Star Marines
The ultimate battle is about to be waged in a war that will alter the universe forever . . .With the planet's fighting men and women deployed across the galaxy—battling in the noble cause of enslaved humanity—the insidious Xul have reached across space to devastate the unsuspecting Earth with asteroid fire. Without warning, a once majestic world is reduced to near-rubble—and the very future of humankind is in dire jeopardy.Interplanetary leaders are on the brink of abandoning Earth and its colonies to an overwhelming enemy. But Brigadier General Garroway of the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit is unwilling to concede defeat—not as long as there's a single marine willing to give his or her life in defense of their embattled homeworld.
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For Brea,who saw me through the worst of times
âTheyâve found the intruder, sir.â
âLet me see.â
A three-dimensional schematic opened in a new mental window. The intruderâs course was clearly marked, as were the last known positions of the monitor Prometheus and the patrol frigate Rasmusson, several High Guard drones, and Mars. A tiny white star had detached from the crimson star marking the intruder. âWhatâs that?â
Data unfolded in columns down the right side of the window. âMass analyses suggests itâs a small asteroid, sir,â Bettisly told him. âAbout one kilometer across ⦠mass approximately two billion tons. The intruder seems to have nudged it onto a new vector.â
Garroway studied the data with growing horror. âTwo thousand kilometers per second?â
âYes sir.â
âThatâs a hell of a nudge.â A cold thought gripped his heart. âWhereâs it going? Whatâs the target?â
The schematic shrank in the window, showing more of the orbit of Mars ⦠and then of Earth. A yellow line projected itself along the rockâs projected path, which passed just in front of Earthâs current position. The white star tracked down the slightly curving line as Earth moved forward â¦
âGreat Father in Heaven â¦â
Prologue
They were called the Hunters of the Dawn.
Their own name for themselves did not translate well into the languages of lesser beings. It might have been rendered, very approximately, as âthe Sentient Ones,â or even, more approximately, as âLiving Ones,â or simply as âWe Who Are.â
All who were not We Who Are were lesser life forms, scarcely worthy of notice save when they became threats. When that happened, they became prey.
The name Hunters of the Dawn had been applied to them by others long ago, members of an interstellar cooperative now long extinct. More recentlyâseveral thousand years before, another species had named them Xul ⦠a word that translated, again approximately, as âDemons.â
What other species called them, or thought of them, scarcely mattered. The Ones Who Are obeyed Darwinian dictates hard-wired into the genome of their distant ancestors a billion years in the past, dictates that drove them to seek out and eliminate any civilization capable of posing a threat to their eons-long dominion over the Galaxy.
Lately, a star system at the edge of a minor branching on one of the galactic spiral arms had become of particular interest to We Who Are. A signal from a Living Ones Seekership long believed lost had been received, indicating that intelligence once again had developed space-faring technology in Sector 2420. More recently, a Huntership had taken samples from a primitive interstellar vessel at the Gateway designated 2420-001, confirming the re-emergenceâand the technological evolutionâof an organic species texted as Species 2824.
And not long after that, the Huntership had been tracked through the Gatewayâpresumably by those same intelligencesâand destroyed.
This was not to be tolerated, could not be tolerated, without violating the genetic coding that formed the social dynamic of We Who Are.
The ancient records had been consulted. The system designated 2420-544 had been of interest at least twice before in the past three hundred thousand cycles, and there were indications of contact and annihilation within that star system even farther back than that. The Lords Who Are had consulted together, drawn their conclusions, and generated their plans.
A Huntership had been dispatched.
That vessel emerged now from paraspace, six light-hours from the target primary. That primary, a bright star only at this distance, was a fairly typical yellow sun possessing a number of planets. Samplings of the electromagnetic spectrum revealed a cloud of structures, vessels, and transmitting objects swarming about the inner system. Most were clustered around one particular planetâthird from the sun, blue with liquid water, the spectra rich with the absorption lines of chlorophyll, and humming with the electronic signature of technic life.
The system matchedâwithin a probability of ninety-plus percentâthe system described by the creatures taken at Gateway 2420-001 a hundred cycles ago. Dissected, patterned, and absorbed, those creatures had yielded a wealth of information about their nascent civilization and origins. That Gateway, about eight light-years distant from this system, was called Sirius in the language of these creatures.
Species 2824 called this star system Sol ⦠and their homeworld, the third planet, Earth.
The Lords Who Are within the Huntership examined the data, and reached consensus.
