Gunny?” the armorer told him. “I hear it’s real pretty over there.”
“I’ll see what I can do, Chief. But I imagine we’re going to be too busy to get anything artistic.”
“Shit, I didn’t say artistic. I just hear the view’s nice, is all. What I really want to see is some after-op combat footage of a bunch of dead Xulies!”
“You and me both, Chief.”
“Bravo Company,” another voice said, cutting in. The dry, staccato tones were those of the company commanding officer, Captain John “Blackjack” Black, though the actual speaker would be Smedley, the company AI. “Squad and section leaders, check your Marines and report status.”
Garroway was the gunnery sergeant assigned to the company HQ, and, as such, was the senior NCO in charge of the seven other enlisted Marines in the unit, under Captain Black himself. He ran through the electronic links with the other HQ personnel—two riflemen, two comm officers, two Navy hospital corpsmen, and a tech specialist/observer. All feeds showed green and ready, systems charged and go, weapons safed and ready.
“Green Tower,” he said over the company net, using the HQ section’s code name to link through to Smedley. “This is Tower Two. All Tower platforms report ready for drop.”
“Copy, Two,” Smedley replied.
Garroway chuckled. The AI was named after Major General Smedley Butler, one of the Corps’ heroes from the ancient, pre-spaceflight era of almost a thousand years ago. According to the histories, though, the original Smedley had been quite a character, often in trouble with his superiors because of his rough manner. Somehow, Garroway doubted that the guy had been quite as laconic as his artificial namesake.
There were historical simulations of the original Butler on file back on Mars, and in the library on board the Hermes. He decided he would link in some time, just to see how the two compared.
“First Platoon, ready to launch,” 2nd Lieutenant Cooper, the platoon’s commanding officer, announced over the Net.
“Second Platoon, ready to go.” That was 2nd Lieutenant Hamblet.
“Third Platoon, ready,” 2nd Lieutenant Costigan added.
“PryFly, Bravo Company,” the captain’s voice said. Garroway thought he heard some stress there. If so, it was the old man himself speaking, and not his electronic proxy. “We are ready for launch.”
“Very well,” another voice said, this one from Ishtar’s primary flight control center, or PryFly. “Bravo Company release in five … four … three … two … one … release!”
Garroway felt the sharp jolt as magnetic grapples released his bottle, and then the Ishtar’s ventral hull was receding against the stars. From his perspective, it appeared that the transport had suddenly begun accelerating away from him; in fact, Ishtar had just halted its gateward drift, allowing a cloud of M-CAPs to emerge from her belly and continue drifting toward the gate at a steady kilometer per second.
M-CAPs, Marine Combat Assault Pods, were only the most recent means of transporting individual Marines into battlespace, an upgrade to the Space Assault Pods, or SAPs in wide use until only a few years ago. Somewhere between a very large, bulky, and powerful unit of heavily armed space armor and a very tiny, lightly armed, underpowered one-man space craft, a CAP carried a single Marine within its claustrophobic core. A gravitic drive allowed the device to accelerate at forty gravities—about four hundred meters per second per second. It responded directly to a Marine’s thoughts, through his cereblink, and provided him with constantly updated information on his surroundings and the tactical situation.
For self-evident reasons, Marines called them bottles, among other nastier, more vitriolic names.
“Okay, people,” Blackjack’s voice told them over the Net. “We’re doing this by the book. We want to maintain the element of surprise for as long as possible, so do not engage your gravitics until I give the word. Power at ten percent only. Magnetic shielding engaged. Optical benders on. Everyone copy?”
A chorus of voices came back over the Net, mingled calls of “aye, aye, sir” and “copy that” and “ooh-rah.” A display open to one side within Garroway’s mind showed the telemetry from each pod, all green and go.
The assault force, one hundred fifty Marines of Bravo Company, First Marine Assault Battalion of the First Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force was going to war.
Falling … falling … the bottles drifted into the opening of the stargate unpowered, with just enough power trickling through their drives to keep them from running afoul of one another, and to keep the magnetic shields charged and ready. Around them, unseen within the distant rim of the gate, a pair of Jupiter-massed black holes circled along their ancient tracks in opposite directions, at a velocity approaching that of light. The stresses on local spacetime were somehow—the technology was still well beyond the capability of human physics—focused at the gate’s lumen. The frequency of those rotating singularities had already been tuned to connect this gate with one particular other gate … one some twenty thousand light years above the plane of the Galaxy.
For the briefest of instants, Garroway felt the sharp, inner twist of tidal forces, and then he was through.
The sky wavered … shimmered … then blinked.
And he was somewhere else, somewhere … astonishingly else.
Not for the first time, Garroway wondered why you couldn’t see through an open gate to the other side, or why radio or lasercom signals could not be passed through, while solid things like starships made the passage almost unimpeded. The physicists said that had to do with a kind of flicker or stutter effect due to the period of the rotating singularities that allowed mass through in discrete, quantum chunks, but which interfered with the wave aspect of energy. Even so, he’d once seen the flash from a nova pass through an open gate, and do so with power enough to destroy a Xul huntership.
So much Humankind had yet to learn.
He looked around, studying ambient space with all the rubbernecking fervor of a first-time tourist in EarthRing City. An ancestor of Garroway’s had been here once, centuries before. The place was known as Cluster Space, and it was located, so far as AI navigational programs could place it, some twenty to twenty-two thousand light years above the plane of the Galaxy, and at least thirty thousand light years from Earth.
From out here, of course, the microscopic yellow speck of Earth’s sun was quite invisible, utterly lost within the vast and milky swirl of pale light hanging in the sky, a spiral that looked oddly like a pale-colored whirlpool frozen in an instant of time. Most individual stars at this distance were lost; only novae or the very brightest of giant suns were visible as separate stars out here. What remained was a kind of graininess or digital noise to the light. In fact, it looked much like the pale glow from the Milky Way seen on a pellucidly clear, dark night on Earth or, better, Mars … and for an obvious reason. It was the same glow, but seen from the outside against the black emptiness of the intergalactic voice, rather than from within one of the Galaxy’s spiral arms.
Here, the Galaxy stretched across half of the sky, tilted at a slightly oblique angle. Garroway could distinguish the slight differences in hue, blue and blue-white in the spiral arms, reddish in the swollen bulge of the central core. The smear of nebulae, some coal-black, other emission nebulae showing pale glows of green or red, wove among the stars like ragged streamers in an unfelt wind.
Opposite, against the ultimate void of the intergalactic abyss, a solitary globular star cluster hung in isolated splendor, a teeming beehive of suns, spanning a breadth of sky perhaps sixteen times as large as the full moon when seen from Earth, glowing with an almost undetectable reddish hue identical to the ruddy glow of the Galactic Core.
In a different direction lay the local star, a class-M red dwarf visible solely as a bright red spark against the night. That star, catalogued simply as CS-1, but