by Ian Douglas
“What options?”
“Come with me.”
The landscape of ancient Mars vanished. In its place hung the hurricane vortex of a giant black hole.
The sky in every direction was an opalescent smear of radiance. At first, Garroway thought he was looking at the Great Annihilator…but then his sense of scale shifted. What he was looking at was far, far larger…the supermassive black hole at the Galaxy’s center, cleansed of the Xul Dyson cloud that had surrounded it.
Garroway and the Tarantulae were disembodied viewpoints, dropping toward the titanic singularity’s event horizon.
“Do you feel it?” his guide asked. “A kind of thrumming, a vibration?”
“Yes.” It was as though the fabric of spacetime itself was trembling with precisely timed pulses or ripples, spreading out in concentric shells from the Core singularity.
“Merge with it.”
Garroway wasn’t quite certain what his guide meant, but as he focused his awareness on the vibrations, he became aware of…images. Sensations. Memories.
And he remembered….
He remembered things he’d never experienced, never even guessed at. He remembered an Intelligence that thought of itself as the One Mind. It had arisen out of myriad lesser intelligent species long ago. How long? Thirty million years? Fifty? He didn’t yet have the frame of reference to translate what he was experiencing. But a long time.
The One Mind had tamed the Galaxy. After eons of struggle among its component species, it had united as an amalgam of intelligent organic superconductors existing as a hive mentality. The One Mind, Garroway now remembered, had created the network of star gates across the Galaxy and beyond. And it had built…something else. Something within the depths of the Quantum Sea, but interacting with four-D spacetime through the instrumentality of the black holes and star gates.
“The Encyclopedia Galactica,” Garroway said, awed. Then, wondering if the words had made sense to the Tarantulae at his side, he added, “We always wondered if a sufficiently advanced species might find a way of recording galactic knowledge—the science, the technology, the history, the culture of an entire galaxy—so that others could tap into it and learn from it.”
“So newcomers wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the older species,” the being said.
“Yes.”
“The One Mind did that. Unfortunately…”
More memories arose in Garroway’s mind. It was a little like the simulations of the Boxer Rebellion and Iwo Jima, this effortless emergence of memories he’d never known before. The difference was that he was still Trevor Garroway. Still human, despite the strange and alien history he was encountering.
He remembered the Psychovores, malevolent, photophobic entities called the Children of the Night that somehow fed on the minds, the psychic energies, of others, beings that organized whole worlds of less advanced sapient life forms as farms for the breeding and harvesting of their property. How long ago? They’d replaced the One Mind perhaps thirty million years ago, possibly when the One Mind transcended all material instrumentality.
And ten million years ago the Children of the Night had been supplanted by the Hunters of the Dawn—polyspecific pantovores driven by an intense xenophobia, a fear of others quite possibly planted by their nocturnal predecessors. Eventually, the Sumerians of Earth would call them “demons.” Xul.
In time, the Builders had created their empire, struggled with the Xul, and failed. Or had it been a failure? Garroway watched, in his memories, the Builders’ exodus beyond the spiral arms of the Galaxy. And behind them they left their legacy—the uploaded minds of some of their own within artificially engineered bipedal beings on the world that one day would be called Earth.
Garroway felt…small. He wondered if Humankind itself wasn’t simply another tool, a weapon in the hands of the ancient Builders against their enemies.
“Not deliberately so, no,” the being next to him told him. “But we are pleased that things worked out as they did. Your intervention here at the Galactic Core freed the instrumentality—what you call the ‘Encyclopedia Galactica’—for use once more.”
Garroway understood. The Encyclopedia existed, if it could be said to have a material existence, as probability waves nested within the vaster, deeper pulse of gravity waves emerging from the supermassive black hole at the Galaxy’s center. The Xul had taken over the Core black hole for their own purposes, and in so doing had shut down the Encyclopedia.
With the Xul threat eliminated, the Encyclopedia Galactica was broadcasting once again. Garroway was immersed in it, sensing the pulse, the tides of data stored for tens of millions of years.
“The Encyclopedia’s records only go back as far as the One Mind,” his guide explained. “But the pattern recorded here is the same as it has been across the eons. We believe the first intelligent species achieved interstellar travel within this galaxy well over four billion years before your Sun came into existence, a mere two billion years after the formation of the Galactic disk…though it’s possible older species still inhabited some of the oldest star clusters, in a distant epoch when the supernova seeding of heavy metals through the interstellar medium was still new. They spread through the Galaxy’s worlds, meeting others, merging, warring, conquering, destroying. Occasionally something like your Conclave would come into existence, a cooperative of mutually alien species united for their common protection and technological and cultural advancement.
