Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  “That’s the idea. It’s called the Predatory Survivors Hypothesis, and it’s the best answer we’ve come up with yet for Fermi’s Paradox.”

  “Fermi’s Paradox?” Norris said. “What’s that?”

  “Look it up on the net,” Hanson told him.

  “‘Where are they?’ was the question supposedly asked by a physicist named Enrico Fermi, back a couple of hundred years ago,” Cassius explained. “Basically, it notes that even if faster-than-light travel is impossible, a single technic race could spread out and colonize the entire galaxy in a few hundred thousand years.”

  “Right,” Ramsey said. “Back in Fermi’s day there was no sign of alien colonists, none that we recognized at the time, anyway. So the question was…where are they? Why aren’t they here? If they’re not here, what happened to them?”

  “It was actually pretty strong evidence that we were alone,” Hanson said. “That we were the only technic civilization in the galaxy or one of a very, very few. Since then, of course, we’ve found out that habitable planets are common…and intelligence must be fairly common too. We know of at least three now and possibly four sentient species besides ourselves—the Ahannu, the Builders, and either one or two groups of Hunters…all, apparently, in the same corner of a very large galaxy.”

  “The Predatory Survivors Hypothesis suggests that many sentient species arise and develop technology at roughly the same time,” Cassius said. “However, in each cycle there is certain to be at least one species that survives by killing off all the competition.”

  “Yeah,” Ramsey said. “Maybe it’s something hardwired into certain species by evolution, with the idea that survival-of-the-fittest means survival-of-the-meanest. Or maybe it’s more random than that. What we seem to see, though, is that every so often a predator species explodes across the galaxy, wiping out every other species in its path. And civilization has to start all over again.”

  “A pretty grim scenario,” Norris said.

  “It is,” Hanson agreed. “But it’s the only theory we’ve found that explains how intelligence can appear as a matter of evolutionary routine, if given even half a chance, and yet also explains why someone hasn’t already snapped up and colonized every habitable world in sight.”

  “It would also explain why the Ahannu built something like that giant relativistic cannon down there,” Ramsey said. “They were scared. Scared the Hunters were going to find them. They must’ve known the Hunters were looking for them, and they couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t find them.”

  They were passing over Ishtar’s day side now. Marduk hung in the sky almost directly overhead, a vast, golden-rimmed crescent, along with a half dozen of the nearer, larger moons threaded like pearls on the silver thread of the gas giant’s rings. The ruby gleam of Llalande 21185 touched the giant’s horizon, then swiftly faded out. Stars reappeared as Derna and the two transports swept into Marduk’s planetary shadow.

  Below, night reigned once more. Vast fields of molten lava glowed with sullen, scarlet anger, as volcanoes and lightning illuminated the cloud deck from beneath with eerily shadowed glows and shimmers.

  A world of storms, fire, and ice, Ramsey thought. Not a bad analog of Hell.

  Closer at hand, TAL-S landers deployed for deceleration. They were due to deorbit in another…fifteen minutes. Worker pods unloaded the transports, readying canisters of supplies for guided reentry.

  “Colonel Ramsey?” It was General King, entering the noumenon. The discussion between Ramsey and the two civilians was tagged private over the net, but a general’s personal security key overrode most encryption lockouts.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Any change on the situation at Krakatoa?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Mr. Norris? I still don’t see why your people are so interested in that damned mountain. It is a menace to this operation so long as it remains intact.”

  “General, that mountain represents the single piece of useful technology we’ve seen on Ishtar, not counting the Pyramid of the Eye, of course. That may be the only thing that made this whole jaunt out here worthwhile.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Norris,” Hanson said. “You’re making a pleasant profit. As am I.”

  “I’m talking about profit for PanTerra…and Earth. They’ve put enormous resources into this expedition. They deserve a payoff.”

