by Ian Douglas
The blue-white thread of light snapped on abruptly, connecting the mountain peak with the sky at a ten-degree angle from the vertical, a beam so bright that Nichole covered her eyes as more of the watching civilians screamed or yelled.
An instant later a soundless flash blossomed in the deep green of the sky.
Long seconds passed, breathless, and then the shockwave from the mountain reached them, a dull, thundering rumble and a gust of heavy, heat-scorched air. The flash in the sky had faded to a scattering of starlike embers, slowly fading.
Only then did the enormity of what had just happened sink in. “Goddess!” she cried. “They’ve destroyed the Emissary!”
And then the panic set in atop the Pyramid of the Eye.
7
22 JUNE 2138
Briefing Room 401
White House Subbasement, Level D
Washington, D.C., Earth
1425 hours ET
“They’re coming in over the walls now!” the Marine cried, his eyes wide and staring. He couldn’t have been older than twenty. “They’re inside the compound and closing in on the pyramid!”
The young Marine’s face filled the darkened briefing room’s wallscreen, which stretched floor to ceiling across one end of the cool, wood-paneled chamber. A number of men and women sat at the long table, watching quietly. The atmosphere was heavy with emotions ranging from grim acceptance to shock.
“We got the last of the civilians out a couple hours ago,” the Marine continued. “There’s a place in the mountains east of here—an Uhsag village the scientists’ve managed to make contact with. We might be able to hold out there for quite a while.
“Of course, ten years is a long time. And maybe you guys—”
Moisture trickled down the huge face on the wallscreen. It was impossible to tell whether it was sweat or tears, but his eyes were glistening. He broke off, then shook his head.
“Screw that. Anyway, if you send relief, watch out for AnKur. That’s the big, lone mountain ten klicks west of the compound. There’s some kind of god-weapon there, a big son of a bitch, hidden inside the top. We had no idea it was there. It picked the Emissary right out of the sky, one shot. Don’t know what the range is, but it’s at least five hundred klicks. I…I…damn it! They’re supposed to be primitives here! What are they doing with a freakin’ planetary defense system?”
A loud explosion banged nearby, and voices could be heard in the background, shouting commands, yelling response. The Marine looked around, shouted, “Right!” Then he looked back into the Eye. “They’re comin’ up the pyramid steps! Gotta go. Uh…look, remember us to our families, for those of us that got ’em, okay? Man, this really sucks vacuum.”
The Marine’s face spun away from the pickup. The quietly watching military officers and civilians in the room could make out a vertical slice of green-violet sky stained by what might have been a distant cloud of smoke, the doorway into the Chamber of the Eye, looking out across the city of New Sumer. Several sharp sounds emanating from the screen—the hiss and snap of high-powered lasers, the shrill whine of power packs—filled the air. Movement, a tumble of half-glimpsed shapes, blocked out the sliver of sky momentarily. Someone screamed.
Several moments passed, punctuated by more sounds, like the cold scrabblings of claws on stone, the clink of metal, a low-voiced grunt. For just a moment another face filled the wallscreen, flat and emotionless, a reptilian face dominated by enormous, oddly shaped eyes of metallic gold, horizontally slashed by elongated pupils. The skin was green and faintly scaled, the skull elongated and topped by a low, bony crest, the mouth a black-rimmed slash. Nictitating membranes flickered over those hypnotic eyes once…twice…and then the apparition vanished.
The wallscreen flickered, then winked out. General Haslett, Army Chief of Staff for the UFR Central Military Command, stared into the dark emptiness for a moment, shocked and afraid. My God, he thought. What are we sending our people out there to face?
General Dahlstrom, the National Security Council’s senior briefing officer, stood as the lights came up.
“Madam President,” she said, “Gentlemen, ladies, that was the last transmission monitored by our ICLI station on Mars. Since about ten hundred hours our time yesterday there has been no further transmission from the Llalande system—only the usual open-channel carrier wave. We still have a visual of the Chamber of the Eye, but there’s been no activity that we can make out.”
