by Ian Douglas
12
18 MARCH 2314
Interstellar Marine Transport Chosin
Incoming, beyond the orbit of Jupiter
1814 hrs, GMT
It took Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach a long time to wake up and, once he did, he wasn’t sure coming back to life was worth the effort.
He emerged from cybe-hibe into a close, moist darkness, cold, aching, and confused. The first thing he was aware of was of a strangling sensation, as though he were drowning. Gagging, coughing, he struggled to breath, until the jelly filling his nose and throat and lungs dissolved away, absorbed by his mucous membranes, and he began drawing deep, shuddering breaths of cool air.
Complete darkness was overcome—barely and slowly—by a brightening of the walls encircling him. He was on his back, in a tube just large enough to enclose his prone body, lying on a narrow slab with a soft and yielding texture, like foam, and with the last of a wet, gelatinous substance still coating his bare skin.
Still struggling to breath, fighting now against panic and claustrophobia, it took a long moment to remember where he was…and to accept that he was not in Ki-kala-kala, the frigid netherworld of his people. At first, he could grasp only fragments of memory, and had to focus hard to remember anything more concrete than tides of shifting emotion.
They’d told him he wouldn’t dream, but they’d been wrong, and some of those dreams haunting him through the stargulf had been less than pleasant.
His thoughts retained the flavor of some of those dreams, if not the substance. He felt images of the dark red and orange jungles, of the tree-sheltered e-duru that had been home slipping away.
Where was he?
He was a Marine—that much he remembered. His fists clenched at his sides as he closed his eyes and held that memory. He was a Marine.
Revivification to Stage Five, a voice said in his head. Breathing passages and lungs clear. Circulation and respiration now fully autonomous. Proceeding to Stage Six.
Nal wasn’t sure what “Stage Six” might entail, but he managed to choke down his apprehension and simply wait. He was a Marine—a Marine—and Marines didn’t let their terror get the better of them.
Of that much he was certain.
An image flashed into his mind, a scene of startling clarity and realism. For just a moment he was standing at the front gate of Gilgamesh Base, the U.S. Marine facility on Enduru…the world the Un-ki called Ishtar. His friends Vedda and Kel both were there beside him, along with other dumu-gir, and the Marine gunnery sergeant who’s taken their oaths was yelling at them to stand in a line, to stand up straight…
The image changed in a bewildering flash. It was nighttime, with stars overhead, the sullen glow of Igi-digir—the Face of God—hanging immense on the western horizon, backlighting the awesome sawback of the Ahtun Range. A gossamer, a green-glowing airworm, rippled past a few spans away, as insubstantial as a breath. A village singer keened mourning at the death of Gir Ulet i-Kaff in an encounter with the Ahannu god-warriors in the jungle below Kur-Dev.
Gir had been a friend of Nal’s, and his lover. Her death had been a large part of why he’d made the long trek down the hill to Gilgamesh Base, and told the Un-ki Marines that he wanted to be nir-gál-mè-a as well.
Memory checks complete. Proceeding to Stage Seven….
Memory check. There was something…
Yes. They’d put something in his head…no, grown something in his head, and they’d told him that he would be able to hear the thing’s voice. He still didn’t understand. The Un-ki magic was so very powerful, so strange.
But the…what had they called it? The implant, that was it. The implant was supposed to help him learn.
Learn how to be a Nirgal.
That thought steadied him. Not “Un-ki,” he thought, a bit fiercely. Earthmen. People. People just like me….
Like other young men in his e-duru—no, village, or town, not e-duru. He’d begun learning English at an early age, but the strange language had been difficult, not at all like the flowing music of Eme-gi, The People’s Tongue, and he’d never been fluent. His vocabulary and his grammar both had improved a lot since they’d given him the implant, but he wasn’t yet adept in thinking in the harsh and dissonant jumbles of alien syllables the Earthmen had brought with them from the stars.
Recruit I-763-56, the voice said. No, a different voice. A woman’s voice. How are you feeling?
