Semper Human (32 page)

“That,” Jordan said, “is just a little too weird to be believed.”

“If you believe a thing to be true,”
Socrates told him,
“then it
is.”

“Nonsense,” Rame said. “I can believe with all my heart that all the Xul out there are gone, poof! It won't make it so!”

“If you believe a thing to be true,”
Socrates said, repeating himself,
“then it
is.”

“There must be other factors,” Garroway pointed out. “Like whether or not what we choose to believe is the
entire
body of our belief…or just a thin smear of happy thoughts over a planet-sized body of habitual thinking, of business-as-usual. We might limit what we're capable of just by a failure of imagination.”

“I don't see that any of this gets us anywhere,” Adri Carter said. “Can we blow that…that
thing
inside the Xul planet or not?”

“If you believe a thing to be true,”
Socrates said for a third time,
“then it
is.”

“Meaning,” Garroway said, “that we
can
drop an antimatter warhead down its throat and limit the collateral damage out here.”

“By what we
believe
?” Rame said, incredulous.

“By what we
know,
” Garroway replied. “You're right. We can't just wish the Xul away…any more than they can wish
us
away. At least yet. That Dyson object might be designed to give their wishes some muscle. But the Xul world is floating in an incredible sea of potential energy, much more energy than we can even imagine.”

“You're talking about the zero-point field,” Rame said.

“Exactly. Tell them, Socrates.”

“Early calculations,”
Socrates told them,
“made some two thousand years ago by Feynman and others, suggested that the virtual particle flux within a single cubic centimeter of seemingly empty space represents energy enough to instantly vaporize all of the oceans of Earth. Later calculations—and subsequent experimentation—demonstrated that the actuality of vacuum energy is some seventy-nine orders of magnitude
larger.”

“In other words,” Garroway said, “the detonation of that Xul world would be the equivalent of lighting a candle within the corona of Earth's sun. No effect.”

“Yes,” Rame said, “but can we be
sure
?”

“As sure as we can be.”

“If you're wrong, you could end existence itself.”

“And if we do nothing, the Xul will end our existence for us.” Garroway looked at the Conclave representative. “How about it, Lord Rame? What's it going to be?”

“I…
we
need time to deliberate.”

Garroway consulted his inner time sense. “We're rotating back into the Quantum Sea in another twenty-one minutes. You have that long to decide.”

Sweat gleamed on the wide expanse of the H-supe's scalp. His large and golden eyes betrayed his fear. “It's not enough!”

“It
has
to be enough, Star Lord. We won't have another chance.”

“I recommend we do it, Star Lord,” Ranser said. “If we don't, the Xul push a button soon, and it will be as though we, the entire human race, never existed. They edit us out of Reality. Or, worse, we wake up and find we're their slaves, that we've
always
been their slaves, with no hope ever of breaking free.”

“I don't think slavery's an option,” Garroway said with a shrug, “The Xul don't think that way. They're more interested in eliminating any possible threat.”

“If…if we eliminate them,” Rame said, “Doesn't that make us as bad as them?”

“Good and bad don't have much to do with it, Star Lord. This is about
survival
.”

Blue Seven
Objective Reality
0935 hours, GMT

Feeling almost naked and almost unarmed, Garwe hurried across the black, metallic landscape with five other Anchor Marines from his scattered squadron—Xander, Wahrst, Bollan, Amendes, and Palin.

Digital life forms like the Xul had a distinct advantage here, he thought.
They
didn't need to breathe, for one thing….

They could also power up larger machines and field more powerful weapons. The pulse-carbine he carried used magnetic induction to accelerate plasma bolts—decent enough for a shoulder-fired weapon, but pathetic compared to the compact but powerful x-ray lasers his Starwraith had mounted. An unaugmented human could only carry so much, after all. Besides, an x-ray beam weapon could burn the Marine firing one almost as badly as it burned the target, one reason the Starwraiths were so heavily armored.

Why the hell had the brass ordered them to unplug? Those simulations? That had been spooky, sure, and had left him feeling not quite in control. He could understand why headquarters wanted to keep the Xul from messing with the squadron's heads. But they'd been
handling
it, okay? The pods had been popping in and out of reality, but they hadn't been getting lost, they had been coming back, and the Marines all had been coping…even Xander. She'd been badly shaken by her vision of Chapultepec and Los Niños, sure, but she'd pulled herself together and kept on going.

They reached the lip of the crater and peered down inside.

Without their sensors, they couldn't tell how deep the thing was, but it went down a long way. A pale, white glow seemed to emanate from somewhere in those depths.

And off to the right, Garwe saw a line of Marines in combat armor toiling up the side.

“There they are,” he said, pointing.

“I see them,” Xander replied. She shifted to the general combat frequency. “Marines…coming up the side of the crater! This is Blue Flight! Do you copy?”

