at Starwall—had been copied and packed into the Entruder

software.

The Marine programmers back in Skybase had named

the Entruder package, by ancient tradition, after a hero of the

Corps. Where Chesty had been named for Chesty Puller, the

Entruder was named Evans, for Evans Fordyce Carlson, three-

time winner of the Navy Cross, and the creator and leader of

the legendary Carlson’s Raiders of WWII.

Spacecraft like the EWC-9 Argus, and AI software pay-

loads like Evans, had been vital components in warfare

for centuries. In fact, it could be argued that they were the

remote descendents of twentieth-century computer viruses

and primitive atmospheric craft like the EA-6B Prowler and

even earlier electronic eavesdropping aircraft. There were

military theorists—in fact there’d been military theorists

for many centuries—who insisted that real war had little

to do with armies or ships, which they considered superflu-

ous. It was, these armchair strategists insisted, the electronic

engagement in the opening nanoseconds of any battle that

determined winners and losers, the outcome predicated on

which side gained more elint—electronic intelligence—in

the collision, and which one better defended its own elec-

tronic trenches.

Warhurst didn’t agree. There would always, he was con-

vinced, be a need for someone—a basic infantryman or

Marine rifleman—to go in and take the high ground away

from the enemy.

Evans

Aquila Space

1254 hrs GMT

From Evans’ point of view, he was on board the Argus

spacecraft, resident within a heavily shielded and protected

central processor, but with secondary nodes on board the

Ontos and the widely scattered fighters. Redundancy was

key, here. If things went wrong with the e-penetration at-

tempt, one, at least, of the dispersed network nodes could

292

IAN DOUGLAS

receive what data had been collected and, with luck, get it

back through the Stargate to Puller 659.

Somewhere up ahead, several thousand individual nano-

probes, hurtled through space at some hundreds of kilome-

ters per second. In the first seconds of free flight, the NeP

probes, each one a few centimeters long and as slender as

a human hair, had released an extremely fine, gossamer

net that encircled its body. The net served both to receive

RF signals from the objective, and to maintain a connec-

tion with Evans through tightly focused, highly directional

microwave beams. Each probe selected a radio-frequency

source and began to home on it, using the local magnetic

field to minutely adjust its course.

Most missed their selected targets. Their velocities were

too high, the energies they could bring to bear on course

correction minute. But a lucky few found the source of radio

emanations squarely within the cone of space available to

them. And they struck.

The flash of kinetic energy released by the impact served

as power source, charging the molecule-sized components

of each NeP thread. These burrowed deep into the surface

of the target, then began tasting the material in which they

were imbedded.

The nanopenetrators had been programmed to accept a

wide variety of materials, including the self-repairing hull

composites of a Xul starship. In this case, the raw materi-

als were those of a typical H-class chondritic asteroid, con-

sisting of approximately twenty-three percent iron, ferrous

sulfide, iron oxides, and nickel, with the rest comprised of

silicates such as olivine and pyroxene, and an aluminosili-

cate of magnesium, iron, and calcium called feldspar.

The twentieth-century mathematician John von Neumann

had described a visionary system whereby a suitably pro-

grammed robot might land on an asteroid and, using avail-

able materials, construct an exact replica of itself. Those two

would build more replicas . . . and more . . . and still more

. . . until there were enough replicators that the program-

ming could shift production over to something else, such as

refined metals packaged for shipping back to Earth. These

STAR STRIKE

293

von Neumann machines, as they were called, were an early

concept in the evolution of nanotechnology, for they showed

how asteroidal nanufactories might be grown in the Solar

System’s asteroid belt or Oort Cloud.

A similar process was under way now, as the nano probe

began recruiting molecules and even individual atoms from

the surrounding matrix—iron and iron oxides, nickel, iron

sulfides, and magnesium for metal, calcium, potassium,

carbon, sulfur, and silica for other materials. Much of a

chondrite’s substance was, in fact, a kind of clay called a hy-

drated silicate, which contained a high percentage of water

and organic materials.

Swiftly—the mining, refining, and assembly processes

took place very quickly on a molecular scale—the thread

of nanomaterial injected into the asteroid’s surface began

growing in two directions— up, creating a new sheet of gos-

samer webwork on the surface of the asteroid in order to

establish a microwave link with the distant Argus space-

craft, and down, sending a vast and complex web of threads,

each finer than a human hair, down into the rock’s deeper

structure. The threads, navigating now by sensing heat in

the substrate around them, delved deeper and deeper until

finally one thread made contact with, not asteroidal rock,

but something else . . . a ceramic shell housing a bundle of

fiber-optic cables carrying pulses of laser light.

Several hundred NePs had impacted on that one, rela-

tively nearby asteroid. Within a few minutes, fast-burrowing

roots of nanoassembler threads began encountering one an-

other, exchanging data, interconnecting their networks, and

rerouting their joint explorations inward. Each probe had no

intelligence of its own beyond the bare minimum required

to carry out its mission, but was still loosely linked to Evans

by microwave.

Evans was highly intelligent, with all the technical and

background data acquired from centuries of intermittent

contact with Xul networks, with more substantial exchanges

with the alien N’mah originally encountered at the Sirius

Stargate, and with extensive studies and reverse-engineering

of artifacts left behind by the Builders half a million years

294

IAN DOUGLAS

ago, from the surfaces of Earth’s Moon and Mars to the ruins

on Chiron, Hathor, and elsewhere.

A blob of assemblers gathered around the ceramic conduit

containing bundles of fiber-optic cable, delving, probing,

sampling. Patterns were noted—fluctuations in frequency,

in amplitude, in spin. Data streamed back to Evans, who

began comparing them to the AI’s extensive technic and lin-

guistic files.

The electronic system here was not Xul. That much was

clear from the start. Indeed, attempts to probe the alien net-

work using Xul-style signals were effectively and immedi-

ately blocked. In biological terms, the electronic network

within the asteroid possessed a complex and well-adjusted

set of anti-Xul “antibodies,” which appeared to be designed

expressly to counter electronic incursions by the Xul.

Knowing this, Evans was able to focus on non-Xul elec-

tronic strategies; there still were a daunting number of

possibilities available, but at least the field was reduced

somewhat. Where humans used binary logic as a means

of encoding data, and the Xul used a trinary system, this

alien network appeared to use another form of numeric code

entirely.

Evans needed to establish just what the mathematical key

to this code might be before he could begin to make some

sense of the streams of alien data. He tried and discarded a

number of possibilities—the ratios of prime numbers to one

another . . . the intervals between oddly-even numbers, even

numbers that, when one was divided by another, produced

even numbers . . . even a numerical ordering of the hydro-

gen emission lines resident within the spectrum of the local

star.

It was definitely a brute-force method to cracking the

code, trying one method after another. Evans’ one advan-

tage was that he was fast, working on a molecular scale and

with very tiny energies.

And ten minutes into the attempt, as more and more

nanothreads wormed their way into the vast and tangled

electronic network beneath the asteroid’s surface, he found

the key.

It was Fibonacci numbers and Phi.

STAR STRIKE

295

One plus one equals two. Add the 2 to the 1 and get 3.

Add the 3 to the 2 and get 5. Each number added to the pre-

ceding number gives the next number in the series, creating

an ongoing string of numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so

on to infinity in a never-ending series.

A curious fact about this series is that if you divide any

Fibonacci number by the next number after it, you get a value

quite close to, but never quite equaling, the transcendental

0.618034 . . . , Phi, the so-called “Golden Mean” that seems

miraculously to appear everywhere in the universe—in the

curves and spirals inherent in pine cones and sea shells and

spiral galaxies, within biological ratios and the arrange-

ments of flower petals and leaves growing around a stem,

and even within the proportions of the human body.

The frequencies of the photon packets traveling through

the alien fiber-optic network could be expressed as ratios

between the first few thousand numbers in the Fibonacci

series. The first level of the code had been cracked.

After that, still working by a kind of well-educated trial-

and-error, Evans began to translate signal ratios into layer

upon layer of nested patterns. By now, nanothreads were

sampling thousands of different sources of electrical and

photonic signals, providing an avalanche of data that would

have taken merely human signals analysts centuries just to

separate and describe.

It took Evans about three hours.

And then the humans on board the Ontos had their first

good look at one of the aliens.

Although, at that point they couldn’t really tell what it

was. . . .

21�

0912.1102

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Puller 695 System

1740 hrs GMT

“What the hell is that?” General Alexander wanted to

know.

“The intelligence analysts are still going over it,” Cara

told him. “They’re especially trying to see if there are any

other ways to make this data fit together into meaningful

patterns. But these particular images appear to be intended

as cels in a visual record of some sort.

“We think these are landscapes. . . .”

Alexander was studying the first of the images sent back

from Aquila Space by Recon Sword, watching them unfold

in his mind. “Landscapes?” he said. “Looks more like the

deep ocean.”

The scene was otherworldly . . . but it was tough to tell

whether that was due to the environment or an alien percep-

tion of that environment. Reds, violets, and blues predomi-

nated. Whatever Alexander was seeing, it was murky, with

vague and uncertain shapes just visible in the background.

In fact, his first impression was that he was looking at a

series of abstract paintings. After clicking through several

dozen of them, though, he began to recognize patterns to the

background and in the color.

“So . . . this is a single cel in some kind of animation?”

STAR STRIKE

297

“Yes, sir. Project a number of these in rapid succession,

and you would have the sensation of movement. We have

recovered some fifty thousand of these so far, enough for

half an hour of video, if projected at twenty-four frames

per second. However, so far most appear to be of differ-

ent sequences. In other words, they’re not all part of the

same ‘movie,’ or, if they are, they represent widely different

scenes, different places, within a single sequence.”

Alexander could only imagine the computing power nec-

essary to sort through the incredible mountain of data re-

covered from the alien network so far. And this represented

only the barest beginning.

“What the hell is this?” He’d brought up a new scene.

Again, it was a murky blend of violets and blues, but with

an intensely bright patch of green at the center. Something

like a cloud of purple smoke appeared to rise from the light.

Nearby, illuminated by the bright patch, was a forest of

brilliant scarlet tubes, each sprouting a mass of purple-red

feathers.