  “I thought we were here to rescue human slaves, Mr. Norris,” Ramsey said with a lightly sarcastic edge to his voice. He’d seen little evidence that Norris or his people back on Earth were that interested in freeing slaves. It was technology they were after. Alien technology. And that mountain must hold secrets worth an obscene fortune to PanTerra.

  “Give me a break,” Norris said. “Social do-gooding is fine, but it doesn’t begin to pay for an interstellar mission.” He shrugged. “Besides, the Sag-ura have been slaves down there for ten thousand years, right? They can wait a few years longer, if need be.”

  “I’m sure both Congress and the Marine Corps share your views, sir,” Ramsey said. He had to bite down on the words to keep his anger from leaking across the interface into the noumenon. Norris, he’d decided, was a thoroughgoing son of a prick, but the MIEU was stuck with him, whatever his own feelings in the matter might be.

  If Norris heard Ramsey’s sarcasm, he ignored it. “General, I can’t stress enough the importance of that planetary defense base. We must have access to its secrets.”

  “We do,” Ramsey told him. “The first phase of the assault has gone smoothly. Surprisingly smoothly, in fact. We’ve taken the mountain, and an ARLT xenotech team is on-site now, examining the thing. You do realize, though, that any secrets inside that mountain are going to take years of study to winkle them out. Our people have reported they don’t understand more than a fraction of what they’ve found.”

  “The next phase is to take the Legation area of New Sumer and the Pyramid of the Eye,” King said, “which will commence with our next orbit. After that we can begin negotiations with the Frogs.”

  “If they agree to it,” Hanson pointed out.

  “Of course, of course,” King said. “I suspect this show of force will be sufficient to force them to the bargaining table. But…Colonel?”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ve posted my standing orders on the net and to every platoon, company, and battalion leader in the task force. If there is even a quiver out of that mountain, we pop the cork. Understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I will not risk the entire MIEU to PanTerra’s profit motive, however compelling that might be. I’m counting on you, Colonel, to detonate that nuke if it becomes necessary to do so in order to protect the fleet. Clear?”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Good. Carry on.” The general’s noumenal presence faded from the link.

  Around the three noumenal viewpoints, the orbiting fleet emerged again from Marduk’s eclipse of the local star. A hundred kilometers below, an ocean steamed and fumed.

  “Shortsighted idiot,” Norris said, the words barely audible.

  “Belay that crap,” Ramsey told him. “He is in command of this mission.”

  “That doesn’t make him right. You’ve felt his fear? The man is terrified. He’s going to order An-Kur blown if he just thinks there’s danger. It was a mistake bringing him on.”

  “Oh? And what did PanTerra have to do with the selection of the MIEU’s chain of command?”

  “PanTerra organized the international follow-up expedition, Colonel, and to win the cooperation of so many foreign governments, they had to make certain…concessions. Among those was to choose as supreme commander for the MIEU, a man all could agree on. General King has had a great deal of experience working in diplomatic circles with various of the other governments, including Brazil and the Kingdom of Allah. He was the best compromise candidate among available senior Marine officers.”

  “I see.” Ramsey hadn’t expected a straight answer from the man. “Then if he’s tha
t experienced, why—”

  “The man has family,” Norris said. “Two husbands, a wife, and two kids. He is a deliberate exception to the military’s famsit rules.”

  Which explained a lot. There wouldn’t be many senior officers available who were domestically unattached.

  “He must have volunteered, surely,” Hanson said. Exceptions could always be made in any set of regulations.

  “Sure. And to get him, PanTerra is providing very well indeed for the general and for the members of his immediate family—including anagathic treatments that will keep them in step with him over the course of a twenty-year-objective mission. Jesus, you know how expensive those are. Just the same, a man isn’t as trustworthy out here if he’s separated from a family.”

  “General King is a Marine,” Ramsey said. “He’ll do what has to be done.”

  Ramsey cared little for General King and hadn’t been impressed with the man so far. He’d never expected to find himself defending King to anyone else.

