by Ian Douglas
Ever since the discovery of the very first gate at Sirius, astronomers, cosmologists, and physicists from every human starfaring government had been clamoring for the chance to use the Gates as research tools—opportunities to explore close-up such cosmic wonders and enigmas as black holes, neutron stars, the large-scale structure of the entire Galaxy, and the weird zoo of mysterious phenomena ticking away at the Galaxy’s heart. Since a significant number of those paths—two-hundred or so—led to Xul-occupied systems, and since the Xul appeared to use the far-flung network of Gate connections for their own long-range movement through the Galaxy, the various interstellar governments had agreed at the Treaty of Chiron in 2490 not to permit any human movement through the gates for any reason, without the fully informed consent of all starfaring governments.
And that was why the Puller Listening Post, and all of the others like it, were illegal, at least within the often murky arena of international treaty law. Under the auspices of the DCI2, the Department of Commonwealth Interstellar Intelligence, the Marines had been tapped to build and operate the system of listening posts…and as part of that operation, they routinely sent robotic probes and even—upon occasion and when necessary—manned surveillance spacecraft to keep an eye on the various identified Xul bases.
“My therapist, huh?” Lee replied. “Since when is the Direction Général interested in the emotional health of junior Marine officers?”
The DGSE—Direction Général de la Sécurité Extraterrestrial—was the Franco-PanEuropean counterpart to the DCI2. It was a guess on Lee’s part, but Ste.-Jean had to be either military or Federal-Republic civilian intelligence, and the DGSE was the largest and best funded of all of the Republic’s intelligence organizations.
The long silence that followed her jab suggested that she’d been on-target, or close to it. She might be consulting with her superiors on a different channel, or with a military intelligence AI.
“Very well,” Ste.-Jean said after a moment. “Perhaps we should play this in a more, ah, straightforward fashion. As it happens, I am DST, not DGSE, but it was a good guess on your part.”
The DST was the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, a kind of civil police intelligence unit tasked with keeping tabs on people, organizations, and traffic within French territory that could pose a threat to the government. Other Terran nationalities within the PanEuropean Republic had their own intelligence organizations, the Germans and British especially, but the French held the lion’s share of planetary colonies within the Republic, and they claimed the Puller system as their own, even if the place wasn’t populated.
“Yeah, well,” Lee said in her mind. “I don’t think I have anything to say to you.”
“Not even in exchange for our medical assistance?” Ste. Jean said. “Look. I will be honest with you. We know all about your observation post at the Puller gas giant. And we know that you went through the stargate in that system to investigate a Xul base. Your government, it seems, has much to answer for…beginning with the arrogant breaking of solemn interstellar treaty, and with placing the security, even the very survival of all human worlds at grave risk. You needn’t worry, Lieutenant. We have brought no charges against you…at least, not yet. We recognize that you were simply doing what your superiors told you to do…and were caught in the middle, yes?”
“If you say so.”
“However, we do require your cooperation. We want to know exactly what you saw and experienced on the other side of the gate. And we want your cooperation in identifying Marine installations that we suspect are imbedded within other Stargate systems in sovereign PanRépublique space.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
That response elicited another long silence.
Lee managed to open her eyes, and this time she could keep them open. She was lying in what obviously was a hospital bed, her body completely enclosed in a plastic sheath that left only her face exposed. Unable to move, she couldn’t see much of the room, but it appeared to be sterile, white, and lacking in any amenities whatsoever. She couldn’t even see a door.
Presumably, they had her body hooked up with tubes for feeding, for medication, and for waste removal, though she couldn’t feel much of anything from her neck down save for that general, far-off-in-the-background sense of pain. Presumably, too, her bloodstream was now crawling with nanoagents—microscopic devices programmed to busily swarm through her circulatory system and repair the damage caused by her exposure to the Galactic Core’s radiation fields, but they might be programmed for other things as well.
The big question of the moment was how they’d managed to tap into her private internal communications channel. If they could manage that, then theoretically they should be able to download her entire on-board memory. They wouldn’t need to ask her questions or elicit her cooperation; all they’d need to do was pull a full memory dump.
Okay, girl, she thought. Think it through. But keep it low-channel, in case they’re listening in…
If they hadn’t pulled a memory dump, then they didn’t have access to her cerebral link hardware. Tentatively, she tried to connect with Terry, her personal software EA, but the AI resident in her hardware remained silent. She tried again, searching for Chesty or any of his iterations. Again, nothing.
Okay, that suggested they’d deliberately disabled Terry…or that he’d been fried by the Core radiation. Chesty was too large a program to reside within her personal hardware, so he might be off-line because of range. Had her cereblink been damaged on the other side of the Gate?
She ran a fast diagnostic, ignoring the fact that her captors—she thought of them in those terms, now—would be able to monitor what she was doing. There was damage, but her hardware appeared to be more or less complete. The software was running at about forty percent efficiency.
