by Ian Douglas
This was the real heart of Operation Clusterstrike. He’d wanted to launch the incursion earlier in the battle, but various factors had conspired to delay things. In partic ular, the Intel people—N-2 in the Navy and Marine lexicon—had needed to analyze the electronic screens now being used by the Xul fleet in order to give the Penetrators a better chance of getting past the enemy’s defenses, both passive and active. They’d also been holding out for a Type III or one of the newly identified Type IV’s as a target, on the theory that the larger Xul hunterships would have more complex, deeper, and more valuable electronic infrastructures to tap.
And, finally, they’d needed an updated picture of what was happening on the far side of the gate. The arrival of those last four fighters and the data they’d uploaded to the battlenet had revealed that the Xul assault was tapering off. As they’d come through the gate, there’d been only a half- dozen hunterships on the other side, and only one large one—the Type III now being targeted by the Penetrators.
Alexander allowed himself a small—a very small—release of the stress that had been riding his shoulders throughout the battle. There’d been so many unknowns with this operation, and one of the largest and most deadly had been whether they would be able to contain the Xul fleet. With as many as a thousand Xul warships in Cluster Space, no one had been able to guarantee that the MIEF line on the Carson Space side of the gate wouldn’t be overwhelmed.
Expendable munitions stores were running low throughout the fleet. Lasers and plasma weapons alone would not have been enough to slow that onslaught if they’d chosen to keep coming.
Both Alexander and Taggart possessed mental triggers keyed to detonate a number of antimatter charges already placed around the Carson Gate’s circumference. If the Xul had been able to push through the bottleneck, if both Taggart and Alexander had been convinced that the MIEF line would not hold, they would have destroyed the gate.
Carson Space was located, as near as the astrographers could determine, some eleven thousand light years from Sol, on the outskirts of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm, a pinpoint in the vast spiral of four hundred billion stars chosen both for its remoteness and for the fact that a careful search of the region had failed to turn up any signs of a Xul presence.
Of course, with the gate destroyed, the surviving ships of 1MIEF would have to be translated back to Sol a few at a time within the vast hangar deck of the Hermes, a slow process that wouldn’t even work with the larger ships in the fleet. And if Hermes had been damaged or destroyed, the journey would have taken a lot longer—a number of years under Alcubierre Drive.
It would have been worth it however, to keep the Xul from discovering the origin of the attack, but there would have been a terrible danger, too. Alexander knew that 1MIEF needed to keep moving, keep threatening the Xul from as many different directions as possible. If the task force lost the initiative, the Xul might recover enough to find Humankind’s world of origin, and this time, Earth and all her colonies would be obliterated.
Maintaining the initiative in this war was absolutely vital to humanity’s survival, but it was a balancing act that was growing more and more difficult, more deadly, with each passing month. By now, the ancient enemy was aware that somebody in the Galaxy was out to kill them, and given their peculiarly paranoid way of thinking, they would be frantic by now in their efforts to track down the threat and destroy it.
In fact, the only thing that had kept Humankind out of the Xuls’ xenophobic eye had been the size of the Galaxy, the sheer vast number of suns and worlds and emerging civilizations. As it was, they’d learned of Earth and its attendant cluster of tiny interstellar communities several times already over the past few centuries. Armageddonfall had come within a hair of annihilating Earth herself, and the Xul capture of an asteroid colonizer ship, fleeing Sol at sublight speeds after the bombardment of Humankind’s homeworld, apparently had given them more precise information about humans, their origins, and their history.
That discovery had prompted the creation of 1MIEF, the Battle of the Nova in 1102 of the Marine Era, and the subsequent near-decade of raids and strikes at Xul nodes across the Galaxy. The joint naval-Marine expeditionary force had been tasked with the seemingly impossible—keeping the Galaxy-wide empire of the Xul reeling and off-balance. If the Xul were bending all of their considerable resources toward finding 1MIEF instead of Earth, perhaps Earth would be able to come up with . . . something else, a weapon, a strategy, an alliance, something that would enable Humankind to survive.
A lean and desperate hope.
Survival would have been a lot less likely had 1MIEF been destroyed this morning . . . or if Taggart and Alexander had been forced to destroy the gate and return to Sol Space by other means. But the gamble appeared to have paid off well. According to the ongoing tally, twelve Xul hunterships had been destroyed so far in the hellfire unleashed in front of the Carson Gate. That had come at a high price; 1MIEF had lost thirty-one ships of various classes, and a large percentage of the aerospace fighters. After this one, the expeditionary force would need to rearm and re-equip, either back at Sol or at one of the other major Commonwealth bases, at 36 Ophiuchi or New Earth, perhaps.
But then it would be back into the battle line again.
Perhaps information taken by the Penetrators would pinpoint the next objective.
The fleet’s fire was raking the newly emerged Nightmare- class huntership now, but carefully, with exacting precision. Certain areas of that immense, quasi-spherical hull had been set aside as targets for the Penetrator swarm, and it wouldn’t do to vaporize the Penetrators before they could eat their way into the Xul hull.
