by Ian Douglas
“You know,” Garroway told Chrome, “we have to think about who’s going to speak for us. If Earth is destroyed, if the Xul miss any of the colonies, the way they missed the Ahannu on Ishtar, it’ll be Fringies like the Foundation of Reason bastards who survive and propagate. The thought makes me a little sick, y’know? As for the Terns, well, they’re going to be Fringies, too. Bureaucrats. Lawyers. Politicos. Anyone sharp enough or rich enough to wangle a cybe-hibe tube. You can’t have a true cross-section of humanity with only a few tens of thousands of people.” He tried to make it a joke. “I hate to think what kind of society they would evolve.”
“Is it really our responsibility, Trig?”
“It is if we make it our responsibility. The folks on Earth deserve a chance to get back on their feet.”
“Damn it! How do we know we won’t just bring the Xul down on top of them?”
She shuddered suddenly, and then she was in his arms again, crying.
And Garroway didn’t know how to answer her question.
18
30 SEPTEMBER 2314
NCO Rec/Com Deck
IST John A. Lejeune
1430 hrs, GMT
Travis Garroway floated into the compartment, using the handholds fastened along the bulkhead. The Lejeune was still rigged for freefall, the better to facilitate the loading of supplies and deadhead Marines.
Marines had been coming in to the mission assembly point for weeks, now, making the transit out from Earth, or the shorter haul up from the Martian surface, most of them already prepped, packed, and sealed inside their cybernetic hibernation tubes. They did it that way to save on consumables; Operation Seafire, once envisioned as a few hundred Marines escorting a couple of transports, had been growing lately out of all recognition. The Marines stowed away in their cybe-hibe tubes on board the Lejeune and her sister ship, the Archibald Henderson, now numbered over 1,800, and more were coming in all the time. Leaving Lejeune’s rotating hab levels folded up and in microgravity made it easier to manhandle all of those capsules in through the hatches and into their receptacles, where they would sleep away the next ten objective years on the voyage out to Sirius.
Garroway had shuttled up to the Lejeune fully conscious on board an AUT, however, to take care of some organizational preliminaries—meaning the archaic and anachronistic hell of the physical paperwork necessary to get Alpha Company, First Battalion of 1RST into operational shape…at least insofar as Corps bureaucracy was concerned. Every few years, someone proposed that the Corps would at long last become paperless—meaning all forms, requisitions, plans of the day, and orders would be handled electronically. So far, each attempt had only resulted in more paperwork, not less. Paper-worshipping bureaucrats, no doubt, were now pointing out that the disaster of Armageddonfall had proven them right. When the GlobalNet had gone down, much electronic data had gone with it…but the storage vaults holding records going back for centuries were still intact.
One of the saving graces of out-system deployment, so far as Garroway was concerned, was the fact that there would be no paperwork out there. Storage space was simply at too much of a premium.
Fortunately, paperwork could be handled virtually…meaning that the record-keeping and form-filling could be done through a cerebral interface. Garroway had come up to the NCO Rec/Com deck on board the Lejeune to get access to a virtual office. He pulled himself into a reclined chair, strapped himself in, and made the palm contact that immediately linked him in with Lejeune’s datanet, giving him access to 1RST’s electronic world.
“Hello, Gunnery Sergeant Garroway,” Quincy’s calm voice said in his mind as he linked in. “I have an important message for you.”
Interesting that it was waiting on the net, and hadn’t come to him through his implants. “Who sent it, Quincy?”
“General Clinton Garroway.”
That startled him. His uncle, he knew, was working on getting Seafire under way. The operation was his baby, and he’d only recently been confirmed as joint commander of the expedition—together with Admiral Hugh Gresham. Though they’d exchanged a few electronic notes over the past few months, they hadn’t really talked.
“Accept.”
“Travis!” General Garroway’s voice said in his mind. “Good to see you! Hang on while I connect.”
