24

0605 .1102 Ops Center
UCS Hermes
Orbiting S-2/I,
Core Space
1135 hrs, GMT

“Sir!” a Navy rating called from the comm board. “We’ve lost one of the Tarantulas!”

Alexander brought up the data, opening a new window in his mind. Cara pointed out the location, on the planet’s surface. “What the hell happened?”

“We’re still checking,” Cara told him. “But it seems probable that the Tarantula struck a piece of orbital debris.”
Space around S-2/I was filled with hurtling junk— fragments left over from the Chosin and the Intrepid, from a number of Nightstar aerospace fighters, and from the Xul giants hammered by the Commonwealth squadron. With no atmosphere around S-2/I to burn up the debris, some of those pieces could orbit at quite a low altitude.

“What were they doing that far south of the base?”
“Captain Black dispatched one Tarantula to recover an aerospacecraft pi lot shot down by the Xul,” Cara told him.

“General!” Taggart’s voice called, interrupting.

“Just a minute, Liam.” Alexander was checking the trajectories of other craft leaving the planet. The Howorth was boosting clear of the surface already, while the other Tarantulas were already en route. It would be risky to redirect one of them to go back and pick up the fallen Tarantula’s occupants, but—”
“General!” Taggart’s and Cara’s voices sounded together.
“What?”
“We have hostiles inbound!” Taggart said.
Alexander’s attentions snapped back to the primary link channel. Xul ships, lots of Xul ships, were materializing out of FTL a few tens of light seconds away. Radiation trails scratched through the hydrogen and dust cloud pervading local space showed they were coming from the direction of the Dyson cloud.

“Sensors have detected nearly one thousand Xul hunterships,” Cara told him, her voice maddeningly calm.

“General Alexander!” Taggart added. “We must leave!”
Alexander felt as though the operation were unraveling around him.

“How many people are on board that Tarantula?”
“Five Navy crew,” Cara reported. “One Navy corpsman. Thirteen Marines, including the rescued man. We’re also missing two other pilots. Twenty-one total.”
Twenty-one Marine and Navy personnel.

We never leave our own behind.

But there were times when a few Marines had to be sacrificed for the survival of many. That was, in fact, the nature of warfare despite the fine- sounding words and principles— the need to pick and choose and make key strategic decisions, all the while knowing that those decisions would result in some Marines dying, while others lived.

We never leave our own behind .
But sometimes we have to, for the sake of completing the mission.

“Radio them,” Alexander said. “Tell them we’ll be back!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Admiral? Get us the hell out of here.”
“Where to, General?”
It scarcely mattered. Back to Earth? No, the rest of the fleet ought to be still at Cluster Space. “Rejoin the MIEF, Admiral.”
“Make to Cunningham and Howorth,” Taggart said. His words were leaden. “Order them to make their own way back to friendly space by the best means they can determine. Astrogation! Initiate translation to Cluster Space.”
“Aye, aye, sir. It’ll take a few. . . .”
“We don’t have a few, Commander. Do it.”
Alexander snapped his awareness back to the Ops Center. On the main display, the star still glowed a brilliant ruby hue, but the light was dimmed, somewhat, by the fiercely radiating white thread extending from its surface. The crescent of the planet bowed away from the star; at visual wavelengths there was no sign of the approaching horde of enemy ships.

Then Hermes’ AI put up the graphic icons, red brackets each marking an invisibly distant Xul ship. A mass of intertangled brackets spread across the visual display, moving out from the focus of the accretion spiral. Range data appeared next to the mass. The nearest enemy ships were five light seconds away, and fast moving closer.

The MIEF squadron had done all it could—setting the star S-2 onto a new orbital path. Sensor drones in battlespace would record the star’s passage fifty days hence . . . but there was nothing more the Commonwealth ships or Marines could do.

Including rescuing the nineteen people stranded on the planet’s surface.

“We don’t even know for sure they survived the crash,” Taggart told him.

“No. But we should have checked.”
“There’s no time, sir,” Cara said.

“I know.” Alexander drew himself up a little straighter. Cunningham and Howorth were under full acceleration now, looping around the planet and engaging their Alcubierre Drives. They had a chance, at least, of making it back to human-occupied space, though the journey would take months, even years. Both were large enough that their onboard nanoprocessors should keep their crews well supplied with oxygen, water, and food no matter how long the trip. All they would need do is stop, occasionally, to harvest raw materials from comets or carbonaceous asteroids.

“I know,” he said again. “But we will be coming back. . . .”
And then Hermes shifted phase, dropping into the Quantum Sea and translating through the dimensions and across a spatial gulf of twenty-five thousand light years.

