Galactic Corps. Ian Douglas

she could talk to Wayne and the others … then thought better of it. They were very busy right at the moment, and needed full concentration for a maneuver that made threading a needle at arm’s length child’s play by comparison.

      Closer, now, and faster. Her vision was narrowing now, her peripheral field going black, and her arms were too heavy to move. She wished she could have another look at the Galaxy sprawled across heaven, but she could no longer turn her head. All she could see was directly ahead—the rapidly expanding stargate, with a Type III Xul huntership approaching the gate’s center.

      Well, the nova light was probably so bright by now she wouldn’t have been able to see it, anyway. Stargate and Xul vessel both had taken on a hard-edged, blue-white glare where they reflected the glow of Bloodlight coming from behind her. Come to think of it, that provided the four fighters with another advantage—coming down out of the sun. Any Xul sensors looking back that way must be fried by now.

      She caught a glimpse of one curving arc of ring-surface flattening out just to the left of dead ahead. And then …

      UCS Hermes

       Stargate

       Carson Space

       0748 hrs, GMT

      “Four more fighters coming through, General,” Colonel Macalvey reported, his voice tight with excitement. Every remaining MIEF fighter was in space, now, swarming about the incoming Xul hunterships as they drifted in an immense and untidy clot at the center of the stargate. “Tough to see them in all that crap.”

      Alexander didn’t reply. The debris cloud in front of the stargate was so thick now that it was tough to see anything, but three of the fighters were broadcasting their transponder signals at full intensity—hoping to ward off so-called friendly fire as they came into the kill zone—and battlespace drones emplaced on the stargate ring itself were picking up and boosting those signals. The transmissions revealed the tightly grouped icons of three … no, four Wyverns flying scant meters off the inner side of the stargate’s ring as they streaked through into Carson Space.

      Good. A few more Marines had made it back. …

      And with them came a burst of signal-boosted telemetry, updating the battlenet. Alexander felt the stream of raw information flowing into Hermes’ computer network. From the little he could grab, unanalyzed, Bloodlight had exploded on the other side, though not as soon as, and not with the violence, expected. As soon as the data were downloaded, the science team AIs would be fine-combing it, updating the available information on Xul warships coming through the gate.

      The big question, of course, was whether the violence of the exploding star had damaged the enemy vessels, hurt them enough to stop them from coming through into Carson Space.

      So far, the battle was going well, and at least vaguely according to plan. In any battle, the key determining factor is the terrain. Open space has no terrain, and tactics must be dictated by the relative technology possessed by the combatants, and by numbers.

      The stargate, however, impressed a type of terrain on battlespace, a bottleneck, specifically, that allowed only a few ships to pass from one side to the other at a time, and that only slowly. In open space, the Xul possessed staggering advantages in technology and firepower, but the stargate bottleneck allowed Admiral Taggart to mass the weaponry of the entire MIEF against a single, tiny area and focus it all on the Xul ships as they passed through into the Carson Space kill zone.

      That kill zone was visible now, even to the unaided eye, as a thick fog and a tangle of wreckage adrift in front of the Carson stargate. As volley upon volley of high-energy beam weapons gutted each Xul ship coming through the gate, gouts of internal gases and molten hull material erupted into space, freezing in seconds into glittering droplets and creating a dense haze. Nuclear and antimatter warheads added expanding spheres of hot plasma to the haze, and throughout were tangled bits of debris, much of it still glowing white-hot.

      The stargate was twenty kilometers across, and already the nebula of debris covered a volume of space much wider than that. It was actually becoming difficult to see what was going on at the cloud’s center. The radiation there was intense enough to scramble most sensors, though the ring-emplaced sensors were still doing a good job of spotting most of the stuff coming through.

      The Xul warships continued to emerge, visible only as large shapes half-glimpsed through the debris cloud. They were coming through at low speed—at eighty to ninety kilometers per hour—and colliding with the drifting wreckage. While they weren’t moving fast enough to cause significant damage to their outer hulls with the collisions, they appeared to be disoriented, as though they weren’t expecting space to be so crowded with wreckage and debris.

      Fire continued to rain down upon each in turn, tearing great gashes in ceramic-metal hull material that glowed red and orange with the intensity of the bombardment. The space in front of the stargate pulsed and strobed with the silent flashes of detonating antimatter warheads, and the debris haze was thick enough that plasma bolts and laser beams had become visible to the unaided eye, illuminated by the trails of vaporizing particles of dust and ice.

      Those Xul warships that worked their way clear of the man-made nebula found themselves at the focus of long-range bombardment from nearly one hundred Commonwealth warships, and by the short-range jab and sting of Marine aerospace fighters.

      Over the past twenty minutes, the battle had slowly transformed into a slaughter. From his vantage point, he could watch the Xul craft emerge from the gate, struggle to orient themselves, and come under that highly focused, devastating fire.

      And, under that assault, one by one, the Xul hunterships died.

      But the plan called for saving one of the monsters, a big one, if possible. …

       Penetrator Team Savage

      UCS Hermes

       Stargate

       Carson Space

       0804 hrs, GMT

      First Lieutenant Charel Ramsey brought the palm of his hand down on the link contact, and, with a heady surge of energy pulsing through his conscious mind, he became a god.

      Ramsey was newly arrived on board the MIEF’s flagship. He’d joined her after a passage through from Earth on the heavy cruiser San Diego only four weeks ago, part of the reinforcement and resupply convoy operation designated Starlight III. As a new graduate of the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center at Sinus Medii, on Luna, he’d been assigned to the expeditionary force’s N-2 division, answering to General Alexander’s command constellation directly and based here on board the Hermes. As an N-2 intelligence officer, he’d been assigned to a penetrator team.

      And he was going in hot.

      Integration complete, a voice—partially his own—said over the Intel net. Ramsey-Thoth now ready for launch.

      Ramsey’s body was lying on one of the link couches inside Hermes’ Combat Ops Center, or COC, but his mind was … elsewhere. Linked by his neural implant system into Hermes’ computer network, with all other input signals blanked by his software, his mind’s eye was now residing within a narrow, tightly bounded virtual space representing a K-794 Spymaster probe.

      Ramsey’s thoughts were integrated now with a powerful artificial intelligence given the name “Thoth,” an apt enough name, since the original Thoth had been the ancient Egyptian god of science, writing, knowledge … and magic. Designed to operate in this curious blend of human and artificial intelligence, Thoth provided Ramsey’s viewpoint with the speed, power, precision, and data acquisition functions of an AI. Ramsey provided purely human talents of flexibility, creativity, and intuition not yet possible for even the most powerful AIs.

      The