“We copy,” a tired voice called back. “Where are you?”

“At the top of the pit, about fifty meters above you and to your left.” She stood up and waved. “Do you see me?”

“Roger that.” One of the figures waved back. “On our way.”

This is ridiculous, Garwe thought. With their implants,
they could have identified each other easily, without all of that arm-waving and radio traffic.

And then a blindingly hot bolt of plasma energy caught Xander squarely in her upper torso, exploding her in a puff of red vapor, the blast silent save for a sharp burst of static over Garwe's radio. Her skin-suited legs and lower body stood for a second, then toppled slowly forward in the low gravity and into the pit.

Her head, still in a black-scorched helmet, struck the ground and bounced, slowly, toward Garwe's feet.

Garwe had already spun in the direction from which the bolt had come. The wall of the pit, to the left, off beyond the climbers, was writhing, coming alive as Xul combat machines molded in against the rock began to uncurl and emerge. He brought his carbine to his shoulder and opened fire, sending bolts slamming into the alien machines. The other Marines began firing as well, Wahrst and Bollan dropping to their knees as they fired volley after volley into the enemy.

But it didn't appear that the light weapons were having much, if any, effect. A second bolt seared through the space between Garwe and Wahrst, gouging a steaming crater into the black ground. Static hissed and snapped over the Marines' comm channels as human and Xul weapons alike opened up in a crisscross-web of deadly energies.

The War Dogs were exposed and badly outnumbered and outgunned. Within another moment, though, the first of the Marines climbing the wall of the pit emerged over the lip, turning to add his fire to theirs.

Static spat, and one of the climbing Marines was hit and fell back into the pit, but slowly the firefight turned in the Marines' favor….

 

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines
Within Objective Reality
0938 hours, GMT

Nal watched Corporal Donovan's body tumble slowly into the depths, bit off a curse, then grabbed the rim of the pit just above his head and dragged himself up and over. The other Marines in his tiny command clambered over the edge as well. For a few moments, they stood in a ragged semicircle at the pit's edge, pouring fire into the slowly morphing surface of the wall twenty meters away. Molten gobbets of metal sputtered and drooled from the wall, and then the enemy fire ceased entirely and the wall went dead.

“Which way?” Nal asked the Marines who'd been covering them from above.

“That way,” one of them said. “I think.”

“You
think
? You'd damn well better be sure!”

“Hey, we don't have our Nav systems up and running, okay? But we came through from somewhere up there.”

“Good enough, Marine,” Nal said. “Let's move it, though! This tunnel is going to get distinctly unhealthy in just a few minutes!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the Marine said, responding to the decisive tone of Nal's voice.

“You people in the pressure suits, get in the middle! H Company, form up around the outside! Protective perimeter!
Move! Move!
”

With the Marines of H Company surrounding the others, the unarmored Marines could take cover behind the 2/9's heavier armor.

Nal thought the others must be Anchor Marines, though he didn't ask. They were wearing lightweight pressure suits, however, rather than Hellfire armor or something heavier, and carrying popgun carbines that were scarcely better than sidearms in a firefight. With the Hellfire-armored Marines on the outside, the pressure-suited Marines stood a slightly better chance of living through the next few minutes.

Nal tried to orient himself. This might have been the tunnel he and the others with him had traversed earlier to reach the pit…but all of the Xul's underground works looked pretty much alike, and they might have emerged into the pit farther down inside its mouth. If these newcomers said that they'd come
this
way, it was good enough for him.

“What's the damned hurry?” one of the Anchor Marines asked. It sounded like a woman.

“Did HQ tell you what we found back there?” Nal asked.

“Nope,” another Anchor Marine said. This one was male. “Just said to find you and get you out.”

“Figures. Truth is, I don't know what we found…but it's big and it looks important. The
Nicholas
is going to try a d-port bombing run in a few minutes. We do
not
want to be anywhere close when that happens!”

“Shee-it!” the other Marine said with considerable depth of feeling. “Let's step it up, people!”

Nal noticed that one of the other Marines was carrying a pressure helmet, and that a woman's head was still encased inside. The eyes were open and staring behind the partially char-frosted visor.

“Who's that?” he asked, curious.

“Captain Xander,” the Marine holding the head replied. “Our CO. She was hit just before we joined up with you.”

Nal refrained from asking why they were dragging the head along. He
knew
why.

The tragedy was that without their implants, the Marines could not save the woman's personality.

Mindkeeping
, the technique was called. If a Marine's brain was more or less intact, mind and memory and personality could all be recorded in the implant, allowing for a full reconstruction later…even if the Medical Department had to clone a whole new body. Without the implant, all they could do was clone her from some of the undamaged tissue. Captain Xander would start off her new life as a newborn baby, an exact clone of the original, but with none of the original's memories. She would be an entirely new person.

