by Ian Douglas
“Since the Corps depends on the Navy for their ride.”
It was a very old, and usually friendly, argument.
Usually . . .
“We have a very small launch window, Commander,” Bigelow told her. “Are you ready to depart?”
“Yes, sir. As soon as Colonel Jamison gets all of his people across to the lander.”
“Another thirty minutes, Captain,” Jamison told him.
“You’d better get over there, Commander. And good luck!”
“Thank you, Captain. We’ll see you when you get back.”
“Definitely.”
Taggart knew that Bigelow didn’t want to leave her here. He didn’t want to leave anyone here. But when it came to making a decision, it wasn’t hard to choose Taggart. No one wanted to look at the fact square on, but her years as America’s chief weapons officer might come in very handy on board the Lucas.
And for her part, she wanted to go. Needed to go. Desperately.
She was thinking about that need minutes later as she crossed from America’s main spinal docking port to the Marne in one of the star carrier’s transport pods. Once and for all, she was going to face the ancient Stargods.
And in that meeting, she was either going to rekindle her old and cooling religious passion . . . or once and for all put it all behind her as childish superstition.
Laurie Taggart’s husbands had been devout Ancient Alien Creationists, and she’d joined to please them—especially Anton. She’d wanted to believe . . . and in that wanting she’d found more and more validation, more and more proof squirreled away in ancient religious texts, in archeological ruins worldwide, in out-of-place artifacts with no rhyme or reason to them, making it easy to append the label alien. She would have been the first to declare, however, that an awful lot of what the AAC believed had to be taken on faith. The Stargods were good . . . and morally superior to humans. The Stargods had created Humankind hundreds of thousands of years ago, tinkering with the DNA of Homo erectus to create a new, higher, more promising species—Homo sapiens. The Stargods lived still in the heavens . . . and someday they would return again for Their children, the faithful. . . .
In fact, she knew, it was all myth, stories identical in basic concept to dozens of older, more traditional religions, dressed in the shinier raiment of technology and modern cosmology. Trev—Admiral Gray—had gotten her to question a few of the basic tenets of her faith. Were mysteries like the Great Pyramid and the beginnings of agriculture and the mutations that resulted in Homo sapiens best and most simply explained by alien Stargods? Or was AAC doctrine more likely to be misinterpretation, misunderstanding, or wishful thinking?
He’d taught her, above all, to be honest with herself.
Most of the time, she didn’t think much about it. AAC liturgy required small groups of Believers, and in the hostile shadow of the White Covenant it was difficult to hook up with such, especially on board a Navy vessel. She hadn’t even been to a meeting in six or seven months, now. There was a group that met at SupraQuito synchorbital that she’d attended for a time when America was docked there. She hadn’t missed it, though. Not much . . .
Recent encounters with advanced civilizations, though, had reawakened in Taggart some of the awe and sense of wonder, some of the need to have everything neatly explained. For a time, she’d thought the ur-Sh’daar might be the Stargods . . . but learning that the ur-Sh’daar had vanished to wherever they’d gone when they’d transcended, leaving behind the Refusers like lost orphans . . . surely the Stargods would be more merciful, more caring than that.
And then the Rosette Aliens had appeared, moving into the Omega Centauri cluster apparently by means of the spacetime-twisting rosette. By all accounts the Sh’daar were afraid of them. Perhaps they were the true Stargods.
But she couldn’t know that until she encountered the Rosette Aliens directly. If they were the Stargods, she had to know. If they were the Stargods, they might try to communicate with the faithful.
With the Believers.
With her.
She’d been the senior weapons officer on America’s bridge when the star carrier had probed Omega Centauri. There hadn’t been much to see at the time—mysterious fields of light and alien shapes that seemed to defy both space and time. Now, though, the aliens were here in force and openly.
And she wanted to meet them.
The Marine contingent and their need for a replacement pilot had offered her the perfect opportunity.
The Joint Chiefs back on Earth wanted an observation post somewhere up close and personal . . . like smack in the Rosette Aliens’ backyard.
