Semper Human (11 page)

“I fear you are throwing their lives away for nothing. They'd serve us better being interviewed for the historical archives.”

“I believe, Tavia, that there's a threat in there, at the center of our Galaxy. And the only way to find out for sure is to send some people, some
good
people, in there to look around and find out. Can you argue with that?”

“N-no.” For the first time, she sounded uncertain.

“If there's nothing to be afraid of in there, we'll find out. If there is a threat…isn't it better to know about it? Rather than hiding and hoping it goes away?”

“Of course.”

“Then why do you, why do
they
resist the obvious solution?”

She hesitated before answering. “Perhaps they, the other
Star Lords, fear the solution more than the threat. If these ancient Marines are half as good as their legends claim for them, perhaps that fear is justified.”

And Star Lord Garrick Rame could not find an answer to that.

2301.2229

Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
0539 hours, GMT

“Now reveille, reveille, reveille! All hands on deck!” Marine Master Sergeant Nal il-En Shru-dech strode around the berthing compartment, a maniacal grin on his face. Like most Enduri, his skin was a deep and swarthy olive, his hair glossy black. His bellow rang off the bulkheads. “
Drop
your cocks,
grab
your socks, and
fall
the fuck in! It's a brand-new day in the Corps! Hell, it's a brand new
millennium
in the Corps, and we're gonna chew us off a piece of it! Let's
move! Move! Move!
”

And the Marines of Company H, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines, the 2/9 of 3 MarDiv,
were
moving, though slowly, as they clambered out of their cybe-hibe enclosures. Naked and dripping, they shuffled across the deck toward the showers, leaving fast-evaporating puddles of nanogel on the deck. Navy corpsmen moved among the enclosures, checking read-outs and helping those Marines too weak to stand. The gel of molecule-sized machines that had suffused their bodies in cybe-hibe had, in theory, maintained cellular reproduction and metabolism, inhibiting a few biological functions such as hair and nail growth, while removing wastes and keeping
muscle tissue and organs in perfect working order. In theory, at least, a healthy Marine should be able to leap straight out of his coffin and pull a thirty-kilometer hike, but the fact was far short of the ideal. Quite possibly, Nal thought, the weakness, the shaky knees, the shortness of breath, the nausea all were purely psychological aftereffects of the long sleep.

The important thing was not to give the men and women of his company time to think about it.

“Hey, Master Sergeant!” Corporal Donovan called out. She reached her arms above her head, stretching hard, skin gleaming in the compartment lighting. “How long were we out?”

“It's been 852 years, sunshine. That's enough rack time to last you until the next Millennium!”

“How many deaders, Master Sergeant?” Private Colby asked.

Nal hesitated. Back in the old days, a Marine could wake up in his coffin and find the decayed ruin of a best buddy in the coffin next to his, especially on board one of the old sublight transports that spent years crawling between stars. Corps legend had it that enlisted Marines ran pools guessing how many would survive an interstellar run, and how many would not.

Nowadays, of course, and especially at a Marine holding facility, C-H casualties were low, typically less than a half of one percent. Any Marines who died midway through the sleep were removed once revivification efforts had failed, and even most of those could be brought back. Nanomedical procedures were good enough now that even Marines who died in combat could usually be brought back, so long as their bodies hadn't been “smoked,” turned to vapor, and their brains were more or less intact. The trickiest ones were those who remained in stasis until the revival process had begun, then started to slip away even while doctors, corpsmen, and medical AIs were trying to pull them back. The standing joke held that not even dying could get you out of the Corps before the Corps was through with you.

“We lost two, Colby,” he replied at last. “Morris and Plesak. A long time ago.”

“Shit. Did they bring them back?”

“One of them. Morris.”

According to the records, Morris' vitals had gone flat seven hundred ninety years before, just six decades after the platoon had entered cybe-hibe. The support-facility techs had pulled her out and she'd been revived—barely. She'd chosen to accept a discharge rather than re-enter the cybe-hibe tubes, her right since accepting tube-time was strictly voluntary. Nal couldn't blame her. Evidently she'd successfully reintegrated into civilian life, married two men and another woman, and died on Luna in 1712 of the Corps Era.

Vek Plesak hadn't been as lucky. His tube had malfunctioned just thirty-one years ago, and all revival efforts had failed.

