by Ian Douglas
Most probes found only another Stargate, usually circling a distant star, like Puller 659, with lifeless worlds or no worlds at all. A few led to planetary systems possessing earthlike worlds, though, so far, no other sentient species had been found this way, and, in accord with the Treaty of Chiron, none had been opened to human colonization.
A very few, mercifully few, opened into star systems occupied by the Xul.
The Ringstar Gate at Puller 659 was one such. One of the regions accessed through the Puller Gate was in a system dominated by a hot, type A star, seething with deadly radiation burning off the galactic core, and host to a major Xul base.
As was the case every time a Xul base was discovered, a Marine listening post had been constructed close by the Puller 659 Gate, and a careful watch kept. Periodically, AI-controlled probes were sent through the Gate to record signals and images from the Xul base. The probes were tiny—the size of volleyballs—and virtually undetectable. The probes would slip through, make their recordings, then double back through the Gate to make their reports.
The usual routine was to send one probe through at a time, to minimize the chances of the reconnaissance being detected. Faults and failures happened, however, and losing contact with one or even two was not unusual, especially through the turbulent gravitic storms and tides swirling about the mouth of a Gate. But Lee had just sent the third probe in a row through to check on number one, and its lasercom trace—kept tight and low-power to avoid detection—had been cut off within twenty seconds of passing the Gate interface.
Not good. Not good at all…especially since the lasercom threads carried no data about what was going on down range, save that the probe was functional.
And standing orders described in considerable detail what happened in such cases.
It was time for a sneak-and-peek.
“Package up the log,” she told Chesty over the telencephalic link. “Beam it out NL. And recommend to Major Tomanaga that we go on full alert.”
“Major Tomanaga is already doing so,” the base AI told her, “and he has just authorized a level-2 reconnaissance through to Starwall.”
“Excellent.” Starwall was the name of the system on the other side of the Gate, the location of the Xul base.
“Will you be taking an FR-100 through the interface?”
“Yeah. Prep one for me, please.”
“Number Three is coming on-line now.”
In a larger base, there would have been a standby pool of Marine fighter pilots ready to fly recon, but the listening post was manned by six Marines at a time, standing watchin-three. The main base complex was a space station orbiting the system’s gas giant, camouflaged from detection by the planet’s far-flung radiation belts and now almost two light-hours away. Non-local com webs bridged that gulf instantly, but it would be hours before fighters could get here.
Marine listening posts like Puller 659 were deliberately kept tiny and unobtrusive; Fitzie was right, damn him. It was her turn.
She dropped out of the link and rose from her couch. Leaving Fitzpatrick in his commlink couch at the monitor station, she caught an intrastation pod and dropped to the fighter bay, two decks down. The uniform of the day was Class-One VS, a black skinsuit that served as her vacsuit in a depressurization emergency, so she needed only to pick up a helmet, gloves, and LS pack on the way.
Her FR-100 Night Owl was warmed and ready for her when she arrived.
The Night Owl was dead black, pulling at the eye, a flat, smooth ovoid with teardrop sponsons and swellings for drives and sensor equipment, its sleek hull designed to absorb or safely redirect everything on the EM spectrum from long-wave radar to short-wave x-rays. It was sophisticated enough to fly itself without a human at the controls, but Corps doctrine still emphasized the need for a human at the controls in any situation where things might go suddenly and catastrophically wrong. The craft was tiny—three fluidly streamlined meters, with a cockpit barely large enough to receive her vacsuited body as it folded itself closely about her and automatically made the necessary neural links.
“Link me in, Chesty,” she thought, and felt the connections open in her mind. The Night Owl’s AI was technically a Chesty2, a smaller, much more compact version of the software running on the station proper. She felt a slight thump as the Owl slid down on magnetic rails through a deck hatch and into its launch lock.
“You are linked and ready for boost, Lieutenant,” Chesty told her. “Lock evacuated. Station clearance for exit granted.”
