Battlespace (22 page)

If his crew chief noticed, she diplomatically didn't mention it. “We'll have her serviced and turned around in six hours, sir,” she told him. “She'll be ready for launch.”

“So soon?” Six hours was a short turnaround after any combat mission. Usually it was more like ten or twelve.

“Orders,” Rierson told him. “The fleet's moving in close. I guess the brass is going to want fighter CAP when we close with the Wheel.”

He nodded. “'Kay. But I need some turnaround myself first.”

Food, shower, sleep. No, correction. Shower, sleep, then food.

No, on third thought, sleep.
Real
sleep.

Implant electronics allowed aviators a kind of sleep—a twilight of half-awake rest with the usual inner chatter of the mind turned off, but which allowed them to be instantly aware if their ship's AI decided to call them back online. The state was similar to deep meditation and could be quite restful. Alexander had used
quiet time
—as the pilots called it—twice during the long drift back to the carrier.

But quiet time could never substitute for the real thing. It helped quiet the mind and stop a man from going nuts, sealed into a tiny metal coffin with plugs jacked into his spine, but it couldn't handle the purely physical needs of a body wedged too long and unmoving into an opening only marginally larger than the space inside a suit of vac armor.

Besides, sleep,
real
sleep, meant a blissful oblivion that you just couldn't find in quiet time.

Yeah, stretching out on his rack for an hour or four was looking damned good right now.

Alpha Company Office
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
1750 hours, Shipboard time

Major Warhurst wished he could get some sleep, something more substantial and forgetful than the pitiful electronic substitute of quiet time. He'd tried, some hours ago, deliberately cutting his workday short and going to his quarters, knowing he'd need to be up and about by 2000 hours that evening.

But even with electronic help, rest had eluded him. The knowledge that Alpha Company would soon be going back into the assault TRAPs had somehow foiled the program designed to still the constant chatter of background thought…or, worse, left him in a trancelike state with nothing but the wordless worry to dwell on. At last, he'd given up and brought himself to full awareness, gotten dressed, and made his way back up to the company office.

As General Ramsey had predicted, his hands were more than full, between bossing a company and working on Lieutenant Colonel Maitland's staff as exec. Corporal Larry Chalker did his best to help him keep ahead of the scutwork, but in the end it was Warhurst alone who had to review and approve every request, every concern, every problem affecting both Alpha Company and the battalion.

Why was it, Warhurst wondered—and not for the first time by far—that the time-saving efficiency promised by the advent of computers two hundred years ago had somehow never materialized? Paper, thank the gods, was mostly a thing of the past; the paperless office, also promised by the computer revolution but a long time in coming, had become almost routine a century ago. But reports were still filed, requests still needed to be brought up onscreen or in-noumen and approval needed to be given with a personal thought-click or palmprint authorization, and within the report-
conscious bureaucracy of the military, the necessities of office work routine devoured the available work time of every officer and most NCOs.

So lately, when he couldn't sleep, he worked.

“Major Warhurst?” The voice in his mind was that of Master Sergeant Vanya Barnes, the senior NCO of the MIEU command constellation.

“Yes, Vanya.” If she was calling him, it meant more work. He tried, on a daily basis, not to allow that to color his perception of the woman herself.

“Got a special request here from Dr. Franz. We thought the company commanders needed to see it for themselves.”

“Okay. Send it through.”

“Here's the path. Give us your approval/disapproval STAT.”

He thought-clicked the file open. It was large, very large, and included a noumenal introduction by Franz himself. The data was titled, rather ponderously, “An Analyses of the Nommo as Related to Ancient Mythology, the Dogon of Africa, and the Star Sirius.” A bit hesitantly, not sure what he was getting in to, Warhurst opened the introduction.