Marine Regimental Strike Team
10 kilometers from Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I Core Space
1210 hrs, GMT

Garroway pulled himself free of tangled wreckage. Broken power cables hung sparking from the overhead, and the deck was sharply canted. Other Marines were struggling to their feet as well. Their link feed from the Tarantula’s cockpit had cut off with the crash.

“Anyone hurt?” Doc O’Neill called, moving down the cargo deck aisle, checking on the Marines. “Is everyone okay?”

The landing, clearly, had been a rough one, but the Marines, well padded within the cocooning embrace of their armor, had ridden out the crash without injuries more serious than bumps and bruises. Someone blew out an emergency hatch on the starboard side forward, and the Marines began scrambling out of the fallen transport.

“Where the hell are we?” Warhurst wanted to know. The terrain was the same as at the pick- up site—broken rock, radiation- baked dust, all beneath that impossible and dramatic three-armed spiral filling a sky of stardust.

“We’re about ten kilometers south of Firebase Hawkins,” a young Navy rating—one of the Tarantula’s crew—told him. She pointed at the horizon. “That way.”

“Yeah,” Lieutenant Aviles, the craft’s pilot, added. “I was trying to make it back to the base. Damn it, we almost made it back.”

“It looks like you’re in command, sir,” Warhurst told him. “We’d better get ourselves sorted out if we want to have a chance of getting rescued.”

“Right, Gunny.”

Garroway heard the conversation, but his attention was elsewhere—on helping Doc O’Neil get Ramsey’s cocoon out of the crashed Tarantula. “How is he?” Garroway asked.

“One step above dead,” O’Neill told him. “I dropped him intocybehibe.”
Cybernetic hibernation had been the first means by which humans had gone to the stars, back when transports were limited by the speed of light and voyages to even the nearest stars took ten years objective. The cere bral implants grown within the brains of Marines and starship personnel could be set to take the man or woman into deep unconsciousness— as O’Neill had said, “one step above dead.” Medical nano swarmed through the circulatory and lymphatic systems, slowing cell growth and metabolic processes to a near stop, removing toxins building up slowly over time, repairing cell damage as tissue inevitably broke down.

With the advent of Alcubierre FTL Drive and, better still, the quantum translation effect used by the largest ships, marines no longer had to hibernate across the gulfs between even neighboring stars. The medical department, though, still used cybe-hibe in serious cases, when a Marine was so badly wounded that he or she would die within hours or days, and the nearest hospital facility was too far away for an immediate medevac.

“Is he gonna be okay, Doc?” Garroway asked.

“I don’t know, Gunny,” O’Neill replied. “I’ve got him doped full of anti-rads, but there’s been a lot of cell damage already. And it’s still happening. Cybe-hibe doesn’t stop radiation. I guess it depends on how long it takes to get him to a hospital. Here, give me a hand with him, okay?”
An hour later, the line of armored Marines and naval personnel had left the crashed Tarantula and was making its way north across the broken plain. They would have a better chance of pick-up, Lieutenant Aviles had decided, back at Firebase Hawkins—not to mention power, intact communications gear, and functioning nanoprocessors to provide water, air, and food. The Tarantula might keep them alive for a few more days . . . but twenty-one people could live indefinitely at the firebase, if they could reach it.

Garroway and a Marine sergeant named Jennings carried Ramsey’s cocoon, with Doc O’Neill walking alongside, keeping an eye on the cocoon’s readouts. They’d laid a sheet of metal cut from the Tarantula’s hull over the cocoon; the active nano surface provided a little extra in the way of radiation protection for the unconscious officer.

Readings were high for all of them, though. Some of them were going to be sick by the time they made it back to the base.

“They couldn’t have left us,” Milo Alvarez said, his boots kicking up small puffs of dust as he trudged along.

“They could and they did, Sergeant,” Warhurst replied. “The damned Xul must’ve jumped them about the time we crashed.”
“So . . . is that it?” Alvarez asked. “They’re just gonna leave us here to die?”
“Nah,” Garroway told the younger Marine. “They always come back for their own. We just have to hold on until that happens.”
But the sky overhead, the dramatic sweep of the accretion disk spiral, the distant clotting of stars and nebulae, only emphasized how very small and how very alone they actually were in a very large and very hostile cosmos.

•••
1105.1102

Senate Committee Deliberation Chamber Commonwealth Government Center, EarthRing
1417, GMT

“. . . and for those reasons,” Alexander was saying, “I formally request permission to return to the Galactic Core immediately, with the full strength of the MIEF.”

