by Ian Douglas
Nal heard the excitement in the junior officer’s mental voice, and couldn’t help smiling. Like most officers of her breed and calling, she tended to be pragmatic, meticulous, and even plodding, and rarely given to bursts of excitement…but he knew she’d been sweating the details of working with modern intelligence systems, and success appeared to have bypassed her normal reserve.
“Simmer down, Mendoza,” Corcoran told her. “What do you have?”
“Sir! Munin has a solid link with the Dahlist network. We can go in whenever you want.”
“Very well. You may initiate THRP transmission.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Nal’s inner grin faded. This part made him uneasy, almost queasy if he thought too hard about it. There was something about the process that just wasn’t right. Not human, somehow.
But, of course, t-humans weren’t quite human to begin with, were they?
Of all the changes and differences between the thirty-second century and the forty-first, the deliberate creation and evolution of Homo telae was, to Nal’s mind, the strangest and the least defensible. Were minds uploaded into a computer network really alive? More to the point, were they the same individuals who’d uploaded themselves in the first place? Or mere copies?
And did that make them real…or electronic fictions?
Millennia ago, a similar debate had existed over cloning, and whether or not clones were legitimate life forms. The question was nonsense, of course; it didn’t matter whether an individual had been generated by the meeting of egg and sperm, or by the biological manipulation of a single cell. The resultant life form was in every way a living creature. Its only difference lay in the fact that it was identical to its parent—and usually considerably younger.
Speaking generally, and from a certain point of view, a human being wasn’t so much blood and bone and tissue as it was patterns of information. Nal knew that his physical self was in a constant state of flux; the oldest cells in his body were living bone tissue, which died and were replaced on the order of every seven years or so. The youngest were his blood cells, which had an expected life span of perhaps three weeks. His body was not the same as it had been even a few years ago; it was constantly tearing itself apart and building itself back, one cell at a time, in a process that extended from conception to death, and there likely wasn’t a single molecule in his body that was the same as those that had made up his physical form the day he’d enlisted in the Corps twenty-three subjective years ago, to pick one example.
And yet he felt like the same individual he’d always been—born and raised on Enduru/Ishtar, living nineteen standard years in the e-duru of Vaj beneath the sullen glow of the Face of God. And twenty-three more waking years in various Marine duty stations or on board ships in the course of his long career, from Marine Recruit to Master Sergeant. All told, Nal could remember over forty years of life, and the Nal il-En Shru-dech of today was the same as the Nal il-En Shru-dech of then, wasn’t he? Older, more experienced, a bit more worn and tired, but the same person, even though every molecule of his body had by now been broken down and rebuilt many times over. It was the pattern of Nal il-En Shru-dech that counted, not the physicality of his component atoms and molecules.
The Homo telae had become what they were by uploading the patterns of their minds onto electronic networks. Though many liked to claim otherwise, the original bodies and minds of those individual human originators of the species had gone on, then, to age normally and eventually to die. It was the copies that lived on in what was supposed to be a blissfully eternal and completely noncorporeal life.
And that was the problem. What Lieutenant Mendoza was doing right now was transmitting several hundred t-humans into the Dahl electronic net as electronic agents, but in electronic terms, what transmission actually meant was copying. The original t-human entities were still here on board the Nicholas. Their exact reproductions would be inside the Dahl network.
Well, almost exact. “THRP” stood for “T-Human Restricted Purpose.” The copies, popularly called “thurps,” were deliberately edited by special AI software so that the new individuals could not think about anything but the mission, were not particularly inclined to preserve their existence, and had no problem with being switched off when their mission was over. Limited Purview suggested a restricted, tightly narrowed and focused consciousness, one that didn’t worry about such niceties as survival or death.
And that, to Nal, seemed nothing less than horrible, a means of turning people into disposable use-once software.
It didn’t really help that he had trouble picturing Homo telae as human in the first place. They thought they were human, and the ones he’d interacted with over the past few weeks seemed to believe they were human, complete with emotions, moods, creativity, and personal motivations.
