Semper Human

by Ian Douglas

  He suspected the Xul had had a tentacle in it; there was no other reasonable explanation, though the strange environment of the Quantum Sea could have been a factor. Dreams here, they said, could become real….

  Space seemed to twist and shimmer to his right, and an instant later Blue Twelve, Lieutenant Kadellan Wahrst, was there, firing her particle weapon into the living wall.

  “Where the hell were you, Kaddy?” he yelled.

  “I’m…not sure. Ancient Earth…1918, I think. God…the futility….”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he told her. “We’re here. We’re now. Keep firing!”

  The wall was beginning to dissolve, as thousands of black constructs the size of Garwe’s thumb began dropping gently to the deck. The Xul worldlet’s gravitational field was low—less than a twentieth of a G—and things fell with agonizing slowness.

  The digital spirits animating this chamber appeared to be fleeing.

  Captain Xander flicked into existence. “Jesus!” she said. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Some kind of Xul effect, Captain,” Garwe told her. “I think they’re tapping into our simulation records. Training sims, but…they kind of take over, don’t they?”

  “Yeah. I was at Chapultepec.”

  “What’s that?” Wahrst wanted to know.

  “A fortress outside of Mexico City. First Mexican-American War, 1847. ‘From the Halls of Montezuma,’ remember?”

  Every Marine, Globe and Anchor alike, knew the stanzas of the Marine Corps Hymn. “From the Halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.” The first was a reference to forty U.S. Marines who’d stormed Chapultepec along with over two hundred other hand-picked American soldiers. The second remembered Captain O’Bannon and his seven Marines at Derna.

  “It wasn’t like I thought from the general histories,” Xander added. She sounded shaken. “There were kids there. Some of the enemy soldiers were kids….”

  Garwe picked up some flashing images of the battle over a side comm band from Xander’s implant, along with statistical data as her AI tried to assimilate the data. Chapultepec had been held by a few hundred Mexican soldiers—reports varied from 400 to 832 in all. Once the initial storming party had taken the walls, columns of American infantry, thousands of men, had poured over and down into the fortress, moving through to seize the Belén and St. Cosmé Gates leading into Mexico City itself. Most of the Mexican soldiers had retreated, but six cadets from the Mexican Military Academy on Chapultepec Hill refused the order to retreat and fought to the last man. The last one alive, Juan Escutia, had wrapped himself in a Mexican flag and hurled himself from the castle parapet to keep the flag out of foreign hands. Some of the cadets were as young as thirteen.

  For centuries they were remembered as Los Niños Héroes, the heroic children.

  “We killed them,” Xander said. “We killed them all….”

  “Not all,” Garwe reminded her. “The ones who chose to stay behind and fight. They stood up against overwhelming odds and they died. That’s what war is all about, remember?”

  “I…remember.” Xander joined the others as they continued burning out the nest of Xul machines. But she moved slowly, almost hesitantly, and Garwe wondered if she was all right.

  HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines

  Within Objective Reality

  0857 hours, GMT

  Nal led a platoon-strength formation deeper into the Xul world. Within the weak gravitational field of the tiny planet, terms like down and up were very nearly arbitrary, but there was pull enough to create a sensation of depth, a yawning cavern opening below the Marines as they descended the uneven walls.

  They’d followed a descending passageway for several kilometers, fighting off several successive waves of Xul combat machines. At last, they’d emerged within a vast, open space, a kind of funnel extending far above their heads, and dropping at least five kilometers into the depths.

  Far beneath them, a massive Xul instrumentality was coming together, swiftly growing as billions of insect-sized machines flew in from every direction or oozed straight out of the walls, melding together into a squat, vaguely spherical mass unsuccessfully shrouding a dazzling inner light.

  Nal didn’t know what the thing was, but at a kilometer across, as big as many Xul warships, it spelled trouble.

  “Are you getting this, sir?” he called. “Sir! Captain Corcoran!”

  There was no reply, and his tacsit readout showed no sign of the company commander.

