Ian Douglas - Galactic Corps

Continuing to rotate, he brought the mass driver mounted on his left arm to bear on another Xul machine as it grappled with PFC Nikki Armandez. BB-sized pellets accelerated to ultra-high velocity slashed across the machine’s shell, ripping open a fist-sized gash in the black sleekness. The machine bucked and jerked, like a living thing, as Armandez twisted clear of flailing tentacles.

Around him, the other Marines were fighting hand-to-hand—or, rather, hand-to-tentacle—as well, firing into enemy combat machines when they were a meter or two away, slicing them into tumbling, drifting chunks when they closed to within an arm’s reach.

Garroway was forcibly reminded of an ancient adage drilled into all Marines in boot camp: the most dangerous weapon in combat was a Marine. It didn’t matter whether he was armed with a plasma weapon, a mass driver, antimatter drone, forearm-mounted slicers, or his bare hands. It wasn’t the Marine’s high-tech toys that were dangerous. It was the Marine that wielded them.

In seconds, the breakthrough had been stopped, the alien machines inside the perimeter literally cut to pieces, while the rest withdrew as suddenly and as silently as they’d appeared. Four more Marines were down, their armor burned open, air and blood leaking into the chamber as a thin, icy pink haze.

Garroway did a quick mental rundown. First Company and the HQ element together totaled fifty men and women, five of them corpsmen. That left thirty-nine combat effectives on the line, now, and that included the specialist comm and computer personnel who had other things to do besides burn down enemy robots.

“Four AM-drones away!” 2nd Lieutenant Cooper reported over the Net.

“That’ll do it,” Captain Black said. “Everyone start falling back to the entry point. Bring the wounded!” A tiny point of light began winking in Garroway’s mind—the recall beacon, indicating the direction of his waiting M-CAP.

Garroway and Corporal Kukovitch held their position behind the pillar, covering several other Marines as they fell back past them toward the waiting M-CAPs, dragging along the bodies of fallen comrades.

That was a point of pride. No Marine was left behind, living or dead, and no Marine or corpsman serving with the unit assumed any Marine was dead in the field, no matter how bad the wound appeared to be. Unless someone had been smoked—literally turned to vapor by an enemy weapon—the possibility remained that they could be retrieved, even if large parts of their bodies had to be regrown or replaced.

Hell, Garroway had experienced that himself nine years back, at the Battle of Nova Space. They’d come after him, too, pulling him from a derelict alien spacecraft as a nearby star exploded. If they hadn’t, he would have been an irrie—an irretrievable—himself.

They leapfrogged back, section by section, one group of Marines providing cover as the rest fell back in moves of several meters at a time. Within a few minutes, they closed in around the tight cluster of M-CAP pods, where they’d broken through into the Xul base’s interior, creating a new, much tighter perimeter. For the moment, the Xul warrior robots were not in evidence—not out in the open, anyway, but sensors wired into Garroway’s external armor were picking up motion—vibrations detected through the Xul hull metal each time he touched it. Each Xul wave attack tended to be larger, usually by an order of magnitude, than the last.

They were gathering. The next assault on the Marines was going to be a big one.

“Medical Ontos now on final approach,” Smedley’s voice said.

“Heads up, people,” Captain Black warned. “Medevac coming in!”

A portion of the overhead flexed, suddenly, directly above the center of the new Marine perimeter, then began breaking apart in a swirling storm of disintegrating chunks. In the next instant, something broke through, ten meters wide and massive, chewing its way through the tough Xul hull armor in clouds of nano-D.

For a moment, it was difficult to see exactly what was eating its way down through the overhead. Something was there, a dark bulk that appeared to swirl and shimmer, becoming at times translucent, almost transparent, and which seemed to reflect the surrounding darkness of the passageway.

Then the effect faded, and the mass solidified into a dark gray surface displaying the Commonwealth emblem and the word marines prominent on the curved hull. A ramp was already lowering. That rear entrance couldn’t open wide in the narrow confines of the fortress passageway, but light from the vehicle’s interior spilled through a narrow opening into the dark space, reflecting from drifting debris.

The craft was an MCA-71 Ontos, one of the bug-like 383-ton Marine workhorses that had served with the Corps for twenty-some years. This one had been designated for medevac. More Navy corpsmen were already descending through the open cargo bay hatch into the Xul fortress, helping to move Marine casualties out of the Xul passageway and into the comparative safety of the rugged little transport.

Garroway held his defensive position with the other Marines on the perimeter. Briefly, he tapped into the telemetry from one of the RAM-D pods—RAM Two; a schematic animation opened in a side window in his mind, showing a drone’s-eye view as the device steered itself swiftly through twisting corridors into the bowels of the Xul fortress. RAM-Ds possessed extremely sophisticated on-board AIs that allowed them to operate with considerable autonomy, and gravitics sensors that let them home on the microsingularities orbiting within the heart of Xul structures.

The image flared in a burst of static snow, then winked out.

“RAM Two has been intercepted,” Smedley’s voice reported. “RAMs One, Three, and Four are proceeding on course.”

Garroway braced for a possible shockwave. If whatever had snagged RAM Two broke the magnetic containment field isolating the antimatter charge, in just a moment there was going to be a very large explosion. …

But seconds passed, and there was no blast. Much Xul technology was still mysterious, and at times seemed unevenly applied. Telemetry indicated that the other three charges were continuing on course, moving swiftly into the fortress’s depths. Perhaps the Xul hadn’t noticed them yet. Or perhaps they didn’t yet know what they were, and had just snagged the one in order to find out.

And that meant the explosion could come at any time. Tampering with a kilo of antimatter was never a good idea. …

Marines and corpsmen began loading the strike force’s dead and wounded onto the medevac Ontos. Still moving section by section as their squadmates covered them, Marines began scrambling up into their waiting M-CAPs. Corporal Fitzhugh yelled a warning at the same time Smedley flashed a new alert—targets emerging from the passageway bulkheads in all directions. Again, Garroway chose a target and commenced fire, burning down one oncoming Xul machine … then another … then a third as the shadowed distance seethed with black movement. The Marines were pumping out an incredible volume of fire—plasma bolts, lasers, nano-D rounds, high-velocity mass-driver slugs, pounding and slashing away at the advancing wall of Xul robots, filling the broad two-meter space between overhead and deck with spinning chunks of metal and ceramic. Garroway’s plasma gun flashed an overheat warning to his helmet display, and he switched to his mass driver to let the primary weapon cool. How long, he wondered, could they keep this up? …

Well, it wouldn’t, it couldn’t last much longer. With the RAM-Ds well on their way into the fortress’s interior, it was, as the ancient adage put it, time for all of them to get the hell out of Dodge. Garroway wasn’t sure what “Dodge” was, but he knew the sentiment behind the expression well.