He was present at the Senate hearing in person rather than electronically, wearing his full-dress Marine blacks with the blue and red trim. He’d even allowed Cara to convince him to wear a personal corona projector, which imitated the radiant nimbus projected by people present in simulation. He disliked this concession to what he considered to be dim-witted fashion nonsense, but was willing to play along if the golden light playing about his head and shoulders convinced even one senator that he should be heard.

He stood at the speaker’s podium; at his back, a threestory-tall visual display mirrored the downloaded images he’d just played for the assembly through their cere bral links—the red sun with its intolerably brilliant jet, the ocher curve of S-2/I’s planetary crescent, the hundreds of tightly packed brackets marking the approaching swarm of Xul hunterships.

He’d emphasized, of course, the need to recover the twenty-one people left on the surface of S-2/I as well as the starships left behind . . . but the primary thrust of his argument had been on the need to go back and see what was actually happening now at the Galactic Core. That the Xul had been responding to the squadron’s close passage about GalCenter there could be no doubt. That they knew that the star S-2 had been tampered with, slowed in its orbital passage of GalCenter in order to put it onto a new and closer path was certain as well. The question was how the Xul had responded to the decelerating star . . . and exactly what they’d been able to do about it.

He’d been trying to read the emotional presence of the Commonwealth Senate for the last three days as he’d delivered his pre sentation and, so far, at least, he had no idea where things stood. Senator Yarlocke, he’d learned, was still in a deep coma, her body kept technically alive in cybernetic suspension, but her mind, apparently, gone. Senator Gerrad Ralston was now head of the Senate Military Committee in Yarlocke’s place.

Ralston, Alexander knew, was a member of Yarlocke’s camp, one of the bitch’s puppies, as he thought of her coterie of hangers-on, an ultra-liberal anti-militarist, and one of the authors of the misbegotten Pax Galactica peace proposal.

“General Alexander,” one of the senators in the curving rows of seats before him said. His link IDed the man as Senator Jeofri Dunford, of South Michigan, and a political moderate. “You stressed just now the need to understand Xul technological capabilities, and gave that as a principal reason for returning to the Galactic Core. Could you elaborate on that, please? If the Xul are as technologically superior as you’ve been painting them, what chance would our fleet have against them?”

“A good question, Senator. I wish I had as good an answer. The best I can do is to say that, in military terms, we can engage a technologically superior enemy if we’re careful about choosing the time and place of that engagement. History is full of instances where groups took on superior technology and won, or, at least, held out for long enough that they could win a political victory, if not a military one. The classic examples are Vietnam in the 20^th Century, or the various Islamic terrorist groups of the 21^st. And that has been our grand strategy against the Xul for some centuries, now.”

“Indeed. But we don’t seem to have much hope of a political victory, here. We’re not engaging the Xul in a political dialogue.”

“No, sir. And that is a problem, not being able to talk with them.

“But since we can’t talk to them, it may be that military actions of the type we’ve been employing—quick, sharp raids against targets small enough to give us a good chance of short-term success—that those give us our best long- term option in dealing with the Xul, and for protecting ourselves. We’ve been saying all along that to be able to talk with them, we need to get their attention. But, just maybe, we’ve been going about it in completely the wrong way. It may be that, so far as the Xul are concerned, there’s no one there for us to talk to. The Xul, as a collective entity, are not intelligent. . . .”
Several senators came to their feet, shouting.

“What are you talking about?”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“General Alexander! Explain yourself!”
He’d already put his conclusions into a written report, but doubted that many here in this chamber had actually bothered to read it.

“For centuries,” Alexander went on, “we’ve been dealing with the Xul on the assumption that they are intelligent, rational beings. We’ve learned, slowly, that they’re quite different from us, that they think differently, that they react differently to various stimuli. But because they are a technological species, building spacecraft and colonizing worlds, we’ve assumed that they are intelligent . . . meaning that they are capable of reason and of rational discourse, the same as us.

“We now believe that we were wrong in making that assumption.”
Alexander waited for a moment, as shouts echoed through the chamber. Gradually, the noise died away; he had their full attention now.

“Our most recent probes of Xul ships, and of their complex at the heart of the Galaxy, has convinced the xenosophontologists with the MIEF that the Xul are, in fact, a CAS.”
There was a long pause. “Can you explain that term, General?” Senator Tillman ventured.

“A CAS, ladies and gentlemen, is a Complex Adaptive System. We’ve known about them for a long time—since the dawn of our relationship with artificial intelligences, in fact.

