Authors: Ian Douglas
“Calm down, Marine. What is it?”
“I don't know! I felt it bump meâ¦there! Over there!” He aimed his laser rifle and fired, the bolts just visible as faint red flickers in the humid air.
“Baxter!” Dunne shouted. “Belay firing! Wait'll you have a target!”
“S-sorry, Gunny.”
“He's right, though,” Weis pointed out. “There could be sharks in here.”
“âSharks'?” Womicki said. He laughed. “That don't seem likely!”
“You now what I mean, damn it.”
“Yeah,” Garroway said. “Remember those civilian briefings we DLed? If the Sirians
are
Wiggles, those Nommo things the scientists say visited Earth a few thousand years back, well, they were supposed to be amphibious, right? They lived in water.”
“So they're swimming around us, right here?” Weis said. “I don't think I like this.”
“Fucking great,” Lobowski added, swinging the muzzle of his pig back and forth, covering the uneasy surface of the water ahead in long, sweeping arcs. “Now we're fighting freakin' tadpoles!”
“We don't know
what
we're fighting, people,” Dunne warned. “Just stay sharp!”
The eight Marines pulled back, finding comfort, if not necessarily safety, in the closeness of the others. They could see
the Argos probe twenty-five meters ahead, hovering at half a meter, its jets roiling the dark water's surface, the sharp hiss amplified by the bare tunnel walls. Halfway between the probe and the Marines, something broke the surface, a long, rolling shape that glistened in the glare from the AR-7's lights.
“Shit!” Baxter cried. “What was that?”
“Tighten up, people,” Dunne told them. “I'm on the command channel with the boss.”
“We can't fight what we can't see,” Womicki said. “What the hell are we doing down here anyway?”
“Maybe,” Garroway said slowly, “we're making contact.”
“Right now,” Lobowski said, “the only contact I want to make is with my pig.”
The water was almost waist deep on Garroway now. “Hang on,” he called. “I'm going to try something.”
“What?” Dunne asked.
“I'm going to stick my head under. Don't worry. I'll be right back.”
“Womicki! Grab the handhold on his armor. Haul him up if he gets into trouble.”
“Right, Gunny.”
He resisted the unthinking urge to hold his breath. With Womicki keeping hold, he slipped forward headfirst under the surface of the water. It was ink-black and his IR scanners could pick up nothing. He thought-clicked his armor's lights on and the murk was filled with a milky-gray pearlescence filled with drifting motes of brightly lit muck. His suit's external mikes were picking up a universe of sound, however, a barrage of rapid clicks and chirps that reminded him of dolphins, back on Earth.
Were those Nommo? “
His voice, too, and his language, were articulate and human
,” at least according to one of the fragments of Berossus's history downloaded from the data stores of the civilian advisors. If that clicking was intelligent speech, it wasn't human.
His eyes were almost useless. Visibility was limited to less than a meter, even when he tried dimming the lights a little. Noâ¦
something
was moving out there. He caught only a shadow, long and sinuous, casting odd shadows as it moved in a rippling flash from right to left. He tried swinging his PG-90 to follow it, but it was gone before he could shove the cumbersome weapon through the water.
Another flash of movement, this one to the left. Turning his body against the steady pressure of Womicki's grip, he was able to see something like an angular face perhaps a meter awayâtwo huge fishlike eyes, green against horny black skin, and a smoothly rounded, elongated skull behind. He had an instant's glimpse only and then the creature was gone in a rippling flash. He thought he saw a body like an eel's or a snake'sâor it could have been a tentacle. Mostly what he remembered were the
eyes
.
Getting his feet under him, Garroway stood up, his helmet breaking the surface and water cascading from his shoulders. “I saw something,” he said. “Here it is.” He uploaded the glimpse he'd had as recorded by his armor's sensors. Cassius and the other AIs might be able to extract more information from the brief sighting than he could manage with his own eyes. The human brain was notoriously unreliable when it came to making sense of something so strange it had nothing with which to compare it. Electronic AIs would be less easily misled.
“How's the water, Gare?” Kat asked him.
“I wish these suits had sonar,” he replied. “Couldn't see for shit. But I think Ski has it right. We're fighting giant tadpoles. The thing I saw must be one of the Nommo young.”
