Semper Human (28 page)

Belleau Wood, the place was called, a tiny comma of forest two miles long and narrowly pinched at the middle. It
occupied the center of a triangle marked by three shell-blasted villages—Belleau, Bouresches, and Lucy-Le-Bocage—and its sole importance lay in the German high command's determination to teach the newly arrived Americans a bloody lesson in the realities of European warfare.

Emerging from the wheat, O'Malley crawled over a low hummock and slid down among a small clump of Marines huddled in the scant shelter afforded by a smoking shell crater. Other Marines lay and crouched nearby, trying to return fire against the incessant and deadly chatter of the German Maxim guns. The mangled dead and dying lay scattered everywhere.

“
Fuck
this!” one of the men inside the crater shouted. He rose to his feet, fully exposed now to the enemy fire. With a start, O'Malley recognized him. He'd seen his photographs, and even seen him in person at a military review a few weeks before. He was Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly, one of the old-breed leathernecks, a two-time Medal of Honor winner from the Boxer Rebellion and Haiti.

Daly waved his bayoneted rifle over his head with a wild, forward sweep. “Come
on
, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”

With a roar, the Marines in the shell hole scrambled to their feet and clambered out, rushing forward with Daly in the lead. Elsewhere across the bloody wheat field, other Marines, singly and in small, huddled groups saw the charge, rose up, and joined it.

And O'Malley raced forward with the rest of them, shouting wildly.

Garroway, Gold One
Above Objective Reality
0849 hours, GMT

The sharp, cold pain in his leg brought Garroway screaming back to full consciousness. He was again on board the
Nicholas
, lying in his link couch, his Starwraith unattended somewhere within the depths of the Great Annihilator's gravitational maw. A Navy corpsman bent over him, looking concerned. “General? Are you okay? What happened?”

The pain was fading but its memory remained. He also remembered his last glimpse of the battle, the screaming mob of Chinese Boxers as they closed in on him, jabbing and lunging at him with their spears and pikes. Sitting up, he tugged at his trousers, exposing his left calf. An angry red welt there was rapidly fading. “Son of a bitch.”

“What happened to your leg?” the corpsman asked. He reached for a nanospray therapeutic unit. “Here, let me inject you….”

“Forget it, son,” Garroway told him, waving him off. “I need to think about this.”

He dropped back on the link couch, but not to reconnect with the Starwraith. He wanted to talk this over with Socrates or one of the other high-level AIs, but if the Xul had compromised the Associate Fleet's electronic networks, the AIs too might be compromised.

He began linking in with his command constellation. Two, Geisman and Bamford, were still linked to other Starwraiths at Objective Reality, but the other nine were merely linked in at the
Nicholas
' end of the data stream, managing the battle.

“Heads up, people!” he snapped over the circuit. “We have a problem.”

Recon Zephyr
Objective Reality's Ring
0849 hours, GMT

Lieutenant Amanda Karr was a part of the chorus. Through Luther and a set of translation programs compiled over the centuries by other penetrations of Xul ships and networks, she could merge with the litany and follow it.

They were researching the Marines.

These are ancient enemies. We have faced them before
….

We have faced them. We have beaten them, absorbed them
….

And they have beaten us, time and time again.

Survival is paramount. We must survive.

To survive we must find their weaknesses and destroy them.

Destroy them….

Karr moved through a sea of chanting voices, unnoticed, the penetrator program providing her with a software shell that let her move through the alien electronic network, tasting, listening, understanding. Hundreds, no,
thousands
of distinct data streams carried encyclopedic volumes of information that seemed to relate to the history of the Marine Corps. As she sampled the streaming data packets, she caught glimpses of ancient, seagoing sailing ships, of ranks of men in stiff-necked uniform jackets carrying antique powder firearms, of men in cloth uniforms and steel helmets, of men in various types of space suits and combat armor.

She merged with one stream. She saw a frozen, snow-covered hillside. Gunnery Sergeant Donald Atkins crouched in his fighting hole, aiming a primitive pulse laser at an advancing wave of dark-clad figures. To left and right, other Marines in mid-twenty-first-century combat dress calmly picked out their targets and fired. The heavy backpack batteries powering their Sunbeam, Mk. IX lasers had been placed in their holes by their feet; winking orange indicator lights indicated that all of the power packs were nearly drained dry.

