by Ian Douglas
French soldiers stood in the open, desperately trying to clean visors suddenly iced over and opaque. Everywhere the stuff landed and froze, it steamed, the ice sublimating into near-vacuum. The UN troops had no idea what was hitting them, and could only imagine that it was some sort of chemical attack, an acid, perhaps, eating away at their combat armor.
By the time they figured out what was really happening, the U.S. Marines were there, disarming them and herding them into small groups of POWs. The base fell swiftly to the Marine assault.
Nearby, at the base, several Marines knocked down the mast bearing the blue UN flag, and raised an American flag attached to a five-meter length of pipe.
As Garroway stood to attention and saluted the flag, Garwe’s personality began reasserting itself. The suddenness and the clarity of the sim had caught him completely by surprise.
That had been Mark Garroway? His Marine ancestor two thousand years back in the past?
“Sands of Mars Garroway,” they’d called him, and he’d passed into Corps legend with Samuel Nicholas and Dan Daly and Smedley Butler and Lewis “Chesty” Puller and so many others. And he’d been there, been him. It didn’t seem possible.
He felt, too, a strong and negative emotional load linked somehow with the simulation imagery. The fighting on Mars had been to secure certain artifact fields and archeological digs on the planet—the very beginning of xenoarcheology. Shortly after the first manned landings on the Red Planet, the first Builder artifacts had been discovered, evidence that extraterrestrials had colonized Mars and performed their equivalent of terraforming, transforming Mars, briefly, into a warm, wet world half a million years ago.
The xenoarcheologists had also discovered the mummified remains of beings from Earth—not modern humans, but members of the species now known as Homo erectus, still wearing uniforms of some sort. Evidently, they’d been trained by the aliens, and some had been transported to Mars as a labor force.
Later, scientists had proven that the aliens had tampered with the Homo erectus genome, creating the species later called Homo sapiens.
Modern man. Human roots extended farther back in time, and farther out into the universe, than had been imagined.
Humans had been created as a slave species. Not long after, the Xul had destroyed the Builders, and wiped out the tiny and fragile terraform colony on Mars. A small colony of Homo sapiens still on Earth, though, had been overlooked.
And their distant, distant descendents had eventually returned to the frozen desert that was Mars and found those remains. The Americans had tried to grab the fragments of advanced technology still hidden beneath the sand…and the attempt had triggered the UN War.
Children, squabbling over advanced technology they couldn’t possibly understand, determined only to keep any possible benefits away from anyone else….
“That’s not the way it happened!” Garwe shouted, staring up at the cavern’s ceiling high above his head. “They were trying to take it away from us! We shared, with the whole planet, later! What happened on Mars made us what we are today!”
“Gar?” Xander said. “Are you okay?”
“Uh, yeah. Sorry, sir. Was I out long?”
“A few seconds.”
“Was that all? It felt like half an hour!”
“Downloads register as memories,” Warhst reminded him. “You know, a typical dream you have at night only lasts a few seconds, but it seems much longer. I think this is like that.”
“There’s also the fact that time is running slower in here than…outside,” Xander said. “You could slip out for a quick drink, spend half an hour chatting, and be back a few seconds after you’d left. Where were you, anyway?”
“Mars,” he said. “Cydonia. Get this. I was Sands of Mars Garroway!”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
Garwe looked around. They were not under fire at the moment, and seemed to have a long stretch of cavern to themselves. Ahead, the tunnel seemed to open up into a pit leading down. His tac display showed other Marines ahead and below them…members of the 2/9.
“We’re going to join up with them,” Xander said. “They’re pulling up out of that pit, and we’re going to help.”
The ragged column of Marine Starwraith strikepods—nine of them left, now—drifted across the black surface toward the pit.
22
1902.2229
HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines
Within Objective Reality
0904 hours, GMT
“You want us to what?” Nal was thunderstruck. The bastards couldn’t mean it!
“We want you to cut your implant feeds, take your implants off-line,” the voice of Colonel Jordan said with a maddening calm that could not possibly be real. “It’s imperative that you do so.”
“By the Ahannu of my fathers, are you trying to fucking kill us?”
It wasn’t the way to talk to a colonel—especially a colonel in the division’s command constellation. The old man himself was probably listening in.
“Master Sergeant, the Xul are using a psychological weapon against us. They’re feeding our own training sims back at us, but with emotional baggage attached that may be designed to impair the division’s combat efficiency. The only way to prevent that is to disconnect from the Net. And that means unplugging your implants. Now.”
“How are we going to coordinate the special delivery with you? QCC requires a Net link to operate.”
“By radio.”
“This deep underground? It won’t penetrate.”
“Then get your ass and your Marines up to the surface, Master Sergeant!”
“With respect, sir. We won’t be able to navigate. Sir!”
“We’re tracking another group of Marines to the top of that tunnel you’re in. They have a navigational lock on the way they came in. You’ll hook up with them and follow them out.”
“Sir, this won’t—”
“Do not argue with me, Master Sergeant! Get the hell out of there any damned way you can! The quicker the better! But kill those implants! Ops Center out!”
