energy from a ZPF quantum power transfer unit, using quantum entanglement to transmit power from one point to another without actually having to cross the space between. Enormous zero-point field taps on board large capital ships sucked potentially unlimited power out of the sub-fabric of space itself and routed it directly to field-entangled power receivers on board individual aerospace fighters.
The advantage, of course, was that fighters didn’t need to carry their own power generating systems for drives or weapons. The down side was that the carriers and big Marine transports had to be closely protected, since the destruction of a carrier would shut down all of her fighters. Briefly, Lee wondered if the Samar had been destroyed, and that was why she wasn’t drawing any juice.
But … no. Samar was back in Carson Space. She’d come through the gate, released her fighters, then returned—safely, so far as the battlespace telemetry could report. The problem, obviously, was on her end of things.
It was tempting to assume that something was blocking or intercepting the energy transmission, but Lee knew that wasn’t the way things worked. She shook her head, frustrated. It still felt a bit strange to her … knowing that she should still be drawing energy from a Marine transport some thirty thousand light years away.
That was part of the technological magic of zero-point energy taps. The energy wasn’t so much transmitted as it was simultaneously co-existent in two separate places, on board the transport and inside the QPT receiver of her drive. Some day, the techies claimed, that bit of quantum-physics magic might make possible the ancient dream of teleportation from point to point; in the meantime, it was enough that her fighter could draw energy from her mothership even at this range. When it didn’t work, the human mind tended to fall back on what felt like common sense. If energy wasn’t coming through, something must be blocking it.
The truth was that some essential component in her own quantum power tap receiver must be down. She might pick up the cause through her diagnostics, but the system was complex and a full set might take hours.
Damn it. If Pappy2 had been up and running, he’d be able to track the information down in no time. Her own personal AI was little more than a secretary, able to sort through incoming data and present it in a way that made sense, but unable to show much in the way of initiative or creativity.
She hated feeling this helpless.
She considered the Wyvern’s suicide switch.
All Commonwealth fighters carried the things, a means of exploding a small antimatter warhead located beneath her seat. There were five steps to go through before the thing could be unsafed and triggered, but once she made the final connection—a manual button accessed underneath a lock-down cap rather than a thought-click—she would never feel a thing. The system had been installed in all fighters and most small military craft as a means of avoiding being patterned by the Xul … or for situations such as this one, where battle damage had rendered the craft inoperable and there was nothing to look forward to but suffocation or radiation poisoning.
She discarded the thought. She wasn’t ready to make that decision, not just yet.
The situation was bad, but at least some of her systems were still running—life support and, thank the gods, her ship’s sensors, which were still feeding data over her cerebral link. That meant she was picking up battlespace data from the far-flung net of drones and probes still adrift on this side of the gate. From the look of things, a lot of Xul ships were gathering, moving toward one of several stargate icons extending across her IHD in a broad, sweeping curve.
Cluster Space was a very special target, she knew. She and the other members of her squadron had been thoroughly briefed before this op, and had downloaded a lot of data going all the way back to the 22nd Century.
In 2170, a Marine strike force had entered this system, sometime after the first encounter with Xul ships at the Sirius Stargate. Backtracking on the path followed by the Xul force, they’d discovered the Cluster Space system, far out among the halo stars at the outer fringe of the Galaxy, at least thirty thousand light years from Sol. They’d emerged from a different kind of stargate, a broad tunnel drilled into the heart of a twenty-kilometer-wide planetoid. According to the records, the Marines had recovered a damaged fighter that had fallen through the gate during the battle, planted antimatter charges, and escaped back through to the Sirius Gate before the charges had detonated, destroying the asteroid gate in Cluster Space and erasing the path back to Sirius.
That raid, quite possibly, had prevented the Xul from discovering Earth—less than nine light years from the Sirius Gate—for another century and a half, buying Humankind precious time. Not until 2314 had the Xul discovered Sol, launching the devastating bombardment against Earth that now, almost six centuries later, was still called Armageddonfall.
The idea now was to keep that from ever happening again. The next time the Xul visited Sol, they might well finish the job. They could destroy stars as well.
Elint—electronic intelligence—acquired by 1MIEF nine years ago during the battles in Aquila Space and at Starwall had revealed a wealth of various stargate connections, and the intelligence services both of the Humankind Commonwealth and of the Marines specifically had been mining that data ever since, trying to assemble a useful map of gate interconnections.
There were, it was estimated, some millions of stargates scattered across the Galaxy, and each gate could be tuned to connect with as many as several thousand other stargates. The web of interconnections was extraordinarily complex and far-flung, and human explorers and their AI analogues had thus far visited only a tiny, tiny fraction of all of the possibilities.
But intelligence gathered during a gate reconnaissance at Sirius four years ago had led to the discovery of the Carson Gate, and that, in turn, had led here, to a major Xul node in Cluster Space. Probes sent from Carson to the Cluster had verified that this was another route to the Cluster Node; in fact, there were no fewer than fifteen stargates in orbit around that single tiny, red-dwarf star, making this system a major communications and travel hub. The destruction of that one gate in this system over seven centuries ago might have temporarily delayed the Xul discovery of Sol and Earth, but it probably hadn’t even inconvenienced the Xul, who appeared to use the gate network to maintain their xenocidal watch over the teeming worlds of the Galaxy.
This time, the Commonwealth possessed the technology to close all of the gates. From experience, they knew that a nova probably wouldn’t destroy them outright. Each gate was distant enough from the local star that even a nova wouldn’t seriously affect it. But the nova would destroy all or most of the Xul ships, fortresses, and other structures orbiting in the local star, as well as annihilate any bases located on the worlds of the star’s planetary system. When 1MIEF went back through the Carson/Cluster gatelink, Marine assault teams could be dispatched to each gate in the system with antimatter charges that would finish the job once and for all.
Those icons appearing in her In-Head Display represented a few of the local system’s stargates, along with hundreds of red icons marking Xul warships within the range of the MIEF’s battlespace sensor drones. It occurred to her that she was about to get a ringside seat on just what happened to Xul vessels on the nova side of a stargate during an MIEF raid.
Of course, she didn’t expect to survive the experience. Any blast wave that seriously damaged a Xul huntership would sweep her little fighter away like a dust mite in a hurricane.
She checked to see that her recorders were going, however. The MIEF would be sending assessment teams through afterward, and if there was anything left of her Wyvern, the automated beacon transmitted by its rad-shielded storage unit would bring them in for a recovery. Of
