by Ian Douglas
“But couldn’t the travelers do something? Help them somehow?”
“Without changing the time line? Mark . . . the further back you travel in time, the more tiny changes can snowball. Some of the time, anyway. Some temporal changes get washed out in the background noise. A few echo through the eons, though, getting stronger and stronger. It’s hard to tell which way it will go. But saving the Naakap—an entire species—might have calamitous repercussions in the remote future.”
Hunter had his doubts about that. How could the survival of these beautiful ribbon-creatures possibly affect Humankind three hundred million years later?
He pointed. “Can I get one of these?” he asked her.
“A pad? Of course. They have them at the base exchange here. I’ll see that you get one, and download what I have of the Encyclopedia Galactica onto it.”
“Thank you. Can I get forty-seven more of these pads? For my people?”
“To desensitize them?”
“I suppose so. I’m thinking of it as sensitizing them now, though. Make them aware of how beautiful alien life-forms can be.”
“Okay. Just be aware, though . . .”
“What?”
“There are . . . things out there. Things so horrible, so inhuman, so nightmarish, they make the Ecopleh look like cute, cuddly teddy bears.” She was tapping at her keyboard again. “Things like . . . this.”
An eye stared out of the screen at Hunter, but it was not at all human. He’d once seen a close-up photo of the eye of a toad—golden, with a horizontal hourglass shape for the pupil. This was like that. Except now it was embedded in a writhing mass of tentacles so numerous they gave the impression of thick, long, and very black squirming hair—a sea urchin with flexible and animated spines. The being filled the screen, and Hunter wasn’t able even to guess how large it might be, or to tell whether or not he was seeing the whole thing. “Teddy bears, huh?” he said.
“Paka,” she told him. “From a world fifty thousand years in the future.”
“Not the sort of thing I’d care to run into on a dark night.” He stared at the Paka for a moment more. “You know, I can’t get a handle on what this critter is like. Mammal? Mollusk?”
“You’d be amazed at how little most beings in the Galaxy resemble anything with which we are familiar. Trust me when I say that we are not going to find Mr. Spock out there—completely human except for the pointy ears and a fondness for logic.”
“Except the Grays.”
“Exactly. And that’s because they are human.”
“Right. But what about the Saurians? They have time travel—The Bell—and they look just like the Grays. But Elanna said they’re not from Earth.”
“She’s correct. They are . . . unusual. We know very little about them, unfortunately.”
I guess we’ll find out if we ever actually fight them.
She then showed him a being that was all spikes and body armor—heavy body armor, like a walking tank. It did replicate the basic humanoid body shape, but the legs were too short and the arms too long and the overall shape of the torso was all wrong. The face was not even remotely human, with the eyes in armored turrets out to either side, like a chameleon, and a vertical slit of a mouth up high, almost at the top of the head.
“Gugada,” she said. “From a very cold planet, somewhat like Titan in our system. Breathes ammonia and excretes methane. But you should hear their opera.”
Hunter shivered.
“It’s okay—they’re supposedly very sweet.”
“I bet.” He thought about what McClure had sat down to talk to him about, and it dawned on him that she hadn’t really talked about who they could shoot. “What about the Saurians? Are we going to have to shoot them on sight?”
“Not on sight, no. You’ll be taking tactical combat orders from Major Powell and from me. We’ll be in the Hillenkoetter’s CIC, and we’ll be in constant communication with Elanna or another Talis. It is vital that your people not fire on anyone unless you have a direct release from us. Do you understand?”
Hunter sighed. “Rules of engagement. Yes, I understand.”
“Good.”
Rules of engagement, Hunter thought, were a fantastic way to get you or your people killed. Some armchair admiral way up the chain of command—or worse, the President himself—decided that it was politically a bad thing to shoot them before they shot you. There were instances in recent history where US troops had been forbidden to fire even when they were being fired upon, and in several notorious cases, were ordered to stand sentry duty with unloaded weapons. Under Obama, troops in Afghanistan had been prohibited from shooting back if any civilians were present at all, and had been required to retreat if they were. Of course, the Taliban soon figured this out and always made sure that civilians were present anytime they attacked. Sheer armchair quarterbacking brilliance . . . and now they had a biologist calling the shots.
“There’s more,” she added.
He closed his eyes. “Great. Just freakin’ great.”
“We may be at war with the Grays, as well.”
“I thought they were our kids?”
“In a way, I guess you’re right. But what matters now is that we had a treaty with them, and now it’s off.”
“You know,” Hunter said, “even if they are related to us, they are the living definition of alien. Evolved a million years beyond us, they say? I would be surprised if they thought anything at all like us. They might not even understand the concept of ‘treaty.’”