She ran through a final check on her instrument feeds, and let the hull embracing her fade away into invisibility. This was always the scary part, the feeling that she was being dumped naked into hard vacuum. No amount of training, no thousands of hours of flight time could ever entirely override that deep-seated, thoroughly human terror of the ultimate night outside.
All systems cleared green. “Let’s do it, then.”
The drop hatch yawned and the sleek, tiny fragment of night fell into darkness.
In her mind, Lee was flying through space unencumbered by such incidentals as a ship or vacsuit. Above and behind her—though such notions as up and down were suddenly meaningless as she fell clear of the LP’s grav field—the listening post hung against the stars, a small asteroid, dust-shrouded and almost lost in the wan light from the distant, red pinpoint of the local sun. Ahead, the Stargate appeared as a vast, red-gold hoop, canted at a sharp angle to the listening post, which stayed well clear of the entrance. In the 112 years that Puller 659 had been in operation, nothing had ever emerged from that gateway other than returning Marine probes.
But there was always that inevitable first time….
Under Chesty’s guidance, the Owl’s N’mah reactionless drive switched on, propelling it toward the Gate, which filled Lee’s view forward now, an immense, flattened band that, from this distance, appeared perfectly smooth and seamless. As moments passed, however, that illusion faded, as lines and geometric shapes became visible by the shadows cast by the distant, bloody sun.
At ninety gravities, the Owl shot forward, and the Gate swiftly grew larger, larger, then larger still. Shielded from the brutal acceleration inside the tiny craft, Lee told Chesty to maneuver closer to the ring wall as the FR-100 crossed into the tidal field, then turned sharply, falling into the ring’s turbulent lumen.
At the last possible moment, Chesty cut the drive, and the Owl dropped through the Gate, the red-gold-gray wall flashing past Lee’s awareness, the sudden gut-twisting wrench of gravitational tides clutching at her….
And then she was through, an explosion of light bathing her wide-open mental windows. Starwall…
An apt enough name. Ringstar, Puller 659, was located in a relatively sparsely populated area of space, out in the Orion Spur of the Cygnus Galactic Arm, just a few hundred light-years from Sol. The Starwall system, however, was an estimated eighteen thousand light-years closer in toward the Galaxy’s central hub. From here, inside the dense banks of interstellar dust and gas that enclosed the Hub and shrouded its glow from the suburbs of the spiral arms, the galactic core literally appeared to be a near-solid wall of stars, presenting a vista like the heart of a globular cluster, but on an impossibly vaster scale, a teeming beehive of billions of closely packed suns, their clotted masses wreathed through with twisted and tattered ribbons of both dark and incandescent nebulae. That mass of stars had an overall reddish tinge to it; most of the stars of the Hub were ancient Population II suns, poor in metals, cooler than the predominantly hot, metal-rich and spendthrift blue stars of the spiral arms.
Lee’s warning systems began their steady and expected drumbeat. Radiation levels on this side of the Gate were high—high enough to fry an unprotected human in seconds, high enough to overwhelm even the Night Owl’s protective shielding within an hour or two at most. For safety’s sake, the clock was running; Lee had a stay-time of forty minutes on this side of the Gate, a quite literal deadline by which she had to return to the listening post, or die.
She scarcely noticed those warnings, however, for her attention had been grabbed by a danger far more immediate. Movement and proximity snatched at her awareness, and she looked up, relative to her own alignment….
It was a Xul huntership. Of that, there could be no doubt. It appeared small, thanks to its distance, but her sensor inputs were giving her a mental download giving the thing’s range, size, mass…gods, it was huge.
The Xul warhsips encountered by Humankind so far had come in a variety of sizes and configurations, but all were enormous, well over a kilometer in length, and more often two. The Xul, for whatever reason, liked to build big.
