Galactic Corps. Ian Douglas

which had been tagged Clusterstrike by the mission planners.

      Behind the Marines was the stargate … but not the gate into which Bravo Company had just fallen. The tidal stresses of the gate back in Carson Space had linked across the light millennia with the gate here, allowing the swarm of Marine bottles to come through, gate-to-gate.

      A flood of radio-frequency noise washed through his bottle’s exposed sensors, and Garroway set his personal AI to screening it, sifting through for hard data on enemy positions. The enemy was here. Humankind’s ancient enemy, the Xul …

      Among other threats, a trio of Xul fortresses orbited here, only a few hundred kilometers away, and those fortresses had to be eliminated if Clusterstrike was to succeed. Trans-gate probes had already slipped through and located each of the three, along with every other enemy ship and station within this system. Those probes had managed to return, apparently unnoticed, but Marine bottles were larger and noisier than AI probes, and they were in this instant terribly vulnerable to attack.

      Unlike the earlier Space Assault Pods, each M-CAP was effectively invisible, the coating of nano covering each one serving as uncounted trillions of optical relays, pulling light from one side of the bottle around to a carefully calculated point on the opposite side before releasing it. The effect was to make the bottle almost invisible so that light, radar, and other radiation was curved past the bottle rather than reflecting from it—optical bending. The various patches in each bottle’s hull not shielded by the benders—which allowed the Marines to see out and to communicate with one another and with the company AI net, among other things—were so small they were nearly invisible at any range greater than a few meters.

      Still, the illusion was not perfect, and things like radiated heat or the spatial distortion caused by a gravitics drive could cause enough of a ripple against background stars to reveal their presence to a careful and watchful enemy. At Captain Black’s command, and under Smedley’s precise control, the school of invisible fish shifted vector as a unit, moving now slantwise across the opening of the stargate, each platoon angling toward a different target, the three Xul bastions guarding this gateway into Cluster Space.

      So far, their entrance appeared to have gone unnoticed.

      It would have been a mistake, though, to assume the Xul were careless or less than alert. Intelligence had reported that their defenses had been tightening up at all of their known gate outposts over the past few years, as the Xul Mind as a whole began, slowly, to react to Humankind’s attacks.

      For almost nine years, now, 1MIEF had been playing a deadly game, one absolutely vital to the survival of Earth and Humankind. With both military and civilian intelligence services certain that the ancient enemy, the Xul, had learned the location of Sol and of the existence of humanity, Lieutenant General Martin Alexander, acclaimed Hero of the Battle of the Nova, had for almost a decade, now, been wielding the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force like a personal weapon. Again and again, a Xul bastion outpost, either long-known or newly discovered, would be targeted by 1MIEF for a lightning raid. Usually, the Xul bastion would be located within a system containing one or more of the ancient stargates.

      Those gates were still mysteries. Human xenosophontologists and intelligence officers all agreed that the system of stargates scattered throughout the Galaxy and beyond were not, themselves, the product of Xul technology, but were leftovers from some other, much more ancient civilization, now long vanished. But the Xul, like the N’mah and humans, used the gates to their own advantage with other technologies for crossing the long, empty light years. The Gatenet provided a transport web spanning tens of thousands of light years—if you knew where each gate attunement led.

      The Xul appeared to be very much at home with the Gatenet, had woven it into the fabric of their empire. Humans were still learning the shape and dimensions of that Net. But one by one, human forces continued to secretly find, note, and then attack every Xul gate outpost they could find. By keeping up a relentless assault, the hope was to keep the Xul preoccupied with tracking down and destroying 1MIEF, rather than with moving into the star systems occupied by Humanity—including Sol—and obliterating them.

      Clearly, the Xul could send Humankind into extinction if they set their considerable assets toward that goal; the trick was to keep them so off balance with constant raids, each one a pinprick on its own, that they never got around to that final genocidal thrust at the worlds occupied by humanity.

      How long could 1MIEF keep up the pinpricks? No one knew, though the topic was a favorite during off-watch bull sessions in the Marine squad bays on board each of the fleet’s transports. Marine and Navy sim-warriors and armchair generals made elaborate bets as to how long the task force could stay on the offensive, whether or not they’d be recalled to Sol, and how long it would be before the Xul empire collapsed.

      Garroway had participated in a few of those sessions, but had refrained from joining in on the betting. If he’d started making wagers, he would have been betting against his own survival … a distinctly uncomfortable position in which to find oneself. He believed in the Marine Corps and in the Corps’ indomitable fighting spirit, but he also knew just how large the Xul presence in the Galaxy must be. Conservative estimates said the Xul hunterships outnumbered all human starships on the order of several tens of thousands to one. The Galaxy was that large.

      Not good odds. Not good odds at all.

      His bottle was rapidly approaching one of the Xul fortresses now, a massive, squashed sphere five kilometers across. The surface showed a platinum-silver sheen that appeared smoothly reflective from a distance but which, as his M-CAP fell closer, was revealed to be a maze of geometric shapes, angles, protrusions, towers, squared-off valleys, and raised blocks. Weapons ports and turrets revealed themselves everywhere, plasma guns and magnetic accelerators and other weapons that affected the very nature of matter itself—and which were still sheer magic in so far as human technology was concerned.

      Smedley announced that they were passing through the first of several magnetic screens. The surface nano on each pod adjusted to let it slip through without disturbing the field and announcing the Marine assault team’s presence. Garroway found he was holding his breath, wondering when something would trigger, when surprise would be lost and the battle would begin. …

      M-CAPs were superbly stealthy, as close-to-invisible as modern military technology could make them. Though bottles could accelerate at forty gravities, their approach so far had been deliberately low-key and unobtrusive, too slow for the automated Xul defense systems to recognize a threat.

      They hadn’t been seen so far. That, or the Xul targeting sensors already had them locked in, and were simply waiting for the order to fire.

      Closer now … fewer than five kilometers. His personal AI took over full control of the small ship, identifying the best place for touch-down, coordinating with the company AI and the other fifty bottles in First Platoon, slowing Garroway’s bottle with precisely timed bursts of its gravitics drive until it was hovering motionless a few meters above the surface. Gently, then, the craft lowered itself against the small but distinct gravitational attraction of the Xul fortress, until the two kissed.

      “Contact,” Garroway reported. Within his mental tacsit display, other Marines were reporting a successful touch-down all around him.

      According to plan, the Headquarters element had grounded with First Platoon, which had as its target the largest of the three Xul bastions. Second and Third Platoons were deploying to the other two fortresses. Each Marine element was now on its own.

      Still under AI control, Garroway’s bottle extended its boarding cutter, a cylinder extruding nano-disassemblers from its business end to eat through the ceramic composites that made up the Xul structure’s hull and create a tightly sealed docking collar. The bottle should be able to eat through the outer layers of armor within a minute or so, allowing Garroway and the other Marines to drop down into the interior of the fortress.

      “Incoming bogies!” a shrill voice called over the tactical net. “We’ve got incoming bogies!”

      So the Xul had finally adapted to this form of attack.