Star Corps (42 page)
Authors: Ian Douglas
The Sentient Sea itself, however, a kind of internal dreamscape of melded minds and stored memories, had its own intelligence, its own awareness.
And it was utterly unlike anything Gavin Norris had ever seen or felt before.
He feltâ¦tendrils of writhing ice penetrating his ears, his nose, the pores of his skin. There was a piercing stab of agony across the left side of his head as the thing worked its way through bone with lightning speed and settled into the contours of Norris's brain.
Norris's
human
brain. Humans and Ahannu were much alike in many ways, but they were not the same species or even remotely related. Aspects of their biologies, which they shared, by chance or design, included such basics as a
shared left-handedness in amino acids and a shared right-handedness in sugars. They could eat many of the same foodsâ¦a fact that the ancient Ahannu had taken advantage of when they'd enslaved early humans to raise crops for them in the fertile river valleys of distant Kia long ago.
But the thought processes were mutually alien, so much so that very little of the Abzu was at all intelligible to Norris.
He sawâ
felt,
ratherâfragments of Memoriesâ¦a whirling chaos of thoughts and alien language and symbologies so distant from his ken he could perceive it only as a kind of storm of color; of nightmare shape; of violent and throbbing scent and taste; of shrieking atonal chords of sound; of a prickling rain of fire across his skin; intense sexual lust; of sadness, fear, joy, despair, greedâ¦
He heard the colors, shrill blues and reds and purples.
He smelled the music, alien and deafening, a cacophony of odor.
He heard the touch of living flame as his skin charred.
He screamedâ¦.
Lance Corporal Garroway
Pyramid of the Eye
New Sumer, Ishtar
1951 hours ALT
Warhurst and another Marine tackled the civilian outside, dragging him down, as Garroway spun around the corner of the entranceway and jumped into the cool darkness of the Chamber of the Eye. He wasn't sure at first what he was seeingâ¦one of the civilians lying on her back by the wall, blood on the front of her coverall; a Frog seated cross-legged at the back, his head encased in purple goo; another civilian kneeling next to the Frog, head back, eyes wildly staring, shrieking at the top of his lungs as purple gunk rippled over his face.
That civilian held a small handgun. Garroway nearly
threw himself across the chamber, swiping at the gun with one gauntleted paw and sending the weapon clattering in pieces across the floor.
The civilianâNorrisâkept screaming, oblivious to the Marines now crowding into the chamber. “What do we do, sir?” Garroway asked Warhurst. “It's killing him!”
“No.” The single word came from the seated Ahannu. It raised a hand, and the purple mess began draining from Norris's ears and face. Flowing from his skin. “No. We areâ¦sorry. We did not meanâ¦this one harm.”
“What did you do to him?” Warhurst demanded.
“What didâ¦he do to himself?” the alien replied. “We fearâ¦he was notâ¦ready forâ¦enlightenment within the Sentient Sea.”
“Enlightenment?” Garroway said. “Is
that
what they call it?”
Norris was still screaming, his mind blasted, utterly gone.
Â
Eight days later Garroway lay at the edge of the jungle with Kat Vinita, relaxing after their last bout of lovemaking. He and Kat had become close these past weeks, very close, though he doubted the arrangement would become permanent. How could it, when they had no idea where they would be deployed next, or if they would be deployed together?
Besides, there was still Lynnley, somewhere out there among those stars.
Hell. Was what he felt for Lynnley nostalgia for a distant friend? Or something more? It was impossible to tell. He'd changed so much.
“There's Sol,” Kat said, pointing. “The Relief Expedition must be along that line of sight too.”
“That's what they say,” Garroway replied. “Another five months and they'll be here.”
She laughed and snuggled closer in his arms. “I wonder if when they get here they'll approve of ourâ¦solution?”
He smiled and lightly stroked her breast. “I doubt it. From what Hanson and Carleton told the brass, PanTerra
was set to keep the Ishtaran humans in what amounted to slavery.” A Navy corpsman had arrived in time to slap some fastheal nano on Dr. Hanson's wound. She'd lived, and she was telling everything she knew about PanTerra's scheme. Carleton had joined her in the revelation, probably to cover his ass.
And King as well, though he still didn't see anything wrong with his stand. Why should he? he asked. PanTerra had been operating with the best intentions of the Ishtaran humans at heart. King had accepted house arrest with ill grace and temper. He would be vindicated, he claimed, at the court-martial.
Unfortunately for him, a board of senior officers would not be available until they returned to Earth. In the meantime, Ramsey had assumed full operational command of 1 MIEU. The Marines themselves joked about the “mutiny.” Some had taken to wearing makeshift eyepatches or peppering their speech with piratical
arrrrs
.
