Star Strike

by Ian Douglas

  “Radios, then?”

  “More likely a variety of electronic equipment,” Chesty replied. “Possibly from large-scale manufacturing centers, or from the nodes of a widely distributed computer network. The signals are extremely faint—as though they have been shielded.”

  “Is it Xul?” Lieutenant Eden asked.

  “Unknown. However, the frequencies do not match previously recorded Xul data intercepts. I believe this may be someone new.”

  “Right, then,” Eden said. “Warhurst? Let’s drop our package.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  A thought-click, and the aft-ventral cargo hatch cycled open. He did a final systems check, and then, a moment later, the EWC–9 Argus/NeP Entruder dropped into vacuum and began slowly accelerating out ahead of the Ontos.

  The spacecraft was designated the EWC–9 Argus, after the hundred-eyed guardian monster—no relative of “Argo,” the mythical ship for which the lost asteroid starship had been named. One of the Marine weapons technicians who’d designed the system on board Skybase reportedly had suggested the name after hearing that Skybase was being renamed Hermes, and there’d already been a fair amount of good-natured ribbing back and forth about Hermes boring hundred-eyed Argus into a coma. “EWC” referred to the vehicle type—Electronic Warfare Craft.

  Working closely with Chesty, Warhurst began feeding a list of potential targets into the EWC’s navigational system. There were hundreds of targets to choose from; all were locked in, though the emphasis was on one particular RF source that, according to parallax measurements, was considerably closer than the rest—less than 100,000 kilometers distant.

  The Aquila Space stargate orbited the local star at the ragged, outer fringe of the system’s broad planetoid belt. The RF sources were widely scattered through the belt, but there were so many that a few, at least, were within easy range of the Argus’ payload. Once the best targets were locked in, Warhurst gave another mental command, and the craft began accelerating under its own gravitic drive, pushing swiftly up to over two hundred Gs. Once clear of the guardian hemisphere of Skydragon fighters, the forward half of the cylindrical craft unfolded, exposing thousands of pencilsized launch tubes, each now tracking a separate target. At a precisely calculated instant, the tubes fired, releasing a cloud of fast-moving nano e-penetrators, NePs in the jargon of the Marine technicians who’d grown them.

  The Entruder was the software that constituted the EWC-9’s principle payload, and was a neologism drawn from electronic intruder, or e-intruder, a term that had already been applied to a whole range of AI-driven electronic monitoring, warfare, and subversion software. Marines had won past engagements with the Xul by slipping complex, artificially intelligent software into the equivalent of Xul operating systems, piggybacking the software into Xul ships or fortresses by using RF leakage—exactly like the radio noise emanating now from the asteroid field ahead.

  Chesty had done this sort of work at Starwall, burrowing like a self-aware computer virus into the Xul system, picking up and transmitting data on the Xul presence in that system, and ascertaining that the Xul forces there, tens of thousands of light-years from human space, knew about the captured Argos. In fact, a great deal of Chesty—including everything he’d learned in his penetration of the Xul ship at Starwall—had been copied and packed into the Entruder software.

  The Marine programmers back in Skybase had named the Entruder package, by ancient tradition, after a hero of the Corps. Where Chesty had been named for Chesty Puller, the Entruder was named Evans, for Evans Fordyce Carlson, three-time winner of the Navy Cross, and the creator and leader of the legendary Carlson’s Raiders of WWII.

  Spacecraft like the EWC-9 Argus, and AI software payloads like Evans, had been vital components in warfare for centuries. In fact, it could be argued that they were the remote descendents of twentieth-century computer viruses and primitive atmospheric craft like the EA-6B Prowler and even earlier electronic eavesdropping aircraft. There were military theorists—in fact there’d been military theorists for many centuries—who insisted that real war had little to do with armies or ships, which they considered superfluous. It was, these armchair strategists insisted, the electronic engagement in the opening nanoseconds of any battle that determined winners and losers, the outcome predicated on which side gained more elint—electronic intelligence—in the collision, and which one better defended its own electronic trenches.

