Star Strike

by Ian Douglas

  But in the final analyses, the Marine Corps was not a democracy, any more than was the chain of command on board a Navy warship. One voice was needed to give the orders; one mind was required to make the necessary decisions.

  He wanted their input, but ultimately, this decision was his, and his alone.

  “Okay, people,” he said, speaking into the hard, new silence. “It’s clear that what we lack more than anything else is decent intel. We need to identify, and quickly, the best way to hit the Xul, and to hit them hard, hard enough to draw their interest away from human space.

  “To that end, I’m authorizing increased surveillance on known Xul bases, with an emphasis on astrogational mapping. We need to know where these bases are relative to one another, and how they interconnect.”

  “Sir,” General Austin asked. “Does that include Stargates outside the Commonwealth?”

  “You’re damned straight it does. Keep the ops black. We don’t need any more political problems, here. I’ll get the authorization we need. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I am also authorizing an AI search of all known astronomical databases. I want to compile every bit of data possible that might reveal unexpected or unknown links between known Stargates and known areas of deep space.” He thought a moment, then added, “Include in that search any deep space anomalies or unexplained phenomena that might indicate a Xul presence or interest.” A number of agencies kept track of such data, he knew, though he wasn’t sure if anyone ever actually used it.

  But the data were there, and AI agents could find it, compile it, and present it to the ops planning team. Reports of gamma or x-ray ray bursts, for example, from a particular star system might indicate a normal and natural process—stellar material from a companion star falling onto the surface of a neutron star, for example—or it could indicate the presence of a Xul fleet.

  “So far as ops planning goes, we need to pick one mode of approach and focus on that. So here’s what we’re going to do….”

  12

  2311.1102

  UCS Samar

  In transit, Alighan to Sol

  0730 hrs GMT

  The transport was two weeks out from Sol. For the past four weeks, Ramsey’s sessions with Karla had continued, with hours out of each ship’s day passing in virtual conversations with the AI in a variety of imagined “safe” environs.

  Slowly, he was coming to grips with his ghosts.

  It hadn’t been easy.

  “I don’t know how the Navy pukes stand it, man,” Staff Sergeant Shari Colver told him. “The boredom would drive me straight out the nearest airlock ricky-tick.”

  “Hey, that’s why they spend most of their time in cybehybe,” Ramsey said with a shrug.

  They were sitting in the ship’s lounge, a small and Spartan compartment that combined rec hall with mess deck and was normally reserved for the use of the shipboard in-transit watch. The domed overhead showed a backdrop of stars; if one studied the star patterns closely enough, individual stars appeared to move from hour to hour—the nearest ones, at any rate…but the effect was a lie, an illusion generated by the Samar’s navigational AI.

  The fact of the matter was that it was impossible to see outside of a starship traveling within an Alcubierre space-time bubble.

  In 1994, a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre had first laid the groundwork for the space drive that later bore his name, when his equations demonstrated that—in theory, at least—a wave of distorted space-time, expanding behind and contracting ahead, could carry a spacecraft along at faster-than-light speeds. No basic physics were violated in the movement; Einstein’s prohibitions against FTL had been directed at mass and energy, not at the fabric of space itself, and, in fact, it was eventually determined that the entire universe had naturally expanded faster than the speed of light in the opening moments of its own birth. A ship in the warp of the Alcubierre Metric might slip quietly across flat space-time at the rate of nine light-years per day, but since it was motionless relative to the encapsulated space-time immediately around it, it avoided completely such inconvenient effects as acceleration, relativistic mass increase, or time dilation.

  But by the nature of the space-bending field around it, a vessel under Alcubierre Drive, also was effectively cut off from the universe outside. There were no navigational vid views outside the hull for the simple reason that there was nothing to see out there save the enveloping black. Encased within a bubble of severely distorted space and time, Samar and her passengers remained completely deaf and blind to their surroundings, and the slow-drifting stars electronically painted on the lounge overhead represented the navigational AI’s best guess as to what should be visible outside. It was, in fact, little more than an elaborate planetarium display.

  But even the display of an educated guess was essentially boring, the patterns of stars changing so slowly the novelty wore off after a very few hours.

  Still, Ramsey and the other waking psych-wounded on board tended to spend a lot of their off-hours here. The cool, K0 star circled by Alighan was located in the constellation Ophiuchus, as seen from Sol, and after the first three weeks or so, star patterns in the sky opposite Ophiuchus, ahead of the Samar, had begun to drift into recognizable constellations, albeit shrunken and distorted. Day by day, those constellations opposite Ophiuchus in Earth’s sky, including the easily recognizable sprawl of Orion with the prominent three-in-a-row suns of his belt, became more and more evident.

  Ramsey and Colver were sitting in one of the double lounge recliners, a side-by-side seat that let them watch the stars. They’d been watching Orion, and wondering if Sol was visible yet somewhere within that dusting of stars ahead.

  No wonder, Ramsey thought, passengers and crew alike in A.D. ships spent the passage in cybe-hibe, save for a small, rotating watch. The planetarium display did little but emphasize just how tiny Samar was within a very large galaxy. That sort of thing could wear unpleasantly on the healthiest of minds.

