Galactic Corps. Ian Douglas

regions of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm, within the dense polar jungles of the warm, inner world of a class-G5 star, a race of brachiating mollusks—morphologically, at least, they somewhat resembled certain members of that terrestrial phylum—swung from the interwoven branches of sessile thermovores not unlike Earthly trees. The species was young, as yet, but had developed an elaborate philosophy based on mating calls, territoriality, music, and mathematics. One day, they might have much to offer an evolving Galactic polylogue, but they hadn’t yet developed electronics or radio, much less the instantaneous magic of quantum-coupled communications. The huntership-communes of We Who Are had passed through this star system several times within the past ten thousand or so years, but not noticed the species’ thriving, arboreal cities.

       Not yet.

       Closer in toward the galactic core, within the teeming star clouds of the Sagittarius Arm, on the rugged, tide-strained volcanic moon of a superjovian gas giant, a race of armored paraholothurids built water’s-edge hive-cities of compacted excrement and composed palendromic epics celebrating their having been chosen as slaves of the sky-disk they saw as the eye of God. Natural radio emitters, they broadcast the glory of the one true religion to the stars. We Who Are had detected those signals and searched for their origin; so far, they’d not found the holothurids’ world, for they tended not to think of planetary bodies outside of the star’s liquid-water habitable zone as a possible abode of life.

       That particular blind spot had given them trouble more than once in the past, and likely would again.

       Closer in still toward the galactic hub, near the merging of the Norma and Scutum-Crux Arms, a fiercely radiating type A star blasted its unusual coterie of rocky worlds with intense radiation. Bathed in abundant radiant energy, Life had emerged on the innermost world and, borne by the local stellar winds, had seeded the other, outer planets of the system as well. Sentience had arisen here a few million years before, rising among several of the numerous, fast-evolving taxas of selenium-germanium chelated crystalline chemovores that constituted the local biosphere. Here, again, the manipulation of naturally occurring radio waves became the basis for communication, and, again, those manipulations had been detected in the depths of space, light-years distant.

       The pace of crystalline life, however, tends to be slow, too slow for We Who Are to distinguish that life from the inorganic chemistry of accreted minerals. Those received artificial signals had caused the local We Who Are node some considerable concern, but it was clear that the problem soon would take care of itself. Type A giants are short-lived stars, their lifetimes on the main sequence lasting less than half a billion years. The local star already was showing signs of instability, and soon the abundant radiation that made life and sentience possible here would become that life’s executioner.

       Twenty-three thousand light years from the Galaxy’s center, within the smear of stars and nebulae known as the Orion Arm, a world called Chiron by its most recent inhabitant, represented two distinct threads of civilization within the Galactic scene. Bathed in the yellow and orange hues of a double star, the world’s continents were battered and cratered by an intense celestial bombardment of half a million years before, and everywhere stood the somber and silent ruins of a golden civilization swept away by the firestorm. They were known by those who’d come later variously as the Ancients and, so numerous were the crumbling shells of their hell-blasted world-cities, as the Builders.

       The Builder civilization had been a brilliant concord of machine intelligences arisen and evolved from various organic precursors; the asteroids that had destroyed Chiron had been flung into the planet by We Who Are, whose hunterships had sought out the Builders’ colony worlds scattered widely across perhaps a third of the Galaxy and in like manner, relentlessly and methodically exterminated each one.

      Chiron was also known to its more recent colonists as Alpha Centauri A-II. Just four and a third light years away lay the G2 star called Sol, and the homeworld of an ambitious, carbon-based, oxygen-metabolizing species of sexual mammals that called itself Humankind. Within the past thousand years, an eye’s blink against the span marking the rise and extinction of myriad expressions of galactic life and sentience, humans and their artificially sentient machines had left the world of their birth to venture to the worlds of nearby stars, beginning with Chiron, and going on to assimilate numerous star systems scattered throughout an oblong realm measuring perhaps eight light centuries across at its greatest extent, four at its smallest. They’d encountered other intelligent species—the primitive An, the advanced but retiring N’mah, and the benthic species of brilliant mathematicians known to them as the Eulers—all three the shattered remnants of past encounters with We Who Are.

       And, more than once within the past handful of centuries, Humankind, too, had attracted the xenocidal attention of We Who Are, and the destructiveness of those encounters was rapidly escalating. Most recently, a human battlefleet had used an ancient system of stargates to reach an important node of We Who Are near the Galactic hub, and there used Euler technology to detonate the star.

       The resultant nova had finally caught the full attention of the Galaxy’s overlords.

       And they moved now with blatantly uncharacteristic haste to obey their racial hard-wiring and eliminate once and for all this new and potentially serious threat to their survival.

       The final clash, the final Armageddon would come soon, and, when it did, it would do so on a scale unknown since the extinction of the Builders.

       1

       1506.1111

       First Platoon, Bravo Company

       Carson Gate/Cluster Space

       0540 hrs, GMT

      Gunnery Sergeant Aiden Garroway wiggled a bit deeper into the bottle’s embrace as the armorer swung the dome canopy down over his head and sealed it in place. “Link check,” he heard, the Navy chief’s words forming in his mind.

      The canopy was opaque, a nanosurfaced ceramic-iridium laminate impervious to almost anything up to a direct hit by a 100-gigawatt laser, but the bottle’s electronics fed the external view directly into Garroway’s brain, channeling the data through his cerebral implants. The armorer’s face leered down at him, distorted by the feed’s fisheye effect, and by the reflections from the fishbowl helmet of the man’s vacwear utilities.

      “Link is on-line,” Garroway replied. “You’re going to have to fix that, though, Chief. God, you’re ugly.”

      The man laughed. “Not as ugly as the Xulies. Good luck, Marine.”

      “Ooh-rah.” With a thoughtclick, Garroway switched the data link to an external view, fed from the Ishtar’s outer hull.

      The view here, high above the stargate, was stunning, spectacular. …

      Carson was a nondescript double star near the fringe of Commonwealth space, a planetless pair of cool M-class dwarfs circling one another in a tight embrace. Two light hours out, so distant that the two suns themselves were merely bright ruby points of light against the background scattering of stars, the local stargate drifted in slow orbit, an immense, slender-rimmed hoop twenty kilometers across, gleaming silver and red in the somber light.

      The Marine transport Ishtar was drifting slowly toward the gate belly-first, some fifteen kilometers above the structure’s center. Her ventral hatches were open, her forward dropdeck exposed to hard vacuum—hence the need for the armorer’s helmet and sealed utilities.

      He switched the feed back to his pod’s external optics. Around him, caught in the glare of overhead lights, were the launch racks holding other bottles, and Navy and Marine personnel—armorers, deckhands,