by Ian Douglas
Another Ahannu rocket banged into the roof of a compound building nearby, sending up a shower of swirling red sparks. Ahannu technology was such a bizarre mix of the antiquated and the advanced. Some few among their elite warrior units carried weapons more advanced than anything in the Terran arsenal…and yet they used gunpowder rockets, primitive firearms, swords, and chakhul—a kind of pike or spear with a long and wickedly curved blade. The high-tech stuff was believed to be working artifacts left over from the Ahannu glory days of ten thousand years before—god weapons, the Ishtaran natives called them. Ishtar was all that was left of a spacefaring empire that once had spanned at least a dozen worlds, including ancient Earth. The Ahannu and the humans they’d brought with them from Earth had survived the collapse of their civilization, which continued only here in sharply abbreviated and primitive form.
Current xenoarcheological thought was sharply divided at the moment between two mutually opposing theories. Traditional dogma held that the Ahannu Empire had been utterly destroyed ten thousand years ago by the enigmatic race known as the Hunters of the Dawn, that somehow the Hunters had overlooked this oddball world, largest moon of a gas giant in a red dwarf star system.
Nichole preferred the newer, more daring theory, advanced by Dr. Hayakawa and others. It posited that the Hunters of the Dawn were long dead when the Ahannu first reached Earth sometime toward the end of the last ice age. The Hunters had been a predatory species ranging this part of the galaxy perhaps half a million years ago, at the time when an earlier cycle of galactic civilization called the Builders had been terraforming Mars and tinkering with what would become the human genome. They and their technology, represented by the immense artifact discovered almost eighty years ago on one of Jupiter’s moons, had destroyed a thriving interstellar community encompassing some hundreds of races scattered throughout this region of space. The Hayakawa Solution held that the Ahannu had been destroyed in a war with themselves, a civil war that devastated all but one of their handful of worlds—Ishtar. It was much easier to accept that idea than the notion that any technic species could have survived—and still be wiping out potential competitors—in nearly historical times.
It was also a bit more comforting. Any killer species like the near-mythical Hunters that could survive half a million years would have godlike powers by now…and it was arrogant presumption to assume they’d lasted long enough to destroy the Ahannu Empire, then conveniently faded into extinction. No, the Hunters must have destroyed themselves, she believed, or simply retired from the galactic stage at some point in the distant past, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Not that any of that was of any great importance now, she thought, as another rocket exploded overhead, and bits of red-glowing, smoking shrapnel clinked and chattered on the pavement. “You okay, Doc?” Aiken asked her.
She nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her with his back to her. “Yes,” she said. “Homemade rockets. Primitive stuff.”
“It’s still deadly enough,” he replied. “Especially if you’re not wearing armor. C’mon. Down this way.”
He led her sharply right, into the mouth of a narrow alley between a storehouse and Building 4, the Mission Recreational Center. He was moving at a jog that ate up the ground, and she found herself having to run all out to keep up with him. Damn, I’m not used to this, she thought. Too much sitting around in the office trading gossip and eating native sholats. She was sweating heavily in the humid heat, and her jumpsuit was rapidly soaking through.
They emerged on Alexander Boulevard, at the edge of the native compound, and turned southeast, toward the Pyramid of the Eye.
Traditional Ahannu architecture ran heavily toward step pyramids and conical, two-and three-story huts. Some xenoarcheologists thought the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia had been inspired by the buildings of the An colony destroyed there in about 8000 B.C., though there was ample evidence that the Builders had used the same design much earlier, on Mars and elsewhere.
In fact, the structure dubbed the Pyramid of the Eye was almost certainly not Ahannu but something much older, erected in the Ishtaran jungle by the Builders as much as half a million years ago.
Perhaps the ancient An had gotten the idea of the step pyramid from the Builders.
Or perhaps it was simply a very common, very sturdy and easily raised architectural style, common to hundreds of civilizations across the galaxy. Nonetheless, the stark power of the ancient ziggurat contrasted sharply with the low, dome structures of mud and brick clustered around its base.
