Battlespace (37 page)

“Thank you, sir.”

“I suggest you get some food in you, get some rest, and for
God's
sake get a shower and a clean uniform! Otherwise, you're going to be partying by yourself!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

“Carry on.”

The other Marines arrived as Warhurst walked off toward
the HQ building. “Hey, Gare!” Roger Eagleton called. “Welcome home!”

“Yeah,” Anna Garcia said. “We thought we'd fuckin' lost you!”

“Jesus!” Lobowski said, wrinkling his nose. “What the hell've you been rolling in, Marine?”

Garroway turned his head and sniffed at the shoulder of his suit utilities. “Whew! I guess the Major was right. I need a shower before I do any serious partying.”

“Or
Sirius
partying,” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne put in. “Vinton? Show this Marine to his quarters and see that he showers down. Steel beach party at the grinder, fifteen hundred hours. Do you copy?”

“Copy, Gunnery Sergeant!” Garroway snapped back, grinning.

“Then git your sorry ass out of my sight until then! Carry on!”

“I gather everything's squared away with the Wiggles?” Garroway asked Kat as they walked toward the hab dome that had been designated for Alpha Company.

“Pretty much. We had a prisoner, but Major Warhurst turned him loose. That didn't stop the fighting, not right away, at any rate, but I guess between that and what you were doing in Wiggle City finally got through. They contacted us by radio through Cassius, speaking ancient Sumerian.”

“Outstanding.”

“Y'know the funny thing? We thought the aquatic Wiggles were the children. It's the other way around. The Walkers—the ones who do the fighting and the building—they're the N'mah young. The big seagoing Wiggles, that's the adult phase. They're the thinkers and the leaders.” She shook her head. “There's
so
much we have to learn!”

“Roger that.” He thought for a moment. “So what's with this big pow-wow the major was talking about? Something about Earth being in danger?”

“They don't tell us much,” she said. “You know that. But the word is, some big stuff is happening.”

“Yeah?” Garroway asked her. “Like what?”

“Well, to begin with, the scuttlebutt is…remember that AI we sent through the gate a couple of days ago?”

Garroway nodded. “Sure.”

“Well, the word is, it's returned. And the brass is
not
happy with what it saw.”

That gave Garroway something to think about. He stopped thinking about it when he entered the barracks shower, however. Kat joined him under the blast of hot water and there were other, more pleasant things to think about. Afterward, they got reacquainted in Kat's rack, with the promise that the Alpha Company barracks was going to be otherwise unoccupied for the next couple of hours. Lobowski and Garcia, standing guard outside, would see to that, she told him.

For just a little while, Garroway could forget about Wiggles, Marine deployments, and alien contact with ancient Earth civilizations, and lose himself on that most ancient, and most pleasurable, of all purely
human
contacts….

General Ramsey
Conference Chamber
Sirius Stargate
1530 hours, Shipboard time

This, Ramsey thought, was the first
physical
briefing session he'd attended in longer than he could remember. Noumenal conferences were so much more convenient. All imaginable data were instantly available, a thought-click away, for everyone to see. There was no travel involved, and no discomfort. What had begun a couple centuries ago with telecommuting had eventually become the means for people
to interface with one another…virtually, within the computer-guided noumena of their minds.

But human implant technology could not interface with N'mah computers, not yet. The two groups, thanks to the extensive Sumerian language database on the MIEU network, could talk to one another face-to-face or by radio, but more sophisticated forms of communication were going to take time.

The battle fleet had moved in close to the Sirius Gate, and most staff personnel—Navy, Marine, Command, and civilian—had been brought across on board TRAPs to quarters prepared for them within the recently grown N'mah buildings. The place designated as the conference chamber was a large room just below the cavern taken up by Camp Denderah. There was a table and chairs, brought down from the
Altair
, for the humans, and a pool, accessed from an underwater tunnel, for the N'mah elders. To one side, a five-meter flatscreen had been set up, so that maps, computer simulations, and visual recordings could be shared with the N'mah, who did not have access to human noumena.

