TUESDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2042

Reagan Arms Hotel, Washington,
DC
1348 hours EDT

When the knock sounded on the door, David very nearly did not rise to answer it. He’d been sitting alone in the hotel room, the lights off, the curtains closed, the wall screen switched off, all morning. He didn’t want to see anyone just now.

But he thought he knew who it was, and he knew he had to answer. When the knock sounded a second time, he struggled up off the bed, made his way to the door, and opened it.

General Warhurst stood on the other side, with one of his aides, a captain, and a pair of enlisted Marines in combat dress, with visored helmets and rifles.

“Good morning, General,” he said. His mouth was dry, and the words came with difficulty.

“Good afternoon, Professor. May we come in?”

David stepped aside, waving them through the door. The two enlisted men took up posts to either side of the door in the corridor outside, their weapons at port arms. Warhurst palmed the room lights on and walked through, taking a seat in the small lounge area beyond the room’s two beds. The aide took up a silent stance at parade rest nearby.

It was still all a little unreal. General Warhurst had met him as he was being released from Joliet and asked if he would come to Washington for a series of meetings. He’d been that close to telling Warhurst to forget it, that he had to go talk to Liana, that he needed to get his own life together first, that above all he didn’t owe the government or anyone who worked for it a damned thing after they’d stolen so much of his life and work.

But it was Warhurst who’d been responsible for his freedom in the first place. David was grateful; more than that, though, he always paid his debts, and Warhurst’s tone had suggested that something important was happening, something in which David’s participation was necessary.

And so, David had let them drive him to his home in the Chicago suburbs, where he’d packed a bag and left a v-mail for the absent Liana on the home computer. An hour later, he’d been on a military VTOL transport from O’Hare International to Andrews Aerospace Force Base outside of Washington.

And if he hadn’t agreed, if he hadn’t made that flight, he would likely have been in Chicago Monday evening when the shock wave rolled across the city from the lake…either in a hotel room or else working late at the Institute, which now no longer existed.

“First of all,” Warhurst said, “please accept our condolences on your loss. Have you heard anything definite at all?”

He shrugged and nodded toward the wall screen. “No. Triple N is saying three quarters of a million dead…as if anyone can ever know the real number. They’re finding lots of survivors, especially out toward the Ring. But, well, they also said there was a big, ancient space brothers’ rally near the lakefront at the time. And…”

“And your wife would have been there,” Warhurst said, completing the thought when David couldn’t go on.

He was suffering from a bad case of survivor’s guilt. He knew that…but the knowledge didn’t help. Nor did it help that he was the one Cheseaux had passed the information through in the first place. If he’d just said something then…

But what? The asteroid had been aimed at Colorado, originally. There was no way of knowing that a piece of it would come down on Chicago.

He should have died in Chicago, too….

He knew how lame, how stupid that self-pitying thought sounded. It wasn’t even as if he and Liana had been all that close during the past few years. He’d wanted a divorce so badly he could taste it. And yet…

The awful part of it was that he’d finally decided to do something about his impossible life with Liana. Now she was dead, his chance to take his own life in his hands snatched away with all those lost lives.

It left him feeling guilty, as though by wishing her out of his life, he’d somehow caused her death. He felt…lost. The universe held no special concern for humans or their petty problems and failed relationships and injured hearts.

Somehow it didn’t even help to know that Teri was okay—that she’d been at a conference in Great LA over the weekend and hadn’t yet returned to Chicago when the city was destroyed. Warhurst had told him that morning that they would be flying her here, to Washington.

Teri alive…and Liana dead.

He could not shake the horror that clung to that equation.

“I can’t promise anything, son,” Warhurst went on. “But I have my people checking. You know, it’s taking an ungodly time to compile casualty lists. Not only was the city trashed, but Chicago was an important hub on the Net. Right now, the whole system’s clogged and almost at a standstill. Maybe she’s okay, but just…out of touch.”

He tried to imagine Liana as one of those filthy, ragged survivors he’d seen on Triple N huddling in the shelter of the Chicago ruins. That was about as back-to-nature as it was possible to get. Somehow, he couldn’t pull the picture into focus. No, she was dead. He was sure of that.

Why did her death hurt so much? He hadn’t thought he’d loved her anymore at all.

“I can’t imagine her missing something like that big church rally.” He scowled, anger gaining the upper hand over grief. “She was so damned wrapped up in that ancient-astronut nonsense!”

Warhurst gave him a tight smile. “I’m surprised to hear you call it ‘nonsense.’ You’re the one who’s been uncovering all this alien stuff.”

