by Ian Douglas
“But at what cost, Duradh’a?” Senator Langley said, his voice loud in the chamber, and echoed by the link with Lee’s implants. “Fleeing not into space, but into the remote future…beginning a new life elsewhere, giving up all thought of further interstellar exploration, giving up fusion power, even radio for fear that we’d tip the Xul off to our hiding place, always fearful of discovery…no, sir. I know what my vote would be.”
“The N’mah might be right, Ted,” another man in a civilian jumpsuit said. “How do we fight a technology that far in advance of our own? It would be like battling hovertanks with rocks!”
“We don’t have a chance,” an Aerospace Force colonel added.
“Actually,” General Garroway said, “we might have a chance. Take a look at this.”
Another download signaled readiness, and Lee opened the window. What he saw was an animated sim, computer-generated and quite realistic in tone and texture. A Marine in full battle armor was kneeling at the edge of a forest, taking aim at some target unseen with a man-portable plasma gun. Behind him, a Neanderthal, naked and hairy, slipped out of the woods with a primitive ax—a stone head strapped to the end of a heavy branch with rawhide strips. The Neanderthal tiptoed close with exaggerated stealth. The Marine’s sensors must have been switched off, since he evidently didn’t see the cave man, who swung the stone ax hard and level, crumpling the man’s helmet.
Someone in the room laughed, a startling sound abruptly cut off, but most greeted the animation in cold silence. “Just what is your point, General?” Petranova asked.
“Just that technology is not the last word in combat. If the history of modern warfare hasn’t taught us that much, it’s taught us nothing.”
He’s got that right, Lee thought. Korea…Vietnam…the Terrorist World War of the early twenty-first century…the Second and Third Mexican Wars…Siberia…the Giza Incursion…Brazil…it was always the big, high-tech Americans up against fanatical peasants fighting us with obsolete weaponry. Of course, Korea, Vietnam, and Brazil were the only ones we lost, and those were political defeats, not military.
But each time, we found technology had limits. You could never do it all from orbit or with robots. We always needed to get infantrymen in, boots on the ground, to kick ass and take names.
Even the wars clearly won by high technology were never the walkovers their advocates claimed they would be. An untrained civilian or a half-trained militiaman armed with any weapon and a fanatical certainty that his cause was right could be killed, but not convinced. And even obsolete weapons were still deadly, when properly deployed and used.
“Are you suggesting a guerrilla war, General?” Vandenkaamp asked.
“And how the hell do we conduct a guerrilla war when the Xul can just walk in despite everything we do and turn our sun nova?” a Navy captain asked. “Damn it, how do we fight them when we can’t even catch them?”
“What I have in mind,” Garroway said after the time-lag hesitation, “is a bit too conventional to be true guerrilla warfare. But what I do suggest is that we convince the Xul that wiping us out is going to be too damned much trouble.
“Have a look at this….”
U.S.S. Clara Barton
en route to Earth space,
1510 hrs, GMT
Travis Garroway opened his eyes, honestly not sure what to expect. He was no longer wearing combat armor—that was a plus—and the pain that had wracked his body was blissfully, blessedly absent.
Even so, he felt washed out and limp, and the ache of remembered pain still throbbed in distant pulsings along his spine and at his temples.
The overhead glowed with an even, soft light. It was not the overhead of the burned-out shell of the AUT, with its bundled tangles of wiring conduits, nano ducts, and life-support modules.
And that was a definite plus as well.
“What the blazing hell hit me?”
A shadow came between his face and the glowing overhead. He blinked, focusing, and the shadow resolved into Chrome’s face. “Twenty hours of nanoreconstructive hibernation hit you,” she said. “Glad you decided to join the party!”
“Chrome! Gods! Are you?…”
She grinned. “I’m fine. So are you. You weren’t as cooked as some of the rest of us, so they hooked you into medihibe last. The Doc says they got to us in time, though. You can even still have kids.”
Tattooed images crawled disconcertingly across her face—a bat flapping its wings, a grinning skull with flames for eyes and stubby demon’s horns, an old solar sailor towed by a billowing mirrored disk that actually reflected portions of Garroway’s head and shoulders, shifting and distorting as it crawled across the topography of cheekbones, nose, and forehead.
“Turn those damned things off, will ya? You’re making me dizzy.”
“How’s this?” The cartoons froze motionless, then blended themselves into a camouflage pattern of black, brown, and jungle green.
“Better. I think.” He struggled to sit up, and realized he was lying on a hospital bed. Gravity felt pretty close to one G.
“We’re on Earth?”
“Negative.” She shook her head, and behind the camo patterns he detected a furtive emotion. Anxiety? Pain?
“Then where?”
“Hospital Ship Clara Barton. A drone off the Preble spotted the autie, and the Barton was able to dispatch a high-acceleration transport to catch us.”
“I…don’t remember.”
“Me neither. We were on the final dregs of life support. Unconscious or first-stage dead, according to Doc.”
