Star Marines

by Ian Douglas

  “Boot camp and a few training sessions afterward,” Chrome added. “Real woo-woo stuff.”

  “I’ve often wondered,” Maverick told them, “if Weiji-do really was what they said, some kind of key to manifesting reality. But it says the same thing as quantum physics, right? Somehow, our minds affect the nature of our reality, by operating down there at the base reality, the Quantum Sea. We believe. It happens.”

  “If that were really true,” Chrome pointed out reasonably, “we could all believe together that the Xul were all gone. And they would be.”

  “What if the Xul believe they’re not gone?” Garroway asked, grinning. “Maybe their belief trumps our belief.”

  “So what does that mean? That reality is the result of a fucking vote?”

  “Physicists say reality is consensual,” Maverick said. “Something we all create together. So maybe so.”

  “You know,” Garroway said, “there’s plenty of evidence that psychic phenomena are real. That they are nonlocal effects. And nonlocal means they occur at the level of the Quantum Sea.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Well, you know the old saying? ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?’”

  “Sure. Clarke. A twentieth-century philosopher.”

  “Okay. Maybe the Xul can rework the Quantum Sea to their exact specifications, just by thinking about it. You want to go to another star FTL? You think you’re there and poof! There you are. You want to send a rock flying? You think about it, and it does.”

  “Scary thought,” Chrome said. “How the hell do you fight someone that powerful?”

  “Well, the Xul aren’t omnipotent,” Maverick said. “If they were, all they’d need to do is think about it and we’d vanish. Or our sun would explode, or we all fall into another dimension, or whatever. Why muck about with throwing rocks when you can click your fingers, or whatever you use for fingers, and zap us all into nonexistence?”

  “There have to be limits,” Garroway said, still thoughtful. “Maybe Chrome’s right. It is a vote. Sixteen billion of us to fifteen point nine-nine-nine billion of them, we win. More likely, though, it’s something a lot more subtle than that. Maybe it has to do with the way we think, or the fact that even when we believe something, there’s a huge pile of un-belief lurking just below the surface, no matter what we do. But it gives an interesting take on ESP, magic, all of that woo-woo stuff, as Chrome calls it.”

  Most Marines believed completely in extrasensory phenomena through personal experience; comjits were a case in point. Military psychologists had long sought to bend the subtle effects of ESP to the military will, but with less than complete success. Mental techniques like remote viewing were provably real, but inconsistent enough that technology—remote drones, for instance—did the job better and more reliably.

  “How does the N’mah inertial damper work?” Chrome asked Maverick. “Magic? Wishful thinking?”

  “We have no idea. The physics boys are still trying to figure that out, but even with working models to take apart and tinker with, there are still too many gaps in our understanding of quantum physics theory. It’s a field effect, they say, something that affects every atom in the target mass together…which is a fancy way of saying they don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Might as well be wishful thinking, then,” Garroway said. “The thing is, I wonder if the Xul pull off their high-tech magic by rewriting information at the base reality…but they don’t really know that that’s what they’re doing.”

  “Why do you say that?” Chrome asked.

  “Look…they can do things like change the inertia in an asteroid and make it zip off toward Earth at two thousand klicks per second, but they couldn’t stop us from planting a few backpack nukes inside their ship and blowing them all to hell. They can cross light-years in the blink of an eye—again, presumably, by rewriting their base reality somehow—but our X-ray lasers surprised them, crippled their ship, and blinded them so that we could get on board. It’s like they have pieces of the whole, big picture, but only pieces, and they don’t have them put together yet.”

  “Huh,” Chrome said. “Maybe they’re too advanced. They don’t know how their own tech works.”

  “Could be,” Maverick said. “They might have inherited their technology, rather than built it themselves.”

  “That almost makes sense, sir,” Chrome told him. “We think they’re inorganic. Machines. Well, somebody had to’ve invented the damned things in the first place. Somebody organic. Rocks and metal ores don’t rearrange themselves into a working computer, complete with a few terabytes of data in mem.”

  “So our Xul friends have all of these gadgets created by their organic predecessors, but don’t understand how it all fits together. How reality, how the universe, really works.”

  “Don’t understand?” Maverick asked. “Or don’t care?”

  “Either way,” Garroway said. “I just wonder if we can use it somehow.”

  “I sure don’t see how,” Chrome said.

  Maverick looked at his bowl of porridge, still steaming. “Well, if I could change reality by thinking about it, I’d wish for a steak dinner. Medium rare…with spring potatoes and green beans. Red wine…the ’98 vintage, I think.”

  “How about Earth?” Chrome asked. “We believe Earth is healed. The cities still standing. Our families intact.”

  That got a reaction from Maverick. Garroway saw the sharp stab of pain, the slight glisten in his eye. “You okay, sir?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You lose someone?”

  “I…don’t know yet.” He put his spoon down. “Maybe you can help me. Either of you hear about survivors out of Miami?”

  “No, sir,” Garroway said. “But then, we haven’t heard much of anything, yet.”

  “They’re supposed to be trying to put up casualty records on the new GlobalNet,” Chrome told him. “But that’s going to take a long time.”

