by Ian Douglas
Garroway wanted to know. The answer might determine well the future of the Marine Corps, of Humankind itself, and of every other intelligent species in the Galaxy.
He heard a clatter, and a bellowed shout. Turning, he saw a group of people coming up the stairway out of the Tranquility Promenade—six of them, three men, three women. Two were in civilian clothing, the other four nude save for their feet, but there was something about them—age, mannerisms—short-cropped hair—something that suggested that all six were military.
They also appeared to be drunk.
“Yah…right up here,” one of the women said, her voice pitched louder than was necessary or appropriate, especially in this sacred place. “Been here b’fore, long time.”
“Geeze, this is the place, huh?” one of the men said, looking around as he reached the observation deck. He saw Garroway and his eyes widened slightly. “Oh, ’scuze us, sir. We came to see…to see…”
“The first spaceship!” another of the men said loudly. “Very first spaceship!”
“First time humans reached the Moon!” a woman said. She scratched absently under one bare breast. “First time ever!”
“Non…nonsense,” a man replied. “People were on the Moon with the An, right? Slaves from their colony in Meso…Mesopo…from Earth.”
“They were the first humans to reach the Moon in modern times,” Garroway told them, keeping his voice low. “At the very end of the pre-Space Era.”
As he spoke, he was querying the local Net for implant bios. If these yahoos were military, their personnel records ought to be readily available—there!
All six were lieutenants in the Anchor Marines, the Marines anchored behind in the world while the Globe Marines slept through the centuries. The first woman who’d spoken was named Amendes, the other was Palin. The man who’d had trouble with the word “Mesopotamia” was Mortin. Namura and Wahrst hadn’t yet spoken.
The man who’d excused himself when he’d seen Garroway was Marek Garwe.
The similarity in names tugged at Garroway’s curiosity. He’d noticed already that Anglic pronunciation had shifted a bit in the eight hundred fifty years since he’d gone into hibernation, and numerous family names had contracted. He’d been wondering if he had any descendents in this new, distant world. Garwe? Garroway? It was possible.
Garroway was also out of uniform, wearing a one-piece gray jumper from the Nicholas’ ship’s store. He saw Garwe’s eyes widen, however, as the lieutenant did some Net-bio checking of his own.
“Attention on deck!” Garwe shouted, drawing himself up to a ragged approximation of attention.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Namura asked.
“This is Major General Garroway,” Garwe said in a loud and urgent whisper heard by all. “Damn it, straighten up!”
“You people are not in uniform,” Garroway said with mild distaste. “And neither am I. No saluting. And no coming to attention.”
“Yes, sir!”
Mortin looked like he was about to fall over. Palin was clinging to his arm, bracing him upright. “Jesus Mohammed! A fuckin’ general!…”
“You people are also falling-down drunk,” Garroway observed. He was scanning through the bio data. “I see you’re all with the 340th Strike Squadron.”
“Yes, sir!” Garwe snapped. “The fightin’ War Dogs, sir!”
“Thash right!” Namura said. “Fightin’ War Dogs! Never been defeated, sir!
“Well…not until fucking Dac IV,” Palin added. “Sir!”
“Can the kay-det crap,” Garroway said. “You’re too drunk to do it right. If you’re with the 340th, you’re under my command now. I want you back on board the Sam Nicholas. Now.”
“S’okay,” Amendes said. She leaned possessively against Garwe, her elbow on his shoulder. “Got into a fight th’ last place. Kinda busted it up, some. Sir.”
“I think the Shore Patrol’s after us, sir,” Garwe said.
“Shuddup, Gar!” Mortin said, his voice low and intense. “Don’t tell him that!”
Garroway noticed a couple of spy-floaters high up off the deck. The things had probably followed the six here, and were probably bringing the SPs in already.
It was okay. He’d already opened an implant link to the Nicholas’ Security Office. “Send me an escort to get some Marines back to their quarters,” he said in his mind, adding the link to his own coordinates. “Double quick!”