Garroway suppressed a shudder. Nanomedical technology was good enough to bring people back from the early stages of death, but it was still a touch-and-go thing to keep memory and personality intact, especially if any significant necrosis had set in. He spent a fearful moment probing his own thoughts. Was he any different than he’d been before? Would he even notice if he were? His last memories were of lying in the endlessly tumbling autie, unable to move, listening to his own pounding heartbeat as the O2 content in his last LS pack thinned away to nothing….
He couldn’t sense any difference, and his internal implant diagnostics indicated that he was healthy enough…a bit low on glucose, potassium, and sodium, a bit low on his red cell count and very low on lymphocytes…but considering what his system had just been through, not too bad at all.
The worst, the most subtle damage had been to the twisted strands of DNA in his chromosomes, and swarms of specially programmed nano, self-replicating, self-guiding, and self-destructing when their job was done, had rewoven damaged segments of his chromosomal structure using patches taken from repetitive non-coding intron DNA sequences.
He still felt like the same person, though. And maybe whether or not he had changed was a question not to be probed too deeply.
“Excellent,” another voice said. “Good to see you back with the living, Gunny. How are we feeling?”
“We are feeling like we were worked over by an Ahannu battle horde with tagu sticks. Who are you?”
“HM1 Foster,” the owner of the voice said, leaning over next to Chrome. He was a painfully young man in a Navy corpsman’s blue scrubs. He checked the diagnostic readout on the bulkhead above Garroway’s head. “Just checking your vitals.”
“I’m doing okay, Doc. When can I get up?”
“When you’re strong enough to do it. Give it a try.”
Garroway sat up, but too quickly. He lay down again, head whirling.
“Give yourself a few minutes to adjust, Gunny. We had to replace most of your blood with fluorohypox, and your bone marrow hasn’t had time to catch up yet. Just be careful moving…and drink water. Lots of water.”
The corpsman moved on to the next bed where, Garroway now saw, PFC Ella Lindeman was lying, apparently still unconscious.
“So…what was the butcher’s bill, Chrome?” he asked.
She looked away. “Fourteen of us made it, Trig. Eight bought it in the fight, and another ten on board
the autie. And the Navy crew, too, of course.”
“The lieutenant?”
She shook her head. “The Navy boys who pulled us out said the autie’s flight deck was a real mess. Nobody made it.”
“The charges blew.”
“The charges blew.”
He felt a small surge of excitement. “Did we get the bastards? Before they could slag Earth?” When she didn’t answer right away, excitement turned to fear. “Chrome. What’s wrong?”
“We don’t have the whole story yet, Trig. Just bits and pieces, what the Barton’s crew’s been able to pass along. But…it sounds like at least one rock made it through and hit Earth. Hard.”
“Gods…”
“There’s a conference going on back at Mars. Lots of wild scuttlebutt, of course. According to Doc Foster, the Barton’s taking us back to L-4. We’ll know more then.”
“So…what? We’re looking at a dinosaur-killer scenario?”
“Something like that. Those rocks were going real fast, they said. Enough kinetic energy to pack a punch equal to a few million H-bombs, all going off at once. They say that enough of the Atlantic got vaporized that…well, if half the rumors are true, Earth has been hurt. Bad.”
Garroway digested this. He had no close family on Earth; they wouldn’t have accepted him for deep-space deployment if he had. His parents were dead, and he’d never married. There was his uncle and some other family in Baltimore, some cousins, his aunt, some childhood friends….
Scratch that. Had some other family. An impact like Chrome was describing in the Atlantic Ocean would have meant tidal waves. Big tidal waves. And Baltimore was on the Patapsco River right off of Chesapeake Bay.
He’d spent some happy vacations at his uncle’s place north of Baltimore when he was a kid. He wondered if anything was left of the old city.
Or of Washington, D.C.
Or of Quantico, or Parris Island, both Marine bases he’d been stationed at earlier in his career, places where he had a lot of friends, a lot of roots.
They would be gone, too.
The world that Travis Garroway had known and grown up in was, he suddenly realized, drastically, horribly changed, the place of his memories wiped away in an instant of flame and flood. He felt the weakness reasserting itself, felt hands and gut trembling.
“I know, Trigger,” Chrome told him, putting an arm around his shoulders. “It hit me bad, too.”
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
“What Marines always do,” she told him. “Semper fi. Always faithful. We still have the Corps.”
“If the country, if the planet we were protecting isn’t there, though…”
“Earth’s still there, Trigger. And so are we. We’ll go on.”
He nodded, but felt a burning in his eyes. “Yeah. We’ll go on.”
What hurt was knowing that everything they’d done…and all those dead…and it hadn’t been enough.
Earth had been counting on them, and they’d failed.
Mars Military Training Command
Stickney Base,
Phobos
1530 hrs, GMT
The voting had proceeded electronically, the results tabulated at once. “We’re agreed,” Vanderkaamp said quietly. “One hundred eighty-five to sixty-two, with twelve abstentions. We will stay in the Solar System, and do all we can both to aid the survivors on Earth, and to defend the system against further incursions by the Xul. A similar vote, of one hundred fifty-seven to ninety-five, with seven abstentions, is in favor of pursuing General Garroway’s suggestion of tracking the Xul ship’s course, locating the star system from which it came, and mounting a preemptive strike. We will need to further study his suggested means of attack, which he has designated Operation Seafire, but the majority agrees that this tactic gives us our best hope of striking back against the Xul, and in a manner that will serve to keep them both off-balance, and at arm’s length, at least for a time.”
