Luna Marine

by Ian Douglas

“I gather you’ve been busy on a related subject while you were at Joliet.”

  “How did you—” He stopped himself. Of course Warhurst would have checked with the prison officials, and he could have gotten access to David’s work-in-progress. During the past two months, the Joliet administration had allowed him access—for a precious few hours each day—to his PAD, the only provisions being that he couldn’t have Net access and that what he wrote each day was subject to review by prison officials. They would have made copies, and Warhurst would have been able to get access to them, by court order, if necessary.

  The Marine commandant had been busy.

  “It wasn’t my intent to snoop,” Warhurst said, following his train of thought. “But some of the stuff coming out of what you picked up on the Moon last April is starting to sound damned scary.”

  David gave a thin smile. “I thought you were at war with the UN.”

  “We are. But, let’s just say that some of us are concerned about what might happen after the war. The paper you wrote in prison was…intriguing.”

  “John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress in prison. It’s nice to have a hobby, something to pass the time.”

  “‘On a New Interpretation of the Fermi Paradox,’” Warhurst said. “That’s not exactly Pilgrim’s Progress.”

  “Pilgrim’s Progress is a morality play about making it into heaven. My paper deals with the possible extinction of humankind. There’s a difference.”

  “Indeed.” He nodded to his aide, who unholstered a PAD and began making entries. “So. Tell us about Fermi’s Paradox?”

  “Back in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi—he was an important physicist who did a lot of the early work on atomic energy—asked the question ‘Where are they?’ He was asking about other intelligent life in the galaxy.”

  “He meant…why haven’t we seen them?”

  “Exactly. You see, our galaxy is something like eight billion years old…about twice as old as Earth itself. It took less than four billion years for life to evolve here; since we know that planets are pretty common, it’s fair to assume that life, including intelligent life, has evolved before, time after time after time. Fermi was making these assumptions before we knew about the Cave of Wonders, of course. He thought the galaxy ought to be crawling with other civilizations.”

  “Lovely thought.”

  “It gets better. It’s been demonstrated that if even one intelligent race evolves, in all the history of the galaxy, and if that race has the same sort of exploratory yearnings, the same curiosity and drive and determination to reach out into space that we do, it could actually colonize the entire galaxy in a ridiculously short period of time.”

  “How short?”

  “Depends. Even if they never were able to build ships that went more than a few percent of the speed of light, though, they could still reach every star, colonize every habitable world, even do their equivalent of terraforming to every likely planet in the galaxy in less than three million years….”

  “Three million years is a long time.”

  “It’s an eyeblink, compared to eight billion years.”

  “I see what you mean. So Fermi wondered why somebody hadn’t already colonized the entire galaxy. Why they weren’t here already.”

  “Exactly. And the more we learn about extraterrestrial civilizations, the more urgent his question becomes. In the Cave of Wonders, beneath Cydonia…that huge array of image screens shows hundreds of other civilizations. We suspect that the blank screens in the Cave represent civilizations that no longer exist, that have died out over the past half million years. Extraterrestrial cultures are common. The galaxy should have been filled up many times over. It should be teeming with starfaring civilizations. Radio astronomers ought to be bombarded by the alien equivalent of TV programs, shortwave broadcasts, and military call signs. But when we listen, we hear…nothing.”

  “But we do know there are other races out there. And we know that at least two of them were here, once.”

  “Right. But what happened to them?

  “According to your research both of them were attacked. Destroyed by invaders?”

  “You’ve seen photos of the Cydonian site, General?” When Warhurst nodded, David went on. “You know, there are still people who haven’t been there who argue that the Face on Mars is a natural phenomenon, that the fact that the Cave of Wonders is located underneath is just a coincidence. It was assumed to be a chance product of weathering for a long time after it was first spotted by early orbital probes. And the funny part was, the first detailed imaging orbital of the site, in the late nineties, showed it really didn’t look much like a face at all. You can just barely make out the overall shape of the features, but they’re battered, smashed, broken…and what’s left has been worn down to dust and rubble by half a million years of sandstorms. The earlier, lower-quality images had actually blurred things enough to show what the Face must have looked like once, half a million years ago, before someone, or something, shot the hell out of it.”

