by Ian Douglas
Jack typed in the new figures. “Just under two hours. One hundred nineteen minutes, in fact.” He looked up. “Stepping up the acceleration doesn’t cut down your travel time as much as you’d think.”
“I imagine how fast we scoot’ll depend on how bad the RAG needs us,” Bosnivic said.
“Well, that and how hard they think they can push the Ranger on her maiden voyage,” Jack said. “This antimatter stuff is pretty new technology, and maybe they don’t want to pull out all the stops, first time around.”
“Where’s the antimatter come from?” David asked.
“Oh, they manufacture the stuff right here at the construction shack,” Bosnivic said, “using solar energy and something like a miniature version of one of those big particle accelerators back on Earth. Takes a long time, even to collect just a few grams of the stuff.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” David asked. “I mean, even a microgram of antimatter will make a hell of a bang if it touches normal matter, right?”
“Hell, yeah!” Bosnivic said, grinning. “A big bang, and a lot of very hard radiation. Why do you think they make the stuff way out here?”
“I’d think it would be pretty vulnerable to UN attack.”
“Not as vulnerable as you think. From here, we can see anything on an approach vector clear back to Earth orbit. And we have a squadron of Sparrowhawks stationed here, just in case the bad guys decide to come check us out. So far, we don’t even think they know what we’re doing here.”
“Which is just as well,” Jack put in. “If we could get a nuke through to that asteroid they were trying to send our way, they could hit us with one if they were really determined. And they would be, too, if they knew the Ranger there was ready to fly!”
Bosnivic nudged Jack and pointed at his PAD. “So, you got your girlfriend in there to crank out those numbers?”
“Hmm? No. That was just the calc function. You could do it, too, Bos, if you could just keep straight which is division and which is multiplication.”
“Girlfriend?” David asked.
“Hey, you never met Jack’s girlfriend? I thought you two were related!”
“Last girlfriend of his I heard about was that v-mail correspondent you were always talking to in California—”
“Let’s not bring that up,” Jack said, his face reddening.
“I definitely sense a story there,” Bosnivic said. “But, anyway, turns out that Flash here is a genius at hacking into AI programs, getting ’em to sit up and beg. They’ve had him modifying our Marine-issue PAD OS/AI to make us a nutcracker.” Floating in mid-bay, he reached down and rubbed his groin suggestively. “And a very nice nutcracker she is! Show him, Jack!”
“Uh, I’d really rather not! Listen, Bos, don’t you have some Marine stuff to do, somewhere?”
Grinning, Bosnivic rubbed his nose with his middle finger. “Thought of somethin’ right here, Flash.”
“Careful you don’t wear that out,” Jack replied, as Bosnivic kicked off the bulkhead and sailed across to some other Marines.
“So,” David said with a wry grin. “You getting on okay with your new friends?”
“Oh, they all figure they have to harass the new guy,” Jack said. “Hey, it’s great to see you! I heard they were assigning a civilian specialist to this op, but I didn’t know it was going to be you!”
“Well, I’m not sure why I got the job, but I’m glad I did. So tell me. What is all this stuff with modified programs, anyway?”
“Well, what he was talking about isn’t exactly something I want Mom to know about. But it got me a billet on this flight, and that’s the important thing.”
“Doing what?”
“There are three of us, see? Bos is one. So’s…that corporal over there. Yeah, the blond woman. Corporal Dillon. We graduated from a special 4069 MOS class they just held at the SCTF at Quantico.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Well, the UN has built a ship at a base they have on the farside of the Moon. An antimatter ship, like the Ranger. According to intelligence, she’s just about ready to go. She already has made some short hops, but they think they’re still working on getting her main weapon mounted and working. Our team is going in to either destroy or capture that ship, whichever we have the best chance of pulling off.
“Anyway, the three of us are on the boarding team. We go in with our nutcrackers, try to subvert the UN computer system running that ship, and take it over. If one of us can pull it off, we might be able to fly that ship out of there.”