  “Lieutenant Haskins!” Again, no response. Damn it, where were they?

  He still couldn’t quite credit the idea that when individual Marines began engaging in those training sims, they actually vanished. That seemed to violate all the laws of physics—the rational and intuitive ones, anyway.

  But there was no denying that Marines were popping in and out of existence like virtual particles in the Quantum Sea. Master Sergeant Nal il-En Shru-dech was, at least for the moment, in command of the company.

  “Nicholas!” he called. “This is Company H of the 2/9! We have a target for you!”

  Marine Ops Center

  Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas

  0858 hours, GMT

  “We have a class-1 priority QCC message coming through, General,” Major Tomas Allendes reported. “A master sergeant on command of a company. Requesting a spacial delivery….”

  Companies normally were commanded by captains, sometimes by first lieutenants, but in combat the unexpected, the disastrous, and the confusion were the rule. Senior enlisted personnel did the real work of running small units in any case, and any officer worth his insignia listened to his NCOs and trusted their judgment.

  “Spacial delivery” was the outrageous pun some joker in the ops planning constellation had invented as the designation for d-teleported nuclear and antimatter weapons. When the Nicholas was inside Quantum Space and within 100,000 kilometers or so of the Xul world, she could use dimensional teleportation to toss high-yield weapons through to key target areas inside the objective.

  The technique had been practiced in sim, but had never been attempted in the real world. To make it work, a spotter team had to be inside the target taking precise measurements of position and local gravitational metrics so that the teleport crews on the Nicholas could lock in on the target zone.

  It should work in theory, if Nicholas could get in close enough, and if the spotter team could come up with accurate positional numbers. The tricky part was getting the spotters out before the warhead blew…and being careful that proximity to other Marine elements within the objective didn’t become friendly fire statistics.

  “Patch him through.”

  “Aye, aye, General.”

  A moment later, Garroway saw a grainy image filtering up through his implant. It was tough to decide exactly what it was he was looking at. The image appeared to be originating from a helmet camera on a Marine clinging to the side of a black, metallic cliff. Other Marines in Hellfire armor were nearby, some coming down the walls, some crouched on a narrow ledge.

  “Nicholas!” a voice called. “We need a fire mission! Priority triple-zero!”

  “This is General Garroway.” He glanced at the transmission ID. Master Sergeant Nal il-En Shru-dech, HQ element, H Company, 2/9. The man had a good record. A good Marine. “What’s the target?”

  The voice hesitated, surprised, perhaps, at a connection with the senior-ranking Marine in the operation.

  “Uh…yessir! I don’t know exactly what the damned thing is, but it’s big! And I think it’s important!”

  “Show us.”

  The helmet-cam view wavered and swung as the Marine let go of the wall and slowly drifted down to the ledge. “I think…I think I can give you a view, here…”

  It looked, Garroway thought, like a black sun.

  No…more like an ordinary, luminous sun, but one shrouded inside of black armor, with openings here and there that let the radiance shine through.

  �
�We’ve got remotes going down, General,” Nal’s voice said. “Should have a better view in a minute. But I’m reading that thing at a kilometer-plus across, and scans show power readings off the scale. I think it may be their power core, sir! A quantum power tap!”

  Garroway considered this. The Xul possessed QPT technology, of course. In fact, Humankind had developed its own QPT technologies by studying captured Xul ships like the Europan Singer. A power tap pulled energy from the Quantum Sea by using a small, artificially generated black hole; what was unusual about this set-up was having the black hole technically inside another black hole—the Great Annihilator. Simply having the tap physically located inside the Quantum Sea instead of safely within the normal realm of four-D spacetime was enough to give a physicist nightmares.

  But he remembered learning how humans had used a quantum converter to turn a 150-kilometer moon of Eris into a microstar bright enough to heat a world from near zero-absolute to warm enough for liquid oceans. This technology might be similar, a source of staggering power.

