Authors: Ian Douglas
The city itself, like a wall, dissipated much of the heat and blast, though buildings were badly damaged as far away as Downers Grove, twenty-three miles to the west. Above Lake Michigan, steam boiled skyward in a vast and roiling pillar, spreading out at eight thousand meters in the characteristic cap of a mushroom cloud, and the city was blanketed in a pall of smoke and falling ash. Most horrifying of all, some hours after the blast, the first burning white flakes began sifting from the sky like an unseasonable snowfallâtiny flecks of plutonium from
Sagittaire
's disintegrating drive module.
And in the shadow of the cloud, the city of Chicago, for the second time in 171 years, was burningâ¦.
US Marines Space Combat
Training Center
Quantico, Virginia
2025 hours EDT
The twelve-and thirteen-hour days were beginning to wear on Jack as badly as the eighteen-hour days in boot camp. The physical stress wasn't the same, though he still
had morning PT and long runs along the trails that wove through the woods along the banks of the Patuxent River. In boot camp, the nonphysical part of his training had been lumped together under the general heading of
knowledge
, as his DIs had barrage-fed him isolated facts and figures on everything from the range and power output of a UN H&K Laserkarabiner LK-36 to the exact chain of command up the ladder from a recruit to President Markham. Jack still had all-too-vivid memories of Gunny Knox's scowling face as he bellowed, “All right, recruits! Time for knowledge!
What
is the birthday of the United States Marine Corps?”
And the answerâin this case, a chorused “
Sir
! The birthday of the United States Marine Corps is 10 November 1775,
sir
!”
At Quantico, knowledge was presented in a far more organized and school-like fashion. In fact, most of every afternoon was spent in classrooms, learning a bewildering array of technicalities, an almost encyclopedic mass of data on the myriad aspects of science, engineering, and medicine necessary for a man to live and function in space. Mornings and evenings, after chow, were reserved for hands-on training and simulator sessions, times when Jack actually got to work with the equipment that would help him survive in space.
Most important, at least in terms of emphasis, was the USMC Hughes/McDonnell Douglas EVA Combat Armor, Class-One. For the past week or so, Jack felt like he'd spent more time in the suit than out of it.
Space suits had come a long way indeed since the days of the first primitive shuttle orbiters. The gloves were thin enough they no longer needed thick rubber fingertip pads, or an additional aluminum fingernail attached to the left thumb in order to pick up small objects. Still, the suits were unpleasantly clumsy, especially under a full Earth gravity. They consisted of an inner cooling garment of tiny plastic tubes, covered by a two-piece insulation layer, and the outer hard-shell sections of reactive camouflage Kevplas and molded-ceramic composites, which snapped and sealed over most of his body like the pieces of a suit of
medieval armor. The helmet, with its built-in computer, comm system, and internal HUD, and the backpack Personal Life Support System and power plant completed the basic suit.
The current space-training class was a special one, consisting of just five Marines, two women and three men. Training had been intensive for the first two weeks, and two other men who'd begun the class on 1 September had already dropped out, unable to keep up with the barrage of facts, figures, and engineering esoterica they were expected to learn. There were more instructors for Class 42-C than students, though Staff Sergeant Ellen Caswell, another veteran of the MMEF and Garroway's March, was their primary instructor. This evening, after chow, they were gathered in Squad Bay 2, suited up, as usual, as Caswell put them through their paces, drilling them at disassembling their M-29 ATARs and putting them back together again, while wearing heavily insulated overgloves.
During a pause in the drill, he raised a clumsily gloved hand.
Caswell was also suited up. “Yes, Private Ramsey?” she said over the squad comm channel. At least no one here had started using his embarrassing Flash moniker.
“I was just wondering, Staff Sergeant, when we were going to get to go into the zero-G hangar?”
He'd heard about the hangar from some research into Corps space training that he'd done back home, before he'd joined up. The trainee was fully suited up in Class-One armor, complete with fifty-kilo backpack and power unit. A special harness was attached to the suit, which in turn was attached to a complicated-looking tangle of gimbals, pivots, and suspensor rigging dangling from the overhead, a carefully stressed and balanced arrangement that simulated the effects of zero G.