And the Chinese Hegemony hordes kept coming….

Karr could hear Atkins' thoughts. The year was 2061, and the place was Hill 440 outside of Vladivostok, in east-maritime Russia. The Marine Third Division had been called in to help America's Russian allies repel the Hegemony's attempt to take over the entire Russian Far East.

The winking light on Atkins' battery pack went red, then faded, and his Sunbeam died.

“That's it for my laser,” he called over the tactical comm net. Setting the useless weapon aside, he drew his service sidearm, a high-power 10mm Colt M2015 automatic.

“Same here,” Captain Norman said from a nearby position. “We hold here, Marines. We
hold!
”

The front ranks of the oncoming army were only fifty meters away, now. Atkins chambered a round and took aim….

Karr jerked back out of the data stream. The simulation…no, the alternate reality, the
parareality
within the flow was powerful and compelling. But where was it coming from? It was inconceivable that the Xul would have enough information about human and Corps history to create such a detailed illusion. The information had to be coming somehow from the Marines' own libraries.

A digital scout within an electronic jungle, she began to investigate more deeply.

Blue Seven
Approaching Objective Reality
0849 hours, GMT

A third cannon shot boomed out from the fort, struck sand, and skipped toward the Marine formation. At Nicholas' shouted orders, the two ranks of Marines parted, dividing left and right, and the near-spent ball rolled harmlessly between them. Another order, and the ranks came together again, continuing the relentless advance on the fort.

The guns appeared to be silent, now. Far off in the distance, a bugle sounded and, moments, later, the flag hanging from the fort's flagstaff lowered.

“Damn my eyes!” a sailor called out. “Th' buggers're
surrendering
!”

With quickening excitement, John Porter and the rest of
the Continental Marines swept toward the fort, as the gates swung open to receive them.

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines
Within Objective Reality
0849 hours, GMT

And in the Tripolitean town of Derna, a handful of Marines rushed the gates of the harbor fort. Enemy resistance appeared to have collapsed entirely, and Mustafa's troops were scattering everywhere.

To the south and west, Hamet's cavalry had swept into Derna unopposed. The defenders on that side of the town, apparently, had been drawn off by Eaton's assault on the eastern barricades, leaving the way wide open for Hamet's men. They'd occupied an empty castle on the outskirts of town, then moved on to seize the governor's palace.

Offshore, in the harbor, the guns of the tiny American flotilla fell silent.

The harbor fort's gates stood open, and Sergeant Derek charged inside….

Blue Twelve
Objective Reality
0849 hours, GMT

Beneath the eaves of Belleau Wood, Corporal Edgar O'Malley followed Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly at a flat-out run, as German bullets zipped and buzzed like angry hornets, and the ground trembled to the
crump
and
thud
of explosions. The Maxim gun position that had driven O'Malley to ground in the first place was less than fifty yards to his right, on the edge of the forest.

A gray shape rose from behind a tangle of logs and cut
brush just ahead. O'Malley raised his Springfield and triggered off a round, and the gray shape sprawled to the ground. Still cheering, the other Marines swept into the forest, taking more casualties, but sweeping the startled Germans from fighting holes and trenches.

Working his way to his right, O'Malley found himself a scant twenty yards behind and to the right of the machine-gun nest. A gunner, a loader, and three other men with the characteristic coal-scuttle helmets of the Imperial German Army crouched in a hole barricaded with timber, their full attention still focused on the sun-drenched glare of the wheat field in front of them. The gunner clutched the twin grips of the deadly Maschinengewehr '08 inches in front of his face, squeezing off tight, professional bursts at the Marines still advancing across the open ground.

O'Malley leaned against a tree, took aim, and squeezed off a single shot. The machinegunner dropped, his helmet drilled at the temple by the .30-caliber round. O'Malley worked the bolt of his rifle, sending spent brass spinning through the air as he chambered a new round, took aim again, and fired. One of the Hun infantrymen, just turning to take the gunner's place behind the Maxim gun, jerked and fell. O'Malley triggered a third round, and a third German lurched to one side, sprawling face down over the barricade.

