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  Nodding, she looked around the room, and said, “I’m going to assume that all of you have watched the footage from the surface, or this briefing isn’t going to make much sense, I’m afraid. The short version is that my assessment tallies completely with that of Commander Winter. It’s a record of the history of the alien race we were looking for, from its earliest days until its end.”

  She paused, then said, “Further, it’s clear from the material we’ve seen that they were the ones who developed the implants, though my analysis suggests that it was at least initially benign in nature. Think of it as a sort of telepathic internet. Imagine the potential of such a network, as long as you were able to keep your own sense of self intact.”

  “That’s quite a big ask,” Moore said.

  “Perhaps, ma’am, but I think they managed to accomplish that, at least at first, though over time they obviously grew far more dependent on the network, perhaps even to the point of assimilating it into their biology. There’s plenty of evidence of that in the records.” She paused, and added, “An hour ago, with the assistance of the ship’s computers and Specialist Volkov, I was able to crack the alien language and read the contents.”

  “You’re joking,” Morgan said, turning to her. “An alien language? From scratch? That’s like a blind man decoding the Rosetta Stone in an afternoon.”

  “Nevertheless, Major, we have done it. All the tests and independent verifications confirm it.” She smiled, then added, “Though we can’t take much of the credit, I’m afraid. It’s pretty obvious that the aliens wanted us to decode it, were desperate for their story to be read. I doubt that this is their actual language. It’s far too simple for that. We’ve only identified eight hundred and three words, for a start. My guess is that they adapted it for the purpose of quick comprehension, and the opening files were very much designed for that intent. The computers picked it up very quickly.”

  “Do we have the silver bullet?” Rogers asked.

  “Possibly,” she replied. “Just possibly.” She reached for a control on the table, the lights dimming as a starfield appeared on the display. “We’ve found the alien homeworld, a little under seven light-years from here. It orbits a gas giant, one of the biggest I’ve ever seen, large enough for it to be tidally-locked to the primary. I wouldn’t have thought life could evolve on a surface like that, but I suppose we’re learning that anything is possible.”

  “Can we get there?” asked Bianchi. “The codes we’ve found…”

  “We could warp into the system,” Winter said. “However, there is another option on the table, one that we would be foolish not to exploit to the full. There’s a wormhole. Here. In this system. One that leads directly to that gas giant, to the alien homeworld.” All eyes were on him as he added, “And a path that the Tyrants know nothing about, or they would have already attacked us from that vector.”

  “They must suspect,” Morgan warned.

  “Possibly, but it’s a big system, and the odds are that other wormholes lead in other directions. Which could open up a can of worms for the future, but at the very least it gives us a place to start. Somewhere to launch our attack.” He looked around the room, and pressed, “And we are going to launch an attack. That remains the intention. We’re going to take the fight to the Tyrants. We don’t have a choice.”

  “A handful of ships against a planet,” Moore said, shaking her head. “Those odds don’t sound good.”

  “Not a handful. One ship. Just Xenophon,” Winter replied.

  “What?” Rogers said. “One ship against…”

  “One ship or four, what difference will it make?” Winter pressed. “The odds are terrible no matter how you look at it, and throwing more ships into the fire isn’t going to make any difference at all. I’m putting Commander Galloway in charge of what’s left of the fleet, and they’re to head back to Earth at best speed, with instructions to inform the population of everything that’s happened out here. That was always our last-resort option, and people, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that’s pretty much where we are at this point. If we fail, then there has to at least be a chance for someone back home to put up a fight, and that’s going to require them to know what they are facing.” He shook his head, and added, “I don’t like it, but that’s how it’s going to have to be.”

  “We’re going in alone?” Bianchi asked.

  “More than that,” Winter said. “I’m stripping ship, right down. We’re going in with a skeleton crew. Just enough to man this ship and a couple of the techjammer shuttles. Technical Officer Mendoza will command that part of the operation herself.”

  “Sir,” Morgan replied, “I am quite certain that everybody on board this ship is well aware of the risks they are running, and if you are concerned about putting them in harm’s way, then…”

  “That isn’t what he’s thinking,” Zhang interrupted. “I’m afraid, Major, that it’s a question of trust. Obviously, many of the procedures that we…that I designed are ineffective. Running such an involved series of scans takes time, and we’ve only got one set of equipment and two trained operators. Even working around the clock, it would take weeks just to scan everyone in this fleet. It just isn’t realistic.”

  “That is precisely correct,” Winter said. He reached for a datapad, and said, “I’ve prepared a list of personnel that have already been scanned for one reason or another, as well as a second, shorter list of critical personnel that we’re going to need for the operation. It amounts to thirty-nine people.”

  “Thirty-nine people?” Bianchi said, shaking her head. “That’s not even a skeleton crew, Commander. We’ll struggle to operate in a firefight.”

  “We’re not even going to try.” Winter smiled, then continued, “A full-scale battle is out of the question. We’d lose. And they must have defenses in orbit by now, sufficient that even a full-sized war fleet wouldn’t be able to crack through easily. We don’t have the resources. Fortunately, we can rely on the paranoia of a series of long-dead dictators to win the day for us.”