The local Shore Patrol would answer to the Navy Yard Facility up in the Ring, or, possibly, to a naval base here on the surface. Either way, they weren’t part of the Nicholas’ chain of command, and getting these six Marines out of the brig and out of legal trouble would be a problem. If he could get them back to the Nicholas, though, he could have Adri Carter, his Exec, deal with the civil authorities directly, and take care of any damages these idiots had inflicted on the local infrastructure.
He’d briefly, only briefly, considered leaving them to the locals, but dismissed the thought immediately. These six were his. He would take care of them.
And that included disciplining them as well.
“Just how badly did you bust that place up?” he asked. “What was the place, anyway?”
“Th’ Lunatic,” Wahrst said. Her nude body showed an impressive array of skin art, much of it animated. Garroway tried not to stare at the display, which included various extraterrestrial animals, a streaming Associative flag, and several scenes of couples having sex. “Th’ place was called th’ Lunatic. Sir.”
“Bunch of Navy shits in there,” Mortin said. “They started it!”
“Really? And how did they do that?”
“We were quietly discussing the…the relative merits of our respective services, sir!” Garwe said. The kid seemed to be making a real effort to focus his mind.
“Oh? That sounds harmless enough.” He had a feeling, though, that he knew what was coming. The rivalry between the Navy and the Marines went way back, back to pre-spaceflight days.
“Sure!” Wahrst said brightly. “They…they said they had Midway and Sirius Gate, greatest naval victories ever! And, of course, we said, well, we had Iwo Jima an’ Cydonia! Greatest Marine victories ever! An’ they said they had John Paul Jones! An’ we said we were born at Tun Tavern!”
“Thash in Philadelphia,” Namura put in.
“I know.”
“An’ then…an’ then one of these Navy pukes, he said, well, we’re great ’cause we invented sex!”
“Okay…”
“An’ Gar, here, he tells ’em, yeah, but the Marines taught ’em how to have sex with two people, ’stead of just one. After that, things got a little, well, noisy.”
The joke had been old when Garroway had first joined the Marines, over a thousand years ago. It, or its variants, had been around just about forever. He suspected that the actual discussion in that bar had been quite different from Wahrst’s version.
Two men and a woman clattered up the steps to the observation gallery. All three wore black Navy uniforms, with SP holo displays at their chests. “Halt, you people!” one of them called. “Shore Patrol! You’re under arrest!”
“They’re not moving at the moment,” Garroway observed, “so they can’t ‘halt.’ In fact, they’re all with me.”
He waited as the SPs interrogated his bio, and watched as they all straightened a bit, and became more deferential.
“Yes, sir. Sorry sir. But these people caused a lot of damage in town. They’re under arrest. Sir.”
“And just how do you know these are the ones you want?”
“Huh! Socon Guardians tracked ’em through the Promenade, of course! Followed their brain waves and implant patterns.” He pointed to a hovering sphere. “And we have those spy-floaters following them. You wanna see the vid recordings, sir?”
Garroway shook his head. These Marines had really put their collective foot in it. The wonder was that they’d gotten this far before being picked up.
He decided to try a diff
erent tack. He locked gazes with the senior SP. “Chief Hambelen. Do you recognize my authority?”
“Sir! Yes, sir. You’re the commanding officer of the Third Marine Division.”
“I’m their commanding officer. I will take full responsibility for them.”
“Sir, we have our orders. We have to take them with us, sober them up, take them before the local magistrate….”
“Negative,” Garroway snapped. “My personnel. My responsibility.”
“Sir—” the female SP began.
“That’s enough! These people are shipping out in two more days and I will not risk having them so entangled in red tape I have to leave them behind. I order you to stand down!”
The three looked uncertain. One of the men, a young second-class, actually dropped his hand to his holstered weapon. Garroway glared at him. “Don’t!”
“Sir, I—”
“Just…don’t!”
The six Marines had been standing in a semicircle, looking uncertain. As Garroway told the SPs off, they started regaining some of their confidence, some swagger. They began closing in, some looking dark and threatening, others grinning.
