by Ian Douglas
“Will you be transmitting that via CQQ, sir?”
He thought about that. “No. We’ll translate Hermes back to Earth’s L-3. We can take a few of the more badly damaged fleet elements back with us, and bring back a load of supplies. Maybe take the Barton back as well, if we have serious casualties who need treatment at NMH EarthRing. And I think I’m going to want to talk to both General Dorrity and Wilson in person.”
Wilson was SecDef, the Commonwealth’s secretary of defense, and ultimately Alexander’s boss, at least underneath the supreme command of President Stiner.
The balance of political power within the Commonwealth had swung back and forth over the years. Theoretically, the legislative, executive, and judicial checks and balances were supposed to preserve that balance in a system that went back over a thousand years to the original United States of America. In practice, though, there was a constant ebb and flow of political power. During the dark years of the mid-27th Century, the Commonwealth Presidency had evolved into the Office of the Chief Executive, with almost dictatorial powers during the first interstellar conflict with the PanEuro peanChinese Alliance. Since then, things had shifted the other way, and the President now was widely seen as a figurehead only, with the real political clout vested with the Commonwealth Senate.
Someday, Alexander reflected, things would swing back to the President . . . or to the Supreme Court . . . or even the wagging tail of the Legislative House. As a military man sworn to uphold the constitutions both of the United States and the Humankind Commonwealth, he by law could have no public opinion on the matter.
Privately, he thought the demagoguery of the Senate was a piss-poor way to prosecute a war . . . almost as poor as having the war run by one civilian with delusions of grandeur. That was why there had to be a balance, to keep any one group or individual from acquiring too much power and misusing it through misplaced ambition or ignorance or both.
The problem of the moment lay with the Senate—in partic ular with the se nior senator from Maine, Cyndi Yarlocke . . . the Warlock, as he thought of her in strict privacy. The woman hated the military, hated the Marines, and hated him. She was worse than Senator Devereaux of a few years back in her determination to shut down both 1MIEF and the Corps. Through Dorrity and the Defense Department, a fair- sized cadre of senators still supported 1MIEF’s efforts against the Xul, but Alexander knew they were fighting a constant rear-guard action against the Warlock and her misguided personality cult.
He also knew that the Warlock’s minions were going to hammer at what they would perceive as a failure out here in Cluster Space—huge losses, the less- than-complete destruction of a Xul node, and the escape of a very large number of Xul ships. They would be seeking political advantage in the outcome of Operation Clusterstrike, of that he was certain. Alexander would need to marshal every positive aspect of the op to defend himself and his people.
“It does look like we have one piece of solid and useful intel, General. From the Penetrator teams.”
“Really? What?”
Cara opened a window in his mind. Alexander found himself looking into a vista filled with stars, swarms of stars, stars gathered in teeming millions, like the inside of a globular cluster . . . no, like the Galactic Core itself. The vista was so filled with stars and a hazy, red-hued light it was difficult to make out individual details, but in the center of the vista was . . . something. Something strange, and very large.
“What the hell is that?” he asked.
“It’s the center of the Galaxy, General,” Cara told him. “The Galactic Core. And it just may be the core, the very heart, of the Xul Empire. . . .”
8
2206 .1111 Freeport Tower
Bahama Banks, Earth
0914 hrs, local
Garroway stepped out onto the open concourse, enjoying the rush of salt-laden breeze, enjoying the feeling of unlinked openness that simply was not possible on board ship. Gravity tugged at him more strongly than usual; most ships maintained internal fields of one G, but they’d kept the gravity at a comfortable Martian one- third on board the Barton.
The docs had warned him to take it easy during his leave Earthside, clucking and fussing over his decision to go there straight off the hospital ship. No matter. He was here, and even standing up to Earth’s one standard gravity felt great with his new legs.
In fact, the pair of legs he’d left on board the Xul fortress in Cluster Space had not been entirely organic. Nine years ago, at the Battle of the Nova, he’d been exposed to a killing blast of radiation from an exploding sun. They’d had to pare away a lot of organic tissue after his rescue; what they replaced it with had been neither purely organic nor purely machine, but a closely woven blend of the two grown from his own cells and from MAT, or medinano-derived artificial tissue.
They acted, looked, and felt like the legs with which he’d been born, with the same neural responses, the same strength and sensitivity to touch, temperature, or pain. But they also responded directly to controlling impulses from his implants, and that was especially valuable to a combat Marine. For short periods he could boost their strength and endurance, letting him run farther and jump higher. He could deliberately shut down feelings of pain or of exhaustion. And they worked automatically to shut off excessive bleeding.
For some time now, he knew, the Corps had actually been debating whether or not to encourage all Marines to have their arms and legs both replaced with new ones grown from MAT, but the very idea was controversial, and had several times brought the Corps under the fire of heavy criticism from various civilian quarters.
So far as Garroway was concerned, he doubted that he would have been able to cut off his own legs inside that fortress if they hadn’t been artificial. It had still hurt like hell until the overrides kicked in, and he’d been in serious danger of decompression until his armor had sealed itself, but he’d known that his Corps-issued legs, as he’d referred to them, could be replaced once they got him back to a hospital facility like the Barton.