  Warhurst didn’t agree. There would always, he was convinced, be a need for someone—a basic infantryman or Marine rifleman—to go in and take the high ground away from the enemy.

  * * * *

  Evans

  Aquila Space

  1254 hrs GMT

  From Evans’ point of view, he was on board the Argus spacecraft, resident within a heavily shielded and protected central processor, but with secondary nodes on board the Ontos and the widely scattered fighters. Redundancy was key, here. If things went wrong with the e-penetration attempt, one, at least, of the dispersed network nodes could receive what data had been collected and, with luck, get it back through the Stargate to Puller 659.

  Somewhere up ahead, several thousand individual nano-probes, hurtled through space at some hundreds of kilometers per second. In the first seconds of free flight, the NeP probes, each one a few centimeters long and as slender as a human hair, had released an extremely fine, gossamer net that encircled its body. The net served both to receive RF signals from the objective, and to maintain a connection with Evans through tightly focused, highly directional microwave beams. Each probe selected a radio-frequency source and began to home on it, using the local magnetic field to minutely adjust its course.

  Most missed their selected targets. Their velocities were too high, the energies they could bring to bear on course correction minute. But a lucky few found the source of radio emanations squarely within the cone of space available to them. And they struck.

  The flash of kinetic energy released by the impact served as power source, charging the molecule-sized components of each NeP thread. These burrowed deep into the surface of the target, then began tasting the material in which they were imbedded.

  The nanopenetrators had been programmed to accept a wide variety of materials, including the self-repairing hull composites of a Xul starship. In this case, the raw materials were those of a typical H-class chondritic asteroid, consisting of approximately twenty-three percent iron, ferrous sulfide, iron oxides, and nickel, with the rest comprised of silicates such as olivine and pyroxene, and an aluminosilicate of magnesium, iron, and calcium called feldspar.

  The twentieth-century mathematician John von Neumann had described a visionary system whereby a suitably programmed robot might land on an asteroid and, using available materials, construct an exact replica of itself. Those two would build more replicas…and more…and still more…until there were enough replicators that the programming could shift production over to something else, such as refined metals packaged for shipping back to Earth. These von Neumann machines, as they were called, were an early concept in the evolution of nanotechnology, for they showed how asteroidal nanufactories might be grown in the Solar System’s asteroid belt or Oort Cloud.

  A similar process was under way now, as the nano probe began recruiting molecules and even individual atoms from the surrounding matrix—iron and iron oxides, nickel, iron sulfides, and magnesium for metal, calcium, potassium, carbon, sulfur, and silica for other materials. Much of a chondrite’s substance was, in fact, a kind of clay called a hydrated silicate, which contained a high percentage of water and organic materials.

  Swiftly—the mining, refining, and assembly processes took place very quickly on a molecular scale—the thread of nanomaterial injected into the asteroid’s surface began growing in two directions—up, creating a new sheet of gossamer webwork on the surface of the asteroid in order to establish a microwave link with the distant Argus spacecraft, and down, sending a vast and complex web of threads, each finer than a human ha
ir, down into the rock’s deeper structure. The threads, navigating now by sensing heat in the substrate around them, delved deeper and deeper until finally one thread made contact with, not asteroidal rock, but something else…a ceramic shell housing a bundle of fiber-optic cables carrying pulses of laser light.

  Several hundred NePs had impacted on that one, relatively nearby asteroid. Within a few minutes, fast-burrowing roots of nanoassembler threads began encountering one another, exchanging data, interconnecting their networks, and rerouting their joint explorations inward. Each probe had no intelligence of its own beyond the bare minimum required to carry out its mission, but was still loosely linked to Evans by microwave.

  Evans was highly intelligent, with all the technical and background data acquired from centuries of intermittent contact with Xul networks, with more substantial exchanges with the alien N’mah originally encountered at the Sirius Stargate, and with extensive studies and reverse-engineering of artifacts left behind by the Builders half a million years ago, from the surfaces of Earth’s Moon and Mars to the ruins on Chiron, Hathor, and elsewhere.

