
another. This model possessed a single, very large sensor,
a glittering crystal as big across as a dinner plate, and the
thing appeared to be narrowly watching her with a cold and
unblinking gaze.

Lee stifled a raw instinct to scream, to thrash, to struggle,
to fight; from her perspective, the monster was holding her
in the implacable grasp of its manipulators. The thing could
easily drag her back to the Xul ship for a more lingering
inspection . . . or it could blast her into randomly drifting
atoms right here. She could see the snouts of several plasma
weapons protruding from that black, slick shell.

The Xul inspection lasted only a second or two . . . and
then it released her. Stunned, she watched it recede once
more, rapidly dwindling toward the huntership in the
distance.

“Looks like we passed inspection,” she managed to say
after a few shaky moments.

“There is a problem, however,” Chesty told her. “That

2
machine has reduced your velocity. Unless you accelerate,
you will not reach the Stargate for another two hours, forty-
seven minutes.”

“Great.”

“I do not understand your use of that word. The ambient
radiation levels are already harming you physiologically.”

She sighed. “It’s called sarcasm. Can you get this thing
back through to the listening post?”

“Of course.”

“Then do it. Deliver everything from Chesty you can ex-

3
tract.” She could feel something already, that faint, scratchy
tingle that presaged a sunburn at the beach. This was going
to be bad. . . .

* * *

114

IAN DOUGLAS

Marine Listening Post

Puller 659 Stargate

1904 hrs GMT

The alarm went off and Gerard Fitzpatrick nearly fell out
of his commlink couch. He’d been discussing the situation
with Chesty, preparing to send out a follow-up probe, when
an FR-100 transponder had lit up half a kilometer this side
of the Gate. He started to check the ID, but Chesty con-
firmed it before he could link through.

“It’s Lieutenant Lee’s Night Owl,” Chesty told him in
maddeningly even tones. “I am linking with my uploaded
counterpart now . . .”

“Well? What does he say, damn it?”

“Lieutenant Lee’s mission was successful. They elec-
tronically penetrated a Xul huntership and have confirmed
that news of Argo’s capture had extended to the Xul base at

Starwall, at the very least. They have also made contact with
the AI from the Argo, which should prove to be informative.

Lieutenant Lee is a casualty.”

“Oh, Christ. How bad?”

“Not good. The radiation flux within the Starwall system
is—”

“I know, damn it! How is she?”

“Alive. Barely. My counterpart informs me she may be
near death. . . .”

“Well, scramble a work pod, damn it! Drag her in here!”

“Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, I must advise against that. The

Night Owl is itself highly radioactive. We could contami-
nate the entire—”

“Chesty, I’ve got the watch, okay? That puts me in com-
mand of this listening post. Patch a Class-One emergency

NL call through to Major Tomanaga. Upload the data Tera
brought back, and tell him I’ve gone out to retrieve the lieu-
tenant’s ship.”

“But—”

“That’s a goddamn fucking order!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the AI replied, with rigidly correct service
protocol.

STAR STRIKE

115

Fitzpatrick knew he could buck the decision up to the Old

Man—Major George Tomanaga at the LP’s main station
two light-hours away. Either Tomanaga would immediately
order him to send out robotic tugs to bring the lieutenant
in—in which case, why the hell wait? Or he would delay
while he conferred with his superiors at paraside HQ, which
could mean hours of delay, hours that Lieutenant Lee did not
have. Or he would say no, order Fitzpatrick to sit tight until
properly equipped tugs could arrive from the main base, and
that would take God-knew how long. Work tugs with rad
screening were not exactly interplanetary greyhounds.

And Fitzpatrick was going out after her now, no matter
what. This way, if the Old Man flashed back an order to him
to sit tight, he wouldn’t have to disobey it.

A small but very guilt-feeling part of him was telling him
that he should have gone on the sneak-and-peek, not her.

Damn it, if she died. . . .

In a way, things had been easier in the old days, before
the widespread introduction of nonlocal communications. A
few centuries ago, he would have flashed off his intent to
go pick up Tera, gone, and been back at the LP long before
his message had even reached HQ. Having faster-than-light
communications was a royal pain in the ass, since it invited
micromanagement by the jerk-off remfies in their comfort-
able habitats far from the point of action.

Well, the hell with orders, and the hell with the remfs.

Marines did not leave their own behind. . . .

USMC Skybase

Paraspace

2355 hrs GMT

“General Alexander. Please wake up.”

Cara’s voice brought Alexander upright in bed. “This had
better be goddamned important,” he mumbled aloud.

Tabatha rolled over at his side. “Mmph. Martin? What
is it?”

“Call from the office, Tabbie,” he said, caressing her
thigh. “Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.”

116

IAN DOUGLAS

“I’ll get us caff.” Nude, she slid out of bed and made her
way in the near darkness to the bedchamber door.

He sighed. “Thanks, kitten.” Though they’d not formally
married, Tabatha Sahir had been his domestic partner for a
good many years, now, and she knew what a call from his
assistant at this hour almost certainly meant.

“We have an upload coming in NL from one of our

Xul listening posts, General,” Cara told him. “It sounds
serious.”

“Tell me.”

Briefly, Cara filled him in on the bare bones of what had
happened. Listening Post Puller 659 had noted the loss of
some automated probes at a targeted Stargate. A Marine
lieutenant and an AI had gone through to check things out
up close and personal, and encountered a Xul huntership.

The AI had successfully linked with the Xul, and they’d
brought some hot data out.

As Alexander listened to a précis of that data, he felt his
gut constrict, a hard, cold knot. Damn! The bastards found
us. . . .

“Put that Marine down for a medal,” he told Cara. “We
owe him a lot.”

“Her,” Cara corrected him. “And the LP reports she is
seriously injured. She may not survive.”

“Shit. Keep me informed of her condition,” he said.

“Okay. Pass the data up the line, Intel and the Joint Chiefs.”

“Very well.”

“And give me a map. Where the hell is this place,
anyway?”

Currently, the bedchamber’s walls and domed ceiling
were set to display the dark and murky blue fog of paras-
pace. Other Marines, he knew, tended to display scenes from

Earth or Earth’s Rings, or generic starfields, or even keeping
the displays blank and neutral, but he’d always found the
shifting blue murk to be relaxing, a definite inducement to
sleep.

As well as to wonder. Paraspace, more poetically known
as the Quantum Sea, lay at the very foundation of what
modern physics was pleased to call reality, whatever the

STAR STRIKE

117
hell that was. It was here that, in accord with the laws of
quantum physics, particles and antiparticles popped into ex-
istence for too brief a space of time to measure, then winked
out again, where standing waves of virtual particles formed
the basis of matter and energy at higher reality levels. The
two-million-ton bulk of Skybase had been constructed in

Mars orbit, then phase-shifted into the Quantum Sea, so the
station could not be said to have a location in normal space/
time at all. The idea had been to put the main operational
headquarters for the U.S. Marine Corps outside the reach
of any possible sneak attack, either by human foes or by the

Xul.

He checked the hour, and groaned. Since there was no day
or night here—indeed, no means of measuring time at all
save by instruments brought through from normal space—by
old, old tradition, the station operated on Greenwich Mean

Time. As commanding general of the station, he could set
any personal schedule he wished, and so several hours ago
had turned in with Tabbie for the “night,” whatever that
might mean here in this eldritch space-that-was-not-space.

By Greenwich Mean, it was just before midnight.

But the CO of any ship, base, or station was always on
call. Always.

At his thought-click, the blue murk faded to dark, and a
three-dimensional representation of human space hung high
in the dome over the bedchamber. Sol glowed bright yellow
at the center, surrounded by a thin haze of other stars in a
many-lobed blob stretching across eight hundred light-years
at its greatest extent, perhaps three hundred light-years at its
smallest.

The amoebic shape of human space had been dictated
by the uneven expansion of colonizing expeditions out-
bound from Sol over the course of the past six or eight cen-
turies. Colony ships searched for worlds as close to Earth
in terms of climate and habitability as possible, bypassing
hundreds of frozen or poisonous rock balls in favor if those
rare worlds that could be made livable with a minimum
of terraforming. The statistics appeared in a window to
one side of the display. All told, human space embraced

118

IAN DOUGLAS
roughly 120 million cubic light-years containing some 10
to 12 million stars.

Of those millions, however, about five hundred systems,
all told, contained a human presence, ranging from tiny
mining or military outposts to a scant handful of systems
like Sol or Chiron, with populations numbering in the tens
of billions. Of those 500, roughly a quarter—128, to be pre-
cise—were members of the Terran Commonwealth. All of
the rest belonged to the nonaligned governments—the Is-
lamics, the PanEuropeans, the Chinese, the Hispanics, the

Russians.

“Drop in the known Gates, please,” he told Cara. In-
stantly, seventeen of the fainter stars on the display turned
bright and purple. Four were in space claimed by the Com-
monwealth. The other thirteen belonged to other stellar
governments.

The closest Gate to Sol, of course, was Sirius C, the

Gateway orbiting in the planetless Sirius star system 8.6
light-years from Sol. Over the centuries, though, as human
colonies reached farther and farther out, other Gates had
been discovered; the second closest Gate was at Gamma Pi-
scium, a Type K0 giant 91 light-years from Sol. The Gates
were unevenly sprinkled across human space with a ran-
domness that suggested that the network, if it had ever pos-
sessed an order to begin with, had been distorted over the
eons by the natural drift of the stars in their individual orbits
about the galactic center.

Probes and research conducted at each of the seventeen
gates located within human space had demonstrated that
none of those seventeen linked with one another, that all
available destinations were other Gates scattered across
the Galaxy at extremely long ranges indeed—usually on
the order of several thousand to several tens of thousands
of light-years. Many, in fact, like the Gate nexus in Cluster

Space, were well outside of the Galaxy proper, out in the
thin halo of dim and distant stars thinning out endlessly into
intergalactic space.

If there was anything like a large-scale order to the ga-
lactic network of Stargates, human research had not yet

STAR STRIKE

119
been able to determine what it was. Neither was it known
yet whether the Gate network had been built by the Xul in
the first place, by the Builders, or by someone else entirely.

That the Xul used the network was definite. Of nearly five
thousand gateway possibilities so far investigated among
those seventeen Gates, almost two hundred opened into star
systems occupied by Xul bases. Marine Listening Posts had
been established at each of those systems, in order to at-
tempt to monitor Xul activities on the far side.

That strategy had just paid off, thank God.

But at a damned high cost.

“Which one is Puller 659?” he asked.

One of the purple points of light flared brighter on the dis-
play. Puller 659, he saw, officially Ringstar in the PanEuro-
pean ephemera according to the windowed description, was
a red dwarf star near the fringes of human-explored space,

283 light-years from Sol and located within the misshapen
lobe of habitation known as the PanEuropean Arm. The
star system was nondescript and otherwise unimportant—
possessing a single gas giant, Ring, and its coterie of moons,
a few dwarf-planet rock-and-ice balls, and a large population
of asteroids and comets.

And the base there was illegal as hell. “Shit!” he said
aloud, with some feeling.

Human politics had just shoved its ugly nose under the
tent flap.

This was not going to be easy.

9�

0511.1102

Senate of the Terran Commonwealth

Earth Ring

1445 GMT

It was, Alexander thought, a less than auspicious start to his
mission to Earth. He’d expected the Commonwealth Senate
to debate his plan for combating the Xul threat. That much
went without saying. He’d not expected that the Marine

Corps itself would be within the Senate’s sights, that they
would actually be debating whether or not to bring the

Corps’ eleven-hundred-year history to a close.

After reviewing the data transmitted back from Puller

659, he’d routed the full text back to Earth, to USMC-HQ,
to the Military Intelligence Agency, and, as required by
regulations, to the Senate Military Oversight Committee.

The reaction of that last was uncharacteristically swift; he’d
been ordered to return to Earth Ring in person, to face a full

Senate meeting and to present his recommendations.

To that end, he’d taken the somewhat unusual step of pull-
ing Skybase out of its paraspace anchorage and returning it
to the Sol System. The Quantum Sea, existing outside of the
normal boundaries of four-dimensional space/time, did not
relate to space/time with a point-to-point correspondence.

If you had a well-plotted set of special coordinates, it was
possible to use paraspace as a means to bypass enormous
distances in 4D space.

Dropping into Sol space had enabled him to get back

STAR STRIKE

121
to Earth Ring much more quickly than an FTL shuttle. He
was wondering, however, if the trip had been worth it. He’d
delivered his recommendation—a carefully parsed blue-
print for action by the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary

Force—1MIEF—minutes ago.

And already the vultures were descending like harpies,
scenting blood and eager for a meal.

Madam Marie Devereaux drew herself up to her full 150
centimeters, chin held high, defiant. She was standing at her
seat in the Commonwealth Senate, an enclosed box high up
within one of the ascending ranks of Senatorial platforms,
but her repeater holo image stood at the chamber’s center,
towering over the Senate Chamber pit, matching each move,
each dramatic pose, each gesture and expression. Alexander
wondered if the holo was projecting the woman’s personal
e-filters to achieve that seeming perfection of face and form,
or if what he was seeing reflected reality.

Not that reality had that much to do with this charade. He
grimaced. Devereaux was putting on the show of her life.

She appeared to be relishing this moment.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate,” she declaimed.

“We’ve heard the arguments in favor of striking at the Xul,
heard them endlessly in round upon round of discussion
within these sacred halls, both in open debate and in closed
committee. Is anyone else here as tired as I am, as sick to
death as I am, I wonder, of hearing yet more excuses for this
collection of odd bits and pieces of military technology and
tradition and self-serving alarmist brinksmanship that calls
itself the U.S. Marine Corps?”

A chorus of boos and shouted catcalls sounded from the
surrounding rings of seats . . . but Alexander heard cheers
and applause as well. It was impossible at this point in the
proceedings to calculate whether the Senate was going to go
along with his recommendation . . . or side with the newly
constituted Peace Party.

What he’d not anticipated, though, was that this session
was going to become a referendum on the very survival of
the Corps.

“The Marines,” Devereaux continued, “may once have

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IAN DOUGLAS
had a place in history, a role to play within the disparate
collection of military services that once served the United

States of America.” The huge, holographically projected
face smiled down beatifically at the watching senators.

“They were very good, I understand, at scrambling up into
the rigging of ancient warships, back in the Age of Sail, and
shooting enemy officers on other ships. Some centuries later,
they served as a kind of police force on American wet-navy
vessels, and as ceremonial guards at American embassies in
other countries. I suspect they were chosen because of how
pretty their red, white, and blue dress uniforms were. . . .”

Chuckles and isolated bits of laughter rose from several
quarters, and Alexander scowled. Damn the woman. Play-
ing politics with the Corps at a deadly time like this. . . .

“Many of us love and admire the Marines, admire them
for their sense of duty, their sense of tradition going back
over eleven hundred years, now. But even as we admire
them, we must admit to ourselves that these Marines have
never really fitted in with their brothers-at-arms in the other
services . . . the Army, the Air Force, even with the Navy,
though historically they draw their strongest support from
them. The Marines, admittedly, have served us well in the
past, but we see from this incident just brought to our atten-
tion that the U.S. Marines are . . . extremist in their views.

And this is not a time, Senators, for extremists.

“You see, the Marines, as we have seen repeatedly in the
past, are not . . . not team players, as the old expression puts
it. They take a disproportionate share of scarce resources
and financing for their own service needs—for training, for
supply, for transport, for administration—and give nothing
back.

“They do nothing that the Army could not do just as well.

Once, perhaps, the argument could be made that the Ma-
rines served a vital role as a ready amphibious landing force.

In the days of wet navies, they could land on any beach,
anywhere in the world, creating a beachhead through which
regular Army forces could arrive and deploy.

“But the day of amphibious landings is long, long past,

Senators. Marines have for centuries deployed through sub-

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orbital transports or orbit-to-surface landing craft, not wet-
navy boats. Their very name— Marines—reflects a bygone
age when ‘marine soldiers’ could be deployed on Navy ships
to carry out missions on Earth’s seas. Why, I wonder, deploy
them into space? Because the Navy builds and operates the
majority of our military spacecraft? Is that reason enough
to keep them . . . like aging pets? Marines, I submit, are
anachronisms, a piece of our past as anachronistic as ar-
mored knights on horseback.

“But more than being military anachronisms, I submit,

Senators, that Marines are political anachronisms. Ask any

Marine. Ask General Alexander, up there in the visitor’s
gallery, who brought this affair to our attention. Their first
loyalties are not to Humankind, nor to our Commonwealth,
but to an outmoded political concept called America, and to
the Marine Corps itself.

“And that, Senators, that makes them, to my way of
thinking, just a little dangerous.”

Again, that smattering of applause. Alexander closed
his eyes, trying to feel the emotion in the room. How many
supported Devereaux? How many supported the lame duck
administration?

How many simply hadn’t yet made up their minds?

“Senators,” Devereaux went on, “the Marines like to
present themselves as being the guardians of our liberty. But
when their heavily armed mobile base appears off our Ring
docking ports, when Marines in their pretty uniforms and
with their steely expressions suddenly walk the corridors of
our orbital habitats . . . how safe, how free can we actually
feel?”

Alexander’s fist closed. He nearly stood, nearly shouted
protest, but forced himself to remain in his seat. Damn it,

He’d ordered Skybase to transit out of paraspace and
dock at Earth Ring. It was unusual, but it was the fastest
means of getting here. Strictly speaking, Skybase was not a
space craft, but a deep space habitat, similar to the colony
facilities in use in the Asteroid Belt and the mining settle-
ments out in the Oort Cloud. It had no motive power of its
own, other than station-keeping thrusters, and it required a

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IAN DOUGLAS
small fleet of tractor tugs to move it around in normal space.

The bulky structure was designed to dock periodically at
major port facilities—those large enough to receive it—for
resupply and maintenance.

As for Marines entering the Ring, well, hell, of course
he’d permitted liberty for the base personnel. The men and
women under his command were people, not robots. Sky-
base had been deployed in paraspace for fifteen months—
five longer than usual, and it was about time the crew had a
chance to go shoreside for a little downtime.

But Devereaux’s tirade was continuing, unfolding like a
thunderstorm. “I submit that the Marines, far from being
guardians of our liberty, represent a clear and present danger
to our cherished way of life. For centuries now, the Marines
have not even been a part of our world culture, not in the way
that Army soldiers or Air Force High Guardsmen are. They
don’t, they can’t fit in. They live for their precious Corps,
maintain their own self-contained culture, their own laws,
their own religion, even . . . and rarely mingle with civilians.

Indeed, I suspect many of our Marine friends consider mere
civilians to be somehow inferior to them.

“The Army is much more connected to our culture, our
society, than are the Marines. Marines are extremists in all
of their views, and anytime you have extremists, you run the
risk of a total disconnection with society.

“And that, my friends, is dangerous. A danger greater
than Theocratic fundamentalism, a danger more sinister
than this so-called Xul threat! How are we to maintain our
freedom with these trained killers in our midst?”

Gods above and gods below. Did the creature just like the
sound of her own voice, or did she really mean even half of
the crap spewing from that ugly hole in her face?

Furious now, Alexander opened an inner window, call-
ing up a bio on Marie Devereaux. She’d been born, he saw,
in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, which was located in the prov-
ince of Quebec. The old sovereign nation of Quebec had
finally joined the old North American Federation in the
twenty-fifth century, but never had been wholly comfortable
with that union. Quebec had never accepted statehood, as

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125
had several of her Canadian sister-provinces. After a plebi-
scite, however, the 2740 Act of Common Union had granted
all of North America full and equal representation in the

Commonwealth Senate, which was how she’d ended up as
a senator. She’d also been an officer in the last war with
the Chinese Hegemony, rising to the rank of general in the

Commonwealth Army, which explained how she’d wangled
a slot as a representative on the Military Advisory Council.

There was nothing, though, to suggest why she had such
a hair up her ass about the Marine Corps.

Or possibly . . .

Okay, that might explain it. Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu was
located south of the St. Lawrence—in a part of Quebec once
and briefly known as occupied Quebec.

That reflected a bit of history dating all the way back to
the First UN War, back in the twenty-first century. Quebec
had invaded the then-United States as part of a much larger

UN offensive involving Mexico, France, and Japan; the U.S.

Army had handily knocked back the invaders, then swept
in and occupied everything north to the St. Lawrence, from

Lake St. Francis to New Brunswick.

That had been the army. But, he noted, elements of the

U.S. Marine Corps had assisted with the occupation in the
late 2050s.

Damn it! That was ancient history! He knew the PanEu-
ros and the Islamics tended to hold grudges that lasted for
thousands of years, but he hadn’t thought that that kind of
narrow-minded Dark Ages thinking extended to the Qué-
becois! Besides, the Marines had been a small, almost inci-
dental part of a much larger and complicated history. Why
single them out for this . . . this persecution?

He read further.

Clearly, Marie Devereaux was ambitious. She’d been

President Rodriguez’s principal political rival for five years,
now, and in the general elections three days ago, the whole-
sale defection of her Peace Party from its sixty-year alliance
with the Liberty Party to the more conservative Constitution-
als had won the election for the Constitutionals. Rodriguez,
a staunch conservative, would be out in two months; Sher-

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IAN DOUGLAS
rilyn Simmons, the new president elect, was a liberal but a
hard-line fiscal conservative . . . and an anti-militarist.

That must be it. Devereaux supported Simmons. More,
she was positioning herself to be noticed by the new admin-
istration. If she were seen as a champion of cutting back the
military—principally by eliminating or severely restricting
the Marine Corps—she was all but assured of a strong posi-
tion within the new government. Hell, she might even be
angling for a shot at the presidency herself, eight years down
the road.

The hell of it was, the election results of the other day
were being widely interpreted by the news media as a rejec-
tion of the hardliner conservative stance against the Islamic

Theocracy. That was scarcely a surprise; lots of people, Al-
exander included, had some doubts about the nature and the
necessity of the current war.

But the media loved the word “mandate,” and the election
was being presented as a mandate to end the ill-starred war
with the Theocracy . . . and, what was more, to draw down
on the military in order to banish any future risk of interstel-
lar war—whether it be with the Theocrats, or with the Xul.

Disarming in the face of a clear and imminent danger.

From Alexander’s perspective, that was sheer lunacy . . .

but he’d seen it before, and knew enough history to know
that the same thing had happened time after time after time
throughout history, going back long before there’d been a

Marine Corps.

The problem was that sooner or later, Humankind would
face an enemy that didn’t give a damn if humans were un-
armed or not, and which would be strong enough and tech-
nologically advanced enough to send humanity the way of
the dinosaurs.

An enemy, for instance, like the Xul.

Devereaux, he realized, was still speaking, but it sounded
like she was on the point of wrapping things up. “Senators,
this proposal placed before us this morning by Lieutenant

General Alexander and his staff should be, must be rejected.

We cannot act preemptively against the Xul. When they
come, if they come, we must trust to the gentle art of diplo-

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127
macy to convince them that we are no threat to them, that
we and they can share this vast Galaxy without threat or
dominance of one over the other.

“Furthermore, I submit that the Marines themselves
should be allowed to retire, to fade away into the mists of
history . . . and to cease once and for all in their meddling
and in their interference in the modern affairs and political
ministrations of a united Humankind! It is, in my humble
opinion, Marine belligerence, their martial spirit and out-
look, their tendency to look at anything strange or unknown
as a military foe that threatens the peace more than any pre-
sumed threat by an ancient and distant alien empire!”

Devereaux sat down, and a moment later the high-vaulted

Senate chamber filled with a roar of applause. There were
jeers and boos as well, but it sounded to Alexander’s ear as
though the senator from Quebec had successfully swung the
majority to her way of thinking.

He thought-clicked a request to speak.

It took several moments for the noise to die away. A
number of the senators in the boxes nearer to the visitor’s
gallery, he could see, were looking up at him expectantly.

Maybe they were just waiting to see if he would react to

Devereaux’s tirade with a tirade of his own. Politics could
be boring, and maybe this sort of infighting was the only
entertainment they could expect this day.

He considered a tirade, a broadside in return, but dis-
missed the idea. That would be fighting on ground of her
choosing.

But he had to respond. . . .

“General Alexander,” Ronald Chien, the Senate president
said. “You have a reply or a rebuttal?”

Slowly, he stood up, and now an immense image of him
towered over the assembly. He tried not to look at it. The
scowl, the craggy eyebrows, the jut of the chin all conspired
to make him look angry, even darkly sinister, and that made
him self-conscious.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate,” he began, keeping
his voice low, “I am not, of course, a member of this body.

I am a guest and, I suppose, a kind of expert witness, whom

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IAN DOUGLAS
you have kindly invited to come here and share my views on
the Argo incident, and on the necessity of adopting War Plan

102–08.” A babble of voices, protests, and catcalls rose, and
he shouted through the noise. “Yes, necessity! Because if
we duck back into our shells and ignore the crisis before us,

I promise you that we will cease to exist as a species, that
you, me, and every man, woman, and child in this system,
on the world beneath us, and among the stars around us, will
be hunted down and exterminated!

“But before I get to that, I feel that I must comment,
briefly, on some of the things Madam Devereaux has said.

You see . . . as it happens, I agree with her, in two important
ways, at least.”

At that moment, the Senate chamber became deathly
silent. Currently, there were within the Commonwealth gov-
ernment 494 senators, two representing each state, district,
major orbital colony, and world within the Commonwealth,
and even some major corporate entities as well. Each of those
senators had his or her own oval seating box, and each was
accompanied by his or her own entourage of secretaries and
personal assistants. Several thousand people were watching

Alexander at that moment in complete and utter silence.

And a far vaster audience, he knew, was present virtually,
watching through their personal links from home.

“Madam Devereaux has said that she believes Marines to
be ‘a little dangerous.’ I really must take exception to that.

Marines are not a little dangerous. We are very dangerous.

We are trained to kill, and we are very, very good at what
we do.

“She has also called us extremists, pointed out that we
are not a part of the overall culture of Humankind, and
suggested that our extremism is more of a threat than are
the Xul.

“Extremists? Maybe so. We are extreme in our pride.

We are extreme—I would say we are insufferable—in our
devotion to our Brotherhood, to one another, and to what
we stand for. We are extremists in that way, in the depth
of our devotion, to our Corps, to our traditions, and to the
memory of those Marines who’ve gone before, to the blood

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129
shed by all of the Marines who have served in the past
eleven hundred years.

“And we are extremists when it comes to our devotion
to duty, to service, to country, to you senators, and to the
people and the government you represent.

“Marines are different from the men and women of the
other branches of service. I admit that. I am proud of that.

And that distinction is an important one.

“In the Army, you have riflemen . . . and you have supply
clerks, and you have cooks, and you have electronics spe-
cialists and sims technicians and cartographers and comm
personnel and pilots and drivers and military police and all
the rest. What is it, now . . . four, maybe five hundred dis-
tinct military specialties?

“In the Marines, though, it’s different. We have special-
ization skills, yes . . . but in the Marines every man and
woman is a rifleman first. I don’t care if a Marine is unload-
ing cargo pallets at a spaceport, or flying an A-410 Kes-
trel, or programming combat sims at Skybase, or sneaking
drones through a Stargate into a Xul base at the Galactic

Core. I don’t care if that Marine is a general officer, or fresh
out of boot camp. He or she is a Marine combat rifleman
first.

“I daresay General Lisa Devi, the General of the Army,
would not call herself a soldier. The General of the Aero-
space Force would not call himself an aerospaceman. The

Chief of Naval operations does not call himself a sailor.

General McCulloch, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine

Corps, however, is damned proud to call himself a Marine.

As I am proud to call myself a Marine.

“Does that make us extremists? Maybe . . . but if it does,

I submit, ladies and gentlemen of the Senate, that the Com-
monwealth needs that kind of extremism. That kind of dedi-
cation. That sense of purpose and that devotion to duty!

“In five more days, ladies and gentlemen, the Marine

Corps will have its birthday, celebrating eleven hundred and
three years of service, first to the United States of America,
then to the Commonwealth of Terra. Eleven hundred years.

“It’s true, you know, that the Marines have their own cul-

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IAN DOUGLAS
ture. I admit that. In fact, I’m damned proud of that. We
call a floor a deck, a door a hatch, a hat a cover, our living
spaces quarters, a bed a rack. We have our own brand of
humor, jokes only Marines can appreciate or even under-
stand. Marines have had their own culture ever since they
lived crowded together on the stinking lower decks of wind-
driven wet-navy sailing ships, ever since seven of them
led an army of revolutionaries across the Sahara Desert to

Derna, ever since they charged time after time after bloody
time the German machine-gun nests in Belleau Wood. It’s
a part of being a member of this fraternity, this brotherhood
of heroes.

“Is that such a bad thing? We still have God knows how
many distinct cultures on Earth, and we call it diversity and
say it’s an important part of being human. And the people
living in Earth Ring have their own distinct way of looking
at things . . . as do people in Mars Ring, or in Luna, or out in
the Belts or the Jovians or Chiron or Ishtar or anywhere else
where humans have gone and made homes for themselves.

We Marines are no different. We’ve made a home for our-
selves within the family we call the Corps. If we’re proud of
that, it’s no worse than being proud of being American, or

Japanese, or Lunan.

“How does having a unique culture make us a threat?

“Yes, we have our ‘pretty uniforms,’ as Madam De-
vereaux said, where each part carries its own tradition, each
color its own meaning. Black for space, blue for the ancient
oceans of Earth. And red. Let’s not forget the red in that thin
red stripe down the trouser legs of our full-dress uniforms.

Red for the blood of Marines shed at places like Chapulte-
pec and Belleau Wood, Suribachi and the Chosin Reservoir,

Cydonia and Ishtar.

“Blood, I might add, shed for your ancestors, so that they,
and you, might be free to hold these deliberations in this
chamber today!”

Alexander was startled by a sudden burst of applause from
the chamber. He hesitated, looking across the pit, wondering
what it was that had inspired this display. He didn’t think of
himself as a demagogue, and certainly not as a politician or

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131
a speechmaker. He’d been speaking from the heart, from a
very angry heart, not so much trying to sway the audience
as to simply get them to hear, to understand.

He took a deep breath, calming himself. He did have
their attention now, so if he was going to make his point,
now was the time to do it.

“You have a choice before you, Senators. You can do
nothing, and wait for the Xul to arrive . . . and they will
arrive, I promise you that. Sooner or later, they will be here,
just as they were here in 2314, but this time it will be an
armada flinging rocks or worse at Mars, not a solitary, ar-
rogant, and cocksure huntership.

“And if that happens, I promise you that the Marines will
stand and fight. We will fight, as we have always fought in
desperate actions, and we will die protecting you, and your
children, and our children, and our worlds. We will stand
and we will fight and we will die . . . because there will be
no place else to which we can withdraw if the enemy comes
to us with his full, vast, and overwhelmingly advanced tech-
nological might.

“Do you understand that? We will die. Earth will die. And
on every one of 512 planets scattered across eight hundred
light-years, Humanity will die! We know something similar
happened half a million years ago, with the destruction of
the Builders. It happened to the An. It will happen to us.

“Or . . . you can adopt the proposal I have placed before
you, a plan drawn up by my staff on Skybase and incorporat-
ing the best intelligence on Xul basing and deployments that
we have. We can go on the offensive, take the war to them
in a dozen different star systems. We can hit them and keep
hitting them and never be there when they muster a retalia-
tory force, and we can hurt them enough that they will send
their full strength after us, rather than to Sol and Earth. We
will lead them deeper and deeper into the sea of stars that
is our Galaxy, far away from Earth, and we will continue to
fight them while you, here, decide how best to preserve that

‘precious way of life’ invoked by Madam Devereaux.

“That, Senators, is the choice I give you. Stand and fight
and die here . . . within Earth’s own solar system. Or send

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IAN DOUGLAS
the Marines, dangerous and extremist as we are, to fight this
war out there, in their backyard, not ours.

“And because we are loyal to the Commonwealth and
to the rule of civilian law, we will wait and do what you
command.

“I only ask that you make up your minds swiftly . . . be-
cause we, all of Humankind, do not have much time left.”

Again, thunderous applause filled the chamber. As Al-
exander took his seat, he turned his gaze on Devereaux, in
her box on the far side of the pit. His link with the local Net
allowed him to zoom in on her face from almost 80 meters
away. She was watching him, he saw, with a cold look of
absolute contempt.

“I don’t think she likes you, General,” Cara whispered in
his thoughts.

“No, I don’t think she does.” He shrugged. “Does make
me wonder, though.”

“Wonder what, General?”

“Why it always seems that our most vicious enemies
aren’t the aliens who want to wipe us off the face of the uni-
verse . . . but our own friends and neighbors.”

“Truthfully, General, I’ve never understood that about
humans. If you don’t have enemies, you seem peculiarly
adept at creating them. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Mind? No. Why would I mind the truth?” He checked
his internal time sense. “Looks like they’re going to be de-
bating for a long time to come, Cara. I need food.”

He electronically logged out, then stepped through the
doorway at the back of his visitor’s box. He could already
tell that it was going to be a long afternoon, one that would
probably extend well into the evening.

And the die was cast, as another general had commented
three thousand years earlier.

There was nothing else he could do to influence events,
however much he might wish it.

10�

1011.1102

USMC Recruit Training Center Command

Ares Ring, Mars

1020 hrs GMT

Like Earth, Mars possessed a ring.

Like its counterpart encircling the Motherworld of Hu-
mankind, the Ares Ring was not solid, but was composed
of some tens of thousands of separate orbital facilities,
colony habs, nanufactories and power stations, dockyards
and spaceports, research stations and living quarters. Each
structure pursued its own orbit about the planet, though
many were magnetically locked with the neighbors, creat-
ing the illusion of a solid structure. They were positioned at
about 20,000 kilometers above the planet’s surface, locking
them in to an arestationary orbit—the equivalent of geosta-
tionary for Earth. From this height, Mars appeared some
eleven times larger than did the full moon from Earth, and
four times brighter.

Unlike Earth, Mars possessed only a single ground to
synchronous-orbit elevator, the Pavonis Mons Tower. Pavo-
nis Mons, the middle of the striking set of three volcanoes
in a row southeast of the vast swelling of Mons Olympus,
reached seven miles into the sky and by chance exactly
straddled the Martian equator—the perfect ground-end
anchor for a space elevator. The habitat housing the Marine

Recruit Training Center Command was positioned close by
the nexus with the P.M. Tower, which looked like a taut,

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IAN DOUGLAS
white thread vanishing down into the mottled ocher and
green face of Mars.

PFC Aiden Garroway stood at attention on the Grand

Arean Promenade, together with the thirty-nine other Ma-
rines of Recruit Company 4102 who’d completed boot train-
ing, and tried not to look down. The deck they were standing
on was either transparent or a projection of an exterior view
from a camera angled down toward Mars—the resolution
was good enough that it was impossible to tell which—and
it was easy to imagine that the company was standing on
empty space, with a twenty-thousand-kilometer fall to the
rusty surface of the planet far beneath his feet.

The effect of standing on empty space, the gibbous disk
of Mars far beneath his feet, could be unnerving. He could
just glimpse the planet when he turned his eyes down, while
keeping his head rigidly immobile.

Garroway and his fellow newly hatched Marines had
spent a lot of time looking at that sight since they’d made
the ascent from Noctis three days before. The world was
achingly beautiful—red-ocher and green, the pristine
sparkle and optical snap of icecaps, the softer white swirls
and daubs and speckles of clouds, the purple-blue of the

Borealis Sea.

For many of them, those from Earth’s Rings, Garroway
included, it brought with it a pang of homesickness. Not
that Mars resembled Earth all that closely, even with its
reborn seas and banks of clouds . . . but the oceanic blues
and stormy swirls of white echoed the world they’d watched
from Terrestrial synchorbit; for the handful of recruits from

Earth herself, it was the colors—the blues and greens, espe-
cially—that reminded them of home.

All things considered, perhaps it was best that he was
standing at attention and looking straight ahead, not gawk-
ing at the deck. Somewhere behind him were the ranks of
seats filled with friends and families of graduating Marines.

No less a luminary than General McCulloch, Commandant
of the U.S. Marine Corps, was delivering a speech, his head
and shoulders huge on the wallscreen ahead and slightly to

Garroway’s right.

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135

“The Marines,” McCulloch was saying, “have been criti-
cized for being different, for being out of step with the so-
ciety that they are sworn to protect. And it’s true. Marines
look at the world around them differently than most people.

Marines are dedicated to the ideal of service.

“I don’t mean to say that joining the Marines constitutes
the only valid form of service. Certainly not. Nor do I mean
that military service is the only way to serve one’s country.

“But military service is one of the very few, unambiguous
ways by which a young man or woman can declare them-
selves in support of the common good. It’s one of the few
means remaining today by which young people can make a
deep and lasting difference, both in their own lives, and in
support of their homeland, even their home world.

“And Marines—these Marines—have selflessly chosen
service to country at considerable personal risk, have chosen
service to others above comfort, above profit, above every
other mundane consideration popular with young civilians
these days. . . .”

Garroway listened to the words, but somehow they didn’t
connect for him. The seats above and behind him, he knew,
were filled almost to capacity, but not one of the Giangreco
line had come out to watch his graduation. Not one.

Estelle, he knew, had wanted to come, but an e-transmit
from her last week had told him the money for a flight out to

Mars just wasn’t there. He wondered if that was the reason . . .

or if Delano Giangreco had put his pacifist foot down. Delano,
he knew, held the purse strings for the entire Giangreco line
family.

He wished that, at least, his birth mother could have been
there.

McCulloch was still talking.

“. . . and it is within the Corps that these young people
learn the heart and soul of altruism. They learn to value the
person standing next to them more than they value them-
selves, learn to regard sacrifice as the sacred gift they give
to their comrades, and to their home.

“There was a time, a thousand years or more ago, when
service in the military was a prerequisite for public service

136

IAN DOUGLAS
as a leader of the community or of the larger state. It was the
military that taught a young person character, and half or
more of the people attending the institutions of higher learn-
ing first served in the military.

“Eventually, however, and unfortunately, such service,
such altruism, became unfashionable. Today, I might point
out, only a tiny fraction of our leaders actually have military
service in their records.

“Does that mean that our Commonwealth leaders are of
poor character? No . . . and I wouldn’t be allowed to say so if
they were.” That brought a small chuckle from the audience.

The commandant, Garroway thought, was skating kind of
close to the edge, here. Service personnel were required to
be completely apolitical so long as they were in uniform.

“But I do wonder,” McCulloch continued, “just where
in this day and age a future leader can better develop that
altruistic ethic, that willingness to sacrifice for others, that
comes from military service in general, from service as a

Marine in particular. . . .”

Garroway stifled a yawn. His feet were hurting, and his
back, and he thought-clicked the appropriate anodynes into
his system, mixed with a mild stimulant. He was operating
now less on a willingness to sacrifice than terror of what

Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst would do to him if he screwed
up.

“Duty,” McCulloch said, the word reverberating through
the Arean Promenade. “Honor. Loyalty . . . to comrades, to
country, to the Corps. . . .”

There was more, lots more, but the rhetoric ended at last.

Warhurst, at the head of the graduating class, crisply attired
in Marine full dress, rasped out the command. “Comp’ney,
forrard . . . harch!” As one, forty new Marines stepped out,
left foot first, the sharp clash of sound shivering the air as
they began the first leg of their march around the Arean

Promenade.

“Right turn . . . harch!” and they swung in-column, four
abreast to the right. As they passed the reviewing stand,

Warhurst snapped, “Comp’ney, eyes . . . right!” He then
raised a sharp salute toward the stand. A live band waiting

STAR STRIKE

137
in the wings burst into the surging strains of the Marine

Corps Hymn.

Garroway snapped his head to the right, and so was able
to see the assembled brass in the reviewing stand rise to
their feet and return the salute. . . .

Afterward, they attended one hell of a party.

Sloan Residence

Ares Ring, Mars

1720 hrs GMT

Warhurst stepped off the elevator and onto a broad, open
deck of artificial wood overlooking a lake. A forest crowded
close around the house—he couldn’t tell if the trees were
real or artificial, but they smelled real in the gentle breeze.

Whichever they were, the illusion was that of a forested
mountain on Earth; the illusion broke down only when the
visitor looked up, toward the hub, and, beyond the hub’s ar-
tificial sun, saw the green and sculpted landscape—woods,
streams, and other buildings—etched into the other side of
the colony arching overhead.

And, of course, when he turned around, he found himself
looking through the hab’s transparent end cap, to see the
green and ocher half-disk of Mars turning gently with the
rest of the sky. Stars and an endless night rotated beyond
the opposite end cap, the two transparencies sandwiching
between them this strip of green and blue.

“Welcome, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst!” a young servant
in scarlet livery announced.

Warhurst had never met the man, and he assumed that the
guy had just pulled his ID off the local Net. “Thank you. It
was kind of you to invite me.”

“It was the senator’s pleasure. Would you care for a drink?”

A serving robot hovered at the man’s side, a selection of
drinks of various sizes, shapes, and colors on its tray.

“Not just now, thank you,” Warhurst replied. He looked
about, puzzled. “I’m not the first one here, am I?”

The servant laughed. “Certainly not, sir! People have
been coming in since early this morning!”

138

IAN DOUGLAS

“Oh. Good.” He felt terribly awkward. He wanted to ask
if Julie, Callie, Donal, or Eric were here . . . or if they were
expected. He didn’t want to see them right now, or relive
any of those memories, not the pain, not the injustice, not
the anger.

God it still hurt. . . .

But the servant was still speaking, gesturing toward the
sliding glass doors leading into the main house. “You’ll find
refreshments inside, sir. Or you can follow the guidelight on
the deck around the corner, there, and go straight back to
the pools. Make yourself at home, have a good time . . . and
happy birthday!”

“Thank you,” Warhurst replied, terse. He didn’t like being
here alone. And quite apart from his . . . personal problems,
social galas like this one always gave him a pain.

As did the pretensions of the rich. But he appreciated the
greeting.

Wherever there was a Corps presence, the date of 1011—
the tenth day of November, old-style—was celebrated, the
birthday of the U.S. Marines.

On that date, in 1775, the Second Continental Congress
had enacted legislation, resolving that “two battalions of

Marines be ‘inlisted’ to serve for and during the present war
between Great Britain and the colonies.” Two weeks later, a

Quaker innkeeper named Samuel Nicholas had been com-
missioned as the first officer of the Marines, and recruit-
ing had begun at the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia. Less than
four months after that, on 3 March 1776, four full months
before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Cap-
tain Nicholas led 268 Marines ashore on New Providence

Island in the Bahamas, capturing two forts, cannons, and
a supply of gun powder in the Corps’ very first amphibious
operation.

Eleven hundred two years later, the Corps continued to
celebrate that birthday, in this case with an elaborate party.

The graduation of class 4102 had been arranged to coincide
with the festivities.

Normally, Marines took care of their own celebrations.

The festivities within the Arean Ring, though, had been hi-

STAR STRIKE

139
jacked this year. Warhurst made a face as he looked around
the expansive, rotating hab module. Senator Sloan was not
a Marine. According to his Net bio, he hadn’t even served
in the military.

But he was one of four Commonwealth senators rep-
resenting Mars, and the two chief pillars of the Martian
economy were xenoarcheological research and the Marines.

Both the 1st Marine Division and the 1st Marine Interstellar

Expeditionary Force had moved their headquarters to Mars
centuries ago, and any political representative of that world
knew that his hopes of staying in office resided with the

Marine constituents.

Danis Sloan was also ostentatiously rich, as the lavish-
ness of his personal quarters suggested. The hab was enor-
mous, a squat, rotating cylinder similar in design to some
of the larger O’Neil-type space colonies, but only about 1
kilometer long, and twice that in diameter. The ends were
capped in transplas, giving constantly turning views of the
stars, the sun, Mars, and the other nearby habs making up
this portion of the Arean Ring as the structure rotated, pro-
ducing its out-is-down spin gravity. Visitors docked at the
hub airlock, then traveled out and down one of the eleva-
tors to reach the landscaped terrain. The main house, where
the party was being held, occupied nearly ten percent of the
hab’s internal terrain, tucked in between one of the transpar-
ent end caps, and a broad, sparkling lake.

And the whole damned thing belonged to Danis Sloan.

Half a million years ago, the Builders had left a vast array
of faster-than-light communicators in a subsurface complex
called the Cave of Wonders, beneath a weathered plateau
in Cydonia. Those communicators still possessed real-time
visual and audio links with similar devices on Chiron, Ishtar,
and elsewhere, but it had taken centuries to reverse-engineer
the process and learn how to use quantum entanglement to
instantly bridge distances measured in light-years.

A quantum dynamicist named Victor Sloan, among
others, had been instrumental in making modern FTL com-
munication possible, and that, in turn, made both interstellar
business and government possible.

140

IAN DOUGLAS

The Sloan fortune now was rumored to exceed the econ-
omies of several small nations. Hell, the guy could prob-
ably buy small countries if he had a use for them. Warhurst
had heard that Sloan’s Arean Ring hab was only one of his
dwellings, that a larger one existed in Earth’s First Ring,
and that others existed in at least three other star systems.

The guy, through his company, Sloan Stellartronics, had his
own FTL starship, for God’s sake, and that was certainly no
cheap date.

Fair enough. FTL communication was vital in tying to-
gether the far-flung worlds of Humankind. The Common-
wealth wouldn’t have been possible without it. More than
that, humanity’s survival might depend upon it; late in the
twenty-sixth century, shortly after they’d become commer-
cially feasible, faster-than-light starships had caught up with
the Argo and the other fleeing asteroid starships, offering to
share the new technology, and offering them evacuation, a
chance to come home. The offers in every case had been re-
jected, but Argo and her sisters all had accepted Sloan units
in order to maintain real-time communications with Earth.

Likely, Warhurst thought, they wanted to know if and
when the Xul found and destroyed Earth, thereby justifying
their flight.

But if that hadn’t happened, if Argo had not possessed an

FTL transmitter quantum-entangled with a Sloan unit back
in the Solar System, Perseus would not have been able to
flash news of the Xul appearance instantly back to Earth,
and word of Argo’s destruction would not have been received
on Earth for more than another four hundred years.

By then it almost certainly would have been too late.

So Sloan was welcome to his fortune. His family had
come by it honestly, at least. Warhurst just wished the man
wasn’t so damned ostentatious about it. Importing and grow-
ing those gene-tailored trees alone must have cost tens of
millions of newdollars . . . enough to fully equip a modern

Marine rifle company at least.

Possibly, he thought as he followed the guidelight moving
before him across the decking, the problem lay in the im-
plication that the Marines—or at least 1MarDiv—somehow

STAR STRIKE

141
belonged to Sloan personally. That wasn’t the case, to be
sure, but the press and often parts of the Commonwealth
government seemed to think it was. Sloan had been chair-
person of the Defense Advisory Council three times run-
ning, losing out in the elections four years ago only because

Marie Devereaux and the Peace Party had insisted on the
change as part of the price of their support.

He wondered if the Peace Party’s swing to support the

Constitutionalists would bring Sloan back to chairperson-
ship of the council. He doubted it. Current politics were way
too volatile to permit long-term government fiefdoms.

And there were all those rumors that Danis Sloan hoped
to launch his own bid for the presidency four years from
now.

Warhurst stepped around the corner of the house and
onto the raised deck above the pool area behind the house.

Sonic suppressor fields had kept the noise levels low, but as
he stepped through the field interface, the babble of conver-
sation, laughter, music, and noise assaulted his ears. Sloan
had been planning a lavish ball in honor of the Marines for a
long time, and the party promised to be a long one—several
days at least.

Several hundred people were gathered on the tiers of
decks behind the residence already. Perhaps a quarter, he
saw, wore Marine dress uniforms, complete with gloves,
glowribbons, and red-striped trousers. The rest wore a
dazzling array of costumes, from formal ball gowns and
dressuits to holographic light displays and sim projections
to complete and fashionable nudity. Sloan’s invitation, obvi-
ously, had gone out to his own social set as well as Marine
personnel . . . and that griped Warhurst as well. This . . . this
ritual honoring this date in history belonged to the Corps.

Civilians shouldn’t have any part of it, no matter how rich or
well connected they might be.

“Sergeant Warhurst, is it?” a woman’s voice said at his
back. “Michel?”

He turned. The speaker was a tall and beautifully
sculpted blond woman, technically nude, but with a fan of
what looked like gorgeously colored peacock feathers ar-

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IAN DOUGLAS
ranged in a full, 2-meter circle behind her body, reaching
from her knees to well above her head, and with nanorganic
emitters within her skin giving off a constant, golden radi-
ance that perfectly matched her hair. Her nipples alone, he
estimated, were giving off enough light to read by, had it
been dark.

“Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst, ma’am,” he said, correct-
ing her.

“Larissa Sloan,” she told him, extending a hand.

“Danis’s first wife, don’t you know. Welcome to our little
gathering!”

He took her hand and gave a slight, perfunctory bow
above it. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

“Now, Sergeant! Don’t ‘ma’am’ me! I’m Rissa to my
friends!”

He made a noncommittal sound, more of a grunt than
an assent, but softening it with a smile. Warhurst wasn’t en-
tirely sure yet if the woman was actually offering that level
of friendship . . . or if he should accept it if she did. Her
exuberance was just a little disturbing, as was her misunder-
standing of the Marine rank structure.

For a moment, she had a faraway look in her eyes as she
accessed data. “And are your wives and husbands here yet?”

she asked brightly. “I haven’t seen them so far. . . .”

“Actually, I’m here alone tonight, Ms. Sloan.”

“Oh, but you must know this affair is for Marines and
their spouses and other partners! Feel free to call them and
have them come right over!”

Briefly, he considered replying with a blunt, “I’m di-
vorced. They kicked me out a month ago.” If the woman had
bothered to look more deeply into his public data stats, past
the front page, at least, she would have seen that.

But it didn’t matter. And he certainly didn’t want to have
to explain the circumstances to this . . . naked butterfly. He
let the comment pass. She was already taking him by the
arm and leading him deeper into the crowd. “There are so
many people for you to meet! Please, help yourself to food,
drink, drugs, whatever suits your fancy! And inside there’s
so much going on. If you want a companion, we have a

STAR STRIKE

143
number of lovely girls here as personal entertainers . . . boys
too, if you prefer.” She patted his arm. “I might look you up
myself after a while, if your partners don’t mind!”

“Ah, excuse me, ma’am,” he said, stopping abruptly. “I
see a couple of Marines over there I know. If you’ll forgive
me?”

He disentangled his arm and strode across the deck, not
waiting to find out if he was forgiven or not. He came up
between two young PFCs in full dress blacks at a buffet and
put his arms over their shoulders. “Semper fi, Marines,” he
said.

The two Marines started, whirled, and came to attention.

“Sir, yes, sir!”

Warhurst grinned and shook his head. “You can always tell
the ones straight out of boot camp. Danvers? Garroway? What
are you two fucking dipshits doing in a galahole like this?”

Garroway stammered, swallowed, and tried again. “Sir!

We were invited, sir!”

Warhurst raised an admonishing white-gloved finger.

“Negative on the ‘sir,’ son. You both are Marines, now, and
that means that I am no longer a ‘sir.’ I may still be God, so
far as you sorry-assed PFCs are concerned, but I do work for
a living. ‘Gunnery Sergeant’ will do perfectly well.”

“Thank you, s-, uh, Gunnery Sergeant.”

“That’s better.” He looked around. “So this is how the
other half lives.”

Garroway turned, his eyes following a small group of at-
tractive and naked young women as they made their way
through the crowd toward the pool. “Must be nice,” he said.

“I wouldn’t mind having a couple of mil, if it meant living
like this.”

“Dream on,” Ami Danvers told him. “You’d need a couple
of bil for a spread like this!” Eyeing a couple of equally nude
men who’d just joined the women, “Of course, I must admit
that the scenery is very nice.”

Garroway sighed dramatically. “Such a tough job, living
like this, but someone has to do it.” He popped a purple-iced
something into his mouth and chewed reflectively. “At least
they feed well.”

144

IAN DOUGLAS

“So, Gunnery Sergeant,” Danvers said conversationally.

“Now that 4102 has flown the nest, will you be taking on a
new boot company?”

“Negative, Danvers. I’ve had it with diaper duty and bab-
ysitting. I’ve put in for 1MIEF.”

“Maybe we’ll be serving together, then,” Garroway said.

“Our orders are for 1MIEF, too!”

“I know,” Warhurst said, nodding. “The whole com-
pany. God help me. I thought I was free of you clowns.” He
shrugged. “But, hey, who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and
they’ll stick me on a listening post on some God-forsaken
asteroid at the other end of the galaxy instead. Then at least

I wouldn’t have to look at the likes of you two!”

“We love you, too, Gunnery Sergeant,” Danvers said.

“Where do we go around here to get a drink?”

Garroway pointed to a bar at the other side of the near-
est swimming pool. “They’ve got booze there. Or there’s a
bigger bar inside.”

“Marines, I’m going to attach myself to you two—just
temporarily—because I am using you for protective cover.

Shall we perform a reconnaissance in force?”

Garroway grinned. “Yes, sir, Gunnery Sergeant, sir!”

Together they entered the house.

The mansion’s interior was, if anything, more decadently
luxurious than outside. The rooms were large and sprawl-
ing, most with soft-carpeted floors that rearranged with a
thought into any size or shape or design of furniture imagin-
able. Most walls and ceilings were taken up by projection
screens, some showing outdoor or undersea views, other
showing erotic scenes with such high resolution it was pos-
sible to bump into a wall that looked like an archway into yet
another bed- or playroom. Food was everywhere, available
at small buffets, or straight out of niches in the walls. Many
of the guests wore sensory helmets, which picked up and en-
hanced sights, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells according
to preset programming. He noticed that most of those folks
had bypassed the food, and gone straight to the caressing
and sex.

One large, circular room, in fact, proved to be the source

STAR STRIKE

145
of several of the erotica projections they’d seen on various
walls. A dozen people of various sexes were grappling with
one another in an impromptu orgy. The three Marines had to
carefully pick their way over and past a number of thrashing
bare limbs to reach the doorway on the other side.

The house wasn’t entirely devoted to orgies, however.

One room they passed through had been set up with sim pro-
jectors, so that people walking in saw and heard and smelled
the claustrophobic bustle of the Tun Tavern late in the year

1775, with Samuel Nichols seated behind a large wooden
barrel, puffing at a long-stemmed pipe as a recruiter regaled
the listeners with the benefits of service with the Marines.

The lines about bounty payments and a ration of grog brought
amused chuckles from the twenty-ninth-century spectators . . .

especially the handful of men and women in uniform.

That raised a question, though. Warhurst wondered why
most of the people he was encountering were in civilian
clothing, or no clothing at all. This was supposed to be a

Marine function, after all.

Or were the Marines all shucking their uniforms to join
in the orgies? A disquieting thought.

“So . . . Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst?” Garroway asked.

“Yeah?”

“This is the Commonwealth way of life we’re supposed
to be fighting for?”

“Well, you won’t find it in the Theocracy or the

Hegemony.”

“Sure, you would,” Danvers said. “They’re just not as bla-
tant about it.”

“Bullshit,” Garroway said.

“No, it’s true. The prudes of every age in history had
orgies. They just didn’t admit to them.”

Warhurst bent over and dragged one white-gloved
finger up the curve of a naked, heaving female butt cheek.

The owner didn’t seem to notice the touch. He looked at
the fingertip critically. “Dust. They need to field-day this
barracks.”

Warhurst was feeling a little giddy, and he wasn’t sure
why. He always felt a bit up-tight around civilians, espe-

146

IAN DOUGLAS
cially in this sort of social milieu. Damn it, they just weren’t

Marines.

And that, he thought, explained the giddiness. He’d seen
and recognized two of his erstwhile recruits, and the relief
he’d felt had been palpable.

“Good evening, gentlemen.”

They’d found the inside bar and been making their way
toward it when a silver-haired man wearing a golden glow
and little else greeted them. Warhurst did a fast ID check,
and almost came to attention. “Senator Sloan?”

“Correct. And you are . . . Gunnery Sergeant War-
hurst, and Privates Danvers and Garroway. Welcome to my
home.”

“It was good of you to host this party, sir.”

“Not at all, not all. Least I could do. I, ah, see by your
public data, you’re on your way to the MIEF.”

“I’ve requested the transfer, sir, yes. Don’t know yet that
they’ll give it to me.”

“Mm. Yes. A Marine goes where he’s sent. Still, I should
think that a man with your record will get that billet, es-
pecially since the MIEF is going to be rather dramatically
expanded over the next few months.”

