Battlespace

by Ian Douglas

  The juveniles, it turned out, were the builders. In N’mah prehistory, tens of thousands of years ago, it must have been the land-dwelling juveniles that had discovered fire, smelted metals, and eventually gone to the stars.

  The race still mourned that decision, which they called the Death Turning. If they’d not begun exploring the oceans of space around them, they might never have encountered the Hunters of the Dawn.

  An estimated twenty thousand years ago, it seemed, long before they encountered a humanity that at that time was still dwelling in caves on distant Earth, the N’mah had found the Hunters—or the Hunters had found them. Their home world and some hundreds of colony planets had all been destroyed, subjected to the intense asteroid bombardments that were the Hunters’ signature.

  This much, at least, had already been learned through informal exchanges with the Elders. As the exchange of data continued, Ramsey expected that the humans, at least, would learn a very great deal more about their prehistoric past.

  “Everything depends on the way the Gate works.” Dr. Marie Valle, the civilian xenotechnologist, was speaking at the moment. “If I’m understanding our hosts…the, the space inside the circle of the Gate is literally in two places at once, and those two places can be many light-years apart.”

  “Yes, yes,” a deep rumble of a voice agreed within their minds. Cassius was transmitting his translation of the N’mah words with the same timbre and intonation as their deep and decidedly unfemale-sounding voices. “Same space, two places.”

  The Sumerian language database, it turned out, was lacking, especially in technical words and concepts. That was hardly surprising; most of the vocabulary had come directly from ancient Sumer, which had not possessed starships, star gates, or the language of quantum physics. The rest had come from the An of Ishtar who, though they still had the computer network they called the abzu, had lost most of the technology of their starfaring past. Concepts like mul-ka, literally “Star Gate,” were simple enough, since both mul, “star,” and ka, “gate,” were known. In the same way, the word starship could be rendered as mul-ma-gur, “ma-gur” being the ancient Sumerian for a large boat.

  But what about words like “energy,” as distinct from izzi, “fire?” Or “atom?” Or “light-year?”

  And the toughest part of the problem was that Sumerian was not the N’mah’s native language. The gods only knew what was happening when they translated, from Sumerian to their own gargle-sounding tongue, a jury-rigged compound nightmare like us-u-su-as-mu, for “length-light-cross-one-year.”

  “If we understand the technology correctly,” Valle went on, “then the Sirian Gate is…‘tuned,’ I guess would be the best word, tuned to overlap with another gate somewhere else in the Galaxy. According to our hosts, there are some millions of gates scattered across the Galaxy. We’re not sure, but these may be another of the legacies left behind by the Builders, half a million years ago…or they could have been constructed by a civilization earlier still than that. By adjusting the tuning at one gate, a ship can dial in on any other gate, no matter how distant.

  “The tuning at the Sirian Gate is currently controlled by a starfaring culture the N’mah refer to as Ghul or Xul. We don’t know what they call themselves. Xul is a Sumerian word, though, for ‘evil,’ or possibly ‘evil destroyers.’”

  “The Hunters of the Dawn,” Dominick said.

  “We don’t know that,” Lymon put in. “Not for sure.”

  “Right,” Ricia Anderson said. “It could be another race of Galaxy-faring psychopaths intent on wiping out emerging civilizations by smacking them with asteroids.”

  Lymon ignored her. “Obviously, we should just take whatever steps are necessary to get control of the gate ourselves. That would solve everything.”

  “Actually, that’s a lot easier said than done,” Valle said. “Xul starships approaching the Gate can retune it to a specific destination, using radio or lasercom codes. As far as we’ve been able to determine, any ship with the appropriate codes can do it. We can learn how to use the gate ourselves—the N’mah have some of the appropriate codes themselves. But we can’t stop the Xul from accessing the Gate, not without destroying the Gate entirely.”

