Galactic Corps

by Ian Douglas

  She shook her head. “Politicians run in my family, I’m afraid, not military.” She didn’t volunteer any further information, and Garroway didn’t press.

  “So you said your family is up on the Ring?” she asked. “Did you get to see them yet, this time back?”

  “Um . . . no.” He decided not to tell her that the Giangreco patriarch had kicked him out of the family when he’d enlisted. Delano Giangreco had been a member of the Reformed Church of the Ascended Pleiadean Masters, and a committed pacifist. None of his kids would be military.

  “Oh, but you have to drop in and see them!”

  “Why? Last time I was there, the Giangreco family had twenty-five spouses and a hundred and eighty- three kids and grandkids, plus a small army of cousins, in-laws, and hangerson. I doubt that some of them even know I’m gone, ten years later.” He looked away, watching sunlight beam and dazzle between the towering white mountains of cumulous clouds above the turquoise sea. “Besides, the Corps is my family now.”

  Another shuttle was coming down from EarthRing, a brilliant, silver speck drifting in from the southwest, then growing into a mirror- bright sphere as it approached Freeport Tower’s upper deck landing platform.

  “So,” Garroway said, jerking himself back to reality. “You feel like getting something to eat?”

  She nodded. “Sounds good. I could go with a bite of something. My stomach’s still on Ring time.”

  He consulted his inner timekeeper. EarthRing kept time according to the ancient GMT standard, so his stomach was insisting that it was now mid- afternoon, even though the local time was just past 0930 hours.

  “Let’s find a place then, before the hungry swarms in that shuttle that just touched down get the same idea.”

  Senate Committee Deliberation Chamber Commonwealth Government Center, EarthRing

  1422 hrs, GMT

  “What you’re saying, General,” Cyndi Yarlocke said quietly, even sweetly, “is that you failed. Despite serious losses in ships and personnel, Operation Clusterstrike failed to make the target star explode, and left the Cluster Space system vulnerable to Xul exploitation.”

  “If you prefer to put it in those terms, Senator,” Alexander said evenly, “yes. I would add that the operation is still under way, and that we have several options open to us, including—”

  “The star that your expeditionary force was supposed to blow up,” Yarlocke said, interrupting, “either did not explode, or did so with far less force than you anticipated. As a result, the massive Xul fleet in Cluster Space escaped. I believe that pretty much sums things up?”

  Alexander bit back a sharp response. Patience, he told himself. What was it Tolstoy had written? “The strongest warriors are these: Time and Patience.”

  Tolstoy had never met Cyndi Yarlocke.

  The Senate Deliberation Chamber had been chosen, Alexander was certain, so that his debriefing would be held on the Defense Committee’s home ground, a bit of symbolism giving them a psychological advantage. It created and reinforced the illusion that 1MIEF was answering directly to this small group of powerful—and disapproving—men and women. Their public e-personae glowed with their coronae flammae, streaming auras of white and golden light projected as emblems of status and power. Alexander was authorized to wear the electronic emblem as well—indeed, regulations required it in certain circumstances—but he hated image and power games played in virtual reality even more than he disliked them in the real world. He’d chosen to make his appearance before the subcommittee in his Marine dress blacks, with only the rows of service ribbons on his chest glowing.

  The virtual meeting chamber had been kept deliberately austere, perhaps to better show off the glow from all those high-level coronae. The five senators of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee appeared to be hanging in a semicircle suspended in empty space, with a face-on view of the Galaxy shining behind them.

  “Our science and battle damage assessment teams are still in the Cluster Space system,” Alexander told them. “According to their initial reports, CS-1, the target star, did, in fact, blow off large portions both of its photosphere and of its outer convection zone, creating a shell of high-energy plasma expanding out from the core. The effect was more pronounced than a flare, but not as violent as a typical nova. Given that CS-1 was only about fifteen percent the mass of Earth’s sun, the results were . . . satisfactory. As good as could be expected, let’s say.”

  He flashed a quick mental request to Cara, his personal AI, who brought up a window displaying planetary data.

  “According to our BDA teams,” he continued, “CS-1 possessed a single planet, which we named Bloodlight I. Tidally locked to the primary. Diameter less than eight thousand kilometers. Rock and ice surface. Subsolar temperature in the 200-degree Kelvin range. Atmosphere primarily methane and nitrogen. Not exactly prime real estate.

  “The Xul had a fairly large complex on the subsolar portion of the planet. That base was completely destroyed by the star’s detonation, which stripped away the atmosphere and melted the rock and ice on which the base had been anchored. There is now very little of the structure left.”

  “The Xul fleet escaped, General,” one of the senators said. His electronic ID gave his name as Senator James Witter, of the Commonwealth state of North California. “The idea, as presented to this subcommittee months ago, was that the Xul presence in Cluster Space would be eliminated.”