“Ah. And if you can’t?”
“Then there’ll be other Marines planting explosives to make damned sure the UN can’t fly it out either!”
“And this nutcracker is?…”
Jack pulled out his PAD, opened the screen, and tapped in a command. “Sam?” he said. “I want you to meet my Uncle David.”
“Delighted to meet you, Uncle David,” Sam replied. She was modestly dressed, thank God, in slacks and an unrevealing blouse. Once, when he’d been working with her at Quantico, some of his instructors had dropped in to see how he was doing, including Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky and Colonel Joanna Bradley, the base XO. When he summoned Sam’s image, she’d appeared in the nude…a bug left over from the days when he’d wanted her to appear that way. He’d received a pretty stiff lecture on sexual harassment and proper respect shown to female members of the Corps.
He was pretty sure he had that problem worked out now, at least. The question was how she was going to fare against the UN computer.
“I’m, ah, pleased to meet you, Sam,” David replied. He glanced at Jack. “This is your nutcracker?”
“She was originally a Net agent,” Jack explained. “Or part of her was. That means she was designed to go out into Earthnet and find information for me, which she did by looking at lots of programs very quickly and comparing their content with lists of things I told her I was interested in. It wasn’t hard to modify her so that she could go into one program, figure out how it worked and what it did, and change how it worked.
“In fact, a lot of the work I did on her, she really did to herself. I just told her what I needed done, and she did it.” He snorted. “Everybody around here’s convinced I’m some sort of programming hotshot. She did all the work, though.”
“You talk about her as thought she’s…alive.”
“Uncle David, sometimes I wonder if she is. She sure acts like she’s self-aware.”
“Well, if she was programmed to act that way—”
“Oh, sure. I know all about simulated personalities. That’s what Sam started off as.” He didn’t add that the personality in question was a rather shallow adolescent’s sex fantasy. Now that Sam had become…legitimate, it embarrassed him to talk about that aspect of her past. “The thing is, AIs, even simple ones like Sam started off as, are meant to grow. To change with time, as they learn things, as they work with humans. It’s fun. Sam’s reached the point where I can’t really tell what she’s about to do or say. Just like a real person.”
“So you think she’s self-aware?”
“Well, I don’t really think she is, but sometimes I get the strangest feeling that she’s doing things on her own. Thinking. Reasoning things out.” He shook his head. “She’s probably too complex now for any programmer to understand how she works. That can be unsettling, y’know?”
“How about it, Sam?” David asked the woman on the PAD display screen. “Are you self-aware?”
“Would you respond to me differently if I were, David?” she asked. “Maybe it’s best that you not be too sure of me.”
David blinked. “I see what you mean, Jack. You didn’t program that answer into her…into it, I mean?”
“Nope. Sometimes she comes up with the damnedest stuff, seems to think of things I never would’ve thought of in a million years. Anyway, we’re going in with three different nutcrackers. I’m betting Sam will be the one that breaks through.”
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” David chuckled. “
So, what is a nutcracker, anyway?”
“Oh, well, the UN ship will have its own computer system, right? To control power, life support, all that stuff, just like our ships.”
“Okay.”
“If we’re going to capture that ship, we need to talk to the computer. Program it to respond to our commands. But it probably won’t be that simple. There’s almost certain to be some sort of password protection, just so some unauthorized guy like the janitor or a bunch of invading Marines don’t screw things up.”
“Gotcha.”
“Sam’s got a database of…I don’t know. How many passwords do you have, Sam?”
“Sixteen thousand, three hundred, eighty-four,” she replied immediately.
“Okay. Sixteen thousand possible passwords, compiled by the NSA. They put together files on all the people they figured might’ve been involved in programming the enemy ship’s systems. They got names of wives and girl-friends and kids. Birthdates of family members. Titles of favorite books. Places they’ve lived or gone to school. Known passwords they’ve used before. All kinds of trivia that a programmer might’ve used as an easy-to-remember password.”