“Sir?” He’d heard scuttlebutt, but nothing certain.

“General Alexander’s proposal did pass, Gunnery Ser-
geant. A reinforced Marine Expeditionary Force is going to
be sent into Xul space.” Sloan gave Warhurst an appraising
look. “What do you think about that, anyway?”

“As you say, sir. A Marine goes where he’s sent.”

“Yes, but . . . against the Xul? That’s a tall order if I ever
heard one.”

“The Xul are not invincible, Senator. We’ve proven that
several times over.”

“What do you think about General Alexander?”

“I don’t know the man, sir.”

“Yes, but you must have an opinion.”

Warhurst shrugged. “From everything I’ve heard, he’s an
excellent officer. And a good Marine.”

“Good enough to take on the Xul?”

“Why are you asking me this, sir?”

STAR STRIKE

147

“Oh, just taking advantage of an opportunity. I have sev-
eral hundred Marines in my home for the day. Seemed like a
good opportunity to get a feel for their morale, their caliber.

Their esprit. How about you, Ms. Danvers? What do you
think about fighting the Xul?”

“Sir! The Marines are gonna kick Xul ass. Sir!”

Sloan laughed. “And you, Private Garroway?”

“Doesn’t much matter what I think, sir. It’s all up to you
people in the government.”

“How’s that?”

“Sir, the Marines will do their job, no matter what. Their
job is whatever the government tells them to do.”

“Yes?”

“So, the way it seems to me . . . the government just needs
to make up its collective mind, if it has one, about just who
the enemy is, what it wants done to him, and give the appro-
priate order. And we’ll do the rest.”

“In other words,” Warhurst added, “you start it. The Ma-
rines will finish it. Sir.”

Sloan looked serious for a moment, then nodded. “That,

Gunnery Sergeant, is not as easy as that. But we’ll do the
best we can.” He studied his drink. “My question for you
is, though . . . the Xul are so far ahead of us in technology.

Ahead of us in numbers, too, if they’re really spread across
the entire Galaxy, the way it appears they are. The MIEF
is going to be horrifically outnumbered, outgunned, out-
classed, right from the start. Do you really think you have a
chance in hell of pulling this off?”

Warhurst pulled himself up straighter. “Sir. Like the pri-
vate here said . . . we will kick Xul ass. Assuming, of course,
that they have one.”

“I sincerely hope you’re right, Gunnery Sergeant,” Sloan
said. “I sincerely hope you’re right.”

11�

1811.1102

UCS Samar

In transit, Alighan to Sol

1430 hrs GMT

The passage from Alighan to Sol took six weeks. For most
of that time, the Marines on board the Marine assault trans-
port Samar would be in cybe-hibe; four companies of Ma-
rines required a lot of consumables—air, food, water—and
took up a lot of space. It was far more economical to ship
them in electronic stasis, sealed inside narrow tubes and
stacked ten-high in the cavernous vessel’s cargo holds, the
meat lockers as they were known to the men and women
who traveled in them.

Escorted by the destroyer Hecate, the Marine transport

Samar had departed Alighan three weeks earlier, engaging
her Alcubierre Drive as soon as she was clear of the bent
spacetime in the vicinity of the local star. Almost three hun-
dred men and women were in meat-locker storage, passing
the voyage in blessed unconsciousness.

For Gunnery Sergeant Charel Ramsey, however, sleep—
or at least the dreamless emptiness of cybernetic hibernation
that mimicked real sleep—had been deferred. He was one
of seventeen Marines in the 55th Marine Regimental Aero-
space Strikeforce designated as psych casualties.

And they weren’t going to let him sleep until he was cured.

“We can edit the memories, you know,” Karla told him
gently. “That would be the easiest course for you, I think.”

STAR STRIKE

149

“Fuck that,” Ramsey said. “I don’t want to forget. . . .”

“I understand. But it’s going to mean a lot of work on
your part. Very difficult, even painful work.”

“So what are we waiting for?” He took a deep breath.

“Tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

In Ramsey’s mind he was in a forest in eastern North

America, back on Earth—oaks, tulip trees, and maples; rho-
dodendrons, ferns, and mountain laurel, and a fast-moving
stream splashing down across tumbled piles of limestone
boulders, many thickly blanketed with moss. The sky
glimpsed through the leaf canopy was bright blue, with sun-
light slanting through the branches at a low angle, as if in
the late afternoon.

It didn’t matter that the woods scene was an illusion.

Within his external reality, he knew, he was in Samar’s
sick bay, in one of the compartments reserved for this type
of treatment. Karla was the ship’s psychiatric specialist AI;

“Karla” was derived from Karl Jung, the name given the
feminine ending because Ramsey found it easier to talk with
women than with men. The AI appeared to be a handsome,
middle-aged woman in a blue jumpsuit, seated on a boulder
next to him. With her dark and lively eyes, black hair, and
square jaw, she actually looked a bit like his mother, going
back to perhaps twenty years before she’d died; he wondered
if that detail was deliberate.

Probably. The Corps’ psych AIs didn’t miss very much.

“You can start,” Karla told him, “by telling me about
your relationship with Thea Howell.”

“We met about a year and a half ago. She was in the 55th

MARS already, Alpha Company, First Platoon . . . though
she hadn’t gotten promoted to staff sergeant yet, and been
moved up to the platoon sergeant’s billet. I was transferred
in from 2/1. . . .”

He went on to tell the AI about how they’d met, how the
relationship had developed. He was a bit nervous about that.

Talking to a medical AI was exactly like talking to a human
medical officer, and a serious breach of regulations would
be reported.

And there were regulations about having sex with some-

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IAN DOUGLAS
one in your own platoon, and even stronger ones about sleep-
ing with your leading NCO—with anyone higher or lower
on the chain of command, in fact. The fact was, though, that
everyone did it, and for the most part the powers-that-were
turned a blind eye to casual sex between fellow enlisted

Marines.

The emphasis was on the word casual and on the word
enlisted. If two Marines became so close that they wanted
to establish a formal contract, one was generally transferred
to a different platoon, because no Marine could be permit-
ted to show favoritism to a sex partner over another fellow

Marine in combat. If jealousy became an issue, the Marine
with the problem would have to enter therapy, possibly to
have the possessive aspects of his or her libido adjusted.

And officers never slept with enlisted personnel. That
particular sin could lead to a general court and dismissal
from the Corps for both parties, as it had since women had
first entered the Corps in 1918. The same went for preg-
nancy or sexually transmitted disease, though neither issue
was the problem it had been before the advent of medinano
late in the twenty-first century.

The fact that Ramsey had been sleeping with his platoon
sergeant for ten months might well be reported, and it could
come back to bite him. Hell, he thought, as another wave of
depression surged up from the blacker corners of his mind,
it had already bitten him. He’d damned near been incapaci-
tated when Thea had been hit on Alighan. They never had
let him see her; her wounds were serious enough that she’d
been popped straight into cybe-hibe and loaded into a medi-
cal support capsule for medevac back to Mars.

Two months afterward, word had finally trickled back
down the chain of command to the 55th MARS, still de-
ployed in mopping up Muzzie resistance on the planet. At
the Naval Hospital in the Arean Ring, on 3007, Staff Ser-
geant Thea Howell had been declared an irretrievable.

She was dead, and he hadn’t even been able to tell her
goodbye.

“What was that?” Karla asked him.

“What was what?”

STAR STRIKE

151

“You just registered an extremely strong surge of emotion
while you were speaking—extremely depressive emotion.

Was it thinking about Staff Sergeant Howell that triggered
it?”

He sighed, leaning back on the boulder and closing
his eyes. “Of course. What did you think it was? Fucking
indigestion?”

“Emotion does not map linguistically . . . at least, not
with one-to-one correspondence. I can easily sense the emo-
tion within you, but the source, the triggering thought or
thoughts, can be numerous and they can be subtle.”

“Look, it’s not complicated,” he told the AI. “I was in
love with Thea—with Staff Sergeant Howell, okay? She
was my platoon leader, but we had a . . . a thing. We were
sex partners, yeah, but we also cared for each other. A lot.

We’d been—” He stopped himself. He’d felt as though once
the words started flowing, he wouldn’t be able to hold them
back, wouldn’t be able to hold back the emotion, or the
memories that caused them.

“You’d been what?”

“We’d started talking about a long-term contract. Mar-
riage.” He said the words with an almost defiant edge to
them.

“I see.” The program paused for a moment, as though
considering the best way to reply. That, Ramsey knew, was
sheer nonsense. Even expert software as complex as a psych

AI ran so much faster than human thought that any pause in
the conversation at all would be for the program the equiva-
lent of waiting hours before responding.

No, the hesitation, he knew, was a tool the AI was using
to let him better respond to it as if it were a human.

“Charel, I know you must be concerned about telling me
this. Regulations prohibit relationships of this sort, particu-
larly when they result in harm to the Marines involved, to
general productivity, good order, and discipline, and espe-
cially to the mission.”

“Yeah.” He thought about it. “You know, I had a buddy
once, a PFC, who fell asleep while sunbathing, back on

Earth. Second-degree burns over half his body. When he

152

IAN DOUGLAS
got out of the hospital, he got a court-martial. The charge
was ‘damaging government property,’ meaning him.”

“What happened to him?”

Ramsey shrugged. “A slap on the wrist. I think they fined
him part of his pay for three months. And he got himself a
new asshole drilled by his platoon sergeant.”

She nodded. “Legally, Charel, Marines are not ‘govern-
ment property,’ as you put it. But regulations do allow mili-
tary personnel to be charged and punished if their actions,
inattention, or irresponsibility causes them bodily or psy-
chological harm, or causes others to be harmed.

“However, I do not foresee that to be the case in this in-
stance. Others in your company have suffered psychologi-
cal injury simply from the fact that many of you had close
friends and comrades irretrievably killed on Alighan.”

Again, a human-sounding pause. “Five hundred eighty

Marines of the 55th MARS made the combat assault on

Alighan. During the assault, they suffered two hundred
five casualties—and one hundred twelve of those were
irretrievables. That’s over nineteen point three percent
killed, Charel.”

He shrugged. “We knew it would be rough going in.”

“For most military units throughout history, losses of
anything above ten or twelve percent were considered crip-
pling. The unit in question effectively ceased to operate as a
fighting group, especially when it was a company-sized unit
or smaller, where most of the personnel actually knew one
another, where the losses represented friends or, at the least,
acquaintances.

“In your assault on the Theocrat position on top of the
building, two of the ten involved were killed. Twenty per-
cent. And the ten of you knew one another, were close to one
another, on a personal level.”

“So? Allison said we’d be lucky if it was twenty-five.

What’s your point?”

“That everyone in your unit suffered considerable loss.

You would not be human if all of you weren’t grieving.”

“None of the others in my squad are here, I notice,” he said.

“Maybe they’re grieving, but they’re handling it, right?”

STAR STRIKE

153

“Each person handles grief differently. How are you han-
dling it, Charel?”

He shrugged again. “I don’t know. Mostly, I guess I’m
not. I was thought-clicking stim releases off my implants
for a while, to kind of keep me going, get me moving in the
morning, y’know? But after a couple of weeks my software
reported me.”

“Yes. And for a good reason. Nanostims are not addictive
physically, but it is very easy to become psychologically reliant
on them. And that would reduce your usefulness to the Corps.”

“Yes. Always the Corps. First, last, and always.”

“You sound bitter.”

“About being one tiny circuit in a very large board? A
number, one among hundreds of thousands? Now, why
would that make me bitter?”

“I will assume that you mean that sarcastically. You
knew when you enlisted that the needs of the Corps came
first, that you would surrender certain rights and privileges
in order to become a Marine.”

“Yes. . . .”

“That the good of the mission comes first, then the good
of the Marine Corps, then that of your own unit . . . and only
then can your personal good be considered.”

“I know all that.”

“Good.” Another hesitation. “Were you aware that Lieu-
tenant Johnson, your platoon CO, has recommended you for
platoon sergeant?”

That startled him. “Shit. No. . . .”

“It’s true. The decision has been deferred, pending my
recommendation.”

“Don’t defer on my account. I don’t want it.”

“Why not?”

He had to think about that one for a moment. He’d wanted
the slot once. He and Thea had joked frequently about him
gunning for her billet, and how he would have to transfer to
a different platoon to get it.

“I’m not sure,” he said after a moment. Where the hell
was Karla going with all of this? “I think . . .” He stopped.

He didn’t want to go there.

154

IAN DOUGLAS

“What do you think, Charel?”

“I think I don’t deserve the slot.”

“Why not?”

“I screwed up. It was my idea, mounting up on Specter guns
and going up the outside of the building like that. If we’d gone
in another way . . . or called down sniper fire from orbit . . .”

“According to the after-action reports,” Karla told him,

“orbital bombardment was restricted in that sector due to
the presence of civilian noncombatants. And assaulting that
tower from the ground up would have resulted in unaccept-
ably high Marine casualties. You made the correct choice,
and your platoon sergeant agreed with your assessment. In
what way did you ‘screw up?’”

“I didn’t get all the APerMs.”

“There were other Marines in the area. In any case,

APerMs are generally deployed in numbers sufficient to
overwhelm individual suit countermeasures. In combat, re-
member, chaos effects tend to outweigh both planning and
advance preparation. You did what you could, what you’d
been trained to do, and you did it to the best of your ability.

Unfortunately, two APerMs got through and killed Howell
and Beck. What could you have done differently that would
have resulted in a different outcome?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know! If I knew, I would be platoon
sergeant material, okay? But I don’t know, and the Corps
isn’t going to risk a platoon with someone who doesn’t know
the answers.”

“I believe, Charel, that you are setting standards for your-
self that are too high, and too rigid.”

“They’re mine to set.”

“Not if in the setting you do harm to yourself. ‘Govern-
ment property,’ remember?”

The session continued, but Ramsey listened with only
half an ear, making polite noises where necessary to con-
vince Karla that he was paying attention.

Or could the AI tell by monitoring his brain waves?

Ramsey didn’t know, nor did he care. The depression was set-
tling in closer, deeper, until it threatened to smother him.

He wanted the damned AI out of his head.

STAR STRIKE

155

USMC Skybase

Dock 27, Earth Ring 7

1015 hrs GMT

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander’s concept, as so-far
approved by the Commonwealth Senate, had been desig-
nated Operation Gorgon. The strategic option of a strike
into Xul space to delay or block a likely Xul attack against
human space by drawing them off in pursuit of a large Navy-

Marine task force was a go.

Now all that remained was to come up with a viable ops
plan. To that end, he’d called a general staff meeting.

“Map Center open,” Lieutenant General Martin Alexan-
der said. In his mind, the dome of the virtual briefing room
shimmered, then deepened into the gently curved clottings
of stars that made up one small section of the Orion Arm of
the Galaxy. With a thought, he began rising into the mass of
stars, focusing now on the amoebic blot of various-colored
translucence marking the various regions of space claimed
by Humankind. One star, just inside the outer periphery of
one of the colored areas, was highlighted a bright green—

Puller 659.

“Our problem,” Alexander told his audience, “is primar-
ily a political one. Puller 659 is the location of a Stargate
leading to a region of Xul-controlled space designated Star-
wall. Intelligence says that Starwall is an important Xul
nexus—and we know they have information about Earth at
the base in that system. Take out Starwall, and we might
arrange to have that information become lost again. Even if
we don’t, Starwall is a big enough target that we know we’ll
hurt the bastards if we hit them there.

“Unfortunately, the Gate leading to Starwall, as you can
see here, is located inside space claimed by the PanEuro-
pean Republic. The Commonwealth Senate is not enthusi-
astic about starting a war with the Republic and opening a
third front, not at a time when we’re already engaged with
the Theocracy . . . and may be about to face a new Xul incur-
sion as well.”

His virtual audience was represented in the briefing area

156

IAN DOUGLAS
by the icons of over two hundred men, women, and artificial
intelligences making up 1MIEF’s ops planning staff, which
included intelligence, communications, and administrative
staff constellations from all organizational levels.

“Our best hope against the Xul, obviously,” he contin-
ued, “would be to get all of the human governments pulling
together . . . ending the war with the Theocracy, and get-
ting them, the PanEuropeans, the Chinese, the Hispanics,
the Russians, all of them pulling together and pooling their
space-military resources to fight the Xul.

“In my estimation, our survival as a species almost cer-
tainly will depend on the human species working together.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that,” the rough voice of

Vice Admiral Liam Taggart put in, and several in the audi-
ence chuckled. Taggart was Alexander’s opposite number in

Gorgon, the commander of 1MIEF’s naval contingent.

No one else in the virtual space would have dared to in-
terrupt Alexander’s exposition.

“Thank you, Liam,” Alexander replied. “Fortunately,
uniting Humankind is a job for the politicians, not the mili-
tary. While they’re working on that, we need to consider
our strategic alternatives for Gorgon, and—just as with the
original gorgons of Greek myth—so far we have three.

“The first, and least desirable in my opinion, is that we
wait . . . hold back and wait for the political situation to re-
solve itself. The advantage is that we don’t have to commit
ourselves at once. The downside is that we can’t assume that
the Xul are going to give us the luxury of waiting. Our intel
from Puller 659 is solid; we know the Xul know where we
are and how to get at us. We can assume they’re gathering
their forces for a strike as we speak. Absolutely the only un-
known factor in the equation is how long we actually have.

“Second, we trespass into PanEurope space, take the
whole MIEF right through the Republic, and the hell with
the consequences. We might win Aurore’s approval and sup-
port . . . but no one’s betting money on that.” Aurore was

Theta Bootes IV, the capital of the PanEuropean Republic.

“Now, the Senate won’t approve a head-on invasion . . .

but they might allow us to pull an end run. Puller 659 is close

STAR STRIKE

157
to the outer periphery of Republican space. We might swing
out this way . . .” As he spoke, a yellow course line moved out
through Commonwealth space from Sol, leaping from star
system to star system to enter an as-yet unexplored region
beyond the frontier, then looping back and around to come
in to the Puller system from outside human space. “Techni-
cally, this would still constitute an invasion of Republican
space . . . but we might be able to slip the whole MIEF into
the Puller system and out through the gate to Starwall before
the Republicans know what’s going down. The downside:

if Aurore finds out and gets ticked off, the Commonwealth
might find itself at war with the Theocracy, the Xul, and the

Republic.

“Third.” Four white pinpoints lit up within Common-
wealth space. “We forget about Puller 659 and Starwall
entirely. There are a total of seventeen known Stargates,
offering a total of about two hundred known routes into

Xul systems, all of them now being actively monitored by

Marine or Navy listening posts. Four of those Gates lie
inside Commonwealth space—Sirius, of course, Mu Cygni,

Gamma Piscium, and Lambda Capricorni.” Each pinpoint
on the map display brightened as he named it.

“These four gates offer us a total of twenty-nine routes
into star systems we know to be occupied by the Xul. We
select one of those twenty-nine potential paths and send the

MIEF there.

“The disadvantage of this choice is that we know the
space controlled by the Xul is unimaginably vast . . . so vast
that what happens in one part might simply not matter to the
rest of it.”

At Alexander’s command, the viewpoint of the watchers’

assembled minds seemed to pull back sharply. The gleam-
ing starscape of near-Sol space dwindled into the distance,
revealing the entire sweep of the Galaxy, three milky-haze
arms wrapped tightly about a bulging, ruddy-hued central
core. In an instant, the patch of space occupied by Human-
kind vanished, a dust speck lost against that teeming back-
drop of stars.

“For instance,” Alexander continued, “if we go through

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IAN DOUGLAS
the Sirius Gate, we could strike here . . .” A white nova flared
near a globular star cluster above the galactic plane.

“Those of you who’ve studied your Corps history re-
member the Marine incursion at a system designated Cluster

Space, about five hundred years ago—a single star system
in the galactic halo that possessed very large collection of
multiple star gates, a kind of switching station for tens of
thousands of different gate routes. That route was slammed
shut when the Marines destroyed the Cluster Space end of
that gatepath . . . but we’ve found similar systems elsewhere.

This is one—designated CS-Epsilon. According to our lis-
tening post at Sirius, it possesses five separate gates in the
same star system. Obviously a high-value target.

“Unfortunately, we’re really in the dark as to just how
important any one stargate nexus is to the Xul. Remember,
they didn’t build these things, so far as we’ve been able to
determine. They just use them . . . and guard as many as they
can. Like us, really, but on a much larger scale.

“So . . . if we hit CS-Epsilon, we don’t know that the
news would reach any other Xul base, or that it would make
the slightest difference to them or their plans.” Two hundred
more stars lit up, scattered from one end of the Galaxy to the
other. “Remember that we only know of about two hundred
systems with a Xul presence. There may be thousands, even
hundreds of thousands of other Xul bases. The MIEF might
rampage across the Galaxy and take out every single known

Xul strongpoint . . . then return to Sol in a few years and
find all of the worlds of Humankind reduced to blackened
cinders because nothing we did really hurt the Xul badly
enough to attract their attention. If Operation Gorgon is to
succeed, we must hit the Xul in a vital spot, hurt them so
badly they send everything they have after us, and leave our
worlds alone, at least for the time being.

“I’m ready to entertain any ideas any of you might
have. . . .”

“Sir,” Colonel Holst, of 3rd Brigade Intelligence, ven-
tured after a long moment’s silence . . .

“Go ahead.”

“Sir . . . with respect, this is just flat-out impossible! How

STAR STRIKE

159
do we know if any of the systems we can reach are impor-
tant enough to get the Xuls’ attention if we hit it? Like you
said, we could blow their bases from now until Doomsday,
and they might not take any more notice of it than we would
of a fleabite. How do we know? . . .”

“We don’t, Colonel. Hell, even with a human enemy,
ninety percent of intelligence work is WAG—wild-assed
guesses. You probably know that better than I do. And with

. . . entities like the Xul, it’s a lot worse.”

“We do know the Xul are xenophobic in the extreme,”

Major General Austin pointed out quietly. He was the CO of
the MIEF’s ground combat division, but he’d put in a bunch
of years in Intelligence on his way up. “In fact, that appears
to be their defining characteristic. Anything, any species,
that poses a threat to them, even a potential threat, they take
notice. The Fermi Answer, remember.”

Eight hundred years before, according to legends rooted
in Earth’s pre-spaceflight era, a physicist named Enrico

Fermi had wondered why, in a galaxy where advanced tech-
nical life ought to be common, and the radio emissions and
other evidence of their existence ought to be easily detected

. . . there was nothing. Humankind had appeared to be alone
in the cosmos. That contradiction had become known as the

Fermi Paradox.

Only gradually had the answer to that paradox revealed
itself. When humans first ventured out to other worlds within
their own Solar System, they’d found ample evidence of ex-
trasolar intelligence—evidence even of the large-scale colo-
nization of Earth, the Moon, and Mars in the remote past.

Later, when they began exploring beyond the Solar System,
they found the blasted, wind-blown ruins of planet-embrac-
ing cities on Chiron and elsewhere. The Fermi Answer, evi-
dently, was that intelligence did evolve, and frequently, but
that someone was already out there, waiting and watching
for any sign of technological evolution.

In all the history of the Milky Way Galaxy, among all
those hundreds of billions of stars, if even one species
evolved with the in-born Darwinian imperative to survive
by eliminating all possible competitors, and if that species

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IAN DOUGLAS
survived long enough to achieve an advanced enough tech-
nology, they would be in the perfect position to wipe out any
nascent species long before it became a serious threat.

The Fermi Answer. Humankind was alone because the

Xul had killed everyone else.

There were exceptions, of course. The An Empire had
been destroyed thousands of years before, but a few had sur-
vived on Ishtar, overlooked when they lost any technology
that might attract Xul notice—like radio. The N’mah had
survived by giving up star travel and living quietly inside
the Sirius Stargate—the strategy now known as “rats-in-the-
walls.” And there might be other exceptions out there among
the stars as well.

Humankind had so far avoided destruction thanks to a
combination of luck and the fact that the Xul appeared to re-
spond to threats in a cumbersome and unwieldy manner; the
sheer size and scope of their Galaxy-wide presence worked
against them.

But that unwieldiness now would be working against the

Marine MIEF.

“General Austin is correct,” Alexander said. “Basic strat-
egy 101: use the enemy’s weaknesses against him. Xul weak-
nesses, at least in so far as we’ve been able to determine over
the past few centuries, include their xenophobia and their
glacial slowness in responding or adapting to threats. The
xenophobia makes them predictable, after a fashion. Their
slow response time gives us a chance to hit them multiple
times before they land on us with their full weight.

“But we do need to identify those systems that will make
them sit up and take notice if we hit them. Ideas?”

“Starwall,” a major in the 55th MARS intelligence group
said after a moment. “We know it’s a major Xul transport
nexus, and we know the intel they took from the Argo is
there. Option B, going into Republic Space and through the

Puller gate to Starwall is our best option.”

And with that, the discussion was off and running, with
various members of the planning staff contributing thoughts
and suggestions, others offering objections and criticisms.

Alexander stepped back mentally, listening to the debate.

STAR STRIKE

161

After a few moments, he assigned Cara the job of monitor-
ing the discussion, while he focused on the far more boring
topic of Expeditionary Force logistics.

Gorgon represented a God-awful mess when it came to
supply. An MIEF was an enormous and sprawling organiza-
tion, so intricate and complex that dozens of specialist AIs
were required simply to maintain internal communications,
logistics, and routine administration. It was a joint-service
unit, comprised of some 52,000 Marine and Navy person-
nel and eighty ships. The Marine component included a full

Marine division—16,000 men and women—plus a Marine

Aerospace Wing and a force service support group.

Currently, 1MIEF drew on 1MarDiv for personnel and
support, but ever since the Commonwealth Senate’s vote
to accept Alexander’s operational proposal, both units had
been heavily reinforced, both by drawing personnel and
assets from other Marine divisions, and from newly grad-
uating classes out of the recruit training centers, both on

Mars and at Earth/Luna. When 1MIEF departed for the
stars—the date of embarkation was now tentatively sched-
uled for mid-January, eight weeks hence—it would be fully
staffed independently of 1MarDiv, which would remain in
the Sol System as part of the standing defense against a pos-
sible Xul strike.

The sheer logistical complexity of Operation Gorgon
meant that a small army of planners were needed to work
out each detail before embarkation. Vast quantities of ex-
pendables were already being routed to the Deimos Yards
over Mars—most of them in the form of water ice, methane,
and ammonia, with lesser amounts of trace elements. The ice
would serve both as shielding and as a water supply; nanoas-
semblers would pull carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitro-
gen from the raw materials and rearrange them as needed to
create air and food. Resupply during the mission would be
accomplished by mining outer-system worlds and asteroids
each time they entered another star system. The supply lines
back to Sol would be too long and tenuous to permit cargo
ships to keep the fleet supplied.

But even if the MIEF was able to “live off the land,”

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IAN DOUGLAS
as some wag had put it already—meaning picking up all
necessary elements in other star systems for reassembly
as needed—the Expeditionary Fleet needed to have robot
miners and transports enough to collect the raw materials,
storage tankers to hold them, and mobile processing plants
to convert and distribute the finished consumables. Besides
that, there were critical decisions to be made concerning me-
chanical spares and replacement parts, especially for com-
plex electronic components that couldn’t be batch grown in
the fleet’s repair ships.

And there were the weapons, the Mark 660 battlesuits,
the ammunition, the power cores and converters . . . the
list seemed endless, the storage space for it all sharply lim-
ited. Alexander and his planning staff were still hard at
work determining if the thing was even possible. It wasn’t
enough simply to add an extra few AKs, ANs, and AEs
to the fleet roster, because each of those vessels—cargo
ships, nanufactory transports, and ammunition ships—in
turn needed their own small mountains of spare parts and
extra equipment.

Where 1MIEF was going was a long, long way out into
the dark, and resupply was going to be a bitch. The situation
was made even tougher by the fact that Alexander couldn’t
even begin to guess how long 1MIEF would be deployed
starside.

“No!” a voice in his mind called, rising above the others.

“You young rock! We do that and we leave our lines of re-
treat wide open and vulnerable! Doing that would be tanta-
mount to suicide!”

Judging from the acrimony of the debate going on within
the staff planning group, it might be a while before the

MIEF could depart in the first place. Rock was an old, old

Corps epithet for a particularly dumb Marine—as in “dumb
as a rock.”

“With respect . . . sir,” another voice came back, biting.

“How the hell are we going to maintain our lines of retreat
across twenty thousand light-years? The EF will be cut off
as soon as it goes through the first Gate!”

“People!” Alexander cut in. “Let’s keep it civil.” A web-

STAR STRIKE

163
work of varicolored lines and brightly lit stars now stretched
across the Galaxy map, showing alternate routes and objec-
tives, known Stargate links, and known Xul bases. Cara had
been tagging and color-coding each idea as it was presented,
attaching to each lists of pros and cons.

As Alexander looked at the tangle, a new surety began to
make itself felt. Leadership styles differed, of course, from
officer to officer, and since the beginning of his career Al-
exander had tried to be democratic in his approach, solicit-
ing the ideas and opinions of his subordinates and giving
each due consideration.

But in the final analyses, the Marine Corps was not a de-
mocracy, any more than was the chain of command on board
a Navy warship. One voice was needed to give the orders;
one mind was required to make the necessary decisions.

He wanted their input, but ultimately, this decision was
his, and his alone.

“Okay, people,” he said, speaking into the hard, new si-
lence. “It’s clear that what we lack more than anything else
is decent intel. We need to identify, and quickly, the best
way to hit the Xul, and to hit them hard, hard enough to
draw their interest away from human space.

“To that end, I’m authorizing increased surveillance on
known Xul bases, with an emphasis on astrogational map-
ping. We need to know where these bases are relative to one
another, and how they interconnect.”

“Sir,” General Austin asked. “Does that include Stargates
outside the Commonwealth?”

“You’re damned straight it does. Keep the ops black. We
don’t need any more political problems, here. I’ll get the au-
thorization we need. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I am also authorizing an AI search of all known
astronomical databases. I want to compile every bit of data
possible that might reveal unexpected or unknown links be-
tween known Stargates and known areas of deep space.” He
thought a moment, then added, “Include in that search any
deep space anomalies or unexplained phenomena that might
indicate a Xul presence or interest.” A number of agencies

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IAN DOUGLAS
kept track of such data, he knew, though he wasn’t sure if
anyone ever actually used it.

But the data were there, and AI agents could find it, com-
pile it, and present it to the ops planning team. Reports of
gamma or x-ray ray bursts, for example, from a particular
star system might indicate a normal and natural process—
stellar material from a companion star falling onto the sur-
face of a neutron star, for example—or it could indicate the
presence of a Xul fleet.

“So far as ops planning goes, we need to pick one mode
of approach and focus on that. So here’s what we’re going
to do. . . .”

12�

2311.1102

UCS Samar

In transit, Alighan to Sol

0730 hrs GMT

The transport was two weeks out from Sol. For the past four
weeks, Ramsey’s sessions with Karla had continued, with
hours out of each ship’s day passing in virtual conversations
with the AI in a variety of imagined “safe” environs.

Slowly, he was coming to grips with his ghosts.

It hadn’t been easy.

“I don’t know how the Navy pukes stand it, man,” Staff

Sergeant Shari Colver told him. “The boredom would drive
me straight out the nearest airlock ricky-tick.”

“Hey, that’s why they spend most of their time in cybe-
hybe,” Ramsey said with a shrug.

They were sitting in the ship’s lounge, a small and

Spartan compartment that combined rec hall with mess
deck and was normally reserved for the use of the ship-
board in-transit watch. The domed overhead showed a
backdrop of stars; if one studied the star patterns closely
enough, individual stars appeared to move from hour to
hour—the nearest ones, at any rate . . . but the effect was
a lie, an illusion generated by the Samar’s navigational

AI.

The fact of the matter was that it was impossible to
see outside of a starship traveling within an Alcubierre
spacetime bubble.

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IAN DOUGLAS

In 1994, a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre had first
laid the groundwork for the space drive that later bore his
name, when his equations demonstrated that—in theory,
at least—a wave of distorted spacetime, expanding behind
and contracting ahead, could carry a spacecraft along at
faster-than-light speeds. No basic physics were violated in
the movement; Einstein’s prohibitions against FTL had been
directed at mass and energy, not at the fabric of space itself,
and, in fact, it was eventually determined that the entire uni-
verse had naturally expanded faster than the speed of light
in the opening moments of its own birth. A ship in the warp
of the Alcubierre Metric might slip quietly across flat spa-
cetime at the rate of nine light-years per day, but since it
was motionless relative to the encapsulated spacetime im-
mediately around it, it avoided completely such inconvenient
effects as acceleration, relativistic mass increase, or time
dilation.

But by the nature of the space-bending field around it, a
vessel under Alcubierre Drive, also was effectively cut off
from the universe outside. There were no navigational vid
views outside the hull for the simple reason that there was
nothing to see out there save the enveloping black. Encased
within a bubble of severely distorted space and time, Samar
and her passengers remained completely deaf and blind to
their surroundings, and the slow-drifting stars electronically
painted on the lounge overhead represented the navigational

AI’s best guess as to what should be visible outside. It was,
in fact, little more than an elaborate planetarium display.

But even the display of an educated guess was essentially
boring, the patterns of stars changing so slowly the novelty
wore off after a very few hours.

Still, Ramsey and the other waking psych-wounded on
board tended to spend a lot of their off-hours here. The cool,

K0 star circled by Alighan was located in the constellation

Ophiuchus, as seen from Sol, and after the first three weeks
or so, star patterns in the sky opposite Ophiuchus, ahead
of the Samar, had begun to drift into recognizable constel-
lations, albeit shrunken and distorted. Day by day, those
constellations opposite Ophiuchus in Earth’s sky, including

STAR STRIKE

167
the easily recognizable sprawl of Orion with the prominent
three-in-a-row suns of his belt, became more and more
evident.

Ramsey and Colver were sitting in one of the double
lounge recliners, a side-by-side seat that let them watch the
stars. They’d been watching Orion, and wondering if Sol was
visible yet somewhere within that dusting of stars ahead.

No wonder, Ramsey thought, passengers and crew alike
in A.D. ships spent the passage in cybe-hibe, save for a
small, rotating watch. The planetarium display did little
but emphasize just how tiny Samar was within a very large
galaxy. That sort of thing could wear unpleasantly on the
healthiest of minds.

“Did you ever wonder,” Colver asked him after a long
while, “why we’re doing our therapy time shipboard? Why
didn’t they just pack us away with everyone else, and start
unscrambling our brains once we get home?”

Ramsey looked around. Three Navy enlisted ratings were
playing cards at a table on the other side of the compart-
ment. They didn’t appear to be listening to the two Marines,
though the space was small enough that they could have, had
they wanted.

“I never thought about it, no,” Ramsey replied. “I mean,
they have the psych AI resident in the ship’s Net, so it’s there
and available. They’d need it for ship’s crew, just because the
isolation could drive people off the deep end. So, as long as
the software’s there anyway . . .” He shrugged. “Why, is it
important?”

“I dunno. I’ve just been in the Corps long enough to know
they do everything for a reason, even if that reason doesn’t
make a whole lot of sense up front. I was just wondering if they
do it in-transit because we are so isolated out here. No distrac-
tions. Nothing to do but count the days until we get home.”

Ramsey managed a chuckle. “Well, hell. I can just imag-
ine Karla trying to talk to me back at the Ring, and all I want
to do is put on my civvies and hit the airlock. The Arean

Ring is pretty good for liberty.”

“You call it Karla?” she asked. “Mine is Karl. For Karl

Jung.”

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IAN DOUGLAS

“Yeah. Depends on whether the patient relates better
to men or women. You know, another possible reason for
shrinking us out here . . . they can control what they put in
our heads.”

“How do you mean?”

“Think about it. Out here, it’s just us and our . . . our
memories, right?”

She nodded. Ramsey didn’t know exactly what had hap-
pened to Colver on Alighan, but it was probably one of a
relatively few but common problems. Stress shock—what
once had been called post-traumatic stress syndrome—or
survivor guilt or anxiety attacks or, like Ramsey, she’d lost
someone important to her and was dealing now with the de-
pression. Whatever it was, he could see echoes of grief, fear,
and sadness in her eyes.

He wondered if his own eyes betrayed his inner demons
that clearly.

“Well,” he went on, “if we were back on the Ring—unless
they quarantined us all—we’d be going out on liberty and
visiting family, getting drunk, getting simmed—”

“Getting laid,” she put in.

“Sure, that, too. We’d probably get ten kinds of advice
from family and friends back there, all about how to put all
the bad memories away, get over it, forget about it, and move
on, y’know?”

“And what they’re telling us here, Karl and Karla, I mean,
is that we have to look at the memories. Deal with them.”

“Yeah. Something like that. Unless we let them mem-
wipe us, we’ve got to deal with our shit. We can delay it, we
can play all kinds of games, we can pretend it never hap-
pened, but, sooner or later, we’ve got to face it.”

“You sound like Karl.” She smiled.

“I wonder why?”

“So you think they don’t want us contaminating our
minds with input from our families?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, but they let us talk together. They don’t have us
isolated from all human contact. They even have the group
sessions, where all of us get together and talk.”

STAR STRIKE

169

“True. But then . . . we’re all in the same boat, literally,
right? Same general experiences. Same problems. And

Karla, Karl, I mean, is there to facilitate.” He thought about
it a moment. “It’s kind of like being in the Corps. We’re all

Marines. Family, y’know?”

“The Green Family.”

“Yeah. Semper fi. . . .”

Green Family was a term out of the days before FTL,
when Marines deployed starside might be gone for decades,
objective. Over the course of the past eight centuries, the

Marine Corps had been strongly shaped in certain key ways
by the physics of interstellar travel.

Back at the dawn of Humankind’s migration into
space, all that had been known for sure about faster-
than-light travel was that it was impossible. Einstein and
relativity had convincingly demonstrated that converting
all of the mass in the universe into energy would not be
enough to accelerate a single atom to the speed of light,
much less pass it. If humans wanted to travel to the stars,
they would have to settle for decades-long voyages in
cybernetic hibernation, on board ships that approached,
but could never actually reach, the magic velocity of c.

Relativistic time dilation slowed the passage of subjective
time, but the fundamental way in which the universe was
put together forbade the FTL warp drives of the popular
fiction of the time.

As a result, Marines deployed to the worlds of other stars
would return to a culture that had changed dramatically
during the intervening decades. Time dilation meant that
the Marines might have aged five or six years, subjective,
while twenty or thirty years objective had passed on Earth.

The resultant temporal isolation had guaranteed that large
numbers of Marines simply couldn’t fit in with the civil-
ians they were sworn to protect; while they were out-system,
most of the cultural markers they’d known and grown up
with had changed. Music, language, fashion, art, politics,
technology, everything that connected them with others had
transformed, while the people they’d left behind were dead
or changed by age.

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IAN DOUGLAS

More and more, Marines had relied on the Corps as
family. A Marine might return from the stars and find that

Marines back on Earth possessed a different cultural back-
ground, true, but they were still Marines. Somehow, the
similarities always outweighed the differences.

Eventually, of course, Einstein was proved to be a spe-
cial case within the broader scope of quantum physics, just
as Newton had been a special case within the mathemat-
ics of relativity. The Stargates had demonstrated that it was
possible to bypass enormous gulfs of interstellar space. En-
counters with the Xul proved that FTL travel was possible
without the Gates, though for centuries no one could figure
out how they did it.

What no one had ever imagined was that, when the prob-
lem was finally cracked, there would be not one solution,
but many. It was still not known how the Xul hunterships
bypassed light, but humans now possessed not one but two
non-Gate modes of FTL travel of their own—the Alcubierre

Drive and the much more recent paraspace phase-shift tran-
sitions, or PPST, used by large structures such as the Corps’

Skybase. And there were suggestions within the wilderness
of theoretical physics that promised other modes of FTL
travel as well.

Neither the Alcubierre Drive nor PPST involved accel-
eration, and, therefore, time dilation didn’t enter into the
equation. Voyages between the stars now required weeks
or months rather than decades. It was with some surprise,
then, that Marine psychologists noted that Marines, enlisted

Marines, especially, still failed to connect with the cultures
from which they’d emerged.

There were some who joked that Marines weren’t human
to begin with, but the problem was becoming worse and
needed to be addressed. The Marines possessed their own
culture, their own societal structure, language, calendar and
timekeeping system, heroes, economy, history, goals, and
concerns.

Most Marines would have pointed out that this had
always been the case, going at least as far back as the global
wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The psychs

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171
didn’t need to invoke star travel to suggest that Marines were
different . . . or that most of them gloried in the difference.

As an ancient Corps aphorism had it, there are only two
kinds of people: Marines, and everyone else.

Ramsey leaned back in his chair, watching the almost
imperceptible drift of the nearest stars on the overhead.

Thea’s death still burned in his gut, hot, sullen, and he still
tended to flinch when he let his mind slip back to the final
moments of the firefight on the skyscraper roof, to the sight
of her battlesuit torn open and bloody as he cradled her, as
he watched her consciousness slip away. He didn’t know if
he could ever heal. . . .

Awkwardly, he lifted his arm and placed it along the
back of the reclining seat, behind Colver’s head. She moved
a little closer to him, her leg touching his, and he let his arm
drape over her shoulders. They continued to watch the illu-
sion of stars.

Whatever happened, he knew he had family—the Green

Family—and, for the moment, at least, that was enough.

PanEuropean Military Hospital Facility

1530/31:05 hours, local time

“Lieutenant?” a woman’s voice said in her head. “Lieutenant

Lee? Can you hear me?”

Lieutenant Tera Lee opened her eyes—then squeezed
them tight once more as the blast of light speared its way
into her skull. “Where the hell am I?”

“You’re in the medical facility at Port-de-Paix.”

“Where . . . where is that? . . .”

“You’re at Aurore. Perhaps you know it as Theta Bootes

IV? Actually, we’re on Aurore’s inner moon. We brought
you here from the star system you call Puller.”

The words were spoken within Lee’s mind, coming
through her cranial implants, and that fact alone was . . .

disturbing.

Aurore, Lieutenant Lee knew, was deep in the heart of
the PanEuropean Republic, the fourth planet circling a hot,

F7 V star some 48 light-years from Sol, a world of broad

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IAN DOUGLAS
oceans, rugged mountains, stunning auroral displays from
which it took its name, and a trio of large moons. At least,
that’s how it was described on the Worlds of Humankind
database she’d studied back in the Naval Academy.

It was also the capital of the Republic . . . and what the
hell was she doing here when her last memories were of
being adrift at Starwall, umpteen thousands of light-years
from the listening post at Puller 659?

“How . . . long? . . .” Her lips were cracked and dry, and
her throat was sore. She was aware of terrible pain, but at a
distance, held at bay, she imagined, by whatever anodynano-
meds they’d given her.

“Please don’t try to talk,” the woman’s voice said. “I’m
using your implant channels to communicate with you di-
rectly. If you focus your words in your mind, I will hear
you.”

The security implications of that were ominous. How had
the PEs gotten hold of her personal comchannels?

For that matter, what the hell was she doing at the PE
capital in the first place?

“How long have you been here?” the voice in her head
continued. “You were brought on board the Sagitta, one of
our light cruisers, on the third of November. That was about
three weeks ago. You arrived at the Theta Bootes system
yesterday. You’ve been in deep cybernetic hibernation since
your . . . exposure to radiation somewhere beyond the Puller

Stargate.

“You were very, very badly burned. I’m told your condi-
tion was beyond the scope of the small base where you were
stationed. If our task force had not arrived when it did, if
your commanding officer had not chosen to communicate
with us, your condition would have deteriorated to the point
where you would have been an irretrievable.”

Major Tomanaga had called in the Europeans? That
didn’t sound right.

“Who are you?” Lee asked. “And why the hell should I
want to talk to you?”

“I am Monique Sainte-Jean. You may think of me as
your . . . your therapist. You have been unconscious for a

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173
very long time, and we want to be sure you awake with your
mind, memories, and personality intact, non?”

Alarm bells were figuratively ringing in Lee’s mind,
now. As a rule, she’d paid scant attention to interstellar poli-
tics, but she had been thoroughly briefed before her deploy-
ment to the Puller star system. The Puller system, she knew,
was uninhabited and of zero importance to anyone, with the
single exception of the Puller Gate.

The Gate’s connections had been explored in the half-
dozen years following its discovery, some three decades
earlier. A total of twelve established gatepaths had been un-
covered there, one of them the route to the large Xul base at

Starwall.

The problem with the stargates was that the multiple paths
to other stars they provided never seemed to go to anyplace
known or useful. All appeared to open at gates circling other
stars scattered across the Galaxy, from the outer halo to the

Galactic Core itself, but until more was known about those
possible destinations—and whether or not entering them
would alert the Xul to Humankind’s presence—it had been
decided to avoid using them entirely.

Ever since the discovery of the very first gate at Sirius,
astronomers, cosmologists, and physicists from every human
starfaring government had been clamoring for the chance to
use the Gates as research tools—opportunities to explore
close-up such cosmic wonders and enigmas as black holes,
neutron stars, the large-scale structure of the entire Galaxy,
and the weird zoo of mysterious phenomena ticking away
at the Galaxy’s heart. Since a significant number of those
paths—two-hundred or so—led to Xul-occupied systems,
and since the Xul appeared to use the far-flung network
of Gate connections for their own long-range movement
through the Galaxy, the various interstellar governments
had agreed at the Treaty of Chiron in 2490 not to permit any
human movement through the gates for any reason, without
the fully informed consent of all starfaring governments.

And that was why the Puller Listening Post, and all of the
others like it, were illegal, at least within the often murky
arena of international treaty law. Under the auspices of the

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IAN DOUGLAS

DCI2, the Department of Commonwealth Interstellar Intelli-
gence, the Marines had been tapped to build and operate the
system of listening posts . . . and as part of that operation,
they routinely sent robotic probes and even—upon occasion
and when necessary—manned surveillance spacecraft to
keep an eye on the various identified Xul bases.

“My therapist, huh?” Lee replied. “Since when is the Di-
rection Général interested in the emotional health of junior

Marine officers?”

The DGSE— Direction Général de la Sécurité Extrater-
restrial—was the Franco-PanEuropean counterpart to the

DCI2. It was a guess on Lee’s part, but Ste.-Jean had to be
either military or Federal-Republic civilian intelligence,
and the DGSE was the largest and best funded of all of the

Republic’s intelligence organizations.

The long silence that followed her jab suggested that
she’d been on-target, or close to it. She might be consulting
with her superiors on a different channel, or with a military
intelligence AI.

“Very well,” Ste.-Jean said after a moment. “Perhaps we
should play this in a more, ah, straightforward fashion. As
it happens, I am DST, not DGSE, but it was a good guess on
your part.”

The DST was the Direction de la Surveillance du Ter-
ritoire, a kind of civil police intelligence unit tasked with
keeping tabs on people, organizations, and traffic within

French territory that could pose a threat to the government.

Other Terran nationalities within the PanEuropean Repub-
lic had their own intelligence organizations, the Germans
and British especially, but the French held the lion’s share
of planetary colonies within the Republic, and they claimed
the Puller system as their own, even if the place wasn’t
populated.

“Yeah, well,” Lee said in her mind. “I don’t think I have
anything to say to you.”

“Not even in exchange for our medical assistance?” Ste.-

Jean said. “Look. I will be honest with you. We know all
about your observation post at the Puller gas giant. And we
know that you went through the stargate in that system to

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175
investigate a Xul base. Your government, it seems, has much
to answer for . . . beginning with the arrogant breaking of
solemn interstellar treaty, and with placing the security,
even the very survival of all human worlds at grave risk.

You needn’t worry, Lieutenant. We have brought no charges
against you . . . at least, not yet. We recognize that you were
simply doing what your superiors told you to do . . . and were
caught in the middle, yes?”

“If you say so.”

“However, we do require your cooperation. We want to
know exactly what you saw and experienced on the other
side of the gate. And we want your cooperation in identi-
fying Marine installations that we suspect are imbedded
within other Stargate systems in sovereign PanRépublique
space.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

That response elicited another long silence.

Lee managed to open her eyes, and this time she could
keep them open. She was lying in what obviously was a hos-
pital bed, her body completely enclosed in a plastic sheath
that left only her face exposed. Unable to move, she couldn’t
see much of the room, but it appeared to be sterile, white,
and lacking in any amenities whatsoever. She couldn’t even
see a door.

Presumably, they had her body hooked up with tubes for
feeding, for medication, and for waste removal, though she
couldn’t feel much of anything from her neck down save for
that general, far-off-in-the-background sense of pain. Pre-
sumably, too, her bloodstream was now crawling with nano-
agents—microscopic devices programmed to busily swarm
through her circulatory system and repair the damage caused
by her exposure to the Galactic Core’s radiation fields, but
they might be programmed for other things as well.

The big question of the moment was how they’d managed
to tap into her private internal communications channel.

If they could manage that, then theoretically they should
be able to download her entire on-board memory. They
wouldn’t need to ask her questions or elicit her cooperation;
all they’d need to do was pull a full memory dump.

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IAN DOUGLAS

Okay, girl, she thought. Think it through. But keep it low-
channel, in case they’re listening in . . .

If they hadn’t pulled a memory dump, then they didn’t
have access to her cerebral link hardware. Tentatively, she
tried to connect with Terry, her personal software EA, but
the AI resident in her hardware remained silent. She tried
again, searching for Chesty or any of his iterations. Again,
nothing.

Okay, that suggested they’d deliberately disabled Terry . . .

or that he’d been fried by the Core radiation. Chesty was too
large a program to reside within her personal hardware, so he
might be off-line because of range. Had her cereblink been
damaged on the other side of the Gate?

She ran a fast diagnostic, ignoring the fact that her cap-
tors—she thought of them in those terms, now—would be
able to monitor what she was doing. There was damage, but
her hardware appeared to be more or less complete. The
software was running at about forty percent efficiency.

Her personal software might have been taken off-line
in order to facilitate her treatment. More likely, her captors
had tried to access the software directly while she was un-
conscious, and either botched it, or caused some physical
damage in the retrieval process. If the former, questioning
her would be the only alternative they had in order to get
the information they wanted. If the latter, they might have a
partial memory dump already in-hand, and simply wanted
to confirm what they had, or to fill in some missing blanks.

Either way, Lee was in no mood to be helpful.

“That is . . . unfortunate,” the woman’s voice said, and

Lee cursed to herself. Apparently, the PEs had managed to
establish quite a deep communications link through her im-
plants, enabling them to read most of her surface thoughts.

If Terry or Chesty had been operational, they would have
been able to block the intruding channel; hell, Terry would
have not only been able to block the intrusion, he’d have
been able to impersonate Lee so closely over an electronic
net that her interrogators would never have been able to tell
the difference. That, after all, was what personal AI secre-
taries did, among other things.

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177

“We have quite a few different means of getting the in-
formation we want,” the woman’s voice went on, relentless.

“And we will have it. If you choose to voluntarily cooperate,
you will be permitted to return to your people within a few
weeks, at most.

“If you refuse, the alternatives could be . . . distressful.

Just think about it. We could vivisect you very slowly, peel-
ing away your skin, your muscles, your tissue bit by bit, and
with enough control of your nervous system that you would
not be able to lose consciousness at any point in the proce-
dure. And throughout it all, you would never know if what
was happening was a virtual simulation being played into
your brain . . . or a horrible and very bloody reality. That is
the nature of direct mental feeds, you know. You have no
way of knowing what is simulated, and what is real.

“The trouble is, such techniques also violate interstellar
treaty, as you know well. Sooner or later you would break
and beg us to let you tell us what we wanted to know . . . but
either way, whether we’d tortured you only in your mind or
actually cut your body to pieces, we could never allow you
to return to your own people. Even a total mindwipe would
not remove all of the emotional scarring from such torture.

“Or . . . consider this. We could fashion for you an elabo-
rate simulated fantasy . . . one involving you being rescued
by your comrades. You would be freed, be taken back to

Earth, and there you would undergo a perfectly natural de-
briefing by your superiors. Again, how could you tell if what
you experienced was real, or a simulation downloaded into
your brain?

“And there are other alternatives as well. We have me-
dinano that could suppress your own will and hijack your
implants. We could rape your mind and your memory, take
from you what we want by force. Unfortunately, I very much
doubt that Lieutenant Tera Lee would have much of a per-
sonality left when we were done. And, again, that entity, that
living shell, could not be permitted to return to Earth, ever.

I imagine that shooting it would be a mercy.

“So, think about it, my dear. Imagine the possibilities.

Cooperate voluntarily and you will see your home and

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IAN DOUGLAS
family again. We might even see our way clear to recom-
pense you generously. The alternatives, you must agree, are
far more . . . unpleasant.”

And then Lee was alone in the hospital room, alone with
her thoughts, and her fears.

Where were Major Tomanaga and the rest of the Marines
stationed at Puller? Where was Fitzie?

And there was something else, something her interroga-
tor had omitted . . . and it was suddenly vitally important
that Lieutenant Lee not think about it, given that they might
well be monitoring her thoughts. . . .

13�

2411.1102

USMC Skybase

Dock 27, Earth Ring 7

0950 hrs GMT

“General?” Cara said within his mind. “I think the AI search
has found something.”

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander had been seated
at his office desk, going over an unsettling report from In-
telligence. A Marine—specifically, the Marine who’d gone
through the Puller Stargate and discovered that the Xul
at Starwall knew of Humankind’s recent activities—was
missing.

Worse, it seemed likely that the PanEuropeans were
behind the disappearance.

But Cara would not have interrupted his work if this
hadn’t been something important. The MIEF staff con-
stellations had been hard at it for almost a week, now. Six
days ago, at the ops planning session, he’d given them the
outlines of what he wanted, but they still had to churn out
the hard data. Actually, he’d not expected any real progress
for another week or two yet, so complex was this strategic
problem.

“Okay,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Whatcha got?”

“You requested an AI search of astronomical databases,
specifically seeking information that might reveal unex-
pected or unknown links between known Stargates and
known areas of deep space.”

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IAN DOUGLAS

“Yes.”

The worst problem the planning team faced at the
moment was the lack of hard data on stargates and exactly
how they interconnected across the Galaxy. Several ongo-
ing database studies were being carried out by astronomical
institutes on dozens of worlds, both in the Commonwealth
and elsewhere. Alexander had hoped that the staff planning
constellations might be able to mine data from those stud-
ies, acquiring a better understanding of just how the various
stargates were linked together.

“You also requested,” Cara went on, “a list of anoma-
lies associated with areas we researched . . . anomalies that
might indicate Xul presence or interest.”

“Yes. What did you come up with?”

“The Aquila Anomaly. The information is very old . . .

pre-spaceflight, in fact.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“The name is relatively recent. The information, however,
was first gleaned from an astronomical compilation known
as the Norton Star Atlas before such information was even
available on electronic media. While we can’t be certain at
this point in the research, the anomaly is significant enough
that we felt it necessary to bring it to human attention.”

“Show me.”

A window opened in his mind, opening on to a view of
deep space, scattered with stars—one bright star, five or
six somewhat dimmer stars, and a background scattering of
stardust.

“This is the constellation of Aquila, as seen from Earth,”

Cara told him.

“The Eagle,” Alexander said, nodding. He hadn’t recog-
nized the pattern of stars when it first appeared, but he knew
the name.

Lines appeared in the window connecting the brighter
stars—a parallelogram above, a triangle below, both slant-
ing off to the right. With great imagination, an observer
might imagine a bird of prey, wings raised in flight.

“As with all constellation groupings,” Cara told him, “the
identification with a person, animal, or object is problem-

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181
atical, at least from the AI perspective. But an eagle is the
historical designation, yes.”

“Beauty, and eagles, are in the eye of the beholder,” Alex-
ander quipped. “That bright star is Altair—Alpha Aquilae.”

It was, he knew, a shade over sixteen and a half light-years
from Earth, and was one of the nearest outposts of the

PanEuropean Republic. Commonwealth military planners
had been working on contingency plans focused on how to
fight a war with the Republic if things came to that unpleas-
ant juncture. If the Commonwealth went to war with the

PanEuropeans, getting past Altair would be their first big
strategic requirement.

Cara ignored his sally—AIs had trouble understanding
certain concepts, like “beauty”—and continued. “You are
aware of the astronomical phenomenon of novae,” the AI
said.

“Of course. Stars that explode—become much, much
brighter in a short period of time. They’re not as violent as
supernovae, of course, but they’re violent enough to cook
any planets they might have. A handful are reported every
year. Most aren’t naked-eye visible, but there have been a
few bright ones.”