  “Then we destroy the Gate,” Ramsey put in. “We have some tactical nukes in our inventory, and two AMB-75 antimatter devices.” He looked pointedly at Lymon. “Our mission orders specifically dictate the necessity of destroying the Gate, should we discover a direct threat to Earth.”

  “We don’t yet know that there is a threat,” General Dominick put in.

  “Besides,” Dr. Franz said, “the Sirius Gate is inhabited! You can’t possibly be thinking of destroying it!”

  Ramsey looked at the silently listening N’mah elders. What were they making of all of this? “No. But there must be a way to disable the Gate without harming the environment here.”

  “That…may be difficult, General,” Valle replied. “The Gate operates because of quantum-special distortions generated by two rotating black holes inside the Gate structure, as we’ve guessed. But that’s also the source both of the gravitational shielding which keeps the inhabited areas habitable, and of the power that runs the N’mah life support systems, their water purifiers and circulators, all of that. Now, the life support we might be able to keep going by tapping into the fusion plants that power some of the secondary systems, but we can’t do a thing about the gravity shielding. The N’mah say they don’t possess gravity control technology.”

  “What about those flying tanks?” Admiral Harris asked.

  “Mag-lev, using the Gate structure itself to generate an intense local magnetic field for propulsion. Old tech. We’ve been able to do the same thing ourselves for a couple of centuries—railguns, maglev trains….

  “In fact,” she went on, “I’m afraid the N’mah aren’t so very far ahead of us in technology at all.”

  “What?” Lymon said, startled. “That’s not possible! We were counting—” She stopped herself.

  “Much, we have lost,” Cassius told them in the N’mah’s rumbling pseudo-voice. “Much. We have been crippled by the Xul.”

  Ramsey made a mental note to follow up on that with the N’mah later, if he could. What they’d revealed about their race so far suggested that some hundreds or perhaps thousands of N’mah colonies were now scattered across the galaxy, hidden in remote and out-of-the way places where they would not attract attention from the Xul. How many such colonies of survivors remained the N’mah themselves didn’t know.

  The Sirian group, they claimed, numbered around ten thousand individuals, both young and adult. They were, the N’mah claimed, a remnant of a much larger Sirian colony that had been destroyed by a Xul attack—if Ramsey was understanding this right—less than two thousand years ago. Evidently, they’d retained some useful high-tech like that nanotrick with metal, but lost the faster-than-light ships, the interstellar communicators, and the world-shattering weapons.

  “The great danger,” Valle said, “is that the Xul, or one of their ships, at any rate, and that’s all it would take, may know now about our activities here. If they come through again—as they did when they destroyed the Isis ten years ago—they would not need to search long or far to find Earth. Local space is bathed in the EM radiation from our civilization. And…while the N’mah do not have faster-than-light starships, the Xul most assuredly do. They use the Gates for zigzagging around the Galaxy, but they also have an FTL drive they use for more local jaunts. If, and when, they emerge here, they will be literally only a few days away from Earth.”

  “But how do they know we’re here?” Dominick asked.

  “For that, why don’t you take a look at the screen. We’ll let Cassius tell his side of things.”

  The flatscreen on one side of the conference table lit up; simultaneously, a noumenal download became available for the humans present. Ramsey chose to focus on that rather than the screen. There was less chance of missing something important that way.

&n
bsp; He found himself adrift in space. It took a moment for him to recognize what he was seeing…a vast, spiraling smear of starlight, the galaxy seen from outside. The scene rotated slowly, and he saw other, more easily comprehended objects…a planet, a red-dwarf star, the magnificence of a globular star cluster, and what appeared to be an asteroid or small moon pierced by an enormous cavern or hole. He was forcibly reminded of the crater Stickney, on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, only instead of being a deep pit filled with dust and loose rubble, the hole seemed to go down and down and down forever, with no bottom.

  A star gate, tunneled into the side of a fair-sized asteroid.

  “This is what I saw—or, rather, what my downloaded alter-ego saw—on the other side of the Sirius Gate,” Cassius explained. “Here is the relevant imagery.”

