by Ian Douglas
She made a sour face. “It would help if the An were the savior type.”
He reached out and lightly stroked the faxcast, with its row of five humans, bound and leashed. “Kind of puts the whole idea of worshiping God in a new light, doesn’t it?”
What he’d translated so far seemed to match certain aspects of the Sumerian myths; humans had been slaves under the An, working in their mines and agricultural colonies and even as janissary armies, conquering “uncivilized” neighbors under the direction of their godlike masters. Most of the translations he’d worked out so far, with Howard’s help, spoke of primitive tribes rounded up and “civilized” by troops under the command of Sharu-Gaz, a term literally meaning “Supreme Leaders of the Killers,” but which both David and Howard had translated as “war-Leaders.” They listed cattle, sheep, and crops taken, gathered, and counted; tributes offered; enemies killed; villages burned; precious metals—the Sumerian word was zu-ab—gathered for transport to “Heaven”; and vast numbers of slaves captured, penned, and sold. The An, whoever they’d been, appeared to share human bio-chemistry, with left-handed amino acids and a preference for right-handed sugars. They’d been able to eat crops and animals native to Earth, and they’d forced the natives to raise those crops and herds. For them.
There was even the extraordinarily disturbing possibility that large numbers of humans had been taken away…as food. He was beginning to wonder if that, in fact, was the root of the worldwide primitive practice of sacrifice.
Each of the artifacts recovered at Picard appeared to be a different list of tribute and conquest. Seventeen dual inscriptions, in Proto-Sumerian and in a totally unknown language that David assumed was the native language of the An colonizers, had opened a crack in the door to an entirely new and previously unguessed-at chapter in human history, one reaching back far before the known, historical beginnings of civilization three to four thousand years earlier.
A chapter in which humanity had been enslaved by war-like invaders with a technology vastly superior to their spears and bows.
The discussion had left David feeling depressed. Lonely. The universe was not the small and comfortable place it had been back when he’d written his doctoral thesis…or when he’d married Liana.
Teri seemed to sense his mood. She leaned forward, touching his arm. “So,” she said, “not to change the subject…but what are you doing tonight? That new gel-bed of mine could use a real workout. I might even be able to rent a dolphin, just for the evening.”
He stared into her eyes for a moment and into the promise behind them. Then he looked away. “Damn. I’m sorry, Teri, no. I wish I could…”
She gave his arm a squeeze. “That’s all right, love. We’ll just have to be patient.”
He laughed, a harsh and bitter sound. Patient? He was fed up with being patient! Liana almost certainly knew about his relationship with Teri, even if she wasn’t aware of the depth of his feelings for her, but still she refused to talk about getting a divorce or even a legal separation.
The truth was that he and Liana simply weren’t well matched with each other. They’d married when he was twenty-nine and she was nineteen; lust, he’d long since decided, had a nasty tendency to cover up a person’s character flaws.
Well…not flaws, exactly, unless you called having the brains of a box full of facial tissue a flaw. And there’d been some good times, especially early on. But damn it all, how could he stay with someone as enamored of these weird cults and bizarre religions as she was, especially when those same groups seemed to be feeding off the information he’d uncovered? Sometimes, it seemed like distorted versions of his discoveries were being bandied about on the Earthnet talk shows before he’d even released them to the director of the institute. It was eerie how quickly the news was spreading through the religious underground out there.
Liana kept pestering him for information about his discoveries. Damn, but he hated that. Sometimes, he wondered if he hated her. He didn’t want to; he really simply wanted the two of them to agree that they’d made a mistake, that they weren’t well matched, and that they should go their separate ways. But the way she was clinging to him, his disdain for her was going to turn to hatred pretty soon.
He was, he realized, unhappy with his life, and that wasn’t Liana’s fault. Working jaunts to Mars and the Moon were a wonderful perk—at least, they were when he wasn’t being shot at—and the chance at making discoveries destined to change humankind’s understanding of history went a long way toward guaranteeing that he would never be bored…but there was still a bitter restlessness within. He wasn’t even sure it had anything to do with Liana. Maybe it had more to do with the constant uphill battle against entrenched academia.