“Correct. Most novae appear to occur in close-double
star systems, where material from one star is falling into the
other. At least, that is the conventional theory, which seems
to hold for a majority of the novae studied so far. And, as
you say, novae are observed and recorded every year. My AI
colleagues went through all such lists, among many others,
in pursuance of your authorization for a data search on 1811,
six days ago.”

“What did you find?”

“An intriguing fact. During a single thirty-seven-year
period in the early twentieth century, a total of twenty bright
novae—exploding stars—were observed from Earth.”

“Go on.”

“Five of those twenty novae occurred within the arbitrary
boundaries of the constellation Aquila.”

It took a few seconds for the import to sink in. “My

God—”

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IAN DOUGLAS

“Twenty-five percent of all observed and recorded novae,
in other words, occurred within point two-five percent of
the entire sky. This, we feel, is statistically important.

“One of these novae,” Cara went on, as a bright, new star
appeared on the skymap just to the west of Altair, “was Nova

Aquila. It appeared in the year 1918, and was the brightest
nova ever recorded until Nova Carina, almost six centuries
later. Two of the other novae appeared in the same year—

1936—here, and here.” Two more bright stars appeared as

Cara spoke, followed a moment later by two more. “And the
last two, here in 1899, and here in 1937.”

“Five novae, though,” Alexander said slowly. He didn’t
want to jump to unreasonable conclusions. “That’s still too
small a number to be statistically significant.”

“It could be a random statistical clustering, true,” Cara
told him. “Statistical anomalies do occur. But the extremely
small area of sky involved—one quarter of one percent—
seems to argue strongly against coincidence as a factor. And
there is this, as well, a datum not available to twentieth-cen-
tury cosmologists.”

The group of stars showing in Alexander’s mind rotated.

The geometric figures of parallelogram and triangle shifted
and distorted, some lines becoming much longer, others
growing shorter.

A constellation was purely a convenience for Earth-based
observers, a means of grouping and identifying stars in the
night sky that had nothing to do with their actual locations
in space. With a very few exceptions, stars that appeared to
be close by one another in Earth’s sky—all members of the
same constellation, in other words— appeared to be neigh-
bors only because they happened to lie along the same line
of sight. That was the fatal flaw in the ancient pseudosci-
ence of astrology; one might as well say that a building on
a distant hill, or the sun rising behind it, were physically
connected to a house three meters away—or to one’s own
hand—simply because they all appeared from a certain
viewpoint to overlap.

Rotating the volume of space that included Aquila dem-
onstrated this fact clearly. On a 2D map, the stars of Aquila

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183
appeared close together—the three brightest, Altair, Als-
hain, and Tarazed, for example, lay almost directly side by
side in a short, straight line. Viewed from the side, however,

Altair—Alpha Aquilae—was only 16.6 light-years from

Earth, while Alshain, Beta Aquilae, was 46.6 light-years
distant. Both, in fact, were quite close to Sol as galactic dis-
tances went. Gamma Aquilae, however, the third brightest
star in the constellation and better known as Tarazed, was

330 light-years from Earth. Epsilon was 220 light-years dis-
tant; a few others were extremely distant; Eta Aquilae, for
instance, was 1,600 light-years away, while dim Nu Aquilae,
so distant it vanished off the window to the left when the
display rotated, was actually a type F2 Ib supergiant 2,300
light-years distant.

The novae could be expected to show a similar range of
distances, but this, Alexander saw, was not the case. They
were clustered; Nova Aquila was about 1,200 light-years
from Earth. The other four were all positioned at roughly
the same distance, though they were spread across the con-
stellation like a sheet, defining a flat region of space roughly
fifty light-years deep and perhaps 200 to 300 light-years
wide, some 800 light-years beyond the borders of human-
colonized space.

Alexander felt a stirring of awe as he examined the 3D
rotation. “Just when did these novae actually light off?” he
asked.

“That represents a second anomaly,” Cara told him. “The
light from all five novae arrived at Earth within that single
thirty-eight-year period between 1899 and 1937. Again, that
might have been coincidence, but, as you see, they actually
are located in relatively close proximity to one another. All
of them, we estimate, exploded within a few years of one
another, right around the year 700 c.e.”

In the year 700, Alexander knew, Byzantines and Franks
had been battling it out with the Arabs for control of the

Mediterranean world on Earth, and the most startling ad-
vance in military technology was the stirrup. Twelve hun-
dred light-years away, meanwhile, someone had been
blowing up suns.

184

IAN DOUGLAS

Random statistical anomalies happened, yes . . . but as

Alexander studied the 3D constellation map, rotating it back
and forth for a better feel of the thing’s volume and the re-
lationship of the stars within it, he was dead certain that
something more than chance was at work here.

“If this is . . . artificial,” he told Cara, “if this is deliber-
ate . . .”

“We estimate a probability in excess of sixty percent
that this clustering of novae is the direct result of intelligent
action.”

“Intelligent action.” Alexander snorted. “Funny term for
something on this scale.”

“We know of several sapient species with technologies
sufficiently high to effect engineering on such a scale,” Cara
told him. “The Builders, the Xul . . . and possibly the N’mah
of several thousand years ago, though they would not be ca-
pable of such activities now. The artificial detonation of a
star is certainly feasible, given what we know of the three
species.”

“I wasn’t questioning that,” Alexander said. “It’s just,
well, I see three possibilities here, assuming that those
novae were artificially generated. One, of course, is that the
star-destroyers were the Xul.”

“Possibly. We have no evidence that they have blown up
stars in the past.”

“No. I agree, it’s just not their style.” The Xul’s usual
modus operandi was to pound a target planet with high-
velocity asteroids, quite literally bombing the inhabitants
back into the Stone Age . . . or into extinction. “But the

Xul have been around for at least half a million years, now,
and if anyone has the technology to blow up a star, they
should.”

“Agreed. What are your other two possibilities?”

“One, and the most intriguing one, I think, is the pos-
sibility that another technic species was detonating stars out
there in Aquila over two thousand years ago.”

“That is the possibility that we noted when we uncovered
this data,” Cara said. “Another high-technic species fighting
a war to the death with the Xul. If we could make contact

STAR STRIKE

185
with such a species, ally with them, it might mean the differ-
ence between survival and extinction for Humankind. I do
not see a third alternative, however.”

“It’s possible that what happened in Aquila had nothing
to do with the Xul,” Alexander told the AI. “It was a civi-
lization busy destroying itself. It might even have been an
accident.”

“What kind of accident could—”

“An industrial accident on a colossal scale. Or an engi-
neering accident . . . an attempt to manipulate whole stars
gone terribly wrong?”

“I have no data that will permit me to evaluate these
ideas.”

“Of course you don’t. We’re not used to thinking about
engineering on an interstellar . . . on a galactic scale. But it
is a possibility.”

“Perhaps the data was not as useful as we first believed,”

Cara told him. The AI sounded almost crestfallen, and Al-
exander smiled. Artificial intelligences were superhumanly
fast and possessed a range and scope and depth of knowl-
edge that far surpassed anything humans were capable of,
even with the most sophisticated cybernetic implant tech-
nology. Where they had trouble matching their human coun-
terparts was in creativity and in imagination. Being able to
imagine a cosmic engineering project on a scale that could
annihilate stars was for the most part still beyond their op-
erational parameters.

“No, Cara,” he told the AI. “The data are tremendously
useful. This is exactly what we’re looking for . . . a focus, a
direction in which we can work.” He thought for a moment.

“The question is how to get out there. It’s a long way.”

“Which brings up the second bit of information our re-
search has uncovered. Look at this.” The image changed,
showing what appeared to be a photograph of open space.

A number of stars were visible, but one in particular stood
out—a dazzling, white beacon. “That is the star Eta Aqui-
lae,” Cara told him. “A star’s spectrum is unique, as unique
as human fingerprints. There is no doubt as to the star’s
identity.”

186

IAN DOUGLAS

“Right. You just pointed that one out on the constellation
image.”

“Actually, this image is in our files from one of our early

Gate explorations. Our probes moved through a particular

Gate pathway, took a series of photographs for later analy-
ses, and returned.”

“Ah! And which Gate? . . .”

“As it happens . . . Puller 659.”

“God. . . .”

“This pathway appears to open into a star system four
hundred light-years from Eta Aquilae.”

“Four hundred . . . Then, the other end might be close to
the area of novae?”

“A distinct possibility. Further, there did not appear to
be a Xul presence there. For that reason, we have not been
monitoring that path, but the original photographs were still
on file.”

“Out stand ing,” Alexander said with feeling. He was
seeing all kinds of possibilities here.

“You concur that an expedition to this region of space
might allow us to contact another technic species, one suf-
ficiently powerful enough to help us withstand the Xul?”

“Yes, although we seem to be back to needing to enter

Republic space. Again . . . we have several possibilities in
front of us.”

“Perhaps you should list them,” Cara said. “I don’t seem
to be seeing as many options and outcomes as are you.”

“Well . . . the big possibility is that there’s someone out
there who beat the Xul two thousand years ago. If we can
make contact with them, ally with them, like you said, we
might have a chance to beat the Xul on their own terms.”

“Yes. This was the possibility we had noted when the
data first turned up in our research. But . . . you also said
the novae could have been caused by the Xul. If so, the spe-
cies we’d hoped to ally with might have been wiped out two
thousand years ago. A mission to the Nova Aquila region
would be futile if that was the case.”

“Not at all. If the Xul resorted to blowing up stars—in-
cinerating whole star systems—then they must have been

STAR STRIKE

187
up against someone or something that scared the liver out
of them . . . assuming they have livers to begin with. Even
if this hypothetical technic species is now extinct, we might
find remnants . . . like the ruins on Chiron and elsewhere.

We might learn why the Xul feared them that much.” He
shrugged. “At least it’s a damned good place to start.”

“That possibility had not occurred to me.”

“Here’s another one. Imagine you’re the Xul, hard-wired
to be paranoid about anyone different or advanced enough
to be a threat. Two thousand years ago, someone in that one
region of space gives you such a damned bad scare that you
detonate stars to get rid of them. You think they’re all dead,
wiped out when their worlds were incinerated . . . but two
thousand years later, someone with a large battle fleet shows
up in that same region and starts nosing around the wreck-
age of those stars. What do you think?”

“Either that the old enemy has reappeared, and is still a
threat,” Cara said, “or, somewhat more likely, that another
technic species is examining the wreckage of that former
civilization—”

“And might learn something from the ruins. Exactly.”

“At the briefing, you emphasized that we needed to find
a means of getting the Xul’s full attention,” Cara said. “A
means of getting them to follow the MIEF off into the

Galaxy instead of striking into Humankind space. The per-
ceived threat posed by the MIEF at Nova Aquila might be
sufficient for this.” The AI paused. “But suppose the Xul
are not involved at all? You mentioned the possibility of a
cosmic engineering or industrial accident involving some
other species.”

“If all we find are the leftovers of a colossal cosmic en-
gineering experiment gone bad,” Alexander said, “it still
might help us. Even a mistake on that scale, something ca-
pable of detonating multiple suns, would represent an ex-
tremely advanced, extremely powerful technology. I would
be willing to bet my pension that the Xul keep a watch on
any such system, just in case.”

“Unless the system in question was so completely obliter-
ated that, literally, nothing remains.”

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IAN DOUGLAS

Alexander shook his head. “Not possible. A supernova
might vaporize any inner planets the star once had, and
even then, I wonder if there wouldn’t be rubble of some sort
left over, moving outward with the outer shell of explosion
debris.”

“According to current astrophysical theory, supernovae
are generated only by extremely massive stars,” Cara told
him. “Stars that massive do not have planetary families, and
in any case would be too young and short-lived to support
the evolution of life, much less advanced technology.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He waved the remark aside. “That wasn’t
my point. In Aquila we’re dealing with ordinary novae, not
supernovae. The explosion blows off the outer layers of the
star’s surface, and what’s left collapses down to a white
dwarf. Any planets in the system would be cooked, maybe
have their outer crusts stripped away, but the planetary cores
would remain.”

“I fail to see how that helps us. Surely, the wreckage
of any advanced technology would be obliterated by any
wave front energetic enough to strip away a planet’s crust.

Buildings, power generators, spacecraft, they all would be
vaporized.”

“But the Xul watching the system, wouldn’t know that
every trace had been vaporized,” Alexander replied. “Not
with one-hundred-percent certainty. And with a spacefar-
ing technic culture, there might be asteroids or outer-system
moons with high-tech bases on them or inside them, or star-
ships or large space habitats that rode out the nova’s expand-
ing wave front relatively undamaged, or bases hidden inside
some sort of long-lived stasis field.” He shrugged. “Endless
possibilities. The chances of our going in and actually find-
ing anything like that are remote in the extreme, granted,
but the Xul won’t know for sure why we’re there, or what we
might find. If they’re as paranoid as our xenosapientologists
think they are, they’ll by God have to respond.”

“I take your point.” The AI hesitated. “It must be com-
forting to know—or at least to have a good idea—how the
enemy will react in a given situation.”

He grunted. “There are still too damned many variables,

STAR STRIKE

189
and we still just don’t know the Xul well enough to predict
how they’ll respond, not with any degree of certainty. The
idea of them being xenophobes certainly fits with what
we’ve seen of them up until now, as does the idea that they
are extremely conservative, and don’t change much, if at
all, over large periods of time. But, damn it, we don’t know.

They’re still aliens . . . which means they don’t think the
same way we do, don’t see the universe the same way we
do, and we’d be arrogance personified if we thought we
understood their motives or their worldview at this point in
time.”

“But this gives us a starting point,” Cara observed.

“That it does,” Alexander agreed. “I’m actually more
concerned—”

“Just a moment,” Cara said, interrupting. “Just a moment. . . .”

Alexander waited. He knew the AI well enough to rec-
ognize that she was momentarily distracted by something
entering her electronic purview. Whatever it was, it had to
be a very large something to so completely monopolize her
awareness, even for just a few seconds.

“General McCulloch’s EA is requesting connect time,”

Cara told him. “Will you accept?”

“Damn it, Cara, when the Commandant of the Marine

Corps requests an electronic conversation with a mere lieu-
tenant general . . .” Alexander replied, letting the statement
trail off.

“Will you accept?”

He sighed. AIs could be narrowly literal to the point of
obsession. “Of course I will.”

“General McCulloch’s EA states that the general will be
on-line momentarily, and to please hold.”

“Then I guess we’ll hold.

“Give me a quick update,” he told the AI. “I’m actually
a lot more concerned about the PanEuropeans and how
they’re reacting to the political situation than I am about
the Xul right now. Is there anything new this morning on

NetNews?”

“I’ve prepared your regular daily digest, which you
can download at your convenience,” Cara told him. “Two

190

IAN DOUGLAS
hundred ninety-five articles and postings concerning the

PanEuropean crisis. Most of those are classified as opinion
pieces or commentary, and most tend to be alarmist or sen-
sationalist in nature.”

“Nothing I need to be briefed on before I talk to the
commandant?”

“In my estimation, no.”

“The usual crap, then.” He sighed. “Why do we have
more trouble understanding ourselves and those like us than
we do entities as alien as the Xul?”

“Human history suggests that this has always been a
factor in human politics.”

“Mm. Yes. Agreed.”

“I am opening a virtual room for your conference with

General McCulloch.”

“Thank you.” Alexander felt the familiar, lightly tingling
surge across his scalp as the external reality of his office on
board Skybase was swept away, replaced by a star-strewn
void. The poly-lobed sprawl of human space filled his visual
field; Puller 659, near the outer fringes of PE space, was
highlighted as an unnaturally brilliant white beacon, out-
shining the strew of other stars.

“It appears General McCulloch is concerned about

PanEuropean reaction if 1MIEF enters Republic space,”

Cara told him.

Alexander snorted. “I’m concerned that we’re, both of
us, Republic and Commonwealth, acting like apes around
the water hole, thumping our chests, shrieking and grimac-
ing at each other, and all the while the leopard is watching
from the underbrush, getting ready to pounce. We should
be working together, damn it, working toward the common
cause, not clawing at each other’s throats.”

“Again, this appears to be a common pattern in human
history. I submit that it represents a hard-wired feature of
human psychology, and no doubt derives from the pre-tribal
evolutionary period you refer to. Humans are apes, remem-
ber, and still possess the ape’s instincts regarding territory,
protectiveness, threat, and strangers.”

“Tell me about it.” He realized Cara would take his words

STAR STRIKE

191
literally, and hastily added, “Belay that. Don’t tell me. The
question is whether or not we’re going to have to go to war
with the PanEuropean Republic in order to force them to
help us against the Xul.”

“Would their cooperation be worth the effort?” Cara
asked.

“Good question. They have a large fleet, and we’re going
to need warships, both to protect the home front, and to
carry out 1MIEF’s long-range mission. Their ground forces
aren’t as good as ours, though.” He didn’t add that PE plan-
etary assault units in particular didn’t measure up to U.S.

Marine standards. “But the stargates they control could be
the key to hurting the Xul. Especially the Puller Gate . . . and

Starwall. There’s also the alert flashed from Tomanaga’s LP.

That, I imagine, is what General McCulloch is going to want
to discuss.”

“I have an incoming data feed from his EA, which I’ve
been processing as we speak,” Cara told him. “It includes
intelligence reports concerning PanEuropean fleet elements
and activities within the Puller 659 system, which supports
your supposition.” There was a brief hesitation. “Channel
opening from General McCulloch.”

And General Vinton McCulloch appeared, his icon bright
with his official corona flammae, his full-dress uniform
bright with luminous decorations and awards. “Good morn-
ing, General,” McCulloch said, voice gravel-rough. “Sorry
to keep you waiting.”

“Not at all, sir.” In fact, Alexander suspected that the
higher the rank, the more you needed to keep subordinates
waiting, just to keep them aware of who they were dealing
with.

“We have a final go from the Senate,” McCulloch said.

“It was damned close, but Operation Lafayette has been
approved.”

“Lafayette?”

“Obscure historical reference, I’m told—‘ Lafayette, we
are here.’ Don’t ask me. I just work here.”

“But we’re going in to get our people.”

“Ay-firmative.”

192

IAN DOUGLAS

“When?”

“Riki-damned-tick. As soon as you can get an assault
team together.”

“I’ve tapped the 55th MARS,” Alexander told him.

“They’re only just back from Alighan, but that means they
haven’t scattered to the four corners yet. The platoon COs
are authorizing liberty, but no leave.”

“Tough break for them.”

Alexander shrugged. “They’re Marines. They’re squared
away and set to boost. We just need to load their AT with
fresh supplies and expendables. We have some more data,
though, that you should see. I’m uploading to you now.”

He waited as General McCulloch assimilated the data.

“It seems Puller 659 has become doubly important,” the
older man said after a moment.

“Yes, sir. A bit of serendipity, actually. It gives us a
choice from the same Stargate . . . Starwall, which appears
to be a major Xul base, or the Nova Aquila region.” He
briefly outlined his ideas about the Aquilae novae, and
why they might be important. “I was recommending Star-
wall,” he concluded. “I need to study this data from the AI
research team, but right now my inclination is to try that
route instead.”

“Have you considered both options?”

“Not yet. I will. Of course, we’re so badly outnumbered
and outgunned as it is. Splitting my force in the face of the
enemy might not be the brightest of ideas.”

“Well, it’s going to be your call,” McCulloch told him,

“pending Senate approval, of course. Just keep me in the
loop.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“I actually came down here to see what you could tell me
about the Puller situation. What’s the latest on that front?”

Alexander lifted his eyebrows. “I’d think you would
know more about the situation out there than me.”

“Hell, son, no one tells me anything. By the time the EAs
finish filtering out the news they think I shouldn’t be bur-
dened with, there’s not enough left to let me ask intelligent
questions. I just know the PEs have some of our people at

STAR STRIKE

193

Puller in custody, but that some of them are still loose and
lying low.”

“That’s right, sir.” Alexander thought-clicked an anima-
tion into view, showing the tiny, red Puller sun, the orbit
of the system’s lone gas giant, and the wider orbit of the
stargate. “Our covert base in that system consisted of two
facilities. The larger, main base is dug into the surface of an
ice-covered moon of this gas giant, here. The giant’s radia-
tion belts mask any electronic leakage. The smaller facility
is out here, dug into the interior of a 10-kilometer asteroid
that’s in orbit around the stargate itself.

“Lieutenant Lee reemerged from the Gate on 2410. One
month later, on 1911, a PanEuropean battlefleet arrived
in-system—we think from the base at Aurore. Assault
troops landed on the gas giant moon and took over our facil-
ity there. The LP commander, Major Tomanaga, reported

PE troops inside the base, and then all communication with
the unit was lost.

“Our best guess is that the PEs had a small, probably ro-
botic probe in the Puller system, and that it detected and
tracked the ships Tomanaga sent out to pick up Lieutenant

Lee when her Night Owl reemerged from the Gate. It would
take about a month for Republic ships to get out there.

“Apparently, however, the Republican forces did not
detect the asteroid LP near the Gate. There are still five Ma-
rines there, under the command of a Lieutenant Fitzpatrick.

Fitzpatrick has been sending us regular updates via QCC.”

QCC, Quantum-Coupled Communications, possessed
two singular advantages over any other form of long-range
communication. It was instantaneous, and there was no way
an enemy could tap into the transmission because there was
no beam or wave to tap. A message spoken or typed at one
console simply appeared at the designated receiver without
passing through the intervening space, a satisfyingly practi-
cal application of what the long-dead Einstein had called

“spooky action at a distance.”

“So Fitzpatrick and his people are still undetected?” Mc-

Culloch asked.

“As of their last report, yes, sir. He was able to tell us that

194

IAN DOUGLAS
the PE squadron consisted of twelve ships, including the fast
cruiser Aurore, a heavy monitor identified as Rommel, and a
fleet carrier, Le Guerrier.”

“I saw the list,” McCulloch said. “They came loaded for
bear, didn’t they?”

“I’m not sure what ‘bear’ is, but, yeah. They came in with
their heavies. Our best guess is that Tomanaga, Lee, and
thirty-five other Marines and naval personnel are now being
held on board the Aurore. She will be our chief target.”

McCulloch nodded. “I just had some intel passed down
from I-squared. You’re going to have help when you get
there.”

Alexander felt an internal twist of hard suspicion. “What
kind of help?”

“You’re aware of the religious problems in the French
sectors?”

Alexander nodded. “Somewhat. I don’t understand
them. . . .”

“The Republic’s French sectors are officially Reformed

Catholic. But there’s a strong Traditionalist Catholic element
in their fleet. DCI2 tells us that the T.C. is set to mutiny if
and when our forces appear. If they can take over the French
warships before we can deploy, they will . . . and they’ve
promised to try to protect our people.”

Alexander groaned. “Gods. . . .”

“What’s the matter?”

“That complicates things, General. You realize that,
don’t you?”

“I know.”

“We’re going to need to go in hot and hard. We do not
need a bunch of friendlies running around, getting in our
way and maybe taking friendly fire. That could get real
nasty, real fast.”

“Affirmative. But we work with what we’ve got.”

“Ooh-rah.” Alexander looked at the animation of the

Puller star system for a moment. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and
the PE fleet will pull out before we get our act together.”

“Don’t count on that, General. So far, they haven’t ad-
mitted that they have our people . . . and we haven’t ad-

STAR STRIKE

195
mitted that we know they have our people. Their safest bet
is to sit tight at the Puller system, especially since they’re
probably questioning our people on exactly what Lee saw on
the other side of the Gate.”

“Starwall. Right. Okay, General. We’ll take them down
and we’ll get our people out. But . . .”

“ ‘But?’ ”

“Nothing. But when we go in, those so-called friendlies
in the PE fleet had better stay the hell out of our way. Our

Marines are going to be moving fast and kicking ass, and
they will not have the time to find out what church their
targets attend.”

“Understood. Just do your best.”

Damn, Alexander thought. It’s going to be a
cluster-fuck.

And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

14�

2611.1102

Suit Locker

UCS Samar

Dock 27, Earth Ring 7

1315 hrs GMT

“So? How does it feel?” PFC Sandre Kenyon asked him.

Garroway blinked, testing the mental currents. “It feels . . .

empty. Kind of like back in boot camp. When we didn’t have
our implants activated, y’know?”

She nodded. “That’s exactly what it’s like. Because that’s
what it is, at least up to a point. You still have Net access,
comm access—”

“But we can get Achilles back?”

“Oh, sure! He’s still there,” she reassured him. She
laughed and nudged Garroway in the ribs with an elbow.

“He just doesn’t know what he’s missing!”

They were sitting side by side on one of the benches
in the locker, surrounded by the silent, hanging shapes of
emergency pressure suits. All of his attention, however,
was focused inward as he took a self-inventory of his
electronic systems. His implant software was still run-
ning. Achilles, however, the platoon AI, did not appear
to be on-line.

He shook his head, partly in confusion, partly in admira-
tion. “How the hell did you learn this, Sandre?”

She shrugged. “I’m a vir-simmer, remember? Back in
my misspent civilian youth, I programmed the micro-AIs

STAR STRIKE

197
in sensory helms. I knew there had to be a back door. I just
needed to find it.”

“It’s still amazing.”

Garroway continued testing the feel of his internal hard-
ware. In a way, it was like that horrible stretch of time in
boot camp, the empty time, when he’d been deprived of any
cereblink hardware at all. He still had most of his connec-
tions for communication, for linking into other computers,
or for downloading data off the Net. What was missing was

Achilles, the AI Electronic Assistant that served both as
guide through the military cyberworld and as an unofficial
tattletale and voice of authority.

“Yeah, well, I had some expert help, too,” Sandre told
him. “Did a favor for Vince, down in the 660 maintenance
shack back at RTC Mars. He uploaded some secure code for
me, gave me a head start.”

“Vince? Staff Sergeant Gamble?”

“That’s right.”

“I didn’t think that old son-of-a-bitch ever had a help-
ful thing to say to anyone!” He made a face, and imitated

Gamble’s acid tones. “Especially puke-recruits.”

She laughed. “You never tried, um, feminine wiles on
the poor dear. Besides, we’re not recruits any more. We’re

Marines.”

“Ooh-rah.” He said it automatically, almost sarcastically,
but he still felt a small, sharp chill of excitement as he spoke.

Boot camp was over, the initiation complete, the metamor-
phosis from civilian to Marine accomplished.

Even so, he’d been feeling a bit of anticlimax. For almost
two weeks after their graduation ceremony on the tenth
of November, Garroway and the rest of the newly minted

Marines had sat around in a temporary barracks at Noctis

Labyrinthus. The forty survivors of Recruit Company 4102
had expected to be shipped out to different units almost im-
mediately, but when their orders didn’t come, speculation
and rumor—“scuttlebutt” in ancient Marine and naval par-
lance—had fast become their primary, if highly unreliable,
source of intel. Day after day, they’d stood watch, held prac-
tice drills, and carried out field days in various buildings

198

IAN DOUGLAS
across the compound, scrubbing, mopping, waxing, and
polishing, “doing the bright work” until, as Ami Danvers
had put it, the rising albedo of the base threatened them all
with blindness. Robots and nanocleaning aerosol fumigants,

Garroway had observed, could have done the job with far
greater, microscopic precision; all of the hard manual labor,
it was patently obvious, was make-work, designed to keep
them busy and out of trouble.

They’d still had plenty of free time, though, and a lot
of the conversation in the squad bay had turned naturally
enough to their new life as Marines, in addition to the more
traditional topics like sex, liberty ports, and more sex. The
fact that they all now housed an artificial intelligence—

Achilles—griped a lot of them. Achilles was, in effect, the
eyes and ears of their superiors, always watching, always
listening. When they were busy, Achilles’ presence didn’t
bother them much; when they were practicing a combat evo-
lution, he was treated as a part of the company, linking them,
all together and guiding their movements, warning them of
danger, and linking them into the larger combat net.

But when they were just sitting around the squad bay
talking, Achilles’ presence became a constant stressor, in-
visible, not discussed, but always there.

And morale had plummeted.

But Sandre, evidently, had decided to do something about
it. She’d struck up a friendly acquaintance with one of the
base personnel, and learned how to switch Achilles off.

A few days later, Company 4102 had been loaded on
board a tiny military intersystem transport and shuttled to

Earth Ring, where they’d been hustled across to their new
duty station, a titanic assault transport named Samar. The
word around the squad bay was that Samar had just returned
from Alighan with the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental

Strikeforce on board, or what was left of it, and that the forty
new Marines were destined to fill out the 55th’s combat-
depleted ranks.

But their orders still hadn’t arrived.

A short time before, Sandre had approached Garroway
on the mess deck, with the suggestion that he accompany

STAR STRIKE

199
her down to the emergency suit locker after chow. He’d read-
ily agreed; the two of them had snuck some playtime sev-
eral times during the long stretch in the holding barracks at

Noctis, and he’d been hoping to pursue the relationship.

With Achilles blocked, he would be able to continue his
trysts with Sandre. Not that the AI had caused them any
trouble at Noctis. Their platoon commander had probably
been informed of all of their meetings up until he’d received
the software that let him disconnect from the AI, but had
chosen not to intervene—quite probably because morale
had been so bad, and disciplining a couple of Marines be-
cause they’d been having sex after hours would have made
things a whole lot worse.

Still, so far as Garroway was concerned, it would be a
lot better if Achilles was out of the picture entirely, at least
once in a while. After sixteen weeks of boot camp, he valued
his privacy more than ever, and grated under the knowledge
that anything he did, from scratching his balls in the head
to just thinking about how he hated Gunny Warhurst could
be recorded and fed up the chain of command. And almost
everyone else in Company 4102 he’d talked to felt the same
way.

“You’re sure Achilles doesn’t know he’s being cut out?”

Garroway asked. He was trying to imagine the AI’s point
of view. Wouldn’t he know that he wasn’t getting data from
certain members of the company, and become suspicious?

“The way it was explained to me,” Sandre told him, “is
that he’s only programmed to respond to certain situations,
thoughts, or words. We don’t know what those triggers are,
of course, but as long as he doesn’t receive them, he’s con-
tent. Artificial intelligences aren’t curious unless they’re
programmed to be curious.”

“Or suspicious, I guess.”

“Exactly.”

“So,” Garroway said, with just a trace of hesitation in his
voice, “this means you and I could? . . .”

“Of course. Why do you think I did it?”

“Just checking.” He slipped his arm over her shoulders,
drawing her closer.

200

IAN DOUGLAS

And the next hour or so was the most pleasant and unfet-
tered hour Garroway had yet enjoyed in the Marine Corps.

The Comet Fall

Terraview Plaza, Earth Ring 7

2226 hrs GMT

“So, did y’hear the latest scuttlebutt?” Staff Sergeant Shari

Colver asked.

“About what?” Ramsey asked.

“Yeah,” Sergeant Vesco Aquinas said. “The rumor mill’s
been grinding overtime lately. Everything from peace with
the Xul to war with the PEzzles.”

“It’d damned well be better than your last butt-load of
scuttlebutt,” Sergeant Richard Chu said. “I didn’t like that
one at all.”

“Roger that,” Ramsey said. “They fucking gave it away. . . .”

The entire platoon had been grumbling since their ar-
rival back in the Sol system, with morale at absolute rock-
bottom. The word was—still unconfirmed but apparently
solid—that the Commonwealth was giving back Alighan.

Two hundred five Marines hit, Ramsey thought with dark
emotion, over half of them irries . . . and they fucking go and
give that shit hole back to the Muzzies. . . .

Colver leaned forward at the table in approved conspira-
torial fashion. “It’s war with the PanEuropeans,” she said
in a throaty half-whisper. “They’re shipping us out next
week.”

“And how do you happen to be privy to that little tidbit?”

Ramsey asked.

“Yeah,” Sergeant Ela Vallida added. “You been talking
with the commandant lately?”

“No, but I have been talking with Bill Walsh.” Walsh was
a staff sergeant over in Ops Planning. “He says it’s already
decided. They’re pulling together the battlefleet now. And
the 55th is on the ship-out list.”

“Aw, shit!” Corporal Franklo Gonzales said.

Chu shook his head. “Well, our luck’s true to form, isn’t
it?”

STAR STRIKE

201

“Shit,” Ramsey said. “Can’t be. We just freakin’ got back
from Alighan!” Even as he spoke the words, though, he
knew how hollow they were. The Corps could do anything
it damned well wanted.

“Fuckin’-A, Gunnery Sergeant,” Corporal Marin Delazlo
put in. “We’re due some freakin’ down time!”

“Maybe,” Ramsey said, taking in the noise and bustle of
their surroundings with a grin, “just maybe this is it!”

The six of them were in the Comet Fall, a popular bar
and nightlife center on the Seventh Ring Grand Concourse.

It was large, murkily red-lit, and crowded; perhaps half of
the other tables had privacy fields up, making them look
like hazy, translucent ruby domes. The house dancers on-
stage and the wait staff navigating among the tables all were
stylishly nude, with eye-tugging displays of light and color
washing across every square centimeter of exposed skin. The
club patrons, both those at non-shielded tables and up on the
stage with the professional dancers, wore everything from
nothing at all to elaborate formal costumes. Music throbbed
and pounded, though you needed a sensory helm for the full
effect. Ramsey and the other Marines had elected not to
wear helms, preferring unfiltered conversation instead.

His mind drifting, Ramsey found himself following the
gyrations of one young woman on-stage wearing what looked
like a swirling, deck-sweeping cloak of peacock feathers, a
glittering gold sensory helm, and a dazzling corona flam-
mae; she’d been enhanced either genetically or through
prosthetics with an extra pair of arms, and her dance move-
ments were eerily and compellingly graceful.

He was feeling wretchedly out of place. Aquinas and

Gonzales both were wearing fairly conservative civvie skin-
suits, but the rest of them were in undress blacks. Both sets
of attire, by regulations, were acceptable wear for liberty,
but it tended to make them stand out somewhat against the
gaudy and sometimes extravagant background of evening
wear sported by the other patrons in the establishment.

“Like hell,” Gonzales said after a long moment. “I don’t
know about you clowns, but me, I’m just getting started! I’m
not ready to redeploy!”

202

IAN DOUGLAS

“That’s right,” Chu said. “I have a lot of catching up to do
in the drinking and socializing departments before my next
deployment!”

“Ooh-rah!” the others chorused, and Colver raised her
glass in salute. “To downtime!”

“Downtime and down the hatch!” Ramsey added, lifting
his own glass, then tossing it off. “Semper fi!”

The drink was called a solar flare, and the name was apt.

He felt the burn going down, then the kick, and finally the
rolling swell of expanding consciousness as the drink’s nano
activators kicked in.

If his platoon implant AI had been activated, he thought,
it would be screaming at him by now. Marines were not
supposed to imbibe implant-activators, for fear it would
scramble their hardware and invalidate their government
warranties or whatever. He didn’t care. After Alighan, he
needed this. Hell, they all did.

How the hell could they just give it away, after what we
went through out there?

“Well, the brass is ramping up for something big,”

Ramsey told the others, perhaps three or four flares later.

He had to focus on each word as he brought it to mind, then
tried to say it. He was pleased. No slurring of speech at all,
at least that he could detect. “I just heard this morning that
we’re getting a shuttle load of fungies in from RTC Mars.”

“Yeah,” Delazlo said, nodding. His speech was slurred,
but it didn’t matter. “’Sh’right. I heard that, too.”

“Shit. Check your daily downloads, guys, why don’t ya?”

Vallida put in. “The fungies arrived yesterday. Forty of
them, straight out of Noctis Labyrinthus.”

“No shit?” Ramsey asked. He hadn’t heard about that.

Still, Samar was such a huge vessel, and she was swarming
right now with technicians, computer personnel, cargo han-
dlers, mechs, and shipwrights. A freaking regiment could
have come on board and he wouldn’t have noticed.

“No shit,” Vallida said. “Seems they want all units up to
full strength, even if we have to raid a nursery to do it.”

“Shee-it,” Gonzales said with considerable feeling. He
was looking a bit the worse for the wear as multiple solar

STAR STRIKE

203
flares continued to burn their way through his circulatory
system. “Just what we need. Babies to baby-sit.”

“Hey,” Colver said with a shrug. “Fresh meat. Don’t
knock it.”

“We all had to start somewhere,” Chu said, the words
slurring slightly.

“The Corps is home, the Corps is family,” Ramsey re-
cited. It was an old mantra focused on the belonging of Ma-
rines. “And to hell with the politicians.”

A waitress walked up to their table, her face a brilliant,
sapphire blue, with rainbow luminescence rippling across
the rest of her body. “You folks with the 55th MARS?” she
asked.

“Yeah,” Ramsey said. He felt a cold chill prickling at the
back of his neck, and some of the drunken haze began evap-
orating from his mind. The Comet Fall was one of hundreds
of nightspots along this stretch of Ring Seven. How the hell
could they have tracked the six of them?

“You heard about us, eh, babe?” Gonzalez said, leering
as he reached for her.

“Nope,” the waitress said, slapping his hand away. “Can’t
say that I have. But your CO sure has. You’re wanted back
at your ship, immediately. All of you. What’d you do, switch
off your AIs?”

“How about another round for the table?” Aquinas
asked.

“To hell with that,” the waitress said, as she began col-
lecting empty and half-empty glasses. “I could get fired and
the boss could lose his license! You people just move on
now, before the SPs show up.”

“So, what have we here?” a young man seated at the next
table over exclaimed. “Pretty-boy Muh- rines?”

The atmosphere turned suddenly cold. That next table
was a big one, with fifteen tough-looking men seated around
it, all of them with similar patterns of blue-white luminous
tattoos on the left sides of their faces—which meant either
a punk gang or a fraternity. The privacy screen had been up
until a few moments ago, but now it looked like they’d just
taken an unhealthy interest in the party next to them.

204

IAN DOUGLAS

“You’d better go,” the waitress told the Marines, drop-
ping her voice.

“The lady’s right,” Ramsey told his friends, pressing his
palm to the credit reader on the table to pay the outstanding
bill, then standing. “Let’s move on. We don’t want trouble.”

“Yeah!” a civilian called from the next table. He snig-
gered. “Run home to mommy and daddy!”

“Back off, mister,” Ramsey growled. “This isn’t your
business.”

“Not my business, Muh-rine?” the kid said, standing and
turning to face Ramsey. “I’ll fucking make it my business if

I want. You freaks aren’t wanted here.”

“That’s right,” another of the punks said. “You pretty-boy
gyrines’re nothin’ but trouble. Who let you out without your
keepers, huh?”

“You lousy little civilian shit—” Aquinas said, starting
forward.

Ramsey put a hand on his arm. “Belay that, Marine. Out-
side. Now.”

A moment later, they stepped onto the plaza beneath
the Comet Fall’s strobing sign. The concourse was a wide,
sweeping mall lined with multi-tiered shops, bars and eat-
eries, with a vast arch of transparency stretched overhead.

Earth, half-full, hung directly overhead.

Chu looked up at the blue and white-mottled orb, frown-
ing through his alcoholic haze. “Why aren’t we falling?”

The question, though garbled, wasn’t as drunken-wrong
as it sounded. Each structure within the Rings circled Earth
once in twenty-four hours, maintaining geostationary posi-
tion. They should all have been in free fall, but the gravity
here was roughly equivalent to the surface gravity on Mars,
about three-tenths of a G.

Vallida laughed at him. “Jesus! You just now noticing,

Chu-chu?”

“Gravity . . .” Ramsey started to say, then tripped over a
hiccup. “Gravity engineering,” he finally said. “Quantum-
state phase change in the . . . in the . . .” He stamped his foot.

“Down there. Subdeck infrastructure. Haven’t you ever been
to th’ Rings?”

STAR STRIKE

205

“Nope. Born’n raised on Mars. Never left until I joined
up, and they fuckin’ send me to Alighan. . . .”

“There they are!”

Harsh voices sounded behind them. Ramsey turned, and
saw the gang from the Comet Fall spilling out into the street.

They were looking for trouble, looking for a fight.

“Heads up, Marines,” Ramsey said. He was fumbling
through the mental commands that would revive his per-
sonal AI. If he could connect with the watch on board Samar

. . . or even with the nearest Shore Patrol base. . . .

“You pretty-boys need to be taught a lesson!” one of the
gangers growled. He was big, heavily muscled, and evidently
having some trouble focusing. “You pretty-boys shouldn’t be
coming into our part of th’Ring. . . .”

“They ain’t all pretty-boys,” another civilian said. He
pointed at Colver and Vallida. “Them two are kinda cute,
for Muh-rines.”

“Then we’ll be gentle with them,” the first said, with a
nasty laugh.

“Yeah,” another said. “We’ll give them special treatment.

But the rest of ’em—”

Ramsey slammed the heel of his palm into the kid’s
nose before he completed the statement, snapping his
head sharply back. The other Marines flowed into action
in the same instant; Ramsey heard the crack of one punk’s
arm as Vallida broke it, heard another ganger choke and
gurgle as Gonzales drove stiffened fingers into his larynx,
but he was already stepping across the body of the one
he’d downed to block a punch thrown by a screaming
punk, guiding the fist harmlessly past his head, locking
the wrist, and breaking it. The kid shrieked in pain, then
went silent and limp as Ramsey hammered the back of his
head with an elbow.

The whole encounter was over within five seconds. The
six Marines stood above fourteen bodies, some of them
unconscious, some writhing and groaning as they cradled
injured limbs or heads or groins. A fifteenth punk was dis-
appearing down the street, running as fast as his legs could
carry him.

206

IAN DOUGLAS

“Not bad, Marines,” Colver said. “Considering our, uh,
slowed reaction times.”

“Slowed, nothin’,” Ramsey said. He reached down and
extracted a tingler from the unconscious grip of one of the
civilians. He checked it, switched it off, then snapped the
projector in half, flinging the pieces across the street. Sev-
eral of the punks were armed, and the other Marines pro-
ceeded to similarly disable the weapons. “We just gave them
the first shot . . . to be . . . to be fair. Right?”

“Whatever you say, Gunnery Sergeant,” Gonzalez said.

“But maybe we should hightail it before the SPs show up.”

“Yeah,” Vallida said. “Someone’s bound to’ve reported
this.”

“Roger that.” He looked around. She was right. Habitats,
even extraordinarily large ones like the Ring habs orbiting

Earth, tended to have lots of cameras and other unobtru-
sive sensor devices, both to monitor the environment and to
watch for trouble of a variety of types—including crime. He
didn’t see any cameras, but that meant nothing; most covert
surveillance cameras, such as the ones the Marines them-
selves used to monitor battlespace, tended to be smaller than

BBs, floating along on silent repulsor fields.

As he completed a full three-sixty of the concourse ter-
rain, he became aware of another problem, one more imme-
diate than having the local police watching the Marines mop
up with some local thugs. “Uh . . . which way?”

His hardware included navigational systems, but he’d not
bothered to engage them when they left the Samar earlier
that evening. He suddenly realized that, in his current some-
what befogged state, he had no idea as to which way Dock

27 and the Samar might be.

“I think, boys,” Colver said, “we’d better switch on our

AIs. Otherwise we’re going to be going in circles.”

That was easier said than done.

Most enlisted Marines learned how to disable their com-
pany AIs temporarily within days of leaving boot camp, and
some probably figured out how to do it while they were still
boots. Hell, for that matter, Garroway was pretty sure that
officers did it, too, right out of OCS or the Naval Academy.

STAR STRIKE

207

No one ever talked openly about it, of course, because it
was against regs. Getting caught was at the very least worth

“office hours,” as commanding officer’s nonjudicial punish-
ment had long been known in the Corps, and in some situa-
tions, like combat or while embarked on board ship, it could
get you a general court and a world of hurt.

The process was simple enough, and involved visualiz-
ing a certain set of code numbers and phrases, which you
brought to mind one by one and held for a second or so.

It provided a kind of back door to the AI’s programming.

It saw and recorded the code, then promptly forgot about
having seen it, or anything at all about the person doing the
coding, until another set of codes was visualized to reset the
software.

The problem was that you needed to have a clear and
highly disciplined mind to be able to pull the visualization
trick off. At the moment, all six of the MARS Marines
were somewhat less than clear in the mental department.

Not only were their minds sluggish with alcohol, but under
the influence of the nano activators in their drinks they
were having trouble focusing on anything with much clar-
ity or discipline, much less memorized strings of alphanu-
meric characters.

“Wait a sec,” Chu said. He was standing still, eyes closed,
arms outstretched. “I almost have it. . . .”

They waited, expectant.

“No. I guess I don’t.”

“Someone write the code down. We can focus on that.”

“No . . . no . . .” Colver said. “I’ve got it. Yeah! There. . . .”

She was silent for a moment, as the other Marines waited.

“C’mon, c’mon,” Gonzales said. “We gotta move! . . .”

“Okay,” Colver said. “Dock 27 is that way.”

“I coulda told you that,” Chu said miserably.

“And I have the recall coming through. Shit. I think we’re
all gonna be AWOL. They passed the word at 1830 hours.

We were supposed to check in at 2000.”

Absent without leave meant NJP for sure. The six of them
had checked out at Samar’s quarterdeck at 1800 hours, and
switched off the company AI minutes after that. It was now

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IAN DOUGLAS
just past 2300 hours, three hours after they were supposed
to be back on board.

“Well, let’s get the hell back there, then,” Ramsey said.

“We’ll just have to face the music.”

“Sure,” Colver said. “What can they do to us . . . ship us
back to Alighan?”

“Don’t even joke about that, Staff Sergeant!” Delazlo
scolded.

Unsteadily, the Marines began making their way back
toward Dock 27 and the Samar.

Unfortunately, as soon as Colver’s AI was switched back
on, the Shore Patrol had a fix on her, and her name was
flagged as being AWOL.

And so the six Marines of 55th MARS ended up spend-
ing the rest of the local night in the brig at Shore Patrol
headquarters.

15�

2811.1102

Platoon Commander’s Office

UCS Samar

Dock 27, Earth Ring 7

0910 hrs GMT

“What the hell were you thinking, Marines?” Either Lieu-
tenant Kaia Jones was furious, or she was one hell of an
actress. The muscles were standing out like steel rods up
the sides of her neck, and the anger behind her words could
have melted through Type VII hull composite. “Switching
off your AI contacts like that?” She paused, sweeping the
six Marines standing in front of her desk with a gaze like a
gigawatt combat laser. “Well?”

“Sir, we were not thinking, sir!” Ramsey snapped back,
his reply militarily crisp.

“No, I should think the hell you weren’t.”

The six of them stood at attention in Jones’ office on
board the Samar. After an uncomfortable night in the SP
brig ashore, they’d been escorted back to the ship by a pair
of square-jawed Navy petty officers with no-nonsense at-
titudes and little to say. Master Sergeant Adellen had met
them at the quarterdeck, signed off on them, and ordered
them to stay in the squad bay, except for meals, until they
could see the Old Man.

“Old Man,” in this case, was a woman; long usage in the

Corps retained certain elements of an ancient, long-past era
when most Marines were male. The commanding officer

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IAN DOUGLAS
was the Old Man no matter what his or her sex. Just as a
superior officer was always sir, never ma’am.

Of course, the joke in Alpha Company was that in

Jones’ case, you couldn’t really tell. She’d been a Marine
for twenty-three years—fifteen of them as enlisted. She’d
been a gunnery sergeant, like Ramsey, before applying
for OCS and going maverick, and her face was hard and
sharp-edged enough that she looked like she’d been a

Marine forever.

Rumor had it that she’d been a DI at RTC Mars, and

Ramsey was prepared to believe it.

“What about the rest of you?” Jones demanded. “Any of
you have anything to say?”

“Sir . . .”

“Spit it out, Chu.”

“I mean, sir, everyone does it. If we didn’t have some
privacy once in a while, we’d all go nuts!”

Jones leaned back in her chair and watched them for a
moment, her gaze flicking from one to the next.

“Privacy to jack yourself on nanostims,” Jones said at
last.

“Sir!” Gonzales looked shocked. “We would never—”

“Spare me, Gonzo,” Jones said, raising her hand. “You
were all medscanned at the Shore Patrol HQ, and I’ve down-
loaded the reports. You were all buzzed. The wonder of it
was that you were still able to stand up . . . much less inca-
pacitate that group of . . . young civilians.”

“Sir, you . . . know about that, too?” Ramsey asked.

“Of course. Your little escapade was captured on three
different mobile habcams, as well as through the EAs of two
of your . . . targets the other night. As it happens, you single-
handedly took out half of the hab’s local militia.”

“What?” Colver exclaimed. “Those punks? Sir! There’s
no way!”

“Don’t give me that, Colver. You’ve been in the Corps
long enough to know about gangcops.”

Ramsey digested this. He’d run into the practice at several
liberty ports, but he’d not been expecting it at a high-tech,
high-profile facility like Earth Ring 7. Gangcops and police

STAR STRIKE

211
militias were widely tolerated and accepted as a means of
ensuring the safety of the larger cities and orbital habs.

It was the modern outgrowth of an old problem. Police en-
forcement could not be left entirely to AIs, neither practically
nor, in most places, by the law. When local governments had
problems recruiting a police force, they sometimes resorted
to enlisting one or another of the youth gangs that continued
to infest the more shadowy corners of most major popula-
tion centers. The idea was to clean them up and give them a
modicum of training—“rehabilitate them,” as the polite fic-
tion had it—and send them out with limited-purview elec-
tronic assistants tagging along in their implants. Whatever
they observed was transmitted to a central authority, usually
an AI with limited judgment, keyword response protocols,
and a link to city recorders that stored the data for use in
later investigations or as evidence in criminal trials.

Defenders of the policy pointed out that crime in targeted
areas did indeed tend to drop; its critics suggested that the
drop was due less to crime than to less reporting of crime;
paying criminals to act as police militias was, they said,
nothing less than sanctioned and legalized corruption.

In any case, a certain amount of graft, of intimidation,
even of violence was unofficially tolerated, so long as the
peace was kept. Wherever humans congregated in large and
closely packed numbers, there was the danger of panic and
widespread violence. Political fragmentation, religious fa-
naticism, rumors about the Xul or about government con-
spiracies all spread too quickly and with too poisonous an
effect when every citizen was jacked in to the electronic net-
work designed to allow a near instantaneous transmission
of information and ideas, especially within tightly knit and
semi-isolated e-communities.

Most citizens accepted the minor threat of being hassled
by street-punk militias if it meant the authorities could iden-
tify and squash a major threat to community peace quickly.

The Earthring Riots of 2855—in Corps reckoning the year
had been 1080, just twenty-two years before—were still far
too fresh in the memories of too many, especially within the
orbital habitats where a cracked seal or punctured pressure

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IAN DOUGLAS
hull could wipe out an entire population in moments. The

Riots had begun less than twenty hours after the appearance
of a rumor to the effect that the Third and Fourth Ring food
supplies had been contaminated by a Muzzie nanovirus. That
rumor, as it turned out, had been false—a hoax perpetrated
by an anti-Muzzie fundamentalist religious group—but over
eight hundred had died when the main lock seals had been
overridden and breached in the panic.

And so the authorities had begun cultivating various
street gangs and civil militias, with the idea that the more
people there were on the streets with reporting software in
their heads, the sooner rumors like the one about a terror-
nanovirus one could be defused.

“Sir,” Ramsey said, “we didn’t know those . . . people
were militia.”

“That’s right,” Delazlo added. “They came after us, not
the other way around! Started hassling us. They started it!”

“I don’t give a shit who started it,” Jones said. “As it
happens, I agree that hiring young thugs off the streets as
peacekeepers is about as stupid an idea as I’ve seen yet. Poli-
ticians in action. However, the Ring Seven Authority has
requested that you be turned over to the civil sector for trial.

The charges are aggravated assault and battery.”

Shit. Ramsey swallowed, hard. In most cases, civil law
took precedence over military law, at least within Common-
wealth territory. They could be looking at bad conduct dis-
charges, followed by their being turned over to the civilian
authority.

No . . . wait a moment. That wasn’t right. A BCD was a
punishment that a court-martial board could hand out, not a
commanding officer.

“Before we go any further with this . . . do any of you
want to ask for a full court?”

That was their right under regulations. They could accept
whatever judgment—and punishment—Jones chose to give
them under nonjudicial punishment, or they could demand
a court-martial.

But there was absolutely no point in that. They’d all been
caught absolutely dead to rights—AWOL and fighting with

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213
the civilian authorities. Better by far to take whatever Jones
chose to throw at them; whatever it was, it wouldn’t be as
bad as a general court, which could hand out BCDs or hard
time.

“How about it? Ramsey?”

“Sir,” Ramsey said, “I accept nonjudicial punishment.”

“That go for the rest of you yahoos?”

There was a subdued chorus of agreement.

“Very well. You all are confined to the ship for . . . three
days. Dismissed!”

Outside the lieutenant’s office, the six Marines looked at
one another. “That,” Colver said, “was a close one!”

“She could have come down on us like an orbital bar-
rage,” Chu added. “Three days?”

“I don’t get it,” Delalzlo said, shaking his head. “A slap
on the wrists. What’s it mean, anyway?”

“What it means,” Ramsey told them, “is she’s keeping
us out of worse trouble. Two days from now we’re shipping
out.”

They’d learned that fact yesterday, shortly after coming
back on board the Samar, but with other things on their
minds, they’d not made the connection. The civil authori-
ties might request that the six miscreants be turned over to
them for trial, but unless and until they were handed over,
they were part of Samar’s company. The needs of the ship
and of the mission always came first; by restricting them to
quarters, Lieutenant Jones was making sure that the civilian
authorities didn’t get them.

Marines always took care of their own.

USMC Skybase

Dock 27, Earth Ring 7

1030 hrs GMT

General Alexander floated against the backdrop of the

Galaxy, surrounded by the icons of the Defense Advisory

Council. Despite the naggingly unpleasant presence of

Marie Devereaux, it was actually a bit of a relief to be here.

“Operation Lafayette,” he told them, “is on sched, with T-

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IAN DOUGLAS
for-Translation Day now set for three days from now.”

For days, now, Alexander had been submerged in the
minutiae of ops preparation. The actual strategic planning
he tended to enjoy, with a sense of roll-up-the-sleeves and
get things moving accomplishment. Going over the endless
downloaded lists of logistical preparations and supply mani-
fests, however, was sheer torture, and he found he was will-
ing to endure even Devereaux’s acidly uninformed tongue to
escape it, even if only for a little while.

“I don’t understand your use of the word ‘translation,’ ”

Devereaux put in. “What does language have to do with
it?”

“It has to do with a mathematical concept, Madam De-
vereaux, not with language,” he replied. “You can download
the details here.” He paused, ordering his thoughts. How to
explain the inconceivable? “Any point in space can be pre-
cisely defined in terms of its local gravitational matrix. If
it can be so defined, it can be given a set of detailed spatial
coordinates.

“Now, the paraspace plenum we call the Quantum Sea
is co-existent with . . . or, rather, think of it as adjacent to
every portion of four-dimensional space-time. Practically
speaking, that’s where we draw vacuum energy from . . . the
realm of quantum fluctuations and zero-point energy. If we
know the precise special and gravitational coordinates of
where we are, and the precise coordinates of where we want
to go, we can translate one set of coordinates to another by
rotating through paraspace.”

“General, that makes no sense whatsoever.”

He sighed. “In simple terms, Madam Devereaux, the

Quantum Sea allows us direct, point to point access through
paraspace to any place in the entire universe.”

“This is something naval vessels can do?”

“Not naval vessels, Madam, no. I don’t know the engi-
neering specifics, but in essence the translation requires
enormous amounts of energy. Skybase is large enough to
accommodate the zero-point energy taps necessary to effect
a translation . . . but nothing smaller could pull down that
much power.

STAR STRIKE

215

“So what we’ve worked out is a kind of shuttle plan. We
take on board as many of the 1MIEF heavies as we can . . .

the first load will consist of a Marine fleet strike carrier, a

Marine assault transport, and either three destroyers or a de-
stroyer and a light missile cruiser for fire support. We make
the first translation from Sol to the Puller system, drop those
four or five ships off, then translate immediately back to Sol
to take on board the next load of ships, which will be queued
up and waiting. It will take, we’re now estimating, a total of
sixteen such transitions to get all eighty vessels of 1MIEF
shifted out to Puller. Obviously, we can take on more light
ships in one load, or fewer heavies. We’re only limited by
the docking storage space on Skybase’s main hangar deck.”

“Essentially,” Admiral Orlan Morgan added, explaining,

“they intend to use Skybase as an enormous fleet carrier.”