“It’ll buy us some more time,” Garroway’s image said from the holoprojection disk. “Just like the Clusterspace Insertion.”
The Clusterspace Insertion had been a Marine operation carried out on the fifth of April 2170—some 144 years ago. After the destruction of the Xul huntership as it emerged from the Sirius Stargate, probes of the Gate had pushed through to explore the space on the other side, the star system from which the Xul vessel had come. Marines emerging at the other side had found another Stargate, this one built into a tunnel excavated into the heart of a small asteroid, and located in a red dwarf star system on the outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy, perhaps fifty thousand light-years or more from Sol.
There, in what had been dubbed Cluster Space, the asteroid Stargate had orbited with some hundreds of other gates. A world had been visible…and the Galaxy as seen from outside, a vast spiral of stars…and a globular star cluster, like a bee-swarm of red suns, filling a quarter of the sky. Garroway had seen recordings made by the Marines on the raid—including one Corporal John Garroway, his great-great-granduncle.
With the possible exception of ancient humans carried to the stars by various aliens, those Marines had traveled farther from home than any other voyagers from the planet Earth.
Stargates, it turned out, could be tuned through myriad different possible destinations by adjusting the rotational velocities and magnetic moment of the gravitationally collapsed masses within them. However, by sending a Marine raiding team through the Gate to plant nuclear charges at the other end, in Cluster Space, they’d made certain that the Xul couldn’t track the outbound path of their lost ship, and follow it up with a larger and more dangerous fleet.
At least, that was the assumption at the time, and it appeared to have worked for nearly a century and a half.
Now, though, another Xul ship had made it all the way to Earth. There remained a major question yet to be resolved as to whether the ship that had attacked Earth had come through the Sirius Gate; or arrived another way, through a different gate at some different star; or had reached Earth simply by traveling faster than light through open space. The navigational data recovered and transmitted by Quincy3 ought to help resolve that question.
Operation Seafire might—just might—enable Earth to become lost again, so far as the Xul were concerned, lost among those hundreds of billions of suns strewn in a titanic spiral across a hundred thousand light-years.
It was all Humankind had remaining in the way of hope.
But Vanderkaamp was still speaking, turning now to the patient, floating image of the N’mah. “I hope the N’mah understand that in choosing not to leave our homeworld, we are not rejecting you. We still desperately need your assistance.”
There was a long pause. In the silence, Lee could sense every one of the delegates in the auditorium straining to pick up some hint of the alien’s feelings and thoughts.
“We understand your…attachment to the world of your origins,” Duradh’a said at last. “We understand the idea, at least, if not the emotion.
“However, we must take care of our needs first. Sacrificing ourselves for another species, however cherished, when that species is ultimately doomed in any case, would be neither productive nor rational. We intend to return to Sirius, there to oversee the evacuation of as many of our own as we can in the flotilla of asteroid starships we have been building over these past several decades.”
“If we stand together,” a Marine general in the audience called out sharply, “we can beat these damned things! Stay! Fight with us!”
Again, there was a long pause, and Lee wondered if the being was conferring with others of its kind on the T’krah Elessed Ev’r. “The N’mah are not a warrior species,” Duradh’a said at last. “What we will do, however, is leave a small group of our people with you—volunteers who will continue to work with your engineers in developing key technologies…especially the inertialess drive, and large-scale nanufacturing and large-scale environmental restructuring. These are skills you will find particularly useful, both in
the defense of your world, and in its repair.
“These volunteers at the same time will be constructing a starship of their own in your Asteroid Belt, so that they can join the rest of us at a later date. They will share with you the secrets of that construction; you may decide to remain and defend your world against the Xul, but your descendents, the next generation, may elect to pursue a different strategy. They should have the opportunity to find safety among the starclouds, even if you choose to stay here and die.”
“That is…very kind of you,” Vandenkaamp said. “I don’t know how we can thank you.”
“Your thank-yous are not necessary, of course,” Duradh’a said, “since they represent a linguistic social gesture with meaning to your species, but not to ours. We believe that every species deserves a chance to survive and find its own destiny. That is why we aided you eight thousand of your years ago. It is why we aid you now.
“But you should recognize one fact. If it is in the N’mah nature to help other species survive, to nurture them, it is in the Xul nature to pluck them up and destroy them. They are very good at this, and utterly and implacably relentless. The plan you’ve discussed here may indeed keep them away for another generation…or two…but they will be back.
“And when they return, it will be to ignite your sun into a nova, and sear the face of every planet in this system clean of life. They will then search the worlds of every star within a hundred light-years, track down your colonies and your outposts and even individual ships traveling between the stars, and they will destroy them as well.
“Whether you admit it here in this hall or not, your Earth is already dead. And unless and until you elect to flee as far as you can, and submerge yourselves as deeply as you can in the sea of space surrounding you, you as a species are already dead as well.”
The holograph projector winked out, leaving 259 human delegates to the conference alone in a stunned and brooding silence.
