just how large the Xul presence in the Galaxy must be. Conservative estimates said the Xul hunterships outnumbered all human starships on the order of several tens of thousands to one. The Galaxy was that large.
Not good odds. Not good odds at all.
His bottle was rapidly approaching one of the Xul fortresses now, a massive, squashed sphere five kilometers across. The surface showed a platinum-silver sheen that appeared smoothly reflective from a distance but which, as his M-CAP fell closer, was revealed to be a maze of geometric shapes, angles, protrusions, towers, squared-off valleys, and raised blocks. Weapons ports and turrets revealed themselves everywhere, plasma guns and magnetic accelerators and other weapons that affected the very nature of matter itself—and which were still sheer magic in so far as human technology was concerned.
Smedley announced that they were passing through the first of several magnetic screens. The surface nano on each pod adjusted to let it slip through without disturbing the field and announcing the Marine assault team’s presence. Garroway found he was holding his breath, wondering when something would trigger, when surprise would be lost and the battle would begin. …
M-CAPs were superbly stealthy, as close-to-invisible as modern military technology could make them. Though bottles could accelerate at forty gravities, their approach so far had been deliberately low-key and unobtrusive, too slow for the automated Xul defense systems to recognize a threat.
They hadn’t been seen so far. That, or the Xul targeting sensors already had them locked in, and were simply waiting for the order to fire.
Closer now … fewer than five kilometers. His personal AI took over full control of the small ship, identifying the best place for touch-down, coordinating with the company AI and the other fifty bottles in First Platoon, slowing Garroway’s bottle with precisely timed bursts of its gravitics drive until it was hovering motionless a few meters above the surface. Gently, then, the craft lowered itself against the small but distinct gravitational attraction of the Xul fortress, until the two kissed.
“Contact,” Garroway reported. Within his mental tacsit display, other Marines were reporting a successful touch-down all around him.
According to plan, the Headquarters element had grounded with First Platoon, which had as its target the largest of the three Xul bastions. Second and Third Platoons were deploying to the other two fortresses. Each Marine element was now on its own.
Still under AI control, Garroway’s bottle extended its boarding cutter, a cylinder extruding nano-disassemblers from its business end to eat through the ceramic composites that made up the Xul structure’s hull and create a tightly sealed docking collar. The bottle should be able to eat through the outer layers of armor within a minute or so, allowing Garroway and the other Marines to drop down into the interior of the fortress.
“Incoming bogies!” a shrill voice called over the tactical net. “We’ve got incoming bogies!”
So the Xul had finally adapted to this form of attack. The pods must have triggered some sort of alarm or defensive system as soon as they’d started touching down. On Garroway’s mental tac display, a cloud of red targets was now emerging over the Xul fortress’s close horizon, bearing down on the Marine assault platoon like an angry swarm of bees.
“Perimeter defense!” Captain Black called. “Take ’em down!”
The thirty M-CAPs of First Platoon and the HQ section had set down on the Xul fortress in an AI-controlled pattern, with an outer ring along the perimeter of Marines with heavy weapons, and two inner rings intent on tunneling into the fortress. Garroway snapped on his targeting link, and felt his bottle spin within the boarding collar to bring the target cloud under his weapon.
The AP-840 M-CAP mounted a single weapon at its stern—the part of the bottle opposite the boarding collar, still raised three meters above the Xul hull. After latching on and digging in—“taking a bite,” as Marine slang put it—the M-CAP essentially became a mounted turret weapon. The gun, depending on the mission load-out, could be a V-90 Striker missile launcher, a rapid-fire magnetic pulse gun, or a Starfire plasma weapon.
Garroway’s bottle mounted the V-90. The Striker was a smart weapon that could carry a variety of warheads. The missiles filling Garroway’s ammo bins each were fitted out with ND-4 nanodisassembler pods. Tracking the incoming cloud in his mind, nudging the selector to full auto, he thoughtclicked the firing control and a stream of forty-centimeter missiles snapped from his weapon mount. The missiles coordinated with one another to disperse into the cloud, ignoring the leading elements of the enemy force and detonating deep within the attacking formation.
Each exploding pod released a cloud of its own—millions of molecule-sized nanodisassemblers traveling at high speed and programmed to begin taking apart whatever they happened to strike. Working on an atomic level, they were fast; almost immediately, red-highlighted targets on the tactical display began winking out, as though black cancers were eating through the formation from within, the decay beginning at a dozen different starting points and swiftly working its way out.
Other Marine M-CAPs around the perimeter began firing as well, adding their own clouds of nano-D to the general destruction, or lashing out with man-made bolts of plasma lightning.
Then the cloud reached the Marine perimeter.
Each target was a Xul warrior—a machine, actually, that was apparently grown within the hulls of their hunterships and forts. Two to three meters long, egg-shaped, but with smooth convolutions and bulges, each extruded a number of tentacles at seemingly random points on their shells, each possessed glittering lenses, also randomly positioned over their bodies. Some of those lenses would be eyes. Others …
Laser fire snapped across the outer hull of Garroway’s pod, generating a silvery puff of expanding vapor. Damn! The Xulies weren’t supposed to be able to see the Marine bottles with the optical benders on … but, then, no one was certain what wavelengths the Xul warriors used for vision, or what other senses they might possess.
He snapped off another burst of nano-D in response, but the Xul that had nailed him had already vaporized an instant before, caught by a flash from Sergeant Colby’s plasma gun.
“Thanks!” Garroway called to her over the tactical net.
“Don’t mention it, Gare!” was her response. She was already tracking another Xul warrior, as was Garroway. As the enemy swarmed over the Marine position, he’d switched to single shots and shoot-to-hit; the enemy was widely enough dispersed now that the Marines could no longer wipe out large numbers of the enemy combat machines with area fire. His bottle spun wildly, tracking a Xul as it streaked past low above the surface of the fortress. Garroway held his fire until his targeting cursor tracked past several nearby Marine bottles, then slammed a nano-D pod squarely into the now-fleeing machine from behind. The Xul warrior fell to pieces, a spray of dissolving parts, seconds later.
Local nano-D levels were rising sharply in the immediate battlespace. Drifting motes of disassembler were striking his pod, now, then rebounding. They were programmed to recognize the outer nano coatings of the M-CAPs and ignore them and seek other targets, but a few were beginning to burrow into his bottle at points scoured clean of nano by the Xul laser bursts. The automatic defenses on Garroway’s pod were growing erratic, and would soon fail.
“Smedley!” Garroway called, loosing another barrage at a pair of incoming Xul combat robots. “I’ve got nano-D on my pod, friendly fire! Tell the bastards to go chow down on something else!”
The company AI