“Uh…I’m feeling…like I’ve been hit over the head by a kur-gal-gub…”
Quite understandable. Let’s pop you out of there. Hang on. And you might want to close your eyes. It’s bright.
He heard a sharp hiss, and then the hatch above his head cycled open, the shelf he was lying on extruded from the narrow, cylindrical chamber in which he’d been trapped, and he blinked against a near intolerable glare of light from somewhere overhead.
A woman’s face blocked the glaring light.
“What’s your name, Recruit?”
“Uh…Nal.”
“Full name.”
“Sir! Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach, sir!” The formulaic recitation, drilled into him back at Gilgamesh, snapped him back to full awareness.
“Service number?”
“Sir! I-763-56, sir!”
“Don’t overdue the ‘sir’ bit, Recruit. I’m not an officer and I’m not a DI. Relax. Do you know where you are?”
He searched his badly jangled memory for a moment. “One…one of the Un-ki mul-hu-gal?”
The woman laughed. “I’m not sure Captain Nakamura would refer to her baby as a ‘great star bird,’ but it works for me. You’re on board the IMT Chosin. You’ve been sleeping for a long time, a very long time, but we’re almost home. Time to get up.”
Not home, he thought. Home was Enduru, light years distant. Excitement pounded in his chest, his temples. The Chosin was nearing fabled Kia, the original homeworld of Man.
He started to sit up, but she laid a hand on his bare shoulder. “Slowly. Sit up when you feel strong enough, but take it easy, okay? You’ve been bottled up in cybe-hibe for two years objective. When you feel ready, follow the green light.”
She stood by as he rolled over and, slowly, sat up. He was nude, but Ishtaran humans possessed few body taboos, and any shyness he might once have possessed had been lost in ten cycles of Marine recruit training.
“You okay?” the woman asked.
He blinked twice…then remembered the Earth-human gesture, and nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Good. Get up when you’re ready.” She touched a box molded to her forearm, studied a readout, then left, moving to the next closed hatchway on this deck. Still blinking a bit in the bright light as his eyes adjusted, he looked out into an enormous chamber, a cylinder ringed by small, circular hatchways like the one from which he’d just emerged, each served by a walkway with a safety railing and deck gratings like steel mesh.
Perhaps half of the hatches, he saw, were now open, and other men and women were sitting up on the extruded pallets, or taking their first tentative steps, hands firmly on the railing. All were nude, save for a few, like the woman who’d just questioned him, wearing Marine utilities. These individuals all seemed to be moving from hatch to hatch, opening them up and reassuring the newly awakened travelers.
When he leaned forward a bit, catching himself on the pallet when dizziness nearly toppled him, he saw that this was simply one of many identical levels, some above this one, some below. And, while his mind and his memory told him that he was inside a gigantic star bird from Lost Earth made of metal and other, less well-understood materials, flying at inconceivable speed through the emptiness of Anu—of heaven—there was absolutely no sensation of motion.
Asleep for two years.
They’d told him during his training that when they put him into cybe-hibe, billions of inconceivably tiny machines would enter his body, taking over his bodily functions, his muscles, his heart, his breathing, his brain, and let him safely sleep for hundreds upon hu
ndreds of cycles. Two years? He still wasn’t entirely sure what a “year” might be, but felt fairly sure it was a long time—several sixes of cycles, at least. The voice in his head, he now remembered, was something called an AI, an artificial intelligence named “Smedley” that lived within the ship, and in the implants of his fellow recruits.
Experimentally, he opened his mind, as he’d been taught, using a nonverbal symbol as a kind of key. You have a question? sounded in his thoughts—the voice of Smedley, speaking English.
“Uh…definitions. How many Enduri cycles are in a ‘year?’”
One Enduri day-night cycle, the voice said, the time it takes for Ishtar to orbit Marduk, its gas-giant primary, once, is equivalent to six point four two Earth days. One Earth year equals 365.25 Earth days, or 56.893 Enduri cycles.
Voices speaking in his thoughts. Magic. It had to be magic, even though the village elders insisted that there was no such thing. No magic, no spells, no gods.
