by Ian Douglas
“So what? I tell you, it’s us.”
“Ooh- rah.”
“Anyway,” Garroway continued, “most of the time, we’re beneath the Xul’s notice. They may honestly not even be aware of us, day to day, the way we are of them. When they sent that ship to Sol five hundred years ago, they were scratching an itch, a reflex, not trying to commit genocide.”
“Well, Gunny,” Gardner said, “you’ve certainly managed to step on my self-esteem for the day!”
“You’re too ugly to have self-esteem, Master Sergeant,” Huerra told her.
“Not true,” Garroway said. “She has esteem d’Corps. What else do jarheads need?”
Gardner laughed. “Semper fi, Gunny.”
Chaffee was leaning back, his opaque helmet visor turned skyward. Overhead, the vast, delicately colored spiral of Sagittarius A arched across the night sky, glowing a sullen red out in the outskirts, but hardening to a definite blue toward the middle. A quarter of it was below the eastern horizon, but the rest dominated the entire sky, filling it despite the competing blue-white glare from the IRS-16 star cluster, and the overall backdrop of gas arcs, clusters, molecular clouds, and stars. A very busy sky, and yet, at the moment, impossibly serene.
Everything up there, Garroway knew, was moving one way or another at literally astronomical velocities, but the scale was so immense that you couldn’t actually see any movement at all. According to the downloads he’d reviewed, the star S-2 was heading toward GalCenter at almost five thousand kilometers per hour, dragging the planet they were now occupying with it. Both would swing around the Dyson Sphere at the Galaxy’s center in another thirty- some days.
By then, of course, the RST would be long gone, though he imagined they would leave behind robotic sensors to record and transmit S-2’s actual close approach and passage. What a ride that would be! . . .
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Chaffee asked, pointing at a spot halfway up from the eastern horizon. “The Center?”
He was pointing at the place where the three vast, flat arms of the Sagittarius A spiral appeared to converge. You couldn’t see a thing naked-eye, or even with IR imaging, but right there, twenty light hours away, was the Dyson Sphere enclosing the super-massive black hole at the Galaxy’s exact center.
If the black hole was walled off behind some kind of shell, how did the infalling matter of the accretion disk, the Sag A spiral, reach it?
“That’s the center,” Garroway told him.
“You think they know we’re here?”
Garroway shrugged, then remembered the gesture couldn’t be seen through the embrace of his armor. “Who knows? Like Huerra said a while ago, they don’t seem to have anything like faster-than-light QCC. We have to assume the bad guys here got off a radio message before their network collapsed . . . but it’ll be twenty hours before they hear about it at GalCenter.”
“More like seventeen hours, thirty minutes, now,” Gardner reminded him.
“Okay, okay. But we’ve got time.”
“A little time,” Huerra put in.
“Right. And long before they hear, the Pax Galactica will be here starting the peace talks, right? And we either talk . . . or we fight. Either way, it doesn’t matter whether they’ve heard we’re here or not.”
“What do you guys think is gonna happen?” Chaffee asked. “Peace or fight?”
“Fight,” Gardner said.
“Fight, definitely,” Garroway said. “The politicians don’t know what the fuck they’re dealing with here. They don’t know the Xul like we do.”
“I dunno,” Huerra said. “We’ve kind of got the bastards by the balls, sitting here on their planet with an Euler triggership, don’t we?”
The triggership had been brought down from orbit an hour ago, gentled in on its agravs into a deep and thick-walled bunker near the center of Firebase Hawkins. The idea was that a casual Xul probe might spot the triggership if it was still in orbit with the Intrepid and the Cunningham, but wouldn’t notice it shielded and sheltered underground.
Of course, so little was still known about Xul technical capabilities.
“That’s what’s scary,” Garroway said. “Up until now, we haven’t been much of a problem for the Xul. Not on a big scale. Like I said, they were just kind of automatically scratching an itch when they hit us before. Now we’re about to really bite ’em right where it hurts.”
“It’ll make them sit up and take notice, that’s for damned sure,” Gardner said. “You think they’re going to roll over without a fight, Al?”
“A guy can dream, right?”
“It’s a good dream,” Garroway said. “But I wouldn’t bet on it. Look at it from the Xul point of view.”
“Is that even possible?” Gardner said with a laugh.
“Maybe not. But what I think their point of view is . . . is the rats in the walls get to scratching and squeaking every now and then. They go in, kill a few, watch the rest scurry back into the walls, and say, ‘What the hell. It’s only rats.’ ”
“Yeah,” Gardner added, warming to the meta phor, “and that’s just the Xul out on the back deck. The ones in the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, they don’t even know the rats are there.”
“Right,” Garroway went on. “Then one day, the rats show up with an AV-110 Tarantula, complete with a weapons pod load-out of K-772 particle beam weapons, programmed nanodisassembler dispensers, and a dozen tactical nukes, and say . . . ‘Hi, there! Now that we have your full attention, please sign a peace treaty with us or we level your house!’ What do you think they’ll do?”
“I dunno,” Chaffee admitted. “I guess it depends on what they have in the garage in the way of pest control.”
