Star Marines

by Ian Douglas

  Good riddance to them all, Lee thought, and he was surprised at how much bitterness rode with the thought. We don’t need them.

  But, before they left, they would agree to give those they left behind a fighting chance, even if it meant sacrificing some of their military assets.

  Only time, possibly a great deal of time, would tell which decision was truly right, or even whether Humankind would survive at all.

  Colonel Lee knew where he stood.

  The Marines, he knew, men and women who’d sworn oaths to the United States and to the Federal Republic, for the most part stood with him.

  And that was with General Clinton Garroway, the man who’d created Operation Seafire, and a man anyone in the Corps would have followed anywhere in the Galaxy.

  16

  25 MARCH 2314

  Camp Hope

  Ring City, Virginia, US/FRA

  1815 hrs, EST

  Garroway carried his tray to an unoccupied table, took a seat, and again contemplated the lump of dried, brown mud in a bowl that was dinner.

  “Can I join you?” a familiar voice asked from behind his shoulder.

  “Hey, Chrome,” he said. “Sure. Grab an ass support.”

  “You look like you just lost your last friend.”

  “Just giving thanks.” He touched the plastic covering, and watched it peel open and begin to cook. “‘For what we are about to receive…’”

  “Can the grouching,” Chrome told him. “In prehistoric times, Marines had to hunt and kill their own mud.”

  “True. You think we’d get a better selection if we went down to the Potomac and dug our own?”

  She made a face. “With all those dead lawyers and politicians carried away by the flood?”

  “You’re right. Bottom feeders aren’t that appetizing.”

  “Affirmative. I prefer to take my sustenance from higher up on the food chain. Eat your porridge.”

  Barracks humor, Garroway thought, had taken a grim turn of late. Lots of jokes about cannibalism and the end of the world. Maybe that kind of insanity was the only way sane people had of remaining sane.

  He picked up a spoon and took a bite. In fact, it wasn’t bad…kind of bland, a little gritty. If you didn’t think too much about it, not bad at all.

  “So whadja think of those kids in the amptheater this morning?” Chrome asked him.

  “The Ishies?” He nodded. “They did good.” He took another bite. “I put the bunch of them in for the Navy Cross.”

  “They won’t get it. Has to be an officer to recommend them. They don’t take the word of grunts for stuff like that.”

  “Hanes said he’d back me.” Captain Theodore Hanes was their company commander here at Fairfax Center. “I played him my combat mems in the debrief this afternoon. He was impressed.”

  “Cool. Might go through, then.”

  “They deserve the recognition. Shit, they’re all still kids, wet behind the ears and barely through Phase One of boot camp. More than that, they don’t even have a handle on civilized life, yet.”

  “You call this civilization?” Chrome asked.

  “You know what I mean. These people were primitives living out in the jungle on Ishtar. Biggest city they’d ever seen was New Sumer. They probably signed on out there because the Marines they saw looked like demigods, or something.”

  “Maybe they saw joining the Corps as a way out of the jungle. Or it was a way to say thanks for the liberation.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t care why they did it. I just think it was pretty spectacular the way they took on that technical this morning. That took sheer, raw guts.”

  “Roger that.” She looked thoughtful. “You know, it seems to me there’s too much emphasis on them being ‘primitives,’ whatever the hell that is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The point is…they’re human. Exactly like you and me. Different upbringing, sure. Different culture, different take on technology. But they’re just as smart as we are. Maybe more, since they haven’t had the fancy hardware…” She tapped the side of her skull. “Implants, downloads, all of that. They’ve made do with less their whole lives.”

  “Could be. You know, there’s a lot of talk lately about how ancient peoples needed so much help from extraterrestrials. You know, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, how they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the N’mah giving them a leg up.”

  “Pretty good, since the N’mah don’t have legs. The adult ones, anyway.”

  “Right. But our ancestors were as smart, as capable, as adaptable as we are today. The N’mah might have helped get civilization started, but our ancestors had already managed to survive when the Xul mopped up the An.”