  “Okay, so what’s the point of your new explanation of Fermi’s Paradox?” Warhurst asked. “I mean, what we’ve found on Mars and the Moon, especially the display screens in the Cave of Wonders, proves that aliens were here. What’s the paradox?”

  “Mostly, I guess, the paradox is why aren’t they here now? Some of the astronut cults make the claim that we are the descendants of alien colonists, maybe an expedition of Builders who got marooned here a long time ago, but that just doesn’t hold up. Our DNA is very clearly the product of evolution here on Earth. Over 98 percent of the DNA in chimps is identical to ours.

  “What’s also puzzling, though, is that the An, whoever they were, didn’t have a technology that was all that much ahead of ours. From what we’ve found on the Moon, they used antimatter-powered spacecraft maybe a century or two ahead of what we’re flying today. Okay, so that meant they were several thousand years ahead of the Sumerians, but that’s not much time at all when you’re talking about periods of millions or even billions of years. The Builders were more advanced, maybe a thousand years beyond where we are now. Again, not that big a difference, when there ought to be civilizations out there millions or even billions of years old.”

  “Maybe there’s some built-in self-destruct mechanism, so that no civilization lasts more than a few thousand years. Or maybe they evolve into…I don’t know. Something else. Something we can’t recognize.”

  “Maybe. But think about this. It only takes one long-lived and energetic civilization to overrun the entire galaxy in a few million years. That’s part of the paradox. It only has to happen once, and we know, in fact, that it must have happened many times.

  “Now, imagine an intelligence that evolves, develops civilization, starflight, and moves out into the galaxy. Imagine that it evolved with a kind of Darwinian imperative, a survival-of-the-fittest mentality that leads it to seek out other, less developed civilizations, and destroy them before they become a threat. And…remember that this only has to happen once to establish a pattern. If it happens once, if it works for them, it could happen again, and again, and again.”

  “This predatory species becomes top dog in the galaxy, you’re saying. It just hangs around and stomps on the new-bies as they emerge, is that what you’re saying?”

  “What I developed in my paper was the idea that the galaxy may endure cycles of civilization alternating with destruction. Hundreds, maybe thousands of civilizations emerge throughout the galaxy, all at about the same time. They develop space travel, spread out…but if even one of them out of how many hundreds or thousands is a predatory race, it’s going to have an advantage over all the others, and it will destroy them.

  “But if there’s one such race, maybe there are two. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Sooner or later, they come into conflict with one another. After a few thousand years of all-out warfare, the galaxy is empty again, except for a scattering of stone-chipping primitives on a few thousand bombed-out worlds who begin starting the w
hole cycle all over again.”

  “‘The Hunters of the Dawn.’”

  “What we’ve been able to translate of the An records and tablets suggests that they were terribly afraid of someone. They called them Ur-Bakar, the Hunters of the Dawn.”

  “And these Hunters also destroyed the Builders?”

  “I think it was a different group of Hunters. I think that galactic civilization was at a high point half a million years ago…then it all collapsed in a war that makes our dustup with the UN look like a shoving match with the neighbor’s kid. A predator race destroyed the Builders, bombed the structures on Mars, destroyed their colonies. Fortunately for us, they missed, or didn’t bother with, the early Homo sapiens who were living on Earth at the time. Within another few thousand years or so, the Hunters were gone as well, probably fighting among themselves, or with other predators.

  “Then, a long time later, maybe ten or fifteen thousand years ago, the An develop star flight. Since we’ve identified the An in the Cave of Wonders display, we have to assume that they were around half a million years ago, were smacked down, and then rebuilt their civilization.

  “They come to Earth, maybe by accident, maybe because they remembered the Builders and were looking for them. They find our ancestors in Mesopotamia, settle down, and start their own colony, using primitives for slave labor.”

  “And then the Hunters of the Dawn come again.”

