Galactic Corps. Ian Douglas

touching down. On Garroway’s mental tac display, a cloud of red targets was now emerging over the Xul fortress’s close horizon, bearing down on the Marine assault platoon like an angry swarm of bees.

      “Perimeter defense!” Captain Black called. “Take ’em down!”

      The thirty M-CAPs of First Platoon and the HQ section had set down on the Xul fortress in an AI-controlled pattern, with an outer ring along the perimeter of Marines with heavy weapons, and two inner rings intent on tunneling into the fortress. Garroway snapped on his targeting link, and felt his bottle spin within the boarding collar to bring the target cloud under his weapon.

      The AP-840 M-CAP mounted a single weapon at its stern—the part of the bottle opposite the boarding collar, still raised three meters above the Xul hull. After latching on and digging in—“taking a bite,” as Marine slang put it—the M-CAP essentially became a mounted turret weapon. The gun, depending on the mission load-out, could be a V-90 Striker missile launcher, a rapid-fire magnetic pulse gun, or a Starfire plasma weapon.

      Garroway’s bottle mounted the V-90. The Striker was a smart weapon that could carry a variety of warheads. The missiles filling Garroway’s ammo bins each were fitted out with ND-4 nanodisassembler pods. Tracking the incoming cloud in his mind, nudging the selector to full auto, he thoughtclicked the firing control and a stream of forty-centimeter missiles snapped from his weapon mount. The missiles coordinated with one another to disperse into the cloud, ignoring the leading elements of the enemy force and detonating deep within the attacking formation.

      Each exploding pod released a cloud of its own—millions of molecule-sized nanodisassemblers traveling at high speed and programmed to begin taking apart whatever they happened to strike. Working on an atomic level, they were fast; almost immediately, red-highlighted targets on the tactical display began winking out, as though black cancers were eating through the formation from within, the decay beginning at a dozen different starting points and swiftly working its way out.

      Other Marine M-CAPs around the perimeter began firing as well, adding their own clouds of nano-D to the general destruction, or lashing out with man-made bolts of plasma lightning.

      Then the cloud reached the Marine perimeter.

      Each target was a Xul warrior—a machine, actually, that was apparently grown within the hulls of their hunterships and forts. Two to three meters long, egg-shaped, but with smooth convolutions and bulges, each extruded a number of tentacles at seemingly random points on their shells, each possessed glittering lenses, also randomly positioned over their bodies. Some of those lenses would be eyes. Others …

      Laser fire snapped across the outer hull of Garroway’s pod, generating a silvery puff of expanding vapor. Damn! The Xulies weren’t supposed to be able to see the Marine bottles with the optical benders on … but, then, no one was certain what wavelengths the Xul warriors used for vision, or what other senses they might possess.

      He snapped off another burst of nano-D in response, but the Xul that had nailed him had already vaporized an instant before, caught by a flash from Sergeant Colby’s plasma gun.

      “Thanks!” Garroway called to her over the tactical net.

      “Don’t mention it, Gare!” was her response. She was already tracking another Xul warrior, as was Garroway. As the enemy swarmed over the Marine position, he’d switched to single shots and shoot-to-hit; the enemy was widely enough dispersed now that the Marines could no longer wipe out large numbers of the enemy combat machines with area fire. His bottle spun wildly, tracking a Xul as it streaked past low above the surface of the fortress. Garroway held his fire until his targeting cursor tracked past several nearby Marine bottles, then slammed a nano-D pod squarely into the now-fleeing machine from behind. The Xul warrior fell to pieces, a spray of dissolving parts, seconds later.

      Local nano-D levels were rising sharply in the immediate battlespace. Drifting motes of disassembler were striking his pod, now, then rebounding. They were programmed to recognize the outer nano coatings of the M-CAPs and ignore them and seek other targets, but a few were beginning to burrow into his bottle at points scoured clean of nano by the Xul laser bursts. The automatic defenses on Garroway’s pod were growing erratic, and would soon fail.

      “Smedley!” Garroway called, loosing another barrage at a pair of incoming Xul combat robots. “I’ve got nano-D on my pod, friendly fire! Tell the bastards to go chow down on something else!”

      The company AI tweaked the electronics in Garroway’s bottle, and the errant nano-D drifted away into space like a puff of vapor, repelled by the brief, coded signal. A lot of the stuff was starting to work on the Xul fortress’s hull around the bottles, too. That might cause problems later, but there wasn’t much that could be done about it. Modern battlefields tended to soften and sludge down as random traces of nano-D, both friendly and enemy, began to accumulate in the area.

      Then there was a sharp jolt, and Garroway’s bottle dropped by a meter, sliding down hard into the boarding collar. The deck he was standing on dilated open. He didn’t immediately fall in the microgravity of the Xul fortress but, setting the pod’s combat initiative on auto, he triggered a pair of battlespace drones, launching them into the emptiness at his feet.

      A firefight was raging down there, as other Marines entered the enemy bastion. Garroway’s drones uplinked to his helmet, showing him images of Marines in heavy armor struggling in a low, broad passageway with Xul fighterbots coming at them tentacle to metallic tentacle. He charged his suit’s weapons, then gave a hard shove down through the open deck. Passing through the boarding collar, he entered the fight.

      The passageway was two meters tall and ten to twenty wide, and the Marines were forced to stoop slightly because a Marine in Type 664 combat armor stood at nearly two and a quarter meters.

      It was a Dantean scene, a circle of Hell, with Marines and Xul fighterbots struggling at knife-fighting range. It looked as though it should be unbearably noisy, but the interior of the Xul fortress was in hard vacuum and each bolt of plasma, each detonating grenade, each ripping or exploding alien shell did so in eerie silence. When Garroway’s boots touched the deck, though, he could feel the noise, a kind of steady, pounding thrum in the bulkheads and deck as the vibrations were transmitted through Xul ceramic to his combat armor.

      The one advantage possessed by the Marine assault team was that they were physically shorter than the Xul machines, which, in that low corridor, were coming at them horizontally, pulling themselves along with powerful flicks of their tentacles against the deck and the overhead. As a result, the only weapons the enemy could bring to bear were those set into the tops of their egg-shaped bodies. After a few moments, the Marines, too, began leaning forward, lifting their boots off the deck, dropping prone to minimize their cross-sections as targets as they poured a devastating and concentrated fire into the attacking hordes.

      Garroway mounted an MPPG-40 on the right arm of his combat armor, a rapid-fire mass driver on his left. He shouldered forward about twelve meters, taking up a firing position next to Corporal Gerad Kukovitch, a massively built fungie in the company from Spokane, Washington. Kuk was mounting a 20mm full-auto grenade launcher on his suit; he was one of the few people in the company big enough to pack one. The Marine was floating horizontally, taking partial cover behind one of a number of pillar-like structures scattered through that alien hall. They looked like massive, meter-thick bundles of rope or ceramic cabling growing like tree trunks between deck and overhead. Garroway stretched out beside him, firing from the other side of the pillar.

      Side by side, the two Marines coordinated their fire, ’Vitch’s grenades silently flashing as they ripped through the enemy ranks, Garroway’s MPPG sending blinding bolts of blue-white energy arcing down the corridor, ripping deep into everything they touched. Sergeant Larissa Colby joined them a second later, adding her plasma weapon to the melee. One by one, other Marines began locking in with the growing phalanx of Marines while their suit AIs linked in with one another under Smedley’s guidance to coordinate their fire.

      Together, as a unit, they were far more effective in concentrating their fire.

      And then, almost