He flexed his legs, then did a couple of deep knee bends. They felt good.
And it felt good to be alive. . . .
“It’s okay, Gare,” a voice said behind him. “We’re on leave. No morning PT!”
He turned, grinning. Nikki Armandez had just emerged from the terminal. Like him, she was wearing her Marine dress blacks.
“So?” he told her. “You can take the Marine out of the Corps, but you can’t take the Corps out of the Marine.”
“How are the new legs?” she asked.
“Good as new.”
“That’s because they are new.” She stepped closer, moving into his embrace. “Have I thanked you, lately, by the way?”
“Only about a dozen times so far this morning.” He kissed her.
They were not, strictly speaking, a couple in the usual sense of the word. They’d been squadmates and friends before the Cluster Space op, but hadn’t become close until they’d found themselves in adjacent recovery quarters on board the Barton. By that time, they’d already made the transit back to the Sol System, the hospital ship tucked away within the cavernous hold of the immense HQ ship Hermes. Nikki had been recovering from pulmonary damage caused by explosive decompression when her suit had been breached in the fortress, and Garroway was learning to use his new legs. They’d started taking walks together in the Barton’s arboretum. One thing had led quite naturally to another, and several days ago they’d become lovers.
Garroway hoped it wasn’t just gratitude for his having dragged her out of the fortress in Cluster Space. He liked to think that he would have done as much for any fellow Marine.
The fact that she was smart and fun to talk to, easy on the eyes, and a rambunctious delight in bed didn’t hurt at all, however.
They stood side by side on the concourse halfway up the side of Freeport Tower, leaning against the safety railing and looking out across translucent azure waters. Some patches of green and clusters of white buildings to the northeast
and to the south marked dry land.
“Why the hell would anyone build a spaceport way out here?” Armandez wondered. “It’s the middle of the ocean!”
“Damfino, Nikki,” Garroway replied. “Maybe just for the view.”
He did a quick check of the local datanet. There was a lot of history stored there, but access was clumsy and primitive, requiring nested layers of menu selections rather than a simple mental request. Earthside datanets were more primitive than up on the Ring, or anywhere in the fleet, for that matter. He would have to sort through the local library later.
“I gather there were a lot of islands around here preArmageddonfall,” he volunteered. “Pretty big ones. Those islands out there on the horizon would have been the high ground. Freeport Tower is supposed to be built atop a drowned city.”
“Oh, like Miami?”
“Yeah. And parts of Washington, D.C., and London, and a lot of other low-lying coastal cities all over Earth. Maybe the locals just refused to evacuate after the sea levels rose.”
“It is gorgeous,” she said. She pointed. “Think we can rent one of those?”
“Those” were a flotilla of sailboats slicing through the water to the east, low, lean hulls of various designs topped by colorful, triangular sails. Garroway and Armandez had just arrived at Freeport on one of the regular EarthRing shuttles. It was interesting to step from one of those silvery agrav transport pods, representative of the very highest transport technologies, and see people engaged in one of the most ancient of all forms of travel, skimming the water with the wind alone as motive force.
“Not this time through,” he told her. “We’re scheduled on a skimmersub for Miami. Departure at 1130 hours. We won’t have time.”
“Maybe this trip, though?” They had two weeks’ leave, two glorious weeks, to explore ancient Earth.
“Maybe.” Garroway wasn’t entirely sure about the whole idea of tricking the wind to take you where you wanted to go. He knew modern sailing craft had their own on- board AIs to do the actual sail handling, but it still seemed an unlikely way of getting from point A to point B.
Aiden Garroway had been born in the 7-Ring orbital complex up in EarthRing. Until he’d joined the Marine Corps and gone to Noctis Labyrinthus on Mars for boot camp, he’d never been out of EarthRing.
Since that day nearly ten years ago, now, he’d been to quite a few other places—to special training facilities on Luna, at AresRing, and out at Europa. He’d served a tour at Ishtar, the habitable moon of the gas giant Marduk orbiting Lalande 21185, some eight and half light years from Earth, and a year ago he’d made E-7—gunnery sergeant—at the orbital complex over Eostre, the fourth planet of Epsilon Indi, eleven light years out.
His fi r s t tour, though, had taken him to Puller 659, several hundred light years from Earth, then to Aquila Space, twelve hundred light years out, and finally to Starwall, estimated at eighteen thousand light-years from Sol.
And his last mission, with Operation Clusterstrike, had taken him outside of the main body of the Galaxy entirely, thirty thousand light years, more or less, from the spot where he was standing now.
So since becoming a Marine, Garroway had been around. But never, in his twenty-nine objective years of life, had he been to Earth.
As a Ringer, he’d grown up with certain preconceptions about the blue- and-white globe hanging eternally in the star-dusted sky. The technologies used on Earth—especially computer and information net technologies—were primitive by Ring standards. From a Ringer’s perspective, the people were . . . dirty. Not quite civilized, not quite educated, not quite culturally attuned. The unspoken assumption was that you had to be just a little crazy to prefer living on Earth.
