We immediately got a high-resolution image of the portal planet. It was small, as they usually are; cold and airless except for the base. It was actually more like a town than a base, and it was as obvious as a beacon. It wasn’t enclosed; air was evidently held in by some sort of force field. It was lit up by an artificial sun that floated a few kilometers above the surface.
There was an ancient cruiser in orbit, its dramatic, sweeping streamlined grace putting our functional clunkiness to shame. There were also two Tauran vessels. None of them was obviously damaged.
All of us 5-and-above officers were on the bridge when we contacted the planet. Commodore Sidorenko sat up front with Garcia; he technically outranked her in this room, but it was her show, since the actual business was planetside.
I felt a little self-conscious, having come straight from the prep bay. Everyone else was in uniform; I was just wearing the contact net for the fighting suit. Like a layer of silver paint.
Garcia addressed the man in the chair. “Do you have a name and a rank?”
It took about forty seconds for the message to get to him, and another forty for his response: “My name is Eagle. We don’t have ranks; I’m here because I can speak Old Standard. English.”
You could play a slow chess game during this conversation, and not miss anything. “But your ancestors defeated the Taurans, somehow.”
“No. The Taurans took them prisoner and set them up here. Then there was another battle, generations ago. We never heard from them again.”
“But we lost that battle. Our cruiser was destroyed with all hands aboard.”
“I don’t know anything about that. Their planet was on the other side of the collapsar when the battle happened. The people here saw a lot of light, distorted by gravitational lensing. We always assumed it was some robotic assault, since we didn’t hear anything from either side, afterwards. I’m sorry so many people died.”
“What about the Taurans who were with you? Are there Taurans there now?”
“No; there weren’t any then, and there aren’t any now. Before the battle they showed up now and then.”
“But there are—” she began.
“Oh, you mean the Tauran ships in orbit. They’ve been there for hundreds of years. So has our cruiser. We have no way to get to them. This place is self-sufficient, but a prison.”
“I’ll contact you again after I’ve spoken to my officers.” The cube went dark.
Garcia swiveled around, and so did Sidorenko, who spoke for the first time: “I don’t like it. He could be a simulation.”
Garcia nodded. “That assumes a lot, though. And it would mean they know a hell of a lot more about us than we do about them.”
“That’s demonstrable. Four hundred years ago, they were supposedly able to build a place for the captives to stay. I don’t believe we would have any trouble simulating a Tauran, given a couple of hundred captives and that much time for research.”
“I suppose. Potter,” she said to me, “go down and tell the fourth platoon there’s a slight change of plans, but we’re still going in ready for anything. I think the best thing we can do is get over there and make physical contact as soon as possible.”
“Right,” Siderenko said. “We don’t have the element of surprise anymore, but there’s no percentage in sitting here and feeding them data, giving them time to revise their strategy. If there are Taurans there.”
“Have your people prepped for five gees,” Garcia said to me. “Get you there in a few hours.”
“Eight,” Siderenko said. “We’ll be about ten hours behind you.”
“Wait in orbit?” I said, knowing the answer.
“You wish. Let’s go down to the bay.”
We had a holo of the base projected down there and worked out a simple strategy. Twenty-two of us in fighting suits, armed to the teeth, carrying a nova bomb and a stasis field, surround the place and politely knock on the door. Depending on the response, we either walk in for tea or level the place.
Getting there would not be so bad. Nobody could endure four hours of five-gee acceleration, then flip for four hours of deceleration, unprotected. So we’d be clamshelled in the fighting suits, knocked out and super-hydrated. Eight hours of deep sleep and then maybe an hour to shake it off and go be a soldier. Or a guest for tea.
Cat and I made the rounds in the cramped fighter, seeing that everybody was in place, suit fittings and readouts in order. Then we shared a minute of private embrace and took our own places.
I jacked the fluid exchange into my hip fitting and all of the fear went away. My body sagged with sweet lassitude, and I let the soft nozzle clasp my face. I was still aware enough to know that it was sucking all of the air out of my lungs and then blowing in a dense replacement fluid, but all I felt was a long low-key orgasm. I knew that this was the last thing a lot of people felt, the fighter blown to bits moments or hours later. But the war offered us many worse ways to die. I was sound asleep before the acceleration blasted us into space. Dreaming of being a fish in a warm and heavy sea.
8
The chemicals won’t let you remember coming out of it, which is probably good. My diaphragm and esophagus were sore and tired from getting rid of all the fluid. Cat looked like hell and I stayed away from mirrors, while we toweled off and put on the contact nets and got back into the fighting suits for the landing.
Our strategy, such as it was, seemed even less appealing, this close to the portal planet. The two Tauran cruisers were old models, but they were a hundred times the size of our fighter, and since they were in synchronous orbit over the base, there was no way to avoid coming into range. But they did let us slide under them without blowing us out of the sky, which made Eagle’s story more believable.
It was pretty obvious, though, that our primary job was to be a target, for those ships and the base. If we were annihilated, the Bolivar would modify its strategy.
