B009NFP2OW EBOK

by Douglas, Ian

  “Okay,” she replied. “Make it count!”

  “Popper” referred to a K-40 antiarmor warhead fired from a tripod-mounted launcher. The things were a century out of date and probably wouldn’t make it past a Jotun’s point defense lasers, but they had to try.

  Where they’d dug the antique up in the first place Ashton couldn’t even begin to guess.

  The weapon fired, a streak of light snapping from the hillside to Ashton’s right. She saw the missile, a tiny point of light weaving and jinking as it closed on the immense transport . . . but then it flared and vanished, still 300 meters from its target. Turrets on the Jotun’s dorsal surface pivoted, seeking the location of the launcher.

  “Get the hell out of there!” she yelled, and then a portion of the Georgetown hillside vanished in a cascade of flame and hurtling debris.

  She didn’t have an in-head tactical display, but the lack of response over her com told her she’d just lost a couple more members of her dwindling army.

  More explosions erupted among the crumbling ruins further up the heights. The defenders had no way to more than scratch the invaders; the Jotun, now, was drifting ponderously toward the hill, climbing out of the swamp, brushing aside trees and the occasional stone tower with contemptuous ease.

  It was time, Ashton thought, recalling the military slang she’d learned twenty years earlier, to “get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “All units,” she said over the tactical channel. “We’re not doing any good here. Pull back . . . pull back. . . .”

  “Boss, these are our homes here!” someone cried.

  “Yeah, and they’re going to be our fucking tombs if we hang around much longer! Fall back! That’s an order!”

  Ashton wasn’t sure who had put her in command. It had just . . . happened. She had the in-head hardware, of course, to set up a tactical net, and that was a big part of it. More, she had combat experience—something more than fighting off Periphery raiders from across the Potomac Estuary.

  But it was not a job she’d looked for. She’d had it with the military two decades ago, when she’d resigned from the USNA Navy and returned to the D.C. swamp.

  They’d made good progress over the past few years, draining parts of that swamp and putting up the Potomac levees, but there sure as hell wasn’t anything here worth fighting for. Dying for . . .

  For God’s sake, let the bastards have it.

  The Jotun was a lot closer, now. Its turrets shifted this way and that, picking out tiny running figures ahead of it and burning them down. It would reach her position in another minute or two.

  She felt a cold stab of fear. If she got up and ran now, the gunners in that transport would see her and burn her down as well. If she stayed where she was, those columns of armored soldiers advancing up the slope would reach her and kill her or worse. If she found a place to hide—inside a wreckage-covered basement or hole, perhaps—they would pick her up sooner or later with their sonic mikes or heat sensors and the result would be the same.

  She’d waited too fucking long. . . .

  Best, then, to go out fighting. She shifted her position so she could see the troops in the Jotun’s shadow, and again took aim. Her in-head showed a target lock and she thoughtclicked the trigger. . . .

  The landscape was blotted out by a white flare of light, and a violent shock picked her up and flung her backward. Blinking, trying to clear her head, she saw the Jotun’s dorsal surface slashed open, saw flames erupting from its exposed interior.

  “What the fuck?” she asked aloud.

  Then a pair of Starhawks shrieked overhead, cleaving the sky on white-slash vapor trails ripped from tortured air. Two more Starhawks followed, and Ashton’s mouth dropped open at the sight of the spacecraft—fighter craft that she once had piloted herself. For a moment, she was stunned, uncomprehending, but then the reality began to assert itself, and she realized that reinforcements had arrived over ancient Washington at last.

  “Hit ’em!” she screamed. Not thinking, she picked herself up and stood, staring, gaping . . . then waving her carbine. “Get the bastards!”

  And the defenders of Washington began to advance once more.

  Captain’s Quarters

  TC/USNA CVS America

  Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  2315 hours, TFT

  Gray had just removed his uniform and tossed it in the disposal when a chime in his in-head announced a visitor. He opened a window to the door’s security link. It was America’s weapons officer, Commander Laurie Taggart.

  He opened the door through the link; taboos against social nudity had long since evaporated, especially in the Navy, where men and women had to live and work together in quarters that could verge on the claustrophobic. “Hello, Commander,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I was wondering . . . um . . .”

  She was staring. “Sorry, Commander. Do you want me to get dressed?”

  “No, sir. It’s not that. There’s something . . . personal that’s been bothering me. I wondered if we could talk.”

  Interesting. Most personal problems on board ship were handled by one of the chaplain psychs . . . or by Commander Sara Gutierrez, America’s executive officer. Traditionally, a ship’s XO was responsible for handling a ship’s internal issues, including any personnel problems, leaving the skipper free to focus on mission, strategy and tactics. Gray tried to be accessible to his crew, however, and wasn’t going to order her to leave. He did, however, go to the uniform dispenser and order a new utilities pack. He slapped the wad against his chest, and let the nanoweave flow across his body, growing a fresh uniform in seconds. Social nudity was fine, but there was a certain propriety demanded by his station if not by society. He ordered a couple of chairs to grow out of the deck, the white carpeting blurring and flowing to become soft black leather, and gestured to one. “Have a seat.”

