Star Marines. Ian Douglas

ago—and the nascent human civilization that served as their slaves—had been wiped out by a small asteroid dropped into what was now the Arabian Gulf.

      Evidently, when it came to planet-wrecking, asteroids were the long-established weapon of choice.

      To ensure that asteroids never again were used as weapons against Earth—by that world’s warring civilizations or by anyone else—the old Federal Republic of America had established the High Guard, a fleet of large warships patrolling through the emptiness from the Asteroid Belt out to beyond Saturn, tracking and monitoring all spacecraft moving into that immense zone.

      The U.E. monitor Prometheus was one of the largest of the modern High Guard vessels, half a kilometer long, with a crew—Navy, Marine, and civilian—of almost three thousand. Mounting powerful batteries of high-energy lasers, missile batteries, and railgun-launched antimatter warheads, surrounded by a vast and far-flung cloud of robotic sensors, drones, and manned fighters, Prometheus was slow, but arguably the most powerful warship in the military inventory of the United Earth.

      Much of the monitor’s crew was in nanosuspension, the better to conserve limited expendables like food, water, and air. At any given time, a quarter of her crew was awake and functioning; Blue Watch had the duty now.

      Sensor Technician Third Class Baldwin drifted within a sphere of night, star-dusted, with brighter points of colored light marking the positions of Prometheus’s drones and patrols, of Deep System Station 39, and of Saturn, now some thirteen million kilometers to spinward. His noumenal link connected him with the assembled sensory data from all of Prometheus’s remote drones and fighters.

      And there was nothing, nothing out there to threaten the almost meditational calm of the watch.

      Watchstanding on a High Guard monitor generally was the very definition of the word boredom. The United Earth had been at peace now—for perhaps the first time in its recent history—for the past eighty years. The last of Earth’s wars, the abortive Central Asian Jihad of 2234, had ended almost before it had begun, and had been limited entirely to ground-based forces. The thought that anybody now possessed the technology to challenge either the U.E. or the American Confederation that dominated that world body in space—much less launch an attack from the Outer System—was laughable. In fact, more and more political voices on Earth had been calling for an end to the High Guard, for so long a frightfully expensive relic of a long-past threat.

      The politicians could argue; in the meantime, the Navy continued its patrols. Tradition would be, must be, maintained. It was the Navy way.

      ST/3 Baldwin first noticed something was happening when the monitor’s AI called his attention to an anomaly—a burst of high energy radiation arriving from the direction of the constellation Canis Major, close by the bright beacon of Alpha Canis Majoris—Sirius. Sensor drones in that direction responded an instant later, reporting a sizeable mass approaching at .95c.

      “What the hell?” Baldwin asked, addressing no one in particular.

      “Contact appears to be a ship,” Prometheus’s artificial intelligence told him. “Type unknown, propulsion system unknown, origin unknown.”

      “Sound the contact alert,” Baldwin snapped. “Get the skipper on-line!”

      “Whatcha got, Baldie?” the captain’s voice asked in his mind a heartbeat later.

      “I don’t know, sir,” he replied. “Whatever it is, it’s big … and it’s coming in at near-c, right behind its dopplered wavefront.”

      That was the trouble with sensor systems limited to the speed of light. If your target was approaching you at close to that velocity, you had damned little warning of the approach.

      And then, the contact was there—huge, gleaming gold, needle-slender but easily packing the mass of four Titan-class High Guard monitors. It decelerated from close to light-speed to almost motionless relative to the Prometheus, hanging there in the black emptiness a scant hundred kilometers away.

      “Christ and Krishna!” Captain O’Mallory rasped. Baldwin felt him trigger the dispatch release, transmitting the details of the encounter so far Earthward.

      Baldwin had seen records of an identical vessel—the mile-long needle that had emerged from the Sirian Stargate over a century and a half ago to snatch up the exploratory vessel Wings of Isis, and then emerged again in 2170—or had it been a different ship? Whether the same or different, the monster intruder, positively identified as belonging to the near-mythical Hunters of the Dawn, had been destroyed in the fierce-fought Battle of Sirius.

      The Hunters of the Dawn, the Xul of ancient Sumerian legend, had returned.

      An instant later, Baldwin began screaming as the quantum reality ground state patterns of the Prometheus, and every soul on board her, were wrenched from material existence. The transformation took only a few seconds.

      From ST/3 Baldwin’s perspective, however, the shrieking tortures of Hell engulfed him, the agony of discorporation going on … and on … and on …

       Assault Detachment Alpha

       Eos Chasma,

       Mars

       1410 hrs, local

      Assault Detachment Alpha was nearly in position for the attack. They’d worked their way up a low range of rugged, eroded hills east of the LZ, and were looking down now on an enormous military base, sprawling towers, a large spaceport, and hectare upon neatly ordered hectare of warehousing. Most of the target was all in their heads—a noumenon conjured within their minds, as opposed to a phenomenon, existing in the world around them. The only material opposition were their human counterparts in this war game, Army Special Forces playing the role of OPFOR.

      Still the training AI monitoring the operation was keeping track of both sides, tallying fire, casualties, and damage, even while painting the illusion of the sprawling military base in the minds of all of the human participants.

      There’d been no fire yet, and no casualties on either side. The landing, much closer to the target than expected, had caught OPFOR by surprise. Space-suited figures were spilling from the image of pressurized bunkers to meet the Marines, but Assault Detachment Alpha had already grabbed the high ground. There weren’t many of them, either … only a company or so, perhaps fifty men. The rest must have already deployed deep into the desert, bypassed by Alpha’s pinpoint drop.

      Garroway grinned behind the opaque shield of his helmet visor as the enemy streamed into the open below, racing for the high ground and straight into Alpha’s sights. It was going to be a slaughter—at least the way computers tallied things.

      He ratcheted back the charging lever on his primary weapon, charging the Hawking. The ammunition load he was carrying was training ordnance, of course, but it would still make a most satisfying pyrotechnic display.

      “A-D Alpha, Alpha Six,” Wilkie’s voice said over the net. “Let’s take ’em! …”

       “Alpha Detachment, this is Stickney Base. Stand down. The exercise is terminated.”

      “What the fuck?” Garroway looked up into the Martian sky—a deep ultramarine overhead, shading toward dusty pink near the horizon. Actually, Phobos was not above the horizon at the moment, though it would be soon. The tiny, potato-shaped moon orbited Mars in less than eight hours, rising in the west and setting in the east only five and a half hours later. But he stared up, anyway, as if to drag down from the sky some reason for the incomprehensible command. “What the hell’s going on?”

      “All right, Marines, you heard the order,” Lieutenant Wilkie said. He stood up, sand spilling from his combat armor as its surface rippled with the rust and ocher hues of its chameleonic display. “Safe your weapons!”

      In the valley below, the magical city of towers, warehouses, and bunkers shimmered and faded from view.