“So that’s what a near-Transcendence civilization builds when it feels like it,” she said.
“Guess they can’t blow all their dough on booze and hookers,” Fromm said, starling a laugh out of her.
“Guess not.”
“Either they’ve hidden all their weapon hardpoints extremely well, or they don’t have any,” he went on. “And I believe a lot of things, but not that a station that size is unarmed. Not in this universe.”
“Yeah. Maybe some of those wings are weapon mounts. Or maybe those statues just come to life and attack intruders.”
He chuckled. “That’d be something.”
“It’s also a honking great big station, Peter. They could have a thousand hundred-inch guns in internal mounts and we’d never spot them until they rolled them out.”
“True.”
There was very little ship traffic nearby, and other than the Brunhild and her escorts, it was all shuttle-sized, downright microscopic at that scale. Most of Xanadu’s shipping happened away from the Habitat for Unique Diversity, in fifteen conventional stardocks built near the entry points of the system’s multitude of warp lines, all within two light-seconds from the main structure. That fact begged a lot of questions. Warp line terminus points tended to occur close to planets within a couple Astronomical Units of their main star. Sol System’s five warp gateways for example, were all located around Earth, Mars or Venus. Those wrinkles in spacetime followed those planets along their orbital paths. This habitat, large as it was, didn’t generate enough natural gravity to hold onto those gateways, and yet they followed it slavishly. That suggested they were created rather than natural, and no known technology could do that. Something else to think about.
Xanadu’s system was a desert of sorts. Other than the station itself, its only other components were a sparse asteroid belt about six AU from its star, and the quark star itself. Quark stars were so dense that normal atoms or even subatomic neutrons couldn’t exist within its closely-packed confines. The ten-kilometer wide sphere packed as much mass as Sol and generated an equivalent gravitational field. It was a tiny blue dot at this distance, and didn’t provide any meaningful illumination. Which meant all the light and energy in habitat was being generated by other means.
There was no Tah-Leen fleet in evidence, either. The intelligence reports had claimed Xanadu’s inhabitants didn’t have starships of their own.
And yet they have destroyed anybody who’s come here looking for trouble, she thought, feeling downright humbled, both by the sight of the artificial planet and the might it implied. All their hopes and plans seemed childish in the face of the ancient aliens’ works.
“If they were all that great, they’d be ruling over half the known galaxy by now, or would have transcended like everyone else their age, at least the ones that didn’t end up getting blown up along the way,” Fromm noted, picking up on her mood and countering it with his typical pragmatism. “Just because they can build big doesn’t mean they’re gods. This is a tiny remnant of an empire. At some point they ran into somebody or something tougher than them, and they ended up huddled up in a corner of the galaxy.”
She smiled at him. “Spoken like a true Marine. Have you drafted an attack plan to take the station yet?”
“This is a diplomatic mission, remember?”
“I thought your job was to estimate capabilities, not judge intent,” she said sweetly, paraphrasing a similar conversation they had on Jasper-Five, on another diplomatic mission. He’d said something similar mere minutes before they had to fight for their lives against the local ‘friendlies.’
“There is that,” he admitted. “Well, give me enough jump-rated Marines to catapult a three-division assault near its main power facilities, and we can probably take this oversized clubhouse, or at least shut down the lights. Assuming we have decent blueprints of where all the important bits are. Depends on what sort of internal defenses they have, of course. Maybe it’s more of a four division job. Or maybe it would take more Marines than we’ve got.”
“In other words, you have no idea.”
“Just by looking at a giant piece of spun glass and gold trimmings? Of course not. I thought your job was to provide us grunts with actionable intelligence,” he added with a grin of his own.
“Well, there is that.”
Smith’s sudden death had left Heather in charge of the CIA assets within the diplomatic mission. Herself and June Gillespie, in other words, armed with those experimental tachyon devices that might or might not give them an edge. And perhaps some unofficial help from Lisbeth Zhang and her own bizarre abilities. The warp pilot’s classes during the voyage here had proven invaluable. Even June was willing to try out the new toys, needs must. Heather hoped it wouldn’t come to that, though. Wars were uncertain enough affairs even when you had a good idea of your enemy’s strengths. Dealing with a complete unknown would be catastrophic for at least one side of such a conflict.
Peter’s grunt alerted her that something was wrong even before she saw the large starship emerging behind the massive space habitat, looking like a tiny speck by comparison until her imp zoomed in and brought it into focus. The ship’s outline was sinuously organic, long and narrow with curves that made her think of a coiled snake. She hadn’t served in the Navy very long, but she’d kept up with the vessel recognition charts that listed the visual profiles of all major powers’ warships.
“That’s a Lamprey dreadnought,” Fromm said. “Either a Class Justice or…”
“A People’s Choice-class,” she said; reciting the information helped steady her nerves a little. “The pointy ‘tails’ on the warp nacelles are the chief visual difference between those two classes. And the smaller ships around it are Hatchling-class frigates. Six of them.”