“We are still analyzing those,” Cara told him.

“Yeah . . . but, these tubes. Could they be the aliens?

Or some kind of vegetation? Obviously, these things are

alive. . . .”

“Possibly,” Cara told him. “They actually resemble cer-

tain species of deep-sea worms living in Earth’s oceans.

That light could be thermo- or sonoluminescence from a

deep-sea volcanic vent.”

“I’ve simmed teleoperated excursions to deep-ocean

vents,” he said. There were companies in Earthring that

for a fee let you piggyback your consciousness into robots

probing the deep ocean trenches, or the poisonous murk of

Venus. Alexander had taken a teleoperational excursion to

the bottom of the Marianas Trench once, about five years

before, and on another occasion had visited one of the deep-

sea smoker vents near the Galapagos Islands. “I’ve seen ben-

thic tube worms . . . and they can grow pretty big. How long

are these?”

“Unknown. We have not yet established a scale for mea-

surement within these images.”

298

IAN DOUGLAS

He nodded. The tube-worm things in the alien data might

be several meters long. Or, if the alien camera that recorded

them was small and this was a tight close-up shot, they could

represent organisms the size of human hairs. How could you

tell, without knowing the scale of what you were looking

at?

However large they were, these were indescribably beau-

tiful, with glittering, deep violet highlights, and feathery

protrusions arrayed in delicate spiral patterns around the

mouth—if that’s what those openings were. And were those

stalked eyes around the ends? Or organs of some other sense

entirely? Were they worms of some sort, analogues of the

tube-worms of Earth’s oceanic deeps? Or were they some

sort of background vegetation?

How, Alexander wondered, can we even begin to com-

municate with something when we’re not even sure what it

is we’re looking at in the first place?

Historically, of course, the Marines were not intended to

be agents of first contact with new species. Their job was to

find the enemy and kill him.

As the ancient joke had it: “Join the Marines; travel to

exotic worlds; meet strange and exciting foreign peoples;

kill them.”

And yet if Operation Gorgon was to succeed, the MIEF

was going to need to adopt the roles both of first-contact

team and diplomatic corps. So far, and not counting the Xul

themselves, or the apparently extinct Builders, the only other

sapient species encountered by Humankind in eight hundred

years of exploration beyond its home world was the N’mah.

It was self-evident that humanity would not be able to defeat

the Xul alone. Earth had to find allies out there among the

stars, however strange. . . .

He thought-clicked to another image and started. This

was obviously a life form of some sort—the eyes were the

giveaway—and a nightmare one at that. Alexander found

himself looking into the face, if that was what it could be

called, of something that might have been a terrestrial oc-

topus, but with six black and gold eyes spaced around the

head, with multiplying branching tentacles, and with a

STAR STRIKE

299

transparent body—he could clearly see what appeared to

be internal organs, as if rendered in glass—that looked like

nothing Alexander had ever seen in his life. A flatworm?

An insect? He was actually having trouble seeing the thing

as a whole, because his brain was not able to compare what

he was seeing at all closely with the memories of life forms

already in his mind.

Still, those six eyes seemed to be staring back at him with

a cold, inner light and, to Alexander’s mind, at least, there

was something there . . . something aware, something intel-

ligent. What, he wondered, could humans have in common

with such nightmares?

He was reasonably certain, however, that this was an

image of one of the aliens.

But whether it would prove to be an ally against the Xul,

or something as implacably hostile as the Xul, remained to

be seen.

Ontos 1, Recon Sword

Stargate

Aquila Space

1905 hrs GMT

“Recon Sword copies,” Lieutenant Eden said out loud.

“We’ll see what we can do. Out.”

Warhurst appreciated the fact that FTL radio allowed

them to stay in touch with the MIEF, even though straight-

line communications through the Stargate were impossible,

and the fleet was now twelve hundred light-years away. Still,

there was something to be said for not having the capability

to talk to HQ instantaneously—like freedom from micro-

management. The good news here was that they were on

their own.

The bad news, of course . . . was that they were on their

own.

“So what’s the word, Lieutenant?” Galena wanted to know.

“When’s the damned fleet comin’ through, anyway?”

“Not just yet,” Eden said. “They want us to follow up on

all the data they’ve been getting.”

300

IAN DOUGLAS

“Meaning? . . .” Warhurst asked. He had a feeling he

knew what the answer was going to be.

“Meaning we get our asses in gear and approach RFS

Alpha for a closer look.”

Radio Frequency Source Alpha was what they were call-

ing that nearest asteroid, the one from which they’d been

getting most of the data so far. With one exception, RFS

Bravo, none of the other targets had been reached yet by the

fast-expanding cloud of nano e-penetrators. Some were days

away from their targets, in fact, even at 300 kps. Bravo, at

an awkward angle relative to the gate, had been hit by only

a single penetrator, and data from that source so far was

miniscule.

But Alpha was proving to be an electronic treasure trove.

Once Evans had cracked the code, torrents of data had been

coming back over almost two hundred separate microwave

channels, relayed back to Recon Sword, and then, via the

QCC net, back to Hermes and the Fleet.

One of the early images from Alpha might actually

have been of one of the aliens—something like an octopus

head on a flatworm’s body, but with odd extrusions and

extensions that made little sense to human eyes, the whole

rendered in what looked like transparent glass, internal

organs and all.

Sitting down to have a meal with these guys must be

a real treat, Warhurst thought. You’d be able to watch the

whole process of digestion. . . .

“Alert,” Chesty said, interrupting his bemused thoughts.

“We are being electronically compromised.”

“What?” Eden snapped. “How? I don’t see anything on

the interface. . . .”

“It would not show there,” Chesty replied. “The penetra-

tion is extremely subtle, and I am aware of it only as a kind

of echo of certain data. I believe the aliens may have mul-

tiple probes piggybacking in through our own microwave

data channels.”

“Shit!” Galena said. “Lieutenant? What do we do?

We’re supposed to be spying on them, not the other way

around!”

STAR STRIKE

301

“I . . . don’t know.” Eden sounded hesitant.

Warhurst scanned the various internal readouts. What-

ever was peering into the Ontos’ computer system wasn’t

tripping any of the safeguards against electronic sabotage.

Chesty was right. The probe was extremely delicate, exqui-

sitely sophisticated.

“Hey, turnabout’s fair play, right?” Warhurst said. “Why

not let them look?”

“Do you think that’s wise, Gunnery Sergeant?” Eden re-

plied. He was already using Chesty to shut down specific

blocks of computer memory, seeking to slam the door shut.

It looked to Warhurst, though, as though it was already too

late. This thing was fast.

“Why not?” he said. “We’re sterile, right? They didn’t

send us out here with any sensitive data on board, stuff like

the coordinates of Earth, or the TO&E of the MIEF.”

“No. Of course not. If there were Xul here . . .”

“Right. Nothing to tell the Xul where we’re from if we

get spotted and picked up.” He didn’t add that, if the scuttle-

butt in the fleet was any indicator, the Xul already knew

exactly where Earth was, thanks to the capture of the Argo.

“These guys on Alpha aren’t Xul. We came here to find

aliens, right? We want to talk to them. So . . .”

“So we make it easy for them to exchange data with us,”

Eden said, completing the thought. “Still, I wasn’t expecting

to be announced quite this soon.”

“They obviously have some pretty sophisticated com-

puter shit over there,” Warhurst said. “They must’ve seen

what was happening when our NePs started hitting the

surface of their asteroid, and figured out we were trying to

communicate, or at least trying to find out about them. Now

they’re doing the same to us.”

“Our orders allow us to exchange data with the aliens,”

Eden said, but slowly, as though he was still trying to figure

things out. “But just basic stuff. This . . . this probe is going

through everything we have!”

“And probably finding us as weird as we find them. Let’s

just keep moving toward Alpha, Lieutenant, but dead slow.

See if they put out the welcome mat for us. . . .”

302

IAN DOUGLAS

e(i� ) + 1 = 0

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1912 hrs GMT

In a large enough cosmos, all things are possible. Even un-

expected potential congruencies between fundamentally

different statements of Reality.

The beings’ name for themselves, their self-identifying

thought-symbol, would have been incomprehensible if spoken,

for it was not a word, but a mathematical relationship, an

equation, that to their minds spoke of the elegance, the perfec-

tion, and the essential unity of the cosmos. The e(i�) + 1 = 0

were, above all else, mathematicians . . . minds that sought

to understand and describe the cosmos through the beauty

of abstract relationships.

They watched, now, through complex electronic senses,

as the odd little spacecraft approached, the ugly machine

unfolding in their collective minds not as something visible,

but as angles, surfaces, and curves, a manifold of continu-

ous and discrete structures and tensors. The beings watched

through a virtual reality created by their computer network;

they had already ascertained that the aliens, too, possessed

computer technology, and appeared to communicate with

one another by means of similar artificially contrived vir-

tual worlds.

Their network was extensive, powerful, and worked very

quickly. Already they’d begun building up a model of the

alien intelligences. There were two, evidently, one identified

as “Chesty”—though the symbols for that identifier were

unintelligible as yet—and one, equally mysteriously, called

“Evans.” Chesty appeared to inhabit the larger, more dis-

tant spacecraft, Evans the smaller, nearer ship, the craft

that had initiated contact in the first place.

The important thing, the supremely important balance of

the equation, was that the aliens were not the Enemy. And

if they were not the Enemy, they might be . . . what? Associ-

ates? Congruent mentalities?

The e(i�) + 1 = 0 had thought themselves alone, utterly

STAR STRIKE

303

alone, in an extremely large and violent universe. The

thought of allies did not come easily to them.

But they understood the concept of complementary in-

teraction, and of the whole being greater than the sum of

the component parts.

In a big enough universe, wholly independent sequences

could sometimes combine, resulting in startling and unex-

pected convergence.

They would not engage the Trigger to destroy the new-

comers . . . not yet. . . .

Ontos 1, Recon Sword

Stargate

Aquila Space

2119 hrs GMT

“Fifty meters,” Warhurst said, reading off the dwindling

numbers on his internal projection. “Thirty . . . twenty . . .

fifteen . . . ten meters . . .”

