Semper Human (15 page)

“Thash in Philadelphia,” Namura put in.

“I know.”

“An' then…an' then one of these Navy pukes, he said, well, we're great 'cause we invented
sex
!”

“Okay…”

“An' Gar, here, he tells 'em, yeah, but the Marines taught 'em how to have sex with
two
people, 'stead of just one. After that, things got a little, well, noisy.”

The joke had been old when Garroway had first joined the Marines, over a thousand years ago. It, or its variants, had been around just about forever. He suspected that the actual discussion in that bar had been quite different from Wahrst's version.

Two men and a woman clattered up the steps to the observation gallery. All three wore black Navy uniforms, with SP holo displays at their chests. “Halt, you people!” one of them called. “Shore Patrol! You're under arrest!”

“They're not moving at the moment,” Garroway observed, “so they
can't
‘halt.' In fact, they're all with me.”

He waited as the SPs interrogated his bio, and watched as they all straightened a bit, and became more deferential.

“Yes, sir. Sorry sir. But these people caused a lot of damage in town. They're under arrest. Sir.”

“And just how do you know these are the ones you want?”

“Huh! Socon Guardians tracked 'em through the Promenade, of course! Followed their brain waves and implant patterns.” He pointed to a hovering sphere. “
And
we have those spy-floaters following them. You wanna see the vid recordings, sir?”

Garroway shook his head. These Marines had really put their collective foot in it. The wonder was that they'd gotten this far before being picked up.

He decided to try a different tack. He locked gazes with the senior SP. “Chief Hambelen. Do you recognize my authority?”

“Sir! Yes, sir. You're the commanding officer of the Third Marine Division.”

“I'm their commanding officer. I will take full responsibility for them.”

“Sir, we have our orders. We have to take them with us, sober them up, take them before the local magistrate….”

“Negative,” Garroway snapped. “My personnel. My responsibility.”

“Sir—” the female SP began.

“That's
enough
! These people are shipping out in two more days and I will
not
risk having them so entangled in red tape I have to leave them behind. I order you to stand down!”

The three looked uncertain. One of the men, a young second-class, actually dropped his hand to his holstered weapon. Garroway glared at him. “
Don't
!”

“Sir, I—”

“Just…
don't
!”

The six Marines had been standing in a semicircle, looking uncertain. As Garroway told the SPs off, they started regaining some of their confidence, some swagger. They began closing in, some looking dark and threatening, others grinning.

The senior SP seemed to realize that he was seriously outnumbered. “Sir,” he said, “I'm going to need to check back with headquarters for orders. Will you be available to make a statement? Sir.”

“You go ahead and check with your CO,” Garroway told him, ignoring the man's question. “Now stand aside! I'm taking these Marines back to their ship!”

The SPs hesitated, and then Hambelen nodded and the other two stepped back. Garroway led his Marines past them, down the steps, and back into the Promenade.

“Thanksh, General,” Namura said.

“Don't thank me, Marine,” Garroway replied. “I promise you that you people are going to wish to high holy heaven that those SPs had taken you into custody after
I
get through with you!”

They met the security force from the
Nicholas
at the base
of the Lunar Ring elevator, and made the trip up to the
Nicholas
in silence.

On the way, Garroway did some more checking on the possible family connection of Garroway with Garwe.

He was surprised and intrigued by the result.

0902.2229

Recon Zephyr
The Great Annihilator
Galactic Core
0540 hours, GMT

The Marine OM-27 Eavesdropper
Captain Ana McMillan
, code-name Zephyr, forced its way yet closer to the eye of the howling storm. On board were two human Marines, Lieutenant Karr and Captain Valledy, plus Luther, the ship's AI. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Valledy whispered. “Just
look
at that thing!”

Karr ignored Valledy's religion-laden emotional leakage. She was nominally Reformed Wiccan, but had little use for religion personally, or for hyperemotional displays in general. She remained focused on her mental link with Luther, the AI, and listened to the sand-blasting shriek of particles against the little recon pod's EM shielding. “Five minutes to optimal release point,” she said.

The Marine carrier
Cydonia
had managed to slip closer to the enigmatic swirl of gas and plasma just ahead than ever before, rail-launching the ugly little Eavesdropper from the electronic cover of a particularly thick mass of infalling dust and star-stuff. They'd abstained from using the gravitics drive entirely, relying on Newtonian physics alone to drop silently
through the sleet of high-energy particles and radiation unobserved. The ship was fully powered; it had to be to maintain its shields, but the energy flux outside the little vessel at the moment was so strong that the
McMillan
's shields would be all but invisible, a candle's flame against the output of a sun. Her gravitics, however, actually bent space/time, and that
would
be detectable.

Four more minutes.

She felt…naked. Vulnerable and exposed. From Karr's point of view, she was adrift in open space, falling toward an immense pinwheel of radiant light just ahead. The light, emitted by white-hot plasma and superheated gas and dust, shaded toward blue and violet at the middle of the swirl; at the pinwheel's exact center, at the eye, was a black emptiness, the ergosphere of the Annihilator itself.

