was about eight times human standard, and the temperature outside the Starwraith’s hull hovered at around the freezing point of water. The day, by most human standards, was positively balmy … at least when compared to temperatures higher or lower in the intensely stratified volume of Dac’s turbulent atmosphere.
Ahead, a cloud wall rose like an impenetrable cliff, a vast pink-brown cliff with a looming, mushroom-shaped top, with wind-carved striations running along its face.
“Reduce velocity, Blues,” Xander ordered. “We’re going subsonic.”
The flight plunged into the face of the cloud-cliff, as the individual pods were buffeted somewhat by windstreams whipping around the cloud at 300 kilometers per hour. At eight atmospheres, with an H/He gas mix, the speed of sound was nearly 2400 kph, so the local winds were little more than zephyrs.
The clouds thickened until optical feeds were useless; Garwe shifted again to tactical, though there was little useful information the system could give him now—radiation flux, gas mix and pressure, temperature and windspeed, projected position of the other eleven pods of Blue Flight.
And, ahead, the beacon marking Hassetas.
Moments later, the flight emerged into another crystalline gulf, the interior of a vast spiral of clouds marking a hot updraft from below.
And ahead, an immense, gossamer bubble almost transparent in the sunlight, was the Dac living city called Hassetas.
“Hassetas airspace control,” Xander’s voice snapped out, crisp and concise, “this is Associative Marine Flight Blue on docking approach. Acknowledge.”
There was no immediate reply, and the silence was a palpable, imminent threat. Had the Hassetas crisis worsened during Blue Flight’s descent from Tromendet, Dac IV’s largest moon? There could be no doubt that weapons—highly advanced and lethal weapons—were trained on the tiny Marine pods now approaching the living floatreef.
The Marines had just called the Dacs’ bluff and sent their squadron into the heart of this latest crisis, and now it was up to the Krysni jellyfish—and the sapient floatreef they served—to decide how to respond.
Would it be peace, and an invitation to land?
Or the triggering of a savage curtain of high-energy weaponry?
Garwe found he was holding his breath, waiting for the reply. …
2
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1845 hours, GMT
Trevor Garroway leaned back in a reclining seat grown by Captain Schilling from the deck of the large compartment she called the Memory Room. “You sure we can start this so soon?” he asked her. “You said it would take twenty hours to grow a new implant.”
The easy stuff is already in place, she told him. It took Garroway a moment to realize that she hadn’t spoken aloud, that her mouth hadn’t moved as she’d said the words. His implant was already picking up the transmitted thoughts of others with his implant encoding.
So … can you hear this? he thought, forcing the words out one by one in his mind.
Ouch, yes, she replied. You don’t need to shout. We’re connected over your basic personal link-channel. Others will be added later. You can also use that channel to begin downloading library data. You don’t have much in the way of artificial storage, yet—only about a pic of memory so far—but the link will let you download the gist to your native memory. You’ll just need to review it to see what’s there.
So what memories are you giving me now? he asked.
A general history of the past two thousand years, she told him, with emphasis on the Xul wars and subsequent social and technological development within the sphere of Humankind … what you knew as the Commonwealth. The rise of the Associative. A little bit of Galactic history, as we now understand it. Not much detail, here, not yet … just what you’ll need to put things into context later.
When you finally tell me what the goddamn crisis is that warrants pulling a Marine Star Battalion out of cold storage, he said, nodding. Gotcha.
Exactly. Are you comfortable? Ready to begin?
He took a deep breath as he settled back into the too-comfortable chair. Ready as I can be, Captain. Shoot. …
And the images began coming down, a trickle at first, and then a flood.
It would, he realized, take him a long time to go through these new memories. Each distinct memory, each fact or date or historical event, did not, could not exist in isolation, but was a part of a much larger matrix. Until he had access to a lot more information, these bits and pieces would tend to remain discreet, unconnected, and essentially meaningless within the far vaster and more complex whole.
One thing, though, was clear immediately. The aliens were coming out of hiding.
He already remembered, of course, the history of the Xenophobe Wars. The Xul—electronically uploaded nonhuman sentients who’d apparently been around for at least the past ten million years—had been the dominant Galactic species, taking control of much of the Galaxy from a predecessor species known as the Children of the Night. The Xul had brought some evolutionary baggage forward in their advance to sapience—notably a hard-wired survival trait that led them, in rather overenthusiastically Darwinian fashion, to utterly obliterate any other species that might constitute a threat. The Xul, it turned out, had been the answer to the age-old question known as the Fermi Paradox. In a Galaxy ten to twelve billion years old, which, given the number of planets and the sheer tenacity and inventiveness of life, should be teeming with intelligent species, the sky was curiously empty. When Humankind had first ventured into its own Solar backyard, then on to the worlds of other nearby suns, it had encountered numerous relics indicating that various species had passed that way before—the Cydonian Face on Mars, the Tsiolkovsky Complex on Luna, the planetwide ruins of Chiron. …
Eventually, other species had been encountered, and communications begun: the An of Llalande 21185, low-tech remnants of an earlier, vanished stellar empire; the amphibious N’mah, living a precarious rats-in-the-walls existence inside the Sirius Stargate, again the survivors of a once far-flung network of interstellar traders; the Eulers, benthic life forms from the ocean deeps of a world twelve hundred light years from Sol, with a curiously mathematical outlook on Reality and the technology to detonate stars.
All three species had encountered the Xul scourge, and all three had survived, albeit barely. The Eulers had fought the Xul more or less to a standstill by exploding many of their own stars—creating funereal pyres visible as anomalous novae in Earth’s night skies in the constellation of Aquila, back in the early years of the twentieth century. The N’mah had gone into hiding, deliberately abandoning interstellar travel in favor of survival. The An colony on a gas giant moon had simply been overlooked, and without radio or other attention-getting technologies, had managed to stay overlooked for the next ten to twelve thousand years.
The Xul, it turned out, had possessed a singular blind spot. Though no longer
