by Ian Douglas
“The earliest Lunar colonies found it was a lot cheaper and more efficient to make their pressure domes out of this stuff,” Wahrst said, “than it was shipping the raw materials up from Earth.”
A large wave smashed against the transparency in complete silence.
“Is there any life out there?” Tami Palin asked, stepping closer to the wall and placing her hand against the slick surface. She sounded wistful. She’d been born and raised, Garwe remembered, on a sea farm cooperative in one of Earth’s oceans. He couldn’t remember where.
“Genegineered plants,” Garwe told her. “Remember the green we saw on the trip down? Algae and bacteria, mostly, in the seas. And several kinds of gene-tailored mosses on land. The air out there’s still mostly carbon dioxide, and the temperature extremes would kill anything that wasn’t special-made to survive them.”
“We make worlds and ecosystems to order,” Wahrst said. “Takes a few centuries, of course, but we get there.”
“Where I want to get is to a bar where we can find some action,” Namura said. He pointed to a forest of holographic signs farther along on the promenade. “And that’s where we’re going to find it. Come on!”
“Target in sight!” Garwe called.
“Lock and load!” Amendes added.
The six Anchor Marine lieutenants advanced on their objective.
Lord Rame Residence
Earthring, Sol System
2255 hours, GMT
Lord Garrick Rame stared into his viewall, which was focused now on the immense transport docked with the Lunar Ring. “Damn them,” he said, whispering.
Brea was asleep in the bedroom. They’d made love earlier, but Rame hadn’t been able to sleep. He’d left her in the bed and come out here. Earlier that day, the Military Council had informed him of their decision…that the Globe Marines would be deployed first to the Large Magellanic Cloud to deal with the Tavros-Endymion situation.
The Nicholas, according to the latest reports, was ready now in all respects for phase-shift deployment. In two more days, she would be outbound, escorted by a naval squadron consisting of a carrier, five cruisers, seven destroyers, and a handful of smaller warships predictably designated Task Force Magellan.
The Nicholas would proceed to Eris, out on the thin, cold outskirts of the Solar System, there to wait as TF Magellan continued under Alcubierre Drive at best speed, making for the Sirius Stargate. The task force would pass through several stargates in the coming months, eventually passing through a gate drifting in the emptiness outside of the Galaxy, a gate that would then drop them into the heart of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.
“Best speed” was something of an optimistic platitude. Even the space-warping bubble of Alcubierre Drive didn’t convey instantaneous transport to a starship. It took time to accelerate to the near-c velocities necessary for the transition to FTL, and even the fastest Alcubierre Drive vessel required three weeks for the run out to Sirius, a distance of over eight light years.
Stargate transits were instantaneous across thousands of light years, but, of course, you could only make the jump between two gates that were precisely tuned to each other. Several thousands of stargates had been discovered scattered across the Galaxy and beyond so far, and each gate had some hundreds of possible connections with other gates, creating a dazzlingly complex web of transit routes from one end of the galactic spiral to the other, and beyond as well. Even so, the Galaxy was an enormous place, four hundred billion stars adrift in a couple of hundred trillion cubic light years; stargates were rarely less than fifty light years from their nearest gate neighbor, and often the next nearest gate was hundreds, even thousands of light years away. So even with FTL drive, it still took time, often many months, sometimes years, to move from one stargate to the next in order to get to where you wanted to be.
The real problem for TF Magellan, though, was the megatransport, the Major Samuel Nicholas. The size of a small asteroid—nanoconstructors had actually devoured, processed and converted a ten-kilometer asteroid to grow her frame and hull into their present form—the Nicholas represented the third mode of faster-than-light transport used by space-faring civilizations across the Galaxy—phase-shifting.
With phase-shifting, you needed an extremely large vessel to house the banks of quantum power taps necessary to open a hole through space/time. With enough energy, you could phase down through multiple spatial dimensions to reach the Dimension0 mathematical construct poetically known as the Quantum Sea, the base-state of reality where matter and energy both had their genesis as standing probability waves. There, virtual particles appeared and vanished in the dance of random energy fluctuations called the zero-point field, gravity itself could be created or banished, and minor distinctions such as distance ceased to have any real-world meaning at all.
Humankind had been working with phase-shift technology for over a thousand years. Late in the Third Millennium, primitive phase-shift vessels had transported fleet elements as large as carriers and battleships across incredibly vast distances, to appear unexpectedly deep within Xul-controlled space. To make the transit, however, the topology of the target region of space, as defined by local gravitational fields and masses, had to be known precisely.
Which was why the Nicholas couldn’t simply rotate out of Solar space and materialize alongside the objective. Instead, she would wait patiently in the darkness at the System’s rim, while her supporting fleet made the long trek, by FTL drive and stargate, to the target region within the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud. There, AI probes would get the precise gravitometric readings that would make a phase-shift rotation into the target area possible.
