by Ian Douglas
“The Xul might not have been there when that happened.”
“Maybe. We don’t know. That’s the problem, Tavia. We don’t know. We need a recon force to go in and find out what’s happening…and if the Xul are in there, we need to shut them down. Permanently. And we sure as hell can’t wait for a star we bump off-course to crawl across three light years and hope the enemy is still there and vulnerable when it gets there!”
“A recon force. Your Marines.”
“The Marines, yes.”
“And not our own Marines?”
“They’re not the same.”
“I find this fascination you have with the ancients disturbing. They’re primitives.”
“They’re well trained. They’re a cohesive unit, a family, really. They’re dedicated and utterly professional. And when given a mission they will find a way to carry it out, or die trying.”
“I fear you are throwing their lives away for nothing. They’d serve us better being interviewed for the historical archives.”
“I believe, Tavia, that there’s a threat in there, at the center of our Galaxy. And the only way to find out for sure is to send some people, some good people, in there to look around and find out. Can you argue with that?”
“N-no.” For the first time, she sounded uncertain.
“If there’s nothing to be afraid of in there, we’ll find out. If there is a threat…isn’t it better to know about it? Rather than hiding and hoping it goes away?”
“Of course.”
“Then why do you, why do they resist the obvious solution?”
She hesitated before answering. “Perhaps they, the other Star Lords, fear the solution more than the threat. If these ancient Marines are half as good as their legends claim for them, perhaps that fear is justified.”
And Star Lord Garrick Rame could not find an answer to that.
7
2301.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
0539 hours, GMT
“Now reveille, reveille, reveille! All hands on deck!” Marine Master Sergeant Nal il-En Shru-dech strode around the berthing compartment, a maniacal grin on his face. Like most Enduri, his skin was a deep and swarthy olive, his hair glossy black. His bellow rang off the bulkheads. “Drop your cocks, grab your socks, and fall the fuck in! It’s a brand-new day in the Corps! Hell, it’s a brand new millennium in the Corps, and we’re gonna chew us off a piece of it! Let’s move! Move! Move!”
And the Marines of Company H, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines, the 2/9 of 3 MarDiv, were moving, though slowly, as they clambered out of their cybe-hibe enclosures. Naked and dripping, they shuffled across the deck toward the showers, leaving fast-evaporating puddles of nanogel on the deck. Navy corpsmen moved among the enclosures, checking read-outs and helping those Marines too weak to stand. The gel of molecule-sized machines that had suffused their bodies in cybe-hibe had, in theory, maintained cellular reproduction and metabolism, inhibiting a few biological functions such as hair and nail growth, while removing wastes and keeping muscle tissue and organs in perfect working order. In theory, at least, a healthy Marine should be able to leap straight out of his coffin and pull a thirty-kilometer hike, but the fact was far short of the ideal. Quite possibly, Nal thought, the weakness, the shaky knees, the shortness of breath, the nausea all were purely psychological aftereffects of the long sleep.
The important thing was not to give the men and women of his company time to think about it.
“Hey, Master Sergeant!” Corporal Donovan called out. She reached her arms above her head, stretching hard, skin gleaming in the compartment lighting. “How long were we out?”
“It’s been 852 years, sunshine. That’s enough rack time to last you until the next Millennium!”
“How many deaders, Master Sergeant?” Private Colby asked.
Nal hesitated. Back in the old days, a Marine could wake up in his coffin and find the decayed ruin of a best buddy in the coffin next to his, especially on board one of the old sublight transports that spent years crawling between stars. Corps legend had it that enlisted Marines ran pools guessing how many would survive an interstellar run, and how many would not.
Nowadays, of course, and especially at a Marine holding facility, C-H casualties were low, typically less than a half of one percent. Any Marines who died midway through the sleep were removed once revivification efforts had failed, and even most of those could be brought back. Nanomedical procedures were good enough now that even Marines who died in combat could usually be brought back, so long as their bodies hadn’t been “smoked,” turned to vapor, and their brains were more or less intact. The trickiest ones were those who remained in stasis until the revival process had begun, then started to slip away even while doctors, corpsmen, and medical AIs were trying to pull them back. The standing joke held that not even dying could get you out of the Corps before the Corps was through with you.
