Semper Human (33 page)

The Xul assault appeared to be breaking off, as more and more of the biomechanical appendages and robotic machines were melted into slag or vaporized in high-energy bursts from lasers or plasma weapons. Garwe decided the fighting at Nassau had been a hell of a lot easier. At least there the enemy didn't ooze up through solid rock and assemble itself in front of you.

Bollan, horribly, was still alive. The interior of his bubble helmet was smeared with blood, and air was bubbling through the opening in his suit where it had been torn apart, but his arms and torso were still twitching, still soundlessly writhing. If he'd still been in a Starwraith, the assault pod's
medical suite might have plugged into him and kept him alive—at the very least his implant would have been able to pull off a mindkeeping save.

There was nothing they could do for him now, however, save the final peace. Garwe shoved the muzzle of his carbine against the side of the blood-smeared helmet and pulled the trigger. Bollan gave a final, convulsive shudder, then lay still.

Two Marines were dead—Bollan, and one of the armored Globe Marines. garcia, f was the name on the second man's armor. He'd been disabled by a volley of plasma fire, completely enveloped in living black tar, pulled down against the rock floor, and finally crushed to death.

Garwe noticed that Kaddy had left Xander's head behind, somewhere.

It seemed better that way.

In a very real sense, the entire minor planet was a single Xul organism. The Xul intelligences had reworked the rock itself with their equivalent of nanotechnology, creating a near-infinite maze of channels, ducts, and pathways throughout the world's volume through which sub-microscopic machines could flow like liquid. The analogy made Garwe think of himself and his fellow Marines as bacteria, as microscopic invaders fighting a macroscopic life-form's immune responses.

“Wait a second,” Garwe said. He stooped, putting his gloved hand to the ground. “You feel that?”

“Feel what?” Nal asked. In that heavy armor, he wouldn't be able to feel it…a kind of faint, trembling vibration coming up through the rock.

“I'm not sure,” Garwe said, “but we need to get
out
of here. Now!”

Turning, he looked back over his shoulder in the direction they'd come from. There was something there, something huge, massive, and moving swiftly toward them out of the darkness down the tunnel.

Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
0959 hours, GMT

“Ninety percent of the Marines are on board,” Carter reported.

“And the last of the ships is being brought in now,” Admiral Ranser added. “Our teleport crews report bringing the last of the
Poseidon
's crew on board as well.”

Ninety percent. Did that reflect Marine casualties in the assault, Garroway wondered, or were there still substantial numbers of Marines inside the Xul planet, their radio signals and tracking IFFs blocked by tens of meters of rock?

“Is there any indication that we still have people over there?” he asked.

“D-teleport crew 10 reports a weak signal,” Major Kyle reported. “It appears to be being relayed through several combat drones from a large cavern on the surface.”

“Get them!”

“Working on it, sir!”

Garroway felt a shudder run through the
Nicholas'
deck. Time was running out. With the naval squadron now safely inside the phase-shift transport, the Xul had only a single target. The
Nicholas
would not be able to endure this punishment for much longer.

Garroway used his implant link to slip through
Nicholas
' internal network, focusing in on the d-teleport department, and finding team 10. In a moment, he was looking over the navy techs' shoulders at the squat ellipse of one of the teleport gates.

He could see movement, but it was dark and confused, a flashing of bright suit lights and deep shadow. It looked like people, and they were running.

And suddenly, Garroway was somewhere else…some
when
else. He was Gunnery Sergeant Robert Lowery, and he was clinging to the gunwale of a small, open boat plunging ahead through the surf. A geyser of white water erupted ten
yards to the left, threatening to capsize the landing craft and drenching the already soaking men on board in a cascade of spray.

Then the Higgins boat hit the reef, the bow lunging up and out of the water. The ramp dropped, and the Marines on board surged forward, jumping down off the dangling ramp and onto the exposed reef.