Nal was stunned. He remembered going without an implant for several weeks during boot camp, about 875 or so years ago. And, of course, on Ishtar, he’d not even had an implant until he was nearly seventeen standard. Enduri kids didn’t. But he’d come to rely on the thing in the twenty-three waking years he’d experienced since boot camp, and he didn’t like the idea of going without again. It had been bad enough when he’d woken up from cybe-hibe on that station orbiting Eris, and found his regulation implant gone. Those hours before the new one had grown into place had been damned miserable.
And that had been in the security of an Associative orbital, not in the middle of a Xul world twelve hundred kilometers across and packed with Xul hardware and weapons. This was not going to be pretty.
“Okay, Marines,” he said. The order had gone out over the Net to every Marine in the division. “You heard the man! Disable the implants.”
“Fuck no, Master Sergeant!” Garcia said.
“That’s suicide, man!” Corporal Donovan said. “Suicide is against regulations!”
“How can we trust them?” Sergeant Cori Ryack put in.
“Don’t give me any of your lip, people!” Nal was furiously angry. He didn’t want to take it out on the Marines in his command, but the anger had a way of spilling over from the original cause to anyone and anything who happened to be in the way. “We have our orders! Disengage your implants!”
“Shit,” Cori said. But he saw her link icon in his in-head display wink out.
One by one, grumbling, most of them, the other Marines thought-clicked the codes necessary to disable their implants, and, one by one, their icons went dark. Nal waited until all thirty-four of the Marines with him were disconnected, monitoring them through his own link, before he thought-clicked his own implant and killed it.
It was like throwing a switch and plunging the room into darkness. There was no data feed, no QC
C link, no targeting locks for his weapons, no sensor information, no AI guidance, no drone intel, no time indicator, no navigational pointers or battlespace monitors, nothing.
“H Company, radio check!” he rasped. His throat was suddenly dry.
“I hear you, Master Sergeant,” Cori said out of the darkness. Then, realizing her ID tag no longer showed on Nal’s in-head display, she added, “Sergeant Ryack, present.”
“Corporal Donovan, present.”
“Gunnery Sergeant Boyd, I’m here.”
“Lance Corporal Zollinger, yo.”
The names continued as, one after another, the men and women of the ad hoc platoon, cobbled together from H Company’s HQ element and all three platoons, sounded off.
Nal felt a little better, knowing all of them were there with him in the dark.
Blue Seven
Objective Reality
0904 hours, GMT
Garwe was outraged. “What is this, some old-Marine rite of passage? It’s sick!”
“Just do it, Marines,” Colonel Jordan’s voice said, implacable. “That’s an order.”
“Do what the man says,” Xander told them. “We can manage outside the pods.”
“Those HQ REMFs…” Bollan began.
“If you ask me,” Maria Amendes said, “they’re the ones who are being infiltrated!”
“Yeah, we can’t trust them!” Palin said.
“Shut up!” Xander bellowed. “Kill the fucking implants and get out of those pods now!”
Starwraith strikepods were completely dependent upon the electronic link between computer and organic brain, moderated through the human implants. With the implants off-line, the strikepods would be so much inert plastic, metal, and nanoceramics.
Garwe shared the suspicions of the others. Colonel Jordan was one of the old-time Globe Marines, asleep in cybe-hibe for the past 850 years. It was okay for them to talk about turning off their implants. They’d done that sort of thing in training, according to their stories, and they’d awakened without them at the end of their suspension.
The Anchor Marines had never had to play those sorts of games.
With that thought came another. We’re just as good as they are.
Which, he realized, might or might not be true. There was only one way to find out.
Angrily, Garwe thought-clicked the code that shut down his implant. Instantly, he was plunged into pitch blackness…and nearly overcome by a stiflingly close, claustrophobic sensation. Working his hand up across the front of his body, he found the manual release plate and pressed it.
With a sharp hiss of escaping air, dwindling almost immediately into vacuum-wrapped silence, the Starwraith’s two-meter-high body split open lengthwise, and Garwe clumsily rose from the narrow, sponge-lined space within, a space just barely large enough to accept a seated human.
The pod was lying on its side on black, metallic rock that glittered like crystal. Garwe was wearing a pressure suit, of course, with bubble helmet and a small emergency EVA pack holding a rebreather element good enough to keep him alive for several hours. The strikepod, of course, had much better life support, enough to keep him alive almost indefinitely if it found enough organic material for its nanufactories to convert into air, food, and water. In this skinsuit, he would survive for perhaps two to three hours…and much less if the radiation flux in the area became dangerous.
His helmet light cast a weirdly shifting pattern of illumination and shadow as he moved. Close by, other patches of moving light marked Xander, Kaddy, and the rest. Which way was the pit? That way, he thought. But it was impossible to be sure. He touched a sequence of pressure points on the inside of the open pod, and a meter-long section of the outer hull cracked open, unfolding to reveal a PK-3096 pulse carbine and power pack. Slinging the pack over one shoulder, he checked to be sure the carbine was operational, then set off across the crystalline ground toward the other Marines.