  “Did you ever wonder,” Colver asked him after a long while, “why we’re doing our therapy time shipboard? Why didn’t they just pack us away with everyone else, and start unscrambling our brains once we get home?”

  Ramsey looked around. Three Navy enlisted ratings were playing cards at a table on the other side of the compartment. They didn’t appear to be listening to the two Marines, though the space was small enough that they could have, had they wanted.

  “I never thought about it, no,” Ramsey replied. “I mean, they have the psych AI resident in the ship’s Net, so it’s there and available. They’d need it for ship’s crew, just because the isolation could drive people off the deep end. So, as long as the software’s there anyway…” He shrugged. “Why, is it important?”

  “I dunno. I’ve just been in the Corps long enough to know they do everything for a reason, even if that reason doesn’t make a whole lot of sense up front. I was just wondering if they do it in-transit because we are so isolated out here. No distractions. Nothing to do but count the days until we get home.”

  Ramsey managed a chuckle. “Well, hell. I can just imagine Karla trying to talk to me back at the Ring, and all I want to do is put on my civvies and hit the airlock. The Arean Ring is pretty good for liberty.”

  “You call it Karla?” she asked. “Mine is Karl. For Karl Jung.”

  “Yeah. Depends on whether the patient relates better to men or women. You know, another possible reason for shrinking us out here…they can control what they put in our heads.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Think about it. Out here, it’s just us and our…our memories, right?”

  She nodded. Ramsey didn’t know exactly what had happened to Colver on Alighan, but it was probably one of a relatively few but common problems. Stress shock—what once had been called post-traumatic stress syndrome—or survivor guilt or anxiety attacks or, like Ramsey, she’d lost someone important to her and was dealing now with the depression. Whatever it was, he could
see echoes of grief, fear, and sadness in her eyes.

  He wondered if his own eyes betrayed his inner demons that clearly.

  “Well,” he went on, “if we were back on the Ring—unless they quarantined us all—we’d be going out on liberty and visiting family, getting drunk, getting simmed—”

  “Getting laid,” she put in.

  “Sure, that, too. We’d probably get ten kinds of advice from family and friends back there, all about how to put all the bad memories away, get over it, forget about it, and move on, y’know?”

  “And what they’re telling us here, Karl and Karla, I mean, is that we have to look at the memories. Deal with them.”

  “Yeah. Something like that. Unless we let them mem-wipe us, we’ve got to deal with our shit. We can delay it, we can play all kinds of games, we can pretend it never happened, but, sooner or later, we’ve got to face it.”

  “You sound like Karl.” She smiled.

  “I wonder why?”

  “So you think they don’t want us contaminating our minds with input from our families?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, but they let us talk together. They don’t have us isolated from all human contact. They even have the group sessions, where all of us get together and talk.”

  “True. But then…we’re all in the same boat, literally, right? Same general experiences. Same problems. And Karla, Karl, I mean, is there to facilitate.” He thought about it a moment. “It’s kind of like being in the Corps. We’re all Marines. Family, y’know?”

  “The Green Family.”

  “Yeah. Semper fi….”

  Green Family was a term out of the days before FTL, when Marines deployed starside might be gone for decades, objective. Over the course of the past eight centuries, the Marine Corps had been strongly shaped in certain key ways by the physics of interstellar travel.

  Back at the dawn of Humankind’s migration into space, all that had been known for sure about faster-than-light travel was that it was impossible. Einstein and relativity had convincingly demonstrated that converting all of the mass in the universe into energy would not be enough to accelerate a single atom to the speed of light, much less pass it. If humans wanted to travel to the stars, they would have to settle for decades-long voyages in cybernetic hibernation, on board ships that approached, but could never actually reach, the magic velocity of c. Relativistic time dilation slowed the passage of subjective time, but the fundamental way in which the universe was put together forbade the FTL warp drives of the popular fiction of the time.

  As a result, Marines deployed to the worlds of other stars would return to a culture that had changed dramatically during the intervening decades. Time dilation meant that the Marines might have aged five or six years, subjective, while twenty or thirty years objective had passed on Earth. The resultant temporal isolation had guaranteed that large numbers of Marines simply couldn’t fit in with the civilians they were sworn to protect; while they were out-system, most of the cultural markers they’d known and grown up with had changed. Music, language, fashion, art, politics, technology, everything that connected them with others had transformed, while the people they’d left behind were dead or changed by age.

  More and more, Marines had relied on the Corps as family. A Marine might return from the stars and find that Marines back on Earth possessed a different cultural background, true, but they were still Marines. Somehow, the similarities always outweighed the differences.

  Eventually, of course, Einstein was proved to be a special case within the broader scope of quantum physics, just as Newton had been a special case within the mathematics of relativity. The Stargates had demonstrated that it was possible to bypass enormous gulfs of interstellar space. Encounters with the Xul proved that FTL travel was possible without the Gates, though for centuries no one could figure out how they did it.