Garroway’s acceptance had opened a direct commlink with his uncle, who was now entering his own virtual reality in order to conduct a conversation. A window opened in his mind, and then the window expanded, pulling him into a detailed virtual setting. He appeared to be in a richly appointed office—mahogany paneling on the walls, thick carpet on the deck, and an expensive commdesk in front of a wallscreen showing a sunny afternoon at a peaceful wooded lake.
Obviously, his uncle was not actually back on Earth. The current time lag between Earth and Mars was over ten minutes. But this was the carefully designed virtual setting where his uncle received electronic visitors.
Clinton Vincent Garroway was seated in the reclining lounger behind the desk. He stood, walked around the desk, and offered Travis his hand. “Good to see you again, son! I’ve been looking forward to getting a chance to chat! I’ve been wanting to get over to see you, but I’ve just been too damned busy.”
Despite calling him “son,” the older Garroway was actually about the same age as the younger chronologically, a bit of temporal paradox created by the nature of relativistic star travel. Clinton Garroway, according to personal records, had been born in 2201, one of two sons of John Esteban Garroway and Kat Vinton. Travis had been born in 2228 to Clinton’s older sister, Katrin, so, going by objective time, Clinton was 113 and Travis was 86.
Both men were Marines, however, and both had been on interstellar deployments, which meant long periods of flight at near-light speed, with time slowing to a crawl. A one-way journey to Sirius took ten years objective, meaning ten years from the viewpoint of those left behind on Earth, but, depending on how close the transport could push c, only two to four years passed objectively, meaning from the point of view of the Marines onboard the transport. To further complicate matters, their actual aging was further slowed by the effects of cybe-hibe.
In all, General Garroway had spent almost sixty-five years of his career on round-trip interstellar voyages to Ishtar, to Sirius, and to Poseidon. Gunnery Sergeant Garroway had only made two out-system deployments—a twenty-five-year flight—objective—to Eostre and back, and a ten-year round-trip hop to Chiron. As a result, thanks to time dilation, both men now had a chronological age of around fifty, no matter what their respective birth certificates might claim.
In fact, if you ignored the slight aging effects of cybe-hibe time, the uncle was now forty-eight biological/subjective years old, while the nephew was fifty-one, not an impossible situation, but certainly an unlikely one.
Garroway knew of cases of Marines who’d spent so much time in cybe-hibe, they were biologically younger than their children.
“It’s good to see you again, sir.”
“Can the ‘sir’ crap, Travis. At least while we’re in here. This isn’t an official link, and it’s not a briefing. Or…” He cocked his head, quizzical. “Maybe it could be. How’s your company shaping up?”
“Well, except for lacking a CO, we’re in pretty good shape. We took the old Alpha Detachment, what was left of it, and perked it up with replacements…including some of the new kids from Ishtar. But Captain Fetterman didn’t volunteer, and Lieutenant Wilkie…” He left the thought unfinished.
“Yeah. Fetterman lost his whole family when Florida went underwater. His wife, two husbands, two kids, birth parents. He’s not in real good shape right now.”
“Shit. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Lots of cases just like his.” The general shook his head. “Actually, he wouldn’t have qualified for an out-system mission. Famsit-5.”
A Marine’s famsit described his familial ties to Earth—spouses, parents, and other close relatives. Corps policy was to select men and w
omen for interstellar deployments with as few such ties as possible—ideally famsit-1 or -2—since a typical mission lasted twenty years or more objective.
“The bad part is that Fetterman’s famsit-1 now, but he’s in no condition to go on deployment. But we do have a new CO coming in from Earth. Captain Mehler. He’ll take over Fetterman’s slot.”
“How much experience?”
The virtual image of the general pursed its lips, thoughtful. “Nothing out-system. He’s seen combat, though. Argentina in ’08. And before that, Harbin.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway. But offworld deployments are nothing like Earthside.”
“That’s why we have experienced NCOs. To ride herd on the officers.”