“I’m a scientist, General. An archeologist. I uncover facts, mostly by digging around in other people’s garbage piles, then try to make reasoned assumptions about what that garbage tells us about them. Okay?”

“No argument there.”

“The ancient-astronut silliness takes the same facts—or more often nothing more substantial than myths or out-of-context religious passages—and builds elaborate dream castles that just can’t be supported by the data. The worst part is when people distort the facts to fit their own preconceived notions. That’s not science. It’s not even good religion. It’s a crime against reason and clear thinking.”

“Hmm. And what is your clear thinking about the An?”

David raised his eyebrows, jolted, for the moment, from his loss. Warhurst, evidently, had been reading his papers, including some that hadn’t been published yet.

He also saw what Warhurst was trying to do, goading him, dragging him from the black comfort of his depression. And he didn’t like it.

“Look, what does any of this have to do with the war? You said you wanted me to come here and work on some big operation coming up, but you still haven’t told me what the Marines need with an archeologist.”

“Dr. Billaud has been talking to our intelligence people.”

“So?”

“Telling them about the UN facility at Tsiolkovsky, on the farside. According to him, there are alien ruins there, in a cave in the central peak.”

David nodded. “He mentioned something of the sort, when I talked to him last.”

“You didn’t tell Colonel Whitworth?

“No, sir. I did not.”

“You know, Professor, some people might find it odd that you withheld critical information from our intelligence people but were sharing important information with foreign nationals.”

“I’ve been through this already, sir. The people I was sharing information with are part of an international scientific community. I won’t say they aren’t political, but they’re more interested in what’s right than in what’s politically convenient. As for not telling Whitworth about Tsiolkovsky, quite frankly, the thought of a battle being fought inside an ET archeological site fills me with horror.”

“I can understand that. But the situation is such that we must attack. To tell you the truth, I was hoping we could enlist you to go along. To look after what might be there.”

David gave Warhurst a hard and searching look. “You’re not telling me everything, are you?”

“I’d rather not, until closer to the time.” He gave a wry smile. “I think you can understand our not wanting our moves becoming known to anyone in the European Union.”

“Ah. Yes. I can imagine you people will have trouble trusting me from now on.”

“Oh, it isn’t that. I wouldn’t tell my own grandmother what we’re planning. But I can tell you that it’s vitally important that we know what we’re getting into, what the UN might have already uncovered over there. So…what can you tell us about the An?”

“That they were a technologically advanced extraterrestrial species that had some interaction with humans six to eight thousand years ago, and possibly earlier. That they probably enslaved a number of early humans while establishing a colony of some sort here and managing to insinuate themselves into Sumerian mythology. That something happened to them after that, apparently an attack of some sort, that either destroyed their colony, or made them abandon it.”

“There’s been a lot of speculation about the An still being around, someplace. Or that they could come back to Earth in the future, either as saviors or as conquerors.”

“That,” David said quietly, “is lunatic-fringe astronut stuff. Faith and speculation, not fact. Science can’t comment on any of that.”

“And what about the Builders?”

David let out a short, half-whistled breath through pursed lips. “We know even less about them. They showed up from God knows where half a million years ago. They were almost certainly not the An, but someone else entirely, though we know almost nothing about them. They may have performed some genetic reengineering on hominids they found on Earth, giving rise to Homo sapiens, but that’s still disputed. They certainly took a number of humans to Mars, where they were engaged in some terraforming operations, though the nature of that effort is also still being debated too. We don’t really know why they did all of that, or what they wanted here. But we know their Mars colony was destroyed in an attack by someone else, one that destroyed their atmosphere-generating equipment and ended with the humans trapped there freezing to death, or suffocating, or both.”

“And the ‘Hunters of the Dawn’? Or the ‘Destroyers’?”

“Just names. Phrases translated from some of those An tablets we uncovered on the Moon. Look, what’s the point of all this?”

“During your three-month…vacation, various people have been building on your work. You remember Kettering?”

“Craig Kettering. Of course.”

“He’s published a paper in American Science. The title is ‘Evidence of Warfare Among Ancient Extraterrestrial Cultures.’ He cites you and several of your papers.”

“Hmm. He usually does.”

“I gather you’ve been busy on a related subject while you were at Joliet.”

