by Ian Douglas
“So far, the battle group will consist of the Chapultepec, plus the supply ships Altair, Mizar, and Procyon, the frigate gunships Daring and Courageous, the carrier Ranger, and the battlecruiser New Chicago. In addition, Ranger will be deploying two space-assault squadrons, Marine Wasps and the new SF/A-2 Starhawks. I think we can be confident that our forces will give a good account of themselves, no matter what they encounter at Sirius.”
“Even against the Hunters of the Dawn, Admiral?” the speaker was Congressperson Alyssa Durand, of the House Military Preparedness Oversight Committee. “I’m told that the Hunters might well be representatives of a civilization at least half a million years old. To engage in a military conflict with such a civilization could well mean suicide for our entire species!”
“Nonsense, Ms. Durand,” Major General Mark Colby snapped. “No civilization could possibly last for half a million years!”
“Some of us believe it to be completely possible, General,” Shugart said. “If the Predatory Survivors Hypothesis is correct, a starfaring culture could become metastable, with no outside threats and plenty of expansion room for bleeding off internal pressures.” The noumenal display shifted to show streams of pure data cascading through the group’s joint awareness, showing the results of thousands of simulated civilizations growing, evolving, and interacting. A schematic of the galaxy showed hypothetical civilizations as red pinpoints winking into existence, expanding into vast interstellar networks as a counter ticked off the centuries, networks that warred, struggled, then vanished…though frequently one stellar empire would grab the galactic center stage, maintaining a stable empire for many thousands of years. Occasionally, one of the networks seemed to freeze in place, remaining stable for much longer. “Computer models suggest such a civilization might endure for millions, even hundreds of millions of years.”
“They’re pretty, sir, but I don’t care about your computer models,” Colby told Shugart. “And all the Predatory Survivors Hypothesis tells us is that someone out there could prove to be very, very nasty. None of this sweetness and light, advanced civilizations must be peaceful crap we’ve been hearing from the religious fanatics.”
Ramsey was familiar with the survivors theory, had even briefed others on the topic numerous times. Essentially, it was a coherent explanation for Fermi’s Paradox…a scientific and philosophical statement noting that even if the speed of light could never be surpassed, a single starfaring culture could colonize the entire galaxy within the course of a few hundreds of thousands of years. Given that the galaxy was on the order of eight billion years old, the galaxy should have been colonized many, many times over already.
At the time Fermi’s Paradox was raised, in the mid-twentieth century, space appeared achingly silent and empty, with no sign of any intelligent species among the stars save the inhabitants of Earth itself. If the best ideas concerning planetary formation and the tenacity of life were correct, the galaxy should be teeming with civilizations by now. The paradoxical question, in the face of all of that silence, was…“Where the hell is everyone?”
The Predatory Survivors Hypothesis simply stated that, in Darwinian terms, one possible survival strategy for any intelligent species was to eliminate all possible competition. If, at some point in the history of galactic civilization, some one species that had evolved to sentience through this strategy had developed star travel, it might continue with that strategy, finding and destroying races of beings that might one day challenge it.
Two centuries later, ample evidence had been found of multiple starfaring cultures—on Earth, the Moon, Mars, Europa, and on quite a few worlds of nearby star systems. All of the traces of alien starfaring cultures, however, were limited to long-dead ruins, until, eventually, the Ahannu had been discovered on Ishtar…and the Ahannu spoke of the Hunters of the Dawn, who had reduced their civilization to stone-age barbarism thousands of years ago.
And now someone else had turned up at Sirius. Someone with superior technology and a damned quick trigger finger.
Had the Hunters survived for an estimated ten thousand years, since the collapse of the An Star Empire?
But things got more complicated and ominous still. There were also the Builders, those representatives of a far-flung starfaring civilization existing half a million years ago, annihilated, evidently, by hostile forces with a singularly narrow and psychopathic focus.
Were those the Hunters of the Dawn as well? Or a predecessor race using the same survival strategy?
Despite Colby’s self-assurance, some authorities believed the Hunters were a single species, wiping out the Builders…then eradicating the An half a million years later. The modus operandi was the same in both cases—the maneuvering of asteroids into new paths that would disrupt any planet-based civilization. Presumably, the motive was the same as well.
But were the two the same? The question, Ramsey thought, was a vitally important one. Durand had a point: anyone who’d been hanging around the galactic scene for half a million years or more was not someone you wanted as your enemy. Such a civilization might well seem almost godlike now from the human perspective, able to swat upstart humanity as casually as a man might swat a fly. The best Earth might hope for would be to remain unnoticed.
But that was no longer possible. If the golden ship had been built by the Hunters, Humankind had just announced its presence to them in huge flaming letters.
The simulation data was replaced by the now-familiar scenes transmitted from Isis during her last moments in the Sirius system. The stargate ring loomed huge against a star-dusted night. Once again, the golden starship emerged from the ring’s center. Again it lunged toward the Isis, and the scene was broken by static for a moment, before the cycle of images started again.
