Battlespace. Ian Douglas
“We have a new situation, one that calls for MIEU-1’s special, um, talents.”
“Another deployment, General?”
He nodded. “Another deployment.”
“To where?”
“To Sirius. Eight-point-six light-years out. The brightest star in Earth’s night sky.”
That pricked Ramsey’s interest. “The Wings of Isis, sir? She found something?”
“Link in, Colonel, and I’ll fill you in with what we know.”
Ramsey closed his eyes and felt the familiar inner shiver as data began to flow, downloading through his cereblink.
Visual: A wedding band adrift in space. Two stars, arc-brilliant and dazzling to look at, hung in the distance, suspended against wispy clouds of hazy light.
“These images were laser-transmitted to us as they were being made,” Foss said. “They arrived two years ago. The star on the left is Sirius A. The other is Sirius B, the white dwarf. And the Wheel. …”
Visual: The NetCam zooms in and the structure is revealed to be enormous. Data scrolls down one side of the visual, indicating dimensions and mass. The structure is titanic, twenty kilometers across, but massing as much as a small start. The density of the thing—better than 6 × 1018 grams per cubic centimeter—is astonishing.
“An alien artifact?”
Foss nodded.
“What is it? A space station? A space habitat of some kind?”
“No. At least … we don’t think so.”
“That density reading,” Ramsey said, examining the data. “That can’t be right.”
“According to gravitometric scans made by the Wings of Isis, it is,” Foss replied.
“Neutronium? Collapsed matter?”
“The density’s not that high. Most of that thing is actually hollow. But we think we know what’s going on. Think of that hoop as a kind of particle accelerator, like the hundred-kilometer supercollider at Mare Humorum on the moon.”
“Okay. …”
“Now imagine, instead of subatomic particles, what you have whirling around inside that giant racetrack are tiny black holes. And they’re moving at close to the speed of light.”
“Black holes? My God, why?”
“Best guess is that what we’re looking at here is an inside-out Tipler Machine.”
“A what?”
“Here’s the data.”
Frank Tipler had been a prominent physicist at the turn of the twenty-first century. Among other things, he’d suggested the mechanism for a means of bypassing space, of jumping from here to there without the tedious process of moving through the space in between. His scheme had called for building a very long cylinder, one hundred kilometers long, ten kilometers wide, and made of neutronium—the ultra-dense collapsed matter of a neutron star. Rotate the thing two thousand times a second, so the surface is moving at half the speed of light. Theoretically, according to Tipler, the rotating mass would drag space and time with it, opening paths through both above the surface. By following a carefully plotted course around the rotating cylinder, a starship pilot could cross light-years in an instant … and would be able to fly back and forth through time as well.
The whole thing was just a thought experiment, of course. No one seriously expected anyone to ever be able to squash neutron stars together in order to make their own time machine.
But someone, evidently, had figured out another way to do the same thing.
“So that thing’s a time machine?” Ramsey asked after he’d had a moment to digest the download.
“Space and time,” Foss replied. “Space-time equivalence, remember? We think this must be one of several identical gateways, constructed around different stars. You fly into one and come out another. We don’t know if they use the time travel component at all, though the smart money says they don’t. They would screw causality to hell and gone if they did. Now. Watch. …”
Visual: The stargate appears from a different angle, suspended against the background haze of the Sirian system. Something appears in the middle, a little off-center. One moment there is nothing there; the next, there is something, a golden object rendered tiny by the scale of the vast Wheel. The scene magnifies, zooming in for a closer look. The object appears to be a ship of some sort, needle slender, but somewhat swollen aft, golden-hued. Data readouts show the object to be over two kilometers long.
Ramsey felt his scalp prickle as he watched the ship grow rapidly larger. The vessel appeared to accelerate suddenly, leaping toward him. …
The image cut off in a burst of white noise and electronic snow.
He blinked. “Okay,” he said slowly. “We have first contact with a high-tech civilization. Who are they?”
“That,” Foss replied, “we don’t know.”
“What happened to the Wings of Isis?” The words were hard, grim.
“We don’t know that, either. Whatever happened, of course, happened ten years ago, while you were still on Ishtar. We have to assume that the Wings of Isis was destroyed, since two more years passed after these images were recorded and transmitted, and we’ve heard nothing from them. That might have been an accident or …”
“Or enemy action. The Hunters of the Dawn?” Ramsey’s heart was beating a little faster now and he felt cold.
“Again, Colonel. We don’t know. But we hope you and your people will be able to tell us.”
“Huh. You don’t believe in easy assignments, do you, sir?”
“This is the Marine Corps, son,” Foss told him. “The only easy mission was the last one.”
27 OCTOBER 2159
Marine Receiving Barracks Star Marine Force Center Twentynine Palms, California 1825 hours, PST
“So what’s the dope, Gare?” Lance Corporal Roger Eagleton asked. “You hear anything?”
“Nope,” Garroway said around a mouthful of steak-and-cheese. “You think they tell me anything?”
“You’re the one with the famous Marine ancestor,” Kat Vinton told him.
“I guess. So why would that mean they’d tell me what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. With your name, we figured they were grooming you for a recruiting tour, y’know?”
“Yeah,” Corporal Bill Bryan added. “Just to keep you happy, so’s you can be convincing with your sales pitch. You know. ‘Join the UFR/US Marines! Travel to exotic climes! Explore strange new cultures! Meet fascinating people! Kill them.’”
“Ooh-rah.”
They were seated at a long mess table, showered, dressed in newly issued utilities, and packing in their first meal in ten years. The chow was first-class and there was lots of it, but now that their stomachs had gotten rid of the last of that damned packing gel and had some time to settle, they were hungry. Even three-lies-in-one field rations would have seemed like food of the gods under the circumstances.