Battlespace (18 page)

Valle was Dr. Franz's expert on xenotechnology and Ramsey could hear the excitement in her voice. After over a century of studying ancient alien artifacts, there were few hard leads on some pretty astounding technologies—including instantaneous communications across interstellar distances and traveling faster than the speed of light—other than the simple fact that they
were
possible.

“We know that gravity control on a large scale is possible,” Dr. Franz's voice put in. “We've seen it done. We just don't know
how
.”

Ramsey nodded to himself. Franz's biography said he'd spent the ten years before coming onboard the
Chapultepec
leading the science team out on Europa, the colony of scientists and xenoarcheotechnologists studying the wreckage of the Singer.

In 2067 the Singer, the huge robotic Hunter ship trapped for half a million years in the depths of the ice-capped Europan world-ocean, had demonstrated what appeared to be antigravity when it attempted—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—to break free of its crypt, but how it had accomplished the feat was a complete mystery. After a century of intensive research in the ship's icebound ruins, human scientists now had more questions than answers as to how the city-sized vessel had been able to move its incredible mass without thrusters or other visible propulsion systems.

“These people may have the trick,” Dominick observed. “That suggests an unfortunate tech balance in their favor.”

“We knew that going in, General,” Ramsey pointed out. “Anyone who can play with black holes to create an interstellar rapid transit system is definitely a bit ahead of us in the technology department.”

“We need to know more about that thing. I'm beginning to wonder if it's manned. It could be entirely automated.”

“Permission to deploy Cassius for a beach recon,” Ramsey said.

In fact, he'd already thought-clicked the order to Cassius I-2. Proper military etiquette required he get the mission commander's permission, but the next step was obvious.

“‘Beach recon,' General?” Franz asked. “There isn't a beach within light-years of here.”

Ramsey grinned. “Force of habit, Doctor. On Earth, we would send a small special forces team—or robots—ashore before a landing. Same principle here, even if the ‘beach' is steel.”

They needed someone at the planned LZ looking for defenses and defenders. And the AI was expendable…or as
close to expendable as any sentient being
could
be this far from home.

SF/A-2 Starhawk
Cassius
Approaching Stargate Sirius
2115 hours, Shipboard time

Cassius I-2 made the final approach to the objective dead slow…drifting in at a bare half meter per second relative. Possibly velocity alone determined whether or not an approaching spacecraft would be blasted by antimatter beams, but it might also be a combination of velocity and mass. The Starhawk was considerably more massive than an Argus probe.

There was still no response from the huge structure ahead. Tentatively, Cassius guided the fighter closer with gentle bursts from its maneuvering thrusters, until the craft was less than five meters away.

“I am reading a gravitational field of point one three nine gravities,” he reported, a verbal amplification to the data automatically streaming back to the task force. “I am having no trouble holding position above the surface.”

Indeed the surface gravity in this area was no more than a gentle tug. Deftly maneuvering the Starhawk for maximum dispersal, Cassius I-2 began deploying BMS drones—Battlefield Micro-Sensors—in a fast-expanding cloud. Each sensor, a sphere only ten millimeters thick, was set to pick up heat, electromagnetic signals, even vibrations transmitted through the ring's hull from inside. Fired from the Starhawk's special munitions dispensers, they scattered across several square kilometers of the ring surface before the low gravity brought them to rest.

A staggering wealth of new data began pouring in, and
Cassius I-2 became quite busy indeed recording and retransmitting it all for analysis back in the fleet.

TRAP-1
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
2142 hours, Shipboard time

The Marines had been waiting for hours in the tiny red-lit compartment, fully suited up, weapons ready, emotions fully charged. Sergeant Garroway sat wedged in with nineteen other Marines, all in full battle dress, shoulder touching shoulder of the Marines to either side, armored knees separated from the knees of the Marine facing him by less than a meter.

