Star Marines

by Ian Douglas

  The Fermi Paradox strikes again, Lee thought. During the mid-twentieth century, physicist Enrico Fermi was supposed to have asked the question, “Where is everyone?” In a galaxy of three or four hundred billion stars—to say nothing of the hundreds of billions of other galaxies—the possibility that other life, other civilizations would sooner or later arise seemed all but certain. Even if the magic of faster-than-light drives never appeared to tamper with the equations, a suitably aggressive and technically oriented species that began spreading across interstellar distances would, sooner or later, reach and colonize every suitable planet in the Galaxy. Given a top velocity of even just ten percent of the speed of light, and a long lead time between waves of colonization, that one species could be expected to colonize the entire Galaxy in less than a million years—an optical-organ’s blink, compared to the age of the Galaxy itself. Given that the equations suggested hundreds, even thousands of star-faring species in the Galaxy at any given epoch, the sky ought to be fairly humming with interstellar signals and starships.

  Hence Fermi’s question: “Where is everyone?” For a long time, human astronomers and astrophysicists had simply assumed that life was a lot more infrequent an occurrence, technology sufficiently rare, and the life span of a technologically capable species sufficiently brief that there was only one intelligence in the Galaxy—Homo sapiens.

  Once humans had reached the Moon and Mars, though, they’d found plenty of evidence of previous waves of interstellar visitors—the first half a million years ago, the second in barely prehistoric times, with the arrival of the Ahannu and, later, the N’mah. Something, someone, seemed determined to obliterate anyone else who achieved space travel.

  That someone was the Xul.

  “Unfortunately, we still know extremely little about the Xul,” said Duandh’a. “They appear to exist as a blend of organic and inorganic components, but may be thought of as a machine group intelligence. They possess large and powerful starships which have faster-than-light capabilities, though they also employ the Ancients’ Stargates to enable them to achieve virtually instantaneous travel across extremely large distances. One base system has been positively identified in a star cluster outside the boundaries of this Galaxy; others are believed to exist within the Galactic Core. The Xul may be ubiquitous throughout this entire Galaxy of four hundred billion suns.

  “The Xul have been in existence for at least half a million years. There is a strong possibility that the Xul, or their remote progenitors, evolved as much as one hundred million years ago and began spreading inexorably across the Galaxy. There is a distinct possibility—at this point unprovable, but a possibility—that a prehuman civilization on your planet, one arising among highly intelligent beings that in turn evolved from the animals you call dinosaurs, was obliterated by a Xul asteroid attack sixty-five million years ago. We see this identical pattern across the Galaxy appear again and again and again—life evolving, life attaining sentience and technology, technic civilization achieving interstellar space flight, followed by the abrupt appearance of the Xul and that civilization’s complete annihilation.

  “One of your scientists,” the N’mah continued, “promulgated the biological concept you call ‘survival of the fittest.’ Briefly, an organism that develops a trait or characteristic that helps it survive will pass that characteristic on to its young. Over large periods of time, evolutionary pressures—survival of the fittest—will streamline those characteristics to sometimes astonishing degrees.

  “We believe that the Xul originally evolved in an extremely competitive environment—perhaps a biosphere that was home to many large and dangerous predators. For those progenitors of modern Xul, survival became a matter of killing anything else that was a threat to the species. This trait may well have become completely and inflexibly instinctive with them, a way of seeing and dealing with the universe that leaves them incapable of seeing other civilized species as potential friends or allies.

  “Once such a species developed advanced technic capabilities, we theorize, they might well maintain their place by deliberately seeking out newly emergent technic civilizations—by means of their radio signals, for instance, or the neutrino flux of fusion power plants—and eliminating them…at least to the point of ‘bombing them into the Stone Age,’ as one of your military personalities so bluntly put it.”

  Lee nodded as the being spoke. This understanding, this resolution of the Fermi Paradox had been floating around ever since the ruins on Mars, Chiron, and elsewhere had been discovered.

  “Fortunately, the Xul are not always…efficient in their ministrations. You have initiated contact with the Ahannu, on the world you call Ishtar…a primitive remnant of what once was a star-faring empire. You have also established relations with we of the N’mah, whom you now know to be similar remnants of a once far-flung interstellar trade and exploratory cooperative.”

  Rats in the walls, Lee thought. So far, humans had communicated only with the N’mah of the Sirius Stargate, a culture that had managed to remake portions of the gate’s interior into a microworld where they continued to live six thousand years later, unnoticed by the Xul even when the Xul continued to use that Gate for interstellar transits. Presumably, there were other N’mah colonies out there among the stars…but if so, they, too, were lying low, remaining very quiet, hoping to stay off the Xul sensor displays. The N’mah had lost or given up interstellar travel thousands of years ago; starships tended to attract a lot of attention.

  “With both the N’mah and the Ahannu,” Duradh’a went on, “there were survivors. In our case, we deliberately gave up some aspects of our technology in order to, as you humans put it, ‘keep a low profile.’ In the case of Ahannu, one of their interstellar colonies was overlooked by the Xul, and maintained a primitive existence without recourse to space-flight at all.”

