by Ian Douglas
In its place arose, once again, and phoenixlike, the United States of America. Its capital—at least for the time being—was situated in Columbus, District of Columbia.
None of this was known, or of consequence, to Task Force Isis. On September 12, 2169, the AIs controlling the fleet began deceleration. The habitat arms were pivoted aft, until they were once more flush against each vessel’s spine in the drive configuration.
This was the tricky part of ship mechanics in the flight profile. At near-light speed, it was imperative that passengers and crew be kept safely within the shadow of the broad mushroom cap of each starship’s R-M tank. About a quarter of the total water had been expended in the acceleration phase, but there was water enough still to absorb and scatter incoming high-energy particulate radiation—specifically the stray hydrogen and helium atoms and nuclei that, with a relative difference in velocity of almost c, became deadly.
Previous star flights had seen the ships spun end-for-end at the beginning of the deceleration phase of the flight. With the crew and passengers now exposed to the deadly flux of radiation coming in from astern, a complex system of water-filled balyuts had been employed in order to screen them. The system, though, made engineers nervous. An impact with a grain of dust missed by the drive flare itself packed the destructive potential of a fistful of high explosives. If the balyut ruptured, the humans in its shadow would fry. In fact, there was a fair chance that the percent or two of casualties each flight suffered en route was due to stray particles missed by the water balloons aft.
With this in mind, and beginning with the explorer ship Isis, a new system had been brought on line. The plasma drive conduit now extended along the entire length of each ship’s spine, passing all of the way through the R-M tank and emerging at the bow. Reconfigured, the drive was now reversed, the star-hot plasma accelerated magnetically forward, up the spine, toward the bow. This meant, of course, new headaches in shielding the hab modules from the avalanche of highly radioactive plasma through the ship’s central column, scant meters away, but this had been accomplished by using a fraction of that energy to generate powerful magnetic shields about the ship’s spine near the hab modules. Now, the ship didn’t need to flip end-for-end, and the R-M tank continued to shield the sleepers.
At least, that was how it would work in theory….
In practice there was a lot more in the way of complex systems in both the ship’s engineering and electronics that could go terribly wrong. The ships’ designers hoped, however, that the change would improve the odds for the survival for all of the sleeping Marines.
During the first two weeks of March 2170, the flotilla entered the environs of Sirius space. Slowed now to a handful of kilometers per second, the vessels—their R-M shielding tanks now worn and deeply pitted by the wear and tear of their ten-year voyage—moved into increasingly dusty space, with the dazzling, pinpoint beacon of Sirius A casting a brilliant glare, white with a faint tinge of blue, just ahead.
The Navy crews had been revived by the ship AIs on February 23. General Dominick and his command constellation, along with the CAG staff on board the carrier, were revived on March 12.
Both Chapultepec and the carrier Ranger released a small cloud of drones—AR-7 Argus reconnaissance probes and UV-20K robot drones—while the fleet was still almost eighty a.u.s out. Traveling much more quickly than the starships, these probes swarmed into the inner system, measuring, listening, looking, recording…seeking any information at all of possible interest to Dominick, Harris, and their staffs. The stargate was located, and the task force shaped an inbound vector for its vicinity.
And on March 28, they started waking up the Marines.
29 MARCH 2170
Deck 2, Hab 1,
UFR/USS Chapultepec 15,000,000 kilometers from
Stargate Sirius
1522 hours, Shipboard time
For the second time in what felt like only two months, Garroway struggled to consciousness, choking on the lung-filling nanogel that had kept him technically alive throughout the long voyage. For a claustrophobic few moments, he tried desperately to figure out where he was and what had happened. He was aware of a searing pain in his lungs as he tried to breathe, of a lesser, emptier pain in his belly, of the foul stink of the inside of the coffin-sized cylinder.
His arm burned slightly and a robotic injector arm withdrew into a side compartment. “Lie still and breathe deeply,” a familiar, genderless voice told him. “Do not try to leave your cell. A transition medical team will be with you momentarily.”
