Ian Douglas - Battlespace (The Legacy Trilogy, Book 2)

B ATTLESPACE

B OOK T WO OF THE H ERITAGE T RILOGY

Ian Douglas

v1.0 (2011.05)

C ONTENTS

Lance Corporal Lynnley Collins, UFR/US Marines, drifted free within inexpressible

Visual: A heavy Trans-Atmospheric Transport slowly descends through a night

So whats the dope, Gare? Lance Corporal Roger Eagleton asked.

The magflier public transport deposited them on the landing shelf

Hospitalman Second Class Phillip K. Lee was trying to run

All right, Marines. Listen up!

Colonel Ramsey floated in noumenal space, watching the bulk of

Hospitalman Second Class Phillip Lee sat huddled in almost total

So? Ramsey asked. What went wrong?

For another three weeks, preparations were made for the MIEUs

Cassius was not so much the pilot of the Starhawk

Admiral Harris, Dominick said, I suggest we deploy for combat.

The fighters are on the way in, Ricia Anderson said.

This time it was different.

HM2 Phillip Lee dropped toward the stargate, trying to keep

Here they come! Gunny Dunne yelled. Check your CCN locks!

Lee froze, staring at the hovering war machine. The only

Recon Company, First Platoon! Saddle up, boys and girls! Were

Space and time, Alexander knew, were two faces of the

The armored form continued to advance until it was five

Kat was completely familiar with the idea of a chain

According to his implant, this was his second day of

One of the Marine pilots of 5-MAS, Cassius went on

Fire in the night.

How long had it been since hed slept last? Garroway

P ROLOGUE

15 August 2148

Star Explorer Wings of Isis

Sirius System

1550 hours, Shipboard time

Lance Corporal Lynnley Collins, UFR/US Marines, drifted free within inexpressible beauty. From her vantage point, she seemed to float in the depths of space, but a space turned glorious by the blue-silver-white beacons of two nearby stars: gleaming Sirius A and its tiny white-dwarf brother, Sirius B.

The Sirius system was thick with dust and debris that caught the starlight and twisted it into hazy knots of pale color. The noumenal display revealed the hard radiation searing the encircling sky as a faint purple background glow.

Noumenal spacesuch a bland and uninformative description of the sheer miraculous. If a phenomenon is something that happens in the world around us, within that collection of events and happenstance and knock-on-wood solid matter humans are pleased to call reality, then a noumenon is that which happens within a persons mind.

Thought, wonder, visualization, imagination such are the bone and sinew of the noumenal. With the appropriate nanochelates forming hypolinks and neural access stacks at certain points within the sulci of the brain, with implanted microcircuitry and perhaps twenty grams of other hardware grown nanobit by nanobit into key nerve bundles to provide sensory input, a human could link in to the data feed from a computer or an AI and become an organic SUI, a sensory users interface, experiencing downloads not on a computer monitor or wallscreen, but as unfolding visual and aural imagery within the mind itself. Lance Corporal Collins, then, was not really adrift in open space, bathed in the fiercely radiant glare of Sirius A. Remote cameras and other sensors on the hull of the explorer ship Wings of Isis provided the cascade of data flooding through her brain by way of the ships communications systems. The sky around her was dramatically, impossibly beautiful, bands of dust and gas aglow in actinic Sirian light. Sirius A was distant enough that she didnt even show a disk, yet still was so brilliant that even within the artfully massaged illusion of the noumenal sensorium it was difficult to look at the star directly. Closer by some hundreds of millions of kilometers, Sirius B radiated its own hot light, illuminating the stellar debris within which it was imbedded in blues, silvers, violets, and harshly glaring white. A white dwarf, a shrunken star the size of Earth and so dense that a teaspoonful possessed the mass of a good-sized mountain, Sirius B was too small even at this relatively close range to show as more than a blinding spark embedded in its glowing cloud of dust.

Lynnley was not watching the stellar panorama, however. Opposite the two arc-brilliant sunsand harshly illuminated by themdrifted the Wheel.

Ten kilometers away from Wings of Isis, and at least twenty kilometers across, the thing was clearly an artifact, something deliberately created by intelligence, a hubless wheel of roughly the same proportions as a wedding band. Under magnification, the outer surface was black, cracked, and broken, which might indicate that the Wheel had been constructed from asteroidal debris. The inner surface was smooth, almost polished, marked by geometric shapes and lines, and here and there lights glowed like neatly ordered stars, indicating power usage and the possibility of life. Gravitometric readings, however, teased and confused. If they could be believed, the Wheel was incredibly dense, the mass of a large planet collapsed into an enigmatic, clearly artificial hoop.

In fact, there were no planets in the Sirian system. Sirius A was far too hot and bright a star to allow for a comfortably Earthlike planet, and it was young, too young for life to have evolved, even had there been such a world; once Sirius B had been nearly as bright as its big brother before it had vomited part of its mass and collapsed into its present shrunken state. The background radiation, barely held at bay by the Isiss magnetic screens, would have fried any unprotected life-form in seconds. Whoever had built that structure had come here from somewhere else.

Why? What was the ring for?

And who had built it, here in the harsh and deadly glare of the Sirian suns?

Unseen, but sensed in the imaginal space at her side, Sergeant Paul Watson watched and wondered with her. Paul was a shipboard lover, but, more, he was a friend, a bulwark against the loneliness. John Garroway, the man she loved, was another Marine, one now even more distant from the Wings of Isis than was Earth. As much as she liked Paul, she wished John was here now instead.

My God! Paul said suddenly, his voice sharp in her mind.

What?

Look! There in the center. Youll need to magnify

She set her attention on the center of that massive Wheel, giving the mental command to narrow in on the field of view. Yes, she saw it now something drifting out from the center of the artifact. If the known diameter of the Wheel was any indication, the object must be a couple of kilometers long at least, as slender as a needle and gleaming in the hard starlight like pure gold.

What is it? she said.

A ship! Paul replied in her thoughts. Obviously, a ship!

Why obviously? Lynnley said. We dont know who these people are. Or what they are. We cant take anything for granted!

Bullshit, Paul replied with a mental snort. Its a ship. That Wheel must be some sort of enormous habitat or space station. I think were about to meet Berossuss friends!

Berossuss friends. The phrase at once chilled and excited.

The Wings of Isis had voyaged to Sirius8.6 light-years from home, on a long-shot gamble. Berossus had been a Babylonian historian living about three centuries B.C.E. Only fragments of his writings remained, but from those fragments had come the story of Oannes, an amphibious being whod appeared at the headwaters of either the Arabian Gulf or the Red Seathere was some confusion as to whichand taught the primitive humans dwelling there the arts of medicine, agriculture, writing, and of reading the stars. Oannes, Berossus insisted, was not a god, but one of a number of beings he called semidemons or animals with reason, intelligent beings like men, but not human. The Greek word he used for them was Annedoti, the Repulsive Ones, and they were said to have the bodies and tails of fish with the heads and limbs of men.