LITMIR.BIZ

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to be listening or hesitating … and then she realized Aiken was talking to someone else on his radio. “Okay. The rest of my team will go through the mission, just to make sure. You come with me.”

      He turned and strode down the rubble-littered street without looking back to see if she was following. She hesitated … but then realized he had all of her notes and records. She had to follow to keep her claim to them. Damn him.

      Nichole didn’t like the Marines, didn’t like their presence here on Ishtar. She felt that militarism had no place on an alien world, had no place at all for a first contact with a sentient alien species. As far as she was concerned, the Marine contingent accompanying the science and diplomatic missions only increased the tension and mistrust between the humans on the one hand and the Ahannu on the other.

      Even so, she had to admit that when things turned sour with the locals, the Marines were all that had stood between members of the civilian missions and death. She couldn’t help wondering, though, if things would have been different had there been no military to provoke Geremelet and his fanatics in the first place.

      Well, the Marines were here, and the damage done. She wondered how things could be patched up with the locals, wondered if there was any way, now, to find a common ground with them. Goddess! Between Geremelet here and the Humankind Party back on Earth …

      Another Ahannu rocket banged into the roof of a compound building nearby, sending up a shower of swirling red sparks. Ahannu technology was such a bizarre mix of the antiquated and the advanced. Some few among their elite warrior units carried weapons more advanced than anything in the Terran arsenal … and yet they used gunpowder rockets, primitive firearms, swords, and chakhul—a kind of pike or spear with a long and wickedly curved blade. The high-tech stuff was believed to be working artifacts left over from the Ahannu glory days of ten thousand years before—god weapons, the Ishtaran natives called them. Ishtar was all that was left of a spacefaring empire that once had spanned at least a dozen worlds, including ancient Earth. The Ahannu and the humans they’d brought with them from Earth had survived the collapse of their civilization, which continued only here in sharply abbreviated and primitive form.

      Current xenoarcheological thought was sharply divided at the moment between two mutually opposing theories. Traditional dogma held that the Ahannu Empire had been utterly destroyed ten thousand years ago by the enigmatic race known as the Hunters of the Dawn, that somehow the Hunters had overlooked this oddball world, largest moon of a gas giant in a red dwarf star system.

      Nichole preferred the newer, more daring theory, advanced by Dr. Hayakawa and others. It posited that the Hunters of the Dawn were long dead when the Ahannu first reached Earth sometime toward the end of the last ice age. The Hunters had been a predatory species ranging this part of the galaxy perhaps half a million years ago, at the time when an earlier cycle of galactic civilization called the Builders had been terraforming Mars and tinkering with what would become the human genome. They and their technology, represented by the immense artifact discovered almost eighty years ago on one of Jupiter’s moons, had destroyed a thriving interstellar community encompassing some hundreds of races scattered throughout this region of space. The Hayakawa Solution held that the Ahannu had been destroyed in a war with themselves, a civil war that devastated all but one of their handful of worlds—Ishtar. It was much easier to accept that idea than the notion that any technic species could have survived—and still be wiping out potential competitors—in nearly historical times.

      It was also a bit more comforting. Any killer species like the near-mythical Hunters that could survive half a million years would have godlike powers by now … and it was arrogant presumption to assume they’d lasted long enough to destroy the Ahannu Empire, then conveniently faded into extinction. No, the Hunters must have destroyed themselves, she believed, or simply retired from the galactic stage at some point in the distant past, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago.

      Not that any of that was of any great importance now, she thought, as another rocket exploded overhead, and bits of red-glowing, smoking shrapnel clinked and chattered on the pavement. “You okay, Doc?” Aiken asked her.

      She nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her with his back to her. “Yes,” she said. “Homemade rockets. Primitive stuff.”

      “It’s still deadly enough,” he replied. “Especially if you’re not wearing armor. C’mon. Down this way.”

      He led her sharply right, into the mouth of a narrow alley between a storehouse and Building 4, the Mission Recreational Center. He was moving at a jog that ate up the ground, and she found herself having to run all out to keep up with him. Damn, I’m not used to this, she thought. Too much sitting around in the office trading gossip and eating native sholats. She was sweating heavily in the humid heat, and her jumpsuit was rapidly soaking through.

      They emerged on Alexander Boulevard, at the edge of the native compound, and turned southeast, toward the Pyramid of the Eye.

      Traditional Ahannu architecture ran heavily toward step pyramids and conical, two- and three-story huts. Some xenoarcheologists thought the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia had been inspired by the buildings of the An colony destroyed there in about 8000 b.c., though there was ample evidence that the Builders had used the same design much earlier, on Mars and elsewhere.

      In fact, the structure dubbed the Pyramid of the Eye was almost certainly not Ahannu but something much older, erected in the Ishtaran jungle by the Builders as much as half a million years ago.

      Perhaps the ancient An had gotten the idea of the step pyramid from the Builders.

      Or perhaps it was simply a very common, very sturdy and easily raised architectural style, common to hundreds of civilizations across the galaxy. Nonetheless, the stark power of the ancient ziggurat contrasted sharply with the low, dome structures of mud and brick clustered around its base.

      She was reminded again of something she’d seen on Earth—the ruins of ancient Egyptian temples, palaces, and workers’ huts clustered about the bases of the three much older, enigmatic pyramids on the Giza Plateau on Earth.

      Aiken abruptly stopped, spinning to his left. Nichole saw nothing but shadows beneath an awning extended from the side of a native shop, but the Marine triggered his laser, firing from the hip. The heavy weapon gave a low-throated hum, deep and loud enough to make her teeth ache, and the beam, made visible by dust particles and ionizing air, sparkled in yellow-white brilliance for nearly a full second.

      Rock exploded from the face of the storefront. By the brief glare of incandescence, Nichole saw a shape—a human shape—stumbling from the scattered shadows.

      It was a man, a Sag-ura, naked and shaven-headed. Judging by the fine network of tattooed scales all over his body, the colorful face markings, and the keen-edged chakhul in his hands, he was one of the Sag-ura slave warriors of the God’s Hand. Aiken’s shot had sliced at an angle down across his torso, nearly severing his head and left arm from his chest in an explosion of blood and charred flesh.

      Nichole didn’t scream, not quite, but she let out a yelp. “What have you done?”

      “Getting you the hell out of here. Come on!”

      “You killed him!” But then she realized how stupid that protest sounded. The slave soldier had certainly been trying to kill them, and if his spear was useless against a Marine’s battle armor, he wouldn’t have had much trouble with the light plasweave fabric of her mission jumpsuit. According to some of the stories collected by the Sag-ura Cultural Studies Group, the Sakura-sag were not known for taking prisoners.

      The Pyramid of the Eye loomed ahead now, its truncated peak bathed in harsh, white light. A pair of Wasps orbited the structure, protecting a larger, more massive flier resting on the uppermost platform. She could see people up there, tiny black stick figures moving against the lights.

      There was a flash and a loud bang, and Aiken stumbled. Nichole could hardly see what happened next, so quickly did it unfold, but she had the blurred impression of more humanoid figures emerging from shadows between several of the buildings along the north

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