Semper Human (21 page)

“Roger that.”

Nal shared Fellacci's heartfelt relief. The Dahl ships would be focusing their efforts on the
Sam Nick
, since she was the most formidable Associative warship now on the Tavros-Endymion side of the suddenly ex-Stargate. And if they destroyed her, none of the Marines in the Large Magellanic Cloud would be getting home.

Ever.

 

Command Deck
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
0618 hours, GMT

“General Garroway, we have re-established contact with our people on board Objective Samar. They have re-established power and life-support, and the base QCC network is back on-line.”

“Excellent. What's their tacsit?”

“There are currently large numbers of Dahlist troops still loose within the base. However, the Marines have secured several key positions within the structure, including the command-control center and primary fire control. THRP digital units have infiltrated Objective Samar's electronic networks and are in control of all systems. Captain Corcoran reports that the situation is under control.”

A typical Marine response. Garroway wasn't sure yet what he thought of the idea of t-Human Restricted Purpose agents. Were they human Marines? Or artificial electronic aigents,
tools
to be used and discarded? There was no time now to debate the ethics of the technology with himself, however. If the THRPs had helped Golf and Hotel Companies of the 2/9 to nail down that fortress, that was all that counted at the moment.

“Good. Pass the word to Corcoran to get those loose Dahlists rounded up fast. We don't want some fanatic doing the same thing to Samar that they just did to the Stargate.”

“Affirmative, General.”

As he spoke, Garroway was studying the relentless approach of the Dahlist ships. They had just overwhelmed two smaller Associative destroyers, the
Carlotti
and the
Lubichev,
pounding them from all sides with antimatter missile fire and fusion beams. The Associative Fleet was still widely dispersed through the system, which gave the Dahl force a tremendous tactical advantage, the ability to close
with isolated Associative ships and use local superiority of firepower to hammer them one and two at a time.

The tight-knit squadron of Dahl Empire ships, protectively grouped around the
Curtains of Light,
their flagship, was making straight for the
Samuel Nicholas
. They carried enough firepower among them to pose a serious threat to the far larger Associative vessel. The
Nick
possessed weapons of her own, of course, but nothing like the firepower of even the
Curtains of Light
by herself. She was a
transport
, for God's sake, not a line-of-battle ship.

Listening in on the flow of commands within the
Nicholas
and among the other Associative vessels, Garroway knew that Ranser and his people were well aware of the threat. Admiral Dravid had just given orders to reverse the huge ship's course, trying to take her out of harm's way, but the transport maneuvered like a small planetoid—which in fact she was. The
Samuel Nicholas
had started life as a ten-kilometer planetoid, after all. And Ranser had just ordered all surviving Associative ships to fall back on the
Nick
's position, to provide her with covering fire, and to concentrate the firepower of the Associative ships.

Curtains of Light
opened fire on a crippled Associative cruiser, the
Hermosillo
, joined an instant later by the other Dahlist vessels surrounding her. The
Hermosillo
, savaged by the explosion of the Stargate, was adrift, her maneuvering gravitics dead, her defensive shields down. She returned fire with a fraction of her weaponry…then flared sun-bright as enemy fusion beams carved through her unresisting hull.

The Associative cruiser vanished, replaced by white light.

AI projections showed that the Dahl fleet was going to be pounding the
Nicholas
within the next few minutes. She would give a good account of herself…but the sims the command constellation AIs were running right now suggested that either the
Nicholas
was doomed, or she would be forced to translate out of the Large Magellanic Cloud and
back to safety—abandoning the remaining handful of Associative warships.

With the destruction of the Stargate, the local gravitational metric had changed. Phase-shift ships would be as cut off from this region as ships that depended on Stargates for long-range jaunts. The Tavros-Endymion Cluster and the new-born Dahlist Empire would truly be cut off and on their own, safe from Associative interference for at least the next century or so.

The Dahlist strategy was looking less and less like a desperate, last-ditch defense against overwhelming numbers, and more like a meticulously crafted—and brilliant—battle plan.

The Dahl ships were moving within a thousand kilometers now of the former position of the Stargate, skirting the ragged edges of the fast-blossoming plasma cloud. They were less than twelve thousand kilometers now from the
Samuel Nicholas
, and closing fast.

