Semper Human (13 page)

“Ah…yes,” Ranser said. Garroway caught his sideways glance at several of the star lords nearby, their forms almost lost in the intense glow of their formal dress coronas. “That may be a bit premature at this point, General.”

Garroway nailed him with a hard stare. Ranser was a squat, heavyset man with gene-altered irises in his eyes that made them look huge and polished-obsidian black. At the moment, those eyes were looking everywhere except directly at Garroway.

“Indeed.” Garroway had the cold feeling that the metaphorical rug was about to be jerked out from under him. There was something about the almost embarrassed atmosphere of the compartment. “Tell me.”

“We have been discussing the unique opportunity we have here with your Marines awake and again on-line,” one of the
star lords said. He…no, it was a
she
…she rose from her seat and stepped forward, between Ranser and Garroway.

Garroway pulled an ID down from the local net, scanning quickly through the data as it dropped into his mind. Her name, he saw, was Tavia Costa, and she represented the
Homo superioris
population on Earth's Moon.

“And what opportunity would that be, my Lord?” he asked.

“You and your…people come highly recommended, General. A number of us within the Associative Council of Lords are interested in how your Marines really perform.”

“I don't think I like the sound of that.”

Costa gave him a cold and appraising look. “And what, General, does what you like or not like have to do with the matter?”

“You sound like you want to test us somehow.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“There is a…problem, General Garroway,” another s-Human said. Her bio identified her as Lelan Valoc, and she was the Star Lord representative for s-Humans within something called the Solar Cloud. “Many of us do not feel the Xul pose the threat some of our colleagues believe them to be. But we're facing a number of situations that threaten the integrity of the Associative. Those of our military forces already deployed have had less than stellar success in handling some of these crises. Perhaps your Marines can do better.”

“It was my understanding that we were to fight the Xul.”

“Your
understanding
, General, is that you work for
us
. The legitimate government of the Galactic Associative.”

Garroway opened his mouth for a sharp reply, then closed it again. His legal position, he realized suddenly, was precarious. His allegiance had been sworn, almost nine centuries ago, to the Commonwealth of Humankind and, through that government body to the ancient United States of America. Presumably, the Galactic Associative was the legal lineal descendent of the Commonwealth…but was it? As he understood it, the Associative included Earth and some thousands
of other worlds colonized by humans, but included some
millions
of other worlds inhabited by things that were people only in the most generous use of the word. Even these two s-Humans standing before him looked alien, with their grotesquely elongated skulls, mahogany skin, and gold cat's eyes, enigmatic and unreadable.

Homo sapiens superioris
. What the hell made them so
superioris
, anyway? Something about the very idea made him bristle, urged him to dig in his heels and refuse to be drawn along.

But until he was certain of his legal standing—and of the legal standing of the Marines under his command—he was going to keep his mouth shut, he decided. He and his people were alone here, adrift in time, over eight centuries removed from the government that had put them here. The Third Marines were counting on him, damn it. The present government could easily relieve him of command…and then he'd have no say about what happened to his people.

And Garroway was not about to let that happen.

“Sir
. I acknowledge that the Associative government is giving me my orders,” Garroway said after an awkward hesitation. “And I will carry out those orders to the best of my ability.”

“We were certain of that fact, General,” Valoc said. Her voice was deep, as deep as a man's, and carried with it undertones that added an almost hypnotic quality to the words. “The old Marines have the reputation for loyalty, and a supreme, almost superhuman devotion to duty.”

She's trying to flatter me,
Garroway thought.
She's trying to manipulate me by appealing to my emotions
.

“No flattery is intended, General,” Costa said. “Not in the sense you're thinking.”

That startled him. Damn! Was she reading his mind? Or was she merely employing a shrewd understanding of human psychology?

“Just what is it you expect my people to do?” Garroway asked. “I
will
say this first. The Marine Third Division is my
command, and my responsibility. My people. I reserve the right to refuse orders that seem suicidal or pointless.”

Pointless,
he thought, was stretching things just a bit. No military structure could survive if the people being ordered to fight could refuse those orders simply because they didn't like them. At no time in history could any fighting man have claimed that he perfectly understood the minds of the people giving him orders…especially when, as was the case with the United States and the later Commonwealth, those orders ultimately were being given by civilian governments.

