Semper Human (19 page)

Don't think about it. Just follow your orders and keep your mouth shut
.

Some things, though, were just plain wrong, and from Nal's point of view, this was one of them.

At the moment, he didn't know what to do about it, however. The tallies seemed as content with the practice as Nal's distant ancestors had been with the lordship of the Ahannu, the alien gods who'd turned them into willing slaves.

And perhaps the two weren't that far distant from each other.

Right now, according to the telemetry streaming back from Objective Samar, the thurps were definitely inside the Dahlist works, infiltrating electronic systems, bypassing safeguards, breaching files, downloading data. That data was flooding back to the
Nichols
now through a high-bandwidth link between the Hugin and Lieutenant Mendoza. The Dahl fortress' main weapons had just gone off-line, sabotaged by a thurp assault team.

And suddenly the air pressure in the compartment was
dropping catastrophically, as smoke, papers, and lightweight debris swirled off the deck and off the computer consoles and funneled in a tight, swirling, horizontal tornado out the open door ahead. For a moment, Nal thought the thurps had opened the main hatches to the outside, but then he noted the real reason for the depressurization.

“Check your fire, Marines!” Nal warned. “We have friendlies inbound!”

He was watching the data feed coming in from the
Nicholas
, getting the grand-tactical picture. Ten members of the 340th Marine Strike Force had landed on the outer hull of Objective Samar, burned their way through the outer hull, and had just entered the battle station's interior passageways. They were a hundred meters away and moving in fast, guided by AIs monitoring the entire battle. The Dahlist troopers falling back from the Marine assault were trapped. They didn't know it yet, but that handful of heavily armored RS/A-91 Starwraiths were slamming up those tangled passageways, taking out everything in their way.

And seconds later, the battle for Objective Samar was over.

Command Deck
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas

Objective Samar
0607 hours, GMT

General Garroway stood on the command deck, looking up at the dome overhead. It wasn't a true transparency, of course—the command deck was buried deep within the immense bulk of the transport—but the projection of the view outside was perfect to the smallest detail. The Stargate hung directly overhead, and Associative ships were emerging now, making the hundred-thousand light-year jump in from Way Point Tun Tavern in a steady stream. Beyond, the flattened sphere of the Dahl fortress designated Objective Sa
mar moved slowly in its orbit about the Stargate ring.

The stellar backdrop behind it all was astonishing—sheets and ribbons and outflung tendrils of blue and green, the radiant glory of the Tarantula Nebula.

Someone once had calculated that if the Tarantula Nebula was as far from Earth as the Great Nebula in Orion—some 4,000 light years—it would cover thirty degrees of the night sky, as big across as sixty full moons, and banish the night. The Tarantula stretched a thousand light years from one side to the other, one of the largest star-forming regions known. The Magellanic Clouds were orbiting the Milky Way Galaxy and had closely interacted with it in the past. That interaction had triggered an extended period of star formation, turning the heart of the tiny galaxy into a jewel box of young, hot stars.

One star cluster, R136a, visible as a hard, tight knot of suns against unfurling color, was only two and a half million years old—its stars infants in comparison to others; twelve of those stars were among the most massive known, type O3 supergiants each millions of times more massive than Sol. Fierce stellar winds streaming off those giants were kneading, tearing, and shaping the far vaster extent of the nebula.

Just 150 light years away from R136a lay another cluster, Hodge 301, perhaps twenty million years old, old enough that its more massive, shorter-lived stars were beginning to age and die. A chain of forty supernovae during the past few millions years had torn at the nebula. Together, the energy streaming from those two clusters had shaped and reshaped the tenuous threads and sheets of the nebula itself, creating its sculpted, twisted, spidery appearance.

Well off to one side was a brilliant, hazy patch. Catalogued as SN 1987A, it was a supernova remnant, a young one. Its light had reached Earth only about two thousand years ago. The Stargate itself was located in the heart of yet a third star cluster, this one several billion years old and relatively small, with a dozen or so stars with human-habitable worlds—the Tavros-Endymion Cluster. The radiation wave front from SN
1978A, Garroway thought, must have scoured any of the local worlds bare of life at this range.

He wondered what the Tarantulae were like. Were they alien enough to survive such a radiation storm, or had they moved into the region later, as the supernova was fading?

The light show spread across the overhead dome was so thick and rich with stars and light that the far larger mass of the home Galaxy, 165,000 light years beyond, was lost.

“General Garroway?”
Lofty Henderson's voice said in his mind.
“We have located Emelius Dahl. He is asking for surrender terms.”

“I see. Where was he?”

“On board one of the Dahlist warships, the
Curtains of Light,
heavy battlecruiser, 290,000 tons.”

The main Dahlist battlefleet was still out there—consisting of twelve capital ships identified so far, and a swarm of armed packets, gunboats, and hastily armed and refitted short-range craft. The Associative fleet was far larger, over a hundred ships, and growing with every moment as new vessels continued to arrive through the Stargate. With the gate's capture, the Dahl Navy had no place else to go, and no access to repair and refit facilities, supplies, or bases.

According to Intelligence, the Dahl Empire, so-called, embraced perhaps twenty star systems, with three worlds enough like Earth not to matter, the recently conquered Tarantulae homeworld, and a couple of dozen other sparsely inhabited planets, from Mars look-alikes to airless rocks and iceballs. They had only the one Stargate, and travel across their Empire was possible only through Alcubierre FTL. Without the Gate, their tiny Navy had no place to go…unless they wanted to seek the help of the Tarantulae, whom until recently they'd been bullying. It sounded as though Dahl had elected to surrender now and get it over with, rather than have his ships chased down and destroyed one by one.

The campaign had been almost as easy as the Star Lords back home had claimed it would be.