Garroway felt himself trembling inside his armor. The stress, after the combat on the surface, was almost crippling. Up there, at least, he'd been fighting an enemy he could see, an enemy that registered on his combat maps, on infrared, and on the control Net. He'd entered the tunnel expecting
more of the sameâand an opportunity to take the fight to the enemy's home ground.
But here, waist deep in what looked suspiciously like an alien sewer, he couldn't see the enemy and couldn't fight him. If that thing he'd glimpsed underwater was one of them, however,
they
could see the Marines without any difficulty whatsoever.
Something bumped his left leg, hard.
“Hold it!” he shouted. The surface of the water was moving in a peculiar way, as though something large,
very
large, was moving just below. “I think⦔
Something massive coiled about his knees and yanked him into the black water.
Major Warhurst
AO MemphisâBeachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1442 hours, Shipboard time
“
Man down
!” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne's voice crackled over the communications net. “
We have a man down
!”
“
Gare
!” That was Kat Vinton.
“Pull them back, Lieutenant,” Warhurst said over the command channel.
“Aye aye, sir!” Gansen snapped. “You heard the man, people! Fall back!”
“Negative!” Dunne said. “Negative, sir! We've lost a Marine! He just vanished underwater! We are
not
leaving without him.”
Warhurst opened a direct and private channel with Dunne. He could see through the sensor suite in Dunne's armor, could see the flattened opening of the tunnel ahead, could see the reflections of lights off the black and dripping walls and sparkling on the surging water below and the armored shapes
of other Marines standing waist deep, weapons shifting back and forth as they looked for a target. “I understand your concern, Gunny,” he said. “But we have the whole MIEU to think about. You people are exposed down there, with big fat targets painted on your armor!”
“With respect, sir, we're not letting the bastards take one of ours without a fight. I recommend dropping mike seven-eighties on 'em.”
Warhurst thought about this. “Won't that kill your man?”
“If he's not already dead,” Dunne replied, his voice grim, “it'll sure the hell shake him up. But it won't kill him unless we drop one right on top of him, sir.”
It made sense. The Marines were encased in armor; the thing that Garroway had glimpsed was not, so far as they knew. Grenades would create a deadly concussion underwater. It would be like dynamiting fishâ¦or dropping depth charges on an enemy submarine.
“Very well,” Warhurst said. “Do it!” He shifted to the command channel. “Lieutenant Gansen!”
“Sir!”
“Try dropping grenades on them. See if you can bring them to the surface.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
Bad precedent
, he thought,
cutting Gansen out of the loop like that
. But the man was on the ragged edge of panic. Warhurst could hear the stress in his voice and the man's med readouts showed a pulse of 136, rapid and shallow breathing, and sharply elevated levels of adrenaline. It would be all too easy to lose the entire platoon if Gansen broke. Right now, Gunny Dunne was the one holding the recon element together.
And the wise commander relied on his senior NCOs.
Through Dunne's eyes, then, he watched as Dunne, Vinton, Womicki, Baxter, and Weis all pulled M-780 hand grenades from their carry pouches, thumbed the arming switches, and tossed them into the water in a broad semicir
cle ahead, halfway between their position and the point where the Argus probe hovered above the oily surface.
Five explosions went off in a ragged, second-long salvo, the blasts hurling geysers of water into the tunnel opening and ringing off the walls, the detonations amplified in the enclosed space, staggering the Marines.
God
, Warhurst thought.
I hope to hell we didn't just score an own goal
â¦.
CPL John Garroway
Sirius Stargate
1442 hours, Shipboard time
Whatever had grabbed him was extremely powerful and fast. One moment, Garroway had been standing in waist-deep water, watching a peculiar movement of the surface, as though something was moving down there. The next, something like a thick snake had coiled around his knees and pulled, pulled
hard
. He'd hit the water on his back and an instant later he was being dragged feetfirst through the blackness.
He still had his PG-90, which was attached to the armor mount on his right side, but he didn't have a target and didn't want to fire blindly. Better to wait until a target presented itselfâ¦.
Then the explosions started going off, piercing, bone-rattling detonations in rapid succession that left his ears ringing and the taste of blood in his mouth. Whatever was dragging him through the water let goâ¦but before he could find his feet or even focus his mind after that brain-numbing barrage, he was grabbed again and again dragged through the water.
