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

by Ian Douglas

  And perhaps to the Xul as well. The Xul certainly used the Gates, as did both humans and N’mah from time to time, but most xenosapientologists were of the opinion that the Xul had not originally built the things, that they had discovered them in place whenever they began spreading across the Galaxy…how long ago? A million years, at least….

  Warhurst felt the sharp, inner twist as the Ontos passed through the gravitationally distorted interface. This was his first time through a Stargate, but he’d been through plenty of sims, and knew to expect that wrenching sensation as, just for an instant, part of his body was here, dropping through the Puller Gate, and the rest emerging from another Gate twelve hundred light-years distant.

  “Woof!” Galena said, with feeling. “Is it always like that?”

  “Damfino,” Lieutenant Eden said. “First time for all of us.”

  “A slight feeling of discontinuity, like an inner jolt or twisting, appears characteristic of human physiological response when passing through a Gate,” Chesty said, the AI voice even and measured.

  “Yeah, well, it felt to me like a hard kick in the ass,” Galena said.

  “Heads up, people,” Eden told them. “Sensors to on. Chesty is on-line. Listen for the signal, now….”

  Warhurst studied the downloaded imagery now feeding in from the Ontos’ forward cameras and other sensors. So far, no surprises. The local sun burned in the distance, some fifty light-minutes away, as a bright, blue-white beacon imbedded in a faint and far-flung haze of zodiacal light. Despite the name for this region of space, the star, listed as HD387136 on the star catalogues, had never gone nova; Nova Aquila, or that star’s white dwarf remnants, were reportedly located perhaps ten light-years distant. The star itself was invisible at that distance, but a smear of light was visible in one part of the sky—the glowing shell of ejecta blasted away when Nova Aquila had detonated, some fourteen hundred years ago.

  As for HD387136, it appeared to be a normal, unremarkable A4-class star, though it did not appear to have a family of planets. The zodiacal light was, in fact, a glow off a cloud of asteroidal debris circling the star in a broad, flat plane. The material, ranging in size from minor planets a few hundred kilometers across down to sand grains and dust motes, created a thin smear of light encircling the star.

  No planets…and no fortress bases, such as those favored by the Xul. Some, small, fear-stubborn piece of him had halfway been expecting to find a Xul monster-ship or orbital fortress base waiting for them on this side, despite earlier negative sweeps by unmanned probes.

  But there was nothing. He saw the low-grade radio-frequency noise, which might have been leakage from a shielded, high-tech source, but which could just as easily be something natural—a hiss of radio noise from the star as its magnetic fields interacted with the orbiting ring of asteroidal debris. The lack of full-sized worlds made the system seem an unlikely place to find intelligent life, or any life, for that matter.

  The fighter screen was spreading out, now, covering as large a volume of space as possible. Linked together through Chesty, each vessel became one component in an array of linked receivers, creating, in effect, an enormous and extremely sensitive radio telescope.

  “So what do you hear, Chesty?” Warhurst asked the AI. The program was powerful enough, he knew, to hold multiple separate conversations without affecting its primary mission.

  “The signal is almost certainly of intelligent origin,” Chesty whispered in his thoughts. Small mental windows opened to show gain and frequency, as well as a simplified map of local space. “The origin appears to be numerous multiple points within the local star’s asteroid field.”

  “Radios, then?”

  “More likely a variety of electronic equipment,” Chesty replied. “Possibly from large-scale manufacturing centers, or from the nodes of a widely distributed computer network. The signals are extremely faint—as though they have been shielded.”

  “Is it Xul?” Lieutenant Eden asked.

  “Unknown. However, the frequencies do not match previously recorded Xul data intercepts. I believe this may be someone new.”

  “Right, then,” Eden said. “Warhurst? Let’s drop our package.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  A thought-click, and the aft-ventral cargo hatch cycled open. He did a final systems check, and then, a moment later, the EWC–9 Argus/NeP Entruder dropped into vacuum and began slowly accelerating out ahead of the Ontos.

  The spacecraft was designated the EWC–9 Argus, after the hundred-eyed guardian monster—no relative of “Argo,” the mythical ship for which the lost asteroid starship had been named. One of the Marine weapons technicians who’d designed the system on board Skybase reportedly had suggested the name after hearing that Skybase was being renamed Hermes, and there’d already been a fair amount of good-natured ribbing back and forth about Hermes boring hundred-eyed Argus into a coma. “EWC” referred to the vehicle type—Electronic Warfare Craft.

  Working closely with Chesty, Warhurst began feeding a list of potential targets into the EWC’s navigational system. There were hundreds of targets to choose from; all were locked in, though the emphasis was on one particular RF source that, according to parallax measurements, was considerably closer than the rest—less than 100,000 kilometers distant.

  The Aquila Space stargate orbited the local star at the ragged, outer fringe of the system’s broad planetoid belt. The RF sources were widely scattered through the belt, but there were so many that a few, at least, were within easy range of the Argus’ payload. Once the best targets were locked in, Warhurst gave another mental command, and the craft began accelerating under its own gravitic drive, pushing swiftly up to over two hundred Gs. Once clear of the guardian hemisphere of Skydragon fighters, the forward half of the cylindrical craft unfolded, exposing thousands of pencilsized launch tubes, each now tracking a separate target. At a precisely calculated instant, the tubes fired, releasing a cloud of fast-moving nano e-penetrators, NePs in the jargon of the Marine technicians who’d grown them.

