Semper Human (10 page)

It was becoming increasingly clear that any action against the Xul would have to be the responsibility of humans, and perhaps a few others.
This
bunch couldn't even agree that a threat existed, much less what to do about it.

The argument was continuing—in fact, now that one of the slow-thinking, slow-speaking, methane-drinking gh'Vrl'jrd'dvre was addressing the group, the debate promised to stretch on for many hours more—but there was no reason for Rame to stay. He'd had his say, and he'd heard all that was worth hearing in response.

This would have to be done another way.

With a thought, he disconnected from the government node, and the thousands of shining pillars with their wildly differing occupants winked out. He was lying in a recliner within the Conclave chamber. There were fifty other recliners arrayed about the floor; eight were actually occupied.

The dome overhead no longer showed the deadly blue blossom of the Core Detonation, but looked down instead on the more serene blues and whirling whites of a half-phase Earth. This particular node of the Associative government was located in Earthring, a band of some billions of habitats and large-scale structures in geosynchronous orbit, some forty thousand kilometers above Earth's equator. Several hundred elevators connected various portions of the Ring with the
planetary surface, slender spokes made invisible by distance and scale. The nearest, descending to an artificial island on the outskirts of Greater Singapore, was just visible as a wisp-thin thread of light in the distance. It was night over half of the visible hemisphere; cities gleamed like thick dustings of stars across the Chinese Hegemony, the squabbling nations of the Indian subcontinent, and the sprawling oceanic megopoli of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.

“Giving up?”

He turned. The speaker was Star Lord Tavia Costa, who represented the million or so s-Humans living on Earth's moon. Despite being one of his political opponents in numerous recent debates, Tavia was a friend. They'd even been lovers for a time, a strictly recreational liaison since for the two of them there could be no thought of children. The genegineering that had created Tavia's species had caused too much genetic drift for offspring to be naturally possible…or desirable.

“I don't think there's any point in carrying on the argument,” he told her. “I'm afraid this is going to be Humankind's problem.”

“And what makes you think it
is
a problem, my Lord?”

Rame stared at her for a long moment. He did find her attractive, in an exotic way, despite the elongated skull. Her golden cat's eyes stared back, unblinking and enigmatic.

Then he sighed. “Damn it, my Lord, are you going to make me go through the whole argument again?”

“No. But your proof is weak, don't you see? A chance that the Xul are infecting our networks with some unspecified, invisible virus? You
must
know that no local government will be willing to shut down the e-networks long enough to be sure they're clear. And the Associative Conclave certainly won't take the responsibility, even if they had the power to do so.”

“No.”

“And you didn't make many friends with your decision to bring in the Globe Marines. Some in the Conclave see that
as a power play on your part, a means of throwing your mass around.”

“I am not here to make friends, my Lord.”

“Then why? Power? Glory? Those notions are as antiquated as your ancient Marines.”

“Don't be ridiculous. I thought you people were supposed to be smart.”

“That's unfair!”

“So is the idea of me doing this for glory,” he snapped. The words sounded more bitter than he'd intended. He turned away again, staring out at the Earth hanging some forty thousand kilometers below.

He felt…old. He was well into his 224th standard year which, by the standards of current nanomedical art, put him solidly into the early chapters of middle age, but his ragged emotions and bitterness had nothing to do with the calendar.

Star Lord
. That concept was antiquated as well. The title had evolved with the rise of the Associative. At first, the term had identified men, women, and AIs appointed by their governments to represent various populations within an electronic legislature called the Conclave. Later, as more and more of the routine was taken on by AIs, the term had become a mark of the new aristocracy, whether they represented anyone or not. By tradition, the title of Star Lord now was hereditary, with Conclave representatives chosen from among their conceited and self-preening ranks.

When Lord Rame had received his appointment to the Conclave over a century ago, he'd actually believed he could make a difference. His constituency was the s/h-Human inhabitants of Earthring 4, which had a population of over three billion, a number roughly equivalent to the current population of the entire Earth. He'd held within his cerebral implant the power to do
good
for that many people.

It had taken him what—twenty years? Thirty?—to lose that first, idealistic flush. Everything since had been a long and rather dismal slide into murky disillusion. The Conclave
of Associative Lords could no more agree on solid action than they could stop the expanding wave front of the Core Detonation.

“Garrick?” Tavia was saying. “Garrick? Are you okay?”

He turned back to face her. “Yes. Sorry. Just thinking….”

She reached out and lightly touched his arm. “Why are you doing this to yourself, Garrick? You're trying to save the Galaxy. It doesn't
want
to be saved.”

“Then what the hell are we here for, Tav?”

“You can't help anyone—people, beings, cultures—that don't want help.”

“I'm just talking about making a difference.”

“Maybe you have. By reviving the Globe Marines.”

“We'll see. I don't know if this is their kind of mission. If they'll even be able to do what we're asking of them.”

“These…old-time warriors of yours. These Marines. They mean a lot to you, don't they?”

“I suppose.” he gave a thin smile. “They're in my blood.”

Garrick Rame had long been a student of history—in particular the military history of his species. According to the historical records, a number of his ancestors had been Marines, back in the days of the Commonwealth, and even before. His family name had been Ramsey once. A Marine Gunnery Sergeant named Charel Ramsey had made first contact with the Eulers, back in 1102 of the Marine Era. A few years later, as a junior officer, Ramsey had taken part in the Navy-Marine expedition to the Galactic Core.

Eleven hundred years ago.

“You realize, I trust,” Tavia told him, “that you're trying to compensate.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your ancestor. What was his name?”

“Which one?” He knew she meant Charel.

