Semper Human

by Ian Douglas

  Garroway stared at the black mass, which was oozing now into a slightly different shape. Did it have a native shape, or was it more of a crust-locked amoeba? He couldn’t tell. Were those branches manipulative members of some sort, or sensory organs, or something else entirely? Again, he couldn’t tell. “How can you trust them if you don’t even know what they call themselves?”

  “The point is, General, they don’t want our kind of real estate. We have almost nothing in common with them. It’s far, far easier to terraform an outer dwarf planet like Eris or Sedna than it is to cool down a planet like Venus and give it a reasonable surface pressure, an atmosphere we could breathe. So they live on Venus, the Eulers live in Eris—they even have a small colony now in Tongue-of-the-Ocean, on Earth—and we’re scarcely aware of their activities. No borders. What would be the point?”

  “Security. But I see what you mean about war being out of date,” he told her.

  He wasn’t convinced that that could be true, however. Garroway tended to have a pessimistic view of human nature, one forged within a long career as a combat Marine and, as a general officer with dealing with politicians. In his opinion, Humankind could no more give up war than he could give up the ability to think.

  “A war with the Eulers or the Vulcans is almost literally unthinkable,” she told him. “But the Xul aren’t competing for resources. They simply want us dead.”

  “Of course. We’ve triggered their xenophobic reflex.”

  “Exactly, sir. If the containment strategy isn’t working…and if they’re becoming more aware of us, well, we need you and your people, General. Like never before.”

  As she spoke, Garroway was scanning through more of the download background and history. Civilians, including humans, had been attacked by locals in a gas giant called Dac IV. Anchor Marines had been sent in—the 340th Marine Strike Squadron. The situation was still unresolved, but it must be desperate. A request for a Globe Marine detachment had also been logged.

  “What in hell,” he said slowly, “is an ‘Anchor Marine?’”

  “Marines who stay with the time stream,” she told him. “Like me.”

  “And I’m a ‘Globe Marine?’”

  “Yes, sir. Our reserves in cybe-hibe.”

  “Who thought up that nonsense?”

  “Sir?”

  “Marines are Marines, Captain. I don’t like this idea of two different sets of background, experience, or training.”

  Here was another problem. Two months ago, a star lord at a place, an artificial habitat called Kaleed, had run into something he couldn’t handle, and requested Marines. No Anchor Marines had been available, and so the Lords of the Associative had decided to awaken a division of Globe Marines.

  Apparently the third Marine Division was to be held on stand-by as the Lords monitored the situation.

  “It was necessary, General,” Schilling explained. “Globe Marines need cultural liaisons, other Marines who are, well, anchored in the current background culture. Otherwise you’d be lost. There have been a lot of changes in both cultural norms and in technology since your day.”

  “You’re making me feel positively ancient, Captain.”

  But he understood the issue. When he’d last been active, over eight centuries ago, there’d already been a sharply drawn dichotomy between Marines and the civilian population they protected. Neither group understood the other. Neither could socialize well with the other. Neither could speak the other’s language. No wonder most Marines tended to find both family partners and sexual liaisons among others in the Corps. Marines might visit the local hot spots and brothels for a quick bit of fun, but longer and more solid relationships required a degree of mutual understanding with civilians that had become harder and harder to come by.

  And it wasn’t just that Marines got into trouble with the locals on liberty. The politicians who requested Fleet Marines to put down an insurrection or show the fist to a local warlord didn’t understand them either. And that was where the problems really started chewing up the machinery.

  “Okay,” Garroway said after a moment. “I understand all of that. We need babysitters. But why does the government need us at all if they have you?”

  “We’re a caretaker force, sir, nothing more. The administrators. The personnel officers and logistics staff who make sure there is a Corps for you to wake up to.”

  “But I see something here about Anchor combat units….”

  “Yes, sir. We have combat units, but they’re more placeholders than anything else. You are the real Fleet Marine Force.”

