Star Strike: Book One of the Inheritance Trilogy (The Inheritance Trilogy, Book 1)

by Ian Douglas

  Abruptly, the record froze, the alphanumeric columns and data blocks halted in mid-flicker.

  “Four point zero one seconds,” Alexander said. “At this point, Perseus flashed the recording of Argo’s log back to Earth.”

  “But…but everyone has been assuming that the Argo was destroyed,” Senator Kalin said, a mental sputter. “We don’t know that. They could still all be alive….”

  “Unlikely, Senator,” Alexander replied dryly. “First of all, of course, there’s been no further contact with the Argo during the past three days. There is also this….”

  Mentally, he highlighted one data block set off by itself—an indication of Argo’s physical status. Two lines in particular stood out—velocity and temperature. The asteroid starship’s velocity had abruptly plummeted by nearly point one c, and its temperature had risen inexplicably by some 1,500 degrees.

  “When Perseus sent off the burst transmission, these two indicators had begun changing during the previous one one-thousandth of a second. We’re not sure, but what the physicists who’ve studied this believe is happening is that Argo’s forward velocity was somehow being directly transformed into kinetic energy. A very great deal of kinetic energy. And liberated as heat. A very great deal of heat.”

  “These data show Argo is still completely intact,” Marie Devereaux noted. She sounded puzzled. “Senator Kalin is right. That doesn’t prove that the Argo was destroyed.”

  “Look here, and here,” Alexander said, indicating two other inset data blocks. “The temperature increase is still confined to a relatively small area—a few hundred meters across, it looks like…but the temperature there in that one spot has risen 1,500 degrees Kelvin in less than a thousandth of a second. The physics people think the Xul simply stopped the Argo in mid-flight—and released all of that kinetic energy, the energy of a multi-billion-ton asteroid moving at near-c, as heat in one brief, intense blast. Believe me, Senator. That much energy all liberated at once would have turned the Argo into something resembling a pocketsized supernova.”

  “But why?” Kalin wanted to know.

  “Evidently because the Xul had copied all of the data they felt they needed. They’re not known, remember, for taking physical prisoners.”

  There was evidence enough, though, of their having uploaded human personalities and memories, however, and using those as subjects for extended interrogation. He’d seen some of the records taken from a Xul huntership, of what had happened to the crew of the Wings of Isis in 2148. He suppressed a cold shudder.

  “If it’s the Xul,” Devereaux added.

  He hesitated, wondering how forceful to make his response. It was vital, vital that these people understand. “Madam Chairperson, Senator Gannel asked a while ago how we could know that Argo was destroyed by a Xul huntership. The answer is we don’t.” He indicated the vast, convoluted ovoid hovering close by Argo in the frozen noumenal projection. “It’s not as though they’ve hung banners out announcing their identity. But I’ll tell you this. If that vessel is not Xul, then it’s being operated by someone just as smart, just as powerful, just as technologically advanced, and just as xenophobic as the Xul. If they’re not Xul, they’ll do until the real thing comes along, wouldn’t you say?”

  “If it’s Xul,” Devereaux continued, “how much does this…incident hurt us?”

  He sighed. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Fifty thousand twenty-fourth century politicians, plutocrats, bureaucrats, specialists, and technicians. How much damage could they do?”

  That asteroid colony ship presented an interesting window into the politics of Humankind’s past. Shortly after the Xul attack on Earth, many of the survivors—especially those wealthy enough or politically powerful enough to buy the privilege—had elected to flee the Motherworld rather than remain behind to face a second attack that all knew to be inevitable. At that time, Humankind had not yet unraveled the secrets of faster-than-light travel. With N’mah help and technology, however, they’d constructed four asteroid starships each capable of carrying tens of thousands of refugees and which could accelerate to nearly the speed of light using the reactionless N’mah space drive.