  But Norris was the outsider here. The Marines did not abandon their own.

  Chamber of Seeing

  Deeps of An-Kur

  Eleventh Period of Dawn

  The Zu-Din gave the command: Attack!

  God-warriors spilled from narrow access passageways into the main caverns, shrieking battletruth and grappling with the enemy. The enemy warriors, three of them protected by layers of impossibly tough armor, did not go under with the first onslaught, but the sheer ferocity of the assault knocked them back and swept them along, like wood chips on a flood.

  Sag-ura gudibir, human slave-warriors, joined the attack this time, rushing forward with shrill yells, brandishing their weapons, and the Godmind noticed an interesting fact. The enemy warriors hesitated at the sight of members of their own species, hesitated and held their fire until the advancing mass was almost upon them.

  The enemy opened fire at the last possible moment, their flame-weapons ripping through the packed mass of lightly armored or naked slave-warriors to hideous, shrieking effect. And then the defenders were slammed back against the cavern wall. Through the artificial senses of the Abzu-il, the Godmind watched and listened as the three became two…then one. Then the enemy warriors were dead; a human slave danced in the passageway, holding high a bloody head still encased in an armored helmet.

  Another held the relay, a small, silver canister resting on tripod legs on the floor of the passageway.

  The Godmind communicated its orders, and the warriors returned to the side passages. In moments, as the relay was carried deeper into the mountain, the transmission between the nuclear device and the enemy forces outside was severed.

  There’d been a possibility, of course, that loss of signal would trigger the device, but the Godmind felt secure in probabilities. Military devices would be designed to allow for power failures or equipment breakage. With a weapon as powerful as the nuclear device left in An-Kur’s control center, the Enemy would want positive control, the ability to trigger the thing deliberately rather than risk an accident with potentially devastating consequences.

  It had a great deal of experience with humans and human reactions from which to draw.

  The Enemy would be reacting to the Godmind’s assault very swiftly now, however. Sensors buried in the surface of the mountain’s peak scanned the sky, watching for the spacecraft in orbit. The calculations would have to be extraordinarily precise, with no room for error….

  The mountain’s sensors picked up the heat and radar signatures of a number of spacecraft coming in from the east…but these were too small and too fast to be the primary targets. Another invasion wave, then, landing craft bearing more ground troops. The Godmind overrode the simple and somewhat limited artificial intelligence of the Kur-Urudug. Wait…wait…there! Rising now above the eastern horizon…the signatures of three huge, orbiting spacecraft.

  The Godmind targeted the lead vessel, as the power within An-Kur’s deep core swiftly mounted.

  ARLT Command Section, Dragon

  One

  Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

  2354 hours ST

  They’d underestimated the Ahannu, and badly…that, or the Marine ARLT had just had its legs cut out from under it by one hell of a coincidence. And in Captain Warhurst’s experience, coincidence was nothing more than a myth used to explain relationships that no one understood.

  He was kicking himself mentally for not having followed his first impulse and deploying a sizable contingent of Marines to guard the nuclear warhead in the alien control center. General King’s orders had been specific, though, and he wouldn’t have been able to leave troops in the mountain’s control center without risking direct insubordination.

  But damn it, if he’d even left a ready-strike team in place within easy reach of the nuke, just in case something went wrong…

  And things certainly were wrong now, with the telltale magnetic flux within the mountain building, the relay in Ahannu hands, and all contact with the nuclear weapon lost. Someone with the appropriate trigger codes would have to go inside the mountain again to get within range of the weapon in order to set it off. That meant Lieutenant Kerns, with a fire team in support.

  If that was the order to come through from orbit. The trouble was, he’d put through an up-link call to either Colonel Ramsey or General King, but so far neither had responded. The suddenness of the renewed attack had caught everyone off balance.

  If the order didn’t come through…would he be able to blow that mountain anyway? Against orders? He might have to in order to save the Derna.