“Exactly. We don’t know what they have. We do know, though, that they don’t seem to think the same way we do. They don’t think in terms of surrender, or of taking prisoners.”
“Except for the patterning thing,” Chaffee said.
“Except for that, which we don’t understand, and which they don’t use often. They probably don’t think of us as fellow sapient beings, certainly not as fellow sapient beings who are their equals.”
“You have to be on a more or less equal footing to negotiate,” Gardner pointed out. “Each side has to understand and respect the other. Not like them, necessarily, but know what they’re capable of, and know that they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do.”
“My point exactly,” Garroway said. “All they know is . . . the rats have become a threat, and something has to be done about them, once and for all.”
“Sheesh, Gunny,” Chaffee said. “You sure know how to build up a guy’s morale.”
“Hey, it beats magic soul-eaters,” Gardner told him.
“What religion are you, anyway, Chaff?” Garroway asked. “You have one?” He was curious. There were so many religions among the teeming billions of Humankind. Their number and their diversity seemed to be defining characteristics of the species.
“RQH. Why?”
“RQH . . . Reformed Quantum Humanist?”
“That’s right.”
“So . . . no such thing as God, everything is wave-particle dualities, but the human intellect survives death in the Quantum Sea.”
“I guess. We see God as what all Mind everywhere is evolving into, the Omega Transformation, we call it. The intellect—the soul, I guess—but we call it the personal omega, is the part of us in the Quantum Sea that survives death, and maybe inhabits a succession of bodies as it evolves. But while we’re here, on this plane, we can’t really see the whole picture.”
“Fair enough. I see why you don’t like the idea of the Xul stealing people’s souls. Excuse me. Personal omegas.”
“They’re kind of like demons in my church,” Chaffee said. “Other religions have the Devil, or Entropy, or bad God- aliens who fight the good God- aliens. We have the Xul.”
“Jesus Christ, Chaffee,” Gardner said, surprised. “If you believe that, why the fuck did you join
the Corps?”
“To fi gh t them, Master Sergeant. To stop them from devouring or killing every human everywhere. To stand between them and Home. Isn’t that a good enough reason?”
“It’ll do,” Garroway said.
“Why?” Chaffee asked. “What god do you believe in, Gunny?”
“The God of Battles,” Garroway said. “The Marine’s God of Battles. . . .”
•••
Ops Center
UCS Pax Galactica
Cluster Space/Core Space 2120 hrs, GMT
The Pax hung in empty space near one of the stargates in the Cluster Space system, actinic blue-white light gleaming from the smooth lines of her saucer hulls.
“Telemetry from the Intrepid is coming through, Madam Senator,” the voice of Pax’s commanding officer said in her mind. “They have successfully mapped the gravitational matrix of an area in S-2 space. We are cleared to proceed with translation.”
“Very well, Admiral,” she replied. “Take us to the Galactic Center.”
“It will take a few moments, Madam Senator. We’re still coordinating with the other ships in the squadron.”
“There’s only the Hermes, damn it.”
“There is the Hermes, Madam Senator, and there are eight warships loaded on both the Hermes and the Pax, which will be disembarking as soon as we complete the maneuver. There are also the Cunningham and the Intrepid, already in Core Space, along with a number of fighters and supply vessels. We need to be careful we don’t translate into a volume of space already occupied by someone else.”
She sighed. Another delay. These military types didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Or maybe they did . . . and were being deliberately obstructionist. Well, they couldn’t put it off much longer.
The QCC link with the Intrepid was transmitting to her mind the view at the Galactic Core—the twenty-light year spiral of the accretion disk, a point of ruby light marking the central Dyson sphere, other icons and symbols indicating S-2 and its planet, the positions of various Commonwealth ships and probes, gas clouds, debris fields, and black holes . . .
It looked damned crowded in there.
In reality, of course, and as she’d explained to General Alexander, Cyndi Yarlocke was not on board the Pax, was not even in Cluster Space at all. Physically, she was still in her private office in EarthRing, attended by machines and by a small army of human servants as her mind followed the unfolding of events at the Galactic Core.
The mastery of Quantum-Coupled Communications had been the technological advance of millennia, greater, even, than FTL travel itself. Originally, QCC instruments had been discovered on Mars, at Chiron, and scattered across a few of the other worlds so far visited by humans. They’d represented one of the great problems of modern physics—obviously linking together two points separated by light years with no time lag whatsoever. Apparently, they operated through the mechanism of entanglement, a principle of quantum mechanics dismissed by no less an authority than Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” yet one that had repeatedly been demonstrated in the laboratory.
It had taken centuries to unlock the secrets of those communicators, ansibles, as one pre-spaceflight author had called them. Not until the 25th-Century overthrow of the so-called Quantum No-Cloning Principle, which insisted that entanglement could not be used to transmit information because such would violate causality, had it become possible to build FTL communicators. Until then, humans had communicated faster than light only by borrowing the machines left behind and still working by the Builders of half a million years before.