His icon grinned. “In the case of a fleet strike carrier like
the Chosin, Skybase becomes a carrier-carrier!”

“If you’ll recall,” Alexander continued, “Skybase was de-
signed to reside in paraspace. It’s a fairly simple operation
to move out of paraspace and into 4D space at any point of
our choosing, if we have the proper field metrics and coordi-
nates to make the transfer.”

“Why weren’t we told this before?” Senator Gannel put
in. He sounded irritated. “It seems to me that this represents
a significant strategic advantage, not only in war against
other human stellar nations, but against the Xul.”

“That’s right,” Senator Kalin put in. “It also means we
could send your battlefleet straight to Starwall or to Nova

Aquila or wherever we want to go without having to pass
through the Puller gate, without trespassing in PanEuropean
territory!”

It was an effort not to lose patience with them. “To trans-
late from one point to another,” he told them, “we need
extremely exact coordinates for both points. We know the
metric throughout Sol-space quite well, of course. We know
the Puller system because we’ve had Marines out there for
several years, now, and one of the things they’ve been doing,
besides watching the Xul on the other side of the Stargate
there, is taking gravitometric readings on local space . . .

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IAN DOUGLAS
just in case. The stargates all put a considerable dimple into
space-time, thanks to the pair of high-speed black holes
each one has racing around inside its structural torus, and
we take those measurements as a matter of course so that we
can better understand the local matrix.

“We do not, however, have gravitational readings on
places like Starwall. We’ve had Marine recon probes out
there, but they had other things to keep them busy than flit
around taking gravity readings. As for Nova Aquila, we
have not yet had any probes out there, either manned or AI.

We have absolutely no data on the local matrix out there.

“Does that answer your objections, Senator?”

“Adequately.”

“And have I answered your questions, Madam

Devereaux?”

“Yes. You’re saying you can get the fleet to Puller, but not
to any place on the other side of the Puller Gate?”

“Exactly. We are fairly confident we can make the trans-
lation to Puller, and each successful translation would give
us additional data on the metric. We would not even be able
to attempt a translation to Nova Aquila, however. We simply
don’t have the requisite information.”

“We will be able to use Skybase translations out to both

Nova Aquila and to Starwall once we have secured them,”

Admiral Morgan added. “We simply need to have the time
and equipment out there to make the necessary readings.”

“We think,” Alexander said. “The gravimetric situation
at Starwall is pretty complicated. When I say we need exact
readings, that’s not a matter of measuring the gravity from
the local star and a couple of the closest planets. Starwall is
close to the outer fringes of the Galactic Core, and literally
millions of nearby stars are affecting the local picture. As
for Nova Aquila . . . well, we’ll know more when we actu-
ally get some instrumentation out there. For now, though,
it’s first things first. We need to secure the Puller system,
and that we can do using Skybase as our transparaspace
shuttle. We have the queue orders drawn up and transmitted.

According to our current schedule, we will begin loading
the first ships on board Skybase later today, using L-3 as our

STAR STRIKE

217
rendezvous point. The first translation to Puller space is now
set for 1800 hours GMT, on 0112, three days from now. Op-
eration Lafayette will commence as soon as the first ships
are released at the Puller Gate. Any questions?”

“Yes, sir,” General Regin Samuels said. “I note in your
plans that this operation will be depending heavily on a Tra-
ditionalist Catholic mutiny in the Puller system. Just how
reliable is this element, anyway?”

“I believe I can answer that, Regie,” Navin Bergenhal,
of the Intelligence Advisory Group, said. “We have good,
solid intelligence assets throughout PanEuropean space, in-
cluding inside both the DST and the DGSE. Those assets,
in fact, are how we determined that the French are indeed
holding some of our people for questioning.”

Not entirely true, Alexander thought. The initial data had
come from Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, still watching and listen-
ing quietly from the hidden asteroid base orbiting the Puller
stargate. But the Commonwealth’s DCI2 had developed that
intelligence further, and brought home a lot of data concern-
ing both the political and the military situations inside Re-
public space.

“From the Marines’ point of view, General Samuels,” Al-
exander said, “we will welcome help from local forces if it
is available. We will not count on it.”

And that was the final decision made after a very long
series of discussions and ops planning sessions, includ-
ing many hours of virtual-reality simulations playing out
each aspect of the mission. Most Marine officers, from
the MIEF’s platoon commanders up to Alexander himself,
felt the possibility of Traditionalist assistance at Puller was
going to be more trouble than it was worth. The situation
presented endless possibilities for targeting the wrong PE
units, for friendly fire incidents, and for outright deception
by the Republic’s defensive forces.

“So, are you saying you don’t trust the Catholics, Gen-
eral?” Devereaux asked.

“I’m saying, Madam Devereaux, that the MIEF will have
the greatest chance for success if we welcome any help that’s
offered, but go in prepared for no help at all. As a matter of

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IAN DOUGLAS
fact, our defensive stature will assume that the T.C. mutiny
is actually a PanEuropean deception, a trick. We would be
foolish to act in any other way, or to lower our guard without
very solid reasons to do so.”

“Quite right, General,” Samuels said, and other military
officers in the assembled council murmured agreement.

It was impossible to get a feel for what Devereaux ac-
tually thought. Her Net persona was well filtered, her icon
image emotionlessly bland in affect. When she’d asked if
he didn’t trust Catholics, however, it had been impossible
not to get the idea that she was fishing for something—a
weakness, perhaps, or an opening for an attack. She was, he
knew from her public records, from a Traditionalist Catholic
family, but he also knew she wasn’t herself a believer . . . at
least not to the extent of going to Mass or accepting the word
of the Papess in Rome as law.

What the hell was her game?

He didn’t trust the woman, not after her attempt to shut
down the Marine Corps. He still wished he knew what her
personal stake was in the Corps—why she seemed to hate it
so. Further searches of available public data had turned up
nothing more on her background. So far as he could tell, she
was simply a political opportunist who saw in the current
situation a possible way of making political capital at the

Corps’ expense.

That made her no less of a viper, however. She would
need to be watched, and carefully, by the few friends the

Marines still had within the Senate. He did not think it
impossible that she might even be working for the PanEu-
ropeans; the Québecois link, certainly, suggested that pos-
sibility. Quebec and France had been in each other’s pockets
for centuries, since the First UN War at least, and possibly
even well before that.

At least the chances were good that the woman wasn’t
working for the Xul. The Xul, Alexander thought with a wry
and inward grin, didn’t work with anyone unless they were

Xul, and even Madam Devereaux wasn’t capable of bridging
a gap like that.

“My ops planning staff has put together an assault plan,”

STAR STRIKE

219

Alexander continued, addressing the group at large. As he
spoke, an animated diagram unfolded in the assembled
minds of the audience. “The first ships in will act to set up
a local defended space into which we can continue to drop
ships and men. As you see here, there are two primary cen-
ters of interest within the Puller 659 system . . . here at the
stargate, where our covert listening post is still in opera-
tion . . . and far in-system, here, at one of the moons of this
lone gas giant. As of our last set of reports from the LP, the

French fleet is in orbit around the gas giant. So far they’ve
made no move at all to investigate the stargate.

“We will materialize here. . . .” He indicated an area
some 10 light-seconds away from the stargate, and nearly 30
light-minutes from the gas giant’s current orbital position.

“With luck, we’ll be able to bring the entire MIEF into posi-
tion before the PEs even know we’re in-system.”

“Won’t they be aware of your ships when they arrive?”

General Samuels asked. “Neutrino emissions from your
ships’ reactors.”

Samuels had a valid point. The QPTs or Quantum Power

Taps utilized by Commonwealth naval vessels required
massive input from conventional antimatter power plants
to open the zero-point channels. Once those channels were
open and functioning, energy from the zero-point field itself
was more than sufficient to keep those channels open and
working, but the power-up procedure required a lot of initial
seed energy . . . and they wouldn’t be able to go through the
paraspace translation with their power taps on. That, any
good QPT engineer knew all too well, was an excellent way
to release a very great deal of energy into a small volume of
space in an accident—a “casualty,” in naval parlance—that
would almost certainly result in the complete vaporization
of Skybase.

With a thought, Alexander switched on a doughnut-
shaped swath of red light surrounding the glowing point of
light that marked the Jovian gas giant. “We hope that the
answer to that, General, is ‘no.’ At the moment the PE fleet
is deep inside the radiation fields of the Puller Jovian. If
their sensors are finely tuned enough, they might pick up

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IAN DOUGLAS
our reactor leakage, but they would have to know exactly
where to look to have much of a chance of picking us up.

We’re hoping that the radiation belts in this area—and their
own shields against that radiation—are going to keep them
pretty well blind to our approach.”

“Isn’t that a rather slender hope, General?” Devereaux
demanded.

“Not at all. According to our LP, the Republic forces have
been paying no attention at all to the Gate. Even if they do
pick up on what’s happening before our fleet is fully in place
and ready to deploy, we anticipate being able to achieve
local battlespace superiority in relatively short order. Their
current fleet in the system consists of twelve ships. Of those,
only two could properly be considered heavies—a monitor
and a fleet carrier. The flagship appears to be a fast cruiser,
and the rest of the ships are destroyers, escorts, frigates, and
three supply-cargo vessels.

“Because we’re trying to rescue our own personnel and
because we wish to limit the scale of destruction, we intend
to use Marine boarding tactics rather than ship-to-ship
combat. That will give us our best chance to capturing the
ships, freeing our people, and resolving the situation with
relatively low casualties.”

He kept to himself the corollary . . . that saving the lives
of naval personnel on the ships of both sides meant spending
the lives of a number of Marines, possibly a large number.

The tactical situation, however, demanded it.

“This is one instance where we absolutely need the Ma-
rines and their special capability in naval engagements,” he
continued. He looked at Devereaux’s icon as he spoke, look-
ing for a reaction, wishing again that he could read the emo-
tion behind that bland, corona-haloed projection. “Modern
space warfare is a notoriously all-or-nothing affair. Most
missiles mount thermonuclear warheads. Beam weapons
are designed to overpower shields and pick off point-defense
batteries, so the nukes can get through. When a nuke gets
through, usually, only a single one is necessary to obliterate
the target vessel and everyone on board. That sort of thing
would be very hard on the POWs we hope to rescue, and

STAR STRIKE

221
on the T.C. mutineers if they happen to be in the way. The

Marines give us an alternative—the ability to burn our way
onboard, capture or knock out the command centers, hijack
their AI nets, and force each ship’s surrender.

“We could launch a Marine strike solely with the person-
nel on board the strike carrier and on the assault transport,
the assets that we will be sending through in the first trans-
lation. Tactical prudence, however, suggests that we wait
until we have sufficient ships in place to provide us with
decent fire support.

“With that in mind, we will begin deploying our Marine
strike forces immediately upon entry into the Puller system.

We will not commit ourselves to the assault, however, until
we have a naval force in-system that at least matches the

PanEuropean fleet already present . . . say, a total of two to
three translation runs. Are there any questions?”

There were questions . . . most of them small and nagging
and micromanaging bits of annoyance. The council appeared
for the most part to have accepted at least the broad outlines
of the plan. Technically, they couldn’t dictate strategy or tac-
tics, but technically, also, the President could, in his guise as
commander in chief of the Commonwealth’s armed forces.

The council sought to understand the plan well enough to
give the President decent feedback. And, slowly, thanks in
part to the military and ex-military personnel within their
number, and to their EA links to the Net, that understanding
was forthcoming.

But Alexander had tangled with politicians often enough
to know that it was never that simple.

Especially, he thought, when one of those politicians was

Marie Devereaux.

16�

0112.1102

USMC Skybase

LaGrange-3/Puller 695

1750 hrs GMT

Skybase drifted in empty space, alone and unattended, now,
as the last of the supply and shuttle vessels pulled back to a
safe distance. Most ships, and most especially the cis-Lunar
tugs and more massive cargo vessels that had been servicing

Skybase, used gravitic engineering both for their drives and
to maintain artificial gravity on board. Such units warped
and wrinkled the fabric of space, rendering useless the Sky-
base’s mathematical understanding of the local metric. From
a distance of 10 kilometers, though, with drives switched
off, the minor warping from the argrav generators was triv-
ial enough to ignore.

General Alexander was in his office on board Skybase,
awaiting the translation to Puller 659, but he was linked in
to the scene transmitted from the transport Aldebaran, the
image electronically unfolded in his mind. From this van-
tage point, some 10 kilometers off, Skybase looked like a
huge pair of dark gray dishes fastened face to face, rim to
rim, with one side flattened, the other deeper and capped
by a truncated dome. The structure’s surface looked smooth
from this distance, but Alexander knew that up close its skin
was a maze of towers, weapons mounts, sponsons, surface
buildings, and trenches laid out in geometric patterns that
gave it a rough and heavily textured look.

STAR STRIKE

223

The perimeter of the double saucer was broken in one
place as though a squared-off bite had been taken from its
rim, at the broad opening leading into Skybase’s hangar
deck, a deep and gantry-lined entryway nearly 100 meters
wide jokingly referred to as the garage door. Harsh light
spilled from that opening, illuminating the gantry cranes
and the massive shapes of the starships nestled inside.

“Ten minutes,” an AI’s voice announced in his head. It
wasn’t Cara, this time, but one of the battalion of artificial
intelligences resident within the MIEF net, tasked with co-
ordinating the entire operation.

Was there anything else that needed to be done, anything
forgotten? God help them all if there was. Alexander expected
no serious trouble with the PanEuropeans at Puller, but after
that, when they jumped through to Nova Aquila. . . .

Three days earlier, a fleet of gravitic tugs had gentled the
behemoth clear of Dock 27 and into open space well beyond
the outer ramparts of the outermost Earthring. Hours later,

Skybase had translated to the fleet rendezvous area to begin
the final loading. The gravimetric picture was complicated
close to Earth and to the artificial gravity-twisting engineer-
ing of the Rings themselves, but the translation was a tiny
one, only about a quarter of a million miles, from geosynch
out to the Moon’s orbit. There’d been the faintest of shud-
ders, and Skybase had quietly vanished from Earth synchor-
bit, to reappear a heartbeat later at L-3.

L-3, the third of the five Earth-system LaGrange points,
was located at the Moon’s orbit, but on the far side of Earth
from the Moon’s current position, so that Luna was perpetu-
ally masked from view by the larger disk of Terra. The point
was gravitationally metastable; the gravitational metric was
relatively flat, here, with Earth and Moon always positioned
in a straight and unchanging line, but ships or structures
parked at L-3 still tended to drift away after a few-score
days due to perturbations by the Sun and by other planets,
especially Jupiter.

However, that metastability would not affect Skybase,
which wouldn’t be there long enough to be perturbed by
much. The important thing was that local space was flat

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IAN DOUGLAS
enough in terms of gravitational balances, providing a good
starting point for the coordinate calculations that would
allow Skybase to transit through a much, much longer jump,
not through but past the Void.

A jump of some 283 light-years, all the way out to Puller

659.

For that transition, local space had to be as flat as could be
managed, with a metric far less complex than the scramble
of interpenetrating gravity fields found in geosynch. There
could be no drift of Moon relative to the Earth, no hum of
nearby artificial agrav fields, no space-bending pulse of
a passing ship under Alcubierre Drive. L-3 was ideal as a
jump-off point, as ideal as could be found, at any rate, this
deep inside the Solar System.

“There is something I do not understand,” Cara said as he
watched the view of Skybase from the transport.

“What’s that?”

“The QST appears to be a highly efficient means of cross-
ing interstellar distances,” the AI said. “I’m curious why
more mobile habitats like Skybase have not been built.”

Alexander let the comment about being curious pass.

From his first introduction to the EA years ago, Cara
had continued to surprise him with what seemed to be
a genuinely human range of behaviors. AIs weren’t sup-
posed to exhibit curiosity, but the more powerful ones did,
indisputably.

“Well, there are plans on the drawing boards,” Alexander
said, “for true starships using Quantum Space Translation . . .

but I don’t think any of them are funded for development yet.

At least, not beyond the wouldn’t-it-be-nice stage.”

“I have seen some of those plans on the Net,” Cara told
him. “But you’re right. None has been funded past the initial
research stage.”

“The Arean Advanced Physics Institute has been using

Skybase as a testbed to study paraspace,” Alexander said,

“both to improve energy tap technology and to investigate
the possibility of very long-range transport. But ships built
around translation technology . . . they’d be damned expen-
sive. They’d also have to be huge, to accommodate the nec-

STAR STRIKE

225
essary power taps and the translation drive itself. A lot of
military decision-makers don’t think it’s feasible.”

“Skybase is still considerably smaller than a typical Xul
huntership,” the AI pointed out. “And it would be simple
enough to mount gravitic drives to provide the neces-
sary maneuverability for combat and in-system travel. A
fleet of such vessels equipped as warships would be most
formidable.”

“And you want to know why we’re not developing such
ships more . . . aggressively?”

“Exactly. It is as though human governments, the people
who make such decisions, do not realize the gravity of the

Xul threat.”

Alexander sighed. It was almost embarrassing admit-
ting to the non-human artificial intelligence in his head
what most senior military officers had lived with for their
entire careers, worse, what humankind had lived with for
centuries.

“That’s a complicated question, Cara. I guess the short
answer is . . . they know the Xul are a threat, sure, but after
five centuries, they don’t seem to be an urgent threat. There
are always more important things to attend to closer at
hand.”

“Even after the Xul incursion of 2314, when humankind
was nearly annihilated?”

Alexander shrugged. “But we weren’t, were we? Humans
have a lot of trouble connecting with something that hap-
pened centuries ago . . . or that might not happen until
centuries in the future. Download the history. Remember
global warming? The fossil fuel crisis? The e-trans crisis?

The genetic prosthesis crisis? The chaos of the nanotech-
nic revolution? If it doesn’t threaten us, immediately and
personally, it’s someone else’s problem—especially if it’s
government that has to take action to fix it. Hell, politi-
cians have trouble keeping their focus on problems just
from one election to the next. The Roman Senate probably
had the same problem with the barbarian crisis three thou-
sand years ago.”

“But it is the politicians—specifically the Senate Mili-

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IAN DOUGLAS
tary Appropriations Committee—that would be responsible
for funding a fleet capable of fighting the Xul, is it not?”

Cara sounded genuinely confused, and Alexander won-
dered how much of that was personality software miming
human patterns, how much was genuine perplexity. There
was no way to tell.

“That’s right,” he said. “And they’re not eager to increase
taxes just so the military can have some expensive new toys.”

He hesitated. While Cara was his electronic assistant alone,
she did share data with many other people, both civilian and
military, and with innumerable other AIs. How well could
he trust her not to share with the wrong people?

The hell with it. They would be gone, soon, gone and
far beyond the reach of anyone—officious bureaucrat, ass-
covering general, or self-serving politician—who might
object to him giving voice to his opinions. “The truth is,

Cara, it’s not just the civilians who are a little slow on the
uptake, sometimes. In fact, if the military really pushed for
it, we would probably get those fancy new ships. The al-
locations for the designing, for the building . . . hell, the
shipyards at Earthring, at the Arean Rings, at Luna, at L-5,
they’d all be falling all over themselves to win those con-
tracts. And the civilian sector would profit with a whole new
means of traveling between star systems.”

“You’re saying the work would stimulate the economy.”

“Definitely. Military contracts have always been a big
factor in keeping the economy going. That’s one reason war
was so hard to get rid of over the centuries.”

“Why, then, would the military sector not wish to see
these ships developed?”

“Because the military sector has always been extremely
conservative. They don’t trust new technology.”

“But advanced technology has always won wars. The
development of nuclear weapons to end World War II, for
instance, would be a case in point.”

“Which actually began as a civilian initiative, instigated
by the U.S. President at the time when he learned that the
enemy had a chance of developing those weapons first. But
check your historical files. Naval vessels continued to have

STAR STRIKE

227
masts for decades after the steam engine made sails obso-
lete. When General Custer’s command was wiped out at the

Little Bighorn, the native forces attacking him were armed
with repeating rifles; most of Custer’s men were not, be-
cause the military bureaucracy of the time was convinced
that repeaters wasted ammunition. Custer also left behind a
couple of Gatling guns—primitive machine guns—because
they slowed up his column. In other words . . . he refused to
change his tactics to take advantage of new technological
developments.

“Later, navies continued to cling to the battleship even
after repeated demonstrations that they didn’t stand a chance
against carrier-based aircraft. Then they clung to carriers
after orbital railguns and microcruise missiles made those
monsters into fat, wallowing targets. Two centuries after
that, Marines were still being issued slug-throwers as stan-
dard weapons because of concerns about the reliability
of lasers and man-portable batteries under combat condi-
tions. As a rule, military leaders don’t like anything new or
different.”

“But why would that be, given that change is the essence
of history?”

“Major changes in how we do things usually means
waiting around until the last generation dies off. It’s a basic
truism of military history: we’re always ready to fight the
last war, and the methods and tactics of the next war always
catch us by surprise.”

“That would seem to be a depressing philosophy for
someone in your line of work, General,” Cara told him. “Or
do you embrace such conservative viewpoints as well?”

He thought about that one for a moment. “There are never
any absolutes in this business,” he told the AI. “No blacks
or whites. In point of fact, space-combat doctrine right now
favors lights over heavies.”

“You refer to the tactical doctrine of using many small,
cheap, and expendable spacecraft, rather than a few large
and expensive ones.”

“Exactly. A Skydragon masses less than a hundred tons,
and can still carry a dozen long-range missiles with thermo-

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IAN DOUGLAS
nuclear warheads. One such warhead can cripple or even de-
stroy a hundred-thousand-ton battlecruiser, if it gets through
the point defense field. The powers-that-be are perfectly
happy to sacrifice a few Skydragon squadrons in exchange
for a high-value heavy, no problem.” He felt his own bitter-
ness rising as he said that. “It remains to be seen if being
able to translate ships as big as Skybase makes it worthwhile
changing tactical doctrines.”

“It seems that there is a certain inertia resident within
any given approach to warfare,” Cara observed. “Once a
government is committed to a given way of doing things, it
is difficult to change.”

“You could say that.” He sighed. “In fact, the conserva-
tive factions are usually right in holding on to the tried and
true . . . up to a point. We know what works, so we stick to
that. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, don’t risk creating a real
mess.

“But . . . and this may be the single most important ‘but’

in any military leader’s lexicon, we must be aware that
change—technological change, social and cultural change,
demographic change, religious change, political change—
all of them are going on around us all the time, even when
we don’t actually see it happening. If we get so mired in the
past that we don’t see the next new wave coming, if we can’t
recognize it in time to adapt, then we’re doomed to go the
way of the dodo, the elephant, and the blue whale, a dead-
end trap and ultimate extinction.”

“It still seems short-sighted to ignore the potential for
this type of interstellar transport,” Cara observed.

“Cara, I couldn’t agree more. Maybe, if Operation Lafay-
ette and Operation Gorgon are both successful, if Skybase
really shows her stuff out there, that by itself will nudge
things along in a positive direction. At least we can hope.”

“Hope is one aspect of humanity I’ve never been able to
fully understand,” Cara told him.

“Three minutes,” another AI’s voice announced. Pure
imagination, really, but to Alexander it seemed that he could
sense the gathering of energy within the bulk of Skybase.

Windows open to one side in his mind showed that all of

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229
the base systems were standing ready, all personnel at battle
stations, the antimatter reactors at the station’s core already
pouring terawatts of energy into the slender channel now
opening into the Quantum Sea.

“Cara,” he said in his mind, “has there been any word
from the Puller listening post?”

“Not for eight days, five hours, twenty-seven minutes,”

the AI told him. “Lieutenant Fitzpatrick’s last report indi-
cated a possibility of failing power systems, however. He
may not be able to communicate.”

“QCC units don’t need much power,” Alexander said.

“And they can’t be tapped or intercepted. If he’s not able
to communicate, it’s because the PEs found him . . . or his
life-support systems failed.” He watched the inner pan-
orama, of Skybase adrift against a star-scattered emptiness,
for another moment. “I don’t like jumping into an unknown
tacsit,” he said at last.

“We’ve known there would be considerable risk, Gen-
eral. The connection with Lieutenant Fitzpatrick has been
tenuous and intermittent ever since the PanEuropean fleet
entered the Puller system.”

“I know.” He was thinking about the ancient military
maxim: no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy.

During ops planning, they’d considered putting a hold
on the actual translation to Puller 659 until they actually
received an all-clear from Fitzpatrick and the listening post.

That idea had been dropped, however. There were reasons,
psychological as well as engineering, that Skybase could not
be kept on perpetual alert waiting for the next contact from
the distant Marine listening post.

So they would make the jump, and simply try to be ready
for whatever they found at the other end.

“Two minutes.”

He opened another window, sending out a connect call.

“Tabbie?”

There was a brief pause.

“Hi, hon,” was her reply. “Almost up to the big
jump-off?”

The link was via conventional lasercom relays, so there

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IAN DOUGLAS
was a speed-of-light time lag of about three seconds be-
tween the moment he spoke, and the moment he heard her
reply.

“Yeah. But I do hate leaving you behind.”

“I hate it, too. But . . . you’ll be back. And I’ll be here
waiting for you.”

They’d talked about that aspect of things a lot during the
weeks before this. Normally, Skybase was home not only
to nearly eight hundred Marines and naval personnel, but
also to some five hundred civilians. Most of them were ex-
military, or the children of military families, or the spouses
of military personnel serving on Skybase. Most worked a
variety of jobs on the base, ranging from administration and
clerical duties to specialized technical services to drivers
and equipment operators in the docking bay.

In fact, they represented the way the Marine Corps, in
particular, had over the centuries evolved its own microcul-
ture. The retired Marine staff sergeant or colonel, the spouse
of a Marine pilot, the child of Marine parents both stationed
at Skybase, all shared the same cultural background, lan-
guage, and worldview that made them a single, very large
and extended family.

But Skybase was about to take part in an operation ut-
terly unlike anything tried in the past. This time, the MIEF’s
headquarters would be traveling with the expeditionary
force. It would be the target of enemy assaults, and it would
likely be gone for many years.

Active duty Marines at Skybase had been given their
orders. The civilians, however, had been given a choice—a
choice to be worked out by both civilian and military mem-
bers of each family. Many civilians had preferred to stay
behind at Earthring, though the decisions of many had been
swayed by the military members of those families, who’d
wanted loved ones to be safe.

According to the final muster roster, two hundred five
civilians were accompanying the Marines and naval person-
nel to the stars on board Skybase. Among them were the
research team from the Arean Advanced Physics Institute,
crucial members of the technician cadre, and a number of

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231
civilian family members who’d refused to be separated from
loved ones.

Tabbie, though, was staying at Earthring. She had family
there . . . and though she’d not wanted to stay at first, Alex-
ander had finally convinced her that she would be better off
making a home for herself there, rather than enduring the
hardships—and the danger—of life aboard the base during
this new deployment.

“I still don’t entirely agree with your reasoning,” she told
him after a moment.

“You mean about Earth not being safe?”

“You’ve said it often enough yourself,” she replied after
the three-second delay. “If the Xul come to Earth again,
when they come, there won’t be any behind-the-lines. Ev-
erybody will be taking the same risks.”

In fact, the original rationale behind giving Skybase its
paraspace capability was to ensure that the MIEF headquar-
ters would survive if the Xul did manage to find and slag
the Earth. It would be a terrible irony, Alexander thought, if

Skybase survived the coming campaign . . . and Tabbie and
the other civilians left at Earthring were killed.

“Yeah, well, there’s a big difference between the Xul
coming to Earth again, and us going out hunting for the bas-
tards,” he told her. “We’ll be out there looking for trouble,
and we’re going to find it. And if we’re successful, we’ll
shake the Xulies up enough that they won’t come to Earth.”

“I know, I know. But I don’t have to like it.”

“One minute,” a voice said in his head.

“Okay, Kitten,” he told her. “I just got the one-minute
alert. If everything goes as planned, I’ll be back in a few
hours for the next set of ships.”

“I love you, Marty.”

“I love you.” He hesitated, then added, “I’ll be back
before you know it.”

He could feel the hard and familiar knot of anticipation
tightening in his gut. He wished this next translation was the
one taking them to the Xul. He wanted to get it over with . . .

but unfortunately Operation Lafayette had to come first. Secure
the jump-off system—and get those captured Marines back—

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IAN DOUGLAS
and then it would be time to deal with the much vaster threat
of the Xul.

“Thirty seconds.”

What perverse insanity emanating from the gods of battle
demanded that humans first tear and kill one another, when
the Xul were the real threat, the most terrible and terrifying
threat the human species had ever encountered?

“Ten seconds.”

“Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . systems en-
gaged. . . .”

The mental window through which Alexander was watch-
ing the scene suddenly turned to white snow and crashing
static. Damn! He hadn’t even considered the self-evident
fact that once Skybase translated, the camera on board
the Aldebaran would suddenly be left far behind, and the
abrupt loss of signal had jarred him. He switched to a dif-
ferent input channel, one connected to a camera feed from

Skybase’s outer hull.

For just an instant, Skybase would have dropped through
the blue-lit haze of paraspace, but Alexander had missed
it. What he saw now was a view of deep space, star-strewn
and empty, the constellations unrecognizable. Two hundred
eighty-three light-years was far enough to distort the famil-
iar patterns of stars in the sky into strangeness.

In fact, there was nothing much to see. Other downloads
from Skybase’s command center, however, began providing
a more complete picture of their surroundings as the base’s
sensitive scanners began sampling the background of ambi-
ent electromagnetic and neutrino radiation. The star gate, as
expected, was about 10 light-seconds in one direction, the
tiny red spark of the local sun in another, the star marking

Puller 659’s solitary gas giant just to one side of the star, and
thirty light-minutes away.

Seconds after translation, Skybase began releasing her
first riders—sixteen F/A-4140 Stardragons of VMA-980, the

Sharpshooters, one of three fighter squadrons in 1MIEF’s
aerospace wing. Sleek, black-hulled, and deadly, the fighters
dispersed around Skybase in a globular formation, the base
protectively at its center. They continued to move outward

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233
at a steady drift of nearly 4 kilometers per second relative to
the Skybase, flight and combat systems shut down, drawing
energy solely from their on-board batteries, watching for a
sign, any sign, that the enemy knew they were there.

Skybase, too, continued sampling ambient space, build-
ing up a detailed picture of its new surroundings. One by
one, PanEuropean ships were picked up by their electro-
magnetic signatures despite their being submerged within
the hash of charged particles enveloping the Puller gas giant.

In all, seven enemy vessels were picked up and identified,
just over half of the expected twelve. Those five missing PE
ships were a minor worry; most likely, they were simply too
well masked by the gas giant’s radiation belts, or they might
be hidden by the bulk of the planet itself, on the far sides of
their orbits. They might even have departed the system . . .

but it was also possible that they were closer at hand, well-
shielded and effectively invisible.

If so, the fighter screen would sniff them out soon enough.

Skybase’s sensors, meanwhile, scoured the surrounding sky,
searching.

There were no ships close by the stargate. The tiny plan-
etoid housing the Marine listening post, however, was spot-
ted and identified after a few moments. A small shuttle slid
from a secondary docking bay in Skybase’s hull, accelerat-
ing toward the stargate.

The first flight of starships was already being off-loaded
as the shuttle departed. First to emerge from Skybase’s maw
was the destroyer Morrigan, 24,800 tons and 220 meters
in length overall, and with a crew of 112. Her antimatter
reactors were already powering up; she would be ready to
engage her primary drive within another fifteen minutes.

Alexander, meanwhile, switched to the downloaded
view being recorded from the Morrigan, and was able to
watch the second starship slip her magnetic moorings and
exit Skybase’s hangar bay, edging gently into hard vacuum,
guided by a quartet of AI-directed tugs.

She was the Thor, and she was sister to Morrigan, her
masculine name notwithstanding. Both Cybele-class de-
stroyers were fast and maneuverable, designed originally to

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IAN DOUGLAS
serve with the Solar High Guard fleet, protecting worlds and
habitats from incoming asteroids or cometary debris. Each
possessed a powerful spinal-mount plasma gun as primary
weapon, but their hull superstructures bristled with second-
ary laser turrets, missile batteries, and railgun accelerators,
as well as automated point-defense mounts.

With the two destroyers launched and positioned a few
thousand kilometers to either side of Skybase, Alexander let
himself begin to breath more easily. The most dangerous part
of Operation Lafayette was the possibility that PanEuropean
warships would be close enough to pick up Skybase’s transi-
tion into normal space. While Skybase did possess defensive
weapons, the structure was still not primarily intended for
combat. The two destroyers would provide the fledgling in-
system beachhead with some decent fire-support.

Third out of Skybase’s cargo deck was the Marine assault
transport Samar, huge, blunt-prowed, and massive. Measur-
ing 310 meters long, and with a beam of 85 meters, Samar
massed nearly 35,000 tons. She carried a crew of 79, as well
as her cargo—four companies of the 55th Marine Aerospace

Regimental Strikeforce, a total of nearly 600 Marines. Half
of those Marines would already be loaded into their ship as-
sault pods, or SAPs, ready to engage in ship-to-ship board-
ing actions.

The final ship nestled within Skybase’s hold was the
largest, the Fleet Marine Carrier John A. Lejeune, mass-
ing 87,400 tons, and measuring 324 meters, stem to stern.

Cocooned within Lejeune’s hangar deck were two more
squadrons of F/A-4140s, as well as a squadron of A-90
ground-support strike craft and a number of support and
auxiliary vessels—ninety-eight aerospace craft in all.

The Lejeune was a tight fit inside Skybase’s hangar bay;
in fact, several outriggers and deep-space communications
and tracking masts had been removed in order to let her slip
through Skybase’s garage door at all. Getting her out was a
tediously exacting exercise in geometry and tug-facilitated
maneuvering that would take nearly an hour if all went well.

It was for that reason that the Lejeune had been the first ship
loaded on board the Skybase, and the last out; Alexander

STAR STRIKE

235
had wanted the fleet carrier to be with the first translated
load, however. Her three Stardragon squadrons—forty-eight
aerospace fighters in all—would be invaluable in achieving
and maintaining battlespace superiority, and greatly ex-
panded the fleet’s reach and sensitivity.

An eighth PanEuropean ship was picked out of the ra-
diation fields around the gas giant. By now, neutrino and
electromagnetic energy emitted by the newly emergent

Commonwealth vessels would have reached the vicinity of
the PE fleet. The question now was how good the enemy was
at picking those radiations out of the storm of particulate
radiation surrounding them at the moment. The Common-
wealth squadron might be detected at any moment; Alexan-
der was gambling on the enemy—even his AIs—being less
than perfectly vigilant.

Even so, every passing minute increased the chances of
discovery.

And so Thor and Morrigan stood guard as Skybase slowly,
even grudgingly gave birth to the John A. Lejeune, while the

Samar drifted nearby, her waiting Marines encased in their

SAP pods, unable to do anything but watch, fret, pray, or
sleep, according to individual habit and preference.

And once Lejeune drifted free in open space, the tugs
dragged her clear and, after a brief gathering of inner power,
the Skybase winked out of existence once again, returned to
distant Earth.

The four capital ships, a small cloud of fighters and aux-
iliaries, and some twelve hundred men and women remained
behind, alone, outnumbered, and expendable almost three
hundred light-years from home.

And everything was riding on a single unknown: was the
enemy aware of their arrival?

The question would be settled, one way or the other,
within the next few hours.

17�

0112.1102

SAP 12/UCS Samar

Assembly Point Yankee

Puller 695 System

1935 hrs GMT

PFC Aiden Garroway could scarcely move. He had a little
bit of wiggle room inside his 660-battlesuit, but the embrace
of his Ship Assault Pod made any real shift in his position
impossible. His confinement was beginning to gnaw at him.

He’d been sealed in here since 1700 hours, long before the

Skybase had even made its translation. Two and a half hours,
now.

Worst of all he couldn’t scratch. There was a point
midway up his back, below his shoulder blades and on the
left, that had been tingling and prickling for the past hour,
and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Theoreti-
cally, he could have used his system nano to anesthetize
the spot—a process that happened automatically if he
was wounded—but so far his thought-clicks hadn’t done a
damned thing. In fact, when he tried to isolate the itch in
his mind, it moved, shifting one way or another until it was
impossible to really pin it down.

The failure of the anesthetic release probably meant the
sensation was purely psychosomatic, but that made it no
easier to bear. In any case, he’d experienced worse. In boot
camp, any unauthorized movement or wiggling when the
recruit platoon had been ordered to hold position, had been

STAR STRIKE

237
punished by a session in the sand pit, taken through a gruel-
ing set of exercises by a screaming Gunny Warhurst or one
of the assistant DIs.

At least Warhurst wasn’t going to reach him in here,
sealed away deep in the belly of Samar’s launch bay. His
former DI was in another SAP, possibly right next door, but
as helplessly cocooned as was Garroway.

At least he had the squad data feed to keep him from
going completely nuts. An open window in his mind showed
an animated schematic of the tacsit, centered on Samar,
with the Lejeune, Thor, and Morrigan spread across several
thousand kilometers of empty space, and with the fighters
farther out yet.

By pulling back on the viewpoint within his mind, the

Commonwealth squadron dwindled to a bright, green dot,
and he could see the icon representing the stargate falling
in from the right. Pulling back still more, he could see the
icons representing the enemy; zooming in on that tightly
grouped pack of glowing red icons revealed seven capital
ships just visible in a pale, red fog representing the radiation
belts around the system’s gas giant. All seven vessels were
evidently in orbit about the giant, and gave no indication
that they were aware, yet, of the presence of the small Com-
monwealth squadron.

But they would be.

Garroway kept turning inward, inspecting closely his
own emotions. He wasn’t sure about what he was looking
for. Fear? Anticipation? Excitement? Impatience?

Maybe he was feeling something of all four. Boot camp
had taken him through so many simulations of combat he
couldn’t begin to number them. In virtual reality simulations
he’d sat inside the close, unyielding embrace of an SAP many
times, until he knew exactly what to expect—the long wait,
the gut-punching jolt of launch, the sweaty palmed anxiety
of the approach, the strike, the penetration, the entry.

Except that, he knew very well, you could never know for
sure what was coming. Simulations were just that, simula-
tions, and the real world was certain to contain more than its
fair share of the unexpected.

238

IAN DOUGLAS

Marine Listening Post

Puller 659 Stargate

1935 hrs GMT

In fact, the unexpected had already happened. Seven days
earlier, guided by intelligence provided by the DGSE— Di-
rection Général de la Sécurité Extraterrestrial—the light
cruisers Sagitta and Pegasus and the destroyer Détroyat had
approached the Marine listening post beside the stargate
under Alcubierre Drive, slowing to sublight velocities at
the last possible moment. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick had noted
the ships powering up, but they arrived at the stargate long
before the light carrying news of their departure from their
orbit around the gas giant.

Seconds after dropping back into unwarped space, Dé-
troyat had released a 10-megaton thermonuclear warhead
which had detonated at the asteroid’s surface; the shock-
wave had wrecked the listening post, and incapacitated or
killed the Marines inside.

Before the fireball had fully dispersed, Pegasus had de-
ployed an anticommunications nanocharge, a warhead releas-
ing a cloud of molecule-sized disassemblers that had sought
out the internal wiring and optical networks interlaced through
the asteroid’s heart and followed it to the listening post’s QCC
unit, reducing it to inert plastic, ceramcomposite, and metal
in seconds. QCC signals could not be intercepted—or even
detected—without a second unit containing elements quantum-
entangled with those of the first, but disassembler nano could
be smart enough to identify an FTL unit and destroy it.

Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and the other five Marines still
within the listening post never had a chance even to alert

Skybase that they were under attack. Within a few more
moments, FMEs—the elite French Fusilier Marin Extra-
terrestrienne—and German Sturmjäger had broken in and
secured what was left of the facility. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick—
badly injured but alive—and the other Marines had been
taken prisoner.

They killed eight FMEs before they were taken, though,
and wounded five more.

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239

For the next week, then, the former Marine listening post
had been occupied by a small reconnaissance unit of PanEu-
ropean special forces. The asteroid’s antennae and other sur-
face structures had been vaporized by the nuke, but the base
was now linked to the PE flagship Aurore by QCC, and the

French troops inside had been monitoring the deployment
of the Commonwealth squadron almost from the moment

Skybase had translated into the Puller battlespace.

And starward, in orbit around the gas giant, Aurore and
her sister ships were already preparing to spring the trap.

SAP 12/UCS Samar

Assembly Point Yankee

Puller 695 System

1948 hrs GMT

“Fifty newdollars,” Gunnery Sergeant Charel Ramsey said
over the squad com channel, “that the whole thing is called
off and we get told to stand down.”

“There speaks the voice of experience,” Master Sergeant

Paul Barrett said. “Didn’t you make the same bet on the way
in to Alighan?”

“Well, hey. Cut me some slack, okay? I’m bound to hit it
right some day.”

“You wish,” Corporal Takamura put in.

Still packed into his SAP, Garroway listened to the banter
among the waiting Marines, and wondered if the old hands
in his new platoon were as confident, as relaxed as they
seemed. He certainly wasn’t able to hear any stress in their
voices.

But then, perhaps they had more experience in masking it.

Shit. Did Marines ever admit that they were terrified? . . .

“Uh-oh,” Ramsey said. “Take a look at the tacsit feed.

There’s something—”

A second before, the space around the squadron had been
empty of all but Commonwealth ships. Now, though, some-
thing like a ripple spread across the electronic representation
of the background starfield . . . and then the PanEuropean
ships were there, in the Commonwealth squadron’s midst.

240

IAN DOUGLAS

There were six of them. Alphanumerics appearing
alongside each red icon identified them by name, class, and
tonnage. Largest was the monitor Rommel, an 81,000-ton
weapons platform mounting multiple plasma cannon banks,
high-energy lasers, three massive turret-mounted antimatter
accelerators, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of mis-
siles with high-yield nuclear warheads. A trio of frigates and
two destroyers followed, minnows to the monitor’s shark.

Garroway stared into the feed for a moment, confused.

The tacsit download now showed those six vessels in two
places at once—here at AP Yankee, and still in orbit around
the gas giant.

Then realization hit him. Of course. The gas giant was
thirty light-minutes distant; the six PE warships had out-
paced the radiations they’d been emitting in orbit, using
their Alcubierre Drives to cross thirty light-minutes in an
instant. As he watched, Samar’s AI updated the tacsit, eras-
ing the obsolete data.

“Are we going to launch?” Sergeant Chu demanded.

“When the hell are we going to launch?”

“Take it easy, Chu-chu,” Barrett said. “I don’t think any
of us want to go out into that.”

The master sergeant indicated the tacsit feed, which now
showed a confused tangle of ships as the two fleets engaged.

Though spread across almost 200,000 kilometers, the view
compressed battlespace to a small globe filled with moving
ships, the rigidly straight lancings of plasma and laser fire,
the arcing trajectories of missiles. In particular, the Com-
monwealth Marine fighters were plunging into the heart of
battlespace under high acceleration. At the instant the PE
ships had materialized, the carefully drawn globe of Marine
aerospace fighters had dissolved like a swarming cloud of
insects, sweeping out, around, and in toward the intruding
vessels.

Each F/A-4140 massed 94 tons, most of that divided be-
tween its powerful Consolidated Aerospace KV-1050 plasma
drive and the Solenergia ZPE quantum power transfer unit.

Two Marines, a pilot and a weapons operator, were squeezed
into a tiny dual cockpit forward. The Stardragon mounted a

STAR STRIKE

241
variety of weapons, interchangeable depending on the mis-
sion profile, but its primary was its spinal mount, running
forward all the way from the aft thrusters to become the dis-
tinctive needle-slim lance extending for 10 meters beyond
the nose.

That lance was a plasma accelerator capable of hurling
tiny masses of fusing hydrogen at near- c velocities, iner-
tia-shielded to bleed off the incredible recoil energies that
otherwise would have torn the fighter to shreds. Range was
limited to about 120,000 kilometers—less than half a light-
second—but the combination of fusion temperatures and
high-velocity kinetic impact could be turned against almost
any target with devastating effect.

In terms of both tonnage and firepower, however, the

PanEuropeans held the advantage. Both Samar and the

Lejeune, while sizeable vessels, possessed only relatively
lightweight armament—primarily point-defense lasers to
engage incoming missiles or enemy fighters. Thor and Mor-
rigan were more heavily armed, but they were two against
six, and the enemy monitor was a behemoth, slow-moving
and clumsy, but possessing a devastating long-range punch
in its trio of turret-mounted antimatter accelerators.

The one advantage held by the Commonwealth lay in
the sixteen Stardragons of VMA-980. The fighter squad-
ron already was beginning to live up to their nickname, the

Sharpshooters, a proud name born by other Marine aviation
squadrons across the centuries. As soon as each fighter was
aligned with a PE target, its on-board AI, closely linked with
the Weapons Officer’s mind, calculated range and speed, ad-
justing the spacecraft’s attitude to permit interception shots
across a range of almost 100,000 kilometers. Like miniature
suns, packets of fast-expanding fusing hydrogen snapped
across the void, penetrating magnetic shielding, slicing
through hull composites, liberating flashes of starcore fury
with each strike. The outer hull of the immense Rommel
seemed to sparkle with the impacts.

The Rommel was clearly the key to the battle, the equiva-
lent of the proverbial high ground in a conventional surface
battle. The Commonwealth destroyers and Lejeune’s fighter

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IAN DOUGLAS
squadrons could deal with the enemy frigates and destroyers
easily enough . . . if the PanEuropean monitor could be neu-
tralized. And if not, the monitor’s heavy weaponry would
make short work of all of the Commonwealth vessels.

From the PanEuropean perspective, it was vital to knock
out the two Commonwealth destroyers quickly, before they
could combine their considerable firepower and cripple the
monitor. Neither Lejeune nor Samar possessed heavy weap-
ons—they were transports, after all, the first of Marine
aerospace fighters, the second of Marines, and while they
mounted considerable point-defense capabilities and some
high-energy lasers for ship-to-ship actions, they lacked the
more devastating firepower of antimatter accelerators or
large plasma cannon.

Admiral Edan Mitchell was in command of the Common-
wealth fleet, operating from his combat command center on
board the Lejeune. He would be linked in to the battlenet
now, Garroway thought, directing the Commonwealth fleet

to focus its full attention on the enemy monitor. Already,
fighters were issuing from the Lejeune’s ventral launch
bays, accelerating at high-G toward the PanEuropean behe-
moth. Clouds of tiny, robotic probes were already scattering
throughout the battlespace, each providing a steady feed of
visual and electronic data for the Commonwealth C3, allow-
ing the battle analyses staff to build up a coherent picture of
the action.

On board the Samar, the waiting Marines could only
watch the battle unfold around them, watch . . . and wonder
if they would get to take part in the battle, or if a direct hit on

Samar was about to end their careers in a single, sun-bril-
liant flash. Once, a plasma bolt struck Samar’s hull with a
savage, burning snap and an explosion of vapor into empty
space, and the transport had rolled slightly, staggered by the
shock. There were no casualties; armor and an AI-controlled
point-defense gun turret had been all that had been hit.

But the jolt had driven home the overwhelming sense
of helplessness Garroway and the other Marines were ex-
periencing right now. And it had led him to rather forcibly
remember one of the battle simulations he and the other

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243
recruits of his training platoon had experienced at Noctis

Labyrinthus, after their naked time, after they’d received
their Corp implants.

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

Earth’s Pacific Ocean back in the late pre-spaceflight era. In
that action, the U.S. 2nd Marine Division, with elements of
the Army’s 27th Infantry Division, had made an amphibious
assault against a tiny tropical coral atoll defended by 4,500

Japanese under the command of Rear Admiral Shibasaki

Keiji.

Tarawa, according to the download data, had been a royal
cluster fuck, an operation that had come that close to being
an utter and complete military disaster. The preliminary
bombardment had transformed the atoll into a fire-blasted
landscape reminiscent of the cratered surface of the Moon,
but had utterly failed to touch the defenders, dug in to a
well-protected labyrinth of trenches, log forts, and five hun-
dred concrete bunkers. Worse, much worse, the first Marine
waves had gone in late, and the tides had been unexpectedly
low, so the incoming landing craft had gotten hung up on
the coral reef 500 yards offshore. The first waves of Ma-
rines had been forced to swim and wade ashore across a
fire-swept lagoon, ideal targets for the Japanese mortars and
machineguns.

A few amphibious tractors—amtracks—had made it over
the reef and across the lagoon, then begun shuttling back
and forth between the beach and the reef, carrying stranded

Marines ashore, but the Japanese fire had been accurate and
heavy. Within a few hours, half of the available amtracks
had been knocked out.

For the Marines huddled in those vehicles, the crossing
must have been hell. All the men could do was wait . . .

crowded together, helpless, wondering if the next incoming
round would be the one to score a hit on their wallowing
vehicle.

Garroway had been there, standing on the reef next to a
blazing landing craft, then on board an amtrack churning its
way across the lagoon as mortar shells sent geysers of spray
skyward on all sides. He’d charged bunkers with handfuls of

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IAN DOUGLAS

Marines, had watched the battle slowly, slowly shift in the
attackers’ favor, but only after three days of savage fighting,
three days collapsed into several long hours by the simula-
tion feed at Noctis Labyrinthus.

Not until now, however, had Garroway truly felt one with
those long-ago, long-dead Marine brothers.

“Listen up, Marines,” Lieutenant Jones’ voice called
over the command channel. “We have orders. Stand by to
launch!”

“Shit,” Ramsey said. “This is it!”

“All you newbies,” Master Sergeant Barrett said. “Your
trajectories will be AI controlled. When you get on board
the target, just stay close and watch your feeds. Just like
your training sims.”

“Yeah,” Ramsey added. “And thank the Marine-green
gods of battle you’re not going up against the Xul first time
out of the gate!”

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

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

Marines.

Garroway watched the data feed coming through. Samar
was rotating to bring her SAP launch tubes to bear on the

Rommel, now 12,000 kilometers off and hammering away
at both the Morrigan and Thor. Garroway watched the num-
bers of the countdown flicker toward zero, bracing himself

. . . and then his SAP slammed into the void under nearly
twenty gravities of acceleration.

With inertial dampers on and his suit cushioned within
the narrow constraints of the pod by a thick, almost gelati-
nous liquid, he felt only a few of those twenty Gs, but they
were enough to crush the breath from his lungs and blur
his vision. When it cleared, when he could focus again on
his link feed, he could see Samar receding rapidly astern,
against a sky lit by intense but utterly silent flashes of light.

SAPs were too small to mount the heavy generators neces-
sary for phase-shifting, so each pod was fully visible to the
enemy’s fire-control radar and lidar systems. This visibility
was offset somewhat by the pods’ absorptive and energy-
scattering outer layers, and the pods were maneuverable

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245
enough to give any fire-control AI severe headaches as it
tried to predict the myriad incoming vectors . . . but the
enemy was tracking the Marine assault wave almost from
the instant it emerged from Samar’s armored belly.

Point-defense lasers snapped out, crisscrossing the gulf
between the Rommel and Samar. Those beams of intense,
coherent energy were invisible in hard vacuum, but the AI
governing the tactical feed was painting them in, presum-
ably to reassure the Marines on the grounds that a beam you
could see had already missed you.

Somehow, Garroway didn’t feel particularly reassured. It
seemed as though the entire sky ahead had lit up with flash-
ing, snapping threads of red light, that they were weaving a
web of fire so thick and complex that the incoming assault
pods couldn’t possibly avoid them all.

Then a brilliant, eye-twisting sun erupted over Rommel’s
aft hull as a small fusion warhead went off. Morrigan and

Thor both were firing everything they had at the monitor,
including nuke-tipped missiles, trying to buy precious time
for the Marine assault. The superheated plasma and EMP
from the blast would provide the SAPs with a bit of cover, at
least for a few seconds.

But the plasma cloud dissipated all too swiftly, and Rom-
mel’s own point-defenses were simply too effective to allow
more missiles to reach her. Abruptly, shockingly, PFC Du-
laney’s pod was speared by a point-defense beam, a direct
hit that vaporized half of the capsule, and sent fragments
hurtling outward from within an expanding cloud of hot gas.

An instant later, Sergeant Mendoza’s pod was hit, a glanc-
ing, slicing strike that sheared away part of the hull, and left
the remnant tumbling helplessly through the void.

One by one, the enemy fire-control systems locked onto
incoming pods. One by one, the pods were being slashed
from the sky. There’d been forty SAPs in the first wave.

Halfway across the gulf there were thirty-four left . . . then
thirty-two. Garroway felt panic rising; none of them were
going to make it across!

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

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IAN DOUGLAS

Ontos 7

Battlespace, Puller 695 System

1953 hrs GMT

“Hang on to your lunch!” Lieutenant Kesar Eden yelled over
the intercom. “We’re punching it!”

Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst lay cradled in his fighting
position, linked into the Ontos’ combat system. There was
a savage thump, and then the John A. Lejeune’s launch bay
fell away around him, the carrier dwindling rapidly astern as
the MCA-71 Ontos accelerated at fifty gravities.

Ontos was the Greek word for “thing,” and this was the
second time in the long history of the Corps that a Marine
weapons system had borne that unlikely name. Eight hun-
dred years before, during the 1950s, the Marine Corps had
developed a light tracked vehicle specifically as a fast-
moving antitank weapon. Massing just 9 tons, and squeezing
three crew members inside a hull compartment just four feet
high, that first Ontos, designated the M50A1, had mounted
six 106mm recoilless rifles on the upper deck of the vehicle.

The idea had been to allow it to engage enemy armor with
six rapid shots, guaranteeing a kill; its speed, then, would let
it withdraw to cover, allowing the exposed recoilless rifles
to be reloaded.

No one, however, had quite known what to do with the
ugly little vehicle. In fact, the Army had cancelled their
original order when the prototype testing was complete.

The Marines, however, had accepted almost 300 of the ve-
hicles, taking them to war in a place called Vietnam—an
environment for the most part lacking enemy armor to serve
as targets.

The Marines were well known for their ability to adapt
to changing conditions and battlefield needs. The Ontos was
an awkward beast, it turned out, unable to carry much am-
munition, and requiring the crew to exit the vehicle in order
to reload, making them vulnerable to enemy fire. Even so,
it proved popular with its crews, who noted that frequently
the enemy would break and run as soon as one of the ugly
little beasts arrived in the combat zone. Those six recoilless

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247
rifles fired beehive rounds, each shell consisting of a bundle
of one hundred darts that sliced through jungle foliage with
devastating effect, turning the vehicle into what had been
called the world’s biggest shotgun. Used against bunkers and
against enemy infantry, the Ontos provided Marine riflemen
with effective close-fire support at the company level.

Always considered an ugly duckling, however, that first

Ontos had never been accepted by decision-makers above
the company level, and the weapon system was withdrawn
from service after it had seen only four years of combat ser-
vice. For decades after, the Ontos had been something of an
embarrassment to those tasked with designing and procur-
ing new weapons.

Eight centuries later, a new Marine weapons system had
been introduced to the Corps bearing the ancient Greek
name for “thing.” Part vehicle, part artillery, it was designed
to both provide close infantry support in combat—especially
in zero- and low-gravity environments, and also to serve
as transport for a Marine squad, getting them safely into
combat, then providing artillery support as they made their
assault. The new Ontos was undeniably ugly, as awkward-
looking as its ancient predecessor, flat, stubby, and mass-
ing 383 tons, with multiply jointed legs and a ball-mounted
forward blast head that gave it the appearance of a huge and
ungainly insect. Twelve armored Marines and their equip-
ment could be carried aft in the lightly armored belly. The
vehicle’s “wings” mounted a pair of hivel accelerator can-
nons that could fire antimatter rounds, tactical nukes, nano-

D canisters, or conventional high explosives.

Space was sharply limited on board the transport, how-
ever. Warhurst and one other gunner were squeezed in to
either side of the vehicle commander in a dorsal sponson
forward, behind the blast-head mount, and cyberlinked into
the Ontos’ command network. The Marines aft were as
tightly cocooned as their counterparts in the SAP pods now
being launched from the Samar. Like the ancient Ontos,
no one really knew what to do with the modern weapon of
that name, but the Corps had adapted it especially for ship-
boarding actions. Four, including Warhurst’s vehicle, had

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IAN DOUGLAS
been accelerated from the Lejeune’s launch bay, and were
vectoring in on the PanEuropean monitor Rommel now.