  Garroway considered this. The Globe and Anchor was one of the oldest and most sacred talismans of the Corps, a symbol going back to the Royal Marines, who were the predecessors of America’s Continental Marines of 1775. It was an amusing idea, he decided, using globe and anchor to identify two different kinds of Marine…but the concept behind it disturbed him. Throughout the history of the Corps he knew, every Marine had known a single brotherhood, the Corps, each man and woman undergoing the same training, with the same traditions, the same language, the same background.

  He found himself wondering if Captain Schilling was a real Marine, or something else—an imitation, a temporary stand-in for the real thing.

  For centuries, Marine culture had been a distinct and self-contained entity in its own right. If cultural drift over the centuries had made the old Marines alien to the rest of Humankind, wouldn’t that alienness extend to these caretaker Marines as well?

  “Every Marine is a rifleman, Captain,” he said.

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “Did you download that in training? I hope to hell you did, because if you didn’t the Corps has changed out of all recognition.”

  “I don’t understand the word ‘rifleman,’ sir. Give me a second…oh.”

  “The rifle is the Marine’s primary weapon, Captain. I don’t care what you use nowadays, the principle is the same. As for the expression, it’s old. Pre-spaceflight, I think. Every Marine is a combat infantryman first, a rifleman, and whatever else—cook, personnel clerk, aviator, storekeeper, computer programmer, general—second.”

  “Today we say, ‘every Marine is a weapons sysop first.’”

  “Somehow, Captain, that just doesn’t have the same ring.”

  Garroway continued to scan lightly through a flood of downloads. He was starting to get the hang of the new implant as he used it. It was responsive and powerful, and he was beginning to get the idea that he hadn’t even begun yet to glimpse its full potential.

  Here was another one, from a world called Gleidatramoro, a kind of trading center and interstellar marketplace in toward the Galactic Core frequented by several hundred races. It was, he noted, another artificial world, like Kaleed. Didn’t people live on planets anymore? A human mob had formed in Gleidat’s capital city and attacked…that was interesting. They’d attacked a number of s-Humans, whatever those were, then gone on to dismember several hundred AIvatars. Cross-connecting on the unfamiliar terminology, he learned that s-Humans were a superintelligent genegineered species of human, while an AIvatar was the human, humanoid, or digital vehicle for an advanced artificial consciousness.

  How, he wondered, was that different from a robot?

  The riot on Gleidatramoro had spread when several non-human species had intervened on behalf of the AIvatars. Several thousand individuals of various species, human, non-human, superhuman, and artificially sentient, had been killed, many of them irretrievably. The humans currently were bottled up within the capital city in a bloody stand-off, and both they and the non-humans were calling for help.

  Again, Anchor Marines had been sent in to regain control. The situation on Gleidatramoro was still fluid.

  And here was an invasion of Propanadnid space by a human warlord named Castillan, who’d launched his armada under the ringing battle cry of “death to the Proppies!” And another, a terrorist attack on an asteroid defense system in the Sycladu system, an attack with, as yet, no known
motive. And still another, an attempt by the human population of Gharst to unplug several million t-Humans…the Homo telae of the local Net. So much for human sensibilities opposed to electronic genocide.

  The list went on…and on, and on, hundreds of incidents during the past thirty days alone. There were far too many, scattered across far too large a volume of space and among far too many worlds, for a single Marine division to have a chance of coping with them all.

  The total number of violent clashes and incidents—some nineteen hundred during the past month, according to the latest tally—was utterly trivial compared to the tens of billions of populated worlds and habitats that made up the Associative. On the other hand, there’d been nine hundred such incidents reported the previous month, and four hundred the month before that. There appeared to be a kind of background noise count of violent encounters, of riots, revolutions, and bullying neighbors, but overall the numbers had been low, perhaps two hundred a month, an indication, Garroway thought, that this Associative might have it on the ball so far as galactic governments were concerned. Lately, though, there’d been a sharp increase in the numbers, and so far there was no sign that the trend had peaked.