“The one who made contact with the Eulers by pounding out prime numbers on his chest.”

“Charel Ramsey.”

“That's the one. He's the reason the Galactic Core is exploding, isn't it? Are you trying to…I don't know…make amends for what he did?”

“He made contact with the Eulers, and from them we learned how to blow up stars,” Rame said. He shrugged. “And that technology triggered the Core Detonation, sure. But I don't see that as
my
responsibility.”

“It's not. But I wonder if you really know that, deep down inside.”

“Damn it, Tavia, it was the Euler trigger ships that let us stop the Xul in the first place! Without the Eulers, the Xul might still be dominating the Galaxy, stomping out emerging technic species, and the Associative never would have happened! That's a
good
thing!”

“I wasn't saying otherwise.”

He glared at Tavia. Like all s-Humans, she was tough to read sometimes.
Homo superioris
had ten separate intelligence factor quotients in the 160 to 200 range or better, and two more in the range of 120-plus. By the standards of most
Homo sapiens
, each and every one was a genius, a
stable
genius, able to think and talk rings around most
Homo
saps. The brighter ones were tough to talk with at all; it was just too hard to follow their lightning thought processes. Worse, they tended to think and speak in layers, and you could never quite be sure whether or not there were hidden layers of meaning in an otherwise uncomplicated sentence.

He remembered again why he'd broken off the physical relationship with Tavia months before. He'd never been certain if he was really hearing her…or an outer shell masking deeper levels of thought and meaning. It was tough to really trust someone like that.

“I'm not trying to make up for anything some long-ago ancestor did or didn't do, Tavia,” he told her at last. “The thing is…that ancient Marine
did
make a difference. The Core Detonation wasn't his fault. No one could have foreseen the collapse of the Xul Dyson structure at the center.
By making contact with the Eulers a few years earlier, though, he gave us a weapon powerful enough to wipe out Xul nodes wherever we found them, even if it meant blowing up entire star systems.”

He didn't add that the Eulers themselves, thousands of years earlier, had held the Xul to an uncomfortable draw by using their trigger ships on their own stars, incinerating their own worlds. He wondered if humans had the same cold and mathematical reasoning power if they were ever faced with a similar threat.

“And you want to make the same sort of difference,” Tavia said. “I suppose I can understand that. But you have yet to convince many of us that there is a threat. Emomemes? The Xul are somehow causing changes in normal human emotional make-up? That's just too much of a stretch, Garrick.”

“And how would s-Humans explain the rising incidence of…of madness on planetary scales? Revolutions. Riots. Whole populations that have lived in peace for millennia suddenly and irrationally at one another's throats? Gods, Tavia…the idiots used tactical nuclear weapons on Kaleed, a
wheelworld
! The damage to the structure may be bad enough that the entire world will have to be evacuated! And they did it to
themselves
!”

Tavia looked away, as though studying the distant Earth suspended in space within its far-flung, thread-slender ring of habitats and orbital manufactories. “These things can happen in cycles. Sociology has never been an exact science. There are elements of chaos that do not lend themselves to rational investigation or measurement, even with large populations.”

“Chaos is right.”

“I spoke in the mathematical sense.”

“I know. But it's not enough to just say these things go in cycles. There's got to be a reason. And we have hard evidence of Xul code broadcast from various stargates…and now from the Great Annihilator.”

“So…what? You would have us shut down all of our electronic nets and systems? Stop using the stargates? Perhaps you favor the N'mah suggestion, and give up all information and space-faring technology.”

“Nonsense.”

“It worked for the N'mah and the An.”

“At what cost to them? And if we withdraw, allow the Xul to regroup and grow strong again, in another thousand years or two we'll be right back where we started. No, we must isolate the Xul threat once and for all, and eliminate it!”

“By sending Marines who've spent the past eight centuries in cybernetic hibernation into a black hole? Our technology may not be up to that.”

“It probably isn't. But what other choice is there?”

“Bombardment.”

He considered this. The option had been floating about within the Conclave for weeks, now, ever since the confirmation from
Night's Edge
that the Xul were broadcasting from within the Great Annihilator black hole had been received. Someone had suggested sending robotic antimatter bombs down the black hole's throat, hoping to hit whatever base or complex the Xul might have hiding down there. That plan had been discarded early on; the Great Annihilator was huge, and there'd be no way of ensuring the bombs would even come close.

And, so, the planners had scaled their destructive vision higher. The same thing that had caused the collapse of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy could be tried on the far smaller Annihilator: an Euler trigger ship could partially explode a nearby star, sending it falling into the singularity and flooding the black hole with infalling mass and radiation. Unfortunately, the nearest star was three light years away.

“There are just too many unknowns,” he told her. “And the star option just won't work. We give that nearest star a nudge, and it would still take thousands of years for it to reach the target. And besides…when the Core Detonation
wave front reached the Annihilator, it hit the thing with way more radiation and plasma than you could get out of a mere star.”

“The Xul might not have been there when that happened.”

“Maybe. We don't know. That's the problem, Tavia.
We don't know
. We need a recon force to go in and find out what's happening…and if the Xul are in there, we need to shut them down. Permanently. And we sure as hell can't wait for a star we bump off-course to crawl across three light years and hope the enemy is still there and vulnerable when it gets there!”

“A recon force. Your Marines.”

“The Marines, yes.”

“And not our own Marines?”

“They're not the same.”

“I find this fascination you have with the ancients disturbing. They're
primitives
.”

“They're well trained. They're a cohesive unit, a family, really. They're dedicated and utterly professional. And when given a mission they
will
find a way to carry it out, or die trying.”