Battlespace (11 page)

Even within Garroway's own Wiccan tradition—as easygoing and nonjudgmental faith as existed anywhere—there were bewildering new branches and offshoots disagreeing over such burning issues as whether or not the An were ancient gods, whether use of nanotechnology for special effects within ritual circles could be considered true magic or not, whether or not Christians should be held accountable for the Burning Times, and over the Rede-ethics of weather-witching, using magic to control the weather.

And finally there were the wars.
Everywhere
wars and more wars. Any Marine of the forty-fourth who did end up staying on Earth—if he didn't take an early out—was going to find himself much in demand. Temperature extremes were driving many inhabitants of far-northern or equatorial regions into the somewhat more habitable latitudes in between. Anti-migration laws had resulted in open warfare and in border massacres. In just the past thirty years, Marines had deployed to Mexico and Egypt, to Siberia and the Chinese coast, to a dozen other shores and climes, fighting at one time or another troops of the Kingdom of Allah, the Chinese Hegemony, the European Federation, the Ukrainian Nationalists, Mexicans, Québecois, Brazilians, Colombians, and forces of the Pan-African Empire. The Great Jihad War of 2147 was now being called World War V. Already there was talk of a World War VI, as migrating populations, spreading famine and disease, and the collapse of national economies propelled desperate people into paradoxically suicidal bids for a better life.

The black forces of War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death were abroad in the world, and it seemed that not even the UFR/US Marines could possibly hold them in check much longer.

Earth had become as scary and as strange a place as
Ishtar…worse, perhaps, since Garroway and his fellow Marines thought it was as familiar as, well, as
home
.

Sirius couldn't possibly be any more alien—or more disappointing—than Earth.

Garroway was ready to go. He
wanted
to go, since the only people he knew—his brother and sister Marines—were also going, or most of them were. The one thing standing in his way was what he was thinking of now as unfinished business with his father.

“Hey, Gare?” Kat Vinton said, interrupting black thoughts. “What's with the ten-thousand-meter stare?”

He blinked, then looked up at her. “Hey, Kat.”

“Hey yourself. What's going on? Why the intense glare?”

“Sorry. I'm feeling…a bit torn.”

“Your girlfriend was onboard the
Isis
, I know. You told me. I'm sorry….”

He nodded. He looked past her at the other Marines in the barracks. He felt as though he were barely holding on.

“Thanks, Kat. I still can't believe she's dead.” Trying to conceal the unsteady emotions within, he turned his attention, part of it, at any rate, back to the disassembled laser rifle before him. He'd already cleaned the optical connector heads and replaced both the pulse-timer chip and the circuit panel pinpointed as dead by his initial diagnostic check. All that remained was to put the thing together, a task Marine recruits were drilled at until they could do it, quite literally, blindfolded.

“Maybe she isn't. We rescued the Marines and scientists on Ishtar after they'd been hiding out in the mountains for ten years, right?”

“I guess,” he told her. He concentrated for a moment on connecting the barrel to the charge assembly. “Pretty grim stuff.”

“But this is different. You saw those downloads.”

“Yeah.” He snapped home the final piece, the pistol grip
clicking firmly into the base housing. He set the completed rifle aside. “Grim isn't half of it. If we haven't heard from them in all this time, I don't think we ever will.”

She reached out and touched his shoulder. “Oh, Gare. I'm so sorry.”

It was passing strange, talking to Kat about this. Lynnely had been his lover, and they'd reached the point of discussing marriage before he'd shipped out onboard the
Derna
for Ishtar. Kat had been his fuck-buddy since Ishtar…his lover, yes, but without the romantic overtones or plans for a serious long-term social connection. When your entire list of social contacts—those you could talk to, at any rate—were fellow Marines, such arrangements became common. Standing regulations frowned on sexual fraternization among enlisted personnel, but in practice both officers and NCOs alike ignored the affairs and relationships that inevitably blossomed among the lower ranks.

