had been received, indicating that intelligence once again had developed space-faring technology in Sector 2420. More recently, a Huntership had taken samples from a primitive interstellar vessel at the Gateway designated 2420-001, confirming the re-emergence—and the technological evolution—of an organic species texted as Species 2824.
And not long after that, the Huntership had been tracked through the Gateway—presumably by those same intelligences—and destroyed.
This was not to be tolerated, could not be tolerated, without violating the genetic coding that formed the social dynamic of We Who Are.
The ancient records had been consulted. The system designated 2420-544 had been of interest at least twice before in the past three hundred thousand cycles, and there were indications of contact and annihilation within that star system even farther back than that. The Lords Who Are had consulted together, drawn their conclusions, and generated their plans.
A Huntership had been dispatched.
That vessel emerged now from paraspace, six light-hours from the target primary. That primary, a bright star only at this distance, was a fairly typical yellow sun possessing a number of planets. Samplings of the electromagnetic spectrum revealed a cloud of structures, vessels, and transmitting objects swarming about the inner system. Most were clustered around one particular planet—third from the sun, blue with liquid water, the spectra rich with the absorption lines of chlorophyll, and humming with the electronic signature of technic life.
The system matched—within a probability of ninety-plus percent—the system described by the creatures taken at Gateway 2420-001 a hundred cycles ago. Dissected, patterned, and absorbed, those creatures had yielded a wealth of information about their nascent civilization and origins. That Gateway, about eight light-years distant from this system, was called Sirius in the language of these creatures.
Species 2824 called this star system Sol … and their homeworld, the third planet, Earth.
The Lords Who Are within the Huntership examined the data, and reached consensus.
Species 2824 posed a threat to We Who Are.
This species, therefore, would die.
Ponderously, and with cool and unemotional deliberation, the Huntership began moving sunward.
1
12 FEBRUARY 2314
Assault Detachment Alpha
Above Olympus Mons,
Mars
1235 hrs, local
He was sealed inside a windowless carbotitanium laminate alloy canister so tiny there was scarcely room to breathe, much less move, but his noumenlink gave him a complete three-sixty on the view outside.
Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway, USMC, was streaking through thin atmosphere, hitting it hard enough to scratch a searing contrail of ionized gas across the night-black sky. His entry pod was surrounded by a faint haze of plasma, but he could still see the surface of Mars spread out beneath him like a map—all ochers and tans and rust-reds, desert colors achingly reminiscent of the American Southwest back home.
Ahead, Olympus Mons rose against the curve of the Martian horizon, enormous, stunning in its size and sweep and grandeur. The crest of Olympus Mons reached twenty-seven kilometers above the Martian desert floor—three times the height of Everest above sea level. As big as the state of Missouri, it was the largest volcano in the Solar System.
Garroway had stood at the base of that mountain three months earlier, playing tourist, and hoping to get a look at it from ground level. The results, however, had been disappointing. Olympus Mons was so large that the curve of the Martian horizon actually hid the peak from an observer standing at the mountain’s base. The only way to see, to really feel the size of that monster shield volcano was to see it from orbit, or … as Garroway was doing now, on a hot-trajectory re-entry forty kilometers up.
“Alpha Two, Alpha Three,” he called. “Do you copy? Over.”
Static hissed in his earphones.
“Alpha Two, Alpha Three. Chrome, are you hearing me?”
Still nothing. The re-entry ionization was still too heavy to permit radio communications. Damn. He’d wanted to share this with Chrome—Staff Sergeant Angelina O’Meara.
A jolt caught the entry capsule, punching the breath from his lungs and eliciting a sharp, bitten-off curse. There was a popular misconception going the rounds at Eos Chasma, the Martian equivalent of an urban legend, to the effect that Olympus Mons was so tall the crest actually extended above the Martian atmosphere. He wished the idiots spreading that nonsense were with him now, enjoying the ride. The average surface pressure on Mars was only about one percent of Earth-normal, and at the top of Olympus Mons, the pressure dropped to two percent of that.
By contrast, the atmospheric pressure at the top of Mt. Everest was about twenty-five percent of the pressure at sea level; the Martian atmosphere was thin—the next best thing to hard vacuum, as Captain Fetterman liked to say—but the one-third gravity meant that it didn’t get squeezed down as tightly to the surface as on Earth, but extended much farther into space. There was plenty of—thud!—atmosphere here two miles above the mountain’s caldera-cloven crest to give him a hell of a ride.
Mars Military Training Command
Stickney Base,
Phobos
1236 hrs, local
Colonel Robert Ellsworth Lee lay in a couch on the Mars Observation Deck, watching the show. In reality, the tiny, inner Martian moon was currently above Elysium, over the horizon from Olympus Mons, but his noumenal link relayed the imagery from a low-altitude robotic satellite positioned to track Alpha’s atmospheric entry and descent.
From this vantage point, unfolding within the window of his mind, the orange face of Mars, pitted and wrinkled, stretched across the entire black reach of the sky. A cloud of brilliant stars streaked across that face, trailing white fire.
Thirty-two of those stars were the IMACs of the Alpha drop. The rest were decoys, deployed to shield the insertion from enemy radar and laser sensors. IMAC—the acronym was pronounced “eye-mac”—stood for Individual Marine Assault Craft, a name that seemed a bit grandiloquent for something not much bigger than a large garbage can.
Ever since World War II, some 370 years before, the Marine Corps had searched for new and effective ways to deliver combat Marines to the beachhead. On an island atoll called Tarawa, in 1943, thousands of Marines had died because their landing craft had grounded on a reef well off an enemy-held beach, forcing the men to wade or swim ashore under devastating machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire. That near-disaster had resulted in the introduction of the Marine amphibious vehicle—the AMTRACK—and, in later years, a whole zoo of armored amphibious vehicles designed to swim Marines ashore and provide them with firepower once they got there. Other innovations had included the helicopter, the tilt-rotor Osprey, and the high-speed hovercraft.
As their battlefields began extending into the vastness