Damn it all, he needed to be sure of these translations. Self-doubt, that was the big weakness. If he could confirm this connection between the An and the Sumerian Anu, prove his discovery despite the unsavory connections with ancient astronuts and all that that entailed, maybe he could still get the last laugh on Tom Leonard and all of the rest.
After that, all he would have to do was prove to his wife and the other crackpot astronuts that he wasn’t some kind of reluctant messiah. That was what he hated most about the church groups his wife was involved with. They looked to him as some kind of prophet, and he simply wasn’t willing to fill that role.
And then there was the problem with the government.
They’d sent him to the Moon to investigate the UN’s discoveries there, and he’d turned up more than anyone had expected. Still, discoveries involving ancient Sumeria and alien slave-raiders were pretty remote…things that might upset astronut churches, the Vatican, and mobs in the streets but didn’t have much to do with the war at all. The government had been far more interested in that piece of an ancient spacecraft that had already been salvaged at Picard than in any of the engraved artifacts he’d found.
He was still keeping secret the information Marc Billaud had given him about an ancient alien base at Tsiolkovsky. There was too much he was still unsure of, too many questions about the exact translations of some of what he’d found.
Before he could go much farther, he needed to be certain of his translations—and he needed something more reassuring than Howard’s cheerfully matter-of-fact pronouncements.
Shesh-Ki, which he translated as “Guardian of the Earth,” and which seemed, by context, to refer somehow, to the Moon.
Gab-Kur-Ra, “In the Chest of the Mountains” or “In the Hiding Place of the Mountains.” The phrase seemed to refer to some sort of secret cavern or base, again, from the context, located on the Moon. That was the secret place Billaud had talked about…on the Lunar farside, at Tsiolkovsky.
Shu-Ha-Da-Ku. “Supremely Strong, Goes Bright” was the exact translation, but it sounded ominously like a reference to a weapon.
And, perhaps most worrisome of all, was the repeated mention of a terrible threat, an enemy that threatened the An, and Earth itself, with Tar-Tar, with utter destruction. The name of this enemy was variously rendered Gaz-Bakar or Ur-Bakar, sometimes with the preface “Shar,” which meant great or the ultimate. Gaz-Bakar—David was guessing, here—must mean something like “Killers” or “Smiters of the Dawn.” Ur-Bakar, then, could be translated two ways, as “Foundations of the Dawn,” or as the far more ominous “Hunters of the Dawn.”
Marc had mentioned that phrase first, on the Moon, when he’d named the nemesis of the An.
The phrase sent an icy shiver down David’s spine. Such phrases, ever since the first decipherings of ancient Sumerian pictographs and the later cuneiform, had been assumed to be poetic references, figurative language only. Now he knew that some, at least, of the allusions were to something all too real.
What had so completely destroyed that An ship above Picard? What had happened to the An colony on Earth, a complex of several dozen high-tech settlements scattered from Egypt to the Indus Valley? He had to know, had to know his translations were right. Confirmation. He needed confir
mation.
“Teri, who would you say is the best Sumerian linguist?”
“Hmm. I’d have to say François Villeret at the Sorbonne.”
David nodded thoughtfully. “That would have been my call, too.” He picked up the cast and tucked it under his arm. “Excuse me a moment, Teri,” he said, walking to the door.
“What are you doing, David?”
“Trust me. You don’t want to know. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
It would be better if he could keep her out of what he was about to do.
In the larger room outside of his office was a faxcaster, a table-sized piece of business-telecommunications equipment. He opened the bin, placed the artifact inside, engravings down, and closed the lid. At the keyboard, he typed in his Earthnet access and two addresses—that of the ultimate destination, and that of his blind remailer address in Finland. With a hum and a leaking of brilliant light from around the seal of the bin’s lid, lasers scanned the cast, as a computer converted each detail in three dimensions into a string of data, uploaded to the Net.