Garroway doubted that the differences, if any, were all that pronounced. Sure, Earth’s Globalnet might not be up to spec compared to the Ring’s electronic data informational services, communications, entertainment, and so on, but it was still part of the electronic web spanning the entire Solar System. It worked. It wasn’t as if Earthers sat in caves, grunting at one another over half-gnawed mammoth bones, whatever the jokes to that effect might claim.
As for the people, Garroway knew that a lot of Earthers preferred a low-tech life, that some even refused cere bral implants and the other necessities of modern existence. From his perspective, or from the perspective of any citizen of a space hab or colony, that made them a little weird. Garroway had been forced to live for three months without any implants or cere bral enhancement at all during his recruit training, and doing without had been like kicking an addictive drug. How anyone could want to live like that . . .
But he tended to be easygoing about the strangenesses preferred by others, and he was at least intellectually prepared to accept that his prejudices were not necessarily based upon fact.
Leaning against the railing overlooking the surging blue- green of the ocean, he drew a deep breath. The air seemed clean enough, though it tasted strange. Salty, with an undercurrent of what he supposed was seaweed or rotting vegetation, perhaps. It wasn’t unpleasant. Just . . . different.
And the people. Most were tourists on their way up- or down- Ring. They wore a bizarre mix of fashion, from high- tech jumpsuits to sheaths of liquid light to gleaming bits of technological jewelry incompletely merged with their flesh to complete nudity save for an oily sheen of solarprotective nano. Hair styles varied as well, from the elaborate and brightly colored decorative to complete depilation. Local people, though, were easily picked out from the crowd, wearing simple textiles, their skins sun- bronzed almost to black. Most wore broad-brimmed hats woven from some local plant fiber. They moved among the tourists like shadows; the tourists, Garroway noticed, tended to move aside to avoid them without really seeing them.
“So . . . are your folks Earthside, Gare?” Armandez wanted to know.
“Uh- uh. They’re up in EarthRing. The Giangrecos line family.”
“Giangrecos? I thought your name was Garroway.”
“It is. My birth mother was Estelle Garroway. She’s dead now, but like most folks she kept her family name after marrying into the line. And on my naming day, I chose Garroway for myself.”
She shook her head. “Naming day? I don’t . . .”
“When two people get married, and they each keep their last names? A child of the marriage gets to choose what his last name will be—mother’s or father’s. Usually around his twelfth birthday.”
“Where I come from, the woman takes the man’s last name.”
“They used to do that on Earth. That, or hyphenate the two names. Most cultures on Earth and in EarthRing nowadays have a naming day ceremony, or something like it. Sort of like a bar mitzvah. ‘Today I am a man.’ ‘Today I choose who I am and how I shall be known to others.’ ”
“It must be confusing.”
“Nah. I think things drifted that way to get away from the old idea that marriage meant own ership. Where are you from, anyway?”
“Ishtar, originally.”
“Ah.” That explained a lot. A sizeable human colony had been established in the Lalande 21185 system, consisting of both emigrants from Earth and the descendents of human slaves taken to that tiny, tide-locked world thousands of years ago by the alien An. They’d been forcibly emancipated only seven centuries ago, in the mid-22nd Century, when U.S. Marines had arrived and beaten the An in a sharp, short war. Today’s human population on Ishtar consisted of a blend of transplanted humanities, of cultures ancient and modern.
“My family came to EarthRing a few years ago, though,” she went on. “Talk about culture shock! I’m still getting used to it!”
He laughed. “So that’s why you joined the Marines, right?”
She punched him in the shoulder. “You!”
“Ow! But it’s true, isn’t it? The Corps has its own comfy little microculture. We have our own way of doing things, our own way of thinking.”
“Everyone’s different, I guess,” she said, sounding defensive. “On Ishtar, we don’
t see a woman taking the man’s name as a mark of own ership.”
He shrugged. “Different cultures. On Jana women don’t even have last names.”
“On Jana women are property, almost.”
“It’s that way on a lot of the worlds in the Theocracy.” He thought about it a moment. The varied microcultures of EarthRing all possessed a strong cultural bias toward the ethic of diversity. Different was good, in other words, a principle that encouraged social experimentation throughout the medley of Ring cultures and among the human colonies on other worlds.
But from a Marine’s point of view, that principle could sometimes be taken too far—as it had with support for the Islamic Theocracy, a product of cultural diversity that itself tolerated diversity about as well as it tolerated free speech. “Just because a culture is different doesn’t mean it’s good or healthy,” he added after a moment.
“Of course. ‘Good’ is a value judgment imposed by the culture of the person making the judgment.”
“I didn’t know you were a philos o pher.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Gare. . . . At least not yet.”
“Mm. I’m looking forward to the download. Anyway,” he went on, “you were asking about my family name. The Garroways have been around for quite a while and both the male and female carriers of the name have kept it going. There’ve been Garroways in the Corps for God knows how long, going way, way back. At least, that’s what the family histories say. How about you?”