LITMIR.BIZ

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grumbling abated somewhat, but not entirely. For Garroway, though, that was good news. Hitting the Xul intruder again, moments before the RST boarded it, might make the difference between survival and death.

      And if we’re real lucky, he thought, they’ll overdo it and the damned thing will be vaporized! He found he didn’t mind at all the possibility that this operation would be aborted at the last minute.

       Battlespace

       1443 hrs, GMT

      The X-ray laser platforms in extended orbit about Mars were under the control of an artificial intelligence named Artemis. She was, in fact, a software clone identical in most respects to Kali, who was handling the long-range targeting of the Xul intruder at HELGA Three, but she was resident in the military computer network that embraced Mars, Deimos, and Phobos, as well as several of the warships currently within a few light-seconds of the Red Planet.

      Her name was apt. In Greek mythology, Artemis was half sister to Ares, the God of War who became Mars when the Romans acquired him, and she was a huntress, expert with the bow. Artemis wasn’t using a bow now, of course, but she was having to take very careful aim at a target several light-seconds distant … which meant she had to take into account the target’s residual velocity of several kilometers per second relative to the planet.

      The XEL satellites could deliver only a fraction of the energy yield of a single HELGA shot, but every indication seemed to suggest that the Xul ship’s energy screens were down. If so, Humankind might have just lucked out; XELs were designed to vaporize mountain-sized boulders on an intercept course with Earth, or at least vaporize enough of them that they were nudged, hard, into a new path.

      Artemis was about to nudge the Intruder … hard.

      Her targeting task was made more difficult by the fact that the XELs were on opposite sides of Mars, and separated by almost two light-seconds. Artemis had to time the triggering as well as take into account the time it would take the bursts of X-ray energy to reach the target. For optimum effect, one X-ray laser pulse should hit the target no less than half a second after the other.

      She was also at a disadvantage because there was only one drone within imaging range of the target right now, and she’d just switched that off in order to give her something by which to make a damage assessment after she fired.

      Like the expert software system that she was, Artemis took all into account, made the necessary calculations—adjusting even for the slight bend in space created by both the Arean gravity well and the much smaller gravity well created by the black hole inside the target’s drive system. She delayed the shot as long as possible so that the Marine shuttle now approaching the target would enjoy the maximum effect, but not so long that she risked catching the AUT in the two beams of coherent X-rays.

      At precisely the appointed moments, the two XELs detonated in nuclear fury, a hair over a second apart. In each, a 10 megaton fusion explosion generated an intense pulse of X-rays, which were shaped into coherence and given an aim point by powerful magnetic fields a stark instant before the generators of those fields were vaporized.

      Two pulses of X-ray energy, each a tenth of a light-second long, flashed across intervening space. Both were invisible, both due to the airlessness of space and to the fact that X-rays are invisible to the human eye, but at the last instant both showed as dazzlingly bright threads of light as they seared through the cloud of dust and gas now surrounding the target. For another instant, though no one was present to see it, an intolerably brilliant point of light dazzled off the Xul ship’s side.

      One point. The other shot had missed. Even the best AI expert system wasn’t perfect.

      But when Artemis switched on the drone image feed again, it was clear that the first shot had hit, and with good effect. The target had not vaporized, unfortunately … but it had been badly holed amidships.

      Artemis transmitted a brief signal to the approaching AUT. “You are clear to board.”

      The Marines were going in.

      6

       12 FEBRUARY 2314

       Assault Detachment Alpha

       Battlespace

       1508 hrs, GMT

      Garroway felt his gut twist as the autie spun end for end. The image of the objective didn’t change, of course, since it was coming from a remote drone. At least they had an image now; from the drone’s vantage point, it looked as though the XEL lasers had burned another hole into the Xul giant, roughly amidships.

      A flashing red light illuminated the autie’s cargo deck—warning that the compartment was now in vacuum. For several minutes, now, the atmosphere had been bleeding away into storage tanks belowdeck. The Marines did not want to have to deal with the explosive effects of sudden decompression when the aft hatch opened up.

      Acceleration slammed again into Garroway’s chest, and he heard the stifled gasps of several other Marines on the platoon channel. The autie was decelerating hard, backing down toward the objective as it fell stern-first, killing its residual velocity.

      He found himself fervently hoping that the navigational AI piloting the autie knew what it was doing. Inertialess field or no, if they hit the Xul vessel too fast, all the Oannan technology in the Solar System wouldn’t keep them all from being reduced to bloody paste inside their armor—Spam in a can, as the old saying put it.

      He wondered what Spam was. It didn’t sound pleasant.

      To take his mind off that claustrophobic image, he checked his Hawking 34mm chaingun—again. The Preble, fortunately, had been carrying a store of live ammo, including cases of 34mm rounds, both AP and HE, and the Navy ratings had passed what they had down into the autie en route. Unfortunately, the supplies of expendable ammo were sharply limited—only about a thousand rounds per man. That meant the Marines’ ammo bins were less than a third full.

      Still, it was better than going into live combat with training rounds. And the team’s pig-gunners all had fresh power packs. His chaingun loadout gave him a standard AP-HE three-to-one ratio—three rounds of armor piercing, followed by one of high explosive, a mix guaranteed to cut through just about anything a human opponent could throw at them.

      Of course, these were not human opponents. He tried not to think about the possible consequences of that, either.

      The deceleration went on for a long time. At the last moment, as his vision started to blur, Garroway saw the autie on the drone feed, a tiny bright star moving fast—too fast—toward the gaping hole in the Hunter ship’s flank.

      Hell, where was the external feed from the autie? There ought to be a camera up, to show them where they were going … but there was no time to think about that.

      “Brace for impact!” he called over the platoon channel.

      In the image window in his mind, the star vanished into the far vaster mass of the Xul ship, slicing through tangled wreckage. The jolt slammed him back against the seat, nearly driving the breath from his body. The impact was silent in hard vacuum, of course, but he could feel the shuddering, grating vibrations of hull metal sliding through whatever the hell the Xul vessel was made of, transmitted through deck and seat.

      And then he felt the familiar dropping sensation of zero gravity. The seat grabbers released him, and he flexed his body, drifting into the aisle between the seats, which now felt more like a tunnel, with no up or down, no deck or overhead. “Okay, Marines! Stand up! By twos! Secure your drift!”

      The tunnel began filling with armored Marines moving gently out of their seats and turning to face aft, gripping the seat backs in gauntleted hands to keep from floating free. Aft, the main hatchway was opening up, the ramp swinging slowly out of the way. Peering past the shoulders of the Marines in front of him, Garroway could see … blackness. An empty

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