by Ian Douglas
It was called “the Hive” because someone had had the idea that the Grays looked like insects, and a small, dark space where insects lived was a hive, right? In fact, there were no Grays on board the Hillenkoetter, and the Talis looked nothing like bugs. In particular, McClure thought, Elanna didn’t look at all insectoid. Those large, azure eyes were incredible. . . .
“We’re underway, Elanna,” McClure said. “I wondered if you could tell me a bit about where we’re going.”
“We know little about Zeta Reticuli, Becky,” Elanna replied. “One of our survey ships passed through the Zeta 1 system about one of your centuries ago. They reported nothing of note.”
“No Gray civilization?”
“Not that we’ve been able to detect, no.”
“Then why go there?”
“Three reasons, Becky. First, our survey was not exactly thorough or detailed. Our people could well have missed something.”
“Okay . . .”
“Second, the Zeta Reticuli system has figured very large in human UFO mythology. Whether there is something there or there is not, humans should find out for themselves.”
“We can’t find out by simply asking you?”
“No. As I said, we have little information to give.” Her large eyes blinked once, slowly. “I’m not sure you yet grasp the sheer size of the cosmos, Becky. However large you can imagine it, the reality is far larger and far more complex. We know only the smallest possible fraction of what there is to know, and that includes details of all of the myriad worlds and civilizations that fill this Galaxy.”
“If enemy aliens were parked less than forty light-years from Earth, I’d think you’d know something about it.” She sighed. “And reason three?”
“Exploration of the Zeta Reticuli system will give your battle group and its personnel a chance to acclimate—to ‘get a feel,’ as you sometimes say—for extrasolar operations.”
“Mark has been wanting that from the beginning. May I tell him?”
Again, a slow, catlike blink. “Of course.”
“Not ‘of course.’ Solar Warden is one secret wrapped in a dozen others. What is it they say? A riddle wrapped in an enigma?”
“I believe the phrase you want is ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ A prime minister of Great Britain said that of Russia. Winston Churchill.”
“I didn’t know that. Thank you.”
Elanna appeared to be thinking, as if wondering to say more.
“There is something else. A reason four.”
“And that is?”
“How much do you know about extradimensional physics?”
“What, like the fourth dimension—that kind of thing?”
“Many more dimensions. You know that string theory, as you understand it now, posits either six or seven additional spatial dimensions beyond the three spatial dimensions and the one dimension of time you know, yes?”
“Eleven dimensions. Okay, yes. I’ve heard that. Remember that I’m a biologist, please, and not a physicist.”
“I will keep that in mind. These additional dimensions are unseen, you believe, because they are rolled up very, very small—smaller than a proton. However, that actually depends on how you look at things.”
“What do you mean?”
Elanna held her hand out, palm facing McClure. “A two-dimensional plane—a flat sheet, a piece of paper—and you see it easily, yes?”
“Yes.”
Elanna rotated her hand so the edge faced McClure. “Look at it from a different angle, and it . . . goes away. Becomes unimaginably small. It’s a matter of perspective.”
“You’re saying these other dimensions are accessible if we can orient ourselves properly?”
“Something like that. Humans are only able to see three spatial dimensions at a time. But it’s possible to rotate in such a way that length, for example, decreases to nothing, while the sixth dimension unfolds and becomes visible.”
“I think I understand.”
“I doubt that, Becky. But don’t feel bad—it’s something that we, eleven thousand years from now, can only dimly grasp. Some may have learned how to work it, though.”
“The Grays?”
“Maybe. We don’t really know. But some of the stories about them—walking through walls, materializing out of empty air, ships that vanish in one place and reappear instantly somewhere else—these are all evidence that they are able to manipulate more than the normal four dimensions.”
“Christ!”
“And that means that the absence of cities or a thriving culture on the Zeta Reticulan planets when our survey was there means absolutely nothing. Anything could be there. Anything at all.”
“And may I tell Mark that?”
Elanna thought about it for a long moment. “Yes. Provided that you believe it will not negatively impact his performance. The information is generally withheld because we fear it could be demoralizing.”
“I can certainly see why.”
Damn. How the hell was she going to tell Mark this?
Chapter Thirteen
Reagan: “What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?”
Gorbachev: “No doubt about it.”
Reagan: “We, too.”
Conversation between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Lake Geneva summit, 1985
12 October 1979
The aliens stormed through the mesa, killing every human soldier and technician and scientist they could find. The attack had taken the humans completely by surprise, and the Saurians showed no mercy.
The Dulce Base had been carved out of the forbidding rock of Archuleta Mesa, a plateau of sheer rugged cliffs rising above the town of Dulce, New Mexico, not far from the Colorado border. For several years, the Dulce Base had been a highly secret research facility staffed both by humans and by Gray aliens.
Kammler was dragged along by Ssarsk, unable to resist, unable to even speak. They’d done something to his mind and his will, rendering him incapable of any resistance whatsoever. All he could do was stumble along in blind obedience to Ssarsk’s mental orders.