  That black shell surrounding the central furnace, he thought, was a lot like the Dyson shell the Xul had built around the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center in order to control it and generate power, though on a far smaller scale.

  Yeah, it made sense. Nal’s unit might have stumbled upon the Xul power generator, or one of them. Take it out and the Associative strike force would do a lot of damage to the enemy.

  “Okay, Master Sergeant,” he said. “You’ve convinced me. Do you have the targeting data?”

  “Yes, sir. It should be coming through now!”

  “Then get your ass out of there, Master Sergeant. Unless you want to see Hell up close and personal!”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Garroway looked at the circle of men and women with him in the Ops Center. The harsh blue glow of the Great Annihilator shone down from the overhead dome, illuminating them in cold, electric light.

  “You all get that transmission?”

  “Yes, General,” Ranser said. “I’ve relayed the request through to Nicholas’ weapons center.”

  “There may be a problem here, sir,” Captain Kyrsti Xin said. She was Admiral Ranser’s senior tech specialist.

  “What is it?”

  “What, exactly, is going to happen if we blow that construct up?”

  “We’ll cripple the Xul base,” Allendes told her.

  “Maybe. But what if the detonation runs out of control?”

  “You mean like the Galactic Core Detonation?” Garroway asked.

  “Something like that. The blast could engulf the entire world, maybe take on an extra kick if there are other power centers down there. But the real question is…if it explodes, what happens to Reality?”

  “I don’t think we quite follow, Captain,” Rame said.

  “Look, the whole Quantum Sea is the base state for what we think of as Reality, right?” Xin told them. “Atoms, electrons, photons, the fundamental building blocks for all matter and energy are essentially standing waves within the flux of virtual particles within the Quantum Sea. What happens when we trigger something that might easily be as big as a supernova down there? Will it wipe out all of those waves? Or a significant number of them? Damn it, we could wipe out our whole Galaxy—stars, planets, civilizations, us—in an instant!

  “How long will it take you to set up a sim to estimate our chances?” Garroway asked.

  “I’m not sure. Thirty minutes to an hour, maybe….”

  “Jordan?” Garroway caught the eye of his constellation’s computer expert. “Link with her and help.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “General,” Rame said, “if there is even a tiny chance that this action would erase the Reality of a significant portion of the Galaxy, perhaps we—”

  “I know,” Garroway said, cutting the Conclave delegate off. “And I don’t like it either. But we don’t have much of a choice, do we?”

  “There’s always a choice,” Rame told him.

  “I’m not sure there is this time. What if what the Xul are trying to do down there in the first place is create some kind of doomsday device?”

  “Interesting thought,” Ranser said.

  Rame looked puzzled. “You mean they could use it as a kind of super-bomb, to wipe out Reality?”

  “Exactly. We know that the flux of virtual particles within the reality base-state represents a staggering amount of energetic potential. Enough potential energy within a volume a few centimeters across, the physicists say, to destroy a galaxy. Our Galaxy.”

  “And that Dyson object they’re building down there could be the trigger,” Ranser said. “My God.”

  “If we don’t find a way to disarm or safely detonate that device, the Xul may do it themselves. Deliberately.”

  “‘To save the village we had to destroy it,’” Ranser said, quoting an ancient military adage. “Shit. I don’t think I want to write up the after-action report on this one.”

  Blue Seven

  Objective Reality

  0903 hours, GMT

  The wall collapsed, the individual machine-elements dissolving as they came apart in the intense heat. Garwe rose from cover and moved forward. “Let’s go, Marines!”

  Captain Xander, Lieutenant Wahrst, and several others followed across the broken, metallic floor of the cavern.

  And then Garwe was someplace else.

  No, not Garwe. Garroway. He was Major Mark Allan Garroway, and he was on Mars, back in the Solar System. Red-ocher desert, broken rock and sand dunes, stretched off to every horizon beneath a pale, pink-tinted sky that darkened to deepest ultramarine at the zenith.