Like aerospace fighters, the Ontos operated off of a Sole-
nergia ZPE quantum-power transfer unit. Using the same
principle as a Quantum-Coupled Communications system,
the ZPE transfer unit used quantum entanglement to trans-
mit energy from one point to another, without actually tra-
versing the space in between. Extremely high energies were
drawn from the zero-point field taps on board the Lejeune
and the Samar, but routed directly to field-entangled power
receivers on board individual F/A-4140s and the MCA-71

Ontos transports, without the possibility of that transmis-
sion being blocked or even detected.

The system had some important trade-offs. The advan-
tage, of course, was that the massive quantum power taps
could be left back on board the capital ships. The disad-
vantage, though, was that if the Lejeune or the Samar were
knocked out of action, their orphaned offspring would
become dead in space, with only their relatively low-powered
on-board antimatter converter systems from which to draw
on for life support and maneuvering.

All of that was of less importance to Warhurst now than
was the simple fact that he was back in action at last.

When he left Recruit Training Command, there’d been
speculation that he would end up in a rifle company with
a number of his former recruits. The 1MIEF personnel de-
partment had killed that idea, however, and in fairly short
order. Marine recruits were instilled with the absolute and
unvarying principle of the Corps—Marines work together,
as a unit. However, learning that basic lesson as they go
through boot camp, most Marines reach graduation hating
their DI. Respecting him, yes, but hating him nonetheless.

It wasn’t that 1MIEF’s command constellation was
afraid that some former recruit of Warhurst’s was going
to get even some night on deployment. Platoon AIs were
good watchdogs when it came to that sort of thing. They
were conscious, though, of the need for a smoothly func-
tioning structure at the squad, platoon, and company levels.

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

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249
when everyone needed to work together smoothly, as a unit,
might get Marines killed.

So Gunny Warhurst had been assigned to an Ontos crew,
a demanding billet that required experienced combat vet-
erans, rather than newbies. The platoon’s fresh meat would
do best in assault platoons where they could draw on one
another—and on the old hands in each platoon—for support
and strength. Serving a gun station on an Ontos required
more seasoning, and the ability to link very closely indeed
with the vehicle commander, and with the other gunner on
board.

Warhurst’s relief at being in action again had more, much
more, to do with his need to get away from Mars and the
still-burning pain of having been evicted from his family.

The psych AIs at Ares RTC had tried to counsel him through
the rough parts, but he honestly couldn’t tell now if they’d
done a damned thing to help.

He knew he was still spending way too much time use-
lessly rehearsing conversations in his head. He so wanted
his family—especially Julie—to understand, to, to what? To
come to their senses and feel how he needed the Corps, to
understand that this was his family as much as the Tamalyn-

Danner line marriage, because, damn it, the Corps was a
part of who and what he was, that he could no more discard
it than he could discard his own heart.

He was beginning to realize that a lot of his grief was
centered less on losing Julie, Eric, Donal, and Callie than it
was on being rejected. Dumped. As though he meant nothing
to any of them, had contributed nothing, had been nothing.

When he thought about how they’d cast him aside, it was all
he could do to see through that haze of enveloping white pain

. . . a searing mingling of grief and loss, of fury and hatred
and broken ego and insulted honor and yearning desire.

He hated them all, now. And he still wanted them to come
back, to say it had all been a mistake.

He still wanted to love them. . . .

Damn it, he was doing it again. Focus, you idiot! he
snarled at himself, furious. Pay attention to what you’re
doing or you’ll get us all killed!

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IAN DOUGLAS

The Ontos had vaulted through the emptiness between
the Lejeune and the enemy monitor, shifting vectors wildly
and rapidly in order to make things as difficult as possible
for the Rommel’s fire-control AIs. Drawing on the ZPE
energy tap on board the Lejeune, the Ontos could afford the
added power-hungry luxury of phase-shifting, which made
the enemy’s job even harder in terms of target acquisition
and lock, and provided some measure of defense against
beams and shrapnel.

But not complete protection, he noted, as a small hivel
slug struck the Ontos amidships. He felt the staggering
shock as a few grams of depleted uranium passed through
the ship. Most of the released kinetic energy, fortunately,
was dissipated by the Ontos’ phase-shifted state, but enough
leaked through to jar his teeth.

He stayed focused on his link, however. They were still
flying, so he ignored the impact, figuring that there was
nothing he could do about it except to keep doing his job,
which was to try to track incoming missiles or armored
enemy troops or gun or sensor emplacements on the moni-
tor’s hull and knock them out with hivel cannon fire.

The ship’s AI had already highlighted the turret that had
loosed that slug. He dragged his mental targeting cursor
over the dome and thought-clicked the number two gun
starboard, sending a stream of high-velocity rounds slash-
ing through the turret in great, pulsing gouts of white heat
before it could fire another shot.

As it neared its objective, as the Rommel loomed huge in
his downloaded mental vision, the Ontos’ hull began morph-
ing into its landing configuration, wings and weapons out-
stretched, clawed legs extended, blast head forward and
down, seeking contact.

Then the Ontos was on the monitor’s hull with a heavy,
ringing thud, its ugly blast head extending and dropping to
bring a torch of plasma energy, as hot as the core of a sun,
into contact with the monitor’s armor cladding.

Under that searing assault, the outer nanolayers rippled
and flowed as they tried to distribute the heat, then burst
away in clouds of vapor, exposing the tender ceramics and

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251
alloys beneath. The Ontos’ claws dug in and held, as the
current of vaporizing metals and composites howled past
like a hurricane wind, expending itself in vacuum. A crater
formed, then deepened, widening, as the Ontos thing con-
tinued to eat its way through the skin and into the heart of
the enemy ship.

The Rommel carried fighters—not as many as the

Lejeune, but enough to provide some measure of close de-
fense against such tactics as the Ontos was now employing.

His AI warned of two bogies swinging up and around over
the horizon of the monitor’s hull, identifying them as PanEu-
ropean Épée fighters—robotic craft that were exceptionally
fast and maneuverable because they had no flesh and blood
on board to coddle.

Warhurst was screaming as he brought both starboard-
side guns to bear on the stooping targets. . . .

18�

0112.1102

SAP 12

PanEuropean Monitor Rommel

Puller 695 System

2004 hrs GMT

Garroway had been wondering if any of the SAPs were going
to make it across the gulf between Samar and the Rommel,
as pod after pod was struck down by the enemy point de-
fenses, but then a fresh wave of blasts flashed and pulsed
across the monitor’s hull, targeting the point-defense turrets
and fire-control sensors. Morrigan was now concentrating
all of her fire against the PanEuropean monitor, attempting
to screen the Marine assault wave, giving them a precious
few seconds to complete their run, and a number of aero-
space fighters had closed enough of the gap to pour con-
centrated devastation into the shuddering hull of the huge
enemy ship. Although he hadn’t seen them, the tacsit feed
also showed three MCA–71 Ontos transports had touched
down on the monitor’s hull, and were busily tunneling into
thick armor. Another nuke, one of a salvo fired from the

Thor, got through a moment later, flaring with dazzling in-
candescence against the night.

But the Rommel was still very much in action. In seconds,
three more SAPs vaporized in white-hot flashes of energy . .

. and the tacsit showed enemy fighters as well, rising from the
monitor to engage the incoming pods.

But by now the PanEuropean monitor was looming

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253
huge just ahead, its surface rushing up to meet Garroway’s
incoming capsule. The guiding AI, Garroway noted with
an almost detached interest, was directing his pod into a
gaping crater blown open moments before by the plasma
blast head of an MCA–71. An instant later, and despite
the inertial damping, Garroway felt the savage shock as
his SAP slammed into the wreckage of what had been the

Rommel’s hull at that point.

The SAP’s squared-off prow was designed to collapse
against whatever it struck, releasing a ring of nanotech dis-
assemblers programmed to ignore the pod, but to eat through
hull metal or composite with which it was in contact. As the
pod slipped deeper into the PE ship’s armor cladding, the

SAP’s entire outer surface turned gelatinous with nano-D,
eating away at the metal and lubricating the pod’s move-
ment. Vanishing into the ship’s hull, the pod continued
burrowing forward, dissolving wreckage and armor, until
sensors within the drilling head detected an empty space
beyond.

When that happened, nano-disassemblers halted their
eating, then converted to sealant, fusing pod to hull, and the
leading end of the assault craft flashed from solid to gas in a
savage liberation of raw energy.

Garroway was waiting, gulping down air, heart pound-
ing, the flamer mounted on his 660-battlesuit’s left forearm
already aimed and armed. As the bow of the assault pod ex-
ploded into gas, he followed up with a burst from the flamer,
sending a fireball searing into the Rommel’s interior.

He was right behind the dissipating fireball, allowing
the pod mechanism to propel him forward and through the
breach into the monitor’s hull as the dampening gel around
him flashed into harmless vapor.

What followed next was pure training. Rommel pos-
sessed an artificially generated gravity field, set to about
three-quarters of a gravity—roughly equivalent to the grav-
ity of Aurore. He was entering the monitor from an unusual
angle, coming down through the overhead of one of the in-
terior decks, and the local gravity field grabbed at him as he
fell through the opening.

254

IAN DOUGLAS

There’d been no good way to predict where he would come
out, or what the local gravity would be like. Part of his brain
registered the fall, and long hours of training took over. He
twisted as he fell, landing catlike, if heavily, on his boots,
his left arm already sweeping up and around to engage any
targets that might present themselves. His helmet sensors
gave him a 360-degree view in a side mental window, but he
pivoted in any case to see for himself, checking both ways.

Several bodies of the ship’s crew lay on the deck both
ahead and behind, within a passageway choked with an im-
penetrable fog of smoke and a near-total darkness relieved
only by his battlesuit’s shoulder-mounted lights. Whether
they’d been killed by external fire, by the blast as the SAP
opened up, or by his flamer, there was no way of knowing.

Nor was it important. A Marine assault was built around
one simple concept—the employment of extreme and sudden
violence to overwhelm local defenses and secure the battle
initiative.

And to keep the initiative, he needed to keep moving. If
he stopped, if he went on the defensive, he would in minutes
be isolated, surrounded, and killed. Two of the ship’s crew
appeared from a side passage just ahead; he triggered his
flamer and saw the two writhe and struggle and then wilt
in the torchblast. Neither had been wearing armor, though
both were carrying mag-pulse rifles. In another second,
both were dead . . . probably irretrievables.

“Green one, one-two!” he shouted into his helmet pick-
up. “On board! Request orienteering fix!”

“One moment,” the voice of the platoon AI said. Then a
window opened in a corner of his mind, showing an anima-
tion of the corridor he was in now, and a flashing pointer
showing which way he needed to go.

That way. Strange. His instincts and his implanted hard-
ware both had been suggesting the other way . . . but he was
feeling a bit disoriented both by the shock of landing and the
drop into the Rommel’s local gravity.

But if Achilles said go that way, that was the way he
would go. The animation also showed the ghosted-out shad-
ows of other passageways around him, and moving green

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255
blips representing other Marines. The sight was deeply reas-
suring; he was alone in that corridor, but he could see other

Marines appearing one after another in other, nearby com-
partments and passageways, all of them moving in the same
general direction.

A monitor was a huge ship, a veritable city wrapped in
thick cladding, and enclosing a maze of passageways and
compartments designed to house several thousand crew
members. A few hundred Marines—to say nothing of how-
ever many members of the 55th MARS had actually survived
the passage from Samar—could not hope to kill or over-
power the entire crew, especially when a number of those
enemy personnel would be PE armored marines trained to
combat just such an assault as this.

The Commonwealth battle-command AIs had already
identified the key objectives within the Rommel, using avail-
able schematics and ship plans from Intelligence, as well as
sounding information being gathered from robotic probes
already burrowing into the ship’s thick hull. The combined
information, transmitted back to Samar and the Lejeune, al-
lowed Achilles and the AIs within the Combat Command

Center to build up a coherent picture of the Rommel’s in-
terior, and to know exactly where each Marine was at the
moment in relation to a list of possible objectives. A hand-
ful of Commonwealth Marines wandering around on their
own would have been lost in moments, easy targets for the
enemy’s counterattack. Under Achilles’ guidance, however,
they could be sure they were moving as a unit, with common
purpose.

Garroway’s primary objective was a command-and-
control center buried in the Rommel’s core. To get there,
he needed to follow this passageway for about 20 meters,
then locate a maintenance shaft in the starboard bulkhead, a
broad, open tunnel plunging into the monitor’s core.

“Here,” Achilles said in his mind, highlighting a section
of the passageway’s bulkhead in red. “There is an access
tube just beyond that partition.”

“Got it,” he said, and he turned his mag-pulse rifle on
his right arm on the bulkhead, slamming a rapid-fire stream

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IAN DOUGLAS
of slugs into the wall. Metal and ceramplast shredded, and
then he could see through the hole and into a black empti-
ness beyond.

He used a personal drone to check the far side, tossing
the fist-sized robot sensor through the hole and watching the
feedback on a helmet display. The maintenance shaft was
a broad but narrow space descending relative to the local
gravity field. There was no artificial gravity, but his armor
thrusters ought to get him where he needed to go.

Just behind him, the overhead suddenly bulged, then ex-
ploded as another SAP broke through. Garroway decided not
to wait for a possible volley of friendly fire, but he tagged
the opening with a small transponder that would show the
bulkhead breach to anyone following him, then plunged
through himself.

The shaft interior was in complete darkness, but his ar-
mor’s shoulder lights illuminated his surroundings in harsh,
shifting patterns of white light and black shadow. A moment
later, he became aware of other lights above him, as other

Marines broke through into the shaft and began the descent
into the monitor’s core.

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

Kicking off from the entrance breach, he drifted down
several meters—“down,” of course, being a relative term in
the sudden falling emptiness of microgravity. He triggered
his suit thrusters and moved more quickly, using his hands
to guide himself along the piping and tightly tied bundles of
fiber optics lining the shaft walls.

He moved through the shaft for what seemed like hours,
though his implant timer insisted it was only three minutes.

At last, though, Achilles highlighted an area of tunnel wall
just ahead. “There,” the AI told him. “That will give you
direct access to your objective.”

The tacsit feed continued to give him a ghosted overlay of
what was behind the surrounding bulkheads. Pulling him-
self up short alongside the indicated section of the tunnel, he
hung in emptiness for another few seconds until five more

Marines reached him, snagging hold of conduits and coming
to a halt at the designated level.

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257

An armored form bumped against him, steadying itself
on a conduit. The 660-armor’s surface Nanoflage made the
figure almost ghostly in the tunnel’s gloom, but a transpon-
der-relayed ID appeared on Garroway’s helmet display—

Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey. Garroway felt an almost
overwhelming sense of relief, so much so he could feel his
knees trembling. He’d not wanted to go through that bulkhead
alone.

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

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

Three more armored figures arrived down the shaft in
short order—Sergeant Richard Chu, Corporal Marin Dela-
zlo, and PFC Sandre Kenyon.

“Okay, people,” Ramsey told them, pulling a breaching
charge from an external suit pouch. “We breach and we go
through, standard one-by assault. Everyone set?”

“Ready, Gunnery Sergeant,” Garroway said. He was fo-
cusing on damping down the fear.

“Fire in the hole!” Ramsey announced, slapping the self-
sticking breaching charge to the sealed hatch. The Marines
rolled away, and an instant later an intense gout of white-hot
metal erupted from the charge, as a nano-D thermal-decou-
pler turned titanium alloy to a spray of liquid and gaseous
metal. The spray grew brighter, expanding into an oval patch
roughly 2 meters high . . . and then the metal burned through
with a brilliant flash.

Ramsey was the first Marine through the still-hot open-
ing, but Garroway crowded through just behind him. Both

Marines tumbled once more into gravity, this time within
a large and circular chamber filled with control consoles,
work stations, and a number of men and women in PE uni-
forms, reclining on link couches as they directed their side
of the battle through the ship’s Net.

Operating under Achilles’ instructions, Ramsey turned
his pulse rifle against one particular bank of instrumenta-
tion, slamming it into junk. The salvo seemed to shock the
reclining enemy officers, as their link with the Rommel’s AI
net was broken and they were dropped out of their command
virtual reality.

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IAN DOUGLAS

Achilles identified one threat—an armored Marine
standing near the compartment’s single hatch. The guy’s
armor would be proof against flamer fire. Instead, Garro-
way triggered a burst from his mag-pulse rifle, the stream of
high-velocity slugs catching the enemy marine high in the
chest and slamming him backward into the hatch.

The other Marines were coming through the opening into
the compartment as well. One of the enemy officers pulled
an ugly handgun from a holster and fired from his couch;
the round ricocheted off Ramsey’s helmet. Chu took three
steps and placed the black muzzle of his flamer against the
man’s skull. “Drop it, monsieur,” he growled.

The chances were good that the language spoken by

Rommel’s crew was Deutsch, not Français, but the mes-
sage was unmistakable. The man, eyes bulging, dropped the
pistol and raised his hands. Other men and women in the
room were already doing the same.

Other Marines, guided by Achilles, were attaching nano-

D charges to specific consoles and link stations, and Ramsey
was jacking a small, heavily armored box into a particular
computer access relay. Garroway and Chu, gesturing with
their weapons, herded the PanEuropean personnel off of
their link couches and across the compartment, lining them
up on their knees, facing an empty bulkhead, their hands
behind their heads.

This compartment, Garroway knew, was one of three aux-
iliary control rooms buried within the Rommel. Some of the
others might be destroyed, or isolated by damage, or Marine
assault squads might already be breaking into them.

All they could do now was wait. Garroway kept the

POWs covered, while Ramsey worked his computer link
and the other three Marines kept their weapons trained on
the sealed hatch. They wouldn’t fire the nano-D charges
unless they absolutely had to. The idea was to capture the
monitor, not junk her . . . but they would render the huge ship
harmlessly inert if they couldn’t force her to surrender.

“Okay,” Ramsey said after a few moments. “Achilles has
interfaced with Rommel’s AI suite. We’re in.”

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

STAR STRIKE

259
joined in. Sandre Kenyon was, by chance, standing close
by. Keeping his weapon still trained on the kneeling POWs,

Garroway reached out and gave Sandre an awkward one-
armed hug, their black armor clashing as it came together
like a pair of colliding tanks.

“It’s gonna be close,” Ramsey said a moment later. He
was getting things on his tactical feed that weren’t funneling
through to the rest of the squad. “We have three more enemy
ships arriving from in-system. Another destroyer . . . and it
looks like a couple of light escort cruisers, Pegasus . . . and

Sagitta. Our fighters are reforming to meet them.”

His momentary rush of enthusiasm cooled, Garroway
stood, covering the prisoners, and waited. Rommel, appar-
ently, was still in the fight, though only intermittently now
as more and more of her Net circuitry was shut down or com-
promised. Garroway tried to figure out what was going on
through the platoon tacsit feed, but gave up after a few mo-
ments. The tangle of ships out there was hopelessly confused,
now, with no fewer than thirteen major warships and well
over a hundred fighters from both sides, plus Marine Ontos
transports and shuttles, robotic sensor craft, and hundreds of
circling, target-seeking missiles. Nukes were going off every
few moments, and each blast tended to blank out the data
transmission with momentary storms of white-noise static.

Someone was at the hatch. Garroway heard the thump,
followed by a mechanical-sounding clank. Chu, Kenyon, and

Delazlo hunkered down behind consoles and link couches,
their weapons aimed at the hatch. Ramsey continued work-
ing with the computer feed relay. By now, a small army of
artificial intelligences were being beamed across from the

Lejeune and the Samar, downloading themselves into the

Rommel’s computer net. If they could capture the electronic
high ground in time. . . .

“The hatch may be a diversion,” Achilles whispered in
their minds. “I am detecting suspicious noises here.” The

AI highlighted a section of bulkhead at right angles to the
bulkhead containing the hatch.

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

Laz, with me!”

260

IAN DOUGLAS

Chu and Delazlo shifted positions to cover the new threat.

A moment later, the hatch flared with a dazzling white light,
metal dissolving under a high-energy assault of nano disas-
semblers. Kenyon opened up with her pulse rifle as soon as
the hatch started melting away and there was no longer a
threat of own-goal riocochets in the compartment, sending a
steady stream of high-velocity fire through the opening and
into the compartment beyond.

Five seconds later, a second gout of light and hot gases ex-
ploded from the other bulkhead, burning through a commu-
nications console. A heavily armored Sturmjäger appeared,
stepping through the gush of incandescent gasses, his dark
grey combat armor outwardly similar to the Marines’ 660-
battlesuit, but with a flatter, more complex helmet and a dif-
ferent weapons loadout.

The German armor appeared to flow and distort as its
surface Nanoflage blended with smoke and bulkhead, but
the elite trooper’s battlesuit could not render its wearer
completely invisible. As he moved, a general outline of the
figure could clearly be seen, and certain things like the
visual pick-ups and external sensor gear were still plainly
visible. The Sturmjäger stepped through the molten open-
ing into a double stream of high-velocity kinetic-kill rounds.

One round in ten contained a charge of nano-D, but the
impact alone was sufficient to shred the man’s plastron and
helmet, opening the suit up in a shocking blossom of bright
red blood. A second trooper came through behind the first,
and was cut down.

After that, there was silence.

Ramsey, Garroway knew, was waiting with a coded thought-
click ready. If he triggered it, the instrumentation in the com-
partment would dissolve. The enemy would hold off on using
things like grenades, thermal charges, or nano-D because they
didn’t want to destroy Rommel’s command-center electronics
any more than the Commonwealth Marines did.

Stand off.

And then, four minutes later, the incredible, the impossible
happened. A white rag appeared in the opening in the bulk-
head. “Marines?” a voice said over a standard com channel.

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

STAR STRIKE

261

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

But the confirmation came through moments later. At
the order of Kapitän Walther Hirsch, commanding officer
of the PanEuropean monitor Rommel, the ship was formally
surrendered. Garroway learned later that the electronic as-
sault AIs, feeding in through the relay, had overcome the
ship’s electronic defenses and taken control of her computer
net. Rommel’s captain, when he found he could no longer
control his ship, had safed her weapons, then announced his
capitulation.

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

Though the Marines in the assault teams wouldn’t learn the
details until later, Rommel’s capitulation triggered a full-
scale disengagement by the other PE ships. One of the PE
frigates and a destroyer had been knocked out of action and
were now helplessly adrift, but the others had broken off the
attack and begun accelerating back in-system.

Over the course of the next hour, naval personnel arrived
from the Lejeune to try to make Rommel operational once
more, though that was clearly going to take time. The moni-
tor had been badly mauled in the fight, and many of her
weapons systems were off-line.

The situation was still extremely serious, however. Both

Thor and Morrigan had also taken heavy damage, and six
aerospace fighters out of the three squadrons engaged,
one fighter in eight, had been destroyed. Both Samar and

Lejeune had taken light damage as well. The original opera-
tional plan for Lafayette had called for at least three loads of
ship, fourteen in all, to be translated into Puller space, and
for those fourteen ships to then make a concerted assault
against the PE ships while they were still in orbit around
the gas giant. The Marine assault was to have been directed
against the cruiser Aurore, which Intelligence believed was
the enemy command ship, and which was believed to be the
vessel where the Marines captured from the Puller listening
post were being held.

A hostage-rescue assault was now out of the question,
since the advantage of surprise had been lost.

Still, the capture of Rommel had certainly changed the

262

IAN DOUGLAS
tactical balance, somewhat. Admiral Mitchell elected to
wait and see what happened next.

Some two hours after the end of the battle, Skybase trans-
lated in from distant Sol with five more ships crammed into
her flight deck, the destroyers Kali and Bellona, and three
escort gunships, Active, Amazon, and Avenger.

General Alexander entered into immediate negotiations
with the PanEuropean commander and, before much longer,
the Battle of Puller 659 officially was over.

USMC Skybase

Puller 695 System

2329 hrs GMT

General Alexander stared across the virtual table at the icon
of his opposite number in the PanEuropean fleet, an older,
diminutive, and bearded man whose personal software had
introduced as Admiral Pascal D’Urville. Intelligence records
indicated that D’Urville was better known in military circles
by the nickname “Marlon,” meaning “Little Falcon,” and the
man’s formal corona flammae actually held within it the faint
image of a bird of prey with outstretched wings. According
to the mil-history downloads, he’d won the nickname while
in command of the battlecruiser Faucon during a nasty little
naval confrontation between the PanEuropean Republic and
the Islamic Theocracy at Ubaylah twenty years before.

“We do not want to be here,” Alexander was saying. “We
have no wish to fight you. You are not our enemy. This is the
wrong war, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy.”

“But I note,” D’Urville replied with just a ghost of a
smile, “that you are here, monsieur. Fighting us.” He was
speaking Anglic, rather than having his words translated by

AI interpreters, with only rare lapses into Français.

“We fought you, yes. We will continue fighting you if
you don’t release our people.”

“What people?”

“The Marines you took from our listening post.”

“An illegal listening post, established clandestinely
within PanEuropean territory.”

STAR STRIKE

263

Alexander stared at the other’s virtual image for a long
moment. There was no way to tell what the man was really
feeling at the moment, no way to read his electronically
created persona. That faint, somewhat sardonic smile
might be reflecting what the man himself felt, or it could
be something inserted by the AIs running the simulation.

“Admiral, I’m not going to argue with you about legali-
ties. That’s for lawyers and politicians to decide. The fact
is . . . you and I are here, and the politicians are on Aurore
and on Earth hundreds of light-years distant. I suggest that
we leave the politicians out of this, just for the moment. Just
possibly, we can find a means of hammering out a peace
without their . . . help.”

He gave a deep, Gallic shrug. “You must know, sir, that
my own powers in that regard are limited. I am charged with
defending PanEuropean space. I am scarcely what you could
call a peacemaker.”

“Admiral, I am here for two reasons, and two reasons
only. I intend to free my people which you are holding as
prisoners of war, and I intend to assemble the rest of my
fleet here, in this system, and then depart through that star-
gate yonder. We offer no threat to PanEuropean sovereignty.

When we move through the gate, I doubt very much that
you’ll see us again.”

D’Urville’s eyes widened slightly. “You hope to die on
the other side?”

“No. Not if we can help it. What I hope is that we will find
other ways home, after dealing with the Xul threat. In any case,
it will take time. Quite probably years. Possibly decades.”

“A long war.”

“A large foe.”

“Monsieur . . . have you given thought to why the Re-
public has refused your fleet passage here? If you should
succeed . . . if you should find the Xul on the other side of
the gate, if you should awaken him, his planet-killer ships
might well come through here, in PanEuropean space. My
government fears your . . . your government’s impetuous
nature. You don’t know what you’re dealing with beyond
the gates. Your meddling might call down the Xul’s wrath

264

IAN DOUGLAS
upon la République. Have you given thought to the possi-
bility that it might be better, far better, simply to leave the

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

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

About the Argo. If the Xul aren’t already on the way, they
will be soon. And when they come, no matter where they
come, no human world will be safe.”

He appeared to consider this. “Your Commonwealth is
taking on a rather arrogant responsibility, you know, one in-
volving the survival of all of humanity. Some of us believe
that to be . . . short-sighted. And stupid.”

“And which is the more short-sighted, Admiral? To face
what’s coming boldly? Even go out to meet it on its own
ground? Or to hide our heads in the dirt until we’re taken
and devoured? Admiral . . . the Republic can do what it
likes, but we are not going to sit around doing nothing while
those monsters roll right over us. We’ve lived in the shadow
of fear for too long. No more.”

“Perhaps that is for the politicians to decide. We have
other matters to deal with, eh?”

“The POWs. Yes.”

“You must realize, General Alexander, that I have lim-
ited authority here. Even if we held the people you men-
tion—and we do not—I cannot simply hand over prisoners
of war without some . . . reciprocity? Yes. Something from
you in exchange.”

“Simple enough. I’m told that we hold nearly four thou-
sand men and women, crewmembers of the Rommel. Includ-
ing Captain Hirsch.”

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

Captain Hirsch back.” He shrugged again. “In any case, our
main fleet shall be here within a day or two. It might be best
if you withdrew with your small fleet now, while you still
can. Details of a prisoner exchange can be handled by our
respective governments.”

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

I’m not going to fucking play games with you. Perhaps you
recognize these?” With a thought-click, he opened a data-
filled window.

STAR STRIKE

265

Hours before, when the Marines had been penetrating the

Rommel’s electronic fastness, the uploaded AIs that had shut
down the PanEuropean monitor had at the same time ac-
cessed a treasure trove of data stored in the enemy vessel’s
computer net. The information included updated rosters on
all of the PE ships in-system, their operational orders, ar-
chived orders going back for weeks . . . and the complete
communications logs recording conversations between the

Rommel and the Aurore.

Lejeune’s command constellation had already prepared a
complete translation for Alexander, which included the text
of an exchange between Admiral D’Urville and a Captain

Hirsch, just before Rommel and the other PE ships had en-
gaged their Alcubierre Drives for the run out to the stargate.

We are on our own, Captain, D’Urville had told his subor-
dinate. They can send us nothing more. It is up to you, my
friend, to hold the line here.

We can do it if we can defeat them in detail, sir, Hirsch
had replied. If we can destroy this small squadron before
more Commonwealth warships arrive. If that happens, well

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

Do it. They are only four ships. Intelligence tells us that
the two transports carry only a handful of fighters and Ma-
rines, a token force only. Kill them now, and we will be wait-
ing for the rest when they arrive.

D’Urville was now reading those words.

Much had been written over the past few centuries re-
garding modern space tactical combat—especially the
use of Marines in ship-to-ship actions such as the one that
had taken down the Rommel. A tactic as old as the ancient
empire of Rome, combat boarding actions seemed nonsen-
sical on the face of it. Armchair strategists had repeatedly
announced that using men to storm and board enemy ships
had no more place in modern warfare than skill at swinging
a sword.

But there were times when capturing an enemy warship
was far, far more valuable in winning a battle than simply
vaporizing it. The recovery and analyses of data from enemy

266

IAN DOUGLAS
computer networks constituted one entire branch of modern
military intelligence. It was information that won battles,
not mere firepower.

“We are not at war, Admiral,” Alexander told the other
man. “Not yet. But you are not now in a position to play
games with me . . . to delay . . . or to fight back. You will
return my people to me and you will have your squadron
stand down. If you do not, my Marines will board each of
your ships in turn and shut them down.”

He didn’t add that Commonwealth AIs had followed
communications pathways in from the Rommel to other
ships in the PanEuropean fleet. It would take time for them
to compromise the entire PE data net, but, like an insidious
invasion of computer viruses, they were already piggyback-
ing into the enemy’s network. At the very least, Alexander
would know within another few hours exactly where any

Commonwealth POWs were being held. He would target
that vessel first; once the POWs were freed, he would take
down the rest.

With luck, it would be simpler still. A single command
from him would shut down the enemy fleet cold.

“You wouldn’t dare!” D’Urville declared. “As you said,
there is no war, yet! You would not . . . would not . . .”

“Admiral, I am a Commonwealth Marine . . . a direct
line descendent of the original United States Marine Corps.

I do not make threats. And I do not make a request a second
time. Surrender here, now, and retain the integrity of your
fleet . . . or surrender to my Marines when they board your
ship.”

The two men locked gazes for a long several seconds.

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

he said.

And the negotiations were over, the war ended before it
had even been declared.

19�

0412.1102

USMC Skybase

Anneau orbit, Puller 695 System

0950 hrs GMT

The Galaxy is a hellishly big place.

Even that minute backwater pocket of the Galaxy that
held all of the worlds of Humankind was immense beyond
all human reckoning. Not even faster-than-light travel or the
quantum miracle of instantaneous communications could
make that volume of emptiness and thinly scattered suns
small enough for any mere government to truly claim to own
or actually to control it.

Admiral D’Urville was the local PanEuropean military
commander, and while he continued to receive orders from

Aurore, he was the man who had to determine how best to
implement them in the distant and out-of-the-way cosmic
speck that was the Puller system—or Anneau, as the PanEu-
ropeans called it. Aurore might suggest—even order—but

D’Urville, simply by virtue of his isolation, was the one who
would decide policy here.

General Alexander stood on Skybase’s main observation
deck, looking up at the world called Ring with something
approaching religious awe. He’d assumed—like nearly ev-
eryone else within the Commonwealth who’d heard the
name—that the world had been named Anneau, or Ring,
and the red dwarf sun Ringstar, because of the location of
the Stargate in the system’s lonely outer reaches. Clearly

268

IAN DOUGLAS
though, that was not the case . . . or else the presence of
the Stargate was a coincidence that permitted an amusing
double meaning.

Like many gas giants, the world of Ring was, in fact,
ringed, surrounded by broad, knife-edge-thin bands of icy
particles. And like Uranus in Earth’s solar system, the planet
had an extreme axial tilt—85 degrees—so that it seemed to
be lying on its side in respect to the plane of its orbit about

Étoile d’Anneau.

As a result, twice in Anneau’s brief, twenty-two-week
year, its rings were face-on to the light of its star, and by
chance that was the case now. The Commonwealth fleet had
maneuvered in-system to approach Anneau and its circling
moons, and from this vantage point, half a million kilo-
meters out, the red-hued light of the tiny sun was diffused
through the glittering plane of the rings, transforming them
into a dazzling series of nested ruby arcs, transparently deli-
cate, spectacularly beautiful.

The Republican fleet had gathered close by the PanEuro-
pean base, constructed on one of the shepherd moons orbit-
ing Anneau just outside the outermost band of sparkling red
light. The Commonwealth fleet, clustered about Skybase,
was maintaining a position farther out, on the gravitational
high ground, so to speak, well clear of the deeper reaches of

Anneau’s gravity well and outside the worst of the planet’s
radiation belts.

A dozen other Commonwealth ships had been dispatched
to the Stargate, where Marines were reclaiming the captured
listening post and preparing, upon the successful completion
of Operation Lafayette, to initiate Operation Gorgon.

With friendly artificial intelligences now resident
throughout the local PanEuropean computer net, the Com-
monwealth fleet had been monitoring a steady stream of

FTL communications between the two Aurores—the PE
flagship and the distant Republican capital. Alexander had
felt considerable compassion for Admiral D’Urville as he’d
been castigated by his superiors for his surrender . . . but the
electronic eavesdropping had proven conclusively that there
would be no help forthcoming for the PanEuropeans in the

STAR STRIKE

269

Anneau system, and it appeared that the Auroran govern-
ment would indeed be forced to accept the fait accompli of
the Marine victory in the sharp little engagement at Puller

659. For one thing, and against all expectations, there had
been a small but significant mutiny within the PE fleet;
as promised, Traditionalist Catholic elements had tried to
seize control of several PE ships, including the Sagitta, the

Détroyat, and the frigate Drogou. As nearly as could be
learned from intercepted comm messages transmitted back
to Aurore, the mutinies all had been suppressed, but the mo-
mentary confusion within the PanEuropean ranks had evi-
dently contributed to their decision to withdraw—and to not
re-engage once additional Commonwealth fleet elements
began making their appearance.

It left Alexander wondering just how close-run the battle
actually had been. It was now clear that by putting their own
special forces troops into the listening post, the PanEuro-
peans had known exactly when the Skybase had first trans-
lated into the Anneau system, and been able to strike when
the Commonwealth forces had been at their weakest. But for
the uncertainties of the promised religious uprising on the

Republican ships—coupled with the valiant assault by the

55th MARS on the Rommel, Operation Lafayette might well
have been a military disaster from the first.

And it also left him wondering what weakness might be
buried within the Gorgon op plan, what overlooked aspect
of the battle plan or key lack of intel on the enemy might be
waiting to undo all of that planning in a single nightmare
orgy of flame, death, and destruction somewhere beyond the

Stargate.

Well, insofar as that went, they’d planned the best they
could. Everything that could be taken into account had
been. The op would succeed, or it would fail . . . but either
way they’d done everything possible.

And Alexander remained convinced that Gorgon was the
only means available to keep the Xul from finally devouring
the worlds of Humankind.

And they would be making the Stargate transit with a
solid victory under their belts. Yesterday, shortly after they’d

270

IAN DOUGLAS
arrived in orbit around Anneau, a PE shuttle had flown up
and out of the gas giant’s gravity well and approached the

Skybase. On board was Major George Tomanaga, Lieuten-
ants Fitzpatrick and Lee, and the other Marine personnel
captured when the PanEuropeans had discovered and taken
over the listening post. Lee had been in a medical stasis tube,
still undergoing treatment from her radiation exposure in
the Starwall system. She was on board the medical support
ship Barton now, and the doctors and med AIs all promised
a rapid recovery. Evidently, she’d already, and with some ve-
hemence, volunteered to join the MIEF’s aerospace wing.

She would be welcome. The final butcher’s bill, the ir-
recoverables, for the Puller system engagement had not
been bad, considering the scope of the victory—76 naval
personnel on board the Thor and the Morrigan, and 92

Marines—most of those last picked off during their ap-
proach to the Rommel. Fifteen Marines, though, had been
aerospace fighter pilots killed in the engagement against

Rommel and her fighters, and 1MIEF would be entering
the next phase of operations with a serious weakness in her
complement of ASF flight officers.

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

Marine boarding parties had not been able to take down the

Rommel, the monitor would have pounded the Common-
wealth ships into scrap, and the PanEuropeans would have
been sitting there waiting when Skybase had reemerged
from paraspace. The warships she carried couldn’t fight
from inside the base’s hangar bay, and Skybase would have
been helpless under Rommel’s powerful, long-range accel-
erator guns.

But Rommel had surrendered, though her ownership still
had to be determined by negotiation. The PanEuropeans,
naturally enough, wanted the monitor back. The MIEF had
returned her crew as part of the general post-battle exchange
of POWs, but, frankly, Alexander was hoping to be able to
incorporate the Rommel into the expeditionary force. Cer-
tainly, there was plenty of historical precedent in naval his-
tory regarding the incorporation of captured warships into
the victor’s fleet. According to his last report from Earth,

STAR STRIKE

271
however, the politicians were going at it hot and heavy now,
arguing the fine points of the battle, and trying to hammer
out a peace before the situation could deteriorate any
further.

Alexander didn’t really care what the outcome was,
so long as 1MIEF had free access through the Puller 659
system to the Stargate.

He could see much of that fleet now, from his vantage
point on the Skybase observation deck. For three days after
the battle, Skybase had been shuttling back and forth be-
tween the carefully measured metrics of Assembly Point

Yankee and the equally precisely measured volume of space
at the Earth-Moon L-3 point. In threes and in fours and in
fives, depending on the masses of the vessels involved, Sky-
base had taken on board the ships of 1MIEF and brought
them across the light-years to this system, eighty ships,
ranging from sleek corvettes to massive assault carriers,
attack transports, and the three centerpieces of the MIEF
naval task force, the 80,000-ton planet-class battlecruisers,

Mars, Ishtar, and Chiron.

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

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

Atlas-class fleet tugs had been solidly anchored to the
structure’s hull; their gravitic drives would provide a small
measure of maneuverability for the huge space-going base.

Unofficially, at least, Skybase had been tagged with a new
name that had tended to transform the MIEF headquarters
from an “it” to a “her,” from a military orbital base to an
active warship.

The name was Hermes, and it had no doubt originally
been proposed, Alexander thought, with tongue firmly in
cheek. Hermes had been the swift messenger god of the an-
cient Greeks, to be sure. With its—no, her—ability to trans-
late back into Solar space, the UCS Hermes would certainly
fit the role of messenger in this coming campaign, but the
huge structure was anything but swift.

Alexander was still questioning his own decision to in-
clude Skybase— Hermes—on the fleet roster. She was so
damned slow that she would be of very little help in a major
fleet action, and by providing the enemy with an easy target,

272

IAN DOUGLAS
she might even prove to be a serious liability. What had
tipped the scales in so far as making the decision was the
fact that including Hermes did have some important posi-
tives. Hermes could maintain instant communication with

Earth no matter where in the Galaxy she ended up, and she
was big enough to carry the gravitometric measuring gear
necessary for establishing new translation points elsewhere.

With that facility, Hermes could slip back to Earth and pick
up reinforcements—personnel, ships, and supplies—no
matter where among the stars the MIEF might find itself.

But there was more. Hermes had also been a trickster
god, the god of thieves, the god of travelers, and the god of
cunning, all traits that the MIEF was going to need when it
came up against the Xul. In myth, Hermes had been the god
who’d lulled Argus, Hera’s hundred-eyed guardian monster,
to sleep in order to free the captive maiden Io.

Alexander knew enough cultural anthropology, however,
to know something else about Hermes the god. He’d been a
psychopomp—a kind of divine escort who guided the souls
of the dead down to the underworld.

And that association was just a little too close to the mark
to bear thinking about. A lot of Marines and naval person-
nel were going to end up passing to whatever afterlife there
might be within the next months and years, and it had been
the UCS Hermes that had brought them here to the stargate
to make that possible.

Senior commanders, Alexander thought wryly, should
not be permitted such thoughts. The perils of too damned
much education . . .

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

“Yes?”

“A message incoming from Major Tomanaga on the

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

“Please.”

A communications window opened in his mind. After a
momentary burst of radiation-induced snow, the face of Major

Tomanaga appeared, making his report. The major had asked
that he be allowed to again take command of the LP, as soon
as his debriefing on board the Hermes had been complete.

STAR STRIKE

273

“Status report,” Tomanaga said, “Operation Gorgon,
at oh-nine-thirty hours GMT, day oh-four, month twelve.

Expected time delay thirty-one minutes, twelve seconds.

The xenotexpert AIs have completed retuning the Puller

Stargate. We have successfully recovered three unmanned
gate probes sent through earlier this morning, and verified
that we now have access to the region designated as Aquila

Space. So far, we have detected no indication of a Xul pres-
ence on the other side. Just maybe we’ve lucked out on this
one.

“At your direction, we are ready to send through manned
units, and then to commence movement of the fleet.

“Tomanaga, Major, commanding officer of Listening

Post Puller, out.

“This message will repeat automatically. . . .”

The speed-of-light time delay for normal-space messages
meant that reports like this one were monologues, trans-
mitted without expectation of a back-and-forth discussion.

Tomanaga had transmitted the message thirty minutes ago,
and it had taken that long for the laser light carrying it to
crawl down in-system.

“Acknowledge message receipt,” Alexander told Cara.

“And pass the word to the rest of the fleet, will you? They
should know.”

“Yes, General.”

One of Alexander’s chief concerns now was the issue of
morale. Platoon AIs had been unanimous in their reports
from the squad bays throughout the fleet. The MIEF Ma-
rines knew that the PanEuropean Republic was not their
primary target now, and they begrudged the fact that ninety-
two fellow Marines were dead for no good reason.

Damn it, the whole political situation with the Republic
should never have come up in the first place; Operation

Gorgon was, first and foremost, an action by all of Hu-
mankind against the Galaxy’s ancient masters. Humans
should not be killing humans. Not now. The MIEF Marines
wanted to get into action, they were eager to get into the
fight, but against the Xul threat which had held Human-
kind hostage now for eight centuries, not their misguided
fellow humans.

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IAN DOUGLAS

They would welcome the news that the way was open for
the invasion of a Xul-dominated Galaxy.

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

“Put it through.”

Another communications window opened. Since

D’Urville was on board the Aurore now, this could actually
be a communications exchange, with a time delay of less
than a second.

D’Urville’s bearded face appeared in the window. “Gen-
eral Alexander?” Again, he spoke in perfect Anglic.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

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

I thought you should know about it.”

“Yes?”

“Apparently, the Commonwealth Senate has agreed to
return the Rommel to the Republic fleet. Something about

‘creating an atmosphere of cooperation and sensibility in
these trying times,’ I believe was how they worded it.”

Alexander had, frankly, been expecting as much.

There was within the Senate a strong undercurrent of ap-
peasement—as though the good will of enemies could be
purchased through concession.

In Alexander’s experience, the reverse was always
true.

“Very well. I will await my own orders before returning
the vessel. I’m sure you understand.” He made a mental note
to check with Intelligence, to see if they could confirm that
message from Aurore.

“Of course. Actually, however, General, I had something
else in mind.”

“Eh?”

D’Urville sighed. “I was wondering, sir, if you would
accept a foreign contingent within your expeditionary
force?”

Alexander blinked, momentarily taken aback. “Let me
get this straight. You want to come along?”

“Some of us do, General.” He glanced left and right, as
though looking to see if anyone else was close by in the com-
partment he was transmitting from. “You must be aware,

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275
your intelligence service must have told you, of the schism
within our fleet.”

“Sir, I cannot comment on matters of fleet intelligence,
either to confirm or deny. You must know that.”

“Of course, of course. One must always follow the rules,
non? But we do regard your intelligence services with
considerable respect. I would be very surprised to find
out that you were unaware of the split between Tradition-
alist Catholic and Reformed Catholic elements within our
fleet.”

“What does all this have to do with a . . . with the foreign
contingent you mentioned?”

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

About who, or, rather, about what the real enemy is. And we
want to help.”

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

“I don’t have exact figures. But several thousand, at
least. Enough, perhaps, to man several ships. Including
the Rommel.” He hesitated. “A number of the Traditional-
ist Catholics have expressed an interest in . . . serving else-
where, for the duration of the emergency. And others of us,
well, our services may no longer be required by the govern-
ment at Theta Bootis IV.”

Alexander considered this for a long moment. D’Urville
seemed sincere . . . even eager.

But . . .

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

“But . . .”

“This is an issue for our respective governments to work
out. Not a couple of old warhorses like us.”

“Governments, monsieur, can rarely see past the ends of
their noses.” He sounded bitter. “And some of us . . . no
longer have the favor of their government.”

D’Urville, Alexander thought, must have been ca-
shiered—or felt it was about to happen . . . the penalty for
failure.

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

D’Urville shrugged. “

‘Trouble’ is one way to say it,

General.”

Damn. But Alexander was in no position to accept

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IAN DOUGLAS
the man’s offer. The PanEuropeans were the enemy, or,
at least, an enemy, despite grand words and declara-
tions to the contrary. Besides, folding a PE force into
the combined Naval-Marine task force would bring its
own nightmare of logistical and political problems. The

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

Nothing would screw that balance faster than adding
outsiders to the mix.

The thought did give Alexander pause, however. The
supreme hope of passing through the Puller gate to Aquila

Space was the possibility that there was someone there, an
alien someone—the ultimate outsiders—who might join
with Humankind to fight the Xul. Any civilization 1MIEF
found in Aquila Space would be infinitely more difficult to
communicate with, to work with, would be far more alien
than the PanEuropeans ever could be.

But . . . he couldn’t risk it. Not for the possible gain of a
few ships. Even the Rommel.

“There will be plenty for all of us to do in this war, Ad-
miral,” Alexander told the man. “It may fall upon you to
defend your homeworlds, if we fail.”

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

General, that most in my government will not be interested
in helping you. They fear repercussions should you fail, and
the Xul find us.”

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

Believe me, you have my sympathy. Here.” He transmitted
an eddress. “That will connect you with the personal AI of

Danis Sloan.”

“Ah! Your Defense Advisory Council, yes?”

“He was chairperson of the Council, yes,” Alexander
said. “Four years ago he was ousted by Marie Devereaux.

She holds the position now.

“Now, I don’t think Devereaux will be interested in your
joining in with the crusade against the Xul, either. In fact,

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

PanEuropean Republic. I do know she doesn’t care much for
the idea of Marines poking around in Xul space. The Treaty
of Chiron must stand, and all of that.”

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277

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

“The Appeasers.”

Alexander chuckled, the sound harsh. “I think every
government has them. But every government has good men
as well. Sloan still has considerable power, and if he can’t
help you, he’ll know who in the Commonwealth government
can.”

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

may I ask, how long before you pass through the gate?” Damn
it, the man was actually trying to be friendly. But Alexander
couldn’t take the risk.

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

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

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

Squad Bay, UCS Samar

Anneau orbit, Puller 659 System

1740 hrs GMT

“I got killed,” Garroway told the circle Marines in the squad
bay lounge, “three fucking times this afternoon. Frankly,

I’m getting a little sick of it.”

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

She was sitting next to him on the lounge, and he turned
and gave her a hard, playful shove. “Hey, practice getting
killed I do not need!”

Garroway was sitting with eight other Marines of First

Platoon, Charlie Company, of the 55th MARS. He was
beginning to feel like he was fitting in with the unit. Oh,
they still called him “newbie” and “fungie”—that last de-
rived from “FNG,” or “fucking new guy.” But he was also
accepted.

Surviving his first live combat with them had helped, of
course.

“What I want to know,” Corporal Marin Delazlo said, “is
how they know what to program into those sims for the Xul
side of things, y’know?”

278

IAN DOUGLAS

“Marines have fought the Xul before,” Corporal Gonza-
les said. “And won.”

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

when? Five hundred years ago?”

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

Chu said.

“Five hundred fifty-four years,” Garroway added, run-
ning the numbers through his implant math processor.

“Okay, 554 years. Yeah . . . you’d know that, wouldn’t you,
fungie? You had an ancestor or something in that battle.”

“Or something.”

“Well, my point is that in all that time, don’t you think
the Xul will have evolved some new tactics? You know, they
say that we’re always prepared to fight the last war, never
the next one.”

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

Ran Allison said slowly, “we know they’re damned slow
on the uptake. Static culture, like they’re locked in to how
they perceive the universe, and in how they react to it. The
xenopsych guys think they haven’t changed much in half a
million years.”

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

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

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

“Right! So what good are all the endless sims?” He
reached across from his chair and rubbed Garroway’s close-
shaven scalp. “Our baby-faced fungie, here, can practice
getting killed until Doomsday and it’s not going to help him
when the real show goes down, am I right?”

Garroway knocked the hand aside and laughed. “Fuck
you very much, Corporal.”

“Thank you, I’ll take two.”

Delazlo had a point, Garroway thought. The simulations
had all been much the same . . . variations, in fact, of the
assault on the Rommel. Time after time, in a kind of free-
flowing lucid dream fed to him by the platoon AI, he’d but-
toned into a SAP and been fired across a flame-shot black-

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279
ness toward an immense . . . thing, a lean golden needle

2 kilometers long, or a space base like a small moon cov-
ered with towers, turrets, and domes. Each time, his SAP
had tunneled through a strange hull material that seemed to
grow and shift around him, and he’d emerged inside a vast
maze of inner passageways and tunnels. The Xul had been
represented by elongated egg-shaped machines with mul-
tiple tentacles and glittering lenses, some serving as eyes,
others as weapons.

There were always a horrific lot of the things, and beat-
ing them generally meant firing fast, firing accurately, and
staying in a tight group with your fellow Marines. The first
two times when he’d been rudely jolted out of the simula-
tion as a “kill” today, it had been after he’d been sepa-
rated from the other Marines in his fireteam by a sudden
and unexpected influx of new Xul combat machines from
an unexpected direction. Sometimes, the damned things
seemed to just mold themselves right out of the surrounding
bulkheads.

And Delazlo had a point. The images fed into his mind
had been gleaned from implants and drone recorders at
the Battle of Night’s Edge in 2323, and from other battles
with the Xul before that. Suppose they had changed their
tactics?

Not that their old tactics were all that bad. Victory meant
holding off those swarming, glittering machine-monsters
long enough to plant a satchel nuke deep enough within the
bowels of the enemy ship so that the whole, huge structure
was destroyed . . . or at least severely inconvenienced.

The trick was planting the charges and then getting out
before they blew. The last time he’d been “killed” today, he’d
planted a backpack nuke, then managed to get lost coming
back out. He’d died within a tiny sun when his own charge
had detonated.

A tall figure in Marine undress blacks walked into the
squad bay—Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey. He stopped, look-
ing the group over.

“Hey, Gunny!” Sergeant Chu said. “Join us as we solve
the mysteries of the universe!”

280

IAN DOUGLAS

“In a minute, Chu-chu.” He seemed preoccupied. “Gar-
roway! A word with you?”

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

Ramsey led him to an alcove at the back of the squad
bay, semi-private from the others behind an arms rack. “I’ve
been meaning to talk to you ever since the Rommel engage-
ment,” he said.

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

“I mean, I was damned scared—”

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

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

“Then, what—”

“I have to ask you a question. An intensely personal ques-
tion. What is your relationship with PFC Kenyon?”

Garroway hesitated, his mind not clicking immediately.

“Uh . . . sorry?”

“When we were in that control compartment, and we
found out the Rommel was surrendering, you two were hug-
ging like old lovers.” He smiled. “Or trying to. Those battle-
suits make that sort of thing a bit tough.”

Garroway played the moment back in his memory. “Oh,
yeah. I guess we did. Well, uh, I guess we got a little excited.

And we are good friends. . . .”

“Son, it’s none of my business. None of the Corps’ busi-
ness. Fuck each other all you want, as long as you both show
up for duty and don’t fall asleep on watch. But . . . I lost
someone recently. Someone very important to me. She got
killed on Alighan, my last out-system deployment.”

“Damn. I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Life happens. And in the Corps, death
happens. Just a friendly word of warning, and advice.” He
raised both hands and clasped them together. “The Marine

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

“Sure, Gunny. I understand that.”

“You think you do. You won’t feel it until you’ve lived it a
few more years, like some of the rest of us have. And maybe
not until you’ve lost someone close, like a lot of us have
already. A lover. A buddy. Someone we went through boot

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281
camp with, or served with on some out-of-the-way hellhole
on the other side of the sky.

“I’m not telling you to break things off with Kenyon. I
just want you to be aware, okay? Fuck-buddies are one thing.

Romance— love—is something else. The first is fine, so
long as you do your job. The second can kill you, if it hurts
you badly enough.”

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

Gunny.”

Ramsey drew a deep breath. “Garroway, I’m only telling
you this shit because I don’t want the smooth functioning of
this platoon to be affected by the emotional misjudgments of
two members of my squad. Lust is acceptable. Love is not.”

He turned, then, and walked away, leaving Garroway in a
decidedly uncomfortable frame of mind.

Did he love Sandre? Well, they’d told each other that
often enough, during stolen moments with the platoon AI
shut out of their minds. But what did the word mean?

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

Bemused, Garroway returned to the bull session in the
squad bay.

20�

0912.1102

Ontos 1, Recon Sword

Stargate

Puller 695 System/Aquila Space

1220 hrs GMT

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

Lejeune departure.”

“Copy that, Lejeune Pryfly. Ten seconds.”

“Good luck, Marines.”

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

“Just bring yourselves back.”

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

“Launch!”

With a savage thump, the Ontos accelerated down the
launch rails and into hard vacuum, leaving the carrier Lejeune
dwindling astern. The sudden acceleration—better than fifty
gravities—would have left the humans on board battered and
broken had the inertial dampers not cushioned them, bleeding
off the excess force into paraspace. Ahead and around them, a
flight of twelve Skydragons adjusted their vectors to match the
larger Ontos. They would accompany the larger craft, flanking
and preceding it in a protective hemispherical formation.

Enough accelerative force leaked through the dampers to
make all three Marines on board the Ontos grunt, hard.

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

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

STAR STRIKE

283

“I hear it’s rougher on the guys in the ASFs,” Warhurst
said conversationally as the pressure eased somewhat.

Within his mental window-link, he could see the green blips
marking the fighters all around them. “Smaller power taps.

We can goose it harder than them.”

In fact, all thirteen spacecraft were now accelerating in
perfect unison, their drives under the control of a single AI,
named Chesty.

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

Marine recon force hidden within the Puller 659 system—

“Chesty” having orignally been the nickname for General

Lewis A. Puller, a twentieth-century Marine officer, and the
only Marine ever to win five Navy Crosses. Evidently, the

Chesty AI had made several trips through the Puller Star-
gate—most notably into the region called Starwall, near
the Galactic center. Later, Chesty downloads had piloted
unmanned probes into Aquila Space, looking for signs of a

Xul presence, or anything else of potential interest.

Chesty knew this Gate, and would be coordinating the
activities of the entire recon formation, codenamed Recon

Sword.

“Lejeune Pryfly, Recon Sword,” Eden said. “Patrol vector
established. Switching to Hermes flight ops.”

“Roger that, Recon Sword.”

Pryfly was the ancient aviator’s name for Primary Flight

Control, tasked with launching aircraft from the old seago-
ing flattops, and, in more recent centuries, with launching
small spacecraft from larger ones. From now on, the mis-
sion would be directed from the Ops Center located on the

Hermes—formerly Skybase. Warhurst imagined that every
high-ranking piece of gold braid in the fleet must either
be there now, or linked in, watching the tiny flotilla hurtle
toward the Stargate.

They would reach the Gate in twenty minutes.

“Are we sure this thing is going to work over there?” Ser-
geant Aren Galena, the number two Ontos gunner, asked. “I
mean, on the other side. . . .”