  The Entruder was the software that constituted the EWC-9’s principle payload, and was a neologism drawn from electronic intruder, or e-intruder, a term that had already been applied to a whole range of AI-driven electronic monitoring, warfare, and subversion software. Marines had won past engagements with the Xul by slipping complex, artificially intelligent software into the equivalent of Xul operating systems, piggybacking the software into Xul ships or fortresses by using RF leakage—exactly like the radio noise emanating now from the asteroid field ahead.

  Chesty had done this sort of work at Starwall, burrowing like a self-aware computer virus into the Xul system, picking up and transmitting data on the Xul presence in that system, and ascertaining that the Xul forces there, tens of thousands of light-years from human space, knew about the captured Argos. In fact, a great deal of Chesty—including everything he’d learned in his penetration of the Xul ship at Starwall—had been copied and packed into the Entruder software.

  The Marine programmers back in Skybase had named the Entruder package, by ancient tradition, after a hero of the Corps. Where Chesty had been named for Chesty Puller, the Entruder was named Evans, for Evans Fordyce Carlson, three-time winner of the Navy Cross, and the creator and leader of the legendary Carlson’s Raiders of WWII.

  Spacecraft like the EWC-9 Argus, and AI software payloads like Evans, had been vital components in warfare for centuries. In fact, it could be argued that they were the remote descendents of twentieth-century computer viruses and primitive atmospheric craft like the EA-6B Prowler and even earlier electronic eavesdropping aircraft. There were military theorists—in fact there’d been military theorists for many centuries—who insisted that real war had little to do with armies or ships, which they considered superfluous. It was, these armchair strategists insisted, the electronic engagement in the opening nanoseconds of any battle that determined winners and losers, the outcome predicated on which side gained more elint—electronic intelligence�
��in the collision, and which one better defended its own electronic trenches.

  Warhurst didn’t agree. There would always, he was convinced, be a need for someone—a basic infantryman or Marine rifleman—to go in and take the high ground away from the enemy.

  Evans

  Aquila Space

  1254 hrs GMT

  From Evans’ point of view, he was on board the Argus spacecraft, resident within a heavily shielded and protected central processor, but with secondary nodes on board the Ontos and the widely scattered fighters. Redundancy was key, here. If things went wrong with the e-penetration attempt, one, at least, of the dispersed network nodes could receive what data had been collected and, with luck, get it back through the Stargate to Puller 659.

  Somewhere up ahead, several thousand individual nano-probes, hurtled through space at some hundreds of kilometers per second. In the first seconds of free flight, the NeP probes, each one a few centimeters long and as slender as a human hair, had released an extremely fine, gossamer net that encircled its body. The net served both to receive RF signals from the objective, and to maintain a connection with Evans through tightly focused, highly directional microwave beams. Each probe selected a radio-frequency source and began to home on it, using the local magnetic field to minutely adjust its course.

  Most missed their selected targets. Their velocities were too high, the energies they could bring to bear on course correction minute. But a lucky few found the source of radio emanations squarely within the cone of space available to them. And they struck.

  The flash of kinetic energy released by the impact served as power source, charging the molecule-sized components of each NeP thread. These burrowed deep into the surface of the target, then began tasting the material in which they were imbedded.

  The nanopenetrators had been programmed to accept a wide variety of materials, including the self-repairing hull composites of a Xul starship. In this case, the raw materials were those of a typical H-class chondritic asteroid, consisting of approximately twenty-three percent iron, ferrous sulfide, iron oxides, and nickel, with the rest comprised of silicates such as olivine and pyroxene, and an aluminosilicate of magnesium, iron, and calcium called feldspar.

  The twentieth-century mathematician John von Neumann had described a visionary system whereby a suitably programmed robot might land on an asteroid and, using available materials, construct an exact replica of itself. Those two would build more replicas…and more…and still more…until there were enough replicators that the programming could shift production over to something else, such as refined metals packaged for shipping back to Earth. These von Neumann machines, as they were called, were an early concept in the evolution of nanotechnology, for they showed how asteroidal nanufactories might be grown in the Solar System’s asteroid belt or Oort Cloud.

  A similar process was under way now, as the nano probe began recruiting molecules and even individual atoms from the surrounding matrix—iron and iron oxides, nickel, iron sulfides, and magnesium for metal, calcium, potassium, carbon, sulfur, and silica for other materials. Much of a chondrite’s substance was, in fact, a kind of clay called a hydrated silicate, which contained a high percentage of water and organic materials.

  Swiftly—the mining, refining, and assembly processes took place very quickly on a molecular scale—the thread of nanomaterial injected into the asteroid’s surface began growing in two directions—up, creating a new sheet of gossamer webwork on the surface of the asteroid in order to establish a microwave link with the distant Argus spacecraft, and down, sending a vast and complex web of threads, each finer than a human hair, down into the rock’s deeper structure. The threads, navigating now by sensing heat in the substrate around them, delved deeper and deeper until finally one thread made contact with, not asteroidal rock, but something else…a ceramic shell housing a bundle of fiber-optic cables carrying pulses of laser light.

