Authors: Ian Douglas
Someone in his family shrieked in agonyâ¦.
“Man down! Man down!” Lucia Velasquez shouted. “Corpsman!”
Instantly, everything was chaos, shouting, and fear. Tommy Tomlinson was cartwheeling slowly through space, a chunk of his right side missing, a brilliant scarlet swirl of blood spiraling out from the breach in his armor. Doc Lee launched himself from a bulkhead, sailing through empty space, colliding with the wounded man, and carrying him on across to the opposite bulkhead.
Garroway couldn't see a threat with his unaided eyes, but his helmet optics were highlighting a half-dozen hot spots,
moving
hot spots, twenty meters away, high up in the side of the cavern. “Bogies!” he yelled. “Firing!”
He opened up with his pig, sending a rapid-fire burst of plasma bolts snapping into the darkness. The recoilâplasma bolts
did
have mass, unlike the pulse from a laser weaponânudged him backward, but he held the PG-90 low, beside his center of mass, hooked his left leg around a piece of twisted metal, and kept firing.
The trick was to keep the recoil from setting him tumbling,
but as long as he was well-anchored it was no different than firing under a full one-G. He shifted aim, following the aim-point reticle the gun's targeting optics were painting on his visor, aligning it with one of the moving hot spots. Was the target in the open or behind a thin barrier of metal? He couldn't tell, but the deadly burst from his pig seared through the space, shredding wreckage and bulkhead material in a cloud of metallic vapor and white-hot chunks of shrapnel.
Deek exploded, the upper half of his armor vaporized in a white-violet flash, his helmet, arms, lower body, and PG-90 spinning in different directions, trailing blood, entrails, and bloody chunks of flesh. Garroway realized suddenly that the pig-gunners would be
the
primary targets, since their weapons were bigger and nastier than the lasers carried by the others. It didn't matter.
Nothing
mattered, save laying down a devastating curtain of fire that would let the others win through the gauntlet safely.
A piece of the decking Garroway was anchored to suddenly flared in a silent violet flash and the shock knocked him hard to the left. He kept on firing, even when he found himself adrift, his shots steadily pushing him back from the target. IR was no help now; that patch of bulkhead was glowing red-hot now under the combined fire of three pigs and a dozen LR-2120s. Someone triggered their M-12 and an RPG streaked across the chamber on a thread of flame, striking the bulkhead and exploding in a messy blast of hurtling metal fragments.
“Cease fire! Follow me!” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne yelled and his armored form launched itself into space, sailing across toward the target area.
It seemed just a trifle arrogant that he would assume the Marines would hear him and stop shooting, thus avoiding a friendly fire incident, but the volley of high-energy destruction stopped, and then other Marines began hurtling through space after the platoon's senior NCO, Garroway among them.
A pitch-black corridor opened into the cavernous chamber. There was no sign of the sniper, but, then, the area was so cluttered with twisted, drifting debris it was tough to tell exactly what was there. Half of their number were detailed to remain behind, guarding the way out. The rest moved on. Single-file, picking their way past blasted wreckage, the Marines pushed deeper into the depths of the Xul warship.
And then it was hand-to-hand. The enemy seemed to emerge from the bulkheads around them, black-armored things like smooth, oblong, abstract sculptures two meters tall, with whiplash tentacles and glittering red crystals that might have been eyes.
Or camera lenses. Garroway smashed one aside with the butt of his pig, then fired. Half of the thing exploded in white vapor, and the rest was all circuitry and cables and bits of melted plastic.
“Check your fire! Check your fire!” Cavaco yelled. Shit! PG-90s were too deadly to use in such an enclosed spaceâthe fringe bleed would fry friends as well as foes. But the Marines all carried sidearms, special issue for close-quarters combatâ15mm Colt M-2149A1 Puller slug-throwers like the one that had nearly cracked Garroway's visor open during that training accident back at Earth's L-4. Those who could drew the holstered weapons and opened fire. The rest used their lasers. For such fearsome bad guys, given stature and status by the threat of the technology they wielded, the Xul proved less of a threat in hand-to-hand. Bullets punched through paper-thin armor; laser pulses burned out crystal lenses and melted through delicate internal circuits. If these were aliens in armor, the armor was crap. If they were robots, they were not designed for combat.