Nal remembered both of them, good Marines, sharp, focused, and squared away.

And both were long dead.

Nal felt a small tug of loneliness at that thought. Marines who'd volunteered for the cybe-hibe reserve program, in a very real sense, were adrift in time, more connected to fellow Marines than to the civilian culture that supported them. The thought that young Kethi Morris was gone, dead of old age after a long life over five centuries ago, simply didn't feel real.

“I'm glad Morris made it, at least,” Corporal Devrochik said. “She was
real
.”

“Real,” in Corps slang, meant solid, practical, in tune with herself and the Corps. A Marine's Marine, unlike the civilian “virties” who lived much of their life in virtual reality, and who seemed to have trouble telling the difference between the two.

Nal didn't like thinking about it. “C'mon, enough jabbering. Into the showers, then into your grays!”

“Yah, I can't find my way to the showers!” Private Mallen
said, miming blindness, his hands outstretched. “They took my fucking implants!”

“Since when did you need implants for
fucking,
Mallen?” Donovan demanded.

“Oh, he needs all the help he can get for fucking,” Sergeant Cori Ryack said as she followed Mallen into the shower deck, laughing. “It's fucking
up
that comes natural for him!”

“Ow, target acquired!” Sergeant Ferris cried. “Target lock! Target
destroyed
!”

“Hey, Master Sergeant,” Private Garcia called. “Who are we fighting, anyway?”

“Yeah,” Private Coswell added. “Why'd they wake us? Sergeant Ryack definitely needed her beauty sleep!”

“You'll get all that in your post-cybe briefing, Marines,” Nal told them. He didn't tell them what he already knew. The Xul were back. The Xul would be the enemy. It would be better to let the brass brief them by the book, rather than fueling speculation and scuttlebutt. But gods! The
Xul
…

“Fuck it,” Private Brisard said. “It must be big, or they wouldn't have called for the best!”

“Yeah?” Devrochik said. “Can't imagine why they woke
you
up, then!”

“Fuck you, Chickie!”

The banter continued as the thirty-eight surviving Marines of H Company cycled through the shower deck, emerging with the last of the dissolving nano gel rinsed away. As each stepped past a uniform dispenser, he or she took a thumb-sized wad marked “utilities, basic, gray” and slapped it hard against skin, just below the hollow of the throat. Shock and body heat activated the garment, which rapidly spread skin-tight over the entire body save for head, neck, and hands. The garments were current Corps issue work clothing, providing temperature control, sweat absorption, skin protection, voice communications, and they were even smart enough to open and seal on command when the wearer needed to use the toilet. They could also provide vid and computer interface
capabilities on the sleeves; for the moment, as Mallen had just pointed out, the men and women of the Ninth Marine Regiment were working without their cerebral implants, a condition guaranteed to make the toughest of them feel vulnerable and somewhat lost.

Still it was better to let them acclimate gradually to this new era, rather than have them inundated by an alien world. They'd be issued their upgraded internal hardware in a day or two, after they'd had a chance to take in some of what had happened, what had
changed
in eight centuries, through their Mark I Mod 0 brains.

Nal continued to listen to the gripes, complaints, and banter as the Marines got dressed and began making their unsteady way to the mess hall. All things considered, his people sounded as though they were in pretty fair shape. It was, he thought, proof that the Marine Corps really did serve as its own family. To awaken eight centuries in the future
alone
, with every person you'd ever known, every social convention you'd ever embraced long dead and gone, would have been grimly, coldly unthinkable.

Nal knew that particular feeling well. He'd been born
dumu-gir
, one of the Free Peoples of the world he'd called Enduru, and which the
Un-ki,
the men of Earth, called Ishtar. His remote ancestors had been abducted from Earth by the alien An sometime in the seventh or eighth millennia
B.C.E
. and taken to Enduru, the earthlike moon of a super-Jovian gas giant in the nearby star system called Lalande 21185. With the collapse of the interstellar An empire beneath the Xul assault, Enduru/Ishtar had been overlooked and forgotten, a tiny, backward enclave of the An and their human slaves surviving with primitive, almost subsistence-level technology until the arrival of the Un-ki—and the
nir-gál-mè-a
who'd beaten the An and set the
gir
, the People, free.