If the title of the file was ponderous, so, too, was the man. Warhurst had met him on only a couple of occasions so far and hoped to be able to maintain the separation as much as was diplomatically possible. Paul Randolph Franz was fussy, pedantic, impatient, arrogant, and all too imperial in his manner to suit Warhurst's taste. He seemed to assume that anyone who didn't know what he knew was ignorant and treated them with an unpleasant blend of condescension and disdain.

He opened it, not quite knowing what to expect.

Oh. This crap again
….

He'd seen bits and pieces of this in various briefings, though never in such…
exhaustive
detail. Franz, it appeared, was something of a fanatic on the topic of Oannes
and was determined to spread the gospel of that footnote to ancient mythology to all who would listen.

No one doubted that extraterrestrial civilizations had interacted with ancient humans, not after the exoarcheological discoveries on the moon, Mars, and on Europa a century ago. The problem was sorting through the firestorm of fringe-element speculation, religion, and outright fantasy that those discoveries had raised.

The most definite known contact with nonhumans had occurred roughly nine to ten thousand years ago, when the then-starfaring An had planted colonies on Earth, enslaved the inhabitants, and sought to expand their interstellar empire across the worlds of some hundreds of stars. In about 7500
B.C.E
.—the exact date was still open to considerable debate—the Hunters of the Dawn, or someone just as malevolently bloodthirsty, had deliberately slammed a number of small asteroids into the Earth. The resulting tidal waves had drowned the An colonies, leaving behind scattered fragments of a suddenly masterless humanity, with any number of world-girdling myths of sunken continents, lost civilizations, a golden age ruled by the gods, of war in heaven, and of an Edenic paradise from which Humankind had been expelled.

The details—and the hard facts—were still largely lost in the murk of prehistory. All that could be said with certainty was that key elements—civilization-destroying floods and an unhappy end to a golden age ruled by the gods—appeared in the myth and legend of culture after culture, worldwide. The discoveries of An ruins on Earth's moon and of the much more ancient ruins left by the Builders on Mars had proved once and for all that there was
something
to the tales…enough, at least, to elevate them from the slums of pseudo-science and crackpot ancient-astronaut theories to the realm of legitimate archeology.

One set of legends, though, could not be reconciled with the others, and those were the legends of Oannes.

According to the information he'd been given in premission briefings, the
Wings of Isis
expedition had in part been sent to Sirius to investigate the possibility that advanced beings from that star had played a role in human prehistory. He'd gone so far as to read the few surviving fragments of Berossus's
Babylonian History
, in which he described the strange beings—
semidemons
or “animals endowed with reason”—who'd arisen from the waters of the Persian Gulf and taught the ancestors of the Babylonians such civilizing niceties as crop cultivation, mathematics, architecture, law, and writing. The leader of these beings had been called Oannes.

The briefing had included some information on a central African tribe called the Dogon, living in the Mali Republic. This primitive people, first contacted by Europeans in 1931, seemed to have as part of their myth and folklore information about the star Sirius that primitive tribesmen had no business knowing. According to them, the information had come from monstrous amphibious beings called
Nommo
, godlike creatures who'd come to Earth from the star Sirius.

There were similarities enough between the two to make many wonder if Oannes had been a Nommo and also to look again at some of the religious traditions of ancient Egypt. The Dogon apparently had migrated over the millennia from Egypt and Sirius had been a vitally important star in Egyptian myth and cosmology.

Had the Dogon managed to keep intact information about prehistoric contact with aliens, information that had been lost, save as tantalizing hints and fragments, everywhere else on Earth?

Warhurst opened the introduction to the file, which included both a written section and a recording of Franz speaking. Franz was suggesting, in rather pointed and definite terms, that the entire files be downloaded to the indi
vidual Marines of MIEU-1. “There is a distinct possibility,” the man said in an earnest appeal to the camera, “that at Sirius these Marines shall be the first humans to encounter an alien species which came to Earth some thousands of years ago…not the Ahannu, of which we've been hearing so much of late, but the Nommo, a completely different, a new and possibly highly advanced alien species. It is imperative, imperative, that these ambassadors of Humankind know something about the beings with whom they may be dealing, rather than killing them out of hand. This, I assure you, would be a disaster of the gravest proportions.”

