Lawrence's eyes swept the ranks. His earnestness and faith gave Gwen chills. "I know this remains confusing, but I promise you, as your Company Commander, keep yourselves and your fellow Marines safe and on task, and I. Will. Get. You. Home. Oo-rah?"
Gwen screamed it back at him along with every other Marine and spectator, "OOO-RAH!!!"
Gwen finished flashing the Croaker surrender to HQ and all the engaged units, as ordered, and she felt pleased to hear it re-broadcast over speakers and nets. The clicks, croaks, wheezes, and whistles of the alien language reverberated off the village's buildings, unintelligible to her, but whatever meaning it had was sufficient to penetrate to the combatants on the opposing side. Slowly, intermittently, but with ever growing finality, the weapons fire from the Croaker militants tapered off. Soon, except for a sporadic potshot from a malcontent or two, the battle was over and human victory over Belle'aube assured.
Even though it was somewhat unnecessary, given the 360 degree coverage of her battle sensorium, Gwen turned to face the Major. She had lost track of his interrogation of the dying leader, but even then she was shocked by what the scene presented before her.
Lawrence's expression vascillated between confusion and angry dismay. He held the Croaker leader up out of the muck by the shoulders, his shaking grip so tight, the gloves in his augmented suit might even be crushing the bones in the alien's arms to powder. Lawrence leaned in toward his dying prisoner and screamed in its face. "No! I won't allow you to lie to me, to these men. We know all about your capabilities. We have decades of observations. You’ve been an honorable foe. Don't be petty here at the end!"
The alien hiccoughed, its species equivalent of a laugh, then whispered something. Hearing the translation in his ears, Lawrence's shoulders slumped. With a final rattle of labored breathing, the alien died, going limp in the Major's hands. Its greenish amphibian skin faded to gray, and it's large, saucer-like eyes turned cloudy and dull.
Lawrence laid the leader back into the mud with gentility and reverence, his motions showing nothing of the violent rage that had encompassed him moments earlier. And after the alien was laid down in a tableau of peace, Lawrence just knelt there, slumped, turned away from Herrera. He just stared at his deceased enemy.
Gwen looked around their surroundings, verifying that things remained safe for the moment, then stepped forward, her boots squelching in the muck. "Major?"
No response.
She took another step. "Major Lawrence? Craig? Are you all right?"
Craig stood and turned around. She expected sorrow or dismay in his face, the loss soldiers sometimes felt when they had been forced to kill a respected enemy. What she saw instead made her take a step back.
Madness. Unfettered rage. Some sort of dark demon -- the polar opposite of Major Craig Lawrence -- had taken up residence inside his skin, and the change frightened her worse than anything she had ever seen in battle.
He reached into a pocket of his body armor to take out a small, palm-sized object and looked at it in disgust. He cast the device into the mud and then pulled his secondary weapon. Major Lawrence armed it, setting the black pistol whining up into inaudible ultrasonic frequencies. Holding it at the ready, he stalked past Herrera, out of the hut, and into the smoke and misty gloom of the just-ended combat. Herrera stood frozen, unable to do more than watch him go.
After he vanished, she shook herself and walked over to where he had tossed the object. Picking it up and wiping it as clean as she could, Herrera saw that it was a small PDA. She looked out into the darkness after him, and then back at the device, not comprehending. She turned it on and scrolled through the entries.
They were all letters, and each one began and ended with a single word. "ILYAMY"
Major Craig Lawrence and First Sergeant Gwen Herrera stood side-by-side in one of the myriad passageways coiling throughout the labyrinthine interior of the UEMAS Ganjgal, just outside an empty troop mess, facing a group of stern-faced senior officers. Craig shook his head and answered Colonel Roger Salas' question. "I'm not . . . really sure that's such a good idea, sir. If it's all the same to you, I'd rather the Marines stay among the Marines. I'm worried that allowing them to mix with the colonists might cause more harm than good."