“How did you—” He stopped himself. Of course Warhurst would have checked with the prison officials, and he could have gotten access to David’s work-in-progress. During the past two months, the Joliet administration had allowed him access—for a precious few hours each day—to his PAD, the only provisions being that he couldn’t have Net access and that what he wrote each day was subject to review by prison officials. They would have made copies, and Warhurst would have been able to get access to them, by court order, if necessary.

The Marine commandant had been busy.

“It wasn’t my intent to snoop,” Warhurst said, following his train of thought. “But some of the stuff coming out of what you picked up on the Moon last April is starting to sound damned scary.”

David gave a thin smile. “I thought you were at war with the UN.”

“We are. But, let’s just say that some of us are concerned about what might happen after the war. The paper you wrote in prison was…intriguing.”

“John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress in prison. It’s nice to have a hobby, something to pass the time.”

“‘On a New Interpretation of the Fermi Paradox,’” Warhurst said. “That’s not exactly Pilgrim’s Progress.”

“Pilgrim’s Progress is a morality play about making it into heaven. My paper deals with the possible extinction of humankind. There’s a difference.”

“Indeed.” He nodded to his aide, who unholstered a PAD and began making entries. “So. Tell us about Fermi’s Paradox?”

“Back in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi—he was an important physicist who did a lot of the early work on atomic energy—asked the question ‘Where are they?’ He was asking about other intelligent life in the galaxy.”

“He meant…why haven’t we seen them?”

“Exactly. You see, our galaxy is something like eight billion years old…about twice as old as Earth itself. It took less than four billion years for life to evolve here; since we know that planets are pretty common, it’s fair to assume that life, including intelligent life, has evolved before, time after time after time. Fermi was making these assumptions before we knew about the Cave of Wonders, of course. He thought the galaxy ought to be crawling with other civilizations.”

“Lovely thought.”

“It gets better. It’s been demonstrated that if even one intelligent race evolves, in all the history of the galaxy, and if that race has the same sort of exploratory yearnings, the same curiosity and drive and determination to reach out into space that we do, it could actually colonize the entire galaxy in a ridiculously short period of time.”

“How short?”

“Depends. Even if they never were able to build ships that went more than a few percent of the speed of light, though, they could still reach every star, colonize every habitable world, even do their equivalent of terraforming to every likely planet in the galaxy in less than three million years….”

“Three million years is a long time.”

“It’s an eyeblink, compared to eight billion years.”

“I see what you mean. So Fermi wondered why somebody hadn’t already colonized the entire galaxy. Why they weren’t here already.”

“Exactly. And the more we learn about extraterrestrial civilizations, the more urgent his question becomes. In the Cave of Wonders, beneath Cydonia…that huge array of image screens shows hundreds of other civilizations. We suspect that the blank screens in the Cave represent civilizations that no longer exist, that have died out over the past half million years. Extraterrestrial cultures are common. The galaxy should have been filled up many times over. It should be teeming with starfaring civilizations. Radio astronomers ought to be bombarded by the alien equivalent of TV programs, shortwave broadcasts, and military call signs. But when we listen, we hear…nothing.”

“But we do know there are other races out there. And we know that at least two of them were here, once.”

“Right. But what happened to them?

“According to your research both of them were attacked. Destroyed by invaders?”

“You’ve seen photos of the Cydonian site, General?” When Warhurst nodded, David went on. “You know, there are still people who haven’t been there who argue that the Face on Mars is a natural phenomenon, that the fact that the Cave of Wonders is located underneath is just a coincidence. It was assumed to be a chance product of weathering for a long time after it was first spotted by early orbital probes. And the funny part was, the first detailed imaging orbital of the site, in the late nineties, showed it really didn’t look much like a face at all. You can just barely make out the overall shape of the features, but they’re battered, smashed, broken…and what’s left has been worn down to dust and rubble by half a million years of sandstorms. The earlier, lower-quality images had actually blurred things enough to show what the Face must have looked like once, half a million years ago, before someone, or something, shot the hell out of it.”

“Okay, so what’s the point of your new explanation of Fermi’s Paradox?” Warhurst asked. “I mean, what we’ve found on Mars and the Moon, especially the display screens in the Cave of Wonders, proves that aliens were here. What’s the paradox?”

“Mostly, I guess, the paradox is why aren’t they here now? Some of the astronut cults make the claim that we are the descendants of alien colonists, maybe an expedition of Builders who got marooned here a long time ago, but that just doesn’t hold up. Our DNA is very clearly the product of evolution here on Earth. Over 98 percent of the DNA in chimps is identical to ours.