The senior SP seemed to realize that he was seriously outnumbered. “Sir,” he said, “I’m going to need to check back with headquarters for orders. Will you be available to make a statement? Sir.”
“You go ahead and check with your CO,” Garroway told him, ignoring the man’s question. “Now stand aside! I’m taking these Marines back to their ship!”
The SPs hesitated, and then Hambelen nodded and the other two stepped back. Garroway led his Marines past them, down the steps, and back into the Promenade.
“Thanksh, General,” Namura said.
“Don’t thank me, Marine,” Garroway replied. “I promise you that you people are going to wish to high holy heaven that those SPs had taken you into custody after I get through with you!”
They met the security force from the Nicholas at the base of the Lunar Ring elevator, and made the trip up to the Nicholas in silence.
On the way, Garroway did some more checking on the possible family connection of Garroway with Garwe.
He was surprised and intrigued by the result.
10
0902.2229
Recon Zephyr
The Great Annihilator
Galactic Core
0540 hours, GMT
The Marine OM-27 Eavesdropper Captain Ana McMillan, code-name Zephyr, forced its way yet closer to the eye of the howling storm. On board were two human Marines, Lieutenant Karr and Captain Valledy, plus Luther, the ship’s AI. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Valledy whispered. “Just look at that thing!”
Karr ignored Valledy’s religion-laden emotional leakage. She was nominally Reformed Wiccan, but had little use for religion personally, or for hyperemotional displays in general. She remained focused on her mental link with Luther, the AI, and listened to the sand-blasting shriek of particles against the little recon pod’s EM shielding. “Five minutes to optimal release point,” she said.
The Marine carrier Cydonia had managed to slip closer to the enigmatic swirl of gas and plasma just ahead than ever before, rail-launching the ugly little Eavesdropper from the electronic cover of a particularly thick mass of infalling dust and star-stuff. They’d abstained from using the gravitics drive entirely, relying on Newtonian physics alone to drop silently through the sleet of high-energy particles and radiation unobserved. The ship was fully powered; it had to be to maintain its shields, but the energy flux outside the little vessel at the moment was so strong that the McMillan’s shields would be all but invisible, a candle’s flame against the output of a sun. Her gravitics, however, actually bent space/time, and that would be detectable.
Four more minutes.
She felt…naked. Vulnerable and exposed. From Karr’s point of view, she was adrift in open space, falling toward an immense pinwheel of radiant light just ahead. The light, emitted by white-hot plasma and superheated gas and dust, shaded toward blue and violet at the middle of the swirl; at the pinwheel’s exact center, at the eye, was a black emptiness, the ergosphere of the Annihilator itself.
Above and below the pinwheel, streaming out at ninety degrees from the pinwheel’s plane, were narrow-beamed searchlights of impossibly brilliant energy. Those beams were blindingly hot with the characteristic 511 keV gamma radiation loosed by the annihilation of positrons, antimatter electrons, as they plowed into the normal matter of dust, gas, and plasma surrounding the black hole.
That object ahead had long been known to Humankind, even before the advent of starships and physical journeys into the Galactic Core. In 1977 of the old calendar, an early satellite named Einstein had first detected X-rays from this source, which had been designated 1E1740.7–2942. For a time, astronomers had assumed that the object was a supermassive singularity, a titanic black hole at the center of the Galaxy, but closer observations by a Russian spacecraft a few years later had proven that it was slightly offset from the Galaxy’s gravitational center by some 340 light years. Studies of the Dopplered radio signals from the object gave clues to the object’s mass—about fifteen times the mass of Earth’s sun.
Those observations had proven that the object was indeed a black hole, but fifteen solar masses was too small by far to be the expected supermassive singularity at the Galactic center. Several more decades had passed before the real central black hole had been identified, strangely and anomalously silent. Not until late in the Third Millennium had that particular mystery been solved; the Xul had constructed a kind of shell around the Core singularity, masking it from view. Close observation of nearby stars orbiting the center had demonstrated that this larger black hole was the equivalent of some two million solar masses, relegating its smaller but much more flamboyant neighbor to simply one of a long list of strange objects within the Core’s galactic neighborhood.
