there’d been reports of Xul hunterships somehow devouring human vessels and so completely scanning their contents that humans and AIs alike were somehow transferred to the bowels of the Xul vessels as living, self-aware programs even though the ships and bodies of the crew were destroyed. That had happened to a human explorer vessel, The Wings of Isis, at Sirius in 2148, and to the Argo, an asteroid colony vessel hundreds of light years from Sol just nine years ago, and there were rumors of other electronic abductions as well.
The scuttlebutt shared among Marines in late-night barracks bull sessions said that humans uploaded into Xul computer nets were kept alive—if that is what their virtual and bodiless existence could be called—for centuries as they were continually interrogated and emotionally dissected by their captors.
By enabling a spacecraft to shift slightly out of phase with the normal four-D plenum of space-time, Commonwealth ship designers had found a means to make the vessel both more difficult to detect going in and harder to scan for the patterning and uploading process. That, Lee thought, was a considerable comfort. Better to go out in a bright flash of hard radiation than wake up as an eternal captive within the virtual hell of a Xul huntership. Even if the “real” her died with the destruction of her body, something, an electronic duplicate would awaken to that hell, and she was unwilling to give the Xul demons another human analogue to torture. Even worse from a purely personal point of view was the possibility that her mind, her living awareness, would somehow be transferred to the immense virtual reality computers that seemed to be the bulk of the Xul starships, that it would be she who awakened in the Xul hell.
Better not to think about that possibility at all. …
The one advantage in an aerospace fighter lay in the fact that the Xul never seemed to think small. Fighters and one-man boarding pods appeared to be beneath the notice of the behemoth hunterships, and a swarm of one-or two-Marine fighters could get in close and loose the equivalent of a capital ship’s broadside.
Even so, casualties in this type of operation tended to be heavy. A lot of her brother and sister Marines in the squadron would not be coming back.
Better not to think about that, either.
She was closing with the Xul huntership at just under fifty kilometers per second. Pappy2, a simplified iteration of the MIEF AI, was doing the actual flying at the moment, jinking and turning the hurtling Wyvern in random patterns to avoid the patterns of antimissile fire filling the sky now to every side.
The Wyvern was a smaller, nimbler fighter than the older Stardragon, massing only seventy-two tons, and with fewer hardpoints for weapons load-outs. It was faster and more maneuverable, however, and could phase-shift more completely, which gave it better protection against Xul defenses. Like the Stardragon, it drew power through a non-local entrainment link from its home-base carrier, in this case the Marine assault carrier Samar, and used quantum field-drive acceleration, so fuel was not an issue. Within her weapons bay, she carried four AM-98 missiles, each with an AI brain and a 1-kilo antimatter warhead. Those missiles had a powered range of ten thousand kilometers; the idea, though, was to get them so close to the target they could be released inside the Xul huntership’s defensive screens.
The trick, of course, was getting clear in time after releasing the missile.
“Okay, Shadow Hawks,” Lee said over the squadron net. “Form on me, left echelon. Maintain three hundred kilometer separation.” Their AIs would be jinking them all over the sky on the way in, and in those circumstances, it didn’t do to get too close to your formation neighbor.
Her link with her fighter’s sensors were painting the enemy fire across her mental display, her IHD, or In-Head Display, as the link was properly known. The enemy ship continued to expand smoothly in her mind’s eye, the jitters and jinkings of the hurtling Wyvern edited out by the AI as they were transmitted.
To her left and astern, a dazzling sun winked on, the expanding fireball of an exploding fighter. Green Three … Lieutenant Costigan. A plasma bolt from the Xul huntership had released the magnetically pent-up antimatter within Costigan’s four antiship missiles, loosing a storm of raw energy, and his Wyvern had simply vanished in a fireball equivalent to a fair-sized nuclear warhead.
At least it had been quick. There were worse ways to go than fighting the Xul, at least according to the scuttlebutt.
One of the AI-piloted fighters flashed out next—Green Nine. But then the remaining fourteen ships of the squadron were past the red line at five hundred kilometers from the target, putting them inside the mathematical zone promising fifty percent survival for missiles loosed at the enemy.
Another AI-piloted Wyvern flashed into dazzling brilliance, Green Twelve, the flare fading swiftly astern. Xul plasma bolts and laser beams crisscrossed the sky, weaving a constantly shifting net through which the surviving Commonwealth fighters twisted and dodged.
“Hold with me!” Lee called over the net. “Just a little deeper in. …”
At less than one hundred kilometers, they plunged through the Xul monster’s outer layers of magnetic screens, designed to let the enemy fire-control systems pinpoint course and speed data of incoming projectiles. Here, Lee was convinced, was where flesh-and-blood pilots held the advantage over AI software. Her tiny fighter’s controls were linked in with her mind, taking commands both from her intent and from Pappy2. Organic pilots might not have reflexes fast enough or precision sharp enough to fly a high-performance aerospace fighter, but software lacked the flexibility and the scope to maneuver through this kind of maze. The two working together provided the best chances of survival—and a completed mission.
At fifty kilometers, she thought-clicked the missile firing command, kicking two of her antimatter killers into open space. Their drives ignited automatically, sending them streaking toward the Xul target. She’d already applied full lateral drive, a high-G maneuver that would have killed her if not for the inertial dampers cocooning her within the narrow confines of the Wyvern’s cockpit. Behind her, the other ships in her squadron broke formation, the better to loose their warshots in an unpredictable cascade.
Pulling nearly two hundred gravities now, Lee swung wide, killing her forward thrust and angling back toward the stargate in a series of rolling, twisting maneuvers.
Her attack run had carried her deep into the volume of space occupied by the approaching Xul hunterships. Two more Xul vessels, both lean, needle-slim Type I’s, swung past her prow nearly three hundred kilometers distant. She snapped them both with targeting cursors, locking in her two remaining AM missiles. She was not going to endure the indignity of returning to the Samar with missiles still in her weapons bay.
A thought-click, and her last two missiles flashed into the night.
It was a night, she saw, illuminated by innumerable pulses and flashes of light. Fighters, the Shadow Hawks and the other attacking squadrons, were scoring hits. The main Commonwealth fleet was adding to the display as their long-range weapons began striking home. Space around her was filled by the deadly flicker and flash of short-lived suns, and awash with the radiation of matter being annihilated.
In the far distance, the Galaxy hung in silent repose, unmoving, cold-lit, and remote.
As happened sometimes, the memories returned. …
Lee had been offered a memory edit, but she’d refused. Her memories, she believed, were a part of what she was, of who she was, and she would no more willingly part with them than she would with one of her legs. Hell, a leg could be regrown. …
Nine years ago, just before 1MIEF took the war against the Xul to the enemy, she’d taken a small reconnaissance spacecraft through a stargate to a Xul node. The place had been code-named Starwall, and was located somewhere along the outer reaches of the Galaxy’s core.
She’d been trapped there for hours. Radiation from the core had burned her terribly before her ship’s AI had managed to return her to a Marine listening post on the other side of the gate. They’d had to regrow much of her body after that, using medinano to excise the radiation damage cell