by Ian Douglas
“Are you okay, Lieutenant?” the captain asked.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Quite a decision, I know. Get the fuck out of my space. Go find someplace where you can finish what you started.”
They’d left, closing the door on the laughter at their backs.
“Quite a decision” wasn’t the half of it. He wondered how long they would have to make up their minds.
Four and a half hours later, the general alarm sounded over the Net, and Garwe and Wahrst scrambled to grow fresh uniforms as the Nicholas went on translation alert.
17
1902.2229
Recon Zephyr
Objective Reality
The Quantum Sea
0830 hours, GMT
Time flows at different rates in different circumstances. It crawls for objects approaching the speed of light, for objects within high-gravity fields, and in those strange-physics regions approaching the event horizon of a black hole. And in some out-of-the-way corners of the metaverse, the currents of time flow strangely indeed.
Within the pocket of the Quantum Sea occupied by the Xul base, time flowed far more slowly than in the outside universe of four dimensions. Days had passed in the Large Magellanic Cloud, while scant seconds passed for Valledy, Karr, and the AI Luther. The OM-27 Eavesdropper was now scant meters from the outer edge of the light ring, and drifting steadily closer. The planetary rings were a knife-thin slash of golden light against the violet-shot darkness.
“You’re sure they haven’t seen us?” Valledy said, his mental voice a whisper in the darkness.
“No sign that they have,” Amanda Karr replied. “I can hear them singing, though.”
The Xul Chorus. When humans had first encountered a living Xul artifact locked beneath the ice of the Europan world ocean, they’d heard what seemed to be voices singing in massed unison, echoing antiphonies calling to one another in never-ending litany and response. The Singer, as it turned out, was insane, driven mad by its half-million-year imprisonment, but it had given the first xenosophontologists an unparalleled look into the nature of the Xul group mind. Millions of uploaded individuals, it seemed, sang back and forth to one another until consensus was reached and myriad choral voices merged into one.
And humans had used this knowledge in the centuries since. AI and human probes had linked with various Xul choruses, slipping in unseen and unfelt by taking on a kind of aural camouflage, blending with the smaller lines of harmony and merging gently with the larger chorus.
As Luther was attempting now.
“Link with me,” Luther’s voice said, an urgent whisper. “Follow…”
And Karr felt herself sliding free of the Eavesdropper’s close embrace, entering a rolling surge of sound, of voices, alien voices, merging and swelling and echoing about her.
The points of light making up the ring, she now saw, were Xul ships, millions, no billions of them, and more were arriving with each passing moment. The Eavesdropper Captain Ana McMillan appeared to be one such vessel.
And her crew now were part of the rising Xul Chorus.
Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
0845 hours, GMT
“Stand ready,” Admiral Ranser said. “Translation in thirty seconds.”
“All sections, all departments, all companies report ready in all respects for translation,” Lofty Henderson’s calm voice added.
General Garroway took a deep breath, willing the fear to sink from throat and gut, willing it to merge with will and become subordinate to mind. The waiting just before an assault was always the hardest part.
“Status on the scouting group,” Garroway demanded.
“Linked in, sir,” Colonel Fremantle told him. “We’ve slipped five iterations of the OM-27’s crew into the Xul matrix. All have opened solid QCC channels with their primaries here. We have a good picture of what’s going on down there, and no indication that the enemy knows what’s happening. And we have good data on the target metric.”
Yet, Garroway added to himself. “Very well,” he said. “Stay on it and yell if anything changes. Anything.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Garroway tried to imagine what it would be like to be a digital upload. Those Marines within the Xul network would know that they were copies, but would feel as though they were the original Marine officers—Captain Valledy and Lieutenant Karr—with the memories and hopes and feelings of the originals. Worse, each would be unaware of the other copies in the matrix. When the Ana McMillan fired her cloud of AI-directed penetrators into the Great Annihilator, each pencil-sized sliver had carried electronic copies of the original Marine scouts, together with a copy of the Luther AI. There’d been nearly eight hundred of them altogether. Most had been picked up one way or another in their approach through the Quantum Sea or in their docking with the objective and destroyed; exactly five had made it through and connected with the Xul Mind, pretending to be part of the alien chorus. For security reasons, none knew of the existence of or the success of the other four.