Marines were only human, after all, even if they rarely cared to admit it.

“Well, at least we can go out there and kick the ass of whoever did it,” Garroway told her.

“Assuming they have asses to kick,” Kat replied. “Yes.” She cocked her head to one side. “What else is going on behind those gray eyes of yours?”

She knew him too well.

“I told you about my father, right?” Damn it, the place was just too damned crowded for this kind of conversation, Garroway thought.

“Ah. The light dawns.” Kat looked around the crowded barracks, then at Garroway, and seemed to read his mind. “Say, Gare?” She jerked her head toward the door. “As long as we have some downtime, I need to show you something. Outside.”

“'Kay.”

He returned the assembled LR-2120 to its position in a rack with forty-seven other laser rifles, then followed her
down the steps, through the building lobby to the front desk where they checked out with a bored sergeant and then out through the front doors into the harsh glare of the sun. It was midafternoon and Garroway felt his exposed skin tingling as the nano imbedded there began reacting to the influx of ultraviolet. The glare lessened to comfortable levels as his eye implants darkened.

The sunlight reminded Garroway once again—and forcefully—of all of the recent barracks chatter about Earth's worsening climate. Every religion was different, of course, but his own Wiccan beliefs held that the Earth herself was alive, the Goddess in material form, Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis of two centuries earlier given spiritual shape and meaning. To see the Earth in Her current condition genuinely hurt. Could he turn and walk away for another twenty years or more? What would She be like upon his return?

Could She be dying and was it his responsibility to stay with Her and try to help?

But what could one person do to stop the drawn-out ecological death of a planet?

“Where the hell are you taking me?” he asked her as he followed her down the front steps.

“I just wanted to find a place where we could talk,” she replied. “I thought the LVP ready line….”

Across from the gleaming white building housing the barracks, a number of vehicles had been drawn up in a rigidly straight line along the side of a paved parade ground. The large hangars housing vehicle maintenance and the flight assembly building rose around the perimeter of the field.

The vehicles were LVPs, the acronym standing for landing vehicle, personnel. Specifically, they were M-990 Warhammers, so called for the blunt, crescent-shaped nose assemblies, like the business end of a double-headed hammer, mounting plasma guns housed in turret blisters at each tip.

The vehicles were ugly, their hulls behind the nose section
heavily armored and as streamlined as a misshapen brick. Though they could fly, in an ungainly fashion, they were designed to be ferried from orbit to ground slung from the wasp-waist belly of a TAL-S Dragonfly, one of the Corps' space-capable transatmospheric landing vehicles. They were heavily armed, too; besides the plasma guns, they had laser point-defense weapons, and turreted railgun mounts at the chin and aft-dorsal hardpoints. Each Warhammer was designed to carry two squads—twenty men—plus their weapons and gear, with a two-man/one-AI crew up front.

They walked across the tarmac to the nearest Warhammer. Kat touched an access panel, and the hatch unfolded from the hull, providing them with steps up into the cargo bay.

“This is a lot roomier than the old TAL-S lander modules,” Garroway said, stepping inside and letting his hand slide along the white-painted overhead. “Wish we'd had these on Ishtar.”

“Yeah, the Corps is always coming up with improvements,” Kat told him. “New and better ways to kill things. Anyway, I thought we could talk here without being…disturbed.”

“Did you think I was going to lose it?”

“No. But I didn't want you clamping down on what you were feeling. C'mon, Gare. Your dad. You don't really want to kill him, do you?”

He sighed. “Kill him? I guess not. I wouldn't like going to prison. Or getting a charge of watchdog nano.
Another
charge, I mean, worse than what we got.”

“Your mother did go back to him, you know, after she'd gotten away. In a way, she has some of the responsibility too.”

“That's not fair.”

“
Life
isn't fair. I wish I had a newdollar for every time I've heard of abused women either going back to their abusers, thinking they would change, or just because they didn't know what else to do…or going on to hook with up someone else just as abusive, or worse. It makes me sick.”

