Semper Human (25 page)

“God, you're beautiful,” Garwe told his partner, letting his hand stroke the curve of her belly. They were trying something adventurous, something from the ancient Kama Sutra called In Suspension. He had her head-down, her back against his legs, her ankles by his ears, her head on the bed while he stood above her, pressing down, entering her deeply. “You okay down there?”

“The blood's rushing to my head,” she said, laughing, “but—”

…and then a door had opened and Marines began streaming into the Battalion Commons, laughing and joking and good-naturedly sparring with one another. An instant later, they saw Garwe and Wahrst tangled awkwardly together on the bed and the laughter swelled to a roar.

Nudity wasn't the issue, of course—many of the incoming Marines weren't wearing anything but their skins, either—but being caught
in flagrante delicto
when you were looking for some private time with your favorite fuck-buddy could still elicit good-natured hilarity. It took them a few moments to get untangled, which caused more laughing commentary and advice.

An officer, a captain, pushed through the crowd around the bed, looked them up and down as Garwe finally pulled free of Wahrst, and frowned. “You people aren't authorized to be in here,” she said. “Let me patch into your IDs.”

Garwe had opened his implant ID, and he felt her scanning the data.

“Anchor Marines?” she said after a moment.

“Yes, sir.”

“Fleet Support?”

“Yes, sir.”

He thought they were about to catch seven kinds of hell, but the woman then shrugged and waved them out. “This is
our
space tonight, Lieutenant,” she said, grinning at the two
of them. “You'll need to find someplace else for your short-arms inspection!”

“
Very
short arms,” another Marine called out, and that kicked off the laughter again.

Wahrst sent a triggering thought to the compartment, and the bed began melting away into the deck. Garwe stepped off. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Sorry. We didn't realize the compartment would be in use.”

Garwe and Wahrst had almost reached the compartment's door when the captain stopped them. “Wait a sec,” she called. “You two are Starwraith drivers?”

“Yes, sir,” Garwe had said. He pulled himself to attention. “Anchor Marine Strike Squadron 340, ‘the War Dogs.'
Sir
!”

Well…what the hell? Anchors didn't mean much to the Globies, he knew, but he was still proud of being a Marine, whatever the old-timers thought.

“Shit,” the captain said, and she shook her head. “Now I
really
hate interrupting you two.”

“Sir?” Wahrst said. “What do you mean?”

“You haven't heard?”

“Heard what?” Garwe asked. But the captain's expression was giving him a dark, cold, sinking feeling in his gut.

“You'd better check in with your CO,” was all the woman said. “Some news has just come down from the top.”

And
that
had been the goddamned truth. Garwe and Kadellan were off duty and had set their implants to pick up only on priority messages, so they'd missed it. The tactical situation was such that Ops Command was asking for live-loaded strikepods.

He scanned through the announcement again, not quite believing what he was seeing. Volunteers. They wanted volunteers. He didn't
have
to go in live.

“Are you okay, Lieutenant?” the captain asked.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Quite a decision, I know. Get the fuck out of my space. Go find someplace where you can finish what you started.”

They'd left, closing the door on the laughter at their backs.

“Quite a decision” wasn't the half of it. He wondered how long they would have to make up their minds.

Four and a half hours later, the general alarm sounded over the Net, and Garwe and Wahrst scrambled to grow fresh uniforms as the
Nicholas
went on translation alert.

1902.2229

Recon Zephyr
Objective Reality
The Quantum Sea
0830 hours, GMT

Time flows at different rates in different circumstances. It crawls for objects approaching the speed of light, for objects within high-gravity fields, and in those strange-physics regions approaching the event horizon of a black hole. And in some out-of-the-way corners of the metaverse, the currents of time flow strangely indeed.

Within the pocket of the Quantum Sea occupied by the Xul base, time flowed far more slowly than in the outside universe of four dimensions. Days had passed in the Large Magellanic Cloud, while scant seconds passed for Valledy, Karr, and the AI Luther. The OM-27 Eavesdropper was now scant meters from the outer edge of the light ring, and drifting steadily closer. The planetary rings were a knife-thin slash of golden light against the violet-shot darkness.

“You're sure they haven't seen us?” Valledy said, his mental voice a whisper in the darkness.

“No sign that they have,” Amanda Karr replied. “I can hear them singing, though.”

The Xul Chorus. When humans had first encountered a
living Xul artifact locked beneath the ice of the Europan world ocean, they'd heard what seemed to be voices singing in massed unison, echoing antiphonies calling to one another in never-ending litany and response. The Singer, as it turned out, was insane, driven mad by its half-million-year imprisonment, but it had given the first xenosophontologists an unparalleled look into the nature of the Xul group mind. Millions of uploaded individuals, it seemed, sang back and forth to one another until consensus was reached and myriad choral voices merged into one.

And humans had used this knowledge in the centuries since. AI and human probes had linked with various Xul choruses, slipping in unseen and unfelt by taking on a kind of aural camouflage, blending with the smaller lines of harmony and merging gently with the larger chorus.

