“I’m not sure,” he said after a moment. Where the hell was Karla going with all of this? “I think …” He stopped. He didn’t want to go there.
“What do you think, Charel?”
“I think I don’t deserve the slot.”
“Why not?”
“I screwed up. It was my idea, mounting up on Specter guns and going up the outside of the building like that. If we’d gone in another way … or called down sniper fire from orbit …”
“According to the after-action reports,” Karla told him, “orbital bombardment was restricted in that sector due to the presence of civilian noncombatants. And assaulting that tower from the ground up would have resulted in unacceptably high Marine casualties. You made the correct choice, and your platoon sergeant agreed with your assessment. In what way did you ‘screw up?’”
“I didn’t get all the APerMs.”
“There were other Marines in the area. In any case, APerMs are generally deployed in numbers sufficient to overwhelm individual suit countermeasures. In combat, remember, chaos effects tend to outweigh both planning and advance preparation. You did what you could, what you’d been trained to do, and you did it to the best of your ability. Unfortunately, two APerMs got through and killed Howell and Beck. What could you have done differently that would have resulted in a different outcome?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! If I knew, I would be platoon sergeant material, okay? But I don’t know, and the Corps isn’t going to risk a platoon with someone who doesn’t know the answers.”
“I believe, Charel, that you are setting standards for yourself that are too high, and too rigid.”
“They’re mine to set.”
“Not if in the setting you do harm to yourself. ‘Government property,’ remember?”
The session continued, but Ramsey listened with only half an ear, making polite noises where necessary to convince Karla that he was paying attention.
Or could the AI tell by monitoring his brain waves? Ramsey didn’t know, nor did he care. The depression was settling in closer, deeper, until it threatened to smother him.
He wanted the damned AI out of his head.
USMC Skybase
Dock 27, Earth Ring 7
1015 hrs GMT
Lieutenant General Martin Alexander’s concept, as so-far approved by the Commonwealth Senate, had been designated Operation Gorgon. The strategic option of a strike into Xul space to delay or block a likely Xul attack against human space by drawing them off in pursuit of a large Navy-Marine task force was a go.
Now all that remained was to come up with a viable ops plan. To that end, he’d called a general staff meeting.
“Map Center open,” Lieutenant General Martin Alexander said. In his mind, the dome of the virtual briefing room shimmered, then deepened into the gently curved clottings of stars that made up one small section of the Orion Arm of the Galaxy. With a thought, he began rising into the mass of stars, focusing now on the amoebic blot of various-colored translucence marking the various regions of space claimed by Humankind. One star, just inside the outer periphery of one of the colored areas, was highlighted a bright green—Puller 659.
“Our problem,” Alexander told his audience, “is primarily a political one. Puller 659 is the location of a Stargate leading to a region of Xul-controlled space designated Starwall. Intelligence says that Starwall is an important Xul nexus—and we know they have information about Earth at the base in that system. Take out Starwall, and we might arrange to have that information become lost again. Even if we don’t, Starwall is a big enough target that we know we’ll hurt the bastards if we hit them there.
“Unfortunately, the Gate leading to Starwall, as you can see here, is located inside space claimed by the PanEuropean Republic. The Commonwealth Senate is not enthusiastic about starting a war with the Republic and opening a third front, not at a time when we’re already engaged with the Theocracy … and may be about to face a new Xul incursion as well.”
His virtual audience was represented in the briefing area by the icons of over two hundred men, women, and artificial intelligences making up 1MIEF’s ops planning staff, which included intelligence, communications, and administrative staff constellations from all organizational levels.
“Our best hope against the Xul, obviously,” he continued, “would be to get all of the human governments pulling together … ending the war with the Theocracy, and getting them, the PanEuropeans, the Chinese, the Hispanics, the Russians, all of them pulling together and pooling their space-military resources to fight the Xul.
“In my estimation, our survival as a species almost certainly will depend on the human species working together.”
“Yeah, well, good luck with that,” the rough voice of Vice Admiral Liam Taggart put in, and several in the audience chuckled. Taggart was Alexander’s opposite number in Gorgon, the commander of 1MIEF’s naval contingent.
No one else in the virtual space would have dared to interrupt Alexander’s exposition.
“Thank you, Liam,” Alexander replied. “Fortunately, uniting Humankind is a job for the politicians, not the military. While they’re working on that, we need to consider our strategic alternatives for Gorgon, and—just as with the original gorgons of Greek myth—so far we have three.
“The first, and least desirable in my opinion, is that we wait … hold back and wait for the political situation to resolve itself. The advantage is that we don’t have to commit ourselves at once. The downside is that we can’t assume that the Xul are going to give us the luxury of waiting. Our intel from Puller 659 is solid; we know the Xul know where we are and how to get at us. We can assume they’re gathering their forces for a strike as we speak. Absolutely the only unknown factor in the equation is how long we actually have.
“Second, we trespass into PanEurope space, take the whole MIEF right through the Republic, and the hell with the consequences. We might win Aurore’s approval and support … but no one’s betting money on that.” Aurore was Theta Bootes IV, the capital of the PanEuropean Republic.
“Now, the Senate won’t approve a head-on invasion … but they might allow us to pull an end run. Puller 659 is close to the outer periphery of Republican space. We might swing out this way …” As he spoke, a yellow course line moved out through Commonwealth space from Sol, leaping from star system to star system to enter an as-yet unexplored region beyond the frontier, then looping back and around to come in to the Puller system from outside human space. “Technically, this would still constitute an invasion of Republican space … but we might be able to slip the whole MIEF into the Puller system and out through the gate to Starwall before the Republicans know what’s going down. The downside: if Aurore finds out and gets ticked off, the Commonwealth might find itself at war with the Theocracy, the Xul, and the Republic.
“Third.” Four white pinpoints lit up within Commonwealth space. “We forget about Puller 659 and Starwall entirely. There are a total of seventeen known Stargates, offering a total of about two hundred known routes into Xul systems, all of them now being actively monitored by Marine or Navy listening posts. Four of those Gates lie inside Commonwealth space—Sirius, of course, Mu Cygni, Gamma Piscium, and Lambda Capricomi.” Each pinpoint on the map display brightened as he named it.
“These four gates offer us a total of twenty-nine routes into star systems we know to be occupied by the Xul. We select one of those twenty-nine potential paths and send the MIEF there.
“The