The earliest phase-shift transports had actually been designed as deep-space bases which used phase-shifting as a means of camouflage rather than for movement, and so they’d possessed only station-keeping thrusters. They’d required tugs to put them into position for a shift. Modern shift-transports were classified as starships and did possess both gravitics for sublight movement, and Alcubierre Drives for FTL travel, but their enormous mass meant that they still crawled compared to more conventional vessels. They were liabilities for squadrons composed of smaller, more maneuverable ships, and modern tactics dictated that they stay safe in a rear-area staging area until the instant that they were needed.
Rame stared at the Nicholas for a few more moments, then shook his head, turning away. The huge vessel represented a colossal military asset, and the idiots were risking her on a minor target for no good reason.
He’d fought the decision in the Military Bureau virtual assembly, fought it as hard as he could, but in the end it had come down to a vote…and the faction led by Valoc and Costa and the other s-Humans had held the majority. The Globe Marines would be deployed to the Magellanics before the Council even considered their use at the Great Annihilator, and there wasn’t a damned thing Rame could do about it.
“Socrates,” he said.
“Yes, my Lord.”
“Are you still in contact with General Garroway?”
There was the slightest of hesitations. “I am not at the moment interfacing with the General,” the AI told him. “However, I can do so easily enough. He is not engaged in any capacity that might require privacy or circumspection.”
“Meaning he’s not in the toilet, or in the middle of having sex with someone.”
“Or asleep, or closeted in a meeting with his command constellation, or discussing strategy with the Military Bureau, or any of several other possibilities,” Socrates agreed.
“Link me to him.”
“One moment, my Lord.”
General Garroway appeared a few meters away, looking mildly surprised. Since the image was being created by his implant, it was essentially an avatar, programmed to display a Marine major general’s blue-gray and black dress uniform, complete with ambient corona. “Lord Rame,” Garroway said. “What are you doing here?”
Rame blinked. He was in his home; where else would he be? Then he realized
that Garroway was seeing him in another setting—presumably wherever he was at the moment. “I’m at home, General,” he said with a grin. “You’re just seeing me wherever you happen to be at the moment.”
Garroway made a sour face and nodded. “Yeah. I realized how stupid that was as soon as I opened my mouth. Back in my day, implant-to-implant communications were usually in virtual spaces, inside your own head. I’m not used to some of the newer wrinkles…like having the image of the person I’m talking to projected into the space in front of me.”
“How are you adapting?”
“Oh, well enough. I just don’t take some of it for granted yet, like you people do. Give me time. I’ll adapt. What can I do for you?”
“Two things, General. I wanted to apologize personally for the change in orders.”
Garroway shrugged. “It was made quite clear to me that you had nothing to do with it,” he said.
“Nevertheless, I feel responsible. It was my idea to bring you guys out of hibernation, to send you in to the suspected Xul nest at the Galactic Core. Using you this way is a criminal waste of assets.”
Garroway smiled. “Why, my Lord? Do you think we’re going to be up against something we can’t handle in the LMC?”
“No. Of course not. But even one Marine casualty would be an obscene waste.”
Garroway didn’t respond to that. Instead, he said, “You said I could do two things. What’s the other?”
“General, I’d like to come along.”
“Come again?”
“I would like to join the mission. I want to go with you…first to the Large Magellanic Cloud, then to the Annihilator.”
“Good God, man, why?”
“Like I said. It’s my responsibility that you’re here, awake, at all. How do you think I would feel staying here while you people are fighting, maybe dying, a couple of hundred thousand light years from where you’re supposed to be?”
“A commendable attitude so far as your public image goes, my Lord,” Garroway said with a wry grin. “But it’s not practical.”
“Why not?”
“My Marines are highly trained, and they use highly specialized equipment. Combat pods aren’t just small, piloted spacecraft. They’re incredibly complex weapons systems requiring precise linkages and command connections with the AI systems running them. Same for Marine Hellsuits. You don’t just put one on and go. It would be tantamount to suicide. And I can’t afford to detail Marines just to baby-sit a newbie.”
“Come on, General. I’m not asking to be in the front lines. I’d like to come along on board the Nicholas. It’s not like there’s not enough room.”
Rame watched Garroway considering this. The Nicholas was more like a small world than a starship. It had plenty of room for twenty thousand Marines and a regular crew of over five thousand. All of its consumables—air, water, food, even clothing and personal effects—were nanufactured along the way from abundantly available elements acquired from ice, dust, and rock picked up in space.
“Well, I certainly have no problem with that,” Garroway said after a moment. “You’ll need to get approval from Admiral Dravid, of course. And from Admiral Ranser.” Dravid was the Nicholas’s commanding officer. Ranser was CO of the naval task force. Both owed their appointments to Rame’s recommendations, so there would be no problem there.
“Of course. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, my Lord. I think you’re nuts, frankly. Going into combat when you could stay nice and safe and warm right where you’re at is not a sane act.”
“As I said, I’m not going to be on the front lines.”
“My Lord, ‘the front’ as a tactical concept has been dead for two thousand years. In space combat there are no rear or front lines. If you stay on board the Nicholas, you’ll simply be remaining on the biggest, fattest target in local battlespace. Are you sure you want to deal with that?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“On your own head be it, then,” Garroway said, shrugging. “Welcome aboard.”
