by Ian Douglas
“You’ll like it more with your implant.”
“Eh?”
“You’ll find nanotech is a part of just about everything now, including what you eat. And your implant has programs that let you respond in subtle ways to nano-treated food. Speaking of which…here.” She handed him a small inhaler. He hadn’t seen where she’d been carrying it on that painted-on uniform, and wondered if she’d materialized it out of the table the same way as she’d summoned their meals.
“What’s this?”
“Your new implant. We needed you to get a meal into your stomach first, so the implant nano has some raw material to work with. Just press that tip into a nostril and touch the release.”
He followed her directions. A warm, moist puff of air invaded his sinuses, and he tasted metal.
“The nano is programmed to follow the olfactory nerve into the brain,” she told him. “It knows where to go, and will begin chelating into imbedded circuits almost immediately. You’ll find yourself coming back on-line within an hour or two. Full growth will be completed within twenty hours or so.”
“That’s good.” He was still feeling shaken at the emptiness he felt without an e-connect. Damn, what had people done before cerebral implants? “And this’ll be better than my old one, huh?”
“Oh, yeah. A lot. You’ll be amazed.”
“I don’t know. Takes a lot to amaze me. What about Lofty?”
She cocked her head again. “‘Lofty?’ Who—”
“My essistant. Personal secretary and Divisional AI. Named for Major Lofton Henderson.”
“Oh, I see. Your personal software has all been backed up in the facility network. You’ll get it all back with the download. Who is Major Henderson?”
“Check your Corps history download, Captain,” he said with stern disapproval. “He was a Marine aviator in the pre-spaceflight era. He commanded VMSB-241 at the Battle of Midway in the year 167 of the Marine Era. Killed in action leading a glide-bomb attack against the aircraft carrier Hiryu. Won a posthumous Navy Cross.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Pardon, sir?”
“Nothing. I just realized that I rattled that off without consulting my implant data base. Maybe there’s hope for me yet.”
“I’m very sure there is, General.”
“So what does a…what did you call yourself? A temporal liaison do?”
“Lots of people are disoriented when they come out of cybe-hibe, sir. And even with the download, they can feel…isolated. Cut off. I’m here as a kind of a guide. I can answer questions. And, well, I know what you’re going through. What you’re feeling. I can reassure you that you’re not as alone as you might feel.”
“If there’s still a Corps, I won’t be alone,” he said. “I confess, though, that I’m a little surprised there still is a Marine Corps. There was talk back in the early thirtieth about disbanding us. The Corpsman who put me under down in Noctis Lab offered to bet me that he’d be waking me up again within the year…that I’d end up being retired, anyway. I take it that didn’t happen?”
“If you’ll check your Corps history, General, you’ll recall that the Marine Corps has always been threatened with disbanding. Why maintain a separate military organization when there’s the regular army?”
That, Garroway thought, was the absolute truth. Since the creation of the Continental Marines in 1775, the Corps had been a kind of bastard unwanted child—except when there was a war on. During peacetime, it was budget battles and second-line equipment, “Truman’s police force” and “in case of war, break glass.” Once the shooting started, though, it was send in the Marines.
In fact, the whole Marine cybe-hibe holding facility was an outgrowth of that millennia-old problem. Even well before the thirtieth century, what Schilling had casually referred to as “cultural disjunct” had been a serious issue within the Corps. Marines tended to stick together, to evolve their own unique culture with their own language and their own ways of looking at the world, and that culture was generally at sharp odds with the local civilian background. The problem had become even worse in the early days of interstellar military operations, when Marine units were packed away in cybe-hibe and deployed to star systems light years away; those units might return to Earth two decades or more after they’d left, aged—thanks to the combined effects of hibernation and relativistic time dilation—only a couple of years. Men and women already isolated from the civilian population by the Marine microculture found themselves even more isolated by twenty years of social change—and the aging or death of any friends or relatives left behind.
