by Ian Douglas
Karr herself had vetoed the idea. The last attempt to penetrate the Great Annihilator had been with an Eavesdropper identical in every respect to the McMillan. That crew’s failure almost certainly had been the result of the Xul spotting them as they neared their objective, not because they’d not been up for a suicide mission. A human mind at the controls was the best guarantee this op had for success. A fully human mind, and that meant no last-minute editing to save the copy’s feelings.
Besides, the thought of editing her memories and feelings to make her feel good about her imminent death was just a bit creepy, more uncomfortable by far than the thought of the death itself.
Then she found herself thinking of her mother, and wondered if just a little last-minute editing wouldn’t have been a good idea after all.
“Ten seconds,” she announced. “Launch package armed.”
“We’re picking up broad-spectrum transmissions from within the singularity,” Luther announced. “No indication yet that they’ve noticed us.”
She wondered how Luther felt about his impending immolation. He seemed to have no feelings at all one way or the other, none that she could read, at any rate.
Stop thinking about it, she told herself. What’s done is done!
“Five seconds!” she announced. Within her mind, she reached for the virtual firing key. “And four…and three…and two…and one…”
“Launch!” Valledy ordered.
She triggered the launch package, sending it spearing down toward the black emptiness of the singularity instants before the Eavesdropper skimmed above the ergosphere, that blurred and eldritch zone of no-return. Half a second after clearing the OM-27’s launch bay, the package fragmented, releasing hundreds of pencil-sized probes, each pursuing its own sharply curving path into the black hole.
“All probes are transmitting,” Luther announced. “Deployment successful. Termination of mission in one—”
…and the OM-27 Eavesdropper, following the sharply bent geometry of spacetime close to the singularity, curved around the burning blackness of the black hole and passed into the violet-white flame of the accretion disk on the far side a tenth of a second later. The end came so swiftly that Amanda Karr wouldn’t have had time to feel it, even if she’d been programmed to do so.
One by one, the ergosphere probes fell through the mathematically defined surface within which the escape velocity from the gravitational singularity was greater than the speed of light, a literal point of no return. The outside universe—the flaming light of the accretion disk, the tortured backdrop of nebulae and plasma streamers within the Galactic Core, the fierce storm of X-ray and gamma radiation and the searingly hot searchlight beams reaching out into the void—all winked out.
And the probes free-fell through a turbulent and violet-tinged night.
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
Major General Garroway’s office
Waypoint Tun Tavern
0905 hours, GMT
The door announcer chimed.
“Come!” Garroway glanced up as the young lieutenant stepped through the privacy field into his office and came to attention.
“Sir! Lieutenant Marek Garwe reporting as ordered, sir!”
“At ease, Lieutenant,” Garroway said. He nodded at one of the chairs in the room’s viewing alcove. “Grab a seat. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
Garroway continued to go through the last of the ops plan presentations, making mental notes in the virtual margins of things he wanted to discuss with his command constellation at their next meeting, which was scheduled for 1300 hours later that ship’s day. He was concerned about the reliance on teleport technology for tactical maneuvers in the upcoming assault on Tavros-Endymion Space. That sort of thing might be old hat for Anchor Marines who’d grown up with it, but it was brand-new to the newly revived Globe Marines of the Third Division. Without adequate training and familiarization, it was a disaster waiting to happen.
He finished the final annotation, placed a marker on the work so he could find the place later, then pulled out of his inner workspace.
His office was positively luxurious by the standards of the late Third Millennium. Art by Roene, Buchwald, and Rembrandt adorned the bulkheads, indistinguishable from the originals. Comfortable furniture grew from the deck on several levels, and could be banished and regrown in any configuration with a thought. His desk was a high-tech recliner that allowed anything from superficial comlinks to complete virtual-world immersion.
The early Fifth Millennium, Garroway had decided, was quite a comfortable place and time in which to live. He was going to like it here, assuming he and his people survived the next few months.
Lieutenant Garwe was perched on one of the seats in the viewing alcove, a space offering the illusion of being located inside a transparent blister extending out from the Nicholas’ outer hull. Beyond the apparent transparency, the Galactic Spiral hung in silent magnificence, a vast and motionless pinwheel of faint stars massed into luminous clots, streams, and filaments, interwoven and entangled with the soft glow of nebulae.
The Galactic Spiral from this vantage point, some 40,000 light years beyond the Rim, was seen in three-quarter profile. The Core was clearly visible as a radiant glow behind massively banked and opaque clouds of dust and gas. There was no sign of the Core Detonation, of course; the light of that cataclysm hadn’t even yet made it beyond the boundaries of the Core itself, and it would be another 90,000 years before the Detonation’s light made it this far. The Core was still a spectacular sight, however. From here, the Galaxy’s central bar—the Milky Way was that type of galaxy classified as a barred spiral—was clearly delineated in bright stars bearing a slightly more red-golden cast than the bluer, fainter stars of the outer spiral arms.
