Star Strike

by Ian Douglas

  Chesty2, as an artificially sentient software package, was both powerful and sophisticated in terms of creative scope, but there was no room in his coding matrix for such data-extravagant luxuries as emotion. He could not feel fear or excitement as the chorus sounded and resounded about him, speaking of the patterning of a host of alien soul-minds from an artifact identified as Argo. He couldn’t even feel the thrill of recognition when he touched a familiar pattern of code indeed…another artificial intelligence that called itself Perseus.

  But Chesty could and did recognize the seriousness of the encounter, and its importance to Humankind.

  Earth had to be warned, and swiftly……or “Species 2824” might very soon become extinct.

  8

  2410.1102

  Lieutenant Tera Lee

  Starwall System

  1609 hrs GMT

  Lieutenant Lee watched the stream of returning data from Chesty3, her alarm growing with each fresh revelation. She could only hear what Chesty was able to translate, but he’d picked several “voices” out of the background chorus and singled them out for special attention.

  And now Lee and Chesty2 listened to the ebb and flow of harmonies from the huntership now drifting a few kilometers away, an eerie symphony of voices crying out, echoing one another, merging, branching, merging once more. The Xul knew of Humankind’s modest pocket of habitation in the Orion Arm, knew that it had destroyed several of their hunterships in the past, knew it represented a threat, at least in principle, to Xul long-term survival.

  This last made absolutely no sense to Lee. How could beings as powerful and as technologically advanced as the Xul feel threatened by the insignificant likes of Homo sapiens? Still, the fact that they believed it was significant.

  It was vital that she get this data back to the listening post.

  But actually pulling that off was going to be a bit more difficult than thinking it. The Night Owl was falling directly away from the Stargate at a relative velocity of 217 meters per second—a bit over 700 kph. To return to the other side of the local Gate, she needed to kill that speed, then accelerate back the way she’d come. But as soon as Chesty2 powered up the Owl’s drive, they risked immediate detection.

  Normally, this wouldn’t have been a problem. The main Xul base in the Starwall system was some twelve light-seconds distant, ten times the distance between Earth and Earth’s moon. Lee could have reversed course and slipped back through the gate before the Xul ever realized she’d been there.

  That was not a good option, though, with a Xul huntership ten kilometers off her beam. For long seconds, she watched that other ship as it slowly drifted farther and farther astern, willing it to switch on its own drive and vanish into the blaze of starlight ahead. Damn it, what were they playing at over there? They’d come through the Gate from the gods alone knew where; why didn’t they now move in-system, to dock with the Xul base here?

  The longer she waited, though, the more she wondered if the Xul huntership had been deliberately parked there, squarely above the center of the Gate’s opening, as a sentinel, as a guard on perimeter watch. It made sense; if the Xul were now suddenly concerned about Species 2824, they might be taking extra security precautions at all of their gateway bases. Or, worse, they might already know that humans possessed a listening post accessible through this gate—659—and be guarding against exactly such reconnaissance missions as Lee was now carrying out.

  “Chesty3 reports that he cannot access more deeply without risking discovery,” Chesty2 told her, a whisper in her mind. “He suggests that he remain in place as a rear guard while we attempt the vector change. He will wait to dissociate until after we pass through the Gate.”

  Lee thought about this, but didn’t like it. Like most Marines, she thought of the Chesty iterations as sentient and autonomous life forms—artificial, perhaps, but as much alive and aware in terms of their thought processes as any organic life form. There were cybernetic tech specialists and theoreticians who would have disagreed with her, of course; the debate over whether a string of software commands and associated data clusters was alive or merely mimicking life through clever responses had been raging unabated in those circles for the entirety of the current millennium. The Turing Test, that ancient assessment of machine intelligence, said far more about human programming skills than it did about the presence or the nature of sentience itself.

  Leaving Chesty3 behind was tantamount, in her mind, to leaving behind a fellow Marine.

