Star Corps (3 page)

2
JUNE
2138

Listening Post 14, the Singer
Europa
1711 hours Zulu

And further still from Earth, some 780 million kilometers from the warmth of a shrunken, distance-dwindled sun, a solitary figure crouched on top of the half-surfaced ruin of a half-million-year-old artifact, high above the swarming camps of humans who studied it. The figure was not human, and in this modality didn't share even a basic humanoid shape with his builders. Humans called this model “the spider,” because of the low-slung, flattened body, the eight spindly legs, and the cluster of eye lenses and manipulators set into his forward armored casing.

He was patient, as only an artificial intelligence could be patient. AI-symbiont CS-1289, Series G-4, Model 8, known to his human companion as Cassius, had waited here in the icy cold for just over 4.147 megaseconds now, some forty-eight days in human terms. By slowing his time sense by a factor of 3,600, however, his wait thus far had seemed more like nineteen hours, and even those hours, passing uneventfully, were accepted without emotion or anxiety, as much a part of Cassius's environment as the ice and the near-perfect vacuum around him.

The surrounding landscape—
icescape
would be a more appropriate term—was a jumble of crushed and broken
structures, towers, pylons, Gothic arches, and towering stacks of smoothed and round-cornered buildings, all encrusted with mottled gray-black and white ice. The swollen orb of Jupiter hung low in the sky, just above one of the radiation-blasted pressure ridges that crisscrossed the icy moon's frozen surface. Europa circled Jupiter in just over three days, thirteen hours. With the time compression, eighty-five hours passed in what seemed to Cassius like a minute and forty-one seconds; shrunken sun and unwinking stars drifted across the sky from horizon to horizon in just fifty seconds. The swollen orb of Jupiter itself always remained in the same area of the sky, bobbing with Europa's libration as the moon orbited in tide-locked step about its primary, but the banded disk waxed and waned through a complete cycle of phases, from full to crescent and dark, then back to full, all in a single time-compressed “day.” The other Jovian moons, from the silvery disk of Ganymede to a handful of stars, circled the giant planet, each at a different pace. Beneath that spectacular light show, across Europa's frozen surface, shadows swung along the undulating ice, shrinking with the fast-rising sun, vanishing at high noon, then lengthening into the darkness of the short night, a cycle three days long compressed into a perceived handful of seconds.

From time to time Cassius was aware of humans moving through his circle of awareness, brief, blurred flickers of motion. He checked each, but at a subliminal, unconscious level. Had any lacked the requisite IFF codes or trespassed into unauthorized zones, his time sense would at once have defaulted to one-to-one, allowing him to challenge the interloper.

A human might have been lonely, but Cassius accepted the isolated duty as simply another mission within his design specs and parameters. He was aware of human activity in the area, of course. The tilted, roughly disk-shaped bulge of the Singer exposed above the frozen wastes of Europa's world-ocean ice cap was ringed by a dozen small camps, pressure domes, habs, and radshield generators providing
access to the mountain-sized mass of alien technology locked in the broken ice. Lights blazed around the perimeter, each casting pools of warm yellow radiance to hold the cold and darkness at bay, but Cassius was more aware of the radio chatter and telemetry, voices and streams of data whispering just above the eternal hiss and crackle of Jupiter's radiation belts.

The human activity was all routine, electronic exchanges depersonalized to the point of tedium.

Seventy-one years before, the Singer had been discovered deep in Europa's ocean, locked away beneath the eternal, planetwide ice cap. Europa's seas were host to teeming, myriad life-forms—sulfur-based thermovores thriving around the Europan equivalent of deep-sea volcanic vents. The Singer, however, was from somewhere else, somewhere outside the Solar system, a product of an advanced technology that had mastered star travel at just about the same time that
Homo erectus
was evolving—or was being evolved, rather—into archaic
Homo sapiens
. Half a million years ago the Singer had been involved in a fight of some kind, a battle that resulted in the destruction of a colony of different aliens then thriving on the surface of Mars, at Cydonia. Damaged, it had crashed through the Europan ice cap and was stranded.

