Star Strike. Ian Douglas

… and then Ramsey heard retching sounds as the Marine turned away suddenly. Ramsey continued staring into the pit, unable to stop looking even as he realized that he would never be able to purge his brain of the sight. There must have been thirty or forty people huddled in the basement, though the nano-D cloud had made sorting one body from another difficult. The tangled, tortured positions of the bodies suggested they’d known what was happening to them, and that death had not been quick.

      They were civilians, obviously. The Islamic Theocracy did not permit female soldiers, and there’d been children down there as well. Clearly, they’d been trying to find shelter inside the basement.

      Equally clearly, the deaths had been inflicted by Theocrat weapons; the assault force had not employed nano-D.

      It was said that the life expectancy of an unarmored person on a modern battlefield was measured in scant seconds. These people had never had a chance. Ramsey felt a sullen rage growing within—rage at the Muzzies for their blind use of indiscriminate weaponry and their placement of military targets close beside civilian enclaves, rage at the op planners who’d targeted a heavily inhabited planet, rage at the very idea of war, of doing this to innocent bystanders.

      Turning away, finally, he grasped Chu’s elbow and steered him clear of the scene.

      He didn’t think he was going to be able to get rid of the memory.

      He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

      And at the same time, he wasn’t certain he could live with the nightmare.

       4

       0507.1102

       USMC Skybase

       Paraspace

       0946 hrs GMT

      Lieutenant General Martin Alexander completed the final download encompassing the Alighan operation. Casualties had been God-awful high—almost twenty percent—and a disproportionate percentage of those were irretrievables, men and women so badly charred by heat or radiation or so melted by nano-D that they could not be brought back to life. Those were the tough ones, the ones requiring a virtual visit to parents or spouses.

      With a mental click, he shifted his awareness to the Map Center, a noumenal chamber with a three-D navigable representation of the entire Galaxy. For a moment, his mind’s eye hovered above the broad, softly radiant spiral, taking in the nebulae-clotted spiral arms, pale blue and white, unwinding from the ruddier, warmer core, a vast and teeming beehive of suns surrounded by gas-cloud ramparts, like luminous thunderheads at the Core’s periphery. Four hundred billion stars across a spiral a hundred thousand light-years across.

      How many of those pinpoint stars making up those banked, luminous clouds and streaming arms were suns, with worlds and life and civilizations?

      An unanswerable question.

      A majority of stars had planets, of course. That fact had been certain as far back as the twenty-first century or before, when extrasolar planets had first been discovered. Worlds with life were common as well; wherever there was liquid water or, more infrequently, liquid ammonia or liquid sulfur, life, of one kind or another, seemed to arise almost spontaneously.

      How many of those worlds with life developed intelligence, however, and communicative civilizations, was a much more difficult, and darker question. Once, the answer would have been “millions” or even “tens of millions,” a guess based partly upon statistical analyses and partly upon xenoarcheological discoveries within the Solar System and elsewhere that showed technic civilization, starfaring civilization, exploding across the Galaxy in wave upon wave.

      But that was before the discovery of the true nature of the Xul.

      “General Alexander?”

      “Yes, Herschel.”

      Herschel was the artificial intelligence controlling the Galaxy display.

      “Your aide wishes to link with you.

      Damn. Never a moment’s peace. “Very well.”

      Cara, his electronic assistant, entered his noumenal space, her EA icon materializing out of the void. “Excuse the interruption, General.”

      “Whatcha got?”

      “Sir, we have a final plot on the Argo. And a partial synch with the ship’s AI.”

      “Only partial?”

      “Whatever happened out there happened very quickly.”

      “I see.” He sighed. “Okay. Feed it through. And let’s see the plot.”

      A white pinpoint winked brightly within the depths of one of the spiral arms. At the same time, he felt the surge of incoming data, an e-brief, only, representing the synch with the Argo’s AI.

      Perseus. The name of the AI had been Perseus.

      “A group of delegates from the Defense Advisory Council wants to link with you to discuss the Xul threat,” his aide continued as he skimmed the brief.

      “I’ll just bet they do. Okay. When?”

      “Fourteen minutes. Ten-hundred hours.”

      “Huh. The Argo incident has them worried.”

      “Terrified, more like it. And can you blame them, sir? There hasn’t been another peep out of the Xul for five hundred years.”

      Alexander completed the brief, then stared into the sea of teeming suns hanging before him. “I wouldn’t call the bombardment of Earth by high-velocity asteroids a ‘peep,’ Cara. Earth was nearly destroyed.”

      “Yes, sir. But they didn’t finish us. In fact, they seem to have lost track of us entirely.”

      “Garroway’s attack at Night’s Edge—” He stopped himself. He had a tendency, he knew, to slip into lecture mode, and his aide knew the history of Night’s Edge as well as he did. Better, perhaps.

      “Exactly, sir,” she said. “Garroway gambled that information about our whereabouts in the Galaxy had not been disseminated yet beyond the Xul base that launched the attack on us. And apparently his gamble paid off. Only now …”

      “Now the Xul appear to have picked up the trail again.”

      “We have to assume that if they captured the Argo, they know where we are. And they’ll be better prepared next time. Stronger, more careful, and in greater numbers.”

      “We damned near didn’t survive their last attack,” Alexander pointed out. “And that was just one Xul huntership!”

      In the year 539 of the Marine Era, or in 2314 c.e. as the Commonwealth measured the passing years, a single kilometer-long Xul vessel had appeared out of the emptiness between the stars, destroyed several human ships, then proceeded to fling small chunks of asteroidal debris at the Earth. The fragments were small, but somehow the Intruder had boosted them to very high velocities—on the order of half the speed of light—giving them the kinetic energy of much larger bodies when they struck.

      Deep space facilities designed as part of the High Guard asteroid defense network had succeeded in destroying many of the infalling rocks, but enough pieces had struck Earth to do terrible damage, obliterating much of Europe and eastern North America in firestorms and tidal waves and plunging the rest of the planet into an ice age—what the histories persisted in calling a “nuclear winter,” even though the impacts were purely kinetic, and not nuclear at all.

      The only thing that had saved civilization from complete collapse had been