It simply wasn’t possible. …
Abruptly, his pod shifted to the right, then inverted … came upright, then inverted again. Slowly, clumsily, they were moving him. He could feel the scrape and roll of tightly packed bodies as they moved. Some hundreds, now, were clinging to the squirming mass of creatures on the inside of the ball, inflating their bodies to levitate the entire, cumbersome mass, while others vented hydrogen like tiny jets in frantic, rapid pulses, shoving him toward the edge of the platform.
Gods! A Starwraith massed almost half a ton under Dac’s gravity. How many of the creatures would it take to negate that weight and actually float him off the platform?
Or perhaps they weren’t actually trying to lift him, but simply to push or drag or roll him off the side. The edge of the tree house deck that was not bordered by the massive bulk of the floatreef tentacles and the surrounding aerial flora was protected by a relatively slender guardrail, and it was less than twenty meters away. If they could get him through the railing, he and some hundreds of clinging Krysni would plummet over the edge and into the black, hot, and crushing depths of the gas giant’s atmospheric deeps. His attackers seemed utterly unconcerned about their own casualties; those crushed up against his optic sensors appeared to be dead already. Evidently, they were willing to sacrifice themselves by the hundreds simply to ensure the destruction of a single Starwraith.
He tried triggering his repulsors, but nothing happened. His primary drive power feed had melted through and shorted out. If he could just take flight, drag this whole, squirming mass high enough into the thin, cold upper reaches of atmosphere, or pull them with him into the abyss until they lost their grip and fell away … but at the moment he wasn’t channeling enough power to lift a single one of these wrinkled, squirming little creatures, much less all of them and his battle pod.
“This is Blue Seven,” Garwe reported, his mental voice calm. “My drive systems are out. I think they’re trying to drag me to the edge of the platform and drop me off!”
More data flickered through his in-head display, more systems failing. There was a chemical agent in use—a concentrated fluoroantimonic acid. Apparently, the creatures crowded in against his Starwraith were injecting, not biological toxins, but acid. Where the acid could reach exposed fiber optic cables and electronic circuitry, it was causing massive internal damage.
He wondered how the creatures were carrying and injecting the stuff without having their own tissues begin to break down.
The Krysni continued to close in. Xander, Palin, Mortin, Wahrst, and Javlotel as well as Garwe all were enveloped, smothered in roughly spherical masses of writhing bodies. Amendes, Cocero, and Ewis all were out of action, their pods now totally inert, no longer transmitting status or comm feed signals. Bakewin, Radevic, and Namura continued to fight, burning away at the ponderous globes of creatures enveloping their fellow Marines as more and more and still more of the meter-long floaters descended from the sky or emerged from the surrounding jungle, filling the open space above the tree house platform with drifting, jostling, jetting Krysni.
Once, years before in a combat medical training feed, Garwe had seen a simulation based on an actual optic feed from a nanotech camera adrift within a human circulatory system. The sim had been about the human body’s internal defenses, its immune system and the response of antibodies to foreign invaders in the system … in this case a single, rod-shaped bacterium. The bacterium, smaller than a blood cell, was still enormous compared to the antibodies flocking to the injured region, swarming in through the pale yellow haze of the surrounding interstitial fluid in clouds, enveloping the bacterium, smothering it, adhering to it, hurling themselves against it in layer upon layer in an awesome spectacle eerily like what Garwe was seeing here and now. The individual antibodies, he recalled, looked like wrinkled, spiky, pale-translucent and roughly spherical bodies, with twisted strands of long-chain molecules extending like tentacles from their bodies. Their resemblance to the drifting Krysni was unsettling.
Antibodies, defending their host.
Then his optical feed cut out, suddenly, as Namura’s pod came under savage attack from four separate electron beam sources. All he could see now were the bodies of Krysni pressed in against his external pick-ups, glowing slightly at infrared wavelengths.
How long, he wondered, could the tough inner shell of his pod last against this concerted assault? His Starwraith’s on-board AI continued to report on the steadily deteriorating situation as circuit after circuit foamed into inert uselessness at the touch of that concentrated acid, as power reserves drained away, as the last of the active nano coating the machine lost power or programming or coherence and flaked away, dead. His pod was all but inert, now, though the sensors continued to feed him a trickle of optical and kinesthetic data.
He was falling. His battle pod’s kinesthetic feeds fed sensations directly to his inner ear, and he could feel himself dropping within the savage grasp of Dac’s gravitational field, better than two and a half times a standard Earth gravity. After the first few seconds, he wasn’t quite in free fall, he noted. The external atmospheric pressure and temperature were rising swiftly as he fell, and the battle pod and its ungainly cocoon of Krysni defenders rapidly hit a terminal velocity of perhaps twelve hundred kilometers per hour.
He could feel the shudders and jolts as the enveloping shell of dead and dying Krasni ripped away a few at a time.
Swathed in darkness, he plummeted into the abyss. …
4
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1907 hours, GMT
“The Xul,” Garroway said, startled, “are acting in a coherent manner? You mean, all of them together, all across the Galaxy?”
“We can’t be sure that all of the surviving nodes are involved,” Schilling told him. “And the nodes we’ve already isolated with AI virsim teams didn’t get the incoming messages, of course. But our node monitors have picked up what appear to be coordinating messages through quantum nonlocal channels. And incidents that we believe are Xul-instigated, somehow, have been occurring throughout the Associative volume.”
“Galaxywide?”
“The Associative has connections through about half of the Galaxy, General. Maybe a bit less. A third?”
“That’s still a hell of a lot.”
“At least a hundred billion stars. A quarter or so have planetary systems. And the incidents are very widely scattered.”
“Okay. The question remains, though, Captain. Just what is it that you expect me and my people to do? My Marines have experience killing Xul, not containing them, not integrating with them, not … not kissing up to them. It sounds to me like it’s not the idea of war that’s out of date. It’s us. The Marines.”
“And that’s why we need the Marines, General. Your generation of Marines. We haven’t engaged the Xul in a stand-up fight for centuries. You and your people have the experience. We don’t.”
“Well,” Garroway said, surprised. “That’s a first.”
“What is, sir?”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Throughout
