by Ian Douglas
Five days after the Armageddon Impact, as they were now calling it, it was raining on the planet Earth. That represented a kind of grim joke. Some of the cheaper fictional download entertainment sims he’d seen made the old mistake of forgetting just how large, and how varied, a planet truly was. “It was raining on the planet Mongo” was, generally, as short-sighted a fictional mistake as saying “It was dawn on the planet Earth.”
But in this case, so far as early reports had indicated, it really was raining everywhere at once, save for at the poles, where it was snowing. Chinese aircraft had flown as far east as San Francisco and as far west as Ukraine, while Australian aircraft had probed eastern Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent. Everywhere, it was raining…and not in showers, either, but in streaming, thundering, heavens-opening torrents.
The single saving grace in the planetwide storm lay in the fact that vast fires set in central Europe, in South America, and in the North American Midwest appeared to have been drowned out. The bad news was that topsoil was being eroded away at a fearful rate.
Global temperatures were high, averaging 35 degrees Celsius everywhere but beyond the Arctic and Antarctic circles and reportedly was rising there as well. The rise in temperature was slowing now, as the rain continued, and no one expected that rise to continue for very much longer. Lee turned in his seat, studying part of the dome overhead opposite the vast sprawl of Mars. The Sun, currently, was below the Phobos horizon, but there, fairly high in the sky, a single star shone brightly enough to be seen despite the bright glare from the Martian desert below. That star now outshone Venus, a brilliant, diamond-sharp gleam of pure, white light.
That star was Earth, now as cloud-decked as Venus, and reflecting most of the solar radiation that hit it.
It wouldn’t be much longer before the average temperature on Earth began falling.
And no one could predict how far temperatures would fall.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” a voice sounded in his head. “This conference will now come to order.”
Lee turned his full attention back to the stage, and its central podium. An NAU Army general stood there, addressing the throng, resplendent in the full dress NAU silver and blue uniform. Lee requested a noumenal ID, and his implant retrieved an identification for the speaker—Major General Lucius Vanderkaamp, commander of the North American Union’s Fifth Army Group.
The title, Lee reflected was something of a misnomer. The NAU possessed an army organization, but very little in the way of actual troops. Instead, under the New York Charter of 2240, the NAU had the right to recruit military units from its member nations—chiefly the United States. Right now, General Vanderkaamp was a general without an army.
“As the senior ranking military officer here,” Vanderkaamp went on, “I am assuming overall command of this meeting, ah, as chairperson. We are here to formally address the serious situation on Earth, determine possible courses of action, and to consider the threat now imposed by the Xul, the so-called Hunters of the Dawn.
“Before we begin, the chair will accept any opening statements or challenges.”
“Mr. Chairman!”
A bearded man in a blue civilian jumpsuit stood near the front. “This meeting is clearly illegal! Many representatives are not here, will not be here for days, yet. Many who are in attendance are so distant as to suffer from a full twenty-minute time-lag, the delay for a transmission and its reply to make the round trip, from Phobos to Luna and Earth orbit and back to Phobos.” He drew herself up straighter. “Further, there are no representatives present of the World Union.”
“And in what way does that make these proceedings illegal, sir?”
“Obviously, this body does not, cannot, speak for all of Humankind!”
François Brissard, Lee noted as he studied the man’s electronic ID, was an assistant consul from France stationed at Cydonia, one of several research colonies on Mars. He was also, he saw, an avid World Unionist, an advocate for a final elimination of international borders and the creation of a single world government…one based on World Union ideals, of course.
“Sit down, François!” another voice called from the crowd. “This isn’t the time for politicking.”
“Monsieur Brissard,” General Vanderkaamp said, patience in his voice, “these proceedings are intended as an initial survey of the…challenges now facing Humankind. I assure we’re not out to steal the World Union’s charter.”
Brissard sat down again, a bit reluctantly, Lee thought.
“Other statements?” Vanderkaamp asked the assembly.