I made it, he thought. Again…
He lay naked on the pallet inside the softly lit, sealed canister until the last of the gel drained away and the hatch next to his head cracked open. Harsh light beat at his eyes as the pallet slid into the chilly emptiness of the compartment. Figures leaned over him, checking instrument readings, pupil dilation, and breathing. “You okay, guy?” one of the shapes asked him. “What’s your ID?”
“Garroway, John. Corporal, serial number 19283-33-…”
“He’s tracking,” the other shape said.
“Hey, Garroway?” the first said, leaning a bit closer. “Remember me?”
He squinted his eyes, trying to see against the light. The two faces came into focus, more or less.
“You!” he said, recognizing the man. “Doc…uh…it’s Lee, isn’t it?”
“That’s me.”
“The corpsman who saved my life a couple weeks ago.”
“That’s me. Only it wasn’t a couple of weeks ago. Welcome to 2170, Marine.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Ah, they woke me early so I could help break you guys out of cold storage.”
“So…we made it. We’re at Sirius?”
“That we are. There are downloads available, when you want to access them. Meanwhile, you know the drill by now. Take it easy. Sit up slowly when you feel strong enough. Showers and clothing issue are on the other side of the compartment. And you can get yourself something to eat.”
Hunger rumbled inside Garroway’s stomach. “Something to eat sounds real good just now.”
“Right. I’ll catch you later, Marine.” The two moved to the next cybehibe container hatch and began cycling it open.
Closing his eyes, he thought-clicked into the shipboard Net and downloaded the current sitrep. All eight ships of the task force had made it safely. The stargate was fifteen million kilometers away—invisibly distant from the ships, but a number of views transmitted by remote probes was available. Garroway clicked through several of these before settling on one—a shot taken from an oblique angle to the gate, so that it appeared as a severely flattened ellipse. By magnifying the image, he could see considerable detail in the structure, including what looked like flat-topped buildings and a scattering of pinpoint lights.
It certainly looked inhabited. So far, however, there’d been no sign that the approaching flotilla had been noticed, no response to their arrival at all. It was somewhat disconcerting.
Strength returned and hunger clawed at him. He dismissed the link, then slowly sat up, swinging his feet over the side of the pallet. Around him, dozens of Marines were sitting up, moving around, or still lying on their cybehibe pallets, as technicians and corpsmen continued to make the rounds, calling those men and women still locked away in their hibernation cylinders back to life.
“Damned fucking engineers….”
He turned at the noise, which had burst from a rugged, hirsute Marine behind him. “Bax? What’s the problem?”
Lance Corporal Clayton Baxter scowled at him as though it was his fault. “The goddamned ship engineers screwed up the pool, is what!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“They screwed up the pool! According to the stats online, we only lost two Marines in cybehibe this time! My money was on twenty-five!”
It took a moment for Garroway to sort through Baxter’s logic. The passengers on interstellar flights often ran pools, with the object
of predicting just how many of their number would not emerge from hibernation at the end of the journey. Historically, the attrition rate could be as high as twenty percent, though two or three percent was usually closer to the mark. If only two Marines had died this time—a casualty rate of something like a tenth of one percent—it meant the new way of handling deceleration had worked. They’d reached Sirius safely slowed to planetary speeds and they hadn’t lost twenty or thirty people to malfunction doing it. Apparently, the scientists who’d decided that cybehibe casualties were caused by the radiation flux during turnover had been right, and their fix had worked.
And Baxter was complaining about it? Garroway shrugged. Clay Baxter was one of those Marines sometimes referred to as a “rock,” a term suggesting great strength and endurance…but something less than a keen and incisive intelligence. He liked things predictable and any change was cause for grumbling.
“You know, Bax, they probably did it just to irritate you.”
“I know, man. Fucking bastards can’t leave well enough alone….”
Garroway fell into line for the shower, just behind Kat and Private Alysson Weis. “Good morning, Gare,” Kat told him. “Sleep well?”
“Uh. Like the dead.” He looked at the two women, both attractive, both completely nude, and wondered if the powers-that-were had slipped something into the nanogel, a libido inhibitory agent of some sort. He felt absolutely zero in the way of arousal.