But five streams of data were coming back to the N-2 section on board the Nicholas. Their presence within the enemy Net was a combat asset of vital importance.
“Ten seconds to translation. All elements remain go.”
And then the last handful of seconds was trickling away.
Garroway felt an inner wrench and drop, as though the Nicholas’ artificial gravity had momentarily been interrupted. Then the gravity resumed its accustomed pull, leaving behind a faint, swimming nausea.
And the Xul base was just ahead.
There were no surprises, thanks to the data sent back from the Zephyr recon teams. The world was 1200 kilometers across to the Nicholas’ ten, a vast and cratered sphere dwarfing the slowly approaching phase-shift transport, its surface crisscrossed by starlike points of light, and with its far-flung rings casting a golden glow over the world that contrasted sharply with the violet hues of the surrounding Quantum Sea.
Things began happening now quickly, too quickly for human minds to follow. Fusion beams snapped out, striking the dwarf planet’s surface with dazzling bursts of light and out-flung sprays of molten rock. Vast bays already open in the Nicholas’ surface began spewing clouds of Marine fighters, of combat pods, and of remote drones.
And the Battle of the Quantum Sea began.
Debarkation Bay 5
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
0846 hours, GMT
Clad in Hellfire combat boarding armor, Nal waited as the elliptical gateway at the end of the ramp shimmered with pulsing energies, steadied, then stabilized, revealing beyond a cavern deep, black, and rock-walled, one of the numerous empty voids within the Xul worldlet designated Objective Reality.
The mission objective’s name was better, he supposed, than the Samar of the last op, but the pun seemed out of place, somehow. The Marines knew that the Xul threat involved the possibility that they would rewrite reality somehow, but Nal doubted that most knew just exactly what was at risk.
If the Xul could rewrite the universe, none of the Marines on board the Nicholas would ever know what hit them. They would simply be…gone, and nothing would stand between the Xul and the rest of an unprepared and unknowing Humankind.
“Ready to go, Marines!” Captain Corcoran said in his mind. “In three…two…one…”
The gate was open and Nal moved forward, along with the rest of the HQ section, just behind Alfa Company. He felt the jarring vibration of hundreds of boots in the metal decking of the ramp, and then he was through the gateway and dropping half a meter to the floor of the night-shrouded cavern.
This time there was no crowding or confusion, no stumbling, no Marines pitching precipitously from the ramp and mangling themselves with an incomplete transition.
But on the far side, the cavern walls were beginning to come alive, writhing with metallic menace as the Xul combat machines awoke.
Blue Seven
O
bjective Reality
0846 hours, GMT
Lieutenant Garwe felt the shudder of acceleration as his RS/A-91 Starwraith streaked from the belly of the Samuel Nicholas, hurtling outward on the rail of a magnetic accelerator. For a moment, he felt suspended between the Nicholas and the vast swelling of the Xul world ahead, both ship and world seeming to fill the violet-limned abyss of the Quantum Sea.
God! he thought, furiously angry. What the fuck am I doing?
Light blossomed just ahead as his AI momentarily took over the controls, swerving with the gravitics to avoid the deadly brush of an enemy fusion beam.
A guy could get fucking killed out here!…
After all the waiting, after all the talk, everything had come down to this, and so quickly he still was having trouble putting it all together.
Okay, so they’d been asking for volunteers, Anchor Marines willing to actually ride their strikepods in toward the Xul target, rather than pilot them remotely from a safe distance. Garwe and Wahrst both had wondered if this was some sort of in-your-face bit of one-upmanship by the 1MarDiv command constellation. You people want to call yourselves Marines, he could imagine his many-times-great grandfather saying, then act like it!
