Galactic Corps. Ian Douglas

      In fact, the only thing that had kept Humankind out of the Xuls’ xenophobic eye had been the size of the Galaxy, the sheer vast number of suns and worlds and emerging civilizations. As it was, they’d learned of Earth and its attendant cluster of tiny interstellar communities several times already over the past few centuries. Armageddonfall had come within a hair of annihilating Earth herself, and the Xul capture of an asteroid colonizer ship, fleeing Sol at sublight speeds after the bombardment of Humankind’s homeworld, apparently had given them more precise information about humans, their origins, and their history.

      That discovery had prompted the creation of 1MIEF, the Battle of the Nova in 1102 of the Marine Era, and the subsequent near-decade of raids and strikes at Xul nodes across the Galaxy. The joint naval-Marine expeditionary force had been tasked with the seemingly impossible—keeping the Galaxy-wide empire of the Xul reeling and off-balance. If the Xul were bending all of their considerable resources toward finding 1MIEF instead of Earth, perhaps Earth would be able to come up with … something else, a weapon, a strategy, an alliance, something that would enable Humankind to survive.

      A lean and desperate hope.

      Survival would have been a lot less likely had 1MIEF been destroyed this morning … or if Taggart and Alexander had been forced to destroy the gate and return to Sol Space by other means. But the gamble appeared to have paid off well. According to the ongoing tally, twelve Xul hunterships had been destroyed so far in the hellfire unleashed in front of the Carson Gate. That had come at a high price; 1MIEF had lost thirty-one ships of various classes, and a large percentage of the aerospace fighters. After this one, the expeditionary force would need to rearm and re-equip, either back at Sol or at one of the other major Commonwealth bases, at 36 Ophiuchi or New Earth, perhaps.

      But then it would be back into the battle line again.

      Perhaps information taken by the Penetrators would pinpoint the next objective.

      The fleet’s fire was raking the newly emerged Nightmare-class huntership now, but carefully, with exacting precision. Certain areas of that immense, quasi-spherical hull had been set aside as targets for the Penetrator swarm, and it wouldn’t do to vaporize the Penetrators before they could eat their way into the Xul hull.

      A pair of Type II hunterships were emerging now, and much of the bombardment shifted over to them. Fire continued to rain down on the Type III, however. That one Xul ship, over two kilometers across, could wreck the Commonwealth fleet if it got close enough. Naval gunfire hammered away at the monster, concentrating on weapon banks, sensor arrays, and drive blisters. If possible, they would immobilize the Nightmare, allowing the Penetrators to do their job without the dangerous distraction of haste. Some Penetrators would be destroyed, no doubt, but hundreds had been fired into that monster precisely so that a few, at least, might survive.

      And after that would come the really tricky part of Operation Clusterstrike. …

       Penetrator Team Savage

      UCS Hermes

       Stargate

       Carson Space

       0812 hrs, GMT

      Lieutenant Ramsey wasn’t really a fish. It was important, however, to create metaphors that seemed as real and true-to-life as possible if the Penetrator team was going to be able to work with them.

      What is software, after all, but patterns of information? Electric charge and lack of charge, gates permitting or refusing trickles of current, a flow of electrons guided this way or that, entire networks of interconnected processors and relays, the whole organized into complex arrays of movement, storage, and potential, all according to carefully designed schema and encodings meaningful to the designers.