  “And now we get to survive again.”

  “Maybe that’s what humans are best at.”

  Another Marine, wearing green utilities, came up beside them, tray in hand. “Mind if I join you?” he said.

  Garroway looked up, saw the silver bars on the man’s collar, and started to stand up. “Sir!”

  “Sit down, sit down,” the lieutenant sounded tired. He also looked very young, in his mid-twenties, Garroway thought. “I just need a place to park.”

  The mess hall, Garroway saw, was pretty full. A line of other officers was filing through past the galley window, each receiving their ration of NMFEs.

  “No room at the BOQ, sir?” Chrome asked him.

  “No. They sent us down here.”

  The Fairfax Center’s Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, Garroway recalled, were small and tight on space. The NCO barracks had more room.

  “Just got shipped in, sir?” Garroway asked.

  He gave a wry grin. “Just passing through. We’re in from Twentynine Palms.”

  Understanding dawned. “You’re one of those Skydragons from this morning!”

  “A-ffirmative.” He held out a hand. “Handle’s Maverick.”

  “Good to meet you, sir,” Garroway shook hands, accepting with the touch the download package that included the man’s name, rank, and unit—his electronic business card. “VMA-412?”

  “Yup. Just in from Mars.”

  Chrome nodded. “We were out that way last deployment.”

  Maverick digested the electronic ID packet Garroway had passed him with the handshake. “You’re 1MarReg! You were the guys who took out the Xul?”

  “That was us,” Garroway said.

  “Good job, Gunny!”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “They scrambled the 412 when the Intruder came in,” Maverick told them. “Had us boosting out to meet them, but you folks took out the bad guys before we could launch. I can’t tell you how damned happy we were to hear we weren’t going up against a Xul capital ship!”

  “Yeah?” Chrome cocked her head to the side. “Excuse my saying so, sir, but that’s not quite the image I thought you fast-movers wanted to present.”

  “What, you mean all the macho crap? Up, up and away? That’s for the zoomies.”

  Zoomy was centuries-old slang for Aerospace Force pilots, and was usually meant as a pejorative. Marine aerospacecraft were generally referred to as fast movers, among other things. Marines had a special love for their ground-attack personnel, however. Ever since WWII, Marine pilots had excelled at close air support of their comrades on the ground, at least in part because of the remarkable esprit that bound them together.

  “‘Every Marine a rifleman,’” Garroway said, quoting. It was an old expression, a reflection of the fact that all Marines were considered to be riflemen first, even if their MOS—their Military Occupational Specialty—had them serving chow in the mess hall, or strapped into the acceleration couch of a high-performance aerospace fighter.

  “Roger that,” Maverick said.

  “You guys kicked ass this morning,” Chrome said.

  “Kicked ass and took numbers, ’cause you were moving too fast to take names.”

  Maverick chuckled. “Wasn’t like we had any tough opposition. What
was it…civilian trucks?”

  “It was tough enough from where we were,” Chrome said. “I imagine the local warlords’ll think twice before trying that shit again.”

  Maverick nodded. “Our orders are to redeploy out here, at least for the time being. They have us sitting on the old Reagan Aerospaceport, just south of here.”

  “Well, it’s great to have you aboard, sir,” Garroway said. “What do you think of the chow?”

  Maverick had opened and heated his meal as they talked, and was just now taking his first bite. He made a face. “Gods! What is it?”

  “Recycled lawyers, politicians, and other bottom feeders. Sir.”

  “Figures. Put ’em to best use.” He looked at Chrome. “Hey, maybe you two can help me out.”

  “With what, sir?”

  “Xul tech. Is it as hairy as they say?”