It was, Ramsey thought, a scene unlike any since the N'mah had first visited a human village on the shores of the Arabian Gulf, eight thousand years or more before. Fourteen men and women sat around three sides of the table, facing three of the huge, iridescent beings, four-eyed serpents with arms, resting in their pool. Cassius was invisibly present as well, of course, translating for the group. The N'mah would speak Sumerian, a language they had learned and recorded during their interactions with humans millennia ago; Cassius would translate to English via the humans' implants. The humans spoke English, which Cassius would translate into Sumerian and transmit, by radio, to the communications hardware each N'mah wore imbedded in her skull.

Her
skull. He was still getting used to N'mah concepts of gender. From what the medical department had been able to learn so far, N'mah males were internal parasites, resident
within the equivalent of the females' genitalia. Females gave live birth to meter-long offspring that looked like large salamanders. These crawled ashore and were taken in by the Community of the Young, the Walkers who constituted the land-phase of N'mah amphibious life. This juvenile phase lasted for a long time; N'mah concepts of time were still poorly understood, but Dr. Franz thought it might be as long as fifty years.

The juveniles, it turned out, were the builders. In N'mah prehistory, tens of thousands of years ago, it must have been the land-dwelling juveniles that had discovered fire, smelted metals, and eventually gone to the stars.

The race still mourned that decision, which they called the Death Turning. If they'd not begun exploring the oceans of space around them, they might never have encountered the Hunters of the Dawn.

An estimated twenty thousand years ago, it seemed, long before they encountered a humanity that at that time was still dwelling in caves on distant Earth, the N'mah had found the Hunters—or the Hunters had found them. Their home world and some hundreds of colony planets had all been destroyed, subjected to the intense asteroid bombardments that were the Hunters' signature.

This much, at least, had already been learned through informal exchanges with the Elders. As the exchange of data continued, Ramsey expected that the humans, at least, would learn a very great deal more about their prehistoric past.

“Everything depends on the way the Gate works.” Dr. Marie Valle, the civilian xenotechnologist, was speaking at the moment. “If I'm understanding our hosts…the, the space inside the circle of the Gate is literally in two places at once, and those two places can be many light-years apart.”

“Yes, yes,” a deep rumble of a voice agreed within their minds. Cassius was transmitting his translation of the N'mah
words with the same timbre and intonation as their deep and decidedly unfemale-sounding voices. “Same space, two places.”

The Sumerian language database, it turned out, was lacking, especially in technical words and concepts. That was hardly surprising; most of the vocabulary had come directly from ancient Sumer, which had not possessed starships, star gates, or the language of quantum physics. The rest had come from the An of Ishtar who, though they still had the computer network they called the
abzu
, had lost most of the technology of their starfaring past. Concepts like
mul-ka
, literally “Star Gate,” were simple enough, since both
mul
, “star,” and
ka
, “gate,” were known. In the same way, the word starship could be rendered as
mul-ma-gur
, “
ma-gur
” being the ancient Sumerian for a large boat.

But what about words like “energy,” as distinct from
izzi
, “fire?” Or “atom?” Or “light-year?”

And the toughest part of the problem was that Sumerian was not the N'mah's native language. The gods only knew what was happening when they translated, from Sumerian to their own gargle-sounding tongue, a jury-rigged compound nightmare like
us-u-su-as-mu
, for “length-light-cross-one-year.”

“If we understand the technology correctly,” Valle went on, “then the Sirian Gate is…‘tuned,' I guess would be the best word, tuned to overlap with another gate somewhere else in the Galaxy. According to our hosts, there are some millions of gates scattered across the Galaxy. We're not sure, but these may be another of the legacies left behind by the Builders, half a million years ago…or they could have been constructed by a civilization earlier still than that. By adjusting the tuning at one gate, a ship can dial in on any other gate, no matter how distant.