  “Thank you. I know I should probably see Chaplain Carruthers about this, sir . . . but you were there.”

  “I was where?”

  “At the Sh’daar galaxy. Eight hundred million years ago.”

  “Ah.”

  “You . . . you know that I’m Church of AAC.”

  Gray nodded. Though personnel could keep their religious affiliations, if any, secret, many chose to have it recorded in their files. Gray had seen Taggart’s file data months before while reviewing the histories of the officers on board America.

  “My church believes that aliens created Homo sapiens something like half a million years ago. And those of us in the Navy . . . well, everyone in the congregation kind of looks to us for . . . for confirmation.”

  “And you’re all wondering if the Sh’daar are God.”

  “Well . . . we wouldn’t put it quite that bluntly, sir, but, well, yes.”

  “Why the Sh’daar?”

  “Sir?”

  “There are thousands of technic species scattered across the galaxy, Commander. We know that much from the Agletsch Encyclopedia Galactica. Some of them have been around for a half million years, easy. The Dhravin, for instance.”

  “But what if it is the Sh’daar?”

  “Would that make a difference, Commander?”

  “Well . . . yes, sir. It would. Of course.” She shook her head, shoulder-length red hair tossing impatiently. “If the Sh’daar are renewing their war against us, it puts us in the position of waging war against our creators.”

  “A defensive war, Commander. They attacked us, remember.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gray thought for a moment, then said, “AI . . . cease recording.” An acknowledgement winked on in his in-head. Normally, everything senior officers in the fleet said and did was recorded and stored, but he didn’t think there was a need here.

  And he didn’t want Taggart to jeopardize her career.

  “Okay, Commander
. We’re now off the record. And you can drop the ‘sir’ stuff. I’m Trev. Or Sandy.”

  “Thank you . . . Trev.

  “Why does it matter if the Sh’daar are our creators?”

  “Well, they must have had a reason. . . .”

  “Maybe. Or maybe they just needed some convenient slaves to do their dirty work.”

  Gray was thoroughly acquainted with the Ancient Alien Creationist myth. Lots of people in the Manhattan Periphery had believed those stories when he was growing up. The idea had been floating around at least since the twentieth century—that aliens had come to Earth half a million years or so ago and tinkered with the human genome. The most popular story took off on ancient Sumerian myth, with legends that beings called Anunnaki had tried to colonize the Earth, and created humans as slaves. Other stories, however, emphasized that the visiting aliens had been benevolent, uplifting Humankind for more noble reasons.

  In this, Gray was a dogmatic agnostic. There were archeological mysteries that centuries of human investigation had not yet explained. Baalbek: a platform in Lebanon that included thousand-ton blocks of stone in its makeup. Yonaguni, Dvaraka, and others: monolithic structures discovered on the sea bottom off Japan and India and submerged for thousands of years. Pumapunku: the incredibly massive, intricate and apparently machine-tooled stone architecture of a temple group in the Andes Mountains apparently scattered by something as powerful as a nuclear blast. There were plenty of other sites around the Earth, enigmatic, ancient, and sadly uncommunicative about who had built them, and how.

  Gray was willing to believe that Earth might once have had visitors from Somewhere Else, though he was suspicious of claims that early humans were incapable of building large and complex structures, that places like Giza or Teotihuacan must have been built with alien technology.

  But had aliens created humanity? The jury was still out on that one.

  “My church doesn’t accept the Anunnaki hypothesis,” Taggart said. “For us, the extraterrestrial gods elevated humans from the apes because they wanted companionship.”

  “I see. And then they left us on our own?”

  She frowned. “Captain, I’m not trying to convert you.”

  “I know. If you were, it would be a clear violation of the White Covenant, and we would not be able to have this conversation.”

  She smiled. “The Covenant is Confederation Law. Are we still bound by that?”

  Gray frowned. “You know? I’m honestly not sure. I think we’ll need to have the lawyers sort that one out once we get back to Earth.” He thought a moment more. “I’d have to say, though, that we’re officially still part of the Confederation, even if Lavallée did take off and abandon us. At least until we’re told otherwise.”

  Justin Lavallée’s desertion was a sore point throughout the USNA flotilla. The Confederation ships had burned past Arianrhod at near-c, abandoned their own fighters, and kept on going, accelerating for the far side of the system. Some hours ago, word had come through that the Confederation ships had dropped into Alcubierre Drive. Likely, they would head into emptiness for a few light years, re-emerge and re-orient themselves, then head for Earth. That would put them back in Earth orbit in another two days . . . maybe three.

  And God knew what they would tell Geneva about Gray’s unwillingness to surrender command of the USNA contingent.

  We’ll worry about that later, he thought.

  “Okay, so the damned Covenant’s still in force. But I need to talk about this, Trev. Suppose the Sh’daar are the creators? Suppose we’re rebelling against the gods?”

  Gray sighed. The fleet faced so many more pressing problems right now . . . not the least of which was establishing some sort of working long-term truce with the Slan. Things looked good so far, but the Slan were so different in the way they thought, in how they saw the universe. In any given exchange, it was incredibly difficult to understand them, and harder still to be sure that they understood you.