Above and below the pinwheel, streaming out at ninety degrees from the pinwheel's plane, were narrow-beamed searchlights of impossibly brilliant energy. Those beams were blindingly hot with the characteristic 511 keV gamma radiation loosed by the annihilation of positrons, antimatter electrons, as they plowed into the normal matter of dust, gas, and plasma surrounding the black hole.

That object ahead had long been known to Humankind, even before the advent of starships and physical journeys into the Galactic Core. In 1977 of the old calendar, an early satellite named Einstein had first detected X-rays from this source, which had been designated 1E1740.7–2942. For a time, astronomers had assumed that the object was a supermassive singularity, a titanic black hole at the center of the Galaxy, but closer observations by a Russian spacecraft a few years later had proven that it was slightly offset from the Galaxy's gravitational center by some 340 light years. Studies of the Dopplered radio signals from the object gave clues to the object's mass—about fifteen times the mass of Earth's sun.

Those observations had proven that the object was indeed a black hole, but fifteen solar masses was too small by far to
be the expected supermassive singularity at the Galactic center. Several more decades had passed before the
real
central black hole had been identified, strangely and anomalously silent. Not until late in the Third Millennium had that particular mystery been solved; the Xul had constructed a kind of shell around the Core singularity, masking it from view. Close observation of nearby stars orbiting the center had demonstrated that this larger black hole was the equivalent of some two
million
solar masses, relegating its smaller but much more flamboyant neighbor to simply one of a long list of strange objects within the Core's galactic neighborhood.

Because of the high levels of gamma radiation streaming from the object, the fingerprint of matter-antimatter annihilation, the object had come to be called the Great Annihilator.

The OM-27 was now a scant few thousand kilometers from the Annihilator's hungry maw, skimming in just above the radiant fury of the accretion disk. The Eavesdropper's inbound course had been carefully plotted, not only to avoid being spotted by the Xul, but to miss the hot accretion disk or the far hotter searchlight-beam jets of deadly energy flaring from the Annihilator's poles.

Of course, the
outbound
course would be something else. Orbital mechanics demanded that the tiny vessel pass through the black hole's equatorial plane at some point, and that meant entering the plasma of the accretion disk, a maneuver that would most certainly end a split second later with the ship's complete destruction.

The black hole lay a few thousand kilometers ahead, just visible at the center of a maelstrom of violet plasma fire. Half of the universe was blotted out by the white-hot glare of the accretion disk circling the black hole, a firestorm of plasma funneling down the singularity's bottomless drain. The searchlight beams of the jets shrieked on radio wavelengths, and bathed circumambient space in a harsh blast of X-rays and hard gamma radiation.

Beyond and behind the jets and the disk, the sky burned, a
background of white fire within which plasma clouds twisted and knotted and turned in the bizarre magnetic flux of the inner Core. The outer hull temperature was currently reading nearly three thousand degrees Kelvin.

It was, Karr thought, like flying through a sun. Soon, though, it would be hotter by far than the mild warmth of a star's core.

One more minute.

The imagery flooding through her awareness included the entire gamut of electromagnetic frequencies, from radio to gamma radiation. There was an odd effect ahead, engulfing the central speck of the black hole itself, as though radio, microwaves, infrared, and visible light all were being sharply bent. Valledy and Karr had been briefed on the effect before launching from the
Cydonia
; the mass of the Annihilator was causing a gravitational lensing effect, bending and focusing longer-wavelength radiations as space itself was distorted in the immediate vicinity of the singularity's ergosphere.

She could hear the sing-song chant of the Xul, focused through the gravitational lens. How was it passing up and out of the Annihilator's gravity well? That wasn't supposed to be possible.

No sign yet that the OM-27 had been spotted.

But, then, there'd been no warning that Vrellit and Talendiaminh had been spotted, either.

“Are you ready for this, Lieutenant?” Captain Valledy asked.

“What difference does it make?” she asked. “We're dead, no matter what.”

“The
real
us will survive.” But he sounded uncertain.

“And that doesn't help us one bit. As far as
I'm
concerned, I'm the real me. Thirty seconds.”

An OM-27 was small, far too small to carry a flesh-and-blood crew. Karr and Valledy both were electronic uploads, exact electronic u/l copies of the minds of the corporeal Karr and Valledy, both still safely on board the
Cydonia
.

Karr knew she was an uploaded copy, but that didn't help. She still had the memories of the original person, and of her emotional make-up. So far as she could tell, she
was
Amanda Karr in every detail—a dark-haired girl from Minot, North Dakota, on Earth, in what once had been the United States; raised in Ring Three and, later, on Mars; joining the Corps when she was nineteen standard. It was all there. The sharp disappointment she'd felt upon awakening from the mental patterning and finding out that she was the copy, not the original, had been overwhelming. She'd heard that some patterned minds went mad at the news that they were copies, not originals.
Prototype envy
, it was called, that aching, heart-sick yearning to somehow reshuffle the fall of the dice and awaken once more, this time as the
real
mind, not the copy.

Somehow, though, she'd hung on.

