by Ian Douglas
In essence, the Marines had just taken a large number of POWs.
“Hermes ,” Black called, “Hawkins Station is operational.”
“Copy that,” replied a voice. “Excellent work! I have members of the Commonwealth Senate with me here. We’ve been following the action closely. Congratulations, Marines! You’ve just made this whole thing possible! . . .”
The voice, Garroway saw on a com readout, was that of General Alexander himself, linking in from Cluster Space.
Well, it stood to reason. Heartfire might well determine the outcome of the whole damned Xul war. Garroway could feel the almost electric effect, however, as realization passed through the RST’s ranks. “Jesus and Buddha!” one Marine whispered aloud. “The Old Man himself’s on-line! . . .”
Garroway found it amusing that the Marines were more excited about having General Alexander looking over their collective shoulder than they were about the visiting senators.
But official notice or not, the Regimental Strike Team’s work was far from done just yet. In some respects it had only just begun. Efforts to continue to root out the last Xul intelligences housed within the complex beneath the ruined base would continue, as would efforts to find any other Xul nests on the planet. At all costs, those had to be shut down before they could warn any other Xul assets in the vicinity— particularly those just twenty light hours away, at the Sag A* Dyson structure.
For the moment, though, those measures were largely electronic actions, carried out by highly specialized artificial intelligences within the nonphysical realm of cyberspace. In the world of knock-wood reality, the Marines and a small army of robotic devices armed with nano material processors began digging into the rubble- strewn surface of S-2/I, working around the heat- tempered rim of the central crater.
And new structures began to grow above the ruins of the old.
Hawkins Station had been named for another ancient hero of the Corps—Lieutenant Deane Hawkins.
In November of 1943, Lieutenant Hawkins had led a team of Marine combat engineers and scout-snipers ashore on the fire- torn coral sands of Betio in the desperate and bloody struggle for Tarawa Atoll. With his face badly scarred by a fire as a child, the Army had rejected Hawkins as “disfigured.” The Marine Corps of the day, apparently, had had fewer scruples . . . or a quite different idea of what constituted disability. Hawkins had served with distinction at another Pacific island—Guadalcanal—where he’d earned a battlefield commission and transformed his scout-sniper unit into a deadly force.
On Betio’s Red Beach Two, Hawkins had conducted a one-Marine offensive against the interlocking pillbox formations that secured the heart of the Japanese defenses. Armed only with a satchel full of grenades, Hawkins had attacked bunker after bunker, stuffing hand grenades through firing slits, down ventilator tubes, and through rear doors. Hit time after time, he’d continued his assault, until a Japanese machine-gunner put a Nambu round through his armpit and into his chest. He’d died ten minutes later, telling his scout-snipers, “I sure hate to leave you boys like this.”
That one Marine had diverted enough enemy fire, however, to enable a battalion pinned down on the beach to move forward, cutting Betio in two and seizing the Japanese airfield in the island.
For his action, Hawkins won a posthumous Medal of Honor, and the captured airstrip became known as Hawkins Field—he’d been the only Marine infantryman to be honored in that way. The commander of the Marine assault regiment at Betio, Colo nel David Shoup, credited Hawkins with winning the battle.
Garroway had been at Tarawa with Hawkins and his men in- sim, had run with him from pillbox to pillbox across fire- swept patches of beach littered with burning vehicles and dead and dying Marines. Modern Corps training sessions included hyper-realistic link simulations allowing personnel to experience historical battles, to feel as though they were present at key battles in the Corps’ history. Derna and Chapultepec, Peking and Belleau Wood, Tarawa and the peak of Mount Suribachi, Chosin and Hue, Guaymas and Vladivostok, Mars, Ishtar, Sirius Gate, and Night’s Edge— the blood- hallowed list of honor ran on for dozens of names, and all had been reproduced in sharp, bullet- snapping resolution for training simulations.