Garroway had never trusted
easy
.

“Have him brought aboard the
Nicholas,
” Garroway told the AI. “But have them be careful! I want a nano-level scan of this guy before he sets foot on board.” One of the more difficult attacks to defend against was a nanotech weapon. The deadliest of attacks could be brought inside one's defenses disguised as the normal bacterial flora of a visitor or a prisoner, as dust on the bottom of their shoe, as compactly folded protein molecules hidden in the lining of lungs and throat.

“Agreed, General. And
…
one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Star Lord Rame requests a moment of your time.”

“Very well. Put him through.”

Rame's lean frame appeared in Garroway's mind, his corona bright. “Congratulations, General.”

“Eh? What for?”

Rame spread his hands. “A magnificent victory, of course! Brilliant!”

“Bullshit.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Lord Rame, Objective Samar was a trap.”

“What do you mean?”

Garroway shrugged. “Hell, I was pretty sure it would be going in. We all were. Any defender of the Tarantula Stargate would know that the key to defending the Tavros-Endymion Cluster is to keep enemy warships from transiting out of the Gate, right?”

“I suppose—”

“Objective Samar was perfectly positioned and had the weapons necessary to destroy our warships as they emerged from the Gate. That made Samar the one absolutely vital target in this operation. We
had
to take it to get our fleet in. If we tried to destroy it, we might damage the Gate…and they also made sure we thought their emperor was there. More encouragement for us to capture the place rather than blow it to bits.

“You figured all that out before going in?”

“No, sir, but I had a good idea. And when one of my people spotted the fact that the fortress was close to the Stargate with no grav shielding up, it kind of clicked. They either wanted us to teleport in and take heavy casualties doing so, because the gravitational tides would screw with a solid d-teleport lock, or they wanted us coming through in small numbers, a few at a time. Either way, we face the horrors of interpenetration of partial transmissions…or else we decide not to teleport, and come in through open space, with assault pods. Again, small numbers, and we'd take heavy casualties weaving in through their fusion and plasma beam defense network.”

“So you did both.”

Garroway nodded. “We did both.”

“And the trap failed.”

Inwardly, Garroway scowled, though he couldn't tell if the Star Lord could see his expression. “Sir, two of my platoons took heavy casualties in that assault. Forty dead, and perhaps half of those are irrecoverable.” He didn't add that the living had suffered badly as well. The sight of those poor Marines mangled and partially
merged
with the metal deck and consoles would have given anyone the cold horrors.

“How long will it take to replace them?”

“We
can't
replace them. These are Globe Marines.”

“The Anchor Marines performed admirably,” Rame said. “Why can't you draw replacements from them?”

Garroway wanted to tell the man that it simply wasn't possible, that Anchor Marines could
never
be Globe Marines, that the training and quality of personnel that had made the Corps great nine centuries before simply didn't exist today.

But he didn't. The fact of the matter was that the Anchor Marines
had
done well, storming the Dahl bastion and closing the jaws of the Marine assault. If the “dead” among them had awakened an instant later back on board the
Nicholas
, that hardly counted against them. It took guts to face shock and dismemberment, even if the horror was solely
virtual. They'd carried out their mission with élan and with precision.

Hell, one of the Marines who'd made it into Samar had been young Marek Garwe.

“We'll make whatever organizational changes we need to, sir,” was all he said.

“That's good. We're…counting on you.”

Something about the way Rame said that last caught Garroway's attention. The Star Lord was not being evasive, quite, but there was something he wasn't saying.

Hell, in Garroway's experience politicians never said everything that they were thinking. There was always another angle, another rationale, another pay-off to be made or another back to be scratched or another deal to be cut with the people who had the money, the influence, and the power.

From what Garroway had seen of politics and government so far in the forty-first century, it was now the politicians who had the lion's share of money, influence, and power, wielding them openly, rather than acting as front-men for behind-the-scenes shadow governments as had been the case in Garroway's day. The Star Lords ran things, made the big decisions, and the people didn't give a damn, so long as they were relatively comfortable.

And maybe that was the way it was
supposed
to work.

But what wasn't Rame telling him?

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Eh? What are you talking about?”

“There's something you're not telling me, my Lord. What is it? Something new about the Xul operation?” He hesitated. “Or something new from the other Star Lords? New orders?”

The image in Garroway's mind, created by Rame's personal AIgent, could not give anything away—no eye-blinks, frowns, widened eyes, or other unconsciously transmitted body language that might help others read Rame's state of mind. Even so, something about the silence that followed his question suggested surprise, even shock.

“Do people of your century always read minds, General?”
Rame said after a moment. “I thought only s-Humans engaged in telepathy.”

“Don't forget your Socon Guardians.”

“What have you heard?”

Garroway sighed. “My Lord, I am a Marine major general. Once an officer reaches the rank of colonel, he spends more time fighting politicians than he spends fighting any foreign enemy.” He took another guess. “The other Star Lords have given you new orders? Concerning me and my people?”

The image in Garroway's mind nodded. “This operation here today was…a test, in a sense. To see if your Marines were…as good as the stories surrounding them.”

“I see. And did we pass?”

“You successfully carried out the operation, General. Despite a serious initial setback, when your initial assault failed.
And
you showed yourself willing and able to work with local elements, the Anchors, to accomplish your mission.”

“So now they want to use us against other targets? Other missions?”

“Exactly.”

“But
not
the Xul.”

Again, Rame hesitated, as though searching for a mild, a
politic
reply. “Not everyone within the Associative leadership believes that the Xul constitute a viable threat. Or an important one. A sizeable majority believe that the Globe Marines would be best employed putting down the rise of rebellion, rioting, and discontent currently sweeping through Associative worlds.”