That data would wait in Villeret’s server thousands of kilometers away, until it was used to recast and carve an exact duplicate.
The fact that some people would consider him to be committing treason by sending this data to a French national was worrisome, of course…but David Alexander had no patience with the blinkered authorities and idiot politicians who were running this ridiculous war.
If François confirmed the translations he and Teri had made, he’d be a lot happier about publishing.
And the hell with what anyone else had to say about it.
ELEVEN
FRIDAY, 2 MAY 2042
Administration Complex
Vandenberg Space Command
Base
1635 hours PDT
“It is the finding of this court that Sergeant Frank Kaminski was not at fault for the friendly-fire incident that took place on Wednesday, 15 April 2042, at the former UN base at Picard Crater in the Mare Crisium, resulting in the deaths of three American soldiers attached to the US Army Special Forces Space Command.
“This court further finds that said friendly-fire incident occurred because the IFF codes that might have prevented the incident had not been programmed into the space suits worn by the victims. The threat to which they were responding developed before Army and Marine personnel at the site could coordinate the necessary codes and other protocols necessary for smooth joint action. Tasked with protecting the civilian in his care, Sergeant Kaminski responded properly to what he perceived as a direct and immediate threat when the Army personnel moved toward his position. In the chaos of battle, with no IFF codes registering on his helmet HUD and no easy way to clearly discriminate between the outward appearance of the space suits worn by newly arrived Army personnel and attacking Chinese troops, Sergeant Kaminski responded as he’d been trained and in full accord with his duties and orders as a United States Marine.
“This court of inquiry finds the cause of the incident leading to the soldiers’ deaths to be human error but can assign no specific blame or responsibility in the matter.
“We hereby declare this case to be closed, with no further recommendations.” A gavel cracked on the wooden strike pad. “Case dismissed!”
“Attention on deck!” the bailiff cried, and everyone in the chamber rose as the panel of three Marine and two Army officers stood behind the bench, gathered their papers, then filed out of the room. Kaitlin watched Kaminski’s back as the young man, who’d been standing at attention to hear the court’s verdict, swayed a little on his feet. This is going to hit him hard, she thought.
She walked forward and touched his shoulder. He jumped.
“You going to be okay, Frank?” she asked.
“Uh, yes, ma’am! I’m fine.”
“You understand, don’t you, that you didn’t have to go through all of this because anyone thought you’d killed those men on purpose, or even because they thought you screwed up. The Corps has to go through the motions, to find out what really happened, and to try to make sure that accidents like this one don’t happen again.”
“Yes, ma’am. I understand all that. Mostly, well, I’m just sorry for those three guys I…that I killed.”
She nodded, patting his shoulder. “It was an accident. There is a difference between an accident and a screwup, Frank. It just happens that accidents tend to be especially deadly in an environment like space.”
“Doesn’t make it easier for their wives and families, does it, ma’am?”
“Sure doesn’t. But people get killed in war, and sometimes people get killed by accident. It wasn’t your fault, Marine. Remember that.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am.” But he didn’t sound convinced.
As Kaminski’s commanding officer, of course, Kaitlin had had to testify at the inquiry. She’d emphasized the lack of coordination between the Marine and Army components of the US force at Picard and tried to assume responsibility for the IFF gaffe herself. If she’d just tried to force the issue with Colonel Whitworth. There simply hadn’t been time….
Her testimony had been accepted; her attempt at taking the blame had been rejected: likely, she thought, because both the Army and Corps wanted to keep the incident as low-profile as possible.
Even so, she’d been very much afraid that someone intended to throw Frank Kaminski to the wolves, a sacrifice to appease the media gods who’d been writing about the friendly-fire incident at Picard ever since the unit’s return to Earth.