Except…no. He knew Garroway pretty well now, he thought. He’d taken the man’s measure, watched him take care of him and his buddies back at Tranquility Base on Luna. The old man had chewed them out, sure…but he’d taken care of them, gotten them back to their ship, and kept them out of the hands of the local monitors.
And later, when Garwe had been pulling that stint of extra duty in the com stacks, Garroway had asked to see one particular bit of incoming QCC traffic, almost as if he’d been asking a favor. No, G-g-g-g-great grand uncle Garroway was a gentleman, and he had the good of the people under his command at heart. This wasn’t hazing and it wasn’t punishment.
It just was.
Behind him, the Samuel Nicholas was fast dwindling to a lopsided disk as Garwe and fifteen other War Dogs hurtled toward Objective Reality. Fusion bursts and antimatter warheads, positron beams, gravitics disruptors, and lasers at x-ray and gamma frequencies crisscrossed the gulf of space between worldlet and asteroid-sized starship, eliciting dazzling flashes and twinkles of light, expanding clouds of dust and white-hot plasma on the surfaces of both. Chunks of molten rock and hull metal boiled off into hard vacuum. The Nicholas wouldn’t be able to take that kind of point-blank bombardment for long.
Which was why, several long seconds later, the Samuel Nicholas vanished, rotating back up into normal four-D space.
And the cloud of Marine fighters, strikepods, and twelve heavy naval vessels were left alone to confront the Xul world.
“Bastards!” Dravis Mortin said over the squadron channel.
“Belay that,” Captain Xander’s voice snapped. “Pay attention to your approach!”
If the Samuel Nicholas was destroyed or crippled, none of the Marines or naval personnel of 1MarDiv would be going home.
So the Marines now were on their own.
Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
0846 hours, GMT
The entity that included Garrick Rame stood in the Ops Center, watching the inert bodies of the Marine division’s command constellation lying on the circle of reclining seats. Through the broad-band QCC links within the chamber, various members of the Conclave watched with him, new visitors flitting in as old ones grew bored and left. There wasn’t, Rame had to admit, much to see—twelve men and women, all, apparently, asleep. Overhead, across the domed ceiling, the pale blue and white glows of the Tarantula Nebula, thick with strewn and clustered stars, had just winked back into existence, a relief after the actinic blue and violet haze of the Quantum Sea.
“But what are they doing?” Tavia Costa asked. “They’re just lying there!”
“Tap into the data flow,” an Euler conclavist suggested. “They follow the course of the struggle within the Xul artifact.”
Rame could sense the data streams, thousands of them weaving their way down through the consciousness of the AIs directing the phase-shift vessel’s mind. He could sense Marine A/S-4000 strike fighters boosting hard toward the Xul world’s surface, and clouds of individual strikepods hurtling through emptiness. The battlecruisers Poseidon and Tra’vaal were there, pounding away at Xul defensive batteries with heavy beam weapons, as the heavy c-boomer artillery ships Doomsday, Armageddon, Ragnorok slammed the alien world with ultra-high-velocity kinetic rounds.
“Three of these people are linked with Marine strikepods,” Socrates pointed out. “Including General Garroway.”
“Why?” Costa asked. “And how? I was given to understand that QCC linkage with that technology was not possible.”
“It’s possible,” Rame said, “but difficult, unstable, and dangerous. The rate of time flow within the Quantum Sea is different from the time flow out here.”
“Why does the commanding general of the Marine division risk himself?” a Cynthiad demanded. Rame could feel the unpleasantly greasy squirm of the paraholothurid within the back of his mind. Something of the entity’s stink seemed to cling even to its link-sim virtual presence.
“Perhaps because this is his ideal of leadership,” Rame suggested.
“He risks his immortality,” the Cynthiad replied. “He risks his soul.”
Rame didn’t answer. Cynthiads were tough enough to understand even without bringing their religion into things.
