21 AUGUST 2323
Assault Group Tripoli, Force Alpha
Objective Philadelphia
Night’s Edge Star System
0942 hrs, TFT
The passageway, clearly, was not designed for humans. It was roughly a meter and a half wide by a meter and a half tall, narrow enough that he kept bumping the sides as he moved. If there’d been gravity he would have had to crawl.
In microgravity, though, it was a simple matter to haul himself along with one hand, while clutching the grip of his gauss rifle with the other. First and foremost, he needed to find and link up with other Marines in the assault force.
There. His armor’s communications suite was picking up signals and routing them through to his tactical display. Two … no, three signals, both within fifty meters of his current position. A fourth appeared seconds later. Across the surface of the Xul fortress, other IMACs were coming to rest, bonding with the hull, drilling through, and releasing the Marines on board.
He tried to orient himself with the other signals, which were spread across an arc of nearly two hundred degrees. His computer calculated signal strengths and range, then identified that one, IDed as Corporal Tracy Fitzpatrick, as closest to the center of the group. The problem was finding a passageway leading in that direction.
And there it was. Garroway wasn’t quite sure how it happened, but the passageway he was in twisted suddenly right, then came to a branching of five tunnels, one heading in exactly the right direction. It opened wider, too, letting him propel himself from handhold to handhold more quickly. If the Xul combat machines didn’t put in an appearance …
No such luck. The surface of the passageway walls began reforming as he watched, with Xul machines seeming to grow out of the surface itself. Each was between one and two meters long, elongated egg shapes with oddly asymmetrical bulges and swellings, with slender and highly mobile tentacles, with glittering lenses that might be eyes, or which might house receptors for other senses entirely. They blocked the way ahead, interlocking their tentacles, a living wall of machines.
Bracing both feet against part of the corridor at his back, he grasped the gauss rifle in both gauntleted hands and squeezed the trigger. The weapon used powerful magnetic fields to hurl twelve-by-five-millimeter slivers of nano-coated steel sleeted from his weapon at high speed. Recoil slammed at him as the slivers accelerated from the weapon with a muzzle velocity of nearly a kilometer per second.
With a cyclic rate of ten per second, the gauss rifle acted like a chain saw in close-quarters combat. The stream of projectiles struck the nearest Xul machine with a pulsing blue-white flash of liberated kinetic energy, and the ovoid body splashed, creating a gaping crater that swiftly opened into a gaping hole all the way through, and an instant later the two halves floated apart, tentacles still wildly lashing about. Other machines were ripped apart in quick succession as Garroway swept the spray of deadly fire back and forth across the advancing crowd. Each strike by another sliver liberated a dazzling blue flash of heat and light. In seconds, the narrow opening of the corridor was filled with drifting fragments, some sparking from broken power feeds, some glowing red hot, like coals.
Garroway pushed ahead, then, shoving past the debris, moving clear of the ambush site. Where the hell was the rest of the assault force?
According to his tactical display, more and more Marines were entering the Xul fortress’s hull, some a few tens of meters away, others kilometers distant. They were all around him now, too. He continued moving toward the closest Marine, however, turning another corner, then entering a broad, open space two meters high but hundreds of meters across.
A trio of Xul machines drifted in front of him. He cut one apart with a burst from his gauss rifle, then saw the other two flash and vanish in a burst from a PPG.
“Gunny!” Private Nolan yelled, waving. “Over here!”
“Coming in!” Garroway called back. “Hold your fire!”
Half a dozen Marines had already gathered there, Corporal Fitzpatrick among them, floating in a ring in order to cover every direction. As more and more Marines arrived, the circle grew larger.
The big question now was where to start planting the backpack nukes. They were inside the outer skin of the fortress, but going deeper would be better, giving them a better chance of destroying it.
Garroway began searching for a way into the fortress’s heart.
Assault Group Tripoli, Strikeforce Wing
Stargate, Edge of Night Star System
0952 hrs, TFT
All thirty-two A-699 Skydragons of the strikeforce aerospace wing had slipped through the Gate in dispersed formation, spread out over an area almost twenty kilometers across. After the shock of transition, they wheeled together into an open cone and began closing with Objective Philadelphia. Battle had already been joined as they entered the battlespace; as he spun his dragon on her axis and went full throttle-up, a brilliant flash close to the surface of the gate marked the destruction of the penetrator Delphinus.
“Okay, chicks,” said the voice of the wing leader, Major Griffith. “Green Squadron on overwatch. Blue on strike. Hit it!”