It was unlikely that the Marines who'd stormed Belleau Wood had fully understood the details, the
point
of the orders they'd been given. Same for the Third MarDiv Marines who'd waded ashore at Guam, slogged through the black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima…or who'd fought to liberate the human
dumu-gir
of Enduri/Ishtar two centuries later.

Marines fought to win…and they fought for their buddies, their fellow Marines.

Costa waved her hand, and an image appeared in the air in front of her, a three-dimensional star map showing a ragged cloud of stars and gleaming nebulae. “The Greater Magellanic Cloud,” she said, as the image began to expand, the viewpoint plunging into the swarm of suns. “A satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. These…” A tight knot of stars lit up green. “…are the Tavros-Endymion Cluster, twenty-five worlds first opened by the Associative Colonial Administration 215 years ago.”

“The Magellanic Clouds?” Garroway said, surprised. “You have colonies all the way out there?”

“Yes. About 165,000 light years out.”

“Why? I mean…aren't there enough worlds for you here in the home Galaxy?”

“Worlds, yes. In abundance, and we build our own when we wish. But the Associative seeks…associates. Other sentient life. Other, alien points of view. Trade partners.
Information
.”

“It is also another step in the creation of the Galactic CAS,” Valoc told him. “That is a Complex—”

“A Complex Adaptive System,” Garroway said, nodding. He remembered the discussion with his Temporal Liaison Officer when he'd come out of cybe-hibe. “I know. Like what the Xul have.”

Valoc's face twisted slightly, though it was hard to tell if she was showing disapproval or some other, more subtle emotion. “
Not
like the Xul,” she said. “The Galactic CAS has intelligent purpose, a
direction
.”

“What purpose?”

“I wouldn't expect a primitive to understand that,” Valoc said.

“Lelan!” Costa said, placing a hand on the other s-Human's arm. “
Compassion
!”

Valoc turned and glared at Costa. For several seconds, they stared at each other, and Garroway got the feeling that they were communicating with each other, silently and very quickly. Had
Homo superioris
been designed with true telepathic abilities? Or was this simply a function of their cerebral implants, brain-to-brain radio on a band to which others had no access?

“You'll have to forgive my friend, General,” Costa said after a moment. “She doesn't often work with Normals.”

Garroway's eyebrows raised at that. “‘Normals?' You mean
Homo
saps?”

“Unenhanced humans.”

“‘Primitives.'”

“Well…if you like.”

“So what the hell is the fascination of
enhanced
humans in the Greater Magellanic Cloud?”

“As Lelan said, it's the most recent node within the general Associative CAS. We've encountered…a new species out there. Extremely old. Extremely powerful. Incredible minds.”

“Okay. So?”

“We call them the Tarantulae.”

For a moment, Garroway had an unsettling mental image of superintelligent giant spiders, but he dismissed it. The Greater Magellanic Cloud, he remembered, was the location of a vast interstellar cloud of dust, gas, and newborn stars called the Tarantula Nebula; likely, the Tarantulae had been named for their proximity to that cloud.

“And we're at war with the Tarantulae?”

“Not quite. It's the human colony there that's causing the trouble.”

“I don't understand.”

“We have been attempting to establish peaceful contact with the Tarantulae for almost a century now,” Valoc said. “Two months ago, the Associative colony in the Tavros-Endymion Cluster attacked a world in the Tarantulae Sphere and have occupied it. A human leader calling himself Emperor Dahl has proclaimed an independent state centered on the Endymion Stargate.”

“Your orders, General,” Costa told him, “are to seize that Stargate and the planetary system it occupies, holding it for an Associative battlefleet.”

“I…see. And what does Star Lord Rame think of this plan?” Garroway asked.

“Rame?” Valoc said. “Why should we ask him?”

“Star Lord Rame initiated the process by which you and your Marines have been recalled,” Costa told him, “but he is not the official in charge of you or your missions.”

“Your orders come from the Military Operations Bureau of the Associative Conclave,” Valoc said. “Lord Rame is a member of that bureau, but he does not have any of the responsibility for strategic planning.”

“And you two do?”

“Among several hundred others, General, yes.”