O'Malley was doing some fast calculating. His Springfield fed from a five-round internal magazine. He'd fired once when he entered the woods…and three times more in fast succession just now. He had one round left, and two Germans in front of him, both of whom had finally figured out where the superbly accurate rifle fire was coming from, and who were turning now to face him. He could kill one of the two, but not both.

For an agonizing couple of seconds, O'Malley and the two German infantrymen faced one another. Then one of the Germans dropped his Mauser rifle and raised his hands.

“
Kamerad
!”

Coolly, O'Malley swung his aim to cover the second German, who quickly dropped his rifle as well. “
Ve zurrender!
” the second man called in heavily accented English.

And then more Marines were swarming into the woods out of the bloody field beyond.

1902.2229

Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
0850 hours, GMT

“It's not just some kind of projected illusion,” Janis Fremantle was saying. “We're getting reports that Marines are actually dropping off the tactical scans, as if they really are teleporting someplace else. Some
when
else.”

“And Zephyr doesn't think the Xul are doing it?” Garroway asked.

“Oh, the Xul are involved somehow. All of our Zephyr penetrators are tracking the data streams responsible inside the Xul Net. But the Xul may not be aware of what they're doing.”

“Maybe they're data mining,” Colonel Jordan, the constellation's computer expert, said. “Trying to find out who's attacking them.”

“Or they're using it as a distraction,” Major Allendes suggested.

“It could be a damned effective weapon,” Colonel Adri Carter, Garroway's Executive Officer, pointed out. “If our people are simming as other people, in other situations, other places, they can't pay attention to where they are physically.”

Garroway thought again about how real, how all-consum
ing the hallucination had been, and nodded agreement. He really
had
been a Marine named Myers, really
had
been wounded on the barricaded Tartar Wall above the Legation Quarter in 1900 Peking. His leg was still throbbing with the memory.

“And it's possible the Xul don't know how completely they're scrambling us,” he said. “If they did, they might have put up a stronger counterattack. Either that, or we haven't seen their end game yet.”

“You mean they're still setting us up for the kill?” Ranser asked.

“Something like that.”

“Perhaps,” Rame suggested, “it's an attempt to communicate.”

“Also possible. But all we can go on now is the effect their attempts are having on us. So far, it's more like a weapon than chit-chat. What kind of command control do we still have?”

Major Den Kyle was the command constellation's senior QCC Network Controller…the senior
human
, at any rate. Garroway had ordered all AIs and digital humans to stand down, just in case they'd been contaminated by Xul electronic infiltration. “At any given moment,” he said, “we have solid links with perhaps half of our personnel over there. It's like Janis said. They keep popping in and out, as if they're going someplace else. When something happens—like you getting stuck with that spear, sir—to jar them out of it, they come back.”

“We need to put more pressure on the bastards,” Garroway said. “How long until we can rotate again, Admiral?”

Ranser consulted an inner checklist. “We're ready any time, General. But we're not scheduled to go back in for another—”

“Pass the word to all hands, then execute our next rotation,” Garroway said. “Remember, a lot more time is passing out here than in there. The bad guys won't be expecting us to pop up again so soon.” He turned away suddenly.

“General?” Ranser asked. “Where are you going?”

“Back inside,” Garroway replied. “I need to see this from over there….”

Blue Seven
Approaching Objective Reality
0850 hours, GMT

The gates opened as the Marines and sailors marched up to the fort. Inside, there were only a handful of defenders. The three cannon shots fired from the walls had been a token defense, a means of preserving honor. Honor preserved, they could now surrender.

A painfully young redcoat lieutenant was in charge of the defenders. Nicholas accepted his sword, then returned it to him. His men, Nicholas said, would be paroled on their word of good behavior.

In any case, there weren't enough Continentals there to waste guarding prisoners.

One ceremony was crucial, however. As the Marines stood in ranks at attention in the parade ground at the center of the fort, as the Marine drummer rolled off a sharp tattoo, Samuel Nicholas broke out the Grand Union flag…thirteen red and white horizontal stripes, with the red, white, and blue Union Jack inset at the upper corner of the hoist. It was the same flag that had flown over the
Providence
and the other ships of the tiny American Navy.