He wondered if future Marine recruits would one day link in and find themselves crawling down into that damned, black hellhole with him. What, he wondered, would they learn? That some Marines were dumb as rocks, he decided.
The Marines of the RST maintained a vigilant watch, but Xul re sistance appeared to have collapsed completely. They dug in, established a perimeter, and did what Marines always did after taking a heavily defended beachhead.
They waited.
Ops Center
UCS Hermes Cluster Space 1820 hrs, GMT
On board Hermes, General Alexander continued to monitor the situation on distant S-2/I. Yarlocke and her entourage had vanished several hours earlier, leaving him with reassurances that they would not interfere with the Heartfire operation, coupled with warnings that 1MIEF was expected to do all it could to make sure that the Pax mission would succeed.
Visible on the main screen in Ops Center, the Pax Galactica hung in empty space, bathed in the harsh light of the nearby exploded star. She was Hermes’ twin, a pair of saucers joined hub to hub, half a kilometer across with what looked like a squared-off bite from the rim giving access to her cavernous docking bay.
Alexander had dealt with obtuse civilian authority more than once during his career, but the Warlock, he thought, brought new meaning to the term “clueless.” He’d gone so far as to play for her a Marine training download, a sim of the first Xul encounter back in 2148, when a human exploration ship, The Wings of Isis, had approached the Sirius Stargate. “Pure conjecture,” Yarlocke had told him. “We don’t know what really happened. . . .”
Years later, an AI penetrator probe had picked echoes of the Wings of Isis encounter within the data matrices of a Xul huntership . . . uploaded copies of the human passengers and crew of that vessel held in a kind of perpetual, virtual hell- sim. Human personalities, somehow read, copied, and uploaded into the Xul computer net, to serve as sources of data for their captors.
Whether those uploads were the literal, imprisoned members of the human ship’s crew, or extremely sophisticated copies uploaded an instant before the humans were vaporized was immaterial, a question, perhaps, for philosophical sophontologists. Those copies thought of themselves as living, breathing humans, shrieking out their existence in unending pain.
Alexander had tried reminding Yarlocke of the fact. “Do you really want to risk ending up like the crew of The Wings of Isis?” he’d asked her.
“Didn’t anyone tell you?” she’d asked in reply, apparently surprised. “I won’t be there. Neither will any other senator. We’ll be sending AI counterparts . . . like our personal assistants. There will be a Navy crew, of course, but the actual negotiations will be carried out with us linking through from EarthRing. . . .”
She apparently cared not a bit that there would be humans on board the Pax . . . or that humans, the Marines of the RST, were already deep within the Galactic Core, where capture might well mean the same sort of virtual nightmare as that suffered by the Isis crew and passengers.
Was her attitude one, then, of simple self-centeredness? Or appalling ignorance coupled with a refusal to face reality?
Alexander didn’t know . . . but he was sure that Yarlocke’s fucking attitude was going to cost a lot of Marine lives.
18
0505 .1102 Marine Regimental Strike Team
Firebase Hawkins,
Objective Lima, S-2/I
1945 hrs, GMT
“The way I heard it,” Lance Corporal Phil Chaffee said, “is the Xul have a weapon, a machine of some kind, that eats your soul. . . .”
“Bullshit,” Garroway said. “That’s squad- bay rot- brain bullsession bullshit.”
Four of them—Garroway, Chaffee, Sergeant Milo Huerra, and Master Sergeant Clara Gardner were sitting in a hol
e on the surface of S-2/I, passing the time in time-honored Marine fashion—exchanging scuttlebutt.
Behind them, Firebase Hawkins rose slowly but relentlessly from the plasma- baked rubble of the ravaged Xul base. Nanoconstructors, injected deep into the rock by the trillions, were devouring rock and reproducing, extruding as a by-product fast-growing shells of nanocrete. Kingfisher heavy transports, massive and bulbous- hulled, had been descending from the Intrepid for the past several hours, bringing down heavy weapons and life- support equipment, turning the captured site into a Marine fortress. Numerous Xul caverns and underground facilities had already been converted into deep, well-protected bunkers. The word “invulnerable” had been floating around on the Net a lot.
