The failure of the anesthetic release probably meant the sensation was purely psychosomatic, but that made it no easier to bear. In any case, he’d experienced worse. In boot camp, any unauthorized movement or wiggling when the recruit platoon had been ordered to hold position, had been punished by a session in the sand pit, taken through a grueling set of exercises by a screaming Gunny Warhurst or one of the assistant DIs.
At least Warhurst wasn’t going to reach him in here, sealed away deep in the belly of Samar’s launch bay. His former DI was in another SAP, possibly right next door, but as helplessly cocooned as was Garroway.
At least he had the squad data feed to keep him from going completely nuts. An open window in his mind showed an animated schematic of the tacsit, centered on Samar, with the Lejeune, Thor, and Morrigan spread across several thousand kilometers of empty space, and with the fighters farther out yet.
By pulling back on the viewpoint within his mind, the Commonwealth squadron dwindled to a bright, green dot, and he could see the icon representing the stargate falling in from the right. Pulling back still more, he could see the icons representing the enemy; zooming in on that tightly grouped pack of glowing red icons revealed seven capital ships just visible in a pale, red fog representing the radiation belts around the system’s gas giant. All seven vessels were evidently in orbit about the giant, and gave no indication that they were aware, yet, of the presence of the small Commonwealth squadron.
But they would be.
Garroway kept turning inward, inspecting closely his own emotions. He wasn’t sure about what he was looking for. Fear? Anticipation? Excitement? Impatience?
Maybe he was feeling something of all four. Boot camp had taken him through so many simulations of combat he couldn’t begin to number them. In virtual reality simulations he’d sat inside the close, unyielding embrace of an SAP many times, until he knew exactly what to expect—the long wait, the gut-punching jolt of launch, the sweaty palmed anxiety of the approach, the strike, the penetration, the entry.
Except that, he knew very well, you could never know for sure what was coming. Simulations were just that, simulations, and the real world was certain to contain more than its fair share of the unexpected.
Marine Listening Post
Puller 659 Stargate
1935 hrs GMT
In fact, the unexpected had already happened. Seven days earlier, guided by intelligence provided by the DGSE—Direction Général de la Sécurité Extraterrestrial—the light cruisers Sagitta and Pegasus and the destroyer Détroyat had approached the Marine listening post beside the stargate under Alcubierre Drive, slowing to sublight velocities at the last possible moment. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick had noted the ships powering up, but they arrived at the stargate long before the light carrying news of their departure from their orbit around the gas giant.
Seconds after dropping back into unwarped space, Détroyat had released a 10-megaton thermonuclear warhead which had detonated at the asteroid’s surface; the shockwave had wrecked the listening post, and incapacitated or killed the Marines inside.
Before the fireball had fully dispersed, Pegasus had deployed an anticommunications nanocharge, a warhead releasing a cloud of molecule-sized disassemblers that had sought out the internal wiring and optical networks interlaced through the asteroid’s heart and followed it to the listening post’s QCC unit, reducing it to inert plastic, ceramcomposite, and metal in seconds. QCC signals could not be intercepted—or even detected—without a second unit containing elements quantum-entangled with those of the first, but disassembler nano could be smart enough to identify an FTL unit and destroy it.
Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and the other five Marines still within the listening post never had a chance even to alert Skybase that they were under attack. Within a few more moments, FMEs—the elite French Fusilier Marin Extraterrestrienne—and German Sturmjäger had broken in and secured what was left of the facility. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick—badly injured but alive—and the other Marines had been taken prisoner.
They killed eight FMEs before they were taken, though, and wounded five more.
For the next week, then, the former Marine listening post had been occupied by a small reconnaissance unit of PanEuropean special forces. The asteroid’s antennae and other surface structures had been vaporized by the nuke, but the base was now linked to the PE flagship Aurore by QCC, and the French troops inside had been monitoring the deployment of the Commonwealth squadron almost from the moment Skybase had translated into the Puller battlespace.
And starward, in orbit around the gas giant, Aurore and her sister ships were already preparing to spring the trap.
SAP 12/UCS Samar
Assembly Point Yankee
Puller 695 System
1948 hrs GMT
“Fifty newdollars,” Gunnery Sergeant Charel Ramsey said over the squad com channel, “that the whole thing is called off and we get told to stand down.”
“There speaks the voice of experience,” Master Sergeant Paul Barrett said. “Didn’t you make the same bet on the way in to Alighan?”
“Well, hey. Cut me some slack, okay? I’m bound to hit it right someday.”
“You wish,” Corporal Takamura put in.
Still packed into his SAP, Garroway listened to the banter among the waiting Marines, and wondered if the old hands in his new platoon were as confident, as relaxed as they seemed. He certainly wasn’t able to hear any stress in their voices.
But then, perhaps they had more experience in masking it.
Shit. Did Marines ever admit that they were terrified? …
“Uh-oh,” Ramsey said. “Take a look at the tacsit feed. There’s something—”
A second before, the space around the squadron had been empty of all but Commonwealth ships. Now, though, something like a ripple spread across the electronic representation of the background starfield … and then the PanEuropean ships were there, in the Commonwealth squadron’s midst.
There were six of them. Alphanumerics appearing alongside each red icon identified them by name, class, and tonnage. Largest was the monitor Rommel, an 81,000-ton weapons platform mounting multiple plasma cannon banks, high-energy lasers, three massive turret-mounted antimatter accelerators, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of missiles with high-yield nuclear warheads. A trio of frigates and two destroyers followed, minnows to the monitor’s shark.
Garroway stared into the feed for a moment, confused. The tacsit download now showed those six vessels in two places at once—here at AP Yankee, and still in orbit around the gas giant.
Then realization hit him. Of course. The gas giant was thirty light-minutes distant; the six PE warships had outpaced the radiations they’d been emitting in orbit, using their Alcubierre Drives to cross thirty light-minutes in an instant. As he watched, Samar’s AI updated the tacsit, erasing the obsolete data.
“Are we going to launch?” Sergeant Chu demanded. “When the hell are we going to launch?”
“Take it easy, Chu-chu,” Barrett said. “I don’t think any of us want to go out into that.”
The master sergeant indicated the tacsit feed, which now showed a confused tangle of ships as the two fleets engaged. Though spread across almost 200,000 kilometers, the view compressed battlespace to a small globe filled with moving ships, the rigidly straight lancings of plasma and