by Ian Douglas
“While extremely fast, such paravelocities are still finite. The Xul ship, we now believe, emerged from the Sirius Gate approximately six and a half days before arriving in our Solar System. The N’mah still at Sirius may have transmitted a warning, but at the speed of light it will take a little more than another eight and a half years to reach us. In other words, the Xul crossed 8.6 light-years in six days, for a paravelocity of, very roughly, five hundred c.
“While the use of a paraspace drive allows for very swift travel between local star systems, such as Sol and Sirius, a ship traveling at five hundred c would still require two centuries to traverse the diameter of our Galaxy, crossing the span of one hundred thousand light-years from one side to the other.
“Our N’mah informants know of only a handful of stargates, but believe they may be scattered throughout our Galaxy, with no gate more than approximately one hundred light-years from at least one other gate.”
“You’re saying the Xul could cross the Galaxy by traveling from gate to gate,” Admiral Jason Colby, at Fra Mauro, put in, “with no more than two to three months’ travel time between each? That doesn’t buy them anything. Still takes over two centuries to cross the Galaxy.”
“No, Admiral,” Quincy said. “We now understand that these stargates can be tuned by adjusting the vibrational frequency of the rotating black holes. Matching frequencies between two gates connects those two gates. Theoretically, each stargate can be tuned to connect with any other stargate. This means that the Xul can reach any point within our Galaxy in no more than two and a half months.”
Lee felt the shock of the audience as they tried to digest this datum. They’d all known that Xul technology was good and that the Xul had a very long reach, but no one had considered yet just how long that reach might be.
The N’mah were right. To escape the Xul threat, Humankind would have to flee to another galaxy entirely and, traveling at sublight speeds, millions of years into the future, an idea that still was daunting in the extreme.
Throughout the discussion, the elements of the Sirian star system remained on the screen at Lee’s back, and in the download window open in all of their minds—brilliant Sirius A, the small but fierce pinpoint of Sirius B, and the gleaming hoop of the Stargate. The image shifted now, moving closer to the gate, which from the new vantage point became a perfect, thread-rimmed circle of silver light.
“This one stargate,” Quincy continued, “may actually give us access to every other stargate in every part of the Galaxy. As yet, we don’t know how, exactly, the tuning of one gate in order to connect it with another specific gate is accomplished. The N’mah say they know how to interact with the gates, and are willing to share that knowledge with us.
“Judging from the navigation data we acquired from the Xul intruder, we believe the probable origin of that vessel to be…here.”
The computer-generated point of view plunged forward through the gate, the stars blurred for an instant, then snapped back into crystal clarity. Starclouds hung suspended in space, half of the field of view a teeming beehive of suns, the other half empty and dark. From this new vantage point, they appeared to be hanging above the plane of the Galaxy; ahead, the Galactic Core glowed like red-orange embers thickly streaked by the dark wisps of nebulae, while, in the foreground, the Galaxy’s spiral arms uncoiled in pale, cold, blue-and-white light.
An orange-hued sun detached itself from the background and grew larger, brighter. A crescent appeared, a bright sickle bowed away from the sun, its night side spangled with thickly clotted lights, as if from dozens of enormous cities.
“As you see,” Quincy said, “this system is located above the plane of the spiral arms of our Galaxy. Like the Cluster Space system our Marines visited a century and a half ago, this system lies on the very fringes of our Galactic neighborhood.
“We have named this system Night’s Edge,” Quincy continued. “One of the human intelligence analysts on this project seemed to feel that the romantic imagery was important. The star is located well above the Galactic plane, and is somewhat closer to the Galaxy’s core than are we. We estimate its distance from Earth to be nearly fifteen thousand light-years.
“Analysis gives us a sixty-five percent likelihood that Night’s Edge is the location of a major Xul military and transport nexus, and that it contains the base from which the intruder vessel was dispatched in February. What we propose is to send 1MIEU to Sirius. There, we will consult with the N’mah still within the Sirius system, before they abandon it entirely, and confirm this analysis with them.
“The operation would then proceed in two phases. First would be a reconnaissance, carried out by AI drones. Depending on the information these drones return to Sirius, we will then pass through the gate in force in order to implement Operation Seafire.”
Again, the room exploded into shouts, together with a smattering of applause. Again, Lee heard a distinct division in the reaction, with some in the audience cheering Quincy’s statement, and others shouting against it.
“That’s suicide!” one particularly strident voice called out. “It would just bring the entire Xul civilization down on us!”
“Yeah,” someone else called out. “Wouldn’t they know where the attack had come from? Won’t they pass it on to other bases? What does it buy us?”
“According to our N’mah advisors,” Quincy said, “communication between separate Xul bases is quite slow. The enemy is highly advanced technically, true, but we can’t overlook the fact that the Galaxy is a very large place—four hundred billion stars, and an estimated fifty billion worlds supporting life advanced enough that resident species could evolve to intelligence and technical sophistication within a few million years. The N’mah believe that there are no more than a very few hundred bases like the one at Night’s Edge.
