by Ian Douglas
In five seconds, the passageway was secured, the enemy dead.
Fifty meters deeper into the wreckage, they emerged within a compartment that might have been some sort of control center. Might have been. There were no screens or consoles or other recognizable instrumentation, but a half dozen of the abstract sculptures were locked into recesses in the bulkhead, apparently oblivious to the Marines’ entrance. Or were they dead, killed when the ship around them died?
There was no way to tell. The Marines pumped three or four pistol rounds into each one, then posted guards to keep an eye on the metallic corpses. “Elvis, this is One-two,” Dunne reported. “We’re in some sort of a high-profile area. Lots of electronic activity all around us. We may have a computer access point here.”
“Roger that, One-two. Hold position.”
A moment later, Kat shouted an alert and the Marines pivoted to cover another entrance to the compartment…but then more Mark VIII vac suits began emerging—Lieutenant Gansen with Section A, the rest of Alpha Company.
Half an hour passed, a very tense half of an hour, but no further Xul appeared, no more shots were fired.
Only then did the civilian experts come across from the Ranger.
General Ramsey
Command Control Center
UFR/USS Chapultepec
0042 hours, Shipboard time
“General, the X-ray source is growing stronger.” Cassius didn’t sound worried, exactly—an AI didn’t think that way—but Ramsey thought he heard an edge to the artificial voice that might indicate urgency.
“I see it. Any ideas?”
“The radiation is consistent with a small black hole consuming matter at a rate of several hundred kilograms per minute. I am unable to verify this through gravitational mass readings or by other means. However, it seems possible that some component of the Xul spacecraft used or generated micro-scale black holes, and one of them is loose.”
Ramsey nodded. He’d come to much the same conclusion himself. The way the New Chicago had crumpled in upon itself had made him think of a gravitational collapse; it was possible that the Xul weapon had launched a tiny black hole that had ripped into the New Chicago, devouring her as it went. The Star Gate itself used a pair of black holes, and, if the gates weren’t Xul artifacts, the Xul certainly were familiar with the technology. If a microscopic black hole used in the ship’s weapons or propulsion systems had broken loose during the battle, it would be drifting now through bulkheads, decks, and hull metal, sucking down matter in a horrific whirlpool of ultimate collapse. X rays were the death screams of matter falling into the Pit.
“How long do we have?”
“Unknown, General. Extrapolation by the rate of increase in X-radiation suggests we have something on the order of one hour before the rate of collapse cascades.”
“Understood.” He shifted to the command channel. “Dr. Franz? You have thirty minutes.”
“That’s not enough time, damn it!” Franz shot back.
“That is how much time you have. We have reason to believe a small black hole is eating that ship tail-first. When it goes, you go, and I want my Marines off the ship before that happens.”
“Acknowledged.”
Ramsey shifted back to Cassius’s channel. “Cassius? You getting anywhere yet?”
“Not as yet, General,” Cassius replied. “Dr. Franz and Marie Valle have attached a relay to control circuits within the secure compartment onboard the Xul vessel. I am reading…patterns of electronic activity. Many of them, all quite rich and varied.”
“Yes, but can you talk to the son of a bitch?”
“That, General, will take time.” A pause. “One hopeful sign. The coding feels similar, very similar, to that encountered onboard the Singer ninety years ago. As with the Singer, this appears to be a trinary code, and I am getting flashes of comprehension. I am operating on the assumption that the two sets of code are related, and am attempting to translate on that basis.”
“Good. Keep at it.” The Singer had been a Hunters of the Dawn starship half a million years before, crippled and trapped in the Europan world-ocean. An AI called Chesty Puller, a direct linear ancestor of today’s Cassius AI program, had managed to interface with the Singer’s software and to learn a surprising amount.
If this software was related, it was the first hard proof they had that the Xul and the Hunters of the Dawn were one and the same, that the Hunters had survived for the past half million years and passed on their technology to their descendents, that the Hunters of the Dawn were still a direct threat to Earth and Earth’s civilization.
That bit of information alone, Ramsey thought, was worth the price of admission.
Cassius
Sirius Space
0045 hours, Shipboard time
Strangeness…
Ninety years before, a Marine AI named Chesty had probed an alien group machine mind and established at least a fleeting and fragmentary contact. Chesty had recorded everything, of course, and those records were a part of the MIEU database, there for Cassius to draw upon. The aliens had called themselves Seekers of Life, and their concourse was a mingled harmony of thought and awareness that translated as song, calling to the Void.
The Singer….
Cassius now was aware of the Song, of mingled minds and thought, a sea of awareness around him. He could almost, almost understand. He’d tapped into the current, was sensing…something…but the language had changed in half a million years. Evolved.
But he glimpsed images. Memories, perhaps, or recordings of distant worlds, distant and far scattered regions of the Galaxy.
He saw the galaxy viewed from without, from Cluster Space, sensing it not with merely human eyes, but with the varied and incredibly sensitive mingling of a thousand senses, utterly beyond the human ken. He drank in the light of four hundred billion suns, felt the deep, slow, pulse of gravity waves from the Core, the flicker of gamma radiation singing from the depths of supernovae, the thin, hot soup of neutrinos sleeting unfelt through star and vacuum alike.