Traditionally, a student's first exposure to the rig came when he was hoisted into the air and given an empty M-29 ATAR and a loaded magazine. Other personnel cleared the hangar, and the student was ordered by radio to load his weapon, switch to full auto, and fire at a man-sized target at the other end of the hangar.
That amusing exercise was designed to demonstrate the need to brace a projectile weapon precisely at the suit's center of gravity, a point marked by a hollow cup positioned at about navel height that exactly fit the rounded butt end of an M-29 modified for zero-G combat. The idea was to keep the weapon centered and aim by controlling the pitch and yaw of the suit itself, aiming with the targeting cursor projected on the helmet's HUD. Most students ended up in a wild, uncontrollable, and embarrassing spin in the dangling support apparatus. Jack, however, knew about action-reaction and was pretty sure he would be able to impress his instructors by firing on-target, without throwing himself into a spin.
“Not this go-round, Ramsey,” Caswell told him. “Next week we'll pop you into the hangar rig to give you a feeling of moving in one-sixth G, but we're cutting zero-G work from the curriculum for you five. Maybe you can pick it up later, after your mission.”
Jack was disappointed, though he tried not to show it. They'd told him at the start that the program he'd be going through with the handful of other special selectees at Quantico was going to be abbreviated. They needed Marines with AI programming experience
now
, for a big, upcoming mission no one wanted to talk about, and so the space training course was being tailored just for them, cut down to include only what they needed to know to survive and fight on the surface of the moon, not in space.
Well, he was still going to the Moon, and that was quite as challenging an environment as Earth orbit or deep space. He looked down at his ATAR with its attached under-barrel M-440 grenade launcher. In another month, if he was able to tough out this course, he would be in space.
It didn't seem possible.
Caswell appeared to be listening to something, her head cocked to one side behind the visor of her helmet. He felt a chill, a kind of premonition. There was a horror in the staff sergeant's eyes that he'd seen beforeâ¦in the trenches in the Russian Far East.
“Listen up, people,” she said, her voice hard. “I've
just had a report come down from Battalion. Approximately one hour ago, a fragment of that asteroid diverted by the UN entered Earth's atmosphere and struck the southern tip of Lake Michigan with an impact equivalent to the explosive force of a small nuclear weapon. Reports, reports are still kind of confused, but it sounds like the city of Chicago has been destroyed.”
There was a roaring sound in Jack's ears, and he felt the hammering of his heart. He felt dizzyâ¦short of breath, and he reached for his suit's controls to up his O
2
feed a notch. Chicagoâ¦gone? He'd been there so many times, visiting Aunt Liana and Uncle Dave.
Hard on the heels of that thought came another. His aunt and uncleâ¦if they were in the city, they must be
dead
â¦
“
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
!” another voice put in, and Marielle Polanski crossed herself, the gesture oddly cumbersome in Marine armor. Then he remembered that Marielle was from Chicago; she'd mentioned once that her folks lived there.
“Private Polanski?” Caswell said. “Are you all right?”
“Y-yes, Staff Sergeant⦔
Suddenly, Marielle began fumbling with the latch for her helmet, clawing at her armor, trying to get out. Jack could hear her retching over the open circuit. Caswell was in front of her in an instant, hitting the emergency release and pulling the bulky helmet off her shoulders. Then Marielle was running from the bay, her boots clacking on the concrete floor as she made for the head.
“That's all for this evening, Marines,” Caswell said, pulling her own helmet off. “I've called Sergeant Honeycutt to come down and check in your gear and weapons. Secure your gear, and you're dismissed for the day.” She walked away quickly, following after Marielle.
Chicagoâ¦destroyed
. The thought went around and around in his mind, inescapable, incomprehensible. The news hit him on several different levels. On the one hand, it meant that the UN had just drastically escalated the war, that they were no longer trying for some mere political victory, but to destroy the United States itself, or at least
to cause such terror and devastation that Washington would be forced to surrender.
That was bad enough, though the information had the cold and remote feel of a class text download in civics or history. On a far more very personal, more direct level was the shock of
personal
loss. He'd never cared much for Liana Alexander, but he knew his mother loved her, knew that Liana's death was going to hurt his mother a lot. And even the death of a relative you didn't like carried with it a shock and a cold ache in the heart that wasn't going to go away soon.