Despite what had happened to the Pan-European expedition, she didn’t think of this as a suicide mission. The Lexington battlegroup had a few things going for it that the Confederation forces had not. They had the benefit of knowing more about the Rosette Alien structures and a possible way of working around them. And, too, they had the Lucas, a stealthy battalion assault transport which might—might—let them slip in close without being noticed.
And, finally, they were going to use the system more effectively as cover. The Rosette Aliens seemed to have focused on a particular volume of space a few hundred kilometers above the day side of Bifrost. The Pan-European fighters had gone in when Heimdall had circled around to the day side and was deep in the midst of the glowing lights and ghostly shapes of the alien presence. This time, however, the human forces were timing their approach to arrive at Heimdall when it was over Bifrost’s night side—with the gas giant and its fierce radiation belts between the Marine craft and the majority of the alien structures.
The plan wasn’t perfect. The Rosetters appeared to have enmeshed Heimdall in structures of light as well. But every little bit, the mission planners had thought, would help.
Ahead, she could see the Marine transport Marne drifting at the edge of the debris ring. Like the Lexington, the Marne was a long, slender beam topped by a shield cap filled with water—radiation shielding at high acceleration. The shield cap was bullet shaped rather than flat like an umbrella, and the transport’s hab modules, several dozen of them, rotated around the ship’s axis in the cap’s shadow.
Farther aft was the Lucas, an ebony-black flying wing with downward-canted airfoils. The battalion assault transport—BAT—had embarked with 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines of the 4th Marine Regiment, the 3/4, a total of 960 Marines organized as a battalion-strength planetary assault team.
Taggart had downloaded all of the data she could find on the Lucas. The name was that of a Marine of five centuries earlier—Jacklyn Lucas—a kid who’d illegally joined the Marine Corps at the age of fourteen. Three years later he’d stormed the beach at Iwo Jima without a rifle, thrown himself on top of two grenades to protect his squad mates . . . and somehow survived to win the Medal of Honor, the youngest person ever to do so. If the ship named after him was channeling that guy’s esprit de corps, Taggart thought, it would be able to survive anything the Rosetters could conjure.
The Marne could carry a 960-Marine battalion with reasonable if somewhat Spartan comfort, the Lucas less so. The Marines would go in packed like sardines, in drop pods and mobile gun walkers. Once the Marines had established a secure perimeter, the Lucas would touch down and morph into a planetary watchstation, a base that would support the Marines and keep an electronic eye on the aliens until the Lexington battlegroup returned. Taggart was definitely in this for the long haul; she would stay in the base with a small team of naval personnel running the equipment.
The Marne, meanwhile, would be empty. She would return to the Himmelschloss and there take the Confederation personnel on board for the evacuation flight back to Earth.
Again—if everthing goes to plan.
Under AI control, her transport pod decelerated sharply as it approached the Lucas, which clung to the Marne’s spine like an angry black tumor. That hull was nanomatrix, like the hulls of advanced fighters, and could change shape to meet the needs of the moment. It change
d now, yawning open to give access in the ship’s side and she drifted into a glare of light inside.
On board was noisy, crowded chaos. Hundreds of Marines were still filing out from Marne’s spine into the assault transport, urged along by screaming NCOs as they floated along passageways in zero-G in search of their fireteam drop capsules. Taggart stepped out of her transport, grabbed hold of a white safety line . . . and froze. Which way?
“Make a hole! Comin’ through!”
A squad of twelve Marines hand-over-handed along the safety line at high speed, nearly colliding with her.
“Commander Taggart,” a voice said in her head—unreasonably calm in all of the confusion. “You want to move to your right, toward the hatchway marked ‘OA-4.’ Do you see it?”
“Yes. Konstantin?”
“A clone of Konstantin, Commander,” the voice said. “I’m Konstantin’s avatar for your mission.”
“Good to meet you. Thanks for the help.”
“Not at all. The Lucas is not an overly large vessel, and navigating her passageways with nine hundred Marines on board can be, I imagine, somewhat daunting.”