Well, they were hardly at their most alluring, their hair clumped wet with gel-foam, their bodies stinking almost as badly as his. Familiarity took some of the edge off, certainly; there was absolutely nothing like privacy within a Marine platoon, where communal showerheads were a way of life.
Mostly though, his physical hunger blocked any other hungers that might have been nagging at him. Gods, he needed something to eat!
Much later, showered, dressed, and fed, he sat in the squad bay with a dozen other Alpha Company Marines.
“So that’s the big hoop, is it?” Private Randy Tremkiss observed, his eyes closed as he surveyed one of the images downstreaming off the ship’s Net. They’d been examining the shots taken of the stargate from different angles by fast-flying probes as they ate. “Don’t look like all that big a blemo.”
“Speak Basic, Kissy,” Dunne admonished. “You’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“Uh, yeah. Right, Gunny.” Tremkiss was one of the MIEU’s newbie replacements. If the old hands had had it rough blending in with the culture and language of North America after their return from Ishtar, the FNGs were having the same trouble as they tried to fit in with their fellow Marines onboard the Chapultepec. The difference was that life in the military possessed a distinct culture all its own.
“You’ve got filters in your implant,” Dunne added. “Use ’em if you have to.”
Garroway didn’t like that part, which felt to him like a kind of thought control. In fact, the filter software flagged certain words in the speaker’s mind as he was about to say them, and suggested other words instead. There was nothing compulsory about it, but it still smacked unhappily of the behavior monitoring software they’d had to use when they went on liberty to an East L.A. condecology.
“What the hell’s the difference, Gunny?” he asked. “We all know what Kissy was saying.”
“Maybe. But in my platoon and if you’re a Marine, you’re going to fucking talk like a Marine. You copy that?”
“Yeah, Gunny. I copy.”
“Makes sense, Gare,” Sergeant Wes Houston said. He took a swig of coffee from a black mug emblazoned with the USMC globe-and-anchor. “What if Kissy tries to say something important during a firefight and slips into civvie-speak? A misunderstanding could cost lives.”
Garroway looked at Houston—an E-5 sergeant once more—and nodded. “I understand all that, Sarge. I just wonder sometimes where the line gets drawn, you know? Between personal freedom and the needs of the group.”
“‘Personal freedom’?” Lance Corporal Baxter exclaimed. “What the fuck is that?”
“Use your language filters, Gare,” Alysson Weis told him with a laugh. “I don’t read you!”
“Yeah,” Kat added. “Transmission garbled! You’re breaking up! This is the freakin’ Marine Corps!”
“Oh, yeah,” Garroway said, attempting a flash of humor. “I clean forgot.”
And it was true that anyone signing on in the military voluntarily gave up certain of his or her civil rights for the duration. Military service could not be run as a democracy.
“Hey, I don’t mind,” Tremkiss said with a shrug. “You guys all sav oldiespeak, an’ I tendo. When in Guangzhou, you blow Guangzhese, or vam it.”
“You wanna try that one again, Kissy?” Dunne growled.
“Uh…‘When in China, speak Chinese, or get the hell out?’”
“Better.” He grinned. “What you don’t want, private, is t’be mistaken for a civilian!”
“Amen to that!” Alysson laughed.
“So, what’s the plan?” Eagleton asked, changing the subject. “How’re we supposed to capture that gate-thing?”
“Ah, we go up to the front door and knock, of course,” Houston said. He rapped the tabletop. “Anybody home? FR Marines calling.”
“If they let us get that close,” Womicki said. “You guys seen how freakin’ big that thing is?”
“Twenty kilometers across,” Garroway said. “With the mass of a couple of Earths.”
“Most of the mass is tied up in a couple of black holes, they say,” Kat pointed out. “According to the download specs, most of that thing is just a big acceleration ring. The actual habitable part probably isn’t any bigger than a small town.”