His initial classes as a Marine recruit had taught him much the same. There was no magic, his teachers had said, though any highly advanced technology might seem like magic to people who weren’t used to it. The visitors from Lost Kia were men and women, the same as the Dumu-gir, not gods.
The Ahannu had claimed to be gods, but the Marines from Earth had defeated them in battle, had created the Dumu-gir Kalam—the Land of the Free People. For over eight thousand cycles, now, men of Lost Kia had lived with the Free People on Enduru, defending them against the hated Ahannu, teaching them of their ancient home in Heaven. Dumu-gir Kalam was what they called an offworld territorial dependency of a Kian land called the United States, and was, therefore, part of the greater American Federation. He still wasn’t sure what some of those words meant, but he did know that, among other things, the Free Peoples had the right to apply for U.S. citizenship. A few lucky ones were accepted every hundred cycles or so to become citizens of the United States. Once a citizen, the very lucky ones could volunteer to train to attend Ishtaran Recruit Training at Gilgamesh Base, just outside of New Sumer. There they would learn how to become U.S. Marines.
Nal had been one of those very lucky ones.
The thought steadied him, and brought a surge of strength. Technically, he wasn’t a Marine yet, but a recruit—a lowly and unworthy creature, as his DIs had assured him time and time again.
A sudden memory flooded his mind—of Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz leaning forward, his nose almost touching Nal’s, his face red as he thundered, “You are not a Marine! You are a recruit…and recruits are so low that whale shit looks like shooting stars to you!”
Nal had no idea what a whale was, but Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz had done an admirable job of communicating the general idea. Oh, yes.
For ten cycles, Nal and sixty-eight other Ishtaran recruits had trained at the Gilgamesh facility, strengthening body, spirit, and his mind, receiving the all-important nanoim-plants that would let them download all they still needed to learn, and acquiring basic skills that would let them, some day, wear the precious talisman of Globe and Anchor.
Not all had made it. His Recruit Training Class, Number 763, had started with one hundred two recruits. The training regimen that followed had been carefully crafted—some would say sadistically so—to weed out those who didn’t have what it took to be a Marine. They were encouraged to drop out at every opportunity, and each successive cycle was, if anything, tougher than the one preceding.
Shakily, Nal stepped off the pallet and stood. Perhaps it was nothing more than the effects of those billions of tiny machines, but he was feeling stronger moment by moment. He was feeling warmer, too. The last of that unpleasant jelly seemed to be evaporating from his skin, now, and the air in the huge chamber was very warm, oxygen-rich, and fresh-tasting. He was aware of a distinct emptiness in the pit of his stomach…which, at the thought, rumbled ominously. He was hungry.
Looking down at the deck grating, he saw a glowing green arrow moving at a walking pace, left to right, followed at an interval by another…and another. More magic that was not magic, he assumed, and he wondered how the trick was done. Reaching out a hand, he took the railing in his left hand and began following the arrows. They would lead him, he knew, to a communal washing chamber, a newly issued uniform, and to food.
Derel ti-Haj Vah-gur walked up behind him, leaning heavily on the rail. “I hurt,” she said. “How about you?”
Like Nal, like most of the native human population on the world Earth-humans called Ishtar, descendents of humans brought from ancient Mesopotamia as slaves by the Ahannu “gods” eight to ten thousand years before, Derel was small, with deep olive skin, black hair, and luminous brown eyes. Ten cycles of tough physical training and medinano injections had hardened her, like him, until the muscles of her belly, arms, and legs were clearly defined beneath her skin.
“Me, too,” he said, stepping aside and letting her pass. He fell into step behind her, watching the hypnotic shift of her buttocks as she walked ahead of him. Normally, he would have appreciated the sight of Derel’s nakedness—they’d shared several happy sexual trysts back on Enduru—but the aches and discomfort of cybe-hibe, and his current hunger, did a lot to redirect any lust he might otherwise have felt. There were also rumors that some of those invisibly small machines swarming through his bloodstream were programmed to block any physical response to such thoughts.