  A blob of assemblers gathered around the ceramic conduit containing bundles of fiber-optic cable, delving, probing, sampling. Patterns were noted—fluctuations in frequency, in amplitude, in spin. Data streamed back to Evans, who began comparing them to the AI’s extensive technic and linguistic files.

  The electronic system here was not Xul. That much was clear from the start. Indeed, attempts to probe the alien network using Xul-style signals were effectively and immediately blocked. In biological terms, the electronic network within the asteroid possessed a complex and well-adjusted set of anti-Xul “antibodies,” which appeared to be designed expressly to counter electronic incursions by the Xul.

  Knowing this, Evans was able to focus on non-Xul electronic strategies; there still were a daunting number of possibilities available, but at least the field was reduced somewhat. Where humans used binary logic as a means of encoding data, and the Xul used a trinary system, this alien network appeared to use another form of numeric code entirely.

  Evans needed to establish just what the mathematical key to this code might be before he could begin to make some sense of the streams of alien data. He tried and discarded a number of possibilities—the ratios of prime numbers to one another…the intervals between oddly-even numbers, even numbers that, when one was divided by another, produced even numbers…even a numerical ordering of the hydrogen emission lines resident within the spectrum of the local star.

  It was definitely a brute-force method to cracking the code, trying one method after another. Evans’ one advantage was that he was fast, working on a molecular scale and with very tiny energies.

  And ten minutes into the attempt, as more and more nanothreads wormed their way into the vast and tangled electronic network beneath the asteroid’s surface, he found the key.

  It was Fibonacci numbers and Phi.

  One plus one equals two. Add the 2 to the 1 and get 3. Add the 3 to the 2 and get 5. Each number added to the preceding number gives the next number in the series, creating an ongoing string of numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on to infinity in a never-ending series.

  A curious fact about this series is that if you divide any Fibonacci number by the next number after it, you get a value quite close to, but never quite equaling, the transcendental 0.618034…, Phi, the so-called “Golden Mean” that seems miraculously to appear everywhere in the universe—in the curves and spirals inherent in pine cones and sea shells and spiral galaxies, within biological ratios and the arrangements of flower petals and leaves growing around a stem, and even within the proportions of the human body.

  The frequencies of the photon packets traveling through the alien fiber-optic network could be expressed as ratios between the first few thousand numbers in the Fibonacci series. The first level of the code had been cracked.

  After that, still working by a kind of well-educated trial-and-error, Evans began to translate signal ratios into layer upon layer of nested patterns. By now, nanothreads were sampling thousands of different sources of electrical and photonic signals, providing an avalanche of data that would have taken merely human signals analysts centuries just to separate and describe.

  It took Evans about three hours.

  And then the humans on board the Ontos had their first good look at one of the aliens.

  Although, at that point they couldn’t really tell what it was….

  21

  0912.1102

  UCS Hermes

  Stargate

  Puller 695 System

  1740 hrs GMT

  “What the hell is that?” General Alexander wanted to know.

  “The intelligence analysts are still going over it,” Cara told him. “They’re especially trying to see if there are any other ways to make this data fit together into meaningful patterns. But these particular images appear to be intended as cels in a visual record of some sort.

  “We think these are landscapes….”

  Alexander was studying the first of the images sent back from Aquila Space by Recon Sword, watching them unfold in his mind. “Landscapes?” he said. “Looks more like the deep ocean.”

  The scene was otherworldly…but it was tough to tell whether that was due to the environment or an alien perception of that environment. Reds, violets, and blues predominated. Whatever Alexander was seeing, it was murky, with vague and uncertain shapes just visible in the background. In fact, his first impression was that he was looking at a series of abstract paintings. After clicking through several dozen of them, though, he began to recognize patterns to the background and in the color.

  “So…this is a single cel in some kind of animation?”

  “Yes, sir. Project a number of these in rapid succession, and you would have the sensation of movement. We have recovered some fifty thousand of these so far, enough for half an hour of video, if projected at twenty-four frames per second. However, so far most appear to be of different sequences. In other words, they’re not all part of the same ‘movie,’ or, if they are, they represent widely different scenes, different places, within a single sequence.”

  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 we
re, 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.