Battlespace (5 page)

“We are pretty sure that the ring is serving as a kind of artificial wormhole,” Kowalewski said, “connecting two distant points in space. The mass readings suggest that black holes are being accelerated through the lumen of the ring and that this is radically distorting both space and time.”

The needle changed course slightly, as though aligning on the
Wings of Isis
. They watched it accelerate in silence, growing large…growing
huge
. At the last instant, the alien vessel seemed to shimmer slightly, and then it was gone,
everything
was gone, stars, Wheel, alien vessel, and the
Wings of Isis
. The watchers hung in blackness absolute.

There was a long silence, and then the scene reappeared—
Isis
drifting toward the Stargate, with Sirius A and B gleaming in the distance.

“So where do these guys come from?” Dominick wanted to know.

“There's no way to tell,” Kowalewski replied.

“Can we use this, this gateway?” Foss asked.

“Again, we don't know…though the physics of the thing suggest that the answer is yes. A ship would just fly right through, like threading a needle. But there's also the possibility, if this thing works like a Tipler Machine, as some have suggested, that we would have to fly a very precise, specific course through the gate. The problem, though, is that we have no way of knowing what that course is—or where it will take us.”

“So how do we learn how to use the damned thing?” Kinsey asked. “Trial and error?”

“Essentially, yes,” Kowalewski replied. “It may be possible to send remote probes into the gateway on different trajectories and record the results. The bad news, though, is that coming back is not as simple as retracing your steps. It may be a completely different course into the gateway on the other side that brings you home.”

The group watched in grim silence for several moments more. The scene repeated itself and again they watched
Wings of Isis
attacked by the huge alien.

Or was it an attack? “We don't really see the
Isis
being destroyed,” Foss pointed out. It looks like the alien is still some five hundred meters away when the transmission ends. Maybe the alien took the
Isis
onboard.”

“It's possible,” Tomasek said. “
Isis
wouldn't even make a decent lifeboat for that behemoth.”

“The fact that we've had no transmissions from the
Isis
since suggests that she
was
destroyed,” Ryerson said. “At the very least, our people are being held prisoner. Not exactly a friendly act.”

“Which brings us back to the billion-dollar question,” Kinsey said. “Who are these guys? Are they the Hunters of the Dawn?”

The question hung in the virtual conference space for a long and cold moment. During the course of the last two centuries, exoarcheologists had uncovered the debris left behind by several sets of alien visitors to Earth's solar system in ages past. The Builders had raised awe-inspiring structures on Mars and on Earth's moon. They'd terraformed Mars, briefly bringing shallow seas and a decent atmosphere back to that arid world, and they'd evidently set their mark on the genome of the primate that later would be called
Homo erectus
. All of that had transpired some half million years ago.

The Ahannu—also known as the An in the myths they sparked in ancient Sumer—came along much later. A starfaring culture, but one not nearly so advanced as the godlike
Builders, the Ahannu had colonized Earth and enslaved several human populations between twelve and ten thousand years before. They'd introduced mathematics, agriculture, medicine, writing, metallurgy, and other important skills to their slaves, who came to worship them as gods.

The gods had been helpless, however, before the onslaught of yet another alien race which they referred to as the Hunters of the Dawn.

Almost nothing was known about the Hunters. An expedition to Europa in 2067 had uncovered an immense robotic warship, the Singer, trapped deep beneath the Jovian moon's ice-locked ocean, the only Hunter relic so far discovered. In almost a century of intense study, very little had been learned about them.

What was known was that the Hunters of the Dawn had eradicated the Builders from Earth, Mars, and the moon half a million years ago, as well as Builder colonies on half a dozen worlds of several neighboring star systems. Presumably, they'd also, five hundred millennia later, destroyed the An empire as well, though that idea was still hotly debated.
Someone
had dropped several large asteroids onto Earth eight or ten thousand years ago, however, wiping out the An colonies and leaving a few human survivors to pick up the fragments of civilization and press forward. They'd also wiped out An colonies on numerous other worlds; the surviving Ahannu outpost on Ishtar evidently had been overlooked because the world was an unlikely place for them—the moon of a gas giant far beyond its star's habitable zone, kept warm by the flexing of tidal forces.

Were the Hunters of the Ahannu the same as the beings who wiped out the Builders? It seemed unlikely that a civilization could remain intact for half a million years, and yet clues linking the two genocides had been uncovered on both the moon and in the Europan world-ocean. If they
were
the same race, might that race still exist today, somewhere among the stars?

The Singer had released a powerful signal of some kind when it reached the surface of its icy prison. Even at the crawl of light, the signal had crossed over ninety light-years already and would still be traveling starward today. The possibility existed that the beings who'd destroyed both the Ahannu and Builder cultures yet survived, and that it now knew of the existence of humankind, or would, very soon.

That single chance, no matter how remote, continued to cause sleepless nights for those charged with Earth's defense. The main reason xenoarcheology continued to be well-funded and—for the most part, at least—strongly supported by several Earth governments was the hope that a dig somewhere would uncover more clues to the Hunters, to where they came from and what they were. The evidence suggested they were out to eradicate
all
possible competitors in the galactic arena.

If that were true, and if the Hunters of the Dawn still existed, Earth was in terrible danger.

“Obviously,” Dominick said after a long silence, “that is something we need to learn. If the Sirian Wheel is a Hunter artifact, or a base, or a way back to their home worlds, we need to know that as well. And that is why we are authorizing Operation Battlespace.”

The term
battlespace
was a relatively new Marine concept with some very old roots. As far back as the twentieth century, combat was seen in terms of control of the battlefield, which included the terrain, approaches, and the airspace above the combat zone. Control all of those factors tactically through fire, force, and movement, and a commander dominated the battlefield.