Briefly, Garroway mentally traced out the main spiral arms, a game he always played when confronted with this vision. Perseus Arm…Scutum-Crux…the Three Kiloparesec Arm blending into the sweep of the Norma Arm…Sagittarius…and right there was the faint and patchwork glow of the Local Arm, and the offshoot known as the Orion Spur. Sol was there, somewhere among those star clouds.
In fact, Earth’s sun was so intrinsically faint as to be invisible to the naked eye at a distance of only thirty or forty light years, and he was looking for it across a gulf two thousand times greater than that. Each and every one of the stars he could see was brighter by far than Sol, and for every star he could see there were tens of thousands that he could not.
Earth’s sun, and its worlds, was lost within that unimaginable immensity.
“General?” Garwe said. He looked concerned.
“Excuse me,” Garroway replied. He waved toward the glowing spiral frozen beyond the transparency. “That sight always gets to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Relax…Marek, is it?”
“Yes, sir. My friends call me ‘Gar.’”
“Mine did, too, before I became a general.”
“Yes, sir.” Garwe’s eyes widened. “Oh, yeah! Right!”
“Have you wondered at all at the similarity in our names, Gar?”
“No, sir. Not really. Wait…are you saying…”
Garwe, Garroway was pleased to note, was sharp and he was quick. “I did some checking on your personnel records. It appears that you and I are related.”
“No shit? Uh…I mean…”
“‘No shit’ indeed. My son, Jerret, was born in 2939, Old Calendar.” He did a quick translation through his implant processor. “That would be 1164 Corps Era. How long a generation is depends a lot on current medical science, of course, but forty years was the old Biblical standard, and it’s still popular as the rule-of-thumb average nowadays. That’s about thirty generations. Closer to forty-five, forty-six generations if you go by the more realistic span of twenty-five years.”
“You’re saying you’re my great-great-great—”
Garroway held up his hand. “Don’t bother with all of those ‘greats,’ son. You’ll we
ar out your vocal cords.”
“—great-grandfather?” Garwe finished. He sounded as though he didn’t quite believe it.
“Actually, you’re a great-nephew, some number of times removed. But, yes. That’s the gist of it.”
“I’m…honored. Sir.”
“Bullshit. You don’t know me and have no reason whatsoever to feel honored by the relationship. In any case, after that many generations, you’re going to have bits of DNA from a reasonable percentage of the entire Third-Millennium population of Humankind, not just me. But I do find the relationship intriguing.”
“Yes, sir! I…I never cared all that much for history, but it’s kind of neat finding out I have a connection to it like this.”
Garroway made a face. “We all do, son. We’re all products of history, and we all have generals in our family tree. And peasants. And scoundrels. And sometimes all three in one twig. That’s the fun of it.”
“I’m surprised the name carried down like that, though, sir.”
“Not too surprising, actually. A couple of thousand years ago, women gave up their family names when they married.”
“‘Married?’”
“Ancient social custom where men technically owned women in order to ensure a stable family grouping for raising kids.” He shrugged. “It was pretty much on the way out when I was born and, in any case, women stopped giving up their names, oh, mid-thirty-hundreds? Maybe a bit before that, when they stopped being property. And when that happened, kids began choosing their own names—you still have Naming Day ceremonies these days?”
“Yes, sir. Usually when a kid gets to be about thirteen standard.”
“Yeah. Typical coming-of-age ritual. So even though half of the family members between your generation and mine were women, and lots of other names are being woven into the family line along the way, when kids decide to take another name than ‘Garroway,’ in one thread of the family line the name was likely to remain fairly constant. It just seems to have mutated a bit along the way. After over a thousand years, that’s scarcely surprising.”
“No, sir.”
“So, many-times-great-grand-nephew, do you know what that means for you?”
“Uh…no, sir.”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“I certainly wasn’t expecting special treatment, sir. Especially after the extra duty I’ve been pulling.”
Garroway chuckled. He’d not handled the actual punishment mast for Garwe and his friends. That had been the responsibility of his immediate commanding officer, Captain Corolin Xander. He had linked with Xander, however, and made some suggestions.
“How’s the extra duty coming along?”
It was Garwe’s turn to make a sour face. “Twenty-one hours to go, sir. Three hours extra duty a night in the com stacks. Another week.”
“Your CO threw the proverbial book at you.”
“It could have been worse, sir.”
“It will be worse if you ever go drunk and disorderly again while you’re on liberty. I promise you that, Marine.”
“Yes, sir. Aye, aye, sir.”
“Actually, I called you in this morning because of your extra duty assignment, not for a family reunion…and not to chew you a new one for your D and D. They have you sorting QCC feeds? Rating their priorities?”
“Yes, sir. Millions of them, sir.”
Garroway chuckled. One consequence of instantaneous communications across interstellar, even intergalactic distances, was the sheer, impossible volume of information traffic, especially that concerned with military, government, and exploratory organizations and services. Originally, Quantum-Coupled Communications networks, or QCCs, had allowed communications only between paired QCC units. Each pair consisted of large arrays of quantum particles—typically phase encapsulated photons—that had been initially created together, so that they were quantum-entangled.