  “Almost twenty thousand of these incidents,” he told her. “That’s more than the number of men, women, and AIs in my division. What are the Marines supposed to do about it? We can’t invade all these worlds. And we can’t protect billions of planets that haven’t been hit.”

  “No. But you can investigate this….”

  A virtual world enveloped Garroway, emerging from his new implant. In an instant, he was surrounded by deep space, within a blazing shell of brilliant stars.

  There were millions of them, most red or orange in hue, which contributed to an overall red and somber background. Ahead, bathing nearby gas clouds in searing, arc-harsh blue radiance, was the Core Detonation.

  “The Galactic Core,” Garroway said, whispering. “The center of the Galaxy.”

  “We did do a number on it, didn’t we?”

  She almost sounded proud.

  Marine Assault Carrier Night’s Edge

  Synchronous Orbit, Dac IV

  Star System 1727459

  1914 hours, GMT

  Lieutenant Garwe snapped back to consciousness, bathed in sweat, his breath coming in short, savage gasps. He was falling…falling into the Abyss….

  No, not falling. He was on his back in a linkcouch, the overhead softly glowing. Lieutenant Amendes leaned over him, a hand on his shoulder. “Easy does it, Gar. You’re safe.”

  “The squadron—”

  “It’s okay, Gar,” she told him. “You’re out of there.”

  He sat up slowly, head spinning. Amendes reached up and removed the brow circlet that had linked Garwe to the Starwraith battlepod through its on-board AI. It took him a moment to readjust after the sharp transition, to remember where he was.

  The carrier, yeah. The Night’s Edge.

  The compartment was circular and domed, with a close-spaced semicircle of twelve linkcouches, half of them still occupied by other members of the squadron. At the far side of the compartment was the main console, just beneath the glowing arc of a holofield.

  “Won’t be long now,” Lieutenant Cocero said from the console. He was watching over a Marine technician’s shoulder. “The Skipper’s down. So’s Pal.”

  Major Lasenbe, the squadron’s Wing Commander, punched his fist into his open palm. “Damn!”

  On a linkcouch nearby, Captain Xander sat up abruptly as though coming wide awake out of a bad dream, her fists clenched. “No, no, no! Shit!”

  “The gasbags are overrunning the compound now,” the Marine tech reported from the console. “They’re in among the buildings now, killing the off-worlders.”

  Garwe slid out of his linkcouch, fighting against the shaking weakness in his legs. Above the console, within the holofield’s glowing depths, Garwe could see a terrified face—the high brow, dark skin, and contrasting golden eyes of a supie. A data block beside the image identified her as Vasek Trolischet, the xenosoph who, unlike the Marines of the 340th, was physically in the gas giant, and unable to escape. The sound was muted, too low for Garwe to hear what she was saying, but from the look on her face, she was terrified.

  Abruptly, the holofield filled with static, and Trolischet’s fear-distorted features blinked out.

  “We’ve lost contact with the Hassetas base, sir,” the technician reported.

  Two more of the Blue Flight Marines emerged from their artificial comas, blinking in the soft lighting. On a viewall on the far side of the compartment, the disk of Dac, vast and striped in hues of brown, salmon, and pale cream flowed in banded serenity, the violence in its depths masked by the giant’s scale.

  Major Lasenbe stood behind the technician, hands now at the small of his back. “A cluster fuck, Captain,” he told Xander without looking at her. “A Class-one cluster fuck.”

  Xander rolled off the couch and came to attention, though she still looked drawn and pale, and seemed to be having difficulty suppressing a tendency to tremble. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’m…sorry, sir.”

  Lasenbe turned. “At ease, Captain. I’m not chewing you out. They should have sent you in with the pick-up ship, not fifteen minutes ahead of it. Maybe those poor devils would’ve had a chance, then.”

  “Is the transport still going in, Major?” Xander asked. “We could reinsert—”

  “No point. The gas bags are wiping out the compound as we speak.”