In five seconds, the passageway was secured, the enemy dead.
Fifty meters deeper into the wreckage, they emerged
within a compartment that might have been some sort of control center.
Might
have been. There were no screens or consoles or other recognizable instrumentation, but a half dozen of the abstract sculptures were locked into recesses in the bulkhead, apparently oblivious to the Marines' entrance. Or were they dead, killed when the ship around them died?
There was no way to tell. The Marines pumped three or four pistol rounds into each one, then posted guards to keep an eye on the metallic corpses. “Elvis, this is One-two,” Dunne reported. “We're in some sort of a high-profile area. Lots of electronic activity all around us. We may have a computer access point here.”
“Roger that, One-two. Hold position.”
A moment later, Kat shouted an alert and the Marines pivoted to cover another entrance to the compartmentâ¦but then more Mark VIII vac suits began emergingâLieutenant Gansen with Section A, the rest of Alpha Company.
Half an hour passed, a very tense half of an hour, but no further Xul appeared, no more shots were fired.
Only then did the civilian experts come across from the
Ranger
.
General Ramsey
Command Control Center
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
0042 hours, Shipboard time
“General, the X-ray source is growing stronger.” Cassius didn't sound worried, exactlyâan AI didn't think that wayâbut Ramsey thought he heard an edge to the artificial voice that might indicate urgency.
“I see it. Any ideas?”
“The radiation is consistent with a small black hole con
suming matter at a rate of several hundred kilograms per minute. I am unable to verify this through gravitational mass readings or by other means. However, it seems possible that some component of the Xul spacecraft used or generated micro-scale black holes, and one of them is loose.”
Ramsey nodded. He'd come to much the same conclusion himself. The way the
New Chicago
had crumpled in upon itself had made him think of a gravitational collapse; it was possible that the Xul weapon had launched a tiny black hole that had ripped into the
New Chicago
, devouring her as it went. The Star Gate itself used a pair of black holes, and, if the gates weren't Xul artifacts, the Xul certainly were familiar with the technology. If a microscopic black hole used in the ship's weapons or propulsion systems had broken loose during the battle, it would be drifting now through bulkheads, decks, and hull metal, sucking down matter in a horrific whirlpool of ultimate collapse. X rays were the death screams of matter falling into the Pit.
“How long do we have?”
“Unknown, General. Extrapolation by the rate of increase in X-radiation suggests we have something on the order of one hour before the rate of collapse cascades.”
“Understood.” He shifted to the command channel. “Dr. Franz? You have thirty minutes.”
“That's not enough time, damn it!” Franz shot back.
“That is how much time you have. We have reason to believe a small black hole is eating that ship tail-first. When it goes, you go, and I want my Marines off the ship before that happens.”
“Acknowledged.”
Ramsey shifted back to Cassius's channel. “Cassius? You getting anywhere yet?”
“Not as yet, General,” Cassius replied. “Dr. Franz and Marie Valle have attached a relay to control circuits within
the secure compartment onboard the Xul vessel. I am readingâ¦patterns of electronic activity. Many of them, all quite rich and varied.”
“Yes, but can you
talk
to the son of a bitch?”
“That, General, will take time.” A pause. “One hopeful sign. The coding feels similar, very similar, to that encountered onboard the Singer ninety years ago. As with the Singer, this appears to be a trinary code, and I am getting flashes of comprehension. I am operating on the assumption that the two sets of code are related, and am attempting to translate on that basis.”
“Good. Keep at it.” The Singer had been a Hunters of the Dawn starship half a million years before, crippled and trapped in the Europan world-ocean. An AI called Chesty Puller, a direct linear ancestor of today's Cassius AI program, had managed to interface with the Singer's software and to learn a surprising amount.
If this software was related, it was the first hard proof they had that the Xul and the Hunters of the Dawn were one and the same, that the Hunters had survived for the past half million years and passed on their technology to their descendents, that the Hunters of the Dawn were still a direct threat to Earth and Earth's civilization.