“Guess they were invited to the party as well. I’m no bubblehead, but I don’t think our destroyer squadron has the chops to take on those ships.”
“It doesn’t. Their combined throw weight might scratch the dreadnought’s paint. Even with our warp shields, we’d be out of luck.”
“And the Tah-Leen let them hide behind their station so we couldn’t detect them even on our final approach. I don’t like surprises. They must have known we wouldn’t be happy about sharing space with them. Great. If our hosts decide they don’t want us around, they don’t even have to spend any ammo to get rid of us. They can let the Lampreys intercept us on our way back to the warp exit point and blow us all to hell. The destroyers might get away, but not this civvie boat.”
“Guess we’ll have to be extra-charming,” Heather said.
His hand squeezed hers. “Or extra sneaky.”
She grinned. “Count on it.”
There were bad days in this job. And then there were days when you might have to tackle a quarter-million-year-old species with some borrowed Starfarer tech and an experimental device that had already proven to kill thirty-three point-three percent of its early adopters.
She had a feeling one of those days might be coming up.
* * *
Lisbeth Zhang checked her uniform one more time after using her imp to provide her with yet another three-sixty view of herself in her dress blues. She always liked to look her best during formal functions. Humans being what they were, making a good impression for some VIP could do more for your career than a row of commendations. Making a good impression with the higher-ups and having several rows of commendations was even better, of course.
A part of her wished her dress uniform included a standard issue pistol, but Sec-State had been adamant about behaving like proper dignitaries. Everyone on the Secretary’s Security Detail would be packing, of course, and most of the Marine company aboard the Brunhild were standing by in full battle-rattle, ready to serve as a reaction force, just in case. Sharing the station, no matter how big it was, with a Lamprey fleet had made everyone more than a little jumpy. But having everybody show up with weapons would only reinforce the stereotype of humans as uncouth barbarians. Most St
arfarers had something very similar to the Russian concept nekulturny and put a great deal of stock in it. Inappropriate behavior was, to many of them, a worse crime than murder or cannibalism. Little was known about the Tah-Leen, but odds were they would be just as punctilious as your average Eet.
Nobody knew for sure. Hell, nobody knew what the damn Snowflakes looked like, even. Woogle didn’t have any visual depictions of the species, which meant no Starfarer had seen them and lived to tell the story or post their pics on social media. Or if any had, they had decided not to share the information with anybody, although that was highly unlikely. Secrets leaked; that was true across the known galaxy.
Lisbeth had monitored the space traffic control communications between the Tah-Leen and the American ships. The controllers had looked human and spoken perfect English. Intercepts from other ships in the system (about a dozen from a bunch of different species were in Xanadu at the moment, making transit well away from the main habitat) had revealed each of them had been addressed by space traffic controllers that looked and sounded like the primary species of each particular vessel. All of which was par for the course in Xanadu. The thousands of ships that used the system as a jump-off point were greeted only by mirror images of their crews. The Snowflakes probably used artificially-generated graphic filters to avoid showing their real faces.
After the Brunhild had docked, with the escort destroyers holding station near the space habitat, its passengers had been asked to wait until a formal welcome reception to be held in three hours. Plenty of time for everyone to get dressed and make preparations for what amounted to First Contact with what probably was the oldest living species in the galaxy.
Not the kind of shindig a Marine major gets invited to, except maybe as staff for someone of flag rank, or maybe to serve canapes. A mistake here would not only happen in front of several people with the power to ruin her life and career (for the second and likely the final time), but it might lead to an interstellar incident that could cost humanity its very existence. Better be on my best behavior. No spitting on the mat or calling the cat a bastard, or whatever the Tah-Leen equivalents are.
Her imp signaled her; it was time to join the shore party. They were assembling at one of the luxury liner’s ballrooms, from which they would head to the main passenger airlock, large enough to fit all hundred and twenty of them comfortably. From there, they would come aboard the Tah-Leen habitat proper. Their hosts had assured them – via another ersatz human speaker – that the environment waiting for them would be ideal for human comfort, so there would be no need for any haz-con equipment or nanite injections. All the military personnel and most of the VIPs would have discreetly-concealed emergency survival systems, of course.
The waiting dignitaries coalesced into three distinct groups as they arrived. The genuine Very Important Persons dominated the center of the ballroom, quietly talking among themselves, men and women both attired in dark business suits, cut in styles that had been fashionable before First Contact and remained so over the past century and a half, in no small part because a near-majority of today’s movers and shakers could remember that bygone era. The dozen or so VIPs were surrounded by twice as many lackeys and some thirty Security Detail agents, orbiting their bosses and principals like so many escort vessels around a dreadnought.
A second group of lower-level flunkies – translators, consultants and the like – were off to one side, not important enough to rub elbows with their betters. Heather was among them, having an animated conversation with someone Lisbeth’s imp identified as an expert in Starfarer protocol.
