by Ian Douglas
“TR-3R Delta!” came over the radio. “TR-3R Delta! What the hell are you doing?”
“Don’t reply,” he told Bucknell. “Radio silence.”
“You think they’ll shoot us down?”
“I doubt it.” He engaged the controls and increased the transport’s velocity, accelerating toward the planet. “They’ll need clearance from the bridge for something that drastic, and that will take time. But no reason for them to think we’re listening . . . or figure out who we are.”
Besides, he hoped, there would be those aboard the Big-H who would hesitate, even balk, at being ordered to shoot down a friendly.
Even so, he pushed the craft as hard as he could to get them out of the Big-H’s particle beam range.
The night side of the planet loomed huge just below.
Following the instructions given to him by the Gray, Hunter dropped the perimeter defenses and led a small team out and into the icy wastes beyond. As the shield went back up behind them, he was left with a palpable feeling of isolation, of loneliness.
Thirty-nine light-years from home. . . .
Alfa Platoon picked its way down the rocky hill, spread out, alert for signs of the attacking aliens. Marlow had started calling the Volkswagen-sized creatures “pillbugs,” and the name had stuck. Hunter had assumed that they belonged to the Xaxki, but according to the people back aboard the Big-H, the Xaxki Guardians knew nothing about them. Someone, Hunter thought, wasn’t talking to others in their chain of command.
At the moment, the hillside outside the alien base was empty. Where the hell had they all gone? Their dead bodies, he knew, crumbled away into nothingness. But it was unnerving to know the things could come and go so suddenly.
“Which way, Colby?”
“That way, sir,” the radioman said, pointing. “I have a solid fix on the transponder.”
“Range?”
“Not sure, Commander. But I think it came down right over there behind those big boulders.”
The boulders were the size of a three-story building, raw, rugged, and slick with ice. The thirteen men of Alfa Platoon picked their way down through the haze-chocked darkness, their helmet lights casting bizarre shapes and movements across the faces of the rocks.
Coulter had point and was first to round the boulder. “There it is, Commander,” he called. “Eighty yards.”
The first of the two downed Stingray fighters lay scattered across the landscape, wings and hull shredded by the impact. There was no evidence of fire, of course, not in an atmosphere lacking oxygen, but frightfully hot metal was steaming in the night, putting up a roiling fog.
The pilot was dead.
“Okay,” Hunter said. “Bring him. We’re not leaving him here.”
Hunter wasn’t particularly religious, but—what was the pilot’s name? Selby. Robert Selby. He deserved a proper burial back home.
Assuming they could get him there.
“Got a lock on the other transponder, Skipper,” Colby told him. “That way.”
The team continued making their way across the alien, hostile landscape.
And that was important, Hunter thought. They were a team now, not a disparate gaggle of military personnel from different services, different backgrounds, different traditions. SEALs, Marines, Army SOF—they all were working together, a smoothly functioning machine, and he was intensely proud of them. So much of an elite unit’s élan came from their knowledge that they were simply the best.
And now here they were, proving it once and for all.
They struggled along across nearly three miles of rock and tholin-slimed ice before approaching the second downed fighter. This one had bellied in across a flat stretch of icy ground, the fuselage remaining more or less intact. Weapons at the ready, six men crouched in a defensive perimeter, while six more, with Hunter, moved in closer.
The attack came out of nowhere—hundreds of the massive pillbugs pushing and lumbering across the rocky ground. Where the hell had they come from? One moment the rocky ground had been bare; the next, it looked like the ground was moving in ponderous, segmented waves.
Nielson was hit, his helmet exploding in a bloody spray of plastic, metal, and bone. Then Alvarez went down, his gloved hands frantically pressing against a ragged tear in the torso of his suit. That was the terrible part of combat in a poisonous environment like this one. Any damage to your environmental suit could kill you in seconds, no matter how minor the wound. The human force dropped to the ground, pouring fire into the surrounding attackers, burning them down one after another after another. The aliens tried closing in, but in such numbers, and in so uncoordinated a manner, that they were bumping up against one another and blocking the rush of those behind.
And then . . .
They were gone.
Hunter stood up slowly, blinking. The field around the platoon had been filled with those lumbering horrors, and now they all had vanished. A dozen dead pillbugs were scattered about the landscape, but those would be gone as well in minutes. What the hell was going on? He was prepared to call it an illusion, some sort of hallucination, as the Saurians claimed—except for the fact that Nielson and Alvarez both were dead, their suited bodies broken, twisted, and steaming on the icy ground.
“What the fuck was that all about, Skipper?” Minkowski demanded.
“I don’t know. Someone’s playing games with us, maybe.” He gestured toward the downed fighter, now a hundred yards up ahead. “C’mon. Let’s go check it out.”
The fighter’s cockpit hatch cycled open as they approached, and a haggard figure in a flight BioSuit stood up. “Man, am I glad to see you guys!”
“You okay?”
“Got dinged up a bit on the landing, but . . . yeah.” He extended a gloved hand. “Lieutenant Commander Boland.”