When Morales said we were going to just go straight in and land on the strip beside the base, I muttered, “Might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat,” and Cat, who was on my line, asked why anyone would hang a sheep. I told her it was hard to explain. In fact, it was just something my father used to say, and if he’d ever explained it, I’d forgotten.
The landing was loud but featherlight. We unclamped our fighting suits from their transport positions and practiced walking in the one-third gee of the small planet. “They should’ve sent Goy,” Cat said, which is what we called Chance Nguyen, the Martian. “He’d be right at home.”
We moved out fast, people sprinting to their attack positions. Cat went off to the other side of the base. I was going with Morales, to knock on the door. Rank and its privileges. The first to die, or be offered tea.
The buildings on the base looked like they’d been designed by a careful child. Windowless blocks laid out on a grid. All but one were sand-colored. We walked to the silver cube of headquarters. At least it had “HQ” in big letters over the airlock.
The shiny front door snicked up like a guillotine in reverse. We went through with dignified haste, and it slammed back down. The blade, or door, was pretty massive, for us to “hear” it in a vacuum; vibration through our boots.
Air hissed in—that we did hear—and after a minute a door swung open. We had to sidle through it sideways, because of the size of our fighting suits. I suppose we could have just walked straight through, enlarging it in the process, and in fact I considered that as I sidled. It would prevent them from using the airlock until they could fix it.
Then another door, a metal blast door half a meter thick, slid open. Seated at a plain round table were Eagle and a woman who looked like his twin sister. They wore identical sky-blue tunics.
“Welcome to Alcatraz,” Eagle said. “The name is an old joke.” He gestured at the four empty chairs. “Why not get out of your suits and relax?”
“That would be unwise,” Morales said.
“You have us surrounded, outside. Even if I were inclined to
do you harm, I wouldn’t be that foolish.”
“It’s for your own protection,” I extemporized. “Viruses can mutate a lot in four hundred years. You don’t want us sharing your air.”
“That’s not a problem,” the woman said. “Believe me. My bodies are very much more efficient than yours.”
“‘My bodies’?” I said.
“Oh, well.” She made a gesture that was meaningless to me, and two side doors opened. From her side a line of women walked in, all exact copies of her. From his side, copies of him.
There were about twenty of each. They stared at us with identical bland expressions, and then said in unison, “I have been waiting for you.”
“As have I.” A pair of naked Taurans stepped into the room.
Both our laserfingers came up at once. Nothing happened.
“I’m sorry I had to lie to you,” one of the women said.
I braced myself to die. I hadn’t seen a live Tauran since the Yod-4 campaign, but I’d fought hundreds of them in the ALSC. They didn’t care whether they lived or died, so long as they died killing a human.
“There is much to be explained,” the Tauran said in a thin, wavering voice, its mouth-hole flexing and contracting. Its body was covered with a loose tunic like the humans’, hiding most of the wrinkled orange hide and strange limbs, and the pinched antlike thorax.
The two of them blinked slowly in unison, in what might have been a social or emotional gesture, a translucent membrane sliding wetly down over the compound eyes. The tassels of soft flesh where their noses should have been stopped quivering while they blinked. “The war is over. In most places.”
The man spoke. “Human and Tauran share Stargate now. There is Tauran on Earth and human on its home planet, J’sardlkuh.”
“Humans like you?” Morales said. “Stamped out of a machine?”
“I come from a kind of machine, but it is living, a womb. Until I was truly one, there could be no peace. When there were billions of us, all different, we couldn’t understand peace.”
“Everyone on Earth is the same?” I said. “There’s only one kind of human?”
“There are still survivors of the Forever War, like yourselves,” the female said. “Otherwise, there is only one human. As there is only one Tauran. I was patterned after an individual named Khan. I call myself Man.”
There were sounds to my left and right, like distant thunder. Nothing in my communicator.
“Your people are attacking,” the male said, “even though I have told them it is useless.”
“Let me talk to them!” Morales said.
“You can’t,” the female said. “They all assembled under the stasis field, when they saw the Taurans through your eyes. Now their programmed weapons attack. When those weapons fail, they will try to walk in with the stasis field.”
“This has happened before?” I said.
“Not here, but other places. The outcome varies.”
“Your stasis field,” a Tauran said, “has been old to us for more than a century. We used a refined version of it to keep you from shooting us a minute ago.”
“You say the outcome varies,” Morales said to the female, “so sometimes we win?”
“Even if you killed me, you wouldn’t ‘win’; there’s nothing to win anymore. But no, the only thing that varies is how many of you survive.”
“Your cruiser Bolivar may have to be destroyed,” a Tauran said. “I assume they are monitoring this conversation. Of course they are still several light-minutes away. But if they do not respond in a spirit of cooperation, we will have no choice.”
Garcia did respond in less than a minute, her image materializing behind the Taurans. “Why don’t we invite you to act in a spirit of cooperation,” she said. “If none of our people are hurt, none of yours will be.”
“That’s beyond my control,” the male said. “Your programmed weapons are attacking; mine are defending. I think that neither is programmed for mercy.”
The female continued. “That they still survive is evidence of our good intentions. We could deactivate their stasis field from outside.” There was a huge thump and Man’s table jumped up an inch. “Most of them would be destroyed in seconds if we did that.”