“Then the rebels haven’t destroyed the Builder FTL unit,” President Katharine LaSalle mused aloud. “That’s one good break for us, at least.”
Dahlstrom nodded. “Yes, Madam President. However, our xenosoc analysts believe that it would be extremely unlikely for them to damage the unit in any case. The Eye is as sacred to Geremelet’s faction as it is to the High Emperor.”
“Right,” Admiral Knudson, the head of the Joint Chiefs, said. He was a brusque, hard-bitten man with long service in the Naval Space Forces. “Part of their campaign, remember, was to liberate the Eye from the evil offworlders.”
“Just what the hell happened out there, anyway?” the President demanded.
“The situation is…complicated, ma’am,” Samantha Van Horne, Director of Central Intelligence, said. She gestured at the empty wallscreen. “It’s hard enough to get good intel on human opponents, let alone aliens. In this case, we have only the tiniest glimmer of how the Ahannu think and, in particular, what they think of us.”
“They can’t still be thinking of us as escaped slaves,” General Karl Voekel, the Aerospace Force representative of the Joint Chiefs, said. He gave David Billingsworth, the SecState, a hard look. “The State Department has been working on that issue for the past five years!”
“This is hardly the time for recriminations,” Billingsworth said. He looked across at Warren Boland, the Secretary of Science. “Besides, we worked with what DepSci gave us.”
Boland shrugged. “As Samantha said, it’s tough reading nonhumans or guessing how they’ll react to anything we do.”
“Every report coming through my data feed indicated that relations with the God-Emperor and his court were good and getting better,” Billingsworth said.
“Its court,” Dahlstrom reminded him. “The Ahannu have no sex.”
“It must make their Saturday nights damned boring,” Haslett observed dryly. “No wonder they’re so riled up. In any case, this—this Destiny Faction, as they call themselves, appeared to be a minor nuisance, nothing more.”
Voekel chuckled. “Jesus, General, a minor nuisance? It’s a damned civil war, and it’s been brewing for years! How did we miss it coming?”
“It’s not exactly a civil conflict,” Van Horne said. “The Ahannu God-Emperor seems to be waiting to see whether it should openly support Geremelet’s horde. It hasn’t come out with a public disavowal, at any rate.”
“So is the Destiny group working for the Emperor?” the President asked. “Or against it?”
Billingsworth shook his head. “We just don’t know, ma’am.”
“Our best reports suggest that the Destiny Faction is independent of the Ahannu government,” Van Horne added, “but that the imperial court is tolerating it and possibly even helping it along privately.” She shrugged. “Maybe the God-Emperor is just letting Geremelet do what the Emperor itself can’t do.”
“Playing both ends against the middle,” Haslett said. “With us as the middle.”
“Something like that,” Billingsworth said. “Now that the Legation compound has been overrun, we have to assume that the God-Emperor will bring Geremelet into the government formally and probably adopt Geremelet’s foreign policy as well.”
“Do we know what that will be?” President LaSalle asked.
“No, ma’am, but we can take a guess. Geremelet’s faction came to power on the platform that humans were renegade slaves…uh, what was the word?”
“‘Sag-ura,’” Van Horne told him. “It means, roughly, ‘foreign slaves.’”
&nbs
p; “Right. They don’t have the technology to strike at Earth, of course, but that’s probably just rhetoric. What they do want is us off of Ishtar, permanently.”
“Ishtar for Ishtarans,” Knudson said with a sneer. “Is that it?”
“Basically, Admiral, yes. They feel they were shamed as a people by appearing inferior to us technologically. Remember, they still think of us as their property, slaves or pets that they domesticated thousands of years ago. If we’re not around to remind them, they can feel better about themselves.”
“So what’s the solution, then?” the President wanted to know.
“Let ’em have their damned planet,” Voekel said. “God knows we don’t need trade with the Annies. The xeno people can study ’em from orbit.”