  Garroway shrugged. “We got through it, okay.” He tried not to think about those last moments, with Xul combat robots swarming around the transport as they boosted clear. He didn’t think he had ever been so scared in his life…not even later, when they were adrift in deep space, with no real hope of rescue. That had been something he’d been able to accept. But those swarms of machines coming after them…

  He shook himself, trying to rid himself of the dark memories. “The way I see it, sir, a lot of their stuff is more developed, but it’s really just variations of what we already have. Particle beams. Lasers. Nanotechnology. While we were inside the Intruder, I saw this huge swarm of…I don’t know. Machines. Pieces. They were moving like they were under intelligent control, repairing the hole in the side of the Xul ship.”

  “G-2 thinks they have at least a limited ability to regrow their big spacecraft,” Chrome added, referring to division-level intelligence. “They probably grow them in the first place by reshaping asteroids, or whatever is handy. If they’re damaged, they just grow a plug in the hole. We have limited abilities along those lines now.”

  “Huh. I wonder what their cities look like?”

  “Maybe they don’t have cities,” Garroway suggested. “Or maybe they just reshape the whole damned planet to suit themselves. That’d be a sight!”

  “The biggest tech-gap,” Garroway said, “seems to be what they do with cupie.”

  “Say again?”

  “Cupie? Q-P. Quantum physics. G-2 says they actually rewrite the laws of physics, at least in a very elementary way.”

  “No shit! Like what?”

  “Like that trick they pulled throwing rocks at Earth,” Chrome told him. “The N’mah know how to reduce the inertia in a discrete lump of mass, right?”

  Maverick nodded.

  “Okay. The Xul do the same thing…only they can give the mass any inertia they want. Like a brand-new vector of two thousand kps.”

  “How the hell could they do that?”

  “If we knew that,” Garroway said with a shake of his head, “we wouldn’t be so worried about these bastards. The smart money, though, says they know how to manipulate virtual particles in the Quantum Sea.”

  That, at least, was what knowledgeable scuttlebutt had to say about it. For at least three centuries, since the development of quantum physics in the mid-twentieth century, scientists had recognized that hard vacuum was not really empty, that at a very deep, very fundamental level of existence, so-called empty-space was a kind of continually bubbling and churning froth of elementary particles popping magically into existence in pairs—particle and antiparticle—and almost immediately vanishing as the paired particles canceled one another out. So long as there was no net increase in mass or energy, the laws of conservation were observed, and you didn’t have something coming out of nothing. Not really. While seeming to violate laws of common sense, the existence of these so-called virtual particles had been proven in the twentieth century. Two metal plates placed parallel and very, very close together registered a slight attractive force between them, called the Casimir Effect, which was the result of a slight excess of energy materializing outside the plates, compared with what materialized between them.

  The twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman had calculated that the virtual energy contained within a single cubic centimeter of hard vacuum would, if liberated, boil all of the oceans of Earth. Ev power plants made use of the Casimir Effect to draw energy—a minute fraction of what potentially was available—from hard vacuum, sufficient to accelerate starships to near-c, making relativistic flight between the stars possible.

  But quantum physics had suggested more than that unimaginable amounts of energy were free for the taking from hard vacuum, much more. That background of virtual particles, the base state, or, as it was more poetically known, the Quantum Sea, was also responsible for non-virtual particles as well. An electron, for instance, could be understood as a succession of particle-pairs popping in and out of existence very, very swiftly, creating a kind of standing wave that defined it and gave it substance.

  It had long been accepted that both matter and energy were not the substantial, thump-the-table-top solidity assumed by Newtonian physics. Matter, it turned out, was as insubstantial as a dream; an atom not only was mostly empty space, but even the particles that made it up—electrons, protons, and neutrons—were more like information than like the layman’s idea of what matter should be. Quantum particles might act like particles…but look at them another way and they acted like waves. In fact, how you measured them, or even thought about them, seemed to be what determined what form they took.

  Matter, at the deepest level of reality, was an idea, and as insubstantial as a thought.