They gave the AI Cassius credit for carrying out the coup.
“I think they'll have to accept it as a
fait accompli
,” Garroway told her after a moment. “I think the colonel is a damned genius, myself.”
“Let's hope the brass back home agrees,” Kat replied.
Colonel Ramsey's solution
was
elegant. The Marine Corps was not supposed to set government policy, but the government was 8.3 light-years away right now, and the nearest other representatives of that government would not be there for another five months. With the sudden Ahannu declaration of peace, something had to be done
now.
Ramsey had put together a working plan. As senior officer for 1 MIEU, he'd formally recognized the free Ishtaran humans as a separate state, an independent state on Ishtar, supported by the U.S. Marines. They would be the ones who talked to Earth's representatives about any repatriation or emancipation of humans in the Llalande system, and they would approve any travel of Ishtaran humans back to Earth.
Further, the Ishtaran stateâ
Dumu-gir Kalam
, as it was to
be calledâwould have access to the Sag-ura under Ahannu control. Earth would supply the diplomats to begin peaceful negotiations between the two groups, with an eye to helping the Sag-ura gain some measure of self-determination. The Ahannu had agreedâreluctantly, but they'd agreed. The Marine
nir-gál-mè-a
carried a fair mass in the way of moral authority. Dr. Hanson had compared it to the Marines being thought of as co-equal gods with the Ahannu.
Gods of battle.
That was quite a promotion, Garroway thought.
Frankly, he doubted that the Sag-ura would ever choose self-determination. According to the xenosoc experts, they didn't think of themselves as slaves but as people who merely served their gods, who had served them since time had begun. What, he wondered, would happen when the government's desire to free the human slaves on Ishtar collided with the laws against interfering with people's religion? The social firestorm that raised would likely burn for another century or two, at least.
But the Sag-ura would have time to become adjusted to some new ideas, like the fact that they could choose a path for themselves. Maybe in a few more centuriesâ¦
“You know,” Garroway said, “once this story gets out, none of the other nations on Earth will have anything to do with PanTerra. They'll be finished.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Though with that much money, I doubt it.”
“Aren't you the little cynic?”
“Fuck you.”
“Again?”
She let her hand run down the hard-muscled curve of his belly. “Maybe. Depends on whether or not you're up to it.”
He laughed, pulled her closer, and kissed her. Glowing, fragile gossamers danced in the night sky above them.
And later still, while Kat slept, Garroway queried the net for the location of Sirius and was disappointed to learn that
that bright star, Alpha Canis Majoris, was halfway across the heavens, invisible now from Ishtar at this longitude.
He wondered if Lynnley was there now.
He wondered if she was thinking of him. Or if she, like he, had found another lover.
He wondered if the sky where she was could be as spectacular as this.
Well, it scarcely mattered. She was a Marine and went where she was sent.
Just like him.
15
AUGUST
2148
Star Explorer
Wings of Isis
Sirius System
1550 hours ST
Lance Corporal Lynnley Collins floated in the wonder of the noumenal projection, apparently free in empty space, actually receiving the feed from the forward cameras of the
Wings of Isis.
The sky around her wasâ¦incredible. Sirius was a young star system, still dusty and littered with debris, and the dust created a background glow of silvers, blues, and whites. Sirius A was embedded in that glow, a dazzling, actinic disk too brilliant to look at comfortably even within the artificially subdued medium of the noumenon.
Closer at hand, Sirius B was a white-hot spark, a white dwarf little larger than Earth. There were no planetsâ¦only rubble, the debris of what might one day be, or once had been, a solar system. Sirius A was far too hot a star to allow for a comfortably Earthlike world; Sirius B had been nearly as bright before it vomited part of its mass and collapsed into its present shrunken state.
Radiationâdeadly if
Wings of Isis
had not been well shieldedâseared local space, visible in the noumenon as a faint purple glow.
The system abounded in mysteries. One mystery in par
ticular had drawn
Wings of Isis
here, across 8.6 light-years of space. The star Sirius, brightest in the skies of Earth's northern hemisphere, had long figured in human mythology. The Egyptians had identified it with the goddess Isis and noted that its rising coincided with the flooding of the Nile. Their gods claimed a special connection with Siriusâ¦and with the constellation Orion, which they called Osiris.