Nal was the product of a human culture, the dumu-gir, which for something like ten millennia had been a slave culture. Their liberation in the mid-twenty-second century, Old Style had been extremely difficult for them, if only because by that time it was almost impossible for them to think of themselves as free.
Those who’d been able to embrace the concept, however, had taken freedom very seriously indeed, and the idea had grown stronger with each passing generation. The idea of copying yourself, but editing the copy so that everything that made you free was missing, seemed positively blasphemous to the Free Men of Enduru.
Nal and the thousand or so other dumu-gir in the 3MarDiv didn’t like the idea at all, but they were Marines, and they did what they were told. In this case, doing what they were told meant to shut up and follow orders…and don’t worry about the tellies because they’re doing what they want to do, the way they want to do it. When Nal had first complained about the idea weeks ago, Corcoran had told him personally to shut the hell up. “The tallies aren’t like us, Master Sergeant,” Corcoran had said. “They see life—and death, for that matter—completely differently, okay? If the thurps don’t mind this restricted purpose thing, than neither should you.”
“But they can’t mind it,” Nal had said, almost crying with exasperation. “Damn it, sir, they’re designed not to!”
“Exactly. So don’t worry about it. That’s an order, Master Sergeant.”
Reluctantly, very reluctantly, Nal had managed an “Aye, aye, Sir.”
But that hadn’t kept him from thinking about it.
And after a lot of thought, he’d finally decided he knew why he had such a strong gut reaction to t-Human downloads. If they—the unnamed but powerful and all-pervasive they of the high command and the Associative government—could allow the t-Humans to edit copies of themselves, in effect creating slaves designed not to care about their condition, how long would it be before the same thing was happening to normals?
Normals. That was the term, almost contemptuous, applied by many of the new forms of Humankind in this brave new world of the forty-first century, the supies, the tellies, and others. The physical bodies of humans, even of old-fashioned Homo sapiens, the normals, had become nearly infinitely variable over the course of the past two millennia. Gene tailoring was used as a matter of course by normals to select for intelligence, endurance, good looks, and resistance to disease in their children. Nanotechnology could resculpt the body as easily as putting on a new set of clothing or coronae; it was called nanocosmetology. Nanobiology could rewrite an individual’s genome, letting him grow new features or develop gene-controlled traits that his or her parents had overlooked.
And the mind could be edited just as easily. Nano-grown cerebral implants had changed the ways humans thought and reasoned since at least the twenty-second century. What was downloading a new skill set, an alien language, for instance, but a reworking of the mind?
What was to stop them from offering a download to all normals that would make them happier, healthier, and better able to cope with modern life?
A new thought tugged at him unpleasantly. What if they already had done just that? Nal still didn’t
understand how people could accept those Socon Guardian things reading peoples’ minds like that.
Don’t think about it. Just follow your orders and keep your mouth shut.
Some things, though, were just plain wrong, and from Nal’s point of view, this was one of them.
At the moment, he didn’t know what to do about it, however. The tallies seemed as content with the practice as Nal’s distant ancestors had been with the lordship of the Ahannu, the alien gods who’d turned them into willing slaves.
And perhaps the two weren’t that far distant from each other.
Right now, according to the telemetry streaming back from Objective Samar, the thurps were definitely inside the Dahlist works, infiltrating electronic systems, bypassing safeguards, breaching files, downloading data. That data was flooding back to the Nichols now through a high-bandwidth link between the Hugin and Lieutenant Mendoza. The Dahl fortress’ main weapons had just gone off-line, sabotaged by a thurp assault team.
And suddenly the air pressure in the compartment was dropping catastrophically, as smoke, papers, and lightweight debris swirled off the deck and off the computer consoles and funneled in a tight, swirling, horizontal tornado out the open door ahead. For a moment, Nal thought the thurps had opened the main hatches to the outside, but then he noted the real reason for the depressurization.