Small wonder that Marines tended to form bonded relationships with Marines, that there were traditional Marine family lines going back, in some cases, two thousand years. Garroway’s great-grandfather had been Gunnery Sergeant Aiden Garroway, who’d taken part in the op that had broken the back of the ancient Xul menace at the Galactic Core in the twenty-ninth century. And there were records of Garroways going much, much further back. There’d been a remote ancestor—immortalized in Corps legend as “Sands of Mars Garroway”—back in the mid-twenty-first, even before the first voyages to other stars.
He started to make a mental note to check and see if there were any Garroways around now. He’d had two kids, Ami and Jerret, before his first stint in cybe-hibe. Their mother had discouraged contact with him, damn her, and they’d been distant after the break-up. But maybe enough time had passed for their descendents….
He shook off the thickening mood, electing instead to stare up at the impossibly blue and white curve of Eris and the tiny glare of Dysnomia, hanging in the sky above the mess deck.
A new century. A new millennium.
He was looking forward to that download.
Upper Stratosphere, Dac IV
Star System 1727459
1820 hours, GMT
The RS/A-91 strikepod plunged out of the upper haze deck into a calm and empty gulf, and Marine Lieutenant Marek Garwe shifted from tactical to optical. Salmon-pink cloud walls towered in all directions, like vast and fuzzy-looking cliffs with gently curved and wind-sculpted faces. The haze layer above was composed mostly of crystals of water ice, scattering the local star’s light, turning the sky a deep, royal blue, with a ghostly halo about the sun.
Below, the cloud canyon yawned into darkness. The next cloud deck was over forty kilometers below, deeply shadowed in the depths beyond the slanting reach of the rays of a distant sun. Intermediate cloud layers indicated updrafts, including a vast spiral in the distance of a storm. Most astonishing was the sheer scale of the vista ahead and below; the opening in the cloud layer appeared to be dozens of kilometers wide and deep, but Garwe’s instrument feeds showed the empty gulf to be nearly four hundred kilometers across.
Dac IV was a gas giant, a little smaller than Jupiter in the distant Sol system, but with the same wind-whipped cloud bands and rotating storm cells in an atmosphere that was 99 percent hydrogen and helium. The 1 percent or so left over was mostly methane and ammonia, plus the poisonous soup of chemical compounds constantly upwelling from the world’s interior that gave the planet’s clouds their spectacular range of color.
Characteristic of most gas giants, Dac IV had no solid surface, which meant that Garwe’s confused and constantly shifting altitude readings were irrelevant; below his hurtling RS/A-91 Starwraith’s hull, the atmosphere grew steadily denser and hotter until it was compressed into metallic hydrogen.
“Tighten up your formation, people,” a voice whispered in his mind. “Objective now reads as 150 kilometers ahead.” Captain Corolin Xander was the CO of Anchor Marine Strike Squadron 340, “The War Dogs,” currently operating as Blue Flight. Her Starwraith was somewhere ahead and off Garwe’s starboard sponson, invisible even to his amplified senses as the squadron plunged toward Hassetas floatreef.
“I’m being painted,” Lieutenant Amendes, in Blue Two, reported. “Intense EM scans, all bands.”
“They can
’t be sure of what they’re seeing,” Xander replied. “They may not even be getting anything back.”
“Oh, they see us, all right,” Lieutenant Bakewin said. “They see something. Scans are increasing in power.”
Starwraiths were encased in the latest wrinkle in nanoflage, a layer of active nano designed to render the two-meter craft effectively invisible by bending all incoming electromagnetic radiation around the smoothly curved surfaces. Pod-to-pod communication was strictly quantum nonlocal, meaning there were no transmissions to give the sender away.
But Dac technology was still a major unknown. How the Dacs had even developed technology in the first place—with no mines, no metallurgy, no heavy industry, no fire—was the subject of ongoing xenosociotechnic debate, and the principal reason for the Associative Compound on Hassetas.