  “It’s not the same, Lieutenant Lee,” Chesty2 whispered in her thoughts, apparently reading them. “We would have left him in any case. Beaming a data package requires duplication. What remains behind must dissociate in order to avoid detection.”

  “I know, I know,” she snapped, angry. “I understand all that. But it’s not as though I have to like it.”

  “I do not understand the distinction.”

  “No.” She sighed. “No, you wouldn’t. Damned soulless machine….”

  Chesty3 had been an exact copy of Chesty2, beamed into the Xul huntership as a subtle modulation of an existing RF carrier wave. That identity had ended, of course, the instant Chesty3 began to experience—and to record—events different from those experienced by Chesty2 back on board the Night Owl, but Chesty2 was being brought up to speed as the data from Chesty3 continued to stream back across the ten-kilometer gap between them.

  From the points of view of the two AIs, there was no point to “rescuing” Chesty3 from the Xul ship. Neither Chesty2 nor his duplicate possessed significant information about Sol or humanity, but it was good technique to leave behind no traces of the recon. Intelligence work was all about assembling small bits of discrete data from many discrete sources, like a jigsaw puzzle, to build a coherent picture of enemy plans or activities, and no one knew just how good the Xul were at that ancient game.

  “Chesty3 suggests we move quickly,” Chesty2 told her. “I concur. We are already beginning to push the safety factor for organic systems in respect to the local radiation fields.”

  She checked the time readout. The AI was right, damn him. She’d been on this side of the Gate for nearly twelve minutes now. Depending on how hard she decelerated, then boosted for the Stargate, she might well be up against the forty-minute stay time allowed for this mission.

  “There’s some wiggle room in the safety factor,” she said. “And we can’t do this suddenly, or our Xul friends over there will have us nailed to the wall. Here’s what I want to try….”

  In swift, concise thoughts, Lee explained what she wanted to do. The AI sounded dubious. “Shutting down life support could expose you to a fatal dose of radiation. I cannot comply.”

  “Nonsense. The hull will shield me long enough. As long as we get back through the Gate in, oh, half an hour or so.”

  “I trust you are aware of the old military aphorism, Lieutenant, the one declaring that no plan survives contact with the enemy.”

  “And Murphy’s Law applies too. I know, Chesty. But if we just cut and run, that huntership over there will be on top of us before we move three meters.”

  “I am required to protect you from—”

  “You are required, Chesty, to see to it that the mission succeeds. Right now, that is your only directive. Is that understood?”

  “Understood.” The inflection of Chesty’s mental voice was neutral, but she could still hear a certain reluctance. Or was that her projection of emotions into an AI interface?

  It didn’t matter. She didn’t like the possible ramifications of her idea, either, but right now it was all they had to work with.

  “Systems are ready for implementation, Lieutenant. At your word.”

  “Very well. Implement. Now….”

  An instant later, the surface of the Night Owl began to shift, blur, and change.

  Nanoflage had been a standard technology within the human military inventory for centuries. Beginning with photoreactive paints late in the twentieth century, objects like body arm
or or vehicles could be set to reflect ambient light and color in such a way that the article in question blended in nearly seamlessly with its surroundings, no matter what the current lighting conditions. At night, it was black; by daylight, it reflected the surrounding colors of desert, jungle, or ocean.

  Eventually, camouflage paint became a thin layer of smart molecules that rearranged themselves to change the object’s color, reflectivity, and even texture in response to the surroundings. With sufficient processing power, provided by long-chain molecules designed to process data like submicroscopic computers, light could actually be absorbed by the paint on one side of the object and re-emitted at the correct angle on the other, providing effective invisibility.

  There were still serious limitations inherent in that bit of technological trickery, however. It worked well for small objects at long range and for long wavelengths only; the old dream of rendering a man invisible was still pure fantasy. The outer surface of the Night Owl was indeed invisible at microwave and radar wavelengths, but the technique still couldn’t be applied to larger craft. Phase-shifting was another high-tech bit of protective camouflage, but that took a hell of a lot of power, and was not one hundred percent effective, either as camouflage or as shielding.