Salas cocked an eye at him and smirked slightly. "Well, Major, it's not all the same to me. We have to spend three years aboard this ship. I'm sure that they're going to be in uncontrolled contact at some point, so why not head it off in advance and allow each group to . . . humanize one another. If we keep them apart, they each may grow to distrust and resent the other side."
"Yes, sir, that's a possibility, but if we mix them together, you're going to get the same things you always get when young Marines mix in with the equivalent of a small town -- pregnant daughters, indignant fathers, jealous boyfriends and girlfriends, and one or two really epic fistfights. At the moment, those Marines that wish to have found their . . . outlets for such things, and the others are waiting patiently for the fight and the end of the deployment. Let's just let things keep until a situation arises that warrants changing it."
The colonel nodded, but stayed firm. "History may be indicative of the future, but every situation is different. I just don't want our men and women going into this fight after such a long wait with no concept of what they're fighting for. Mingling with the colonists might give them that."
Lawrence would not budge either. "Respectfully, sir, my Marines do know what they're fighting for. They're fighting for the survival of mankind and for the chance to go home. And that's all they need, not distractions."
Salas nodded and turned to Herrera. "And what do you think, First Sergeant?"
She looked from the colonel to the Major. She nodded her head to Craig. "I'm sorry, Colonel. I've got to stick with Major Lawrence on this one."
Salas laughed. "And why should today be different from any other day? You two are thick as thieves. But, I suppose I wouldn't want it any other way. All right, I'll give in on it for today. It'll still be in my back pocket, though, and if I deem it necessary, the colonists and the Marines will mingle." With that, he nodded to them and strode back into the maze of the United Earth Marine Assault Ship, his entourage trailing behind him.
Lawrence looked at Herrera, shrugged, and walked into the troop mess. He sat at a table and whipped out his PDA, back to work as always.
She sauntered over to him, as intrigued as he about the colonel's idea. Reading over his shoulder without a bit of shame, she frowned. "ILYAMY? Wasn't that the little love-code you had for your wife? Don't tell you've got a deployment-honey aboard the Ganjgal."
He glanced up, quizzical, and then went back to writing on the digital pad. "Nothing so salacious, Top. I'm just writing another letter to Regan."
Gwen sat next to him and grinned at the futility of his gesture. "Aren't you the sweet one, sir. Kind of pointless though, isn't it? Why write letters when you can't send them to her, and she's going to see you after a month's Earth-time anyways?"
"What are you talking about, Top? I send my wife and kids a letter every single week."
She stood up so fast the table jumped. "You can't do that!" Herrera said in a harsh whisper. "You're screwing with causality! You'll keep us from ever getting home!"
Lawrence held up placating hands to the woman that could very well kill him. "Calm down, First Sergeant. There's no causality violation in sending a message from here, just in receiving one from Earth. You did read the mission briefing, didn't you?"
She paused, considering. "I skimmed it."
He smiled and reached across the table for a server laden with condiments. "Please, sit. School is in session, Top."
She sat down next to him, regarding him with unease.
Lawrence nodded and gestured to the condiments he had laid on the table. "Okay, take a look and a listen. This is basically how the Barnum drive gets us home and why we can send, but not receive messages." He pointed to the first bottle. "The ketchup is Earth. Next in line is the hot
sauce -- that's us aboard the Ganjgal. And we're headed to the mustard or Belle'aube, 60 lightyears away. Got it?"
She nodded. "We're hot sauce, en route to mustard. Roger all."
He took the representation of their ship and slid it between the Earth and the Croaker colony planet. "Here we are, going as fast as human technology will take us -- on a 4 gee gradient spacetime wave, with a 3 gee counter-gradient so we don't get crushed. At that constant acceleration, it takes us 84 objective years, and three subjective years to go the 60 lightyears between the two planets. But it's still too slow. By the time we reach the colony, our families will all be dead of old age.
"The Croakers and the other colonizing races have a cheat, though. It's why you see so many of them out there -- sociologists figure they're so widespread because of the support of a functioning galactic society, made possible by faster-than-light shortcuts."