And as for Davidâ¦
Hell, David Alexander had been more like a father than an uncle for a good many years. So much of Jack's own lifeâhis fascination with ETs and the discoveries on Mars, his joining the Corps, his love of spaceâall had been the direct result of his uncle's stories. David Alexander had shaped one hell of a lot of Jack's life, and his dying meant that a part of Jack had died as well.
Jack couldn't look at the possibility of David's death with anything like rationality. There was a chance, maybe even a good chance, that his uncle was still alive. Joliet was a good sixty miles from downtown Chicago, and the last Jack had heard, his uncle had been in the federal prison there.
He'd heard a story, once, about the sole survivor of a devastating volcanic eruption on the island of Martinique back in 1902. He'd been a prisoner in the deepest-buried cell in the city's jail.
At the same time Jack felt that stirring of hope, he shoved it back, told himself that David had to be dead as well. He couldn't bear the thought of being hit by this icy shock twice, to allow himself to hope that his uncle was alive, then to find out that whatever had hit Chicago had been big enough to take out Joliet as well.
Someone had once pointed out that ignorance is bliss, knowledge is powerâ¦and uncertainty is sheer hell.
He knew the truth behind those words now, in a way he'd never before imagined.
TUESDAY
, 16
SEPTEMBER
2042
Reagan Arms Hotel, Washington,
DC
1348 hours EDT
When the knock sounded on the door, David very nearly did not rise to answer it. He'd been sitting alone in the hotel room, the lights off, the curtains closed, the wall screen switched off, all morning. He didn't want to see anyone just now.
But he thought he knew who it was, and he knew he had to answer. When the knock sounded a second time, he struggled up off the bed, made his way to the door, and opened it.
General Warhurst stood on the other side, with one of his aides, a captain, and a pair of enlisted Marines in combat dress, with visored helmets and rifles.
“Good morning, General,” he said. His mouth was dry, and the words came with difficulty.
“Good afternoon, Professor. May we come in?”
David stepped aside, waving them through the door. The two enlisted men took up posts to either side of the door in the corridor outside, their weapons at port arms. Warhurst palmed the room lights on and walked through, taking a seat in the small lounge area beyond the room's two beds. The aide took up a silent stance at parade rest nearby.
It was still all a little unreal. General Warhurst had met
him as he was being released from Joliet and asked if he would come to Washington for a series of meetings. He'd been
that
close to telling Warhurst to forget it, that he had to go talk to Liana, that he needed to get his own life together first, that above all he didn't owe the government or anyone who worked for it a damned thing after they'd stolen so much of his life and work.
But it was Warhurst who'd been responsible for his freedom in the first place. David was grateful; more than that, though, he always paid his debts, and Warhurst's tone had suggested that something important was happening, something in which David's participation was necessary.
And so, David had let them drive him to his home in the Chicago suburbs, where he'd packed a bag and left a v-mail for the absent Liana on the home computer. An hour later, he'd been on a military VTOL transport from O'Hare International to Andrews Aerospace Force Base outside of Washington.
And if he hadn't agreed, if he hadn't made that flight, he would likely have been in Chicago Monday evening when the shock wave rolled across the city from the lakeâ¦either in a hotel room or else working late at the Institute, which now no longer existed.
“First of all,” Warhurst said, “please accept our condolences on your loss. Have you heard anything definite at all?”
He shrugged and nodded toward the wall screen. “No. Triple N is saying three quarters of a million deadâ¦as if anyone can ever know the real number. They're finding lots of survivors, especially out toward the Ring. But, well, they also said there was a big, ancient space brothers' rally near the lakefront at the time. And⦔
“And your wife would have been there,” Warhurst said, completing the thought when David couldn't go on.
He was suffering from a bad case of survivor's guilt. He knew thatâ¦but the knowledge didn't help. Nor did it help that he was the one Cheseaux had passed the information through in the first place. If he'd just said something thenâ¦
But what? The asteroid had been aimed at Colorado,
originally. There was no way of knowing that a piece of it would come down on Chicago.
He should have died in Chicago, tooâ¦.