Garroway glanced at the icon representing Objective Samar, now adrift within that cloud.

Then he took a harder look. “Lofty? Open a channel to Captain Corcoran.”

“Captain Corcoran on-line, General.”

“Captain? This is Garroway. I need your help, here….”

Company H, 2/9
Command Deck
Objective Samar
0620 hours, GMT

“We need those main weapons on line
now
!” Nal all but screamed the thought-command over the channel.

“Restricted firing codes are necessary to comply with order,” a flat and utterly emotionless voice sounded in Nal's head. “Restricted firing codes appear unavailable on this network.”

“The firing codes are in there! Find them!”

“Restricted firing codes appear unavailable on this network.”

The problem with thurps, Nal decided, was not the ethical aspect of human personalities shorn of emotion or curiosity. It was the sheer, stubborn single-mindedness of the things. Working with them was like working with a pre-AI computer, uninspired software that did absolutely nothing except what you
told
it to do.

But the powerful AIs running the
Samuel Nicholas
ship systems, as well as the AI in charge of Fleet Intelligence, were working together on the problem already, cranking through trillions of possible alphanumeric combinations in the course of seconds, searching for the right seven-space code that would unlock the combination. The right codes might surface at any moment…but it might take hours, yet, for even the superhuman machine intelligences to find them through what was essentially low-tech brute-force.

Nal had a new thought, however. “What search phrase are you using?” he demanded.

“We are searching for the term ‘firing code,' or variations, as directed. There was no result.”

“Try ‘password.'”

“Affirmative. No result.”

“Try ‘weapons free.'”

“Affirmative. No result.”

“Try ‘freedom.' Try ‘death to the Associative.' Try ‘Imperial Victory' or ‘Emperor Emelius Dahl' or ‘victorious Empire' or variations and combinations of all of these.”

“Affirmative. No result.”

It was unlikely that the Dahl command had passwords for weapons release stored on any easily accessible computer network. Even if they had—and in Nal's experience, humans tended to be sloppy about such things—the chances that he could hit on the Dahl password for unlocking the weapons systems were small to nil, especially when the window of opportunity was only seconds long. But the thurps possessed nothing like human creativity, and would not find a password
file at all if left to their own devices. At least there was a chance, if he kept throwing suggestions at them.

“Do you have access to the local calendar?”

“Affirmative. No result.”

“What is the date of Emelius Dahl's birth?”

“Thirty-five Ebon, Year of the Associative 744.”

“Try that. All variations.”

“Affirmative. No result.”

“What would the year of his birth be in local terms?”

“Year minus forty-five.”

“Try that. All variations.”

“Affirmative. No result.”

“What is the date in the local calendar of the creation of the Dahl Empire?”

“One Dahl, Year Zero.”

The man
was
an egomaniac. “Try that. All variations.”

There was a longer than normal hesitation. “Access gained. Primary weapons coming on line.”

“Captain Corcoran!” Nal shouted. “We have weapons!”

“Track, lock, and fire!” Corcoran replied. “
Do it!
”

“Firing….”

Nal looked up at the overhead. Objective Samar possessed ten 4.35-meter fusion accelerators, designed to kill any warship coming through the Stargate. Each tube was essentially a mag-accelerator which took several kilos of compressed liquid hydrogen stored within tightly wound magnetic containment fields and hurled them at the target at a hair under the speed of light. The sharp acceleration collapsed the hydrogen mass, inducing fusion a fraction of a second after emerging from the weapon's muzzle and directing the rapidly expanding mass, at star-core temperatures, into the target.

The first volley tore outward through the expanding plasma cloud created by the destruction of the Stargate, creating straight-line lightning bolts of searing radiation stark against the sky. Three fusion bolts struck the
Curtain of Light
broadside-on, slamming through her shields and vaporizing her hull in a radiant, destructive kiss.

