Battlespace (41 page)

5
APRIL
2170

Corporal Garroway
Cluster Space
1215 hours, Shipboard time

How long had it been since he'd slept last? Garroway had lost track. It was twelve hours, more or less, since the battle on the Xul ship.

Three hours since he'd come…here.

He stood on the surface of an airless, dusty rock, the horizon so close he could almost touch it, the sky a glory of un-earthly majesty and wonder. This was what they were calling Cluster Space, a place they were now claiming was at
least
30,000 light-years from home. Half of the sky was filled with the subtle smear of starlight that was the home Galaxy, the Milky Way. It had taken Garroway quite a while to even make sense out of what he was seeing, for the reality bore little resemblance to the time-exposure photographs he'd seen in books and astronomy-text downloads. The subtle blue glow of the spiral arms, the warmer, ruddier glow at the core with a fuzzy, star-like nucleus, the bands and lanes of dust and gas, the iridescent colors of the nebulae…

At his back, the globular star cluster covered sixteen times the area of the Moon seen from Earth, and was bright enough to cast a shadow. The local planet and its dwarf sun were out
of sight, at the moment, below the ridiculously close, sharp horizon. The dusty rock he was standing on was a twenty-kilometer planetoid with a stargate bored into its core, a different kind of stargate than the one at Sirius…maybe even an entirely different kind of technology.

Garroway didn't know and didn't care. He'd volunteered to come through with the security team accompanying the engineers. They'd searched the moonlet for inhabitants—there were none—and now they were planting a pair of antimatter bombs that would blow this gate into rubble. Elsewhere, Starhawk fighters had gone out, located a Marine Starhawk that had fallen through during the battle, and already had it under tow through the Gate. The word was that the pilot was in bad shape, but that he would live.

Which was more than could be said of a number of good Marines.

“Gare?” a voice called. “You okay?”

It was Kat. “Yeah,” he replied. “Just thinking.”

She joined him, her chamelearmor mingling the dark gray of the planetoid beneath their feet with the black of space. “You've been thinking for hours.
Never
a good sign.”

“Did you hear the scuttlebutt about the
Isis
people?”

“Yeah. I heard.”

They were saying that the
Isis
crew had been killed twenty-two years ago. That was what was going into the official report. But Dunne had heard a bit more—he'd hacked into the battalion databanks, he claimed—and he'd told some of the Marines…including Garroway.

Xul technology was still beyond human comprehension,
magic
, for all intents and purposes. But Cassius had picked up some human voices in the cacophony of thought and mind within the Xul ship minutes before its destruction. No one understood how it could be accomplished, but somehow, somehow, those 245 humans, including Lynnley, had been downloaded into the Xul group mind. Maybe they'd been
saved for interrogation. Maybe they were there so the Xul could learn about humans.

It was doubtful that they'd learned much of value, though, because if Cassius's data was correct, they'd been broken down, dissolved almost literally atom by atom, so that it was the information being stored, not their physical bodies.

Mind is, essentially, patterns of information. Electric charge. Ion flow and balance.
Data
. And the data that described Lynnley Collins's mind had been data taken from a body in agony. They'd downloaded her tortured mind into their computers and they'd left it there that way for twenty-two years.

The blessing was that her mind—or whatever it was that was left of her—had been insane and beyond knowing soon after the download took place.

And the greater blessing still was that the torture had ended, at long last, with the Xul ship's destruction.

Garroway had never believed in the Christian or the Islamic view of the universe, the view that said that a just and righteous God condemned human souls to everlasting torture because they happened to be born into the wrong culture, the wrong religion. That was one reason he'd long ago embraced a gentler, less dogmatic and less judgmental faith in Wicca.

The Xul, with their godlike powers, had condemned 245 humans to a perfect simulation of Hell for twenty-two years.

Garroway could not understand how any mind, no matter how depraved, how
evil
in any sense of that word, could subject any mind, any soul to that kind of torment.

Had they even been aware of what they were doing? Scuttlebutt said they were machines, after all. Machines that wanted to eliminate any Darwinian competition to their rule of the Galaxy.

“I'm so sorry, Gare,” Kat told him. It was as though she were reading his mind.

Maybe she was.

“We're going back there,” he said, gesturing with one hand at the galactic spiral. “We're going back there and we're going to
kill
those…things.”

“Roger that.
Semper fi.
”

“Semper fi.”

“Okay, Marines,” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne's voice called. “The charges are in place. Hotfoot it back here if ya don't want to be stranded a
long
fucking way from home!”

Garroway took a last look at the Galaxy. It seemed, from this vantage point, an unbearably cold, lonely, and hostile place.

Once the Marines had gone, the antimatter charges would destroy this gate; if the Xul returned to this system, they'd have no way of telling from which of four hundred billion suns the attackers had come.

With luck, the Marines had purchased some time for Humankind…maybe even as much as a century. It wasn't much, but it would have to do.

Do more with less.

And whatever the future held for humans…for the
Galaxy
…Garroway knew the Corps would make a difference.

Always.

Semper fi.