“The Xul, for all their high-tech ability, simply cannot keep track of every planet, of every species, at least not in any detail. Each base is responsible for a very large sector containing many millions of stars, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of worlds. The Xul also move slowly by our standards, taking their time before responding to a threat. So far as the N’mah have been able to determine, the Xul have no central authority, no emperor or home government. Information filters from one Xul world to another only intermittently, with the movement of their ships, and distant outposts may be thousands of years behind in acquiring news from the more centralized regions. By the same token, Xul worlds in toward the heart of the Galaxy, where we believe they are more thickly distributed, might not learn of events in the outlying regions for millennia.
“We believe, therefore, that if we destroy the base and any Xul ships present at Night’s Edge, the Xul elsewhere will eventually learn of the attack, but not for a time…perhaps not for centuries.”
“Then all we’ve done is put off the day of reckoning,” President Raleigh observed.
“Yes, Madam President,” Quincy replied. “But…which would be better? To delay a possible Xul response by centuries? Or to simply sit back and wait for the inevitable response from the Night’s Edge base when their warship fails to return? The vessel that struck Earth is already several months overdue. We believe they will respond within ten to fifty years—”
“You believe?” Lieutenant General Clarence Armitage, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood in the audience, interrupting. “You believe? The enemy could be in Earth orbit tomorrow!”
“General, the ten-to-fifty-year estimate was based on N’mah observations of Xul behavior over the past several millennia,” Quincy replied, his voice unruffled by Armitage’s outburst. “You are quite correct, however. Given a possible flight time from Night’s Edge of six days, by way of the Sirius Stargate, they could indeed be here at any moment. Their response to perceived threats tends to be ponderously slow, however. Remember, the Singer almost certainly broadcast a signal of some sort to the stars in 2067, quite probably an announcement of our existence, but there was no evidence
of Xul activity in this part of the Galaxy until one of their ships emerged from the Sirius Gate in 2148, some eight decades later. After the destruction of the second Xul intruder at Sirius in 2170, another 144 years passed before one of their warships actually found Earth.
“However, we don’t know, not with any surety. Earth remains in terrible danger.”
“Then how does this Seafire proposal help us?” Senator Fortier demanded, her Québecois French translated into acid English in Lee’s mind. “All it will do is draw precious military resources away from Earth when we need them here most!”
“As I said, we don’t know with any surety. All we can do is look at the problem statistically, seeking the greatest—”
“Excuse me, Quincy,” Colonel Lee said, breaking in. “Perhaps I can answer this one.”
“Of course, Colonel.”
Lee turned on the dais to face Senator Fortier. She was seated near the President, and he wondered if that indicated a sharing of viewpoint. Unlikely. The President had more sense, usually.
But Quincy and other expert AI systems were always at their weakest when attempting to respond to emotional arguments. For that, you needed a human mind.
“Madam President, Madam Senator,” he said. “Quincy has given us the facts, the best analysis of the information retrieved from the Xul ship possible with our current technology. What we have to decide now is beyond the purview of any artificially intelligent system, and it is why we are meeting here this morning.
“General Armitage pointed out that our use of Seafire to delay the enemy may be futile. It will take ten years, objective, for a Marine expeditionary unit to reach Sirius. We have no way of cutting down on that travel time, none. And, as the general said, a Xul follow-up expedition could have departed from Night’s Edge a week ago, emerged through the Sirius Gate, and be here in time for breakfast tomorrow.
“And Senator Fortier, you are right, as well. A Marine expeditionary force consists of a thousand Marines, several hundred naval personnel, and at least eight to ten major ships—transports, mostly, but we would want a significant fleet presence along as well—say, a battlecruiser and a couple of destroyers, at least.
“But ask yourselves this. Wouldn’t it be better to take the fight to the enemy—even if it did not delay him by a single hour—rather than just sitting here and waiting for the end? Isn’t it better to go down fighting, than to close our eyes and hope it’s all just a bad dream, or that the bogeyman will go away? Isn’t it better to strike back than to flee to some other galaxy in the hope—quite possibly the misguided hope—that the enemy will never be able to find us…or that he won’t be there waiting for us when we finally arrive a couple of million years objective from now? We’ve been discussing the possibility of building asteroid starships and departing for M-31 in Andromeda at the speed of light.” He shrugged. “The N’mah don’t know of any Xul presence outside our Galaxy. The refugees might be safe.
“Or it could be that the Xul have been there for a million years already, or that within the next two million years, they’ll decide to go there and be waiting to meet us. The point is, no matter what we decide here in this chamber today, there are no guarantees…none, except for one. If we decide to wait here for the Xul to return, if we try to face even one of their FTL starships with military might, even our entire Navy and High Guard combined, we will be destroyed. While no accurate estimation is possible, Xul technology is at least a thousand years ahead of ours, and the tech-level difference might well be measured in hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. If we try to stand up to them on their terms, we will lose. And losing, I remind you all, means the extinction of Homo sapiens.