“Check your fire, Marines!” Nal warned. “We have friendlies inbound!”
He was watching the data feed coming in from the Nicholas, getting the grand-tactical picture. Ten members of the 340th Marine Strike Force had landed on the outer hull of Objective Samar, burned their way through the outer hull, and had just entered the battle station’s interior passageways. They were a hundred meters away and moving in fast, guided by AIs monitoring the entire battle. The Dahlist troopers falling back from the Marine assault were trapped. They didn’t know it yet, but that handful of heavily armored RS/A-91 Starwraiths were slamming up those tangled passageways, taking out everything in their way.
And seconds later, the battle for Objective Samar was over.
Command Deck
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
0607 hours, GMT
General Garroway stood on the command deck, looking up at the dome overhead. It wasn’t a true transparency, of course—the command deck was buried deep within the immense bulk of the transport—but the projection of the view outside was perfect to the smallest detail. The Stargate hung directly overhead, and Associative ships were emerging now, making the hundred-thousand light-year jump in from Way Point Tun Tavern in a steady stream. Beyond, the flattened sphere of the Dahl fortress designated Objective Samar moved slowly in its orbit about the Stargate ring.
The stellar backdrop behind it all was astonishing—sheets and ribbons and outflung tendrils of blue and green, the radiant glory of the Tarantula Nebula.
Someone once had calculated that if the Tarantula Nebula was as far from Earth as the Great Nebula in Orion—some 4,000 light years—it would cover thirty degrees of the night sky, as big across as sixty full moons, and banish the night. The Tarantula stretched a thousand light years from one side to the other, one of the largest star-forming regions known. The Magellanic Clouds were orbiting the Milky Way Galaxy and had closely interacted with it in the past. That interaction had triggered an extended period of star formation, turning the heart of the tiny galaxy into a jewel box of young, hot stars.
One star cluster, R136a, visible as a hard, tight knot of suns against unfurling color, was only two and a half million years old—its stars infants in comparison to others; twelve of those stars were among the most massive known, type O3 supergiants each millions of times more massive than Sol. Fierce stellar winds streaming off those giants were kneading, tearing, and shaping the far vaster extent of the nebula.
Just 150 light years away from R136a lay another cluster, Hodge 301, perhaps twenty million years old, old enough that its more massive, shorter-lived stars were beginning to age and die. A chain of forty supernovae during the past few millions years had torn at the nebula. Together, the energy streaming from those two clusters had shaped and reshaped the tenuous threads and sheets of the nebula itself, creating its sculpted, twisted, spidery appearance.
Well off to one side was a brilliant, hazy patch. Catalogued as SN 1987A, it was a supernova remnant, a young one. Its light had reached Earth only about two thousand years ago. The Stargate itself was located in the heart of yet a third star cluster, this one several billion years old and relatively small, with a dozen or so stars with human-habitable worlds—the Tavros-Endymion Cluster. The radiation wave front from SN 1978A, Garroway thought, must have scoured any of the local worlds bare of life at this range.
He wondered what the Tarantulae were like. Were they alien enough to survive such a radiation storm, or had they moved into the region later, as the supernova was fading?
The light show spread across the overhead dome was so thick and rich with stars and light that the far larger mass of the home Galaxy, 165,000 light years beyond, was lost.
“General Garroway?” Lofty Henderson’s voice said in his mind. “We have located Emelius Dahl. He is asking for surrender terms.”
“I see. Where was he?”
“On board one of the Dahlist warships, the Curtains of Light, heavy battlecruiser, 290,000 tons.”
The main Dahlist battlefleet was still out there—consisting of twelve capital ships identified so far, and a swarm of armed packets, gunboats, and hastily armed and refitted short-range craft. The Associative fleet was far larger, over a hundred ships, and growing with every moment as new vessels continued to arrive through the Stargate. With the gate’s capture, the Dahl Navy had no place else to go, and no access to repair and refit facilities, supplies, or bases.