  It would take an hour or more to get back down to Hassetas. By then it would be too late.

  “God damn it,” Xander said, slumping, her fists clenched.

  Garwe was trembling as well, part of the after-effect of a particularly close linkride. Starwraith battle pods actually did serve as combat suits for living Marines, but it was also possible to link with them from the safety of a remote location, so long as non-local communications elements eliminated any speed-of-light time lag. The Marine Carrier Night’s Edge was in synchronous orbit for Dac, just over 180,000 kilometers out, an orbit that perfectly matched the planet’s rotational period of eleven hours, or, rather, which matched the period of Hassetas, since the different cloud belts circled the gas giant at different rates. Any closer, and the ship’s orbit would have carried her past the target and over the horizon, blocking the sensory and control feed signals transmitted from ship to pods and back. The time delay at that distance for conventional EM transmissions would have been impossible, six-tenths of a second for remote sensory signals to travel from pod to Marine, and another six-tenths of a second for the Marine’s responses to travel back down to the pod. Both the pods and the carrier, however, were equipped with quantum-coupled comm units, QCC technology that operated instantaneously, with no time lag. Without instantaneous transmission times, the Marines would have been bumping into things—or aiming at targets that had already moved on. Even at that, Garwe’s pod had felt…sluggish, not quite in synch with his mind. The effect hadn’t been much, but he felt that it had affected his combat performance.

  “Sir, with respect,” he said.

  “Who are you?” Lasenbe demanded.

  “Sir! Lieutenant Garwe, Blue Seven. It might’ve been better if we’d gone in physically. I felt slow down there, like there was a time lag.”

  “Nonsense. There was no lag. Besides, if you’d deployed physically, Lieutenant, you would now be dead. Your pod crushed and burned…” He paused, checking data pulled down through his implant. “Three minutes ago.”

  “But if we’d been able to pull back and engage the enemy in the air, instead of trying to protect those buildings—”

  “You did what you were ordered to do, Lieutenant. Hammet!”

  “Sir!” the technician snapped.

  “How many Marines are still e-deployed?”

  “Three, sir. Namura, Rad—”

  “Yank ’em out. We can’t do anything more down there.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

&n
bsp; Lasenbe was pointedly ignoring Garwe now, giving orders for the withdrawal of the rest of the squadron. On the couches at his back, the other Marines were beginning to revive, their links with the battlepods 180,000 kilometers below severed.

  “What the hell was that chemical they were hitting us with?” Palin wanted to know. “Some kind of acid….”

  “Fluoroantimonic acid,” Hammet said. “We got a full read-out on the chemical composition up here.”

  “Fluoro—what?” Misek Bollan asked.

  “A mixture of hydrogen fluoride, HF, and antimony pentafluoride, SbF5,” Xander said, with the air of someone perfectly at ease with ungainly chemical formulae. “Nasty stuff. One of the strongest acids known.”

  “Roughly 2 ´ 1019 times stronger than one hundred percent sulfuric acid,” Hammet added. “No wonder it was eating through your internal circuitry.”

  “Since when did you become a chemist, Skipper?” Wahrst asked. She was grinning.

  “Since before I became a Marine,” Xander replied. “What I want to know is…how were those gas bags delivering the stuff? It protonates organic compounds, eats right through them. Why didn’t it dissolve the gas bags?”

  “They’re supposed to have some kind of natural delivery system, aren’t they?” Mortin said.

  “Right. A natural delivery system, which means made out of the local equivalent of organics, proteins, bone, cartilage, that sort of thing. When we handled HSbF6 in the lab, we needed either Teflon or field-shielded containers. It even eats through glass.”

  “They must’ve had help,” Garwe said. “Some source of technology from the outside. But then, they were using electron beam weapons, too, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, they were,” Xander said. “Someone has been running relatively high-tech weaponry to the locals. I wonder who?”

  “Or why?” Palin put in. “What do the gas bags have that they could trade off-world for weapons?”