  “Right. Probably a whole new crop that evolved along those same kill-them-before-they-kill-you lines. They destroyed the An bases on the Moon. Destroyed their colonies on Earth…and by doing so must’ve left a pretty deep impression in the surviving humans about fire raining from the skies and wars among the gods.

  “And once again we were lucky. The Hunters either ignored what they considered to be savages, or they just couldn’t find and exterminate them all.” He shook his head. “I hate like the devil to sound like one of the ancient-astronut preachers, but there is evidence of a cataclysmic flood throughout the Tigris-Euphrates Valley five or six thousand years ago, and it was probably the basis for the Sumerian flood myths that eventually found their way into the Book of Genesis. My thinking now is that the Destroyers dropped a small asteroid into the Arabian Sea, and let the tidal wave wipe out the An cities.”

  “Just like Chicago.”

  “Just like Chicago. We know that the Persian Gulf was swampy lowland until just a few thousand years ago. Maybe it’s just still flooded, after six thousand years. You know, it might be interesting to do a careful sonar survey of the floor of the Arabian Sea, looking for a recent impact crater under the silt.”

  He found he was breathing hard, that he was on his feet and pacing, instead of slumped on the hotel-room bed. He’d not wanted to discuss any of this, to discuss anything, but once the words had started, they’d tumbled out in an unruly torrent. He wondered if that had been Warhurst’s purpose.

  There was a knock at the door. “You’d better get that,” Warhurst told him.

  A bit unsteadily, he walked to the door, considered activating the small security display, then decided that the Marines posted outside were all the security anyone needed. He opened the door….

  “Teri!”

  “David!” She stepped forward, taking him in her arms. “General Warhurst told me…that they haven’t found Liana.”

  “Teri…” He couldn’t raise his arms to return her embrace. He couldn’t…. He was so damned happy to see her alive…but the thought that he’d wished Liana dead would not let go.

  She seemed to sense his confusion. Slowly she released him. “I’m sorry, David. I’m so sorry.”

  “I…I’m going to need some time, Teri. To get my head straight.”

  “I understand.”

  “Dr. Sullivan, here, is the one who got you sprung,” Warhurst said, “not me. She talked with your wife, and got access to your correspondence files. Sent e-mail to every person in your address file. That happened to include a young Marine—”

  “Frank Kaminski?”

  “Affirmative. Kaminski took it up with his CO, who happens to be a friend of mine.”

  “That would be Kaitlin Garroway.”

  “And she told me.”

  He looked at Teri. “Thank you.” He tried to imagine her forcing a meeting with Liana, and failed. Maybe he hadn’t known either woman as well as he’d thought.

  “Come on in and grab yourself a stool, Dr. Sullivan,” Warhurst said. “What we’re talking about here will interest both of you.”

  “So,” she said brightly, “what have you men been gabbing about?”

  “We’re getting ready to kick the UN off our Moon, Dr. Sullivan,” Warhurst said, extracting his PAD from his inside jacket pocket and unfolding it. “But we’re going to want a couple of archeologists along, just in case we have another Cave of Wonders to deal with.”

  “Billaud’s site? At Tsiolkovsky?” David asked.

  Warhurst nodded, and David groaned. He was remembering the battle at Picard, the carefully excavated trenches trampled over by soldiers. He thought, too, of that French soldier in 1799, who’d uncovered the Rosetta stone and provided Western science with the key to the writing of an ancient and very alien civilization. At the same time, some of the soldier’s friends were practicing with artillery…and using the Great Sphinx, at that time showing only its head above the enveloping sands, as a target.

  He’d seen two pitched battles fought on a valuable archeological site, now, at Cydonia and at Picard. He didn’t want to see a third.

  “What,” Warhurst replied, reading from his PAD, “does the term ‘E-U-Nir-Kingu Gab-Kur-Ra’ mean to you?”

  “Sumerian,” Teri said. “‘E-U-Nir’ is, ah, a house with raised foundations? ‘House Rising High,’ I think I’d translate it. ‘King-gu’ means a righteous emissary, but it was also the Sumerian name for the Moon.”

  “And ‘Gab-Kur-Ra’ means something like ‘Chest Hidden in the Mountain,’” David added.