According to Intelligence, the Dahl Empire, so-called, embraced perhaps twenty star systems, with three worlds enough like Earth not to matter, the recently conquered Tarantulae homeworld, and a couple of dozen other sparsely inhabited planets, from Mars look-alikes to airless rocks and iceballs. They had only the one Stargate, and travel across their Empire was possible only through Alcubierre FTL. Without the Gate, their tiny Navy had no place to go…unless they wanted to seek the help of the Tarantulae, whom until recently they’d been bullying. It sounded as though Dahl had elected to surrender now and get it over with, rather than have his ships chased down and destroyed one by one.
The campaign had been almost as easy as the Star Lords back home had claimed it would be.
Garroway had never trusted easy.
“Have him brought aboard the Nicholas,” Garroway told the AI. “But have them be careful! I want a nano-level scan of this guy before he sets foot on board.” One of the more difficult attacks to defend against was a nanotech weapon. The deadliest of attacks could be brought inside one’s defenses disguised as the normal bacterial flora of a visitor or a prisoner, as dust on the bottom of their shoe, as compactly folded protein molecules hidden in the lining of lungs and throat.
“Agreed, General. And…one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Star Lord Rame requests a moment of your time.”
“Very well. Put him through.”
Rame’s lean frame appeared in Garroway’s mind, his corona bright. “Congratulations, General.”
“Eh? What for?”
Rame spread his hands. “A magnificent victory, of course! Brilliant!”
“Bullshit.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Lord Rame, Objective Samar was a trap.”
“What do you mean?”
Garroway shrugged. “Hell, I was pretty sure it would be going in. We all were. Any defender of the Tarantula Stargate would know that the key to defending the Tavros-Endymion Cluster is to keep enemy warships from transiting out of the Gate, right?”
“I suppose—”
“Objective Samar was perfectly positioned and had the weapons necessary to destr
oy our warships as they emerged from the Gate. That made Samar the one absolutely vital target in this operation. We had to take it to get our fleet in. If we tried to destroy it, we might damage the Gate…and they also made sure we thought their emperor was there. More encouragement for us to capture the place rather than blow it to bits.
“You figured all that out before going in?”
“No, sir, but I had a good idea. And when one of my people spotted the fact that the fortress was close to the Stargate with no grav shielding up, it kind of clicked. They either wanted us to teleport in and take heavy casualties doing so, because the gravitational tides would screw with a solid d-teleport lock, or they wanted us coming through in small numbers, a few at a time. Either way, we face the horrors of interpenetration of partial transmissions…or else we decide not to teleport, and come in through open space, with assault pods. Again, small numbers, and we’d take heavy casualties weaving in through their fusion and plasma beam defense network.”
“So you did both.”
Garroway nodded. “We did both.”
“And the trap failed.”
Inwardly, Garroway scowled, though he couldn’t tell if the Star Lord could see his expression. “Sir, two of my platoons took heavy casualties in that assault. Forty dead, and perhaps half of those are irrecoverable.” He didn’t add that the living had suffered badly as well. The sight of those poor Marines mangled and partially merged with the metal deck and consoles would have given anyone the cold horrors.
“How long will it take to replace them?”
“We can’t replace them. These are Globe Marines.”
“The Anchor Marines performed admirably,” Rame said. “Why can’t you draw replacements from them?”
Garroway wanted to tell the man that it simply wasn’t possible, that Anchor Marines could never be Globe Marines, that the training and quality of personnel that had made the Corps great nine centuries before simply didn’t exist today.
But he didn’t. The fact of the matter was that the Anchor Marines had done well, storming the Dahl bastion and closing the jaws of the Marine assault. If the “dead” among them had awakened an instant later back on board the Nicholas, that hardly counted against them. It took guts to face shock and dismemberment, even if the horror was solely virtual. They’d carried out their mission with élan and with precision.