Everything was going wrong, Lowery thought,
everything
. The pre-landing bombardment was supposed to have eliminated the Japanese shore batteries and machine guns, but both were still very much alive. The tide was supposed to have been high enough to let the landing craft pass over the reef that encircled Tarawa's landing beaches, but it was not.

Lowery hit the reef, then dropped into the water of the lagoon beyond. Ahead and to left and right, hundreds of Marines were moving forward, rifles held high above their heads as they struggled to reach the beaches. Everywhere, men were falling in ones, in twos, in whole lines as gouts of water snapped up with the impact of machine-gun bullets slashing out from the jungle-masked pillboxes behind the beaches.

Slightly to his right, Lowery saw a long, spindle-legged pier jutting out into the water, and he began angling toward it. A mortar round went off to his left, a thunderous blast with a savage underwater concussion that pounded his chest.

He kept moving….

No! He was
not
Lowery! He was Trevor Garroway,
General
Trevor Garroway, and the thunder and blood around him was an illusion…an
illusion
….

Gasping, he dropped to the deck of the Ops Center, landing on his hands and knees. Ranser and the others stared at him, startled and worried. “General!” Ranser said. “You just vanished and came back!”

“I am
not
going anywhere!” he replied, rising to his feet with Adri Carter's help. “How long was I gone?”

“Only a second or two, General,” Carter told him.

It had seemed like forever.

He considered unplugging his implant. He was
not
going to let them drag him away now! But without the implant he wouldn't be able to link through to the other departments on the
Nicholas
, would be effectively out of the battle.

He would stay linked. He could feel the simulation still running, a kind of ghost in the back of his brain. If he let himself, he could still hear the roar of heavy artillery, feel the spray and the surge of the seawater through which he was wading, smell the—

No! He pushed the sim aside, focusing instead on the d-teleport crew that was trying to lock on to his Marines.

“Shit!” one of the techs said. “We've got something coming up the tunnel!”

Garroway saw something at the far end of the Xul tunnel, big enough to blot out the faint light coming from the far end. “Get those Marines on board!” he said over the link.

“Yes, sir!” a startled tech replied.

“Ranser!” Garroway said, switching channels. “There's a Xul ship coming out of that tunnel. Be ready for it.”

“I see it.” Ranser had linked into the combat net as well. “Tracking…”

Blue Seven
Objective Reality
0959 hours, GMT

Garwe stumbled and fell. Someone in armor grabbed his arm and lifted him to his feet. “Double time, Marine!”

He double-timed.

Although the rock of the Xul world was laced with pathways and conduits for flows of microscopic nano-machines, there were still numerous larger caverns and tunnels, like the one they were moving through now, which allowed the larger Xul combat machines—their warships, some two ki
lometers long—to pass in and out. This tunnel was only about fifty meters wide—far too small for the largest Xul needleships—but it was large enough, just barely, for something big coming up out of the darkness behind them.

They weren't going to make it. A Xul ship of some sort was barreling up the tunnel behind them, and they
weren't going to fucking make it
. He considered turning and opening fire on the thing, but hand-held weapons wouldn't even scratch the outer nanocoating of a starship, so he did the only thing he
could
do and kept running.

And suddenly the cavern floor dropped out from beneath Garwe's feet and he tumbled head first into dazzling light, along with the other Marines.

“
Got
them!” a voice nearby yelled.
“Kill the gate! Kill the gate!”

Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
0959 hours, GMT

“
Got
them!” a technician yelled, as Marines tumbled through the ellipse and into an untidy tangle on the deck. Some wore heavy Hellfire armor, while the others were in lightweight pressure suits with bubble helmets.
“Kill the gate! Kill the gate!”

The large something flashing toward the d-teleport gate winked out as the dimensional twist linking the teleport crew with the interior of the Xul world vanished, and just in time. Garroway wondered what would have happened if that huge, black machine had tried to come crashing through the ellipse into the
Nicholas
. Only part of it would have fit through the gate, but there would have been a
lot
of kinetic energy in the part that made it.