The Ontos was slowly, almost grudgingly approaching

the asteroid’s surface, gentling down on carefully adjusted

coughs from its gravitic drive. Outside, the asteroid’s surface

appeared harshly illuminated in white light, every shadow

of each loose rock or fold in the landscape sharply etched

into a surface of smooth gray dust. Landing legs, claws ex-

tended, splayed out, reaching for the surface. Through his

mental window, linked to the craft’s external cameras, War-

hurst was aware of the Ontos’ own shadow moving up to

meet them as they descended.

“Five meters . . . three . . .”

Eden gave a final burst of power to the drive. “Okay.

We’re down. Cutting drive power . . . cutting AG.”

Warhurst hadn’t even felt the bump of landing. As Eden

cut the artificial gravity, his stomach surged, the sensation

almost that of free fall. This tiny drifting mountain did have

a gravity field of its own—but at about one ten-thousandth

of a G it wasn’t enough to keep things nailed down or give

a distinct feeling of up and down. Warhurst reached out and

plucked a pen from a nearby rack and dropped it. The silver

304

IAN DOUGLAS

tube appeared to float in front of his eyes, and only very, very

gradually did it begin to make its way toward the deck.

Warhurst turned his full attention to the view outside, en-

larging the window with a thought. The surface looked like

gray beach sand or coarse powder, the horizon startlingly

close. The local sun, blue-white and intensely brilliant, hung

just above the horizon. The asteroid’s rotation was rapid

enough that the sun’s movement was clearly visible as it

drifted toward the horizon.

“You sure this is the place, Lieutenant?” Galena asked.

“Where’s the welcoming committee?”

“This is where Chesty brought us,” Eden replied.

“The alien signal is coming from that mound in the land-

scape some 20 meters in that direction,” Chesty said, mark-

ing the indicated hillock with a green cursor in their minds.

“And it appears to be opening up.”

The three Marines watched for a long moment. Some-

thing like a door was indeed opening in the side of a hill . . .

inviting.

“Well,” Eden said. “Time to go earn our pay. Prepare for

egress.”

Ten minutes later, the Marines emerged, one by one,

from the belly of the Ontos and began drifting across the

surface toward the open door. There wasn’t gravity enough

to keep them on the surface, and a hard jump could have put

them into orbit. Instead, they used their 660 armor’s thruster

packs, using gentle bursts to guide themselves forward.

As they neared the opening, the sun slid beneath the im-

possibly close horizon. Night closed in with startling swift-

ness; stars winked on, along with the flat band of zodiacal

light stretching up from the spot where the sun had set.

Lights winked on within the entrance ahead.

“You sure this isn’t a Xul trap, Chesty?” Warhurst asked

the invisible but ever-present AI.

“If it is,” Chesty’s voice replied in his mind, “it is an un-

commonly convoluted and opaque one. I have been exchang-

ing data at an extremely high rate of speed for several hours

now, and am beginning to understand the conventions these

. . . beings use. True communication is as yet impossible, but

STAR STRIKE

305

I can with some confidence tell you that these are not Xul. I

see no evidence that they intend us harm.”

“So . . . what’s inside the door?” Galena asked, braking to

a halt relative to the gray and dusty hillside. His jets stirred

up a cloud of powdery dust that hung suspended above the

surface, glowing in the light spilling from the entrance.

“Unknown,” Chesty told them. “But we may learn more

if we enter.”

UCS Hermes

Stargate, Puller 695 System

2140 hrs GMT

“The Marines are entering the opening now,” Cara said.

“Very well,” General Alexander said. He was going over

the ready list one final time, but at Cara’s warning, he re-

opened the mental window to the feed from Recon Sword.

The transmission was coming from a camera mounted on

Lieutenant Eden’s helmet. He could see the back of Garro-

way’s M-660 armor just ahead as the Marine pulled himself

into the doorway.

He fought the temptation to tell the Marines to be care-

ful. They didn’t need micromanaging . . . and wouldn’t ap-

preciate the offer. He remained silent as the trio descended

deeper into the tumbling mountain.

Garroway stopped, and affixed a small, black box to a

rock wall—a comm relay that should keep the three in touch

despite the rock around them.

And then the signal began to fuzz and break up.

“Recon One,” another voice said over the channel. “This

is Ops. We’re losing your signal. Do you copy?”

Alexander heard a reply, but it was garbled and broken.

And then the image was gone, replaced by hissing

static.

Damn. . . .

A QCC link could send comm signals across twelve hun-

dred light-years, from the Ontos to Hermes, in an eye-blink

. . . but the Marines in their armored suits were dependent

on conventional radio to get their data streams back to the

306

IAN DOUGLAS

Ontos. The relays they were using should have kept them

linked in no matter how deep into the asteroid they went.

Evidently, something else was blocking the signal, most

likely some sort of alien shielding technology.

And that might be accidental, or it might be the closing

of a trap.

“Cara,” Alexander snapped. “Open a channel to Admiral

Taggart, please.”

“Aye, aye, General.”

Taggart must have been waiting for the call. His voice

came back almost at once. “I’m here, Martin. Time to

roll?”

“We’ve just lost contact with our scout team, Liam. I

need the full fleet over there, ASAP.”

“We’ve been monitoring the op here,” Taggert replied.

“The ship captains have all been brought on-line already,

and we’re ready to move.”

“Let’s do it, then.”

“I’ve just given the order to proceed through the Gate.”

Alexander had wanted to hold back on passing through

the Gate until they were more certain of how they would be

received, until contact with the aliens was established, but it

was too late for that now.

They were committed, and Alexander was not going to

abandon those men on the other side.

e(i� ) + 1 = 0

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

2209 hrs GMT

Sensors imbedded within the access corridor kept the e(i�) +

1 = 0 apprised of where the three alien probes were as they

descended from the surface. Communication, however, was

not possible. While the e(i�) + 1 = 0 could sense—the closest

analog in terms of sensory input actually was taste —the

internal communications of the three, there was as yet no

way to derive meaning from them.

Indeed, the watchers were having some difficulty now

STAR STRIKE

307

determining whether the intruders were organic beings or if

they were robotic extensions of some sort.

The intruding automatons shared characteristics of or-

ganic beings and machines. To e(i�) + 1 = 0 senses, they ap-

peared as interpenetrating patterns of n-dimensional solids

and complex surfaces that were bound by complex tensors

and their associated scalar fields, radiating heat and oc-

casional bursts of heterodyned radio noise that may have

been attempts at communication.

After several moments, the watchers monitoring the

aliens’ approach assumed they were autonomous probes,

possibly robots, possibly engineered bioforms in protective

armor and under the control of “Chesty” and “Evans,” the

alien intelligences in the ships still outside. Blocking the

probes’ radio links with Chesty had not incapacitated them,

demonstrating that they were not teleoperated machines.

It was equally possible, however, that these three were

biological constructs analogous to the e(i�) + 1 = 0’s own

sigma forms, life forms bioengineered eons ago to allow

them to extend their reach into alien environments.

A major problem remained, now, in establishing com-

munication with the beings, whatever they were. The e(i�) +

1 = 0 could feel the flow and surge of internal virtual worlds

riding some of the emitted RF noise—a clear point of simi-

larity between the two distinct sequences. If there was to be

communication, it might best be effected through a shared

artificial reality.

But deriving common ground, even a virtual common

ground, was going to be an incredibly complex and difficult

task with the limited number of axioms that could be as-

sumed. To build a valid model, the e(i�) + 1 = 0 desperately

needed more data.

Then, as the e(i�) + 1 = 0 watchers continued to observe

the three alien probes, other monitors raised an alarm.

The Translation Ring, orbiting slowly at the outer rim of

the e(i�) + 1 = 0 Collective, had just opened . . . and more

alien tensors—ships, apparently, though the forms were dif-

ficult to integrate within e(i�) + 1 = 0 concepts, were now

coming through.

308

IAN DOUGLAS

Recon Sword

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

2210 hrs GMT

“Hold up, Marines,” Eden said. “We’ve lost signal. I’m not

reading Ops Control!”

Warhurst checked a readout. “The relays are functioning,

sir,” he said. “Must be some kind of shielding.”

“Should we turn around and go back?” Galena wanted

to know.

Eden considered this. “No. We’re here to make contact.

Let’s keep going. But . . . watch yourselves.”

The passageway was a cylindrical tunnel 3 meters wide

plunging almost directly down into the heart of the asteroid.

The gravity was so slight that the descent was easy, a matter

of guiding themselves forward by pushing along the walls,

or with short, tightly controlled bursts of gas from their jets.

Warhurst was wondering when they would find an airlock.

The entranceway had opened directly into this tunnel from

the hard vacuum outside, and they were still in vacuum as

they continued moving deeper.

And deeper. The rock was only about 12 kilometers

across. How much deeper were they going to go?

And then, without warning, the tunnel opened into a

large, a huge chamber, one with polished walls that shone in

the Marines’ suit lights. That chamber was filled with rank

upon rank upon gleaming rank of polished-silver cylinders,

each 3 meters long and 1 meter thick and with rounded end-

caps, each imbedded in a tight-packed tangle of conduits

and plumbing.

“My God,” Warhurst said. “What the hell have we

found? . . .”

System Outskirts

Aquila Space

2315 hrs GMT

The Xul sentry probe had waited, silent, unrecognized, for a

STAR STRIKE

309

long time . . . ever since the vicious series of actions result-

ing in the extermination of Species 3119.

The ancient Hunters of the Dawn knew this star system as

1901–002, the second system of Galactic Sector 1901, and

it possessed an inherent importance simply by being one of

those rare and far-scattered suns possessing a Gateway.

But System 1901–002 was important also because, once,

it had been part of Species 3119’s small but troublesome

collective. The extermination of Species 3119 had not been

as serious a problem as the genocidal war against the As-

sociative, half a million years ago, but it had still given We

Who Are cause for serious concern. Somehow, despite all of

the Xul’s technological resources, Species 3119 had evolved

an extremely advanced and deadly technological base, one

capable of exploding stars.

