Ramsey sagged. “Aye, aye, sir.”
“Get your asses over to the Fortress. We’ll be disembarking from there.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
The Fortress—what was left of it—loomed above the skyline of Meneh not far from the ocean. It was called El Kalah, which in the creole-Arabic spoken throughout the Theocracy meant “fortress.” Originally a vast dome half a kilometer across bristling with ball turrets, each turret mounting plasma, A.M., or hivel accelerator weapons, El Kalah had been the first target in the pinpoint orbital bombardment of the planet, and there was little left of the complex now save the shattered, jagged fragments of dome enclosing a smoking ruin open to the sky. The weapons turrets had been neutralized in rapid succession, and the remaining complex pounded for hours with everything from antimatter to tunneler rounds to knock out any deeply buried bunkers. Much of what was left had melted in the nano-D clouds.
Close by the Fortress was an area that had been a residential zone, stone and cast ‘crete housing set in orderly rows among parkland and market squares. At least that was how the downloaded maps described the area. Though the region had not been deliberately targeted, it was now an almost homogenous landscape of rubble and partially melted stone.
As they picked their way through the wreckage, Ramsey and Chu came upon a scene of nightmare horror.
Several Marines in armor were clearing rubble, revealing what had been a basement. On the basement floor, dimly visible in smoky light …
“Jesus,” Chu said … and then Ramsey heard retching sounds as the Marine turned away suddenly. Ramsey continued staring into the pit, unable to stop looking even as he realized that he would never be able to purge his brain of the sight. There must have been thirty or forty people huddled in the basement, though the nano-D cloud had made sorting one body from another difficult. The tangled, tortured positions of the bodies suggested they’d known what was happening to them, and that death had not been quick.
They were civilians, obviously. The Islamic Theocracy did not permit female soldiers, and there’d been children down there as well. Clearly, they’d been trying to find shelter inside the basement.
Equally clearly, the deaths had been inflicted by Theocrat weapons; the assault force had not employed nano-D.
It was said that the life expectancy of an unarmored person on a modern battlefield was measured in scant seconds. These people had never had a chance. Ramsey felt a sullen rage growing within—rage at the Muzzies for their blind use of indiscriminate weaponry and their placement of military targets close beside civilian enclaves, rage at the op planners who’d targeted a heavily inhabited planet, rage at the very idea of war, of doing this to innocent bystanders.
Turning away, finally, he grasped Chu’s elbow and steered him clear of the scene.
He didn’t think he was going to be able to get rid of the memory.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
And at the same time, he wasn’t certain he could live with the nightmare.
0507.1102
USMC Skybase
Paraspace
0946 hrs GMT
Lieutenant General Martin Alexander completed the final download encompassing the Alighan operation. Casualties had been God-awful high—almost twenty percent—and a disproportionate percentage of those were irretrievables, men and women so badly charred by heat or radiation or so melted by nano-D that they could not be brought back to life. Those were the tough ones, the ones requiring a virtual visit to parents or spouses.
With a mental click, he shifted his awareness to the Map Center, a noumenal chamber with a three-D navigable representation of the entire Galaxy. For a moment, his mind’s eye hovered above the broad, softly radiant spiral, taking in the nebulae-clotted spiral arms, pale blue and white, unwinding from the ruddier, warmer core, a vast and teeming beehive of suns surrounded by gas-cloud ramparts, like luminous thunderheads at the Core’s periphery. Four hundred billion stars across a spiral a hundred thousand light-years across.
How many of those pinpoint stars making up those banked, luminous clouds and streaming arms were suns, with worlds and life and civilizations?
An unanswerable question.
A majority of stars had planets, of course. That fact had been certain as far back as the twenty-first century or before, when extrasolar planets had first been discovered. Worlds with life were common as well; wherever there was liquid water or, more infrequently, liquid ammonia or liquid sulfur, life, of one kind or another, seemed to arise almost spontaneously.
How many of those worlds with life developed intelligence, however, and communicative civilizations, was a much more difficult, and darker question. Once, the answer would have been “millions” or even “tens of millions,” a guess based partly upon statistical analyses and partly upon xenoarcheological discoveries within the Solar System and elsewhere that showed technic civilization, starfaring civilization, exploding across the Galaxy in wave upon wave.
But that was before the discovery of the true nature of the Xul.
“General Alexander?”
“Yes, Herschel.”
Herschel was the artificial intelligence controlling the Galaxy display.
“Your aide wishes to link with you.
Damn. Never a moment’s peace. “Very well.”
Cara, his electronic assistant, entered his noumenal space, her EA icon materializing out of the void. “Excuse the interruption, General.”
“Whatcha got?”
“Sir, we have a final plot on the Argo. And a partial synch with the ship’s AI.”
“Only partial?”
“Whatever happened out there happened very quickly.”
“I see.” He sighed. “Okay. Feed it through. And let’s see the plot.”
A white pinpoint winked brightly within the depths of one of the spiral arms. At the same time, he felt the surge of incoming data, an e-brief, only, representing the synch with the Argo’s AI.
Perseus. The name of the AI had been Perseus.
“A group of delegates from the Defense Advisory Council wants to link with you to discuss the Xul threat,” his aide continued as he skimmed the brief.
“I’ll just bet they do. Okay. When?”
“Fourteen minutes. Ten-hundred hours.”
“Huh. The Argo incident has them worried.”
“Terrified, more like it. And can you blame them, sir? There hasn’t been another peep out of the Xul for five hundred years.”
Alexander completed the brief, then stared into the sea of teeming suns hanging before him. “I wouldn’t call the bombardment of Earth by high-velocity asteroids a ‘peep,’ Cara. Earth was nearly destroyed.”
“Yes, sir. But they didn’t finish us. In fact, they seem to have lost track of us entirely.”
“Garroway’s attack at Night’s Edge—” He stopped himself. He had a tendency, he knew, to slip into lecture mode, and his aide knew the history of Night’s Edge