MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2042

Sam
UNS Guerrière, Tsiolkovsky Base
0114 hours GMT

“Damn, Sam. I don’t know how we’re going to pull this off….”

PFC Jack Ramsey
UNS Guerrière, Tsiolkovsky Base
0114 hours

“Jack, I think we’re going to have to try a completely different approach,” Sam said, less than two seconds later. “I believe I may have a possible password.”

“Do it!”

An agony of seconds passed.

“The second password was not accepted,” Sam said. “Incremental counter now set at one. However, I am certain I am on the right track. Does anyone know how to say ‘Hunters of the Dawn’ in French?”

Jack blinked. She’d been given French word lists….

…but that wasn’t the same as knowing a language, and he didn’t think that that phrase was on the list in any case. “Hey!” He shouted on the platoon channel. “Sam needs to know how to say ‘Hunters of the Dawn’ in French! Who knows it?”

“I do,” Kaitlin said. “Chasseurs de l’Aube.”

“Shass—Damn it! Spell the fucking thing! On Channel Three!”

Ignoring his less than protocol-correct words, Kaitlin spelled the phrase.

A long second later, Sam said, “Computer security safeguards are now down. I have control of GUERRIÈRE’s computer.” Another pause. “Countdown to uncontrolled release of antimatter aborted at T minus four-point-one-three-one seconds.”

“Sam…I think I love you!…”

Jack didn’t feel it when his knees gave way and he dropped to the deck, falling slowly in one-sixth G.

Captain Rob Lee
UNS Guerrière, Tsiolkovsky Base
0118 hours GMT

Rob came up onto the bridge, expecting almost anything. The fighting everywhere appeared to be ending, but there was always the possibility of a holdout fanatic somewhere…or a UN trooper who hadn’t gotten the word.

She was there, helping as Marine on the deck. “Kaitlin!” Bueller and Kaminski stood nearby, weapons ready; the bridge around them a charnel house. He scarcely saw them. “Kaitlin! You’re okay!” Then he saw that one of the bodies was Bosnivic, the other Jack Ramsey. “Are they—”

“Bosnivic’s dead,” Kaitlin told him. She sounded shaken. “I think Ramsey, here, just had too little CO₂ in his mix. He got excited, hyperventilated, and passed out.” She looked up at Rob, eyes very large. “He just saved us, Rob. All of us.”

“The computer? The ship?”

“Is ours. But it was damned close. Four seconds to spare. They had a trigger set on the antimatter generator, and a timer going.”

“Holy God….”

She finished adjusting Jack’s gas mix, then stood up, swaying a bit. Rob tried to take her in his arms, but Mark I armor was less than satisfactory for close contact. They bumped awkwardly, and she laughed, fending him off. “Easy, there, Tiger. You’ll startle the men. Maybe later….”

Kaminski was at the communications console nearby. “Uh, Lieutenant? I think I can patch through to an L-1 halo comsat!”

“Great!” Kaitlin replied. “Can you raise Mission Control?”

“That’s what I’m working on, ma’am. It’s gonna take a while.”

L-1 was a gravitational balance point above the Moon’s farside. It was possible to orbit that point, rather than the Moon itself, which made it an ideal spot for comsats. The UN had taken advantage of this footnote in physics to keep their base at Tsiolkovsky in touch with Earth; now it could serve the victorious American forces as well.

Jack was trying to sit up. “Christ! What happened?”

“You got a little too excited, Ramsey,” Kaitlin told him. “You passed out. Feeling better now?”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“Good. We’ll have the corpsmen take a look at you aboard the Ranger, just to be sure.”

“The lieutenant tells me you just saved us all, son,” Rob said.

“Wasn’t me, sir.” He shook his head emphatically. “It was Sam.”

“Sam?”

Standing, he retrieved his PAD from a nearby console. His suit communications jack had pulled free when he’d fallen, and he plugged himself back in now. “This is Sam. And if I didn’t know better, I’d swear she just had a very uncomputerlike burst of pure, creative thought!”

“But, of course, you do know better, don’t you, Jack?” a young woman’s voice said over the platoon channel.

“Sam, I don’t know a damned thing anymore. You and me have to talk!…”

Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
UNS Guerrière, Tsiolkovsky Base
0535 hours GMT

It took over four hours—and some more of Sam’s nut-cracking to override some UN security protocols—to make the comsat patch, but at last the thing was done. Kaitlin sat at the communications console and jacked in her headset. “Potomac, Potomac,” she called. “This is Night Rider. Over.”

Static hissed in her earphones. Guerrière’s hatch had been repaired and her atmosphere restored during the past couple of hours, and she had her helmet and gloves off at last.

