Star Marines

“Two thousand kps, sir. That’s fast. Just how are we supposed to intercept it? And the intruder appears to be closing on another small asteroid.”

On the schematic, the Hunter ship appeared to leap ahead, vaulting across several thousand kilometers within an eye’s blink. Seconds later, a second curving, yellow path drew itself across space, moving almost parallel to the first, but gently converging with it, the two lines intersecting where they crossed Earth’s orbit.

“Damn,” Garroway said quietly. “It’s going to keep throwing rocks.”

“That is Quincy’s analysis at this point, General.”

Quincy was the invisible member of Garroway’s command constellation, an AI resident at the moment in Phobos, but who could be uploaded to the Preble’s on-board computer network once the crew had things squared away. Their precipitous exit from Phobos had pretty much scrambled any hope of an orderly transition for the MIEU command group. They weren’t even supposed to be on this vessel, which was small, cramped, and possessed a frankly second-rate electronics suite.

But Marines did what they could with what was available.

Even so, Garroway felt momentarily at a loss. What could the Marines do against such a weapon? Stopping falling rocks was the Navy’s job—specifically the High Guard. At this larger scale, the mind-window schematic showed several dozen blue stars scattered across the Inner System and the near reaches of the Asteroid Belt. Many were already in motion; the rest soon would be. The World Federation was now going on full alert, at war with the Hunters of the Dawn.

Dozens of Navy warships were converging on the intruder.

But it’s not enough, Garroway thought. Not nearly enough. …

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

0850 hrs, GMT

The Lords Who Are took note of the swarm of hostile ships converging on the lone huntership, and dismissed the threat, a threat scarcely worthy even of contempt. Analysis of the local species’ technological capabilities verified the data assembled from the various local spacecraft already patterned and stored. The local species—the name We Who Are reserved for such might have translated well as “pests” or “vermin”—used spacecraft capable of sustained thrust, but at accelerations so low it would take millions of seconds to reach a meaningful percentage of the speed of light, and they did not appear to possess faster-than-light capabilities at all.

So far as weapons were concerned, it appeared unlikely that they had anything more threatening than high-energy coherent beam weapons, missiles with various types of warheads, or kinetic-kill weapons employing high-velocity masses. Some of those weapons might prove to be a minor threat, if the vermin could get close enough to the huntership to employ them.

The Lords Who Are considered the advisability of a minor demonstration to convince the vermin of their own helplessness. It would be some time, however, before the nearest of the local defenders would be close enough for the huntership to employ its own weapons against them.

They elected to continue snatching small asteroids from orbit and imparting to them new vectors, vectors that would carry them in to strike the third planet, and utterly annihilate the vermin civilization.

Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

0924 hrs, Shipboard/GMT

“That’s the fifth asteroid launched in the past hour and a half,” Admiral Jollet said. “They’re testing our defenses by brute strength, throwing enough at them to overwhelm them.”

“‘Testing?’” General Garroway said. “It looks to me like an all-out attempt to wipe us off the face of the Galaxy.”

“The intruder,” Rear Admiral Thom Bennett was saying, “appears to be trying to wipe us out as a species, using classic wave tactics.”

Bennett hadn’t heard Garroway’s comment, of course. Garroway and Jollett, both, were on board the Commodore Edward Preble, while most of the virtual conference participants were on Earth, currently seven light-minutes away. The exchange Garroway and the other brass on board the Preble were experiencing was old news—seven minutes old, to be precise. For that reason, they were out of the direct comm loop, but they could still talk among themselves.

“One ship?” Lieutenant General Clarence Armitage, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said with a mental snort. “Preposterous!”

“Thom is right,” General Eva Cortez said. “If even one of those rocks gets through, it means catastrophe.”

Garroway felt the emotions of the other men and women within the noumenal briefing session. It was, he thought, less a formal briefing than a mental chat-room gabfest and sightseeing session for the Federation’s high-ranking brass.

From his point of view, he was still watching the schematic showing the intruder’s progress through the Asteroid Belt, together with the fast-multiplying knot of new vectors intersecting at the point where Earth would be in another day and a half. Icons representing some two hundred other officers hung within the schematic with him, including the various chairpersons of the Joint Chiefs, their staffs, as well as a number of senior personnel representing the Federation Joint Forces Command, both the regular Navy and the High Guard, and the U.S. Marines. More brass were dropping into the noumenon every moment, as the scope and seriousness of the threat became more and more clear. Also present were a growing number of civilian government officials—representatives and congresspersons both from the governments of the United States of America and of the American Federal Union, as well as representatives from member states of the World Union.

Garroway felt the buzz of mental conversations seven minutes past, as well as the ebb and flow of emotions. Those last ranged from genuine fear to outright disbelief; as the intruder kicked more and more kilometer-sized boulders onto intercept courses with Earth, however, outright skepticism among the observers was dwindling.

One of the officers who remained unconvinced, however, was General Armitage. “By ‘wave tactics,’ Admiral, I assume you mean an attempt to swamp our defenses.”

“Yes, General. Five … no, six bodies, now … streaming in one after the other at two thousand kilometers per second … even the High Guard planetary defense AIs can’t cope with that. They’re trying, of course, but they can’t guarantee that one or more of those rocks won’t get through.”

“By my count, there are two hundred thirty-six High Guard vessels currently in Solar orbit,” a new voice said. The noumenal icon identified the speaker as Senator Alena Fortier, of Quebec. She was speaking Québecois French, but the AIs managing the mass mindlink handled the translations easily enough. “Perhaps it’s time the military finally paid for itself in terms of some useful action.”

