He checked the hour, and groaned. Since there was no day or night here—indeed, no means of measuring time at all save by instruments brought through from normal space—by old, old tradition, the station operated on Greenwich Mean Time. As commanding general of the station, he could set any personal schedule he wished, and so several hours ago had turned in with Tabbie for the “night,” whatever that might mean here in this eldritch space-that-was-not-space. By Greenwich Mean, it was just before midnight.
But the CO of any ship, base, or station was always on call. Always.
At his thought-click, the blue murk faded to dark, and a three-dimensional representation of human space hung high in the dome over the bedchamber. Sol glowed bright yellow at the center, surrounded by a thin haze of other stars in a many-lobed blob stretching across eight hundred light-years at its greatest extent, perhaps three hundred light-years at its smallest.
The amoebic shape of human space had been dictated by the uneven expansion of colonizing expeditions outbound from Sol over the course of the past six or eight centuries. Colony ships searched for worlds as close to Earth in terms of climate and habitability as possible, bypassing hundreds of frozen or poisonous rock balls in favor if those rare worlds that could be made livable with a minimum of terraforming. The statistics appeared in a window to one side of the display. All told, human space embraced roughly 120 million cubic light-years containing some 10 to 12 million stars.
Of those millions, however, about five hundred systems, all told, contained a human presence, ranging from tiny mining or military outposts to a scant handful of systems like Sol or Chiron, with populations numbering in the tens of billions. Of those 500, roughly a quarter—128, to be precise—were members of the Terran Commonwealth. All of the rest belonged to the nonaligned governments—the Islamics, the PanEuropeans, the Chinese, the Hispanics, the Russians.
“Drop in the known Gates, please,” he told Cara. Instantly, seventeen of the fainter stars on the display turned bright and purple. Four were in space claimed by the Commonwealth. The other thirteen belonged to other stellar governments.
The closest Gate to Sol, of course, was Sirius C, the Gateway orbiting in the planetless Sirius star system 8.6 light-years from Sol. Over the centuries, though, as human colonies reached farther and farther out, other Gates had been discovered; the second closest Gate was at Gamma Piscium, a Type K0 giant 91 light-years from Sol. The Gates were unevenly sprinkled across human space with a randomness that suggested that the network, if it had ever possessed an order to begin with, had been distorted over the eons by the natural drift of the stars in their individual orbits about the galactic center.
Probes and research conducted at each of the seventeen gates located within human space had demonstrated that none of those seventeen linked with one another, that all available destinations were other Gates scattered across the Galaxy at extremely long ranges indeed—usually on the order of several thousand to several tens of thousands of light-years. Many, in fact, like the Gate nexus in Cluster Space, were well outside of the Galaxy proper, out in the thin halo of dim and distant stars thinning out endlessly into intergalactic space.
If there was anything like a large-scale order to the galactic network of Stargates, human research had not yet been able to determine what it was. Neither was it known yet whether the Gate network had been built by the Xul in the first place, by the Builders, or by someone else entirely. That the Xul used the network was definite. Of nearly five thousand gateway possibilities so far investigated among those seventeen Gates, almost two hundred opened into star systems occupied by Xul bases. Marine Listening Posts had been established at each of those systems, in order to attempt to monitor Xul activities on the far side.
That strategy had just paid off, thank God.
But at a damned high cost.
“Which one is Puller 659?” he asked.
One of the purple points of light flared brighter on the display. Puller 659, he saw, officially Ringstar in the PanEuropean ephemera according to the windowed description, was a red dwarf star near the fringes of human-explored space, 283 light-years from Sol and located within the misshapen lobe of habitation known as the PanEuropean Arm. The star system was nondescript and otherwise unimportant—possessing a single gas giant, Ring, and its coterie of moons, a few dwarf-planet rock-and-ice balls, and a large population of asteroids and comets.
And the base there was illegal as hell. “Shit!” he said aloud, with some feeling.
Human politics had just shoved its ugly nose under the tent flap.
This was not going to be easy.
0511.1102
Senate of the Terran Commonwealth
Earth Ring
1445 GMT
It was, Alexander thought, a less than auspicious start to his mission to Earth. He’d expected the Commonwealth Senate to debate his plan for combating the Xul threat. That much went without saying. He’d not expected that the Marine Corps itself would be within the Senate’s sights, that they would actually be debating whether or not to bring the Corps’ eleven-hundred-year history to a close.
After reviewing the data transmitted back from Puller 659, he’d routed the full text back to Earth, to USMC-HQ, to the Military Intelligence Agency, and, as required by regulations, to the Senate Military Oversight Committee. The reaction of that last was uncharacteristically swift; he’d been ordered to return to Earth Ring in person, to face a full Senate meeting and to present his recommendations.
To that end, he’d taken the somewhat unusual step of pulling Skybase out of its paraspace anchorage and returning it to the Sol System. The Quantum Sea, existing outside of the normal boundaries of four-dimensional space/time, did not relate to space/time with a point-to-point correspondence. If you had a well-plotted set of special coordinates, it was possible to use paraspace as a means to bypass enormous distances in 4D space.
Dropping into Sol space had enabled him to get back to Earth Ring much more quickly than an FTL shuttle. He was wondering, however, if the trip had been worth it. He’d delivered his recommendation—a carefully parsed blueprint for action by the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force—1MIEF—minutes ago.
And already the vultures were descending like harpies, scenting blood and eager for a meal.
Madam Marie Devereaux drew herself up to her full 150 centimeters, chin held high, defiant. She was standing at her seat in the Commonwealth Senate, an enclosed box high up within one of the ascending ranks of Senatorial platforms, but her repeater holo image stood at the chamber’s center, towering over the Senate Chamber pit, matching each move, each dramatic pose, each gesture and expression. Alexander wondered if the holo was projecting the woman’s personal e-filters to achieve that seeming perfection of face and form, or if what he was seeing reflected reality.
Not that reality had that much to do with this charade. He grimaced. Devereaux was putting on the show of her life. She appeared to be relishing this moment.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate,” she declaimed. “We’ve heard the arguments in favor of striking at the Xul, heard them endlessly in round upon round of discussion within these sacred halls, both in open debate and in closed committee. Is anyone else here as tired as I am, as sick to death as I am, I wonder, of hearing yet more excuses for this collection of