  What no one had ever imagined was that, when the problem was finally cracked, there would be not one solution, but many. It was still not known how the Xul hunterships bypassed light, but humans now possessed not one but two non-Gate modes of FTL travel of their own—the Alcubierre Drive and the much more recent paraspace phase-shift transitions, or PPST, used by large structures such as the Corps’ Skybase. And there were suggestions within the wilderness of theoretical physics that promised other modes of FTL travel as well.

  Neither the Alcubierre Drive nor PPST involved acceleration, and, therefore, time dilation didn’t enter into the equation. Voyages between the stars now required weeks or months rather than decades. It was with some surprise, then, that Marine psychologists noted that Marines, enlisted Marines, especially, still failed to connect with the cultures from which they’d emerged.

  There were some who joked that Marines weren’t human to begin with, but the problem was becoming worse and needed to be addressed. The Marines possessed their own culture, their own societal structure, language, calendar and timekeeping system, heroes, economy, history, goals, and concerns.

  Most Marines would have pointed out that this had always been the case, going at least as far back as the global wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The psychs didn’t need to invoke star travel to suggest that Marines were different…or that most of them gloried in the difference.

  As an ancient Corps aphorism had it, there are only two kinds of people: Marines, and everyone else.

  Ramsey leaned back in his chair, watching the almost imperceptible drift of the nearest stars on the overhead. Thea’s death still burned in his gut, hot, sullen, and he still tended to flinch when he let his mind slip back to the final moments of the firefight on the skyscraper roof, to the sight of her battlesuit torn open and bloody as he cradled her, as he watched her consciousness slip away. He didn’t know if he could ever heal….

  Awkwardly, he lifted his arm and placed it along the back of the reclining seat, behind Colver’s head. She moved a little closer to him, her leg touching his, and he let his arm drape over her shoulders. They continued to watch the illusion of stars.

  Whatever happened, he knew he had family—the Green Family—and, for the moment, at least, that was enough.

  * * * *

  PanEuropean Military Hospital Facility

  1530/31:05 hours, local time

  “Lieutenant?” a woman’s voice said in her head. “Lieutenant Lee? Can you hear me?”

  Lieutenant Tera Lee opened her eyes—then squeezed them tight once more as the blast of light speared its way into her skull. “Where the hell am I?”

  “You’re in the medical facility at Port-de-Paix.”

  “Where…where is that?…”

  “You’re at Aurore. Perhaps you know it as Theta Bootes IV? Actually, we’re on Aurore’s inner moon. We brought you here from the star system you call Puller.”

  The words were spoken within Lee’s mind, coming through her cranial implants, and that fact alone was…disturbing.

  Aurore, Lieutenant Lee knew, was deep in the heart of the PanEuropean Republic, the fourth planet circling a hot, F7 V star some 48 light-years from Sol, a world of broad oceans, rugged mountains, stunning auroral displays from which it took its name, and a trio of large moons. At least, that’s how it was described on the Worlds of Humankind database she’d studied back in the Naval Academy.

  It was also the capital of the Republic…and what the hell was she doing here when her last memories were of being adrift at Starwall, umpteen thousands of light-years from the listening post at Puller 659?

  “How…long?…” Her lips were cracked and dry, and her throat was sore. She was aware of terrible pain, but at a distance, held at bay, she imagined, by whatever anodynanomeds they’d given her.

  “Please don’t try to talk,” the woman’s voice said. “I’m using your implant channels to communicate with you directly. If you focus your words in your mind, I will hear you.”

  The security implications of that were ominous. How had the PEs gotten hold of her personal comchannels?

  F
or that matter, what the hell was she doing at the PE capital in the first place?

  “How long have you been here?” the voice in her head continued. “You were brought on board the Sagitta, one of our light cruisers, on the third of November. That was about three weeks ago. You arrived at the Theta Bootes system yesterday. You’ve been in deep cybernetic hibernation since your…exposure to radiation somewhere beyond the Puller Stargate.

  “You were very, very badly burned. I’m told your condition was beyond the scope of the small base where you were stationed. If our task force had not arrived when it did, if your commanding officer had not chosen to communicate with us, your condition would have deteriorated to the point where you would have been an irretrievable.”

  Major Tomanaga had called in the Europeans? That didn’t sound right.

  “Who are you?” Lee asked. “And why the hell should I want to talk to you?”

  “I am Monique Sainte-Jean. You may think of me as your…your therapist. You have been unconscious for a very long time, and we want to be sure you awake with your mind, memories, and personality intact, non?”

  Alarm bells were figuratively ringing in Lee’s mind, now. As a rule, she’d paid scant attention to interstellar politics, but she had been thoroughly briefed before her deployment to the Puller star system. The Puller system, she knew, was uninhabited and of zero importance to anyone, with the single exception of the Puller Gate.

  The Gate’s connections had been explored in the half-dozen years following its discovery, some three decades earlier. A total of twelve established gatepaths had been uncovered there, one of them the route to the large Xul base at Starwall.

  The problem with the stargates was that the multiple paths to other stars they provided never seemed to go to anyplace known or useful. All appeared to open at gates circling other stars scattered across the Galaxy, from the outer halo to the Galactic Core itself, but until more was known about those possible destinations—and whether or not entering them would alert the Xul to Humankind’s presence—it had been decided to avoid using them entirely.