Battlespace (24 page)

At their leisurely approach velocity of five meters per second, they would cover the remaining eight kilometers in twenty-six and a half minutes. That would leave them with three and a half hours on the surface.

During combat, of course, twenty-six minutes was a very long eternity indeed.

And there was not a damned thing in the universe they could do in that time, save wait, watch, and hope the Wiggles didn't see them.

SF/A-2 Starhawk
Talon Three
Sirius Stargate Drop Zone
1245 hours, Shipboard time

For long minutes, now, Alexander had maneuvered his Starhawk above the Wheel's face, locating targets and raking them with laser and chain-gun fire. Besides his Starhawk's standard 800-Megawatt chin laser, he was using a Mark XXVII pod load-out locked in beneath his starboard wing, mounting twin 2-K Mw pulse lasers and an M-82 Thorhammer 30mm high-velocity chain gun, firing 280-gram high-explosive rounds at ten rounds per second.

Against infantry in the open, or even standard bunkers and redoubts, the Starhawk's surface-strike capabilities were awesome. Unfortunately, it was tough to gauge just how ef
fective the strike fighter bombardment against the Wheel's defenses actually were.

By now, the surface of the Wheel had been extensively mapped and even parts of the interior structure had been unveiled by the sensors scattered throughout the combat area. Computer graphics overlaid Alexander's noumenal vision, marking gun turrets, heat vents, ports, and various structures of unknown purpose.

Of particular interest were the oddly shaped turrets—like elongated, angular observatory domes—housing the positron beam projectors. Those stood out as bright red triangles in his mind's eye, marked by the powerful flux of magnetic forces focused within each one.

“
Talon Six
,
Talon Three
,” he called, dropping across the DZ from rim toward the gate's vast, central opening. “I've got a target, Sector one-five. I'm on it.”

“Copy Three. Mind the bumps.”

“Roger that.” Thought-clicking on a weapons turret, he opened fire with his pod lasers. Light flared from the target, as metallic vapor exploded into hard vacuum.

His spacecraft slanted across the alien landscape, then passed over the inner edge of the Wheel's structure, entering the volume of space above the eighteen-kilometer-wide central opening. Alexander's stomach gave a sudden lurch as he crossed a gravity gradient—one of the “bumps” Six had warned him to mind. Suddenly the Starhawk was falling, accelerating at almost 120 meters per second squared. He fired his ventral thrusters, compensating.

Those things had been giving the aerospace fighter squadrons fits since they approached the Wheel. The entire stargate possessed the mass of a small star, something like eight percent of Sol, with a gravitational tug of about twelve gravities. Somehow, though, the gate's builders had partially shielded the structure's gravitational field. Over the face of the Wheel, where the Marines hoped to land, surface gravity
was only a bit over one G and that seemed somehow restricted to within a few meters of the structure itself. Entering the gravitationally stressed region above the central opening of the Wheel, or passing the boundary between one gravity and twelve, could be a bit rough.

We don't know what the hell we're up against
, Alexander thought, cutting in his main drive, boosting hard.

Suddenly, a blast of static shrilled in his head and his drive went dead. He was still falling, but now his plasma drive was useless.

Panic clawed at him. Still accelerating in free fall at twelve gravities, the Starhawk plunged into the Sirius Stargate.

Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Above the Sirius Stargate
1246 hours, Shipboard time

Almost there
….

Garroway had long since positioned himself feet “down,” though, technically, he was still in zero-G and there was no such thing as down. Still, the surface of the stargate was now spread out beneath his feet like an eerie, black, and blasted landscape, swiftly rising to meet him.

The battle, silent and almost peaceful in its unfolding, continued around him. Radio chatter was the only sound to be heard, punctuated occasionally by blasts of static. There'd been casualties; TRAP 2-2 had taken a direct hit, mercifully several minutes after it had released its cargo of Marines. According to the company data feed, three Marines—Busch, Nicholson, and Briley, all in A Section—had been hit…or, at least, their suit transponders and netlinks had stopped communicating.

To his right, toward the emptiness within the stargate's cir
cle, Garroway watched with cold horror as a Starhawk fighter fell toward the gate, entered it…and vanished.

The poor bastard
….

The Marines had spent a lot of time these past few days discussing what would happen if they missed the Wheel and fell through the gateway itself, an open gate leading…where?

No one knew, though theories abounded. All knew that a downloaded copy of the MIEU's CC AI had fallen through the gate two days earlier and not reappeared. There were also rumors that the brass had already fired a number of probes through the open gate deliberately, in hopes of getting a few, at least, back with memories intact of the other side.

If true, no one had reported the results to the Marines.

For some minutes, Garroway had wondered if the Navy pilot onboard TRAP 1-2 had misjudged. His landing point, clearly, was going to be ominously close to the inner edge of the Wheel. Now, as he closed the last hundred meters, he could see that he was not going to end up finding out for himself. His touchdown point was a good fifty meters or more away from the edge, and the relief he felt, like an incoming wave of giddiness, wiped away fear and horror and even excitement.
I'm going to make it
.

And for the moment, that was enough.

He did wonder if that Marine Starhawk pilot had been alive when he went through the gate and, if so, what he was seeing now….

SF/A-2 Starhawk
Talon Three
Place unknown
Time unknown

At first, Alexander was blind.

Well, not
blind
, exactly. He could see the stars, could see a
planet and…and
things
. The problem was putting exactly what he was seeing together into something coherent. Something recognizable.

He'd heard, once, in a download on quantum physics, that when Columbus's tiny fleet of exploration had first arrived in the New World, the Taino peoples living in the Bahamas at the time literally could not see the Spanish ships. One, a medicine man or shaman for the tribe, did notice some unusual ripples on the water offshore, and wondered what could possibly be causing them. For several days in succession, he came down to the beach and looked, staring at the horizon, studying the water, trying to see…
something
.

