by Ian Douglas
But he was alive. Alive. He could even still have sex, as he’d enthusiastically proved several times now both with Nikki, and in one memorable five-way last night that had included Kath and Traci. He would never have children of his own, not in the traditional way, at least.
It didn’t matter to him in the least. Aiden Garroway had all the family he needed. He’d checked out on a two-week leave and come down-ring with Nikki to Miami. Warhurst had checked out of the hospital almost a week earlier, and was spending it back home with his partners.
“So!” Traci said brightly. “Have either of you boys seen the latest from the encyclopedia? It just came through this morning!”
“Hell, no,” Warhurst said. “You three kept me up all night, remember? I’ve been getting my hard-earned beauty sleep.”
“Which you definitely need,” Garroway told him. “No, Traci. What came through now?”
“Have a look!”
With a thought, a large display rose from the deck behind the tub and switched on. She could have given him a direct link, of course, but apparently she wanted to see his reaction as he watched with his eyes instead of his mind.
“My God,” Garroway said, looking at the image on the screen. “What is it?”
“According to the Translators, it’s a living rock. A kind of complex crystalline solid that processes stellar energy on some planets around an A-class star maybe twenty thousand light years from here. The planet’s surface is so bathed in radiation that—”
“Ah . . . I don’t think I want to hear about that,” Garroway said, holding up a dripping hand. “I’ve had enough radiation baths to last me, thank you very much.”
“How many alien species does that make now?” Warhurst wanted to know.
“Two hundred seventy-three . . . and according to the Translators, more are turning up every day. Looks like the Galaxy’s a pretty crowded place after all.”
It had been an astonishing end to an astonishing adventure, Garroway thought. When S-2 had crashed through the Dyson cloud surrounding the central black hole, many of those trillions of structures had been vaporized outright in the heat of the exploding sun. Others, their magnetic support structure fatally damaged, had collapsed into the relentless pull of the black hole.
The Xul, the ancient Hunters of the Dawn, still survived, of course. There were, N-2 estimated, some tens of thousands of Xul nodes still scattered across the Galaxy. But the vast majority of their total numbers had perished in the cataclysm at the Galactic Core. There was some question as to whether the survivors could even function now, given the possibility that they’d needed a critical mass in terms of numbers in order to act.
Whatever had happened to the Xul, one startling change had manifested almost as soon as the Dyson cloud was swept away from the region encircling GalCenter. Someone, some thing, was using the Galaxy’s black hole as a colossal communications and information storage device. The Xul cloud had been blocking the signals from that device. With the Xul gone from the Core, now, the signals had resumed.
Black holes, large and small, were doorways of sorts into the Quantum Sea, the base state of reality. Technically, nothing could escape a black hole, a gravitational singularity that held captive everything that passed its event horizon, even light.
And yet, it seemed now, black holes could communicate with one another, instantly, via the Quantum Sea. Fluctuations of their event horizons as matter fell through them created gravitational distortions that served as carrier waves. Modulations impressed upon those distortions carried information. A lot of information.
The nature of those waves had been detected by the MIEF hours after the collapse of the Dyson cloud; nested signals, layer upon layer of them, were captured, recorded, and routed through powerful artificial intelligences programmed as translators. The surface data in those layers, it turned out, were mathematical formulae designed as a linguistic and technical primer, allowing for a relatively simple translation of the deeper layers of data.
In a month, the Translators had barely begun their work. Still, public fascination with the news had forced the government to release some data as it became available. Every so often, a description of a new and utterly alien race was gleaned from the ocean of electronic data, condensed into an entertaining format, and broadcast over the GlobalNet.
Centuries before, radio astronomers had speculated on the possibility of a Galaxy-wide network of stored information bearing data on myriad worlds and civilizations. They’d called it the Encyclopedia Galactica, and assumed it would be presented as information encoded into radio signals broadcast from star to star. The fact that in years of painstaking searching they’d never found such a thing had been part of the enduring mystery of the Fermi Paradox. Where was everyone?
And now the Encyclopedia Galactica had been found . . . its signals masked by the Xul cloud at the Galactic Core. No one yet knew whether the Xul had been reading those imbedded messages, or were so intent on their tinkering with Reality that they’d not even seen them. Another mystery. Another Unknown.
The primary broadcast center was the Galactic Core, but it turned out that every black hole was linked into the Network. While the central black hole was off-line, as it were, no signals had come through any of them. Now, though . . .
There were hints that the Network was more than Galactic in scale, hints that galactic black holes across the entire universe might be talking with one another . . . and in real time, not the crawl of eons endured by slow-paced light.
“Well, it’s good to know the Xul didn’t wipe out everyone in the Galaxy,” Garroway said. “It was starting to feel a bit lonely, you know?”
Not as lonely, perhaps, as the surface of S-2/I. But every indicator suggested that the Galaxy should be humming with life, while Humankind’s explorations so far had uncovered so few—the An, the N’mah, the Eulers.
And the Xul.
Within the titanic elliptical galaxy called M-87, located in what Earth astronomers described as the Virgo Cluster some sixty million light years from Sol, Mind considered the new data. For some millions of years, a partic ular modest spiral galaxy within the outlying reaches of the Virgo supercluster had been unaccountably silent, the singularity within its central core somehow shrouded and muffled, blocking Mind.
And now, the shroud had been lifted.
Mind considered the implications. Presumably, the inhabitants of that galaxy had chosen to isolate themselves from the rest of the cosmos. It happened sometimes, for religious or philosophical or emotional reasons. There were so many, many different types of mind, so many forms of thought.
The collective sentience that called itself Mind had not interfered, of course, but it was curious.
And it wondered now at just what had changed in that insignificant spiral, sixty million light years distant. . . .
Perhaps further investigation would be necessary.
Much later, Garroway awoke, cuddled between Nikki and Traci, while Warhurst and Kath snored gently nearby. The overhead had been set to show the star-clotted night sky. After the Galactic Core, the sky seemed dark and empty with its scant handful of bright stars, its almost non existent dusting of dimmer ones. The Milky Way stretched across the zenith.
I wonder if we really made a difference?
Sagittarius. In that direction, he thought, lay the Core. Energy shredded from the dying sun S-2 and from the infalling trillions of Xul habitats had been blasted outward in an explosion that would likely continue for millennia. Most of the debris had been swallowed by the central black hole, but much, too, had escaped. In a few centuries, the outrushing blast would intercept those molecular gas clouds ringing the center, and the shock wave would trigger a burst of star formation that in twenty- some thousand years would turn the Galactic center brilliant, even out here in the stellar suburbs.
Oh, yeah. The Marines had made a difference. No one knew, yet, if the Xul War was over. Probably it wasn’t . . . but the balance of things had most certainly changed.<
br />
Things would be different. Changed. Perhaps in ways now unguessable.
As he drifted back into sleep, Aiden Garroway thought about the Marine Corps, and the difference the Corps had always made in the vaster scheme of things.
Semper fi . . . .
About the Author
IAN DOUGLAS is the author of the popular military SF series The Heritage Trilogy and The Legacy Trilogy. A former naval corpsman, he lives in Pennsylvania.
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By Ian Douglas
Books in the Inheritance Trilogy
Star Strike: Book One Galactic Corps: Book Two
Books in the Legacy Trilogy
Star Corps: Book One Battlespace: Book Two Star Marines: Book Three
Books in the Heritage Trilogy
Semper Mars: Book One Luna Marine: Book Two Europa Strike: Book Three
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
GALACTIC CORPS . Copyright © 2008 by William H. Keith, Jr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader September 2008 ISBN 978-0-06-171768-0
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