The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas

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      He sighed. “Thanks, kitten.” Though they’d not formally married, Tabatha Sahir had been his domestic partner for a good many years, now, and she knew what a call from his assistant at this hour almost certainly meant.

      “We have an upload coming in NL from one of our Xul listening posts, General,” Cara told him. “It sounds serious.”

      “Tell me.”

      Briefly, Cara filled him in on the bare bones of what had happened. Listening Post Puller 659 had noted the loss of some automated probes at a targeted Stargate. A Marine lieutenant and an AI had gone through to check things out up close and personal, and encountered a Xul huntership. The AI had successfully linked with the Xul, and they’d brought some hot data out.

      As Alexander listened to a précis of that data, he felt his gut constrict, a hard, cold knot. Damn! The bastards found us. …

      “Put that Marine down for a medal,” he told Cara. “We owe him a lot.”

      “Her,” Cara corrected him. “And the LP reports she is seriously injured. She may not survive.”

      “Shit. Keep me informed of her condition,” he said. “Okay. Pass the data up the line, Intel and the Joint Chiefs.”

      “Very well.”

      “And give me a map. Where the hell is this place, anyway?”

      Currently, the bedchamber’s walls and domed ceiling were set to display the dark and murky blue fog of paraspace. Other Marines, he knew, tended to display scenes from Earth or Earth’s Rings, or generic starfields, or even keeping the displays blank and neutral, but he’d always found the shifting blue murk to be relaxing, a definite inducement to sleep.

      As well as to wonder. Paraspace, more poetically known as the Quantum Sea, lay at the very foundation of what modern physics was pleased to call reality, whatever the hell that was. It was here that, in accord with the laws of quantum physics, particles and antiparticles popped into existence for too brief a space of time to measure, then winked out again, where standing waves of virtual particles formed the basis of matter and energy at higher reality levels. The two-million-ton bulk of Skybase had been constructed in Mars orbit, then phase-shifted into the Quantum Sea, so the station could not be said to have a location in normal space/time at all. The idea had been to put the main operational headquarters for the U.S. Marine Corps outside the reach of any possible sneak attack, either by human foes or by the Xul.

      He checked the hour, and groaned. Since there was no day or night here—indeed, no means of measuring time at all save by instruments brought through from normal space—by old, old tradition, the station operated on Greenwich Mean Time. As commanding general of the station, he could set any personal schedule he wished, and so several hours ago had turned in with Tabbie for the “night,” whatever that might mean here in this eldritch space-that-was-not-space. By Greenwich Mean, it was just before midnight.

      But the CO of any ship, base, or station was always on call. Always.

      At his thought-click, the blue murk faded to dark, and a three-dimensional representation of human space hung high in the dome over the bedchamber. Sol glowed bright yellow at the center, surrounded by a thin haze of other stars in a many-lobed blob stretching across eight hundred light-years at its greatest extent, perhaps three hundred light-years at its smallest.

      The amoebic shape of human space had been dictated by the uneven expansion of colonizing expeditions outbound from Sol over the course of the past six or eight centuries. Colony ships searched for worlds as close to Earth in terms of climate and habitability as possible, bypassing hundreds of frozen or poisonous rock balls in favor if those rare worlds that could be made livable with a minimum of terraforming. The statistics appeared in a window to one side of the display. All told, human space embraced roughly 120 million cubic light-years containing some 10 to 12 million stars.

      Of those millions, however, about five hundred systems, all told, contained a human presence, ranging from tiny mining or military outposts to a scant handful of systems like Sol or Chiron, with populations numbering in the tens of billions. Of those 500, roughly a quarter—128, to be precise—were members of the Terran Commonwealth. All of the rest belonged to the nonaligned governments—the Islamics, the PanEuropeans, the Chinese, the Hispanics, the Russians.

      “Drop in the known Gates, please,” he told Cara. Instantly, seventeen of the fainter stars on the display turned bright and purple. Four were in space claimed by the Commonwealth. The other thirteen belonged to other stellar governments.

      The closest Gate to Sol, of course, was Sirius C, the Gateway orbiting in the planetless Sirius star system 8.6 light-years from Sol. Over the centuries, though, as human colonies reached farther and farther out, other Gates had been discovered; the second closest Gate was at Gamma Piscium, a Type K0 giant 91 light-years from Sol. The Gates were unevenly sprinkled across human space with a randomness that suggested that the network, if it had ever possessed an order to begin with, had been distorted over the eons by the natural drift of the stars in their individual orbits about the galactic center.

      Probes and research conducted at each of the seventeen gates located within human space had demonstrated that none of those seventeen linked with one another, that all available destinations were other Gates scattered across the Galaxy at extremely long ranges indeed—usually on the order of several thousand to several tens of thousands of light-years. Many, in fact, like the Gate nexus in Cluster Space, were well outside of the Galaxy proper, out in the thin halo of dim and distant stars thinning out endlessly into intergalactic space.

      If there was anything like a large-scale order to the galactic network of Stargates, human research had not yet been able to determine what it was. Neither was it known yet whether the Gate network had been built by the Xul in the first place, by the Builders, or by someone else entirely. That the Xul used the network was definite. Of nearly five thousand gateway possibilities so far investigated among those seventeen Gates, almost two hundred opened into star systems occupied by Xul bases. Marine Listening Posts had been established at each of those systems, in order to attempt to monitor Xul activities on the far side.

      That strategy had just paid off, thank God.

      But at a damned high cost.

      “Which one is Puller 659?” he asked.

      One of the purple points of light flared brighter on the display. Puller 659, he saw, officially Ringstar in the PanEuropean ephemera according to the windowed description, was a red dwarf star near the fringes of human-explored space, 283 light-years from Sol and located within the misshapen lobe of habitation known as the PanEuropean Arm. The star system was nondescript and otherwise unimportant—possessing a single gas giant, Ring, and its coterie of moons, a few dwarf-planet rock-and-ice balls, and a large population of asteroids and comets.

      And the base there was illegal as hell. “Shit!” he said aloud, with some feeling.

      Human politics had just shoved its ugly nose under the tent flap.

      This was not going to be easy.

       9

       0511.1102

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