Star Corps

“What … what about you guys? Aren’t you coming?”

“We’ll be going out later,” he replied. With that, he turned and trotted toward the northwest, the other two Marines at his heels.

Nichole started up the pyramid’s steps. The satchel, slung over her shoulder, was heavier than she’d remembered it, and she was out of breath from the ragged jog through the Legation compound’s streets. Her jumpsuit was supposed to be self-drying and cooling, but its microcircuitry just couldn’t keep up with the heat or her exertions, and she felt her strength waning.

Three-quarters of the way up, she stopped, dropping the pack and sagging onto the step for a breather. From there, the compound and the surrounding city were spread out below and around her in magnificent, twilit panorama. Heavy columns of smoke stained the sky to the north and northwest, and she could see hordes of attackers surging through the streets and plazas a kilometer away. Many carried torches and were burning anything they could find that was flammable. It was a scene out of Hell, of an alien Armageddon.

Shouldering her pack again, she started up the last of the steps. They were awkwardly placed, steeper and more narrow than was comfortable for human legs. Ahead, the stairway split to either side of an alcove opening into the pyramid’s interior, creating a stone-walled chamber that opened onto the steps. Light spilled from the inside, and she saw people moving within. She decided to enter the alcove and see who was there.

The Chamber of the Eye, from which the pyramid took its name, was featureless and bare, the walls, floor, and ceiling highly polished black stone, with no carvings, no paintings, no decorations of any kind. The lights came from high-power lamps erected by human technicians; the only furnishing that had been in the room when the first expedition arrived from Earth was an ellipsoid of what looked like polished rock crystal two meters across, suspended from the ceiling by a slender but rigidly inflexible tether. Its dark interior gave it the look of a huge eye—hence the name.

At the moment, a man’s head and shoulders hovered within the eye’s pupil. Behind him was the corporate logo of PanTerra, a stylized graphic of Earth floating within a canted ring. The usual pair of Marine sentries stood inside the door, expressions blank. Carleton stood in front of the eye, along with three other PanTerran reps, speaking with impassioned urgency. “Damn it, Roth, this is your screw-up! I’m not taking a fall for it!”

“No one is asking you to, Mr. Carleton,” the face within the eye said with a bland lack of emotion. “And, of course, we take full responsibility for all decisions made at the corporate level. Still, our field personnel must be held accountable for losses incurred due to any mishandling of the local situation—”

“There was no mishandling, damn it! We carried out Corporate’s directives to the letter!”

“That will be determined at the review. We’ll keep you informed, of course.”

“Jesus Christ, have you been listening to me, Roth? We’re losing the interstellar link! We’re eight light-years from help! An hour from now we could all be dead!”

“Well, we certainly hope that won’t happen, Mr. Carleton,” Roth said. “As you point out, though, you are eight light-years and some away … a ten-year journey at best. There is absolutely nothing any of us here can do … but wish you luck. Goodbye, Mr. Carleton. I hope your fears about the situation there … prove meritless.”

The face in the Eye blanked out, replaced by the standard carrier wave signal of ICLI. The government organization known as Interstellar Communications Link International was the entity responsible for maintaining the faster-than-light comlinks between several far-flung planets—here on Ishtar, among the melancholy ruins on Chiron at Alpha Centauri A, on inhospitable Hathor at Wolf 359, and of course in the Cave of Wonders on Mars. Within the Cave of Wonders, beneath the barren Cydonian mesa known as the Face, an array of thousands of viewscreens, product of a technology seemingly magic by current human standards, showed that once, half a million years ago, the Builders had created an instantaneous communication network linking thousands of worlds. Most of the screens at the Martian Builders site were dead, evidence that their empire, like so many others, had fallen to the Hunters of the Dawn.

Of the rest, a handful had been identified with nearby stars, and, as the new antimatter-torch technology gave humankind a means of approaching near-light speed, three of those worlds—Chiron, Hathor, and Ishtar—had been visited. The first two were dead worlds, the detritus of a war of interstellar extinction fought half a million years before; Ishtar, however …

“Bastard!” Carleton snapped.

“What’s the matter, Carleton?” Nichole asked. “Your books showing a loss for the quarter?”

Carleton whirled. “What are you doing here?”

“Hey, I just came in out of the cold.”

The irony was lost on the PanTerra agent. “You shouldn’t be in here.”

“Why not? Free access …” One of the absolute rules of ICLI’s stewardship of the FTL comm links was that access to the Builder technology was never to be restricted to any person or group, for any purpose. It was a rule more often honored in the breach than in fact.

“We’re not going to have access in another few moments,” he said, apparently trying to steer the conversation away from PanTerra business. “Those idiots!”

“Blaming the home office for your own stupidity isn’t going to cut it,” she told him. “Anyway, PanTerra has no business exploiting the natives or their technology.”

“That, Doctor, is not your decision. C’mon, let’s get to the transport.”

He brushed past her and out onto the pyramid steps, followed by his assistants. Nichole hesitated a moment, staring at the Eye, then turned and followed them.

That Eye had provided humans with their first glimpse of living An a century ago, when Dr. Alexander himself had entered the Cave of Wonders on Mars and seen for the first time the arrayed viewscreens providing two-way real-time links with a thousand worlds. Studies of the sky—the slow-moving stars and a spectroscopic analysis of the distant red sun glimpsed through the open, west-facing opening of the chamber—had identified the site as a world of Llalande 21185, and a relatively easy goal for one of Earth’s early interstellar attempts. The chances for profound scientific and historical investigation and discovery had been staggering.