Maverick, more formally known as Lieutenant Thomas K. Elliott, shoved his ’dragon’s virtual thruster control all the way forward and felt the answering slam of acceleration as his fighter boosted toward the flattened sphere of black metal ahead. “TK” to his friends, Elliott was known as “Maverick” in the cockpit, a handle reflecting his west Texas birthplace and his notoriously independent, even unmilitary attitude.
“Oh-five, boosting,” he called over the squadron command link. Other members of the squadron added their confirmations. Blue Squadron would make an attack run on Objective Philadelphia first, with Green Squadron hanging back just in case the bad guys popped a surprise. Elliott was Blue-five.
He’d joined the Marines in 2306—eight years ago, subjective—and after training and several duty stations on Earth and in Earth orbit, been assigned to VMA-412, a Marine aerospace attack squadron based on Mars. He’d been completing his first two-year space deployment there when the Intruder had suddenly shown up and begun flinging rocks at Earth.
The events of that day, of that week, still were burned into his soul. VMA-412 had scrambled, boosting for orbit where they’d rendezvoused with the Marine IST Henderson; the attempt to intercept the Xul intruder … and the stunningly welcome news that the Marines operating off the Preble had gotten there first and destroyed the monster.
Days later, after being redeployed to Earth to provide aerospace security for relief forces operating there, Elliott had learned that his entire family had been killed when the Helios Tower megaplex in Miami had been struck by a fragment and destroyed.
Elliott had been granted leave that spring, and over the course of two weeks had gone through extensive deep-psych counseling. He’d never been sure how well the reprogramming had taken, however. It certainly had felt touch-and-go at the time. He’d never discussed the matter with his AI-generated virtual therapists, but he’d been damnably close to suicide more often than he cared to admit even to himself, including at least three occasions after the AIs had pronounced him fit for duty.
He was pretty sure his therapists knew; it was tough to hide stuff like that from their deep probes of both his brain chemistry and his nano-neural implants. But they’d said nothing, and neither had he. He didn’t want to make an admission that would end with him being summarily dismissed from the Corps.
In fact, Elliott was pretty sure they wouldn’t have done that. The Corps had lost a lot of personnel Earthside with Armageddonfall, and simply didn’t have the manpower to dismiss trained and experienced Marines—especially aerospace pilots—on something as relatively minor as psychological trauma.
That thought forced a hard-edged grin from him. Marine medico-AIs did not consider psychological trauma as minor, ever, but with the shortage of pilots they might well have insisted that he be assigned someplace on Earth or in Earth orbit … perhaps with an eye to helping him overcome his trauma by helping the survivors on the home planet directly. They would not have risked him on a two-decade interstellar mission into Xul space, where the top functioning of every Marine was vital to the mission’s success.
But he’d been able to bury a lot of what he’d felt, to bury it deeply enough, he thought, to give him a shot at being accepted for Operation Seafire. By early summer, as plans for Seafire solidified and received a final go from the World Union and Federal Senate votes, he had done his grieving, come to grips with his personal demons, and was out for blood. Xul blood … or whatever electromagnetic ichors passed for blood in that mechanistic and bloodless collection of group minds and ship-born gestalts humans called the Xul.
He was going to make the bastards pay.
“Blue Squadron!” Griffith called, as the Xul fortress loomed large dead ahead. “Spread out! We’ve got a power surge building!”
The A-699 was streamlined for atmospheric work, but still possessed an ungainly, droop-nosed appearance, more vulture, as one wag had put it, than dragon. Delta wings stretched out aft, angled sharply down as if clutching something precious to its breast, enclosing a clutch of plug-and-play wing-mount hard-point pods that could carry anything from EM sensors to AG-40 mass-homers with 20KT tactical nuke warheads.
For this op, the squadron was packing a mix of AG-12 kinetic-kill rockets and FGX-4 missile pods; tactical nukes were definitely contraindicated this time around, with Marines swarming around inside the target. As he twisted the Skydragon into line with the objective, he noted the area—highlighted in green on his visual display—where his fellow Marines had landed, and took aim at a stretch of metal terrain nearby. His mental command triggered a burst of KKRs, meter-long needles of compmat, compressed matter electromagnetically stabilized at a density some five times greater than depleted uranium. Accelerating at nearly 100 gravities, those deadly slivers smashed into the Xul station’s hull, punching through in gouts of light, intense heat, and sprays of molten metal.