  “I’ve heard there are some big emergency camps down in Georgia,” Garroway told him. “Sounds like half of Florida is there. Who are you looking for? Where were they?”

  “Miami Complex,” Maverick said. “Helios Towers, in fact.”

  Garroway struggled to keep his face impassive. The Helios Towers had been a monster engineering project created in response to the slow encroachment of rising sea levels throughout the past few centuries of global warming. Much of Old Miami was under water, had been for decades, save for the walled portions and the towers. Helios Towers had been built farther out at sea, a skyward-reaching series of condominia erected in defiance of a steadily worsening climate.

  But since arriving on Earth, he’d heard scuttlebutt—only rumors, but rumors nonetheless—that the Helios Towers had taken a direct hit during the firestorm preceding Armageddonfall…and that the rest of Miami had pretty much washed away in the tidal wave that followed.

  He exchanged glances with Chrome, and saw that she was thinking the same thing. Should they tell him? Or let him keep hoping?

  “I don’t know what to tell you, sir,” Garroway said after an uncomfortable moment. “Florida got hit pretty bad. Who is it. Your wife? A girlfriend?”

  “Both of my wives,” he replied. “And our husband. My daughter. Two sons. A couple of in-laws. We had our own compound down there, on Helios West. Gorgeous terraces. Our own flitterport.” He seemed to shake himself. “Well, maybe all I can do is keep hoping.”

  “We’ll hope with you, sir,” Garroway said. “Miracles happen.”

  But at the moment, he wasn’t at all sure he believed that.

  17

  16 AUGUST 2314

  Marine Training Command

  Camp Pendleton, California

  1005 hrs, PST

  “…and acting in the very best traditions of the United States Marine Corps, Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach did take command of a small group of fellow recruits and lead them against the marauder force that had penetrated the Marine
perimeter. Realizing his weapon was useless against the enemy’s personal armor, and without thought for his own safety, he leaped from an elevated walkway onto the deck of a heavily armed transport hovercraft passing below his position, and engaged one of the marauders there in hand-to-hand combat. Despite the fact that the marauder wore combat armor and Private Shra-dach did not, he managed to seriously wound the marauder, while his companions, following his lead, attacked other marauders in the same vehicle and killed or overpowered them all.

  “As a direct result of Recruit Private Shra-dach’s actions, the small and badly outnumbered security element stationed at the relief distribution center was able to repulse the marauder attack. Intelligence gathered from prisoners taken in the action was instrumental in organizing follow-up air-and ground strikes over the next several weeks which broke the power of marauder forces in the Washington, D.C.-Ring City area of operations.

  “It is, then, my very great privilege to award Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach the Silver Star for heroism. In addition, the Navy Department has authorized his immediate promotion to lance corporal.”

  The officer standing in front of him leaned forward, pinning the medal on Nal’s tunic. Nal remained rigidly at attention as the award was snapped into place, then—as he’d been carefully coached—he shook the man’s hand when it was offered. “Congratulations, Lance Corporal Shra-dach!”

  “Sir! Thank you, sir!”

  When the man released his hand, he rendered a crisp salute, which the general returned, then did a sharp about-face and returned to the waiting ranks.

  It seemed as though the entire Marine Corps had gathered here under the foul-weather dome over Camp Pendleton’s RTC grinder. Nal had never seen so many Blue Dress A uniforms, the traditional blue and red high-necked jackets worn with medals, over sky blue trousers. Having them all here to see him get this medal was a bit overwhelming.

  So, too, was getting the medal and the promotion from the hand of none other than General John R. Dumont, the 210th Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, who’d flown out to California specifically for this awards ceremony.

  About-facing again, he stood once more in the front rank between Chakar Na-il Havaay, on his left, and Derel ti-Haj Vah-gur, who appeared to be trying to stifle a large grin on his right. “Way to go,” she whispered in his mind…an Earth colloquialism she enjoyed using at every opportunity. “The Ishtar Marines have landed!”

  “Roger that,” Chakar added.

  “Stow it, you two,” he transmitted over the private channel. “We’ll talk later.”

  Commandant Dumont was standing before them now, hands clasped behind his back, as he talked about valor, commitment, and the traditions of the Corps. Behind him, several hundred meters away, Nal could see the transparency of the sheltering dome, and the falling snow outside.

  It had been snowing now for weeks, but he was still fascinated by the phenomenon. Back on Enduru—Ishtar, rather; he was still having trouble getting used to the English name—the human enclaves and cities, like the Anu cities, all were located in the so-called twiheat zone between fire and ice. Ishtar was an Earth-sized satellite of a super-Jovian gas giant. The day-night cycle of light and dark was provided by a wan and distant red dwarf sun—Lalande 21185, according to the Earth-human naming conventions—but heat came partly from tidal forces flexing the world’s crust, and partly from the infrared radiation of the gas giant, which hung suspended forever just above the western horizon of the rugged, heavily forested uplands where Nal and the others had been born.