  Crouching in a gulley behind the sheltering crest of a sand dune with a number of other Marines, Garroway held his M-29 ATAR assault rifle above his head, using the weapon’s optics to transmit a camera image to his helmet’s HUD without exposing his head. The next dune in line was 185.4 meters distant, according to the weapon’s range finder. He could make out black spots along the crest of the dune opposite that might be the helmeted heads of the enemy. Beyond them were the microwave tower, several habs, the grounded shuttle Ramblin’ Wreck, and the pale blue of the UN flag hanging listless in the near-vacuum that was the Martian atmosphere.

  High-velocity rounds slashed silently into the sand, throwing up gouts of dust.

  The year was 2040, during the UN War, and Garroway was in charge of the small Martian Marine Expeditionary Force, the MMEF. The enemy troops over there, crouched in a trench just behind the top of the dune, were UN troops—French, most of them—and they’d captured the American base at Cydonia.

  “They’re dug in and they’re waiting for us,” Garroway said. He pulled his assault rifle back down. “We can’t take them frontally.”

  “Hey, you think the beer-bombing idea’s gonna work, Major, sir?” Corporal Slidell was lying on his stomach, just beyond Lieutenant King.

  “It damned well better, Slider,” Garroway said. “If it doesn’t, we’re in a hell of a fix…and we’ll have thrown away the only beer within a hundred million miles.”

  “You can say that again,” Slider replied. “Sir.” His tone stopped just short of insolence. The beer Garroway was referring to had been smuggled up from Earth by Slider Slidell, and Garroway had taken charge of the contraband at Slidell’s disciplinary hearing.

  Now the beer was being put to a use somewhat different from that which its brewers had intended.

  Lieutenant King raised his rifle for a look. “Hey, Major!” he called. “Have a peek!”

  Garroway lifted his rifle once more, careful not to expose too much of his arms to French fire. The Martian environment was a deadly arena for combat. One nick from a bullet anywhere on your pressure suit meant rapid and explosive decompression.

  There it was, silhouetted against the sky just beyond the enemy lines—a spindly-legged craft balanced atop pale plasma flame, one of the point-to-point Martian suborbital shuttle craft affectionately known as lo
bbers. As he watched, a black speck fell from the open cargo hatch, tumbling as it slowly fell, spilling dozens of smaller objects in a broad footprint across the surface below.

  The reaction was immediate and animated. Men in combat armor with blue-painted helmets were leaping from their trench behind the far dune, some slapping at themselves, some shooting their rifles at the lobber overhead, most running as fast as their cumbersome suits would allow, scattering across the desert.

  “You know,” King said, “I think we’ve just added a new secret weapon to the Corps’ inventory. Beer bombs!”

  “Yeah,” Slidell said. “My beer!…”

  “Sacrificed in a good cause, Slider,” Garroway told him. “We were not issued ordnance sufficient to the needs of this mission. We therefore improvise, adapt, and overcome!”

  “Yeah, I guess. Look at them blue-tops run!”

  Silent gunfire volleyed from the Marine line, targeting the French troops who were shooting at the lobber. Several toppled over, falling back into their trench. More of them dropped their rifles and began running.

  “Let’s go, Marines!” Garroway called, struggling to rise in the yielding sand. A bullet struck his combat armor with a sharp spang audible within the suit. He turned, targeted the French soldier who’d fired, and took him down with a short burst.

  French soldiers still in their trenches opened up on the charging Marines. Marchewka was hit and flung back down the back slope of the ridge. Then Hayes took a round through his visor, his helmet exploding in a burst of pink and white vapor.

  But another case of contraband beer came spilling across the French trench line, and the remaining UN troops suddenly broke and fled.

  Marines were known for their use of close-air support in combat, but this was the first time that the weapon had been aluminum cans filled with beer. The thin containers were under considerable pressure in the almost nonexistent Martian atmosphere, and punctured very easily. When they ruptured, the beer exploded in a sticky, golden cloud that covered everything it landed on, freezing almost instantaneously.