Static howled across his link connection, a shriek of EMP. Ahead, two of his comrades, Steelgirl and Ripper, vanished in silent bursts of white-hot plasma, and his sensors tracked the passage of an intense beam of magnetically accelerated charged particles. He hadn’t even seen the Xul weapon that killed them, but he twisted hard to port and accelerated, hoping his violent jinking would throw off the aim of any Xul gunners who might now have him in their sights.
A second beam fired, and another Blue Squadron Marine died—Hammer, one of the squadron’s newbies. Damn. …
Fighter combat in microgravity was entirely different from atmospheric engagements. Once moving in a given direction, you kept moving in that direction. To turn, you killed your forward movement while simultaneously applying a sideways vector. There was no atmosphere in which to bank, brake, or swoop. There were only the cold, hard hand of Newton, and the equations of mass, thrust, and vector.
Elliott’s long burst of kinetic-kill rockets had acted like forward thrust, sharply slowing him. Yawing left, he applied fifty Gs of thrust to boost him at an angle from his original course, carrying him low across the enemy fortress’s surface. The maneuver would have rendered him unconscious if not for the N’mah inertial damper humming away just behind his acceleration couch.
Still another Skydragon vanished in white light as static howled. The Xul station was using powerful PPGs, magnetic weapons directing beams of charged particles, at the swarming fighters.
Skimming past the dark surface of the fortress, Elliott flipped his fighter end for end, streaking into the night tail-first, keeping his craft’s blunt nose pointed at the enemy. Interesting. The surface of the fortress sphere was shifting, as though the individual slabs that made up its outer armor were sliding, interpenetrating, and changing shape. Briefings had indicated that Xul ships and constructs could repair themselves, and he wondered if that was what he was witnessing.
Ten kilometers out, he armed and triggered an FGX-4. The missile lurched away from beneath his port wing, hurtling toward the target on white fire. A kilometer above the surface of the flattened sphere, the missile detonated, an utterly silent 10 kiloton fission burst that pumped a powerful X-ray laser focused as a tight FGX beam—the letters standing for Fission Generated X-ray.
Elliott didn’t see the effect of his shot; his optics blacked out as the sensors overloaded and, moments later, the expanding shell of plasma from the explosion caught his Skydragon and sent it tumbling. The sky pinwheeled past his head, alternating the massed, clotted stars of the galactic spiral with the emptiness of intergalactic space.
He scarcely cared. He’d hit the bastards back, and he’d hit them hard.
There was little more that he could do, now, save try to get his ship back into the fray.
Assault Group Tripoli, Force Bravo
Objective Philadelphia
Night’s Edge Star System
0958 hrs, TFT
His IMAC burst open and Lance Corporal Nal il-En Shra-dach spilled headfirst into the bowels of the alien craft. Clumsily, he rose to his knees while unshipping his laser rifle. He was wearing Mark XLIII CAS, an older version of combat armor than the Fighting Forty-four used by the first-wave Marines, and that meant his weapon was not integral to the armor.
No matter. He’d not had time to train with the more complicated CAS system, and it simply meant that he needed to be careful not to lose his weapon.
The mantra etched into his mind by a succession of DIs droned in his thoughts. This is the General Electric/Mitsubishi LR-2303 laser rifle, the current standard-issue personal infantry weapon of the U.S. Marine Corps! It is a one-tenth-second fifty-megawatt pulse laser weapon, delivering five megajoules of energy on-target, with the equivalent destructive power of the detonation of one kilogram of TNT or a similar chemical explosive. …
Nal rose as though he were trapped in a dream, witnessing things, including his own movements, as though from a distance, and in painfully slow motion. He checked the safety on his laser rifle, and checked his noumenal indicators to make sure the weapon was at full power and the auto-interrupts engaged. By the book, recruit! By the fucking book!
His training over the past months had been exhaustive and, unfortunately, the vast majority of it had been through noumenal downloads, rather than by direct real-world experience. It still seemed like nothing short of pure magic that the Kia-people—the humans of lost Earth—could pour knowledge into his head as though filling a tub with water by pouring it in from buckets. Incredible. …
But everyone from Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz back on Ishtar to the small army of drill instructors, proctors, and teachers at the Marine training facilities on Earth all had emphasized again and again that downloaded knowledge had to be reinforced by real-world experience before it could be truly his. It wasn’t enough to know it; it had to become a part of you.