  Since it was tidally locked, Ishtar always turned the same face toward Marduk, as the Earth-humans called the gas giant primary. That face, the Hot Face, was desert, utterly dry and barren, with temperatures running well above 40 degrees Celsius. The Ice Face, on the other hand, was continually locked in a hemisphere-wide sheet of ice, and temperatures there never reached above the freezing point of water. According to offworlders, snow—frozen rain—fell over the icecap which, as it slowly moved into the twiheat zone, melted, creating Ishtar’s shallow, world-girdling seas.

  But Ishtar’s twiheat zones were tropically warm, for the most part, and Nal and his friends had never seen anything like those huge, fluffy white flakes that fell and fell and kept falling from lead-gray skies.

  Earth-born Marines had told the Ishtaran recruits that what they were seeing here was definitely out of the ordinary, that it never snowed in this part of California save on the upper elevations of the very highest mountains, and never in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere summer. Nal was still getting used to so much that was, not just different, but spectacularly alien about this world so far from his home.

  For the most part, Nal had enjoyed the second and third phases of his training. The Marines had flown the Ishtaran contingent to California from D.C. a few weeks after the action that had won him this ribbon with its pendant five-pointed star now hanging from his blue tunic. The original Recruit Training Center at Camp Pendleton had been badly damaged by tidal waves rolling in off the Pacific, but new boot camp facilities had been set up farther inland, south of Lake O’Neil, in a place called Rattlesnake Canyon.

  Eager to learn all he could about his new home, as soon as he’d arrived Nal had downloaded files describing the local fauna, including the creature known as a rattlesnake. There was nothing like it back home and he’d been eager to meet one. His Earth-born friends had had to point out to him that rattlers did not do well in snow.

  Because of the snow, and the subzero temperatures, most of his boot training had been done indoors. Underground tunnels and high-speed tube transports got them around from dome to dome throughout the base facilities. His boot company had made a couple of long-distance marches, though, slogging through knee-deep snow wearing heavy armor. Both excursions were outings he would never forget, simply for their sheer, stark, exotic beauty.

  Snow!…

  His boot camp class had graduated on 5 August, and they’d been transferred to a holding company with new barracks just above the aerospace field. Every Ishtaran had graduated, and received the much anticipated promotion to private first class.

  Nal had received the special honor of remaining PFC for less than two weeks before receiving his meritorious promotion to lance corporal. He still wasn’t a noncom—that wouldn’t come until he made corporal—and therefore still couldn’t wear the coveted “blood stripe” down the outside seam of his dress blue trousers. But the promotion did bring with it a slightly increased degree of trust and responsibility, his first real step up the long career level. Nal was already determined to make the Corps his home for the next thirty Earth years.

  Thirty years subjective, of course. Nal had already volunteered for Operation Seafire, and been accepted.

  He was going to the stars.

  Near the Face Complex

  Cydonia, Mars

  1745 hrs, GMT

  Travis Garroway stood on the crest of a low ridge, watching the teleoperated machines toil in the ocher sands below. A dust plume hung above the construction pit, casting a long shadow.

  Chrome was at his side. Both wore light pressurized armor with bubble helmets, the suits sealed against the thin, cold breath of carbon dioxide that was all Mars could claim as an atmosphere.

  A billion years ago, an ocean had rolled here, and the air had been almost as thick as Earth’s. The air had thinned, the world had grown cold and dry…though, again, and very briefly, open water had flowed here a scant half million years ago. Turning to his right, Garroway studied the rugged profile of a lone mesa on the eastern horizon. They had done that, though it hadn’t lasted.

  “Your ancestor fought here, didn’t he?” Chrome asked. “‘Sands of Mars Garroway?’”

  “Yes. Yes, he did. World War IV. Though at the time they called it the UN War.”

  “You excited to be back on the same spot?”

  Garroway shrugged, then realized the gesture didn’t translate well through a pressure suit. “I suppose. Som
etimes I think the name’s a lot to try to live up to, y’know?”

  “Hell with that,” Chrome said. “You live for yourself, and you stay true to yourself. Not your ancestors. Or your relatives.”

  He glanced at her, wondering if she knew he’d been wrestling with the fact of his powerful uncle, or merely guessed. Sometimes, the lady was damned near psychic in what she could pick up out of the ether around her.

  “You’re right, of course. But sometimes I want to change my name.”

  “Why focus more attention on it? Just let it go. Ah!” She took his elbow with one hand, pointed with the other. “They’re loading up another shot.”

  Several kilometers away, just visible in the distance, a monorail track began close by the cluster of pyramidal mountains known as the City, running almost directly due south—and so long that the far end lay somewhere invisibly over the horizon. The launch rail had been grown only a few weeks ago, using specially programmed constructionano that had pulled iron from the rust that made Mars the Red Planet and molded it into shape. From here, you could see where the iron oxide had been leached from the soil for thirty meters to either side of the rail, creating a long, silver-white strip through the desert.

  Nearby, the robotic tractors and diggers below were shoveling desert sand into huge plastic cargo containers bound in iron hoops. One of those containers was being gentled onto the monorail now. Superconducting circuits trapped current and created a powerful levitation effect, with the cargo container hovering centimeters above the rail.

  “Looks like they’re about to fire off another one,” Chrome observed.