But not killed. The bizarre machine intelligence that called itself Life Seeker, which humans dubbed “the Singer” because of its eerie, ocean-locked wail, had waited out the millennia, eventually sinking into insanity—some believed out of sheer loneliness. When humans had approached it seventy-one years before, it roused itself from schizophrenic dreamings and attempted to break free. Piercing the ice, it transmitted a broadband radio pulse of incredible power to the stars and then, its scant energy reserves exhausted, died.

The Singer had been silent ever since.

Silent, that is, save for the noisy monkey-pack swarmings
of human explorers, archeotechnologists, xenosophontologists, and exocyberneticists. As soon as the brief Sino-Confederation War of 2067 had ended, a steady stream of human ships made their way into the Deeps beyond the orbit of Mars, voyaging to the coterie of moons circling Jupiter. The Singer might be dead, but the kilometer-wide corpse was a solid mass of advanced alien technologies, an immense computer, essentially, that once had housed a self-aware intelligence far exceeding humankind's. For seven decades human science had been plumbing the depths of the Singer, gleaning a host of technological tricks, arts, and secrets. There were endless promises of new and near-magical means of generating limitless power, of bending gravity to human will, of generating nucleomagnetic fields powerful enough to block a thermonuclear blast and sever the fabric of space itself, of new structural materials millennia beyond current manufacturing understanding, of computers and AIs of superhuman speed and capability, even—whisper the mere possibility softly—of the chance that one day humans might venture to the stars at speeds vastly exceeding that of light.

Such were the promises of the inert Singer…promises still far from being realized. In seventy-two years, Earth's best scientists had barely begun to catalog the wonders still locked away inside that dead and ice-bound hulk. It might be centuries more before hints, guesses, speculations, and grueling work in the frozen hell of Europa's 140-degree-Kelvin embrace generated useful technology.

Those promises, however, were so golden that accredited scientists were not the only mammals scavenging through the Singer's dark, cold corridors. Five years ago a couple of research assistants with a Pakistani archeotechnological team had been caught by Marine security personnel with nearly forty kilos of Singer material—bits and pieces of structural support members and paneling, the equivalent of computer circuit boards, dozens of the fist-sized crystals believed to be used as memory storage media, and several
oddly shaped artifacts of completely alien design and unknown purpose.

That hadn't been the first time site robbers managed to infiltrate the legitimate science teams and smuggle out pieces of the alien ship. Bits of Singer technology had been appearing on Earth for at least the past ten years. Collectors reportedly had paid as much as fifteen million newdollars for fragments mounted and privately displayed as…art. The most startling case on record was the three-meter-wide slice of alien hull metal found hanging behind the altar of the Church of the Gray Redeemers in Los Angeles. When
that
had been smuggled back to Earth, and how, was anybody's guess.

The U.S. Marines had been the guarantors of the Singer archeological site's security ever since the end of the Sino-Confederation War. Once it was realized that covert looters were making off with fragments of the alien ship and selling them as curios, as art, and even as religious relics, the newly formed Confederation Department of Archeotechnology authorized the use of military AIs as sentries. Cassius had been assigned to Outwatch duty eight months ago, when the rest of his constellation—the twelve Marine officers and NCOs of cybergroup Delta Sierra 219—had been deployed to Cydonia. There was little need of team AIs on Mars, where the duty was routine and the local net provided reliable data and technoumetic access. On Europa his considerable skills and more-than-human senses could be put to good use patrolling the Singer artifact, protecting it and the Confederation science teams.

In eight months there'd been no incidents. Everything was strictly routine…which was, after all, the best way for things to be. Another sixteen months, and he would be able to rejoin his constellation back on Earth. Though it was difficult to say whether what he felt for his teammates was truly akin to
human
emotion, he did miss them….

A radio signal caught his attention, and he instantly
shifted back to standard temporal perception. The sun stopped its rapid drift across the sky, coming to a halt just above the golden-orange crescent of Jupiter. The shadows froze motionless in the patterns of mid-afternoon.

A Navy lander was descending from the west, balancing itself down gently with plasma thrusters against Europa's 131-centimeters-per-second-squared gravitational tug. IFF tagged the dull black and silver sphere as a lander from the Outwatch frigate
Kamael,
currently in Europa orbit.