His external lights illuminated the water around him, but all he could see was a blur of brightly lit muck streaming up past his helmet visor. It felt as though he were going down, as
if the floor of the tunnel had dropped sharply or opened into a vaster submerged chamber of some sort.
Radio and lasercom would be useless down here, he knew. But if he could let the rest of his unit know he was still alive and maybe give his captor a surprise at the same timeâ¦.
He pivoted the PG-90 to point roughly at what he thought might be up and triggered three quick rounds. The plasma bolts flash-heated the water surrounding them to steam, each shot accompanied by a shrill, shrieking hiss and the jolt of a miniature thunderclap, as tunnels of vacuum drilled through the water suddenly collapsed.
Whatever was holding on to Garroway let go then and he felt himself sinking. Marine armor didn't float, didn't even possess neutral buoyancy.
He was going down like a damned brick.
2
APRIL
2170
SF/A-2 Starhawk
Talon Three
Place unknown
Time unknown
Space and time, Alexander knew, were two faces of the same coin. By jumping this far through space, timeâas measured on Earth or back at the fleetâhad little meaning or relevance.
Still his internal timekeeping and the clocks in his Starhawk had marked off over two hours since he'd come through the gate toâ¦
here
, wherever the hell here was.
Outside the galaxy, certainly. His eyes, no, his mind had adjusted to the strangeness of this place. That spiral smear of starlightâ¦it was hard to tear his gaze away. So beautifulâ¦
He was a dead man. He knew that. His shipboard air and power would lastâ¦what? Another twenty hours, plus whatever was trapped inside his cockpit. Another day of breathing. And after thatâ¦
The damnedest thing about the situation was not being able to report back. His fighter was deadâno maneuvering or thruster control at all and barely enough power to keep him warm for a few more hours. The stargate he'd emerged from was a good fifty kilometers away now, a range that was slowly but steadily increasing. He had no way of going back.
When he saw the other Starhawk, he thought he was hallucinating.
No, it
was
a Starhawkâ¦a special modâ¦Hell, it was the Starhawk with an AI onboard they'd sent in as a scout.
Alexander sat upright so quickly his helmet whacked the cockpit's armored overhead. If both he and the probe had ended up in the same place, the same space, it told them something about how the stargates worked. His briefings had emphasized that no one knew if you just flew right through or if you had to follow a very precise and carefully calculated path to get where you wanted to go. This suggested that the gates were just gatesâwith one destination.
Or, at least, one destination at a time.
The other A-2 was closer now. Damn, it was showing some battle damage as wellâ¦long half-melted scorings down its port side. Maneuvering thruster damage, certainly, and maybe worse.
But it gave him a fighting chance, at the very least. Pooner wasn't dead yet.
And with the arrival of that AI, he was no longer quite so aloneâ¦.
CPL John Garroway
Sirius Stargate
1449 hours, Shipboard time
He'd never been this isolated, this
alone
.
Back in boot camp, an eternity or so ago, one of the first things they'd done was remove his implant. He'd entered the Corps with a high-end executive model implant, with social interactive icon selection, emotional input and multiple net search demons, a high-thrust unit that had put him way ahead of the other kids in his school network. Stripped of that cra
nialink nanohardware, he'd felt naked and helpless, feelings which, of course, his drill instructors had exploited.
He'd learned to live without it, and that had been one of the key lessons he'd carried with him out of boot camp. The basic, unaugmented Mark I human being was an incredible machine even without high-tech rewiring, even without instant access to satellite networks and libraries of data, even without immediate electronic interfacing with others.
Later in his training, he'd received a standard government-issue implant, but the knowledge that he
could
function without electronic enhancement remained with him.
He was damned glad of that training now. His implant connected to the electronic environment through a variety of EM wavelengths, including VLF, VHF, UHF, EHF, all via both broadband and maser, and both infrared and optical laser. None of them, even the lowest frequencies, could penetrate both water and the metal of the Wheel's structure to connect him with the other Marines.
He was completely on his own.