“Bravo, Commander. Exactly right. But they definitely understood trade. Except they began taking more and more people. A lot of them weren’t being returned. In others, the hypnotic commands keeping the people in ignorance were breaking down. We thought just a few would be taken. I mean . . . how many specimens would they need? Turns out they were taking hundreds of thousands of people. They were fascinated by human reproduction, and took sperm and ova samples from almost everybody they captured. That was actually what put us on to the fact that they were human, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Sure. There was all of this speculation in the popular press and in books on the subject that they were busily creating some sort of alien-human hybrid race, okay? But, biologically, that’s pure bullshit! You and I, Commander, are more closely related to planaria or . . . or slime molds than we are to anything truly alien from Out There. But if the Grays are our human descendants, well, we think they’ve hit some sort of genetic bottleneck up there in the remote future. Something that’s threatening the species with extinction. And they’re coming back to our time to pick up the genetic raw materials that might help them correct the problem.”
Hunter made a face. “Okay. I guess that makes sense. I would think we could have helped them out with an account at one of our sperm banks, rather than let them kidnap us, though.”
“As you said, Commander, the Grays are alien. They’re human, but they are very, very alien in the way that they think. More alien than you could possibly imagine.
“And we are going to have to find a way to bridge that gap of mutual alienness, find a way to understand one another and communicate with one another, before we . . . and they . . . become extinct.”
Maybe that’s why his team hadn’t gotten any training time yet.
It seemed like there was no one in the Galaxy they were going to be asked to shoot.
Chapter Eleven
The next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the Earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets. The politics of the future will be cosmic, or interplanetary.
General Douglas MacArthur [attributed], 1955
10 February 1971
Hans Kammler found himself on the street in front of his house, naked, disoriented, and with a throbbing pain behind his eyes. How had he gotten here?
He had no memories of having awoken, or of having come out here. Had he been sleepwalking?
He’d
never done so before, at least, not that he knew. His restless sleep, the horrifying nightmares, those might point to some sort of sleep disorder, and possibly somnambulism was simply a new symptom.
Barefoot, he made his way back across the sidewalk, up the steps to his front porch, and reached out to open the front door.
It was locked.
Had he come outside while asleep and locked the door behind him?
He rang the front doorbell repeatedly, until Traci reluctantly cracked the door open, saw who it was, then let him inside. “What were you doing out there?”
Kammler couldn’t answer her. He had no answers.
But he did have just the faintest shreds of memory . . . a dream.
He’d been dreaming of the alien Ssarsk.
Hunter rendered a crisp salute, first to the quarterdeck, then to the man in dress whites before him. “Permission to come aboard, sir.”
“Granted. Welcome on board the Hillenkoetter.”
The ship, Hunter thought, was impressive. He and the other SEALs had taken a close look at her from outside before they’d boarded . . . or as close as they could get from their vantage point on the concrete flooring below the monster vessel.
She was twelve hundred feet long and massed sixty-eight thousand tons, a long, slender, somewhat flattened cigar shape of dark gray metal comparable in length to a modern nuclear-powered supercarrier, but with less than half a carrier’s beam and a little more than half the mass. Her tubular hull was capped fore and aft by light gray geodesic domes, with four more identical domes spaced evenly around the cylinder next to and at right angles to the caps. Those ten domes, he was told, each sixty feet across at the base, housed the ship’s power and flight control drives. The Big-H certainly looked nothing like a conventional rocket, with no venturis aft for the escape of propellant gasses, and with bow identical to stern. Instead, she ran on something called zero-point energy, which used intense magnetic fields to twist space-time, and therefore gravity, to the whim of her skipper.
That skipper was Captain Fred Groton, a tall, heavyset man with a no-nonsense attitude who met Hunter and his men on the quarterdeck. If it wasn’t by the book, some members of his bridge crew had said, he wanted no part of it. He’d shuttled up from Earth with a last few dozen personnel. With their arrival, Hillenkoetter’s roster was complete, and the ship was cleared for launch.
Standing beside the captain was Commander Haines. “Your people will be quartered on the third deck, amidships twelve abaft Frame 40,” he said. “Berthing compartments eight through twelve. I’ll detail a rating to take you down.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank us, son,” Groton said. “Not until you know what we’re going to put you through!”
“I was wondering about that, sir.”
“Department heads briefing at 1500, Commander. Conference A. Be there.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
The Hillenkoetter was a small city, with miles of intricately threaded internal passageways. Where an older, oceangoing supercarrier might have a crew of five thousand, however, the Big-H had only about six hundred, equivalent to the crew of a guided missile cruiser with half the Hillenkoetter’s length and a fifth of her mass. As an enlisted man led Hunter and his team into the bowels of the ship, he reflected that it was going to take them a while to learn her layout.
On the other hand, maybe a detailed understanding wasn’t expected of them. The 1-JSST was there to serve as landing team and planet security, so they’d been berthed close to the two immense hangar decks that would be used to deploy the TR-3B transports that would take them down to the surfaces of alien worlds. If they couldn’t find the bridge from there, well . . . they weren’t supposed to be up there in the first place, right?
“Hey . . . this is pretty fancy,” a sergeant named Pomeroy said, flipping on a light.
“A real posh hotel,” Nielson agreed. “I could get used to this!”
Rather than a traditional berthing space at sea where hundreds of men might be crowded together head by foot, the Hillenkoetter had cubes set up for two men each, with a shower head for every two compartments. Officers had individual quarters with private heads, while the women were berthed forward in their own area, two to a cube, which nicely addressed one of Hunter’s biggest concerns about quartering arrangements with a mixed crew.