“What’s also puzzling, though, is that the An, whoever they were, didn’t have a technology that was all that much ahead of ours. From what we’ve found on the Moon, they used antimatter-powered spacecraft maybe a century or two ahead of what we’re flying today. Okay, so that meant they were several thousand years ahead of the Sumerians, but that’s not much time at all when you’re talking about periods of millions or even billions of years. The Builders were more advanced, maybe a thousand years beyond where we are now. Again, not that big a difference, when there ought to be civilizations out there millions or even billions of years old.”

“Maybe there’s some built-in self-destruct mechanism, so that no civilization lasts more than a few thousand years. Or maybe they evolve into…I don’t know. Something else. Something we can’t recognize.”

“Maybe. But think about this. It only takes one long-lived and energetic civilization to overrun the entire galaxy in a few million years. That’s part of the paradox. It only has to happen once, and we know, in fact, that it must have happened many times.

“Now, imagine an intelligence that evolves, develops civilization, starflight, and moves out into the galaxy. Imagine that it evolved with a kind of Darwinian imperative, a survival-of-the-fittest mentality that leads it to seek out other, less developed civilizations, and destroy them before they become a threat. And…remember that this only has to happen once to establish a pattern. If it happens once, if it works for them, it could happen again, and again, and again.”

“This predatory species becomes top dog in the galaxy, you’re saying. It just hangs around and stomps on the new-bies as they emerge, is that what you’re saying?”

“What I developed in my paper was the idea that the galaxy may endure cycles of civilization alternating with destruction. Hundreds, maybe thousands of civilizations emerge throughout the galaxy, all at about the same time. They develop space travel, spread out…but if even one of them out of how many hundreds or thousands is a predatory race, it’s going to have an advantage over all the others, and it will destroy them.

“But if there’s one such race, maybe there are two. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Sooner or later, they come into conflict with one another. After a few thousand years of all-out warfare, the galaxy is empty again, except for a scattering of stone-chipping primitives on a few thousand bombed-out worlds who begin starting the whole cycle all over again.”

“‘The Hunters of the Dawn.’”

“What we’ve been able to translate of the An records and tablets suggests that they were terribly afraid of someone. They called them Ur-Bakar, the Hunters of the Dawn.”

“And these Hunters also destroyed the Builders?”

“I think it was a different group of Hunters. I think that galactic civilization was at a high point half a million years ago…then it all collapsed in a war that makes our dustup with the UN look like a shoving match with the neighbor’s kid. A predator race destroyed the Builders, bombed the structures on Mars, destroyed their colonies. Fortunately for us, they missed, or didn’t bother with, the early Homo sapiens who were living on Earth at the time. Within another few thousand years or so, the Hunters were gone as well, probably fighting among themselves, or with other predators.

“Then, a long time later, maybe ten or fifteen thousand years ago, the An develop star flight. Since we’ve identified the An in the Cave of Wonders display, we have to assume that they were around half a million years ago, were smacked down, and then rebuilt their civilization.

“They come to Earth, maybe by accident, maybe because they remembered the Builders and were looking for them. They find our ancestors in Mesopotamia, settle down, and start their own colony, using primitives for slave labor.”

“And then the Hunters of the Dawn come again.”

“Right. Probably a whole new crop that evolved along those same kill-them-before-they-kill-you lines. They destroyed the An bases on the Moon. Destroyed their colonies on Earth…and by doing so must’ve left a pretty deep impression in the surviving humans about fire raining from the skies and wars among the gods.

“And once again we were lucky. The Hunters either ignored what they considered to be savages, or they just couldn’t find and exterminate them all.” He shook his head. “I hate like the devil to sound like one of the ancient-astronut preachers, but there is evidence of a cataclysmic flood throughout the Tigris-Euphrates Valley five or six thousand years ago, and it was probably the basis for the Sumerian flood myths that eventually found their way into the Book of Genesis. My thinking now is that the Destroyers dropped a small asteroid into the Arabian Sea, and let the tidal wave wipe out the An cities.”

“Just like Chicago.”

“Just like Chicago. We know that the Persian Gulf was swampy lowland until just a few thousand years ago. Maybe it’s just still flooded, after six thousand years. You know, it might be interesting to do a careful sonar survey of the floor of the Arabian Sea, looking for a recent impact crater under the silt.”

He found he was breathing hard, that he was on his feet and pacing, instead of slumped on the hotel-room bed. He’d not wanted to discuss any of this, to discuss anything, but once the words had started, they’d tumbled out in an unruly torrent. He wondered if that had been Warhurst’s purpose.