Because of the high levels of gamma radiation streaming from the object, the fingerprint of matter-antimatter annihilation, the object had come to be called the Great Annihilator.
The OM-27 was now a scant few thousand kilometers from the Annihilator’s hungry maw, skimming in just above the radiant fury of the accretion disk. The Eavesdropper’s inbound course had been carefully plotted, not only to avoid being spotted by the Xul, but to miss the hot accretion disk or the far hotter searchlight-beam jets of deadly energy flaring from the Annihilator’s poles.
Of course, the outbound course would be something else. Orbital mechanics demanded that the tiny vessel pass through the black hole’s equatorial plane at some point, and that meant entering the plasma of the accretion disk, a maneuver that would most certainly end a split second later with the ship’s complete destruction.
The black hole lay a few thousand kilometers ahead, just visible at the center of a maelstrom of violet plasma fire. Half of the universe was blotted out by the white-hot glare of the accretion disk circling the black hole, a firestorm of plasma funneling down the singularity’s bottomless drain. The searchlight beams of the jets shrieked on radio wavelengths, and bathed circumambient space in a harsh blast of X-rays and hard gamma radiation.
Beyond and behind the jets and the disk, the sky burned, a background of white fire within which plasma clouds twisted and knotted and turned in the bizarre magnetic flux of the inner Core. The outer hull temperature was currently reading nearly three thousand degrees Kelvin.
It was, Karr thought, like flying through a sun. Soon, though, it would be hotter by far than the mild warmth of a star’s core.
One more minute.
The imagery flooding through her awareness included the entire gamut of electromagnetic frequencies, from radio to gamma radiation. There was an odd effect ahead, engulfing the central speck of the black hole itself, as though radio, microwaves, infrared, and visible light all were being sharply bent. Valledy and Karr had been briefed on the effect before launching from the Cydonia; the mass of the Annihilator was causing a gravitational lensing effect, b
ending and focusing longer-wavelength radiations as space itself was distorted in the immediate vicinity of the singularity’s ergosphere.
She could hear the sing-song chant of the Xul, focused through the gravitational lens. How was it passing up and out of the Annihilator’s gravity well? That wasn’t supposed to be possible.
No sign yet that the OM-27 had been spotted.
But, then, there’d been no warning that Vrellit and Talendiaminh had been spotted, either.
“Are you ready for this, Lieutenant?” Captain Valledy asked.
“What difference does it make?” she asked. “We’re dead, no matter what.”
“The real us will survive.” But he sounded uncertain.
“And that doesn’t help us one bit. As far as I’m concerned, I’m the real me. Thirty seconds.”
An OM-27 was small, far too small to carry a flesh-and-blood crew. Karr and Valledy both were electronic uploads, exact electronic u/l copies of the minds of the corporeal Karr and Valledy, both still safely on board the Cydonia.
Karr knew she was an uploaded copy, but that didn’t help. She still had the memories of the original person, and of her emotional make-up. So far as she could tell, she was Amanda Karr in every detail—a dark-haired girl from Minot, North Dakota, on Earth, in what once had been the United States; raised in Ring Three and, later, on Mars; joining the Corps when she was nineteen standard. It was all there. The sharp disappointment she’d felt upon awakening from the mental patterning and finding out that she was the copy, not the original, had been overwhelming. She’d heard that some patterned minds went mad at the news that they were copies, not originals. Prototype envy, it was called, that aching, heart-sick yearning to somehow reshuffle the fall of the dice and awaken once more, this time as the real mind, not the copy.
Somehow, though, she’d hung on.
There’d been talk about editing the copies’ memories so that the emotional pain wouldn’t be this bad. There’d even been talk about editing the overall mind patterns in order to create an acceptance, even a willingness to die on this mission.