“The tuning at the Sirian Gate is currently controlled by a starfaring culture the N'mah refer to as
Ghul
or
Xul
. We
don't know what they call themselves. Xul is a Sumerian word, though, for ‘evil,' or possibly ‘evil destroyers.'”

“The Hunters of the Dawn,” Dominick said.

“We don't know that,” Lymon put in. “Not for sure.”

“Right,” Ricia Anderson said. “It could be
another
race of Galaxy-faring psychopaths intent on wiping out emerging civilizations by smacking them with asteroids.”

Lymon ignored her. “Obviously, we should just take whatever steps are necessary to get control of the gate ourselves. That would solve everything.”

“Actually, that's a lot easier said than done,” Valle said. “Xul starships approaching the Gate can retune it to a specific destination, using radio or lasercom codes. As far as we've been able to determine,
any
ship with the appropriate codes can do it. We can learn how to use the gate ourselves—the N'mah have some of the appropriate codes themselves. But we can't stop the Xul from accessing the Gate, not without destroying the Gate entirely.”

“Then we destroy the Gate,” Ramsey put in. “We have some tactical nukes in our inventory, and two AMB-75 antimatter devices.” He looked pointedly at Lymon. “Our mission orders specifically dictate the necessity of destroying the Gate, should we discover a direct threat to Earth.”

“We don't yet know that there is a threat,” General Dominick put in.

“Besides,” Dr. Franz said, “the Sirius Gate is inhabited! You can't possibly be thinking of destroying it!”

Ramsey looked at the silently listening N'mah elders. What were they making of all of this? “No. But there must be a way to disable the Gate without harming the environment here.”

“That…may be difficult, General,” Valle replied. “The Gate operates because of quantum-special distortions generated by two rotating black holes inside the Gate structure, as we've guessed. But that's also the source both of the gravita
tional shielding which keeps the inhabited areas habitable, and of the power that runs the N'mah life support systems, their water purifiers and circulators, all of that. Now, the life support we might be able to keep going by tapping into the fusion plants that power some of the secondary systems, but we can't do a thing about the gravity shielding. The N'mah say they don't possess gravity control technology.”

“What about those flying tanks?” Admiral Harris asked.

“Mag-lev, using the Gate structure itself to generate an intense local magnetic field for propulsion. Old tech. We've been able to do the same thing ourselves for a couple of centuries—railguns, maglev trains….

“In fact,” she went on, “I'm afraid the N'mah aren't so very far ahead of us in technology at all.”

“What?” Lymon said, startled. “That's not possible! We were counting—” She stopped herself.

“Much, we have lost,” Cassius told them in the N'mah's rumbling pseudo-voice. “Much. We have been crippled by the
Xul
.”

Ramsey made a mental note to follow up on that with the N'mah later, if he could. What they'd revealed about their race so far suggested that some hundreds or perhaps thousands of N'mah colonies were now scattered across the galaxy, hidden in remote and out-of-the way places where they would not attract attention from the Xul. How many such colonies of survivors remained the N'mah themselves didn't know.

The Sirian group, they claimed, numbered around ten thousand individuals, both young and adult. They were, the N'mah claimed, a remnant of a much larger Sirian colony that had been destroyed by a Xul attack—if Ramsey was understanding this right—less than two thousand years ago. Evidently, they'd retained some useful high-tech like that nanotrick with metal, but lost the faster-than-light ships, the interstellar communicators, and the world-shattering weapons.

“The great danger,” Valle said, “is that the Xul, or one of their ships, at any rate, and that's all it would take, may know now about our activities here. If they come through again—as they did when they destroyed the
Isis
ten years ago—they would not need to search long or far to find Earth. Local space is bathed in the EM radiation from our civilization. And…while the N'mah do not have faster-than-light starships, the Xul most assuredly do. They use the Gates for zigzagging around the Galaxy, but they also have an FTL drive they use for more local jaunts. If, and when, they emerge here, they will be literally only a few days away from Earth.”