Through his interface with the tiny craft, he could see the fortress, looming huge as it receded astern, and a sky filled with streaks of white fire. Weapons fire—whether human or Xul—was in fact invisible in vacuum, but the pod’s computer painted the tracks in as a flight aid. With a thought, he banished the special effects; there was nothing he could do in the way of actively dodging incoming fire, and seeing those bolts was both distracting and terrifying. If his pod was hit in the next few minutes, he would never feel the blast that killed them.
He ordered the pod’s computer to establish a course consisting of random jinks that would continue to bear on the stargate.
Without the flashing lights and energy bolts, surrounding space took on an almost surreal aspect of beauty, majesty, and peace. The Xul bastion continued to dwindle astern, as the stargate slowly grew larger ahead. In the distance, the glowing spiral of the Milky Way Galaxy stretched across half of heaven, as beautiful, as insubstantially delicate as a dream. Green icons floated between him and the gate, a scattering of pinpoints marking Bravo Company’s other M-CAPs.
One pinpoint flared for an instant, a dazzling star, then vanished. Corporal Levowsky’s pod, according to the readout. PFC Hollander’s pod went next. Damn! …
He forced himself to ignore the ongoing roll call of Marines who would not be retrieved. Some of the escaping Marines were going to get nailed just by sheer chance, judging from the volume of hostile fire, and those Xul laser and plasma bursts were hot enough to reduce an M-CAP and its passenger to thin, hot gas in an instant.
At this point, it was down to sheer chance. The Marine pods all were jostling and jinking their way toward the stargate. Some percentage of them would not make it. Which ones were hit, which ones made it, that now was entirely in the laps of the Gods of Battle.
Garroway had another alarm to contend with as well, and, once again, it was something he couldn’t do much about. He’d lost much of the air inside his armor when he’d breached his own suit. In the moments since, his armor had been struggling to replenish internal pressure from the life support system in his backpack. He was no longer chewing cold vacuum, which was a distinct improvement … but by tapping the rebreather source gases in his tanks, he’d sharply lowered his stay time. His armor’s on-board computer estimated that he was down to another hour or so before his oxygen supply went critical.
And according to the telemetry from Armandez’s armor, her LSS had been damaged as well, leaking a good eighty percent of her gas supply to space before it had sealed off the damage. Their rebreather filters would continue to pull oxygen from exhaled carbon dioxide and water vapor as they breathed, but there would be less and less free O2 available with every breath cycle as more and more of it was locked up by his metabolism.
Again, he killed the warning.
What he couldn’t kill were the growing physical problems brought on by his self-inflicted wounds. The pain was manageable for the moment, thanks to the nano-anodynes, but it was growing steadily worse. Shock and blood loss both had brought him close to unconsciousness, and he’d severely compounded that threat with the abrupt loss of pressure in his suit. Again, the problems were being held at bay for the moment—fluorocarbons were far more efficient at oxygen and CO2 transport in the circulatory system than were red blood cells, so you didn’t need as much of the stuff as you’d lost, but his blood volume was dangerously low and threatening still to drag him into shock, despite the medinano churning away in his brain.
He hoped the bottle’s AI was bright enough to get them through the gate, because he didn’t think he was going to be awake for very much longer. …
“Hey, Gare?” a female voice called over the combat Net. “Gare, you okay?”
“Yeah.” The word felt fuzzy on his tongue. He was having some trouble focusing now. The com ID said the voice belonged to Sergeant Colby.
“Cut your random guidance,” Colby told him. “We’re trying to rendezvous for a pick-up!”
Garroway thought-clicked the guidance control, resuming a straight-line course. If the Xul were watching closely, they would be able to nail him in seconds … but somehow that just didn’t seem important any longer.
“Hang on, Garroway,” another voice said, a man’s voice, this time. His helmet identified it was 2nd Lieutenant Cooper. “We’ve got you, buddy.”
The downloaded visual showed three other Marine bottles closing on him from three sides. Magnetic grapples emerged from their hulls, latching on. Despite the inertial damping, he felt the slight jar as they grabbed him, then began accelerating again, four pods moving randomly now as a single unit.
He could also hear another voice in the background, an AI reciting a running countdown. “Eight … seven … six … five …”
It took him a moment to realize the count was for the antimatter charges left on board the Xul bastion.
That woke him up, shaking off the growing lethargy, at least for the moment. He looked back at the Xul fortress just as the numbers ran out. “… three … two … one … now … now … n-”
White light filled heaven.
The blast was soundless, of course, in the vacuum of space, but the Xul bastion, shrunken now to something the size of a football held at arm’s length, blossomed along one side as three kilograms of antimatter came into direct contact with the normal matter surrounding them. In an instant, the five-kilometer-wide structure vanished, engulfed by the deadly white bloom.
The image winked out, then, as the M-CAP’s optics shut down to preserve the bottle’s electronics and Garroway’s optical centers. His eyes were safe, since the image was being downloaded directly into his brain, but too much energy in the input could make his brain think it had just been blinded, and at a certain safe level, the input was cut automatically.
For a long moment, he rode in darkness, seeing now with his own eyes, but with nothing to look at but the darkness of the pod’s cramped interior, and Armandez’s armored legs and boots pressed up against his visor.
He felt the shockwave as it passed, a distant, rumbling thunder felt rather than heard against the pod’s hull. Radiation counters soared, and more warning lights flashed in his mind and on his helmet display. He, Armandez, and the three Marines hauling him to safety had all just received lethal doses of hard radiation.
Well, that wouldn’t be the first time. If they got back to the hospital ship Barton in time, they could do something about that. His legs, too.
If …
The outside optic feed was restored as light levels fell to acceptable levels. Garroway was fading fast, but he was able to see not one, but three brilliant suns now shining in an uneven embrace of the approaches to the stargate. All three Xul fortresses had been successfully reduced.
And almost directly ahead, the first starships of 1MIEF were emerging from the stargate, Ishtar, Mars, and Chiron, followed by the fleet carriers Chosin and Lejeune, already loosing their swarms of Marine aerospace fighters. Surrounding the vanguard was a small cloud of destroyers and light cruisers, followed by the immense MIEF flagship Hermes.
Three small, purple icons were trailing along beneath the Hermes’ lee, but as the flag completed its transit of the gate, those icons accelerated sharply, arrowing into the Cluster Space system and swiftly flashing into the faster-than-light invisibility of their Alcubierre Drives.
Those, Garroway knew, were Euler Starblasters, alien weapons of incredibly destructive power. He tried to twist around to follow the line of their flight, in toward Bloodlight, the distant red sun of this system … but within the next second or two, everything—the M-CAPs, the distant sprawl of the Galaxy, the trio of short-lived suns guarding the