by Ian Douglas
Kill the others inside the base, Ssarsk ordered the other three Saurians. Hunt them down. He reached out and grabbed Kammler’s arm with surprising strength. All save this one. It belongs to us.
Kammler shuddered, knowing the truth of those words.
The Hillenkoetter lifted off from the Moon the next day.
“Commander Hunter?” a young lieutenant said. “Captain’s compliments, sir, and would you like to observe our departure from the bridge?”
Hunter laughed. “Would I?” He was surprised, remembering his thought from the day before about how the ground-pounders likely would not be welcome on the bridge. “Absolutely.”
“If you’ll follow me, sir?”
“So . . . to what do I owe this honor?” he asked as he followed the lieutenant up a metal-decked companionway.
“The skipper thought you might like to watch procedures up there, sir. I guess, well, things have been kind of abrupt for you, huh? One day you’re minding your business on Earth, next thing you know you’re on the Moon, and the next you’re on your way to distant stars. That would disorient anybody.”
“You’ve got that right, son.”
“If you watch the liftoff from up there, maybe it’ll—I don’t know—seem a bit more real.”
“Is it real to you, Lieutenant?”
“I’ve been up here for six years, Commander. Yeah, it’s about as real as it gets.”
He entered the bridge, and was directed to a line of seats called “the gallery” along the curving aft bulkhead. Half a dozen other personnel were already seated there, and Hunter took a chair between an attractive woman and an older, professorial type, both in civilian clothing.
“Welcome to my bridge, Commander,” Captain Groton told him. “Just stay the fuck out of the way.”
Hunter introduced himself, remembering that the woman was Dr. Michaels and the man was Dr. Brody. Hunter was still mildly surprised that an invitation had been extended to a grunt—him—but decided that he wasn’t about to question it.
The launch process began, however, with an intensely uncomfortable period of gravity adjustment. For the better part of a week, Hunter and the others had been living on the Moon, where the pull of gravity was only one-sixth of the surface gravity of Earth. Having the ship’s artificial gravity dialed up to six times more than what his body had become accustomed to was less than pleasant. The process was spread out over the course of an hour, to ease the effects, but as the weight of five men began pressing Hunter into the cushions of his seat, it left him wondering aloud why the hell they didn’t use artificial gravity inside the base.
“I think it’s because they don’t want the bad-guy aliens to spot us,” Brody told him.
“Yes? And how would aliens do that?”
“Stands to reason, Commander,” Michaels told him. “Everybody knows that magnetogravitic generators put out a great deal of power, and the fields they create can be detected by magnetic scanners. If the base had artificial gravity switched on all the time, a Saurian ship passing overhead would pick that up easily.”
“‘Everybody knows,’ huh?” Hunter didn’t care for Michaels’s condescending attitude, and she was decidedly less attractive in his eyes now. “May I ask how you know so much about it?” he asked.
She gave him a cool look. “I’ve been working in the field of magnetogravitic technology for fifteen years now, Commander, and I helped design this ship. I’d damned well better know something about it.”
“Just don’t get Dr. Michaels started on the subject of time travel,” Brody warned.
In fact, there were portions of Darkside Base that were under a full Earth gravity all the time—the gymnasiums and some of the public lounge areas. During long-term stays in micro- or lower-g environments it was vital to work out daily in 1 g to prevent a loss of muscle mass. But it didn’t make this shift any less unpleasant.
Hunter also didn’t know why Saurian ships wouldn’t pick up the generators under the floor of the gym, but he wasn’t going to ask. Dr. Michaels might deign to answer him.
The bridge was a large compartment twenty yards across, a well sunk into the deck ringed about with consoles and large-screen monitors. Above and behind Hunter’s chair was the flag bridge, where Admiral Carruthers and his staff watched in nonmicromanagerial silence, as the bridge crew—about thirty naval officers and enlisted technicians—went about the tasks associated with taking Hillenkoetter into space.