And a radio transmission from the Singer main base was already calling him in. “Cassius, this is Outwatch Europa. RTB, repeat, RTB.”

Return to base? He was not scheduled to leave Listening Post 14 for another 105 hours.

But more so than for a human, even for a human Marine, orders were decidedly orders. He extended his spider legs to full length and began picking his way down the icy slope of the Singer's hull, making his way rapidly toward the main base.

The lander had been sent for him. He wondered why.

Giza Complex
Kingdom of Allah, Earth
1815 hours Zulu

“Here they come!” Captain Warhurst yelled. A thousand armed men, at least, sprinted into the open, screaming and firing wildly. Most were on foot, but a number of vehicles were mixed in with the surging mob—open-topped flatbed trucks with gun crews in the back, and light cargo hovercraft of various sizes and descriptions. “Commence firing!”

Warhurst leaned forward against the low wall of sandbags, moving his weapon to drag the targeting reticle into line with one of the charging Mahdi shock troops, a big man in mismatched pieces of Chinese and Persian armor, carry
ing a K-90 assault rifle. A touch of the firing stud, and the LR-2120 hummed, the vibration of the charge cycler flywheel barely perceptible through his armor.

There was no flash or visible pulse of light. Such wasteful displays of pyrotechnics belonged solely to the noumenal fantasies of VR thrillers. The laser pulse lasted for only one hundredth of a second, far too brief a period to register on the human eye even if there'd been dust or smoke in the atmosphere to make the light visible. The LR-2120 had a pulse output of fifty megawatts; one watt for one second equals one joule, so the energy striking the target equaled half a million joules—equivalent to the explosive power released by the detonation of fifty grams of CRX-80 blasting compound, or a tenth of a stick of old-fashioned dynamite.

The pulse explosively vaporized a fist-sized chunk of the man's polylam breastplate as well as the cloth, flesh, and bone underneath, slamming him back a step before he crumpled to the sand. Warhurst shifted targets and fired again…and again…

The attack had been gathering all day. Kingdom of Allah troops and Mahdi fanatics had begun spilling across the Giza and Duqqi bridges out of Cairo early that morning, shortly after the Marines secured their slender perimeter about the Giza complex, but they stayed within the cluttered, narrow streets between Giza and the river, mingling with a fast-swelling crowd of civilians who chanted and waved banners. The Marines found it amusing. The signs and banners, for the most part, were in English, as were the chants. Clearly, the demonstration was for the benefit of the net news services and their floating camera eyes, which by now saturated the battlefield area as completely as the Marines' own recon probes.

By mid-afternoon, however, the demonstrators had dwindled away, most of them crossing the Nile bridges back into Cairo proper. The shock troops and militia had remained, and the Marines braced themselves, knowing what to expect.

The attack finally came, boiling out from among the ramshackle buildings and narrow streets and into open ground. The Marines had orders not to fire on civilian structures, but they had deployed a line of RS-14 picket 'bots fifteen hundred meters from the Marine perimeter. The baseball-sized devices had buried themselves in the sand and emerged now to transmit data on the range, numbers, and composition of the attacking force, and to paint larger targets, like trucks and hovercraft, with lasers.

With accurate ranging data transmitted from the pickets, Marines inside the perimeter began firing 20mm smart-round mortars, sending the shells arcing above the oncoming charge, where they detonated, raining special munitions across the battlefield. Laser-homing antiarmor shells zeroed in on the vehicles. Shotgun fléchette rounds exploded twenty meters above the ground, spraying clouds of high-velocity slivers across broad stretches of the battlefield. Concussion rounds buried themselves in the sand, then detonated, hurling geysers of sand mixed with screaming, kicking bodies into the air.

Only one TAV was airborne at the moment. They were being kept up one at a time to conserve dwindling supplies of the liquid hydrogen used to fuel them. One was sufficient, however, to stoop like a hawk out of the sun, scattering a cloud of special munitions bomblets in a long, precisely placed footprint through the middle of the crowd. A truck and two hovercraft exploded, sending a trio of orange fireballs into the intense blue of the late afternoon sky.