There'd been talk about editing the copies' memories so that the emotional pain wouldn't be this bad. There'd even been talk about editing the overall mind patterns in order to create an acceptance, even a willingness to die on this mission.

Karr herself had vetoed the idea. The last attempt to penetrate the Great Annihilator had been with an Eavesdropper identical in every respect to the
McMillan
. That crew's failure almost certainly had been the result of the Xul spotting them as they neared their objective, not because they'd not been up for a suicide mission. A human mind at the controls was the best guarantee this op had for success. A fully
human
mind, and that meant no last-minute editing to save the copy's feelings.

Besides, the thought of editing her memories and feelings to make her feel good about her imminent death was just a bit creepy, more uncomfortable by far than the thought of the death itself.

Then she found herself thinking of her mother, and wondered if just a little last-minute editing wouldn't have been a good idea after all.

“Ten seconds,” she announced. “Launch package armed.”

“
We're picking up broad-spectrum transmissions from within the singularity
,” Luther announced. “
No indication yet that they've noticed us
.”

She wondered how Luther felt about his impending immolation. He seemed to have no feelings at all one way or the other, none that she could read, at any rate.

Stop thinking about it,
she told herself.
What's done is done!

“Five seconds!” she announced. Within her mind, she reached for the virtual firing key. “And four…and three…and two…and one…”

“Launch!
” Valledy ordered.

She triggered the launch package, sending it spearing down toward the black emptiness of the singularity instants before the Eavesdropper skimmed above the ergosphere, that blurred and eldritch zone of no-return. Half a second after clearing the OM-27's launch bay, the package fragmented, releasing hundreds of pencil-sized probes, each pursuing its own sharply curving path into the black hole.

“
All probes are transmitting
,” Luther announced. “
Deployment successful. Termination of mission in one
—”

…and the OM-27 Eavesdropper, following the sharply bent geometry of spacetime close to the singularity, curved around the burning blackness of the black hole and passed into the violet-white flame of the accretion disk on the far side a tenth of a second later. The end came so swiftly that Amanda Karr wouldn't have had time to feel it, even if she'd been programmed to do so.

One by one, the ergosphere probes fell through the mathematically defined surface within which the escape velocity from the gravitational singularity was greater than the speed of light, a literal point of no return. The outside universe—the flaming light of the accretion disk, the tortured backdrop of nebulae and plasma streamers within the Galactic Core, the fierce storm of X-ray and gamma radiation and the searingly hot searchlight beams reaching out into the void—all winked out.

And the probes free-fell through a turbulent and violet-tinged night.

Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
Major General Garroway's office
Waypoint Tun Tavern
0905 hours, GMT

The door announcer chimed.

“Come!” Garroway glanced up as the young lieutenant stepped through the privacy field into his office and came to attention.

“
Sir
! Lieutenant Marek Garwe reporting as ordered,
sir
!”

“At ease, Lieutenant,” Garroway said. He nodded at one of the chairs in the room's viewing alcove. “Grab a seat. I'll be with you in a moment.”

Garroway continued to go through the last of the ops plan presentations, making mental notes in the virtual margins of things he wanted to discuss with his command constellation at their next meeting, which was scheduled for 1300 hours later that ship's day. He was concerned about the reliance on teleport technology for tactical maneuvers in the upcoming assault on Tavros-Endymion Space. That sort of thing might be old hat for Anchor Marines who'd grown up with it, but it was brand-new to the newly revived Globe Marines of the Third Division. Without adequate training and familiarization, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

He finished the final annotation, placed a marker on the work so he could find the place later, then pulled out of his inner workspace.

His office was positively luxurious by the standards of the late Third Millennium. Art by Roene, Buchwald, and Rembrandt adorned the bulkheads, indistinguishable from the originals. Comfortable furniture grew from the deck on several levels, and could be banished and regrown in any configuration with a thought. His desk was a high-tech recliner
that allowed anything from superficial comlinks to complete virtual-world immersion.

The early Fifth Millennium, Garroway had decided, was quite a comfortable place and time in which to live. He was going to like it here, assuming he and his people survived the next few months.

Lieutenant Garwe was perched on one of the seats in the viewing alcove, a space offering the illusion of being located inside a transparent blister extending out from the
Nicholas
' outer hull. Beyond the apparent transparency, the Galactic Spiral hung in silent magnificence, a vast and motionless pinwheel of faint stars massed into luminous clots, streams, and filaments, interwoven and entangled with the soft glow of nebulae.

The Galactic Spiral from this vantage point, some 40,000 light years beyond the Rim, was seen in three-quarter profile. The Core was clearly visible as a radiant glow behind massively banked and opaque clouds of dust and gas. There was no sign of the Core Detonation, of course; the light of that cataclysm hadn't even yet made it beyond the boundaries of the Core itself, and it would be another 90,000 years before the Detonation's light made it this far. The Core was still a spectacular sight, however. From here, the Galaxy's central bar—the Milky Way was that type of galaxy classified as a barred spiral—was clearly delineated in bright stars bearing a slightly more red-golden cast than the bluer, fainter stars of the outer spiral arms.