“We lost two, Colby,” he replied at last. “Morris and Plesak. A long time ago.”
“Shit. Did they bring them back?”
“One of them. Morris.”
According to the records, Morris’ vitals had gone flat seven hundred ninety years before, just six decades after the platoon had entered cybe-hibe. The support-facility techs had pulled her out and she’d been revived—barely. She’d chosen to accept a discharge rather than re-enter the cybe-hibe tubes, her right since accepting tube-time was strictly voluntary. Nal couldn’t blame her. Evidently she’d successfully reintegrated into civilian life, married two men and another woman, and died on Luna in 1712 of the Corps Era.
Vek Plesak hadn’t been as lucky. His tube had malfunctioned just thirty-one years ago, and all revival efforts had failed.
Nal remembered both of them, good Marines, sharp, focused, and squared away.
And both were long dead.
Nal felt a small tug of loneliness at that thought. Marines who’d volunteered for the cybe-hibe reserve program, in a very real sense, were adrift in time, more connected to fellow Marines than to the civilian culture that supported them. The thought that young Kethi Morris was gone, dead of old age after a long life over five centuries ago, simply didn’t feel real.
“I’m glad Morris made it, at least,” Corporal Devrochik said. “She was real.”
“Real,” in Corps slang, meant solid, practical, in tune with herself and the Corps. A Marine’s Marine, unlike the civilian “virties” who lived much of their life in virtual reality, and who seemed to have trouble telling the difference between the two.
Nal didn’t like thinking about it. “C’mon, enough jabbering. Into the showers, then into your grays!”
“Yah, I can’t find my way to the showers!” Private Mallen said, miming blindness, his hands outstretched. “They took my fucking implants!”
“Since when did you need implants for fucking, Mallen?” Donovan demanded.
“Oh, he needs all the help he can get for fucking,” Sergeant Cori Ryack said as she followed Mallen into the shower deck, laughing. “It’s fucking up that comes natural for him!”
“Ow, target acquired!” Sergeant Ferris cried. “Target lock! Target destroyed!”
“Hey, Master Sergeant,” Private Garcia called. “Who are we fighting, anyway?”
“Yeah,” Private Coswell added. “Why’d they wake us? Sergeant Ryack definitely needed her beauty sleep!”
“You’ll get all that in your post-cybe briefing, Marines,” Nal told them. He didn’t tell them what he already knew. The Xul were back. The Xul would be the enemy. It would be better to let the brass brief them by the book, rather than fueling speculation and scuttlebutt. But gods! The Xul…
“Fuck it,” Private Brisard said. “It must be big, or they wouldn’t have called for the best!”
“Yeah?” Devrochik said. “Can’t imagine why they woke you up, then!”
“Fuck you, Chickie!”
The banter continued as the thi
rty-eight surviving Marines of H Company cycled through the shower deck, emerging with the last of the dissolving nano gel rinsed away. As each stepped past a uniform dispenser, he or she took a thumb-sized wad marked “utilities, basic, gray” and slapped it hard against skin, just below the hollow of the throat. Shock and body heat activated the garment, which rapidly spread skin-tight over the entire body save for head, neck, and hands. The garments were current Corps issue work clothing, providing temperature control, sweat absorption, skin protection, voice communications, and they were even smart enough to open and seal on command when the wearer needed to use the toilet. They could also provide vid and computer interface capabilities on the sleeves; for the moment, as Mallen had just pointed out, the men and women of the Ninth Marine Regiment were working without their cerebral implants, a condition guaranteed to make the toughest of them feel vulnerable and somewhat lost.
Still it was better to let them acclimate gradually to this new era, rather than have them inundated by an alien world. They’d be issued their upgraded internal hardware in a day or two, after they’d had a chance to take in some of what had happened, what had changed in eight centuries, through their Mark I Mod 0 brains.