Which was fine, Travis thought, if the officer in question paid attention to what the NCOs had to say. “Affirmative.”
“I’ll want you and Staff Sergeant O’Meara to take him in hand, keep a close eye on him.”
It took a beat for Garroway to translate O’Meara’s name. Chrome. Of course. “Aye, aye, General.”
“The other thing I wanted to check on with you, son. We’re pulling a Sullivan on this one. Do you have a problem with that?”
He shrugged. “No. The point of the Sullivan Regs is to keep the folks back home from losing everyone. Outside of…what? Cousin Lou and a few others? It’s just you and me now, Uncle Clint. Right?”
In 1942, five brothers—Albert, Francis, George, Joseph, and Madison Sullivan—all were serving on board the same ship, the light cruiser Juneau. Three of them, in fact, had enlisted with the stipulation that they serve aboard the same vessel as their older brothers. When the Juneau was torpedoed and sunk later that year in one of the naval actions around the island of Guadalcanal, all five Sullivan brothers had been killed.
Contrary to popular belief, no official or Congressional act or set of regulations was ever passed prohibiting the assignment of close family members to the same ship or overseas duty station. However, as the years passed, unofficial policy within both the Navy and the Marine Corps was to avoid posting siblings or parents and children to the same duty station during time of war, and this became known as the Sullivan Regs. “To pull a Sullivan” meant to find a way to circumvent this policy.
In fact, the Corps, especially, generally had to work hard to find unattached personnel—people with no close family on Earth—in order to fill billets on out-system missions. There were a number of cases of close family being sent off on interstellar deployments when they were otherwise famsit-1, with no one close left behind.
Even in those cases, though, there was official resistance to such deployments, when an entire family line could be snuffed out in one action. One of the Marines involved could invoke Sullivan policy if he or she feared that possibility. According to accessible records on the Net, that had happened eight times in the past century.
This time around, though, all bets were off. Many more Marines had lost close family on Earth during Armageddonfall than the other way around.
“At least the Ishtarans are all already low-famsit,” the general said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be here. How are they shaping up?”
“Good,” Travis replied. “Very good, in fact. Some of them performed exceptionally well against the marauders in Ring City. Normally, I’d be concerned about deploying them out-system without a lot more combat experience.” He shrugged. “Of course, from their point of view, they’re already out-system. Ishtar is a long way from here.”
“And even farther when we’re at Sirius.” He didn’t add the obvious. Both Sirius and the Lalande system—and Sol as well—would be over fifteen thousand light-years away once 1MIEU passed through the Sirius Gate.
“You know,” Travis said, thoughtful, “I think the Ishtarans are living examples of famsit Corps. The Corps is their family. As much as it is for any of us now.”
Famsit Corps. The concept had been floating around through unofficial channels and in late-night bull sessions for a couple of centuries, now. One of the worst problems men and women on interstellar deployment faced was culture drift, and the psych people were beginning to suspect that it was as serious a problem as losing close family members to time dilation effects.
No one was immune. A Marine entered a cybe-hibe tube and slept all the way to another star—Sirius, say—at the speed of light. The voyage might take nine or ten years, objective, though between time dilation and cybe-hibe, the Marine missed it all.
He’s awakened at the other end, pulls his tour of duty—typically a year—then enters cybe-hibe for the trip back home.
The Marine returns to Earth having experienced only his year’s duty at the Sirius Stargate, but he finds Earth has aged twenty or more. If he’d stayed behind and experienced those twenty years, he would have noticed only minor change, because change happened gradually.
But coming home to a culture with social systems, political events, electronic systems and data access, even language all bumped ahead by twenty years could mean a terrible shock, even psychological displacement. Very few Star Marines, as those with out-system deployment time were known, now, felt wholly at home on Earth.
Travis Garroway had been born on Earth, in Pennsylvania, in 2228. He’d grown up there, and joined the Marine Corps when he turned eighteen, in 2246.
