Marine listening posts like Puller 659 were deliberately kept tiny and unobtrusive; Fitzie was right, damn him. It was her turn.
She dropped out of the link and rose from her couch. Leaving Fitzpatrick in his commlink couch at the monitor station, she caught an intrastation pod and dropped to the fighter bay, two decks down. The uniform of the day was Class-One VS, a black skinsuit that served as her vacsuit in a depressurization emergency, so she needed only to pick up a helmet, gloves, and LS pack on the way.
Her FR-100 Night Owl was warmed and ready for her when she arrived.
The Night Owl was dead black, pulling at the eye, a flat, smooth ovoid with teardrop sponsons and swellings for drives and sensor equipment, its sleek hull designed to absorb or safely redirect everything on the EM spectrum from long-wave radar to short-wave x-rays. It was sophisticated enough to fly itself without a human at the controls, but Corps doctrine still emphasized the need for a human at the controls in any situation where things might go suddenly and catastrophically wrong. The craft was tiny—three fluidly streamlined meters, with a cockpit barely large enough to receive her vacsuited body as it folded itself closely about her and automatically made the necessary neural links.
“Link me in, Chesty,” she thought, and felt the connections open in her mind. The Night Owl’s AI was technically a Chesty2, a smaller, much more compact version of the software running on the station proper. She felt a slight thump as the Owl slid down on magnetic rails through a deck hatch and into its launch lock.
“You are linked and ready for boost, Lieutenant,” Chesty told her. “Lock evacuated. Station clearance for exit granted.”
She ran through a final check on her instrument feeds, and let the hull embracing her fade away into invisibility. This was always the scary part, the feeling that she was being dumped naked into hard vacuum. No amount of training, no thousands of hours of flight time could ever entirely override that deep-seated, thoroughly human terror of the ultimate night outside.
All systems cleared green. “Let’s do it, then.”
The drop hatch yawned and the sleek, tiny fragment of night fell into darkness.
In her mind, Lee was flying through space unencumbered by such incidentals as a ship or vacsuit. Above and behind her—though such notions as up and down were suddenly meaningless as she fell clear of the LP’s grav field—the listening post hung against the stars, a small asteroid, dust-shrouded and almost lost in the wan light from the distant, red pinpoint of the local sun. Ahead, the Stargate appeared as a vast, red-gold hoop, canted at a sharp angle to the listening post, which stayed well clear of the entrance. In the 112 years that Puller 659 had been in operation, nothing had ever emerged from that gateway other than returning Marine probes.
But there was always that inevitable first time. …
Under Chesty’s guidance, the Owl’s N’mah reactionless drive switched on, propelling it toward the Gate, which filled Lee’s view forward now, an immense, flattened band that, from this distance, appeared perfectly smooth and seamless. As moments passed, however, that illusion faded, as lines and geometric shapes became visible by the shadows cast by the distant, bloody sun.
At ninety gravities, the Owl shot forward, and the Gate swiftly grew larger, larger, then larger still. Shielded from the brutal acceleration inside the tiny craft, Lee told Chesty to maneuver closer to the ring wall as the FR-100 crossed into the tidal field, then turned sharply, falling into the ring’s turbulent lumen.
At the last possible moment, Chesty cut the drive, and the Owl dropped through the Gate, the red-gold-gray wall flashing past Lee’s awareness, the sudden gut-twisting wrench of gravitational tides clutching at her. …
And then she was through, an explosion of light bathing her wide-open mental windows. Starwall …
An apt enough name. Ringstar, Puller 659, was located in a relatively sparsely populated area of space, out in the Orion Spur of the Cygnus Galactic Arm, just a few hundred light-years from Sol. The Starwall system, however, was an estimated eighteen thousand light-years closer in toward the Galaxy’s central hub. From here, inside the dense banks of interstellar dust and gas that enclosed the Hub and shrouded its glow from the suburbs of the spiral arms, the galactic core literally appeared to be a near-solid wall of stars, presenting a vista like the heart of a globular cluster, but on an impossibly vaster scale, a teeming beehive of billions of closely packed suns, their clotted masses wreathed through with twisted and tattered ribbons of both dark and incandescent nebulae. That mass of stars had an overall reddish tinge to it; most of the stars of the Hub were ancient Population II suns, poor in metals, cooler than the predominantly hot, metal-rich and spendthrift blue stars of the spiral arms.
Lee’s warning systems began their steady and expected drumbeat. Radiation levels on this side of the Gate were high—high enough to fry an unprotected human in seconds, high enough to overwhelm even the Night Owl’s protective shielding within an hour or two at most. For safety’s sake, the clock was running; Lee had a stay-time of forty minutes on this side of the Gate, a quite literal deadline by which she had to return to the listening post, or die.
She scarcely noticed those warnings, however, for her attention had been grabbed by a danger far more immediate. Movement and proximity snatched at her awareness, and she looked up, relative to her own alignment. …
It was a Xul huntership. Of that, there could be no doubt. It appeared small, thanks to its distance, but her sensor inputs were giving her a mental download giving the thing’s range, size, mass … gods, it was huge.
The Xul warhsips encountered by Humankind so far had come in a variety of sizes and configurations, but all were enormous, well over a kilometer in length, and more often two. The Xul, for whatever reason, liked to build big.
This model had been named the Type III by Marine Intelligence, and was designated as the Nightmare class. Unlike the slender needles of Types I and II, the Nightmare was an immense flattened and elongated spheroid two kilometers across, its surface pocked and marked by countless structures and surface irregularities laid out in geometric arrays of almost fractal complexity. The Singer, discovered eight centuries before beneath the ice of Europa’s world-ocean, had been of this type. The monster was larger than the asteroid shrouding the Puller listening post … but was entirely artificial, apparently grown through the Xul equivalent of nanotechnology.
Just why they built their ships and bases on such a large scale remained one of the deeper mysteries of Xul technology. Encounters with the Xul over the past eight centuries had demonstrated that they almost certainly did not possess an organic component; as near as the various human intelligence services could determine, the Xul was a gestalt of myriad machine intelligences, some of them artificial like AIs, but some possibly originally recorded and uploaded into machine bodies from the organic originals millions of years ago.
These UIs, as they were now known, Uploaded Intelligences, were virtually immortal. Imbedded within the tightly meshed and folded circuitry that filled most of the huge Xul ships, they couldn’t be said to be truly alive, not in the human sense, and they certainly didn’t require the life-support systems found on any human-manned spacecraft.
Lee watched the complicated surface of the Xul monster glide slowly past—nearly ten kilometers away, near the center of the Gate opening, but large enough even at that range to occult the massed stars beyond like an ink-black shadow, sharp enough and detailed enough that she felt like she could reach up and touch it. It took her a moment to realize that she was on a parallel course; like her, it had only recently emerged from the Stargate behind her and was also moving into the Starwall system, but at a slightly slower speed so that she was catching up with and slowly passing it. From her perspective, it seemed to her that the Xul vessel was standing still, or even moving past her in the other direction, toward the Gate.
The Nightmare’s presence suggested answers to several questions. This side of the Gate must have been retuned by the Xul to another Gate, one other than the one at Puller 659. As a result, the four missing probes had been lost either