“Gravity at 98 percent,” a voice called from a console forward. “All normal.”
“Inertial dampers on.” That was Captain Groton, watching over his small and circular fiefdom from a complicated chair just ahead of Hunter’s position in the gallery.
“Inertial dampers on, aye, sir.”
“Inertial mass to 15 percent.”
“Inertial mass, one-five percent, aye, sir.”
“Energy feed to 5 percent.”
“Energy at 5 percent, aye.”
Hunter felt a growing thrum coming up through the deck.
“Where’s all the energy coming from?” Hunter asked in an awed whisper, more to himself than to anyone else. “Fusion power?”
Michaels gave a short snort. “Fusion wouldn’t even begin to cut it, Commander,” she told him. “To accelerate a vessel this large to close to the speed of light would require the immediate annihilation of a very great deal of mass—roughly the entire mass of our entire solar system, including the sun. No, this is ZPE.”
“ZPE?”
“Zero-point energy,” Brody translated. “Turns out that so-called empty space—hard vacuum—isn’t so empty after all. It’s a kind of boiling, seething sea of energy coming into existence according to the rules of quantum mechanics, and almost immediately self-annihilating again. We’re not aware of it because it vanishes so quickly, preserving the sacred laws of conservation of mass and energy. But our alien friends figured out a long time ago how to extract a tiny, tiny fraction of that energy—it’s called virtual energy—and make it available for use.”
“How much energy?”
“It is estimated, Commander, that the volume of a lightbulb—a few cubic centimeters—contains roughly one hundred times the energy required to turn all of Earth’s oceans into vapor instantly. And the ship’s power core is drawing on the vacuum energy of a much larger volume than that.”
“Over two hundred cubic meters,” Michaels said. She sounded smug. “The energy of a quasar at the touch of a button!”
“Quasar?” Hunter asked.
“Quasi-stellar object, Commander. Black holes very far off in the universe that we used to think were spewing so much of the gas and dust they were feeding on out into space as intense beams or jets. According to the Talis, however, it’s not that these supermassive black holes are messy eaters. They actually access some of the virtual energy surrounding the volume they occupy, and release it as energy . . . a lot of energy. Up to several hundred times the radiation output of an entire galaxy.”
“Some of it, huh?”
“A few percent.”
“Give us lift, Mr. Larimer,” Groton ordered. “Five meters above the gantry.”
“Positive lift, taking us to five meters, Captain, aye, aye.”
Hunter watched in silence. The thought of how much energy must be available to the Hillenkoetter was staggering. At the same time, he felt conflicted. On the one hand, they were riding a machine like an ant somehow tapping into the blast of a nuclear weapon, and that was terrifying. On the other . . . here, beneath his feet, was the final answer to all of Earth’s energy problems—an end to fossil fuels and to pollution, an end to poverty and hunger and want, an end to international energy monopolies and high fuel costs . . .
Everything else he could maybe understand—maybe. But how dare the bastards keep this secret!
The big screen forward showed a vertical face of rock and metal slowly gliding down as the Hillenkoetter lifted above the gantry support that had been cradling her. Ahead, a circular tunnel
mouth gaped open.
“Ahead slow, Ms. Briem. Take us out.”
“Ahead slow, Captain.”
The tunnel mouth slowly expanded.
The opening, Hunter saw, was curtained by a faint shimmer, like the glow of an aurora.
“Force field?” he asked Brody.
“You could call it that.”
“Actually it’s a magnetokinetic induction screen,” Michaels said.
“C’mon,” he said. “Now you’re just making words up!”
“She’s not, Commander. The screens save us having to spend a few hours pumping the air out of the egress chamber.”
“So . . . it’s a force field,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“External atmosphere now at two times ten to the fifth particles per cubic centimeter,” a bridge officer reported.
“Pressure at three times ten to the minus fifteen bar,” said another.
Or as close to hard vacuum as made no difference whatsoever.
Hunter could see little on the big screen now, save darkness.
