Ian Douglas - Galactic Corps

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

“Okay, people,” Blackjack’s voice told them over the Net. “We’re doing this by the book. We want to maintain the element of surprise for as long as possible, so do not engage your gravitics until I give the word. Power at ten percent only. Magnetic shielding engaged. Optical benders on. Everyone copy?”

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

The assault force, one hundred fifty Marines of Bravo Company, First Marine Assault Battalion of the First Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force was going to war.

Falling … falling … the bottles drifted into the opening of the stargate unpowered, with just enough power trickling through their drives to keep them from running afoul of one another, and to keep the magnetic shields charged and ready. Around them, unseen within the distant rim of the gate, a pair of Jupiter-massed black holes circled along their ancient tracks in opposite directions, at a velocity approaching that of light. The stresses on local spacetime were somehow—the technology was still well beyond the capability of human physics—focused at the gate’s lumen. The frequency of those rotating singularities had already been tuned to connect this gate with one particular other gate … one some twenty thousand light years above the plane of the Galaxy.

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

The sky wavered … shimmered … then blinked.

And he was somewhere else, somewhere … astonishingly else.

Not for the first time, Garroway wondered why you couldn’t see through an open gate to the other side, or why radio or lasercom signals could not be passed through, while solid things like starships made the passage almost unimpeded. The physicists said that had to do with a kind of flicker or stutter effect due to the period of the rotating singularities that allowed mass through in discrete, quantum chunks, but which interfered with the wave aspect of energy. Even so, he’d once seen the flash from a nova pass through an open gate, and do so with power enough to destroy a Xul huntership.

So much Humankind had yet to learn.

He looked around, studying ambient space with all the rubbernecking fervor of a first-time tourist in EarthRing City. An ancestor of Garroway’s had been here once, centuries before. The place was known as Cluster Space, and it was located, so far as AI navigational programs could place it, some twenty to twenty-two thousand light years above the plane of the Galaxy, and at least thirty thousand light years from Earth.

From out here, of course, the microscopic yellow speck of Earth’s sun was quite invisible, utterly lost within the vast and milky swirl of pale light hanging in the sky, a spiral that looked oddly like a pale-colored whirlpool frozen in an instant of time. Most individual stars at this distance were lost; only novae or the very brightest of giant suns were visible as separate stars out here. What remained was a kind of graininess or digital noise to the light. In fact, it looked much like the pale glow from the Milky Way seen on a pellucidly clear, dark night on Earth or, better, Mars … and for an obvious reason. It was the same glow, but seen from the outside against the black emptiness of the intergalactic voice, rather than from within one of the Galaxy’s spiral arms.

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

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

In a different direction lay the local star, a class-M red dwarf visible solely as a bright red spark against the night. That star, catalogued simply as CS-1, but nicknamed Bloodlight by the Marines, was the primary target of the op, which had been tagged Clusterstrike by the mission planners.

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

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

Among other threats, a trio of Xul fortresses orbited here, only a few hundred kilometers away, and those fortresses had to be eliminated if Clusterstrike was to succeed. Trans-gate probes had already slipped through and located each of the three, along with every other enemy ship and station within this system. Those probes had managed to return, apparently unnoticed, but Marine bottles were larger and noisier than AI probes, and they were in this instant terribly vulnerable to attack.

Unlike the earlier Space Assault Pods, each M-CAP was effectively invisible, the coating of nano covering each one serving as uncounted trillions of optical relays, pulling light from one side of the bottle around to a carefully calculated point on the opposite side before releasing it. The effect was to make the bottle almost invisible so that light, radar, and other radiation was curved past the bottle rather than reflecting from it—optical bending. The various patches in each bottle’s hull not shielded by the benders—which allowed the Marines to see out and to communicate with one another and with the company AI net, among other things—were so small they were nearly invisible at any range greater than a few meters.

Still, the illusion was not perfect, and things like radiated heat or the spatial distortion caused by a gravitics drive could cause enough of a ripple against background stars to reveal their presence to a careful and watchful enemy. At Captain Black’s command, and under Smedley’s precise control, the school of invisible fish shifted vector as a unit, moving now slantwise across the opening of the stargate, each platoon angling toward a different target, the three Xul bastions guarding this gateway into Cluster Space.

So far, their entrance appeared to have gone unnoticed.

It would have been a mistake, though, to assume the Xul were careless or less than alert. Intelligence had reported that their defenses had been tightening up at all of their known gate outposts over the past few years, as the Xul Mind as a whole began, slowly, to react to Humankind’s attacks.

For almost nine years, now, 1MIEF had been playing a deadly game, one absolutely vital to the survival of Earth and Humankind. With both military and civilian intelligence services certain that the ancient enemy, the Xul, had learned the location of Sol and of the existence of humanity, Lieutenant General Martin Alexander, acclaimed Hero of the Battle of the Nova, had for almost a decade, now, been wielding the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force like a personal weapon. Again and again, a Xul bastion outpost, either long-known or newly discovered, would be targeted by 1MIEF for a lightning raid. Usually, the Xul bastion would be located within a system containing one or more of the ancient stargates.