Garcia paused. “Then explain why you haven’t.”
“One of my directives,” the male said, “is to minimize casualties among you. There is a genetic diversity program, which will be explained to you at Stargate.”
“All right,” Garcia said. “Since I can’t communicate with them otherwise, I’ll let you deactivate the stasis field—but at the same time, of course, you have to turn off your automatic defenses. Otherwise they’d be slaughtered.”
“So you invite us to be slaughtered instead,” he said. “Me and your two representatives here.”
“I’ll tell them to cease fire immediately.”
All this conversation was going on with a twenty-second time lag. So “immediately” would be a while in coming.
Without comment, the two Taurans disappeared, and the forty duplicate humans filed back through the dome.
“All right,” Eagle said, “perhaps there is a way around this time lag. Which of you is the ranking officer here?”
“I am,” I said.
“Most of my individuals have returned to an underground shelter. I will turn off your stasis field and our defenses simultaneously.
“Tell them they must stop firing immediately. If we die, our defenses resume, and they won’t have the protection of the stasis field.”
I chinned the command frequency, which would put me in contact with Cat and Sergeant Hencken as soon as the field disappeared.
“I don’t like this,” Morales said. “You can turn your weapons on and off with a thought?”
“That’s correct.”
“We can’t. When Captain Potter gives them the order, they have to understand and react.”
“But it’s just turning off a switch, is it not?” There was another huge bang, and a web of cracks appeared in the wall to my left. Man looked at it without emotion.
“First a half dozen people have to understand the order and decide to obey it!”
The male and female smiled and nodded in unison. “Now.”
Thumbnail pictures of Karl and Cat appeared next to Morales. “Cat! Karl! Have the weapons units cease fire immediately!”
“What’s going on?” Karl said. “Where’s the stasis field?”
“They turned it off. Battle’s over.”
“That’s right,” Morales said. “Cease fire.”
Cat started talking to the squads. Karl stared for a second and started to do the same.
Not fast enough. The left wall exploded in a hurricane of masonry and chunks of metal. The two Men were suddenly bloody rags of shredded flesh. Morales and I were knocked over by the storm of rubble. My armor was breached in one place; there was a ten-second beep while it repaired itself.
Then vacuum silence. The one light on the opposite wall dimmed and went out. Through the hole our cannon had made, the size of a large window, the starlit wasteland strobed in silent battle.
The three thumbnails were gone. I chinned down again for command freek. “Cat? Morales? Karl?”
Then I turned on a headlight and saw that Morales was dead, his suit peeled open at the chest, lungs and heart in tatters under ribs black with dried blood.
I chinned sideways for the general freek and heard a dozen voices shouting and screaming in confusion.
So Cat was probably dead, and Karl, too. Or maybe their communications had been knocked out.
I thought about that possibility for a few moments, hoping and rejecting hope, listening to the babble. Then I realized that if I could hear all those privates, corporals, they could hear me.
“This is Potter,” I said. “Captain Potter,” I yelled.
I stayed on the general freek and tried to explain the strange situation. Five did opt to stay outside. The others met me under the yellow light, which fr
amed the top of a square black blast door that rose out of the ground at a forty-five-degree angle, like our tornado shelter at home, thousands of years ago, hundreds of light-years away. It slid open, and we went in, carrying four fighting suits whose occupants weren’t responding but weren’t obviously dead.
One of those was Cat, I saw as we came into the light when the airlock door closed. The back of the helmet had a blast burn, but I could make out VERDEUR.
She looked bad. A leg and an arm were missing at shoulder and thigh. But they had been snipped off by the suit itself, the way my arm had been at Tet-2.
There was no way to tell whether she was alive, since the telltale on the back of the helmet was destroyed. The suit had a biometric readout, but only a medic could access it directly, and the medic and his suit had been vaporized.
Man led us into a large room with a row of bunks and a row of chairs. There were three other Men there, but no Taurans, which was probably wise.
I popped out of my suit and didn’t die, so the others did the same, one by one. The amputees we left sealed in their suits, and Man agreed that it was probably best. They were either dead or safely unconscious: if the former, they’d been dead for too long to bring back; if the latter, it would be better to wake them up in the Bolivar’s surgery. The ship was only two hours away, but it was a long two hours for me.
As it turned out, she lived, but I lost her anyhow, to relativity. She and the other amputees were loaded, still asleep, onto the extra cruiser, and sent straight to Heaven.
They did it in one jump, no need for secrecy anymore, and we went to Stargate in one jump aboard Bolivar.
When I’d last been to Stargate it had been a huge space station; now it was easily a hundred times as large, a man-made planetoid. Tauran-made, and Man-made.
We learned to say it differently: Man, not man.
Inside, Stargate was a city that dwarfed any city on the Earth I remembered—though they said now there were cities on Earth with a billion Men, humans, and Taurans.
We spent weeks considering and deciding on which of many options we could choose to set the course of the rest of our lives. The first thing I did was check on William, and no miracle had happened; his Strike Force had not returned from Sade-138. But neither had the Tauran force sent to annihilate them.