  From Alexander’s point of view, the decision to flee the Galaxy entirely, to travel over two million light-years to reach another galaxy, seemed to be a bit of overkill. Still, he had to admit that, judging by the interstellar vistas recorded at Night’s Edge and elsewhere, the Xul did appear to have a presence embracing much of the Galaxy. Two of their known bases—Night’s Edge and a Stargate nexus known only as Cluster Space—were actually located well outside of the Galactic plane, where the Galaxy’s spiral arms curved across the sky much as they did in Alexander’s noumenal simulation. Their empire, if that’s what it could be called, might well extend across the entire Milky Way—four hundred billion suns, and an unknown hundreds of billions of worlds.

  The refugees of the twenty-fourth century had desperately hoped to find a new home well beyond even the Xul’s immensely long reach through space and time. It would take over two million years to make the trip, but relativistic time dilation would reduce that to something like thirty years; with the prospective colonists in cybe-hibe stasis, even that brief subjective time would vanish as they fled into the remote future.

  The only question had been whether or not the refugee ships could slip out of the Galaxy without being spotted by the Xul. That hope, unfortunately, had failed.

  “Our problem, of course,” Alexander went on, “is that we must assume that the Xul now know exactly where we are, and who we are. Most of the people on board probably didn’t have useful information that would lead the Xul back to Earth. A few would have, however, though I’m actually more concerned about the data Perseus might have been carrying. He probably had a complete record of the 2314 attack, for instance, and would have had the galactic coordinate system we use for navigation.

  “The Xul are smart. They’ll put that data together with the elimination of their base at Night’s Edge, and know we were responsible. They might also be able to see enough of the stellar background in any visual records to positively locate Sol. And…there’s also Argo’s path. The refugee ships were supposed to make a course correction or two on the way out, so they didn’t draw a line straight back to Earth, but doing that sort of thing at relativistic speeds is time consuming and wastes energy. I doubt the changes were enough to throw the Xul off by very much. At the very least, they’ll figure the Argo set out from someplace close to the Sirius Stargate. That bit of data alone might be enough. It’s only eight and a half light-years from Earth.”

  In fact there was so much Humankind didn’t know about the Xul or how they might reason things through. No one could explain why, for instance, they didn’t share data more freely among themselves. The only reason the Xul hadn’t identified Humankind as a serious threat centuries ago was the fact that the Night’s Edge raid did appear to have obliterated any record of the Xul operation against Earth nine years earlier.

  “What about the other three refugee ships?” Navin Bergenhal, one of the Intelligence Advisory Group members, asked. “They’re all in danger now.”

  “We’ll need to send out QCC flashes to them, of course,” Alexander said. “I doubt there’s anything they can do, though, since it’ll take a year of deceleration for them to slow down, and another year to build back up to near-c for the return trip. If they wanted to return.” He shrugged. “Their escapist philosophy may prove to be the best after all. If the Xul find Earth and the rest of our worlds, the only hope for Man’s survival might well rest in one or more of those surviving colony ships making it to M-31.”

  “The destruction of the Argo is tragic, yes,” Devereaux said. “But I still don’t see an immediate threat. This all took place five hundred light-years away, after all. And the Xul have always been glacially slow in their military responses.”

  Alexander nodded. “Agreed. If they behave as they have in the past, it might be some time before that information dissemin
ates across all of Xul-controlled space. But, Madam Devereaux, we would be foolish to assume they won’t disseminate it, or that they won’t act upon it eventually. Our best xenopsych profiles so far suggest that the Xul are extreme xenophobes, that they destroy other technic races as a kind of instinctive defense mechanism. We’ve bloodied them a couple of times now, at Sirius, at Night’s Edge, and at Sol, so you can bet that they’re going to sit up and take notice.”

  “We’re going to need to…consider this,” Devereaux said. “In light of the current difficulties with the Islamic Theocracy, we must proceed…circumspectly. Perhaps Intelligence can run some simulations plots, and come up with some realistic probabilities.”

  Damn. He was going to have to turn up the heat. “With all due respect, Madam Devereaux,” he said, “that is fucking irresponsible. It’s also stupid, playing politics with the whole of Humankind at stake!”