Even the largest hunterships of the Xul could not with-

stand the flood of energy loosed by the destruction of a

sun.

Long debate had followed the final destruction of Species

3119. How had they managed to evolve such an advanced

technology without alerting those elements of the Xul ga-

lactic collective tasked with identifying threats to Xul sur-

vival? The question had become academic, of course, with

the destruction of the last stronghold of the bitterly suicidal

3119s . . . but there had remained a genuine concern that

other hold-outs might have escaped the notice of the giant

hunterships, might have survived to rebuild their culture,

their numbers, and their star-annihilating technologies.

And so Xul scout-probes had been seeded within each

of the star systems scattered across Sector 1901. Carefully

disguised as solitary lumps of carbonaceous rock and ices

a few kilometers across, orbiting in the cold, dark, outer

reaches of each system, these probes used almost no energy

and therefore were essentially undetectable. The sentient

mechanisms within each slept through the millennia, until

passive sensors on their surfaces registered activity within

certain narrow parameters.

Such activity was evident now in the probe orbiting two

light-hours from the local star.

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IAN DOUGLAS

A fleet, a very large fleet, was coming through the 1901–

002 Gateway.

As yet, the Xul sentience didn’t have enough data to be

able to identify the operators of that fleet. Possibly, the

fleet’s arrival represented the reemergence of Species 3119,

after thousands of years of quiescence. Equally possibly, the

fleet was that of another alien technic species, quite possi-

bly of Species 2824, which had also caused unexpected dif-

ficulties for We Who Are in the recent past.

If it was Species 2824, their fleet’s arrival was of partic-

ularly serious import, for that species originated in Sector

2420, ten to fifteen hundred light-years distant. They must

be learning to use the gateway network, and that could have

unfortunate repercussions for We Who Are.

Even more ominous was their presence here , in one of

the ancient systems of Species 3119. The alien fleet’s arrival

suggested that they knew about the war with 3119, knew how

close 3119 had come to stopping We Who Are . . . and might

be looking for clues to the Weapon 3119 had employed.

Such . . . curiosity could not be permitted.

After recording the event, now two hours old, the Xul

probe powered up, made a final internal check of all sys-

tems, then shimmered in a roil of twisting space/time, and

was gone.

This time there could be no delay. An immediate and

overwhelming response was absolutely necessary.

The supremacy, no, the very survival of We Who Are was

at stake.

22�

1012.1102

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Aquila Space

0945 hrs GMT

General Alexander hadn’t gotten much sleep that night.

Not that abstract terms like night and day had much to

do with the operation of a starship on deployment. By con-

venience and by tradition, 1MIEF operated on Greenwich

Mean Time, but, in fact, all ship stations had to be fully

manned at all times. Besides, ship captains, to say nothing

of the MIEF commanders, Lieutenant General Alexander

and Vice Admiral Taggart, were by definition always on

duty, no matter what their actual state of consciousness.

He’d spent much of the night, so-called, monitoring the

incoming tide of data transmitted first by Recon Sword,

then by Marines of the 55th MARS off the Samar who had

arrived some hours later. Currently, forty-five Marines of

First Platoon, Alpha Company, were in the large subsurface

chamber Recon Sword had discovered. The Marines, guided

by intelligence and xenosophontologist personnel on board

the Hermes, had spread out through the chamber, trying to

gain an understanding of just what it was for.

The best guess so far was that each of those curious cyl-

inders contained an alien held in suspended animation—an

analogue of the old cybe-hibe capsules once used by the

Corps on long, speed-of-light deployments between the stars

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IAN DOUGLAS

centuries before. The conduits appeared to carry life-support

fluids and power. While the alien technology was still dif-

ficult to understand, certain things—electrical pumps and

fiber-optic cables, for example—were recognizable as such

no matter how strange their outward appearance or form.

“I’m not sure,” Alexander was telling one of the MIEF

intelligence officers, “that poking holes in their equipment

is the right way to get started with them. Especially if those

cylinders represent some sort of suspended-animation can-

ister. What if we kill someone inside?”

“That, General,” Colonel Jen Willis replied, “won’t

happen. Nano microprobes are perfectly safe. And the data

we get will tell us a great deal about alien physiology.”

The technique was simple enough, Alexander knew. A

tiny amount of specially programmed nano, consisting of

nano-D and the raw materials for the probe itself, was placed

on the surface of the device or container being sampled. The

disassemblers ate a literally microscopic hole through the

material. As soon as they detected a change in the mate-

rial, the probe nano would insinuate itself through the hole,

growing itself into a variety of sub-microscopic probes.

If there was air or liquid inside the container, the probes

would identify it and radio the results to the Marines out-

side. If there were electronics inside, the probes would trace

and sample them, transmitting information on what types

of signals, at what voltages, were being encountered. The

whole probe process occurred at such a tiny scale, however,

that even living organisms could be sampled without harm-

ing them. Doctors used similar means to diagnose illness,

with patients who lacked their own internal nanosystems for

some reason.

Still, Alexander was concerned. They as yet had no idea

what they were dealing with, and the MIEF certainly could

not afford to turn potential allies into enemies by a careless

or clumsy misstep.

At the same time, they had to learn what they were deal-

ing with. Continued probes of the alien computer network

had amassed huge amounts of data, including more of the

enigmatic cels that might be landscapes or portraits, but

STAR STRIKE

313

most of it was still unintelligible. If the xenosophontology

department could come up with some clues to the nature

of the aliens, the AIs might be able to work out clues to the

language.

A few clues had been gleaned already.

“So . . . what was it you’ve named the aliens?” he asked

Willis.

“ ‘Eulers,’ ” she said, giving the name its Germanic pro-

nunciation which sounded like “Oilers.”

“And that was the name of . . . what did you say? A

mathematician?”

“Yes, sir. Leonhard Euler. Eighteenth century . . . one of

the greatest mathematicians of all time.”

“Okay. But I still don’t understand—”

“Whoever these people are,” Willis explained, “they

seem to incorporate a lot of pretty sophisticated mathemat-

ics into what they’re doing. Our AI analyses were able to

pick out basic number theory from their computer net pretty

quickly, and give us an understanding of some of what

they’re saying. We were able to determine the electrical sig-

nals they use for a lot of their communications that way . . .

zero, one, pi, e . . .”

“You told me earlier they use Fibonacci numbers as a

means of encoding their computer data.”

“Well . . . it’s not that simple, but, essentially, yes sir. In

fact, that gave us our first clue, when we figured out they

were using the Fibonacci series and its relationship to phi

as a means of encoding data. And one of the things we’ve

picked up since is what appears to be a mathematical equa-

tion that they use to refer to themselves.”

“Yes, e to the i times pi, plus one equals zero,” Alexander

said, reading the equation off of an open memory window.

Math had never been his forte. “You told me. But I don’t

understand what that means.”

Willis sighed. She’d explained all of this before. “Sir,

the equation is significant because it very succinctly re-

lates five of the most important, most basic of mathemati-

cal constants— e, the square root of minus one, pi, one, and

zero—in a single brief, elegant statement. It also employs

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IAN DOUGLAS

the mathematical notions of addition, multiplication, expo-

nentiation, and equality. Are you with me, sir?”

“I think so. . . .”

“It’s important to understand that these are not human

concepts. The relationship of the radius of a circle to its cir-

cumference, the base of the natural logarithm, these are very

special numbers that simply appear, all by themselves, in a

whole host of mathematical operations. It’s as though num-

bers like pi and e are built into the nature of the universe

itself. In fact, some mathematical philosophers have used

that equation to attempt to prove the existence of God.”

“I see. And Euler? . . .”

“Came up with the equation, yes, sir. It’s an identity de-

rived from the Euler Formula. Or, I should say, he was the

first human to derive it. Any mathematically competent spe-

cies would do the same, sooner or later, because things like e

are the same whether you’re human or Xul or An or N’mah

or whatever.”

“So how do you know the aliens are using this as their

name for themselves?”

“Guesswork, sir. But educated guesswork. The identity

appears again and again within the data streams we’ve been

receiving, and it appears to be a placeholder, a way of iden-

tifying something else. So maybe it’s what they call their

home planet . . . or maybe it’s something else entirely, but

the likeliest explanation is that they’ve adopted the term to

mean themselves.”

Alexander remembered having downloaded an e-pedia

history, once, that had described how Thomas Young and

Jean-François Champollion had first deciphered the Egyp-

tian hieroglyphics and Demotic script found on the Rosetta

Stone, a thousand years before. Champollion, in particu-

lar, had noticed that certain repeating collections of hiero-

glyphic symbols on the stone were enclosed in ovals, called

cartouches, and that these seemed to correspond to certain

names, like Ptolemy and Cleopatra, that appeared in the

stone’s parallel text in classical Greek. The names of rulers

mentioned in the text had proven to be the key to unlocking

the writing of ancient Egypt. Perhaps the AIs working on

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315

translating the alien data streams were employing a similar

strategy.

Of course, translating the Rosetta Stone would have been

child’s play compared to this, working out the linguistic and

conceptual symbolisms of the completely unknown lan-

guage of a completely unknown alien species.

“An equation is a little hard to pronounce,” he said,

bemused.

“For us,” Willis said. “But we don’t yet know how they

speak to one another. Maybe the mathematical term sounds

to them like a single, short word would to us. Or their lan-

guage might be nothing but equations and numerical rela-

tionships. And they might very well not have speech as we

know it, with audible sounds. Maybe they use organic radio.

Or fluctuating magnetic fields. Or changing colors or skin

patterns. Or, hell, as a particular smell, if they communicate

by means of odors.

“The fact is, sir, we don’t know enough about their biol-

ogy to even guess at what we’re working with here. That’s

why we need to probe one of those capsules, very gently,

very subtly. Until we do, we simply won’t have enough in-

formation to go on, and all of the data we’ve recorded so far

is just, for the most part, noise.”

Alexander thought about it a moment more. “Okay,” he

said, but reluctantly. “But only one, and I want you to use

the absolute least amount of intrusion possible. We’re the

guests, here, and uninvited guests at that. I don’t want to

blunder in and break up the furniture.”