  “A chest,” Warhurst repeated. “Or a storeroom, maybe? A place for storing records?”

  Realization struck David. “Which is what Marc Billaud called the central peak at Tsiolkovsky.”

  Warhurst shot him a sharp glance. “When was that?”

  “When I talked to him on the Moon. At Picard. He said he wasn’t going to betray his country, but that we’d get the answers we wanted at Gab-Kur-Ra.”

  “You didn’t mention that in your report.”

  “I…I didn’t think of it at the time. I hadn’t made the connection with ancient Sumerian and the An tablets yet. And, well, it didn’t make much sense.”

  “Maybe he was trying to tell you something he didn’t want other people to hear, or understand,” Teri suggested.

  “Could well be.” David looked at Warhurst. “Where did you hear that name?”

  “From Billaud. He’s been talking freely to our intel people ever since we learned the UN military was playing with the notion of bombing us with asteroids. He’s given us some information about the UN layout at Tsiolkovsky—not everything we need; he’s a scientist, not a military man, but some. He told us there were some ET ruins at the crater’s central peak and that they were called Gab-Kur-Ra. He gave us a translation of that but wasn’t able to tell us what was inside. He says no one’s being allowed in.”

  “The UN has been pretty touchy about ancient-astronaut stuff ever since we let the cat out of the bag about Cydonia,” David said. “Maybe they’re still trying to sit on it.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe what they’ve found there is so secret they can’t let civilians see it. We already know the French were getting clues to building an antimatter-powered spacecraft from wreckage they picked up at Picard. Maybe there were more clues at this Gab-Kur-Ra place.”

  “Which means,” David said, “it’s going to be heavily guarded when your Marines get there. My God….”

  Step by step, the scenario he’d most been dreading was unfolding….

  TWENTY-THREE


  SUNDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2042

  Above the Lunar Farside

  0845 hours GMT

  They called them LAVs, but the M340A1 Armored Personnel Carrier had very little in common with the Light Armored Vehicles employed by the US Marines during the closing years of the twentieth century. These LAVs had been designated as Lunar Assault Vehicles by some unsung Pentagon bureaucrat, either in deliberate imitation of the earlier LAVs, or in complete technomilitary historical ignorance. Either way, the informal designation allowed the team members of Bravo Company, 1-SAG, to resurrect an old Marine battle cry: LAV it to the Marines!

  The heavy Conestoga-class trans-Lunar cargo shuttle Santa Fe was one of only two vessels of her class, heavy-lift ships designed to carry prefabricated hab units and construction materials to the bases at Fra Mauro and Tsiolkovsky when they were first built back in the 2020s. Obsolete now, the Santa Fe had been adapted by the military for one final Lunar flight.

  She came in above the flat, dark floor of the Mare Crisium, heading southeast. She dropped to less than twenty kilometers’ altitude above the Mare Smythii and went “over the hill,” dropping below the horizon visible from Earth and vanishing around the farside. Still descending, the craft swept in low across the crater rim of Pasteur before pitching over and firing a savage burst of plasma, braking her forward velocity before gentling down toward the dusty Lunar surface.

  Clouds of dust lashed and billowed from the touch of those hot jets; the freighter’s open-girder undercarriage touched down, and the vessel, momentarily, at least, was at rest.

  Almost at once, however, there was fresh activity, as foil-covered bays on each side opened, and the wedge-shaped objects stowed inside folded out and down, dropping the last several meters to the Lunar surface in a silent, slow-motion drop and bounce.

  During the Apollo program, over seventy years before, a similar system had been used to stow and deliver light-weight Lunar Rovers to the Moon’s surface; the four wedge shapes deployed this time were each far larger and more massive than those primitive NASA rovers. Each LAV massed just under fifteen tons and measured 9.1 meters long by 3.5 meters wide by 2.4 meters tall, a lean, flat brick with a wedge-shaped nose, mounted on four independently powered tires and coated with reactive camo and ablative plastic and ceramic laminates. The flat upper deck was interrupted only by the swell of a ball-mounted weapons turret.