Galactic Corps

by Ian Douglas

  “We’re going quietly,” Garroway said. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  “Yeah? Well, you got trouble, gyrene! You owe me five thousand for that busted table!”

  “What . . . for this cheap crap?” His leg moved, a blindingly fast side kick into the central support of the table they’d been sitting at. The material was a tough, nanopolymer, but it tended to shatter under a strong enough impact. It shattered now, toppling the table and sending their drinks crashing to the floor.

  Warhurst stepped up close to Usher, grasping the front of the man’s armored vest and lifting him off the deck one- handed. In his other hand, he brandished a shard of black plastic from the table. “Perhaps you weren’t aware, sir, that while this stuff looks like mahogany, it is, in fact, a kind of plastic easily and cheaply grown from landfill mines. See? No splinters. At a guess, I’d say your table is worth no more than, oh, five newdollar creds or so.”

  The two Grotto employees, tough-looking bouncers, approached the tableau, but they stopped as Garroway, Armandez, and Ramsey dropped into weiji-do combat stances, facing them.

  “Now, I can understand your trying to take advantage of some simple Marines visiting your establishment on liberty,” Warhurst went on, his growl loud enough to carry throughout the listening room. “Watered-down drinks, the meat nanoconstituted from seaweed and scraps . . . and maybe you figure your hired help can pick a fight with ’em and shake ’em down for a few newdollars, right? But I’m a civilian, and I live right here in Miami. I know you, Usher . . . and I know the local law enforcement monitors.”

  “Hey, boss?” one of the bouncers said. He evidently didn’t like the cold look he was getting from Armandez. “Whatta we do?”

  “Uh . . . maybe . . .” Usher gurgled. “Maybe there was . . . a misunderstanding? We . . . uh . . . we thought the Marines here had started a fight.”

  “No, the Marines did not start a fight. As the lieutenant there told you, they finished it, but they didn’t start it. Now . . . do you want to start a fight with us?”

  “N-no.”

  “What?”

  “No . . . sir.”

  Warhurst dropped the plastic shard, then slapped his free hand across a data pad on the man’s left arm, triggering a credit transfer. “There’s ten creds,” he said. “To pay for two tables. I suggest you take it out of Mr. Tarwhalen’s paycheck. He is one of your employees, yes?”

  “Uh . . . no . . . I mean . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “We’re leaving, now,” Warhurst told him. Gently, almost lovingly, he lowered the man back to the deck. “We’ll be passing the word to our friends that the Grotto doesn’t care for service personnel as clientele.”

  “But . . . wait! No!” Usher’s eyes went wide. “I . . . uh . . . told you, there was just a misunderstanding!”

  “Well, there won’t be any more of those, will there? C’mon, people.”

  Warhurst led the others out of the club.

  “I think he really wanted to apologize,” Armandez said.

  “Of course he did. When the fleet’s in, half his revenues must come from Marines and Navy personnel down- Ring on liberty. He can’t afford to lose us.”

  “So why the shake-down?”

  Warhurst shrugged. “Hell, it’s always been that way. Navy towns, Army towns, they grow up outside of bases like weeds, and their main source of income is military. Some treat their guests good. Others figure they can roust you because you don’t want trouble, don’t want the SPs hauling your ass off to the brig, don’t want to maybe face a captain’s mast for conduct prejudicial. Damned civilians . . . what? What’s happening?

  Garroway, Armandez, and Ramsey all had suddenly frozen in mid- stride, far-away looks on their faces. Garroway listened for a moment to a message streaming in through his implant.

  “Sorry, Gunny,” he said. “We’re getting a special recall.”

  “Yeah,” Ramsey said. “A transport is touching down outside of Miami. They want us aboard now.”

  Warhurst nodded. “Sent you an official ride, did they? Well . . . thanks for coming down and looking me up, Marines.”

  “Thanks for your hospitality,” Ramsey replied. “Gunny . . . ladies . . .”

  “Hey, come back next time you rotate through,” Traci told them. “Please?”

  She sounded . . . not scared, exactly, but very, very earnest. Like she genuinely wanted to see them again, but knew there was a chance that they would not be coming back.

  “We’ll take you up on that, Traci,” Ramsey told her. He grinned. “Right now, we have some Xul to take down. After the Atlantis Grotto, it should be easy!”

  They boarded a local commuter submarine that would get them to Miami proper in ten minutes.

  And Garroway wondered if he would ever feel the tiring drag of Earth’s gravity again.

  13

  0412 .1102 Combat Center,

  UCS Hermes

  Cluster Space

  0810 hrs, GMT

  “A probe’s coming back through, General,” a technician reported. “The first one. Athena is coming on-line. We have a data stream.”

  Alexander was standing in Hermes’ battle command center, a cavernous compartment dominated by large display screens, and by the ranks of couches occupied by men and women linked into 1MIEF’s computer net. Most of the screens showed views, from various angles, of Cluster Space, where Hermes drifted amidst a cloud of smaller warships. The local star, now a slow-dimming nova, still burned fiercely, bright enough to banish into invisibility the pale glory of the galactic spiral far beyond, but it was shrunken now to an arc- brilliant pinpoint of harsh light imbedded in the twists and shining folds of its own atmosphere, shells of gas blasted into space by the star’s recent detonation. The light, cold and blue-white, gave a sharp edge to the nearest stargate, a vast hoop of tarnished gold.