“Of course, General,” Willis said. “That goes without

saying.”

When it came to understanding the alien, Alexander

thought, nothing went without saying. “Just be damned care-

ful,” he said. “We’re already fighting the Xul . . . and maybe

the PanEuropeans as well, if the negotiations back on Earth

break down. Let’s not make these guys mad at us, too!”

“Nothing,” Willis said, “can possibly go wrong.”

But Alexander wasn’t so sure. Beings that thought in

terms of higher mathematics—for him that seemed to define

the very term “alien.”

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IAN DOUGLAS

And the more alien these beings were, the more opportu-

nity there would be for something to go horribly wrong.

First Platoon, Alpha Company

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1010 hrs GMT

“Wait a second,” Garroway said. “They want us to fucking

what?”

Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey turned, looking at the array

of cylinders gleaming, rank upon rank, into the surrounding

darkness. “We’re supposed to poke a hole in one of those

things? I don’t like it.”

Sandre Kenyon held up the probe pack she’d just brought

down from the surface. “They said the hole would be too

small to cause any problem, Gunny.”

“Yeah, but I don’t like the idea of poking at stuff we don’t

understand.”

“It’s fucking crazy,” Sergeant Chu said. “What if there’s,

I don’t know, radiation inside those things? Or antimatter

power plants?”

“That’s a hell of a lot of antimatter generators,” Garroway

said, still looking at the rows of silently waiting cylinders.

He could see several small, black shapes—platoon remote

sensor drones—were patrolling among the cylinders, search-

ing for anything out of the ordinary. “But that doesn’t really

make sense, power plants that small, and so many of them.

They look more like the old cybe-hibe capsules, y‘know?”

“That’s what Master Sergeant Barrett said,” Kenyon

said. “That’s why the whiz-boys want a sample of what’s

inside.”

PFC Sandre Kenyon had arrived from the outside mo-

ments ago, bringing with her the sampling kit. Radio

communication with the outside was still blocked, so the

Marines had fallen back on the ancient expedient of using

runners—or, in this case, fliers—to maintain communica-

tions with the ships of the MIEF.

“Do you know how to use that stuff, Private?” Ramsey

STAR STRIKE

317

asked her.

“Sure, Gunny. They gave me a download.”

Ramsey hesitated. It felt to Garroway like he wasn’t at all

happy with this. “Okay. Do you want to do it, or do you want

to uplink the data to one of us?”

“I can do it, Gunny.” She tapped the side of her helmet.

“They loaded some special software just now, to record what

happens on a molecular level. The Master Sergeant wants

me to hot-foot it back up there to upload the results as soon

as the probe is complete.”

Another long hesitation. “Very well, Marine. Go ahead.”

As she started to move toward the nearest of the cylinders,

he stopped her with a gauntlet on her shoulder. “Wait one,

Kenyon. The rest of you! Move back. Set up a globe perim-

eter, interlocking fields of fire. Chu, Takamura, Delgado,

Doc . . . you four at the tunnel entrance. Put the remotes out

at least 20 meters beyond the globe. We’re going to do this

by the book.”

It took only a few moments for the Marines in the

chamber to take up new positions, with Ramsey and

Kenyon at the center. When each Marine signified that

he or she was in position, Ramsey gave Kenyon the word.

“Okay. Do it.”

Garroway was floating behind one of the cylinders about

4 meters away. Though he was facing away from the two

Marines, he was able to use his helmet optics to zoom in

close, in effect looking over Sandre’s shoulder as she ap-

proached the selected cylinder. The kit she’d brought down

from the surface contained four probe units, each the size

and shape of a bottle cap. Selecting one, she placed it against

the cylinder, then touched its upper surface with the hard-

wire e-contacts in the palm of her left glove. The device was

activated by a mental trigger command, transmitted through

the suit’s electronics.

“Okay,” Sandre said, removing her hand and maneuver-

ing closer so that she could better see. “Probe activated. It

looks like it’s—”

Something like a bright, silver shaft, needle-thin but

meters long, speared from the back of Sandre’s helmet. There

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IAN DOUGLAS

was no sound, of course, in the vacuum of the chamber, but

the effect was like that of a gunshot. The back of Sandre’s

helmet exploded outward in hurtling shards of metal, ce-

ramic, and bone mingled with a shocking scarlet mist that

swiftly froze into glittering pinpoints of ruby ice.

“Sandre!” Garroway screamed, turning sharply. Sandre’s

body tumbled backward, arms flung wide, her helmet a gory

tangle of shredded composites and blood-ice.

“Belay that!” Ramsey snapped. “Hold your positions!”

But Sandre’s body was tumbling past Garroway only a

couple of meters away. Reaching out, he grabbed one of

her combat harness straps and dragged her toward him.

Gobbets of red and gray ice continued spinning across the

chamber, disconcertingly, and Garroway struggled not to

be sick.

As he pulled her close, he saw the circular, two-centimeter

hole leaking freezing red mist that now punctured her helmet

visor dead center. Most of the back of her helmet was gone.

“Corpsman!” he yelled over the company frequency.

“Corpsman front!”

Doc Thorne was already on his way, however, jetting

across from the tunnel mouth in a long, flat trajectory.

“Where the hell’d the fire come from?” Corporal Alli-

son cried. He was pivoting nearby, the muzzle of the field-

pulse rifle mounted on his right forearm seeking a target.

Most of the Marines on the perimeter were turning now

to face the dark corners of the chamber behind Sandre, a

rough, curving surface of rock all but lost in the shadows

30 meters from the nearest side of the cylinder array. A

dozen suit lights began searching the walls of the cavern

in that direction, as remote drones closed in from every

side, piercing the shadows with beams of glaring white

light.

Garroway saw at once their mistake. They were assum-

ing a sniper had drilled Sandre from behind as she worked

at the cylinder . . . but he’d had the distinct impression that

whatever had hit her had come from the cylinder, punch-

ing a two-centimeter entrance hole through her visor, and

exploding outward from the back of her head in a classic

STAR STRIKE

319

exit wound. The way her body had tumbled heels-over-

head away from the deadly cylinder seemed to support

the idea.

“Wait!” he yelled. “That’s not—”

“I got targets!” Corporal Allison yelled, and he fired his

pulse rifle. White flame blossomed off the side of the cavern

wall, 30 meters away.

Okay, you got it wrong, he thought, releasing Sandre’s

body into Doc Thorne’s keeping. He raised his own pulse

rifle, looking for a target. He knew the difference between

an exit wound and an entrance wound, thanks to ballistics

training in boot camp, but he also knew that a shaped-charge

explosive round might reverse the picture, causing explosive

damage on impact and firing a tightly focused needle of hot

plasma out the other side. Everyone else seemed convinced

that there was a shooter out there in the darkness. Anger

surfaced through the numbness left by Sandre’s shockingly

sudden death, anger at himself for having jumped to the

wrong conclusion.

There! His suit optics caught an awkward scramble of

movement, though even under infrared it wasn’t giving much

of a signature. What the hell was that thing? . . .

His simulations of close-combat with Xul robots had

accustomed him to tracking stealthy movement as hostile

war machines emerged from the surrounding bulkheads.

This didn’t look like that, however. The thing looked like

an immense spider . . . or possibly a crab, but with multiply

branched legs spanning a good 3 meters.

But there was no time for analyses, no time for thought.

He triggered his weapon and felt the sharp, visceral thrill of

a solid hit as the spidery thing came apart in a messy splash

of green and yellow liquid.

Other spider-shapes were moving across the cavern

walls, now, the lights from the Marine armor and the drift-

ing remotes casting weirdly shifting, nightmare shadows

everywhere. Garroway used his suit optics to zoom in close

on one, trying to understand what he was seeing. He could

see some sort of harness on the thing, proof that it wasn’t an

animal. He had a moment’s glimpse of six glittering silver

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IAN DOUGLAS

beads arranged in a circle around what might have been the

thing’s face, three above, three below. Eyes? Or weapons?

Xul combat machines possessed randomly scattered lenses

across their egg-shaped bodies, some of them eyes, some of

them beam weapons.

Shit! Maybe these things were Xul! He triggered his

pulse rifle, and the spindle-limbed creature disintegrated in

an eerily silent flash of blue-white energy.

It was distinctly odd, though. The spiders didn’t appear

to be carrying anything like weapons in those branching,

clawed arms, and they weren’t shooting back.

e(i� ) + 1 = 0

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1012 hrs GMT

Inequivalence!

Perhaps the intruders were Enemy after all. They weren’t

of the usual design—oblate spheroids of complex topology,

with beam weapons hidden inside—but they did appear

to be autonomous machines of fairly high sentience, and

they did possess potent beam weapons mounted to their

exoskeletons.

They also possessed the Enemy’s predilections both for

unthinking destruction and for a suicidal disregard for indi-

vidual remote elements, using individual machines as tools,

as expendable parts of the whole. The e(i�) + 1 = 0 regarded

their autonomous extensions, the Manipulators, both as

part of the racial Set, and as pets.

And the Enemy intruders were destroying those pets

now as soon as they emerged into the cavern. The monitors

transmitted a command, pulling the Manipulators back into

the walls of the Third Chamber of Repose.

At the same time, other monitors readied the Trigger.

The Set of e(i�) + 1 = 0 was under deliberate and deadly

attack.

* * *

STAR STRIKE

321

First Platoon, Alpha Company

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1014 hrs GMT

“Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!” Ramsey, Garroway

thought, had apparently come to the same conclusion. The

spiders weren’t shooting, weren’t even armed.

Responding to training, the Marine platoon stopped

shooting almost at once. There’d been five or six of the

things on the cavern wall. At least four had been destroyed

in the volley of fire, and the others were already vanishing

into an almost invisible opening in the rock.

“Chu!” Ramsey snapped.

“Yeah, Gunny!”

“Get back to the surface. Give ’em your memory.”

“Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”

“Doc! How is she?”

“Clinical,” the corpsman replied. “Don’t know if she’ll

be irrie . . .”

Clinically dead. Garroway felt a surge of grief at that.