There was more of the same. He scanned rapidly through the introduction to Franz's paper—it was still called a “paper” in academic circles, even if no actual paper was involved—then skimmed the first section, which was devoted to the Dogon and their traditions.

Some of the stuff was interesting. Much was pedantic and self-serving. Franz spent quite a bit of time attempting to refute claims that the Dogon material had been contaminated by outside contact with Europeans. The central piece of anomalous information turned around the Dogon reverence for Sirius, the brightest star in Earth's sky, and on another Sirius, invisibly small and incredibly “heavy,” as the Dogon put it, which circled Sirius in an elliptical path once every fifty years.

That sounded like a layman's understanding of the white dwarf Sirius B.

Sirius B had first been predicted, through gravitational perturbation, in the early 1800s and not seen optically until 1862. Certainly, it was possible that western missionaries had penetrated the wilds of central Africa in the nineteenth century, heard the astronomical myths of their hosts, and shared a few myths of their own.

Possible, but, in this case, unlikely. The cultural motifs of
dance and pottery making with which the Dogon expressed their anomalous astronomical knowledge—and that included tidbits such as the Galilean satellites and the rings of Saturn, among other things, not just the presence of an invisible star circling Sirius—were
centuries
old, predating even western astronomers' knowledge of white dwarf suns. Church records seemed clear: the Dogon had not known western contact until Catholic missionaries arrived in the region in the early 1930s and by then Sirius and the Nommo were deeply rooted in their culture.

Franz's information was mostly written, but the files included a number of recordings of him giving speeches on the topic and a long vid of him talking into the camera, as if in a documentary. There was an amusing sequence, Warhurst found, of CGI graphics showing several ideas of what the Nommo might actually look like.

According to ancient Babylonian carvings, the Nommo were upright, bearded humans wearing what looked like a giant fish as a cloak—with the fish's head perched like a cap atop the human head and the tail hanging down the back and between the legs. In the words of Berossus himself, as recorded by Alexander Polyhistor, “…the whole body of the animal was like that of a fish; and had under a fish's head another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish's tail. His voice, too, and language, was articulate and human; and a representation of him is preserved even to this day.”

The representation, no doubt, was the Babylonian carving. Franz's graphics included a shot of several Babylonian carved reliefs of fish-cloaked humans; it was hard to take them seriously.

More serious was a computer-graphic simulation of a creature that looked much like an elongated dolphin, complete with fluked tail. The face was almost human, however,
with a wise look to the eyes. The legs, with long, webbed toes, held the being upright; the arms looked like human arms, but could also serve as legs when the being dropped to all fours. Several beautifully rendered scenes showed the beings swimming in shallow, sunlit seas, as graceful as seals or as otters. On land they were awkward and more clumsy, and seemed to have trouble standing or walking, as though the gravity was too much for them.

Franz's main point seemed to be that the Nommo—a name which he claimed meant
monitor
or
guardian
in the Dogon language—were amphibious and far more at home in the water than on land. He suggested that if Nommo starships were discovered at Sirius, they would be water-filled…at least partially. The Nommo of the Dogon appeared to breathe air without difficulty, though they tended to stay in the shallows.

Warhurst caught himself wondering what the Nommo really looked like. If they were anything like these dolphin-people, they wouldn't pose much of a military threat. They could hardly stand up, much less carry a weapon. And how did a species more at home in the water than on land develop fire, metallurgy, chemistry, heavy industry, and, eventually, space flight?

One point caught his attention. Apparently, one of Franz's proofs that the Nommo had come from Sirius lay in the discovery—in 1995—of a
third
star in the Sirius system, again through the results of gravitational perturbation on the system's visible elements. Sirius C, though never photographed directly, purportedly was a red dwarf star with a mass that was five percent of Earth's sun and circling Sirius B.