  The Ahannu planet, Ishtar, had been a surprise—the Earthlike satellite of a super gas giant. Quite possibly, the Xul simply hadn’t bothered looking for Ahannu colonies outside of the normal liquid-water band surrounding the system’s cool, red dwarf star.

  “We believe that a similar option is open to Humankind. We of the T’krah Elessed Ev’r wish to formally offer you this possibility of safety…to flee with us to a new sanctuary, possibly worlds located in a neighboring galaxy, there to rebuild your civilization and escape the Xul predators.”

  Shocked silence greeted this offer. Lee was surprised. He’d expected offers of technological help, but not an offer of wholesale migration.

  “Durahd’a,” one of the naval officers in the audience said, his manner tentative, “do I understand that you’re suggesting we abandon Earth?”

  “Of course. You managed to destroy the Xul ship—an act of incredible bravery and courage, I will add—but you must recognize the inevitable, that sooner or later the Xul will come looking for that vessel. When they do, they will not limit themselves to bombarding Earth with asteroids. They have the ability to turn your sun into a weapon that will incinerate every living creature in this star system.”

  “If that’s true,” Brigadier General Pamela Steubbins asked, “why didn’t they just do it first time around?”

  “The Xul, to judge by what little we know of them, must be an extremely conservative species. Think about it. They have been in existence as a technologically adept species for at least a million years, and quite probably for as much as one hundred times longer than that. They tend to move slowly, to think slowly, to draw conclusions slowly…but to make plans that seem quite long-ranged to more ephemeral species. We know they can incinerate entire star systems, and that they have done so when faced by a sufficiently dangerous foe. A world scorched by a nova, however, orbiting a burned-out white dwarf sun, is of little use to them. The Xul, we believe, do tolerate, and even cultivate, the existence of other intelligences…taking care to keep them in a pretechnological state. We don’t know what they do with them, but we have seen evidence of this. Some of your years ago, the Xul dropped yet an
other asteroid on your planet to annihilate a promising Bronze Age culture there. They did not eradicate all life or all civilization, however. Possibly they planned on using you humans for something else.

  “To answer your question, General Steubbins, the Xul use the least amount of force possible in any given situation commensurate with accomplishing their goals—sending one ship instead of a fleet, using an asteroid bombardment instead of novae. But since you have just rather dramatically demonstrated that you do pose a long-term threat to them. I think you can be confident that they will not hold back a second time.”

  “How the hell are we supposed to move the entire human population elsewhere?” a man in civilian clothing called out in what was almost a wail of despair. “There may be billions of people left alive on Earth!”

  “With regret, Senator Langley, that situation will not long ensue. The heat currently enveloping your homeworld will soon give way to ice and sub-freezing temperatures. Only those of your species already in space—plus the handful more you may be able to rescue—will survive.”

  Again, silence hung heavy within the bowl of the conference auditorium.

  Only in the century or so since humans had reached Sirius had the N’mah begun building starships again, Lee knew, after a hiatus of at least five thousand years. One such was the enormous T’krah Elessed Ev’r, a ten-kilometer-long vessel that essentially was an asteroid with an inertialess drive attached, and rotating inner wheels housing thousands of N’mah, both aquatic adults and amphibian juveniles.

  For more than eighty years, now, more and more of the N’mah population in the Sirian Stargate had been moving onto the asteroid starships. Sirius was no longer safe for them, not after the humans had destroyed a Xul huntership at the Gate.

  “In any case,” Duradh’a said, “there is a limit to what we can do. Essentially, we propose to give you what help we can in turning several asteroids into…I believe your term for them is ‘interstellar arks.’ This is what we of the N’mah are doing, as we continue to abandon the Sirian Stargate. In fact, we will not be able to evacuate all of our people, but we are doing what we can.

  “This is the decision you must make as well, if Homo sapiens is to have a chance of surviving.”

  There was another long silence at this…and then the conference hall broke out in a babbling, chaotic pandemonium.

  11

  18 FEBRUARY 2314

  Mars Military Training Command

  Stickney Base,

  Phobos

  1435 hrs, GMT

  “We are not going to abandon Earth!” Admiral Marcia Thomas said, shouting to be heard above the murmur of shocked and angry voices. “This is our home!”

  General Vandekaamp pounded the top of the podium with the flat of his hand, gradually restoring order. Turning to face the image of the floating N’mah, he said, “This conference was called to discuss our options if the Xul return. I believe I speak for most here when I say it is premature to discuss running away.”

  “That is your decision, of course,” the N’mah said. Lee tried to read some sort of emotion into the voice, into the being’s manner, and failed. The four whiteless eyes, the chitin-armored face, the shoulderless arms, none of these was remotely human, and if they bore anything at all like a human emotion, Lee could not read it. The dry voice, of course, was the mentally projected voice of the translator AI; Lee had never heard a N’mah voice, but an article he’d downloaded once had said its speech issued through the two vertical slits on its face—analogues of human nostrils—and that the tooth-filled mouth was used only for eating. He doubted very much that he would pick up on the strange being’s emotions through its tone of voice, either.

  The human emotion loose in the room, however, was undeniable, and quite clear. The murmurs were spreading throughout the audience again, growing louder, more urgent. “How do we know the N’mah aren’t working with the Xul?” one insistent voice called out.