They reached one of the lower levels, surprising three human technicians and burning them down. Mounting terror gibbered at the back of Kammler’s mind. He’d only been down into this level once, months ago, and he’d had nightmares—new nightmares—ever since. The genetic experiments the aliens were carrying out here terrified him, left him weak, shaking, and ill.
During the war, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he’d known Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death,” whose horrific medical experiments on concentration camp inmates defied all belief or reason. Much of Mengele’s passion had focused on genetic studies, attempts to prove “Aryan racial purity” by torturing Jews and Gypsies in the sacred name of science.
At the time, Kammler had thought nothing of it. Mengele’s victims, after all, had been Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and other Untermenschen of no importance at all. But for the past several years, Kammler had been a virtual prisoner in this place, a prisoner of beings who thought of humans, all humans, as the SS had thought of the Jews. For Kammler, life had become a never-ending nightmare, one that placed him in the same position as some nameless Birkenau Sonderkommando. Attempts to ingratiate himself to his masters had been ignored. The worst of it was when he felt them inside his head.
And Kammler never knew when the aliens might decide he was no longer useful and order his vivisection.
To be on the receiving ends of this type of cold and dispassionate domination by implacable and merciless inhuman beings he did not understand seemed to be a bizarre reversal of the natural order.
We must abandon this place, Ssarsk told the others. The humans will be here soon, in greater numbers. We cannot hold them off forever.
What about . . . that? one asked, gesturing at Kammler.
We will take it with us. We may still have a use for it.
Kammle
r tried to scream . . . and could not.
“You know,” Dr. Brody said, “I miss the stars streaking past.”
“What stars?” Hunter replied. “I don’t see any stars.”
“Exactly.”
The two men were sitting in one of Hillenkoetter’s spacious lounges, where a long broad window looked out into space. At the ship’s current velocity, however, very close to the speed of light, only an impenetrable darkness was visible. Up on the bridge, when they’d left the Earth-Moon system the week before, Hunter had seen the strange ring of frosty light ahead as they transited to lightspeed, but he’d not understood it.
The astrophysicist Lawrence Brody, however, was able to explain.
“Imagine a rainstorm,” he said, “where the rain is coming down straight. No wind. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now imagine driving through that rain very fast. What happens?”
“Well . . . the rain hits the windshield at an angle. It comes at you almost sideways if you’re going fast enough.”
“Precisely. And that’s what happens when we move at relativistic speeds through all the light coming from all the stars around us. From our point of view, the incoming light kind of gets crowded up forward. That ring they see on the bridge is the light from all the stars around us, all the stars in the universe, but smunched together up ahead.”
“So what stars did you want to see?”
“Oh . . . I was a fan of Star Trek, back in the sixties. I was just a kid . . . but I loved that show. I loved seeing the Enterprise zipping along with the stars streaming past like snowflakes in a blizzard.”
“Ah. And you miss that, do you?”
“Oh, yes,” Brody said, nodding. “You can’t imagine how disappointed I was at MIT when I learned it wouldn’t look like that.”
Hunter chuckled. “Never saw the show.”
“What? You benighted heathen! Not even the movies?”
“Nope. I never cared much for sci-fi.” He shrugged. “Now here I am living it. Go figure.”
“Well . . . just don’t wear a red shirt when you go down with the landing party.”
Hunter didn’t understand the reference, but before he could ask, he was interrupted by a noncom.
“Commander?”
It was Sergeant Pomeroy.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“Excuse the interruption, sir. You’re needed in the gym. A fight between Master Sergeant Coulter and Chief Brunelli, sir.”
“God, what now.” He stood. “You’ll excuse me, Dr. Brody?”
“Of course. Duty calls!”
Except that it wasn’t duty . . . or it shouldn’t have been. By the time Hunter got there, the two men had been separated. It looked like most of the unit was there around them, milling about and gossiping.
“Okay, what the hell is going on here?” Hunter demanded, uncomfortably aware of the audience.
Brunelli pointed. “That queer made a pass at me!”
“I did not,” was Coulter’s rejoinder. “He started it!”
Both men were somewhat the worse for wear. Coulter was holding a handkerchief to a bloody nose. Brunelli had the beginnings of a shiner beneath his right eye.
What was shocking about the incident, Hunter thought, was the fact that both men were pay grade E-7. Both had been in the service for at least ten years, and both carried with their stripes and rockers considerable responsibility both as leaders and as examples to the other men. It wasn’t like a couple of seamen going at one another in a drunken brawl ashore.
“You two ought to know better than this!” Hunter said, keeping his voice low and dangerous. “I have better things to do than playing nursemaid to children! Stand at attention when I’m talking to you!”
Both men came to attention, eyes straight ahead.
“Who threw the first punch?”
“I did, sir,” Brunelli said. “I was . . . provoked.”
“No amount of provocation justifies hitting a fellow member of this unit! Not to mention I talked to you about this. You’re on report!”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“Coulter! What did you do to set him off?”
“I . . . sir . . . we were just talking, sir.”
“Uh-huh. And what did you say?”
“I just sort of mentioned that, well, we all know about sailors, sir. . . .”
“He swished when he said it, sir.”
“Shut up, Brunelli! What is it we know about sailors, Coulter?”
