Battlespace. Ian Douglas
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BOOK TWO OF
THE LEGACY TRILOGY
BATTLESPACE
IAN DOUGLAS
To CJ, who’s helped me with my own battle space.
Table of Contents
“I hope they’re friendly,” Lynnley said.
“I hope they’re friendly,” Lynnley said.
“Of course they’re friendly!” Paul replied. “All the legends about gods from Sirius emphasized that they were friendly, taught humans how to plant crops, that kind of thing. They’re just coming out to greet us!”
The shipboard alert clamored in their minds. Now hear this, now hear this, intoned the voice of the Marine detachment’s resident AI. Battle stations, battle stations. All hands man your battle stations.
A precaution only, she thought. Here, almost nine light-years from what was known and understood, it paid to be doubly cautious.
“Damn,” she said. “I sure hope you’re right.”
She began to disconnect from the noumenal feed. Battle stations for the Marines was in the squad bay aft, suited and armed, ready to repel an attack on the ship or to deploy planetside in their TAL-S Dragonflies to meet an enemy. There was no planetside here, and the golden ship, or whatever it was, had made no hostile moves as yet, had it?
Just a precaution … just a precaution. …
Then something made her hesitate, to look again at the approaching golden vessel.
And then she felt her soul and mind being dragged from her body. …
She began screaming. …
15 AUGUST 2148
Star Explorer Wings of Isis Sirius System 1550 hours, Shipboard time
Lance Corporal Lynnley Collins, UFR/US Marines, drifted free within inexpressible beauty.
From her vantage point, she seemed to float in the depths of space, but a space turned glorious by the blue-silver-white beacons of two nearby stars: gleaming Sirius A and its tiny white-dwarf brother, Sirius B.
The Sirius system was thick with dust and debris that caught the starlight and twisted it into hazy knots of pale color. The noumenal display revealed the hard radiation searing the encircling sky as a faint purple background glow.
Noumenal space—such a bland and uninformative description of the sheer miraculous. If a phenomenon is something that happens in the world around us, within that collection of events and happenstance and knock-on-wood solid matter humans are pleased to call reality, then a noumenon is that which happens within a person’s mind.
Thought, wonder, visualization, imagination … such are the bone and sinew of the noumenal. With the appropriate nanochelates forming hypolinks and neural access stacks at certain points within the sulci of the brain, with implanted microcircuitry and perhaps twenty grams of other hardware grown nanobit by nanobit into key nerve bundles to provide sensory input, a human could link in to the data feed from a computer or an AI and become an organic SUI, a sensory user’s interface, experiencing downloads not on a computer monitor or wallscreen, but as unfolding visual and aural imagery within the mind itself.
Lance Corporal Collins, then, was not really adrift in open space, bathed in the fiercely radiant glare of Sirius A. Remote cameras and other sensors on the hull of the explorer ship Wings of Isis provided the cascade of data flooding through her brain by way of the ship’s communications systems. The sky around her was dramatically, impossibly beautiful, bands of dust and gas aglow in actinic Sirian light. Sirius A was distant enough that she didn’t even show a disk, yet still was so brilliant that even within the artfully massaged illusion