Garroway was on the bottomâthe ground was solid beneath his feet, though each step stirred up fresh clouds of drifting muck. The only light was that coming from the lamps set into his helmet and the top of his backpack, looking over his shoulders. At top intensity, it was like standing in the center of a fierce blizzard in whiteout conditions. At lower intensity, he could see two or three meters, but the water drank light hungrily. Hundreds of those amphibious creatures could be out there, only a few meters away, and he would never see them.
Walking was like it must have been for a hard-hat diver two or three centuries before. He had to lean forward, each step ponderously slow. He picked the direction that his suit's inertial system indicated would take him back to the rest of his platoon and kept walking.
The ground appeared to be rising somewhat, though it was
hard to be sure. His only real indicator of depth was pressure, which currently was indicating 1.34 atmospheres. With an ambient atmospheric pressure at the surface of the water of 11.5 psi, or .78 of an atmosphere, and a surface gravity averaging .9G, the depth here should be eight meters, or at least that's what the armor's onboard computer and his own implant told him.
His armor was registering a pressure now of 15.2 psi in the pounds-per-square-inch measurement still widely used by the Corps, but that would go up by almost eight-tenths of an atmosphere for every ten meters of descent. If he went any deeperâ¦what, he wondered, was the crush depth of Mark VIII vac armor? No one had ever told him. The suit's designers, he guessed, had never anticipated using it as a dive suit at high pressure, as opposed to more Earthlike atmospheric pressures, or in hard vacuum.
His boot hit something like a step and he took a step up, noting as he did a fractional decrease in the ambient pressure. A step in the right direction.
His suit's AI was smart enough to handle motion detection in a full three-sixty. It wasn't equipped with sonar, unfortunately, but miniature cameras scanned all directions and the AI was smart enough to distinguish between the motion of a potential threat and the movement caused by his own motion through the dancing particles of muck. Even so, he opened a small video window inset in his HUD to show him what was going on behind his back. His shoulder blades were itching with the constant anticipation of one of those amphibious nightmares coming up on him from behind.
What had grabbed him? He'd never seen it clearly and replaying recorded camera images showed him only confused impressions of what might be a tentacle or a big snake, a head with gleaming, green fish-eyes as big as his fist, and a glimpse of something that might have been a mouth lined with needle-sharp teeth.
The emphasis was on the word
might
. He simply could not make much of whatever it was he was seeing, partly because of the poor visibility, and partly, he knew, because he had little with which to compare it.
Mostly, he just knew he didn't want one sneaking up behind him.
Another step up. This was definitely encouraging. He kept moving.
AO MemphisâBeachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1450 hours, Shipboard time
“Sir?” Gansen's voice said over the comlink. “Sir, you'd better come down here.”
“Why?”
“I think we've just captured ourselves a Wiggler.”
“On my way.”
“Major Warhurst?” The speaker was the civilian, Dr. Franz. “I and my people should be there!”
Warhurst shook his head inside his helmet. “We can't very well wait for you people,” he said. “You're still two hours away.” Although
Daring
and
New Chicago
were only a hundred kilometers from the Wheel, the
Chapultepec
,
Ranger
, and the task force supply ships remained several thousand kilometers out. If the Wheel's defenders decided to start shooting at the fleet again, it would be better to lose a battle cruiser or a gunship than the carrier or the Marine transport.
“Nevertheless,
we
are why you people are here!” That was Cynthia Lymon, the PanTerra rep. “We are the ones authorized to make first contact!”
Warhurst was about to give her a sharp reply, then thought better of it. They were there and he was here, and he would
take what actions he deemed necessary to carry out his orders. “I would say first contact has already been made,” he said. “But take it up with General Ramsey.” He broke the connection, then directed Cassius to screen out calls from the civilians. He didn't need that particular distraction right now.
Warhurst had entered the hull access bubble sometime earlier. By this time, all of thirty-some Marines of First Platoon, Alpha Company, had already descended into the pit in the center of the airlock working space, but two squads from Second Platoon were standing by as a security element and two more were in the tunnel. They helped him attach his tether and drop backward into the tunnel entrance and two Marines accompanied him as bodyguards.
Not
, he thought,
as if bodyguards could help if the enemy decided to grab me.
The water started out less than half a meter deep, but the tunnel floor appeared to slope downward toward arbitrary north and was waist deep by the time he reached Gansen and the handful of other Marines on point a hundred meters from the opening. By this time, all of Alpha's First Platoon was in place, forming a horseshoe-shaped perimeter around their prize.