  “The Sh’daar are not God, Laurie,” Gray told her. “If they were, I think they would have found a way to tell us. Something a little more persuasive than sending their client races to attack us.”

  “But we know that eight hundred million years ago,” she said, “the Sh’daar were raptured. . . .”

  That again. Certain Christian sects on Earth, Gray knew, were convinced that one day the faithful would be snatched up into heaven, leaving the unsaved to face God’s wrath. They called it the Rapture, an odd twist to Christian eschatology first developed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most Christian sects held that the Rapture—a term never mentioned in the Bible—simply referred to the final judgment at the end of time. But a few held that believers would be “caught up in the clouds” prior to the end, with nonbelievers left behind to face terrible suffering, the “Great Tribulation,” as their world came apart. Gray, curious about the terminology, had downloaded several essays on the topic.

  Records America had accessed within Omega Centauri T-0.876gy had shown the physical forms of hundreds of mutually alien species belonging to the ur-Sh’daar federation simply . . . vanishing from their worlds. Human researchers hadn’t yet figured out the mechanism for that disappearing act, and couldn’t even agree on what they were seeing, but all agreed that the records showed the moment of the ur-Sh’daar Technological Singularity, when their levels of technology reached a point where the outward form and nature of those beings had somehow changed beyond all recognition or understanding.

  It had been inevitable, Gray knew, that some of those fundamentalist religious sects would take that transformation as evidence of an alien rapture.

  “We don’t know what happened to the ur-Sh’daar,” he told her. “All we know is that a number of them were left behind at the moment of Singularity, the ancestors of the modern Sh’daar, and that they were terrified by what happened.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “So terrified they’ve been trying to block advanced technological progress in every species they meet.” Gray hesitated. The White Covenant expressly prohibited attempts by one person to change the religious beliefs of another . . . but he very much wanted Taggart to understand. “Can I ask you something? Something that might violate the Covenant?”

  “Of course.”

  “First off, the AAC believes that what happened to the ur-Sh’daar was a kind of Rapture, right? God’s chosen snatched away and never seen again. Well, the Sh’daar were the ones left behind. That tells me they aren’t God and they weren’t His chosen.”

  “I see where you’re going. . . .”

  “Maybe you don’t. Because my question is . . . if what you mean by ‘God’ is the creator of the universe, someone who cares about his, her, or its creation, why were so many of the ur-Sh’daar left behind? Think about the emotional scarring inflicted on an entire interstellar civilization, scarring that’s driving them to conquer and to wage war on other species almost a billion years later. Does that sound like a loving God?”

  “We’re not supposed to question—”

  “Bullshit! If we’re not supposed to question, why do we have minds? Logic? Reason? What happened in Omega Centauri a billion years ago was a tragedy, not an act of love, and certainly not an act of creation!”

  She didn’t reply. She sat in the chair, staring at her knees.

  “If aliens came to Earth thousands of years ago,” Gray went on, relentless, “if they changed the human genome to create us . . . it was an act of technology, not of love or caring.

  “And as far as we can make out, the Sh’daar used time travel through an artificially constructed gateway into their future to enter our galaxy . . . we’re still not sure when, but it probably was well over a hundred thousand years ago. They set up a base somewhere in this time and began conquering or absorbing every species they encountered, until they finally got to us fifty-some years ago.

  “If they were our cre
ators, what the hell took them so long? What, did they make us, then go away, only to come back in the twenty-fourth century? Damn it, Laurie, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “But we know that the creators work in mysterious ways. . . .”

  “They give us brains to figure out the universe, to develop science and discover how things work and to use logic and reason to make deductions about who and what we are . . . and then slap us down for believing what we’ve learned? Right. . . .”

  “That’s not the way it is!” She was almost in tears.

  “Laurie . . . your personnel files say you have a base IQ of one thirty-two, enhanced to one sixty. You have a Logic Quotientof one twenty, and a Reasoning Aptitude Score of point nine five. You’ve got a brain! Okay? Use it!”

  After a time, Gray widened his chair and she sat next to him, his arm around her shoulders.

  “What . . . do you believe, Trev?” she asked him after a long while.

  “I’m not sure,” he replied. “I grew up in the Manhat Ruins, and didn’t have the time or the inclination to worry much about God. Then my wife developed some health problems, and I took her to the nearest facility that could treat her, on the other side of the Line.”

  “ ‘Wife’?” She repeated the word as though it had a faintly unpleasant taste.

  “Periphery culture. I was a monogie. One partner, in a relationship called marriage.”

  “I’ve heard of it. Some folks in Chicago practice that too.” She shook her head. “But why?”

  “Life in lots of the Periphery areas can still be pretty touch and go. Small family units have good survival value.”

  “And some people just like exotic relationships.”

  He looked away. The topic still hurt a bit. “Well, in any case, the treatment . . . changed her. She didn’t . . . didn’t feel anything for me any longer, and she went off on her own. Joined a line marriage somewhere Upstate.” He shrugged. “I guess I had a hard time seeing God or God’s love in any of that.”