Zero gravity made little difference to his discomfort. Transfer pods were not designed with spaciousness in mind, but efficiency, compactness, and a brutal lack of frills. The enforced immobility was wearing at him, cramping the muscles of back, shoulders, and legs, while globules of sweat escaped from under his headband and drifted around inside his battle helmet like tiny, silvery and out-of-focus planets.

And the day some designer of military hardware came up with a suit of battle armor that could scratch where it itched…

They said the waiting was the hardest part, and Garroway was in heartfelt agreement. Fifty-two hours ago he'd been sound asleep—a better word was
comatose
—in cybehibe, no worries, no cares, no discomfort, not even any dreams, save for some fuzzy fragments now more felt than remembered. Now he was…here.

He wished he knew what was happening. The platoon had been disconnected from the intel feed from the probes now scouting the stargate. No reason had been given, though Garroway guessed there were several. For one thing, if a lot of data was coming back from the robot scouts, they needed to
conserve bandwidth. For another, Garroway knew from experience that speculating on incomplete information was an excellent way to screw things up royally. Better that the rankers be handed just what they needed to know to function…and not so much that they started making wild and half-assed guesses—and possibly panicking as a result.

And there was always the possibility, he told himself wryly, that even calm and fully assed information would be so scary they would panic anyway—and with perfectly good reason.

Sometimes, he knew, ignorance
was
bliss.

That didn't make the waiting and the not-knowing any easier to endure, however.

At least this time the section wasn't under radio silence, as had been the case in so many of the training runs, and there was a ragged and occasional exchange of background chatter over the Alpha Platoon channel. Most of the Marines remained silent, however, each alone with his or her thoughts.

Waiting….

“Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait,” a voice said. An ID tag appeared at the top of Garroway's HUD, identifying the speaker as PFC Stefan Arhipov, one of the platoon newbies. “That's the fucking Marines for ya, huh?”

Garroway ignored the comment, as did the others. It sounded like an attempt to talk to someone, to start a conversation just for the comfort.

“Hey, Corp?” Arhipov persisted. It took Garroway a moment to realize the man was talking to him. “They say you were one of the guys out on Ishtar.”

You couldn't tell who was speaking to you by body language when everyone was encased in Mark VIII vac armor, but the name
ARHIPOV, S
. was painted across the helmet of the man sitting opposite him in a dark gray just barely lighter than the helmet's current neutral black.

“I was there,” Garroway replied, laconic.

“Yeah? What was fighting the Annies like, anyway?”

“Not fun.”

An uncomfortable silence followed. “Uh, Corporal?”

“Yes?”

“Why'd they pack us into this sewer pipe, anyway? The way I heard it, we were going to check out the stargate with robots. They're not planning on sending us in to capture the thing yet, are they?”

“When they tell me, I'll tell you,” Garroway replied and left it at that.

“They didn't TRAP us t'start the invasion, kid,” Sergeant Cavaco said. “Didn't you hear?”

“Uh, no, Sarge. Why—”

“Regulations,” Corporal Vinton said. “When the fleet went to battle stations, we were ordered in here.
This
is our battle station.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“Didn't you know, kid?” Cavaco asked. “This here transfer pod is our fuckin'
lifeboat
.”

“That's right,” Sergeant Houston told them. “If anything happens to the
Pecker
, they can jettison us before the whole ship goes up.”

“That's the idea,” Cavaco said. “And just between us, I don't care much for the idea of being burned alive inside a transport, no way out and no way to fight back.”

“Burned…burned alive?”

“Sure! Oh, I guess it would be quick enough if the bad guys used a nuke on us, but scuttlebutt says they've already picked off some of our robot probes with lasers. Or maybe we'd just decompress. But the smart money in the pool says the plastics on board get heated to such high temperatures that the whole hab section of the ship just bursts into flame at something like a thousand degrees Celsius or so. Course, once the air leaks out, the fire goes out, but that doesn't exactly help the survivors, right?”

“Sure,” Houston said. “So they're doing us a favor, see, kid? We get to escape while the brass stays behind and fries.”

