Battlespace (17 page)

And on March 28, they started waking up the Marines.

29
MARCH
2170

Deck 2, Hab 1,
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
15,000,000 kilometers from
Stargate Sirius
1522 hours, Shipboard time

For the second time in what
felt
like only two months, Garroway struggled to consciousness, choking on the
lung-filling nanogel that had kept him technically alive throughout the long voyage. For a claustrophobic few moments, he tried desperately to figure out where he was and what had happened. He was aware of a searing pain in his lungs as he tried to breathe, of a lesser, emptier pain in his belly, of the foul stink of the inside of the coffin-sized cylinder.

His arm burned slightly and a robotic injector arm withdrew into a side compartment. “Lie still and breathe deeply,” a familiar, genderless voice told him. “Do not try to leave your cell. A transition medical team will be with you momentarily.”

I made it
, he thought.
Again
…

He lay naked on the pallet inside the softly lit, sealed canister until the last of the gel drained away and the hatch next to his head cracked open. Harsh light beat at his eyes as the pallet slid into the chilly emptiness of the compartment. Figures leaned over him, checking instrument readings, pupil dilation, and breathing. “You okay, guy?” one of the shapes asked him. “What's your ID?”

“Garroway, John. Corporal, serial number 19283-33-…”

“He's tracking,” the other shape said.

“Hey, Garroway?” the first said, leaning a bit closer. “Remember me?”

He squinted his eyes, trying to see against the light. The two faces came into focus, more or less.

“You!” he said, recognizing the man. “Doc…uh…it's Lee, isn't it?”

“That's me.”

“The corpsman who saved my life a couple weeks ago.”

“That's me. Only it wasn't a couple of weeks ago. Welcome to 2170, Marine.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Ah, they woke me early so I could help break you guys out of cold storage.”

“So…we made it. We're at Sirius?”

“That we are. There are downloads available, when you want to access them. Meanwhile, you know the drill by now. Take it easy. Sit up slowly when you feel strong enough. Showers and clothing issue are on the other side of the compartment. And you can get yourself something to eat.”

Hunger rumbled inside Garroway's stomach. “Something to eat sounds
real
good just now.”

“Right. I'll catch you later, Marine.” The two moved to the next cybehibe container hatch and began cycling it open.

Closing his eyes, he thought-clicked into the shipboard Net and downloaded the current sitrep. All eight ships of the task force had made it safely. The stargate was fifteen million kilometers away—invisibly distant from the ships, but a number of views transmitted by remote probes was available. Garroway clicked through several of these before settling on one—a shot taken from an oblique angle to the gate, so that it appeared as a severely flattened ellipse. By magnifying the image, he could see considerable detail in the structure, including what looked like flat-topped buildings and a scattering of pinpoint lights.

It certainly looked inhabited. So far, however, there'd been no sign that the approaching flotilla had been noticed, no response to their arrival at all. It was somewhat disconcerting.

Strength returned and hunger clawed at him. He dismissed the link, then slowly sat up, swinging his feet over the side of the pallet. Around him, dozens of Marines were sitting up, moving around, or still lying on their cybehibe pallets, as technicians and corpsmen continued to make the rounds, calling those men and women still locked away in their hibernation cylinders back to life.

“Damned fucking engineers….”

He turned at the noise, which had burst from a rugged, hirsute Marine behind him. “Bax? What's the problem?”

Lance Corporal Clayton Baxter scowled at him as though
it was
his
fault. “The goddamned ship engineers screwed up the pool, is what!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“They screwed up the pool! According to the stats online, we only lost two Marines in cybehibe this time! My money was on twenty-five!”

It took a moment for Garroway to sort through Baxter's logic. The passengers on interstellar flights often ran pools, with the object of predicting just how many of their number would not emerge from hibernation at the end of the journey. Historically, the attrition rate could be as high as twenty percent, though two or three percent was usually closer to the mark. If only two Marines had died this time—a casualty rate of something like a tenth of one percent—it meant the new way of handling deceleration had worked. They'd reached Sirius safely slowed to planetary speeds
and
they hadn't lost twenty or thirty people to malfunction doing it. Apparently, the scientists who'd decided that cybehibe casualties were caused by the radiation flux during turnover had been right, and their fix had worked.