“Yeah,” PFC Vincet Ardmore said. He was another newbie in the platoon, six subjective months out of boot camp, but he was in his midtwenties, older than the usual E-2. “And how many point-defense batteries can that small town deploy? I hoped the honches groz what they’re acing.” He stopped, shook his head. “Sorry. Uh…I hope the brass hats know what they’re doing.”
“Hey, don’t sweat it, Ardie,” Womicki said. “Since when did the brass ever know what the fuck it was doing?” The others laughed.
Garroway didn’t join in, however. He was studying one of the long-range views of the stargate…or whatever the hell it was, an enormous ring adrift in space. On Ishtar, there’d been plenty of unknowns, including a hollow mountain filled with ancient technology and one hell of an enormous surface-to-orbit cannon, and no one knew what they were getting into on the way in.
This was worse, though. The Annies were primitives, despite an assortment of high-tech weapons handed down from a few thousand years before and an intelligent computer that linked the Ahannu leaders into a single command network. These people—if the size of that loop and if their use of black holes in a space-based facility were any indication—were way ahead of humans in the technology department. They just might be as many thousands of years ahead of humans as humans were ahead of the Ishtar An.
And that was a decidedly unpleasant thought upon which to dwell.
10
30 MARCH 2170
SF/A-2 Starhawk Cassius
Approaching Stargate Sirius
1935 hours, Shipboard time
Cassius was not so much the pilot of the Starhawk as, in a very real way, he was the Starhawk.
Technically, he wasn’t even Cassius, but a copy of Cassius downloaded from the Chapultepec’s Net. The original—if that term had any meaning in the world of artificial intelligence—remained on the local Net as part of the MIEU command constellation. For identification purposes, he was now CS-1289, Series G-4, Model 8, I-2…with the I standing for iteration…and he was resident within the computer control Net of the A-2.
It wasn’t cramped, exactly—that was a human concept from the world of three dimensions and occupied space—but it was limiting. Rather than being resident within a network of some hundreds of thousands of individual processors on board the Chap
ultepec—from the targeting computers of the MIEU’s plasma smartguns to the main navigational computer—Cassius I-2 found himself within a “space” defined by only 714 computer processors and network nodes. A tenuous laser communications feed linked him to Cassius prime and the Chapultepec, but, while he continued to be aware of the flow of data within his parent program, there was also a sense of diminishment…and of isolation.
The Starhawk normally was a manned transatmospheric fighter, a stubby, boomerang-shaped vehicle cloaked in a dead-black radar absorbing skin designed to operate at the fringes of Earth’s atmosphere. Since it could fly either with a human pilot or purely under computer control as a UAV, it was a good choice as the automated steed ridden by the AI download, but that didn’t mean Cassius I-2 was comfortable, if that word had any meaning to a piece of self-aware software.
Time passed, at the dragging realtime rate of 1:1. Cassius had passed most of the past four years subjective in slowtime mode, his time sense slowed by a factor of almost 105:1 so that the long, empty months of star travel had passed in what, to a human, would have seemed like four days. No intelligence, whether carbon-based or silicon-based, could have survived the sheer emptiness and boredom of an environment unchanging over such a period of time. Cassius remembered too well the alarming example of the alien AI found within Europa’s ice-locked ocean. Half a million years of immobile isolation had left that artificial mind hopelessly insane. While Cassius was not capable of fear—not as humans understood the emotion—certain of his survival subroutines tended to pop up unbidden when he reviewed that particular set of data. Neither long-term isolation nor boredom were healthy for any intelligent being and long-term, of course, was a strictly relative term. For a being who could process data much more quickly than a human, even a day could pass with the agonizingly glacial boredom of years.
Now, however, his perception of the passage of time was close to the human norm—primarily so that he could communicate directly with the command constellations watching the progress of his flight from the combat center on the Chapultepec, 150,000 kilometers astern. He was now 107 kilometers out from the objective, and closing with it at two kilometers per second. Surrounding him, 5 kilometers distant and under his direct control, were two dozen AR-7 Argus reconnaissance probes, expendable unmanned craft through which Cassius—and the command constellations back on-board the Chapultepec—could hear and see.
