tentacled combat robots the Marines were engaging now appeared to be analogues of white cells and other immune-defense systems in an organic system. If that was so, the passageways like this one, which seemed to riddle all Xul structures with labyrinthine complexity, could reasonably be compared to a body’s circulatory system, to blood vessels and lymphatic ducts serving as conduits for robotic devices designed for a variety of tasks including both repair and defense.
And to carry the uneasy comparison just a bit further, that meant that the Marines of 1MIEF were microbes, invaders penetrating the Xul’s giant circulatory system with the intent of killing it.
At least in the human organism, bacteria didn’t come in the form of platoons of Marines, heavily armored and carrying plasma and antimatter weaponry.
As with armchair discussions of 1MIEF’s strategy and tactics, the topic was often discussed in Marine squad bays during off-duty hours. For now, Garroway’s thoughts touched on the image only briefly: Let’s give this fat bastard one hell of an upset stomach! The rhythm of targeting and firing fell into an almost automatic process, guided by his training and the mental conditioning of weiji-do.
The two heavy gunners, meanwhile, rapidly completed setting up their weapons, one aiming forward, into the advancing mass of Xul warriors, the other aimed into the attackers in the opposite direction. A moment later, the weapons rocked in their mounts, and a pair of silvery shapes, each roughly the size of a big man’s forearm and fist, flashed from the muzzles and, accelerating on their microgravitics, streaked into the surrounding darkness. One slammed into the side of an advancing Xul warrior, knocking it aside and continuing to accelerate as it flashed out of sight.
Designated RD-260, the weapon was popularly known as the RAM-D, for Remote Antimatter Detonator. Each round contained nearly a kilogram of antimatter suspended in hard vacuum and an electromagnetic bubble, preventing it from coming into contact with the containment cylinder’s poly-ceramic and steel walls.
The gunners began reloading, hauling new RAM-D rounds out of the carry-satchels mounted on the hips of their armor. Tactical doctrine called for loosing three rounds apiece … if the enemy gave them that much time.
Sergeant Dixon, meanwhile, was laying down the back-up, a Mk.17 backpack nuke. He had it up against the overhead close beside one of the chamber’s pillars, holding it firmly in place while the nano coating on the device’s back formed an unbreakable bond with the surface of the alien composite. Dix’s nuke was the mission’s back-up guarantee … just in case the Xulies intercepted the other packages.
Garroway kept up a steady fire, frying Xul combat machines as quickly as he could target them. The microgravity environment within the confines of the passageway, however, was becoming clogged with drifting bits of debris, everything from glittering particles the size of grains of sand up to the three-meter shells of almost-intact Xul warriors burned out by Marine marksmanship. Clouds of nano-D adrift in the area were dissolving the larger pieces, but left behind a gritty, clinging dust that illuminated the enemy’s laser beams as they flashed and probed through the gloom.
The Marines’ armor was deflecting most of the incoming lasers, the outer layers of nano redirecting and scattering each flash harmlessly in a cascade of brilliant iridescence. Laser bolts repeatedly struck the pillar Garroway was half sheltering behind, striking with sharp, silent flashes and puffs of white vapor.
Some of the enemy fire was getting through, however, striking Marine armor on bare patches not covered by nano—on sensors and joint lines and link connector pads. Corporal Tomkins was down, air and boiling blood spraying from a severed lower arm until the suit’s autosealers and nanomedibot injectors could kick in. “Corpsman! Corpsman front!” In seconds, Doc Huston was with the wounded Marine, dragging him out of the line of fire, putting his own armor between the wounded man and the enemy as he hauled the man back toward the pods.
Then PFC White was hit, half of her visor charred, cracked and leaking air. Doc Billingsly had her in seconds, slapping a sealant patch over her visor before it could crack further, and pulling her back out of the firefight. The Marines continued putting down a devastating defensive fire, drawing closer to one another as their defensive perimeter tightened up.
The special-weps gunners loosed their second rounds, firing almost together. The leading Xul machines reached the Marine perimeter at almost the same moment, colliding headlong with Marine riflemen in a confused tangle of armored legs and arms and whiplashing tentacles. Suddenly, the defensive perimeter was broken, with dozens of the gleaming combat machines smashing through the line and grappling with the armored Marines. In an instant, the battle went from a firing line drill to a knife fight.
One of the massive warrior robots collided with Garroway as he burned down a Xul machine alongside it, and the impact drove him back like the blow from a sledgehammer. The enemy was too close for plasma weapons now, too close even for his flamer. As Garroway tumbled over backward in the embrace of a Xul attacker, he thought-clicked his slicers into place—squared-off plates extending from his suit gauntlets over the backs of his hands thirty centimeters beyond the tips of his fingertips. Each plate was nano-grown from a carbon-niobium alloy in a sheet with edges feathered down to just an atom or two thick, rigidly anchored in a quark-quark substrate. They were monofilaments made rigid, sharp enough to slice cleanly through any solid matter less dense than neutronium.
Garroway’s right arm came up and around as he shifted in his mind to weiji-do, the martial art form modern Marines trained in extensively in boot camp. Weiji-do, the Way of Manifestation, was a set of mental conditionings and downloaded training related to more ancient forms like t’ai chi. The imagery was of the essential chaos at the root of all existence out of which matter and energy were summoned, a deliberate tie-in with the principles of quantum physics that pulled energy from the base-state Quantum Sea.
Mentally drawing on the chaos of unformed reality, he focused a savage thrust of mental energy into the slicer blade as he rotated his suit sharply, sending the blade like a scalpel through the ceramic-plastic laminates of the Xul machine’s shell. Pivoting, he arrested his rotational energy and came back with his left blade; the Xul machine’s tentacles dropped away as the machine’s body gaped open with mirror-smooth surfaces at the cuts. A final thrust, and the machine snapped into two pieces, lifelessly inert. Electricity snapped and flickered across exposed alien circuits, the bolts grounded out by Garroway’s armor.
Continuing to rotate, he brought the mass driver mounted on his left arm to bear on another Xul machine as it grappled with PFC Nikki Armandez. BB-sized pellets accelerated to ultra-high velocity slashed across the machine’s shell, ripping open a fist-sized gash in the black sleekness. The machine bucked and jerked, like a living thing, as Armandez twisted clear of flailing tentacles.
Around him, the other Marines were fighting hand-to-hand—or, rather, hand-to-tentacle—as well, firing into enemy combat machines when they were a meter or two away, slicing them into tumbling, drifting chunks when they closed to within an arm’s reach.
Garroway was forcibly reminded of an ancient adage drilled into all Marines in boot camp: the most dangerous weapon in combat was a Marine. It didn’t matter whether he was armed with a plasma weapon, a mass driver, antimatter drone, forearm-mounted slicers, or his bare hands. It wasn’t the Marine’s high-tech toys that were dangerous. It was the Marine that wielded them.
In seconds, the breakthrough had been stopped, the alien machines inside the perimeter literally cut to pieces, while the rest withdrew as suddenly and as silently as they’d appeared. Four more Marines were down, their armor burned open, air and blood leaking into the chamber as a thin, icy pink haze.
Garroway did a quick mental rundown. First Company and the HQ element together totaled fifty men and women, five of them
