Star Strike

by Ian Douglas

  Garroway saw at once their mistake. They were assuming a sniper had drilled Sandre from behind as she worked at the cylinder…but he’d had the distinct impression that whatever had hit her had come from the cylinder, punching a two-centimeter entrance hole through her visor, and exploding outward from the back of her head in a classic exit wound. The way her body had tumbled heels-overhead away from the deadly cylinder seemed to support the idea.

  “Wait!” he yelled. “That’s not—”

  “I got targets!” Corporal Allison yelled, and he fired his pulse rifle. White flame blossomed off the side of the cavern wall, 30 meters away.

  Okay, you got it wrong, he thought, releasing Sandre’s body into Doc Thorne’s keeping. He raised his own pulse rifle, looking for a target. He knew the difference between an exit wound and an entrance wound, thanks to ballistics training in boot camp, but he also knew that a shaped-charge explosive round might reverse the picture, causing explosive damage on impact and firing a tightly focused needle of hot plasma out the other side. Everyone else seemed convinced that there was a shooter out there in the darkness. Anger surfaced through the numbness left by Sandre’s shockingly sudden death, anger at himself for having jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  There! His suit optics caught an awkward scramble of movement, though even under infrared it wasn’t giving much of a signature. What the hell was that thing?…

  His simulations of close-combat with Xul robots had accustomed him to tracking stealthy movement as hostile war machines emerged from the surrounding bulkheads. This didn’t look like that, however. The thing looked like an immense spider…or possibly a crab, but with multiply branched legs spanning a good 3 meters.

  But there was no time for analyses, no time for thought. He triggered his weapon and felt the sharp, visceral thrill of a solid hit as the spidery thing came apart in a messy splash of green and yellow liquid.

  Other spider-shapes were moving across the cavern walls, now, the lights from the Marine armor and the drifting remotes casting weirdly shifting, nightmare shadows everywhere. Garroway used his suit optics to zoom in close on one, trying to understand what he was seeing. He could see some sort of harness on the thing, proof that it wasn’t an animal. He had a moment’s glimpse of six glittering silver beads arranged in a circle around what might have been the thing’s face, three above, three below. Eyes? Or weapons? Xul combat machines possessed randomly scattered lenses across their egg-shaped bodies, some of them eyes, some of them beam weapons.

  Shit! Maybe these things were Xul! He triggered his pulse rifle, and the spindle-limbed creature disintegrated in an eerily silent flash of blue-white energy.

  It was distinctly odd, though. The spiders didn’t appear to be carrying anything like weapons in those branching, clawed arms, and they weren’t shooting back.

  * * * *

  e( iπ ) + 1 = 0

  RFS Alpha

  Aquila Space

  1012 hrs GMT

  Inequivalence!

  Perhaps the intruders were Enemy after all. They weren’t of the usual design—oblate spheroids of complex topology, with beam weapons hidden inside—but they did appear to be autonomous machines of fairly high sentience, and they did possess potent beam weapons mounted to their exoskeletons.

  They also possessed the Enemy’s predilections both for unthinking destruction and for a suicidal disregard for individual remote elements, using individual machines as tools, as expendable parts of the whole. The e(ip) + 1 = 0 regarded their autonomous extensions, the Manipulators, both as part of the racial Set, and as pets.

  And the Enemy intruders were destroying those pets now as soon as they emerged into the cavern. The monitors transmitted a command, pulling the Manipulators back into the walls of the Third Chamber of Repose.

  At the same time, other monitors readied the Trigger.

  The Set of e(ip) + 1 = 0 was under deliberate and deadly attack.

  * * * *

  First Platoon, Alpha Company

  RFS Alpha

  Aquila Space

  1014 hrs GMT

  “Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!” Ramsey, Garroway thought, had apparently come to the same conclusion. The spiders weren’t shooting, weren’t even armed.

  Responding to training, the Marine platoon stopped shooting almost at once. There’d been five or six of the things on the cavern wall. At least four had been destroyed in the volley of fire, and the others were already vanishing into an almost invisible opening in the rock.