“Base, Hillenkoetter,” Groton said. “Ready to open the barn doors.”
“Copy that, Hillenkoetter. Opening roof doors.”
“Roof doors open, Captain. Alignment within acceptable parameters.”
“Positive lift, Mr. Larimer,” Groton ordered. “Slow exit, 5 mps.”
“Positive lift, aye, aye, sir. Emerging at five meters per second.”
And then they were above the lunar surface. Harsh sunlight glared white from plains and mountains above an endless black sky. Hunter had expected to see stars, but there were none. The surface, he decided, was so bright that the cameras could not handle light from both the landscape and from stars.
“We are clear of the exit, Captain,” Briem reported. “Altitude twenty-five meters.”
“Very well. All stations report.”
Hunter heard the buzz and crackle of various departments reporting in. God but this was a complicated process! He wondered if getting an aircraft carrier underway from a dock took as much time and effort.
Well, come to think of it . . . yes, it probably did.
“All departments report readiness for space in all respects, Captain,” the XO reported.
“Very well,” the Captain said. “Nav, set course to take us clear of lunar space.”
“Course set, Captain. One-one-seven by minus five-two.”
“One-one-seven by minus five-two, aye, aye, Captain.”
“And on my mark take us out, Ms. Briem. Ahead 10 percent.”
“On your mark, ahead 10 percent, aye.”
“And three . . . and two . . . and one . . . mark!”
And the lunar surface disappeared.
It vanished away with such suddenness that for a moment Hunter thought that something had gone wrong, that the monitor was dead. Then someone switched cameras, and he saw two fast-dwindling disks—the white face of the Moon, and the smaller, blue-and-white disk beyond of Earth.
“Ten percent of the speed of light,” Brody informed him. “That’s thirty thousand kilometers per second! Pretty good, eh?”
The Earth and Moon dwindled to a close-set pair of bright stars, and Groton ordered the ship to come to a halt—one relative to the rest of the solar system, Hunter presumed. For half an hour, Groton checked with various departments and received reports on the ship’s status. Finally, he looked up at the screen and said, “We’ve got places to go, people. Nav! Align us with Zeta Reticuli.”
Hunter noticed that he could see stars now on the monitor. . . . Nothing but stars, looking clearer and brighter and sharper than he’d ever seen them on Earth. Those stars wheeled about with disconcerting speed as Hillenkoetter turned in space, aligning her prow with a dim and inconspicuous constellation. Two faint smears of light showed off to the left. “What’re those smudges?” he asked Brody.
“The Magellanic Clouds,” Brody replied. “Dwarf galaxies.”
“And that’s where we’re going?”
“Great Einstein’s ghost!” Michaels exclaimed. “Don’t you knuckle-dragging military types know anything?”
Before Hunter could tell her exactly what he knew, Brody chuckled. “No, Commander. Those are satellite galaxies to our Milky Way Galaxy, over 160,000 light-years away. Here, look. Imagine a line connecting the two . . .”
“Okay.”
“Now look for two stars, very dim stars, at right angles to that line, and about half that line’s length up from it. See them?”
“I’m not sure.” There were so many stars.
“Well . . . they’re there. Two stars, a visual binary, very close together. Only about the fifth magnitude, which means they’re right on the edge of being visible to the unaided eye. Zeta Reticuli, and they’re right on our back doorstep compared to the Clouds of Magellan. Only thirty-nine light-years away.”
“I think I see them. Yes!”
“Nav plots are set, Captain,” the ship’s navigator reported.
“Where are our chicks?”
“Samford, Inman, Carlucci, and Blake are taking up station, one thousand meters to port, starboard, zenith, and nadir.”
On several of the monitors, Hunter could make other spacecraft—cylinders, like the Hillenkoetter, but stubbier, flattened, and with protrusions and sponsons amidships that might have been weapons housings of some sort. He wasn’t sure, but something about the lights marking windows or other ports in their hulls suggested that they were quite a bit smaller than the Hillenkoetter.
