Sam told him, “dealing with the war. Eighty-five of those are cross-linked with stories about the US Marine Corps.”
“Just gimme a summary.”
“Of course, Jack. In summation of the most important stories, extensive fighting is continuing near Chapayevsk and Saratov, where Moslem troops continue their advance into southern Russia, and at Vladivostok, where PRC troops are threatening to break through the Russian-American lines. US forces entered the towns of Navajoa and Ciudad Camargo yesterday, completing operations in Sonora and Chihuahua. According to Secretary of Defense Archibald Severin, ‘The threat of Mexico forcing the creation of their so-called Aztlan Republic, carved out of the American Southwest, has been effectively and permanently neutralized.’”
As she spoke, she let one hand slide down between her legs, gently caressing. Jack’s attention was torn between her and the rapid-fire succession of download imagery. On the screen, greasy black smoke boiled into the sky behind a war-damaged Capitol dome. Other scenes showed fire-fighters and disaster crews picking their way through tumbledown rubble and smoking craters.
“Four American cities,” Sam continued, “Washington, Atlanta, Boston, and Miami, were hit by EU ship-or sub-launched cruise missiles last night. Damage and casualties are reportedly light. The president said today that—”
“Never mind that. Let’s hear the stories about the Corps.”
“Of course, Jack. In Cuba, the launch sites at Matanzas and Sagua la Grande are now firmly under US control. Elements of the 1st Marines are advancing on Habana, and reports of mass surrenders of starving Cuban soldiers have been reported by most major news networks.
“In the Russian Far East today, the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 5th Marines, fighting alongside battle-hardened elements of the 43rd and 115th Russian Armies, repulsed what was described as a major human-wave assault south of Laka Khanka near the city of Ussuriysk—”
“Skip it, Sam. Space news.”
“Whatever you say, Jack. There are fifteen new stories dealing with space, including one cross-indexed to the US Marines and to the war.”
“Shibui! Now you’re talking! Let me hear that one, Sam.”
The window showed a stock photo of the moon, shot from space. “Reports of a military expedition to the moon by a special assault force of US Marines trained in space-combat techniques have been circulating in Washington today, but all attempts to confirm or deny these reports have so far failed. It has been confirmed that a Zeus II heavy-lift booster took off from Vandenberg early this morning with an estimated ninety to one hundred Marines aboard. Official agencies have responded only with ‘no comment’ to speculations that the Marines are bound for the UN-held base in the lunar crater Fra Mauro. There are no images associated with this story.”
“Okay. Save it, and I’ll look at that one a bit later. Anything on aliens?”
“There are twelve stories dealing with extraterrestrials or aliens, including three new additions to the Cave of Wonders database.”
“Sugoi shibui! Lemme see those now.”
“Of course, Jack. One of those stories mentions your Uncle David.”
“Hey, yatta! Play that one first.”
“Whatever you say, Jack.”
Jack didn’t mind admitting that he was space-crazy. A lot of his friends were, especially since the intriguing discovery of ancient humans on Mars had been publicized two years ago. The fact that his archeologist uncle, Dr. David Alexander, had been the sonic-imager technician on that expedition—and the man who’d smuggled out news of the discovery at the very beginning of the war—just made it that much better. And some of what they’d been coming up with, lately, from the incredible mass of data gathered within the Cave of Wonders…
His uncle’s face came up in the window, as secondary windows opened to show the red Martian landscape, the now-famous Cydonian Face, and a montage of images taken from the immense chamber beneath the Face. Jack leaned a bit closer, his heart pounding, as he looked at those images.
Images from other worlds.
His uncle was talking. “Full screen, Sam.”
“Of course, Jack.”
The view of David Alexander filled the screen, replacing Samantha’s tanned and naked body. There were a few things that Jack found more fascinating than pretty women.
“…and so we’ve been able to identify another alien race from the data we’ve brought back,” the man was saying. He was wearing a safari jacket with the Mars-Face emblem of the Cydonian Research Foundation over the left breast pocket. “Of course we don’t know what they called themselves, but we call them Race Eighty-four, because they’re the eighty-fourth distinct species we’ve been able to isolate for study.”
Another window expanded in the picture, showing a…face. It was recognizable as such, at least, which was more than could be said with many of the eighty-three other beings glimpsed on the display screens found within the Cave of Wonders. The eyes were startling, large and golden and horizontally slit by a jagged black line that must have been a pupil; the head was more like that of a fish or reptile, a mottled apple green and green-yellow, with a low skull crest and glistening scales like fine chain mail. There were no external ears that Jack could see, but there was a recognizable nose and a lipless, black-rimmed mouth in a more or less human arrangement on the head.
Lizard-man, Jack thought, heart pounding. Fish-man. It looked so human it almost looked hokey, like one of those man-in-latex monsters that still occasionally waddled through the cheaper varieties of sci-fi late movies, the ones made decades ago, before the advent of digital characters and programmable AI agents. He wondered what its hands looked like, and whether or not it had a tail.
“The other end of this particular communications link,” Alexander said, “is still working, apparently has been working for thousands of years. We think, from what we’ve learned so far, that the Eighty-fours must have been an advanced, technic species perhaps ten to twelve thousand years ago. Now, they seem to be barely above the stone age, if that. We have no idea what happened.
“We also don’t know how the communications complex at Cydonia managed to connect with the Eighty-fours’ home world, especially since Cydonia is something like half a million years old. Each of the active screens within the Cave of Wonders, however, has large amounts of encoded information, information which, we believe, includes data on that species’s language, culture, history, and biology. In time, we might be able to learn more about the Eighty-fours, as well as the other races we’ve glimpsed so far, and discover what connection they may have with the Builders of so long ago.
“What makes this one especially interesting,” Alexander continued, “is that we’ve been able to identify the home star of these people…and they’re close. Real close!”
The alien face was replaced by a landscape and a darkening, alien sky. It looked as though the scene had been shot from the open-air top of some kind of high, flat-topped building; in the distance, fading into the shadows, something like an ancient Mayan step pyramid rose from a black jungle, with stairways sloping up each face and ornate carvings worked into the stone. Two moons, crescents bowed away from the red-orange twilight glow at the horizon, hung in a purple sky. The stars were just coming out….
“It appears that their end of the