He decided he was going to have to study whatever downloads were available dealing with the current government, its hierarchy, and the chain of command within both the military and civilian sectors. He couldn't assume that the
same channels were in place that had been there eight hundred fifty years before.

“I will require,” he said slowly, “complete documentation, histories, and available intelligence data on the situation, my Lord.”

“You will have them,” Valoc said.

“And don't look so glum!” Costa put in brightly. “The situation may not even require military intervention. Your arrival at the Endymion Stargate no doubt will be all that is required to restore proper order and Associative authority!”

“No doubt.”

But Garroway had
every
reason to doubt. Eight and a half centuries before, he'd learned that any time a civilian leader told him that a given operation would be easier than expected, it was almost certain, in fact, to be worse.

Often
much
worse.

He wondered how this unexpected detour on the way to the Galactic Core might go wrong.

0302.2229

Tranquility Promenade
Luna, Sol System
2010 hours, GMT

“Too bad Misek didn't want to come down here,” Maria Amendes said, laughing. “He'd have enjoyed it, despite himself.”

“Hell, let him sulk back on the
Major Nick
,” Garwe replied. “All the more for us, right?”

“Bollan takes things too damned seriously,” Kadellan Wahrst said. “He needs to loosen up.”

It was five days after the arrival of the
Night's Edge
at Luna Ring. Six of the Marines of Anchor Marine Strike Squadron 340 stood on the main concourse of the Tranquility Grand Promenade, a vast, domed enclosure ten kilometers across, set at the base of one of the primary elevators coming down from the Lunar Ring. The War Dogs had been given liberty—probably their last fling ashore before the
Nicholas
boosted for the Larger Magellanic—and Garwe, Amendes, Wahrst, Mortin, Palin, and Namura had come down the elevator
en masse,
a shore party to see the sights, take in the local color, and take in some of the local intoxicants as well.

Half of the Promenade was partially submerged; outside
the curved, moonglass walls, silt-laden waves broke against the transparency with a slow, almost sullen regularity. The lowland reaches of the Mare Tranquilitatis were submerged, now, with water as deep in places as half a kilometer. The sun was low on the eastern horizon, while a half-full Earth hung almost directly overhead. The sky was pale near the horizon, but shaded rapidly toward the zenith with a deep, vibrant ultramarine, almost black, with the brightest stars just visible despite the glare of sunrise. Luna's atmosphere was still achingly thin, far too thin for unaugmented humans to breathe without pressure suits and masks. It was thick enough after several centuries, however, to moderate the temperature extremes somewhat, though the nights outside were still bitterly cold. In the distance, a dense fog was boiling off the ice skim that covered much of the sea after the long, two-week night.

Fred Namura stepped closer to the transparency, curious. He tapped at it. “Plastic?” he said. “How primitive! Haven't these people ever heard of viewall technology?”

“Moonglass,” Amendes told him. “Glass made from the silica in the Lunar regolith.” When Namura stepped back suddenly, looking nervous, she laughed. “Don't worry. It's
strong
.”

“Yeah,” Garwe said. “Ordinary silica, when you melt it to make glass, has a lot of water in it. But this stuff has been baking in hard vacuum for a few billion years. Pure silica, with no water in the mix at all. It's supposed to be stronger than steel.”

“The earliest Lunar colonies found it was a lot cheaper and more efficient to make their pressure domes out of this stuff,” Wahrst said, “than it was shipping the raw materials up from Earth.”

A large wave smashed against the transparency in complete silence.

“Is there any life out there?” Tami Palin asked, stepping closer to the wall and placing her hand against the slick surface. She sounded wistful. She'd been born and raised, Garwe
remembered, on a sea farm cooperative in one of Earth's oceans. He couldn't remember where.

“Genegineered plants,” Garwe told her. “Remember the green we saw on the trip down? Algae and bacteria, mostly, in the seas. And several kinds of gene-tailored mosses on land. The air out there's still mostly carbon dioxide, and the temperature extremes would kill anything that wasn't special-made to survive them.”

“We make worlds and ecosystems to order,” Wahrst said. “Takes a few centuries, of course, but we get there.”

“Where I want to get is to a bar where we can find some action,” Namura said. He pointed to a forest of holographic signs farther along on the promenade. “And
that's
where we're going to find it. Come on!”