Her personal software might have been taken off-line in order to facilitate her treatment. More likely, her captors had tried to access the software directly while she was unconscious, and either botched it, or caused some physical damage in the retrieval process. If the former, questioning her would be the only alternative they had in order to get the information they wanted. If the latter, they might have a partial memory dump already in-hand, and simply wanted to confirm what they had, or to fill in some missing blanks.
Either way, Lee was in no mood to be helpful.
“That is…unfortunate,” the woman’s voice said, and Lee cursed to herself. Apparently, the PEs had managed to establish quite a deep communications link through her implants, enabling them to read most of her surface thoughts. If Terry or Chesty had been operational, they would have been able to block the intruding channel; hell, Terry would have not only been able to block the intrusion, he’d have been able to impersonate Lee so closely over an electronic net that her interrogators would never have been able to tell the difference. That, after all, was what personal AI secretaries did, among other things.
“We have quite a few different means of getting the information we want,” the woman’s voice went on, relentless. “And we will have it. If you choose to voluntarily cooperate, you will be permitted to return to your people within a few weeks, at most.
“If you refuse, the alternatives could be…distressful. Just think about it. We could vivisect you very slowly, peeling away your skin, your muscles, your tissue bit by bit, and with enough control of your nervous system that you would not be able to lose consciousness at any point in the procedure. And throughout it all, you would never know if what was happening was a virtual simulation being played into your brain…or a horrible and very bloody reality. That is the nature of direct mental feeds, you know. You have no way of knowing what is simulated, and what is real.
“The trouble is, such techniques also violate interstellar treaty, as you know well. Sooner or later you would break and beg us to let you tell us what we wanted to know…but either way, whether we’d tortured you only in your mind or actually cut your body to pieces, we could never allow you to return
to your own people. Even a total mindwipe would not remove all of the emotional scarring from such torture.
“Or…consider this. We could fashion for you an elaborate simulated fantasy…one involving you being rescued by your comrades. You would be freed, be taken back to Earth, and there you would undergo a perfectly natural debriefing by your superiors. Again, how could you tell if what you experienced was real, or a simulation downloaded into your brain?
“And there are other alternatives as well. We have medinano that could suppress your own will and hijack your implants. We could rape your mind and your memory, take from you what we want by force. Unfortunately, I very much doubt that Lieutenant Tera Lee would have much of a personality left when we were done. And, again, that entity, that living shell, could not be permitted to return to Earth, ever. I imagine that shooting it would be a mercy.
“So, think about it, my dear. Imagine the possibilities. Cooperate voluntarily and you will see your home and family again. We might even see our way clear to recompense you generously. The alternatives, you must agree, are far more…unpleasant.”
And then Lee was alone in the hospital room, alone with her thoughts, and her fears.
Where were Major Tomanaga and the rest of the Marines stationed at Puller? Where was Fitzie?
And there was something else, something her interrogator had omitted…and it was suddenly vitally important that Lieutenant Lee not think about it, given that they might well be monitoring her thoughts….
13
2411.1102
USMC Skybase
Dock 27, Earth Ring 7
0950 hrs GMT
“General?” Cara said within his mind. “I think the AI search has found something.”
Lieutenant General Martin Alexander had been seated at his office desk, going over an unsettling report from Intelligence. A Marine—specifically, the Marine who’d gone through the Puller Stargate and discovered that the Xul at Starwall knew of Humankind’s recent activities—was missing.
Worse, it seemed likely that the PanEuropeans were behind the disappearance.
But Cara would not have interrupted his work if this hadn’t been something important. The MIEF staff constellations had been hard at it for almost a week, now. Six days ago, at the ops planning session, he’d given them the outlines of what he wanted, but they still had to churn out the hard data. Actually, he’d not expected any real progress for another week or two yet, so complex was this strategic problem.
“Okay,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Whatcha got?”
“You requested an AI search of astronomical databases, specifically seeking information that might reveal unexpected or unknown links between known Stargates and known areas of deep space.”
“Yes.”
The worst problem the planning team faced at the moment was the lack of hard data on stargates and exactly how they interconnected across the Galaxy. Several ongoing database studies were being carried out by astronomical institutes on dozens of worlds, both in the Commonwealth and elsewhere. Alexander had hoped that the staff planning constellations might be able to mine data from those studies, acquiring a better understanding of just how the various stargates were linked together.
“You also requested,” Cara went on, “a list of anomalies associated with areas we researched…anomalies that might indicate Xul presence or interest.”
“Yes. What did you come up with?”
“The Aquila Anomaly. The information is very old…pre-spaceflight, in fact.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“The name is relatively recent. The information, however, was first gleaned from an astronomical compilation known as the Norton Star Atlas before such information was even available on electronic media. While we can’t be certain at this point in the research, the anomaly is significant enough that we felt it necessary to bring it to human attention.”
“Show me.”
A window opened in his mind, opening on to a view of deep space, scattered with stars—one bright star, five or six somewhat dimmer stars, and a background scattering of stardust.
“This is the constellation of Aquila, as seen from Earth,” Cara told him.