He wondered, though, who was paying for this opulence.
Well . . . black budgets were wonderful things. He remembered Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld going ballistic over a “missing” 2.3 trillion dollars back in 2001—money not actually missing, but impossible to track given the government’s outdated accounting systems.
The Hillenkoetter, he’d heard, had cost about twenty-five billion—a supercarrier of the Gerald R. Ford class went for about half that, at thirteen billion per unit—and an entire space fleet battle group ran something like fifty billion—pocket change compared to a few hundred quadrillion. Back on Reagan’s watch, the media had been worrying about $600 toilet seats, so this wasn’t anything new. How much of the black budget came from what were euphemistically called “accounting oversights”?
He’d heard that there were eight of these huge spacecraft carriers, constructed gradually over the past forty years, along with a fleet of smaller craft designed as escorts and fighters. Each spacecraft carrier was the center of a carrier battle group, and eight such groups came to four hundred billion.
Hell, where had all the rest of the money gone? One thing was certain: the Solar Warden program represented one hell of a lot of creative accounting.
But that begged another question. What was it all for? Was America gearing up for a war in space to defend Earth from aggressive aliens? It certainly looked that way.
And it wasn’t just the United States either. Scuttlebutt had it that there were half a dozen different nations involved with the program, making Solar Warden a truly global defense force. Russians, Chinese, Brits, Japanese, Germans—they were supposedly all represented, though Hunter had yet to meet any of them.
Huh. Another thought occurred to him. What did the Germans think of hunting for Nazis Out There?
Hunter had his own office, which was good because his stateroom was claustrophobically tiny, with barely enough space for a desk, a rack, and a couple of chairs. Hillenkoetter had tons of room—room to spare, in fact, with such a small crew—but her designers apparently had been guided by the ship plans of seagoing navies. Couldn’t have everything. With a couple of hours to go before the department-head briefing, he found his office, booted up the laptop he found there, and began downloading his workload off the Moon’s equivalent of an Internet.
He was still going through the records of his combat team. And damn it . . . wouldn’t you just know it? The last man to report in was Master Sergeant Charles N. Briggs, US Air Force.
Interservice rivalry didn’t really drive Hunter’s concerns about having an airman in the group. Briggs was a CCT—a combat control specialist, which made him a certified air traffic controller. The problem was that, together with his ATC training, he’d only completed the seven-and-a-half-week basic military training course, which—so far as Hunter could tell—was not even close to being in the same league as a SEAL’s solid year of BUD/S, parachute training, and quals course.
Combat controllers were embedded with Army or Marine units to communicate with ground-support aircraft. Briggs was going to have to serve the same purpose, Hunter decided. He made the decision to put Briggs into Alfa Platoon, with Hunter. Master sergeant was the equivalent of “chief” in the Navy, so he held the same rank as Dixon and Brunelli. He would have to pull his weight as a senior noncom, then; Hunter was feeling damned stretched in that department.
But he thought about his conversation with McClure, and could only shake his head.
Air Force.
What did still worry him was integration. How was he supposed to fit forty-some men and women together into a seamless whole, despite wildly different
levels of training and experience? All were elite warriors, superbly trained and disciplined, but the esprit de corps of each separate unit—Marines, Rangers, SEALs, and all the rest—made any real unit integration problematic at best.
And after that came the somewhat less immediate problem of mission. The United States military had an absolutely splendid record of service, chalking up victory after victory against enemies bigger and stronger and better supplied than they. Where things went pear-shaped, every time, was when the mission orders to those units became unworkably complicated and scattered. Beating the enemy and nation building. Support the local government and win hearts and minds and bomb supply routes without violating borders. Win a war without suffering major casualties and without causing needless enemy casualties because that would look bad on the evening news . . .
God save us, Hunter thought, from the political generals and the REMFs, for whom policy came before the simple need to fight and win a war.
At 1500, Hunter found his way—with several stops for guidance—up to the briefing room. Hillenkoetter, like Navy surface ships, had been split by her main deck, running fore and aft at about her midline. That was designated the First Deck, and the continuous decks below that were the Second Deck, Third Deck, and so on down to her keel. The continuous deck above the First Deck was the O-1 deck, with O-2, O-3, and so on above that. The flag bridge, command bridge, and CIC were located on the O-4 deck just forward of Frame 23. Unlike oceangoing vessels, Hillenkoetter had no need for a bridge high up on the superstructure, since all of her incoming information about where she was and who was close by was handled electronically. By burying the bridge spaces within the upper half of the ship’s body, the vessel’s command staff received at least some protection.
Hunter wasn’t sure how much protection that actually might be; he was hearing rumors about high-energy lasers, particle beams, and nukes.
Conference Compartment A was located on the O-2 level beneath the bridge, a spacious room with a wall-sized projection screen and a podium off to the side. About forty men and women were gathering there, and Hunter wondered just how many departments there were on the Big-H. A lot of the people—about half—were civilians, he noticed. He spotted Dr. McClure and nodded at her. Xenobiology department, she’d said.