  The scene shifted to the planet, visible only as a slender, ruddy crescent close by the shrunken red sun. A star gleamed—oddly—inside the arms of the crescent, where no star should be. Cassius’s imaging system zoomed in on that star; the crescent expanded until it filled the scene, then expanded some more and moved out of sight. The star stayed star-like for a moment, then suddenly expanded as well.

  And then Ramsey was looking at the golden, needle-shaped spacecraft he’d seen before, the one that had emerged from the Sirius Gate to destroy the Isis.

  “Xul-mul-ma-gur,” one of the N’mah rumbled.

  “A Xul starship,” Cassius translated. “And they almost certainly now know we are here.”

  22

  4 APRIL 2170

  General Ramsey

  Conference Chamber

  Sirius Stargate

  1540 hours, Shipboard time

  “One of the Marine pilots of 5-MAS,” Cassius went on, “rescued me, so to speak. Captain Greg Alexander fell through the stargate during the battle, four days after I—after Cassius I-2, rather—went through.”

  “Wait a sec,” Helen Albo, Dominick’s chief of staff, said. “I’m confused. Are you Cassius? Or the other Cassius? Which one is I-2?”

  “I am both,” Cassius replied evenly. “When I was downloaded into the Starhawk probe, Cassius Iteration-two became a separate consciousness, experienced a different stream of events and recorded memories different from those of the Cassius left behind. When I—when he, rather—returned, he was uploaded back into the MIEU computer net, where his separate memories became my own. Essentially, Cassius I-2 no longer exists as a distinct and separate entity. I am he.”

  “Oh. Stupid question.”

  “Not at all. The English language is not well designed for distinctions of this nature.”

  “How badly damaged was your Starhawk?” Ramsey asked.

  “My maneuvering thrusters were operable, enough so that I was able to stop my spin. My main drive, however, was damaged, and I had lost nearly all of my reaction mass. I elected to maneuver my craft to a parking point some fifty kilometers from the opening of the stargate on that side, and observe the region.”

  “For clarification,” Ricia Anderson said, “we’ve named that stargate the Cluster Gate. We’re uncertain as yet which of a number of different globular star clusters it might be, but the name seems to fit. That gate—and the red dwarf sun it orbits—appear to lie within a few hundred light-years of the cluster proper. Go ahead, Cassius. Excuse the interruption.”

  “Some eighty-three hours after I went through, Captain Alexander emerged from the gate. His Starhawk was badly damaged and incapable of maneuvering. Fortunately, we both fell through the gate on similar trajectories, and ended up in the same general volume of space, and I retained sufficient maneuvering capability to effect a rendezvous with him. These scenes were taken by one of the remote probes I released in the area.”

  The assembled humans and N’mah watched the scene as recorded by a remote probe—one damaged SF/A-2 Starhawk drifted slowly alongside a second, more badly mangled one. Against the backdrop of the sky-filling galaxy, a space-suited human figure emerged from the badly damaged fighter and began checking over the plasma-blasted ruin of the portside thrusters of the other.

  “Fortunately, his Starhawk still possessed reaction mass. My main drive was damaged but repairable. Captain Alexander was able to effect repairs to my portside drive, a matter of replacing the KR-1509 circuit board, which had melted, with the identical board from his SF/A-2, which was intact. The repairs allowed me to reverse my path and return through the gate.”

  “Why didn’t Alexander come with you?” Dr. Franz wanted to know.

  “My Starhawk had neither life support, nor space for a human passenger. The cockpit area had been given over to the electronics necessary to support the Cassius iteration.”

  “So Captain Alexander is still adrift outside the Cluster Gate,” Ramsey said. “How much life support does he have left?”

  “At the time,” Cassius said, “five point three hours ago, his fuel cells would provide reserve power for another fourteen hours. He evacuated the air from his cockpit in order to perform the EVA to effect repairs on my Starhawk. His space suit, I estimate, if connected to his reserve shipboard tanks, had air for another twenty hours.”