There was considerable speculation within the ranks as to just how invulnerable the firebase might be. The Xul could bombard planets with asteroids, could annihilate worlds, detonate stars. Against that kind of firepower, the Marine base was just about as invulnerable as a stick of butter beneath the flame of a blowtorch. The only thing Firebase Hawkins really had going for it was the fact that it was so close to Sag A* that turning S-2 into a supernova wasn’t a good option for the enemy . . . that and the fact, the hope, really, that the Xul didn’t yet know the Marines were there.
In a nameless crater on the base perimeter, the four Marines had begun discussing Xul weaponry, and the chances that 1MIEF might be able to carry this thing off.
“But they were tellin’ me back at the holding company after boot camp,” Chaffee was saying, “that the Xul could just kind of reach out and . . . snick! Grab a ship and the souls of everyone inside!”
“Not quite, Lance Corporal,” Gardner said, chuckling. “I think someone was having some fun playing with the new meat.”
“That’s right,” Garroway said. “Soul-eaters? That’s right up there with skyhooks and left-handed blivits. Stuff with which to haze the new kid in the platoon.”
“But the master sergeant at the barracks said—”
“Look,” Gardner told him, patiently, but with an edge to her voice, “if humans have something that answers to a soul, the Xul can’t steal it, okay? What we think they do is electronically pattern or copy the state of every neuron, every electrical charge in a person’s brain and nervous system. That gets stored inside a kind of computer subsystem that can translate things like language and memory. They can go in and question it, get information from it. It might even still think it’s a whole person. But it’s just . . . information. See?”
“But there was The Wings of Isis incident six, seven hundred years ago. . . .”
“Drop it, Chaffee,” Garroway told him. “I don’t think any of us want to think about alien soul-eaters right now!”
That drew some laughter from the others, but it was humor strained and on-edge.
The conversation had him wondering, though . . . and he imagined the others were thinking the same things. What was a human being, really, other than patterns of information? An organism made up of various organ systems and tissues, which in turn were made up of molecules, which were collections of atoms . . . and atoms themselves, according to the laws of quantum physics, were nothing more than standing wave patterns in the chaos of virtual particles filling the reality substrate known as the Quantum Sea. Human beings, so far as their individual molecules and atoms were concerned, were in a constant state of flux. Every cell in the body died—some in years, most in weeks or months—and was replaced. He thought he remembered having downloaded something once about even bone cells being replaced every seven years or so. The Aiden Garroway sitting here in a hole on S-2/I was a completely different being, in terms of his material make-up, than the Aiden Garroway who’d triggered a supernova a decade ago.
And yet he was still himself, still remembered cramming himself into the narrow constraints of the Euler triggership, still remembered the feelings of relief and trembling release when Gunny Warhurst had cut him free, as an exploding star filled heaven with radiant light. . . .
The individual molecules and atoms of his body all had been replaced, most of them many times over . . . and that wasn’t even counting the fact that in those years he’d lost two sets of legs and had them regrown. All that connected the Garroway of today with the Garroway of ten years ago was . . . patterns of information.
A quietly disturbing thought. If there were such things as souls, they would have to be informational patterns as well, impressed somehow among those standing waves in the Quantum Sea. Patterns, perhaps, that survived the death and breakdown of the physical body.
Just what was it that the Xuls patterned when they took human prisoners?
He shouldered the thought aside, angry. Damn it, if the Xul did pattern him, copy him, it would be the copy that ended up in the Xul computers, right? Not . . . him, the quintessential Aiden Garroway. It would be someone else, someone with all the memories and feelings of Aiden Garroway, but a doppelganger, screaming out eternity in the depths of a Xul-manufactured cybernetic hell. . . .