So Nal still felt awkward and clumsy with such basic items of equipment as the IMAC, his combat armor, and his laser. He knew how to use them, but he hadn’t yet had the time to practice that knowledge.
This, he’d been told by an Earth Marine in the chow line one evening, was what you called major on-the-job training.
As he’d been trained, he checked his tactical display, looking for the nearest Marines. This type of landing was tricky, since it involved the incoming landing force being scattered all across the map, and the first thing he needed to do was rendezvous with other Marines. There was a concentration of green blips that way, behind him and to the left, and the passageway he was in ran more or less in that direction.
Swallowing his dry-mouthed fear, he started moving.
Perhaps the two things in all the universe he most desperately desired, most desperately believed, was to find other Marines and to not find the enemy. He felt totally unprepared for an encounter with the Xul, alone and in the dark.
And, somehow, the gods he no longer believed in were textening. He turned several corners, followed the left-hand path in a branching corridor, and heard a challenge from up ahead. “Who’s there?”
He was so scared he almost answered in his home tongue. “Lance Corporal Shra-dach!” he managed to say. “I’m with you!”
“Come on in, Nal,” another voice, a woman’s voice, said. It was Staff Sergeant O’Meara, and he felt an almost embarrassing rush of relief and happiness. “Any sign of Xul activity that way?” she asked him.
“N-no, Staff Sergeant. Nothing.”
“Damned peculiar,” she said. “We should’ve run into something by now.”
Something hammered at the soles of his boots. “Gods! What was that?”
“Don’t sweat it, kid. Our aerospace wing is hammering the station from the outside. Giving it an A-one shellacking, from the sound of it. C’mon. We need to make tracks.”
Nal fell into line with the others—about twenty other Marines, led by the staff sergeant. It felt good to be with O’Meara again. He didn’t really know her, but he knew she’d been nearby at the battle outside Washington, and somehow that counted for a lot.
They descended several levels, then turned another corridor. Suddenly, the Xul combat machines were there, all around them, dropping out of the overhead and emerging from the passageway walls. Nal brought his laser rifle up and began firing, his aim wild, but his suit computer helped compensate, letting him fire when the muzzle of his weapon actually happened to be on one of the Xul machines, and cutting the power when his movements dragged his point of aim across a fellow Marine.
It was without doubt the most desperate moment in Nal’s life, far more terrifying than the hand-to-hand fight atop the Marauder technical. A huge thing of shadows and snakes was moving in the darkness ahead, and most of the Marines were concentrating their fire on that, but other, smaller attackers were already among them, seeking to grapple them one-on-one. A meter-long ovoid of black ceramic and metal clasped his legs with slender, flexibly twining tentacles, dragging him close. He lashed out with his weapon, smashing the butt against glittering lenses, then pounding away indiscriminately, breaking the thing’s grip. He fired as it tumbled backward, and the laser bolt blew the thing into half-molten fragments, its tentacles still writhing and twisting like living things.
Nal had never seen a kilogram of TNT explode, and, in fact, most of the energy in the bolt translated not as explosion, but as intense heat at the target, melting through the toughest metal, and causing the thing’s body to explode from thermal shock. The detonation was startlingly impressive, however, even with a complete lack of sound in the airless void of the passageway, and made him more cautious with his next shot. Another of the metallic beasts was grappling with Sergeant Ruehe, clinging to her back, and he hesitated, unable to fire.
Letting the laser rifle dangle from its sling, he pushed off from the wall at his back and flew in a long, flat trajectory, colliding with the tangle of pressurized armor and whiplashing tentacles.
“Get it off!” Ruehe was screaming. “It’s eating into my suit! Get it off!”
Grasping a tentacle with each hand, he pulled, hard, ripping the thing free from Ruehe’s armor. The egg-shaped Xul device, he saw, had been changing shape, molding itself to fit the curves and angles of the back and side of her armor, and the nuclear device she wore high on her shoulders. One of the glittering lens “eyes,” he saw, was emitting a dazzling point of light that was etching away at her armor—a laser cutter drilling into her suit. A sudden puff of vapor sprayed from the charred bit of armor, and the beam became sharply visible. Ruehe screamed again. …
He didn’t have a knife, couldn’t attack it the way he’d taken on the armored marauder on Earth, but he could reach in with his glove and smash the lens, pushing it back into the body of the thing as the armored surface of his glove btextered and started to boil away. He felt sharp pain in his hand, and a maddeningly calm voice in his head began speaking of pressure loss and suit breach.
