At Alexander’s command, the viewpoint of the watchers’ assembled minds seemed to pull back sharply. The gleaming starscape of near-Sol space dwindled into the distance, revealing the entire sweep of the Galaxy, three milky-haze arms wrapped tightly about a bulging, ruddy-hued central core. In an instant, the patch of space occupied by Humankind vanished, a dust speck lost against that teeming backdrop of stars.
“For instance,” Alexander continued, “if we go through the Sirius Gate, we could strike here …” A white nova flared near a globular star cluster above the galactic plane.
“Those of you who’ve studied your Corps history remember the Marine incursion at a system designated Cluster Space, about five hundred years ago—a single star system in the galactic halo that possessed very large collection of multiple star gates, a kind of switching station for tens of thousands of different gate routes. That route was slammed shut when the Marines destroyed the Cluster Space end of that gatepath … but we’ve found similar systems elsewhere. This is one—designated CS-Epsilon. According to our listening post at Sirius, it possesses five separate gates in the same star system. Obviously a high-value target.
“Unfortunately, we’re really in the dark as to just how important any one stargate nexus is to the Xul. Remember, they didn’t build these things, so far as we’ve been able to determine. They just use them … and guard as many as they can. Like us, really, but on a much larger scale.
“So … if we hit CS-Epsilon, we don’t know that the news would reach any other Xul base, or that it would make the slightest difference to them or their plans.” Two hundred more stars lit up, scattered from one end of the Galaxy to the other. “Remember that we only know of about two hundred systems with a Xul presence. There may be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of other Xul bases. The MIEF might rampage across the Galaxy and take out every single known Xul strongpoint … then return to Sol in a few years and find all of the worlds of Humankind reduced to blackened cinders because nothing we did really hurt the Xul badly enough to attract their attention. If Operation Gorgon is to succeed, we must hit the Xul in a vital spot, hurt them so badly they send everything they have after us, and leave our worlds alone, at least for the time being.
“I’m ready to entertain any ideas any of you might have. …”
“Sir,” Colonel Hoist, of 3rd Brigade Intelligence, ventured after a long moment’s silence …
“Go ahead.”
“Sir … with respect, this is just flat-out impossible! How do we know if any of the systems we can reach are important enough to get the Xuls’ attention if we hit it? Like you said, we could blow their bases from now until Doomsday, and they might not take any more notice of it than we would of a fleabite. How do we know? …”
“We don’t, Colonel. Hell, even with a human enemy, ninety percent of intelligence work is WAG—wild-assed guesses. You probably know that better than I do. And with … entities like the Xul, it’s a lot worse.”
“We do know the Xul are xenophobic in the extreme,” Major General Austin pointed out quietly. He was the CO of the MIEF’s ground combat division, but he’d put in a bunch of years in Intelligence on his way up. “In fact, that appears to be their defining characteristic. Anything, any species, that poses a threat to them, even a potential threat, they take notice. The Fermi Answer, remember.”
Eight hundred years before, according to legends rooted in Earth’s pre-spaceflight era, a physicist named Enrico Fermi had wondered why, in a galaxy where advanced technical life ought to be common, and the radio emissions and other evidence of their existence ought to be easily detected … there was nothing. Humankind had appeared to be alone in the cosmos. That contradiction had become known as the Fermi Paradox.
Only gradually had the answer to that paradox revealed itself. When humans first ventured out to other worlds within their own Solar System, they’d found ample evidence of extrasolar intelligence—evidence even of the large-scale colonization of Earth, the Moon, and Mars in the remote past. Later, when they began exploring beyond the Solar System, they found the blasted, wind-blown ruins of planet-embracing cities on Chiron and elsewhere. The Fermi Answer, evidently, was that intelligence did evolve, and frequently, but that someone was already out there, waiting and watching for any sign of technological evolution.
In all the history of the Milky Way Galaxy, among all those hundreds of billions of stars, if even one species evolved with the in-born Darwinian imperative to survive by eliminating all possible competitors, and if that species survived long enough to achieve an advanced enough technology, they would be in the perfect position to wipe out any nascent species long before it became a serious threat.
The Fermi Answer. Humankind was alone because the Xul had killed everyone else.
There were exceptions, of course. The An Empire had been destroyed thousands of years before, but a few had survived on Ishtar, overlooked when they lost any technology that might attract Xul notice—like radio. The N’mah had survived by giving up star travel and living quietly inside the Sirius Stargate—the strategy now known as “rats-in-the-walls.” And there might be other exceptions out there among the stars as well.
Humankind had so far avoided destruction thanks to a combination of luck and the fact that the Xul appeared to respond to threats in a cumbersome and unwieldy manner; the sheer size and scope of their Galaxy-wide presence worked against them.
But that unwieldiness now would be working against the Marine MIEF.
“General Austin is correct,” Alexander said. “Basic strategy 101: use the enemy’s weaknesses against him. Xul weaknesses, at least in so far as we’ve been able to determine over the past few centuries, include their xenophobia and their glacial slowness in responding or adapting to threats. The xenophobia makes them predictable, after a fashion. Their slow response time gives us a chance to hit them multiple times before they land on us with their full weight.
“But we do need to identify those systems that will make them sit up and take notice if we hit them. Ideas?”
“Starwall,” a major in the 55th MARS intelligence group said after a moment. “We know it’s a major Xul transport nexus, and we know the intel they took from the Argo is there. Option B, going into Republic Space and through the Puller gate to Starwall is our best option.”
And with that, the discussion was off and running, with various members of the planning staff contributing thoughts and suggestions, others offering objections and criticisms. Alexander stepped back mentally, listening to the debate. After a few moments, he assigned Cara the job of monitoring the discussion, while he focused on the far more boring topic of Expeditionary Force logistics.
Gorgon represented a God-awful mess when it came to supply. An MIEF was an enormous and sprawling organization, so intricate and complex that dozens of specialist AIs were required simply to maintain internal communications, logistics, and routine administration. It was a joint-service unit, comprised of some 52,000 Marine and Navy personnel and eighty ships. The Marine component included a full Marine division—16,000 men and women—plus a Marine Aerospace Wing and a force service support group.
Currently, 1MIEF drew on 1MarDiv for personnel and support, but ever since the Commonwealth Senate’s vote to accept Alexander’s operational proposal, both units had been heavily reinforced, both by drawing personnel and assets from other Marine divisions, and from newly graduating classes out of the recruit training centers, both on Mars and at Earth/Luna. When 1MIEF departed for the stars—the date of embarkation was now tentatively scheduled for mid-January, eight weeks hence—it would be fully staffed independently of 1MarDiv, which would remain in the Sol System as part of the standing defense against a possible Xul strike.
The sheer logistical complexity of Operation Gorgon meant that a small army of planners were needed to work out each detail before embarkation. Vast quantities of expendables were already being routed to the Deimos Yards over Mars—most of them in the form