Battlespace

Dunne shrugged. “I was talking to the senior revival tech a while ago. All he knew was that we were being kept here for a while, possibly with the idea of letting us volunteer to go out-system again.”

Out-system again? Garroway thought about it, and he didn’t care for it. He’d just gotten back, and there were things he wanted to do, damn it. Like see how things had changed in twenty years. And, oh yeah … see if he could find his father and kill the bastard.

Anyway, the usual routine in both the Navy and the Marines was to rotate personnel between ship and shore assignments or between overseas or off-world duty stations and duty back in the World.

“This is just gonna be for volunteers, right, Sergeant?” he asked.

“I’d imagine so,” Dunne said. “Unless the Corps’s changed one hell of a lot in the past twenty years.”

“On the other hand,” Houston said thoughtfully, “we are all Famsit one or two. I’d imagine that’s a resource kind of scarce in the Corps, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Corporal Regi Lobowski said. “Maybe there’s no one else to send.”

“The question is,” Kat said, “send where? Any idea, Sarge?”

“Nope. Not that there are that many possibilities.”

Garroway had already uplinked to the platoon net, with a search query. How many out-system missions were going on right now?

And the choices were fairly limited. Marine detachments had been assigned to several extrasolar archeological missions, but most of those had been recalled due to budgetary constraints. The Chiron mission, at Alpha Centauri A, had been reopened two years ago after a ten-year suspension, and the Diego Vasquez, with exoarcheologists, planetologists, and Marines, was now en route to begin again the exploration of that desert world’s dead cities, but Kali/Ross 154 and Thor/61 Cygni A both remained abandoned. There were Marines stationed at Rhiannon/Epsilon Eridani and at Poseidon/Tau Ceti, both worlds with ruins apparently going back to the long-vanished Builders.

And there was a detachment onboard the Spirit of Discovery, a deep explorer now en route for 70 Ophiuchi, and another on the Wings of Isis expedition to Sirius. That brought a wistful pang to Garroway. Lynnley was assigned to that shipboard detachment. He wondered where she was now … en route home? She ought to be by now. He hoped so.

What else? Outposts on Janus, on Hecate, and on Epona. There were no Marines stationed on those desolate worlds, but if there was trouble, Marines might be sent—assuming the need justified the colossal expense of an interstellar military expedition.

“Betcha it’s Rhiannon,” Corporal Anna Garcia said. “I heard the Builder ruins there are even bigger and more extensive than on Chiron, and the EU would just love to snatch that little gem right out from under our noses.”

“Nah,” Lobowski said. “Gotta be Chiron. Makes sense, right? I mean, we have a base there, we’re diggin’ up all kinds of cool shit, and then we pull out when the money dries up. But now we’re sending out another expedition to the place. Either there’s some highly classified shit goin’ down out there, stuff the big boys don’t want to talk about, or the EU is about to make a grab for the place. And the Feds want the Marines to handle it.”

Womicki laughed. “Shee-it. Y’wanna know what I think?”

“Not really.”

“I think they’re sending us back to Ishtar. Wouldn’t that be just like the Corps? Send us out there to fight the Frogs, haul us back, and then as soon as we’re back, they ship us out to the same place again. SOP—standard operating procedure.”

“You’re full of it, Wo. Your eyes are brown.”

Garroway wasn’t sure what to think. Alpha Centauri … Epsilon Eridani … Tau Ceti … Sirius. Which was it?

Sergeant Houston’s comment about famsits was a good one. Where possible, the Corps only sent Famsit one and two personnel to the stars … men and women who had no close family on Earth. That was for the simple fact that travel between the stars took years objective; between relativity and cybehibe, a starfaring Marine might age a few months while a wife or parents back home aged a decade or two. Military service had always placed a strain on families, but time-lagging brought a whole new level of complexity to the problem.

How do you find Marines who have no family attachments at home?

“I’d sign on for another cruise,” Womicki said.

“Fuck, not me,” Houston said. “I’ve put in six years subjective—and twenty-six objective. Done my time, and now this gyrine’s gonna be an ex-gyrine.”

“There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine, asshole,” Dunne said good-naturedly. “Once in the Corps, always in the Corps!”

“Yeah,” Kat put in. “They own you, body and soul, for all eternity. Didn’t you read the fine print on your enlistment contract?”