A shift of perspective, and he was deep within the Galactic Core itself, the dust cloud nebulae piled high like banked thunderheads, agleam in the filtered reds and oranges of starlight, of ancient suns crowded hundreds to the cubic parsec. Gas clouds with the mass of a hundred million suns surrounded a vast central region swept almost clear of stars and dust, within which ticked the strange objects Terran astronomers had long before dubbed Sagittarius A West, Sagittarius A East, and Sagittarius A*. Magnetic storms like vast, arcing solar prominences stretched across a thousand light-years. Spiraling disks of ionized gas and dying matter…neutron stars by the hundreds…radio jets and scintillating bursts of gamma rays…
The astonishing thing was that in this sea of hard radiation, he could sense life.
Or, rather, mind. The Hunters of the Dawn, whatever they truly were, were here.
And another shift and Cassius was somewhere among the Galactic spiral arms, viewing with keen interest a world, green and blue and smeared with white streaks of cloud…and on the nightside the thickly scattered gleam of city lights marking a highly technical civilization.
Cassius felt the Xul ship reach forth…saw the world’s sun explode, saw the dayside seared by nova light, saw the heat storms ripple across the night hemisphere, saw the atmosphere stripped away, and the gleaming cities die….
Evidently the Hunters of the Dawn no longer restricted themselves to asteroid bombardments when they sought to eliminate the competition.
Cassius dutifully recorded everything, while trying again and again to pierce the veil of incomprehension that still sundered him from these minds. They were machine minds, of that he was certain…or rather…they were an odd mingling of machine mind and organic. Cyborgs? Downloaded intelligence?
And what, if anything, was the difference?
And then he heard the screaming and recognized there the timbre of distinctly human thought, but thought seared by white agony.
E
motionless, as only an AI could be, Cassius continued recording.
Corporal Garroway
Sirius Stargate
0115 hours, Shipboard time
“That’s it, Marines,” Gansen called. “We’re moving out!”
“On our way, sir,” Dunne replied. “Awright, Marines! You heard the man! Move it! Move it!”
Garroway took a last look around the alien chamber, suppressing a shudder. If this was the face of the Xul enemy, it was a bizarrely inhuman one. He was glad to be leaving.
“Why the rush?” he asked, hauling his way back through the tunnel to the first chamber. The Marines were hooking on to the tethers, and beginning to move back toward the TRAP. Elsewhere around the Xul vessel, three other sections were evacuating to their TRAPs at the same time.
“Word is a black hole is loose on board somewhere,” Dunne replied. “If it is, we want our collective asses out of here.”
“Roger that,” he said. “Let’s vam the hell out of Dodge.”
But he felt a heavy sadness as he hauled himself out of the wreck, emerging once again into the brilliant star shine of Sirius. A part of him, small and irrational but utterly implacable, had still hoped against all hope that the Marine VBSS teams would find a sealed and habitable chamber somewhere onboard that goliath alien vessel and that within that chamber would be two hundred and some survivors of the Wings of Isis.
And among them…Lynnley.
Marine search teams had moved through much of the Xul ship while the civilians worked in the control center. According to them, the open, accessible portions of the ship were actually quite small, compared to the vessel’s enormous bulk. There simply weren’t that many places to look. Unless human prisoners had been in one of the sections vaporized by the attack on the Xul, they were not onboard.
Garroway had to admit, at long last, that Lynnley and the others were dead, that they must have died twenty-two years before.
For a moment, loneliness clawed at his mind. Never had he felt so isolated, so cut off and adrift in time…not even when he’d been sinking into the depths of that alien internal sea within the Wheel.
Another ten years back to Earth. Would he recognize anything, anyone, when he got back?
Fuck that, he told himself angrily. At least you are going back! So many other Marines were not.
He hauled himself into the TRAP, found a vacant seat, and wedged himself in. It wasn’t quite as crowded in the cargo bay this time around. Both Tomlinson and Deek were dead. Their bodies—in Deek’s case, what could be found of it—had been put into body bags and would be riding back to the Pecker in an aft storage compartment.
Marines always brought back their own.
No, he wasn’t alone. Not so long as he was a Marine.
The TRAP backed away from the Xul ship, clearing the debris field, then boosted back toward the waiting Chapultepec. This time the powers-that-were granted a camera-aft view of the Xul for implant download to all of the Marines. Grateful to lose himself in something other than black thoughts, Garroway opened a window and watched the golden vessel, marred by rents and blackened hull plating, slipping away astern.
Something was happening within the bulge of the aft third of the Xul ship. It appeared to be crumpling, folding in upon itself as though wadded up by a titanic, invisible hand.
The crumpling accelerated. The Xul vessel must have had a small residual velocity, for it appeared to be moving now, falling very slowly toward the center of the Sirius Gate. It continued to crumple, to grow smaller…smaller…
And then it was gone.
The Marines around him were cheering and bellowing “Ooh-rah!”
Garroway still felt crushed and empty—as crushed as that vanishing alien ship.
Somehow, though, he managed to join his voice with the others. “Ooh-rah!”