Porter watched the flag as it climbed the mast and felt a peculiar, almost surging tug at heart and throat. Not the British flag…
his
flag. America's flag.

And as he watched, another presence grew stronger in his mind. Porter was fading, Garwe growing stronger. It was Marek Garwe standing there in Fort Montagu, watching the flag-raising ceremony, feeling the sharp rush of pride even though the people he was watching had been dead 2,200
years, and the flag of a long-vanished republic meant little now save as a historical curiosity.

He was still powerfully moved.

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines
Within Objective Reality
0850 hours, GMT

Sergeant Derek raced through the open gates of the fort, close behind O'Bannon, waving his sword, and Eaton, arm bandaged, holding a cocked flintlock pistol in his good hand. Many of the fort's gunners had fled already, and several of the nine-pounder carriages had been smashed by gunfire from the
Argus
and the other American ships, but several cannon remained intact, and a number of Arab gunners still manned them.

Derek bayoneted a Barbary soldier wielding a scimitar just beyond the gate. Eaton raised his pistol and fired at one of the gun crews on the platform behind the fort's palisades. A turbaned soldier dropped his ramrod, slumping over the weapon's muzzle. The other members of the gun crew scattered, running for cover, and the fever caught among the other gun crews as well. In moments, the Barbary troops were scrambling over the low walls, fleeing the fort and leaving it to the cheering Americans, Greeks, and Arab mercenaries.

Most of the cannon had been reloaded in preparation for a massed broadside at the American ships. Shouting, waving his sword, O'Bannon began bullying the Greek Christians and Arab Muslims, getting them to manhandle the heavy guns around to face the opposite direction, down into the heart of the city.

“Sir!” Derek called out. “The flag!…”

The Tripolitan flag still hung from the flagstaff in the center of the fort, and firing from beneath those colors would be a serious breach of military custom. “Right you are, Sergeant,” O'Bannon replied. Trotting down the stone steps from the
parapet, where his men continued to wrestle the captured guns around to the south wall, he unfastened the lanyard and quickly hauled down the flag.

He had another flag tucked away inside his blue jacket. Pulling it out, he attached it to the lanyard, then swiftly hauled the banner up the flagpole. It broke in the offshore breeze, fifteen white stars on a blue field, fifteen horizontal red and white stripes along the fly.

The Marines cheered, then, and, perhaps because it was infectious, so did the Greek mercenaries…and then even the Arabs were cheering as well. It took a few moments, but as the cheers and huzzahs died away, Derek could hear more cheering, this floating in across the harbor. The brig
Argus
was close enough that he could see blue-jacketed sailors crowding her ratlines and rails, waving their flat hats, and cheering wildly. A similar commotion appeared to have broken out on board the more distant
Hornet
and
Nautilus
.

Only then did the real meaning, the real
magic
of the moment strike Derek.

The United States of America had been in existence for just twenty-nine years. During that time, she'd fought a Revolution lasting seven years, as well as an undeclared and totally maritime quasi-war with France. Now, America was fighting for her right as a nation of the world, the equal of all others, the right to unrestricted commerce on the high seas without being forced to pay humiliating tribute to foreign princes.

And for the first time in her brief history, her flag had just been hoisted above a bastion of the Old World.

The U.S. Marines had made their mark upon history, and nothing, absolutely
nothing
, could possibly stop them now.

Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
0851 hours, GMT

“Three…two…one…rotate!”

“Initiate dimensional translation.”

At Ranser's command, the ten-kilometer bulk of the
Samuel Nicholas
dropped out of normal space and into the eldritch otherness of the Quantum Sea. She materialized almost exactly where she'd been before, perhaps five hundred kilometers from the Xul world-base. Although the
Nicholas
was primarily a transport, she mounted massive X-ray and gamma ray lasers in turrets on her outer hull, and possessed numerous mag-accelerators capable of whipping antimatter warheads or simple lumps of dead mass to near-light velocities and slam them into the target.

