was Colonel Regin Macalvey, a tall, lanky Marine from EarthRing’s Skyholme Sector. He was currently in his F/A-4140 Stardragon, regrouping his squadrons as they came back through the gate.
“All together, General? Or are you asking about the Shadow Hawks?”
“Both.”
“We’re still tallying, sir. Losses for the whole wing might be as high as twelve percent. We’re still waiting for some stragglers to report in.”
“And the Shadow Hawks?”
“Four ships have reported in so far, General. Out of sixteen. There may be some more, though, still on the other side of the gate.”
“I see.”
“We’ll want to go back across and have a close look, General. Once this little dust-up is settled.” He didn’t add that fighters stranded on the far side of the gate were going to have some trouble when the star over there blew. If it blew. …
“If we can, CAG,” Alexander replied. “CAG” was an ancient term for a carrier’s aerospace wing commander, a relic of the days when he was called “Commander, Air Group.”
An assessment probe was going to be vital after this op, Alexander reflected … but that assumed that the red star went nova, that the Xul node on the other side of the gate was destroyed, and that 1MIEF wasn’t going to have to destroy the gate to keep the bad guys out.
A lot of assumptions. The next few minutes were going to be very busy indeed.
“Sir, we have Marines and AIs both still on the Cluster side of the gate. Alive. We can’t leave them, there.”
“I know that, CAG. And you know there are no promises.”
“But—”
“Get your people squared away, Colonel.” Alexander was watching the data feed update itself. Every few minutes, another reconnaissance drone would slip through the gate with a tactical update to the fleet communications net. As the data flowed through Alexander’s link, he could see the Xul fleet massing on the other side, still approaching the gate. “We might have some visitors very soon, now.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Macalvey sounded bitter. Like any good Marine CO, he genuinely cared about the men and women under his command, cared even about the AIs. His personnel record mentioned that Macalvey was a member of the Church of Mind. It explained a great deal, not that explanations were required here. Alexander himself was a long-lapsed Neopag, but he had the Marine officer’s deeply ingrained concern for his people.
In any case, there were sound practical reasons for getting back into Cluster Space when this was all over. The three Euler Starblasters were still on the other side of the gate, if they’d survived, along with a large menagerie of smaller probes and drones. He wanted to recover them if at all possible. The more the Commonwealth could learn about the ways and means of blowing up stars, the better. It was their primary weapon, now, against the Xul hordes.
He sensed Admiral Taggart’s awareness. “Our fleet is in position, General,” Taggart told him. “If they come through …”
“With luck, they’ll wait to think things through,” Alexander told him. The slowness of Xul tactical responses was proverbial, though it never did to rely too much on their past performance. The enemy had been known to pull a surprise move from time to time in the past.
“Yeah. The question is whether that pipsqueak sun over there will pack enough of a bang to get them all.”
“Or if they’ll be warned by their friends closer in.” The Xul, it was known, possessed FTL communications. A base or ship close to the exploding sun might have time to transmit a warning to other Xul vessels farther out before it was engulfed.
So many unknowns.
Alexander checked the time. One minute more until the big question was answered. If the star had exploded on schedule, the nova’s wave front was nearly to the gate by now.
The last recon drone imagery showed seven of the massive Xul hunterships less than a thousand kilometers from the gate, and still closing with it. The red dwarf star continued to burn in the distance, casting a bloody glare across their sunlit surfaces. Deeper in the system were hundreds, no, well over a thousand more, pinpointed by the X-ray and gamma radiation loosed by their black-hole power plants.
If that entire enemy fleet managed to come through the gate into Carlson Space, 1MIEF would be finished.
Space within the ring of the stargate shimmered. Abruptly, with the suddenness of nightmare, the long, slender prow of a Xul Type I, gleaming gold in the light of the Carson sun, emerged from the empty space inside the gate’s ring.
“All ships!” Admiral Taggart commanded over the combat link. “Fire!”
Still emerging from the warped space of the stargate, the Xul huntership was caught in a web of high-energy beams and exploding missiles. Taggart had positioned the retreating Expeditionary Force fleet to take maximum advantage of the tactical bottleneck; the Xul ships could only emerge into Carson Space through the twenty-kilometer lumen of the stargate ring, and over a hundred combatant vessels of 1MIEF could focus all of their fire on that one tiny region of space.
The incredibly tough ceramic and metal alloy of the Xul warship’s outer hull withered, rippled, and peeled away beneath that blast, as high-velocity kinetic-kill projectiles slammed into it at an appreciable fraction of light speed and plasma bolts seared into it at star-core temperatures. Moments later, the first nuclear and antimatter warheads began slamming into it, and the area immediately in front of the gate opening was blotted out by expanding spheres of plasma.
Under that ferocious onslaught, no material substance could remain intact for long. The Xul ship’s fiercely radiating, needle-shaped hull continued moving into Carson Space, but its drive and weapons systems were dead. Pieces of its internal skeleton were visible now, and the remnants of its hull cladding were softening and streaming away as metallic vapor.
But even as it drifted clear, four more Xul ships were emerging from the gate interface.
Thirty seconds to go … an eternity in the lightning-quick stab and parry of space-naval combat.
Major Lee,
AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,
Cluster Space
0731 hrs, GMT
It had taken several minutes, but at last she’d been able to stabilize her tumbling spacecraft. The vast sprawl of the Galactic spiral was at last no longer sweeping across her mind’s eye. Behind her, the local sun, a ruby pinpoint, continued to burn in the far distance.
The situation was damned bad. Com and nav systems both were out, as was her link with Pappy2. And there was worse. When she oriented her Wyvern to line up with the stargate and thought-clicked her main drive, nothing happened.
Stifling the sharp surge of fear, she began running diagnostics.