One tribe of primitives in sub-Saharan Africa, the Dogon, worshiped gods from Sirius. When Europeans had first contacted them in 1931, they'd known astonishing details about the Sirius systemâincluding the fifty-year orbital period of Sirius B and the fact that it was the tiniest of stars but with tremendous “weight,” a fair description of a white dwarf.
The fact of Sirius B had been unknown to modern astronomy until the mid-1800s, when its existence was deduced by perturbations in Sirius A's path. Sirius B was not even seen optically until 1862, with the use of technologies utterly beyond the Dogon's understanding.
Perhaps the Dogon had gotten their unusual understanding of astronomy from European missionaries whose visit had been otherwise forgotten.
Or perhaps not. There were no Church records of any missionaries visiting the Dogon until 1931.
Berosus, the Babylonian historian, had recorded myths and legends of the peoples who'd preceded the Babylonians in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. Among them had been the story of Oannes, a being described as a “semidemon” who'd emerged from the waters of the Persian Gulf to teach the locals agriculture, mathematics, medicine, and the alphabet, and who claimed to be from the star Sirius.
All the stuff of myth and nonsense, of course. So archeologists had assumed, until discoveries on Earth, Mars, and Earth's moon in the twenty-first century had proven that early humans had entertained visitors from the stars.
The Isis Expedition had been dispatched to Sirius to learn more about whoever had taught the pre-Sumerians, the
Egyptians, the ancestors of the Dogon. Perhaps they were starfaring Ahannu.
But the description left by Berosus sounded like they might be something else.
And the evidence of that something else hung in space before the
Wings of Isis
, still ten kilometers distant but large enough to fill a quarter of the sky.
Lynnley stared at the object, her sense of wonder stirred. If this was an example of the technology of the ancient visitors to Earth, no
wonder
they'd been welcomed and worshiped as gods.
From her vantage point it appeared to be an immense wheel, thick-rimmed, twenty kilometers across. The outer surface was broken and black, like a cinder; apparently the thing had been built of asteroidal material gathered from Sirian spaceâ¦and yet gravitometric readings suggested that the thing was unimaginably dense.
It was impossible to tell what the huge structure was for, but telltale lights gleamed on the rim, constellations of power usage and life.
Somebody lived there.
“So what do you think it is, Paul?” she asked.
Sergeant Paul Watson gave a noumenal shrug. “I think it's a giant habitat of some kind,” he said. “You know, like the O'Neil colonies they used to talk about building someday. You make a big wheel or cylinder, rotate it to provide artificial gravity⦔
“But that thing's not rotating.”
“Maybe it was destroyed in the same war that wiped out the Builders,” he suggested. “It's dead.”
“Then what are those lights?” she insisted. “
Someone's
alive over there.”
“Geez, how the hell should I know?” he growled. “Be patient! We'll find out soon enough.”
She laughed. Paul was her current shipboard lover. He was a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, but a decent guy.
He carried just enough arrogance on his shoulders that it was fun to deflate him with an impossible question every so often.
She did wonder, sometimes, about John. Where was he now? In the Llalande system?
What was he doing?
What was he thinking?”
“My God!” Paul said.
“What?”
“Look! There in the center. You'll need to magnifyâ¦.”
Something was drifting out of the center of that massively rimmed wheelâ¦a ship, but such a ship as human eyes had never before seen, at least not in historical times. Comparing it to the known diameter of the wheel suggested that it was huge, a couple of kilometers long at least, needle-slim, and made of something that looked like purest beaten gold.
“Whatâ¦is it?” she said.
“A ship!” Paul said. “Obviously, a ship!”
“Why obviously?” Lynnley said. “We don't know who these people are. Or what they are. We can't take anything for granted!”
“Bullshit,” Paul replied with a mental snort. “It's a
ship
. That wheel must be some sort of enormous habitat or space station. I think we're about to meet Berosus's friends!”
“I hope they're friendly,” she said. “The
Wings of Isis
wouldn't make a decent lifeboat for that thing!”
“Of
course
they're friendly!” Paul replied cheerfully. “All the legends about gods from Sirius emphasized that they were friendly, taught humans how to plant crops, that kind of thing. They're just coming out to greet us!”
The shipboard alert clamored in their minds.
Wings of Isis
was going to battle stations. “I hope to the Goddess you're right, Paul,” she said. “But whoever they are, they must be damned old, and someone once said that the old are often insanely jealous of the young. Andâ¦there are the Hunters of the Dawn, remember?”
She felt his noumenal touch. “Nah. It's Oannes's descendants, and they're coming out to see how their offspring have done. Everything'll be fine. You'll see.”
“Damn,” she said. “I sure hope you're right.”
She wished that John Garroway were here.