Star Marines. Ian Douglas

toward the waiting soldiers.

      “Hey, Marines,” one of their former enemies called, raising a massively gauntleted hand. His words were light, bantering. “We were gonna kick your asses!”

      “Ah, you guys were already dead,” Lance Corporal Annette DeVries said. “We had you in our sights!”

      “Yeah?” another SpecFor soldier said. “We were just suckering you in, jarheads. We had two more companies out in the desert, closing on you from all sides.”

      “That would have put you right where we wanted you, doggie,” Chrome observed. “We could’ve shot in every direction without hitting our own guys.”

      “Quiet down, quiet down,” Wilkie ordered. “Save it. A couple of transports are inbound to haul us back to base.”

      “So why the cancellation of the fun and games, Lieutenant?” Garroway asked. “Things were just getting interesting.”

      “You’ll be told what you need to know when you need to know it, Gunny. Now get your ass in gear and move it!”

      Garroway scowled at the back of the officer’s helmet, just ahead of him in the file. Wilkie was a newbie to Bravo Company, fresh out of Annapolis, and hadn’t yet learned the difference between leadership and bullying. Fresh meat. It would be the job of the platoon’s senior NCOs—meaning him and Chrome—to get the guy squared away.

      And if he didn’t square, well, there were ways of dealing with that, too. Gentle ways, but ways. A company commander learned to work with his NCOs, his most experienced people, or he found himself transferred to a less life-and-death-oriented billet.

      The fact remained, something was happening to upset the brass. He turned and looked back toward the western horizon again, where low, dun-colored hills stood out in crisp relief against the dust-laden sky. Phobos was just now rising—a tiny, misshapen disk, moving swiftly enough that he could actually track its movement by eye.

      What the hell was going on up there?

       Mars Military Training Command

       Stickney Base,

       Phobos

       1455 hrs, local

      “This way, General, if you please.”

      Garroway followed the young Navy lieutenant commander down a corridor with rounded, padded walls and four sets of handrails placed to either side, and above and below. The surface gravity of Phobos was minute; he weighed only a few ounces here, and he could make his way with considerable speed by pulling himself along hand-over-hand. The tunnel was crowded with military personnel of all services, and a number of civilians as well, all moving in the same direction.

      “Just where in hell are we going, commander?” Garroway demanded.

      “Orders, sir,” she replied. “From Earth! We’re evacuating Phobos.”

      “So I gather. Why?”

      “Damfino … uh, sorry, sir. I don’t know. But hurry! Please!”

      Like red cells crowding through a blood vessel, the crowd followed a bend in the passageway leading left, then took a new tunnel that opened in the overhead of the old. Hauling himself up against the moonlet’s feeble gravity, he soon entered a massive airlock, and recognized one of the main docking connectors giving access to the labyrinth of tunnels and rooms honeycombing Phobos. Two scared-looking naval personnel clung to the bulkheads, waving people on, and up.

      Moments later, Garroway followed his escort into the main lock of the armed transport Commodore Edward Preble.

      His escort threaded her way ahead through the press of bodies, leading him at last to a compartment marked COMMUNICATIONS CENTER.

      “They wanted you in here, sir,” she told him. “Go to Channel Fifteen, and identify yourself. Good luck!”

      “Thank you, Commander …”

      But she was already gone.

      Preble’s comm center was a circular room with several oversized, sharply reclined chairs set around the room’s perimeter, half of them already occupied by naval officers. Garroway picked an empty seat, lay down, and brought the palm of his hand into contact with the electronic pickup in the armrest.

      “Channel Fifteen,” he said in his mind. “Garroway, Clinton. Major General. Service number seven-seven-six, three-one—”

      A window opened in his mind.

      He recognized the face looking out at him—an old friend, Major General Ronald Edison, CO of the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Command, and Garroway’s boss. “Good morning, Clint,” Edison said. The older man’s eyes flicked to a point offcamera, then back. “At least, it’s morning here. We have … a problem.”

      Garroway didn’t respond. Edison was on Earth—probably in his office in the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia—and with the current respective positions of Earth and Mars, a lasercom signal took over fourteen minutes to pass one-way from one to the other. Edison had transmitted this message almost a quarter of an hour earlier.

      “Thirty minutes ago, we received an emergency tight-beam radio communication from the Titan-class monitor Prometheus. The message was transmitted from near Saturn at zero-four-forty-eight hours Zulu—that’s just over an hour and a half ago. Here is the message in its entirety.”

      The general’s face vanished, replaced by a sight Garroway knew, but had hoped never to see in his lifetime—a rapidly growing oval of pure gold, reflecting the light of a distant sun as it approached the camera. The image shifted to a different angle, this one taken from a remote drone some distance away and off to one side. The golden oval was only the end-on view of an immense vessel, shaped like a flattened needle, slim, but titanic in bulk and mass. Flickering alphanumerics on the border of the noumenal image, together with computer-generated schematics, suggested a vessel nearly two kilometers long, hundreds of meters thick, and massing somewhere in the tens of millions of tons.

      “The ship appears to be identical to the one we encountered at Sirius in 2170!” a new voice was saying. Static hissed and blasted, distorting the words. The intruder must be putting out some sort of high-energy field, interfering with the transmission. “We have just lost contact with the High Guard patrol frigate Rasmusson, which … well, their last known position would have been pretty close to this monster’s line of approach.

       “It’s coming from just about right ascension six hours, forty-five minutes, declination minus sixteen degrees, forty-three minutes … in Canis Major. Pretty much bang-on the position of Sirius. I think this thing popped through the Stargate out there, and came straight to us. It’s getting closer …”

      Fresh static washed across the message, and the image shivered and flickered. Garroway strained to hear the next few words. “… ters of … Dawn … huge … no communications …” Image and sound garbled out for a few seconds, then, eerily, came back, momentarily clear. “Get the word out!” the speaker said. “They’re back!”

      Then the image flared white with interference snow, turned ragged, and was gone.

      General Edison’s face stared again into Garroway’s noumenal gaze. “The Hunter ship approached the Prometheus at point nine-five c before slowing to a relative stop in seconds. We can assume that after destroying the monitor, it has continued into the inner system at near-light speed. It may reach Earth at any moment.

      “The President has alerted all commands to the threat. As of this moment, we are on a full war alert. I’ve ordered the evacuation of Phobos, on the assumption that the invaders will be able to detect the communications nexus there, and may strike there as well. In ships, you might have a chance.

      “This is what we’ve been dreading for a century and a half, Clint. It’s finally happened.