The thing was, nanomedicine could patch up almost anyone

nowadays, unless they’d been vaporized—turned to smoke.

Usually, irries—irretrievables—were smokers, with so

much of the body burned away there wasn’t enough for full-

body forced cloning.

But there was another class of irrie that no Marine liked

to think about. Sandre’s head could be regrown easily

enough, but her brain had been pulped and sprayed out the

back of her head. The revived Sandre Kenyon would have

none of the memories, experiences, or training of the origi-

nal. In fact, she would be, in effect, a newborn baby, one

who would have to learn to crawl, to toddle, to speak from

the very beginning.

Sandre—the Sandre that Garroway had known and

loved—was gone.

And the pain he felt now at that realization was almost

unbearable, a sharp, burning despair that threatened to para-

lyze him.

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IAN DOUGLAS

“Garroway! Garroway! Snap out of it!”

He became aware of Ramsey shouting at him over the

platoon channel. Doc Thorne was already following Chu out

the tunnel entrance, with Sandre’s body in tow. He hadn’t

even heard Ramsey give the order to take her out.

“Uh . . . yeah . . .”

“Square yourself away, Marine!” Ramsey said, the words

hard and sharp-edged. “Eyes on your front! That goes for

the rest of you devil dogs, too! Watch your fronts!”

Long, silent seconds passed. Garroway was gasping for

breath, struggling to control his grief, his rage, his scream-

ing thoughts. Damn it, damn it, damn it. He knew what he’d

seen. He’d been right the first time.

“Hey . . . Gunny?”

“What is it, Garroway?”

“I don’t think Sand—uh, Private Kenyon was shot. I

don’t think those spider-things on the wall were attacking

us.”

“I know,” Ramsey said. He was floating next to the cyl-

inder Sandre had been probing, examining the neat, round

hole in its side. A thin rime of ice coated the tank’s side. “If

I didn’t know better, I’d say this tank was holding some-

thing, a liquid, maybe, under incredible pressure. When she

triggered the probe, the pressure broke loose, and what was

inside hit her like a mass-driver cannon.”

Garroway nodded inside his helmet. “It was a fucking

accident!”

“Take it easy, Marine. It happens.” He drifted back from

the now-empty cylinder. “Okay, Marines, listen up! By the

numbers, fall back to the tunnel entrance, then start back up,

single file.”

“What the hell?” Allison said. “We’re retreating?”

“I think we’ve done enough damage here,” Ramsey said.

He was working at the release catch for the pulse rifle on his

right arm. It flipped free, and the weapon drifted off. Catch-

ing it, he handed it to Vallida.

“What are you doing, Gunny?”

“Disarming. I’m going to stay here and see if those beas-

ties come out of the walls again.”

STAR STRIKE

323

“Unarmed? You can’t—”

“Just get the fuck out of here!” Ramsey shouted. Then,

more quietly, “The rest of you get back to the surface.

Upload what you’ve seen here. Garroway? Tell them what

you think, what you told me. I’m going to see if they try to

talk to me.”

“Right, Gunny.” Garroway felt stunned, and he felt an odd

sense of déjà vu—not a repeat of something he’d felt before

personally, but of a similar incident, one every Marine stud-

ied in downloaded sims in boot camp.

Centuries before, a group of Marines exploring the in-

terior of the Sirius Stargate had gotten into a firefight

with monstrous, aquatic beings. One of those Marines had

been his many-times-great grandfather, one Corporal John

Garroway.

Somehow, John Garroway had become separated from

the rest of his unit, but with considerable presence of mind

in a terrifying situation, he’d put up his weapon and allowed

the aliens to take him. They’d started showing him movies,

then teaching him their language.

And that had been Humankind’s first modern contact

with the N’mah, an amphibious species that had visited

Earth in antiquity. The N’mah, or the Nommo, as they’d

been known in prehistory, had first visited Earth around

6000 b.c.e. and quite possibly ensured the survival of the

scattered and Xul-brutalized humans who had gone on to

found ancient Sumeria.

Modern Marines were trained to kill, but they were also

trained to use their heads, and to attempt communication

with, to attempt to understand the unknown whenever

possible.

That was what Gunny Ramsey was doing now.

“Gunny?” Garroway said. “You want me to stay with

you?”

“Negative, Marine. Get to the surface.” He was unship-

ping his flamer from his left forearm, now, letting the weapon

drift toward the blast-charred rock wall of the cavern. He

was completely unarmed, now. The question was, would the

aliens understand that?

324

IAN DOUGLAS

“If you don’t hear from me again,” he went on, “well . . .

it’ll be up to the general to figure out what happens next. But

give me a few hours, at least.”

“Aye, aye, Gunny.” He started to go, then turned again.

“Gunny?”

“What?”

“Semper fi.” And then he was gone.

23�

1012.1102

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Aquila Space

1132 hrs GMT

General Alexander was listening in on the debriefing of

the Marines of the 55th MARS. They’d emerged from the

asteroid habitat moments before, and were now on the sur-

face, once again linked in with the MIEF computer net.

In effect, Alexander was an invisible presence within the

virtual room where Colonel Willis was carrying out the

debriefing.

“And Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey is trying to establish

contact alone?” Colonel Willis was asking one of the MARS

Marines.

“Yes, sir,” PFC Garroway replied. In the Corps, female

officers were always accorded the courtesy of sir. “He

wouldn’t let me stay with him.”

“I see,” Willis said. “Okay, Private Garroway. You may

go.”

“Uh . . . sir?”

“Yes?”

“Have you heard anything about Private Kenyon? Are

they going to be able to bring her back?”

“I . . . don’t know, Garroway. But we’ll keep you

informed.”

“Yes, sir.” He hesitated.

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IAN DOUGLAS

“Something else, Marine?”

“Yes, sir. If you need people to go back in for the gunny,

I want to volunteer.”

“Thank you, private. Dismissed.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Alexander checked his internal timekeeper as Garroway

vanished from the virtual compartment. Gunnery Sergeant

Ramsey had been alone inside the alien habitat for over an

hour, now. Damn it, how long did they need to wait before

he sent in the whole MIEF assault force to bring the man

out?

“General Alexander?”

“Yes, Colonel?” The two of them were alone now in the

virtual debriefing room.

“You’ve been listening in?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I . . . don’t think the Marine boarding party came under

attack.”

“I know they didn’t, Colonel. It was a horrible mistake. An

accident.” That much was clear from slow-motion playbacks

of the data in the Marines’ implant data storage, and through

the recordings made by First Platoon’s AI, Achilles.

“What the hell happened to that one Marine, though?”

Willis asked.

“Kenyon? Apparently the contents of those cylinders inside

the asteroid are under pressure . . . tremendous pressure. Achil-

les thinks something like 10 tons per square centimeter. Kenyon

triggered that nanoprobe that began eating a microscopic hole

into the cylinder, and the contents explosively decompressed

through the hole.” In fact, the pressure had propelled the bottle-

cap-sized probe package affixed to the surface of the cylinder

straight through Kenyon’s visor and out the back of her head

like a high-velocity kinetic-kill round.

In the stress of the moment, the Marines had assumed

they were taking fire, and responded appropriately. The

question now was whether the damage could be undone,

at least insofar as human-Euler relations were concerned.

There was little chance that the docs and meds would be able

to bring Private Kenyon back. And a number of Eulers—if

STAR STRIKE

327

that’s what the spidery crab-things were—had been killed

as well.

Operation Gorgon was not off to a good start.

RFS Alpha

Aquila Space

1132 hrs GMT

Ramsey faced the alien.

He knew that what he was experiencing wasn’t real, not

in the usual sense. This was clearly a piece of virtual reality

programming, an illusion unfolding within his mind, but it

was as solid and as realistic as any training sim or virtual

briefing session he’d ever encountered.

Achilles had found the door for him, picking up a thread

of radio noise and following it into this simulated reality.

Most of the platoon AI had vanished with the rest of the

MARS Marines, but a small operational portion of the

AI software remained resident within his armor and his

implants, as much as could be supported by the available

hardware. This version of Achilles was sharply truncated,

its experience and memory limited to what Ramsey himself

had on board.

He thought of the AI as Achilles , a subset of the larger

2

program, and was grateful to have someone else with

whom to talk. Not only that, but virtual reality was the

AI’s natural habitat. He would have been lost without the

intelligent software’s ability to interface with the alien

signals.

“Is this their native environment?” he asked. “A repre-

sentation of it, I mean?”

“It seems likely,” Achilles replied. “I cannot be certain

2

that details such as color are correct, but the data is coming

from the surrounding structure . . . from the asteroid-habi-

tat itself. Their computer system is extremely sophisticated,

almost invisible.”

“Invisible?”

“The most advanced technology,” Achilles informed

2

him with something that almost sounded like pride, “is that

328

IAN DOUGLAS

which interfaces so smoothly with the user that he is un-

aware of its actions. The Eulers appear to live here.”

It still seemed strange, naming an alien race after a long-

dead human mathematician. Especially since it was hard to

imagine anything more alien than this.

Ramsey was most aware of the being’s . . . face; it had

what he assumed were eyes, six of them, so “face” was as

good a term as any. The eyes, three above, three below, en-

circled a clump of multi-branchiate tentacles, something

like the branches of a tree limb.

It reminded Ramsey rather strongly of an octopus, though

the tentacles were nothing like the tentacles sported by that

denizen of Earth’s oceans. The body, however, was utterly

unlike anything Ramsey had ever seen before, a transpar-

ent to translucent gray mass, something like the body of a

huge, flattened worm or snake, but with six bulbous append-

ages that might be legs, each sprouting long and interweav-

ing tentacles that faded away into the surrounding darkness.

The body itself appeared boneless and changed shape as he

watched, from long and thin to short and squat. And were

those three triangular extensions small wings, or large fins

. . . or something else entirely? He found himself fascinated

by what he assumed were the being’s hearts, five of them

running in a line from just behind the head to deep within

that monstrous translucent body, pulsing in series, one after

the next.