Nir-gál-mè-a
was the Enduri name for the United States Marines who'd defeated the An hordes. In Emi-gi, the People's Tongue, it meant, roughly, “Respected in Battle.” Ever since, Marines, especially Marines who'd been stationed on
Ishtar, had used the term “Nergie,” “Nergal” or, more formally, “Nergal May-I” as a nom d'guerre, a badge of honor much like the far more ancient “devil dogs” and “leathernecks.”

Until the arrival of the Marines, in Year 373 of the Corps, the
gir
had worshipped the An as
digir
, as gods, a condition that had been both religion and the only conceivable way of life since the first
gir
had been shipped to Enduru from the ancient An colony at Sumer. The Nergals had proven once and for all that the scaled, golden-eyed beings called
An
or
Ahannu
were not gods at all. Not humans, of course…but not gods. Perhaps inevitably, the
nir-gál-mè-a
had themselves taken on something of a godlike aura to the newly liberated humans native to Enduru. The newly created
dumu-gir
state had become a protectorate of the then-United States of America. It had acquired complete independence over a thousand years ago, but by tradition and law, its native human peoples could still petition to join the Corps.

It had been over one hundred five thousand Enduri cycles—better than eighteen hundred standard years—since the Battle of Ishtar. In that time, tens of thousands of
dumu-gir
men and women had volunteered to serve, first with the United States Marines, later with the Commonwealth Marines, and now, it seemed, with the Galactic Associative Marines. Nal il-En Shru-dech was just the latest in a long, long line of Marines from his world to join the military elite of Kia, Earth.

He still, at times, missed the red and orange jungles encircling Vaj, the
e-duru
of his birth, with the brooding glow of Igi-digir—the Face of God—suspended eternally above the jagged, volcanic peaks of the Ahtun Mountains in the West. But he'd left home and family twenty-three standard years ago…or, rather, twenty-three years that he could actually remember.

Add to that the eight hundred fifty years he'd lain unconscious in his C-H coffin.

Vaj was technically a village, but in fact had been more of an extended community based on family lines and relationships.
The Vaj he'd known must be long, long gone by now, or so changed as to be vanished in all but name. The Corps was Nal's
e-duru
now, more than ever.

“Let's
go,
Marines!” he bellowed. “
Every
meal in the Corps a banquet! And this is our first chow in eight hundred fifty years, so even n-rats will be food of the gods!
Fall in for chow!
”

Lord Rame Residence
Earthring, Sol System
2112 hours, GMT

Lord Garrick Rame lived in Earthring Four, Green Sector, which was almost halfway around the vast arc from SupraSingapore, just a few thousand kilometers spinward from SupraQuito, an inertialess magtube ride of seven and a half billion kilometers and nearly nine hours.

He could have taken an express shuttle, of course, cutting directly across a chord of the Rings from point to point, skimming just above Earth's atmosphere en route and making the transit in under an hour, but he preferred public transportation and the feeling, however illusory it might be, of being a part of the population he claimed to represent. Tavia and the other lords he worked with day to day found the affectation…quaint, and, perhaps, a bit amusing.

The magtube whisked and deposited him within a kilometer of his hab. Abandoning the slidewalks in favor of a brisk walk, he entered the broad, open compound reserved for government officials and wealthy corporate personnel, passing beneath the silent, mental gaze of an AI socon guardian before stepping onto the outer deck of his hab moments later.

Brea Marr was in the garden grotto, nude except for work gloves; with most humans living in climate-controlled habs such as the Earthring structures at Geosynch, clothing now served almost solely as adornment and as an indicator of so
cial status rather than for simple concealment. Modesty taboos had evaporated long ago; still, humans being what they were, personal adornment continued to be an easily visible indicator of social rank. As Rame walked toward his partner, he pressed a touch-sensitive patch of metallic silk on his left shoulder, concentrating for an instant on a particular thought code, and the rainbow glitter of his formal vestments dissolved in a light swirl of smoke. A second coded thought killed his corona, the artificial nimbus of light marking him as a senior government official.

“Welcome home, dear one,” Brea said, hugging him close. “How'd it go?”

“The usual,” he told her. He shrugged as she released him. “Civilization is going to hell, and no one wants to listen.” He didn't really want to discuss it. He was feeling…drained. Stretched thin.