She had to move aside for several more columns of hurrying Marines, but eventually she reached Lucas’s small bridge. Two other naval officers were already there—Lieutenant Kathy Peters, the navigator and pilot, and Lieutenant Ross Hagelund, the engineer and nanotech officer.
“Captain on deck!” Peters snapped.
“As you were. How are we doing?”
“Behind schedule, Captain,” Hagelund told her. She blinked at the unaccustomed honorific, then accepted it. The commanding officer of a ship is always the captain, no matter what her actual rank.
“Are we ready for space otherwise?”
“Absolutely, ma’am. Ready to haul ass at your command.”
Taggart was already lowering herself into her seat, which closed in around her and provided her with palm pads for interface. The upper half of the bridge was already set to show surrounding space; the bottom side of the Marne’s shield cap could be seen a couple of hundred meters ahead, beyond her rotating hab modules. As Taggart linked in to the bridge channels, data flowed down through her consciousness, giving her readouts of ship systems, of navigational data, of the status of the Marines aft and below.
They still had six hours on their launch window. No problems there.
It wouldn’t be very much longer, now.
I’ll talk to the gods soon . . .
Bethesda Medical Center
Bethesda, Maryland
1410 hours, TFT
The military hospital complex had stood here, twelve kilometers northwest of Washington, D.C., for almost five hundred years. Congressmen and presidents had been treated here, with high-speed mag lev subways connecting the medical center with the subbasements of the White House and Capitol. When D.C. was flooded by rising sea levels in the late twenty-first century, Bethesda had remained an enclave of civilization and medical research. The National Institutes of Health had been just to the west, with research facilities simply too important to surrender just because D.C. had gone the way of lost Atlantis. The battle against the Blood Death had been fought here, in part.
But the facility had gone into a slump after that, and for a time it had been privately owned and operated and very nearly been abandoned. With the return of the USNA government to D.C. and the rebuilding of Washington, however, the Bethesda medical complex was again at the cutting edge of nanomedicine and modern epidemiology. The mag lev subways weren’t yet open, but Bethesda once more held the distinction of being the government’s official center for modern medicine.
“So what am I doing here?” Gray said. He was encased in living plastic, a high-tech bed that fed, cleaned, and exercised him, delivered regular doses of nanobots and carried away wastes. Whatever the device was doing, it was working; the headache, the joint pains, the dizziness all were gone. He still felt quite weak and a bit groggy, but that was to be expected.
The alien bacteria, the doctors had told him, were under control. Exactly what that meant, he wasn’t sure. Gray wanted them gone. . . .
He’d awakened several hours before, to find himself in a strange bed in a strange room under one G, his weight about twice what it had been in America’s sick bay. The room was spacious, and one wall was transparent; doctors and medical technicians came and went in sealed e-suits. Clearly he was still in isolation.
“We brought you down on a high-speed shuttle, Admiral,” President Koenig told him. “Didn’t even bother with the space elevator. Flew you straight into Andrews and hauled you out here in a sealed floater.”
“Wasn’t that taking a hell of a big chance, sir? The idea was to keep me from infecting the entire planet.”
“We’ve kept you as isolated as you were on the America,” Koenig told him. The president was standing behind the transparency, with a dozen aides, senior military officers, and others. Gray was flattered. For the president of the USNA to leave his office in the New White House and trek out here just to see him was . . . startling.
But he didn’t like being the center of attention, and even more he didn’t like the potential risk to the human species.
“It turns out there was not a large danger,” a doctor standing next to the president told him. “You’ve encountered a race called the Agletsch?”
“And you are?”
“Yes—sorry. Dr. Jamil Gorham.”
“Okay.”
“As I was saying, you’ve met the Agletsch?”
“Of course. Many times.”
“Well, most Agletsch carry the paramycoplasma organism in their bodies . . . or one version of it, at least. That’s the point, you see. Each and every species infected by paramycoplasma is infected by a different, artificial species of the bacteria. There has never been an instance of cross-species contamination occurring naturally.”
