LITMIR.BIZ

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a whole new level of complexity to the problem.

      How do you find Marines who have no family attachments at home?

      “I’d sign on for another cruise,” Womicki said.

      “Fuck, not me,” Houston said. “I’ve put in six years subjective—and twenty-six objective. Done my time, and now this gyrine’s gonna be an ex-gyrine.”

      “There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine, asshole,” Dunne said good-naturedly. “Once in the Corps, always in the Corps!”

      “Yeah,” Kat put in. “They own you, body and soul, for all eternity. Didn’t you read the fine print on your enlistment contract?”

      “Anyway, Sarge,” Lobowski said. “Maybe they won’t give you a choice. Maybe they just say ‘Jump,’ and you say ‘Aye aye, and how high, sir!’”

      “Aw, they ain’t gonna ship us out without us sayin’ they can,” Corporal Matt Cavaco said. “It’s against the law.”

      “The law,” Dunne said slowly, “is what the brass says the law is. They want us to go fifteen light-years and tromp on some bug-faced locals, then that’s what we’ll do.”

      “Semper fi,” Kat said.

      “Do or die,” Garroway added.

      He wondered if they would at least be allowed leave before being shipped out-system again.

      He had an old debt to settle with his father, and if another twenty years passed on Earth before he returned again, it might well be too late.

       Virtual Conferencing Room 12 Star Marine Force Center Twentynine Palms, California 1904 hours, PST

      “Colonel Ramsey? Thank you for nouming in for this meeting. I know it’s late there … and you must be tired after your long journey.”

      The others in the noumenal space laughed. “My pleasure, General,” Ramsey said. “Not as late for me as for some of you.”

      In point of physical reality, Ramsey was lying on a padded recliner in a small room behind Foss’s office. To his mind’s eye, however, he stood—if that was the word, since there was no trace of a floor—in Sirius space, surrounded by the illusion of glowing gas and dust. Sirius A and B were hard, brilliant pinpoints beneath his feet. Ahead and above hung the enigmatic Wheel.

      “Gentlemen,” the welcomer said, “ladies, this meeting will initiate Operation Battlespace. This information is classified, of course. Code Seven-Orange.”

      General Foss stood beside him. They were being addressed by Major General Franklin Kinsey, a man with the unwieldy title of CO-USMCSPACCOM, the commanding officer of the UFR/US Marine Space Command, based in Quantico, Virginia. Also in attendance were Brigadier General Harriet Tomasek, the coordinator of SMF space transport assets; Brigadier General Cornell Dominick, SPACCOM’s liaison with the Joint Chiefs; and Colonel Gynger Kowalewski, SPACCOM’s senior technical advisor. Two civilians were present as well, a Dr. James Ryerson, from the Federal Exoarcheological Intelligence Department, or XID; and Franklin T. Shugart from the President’s Federal Advisory Council. Other men and women, some in uniform, others in icon-civvies, hovered in the near distance, staff members, aides, and advisors.

      Their images—computer-generated—hung in a semicircle in space, watching the immense Wheel. To one side, the explorer ship Wings of Isis appeared to be drifting toward the artifact, a long and slender assembly of hab and cargo modules topped by the broad, full mushroom cap of the water tank that served as both reaction mass and shielding against deadly impacts of particulate radiation encountered at near-c velocities. The star transport’s deceleration drive had been deployed, rising up through the center of the shielding cap to keep the hab modules safe in the cap’s shadow.

      “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

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