And Baxter was
complaining
about it? Garroway shrugged. Clay Baxter was one of those Marines sometimes referred to as a “rock,” a term suggesting great strength and endurance…but something less than a keen and incisive intelligence. He liked things predictable and
any
change was cause for grumbling.

“You know, Bax, they probably did it just to irritate you.”

“I know, man. Fucking bastards can't leave well enough alone….”

Garroway fell into line for the shower, just behind Kat and Private Alysson Weis. “Good morning, Gare,” Kat told him. “Sleep well?”

“Uh. Like the dead.” He looked at the two women, both attractive, both completely nude, and wondered if the powers-
that-were had slipped something into the nanogel, a libido inhibitory agent of some sort. He felt absolutely zero in the way of arousal.

Well, they were hardly at their most alluring, their hair clumped wet with gel-foam, their bodies stinking
almost
as badly as his. Familiarity took some of the edge off, certainly; there was absolutely nothing like privacy within a Marine platoon, where communal showerheads were a way of life.

Mostly though, his physical hunger blocked any other hungers that might have been nagging at him.
Gods
, he needed something to eat!

Much later, showered, dressed, and fed, he sat in the squad bay with a dozen other Alpha Company Marines.

“So that's the big hoop, is it?” Private Randy Tremkiss observed, his eyes closed as he surveyed one of the images downstreaming off the ship's Net. They'd been examining the shots taken of the stargate from different angles by fast-flying probes as they ate. “Don't look like all that big a blemo.”

“Speak Basic, Kissy,” Dunne admonished. “You're not in Kansas anymore.”

“Uh, yeah. Right, Gunny.” Tremkiss was one of the MIEU's newbie replacements. If the old hands had had it rough blending in with the culture and language of North America after their return from Ishtar, the FNGs were having the same trouble as they tried to fit in with their fellow Marines onboard the
Chapultepec
. The difference was that life in the military possessed a distinct culture all its own.

“You've got filters in your implant,” Dunne added. “Use 'em if you have to.”

Garroway didn't like that part, which felt to him like a kind of thought control. In fact, the filter software flagged certain words in the speaker's mind as he was about to say them, and suggested other words instead. There was nothing compul
sory about it, but it still smacked unhappily of the behavior monitoring software they'd had to use when they went on liberty to an East L.A. condecology.

“What the hell's the difference, Gunny?” he asked. “We all know what Kissy was saying.”

“Maybe. But in
my
platoon and if you're a Marine, you're going to fucking
talk
like a Marine. You copy that?”

“Yeah, Gunny. I copy.”

“Makes sense, Gare,” Sergeant Wes Houston said. He took a swig of coffee from a black mug emblazoned with the USMC globe-and-anchor. “What if Kissy tries to say something important during a firefight and slips into civvie-speak? A misunderstanding could cost lives.”

Garroway looked at Houston—an E-5 sergeant once more—and nodded. “I understand all that, Sarge. I just wonder sometimes where the line gets drawn, you know? Between personal freedom and the needs of the group.”

“‘Personal freedom'?” Lance Corporal Baxter exclaimed. “What the fuck is
that
?”

“Use your language filters, Gare,” Alysson Weis told him with a laugh. “I don't read you!”

“Yeah,” Kat added. “Transmission garbled! You're breaking up! This is the freakin'
Marine
Corps!”

“Oh, yeah,” Garroway said, attempting a flash of humor. “I clean forgot.”

And it was true that anyone signing on in the military voluntarily gave up certain of his or her civil rights for the duration. Military service could
not
be run as a democracy.

“Hey, I don't mind,” Tremkiss said with a shrug. “You guys all sav oldiespeak, an' I tendo. When in Guangzhou, you blow Guangzhese, or vam it.”

“You wanna try that one again, Kissy?” Dunne growled.

“Uh…‘When in China, speak Chinese, or get the hell out?'”

“Better.” He grinned. “What you
don't
want, private, is t'be mistaken for a civilian!”

“Amen to that!” Alysson laughed.

“So, what's the plan?” Eagleton asked, changing the subject. “How're we supposed to capture that gate-thing?”

“Ah, we go up to the front door and knock, of course,” Houston said. He rapped the tabletop. “Anybody home? FR Marines calling.”

“If they let us get that close,” Womicki said. “You guys seen how freakin' big that thing is?”

“Twenty kilometers across,” Garroway said. “With the mass of a couple of Earths.”