She was reminded again of something she’d seen on Earth—the ruins of ancient Egyptian temples, palaces, and workers’ huts clustered about the bases of the three much older, enigmatic pyramids on the Giza Plateau on Earth.
Aiken abruptly stopped, spinning to his left. Nichole saw nothing but shadows beneath an awning extended from the side of a native shop, but the Marine triggered his laser, firing from the hip. The heavy weapon gave a low-throated hum, deep and loud enough to make her teeth ache, and the beam, made visible by dust particles and ionizing air, sparkled in yellow-white brilliance for nearly a full second.
Rock exploded from the face of the storefront. By the brief glare of incandescence, Nichole saw a shape—a human shape—stumbling from the scattered shadows.
It was a man, a Sag-ura, naked and shaven-headed. Judging by the fine network of tattooed scales all over his body, the colorful face markings, and the keen-edged chakhul in his hands, he was one of the Sag-ura slave warriors of the God’s Hand. Aiken’s shot had sliced at an angle down across his torso, nearly severing his head and left arm from his chest in an explosion of blood and charred flesh.
Nichole didn’t scream, not quite, but she let out a yelp. “What have you done?”
“Getting you the hell out of here. Come on!”
“You killed him!” But then she realized how stupid that protest sounded. The slave soldier had certainly been trying to kill them, and if his spear was useless against a Marine’s battle armor, he wouldn’t have had much trouble with the light plasweave fabric of her mission jumpsuit. According to some of the stories collected by the Sag-ura Cultural Studies Group, the Sakura-sag were not known for taking prisoners.
The Pyramid of the Eye loomed ahead now, its truncated peak bathed in harsh, white light. A pair of Wasps orbited the structure, protecting a larger, more massive flier resting on the uppermost platform. She could see people up there, tiny black stick figures moving against the lights.
There was a flash and a loud bang, and Aiken stumbled. Nichole could hardly see what happened next, so quickly did it unfold, but she had the blurred impression of more humanoid figures emerging from shadows between several of the buildings along the north side of the boulevard.
Aiken dropped to one knee, recovering, pivoting with his cumbersome laser. The weapon hummed again, and by its flash she saw the attackers, a handful of Sag-ura led by a full-caste Ahannu warrior.
It was a big one, taller than a man, and more massive. The folks back home called them reptiles, though they were more properly classified as parareptilians. The scales, the slit pupils, the cranial crest, the fighting claws, all contributed to the lizard-like feel of the thing. Literally designed for fighting, it didn’t have the intelligence of Ahannu god-warriors, but it was quick and it was cunning. The god-weapon clutched in its six-fingered hands didn’t help either.
It fired a second time, and something exploded against Aiken’s armor. It staggered him, but he brought the laser to bear, firing into the Ahannu’s chest. It was wearing a quilted cloth uniform or armor of some kind, but that provided scant protection from the Marine’s return fire. It keened, a shrill, baying wail, then dropped to the pavement, heavily muscled legs kicking and twitching.
The Sag-ura warriors that accompanied it slashed at Aiken with their spears, then scattered as he triggered the laser again and brought down two of them. Two more armored Marines trotted up. “Hey, Master Sergeant!” one said over his su
it’s external speaker. “You called?”
“Where the hell were you guys? The freakin’ Annies are all over the place.”
“Roger that. They’re coming through the North Gate like nobody’s business. We’re not holding them.”
Aiken stooped, picking up the god-weapon dropped by the Ahannu warrior. “Let’s move it. We have a transport to catch.”
The trio led Nichole through the East Gate of the Legation compound to the west face of the pyramid just beyond. Other people, civilians and military, were moving up the broad steps. A rocket exploded in the distance with a hollow thump. “Go on up and get on the T-40,” Aiken told her. “Here.” He handed her the pack.
“What…what about you guys? Aren’t you coming?”
“We’ll be going out later,” he replied. With that, he turned and trotted toward the northwest, the other two Marines at his heels.