“I have a statement.” The woman’s voice spoke Surzhyk, a creolized Ukrainian and Russian, but Lee heard it translated in his mind into English. Dr. Marta Petranova was a Russian xenoarcheologist, but she’d been granted diplomatic status by the Ukraine consulate at Clarke City, on Mars.
“Dr. Petranova.”
“The agenda you published for this conference is not complete.”
“In what way?”
“You list two items of interest—the survival of our brothers and sisters trapped on Earth, and the possibility of further attacks by the Xul. You have neglected the possibility of invasion.”
“I would think that was covered by the item concerning the Xul—”
“Not invasion by the Xul, Mr. Chairman. By the Chinese.”
Vanderkaamp looked blank. Lee checked Petranova’s ID and bio, and saw that she, too, was a World Unionist.
When Vanderkaamp didn’t reply immediately, she pressed on. “Mr. Chairman! My consulate has received reports, many reports, of troops and aircraft belonging to the North China Hegemony landing in widely scattered areas of the Russian Federation, the Emirate of Tashkent, and Ukraine! Beijing is taking advantage of the chaos and devastation on our planet to advance their own agenda—one of planetary conquest!”
“Good God! First things first!” someone called from the crowd, and then it seemed that everyone was shouting, demanding attention.
Lee leaned back in his seat, then glanced at Major Risler, seated beside him. Carol Risler was his executive officer. “Well,” he whispered, “it’s starting.”
“You have to admit that parliamentary procedure lasted longer than we thought it would,” she replied.
It was, Lee thought, a matter of scale. The destruction wrought on Earth by the Xul attack was so great, on such a vast and devastating scale, that many—perhaps most—of the men and women here simply couldn’t see the whole image. As a result, Brissard was pushing to make sure the World Union was properly represented, and Petranova wanted to make sure the Chinese didn’t extend their hegemony into Siberia and eastern Europe.
Maybe they simply couldn’t look at something as big as the extinction of Humankind.
“Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!” Another voice cut across the babble, both of voices in the chamber, and the confusing mental cacophony as various delegates tried to speak over implant circuitry.
“The chair recognizes General Garroway. Gentlemen! Ladies! Please!”
The shouting died away, reluctantly, as a holographic figure appeared on one of the side projection daises. Lee recognized Garroway’s craggy features. He was wearing dark gray Marine utilities, which cut a sharp contrast with the full-dress uniforms so in evidence among the members of the conference physically present.
The slightly translucent figure of General Garroway waited patiently for the confusion to die away. His ID tag indicated that he was still on board the transport Preble, several million kilometers out from Mars.
“I thought the conference would appreciate seeing some of the intel 1RST managed to snatch from the Xul ship,” he said at last. “As I’m sure you’ve already been made aware, while the Marines were planting the charges that destroyed the Xul ship, the AI from my command constellation managed to infiltrate the Xul computer network.”
That raised a fresh murmur of comment and low-voiced conversation. Evidently, most here had not heard this. Lee had, however, and he nodded qu
ietly. The general knew how to grab the attention of everyone here.
A light winked at the edge of Lee’s mental awareness—a noumenal warning that an image was available for download. He accepted the message, and a window opened in his mind.
He gasped, his sharp intake of breath mingling with similar sounds throughout the auditorium. The view was…spectacular.
The viewpoint appeared to be just above the plane of the Galaxy, looking along one of the spiral arms back toward the Core. Stars gleamed in uncounted hundreds of millions, most with a blue to white hue in the arms, but shading to red and orange at the central bulge of the Galactic hub. The camera appeared to be moving deeper into the arm; individual suns separated themselves from the clotted mass of stars in the background and drifted past, to left or right, above or below.
When Lee tried to focus on any one star, a small ID tag appeared next to it. The writing was gibberish—short bursts of dots and lines that might be Xul writing, or which might be some sort of electronic notation. He was also, aware, though, of lines drawing themselves from sun to sun through the starcloud ahead, and other symbols that might be navigational beacons…or stargates…or…
“We still can’t directly translate the Xul language,” Garroway continued, “but as you can see from this, we did get some navigational data.
