The disturbance was a kind of wake, created by a mass of some hundreds of millions of tons plowing through the tenuous matter of the interstellar void at near-c.
The sentry machine had taken up its lonely vigil half a million years before, during the desperate and no-quarter war of extermination against the Associative, a war that had laid waste to ten thousand suns and countless worlds scattered across a third of the Galaxy. Occasionally, it conversed with others of its kind—a means of staying sane through the millennia—but for most of its existence it had been asleep, dreaming the eldritch dreams of a being neither wholly mechanism, nor wholly biological.
The builders of the Sentry called themselves something that might have translated, very approximately, as “We Who Are.” Other species across light centuries of space and hundreds of millennia called them many other things. The inhabitants of Earth, once, had called them “Xul,” a name that in ancient Sumeria had come to mean “demon.”
A far older civilization had called them the Hunters of the Dawn.
However they were known to themselves or to others, how they were identified was less important for their view of themselves than was their evolutionary imperative, the drive, refined over millions of years, that made them what they were. For the Xul, existence—more, survival—was an absolute, the defining characteristic of their universe. In their worldview, survival meant eliminating all potential competition. Their culture did not have anything like religion, but if it had, their religion would have been a kind of Darwinian dogmatism, with the fact that they had so far survived serving as proof that they were, indeed, the fittest.
For the Xul, the first requirement for continued survival was the detection and identification of potential threats to existence. An object with the mass of a fair-sized asteroid traveling through the Galaxy at near-c velocities indicated both sentience and a technology that might represent a serious threat.
With an analytical detachment more characteristic of the computers in its ancestry than of organic beings, the Sentry tracked the disturbance through local space. A ripple twisted the fabric of space/time, and the Sentry shifted across light-years, emerging alongside the massive object, traveling at precisely the object’s velocity.
At this speed, a hair’s breadth short of the speed of light itself, the universe appeared weirdly and beautifully compressed, a ring of solid starlight encircling the heavens slightly ahead of the hurtling vessels. With the patient calm of a lifespan measured in millennia, the Sentry reached out with myriad senses, tasting the anomalous traveler.
Outwardly, the object was an ordinary asteroid, a carbonaceous chondrite of fairly typical composition, with a dusty, pocked surface of such a dark gray color as to be nearly coal black. Outwardly, there was no indication of intelligent design—no lights, no artificial structures on the surface, no thruster venturis or other obvious clues to the object’s propulsive system. Even the high velocity might be an artifact … a souvenir of a long-ago close-passage of a black hole or neutron star, with the resultant slingshot effect whipping a random, dead rock to within one percent of c.
But the Sentry’s gentle probings elicited other evidence, proof that the fast-moving object was both the product of technology and inhabited. A steady trickle of neutrinos proved the presence of hydrogen fusion plants, providing power for life-support and secondary systems. The tick and flux of even more subtle, virtual particles revealed the operation of a quantum effect power system, tapping the base state of space itself for the energies necessary to move that much mass at that high a speed. The drive was quiescent now, but the potential remained, a subtle aura of shifting energies representing fields and forces that might engage at any moment. Perhaps most telling of all, a powerful shield composed of interplaying gravitic and magnetic fields swept space far ahead of the starship—for starship is what the object was—clearing its path of stray subatomic particles lest they strike rock and cascade into deadly secondary radiation, frying the ship’s passengers as they slept away the objective decades.
For passengers there were—some fifty thousand of them, stored in a cybernetic hibernation that let them pass decades of subjective time without the need for millions of tons of food, water, and other expendables. At the moment, the only member of the starship’s crew that was actually awake was a being far more closely related, in its basic nature, to the Sentry than it was to the slumbering beings in its care, a sentient computer program named Perseus.
For over five hundred years, Perseus had overseen the routine operation of the asteroid starship and her refugee passengers, monitoring drive systems and power plant, life support and cybe-hibe stasis capsules. The ship, christened Argo, had fled distant Earth a few years after the devastating attack on that world by the Xul; her destination was another galaxy entirely, M-31, in Andromeda, something over two million light-years distant.
The voyage as planned would take almost 2.3 million years objective, but on board the clocks would record the passage of barely thirty years. Argo’s sleeping passengers, for the most part, were members of Earth’s political and economic elite. Many were representatives of the governments of the United States and of the American Union who’d felt Humankind’s only hope of survival lay in avoiding all-out war with the technologically advanced Xul, in escaping the enemy’s notice, in fleeing to another galaxy entirely and beginning anew.
Their decision proved to be a supreme exercise in wishful thinking. The Xul sentry engaged Perseus as the sentient program was still shifting to full operational mode. It had time to engage a single emergency comm channel before the Xul group-mind overwhelmed it in an electronic cascade of incoming data.
Parts of Perseus were hijacked by the alien operating system; others were wiped away, or simply stored for later exploration.
And within the Argo-planetoid’s heart, fifty thousand human minds cried out as one as they were patterned and replicated by the intruder. Moments later, the asteroid’s immense kinetic energy was instantly transformed into heat and light, bathing the Xul Sentry in the actinic glare of a tiny nova.
By the Xul way of thinking, the asteroid starship represented both a threat and unfinished business.
Neither could be tolerated.
0407.1102
Green 1, 1-1 Bravo
Alighan
0340/38:22 hours, local time
The Specters descended over the Southern Sea, slicing north through turbulent air, their hulls phase-shifted so that they were not entirely within the embrace of normal space. Shifted, they were all but invisible to radar, and little more than shadows to human eyes, shadows flickering across a star-clotted night.
On board Specter One-one Bravo, Gunnery Sergeant Charel Ramsey sat huddled pauldron-to-pauldron with the Marines locked in to either side of him. The squad bay was red lit and crowded, a narrow space barely large enough to accommodate a platoon of forty-eight Marines in full Mark 660 assault battlesuits. He tried once again to access the tacnet, and bit off a curse when all that showed within the open mindwindow was static. They were going in blind,