His father, separated from his mother long before, had never been close, nor had he been particularly close to either of two stepfathers. His mother had died two years after he’d joined up, which left him as famsit-3, and he’d been able to get a waiver reducing him to famsit-2 so he could apply for out-system duty.
In 2249, he’d served his first interstellar deployment—at Chiron, 4.3 light-years from Earth. He’d returned to Earth early in 2260.
All of his cultural indoctrination—the way he related to society and the world around him—had been set down between the years 2228 and 2249. When he’d returned to Earth, peelies and gaffers were long gone, quaint bits of history now considered passé. Virtual sex had been around for centuries, of course, but by 2260 you could engage in virtual memming, which his generation thought shocking and just a bit obscene. The idea of buying a person’s memories of their private sex life was just a bit too voyeuristic for his tastes, even yet. And sibbing was even worse. There were new security controls on downloads off the Net, and new ways of interacting with Net agents. It was no longer possible, for instance, to tell if you were linking with a person, or with a very good personal AI secretary, one that perfectly mimicked a person’s speech, manner, and attitudes.
And the religions…especially those religions inspired by contact with the Ahannu, the N’mah, and the Xul. Those had continued to explode in number and in diversity of belief, defining whole new worlds of doctrine and dogma, and shaping the background culture as a whole. To those men and women who actually deployed to the alien worlds of Ishtar or the Sirius Stargate, the An and the N’mah were exotic, but scarcely divine. To the teeming billions on Earth, they represented the unknown, the transcendent, and the awe-inspiring power of the unseen world. And their belief was driving the changes behind a fast-changing cultural dynamic.
So much change in just twenty years.
For the next twenty-seven years Travis had served in the Corps—sometimes offworld, on Mars, Luna, Europa, and on deployments aboard various High Guard vessels, but usually back on Earth. He’d been a DI at Camp Lejeune from ’80 to ’83; that had been when he’d met Chrome. In 2287, the two of them had boarded the IST Vandergrift for the deployment to Epsilon Indi, 11.8 light-years away. Twenty-five years objective later, in early 2313, they’d returned to an Earth now in some ways almost weirdly alien. Travis could only wonder what his uncle had gone through, with sixty-five years away from the rapidly evolving social culture of Earth. His first deployment out-system had been in 2225, three years before Travis had even been born, and he’d probably felt much more intensely the alienation, the strangeness, the lack of belonging experienced by all of those sundered from home and fami
ly by impossible gulfs of distance and time.
It was no wonder, then, that most Star Marines found themselves much more closely connected with the Marine Corps itself as a culture, than they did with the civilian cultures of Earth. The Marines left behind in the Solar System changed with the changing culture, true, since they were still a part of the changing attitudes and beliefs of the home world, but first and foremost they were Marines, and the actual drift in social connections and attitude tended to be small.
Even Marines stationed on Earth tended to hang together, enclosed in their own world, with their own language, their own customs, their own rituals.
In fact, that had been true for as long as there’d been a Marine Corps. Marine tradition was strong, the sense of family and belonging, of gung ho—pull together!—of duty and honor and loyalty and, above all, of esprit d’corps all served to set the Marine apart, in his mind, from the civilian world, and even from other military services. The Corps was father and mother, spouse and sib.
Famsit Corps.
In that regard, the new recruits from Ishtar were a bit of an unknown, and a bit of a gamble. Their home culture, the values and ideals and even technology with which they’d grown up were already markedly alien from Earth’s overall background culture. They were more family-oriented, in many ways, more relaxed about casual sex than most people on Earth, less prone to infection by religious memes. At the same time, they had nothing like the nanotechnic implants carried by most Earth-born humans, and no experience at all with unlimited mind-to-mind communication or data access. The idea of simply thinking a question, any question, and having it answered immediately was as strange to them as the idea of flying to Mars would have been to Columbus.