The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ with that, the discussion was off and running, with various members of the planning staff contributing thoughts and suggestions, others offering objections and criticisms. Alexander stepped back mentally, listening to the debate. After a few moments, he assigned Cara the job of monitoring the discussion, while he focused on the far more boring topic of Expeditionary Force logistics.

      Gorgon represented a God-awful mess when it came to supply. An MIEF was an enormous and sprawling organization, so intricate and complex that dozens of specialist AIs were required simply to maintain internal communications, logistics, and routine administration. It was a joint-service unit, comprised of some 52,000 Marine and Navy personnel and eighty ships. The Marine component included a full Marine division—16,000 men and women—plus a Marine Aerospace Wing and a force service support group.

      Currently, 1MIEF drew on 1MarDiv for personnel and support, but ever since the Commonwealth Senate’s vote to accept Alexander’s operational proposal, both units had been heavily reinforced, both by drawing personnel and assets from other Marine divisions, and from newly graduating classes out of the recruit training centers, both on Mars and at Earth/Luna. When 1MIEF departed for the stars—the date of embarkation was now tentatively scheduled for mid-January, eight weeks hence—it would be fully staffed independently of 1MarDiv, which would remain in the Sol System as part of the standing defense against a possible Xul strike.

      The sheer logistical complexity of Operation Gorgon meant that a small army of planners were needed to work out each detail before embarkation. Vast quantities of expendables were already being routed to the Deimos Yards over Mars—most of them in the form of water ice, methane, and ammonia, with lesser amounts of trace elements. The ice would serve both as shielding and as a water supply; nanoassemblers would pull carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen from the raw materials and rearrange them as needed to create air and food. Resupply during the mission would be accomplished by mining outer-system worlds and asteroids each time they entered another star system. The supply lines back to Sol would be too long and tenuous to permit cargo ships to keep the fleet supplied.

      But even if the MIEF was able to “live off the land,” as some wag had put it already—meaning picking up all necessary elements in other star systems for reassembly as needed—the Expeditionary Fleet needed to have robot miners and transports enough to collect the raw materials, storage tankers to hold them, and mobile processing plants to convert and distribute the finished consumables. Besides that, there were critical decisions to be made concerning mechanical spares and replacement parts, especially for complex electronic components that couldn’t be batch grown in the fleet’s repair ships.

      And there were the weapons, the Mark 660 battlesuits, the ammunition, the power cores and converters … the list seemed endless, the storage space for it all sharply limited. Alexander and his planning staff were still hard at work determining if the thing was even possible. It wasn’t enough simply to add an extra few AKs, ANs, and AEs to the fleet roster, because each of those vessels—cargo ships, nanufactory transports, and ammunition ships—in turn needed their own small mountains of spare parts and extra equipment.

      Where 1MIEF was going was a long, long way out into the dark, and resupply was going to be a bitch. The situation was made even tougher by the fact that Alexander couldn’t even begin to guess how long 1MIEF would be deployed starside.

      “No!” a voice in his mind called, rising above the others. “You young rock! We do that and we leave our lines of retreat wide open and vulnerable! Doing that would be tantamount to suicide!”

      Judging from the acrimony of the debate going on within the staff planning group, it might be a while before the MIEF could depart in the first place. Rock was an old, old Corps epithet for a particularly dumb Marine—as in “dumb as a rock.”

      “With respect … sir,” another voice came back, biting. “How the hell are we going to maintain our lines of retreat across twenty thousand light-years? The EF will be cut off as soon as it goes through the first Gate!”

      “People!” Alexander cut in. “Let’s keep it civil.” A webwork of varicolored lines and brightly lit stars now stretched across the Galaxy map, showing alternate routes and objectives, known Stargate links, and known Xul bases. Cara had been tagging and color-coding each idea as it was presented, attaching to each lists of pros and cons.

      As Alexander looked at the tangle, a new surety began to make itself felt. Leadership styles differed, of course, from officer to officer, and since the beginning of his career Alexander had tried to be democratic in his approach, soliciting the ideas and opinions of his subordinates and giving each due consideration.

      But in the final analyses, the Marine Corps was not a democracy, any more than was the chain of command on board a Navy warship. One voice was needed to give the orders; one mind was required to make the necessary decisions.

      He wanted their input, but ultimately, this decision was his, and his alone.

      “Okay, people,” he said, speaking into the hard, new silence. “It’s clear that what we lack more than anything else is decent intel. We need to identify, and quickly, the best way to hit the Xul, and to hit them hard, hard enough to draw their interest away from human space.

      “To that end, I’m authorizing increased surveillance on known Xul bases, with an emphasis on astrogational mapping. We need to know where these bases are relative to one another, and how they interconnect.”

      “Sir,” General Austin asked. “Does that include Stargates outside the Commonwealth?”

      “You’re damned straight it does. Keep the ops black. We don’t need any more political problems, here. I’ll get the authorization we need. Okay?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “Good. I am also authorizing an AI search of all known astronomical databases. I want to compile every bit of data possible that might reveal unexpected or unknown links between known Stargates and known areas of deep space.” He thought a moment, then added, “Include in that search any deep space anomalies or unexplained phenomena that might indicate a Xul presence or interest.” A number of agencies kept track of such data, he knew, though he wasn’t sure if anyone ever actually used it.

      But the data were there, and AI agents could find it, compile it, and present it to the ops planning team. Reports of gamma or x-ray ray bursts, for example, from a particular star system might indicate a normal and natural process—stellar material from a companion star falling onto the surface of a neutron star, for example—or it could indicate the presence of a Xul fleet.

      “So far as ops planning goes, we need to pick one mode of approach and focus on that. So here’s what we’re going to do. …”

       12

       2311.1102

      UCS Samar

       In transit, Alighan to Sol

       0730 hrs GMT

      The transport was two weeks out from Sol. For the past four weeks, Ramsey’s sessions with Karla had continued, with hours out of each ship’s day passing in virtual conversations with the AI in a variety of imagined “safe” СКАЧАТЬ