  “Chu!” Ramsey snapped.

  “Yeah, Gunny!”

  “Get back to the surface. Give ’em your memory.”

  “Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”

  “Doc! How is she?”

  “Clinical,” the corpsman replied. “Don’t know if she’ll be irrie…”

  Clinically dead. Garroway felt a surge of grief at that. The thing was, nanomedicine could patch up almost anyone nowadays, unless they’d been vaporized—turned to smoke. Usually, irries—irretrievables—were smokers, with so much of the body burned away there wasn’t enough for full-body forced cloning.

  But there was another class of irrie that no Marine liked to think about. Sandre’s head could be regrown easily enough, but her brain had been pulped and sprayed out the back of her head. The revived Sandre Kenyon would have none of the memories, experiences, or training of the original. In fact, she would be, in effect, a newborn baby, one who would have to learn to crawl, to toddle, to speak from the very beginning.

  Sandre—the Sandre that Garroway had known and loved—was gone.

  And the pain he felt now at that realization was almost unbearable, a sharp, burning despair that threatened to paralyze him.

  “Garroway! Garroway! Snap out of it!”

  He became aware of Ramsey shouting at him over the platoon channel. Doc Thorne was already following Chu out the tunnel entrance, with Sandre’s body in tow. He hadn’t even heard Ramsey give the order to take her out.

  “Uh…yeah…”

  “Square yourself away, Marine!” Ramsey said, the words hard and sharp-edged. “Eyes on your front! That goes for the rest of you devil dogs, too! Watch your fronts!”

  Long, silent seconds passed. Garroway was gasping for breath, struggling to control his grief, his rage, his screaming thoughts. Damn it, damn it, damn it. He knew what he’d seen. He’d been right the first time.

  “Hey…Gunny?”

  “What is it, Garroway?”

  “I don’t think Sand—uh, Private Kenyon was shot. I don’t think those spider-things on the wall were attacking us.”

  “I know,” Ramsey said. He was floating next to the cylinder Sandre had been probing, examining the neat, round hole in its side. A thin rime of ice coated the tank’s side. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this tank was holding something, a liquid, maybe, under incredible pressure. When she triggered the probe, the pressure broke loose, and what was inside hit her like a mass-driver cannon.”

  Garroway nodded inside his helmet. “It was a fucking accident!”

  “Take it easy, Marine. It happens.” He drifted back from the now-empty cylinder. “Okay, Marines, listen up! By the numbers, fall back to the tunnel entrance, then start back up, single file.”

  “What the hell?” Allison said. “We’re retreating?”

  “I think we’ve done enough damage here,” Ramsey said. He was working at the release catch for the pulse rifle on his right arm. It flipped free, and the weapon drifted off. Catching it, he handed it to Vallida.

  “What are you doing, Gunny?”

  “Disarming. I’m going to stay here and see if those beasties come out of the walls again.”

  “Unarmed? You can’t—”

  “Just get the fuck out of here!” Ramsey shouted. Then, more quietly, “The rest of you get back to the surface. Upload what you’ve seen here. Garroway? Tell them what you think, what you told me. I’m going to see if they try to talk to me.”

  “Right, Gunny.” Garro
way felt stunned, and he felt an odd sense of déjà vu—not a repeat of something he’d felt before personally, but of a similar incident, one every Marine studied in downloaded sims in boot camp.

  Centuries before, a group of Marines exploring the interior of the Sirius Stargate had gotten into a firefight with monstrous, aquatic beings. One of those Marines had been his many-times-great grandfather, one Corporal John Garroway.

  Somehow, John Garroway had become separated from the rest of his unit, but with considerable presence of mind in a terrifying situation, he’d put up his weapon and allowed the aliens to take him. They’d started showing him movies, then teaching him their language.