  Several hundred NePs had impacted on that one, relatively nearby asteroid. Within a few minutes, fast-burrowing roots of nanoassembler threads began encountering one another, exchanging data, interconnecting their networks, and rerouting their joint explorations inward. Each probe had no intelligence of its own beyond the bare minimum required to carry out its mission, but was still loosely linked to Evans by microwave.

  Evans was highly intelligent, with all the technical and background data acquired from centuries of intermittent contact with Xul networks, with more substantial exchanges with the alien N’mah originally encountered at the Sirius Stargate, and with extensive studies and reverse-engineering of artifacts left behind by the Builders half a million years ago, from the surfaces of Earth’s Moon and Mars to the ruins on Chiron, Hathor, and elsewhere.

  A blob of assemblers gathered around the ceramic conduit containing bundles of fiber-optic cable, delving, probing, sampling. Patterns were noted—fluctuations in frequency, in amplitude, in spin. Data streamed back to Evans, who began comparing them to the AI’s extensive technic and linguistic files.

  The electronic system here was not Xul. That much was clear from the start. Indeed, attempts to probe the alien network using Xul-style signals were effectively and immediately blocked. In biological terms, the electronic network within the asteroid possessed a complex and well-adjusted set of anti-Xul “antibodies,” which appeared to be designed expressly to counter electronic incursions by the Xul.

  Knowing this, Evans was able to focus on non-Xul electronic strategies; there still were a daunting number of possibilities available, but at least the field was reduced somewhat. Where humans used binary logic as a means of encoding data, and the Xul used a trinary system, this alien network appeared to use another form of numeric code entirely.

  Evans needed to establish just what the mathematical key to this code might be before he could begin to make some sense of the streams of alien data. He tried and discarded a number of possibilities—the ratios of prime numbers to one another…the intervals between oddly-even numbers, even numbers that, when one was divided by another, produced even numbers…even a numerical ordering of the hydrogen emission lines resident within the spectrum of the local star.

  It was definitely a brute-force method to cracking the code, trying one method after another. Evans’ one advantage was that he was fast, working on a molecular scale and with very tiny energies.

  And ten minutes into the attempt, as more and more nanothreads wormed their way into the vast and tangled electronic network beneath the asteroid’s surface, he found the key.

  It was Fibonacci numbers and Phi.

  One plus one equals two. Add the 2 to the 1 and get 3. Add the 3 to the 2 and get 5. Each number added to the preceding number gives the next number in the series, creating an ongoing string of numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on to infinity in a never-ending series.

  A curious fact about this series is that if you divide any Fibonacci number by the next number after it, you get a value quite close to, but never quite equaling, the transcendental 0.618034…, Phi, the so-called “Golden Mean” that seems miraculously to appear everywhere in the universe—in the curves and spirals inherent in pine cones and sea shells and spiral galaxies, within biological ratios and the arrangements of flower petals and leaves growing around a stem, and even within the proportions of the human body.

  The frequencies of the photon packets traveling through the alien fiber-optic network could be expressed as ratios between the first few thousand numbers in the Fibonacci series. The first level of the code had been cracked.

  After that, still working by a kind of well-educated trial-and-error, Evans began to translate signal ratios into layer upon layer of nested patterns. By now, nanothreads were sampling thousands of different sources of electrical and photonic signals, providing an avalanche of data that would have taken merely human signals analysts centuries just to separate and describe.

  It took Evans about three hours.

  And then the humans on board the Ontos had their first good look at
one of the aliens.

  Although, at that point they couldn’t really tell what it was….

  21

  0912.1102

  UCS Hermes

  Stargate

  Puller 695 System

  1740 hrs GMT

  “What the hell is that?” General Alexander wanted to know.

  “The intelligence analysts are still going over it,” Cara told him. “They’re especially trying to see if there are any other ways to make this data fit together into meaningful patterns. But these particular images appear to be intended as cels in a visual record of some sort.

  “We think these are landscapes….”

  Alexander was studying the first of the images sent back from Aquila Space by Recon Sword, watching them unfold in his mind. “Landscapes?” he said. “Looks more like the deep ocean.”

  The scene was otherworldly…but it was tough to tell whether that was due to the environment or an alien perception of that environment. Reds, violets, and blues predominated. Whatever Alexander was seeing, it was murky, with vague and uncertain shapes just visible in the background. In fact, his first impression was that he was looking at a series of abstract paintings. After clicking through several dozen of them, though, he began to recognize patterns to the background and in the color.

  “So…this is a single cel in some kind of animation?”

  “Yes, sir. Project a number of these in rapid succession, and you would have the sensation of movement. We have recovered some fifty thousand of these so far, enough for half an hour of video, if projected at twenty-four frames per second. However, so far most appear to be of different sequences. In other words, they’re not all part of the same ‘movie,’ or, if they are, they represent widely different scenes, different places, within a single sequence.”