“Now’s a hell of a time to wonder about that,” Warhurst
said with a chuckle.

284

IAN DOUGLAS

“Yeah, well, I’m just not sure I trust the quantum-
whatzis,” Galena said. “How do we know we’re not going to
be flat out of juice when we pass through . . . that.”

“That,” of course, was the Stargate, visible now within
their inner link windows as a perfect circle of dark and
ruddy gold against a star-strewn night up ahead. For sev-
eral days, now, the MIEF fleet had been redeploying back
out from the inner-system gas giant to a staging/departure
zone near the Gate, and the Samar had reached the jump-off
point just yesterday. The gate was expanding swiftly as the
recon patrol approached it at 3 kilometers per second.

“Distance doesn’t make any difference, Sergeant,” Eden
said. “We’ll still get power, even if we’re on the far side of
the galaxy.”

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

Warhurst could understand the younger man’s anxiety.

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

Galena. It was hard not to picture the ZPE quantum power
transfer technology as a means of beaming energy from
the Lejeune to the Ontos and the fighters, when in fact the
system did no such thing. Energy called into being from the

Zero Point Field in the carrier’s massive power taps simul-
taneously appeared in the Ontos’ Solenergia field-entangled
receivers. There was no energy beam to be tapped or inter-
cepted by an enemy, or to be lost during violent maneuvers.

And the lieutenant was right. Theoretically, they could be
a hundred thousand light-years away—or even millions of
light-years away, in another galaxy entirely, and still be able
to tap into that power flow—exactly as though there were no
intervening distance between the two at all.

That was the point of quantum-entangled technologies:

power here was instantly and simultaneously there, just as
with quantum FTL communications, through the applica-
tion of the immortal Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.”

Theoretically, the only thing that could cut the energy flow
on board an Ontos or an aerospace fighter was the destruc-
tion of the Lejeune . . . and there were back-up entanglement
receivers keyed to other carriers and transports in the fleet,
and to Skybase itself.

STAR STRIKE

285

No problem.

But while he’d downloaded the explanation and knew
the words, Warhurst, like most Marines he knew, still had
some trouble when it came to accepting seemingly magical
technologies. After all, there was a universe of difference
between the theoretical and the practical. What if passing
through a stargate affected the quantum-entangled link in
unpredictable ways?

He snorted to himself. Maybe Marines were just so
damned used to having to go it alone and rely on their own
resources that they had trouble with the concept of accepting
anything for free or on faith . . . even high-tech magic.

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

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

“You know, Gunny, I never did buy into all that weird
shit,” Galena said.

“You’d damned well better. The Corps teaches that stuff
for a reason.”

“Yeah, well, I always had trouble understanding stuff
that I couldn’t wrap my brain around, y’know?” Warhurst
could sense his shrug.

“Most of us don’t know how an ordinary wallscreen
monitor works, either,” Warhurst said. “But that doesn’t stop
us from using our own wetware as well as the hardware,
right?”

“If you say so, Gunny.”

He didn’t sound convinced. Galena was, in Warhurst’s ex-
perience, a stereotypical “rock,” a dumb-as-a-rock Marine.

Sergeant Galena was a good man—there was no question
about the man’s credentials. The word was he’d distin-
guished himself on Alighan by charging a Muzzie position
guarded by a dug-in battery of APerM launchers and taking
them out at point-blank range with his flamer, and the guy
was in line to get a Silver Star for that little action.

But he was also opinionated, mule-stubborn, and un-
willing to stretch when it came to trying to understand
anything that wasn’t bloody self-obvious. Warhurst wished
he’d had the guy in one of his boot companies back at

Noctis Labyrinthus. Maybe a few extra after-hours rounds

286

IAN DOUGLAS
of being pitted would have opened up some willingness
to dig in the man’s stubborn shell. According to the guy’s
personnel records, he’d done acceptably in his T’ai Chi
training in boot camp . . . but had gone into it as a means of
hand-to-hand combat, and never, apparently, picked up on
the system’s more subtle, purely mental aspects.

And according to those records, he’d never really gotten
the hang of the weiji-do exercises at all. Those, however,
were not requirements for graduation since, frankly, some
recruits could handle them, and some never could.

Warhurst would have felt better if Galena had been able
to run through a basic T’ai chi/weiji-do kata in boot camp,
though. During a recon op, as in combat, you needed to
know you were tuned in with your buddies, a part of them,
all acting together as one.

The Stargate continued to expand ahead, the far-flung
hoop now stretched across a full third of the sky.

Probes sent through to Aquila Space had returned without
detecting Xul ships or fortresses. That, at least, was a bless-
ing. But Warhurst wished the brass had been more specific
about what the probes had detected. There were rumors, but
the data had not been released to the people who needed it
most—the Marines going in on point.

Why were the probe reports being hushed up? The of-
ficial word was that signals had been detected on the other
side—RF noise which might mean technology—but that the
data were still being analyzed.

Maybe so. But Warhurst was suspicious of any ops brief-
ing that began with the words, “This one should be easy.”

They had been shown visual downloads from Aquila

Space, at least, so they had an idea of what they would be
seeing. Twelve hundred light-years was not far, as galactic
distances go, and the stellar backdrop—the number of back-
ground stars—seemed about the same as in circumsolar
space. The local Stargate appeared to be in orbit around an

A-class star imbedded in a flat disk of dust and asteroidal
debris.

The big question, of course, was whether anything un-
pleasant might be lurking in that debris field. That was why

STAR STRIKE

287
the Ontos was going through first, in its role as scout-recon.

The Ontos carried a QCC radio, allowing real-time com-
munications with the Skybase, and—instead of a squad of

Marines—its payload bay carried a very special miniature
spacecraft. Warhurst, besides serving in his usual role as
starboard-side gunner, had also been assigned as loadmaster
for the mission. He performed a quick mental check of the
craft loaded into the MCA–71’s aft bay. All green.

“Ten seconds,” Eden warned them. Ahead, the lead Sky-
dragon fighter passed into the plane of curiously disturbed
space at the center of the Stargate . . . and winked out of
existence. Four seconds later, the three fighters spread out
behind the leader reached the interface and vanished as
well. The rim of the Gate cut the sky in half, now, a thread
of gold light. Warhurst tried to imagine two Jupiter masses
shrunken to marble-sized black holes, hurtling through the
ring structure at near- c velocities, the gravitational stresses
somehow focused on the space here, at the ring’s center.

Whoever— whatever—had constructed the Stargates had
been the master of technologies still incomprehensible to

Humankind.

And perhaps to the Xul as well. The Xul certainly used
the Gates, as did both humans and N’mah from time to time,
but most xenosapientologists were of the opinion that the

Xul had not originally built the things, that they had discov-
ered them in place whenever they began spreading across
the Galaxy . . . how long ago? A million years, at least. . . .

Warhurst felt the sharp, inner twist as the Ontos passed
through the gravitationally distorted interface. This was his
first time through a Stargate, but he’d been through plenty of
sims, and knew to expect that wrenching sensation as, just
for an instant, part of his body was here, dropping through
the Puller Gate, and the rest emerging from another Gate
twelve hundred light-years distant.

“Woof!” Galena said, with feeling. “Is it always like
that?”

“Damfino,” Lieutenant Eden said. “First time for all of us.”

“A slight feeling of discontinuity, like an inner jolt or
twisting, appears characteristic of human physiological re-

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IAN DOUGLAS
sponse when passing through a Gate,” Chesty said, the AI
voice even and measured.

“Yeah, well, it felt to me like a hard kick in the ass,”

Galena said.

“Heads up, people,” Eden told them. “Sensors to on.

Chesty is on-line. Listen for the signal, now. . . .”

Warhurst studied the downloaded imagery now feeding
in from the Ontos’ forward cameras and other sensors. So
far, no surprises. The local sun burned in the distance, some
fifty light-minutes away, as a bright, blue-white beacon
imbedded in a faint and far-flung haze of zodiacal light.

Despite the name for this region of space, the star, listed
as HD387136 on the star catalogues, had never gone nova;

Nova Aquila, or that star’s white dwarf remnants, were re-
portedly located perhaps ten light-years distant. The star
itself was invisible at that distance, but a smear of light was
visible in one part of the sky—the glowing shell of ejecta
blasted away when Nova Aquila had detonated, some four-
teen hundred years ago.

As for HD387136, it appeared to be a normal, unremark-
able A4-class star, though it did not appear to have a family
of planets. The zodiacal light was, in fact, a glow off a cloud
of asteroidal debris circling the star in a broad, flat plane.

The material, ranging in size from minor planets a few hun-
dred kilometers across down to sand grains and dust motes,
created a thin smear of light encircling the star.

No planets . . . and no fortress bases, such as those fa-
vored by the Xul. Some, small, fear-stubborn piece of him
had halfway been expecting to find a Xul monster-ship or
orbital fortress base waiting for them on this side, despite
earlier negative sweeps by unmanned probes.

But there was nothing. He saw the low-grade radio-
frequency noise, which might have been leakage from a
shielded, high-tech source, but which could just as easily
be something natural—a hiss of radio noise from the star as
its magnetic fields interacted with the orbiting ring of aster-
oidal debris. The lack of full-sized worlds made the system
seem an unlikely place to find intelligent life, or any life, for
that matter.

STAR STRIKE

289

The fighter screen was spreading out, now, covering as
large a volume of space as possible. Linked together through

Chesty, each vessel became one component in an array of
linked receivers, creating, in effect, an enormous and ex-
tremely sensitive radio telescope.

“So what do you hear, Chesty?” Warhurst asked the AI.

The program was powerful enough, he knew, to hold mul-
tiple separate conversations without affecting its primary
mission.

“The signal is almost certainly of intelligent origin,”

Chesty whispered in his thoughts. Small mental windows
opened to show gain and frequency, as well as a simplified
map of local space. “The origin appears to be numerous
multiple points within the local star’s asteroid field.”

“Radios, then?”

“More likely a variety of electronic equipment,” Chesty
replied. “Possibly from large-scale manufacturing centers,
or from the nodes of a widely distributed computer network.

The signals are extremely faint—as though they have been
shielded.”

“Is it Xul?” Lieutenant Eden asked.

“Unknown. However, the frequencies do not match pre-
viously recorded Xul data intercepts. I believe this may be
someone new.”

“Right, then,” Eden said. “Warhurst? Let’s drop our
package.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

A thought-click, and the aft-ventral cargo hatch cycled
open. He did a final systems check, and then, a moment later,
the EWC–9 Argus/NeP Entruder dropped into vacuum and
began slowly accelerating out ahead of the Ontos.

The spacecraft was designated the EWC–9 Argus, after
the hundred-eyed guardian monster—no relative of “Argo,”

the mythical ship for which the lost asteroid starship had
been named. One of the Marine weapons technicians who’d
designed the system on board Skybase reportedly had sug-
gested the name after hearing that Skybase was being re-
named Hermes, and there’d already been a fair amount of
good-natured ribbing back and forth about Hermes boring

290

IAN DOUGLAS
hundred-eyed Argus into a coma. “EWC” referred to the
vehicle type—Electronic Warfare Craft.

Working closely with Chesty, Warhurst began feeding a
list of potential targets into the EWC’s navigational system.

There were hundreds of targets to choose from; all were
locked in, though the emphasis was on one particular RF
source that, according to parallax measurements, was con-
siderably closer than the rest—less than 100,000 kilometers
distant.

The Aquila Space stargate orbited the local star at the
ragged, outer fringe of the system’s broad planetoid belt. The

RF sources were widely scattered through the belt, but there
were so many that a few, at least, were within easy range
of the Argus’ payload. Once the best targets were locked
in, Warhurst gave another mental command, and the craft
began accelerating under its own gravitic drive, pushing
swiftly up to over two hundred Gs. Once clear of the guard-
ian hemisphere of Skydragon fighters, the forward half of
the cylindrical craft unfolded, exposing thousands of pencil-
sized launch tubes, each now tracking a separate target. At
a precisely calculated instant, the tubes fired, releasing a
cloud of fast-moving nano e-penetrators, NePs in the jargon
of the Marine technicians who’d grown them.

The Entruder was the software that constituted the EWC-

9’s principle payload, and was a neologism drawn from elec-
tronic intruder, or e-intruder, a term that had already been
applied to a whole range of AI-driven electronic monitoring,
warfare, and subversion software. Marines had won past en-
gagements with the Xul by slipping complex, artificially
intelligent software into the equivalent of Xul operating sys-
tems, piggybacking the software into Xul ships or fortresses
by using RF leakage—exactly like the radio noise emanat-
ing now from the asteroid field ahead.

Chesty had done this sort of work at Starwall, burrow-
ing like a self-aware computer virus into the Xul system,
picking up and transmitting data on the Xul presence in that
system, and ascertaining that the Xul forces there, tens of
thousands of light-years from human space, knew about the
captured Argos. In fact, a great deal of Chesty—including

STAR STRIKE

291
everything he’d learned in his penetration of the Xul ship

at Starwall—had been copied and packed into the Entruder
software.

The Marine programmers back in Skybase had named
the Entruder package, by ancient tradition, after a hero of the

Corps. Where Chesty had been named for Chesty Puller, the

Entruder was named Evans, for Evans Fordyce Carlson, three-
time winner of the Navy Cross, and the creator and leader of
the legendary Carlson’s Raiders of WWII.

Spacecraft like the EWC-9 Argus, and AI software pay-
loads like Evans, had been vital components in warfare
for centuries. In fact, it could be argued that they were the
remote descendents of twentieth-century computer viruses
and primitive atmospheric craft like the EA-6B Prowler and
even earlier electronic eavesdropping aircraft. There were
military theorists—in fact there’d been military theorists
for many centuries—who insisted that real war had little
to do with armies or ships, which they considered superflu-
ous. It was, these armchair strategists insisted, the electronic
engagement in the opening nanoseconds of any battle that
determined winners and losers, the outcome predicated on
which side gained more elint—electronic intelligence—in
the collision, and which one better defended its own elec-
tronic trenches.

Warhurst didn’t agree. There would always, he was con-
vinced, be a need for someone—a basic infantryman or

Marine rifleman—to go in and take the high ground away
from the enemy.

Evans

Aquila Space

1254 hrs GMT

From Evans’ point of view, he was on board the Argus
spacecraft, resident within a heavily shielded and protected
central processor, but with secondary nodes on board the

Ontos and the widely scattered fighters. Redundancy was
key, here. If things went wrong with the e-penetration at-
tempt, one, at least, of the dispersed network nodes could

292

IAN DOUGLAS
receive what data had been collected and, with luck, get it
back through the Stargate to Puller 659.

Somewhere up ahead, several thousand individual nano-
probes, hurtled through space at some hundreds of kilome-
ters per second. In the first seconds of free flight, the NeP
probes, each one a few centimeters long and as slender as
a human hair, had released an extremely fine, gossamer
net that encircled its body. The net served both to receive

RF signals from the objective, and to maintain a connec-
tion with Evans through tightly focused, highly directional
microwave beams. Each probe selected a radio-frequency
source and began to home on it, using the local magnetic
field to minutely adjust its course.

Most missed their selected targets. Their velocities were
too high, the energies they could bring to bear on course
correction minute. But a lucky few found the source of radio
emanations squarely within the cone of space available to
them. And they struck.

The flash of kinetic energy released by the impact served
as power source, charging the molecule-sized components
of each NeP thread. These burrowed deep into the surface
of the target, then began tasting the material in which they
were imbedded.

The nanopenetrators had been programmed to accept a
wide variety of materials, including the self-repairing hull
composites of a Xul starship. In this case, the raw materi-
als were those of a typical H-class chondritic asteroid, con-
sisting of approximately twenty-three percent iron, ferrous
sulfide, iron oxides, and nickel, with the rest comprised of
silicates such as olivine and pyroxene, and an aluminosili-
cate of magnesium, iron, and calcium called feldspar.

The twentieth-century mathematician John von Neumann
had described a visionary system whereby a suitably pro-
grammed robot might land on an asteroid and, using avail-
able materials, construct an exact replica of itself. Those two
would build more replicas . . . and more . . . and still more

. . . until there were enough replicators that the program-
ming could shift production over to something else, such as
refined metals packaged for shipping back to Earth. These

STAR STRIKE

293
von Neumann machines, as they were called, were an early
concept in the evolution of nanotechnology, for they showed
how asteroidal nanufactories might be grown in the Solar

System’s asteroid belt or Oort Cloud.

A similar process was under way now, as the nano probe
began recruiting molecules and even individual atoms from
the surrounding matrix—iron and iron oxides, nickel, iron
sulfides, and magnesium for metal, calcium, potassium,
carbon, sulfur, and silica for other materials. Much of a
chondrite’s substance was, in fact, a kind of clay called a hy-
drated silicate, which contained a high percentage of water
and organic materials.

Swiftly—the mining, refining, and assembly processes
took place very quickly on a molecular scale—the thread
of nanomaterial injected into the asteroid’s surface began
growing in two directions— up, creating a new sheet of gos-
samer webwork on the surface of the asteroid in order to
establish a microwave link with the distant Argus space-
craft, and down, sending a vast and complex web of threads,
each finer than a human hair, down into the rock’s deeper
structure. The threads, navigating now by sensing heat in
the substrate around them, delved deeper and deeper until
finally one thread made contact with, not asteroidal rock,
but something else . . . a ceramic shell housing a bundle of
fiber-optic cables carrying pulses of laser light.

Several hundred NePs had impacted on that one, rela-
tively nearby asteroid. Within a few minutes, fast-burrowing
roots of nanoassembler threads began encountering one an-
other, exchanging data, interconnecting their networks, and
rerouting their joint explorations inward. Each probe had no
intelligence of its own beyond the bare minimum required
to carry out its mission, but was still loosely linked to Evans
by microwave.

Evans was highly intelligent, with all the technical and
background data acquired from centuries of intermittent
contact with Xul networks, with more substantial exchanges
with the alien N’mah originally encountered at the Sirius

Stargate, and with extensive studies and reverse-engineering
of artifacts left behind by the Builders half a million years

294

IAN DOUGLAS
ago, from the surfaces of Earth’s Moon and Mars to the ruins
on Chiron, Hathor, and elsewhere.

A blob of assemblers gathered around the ceramic conduit
containing bundles of fiber-optic cable, delving, probing,
sampling. Patterns were noted—fluctuations in frequency,
in amplitude, in spin. Data streamed back to Evans, who
began comparing them to the AI’s extensive technic and lin-
guistic files.

The electronic system here was not Xul. That much was
clear from the start. Indeed, attempts to probe the alien net-
work using Xul-style signals were effectively and immedi-
ately blocked. In biological terms, the electronic network
within the asteroid possessed a complex and well-adjusted
set of anti-Xul “antibodies,” which appeared to be designed
expressly to counter electronic incursions by the Xul.

Knowing this, Evans was able to focus on non-Xul elec-
tronic strategies; there still were a daunting number of
possibilities available, but at least the field was reduced
somewhat. Where humans used binary logic as a means
of encoding data, and the Xul used a trinary system, this
alien network appeared to use another form of numeric code
entirely.

Evans needed to establish just what the mathematical key
to this code might be before he could begin to make some
sense of the streams of alien data. He tried and discarded a
number of possibilities—the ratios of prime numbers to one
another . . . the intervals between oddly-even numbers, even
numbers that, when one was divided by another, produced
even numbers . . . even a numerical ordering of the hydro-
gen emission lines resident within the spectrum of the local
star.

It was definitely a brute-force method to cracking the
code, trying one method after another. Evans’ one advan-
tage was that he was fast, working on a molecular scale and
with very tiny energies.

And ten minutes into the attempt, as more and more
nanothreads wormed their way into the vast and tangled
electronic network beneath the asteroid’s surface, he found
the key.

It was Fibonacci numbers and Phi.

STAR STRIKE

295

One plus one equals two. Add the 2 to the 1 and get 3.

Add the 3 to the 2 and get 5. Each number added to the pre-
ceding number gives the next number in the series, creating
an ongoing string of numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so
on to infinity in a never-ending series.

A curious fact about this series is that if you divide any

Fibonacci number by the next number after it, you get a value
quite close to, but never quite equaling, the transcendental

0.618034 . . . , Phi, the so-called “Golden Mean” that seems
miraculously to appear everywhere in the universe—in the
curves and spirals inherent in pine cones and sea shells and
spiral galaxies, within biological ratios and the arrange-
ments of flower petals and leaves growing around a stem,
and even within the proportions of the human body.

The frequencies of the photon packets traveling through
the alien fiber-optic network could be expressed as ratios
between the first few thousand numbers in the Fibonacci
series. The first level of the code had been cracked.

After that, still working by a kind of well-educated trial-
and-error, Evans began to translate signal ratios into layer
upon layer of nested patterns. By now, nanothreads were
sampling thousands of different sources of electrical and
photonic signals, providing an avalanche of data that would
have taken merely human signals analysts centuries just to
separate and describe.

It took Evans about three hours.

And then the humans on board the Ontos had their first
good look at one of the aliens.

Although, at that point they couldn’t really tell what it
was. . . .

21�

0912.1102

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Puller 695 System

1740 hrs GMT

“What the hell is that?” General Alexander wanted to
know.

“The intelligence analysts are still going over it,” Cara
told him. “They’re especially trying to see if there are any
other ways to make this data fit together into meaningful
patterns. But these particular images appear to be intended
as cels in a visual record of some sort.

“We think these are landscapes. . . .”

Alexander was studying the first of the images sent back
from Aquila Space by Recon Sword, watching them unfold
in his mind. “Landscapes?” he said. “Looks more like the
deep ocean.”

The scene was otherworldly . . . but it was tough to tell
whether that was due to the environment or an alien percep-
tion of that environment. Reds, violets, and blues predomi-
nated. Whatever Alexander was seeing, it was murky, with
vague and uncertain shapes just visible in the background.

In fact, his first impression was that he was looking at a
series of abstract paintings. After clicking through several
dozen of them, though, he began to recognize patterns to the
background and in the color.

“So . . . this is a single cel in some kind of animation?”

STAR STRIKE

297

“Yes, sir. Project a number of these in rapid succession,
and you would have the sensation of movement. We have
recovered some fifty thousand of these so far, enough for
half an hour of video, if projected at twenty-four frames
per second. However, so far most appear to be of differ-
ent sequences. In other words, they’re not all part of the
same ‘movie,’ or, if they are, they represent widely different
scenes, different places, within a single sequence.”

Alexander could only imagine the computing power nec-
essary to sort through the incredible mountain of data re-
covered from the alien network so far. And this represented
only the barest beginning.

“What the hell is this?” He’d brought up a new scene.

Again, it was a murky blend of violets and blues, but with
an intensely bright patch of green at the center. Something
like a cloud of purple smoke appeared to rise from the light.

Nearby, illuminated by the bright patch, was a forest of
brilliant scarlet tubes, each sprouting a mass of purple-red
feathers.

“We are still analyzing those,” Cara told him.

“Yeah . . . but, these tubes. Could they be the aliens?

Or some kind of vegetation? Obviously, these things are
alive. . . .”

“Possibly,” Cara told him. “They actually resemble cer-
tain species of deep-sea worms living in Earth’s oceans.

That light could be thermo- or sonoluminescence from a
deep-sea volcanic vent.”

“I’ve simmed teleoperated excursions to deep-ocean
vents,” he said. There were companies in Earthring that
for a fee let you piggyback your consciousness into robots
probing the deep ocean trenches, or the poisonous murk of

Venus. Alexander had taken a teleoperational excursion to
the bottom of the Marianas Trench once, about five years
before, and on another occasion had visited one of the deep-
sea smoker vents near the Galapagos Islands. “I’ve seen ben-
thic tube worms . . . and they can grow pretty big. How long
are these?”

“Unknown. We have not yet established a scale for mea-
surement within these images.”

298

IAN DOUGLAS

He nodded. The tube-worm things in the alien data might
be several meters long. Or, if the alien camera that recorded
them was small and this was a tight close-up shot, they could
represent organisms the size of human hairs. How could you
tell, without knowing the scale of what you were looking
at?

However large they were, these were indescribably beau-
tiful, with glittering, deep violet highlights, and feathery
protrusions arrayed in delicate spiral patterns around the
mouth—if that’s what those openings were. And were those
stalked eyes around the ends? Or organs of some other sense
entirely? Were they worms of some sort, analogues of the
tube-worms of Earth’s oceanic deeps? Or were they some
sort of background vegetation?

How, Alexander wondered, can we even begin to com-
municate with something when we’re not even sure what it
is we’re looking at in the first place?

Historically, of course, the Marines were not intended to
be agents of first contact with new species. Their job was to
find the enemy and kill him.

As the ancient joke had it: “Join the Marines; travel to
exotic worlds; meet strange and exciting foreign peoples;
kill them.”

And yet if Operation Gorgon was to succeed, the MIEF
was going to need to adopt the roles both of first-contact
team and diplomatic corps. So far, and not counting the Xul
themselves, or the apparently extinct Builders, the only other
sapient species encountered by Humankind in eight hundred
years of exploration beyond its home world was the N’mah.

It was self-evident that humanity would not be able to defeat
the Xul alone. Earth had to find allies out there among the
stars, however strange. . . .

He thought-clicked to another image and started. This
was obviously a life form of some sort—the eyes were the
giveaway—and a nightmare one at that. Alexander found
himself looking into the face, if that was what it could be
called, of something that might have been a terrestrial oc-
topus, but with six black and gold eyes spaced around the
head, with multiplying branching tentacles, and with a

STAR STRIKE

299
transparent body—he could clearly see what appeared to
be internal organs, as if rendered in glass—that looked like
nothing Alexander had ever seen in his life. A flatworm?

An insect? He was actually having trouble seeing the thing
as a whole, because his brain was not able to compare what
he was seeing at all closely with the memories of life forms
already in his mind.

Still, those six eyes seemed to be staring back at him with
a cold, inner light and, to Alexander’s mind, at least, there
was something there . . . something aware, something intel-
ligent. What, he wondered, could humans have in common
with such nightmares?

He was reasonably certain, however, that this was an
image of one of the aliens.

But whether it would prove to be an ally against the Xul,
or something as implacably hostile as the Xul, remained to
be seen.

Ontos 1, Recon Sword

Stargate

Aquila Space

1905 hrs GMT

“Recon Sword copies,” Lieutenant Eden said out loud.

“We’ll see what we can do. Out.”

Warhurst appreciated the fact that FTL radio allowed
them to stay in touch with the MIEF, even though straight-
line communications through the Stargate were impossible,
and the fleet was now twelve hundred light-years away. Still,
there was something to be said for not having the capability
to talk to HQ instantaneously—like freedom from micro-
management. The good news here was that they were on
their own.

The bad news, of course . . . was that they were on their
own.

“So what’s the word, Lieutenant?” Galena wanted to know.

“When’s the damned fleet comin’ through, anyway?”

“Not just yet,” Eden said. “They want us to follow up on
all the data they’ve been getting.”

300

IAN DOUGLAS

“Meaning? . . .” Warhurst asked. He had a feeling he
knew what the answer was going to be.

“Meaning we get our asses in gear and approach RFS

Alpha for a closer look.”

Radio Frequency Source Alpha was what they were call-
ing that nearest asteroid, the one from which they’d been
getting most of the data so far. With one exception, RFS

Bravo, none of the other targets had been reached yet by the
fast-expanding cloud of nano e-penetrators. Some were days
away from their targets, in fact, even at 300 kps. Bravo, at
an awkward angle relative to the gate, had been hit by only
a single penetrator, and data from that source so far was
miniscule.

But Alpha was proving to be an electronic treasure trove.

Once Evans had cracked the code, torrents of data had been
coming back over almost two hundred separate microwave
channels, relayed back to Recon Sword, and then, via the

QCC net, back to Hermes and the Fleet.

One of the early images from Alpha might actually
have been of one of the aliens—something like an octopus
head on a flatworm’s body, but with odd extrusions and
extensions that made little sense to human eyes, the whole
rendered in what looked like transparent glass, internal
organs and all.

Sitting down to have a meal with these guys must be
a real treat, Warhurst thought. You’d be able to watch the
whole process of digestion. . . .

“Alert,” Chesty said, interrupting his bemused thoughts.

“We are being electronically compromised.”

“What?” Eden snapped. “How? I don’t see anything on
the interface. . . .”

“It would not show there,” Chesty replied. “The penetra-
tion is extremely subtle, and I am aware of it only as a kind
of echo of certain data. I believe the aliens may have mul-
tiple probes piggybacking in through our own microwave
data channels.”

“Shit!” Galena said. “Lieutenant? What do we do?

We’re supposed to be spying on them, not the other way
around!”

STAR STRIKE

301

“I . . . don’t know.” Eden sounded hesitant.

Warhurst scanned the various internal readouts. What-
ever was peering into the Ontos’ computer system wasn’t
tripping any of the safeguards against electronic sabotage.

Chesty was right. The probe was extremely delicate, exqui-
sitely sophisticated.

“Hey, turnabout’s fair play, right?” Warhurst said. “Why
not let them look?”

“Do you think that’s wise, Gunnery Sergeant?” Eden re-
plied. He was already using Chesty to shut down specific
blocks of computer memory, seeking to slam the door shut.

It looked to Warhurst, though, as though it was already too
late. This thing was fast.

“Why not?” he said. “We’re sterile, right? They didn’t
send us out here with any sensitive data on board, stuff like
the coordinates of Earth, or the TO&E of the MIEF.”

“No. Of course not. If there were Xul here . . .”

“Right. Nothing to tell the Xul where we’re from if we
get spotted and picked up.” He didn’t add that, if the scuttle-
butt in the fleet was any indicator, the Xul already knew
exactly where Earth was, thanks to the capture of the Argo.

“These guys on Alpha aren’t Xul. We came here to find
aliens, right? We want to talk to them. So . . .”

“So we make it easy for them to exchange data with us,”

Eden said, completing the thought. “Still, I wasn’t expecting
to be announced quite this soon.”

“They obviously have some pretty sophisticated com-
puter shit over there,” Warhurst said. “They must’ve seen
what was happening when our NePs started hitting the
surface of their asteroid, and figured out we were trying to
communicate, or at least trying to find out about them. Now
they’re doing the same to us.”

“Our orders allow us to exchange data with the aliens,”

Eden said, but slowly, as though he was still trying to figure
things out. “But just basic stuff. This . . . this probe is going
through everything we have!”

“And probably finding us as weird as we find them. Let’s
just keep moving toward Alpha, Lieutenant, but dead slow.

See if they put out the welcome mat for us. . . .”

302

IAN DOUGLAS
e(i� ) + 1 = 0

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1912 hrs GMT

In a large enough cosmos, all things are possible. Even un-
expected potential congruencies between fundamentally
different statements of Reality.

The beings’ name for themselves, their self-identifying
thought-symbol, would have been incomprehensible if spoken,
for it was not a word, but a mathematical relationship, an
equation, that to their minds spoke of the elegance, the perfec-
tion, and the essential unity of the cosmos. The e(i�) + 1 = 0
were, above all else, mathematicians . . . minds that sought
to understand and describe the cosmos through the beauty
of abstract relationships.

They watched, now, through complex electronic senses,
as the odd little spacecraft approached, the ugly machine
unfolding in their collective minds not as something visible,
but as angles, surfaces, and curves, a manifold of continu-
ous and discrete structures and tensors. The beings watched
through a virtual reality created by their computer network;
they had already ascertained that the aliens, too, possessed
computer technology, and appeared to communicate with
one another by means of similar artificially contrived vir-
tual worlds.

Their network was extensive, powerful, and worked very
quickly. Already they’d begun building up a model of the
alien intelligences. There were two, evidently, one identified
as “Chesty”—though the symbols for that identifier were
unintelligible as yet—and one, equally mysteriously, called

“Evans.” Chesty appeared to inhabit the larger, more dis-
tant spacecraft, Evans the smaller, nearer ship, the craft
that had initiated contact in the first place.

The important thing, the supremely important balance of
the equation, was that the aliens were not the Enemy. And
if they were not the Enemy, they might be . . . what? Associ-
ates? Congruent mentalities?

The e(i�) + 1 = 0 had thought themselves alone, utterly

STAR STRIKE

303
alone, in an extremely large and violent universe. The
thought of allies did not come easily to them.

But they understood the concept of complementary in-
teraction, and of the whole being greater than the sum of
the component parts.

In a big enough universe, wholly independent sequences
could sometimes combine, resulting in startling and unex-
pected convergence.

They would not engage the Trigger to destroy the new-
comers . . . not yet. . . .

Ontos 1, Recon Sword

Stargate

Aquila Space

2119 hrs GMT

“Fifty meters,” Warhurst said, reading off the dwindling
numbers on his internal projection. “Thirty . . . twenty . . .

fifteen . . . ten meters . . .”

The Ontos was slowly, almost grudgingly approaching
the asteroid’s surface, gentling down on carefully adjusted
coughs from its gravitic drive. Outside, the asteroid’s surface
appeared harshly illuminated in white light, every shadow
of each loose rock or fold in the landscape sharply etched
into a surface of smooth gray dust. Landing legs, claws ex-
tended, splayed out, reaching for the surface. Through his
mental window, linked to the craft’s external cameras, War-
hurst was aware of the Ontos’ own shadow moving up to
meet them as they descended.

“Five meters . . . three . . .”

Eden gave a final burst of power to the drive. “Okay.

We’re down. Cutting drive power . . . cutting AG.”

Warhurst hadn’t even felt the bump of landing. As Eden
cut the artificial gravity, his stomach surged, the sensation
almost that of free fall. This tiny drifting mountain did have
a gravity field of its own—but at about one ten-thousandth
of a G it wasn’t enough to keep things nailed down or give
a distinct feeling of up and down. Warhurst reached out and
plucked a pen from a nearby rack and dropped it. The silver

304

IAN DOUGLAS
tube appeared to float in front of his eyes, and only very, very
gradually did it begin to make its way toward the deck.

Warhurst turned his full attention to the view outside, en-
larging the window with a thought. The surface looked like
gray beach sand or coarse powder, the horizon startlingly
close. The local sun, blue-white and intensely brilliant, hung
just above the horizon. The asteroid’s rotation was rapid
enough that the sun’s movement was clearly visible as it
drifted toward the horizon.

“You sure this is the place, Lieutenant?” Galena asked.

“Where’s the welcoming committee?”

“This is where Chesty brought us,” Eden replied.

“The alien signal is coming from that mound in the land-
scape some 20 meters in that direction,” Chesty said, mark-
ing the indicated hillock with a green cursor in their minds.

“And it appears to be opening up.”

The three Marines watched for a long moment. Some-
thing like a door was indeed opening in the side of a hill . . .

inviting.

“Well,” Eden said. “Time to go earn our pay. Prepare for
egress.”

Ten minutes later, the Marines emerged, one by one,
from the belly of the Ontos and began drifting across the
surface toward the open door. There wasn’t gravity enough
to keep them on the surface, and a hard jump could have put
them into orbit. Instead, they used their 660 armor’s thruster
packs, using gentle bursts to guide themselves forward.

As they neared the opening, the sun slid beneath the im-
possibly close horizon. Night closed in with startling swift-
ness; stars winked on, along with the flat band of zodiacal
light stretching up from the spot where the sun had set.

Lights winked on within the entrance ahead.

“You sure this isn’t a Xul trap, Chesty?” Warhurst asked
the invisible but ever-present AI.

“If it is,” Chesty’s voice replied in his mind, “it is an un-
commonly convoluted and opaque one. I have been exchang-
ing data at an extremely high rate of speed for several hours
now, and am beginning to understand the conventions these

. . . beings use. True communication is as yet impossible, but

STAR STRIKE

305

I can with some confidence tell you that these are not Xul. I
see no evidence that they intend us harm.”

“So . . . what’s inside the door?” Galena asked, braking to
a halt relative to the gray and dusty hillside. His jets stirred
up a cloud of powdery dust that hung suspended above the
surface, glowing in the light spilling from the entrance.

“Unknown,” Chesty told them. “But we may learn more
if we enter.”

UCS Hermes

Stargate, Puller 695 System

2140 hrs GMT

“The Marines are entering the opening now,” Cara said.

“Very well,” General Alexander said. He was going over
the ready list one final time, but at Cara’s warning, he re-
opened the mental window to the feed from Recon Sword.

The transmission was coming from a camera mounted on

Lieutenant Eden’s helmet. He could see the back of Garro-
way’s M-660 armor just ahead as the Marine pulled himself
into the doorway.

He fought the temptation to tell the Marines to be care-
ful. They didn’t need micromanaging . . . and wouldn’t ap-
preciate the offer. He remained silent as the trio descended
deeper into the tumbling mountain.

Garroway stopped, and affixed a small, black box to a
rock wall—a comm relay that should keep the three in touch
despite the rock around them.

And then the signal began to fuzz and break up.

“Recon One,” another voice said over the channel. “This
is Ops. We’re losing your signal. Do you copy?”

Alexander heard a reply, but it was garbled and broken.

And then the image was gone, replaced by hissing
static.

Damn. . . .

A QCC link could send comm signals across twelve hun-
dred light-years, from the Ontos to Hermes, in an eye-blink

. . . but the Marines in their armored suits were dependent
on conventional radio to get their data streams back to the

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IAN DOUGLAS

Ontos. The relays they were using should have kept them
linked in no matter how deep into the asteroid they went.

Evidently, something else was blocking the signal, most
likely some sort of alien shielding technology.

And that might be accidental, or it might be the closing
of a trap.

“Cara,” Alexander snapped. “Open a channel to Admiral

Taggart, please.”

“Aye, aye, General.”

Taggart must have been waiting for the call. His voice
came back almost at once. “I’m here, Martin. Time to
roll?”

“We’ve just lost contact with our scout team, Liam. I
need the full fleet over there, ASAP.”

“We’ve been monitoring the op here,” Taggert replied.

“The ship captains have all been brought on-line already,
and we’re ready to move.”

“Let’s do it, then.”

“I’ve just given the order to proceed through the Gate.”

Alexander had wanted to hold back on passing through
the Gate until they were more certain of how they would be
received, until contact with the aliens was established, but it
was too late for that now.

They were committed, and Alexander was not going to
abandon those men on the other side.

e(i� ) + 1 = 0

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

2209 hrs GMT

Sensors imbedded within the access corridor kept the e(i�) +

1 = 0 apprised of where the three alien probes were as they
descended from the surface. Communication, however, was
not possible. While the e(i�) + 1 = 0 could sense—the closest
analog in terms of sensory input actually was taste —the
internal communications of the three, there was as yet no
way to derive meaning from them.

Indeed, the watchers were having some difficulty now

STAR STRIKE

307
determining whether the intruders were organic beings or if
they were robotic extensions of some sort.

The intruding automatons shared characteristics of or-
ganic beings and machines. To e(i�) + 1 = 0 senses, they ap-
peared as interpenetrating patterns of n-dimensional solids
and complex surfaces that were bound by complex tensors
and their associated scalar fields, radiating heat and oc-
casional bursts of heterodyned radio noise that may have
been attempts at communication.

After several moments, the watchers monitoring the
aliens’ approach assumed they were autonomous probes,
possibly robots, possibly engineered bioforms in protective
armor and under the control of “Chesty” and “Evans,” the
alien intelligences in the ships still outside. Blocking the
probes’ radio links with Chesty had not incapacitated them,
demonstrating that they were not teleoperated machines.

It was equally possible, however, that these three were
biological constructs analogous to the e(i�) + 1 = 0’s own
sigma forms, life forms bioengineered eons ago to allow
them to extend their reach into alien environments.

A major problem remained, now, in establishing com-
munication with the beings, whatever they were. The e(i�) +

1 = 0 could feel the flow and surge of internal virtual worlds
riding some of the emitted RF noise—a clear point of simi-
larity between the two distinct sequences. If there was to be
communication, it might best be effected through a shared
artificial reality.

But deriving common ground, even a virtual common
ground, was going to be an incredibly complex and difficult
task with the limited number of axioms that could be as-
sumed. To build a valid model, the e(i�) + 1 = 0 desperately
needed more data.

Then, as the e(i�) + 1 = 0 watchers continued to observe
the three alien probes, other monitors raised an alarm.

The Translation Ring, orbiting slowly at the outer rim of
the e(i�) + 1 = 0 Collective, had just opened . . . and more
alien tensors—ships, apparently, though the forms were dif-
ficult to integrate within e(i�) + 1 = 0 concepts, were now
coming through.

308

IAN DOUGLAS

Recon Sword

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

2210 hrs GMT

“Hold up, Marines,” Eden said. “We’ve lost signal. I’m not
reading Ops Control!”

Warhurst checked a readout. “The relays are functioning,
sir,” he said. “Must be some kind of shielding.”

“Should we turn around and go back?” Galena wanted
to know.

Eden considered this. “No. We’re here to make contact.

Let’s keep going. But . . . watch yourselves.”

The passageway was a cylindrical tunnel 3 meters wide
plunging almost directly down into the heart of the asteroid.

The gravity was so slight that the descent was easy, a matter
of guiding themselves forward by pushing along the walls,
or with short, tightly controlled bursts of gas from their jets.

Warhurst was wondering when they would find an airlock.

The entranceway had opened directly into this tunnel from
the hard vacuum outside, and they were still in vacuum as
they continued moving deeper.

And deeper. The rock was only about 12 kilometers
across. How much deeper were they going to go?

And then, without warning, the tunnel opened into a
large, a huge chamber, one with polished walls that shone in
the Marines’ suit lights. That chamber was filled with rank
upon rank upon gleaming rank of polished-silver cylinders,
each 3 meters long and 1 meter thick and with rounded end-
caps, each imbedded in a tight-packed tangle of conduits
and plumbing.

“My God,” Warhurst said. “What the hell have we
found? . . .”

System Outskirts

Aquila Space

2315 hrs GMT

The Xul sentry probe had waited, silent, unrecognized, for a

STAR STRIKE

309
long time . . . ever since the vicious series of actions result-
ing in the extermination of Species 3119.

The ancient Hunters of the Dawn knew this star system as

1901–002, the second system of Galactic Sector 1901, and
it possessed an inherent importance simply by being one of
those rare and far-scattered suns possessing a Gateway.

But System 1901–002 was important also because, once,
it had been part of Species 3119’s small but troublesome
collective. The extermination of Species 3119 had not been
as serious a problem as the genocidal war against the As-
sociative, half a million years ago, but it had still given We

Who Are cause for serious concern. Somehow, despite all of
the Xul’s technological resources, Species 3119 had evolved
an extremely advanced and deadly technological base, one
capable of exploding stars.

Even the largest hunterships of the Xul could not with-
stand the flood of energy loosed by the destruction of a
sun.

Long debate had followed the final destruction of Species

3119. How had they managed to evolve such an advanced
technology without alerting those elements of the Xul ga-
lactic collective tasked with identifying threats to Xul sur-
vival? The question had become academic, of course, with
the destruction of the last stronghold of the bitterly suicidal

3119s . . . but there had remained a genuine concern that
other hold-outs might have escaped the notice of the giant
hunterships, might have survived to rebuild their culture,
their numbers, and their star-annihilating technologies.

And so Xul scout-probes had been seeded within each
of the star systems scattered across Sector 1901. Carefully
disguised as solitary lumps of carbonaceous rock and ices
a few kilometers across, orbiting in the cold, dark, outer
reaches of each system, these probes used almost no energy
and therefore were essentially undetectable. The sentient
mechanisms within each slept through the millennia, until
passive sensors on their surfaces registered activity within
certain narrow parameters.

Such activity was evident now in the probe orbiting two
light-hours from the local star.

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IAN DOUGLAS

A fleet, a very large fleet, was coming through the 1901–

002 Gateway.

As yet, the Xul sentience didn’t have enough data to be
able to identify the operators of that fleet. Possibly, the
fleet’s arrival represented the reemergence of Species 3119,
after thousands of years of quiescence. Equally possibly, the
fleet was that of another alien technic species, quite possi-
bly of Species 2824, which had also caused unexpected dif-
ficulties for We Who Are in the recent past.

If it was Species 2824, their fleet’s arrival was of partic-
ularly serious import, for that species originated in Sector

2420, ten to fifteen hundred light-years distant. They must
be learning to use the gateway network, and that could have
unfortunate repercussions for We Who Are.

Even more ominous was their presence here , in one of
the ancient systems of Species 3119. The alien fleet’s arrival
suggested that they knew about the war with 3119, knew how
close 3119 had come to stopping We Who Are . . . and might
be looking for clues to the Weapon 3119 had employed.

Such . . . curiosity could not be permitted.

After recording the event, now two hours old, the Xul
probe powered up, made a final internal check of all sys-
tems, then shimmered in a roil of twisting space/time, and
was gone.

This time there could be no delay. An immediate and
overwhelming response was absolutely necessary.

The supremacy, no, the very survival of We Who Are was
at stake.

22�

1012.1102

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Aquila Space

0945 hrs GMT

General Alexander hadn’t gotten much sleep that night.

Not that abstract terms like night and day had much to
do with the operation of a starship on deployment. By con-
venience and by tradition, 1MIEF operated on Greenwich

Mean Time, but, in fact, all ship stations had to be fully
manned at all times. Besides, ship captains, to say nothing
of the MIEF commanders, Lieutenant General Alexander
and Vice Admiral Taggart, were by definition always on
duty, no matter what their actual state of consciousness.

He’d spent much of the night, so-called, monitoring the
incoming tide of data transmitted first by Recon Sword,
then by Marines of the 55th MARS off the Samar who had
arrived some hours later. Currently, forty-five Marines of

First Platoon, Alpha Company, were in the large subsurface
chamber Recon Sword had discovered. The Marines, guided
by intelligence and xenosophontologist personnel on board
the Hermes, had spread out through the chamber, trying to
gain an understanding of just what it was for.

The best guess so far was that each of those curious cyl-
inders contained an alien held in suspended animation—an
analogue of the old cybe-hibe capsules once used by the

Corps on long, speed-of-light deployments between the stars

312

IAN DOUGLAS
centuries before. The conduits appeared to carry life-support
fluids and power. While the alien technology was still dif-
ficult to understand, certain things—electrical pumps and
fiber-optic cables, for example—were recognizable as such
no matter how strange their outward appearance or form.

“I’m not sure,” Alexander was telling one of the MIEF
intelligence officers, “that poking holes in their equipment
is the right way to get started with them. Especially if those
cylinders represent some sort of suspended-animation can-
ister. What if we kill someone inside?”

“That, General,” Colonel Jen Willis replied, “won’t
happen. Nano microprobes are perfectly safe. And the data
we get will tell us a great deal about alien physiology.”

The technique was simple enough, Alexander knew. A
tiny amount of specially programmed nano, consisting of
nano-D and the raw materials for the probe itself, was placed
on the surface of the device or container being sampled. The
disassemblers ate a literally microscopic hole through the
material. As soon as they detected a change in the mate-
rial, the probe nano would insinuate itself through the hole,
growing itself into a variety of sub-microscopic probes.

If there was air or liquid inside the container, the probes
would identify it and radio the results to the Marines out-
side. If there were electronics inside, the probes would trace
and sample them, transmitting information on what types
of signals, at what voltages, were being encountered. The
whole probe process occurred at such a tiny scale, however,
that even living organisms could be sampled without harm-
ing them. Doctors used similar means to diagnose illness,
with patients who lacked their own internal nanosystems for
some reason.

Still, Alexander was concerned. They as yet had no idea
what they were dealing with, and the MIEF certainly could
not afford to turn potential allies into enemies by a careless
or clumsy misstep.

At the same time, they had to learn what they were deal-
ing with. Continued probes of the alien computer network
had amassed huge amounts of data, including more of the
enigmatic cels that might be landscapes or portraits, but

STAR STRIKE

313
most of it was still unintelligible. If the xenosophontology
department could come up with some clues to the nature
of the aliens, the AIs might be able to work out clues to the
language.

A few clues had been gleaned already.

“So . . . what was it you’ve named the aliens?” he asked

Willis.

“ ‘Eulers,’ ” she said, giving the name its Germanic pro-
nunciation which sounded like “Oilers.”

“And that was the name of . . . what did you say? A
mathematician?”

“Yes, sir. Leonhard Euler. Eighteenth century . . . one of
the greatest mathematicians of all time.”

“Okay. But I still don’t understand—”

“Whoever these people are,” Willis explained, “they
seem to incorporate a lot of pretty sophisticated mathemat-
ics into what they’re doing. Our AI analyses were able to
pick out basic number theory from their computer net pretty
quickly, and give us an understanding of some of what
they’re saying. We were able to determine the electrical sig-
nals they use for a lot of their communications that way . . .

zero, one, pi, e . . .”

“You told me earlier they use Fibonacci numbers as a
means of encoding their computer data.”

“Well . . . it’s not that simple, but, essentially, yes sir. In
fact, that gave us our first clue, when we figured out they
were using the Fibonacci series and its relationship to phi
as a means of encoding data. And one of the things we’ve
picked up since is what appears to be a mathematical equa-
tion that they use to refer to themselves.”

“Yes, e to the i times pi, plus one equals zero,” Alexander
said, reading the equation off of an open memory window.

Math had never been his forte. “You told me. But I don’t
understand what that means.”

Willis sighed. She’d explained all of this before. “Sir,
the equation is significant because it very succinctly re-
lates five of the most important, most basic of mathemati-
cal constants— e, the square root of minus one, pi, one, and
zero—in a single brief, elegant statement. It also employs

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IAN DOUGLAS
the mathematical notions of addition, multiplication, expo-
nentiation, and equality. Are you with me, sir?”

“I think so. . . .”

“It’s important to understand that these are not human
concepts. The relationship of the radius of a circle to its cir-
cumference, the base of the natural logarithm, these are very
special numbers that simply appear, all by themselves, in a
whole host of mathematical operations. It’s as though num-
bers like pi and e are built into the nature of the universe
itself. In fact, some mathematical philosophers have used
that equation to attempt to prove the existence of God.”

“I see. And Euler? . . .”

“Came up with the equation, yes, sir. It’s an identity de-
rived from the Euler Formula. Or, I should say, he was the
first human to derive it. Any mathematically competent spe-
cies would do the same, sooner or later, because things like e
are the same whether you’re human or Xul or An or N’mah
or whatever.”

“So how do you know the aliens are using this as their
name for themselves?”

“Guesswork, sir. But educated guesswork. The identity
appears again and again within the data streams we’ve been
receiving, and it appears to be a placeholder, a way of iden-
tifying something else. So maybe it’s what they call their
home planet . . . or maybe it’s something else entirely, but
the likeliest explanation is that they’ve adopted the term to
mean themselves.”

Alexander remembered having downloaded an e-pedia
history, once, that had described how Thomas Young and

Jean-François Champollion had first deciphered the Egyp-
tian hieroglyphics and Demotic script found on the Rosetta

Stone, a thousand years before. Champollion, in particu-
lar, had noticed that certain repeating collections of hiero-
glyphic symbols on the stone were enclosed in ovals, called
cartouches, and that these seemed to correspond to certain
names, like Ptolemy and Cleopatra, that appeared in the
stone’s parallel text in classical Greek. The names of rulers
mentioned in the text had proven to be the key to unlocking
the writing of ancient Egypt. Perhaps the AIs working on

STAR STRIKE

315
translating the alien data streams were employing a similar
strategy.

Of course, translating the Rosetta Stone would have been
child’s play compared to this, working out the linguistic and
conceptual symbolisms of the completely unknown lan-
guage of a completely unknown alien species.

“An equation is a little hard to pronounce,” he said,
bemused.

“For us,” Willis said. “But we don’t yet know how they
speak to one another. Maybe the mathematical term sounds
to them like a single, short word would to us. Or their lan-
guage might be nothing but equations and numerical rela-
tionships. And they might very well not have speech as we
know it, with audible sounds. Maybe they use organic radio.

Or fluctuating magnetic fields. Or changing colors or skin
patterns. Or, hell, as a particular smell, if they communicate
by means of odors.

“The fact is, sir, we don’t know enough about their biol-
ogy to even guess at what we’re working with here. That’s
why we need to probe one of those capsules, very gently,
very subtly. Until we do, we simply won’t have enough in-
formation to go on, and all of the data we’ve recorded so far
is just, for the most part, noise.”

Alexander thought about it a moment more. “Okay,” he
said, but reluctantly. “But only one, and I want you to use
the absolute least amount of intrusion possible. We’re the
guests, here, and uninvited guests at that. I don’t want to
blunder in and break up the furniture.”

“Of course, General,” Willis said. “That goes without
saying.”

When it came to understanding the alien, Alexander
thought, nothing went without saying. “Just be damned care-
ful,” he said. “We’re already fighting the Xul . . . and maybe
the PanEuropeans as well, if the negotiations back on Earth
break down. Let’s not make these guys mad at us, too!”

“Nothing,” Willis said, “can possibly go wrong.”

But Alexander wasn’t so sure. Beings that thought in
terms of higher mathematics—for him that seemed to define
the very term “alien.”

316

IAN DOUGLAS

And the more alien these beings were, the more opportu-
nity there would be for something to go horribly wrong.

First Platoon, Alpha Company

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1010 hrs GMT

“Wait a second,” Garroway said. “They want us to fucking
what?”

Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey turned, looking at the array
of cylinders gleaming, rank upon rank, into the surrounding
darkness. “We’re supposed to poke a hole in one of those
things? I don’t like it.”

Sandre Kenyon held up the probe pack she’d just brought
down from the surface. “They said the hole would be too
small to cause any problem, Gunny.”

“Yeah, but I don’t like the idea of poking at stuff we don’t
understand.”

“It’s fucking crazy,” Sergeant Chu said. “What if there’s,

I don’t know, radiation inside those things? Or antimatter
power plants?”

“That’s a hell of a lot of antimatter generators,” Garroway
said, still looking at the rows of silently waiting cylinders.

He could see several small, black shapes—platoon remote
sensor drones—were patrolling among the cylinders, search-
ing for anything out of the ordinary. “But that doesn’t really
make sense, power plants that small, and so many of them.

They look more like the old cybe-hibe capsules, y‘know?”

“That’s what Master Sergeant Barrett said,” Kenyon
said. “That’s why the whiz-boys want a sample of what’s
inside.”

PFC Sandre Kenyon had arrived from the outside mo-
ments ago, bringing with her the sampling kit. Radio
communication with the outside was still blocked, so the

Marines had fallen back on the ancient expedient of using
runners—or, in this case, fliers—to maintain communica-
tions with the ships of the MIEF.

“Do you know how to use that stuff, Private?” Ramsey

STAR STRIKE

317
asked her.

“Sure, Gunny. They gave me a download.”

Ramsey hesitated. It felt to Garroway like he wasn’t at all
happy with this. “Okay. Do you want to do it, or do you want
to uplink the data to one of us?”

“I can do it, Gunny.” She tapped the side of her helmet.

“They loaded some special software just now, to record what
happens on a molecular level. The Master Sergeant wants
me to hot-foot it back up there to upload the results as soon
as the probe is complete.”

Another long hesitation. “Very well, Marine. Go ahead.”

As she started to move toward the nearest of the cylinders,
he stopped her with a gauntlet on her shoulder. “Wait one,

Kenyon. The rest of you! Move back. Set up a globe perim-
eter, interlocking fields of fire. Chu, Takamura, Delgado,

Doc . . . you four at the tunnel entrance. Put the remotes out
at least 20 meters beyond the globe. We’re going to do this
by the book.”

It took only a few moments for the Marines in the
chamber to take up new positions, with Ramsey and

Kenyon at the center. When each Marine signified that
he or she was in position, Ramsey gave Kenyon the word.

“Okay. Do it.”

Garroway was floating behind one of the cylinders about

4 meters away. Though he was facing away from the two

Marines, he was able to use his helmet optics to zoom in
close, in effect looking over Sandre’s shoulder as she ap-
proached the selected cylinder. The kit she’d brought down
from the surface contained four probe units, each the size
and shape of a bottle cap. Selecting one, she placed it against
the cylinder, then touched its upper surface with the hard-
wire e-contacts in the palm of her left glove. The device was
activated by a mental trigger command, transmitted through
the suit’s electronics.

“Okay,” Sandre said, removing her hand and maneuver-
ing closer so that she could better see. “Probe activated. It
looks like it’s—”

Something like a bright, silver shaft, needle-thin but
meters long, speared from the back of Sandre’s helmet. There

318

IAN DOUGLAS
was no sound, of course, in the vacuum of the chamber, but
the effect was like that of a gunshot. The back of Sandre’s
helmet exploded outward in hurtling shards of metal, ce-
ramic, and bone mingled with a shocking scarlet mist that
swiftly froze into glittering pinpoints of ruby ice.