“Nothing, sir. I didn’t mean anything by it, sir.”
“You’re on report, too! The rest of you . . . get back to what you were doing!”
The crowd evaporated, but Hunter could hear the grumbling. Well, damn it, how was he supposed to handle this? “Minkowski! Layton! Center yourself on the hatch!”
Master Chief Minkowski was the senior NCO of Alfa Platoon, which was Coulter’s unit. Master Sergeant Bruce Layton was the senior NCO of Charlie Platoon, which was Brunelli’s. Both men stood side by side in front of Hunter, rigidly at attention.
“Why couldn’t you two have defused this?” Hunter demanded, keeping his voice low. If he was going to give his noncoms a dressing-down, he didn’t want to do it in front of the men.
“Sir, it happened so fast—” Layton said.
“Uh-huh. Mink?”
“No excuse, sir.”
“The men in your platoons are your responsibilities. You should have stopped it, and if it happened too fast you should have resolved the aftermath and not brought me into it. Now I have to take official notice, and that will not do morale any good at all. Do you two understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hunter considered putting them on report as well but decided against it. “I expected more out of you two. Dismissed! Now get the hell out of my sight!”
The Hillenkoetter, Hunter thought as he walked back to his office, was a comfortable ship, a large ship with plenty of space . . . no pun intended. Nonetheless, when you took a large number of people and packed them in together for weeks at a time, there were going to be explosions. Enforced inaction and a lack of outlets was going to fray nerves and cause discipline problems, no matter what he or any of his noncoms could do. There’d already been problems. Two days earlier, a Ranger on night security had caught Taylor with Ann Seton, one of the members of Charlie Platoon. The two had been in flagrante delicto—meaning bare-assed naked—in a closet-sized storage locker, and he’d put them both on report. Hunter still had that little scandal to deal with, as well.
With all the talk about time travel, why the hell couldn’t the people driving this thing cut the journey down to a more manageable length?
Like, say, ten minutes?
Fred Groton wished the voyage was scheduled to take longer. Besides the usual run of paperwork and reports, he was still going through possible tactical encounters, working out battle plans to match each, and assigning them simple code names—“Plan Alfa,” “Plan Bravo,” and so on—so that if Hillenkoetter found herself in a fight, the human forces wouldn’t be trying to put together an attack plan on the fly. Ordering the fleet to “execute Attack Plan Delta” was way simpler than trying to give explicit and detailed step-by-step battle plans for five vessels in the middle of a contested battlespace, and less prone to misunderstanding or to unexpected data dropouts.
The problem was that there were so damned many variables. How many enemy ships might there be? What kind of weapons would they carry? What if those weapons could outrange those of the human ships?
What had he and his tactical staff failed to anticipate?
He gathered up the latest stack of printouts and stood up behind his desk. He needed to clear these with Admiral Carruthers . . . and then, God help him, he had to take them to Elanna or Vashnu. The time travelers were the big unknowns. A dozen times now, he’d shown them a series of meticulously crafted battle plans, only to be told that he’d overlooked some key aspect of Gray or Saurian t
echnology . . . or that he’d misapplied the tactics of surface naval warfare to the three-dimensional arena of space. Hardest to keep in mind—Elanna had pointed this one out to him several times already—was the fact that they would be facing an enemy capable of near-c travel . . . c being the symbol for the speed of light. If they spotted enemy ships five light seconds off . . . those ships could shift to near-c and be on top of him literally an instant behind the light warning that they’d moved.
This was Groton’s first time in command of the Hillenkoetter, but he’d been in space since 2003; the last four years had been as the executive officer of the Big-H, so he was not exactly inexperienced.
But there was so much that was unknown.
He wished he had another year or two to work on those plans. . . .
Hunter looked up at the two men standing in front of him—Coulter and Brunelli. He’d thought long and hard about how to handle this.
Technically, as the man who’d put the two of them on report, he shouldn’t have been the one to hear their case.
Technically, too, this was a captain’s mast, a disciplinary hearing that traditionally would be held by the commanding officer of the ship—the captain—or at least by the ship’s XO.
Hunter was damned, though, if he was going to bring Captain Groton into this. The 1-JSST’s exact position on the ship command and control charts was still a bit vague. Lieutenant Commander Hunter answered to Major Victor Powell, but only in a tactical sense—taking orders from him in operations carried out on a planet’s surface, not in terms of discipline or running the unit. The rank of major was the equivalent of the Navy rank of lieutenant commander, which made the TO&E for Operation Excalibur pretty damned fuzzy. So if one of his people committed murder or mutiny, then the matter would have to go up before Captain Groton. But short of that . . .
“What do you two have to say for yourselves?”
“No excuse, sir.”
“No excuse, sir.”
Having the two of them up before him together was another breach with tradition. Captain’s mast was a kind of mini-trial, but nonjudicial, a disciplinary hearing under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for offenses within a military unit. However, he’d offered them the chance to come before him together, and they’d accepted that. In point of fact, the offense had to do with these two clowns’ failure to work together and their failure to respect one another as fellow military noncoms. He was determined to address that problem, and not simply sweep it under the carpet.