  And that had been Humankind’s first modern contact with the N’mah, an amphibious species that had visited Earth in antiquity. The N’mah, or the Nommo, as they’d been known in prehistory, had first visited Earth around 6000 B.C.E. and quite possibly ensured the survival of the scattered and Xul-brutalized humans who had gone on to found ancient Sumeria.

  Modern Marines were trained to kill, but they were also trained to use their heads, and to attempt communication with, to attempt to understand the unknown whenever possible.

  That was what Gunny Ramsey was doing now.

  “Gunny?” Garroway said. “You want me to stay with you?”

  “Negative, Marine. Get to the surface.” He was unshipping his flamer from his left forearm, now, letting the weapon drift toward the blast-charred rock wall of the cavern. He was completely unarmed, now. The question was, would the aliens understand that?

  “If you don’t hear from me again,” he went on, “well…it’ll be up to the general to figure out what happens next. But give me a few hours, at least.”

  “Aye, aye, Gunny.” He started to go, then turned again. “Gunny?”

  “What?”

  “Semper fi.” And then he was gone.

  23

  1012.1102

  UCS Hermes

  Stargate

  Aquila Space

  1132 hrs GMT

  General Alexander was listening in on the debriefing of the Marines of the 55th MARS. They’d emerged from the asteroid habitat moments before, and were now on the surface, once again linked in with the MIEF computer net. In effect, Alexander was an invisible presence within the virtual room where Colonel Willis was carrying out the debriefing.

  “And Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey is trying to establish contact alone?” Colonel Willis was asking one of the MARS Marines.

  “Yes, sir,” PFC Garroway replied. In the Corps, female officers were always accorded the courtesy of sir. “He wouldn’t let me stay with him.”

  “I see,” Willis said. “Okay, Private Garroway. You may go.”

  “Uh…sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you heard anything about Private Kenyon? Are they going to be able to bring her back?”

  “I…don’t know, Garroway. But we’ll keep you informed.”

  “Yes, sir.” He hesitated.

  “Something else, Marine?”

  “Yes, sir. If you need people to go back in for the gunny, I want to volunteer.”

  “Thank you, private. Dismissed.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Alexander checked his internal timekeeper as Garroway vanished from the virtual compartment. Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey had been alone inside the alien habitat for over an hour, now. Damn it, how long did they need to wait before he sent in the whole MIEF assault force to bring the man out?

  “General Alexander?”

  “Yes, Colonel?” The two of them were alone now in the virtual debriefing room.

  “You’ve been listening in?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “I…don’t think the Marine boarding party came under attack.”

  “I know they didn’t, Colonel. It was a horrible mistake. An accident.” That much was clear from slow-motion playbacks of the data in the Marines’ implant data storage, and through the recordings made by First Platoon’s AI, Achilles.

  “What the hell happened to that one Marine, though?” Willis asked.

  “Kenyon? Apparently the contents of those cylinders inside the asteroid are under pressure…tremendous pressure. Achilles thinks something like 10 tons per square centimeter. Kenyon triggered that nanoprobe that began eating a microscopic hole into the cylinder, and the contents explosively decompressed through the hole.” In fact, the pressure had propelled the bottle-cap-sized probe package affixed to the surface of the cylinder straight through Kenyon’s visor and out the back of her head like a high-velocity kinetic-kill round.

  In the stress of the moment, the Marines had assumed they were taking fire, and responded appropriately. The question now was whether the damage could be undone, at least insofar as human-Euler relations were concerned. There was little chance that the docs and meds would be able to bring Private Kenyon back. And a number of Eulers—if that’s what the spidery crab-things were—had been killed as well.

  Operation Gorgon was not off to a good start.

  * * * *

  RFS Alpha

  Aquila Space

  1132 hrs GMT

  Ramsey faced the alien.

  He knew that what he was experiencing wasn’t real, not in the usual sense. This was clearly a piece of virtual reality programming, an illusion unfolding within his mind, but it was as solid and as realistic as any training sim or virtual briefing session he’d ever encountered.