This model had been named the Type III by Marine Intelligence, and was designated as the Nightmare class. Unlike the slender needles of Types I and II, the Nightmare was an immense flattened and elongated spheroid two kilometers across, its surface pocked and marked by countless structures and surface irregularities laid out in geometric arrays of almost fractal complexity. The Singer, discovered eight centuries before beneath the ice of Europa’s world-ocean, had been of this type. The monster was larger than the asteroid shrouding the Puller listening post…but was entirely artificial, apparently grown through the Xul equivalent of nanotechnology.
Just why they built their ships and bases on such a large scale remained one of the deeper mysteries of Xul technology. Encounters with the Xul over the past eight centuries had demonstrated that they almost certainly did not possess an organic component; as near as the various human intelligence services could determine, the Xul was a gestalt of myriad machine intelligences, some of them artificial like AIs, but some possibly originally recorded and uploaded into machine bodies from the organic originals millions of years ago.
These UIs, as they were now known, Uploaded Intelligences, were virtually immortal. Imbedded within the tightly meshed and folded circuitry that filled most of the huge Xul ships, they couldn’t be said to be truly alive, not in the human sense, and they certainly didn’t require the life-support systems found on any human-manned spacecraft.
Lee watched the complicated surface of the Xul monster glide slowly past—nearly ten kilometers away, near the center of the Gate opening, but large enough even at that range to occult the massed stars beyond like an ink-black shadow, sharp enough and detailed enough that she felt like she could reach up and touch it. It took her a moment to realize that she was on a parallel course; like her, it had only recently emerged from the Stargate behind her and was also moving into the Starwall system, but at a slightly slower speed so that she was catching up with and slowly passing it. From her perspective, it seemed to her that the Xul vessel was standing still, or even moving past her in the other direction, toward the Gate.
The Nightmare’s presence suggested answers to several questions. This side of the Gate must have been retuned by the Xul to another Gate, one other than the one at Puller 659. As a result, the four missing probes had been lost either because they’d passed through the returned Gate to that other system…or just possibly because they’d been in the process of returning and been brushed aside by this giant just as it emerged into the Starwall system.
To a monster like the Xul Nightmare, those probes must have been insignificant, dismissed as drifting fragments of meteoric debris. On that scale, Lee’s FR-100 was little larger; so long as she didn’t change her vector, she should be ignored.
Should be. So much about the Xul—both the limits of their technology and the leadings of their psychology—still were utter unknowns.
But it’s so far, so good, she thought, watching the monster slide past in the distance. She was glad she’d told Chesty to steer her closer to the ringwall, though. Had she emerged from the Gate near the center of its opening, she might well have slammed headlong into the ass end of that thing.
That didn’t let her out of the woods, though. If she applied power to decelerate in order to reverse course and return to the Gate, the Xul monster might easily pick up her energy signature; scraps of interstellar debris did not reverse course on their own, nor did they radiate the clouds of neutrinos that were the waste product of tapping the virtual energy of the Quantum Sea.
Lee felt a small shiver at the base of her neck, a prickling warning of danger. If she couldn’t reverse course, she would die of radiation poisoning in short order. And, even if she did reverse course…the Xul Nightmare’s presence suggested that the Stargate on this side was now attuned to a different star system. If she went through, she would not emerge at Puller 659, but in some other unguessable but absolutely guaranteed remote location. Chesty could retune the Gate for a return, of course; the Puller 659 Gate’s coordinates were programmed into him.
But that would be a rather nasty giveaway to the Xul here at Starwall, who would certainly be monitoring the Gate’s settings. Regulation One-alpha, drilled into every Marine standing duty at a Gate listening post, was to lay low and keep a low profile, to not attract Xul attention to human activities. Humankind had survived for the past eight centuries only because they’d managed, on the whole, to stay off the metaphorical Xul radar.
“Chesty?” she asked. “Are you picking anything up from over there? Can you piggyback it?”
“We are intercepting the usual RF leakage,” the AI replied. “I am attempting to locate a viable frequency with which to establish a tap.”