“Then, inevitably, one species would arise with the simple Darwinian imperative: survival requires the elimination of all competitors.”
“We used to call it ‘the empty sky.’ The Galaxy should have been buzzing with advanced civilizations. It wasn’t.”
“The Xul are only the last of a long, long list of sophont species who attempted to maintain their existence by exterminating any and all who might one day challenge them. It’s easier to do that when the target species is still young and planet-bound, of course. But the galaxy is a big place, and there are always a few who are overlooked. Fortunately.”
“I take it you—your species, I mean—are wondering if Humankind is going to do the same. If we’ll try to survive by crushing all opposition.”
“The Galaxy has been locked in a bloody and self-destructive cycle of violence for some eight billion years, twice the span of your Earth. Each cycle of violence begets the next cycle of violence. Can you humans break the cycle, here and now?”
“I…don’t know.” He wondered. He thought of the Associative bringing the errant Dahlists into line, all the way out in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
He remembered the Legation force bringing the Chinese dissidents to heel.
He remembered crushing the Japanese Empire—Humankind’s first use of nuclear weapons, at least in modern Earth history. There were hints that nukes had been used before, in the dim, remote past.
He remembered the fall of the Soviets, the destruction of the Muslim extremists, the crushing of the Hegemony…and so many, many more.
“You’re asking me if Humankind can survive without becoming as bad as the Xul. I can’t answer that. But I do know that the desire is there. The Xul were driven by a kind of hard-wired response to threat: if it’s different, kill it. We’re not. We’re a social and cooperative species. We want to get along.” He grinned. “Even when we can’t stand the other guy’s guts.”
“And that may be the best answer we can hope for,” his guide replied. “At least for now.”
Garroway’s surroundings shimmered, rippled, then vanished, and he was back on board the Nicholas. He blinked. “Was I gone long?”
Rame looked at him curiously. “You were not gone at all.”
“I…see….”
“Our little raid into the Quantum Sea has had one effect,” Admiral Ranser said. “The Great Annihilator is gone.”
It was true. The Samuel Nicholas drifted alone within the sea of fast-moving charged particles, a hot and luminous cloud expanding from the center of the Gal
actic Core, 350 light years away. The fifteen-solar-mass singularity of the Great Annihilator, however, had quietly rippled into nothingness. Somehow, the Xul worldlet down in the Quantum Sea and its power taps had been inextricably linked with the singularity. When the one had vanished, so had the other.
He could still sense the ripples of probability, of possibility, from the Galactic Core, however. Was that real, or imagined? Or…an implanted memory?
“We might want to go back in and explore the central Galactic Core,” he told the others. “The Central Library is open for business again.”
“What?” Rame said. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ll see….”
Garroway was remembering a quote, something from a late-nineteenth-century philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche who’d written a book called Beyond Good and Evil. He wasn’t sure where he’d picked it up, but he knew it had perfect relevance for Humankind:
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
The abyss might be gazing into Humankind. What it saw there, however, along with all the faults and follies and foibles of the human species, was a singular organization, a brotherhood of warriors dedicated to honor and to one another.
The Marine Corps.
Forever vigilant.
Forever human.
Semper humanus.
Epilogue
0310.2230
North America
Earth
0800 hours, GMT
The Marine Corps would continue.
There was, of course, considerable question about that continuance once the Associative Conclave understood that the Xul menace, at long last, was gone. There was no need for a Marine Corps now—neither Globe nor Anchor Marines—with peace at hand.
But the Corps had lasted for 2230 years so far, and had long ago acquired a distinct life of its own. It could not simply be turned off when it was no longer needed.
And many felt that there would always be a need, so long as Humankind remained human.
Marine Master Sergeant Nal il-En Shru-dech had given a lot of thought to a return to cybe-hibe. That, after all, had been one of the options. Eight and a half centuries before, Marines of the Third Division had been given the choice of disbanding, or of going into cybernetic hibernation. Many Marines, disillusioned with the culture of the day, had opted for cybe-hibe, and the chance of either serving again in the future…or of emerging one day in a more tolerant culture willing to accept the Corps and their admittedly non-civilian way of looking at things.