“My staff transmitted the data we were able to get back from the Xul ship to our N’mah allies on board the T’krah Elessed Ev’r, and I’ve already discussed this with them. They agree that they may be able to figure out where that ship came from.”
The conference chamber now was deathly silent. The large holoprojection disk lit up and, a moment later, a tall and sinuous figure appeared in the projection area.
Every person in the room, Lee realized, was leaning forward now, watching both with physical eyes and through the downloads linking into their cranial implants.
The “Repulsive Ones,” Lee thought as the alien’s image took form, hovering as though adrift in a column of water. And just incidentally the saviors of Mankind…
The historian Berossus had written about them around 280 B.C.E., in his History of Babylon, recounting a myth possibly dating all the way back to ancient Sumeria. According to that story, a strange-looking being calling himself “Oannes” had appeared to people living at the head of the Persian Gulf before recorded history, teaching them math, agriculture, science, medicine, writing, and other essentials of civilization. Oannes, Berossus said, took no food, but returned each evening to his home under the sea, for he was amphibious. The being was described as having “a fish’s head atop another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s tail.”
In fact, the adult N’mah looked like a four-meter-long eel, mottled gray with an opalescent sheen, with a long and flattened tail. The head, elongated, strangely articulated, and encased in a black, chitinous armor, possessed four eyes—two the size of a man’s fists ringed in bone high up, well above two smaller eyes deeply recessed into the skull. Two vertically slit nostrils were set between the two pairs of eyes, and seemed to supplement pulsing gill slits in what passed for a chest. The jaw was massively armored and set with needle-sharp teeth. The being was fully aquatic, though it could breath air for short periods.
To human eyes, a Repulsive One, indeed. But the N’mah were highly cultured and possessed a technology well in advance of humans. They used something like the electronic implant communications technology employed by humans—evident in the flat oval of silvery metal showing on the side of the being’s long skull—and they used an organic form on nanotechnology to reshape their surroundings to their needs. Their near-inertialess drive allowed their ships to accelerate at as much as one hundred gravities without pulping delicate cargoes, like passengers. Human physicists were still trying to get a grasp on how they managed that little trick.
This N’mah appeared to be floating in midair but, in fact, the being was in a tank of water elsewhere, his image projected by the holographic display. As Berossus had claimed, the beings were amphibious—but in the reverse of the pattern seen in Terrestrial amphibians, like frogs. In the N’mah, the juvenile stage crawled out of shallow birthing waters and onto land, though they were truly amphibious and at home in the water as well; after about fifty terrestrial years, the adults lost their hind legs and became purely marine-aquatic. It was the long juvenile phase of the life cycle that carried out the mining, the smelting, the fire-building, and the air-breathing industry for the race.
Berossus had called the creature of ancient Sumerian myth “Oannes.” Whether he meant that that was the being’s name, or the name of their species was not made certain in his History, but he’d been clear on one point: Oannes, whatever he was, was not a god, but an “animal with reason,” an intelligent being which claimed to hail from the star Sirius.
That was a vitally important distinction that had set the Oannes myth apart from the usual ancient stories of gods and goddesses.
Another set of myths had arisen in Central Africa, with a primitive tribe called the Dogon. Not contacted by the outside world until the 1920s, their myths included stories of strange beings called “Nommo” who came from the star Sirius—again, not gods, but thinking creatures very unlike men. The story might easily have been dismissed as flights of a tribal people’s imagination or religious myth…except for the fact that the Dogon appeared to possess information, incorporated into their dances and their pottery designs long before their contact with the outside world, about Sirius’s invisible white dwarf companion, Sirius B, and the system’s even smaller member, Sirius C.
The evidence, while not conclusive, had been strongly suggestive, enough so that xenoarcheologists began taking them seriously. During the twenty-first century, discoveries throughout the Solar System demonstrated repeatedly that Earth had been visited not once, but many times, and over a period of many thousands of years, by nonhuman intelligences from the stars. The Oannans/Nommo, it seemed, might be one of them.
