1506.1111
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Cluster Space
0717 hrs, GMT
Lieutenant General Martin Alexander, CO of the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, was linked into Hermes’ tactical command net, and from his mind’s-eye vantage point high atop the data stream he could see the unfolding of the entire battle. Bravo Company, chosen to spearhead this op, was pulling out, the individual M-CAPs hurtling at maximum acceleration for the safety of the stargate, as three brand-new and short-lived stars burned behind them.
The virtual icon of Vice Admiral Liam Taggart hovered next to Alexander’s awareness, backlit by the stars of the Galaxy. “Battlenet is reporting multiple targets accelerating toward our position,” Taggart’s voice said in Alexander’s mind. “I’d rather not let them get too close. If I may? …”
“Of course, Admiral. Get those damned things out of my sky. …”
Technically, the two men shared command, Taggart commanding 1MIEF’s naval forces and actions, while Alexander commanded the Marine units, both in space and on the ground, while supreme authority was vested with the Commonwealth Senate.
In fact, Alexander held overall command of the entire expeditionary force. The Senate was some tens of thousands of light years distant, now, and it was up to Alexander to determine how best to carry out the civilian command authority’s directives. The 1MIEF was an extension of Alexander’s determination and will, whatever the chain of command might look like charted.
If Alexander was in overall command, Taggart’s request for permission to engage the enemy was still little more than a polite fiction. The two long ago had arrived at a flexible and efficient compromise in military authority, and Alexander trusted the older man’s experience with naval tactics. The two men worked well together, had been working well as a superb team now for over nine years.
Usually, Alexander preferred to stand back and give Taggart free rein. But Cluster Space was important, the biggest and most strategically vital Xul node yet encountered, and Operation Clusterstrike had been conceived as a major body blow against the Xul.
They would take this one down by the book.
The MIEF fleet was dispersing now as it cleared the Gate, the ships bathed in the intense glare from the exploding fortresses. Xul ships were approaching from the system’s heart, but Ishtar, Mars, and Chiron were already directing their long-range weaponry against them, slamming them with long-range mass-driver fire. A cloud of smaller warships—cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers—accelerated rapidly, spreading out both to present more difficult targets, and to allow them to put the enemy vessels into a crossfire. As the big carriers came through behind the lead battlecruisers, swarms of Marine fighters and AI combat drones began streaming from the launch bays, filling Alexander’s virtual sky with hurtling, gleaming shapes.
Traditionally, Marines were intended to secure an invasion beachhead, emerging from the sea to seize and hold a landing area until regular Army troops could arrive and take over. That, at least, had been the Corps’ tactical dogma as far back as the twentieth century, when the Marines had ceased being purely naval troops and come into their own as an independent fighting force. Over the next few centuries, the major combat role for the Corps had been as elite infantry, tasked with a variety of missions, from boarding, search, and seizure to hostage rescue to combat assault.
Most recently, however, in the escalating war with the Galaxy-wide empire of the Xul, the Marines assigned to 1MIEF had been tasked with gate-clearing, a euphemism referring to ops like this one, requiring Marine elements to melt their way into the interior of one or more enemy bastions guarding a stargate’s approaches, planting nuclear or antimatter charges deep within the structure’s bowels, then fighting their way clear as the fortresses exploded. The moment the forts were destroyed or crippled, the main naval elements of 1MIEF could pour through the stargate and secure the gate approaches.
And then the Euler ships would come through.
“Your people did a hell of a job,” Taggart said, indicating the burning, new suns of the three Xul fortresses. They were fading now, though local space was still bathed in the harsh, 511?keV radiation released by the annihilation of positronium. A kilogram of antimatter detonated in each of those Xul bastions made a hell of a bang.
“Thank you, Admiral. I’ll be happier when we know the bursters hit their target.”
Alexander watched the straight-line trails marking the inbound course of the three Euler Starbursters on his internal display, arrowing toward the distant pinpoint of Bloodlight. Two more minutes …
“I’d still like to know how a species that evolved in a deep ocean basin could even have an idea of what the stars are,” Taggart said, “much less develop the technology to reach them. Doesn’t make sense.”
“Given enough years,” Alexander replied, “damned near anything is possible. Just be glad the Eulers and their technology are on our side!”
The Eulers were the benthic inhabitants of several star systems in Aquilan space, some twelve hundred light years from the worlds of Sol. Contacted nine years before, during the first incursion by the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force into the region of space near Nova Aquila, Eulers was the name humans had given them. Their name for themselves, it seemed, was a mathematical equation, an indication of their intensely mathematical worldview, and the humans studying them had named them after the human mathematician who’d developed that particular equation for humankind.
After nine years of study, there was still no other way to transcribe the thought-symbol they applied to themselves, or even to be sure they possessed language as humans understood the term. The massive, tentacled beings appeared to communicate with one another by changing colors and patterns visible in their mottled skin and by the taste of chemicals in the water, though direct telepathy among their own kind had not been ruled out.
Remarkably, for an oceanic species, they did possess sophisticated computer implant technology, and that was how they were, in fact, able to communicate with humans, through shared virtual realities. Their technology, their industry, and their material fabrication sciences all were quite advanced, despite the apparent disadvantage of living in the ocean deep at crushing pressures.
Like the N’mah, the Eulers defied the old xenosophontological dictum that had once declared that an intelligent species evolving in the sea would never develop technology because they could never make fire. Eons ago, they’d gene-engineered crab-like creatures to serve as their symbiotic extensions, first into the shallows of their home world, then onto dry land and, eventually, into the depths of space, to other worlds. Through their symbiotes, they’d developed fire, and industry, and a faster-than-light stardrive identical in its physics to the Alcubierre Drive employed by the Commonwealth. And the Eulers had traveled far.
Thousands of years ago, they’d encountered the Xul. The details still weren’t well understood by human xenosophontologists, but there’d been a war, perhaps several. The Eulers had learned how to use their FTL ships as shockwave triggers to make stars explode.
The Marines had learned that little trick from the Eulers nine years ago, at the Battle of the Nova. The Alcubierre Drive worked by encapsulating the starship in a bubble of severely warped space-time. Space ahead of the vehicle was sharply contracted, while space behind was expanded. The ship itself didn’t move at all relative to the space-time matrix around it, but the space moved, and carried the ship with it, accelerating to a fair-sized multiple of the speed of light.
So