by Ian Douglas
Alexander could only imagine the computing power necessary to sort through the incredible mountain of data recovered from the alien network so far. And this represented only the barest beginning.
“What the hell is this?” He’d brought up a new scene. Again, it was a murky blend of violets and blues, but with an intensely bright patch of green at the center. Something like a cloud of purple smoke appeared to rise from the light. Nearby, illuminated by the bright patch, was a forest of brilliant scarlet tubes, each sprouting a mass of purple-red feathers.
“We are still analyzing those,” Cara told him.
“Yeah…but, these tubes. Could they be the aliens? Or some kind of vegetation? Obviously, these things are alive….”
“Possibly,” Cara told him. “They actually resemble certain species of deep-sea worms living in Earth’s oceans. That light could be thermo-or sonoluminescence from a deep-sea volcanic vent.”
“I’ve simmed teleoperated excursions to deep-ocean vents,” he said. There were companies in Earthring that for a fee let you piggyback your consciousness into robots probing the deep ocean trenches, or the poisonous murk of Venus. Alexander had taken a teleoperational excursion to the bottom of the Marianas Trench once, about five years before, and on another occasion had visited one of the deep-sea smoker vents near the Galapagos Islands. “I’ve seen benthic tube worms…and they can grow pretty big. How long are these?”
“Unknown. We have not yet established a scale for measurement within these images.”
He nodded. The tube-worm things in the alien data might be several meters long. Or, if the alien camera that recorded them was small and this was a tight close-up shot, they could represent organisms the size of human hairs. How could you tell, without knowing the scale of what you were looking at?
However large they were, these were indescribably beautiful, with glittering, deep violet highlights, and feathery protrusions arrayed in delicate spiral patterns around the mouth—if that’s what those openings were. And were those stalked eyes around the ends? Or organs of some other sense entirely? Were they worms of some sort, analogues of the tube-worms of Earth’s oceanic deeps? Or were they some sort of background vegetation?
How, Alexander wondered, can we even begin to communicate with something when we’re not even sure what it is we’re looking at in the first place?
Historically, of course, the Marines were not intended to be agents of first contact with new species. Their job was to find the enemy and kill him.
As the ancient joke had it: “Join the Marines; travel to exotic worlds; meet strange and exciting foreign peoples; kill them.”
And yet if Operation Gorgon was to succeed, the MIEF was going to need to adopt the roles both of first-contact team and diplomatic corps. So far, and not counting the Xul themselves, or the apparently extinct Builders, the only other sapient species encountered by Humankind in eight hundred years of exploration beyond its home world was the N’mah. It was self-evident that humanity would not be able to defeat the Xul alone. Earth had to find allies out there among the stars, however strange….
He thought-clicked to another image and started. This was obviously a life form of some sort—the eyes were the giveaway—and a nightmare one at that. Alexander found himself looking into the face, if that was what it could be called, of something that might have been a terrestrial octopus, but with six black and gold eyes spaced around the head, with multiplying branching tentacles, and with a transparent body—he could clearly see what appeared to be internal organs, as if rendered in glass—that looked like nothing Alexander had ever seen in his life. A flatworm? An insect? He was actually having trouble seeing the thing as a whole, because his brain was not able to compare what he was seeing at all closely with the memories of life forms already in his mind.
Still, those six eyes seemed to be staring back at him with a cold, inner light and, to Alexander’s mind, at least, there was something there…something aware, something intelligent. What, he wondered, could humans have in common with such nightmares?
He was reasonably certain, however, that this was an image of one of the aliens.
But whether it would prove to be an ally against the Xul, or something as implacably hostile as the Xul, remained to be seen.
Ontos 1, Recon Sword
Stargate
Aquila Space
1905 hrs GMT
“Recon Sword copies,” Lieutenant Eden said out loud. “We’ll see what we can do. Out.”
Warhurst appreciated the fact that FTL radio allowed them to stay in touch with the MIEF, even though straight-line communications through the Stargate were impossible, and the fleet was now twelve hundred light-years away. Still, there was something to be said for not having the capability to talk to HQ instantaneously—like freedom from micromanagement. The good news here was that they were on their own.
The bad news, of course…was that they were on their own.
“So what’s the word, Lieutenant?” Galena wanted to know. “When’s the damned fleet comin’ through, anyway?”
“Not just yet,” Eden said. “They want us to follow up on all the data they’ve been getting.”
“Meaning?…” Warhurst asked. He had a feeling he knew what the answer was going to be.
“Meaning we get our asses in gear and approach RFS Alpha for a closer look.”
Radio Frequency Source Alpha was what they were calling that nearest asteroid, the one from which they’d been getting most of the data so far. With one exception, RFS Bravo, none of the other targets had been reached yet by the fast-expanding cloud of nano e-penetrators. Some were days away from their targets, in fact, even at 300 kps. Bravo, at an awkward angle relative to the gate, had been hit by only a single penetrator, and data from that source so far was miniscule.
