Gradually, though, she’d come to grips with the issue. The Corps was her family, and the men, women, and AIs in her squadron her kids.
Her battlenet link painted new volleys of high-energy fire from the expeditionary force, streaks and lines and hurtling spheres of green light rendering the invisible visible in her mind.
“Shit, skipper!” Lieutenant Daniels called over the tactical channel. “We’re gonna get fried by our own people!”
“Follow procedure and trust the system,” she told him. “Pappy knows what he’s doing.”
Indeed, only a massively parallel AI like the MIEF primary AI could coordinate the incredible volume of fire and moving spacecraft now filling the operational battlespace. No merely human mind could have kept track of so many variables, so many targets and energies.
“If everything is on sched,” Lieutenant Garcia’s voice put in, “we’re going to get fried by that nova pretty quick!”
“Follow procedure,” Lee replied. “The triggerships haven’t even reached the sun yet. There’s plenty of time… .”
In fact, a countdown was ticking away in a side window open in her mind. They had about ten and a half minutes yet, give or take a bit, before the expanding blast wave of the nova reached them … assuming everything was on schedule. Plenty of time if nothing unexpected happened.
“Skipper! I’ve got a bender coming through, dead ahead!”
She checked the ID. The call was from 2nd Lieutenant Joanna Wayne, and she was only thirty kilometers off Lee’s port wing. A bender was something warping space, possibly one of the Euler triggerships … but there was a chance it was something else.
It was. She saw the brilliant flash of twisted starlight, saw the Xul Type IV materialize out of empty space fifty kilometers ahead. Like humans, the Xul used the Galaxy-spanning network of stargates, but their ships also possessed FTL capability through something like the Commonwealth’s Alcubierre Drive, which sharply warped local space.
And the alien warship had dropped into the normal spacetime matrix directly between most of her squadron and the stargate.
They were going to have to fight to get through.
1506.1111
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Cluster Space
0719 hrs, GMT
In General Alexander’s mind, 1MIEF’s battle array resembled a kind of spreading haze of discrete ships, darting and shifting from side to side as they moved. Fleet movements were coordinated by the AI-controlled battlenet, which jinked individual ships to make them harder to target without running afoul of one another. The battlenet could coordinate fire, too, concentrating the volleys from a hundred ships on one Xul monster at a time. Under that kind of intensive bombardment, even the largest, thickest-skinned whale would be whittled down to a cloud of tumbling debris before long.
At the moment, the fleet’s heaviest fire was concentrated on a single Xul Type III, a monster code-named Nightmare-class, a flattened spheroid two kilometers across. White flares of light popped and strobed across the Xul vessel’s hull, pounding at it, battering it, sending gouts and streamers of gas and vaporizing metal spraying into space. A squadron of aerospace fighters were closing with it as well, slamming antimatter warheads into its shuddering bulk.
The vessel was still thirty thousand kilometers off, invisible to the unaided eye, but visible in crystalline detail through the battlenet datafeed, which was drawing in image feeds from several hundred drones spreading through battlespace.
The Nightmare was hurt, trailing plumes of escaping vapor that froze as it hit vacuum into glittering clouds of minute ice crystals. Craters gaped in the monster’s hull, glowing sullen red and orange within the shattered interior. Burn, you bastard, Alexander thought with a silent, fierce intensity. The war with the Xul had been unrelenting and without mercy on either side, a literal war to the death.
A moment later, something inside exploded with savage violence, blowing out a quarter of the Xul warship’s flank. What was left began to fold and crumple in upon itself. Xul ships generated micro black holes as part of their power and drive systems, and when their drive containment fields failed, those singularities tended to eat their way through the ship’s structure, devouring everything with which they came into contact and releasing a flood of hard radiation in their wakes.
Alexander could hear Taggart’s thoughts as the admiral gave orders to the fleet. Another large Xul huntership was being targeted now, as the massed weapons of 1MIEF’s warships shifted to another target—a Type II huntership a kilometer long and thirty-eight thousand kilometers distant. The fleet’s weaponry ran an impressive gamut—high-intensity lasers at both optical and X-ray frequencies, gigavolt plasma discharges, and a wide variety of projectiles and missile warheads—from kinetic kill projectiles to nukes to antimatter charges, with calibers ranging from a few millimeters to several meters. A high-energy storm of devastating warshots began slamming into this new target, scouring and ripping at its ceramic armor like a lightning-charged hailstorm.
However, more and more Xul vessels were moving and beginning to converge on the 1MIEF fleet.
“Ten seconds to expected detonation,” a new voice intoned within Alexander’s head. Then, “Five … four … three … two … one … mark.”
Alexander glanced toward the local star. Bloodstar, the red sun of Cluster Space, continued burning as before, of course, a sullen ember, little more than a pinpoint of ruby light. It would be another ten long minutes before the light from the exploding star reached them.
“Okay, Pappy,” Alexander told the disembodied voice. Pappy was the senior artificial intelligence in 1MIEF, named after an early Marine aviator named Gregory “Pappy” Boyington. “Give me observational data as soon as it’s available. Tag? You heard?”
“I did, General.”
“I suggest we start falling back to the stargate.”
“Affirmative, General.” Alexander heard him begin giving orders, sounding the tactical recall.
This was the tricky part of the operation, getting the forty-two Commonwealth warships that had already come through the stargate, along with over a hundred aerospace fighters and minor combatants, back through to Carson Space without being overwhelmed by the Xul counterattack. The Xul, as the Commonwealth had learned over the years, tended to be cautious. Swat their noses hard enough, and they might not follow up on an enemy raid for years. Still, the toughest part of any op, whether in space or on a planet’s surface, was in the withdrawal phase, when the last few ships or men covering a retreat were left to face overwhelming numbers alone.
The Marines were used to that situation, the Navy less so.
The Xul Type II was collapsing upon itself, now, dwindling with eerie rapidity as the black hole within swallowed it from the inside out. But AI scans of battlespace data indicated that there were as many as two thousand Xul warships in this system. Cluster Space, as was well known, was a major Xul node and operations center.
At the