A pair of Type II hunterships were emerging now, and much of the bombardment shifted over to them. Fire continued to rain down on the Type III, however. That one Xul ship, over two kilometers across, could wreck the Commonwealth fleet if it got close enough. Naval gunfire hammered away at the monster, concentrating on weapon banks, sensor arrays, and drive blisters. If possible, they would immobilize the Nightmare, allowing the Penetrators to do their job without the dangerous distraction of haste. Some Penetrators would be destroyed, no doubt, but hundreds had been fired into that monster precisely so that a few, at least, might survive.
And after that would come the really tricky part of Operation Clusterstrike. . . .
•••
Penetrator Team Savage UCS Hermes
Stargate
Carson Space
0812 hrs, GMT
Lieutenant Ramsey wasn’t really a fish. It was important, however, to create meta phors that seemed as real and true- to- life as possible if the Penetrator team was going to be able to work with them.
What is software, after all, but patterns of information? Electric charge and lack of charge, gates permitting or refusing trickles of current, a flow of electrons guided this way or that, entire networks of interconnected processors and relays, the whole organized into complex arrays of movement, storage, and potential, all according to carefully designed schema and encodings meaningful to the designers.
Information .
Xul and human technology had that much in common, at least. Human computer systems used binary logic coded into electrical charges moving across microscopic threads of gold, copper, osmium, hafnium-carbide, and other elements and compounds layered on wafers of silicon or boron-carbon nanolaminates; the Xul used a trinary logic generated by triple gates etched into ceramic substrates or suspended in gels of organic polymers.
More, Xul minds were not even remotely human, existing as nested hierarchies of intelligence and communication within vast networks of awareness, myriad minds in a kind of chorus of thought blending layer by layer into a metamind directing each huntership, the metaminds in turn interconnecting into higher and more remote layers of awareness and organization.
Still, since the recovery and dissection of a Xul huntership within the frozen world-ocean of Europa, in Earth’s home solar system over eight centuries before, human and huma
n-designed AIs had probed, analyzed, and mapped numerous examples of Xul technology. Software, and entire artificially intelligent tech-genera, had been developed to allow human computer systems to interface with alien.
And at every opportunity, those software systems were used to probe and penetrate Xul technologies, seeking that most powerful, that most vital of all weapons in any war.
Again, information.
But where patterns of charge and electron flow can be meaningful to an intruding software program, those patterns are meaningless to human awareness without some fairly high-level and sophisticated translation. In short, a kind of computer animation was playing out a movie within Lieutenant Ramsey’s mind, through Thoth’s connection with the hardware implanted within his brain and nervous system.
To Ramsey’s mental viewpoint, he was moving through an ocean.
He was used to virtual spaces set to replicate marine environments. This time, though, it wasn’t the lightless abyssal depths favored by the alien Euler, but something like the warm shallows of a coral reef, a sparkling clear, blue-green translucence filled with myriad swarms of brightly colored fish representing moving patterns of data, with vast and tortured landscapes of coral, seaweed forests, anemones, and other marine life representing storage areas, quiescent memories, and hardware infrastructure.
Ramsey had been born in EarthRing, but most of his childhood had been spent in the Florida Reefs, not far from Lost Miami. He’d done a lot of diving both there and in the nearby sunken Bahama Banks, and even worked for a time on the Atlantis Project. He’d chosen the undersea metaphor as his preferred means of interfacing with the alien Xul system.
As the Penetrator chewed its way deeper and yet deeper into the alien armor, its sensors had been alert to electron flow and magnetic moment. Eventually, nearly forty meters down, it detected a bundle of thallium-niobium-bromide threads in an induced high- temperature superconductive state and changed direction slightly to intercept it. Once the Penetrator’s access tip had been exposed and brought into contact with the superconductor cable, Thoth had begun insinuating himself into the alien network.
And Ramsey’s mind was piggybacked with Thoth, along for the ride.
He could hear the Chorus . . .
Once, in a virtual reality diving simulation at the Bimini Oceanarium, Ramsey had heard whalesong, the deep, eerie, and echoing tones of the long-vanished humpback whale. This was like that, a low, throbbing, and utterly compelling pulse through his VR surroundings more felt than heard. And with Thoth’s ability to decode the signals for him as they came through, he could hear them as words, intelligible words. . . .
9021: . . . threat . . .
7365: . . . failure . . .
4643: . . . cessation . . .
chorus: . . . this is not possible! . . .
7365: . . . possibility is self-evident . . .
1549: . . . ending is the way of existence . . . chorus: . . . but Mind must endure! . . . but Mind must endure! . . .
8575: . . . but Mind must endure . . . but the Threat is grave . . .
The phrases were fragmentary and incomplete, the connection like listening in on less than half of a complete conversation. It felt as though individuals were singing thoughts, then joining in a chorus with other individuals to blend ideas and, perhaps, generate new concepts.
He’d heard this type of sing-song before. There were recordings of Xul exchanges from The Singer, the Xul Type III frozen for half a million years in the ice of the Europan ocean, and from other Xul ships electronically “boarded” by AI probes during encounters over the centuries since. All intel officer trainees listened to those recordings endlessly, seeking to familiarize themselves with the strange timbre and layered, roundabout reasoning that passed for Xul thought. Individual speakers in the conversation were identified by four-digit numbers, felt rather than seen or heard, through a kind of electronically enhanced intuition.