As a politician, Yarlocke knew that if you controlled communications, you controlled the ultimate power in the universe. You could know what was happening on the far side of the Galaxy, could coordinate planning among your most widely dispersed forces, could even rewrite history to order, all by knowing the trick to instantaneous communications.
It was that, she knew, that would prove to be the eventual undoing of the Xul. Information exchange for them was slow, its dissemination limited to the movement of their starships, which appeared to happen randomly, rather than by plan. Pax would arrive at the Galactic Center, bypassing the bases, fortresses, and other defenses the Xul had erected farther out in the Core, and offer to deal with the Xul leadership directly. With a Commonwealth Navy squadron at the Core, the Xul would have no choice but to negotiate.
The peace, Yarlocke knew, would not last. It couldn’t, because of the dynamic of History. The Xul, by all xenosophontological reports, were static, possibly even in decline, with no innovation, no growth, and quite possibly no social motivation to drive them forward. Humankind technology was constantly growing, changing, evolving; the Xul were advanced, but there was no sign that they’d changed at all. The Xul ships that had attacked Euler space some twelve hundred years ago, apparently, were identical to the ships they used today. Flat growth. Stagnant.
All Earth and her colonies needed was a little breathing room, and the Peace would ensure that. Within another century or so, Humankind would have developed so far in weaponry and engineering that the Xul would be left behind.
Cyndi Yarlocke, meanwhile, would use her new title as peacemaker to secure her own power in the Commonwealth, and go on to at last bring all of Humankind under the same government. That step, too, was necessary; General Alexander would be her principal tool in that, whether he agreed with her or not.
He was the revered leader of the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, all but worshipped by every Marine alive.
And if she owned Alexander, she would own his Marine Corps. As simple as that.
“Madam Senator,” Admiral Brooke’s voice said, “we are beginning translation.”
She pulled her awareness back out of Core Space, and watched from the bridge of the Pax Galactica. Young men and women sat at their consoles, while on the viewall panels at the far end of the compartment, the vista of Earth’s Galaxy shimmered, faded, and then was replaced by a new and quite alien backdrop.
There were no symbols or icons this time. She saw, as if with her physical eyes, the strange brilliance of the innermost volume of the Galactic Core, the red- to- blue spiral of Sagittarius A, the banked masses of star clouds in the remote distance, the nearer glow of dust clouds and arching jets of plasma within fiercely twisted magnetic fields.
Magnificent , she thought. . . .
The red-giant sun S-2 glowed sullenly to her left, close by the ocher-red crescent of S-2/I. The Intrepid, a red-gold illumined needle, was just visible between the planet and the Pax. On the other side of the sky, she could make out the shape of the Hermes, a tiny toy gleaming in red light.
The two transports floated silently in space for nearly three hours, as each unloaded the warships carried in their cargo bays—two light fleet carriers, the battleship The Morrigen, two battlecruisers, two destroyers, and a heavy transport. A tiny fleet, almost insubstantial . . . but a strong enough force to make the Xul think twice before attacking, surely.
Moments after The Morrigen completed her disembarkation from the Pax Galactica’s hold, Admiral Brooke announced their readiness to proceed.
“Do it, Admiral,” she told him. Her viewpoint stood by him on the Pax’s bridge, watching as he gave orders powering up the Alcubierre Drive.
The process took some moments. The Hermes- class transport, originally designed not as a ship but as a semi-mobile base, had not originally been designed to travel FTL, save through its translation trick through the Quantum Sea. The Alcubierre Drive had been an add-on to the Hermes, and had been incorporated into the Pax’s design only belatedly, while she was still in the Ares Yard space dock as the Brynhldr.
But the drive was powered now by the full output of Pax Galactica’s banks of QPT generators, and space around her was bending inexorably as the power rose. She was moving. . . .
Then the star-clotted vista through the viewall panels blurred, then turned brilliant with unimaginable velocity. At several hundred times the spee
d of light, the Pax skipped in across the intervening light hours.
Abruptly, the view ahead cleared. Yarlocke was looking at . . . gods. What was she looking at? A cloud, perhaps, but in two halves, and dark as soot, but with an impossibly fierce white gleam peeking out from between. The soot, the cloud, whatever it was, appeared to have shape and substance, but in an oddly fluid manner. She was having trouble making out individual shapes; it was as though the eye kept resting on that . . . thing, then sliding off.
“Is that the Dyson sphere they’ve been talking about?” she asked Brooke.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I was expecting, I don’t know. A shell or something.”
“It’s composed of some trillions of discrete . . . pieces,” he told her. “Spacecraft. Worlds the size of asteroids. There may be whole planets in there bigger than Earth. They’re in orbit around the central black hole, but they’re held together in a semi-rigid structure by some sort of magnetic or energy-field network.”
“But what—”
“Madam Senator, not now, please. We’re . . . busy . . .”
She could see the other ship on the Pax’s screens . . . something that appeared to detach itself from the GalCenter cloud and move out toward the Humankind vessel at high speed. Very high speed. At first, she thought it was one of the big Xul vessels . . . one of the ones they called Behemoth class.