Nichole started up the pyramid’s steps. The satchel, slung over her shoulder, was heavier than she’d remembered it, and she was out of breath from the ragged jog through the Legation compound’s streets. Her jumpsuit was supposed to be self-drying and cooling, but its microcircuitry just couldn’t keep up with the heat or her exertions, and she felt her strength waning.
Three-quarters of the way up, she stopped, dropping the pack and sagging onto the step for a breather. From there, the compound and the surrounding city were spread out below and around her in magnificent, twilit panorama. Heavy columns of smoke stained the sky to the north and northwest, and she could see hordes of attackers surging through the streets and plazas a kilometer away. Many carried torches and were burning anything they could find that was flammable. It was a scene out of Hell, of an alien Armageddon.
Shouldering her pack again, she started up the last of the steps. They were awkwardly placed, steeper and more narrow than was comfortable for human legs. Ahead, the stairway split to either side of an alcove opening into the pyramid’s interior, creating a stone-walled chamber that opened onto the steps. Light spilled from the inside, and she saw people moving within. She decided to enter the alcove and see who was there.
The Chamber of the Eye, from which the pyramid took its name, was featureless and bare, the walls, floor, and ceiling highly polished black stone, with no carvings, no paintings, no decorations of any kind. The lights came from high-power lamps erected by human technicians; the only furnishing that had been in the room when the first expedition arrived from Earth was an ellipsoid of what looked like polished rock crystal two meters across, suspended from the ceiling by a slender but rigidly inflexible tether. Its dark interior gave it the look of a huge eye—hence the name.
At the moment, a man’s head and shoulders hovered within the eye’s pupil. Behind him was the corporate logo of PanTerra, a stylized graphic of Earth floating within a canted ring. The usual pair of Marine sentries stood inside the door, expressions blank. Carleton stood in front of the eye, along with three other PanTerran reps, speaking with impassioned urgency. “Damn it, Roth, this is your screw-up! I’m not taking a fall for it!”
“No one is asking you to, Mr. Carleton,” the face within the eye said with a bland lack of emotion. “And, of course, we take full responsibility for all decisions made at the corporate level. Still, our field personnel must be held accountable for losses incurred due to any mishandling of the local situation—”
“There was no mishandling, damn it! We carried out Corporate’s directives to the letter!”
“That will be determined at the review. We’ll keep you informed, of course.”
“Jesus Christ, have you been listening to me, Roth? We’re losing the interstellar link! We’re eight light-years from help! An hour from now we could all be dead!”
“Well, we certainly hope that won’t happen, Mr. Carleton,” Roth said. “As you point out, though, you are eight light-years and some away…a ten-year journey at best. There is absolutely nothing any of us here can do…but wish you luck. Goodbye, Mr. Carleton. I hope your fears about the situation there…prove meritless.”
The face in the Eye blanked out, replaced by the standard carrier wave signal of ICLI. The government organization known as Interstellar Communications Link International was the entity responsible for maintaining the faster-than-light comlinks between several far-flung planets—here on Ishtar, among the melancholy ruins on Chiron at Alpha Centauri A, on inhospitable Hathor at Wolf 359, and of course in the Cave of Wonders on Mars. Within the Cave of Wonders, beneath the barren Cydonian mesa known as the Face, an array of thousands of viewscreens, product of a technology seemingly magic by current human standards, showed that once, half a million years ago, the Builders had created an instantaneous communication network linking thousands of worlds. Most of the screens at the Martian Builders site were dead, evidence that their empire, like so many others, had fallen to the Hunters of the Dawn.
Of the rest, a handful had been identified with nearby stars, and, as the new antimatter-torch technology gave humankind a means of approaching near-light speed, three of those worlds—Chiron, Hathor, and Ishtar—had been visited. The first two were dead worlds, the detritus of a war of interstellar extinction fought half a million years before; Ishtar, however…
“Bastard!” Carleton snapped.
“What’s the matter, Carleton?” Nichole asked. “Your books showing a loss for the quarter?”
Carleton whirled. “What are you doing here?”
“Hey, I just came in out of the cold.”
The irony was lost on the PanTerra agent. “You shouldn’t be in here.”