David’s brow furrowed. “That still seems like kind of a long shot. I mean, that sort of code isn’t going to be easy, or what’s the point?”
“I think the idea is that the UN isn’t expecting us to come and try to take their ship away from them, so the password’s going to be relatively simple.”
“Still, so many possibilities….”
“Well, they’ve also put together some code-breaking algorithms that Sam can draw on. And she’s pretty slick herself, now. I’ve used her to get into places I wasn’t supposed to be.”
David’s eyebrows went higher. “Oh? And what places would those be?”
“Oh, password-protected stuff.” He didn’t elaborate. Two weeks earlier, however, Sam had broken into the main personnel files at Quantico to see if Jack had been selected for this mission. He hadn’t intended to change anything in those files, just to look around.
As it happened, he’d had the second best scores of all the trainees, after Diane Dillon, and had been given a slot aboard the Ranger.
And then there’d also been the time when he’d taken a peek at some of his uncle’s working files on aliens from the Cydonian underground site. He simply hadn’t been able to resist that siren’s call.
“So…how come you’re here?” Jack asked David, shifting the subject to safer ground. “Is Tsiolkovsky another alien site?”
“It’s distinctly possible.”
“The An again? Or the…what are they called? The Hunters of the Dawn?”
David looked at him sharply. “How much do you know about the Hunters?”
Damn. He probably shouldn’t have brought them up. “Not…not a whole lot. There’s been some stuff out on the Net.”
“Liana got some things out of my files she shouldn’t have,” David said, “and uploaded it to her cult church. From there it went…everywhere. But there’s a lot of speculation and misunderstanding and just plain idiot stuff mixed in. Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“That’s it, though, isn’t it?” Jack said, pushing. “There’s something about the Hunters of the Dawn at Tsiolkovsky?”
“I don’t really think so,” David replied. “If anything, there’s just an An base back there. From what Intelligence picked up, though, from some French scientists they questioned, our UN friends are very interested in the Hunters. Almost frantic. And our people would like to know what they know. What they’re afraid of.”
“The answer to the Fermi Paradox?”
Again, David gave Jack a long, hard look.
“I, uh, had Sam out looking for everything she could find on the Hunters of the Dawn,” Jack admitted. “The little bit I found on the open Net, well, like you said, it didn’t seem very reliable. Ancient-astronut stuff. So I guess maybe she did a check on everything you’d written on the subject.”
“Including some classified reports?” David shook his head and grinned. “Okay. I should have guessed as much. Don’t put too much store in any of that stuff, though, Jack. It’s all still very preliminary.”
“Yeah, but it’s important,” Jack said. “Alien civilizations that think they have to wipe out every other civilization they find, just to survive? I can see why the government would be interested in that. We might run into them ourselves, soon.”
“Sometime back in the 1920s or 1930s,” David said, “the first radio signals strong enough to propagate through space left our planet. The oldest of them are over a hundred light-years away by now, and there’s no way to call them back. If anyone is out there, listening, we’ve given ourselves away already.”
“And is that why the UN is so worried about it?”
“It’s why we’re all worried about it, Jack, and why I want to be damned sure of things before I release this. If my idea is true, galactic civilizations go through a kind of cycle, rising, developing interstellar travel, then getting smashed by the current crop of Hunters. That suggests we’re in an upswing now, on our way to the stars. And somewhere out there, maybe not too far away, the next batch of Hunters are setting up shop, too.”
“Well, we do have an advantage.”
“What?”
“We know about them. I imagine most emerging races don’t have a clue that the Hunters are out there. They struggle up to civilized status, develop spaceflight, go to the stars, and wham! They never know what hit ’em. You know,” he continued thoughtfully, “there’s another possibility too.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
“That we’re the next Hunters of the Dawn.”