  “With respect, sir, the op plan we submitted to this subcommittee suggested that we might be able to deny Cluster Space to the enemy, and that we might cause considerable damage to his assets there. That’s not the same as ‘eliminated.’ Our best estimates suggested that the Xul maintained an operational fleet in Cluster Space of around one thousand starships of various masses. The expeditionary force possessed fewer than one hundred fifty vessels, not counting fighters, drones, and minor combatants. We destroyed fourteen enemy vessels—”

  “At a cost of thirty- three of our own ships,” Senator Alan Connelly interrupted. “A loss ration of more than two to one. That is an unacceptable ratio, especially when some hundreds of Xul ships escaped the battle unscathed.”

  Alexander refrained from pointing out that, in terms of tonnage, at least, 1MIEF’s losses were insignificant compared to those of the Xul with their kilometer-long monster hunterships. In any analyses of a battle’s success or failure, everything depended on how you looked at it, on what statistical factors you chose to emphasize. These sharks were determined to paint Operation Clusterstrike as a failure. They would accept only those data that supported their preconceived worldview.

  “You realize, General,” Yarlocke went on, “that 1MIEF contains a majority of all Commonwealth military ships. The destruction of your command would leave Earth and all of Commonwealth space terribly vulnerable . . . not only to the Xul, but to other human interstellar nation- states not yet allied with us.”

  She meant, of course, the Chinese Hegemony and the Islamic Theocracy. A number of wars had been fought with both states over the past few centuries, and since the Alighan War of nine years ago, things had been simmering with the Theocrats—no open war, but no armistice, either.

  Not for the first time, Alexander wondered if Humankind would ever get its house in order. Even the PanEuro pean Republic, theoretically now an ally, couldn’t be completely trusted, though they’d recently sent a contingent of heavy warships to reinforce 1MIEF. The South American Union had not yet committed either. The Rus sians, Japanese, and Indians supported the Commonwealth, but all of them had problems of their own right now—most of them involving the Chinese Hegemony—and were unlikely to be able to lend much in the way of support, either in fighting the Xuls or if another intra-human war broke out.

  Any long-range military strategy formulated by the Commonwealth needed to take into account the possibility that they could be facing another war at any time, with the Chinese, the Theocrats, or both.

  She appeared to be waiting for an answer. That much, at leas
t, was encouraging. They might still hang him, but he’d be allowed to speak in his own defense.

  “Senators,” he said, “I’m very much aware of the current delicate political situation. My command constellation receives daily briefs from Commonwealth Intelligence. Believe me, I am as eager as any of you to preserve 1MIEF as a viable force, both against the Xul and against possible Islamic or Chinese threats. I submit that the mere existence of a hundred or so Commonwealth warships manned by crews with near constant combat experience over the past decade would give any other star nation pause before starting a war.”

  “Yes. Secretary of Defense Wilson has presented us with the same argument,” Yarlocke said, disapproval tugging at her mental voice. “However, many of us in the Senate believe there is another way.”

  Here it comes, Alexander thought, masking the words carefully against unwanted transmission.

  “What’s coming?” Cara, his personal AI, asked.

  The reason they dragged us in here for this asinine light show. “And what would that way be, Madam Senator?” he asked.

  “It is time,” Yarlocke said, “past time, in fact, to end this useless and dangerous confrontation with the Xul once and for all. The Galaxy is an enormous place, three to four hundred billion stars, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of earthlike worlds, and we’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that the Xul even use planets like Earth. It’s big enough that we can share.”

  “Uh- huh. And does the Commonwealth Senate believe it can convince the Xul of that?”

  “That,” Senator Ralston said, “is obstructionist thinking. Typical militarist thinking. We can’t know until we’ve tried.”

  “I would have thought, Senator,” Alexander said quietly, “that the Fermi Evidence was conclusive by now.”

  Eight centuries before, the physicist Enrico Fermi, according to a well-known anecdote, had asked the pregnant question, “Where are they?” He was referring to non-human galactic civilizations, conspicuous, at that time, by their absence. In the decades before spaceflight, there’d been only statistical probabilities suggesting that earthlike worlds, that life, that mind should be common in a Galaxy of hundreds of billions of suns, in a universe sixteen billion years old. The sky, Fermi reasoned, should be filled with the evidence of teeming civilizations far older than Humankind, with their radio signals and infrared leakage from titanic construction projects, with their starships, with evidence of engineering projects on an interstellar, even on a galactic scale.

  Even if magical FTL drives remained forever impossible, technologies easily envisioned by 20th Century physicists suggested that, in the course of billions of years, the entire Galaxy could be explored and colonized many times over by civilizations only slightly in advance of Man.

  And yet, Earth’s skies of eight centuries past had remained eerily silent. The conclusion, that Humankind was the only technic civilization in the Galaxy, perhaps in the entire cosmos, seemed untenable simply and purely on statistical grounds. Hence, Fermi’s Paradox: Where are they?

  As humans had begun venturing off their birth world and into their own Solar System during the following century, the answer had begun to surface, fragmentary and incomplete at first, but chilling in its implications. Ruins and artifacts discovered half- buried in the sands of Mars and on the surface of Earth’s own Moon had revealed ancient colonizing efforts by at least two different extraterrestrial civilizations—the Builders of half a million years earlier, and the An of ten to fifteen thousand years ago.

