radiation, for that matter, so long as the probe’s hardened circuits were shielded from EMP. One second before impact, the probe’s bow shielding fired, transformed by an antimatter charge into a spear of raw energy stabbing down into the Xul ship’s armor. The probe struck a seething opening filled with searing hot plasma and tunneled in, its lead element revealed now as a nano-tunneler.
The Spymaster probe vanished, swallowed by the narrow-mouthed crater of its own making.
And moments later, Ramsey-Thoth began to hear the Nightmare’s Song. …
1506.1111
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Carson Space
0810 hrs, GMT
“The first wave of Penetrators is away, General.”
“About damned time.”
Alexander watched the green threads of the tiny missiles extending from Hermes and other ships in the fleet toward the most recent Xul ship to cross the gate interface. The first were already impacting on its hull.
This was the real heart of Operation Clusterstrike. He’d wanted to launch the incursion earlier in the battle, but various factors had conspired to delay things. In particular, the Intel people—N-2 in the Navy and Marine lexicon—had needed to analyze the electronic screens now being used by the Xul fleet in order to give the Penetrators a better chance of getting past the enemy’s defenses, both passive and active. They’d also been holding out for a Type III or one of the newly identified Type IV’s as a target, on the theory that the larger Xul hunterships would have more complex, deeper, and more valuable electronic infrastructures to tap.
And, finally, they’d needed an updated picture of what was happening on the far side of the gate. The arrival of those last four fighters and the data they’d uploaded to the battlenet had revealed that the Xul assault was tapering off. As they’d come through the gate, there’d been only a half-dozen hunterships on the other side, and only one large one—the Type III now being targeted by the Penetrators.
Alexander allowed himself a small—a very small—release of the stress that had been riding his shoulders throughout the battle. There’d been so many unknowns with this operation, and one of the largest and most deadly had been whether they would be able to contain the Xul fleet. With as many as a thousand Xul warships in Cluster Space, no one had been able to guarantee that the MIEF line on the Carson Space side of the gate wouldn’t be overwhelmed.
Expendable munitions stores were running low throughout the fleet. Lasers and plasma weapons alone would not have been enough to slow that onslaught if they’d chosen to keep coming.
Both Alexander and Taggart possessed mental triggers keyed to detonate a number of antimatter charges already placed around the Carson Gate’s circumference. If the Xul had been able to push through the bottleneck, if both Taggart and Alexander had been convinced that the MIEF line would not hold, they would have destroyed the gate.
Carson Space was located, as near as the astrographers could determine, some eleven thousand light years from Sol, on the outskirts of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm, a pinpoint in the vast spiral of four hundred billion stars chosen both for its remoteness and for the fact that a careful search of the region had failed to turn up any signs of a Xul presence.
Of course, with the gate destroyed, the surviving ships of 1MIEF would have to be translated back to Sol a few at a time within the vast hangar deck of the Hermes, a slow process that wouldn’t even work with the larger ships in the fleet. And if Hermes had been damaged or destroyed, the journey would have taken a lot longer—a number of years under Alcubierre Drive.
It would have been worth it however, to keep the Xul from discovering the origin of the attack, but there would have been a terrible danger, too. Alexander knew that 1MIEF needed to keep moving, keep threatening the Xul from as many different directions as possible. If the task force lost the initiative, the Xul might recover enough to find Humankind’s world of origin, and this time, Earth and all her colonies would be obliterated.
Maintaining the initiative in this war was absolutely vital to humanity’s survival, but it was a balancing act that was growing more and more difficult, more deadly, with each passing month. By now, the ancient enemy was aware that somebody in the Galaxy was out to kill them, and given their peculiarly paranoid way of thinking, they would be frantic by now in their efforts to track down the threat and destroy it.
In fact, the only thing that had kept Humankind out of the Xuls’ xenophobic eye had been the size of the Galaxy, the sheer vast number of suns and worlds and emerging civilizations. As it was, they’d learned of Earth and its attendant cluster of tiny interstellar communities several times already over the past few centuries. Armageddonfall had come within a hair of annihilating Earth herself, and the Xul capture of an asteroid colonizer ship, fleeing Sol at sublight speeds after the bombardment of Humankind’s homeworld, apparently had given them more precise information about humans, their origins, and their history.
That discovery had prompted the creation of 1MIEF, the Battle of the Nova in 1102 of the Marine Era, and the subsequent near-decade of raids and strikes at Xul nodes across the Galaxy. The joint naval-Marine expeditionary force had been tasked with the seemingly impossible—keeping the Galaxy-wide empire of the Xul reeling and off-balance. If the Xul were bending all of their considerable resources toward finding 1MIEF instead of Earth, perhaps Earth would be able to come up with … something else, a weapon, a strategy, an alliance, something that would enable Humankind to survive.
A lean and desperate hope.
Survival would have been a lot less likely had 1MIEF been destroyed this morning … or if Taggart and Alexander had been forced to destroy the gate and return to Sol Space by other means. But the gamble appeared to have paid off well. According to the ongoing tally, twelve Xul hunterships had been destroyed so far in the hellfire unleashed in front of the Carson Gate. That had come at a high price; 1MIEF had lost thirty-one ships of various classes, and a large percentage of the aerospace fighters. After this one, the expeditionary force would need to rearm and re-equip, either back at Sol or at one of the other major Commonwealth bases, at 36 Ophiuchi or New Earth, perhaps.
But then it would be back into the battle line again.
Perhaps information taken by the Penetrators would pinpoint the next objective.
The fleet’s fire was raking the newly emerged Nightmare-class huntership now, but carefully, with exacting precision. Certain areas of that immense, quasi-spherical hull had been set aside as targets for the Penetrator swarm, and it wouldn’t do to vaporize the Penetrators before they could eat their way into the Xul hull.
A pair of Type II hunterships were emerging now, and much of the bombardment shifted over to them. Fire continued to rain down on the Type III, however. That one Xul ship, over two kilometers across, could wreck the Commonwealth fleet if it got close enough. Naval gunfire hammered away at the monster, concentrating on weapon banks, sensor arrays, and drive blisters. If possible, they would immobilize the Nightmare, allowing the Penetrators to do their job without