“Commander Hunter. Welcome to our world. . . .”
The downed pilot looked around. “Looks like the natives are restless, sir.”
“And then some. I just wish I knew where the hell they’ve gone.”
“And if they’ll be back.”
“Right.” Hunter gestured up the hill. “Let’s get back to the domes.”
From everything Hunter had ever heard of the alien Grays, they had advanced technology, sure . . . but it was nothing like magic. A twenty-first century human could grasp that what they did was possible, even if humans couldn’t do it yet.
But since encountering the Xaxki, Hunter was becoming convinced that there was another dimension to life in the Galaxy, that some species were inconceivably old, and possessed technologies and ways of understanding the cosmos that were completely beyond the ken of mere mortals. These were civilizations that were truly godlike, so far as humans were concerned . . . and just pray that humankind never came into conflict with them, because mere humans would not stand a chance.
Such civilizations would be powerful enough to reach out and swat the entire human species like an insect. The thought made the universe far larger, far darker, and far more dangerous than Hunter had ever imagined. The diminutive Grays and the malevolent Saurians both seemed downright homey by comparison.
Hunter shivered, as if touched by the cold outside his suit, then continued up the slope.
Moments after completing the fiery atmospheric entry, Duvall brought the TR-3R into level flight a thousand feet above the ground, which was lost in an icy night beneath a solid ceiling of clouds. Beside him, Bucknell had the TR’s see-in-the-dark vision switched on and was scanning the ground below with the craft’s ventral FLIR sensors. Information loaded on the craft’s navigation computer would pinpoint the location of the surface structures seen from orbit. Finding the alien base should be as simple as following a preprogrammed guide path straight to the target.
“Got ’em, Boss. Left ten degrees.”
“Left ten . . .”
He put the recon craft into a gentle bank to port. Up ahead, atop a small mountain, he could see the domes of the alien settlement. And closer, visible on Bucky’s v
iewscreen, was a toiling line of white figures trudging up the slope. The FLIR was set to show heat sources as white and light gray, and colder surfaces as black or dark gray. Environmental suits were not particularly efficient at conserving heat, and they leaked like sieves at infrared wavelengths. He could see individual heating units like tiny, bright stars on the back of each figure.
“Hang on, Bucky. We’re going down.”
Thunder rolled, and Hunter looked up. He saw nothing but cloud wrack at first . . . but then a barely-glimpsed black triangle passed across a slightly less dark backdrop of clouds, banking into a broad, sweeping turn. He pointed. “Colby! See if you can raise them!”
“Briggs already has them, Skipper. But I’ll patch you in through him.”
“This is JSST Alfa Platoon,” Hunter said, “calling unidentified spacecraft over this position. Come in!”
“JSST Alfa,” a voice came back. “This is unidentified flying object TR-3R Delta. You guys need a lift?”
“We’re going to need a lot more than a 3R,” Hunter replied. “I’ll have them lower the shields. You touch down in the middle of the compound . . . and we’ll talk.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I suspect that in the past sixty years or so that there has been some back-engineering (of E.T. technologies) and the creation of this type of equipment. But it’s not nearly as sophisticated yet as what the visitors have.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, 1996
Hans Kammler felt the alien mind as it crawled into his, icy and cold. It felt to him as though that mind had been hammering in a vain attempt to reach him, but then had surged through, a tidal wave of alien thought and purpose filling his skull. In agony, he opened his mouth, trying desperately to scream, but nothing could emerge into the green liquid around him.
You have moved through time, a Voice thundered inside his brain. It was like . . . like a recognition. You have been under the control of The Surviving Few. It was a harsh accusation.
Please, he thought. Please . . . I don’t know what you’re saying. Please help me. . . .
Information spilled across the telepathic channel. Kammler didn’t know how he knew, but he was certain that he was feeling the flame of an immensely powerful mind, something called the Xaxki Dreamer, something awakened by beings called the Guardians and sent here to . . . to . . . what?
To talk with him?
No, he corrected himself . . . to talk with humans. The Xaxki were only dimly aware of humans on this world, and sought to speak with them.
But Kammler, trapped in a bottle, naked and helpless and terrified, was in no condition to talk with anyone.
Then with a suddenness that left him broken and achingly alone, the Mind was gone.
Duvall stepped off the ladder and onto the rocky surface. The hull still hot, the TR-3R rested on three landing legs, steaming in the alien night. A dozen men in combat armor faced him, weapons at the ready. “Lieutenant Duvall,” he said, hands raised. These guys seemed a bit . . . hair-trigger.
“Lieutenant Commander Hunter,” one of them said, lowering his weapon. “Welcome to Velat.”
“I thought this was Serpo?”
“Velat is what the Saurs call it.”
“Double-D!” another suited figure said. “Good to see you, bro!”
“Commander Boland?”
“The same. What the hell are you doing down here?”
“Setting myself up for a court martial, I think. You guys know they’re sitting tight upstairs? No ships to come down to the planet, and you folks are to stay put!”