But Alpha was proving to be an electronic treasure trove. Once Evans had cracked the code, torrents of data had been coming back over almost two hundred separate microwave channels, relayed back to Recon Sword, and then, via the QCC net, back to Hermes and the Fleet.
One of the early images from Alpha might actually have been of one of the aliens—something like an octopus head on a flatworm’s body, but with odd extrusions and extensions that made little sense to human eyes, the whole rendered in what looked like transparent glass, internal organs and all.
Sitting down to have a meal with these guys must be a real treat, Warhurst thought. You’d be able to watch the whole process of digestion….
“Alert,” Chesty said, interrupting his bemused thoughts. “We are being electronically compromised.”
“What?” Eden snapped. “How? I don’t see anything on the interface….”
“It would not show there,” Chesty replied. “The penetration is extremely subtle, and I am aware of it only as a kind of echo of certain data. I believe the aliens may have multiple probes piggybacking in through our own microwave data channels.”
“Shit!” Galena said. “Lieutenant? What do we do? We’re supposed to be spying on them, not the other way around!”
“I…don’t know.” Eden sounded hesitant.
Warhurst scanned the various internal readouts. Whatever was peering into the Ontos’ computer system wasn’t tripping any of the safeguards against electronic sabotage. Chesty was right. The probe was extremely delicate, exquisitely sophisticated.
“Hey, turnabout’s fair play, right?” Warhurst said. “Why not let them look?”
“Do you think that’s wise, Gunnery Sergeant?” Eden replied. He was already using Chesty to shut down specific blocks of computer memory, seeking to slam the door shut. It looked to Warhurst, though, as though it was already too late. This thing was fast.
“Why not?” he said. “We’re sterile, right? They didn’t send us out here with any sensitive data on board, stuff like the coordinates of Earth, or the TO&E of the MIEF.”
“No. Of course not. If there were Xul here…”
“Right. Nothing to tell the Xul where we’re from
if we get spotted and picked up.” He didn’t add that, if the scuttlebutt in the fleet was any indicator, the Xul already knew exactly where Earth was, thanks to the capture of the Argo. “These guys on Alpha aren’t Xul. We came here to find aliens, right? We want to talk to them. So…”
“So we make it easy for them to exchange data with us,” Eden said, completing the thought. “Still, I wasn’t expecting to be announced quite this soon.”
“They obviously have some pretty sophisticated computer shit over there,” Warhurst said. “They must’ve seen what was happening when our NePs started hitting the surface of their asteroid, and figured out we were trying to communicate, or at least trying to find out about them. Now they’re doing the same to us.”
“Our orders allow us to exchange data with the aliens,” Eden said, but slowly, as though he was still trying to figure things out. “But just basic stuff. This…this probe is going through everything we have!”
“And probably finding us as weird as we find them. Let’s just keep moving toward Alpha, Lieutenant, but dead slow. See if they put out the welcome mat for us….”
e(i©) + 1 = 0
RFS Alpha
Aquila Space
1912 hrs GMT
In a large enough cosmos, all things are possible. Even unexpected potential congruencies between fundamentally different statements of Reality.
The beings’ name for themselves, their self-identifying thought-symbol, would have been incomprehensible if spoken, for it was not a word, but a mathematical relationship, an equation, that to their minds spoke of the elegance, the perfection, and the essential unity of the cosmos. The e(ip) + 1 = 0 were, above all else, mathematicians…minds that sought to understand and describe the cosmos through the beauty of abstract relationships.
They watched, now, through complex electronic senses, as the odd little spacecraft approached, the ugly machine unfolding in their collective minds not as something visible, but as angles, surfaces, and curves, a manifold of continuous and discrete structures and tensors. The beings watched through a virtual reality created by their computer network; they had already ascertained that the aliens, too, possessed computer technology, and appeared to communicate with one another by means of similar artificially contrived virtual worlds.
Their network was extensive, powerful, and worked very quickly. Already they’d begun building up a model of the alien intelligences. There were two, evidently, one identified as “Chesty”—though the symbols for that identifier were unintelligible as yet—and one, equally mysteriously, called “Evans.” Chesty appeared to inhabit the larger, more distant spacecraft, Evans the smaller, nearer ship, the craft that had initiated contact in the first place.
The important thing, the supremely important balance of the equation, was that the aliens were not the Enemy. And if they were not the Enemy, they might be…what? Associates? Congruent mentalities?
The e(ip) + 1 = 0 had thought themselves alone, utterly alone, in an extremely large and violent universe. The thought of allies did not come easily to them.
But they understood the concept of complementary interaction, and of the whole being greater than the sum of the component parts.
In a big enough universe, wholly independent sequences could sometimes combine, resulting in startling and unexpected convergence.
They would not engage the Trigger to destroy the newcomers…not yet….
Ontos 1, Recon Sword
Stargate
Aquila Space
2119 hrs GMT
“Fifty meters,” Warhurst said, reading off the dwindling numbers on his internal projection. “Thirty…twenty…fifteen…ten meters…”
The Ontos was slowly, almost grudgingly approaching the asteroid’s surface, gentling down on carefully adjusted coughs from its gravitic drive. Outside, the asteroid’s surface appeared harshly illuminated in white light, every shadow of each loose rock or fold in the landscape sharply etched into a surface of smooth gray dust. Landing legs, claws extended, splayed out, reaching for the surface. Through his mental window, linked to the craft’s external cameras, Warhurst was aware of the Ontos’ own shadow moving up to meet them as they descended.