  “Order!” Vanderkaamp yelled. “We will have order!”

  “I believe that our, our honored guest doesn’t understand our situation,” General Steubbins said. “The N’mah have not known their homeworld for many thousands of years. Isn’t that right?”

  “Truth,” Duradh’a replied. “Our world of origin, we believe, was destroyed by the Xul long ago. We understand your…emotional attachment to the world that gave your species birth. But believe me when I say that your survival as a species demands that you outgrow such attachments. I tell you the absolute truth. Earth, and every world in this stellar neighborhood, and every living being on or near them, is doomed. The Xul will not, they cannot experience competition or threat in any form without responding in the only way they are capable of responding—by returning to this system, and closely searching those nearby, in order to obliterate every trace of sentient life they can find.

  “Your one hope is to find another world, in a star system so lost among the stars that the Xul can never find you.”

  “He can’t be serious,” Major Risler said quietly, at Lee’s side. “How can we run from something that has FTL, when we don’t?”

  “I don’t think he means outrunning them,” Lee replied, whispering. “The cosmos is a big place. If we found another world, maybe in another galaxy, it would take even the Xul millions of years to find us, combing the stars one by one. I doubt they’d be that persistent.”

  “Another galaxy? But that would take millions of years!”

  “Not for us,” Lee said. “Not at near-c.”

  He was pretty sure he saw what the N’mah delegate was saying. Even the Xul had their limitations. Survivors of their past predations had escaped their notice in part because there were so many stars—four hundred billion in this one galaxy alone. The Xul couldn’t look everywhere, couldn’t be everywhere. Like the N’mah, Humankind might be able to lose itself in the immensity of space.

  And with the N’mah inertialess drive, even flight to another galaxy might well be an option. Lee had once seen a technical discussion of the idea. If a ship could be boosted to a high enough percentage of the speed of light, relativistic time dilation would slow the passage of time for those on board to a crawl. One estimate suggested that the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.3 million light-years distant, would be only twenty-seven years away, according to shipboard clocks. No Earth-built ship was capable of that yet, but with N’mah technological help…

  Yeah, it just might work.

  But…

  While twenty-seven years passed for the passengers of a ship crossing between the galaxies, 2.3 million years would pass for the Xul. True, they appeared to change only very slowly, over the course of ages, but even so, where would they and their technology be two million years hence?

  Lee found the thought disquieting.

  Much more disquieting, however, was the thought of what would happen to those left behind. Senator Langley had it right. How could that fraction of Humanity already in space simply abandon the survivors on Earth?

  Within the past standard day, Fleet Command at Fra Mauro, on Luna, had succeeded in inserting a large number of remote probes into Earth’s tormented atmosphere, and the probes had begun sending back images. No numbers were available yet on how many might be still alive on the planet’s surface, but there were survivors, teeming swarms of them in some places, sheltering as best they could from the torrential, never-ending rain, grubbing among the ruins of wrecked cities and fallen arcologies looking for food and emergency supplies, struggling to stay above the rising waters, to stay alive.

  Things appeared to be worst in western Europe, where repeated tidal waves had scoured away the very surface of the world right down to bedrock. Across eastern North America, there appeared to be little left in the way of infrastructure or organized government. Washington, D.C., Baltimore, the New York Metroplex, Boston, Charleston—cities as far inland as Atlanta had been reduced to utter ruin, and most of the coastal cities now stood under water, submerged by the tidal swell from the continuing hyperstorm tha
t embraced most of the North Atlantic. Of some cities—Miami, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, there was not a trace remaining. Indeed, little remained at all of the entire former state of Florida or of the Gulf Coast as far north as Baton Rouge, and a new arm of the sea now reached far to the north to truncate the Mississippi River just below Vicksburg; the storm’s tidal surge had—temporarily, at least—raised the gulf ’s water level by over thirty meters.

  Things were not so bad in the Southern Hemisphere, or in Asia, or even inland along the North American West Coast, where cities still stood, aircraft again roamed the skies, and armies and heavily armed militia appeared to be enforcing order for the public good.

  How many now remained alive on the planet? It was impossible as yet to say. Estimates ran from as low as five billion—mostly in eastern Asia and the Southern Hemisphere—to an optimistic ten to twelve billion. Intermittent contact had been established with survivors on the U.S. West Coast, suggesting that things were grim there, but far from hopeless. The shorelines and great metroplexes along the coast had been battered by tidal waves, but most people inland had escaped unharmed.

  So far. That would change when the temperatures began dropping.

  “Eight thousand of your years ago,” Duradh’a said, continuing, “the survivors on Earth were of no importance to the Xul. Evidently, they checked in on your planet for some thousands of years after, monitoring your recovery, but after the incident thirty-five hundred years ago, they seem to have lost track of you.

  “I assure you, that will not happen again. Your species has proven itself adaptable, resourceful, and…stubborn to a degree that can only convince the Xul that you must be exterminated. Among the vast starclouds at the far end of the Galaxy, or, better, hidden away within the uncharted suns of a neighboring Galaxy, you might win survival.”