“Sounds like you have a personal stake in it.”

“I do. My sister. Her third husband beat her to death. Her first and second husbands tried to.”

“I'm sorry.”

She shrugged. “So am I. I hear the bastard's on nanocontrolled release now, out in Detroit. I hope he screws up and gets fried. I truly, truly do. But I'm not going to hurry him along.”

“They haven't caught my father,” Garroway said. “Not yet. In fact, he's probably with the
Aztlanista
underground. He certainly held Azzy sympathies when I knew him.”

“Yeah, and that's just it, Gare. You
don't
know him. Not now. It's been twenty-one years, right? He's a completely different man. I'm not saying he isn't any better now. I'm not even saying the bastard doesn't deserve to die. But you've been away from Earth too long to get caught up in that.” She grinned at him. “Even if it only feels like a year for you.”

“Damn it, Kat. He killed my mother!…”

“So…somehow you track him down, find him wherever he's hiding out. What do you do?”

“I alternate between wanting to put a bullet through his brain and wanting to blow out his kneecaps, leave him crippled.”

“With meditech the way it is nowadays, he wouldn't stay crippled. Look what they did to the asshole you side-kicked. And how would you carry it out, when the watchdog nano in your system is watching you all the time, watching for you to just
think
a violent thought before putting you out?”

Garroway's eyes were burning. He was having trouble swallowing.

“You wake up in jail, with a charge of attempted murder hanging on you. No captain's mast this time. You end up in front of a civilian judge. Dishonorable discharge. Prison or worse. Is the revenge, is the
attempted
revenge, really worth it?”

Then the tears began to flow freely. A low moan escaped from his throat and then he was crying. He hadn't cried like this in years, not since he'd been living at home with an out-of-control abuser for a father and a mother terrified of being her own person.

A long time later, Kat held him close. A pull-down storage shelf in the cargo bay had become their bed, a thick roll of foam padding their mattress. Their lovemaking had been hard and needy, almost desperate. At last, though, they clung to one another, sweat turning their bare skin slick and soaking the pad beneath them. With the power off, the interior of the Warhammer had grown stiflingly hot, but that hadn't mattered, somehow.

Garroway breathed in the delicate scent of Kat's hair, mingled with the smells of sweat, sex, and machine oil. Reluctantly, he consulted his internal clock. “We'd better get back,” he whispered.

“I know. But this was…good. Thank you.”

“Thank
you
,” he told her.

“So, what's it gonna be? Are you going to ditch the Corps and try to hunt down your father? Maybe do hard time?” She gave him a wicked grin, barely visible in the half-light filtering aft from the Warhammer's cockpit. “Or are you coming with me to the stars?”

“That was not fair, lady.”

“Nope. But the question stands.”

He released her a little, pulling back. “You're right, of course. There's nothing I can do to the bastard. Maybe the best thing I can do is live my own life the best way I can—and the hell with him.”

She nodded. “Ah, yes! He
can
be taught!”

He shrugged. “The Corps is my home,” he told her. “You and the rest of them are my family. But I was also…”

“You were also what?”

“I was thinking about how fucked up the Earth Herself is.

The climate. The environment. Wondering if I had the right to run off and leave Her.”

“I'm not a Wiccan,” she told him. “You'll need to answer questions about your Goddess for yourself. But could you change anything by yourself?”

“Well, the simple answer is that if everyone does his or her part….”

“Uh-uh. You. By yourself. What can you do?”

“Not a damned thing. There's nothing I can do here. I can't get revenge for my mother. I can't fix the environment. Hell, I can't even make a home for myself here any longer. Earth is too…too alien now. Y'know?”

“I'm way ahead of you, Marine.”

“I could say I'm going to go to Sirius to find Lynnley and the others, but I know I can't even do that. She's dead. There's nothing I can do about that either.”

