by Ian Douglas
Nowadays, an entire minor industry thrived to provide suitable ambiance for the evening. The Palace of Illusion was run by a major area theme park to cater expressly to formal social events. She wondered how much all of this had cost—the lighting and special effects, the live music, the endless tables of food, the sheer space: the grounds and gardens outside on a hilltop overlooking the dazzling horizon-to-horizon glow of Greater Los Angeles; a Grand Hall so large the walls were lost in the artificial mists and play of laser holography designed to create a sense of infinite space; and elsewhere, private rooms, conversation bubbles, or even private VR spheres designed to accommodate social and conversational groupings of every size and taste.
Several thousand people were in attendance. Kaitlin felt completely lost. She wished Rob, her husband, was here, but the lucky bastard was on the other end of the continent right now, CO of the Marine Space Training Command at Quantico, and he’d been able to plead schedule and a meeting with the Joint Chiefs to duck the invitation. It was harder for Kaitlin. Her current assignment had her in command of the 1st Marine Space Regiment, which consisted of the 1st and 2nd Marine Space Expeditionary Forces, and various support elements. Normally, she was in Quantico too, but for the past month she’d been stationed at Vandenberg, commuting by HST on those few weekends she had free.
All of which had left her without an acceptable excuse for being here tonight.
She wandered the fringes of the Great Hall, looking for someone she knew. She had her personal pinger on, set to alert her if she came within fifty meters of any other pinger broadcasting an interest in things that interested her: the Corps, recovered ET technology, science fiction, programming—especially cryptoprogramming—chess, anything involving Japanese language or culture. It was also searching for any of a handful of people she knew who might be here. So far, no luck. Senator Fuentes was here, of course; it was her party. Twenty-five years ago, Colonel Carmen Fuentes had been her CO in the desperate fight for Tsiolkovsky on the Lunar far side. Unfortunately, the senator was surrounded five deep just now by well wishers, sycophants, politicians, and social climbers. Kaitlin didn’t have a chance in hell of breaching those defenses.
She wandered through the crowd, amusing herself by observing the variations in dress and social custom. Kaitlin was wearing the new formal Blue Dress Evening uniform—long skirt, open jacket with medals and broad red lapels over ruffled white blouse, and the damned silly gold braid epaulets that made her feel like she was walking around with boards balanced precariously on her shoulders. And heels. She hated heels. Heels had been abandoned by progressively thinking women fifty years ago. All she needed to feel a perfect fool was a sword and scabbard.
There were quite a few of those in the room. Most of the male Marine officers were in full Blue Dress A uniform, with swords—the famous Mameluke blade first presented to Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon for the capture of Derna in 1805—at their sides.
Corps tradition. It was everywhere she looked. Those red stripes on the legs of their pants, for instance, symbolized the bloody Battle of Chapultepec in the Mexican War, the “Halls of Montezuma” immortalized in the Marine Corps Hymn.
Most of the people at the gathering, however, were civilians, and Kaitlin found herself feeling quite out of place with the creatures—as alien to her way of thinking as the Builders or the An or any of the myriad species glimpsed from the Cave of Wonders at Cydonia. Their dress ran the colorful gamut from full traditional formal to almost nude; complete nakedness was still frowned upon in most social circles in all but small and informal gatherings, but donning nothing but footwear, suitably fashionable technological accessories, and skin dyes or tattoos was customary for larger parties, if still mildly daring.
The creature confronting her now was a case in point. He was clad in the new technorganic-look, half hardware appliqué, half dyetooed skin. He wore a visible pinger on his right shoulder which was pulsing orange light at the moment, an indicator that he was interested in sexual diversions of any kind. Orange dyettooes covered half his body in what looked like Sanskrit characters, including his genitals—just to make sure that everyone knew he was available for play.
Kaitlin preferred the old days, when there’d always been a hint of mystery, even suspense, with any new and casual meeting.
The times, the culture, were simply changing too damned fast.