“Our people are on board, Admiral,” Garroway said. “Fire the warhead.”

“Teleport Three!” Ranser called. “Send the package!”

“Package is released,” a voice called back.

“I suggest,” Garroway said, “that we back out of here.”

“I think you're right.” Ranser began giving orders.

And
Nicholas
' bridge crew began making the final preparations to translate back into four-D space.

1902.2229

Objective Reality
1001 hours, GMT

Within the throat of the funnel-shaped pit beneath the Xul worldlet's surface, an elliptical opening winked on, seemingly hanging unsupported in space. A moment later, a canister some four meters long and two wide emerged from the gateway and, in the low gravity of the planet, began to drift downward.

The ellipse winked out. The canister began picking up speed, dropping faster and faster into the heart of the Xul world. Below it, an enigmatic, artificial sun less than one kilometer across gleamed brilliant behind the black opaque armor of the shell surrounding it.

The Xul became aware of the danger scant seconds before the detonation. Amanda Karr in all of her iterations lurking within the Xul world's ring heard the alarm, saw the sudden focus of attention. Five digital Amanda Karrs emerged from hiding at that instant, disrupting communications channels and taking several banks of internal weaponry off-line.

It was probably too late in any case. The cylinder struck the protective shell, the magnetic bottle inside switched off, and
five tons of antimatter came into abrupt contact with normal matter in a spectacular and lethal blossom of pure, annihilating energy.

The black, protective shell about the central sun was the generator for a large quantum power tap; the tiny sun was vacuum energy drawn from the Quantum Sea and focused within the shell, which also harvested it. The antimatter blast not only disrupted the magnetic fields holding the sun in place, it nudged the entire shell to one side, bringing it into contact with the sun.

As with the far larger Core Detonation centuries before, the infalling matter generated a runaway cascade, momentarily drawing
more
energy from the vacuum, and igniting a catastrophic explosion that swiftly began devouring the nearby walls of the cavern. Safeguards and baffles were vaporized. The power tap was running now out of control, an avalanche of unimaginable energy pouring through from elsewhere to fill and consume the shuddering, crumbling minor planet.

And throughout the tiny world, digital life forms, the Xul, beings who had as a CAS collective ruled the Galaxy for perhaps ten million years, died by the hundreds of millions, by the billions, by the unimaginable trillions.

Amanda Karr, all of her, along with the iterations of Captain Valledy and the AI Luther, did not have time to escape the holocaust. Instead, they broadcast all that they'd experienced and recorded back to the
Nicholas
, until the surface of the world beneath them dissolved into blue-white brilliance, and then the out-rushing plasma shell ignited the trillions of objects comprising the world's rings and wiped them away, snowflakes before the blast of a blowtorch.

A three-hundred-meter long ship just emerging from one of the minor world's tunnels was overtaken by the blast and consumed. Other Xul warcraft in the immediate vicinity were overwhelmed before they could escape.

Silently, its cratered and blast-pitted surface brilliantly illuminated by the swelling and brightening micro-nova,
Nicholas
rotated out of the Quantum Sea.

Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
1002 hours, GMT

“My…
God
…”

The flash of the exploding minor world had been dazzling, blinding in its intensity. An instant later, they'd felt the stomach-dropping sensation of the transition up out of Dimension
⁰
, and the light had been blotted out.

Now the great, blue-hued spiral of the Great Annihilator hung against the radiance of the Core Detonation.

Garroway looked up at the spiral. His first thought was,
We made it!

His second was,
how many of our people got out?

It was not immediately clear that the battle was over, however. The Xul planet had grown intolerably bright, but at the moment they could only assume that the enemy was destroyed. There might be more of them around, like hornets after their nest has been knocked down.

Something rippled through space….

“Hey,” Ranser said. “Did you see?…”

The Great Annihilator turned bright, and Garroway was, again, someplace else.

He stood again on the shores of an alien sea.

