hanging there in the black emptiness a scant hundred kilometers away.
“Christ and Krishna!” Captain O’Mallory rasped. Baldwin felt him trigger the dispatch release, transmitting the details of the encounter so far Earthward.
Baldwin had seen records of an identical vessel—the mile-long needle that had emerged from the Sirian Stargate over a century and a half ago to snatch up the exploratory vessel Wings of Isis, and then emerged again in 2170—or had it been a different ship? Whether the same or different, the monster intruder, positively identified as belonging to the near-mythical Hunters of the Dawn, had been destroyed in the fierce-fought Battle of Sirius.
The Hunters of the Dawn, the Xul of ancient Sumerian legend, had returned.
An instant later, Baldwin began screaming as the quantum reality ground state patterns of the Prometheus, and every soul on board her, were wrenched from material existence. The transformation took only a few seconds.
From ST/3 Baldwin’s perspective, however, the shrieking tortures of Hell engulfed him, the agony of discorporation going on … and on … and on …
Assault Detachment Alpha
Eos Chasma,
Mars
1410 hrs, local
Assault Detachment Alpha was nearly in position for the attack. They’d worked their way up a low range of rugged, eroded hills east of the LZ, and were looking down now on an enormous military base, sprawling towers, a large spaceport, and hectare upon neatly ordered hectare of warehousing. Most of the target was all in their heads—a noumenon conjured within their minds, as opposed to a phenomenon, existing in the world around them. The only material opposition were their human counterparts in this war game, Army Special Forces playing the role of OPFOR.
Still the training AI monitoring the operation was keeping track of both sides, tallying fire, casualties, and damage, even while painting the illusion of the sprawling military base in the minds of all of the human participants.
There’d been no fire yet, and no casualties on either side. The landing, much closer to the target than expected, had caught OPFOR by surprise. Space-suited figures were spilling from the image of pressurized bunkers to meet the Marines, but Assault Detachment Alpha had already grabbed the high ground. There weren’t many of them, either … only a company or so, perhaps fifty men. The rest must have already deployed deep into the desert, bypassed by Alpha’s pinpoint drop.
Garroway grinned behind the opaque shield of his helmet visor as the enemy streamed into the open below, racing for the high ground and straight into Alpha’s sights. It was going to be a slaughter—at least the way computers tallied things.
He ratcheted back the charging lever on his primary weapon, charging the Hawking. The ammunition load he was carrying was training ordnance, of course, but it would still make a most satisfying pyrotechnic display.
“A-D Alpha, Alpha Six,” Wilkie’s voice said over the net. “Let’s take ’em! …”
“Alpha Detachment, this is Stickney Base. Stand down. The exercise is terminated.”
“What the fuck?” Garroway looked up into the Martian sky—a deep ultramarine overhead, shading toward dusty pink near the horizon. Actually, Phobos was not above the horizon at the moment, though it would be soon. The tiny, potato-shaped moon orbited Mars in less than eight hours, rising in the west and setting in the east only five and a half hours later. But he stared up, anyway, as if to drag down from the sky some reason for the incomprehensible command. “What the hell’s going on?”
“All right, Marines, you heard the order,” Lieutenant Wilkie said. He stood up, sand spilling from his combat armor as its surface rippled with the rust and ocher hues of its chameleonic display. “Safe your weapons!”
In the valley below, the magical city of towers, warehouses, and bunkers shimmered and faded from view. In its place, a pair of pressure domes remained, along with a few dozen black-armored Special Forces troopers.
In single file, the Marine element began trudging down the hillside toward the waiting soldiers.
“Hey, Marines,” one of their former enemies called, raising a massively gauntleted hand. His words were light, bantering. “We were gonna kick your asses!”
“Ah, you guys were already dead,” Lance Corporal Annette DeVries said. “We had you in our sights!”
“Yeah?” another SpecFor soldier said. “We were just suckering you in, jarheads. We had two more companies out in the desert, closing on you from all sides.”
“That would have put you right where we wanted you, doggie,” Chrome observed. “We could’ve shot in every direction without hitting our own guys.”
“Quiet down, quiet down,” Wilkie ordered. “Save it. A couple of transports are inbound to haul us back to base.”
“So why the cancellation of the fun and games, Lieutenant?” Garroway asked. “Things were just getting interesting.”
“You’ll be told what you need to know when you need to know it, Gunny. Now get your ass in gear and move it!”
Garroway scowled at the back of the officer’s helmet, just ahead of him in the file. Wilkie was a newbie to Bravo Company, fresh out of Annapolis, and hadn’t yet learned the difference between leadership and bullying. Fresh meat. It would be the job of the platoon’s senior NCOs—meaning him and Chrome—to get the guy squared away.
And if he didn’t square, well, there were ways of dealing with that, too. Gentle ways, but ways. A company commander learned to work with his NCOs, his most experienced people, or he found himself transferred to a less life-and-death-oriented billet.
The fact remained, something was happening to upset the brass. He turned and looked back toward the western horizon again, where low, dun-colored hills stood out in crisp relief against the dust-laden sky. Phobos was just now rising—a tiny, misshapen disk, moving swiftly enough that he could actually track its movement by eye.
What the hell was going on up there?
Mars Military Training Command
Stickney Base,
Phobos
1455 hrs, local
“This way, General, if you please.”
Garroway followed the young Navy lieutenant commander down a corridor with rounded, padded walls and four sets of handrails placed to either side, and above and below. The surface gravity of Phobos was minute; he weighed only a few ounces here, and he could make his way with considerable speed by pulling himself along hand-over-hand. The tunnel was crowded with military personnel of all services, and a number of civilians as well, all moving in the same direction.
“Just where in hell are we going, commander?” Garroway demanded.
“Orders, sir,” she replied. “From Earth! We’re evacuating Phobos.”
“So