The twelve tiny pods comprising Blue Flight leveled off when they reached the expected Hassetasan depth. In popular human thought, gas giants like Dac IV, those located in their star’s outer system rather than in close to their star, were cold…and so they were at the thin, upper layers of their outer cloud decks. The deeper into the atmosphere a flier plunged, however, the thicker and hotter the gas mix became. At this depth, the atmospheric pressure was about eight times human standard, and the temperature outside the Starwraith’s hull hovered at around the freezing point of water. The day, by most human standards, was positively balmy…at least when compared to temperatures higher or lower in the intensely stratified volume of Dac’s turbulent atmosphere.
Ahead, a cloud wall rose like an impenetrable cliff, a vast pink-brown cliff with a looming, mushroom-shaped top, with wind-carved striations running along its face.
“Reduce velocity, Blues,” Xander ordered. “We’re going subsonic.”
The flight plunged into the face of the cloud-cliff, as the individual pods were buffeted somewhat by windstreams whipping around the cloud at 300 kilometers per hour. At eight atmospheres, with an H/He gas mix, the speed of sound was nearly 2400 kph, so the local winds were little more than zephyrs.
The clouds thickened until optical feeds were useless; Garwe shifted again to tactical, though there was little useful information the system could give him now—radiation flux, gas mix and pressure, temperature and windspeed, projected position of the other eleven pods of Blue Flight.
And, ahead, the beacon marking Hassetas.
Moments later, the flight emerged into another crystalline gulf, the interior of a vast spiral of clouds marking a hot updraft from below.
And ahead, an immense, gossamer bubble almost transparent in the sunlight, was the Dac living city called Hassetas.
“Hassetas airspace control,” Xander’s voice snapped out, crisp and concise, “this is Associative Marine Flight Blue on docking approach. Acknowledge.”
There was no immediate reply, and the silence was a palpable, imminent threat. Had the Hassetas crisis worsened during Blue Flight’s descent from Tromendet, Dac IV’s largest moon? There could be no doubt that weapons—highly advanced and lethal weapons—were trained on the tiny Marine pods now approaching the living floatreef.
The Marines had just called the Dacs’ bluff and sent their squadron into the heart of this latest crisis, and now it was up to the Krysni jellyfish—and the sapient floatreef they served—to decide how to respond.
Would it be peace, and an invitation to land?
Or the triggering of a savage curtain of high-energy weaponry?
Garwe found he was holding his breath, waiting for the reply….
2
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1845 hours, GMT
Trevor Garroway leaned back in a reclining seat grown by Captain Schilling from the deck of the large compartment she called the Memory Room. “You sure we can start this so soon?” he asked her. “You said it would take twenty hours to grow a new implant.”
The easy stuff is already in place, she told him. It took Garroway a moment to realize that she hadn’t spoken aloud, that her mouth hadn’t moved as she’d said the words. His implant was already picking up the transmitted thoughts of others with his implant encoding.
So…can you hear this? he thought, forcing the words out one by one in his mind.
Ouch, yes, she replied. You don’t need to shout. We’re connected over your basic personal link-channel. Others will be added later. You can also use that channel to begin downloading library data. You don’t have much in the way of artificial storage, yet—only about a pic of memory so far—but the link will let you download the gist to your native memory. You’ll just need to review it to see what’s there.
So what memories are you giving me now? he asked.
A general history of the past two thousand years, she told him, with emphasis on the Xul wars and subsequent social and technological development within the sphere of Humankind…what you knew as the Commonwealth. The rise of the Associative. A little bit of Galactic history, as we now understand it. Not much detail, here, not yet…just what you’ll need to put things into context later.
When you finally tell me what the goddamn crisis is that warrants pulling a Marine Star Battalion out of cold storage, he said, nodding. Gotcha.
Exactly. Are you comfortable? Ready to begin?
He took a deep breath as he settled back into the too-comfortable chair. Ready as I can be, Captain. Shoot….
And the images began coming down, a trickle at first, and then a flood.
It would, he realized, take him a long time to go through these new memories. Each distinct memory, each fact or date or historical event, did not, could not exist in isolation, but was a part of a much larger matrix. Until he had access to a lot more information, these bits and pieces would tend to remain discreet, unconnected, and essentially meaningless within the far vaster and more complex whole.
