powerful, warped space more tightly, and therefore made a bigger ripple when it hit the core of a star.
The three Euler Starbursters now streaking toward the Bloodlight, the Cluster Space sun, were piloted by sophisticated artificial intelligences, however, rather than humans or Euler-symbiotes. It was easier that way. Unlike most humans—those who weren’t religious fanatics, anyway—AIs could be programmed to welcome death.
Victory required that only one Starburster reach the local star; sending three was for insurance. Since the Euler craft could not transit a stargate faster-than-light, however, and since they possessed nothing in the way of defenses except their speed, the fleet first had to move through and seize a volume of battlespace on the far side of the gate. To do that, of course, it was necessary to destroy any sentry fortresses the Xul had placed nearby … and that was where the Marines came in.
Someday, Alexander thought with wry amusement, someone might create an AI combat machine smart enough, compact enough, and deadly enough to go into Xul forts and sentry ships and plant antimatter devices … but so far, at least, that particular dirty job was still best given to the Marines. Flying an Euler Starburster into the heart of a sun was child’s play compared to fighting your way into the interior of one of those Xul monsters and planting a bomb where it would do the most good.
Ninety more seconds. Bloodlight, however, was ten light minutes away, farther than Earth was from her sun. If … no, Alexander corrected himself, when the star detonated, it would be eleven and a half minutes before the Marine-naval expeditionary force knew the op had been successful.
Which was a good thing, actually. It should give them time to get clear.
Not for the first time, Alexander wondered if this particular raid could succeed. There were so many unknowns … not least of which was whether the Euler nova triggers would even work on a red dwarf star. Suns targeted by the Starbursters over the past few years all had been larger, more massive stars. An M-class dwarf possessed only a tiny fraction of the mass of stars like Earth’s sun, and there was some debate within the expeditionary force’s scientific and technical circles as to whether such a small star as Bloodlight could even be induced to go nova.
Well, they would know one way or the other in just … he checked his inner time readout again … another ten minutes, twenty-five seconds.
For now, the ships of 1MIEF continued to pass through the stargate into Cluster Space. Over the course of the past nine years, the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force had changed and evolved as human tacticians and strategists studied past actions and tried to determine the best mix of firepower and maneuverability for dealing with the Xul giants. The emphasis now was on faster, more maneuverable ships than the lumbering battlecruisers like Mars.
The Planet-class battlecruisers massed 80,000 tons each, but 1MIEF now numbered some two hundred starships, and most of them massed under twelve thousand tons. Compared to the one-and two-kilometer-long behemoths favored by the Xul, they were minnows nibbling at the flanks of whales.
But with enough of them firing together, they could bite hard. Smaller still, but still deadly, were the fighters of the four Marine Aerospace wings currently embarked with the Expeditionary Force. Launched from the Fleet’s flotilla of aerospacecraft carriers, those fighters—F/A-4140 Stardragons and the newer F/A-4184 Wyvern—were small, fast, and highly maneuverable. With antiship loadouts, they were deadly as well, especially when attacking in a swarm, like now.
Focusing his attention on one of the aerospace fighter icons moving within his inner display, Alexander began tracking the attack run of the Aerospace Squadron 16, the Reivers, as they closed on the nearest of the Xul monsters.
Brave people, he thought. Brave Marines.
If capital ships were minnows attacking Xul whales, the fighters were mosquitos.
And they were already taking a hell of a lot of casualties. …
Green One,
AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,
Cluster Space
0718 hrs, GMT
Major Tera Lee relaxed into the pilot link, watching the mental image of the Xul warship expand within her awareness from a bright star to a monster, now just two thousand kilometers distant. A Type III, the enemy vessel was one of the Xul huntership behemoths designated as a Nightmare-class, a flattened spheroid two kilometers across, the largest mobile Xul vessel yet encountered by the Commonwealth.
Lee was squadron CO of VMA-770, the Shadow Hawks. A twelve-year veteran of Marine aviation, she was tucked into the claustrophobic embrace of an F/A-4184 Wyvern, one of the sharp-edged single-seaters only recently delivered to the Shadow Hawks. This would be the Wyvern’s first test of actual combat, although Lee had been practicing in simulation for a year before she’d ever strapped on one of the machines for real. Technically, she had over a thousand hours of virtual flight time on the beast.
She knew better than to put too much reliance on simulations, however. Sims were good, but nothing matched the realities of combat. As she expanded her consciousness through the Wyvern interface, however, she noted that everything was green and wide open. So far, so good. …
“Green Squadron, this is Green Leader,” she called. “Everyone check your phase shift frequencies and cloaking. I don’t want anyone getting their souls eaten in there.”
The other fifteen pilots in the squadron came back at her with electronic confirmations—seven humans, eight AIs. That would be another first this morning—going into combat with half of the Shadow Hawks’ pilots consisting of sophisticated software instead of flesh and blood. She didn’t care for the idea at all—and neither did the others in her squadron—but orders were indisputably orders. It could be that the coming scrap would settle the old issue of live pilots versus electronics once and for all.
Twelve hundred kilometers. The scale in her downloaded imagery shifted. The Xul warship was still invisible to unaided, Mark I eyeballs, but the battlenet continued to feed high-definition imagery to the AIs controlling this phase of the engagement.
Nine hundred kilometers. She hoped that she was still as invisible to the Xul as the enemy would have been to her unaugmented vision. There were horror stories about what happened to ships’ crews engulfed by the monsters—about people having their souls eaten, as the darker tales liked to put it.
In fact, the Xul rarely made use of their patterning technology as a weapon, though it wasn’t unknown. Since the first human encounters with the Xul centuries ago, however, there’d been reports of Xul hunterships somehow devouring human vessels and so completely scanning their contents that humans and AIs alike were somehow transferred to the bowels of the Xul vessels as living, self-aware programs even though the ships and bodies of the crew were destroyed. That had happened to a human explorer vessel, The Wings of Isis, at Sirius in 2148, and to the Argo, an asteroid colony vessel hundreds of light years from Sol just nine years ago, and there were rumors of other electronic abductions as well.
The scuttlebutt shared among Marines in late-night barracks bull sessions said that humans uploaded into Xul computer nets were kept alive—if that is what their virtual and bodiless existence could be called—for centuries as they were continually interrogated and emotionally dissected by their captors.
By enabling