He realized he deeply disliked and distrusted the ugly little creatures…and wondered if Xul emomemes were affecting the Rame-composite mind.
“He merely demonstrates those warrior virtues that this Conclave recognized when they authorized his revival,” Socrates pointed out. “Loyalty…and a superhuman devotion to duty.”
“Are you mocking me, aigent?” Valoc demanded. “You steal my words.”
“I only point out what you yourself said of the Marines,” Socrates said.
More hostility, Rame thought. More emotional abrasiveness. It could be a Xul weapon. If it’s not, they’re missing a bet.
The assembled Associative Conclave continued to bicker as the initial assault began.
Garroway, Gold One
Above Objective Reality
0846 hours, GMT
Garroway rode the RS/A-91 Starwraith through emptiness, seeking the best approach to the alien world. There was an excellent chance, he knew, that he would be killed or—infinitely worse—left hopelessly insane within the next handful of seconds.
Millennia ago, teleoperational systems had become possible, and Humankind’s notions of here and there had forever been changed. Primitive motion pictures had been the start of it; viewers could see images projected on a screen that, temporarily, at least, could give them the illusion of being someplace else, of flying, of performing heroic deeds, of being someone else.
And as the centuries passed and technologies advanced, the illusion of being there had improved. In the early Third Millennium, a commercial venture had landed a small wheeled rover on the surface of Earth’s moon. People on Earth could pay for the privilege of piloting the rover across the lunar surface from 400,000 kilometers away, this in the decades before most humans had regular and easy access to the moon, or even to Earth orbit.
The time delay for the images to travel from Luna to Earth, plus the time it took for control signals to go from Earth to the rover—about two and a half seconds, altogether—had been annoying, certainly, but few people had minded. The solar-powered rover traveled slowly, there were few obstacles, and the sheer thrill of being the very first person in modern history to see what was behind that rock or over that rille had more than made up for the frustrations induced by the speed of light.
Humans had learned then that it didn’t matter if optical images traveled a few centimeters from their retinas to the backs of their skulls, or if they had come from incomparably farther away. The technology allowed Earth-bound humans to be there.
And that had been with simple optical hook-ups, with images projected on screens or through heavy, three-D visors worn over the face. Before long, computer interface technology and nanotechnics had allowed images to be projected directly into a person’s mind, for virtual-reality simulations to unfold for all of the senses, not just vision. Within a century or so of those first, crude sightseeing Lunar rovers, people had been remotely visiting the sulfurous, crushing pressure and searing heat of the Venusian surface; moving across the icy wastes of Europa and Pluto; or virtually inhabiting robotic bodies that allowed them to interact with people on the opposite side of the Earth…or on the surfaces of the other worlds of the Solar System.
The military uses of the technology were obvious. Remotely operated drones had beamed back reconnaissance images of the battlefield since the late twentieth century. Later versions had gone on their unmanned missions armed.
Garroway had no particular problem with the Anchor Marines who’d remotely flown their Starwraith strikepods from the safety of an orbiting transport. It took skill, training, and, yes, a measure of bravery to operate the things effectively in combat, if only because it was so damned hard to override the reactions of the human autonomic nervous system.
But a Marine’s duty sometimes required him or her to leave the relative safety of the transport and deliberately go into harm’s way, as ancient naval tradition stated it.
He could feel the problems of mismatched time rates. Time within the Quantum Sea—at least in this niche of Dimension0—was sluggish in the extreme compared with the universe outside. He wasn’t certain whether the effect was due to the relativity effects of the supermassive black hole “above” this region, or something inherent in the base state of reality itself. His mind still worked with lightning speed; the mechanical and electronic components of his strikepod, however, along with the mind of the aigent running it, oozed as if in special-effects slow motion.
The AI, fortunately, could operate at superhuman speed, and could speed its thoughts to the point where it could still communicate effectively with him over the QCC command channel.