“So why the hell not invest ten ships and a couple of thousand volunteers in the possibility, however slight, that striking back, that hurting them, badly, will hide our location a few more centuries? The Xul are convinced that we’re some sort of a threat to them, long term? Then let’s prove it to them, and hurt them bad enough that they stop and really think about whether trying to eliminate us is a good idea?” Lee thought again of the computer animation General Garroway had shown them when he’d first proposed Seafire—the caveman sneaking up behind the combat-armored soldier and walloping him with a stone ax. “Right now, standing up to the Xul, for us, is like a Stone-Age primitive going it toe-to-toe with a fully armed and armored Marine. We try to fight him one-on-one, and we get killed. But if we do the unexpected, find a way to slip in under their defensive radar and get in just one, good, killing blow, we might win for ourselves the time to rebuild the Earth…and to bring our military technology up to a level that really gives us a fighting chance!”
He didn’t add a bit of history, something he’d downloaded from the net archives just last night. As the political debate over whether to flee or fight had continued to unfold over the past four months, a small group of military officers, here on Earth and in near-Earth space, had begun making reference to what they called the Doolittle Option.
Three and a half centuries before, during the Second World War, the United States had found itself at a serious disadvantage in fighting the Japanese Empire in the Pacific. At the war’s beginning, the Japanese actually enjoyed several significant technological advantages—better torpedoes, better surface warships—than the Americans, and their unexpected strike at the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor had savaged the American Pacific Fleet, leaving it vastly outnumbered in battleships, aircraft carriers, and other major fleet elements as well.
But four months after Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle had organized and led a raid against the Japanese home islands with sixteen medium bombers, aircraft normally flown from land bases but which, with special training on the part of the crews, could be flown off the deck of an aircraft carrier.
The raid had been a resounding success, though none of the aircraft made it through to their planned landings in China, and the actual damage inflicted on the Japanese had been trivial. The true value of the Doolittle Raid, as it came to be called, had been not in military advantage but in stirring the resolve of Americans at home, civilians stunned by news of an uninterrupted string of Japanese victories, from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines to the Dutch East Indies.
Military historians had convincingly argued since then that the raid had forced the Japanese to step up their attempts to annihilate the American carrier fleet—which had escaped the attack against Pearl Harbor—in order to prevent another such attack.
And that had led to the turning-point Battle of Midway two months later, when the enemy’s naval juggernaut in the Pacific had at last been decisively stopped, allowing U.S. superiority in production to begin to catch up with, then surpass, the Japanese.
Operation Seafire shared certain elements with the Doolittle Raid. It stood no chance of seriously harming the enemy, and it depended on makeshift means to overcome Xul technological superiority.
But it had the potential to make a serious strategic difference, giving Earth the time it needed to rebuild, rearm, and develop a credible defense.
The audience had again erupted into shouting, and Lee tried to make a guess as to which side had the numbers—or, at the very least, which was shouting loudest. A vote had been promised for that afternoon. From the sound of things, the vote would be close.
A substantial number of people still wanted to opt for leaving Earth, even though the best studies conducted so far suggested that at most only a few hundreds of thousands of people might be saved in a handful of asteroid starships—a tiny, tiny fraction of several billion survivors. Over the past weeks, word of the deliberations outside of Washington had leaked to the rest of the nation, then to the world, and thousands had died in the riots that followed. Both Canton and North China had threatened war against the Federal Republic, and the World Union, meeting at their new provisional capital in Sydney, had as their first official act passed a condemnation of both the Federal Union and the United States for “unilateral acts to the detriment of Hu
manity.”
If the U.S. or the FR decided to jump ship, the rest of the world wanted to jump as well.
“If I might have your attention a moment more,” Lee said, then waited. Gradually, the noise subsided, and each member of the audience again was looking at him.
“Thank you,” he said. “I just wanted to add that, as of two weeks ago, the selection process has begun within the 1st Marine Division. We already have more than enough volunteers to create our expeditionary force. We have also begun sequestering the supplies necessary at L-4, and begun necessary updates and modifications of several starships in anticipation of a mission to Night’s Edge.
“I would urge you, the civilian leadership that will make the final decision here today…even if you decide to save a few thousand souls and leave Earth forever, remember that billions will remain behind, and deserve a fighting chance. Send the Marines to Night’s Edge! Those who remain on Earth will not have a better chance for survival!
“This concludes my presentation this morning.”
Lee left the dais and walked up an aisle to an empty seat as the chamber around him thundered with argument and counterargument. Tom Llewellyn took his place on the projection dais. In the window open in his mind, Llewellyn’s face appeared as the science advisor again pleaded for order.
The vote, Lee knew, was going to be damned close…but now there was a good chance that the government would do what Lee knew to be the right thing. Some of Earth’s survivors—the rich, the powerful, the governing elite—might well pursue the Andromedan Proposal as presented by Senator Fortier. With their power and economic bases on Earth wrecked by Armageddonfall, they might well conclude that they had nothing to lose and everything to gain by getting as far away from Earth as possible in space and in time and starting all over again. After all, they would still be in charge once they’d founded the new human colony.