Nal continued to listen to the gripes, complaints, and banter as the Marines got dressed and began making their unsteady way to the mess hall. All things considered, his people sounded as though they were in pretty fair shape. It was, he thought, proof that the Marine Corps really did serve as its own family. To awaken eight centuries in the future alone, with every person you’d ever known, every social convention you’d ever embraced long dead and gone, would have been grimly, coldly unthinkable.
Nal knew that particular feeling well. He’d been born dumu-gir, one of the Free Peoples of the world he’d called Enduru, and which the Un-ki, the men of Earth, called Ishtar. His remote ancestors had been abducted from Earth by the alien An sometime in the seventh or eighth millennia B.C.E. and taken to Enduru, the earthlike moon of a super-Jovian gas giant in the nearby star system called Lalande 21185. With the collapse of the interstellar An empire beneath the Xul assault, Enduru/Ishtar had been overlooked and forgotten, a tiny, backward enclave of the An and their human slaves surviving with primitive, almost subsistence-level technology until the arrival of the Un-ki—and the nir-gál-mè-a who’d beaten the An and set the gir, the People, free.
Nir-gál-mè-a was the Enduri name for the United States Marines who’d defeated the An hordes. In Emi-gi, the People’s Tongue, it meant, roughly, “Respected in Battle.” Ever since, Marines, especially Marines who’d been stationed on Ishtar, had used the term “Nergie,” “Nergal” or, more formally, “Nergal May-I” as a nom d’guerre, a badge of honor much like the far more ancient “devil dogs” and “leathernecks.”
Until the arrival of the Marines, in Year 373 of the Corps, the gir had worshipped the An as digir, as gods, a condition that had been both religion and the only conceivable way of life since the first gir had been shipped to Enduru from the ancient An colony at Sumer. The Nergals had proven once and for all that the scaled, golden-eyed beings called An or Ahannu were not gods at all. Not humans, of course…but not gods. Perhaps inevitably, the nir-gál-mè-a had themselves taken on something of a godlike aura to the newly liberated humans native to Enduru. The newly created dumu-gir state had become a protectorate of the then-United States of America. It had acquired complete independence over a thousand years ago, but by tradition and law, its native human peoples could still petition to join the Corps.
It had been over one hundred five thousand Enduri cycles—better than eighteen hundred standard years—since the Battle of Ishtar. In that time, tens of thousands of dumu-gir men and women had volunteered to serve, first with the United States Marines, later with the Commonwealth Marines, and now, it seemed, with the Galactic Associative Marines. Nal il-En Shru-dech was just the latest in a long, long line of Marines from his world to join the military elite of Kia, Earth.
He still, at times, missed the red and orange jungles encircling Vaj, the e-duru of his birth, with the brooding glow of Igi-digir—the Face of God—suspended eternally above the jagged, volcanic peaks of the Ahtun Mountains in the West. But he’d left home and family twenty-three standard years ago…or, rather, twenty-three years that he could actually remember.
Add to that the eight hundred fifty years he’d lain unconscious in his C-H coffin.
Vaj was technically a village, but in fact had been more of an extended community based on family lines and relationships. The Vaj he’d known must be long, long gone by now, or so changed as to be vanished in all but name. The Corps was Nal’s e-duru now, more than ever.
“Let’s go, Marines!” he bellowed. “Every meal in the Corps a banquet! And this is our first chow in eight hundred fifty years, so even n-rats will be food of the gods! Fall in for chow!”
Lord Rame Residence
Earthring, Sol System
2112 hours, GMT
Lord Garrick Rame lived in Earthring Four, Green Sector, which was almost halfway around the vast arc from SupraSingapore, just a few thousand kilometers spinward from SupraQuito, an inertialess magtube ride of seven and a half billion kilometers and nearly nine hours.
He could have taken an express shuttle, of course, cutting directly across a chord of the Rings from point to point, skimming just above Earth’s atmosphere en route and making the transit in under an hour, but he preferred public transportation and the feeling, however illusory it might be, of being a part of the population he claimed to represent. Tavia and the other lords he worked with day to day found the affectation…quaint, and, perhaps, a bit amusing.