For perhaps a quarter of a second, the
Nicholas
hung in empty space, unnoticed. With the difference in time flow within this region, the ship had been gone for less than a minute. Then the Xul began to take notice of her. At the same time, her own fire control computers had located the transponders of Marines and Associative ships in the region, and targeted areas of the worldlet where they could avoid inflicting casualties through friendly fire. Gouts of light began sparking and flashing across the planet's surface as the
Nicholas
main weapons came to bear.

The Associative Fleet continued their ongoing bombardment as well, and in seconds the entire face of the Xul world appeared to be sparkling with a multitude of hits.

The enemy's fire didn't slacken, however, and in seconds both the battlecruiser
Poseidon
and the cruisers
Hesperides
and
Azuran
were savaged by multiple beams from the Xul worldlet. Multiple explosions ate through the vessel's hulls, leaving the
Poseidon
a drifting hulk, the other two as expanding clouds of hot gas and debris.

The surviving Associative ships continued the bombardment, however, working to suppress the Xul surface structures, turrets, and weapons mounts and reduced the volume of enemy fire. After twenty seconds, the huge transport winked out once more, vanished back to four-D space. And, seconds later, it reappeared, drifting in a different direction, this time, hammering the Xul world from a different quarter.

Xul combat machines emerged from caverns and shielded
entrances in black, swarming clouds. They were met by squadrons of heavy F/A-750 Nightstar fighters and A/S-4000 Maelstroms, cutting through the clouds instants after devastating high-energy beams burned through them.

Many of the fighters lost their human components momentarily, as the Marines in their cockpits shifted into simulations coming through the combat Net, but the AIs continued flying them. Some fighters winked off of tactical displays entirely, to reappear moments later, as high-volume data streams interacted with the strangely malleable pseudo-space of the Quantum Sea.

Overall, the Marine and Navy forces were able to keep up the pressure, however.

In the sky and beneath the ground, within the Quantum Sea and at a thousand realities across time and space, the Marine assault of Objective Reality continued.

Blue Seven
Objective Reality
0851 hours, GMT

The gun powder that was supposed to be in Nassau wasn't there.

It took fourteen days to load the supplies captured at Nassau on board the tiny American squadron—eighty-eight cannon, sixteen thousand shells, ten thousand rounds of musket ammunition, and other supplies—but the majority of the precious gunpowder stored there had been moved elsewhere the day before.

During the voyage back from Nassau, the flotilla had engaged a British warship, the HMS
Glasgow
, and Nicholas' Marines had helped man the broadside cannon. The fight was inconclusive, but Lieutenant John Fitzpatrick and six Marines had been killed—the first Marines ever to die in combat—and four others had been wounded.

The powerful surge of emotion, of pride in the Corps and
the Corps' history, was giving way as Lieutenant Garwe began slipping back into control of the simulation.

The raid on Nassau had been a spectacular success by any measure, but there were ongoing debates that tended to cloud the light of that bright victory. Commodore Esek Hopkins, the commander of the little Continental Navy flotilla that had seized the Bahamian port, came under censure. His orginal orders from Congress had been to clear the Chesapeake Bay of British raiders, but he'd disregarded those orders to carry out the raid on Nassau. On his return, his fleet was blockaded helplessly inside Narragansett Bay, and there were allegations of his incompetence and inaction, both at Narragansett Bay and in the action with the
Glasgow
.

In January of 1778, he'd been permanently relieved of his command.

And there were questions…
questions
. Tun Tavern, the recruiting station so beloved of the Corps, might not in fact be the actual place where the Marines had first been recruited. The histories suggested that it had been another tavern entirely, the Conestoga, owned by Nicholas's family, where the Marine Corps saga had actually begun. The records from the era were so fuzzy and incomplete, it was impossible to be sure of what was real, what was myth.

Garwe felt himself tottering on the edge of a swirling, dark depression. Who
were
the Marines, anyway? Their history had all been a shabby lie. The landing at Nassau had been almost unopposed, and the powder they'd hoped to seize was gone. Esek Hopkins had been disgraced, and the Marines during the Revolution—aside from recruits enlisted and taken directly on board naval vessels—had primarily served with Washington's army as artillerymen, though a handful had sailed down the Mississippi in 1778 to deny New Orleans to British merchants.