Modern combat made the concept a bit trickier than it had been back in the days of the Old Corps. Space was a completely three-dimensional medium and controlling the approaches to the battlefield when you had to take into account the possibilities of a strike from space was a lot tougher than
worrying about air strikes from a carrier at sea or from the other side of the mountains. The MIEU-1's attack against the Ahannu on Ishtar had been carried out by troop transports approaching from the opposite side of the planet, then skimming in from over the horizon.

Ramsey looked up at the huge ring floating in the middle of a vast emptiness above him and wondered how they would approach
that
target.

It wasn't going to be easy.

“Colonel Ramsey,” Dominick went on, “it is the consideration of the Joint Chiefs that your group would be best for this mission. They have experience taking a fortified enemy-alien position, the Legation Compound on Ishtar, and they have experience deploying in a hostile alien environment. They were superb on Ishtar. More, they have already been screened for Famsit one and two considerations.”

“Sir,” Ramsey said, “with respect…is this a voluntary deployment? Or are you just shipping us out?”

“Well, consideration will be given to each Marine's personal wish, of course,” one of Kinsey's aides said. She was a colonel, and her electronic ID label read
CHENG
. Ramsey mentally requested further information, and a window opened in his awareness, silently scrolling words identifying Cheng as an expert in sociopsychological engineering.

“Forgive me, Colonel Cheng,” Ramsey said, “but in the Corps that doesn't mean squat. I want to know if you plan on shipping these boys and girls out again without even hearing what they have to say about the matter. These people have fought hard for their country and for the Corps. They deserve to be treated right.”

“I think what Colonel Cheng is saying,” Franklin Shugart told him, “is that we will listen to what your people have to say. Those who wish to remain on Earth should be able to, after…appropriate retraining.”

“‘Appropriate retraining,'” Ramsey repeated. He didn't like the sound of that. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Earth has changed in twenty years, Colonel,” Shugart told him. “You don't yet know how
much
it's changed. The culture. The language. The political spectrum. The religious splintering.”

“Twenty years isn't so much.”

“No? You haven't been here. We have. I sub you not glyph us on our n-state stats until you've DLed the gamma-channa.”

Ramsey mentally checked his noumenal link and saw that Shugart had disengaged a consecutive translation function for his last few words.

“Okay, so your speech patterns have shifted a bit. We can learn. People who've been alive for more than twenty years
have
learned.”

“Yes, but gradually,” Shugart pointed out, restoring the translation function.

“Right,” Kinsey added. “We didn't get hit with it all packed into one incoming warhead. I was…what? Thirty-eight when Operation Spirit of Humankind set out for the Lalande system. There've been astonishing changes in the years since, but I adapted to them incrementally, step by step, like everyone else. Like everyone
except
the Marines of MIEU-1.”

“The truth of it, Colonel,” Cheng said, “is that there are certain, well,
legal
problems with simply loosing your men and women on the country, unprepared. It's not fair to them. It's not fair to the civilian population.”

An old, old joke about cybernetic hibernation for Marines spoke of keeping them frozen in glass tubes with sign plates reading:
IN CASE OF WAR, BREAK GLASS
. Marines were warriors—arguably the best damned warriors on the planet—and their skills could be embarrassing, even disruptive, in peacetime.

But it was still wrong to treat them that way.

“So you're keeping them prisoner?” Ramsey asked. He could feel the anger rising within, a burgeoning red tide. “Lock them up and then ship them out? What kind of shit are you trying to shovel at us?”

“Colonel Ramsey,” Shugart scolded. “Some decorum, if you please. No one is going to be locked up, as you put it. But we will have to introduce certain safeguards. It's for their own good, as well as for the protection of the civilian populace.”

“And as for shipping them out right away,” Tomasek observed, “why don't we wait and see what they would prefer?” Her noumenal icon shrugged. “With no family attachments, with Earth changed so much, they might actually prefer another going back to space.”

“Gentlemen…ladies,” Ramsey said, “you're asking them to give up another twenty years objective for the dubious pleasure of facing the Hunters of the Dawn. It's too much!”

“Too much for the Marines?” Shugart said with an unpleasant smile. “I didn't know there was such a thing.”

“They'll go as volunteers,” Ramsey told him, “or not at all.” He owed
that
much to his people, at least.

“I have to agree, Mr. Shugart,” Kinsey said. “These are Marines,
people
, we're dealing with. Not chess pieces.”

“I don't believe you or the colonel fully understand,” Shugart said. “This will be a direct presidential order. The Federal Directorate has precedence over national interests.”

And that, Ramsey had to admit, was one aspect of modern politics he did
not
understand, and it was becoming more confusing by the decade. The sudden growth of the old United States of America during the collapse of Canada and the wars with the U.N. and Mexico in the last century had resulted in huge, new territories added to the continental United States. To manage those territories, and to prepare them for admission as new states, the United Federal Repub
lic of America had emerged as an organizational step above the United States.

And so, technically, the Corps was now the UFR Marines. Still, tradition dies hard in the Corps. So far as most Marines were concerned, they were still the
United States
Marines, a title
no
leatherneck would surrender without a fight. While the President of the United States was also President of the Federal Republic, technically the two were not the same, and, legally, it was the United Federal Republic that called the shots now…in the name of organizational efficiency.

Not that bureaucrats ever seemed that concerned about efficiency.

Ramsey didn't like the change, which had been well under way before the MIEU's departure for Ishtar, and which was now very well entrenched with the new Federal capitol being constructed in New Chicago. He felt, he imagined, much as an advocate of states' rights might have felt as the Federal government superseded mere state governments around the time of the American Civil War.