“I’ve met with the Agletsch many times,” Koenig admitted. “Face to . . . er . . . eyestalks. If the Sh’daar had wanted to get me with germ warfare, they certainly had the opportunity.”
“TBB,” the doctor added. “The trans-biospheric barrier.”
“So what happened with me?” Gray asked. “Why did I get it . . . or we, I should say. How about the other people who got sick with me?”
“Under treatment and doing fine, Admiral,” Koenig told him.
“We believe,” Dr. Gorham said, “that the paramycoplasma organism has to be specifically genegineered for each species . . . so much so that it’s almost a completely new organism . . . not just a new species, but by rights a new genus. For now, the xenobiologists are keeping the original classification. We’ve named the Agletsch version Paramycoplasma agletschii . . . and there’s simply no way that P. agletschii can infect humans.”
“Which means . . .”
“The organism was very carefully crafted so that it could infect us,” Koenig said, nodding.
“Bacteriological warfare,” Gray said. “A deliberate attack . . .”
“Actually,” the voice of Konstantin said in Gray’s mind, “we think that this was an attempt at communication, not warfare.”
“Exactly,” Koenig said. “They weren’t attacking us. They wanted to talk. And it may be the slickest means of interspecies communication available throughout the galaxy.”
“I don’t understand. . . .”
They explained, or they tried to. Gray’s expertise was not in xenobiology or genegineering. Still, it mostly made sense. The trick, they told him, was coming up with an organism that maintained its biological identity and could continue to function as a superorganism when taken as an aggregate of millions of cells, but which could develop metabolic and reproductive strategies enabling it to survive in wildly different hosts.
The Agletsch, for instance, were carbon-based organisms very much along the lines of life on Earth, so much so that they could get nourishment out of most human foods, and yet their metabolism made use of potassium and phosphorous to a degree unknow
n on Earth, and also incorporated cyanide, methyl cyanide, and hydrocyanic acid.
In other words, the foods Agletsch ate normally would poison humans.
Or there were the Turusch, another star-faring species under the Sh’daar Collective banner. They apparently hailed from a world hotter than Earth. Their metabolism was carbon-based, but they employed silicon chemistry as well. They used sulfur and sulfur compounds to a degree not seen in terrestrial life, and a complex analogue of chlorophyll to convert sunlight into energy.
For any reasonable theory of alien microbiology, the microorganisms found in Agletsch or Turusch should not have any effect whatsoever on humans, nor should the two be able to infect one another.
But bacterial samples taken from both the Agletsch and from a colony of Turusch POWs at Crisium Base proved that both carried cocci of genus Paramycoplasma. They’d just adjusted their surface proteins to a remarkable degree, so that P. agletschii could handle the cyanide of Agletsch metabolism, while P. turuschii was happy living with the sulfur chemistry of the Turusch.
And detailed DNA analyses proved that both were related to Paramycoplasma subtli, the species that had attacked Gray and the other members of the N’gai expedition.
“In fact,” Gorham told Gray, “we’re considering changing the name of the bug to Paramycoplasma homosapiensi. Keep it all nice and orderly, you know.”
“Thanks for the biology lesson, Doc, but that’s not really what I’m concerned about at the moment. What do you mean by the idea that the Sh’daar were trying to talk to us?”
“That was my observation, Admiral,” Konstantin’s voice said. “And it is still only a working theory. But ever since we first began encountering the various Sh’daar species, there has been something of a mystery. With some hundreds, perhaps thousands of mutually alien species making up their Collective, how do they get anything done? What single motivation can unite such disparate species?”
Arguably, that was one of the biggest mysteries about the Sh’daar, and had been ever since the start of the war. Humankind had encountered a number of different alien races—Turusch, H’rulka, Slan, Nungiirtok, and others—and in each case they’d come under attack. Human strategists had noted that if all of the Sh’daar species had managed to put together a coordinated attack, Earth would have been destroyed or forced to capitulate immediately. Instead, the attacks had been piecemeal, and seemingly without a coherent strategy.
