Star Marines. Ian Douglas

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