“That’s a hell of a fleet,” Hunter told Brody.
“Indeed. This is a carrier battle group after all. Those are cruisers, heavily armed for their size, and reasonably well armored. They’re named after various former directors of the NSA.”
“Good heavens, why?”
“Because many of those men were members of MJ-12, and were behind the genesis of Solar Warden.”
“All fleet elements report they are in position, Captain.”
“Comm . . . command link with the battle group. I want everybody to stay together.”
“We’re linked in, Captain.”
“Very well. Ms. Briem, on my mark, take us to full speed ahead.”
“Full ahead, Captain, lightspeed on your mark. Aye, aye.”
“And three . . . two . . . one . . . mark.”
And the starscape vanished, replaced by a brilliant and frosty-blue circle of light.
Groton got out of his chair, ducking to clear some of the monitors hanging from the overhead. “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, grinning at the gallery. “How’d you like the show?”
“Fantastic, Captain,” an engineer at the far end of the line of seats said. He shook his head. “To actually see those metrics transformed into reality!”
As they began moving toward the exit off the bridge, Hunter turned to the captain. “I want to thank you, sir, for letting us come up here.”
“Not at all, not at all. We’re bringing sci-fi to life here, and it’s nice to have an audience.”
“I wouldn’t waste it on the military, Fred,” Michaels said, brushing past. She said the word with the disgust normally reserved for a particularly low and loathsome creature.
“On the bridge, it’s captain, Doctor. Please remember that.”
“Sorry.” She sounded anything but, though.
“She doesn’t much like us military types, does she?” Hunter said, watching her as she walked off the bridge.
“Oh, don’t worry about Ellen,” Groton said. “I think she’s a child of the sixties. Make love, not war.”
“No way is she that old.”
“No, but her parents were. Not that her opinon of us matters. As Admiral Carruthers so succinctly put it yesterday, this is a military expedition.”
“Question, Captain?”
“Go ahead.”
“My men and I came on board with very little training and less preparation. We have no idea what it is that we’re supposed to do here. If we get into a fi
refight with slimy alien horrors, we’ll be completely out of our depth. No practice with our weapons, no idea of tactics, and even less idea of the tactics and equipment in use by our enemy. Sir, to put it bluntly, this whole thing could be a clusterfuck from the get-go.”
Groton stared into Hunter’s eyes for a moment. “I see. And I regret the haste with which you and your people were brought on board, Commander. Here we are, able to control space and time pretty much at will, yet the bureaucracy still manages to screw it all up every single time!”
“Exactly: hurry up and wait, sir. Then everything was supposed to be done yesterday, of course.”
“I sometimes wonder if our descendants—the Talis and the Grays—have managed to harness the bureaucracy. Somehow I doubt it.” He shook his head. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure what to tell you, Mr. Hunter. Experience with your weapons and equipment will come. It’s all pretty much idiotproof, if only because the Talis know we’re idiots, okay? As for the tactics . . . well, that’s why you’re here, Commander.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“The 1-JSST is the first human deep-space tactical team ever to be put into space. Up until now, we’ve used Marines, but the intent here is to field a unit with the express purpose of going down to the surfaces of hostile planets and doing whatever is necessary to complete the mission. That may involve killing things. Or it may involve diplomacy. Or it might simply be to assist the scientists while they take their samples and make their readings. We expect a certain degree of flexibility in your deployment as well as a great deal of creativity. This means this is completely new to all of us.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“It means you’re writing the book, Commander. You’ll be making things up as you go along.”
The words struck Hunter like a thunderbolt. “M-making things up?” Belatedly, he added, “Sir?”
“Exactly. You’re a SEAL. Improvise, overcome, and adapt!”
“That’s the US Marines, Captain.”
“Good thing we brought some of those along then, too.” Groton turned back to his station.
Hunter returned to the JSST’s spaces aft in a very thoughtful mood.
Elanna looked up as McClure entered the Hive.