  There was a long pause. Devereaux’s head cocked to one side. “With all due respect what, General Alexander?”

  “Eh?”

  “Your filter blocked you,” Cara whispered in his mind.

  “Oh, for the love of…” Angrily, he cleared part of the filter program, dropping it to a lower level. The software had decided that his choice of language left a lot to be desired, and had edited it.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Devereaux,” he said as the program shifted to a lower level. He glanced down at himself. At least he was still in uniform. “Social convention required that I have my e-filters in place, lest I…give offense. But we don’t have time for that nonsense now. What I said, ma’am, was that delay, any delay—giving the matter further study, running numbers, whatever you wish to call it—is irresponsible and stupid. I believe the term my e-filter didn’t like was ‘fucking irresponsible.’”

  “I see.” Her own e-filters were in place of course, but they didn’t stop a certain amount of disapproval from slipping through in those two short words. “And just what do you expect us to do about this, General Alexander?”

  “A raid, Madam Devereaux.” At a thought, the frozen view from the Argo at the moment of the ship’s destruction vanished, and was replaced by the galactic map he’d been studying before the delegates had arrived. The viewpoint zoomed in on the irregular green glow of human space, on the path of the Argo, and on a tight scattering of red pinpoints marking the nearby systems from which the huntership might have emerged—Nu Andromeda, Epsilon Trianguli, and a few others. “What the Marines call a sneak-and-peek.”

  The display continued to animate as he spoke, the viewpoint zooming in until Epsilon Trianguli showed as a hot, white sphere rather than as another star. An A2 type star, Epsilon Trianguli appeared imbedded in a far-flung corona of luminous gas, and even in simulation was almost too brilliant to look at directly.

  A hypothetical planet swung into view, a sharp-edged crescent bowed away from the star, attended by a clutter of sickle-shaped moons. A swarm of dark gray and metallic slivers materialized out of emptiness and scattered across the system. Other planets appeared in the distance, along with the gleaming, wedding-band hoop of a stargate.

  “First in are AI scouts, to show us the terrain. We also need to know if there’s a stargate in the target system. The scouts will find out if there is a Xul presence in the system, and map it out so we’re not going in blind.”

  Obedient to his lecture, a Xul station revealed itself, menacing and black, positioned to guard the stargate. A swarm of new objects entered the scene, dull-black ovoids, descending toward the Xul structure in waves. Pinpoints of white light flickered and strobed against the surface in a silent representation of space combat.

  “The Marines go in hot, wearing marauder armor and accompanied by highly specialized penetrator AIs,” Alexander went on. “Details depend on what the scouts turn up, of course, but the idea will be to insert a Marine raiding party into the Xul, grab as much information as we can, and blow the thing to hell.”

  On cue, the camera point of view pulled back sharply, just as the Xul base in the scene, in complete silence, detonated—a searing, fast-expanding ball of white light that briefly outshone the brilliant local sun.

  “Very pretty,” Devereaux said as the display faded into darkness once more. The noumenal scene flowed and shifted once more, becoming a more conventional virtual encounter space. “But just what would be the point?”

  They now appeared to be seated around the perimeter of a sunken conversation pit three meters across, the representation of the Galaxy as seen from above spiraled about itself at their feet. Here, the individual icons all expanded into images of people, though their electronic secretaries and EAs remained visible only as tiny, darting icons of yellow light orbiting their human masters. The walls and ceiling of the room appeared lost in darkness.

  “The point, Madam Devereaux, is to avoid being put on the defensive again. We were on the defensive in 2314. You know what happened.”

  ‘Yes,” General Samuels said. “We beat them.”

  “At a terrible cost, sir. Earth’s population in 2314 was…what?” Alexander pulled the data down from the Net. “Fifteen point seven billion people. Four billion died within the space of a few hours during the Xul bombardment. Four billion. Exact numbers were never available, given the chaos of the next few decades, but an estimated one to two billion more froze during the Endless Winter, or starved to death, or died of disease or internal electronics failure or just plain despair.”

