But even if the MIEF was able to “live off the land,” as some wag had put it already—meaning picking up all necessary elements in other star systems for reassembly as needed—the Expeditionary Fleet needed to have robot miners and transports enough to collect the raw materials, storage tankers to hold them, and mobile processing plants to convert and distribute the finished consumables. Besides that, there were critical decisions to be made concerning mechanical spares and replacement parts, especially for complex electronic components that couldn’t be batch grown in the fleet’s repair ships.
And there were the weapons, the Mark 660 battlesuits, the ammunition, the power cores and converters … the list seemed endless, the storage space for it all sharply limited. Alexander and his planning staff were still hard at work determining if the thing was even possible. It wasn’t enough simply to add an extra few AKs, ANs, and AEs to the fleet roster, because each of those vessels—cargo ships, nanufactory transports, and ammunition ships—in turn needed their own small mountains of spare parts and extra equipment.
Where 1MIEF was going was a long, long way out into the dark, and resupply was going to be a bitch. The situation was made even tougher by the fact that Alexander couldn’t even begin to guess how long 1MIEF would be deployed starside.
“No!” a voice in his mind called, rising above the others. “You young rock! We do that and we leave our lines of retreat wide open and vulnerable! Doing that would be tantamount to suicide!”
Judging from the acrimony of the debate going on within the staff planning group, it might be a while before the MIEF could depart in the first place. Rock was an old, old Corps epithet for a particularly dumb Marine—as in “dumb as a rock.”
“With respect … sir,” another voice came back, biting. “How the hell are we going to maintain our lines of retreat across twenty thousand light-years? The EF will be cut off as soon as it goes through the first Gate!”
“People!” Alexander cut in. “Let’s keep it civil.” A webwork of varicolored lines and brightly lit stars now stretched across the Galaxy map, showing alternate routes and objectives, known Stargate links, and known Xul bases. Cara had been tagging and color-coding each idea as it was presented, attaching to each lists of pros and cons.
As Alexander looked at the tangle, a new surety began to make itself felt. Leadership styles differed, of course, from officer to officer, and since the beginning of his career Alexander had tried to be democratic in his approach, soliciting the ideas and opinions of his subordinates and giving each due consideration.
But in the final analyses, the Marine Corps was not a democracy, any more than was the chain of command on board a Navy warship. One voice was needed to give the orders; one mind was required to make the necessary decisions.
He wanted their input, but ultimately, this decision was his, and his alone.
“Okay, people,” he said, speaking into the hard, new silence. “It’s clear that what we lack more than anything else is decent intel. We need to identify, and quickly, the best way to hit the Xul, and to hit them hard, hard enough to draw their interest away from human space.
“To that end, I’m authorizing increased surveillance on known Xul bases, with an emphasis on astrogational mapping. We need to know where these bases are relative to one another, and how they interconnect.”
“Sir,” General Austin asked. “Does that include Stargates outside the Commonwealth?”
“You’re damned straight it does. Keep the ops black. We don’t need any more political problems, here. I’ll get the authorization we need. Okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. I am also authorizing an AI search of all known astronomical databases. I want to compile every bit of data possible that might reveal unexpected or unknown links between known Stargates and known areas of deep space.” He thought a moment, then added, “Include in that search any deep space anomalies or unexplained phenomena that might indicate a Xul presence or interest.” A number of agencies kept track of such data, he knew, though he wasn’t sure if anyone ever actually used it.
But the data were there, and AI agents could find it, compile it, and present it to the ops planning team. Reports of gamma or x-ray ray bursts, for example, from a particular star system might indicate a normal and natural process—stellar material from a companion star falling onto the surface of a neutron star, for example—or it could indicate the presence of a Xul fleet.
“So far as ops planning goes, we need to pick one mode of approach and focus on that. So here’s what we’re going to do. …”
2311.1102
UCS Samar
In transit, Alighan to Sol
0730 hrs GMT
The transport was two weeks out from Sol. For the past four weeks, Ramsey’s sessions with Karla had continued, with hours out of each ship’s day passing in virtual conversations with the AI in a variety of imagined “safe” environs.
Slowly, he was coming to grips with his ghosts.
It hadn’t been easy.
“I don’t know how the Navy pukes stand it, man,” Staff Sergeant Shari Colver told him. “The boredom would drive me straight out the nearest airlock ricky-tick.”
“Hey, that’s why they spend most of their time in cybehybe,” Ramsey said with a shrug.
They were sitting in the ship’s lounge, a small and Spartan compartment that combined rec hall with mess deck and was normally reserved for the use of the shipboard in-transit watch. The domed overhead showed a backdrop of stars; if one studied the star patterns closely enough, individual stars appeared to move from hour to hour—the nearest ones, at any rate … but the effect was a lie, an illusion generated by the Samar’s navigational AI.
The fact of the matter was that it was impossible to see outside of a starship traveling within an Alcubierre spacetime bubble.
In 1994, a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre had first laid the groundwork for the space drive that later bore his name, when his equations demonstrated that—in theory, at least—a wave of distorted spacetime, expanding behind and contracting ahead, could carry a spacecraft along at faster-than-light speeds. No basic physics were violated in the movement; Einstein’s prohibitions against FTL had been directed at mass and energy, not at the fabric of space itself, and, in fact, it was eventually determined that the entire universe had naturally expanded faster than the speed of light in the opening moments of its own birth. A ship in the warp of the Alcubierre Metric might slip quietly across flat spacetime at the rate of nine light-years per day, but since it was motionless relative to the encapsulated spacetime immediately around it, it avoided completely such inconvenient effects as acceleration, relativistic mass increase, or time dilation.
But by the nature of the space-bending field around it, a vessel under Alcubierre Drive, also was effectively cut off from the universe outside. There were no navigational vid views outside the hull for the simple reason that there was nothing to see out there save the enveloping black. Encased within a bubble of severely distorted space and time, Samar and her passengers remained completely deaf and blind to their surroundings, and the slow-drifting stars