“Isn’t it already too late to run and hide?” Brigadier General Cornell Dominick asked. It seemed that SPACCOM’s liaison with the Joint Chiefs was reading Ramsey’s mind. “They encountered our explorer ship at Sirius and destroyed or captured it. They might very well know now exactly where the Isis came from. Hell, by this time a fleet could be almost here if it came through the Sirius Gate from wherever the Hunters call home, then backtracked on the Isis at near-c. Surely we need to put an armed presence at the stargate, even if it’s just there as a tripwire.”
“There are too damned many unknowns, General,” Shugart said. “Was the Isis destroyed? Or did they capture her? If she was destroyed immediately, the Hunters, if that’s who they are, might not know the ship’s origin. Or, as you say, the Hunters might have put a fleet through the stargate, and have been en route to Earth these past ten years. If that’s the case, sending seven ships to Sirius is not only useless, it’s foolhardy. Surely we would need every available warship here to defend Earth against such an attack.”
“Mr. Shugart—” Harris began.
“But if there is the slightest chance that we can still evade detection by these, these sociopathic monsters,” Shugart continued, pushing over the admiral’s attempted interruption, “then we should take it. We cannot hope to militarily challenge a technology even a thousand years in advance of our own…to say nothing of a technology gap of half a million years!”
“But that’s just it, Mr. Shugart,” Colonel Gynger Kowalewski, SPACCOM’s senior technical advisor, put in. “There is no way to hide, even if we wanted to.” At her mental command, a star map appeared, showing Sol at the center surrounded by a scattering of stars reaching out several light centuries. A sphere of purple grew out from Sol, engulfing hundreds of nearby star systems. “The Singer sent out its…call, or whatever that signal was, ninety years ago. Here’s how far it’s gone in that time—ninety light-years.”
A second sphere, this one red, overlapped the first, then grew a bit larger. Kowalewski continued. “The light from the drive flares of our first interstellar ships—with a characteristic wavelength indicating matter-antimatter reaction—started out over a century ago, and theoretically, they could be detected across galactic distances a
s anomalous gamma-ray sources by any sufficiently advanced technology.”
A third sphere expanded out from Sol, swallowing the first two and stretching across four times their volume or more, engulfing myriad stars. “Radio and television signals,” Kowalewski said, “a sure proof of intelligent and technological life, began leaving Earth well over two hundred years ago. We estimate that that initial wave front has now reached something on the order of three to four thousand stars.
“Two hundred years ago, Mr. Shugart,” she concluded, “we reached up, rang the door chimes, and announced our presence! If the Hunters are out there and still listening, they will hear us. Quite possibly they already have!”
“And we don’t know how much time we have, either,” Dominick added. “Maybe the nearest Hunter base is a thousand light-years away, and we have eight centuries left before they hear us. Or they could have heard us a hundred years ago, and that they’re still arguing, trying to decide how best to deal with us.”
“Our AI cultural simulations have suggested that a long-lived civilization will tend to make decisions, and to act and react, very slowly, very deliberately,” Kowalewski pointed out.
“There you go,” Colby said with a chuckle. “Maybe we don’t have to worry about them after all. But I need something more than guesswork about the long-term survivability of a civilization before I’ll accept the crazy notion that bogey men half a million years more advanced than we are might be coming after us.”
“General Colby,” Congressperson Durand said, “half a million years or ten thousand years…it makes no difference, either way. Our technology was a mere three or four centuries ahead of the Ahannu and a thousand Marines forced some millions of them to accept peace in a couple of days.”
Well, Ramsey thought, it hadn’t been quite that simple.
“My esteemed colleague is correct,” Congressperson Wayne R. Reardon, of the Military Appropriations Committee, said. “I submit that it would be better to make friends of these people, than to make them enemies.”
Ramsey thought-clicked to raise a noumenal icon, indicating that he wished to speak. Normally, it was wisest to maintain a low profile at briefings heavy with high brass and politicians, but the idiocy factor was growing worse by the minute.
“Colonel Ramsey,” Admiral Harris said. “Your thoughts?”
“Thank you, Admiral,” Ramsey said quietly. “Ms. Durand, Mr. Reardon, with respect, you miss the point. Whether we fight them or not, whether we make friends with them or not, we do not have a choice! Basic military strategy demands we find out as much about them as we can, just as far away from Earth as we can.”
“Colonel, how can you possibly talk about basic strategy in a case like this?” Durand wanted to know. “This situation is unprecedented! We don’t know what we’re up against!”
“Partly true, Madam Congressperson. Partly true. We don’t know who we’re up against or what their full capabilities might be. However, we can analyze the situation in the light of past military experience. If this stargate operates as we believe it does, it represents a strategic chokepoint.”
“Excuse me…a chokepoint?”
“A place which the enemy must control if it is to send forces against us. Think of a narrow strait on Earth, like the Strait of Gibraltar, but back in the days of surface wet-navies. Anyone who wanted to control the western Med on Earth had to control that passage, to keep the enemy from sending fleets in from the Atlantic.”
“Don’t patronize me, Colonel. Aerospace assets make surface fleets and straits irrelevant.”
“The point is…if the Hunters or other potential enemies must come through that gate, then it is a chokepoint. Deny them control, and we are safe. Surrender it and they can strike us when and where they choose.”