  Nodding, Mendoza said, “It’s all in the data.”

  “The silver bullet?” Moore asked.

  “Possibly. Just possibly.” She paused, then said, “The alien race committed suicide. Effectively. During their warlike period, one of their nations constructed an automatic defense system, and turned over control of their nuclear arsenal to it. They built it to last for centuries, millennia, without supervision. Something went wrong, and the defenses were triggered. The result was Armageddon.”

  “They couldn’t stop it?”

  “It had been built too well, and it had been all but forgotten over the decades. I suppose there were safeguards, but they failed. At least, some of them. There was a second wave.”

  Rogers looked at Mendoza, and said, “Are you saying that the Tyrant homeworld has enough weapons stashed there to destroy it?”

  “To wipe out civilization, sure,” she replied. “The missiles won’t work, not after all this time, but based on the specifications that were included, the warheads should work fine. All of this was right at the start of the files. I’ve barely scratched the surface, but the bulk of the message was a warning to other sentient races not to repeat the mistakes they made. I doubt they had in mind providing the means to destroy their planet, but for our purposes…”

  Raising a hand, Winter said, “We think, we hope, we pray that we have a way of triggering those explosions remotely. After a fashion. We’re going to have to get within fifty miles of the site to send the transmission, to send the coding signal that will detonate the warheads. To put it into context, we’re talking about three thousand two-megaton explosions, concentrated in the most densely populated regions of the planet.”

  “Do we know that?” Moore asked.

  “We can assume that,” Mendoza replied. “The Tyrants were scavenging over the remains of the civilization that once lived there. It only makes sense that they’d concentrate the bulk of their infrastructure on those
points. It hardly matters anyway. The planet suffered a nuclear holocaust twenty thousand years go. The ecosystem has barely had a chance to recover. Triggering a second will almost certainly finish it for good.”

  “There’s an ethical consideration that I feel I have to bring up here,” Bianchi warned. “We’re acting on the I think reasonable assumption that there are millions of people down on that planet, people who were likely implanted at birth, based on the data we’ve recovered so far.”

  “You’re suggesting that we shouldn’t take this chance?” Morgan asked. “I know that ethics isn’t a numbers game, but…”

  “Billions of lives against millions,” Winter said. “Commander, I have some sympathy for what you are saying, and if there was another way to complete this mission, one with the same chance of success, I’d happily take it. There isn’t. There’s no fleet. No reinforcements. No second chance. If what we saw on Eudoxus is any indication, there could be traitors everywhere. The only option we have left is to take out the core of the network, bring down the whole damn system and end this war. Hell, the EMP alone ought to do the job.”

  “Not to mention that every time we’ve been able to disconnect one of them from the network, they’ve committed suicide shortly thereafter,” Moore added. “I could make a strong argument that this is precisely what they want.”

  “We can’t know that,” Bianchi pressed.

  “We must believe that,” Winter counted. He paused, then said, “The ethics of this are lousy, but at the end of the day, we are at war, and if the enemy are victorious, the human race comes to an end. Now it turns out that alien technology was used to create this torture device. Who knows what influence that had on this nightmare.” He looked at Bianchi, and added, “If you don’t want to be a part of this, then you are at liberty to enter a formal protest. I will note it in the log. I will go further; you can transfer to Turing, and Commander Galloway can take your place here.”

  “No, sir,” she replied. “I simply wanted to have the issue placed on the record.” She looked around the room, and said, “We’re talking about fellow human beings, not soulless machines. That’s the same trap the Tyrants fell into. We can’t follow their example, or all of this is pointless.”

  For a moment, there was a long silence, Moore finally asking, “What’s the battle plan, Commander?”

  “We fly through the wormhole and launch every probe we’ve got to get a picture of the local defenses. There’s no point trying to conceal our arrival. We’ll set off every sensor in the system. We’re going to have to make use of speed and surprise. I doubt they’ll have any heavy defenses close by. Then we slingshot around the gas giant to gain as much speed as possible to plan our attack, and aim for the planet, right for the target.”

  Nodding. Morgan said, “They’d be expecting an orbital assault. We might be able to feint that, throw them off. If they don’t know this is a vulnerable spot, then that works to our advantage.”

  “If they do, then we execute the secondary plan. Lieutenant Moore, have you made the requisite preparations?”

  She sighed, nodded, and said, “We can bring this ship down anywhere on the planet, and as long as we hit something solid, the result will be a twenty gigaton explosion. More than enough to have the desired effect. There won’t be a structure still standing on the planet, and enough dust thrown into the air to amount to a nuclear winter.”

  “One more reason to strip down to a skeleton crew,” Morgan mused.

  “Quite so, Major,” Winter replied. “Commander Bianchi, I want you to make all the relevant preparations. See that anyone going on the mission makes their wills, and has an opportunity to prepare some final messages home. I’ve tried to select from those without children where I can, but in some cases it just wasn’t possible.”

  “Understood, sir. I’ll see it done. When do we leave?”