Still, the thought that there would be an Aiden Garroway imprisoned on the Xul system, together, maybe, with thousands or millions of other such copies . . . the fact that they were copies didn’t make it right.
“Okay, okay,” Chaffee was saying. “But the rec ords still say they could take something like The Wings of Isis—and she was a pretty big ship, remember—and break her down in an instant. Disintegrate her, I guess. And there have been a few other times that’s happened, right? How do they do it?”
“We don’t know,” Garroway said.
“We think—think—they can reach down into the Quantum Sea and . . . change things,” Gardner added. “Erase matter. But we don’t really know.”
“Apparently they can’t erase whole planets,” Garroway pointed out. “Ships, yeah. But not something as big as a planet . . . or a solar system.”
“So they could come here to this planet and erase maybe just the firebase?”
“Maybe.”
“The good news,” Huerra pointed out, “is that, if they can do it, they don’t do it often. They seem to rely on pretty conventional energy weapons most of the time . . . and on throwing asteroids around when they need to bombard a planet.”
“Very reassuring,” Gardner said. “They probably won’t erase us, but they can drop rocks on us.”
“The way I heard it,” Garroway said, “is they only use their patterning technology when they need to gather intelligence about an enemy. And the Xul are, well, conservative in how they think. Very conservative.”
“Stands to reason, doesn’t it?” Huerra said. “The xenosoph people say the Xul are over a million years old as a race, maybe ten million. Once they uploaded themselves into their computers a million years or so ago, they stopped changing, stopped evolving at all. What worked for great- great-grand pap works for me, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I guess a race as old as theirs survives by becoming pretty static. No growth, and no new ideas.”
“That may be our one big advantage over the Xul,” Gardner said. “They may be millions of years ahead of us in evolution, but their technology isn’t. They don’t change.”
“Right,” Garroway added. “You know, for a long time, people wondered why the Xul didn’t just come in and stomp all over Humankind. At Armageddonfall, back in 2314, they sent one ship to destroy the Earth. We destroyed that ship, and then went nuts waiting for a follow- up fleet that never showed. On the one hand, the Xul have some kind of xenocidal hard-wired phobia of other intelligent species, to the point that they think any other space-faring species is a threat that has to be destroyed. On the other hand, they’re damned slow in responding to a threat.”
“Yeah,” Huerra said. “If they’d ever invented FTL communications and wired the whole Galaxy into a comm network, they’d have figured out where we are and stepped on us eight hundred years ago. But information travels slowly from one Xul node to the next. Maybe it’s by conventional radio, moving at the speed of light. Or maybe it’s ju
st carried by their hunterships, so it’s FTL, but it only reaches a few of their nodes at a time.”
“Right,” Garroway said. “And each time we take out one of their nodes—Cluster Space, Starwall, Night’s Edge—we screw up their internal comm system. They lose track of us and have to start over.”
“A damned inefficient way to run a war of galactic conquest,” Chaffee pointed out.
“Yeah,” Garroway said. “Lucky for us. Thing is, they already own the Galaxy, so it’s not a matter of conquest. We’re more like . . . I dunno. Rats in the walls.”
“Squeak,” Gardner said.
“Dangerous rats,” Huerra added. “Rats who’ve figured out how to blow up stars!”
Garroway laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Gardner asked him.
“I just remembered something I downloaded once . . . an old image, maybe a frame from a short sim, I don’t remember. Anyway, it shows this maze, right? Like they used to use to test the intelligence of rats? You put a lab rat in the door one side, and see how long it takes him to figure out how to get to the cheese.”
“Yeah?”
“So the entrance is down in one corner, the cheese is in the corner diagonally opposite . . . and the rat has chewed a straight path from entrance to cheese, right through all the intervening walls of the maze. The image was titled ‘Marine Corps rat.’ ”
“I’ve seen that,” Gardner said. “It’s old. Maybe pre- spaceflight. They haven’t used lab rats and mazes in centuries.”