“Blue stellar!” the dyed apparition said. “You’re Colonel Kaitlin Garroway, First Marine Space Force! Your pat was Sands of Mars Garroway, your—”
“I do know who I am,” she said, a bit more sharply than she’d intended. She still couldn’t get used to the new habit people had of announcing themselves by announcing you…an ostentatiously irritating means, basically, of proving they had a good Farley program running in their PAD assistants.
“Tek! Been progged to ’face with ya, Colonel. Saw you on the list when I dunelled it and nearly maxed.”
Kaitlin blinked. She had the general idea that the kid—he couldn’t have been older than his early twenties—was glad to see her, but she still wasn’t sure why. He had a decided technological edge on her. He was wearing some pretty sharp-edged tech, including a partial sensory helmet—it covered only the left side of his head, leaving the primitive right half free and “natural”—with a flip-aside monocular for his data HUD. He was probably tapping all the data on her that he could find at this moment, while she had nothing to query but the AI secretary resident in her PAD. She was damned if she would let herself appear interested, though, by opening her personal access device just to electronically query the local net server for a Farley on this guy’s name, background, and interests.
“And you are?” she asked, her voice cool.
“Oh, vid. Handle’s Hardcore. Wanted to link with ya on some prime throughput. Like what the milboys are runnin’ landing on Jupiter. I run, like, the Masters might get the wrong feed, c’nect?”
Kaitlin was abruptly conscious of just how many people in the room around her were wearing sensory communications gear of some sort, from appliqués like Hardcore’s to full helmets with darkened visors and internal HUD displays. Resident AIs with the appropriate dialect and slang interpreters made talking cross-culture a lot easier than trying it null-teched.
“To begin with,” she said slowly, trying to sort her way through the tangle of techculture slang, “the Marines aren’t landing on Jupiter. A Marine Space Expeditionary Unit is deploying to Europa. That’s one of Jupiter’s moons. As for the Masters…I suppose you mean one or another of the A-Squared cultures?”
“Absopos, cybe! Like, I run the An made us what we are, linkme? And, like, I run they might not log our peaceful nature with the mils goosestepping into their domain.”
A-Squareds. Thank the newsies for that bit of cuteness, meaning Ancient Aliens. There were two known, now, and a third inferred, thanks to xenoarcheological digs on Mars, the Moon, and even, lately, on Earth, now that the diggers knew what to look for. The Builders had left the enigmatic structures and fragments on Mars half a million years ago, and presumably had tinkered with human genetics at the same time, creating archaic Homo sapiens from the earlier populations of Homo erectus. The An had been something else entirely, a nonhuman spacefaring species that had enslaved a fair-sized fraction of humanity ten thousand years ago, and left their imprint in human myth, legend, and architecture across the Fertile Crescent, in parts of Africa, and in both South and Central America before being annihilated by the presumptive third Ancient Alien culture, the Hunters of the Dawn.
“The Builders have been extinct for half a million years,” she told Hardcore. “The An appear to have been wiped out ten thousand years ago. If the Hunters of the Dawn are still out there, we haven’t seen any sign of them. I can’t see that any of them would mind us going to Europa. And the Marines are going there to protect American interests.” As always. First to fight. Too often, the first to die.
“But that runs totally null, cybe. Like, they upgraded us, so we have to be jacked in
tight and one-worlding it when they return….”
Kaitlin at last was beginning to take the kid’s measure. An Ancient Astronut.
There were literally hundreds of new cults and religions about, spawned by the recent discoveries elsewhere in the Solar System that were continuing the ongoing process of displacement for humankind’s place in the universe begun by Copernicus so long before. The Builders had tinkered with human DNA, and a few civilized members of that new species had died on Mars when the facilities there had been attacked by unknown enemies. The An had established bases on the Moon and colonies on Earth, enslaving large numbers of humans to help raise their monumental and still enigmatic structures at Giza, Baalbek, Titicaca, and elsewhere, before infalling asteroids deliberately aimed by another unknown enemy had wiped most of the An centers away in storms of flame and flood. Twice, it appeared, humans had narrowly escaped the fates of more advanced, alien patron races.
