Star Marines

“Ah, roger that, Sierra One-one,” Wilkie replied over the same channel. “We’re ready.”

The voice of the shuttle pilot sounded tight and dry. What the hell was happening, anyway? Every one was stressed to the nines about something, and no one had bothered to tell the grunts what it was they had to worry about.

Typical. In fact, chances were that those Navy pilots up there didn’t know either, that they were simply reacting to the sudden avalanche of worry and stress from higher up the chain of command, like everyone else.

Wilkie was right. They would be told when they needed to know. But it griped him all the same.

One of the stars separated from formation with the other two, swiftly growing brighter, then resolving into an AUT-84 Cambria-class transport, all knobby modules, outriggers, and sponsons behind a bulky, insect-faced command module. A bright landing light shone from beneath the nose, and red and green running lights winked to port, starboard, and astern. Tiltjet thrusters were angled for a vertical touchdown, stirring up a swirling storm of dust and sand as the shuttle deployed its landing gear and gentled itself toward the ground. The landing was eerily silent, of course. The thin pretense that masqueraded as the Martian atmosphere wasn’t thick enough to carry sound.

The AUT—Armored Utility Transport, and called an “autie” for short—touched down with a slight bounce, the cargo ramp in its belly already deploying.

“Okay, Marines!” Wilkie yelled over the command channel. “Double file, and haul ass! Hut! Hut! Hut!”

The twin columns of Marines jogged ponderously down a slight rise, passing through the cloud of yellow dust still billowing around the utility craft, then up the ramp and into the darkened troop bay.

A Navy chief in a lightweight pressure suit and bubble helmet waved them on. “Let’s go, Leathernecks!” he called. “We’re on the meter, here! Drop your loads and grab a chair!”

The double row of seats along either side of the troop bay were specially designed to accommodate Mark XLIV CAS-clad Marines. Garroway hit the release for his backpack with its Shrike-C dummies, and passed it forward with the stream of other CAS packs. He found a seat and settled into it, feeling the automatic grabbers take hold, anchoring him in place. As his gauntlet came into contact with a pad on the armrest, he felt the mental connection with the shuttle’s AI, and the flow of data between it and his suit. A moment later, a window opened in his mind, giving him a clear view of the Martian landscape outside. The Special Forces were gathered in small knots well clear of the LZ, watching.

The autie was already climbing, boosting clear of the ground on its quad of outrigger tiltjets. There was a slight vibration as the jets began angling forward, repositioning for normal flight. The autie’s nose tipped up, and then they were accelerating with surprising speed for so clumsy looking a vehicle.

Garroway watched the LZ dwindle, saw the dark and wrinkled gash of the Vallis Marineris opening up on the horizon to the west like a vast wound on the planet’s dusky face. The sense of urgency remained. Someone wanted the Marines of Detachment Alpha someplace else in one hell of a hurry. At first, he thought they were shaping an approach vector to Phobos, which was rising in the west, now, well behind the accelerating autie. After a few more moments, though, it became clear that they were climbing beyond the orbit of Phobos, some 9,400 kilometers above the Martian surface, that the shuttle pilots had another rendezvous in mind.

For the first time, Garroway began to consider the obvious, the possibility that something had happened requiring a combat-ready Marine detachment.

No one had passed the word yet, but it felt like the Marines were going to war.

3

12 FEBRUARY 2314

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

0740 hrs, GMT

The huntership decelerated with inertialess ease, coming to a relative halt close alongside the drifting chunk of dark gray rock, almost black, dust-cloaked and cratered. Invisible energies reached forth, caressing the stony, carbonaceous chunk, a leftover tidbit from the formative period of this star system.

Within the eldritch world of the quantum, qualities such as mass, inertia, and gravity all were dictated by standing waves within the background base state of reality known as the zero-point field. Here, within an arena far below those gross and clumsily huge manifestations of matter and energy known as protons, neutrons, or electrons, virtual particles came into existence and, within an instant, vanished again. Manipulating those standing waves allowed matter to be rearranged, inertia to be banished, and gravity itself to be eliminated, reduced, or redirected. Accessing the zero-point field allowed space itself to be twisted and restructured, permitting faster-than-light travel, as well as the creation of incredible energies drawn from the vacuum of so-called empty space.

We Who Are found and wave-patterned the nameless lump of nickel-iron against the matrix of the zero-point field, then gently adjusted the parameters determining mass, inertia, and vector. Instantly, the chunk of rock hurtled off at high speed in a new direction, one taking it in-system, toward the bright blue point of light identified as the homeworld for 2420-544’s dominant sentient species.

Extending their electronic senses further afield, We Who Are located a second lump of dark stone tumbling through the night and moved to intercept it.

Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

0817 hrs, Shipboard/GMT

Escape velocity from the surface of Phobos was only a hair over ten centimeters per second. A single sharp, short burst from the Preble’s main thrusters, and the Navy transport was moving out from Mars fast enough that the tiny, potato-shaped moon rapidly dwindled to a dark speck barely visible against the orange-rust face of Mars, then vanished. General Garroway felt the sudden cessation of thrust, and the return of the falling sensation of microgravity, and wondered what was happening.

By tapping into the Preble’s common access datalink, Garroway was able to open a navigational window, which showed that the transport was in the process of rendezvousing with a high-speed AUT coming up from the Martian surface ahead. The shuttle was already in a considerably higher orbit than was the Preble, which meant the transport would soon overtake the tiny craft, now three thousand kilometers in front of them.

A further data check revealed the interesting datum that the autie was carrying thirty-two marines of Detachment Alpha, the same group whose exercise he’d just been watching from the relative comfort of the Phobos training facility.

His nephew was on board, one of five or six senior NCOs.

He resisted the temptation to link into the autie’s comm center and talk to Travis, to let him know that his uncle was on board the Preble. There would be time enough for reunion later.

Besides, the change in the RST’s status, transferring it to 1MIEU and putting it directly under his command, raised a nightmare specter—the possibility that soon, possibly very soon, General Clinton Garroway would be giving orders that meant Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway’s death.

A warning chimed within his head. Jack Bettisly, his aide, was calling for his attention.

“Damn it, what do you want?”

He felt Major Bettisly’s flinch, and immediately regretted the snap of anger. Still, there was no going back.

“Sorry to intrude, sir,” Bettisly said. “But we have a feed from three High Guard pickets. They’ve found the intruder, sir.”

“Let me see.”

A three-dimensional schematic opened in a new mental window. The intruder’s course was clearly marked, as were the last known positions of the monitor Prometheus and the patrol frigate Rasmusson, several High Guard drones, and Mars, with the Preble just beginning to get under way. A tiny white star had detached from the crimson star marking the intruder. “What’s that?”

Data unfolded in columns down the right side of the window. “Mass analyses suggests it’s a small asteroid, sir,” Bettisly told him. “About one kilometer across … mass approximately two billion tons. The intruder seems to have nudged it onto a new vector.”

Garroway studied the data with growing horror. “Two thousand kilometers per second?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s a hell of a nudge.” A cold thought gripped his heart. “Where’s it going? What’s the target?”

The schematic shrank in the window, showing more of the orbit of Mars … and then of Earth. A yellow line projected itself along the rock’s projected path, which passed just in front of Earth’s current position. The white star tracked down the slightly curving line as Earth moved forward. …

“Great Father in Heaven …”

“Yes, sir. The rock will hit Earth.”

“How long?”

“Nineteen hours, forty-seven minutes, thirty seconds from launch.”

“Less than a full day. Still, there’s time to intercept it.”

“Yes, sir.” Bettisly sounded uncertain.

“Talk to me.”