Herrera shook her head. "Yeah, a shortcut we were told would be inaccessible if we dared to have any contact with home, Major. Why don't you get to the part where I shouldn't frag you?"
"Very well." He turned back to the bottles, sliding the hot sauce to the mustard. "First, we have to reach the colony and beat the Croakers."
"Damn right. We'll kick their mustardy yellow asses all over the table."
Lawrence grinned. "Ooo-rah. Now, after we secure their colony and their tech -- intact -- we find their jump-gate system." He held up a bottle of soy sauce and set it next to the mustard and the hot sauce. "And then we open the wormhole, or go to hyperspace, or hit the big red button, or whatever . . ." He tossed the hot sauce to his other hand, over by the ketchup/Earth. "And home."
"Right, but none of that works if we communicate with Earth, right? If we talk to Earth, it somehow causes screws up cause and effect and cuts off the way home."
He shook his head. "Not quite. Here's a question for you: where are we -- aboard the Ganjgal -- when we make the jump back to Earth?"
Herrera looked at him, looked at the table, and then pointed a tentative finger at the mustard bottle representing Belle’aube.
The Major shook his head. He reached out and took the hot sauce, moving it almost all the way back to Earth. "See, the reason any of this is possible is because of a confluence of relativity and quantum mechanics -- though both of those older theories are flawed parts of the whole. Relativity says that when you travel through space, you also travel through time. Use a wormhole to shortcut that distance, and you essentially move faster than light and thus backwards in time, so far back that we arrive a month after we left, even though we are still on a 3 year slash 84 year journey out there. We'll be in two places at once.
"Right now, those of us that survive the battle should already be back at home with our families at the same time as we're cruising around out here. What would happen if our future Earth selves sent us a message saying that half the company and all the colonists would be killed in the assault -- therefore we should just turn around then and not go? We're traveling fast, but not fast enough to avoid receiving the message."
"Well, that would be a paradox, right? A causality violation, and that, for some reason, stops us from jumping home."
"Correct," Lawrence said, nodding. "The reason it stops us is due to quantum mechanics, Schrodinger's Cat level stuff. If we read a message from our future selves and take a different course of action, then that observation collapses the probability functions while they're filled with complex, imaginary numbers. All the wormholes home shut down, preventing us from violating causality. If we refuse to look at Earth or any messages from home, though, those backwards-in-time pathways remain open as positive probability functions. That's why they call it the Barnum Effect: you can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, as quipped by an ancient huckster named P. T. Barnum. In this case, the mark getting fooled is space-time itself, but only so long as we keep ourselves willfully ignorant of the joke's future punchline."
"Okay," she allowed. "I'll push the 'I Believe' button like I did the first time they explained this. But how are you not screwing us by sending messages to your family?"
He pointed to the condiments again. "Think about it. What happens if our future selves and Earth get a message from me, here on the slow leg of the journey?"
She pondered his display again and then shrugged. "Nothing, I guess. It's already happened to your future self, and to your family it's just regular transmissions from space over the course of 84 years. Causality doesn't care."
He smiled, but this time with a touch of melancholy. "Precisely. The way I see it is this -- if I don't survive the mission, or even if I die the day I get back, my family, down to my children's children's children, will get regular missives from me, saying how much I love them, and how much I miss them and was thinking of them. And if I live to a ripe old age with my Regan, the messages will continue long after I'm gone . . . a touch of grace in a cold, uncaring universe."
Lawrence looked down at the letter on his PDA. Gwen Herrera watched him, and neither of them were aware of the slight smile on her own lips. She shook her head and said, "So why doesn't everybody realize this? Why did Colonel Salas never promote the fact that we could still send messages?"
He shrugged. "Salas isn't a family man -- he's divorced with no kids. I doubt such a thing would occur to him to mention, not when those he does want to speak with will be seeing him after a month. Most people probably feel the same way." Craig turned and slid the PDA toward her. "Would you like to send your husband a letter?"
