Star Marines. Ian Douglas

to a suicide mission?”

      “Yes, sir. It will be volunteers only, of course. I’m sure that’s what General Garroway has in mind.”

      It was. And Garroway had no doubt that there would be plenty of volunteers from the assault detachment. He knew what these Marines were like.

      “Very noble, General, I’m sure,” Logan said. “But Senator Fortier is right. If the HELGA platforms are firing at the enemy ship, they can’t be firing at the asteroids threatening the Earth.”

      “Sir, I submit that by the time Preble has picked up the assault pods and reached striking range of the intruder, the matter will already have been settled, one way or another.”

      Garroway nodded in silent, unseen agreement. He didn’t add that a Marine assault on the Hunter warship could only take place if some way could be found to immobilize it. So long as it could slip away at the speed of light any time it felt threatened, no human weapon or vessel was going to be able to touch it. They would have to disable the intruder, at least temporarily, or they would never be able to catch it.

      Unfortunately, Fortier, Logan, and the other civilian leaders had managed to hijack the informal planning session, turning it into a government-sponsored briefing session. That was one of the problems of chat-room technology; anyone with the appropriate codes and clearance could drop in. He would need to discuss things privately with Jollett, Castellaw, and Armitage.

      And with Colonel Lee.

      “General Garroway is right,” Armitage said, thoughtful. “First things first. Let’s see if HELGA and the XEL satellites can stop the asteroids already en route to Earth. After that …”

      Of course, if Earth’s high-energy defenses failed, it was quite possible that there would be no after that to worry about.

       High Guard HEL Facility 3

       Solar Orbit

       1151 hrs, GMT

      Captain Gupta Narayanan burst out of the access tunnel, propelling himself with long, easy strokes onto the main control deck. Microgravity had its advantages, he decided, at least once you were used to it.

      “Captain, we are at power,” Kali, the station’s AI, announced over his mindlink. “We are ready to commence the firing program.”

      Narayanan pulled himself into the control deck’s command chair and strapped himself in. The targeting schematic came on-line, flooding into a newly opened window within his mind.

      There were now seven asteroids en route from various points in the Belt, all on paths that converged on Earth.

      A targeting curser tracked and locked on to the lead asteroid in the stream … or, rather, on the place where that rock would be in another five minutes. It would take that long for the HEL burst to cross the intervening space to the target.

      Actually hitting that rock, Narayanan mused, was roughly akin to shooting at and hitting the base of a 10mm cartridge with a BB-sized pellet at a range of one kilometer—an accomplishment made even more astonishing by the fact that the cartridge actually moved six hundred meters between the moment the BB was fired and the moment it reached its target. Targeting such small objects across such vast distances required inhuman precision and accuracy—which, in point of fact, was why the actual aiming and firing were carried out by an artificial intelligence resident within the HELGA platform’s computer net.

      “Shall I request final confirmation from SPACDEFCOM?” Kali asked him.

      Briefly, he considered making the request; standing orders required that formality. In fact, he could be court-martialed for failing to do so.

      But it was formality only, and his immediate orders—and his duty—were clear. Those asteroids possessed among their number kinetic energy enough to scour every scrap of life from the planet several times over. At HELGA Three’s current position relative to Earth, a radio signal would take four and a half minutes to reach Earth, and the reply would take another four and a half. The sooner he initiated the sequence, the better Earth’s chances for survival.

      The problem was that the HELGA platforms, though designed to protect Earth from asteroid and comet impacts, were deadly weapons of mass destruction in their own right. One three-second beam from HELGA Three striking New York, for instance, would release the energy of ten thousand Hiroshimas, and obliterate the city.

      The weapons had been designed and deployed by the United States, but in accordance with the Jerusalem Treaty of 2270, control of the weapon was vested not in the Federal Union of the United States, or in the American Union. The World Union, though still embryonic and with uncertain authority, alone held the firing button for the three satellites. Crews were rotated on and off the stations on six-month schedules, and were drawn from nation states all over the world with histories of non-aggression or neutrality—Sweden, Switzerland, Tuamotu, and Narayanan’s own Republic of Andhra Pradesh.

      The firing protocols were so complex, the joke was that if a stray asteroid ever did threaten Earth, the dinosaurs would take care of it … after the clearance to fire came through from their HQ sixty-five million years before.

      Politics, he thought, the word an obscenity.

      “Negative on confirmation,” he told the AI. “Initiate firing sequence.”

      “Firing one,” Kali told him. “Time Zulu 1151 hours, seventeen seconds.”

      There was no flash, no sound, no dimming of the station’s lights, no evidence at all of the titanic release of power save for the data stream appearing in the targeting window in Narayanan’s head. For three seconds, an inconceivable torrent of laser energy streamed into space. Then, the station’s massive capacitors drained, the system began recharging for the next shot.

      Recharge would take just over forty-five minutes.

      4

       12 FEBRUARY 2314

       Battlespace

       1156 hrs, GMT

      In the four and a quarter hours since the huntership had boosted that first small planetoid toward Earth, the rock had traveled almost 31 million kilometers which, on the vaster scale used to measure distances across something as large as a solar system, translated to a little more than one and a half light-minutes. HELGA Platform 3, in solar orbit 132 million kilometers from the Sun, currently and by chance, was five light-minutes from the rock that was its first target.

      At their current respective positions, rock, HELGA Three, and Earth formed a triangle with slightly unequal legs—five light-minutes from HELGA to the rock, six from the rock to Earth, four and a half from Earth to HELGA. In physics, one watt of power delivered in one second equaled one joule. The HELGA laser—actually a battery of twenty-five lasers fired as an array—had an output of some 50 billion joules. The three-second beam, then, carried 150 thousand megajoules, the equivalent of 750 twenty-megaton nuclear warheads.

      Some five minutes after Kali triggered the HELGA discharge, then, the kilometer-wide rock was struck by the laser energy streaming out from the distant military base between the orbits of Earth and Venus. The beam itself was invisible, of course; there was no air to ionize, no mist of dust or water vapor in the vacuum of space to call the beam into visibility. The tumbling mountain of rock, however, abruptly flared sun-hot, as a brilliant, blindingly intense star-point of white light ignited at the planetoid’s limb.

      In fact, the targeting was less than perfect; tiny uncertainties about the rock’s precise position and vector meant that the strike was not dead-center on the target, and, though the three-second beam was tracking along the asteroid’s calculated inward-bound path, it actually connected with the rock for less than half a second before the rock tumbled out of the beam.

      That half-second, however, was sufficient to pour the wrath of over a hundred detonating twenty-megaton