One thing, though, was clear immediately. The aliens were coming out of hiding.
He already remembered, of course, the history of the Xenophobe Wars. The Xul—electronically uploaded nonhuman sentients who’d apparently been around for at least the past ten million years—had been the dominant Galactic species, taking control of much of the Galaxy from a predecessor species known as the Children of the Night. The Xul had brought some evolutionary baggage forward in their advance to sapience—notably a hard-wired survival trait that led them, in rather overenthusiastically Darwinian fashion, to utterly obliterate any other species that might constitute a threat. The Xul, it turned out, had been the answer to the age-old question known as the Fermi Paradox. In a Galaxy ten to twelve billion years old, which, given the number of planets and the sheer tenacity and inventiveness of life, should be teeming with intelligent species, the sky was curiously empty. When Humankind had first ventured into its own Solar backyard, then on to the worlds of other nearby suns, it had encountered numerous relics indicating that various species had passed that way before—the Cydonian Face on Mars, the Tsiolkovsky Complex on Luna, the planet-wide ruins of Chiron….
Eventually, other species had been encountered, and communications begun: the An of Llalande 21185, low-tech remnants of an earlier, vanished stellar empire; the amphibious N’mah, living a precarious rats-in-the-walls existence inside the Sirius Stargate, again the survivors of a once far-flung network of interstellar traders; the Eulers, benthic life forms from the ocean deeps of a world twelve hundred light years from Sol, with a curiously mathematical outlook on Reality and the technology to detonate stars.
All three species had encountered the Xul scourge, and all three had survived, albeit barely. The Eulers had fought the Xul more or less to a standstill by exploding many of their own stars—creating funereal pyres visible as anomalous novae in Earth’s night skies in the constellation of Aquila, back in the early years of the twentieth century. The N’mah had gone into hiding, deliberately abandoning interstellar travel in favor of survival. The An colony on a gas giant moon had simply be
en overlooked, and without radio or other attention-getting technologies, had managed to stay overlooked for the next ten to twelve thousand years.
The Xul, it turned out, had possessed a singular blind spot. Though no longer corporeal, existing as arguably self-aware software within huge and complex computer networks, they’d obviously begun as biological life forms—quite possibly as a number of them—arising on worlds that must have been similar in most respects to Earth in terms of temperature range, gravity, and atmospheric composition. Their blind spot was an inability to see outside of the ecological box; they tended to overlook other possible environments that might harbor life. The current An homeworld, for instance, was an Earth-sized moon of a gas giant, heated from within by tidal flexing, but far outside the so-called habitable zone of the system’s cool, red-dwarf star. The N’mah lived inside entirely artificial but necessary structures, the ten-or twenty-kilometer-wide stargates constructed by a far older, long-vanished congeries of star-faring species. And the Eulers, six-eyed tentacled chemovores evolving near deep-ocean volcanic vents, lived under such crushing pressures that they might have remained forever unnoticed by the Xul hunterships if they hadn’t possessed minds brilliant enough, and curious enough, to develop—through artificially crafted intelligent life forms and a patience spanning perhaps millions of years—the technology to venture into interstellar space.
All of that had been well known and understood by the time Garroway had joined the Marine Corps, in the twenty-eighth century. During the next few hundred years of his Marine career, perhaps half a dozen other intelligent species had been discovered—the Vorat, the widely scattered Nathga, the Chthuli. Again, nonterrestrial habitats had kept them hidden from the Xul. The Vorat were thermic chemovores, dwelling on high-temperature, high-pressure worlds similar to Venus in Earth’s solar system. The Nathga were jelly-bag floaters that had evolved in the upper cloud levels of a world like Jupiter, eventually developing the technology that had allowed them to slowly migrate to some thousands of similar gas giants across a good third of the Galaxy. And the Chthuli, like the Eulers, were a benthic species that had colonized the ocean basins of several oceanic worlds.