  Achilles had found the door for him, picking up a thread of radio noise and following it into this simulated reality. Most of the platoon AI had vanished with the rest of the MARS Marines, but a small operational portion of the AI software remained resident within his armor and his implants, as much as could be supported by the available hardware. This version of Achilles was sharply truncated, its experience and memory limited to what Ramsey himself had on board.

  He thought of the AI as Achilles2, a subset of the larger program, and was grateful to have someone else with whom to talk. Not only that, but virtual reality was the AI’s natural habitat. He would have been lost without the intelligent software’s ability to interface with the alien signals.

  “Is this their native environment?” he asked. “A representation of it, I mean?”

  “It seems likely,” Achilles2 replied. “I cannot be certain that details such as color are correct, but the data is coming from the surrounding structure…from the asteroid-habitat itself. Their computer system is extremely sophisticated, almost invisible.”

  “Invisible?”

  “The most advanced technology,” Achilles2 informed him with something that almost sounded like pride, “is that which interfaces so smoothly with the user that he is unaware of its actions. The Eulers appear to live here.”

  It still seemed strange, naming an alien race after a long-dead human mathematician. Especially since it was hard to imagine anything more alien than this.

  Ramsey was most aware of the being’s…face; it had what he assumed were eyes, six of them, so “face” was as good a term as any. The eyes, three above, three below, encircled a clump of multi-branchiate tentacles, something like the branches of a tree limb.

  It reminded Ramsey rather strongly of an octopus, though the tentacles were nothing like the tentacles sported by that denizen of Earth’s oceans. The body, however, was utterly unlike anything Ramsey had ever seen before, a transparent to translucent gray mass, something like the body of a huge, flattened worm or snake, but with six bulbous appendages that might be legs, each sprouting long and interweaving tentacles that faded away into the surrounding darkness. The body itself appeared boneless and changed shape as he watched, from long and thin to short and squat. And were those three triangular extensions small wings, or large fins…or something else entirely? He found himself fascinated by what he assumed were the being’s hearts, five of them running in a line from just behind the head to deep within that monstrous translucent body, pulsing in series, one after the next.

  He found he could
only study the creature for a few moments before the sheer strangeness began to overwhelm him, and he had to look away for a time. The surroundings weren’t that much better, though. He seemed to be standing underwater, very deep underwater. It was like being enmeshed in liquid blackness. The only light came from the near distance, where something like a sphere of bubbles churned and pulsated, seeming to emit a cool greenish light. Nearby, a forest of scarlet feathers waved gently in the current.

  In this sim, he noted, he wasn’t wearing armor, but plain black utilities. His boots were planted in viscous mud; he could not feel the cold, the wet, or what must have been a crushing pressure from the surrounding water. How many kilometers of ocean, he wondered, looking up into blackness, were supposed to be piled up on top of him?

  The alien continued to watch him. Nearby, he noted, were two of the spidery creatures the Marines had encountered in the chamber earlier, but there was no question in his mind that the tentacled being directly in front of him was the controlling intelligence here. There was something about its eyes, something radiating awareness, calm, and assurance. Intelligence.

  The question was, how did the alien perceive him? As intelligent? Or as a computer-simulated icon within the alien computer net, a manifestation of software expressions that could be…anything?

  He thought for a moment, and the alien watched him, its tentacles drifting and weaving with a current Ramsey could not feel. The Marines had been briefed before being deployed to this rock. The Eulers, the xenosophies thought, knew mathematics, even identified themselves by means of a math equation.

  Okay. Ramsey wasn’t a math wiz, but he knew a few things. Reaching up, he slapped his chest with his right hand, paused, then slapped twice. Then three times. Then five. Then seven. And eleven. Not a simple counting sequence, but counting in primes, whole numbers that could only be divided evenly by themselves or by one.

  Wondering how long he should continue the sequence, he started slapping his chest to count out the number thirteen…but then he felt something like a series of light taps on his forehead…thirteen of them, as the Eulers picked up the sequence.