It was just as well. The DIs and instructors had made it abundantly clear that fraternization among the recruits, as they called it, would not be tolerated, at least while they were still in training. “After you graduate, if you graduate,” he remembered Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz screaming at them as they stood rigidly at attention in their squad bay, “you can fuck each other’s brains out, what you have of ’em! But until that day you will have no feelings save two! You will desire with every miserable fiber of your miserable beings to please me! And you will love, with every miserable fiber of your miserable beings, my beloved Corps!…”
Wojkowiz had an odd manner of speaking, stressing every few words in a way that seemed calculated to impress their meaning on his Ishtaran recruits. That was just as well. All of the recruits knew some English besides their native Eme-gi—the Free Peoples used it as a trade and diplomatic language with the offworlder colonists—but few were really comfortable with it. That was changing, fast, with the downloads that had been coming at them faster and faster during their first training phase.
And on Kia, the Earth of ancient legend, they would be speaking nothing but English.
Earth, he told himself grimly. Not Kia, but Earth….
According to the contract the Ishtaran recruits had signed back at Gilgamesh, they would train on their home world for ten cycles—roughly nine Earth weeks—then be transported to Earth, to a magical-sounding place called Parris Island, where they would complete their training, this time with recruits from Earth, in another fifteen cycles. The rigorous sessions on Ishtar before they even boosted for orbit were designed to make sure there were as few dropouts from the class as possible, once they’d made the long—and expensive—eight light-year journey from Lalande 21185 to Sol.
And after that? Graduation and assignment, of course. Each Ishtaran had volunteered for six years—341 cycles—of service in the Corps, during which time they might be assigned to Earth, to various Marine Corps facilities throughout Earth’s Solar System, to bases on the worlds of yet other stars scattered across the Vault of Anu, or even find themselves right back where they’d started, on Enduru/Ishtar.
Nal had to remind himself that his 341-cycle enlistment was 341 subjective cycles, that almost 600 full cycles had just passed in what had felt to him like an eye-blink. It still didn’t seem real—knowing that he’d slept that long and not even realized it. Stranger still was something else he’d learned—that the Chosin had been traveling so fast that time itself had shortened somehow, so that while 600 cycles had passed back home, fewer than 200 had passed on board the ship, and that was how long he’d actually s
lept.
Neither the two hundred nor the six hundred counted against his enlistment. His subjective timekeeper told him he’d been placed into cybe-hibe just hours ago, despite the disturbing tides of his dreams, and no time whatsoever had elapsed.
He shook his head. There was no way, no way he was ever going to understand the games the men of Kia played with time itself. Better to just do what he was told, learn what he could, and accept the rest on faith. Trying to understand Kian magic, he’d heard, could drive you insane.
An hour later—the unit of time was half again longer than one kin, which was 1/360th of a cycle—he was showered, dressed in olive-green recruit utilities, and seated in Chosin’s third-deck mess hall. The meal was scanty and bland—a kind of mush with little real flavor—but he’d been assured it contained all the nutrients he needed to keep going. He wondered if this were standard fare for Earth people.
Possibly, even probably, not. Chosin, he’d been told once, carried enormous quantities of water, which were used as radiation shielding at near-c velocities, but needed to be highly efficient when it came to hauling bulky expendables such as food.
Derel sat down next to him with her tray. “Have you heard anything?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something has the Kians pretty upset.”
He looked around the mess hall. It was crowded already, and more Marines were arriving moment by moment. There a thousand Marines on board the Chosin, he’d been told, and only sixty-nine of them were native Enduri. All the rest, Marines of the 3rd Marine Division, 15th Regiment, Third Battalion, had been from Earth, Marines stationed on Enduru—no, Ishtar—for 120 cycles. Chosin had arrived at Ishtar twelve cycles ago with replacements from Earth, and now these men and women were going home.
The Enduran-born Marines, he saw, had not been encouraged to mingle with those from Earth. Or maybe it was just their recruit status. You are not Marines. You are recruits! In any case, the Enduran personnel had been given a couple of mess tables to themselves, off to one corner of the compartment.