  “We know our history, General,” Devereaux said.

  “Then you should know that the human race came within a hair’s breadth of becoming extinct. Over a third of the human race died, murdered by one Xul huntership. One! We were lucky to be able to destroy it. And if General Garroway hadn’t backtracked the Intruder through the Sirius Stargate to Night’s Edge and found a way to take out the base there, we wouldn’t be sitting here now discussing it!”

  “And you know, General,” Devereaux said, “that the current political situation may preclude a major operation such as you seem to be suggesting. The Monists and the Starborn both are threatening to side with the Islamic Theocracy. If they do, the Commonwealth will fall.” She spread her hands. “If that happens, how are we supposed to defend ourselves if the Xul do come?”

  “I submit, Madam Devereaux, that the Human species right now has more to worry about than the exact nature of God. If we do not take a stand, an active stand, against the Xul threat, if we don’t deal with it now, while we have a chance of doing so, then none of the rest matters. We’ll be settling the question of God’s nature by meeting Him face to face!”

  “He does have a point, Marie,” another delegate in the circle said. He wore the uniform and the corona of a Fleet admiral, and the alphanumerics that popped up when Alexander looked at him identified him as Admiral Joseph Mason. As he spoke, the light brightened around him, drawing the eye. “We can’t ignore what’s happened out there.”

  “Five hundred light-years, Admiral. It’s so far away.”

  “It’s a very short step for the Xul, Marie. We’ve survived so far only because we’ve been lost within…what? Ten million stars, or so. Even the Xul can’t pay close attention to every one. But we know the Xul. We know what they did to the Builders. And to the An. And probably to some ungodly number of other civilizations and species scattered across the Galaxy over the past half million years or so. If they locate Sol and the other worlds of human space, they will do the same to us.”

  The light brightened around another delegate. “And I concur, Madam Devereaux.” The speaker was a civilian, his noumenal presentation wearing the plain white robes of a Starborn Neognostic.

  “You do, Ari?” Devereaux said, surprised. “I’d have thought you would be solidly opposed to this kind of…of interstellar adventurism.”

  “I may be a Starborn,” Arimalen Daley said, inclining his head, “but I’m not stupid. Lieutenant General Alexander is right. We need to be careful in setting our priorities. I believe even our Theocrat friends would agr
ee that there are times when religious or philosophical differences must be set aside for the sake of simple survival.”

  Alexander was startled by Daley’s statement, but pleased. He had little patience with religion, and tended to see it as a means of denying or avoiding responsibility. Daley’s response was…refreshing.

  He opened a private window in his mind, accessed an e-pedia link, and downloaded a brief background on the Starborn, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. No…he’d remembered correctly. The Starborn had been around for two or three centuries, but had arisen out of several earlier belief systems centered on The Revelation. For them, all intelligence was One…and that included even the Xul. They opposed all war in general, and most especially war based on a clash between opposing faiths. Within the Commonwealth Senate, they’d been the most vocal of the opponents of the military action against the Islamist Theocracy, for just that reason.

  Alexander wondered why Daley had sided with him.

  For himself, Alexander had no patience whatsoever with religion of any type. Beginning in the twentieth century, Humankind had been wracked by religious mania of the most divisive and destructive sort. World War III had been brought on by Islamic fundamentalism, but other sects and religions demanding rigid boundaries and unquestioning obedience to what was imagined to be God’s will had added their share of terror, insanity, and blood to the chaos of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And then had come the discoveries on Mars, of buried cities and the Builders, of the mummified bodies of anatomically modern humans beneath the desiccated sands of Cydonia and Chryse.

  Science fiction and the more sensationalist writers of pop-science had long speculated that extraterrestrials had created humans, but now there was proof. The Builders had tinkered with the genetics of Homo erectus in order to create a new species—Homo sapiens. It had always been assumed that if such proof was ever uncovered, it would once and for all end the tyranny and the comfort of religion. If God was a spaceman, there scarcely was need for His church. Religion would die.