Europa Strike (39 page)

But, after it all, Robbie was still gone. Somehow, she'd thought that delivering reinforcements to Europa, that reinforcing the MSEF expedition, would help her escape the pain and loneliness she felt with Rob's death.

It hadn't.

And…what of that immense thing locked in the ice midway between the CWS and Chinese bases? Twelve kilometers across, a titanic shell of intricate design. Even dead and lifeless, it could overwhelm the senses with sheer power of statistics.

A reminder of
just
how small,
just
how powerless humans were in an uncaring and brutal universe.

“Colonel!” John Reynolds emerged form the communications shack, excited. “Colonel Garroway!”

“Yes.” She did not turn from the display screen, and the marble-smooth brilliance of Europa turning below.

“The message from Earth just came in. They're congratulating you on a brilliant operation. That's what they said! ‘Brilliant!'”

She said nothing.

“There's more.” When she didn't reply, didn't turn, he added, “There's a lot more. It seems a Navy search-and-rescue op was deployed to the Asteroid Belt, just as another Peaceforcer ship showed up. The
Liddy Dole
. They tracked the hab modules from the
Kennedy
in simulation, and figured out where they were.

“Colonel, they found twenty men and women alive in one of those modules. Half starved, half frozen, dehydrated, yeah…but
alive
.

“And your son was among the survivors.”

The tears came before she could stop them, spilling from her eyes, adhering to her cheeks, launching themselves into the air in tiny, jiggling droplets of silver as she shook her head.

Robbie was
alive
.

And she was no longer quite so alone.

15
SEPTEMBER
2067

Major Jack Ramsey looked up at Dr. Alexander. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘My God, I can read it!'”

Physically, they were in the surface hab, but both men, along with Teri and Paul, had entered a virtual reality simulation modeling Mars as it had been half a million years before. Pyramids the size of mountains, still fresh and clean and not yet ground away by millennia of dust, rose on the horizon. The Boreal Sea lapped at their feet, reflecting the pink-shading-to-blue of the sky. The enigmatic monument humans would later call the Face had not yet been carved; instead, a cluster of alien-looking buildings, all black curves and spires, rose from the crest of the mesa that one day would bear vaguely, crudely hewn human features.

And everywhere there were people. Humans—though their brows were a bit low, their chins receding. Genus Archaic
Homo
, gene-tailored to intelligence and speech and cleverness, then brought to Mars by aliens known as the Galactics.

And Galactics as well—or one group of them. The strange, floating, upright cigar shapes with their glittering crystal eyes were the repositories of keen but alien intelligences, downloaded into immortal machine bodies ages before and light-millennia distant.

What was most exciting was the fact that this simulation had not been assembled by the archaeological team, or by Dejah Thoris. They had entered a simulation that was part of the records stored for half a million years in the vault buried far beneath the Face, the Cave of Wonders. The key had come from Europa, where a personal secretary program called Chesty Puller had picked up enough from the Singer spacecraft to provide the necessary clues, the Rosetta Stone, that gave access to Builder records…and legibility to their writings. Apparently, the Singer, even though it had been alien, had stored Builder records. Or perhaps those languages and protocols had been universal, a lingua franca among many cultures, including that of the Life Seekers.

Someday, they would know for sure.

Words shimmered in the air before them, alien characters of line and curve and staccato jots, like apostrophes.

“I can
read
it!”

“How?” Jack asked. “It looks like…oh!”

The words changed in his mind as he focused on them. The text, manipulated by a melding of human software and a technology half a million years dead, appeared as English.

W
E NOW KNOW THE
L
IFE
S
EEKERS HAVE FOUND US AND WILL BE HERE SOON
, the words read. He was aware, too, of a voice, an echo in his mind, repeating the text scrolling before his eyes. W
E KNOW THAT THE WORLD WE ARE BUILDING HERE IS DOOMED
. S
OME FEW OF US HAVE ALREADY BEGUN THE DOWNLOAD PROCESS INTO THE MINDS OF SOME OF THE
TAR-SAH
. P
ERHAPS THEY CAN ESCAPE NOTICE ON THE
B
LUE
W
ORLD
. P
ERHAPS NOT
. T
HE REST OF US
—

The image flickered, then faded into blackness.

“The Hunters of the Dawn found them,” Jack said. “While they were still preparing.”

“But a few escaped,” Paul said. “To Earth.”

“That might explain some things,” Teri said. “The longing our species seems to have for the stars, for heaven, for a lost golden age. The Ancients' fascination with megalithic structures, pyramids, measuring the skies and the seasons—”

“And it's the only way there is to explain how humans could be the offspring of alien visitors,” David said, grinning.

Paul laughed.

Jack, however, suppressed a small shiver. The discoveries on Europa had unlocked a flood of new information—information about humans, about where they'd come from and why, about the Galactics, about the Life Seekers who sought out life not to embrace it, but to destroy.

The Face, for instance. That, they now knew, had been carved by a last few survivors of the human colony on Mars—a signal across 50 million kilometers to brother humans, and to human demigods whose minds included the downloaded personalities of Galactics. We are here! Remember us!

But in five thousand centuries, so much had been forgotten. Whatever Galactic-centered civilization that might have survived on Earth had collapsed. Ice ages had come and gone. A new race of alien masters, the An, had established colonies and enslaved the primitive humans until they had been destroyed by what they'd called the Hunters of the Dawn.

Was that another name for the Life Seekers? Or had the Life Seekers followed the Galactics into extinction, to be replaced hundreds of thousands of years later by another species that equated survival with the extinction of all competitors?

The Fermi Paradox. Where was everyone?

Dead. Dead and gone. Until the Great Cycle repeats itself, and new species arise to cogent thought and civilization and again reach for the stars. Only with every new generation, there must be a few, a very few, who survived by eliminating all others.

Hunters of the Dawn, reborn time after time after long, bloody time, until there was a galaxy filled with worlds as promising and as dead as Chiron.

Still, life endured. Civilizations fell, but life went on. There'd been survivors of the barrage from space that had annihilated the An. There were other worlds around nearby stars that still held primitive An colonies.

And the descendants of the human survivors of those long-ago wars had survived against all odds, had embraced technology again, had stepped toward the stars, a few even discarding the gods and angels and demons arisen from memories of alien masters.

Who were the Hunters of the Dawn now? And where?

Jack had a feeling humankind would learn the answer very soon now.

It was a very small part of the heritage they had yet to claim from among the stars.