  “Lieutenant Moore, can you be ready for departure in six hours?”

  “I can, sir.”

  Nodding, he replied, “Then that’s when we leave. No sense waiting any longer than we have to.” He paused, then added, “This is the big show, people. This is what we’ve been waiting for. Let’s make it good. Dismissed.”

  Chapter 17

  Mendoza looked at the monitor with rapt attention as she scrolled through the text, working her way through an ever-lengthening series of search times as she fished the alien archive, rummaging through the database for the information they needed to press the attack. It was obvious that it was the work of a single, collective entity, one mind behind the whole network. At some point, regardless of the original intention, the aliens had merged into a single entity. Except that they had done it by choice, not force.

  “Anything interesting?” Volkov asked, walking into the room.

  “That’s the dumbest question I’ve heard today,” she replied, her eyes still locked on the monitor. “I could spend the rest of my life going through all of this and still not run out of questions to ask. It’s going to take generations for researchers back home to even begin to assimilate all of this information. It’s not just technical specifications. Everything is here, in concentrated form. Art, music, literature. Everything their society ever produced.”

  “In that small a package?” Volkov asked, shaking his head. “I guess they can’t have been all that creative.”

  “No, it just means they were phenomenally good at data compression. I’ve already seen a few tricks that I want to try and adapt to our database at some point, and that’s just for starters. We’re going to be able to leap forward three or four generations in terms of computer design, and if we can work out the secret of the wormhole, that could unlock the galaxy.” Turning to the engineer, she said, “They were methodical, beyond all belief. They didn’t race ahead like we do. They cautiously advanced, a step at a time, making sure of their footing before they moved forward.”

  “And blew themselves up with a forgotten weapon.”

  “Even that is a miracle of engineering. A computer/defense system designed to last for thousands of years with only routine maintenance? I’m not sure we could put together a system that would last for a century, certainly not something as complicated as Guardian.”

  “Guardian?”

  “That’s what they called it. Apparently, the designers were concerned that human error might lead to the final war, the apocalypse, and they’d hoped to rule that out by transferring command responsibility to a machine. I guess they forgot that the programmers were as vulnerable to error as the politicians they were trying to replace.”

  “Nobody’s perfect, I guess,” Volkov replied.

  “That’s putting it mildly,” she said. “I’m trying to work out the details of the interface mechanism. At some point, they integrated Guardian into their collective consciousness. That must have made it far, far worse for them. They knew exactly what was happening, every detail, but couldn’t do a damned thing to stop it.”

  “And now they’re gone,” he said. “Wiped off the map for eternity.” He paused, then asked, “They are all gone, right?”

  “They were very sensitive to environmental and technological disruption, as far as I can tell. That makes sense. Over time they became totally dependent on the link, could not survive without it, though whether that was biological or psychological I couldn’t say. They suggest the former, but the latter is heavily implied in some of the research material.”

  Shaking his head, Volkov replied, “I can’t believe how much progress you’ve managed to make in such a short space of time. It doesn’t seem realistic. A completely alien database…”

  “That they desperately wanted us to be able to read. Someone spent a very long time preparing this. Centuries, I think. My assumption is that there was a small cluster of survivors out here, isolated from everything else, and they completed the work before dying out. There can’t have been enough of them to keep the race going, and there’s no evidence of any sort of technological civilization down there, certainly nothin
g that could sustain a race over the long-term.”

  “How did they live while the others died, though?”

  “They didn’t watch the destruction of their world and experience the deaths of billions of people as a personal thing. Imagine feeling everything you ever knew dying. I’m surprised they lingered as long as they did. I’ve no idea how they got the details of the destruction of their world, but the final logs make it clear that they were able to get over the shock. They just couldn’t keep everything else going.”

  “Now for the big question. Might they have survived elsewhere?”

  “Probably.”

  Raising an eyebrow, he said, “That was quick.”

  “They spent centuries trying to work out how to cross the stars, and it was one of the first things I looked for. This database is indexed in a totally intuitive way, beyond all belief. They never cracked the warp drive, but they did launch sleeper ships in all directions, out towards any star that might support them, as well as a few generation ships.”

  “Then we might have friends out there, somewhere among the stars,” he replied. “Though we made one attempt at a generation ship, and it never even reached the Oort Cloud.”

  “We never did find out what happened out there,” she said. “Odds are we never will, but don’t forget, they had complete continuity of consciousness. We might not have been able to pass the spirit, the meaning of such a journey down through the generations, but that wasn’t a problem they ever had to face. They’d have the assurance that their descendants would know, one way or another, would be certain in the knowledge that their intentions and hopes would be remembered.”

  “You sound as though you admire them.”

  “I do,” she replied. “Of course I do. It’s the ultimate expression of everything humanity has been working towards since we first learned to talk, to share information between ourselves. You can think of mankind as a rather badly designed collective consciousness right now, if you want, though one dependent on the ability of our five senses to perceive it. Imagine if we could link ourselves together, if we could make the decision to connect our consciousness. Further than that, if we could manage to link across the light-years. Wormhole technology could allow that. I suspect that was the idea.”