“Sandre!” Garroway screamed, turning sharply. Sandre’s
body tumbled backward, arms flung wide, her helmet a gory
tangle of shredded composites and blood-ice.

“Belay that!” Ramsey snapped. “Hold your positions!”

But Sandre’s body was tumbling past Garroway only a
couple of meters away. Reaching out, he grabbed one of
her combat harness straps and dragged her toward him.

Gobbets of red and gray ice continued spinning across the
chamber, disconcertingly, and Garroway struggled not to
be sick.

As he pulled her close, he saw the circular, two-centimeter
hole leaking freezing red mist that now punctured her helmet
visor dead center. Most of the back of her helmet was gone.

“Corpsman!” he yelled over the company frequency.

“Corpsman front!”

Doc Thorne was already on his way, however, jetting
across from the tunnel mouth in a long, flat trajectory.

“Where the hell’d the fire come from?” Corporal Alli-
son cried. He was pivoting nearby, the muzzle of the field-
pulse rifle mounted on his right forearm seeking a target.

Most of the Marines on the perimeter were turning now
to face the dark corners of the chamber behind Sandre, a
rough, curving surface of rock all but lost in the shadows

30 meters from the nearest side of the cylinder array. A
dozen suit lights began searching the walls of the cavern
in that direction, as remote drones closed in from every
side, piercing the shadows with beams of glaring white
light.

Garroway saw at once their mistake. They were assum-
ing a sniper had drilled Sandre from behind as she worked
at the cylinder . . . but he’d had the distinct impression that
whatever had hit her had come from the cylinder, punch-
ing a two-centimeter entrance hole through her visor, and
exploding outward from the back of her head in a classic

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319
exit wound. The way her body had tumbled heels-over-
head away from the deadly cylinder seemed to support
the idea.

“Wait!” he yelled. “That’s not—”

“I got targets!” Corporal Allison yelled, and he fired his
pulse rifle. White flame blossomed off the side of the cavern
wall, 30 meters away.

Okay, you got it wrong, he thought, releasing Sandre’s
body into Doc Thorne’s keeping. He raised his own pulse
rifle, looking for a target. He knew the difference between
an exit wound and an entrance wound, thanks to ballistics
training in boot camp, but he also knew that a shaped-charge
explosive round might reverse the picture, causing explosive
damage on impact and firing a tightly focused needle of hot
plasma out the other side. Everyone else seemed convinced
that there was a shooter out there in the darkness. Anger
surfaced through the numbness left by Sandre’s shockingly
sudden death, anger at himself for having jumped to the
wrong conclusion.

There! His suit optics caught an awkward scramble of
movement, though even under infrared it wasn’t giving much
of a signature. What the hell was that thing? . . .

His simulations of close-combat with Xul robots had
accustomed him to tracking stealthy movement as hostile
war machines emerged from the surrounding bulkheads.

This didn’t look like that, however. The thing looked like
an immense spider . . . or possibly a crab, but with multiply
branched legs spanning a good 3 meters.

But there was no time for analyses, no time for thought.

He triggered his weapon and felt the sharp, visceral thrill of
a solid hit as the spidery thing came apart in a messy splash
of green and yellow liquid.

Other spider-shapes were moving across the cavern
walls, now, the lights from the Marine armor and the drift-
ing remotes casting weirdly shifting, nightmare shadows
everywhere. Garroway used his suit optics to zoom in close
on one, trying to understand what he was seeing. He could
see some sort of harness on the thing, proof that it wasn’t an
animal. He had a moment’s glimpse of six glittering silver

320

IAN DOUGLAS
beads arranged in a circle around what might have been the
thing’s face, three above, three below. Eyes? Or weapons?

Xul combat machines possessed randomly scattered lenses
across their egg-shaped bodies, some of them eyes, some of
them beam weapons.

Shit! Maybe these things were Xul! He triggered his
pulse rifle, and the spindle-limbed creature disintegrated in
an eerily silent flash of blue-white energy.

It was distinctly odd, though. The spiders didn’t appear
to be carrying anything like weapons in those branching,
clawed arms, and they weren’t shooting back.

e(i� ) + 1 = 0

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1012 hrs GMT

Inequivalence!

Perhaps the intruders were Enemy after all. They weren’t
of the usual design—oblate spheroids of complex topology,
with beam weapons hidden inside—but they did appear
to be autonomous machines of fairly high sentience, and
they did possess potent beam weapons mounted to their
exoskeletons.

They also possessed the Enemy’s predilections both for
unthinking destruction and for a suicidal disregard for indi-
vidual remote elements, using individual machines as tools,
as expendable parts of the whole. The e(i�) + 1 = 0 regarded
their autonomous extensions, the Manipulators, both as
part of the racial Set, and as pets.

And the Enemy intruders were destroying those pets
now as soon as they emerged into the cavern. The monitors
transmitted a command, pulling the Manipulators back into
the walls of the Third Chamber of Repose.

At the same time, other monitors readied the Trigger.

The Set of e(i�) + 1 = 0 was under deliberate and deadly
attack.

* * *

STAR STRIKE

321

First Platoon, Alpha Company

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1014 hrs GMT

“Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!” Ramsey, Garroway
thought, had apparently come to the same conclusion. The
spiders weren’t shooting, weren’t even armed.

Responding to training, the Marine platoon stopped
shooting almost at once. There’d been five or six of the
things on the cavern wall. At least four had been destroyed
in the volley of fire, and the others were already vanishing
into an almost invisible opening in the rock.

“Chu!” Ramsey snapped.

“Yeah, Gunny!”

“Get back to the surface. Give ’em your memory.”

“Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”

“Doc! How is she?”

“Clinical,” the corpsman replied. “Don’t know if she’ll
be irrie . . .”

Clinically dead. Garroway felt a surge of grief at that.

The thing was, nanomedicine could patch up almost anyone
nowadays, unless they’d been vaporized—turned to smoke.

Usually, irries—irretrievables—were smokers, with so
much of the body burned away there wasn’t enough for full-
body forced cloning.

But there was another class of irrie that no Marine liked
to think about. Sandre’s head could be regrown easily
enough, but her brain had been pulped and sprayed out the
back of her head. The revived Sandre Kenyon would have
none of the memories, experiences, or training of the origi-
nal. In fact, she would be, in effect, a newborn baby, one
who would have to learn to crawl, to toddle, to speak from
the very beginning.

Sandre—the Sandre that Garroway had known and
loved—was gone.

And the pain he felt now at that realization was almost
unbearable, a sharp, burning despair that threatened to para-
lyze him.

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IAN DOUGLAS

“Garroway! Garroway! Snap out of it!”

He became aware of Ramsey shouting at him over the
platoon channel. Doc Thorne was already following Chu out
the tunnel entrance, with Sandre’s body in tow. He hadn’t
even heard Ramsey give the order to take her out.

“Uh . . . yeah . . .”

“Square yourself away, Marine!” Ramsey said, the words
hard and sharp-edged. “Eyes on your front! That goes for
the rest of you devil dogs, too! Watch your fronts!”

Long, silent seconds passed. Garroway was gasping for
breath, struggling to control his grief, his rage, his scream-
ing thoughts. Damn it, damn it, damn it. He knew what he’d
seen. He’d been right the first time.

“Hey . . . Gunny?”

“What is it, Garroway?”

“I don’t think Sand—uh, Private Kenyon was shot. I
don’t think those spider-things on the wall were attacking
us.”

“I know,” Ramsey said. He was floating next to the cyl-
inder Sandre had been probing, examining the neat, round
hole in its side. A thin rime of ice coated the tank’s side. “If

I didn’t know better, I’d say this tank was holding some-
thing, a liquid, maybe, under incredible pressure. When she
triggered the probe, the pressure broke loose, and what was
inside hit her like a mass-driver cannon.”

Garroway nodded inside his helmet. “It was a fucking
accident!”

“Take it easy, Marine. It happens.” He drifted back from
the now-empty cylinder. “Okay, Marines, listen up! By the
numbers, fall back to the tunnel entrance, then start back up,
single file.”

“What the hell?” Allison said. “We’re retreating?”

“I think we’ve done enough damage here,” Ramsey said.

He was working at the release catch for the pulse rifle on his
right arm. It flipped free, and the weapon drifted off. Catch-
ing it, he handed it to Vallida.

“What are you doing, Gunny?”

“Disarming. I’m going to stay here and see if those beas-
ties come out of the walls again.”

STAR STRIKE

323

“Unarmed? You can’t—”

“Just get the fuck out of here!” Ramsey shouted. Then,
more quietly, “The rest of you get back to the surface.

Upload what you’ve seen here. Garroway? Tell them what
you think, what you told me. I’m going to see if they try to
talk to me.”

“Right, Gunny.” Garroway felt stunned, and he felt an odd
sense of déjà vu—not a repeat of something he’d felt before
personally, but of a similar incident, one every Marine stud-
ied in downloaded sims in boot camp.

Centuries before, a group of Marines exploring the in-
terior of the Sirius Stargate had gotten into a firefight
with monstrous, aquatic beings. One of those Marines had
been his many-times-great grandfather, one Corporal John

Garroway.

Somehow, John Garroway had become separated from
the rest of his unit, but with considerable presence of mind
in a terrifying situation, he’d put up his weapon and allowed
the aliens to take him. They’d started showing him movies,
then teaching him their language.

And that had been Humankind’s first modern contact
with the N’mah, an amphibious species that had visited

Earth in antiquity. The N’mah, or the Nommo, as they’d
been known in prehistory, had first visited Earth around

6000 b.c.e. and quite possibly ensured the survival of the
scattered and Xul-brutalized humans who had gone on to
found ancient Sumeria.

Modern Marines were trained to kill, but they were also
trained to use their heads, and to attempt communication
with, to attempt to understand the unknown whenever
possible.

That was what Gunny Ramsey was doing now.

“Gunny?” Garroway said. “You want me to stay with
you?”

“Negative, Marine. Get to the surface.” He was unship-
ping his flamer from his left forearm, now, letting the weapon
drift toward the blast-charred rock wall of the cavern. He
was completely unarmed, now. The question was, would the
aliens understand that?

324

IAN DOUGLAS

“If you don’t hear from me again,” he went on, “well . . .

it’ll be up to the general to figure out what happens next. But
give me a few hours, at least.”

“Aye, aye, Gunny.” He started to go, then turned again.

“Gunny?”

“What?”

“Semper fi.” And then he was gone.

23�

1012.1102

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Aquila Space

1132 hrs GMT

General Alexander was listening in on the debriefing of
the Marines of the 55th MARS. They’d emerged from the
asteroid habitat moments before, and were now on the sur-
face, once again linked in with the MIEF computer net.

In effect, Alexander was an invisible presence within the
virtual room where Colonel Willis was carrying out the
debriefing.

“And Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey is trying to establish
contact alone?” Colonel Willis was asking one of the MARS

Marines.

“Yes, sir,” PFC Garroway replied. In the Corps, female
officers were always accorded the courtesy of sir. “He
wouldn’t let me stay with him.”

“I see,” Willis said. “Okay, Private Garroway. You may
go.”

“Uh . . . sir?”

“Yes?”

“Have you heard anything about Private Kenyon? Are
they going to be able to bring her back?”

“I . . . don’t know, Garroway. But we’ll keep you
informed.”

“Yes, sir.” He hesitated.

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IAN DOUGLAS

“Something else, Marine?”

“Yes, sir. If you need people to go back in for the gunny,

I want to volunteer.”

“Thank you, private. Dismissed.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Alexander checked his internal timekeeper as Garroway
vanished from the virtual compartment. Gunnery Sergeant

Ramsey had been alone inside the alien habitat for over an
hour, now. Damn it, how long did they need to wait before
he sent in the whole MIEF assault force to bring the man
out?

“General Alexander?”

“Yes, Colonel?” The two of them were alone now in the
virtual debriefing room.

“You’ve been listening in?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I . . . don’t think the Marine boarding party came under
attack.”

“I know they didn’t, Colonel. It was a horrible mistake. An
accident.” That much was clear from slow-motion playbacks
of the data in the Marines’ implant data storage, and through
the recordings made by First Platoon’s AI, Achilles.

“What the hell happened to that one Marine, though?”

Willis asked.

“Kenyon? Apparently the contents of those cylinders inside
the asteroid are under pressure . . . tremendous pressure. Achil-
les thinks something like 10 tons per square centimeter. Kenyon
triggered that nanoprobe that began eating a microscopic hole
into the cylinder, and the contents explosively decompressed
through the hole.” In fact, the pressure had propelled the bottle-
cap-sized probe package affixed to the surface of the cylinder
straight through Kenyon’s visor and out the back of her head
like a high-velocity kinetic-kill round.

In the stress of the moment, the Marines had assumed
they were taking fire, and responded appropriately. The
question now was whether the damage could be undone,
at least insofar as human-Euler relations were concerned.

There was little chance that the docs and meds would be able
to bring Private Kenyon back. And a number of Eulers—if

STAR STRIKE

327
that’s what the spidery crab-things were—had been killed
as well.

Operation Gorgon was not off to a good start.

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1132 hrs GMT

Ramsey faced the alien.

He knew that what he was experiencing wasn’t real, not
in the usual sense. This was clearly a piece of virtual reality
programming, an illusion unfolding within his mind, but it
was as solid and as realistic as any training sim or virtual
briefing session he’d ever encountered.

Achilles had found the door for him, picking up a thread
of radio noise and following it into this simulated reality.

Most of the platoon AI had vanished with the rest of the

MARS Marines, but a small operational portion of the

AI software remained resident within his armor and his
implants, as much as could be supported by the available
hardware. This version of Achilles was sharply truncated,
its experience and memory limited to what Ramsey himself
had on board.

He thought of the AI as Achilles , a subset of the larger

2
program, and was grateful to have someone else with
whom to talk. Not only that, but virtual reality was the

AI’s natural habitat. He would have been lost without the
intelligent software’s ability to interface with the alien
signals.

“Is this their native environment?” he asked. “A repre-
sentation of it, I mean?”

“It seems likely,” Achilles replied. “I cannot be certain

2
that details such as color are correct, but the data is coming
from the surrounding structure . . . from the asteroid-habi-
tat itself. Their computer system is extremely sophisticated,
almost invisible.”

“Invisible?”

“The most advanced technology,” Achilles informed

2
him with something that almost sounded like pride, “is that

328

IAN DOUGLAS
which interfaces so smoothly with the user that he is un-
aware of its actions. The Eulers appear to live here.”

It still seemed strange, naming an alien race after a long-
dead human mathematician. Especially since it was hard to
imagine anything more alien than this.

Ramsey was most aware of the being’s . . . face; it had
what he assumed were eyes, six of them, so “face” was as
good a term as any. The eyes, three above, three below, en-
circled a clump of multi-branchiate tentacles, something
like the branches of a tree limb.

It reminded Ramsey rather strongly of an octopus, though
the tentacles were nothing like the tentacles sported by that
denizen of Earth’s oceans. The body, however, was utterly
unlike anything Ramsey had ever seen before, a transpar-
ent to translucent gray mass, something like the body of a
huge, flattened worm or snake, but with six bulbous append-
ages that might be legs, each sprouting long and interweav-
ing tentacles that faded away into the surrounding darkness.

The body itself appeared boneless and changed shape as he
watched, from long and thin to short and squat. And were
those three triangular extensions small wings, or large fins

. . . or something else entirely? He found himself fascinated
by what he assumed were the being’s hearts, five of them
running in a line from just behind the head to deep within
that monstrous translucent body, pulsing in series, one after
the next.

He found he could only study the creature for a few mo-
ments before the sheer strangeness began to overwhelm him,
and he had to look away for a time. The surroundings weren’t
that much better, though. He seemed to be standing under-
water, very deep underwater. It was like being enmeshed
in liquid blackness. The only light came from the near dis-
tance, where something like a sphere of bubbles churned
and pulsated, seeming to emit a cool greenish light. Nearby,
a forest of scarlet feathers waved gently in the current.

In this sim, he noted, he wasn’t wearing armor, but plain
black utilities. His boots were planted in viscous mud; he
could not feel the cold, the wet, or what must have been a
crushing pressure from the surrounding water. How many

STAR STRIKE

329
kilometers of ocean, he wondered, looking up into black-
ness, were supposed to be piled up on top of him?

The alien continued to watch him. Nearby, he noted,
were two of the spidery creatures the Marines had encoun-
tered in the chamber earlier, but there was no question in
his mind that the tentacled being directly in front of him
was the controlling intelligence here. There was something
about its eyes, something radiating awareness, calm, and as-
surance. Intelligence.

The question was, how did the alien perceive him? As
intelligent? Or as a computer-simulated icon within the alien
computer net, a manifestation of software expressions that
could be . . . anything?

He thought for a moment, and the alien watched him,
its tentacles drifting and weaving with a current Ramsey
could not feel. The Marines had been briefed before being
deployed to this rock. The Eulers, the xenosophies thought,
knew mathematics, even identified themselves by means of
a math equation.

Okay. Ramsey wasn’t a math wiz, but he knew a few
things. Reaching up, he slapped his chest with his right
hand, paused, then slapped twice. Then three times. Then
five. Then seven. And eleven. Not a simple counting se-
quence, but counting in primes, whole numbers that could
only be divided evenly by themselves or by one.

Wondering how long he should continue the sequence, he
started slapping his chest to count out the number thirteen

. . . but then he felt something like a series of light taps on
his forehead . . . thirteen of them, as the Eulers picked up
the sequence.

Good, he thought. I couldn’t have kept on slapping myself
all day.

The exchange of prime numbers, perhaps, had been a test

. . . or maybe it was simply an Euler’s way of saying a polite

“hello.” He waited. . . .

And then images began to form, unbidden, in Ramsey’s
mind. They were fragmentary, at first, and incomplete, but
he sensed that the alien was uploading information to him,
a very great deal of information, and at a staggering rate.

330

IAN DOUGLAS

Language, of course. History. Strange images that Ramsey
couldn’t even grasp as they slipped past.

But he opened himself, and watched . . . and learned.

So . . . this was another marine race, an oceanic spe-
cies like the N’mah, amphibious beings with a two-stage life
cycle. N’mah juveniles were true amphibians, walking erect
on more-or-less human legs but able to return to the sea.

After perhaps forty to forty-five years, the juvenile forms
lost their legs, grew considerably bigger, and never again
emerged from the depths; they also seemed to lose much of
the questing inventiveness of their young, preferring instead
a quiet life of contemplation in warm, shallow, sunlit seas.

In N’mah civilization, it had been the amphibious juveniles
that had discovered dry land, tamed fire and stone, metal
and electricity, and eventually built the ships that took them
to the stars. Sometime around 6000 b.c.e., the juveniles had
visited Earth, helping re-establish civilization in the Fertile

Crescent after the Xul had wiped out the local An colonies.

The N’mah had been remembered in myth as the Nommo.

The Eulers, he saw, were like the N’mah in the scope of
the problems they were forced to overcome as an aquatic
civilization. No fire, an understanding of chemistry limited
by water and pressure, and not even the first glimmer of un-
derstanding concerning astronomy or cosmology.

And yet, given enough time, given billions of years, per-
haps . . .

Ramsey wasn’t sure how long it had taken. The thought-
images flowing through his mind conveyed the sense of
passing time, a lot of it, but he couldn’t begin to put a mean-
ingful figure to it. The Eulers learned, eventually, to use the
intense heat found in the throats of volcanic vents to smelt
metal, and they appeared to develop an advanced under-
standing of chemistry as well, especially the chemistries of
sulfur, methane, and certain salts. It was in biology that they
excelled, however, breeding new species, then altering the
genome of the flora and fauna of the extreme depths to suit
their needs.

The spider-things, he saw in a succession of images,
had been created by the Eulers, who gave them extremely

STAR STRIKE

331
dextrous, three-fingered manipulators at the end of each of
twelve jointed legs. They could swim as well as walk, using
directed bursts of water to jet forward like armored squids,
and they appeared unaffected by changes in pressure. Achil-
les whispered to him an aside that certain terrestrial sea

2
animals—sperm whales and seals, for example—could dive
to extreme depths without being imploded by the pressures
of the abyss. Somehow the spiders did the same trick in re-
verse, and it was through them that the Eulers, many ages
ago, had discovered the ceiling of their watery world, and
broken through to the land and skies beyond.

Through the spiders, which Achilles dubbed “Manipula-

2
tors” because of their obvious dexterity, the Eulers eventu-
ally reached the surface of their world. Ramsey saw pictures
of that world unfold in his mind and was immediately re-
minded of Europa in the Sol System, the iced-over ocean
world that was one of Jupiter’s major satellites. The Euler
home world, evidently, was similar, an icy moon kept liquid
by tidal stresses as it circled its vast, gas-giant primary.

Unlike Europa, this world possessed solid land, however,
scattered across an ice-free equatorial zone.

For untold millions of years, Euler civilization grew
both on the sea floor and in pressurized cities built on land,
where an inborn propensity for mathematics led them, in
time, to add astronomy to their growing repertoire of skills.

Long before, in the cold dark of the benthic deep, they’d de-
veloped abstract mathematics to an astonishing degree—or
so Achilles suggested—but the full flowering of math and

2
physics began when they first saw the stars.

Eventually, they and their Manipulator creations learned
to leave their world entirely, traveling in immense ships
filled with highly pressurized seawater.

By that time, the Euler-Manipulator partnership was a
true symbiosis. Manipulators, in their rigid, jointed exo-
skeletons, were unaffected by extremes of heat or cold,
by radiation, even by hard vacuum. By wearing a kind
of body harness that provided methane-rich, sulfur-laden
water under pressure to the respiratory spiracles along its
sides, a Manipulator could work in open space for long

332

IAN DOUGLAS
periods. Ramsey and the other Marines had seen several
of the Manipulators tasked with maintaining the pressur-
ized cylinders in the chamber they’d entered. He’d seen the
respiration harness, though he hadn’t realized then what
he’d been seeing.

Driven more by curiosity than by a need for living room,

Euler explorers had eventually left their original star system
and ventured to the planetary systems encircling other
nearby stars. If Ramsey was understanding the charts he
was being shown, they’d visited worlds across a swath of the
galactic starscape far larger than that now occupied by hu-
mankind. Among those stars they’d found ice-roofed ocean
worlds similar to home, and colonized many of them. At this
point in their history, they’d not possessed faster-than-light
travel. They hadn’t needed it. The Eulers were immensely
long-lived and they took their civilization with them in im-
mense city-ships.

But in time they’d encountered the Xul.

Ramsey easily recognized the characteristic lines of the

Xul hunterships . . . the slender gold needles 2 kilometers
long, the even larger disks and flattened wedges, each the
hardware “body” of an electronic community dedicated to

Xul survival, and the utter extermination of any competing
species.

The war, Ramsey sensed, had been a long one. The Eulers
were not warlike; indeed, from what they were able to com-
municate through Achilles , they didn’t even have a concept

2
for war. They learned, however, as the Xul began a bitter
and implacable campaign to eradicate each of the worlds
occupied by the Eulers.

With the Xul as teachers, however, the Eulers had
learned, and learned well. The Xul had bombarded their icy
worlds with high-velocity asteroids until whole oceans had
boiled away; the Eulers had learned how to reach down into
the Quantum Sea and adjust such basics of Reality as iner-
tia, mass, and velocity, and bombarded the Xul hunterships
with asteroids in return. The Xul had possessed overwhelm-
ing tactical superiority in their FTL ships. The Eulers had
worked out how to wrap space around their ship-habitats

STAR STRIKE

333
and travel faster than light as well, using a system that, if

Ramsey understood the animated schematics he was being
shown, was identical to the Alcubierre Drive developed a
few centuries ago by Humankind.

But the Xul kept coming, pounding world after world
into crater-gouged ruin.

And then, if the images were to be believed, if he was
understanding this right . . . the Eulers stopped the Xul.

And they did it by blowing up stars.

That, it seemed, was the secret of Aquila Space. Ramsey
could see how they did it, too, as the Euler showed him an-
other set of animated schematics. They would wait until an
entire Xul battlefleet had entered a star system and begun
hammering the local Euler colony. An Euler ship under their
equivalent of Alcubierre Drive would elude the Xul fleet and
dive into the local sun.

Every star, Ramsey knew, was poised in a delicate bal-
ance between its own radiation pressure, which threatened
to tear the star apart, and its own gravity, which sought to
pull it together. The Alcubierre Drive sharply warped space,
compressing the space ahead of the ship, and attenuat-
ing it behind. Put enough of a warp into it, and that fast-
moving bubble of distorted space actually compressed the
tightly packed matter at the star’s core. As the ship tunneled
through the core of the star, more or less shielded from the
awesome heat and pressure by the warp field around it, it
triggered a wave of compression that shattered the balance
between radiation and gravity. The core partially collapsed,
then rebounded, hurtling outward.

Nova . . .

Ramsey watched the wave-front of white-hot plasma
sweeping out through a star system, watched it catch the

Xul fleet as it hung above the frozen moon of a gas giant,
watched even those massive constructs soften, crumble,
soften and melt, and finally vaporize in the intense blast of
star-stuff. The blast savaged the moon as well, of course,
turning it into a short-lived and massive comet as the ice
vaporized in a long, brilliant tail, even as it stripped away
much of the atmosphere from the gas giant primary.

334

IAN DOUGLAS

As the wave-front continued to expand, everything in the
system died.

Ramsey found himself breathing harder, his heart pound-
ing. My God, they destroyed themselves to kill the Xul. But,
then, perhaps they rationalized the exchange as a good trade,
with the Euler colony doomed in either case. Would human-
kind have shown the same single-mindedness of purpose,
he wondered?

“What can we show them in exchange?” he asked Achil-
les . “This guy just uploaded their whole damned history to

2
me.”

“I have been sending them animated schematics show-
ing our ships in combat against the Xul,” Achilles replied.

2

“I fear more detailed conversations must wait until we can
work out a common language.”

Right. The thing floating in front of him wouldn’t speak,
wouldn’t be able to form words the way humans did, so
communication wouldn’t be a matter of just learning one an-
other’s language. Deep sea life forms . . . maybe they com-
municated via sonar, like whales and dolphins. Or through
changes in color and patterning, like octopi and squids. Or
by electrical fields. Or by sensing changes in pressure in the
surrounding water. Or bioluminescence. Or through some
other sense entirely.

“Can you tell him . . . tell him that we’re sorry we dam-
aged that tank?”

“Sorry is a rather advanced concept,” Achilles replied. “I

2
do not have the required symbology. However . . . he . . . she,
rather . . . has just showed me what those tanks are for.”

“They’re like cybe-hibe canisters,” Ramsey said. “The

Eulers are hibernating in those things.”

“Not hibernating,” Achilles told him. “Not quite. Again,

2

I lack adequate symbols for full understanding, but I believe
the beings inside those tanks are alive and aware. They ap-
parently share an extremely rich virtual world, within which
they interact with one another as a viable culture.”

Ramsey digested this. It made sense, in a way, rather
brilliant sense, in fact. In creating asteroid habitats like this
one, or starships crewed by Eulers, they could hollow out

STAR STRIKE

335
a mountain and fill it with water under high pressure—in
effect taking a part of their seafloor world with them. Or,
much simpler, much safer and more efficient, they could en-
capsulate each Euler in just enough pressurized seawater to
keep him alive, pipe in nutrients and pipe out wastes . . . and
free his mind to interact with his fellows in a virtual reality
that could be as vast, as rich, and as varied as their computer
network could allow.

And judging from the way this Euler was using a virtual
reality sim to communicate with him, the alien computer net
must allow a very great deal indeed.

“How advanced do you think the Eulers are, Achilles?”

he asked. “How far ahead of us are they?”

“That question is meaningless, Gunnery Sergeant. The
two cultures, Euler and human, are so different in so many
ways, there are few benchmarks against which both may be
measured. The evolution of their science and technology
took considerably longer, and more effort, than did those of
humankind. However, I estimate that the Eulers as an intel-
ligent species have been in existence for something in excess
of one hundred million years . . . and quite possibly much
longer still.”

“Jesus . . .” When the Eulers had first mastered the
ocean depths of their homeworld, dinosaurs still stalked the

Earth.

It was interesting, though, that the Xul had taken that
long to notice the Eulers. The first appearance of the Xul
with which humans were familiar had taken place half a
million years ago, with the extinction of the commonality
of advanced civilizations variously known as the Ancients
or the Builders.

The fact that the Eulers hadn’t encountered the Xul until
a mere two thousand years ago—when the novae in this
region of space had been deliberately triggered—strongly
suggested a weakness in the way the Xul thought and
acted.

That weakness had been suggested before, and it had to
do with a kind of short-sightedness on the Xul’s part when it
came to understanding life. The Xul seemed to understand

336

IAN DOUGLAS
and expect civilizations on worlds like Earth, worlds at a
comfortable distance from the local sun, with liquid water
and Earthlike climates.

But life, as was well known by now, was not constrained
by concepts like Earthlike. Life had taken hold and thrived
in myriad places—from deep-sea volcanic vents on Europa
to the subsurface Martian permafrost to traces found in

Oort-Cloud cometary nuclei. For eight centuries, human sci-
ence had been redefining what the very word life meant; the
search for life in a new solar system was no longer confined
to the star’s so-called habitable zone.

And what was true for life in general, it seemed, was also
true for whole civilizations.

When the Xul had destroyed the interstellar empire of
the An several thousand years ago, they’d overlooked one

An colony—the satellite of a gas giant at Lalande 21185 far
from the meager warmth of the system’s red-dwarf primary.

By chance, a few An and their human slaves had survived
there, unnoticed by the marauding hunterships.

And the amphibious N’mah—a marine species, like the

Eulers, with only a limited presence on solid land—had
been overlooked as well. Eventually, the N’mah worlds had
been discovered and destroyed, but the N’mah, too, had sur-
vived . . . by living inside the hollow structures of a Stargate,
and, more recently, in asteroid habitats hollowed out for the
purpose.

And now it seemed that the Eulers had long been over-
looked by the Xul, apparently because their favored worlds
were gas-giant satellites well outside the usual habitable
zone of a given planetary system. Once the Xul had finally
noticed the Euler worlds, the Eulers, evidently, had, like the

N’mah, moved to hollowed-out asteroids.

Ramsey remembered how many RF targets had been de-
tected in this star system alone, in the vast band of asteroids
circling the local star. There might be some hundreds of in-
habited planetoids lost among the hundreds of thousands of
chunks of debris making up the asteroid belt.

He had so many questions. Surely the Xul could pick
up radio frequency noise as readily as could human ships.

STAR STRIKE

337

Weren’t the Eulers afraid that their radio leakage would give
them away?

Or were they unaware of it? They must know radio, since
their virtual reality world seemed to be transmitted at radio
wavelengths. Or, perhaps the Xul were oblivious to leakage
at radio frequencies?

“Unknown,” Achilles said, reading his thoughts and

2
stating the obvious. “There is reason to suspect that the Xul
are so self-centered they don’t notice relatively subtle ef-
fects like secondary radio transmission. But, ultimately, we
simply don’t know.”

Ramsey stared at the nightmarish being floating in front
of him. If the scale was accurate, the thing was almost 3
meters long, with easily twice the mass of a human, at least.

He felt no fear now, however. The being—had Achilles2
called it she?—appeared to be waiting.

Waiting for what?

Waiting, perhaps, for an apology.

Or, at the least, for some sign that the humans wanted
an alliance. That might be self-evident, especially in the
images of humans battling Xul that Achilles was sending

2
them— the enemy of my enemy is my friend. . . .

On the other hand, there was no way to guess what the

Eulers were thinking, how they thought, how they connected
with or even perceived aliens in the first place. These things
were different. . . .

“Achilles? Can you create an animation of humans and

Eulers working together? Maybe show them fighting the

Xul?”

“I will try.” A moment passed. “Done.”

There was no response from the Euler. It hovered there in
the darkness of a virtual sea, its tentacles waving gently in
an unfelt current.

“Achilles . . . bring an image of the damaged cylinder
into this simulation, would you?”

“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant.”

A lone tank appeared in the shared simulation, upright, 3
meters tall, a meter thick. The 2-centimeter hole was clearly
visible in the side.

338

IAN DOUGLAS

At least the Euler crammed inside that thing would not
have suffered. Literal explosive decompression as the con-
tents blasted out into hard vacuum would have killed it
instantly.

As instantly as it had killed Private Kenyon.

Ramsey moved forward in the simulation until he was
standing directly beside the cylinder. Reaching out, he
tapped it, just above the hole. Then he tapped himself on his
own chest. Finally, he opened his arms wide, hands open,
legs spread apart. Spread-eagle, he stood there for a long
moment, hoping the symbols were clear.

He’d already pointedly divested himself of his weap-
ons, and, in the sim he wasn’t even wearing armor. There
wasn’t a lot else he could do to prove peaceful intent to these
beings, except try for an empty-hand-means-no-weapon ges-
ture. Hell, even that might not be understood by a being that
had no hands.

How did one mime an empty tentacle?

If these beasties knew math, though, they must un-
derstand a one-to-one equivalence. He’d been the one in
command when Kenyon had drilled into the tank. He was
offering himself, one for one. . . .

The damaged tank vanished. Slowly, when nothing fur-
ther happened, he lowered his arms.

“Did you take the tank out of the sim, Achilles?”

“No, Gunnery Sergeant. She did.”

Communication.

He studied the impassive being for a moment. “Achilles?

What makes you think that it’s a she?”

“They have been transmitting a great deal of data, Gun-
nery Sergeant, more than what you have been experienc-
ing for the past few moments. Some of that information
includes data on their biology . . . which appears to be based
on polyaromatic sulfonyl halides, by the way.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Do you see this?” Achilles asked, putting a green cursor

2
over a part of the alien’s body, just below the octopoid head
and between the front two tentacled protuberances. There,
buried between the outer layers of transparent skin and the

STAR STRIKE

339
uppermost of the five pulsing hearts, was a dark, knobby
shadow, like a bunch of grapes the size of Ramsey’s fist.

“Yeah. . . .”

“In the Eulers, the male is a parasite living inside the larger
female. Some species on Earth show similar adaptations.”

Ramsey had heard of deep-sea angler fish that did that,
and possibly for the same reason . . . to ensure that mates
could find one another in the dark and cold of the benthic
abyss.

“Gunnery Sergeant?”�

“Yes?”�

“I believe they are responding in the affirmative.” Achil-�
les opened a new window in Ramsey’s head. “They are

2
retransmitting the animations I just sent them, showing
humans and Eulers working together to fight the Xul.”

The image was a crude animation, showing cartoon rep-
resentations of a human and of an Euler on one side, a rec-
ognizable sketch of a Xul huntership on the other. Human
and Euler moved up and down quickly and in unison for a
moment, and the Xul ship broke into pieces and dissolved.

Thank God! . . .�

“Gunnery Sergeant?”�

“What is it, Achilles?”�

“We now have a clear radio channel back to the fleet.”�

Excitement thrilled, pounding at Ramsey’s awareness. �

“Excellent!”

“Perhaps not. According to FleetCom, the Stargate has
just changed pathways . . . and a Xul fleet is coming through.

A very large Xul fleet. . . .”

As Ramsey accessed the newly opened command
channel, he heard the alert sounding as the Fleet went to
battlestations.

24�

1012.1102

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Aquila Space

1157 hrs GMT

Emerging from the tube-car transport from his office,

General Alexander entered the Ops Center, a large and
circular room given over primarily to communications
equipment and to the couches used by Ops personnel
when they linked in full-sim with the Fleet Command

Net. At a brisk walk, he threaded his way through the
couches, most of them occupied by men and women of
his command constellation, and lay down on the central
couch reserved for CO-MIEF2. CO-MIEF1, Admiral

Taggart, was already strapped to the couch next to his,
his face white and drawn as he wrestled with the fast-de-
teriorating tactical situation.

As he lay down, contacts in the material connected with
his implant interfaces at wrists and palms and the back of
his head, snapping him instantly into a virtual world per-
fectly re-creating the view outside.

The eighty ships of 1MIEF hung suspended between the
icon representing RFS Alpha and the wedding-band hoop of
the system’s stargate.

The Xul ships were still emerging from the Gate. He
counted five so far, four of the 1- to 2-kilometer-long nee-
dles commonly referred to as hunterships, Types I and II,

STAR STRIKE

341
and one of the larger, far more massive flattened spheres
that Marine Intelligence called “Nightmares.” Another Type

I huntership was just emerging from the Gate, the gold-hued
spire of its prow protruding from the grav-twisted emptiness
at the Gate’s center.

“Welcome to the show, General,” Admiral Taggart’s
voice said in his mind. “Ain’t we got fun?”

“Is this real time or time-lagged?” Alexander asked. The
question was vital. The Stargate was twenty-five light-minutes
away. What he was seeing now might be real-time, or it
could be the tactical situation of almost half an hour ago,
with the light they were seeing having taken that long to
crawl across space to the MIEF.

“Real time,” Taggart replied. He indicated four green
icons encircling the Stargate, but well distant from the
merging enemy fleet. “We have four patrol-picket ships
posted around the Stargate— Sentry, Defender, Patriot, and

Watcher. They’re relaying their sensor data via QCC.”

“Good.” Patrol pickets were the smallest FTL-capable
ships in the MIEF’s inventory, snug little eight-man vessels
massing 500 tons, not a whole lot bigger than an Ontos, but
they could be customized with swap-out sensor pods and
drone controls.

As he watched, a blue-white thread of light snapped out
from the largest Xul ship, the saucer, and touched one of the
pickets. There was a flare of light. . . .

“Damn,” Taggart said. “That was Watcher. The others
are taking evasive action.”

The pickets, darting gnats to the ponderous Xul behe-
moths, jinked and shifted, making targeting them difficult.

The Xul, however, after destroying Watcher, appeared to
take no more notice of them. Arrogant bastards, Alexan-
der thought. They honestly don’t care whether we see what
they’re doing or not.

That, he thought, was the worst part about dealing with
the Xul. The slow-paced tempo of their response to humans
suggested that humans simply weren’t that significant to
them, insects to be swatted at leisure.

And, watching those huge ships sliding into the hard,

342

IAN DOUGLAS
blue-white glare of the HD387136 system’s sun, it was easy
to believe that such was exactly the case.

Admiral Taggart, he saw, was already deploying the

MIEF to strike the Xul ships before they could get orga-
nized. The fleet carriers Chosin and Lejeune were lining
up for FTL runs into the near-Gate battlespace, where they
could release their fighters, while the heavy guns, Ishtar,

Mars, and Chiron, spread out in order to catch the enemy
vessels in a three-way crossfire. Cruisers, destroyers, and
frigates were scattering across the sky, arcing in on the Xul
flotilla from every possible direction.

“You’re trying for englobement?” he asked the admiral.

“That’s the idea,” Taggart told him. “If we can close in on
them, englobe them up against the stargate before they can
spread out, we might have a chance.”

The Xul ships were still very close together. Alexander
saw what Taggart was suggesting. Hit them now, before they
dispersed, and the massive bulks of the Xul ships themselves
might block some of their own fire.

“How close are you trying to get?”

“Fifty thousand kilometers,” Taggart told him. “Any
closer, and we won’t be able to stand up to the big Xul
guns.”

The sixth huntership was all the way through the Gate,
now. Were any more coming through? How long would they
stay in place? The MIEF was accelerating now, preparatory
to engaging their Alcubierre Drives for the short sprint in to
the Gate.

“Cara,” Alexander asked, curious. “Do we have a fix on
where they’re coming from?”

“Affirmative, General. The Gate has been retuned to the
orbital resonances associated with Starwall.”

Alexander had suspected as much. Starwall was the loca-
tion of a major Xul node, and that was where Lieutenant Lee
had picked up the intelligence that the Xul had learned of

Earth after taking the Argo.

Starwall, then, would be the MIEF’s first objective . . .

if the enemy fleet now flowing into Aquila Space could be
stopped.

STAR STRIKE

343

As one, linked together by the FleetCom net, fifty-eight
of the MIEF vessels blurred, streaking forward, leaving
behind the carriers, the troop ships, and the noncombatant
logistical vessels. FTL maneuvers across a scant twenty-five
light-minutes, were touchy, requiring absolute precision and
timing. In fact, AIs were at the helm of each of those ves-
sels; no human touch at a control or thought-click could pos-
sibly be precise enough.

The Xul ships were beginning to accelerate, slowly, at
first, but they were drawing away from the Gate. Not good.

Ships in Alcubierre Drive could not see out or communicate;
they might arrive to find the Xul fleet already behind them.

Minutes passed . . . and then the MIEF ships dropped
out of FTL.

No battle plan, the ancient saying went, ever survives con-
tact with the enemy. The englobement had almost succeeded

. . . but the Xul ships had moved far enough in the interven-
ing minutes that two of the hunterships were already outside
the globe, and the others were much closer to the nearest

MIEF ships than had been planned. The light cruiser Shiva
had dropped into normal space less than 8,000 kilometers
from one of the Xul needles, and came under immediate and
devastating fire.

Among other high-tech magic, Xul weapons included
linear accelerators that hurled microscopic black holes at
the target. Shiva staggered under a barrage from the enemy
warship, her structure crumpling as naked singularities the
size of a human blood cell ripped through her hull and inter-
nal spaces. Such tiny black holes couldn’t eat much matter
in a single pass; the excess was bled off as fiercely radiat-
ing energy, much of it in the x-ray frequencies. In seconds,

Shiva had been transformed into a drifting knot of white-hot
wreckage.

But one of the Xul ships, a kilometer-long Type I, was
crumpling as well. Alexander saw the huge vessel slew to
one side and begin drifting helplessly, the long, slender
blade of its structure beginning to collapse toward the aft
end. Alexander pointed this out to Cara.

344

IAN DOUGLAS

“I have just analyzed the paths of each of the MIEF ves-
sels,” Cara told him. “One, the path taken by the Valkyrie-
class light cruiser Judur, intersected that Type I huntership
while Judur was still under Alcubierre Drive.”

“Interesting.” He’d not thought about the possibility of
what might happen if the warp bubble enclosing a ship under

FTL passed through another ship. He knew there’d been
some discussion of the idea among tactical planners, but that
the practice was not recommended. The warp bubble tended
to compress space ahead of the ship under drive, and extend
space astern; he could see how that might badly chew up a
ship that happened to be in the way. “Could that be adapted
as a weapon?” he asked.

“Negative,” Cara told him. “There have been numerous
studies since the inception of a practical Alcubierre Drive.

Essentially, there is no way to aim a vessel traveling under

Drive, since it cannot see past the horizon of its own warp
bubble. An actual hit would occur only by sheer, random
chance.”

“I see.” In simplistic terms, hitting another ship while
under FTL drive would be like hitting another bullet with a
bullet of your own—fired with your eyes shut.

But sheer chance did happen in combat, especially when
the combatants were as relatively close-packed as these.

Chance or not, the Judur had just cut down the odds against
the MIEF by a substantial margin.

“The Judur doesn’t seem any the worse for wear,” he
commented, checking the telemetry on the cruiser.

“A ship within the Alcubierre warp bubble is effectively
cut off from the rest of the universe,” Cara reminded him.

“Damn, there’s got to be a way we could use that,” Alex-
ander said.

The Judur was firing her main batteries now into the
nearby Xul vessel, which continued to slowly crumple and
deform. Xul hunterships possessed small black holes as the
hearts of their power plants; serious damage to the ship
could result in the black hole getting loose from its magnetic
restraints and eating its way through the collapsing vessel.

Elsewhere, other MIEF warships were beginning to

STAR STRIKE

345
engage the enemy now, ganging up four and five and six
to one, where possible. Chosin and Lejeune were loosing
streams of Skydragon fighters. As soon as all fighters were
away, they would pull back out of the engagement area.

Until that happened, however, they were vulnerable. Chosin
lurched sharply as a micro-black hole passed through her
bow, radiating fiercely.

Xul warships possessed electromagnetic screens power-
ful enough to twist aside charged particle beams and any
solid object with enough ferrous material to grab hold of.

Lasers, however, were unaffected by magnetic screens, and
could punch holes in Xul warships if they were powerful
enough.

Much research had gone into this aspect of space-borne
weaponry. During the battle to save Earth 563 years ago,
titanic high-energy laser arrays in solar orbit had been used
as very long range artillery and had managed to disable the

Xul hunter, opening up a way for Marines to get on board
with their backpack nukes.

But Xul hulls were built up of composite adaptive materi-
als as tough as diamond, and the ships themselves were so
huge that most lasers small enough to be mounted on board
a warship simply weren’t powerful enough to punch through
one-on-one. The three heavy battlecruisers Ishtar, Chiron,
and Mars, however, were built around spinal-mount HEL
weapons—the acronym stood for High-Energy Laser—each
with an output of 10 million billion watts—1,000 terawatts,
or 1 petawatt.

A 5 megawatt laser delivers the energy equivalent to the
detonation of a kilogram of TNT. A spinal-mount HEL,
then, firing in a tenth-second pulse, released 500 terawatts
of power in a pulse equivalent to a 1 megaton nuclear
explosion.

Not even the thick, tough skin of a huntership’s hull could
stand up to that much energy concentrated in one small spot.

Xul ships repaired themselves swiftly—Marines had wit-
nessed huge holes burned into a Xul warship’s hull literally
growing shut in the course of a few moments—but tactics
had evolved to circumvent, or, rather, to overwhelm Xul

346

IAN DOUGLAS
technology. Where possible, the AIs controlling the aiming
of shipboard weapons would focus all available weapons
on the same spot, the first bursts opening up a hole in the
target, and subsequent laser bursts or remote-guided war-
heads traveling into the target’s interior, causing massive
internal damage.

The other capital ships possessed lighter weapons, of
course, but each still packed a significant punch. Light
cruisers like the Judur and her Valkyrie sisters each pos-
sessed turret-mounted lasers with a 100TW output, roughly
the energy released by a 20 kiloton nuke. Xul hunterships
could generally shrug off 20KT pinpricks without much
effort, but a concentration of such bursts could add up to sig-
nificant damage. The main batteries of deity-class cruisers
like the Diana, the Kali and the hastily repaired Morrigan
could deliver pulses five times stronger, in the hundred-ki-
loton range.

Guided by the command net, then, the MIEF warships
swarmed the far larger Xul vessels, blasting at their thick
outer hulls with big-gun petawatt lasers, then following up
with smaller but far more numerous laser weaponry to cause
greater internal damage. When Xul magnetic shields col-
lapsed, then, the way was open for swarms of smart mis-
siles with megaton thermonuclear warheads, and the sharp,
savage bursts of charged-particle weapons. The fighters
darted in close, skimming the Xul hulls, slashing at hot cra-
ters with missiles and beams that could never have touched
the carapaces of those giants, but which now wreaked sear-
ing damage within the enemy warships’ interiors.

But even piling on at ten to one odds, it took time to
reduce the armored mountain of a Xul huntership, and
during that time the huntership could do serious damage in
turn. Besides tightly focused plasma weapons like the one
that had flashed Watcher into hot vapor, or the microsin-
gularities fired at high velocities like the barrage that had
destroyed the Shiva, the Xul possessed another weapon that

Commonwealth science had not yet been able to get a handle
on, either to duplicate it, or to defend against it. Somehow,
the Xul could reach down into the Quantum Sea itself and

STAR STRIKE

347
change the basic metric of a tightly focused sphere of space.

With this, they could grab random asteroids and impart high
velocities to them, as when they bombarded planets, or they
could grab a human starship and crush it into a gravitational
singularity. The light cruiser Skeggold seemed to crumple
and fold in upon herself in the invisible grip of the deadly
weapon, then vanished in a burst of hard x-rays. Seconds
later, the heavy cruiser Hera, 3,000 kilometers away, stag-
gered and rolled under a titanic impact, then flared into nova
brilliance as the micro-black hole that had been the Skeg-
gold hurtled through the Hera at nearly half the speed of
light.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the battle was how
quickly it proceeded. Ten seconds after the general engage-
ment had begun, eight MIEF ships had been destroyed,
thirteen percent of the Commonwealth warships engaged so
far, and all of the Xul monsters were still firing, even the
doomed vessel that had been inadvertently rammed by the

Judur.

The fighters were beginning to swarm through the bat-
tlespace, accompanied by clouds of USCVs—unmanned
space combat vehicles mounting tactical nukes and nano-D
warheads. The Xul ships were taking damage, a lot of it.

But the monsters were simply too strong. . . .

At this point in the battle, there was little Alexander, as
commander of the Marine contingent, could do. Although
the recon Marine element had already been deployed onto
and around RFS Alpha, several hundred Marines were now
in their SAP capsules and ready to deploy against the enemy
with backpack nukes . . . but in this hellfire chaos of plasma
beams and mass cannon blasts, of petawatt laser bursts and
high velocity microsingularities, he would be throwing
them away unless he had a clear target, a clear plan. That
largest Xul ship, the squat, weapons-laden Nightmare, might
be their command ship, but it was as yet unclear that the

Xul even had command ships. The Xul were rarely encoun-
tered in groups—thank the gods—and the smallest of those
needle-slim Type I hunterships was a match for the entire

MIEF.

348

IAN DOUGLAS

Gods! Another huntership was emerging from the Gate.

He remembered the scans picked up by the Night Owl re-
connaissance into the Starwall system. There were a lot of

Xul ships over there. . . .

“Message from the Eulers, General,” Cara told him, star-
tling him out of his increasingly black thoughts.

“What?” He didn’t even know communication had been
opened with them.

“The message is in animated-simulation form, sir, but it
seems to be a suggestion that we prepare to accelerate under

Alcubierre Drive. They are preparing . . . it appears to be a
small starship that they are going to fire into the system’s
sun, which apparently will trigger a nova. If we are prepared
to enter Alcubierre Drive a few seconds before the wave-
front of the exploding sun reaches us, we might escape,
while the Xul ship is enveloped and destroyed.”

So that was the source of the novae in this region of space,
two thousand years ago—the Euler ultimate weapon.

But . . . no.

“Send a negative,” he told Cara.

“Repeat, please?”

“Tell them no, damn it! We have a couple hundred fight-
ers out there, and they can’t travel FTL. And the Marines on

Alpha. And the Hermes, too. They’d all be fried.”

A moment passed. “The Eulers have sent an interroga-
tive,” Cara told him. I believe they are asking what you plan
to do instead.”

A very good question, Alexander thought. I wish I had a
good answer. . . .

The battle was going to be over, with 1MIEF wiped out of
the sky, if someone didn’t come up with something damned
fast. . . .

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1215 hrs GMT

Garroway stood on the bleak and dusty gray surface of the
asteroid, looking up. The Marines of the 55th MARS were

STAR STRIKE

349
queued up to board a Brigid-class shuttle, which would ferry
them back to the Samar, which was stationed a few thousand
kilometers off of the asteroid RFS Alpha, along with other
troopships, with the hospital ship Barton, and with other
non-combatants like the supply vessels.

The light from the battle at the Stargate had not yet
reached the Euler planetoid, but a window open to the pla-
toon channel was showing a scaled-down running commen-
tary, showing lists of the ships engaged, of the damage they
were taking, of the orders being issued to them.

It looked like one hell of a fight.

“Jesus,” Corporal Chu said. “We’re losing!”

“When are they going to put us into the fight?” Sergeant

Ernesto Delgado wondered.

“I don’t think there’s a hell of a lot we could do if we
were there,” Takamura pointed out. “Shit! They just nailed
the Osiris!”

Marine training had emphasized the use of SAP capsules
to deliver Marines to the interior of large enemy vessels,
where they could cause considerable mayhem, up to and in-
cluding planting nuclear charges deep in the target vessel.

That training was based on the experience of multiple en-
counters with Xul ships, but the most recent of those en-
counters had still been over five hundred years ago. Would
such old tactics even work nowadays? The Xul weren’t sup-
posed to be very innovative, but still, they must do something
besides sitting around waiting for another threat species to
show up. . . .

Whole starships were being wiped away out there. What
chance did individual Marines possess in that hellish combat
environment?

“Hey, guys!” Ran Allison called, pointing. “What the
hell is that?”

Garroway turned, looking up. That was an oddly shaped
vehicle of some sort, dust-gray, like the asteroid’s surface,
and looking something like a smoothed and somewhat
elongated asteroid itself, an egg shape in clay squeezed
and misshapen under a giant’s hand. Garroway’s helmet
display gave a readout on the thing—20 meters long, with

350

IAN DOUGLAS
an estimated mass of 35 tons. It was rising above the aster-
oid’s horizon.

“That is an Euler spacecraft which has just emerged from
a tunnel complex on the other side of this asteroid,” Achilles
told him. “Specifically, it is a craft they refer to as a ‘trigger.’

It creates a powerful warp bubble similar to that of a ship
under Alcubierre Drive.” There was a hesitation, as though
the AI didn’t quite understand, or quite believe the informa-
tion it was passing along. “If the information I am receiving
is accurately translated, the Eulers use devices like this to
induce a nova in a star.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” PFC Emilio Santiago said.

“What,” Chu said. “They’re going to blow up their star?”

He indicated the blue-white beacon of HD387136 hanging
low above the asteroid’s impossibly near horizon. “That
star?”

“Unknown,” Achilles told them. “The Eulers have sug-
gested using the device to blow up the local sun. General

Alexander has refused, however. Too many MIEF vessels
operating now do not have FTL capability, and would be
caught and destroyed by the blast. We do not yet know if
they intend to comply with General Alexander’s wishes.”

“I wonder what the chain of command is where aliens are
concerned?” Master Sergeant Barrett wondered aloud.

“Not our business,” Lieutenant Kaia Jones, the platoon

CO, said. “Keep in line. Get on board the shuttle.”

But Garroway couldn’t help thinking that it damn well
was their business, if the aliens were about to flash them all
into cinders in the light of an exploding sun. . . .

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Aquila Space

1220 hrs GMT

The battle was going badly. Ten MIEF ships had been de-
stroyed already, and three others were badly damaged.

The fighters—Marine squadrons off the Chosin and the

Lejeune—were pressing home their attack at point-blank

STAR STRIKE

351
range, and two of the Xul craft, one Type I and one Type

II, appeared to be crippled, but the MIEF could not keep
sustaining casualties at this rate.

There was a possibility, though. Definitely a long shot,
but better than watching the entire MIEF being chewed to
pieces. He shifted his attention to the Euler trigger, as Cara
called it, which had just emerged from RFS Alpha.

“Admiral Taggart? I suggest that it’s time to go over to
the offensive.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Taggart growled
in his mind. “We’re not holding them as it is!”

“Old Marine maxim,” Alexander replied. “When things
get desperate, attack. Cara? Connect with the Eulers. See if
they can use that trigger against the Xul star, the one on the
other side of the Gate.”

There was a pause, maddening as the battle continued
to swirl in front of the stargate. The Xul Type I rammed by

Judur finally collapsed in upon itself, devoured by the black
hole running wild at its core. Nuclear blasts from fighter-
launched missiles were savaging two more hunterships . . .

but the much larger Nightmare-class hunter appeared vir-
tually untouched. For several minutes, now, Mars, Chiron,
and Ishtar had been concentrating their heavy lasers on the
largest Xul vessel, but the damage inflicted so far appeared
minimal. The Nightmare had returned fire, however, and

Chiron had been badly hurt.

“General?” Cara said. “There is a problem. If I under-
stand the transmission correctly, the Eulers cannot control
the nova trigger once it passes through a stargate.”

“Damn . . .”

“However, Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey is still inside RFS

Alpha, and has been monitoring our conversation with the

Euler. He says that the nova trigger might take a human pilot

. . . and he has volunteered.”

“Ramsey has been in communication with the Eulers?”

“Yes, sir. He appears to have exchanged a substantial
amount of data with them. We are still evaluating most of
what he has passed on to us.”

Alexander thought for a moment. “Okay . . . let’s try that.

352

IAN DOUGLAS

But I don’t want Ramsey at the controls. I want him brought
back safe so the xenosoph people can download everything
he’s learned in there. Am I clear?”

“Yes, General.”

Alexander checked the swarming icons around the Euler
asteroid. There were a number of Marines in open space,
preparing to board a shuttle.

“Ask Ramsey to find out how difficult piloting that thing
should be.”

“Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey says he has already dis-
cussed this with his . . . hosts. He says a simple program
could be downloaded to a Marine’s implant hardware that
would give him full control of the trigger.”

“Let me ask this. This . . . trigger makes a star explode.