  But what the Night Owl could do was rearrange the outer layers of its hull, transforming that sleek and light-drinking surface into something rough, rugged, and dusty-looking, giving it an appearance radically different from the sleek, black set of curves it exhibited now.

  At the same time, Lee applied a full one hundred gravities of thrust for a fraction of a second, killing the Owl’s forward momentum and putting it on a new vector, moving back toward the Stargate at a bit over 500 kilometers per hour. As an added bit of camouflage, she put the FR-100 into a gentle tumble, setting the blazing panorama of stars and nebulae into a slow spin about her head. Then she shut down all power, including shielding and even her life support.

  She had enough air inside the cockpit to last for several hours. More serious was the lack of magnetic shielding. The adaptable nanosurface of the ship would handle some of the radiation sleeting across the hull, but not all of it, and not for long. She was already being burned, though she felt nothing…yet.

  To any observer on the outside, however, the tiny spacecraft now looked precisely like a three-meter-long planetoid—a dusty, cracked, and rugged lump of nickel iron adrift in space. That sudden burst of energy would have been detected by the Xul, of course; the question was how closely they’d been monitoring their immediate surroundings. In its earlier configuration, the FR-100 would have been invisible at a range of 10 kilometers, but by changing vector she’d just done the equivalent of sending up a flare.

  The question now was just how paranoid the Xul actually were—and how observant. Would they dismiss that brief burst of neutrinos as an anomaly, the random product of that brilliant background of massed stars? Or would they associate it with what appeared on the surface to be a lifeless and tumbling bit of rock?

  She waited. The Owl’s computer network used only a trickle of energy, as easily shielded as the electrical field of her own body, so she was able to continue watching through Chesty2’s electronic senses, monitoring the Xul huntership. So far, there’d been no response…not yet…

  The tumble threatened to make her dizzy. “Can you adjust the visual input for the spin?”

  “Affirmative.” And the tumble seemed to cease from her vantage point, though the Night Owl continued to fall end over end. She was facing the Stargate, now fifteen kilometers ahead and slowly growing larger. The Xul huntership was a flattened oval in the distance, slowly passing her on her left. There’d been no reaction whatsoever that she could detect.

  “A message from Chesty3,” Chesty2 told her. “The Xul—”

  She never heard the message, because suddenly the alien machine was there, twenty meters away, a flattened ovoid sprouting unevenly planted tentacles like black whips. Three of those tentacles snapped out and grasped the Night Owl, and with the inertial damping fields down, she felt the gut-wrenching jolt as the ship’s tumble was arrested, and as the alien machine decelerated.

  On several occasions, Marines had fought Xul combat machines—in the bowels of hunterships at Sirius and at Sol, and within the depths of a Xul space station at Night’s Edge—and always they seemed to be variations on this same theme, egg-shaped, with bumps and swellings and convolutions, with sensory lenses and implanted tentacles in patterns that appeared to differ from one individual to another. This model possessed a single, very large sensor, a glittering crystal as big across as a dinner plate, and the thing appeared to be narrowly watching her with a cold and unblinking gaze.

  Lee stifled a raw instinct to scream, to thrash, to struggle, to fight; from her perspective, the monster was holding her in the implacable grasp of its manipulators. The thing could easily drag her back to the Xul ship for a more lingering inspection…or it could blast her into randomly drifting atoms right here. She could see the snouts of several plasma weapons protruding from that black, slick shell.

  The Xul inspection lasted only a second or two…and then it released her. Stunned, she watched it recede once more, rapidly dwindling toward the huntership in the distance.

  “Looks like we passed inspection,” she managed to say after a few shaky moments.

  “There is a problem, however,” Chesty2 told her. “That machine has reduced your velocity. Unless you accelerate, you will not reach the Stargate for another two hours, forty-seven minutes.”