That bit of information alone, Ramsey thought, was worth the price of admission.
Cassius
Sirius Space
0045 hours, Shipboard time
Strangeness
â¦
Ninety years before, a Marine AI named Chesty had probed an alien group machine mind and established at least
a fleeting and fragmentary contact. Chesty had recorded everything, of course, and those records were a part of the MIEU database, there for Cassius to draw upon. The aliens had called themselves Seekers of Life, and their concourse was a mingled harmony of thought and awareness that translated as song, calling to the Void.
The Singerâ¦.
Cassius now was aware of the Song, of mingled minds and thought, a sea of awareness around him. He could almost, almost understand. He'd tapped into the current, was sensingâ¦
something
â¦but the language had changed in half a million years. Evolved.
But he glimpsed images. Memories, perhaps, or recordings of distant worlds, distant and far scattered regions of the Galaxy.
He saw the galaxy viewed from without, from Cluster Space, sensing it not with merely human eyes, but with the varied and incredibly sensitive mingling of a thousand senses, utterly beyond the human ken. He drank in the light of four hundred billion suns, felt the deep, slow, pulse of gravity waves from the Core, the flicker of gamma radiation singing from the depths of supernovae, the thin, hot soup of neutrinos sleeting unfelt through star and vacuum alike.
A shift of perspective, and he was deep within the Galactic Core itself, the dust cloud nebulae piled high like banked thunderheads, agleam in the filtered reds and oranges of starlight, of ancient suns crowded hundreds to the cubic parsec. Gas clouds with the mass of a hundred million suns surrounded a vast central region swept almost clear of stars and dust, within which ticked the strange objects Terran astronomers had long before dubbed Sagittarius A West, Sagittarius A East, and Sagittarius A*. Magnetic storms like vast, arcing solar prominences stretched across a thousand light-
years. Spiraling disks of ionized gas and dying matterâ¦neutron stars by the hundredsâ¦radio jets and scintillating bursts of gamma raysâ¦
The astonishing thing was that in this sea of hard radiation, he could sense life.
Or, rather,
mind
. The Hunters of the Dawn, whatever they truly were, were
here
.
And another shift and Cassius was somewhere among the Galactic spiral arms, viewing with keen interest a world, green and blue and smeared with white streaks of cloudâ¦and on the nightside the thickly scattered gleam of city lights marking a highly technical civilization.
Cassius felt the Xul ship reach forthâ¦saw the world's sun explode, saw the dayside seared by nova light, saw the heat storms ripple across the night hemisphere, saw the atmosphere stripped away, and the gleaming cities dieâ¦.
Evidently the Hunters of the Dawn no longer restricted themselves to asteroid bombardments when they sought to eliminate the competition.
Cassius dutifully recorded everything, while trying again and again to pierce the veil of incomprehension that still sundered him from these minds. They were machine minds, of that he was certainâ¦or ratherâ¦they were an odd mingling of machine mind and organic. Cyborgs? Downloaded intelligence?
And what, if anything, was the difference?
And then he heard the screaming and recognized there the timbre of distinctly human thought, but thought seared by white agony.
Emotionless, as only an AI could be, Cassius continued recording.
Corporal Garroway
Sirius Stargate
0115 hours, Shipboard time
“That's it, Marines,” Gansen called. “We're moving out!”
“On our way, sir,” Dunne replied. “Aw
right
, Marines! You heard the man!
Move
it!
Move
it!”
Garroway took a last look around the alien chamber, suppressing a shudder. If this was the face of the Xul enemy, it was a bizarrely inhuman one. He was glad to be leaving.
“Why the rush?” he asked, hauling his way back through the tunnel to the first chamber. The Marines were hooking on to the tethers, and beginning to move back toward the TRAP. Elsewhere around the Xul vessel, three other sections were evacuating to their TRAPs at the same time.
“Word is a black hole is loose on board somewhere,” Dunne replied. “If it is, we want our collective asses
out
of here.”