She grinned and pushed it back. "No thanks, Major. Joe and I are in sort of a rocky spot. Time apart will do us some good -- of course, he won't see a month away as much of a time apart. But I've got three years absence to let my heart grow fonder, and I'm not above seeking an . . . 'outlet' of my own."
Craig laughed and stood up, pocketing his PDA. "And on that note, I'll take my leave. Get some sleep, Top."
"Roger that, sir."
The Major walked out through a different corridor than Salas had taken. Herrera sat at the table in the empty troop mess for a long time, watching where he had gone and sliding the bottle of hot sauce back and forth between Earth and the colony.
Gwen Herrera shoved the PDA into her pocket and dashed out of the Croaker headquarters. Outside, the mud was even slicker in the planet's omnipresent mist, perfect for the aliens and at the very least livable for the human colonists still up in orbit. It was not her idea of Eden, but she was not planning on staying either. Her job was to secure the world for human dominance and get out.
It would be nice if she could leave with the man who brought her.
Looking around, she could not see a thing. Thermal vision and radar were little better. At her armored feet, tracks crisscrossed all over the muck and she could not distinguish which ones might be the Major's, but she remained determined to find him. She still had no idea what had set him off, what the Croaker chieftain had said, but she knew the look that had been on his face.
Craig Lawrence had always been driven, a man on a mission, but now that mission was murder, she was sure of it. And she . . . cared too much for her commander to allow him to come to so ignoble an end. Herrera keyed her comm rather than flashing an alert to the common net, hoping her voice would cut to the top of any other communication. "All stations, this is Top. I'm looking for the Major. Anyone with eyes on, roger up now."
She paused in the mist and mud. Then, "Top, this is Van Kamp. I'm over by the northeastern corner of the village. I just saw the Major storm past me, making a beeline for the dropship. Does that mean we win?"
Herrera cut the circuit without answering and sprinted as best she could through the sludge. The dropship was not a good sign. That way lay only humans, and specifically one set of humans: those at the command center.
Huts, Marines, and captured croakers flashed by as she dashed past. It was a horrible risk, what she was doing. There could be any number of isolated, armed croakers, land mines, or booby trap
s in her path, but she knew she had little time. Once the squat rocket shape of the SSTOD was in sight, she almost slowed in relief, but then she heard shouts and cries of alarm over her proximity channel.
Gwen ran even harder up the steel grating of the troop ladder, leading with her plasrail, safety off. She entered the command deck and slipped to a quick stop with her muddy boots, registering the scene inside in an instant.
A Marine lance corporal who had been on guard at the hatchway lay crumpled on the deck, stirring feebly. The compartment was filled with sensor displays and status read-outs, their blue glow providing most of the space's lighting -- lighting that revealed several officers and senior non-coms, all of them frozen in mid-reach for their sidearms. At the center of it all stood Colonel Salas with the Major behind him, arm outstretched. Craig held his pistol tight against the base of the colonel's neck, his finger half-squeezing the trigger.
Of all those in the compartment, Herrera alone had her weapon at the ready. Without even thinking, she pointed the plasrail at the Major's head. Her blood pounded in her ears and she found she could hardly breathe. She popped her helmet open and gulped down fresh air for the first time in days. As calm as she could, she threatened, "Don't do it, Major."
Lawrence ground the pistol's barrel into the back of Salas' neck. "I'm sorry, Top, but I don't really have any reason not to. Even if you or these others don't kill me, it's not like I'll ever stand trial back on Earth. And why should I outlive my family anyways?"
Her eyes narrowed. "What are you talking about?"
"I mean we're not going home. None of us. Ever."
Something twisted in her gut, but she shrugged it off. Herrera took a step further, holding her aim steady. "Why? Was there a causality violation? Did someone receive a message from Earth?"
Lawrence barked a humorless laugh. "I wish that was the case. I wish it was just some stupid mistake, something that countered the trick we were trying to play on nature. But that's not what it is -- is it, Colonel?"
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