David’s mouth twisted, as though at a bad taste. “That’s…not a very pleasant idea.”
“It could happen,” Jack said. “Remember Chicago? People did that. People not so different from us.”
A shrill whistle sounded from an overhead speaker, and every Marine in the squad bay fell silent, listening.
“Now hear this, now hear this,” Captain Lee’s voice said over the speaker. “We have just received a report that the RAG has reached its first objective and is deploying for the assault. We are now cleared for loading and debarkation. All hands, grab your gear and report to your squad leaders, preparatory for embarkation aboard the Ranger.”
“That’s it, Uncle David,” Jack said. His heart was hammering now, and he was praying that he wasn’t going to screw up. He folded up his PAD and tucked it back into his holster. “We’re going to war!”
“And God help us all,” David replied quietly. “God help us all….”
TWENTY-FOUR
SUNDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2042
Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater, West Rim
2233 hours GMT
Communicating with Earth was a real problem for the Rim Assault Group, once the Earth had dropped behind the stark, Lunar horizon. Any US spacecraft entering orbit around the Moon was killed as soon as it passed into line of sight of Tsiolkovsky. The same went in spades for any comsat parked in a halo orbit in L-1, above the Lunar farside; it was possible to establish a short-term polar orbit that wouldn’t rise above Tsiolkovsky’s horizon, but there were almost certainly UN forces at one or both of the moon’s water-rich poles, and even if they couldn’t shoot it down, they would certainly warn the UN farside base that something was up.
And the RAG depended utterly on its presence being kept secret until the last possible moment. A teleoperated Earth-Lunar freighter had been sacrificed to preserve that secret.
They’d been traveling steadily for nearly fourteen hours, a line-ahead column of vehicles nearly invisible against the unyielding silver-gray of the Lunar surface. A careful search from the sky might have picked them up, or at least have picked up their tracks, but the Moon was an extremely large place, with as much surface area as the continent of Africa, and the LAVs were very small. Even so, the four-wheeled vehicles had been deliberately designed to toss roos
ter tails of dust high and to the rear as they traveled, and as the dust settled out of the sky it tended to partially fill in and blur those telltale parallel trails, not filling them in completely, but making them far harder to spot at a casual glance.
One LAV had broken down. Gunnery Sergeant Miller’s LAV-3, with Second Platoon, Second Squad, had quietly died as they’d traversed the floor of the huge crater Fermi, fifty kilometers back. There wasn’t room in the other LAVs for any more personnel, so Miller and his people were sitting tight; if the RAG was successful, they would be picked up later.
If not…
Kaitlin tried not to think about the alternatives.
They made the approach up the western slope of Tsiolkovsky cautiously. There were UN defensive installations along the ringwall, but the crater’s circumference, over 580 kilometers, was so large that the UN couldn’t have woven a very tight net, and LAVs with stealth surfacing should be able to slip between them. The trick was identifying the UN perimeter installations in the first place so the Marines could sneak through.
Kaitlin sat in a jump seat next to Staff Sergeant Hartwell, watching over his shoulder as the staff sergeant threaded the LAV up the gradually steepening slope. It was particularly rugged here, good country for evading surface radar. Besides, since all of the LAVs possessed radar-absorbing stealth laminates, it should be possible for them to pick up UN radar before that radar could register them in return.
Still, it was a nail-biting feeling, sitting there, locked up in a brick-shaped can with twelve other Marines, inching up the slope while waiting for a sudden, sharp IFF challenge. No one spoke…almost as though they feared being heard by the enemy, which, of course, was nonsense in the Lunar vacuum.
People under stress, she thought, rarely act in strictly logical ways.
The expected challenge was never issued. Hartwell picked up one intermittent radar emitter fifteen kilometers to the south, and a very faint signal perhaps at twice that range to the north. Carefully, he adjusted LAV-1’s course to thread between the two at roughly the halfway point, with LAVs 2 and 4 following slowly in his tire tracks.