  “What they’re saying,” Chrome added, building on Garroway’s explanation, “is that if matter is really nothing more than standing waves in the Quantum Sea, as information, really, then it ought to be possible to reach down in there and change the information. Part of the information would be everything that makes up the block of data we call inertia…the particle’s mass, its vector, how much kinetic energy is wrapped up inside it.”

  “They say that’s what the N’mah dampers do,” Maverick said. He grinned. “If it weren’t for that little bit of techno wizardry, I’d be turned into a thin layer of red jelly every time I boosted my ’dragon up to full throttle.”

  “Sure,” Garroway said. “The Quantum Sea idea also explains nonlocality, since all points in our universe correspond with this base-state universe in a way that doesn’t involve space or distance. So that gives us a clue as to how the Ancients could build that bank of communications screens beneath the Cydonian Face on Mars…with real-time connections to screens on planets in other star systems. Seems to be faster-than-light, but that’s an illusion. Nonlocal phenomena bypass space, so they can’t be said to have a speed of faster than anything.”

  “It might also be how the Xul manage their faster-than-light stardrive,” Chrome pointed out. “You just reach down to the quantum level of reality, rewrite the informational content for the standing waves of a certain mass—a starship, say—and in this universe it instantly vanishes here, and reappears there…light-years away.”

  “Yeah. So how do they manage that?” Maverick asked.

  Garroway shrugged. “Like I said, sir. If we knew how, the bastards wouldn’t have us with our backs up against the wall.”

  “We had an AI inside the Intruder before we pulled the plug on them,” Chrome said. “Maybe he got some technical data…like how they work their magic.”

  “That would be good,” Maverick said. He looked thoughtful. “I wonder.”

  “Wonder what, sir?”

  “You guys went through the usual Weiji-do courses, right?”

  “In boot camp,” Garroway said. “Sure.”

  Weiji-do—the Way of Manifestation—was billed as a form of martial arts and taught as such in the Marines, though physical combat had little to do with it. Wei Chi was the name of one of the hexagrams in the ancient divination tool known as the I Ching. According to that system, a particular pattern of cast coins or y
arrow stalks represented incompletion or emptiness…but it was the emptiness, the chaos, from which order could be called forth. Even complete chaos, according to that way of thinking, was more accurately portrayed as possibility. As potential.

  And that, according to the modern science of quantum physics, was exactly what the Quantum Sea was…a state of disorder or chaos that held within it unlimited potential. All that was needed was for Mind to reach in and bring it forth, to literally manifest reality.

  Garroway had never been sure how much of that pseudo-mysticism to swallow. There was a whole modern school of philosophy based on the idea that the human mind actually created reality from moment to moment in Godlike fashion simply by observing it, an extension of the old Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of quantum physics, that said that nothing was real, that everything was overlapping wave forms and possibility until an Observer with a capital O observed those waves and made them collapse into Reality.

  Reality. Whatever the hell that was.

  In fact, Garroway was convinced that just believing something, or wishing it was real, was a hell of a long way from making it so. All you needed to do was look at the incredible diversity of human religious belief. Which one was “right?” Did the fact that members of the Gray Redeemer Church thought little gray aliens with big black eyes were God make it so?

  Still, the Corps had taught Weiji-do for about the past century or so as a discipline designed to help recruits think. So much of the Corp’s modern technology, from battle suits to laser weapons, from communication links to aerospace fighters, depended on clarity and precision of thought when working through personal nanotech implants. A Marine couldn’t afford to let his mind wander when he was in a firefight, or trying to pull out of a dive in a fighter pulling ten Gs. Weiji-do involved meditation techniques and mental exercises, coupled with complex and dancelike moving meditations drawn from the far older martial discipline of Tai Chi, to precisely control thought. One part of the discipline, Garroway remembered, was rooted in the idea that each individual created his own reality, through thought and belief, by calling it forth from the Unmanifest Chaos of the Quantum Sea. The better you controlled your thinking, his teacher had told him, the better the Reality you create.