“Madam Senator,” Rear Admiral Karen Castellaw said. “Things are not that simple.”

Castellaw was the current commanding officer of the High Guard, technically still a branch of the Federal Navy, but operating in most respects as a distinct entity, much like the Coast Guard that still patrolled North American waters on Earth.

“They never are,” Major General Edison dryly observed.

“Indeed?” Fortier snapped. “The High Guard, according to its charter, is there to protect Earth from impacts by comets and asteroids, am I right? In half a century, they’ve done nothing but act as a drain upon the public treasury. Now, there are asteroids—small ones, anyway, on collision course with Earth. Where, I ask, is the High Guard?”

Senator Fortier had a belligerent reputation. A staunch Democratic Unionist and a leader of the World Disarmament Coalition, she was an adamant and outspoken champion of an old and cherished dream—the total and complete elimination of the military. After eighty years of unbroken peace, many both in the North American Union and within the broader scope of the World Federal Union felt that Humankind could at last dispense with military expenditures entirely, diverting the money and the mind power instead to more peaceful and profitable uses.

Of course, the military’s position on that issue was that, if nothing else, one day it would be necessary to face the Hunters of the Dawn. Garroway found it fascinating that now, confronted with the reality and the immediacy of the Hunter threat, Senator Fortier still retained her stubbornly anti-military bias.

“The physics of the situation,” Dr. Katarina Walden, of the Union government’s Office of Planetographic Studies, pointed out, “are … intimidating. Even a one-kilometer asteroid can mass something like three million tons. There are strategies for vaporizing, or, more likely, for diverting something of that size. But these bodies are moving at two thousand kilometers per second. We quite simply don’t have anything that can match their courses and speeds in … less than eighteen hours, now.”

“So?” Fortier asked with a mental shrug. “If you can’t catch them with missiles, use plasma and HEL beams.”

“Senator, do you have any idea how much energy is required to completely vaporize a rock one kilometer in diameter?” Walden sounded exasperated. Garroway was impressed, however, by her reserve. “We will need to target each rock in such a way that a burst of plasma from the weapon strike acts as a kind of jet to shove it aside. If we do that early enough, the rock could be nudged aside enough that it might miss Earth. Might. If we can hit it early enough on its trajectory. At that kind of velocity, however, the rock might well not be shoved aside in time.”

“Then I would suggest that the sooner you begin, the greater the chance of success,” Fortier said.

“You’re right, Senator,” Admiral Castellaw said. “Of course. Our best and most immediate hope is the HELGA system, and I’ve already issued the necessary orders. All three weapons platforms have lines of sight on the incoming targets. They should be able to commence firing within two hours.”

HELGA stood for High-Energy Laser Gun Array. The word “Gun” in that acronym was often challenged by purists as redundant, but the Navy retained the age-old distinction of a gun as a very large and long-ranged shipboard weapon, as artillery rather than, say, a rifle. There were three HELGA stations, all sharing a single orbit around the sun between the orbits of Earth and Venus and spaced 120 degrees apart. Solar collector panels nearly ten square kilometers in gleaming expanse captured sunlight—far brighter and more energetic than the stuff that reached Earth—and stored it in the enormous high-capacity, high-discharge batteries that made up much of each orbital station’s bulk.

The HELGA stations, administered by the High Guard, had been designed with only one purpose in mind—to vaporize any asteroid or comet found to be on an intercept path with Earth. Since the twenty-first century, when an attempt had actually been made to destroy the United States through the deliberate manipulation of a ten-kilometer asteroid’s orbit, various Skyfall scenarios had remained the single biggest nightmare facing both military and civilian leaders. In the forty-seven years since the completion of Station One, they’d not once been necessary, though of course they’d been extensively tested against selected target asteroids in the Belt.

“Well … those big laser cannons won’t have any trouble with one-kilometer rocks, will they?” People’s Representative Gardenez, of the North American Federal Republic asked.

Castellaw sighed. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t answer that yet. It takes time between each laser discharge to store up enough energy for the next shot. We’re also programming twelve XEL satellites to contribute their fire as well. Between the two systems … maybe …”

“If the Hunters don’t put so many rocks into the stream,” General Dumont, the Marine Corps Commandant, added, “that neither the HELs or the XELs can handle them all.”

XELs—pronounced “zels” and standing for X-ray Emission Lasers—were unmanned weapons positioned at strategic points throughout the inner Asteroid Belt. When triggered, a nuclear detonation provided an intense pulse of X-rays, which were focused into a very brief, but very powerful burst of coherent X-ray energy. For obvious reasons, they were single-shot weapons, but the energy each released in a fraction of a second, while substantially less than that of a three-second burst from a HELGA platform, could still vaporize large rocks.

“All available fleet elements are being deployed toward the intruder,” Admiral Bennett said. “Unfortunately, it will take time to get there, and we run the risk of having them arrive piecemeal. What’s worse, the intruder appears capable of accelerating at incredible rates … possibly enough to reach the speed of light within moments.” He indicated the schematic, where the red star of the Hunter vessel suddenly winked out, to reappear tens of thousands of kilometers away. “We don’t know how the hell that could be possible, but he seems to be providing a demonstration, just for us.”

“An application of inertialess technology, obviously,” Representative Logan, of the Federal Union observed. “Have we discussed this with the Oannans?”