“Why not? Free access…” One of the absolute rules of ICLI’s stewardship of the FTL comm links was that access to the Builder technology was never to be restricted to any person or group, for any purpose. It was a rule more often honored in the breach than in fact.
“We’re not going to have access in another few moments,” he said, apparently trying to steer the conversation away from PanTerra business. “Those idiots!”
“Blaming the home office for your own stupidity isn’t going to cut it,” she told him. “Anyway, PanTerra has no business exploiting the natives or their technology.”
“That, Doctor, is not your decision. C’mon, let’s get to the transport.”
He brushed past her and out onto the pyramid steps, followed by his assistants. Nichole hesitated a moment, staring at the Eye, then turned and followed them.
That Eye had provided humans with their first glimpse of living An a century ago, when Dr. Alexander himself had entered the Cave of Wonders on Mars and seen for the first time the arrayed viewscreens providing two-way real-time links with a thousand worlds. Studies of the sky—the slow-moving stars and a spectroscopic analysis of the distant red sun glimpsed through the open, west-facing opening of the chamber—had identified the site as a world of Llalande 21185, and a relatively easy goal for one of Earth’s early interstellar attempts. The chances for profound scientific and historical investigation and discovery had been staggering.
But so too, unfortunately, had been the opportunity for corporate greed. Nichole hated Carleton, hated the whole idea of having PanTerra and a consortium of other corporate and government business interests present on this expedition…but as Carleton had so bluntly pointed out, that had not been her decision. The Lima Accord of 2125 had promised the right of corporate entities to trade with the Ahannu, in order to define, create, and realize new markets and products, and to provide diplomatic and cultural ties between the two races.
Who could have foreseen that their interference would have caused a damned war?
At the truncated peak of the Pyramid of the Eye, a T-40 Starhauler rested on massive landing jacks, its cargo ramp down. A line of Marines was trying to maintain order in the crowd attempting to board the transport. “Take it easy, people!” one Marine bellowed over an amplified suit speaker. “There’s room enough for all of you! Take your time, and take your turn!”
“Move along! Move along!” another Marine called from
the top of the transport’s ramp. “Plenty of room. Don’t panic.”
Plenty of room…but the Marines weren’t coming, not on this trip. The T-40 had been detailed to haul the last of the Legation compound’s civilian population up to the Emissary, in orbit five hundred kilometers above Ishtar.
Nichole took her place in line and filed up the ramp, just behind Carleton and his assistants. The Starhauler had been designed as a transatmospheric cargo carrier, not a people mover, but its capacious cargo bay could hold thirty people or so in claustrophobic discomfort.
Nearly two hundred civilians had already been transported to the Emissary on previous trips. About 150 remained, most milling about outside the Marine guard perimeter waiting to board a shuttle, but they were fast running out of time, just moments ahead of the Destiny Faction’s attack on the compound.
A Marine at the edge of the waiting crowd took her name, checked his implant data, and said, “There you are, Dr. Moore! Where’ve you been, anyway? You’re on top priority.”
“I’d just as soon wait my—”
The Marine cut her off. “Key admin personnel and people with expert knowledge of Annie customs and language have immediate clearance to orbit, ma’am. Come on through.”
He ushered her through the Marine barricade as the crowd grumbled and surged forward. A real nasty scene in the works, she decided…and decided, too, that she didn’t envy those Marines their job.
She stood in line beneath the thrust of the transport’s stub wing but had not yet reached the ramp when someone screamed and pointed.
People around her stopped talking, and several wandered out of line, walking toward the north parapet of the pyramid. In the west, the peak of the conical mountain known as An-Kur—“God Mountain”—was…glowing.
“What the hell?” Carleton said, turning on the ramp ahead of her to stare back at the sight.
“It’s a volcano!” a young media rep shouted.
It was no volcano, that much was obvious. To Nichole, it looked as though the top of that far-off mountain had just peeled itself open, and now a pinpoint of light brighter than the local sun, brighter even than Earth’s sun seen from Earth, was shining out of the cavity within.