  “Great.”

  “I do not understand your use of that word. The ambient radiation levels are already harming you physiologically.”

  She sighed. “It’s called sarcasm. Can you get this thing back through to the listening post?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then do it. Deliver everything from Chesty3 you can extract.” She could feel something already, that faint, scratchy tingle that presaged a sunburn at the beach. This was going to be bad….

  * * * *

  Marine Listening Post

  Puller 659 Stargate

  1904 hrs GMT

  The alarm went off and Gerard Fitzpatrick nearly fell out of his commlink couch. He’d been discussing the situation with Chesty, preparing to send out a follow-up probe, when an FR-100 transponder had lit up half a kilometer this side of the Gate. He started to check the ID, but Chesty confirmed it before he could link through.

  “It’s Lieutenant Lee’s Night Owl,” Chesty told him in maddeningly even tones. “I am linking with my uploaded counterpart now…”

  “Well? What does he say, damn it?”

  “Lieutenant Lee’s mission was successful. They electronically penetrated a Xul huntership and have confirmed that news of Argo’s capture had extended to the Xul base at Starwall, at the very least. They have also made contact with the AI from the Argo, which should prove to be informative. Lieutenant Lee is a casualty.”

  “Oh, Christ. How bad?”

  “Not good. The radiation flux within the Starwall system is—”

  “I know, damn it! How is she?”

  “Alive. Barely. My counterpart informs me she may be near death….”

  “Well, scramble a work pod, damn it! Drag her in here!”

  “Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, I must advise against that. The Night Owl is itself highly radioactive. We could contaminate the entire—”

  “Chesty, I’ve got the watch, okay? That puts me in command of this listening post. Patch a Class-One emergency NL call through to Major Tomanaga. Upload the data Tera brought back, and tell him I’ve gone out to retrieve the lieutenant’s ship.”

  “But—”

  “That’s a goddamn fucking order!”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the AI replied, with rigidly correct service protocol.

  Fitzpatrick knew he could buck the decision up to the Old Man—Major George Tomanaga at the LP’s main station two light-hours away. Either Tomanaga would immediately order him to send out
robotic tugs to bring the lieutenant in—in which case, why the hell wait? Or he would delay while he conferred with his superiors at paraside HQ, which could mean hours of delay, hours that Lieutenant Lee did not have. Or he would say no, order Fitzpatrick to sit tight until properly equipped tugs could arrive from the main base, and that would take God-knew how long. Work tugs with rad screening were not exactly interplanetary greyhounds.

  And Fitzpatrick was going out after her now, no matter what. This way, if the Old Man flashed back an order to him to sit tight, he wouldn’t have to disobey it.

  A small but very guilt-feeling part of him was telling him that he should have gone on the sneak-and-peek, not her. Damn it, if she died….

  In a way, things had been easier in the old days, before the widespread introduction of nonlocal communications. A few centuries ago, he would have flashed off his intent to go pick up Tera, gone, and been back at the LP long before his message had even reached HQ. Having faster-than-light communications was a royal pain in the ass, since it invited micromanagement by the jerk-off remfies in their comfortable habitats far from the point of action.

  Well, the hell with orders, and the hell with the remfs. Marines did not leave their own behind….

  * * * *

  USMC Skybase

  Paraspace

  2355 hrs GMT

  “General Alexander. Please wake up.”

  Cara’s voice brought Alexander upright in bed. “This had better be goddamned important,” he mumbled aloud.

  Tabatha rolled over at his side. “Mmph. Martin? What is it?”

  “Call from the office, Tabbie,” he said, caressing her thigh. “Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.”

  “I’ll get us caff.” Nude, she slid out of bed and made her way in the near darkness to the bedchamber door.

  He sighed. “Thanks, kitten.” Though they’d not formally married, Tabatha Sahir had been his domestic partner for a good many years, now, and she knew what a call from his assistant at this hour almost certainly meant.