Star Marines. Ian Douglas

to make anyone in the family think twice about joining—for instance, and perish the thought—the Navy.

      He sighed. Wilkie was right, of course. He didn’t belong on the suicide squad. But he didn’t have to like the alternative.

      Suicide squad. That was what some of the Marines in the platoon were calling it, of course, though Garroway, Chrome, and the other senior people were trying to discourage that idea. This would be a team effort … gung ho. Everyone pulling together.

      No one would be left behind.

      Even so, it was hard to imagine hauling a thirty-one kilo pack containing a 120-kiloton nuclear device into the bowels of an alien starship without thinking in terms of suicide. No one knew what kind of close-in defenses the Hunter of the Dawn warships possessed. No one knew for certain what the crew was like. Xul starships appeared to be crewed, or at least defended, by mobile machines … though the vessels seemed also to be little more than bodies housing titanic and very alien artificial intelligences.

      Did they possess other means for discouraging enemy troops from coming onboard and leaving unpleasant surprises behind, surprises such as a quintet of K-94s?

      No one knew. But the Marines of RST-1 would be finding out for themselves very soon now.

      “Equipment check,” Garroway called. “Everybody check your buddy.”

      The Marines were paired off, each with a partner … except for Garroway, the platoon gunny. He watched the others check one another, moving down the crowded aisle. “Chien! Check your starboard-side harness. You’re dangling.”

      “Right, Gunny.”

      “Tomasek! Shorten up that strap on your ’thirty.”

      “Aye, aye, Gunny Garroway.”

      He continued making his way among the men, checking equipment, but mostly letting them see that he was there with them. Twelve of the thirty were newbies straight out of boot camp. And two of those, he saw—Istook and Lowey—had volunteered to backpack a couple of the ’94s.

      Both were sitting next to each other on the starboard side aft, and their vitals readouts showed they both were scared. Well, hell. So was Garroway.

      “Hey, Marines,” he said over a private channel. “How’s it going?”

      PFC Gwyneth Istook was a pale, red-headed youngster from Sebree, Kentucky. Private Randolph C. Lowey was a black kid from Manchester, Georgia. “Doin’ okay, Gunny,” Lowey said.

      “Yeah,” Istook added. “Ooh-rah!”

      “I want you both to stick close to me, understand? No heroics. No wandering off.”

      “Right, Gunny.”

      “Okay, Gunny.”

      “This is not a suicide mission. You will follow me in, place your devices, and follow me out. Got it?”

      “Got it, Gunny.” Istook’s mental voice was level and hard.

      “Good.”

      He wished he could be as sure of that as he sounded.

      “Uh … Gunny?” Lowey asked. “What if that thing collapses while we’re in there?”

      It was a question for which there was no answer. Marines had boarded a disabled Xul huntership once before … and escaped moments before the black hole that apparently powered the thing had devoured the entire mile-long hulk.

      “Then we’re dead,” he replied, his voice cold. “But we’ll be dead so fast we won’t even know what hit us. And we know the bastards won’t take the rest of humanity with ’em. Right?”

      “Right, Gunny. It’ll be quick?”

      “Faster than an eye-blink.”

      He didn’t add that it would also be quick if they all went out in their own nuclear fireballs. They knew. In a way, it was a kind of blessing. Most Marines Garroway knew were more afraid of being seriously wounded or mutilated than they were of a fast and clean death. There was scuttlebutt—only scuttlebutt, he reminded himself—that if the Xul captured you, it was neither fast nor clean.

      Casualties in the unforgiving vacuum of space tended to be fatal, and rapidly so, in any case. But right now, he thought, every man and woman in the autie must be thinking about the alternatives.

      “Five minutes!” sounded over the command channel. “Everybody strap in!”

      Garroway made his way back to his seat, squeezing the bulk of his CAS into the bucket between Corporal Visclosky and Sergeant Bonilla.

      “Think they’ll have the front door open for us?” Chrome asked him over a private channel.

      “Damfino,” he replied as the grabbers snugged him in. “Wish we’d had time to load on some IMACs.”

      “Roger that. This whole fucking op feels like the brass is making it up as they go along.”

      “Yeah. What if we can’t breach the objective’s hull?”

      “Then we’ll do it the Marine way,” Garroway told her. “Improvise, overcome, and adapt.”

      “We can use Will-kill’s head as a battering ram.”

      Garroway let that pass … and hoped, for Chrome’s sake, that Wilkie wasn’t monitoring the private channels. Chances were, though, that the lieutenant had other things on his mind right now.

      Like how the hell the RST was going to get inside the Intruder if its hull hadn’t been breached.

      Garroway, along with most of the Marines in this compartment, had studied the intelligence data gleaned from studies of the Singer, found almost three centuries before beneath the ice of the Europan world-ocean, and from the battle with a Hunter-of-the-Dawn starship at the Sirius stargate 144 years ago. The Xul Hunters possessed a technology that made human starships look like stone axes by comparison.

      But that technology could be overcome. The ship that had emerged through the Sirius stargate had been protected by an electromagnetic force field of some kind, designed to divert charged particles, but it had been crippled by the field expedient of turning the plasma drives of seven starships against it. That concentration of charged particles had evidently overwhelmed the Xul vessel’s shielding and breached the hull, allowing a small Marine boarding party to enter.

      A boarding party, Garroway thought with a dark smile, that had included one of his Marine ancestors—his great-granduncle Corporal John Esteban Garroway.

      According to the records, studied in almost obsessive detail by generations of Marines since, the Xul starship had been destroyed by a rogue micro-black-hole released by its own disabled drive, literally collapsing into a gravitational singularity of its own manufacture. Before that collapse, however, the Marine boarding party had been able to tap into the equivalent of the Xul’s computer net, information that was still being studied, translated, and argued over.

      This time, the Marines would be going in to make sure the Xul monster was destroyed.

      The big question was whether they would even be able to get on board. Intelligence data suggested that the Xul’s outer hull was a nanufactured synthetic tougher than diamond, resistant to nuclear explosions and other forms of large-scale mayhem. IMAC pods were designed to use special nanodisassembler docking cuffs that would eat through anything, even Xul hulls. In the absence of fresh IMACs, though, the Marine RST was going to have to wing it. Four Marines were equipped with portable disassemblers; it would be a lot simpler if whatever had disabled the Xul starship had also burned a hole through it.

      What had they used? The XEL pods orbiting Mars, and in the Asteroid Belt? The HELGA platforms in solar orbit? Or had someone gotten lucky with an antimatter warhead?

      Well, they would know in a few more minutes. If the Xul were disabled enough not to be aware