He knew how lame, how stupid that self-pitying thought sounded. It wasn't even as if he and Liana had been all that close during the past few years. He'd wanted a divorce so badly he could taste it. And yetâ¦
The awful part of it was that he'd finally decided to
do
something about his impossible life with Liana. Now she was dead, his chance to take his own life in his hands snatched away with all those lost lives.
It left him feeling guilty, as though by wishing her out of his life, he'd somehow caused her death. He feltâ¦lost. The universe held no special concern for humans or their petty problems and failed relationships and injured hearts.
Somehow it didn't even help to know that Teri was okayâthat she'd been at a conference in Great LA over the weekend and hadn't yet returned to Chicago when the city was destroyed. Warhurst had told him that morning that they would be flying her here, to Washington.
Teri aliveâ¦and Liana dead.
He could not shake the horror that clung to that equation.
“I can't promise anything, son,” Warhurst went on. “But I have my people checking. You know, it's taking an ungodly time to compile casualty lists. Not only was the city trashed, but Chicago was an important hub on the Net. Right now, the whole system's clogged and almost at a standstill. Maybe she's okay, but justâ¦out of touch.”
He tried to imagine Liana as one of those filthy, ragged survivors he'd seen on Triple N huddling in the shelter of the Chicago ruins. That was about as back-to-nature as it was possible to get. Somehow, he couldn't pull the picture into focus. No, she was dead. He was sure of that.
Why did her death hurt so much? He hadn't thought he'd loved her anymore at all.
“I can't imagine her missing something like that big church rally.” He scowled, anger gaining the upper hand
over grief. “She was
so
damned wrapped up in that ancient-astronut nonsense!”
Warhurst gave him a tight smile. “I'm surprised to hear you call it ânonsense.' You're the one who's been uncovering all this alien stuff.”
“I'm a scientist, General. An archeologist. I uncover facts, mostly by digging around in other people's garbage piles, then try to make reasoned assumptions about what that garbage tells us about them. Okay?”
“No argument there.”
“The ancient-astronut silliness takes the same factsâor more often nothing more substantial than myths or out-of-context religious passagesâand builds elaborate dream castles that just can't be supported by the data. The worst part is when people distort the facts to fit their own preconceived notions. That's not science. It's not even good religion. It's a crime against reason and clear thinking.”
“Hmm. And what is your clear thinking about the An?”
David raised his eyebrows, jolted, for the moment, from his loss. Warhurst, evidently, had been reading his papers, including some that hadn't been published yet.
He also saw what Warhurst was trying to do, goading him, dragging him from the black comfort of his depression. And he didn't like it.
“Look, what does any of this have to do with the war? You said you wanted me to come here and work on some big operation coming up, but you still haven't told me what the Marines need with an archeologist.”
“Dr. Billaud has been talking to our intelligence people.”
“So?”
“Telling them about the UN facility at Tsiolkovsky, on the farside. According to him, there are alien ruins there, in a cave in the central peak.”
David nodded. “He mentioned something of the sort, when I talked to him last.”
“You didn't tell Colonel Whitworth?
“No, sir. I did not.”
“You know, Professor, some people might find it odd that you withheld critical information from our intelligence
people but were sharing important information with foreign nationals.”
“I've been through this already, sir. The people I was sharing information with are part of an international scientific community. I won't say they aren't political, but they're more interested in what's right than in what's politically convenient. As for not telling Whitworth about Tsiolkovsky, quite frankly, the thought of a battle being fought inside an ET archeological site fills me with horror.”
“I can understand that. But the situation is such that we
must
attack. To tell you the truth, I was hoping we could enlist you to go along. To look after what might be there.”
David gave Warhurst a hard and searching look. “You're not telling me everything, are you?”
“I'd rather not, until closer to the time.” He gave a wry smile. “I think you can understand our not wanting our moves becoming known to anyone in the European Union.”
“Ah. Yes. I can imagine you people will have trouble trusting me from now on.”
“Oh, it isn't that. I wouldn't tell my own grandmother what we're planning. But I
can
tell you that it's vitally important that we know what we're getting into, what the UN might have already uncovered over there. Soâ¦what can you tell us about the An?”
