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Star Corps(109)



“But their search wasn’t perfect. They missed scattered bands of human survivors on Earth—overlooked them or ignored them—or else we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. And they missed the Ahannu colony here.”

“Why?” Ramsey asked.

He felt her noumenal shrug. “Perhaps they were searching for evidence of technology…radio transmissions, neutrino leakage from fusion reactors, that sort of thing. That’s probably why our ancestors escaped on Earth. Flint-knapping and campfires don’t show up very well from space. Out here…well, like Mr. Norris said, this isn’t exactly prime real estate. Ishtar is five times farther from its star than Earth is from the sun, and Llalande is a cool red dwarf. Anything this far out ought to be frozen solid at ten or twenty degrees Kelvin.”

“It’s not because Marduk is a brown dwarf, right?” Norris said. “A failed star.”

“Incorrect,” the voice of Cassius said. “The gas giant Marduk is of insufficient mass to be classified as a true brown dwarf.”

“Actually,” Hanson added, “the gas giant does give off a lot more heat than it receives from the star, but not enough on its own to make Ishtar habitable. Most of Ishtar’s heat comes from tidal sources—volcanism and seismic activity—caused by the constant tug-of-war on it between the gas giant and the other major satellites of Marduk. It’s like Io and Jupiter in our own Solar system, though not quite so extreme. Instead of the entire crust turning itself inside out, the tidal flexing gradually liberates heat that is trapped by Ishtar’s atmosphere and oceans.”

“Still, you’d think the Hunters of the Dawn would have noticed the anomaly,” Ramsey said. “A planet-sized moon, warm and with an atmosphere, this far out…”

“There are lots of unusual things about Ishtar,” Hanson said. “The tidal friction is just enough to create a habitable band around the Marduk twilight zone…not too much, not too little. The atmosphere is thick enough to trap the heat released through volcanism and crustal movements. There’s enough of an ionosphere and a planetary magnetic field to deflect the worst of the radiation from Marduk. The storms caused by the constant heating of Ishtar’s oceans are incredible, but some of the fault valleys in the twilight band offer shelter enough for a small civilization to survive. All things considered, the chances of finding a livable world here must be somewhere between damned slim and nonexistent.”

“Is it possible Ishtar is the product of planetary engineering?” Ramsey wondered. “I mean, with that many coincidences…”

“We were actually wondering about that for a while,” Hanson replied. “After all, Mars shows evidence of having been terraformed half a million years ago. We thought for a while it might be possible that the Ahannu were responsible.

“But the Ahannu don’t appear to have ever possessed that level of technology. Star travel, yes…but not changing climates and atmospheres on a planetary scale. No, the civilization we call the Builders terraformed Mars 500,000 years before the Ahannu came on the scene. The Builders were wiped out by an even more technically proficient civilization, the race that created ‘the Singer’ that we found out on Europa.”

“The Hunters of the Dawn,” Norris said.

“Mmm. Possibly,” Hanson said. “It doesn’t seem likely that the same folks who wiped out the Builders on Mars and the civilization we found at Alpha Centauri would have survived half a million years, to be on hand in time to wipe out the Ahannu.”

“Though both predatory species have been called ‘Hunters of the Dawn’ in popular literature,” Cassius observed, “the time span involved makes it extremely unlikely that the same ‘Hunters’ destroyed both the Builder civilization and the starfaring Ahannu culture. In any case, the Singer discovered beneath the ice at Europa represents a technology far beyond the probable technology of the destroyers of the Ahannu colonies half a million years later. There are considerable xenoarcheological problems inherent in identifying the two as one.”

“Can’t you shut that damned thing off?” Norris asked.

Ramsey grinned. “Not likely. Cassius is a part of our Command Constellation. Besides, Cass, you were out there at the Singer, weren’t you?”

“Correct. Though there was scant opportunity for exploration. My primary task on Europa was guard duty.”

“Yeah, well, there’s no sign of the Dawn Hunters nowadays,” Norris pointed out, ruffled. “Except for the mess they left behind.”