“And so?…”

“And so, yeah. I'm coming with you. Not to rescue Lynnley, but because that's where I
belong
.”

She drew him close and they began making love once more.

5
DECEMBER
2159

Virtual Conferencing Room 8
Star Marine Force Center
Twentynine Palms, California
0915 hours, PST

Colonel Ramsey floated in noumenal space, watching the bulk of the approaching starship eclipse a dazzling sun. The image was being transmitted from one of the L-4 dockyard facilities. A crescent Earth hung in the distance, her nightside picked out by the star-twinkle of cities.

The advent of noumenal conferencing, he thought wryly, might well have doomed technic civilization. When the powers-that-were could call a meeting at any time, gathering the attendees' telepresences from anywhere on Earth or in near-Earth space, then meetings and briefings and virtual conferences became the rule, until it seemed as though nothing else ever got done.

There must have been, he thought, a halcyon era before the creation of the noumenon when managers could manage without constantly being tied up in meetings.

Admiral Don D. Harris originally had called this briefing as an update check on the progress of Operation Battlespace. Other interested parties had signed on, however, including members of Congress and the Federal Advisory
Council, until the whole affair had become an unwieldy circus.

Ramsey actually found himself looking forward to the Sirius deployment, if only because he could occasionally get some work done.

His virtual presence, attired in formal full-dress, was one of some hundreds of telepresences hanging in space at a vantage point almost half a million kilometers from Earth, at the L-4 LaGrange Point where the Federal Republic maintained a number of its more important deep space facilities. The ship was the Marine Interstellar Transport
Chapultepec
, newly built and launched by the Lunarhalo Shipbuilding Consortium at L-1 and maneuvering now to her regular berth at the HEO military base at L-4. Slowly, the vessel grew huge, a looming, black-shadowed mushroom 622 meters long, her three hab modules for the moment tucked in along her flanks beneath the massive dome of the ship's reaction-mass storage tank. During the long coasting period of the vessel's flight, those modules were extended on their arms and rotating about the ship's spine, creating artificial gravity while remaining in the shadow of the R-M tank, shielded there from the deadly flux of radiation raised by the ship's near-
c
velocity. Aft, a trio of heat radiators each a meter thick and easily the area of a city block gave the vessel the appearance of an arrow with a broad flattened dome in the place of an arrowhead. She was not streamlined, but she
was
sleekly functional, giving the impression of unimaginable speed and power.

Ramsey watched as robotic tugs gentled the behemoth in for final capture and docking at the HEO base. There, inspection teams would begin the final check and recheck process to certify the
Chapultepec
for service. She'd better be ready, he thought. No less than five admirals, three generals, and two congresspersons, one of them a retired Marine, had officiated at the
Pec
's commissioning and launch. It would be
embarrassing to find a hitch now that would send her back to the orbital yards.

Besides, a very great deal was riding on
Chapultepec
launching on schedule, some three months hence.

“What I would like to know,” a combative voice declared in Ramsey's mind, “is how that vessel can be expected to handle a threat like the one we've seen on those transmissions from Sirius. If that…that gold-colored thing we saw come out of the Ring
was
a Hunters of the Dawn warship, we may have to admit that we are out of our league, that we're up against a foe as far in advance of us as we are above the Ahannu.”

The speaker was Frank Shugart, from the President's Federal Advisory Council. He appeared to be the spokesperson for a small army of civilian bureaucrats and politicians who'd linked in for this noumenal briefing, an army that included Dr. Howard Slatterby, Director of the National Security Council, and three congresspersons representing various House committees with an interest in this project. A virtual circus indeed….

“It won't be just that one vessel, sir,” the image of Admiral Harris, dazzling in his icon dress whites, pointed out. Harris was currently at L-4 physically, and there was the briefest flicker of hesitation in his reply, due to the second-and-a-quarter time delay. “Operation Battlespace has been conceived as our first true interstellar fleet deployment.”