8947: . . . the Mind has encountered . . .
4641: . . . We Who Are have encountered this species before . . .
3399: . . . this species . . .
8947: . . . Species 2824 . . .
8571: . . . Species 2824 . . . System 2420–544 . . .
8947: . . . has been a Threat before . . .
2255: . . . to We Who Are before . . .
chorus 1 : . . . the Threat must be eliminated . . .
chorus 2 : . . . Species 2824 must be eliminated . . .
chorus 1: . . . System 2420–544 must be eliminated . . .
chorus all: . . . We Who Are must endure . . .
Dream on bastards, Ramsey thought. The Xul had been trying to eliminate Humankind for a long time.
Bit by bit, modern Humankind had been piecing together the complete history of his ancient encounters with the Xul, a history, it turned out, that reached back to the very beginnings of Man as a species.
Ages ago, the Xul had wiped out the Builders, an interstellar civilization—possibly a machine intelligence, though details were sketchy—that had terraformed Mars perhaps as much as half a million years ago, left mysterious artifacts on Earth’s moon, and apparently tampered with the genome of Homo erectus in order to create not one but two new hominid species . . . Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis.
The Martian colony had been destroyed and the planet’s artificially generated atmosphere had been blasted away, but somehow the Xul had overlooked the Builders’ gene tic laboratory on Earth. Humans and Neanderthals had survived.
Sometime around 7000 b.c.e., the Xul had all but annihilated the An, a technically proficient species with an interstellar empire consisting of several dozen worlds, including Earth, where Neolithic human tribes had been enslaved, trained, and interbred to serve the colonizing masters as farmers and as miners. The An and a few of their human slaves had survived on the Earthlike moon of a gas giant at Lalande 21185, but only by losing most of their technological know- how. Though Earth was bombarded by asteroids and the An population centers destroyed, the human survivors on Earth had struggled back from the brink of extinction, helped openly by the alien N’mah. Something of the encounter with destroying monsters from the stars had lingered on, though, in myth, legend, and religion. It was the ancient Sumerians who provided their word for “demon” to the destroyers—Xul.
The Xul had almost certainly been alerted to Humankind’s existence sometime in the 21st Century, when The Singer had been uncovered on Europa. A group mind housed within the enormous spacecraft’s computer network had sent a signal starward. That fragment of the Xul overmind, however, after half a million years of isolation beneath the Europan ice, had been hopelessly insane. Attempts to retrieve and translate data stored there had been less than completely successful.
In 2148, a human explorer ship, The Wings of Isis, had been patterned and stored by a Xul huntership at the stargate orbiting Sirius A. In 2170, Marine and naval elements had fought the Battle of Sirius Gate, destroying a Xul ship, and also making contact with the alien N’mah living a low-tech, survivalist existence inside the stargate structure itself.
And since then there’d been repeated isolated contacts and encounters with the Xul, repeated clashes and raids. The arrival of a Xul ship within the Sol System in 2314 had very nearly destroyed the world of Humankind’s birth. Only the destruction of the intruding Xul ship, made possible by a Marine assault force actually entering the monster with backpack nukes, had saved Earth and, quite possibly, all of humanity.
Xenosophontologists—the researchers, human and AI— who studied alien intelligences, had been studying the Xul since the recovery of The Singer on Europa. Each electronic penetration of a Xul ship-network taught them a little more. According to them, the Xul—who apparently referred to themselves as We Who Are—possessed a kind of hardwired Darwinian paranoia triggered by any encounter with non-Xul intelligence. For uncounted ages, they’d watched and listened from their base-nodes scattered across the Galaxy, noting the emergence of life and of Mind, and eliminating that life on
ce it appeared to pose a threat—which generally was defined as developing technology, especially star travel.
At the same time, however, it was difficult to get their attention. They appeared to react strongly to the arrival of starships in areas under their control, but they did not appear to do much in the way of active patrolling. They also tended to overlook species existing in environments outside the expected. That An colony at Lalande 21185, for instance, had escaped the general destruction of the An’s interstellar empire because it wasn’t in the so-called habitable zone encircling its star. The world called Ishtar was the moon of a gas giant in the frozen realm far from the system’s red-dwarf primary, but parts of its surface were kept habitable by gravitational tidal stresses. The N’mah were amphibious, with their adult phase living underwater; the colony contacted by Earth had escaped Xul notice by colonizing flooded portions of the interior of the Sirius Stargate. And then there were the Eulers. . . .
The point was that the Xul did not think, did not react the same way humans would to something perceived as a threat. Their paranoia was over- the-top, a species-wide overreaction that saw anything different as a threat, but their physical reaction to that threat tended to be measured and slow, even dilatory, and often fragmentary. Human xenosophontologists were as yet uncertain why this might be so; all intelligence officers, however, had been repeatedly instilled with a kind of mantra when it came to spying on the Xul: we don’t yet understand them; any scrap of information, however small, is vital.
