Ian Douglas - Battlespace

“Is this a computer simulation of the ship’s approach?” Dominick wanted to know. “Or the real thing?”

“Actually, it’s built up from data transmitted from a half-dozen robot probes deployed as the Isis entered the Sirius system,” Kowalewski said. “It’s a sim, yes, but it’s based on direct data, not extrapolation.”

“It’s the real thing, Corny,” Tomasek said with a laugh. “In so far as we can know what is real.”

“Here comes the hostile,” Kinsey pointed out. The golden needle of the alien spacecraft appeared. Under heavy magnification, it seemed to materialize out of empty space, but a ripple of movement visible against the background stars visible through the opening suggested that space itself was being warped out of shape within the center of the ring.

“We are pretty sure that the ring is serving as a kind of artificial wormhole,” Kowalewski said, “connecting two distant points in space. The mass readings suggest that black holes are being accelerated through the lumen of the ring and that this is radically distorting both space and time.”

The needle changed course slightly, as though aligning on the Wings of Isis . They watched it accelerate in silence, growing large … growing huge . At the last instant, the alien vessel seemed to shimmer slightly, and then it was gone, everything was gone, stars, Wheel, alien vessel, and the Wings of Isis . The watchers hung in blackness absolute.

There was a long silence, and then the scene reappeared— Isis drifting toward the Stargate, with Sirius A and B gleaming in the distance.

“So where do these guys come from?” Dominick wanted to know.

“There’s no way to tell,” Kowalewski replied.

“Can we use this, this gateway?” Foss asked.

“Again, we don’t know … though the physics of the thing suggest that the answer is yes. A ship would just fly right through, like threading a needle. But there’s also the possibility, if this thing works like a Tipler Machine, as some have suggested, that we would have to fly a very precise, specific course through the gate. The problem, though, is that we have no way of knowing what that course is—or where it will take us.”

“So how do we learn how to use the damned thing?” Kinsey asked. “Trial and error?”

“Essentially, yes,” Kowalewski replied. “It may be possible to send remote probes into the gateway on different trajectories and record the results. The bad news, though, is that coming back is not as simple as retracing your steps. It may be a completely different course into the gateway on the other side that brings you home.”

The group watched in grim silence for several moments more. The scene repeated itself and again they watched Wings of Isis attacked by the huge alien.

Or was it an attack? “We don’t really see the Isis being destroyed,” Foss pointed out. It looks like the alien is still some five hundred meters away when the transmission ends. Maybe the alien took the Isis onboard.”

“It’s possible,” Tomasek said. “ Isis wouldn’t even make a decent lifeboat for that behemoth.”

“The fact that we’ve had no transmissions from the Isis since suggests that she was destroyed,” Ryerson said. “At the very least, our people are being held prisoner. Not exactly a friendly act.”

“Which brings us back to the billion-dollar question,” Kinsey said. “Who are these guys? Are they the Hunters of the Dawn?”

The question hung in the virtual conference space for a long and cold moment. During the course of the last two centuries, exoarcheologists had uncovered the debris left behind by several sets of alien visitors to Earth’s solar system in ages past. The Builders had raised awe-inspiring structures on Mars and on Earth’s moon. They’d terraformed Mars, briefly bringing shallow seas and a decent atmosphere back to that arid world, and they’d evidently set their mark on the genome of the primate that later would be called Homo erectus . All of that had transpired some half million years ago.

The Ahannu—also known as the An in the myths they sparked in ancient Sumer—came along much later. A starfaring culture, but one not nearly so advanced as the godlike Builders, the Ahannu had colonized Earth and enslaved several human populations between twelve and ten thousand years before. They’d introduced mathematics, agriculture, medicine, writing, metallurgy, and other important skills to their slaves, who came to worship them as gods.

The gods had been helpless, however, before the onslaught of yet another alien race which they referred to as the Hunters of the Dawn.

Almost nothing was known about the Hunters. An expedition to Europa in 2067 had uncovered an immense robotic warship, the Singer, trapped deep beneath the Jovian moon’s ice-locked ocean, the only Hunter relic so far discovered. In almost a century of intense study, very little had been learned about them.

What was known was that the Hunters of the Dawn had eradicated the Builders from Earth, Mars, and the moon half a million years ago, as well as Builder colonies on half a dozen worlds of several neighboring star systems. Presumably, they’d also, five hundred millennia later, destroyed the An empire as well, though that idea was still hotly debated. Someone had dropped several large asteroids onto Earth eight or ten thousand years ago, however, wiping out the An colonies and leaving a few human survivors to pick up the fragments of civilization and press forward. They’d also wiped out An colonies on numerous other worlds; the surviving Ahannu outpost on Ishtar evidently had been overlooked because the world was an unlikely place for them—the moon of a gas giant far beyond its star’s habitable zone, kept warm by the flexing of tidal forces.

Were the Hunters of the Ahannu the same as the beings who wiped out the Builders? It seemed unlikely that a civilization could remain intact for half a million years, and yet clues linking the two genocides had been uncovered on both the moon and in the Europan world-ocean. If they were the same race, might that race still exist today, somewhere among the stars?

The Singer had released a powerful signal of some kind when it reached the surface of its icy prison. Even at the crawl of light, the signal had crossed over ninety light-years already and would still be traveling starward today. The possibility existed that the beings who’d destroyed both the Ahannu and Builder cultures yet survived, and that it now knew of the existence of humankind, or would, very soon.

That single chance, no matter how remote, continued to cause sleepless nights for those charged with Earth’s defense. The main reason xenoarcheology continued to be well-funded and—for the most part, at least—strongly supported by several Earth governments was the hope that a dig somewhere would uncover more clues to the Hunters, to where they came from and what they were. The evidence suggested they were out to eradicate all possible competitors in the galactic arena.

If that were true, and if the Hunters of the Dawn still existed, Earth was in terrible danger.

“Obviously,” Dominick said after a long silence, “that is something we need to learn. If the Sirian Wheel is a Hunter artifact, or a base, or a way back to their home worlds, we need to know that as well. And that is why we are authorizing Operation Battlespace.”

The term battlespace was a relatively new Marine concept with some very old roots. As far back as the twentieth century, combat was seen in terms of control of the battlefield, which included the terrain, approaches, and the airspace above the combat zone. Control all of those factors tactically through fire, force, and movement, and a commander dominated the battlefield.