“A CAS is any system made up of many independent operators, or agents. Each agent operates on a fairly simplistic level, doing one or two things inde pen dently. A good example is a termite nest.”
“We’ve already determined that the Xul do not have a hive mind, General,” Senator Ralston said.

“I’m not talking about a hive mind,” Alexander said. “At least, not in the sense that most humans understand the term. Most people think that an ant hill or a termite mound are analogues of human cities . . . that there are soldiers to defend them and workers to build and, somewhere down inside the mound, there’s a queen termite telling all of the other termites what to do.

“Termite nests do have queens—and kings as well, unlike ant hills—but their sole contribution to the colony is reproduction. They don’t give orders or control the nest. In fact, no one ‘gives orders.’ Each termite goes about its daily life, doing termite things. Thousands of termites—certain species of them, anyway, together build incredibly complex ‘cities’ six meters high, which regulate the internal temperature to within one degree Centigrade over the course of a day. A colony of a million termites working together creates the impression of a single organized and intelligent mind.

“In fact, each termite is a CAS agent with a very simple set of behaviors. The termite colony has its own pattern of behavior—far more complex, interesting, and apparently intelligent than that of a single insect. One termite is rigid in its behavior, and it dies when its surroundings aren’t appropriate for that behavior. The entire colony, however, is highly resilient and adaptive, can survive a wide range of threats and conditions, and in some ways mimics what we humans think of as intelligent behavior.”
“General Alexander,” Senator McLeod, of Ontario, said, “are you saying the Xul are termites?”
Alexander sighed. How to get through to them? Senators were as rigid and as predictable in their behavior, in some ways, as individual termites.

“No, sir. I’m saying they are a complex adaptive system. Nature is full of them. A hurricane is a CAS, with numerous chaotic agents that work together to create a storm that appears to have conscious volition. Individual agents can be anything. Termites in a termite colony. Humans in the Commonwealth. Machines. AIs or more simplistic software. Corporations spread across the Commonwealth and in other nation- states. Cancer cells are CAS agents. The Commonwealth economy . . . that’s made up of hundreds of billions of individual agents, from banking laws and the rules of supply and demand to individual Commonwealth citizens earning and spending credit. We have government bureaucracies tasked with maintaining and regulating our economy, but no one is in charge. It just happens. City air traffic in a congested environment like New Chicago. Schools of fish in the Atlantic sea farms. Antibodies in the human body. They work together because they grew and evolved together, and what they do was streamlined along the way until it appears to be a seamless, an intelligent whole.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate, we’ve been puzzled for a long time about Xul behavior . . . about why we couldn’t communicate with them, about why they didn’t seem to show curiosity about us or anything else in the cosmos. They seemed to react to us in a simplistic fashion—as radical xenophobes—but we couldn’t understand why their efforts to hunt us down and exterminate were so sporadic and more or less ineffectual. We assumed they were a machine intelligence . . . and yet our own AIs show more intelligence than a Type IV huntership carrying billions of Xul uploaded minds.

“Now we understand. Or we’re beginning to. Their behavior is starting to make sense. Individual Xul, we think, are the conscious minds of once-organic beings uploaded into computer networks. Maybe the original organic Xul, a few million years ago, were xenophobic and built starships and wiped out other species . . . or maybe those behaviors developed later when individual Xul stopped thinking for themselves.

“But they did stop thinking. Groups of Xul arrive at a consensus by echoing thoughts back and forth—what we call ‘singing’ or ‘choruses.’ But the evidence suggests that they are only rarely aware of what’s going on in the larger world around them. They may have created the Xul equivalent of paradise- simulations inside their computer networks, and don’t bother with what we think of as the ‘real world’ any longer.

“In our culture, we have people who are addicted to simulations—game sims, simulated sex, simulated relationships. I submit that the Xul, the real Xul, have taken this process several steps further. They interact with reality around them as rarely as possible. And the blind interaction of trillions of Xul ships and nodes scattered across the Galaxy takes on a life, a personality of its own.”
“What are you saying then, General?” Senator Ralston asked. “That they’re not a threat?”
“Oh, no. They’re very much a threat. When buildings were made primarily of wood, termites could destroy them. The best-regulated national economy can react to market forces in unexpected ways to unexpected conditions and collapse. For millions of years, the Xul CAS has more or less systematically hunted down and exterminated emerging sentient species, star-faring cultures, alien intelligences. And there is a distinct possibility that the CAS is reacting in a startlingly high- tech way at GalCenter to erase Reality, thereby insuring that the Xul survive in their tight little electronic paradises. We can’t permit that to happen, because to do so would mean our extinction . . . and quite possibly the extinction of every sentient species in the universe.”
“Then what are you suggesting, General?” Ralston said, pushing. He spread his hands. “You’re saying we can’t talk to them, we can’t fight them . . .”
“We can learn more about them, Senator. Information, right now, is our most precious asset. We have set events in motion at the Galactic Core that may well fundamentally change Xul behavior, because the Xul CAS has never in its existence faced a threat quite like this. If we’re lucky, we’re going to eliminate so many of the individual Xul agents that the total number may drop below some critical mass, some necessary level below which their CAS doesn’t function. To continue the termite analogy, if you reduce the number of termites from a million to a few hundred, the mound will stop acting as though it’s got a mind of its own. I can’t promise this, now, but I do promise that Xul behavior is about to change.