This, he decided, was a fantastic way to get himself killed.
Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
0932 hours, GMT
“We have a better idea of what’s going on, now,” Garroway told the others. “Socrates? Maybe you should present the technical stuff.”
“Full technical specifications are unnecessary and would confuse the issue,” the AI said. “But we now know why Marines have been shifting in and out of the Quantum Sea…and possibly where they’ve been going. And when.”
The basic principles of quantum physics had been laid down two thousand years earlier. Among the stranger implications of the field was the idea that reality itself was somehow created by the observer, an implication proven time after time in laboratory experiments, and which eventually became the bedrock of human understanding of the universe.
Within the normal reaches of four-dimensional spacetime, probability curves represented human perceptions of reality, bound energy and matter to the moving present, and created the experience of time itself. Beneath this perceived reality, however, was the murky realm of the Quantum Sea, a vast matrix of interconnected possibility waves generated within the dance of appearing and vanishing virtual particles. Where possibility waves intersected, they reinforced or canceled one another; where they were reinforced, a probability curve within normal space was the result.
The mind affected these possibility waves, a fact demonstrated repeatedly in quantum physical experiments and within such art forms as yoga and weiji-do.
In short, reality could be explained as a matrix of possibility waves affected by consciousness; where Mind interacted with wave forms, the waves collapsed and manifested reality—matter, energy, stars, the entire realm of spacetime experience.
Mind, in other words, creates Reality.
The Mind, too, was now understood as a kind of time machine, with the ability to slow or speed the perceived passage of time…and where the perception was changed, the reality changed as well.
Freeing the mind from the body, again through the practice of yoga or certain martial arts, or simply through the intense and overwhelmingly vivid data feeds of a virtual simulation allowed a person’s concept of self, his ego, to dissolve. And when the ego-self dissolved, its effect on Reality changed, introducing new probabilities within the objective universe. The enlightenment described by countless religions and spiritual masters through the ages appeared to be what happened when ego dissolved completely, if temporarily, and Mind and Cosmos became One.
Buddhism had been saying that for forty-five hundred years. Wiccans and the practitioners of various magical traditions claimed to change Reality by force of Mind, claimed that this was what magic truly was…and according to Quantum Physics it was possible that they did, at least on a small scale. If the scale of magical manifestation was small, perhaps it was kept that way by the limits they themselves placed on their minds through habit, doubt, and fear.
And Marines changed Reality as well, shaped it with their dedication to duty, to honor, to their love of the Corps and Corps history.
“We believe,” Socrates told them, “that the Xul have been attempting to affect reality at two levels. First, and perhaps most obviously, they were using our own historical training simulations as a means of introducing emotionally conflicting data, hoping, perhaps, to affect the performance of our Marines in the field.”
“Won’t work,” Garroway said.
“Why not?” Rame asked.
“I experienced two simulations…the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and the Battle of Iwo Jima forty-five years later. In both cases there were emotional overtones. The Boxer Rebellion involved Western military forces coming in and overpowering a rather backward and technologically primitive people. It was rifles against spears, swords, and a few obsolete muskets. At Iwo, they were trying to convince me that the flag-raising was a political sham, that the invasion of the island itself wasn’t necessary.
“But whatever the facts of historical reality, the Marine Corps has its own reality.�
�
“You mean you people made it all up?” Ranser asked, and several of the members of his staff chuckled. Garroway’s constellation remained dead-silent.
“No, Admiral. It’s a matter of slant, of where the attention is focused. Of what truly matters. The reality of the Marine Corps is one created through twenty-two hundred years of service, with old-fashioned ideals such as honor, courage, brotherhood, duty. What we believe, what we know to be true is what creates the reality of the Marine Corps through all its succeeding generations. The Xul might try to shade things one way or another—I don’t think they can use the sims to lie, exactly, but they can attach different shades of meaning that affect how we feel. What they don’t seem to be picking up on is that our will, our integrity, our belief in ourselves as Marines, are stronger. We experience the alien emotions and shake them off, because we know the real story.”
“Socrates?” Rame said. “You said there were two ways they were affecting reality.”
“The second means is more subtle, and rooted in our understanding of Quantum Physics. We believe that they were…measuring, tasting the human mind, and its potential effect on meta-reality. Down within the substrate of the Quantum Sea, they could use simulations lifted from our own data banks in order to temporarily suppress the egos of some Marines by overwhelming them with image and sensation. Suppress the ego-self, and the mind is temporarily freed from the body…and from what we perceive as time. In doing so, they hoped to rewrite the meta-reality into something different, something of their choosing.”
“Our people were being shifted back in time?” Ranser asked.
“Evidence suggests that the effect pinched off micro-universes within which their separate experiences were manifested,” Socrates told him. “They weren’t literally back in history. But they were no longer present within the Quantum Sea, either. They were…elsewhere. But as they experience that elsewhere, it becomes stronger, more real. They might remain there, if the simulation of reality is strong enough to overcome their ego-selves.”