  The first Xul artifact, the huntership lost beneath the ice of Europa and called “The Singer,” had been uncovered late in the 21st Century. The first explorations beyond the Solar System, to the worlds of Chiron at Alpha Centauri, Ishtar at Lalande 21185, and elsewhere, had demonstrated that waves of interstellar colonization occurred across interstellar distances in regular cycles. Each time, the colonizing civilizations had been destroyed, abruptly and with xenophobic thoroughness.

  Repeated encounters with the Xul over the past centuries had reinforced the self-evident conclusion. The Xul, for at least the past half-million years, and possibly for ten to twenty times longer than that, had maintained their dominance across the Galaxy by systematically destroying any species, any world which, to their way of thinking, represented a threat. Xul xenophobia had been confirmed by numerous intelligence-gathering probes into their ships and fortresses. Accepted xenosophontological theory suggested that the original precursor species to modern Xuls had possessed a kind of hardwired Darwinian imperative: any non-Xul life form was a potential threat, and the only rational way to deal with it was to destroy it before it was strong enough to become an actual threat.

  Slowly, Fermi’s Paradox became Fermi’s Evidence. The skies were silent because noisy civilizations were detected and destroyed early in their phases of off-world growth. The few other cultures contacted so far—the An, the N’mah, and the Eulers—had survived by being inconspicuous, or by occupying planetary environments so far outside what the Xul considered to be the norm that they’d been overlooked

  All of which meant there was no way to reason with the Xul . . . or to peacefully co-exist with them. Grim as the equations might be, either Humankind would wipe out the Xul, or the Xul would wipe out Humankind. There would be no middle ground, no basis for cooperative rapprochement, no peace short of the final peace of genocidal annihilation.

  And that was something that a lot of humans simply could not or would not accept.

  “General Alexander,” Senator Tillman was saying, “some of us feel that the Commonwealth’s military leadership is simply too, ah, reactionary politically. You look to the past, rather than to the future. You are locked into old patterns of thought that preclude your seeing future potentials.”

  “With damned good reason, Senator. It was the 20th Century philos o pher Jorge Santayana who said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The Xul have not exactly given us reason to trust them. And the experiences others have had with them—the Builders of ancient Mars and Chiron, the An, the N’mah . . . We need to pay attention to what they’re telling us across the millennia.”

  “What history teaches us, General,” Yarlocke said sharply, “is that military solutions do not work. Not the way their proponents suggest or intend.”

  “Indeed? That might be news to the Franco-UN leaders of the 21st Century. Or the warlords of the Japanese Empire and the Nazi Reich a century before that. Or the British Empire faced with the loss of its American colonies. Or to the empire of Darius. Or the Carthaginians. Military solutions might be destructive and they might be expensive, but they do work.”

  “Again, a typically militarist response,” Senator Ralston said. “I wouldn’t expect a military leader to understand.”

  “Senator, I am a military leader. For thirty years, now, I have done my duty as I believed it was required of me. If you—”

  “General Alexander,” Tillman said, interrupting, “no one is questioning your dedication, your honor, or your sense of duty. We simply don’t want militarist training and attitudes to . . . to harm Humanity by overlooking alternatives to war.”

  “Senators,” Alexander said, “I suggest that this is something best taken up with SecDef and with the President. If you’re looking for my resignation, I’m afraid I cannot and will not accommodate you . . . not like this. My understanding of the chain of command is that your committee provides oversight, advice, and can argue over my bud get . . . but that only Mr. Wilson and President Stiner have the right to fire me. If you disapprove of the way I’ve been carrying out my orders, I suggest that you take it up with them.”

  “General Alexander,” Yarlocke said with a frustrated shake of her icon’s radiant head, “we didn’t ask you here to criticize. Earlier, you invoked the words of Santayana. He also said, ‘The wisest mind has something yet to learn.’ We, the elected representatives of a sizeable percentage of Humankind, are facing the prospect of the interminable continuatio
n of an endless, brutal, expensive, dangerous, and useless war, one that has dragged on now for centuries, off and on, with no promise or hope of an ending. We wish to explore alternatives.”

  “I can tell you what the alternative is, Madam Senator. Senators Ralston and Tillman will probably tell me that it’s militarist thinking, but the alternative presented by both ancient and recent history is that Humankind will either be driven to extinction or so badly hammered by the enemy that only Stone-Age primitives are left. The Commonwealth military is dedicated to avoiding that alternative . . . assuming our progressive leadership allows us.”

  “That will be quite enough, General,” Yarlocke said, and there was no missing the hostility in her mental voice. “Remember your place!”

  “I am a Marine, Madam Senator,” Alexander said. “That is my place. My cause is duty to the Commonwealth, which I serve, and to my Corps.”

  “Your duty, General, is to the civilian leadership of the Commonwealth, as directed by the President, true, but with the consent of the Commonwealth Senate. You would do well to remember that!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Alexander replied. There was, he thought, no point in further antagonizing these people. They were looking for political witches to hunt, and had found a convenient one in him and in 1MIEF. They would tell him, no doubt in exquisite detail, exactly what they thought of him and of all “militarist” thinking, and all he could do was listen and let it wash over him.