“Most of the mass is tied up in a couple of black holes, they say,” Kat pointed out. “According to the download specs, most of that thing is just a big acceleration ring. The actual habitable part probably isn't any bigger than a small town.”

“Yeah,” PFC Vincet Ardmore said. He was another newbie in the platoon, six subjective months out of boot camp, but he was in his midtwenties, older than the usual E-2. “And how many point-defense batteries can that small town deploy? I hoped the honches groz what they're acing.” He stopped, shook his head. “Sorry. Uh…I hope the brass hats know what they're doing.”

“Hey, don't sweat it, Ardie,” Womicki said. “Since when did the brass
ever
know what the fuck it was doing?” The others laughed.

Garroway didn't join in, however. He was studying one of the long-range views of the stargate…or whatever the hell it was, an enormous ring adrift in space. On Ishtar, there'd been plenty of unknowns, including a hollow mountain filled with ancient technology and one hell of an enormous surface-to-orbit cannon, and no one knew what they were getting into on the way in.

This was worse, though. The Annies were primitives, despite an assortment of high-tech weapons handed down from
a few thousand years before and an intelligent computer that linked the Ahannu leaders into a single command network. These people—if the size of that loop and if their use of black holes in a space-based facility were any indication—were way ahead of humans in the technology department. They just might be as many thousands of years ahead of humans as humans were ahead of the Ishtar An.

And that was a decidedly unpleasant thought upon which to dwell.

30
MARCH
2170

SF/A-2 Starhawk
Cassius
Approaching Stargate Sirius
1935 hours, Shipboard time

Cassius was not so much the
pilot
of the Starhawk as, in a very real way, he
was
the Starhawk.

Technically, he wasn't even Cassius, but a copy of Cassius downloaded from the
Chapultepec
's Net. The original—if that term had any meaning in the world of artificial intelligence—remained on the local Net as part of the MIEU command constellation. For identification purposes, he was now CS-1289, Series G-4, Model 8, I-2…with the I standing for
iteration
…and he was resident within the computer control Net of the A-2.

It wasn't
cramped
, exactly—that was a human concept from the world of three dimensions and occupied space—but it was limiting. Rather than being resident within a network of some hundreds of thousands of individual processors on board the
Chapultepec
—from the targeting computers of the MIEU's plasma smartguns to the main navigational computer—Cassius I-2 found himself within a “space” defined by only 714 computer processors and network nodes. A tenuous laser communications feed linked him to Cassius prime and the
Chapultepec
, but, while he
continued to be aware of the flow of data within his parent program, there was also a sense of diminishment…and of isolation.

The Starhawk normally was a manned transatmospheric fighter, a stubby, boomerang-shaped vehicle cloaked in a dead-black radar absorbing skin designed to operate at the fringes of Earth's atmosphere. Since it could fly either with a human pilot or purely under computer control as a UAV, it was a good choice as the automated steed ridden by the AI download, but that didn't mean Cassius I-2 was
comfortable
, if that word had any meaning to a piece of self-aware software.

Time passed, at the dragging realtime rate of 1:1. Cassius had passed most of the past four years subjective in slowtime mode, his time sense slowed by a factor of almost 10
⁵
:1 so that the long, empty months of star travel had passed in what, to a human, would have seemed like four days. No intelligence, whether carbon-based or silicon-based, could have survived the sheer emptiness and boredom of an environment unchanging over such a period of time. Cassius remembered too well the alarming example of the alien AI found within Europa's ice-locked ocean. Half a million years of immobile isolation had left that artificial mind hopelessly insane. While Cassius was not capable of
fear
—not as humans understood the emotion—certain of his survival subroutines tended to pop up unbidden when he reviewed that particular set of data. Neither long-term isolation nor boredom were healthy for any intelligent being and
long-term
, of course, was a strictly relative term. For a being who could process data much more quickly than a human, even a day could pass with the agonizingly glacial boredom of years.

Now, however, his perception of the passage of time was close to the human norm—primarily so that he could communicate directly with the command constellations watching the progress of his flight from the combat center on the
Chapultepec
, 150,000 kilometers astern. He was now 107 kilo
meters out from the objective, and closing with it at two kilometers per second. Surrounding him, 5 kilometers distant and under his direct control, were two dozen AR-7 Argus reconnaissance probes, expendable unmanned craft through which Cassius—and the command constellations back on-board the
Chapultepec
—could hear and see.