  On the far side of that ring lay the Galactic center.

  He considered linking in. Generally, he preferred to be on-line for raw feeds such as this one. The incoming data were cleaner that way, more coherent, better ordered, and with full access to ancillary data as it was required. Still, it was good to appear in person once in a while, rather than solely by virtual presence icon.

  But to get a good understanding of the incoming data, he would need to link in, at least superficially. There was simply no other way to understand even a fraction of what would be coming through. In pre-network days, of course, scout/ recon data would have been compiled by an intelligence team, analyzed, then condensed into a report delivered by staff officers—an excellent way to lose the subtle nuances, or for the commanding officer to be fed only that information he wished to hear.

  “I’m going to take this,” he told Liam Taggart.

  “You want full-im?” the admiral asked. “We can scare up an extra couch.”

  “Not necessary.” For full-immersion, he would need a couch, entering what amounted to unconsciousness as he stepped into the link’s virtual world. “I just want the overview.”

  Taggart grunted. “I think I’ll wait for the briefing.” And there would be briefings, of course, after the data had been thoroughly analyzed. But Alexander had been waiting for this moment with growing anticipation. To hell with command patience. He wanted to see what the Spymasters had found. The Galactic Core. The expeditionary force’s astronomers and physicists would be waiting for this feed even more eagerly. The realm at the Galaxy’s center was still largely mysterious, holding riddle upon riddle, enigma upon enigma.

  On a nearby console was a palmlink. Placing his hand flat against the smooth plastic, he brought the myriad threads interlaced through the skin of his palm into contact with the link network. A password and automatic DNA check opened the security gate, and the data flooded through.

  A window opened in his mind, showing a picket ship’s external camera view of the incoming Spymaster, a blunt torpedo drifting in front of the nearest stargate. He repressed a start at the sight. They’d sent the probe through fewer
than forty hours ago; it was returning worn and battered, the once pristine blue and white paint of the Commonwealth logo on its hull sandblasted almost completely down to bare metal and plastic, the black surface beneath burnt, scored, dented, and even peeled away in places as though it had been through a savage firefight.

  Perhaps it had been. He would know in a moment.

  “Looks like it’s been in a fight,” Admiral Taggart said in his mind. “Could mean they know we’re here.”

  “We’ll keep the fleet on full alert,” Alexander told him. He didn’t add the words of course. “But that might not be battle damage. We know that conditions at the Galactic core are . . . extreme.”

  “Gas and dust, high radiation levels,” Taggart said. “Yeah, if we go in there, we’ll be using everything we’ve learned in the past ten years dealing with novae. But if the Xul did spot it . . .”

  “I know. And they’ll have tracked it, and know where we are.”

  The Spymaster had been designed to slip into an enemyoccupied system and remain undetected, using various stealth-cloaking technologies as Athena, the on- board AI, probed local computer nets and virtual realities.

  But the environment existing at the center of the Galaxy, as Alexander had suggested, was extraordinary, still largely unknown and unmapped, but definitely not conducive to life as Humankind understood it. It was a realm of hot gases and plasmas, powerful magnetic fields, and peculiar objects unlike anything found elsewhere in the Galaxy.

  There might be other dangers to spacecraft within the Core besides lurking Xul.

  At the moment, Athena—or a copy of the program, at any rate—was being downloaded into Hermes’ computer network, where it was being assimilated by Pappy. Essentially, Athena was a smaller, more compact version of one aspect of Pappy, but with large quantities of matching code that were now being compared, line by line, with the incoming information. Data acquired in the Core—Athena’s memory, basically—could be stored and analyzed as it came through. Thousands of subroutines, called code spiders, were going through the data now, cataloguing it and marking the most critical bits for immediate study. Although the data were raw—meaning only another AI could read and understand them at the moment—some of them consisted of camera and sensor imagery, which could be split off from the main stream and sampled by humans.

  Alexander let himself enter one of those side streams . . . struggling to understand just what it was he was seeing.

  At first, all he could make out was a bewildering wash of red and blue-white.

  The human brain actually needs to learn to see, and seeing, of course, takes place in the brain, not the eyes. If the image being transmitted from the eyes is so strange, so alien as to be outside of human experience, it can take time for the brain to interpret the image in any meaningful way.

  Gradually, though, Alexander was able to pick meaning out of the blurred and confused tumble of color.

  He appeared to be looking into the center of a hollow shell, with shining walls composed of myriad stars and interwoven strands of soft-glowing dust and gas. The stars were as densely packed, it seemed, as the beehive stars within a globular cluster, like the one dominating the skies of Cluster Space. It looked much like the vista of another realm he’d seen—a region called Starwall just outside the vast, flattened sphere of suns and nebulae comprising the Galactic hub.

  It was tough to judge distances by eye. Those stars were hundreds, perhaps thousands of light years away, but there was no way to judge that from the image in his mind. But the star-enclosed volume felt huge, intertwined by glowing nebulae and bathed in soft light.