At a touch from Harris's thoughts, the scene shifted to show a graphic simulation of seven ships viewed from the side, all quite similar in overall design—mushroom-cap R-M tanks, central drive spines, stern radiator assemblies—but ranging in length overall from the 85 meters of the frigate
Daring
to the 622-meter bulk of the
Chapultepec
. All save the three robotic freighters had rotating hab modules tucked in beneath the R-M tanks.

“So far, the battle group will consist of the
Chapultepec
, plus the supply ships
Altair, Mizar
, and
Procyon
, the frigate
gunships
Daring
and
Courageous
, the carrier
Ranger
, and the battlecruiser
New Chicago
. In addition,
Ranger
will be deploying two space-assault squadrons, Marine Wasps and the new SF/A-2 Starhawks. I think we can be confident that our forces will give a good account of themselves, no matter what they encounter at Sirius.”

“Even against the Hunters of the Dawn, Admiral?” the speaker was Congressperson Alyssa Durand, of the House Military Preparedness Oversight Committee. “I'm told that the Hunters might well be representatives of a civilization at
least
half a million years old. To engage in a military conflict with such a civilization could well mean suicide for our entire species!”

“Nonsense, Ms. Durand,” Major General Mark Colby snapped. “No civilization could possibly last for half a million years!”

“Some of us believe it to be completely possible, General,” Shugart said. “If the Predatory Survivors Hypothesis is correct, a starfaring culture could become metastable, with no outside threats and plenty of expansion room for bleeding off internal pressures.” The noumenal display shifted to show streams of pure data cascading through the group's joint awareness, showing the results of thousands of simulated civilizations growing, evolving, and interacting. A schematic of the galaxy showed hypothetical civilizations as red pinpoints winking into existence, expanding into vast interstellar networks as a counter ticked off the centuries, networks that warred, struggled, then vanished…though frequently one stellar empire would grab the galactic center stage, maintaining a stable empire for many thousands of years. Occasionally, one of the networks seemed to freeze in place, remaining stable for much longer. “Computer models suggest such a civilization might endure for millions, even
hundreds
of millions of years.”

“They're pretty, sir, but I don't care about your computer models,” Colby told Shugart. “And all the Predatory Survivors Hypothesis tells us is that someone out there could prove to be very, very nasty. None of this sweetness and light, advanced civilizations must be peaceful crap we've been hearing from the religious fanatics.”

Ramsey was familiar with the survivors theory, had even briefed others on the topic numerous times. Essentially, it was a coherent explanation for Fermi's Paradox…a scientific and philosophical statement noting that even if the speed of light could never be surpassed, a single starfaring culture could colonize the entire galaxy within the course of a few hundreds of thousands of years. Given that the galaxy was on the order of eight billion years old, the galaxy should have been colonized many, many times over already.

At the time Fermi's Paradox was raised, in the mid-twentieth century, space appeared achingly silent and empty, with no sign of any intelligent species among the stars save the inhabitants of Earth itself. If the best ideas concerning planetary formation and the tenacity of life were correct, the galaxy should be teeming with civilizations by now. The paradoxical question, in the face of all of that silence, was…“Where the hell is everyone?”

The Predatory Survivors Hypothesis simply stated that, in Darwinian terms, one possible survival strategy for any intelligent species was to eliminate
all
possible competition. If, at some point in the history of galactic civilization, some one species that had evolved to sentience through this strategy had developed star travel, it might continue with that strategy, finding and destroying races of beings that might one day challenge it.

Two centuries later, ample evidence had been found of multiple starfaring cultures—on Earth, the Moon, Mars, Europa, and on quite a few worlds of nearby star systems. All of
the traces of alien starfaring cultures, however, were limited to long-dead ruins, until, eventually, the Ahannu had been discovered on Ishtar…and the Ahannu spoke of the Hunters of the Dawn, who had reduced their civilization to stone-age barbarism thousands of years ago.

And now someone else had turned up at Sirius. Someone with superior technology and a damned quick trigger finger.