As Luther was attempting now.

“Link with me,”
Luther's voice said, an urgent whisper.
“Follow…”

And Karr felt herself sliding free of the Eavesdropper's close embrace, entering a rolling surge of sound, of voices,
alien
voices, merging and swelling and echoing about her.

The points of light making up the ring, she now saw, were Xul ships, millions, no
billions
of them, and more were arriving with each passing moment. The Eavesdropper
Captain Ana McMillan
appeared to be one such vessel.

And her crew now were part of the rising Xul Chorus.

Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
0845 hours, GMT

“Stand ready,” Admiral Ranser said. “Translation in thirty seconds.”

“All sections, all departments, all companies report ready in all respects for translation,”
Lofty Henderson's calm voice added.

General Garroway took a deep breath, willing the fear to sink from throat and gut, willing it to merge with will and become subordinate to mind. The waiting just before an assault was
always
the hardest part.

“Status on the scouting group,” Garroway demanded.

“Linked in, sir,” Colonel Fremantle told him. “We've slipped five iterations of the OM-27's crew into the Xul matrix. All have opened solid QCC channels with their primaries here. We have a good picture of what's going on down there, and no indication that the enemy knows what's happening. And we have good data on the target metric.”

Yet, Garroway added to himself. “Very well,” he said. “Stay on it and yell if anything changes.
Anything
.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Garroway tried to imagine what it would be like to be a digital upload. Those Marines within the Xul network would know that they were copies, but would
feel
as though they were the original Marine officers—Captain Valledy and Lieutenant Karr—with the memories and hopes and feelings of the originals. Worse, each would be unaware of the other copies in the matrix. When the
Ana McMillan
fired her cloud of AI-directed penetrators into the Great Annihilator, each pencil-sized sliver had carried electronic copies of the original Marine scouts, together with a copy of the Luther AI. There'd been nearly eight hundred of them altogether. Most had been picked up one way or another in their approach through the Quantum Sea or in their docking with the objective and destroyed; exactly five had made it through and connected with the Xul Mind, pretending to be part of the alien chorus. For security reasons, none knew of the existence of or the success of the other four.

But five streams of data were coming back to the N-2 section on board the
Nicholas
. Their presence within the enemy Net was a combat asset of vital importance.

“Ten seconds to translation. All elements remain go.”

And then the last handful of seconds was trickling away.

Garroway felt an inner wrench and drop, as though the
Nicholas
' artificial gravity had momentarily been interrupted. Then the gravity resumed its accustomed pull, leaving behind a faint, swimming nausea.

And the Xul base was just ahead.

There were no surprises, thanks to the data sent back from the Zephyr recon teams. The world was 1200 kilometers across to the
Nicholas
' ten, a vast and cratered sphere dwarfing the slowly approaching phase-shift transport, its surface crisscrossed by starlike points of light, and with its far-flung rings casting a golden glow over the world that contrasted sharply with the violet hues of the surrounding Quantum Sea.

Things began happening now quickly, too quickly for human minds to follow. Fusion beams snapped out, striking the dwarf planet's surface with dazzling bursts of light and out-flung sprays of molten rock. Vast bays already open in the
Nicholas
' surface began spewing clouds of Marine fighters, of combat pods, and of remote drones.

And the Battle of the Quantum Sea began.

Debarkation Bay 5
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
0846 hours, GMT

Clad in Hellfire combat boarding armor, Nal waited as the elliptical gateway at the end of the ramp shimmered with pulsing energies, steadied, then stabilized, revealing beyond a cavern deep, black, and rock-walled, one of the numerous empty voids within the Xul worldlet designated Objective Reality.

The mission objective's name was better, he supposed, than the Samar of the last op, but the pun seemed out of place, somehow. The Marines knew that the Xul threat involved the possibility that they would rewrite reality somehow, but Nal doubted that most knew just exactly what was at risk.

If the Xul could rewrite the universe, none of the Marines
on board the
Nicholas
would ever know what hit them. They would simply be…gone, and nothing would stand between the Xul and the rest of an unprepared and unknowing Humankind.

“Ready to go, Marines!” Captain Corcoran said in his mind. “In three…two…one…”

The gate was open and Nal moved forward, along with the rest of the HQ section, just behind Alfa Company. He felt the jarring vibration of hundreds of boots in the metal decking of the ramp, and then he was through the gateway and dropping half a meter to the floor of the night-shrouded cavern.

This time there was no crowding or confusion, no stumbling, no Marines pitching precipitously from the ramp and mangling themselves with an incomplete transition.

But on the far side, the cavern walls were beginning to come alive, writhing with metallic menace as the Xul combat machines awoke.

Blue Seven
Objective Reality
0846 hours, GMT

Lieutenant Garwe felt the shudder of acceleration as his RS/A-91 Starwraith streaked from the belly of the
Samuel Nicholas
, hurtling outward on the rail of a magnetic accelerator. For a moment, he felt suspended between the
Nicholas
and the vast swelling of the Xul world ahead, both ship and world seeming to fill the violet-limned abyss of the Quantum Sea.