“We know,” Hunter said with dry understatement. “I gather you two know each other?”
“Same squadron,” Duvall said. “He’s my CO.”
“Is Bucky with you?”
“Sure is.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “She’s on the 3R, just in case I needed fire support out here.”
“Okay. How many people can a 3R carry?” Hunter wanted to know. “Maximum load, really packed in.”
“I dunno, sir. Things are pretty tight. There’s a cargo hold aft . . . might hold fifteen, maybe eighteen people if they didn’t mind being real friendly.”
“Damn.”
“Why? How many you got, sir?”
“Three platoons . . . forty-eight people, with several casualties. Problem is, we have a shitload of civilians, human civilians, in the basement. We’re not going to leave them here!”
“How many?”
“Three hundred or so.”
Duvall whistled. “No way in hell I could carry that kind of load. That’s three trips for a TR-3B, at least.”
“Or three TR-3Bs in one flight.” Hunter appeared to be thinking furiously. “Okay, tell you what. I’m going to send you back to the Big-H with one platoon, including all of the casualties and Commander Boland, here, okay? Meanwhile, I’ll get on the horn to see if we can get an evac going.”
“And how are you going to strong-arm an admiral into doing what you want? Sir.”
“I’ll get him to see reason,” Hunter said, “if I have to crawl through the radio link and dope-slap the bastard.”
On the flag bridge of the USSS Hillenkoetter, Admiral Charles Carruthers scowled at Paul King. “What do you mean they refuse to talk with us?”
“I do not believe humans matter to them in any way whatsoever, Admiral,” King replied.
“Da,” Kozlov added. “In fact, I feel we may have here the solution to the so-called Fermi paradox.”
“I thought the Fermi paradox was null and void,” Captain Groton said. “‘Where are they?’ Turns out they’re right here. . . .”
“That’s not the point,” King replied, a little brusquely. “We know alien civilizations are everywhere, even right on our cosmic doorstep, and yet all are silent. The paradox remains.”
Carruthers considered this. In the mid-twentieth century, physicist Enrico Fermi, over lunch with his colleagues, had famously put forward the question, “Where is everybody?” The question centered on the likelihood of intelligent alien life, and the mathematics that declared that even without faster-than-light, a star-faring civilization would fill the entire Galaxy in just a few million years. Some civilizations, perhaps, would be uninterested in colonizing the stars, some would exterminate themselves before getting that far, but all it would take was one. . . .
Of course, at that time, in 1950, Fermi had no way of knowing that space-traveling aliens had been discovered, and their recovered technologies were already being studied. But the question remained; planets were now known to be ridiculously commonplace; the chemistry of life dictated that it would arise almost spontaneously on any planet with even remotely favorable parameters; the sky should be filled with the noise of alien civilizations.
But it wasn’t. Even with proof of alien civilizations out there, the skies remained dark and silent.
Or, at the very least, humans were technologically deaf to their communications networks, and no one was building megaconstructions out there big enough to be visible from Earth.
So even among those cognoscenti aware of the alien presence, the Fermi paradox remained . . . troubling. Humans now knew of some eighty alien species, either directly or by way of the Grays, but for the most part they remained silent and unseen.
Kozlov was suggesting that if there were many more civilizations out there far more advanced than humankind, few, if any, had any interest in something as primitive as humans.
“Maybe so,” Carruthers said. “But these Xaxki had damned well better talk to us. We have people down there on the surface!”
People . . . and a rogue recon transport. TR-3R Delta had been tracked down to the alien mountaintop compound. Carruthers had the nightmare feeling that the entire mission was going right down the tubes.
“And it is for that reason that we must be particularly careful,” King told him. “We appear to have landed in the middle of a full-blown war. One side is so powerful we don’t dare anger them. The other, the Grays and th
e Saurians, are powerful as well . . . and they’re currently on Earth and must be placated.”
“We cannot afford to anger either group,” Kozlov added.
“With respect, sir,” Groton said, “we can’t leave our people down there on Serpo.”
“I heard you, Captain.” Carruthers was annoyed with the man. Groton had been hammering out that same complaint for hours, now. He more than half suspected that Groton had sent that TR-3R down to the planet against his orders.
“Sir, from the sound of it, they’ve already been in combat with the Saurians. We also have reports of a number—a very large number—of civilian prisoners. Human prisoners. I respectfully submit that the Saurians aren’t going to get any madder than they are already, and that the Xaxki want us out of there anyway. The faster we move on this, the better. Sir.”
Carruthers felt trapped, and he didn’t like it one bit. He’d ordered a halt to hostilities on the planet’s surface at the urging of the two ambassadors in order to appease the Xaxki, only to learn that the human forces down there were battling it out with the Saurians. And that, apparently, the Xaxki didn’t really care about humans one way or the other.
An old declaration had it that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Evidently, the Xaxki didn’t think like that. They seemed to want nothing to do with any outsiders entering their system—true xenophobes.