“Yeah,” Cavaco said with a chuckle. “Now, that doesn't exactly help us personally, of course. You can just imagine…there we are, adrift in space, eight and a half light-years from home, our only way of getting back to Earth…gone.”

“So how much air do we have in one of these things?” PFC Tremkiss asked. The conversation, Garroway noticed, was fast becoming a round of old hands against the newbies.

“Oh, enough to last…whatcha think, Wes? Maybe forty-eight hours, including what's in our suits? At least we won't have to worry about starving to death.”

“If we take turns breathing in shifts, yeah, about that,” Houston agreed.

“Aw, c'mon, guys!” PFC Loren Geisler said. He was another newbie to the platoon and, along with Sergeant Cavaco, was in Garroway's three-man fire team. “You can only pull the leg so far!”

“Who's leg-pulling?” Cavaco asked. “We are
very
much on the sharp pointy end of the stick, here. We don't know anything about who we're fighting. We have no strategic reserve and no backup. Our only way home is the
Pecker
. And two robot transports don't have consumables enough to keep over a thousand people alive for very long, even with nanoconverters. We are
way
up Shit Creek here, gentlemen, and using our helmets to bail.”

“Do we really not know anything about the enemy?” Tremkiss asked. “I heard scuttlebutt that said they were just An, only they still had starships.”

“That's a scary thought,” Garroway said, joining the conversation despite a desire to keep to himself. “They did enough damage with spears. I'm not sure I'd care to meet them in spaceships.”

“The point is,” Cavaco said, pushing ahead, “maybe the bad guys come pick us up to interrogate us—and maybe they
don't. Maybe some of the other ships in the fleet survived, though, of course, they don't have the space or the consumables to take us on board.”

“The
Ranger
does,” Houston told him.

“Nah. Not for cybehibe. Not enough tubes. You need an IST for that.”

“Oh, yeah. That's right.”

“What I heard,” HM2 Phillip K. Lee put in, “was that if the IST was crippled, they'd pack all of the surviving Marines onboard the
Ranger
. Nine out of ten would go into the converters to provide food and water for the rest. First they'd ask for volunteers, then the command AI would choose the rest. See, without cybehibe, the ones who were left have to survive on very tight rations for the ten-year trip back home.”

Several of the others, including Garroway, chuckled at that one. There'd been, of course, a lot of good-natured razzing of the lone Navy man assigned to the platoon, but the corpsman seemed able to give as good as he got.

“Leave the poor newbies alone,” Corporal Vinton put in. “They have enough to worry about without thinking about cannibalism!”

The female members of the platoon, Garroway noticed, had not joined in with the hazing. Was that because they were less likely to pile on a guy who was being picked on? Or were their motherly instincts kicking in?

On second thought, her comment about cannibalism carried its own form of sadism. Arhipov, Tremkiss, and the half dozen or so other newbies in the section must be terrified by now, even if they weren't buying a word of it.

“So…why bother putting us in the pods, if it doesn't matter?” Arhipov said. Garroway could hear the edge to his voice…fear and protest mingled with stress.

“So we can fight if the bad guys come get us, of course,” Houston told him. “We're Marines. That's what we do, right?
We fight! We take out as many of the bastards as we can!”

“Ooh-rah!” Cavaco said. Half a dozen other voices joined in.

“So if we get cast loose in the next few hours…and if the
Pecker
buys it and we're adrift all alone…you just be ready to kill anything that grabs us and takes us aboard, right? I heard the bad guys are really horrible monsters. Three meters tall…six eyes…and the sweet disposition of a Parris Island DI on a bad day.”

“That bad?” Garroway asked.

“Worse!” Cavaco laughed, a dry and strained rasp. “Hey, these critters already snatched the
Wings of Isis
and had the crew and passengers for lunch.”

Garroway had been enjoying the banter—not to mention the traditional hazing of the FNGs—but that last comment stopped him, made him pull back into his self-imposed shell. He'd been planning on marrying one of those passengers on the
Isis
—and not even knowing what had happened to her continued to gnaw at him.