“Not if they have the technology to shoot a starship out of the sky,” Dahlstrom pointed out.
Voekel shrugged. “They’ve had five years to study these critters. That ought to be enough.”
“Five years,” Boland pointed out, “isn’t enough time to even begin mapping out the problem. This is a whole world, a whole culture, a history, a language, a people unlike anything we’ve ever known—”
“The fact is,” Voekel said, “we don’t need these Annie jokers nearly as much as they need us. And starships are damn expensive. I just think we ought to take a real careful look at what we have invested here, before sending any more of our assets out there to Llalande.”
“Are you saying we should call off Operation Spirit of Humankind?” Haslett asked. He pursed his lips, a sardonic acknowledgment of the pretentiousness of the cumbersome title. “At this late date?”
“What’s late?” Voekel asked. “The ships haven’t launched yet. The relief force hasn’t even been assembled. We could call the whole thing off this afternoon. Damn it, I say we should call it off. The cost—the risk—it’s just not worth it.”
“Which means we write off our people on Ishtar,” Admiral Knudson said. “Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable!”
“Karl may be right,” Thomas Wright, the Secretary of Human Affairs, said. “The cost of each interstellar expedition is…quite literally astronomical.” He chuckled at his own wit. “Attempting to enforce our political will on aliens is lunacy at best. DepHA regrets the loss of life, of course, but I remind you that we advised against the original involvement at Llalande when contact was first established ten years ago. The Ahannu are primitives and no longer understand those fragments of advanced technology they still possess. It’s not as though they can teach us anything, right?” He made an unpleasant face. “As for the xenohistorical crap, that’s been out of control since First Contact and the Genesis Awareness. I don’t think anyone really understands the Frogs or what they supposedly did on Earth thousands of years ago. I don’t think we need to. It’s all moot.”
“We’d damned well better understand them, Mr. Wright,” Van Horne said, her voice sharp, “if we’re going to understand the psychoreligious mania that’s infected the American population over the past few decades.”
That, Haslett thought, was certainly true. The knowledge that aliens, the ancestors of the Ahannu, had colonized Earth over ten thousand years earlier, enslaving the human inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent, had struck humankind’s collective awareness like a thunderbolt. The idea that those aliens had actually tinkered with the human genome, somehow been responsible for what humans were like today…that bit of information had utterly and forever transformed the way man would look at himself.
“Just the American population?” Billingsworth asked with a wry grin. “Whether people think they’re gods, devils, or alien slave raiders, the whole damned world has gone nuts over the Ahannu, one way or another.”
“Be that as it may,” Voekel said, “certain inescapable facts remain. We cannot support a major military operation at interstellar distances against the determined resistance of an entire planetary population. Further, there is no compelling reason to do so. The loss of our people already in the Llalande system is regrettable, certainly, but we must recognize and accept that even if some have survived the debacle at Ishtar, ten years is a long time. There will be no survivors by the time the Derna and her support group arrives in the Llalande system.”
“Madam President,” Admiral Knudson said, turning to face the woman at the head of the table. “The voters will never forgive a…a betrayal of this magnitude! We must at least attempt to relieve the Llalande mission. Anything less would be criminal!”
“Sending more people after them to die would be stupid,” Voekel said. “If military history teaches us anything it’s that we should know when to cut our losses and get out.”
“There’s more to it than that,” the President said. “There are…certain political considerations that must be taken into account.”
“Aren’t there always?” Billingsworth asked with a wry twist to his mouth.
“It’s this issue of human slaves on Ishtar,” the President continued. “The people are up in arms. Protests. Demonstrations. Marches. Riots, even. Some pro-An, of course, mostly the religious groups, but the worst are the anti-An movements. More and more groups are appearing everywhere now, here and in other countries too. The Human Dignity League. The Earth First Coalition. The Humankind Abolitionist Union. I’ve never known any issue to unite so many people from so many countries across so much of the entire globe!”