“But what if the Hunters are already on the way?” Reardon demanded.
Ramsey shrugged. “Then we’ve already lost. We could be in for a replay of ten thousand years ago, with Earth rock-bombed back to the stone age.”
“Then we shouldn’t send ships out-system that we’ll need to protect us here.”
“Sir, if we’re up against a foe capable of deploying ships like the Europan Singer, all the warships Earth can deploy would not be capable of stopping even one of them. We can spare eight ships to investigate the Sirius stargate. In fact, we must.”
“Tell me this, Colonel,” Durand said. “If you get out there, take the stargate and then find yourself facing something like the Singer or worse coming through…what do you do? What can you do?”
“We warn Earth, first of all. The Hunters may have faster-than-light technology that makes stargates superfluous…but if they don’t, they’ll have a nine-to-ten-year minimum flight from Sirius to Earth, just like us. And, while we can’t yet use Builder com technology to have real-time conversations between the fleet and Earth, there’s a chance that we’ll find one of their interstellar communicators on the Sirius Gate, which would give us instantaneous communications with Mars. If so, that gives you over eight years back here to prepare.
“And if worst came to worst? We would destroy the Sirius Gate.”
“My God,” Reardon said. “How? That thing is enormous!”
“What we’ve learned so far about the gate,” Kowalewski told them, “indicates that it is very strongly made. However, the forces it houses—a pair of orbiting black holes, we think—are nothing short of incredible. Disrupting the movement of those black holes in any way would quite probably tear the stargate to pieces. We won’t know for sure, of course, until we actually get out there. However, it seems more than likely that a large enough thermonuclear or antimatter war-head would upset the balance of forces inside the ring enough to do the trick.”
John Knowles indicated a desire to speak. He was a Deputy Undersecretary of Space Military Activities at the State Department and as such held the unenviable position of liaison between the UFR’s extrasolar operations and planning and the governments of other nations.
“There is another aspect to this situation,” he said. “Other governments have expressed an interest in this operation. The European Union and the Chinese Hegemony both have repeatedly pointed out that our actions at the Sirius Gate have very serious ramifications for other nations of Earth as well. The EU, in particular, is…ah…suggesting that we include a detachment of European warships with Operation Battlespace.”
“The hell with them,” Harris said.
“Their participation could be invaluable,” Knowles pointed out. “They sent the relief force to Ishtar twenty years ago, remember.”
“Yeah, arriving after our Marines had taken the place over and forced a peace treaty out of the Ahannu. Who needs them?”
“We may have them, like it or not,” Knowles said. “We have been informed that the EU and the Chinese are preparing an interstellar task force of their own. Things might move more smoothly if we incorporate their forces, planning, and objectives in with our own from the start.”
“Yeah,” Dominick said. “And it could be another case of them exploiting our coattails. They’re afraid we discover some really useful ancient tech on that thing out at Sirius and want to make sure they get their share.”
“Well, that’s only fair…” Reardon began.
“No, ma’am, it’s not! We take the risks, we foot the bill, and then they step in and take whatever we find? We fought the U.N. War a century ago to prove we didn’t have to take that kind of crap.”
“Right,” General Colby added. “Or else they insist on doing it their way: with their commanding officer and their agenda. Let me ask you this. When have the French ever been right in a military crisis?”
“Please, General Colby!” Durand said. “Save your cultural bigotry for outside this noumenon!”
“That’s not helpful, Mark,” Dominick added. “If the EU and Chinese want to tag along, there’s not a lot we can do to stop them. But we can insist that our men and spacecraft remain under our control. I would reject utterly any suggestio
n to do otherwise.”
“We understand your reservations, General Colby,” Reardon said. “They are noted. However, the principal question before this meeting is whether or not we should proceed with Operation Battlespace at all. The risks, as have been noted, are appalling.”
Again Ramsey indicated his desire to speak. “Colonel Ramsey?” Harris said.
“I submit, ladies and gentlemen, that it is far riskier to do nothing. Throughout its history, a primary mission of the U.S. Marines—arguably the primary mission—has been to be the first to fight this nation’s battles, and to do so as far from our home shores as possible. I, for one, would much rather fight the Hunters of the Dawn at Sirius than in southern California and I imagine most of you feel the same.
“But there’s something else, absolutely vital to the safety of Earth…and that is knowing our enemy.”
“But we know nothing about these…people,” Durand insisted.
“Exactly. Which is why the MIEU-1 must go to Sirius.” Ramsey thought a moment. “Sun Tzu put it best, I think. He said if you know yourself but not your enemy, you’ll be victorious half of the time. Know your enemy but not yourself and, again, you win half of the time.
“But if you know yourself and the enemy, you will always be victorious. Or so claims Sun Tzu. Well, gentlemen, ladies, we know the Marines and what they’re capable of. Now we need to learn about the enemy. And that is why we have the MIEU-1.”
“And how will you learn anything about him if your fleet is destroyed in the first few moments of the engagement?” Reardon asked. “Eh?”
“The Marines have made reconnaissance into an art. We are in the process of organizing two of the MIEU companies as a special Marine Recon unit. And…we also have Cassius.”
