Marine Listening Post
Puller 659 Stargate
1554 hrs GMT
Lieutenant Tera Lee unlinked from the feed and blinked in the dim light of the comdome. “Shit,” she said, and made a face. “Shit!”
“What’s the problem, sweetheart?” Lieutenant Gerard Fitzpatrick, her partner on the watch, asked.
She ignored the familiarity. Fitzie was a jerk, but a reasonably well meaning one. She hadn’t had to deck him yet. Yet. …
“That’s four transgate drones we’ve lost contact with in the past ten minutes,” she said, checking the main board, then rechecking the communications web for a fault. Everything on this side of the Gate was working perfectly. “Something’s going down over there. I don’t like it.”
“You link through to the old man?”
“Chesty’s doing that now,” she told him. She wrinkled her nose. “I smell another sneakover.”
“Yeah, well, it’s your turn,” he said, shrugging. Then he brightened. “Unless you wanna—”
“Fuck you, Fitzie,” she said, keeping her voice light.
“Exactly.”
“Forget it, Marine. I have standards.”
He sighed theatrically. “You wound me, sweetheart.”
“Call me ‘sweetheart’ again and you’ll know what being wounded is like, jerkface. If you survive.”
She dropped back into the linknet before he could make another rejoinder.
The star system known to Marine Intelligence as Puller 659 was about as nondescript as star systems could get—a cool, red dwarf sun orbited by half a dozen rock-and-ice worlds scarcely worthy of the name, and a single Neptune-sized gas giant. The French astronomers who’d catalogued the system had named the world Anneau, meaning Ring, and the red dwarf Étoile d’Anneau, Ringstar. None of Ringstar’s planets possessed native life or showed signs of ever having been life-bearing. And despite frequent sweeps, no one had ever found any xenoarcheological tidbits, none whatsoever, save one.
And that one was why the Marine listening post was here. As Lee linked through to another teleoperated probe, she could see it in the background—a vast, gold-silver ring resembling a wedding band out of ancient tradition, but twenty kilometers across.
Just who or what had created the Stargates remained one of the great unanswered riddles of xenoarcheological research. Most academics, striving for the simplest possible view of things, assumed that the Builders—that long-vanished federation of starfaring civilizations half a million years ago—had created them, but there was no proof of that. It was equally likely that the things were millions of years old, that they’d been old already when the Builders had first come on the scene … back about the same time that the brightest creature on Earth was a clever tool-user that someday would receive the name Homo erectus.
Whoever or whatever had built the things evidently had scattered them across the entire Galaxy. Gates were known to exist in systems outside the Galactic plane; Night’s Edge was such a place, where the sweep of the Galaxy’s spiral arms filled half the sky. Gate connected Gate in a network still neither understood nor mapped. Each Gate possessed a pair of Jupiter-massed black holes rotating in opposite directions at close to the speed of light; shifting tidal stresses set up by the counter-rotating masses opened navigable pathways from one Gate to another, allowing passage across tens of thousands of light-years in an eye’s blink. More, the vibrational frequencies of those planetary masses could be tuned, allowing one Gate to connect with any of several thousand alternate Gates.
The alien N’mah, first contacted in 2170, had been living inside the Gate discovered in the Sirius system, 8.6 light-years from Earth. Though they’d lost the technology required for faster-than-light drives, they’d learned a little about Gate technology, and they’d taught Humankind how to use the Gates—at least after a fashion. Thanks to them, Marines had scored important victories over the Xul, in Cluster Space, and at Night’s Edge.
If it had simply been a matter of destroying Stargates to keep the Xul out of human space, things would have been far simpler. Unfortunately, it turned out that there was more than one way to outpace light. The Xul used the Gates extensively—indeed, a large minority of those academics felt that the Xul were the original builders of the Stargates—but their hunterships could also slip from star to star in days or weeks without benefit of the Gates.
In the past five centuries, Humans had learned at last how to harness quantum-state vacuum energies and liberate inconceivable free energy, and how to apply that energy to the Quantum Sea in order to achieve trans-c pseudovelocities—high multiples of the speed of light. They’d located some dozens of separate Stargates, and sent both robotic and manned probes through to chart the accessible spaces on the far side.
Most probes found only another Stargate, usually circling a distant star, like Puller 659, with lifeless worlds or no worlds at all. A few led to planetary systems possessing earthlike worlds, though, so far, no other sentient species had been found this way, and, in accord with the Treaty of Chiron, none had been opened to human colonization.
A very few, mercifully few, opened into star systems occupied by the Xul.
The Ringstar Gate at Puller 659 was one such. One of the regions accessed through the Puller Gate was in a system dominated by a hot, type A star, seething with deadly radiation burning off the galactic core, and host to a major Xul base.
As was the case every time a Xul base was discovered, a Marine listening post had been constructed close by the Puller 659 Gate, and a careful watch kept. Periodically, AI-controlled probes were sent through the Gate to record signals and images from the Xul base. The probes were tiny—the size of volleyballs—and virtually undetectable. The probes would slip through, make their recordings, then double back through the Gate to make their reports.
The usual routine was to send one probe through at a time, to minimize the chances of the reconnaissance being detected. Faults and failures happened, however, and losing contact with one or even two was not unusual, especially through the turbulent gravitic storms and tides swirling about the mouth of a Gate. But Lee had just sent the third probe in a row through to check on number one, and its lasercom trace—kept tight and low-power to avoid detection—had been cut off within twenty seconds of passing the Gate interface.
Not good. Not good at all … especially since the lasercom threads carried no data about what was going on down range, save that the probe was functional.
And standing orders described in considerable detail what happened in such cases.
It was time for a sneak-and-peek.
“Package up the log,” she told Chesty over the telencephalic link. “Beam it out NL. And recommend to Major Tomanaga that we go on full alert.”
“Major Tomanaga is already doing so,” the base AI told her, “and he has just authorized a level-2 reconnaissance through to Starwall.”
“Excellent.” Starwall was the name of the system on the other side of the Gate, the location of the Xul base.
“Will you be taking an FR-100 through the interface?”
“Yeah. Prep one for me, please.”
“Number Three is coming on-line now.”
In a larger base, there would have been a standby pool of Marine fighter pilots ready to fly recon, but the listening post was manned by six Marines at a time, standing watch-in-three. The main base complex was a space station orbiting the system’s gas giant, camouflaged from detection by the planet’s far-flung radiation belts and now almost two light-hours away. Non-local com