launch unit strapped to the massive back carried three Shrike-C missiles with AI guidance and tactical nuclear warheads, each packing a two-kiloton punch. The suit’s on-board AI unit was smarter than a man, with better speed, better memory, and better focus, though it lacked emotion or a sense of morals, of right and wrong. Kill-no-kill decisions still required a human wired into the decision circuit.
The Mk. XLIV—the “Fighting Forty-four”—was widely viewed in military circles as the endpoint of the evolution of individual combat armor, massive, high-powered, and lethal. Current military doctrine declared that the life expectancy of an unarmored man on the modern battlefield was to be measured in scant seconds, and the Mk. XLIV was intended to extend that lifespan to minutes, even to hours.
At the moment, there were thirty-two Marines in Mk. XLIVs scattered across the desert in a footprint twelve kilometers across. According to satellite nav data, they’d come down precisely on the planned LZ which, if all had worked as planned, put them well inside the opposing force’s perimeter, almost on top of their objective.
“Okay, Marines!” Wilkie called. “Let’s move!”
“Ooh-rah!” Garroway and the other Marines chorused, the ancient war-cry of the Corps.
The formation turned east and began moving, loping across the broken and water-eroded desert floor at a ground-eating five kilometers per hour.
We Who Are
Outer Solar System
0448 hrs, GMT
The Huntership continued its approach to the target world, sensors fully deployed, tasting the radiations and reflections of an immense volume of local space. A second artificial structure was detected, a large one—almost a quarter of the Huntership’s mass—moving in an extended orbit well above the system ecliptic.
Again, We Who Are extended their collective consciousness, almost casually reaching for this new target. …
2
12 FEBRUARY 2314
High Guard Monitor U.E.S. Prometheus
Trans-Saturn Space
1248 hrs, local
In the dark and lonely gulf beyond the orbit of Saturn, one light-hour from a dim and shrunken Sol, the U.E.S. Prometheus maintained her year-long vigil.
During the twenty-first century, during the UN War, an attempt had been made to shift the orbit of a bit of nickel-iron debris in order to bring it down on North America with the destructive impact of many fusion warheads—a single blow to end a savage and expensive war. The attempt had failed—mostly. The wreckage of the spacecraft engaged in the tricky maneuver had come down over Lake Michigan; the ruins of Old Chicago would remain radioactively uninhabitable for a number of centuries yet to come.
Later, as Humankind began exploring its interstellar neighborhood, unsettling discoveries came to light, discoveries to the effect that the galactic predators known as the Hunters of the Dawn used asteroids to destroy promising civilizations, including the Ancients. Exoarcheologists were still exploring the planetwide ruins on Chiron, in the Alpha Centauri system, and believed that the Ancients’ colony on Mars had failed when an asteroid impact there had stripped away much of the artificially induced atmosphere. The An colony on Earth eight millennia ago—and the nascent human civilization that served as their slaves—had been wiped out by a small asteroid dropped into what was now the Arabian Gulf.
Evidently, when it came to planet-wrecking, asteroids were the long-established weapon of choice.
To ensure that asteroids never again were used as weapons against Earth—by that world’s warring civilizations or by anyone else—the old Federal Republic of America had established the High Guard, a fleet of large warships patrolling through the emptiness from the Asteroid Belt out to beyond Saturn, tracking and monitoring all spacecraft moving into that immense zone.
The U.E. monitor Prometheus was one of the largest of the modern High Guard vessels, half a kilometer long, with a crew—Navy, Marine, and civilian—of almost three thousand. Mounting powerful batteries of high-energy lasers, missile batteries, and railgun-launched antimatter warheads, surrounded by a vast and far-flung cloud of robotic sensors, drones, and manned fighters, Prometheus was slow, but arguably the most powerful warship in the military inventory of the United Earth.
Much of the monitor’s crew was in nanosuspension, the better to conserve limited expendables like food, water, and air. At any given time, a quarter of her crew was awake and functioning; Blue Watch had the duty now.
Sensor Technician Third Class Baldwin drifted within a sphere of night, star-dusted, with brighter points of colored light marking the positions of Prometheus’s drones and patrols, of Deep System Station 39, and of Saturn, now some thirteen million kilometers to spinward. His noumenal link connected him with the assembled sensory data from all of Prometheus’s remote drones and fighters.
And there was nothing, nothing out there to threaten the almost meditational calm of the watch.
Watchstanding on a High Guard monitor generally was the very definition of the word boredom. The United Earth had been at peace now—for perhaps the first time in its recent history—for the past eighty years. The last of Earth’s wars, the abortive Central Asian Jihad of 2234, had ended almost before it had begun, and had been limited entirely to ground-based forces. The thought that anybody now possessed the technology to challenge either the U.E. or the American Confederation that dominated that world body in space—much less launch an attack from the Outer System—was laughable. In fact, more and more political voices on Earth had been calling for an end to the High Guard, for so long a frightfully expensive relic of a long-past threat.
The politicians could argue; in the meantime, the Navy continued its patrols. Tradition would be, must be, maintained. It was the Navy way.
ST/3 Baldwin first noticed something was happening when the monitor’s AI called his attention to an anomaly—a burst of high energy radiation arriving from the direction of the constellation Canis Major, close by the bright beacon of Alpha Canis Majoris—Sirius. Sensor drones in that direction responded an instant later, reporting a sizeable mass approaching at .95c.
“What the hell?” Baldwin asked, addressing no one in particular.
“Contact appears to be a ship,” Prometheus’s artificial intelligence told him. “Type unknown, propulsion system unknown, origin unknown.”
“Sound the contact alert,” Baldwin snapped. “Get the skipper on-line!”
“Whatcha got, Baldie?” the captain’s voice asked in his mind a heartbeat later.
“I don’t know, sir,” he replied. “Whatever it is, it’s big … and it’s coming in at near-c, right behind its dopplered wavefront.”
That was the trouble with sensor systems limited to the speed of light. If your target was approaching you at close to that velocity, you had damned little warning of the approach.
And then, the contact was there—huge, gleaming gold, needle-slender