He found he could only study the creature for a few mo-

ments before the sheer strangeness began to overwhelm him,

and he had to look away for a time. The surroundings weren’t

that much better, though. He seemed to be standing under-

water, very deep underwater. It was like being enmeshed

in liquid blackness. The only light came from the near dis-

tance, where something like a sphere of bubbles churned

and pulsated, seeming to emit a cool greenish light. Nearby,

a forest of scarlet feathers waved gently in the current.

In this sim, he noted, he wasn’t wearing armor, but plain

black utilities. His boots were planted in viscous mud; he

could not feel the cold, the wet, or what must have been a

crushing pressure from the surrounding water. How many

STAR STRIKE

329

kilometers of ocean, he wondered, looking up into black-

ness, were supposed to be piled up on top of him?

The alien continued to watch him. Nearby, he noted,

were two of the spidery creatures the Marines had encoun-

tered in the chamber earlier, but there was no question in

his mind that the tentacled being directly in front of him

was the controlling intelligence here. There was something

about its eyes, something radiating awareness, calm, and as-

surance. Intelligence.

The question was, how did the alien perceive him? As

intelligent? Or as a computer-simulated icon within the alien

computer net, a manifestation of software expressions that

could be . . . anything?

He thought for a moment, and the alien watched him,

its tentacles drifting and weaving with a current Ramsey

could not feel. The Marines had been briefed before being

deployed to this rock. The Eulers, the xenosophies thought,

knew mathematics, even identified themselves by means of

a math equation.

Okay. Ramsey wasn’t a math wiz, but he knew a few

things. Reaching up, he slapped his chest with his right

hand, paused, then slapped twice. Then three times. Then

five. Then seven. And eleven. Not a simple counting se-

quence, but counting in primes, whole numbers that could

only be divided evenly by themselves or by one.

Wondering how long he should continue the sequence, he

started slapping his chest to count out the number thirteen

. . . but then he felt something like a series of light taps on

his forehead . . . thirteen of them, as the Eulers picked up

the sequence.

Good, he thought. I couldn’t have kept on slapping myself

all day.

The exchange of prime numbers, perhaps, had been a test

. . . or maybe it was simply an Euler’s way of saying a polite

“hello.” He waited. . . .

And then images began to form, unbidden, in Ramsey’s

mind. They were fragmentary, at first, and incomplete, but

he sensed that the alien was uploading information to him,

a very great deal of information, and at a staggering rate.

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IAN DOUGLAS

Language, of course. History. Strange images that Ramsey

couldn’t even grasp as they slipped past.

But he opened himself, and watched . . . and learned.

So . . . this was another marine race, an oceanic spe-

cies like the N’mah, amphibious beings with a two-stage life

cycle. N’mah juveniles were true amphibians, walking erect

on more-or-less human legs but able to return to the sea.

After perhaps forty to forty-five years, the juvenile forms

lost their legs, grew considerably bigger, and never again

emerged from the depths; they also seemed to lose much of

the questing inventiveness of their young, preferring instead

a quiet life of contemplation in warm, shallow, sunlit seas.

In N’mah civilization, it had been the amphibious juveniles

that had discovered dry land, tamed fire and stone, metal

and electricity, and eventually built the ships that took them

to the stars. Sometime around 6000 b.c.e., the juveniles had

visited Earth, helping re-establish civilization in the Fertile

Crescent after the Xul had wiped out the local An colonies.

The N’mah had been remembered in myth as the Nommo.

The Eulers, he saw, were like the N’mah in the scope of

the problems they were forced to overcome as an aquatic

civilization. No fire, an understanding of chemistry limited

by water and pressure, and not even the first glimmer of un-

derstanding concerning astronomy or cosmology.

And yet, given enough time, given billions of years, per-

haps . . .

Ramsey wasn’t sure how long it had taken. The thought-

images flowing through his mind conveyed the sense of

passing time, a lot of it, but he couldn’t begin to put a mean-

ingful figure to it. The Eulers learned, eventually, to use the

intense heat found in the throats of volcanic vents to smelt

metal, and they appeared to develop an advanced under-

standing of chemistry as well, especially the chemistries of

sulfur, methane, and certain salts. It was in biology that they

excelled, however, breeding new species, then altering the

genome of the flora and fauna of the extreme depths to suit

their needs.

The spider-things, he saw in a succession of images,

had been created by the Eulers, who gave them extremely

STAR STRIKE

331

dextrous, three-fingered manipulators at the end of each of

twelve jointed legs. They could swim as well as walk, using

directed bursts of water to jet forward like armored squids,

and they appeared unaffected by changes in pressure. Achil-

les whispered to him an aside that certain terrestrial sea

2

animals—sperm whales and seals, for example—could dive

to extreme depths without being imploded by the pressures

of the abyss. Somehow the spiders did the same trick in re-

verse, and it was through them that the Eulers, many ages

ago, had discovered the ceiling of their watery world, and

broken through to the land and skies beyond.

Through the spiders, which Achilles dubbed “Manipula-

2

tors” because of their obvious dexterity, the Eulers eventu-

ally reached the surface of their world. Ramsey saw pictures

of that world unfold in his mind and was immediately re-

minded of Europa in the Sol System, the iced-over ocean

world that was one of Jupiter’s major satellites. The Euler

home world, evidently, was similar, an icy moon kept liquid

by tidal stresses as it circled its vast, gas-giant primary.

Unlike Europa, this world possessed solid land, however,

scattered across an ice-free equatorial zone.

For untold millions of years, Euler civilization grew

both on the sea floor and in pressurized cities built on land,

where an inborn propensity for mathematics led them, in

time, to add astronomy to their growing repertoire of skills.

Long before, in the cold dark of the benthic deep, they’d de-

veloped abstract mathematics to an astonishing degree—or

so Achilles suggested—but the full flowering of math and

2

physics began when they first saw the stars.

Eventually, they and their Manipulator creations learned

to leave their world entirely, traveling in immense ships

filled with highly pressurized seawater.

By that time, the Euler-Manipulator partnership was a

true symbiosis. Manipulators, in their rigid, jointed exo-

skeletons, were unaffected by extremes of heat or cold,

by radiation, even by hard vacuum. By wearing a kind

of body harness that provided methane-rich, sulfur-laden

water under pressure to the respiratory spiracles along its

sides, a Manipulator could work in open space for long

332

IAN DOUGLAS

periods. Ramsey and the other Marines had seen several

of the Manipulators tasked with maintaining the pressur-

ized cylinders in the chamber they’d entered. He’d seen the

respiration harness, though he hadn’t realized then what

he’d been seeing.

Driven more by curiosity than by a need for living room,

Euler explorers had eventually left their original star system

and ventured to the planetary systems encircling other

nearby stars. If Ramsey was understanding the charts he

was being shown, they’d visited worlds across a swath of the

galactic starscape far larger than that now occupied by hu-

mankind. Among those stars they’d found ice-roofed ocean

worlds similar to home, and colonized many of them. At this

point in their history, they’d not possessed faster-than-light

travel. They hadn’t needed it. The Eulers were immensely

long-lived and they took their civilization with them in im-

mense city-ships.

But in time they’d encountered the Xul.

Ramsey easily recognized the characteristic lines of the

Xul hunterships . . . the slender gold needles 2 kilometers

long, the even larger disks and flattened wedges, each the

hardware “body” of an electronic community dedicated to

Xul survival, and the utter extermination of any competing

species.

The war, Ramsey sensed, had been a long one. The Eulers

were not warlike; indeed, from what they were able to com-

municate through Achilles , they didn’t even have a concept

2

for war. They learned, however, as the Xul began a bitter

and implacable campaign to eradicate each of the worlds

occupied by the Eulers.

With the Xul as teachers, however, the Eulers had

learned, and learned well. The Xul had bombarded their icy

worlds with high-velocity asteroids until whole oceans had

boiled away; the Eulers had learned how to reach down into

the Quantum Sea and adjust such basics of Reality as iner-

tia, mass, and velocity, and bombarded the Xul hunterships

with asteroids in return. The Xul had possessed overwhelm-

ing tactical superiority in their FTL ships. The Eulers had

worked out how to wrap space around their ship-habitats

STAR STRIKE

333

and travel faster than light as well, using a system that, if

Ramsey understood the animated schematics he was being

shown, was identical to the Alcubierre Drive developed a

few centuries ago by Humankind.

But the Xul kept coming, pounding world after world

into crater-gouged ruin.

And then, if the images were to be believed, if he was

understanding this right . . . the Eulers stopped the Xul.

And they did it by blowing up stars.

That, it seemed, was the secret of Aquila Space. Ramsey

could see how they did it, too, as the Euler showed him an-

other set of animated schematics. They would wait until an

entire Xul battlefleet had entered a star system and begun

hammering the local Euler colony. An Euler ship under their

equivalent of Alcubierre Drive would elude the Xul fleet and

dive into the local sun.

Every star, Ramsey knew, was poised in a delicate bal-

ance between its own radiation pressure, which threatened

to tear the star apart, and its own gravity, which sought to

pull it together. The Alcubierre Drive sharply warped space,

compressing the space ahead of the ship, and attenuat-

ing it behind. Put enough of a warp into it, and that fast-

moving bubble of distorted space actually compressed the

tightly packed matter at the star’s core. As the ship tunneled

through the core of the star, more or less shielded from the

awesome heat and pressure by the warp field around it, it

triggered a wave of compression that shattered the balance

between radiation and gravity. The core partially collapsed,

then rebounded, hurtling outward.

Nova . . .

Ramsey watched the wave-front of white-hot plasma

sweeping out through a star system, watched it catch the

Xul fleet as it hung above the frozen moon of a gas giant,

watched even those massive constructs soften, crumble,

soften and melt, and finally vaporize in the intense blast of

star-stuff. The blast savaged the moon as well, of course,

turning it into a short-lived and massive comet as the ice

vaporized in a long, brilliant tail, even as it stripped away

much of the atmosphere from the gas giant primary.

334

IAN DOUGLAS

As the wave-front continued to expand, everything in the

system died.

Ramsey found himself breathing harder, his heart pound-

ing. My God, they destroyed themselves to kill the Xul. But,

then, perhaps they rationalized the exchange as a good trade,

with the Euler colony doomed in either case. Would human-

kind have shown the same single-mindedness of purpose,

he wondered?