The Corps faced such a decision point again, now, over 2200 years after they’d first waded ashore from small boats onto the beach at Nassau to face the guns at Fort Montagu. Many Marines had opted for the future. Captain Corcoran. Corporal Zollinger. PFC Brisard.
Nal had made a different choice…as had his current domestic partner, Cori Ryack.
Lieutenant—now Captain—Marek Garwe had made the same choice, as had his partner, Kaddy Wahrst. One good thing that had come with the reorganization of the Corps: there were no longer Anchor Marines or Globe Marines. All of them were the same—Marines.
General Trevor Garroway, of course, was now the commandant of the reorganized Corps. There’d been no question about that. Some of the men and women now in the Corps would have elected the man as God if that had been an option.
Garroway was here, on the speaker’s gallery, together with the Associative and national dignitaries who’d actually chosen to attend this ceremony today live, instead of via sim.
There’d been the question, though, of what to do with those Marines who’d opted not to enter cybe-hibe for a distant and uncertain future. This had been the logical, perhaps the only possibility.
The color guard approached the flag staff. “Atten—hut!” Nal barked.
At his back, one hundred twenty Marines came to crispsnapping attention. They wore the current full-dress uniform of the Corps. The tailoring of those uniforms would have been strange to Marines at Nassau, or Tarawa, or Khe Sanh, or Enduru, but certain elements remained constant. Eternal.
The stiff collars that gave Marines the name leathernecks.
The curved ceremonial swords carried by the officers, in memory of the march to Derna.
The blood stripe—the red strip down the leg, in memory of Chapultepec.
The color guard reached the flagstaff. “Present…harms!”
Ceremonial rifles came to the present, and Nal rendered a hand salute. An ancient, ancient anthem played as the flag, red and white stripes, field of blue, went up the mast.
The ancient United States of America had never died, quite…but it had dwindled away, first as a piece of the North American Commonwealth, later as a member-state of the Galactic Commonwealth and, later still, of the Associative.
But it existed still—seventy-five semiautonomous states stretching from the Bering Strait to the Floridian Sea. Sadly for traditionalists like most Marines, global warming across two millennia and the Xul bombardment of 2314 had long ago submerged or scoured away many of the Corp’s most sacred sites—Parris Island, Quantico, Nassau, Camp Pendleton.
But this area went back at least two thousand years. It was heavily forested now, a tropical rainforest close beside the ocean, but then it had been a high and barren plateau, a major Corps training and air station in the decades before Humankind had first left its world.
An odd name. Twentynine Palms.
The flag reached the top of the staff, fluttering in the stiff offshore breeze, and the anthem ended.
“Order…harms!”
As one, with an echoing crack, the rifles snapped back, butts to the ground.
The Corps retained its presence out among the stars, of course. The Marine Corps now had the very specific mission of guarding the Galactic Core, deep within the cloud of the Core Detonation. Scientists from a thousand cultures were out there now, investigating, experiencing the eons of history transmitted from the Encyclopedia. The Marines would make certain that all had access, that none would censor. The free flow of information, of truth, was the single absolute for any culture that sought to avoid the Xul Solution.
But back on Earth, a grateful Associative had established a new military enclave for those who’d volunteered to come here. And…who knew? One day, the ancient United States might unfold itself again among the stars.
“Parade…rest!”
Trevor Garroway, Commandant of the Marine Corps, stood to deliver his speech at the formal opening of the USMC base at Twentynine Palms.
The United States Marine Corps had returned home at last.
About the Author
IAN DOUGLAS is the author of the popular military SF series The Heritage Trilogy, The Legacy Trilogy, and The Inheritance Trilogy. A former naval corpsman, he lives in Pennsylvania.
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By Ian Douglas
Books in the Inheritance Trilogy
STAR STRIKE: BOOK ONE
GALACTIC CORPS: BOOK TWO
SEMPER HUMAN: BOOK THREE
Books in the Legacy Trilogy
STAR CORPS: BOOK ONE
BATTLESPACE: BOOK TWO
STAR MARINES: BOOK THREE
Books in the Heritage Trilogy
SEMPER MARS: BOOK ONE
LUNA MARINE: BOOKS TWO
EUROPA STRIKE: BOOK THREE
Credits
Cover art by Fred Gambino
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SEMPER HUMAN. Copyright © 2009 by William H. Keith, Jr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted th
e non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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