“If we want to have it change in our favor, we need to be there.”
“General,” Senator Tillman said, rising, “we’ve seen the rec ords you brought back. A thousand Xul hunterships were coming toward your squadron. The entire MIEF, a fleet consisting of every warship in human-controlled space wouldn’t be enough to stop them all. You acted rightly in breaking off the action and returning here. To take our only defense against the Xul back into that . . . that cauldron would be to squander it, to throw it away. An unthinking militarist response is not what is called for now.”
“No, sir, but perhaps a thinking militarist response is what’s necessary. Let me go back in there, with enough ships to make a difference. We will recover our people from S-2/I before the world is destroyed . . . and we will be in place to take action should we see an opportunity to make a positive difference.

“Maybe, Senator, when the Xul stop reacting as a nonsentient CAS to external stimuli, maybe the real Xul intelligence will poke its head up, look around . . . and try to talk with us. Isn’t that worth a try?”
The session, the questions, the answers, the pleading went on for another two hours, and at the end, Alexander, exhausted, left the podium and retired to a side chamber, there to watch the debate, the speechmaking pro and con by a number of individual senators. He listened for nearly another hour to senators urging an adoption of the proposal interspersed with others urging it be rejected. One senator— Alexander never caught his name—insisted that the Navy and the Marines were not in existence to destroy termites at the Galactic Center.

Eventually, it was time for the vote.

“General Alexander?”
He rose. “Senator Armandez! It’s good to see you.”
“Hello, General. I wanted to stop in and tell you . . . thank you. I appreciate what you’ve tried to do.”
Alexander grinned, shaking the man’s hand. “Shouldn’t you be on the floor voting?”
“Already did, General. We gave it our best shot. I don’t know what else we can do.”
“You don’t sound too confident, sir.”
Armandez shrugged. “It’s going to be close. As usual, things are divided pretty evenly between the established party positions, conservative and liberal, militarist and antimilitarist. I don’t know how many of the antis are going to let your speech persuade them. They all have some pretty heavy political baggage, reasons to see the proposal fail.”
The proposal was Alexander’s suggestion, that the full MIEF be allowed to return to the Core and watch events transpire.

“I still don’t understand what they think they have to lose, sir.”
“Political face, in part. And a fair- sized minority would like to have your MIEF at its beck and call. You’d be posted here in the Sol System in case the Xul came here. Eventually, you might find yourself being used in little wars and land grabs elsewhere—in the Islamic Theocracy, or against the PanEuro peans.”
“I thought they were anti-military, sir?”
“They are, General, whatever is convenient for the moment. Whatever serves their career, their political agenda, or their immediate need. If it scratches their itch, they want it. Doesn’t matter what the words are. In a way, the Senate is a CAS, too.”
“I was aware of that, sir.” He hesitated. “May I ask why you’re supporting me? I know you’re considered pro-military—”
He waved the statement aside. “It doesn’t have to do with pro or anti-military. Every man and woman in that chamber knows the military is necessary. They just disagree on how best to employ it. No . . . partly, I agree with you that if we’re forced to fight this . . . this force of nature, it’s best done as far from Sol as possible. And, there’s a personal reason.”
“What’s that?”
“I have a daughter.”
“Yes, sir?”
“A Marine.”
“I remember, Senator.”
“She’s in love with another Marine. One of the men still back there on that planet. She . . . we would like him to come home safely.”
“I . . . understand, sir.”
“Ah! Here comes the tally.”
A total of 321 senators were voting this eve ning. As the results came in, the numbers came up on the display above the image of the Senate Chamber . . . 151 in favor of Alexander’s proposal, 165 against, with 5 abstentions.

The 1MIEF would be recalled to Sol Space. It would not be permitted to return to GalCenter.

“Don’t worry, General,” Armandez told him. “We’ll find a way. We will find a way.”
“Yes, sir.”
But would it be in time to save the people still stranded out there within the Galactic Core?