God
! he thought, furiously angry.
What the fuck am I doing?

Light blossomed just ahead as his AI momentarily took over the controls, swerving with the gravitics to avoid the deadly brush of an enemy fusion beam.

A guy could get fucking killed out here
!…

After all the waiting, after all the talk, everything had come down to this, and so quickly he still was having trouble putting it all together.

Okay, so they'd been asking for volunteers, Anchor Marines willing to actually ride their strikepods in toward the Xul target, rather than pilot them remotely from a safe distance. Garwe and Wahrst both had wondered if this was some sort of in-your-face bit of one-upmanship by the 1MarDiv command constellation.
You people want to call yourselves Marines
, he could imagine his many-times-great grandfather saying,
then act like it
!

Except…no. He knew Garroway pretty well now, he thought. He'd taken the man's measure, watched him take care of him and his buddies back at Tranquility Base on Luna. The old man had chewed them out, sure…but he'd taken care of them, gotten them back to their ship, and kept them out of the hands of the local monitors.

And later, when Garwe had been pulling that stint of extra duty in the com stacks, Garroway had asked to see one particular bit of incoming QCC traffic, almost as if he'd been asking a favor. No, G-g-g-g-great grand uncle Garroway was a gentleman, and he had the good of the people under his command at heart. This wasn't hazing and it wasn't punishment.

It just
was
.

Behind him, the
Samuel Nicholas
was fast dwindling to a lopsided disk as Garwe and fifteen other War Dogs hurtled toward Objective Reality. Fusion bursts and antimatter warheads, positron beams, gravitics disruptors, and lasers at x-ray and gamma frequencies crisscrossed the gulf of space between worldlet and asteroid-sized starship, eliciting dazzling flashes and twinkles of light, expanding clouds of dust and white-hot plasma on the surfaces of both. Chunks of molten rock and hull metal boiled off into hard vacuum. The
Nicholas
wouldn't be able to take that kind of point-blank bombardment for long.

Which was why, several long seconds later, the
Samuel
Nicholas
vanished, rotating back up into normal four-D space.

And the cloud of Marine fighters, strikepods, and twelve heavy naval vessels were left alone to confront the Xul world.

“Bastards!” Dravis Mortin said over the squadron channel.

“Belay that,” Captain Xander's voice snapped. “Pay attention to your approach!”

If the
Samuel Nicholas
was destroyed or crippled, none of the Marines or naval personnel of 1MarDiv would be going home.

So the Marines now were on their own.

Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
0846 hours, GMT

The entity that included Garrick Rame stood in the Ops Center, watching the inert bodies of the Marine division's command constellation lying on the circle of reclining seats. Through the broad-band QCC links within the chamber, various members of the Conclave watched with him, new visitors flitting in as old ones grew bored and left. There wasn't, Rame had to admit, much to see—twelve men and women, all, apparently, asleep. Overhead, across the domed ceiling, the pale blue and white glows of the Tarantula Nebula, thick with strewn and clustered stars, had just winked back into existence, a relief after the actinic blue and violet haze of the Quantum Sea.

“But what are they
doing
?” Tavia Costa asked. “They're just lying there!”

“Tap into the data flow,” an Euler conclavist suggested. “They follow the course of the struggle within the Xul artifact.”

Rame could sense the data streams, thousands of them weaving their way down through the consciousness of the AIs directing the phase-shift vessel's mind. He could sense Marine A/S-4000 strike fighters boosting hard toward the Xul world's surface, and clouds of individual strikepods hurtling through emptiness. The battlecruisers
Poseidon
and
Tra'vaal
were there, pounding away at Xul defensive batteries with heavy beam weapons, as the heavy
c
-boomer artillery ships
Doomsday
,
Armageddon
,
Ragnorok
slammed the alien world with ultra-high-velocity kinetic rounds.

“Three of these people are linked with Marine strikepods,”
Socrates pointed out.
“Including General Garroway.”

“Why?” Costa asked. “And how? I was given to understand that QCC linkage with that technology was not possible.”

“It's possible,” Rame said, “but difficult, unstable, and dangerous. The rate of time flow within the Quantum Sea is different from the time flow out here.”

“Why does the commanding general of the Marine division risk himself?” a Cynthiad demanded. Rame could feel the unpleasantly greasy squirm of the paraholothurid within the back of his mind. Something of the entity's stink seemed to cling even to its link-sim virtual presence.

“Perhaps because this is his ideal of leadership,” Rame suggested.

“He risks his immortality,” the Cynthiad replied. “He risks his
soul
.”

Rame didn't answer. Cynthiads were tough enough to understand even without bringing their religion into things.

He realized he deeply disliked and distrusted the ugly little creatures…and wondered if Xul emomemes were affecting the Rame-composite mind.

“He merely demonstrates those warrior virtues that this Conclave recognized when they authorized his revival,”
Socrates pointed out.
“Loyalty
…
and a superhuman devotion to duty.”