“The Eagle,” Alexander said, nodding. He hadn’t recognized the pattern of stars when it first appeared, but he knew the name.
Lines appeared in the window connecting the brighter stars—a parallelogram above, a triangle below, both slanting off to the right. With great imagination, an observer might imagine a bird of prey, wings raised in flight.
“As with all constellation groupings,” Cara told him, “the identification with a person, animal, or object is problematical, at least from the AI perspective. But an eagle is the historical designation, yes.”
“Beauty, and eagles, are in the eye of the beholder,” Alexander quipped. “That bright star is Altair—Alpha Aquilae.” It was, he knew, a shade over sixteen and a half light-years from Earth, and was one of the nearest outposts of the PanEuropean Republic. Commonwealth military planners had been working on contingency plans focused on how to fight a war with the Republic if things came to that unpleasant juncture. If the Commonwealth went to war with the PanEuropeans, getting past Altair would be their first big strategic requirement.
Cara ignored his sally—AIs had trouble understanding certain concepts, like “beauty”—and continued. “You are aware of the astronomical phenomenon of novae,” the AI said.
“Of course. Stars that explode—become much, much brighter in a short period of time. They’re not as violent as supernovae, of course, but they’re violent enough to cook any planets they might have. A handful are reported every year. Most aren’t naked-eye visible, but there have been a few bright ones.”
“Correct. Most novae appear to occur in close-double star systems, where material from one star is falling into the other. At least, that is the conventional theory, which seems to hold for a majority of the novae studied so far. And, as you say, novae are observed and recorded every year. My AI colleagues went through all such lists, among many others, in pursuance of your authorization for a data search on 1811, six days ago.”
“What did you find?”
“An intriguing fact. During a single thirty-seven-year period in the early twentieth century, a total of twenty bright novae—exploding stars—were observed from Earth.”
“Go on.”
“Five of those twenty novae occurred within the arbitrary boundaries of the constellation Aquila.”
It took a few seconds for the import to sink in. “My God—”
“Twenty-five percent of all observed and recorded novae, in other words, occurred within point two-five percent of the entire sky. This, we feel, is statistically important.
“One of these novae,” Cara went on, as a bright, new star appeared on the skymap just to the west of Altair, “was Nova Aquila. It appeared in the year 1918, and was the brightest nova ever recorded until Nova Carina, almost six centuries later. Two of the other novae appeared in the same year—1936—here, and here.” Two more bright stars appeared as Cara spoke, followed a moment later by two more. “And the last two, here in 1899, and here in 1937.”
“Five novae, though,” Alexander said slowly. He didn’t want to jump to unreasonable conclusions. “That’s still too small a number to be statistically significant.”
“It could be a random statistical clustering, true,” Cara told him. “Statistical anomalies do occur. But the extremely small area of sky involved—one quarter of one percent—seems to argue strongly against coincidence as a factor. And there is this, as well, a datum not available to twentieth-century cosmologists.”
The group of stars showing in Alexander’s mind rotated. The geometric figures of parallelogram and triangle shifted and distorted, some lines becoming much longer, others growing shorter.
A constellation was purely a convenience for Earth-based observers, a means of grouping and identifying stars in the night sky that had nothing to do with their actu
al locations in space. With a very few exceptions, stars that appeared to be close by one another in Earth’s sky—all members of the same constellation, in other words—appeared to be neighbors only because they happened to lie along the same line of sight. That was the fatal flaw in the ancient pseudoscience of astrology; one might as well say that a building on a distant hill, or the sun rising behind it, were physically connected to a house three meters away—or to one’s own hand—simply because they all appeared from a certain viewpoint to overlap.
Rotating the volume of space that included Aquila demonstrated this fact clearly. On a 2D map, the stars of Aquila appeared close together—the three brightest, Altair, Alshain, and Tarazed, for example, lay almost directly side by side in a short, straight line. Viewed from the side, however, Altair—Alpha Aquilae—was only 16.6 light-years from Earth, while Alshain, Beta Aquilae, was 46.6 light-years distant. Both, in fact, were quite close to Sol as galactic distances went. Gamma Aquilae, however, the third brightest star in the constellation and better known as Tarazed, was 330 light-years from Earth. Epsilon was 220 light-years distant; a few others were extremely distant; Eta Aquilae, for instance, was 1,600 light-years away, while dim Nu Aquilae, so distant it vanished off the window to the left when the display rotated, was actually a type F2 Ib supergiant 2,300 light-years distant.
The novae could be expected to show a similar range of distances, but this, Alexander saw, was not the case. They were clustered; Nova Aquila was about 1,200 light-years from Earth. The other four were all positioned at roughly the same distance, though they were spread across the constellation like a sheet, defining a flat region of space roughly fifty light-years deep and perhaps 200 to 300 light-years wide, some 800 light-years beyond the borders of human-colonized space.
Alexander felt a stirring of awe as he examined the 3D rotation. “Just when did these novae actually light off?” he asked.
