Star Strike. Ian Douglas

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       STAR STRIKE

      BOOK ONE OF THE INHERITANCE TRILOGY

      IAN DOUGLAS

       To CJ and Garin, good friends who saw me through rough times. And, as always, for Brea.

      Table of Contents

       Title Page

       Dedication

Acknowledgments

       Keep it simple. Secure the spaceport. Hold until relieved.

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       Chapter 18

       Chapter 19

       Chapter 20

       Chapter 21

       Chapter 22

       Chapter 23

       Chapter 24

       Chapter 25

       Chapter 26

       Epilogue

       Also by Ian Douglas

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       Acknowledgments

      My special thanks to David Plottel, friend, programmer, mathematician, and ubergeek, for his insights into Leonhard Euler and the God-equation known as Euler’s Identity.

       Keep it simple. Secure the spaceport. Hold until relieved.

      Nothing new there.

       Remember your training.

      The question was whether the landings would be enough. Alighan was a heavily populated world in the Theocracy of Islam, with over two billion people in the ocean-girdled world’s teeming cities. The Marine assault force consisted of the four companies of the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, a total of five hundred eighty men and women … against an entire world.

      True, they were exceptionally well armed and armored men and women, and they seemed—for the moment at least—to have the element of surprise. Even so, fewer than six hundred Marines against a population of two billion who would fight to the death and take as many Marines with them as they could.

      Impossible.

      Ridiculously impossible.

      But the United Star Marines specialized in the impossible, as they and their predecessors had done for the past eleven hundred years …

       Prologue

      Deep within the star clouds of the Second Galactic Spiral Arm, a sentient machine detected the blue-white shriek of tortured hydrogen atoms, and a program hundreds of thousands of years ancient switched from stand-by to active. Something was out there … something massive, something moving at very nearly the speed of light.

       Even the hardest interstellar vacuum contains isolated flecks of matter—hydrogen atoms, mostly, perhaps one per cubic centimeter or so. The object’s high-speed passage plowed through these atoms, ionizing many, leaving a boiling hiss in its wake easily detectable by appropriately sensitive instrumentation. The disturbance was a kind of wake, created by a mass of some hundreds of millions of tons plowing through the tenuous matter of the interstellar void at near-c.

       The sentry machine had taken up its lonely vigil half a million years before, during the desperate and no-quarter war of extermination against the Associative, a war that had laid waste to ten thousand suns and countless worlds scattered across a third of the Galaxy. Occasionally, it conversed with others of its kind—a means of staying sane through the millennia—but for most of its existence it had been asleep, dreaming the eldritch dreams of a being neither wholly mechanism, nor wholly biological.

       The builders of the Sentry called themselves something that might have translated, very approximately, as “We Who Are.” Other species across light centuries of space and hundreds of millennia called them many other things. The inhabitants