So much was known now, a revelation at least as stunning as the knowledge that humankind predated Bishop Usher’s date of special creation in 4004 BC. But so much was still unknown, and in the mystery, in the undiscovered, there was plenty of room for speculation…and for radical new forms of faith. From the sound of it, Hardcore was a member of one of the new denominations that actually gloried in the knowledge that humanity had once been engineered as slaves. It certainly made the question of existence simple: Humankind was here to serve the Masters. Obviously, the Masters weren’t about right now, but when They returned, they would expect an accounting of their faithful servants for the world they’d left in the servants’ care.
Kaitlin wondered what Hardcore would do if she posed as a member of one of the other cults and political spin-off groups—a Humanity Firster, say, who’d vowed to venture forth to the stars and eradicate the alien scum who’d once tried to enslave Mankind, and failed.
She decided that the Senator would probably prefer that she keep a low profile. In any case, members of the U.S. Armed Forces weren’t allowed to express political or religious opinions of any kind while in uniform.
“I can’t share your view of the aliens,” she told him, blunt, but as diplomatically as possible. “We do know that there might be…people out there we’re going to want to protect ourselves from. Isn’t it reasonable to want to find out all we can about them, as far from Earth as we can manage?”
“Hey, I can’t ’face with that, cybe. I mean, we can’t run different than our progamming, right? And we were made to serve the Masters.”
A tiny chirp in her left ear told her that her pinger had just detected one of the people on her tell-me list. “Who?” she subvocalized.
“Dr. Jack Ramsey,” her earpiece’s voice whispered. “He has just entered the palace of Illusion.”
“Thank God.”
“Sorry?” Hardcore said, puzzled. “I don’t ’face ya.”
“And a good thing it is, too,” she told him. “I’ve got to go. I’m meeting a friend.”
“But, like, we gotta ’face on the issue, cybe. Don’t log me off!”
“Please. Excuse me.” She turned and started to walk away. “Which way to Jack Ramsey?” she asked her pinger.
“Five degrees left, now sixteen-point-one meters, closing…”
“Like, we should clear this.” He was following her, matching her stride for stride.
“Hardcore!” another voice said. “Hey, you found her!”
“Found but not downed. She won’t ’face, Slick-Cybe.”
The newcomer was more conventionally dressed in a two-tone green tunic with a stiff, tight collar, but he sported many of the same technical accouterments Hardcore wore. He stepped in front of her, blocking her way. “Hey, Colonel. My des is Slick. We were hoping you’d give us a few moments of your time.”
“Who is ‘we’?” she demanded. She was losing patience with this crew.
“C’mon in,” the newcomer said, grinning…obviously speaking for someone else’s benefit. Kaitlin saw with alarm that several people were detaching themselves from various parts of the crowd around her and walking her way.
Ambush…
She couldn’t help but think of it in military terms. They’d pinpointed her location with a scout, called in a blocking force, and now the main body was closing in.
And, damn it, she couldn’t run in heels. She would have to stand and fight it out.
Their dress ran from Hardcore’s stylish nudity to an elaborate Elizabethan ball gown that looked heavier than the man wearing it. One woman had her head shaved, wore golden, slit-pupiled contacts, and had dyetooed her entire body in a green scale pattern that gave her a vague resemblance to an oversized and rather too mammalian-looking An.
The oldest of them was conservatively dressed and appeared to be in his late thirties.
“Colonel Garroway!” that man said. “I’m Pastor Swenson, of the Unified Church of the Masters. I was hoping to run into you this evening!”
“You must excuse me,” she told him. “There’s someone I have to meet.” She wished she was wearing a comlink right now, or at least a full-link-capable pinger. It would have been nice to punch in Jack’s ID right now and call for help.
“This will only take a moment, please! We’re afraid that the U.S. government and the CWS Planning Committee are making a serious mistake, one that could have the most serious repercussions for our entire species!”