The magtube whisked and deposited him within a kilometer of his hab. Abandoning the slidewalks in favor of a brisk walk, he entered the broad, open compound reserved for government officials and wealthy corporate personnel, passing beneath the silent, mental gaze of an AI socon guardian before stepping onto the outer deck of his hab moments later.
Brea Marr was in the garden grotto, nude except for work gloves; with most humans living in climate-controlled habs such as the Earthring structures at Geosynch, clothing now served almost solely as adornment and as an indicator of social status rather than for simple concealment. Modesty taboos had evaporated long ago; still, humans being what they were, personal adornment continued to be an easily visible indicator of social rank. As Rame walked toward his partner, he pressed a touch-sensitive patch of metallic silk on his left shoulder, concentrating for an instant on a particular thought code, and the rainbow glitter of his formal vestments dissolved in a light swirl of smoke. A second coded thought killed his corona, the artificial nimbus of light marking him as a senior government official.
“Welcome home, dear one,” Brea said, hugging him close. “How’d it go?”
“The usual,” he told her. He shrugged as she released him. “Civilization is going to hell, and no one wants to listen.” He didn’t really want to discuss it. He was feeling…drained. Stretched thin.
And unappreciated.
“Is it really the Xul again?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more. I’m going inside.”
“You can’t save the Galaxy all by yourself,” she told him. “Not even the Americans could do that.”
“No. But we can try.”
Despite his hab address, forty thousand kilometers above Earth’s surface, Lord Garrick Rame actually thought of himself as American.
And that was decidedly something of a peculiarity in the modern Solar political order, where the s/h population of the four concentric Earthrings—and that meant the standard-human population, without counting AIs or the various other genus Homo species—numbered perhaps five times the total population now inhabiting the entire Earth. For well over a thousand years now, and perhaps for longer than that, space had been the preferred environment for all of the branches of genus Homo, not the confined and dirty enclosure of anything so limited as a planetary surface. There were stil
l nations and nation states on Earth’s surface—far too many of them, and in far too contentious a tangle—but none of them really mattered any longer.
As he stepped into the spacious interior of his hab, he was greeted, as always, by the floor-to-ceiling vista presented by his viewall, with Earth, small and vulnerable, deep blue swathed in swirls of white, suspended within the immensity of Solar Space.
As at SupraSingapore, the scene was achingly, hauntingly beautiful. A thought could enlarge the globe, rotate it to any quarter, even wipe away the clouds and zoom down for a close inspection of any spot on the planet with a resolution of half a centimeter or so, but he much preferred this view as the default setting, showing Earth a bit smaller than the fist at arm’s length, set in the just-visible circlet of tightly clustered and artificial stars marking out the vast, fifteen-billion-kilometer sweep of her encircling rings.
The time was just past 2100 GMT, which meant that most of the Western Hemisphere was still in daylight. Rame’s gaze sought out familiar topological landmarks on this side of the globe—the stubby remnants of long-drowned Florida, Louisiana, and Yucatan, the Nicaragua Canal, the Amazon Sea, the hard, tiny glitter of the marine Arcologies off both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Two millennia of rising sea levels had resulted in the mass migration of coastal populations, not inland, but to towering oceanic habitats rising from the sunken remnants of ancient coastal cities—Miami, Los Angeles, Washington, even Manhattan, which had lost its long rear-guard holding action against the relentless sea when the Verrazano Dam had been overwhelmed at last in the mid-2700s.
Of course, a far larger migration had been taking place steadily ever since the first of the space elevators had begun commercial operation. There were dozens of them now, invisibly slender cables extending from as many points on the planet’s equator all the way out to Earthring, 40,000 kilometers above, and beyond to the planetoids tethered as transorbital counterweights. For a thousand years now, Earth’s population had been steadily shrinking, as more and more of her children streamed up the elevators to space. Demographics specialists predicted that if the trend continued, the world of Humankind’s birth would be all but uninhabited in another thousand years or less.