Finally, according to the story, he was able to see three vessels, three “great canoes with white wings” utterly unlike anything he'd ever seen before. Once he'd seen them, he was able to tell others and, because they trusted him, in time the other people of the tribe could see them as well.

Alexander had no idea if the story was literally true. It seemed too utterly, weirdly fantastic to be fact. At the same time, the science of quantum physics had long ago established that “reality” was a slippery critter, one determined more inside the brain than outside of it. If the brain had nothing whatsoever to relate to in the flood of impressions coming in, then perhaps partial blindness was the result.

That was what he was facing now. He knew he was seeing stars in this strange, alien place, but he was having considerable difficulty sorting out the patterns around him. Behind him was…what? A planetoid, its surface densely cluttered by…things that looked more grown than constructed…an artificial moon or an enormous space station of some kind. An elliptical hole opening deep into the surface revealed the maw of the stargate through which he'd just emerged.

Ahead was a star, shrunken and bloody in color, shrouded behind something like a red-hued haze or fog. Between him
and the star, a planet showed a sharp-rimmed black disk against the fog, edged by a slim, reddish crescent.

To the left and above, the sky was largely empty, a black gulf with only a very thin scattering of faint stars or the fuzzy nebulosities of distant galaxies or globular star clusters. Empty…except for
there
, behind him and high to the left, partially blocked by the stargate from which he'd just emerged, where an explosion of stars appeared frozen in midburst.

Scoop up a million suns or so. Pack them together within a volume of space two hundred light-years across, a fuzzy snowball of stars.
That
was what he was seeing, the thronging, dense star-swarm of a globular cluster.

And to the right and below…

That
was strangeness. Stars were crowed upon stars, billions of them, but so faint and so distant as to present a kind of dim blue graininess rather than a vista comprised of distinct stars. It was very much like looking at the track of the Milky Way across the summer's sky back home, as seen from the relatively pollution-free clarity above the mountains of Montana, or far out at sea.

If that red star up ahead had not been shrouded in its cocoon of red-tinted fog, he knew he would be unable to see any detail in what was there at all. As it was, enough light leaked through from the dwarf star to render the vista vanishingly faint.

He tried looking at his surroundings in different ways. Without a clear canopy on his fighter, he could only see what his fighter's electronics fed through to him by way of his neural implant. He talked to Connie, having her “look” at different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. He had her block out the light from the local star so he could see the thing more clearly. He had her adjust both brightness and contrast, trying to better understand what he was
almost
seeing.

After ten minutes, the pieces were beginning to fall into
place, mostly because he already thought he knew just what it was he was seeing. He'd just not expected…this.

That faint blue graininess was indeed like the Milky Way he remembered from those summer nights back home. But rather than existing as a single ragged band across the night sky,
this
Milky Way twisted in upon itself like a whirlpool or like the swirling clouds of a hurricane viewed from low orbit. The central core was as indistinct as were the spiral arms, but somewhat thicker, denser, and showing a faint blush of reddish or orange light. Smears of black, of red, of blue, of other shades and hues almost too faint to be seen piled up in ramparts along the core and drew converging, spiraling lanes among those crowded stars almost all the way to the center.

The core itself resembled nothing so much as an immense, flattened sphere of hazy light, grainy to the naked eye like the spiral arms, but only a step removed from invisibility.

Alexander had seen photographs of spiral galaxies, of course. And he knew that what he was seeing now must be something no human had ever before seen—his own galaxy, the Milky Way, but viewed from just outside—or above—the core.

What made it hard to recognize was its faintness. The photographs he'd seen all were the results of
long
time exposures, where photons from an inherently faint background could pile up on film or CCDs over a period of hours, while the human retina operated from instant to instant, with no time lag for accumulation at all.

It was also strange to see so
much
detail, despite the faintness of those spiral arms. They filled fully half of the sky, like the ground seen from a sharply banking aircraft, yet they seemed almost close enough to touch. He could make out the empty-seeming gaps between the far-flung spiral arms, the lanes of dust and gas, the faint color of immense nebulae.

Taken all together, the spiral face of the galaxy, the swarming suns of the cluster astern, the mind-bending emptiness of the Void beyond—it was too much to absorb all at once.

Alexander did not think of himself as a religious person.

He had been once. His parents had been Army of Christ Spiritualists, Bible fundamentalists who believed in salvation by grace, Holy Spirit baptism, and communion with the beloved dead. Alexander hadn't been to a service or a séance since he'd been fifteen, however. The ACS taught that the world was a special creation of God that was six thousand years old, that extraterrestrials were demons bent on Humankind's spiritual destruction, and that the stars of the night sky were a kind of illusion designed by the Creator to manifest His own glory. There were parts of that doctrine Alexander had never been able to wrap his mind around—especially the idea that God would resort to a kind of trickery to manipulate humans—and he'd pretty much stopped believing.

But he felt distinct stirrings of that old religion now, mingled with feelings of both fear and awe. The face of the galaxy—like the Face of God—was too vast to take in all at once.

If there
was
a God, He was far, far larger than the creature imagined by the pastor at his ACS church.

“My God…” was all Alexander could say aloud, his voice a cracked whisper. “
My God
….”

Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
TRAP 1-2
Sirius Stargate, surface
1247 hours, Shipboard time

Only a few more meters to go.

Fire from the Wheel seemed almost nonexistent now, though whether that was part of an enemy strategy of deliberately holding back or the result of the pounding by Marine aerospace fighters and Navy starships was unclear. Garroway readied himself for the landing, gripping his laser rifle tightly in his gauntleted hands, bending his knees, trying above all to relax. The surface rushed up to meet him.