The Second Battle of Picard Crater had been a complete victory for the American forces. Kaitlin’s ploy, holding a platoon in reserve south of the crater until the Chinese attack, had been a triumphant vindication of the longstanding Marine tactical dogma of fighting with two lead elements, and keeping a third in reserve. Casualties had been light: eight killed, including the three killed by friendly fire. Twenty-eight UN troops, all members of the seventy-fourth People’s Army of the Republic of North China, had been killed, and fifteen captured. Those prisoners, when added to the Italian POWs taken in the first battle, had posed a real problem, stretching American logistics and the ability to feed them and keep them breathing to the limit. The mining shuttle captured at Picard had been kept busy making runs to and from the Moon’s north pole, bringing in loads of polar ice for the base’s O2 converters. Even at that, by the time a relief expedition, including twelve more tugs, had arrived from Earth five days later, everyone had been on short rations, and off-duty personnel were kept in their racks, sleeping, to conserve oxygen.
One-SAG had returned to Earth and to a heroes’ welcome; maybe that was why the powers-that-were hadn’t pushed the court of inquiry thing further.
“You look mad,” a voice said in her ear.
She turned, looking up at Captain Rob Lee, trim and sharp in his razor-creased khakis. “Damn it, if anyone had to face an official court of inquiry,” she said, “it should have been me.”
“If anyone had to face a court,” he corrected her, “it should have been that idiot Whitworth. You done good, Kate.”
“Wish I could believe you.”
“You got the duty tonight, Marine?”
“No….”
He drew a deep breath. “Then I’ll tell you what. Ol’ Doc Lee prescribes dinner out tonight. Followed by a drive down to Gaviota and a moonlight walk on the beach. Say…I pick you up at nineteen hundred?”
“A moonlight walk?” She smiled. “Not as good as a walk on the Moon itself.”
“But a damn sight more romantic. You ever try necking while sealed up inside one of those tin suits? Not my idea of a good time.”
“Well, I guess you’ll have to show me what your idea of a good time is. Nineteen hundred it is. Where do you want to eat?”
“I was kind of thinking of the Menkoi.”
Her eyebrows went up. “‘Love noodles’?”
“Is that what it means?” The scalp beneath his short-cropped Marine haircut flushed darker, and he
looked uncomfortable.
“More or less.”
“It’s the name of a new Japanese restaurant in Las Cruces.”
“I know. It sounds great. I’m looking forward to it.”
It wouldn’t be their first date since their return from the Moon. In fact, they’d been seeing rather a lot of one another lately. She hadn’t known Rob all that well before the mission, but since then, she’d discovered that they had a lot in common besides a passionate love of the Corps. Both loved long discussions and longer walks; both were outspoken and not afraid to express an opinion. Both were well-read, enjoyed programming, and loved science fiction. Both were taking cram courses in French, in the spirit of know-your-enemy. And they both loved Japanese food.
Dinner was, for Kaitlin, a blissful escape from the stress she’d been under for the past week, during the official inquiry. The chefs all knew her—she’d been to the Menkoi more than once and startled the Japanese manager by bowing and greeting him in fluent Nihongo—and they made a fuss over the two Marines, so much so that Rob was embarrassed. “I keep forgetting you’re half-Japanese yourself,” he said with a wry grin.
“Only in the heart,” she replied. “Living there as long as I did will do that to you.”
“And that’s why you’re so good at French, right? Because you speak Japanese?”
“Any second language makes the third easier,” she told him.
While the Menkoi had a Western section in the front, there were rooms in the back reserved for traditional dining, where shoes were left outside the door, and the rice was served after the various side dishes that made up the meal, to fill the belly and cleanse the palate. They ate seated on the floor, using o-hashi; Kaitlin had to help Rob get his fingers properly positioned for the exercise and to reassure him that it was okay to lift the soup bowl to his chin in order to get at the solid bits of meat and vegetable afloat inside. Their conversation ranged from the alien images and information discovered on Mars to the future of humankind in space.