You are still in the clear,
a voice whispered in his consciousness.
Move in closer.
The command was accompanied by data describing an optimal close-approach vector.

The voice, relayed by a tight point-to-point laser communications beam, belonged to Cassius Prime, with the command constellation nexus onboard the
Chapultepec
.

Acknowledged
, he replied over the tight beam.
Complying
. He flexed his control interface and felt the
thump
as thrusters adjusted his course by half a degree, and accelerated his approach velocity to 2.75 kps. Four of the Argus probes changed course and speed as well, spreading out a bit, and accelerating at different rates. One, a sacrificial probe on point—boosted to a close rate of 8.0 kps. It would approach the objective in another twelve seconds. He slowed his perception of time by a factor of two. If something happened to the probe, he wanted to see it, and to see it in detail.

He expanded the window showing the point probe's POV in his field of perception. The objective, a ring canted at a sharp angle so that it appeared as a highly flattened ellipse, grew slowly larger…and larger…and larger still, until it no longer fit within the probe's field of view without down-shifting the magnification factor. Cassius opened a second window, the one to show close-up detail, the other to show the entire alien structure. The Argus probe's scanners were picking up a flood of data now and Cassius I-2 relayed every bit back to Cassius Prime as quickly as it came through—data on infrared hotspots, on mass and mass movement, on a sharply curving gravitational gradient, on powerful magnetic fields…

Twelve-point-seven kilometers out, the point probe vanished in a sudden, bright flare of silent light.

Battle analyses
, the voice of Cassius Prime demanded.
Weapon evaluation
.

Unknown
, he replied.
Radiation backscatter suggests the 511 ke V line consistent with positron annihilation, however.

He waited out the two and a half second time lag as his reply crawled up the laser com beam to the fleet and an answer crawled back:
Agreed. Continue approach.

Two more Argus probes vectored closer to the objective. Positron annihilation meant the objective was using antimatter—specifically positrons, the positively charged AM opposite of negatively charged electrons—as a weapon. The Marines used antimatter warheads, of course, but the technology of creating and firing a beam of positrons was considerably in advance of current Earth military technology.

At 5 kps, the two Argus probes drew closer. Twelve-point-seven kilometers out, both vanished once again. This time, Cassius I-2 caught to distinct spectra of positronic beams directed from the objective's surface.

Cassius I-2 slowed his approach velocity, but continued his approach.

Combat Command Center
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
1936 hours, Shipboard time

Chapultepec
's Combat Command Center was a cramped space at the best of times, a compartment seemingly cluttered with monitors and communications stations. Its single saving grace was that it was located in a nonrotating module on the ship's spine, actually inside the R-M tank. Zero gravity allowed those working inside to take advantage of a three-dimensional volume instead of a two-
dimensional deck, which allowed for a bit more breathing room, at least.

Still, Ramsey's command constellation took up most of that space, which they claustrophobically shared with Admiral Harris and the onboard naval personnel of the flotilla's command group. Though the data they were viewing appeared on various of the flatscreen monitors, most of them were in fact watching it noumenally, through windows opened by their implants within their minds. If the others attending the meeting electronically—General Dominick and his command constellation and the four civilians present on the expedition—had all been
physically
present in that compartment, the crowding would have been impossible. Even with just the eight naval personnel and the five Marines of the MIEU's CC present, it was tough to move without finding someone's elbow—or some other protruding body part—in your face.

So while Ramsey and his constellation shared the cramped volume of the CCC with Admiral Harris and his people, the rest tuned in on the shared noumenon, Dominick and his staff linked in from the flotilla's flagship,
Ranger
; the civilians from their quarters on
Chapultepec
's Hab One module; and the command staffs of the other manned starships.

All of the flatscreens—and the noumenal displays opened in their minds—had been showing the same view at the moment—a split-screen close-up of the stargate from two vantage points, with an inset window in the upper left showing the entire ring. The data, relayed by Cassius I-2, was coming from the two Argus probes now closing to within a few kilometers of the objective.

And then, as sudden as a punch to the gut, all three windows had just flashed white with snow, then gone blank.

The view from Cassius I-2's Starhawk reappeared, a long-range magnified view of the enigmatic stargate ring.