Entanglement, and the technology required for reading coupled photons, permitted instant communications across any conceivable distance thanks to the quantum property of nonlocality—what Einstein had referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” A change in spin of one photon generated an instantaneous and opposite change in the other, even when the two had subsequently been separated by many light years. Eventually, second-level entanglement had been achieved, allowing any number of receivers to tap in to a given QCC signal anywhere in the universe, provided they had the appropriate encryption key for that signal.
And assuming someone had sorted through the jungle of incoming messages. The six errant members of the 340th Strike Squadron had been assigned thirty hours of extra duty wading through the message buffers, or “stacks,” of incoming QCC traffic, sorting them by priority and filing them for later reference.
“There’s one that should be coming through today,” Garroway told the younger man. “Might even already be in the stacks. I want you to flag it and route it through to me. Here’s the locator code.” He passed an alphanumeric to Garwe, implant-to-implant.
Garwe looked uncertain, and seemed about to say something.
“What?” Garroway asked.
“Well, sir…if you have the locator code, you could check and see if it’s in there for yourself.”
“True. But what I don’t have is the encryption code, so I can’t do anything with it. When you put a priority on it, I want you to forward a copy to me, with the encryption key.”
“Isn’t that…illegal? Sir.”
“Let’s call it a gray area. The information I’m looking for is a transmission from an OM-27 Eavesdropper entering the Great Annihilator at the Galactic Core. As such, it will include data vitally necessary to the planning of our next op, the big one, after this little side show in the Large Magellanic.”
“I…see….”
“Associative Supreme Command will relay the message to us eventually—they’d damned well better—but I want to see the raw data, the intel coming through before the chair jockeys back home have a chance to clean it up.”
The ASC was the military council in overall command of Marine-Naval operations, and seemed to be pretty much in the collective pocket of the Council of Lords.
“You think the ASC would…would lie to us, sir?”
“Not lie. General Levingaller seems to be a good sort, and he wouldn’t intentionally harm anyone in the Corps. But it’s a highly politicized department, and the politicians are running everything back there. And the data is all going through electronic systems, being reviewed by AIs and digital t-humans…and one of the things we’re watching out for is the possibility that the Xul have somehow compromised our electronic networks. I just don’t want to take any chances, you understand?”
“Yes, sir! I’ll get you what you need, sir.”
“Thanks. I know I can count on you.” Garroway stood up. “You’re dismissed.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Garwe hurried out, and Garroway turned back to contemplate the Galaxy of Man.
The first op was on-track and on schedule, with the first assault scheduled for some twenty hours later. Most of the assault force was here at the first waypoint, a well-mapped and empty stretch of space roughly a quarter of the way between the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud. Tun Tavern, someone down in Ops had called it, after the place where the original Captain—later Major—Samuel Nicholas had first begun recruiting Continental Marines, and the name had stuck. The recon element, by now, was approaching the objective under Alcubierre Drive. Within the next few hours, data should be streaming back from the first-in gravmappers. When the final gravitometric plot was complete, the Sam Nicholas would rotate through the Quantum Sea and emerge within a few thousand kilometers of the Tavros-Endymion Cluster Stargate.
Then the fun would begin.
The trouble was the demand by HQ that the Globe Marines use teleportation for their tactical deployment. By now, all Marines in 3MarDiv had received downloads on how teleportation worked and how it could most effectively be used, but Garroway knew w
ell that having data in your head was a hell of a long way from knowing something.
He was afraid that he was going to lose some good Marines tomorrow because of their lack of familiarity with the technology, and he didn’t like that, not one bit.
And he was going to do his best to prevent it from happening.
11
1002.2229
Company H, 2/9
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas Objective Samar
Tavros-Endymion Stargate
0510 hours, GMT
Master Sergeant Nal il-En Shru-dech completed a final run-through, checking the weapon read-outs and health stats of each Marine in the company. Company H of the 3MarDiv’s 2/9 was ready.
This was the part, however, that always made his mouth a bit dry and his palms slick with sweat, the long agony of minutes before the actual assault, waiting for the go-command.
And it didn’t help that he and his Marines were about to use a device all but undreamed of eight and a half centuries before, when they’d last entered cybe-hibe.
He’d downloaded all the training material, of course, and knew the theories and the established techniques. Hell, a direct data download could make a man an expert on anything in seconds; what it didn’t do was confer muscle memory or the confidence of solid experience.
“You think this thing’s gonna work, Master Sergeant?” Captain Corcoran, the company commander, asked over the private channel.
“Damfino, sir,” Nal replied.
“Scares the shit out of me.”
“Of course it does, sir. Scares me, too. Teleportation is not a natural act.”
“Works okay for Stargates,” Corcoran said. It sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.
“Absolutely, sir. And phase-shifters, too. I figure some very smart people have been working on this stuff for a long time, for centuries while we were snoozing, y’know? And they’ve had plenty of time to get the bugs out.”
“You think it’s safe, then?”
Hell, no! he thought, but he knew that wasn’t what the skipper wanted to hear. “Sure it is, sir. Just stick to the procedures we downloaded, and watch where you step. Don’t do anything stupid. We’ll come through just fine.”