There were plenty of Corps legends concerning Marines who'd dueled with enemy warships. Perhaps the most ancient went back two thousand years, to the battle for a tiny island—long since submerged by rising sea levels on Earth—called Wake. Late in the Year 166 of the Corps—early 1941, Old Style—four hundred and forty-nine men of the first Marine Defense Battalion, plus sixty-eight naval personnel and over twelve hundred civilian workers had come under attack by an invasion force launched by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Major James Devereaux, in command of the Marines under a Navy officer, had ordered his gunners to hold their fire until the Japanese vessels moved in close, then let loose with six five-inch naval cannon salvaged from a scrapped cruiser. The barrage had sent a shell into the ammunition locker of the destroyer
Hayate
and blown her out of the water, and scored eleven hits on the superstructure of the light cruiser
Yubari
. A second enemy destroyer had been sunk by Marine aircraft.

The
Hayate
had been the first Japanese warship sunk in World War II, and forced the enemy to withdraw—the first defeat of the war inflicted on the Japanese Empire.

Nal, as a boy hungry for anything he could find and download on the history of the ancient Marines, knew the story well. He tried not to think about the outcome of that particular engagement: the Japanese had returned, stormed the island, and taken it.

This time, however, history seemed unlikely to repeat itself. The
Curtain of Light
now resembled its own name, taking on the appearance of an unraveling knot of radiance. Other fusion bolts from the drifting fortress struck the heavy cruisers
Endymion
and
Starlight
, annihilating them in dazzling bursts of plasma flame.

And, suddenly, the survivors were fleeing, and the Battle of the Tavros-Endymion Gate was now
truly
over.

1002.2229

Recon Zephyr
The Great Annihilator
Galactic Core
0950 hours, GMT

It was a long,
long
drop.

The Marine OM-27 Eavesdropper
Captain Ana McMillan
fell endlessly through an eerie, black-violet light, buffeted by energies beyond human ken. On board, the consciousness of Lieutenant Amanda Karr looked out through the Eavesdropper's sensors, trying to make sense of that turmoil of nonexistence.

Her inner time-keeper insisted that only seconds had passed since Recon Zephyr had whipped in through the ergosphere of the massive black hole known as the Great Annihilator. Her mind knew that a longer time had passed, that time for her was moving far more slowly than in the universe outside. How much more slowly was impossible to know. The answer depended on a number of variables, including the precise path the probe was taking as it passed through the severely warped spacetime of the Annihilator's throat.

Captain Valledy was praying.

She ignored him. “Luther! How far in are we?”

The AI hesitated before answering.
“That question cannot be answered directly, Lieutenant Karr. It's not a matter of distance or of time now. We may literally be in a different kind of space…the base state of reality.”

“The Quantum Sea?”

“Affirmative.”

“Then what am I seeing?”

“Essentially you are seeing what your brain
chooses
to see.”

It was a less than satisfactory answer.

“Any sign of a Xul base or a ship or something?”

“Possibly. But human consciousness may be necessary to manifest it.”

Again, not helpful.

Karr pulled what data she had on the Quantum Sea down from her permanent memory storage. There wasn't a lot. It had been known since the advent of quantum physics two millennia before that at the base level of reality, particles and antiparticles continually popped in and out of existence. The virtual energy of this effect was converted to actual energy by quantum power taps; estimates of the amount of potential raw energy hidden within a volume of hard vacuum the size of a human fist suggested something vast enough to destroy the entire Galaxy and a significant amount of the space-time fabric beyond. Perhaps fortunately, human QPT technology so far could access only a minute fraction of that potential—enough to power starships or detonate suns, but not enough to do serious injury to the Galaxy as a whole.

Theoretically, if you could control the standing wave forms of subatomic particles appearing and vanishing within the reality substrate, you could control the form of reality itself. That trick, too, remained so far beyond the grasp of human technology.

There were hints, though, that consciousness itself was what called forth reality from the infinite chaos of the Quantum Sea. Weiji-do and certain other mental and martial arts disciplines
might offer a means of rewriting reality on the fly, as it were…but actual experiments along those lines had so far proven fruitless.

She tried focusing on the possibility…no, on the certainty that the Xul presence here in the Annihilator was close by, just ahead, in fact, that it was close enough to be coming into view…

And there it was.

The thing's materialization was so abrupt and startling that Karr wondered for a moment if she'd simply missed seeing the thing at first in that diffuse, hazy, violet-blue glow.