  Over all, that light held a distinctly reddish hue; the stars of the Galactic Core were old, old . . . red giants, among the most ancient suns of the Galaxy. Once they’d been thought to have been spawned in an epoch before supernovae had scattered transmuted elements across the heavens, and, therefore, metal poor of the type known as Population I. Later research had proven, though, that many generations of stars had come and gone within the Galactic Core, with barrages of supernovae flooding the region with heavier and heavier elements from which new generations of stars had been born.

  How many of those massed red stars, Alexander wondered, had planets, had life? The entire galactic hub was bathed in intense radiation fields—they’d proven that with a military operation at Starwall a decade ago, just outside the Hub—and most xenobiologists assumed that life could not evolve under such extreme, such violent conditions.

  But he knew that Life always was stronger, more surprising, more unpredictable, and less amenable to being stuffed into a box for easy categorization than humans ever were able to credit or accept.

  So very many suns.

  So many possible worlds. . . .

  At first, that curving wall of stars was all Alexander could really see, and much of that was lost in a distinct haze that filled the star- hollow. As he adjusted to the scale and scope of the strange panorama, however, he began to notice other things, things that helped put the scene into perspective, helped reveal its true size and depth. As he kept looking, other features began to separate from the background, to make themselves known. He could pick out the gas-delineated bubbles of ancient supernovae, and several rings of gas clouds encircling the very center.

  That central region of the image was dominated by a number of objects. Distance and scale made them all seem tiny, almost toy-like, and Alexander had to employ a zoom function in the download window to better see. Brightest and most obvious was a tight-packed but ragged cluster of brilliant, diamond- hard stars emerging from the tatters of a blue-lit nebula. Several of the stars were particularly bright, so bright that Alexander found himself mentally squinting at them, trying to see through their glare. Assuming that all had been born from the same nebula at about the same time, they should all be of about the same mass and brightness. Those most brilliant of the stars were exploding supernovae. He could see the delicately sculpted folds and hollows of the nebula, where radiation pressure from the exploding stars were working the clouds of dust and gas like sculptor’s clay.

  Nearby burned a bright red star, its crystalline ruby color sharply contrasting with the blue light of the cluster; a tail, like a comet’s tail, streamed from the red giant directly away from the hot glare of the cluster. And a few degrees from that was something so strange that Alexander kept trying to focus on it, and kept failing, as though his eyes were sliding right off of it. He had to focus sharply to make himself see the thing, which appeared to be imbedded in a three-armed spiral of gas like a miniature galaxy.

  Elsewhere were other objects—things like comets smeared across light years, and something, well off to the side, that looked like another, smaller miniature galaxy, its spiral arms tightly wound into a flat accretion disk, and with brilliant shafts of luminescence, like searchlight beams, extending out from the poles of its central hub. That peculiar object, at least, had been known to Earth astronomers for many centuries. The searchlight beams were streams of positrons emerging from a black hole; their interaction with normal matter hundreds of light years from the singularity filled the Core with radio noise—the 511 keV shriek of positronium annihilating its normal-matter counterpart— electrons. That particular object, Alexander knew, had been dubbed “The Great Annihilator” by Earth astronomers, but it remained one of the deeper mysteries of the galactic Core. Measure ments of the velocity of gas within the accretion disk showed that the singularity—probably originally a collapsed star—was equivalent to about ten to fifteen solar masses. Astronomers had been looking for a black hole at the Galaxy’s center . . . but the Great Annihilator, paradoxically, was nowhere near massive enough to power all of the strange goings-on in that eldritch region, and it was also offset a bit—by perhaps 350 light years—from the actual center of the Galaxy. In other words, the Great Annihilator was a black hole, but not the black hole, the one that scientists expected to mass at several million solar masses and to occupy the exact dead center of the Galaxy
’s gravitational system.

  And there were other strangenesses as well. Perhaps weirdest optically were a number of streaks of light arcing across the gulf, where gas or dust had been smeared into vast, curving, and inter-nested bands or ring segments. Looking at these, Alexander was reminded forcibly of demonstrations he’d seen as a child of the existence of magnetic lines of force, using a magnet, a piece of paper, and iron filings to make the invisible fields of force visible. He had no doubt that he was looking at the effects of powerful magnetic fields here, as they reshaped clouds of ionized gas.

  Alexander was still having trouble with scale as he studied the image, but the hollow within the central star cloud appeared to be filled with a faint mist, thin to the point of invisibility in some areas, so thick as to appear solid in others. Like a planetary atmosphere, the Core’s haze shrouded things in the distance, like the far wall of Hub stars, and the curious artifact near the red sun was also blurred slightly by the haze, making it feel distant, and therefore titanic.

  “I’m having some trouble with the scale,” Taggart’s voice said in Alexander’s thoughts. “Just what the hell are we looking at?”

  “The Galactic Core,” Alexander said, speaking not so much in answer to Taggart’s question as to release some of the pent- up awe he was feeling at the sight unfolding within his mind. He shook himself, then added, “What we’re seeing matches the old radiotelescopy data. But it’s different seeing it all by visible wavelengths, isn’t it?”