He ignored both, wedging himself between the sergeant and her weird attacker, levering it away from her and thrusting it clear as the tentacles loosed their grip. Another Marine fired at point-blank range, blasting the machine into molten gobbets of debris.
He grasped his hand, but his suit was already sealing itself, the nano circulating inside the skin coagulating and stiffening in a high-tech analogue of blood, a blood clot sealing a wound. Medinano in his body reduced the pain to a distant throb. Sergeant Ruehe’s suit, too, was healing.
“Thanks, Nal!” she told him.
“Dra-evidha,” he said. He saw puzzlement shade her eyes through her visor, then realized he’d answered her in the People’s Tongue. With adrenaline pounding through his system, English came clumsily to his lips. He searched for something he could say that she could understand. “Gung ho. …”
And she replied, grinning fiercely. “Semper fi!”
The attack ended as suddenly as it had begun, the strange machines melting away back into the tunnel walls, the large mass ahead torn and pocked by craters, the ragged edges still glowing red-hot.
“Let’s go, Marines!” O’Meara called from out in front. “I’ve got a lock on the rest of Alpha!”
Around them, like something from the depths of a terrifying nightmare, the tunnel walls themselves seemed to be changing shape.
Assault Group Tripoli, Force Alpha
Objective Philadelphia
Night’s Edge Star System
1003 hrs, TFT
They needed to find a way to plant their nuclear charges deep enough inside the fortress that the surface field dampers would not suppress the blasts. Guided by deep-probe soundings of the metal and ceramic walls around them, Garroway and his fellow Marines were moving deeper and deeper into the mazelike tangle of passageways that seemed to fill the skin of the fortress. The passageways around them were definitely flowing and shifting, changing shape as the Marine strike force made its way through the fortress’s interior. It was, Garroway thought, uncannily like moving through living intestines, as though the entire fortress were alive and made of flesh and blood.
Which was impossible, of course. The walls were metal and ceramic, not organic tissue … but somehow they were moving and growing around the Marines, opening up new passageways, closing others.
At first, he’d thought the thing was trying to close on them, to crush them—the word digest came unpleasantly to mind—but as they kept tracing their way deeper into the Xul structure, it became clear that the changes were actually helping the Marines more often than not, leading them in the directions their sensors told them they needed to go. This made no sense whatsoever.
“It’s like it wants us deeper inside,” Corporal Collesco said after a yawning passageway opened to their left, leading in exactly the direction they needed to move.
“Not quite,” Garroway said. “it’s more like we’re getting what we want close around us, but the Xul mind is controlling things farther away. Shit. …”
“What?”
“Consensual reality.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Keep moving!”
The thought nagged at him. When the Marines needed a particular route to open, it did … though the walls kept disgorging various types of enemy combat machines, creating a moving firefight as they penetrated the monster. He was remembering, though, a conversation he’d had in a mess hall with Chrome and a Marine flier back on Earth an age or two ago … about quantum physics, and how the Xul performed their magic.
Belief?
Yeah, he thought. I want a tunnel to open up heading at one-eight-five relative … and it does. Wild.
And suddenly, it seemed completely plausible.
But he needed to test it.
“Force Bravo is coming in, one-eight-five relative!” Sergeant Giambastiani called suddenly. “Got ’em on deep sensor probe!”
“I see them.” He saw the green blips on his tactical display, about twenty meters behind them, but separated from the rest of them still by that much solid tunnel wall. They were picking up the vibrations of their movements, the heat from their suits, but they couldn’t communicate with them directly.
“Try something, everybody! We need a tunnel between us and Bravo! There’s got to be one. Imagine it opening up for us!”
“Whiskey Tango Fox?” Valdez said, using the old phonetic alphabet query—an ancient military joke—meaning “What the fuck?”
“Never mind! Just believe it!”
And the wall of the twisting corridor behind them began to melt, pieces moving, sliding out of the way, rearranging themselves as a new tunnel opening appeared. Moments later, an armored figure appeared, striding out of the opening—her ID revealing her as Chrome. More Marines followed behind her, weapons at the ready.
“Thank God!” Chrome called. “We thought we’d never get through to you!”
“That’s why you were having trouble,” Garroway said.
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Form a perimeter!”
Yeah. It worked. …
“Quincy!” he called in his mind, uplinking to the platoon AI. “Quincy! Are you there? Do you copy?”
Quincy5 was little more than a local net spider, a tiny fragment of the original command constellation’s AI resident within the computers of the Marines’ combat armor and the weld-docked IMACs, far too limited in memory to be truly intelligent or self-aware.