There was a knock at the door. “You’d better get that,” Warhurst told him.

A bit unsteadily, he walked to the door, considered activating the small security display, then decided that the Marines posted outside were all the security anyone needed. He opened the door….

“Teri!”

“David!” She stepped forward, taking him in her arms. “General Warhurst told me…that they haven’t found Liana.”

“Teri…” He couldn’t raise his arms to return her embrace. He couldn’t…. He was so damned happy to see her alive…but the thought that he’d wished Liana dead would not let go.

She seemed to sense his confusion. Slowly she released him. “I’m sorry, David. I’m so sorry.”

“I…I’m going to need some time, Teri. To get my head straight.”

“I understand.”

“Dr. Sullivan, here, is the one who got you sprung,” Warhurst said, “not me. She talked with your wife, and got access to your correspondence files. Sent e-mail to every person in your address file. That happened to include a young Marine—”

“Frank Kaminski?”

“Affirmative. Kaminski took it up with his CO, who happens to be a friend of mine.”

“That would be Kaitlin Garroway.”

“And she told me.”

He looked at Teri. “Thank you.” He tried to imagine her forcing a meeting with Liana, and failed. Maybe he hadn’t known either woman as well as he’d thought.

“Come on in and grab yourself a stool, Dr. Sullivan,” Warhurst said. “What we’re talking about here will interest both of you.”

“So,” she said brightly, “what have you men been gabbing about?”

“We’re getting ready to kick the UN off our Moon, Dr. Sullivan,” Warhurst said, extracting his PAD from his inside jacket pocket and unfolding it. “But we’re going to want a couple of archeologists along, just in case we have another Cave of Wonders to deal with.”

“Billaud’s site? At Tsiolkovsky?” David asked.

Warhurst nodded, and David groaned. He was remembering the battle at Picard, the carefully excavated trenches trampled over by soldiers. He thought, too, of that French soldier in 1799, who’d uncovered the Rosetta stone and provided Western science with the key to the writing of an ancient and very alien civilization. At the same time, some of the soldier’s friends were practicing with artillery…and using the Great Sphinx, at that time showing only its head above the enveloping sands, as a target.

He’d seen two pitched battles fought on a valuable archeological site, now, at Cydonia and at Picard. He didn’t want to see a third.

“What,” Warhurst replied, reading from his PAD, “does the term ‘E-U-Nir-Kingu Gab-Kur-Ra’ mean to you?”

“Sumerian,” Teri said. “‘E-U-Nir’ is, ah, a house with raised foundations? ‘House Rising High,’ I think I’d translate it. ‘King-gu’ means a righteous emissary, but it was also the Sumerian name for the Moon.”

“And ‘Gab-Kur-Ra’ means something like ‘Chest Hidden in the Mountain,’” David added.

“A chest,” Warhurst repeated. “Or a storeroom, maybe? A place for storing records?”

Realization struck David. “Which is what Marc Billaud called the central peak at Tsiolkovsky.”

Warhurst shot him a sharp glance. “When was that?”

“When I talked to him on the Moon. At Picard. He said he wasn’t going to betray his country, but that we’d get the answers we wanted at Gab-Kur-Ra.”

“You didn’t mention that in your report.”

“I…I didn’t think of it at the time. I hadn’t made the connection with ancient Sumerian and the An tablets yet. And, well, it didn’t make much sense.”

“Maybe he was trying to tell you something he didn’t want other people to hear, or understand,” Teri suggested.

“Could well be.” David looked at Warhurst. “Where did you hear that name?”

“From Billaud. He’s been talking freely to our intel people ever since we learned the UN military was playing with the notion of bombing us with asteroids. He’s given us some information about the UN layout at Tsiolkovsky—not everything we need; he’s a scientist, not a military man, but some. He told us there were some ET ruins at the crater’s central peak and that they were called Gab-Kur-Ra. He gave us a translation of that but wasn’t able to tell us what was inside. He says no one’s being allowed in.”

“The UN has been pretty touchy about ancient-astronaut stuff ever since we let the cat out of the bag about Cydonia,” David said. “Maybe they’re still trying to sit on it.”

“Maybe. Or maybe what they’ve found there is so secret they can’t let civilians see it. We already know the French were getting clues to building an antimatter-powered spacecraft from wreckage they picked up at Picard. Maybe there were more clues at this Gab-Kur-Ra place.”

“Which means,” David said, “it’s going to be heavily guarded when your Marines get there. My God….”

Step by step, the scenario he’d most been dreading was unfolding….