Had the Hunters survived for an estimated ten thousand years, since the collapse of the An Star Empire?

But things got more complicated and ominous still. There were also the Builders, those representatives of a far-flung starfaring civilization existing half a million years ago, annihilated, evidently, by hostile forces with a singularly narrow and psychopathic focus.

Were those the Hunters of the Dawn as well? Or a predecessor race using the same survival strategy?

Despite Colby's self-assurance, some authorities believed the Hunters were a single species, wiping out the Builders…then eradicating the An half a million years later. The modus operandi was the same in both cases—the maneuvering of asteroids into new paths that would disrupt any planet-based civilization. Presumably, the motive was the same as well.

But were the two the same? The question, Ramsey thought, was a vitally important one. Durand had a point: anyone who'd been hanging around the galactic scene for half a million years or more was
not
someone you wanted as your enemy. Such a civilization might well seem almost godlike now from the human perspective, able to swat upstart humanity as casually as a man might swat a fly. The best Earth might hope for would be to remain unnoticed.

But that was no longer possible. If the golden ship had been built by the Hunters, Humankind had just announced its presence to them in huge flaming letters.

The simulation data was replaced by the now-familiar scenes transmitted from
Isis
during her last moments in the
Sirius system. The stargate ring loomed huge against a star-dusted night. Once again, the golden starship emerged from the ring's center. Again it lunged toward the
Isis
, and the scene was broken by static for a moment, before the cycle of images started again.

“Isn't it already too late to run and hide?” Brigadier General Cornell Dominick asked. It seemed that SPACCOM's liaison with the Joint Chiefs was reading Ramsey's mind. “They encountered our explorer ship at Sirius and destroyed or captured it. They might very well know now exactly where the
Isis
came from. Hell, by this time a fleet could be almost
here
if it came through the Sirius Gate from wherever the Hunters call home, then backtracked on the
Isis
at near-
c
. Surely we need to put an armed presence at the stargate, even if it's just there as a tripwire.”

“There are too damned many unknowns, General,” Shugart said. “
Was
the
Isis
destroyed? Or did they capture her? If she was destroyed immediately, the Hunters, if that's who they are, might not know the ship's origin. Or, as you say, the Hunters might have put a fleet through the stargate, and have been en route to Earth these past ten years. If that's the case, sending seven ships to Sirius is not only useless, it's foolhardy. Surely we would need every available warship
here
to defend Earth against such an attack.”

“Mr. Shugart—” Harris began.

“But if there is the
slightest
chance that we can still evade detection by these, these sociopathic monsters,” Shugart continued, pushing over the admiral's attempted interruption, “then we should take it. We cannot hope to militarily challenge a technology even a thousand years in advance of our own…to say nothing of a technology gap of half a million years!”

“But that's just it, Mr. Shugart,” Colonel Gynger Kowalewski, SPACCOM's senior technical advisor, put in. “There
is
no way to hide, even if we wanted to.” At her men
tal command, a star map appeared, showing Sol at the center surrounded by a scattering of stars reaching out several light centuries. A sphere of purple grew out from Sol, engulfing hundreds of nearby star systems. “The Singer sent out its…call, or whatever that signal was, ninety years ago. Here's how far it's gone in that time—ninety light-years.”

A second sphere, this one red, overlapped the first, then grew a bit larger. Kowalewski continued. “The light from the drive flares of our first interstellar ships—with a characteristic wavelength indicating matter-antimatter reaction—started out over a century ago, and theoretically, they could be detected across galactic distances as anomalous gamma-ray sources by any sufficiently advanced technology.”

A third sphere expanded out from Sol, swallowing the first two and stretching across four times their volume or more, engulfing myriad stars. “Radio and television signals,” Kowalewski said, “a sure proof of intelligent and technological life, began leaving Earth well over
two
hundred years ago. We estimate that that initial wave front has now reached something on the order of three to four
thousand
stars.