On Earth, they still saw Hubble as an outer space Eden, but Earth was sixty thousand light-years away. The astronomers who named Hubble’s solar system after an ancient religious order had no way of knowing that they were looking at an extinct vision. The images they saw were older than civilization.
Viewed from observatories in the much closer Sagittarius Arm, Hubble was a scene of grand destruction. From their telescopes, scientists watched as Templar, the eponymous central star of the Templar System, expanded. Once a benevolent sun, Templar died as suns often do, swelling until it devoured half of the solar system around it. Before collapsing into itself, Templar engulfed A8Z3, A8Z2, and A8Z1, its three closest neighbors. Those planets vanished entirely.
Fifty thousand light-years away, the flaring red surface of Templar had just begun to spread into the orbits of the next neighboring planets. I have watched video images of it melting entire mountain ranges and boiling seas into steam— images of a fifty-thousand-year-old apocalypse that are still viewable fifty thousand light-years away.
A8Z4 and Hubble (A8Z5), the fourth and fifth planets from Templar, were not completely destroyed, though the dying sun scorched their surfaces. A8Z4 now existed as a wisp of dust particles and gas. You could fire a missile through it. The once-rich soil of Hubble was cooked to ash, and its atmosphere became toxic.
The kettle opened to reveal the rim of a sweeping valley. As the platoon hustled out of the armored transport, I looked across the panorama and noticed how the black sky and gray landscape seemed to stretch forever.
During our briefing, Captain McKay described the full extent of this invasion. Within the hour, armored transports would land thirty thousand Marines on this desecrated planet with another seventy thousand Marines waiting in reserve.
The outer skin of Hubble’s atmosphere was formed of combustible gas that exploded in harmless flashes when heated by rocket engines. We had so many ships passing through the atmosphere that the sky looked like it was on fire.
“Positions, men,” Sergeant Shannon bellowed. “Fan out. Secure the area.”
We knew the drill. Shannon had trained us well. He had rehearsed every step of securing a landing area with us hundreds of times.
“You heard the sergeant,” I said to my fire team. The four men on my team formed a diamond, and we headed south to the ridge. The ash crunched and compressed under my boots. I did not sink; it was not like stepping into water or quicksand. It felt more like walking on dry leaves.
The sun that burned up this system might have burned out, but it still generated heat, over two hundred degrees. The planet’s landscape spread before us as a perpetual nightscape. On other worlds I sometimes regretted the way our night-for-day vision blotted out color; but it didn’t matter on a desolate brick, like Hubble. Everything was gray or black except for the amber-colored condensation that formed on my visor. I wiped at it with the tips of my fingers, leaving a translucent swirl. Fine beads of oil hung in the air of the planet like steam after a summer rain.
The first of the barges landed no more than thirty yards from where I stood. Jets of fiery exhaust flared from its engines. The blast blew dust that stuck to the oil on the front of my visor. I tried to clean it, but the hardened plastic on my battle armor only smeared the film. When I looked back at the barge, the smear obscured my view of a column of low-gravity tanks rolling out of its hold.
LG tanks were ten feet tall and thirty feet long—built long and low to take advantage of any available gravity. They were iron beasts carrying artillery, particle beams, and missiles. Weighing nearly two hundred thousand pounds each, they sank six inches into the clinker soil.
“Holy shiiiiit,” Lee gasped over the interLink. “Sergeant Shannon, Harris, you’d better have a look at this.” Lee stood at the edge of the valley. I joined him.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“Ping it,” Lee said.
Shannon let out a litany of four-letter words.
Using optic commands, I initiated the sonic locator. My helmet emitted an inaudible ping that bounced across the landscape. One moment, I saw the valley below me as a wasted desert with cinder for soil; the next moment, the sonic locator overlaid that scene with a network of translucent green trenches. Hundreds of snake shafts crisscrossed the ground in nonsensical patterns. I did not know what the excavations could be used for. When I discussed them with veteran Marines, I used to get a shrug and a tired look. To them, snake shafts were as baffling as the giant stone heads on Easter Island, something that religious fanatics built for the sake of building. I thought that there had to be more to it than that.
“Those can’t all be snake shafts,” I said. “There are too many of them.”
My sonic locator sent out another ping as the ghosts of the first ping faded. An identical pattern appeared.
“The Mogats could not have dug those,” I said. “They only left Ezer Kri a few weeks ago.”
“Then somebody has been digging into this planet for years,” Lee said. “Think they knew they would hide here someday?”
“I don’t know what to make of it,” Shannon said as he left to return to his squad.
As Lee and I debated the improbabilities of the snake shafts, a gust of wind blasted so hard it almost pushed me over. I looked back to see the gray hull of another barge touching down. The barge’s oblong body settled with a loud creak, then made a loud mechanical whine as the cargo bay doors opened. It carried Cobra gunships—low-flying units used to cover ground troops. With their giant racks of guns and rockets, Cobras looked more like gigantic bumblebees than snakes. The gunships’ engines kicked into gear as a conveyor belt moved them to the front of the cargo bay, and they launched into the air.
My vision remained clouded. I tried brushing the oil-based mud from my visor with my glove again, but that only smeared it more.
By that time, over twenty thousand Marines crowded the ridge with another ten thousand on the way. I looked across the scene and took mental inventory of the men and tanks. “Lee, gunships, tanks…this is a full-scale invasion,” I said.
“I’ve never seen anything on this scale,” he agreed. “Shannon is probably the only active Marine who has.”
The oil mist that passed for humidity in Hubble’s atmosphere distorted sounds, but it did not smother them. A wing of ten Harriers zoomed over our heads. Two seconds passed before the roar of their engines tore through my helmet. By the time the sound caught up to us, the Harriers had slowed for a methodical sweep of the valley. As the fighters approached the horizon, I heard the thunder of missiles and
saw tiny bubbles of light along the valley floor.
“Move out!” McKay’s voice bellowed over the interLink.
“Gentlemen, let’s roll!” Shannon shouted.
That was our call. The first wave of the attack consisted of thirty thousand Marines, a mere five hundred tanks, and thirty gunships. The Harriers that preceded us pounded the enemy’s gun placements, bunkers, and air defense. Whatever ships and airfields the Mogats possessed, would now lie in ruin.
As the Harriers wove their fire, our job was to cause chaos. We would breach the Mogat lines and scatter their defenders so that the rest of our landing party could deliver a killing blow. The Mogats were the men who had massacred our platoon. We owed them.
“Lets go!” Lee yelled to his men over a platoon-wide open channel on the interLink.
Lunging over the precipice, we used our jetpacks to glide down the sloping valley wall. Our packs set off small fireballs in the gassy air. From above, we must have looked like a swarm of locusts with exploding asses. Once we reached the valley floor, we dropped to our feet and trotted toward battle.