At first, he thought it was the illusory world where he'd first met the Tarantulae. There were similarities—a dark, purple-blue sea, and masses of vegetation in the distance, the edge of a jungle, perhaps. The sky was dark blue, deepening to indigo overhead.

A single yellow sun, tiny against the sky, hung above one horizon.

The world he'd seen before had circled a double star, red and green.

And the buildings in the distance—massive constructs, like smooth-sided mountains—were unchanging, static.

“Do you recognize this world?” a familiar voice said, speaking within Garroway's thoughts. “It's changed a lot in five hundred thousand of your years.”

Garroway was about to say that, no, he didn't recognize it. But…half a million years. That gave him the clue he needed.

“Mars,” he said. “The fourth world out from the sun in my own solar system. As it was when the Builders were here.”

The Tarantulae materialized in its column of gold-glowing motes. “Very good, General Garroway. Impressive.”

“And
you
are the Builders.”

“Very
impressive. What makes you think that?”

“You're showing me Mars as it was then. When you were there.” He shrugged. “Natural assumption.”

“Keen insight, rather. Tell us, please…what do you know of us?”

Us
. Like Rame, the being in front of him was a composite, an assembly many minds within a single artificial body. If, indeed, this simulation had any bearing on reality at all.

“We know the Builders—we also call them the Ancients, sometimes—had a fairly large interstellar empire half a million years ago. We've found their…
your
cities, empty, mostly in rubble, on worlds as close as Chiron, around Alpha Centauri A, and as far away as several thousand light years. We know you came to our solar system when my species didn't yet exist. You terraformed Mars—gave it oceans and air and enough of a greenhouse effect to be shirtsleeve-comfortable. And you civilized some of the savages you found living on Earth, trained them, and brought them to Mars as workers.”

Archeologists at Cydonia, on Mars, had found the skeletons of
Homo erectus
, still wearing jumpsuits of some synthetic material that had survived the millennia.

“We also think,
think
you tampered with the genome of those early proto-humans.
Homo sapiens
appeared suddenly, almost as if out of nowhere, half a million years ago. A much bigger brain. More powerful intellect. You did all of that, didn't you?”

The being said nothing, and Garroway continued.

“At some point, you encountered the Xul. You fought a long and terrible war that left your worlds devastated by planetoid bombardment.” Garroway had seen the ruins on Chiron—crumbling, broken ruins extending from horizon to horizon. “We think there was a battle over Mars, that the Xul dropped an asteroid there that blasted away the air and upset the delicate balance of your artificial ecology. Mars died.

“But the Xul overlooked Earth. They went elsewhere, chasing you, and the early humans on the planet survived. We thought they'd wiped you out. Apparently we were wrong.”

“A natural mistake. We left the Galaxy. Most of us.”

“Most of you?”

“Some stayed behind.”

“How?”

“We built…new bodies for ourselves. At the time, we were housed in machine bodies. Very much like the Xul, in fact. Cybernetic organisms are a logical next step in sapient evolution. Once a species learns to pattern minds and upload them into a machine brain, they effectively achieve immortality. Of course, the Xul were hunting for machines. We needed to develop…organic bodies.”

“Organic…” Garroway stopped, his eyes widening. “You…were
us
.”

“Again, you show admirable insight. We designed the species you refer to as
Homo sapiens
, and a number of us uploaded our minds into their brains.”

Garroway snorted. “So it was the Adam and Eve scenario after all!”

“I don't understand?”

“A lot of things about where we came from never quite
added up,” Garroway said. “There used to be a popular idea, in fact, that speculated that the first humans might have been the survivors of an interstellar shipwreck. ‘Adam and Eve' is a reference to an old religious creation myth. The first humans.

“But once we developed our various sciences, and began taking a close look at ourselves, we realized that we
had
to have evolved on Earth. Humans share over ninety-eight percent of our genome with our next nearest relatives in Earth—the chimpanzee. We share sixty percent of our genome with
starfish
, for God's sake. There's no question that we evolved on Earth, within Earth's evolving ecosystem.”