“Night Rider,” she heard in her headphones. “Night Rider, this is Potomac. We read you!”

She thought she recognized that voice. Encryption software at both ends of the link made it safe enough to say the name to be sure. “General Warhurst? Is that you?”

The two-and-a-half-second time lag for a radio signal to travel to Earth and for the reply to come back was noticeable, but not long enough to be a problem. “This is Warhurst. Kaitlin? Kaitlin, is that you?”

“That’s affirmative, sir!” She grinned. Only a few moments ago, Kaminski had reminded her of what day it was. By this time, it was even the tenth of November in Washington, where the commandant was waiting out the mission with the Chiefs of Staff. “Listen up! It is my great pleasure to present you and the Marine Corps with a special birthday present…the UN warship Guerrière!”

Three seconds dragged by. When she heard Warhurst’s voice again, she could hear wild cheering in the background, so loud that it almost drowned out the commandant. “Excellent, Lieutenant Garroway! That’s splendid.” There was a pause. “Does your being on the line mean…are Colonel Avery or Captain Fuentes or Captain Lee there?”

“The colonel is still aboard Ranger, sir. Captain Lee…I think he’s outside, helping collect the wounded and get the POWs organized. Captain Fuentes was hurt pretty bad, but I understand from one of the corpsmen aboard Ranger that she’ll be okay.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth, hesitated, then added, “The butcher’s bill was damned high, sir. Don’t have the figures yet, but we had at least fifty percent casualties, dead and wounded. Probably more.”

“I understand, Lieutenant. You people accomplished the damned-near impossible!”

“You have no idea just how close it was, sir.”

“Be advised that three transports are already en route from Earth and will arrive there in two days. Sorry, but except for Ranger and that UN ship, everything we have is old tech! I’m afraid they’ll take their time getting there!”

“Understood, Potomac. We have water, food, air, power, and med support. We’ll be okay.”

“They’ll be dropping off an Army team to take over from you. We want all of the Marines back on Earth as quickly as possible. Don’t know the details, but I imagine they’re going to be throwing a bit of a bash for you people as soon as you get home!”

The news did not cheer her. Postcombat fatigue was setting in, and she still felt sick after taking those rads.

She wondered how badly she and the other surviving Marines of Second Platoon, First Squad, had been burned.

She wondered if she would ever be able to have children. The thought scared her, left her shaking.

“Once again, Lieutenant, an outstanding job. I’ll want to pass that on to Colonel Avery and the rest of the command staff personally as soon as you can round them up and get them on the line.”

“Aye, aye, sir. We just got the comm link working now. We’ll call back at…make it zero-eight-hundred, Greenwich.”

“Roger that! We’ll talk to you again at oh-eight-hundred.”

“Roger, Night Rider copies. Over and out.”

She looked again at the bodies of Bosnivic and three UN troopers—one of the last, apparently, the general in command of the installation—laid out now side by side on the deck near the open hatch. So many killed. So many others wounded.

She wondered if it had been worth it.

David Alexander
An Cavern, Tsiolkovsky Base
0600 hours GMT

David knew that it had been worth it.

Quite apart from the capture of the UN ship—which, he’d been assured, would have been more than powerful enough to have ended the war once and for all on the UN’s terms if they’d gotten her working before the Ranger—there was this, a Cave of Wonders, a new Cave of Wonders on the farside of the Moon.

And it was intact. Blessedly, miraculously intact. Ever since he’d first heard of the possibility of alien artifacts on the Moon, he’d dreaded the possibility of what, in fact, had come to pass—another pitched battle among ruins and relics of inestimable importance to humankind’s understanding of who and what he was. If this place had been destroyed, if Jack had failed to stop that countdown aboard the UN ship…

Well, none of them would have survived to mourn the loss of the place the Ancients had called Gab-Kur-Ra, the Hidden Place Within the Mountains.

It was nowhere near as large or as mysterious as the Builder facility beneath the battered visage of the Cydonian Face on Mars, but it was far more personal. As near as David could tell, this had been some sort of An communications and control center, a series of chambers hollowed out from the solid volcanic rock of Tsiolkovsky’s central peak at a time when humankind was just emerging from the last ice age.

One of the French archeologists who’d been stationed at the base had led David to the chamber earlier, with a couple of Marines along as guards. There’d been a fair-sized community of UN scientists at the base; most had been rounded up by now and put aboard the Ranger, where they were being debriefed.

David knew he was going to be very interested in those intelligence reports. What they’d found here, several years ago, unguessed at by the rest of the world, was as important in its way as the discovery of the Builder artifacts on Mars.