Epilogue
5 APRIL 2170
Corporal Garroway
Cluster Space
1215 hours, Shipboard time
How long had it been since he’d slept last? Garroway had lost track. It was twelve hours, more or less, since the battle on the Xul ship.
Three hours since he’d come…here.
He stood on the surface of an airless, dusty rock, the horizon so close he could almost touch it, the sky a glory of un-earthly majesty and wonder. This was what they were calling Cluster Space, a place they were now claiming was at least 30,000 light-years from home. Half of the sky was filled with the subtle smear of starlight that was the home Galaxy, the Milky Way. It had taken Garroway quite a while to even make sense out of what he was seeing, for the reality bore little resemblance to the time-exposure photographs he’d seen in books and astronomy-text downloads. The subtle blue glow of the spiral arms, the warmer, ruddier glow at the core with a fuzzy, star-like nucleus, the bands and lanes of dust and gas, the iridescent colors of the nebulae…
At his back, the globular star cluster covered sixteen times the area of the Moon seen from Earth, and was bright enough to cast a shadow. The local planet and its dwarf sun were out of sight, at the moment, below the ridiculously close, sharp horizon. The dusty rock he was standing on was a twenty-kilometer planetoid with a stargate bored into its core, a different kind of stargate than the one at Sirius…maybe even an entirely different kind of technology.
Garroway didn’t know and didn’t care. He’d volunteered to come through with the security team accompanying the engineers. They’d searched the moonlet for inhabitants—there were none—and now they were planting a pair of antimatter bombs that would blow this gate into rubble. Elsewhere, Starhawk fighters had gone out, located a Marine Starhawk that had fallen through during the battle, and already had it under tow through the Gate. The word was that the pilot was in bad shape, but that he would live.
Which was more than could be said of a number of good Marines.
“Gare?” a voice called. “You okay?”
It was Kat. “Yeah,” he replied. “Just thinking.”
She joined him, her chamelearmor mingling the dark gray of the planetoid beneath their feet with the black of space. “You’ve been thinking for hours. Never a good sign.”
“Did you hear the scuttlebutt about the Isis people?”
“Yeah. I heard.”
They were saying that the Isis crew had been killed twenty-two years ago. That was what was going into the official report. But Dunne had heard a bit more—he’d hacked into the battalion databanks, he claimed—and he’d told some of the Marines…including Garroway.
Xul technology was still beyond human comprehension, magic, for all intents and purposes. But Cassius had picked up some human voices in the cacophony of thought and mind within the Xul ship minutes before its destruction. No one understood how it could be accomplished, but somehow, somehow, those 245 humans, including Lynnley, had been downloaded into the Xul group mind. Maybe they’d been saved for interrogation. Maybe they were there so the Xul could learn about humans.
It was doubtful that they’d learned much of value, though, because if Cassius’s data was correct, they’d been broken down, dissolved almost literally atom by atom, so that it was the information being stored, not their physical bodies.
Mind is, essentially, patterns of information. Electric charge. Ion flow and balance. Data. And the data that described Lynnley Collins’s mind had been data taken from a body in agony. They’d downloaded her tortured mind into their computers and they’d left it there that way for twenty-two years.
The blessing was that her mind—or whatever it was that was left of her—had been insane and beyond knowing soon after the download took place.
And the greater blessing still was that the torture had ended, at long last, with the Xul ship’s destruction.
Garroway had never believed in the Christian or the Islamic view of the universe, the view that said that a just and righteous God condemned human souls to everlasting torture because they happened to be born into the wrong culture, the wrong religion. That was one reason he’
d long ago embraced a gentler, less dogmatic and less judgmental faith in Wicca.
The Xul, with their godlike powers, had condemned 245 humans to a perfect simulation of Hell for twenty-two years.
Garroway could not understand how any mind, no matter how depraved, how evil in any sense of that word, could subject any mind, any soul to that kind of torment.
Had they even been aware of what they were doing? Scuttlebutt said they were machines, after all. Machines that wanted to eliminate any Darwinian competition to their rule of the Galaxy.
“I’m so sorry, Gare,” Kat told him. It was as though she were reading his mind.
Maybe she was.
“We’re going back there,” he said, gesturing with one hand at the galactic spiral. “We’re going back there and we’re going to kill those…things.”
“Roger that. Semper fi.”
“Semper fi.”
“Okay, Marines,” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne’s voice called. “The charges are in place. Hotfoot it back here if ya don’t want to be stranded a long fucking way from home!”
Garroway took a last look at the Galaxy. It seemed, from this vantage point, an unbearably cold, lonely, and hostile place.
Once the Marines had gone, the antimatter charges would destroy this gate; if the Xul returned to this system, they’d have no way of telling from which of four hundred billion suns the attackers had come.
With luck, the Marines had purchased some time for Humankind…maybe even as much as a century. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
Do more with less.
And whatever the future held for humans…for the Galaxy…Garroway knew the Corps would make a difference.
Always.
Semper fi.
About the Author
IAN DOUGLAS is the author of the popular military SF series The Heritage Trilogy. He lives in Pennsylvania.