  ARLT Section Dragon Three

  Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

  2354 hours ST

  The alarm in Garroway’s head brought him to full alertness, and he sat upright so sharply his head struck a projecting ledge on the bulkhead beside him.

  He’d been trying to get some shut-eye, as Valdez had ordered, lying on a sleeping bag unrolled on the deck inside the Dragon Three LM. A command to his implant had begun to close down the waking portions of his brain, leaving him in a comfortable state of half-awareness when the alert came in.

  Rubbing his head, he grabbed his helmet, gloves, and rifle and stumbled from the lander, along with several other Marines who’d been similarly awakened. “What the hell?” Corporal Womicki said. “I can’t link through!”

  Garroway was trying to download an AI update through his link as well, and also without success. He kept getting the tone indicating a system error. The local node, however, was online, providing the disturbing news that a magnetic field was building inside the mountain’s core.

  The bastards were getting ready to fire that god-awful gun again.

  He saw Valdez, Lieutenant Kerns, and a handful of other Marines running across the LZ toward the gateway to the mountain. “Gunny!” he called out. “Where do we go?”

  Valdez turned and looked at him, her face pale and sharp-edged. “Stay here, Private. You’re not trained for this.”

  Trained for what? “I can learn, Gunny. Where do you want me?”

  “Stay here! That’s an order!” And she was gone, jogging after Lieutenant Kerns.

  Combat Information Center

  IST Derna, in Ishtar orbit

  2358 hours ST

  The net had jammed.

  It hadn’t gone down—thank all the gods of technology for that—but data could only flow from node to node through the system so fast, and when the data packets began queuing up, taking their turn in line, bottlenecks were sure to form.

  Extremely tight, extremely dangerous bottlenecks.

  A frequent problem in the early days of the Internet was narrow bandwidth, with too-small channels creating a traffic jam of data. Something of the sort was happening now, as more and more demands were placed on the transmission carriers, data-routing AIs, and relay nodes, both those on board the starships and those already on the planet.

  The Algol had already launched two of the five communications satellites that would provide for f
ull-time data access, but the net so far was operating only at about forty percent of full efficiency, with most of the storage, switching, and retrieval functions handled by Cassius on board the Derna. The streams of broadband data uploading continually to Derna’s CIC had already severely taxed the system.

  Now, as the alert went out, the system slowed. First to be cut out were the low-ranking data requests—Marines on the ground, mostly, querying the system to see what was going on. As additional ground sensors kicked in to monitor events inside An-Kur, though, the communications blackout spread to upper echelons as well. Cassius was working to pull the system back into balance, but the effort would take a minute or two more yet….

  Chamber of Seeing

  Deeps of An-Kur

  Eleventh Period of Dawn

  The Godmind had a firm target lock. Fire!

  The magnetic flux surged, sparking violet lightnings within the mountain core. A tiny sliver of rock, accelerated to nearly the speed of light, was transformed into a bolt of high-energy plasma flicking up the mountain’s throat in a tiny instant of time, deflected at the peak by powerful directional fields and sent searing through tortured atmosphere toward the target.

  A hit!

  Combat Information Center

  IST Derna, in Ishtar orbit

  2359 hours ST

  Ramsey was still trying to open the data-stream channel between Derna and the LZ when the bolt flashed clear of Ishtar’s atmosphere and struck the Algol, in orbit less than fifty kilometers ahead of the Derna and the Regulus. In the noumenon, he could see the Algol as a bright star adrift above the slow-turning expanse of gold and violet clouds that was Ishtar’s curved horizon, saw the clouds suddenly burn blue-white…and in the same instant the star marking the transport flared to nova brightness.

  Another instant passed…and then Derna’s AI sounded a ship alarm within the noumenon. “Debris on collision course. Debris on—”

  Something struck the Derna, punching through the reaction mass tank like a bullet through cardboard. The shock sent the huge vessel into a tumbling roll.