“That they were a technologically advanced extraterrestrial species that had some interaction with humans six to eight thousand years ago, and possibly earlier. That they probably enslaved a number of early humans while establishing a colony of some sort here and managing to insinuate themselves into Sumerian mythology. That something happened to them after that, apparently an attack of some sort, that either destroyed their colony, or made them abandon it.”
“There's been a lot of speculation about the An still being around, someplace. Or that they could come back to Earth in the future, either as saviors or as conquerors.”
“That,” David said quietly, “is lunatic-fringe astronut
stuff. Faith and speculation, not fact. Science can't comment on any of that.”
“And what about the Builders?”
David let out a short, half-whistled breath through pursed lips. “We know even less about them. They showed up from God knows where half a million years ago. They were almost certainly not the An, but someone else entirely, though we know almost nothing about them. They may have performed some genetic reengineering on hominids they found on Earth, giving rise to
Homo sapiens
, but that's still disputed. They certainly took a number of humans to Mars, where they were engaged in some terraforming operations, though the nature of that effort is also still being debated too. We don't really know why they did all of that, or what they wanted here. But we know their Mars colony was destroyed in an attack by someone else, one that destroyed their atmosphere-generating equipment and ended with the humans trapped there freezing to death, or suffocating, or both.”
“And the âHunters of the Dawn'? Or the âDestroyers'?”
“Just names. Phrases translated from some of those An tablets we uncovered on the Moon. Look, what's the point of all this?”
“During your three-monthâ¦vacation, various people have been building on your work. You remember Kettering?”
“Craig Kettering. Of course.”
“He's published a paper in
American Science
. The title is âEvidence of Warfare Among Ancient Extraterrestrial Cultures.' He cites you and several of your papers.”
“Hmm. He usually does.”
“I gather you've been busy on a related subject while you were at Joliet.”
“How did youâ” He stopped himself. Of course Warhurst would have checked with the prison officials, and he could have gotten access to David's work-in-progress. During the past two months, the Joliet administration had allowed him accessâfor a precious few hours each dayâto his PAD, the only provisions being that he couldn't have Net access and that what he wrote each day was
subject to review by prison officials. They would have made copies, and Warhurst would have been able to get access to them, by court order, if necessary.
The Marine commandant had been busy.
“It wasn't my intent to snoop,” Warhurst said, following his train of thought. “But some of the stuff coming out of what you picked up on the Moon last April is starting to sound damned scary.”
David gave a thin smile. “I thought you were at war with the UN.”
“We are. But, let's just say that some of us are concerned about what might happen after the war. The paper you wrote in prison wasâ¦intriguing.”
“John Bunyan wrote
Pilgrim's Progress
in prison. It's nice to have a hobby, something to pass the time.”
“âOn a New Interpretation of the Fermi Paradox,'” Warhurst said. “That's not exactly
Pilgrim's Progress
.”
“
Pilgrim's Progress
is a morality play about making it into heaven. My paper deals with the possible extinction of humankind. There's a difference.”
“Indeed.” He nodded to his aide, who unholstered a PAD and began making entries. “So. Tell us about Fermi's Paradox?”
“Back in the 1940s, Enrico Fermiâhe was an important physicist who did a lot of the early work on atomic energyâasked the question âWhere are they?' He was asking about other intelligent life in the galaxy.”
“He meantâ¦why haven't we seen them?”
“Exactly. You see, our galaxy is something like eight billion years oldâ¦about twice as old as Earth itself. It took less than four billion years for life to evolve here; since we know that planets are pretty common, it's fair to assume that life, including intelligent life, has evolved before, time after time after time. Fermi was making these assumptions before we knew about the Cave of Wonders, of course. He thought the galaxy ought to be crawling with other civilizations.”
“Lovely thought.”
“It gets better. It's been demonstrated that if even one intelligent race evolves, in all the history of the galaxy,
and if that race has the same sort of exploratory yearnings, the same curiosity and drive and determination to reach out into space that we do, it could actually colonize the entire galaxy in a ridiculously short period of time.”
“How short?”
“Depends. Even if they never were able to build ships that went more than a few percent of the speed of light, though, they could still reach every star, colonize every habitable world, even do their equivalent of terraforming to every likely planet in the galaxy in less than three million yearsâ¦.”