“What can we show them in exchange?” he asked Achil-

les . “This guy just uploaded their whole damned history to

2

me.”

“I have been sending them animated schematics show-

ing our ships in combat against the Xul,” Achilles replied.

2

“I fear more detailed conversations must wait until we can

work out a common language.”

Right. The thing floating in front of him wouldn’t speak,

wouldn’t be able to form words the way humans did, so

communication wouldn’t be a matter of just learning one an-

other’s language. Deep sea life forms . . . maybe they com-

municated via sonar, like whales and dolphins. Or through

changes in color and patterning, like octopi and squids. Or

by electrical fields. Or by sensing changes in pressure in the

surrounding water. Or bioluminescence. Or through some

other sense entirely.

“Can you tell him . . . tell him that we’re sorry we dam-

aged that tank?”

“Sorry is a rather advanced concept,” Achilles replied. “I

2

do not have the required symbology. However . . . he . . . she,

rather . . . has just showed me what those tanks are for.”

“They’re like cybe-hibe canisters,” Ramsey said. “The

Eulers are hibernating in those things.”

“Not hibernating,” Achilles told him. “Not quite. Again,

2

I lack adequate symbols for full understanding, but I believe

the beings inside those tanks are alive and aware. They ap-

parently share an extremely rich virtual world, within which

they interact with one another as a viable culture.”

Ramsey digested this. It made sense, in a way, rather

brilliant sense, in fact. In creating asteroid habitats like this

one, or starships crewed by Eulers, they could hollow out

STAR STRIKE

335

a mountain and fill it with water under high pressure—in

effect taking a part of their seafloor world with them. Or,

much simpler, much safer and more efficient, they could en-

capsulate each Euler in just enough pressurized seawater to

keep him alive, pipe in nutrients and pipe out wastes . . . and

free his mind to interact with his fellows in a virtual reality

that could be as vast, as rich, and as varied as their computer

network could allow.

And judging from the way this Euler was using a virtual

reality sim to communicate with him, the alien computer net

must allow a very great deal indeed.

“How advanced do you think the Eulers are, Achilles?”

he asked. “How far ahead of us are they?”

“That question is meaningless, Gunnery Sergeant. The

two cultures, Euler and human, are so different in so many

ways, there are few benchmarks against which both may be

measured. The evolution of their science and technology

took considerably longer, and more effort, than did those of

humankind. However, I estimate that the Eulers as an intel-

ligent species have been in existence for something in excess

of one hundred million years . . . and quite possibly much

longer still.”

“Jesus . . .” When the Eulers had first mastered the

ocean depths of their homeworld, dinosaurs still stalked the

Earth.

It was interesting, though, that the Xul had taken that

long to notice the Eulers. The first appearance of the Xul

with which humans were familiar had taken place half a

million years ago, with the extinction of the commonality

of advanced civilizations variously known as the Ancients

or the Builders.

The fact that the Eulers hadn’t encountered the Xul until

a mere two thousand years ago—when the novae in this

region of space had been deliberately triggered—strongly

suggested a weakness in the way the Xul thought and

acted.

That weakness had been suggested before, and it had to

do with a kind of short-sightedness on the Xul’s part when it

came to understanding life. The Xul seemed to understand

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IAN DOUGLAS

and expect civilizations on worlds like Earth, worlds at a

comfortable distance from the local sun, with liquid water

and Earthlike climates.

But life, as was well known by now, was not constrained

by concepts like Earthlike. Life had taken hold and thrived

in myriad places—from deep-sea volcanic vents on Europa

to the subsurface Martian permafrost to traces found in

Oort-Cloud cometary nuclei. For eight centuries, human sci-

ence had been redefining what the very word life meant; the

search for life in a new solar system was no longer confined

to the star’s so-called habitable zone.

And what was true for life in general, it seemed, was also

true for whole civilizations.

When the Xul had destroyed the interstellar empire of

the An several thousand years ago, they’d overlooked one

An colony—the satellite of a gas giant at Lalande 21185 far

from the meager warmth of the system’s red-dwarf primary.

By chance, a few An and their human slaves had survived

there, unnoticed by the marauding hunterships.

And the amphibious N’mah—a marine species, like the

Eulers, with only a limited presence on solid land—had

been overlooked as well. Eventually, the N’mah worlds had

been discovered and destroyed, but the N’mah, too, had sur-

vived . . . by living inside the hollow structures of a Stargate,

and, more recently, in asteroid habitats hollowed out for the

purpose.

And now it seemed that the Eulers had long been over-

looked by the Xul, apparently because their favored worlds

were gas-giant satellites well outside the usual habitable

zone of a given planetary system. Once the Xul had finally

noticed the Euler worlds, the Eulers, evidently, had, like the

N’mah, moved to hollowed-out asteroids.

Ramsey remembered how many RF targets had been de-

tected in this star system alone, in the vast band of asteroids

circling the local star. There might be some hundreds of in-

habited planetoids lost among the hundreds of thousands of

chunks of debris making up the asteroid belt.

He had so many questions. Surely the Xul could pick

up radio frequency noise as readily as could human ships.

STAR STRIKE

337

Weren’t the Eulers afraid that their radio leakage would give

them away?

Or were they unaware of it? They must know radio, since

their virtual reality world seemed to be transmitted at radio

wavelengths. Or, perhaps the Xul were oblivious to leakage

at radio frequencies?

“Unknown,” Achilles said, reading his thoughts and

2

stating the obvious. “There is reason to suspect that the Xul

are so self-centered they don’t notice relatively subtle ef-

fects like secondary radio transmission. But, ultimately, we

simply don’t know.”

Ramsey stared at the nightmarish being floating in front

of him. If the scale was accurate, the thing was almost 3

meters long, with easily twice the mass of a human, at least.

He felt no fear now, however. The being—had Achilles2

called it she?—appeared to be waiting.

Waiting for what?

Waiting, perhaps, for an apology.

Or, at the least, for some sign that the humans wanted

an alliance. That might be self-evident, especially in the

images of humans battling Xul that Achilles was sending

2

them— the enemy of my enemy is my friend. . . .

On the other hand, there was no way to guess what the

Eulers were thinking, how they thought, how they connected

with or even perceived aliens in the first place. These things

were different. . . .

“Achilles? Can you create an animation of humans and

Eulers working together? Maybe show them fighting the

Xul?”

“I will try.” A moment passed. “Done.”

There was no response from the Euler. It hovered there in

the darkness of a virtual sea, its tentacles waving gently in

an unfelt current.

“Achilles . . . bring an image of the damaged cylinder

into this simulation, would you?”

“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant.”

A lone tank appeared in the shared simulation, upright, 3

meters tall, a meter thick. The 2-centimeter hole was clearly

visible in the side.

338

IAN DOUGLAS

At least the Euler crammed inside that thing would not

have suffered. Literal explosive decompression as the con-

tents blasted out into hard vacuum would have killed it

instantly.

As instantly as it had killed Private Kenyon.

Ramsey moved forward in the simulation until he was

standing directly beside the cylinder. Reaching out, he

tapped it, just above the hole. Then he tapped himself on his

own chest. Finally, he opened his arms wide, hands open,

legs spread apart. Spread-eagle, he stood there for a long

moment, hoping the symbols were clear.

He’d already pointedly divested himself of his weap-

ons, and, in the sim he wasn’t even wearing armor. There

wasn’t a lot else he could do to prove peaceful intent to these

beings, except try for an empty-hand-means-no-weapon ges-

ture. Hell, even that might not be understood by a being that

had no hands.

How did one mime an empty tentacle?

If these beasties knew math, though, they must un-

derstand a one-to-one equivalence. He’d been the one in

command when Kenyon had drilled into the tank. He was

offering himself, one for one. . . .

The damaged tank vanished. Slowly, when nothing fur-

ther happened, he lowered his arms.

“Did you take the tank out of the sim, Achilles?”

“No, Gunnery Sergeant. She did.”

Communication.

He studied the impassive being for a moment. “Achilles?

What makes you think that it’s a she?”

“They have been transmitting a great deal of data, Gun-

nery Sergeant, more than what you have been experienc-

ing for the past few moments. Some of that information

includes data on their biology . . . which appears to be based

on polyaromatic sulfonyl halides, by the way.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Do you see this?” Achilles asked, putting a green cursor

2

over a part of the alien’s body, just below the octopoid head

and between the front two tentacled protuberances. There,

buried between the outer layers of transparent skin and the

STAR STRIKE

339

uppermost of the five pulsing hearts, was a dark, knobby

shadow, like a bunch of grapes the size of Ramsey’s fist.

“Yeah. . . .”

“In the Eulers, the male is a parasite living inside the larger

female. Some species on Earth show similar adaptations.”

Ramsey had heard of deep-sea angler fish that did that,

and possibly for the same reason . . . to ensure that mates

could find one another in the dark and cold of the benthic

abyss.

“Gunnery Sergeant?”�

“Yes?”�

“I believe they are responding in the affirmative.” Achil-�

les opened a new window in Ramsey’s head. “They are

2

retransmitting the animations I just sent them, showing

humans and Eulers working together to fight the Xul.”

The image was a crude animation, showing cartoon rep-

resentations of a human and of an Euler on one side, a rec-

ognizable sketch of a Xul huntership on the other. Human

and Euler moved up and down quickly and in unison for a

moment, and the Xul ship broke into pieces and dissolved.

Thank God! . . .�

“Gunnery Sergeant?”�

“What is it, Achilles?”�

“We now have a clear radio channel back to the fleet.”�

Excitement thrilled, pounding at Ramsey’s awareness. �

“Excellent!”

“Perhaps not. According to FleetCom, the Stargate has

just changed pathways . . . and a Xul fleet is coming through.

A very large Xul fleet. . . .”

As Ramsey accessed the newly opened command

channel, he heard the alert sounding as the Fleet went to

battlestations.

24�

1012.1102

UCS Hermes

Stargate

Aquila Space

1157 hrs GMT

Emerging from the tube-car transport from his office,