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