“I’ll be on board within twenty-four hours. Good-bye.”
The general’s image winked out.
And Rame started thinking about what he would tell Brea.
Tranquility Base Monument
Luna, Sol System
2310 hours, GMT
The image of Star Lord Rame winked out, and Garroway was once more alone. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. Until this moment, Rame had seemed to be fairly typical for a politician…a decent enough sort, perhaps, but with little substance or backbone. Garroway had had plenty of experience with the type during his extended career. In a military service answering by law to the civilian government, major generals could spend as much time working with politicians and government appointees as they did with their subordinates in the chain of command.
He leaned forward, placing both hands on the safety railing in front of him. He was on the tourist overlook above Tranquility Base. He’d last been to the monument over nine hundred years ago; the place never failed to move him deeply.
Eight meters below, a portion of the raw, Lunar surface a kilometer across had been left undeveloped, unchanged, beneath a high, broad dome of transparent moonglass jutting out from the northern edge of the much larger Tranquility Promenade. From the overlook, he could see the descent stage of the Lunar Excursion Module, its crinkled foil panels gleaming in the overhead lights, its four splayed and spidery legs still resting on their pads in the ancient regolith. The dark gray soil around the lander was crisscrossed by hundreds of footprints, each perfectly preserved in the dust after over 2,000 years. Here and there were scattered other artifacts—scientific instruments left behind by Armstrong and Aldrin, the first men to walk the Lunar surface in historic times.
Nearby, an odd-looking flag—red and white stripes, a blue field with fifty stars in the corner—hung from a staff planted in the ground, stretched out beneath a supporting wire. Garroway had heard that the flag had actually been knocked down by the exhaust of the LEM’s upper stage when it had rocketed into the black Lunar sky two millennia before, but that it had been restored some seventy-five years later, when an American military expedition had returned to the site. According to the history downloads, Major Catharine Henderson and Lieutenant Peter Flores, both U.S. Marines, had set the flag back in place.
In the distance, low, rolling waves broke silently against the base of the sheltering dome. This portion of the Mare Tranquilitatis would have been under several meters of water had the moonglass dome not been erected over a thousand years earlier.
The patch of Lunar surface known as Tranquility Base was now a shrine, a sacred site, the place where modern men from Earth had first set foot on the soil of another world.
A silver plaque had been set into the safety rail close by the spot where Garroway stood, an exact replica of the original still affixed to the ladder on the Lunar lander’s descent stage below. It showed the two side-by-side hemispheres of the Earth above the inscription, in Old Anglic capitals:
HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969, A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND
Beneath were the signatures of the three men who’d first made the journey, in a line above the signature of the then-President of the United States.
Garroway read the lower line, tracing it with his finger as his implant translated the unfamiliar words in his mind.
“We came in peace for all mankind.”
Not that there’d been peace in the two thousand years since. Those Marines who’d set up the American flag at Tranquility Base had been on the Moon as part of a military expedition. In 2042, the United States had been at the end of a shooting war with a political organization called the United Nations and, in particular, another country called France. At stake had been xenoarcheological remains discovered on Mars and here on the Moon, artifacts opening a new window onto Humankind’s long and tortured past.
> Most of the next thousand years had seen warfare—with the Chinese Hegemony, with the Islamic Theocracy, with the Pan-European Union, with so many others. And as Humankind had stepped out beyond the limits of his own Solar System, he’d found other enemies as well, waiting among the stars—the Ahannu of Ishtar, the N’mah at Sirius Gate…and the Xul.
Always the Xul.
According to the histories he’d reviewed, the following thousand years, the Fourth Millennium, had been calmer, more rational, less war-torn than any previous time in the history of Humankind. Differences between competing human elements in philosophy or religion had become less important, less volatile as each was able to develop worlds of its own. Non-human civilizations, it turned out, rarely were in direct competition with humans over anything, so different, so alien were their psychologies and their worldviews, and most armed conflict between species generally turned out to arise from blatant misunderstanding. The Xul appeared to have been crushed with the destruction of their Dyson-sphere base at the Galactic Core, and their surviving interstellar nodes had been successfully contained, it seemed, by AI incursion modules.
By the closing centuries of the Fourth Millennium, there’d been a genuine hope that warfare might actually be a thing of the past, an artifact of Man’s emotional adolescence.
And so much for that, Garroway thought. They still need us, need the Corps, after all.
Garroway, somewhat to his own surprise, was not as upset by the change in orders as Lord Rame appeared to be. His briefing on the Tavros-Endymion situation had convinced him that something fundamentally was wrong with the Galactic Associative, that the Galaxy-spanning organization was suffering from a kind of disease or psychological breakdown—not a literal disease, perhaps, but a shift in world view that was both serious and accelerating.
The Galaxy, after a thousand shining years of relative peace, was descending into insanity once again.
Did that mean that peace itself was an aberration, that there would always be war, conquest, and violence as an outgrowth of civilization? Or did it mean that someone was interfering with what Humankind and so many other civilizations had created?