The smallest group in the bunch beckoned to Lisbeth like a traffic transponder: uniformed personnel, including Captain Fromm and all his company officers, except for the XO, who was staying behind to command the reaction force aboard the Brunhild. The Commander of DESRON 91, Captain Naomi Benchley, was also there, although she could have just as easily been rubbing elbows with the VIPs, being the second seniormost military officer present. General Gage was the number one, and he was hanging out with the Secretary.
She exchanged salutes with her fellow officers before mingling with them. Captain Benchley resumed the conversation she was having with Captain Fromm.
“It looks like the latest Imperium probe into Wyrashat space means business,” Benchley said. “That’s going to be the next main theater of operations, you can count on it. And all we’ve got to back up the Wyrms is the Human Expeditionary Force: a battleship division, plus a handful of cruiser squadrons and support and about the same number of Pan-Asian cans, for what they’re worth. Not a good situation.”
“A new carrier strike group is on its way there,” Lisbeth said. “That should help.”
She watched Captain Benchley’s reaction carefully. The Navy was divided into two camps when it came to carrier-based warp fighters. There was the enthusiastic faction that not only wanted more carriers and fighters built, but who wanted to take the latter away from the Marines. And the pessimistic faction that believed that newfangled devices were just a fad that would pass as soon as the enemy figured out countermeasures that rendered the new toys all but useless. This early in the game, there was no middle faction. Maybe after a couple of years went by.
“I only wish they had more to send,” Benchley replied.
A carrier partisan, then, Lisbeth decided with some relief.
“Hell, I wish they’d given us a light carrier for this cruise,” the Navy captain went on. “Might have given us a chance to fight our way out of this system, if it comes to that.”
“Getting enough pilots is going to be our biggest problem,” Lisbeth said. “The training required is…” She wandered off for a few seconds, images of what happened during some of the training failures flashing past her eyes. “Let’s just say you can’t take shortcuts.”
The other officers eyed her with a mixture of respect and wariness. Over the last few months, warp fighter pilots had eclipsed navigators as the most ‘out there’ occupational specialty in all branches of the service. They probably wouldn’t be surprised if she started telling people’s fortunes, or howling at the moon for that matter.
“Well, let’s just hope we can deploy enough to keep the Imperium off our backs.”
“Amen to that.”
“We’ve been cleared to enter the Habitat for Unique Diversity,” a voice piped in via her imp. “Please proceed to the exit as indicated.”
The gathering became a procession of sorts, spearheaded by the State Department delegation. The Security Detail was right behind them, followed closely by the military officers. The rest of the invitees brought up the rear. Normally the security officers would go first, but under the circumstances it’d been decided such a display would show distrust and, more importantly, fear. So the VIPs were going to be the first to venture into the wolf’s lair. A refreshing change of pace, as far as Lisbeth was concerned.
Say what you would about their choice of transport, but the Brunhild was at least designed to allow large numbers of people to walk around its innards in relative comfort. Trying to move over a hundred mostly-civilian passengers in the cramped corridors that predominated even inside dreadnoughts would have been downright painful. The group made it to the oversized airlock without anybody bumping into a bulkhead, and there was only a slight delay as the equally large station airlock – baroquely-decorated gold and silver overlapping doors, covered in fancy bass-reliefs of what could be monsters or perhaps the mysterious Tah-Leen themselves – slid open, revealing a single greeter standing on the other side.
A single, apparently human greeter.
The woman that met the diplomatic party looked perfectly normal, other than being on the tall side, topping a good six-five despite wearing sandals. Light olive-skin, hazel eyes and jet-black hair could have belonged to any of a dozen ethnic groups or nationalities on Earth. There was no way this was an alien in its original body. Starfarers were humanoid more often than not, with nine of the seventeen major species in the known
galaxy following the same body plan as humans – bilaterally symmetrical bipeds – but nobody looked exactly like anyone else.
Just for the hell of it, Lisbeth tried to access the woman’s profile. Just about every human in the universe had one, either via Facettergram or one of the handful lesser services trying to compete with the social media giant. Most Starfarers had equivalent systems and compatible public profiles as well. All she got from her imp query was a ‘Profile Set to Private’ message, which could mean a dozen different things. No help there.
Human or not, the woman was extremely beautiful even for an American, where thanks to modern medicine only the very poor or very eccentric were unattractive. If she ever got tired of working for the Tah-Leen, she could make a living as a fashion model. She was wearing a charmingly-archaic ankle-length tunic, closely fitted and dyed black with a vertical ochre stripe adding a dash of color. The tunic was fastened at the shoulder with a golden brooch and belted tightly right below its wearers’ breasts. A shawl over her head, the curly hairdo, and the somewhat crude golden jewelry she wore made the woman look like an actor in a historical media production set in Biblical or Classical times.
“Welcome,” the seemingly Terran female said. “The Tah-Leen are delighted to have you aboard the Habitat for Unique Diversity, Jewel of Xanadu, Home to All True Individuals. We celebrate diversity, self expression, and individuality above all things. We, a rainbow of infinite colors, bid you welcome, for in welcoming you we are, for once, united and speaking as one.”
Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3) Page 10