“Target in sight!” Garwe called.

“Lock and load!” Amendes added.

The six Anchor Marine lieutenants advanced on their objective.

Lord Rame Residence
Earthring, Sol System
2255 hours, GMT

Lord Garrick Rame stared into his viewall, which was focused now on the immense transport docked with the Lunar Ring. “
Damn
them,” he said, whispering.

Brea was asleep in the bedroom. They'd made love earlier, but Rame hadn't been able to sleep. He'd left her in the bed and come out here. Earlier that day, the Military Council had informed him of their decision…that the Globe Marines would be deployed first to the Large Magellanic Cloud to deal with the Tavros-Endymion situation.

The
Nicholas
, according to the latest reports, was ready now in all respects for phase-shift deployment. In two more days, she would be outbound, escorted by a naval squadron consisting of a carrier, five cruisers, seven destroyers, and a
handful of smaller warships predictably designated Task Force Magellan.

The
Nicholas
would proceed to Eris, out on the thin, cold outskirts of the Solar System, there to wait as TF Magellan continued under Alcubierre Drive at best speed, making for the Sirius Stargate. The task force would pass through several stargates in the coming months, eventually passing through a gate drifting in the emptiness outside of the Galaxy, a gate that would then drop them into the heart of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.

“Best speed” was something of an optimistic platitude. Even the space-warping bubble of Alcubierre Drive didn't convey instantaneous transport to a starship. It took time to accelerate to the near-c velocities necessary for the transition to FTL, and even the fastest Alcubierre Drive vessel required three weeks for the run out to Sirius, a distance of over eight light years.

Stargate transits were instantaneous across thousands of light years, but, of course, you could only make the jump between two gates that were precisely tuned to each other. Several thousands of stargates had been discovered scattered across the Galaxy and beyond so far, and each gate had some hundreds of possible connections with other gates, creating a dazzlingly complex web of transit routes from one end of the galactic spiral to the other, and beyond as well. Even so, the Galaxy was an enormous place, four hundred billion stars adrift in a couple of hundred trillion cubic light years; stargates were rarely less than fifty light years from their nearest gate neighbor, and often the next nearest gate was hundreds, even thousands of light years away. So even with FTL drive, it still took time, often many months, sometimes
years
, to move from one stargate to the next in order to get to where you wanted to be.

The real problem for TF Magellan, though, was the megatransport, the
Major Samuel Nicholas
. The size of a small asteroid—nanoconstructors had actually devoured, processed and converted a ten-kilometer asteroid to grow her frame and
hull into their present form—the
Nicholas
represented the third mode of faster-than-light transport used by space-faring civilizations across the Galaxy—phase-shifting.

With phase-shifting, you
needed
an extremely large vessel to house the banks of quantum power taps necessary to open a hole through space/time. With enough energy, you could phase down through multiple spatial dimensions to reach the Dimension
⁰
mathematical construct poetically known as the Quantum Sea, the base-state of reality where matter and energy both had their genesis as standing probability waves. There, virtual particles appeared and vanished in the dance of random energy fluctuations called the zero-point field, gravity itself could be created or banished, and minor distinctions such as distance ceased to have any real-world meaning at all.

Humankind had been working with phase-shift technology for over a thousand years. Late in the Third Millennium, primitive phase-shift vessels had transported fleet elements as large as carriers and battleships across incredibly vast distances, to appear unexpectedly deep within Xul-controlled space. To make the transit, however, the topology of the target region of space, as defined by local gravitational fields and masses, had to be known
precisely
.

Which was why the
Nicholas
couldn't simply rotate out of Solar space and materialize alongside the objective. Instead, she would wait patiently in the darkness at the System's rim, while her supporting fleet made the long trek, by FTL drive and stargate, to the target region within the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud. There, AI probes would get the precise gravitometric readings that would make a phase-shift rotation into the target area possible.