  “So we have fourteen hours, more or less, to go in and pick him up.”

  “Unless,” Admiral Harris said, “the Xul have already picked him up.”

  “You said the Xul may know about us,” Dominick said. “Is that because of your, ah, incursion to the other side?”

  “Actually, we saw no indication that the Xul starship was aware of us,” Cassius said. “Our ships were tiny and operating at extremely low power. However, we must assume that they are aware of the gate’s operation.”

  “When the Isis first approached the Sirius Gate,” Harris said, “she launched several remote probes through the gate aperture. We now believe the Xul ship became aware of Isis’s presence as those probes emerged through their side of the gate. If so, they would certainly know about those two fighters.”

  “And be on the way now to investigate,” Ramsey added. “At least, we must make that assumption.”

  “So the question becomes,” Dominick said, “what can we do about it?”

  “I’d give a lot for a planetary defense battery right now,” Harris said. “Something big enough to be sure of taking out that Xul behemoth.”

  The N’mah rumbled among themselves for a moment, then posed a question to Cassius in Sumerian. He translated. “Please, what is ‘planetary defense battery’?”

  “Anything big enough to kill the Xul ship,” Harris replied, grim. “Railgun. Plasma weapons. Missiles with nuclear or AM warheads. The New Chicago has a fair-sized particle beam cannon, spinal mount. But from what we’ve seen of that Xul battlewagon, we’d need three or four such weapons firing together to guarantee a kill.”

  “But…do you now have such weapons aboard each of your vessels?” one N’mah said.

  Another N’mah agreed. “It was your use of these weapons against what you call the Wheel that prompted our defense in the first place.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Dominick protested. “You fired first at us.”

  “Maybe he means the laser sampling, early on,” Valle suggested.

  “No. Each of your starships possesses a…” Cassius broke off, then continued in his usual voice. “The N’mah words literally translate as ‘huge-fire-moving-bow.’ I believe, however, that she is referring to some type of very large, high-energy weapon.”

  “Something shooting energy instead of arrows?” Valle said. “That makes sense.”

  “No,” Harris said. “It does not. New Chicago is the only ship with that kind of weapon. The other ships have spinal-mount railguns, but those aren’t nearly big enough to worry something as big as the Xul ship.”

  “No, no,” one of the N’mah insisted, through Cassius. “Your ships. Big fire-weapons. What you said before…‘spinal mount.’”

  “I think she’s right,” Ramsey said. “I think she means the Kemper Drives!”

  That caused
some consternation around the table. “What the hell are you talking about, General?” Dominick demanded.

  “Think about it, sir. All of our ships are essentially very large particle accelerators. The Kemper Drive uses magnetic fields to accelerate reaction mass to near-light speed and blast it out into space…either astern or forward, depending on whether the ship is accelerating or decelerating. What comes out tends to be a very hot plasma. You all know damned well how careful we are not to point those things at, say, an inhabited planet or space station when we light them off! When we decelerated into the Sirius system, though, we must’ve looked like we were coming in, plasma guns blazing!”

  Further questioning proved that Ramsey was correct. The N’mah had ships that operated with a magnetic drive…nothing as large, as powerful, or as deadly as the Kemper Drive accelerators. To N’mah instrumentation, the MIEU’s arrival had looked like an attack. They’d chosen to stay hidden—their usual strategy when confronted by the arrival of a Xul ship—until Cassius I-2 had used his sampling laser, obviously a direct attack. Then, and only then, had they struck back.

  “Are you suggesting that we could use our ships as weapons?” Harris asked.

  “Exactly. And the sooner we position the ships, the better. We should also plan on sending another probe through the gate, just to take a quick peek at the other side.” Ramsey was talking fast now, trying to keep up with his own racing thoughts as he traced out the possibilities. “Our immediate problem is the Xul ship at the Cluster Star Gate. If it comes through to our side, we must destroy it. Whether it comes through or not, we must also destroy the Cluster Gate.”