Other ancient cultures revered Sirius as well—among them the Egyptians, who called Sirius Sopdet, or Sothis, and “the Sun behind the Sun,” identifying it with the goddess Isis and the civilizing influence of the gods. The fact that the rising of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, coincided with the flooding of the Nile was most likely responsible for its veneration in ancient Egypt. Still…
In 2148, the Earth explorer vessel Wings of Isis had reached Sirius, 8.6 light-years from Earth, discovering that “Sirius C” was, in fact, an artificial structure, one containing the mass of a large planet somehow collapsed into a titanic metal hoop twenty kilometers across. Enormous masses compressed into artificial black holes counter-rotated within the hoop at an appreciable fraction of c, warping space and time and allowing instantaneous passage across impossible gulfs between the stars.
Tragically, Wings of Isis had been destroyed by a Xul starship while in the Sirian system; a later Marine expedition had made contact with the N’mah, as the inhabitants of the Sirius C gate called themselves.
And it turned out that the N’mah remembered the people of Earth….
“My name,” the being said, “or, rather, my title, is Duradh’a, and you may address me as such. Our peoples, N’mah and human, are closely intertwined,” a voice said over Lee’s cerebralink, dry and without accent, the product of a translation AI. “The threat of extinction has bonded us.”
True enough, Lee thought. When discovered, the N’mah had been living within the stargate structure, not as owners, but as high-tech vermin lurking within the Gate’s tunnels and inner chambers, living quietly beneath the Xuls’s notice. But eight thousand years earlier, they’d possessed technologies now forgotten, including the ability to travel faster than light between the stars.
And eight thousand years earlier, their explorers had discovered Earth.
“This,” the N’mah was saying, “is not the first time your planet has been bombarded by the entities you call Xul and Hunters of the Dawn.
This you have learned for yourselves.”
Earth, it seemed, had had a long history of visitors from the stars. Another alien race, the Ahannu, had colonized parts of Earth perhaps ten thousand years ago, enslaving large portions of the primitive human population, which came to worship them as the Anu, the gods. Archeoethnographers only now were beginning to unravel what that period of servitude had done in molding human thought, in planting the seeds that later became the gods of ancient myth…and of modern religion.
But the Ahannu had attracted the attention of the Xul, and the Xul, it was now known, had diverted asteroids that time as well, including one that struck the Arabian Gulf, sending a tidal wave smashing into what later would be called the Fertile Crescent. The Ahannu colonies were literally wiped from the face of the planet. That impact, inundating with a tidal wave what centuries later would become Sumeria, proved to be the original genesis of Noah’s Flood, transmitted to the ancient Hebrews by way of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, and other ancient sources.
On that occasion, too, as was hinted at by the story of Noah, Humankind had been brought to the point of extinction.
According to N’mah records, their explorers had discovered human survivors of the flood, wretched beings on the point of reverting to complete savagery when the starships arrived, bringing the gifts of civilization, and, in the process, planting the seeds that would one day become the legends of Oannes and the Nommo, of God’s covenant with Man, of Prometheus’s gift of fire.
Under N’mah guidance, civilization had emerged once more on the fertile plains between the Tigris and the Euphrates, cities had appeared, and humanity been reborn. The N’mah quite literally were the saviors of Humankind.
And now, every person in that conference auditorium desperately hoped, they would be Humankind’s saviors once again.
“We have long recognized,” Duradh’a continued, floating serenely in his tank, “the essentially cyclic nature of technic civilization within the parts of the Galaxy with which we are familiar. Your own discoveries—on your Luna, on the fourth planet of this system, on the world you call Chiron a little over four light-years from here, and elsewhere—have revealed the detritus of ancient star-faring civilizations smashed into extinction during repeated waves of devastation. You recognize, as well, that what you call the Xul or the Hunters of the Dawn are responsible for what your philosophers have called the Fermi Paradox.”