“If they are, there’s not a damned thing I can do about it, Pastor. I’m just a soldier, not a politician or a government planner.”
“But the young men and women who are going to Jupiter are under your command, after all. You must have some say in how they’re being used. And the news media would listen to your opinions. We believe these are extraordinarily critical and dangerous times, you see, and we—”
“As I told this gentleman, Pastor,” she said, nodding at Hardcore, “I don’t agree with your opinions about extraterrestrials. I certainly don’t believe that something that happened thousands of years ago to tribes of primitives living thousands of kilometers from here requires us to somehow surrender our minds and integrity and will.’
“Ah, well, Colonel,” Swenson said with an ingratiating smile, “you must accept that the Bible tells us about these things, that it told us a long time ago! Signs and wonders in the heavens, and blood upon the Moon! You fought a battle on the Moon, Colonel! You know that the prophecy is being fulfilled right here in our lifetimes! Prophecy written down two thousand years ago, telling us that—”
“Telling us nothing, Pastor, except that some people have either a remarkable imagination or an astonishing will to believe.”
Slick reached out and took her arm. “You mustn’t say things like that, Colonel! We’ve formed a kind of delegation, if you like, to—”
Reaching down with her left hand, she grasped his hand, her thumb finding the nerve plexus at the base of his thumb. As she turned his hand back and over, his face went white and he started to sag at the knees.
“Don’t ever do that,” she told him pleasantly. “And get out of my way, now, or I’ll turn something else numb…permanently.”
“Are you having any trouble, Colonel?” a familiar voice asked. Jack Ramsey walked over to the group, a man in his early forties in civvies, a red and black close-collar smartsuit.
“I don’t know,” she said. She looked at Slick. “Am I having any trouble with you?”
Slick shook his head in a vigorous ‘no.’ She increased the pressure slightly, and he gasped and dropped to his knees.
“Good,” she said, smiling. She released him. “How about you, Hardcore?”
“I…ah…was just gonna go ’face with the food table. ’Scuze.” He bobbed his head and vanished into the crowd, followed closely by his friend. The others—Swenson, the scaled woman—all drifted off into the crowd.
“And what was that all about?” Jack asked her.
“Astronuts,” she replied. “Don’t like the idea of us Neanderthal military types making First
Contact.”
He made a face. “I’ve heard that one before. This particular bunch thinks the An gene-engineered Moses, the Buddha, and Jesus Christ as special avatars in order to civilize us. They say they’re waiting for proof that we’ve given up our savage, warlike ways before letting us join them in heaven.”
“How do you know all this?”
He tapped the left arm of his smartsuit, where stylish threads of gold and silver were worked into the black synthetic fabric like a tiny map of an overgrown inner city. The suit was one of the later models, with over fifty gig of access and automatic comlink to any local node or net server. When she looked more closely into his eyes, she saw they were a bit greener than usual; he was wearing contact displays. “They’ve been dropping electronic tracts on anyone they can get an eddress for.”
“Try that again with me and I’ll drop something on them. Why the hell are they here?”
“Swenson is a minor celebrity. On all of the talk shows and media interviews he can swing. I guess the others are part of his entourage.”
“Well, thanks for coming to my rescue.”
“You didn’t look like you needed rescuing.”
“Oh, but I did.” She grinned. “When you arrived, I was in the process of chewing my leg off at the ankle.”
“And such a lovely ankle, at that. I’m glad. How’s the general? And your kids?”
“Rob’s still at Quantico, and I wish I were there with him instead of playing socialite and sometime target for religious activists. Rob Junior’s had his first assignment off-world. Peaceforcer duty. And Kam and Alan are growing up too fast and I don’t get to see them enough by half. You know, I honestly think they’re going to go through life thinking that their cissie is their mother, not me.”
“It’s tough, I know. You thinking about getting out?”
“Who told you that?”
“It’s been around. If you don’t want to say—”
“Oh, it’s no secret. I haven’t decided, but it’s damned tempting. It would be nice to have a life again. Get to see my family.”