Had its appearance been coincidence? Or had she just called the reality forth from a background chaos of infinite possibilities?

She suspected there could be no simple or direct answer to that question.

The object ahead was bigger than a typical asteroid…a dwarf planet, spherical in shape, heavily cratered, with a diameter of perhaps twelve hundred kilometers. Geometric patterns of golden light covered the surface, radiating out from central nodes, embracing the curve of the tiny world, like megapoli connected by brightly lit straight highways. More lights gleamed in a ring plane encircling the world, and Karr could make out the thread-slender and luminous spokes connecting points on the ring with points on the world's equator.

There was intelligence here, and of a high order.

“Begin QCC transmission of all incoming data,” she told Luther. “Including the local metric.”

You weren't supposed to be able to transmit
anything
out of a black hole, but quantum-coupled communications networks were different. On a quantum level, there was no difference between
here
and
there
; a message generated at one point appeared on the appropriately coded receivers at another, literally without passing through the space in between.

The OM-27 continued to fall toward the alien structure.

Star Lord Rame's Office
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
1340 hours, GMT

“Your efforts,” Rame told the assembled Star Lord Conclave within his mind, “are not helping. Indeed, you may have so alienated Garroway and his people that they will no longer be willing to help us.”

“Nonsense,” Valoc said, drawing herself up taller, and letting her corona flare. “The Marines are here at our sufferance. They will do what we direct them to do.”

“No, Lord Valoc, they will not. General Garroway will refuse any order that is clearly not in the best interests of his Marines.”

“That is…ridiculous,” Tavia Costa said. “The military
cannot
be a democracy. The soldier cannot decide whether or not he will obey orders that might lead to his death. Soldiers are created to face death at the orders of those above them.”

“General Garroway feels he has a responsibility to the people under his command. A responsibility to see to their best interests.”

“We can replace Garroway with another.”

“You could. I have the feeling that any other Globe Marine would act in the same manner. Remember. These people have a tremendously strong bond with one another, a bond far greater than any they share with non-Marines. That, after all, was one reason this particular group of Marines volunteered to enter cybernetic hibernation in the first place. They had little in common with the human-civilian culture of eight and a half centuries ago. They have far less with us.

“And for that reason, I have the strong feeling that the Marines would not follow someone who was not of their number, an outsider. At the very least, a substitution of leaders would harm the unit's effectiveness.”

“In any case,” an Euler star lord put in, “it's not a matter
of simply choosing whether or not to obey orders. These Marines did volunteer to enter cybernetic stasis in order to serve as a ready reserve…specifically against future incursions by the Enemy.”

When an Euler used the word translated as “enemy,” it
always
meant the Xul.

“This Warrington Initiative he mentioned,” Valoc said. “We know. But the situation has changed. The Xul are no longer a threat. As an elite direct-action force, the Marines are a valuable asset, one to be used.”

“We can no longer be certain that the Xul are not a threat,”
the liaison AI, Socrates, suggested.
“The QCC data we've just received from the Great Annihilator suggests otherwise.”

“Flawed data!” Radather, the t-Human representative snapped. “The data are clearly flawed!”

“Prove that,” Rame told the electronic entity's virtual avatar. “How would you, an electronic life form, know if the very basis for your own existence had been tampered with by other agencies?”

“The same applies to Socrates!”

“Nevertheless, the Annihilator data suggests that our e-networks have to some unknown extent been contaminated by Xul emomemes. The strength of your emotional reaction just now demonstrates that there may be a problem.”

“And what do you suggest?” a Veldik star lord asked. Its avatar was difficult to see, a confused and turbulent pillar of yellow smoke, within which could be glimpsed unsettling pieces of the being's organic form as it moved.

“That we permit the Marines to do what they're best at,” Rame replied. “We have a target. We have at least the possibility that that target is a threat to the Associative, perhaps to all life throughout our galaxy. I propose that we order General Garroway to neutralize that threat.”