But it did have access to a fair amount of data, and could draw conclusions within certain very narrowly focused parameters. Its primary purpose was to help to electronically connect and coordinate the Marines scattered across the fortress drop zone, and to serve as a communications link with the rest of the task force, but a secondary assignment involved penetrating what passed for a Xul computer system, the electronic and virtual world of this station, seeking data files to rifle, systems to shut down, sabotage to inflict. Quincy5, in that regard, was an extremely sophisticated and complex computer virus.
“Ready.” Garroway heard the flat and uninflected voice in his head.
“Quincy!” Garroway said. “Record for transmission!”
“Ready.”
“The Xul have some way of reaching down to the base state of reality to directly change matter and energy! It’s some kind of field or quantum effect that works on belief! Or maybe desire! Whatever it is, it changes the shape of matter locally. It’s like it rewrites the base program for matter!”
As he thought about it, the effect had been evident when they’d penetrated the Xul intruder in the Solar System last February-subjective. It had seemed like luck at the time, but they’d been able to plant their charges and extricate themselves ahead of that swarm of Xul combat machines and escape.
Well, almost escape. …
“Do you copy that Quincy? Can you correlate with any of your data?”
“Copy. Correlation will require connection with higher-level host-avatars.”
“Transmit this when you get the chance. Flag it urgent!”
“Acknowledged.”
As expected, the walls around them were blocking their communications channels. His message, though, would be stored inside the suit computers of all Marines within range, and the first time one got close enough to make automatic connection with one of the IMACs up on the roof, the entire message would be burst-transmitted to every other Marine in range, including the aerospace craft outside, and any F-8 Penetrators maintaining station close to the Gate.
Briefly, he wondered if wishing there were a direct channel would work … and made a brief experimental attempt to link with his IMAC pod … but without result. The effect really did seem to be limited to the immediate area—within a few tens of meters or so.
“Texten up, everybody,” he called over the tactical channel. “We can make these passageways come and go by thinking about them. Tap into your Weiji-do training. Focus on opening a wide, clear corridor into the heart of this thing!”
And then, just ahead, the wall dissolved, melting away into emptiness. Beyond lay the approach to a vast chasm, an archway opening on emptiness. At their feet, the chamber yawned into a canyon half a kilometer wide, with the bottom lost in darkness far below.
“This,” Garroway said, “is exactly what we were looking for. Okay, Marines! Plant ’em!”
Of course, the Xul might be able to suppress the blast effects throughout the fortress interior … but there was only one way to find out.
Assault Group Tripoli, Strikeforce Wing
Stargate, Edge of Night Star System
1008 hrs, TFT
Maverick’s Skydragon had at last responded to his gentle urgings, losing its spin and boosting once more back toward the now-tiny ring of the Edge-of-Night Stargate. He could see both the Gate and its attendant fortress, now, made tiny by distance, and silhouetted against the infinitely complex and richly star-dusted background of the Galaxy’s spiral arms. That, he decided, was how the IMACs had been spotted during their approach. They must have occulted enough background stars to make their movement obvious to the fortress’s electronic senses.
He thought he had enough reaction mass to make it back to the Gate, but there would be damned little to spare. He would have to nurse it carefully. From the look of things, the battle around the fortress was in full voice; silent flashes marked X-ray laser blasts against the fortress … or the smaller, brief puffs of light marking the death of Marine fighters.
He had to get back there. …
But a warning notice winked in his mind, and he opened a new window, downloading information coming from the far-flung sensory net of battlespace sensor drones.
They must be tracking this same data in the Penetrators back at the Gate … but, just in case they were too busy to notice …
“Tripoli Control, this is Blue-Oh-Five! Do you copy?”
There was no answer. Yeah, they were busy all right.
“Tripoli Control, this is Blue-Oh-Five! Do you copy?”
“Blue-Oh-Five, this is Tripoli Control.” The words were static blasted, almost unrecognizable. “Go ahead.”
“Take a look at your perimeter watch!” he called. “We’ve got trouble inbound!”
“Blue-Oh-Five, what is your situation? Over.”
“Not my situation. Yours! Take a look at Objective Tripoli! It’s the Xul fleet! They’ve left Tripoli and are moving in on you fast!”
Xul warships, at least a score of them, were materializing out of nothingness kilometers away, and closing on the Stargate like cavalry come to the rescue.
The enemy’s cavalry. …