The earliest phase-shift transports had actually been designed as deep-space bases which used phase-shifting as a means of camouflage rather than for movement, and so they'd possessed only station-keeping thrusters. They'd required tugs to put them into position for a shift. Modern shift-transports were classified as starships and did possess both gravitics for
sublight movement, and Alcubierre Drives for FTL travel, but their enormous mass meant that they still crawled compared to more conventional vessels. They were liabilities for squadrons composed of smaller, more maneuverable ships, and modern tactics dictated that they stay safe in a rear-area staging area until the instant that they were needed.

Rame stared at the
Nicholas
for a few more moments, then shook his head, turning away. The huge vessel represented a colossal military asset, and the idiots were risking her on a minor target for no good reason.

He'd fought the decision in the Military Bureau virtual assembly, fought it as hard as he could, but in the end it had come down to a vote…and the faction led by Valoc and Costa and the other s-Humans had held the majority. The Globe Marines would be deployed to the Magellanics before the Council even considered their use at the Great Annihilator, and there wasn't a damned thing Rame could do about it.

“Socrates,” he said.

“Yes, my Lord.”

“Are you still in contact with General Garroway?”

There was the slightest of hesitations.
“I am not at the moment interfacing with the General,”
the AI told him.
“However, I can do so easily enough. He is not engaged in any capacity that might require privacy or circumspection.”

“Meaning he's not in the toilet, or in the middle of having sex with someone.”

“Or asleep, or closeted in a meeting with his command constellation, or discussing strategy with the Military Bureau, or any of several other possibilities,”
Socrates agreed.

“Link me to him.”

“One moment, my Lord.”

General Garroway appeared a few meters away, looking mildly surprised. Since the image was being created by his implant, it was essentially an avatar, programmed to display a Marine major general's blue-gray and black dress uniform, complete with ambient corona. “Lord Rame,” Garroway said. “What are
you
doing here?”

Rame blinked. He was in his home; where else would he be? Then he realized that Garroway was seeing him in another setting—presumably wherever he was at the moment. “I'm at home, General,” he said with a grin. “You're just seeing me wherever you happen to be at the moment.”

Garroway made a sour face and nodded. “Yeah. I realized how stupid that was as soon as I opened my mouth. Back in my day, implant-to-implant communications were usually in virtual spaces, inside your own head. I'm not used to some of the newer wrinkles…like having the image of the person I'm talking to projected into the space in front of me.”

“How are you adapting?”

“Oh, well enough. I just don't take some of it for granted yet, like you people do. Give me time. I'll adapt. What can I do for you?”

“Two things, General. I wanted to apologize personally for the change in orders.”

Garroway shrugged. “It was made
quite
clear to me that you had nothing to do with it,” he said.

“Nevertheless, I feel responsible. It was my idea to bring you guys out of hibernation, to send you in to the suspected Xul nest at the Galactic Core. Using you
this
way is a criminal waste of assets.”

Garroway smiled. “Why, my Lord? Do you think we're going to be up against something we can't handle in the LMC?”

“No. Of course not. But even one Marine casualty would be an obscene waste.”

Garroway didn't respond to that. Instead, he said, “You said I could do two things. What's the other?”

“General, I'd like to come along.”

“Come again?”

“I would like to join the mission. I want to go with you…first to the Large Magellanic Cloud, then to the Annihilator.”

“Good God, man, why?”

“Like I said. It's my responsibility that you're here, awake, at all. How do you think I would feel staying here while you
people are fighting, maybe dying, a couple of hundred thousand light years from where you're supposed to be?”

“A commendable attitude so far as your public image goes, my Lord,” Garroway said with a wry grin. “But it's not practical.”

“Why not?”

“My Marines are highly trained, and they use highly specialized equipment. Combat pods aren't just small, piloted spacecraft. They're incredibly complex weapons systems requiring precise linkages and command connections with the AI systems running them. Same for Marine Hellsuits. You don't just put one on and go. It would be tantamount to suicide. And I can't afford to detail Marines just to baby-sit a newbie.”

“Come on, General. I'm not asking to be in the front lines. I'd like to come along on board the
Nicholas
. It's not like there's not enough room.”

Rame watched Garroway considering this. The
Nicholas
was more like a small world than a starship. It had plenty of room for twenty thousand Marines and a regular crew of over five thousand. All of its consumables—air, water, food, even clothing and personal effects—were nanufactured along the way from abundantly available elements acquired from ice, dust, and rock picked up in space.