“Anyway, Sarge,” Lobowski said. “Maybe they won’t give you a choice. Maybe they just say ‘Jump,’ and you say ‘Aye aye, and how high, sir!’”

“Aw, they ain’t gonna ship us out without us sayin’ they can,” Corporal Matt Cavaco said. “It’s against the law.”

“The law,” Dunne said slowly, “is what the brass says the law is. They want us to go fifteen light-years and tromp on some bug-faced locals, then that’s what we’ll do.”

“Semper fi,” Kat said.

“Do or die,” Garroway added.

He wondered if they would at least be allowed leave before being shipped out-system again.

He had an old debt to settle with his father, and if another twenty years passed on Earth before he returned again, it might well be too late.

Virtual Conferencing Room 12 Star Marine Force Center Twentynine Palms, California 1904 hours, PST

“Colonel Ramsey? Thank you for nouming in for this meeting. I know it’s late there … and you must be tired after your long journey.”

The others in the noumenal space laughed. “My pleasure, General,” Ramsey said. “Not as late for me as for some of you.”

In point of physical reality, Ramsey was lying on a padded recliner in a small room behind Foss’s office. To his mind’s eye, however, he stood—if that was the word, since there was no trace of a floor—in Sirius space, surrounded by the illusion of glowing gas and dust. Sirius A and B were hard, brilliant pinpoints beneath his feet. Ahead and above hung the enigmatic Wheel.

“Gentlemen,” the welcomer said, “ladies, this meeting will initiate Operation Battlespace. This information is classified, of course. Code Seven-Orange.”

General Foss stood beside him. They were being addressed by Major General Franklin Kinsey, a man with the unwieldy title of CO-USMCSPACCOM, the commanding officer of the UFR/US Marine Space Command, based in Quantico, Virginia. Also in attendance were Brigadier General Harriet Tomasek, the coordinator of SMF space transport assets; Brigadier General Cornell Dominick, SPACCOM’s liaison with the Joint Chiefs; and Colonel Gynger Kowalewski, SPACCOM’s senior technical advisor. Two civilians were present as well, a Dr. James Ryerson, from the Federal Exoarcheological Intelligence Department, or XID; and Franklin T. Shugart from the President’s Federal Advisory Council. Other men and women, some in uniform, others in icon-civvies, hovered in the near distance, staff members, aides, and advisors.

Their images—computer-generated—hung in a semicircle in space, watching the immense Wheel. To one side, the explorer ship Wings of Isis appeared to be drifting toward the artifact, a long and slender assembly of hab and cargo modules topped by the broad, full mushroom cap of the water tank that served as both reaction mass and shielding against deadly impacts of particulate radiation encountered at near-c velocities. The star transport’s deceleration drive had been deployed, rising up through the center of the shielding cap to keep the hab modules safe in the cap’s shadow.

“Is this a computer simulation of the ship’s approach?” Dominick wanted to know. “Or the real thing?”

“Actually, it’s built up from data transmitted from a half-dozen robot probes deployed as the Isis entered the Sirius system,” Kowalewski said. “It’s a sim, yes, but it’s based on direct data, not extrapolation.”

“It’s the real thing, Corny,” Tomasek said with a laugh. “In so far as we can know what is real.”

“Here comes the hostile,” Kinsey pointed out. The golden needle of the alien spacecraft appeared. Under heavy magnification, it seemed to materialize out of empty space, but a ripple of movement visible against the background stars visible through the opening suggested that space itself was being warped out of shape within the center of the ring.

“We are pretty sure that the ring is serving as a kind of artificial wormhole,” Kowalewski said, “connecting two distant points in space. The mass readings suggest that black holes are being accelerated through the lumen of the ring and that this is radically distorting both space and time.”

The needle changed course slightly, as though aligning on the Wings of Isis. They watched it accelerate in silence, growing large … growing huge. At the last instant, the alien vessel seemed to shimmer slightly, and then it was gone, everything was gone, stars, Wheel, alien vessel, and the Wings of Isis. The watchers hung in blackness absolute.

There was a long silence, and then the scene reappeared—Isis drifting toward the Stargate, with Sirius A and B gleaming in the distance.

“So where do these guys come from?” Dominick wanted to know.

“There’s no way to tell,” Kowalewski replied.

“Can we use this, this gateway?” Foss asked.