Does the trigger get destroyed too?”

“That is unclear, General. The trigger is, in effect, a small
starship under Alcubierre Drive. The warp bubble triggers
the nova. The ship might be safe inside that bubble but . . .

there are numerous unknowns.”

Unknowns? About diving a tiny one-man ship into a star?

Imagine that.

“Okay. Cara, put out a request for volunteers among the

55th MARS Marines still on the asteroid.”

“Yes, General.”

“And Admiral Taggart? Start rounding up your ships.

We’re taking 1MIEF through that Gate!”

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1234 hrs GMT

In the last few moments, the light from the battle had
reached the Euler planetoid. There wasn’t much to see . . .

a delicate twinkling against the stars, but Garrison knew
that each momentary pinpoint of light was another nuclear
detonation, or a dying ship.

And then the request for volunteers came through.

“They want a volunteer to do what?” Master Sergeant

Barrett said.

STAR STRIKE

353

“Someone to pilot the alien ship,” Lieutenant Jones said.

“That volunteer will steer the ship through the Gate, then
engage the Alcubierre Drive and take it through the star on
the other side. That should trigger the star into going nova.”

“Yeah, Lieutenant, but what’s the point?” Delaslo said.

“How does that help us?”

“The MIEF is preparing to break through the Gate,
through to Starwall Space. That’s eighteen thousand light-
years away from here, in toward the galactic core. When
they do so, the Xul ships should follow them. On the other
side, the flight of the Euler trigger ship will be carefully
timed, so that our fleet can withdraw just before the wave-
front from the exploding star reaches them.”

Several people started talking at once. Garroway thought
for a second, then thought-clicked a signal, the electronic
equivalent of raising his hand. “Lieutenant?”

“What is it, Garroway?”

“I volunteer, sir.”

“I volunteer, sir,” Sergeant Chu said, an instant behind

Garroway.

“No, I do,” Shari Colver said. “I volunteer!” And then
everyone was clamoring for attention.

“Silence!” Jones rasped. “As you were, all of you! Private

Garroway . . . you know this could be a one-way flight?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why do you want to do it?”

He was wondering that himself. Part of him was still in
shock after Sandre’s abrupt death, and he knew that when
the shock wore off the grieving would begin. He wasn’t
looking forward to that.

But was grief enough for him to risk suicide?

He didn’t think that was the reason . . . not all of it,
anyway.

But he did know that if nothing was done, every Marine
in the MIEF would be killed when the Xul finally over-
whelmed the hard-pressed fleet, him included.

And these Marines were his family, his new family. He
couldn’t let one of them go instead.

“Sir,” he said carefully. He wasn’t going to mention

354

IAN DOUGLAS

Sandre; somehow he knew that that would get him turned
down for sure. “Marines go back a long way in my family.

Ever hear of ‘Sands of Mars’ Garroway?”

“You’re related to him?”

“Yes, sir. And a few others, Marines who fought the Xul
later on. It’s only fair that I finish what they started, right?”

“That,” Jones told him, “is a load of crap. But I don’t
have time to argue. Report to Master Sergeant Barrett for a
download. You’ve got about three minutes to learn how to
pilot an alien starship!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

He was jubilant as he sought out the master sergeant.

There were some wild stories about Garroway Marines . . .

like the one about Sands of Mars Garroway capturing a
detachment of French soldiers at Cydonia by dropping alu-
minum cans of contraband beer on them from a small cargo
hopper. In the all-but-vacuum thinness of the Martian atmo-
sphere as it was back then, long before the planet’s terrafor-
ming had begun, the falling beer cans had exploded like tiny
bombs, coating French optics and suit visors with a sticky,
boiling, freezing mess that convinced them they were under
attack by weaponry far more deadly than beer.

And now he was about to dive a starship into a sun eigh-
teen thousand light-years away . . . a fitting way, he thought,
to continue the family saga.

Besides, then he wouldn’t have to think about Sandre.

25�

1012.1102

RFS Alpha

Cygni Space

1244 hrs GMT

The side of the Euler ship cycled open as Garroway and
the other Marines approached it, and one of the gray crab-
creatures scrambled out, all jointed legs and weaving
antennae.

Now that he wasn’t trying to kill one, Garroway was able to
get an interested close-up look. The creature—what had they
called it? The Manipulator was naked to space except for black
strips of some obviously artificial material running around
each side of the thing’s flat, round body—devices, he gath-
ered, for circulating water and chemicals through its respira-
tory system. What he’d at first taken for a swollen part of the
creature’s carapace, on closer inspection proved to be a kind of
strap-on backpack, presumably its life-support system.

“So why doesn’t that thing fly the ship?” Chu wanted to
know. “Why does Garry have to go?”

“The word is that the Manipulators don’t think all that
well on their own,” Barrett replied. “By themselves, they’re
maybe as smart as, I don’t know, a smart dog? They have
to be linked with one of the Eulers to, ah, reach their full
potential. And the Eulers say they can’t maintain that link
through the Gate.”

“They don’t have QCC?” Colver said. “Hey, maybe their
science isn’t as hot as everyone’s been saying.”

356

IAN DOUGLAS

“Technology doesn’t necessarily go in a straight line,”

Garroway said. As the moment approached, he was trying
not to think about it, and he welcomed the chance to talk
about something else. “We only figured out FTL commu-
nication after studying the hardware left on Mars by the

Builders, and even that took us a few centuries before we
could pull it off, right?”

The Euler ship was resting on the asteroid’s surface, now,
the entrance a wide, very flat strip open in the hull. Garro-
way leaned over and looked in.

“Shit,” he said. The ship had not been designed with
humans in mind.

For a moment, Garroway wasn’t sure he was going to
be able to do it. The cockpit, if that’s what you could call
it, was less than a meter tall, high enough to accommodate
a Manipulator with its life-support backpack, but it was
going to be a very tight squeeze for a human in combat
armor.

“You sure you want to go through with this, Marine?”

Barrett asked.

“Yes, Master Sergeant.” There was no backing out now.

“Maybe you guys can pick me up and kind of feed me in
there?”

“Okay, Marines. All together. . . .”

Manhandling Garroway into a prone position and slid-
ing him forward into the flat opening required finesse but
not a lot of strength, not in RFS Alpha’s weak gravitational
field. Garroway weighed only a few hundred grams, here,
though he and his 660-armor together still massed almost

200 kilos. He’d already unshipped his weapons, equipment
pouches, backpack, and everything else he could unhook
and discard.

Once, as a teenager, he’d gone caving with some friends
in Arkansas—the real thing, not a remote sim. Sliding for-
ward on his belly through the mud, squeezing absolutely
flat between the painfully narrow gap between floor and
ceiling, and always the chittering fear in the back of his
mind that he was about to find himself stuck, unable to
move forward or back—this experience was like that.

STAR STRIKE

357

The inside of the cockpit was not smooth, but folded into
wrinkles and swellings and depressions above and below,
as though designed to mold to the actual carapace of a

Manipulator.

But as the others pushed him forward, he felt the surfaces
above and below relax, slightly, almost as though the ship
itself were alive, adapting itself to this alien shape.

“Okay, Garroway,” Barrett told him. “You’re all the way
in. Check your software.”

Closing his eyes, he thought-clicked on a mental icon,
a new icon downloaded into his implant hardware only a
few moments ago. He felt a small, inner thrill as current
flowed, and a display swam into view against his mental
landscape.

He hadn’t had time to practice with it yet, but the advan-
tage, the whole point of downloaded training was that you
didn’t need to practice to create and reinforce new synaptic
links. The links were there . . . though you often needed to
practice just to get the feel of the new skill.

That sort of thing had been honed by the Marines through
almost seven centuries of work with cerebral implant tech-
nology. Some of the skills required of Marines—firing a
forearm-mounted pulse rifle while moving, for example, or
kicking off with your 660’s jump jets and skimming across
a hundred meters of open ground in a single bound—those
were not natural acts. Without download training, they
would require months of intensive training and practice; in-
stead, the skill set was downloaded in a few seconds, and the
recruit spent a day or so practicing with it, getting it nailed
down solid.

So he knew what mental buttons to push. He just wished
he could have some time with a hammer to be sure the
knowledge was in good and tight.

“Okay, Garroway,” Barrett’s voice said in his mind.

“How’s it feel?”

“Okay, Master Sergeant. Not much room in here.” He
wiggled a bit. “I think the space is closing around my suit.”

“Yeah. The word is the ship is alive.” He chuckled. “Your
call sign is Jonah.”

358

IAN DOUGLAS

“Does that mean something?”

“Swallowed by a big fish?”

The reference meant nothing. “Sorry. . . .”

“Never mind. Old Judeo-Christian religious reference.

The hatch is closing.”

He couldn’t move his helmet to see, but he was aware
of a new and deeper darkness. He let his AI connect with
the alien vessel’s external sensors, and was enveloped in a
sim of surrounding space. He could see stars, and the gray,
pocked terrain of the planetoid beneath him.

“You still hear me okay?”

“Yeah, Master Sergeant.”

“Okay, son. I’m passing you over to the lieutenant. She’s
in direct link with Hermes Ops.”

“Hello, Garroway,” Jones’ voice said. “How is it in
there?”

“Snug, sir.”

“Okay. Just sit tight. We’re waiting for the right tactical
moment before you get the go, okay?”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Sit tight. Well, lie tight. There wasn’t a lot else he could
do right now.

Curious, he did pull down an e-pedia entry on “Jonah.”

Garroway was, at least nominally, neopagan, and had never
read the Old Testament, or the story of the Biblical prophet
swallowed by a “great fish.” The story wasn’t exactly com-
forting, or particularly appropriate. The prophet Jonah, as
near as he could tell, had been swallowed by the fish be-
cause he’d been disobedient to God.

He wasn’t being disobedient. Quite the contrary. He was
allowing the bioengineered fish to swallow him out of what
he perceived as his duty to his brother and sister Marines.

The tightly enclosed space grumbled and fluttered around
him, settling into an even tighter embrace. He ignored the
claustrophobic sensations—he’d not felt those since that
one, abortive time in that cave ten years ago—and instead
opened a tacsit feed.

The battle at the stargate was still raging strong . . . and
not going well for the good guys.

STAR STRIKE

359

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Aquila Space

1248 hrs GMT

“Okay,” Taggart said, grim. “There’s our opening!”

Alexander could see the moment as it shaped itself. The

MIEF ships had slowly moved past the Xul ships, abandoning
their englobement technique and placing themselves—most
of them, anyway, between the Xul ships and the stargate.

“I see it,” he said.

“You do know, I trust, that this is going to leave us ‘way
out on a limb’. . . .”

“And the Marine fighters, too,” Alexander replied. “But
if this thing works, we wouldn’t survive on the other side.”

“Yeah. The question is how long we survive on this side.

The Xul may not care if the rest of the fleet goes through.

They may decide to stay here and stomp on us.”

“It’s all we have, Liam. Let’s do it.”

Taggart gave the mental command, putting the MIEF in
motion. At the same time, Alexander issued a command of
his own, ordering Jonah to commence his run.

Mars and Ishtar leaped forward, under high acceleration,
with the injured Chiron lagging along after. Their spinal-
mount main batteries were pointed uselessly ahead at the
center of the gate, but their turret-mounted secondaries
lashed out in all directions, slashing and shearing through
the nearest Xul hunterships.

The trio of planet-class battlecruisers was followed by
the other MIEF capitol ships—all save the Hermes, which
lacked the Alcubierre Drive, and the fleet carriers Chosin
and Lejeune, which would remain on this side of the gate
with their fighters. Those three hung back, then began ac-
celerating clear of the battlespace. The hope, of course, was
that the Xul warships would ignore them, focusing instead
on the greater threat of what the larger MIEF flotilla might
do on the other side, at Starwall.

Following in cone formation, the rest of the redeploy-
ing MIEF fleet accelerated toward the gate, the cone’s apex

360

IAN DOUGLAS
at the three battlecruisers. The formation was ragged and
incomplete; three destroyers and a light cruiser were left
behind, helplessly adrift, sections of their hulls white-hot
from the tunneling of enemy weapons, clouds of debris
adrift around them.

A final check. The Gate’s tuning was still set to Starwall.

In Alexander’s mind, the two flotillas pulled apart from each
other, three ships and a cloud of fighters staying behind, the
other thirty-seven surviving ships of the MIEF battlefleet
moving toward the Gate under their gravitics, faster . . . still
faster . . . and faster still before plunging through.

And Hermes, Chosin, and Lejeune, attended by their
attendant fighters and remote combat drones, remained
alone.

“Okay, everyone,” Taggart said over the Net. “Now we
see if this is going to work!”

The Xul ships didn’t react at first to the sudden exodus,
and for a horrible moment, Alexander thought that the
enemy force was going to ignore it entirely, to stay instead
and continue pounding the ships remaining in Aquila

Space. There were five Xul vessels in all—the Nightmare-
class monster, a larger Type II, and three Type I’s. All
five showed some indication of the pounding they’d been
taking, at least, and the Type II and one Type I showed
serious damage.

All five were definitely still in the fight, however.

Hermes shuddered as a string of five microsingularities
snapped through her hull, tunneling through in an instant in
searing blasts of x-radiation. Alarms sounded in his head.

One of the four Atlas-class tugs mounted on Hermes’ hull
had been badly hit, her power plant off-line, her gravitics
drives down. Damage reports were flooding back. Hermes
was venting atmosphere, radiation levels were climbing. At
least two hundred of her crew and passengers were dead
already.

And it was going to get worse.

“I think . . .” Taggart said, somewhat tentatively. “I think
they’re starting to go for it.”

The Nightmare Xul ship was definitely moving toward

STAR STRIKE

361
the Gate, now, following the vanished MIEF. Two . . . no, all
three of the Xul Type I hunterships were following as well,
one of them limping well behind the others.

The Type II, though, clearly was not joining the others. It
was outbound from the Gate, closing in the Hermes.

“All ships, focus on that Type II,” Taggart ordered. “Take
him down!”

Hundred-terawatt lasers snapped out from turrets
mounted on Hermes’ hull, and the equivalent of 20-kiloton
nukes sparkled across the Type II’s hull. The Xul hull mate-
rial was so thick and strong that those blasts had little effect
overall. Still, in places the gunners and AI directors were
able to concentrate on gaps in that charred armor, and when
the laser fire burned into the vessel’s dark interior, bursts of
gas, of broken hull fragments and other debris spewed into
space like tiny geyser plumes. Alexander could see sullen,
interior glows here and there through gaps in the outer shell,
as portions of the interior structure became molten under
the barrage.

Again, microsingularities lashed out from the enemy
vessel, striking the Hermes and passing clean through.

Damage-control parties were overstretched as it was, using
nanotech repair robots to patch the holes and stem the loss
of internal atmosphere.

“Why haven’t they used their force weapon?” Alexander
asked Cara. That was the deadly signature of the Xul hunt-
erships—that seemingly magical means of reaching out and
crumpling a target vessel into a tiny black hole. The Type II
was definitely in range, now, for that weapon. . . .

“Analyses of the timing of past uses of the weapon sug-
gests that there are constraints in power usage or availabil-
ity,” Cara told him. “They may need a sizeable recharge
time.”

“I’m glad there are some constraints to those things,”

Alexander said, watching the monster’s approach. Hermes’

laser batteries continued slashing into the thing, but were
having little obvious effect. “You don’t have hard figures for
us, do you?”

“I am sorry, General, but no.”

362

IAN DOUGLAS

“We’ll keep pounding the bastard,” Taggart said. “Maybe
we’ve damaged the weapon already. Or maybe we can kill
them before they get it working again.”

“Gods willing,” Alexander said. “Right now, I think
they’re trying to ram us! . . .”

But Taggart had already given another command, and the

Hermes was pulling back as fast as the straining gravitics of
her three remaining tugs could move her. Both of the carri-
ers had pulled well off to the side, and were adding their vol-
leys to the firepower now playing across the Xul ship’s hull.

The Xul ignored them, following the limping Hermes.

“Is Jonah on the way?” he asked.

“Affirmative,” Cara told him. “He departed the Euler
planetoid three minutes, five seconds ago, just before the

MIEF went through the Gate.”

Then we just need to hold on a little longer. . . .

Jonah

Cygni Space/Starwall Space

1252 hrs GMT

Garroway waited in an absolute blackness.

Three minutes before, the order had come through and

Jones had passed it on. “You’re clear to launch! Good luck! ”

He’d thought-clicked a command, and the ship, propelled by
something similar to the gravitics drive used by the Com-
monwealth, had slid up and forward into the night, the plan-
etoid falling away and vanishing astern in seconds. In open
space, he gave the necessary commands, followed by a final
thought-click . . . and the universe winked out.

From the Euler planetoid, Garroway needed to fly a
two-legged path, the first leg to line himself up squarely
with the stargate, so that the ring was facing him full-on,
and the second leg, to bring him to his jump-off point. He
would not attempt to thread the gate’s eye under drive, be-
cause no one knew if that would work. Technically, the
ship was not in normal space while under Alcubierre Drive,
but enclosed within its own tiny, pocket universe; whether
that pocket universe would be affected by the gravitational

STAR STRIKE

363
twisting at the center of the gate, whether it would pass
through to Starwall or be destroyed or not be affected at
all, no one knew.

Jonah would go through the gate at sublight speeds.

The actual timing of the maneuver would be handled
by Achilles , a subset of the platoon AI traveling with him,

2
since as soon as he switched on the drive he’d be cut off from
the rest of the platoon.

Minutes dragged past, and Garroway waited them out in
the enveloping and absolute dark. This first jump—moving
fifteen light-minutes at five times the speed of light—would
take 3 minutes. During that time, he was completely cut off
from everything except what was already in his head—the
downloaded flight-control program, and the waiting, reas-
suring presence of Achilles .

2

He remembered when Sandre had taught him how to
switch his platoon AI off, and wondered how he could ever
have contemplated such a thing. Achilles was a part of him,

2
an important part, and right now he was damned glad he
was there.

And then the stars were back. If Achilles had gotten the

2
timing right, the trigger ship had just shifted across fifteen
light-minutes.

“Do you see the gate?” Garroway asked the AI. All he
could see were stars—one, the system’s primary, a daz-
zlingly brilliant blue-white pinpoint off to his left and
slightly behind.

“I have the navigational telemetry,” Achilles told him.

2

A green curser marked an otherwise empty bit of sky. “The
gate is there, range eleven light-minutes.”

“Okay, send a signal. ‘Waypoint Alpha reached, okay.’”

“Transmitting.” They would get the word back at the
planetoid in fifteen minutes, after he was long gone.

Using his mind, Garroway gentled the trigger ship into a
new orientation. Controlling the thing was much like con-
trolling his own body, a sense of nudging himself that way,
and having the body turn in response. A targeting cross-
hair thrown up against his visual field showed the precise
aim point of the ship. When that intersected with the green

364

IAN DOUGLAS
cursor, he thought-clicked again, and, again, the universe
winked out.

The timing needed to be excruciatingly precise. Two
minutes, twelve seconds at five times the speed of light
would take him eleven light-minutes. But at that veloc-
ity, if the timing was off by a hundredth of a second, he
would over- or under-shoot by 15,000 kilometers—a dis-
tance considerably greater than the diameter of the Earth.

Achilles , he knew, was working at the nanosecond level.

2

If the AI missed by a nanosecond, he would only over-
shoot by . . . what? He pulled down the figures. One and
a half meters.

No human mind could hope for that degree of precision.

The universe winked back into existence. The stargate
was there, hanging in space dead ahead, a golden ring with
a thread-slender rim. Nearby, off to starboard and below at
this orientation, was the UCS Hermes. Farther off were the
carriers Lejeune and Chosin.

To port and high was the vast, slender blade of a Xul hunt-
ership, needle-slim forward, swelling at the stern into bulg-
ing protuberances and sponsons a hundred meters long.

The Xul ship was hurt, and badly. Vast craters showed in
that geometrically patterned surface, and the hull was envel-
oped in a silvery mist, part debris, part clouds of nano-D and
remote drones. Nuclear explosions flashed and flickered,
like the popping of strobes, along the damaged hull surface,
as the Hermes slashed at it with barrage after barrage of
nuke-tipped missiles and 100-terawatt laser blasts.

But Hermes was injured as well. The double rim-to-rim-
saucer of the former Skybase had been repeatedly hit by

Xul singularity weapons, and portions of its dark gray hull
showed a thick scattering of puckered craters and had been
blackened by searing temperatures. As he watched, blue
lightning played across the Hermes’ hull, blasting away a
cloud of fragments.

“Private Garroway,” a voice said in his head. “Welcome
to Hell. This is General Alexander.”

“Yes, sir!” Garroway responded, surprised. What the hell
was a general doing talking to him?

STAR STRIKE

365

“We’re all counting on you, son,” Alexander said. “The
rest of the fleet’s gone through the Gate, as planned, and
most of the Xul with them. We’re all of us counting on you
now to carry out your mission.”

“I won’t let you down, sir.”

“I know you won’t. Listen up, now. On the other side,
you’ll make contact with Captain Michael Angi. He’s the
skipper of the Mars, and he’ll be . . . uh!”

The transmission was briefly interrupted, as another Xul
barrage struck home.

“Hermes? Are you there?”

“We’re here, Garroway. Okay, the skipper of the Mars
is coordinating the operation on that side. If the Mars has
already been destroyed, your contact will be Captain Gerald

Baumgartner, of the Ishtar.”

“Right, sir.”

“Better get a move on, son. They’re waiting on you, but
they won’t be able to hold out for long.”

Garroway engaged the craft’s gravitic drive, and watched
the Gate loom huge across his view forward. “On my way,

General.”

“Godspeed, son. And semper fi.”

“Semper—”

But before he completed the farewell, the alien starship
snapped through the gate interface.

His view forward blurred sharply, then suddenly sprang
back into sharp relief. The thin, background scattering stars
of Aquila Space was gone, replaced by a wall of mottled
night and light.

The panorama was breathtaking, and magnificent. It
was like looking at a towering cliff, hundreds of meters
high—but instead of rock the cliff face was made of stars,
of millions, of billions of stars massed and piled high and
thronging deep, a wall of blazing stars interlaced through
with the snaking tendrils of black, obscuring dust clouds,
and with the shining radiant clouds and delicately hued
sheets of reflective nebulae, their tattered edges gilded by
starlight.

Billions of stars, the majority red or orange in hue, the

366

IAN DOUGLAS
massed suns of the central bulge of the spiral galaxy that
was the Milky Way.

“Private Garroway,” Achilles said. “We need to adjust

2
course.”

Shaking himself, Garroway tore his gaze away from that
incredible starfield vista, and looked instead for the local
star. He knew it should be that way, since part of his mis-
sion download had included data brought back from Marine
recon flights into this space.

And there it was . . . a mottled, red-orange disk easily
three times larger in apparent size than Sol appeared from

Earth, its light stopped down by the alien vessel’s optics—or
by Achilles —to keep his eyeballs from frying. Garroway

2
nudged, and the alien trigger ship responded, swinging to
bring the crosshairs over the star.

“Jonah, this is Mars,” sounded in his mind. “Do you
copy?”

“I hear you, sir.” He shifted his attention around to the
other side, where brilliant flashes of light were sparkling in
the distance, off to one side of the Gate. The Mars was quite
close—several kilometers, her scarred hull clearly visible by
the ruddy glow of the local star. The other ships of the MIEF
were scattered across the sky, attempting to avoid the re-
lentless approach of some twenty Xul hunterships of various
shapes and sizes. Twelve light-seconds away, sunward, his
sensors showed a large, stationary complex of some sort . . .

obviously a large Xul orbital fortress. More Xul ships were
emerging from it as he watched.

“Okay,” Captain Angi’s voice said. “We have you on lidar.

Your range to the local sun is now seven point one-three
light-minutes. The flight profile calls for you to go through
at five c . . . so that puts the detonation at one point four
two six minutes, that’s one minute, twenty-five point five six
seconds. If all goes well, the star blows and the wave-front
reaches us seven minutes and eight seconds after that . . . so
call it eight and a half minutes after you engage your drive.

We will time our maneuver from that moment.”

“Right, Captain,” Garroway replied. All of this had been
downloaded to him already, but the confirmation—being

STAR STRIKE

367
certain that everyone was operating on the same wave-
length—was vital.

“With luck, you’ll pass through the star and emerge on
the other side. Just keep your drive on long enough to clear
the radiation front, and you should be okay.”

He could hear the unbelief in Angi’s mental voice. The
guy was whistling in the dark. Or he was convinced that

Garroway was on a suicide run, and lying to spare Garro-
way’s feelings.

“I was told to hold my speed at five c and to stay in warp
for an hour after I hit the core,” Garroway said. “That will
put me five light-hours from the star, which should be plenty
of space.”

There was no reply at first. More Xul Type I’s and Type

II’s were converging rapidly on the MIEF squadron, and the

Mars had just taken a savage burst of particle-beam fire.

The battlecruiser lurched, rolling heavily to starboard, al-
ready slewing to port to return fire with her main gun.

“You’d better get going,” Angi told him. “Good luck,

Marine. God go with you!”

“You, too,” Garroway said. “Looks like you may need

Him more than me.”

He checked his targeting cursor, which was centered per-
fectly on the red-orange globe of the local star. “Are we set,

Achilles? ”

“All systems on-line,” the AI said. “Ready at your com-
mand. . . .”

He gave the thought-click order, and the universe—

MIEF fleet, Xul attackers, red-orange star, and that in-
credible background vista of star clouds all blinked out of
existence. . . .

26�

1012.1102

Jonah

Cygni Space/Starwall Space

1258 hrs GMT

Garroway took careful note of the time—1258 hours, nine
seconds. From the instant Achilles engaged the Alcubierre

2

Drive to the center of the star, the flight time should be one
minute, twenty-five seconds. An abstract part of his mind
wondered about acceleration; did a ship under this alien ver-
sion of the Alcubierre Drive leap instantly to 5 c? Or, as with
human ships, did it take a few minutes to build up to speed
from a standing start?

Then he realized that the flight profile called for a mean
velocity of five times the speed of light. It might well take
seconds or even as much as a minute to build up to speed,
but if so, Achilles would take the craft up to more than 5c

2
in order to compensate for the lost time at lower speeds. He
started to set the problem up—a simple enough bit of cal-
culus—then decided it really didn’t matter. He didn’t know
enough about the trigger ship’s capabilities. Gods willing,

Achilles did. If he didn’t, they were all in a lot of trouble.

2

He wondered what the star’s name was. No one had told
him. But then, Starwall Space was supposed to be eighteen
thousand light-years away from Sol. You wouldn’t even be
able to see this star from Earth, save as a part of the misty
backdrop of the Milky Way, somewhere in the constellation
of Sagittarius.

STAR STRIKE

369

The data he possessed did say that the star was a Type K0

IV giant, with a diameter of about three times that of Earth’s
sun—make it 4, no, 4.2 million kilometers. That would be . . .

he ran a quick calc, and blinked with surprise. Fourteen light-
seconds. That was big. . . .

And at 5 c, it would take his trigger ship just under three
whole seconds to pass all the way through the star. Some-
how, when they’d told him he would be flying faster than
light through the heart of a star, he’d thought he would be in
and out so fast he wouldn’t even notice. He’d had no idea it
would take that long to make the passage.

Thirty seconds to go. . . .

He did wish he could see out. There was no sensation of
movement or acceleration whatsoever, and not a glimmer of
light from the outside. Considering where he was about to
go, this was a good thing, he knew. If that glimmer was able
to reach him, by the time the trigger ship hit the star’s photo-
sphere the energy would be enough to vaporize the ship.

Ten seconds.

He wondered if he would feel the star’s gravity. No . . .

gravitational effects should be shunted aside by the warp
bubble as well. According to the experts, he ought to be so
completely cocooned in that bubble that he would feel noth-
ing at all . . . in another five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .

In fact it felt like hitting a brick wall. He felt a violent
shock, so hard the interior of his armor instantly embraced
him in something like a thick, gelatinous foam to take up
some of the impact.

And the shock continued, dragging on for what seemed
like an eternity, and which in fact lasted less than three
seconds.

Garroway was unconscious by the time he emerged from
the star. . . .

* * *

370

IAN DOUGLAS

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Aquila Space

1259 hrs GMT

“Okay,” Alexander said, as his internal clock flickered past

1259 and thirty-four seconds. “Time.”

A QCC message flashed over from the Mars had given
them the word. Garroway had switched to Alcubierre Drive
at 1258:09 and vanished; at 1259:34 he should have reached
the center of the target star. As the seconds continued ticking,

Garroway would be hurtling out the other side, and the star
should be rebounding in upon itself after the hyper- c shock-
wave of the passing warp bubble tunneling through its heart.

A second clock was now counting down from seven min-
utes, eight seconds. That was how long the wave-front would
take to reach the stargate from the detonating star.

The problem was, they were operating in unknown ter-
ritory, here. The passage of the warp bubble should trig-
ger a nova, yes. The Eulers had done this sort of thing
at least five times before in their past. But the explo-
sion probably—emphasis on probably—wouldn’t be in-
stantaneous. Theory said the wave of compressing, then
expanding space within the star’s core would create a
massive shockwave that would force the star to begin col-
lapsing upon itself. At some point, the star’s mass would
rebound, hurtling outward as a titanic explosion . . . but just
how long would that take? Several seconds? A minute?

Hell . . . a week?

They didn’t have a week, of course. The Xul Type II was
still bearing down upon them. Hermes shuddered under an-
other direct hit.

“Tug Four is gone,” Taggart said. “We’re more adrift now
than under power.”

Alexander was studying the tactical situation. The Xul
ship was still 500 kilometers away, almost directly between
the Gate and the retreating Hermes. The Hermes was ac-
celerating outbound from the Gate, but slowly, slowly, as
enemy fire continued to rake her.

STAR STRIKE

371

“Just how hard up are we?” he asked Taggart.�

“Why do you want to know?”�

“Look, it may be a bit late, but something just occurred�
to me. The blast from that nova is going to hit the other side
of that gate just seven minutes from now. Do we want to be
here when it does?”

“Oh, my God. . . .”

“I suggest, Admiral, that we find a way to put some lat-
eral acceleration on this thing, see if we can nudge ourselves
out of the line of fire. . . .”

“You’re right.” A pause. “Damn.”�

“What?”�

“General, I don’t think we’re going to make it.”�

“Can we translate?”�

“I was just checking that. The quantum tap converters are �
junk. We barely have enough battery and capacitor power
right now to keep firing.”

“Can we change the Gate’s tuning?” If the stargate was
open to another region of space—back to Puller 659, for
instance—the Gate would effectively be closed when the
energy from the exploding star reached it.

“No go. Navigation says they think the Xul are overriding
our signals somehow. They tried to connect, and couldn’t.

We signaled both Lejeune and Chosin, and they couldn’t get
through, either.”

“They may have locked the Gate open, so that if our
people come back through, they know they arrive here.”

“Good possibility.”

No one had any idea what would happen when the star
blew on the other side of the Gate. The immediate effect
would be light and hard radiation, a very great deal of both.

Traveling at the speed of light, they would hit the Gate seven
minutes and a few seconds after the star exploded.

The second effect would actually be worse. Heavier par-
ticles and white-hot plasma would be following that initial
wave front, lagging behind by about twenty minutes. Finally,
the main body of stellar debris—a fast-expanding shell of
intensely hot plasma—might take a day to reach the Gate.

The light and radiation of the first front, though, would be

372

IAN DOUGLAS
more than enough to cause a great deal of hurt if it was able
to pass through the open Gate.

“We may still have one chance,” Alexander said. “Let’s
try something. . . .”

UCS Mars

Stargate

Starwall Space

1306 hrs GMT

Captain Angi checked his time readout. “Okay, everyone,”

he said over the FleetNet. “Heads up, now. If that Marine
did his job, the star should have blown and the wave-front
ought to be on its way. We have thirty more seconds to go.”

The battle continued to flash and flame around them as
the Xul ships closed in. Commanding the flotilla, Angi had
directed all surviving ships to align themselves in a par-
ticular direction, aimed at the stars. Navigational officers
on every ship in the fleet had their full attention focused
on the local star, which continued to burn peacefully in the
distance.

Strange to think that, if all had gone as planned, the star
was already destroyed, already a blazing nova.

The light just hadn’t reached them yet.

Fifteen seconds.

For this to work, they couldn’t just slip into Alcubierre

Drive at the seven minutes, eight seconds mark. No one
knew just how long it would take for the star’s core to re-
bound and detonate, and, evidently, the Eulers hadn’t been
able to explain that part.

That meant that human eyes and AI senses would be
studying the star intently, and the word would not be given
until some sign of instability was detected.

How long that would be was anybody’s guess.

The UCS Alcyone was gone, crushed from existence by
the unseen fist of a Xul force weapon. The Hera and the

Salamone both were drifting, helpless wrecks. Other ships
were taking hellish damage.

This could not go on much longer. . . .

STAR STRIKE

373

“Ares? Give me a count, please.”

Ares was the Mars’ shipboard AI, and Angi’s personal
assistant. “Five seconds,” the AI murmured in his thoughts.

“Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . mark. And counting. Plus
two . . . plus three . . . plus four . . .”

“Never mind the second-by-second rundown,” he told the

AI. “Is everyone ready to go at the word?”

“All ships, all stations, report ready, Captain.”

“Okay. Commence acceleration, but gravitics only. Ten
gravities.”

“Accelerating, ten gravities. Aye, aye.”

But not all of the survivors of 1MIEF could manage ten
gravities. The destroyer Ganga was barely able to make
two. Two of the Valkyries, Skuld and Radgrid, were close
in against a Xul Type II, pounding away at the monster at
point-blank range. Either they didn’t get the word, or their
drives were dead. They weren’t moving.

Angi stared into the sullen image of the star. Do some-
thing, damn it, he thought. Do some—

“Spectral shift in the star!” a voice called over the Net.

“Going to blue! . . .”

“It’s going!”

“All commands, ” Angi yelled. “Execute! Execute!

Execute! ”

And in rapid succession, the MIEF warships began wink-
ing out of existence.

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Aquila Space

1306 hrs GMT

“Captain Angi just gave the execute order,” Taggart said.

“Here it comes, then,” Garroway said. “How are we
doing?”

“Not good, but we’re moving. . . .”

Hermes massed some two million tons, the carrier

Lejeune just over 87,000 tons, but the carrier’s gravitics were
still in good shape and she packed a hell of a lot of thrust.

374

IAN DOUGLAS

Admiral Forsythe, the Lejeune’s skipper, had brought the
carrier up to Hermes’ massive flank, pressed her blunt nose
up against the hull, and begun pushing, hard.

They’d only had time for a couple of minutes of thrust,
and the Xul ship appeared to be trying to target the carrier
now deliberately . . . but the vast bulk of the Hermes was
moving out of a direct line with the stargate’s lumen.

This might all be for nothing, Garroway thought, lying
in the Ops couch and waiting for death as the Xul ship fired
a final volley, or death as a star exploded through the Gate.

One of the minor mysteries of the Gate was that light and
other radiation did not normally pass through the central
opening. That was why you couldn’t signal through an open
gateway with radio, or look through from one side to see an
entirely different starscape on the other. The physics boys
were still arguing about that one; the favored theory was
that the gate was open in tiny, discrete instants of time. Why
that would block visible light and not a slow-moving star-
ship, though, was not translatable into something approach-
ing standard Anglic.

The face of the Stargate, the space within the rim, was
starting to glow.

Maybe it just took a lot of light. . . .

The Gate’s face grew brighter, taking on the aspect of a
shining, flat disk. Hermes and Lejeune were almost out of
the shaft of light emerging from the Gate, now, almost but
not quite. Damage control reported radiation levels rising in
the illuminated portion of the ship.

The Xul Type II was still squarely in front of the Gate,
one side of its hull sharply illuminated now by the rapidly
increasing glare, the other half in utterly black shadow.

“Make to the Lejeune!” Alexander told Cara. “Give us
more thrust!”

“Captain Forsythe reports he is at one hundred twenty
percent power now. His power tap feed is threatening to
overload.”

“Tell him it won’t matter if we can’t get the hell out of
the way!”

“Yes, sir.”

STAR STRIKE

375

Lejeune’s thrust increased. Alexander could actually feel
a slight shudder passing through the couch beneath his back,
a kind of steady, building thrum as the carrier served as an
immense tug, maneuvering the Goliath Hermes aside.

“We’re clear, General. . . .”

“Thank God!”

The Xul vessel had stopped firing, had stopped accelerat-
ing, and now was drifting in that hellfire glare.

Probes still within the shaft of light from the stargate re-
ported soaring radiation levels . . . and then, in rapid succes-
sion, they died.

“Make to Samar,” Alexander said after a long, exhausted
moment. “Tell them . . . tell them PFC Garroway has suc-
cessfully completed his mission.”

Cygni Space/Starwall Space

1307 hrs GMT

Nova light flooded circumambient space.

Type IV giant stars do not, as a rule, possess planetary
systems, and this one was no exception. It did possess a
fair amount of asteroidal debris, and the commune of intel-
ligence known as We Who Are, millennia before, had used
that material to build one of their primary nodes.

Circling the star at various distances were no fewer
than three hundred fortress-like structures, each the size of
a small moon. Thousands of ships of all types, including
many not yet seen and catalogued by human observers, were
moored at docking bays, or orbiting in the star’s somber red
light . . . some being readied for patrol, some undergoing a
periodic refit and updating, some being constructed out of
the available local raw materials.

And, of course, there was the stargate itself.

The Lords Who Are of this region of space had long been
considering what to do about the troublesome life form
known as Species 2824, and its originating system, 2420–

544. Some, indeed, had moved at a most unseemly haste in
their urgency to do something about the offending life form.

The recent return of a galactic picket with word that one of

376

IAN DOUGLAS
the aliens’ sublight ships had been taken, patterned, and
destroyed, had accelerated that haste.

Perhaps that urgency was even justified. Species 2824
had proven to be unexpectedly resourceful. Evidently, they
had allied with another troublesome species—designated

3990—and learned that species’ techniques for destroying
stars.

The battle with the intruding fleet had been raging for
some time out near the system’s stargate, and victory had
been assured when, suddenly, shockingly, the entire enemy
battlefleet had vanished.

No matter. It could only be a delaying maneuver. The
aliens were cut off from the stargate, and could easily be
pursued by hunterships. It would take only a few moments
for the hunterships to come to full power and engage their
drives. They would overtake the fleeing enemy ships in sec-
onds, matching vectors.

And then . . .

But there was no “and then.” One by one, in-laying sta-
tions and nodal structures had been overtaken by the fast-
expanding wave of raw, horrific light racing out from the
central star. Sensors overloaded and burned out. Radiation
soared. Electromagnetic flux burned through circuitry.

The minds of We Who Are once had been organic, but ex-
isted now as nested electromagnetic patterns within the cir-
cuitry of their ships, their base fortresses, their planet-wide
cities. As circuitry melted, those minds were destroyed.

The leaders of the Xul commune, the Lords Who Are, died
as the hardware supporting them overloaded, then melted,
then vaporized. As they died, the metamind of which they
all were composite parts, the metamind that gave shape and
purpose to the local will of We Who Are, died. Some in-
dividual fragments, lone hunterships or far-outlying bases
and outposts survived . . . but only for a short while. Fast
on the heels of the dying star’s light came the more massive,
deadlier onslaught of high-energy particles.

And not a single Xul huntership saw the danger in time
to save itself.

Not a single one of We Who Are within the Starwall node
survived. . . .

STAR STRIKE

377

Jonah

Cygni Space/Starwall Space

1835 hrs GMT

This, Garroway thought muzzily, is not good. I still can’t see
out, and it’s been over six hours. Either I’m still going FTL,
or the whole damned ship is dead.

Either way . . . not good. . . .

He was just now clawing his way back to consciousness.

His internal timepiece showed how much time had elapsed
since his passage through the core of the star.

He felt . . . terrible, broken and bruised throughout his
body, and he felt like he was suffering from an excruciating
case of sunburn.

His stomach twisted, then heaved. His internal nano was
damping down the nausea, but the treatment so far was only
partially successful.

Medical sensors were reporting . . . no. He couldn’t have
absorbed that much radiation. . . .

“Achilles? Achilles, are you there?”

“I am here.”

“What the hell is going on? Why haven’t we dropped out
of Drive?”

“Evidence suggests that we have, Private Garroway. The
radiation sensors in your combat armor show an extremely
high flux.”

“Shit. Did that leak through from the nova, somehow? . . .”

“Nothing leaked, as you put it, while we were within the
star. However, we did encounter some . . . turbulence during
the passage. Many of the ship’s systems were damaged or
otherwise incapacitated. The Alcubierre Drive appears to
have cut out only about ten minutes after our passage.”

“Then . . . we got caught in the blast?”

“Affirmative. We were fifty light-minutes from the star
by that time, however, so damage was relatively minimal.

At least, we were not vaporized immediately. Radiation
levels were high. We are also continuing to sustain radiation
damage from the stellar background.”

“Pardon?”

378

IAN DOUGLAS

“The galactic core is an extremely active region, with over-
all high levels of particulate radiation. Lieutenant Lee was
badly burned after an exposure of about forty minutes.”

“Forty minutes. And I’ve been out here for . . .”

“Five hours, nineteen minutes.”

Nausea clawed at him. This time, his internal nano
couldn’t handle the surge, and he was achingly, desperately
sick inside his armor.

A long time after, he sipped water from the helmet input
valve near his mouth.

“How . . . long do I have?”

His suit monitors reported hard vacuum around him. Well

. . . of course. He’d been in vacuum when they’d shoved him
inside. He tried to rub his eyes, and was frustrated when his
gauntlet bumped against the side of his helmet. He wasn’t
thinking very well.

Garroway was seriously tempted to open his helmet. Ex-
plosive decompression would kill him pretty quick—a rush
of air from his lungs, a sharp pain as he gasped for breath. A
moment or two of pain and cold and growing numbness . . .

The thought of slowly baking to death in hard radia-
tion was not nearly so pleasant. In his mind’s eye, he could
imagine the blistering, the sloughing skin. His internal nano
would fight to keep his organ systems going, though. He
might linger . . . how long?

Achilles had not responded right away. Maybe the AI

2
was balancing the psychological harm the news might
impart. Hell, he knew he was going to die. . . .

“There’s no way to be sure,” Achilles told him. “The
dosage you’ve received already is fatal, and you’re picking
up more rads with each passing moment. Without interven-
tion, and depending on the efficiency of your medinano at
handling things like organ system shut-down and internal
hemorrhage, I estimate you will survive between twenty-
four and thirty-six hours.”

A day to a day and a half of agony. He already hurt, and
he knew the pain would get worse.

Better to crack his helmet while he still could, while he
still had some strength.

STAR STRIKE

379

“What did you mean by ‘intervention?”

“There remains the very real possibility of rescue,”

Achilles told him. “Do you think your comrades will give

2
up on you without even trying to find you?”

“No,” he said. Marines never abandoned their own. “No,
but what chance is there of them finding us?”

The MIEF flotilla on this side of the stargate was poised
to enter Alcubierre Drive just before the wave-front hit them.

If all went according to plan, the Xul ships would have been
overwhelmed and destroyed before they could pursue. The

MIEF ships would have retired to a safe distance, outside
of the star’s primary blast radius, then would have begun
searching along our projected line of flight. They would not
leave you.

“Yeah . . . but if what you say is right, we lost our drive
fifty light-minutes out from the star. We were supposed to
stay under Drive until we were over five times farther out.

This is a very tiny ship. They’ll never . . . never . . .” He
stopped, overwhelmed once again by savage nausea. He
began vomiting, and when there was nothing left to come
up he continued retching again and again and again. He lay
there, wondering if that was the end of it, and then he began
vomiting again . . . this time blood.

His helmet systems drained much of the mess, keeping
him from drowning, but he wore a mask of foul slime, and
the pain was nearly unbearable. He was so weak that each
breath was a struggle. The stench . . . the stench alone made
him long for death.

“Even . . . if they find us . . .” he said at last. “I’m an
irrie.”

“Not true, Private. What is it you humans like to say . . .

‘where there’s life, there’s hope’? The medical facilities aboard
the Samar are quite good. The facilities on the Barton are
even better. Radiation poisoning is well understood. There
are nanomedical techniques that—”

“They’re not fucking going to find us, damn it! We are
a very small grain of sand lost in a very large ocean.” He
paused, gasping for a moment for his next breath. When he
had strength again, he added, “Take over, Achilles. If they

380

IAN DOUGLAS
do find us, they’ll want a complete download of all of this.

I’m cracking my helmet.”

“I recommend that you do nothing, Private.”

“Who are you to give me orders?”

“I believe there is a genuine chance that help might come.

It is my duty to preserve your life, if possible.”

“Fuck you. . . .”

He reached for the lever on the side of his neck coupling
that would release the helmet lock, but he couldn’t move his
arm.

“Achilles? Is that you?”

“I have overridden your armor’s power systems, Private.

Help is on the way.”

He struggled for a moment, trying to move his leaden
right arm, without success.

There was another way. He brought to mind a particular
mental code, the code that would let him switch Achilles off.

He wasn’t entirely sure it would work. The code Sandre had
taught him essentially caused the AI to overlook him without
realizing he couldn’t be seen, but that was for when Achilles
was running in the hardware of a platoon of a hundred or so

Marines. If there was just one Marine, and the AI was resi-
dent inside his internal hardware, what would happen?

He thought-clicked the code.

“Achilles?”

There was no response. Garroway tried moving his arm.

It moved, sliding heavily across the surface of the Euler
ship’s cockpit deck. His glove hit the side of his helmet, and
he fumbled for a moment, trying to find the lever.

He thought about Sandre.

He thought about the Corps. . . .

Ontos 7

Aquila Space

1842 hrs GMT

“Got him!” Warhurst cried. “Haul him in, gently!”

Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst, armor clad, was clinging
to the flame-scoured hull of the Euler triggership with one

STAR STRIKE

381
hand and both legs, his other hand gripping the line extend-
ing from the Ontos cargo deck.

The long, desperate search had paid off. Every ship in the

MIEF had been looking for him, including Samar, Chosin,

Lejeune, two wings of aerospace fighters, and fifty human-
piloted Euler triggerships that had come across just as soon
as it had been verified that the stargate was still operating.

The smaller ships couldn’t search for long in the hellishly
high radiation fields here, but they’d contributed . . . mostly
by patrolling along the blast front to make sure there were
no surviving Xul in the system.

It had been Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey, back at RFS

Alpha, who’d suggested using clouds of NeP probes, firing
them at high velocity along the projected line of Garroway’s
flight path out from the star. There was no radio signal to
track, and the Euler triggership’s infrared signature was lost
in the far greater heat-glare of the exploding star.

But by chance alone, some few of those millions of nano
e-penetrators, their antenna-nets flung wide, had passed
through the shadow cast by the triggership, detected the
faintest fall-off of light from the star, and homed on the
source.

One had struck the triggership’s hull, and transmitted
back to the Mars the triggership’s hull composition and its
location.

Moments later, Mars and Lejeune were closing on the
spot, far deeper into the deadly white blossom of the explod-
ing star than anyone had guessed.

Ontos 7 had been back on board the Lejeune. Warhurst,

Eden, and Galena had emerged from the battered carrier’s
launch bay to make the actual capture.

The Euler triggership was too large to winch into the

Ontos’ cargo bay. Instead, Warhurst had emerged with a
tow cable and used a nanolock to fuse it to the tiny vessel’s
hull.

“The controls aren’t working,” he said after a moment’s
trying to link with the triggership’s AI. “It won’t respond to
the codes. I’ll have to melt through the hull.” He brought his
fist down on the hull, hard, several times. “Hey, in there!”

382

IAN DOUGLAS
he called on the assigned frequency. “Garroway! Do you
hear me? We’re going to get you out!”

There was no response, which could mean that Garro-
way’s radio was out. Or, judging from the look of that hull,
and the levels of background radiation, it could mean—

No. Don’t think about that.

Warhurst had been Garroway’s DI. He still thought of the
kid as one of his Marines.

He could feel the mad tingle, the burn of the radiation.

The nova was an intensely brilliant blaze of light that blot-
ted out one entire half of the universe, and turned his visor
opaque every time he twisted in that direction. He’d learned
to keep his back to the star. Even then, the reflection off the
triggership’s hull was so bright he could scarcely see any-
thing at all.

He pulled a squeeze tube from a thigh pouch and began
squeezing the contents out onto the Euler vessel’s hull.

“Warhurst?” Eden’s voice said from inside the Ontos.

“You’ve got five minutes.”

“I know, I know.” The Ontos’ magnetic screens pro-
vided some shielding, at least, from particulate radiation.

Out here, there was nothing but his armor. He knew he was
being badly burned, but he tried not to think about that. His

660-armor was deflecting the worst of the hard stuff, es-
pecially the heavier particles, but he only had another five
minutes or so out here before he started suffering physical
effects—nausea and vomiting, sloughing skin, weakness,
bleeding. . . .

No matter what, it would be medical cybe-hibe and nano-
reconstruction on board the Barton for him, no question. . . .

But that was a small enough price to pay, if he could bring

Garroway with him.

The paste outlined a rectangle 2 meters long and a meter
wide. He pulled a nanocharge release from another pouch,
stuck it in the paste, and pulled his hand away. “Fire in the
hole.”

There was no actual fire, of course. The nano was nano-D,
designed to eat quickly through various composites. A quick
test had already verified that it worked on Euler ship hulls.

STAR STRIKE

383

Something like white talcum exploded from the strip,
and the hull section floated free, opening up the craft’s inte-
rior. There was no need for his armor lights. The dying sun
behind him illuminated the interior clearly. Reaching in, he
grabbed Garroway’s arm.

“Garroway? You okay?”

At first there was no reaction, and he thought—

Garroway moved. He couldn’t turn his helmet, but War-
hurst could see movement behind the vomit smeared visor.

The Marine’s hand reached out and grabbed Warhurst’s
wrist, weak . . . but alive. Alive.

“I’ve got him, people,” Warhurst said. “I’m bringing him
in. . . .”

Epilogue�

1501.1103

UCS Barton

Cygni Space

0915 hrs GMT

“Garroway? How you feeling, son?”

Garroway opened his eyes, trying to focus. There was a
tall man standing next to him. A tall man in a Marine dress
uniform.

“Terrible,” he replied. He managed to focus on the ap-
parition’s rank tabs, and his eyes opened wider. “Uh . . .

terrible, sir!” He tried to sit up, and failed. He was pinned to
the bed by a labyrinth of tubes, conduits, and data feeds.

“At ease, at ease,” the apparition said. “I’m General Alex-
ander. They told me they were bringing you out of medical
cybe-hibe this morning. I wanted to stop by and see you.”

“Uh, yes, sir.” He blinked. The last thing he remem-
bered . . .

“You have every right to feel terrible. I gather they’ve
been practically regrowing you from scratch. Right now,

I think you have more medical nano inside you than you
have cells, snipping out the bad bits and weaving together
the good!”

“I . . . was going to kill myself. I was trying to kill
myself. . . .”

“I know. Your platoon AI told us all about it.” Alexander
folded his arms. “I suppose I should chew you a new one for
trying to destroy government property. But under the cir-

STAR STRIKE

385
cumstances, you had every right. I’m just glad you didn’t
carry it through.”

“I tried, sir. I really did. But I couldn’t find the catch on
my helmet.”

He grinned. “Yeah. I heard, Achilles said when you shut
him out, he couldn’t freeze your arm actuators any longer,
but he could still overload the sensory feedback circuits
in the sleeve of your armor. Not lock them, but feed extra
energy through them, burn them out. You thought you were
reaching for the release lever, but you couldn’t control the
arm of your 660 well enough to find it.”

“I . . . know. I kept hitting my helmet, scraping at the side.

Couldn’t figure why I couldn’t hit it. Such a simple thing.

Then . . . then I heard a thump on the ship’s hull. I thought

God was knocking.”

“Almost,” Alexander said, nodding. “Gunnery Sergeant

Warhurst. Now Staff Sergeant Warhurst, by the way. He’s in
the next compartment over, next to yours. You’ll be able to
thank him in person in a day or two, I’m told.”

“ ‘Next compartment?’ Where are we, anyway, sir?”

“You’re on board the medical ship Barton. You’ve been
a long time healing. So has he, though he wasn’t nearly as
burned to a crisp as you were!”

“How . . . long?”

“About a month. It’s now 15 January, in this, the Year of
our Corps 1103.”

“A month! And . . . did it work? The mission, I mean.”

“Perfectly. Complete success. You followed your mission
profile down to the letter, the star blew, and as near as we
can tell, every Xul in the system was vaporized.” His face
showed a sudden sadness. “We lost a lot of ships before it
was all over. A lot of people. But most of the MIEF came
through.”

“So . . . what happens now, sir?”

“Operation Gorgon continues. We rest, we refit. We make
up our losses, both in men and ships. And we plan where to
hit the Xul next.”

“We have a weapon that can kick ’em right where it hurts,

General.”

386

IAN DOUGLAS

“And allies,” Alexander added. “Damned if I know how
we’re going to incorporate them into a Marine unit, but we
have allies. The Eulers, definitely. And maybe some others
as well.”

“Uh, where are we now, anyway? Back at Earth? Or at

Puller 659?”

“Actually, we’re in Aquila Space, though we have pickets
rotating out at Starwall, watching for the Xul. We’ve been in
contact with Earth, though, with QCC . . . and with Aurore,
too, and there’s been some ship traffic back and forth. You’ll
be interested to know that we might have some unexpected
reinforcements coming through the Gate soon. The PEs
are joining us. The Rommel and some of the other ships at

Puller have already come through. I guess the PanEuropeans
were rather impressed by your little escapade at Starwall.

Or . . .” He shrugged. “Maybe they just don’t want us to have
the technology for blowing up stars all to ourselves. The
politics of this are going to be damned interesting.”

“Shit, sir. Who the hell needs them? We can take on the

Xul ourselves!”

Alexander grinned. “That’s the spirit, Marine.” Bend-
ing over, he clapped Garroway’s shoulder, then reached into
a belt pouch. “Oh, by the way. I’ve got something for you
here. . . .”

He pulled out two felt-covered gray cases, and opened
them one after another, then set them on the pillow by Gar-
roway’s head. Garroway turned his head, trying to focus on
them.

“The Purple Heart,” Alexander said. “And the Medal of

Honor. There’ll be a formal ceremony later, when you’re re-
covered, but I wanted to be the one to let you know.”

“I . . . I don’t know what to say, sir.”

Alexander shrugged. “What is there to say? You earned
them both.”

“But it wasn’t just me, sir. I was just stupid enough to
volunteer.”

“You’re right, of course. But, well . . . you and I both
know it’s not about medals.”

“No, sir.”

STAR STRIKE

387

He gestured at the Medal of Honor, gold star gleaming
beneath a blue silk ribbon, a design a millennium old. “I did
some checking. I gather you’re not the first Garroway to win
that little blue ribbon.”

“No, sir.” Sands of Mars Garroway had won the coveted
award some eight centuries before.

Tradition.

Duty.

Brotherhood.

“General?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for coming after me. For looking for me. I . . . I
guess I kind of lost faith out there. I didn’t think you would
find me.”

“Hey, Marines never leave their own behind. Never.”

“I . . . know.”

“Semper fi,” Alexander told him. “Semper fi, Marine.”

Acknowledgments�

My special thanks to David Plottel, friend, programmer,
mathematician, and ubergeek, for his insights into Leonhard

Euler and the God-equation known as Euler’s Identity.

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

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.

STAR STRIKE: BOOK ONE OF THE INHERITANCE.

TRILOG

Y. 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, non-transferable right to access and read
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decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or
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electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter
invented, without the express written permission of

HarperCollins e-books.

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Document Outline

- Title Page

- Dedication Page

- Contents

- Prologue
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Chapter Eleven
- Chapter Twelve
- Chapter Thirteen
- Chapter Fourteen
- Chapter Fifteen
- Chapter Sixteen
- Chapter Seventeen
- Chapter Eighteen
- Chapter Nineteen
- Chapter Twenty
- Chapter Twenty-One
- Chapter Twenty-Two
- Chapter Twenty-Three
- Chapter Twenty-Four
- Chapter Twenty-Five
- Chapter Twenty-Six
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- By Ian Douglas
- Copyright Notice
- About the Publisher

Table of Contents

- Prologue
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Other Books by Ian Douglas
- Cover
- Copyright
- About the Publisher
- Prologue�
- 7�
- 15�
- 23