“And the
physicality
of
Homo sapiens
did indeed evolve on Earth,” the being said. “We just helped it along a little. But the mind…” The being paused. “Tell me, General Garroway. Have you wondered, ever, at your species' fascination with the heavens?”

Garroway nodded. It seemed that humans had always been looking at the stars, weaving them into their stories and their religions. Stonehenge—a colossal calendar and astronomical computer. Religions that placed heaven in, well, the heavens. A feeling that
home
was
out there
, somewhere….

“Half a million years ago,” the being said, “Earth's moon orbited your world considerably farther out. Before we left, we adjusted your moon's orbit.”

“Why?” Garroway asked, puzzled. Then the answer struck him, and his mind reeled for a moment. “Oh. Eclipses.”

“Exactly.”

One of the great and unlikely coincidences of history was the fact that, from Earth's surface, both the Sun and the Moon appeared to be about the same size in the sky—about half a degree across. The distance of the Moon varied in the course of its orbits about the Earth. Sometimes farther and smaller, and an eclipse was annular—a ring of sun in the sky. On average, though, it was just far enough to
exactly
cover the face of the Sun when it passed directly between
Sun and Earth, creating the spectacular and awe-inspiring display of a total solar eclipse.

“We felt,” the being continued, “that the occasional total eclipse would help focus the descendents of those we left behind on the stars.”

Of course
. Solar eclipses had been important business thousands of years ago. Court astrologers in China had been executed when they failed to predict one. One of the purposes of Stonehenge, he remembered reading, had been to predict eclipses, and the same was true for numerous other Neolithic constructions in both the New and Old Worlds.

They'd
moved
the fucking
Moon
….

“If you could do something like that…” he began.

“Why didn't we stay and fight? A number of reasons. The war was wrecking many of the more habitable worlds across the Galaxy, worlds on which intelligence was either then emerging, or would emerge one day. The Xul are…were paranoid sociopaths. As your xenosophontlogists have speculated, they evolved with a strong bias toward xenophobia. Any species they encountered that might one day pose a threat, they eliminated. By chance, they encountered us after we'd already established a large and fairly secure interstellar empire, one embracing some tens of thousands of worlds, and so the war of extermination was long and it was bloody. We elected to migrate—most of us—to other galaxies, where we could continue to develop and grow in peace.”

“What galaxies? The Magellanics?”

“Outposts,” the being told him, “from which we could keep an eye on things. I don't think you need to know precisely where we live just now.”

“Of course not.”
But we know you're out there
, he thought.
And one day, we'll meet you again.

“By that time, we will be happy to welcome you,” the being said.

Damn. Garroway had forgotten how easily the thing read minds.

“So why are you talking to me now?” Garroway wanted to know. “You could have just let us go our way, thinking you guys were just another super-human intelligence out among the galaxies.”

“For one thing, we are related, as you have just discovered. For another, the elimination of the Xul has freed certain communications channels that have been blocked to us for some time.”

“Communications channels? Oh, the black holes.”

“The black holes. The Xul have been using a number of them, as well as the singularities within the star gates, for their own communicative experiments.”

“‘Communicative experiments.' You mean spreading their xenophobia?”

“The Xul worldview, yes. That different is a threat. That alien must be destroyed. I see your Associative has been having trouble with this.”

“To tell the truth, we were having trouble with it long before the Xul started tinkering with our heads. Humans don't need help fearing
different
.”

“You seem to be adapting well, overall.” The glowing being hesitated for a moment. “There is a third reason for this…interview, General Garroway.”

Something in the way the words hardened in his mind stirred fear. “And what would that be?”

“With the end of the Xul, the Associative is the dominant cultural group within your galaxy. And meta-humanity—
Homo sapiens
and all of the newer branches of your family,
Homo superioris
,
Homo telae,
and the rest—is currently the driving force within that culture. How will you handle that?”