And, damn it, if it hadn’t been for the stupid war, perhaps he could have been brought in on the discovery sooner. He was going to have to have words with Billaud and the others. He’d shared his discoveries with them…well, some of the discoveries, anyway. But they’d been keeping this one secret.

And now he thought he understood why.

The chairs in the room were too small for a human frame, especially one clad in a space suit. The An stood perhaps a meter and a half tall and were quite slender, with a lizardlike grace to their movements. He could tell this, now, watching the large screen in the chamber he thought of as the communications center, where touching a series of oddly shaped keys on the oval instrument console called forth a seemingly endless selection of video images.

Scenes recorded on Earth perhaps eight to twelve thousand years ago.

Clearly, the An had once ruled the Earth, dominating the primitive human cultures with their technology as completely as humans dominated their herds of domestic animals. The scenes reminded David vividly of the Sumerian word for human—lu—which had the additional meaning of “those who are shepherded.” Human workers were lulu, a doubling of the idea that they were creatures needing shepherding. Slaves….

He watched the building of a city—his archeologist’s digger soul desperately wanted to know just where it was—and the worship of the An, somewhere, he thought, in ancient Mesopotamia. He watched endless processions of naked men and women bringing tribute and laying it at the An masters’ feet…and similar processions of men and women bound and collared, led like animals aboard a vast An transport, slaves taken to some unimaginable fate and destination among the stars. He watched other An spacecraft arriving and departing, watched humans arise in revolt only to be burned down by the thousands, watched the creation of the first organized religions, with priests in place as police and intermediaries. And not all of the scenes were in ancient Sumer, either. He saw records that showed the pyramids as they’d originally appeared, thousands of years before the age of the pharaohs, encased in gold and white limestone, ablaze in the morning sun.

Through this eerie window onto the remote past, he understood so much more now. The An had six fingers on each hand. He saw there the origin of the twelve-and sixty-based counting systems of ancient Sumer. He saw the origin of religion and priesthoods, of architecture, of animal and plant domestication, of language, of writing, of science, of Cyclopean monuments, of gold as a medium of exchange, of myths with arcane similarities the world over, of legends of gods who descended from the sky and wielded lightning in battle.

There were answers in these records to hundreds of the greatest mysteries of human history and prehistory. It might take generations more to unravel those mysteries, to uncover and record the real history of Man’s past, but they would be uncovered.

How small, how quaint to assume that the civilizations of Egypt and Sumer had appeared out of nowhere, full-blown and at the height of their glory! How blind to think that the past thirty thousand years were empty of human triumph, accomplishment—and tragedy—simply because no records from that time had survived….

The records stored within the Tsiolkovsky Vault, David knew, were an archeologist’s dream, images—sounds too, he was sure, though the chamber was in vacuum and he hadn’t heard them yet—made by an extraterrestrial civilization intent on studying the intelligent but primitive beings on the world the An called Ki…Earth.

Imagine what there was to be learned….

At the same time, there was terror in that imagining, and in the answers to be found there. David wondered if the human species was ready to learn those answers. Now, after seeing records of humans caught, studied, enslaved—and civilized—by the alien An, he thought he understood why the UN had been so dead set against his revealing what he’d found on Mars.

What he was seeing here might well bring down several of the Earth’s major religions, would certainly generate new religions, as indeed some of the leaked information on the An already had. More important, it would yet again bump Man down a step from his perception of himself as the pinnacle of creation, at the center of the universe. As much as Copernicus or Darwin, it would change forever what Man thought of himself.

Once, David knew he would have immediately demanded the release of this information, and to hell with the consequences. Truth and reality were better than comforting fiction, after all.

Now, he just wasn’t sure. There was so much…so much…

Especially when he saw the Hunters of the Dawn.

He watched from the An point of view as someone…or something attacked in angular, weirdly twisted black craft that were the stuff of nightmares, saw mushroom clouds rise above burning An cities, saw An and their humans slaves alike hunted down and burned from the sky, watched an asteroid impact far out at sea send a tidal wave rolling inland, obliterating the burning colony cities of the An.

Just like Chicago….

Perhaps even humankind’s own penchant for destruction had its roots, its heritage of struggle and war, in these ancient, deadly incursions from the sky.

David knew he was going to have to find out, somehow. Teri…she was going to have to see these records. There appeared to be tens of thousands of them. He wondered whether it would be possible to copy them all and send them back to Earth, or whether it would be easier just to bring Teri and a research team out here.

The latter, probably. Man was going to be doing more and more research in space now, especially now that he’d unlocked the secret of the antimatter drive.

He would have to learn all he could, before the Hunters of the Dawn came again.

The thought left David feeling very cold…and very, very small….