The debate continued for another hour, but Rame was certain already that he'd won. The transmissions from Recon Zephyr had included recordings of signals emanating from
the structure deep within the Great Annihilator that matched odd scraps and pieces of signals recorded elsewhere throughout the Galaxy…most especially in close proximity to black holes and to Star Gates with their paired micro-singularities.
Somehow
, the Xul were affecting the Associative Net.

And, somehow, they had to be stopped.

Garroway's Office
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas

Objective Samar
1420 hours, GMT

“The Deep Alien Protocol is running, General.”

Garroway nestled back a little deeper into his recliner and closed his eyes. “Thank you, Lofty. Put me in.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

And a new world opened up around Garroway.

There were non-human alien species scattered across the Galaxy…but many, if not the majority, were at least approachable. Apprehensible.
Comprehensible
in human terms.

Garroway had met quite a few alien species, even before his long sleep into the future. They might have radically different body shapes and bizarre ways of thinking about themselves and their environment, but a surprisingly large number were carbon-based, with something like peptide chains and amino acids. They tended to utilize the more common elements, the earlier entries on the Periodic Table—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and others. They tended to use liquid water as a solvent, which meant they lived in a temperature range between zero degrees and one hundred degrees Celsius. They might see the universe in different ways, at different wavelengths or with different senses than those evolved by humans, but they tended to share certain constants—an awareness of their natural surroundings, basic needs such as raw materials for metabolic processes
and instincts for survival, reproduction, and the protection of offspring. Most were searching for ways and means of understanding the cosmos, and most had evolved certain basic tools—math, science, and religion—to help them do so. First contact with the deep-sea Eulers had been made on the basis of an exchange of prime numbers, and a mutual understanding of higher mathematics.

But many others were so truly, so deeply alien that it was difficult at first even to understand them as sentient. In some cases, it was difficult to recognize them as
living
, to say nothing of being intelligent species with their own language, culture, worldview, and identity of self.

And even many of the comprehensible species out there lived in environments where direct face-to-whatever meetings were impossible or extremely difficult—the deep-benthic Eulers and Cthuli, for example, or the heat-loving Vorat.

The Deep Alien Protocol had been developed five centuries earlier as a means of addressing the issue. AIgents created virtual realities within which humans could meet with alien species; massively parallel artificial intelligences were able now to dissect alien computer technologies and protocols and create high-speed electronic bridges with their human analogues, and to do so quickly enough that those using the system were unaware of what was going on behind the scenes. It wasn't just language that was being translated, but nuances of environment, of culture, or biology, even of history.

It helped if the alien technology included something like computers and something like virtual simulations. Similarity of purpose in the technologies involved provided clues to the translation.

Garroway wasn't entirely certain of what he was getting into as the new world began unfolding around him. An hour ago, a channel had opened on the Fleet's QCC. AIs had linked through that channel and reported that the Tarantulae were there, that they wanted to talk. No one had yet figured out just how the aliens had acquired that channel, since QCC worked
only between comm units that were tuned to one another on a quantum level.

But no matter how they'd managed the trick, they appeared to want to talk, and Garroway had volunteered to link in.

In part, he'd wanted to forestall Rame or the other star lords from getting in here. He knew Rame was now linked in with some sort of high-level electronic conference with the rest of the Associative Conclave, and that they were discussing what to do with Garroway and the First Marine Division.

Let them talk. The Marines were not going to go liberate Kaleed or any other Associative world. An entire galaxy was too large even for 1MarDiv, and he would
not
see his people squandered.

But if the mysterious Tarantulae wanted to talk, he was eager to open that channel. New information was always valuable…as was the potential of a new alliance. He was remembering the history of the first contact with the Eulers, and what that had meant in the Xul War.

The protocol snapped into place. His office was gone. He seemed now to be out of doors, standing on a beach. It was either early morning or late afternoon; two small suns hung above their sun-dance reflections in the water, one red, one a contrasting green. Overhead, a number of other stars were visible, even though the sky was bright blue with a hint of violet near the zenith. The ocean, for the most part, appeared a deep, red-violet; the ancient phrase of a poet came to mind: “
the wine-dark sea
….”

At his feet, what appeared to be seaweed washed up on the black-sand beach was moving. Garroway couldn't tell if it was animal or plant…or, more likely, something else entirely.