Again Haslett had to agree. Descendants of human slaves taken by the An to the Llalande system ten thousand years ago now numbered anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions—no one was sure how many there were—and their bondage had become a rallying point for all of the anti-An groups on Earth.
“And the violence is completely out of hand,” President LaSalle continued. “That riot in New Chicago a couple of weeks ago…what was the final tally on that?”
“Fifty-one killed, Madam President,” an aide with an open cerebralink seated just behind him said, a vacant expression on his face as he pulled the requested data down off the White House AI-Data Net. “Over three hundred injured. Perhaps 800 million in property damage.”
“Fifty-one killed,” President LaSalle repeated, shaking her head. “And there have been riots all over. Here in Washington. Detroit. Los Angeles. New Miami. And in other countries too. Johannesburg. Rome. Kiev. Madrid. Rio. The people want those human slaves on Ishtar—these Saguras—they want them free. If we abandon the planet, it’s going to count heavily against us in the congressional elections this year and even worse in the presidential election in ’forty.”
“Madam President,” Voekel said, “surely we can’t base our policy—our military policy—on a world eight light-years away, on the antics of a few damned malcontents!”
“General, those ‘few damned malcontents,’ as you call them, pull a hell of a lot of political weight. You know how unsettled things have been all over the world since the discovery of human slaves on Ishtar. If we back out now, if we abandon the relief mission, we could conceivably find ourselves facing civil unrest at home and a shooting war with the rest of the Federation. I will not be the President who signs that order!”
The men and women gathered at the table were silent for a moment. General Haslett finally spoke. “General Colby? You’ve said nothing so far. They’re your Marines. What do you think?”
General Anton Colby, Commandant of the U.S. Marines, shook his head gravely. “The Marines go where they’re told to, General. For the record, I am opposed completely to abandoning our people on Ishtar, but you all knew that already.” There were a few subdued chuckles from around the table.
“With the situation on Ishtar,” Colby continued, “we are faced with a strategic problem unlike anything we have faced before. As General Voekel pointed out, the battlefield is so far away that the tactical situation is likely to have changed beyond recognition by the time our boys and girls get there. The length of the deployment is such that we will need to use a specially derived and trained unit, one without close family ties to
home. By the time they return to Earth, everyone they know will have aged twenty years at least, while they will have aged only months…depending on the rho-delta-tau and the efficiency of the onboard hibertechnic equipment.
“Gentlemen…ladies…Madam President…there is an old saying in the Corps, one dating from the first half of the twentieth century. ‘Send in the Marines.’ That saying was a reflection of the Corps’ flexibility and hitting power in situations where it just didn’t pay to declare war and send in the entire army, but where military might or the threat of an all-out war was necessary to achieve the President’s goals, whatever they might be.
“The Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit will have the training and the hardware necessary to rescue our mission in the Llalande system. If we’re too late for a rescue, well, they can secure our property there, show the folks back home that we at least goddamn tried, and if necessary send a message to the Ahannu that humans don’t take kindly to being pushed around.
“I would like to add that some eighty of the people on Ishtar are Marines serving with the Terran research mission there. The Corps does not forget its own. If the decision is made to abandon those brave men and women out there, then I am prepared to immediately tender my resignation as Commandant of the Marine Corps. A number of my staff and other senior Corps officers are prepared to take the same steps. That, Madam President, is all I have to say at this time.”
“Well spoken,” Billingsworth said. “Madam President, I must agree with General Colby. Operation Spirit of Humankind must go on, whatever the cost in dollars or lives. We lose too much if we let the Ahannu scare us off.”
“This council is not a democracy,” the President said, her voice cold. “There will be no vote. The decision rests entirely with me.”
“Ah, and with Congress, Madam President,” the Secretary of Human Affairs said. “We can’t forget Congress. They’re paying the bill, after all, and have the responsibility to declare war.”