“Okay, gentlemen,” he said. “What've we got here?”
HM2 Lee crouched in the water next to a huge gently heaving bulk. “It's unconscious, sir,” he said. “The grenades stunned it and it floated to the surface.”
“We got three, sir,” Gansen told him. “But the other two are dead.”
“Let me see.”
He studied the being Lee was working on, though he could see the whole form better on his noumenal display as the corpsman carried out his electronic examination. It was large, a good three, almost four meters longâ¦most of that taken up by a powerful, muscular body, flattened side to side like a terrestrial eel. It was hard to determine the color under
the shifting lights of the Marine armor, but it appeared to be a mottled green-gray, with opalescent highlights. The skin did not appear to be scaly, but had more of a rubbery texture, like the skin of a dolphin, but with an oily sheen. Halfway down the body, a pair of fins, like stubby, clawed hands with heavy webbing, protruded from the being's side and there was a slit on the belly that might have been a hiding place for genitalia or excretory organs. Two long, oddly jointed arms emerged shoulderless from the upper body, each with broad, webbed, six-fingered hands. They appeared designed to fit neatly into grooves along the creature's side, as if to enhance its powerful streamlining.
Strangest of all was the thing's head. The skull was large and elongated and, again, appeared designed to fit into a hollow in the being's back when it was swimming. The neck was articulated, however, to let the head move to a more human-like position atop the body; perhaps it could balance on its tail like a snake, its head and upper body erect. There were obvious gill slits on what might be the chest; their rapid pulsing just beneath the water's surface was all that proved the creature was still alive.
The face was long, angular, and appeared to be encased in a horny black chitin or natural armor. The armor covered the head, the upper torso down as far as the gill slits, and what would have been the shoulders. The being possessed two sets of eyes. The two at the top of its head were large and bone-ringed, as big as a man's fist, flat, and set to either side, like the eyes of a fish, though they appeared to be angled in such a way as to allow stereoscopic vision. They were all pupil and the retinas reflected the surrounding lights with a deep green glow. Below those eyes were a pair of long vertical slits that might be nostrils, or secondary gill slits, or something else entirely, and below those were two more eyes, these small, black, deep-set, and facing full forward. At the bottom, a sharply angular and armored jaw
gaped open, exposing a mouth filled with inch-long, needle-sharp teeth.
Warhurst had no doubt that he was looking at one of the creatures the Dogon of Africa called Nommo. “
The whole body of the animal was like that of a fish
,” ran the account of Berossus downloaded from Franz's data, “
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.
” There was only one head, but the two sets of very different eyes on a face twice as long as a human's gave the impression of two faces. Warhurst could understand how a verbal description of the being could be garbled in the telling.
Berossus's history had called the Nommo “animals with reason.” The being in the water before Warhurst showed no indication of civilization save one. On the right side of its smooth skull, halfway back, a silver and black device of some sort appeared to be attached to the being's skinâ¦or possibly through the skin and into the bone beneath. It was flat and oval in shape, with a crescent symbol in raised relief. But was it technology of some sort or simply a decoration?
He pointed. “What's that?”
“We're not sure yet, Major,” Dunne replied. “Doc scanned it and says it reads like it might be full of microcircuitry, but we haven't had time to check it out yet.”
So. A device of some sortâ¦for communication with others of its kind or possibly for cybernetic enhancement of some sort, like the Marines' implants. He was curious, though. The being before him was obviously supremely adapted to life underwater. How could such a being develop metallurgy and smelting, or radio, computers, and cybernetics? The Marines didn't have the whole story yet, and it would be wise to proceed cautiously until they knew more.
“Doc?” he asked. “How badly is it hurt?”
“I wish I could tell you, sir,” Lee replied. He was using a small hand scanner, running it up and down the length of the
creature's head and torso. In humans, it would have let him find broken bones or internal bleeding and let him monitor vital signs. “No obvious fractures or hemorrhage, but is a heart rate of 21 normal? How about a body temperature of 32 Celsius? I can't make heads or tails of these brainwave readings. I don't dare administer a stimulant or a nanoinjection. About all I can do is keep the gill slits in the water so it can breathe and hope for the best.”