“Well,” General Dominick said. “That, I would say, is
pretty conclusive. That thing is inhabited and the inhabitants are not friendly.”

“It does make our job a damned sight tougher,” Admiral Harris observed.

“Antimatter beams,” Ramsey said. “Our people won't stand a chance.”

“There's got to be a way to get closer,” Major Ricia Anderson said. She was Ramsey's chief-of-staff in the MIEU's CC, a tough, no-nonsense Marine who'd refused a promotion to lieutenant colonel to be on General Kinsey's staff at USMCSPACCOM in order to stay with the MIEU. “We know the Goldies came through unharmed.”

Goldies was what they'd taken to calling the huge ship—its hull gleaming like polished gold—that had emerged from the gate and destroyed or swallowed the
Wings of Isis
. It was assumed that the Goldies were the builders—or, at least, the current owners—of the stargate, though, of course, no one could know for sure that that was the case. They were operating in a hard data vacuum here and the first attempt to fill that vacuum in a bit had just been met by a positron beam.

“Obviously we don't have the right IFF codes,” Colonel Frank Hunter said. Hunter was Army, a member of Dominick's command staff. “We may have to do a high-speed rush-and-dump, and eat the casualties.”

“Not acceptable, Colonel,” Ramsey said. “My Marines are not Mahdis.”

The Kingdom of Allah, back on Earth, was led by a coalition of governments built around a man claiming to be the Mahdi, supposedly a kind of Shi'ite messiah. Since the fighting in Egypt in 2138, Marines had attached the name to the Mahdi's more fanatical troops…the ones who'd used human wave tactics in suicidal battles from Cairo to Kirghiz.

“We didn't come eight and a half light-years to stand off at a distance and
watch
, General,” Dominick told him.

“Might I make an observation?” the voice of Cassius said
within their noumenal awareness. Cassius was, in fact, the sixth member of Ramsey's constellation, the one member who was not a Marine—or even human.

“Of course, Cassius,” Ramsey said. “What've you got?”

“All three probes were destroyed at a range from the nearest surface of the objective of
exactly
12,763.8 meters. This strongly suggests that the antimatter beam weapons are under automatic control.”

“So?” Dominick growled. “All that says is we need to broadcast the right code going in. And we don't have it.”

“Not necessarily, General,” Cassius told him. “We may be looking at a meteor defense system. It is possible that we are simply approaching at too great a velocity.”

“Huh?” Dominick sounded startled. “Do you to say mean that if our people go in slowly enough, the stargate's defenses won't see them?”

“It's a possibility,” the AI's voice went on, “and one I suggest we investigate.”

An hour later they had proof that Cassius Prime's suggestion was right. Cassius I-2 had vectored eight more Argus probes in toward the stargate ring one by one, and one by one the first seven had been vaporized by tightly focused beams of antielectrons. The eighth, with an approach velocity of only 7 meters per second, had slipped past the magic 12.7 kilometer line and actually drifted across the entire width of the ring at an “altitude” of less than 3 meters.

There was absolutely no indication of a response by anyone onboard…at least, not until the Argus probe drifted past the inside edge of the ring. Suddenly, its onboard instrumentation began registering an extremely powerful gravitational field and the little robot was inexorably dragged down into the ring's central opening.

And then it was gone, as though a huge and invisible hand had yanked it from the sky. No explosion, no positron beam, just…
gone
.

“That certainly supports the notion that the thing is a transport device,” Ricia Anderson observed. “You fly into the center of the ring and you vanish. Do you think the probe ended up at some other star?”

“Well, Colonel, we're not getting signals from it now, that's for damned sure,” a Command Center technician said. She was Sergeant Major Vanya Barnes, and she was the senior enlisted component of Ramsey's command constellation. “It's either been ripped to shreds or it's someplace else. Take your pick.”

“At least we're getting decent data now,” Ramsey observed. He was watching a pair of secondary windows open in his mind, where data streams from seven probes were being displayed simultaneously.

“I don't know about the word
decent
, General,” Barnes told him. “Those gravitational readings are decidedly weird. It's like normal gravity…about a tenth of a G…over the outer surface of the ring, nice and stable, y'know? But when you go over the sides, the fluctuations are totally screwed. I can't make heads or asses out of these readings.”

“Shielding,” the voice of Dr. Marie Valle suggested. “My God, maybe they have some means of shielding against gravity!”