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Authors: Ian Douglas

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BOOK: Battlespace
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“Roger that,” he said. “Let's vam the hell out of Dodge.”

But he felt a heavy sadness as he hauled himself out of the wreck, emerging once again into the brilliant star shine of Sirius. A part of him, small and irrational but utterly implacable, had still hoped against all hope that the Marine VBSS teams would find a sealed and habitable chamber somewhere onboard that goliath alien vessel and that within that chamber would be two hundred and some survivors of the
Wings of Isis
.

And among them…Lynnley.

Marine search teams had moved through much of the Xul ship while the civilians worked in the control center. According to them, the open, accessible portions of the ship were actually quite small, compared to the vessel's enormous bulk. There simply weren't that many places to look. Unless human prisoners had been in one of the sections vaporized by the attack on the Xul, they were not onboard.

Garroway had to admit, at long last, that Lynnley and the others were dead, that they must have died twenty-two years before.

For a moment, loneliness clawed at his mind. Never had he felt so isolated, so cut off and adrift in time…not even when he'd been sinking into the depths of that alien internal sea within the Wheel.

Another ten years back to Earth. Would he recognize anything, anyone, when he got back?

Fuck that
, he told himself angrily.
At least you
are
going back
! So many other Marines were not.

He hauled himself into the TRAP, found a vacant seat, and wedged himself in. It wasn't quite as crowded in the cargo bay this time around. Both Tomlinson and Deek were dead. Their bodies—in Deek's case, what could be found of it—had been put into body bags and would be riding back to the
Pecker
in an aft storage compartment.

Marines always brought back their own.

No, he wasn't alone. Not so long as he was a Marine.

The TRAP backed away from the Xul ship, clearing the debris field, then boosted back toward the waiting
Chapultepec
. This time the powers-that-were granted a camera-aft view of the Xul for implant download to all of the Marines. Grateful to lose himself in something other than black thoughts, Garroway opened a window and watched the golden vessel, marred by rents and blackened hull plating, slipping away astern.

Something
was happening within the bulge of the aft third of the Xul ship. It appeared to be crumpling, folding in upon itself as though wadded up by a titanic, invisible hand.

The crumpling accelerated. The Xul vessel must have had a small residual velocity, for it appeared to be moving now, falling very slowly toward the center of the Sirius Gate. It continued to crumple, to grow smaller…smaller…

And then it was gone.

The Marines around him were cheering and bellowing “
Ooh-rah
!”

Garroway still felt crushed and empty—as crushed as that vanishing alien ship.

Somehow, though, he managed to join his voice with the others. “
Ooh-rah
!”

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.

About the Author

IAN DOUGLAS
is the author of the popular military SF series
The Heritage Trilogy
. He lives in Pennsylvania.

 

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Books in the Legacy Trilogy
by Ian Douglas

S
TAR
C
ORPS
: B
OOK
O
NE

B
ATTLESPACE:
B
OOK
T
WO

 

Books in the Heritage Trilogy
by Ian Douglas

 

S
EMPER
M
ARS:
B
OOK
O
NE

L
UNA
M
ARINE:
B
OOK
T
WO

E
UROPA
S
TRIKE:
B
OOK
T
HREE

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

BATTLESPACE
. Copyright © 2006 by William H. Keith, Jr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub © Edition NOVEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061979644

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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United States

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BOOK: Battlespace
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