Xul ships leaked, at least at radio frequencies. The millions of kilometers of nanoelectronic circuitry and processors packed into each of those immense hulls gave off a constant hiss and murmur of radio noise as a kind of metabolic byproduct, and the Xul never seemed to bother with shielding. Some theorists suggested that the radio noise served an almost organic function, helping to reassure individual Xul ship-entities that others of their kind were near.
Ever since the first studies carried out on the Singer eight centuries before, humans had looked for ways to turn this fact to their advantage. It was possible, for instance, to use some Xul frequencies as carrier waves, allowing human-developed AI programs to upload into a Xul computer network and have a look around. The technique was called piggybacking, and Marine listening posts often used it in attempts to gather yet more intelligence on the poorly understood and still mysterious Xul.
There was an ancient aphorism, something all Marines learned in boot camp, something from the writings of Sun Tzu in The Art of War. It stated that if the warrior knew himself, but not the enemy, he would be victorious only half the time. If he knew the enemy, but not himself, he would, again, be victorious only one battle out of two. Only if the warrior knew the enemy and himself could he hope to win every battle….
The Marine philosophy, begun in the crucible of recruit training, was designed to create a sure knowledge of self. Unfortunately, even after eight centuries, the Xul were still largely an utterly alien quantity. Xenocultural theorists were still divided as to whether the Xul could properly be called living beings…or even whether they were self-aware, both sentient and conscious in the same way that humans understood the terms. In most ways, they appeared to be machine intelligences, like human-designed AIs, but on a far vaster and more powerful scale.
There were hints, however, that each Xul ship contained hundreds, perhaps thousands of organic minds patterned and downloaded into the vessel’s circuitry, separate identities arrayed in a gestalt, a group mind, in an interconnected collection referred to—ever since the discovery of The Singer—as a chorus.
There were hints, too, that a Xul chorus included the downloaded minds both of the original, biological Xul, beings whose organic bodies had died and decayed countless millennia ago, and the minds of other intelligent beings captured and incorporated into the Xul matrix for purposes of interrogation…the Xul version of knowing both self and adversary. So far, the Xul definitely had the advantage in the arena of knowing, but progress had been made in that direction during the past eight centuries.
As Chesty2 was about to demonstrate….
Chesty2
Starwall Syst
em
1608 hrs GMT
Unlike humans, the artificial intelligence, dubbed “Chesty” after the nickname of a legendary Marine of long ago, did not rely exclusively on vision to model his surroundings. Merging with the data streams flowing like myriad streams and rivers through the tightly packed and tangled electronic pathways of the alien vessel, the closest sensory analogue he possessed was that of sound.
Human understanding of Xul mentalities had actually taken an enormous leap forward in the twenty-fourth century, when communications breakthroughs with dolphins in Earth’s oceans had helped forge a new understanding of how they perceived their watery surroundings as magical, somehow crystalline panoramas of sound rendered palpable.
From Chesty’s point of view, he was slipping deeper into a vast and hauntingly resonant meshing of rhythms and harmonies, a blending of tones and pulses and throbbings and even voices in a shifting, ever changing whole that felt both self-directing and self-contained, but which also felt like a fragment, a discrete but dependent shard of something far larger, tantalizingly beyond the reach and scope of Chesty’s awareness.
The trick was twofold—remaining invisible within that harmonic chorus while retaining the ability to probe and peer and penetrate, winkling out useable data from the incoherent ocean of information pulsing around him and recording it for later analyses. As he slipped into the Xul data stream, Chesty manifested a data shell around the essential core of his operating software, taking on the virtual appearance of a minor counterpoint to the thronging choral harmony about him. So long as he played the part and kept it low-key, he should be able to remain undetected. His distant ancestors would have recognized the technique at once. Chesty3 was, for all intents and purposes, a computer virus slipping in through an unguarded back door.