“Five meters…three…”
Eden gave a final burst of power to the drive. “Okay. We’re down. Cutting drive power…cutting AG.”
Warhurst hadn’t even felt the bump of landing. As Eden cut the artificial gravity, his stomach surged, the sensation almost that of free fall. This tiny drifting mountain did have a gravity field of its own—but at about one ten-thousandth of a G it wasn’t enough to keep things nailed down or give a distinct feeling of up and down. Warhurst reached out and plucked a pen from a nearby rack and dropped it. The silver tube appeared to float in front of his eyes, and only very, very gradually did it begin to make its way toward the deck.
Warhurst turned his full attention to the view outside, enlarging the window with a thought. The surface looked like gray beach sand or coarse powder, the horizon startlingly close. The local sun, blue-white and intensely brilliant, hung just above the horizon. The asteroid’s rotation was rapid enough that the sun’s movement was clearly visible as it drifted toward the horizon.
“You sure this is the place, Lieutenant?” Galena asked. “Where’s the welcoming committee?”
“This is where Chesty brought us,” Eden replied.
“The alien signal is coming from that mound in the landscape some 20 meters in that direction,” Chesty said, marking the indicated hillock with a green cursor in their minds. “And it appears to be opening up.”
The three Marines watched for a long moment. Something like a door was indeed opening in the side of a hill…inviting.
“Well,” Eden said. “Time to go earn our pay. Prepare for egress.”
Ten minutes later, the Marines emerged, one by one, from the belly of the Ontos and began drifting across the surface toward the open door. There wasn’t gravity enough to keep them on the surface, and a hard jump could have put them into orbit. Instead, they used their 660 armor’s thruster packs, using gentle bursts to guide themselves forward.
As they neared the opening, the sun slid beneath the impossibly close horizon. Night closed in with startling swiftness; stars winked on, along with the flat band of zodiacal light stretching up from the spot where the sun had set.
Lights winked on within the entrance ahead.
“You sure this isn’t a Xul trap, Chesty?” Warhurst asked the invisible but ever-present AI.
“If it is,” Chesty’s voice replied in his mind, “it is an uncommonly convoluted and opaque one. I have been exchanging data at an extremely high rate of speed for several hours now, and am beginning to understand the conventions these…beings use. True communication is as yet impossible, but I can with some confidence tell you that these are not Xul. I see no evidence that they intend us harm.”
“So…what’s inside the door?” Galena asked, braking to a halt relative to the gray and dusty hillside. His jets stirred up a cloud of powdery dust that hung suspended above the surface, glowing in the light spilling from the entrance.
“Unknown,” Chesty told them. “But we may learn more if we enter.”
UCS Hermes
Stargate, Puller 695 System
2140 hrs GMT
“The Marines are entering the opening now,” Cara said.
“Very well,” General Alexander said. He was going over the ready list one final time, but at Cara’s warning, he reopened the mental window to the feed from Recon Sword. The transmission was coming from a camera mounted on Lieutenant Eden’s helmet. He could see the back of Garroway’s M-660 armor just ahead as the Marine pulled himself into the doorway.
He fought the temptation to tell the Marines to be careful. They didn’t need micromanaging…and wouldn’t appreciate the offer. He remained silent as the trio descended deeper into the tumbling mountain.
Garroway stopped, and affixed a small, black box to a rock wall—a comm relay that should ke
ep the three in touch despite the rock around them.
And then the signal began to fuzz and break up.
“Recon One,” another voice said over the channel. “This is Ops. We’re losing your signal. Do you copy?”
Alexander heard a reply, but it was garbled and broken.
And then the image was gone, replaced by hissing static.
Damn….
A QCC link could send comm signals across twelve hundred light-years, from the Ontos to Hermes, in an eye-blink…but the Marines in their armored suits were dependent on conventional radio to get their data streams back to the Ontos. The relays they were using should have kept them linked in no matter how deep into the asteroid they went. Evidently, something else was blocking the signal, most likely some sort of alien shielding technology.
And that might be accidental, or it might be the closing of a trap.
“Cara,” Alexander snapped. “Open a channel to Admiral Taggart, please.”
“Aye, aye, General.”
Taggart must have been waiting for the call. His voice came back almost at once. “I’m here, Martin. Time to roll?”
“We’ve just lost contact with our scout team, Liam. I need the full fleet over there, ASAP.”
“We’ve been monitoring the op here,” Taggert replied. “The ship captains have all been brought on-line already, and we’re ready to move.”
“Let’s do it, then.”
“I’ve just given the order to proceed through the Gate.”
Alexander had wanted to hold back on passing through the Gate until they were more certain of how they would be received, until contact with the aliens was established, but it was too late for that now.