The original Captain Xander was irretrievably dead.

Carrying the head wasn't harming anything, though, at least so long as they weren't being shot at. Nal decided not to make an issue of it.

He also considered asking one of the Anchor Marines who was in command now. He had a feeling that these Anchors were part of one of the Starwraith squadrons that had been assaulting the Xul worldlet from the outside. If so, these eight people were all lieutenants—officers—while all of the Marines in Nal's group were enlisted personnel.

None of them wore visible rank tabs on their suits or armor, however. That sort of thing had always been handled through the implants, identifying a speaker or an icon on a tac display by his rank and position. There'd been no need to physically mark their suits.

If they were going by the ancient Book, those eight lieutenants should have sorted out who was senior—by graduating class, if necessary—and that one would have taken command of the entire group. Nal didn't want to take the time to do that, though, and it was simpler, and safer, for the experienced NCO to simply take charge now, and work out the niceties of rank later.

If there
was
a later.

He thought he could see a spot of light in the distance up ahead.

1902.2229

Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
0954 hours, GMT

“Translation into the Quantum Sea in one minute, thirty seconds,” a technician announced.

Garroway, Ranser, and their staffs stood in the Ops Center beneath the glowing blue eye of the Great Annihilator.
Once more into the breach, dear friends,
Garroway thought, quoting an ancient text.
Once more into the breach
….

“So why was this flag-raising you were participating in so important?” Rame wanted to know.

“A politician—James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy—was on the beach on Iwo Jima that morning when the first flag was raised,” Garroway told him, his voice low. It was as though he were remembering the incident first-hand. “Even though it was a smaller flag than the one they put up later, and not easily visible, it
was
seen. Marines all over the beachhead started yelling and cheering their heads off. Ships offshore began sounding horns.

“Anyway, the politician turned to the Marine general standing next to him, a guy named Holland Smith, and said, ‘Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine
Corps for the next five hundred years.' It became an icon of the Corps.”

“That was what, two thousand years ago?”

“Something like that.”

“More than the five hundred years predicted by this James Forrestal.”

Garroway shrugged. “It wasn't a prediction, and the number of years is irrelevant. He was commenting on the public relations of the event, on how important it was for the Marine Corps.”

“Public relations? I don't understand.”

“Over the years, plenty of presidents—the leaders of that country—tried to eliminate the Marine Corps to save costs, to be efficient and end redundancy in the military services, that sort of thing. There were key battles and campaigns, though, that made the Corps so famous, so popular with the citizens of that country, that they were never able to kill it. The March at Derna. The storming of Chapultepec. The Battle of Belleau Wood. The raising of the flag on Suribachi. They're all part of who and what the Marines are.”

“Maybe that's why those simulations the Xul were broadcasting didn't have much effect,” Rame suggested. “They weren't telling your Marines anything they didn't already know!”

“That's possible.”

“Speaking of those simulations, sir,” Fremantle said, “are we
sure
it's a good idea to keep our implants on for this rotation?”

“Those transmissions were aimed at the Marines near and inside the Xul planet,” Garroway said with a shrug. “I don't think anyone experienced them on the
Nicholas
, did they?”

“No data yet, General,” Carter said. “No reports of it, anyway, except for you, Narayanan, and Davenport.”

Major Davenport and Colonel Narayanan had been the other two members of the command constellation who'd linked into Starwraiths with Garroway earlier. Both had broken free at the same time as Garroway. Davenport had re
ported slipping in and out of the mind of a Marine sergeant fighting Muslim insurgents in Egypt in 2314. Narayanan had been with the Marines in Operation Heartfire, the assault on the Xul Dyson sphere at the Galactic Core in 2887.

“And we were linked through to our Starwraiths,” Garroway said. “The sims seemed to switch off when we cut the link and woke up back here. I suspect we'll be okay, at least for the few minutes it'll take for pick-up and launch.”

I hope
, he added to himself. Things
always
went wrong in combat.

“If
you
want to switch off your implant, Colonel, I'm sure that would be fine with the rest of us,” Carter told Fremantle, grinning.

“Um, no,” the intelligence officer said. “I don't think that will be necessary.”

“Rotation into the Quantum Sea,” the Ops Center tech announced, “in five…in four…in three…two…one…
initiate!
”

And the
Nicholas
dropped through into the violet-blue haze of Otherness.

Again, the ringed dwarf planet hung suspended in front of the transport, twenty thousand kilometers distant. Five naval vessels remained; they'd pulled back out of range after taking heavy punishment from the Xul world, but began closing with the planet once more when the
Nicholas
appeared.

“Give orders to take those ships on board,” Ranser said. “Let's get them out of here, too.” No one knew what would happen to this bizarre space-that-was-not-a-space beyond the throat of the Great Annihilator if the Xul world-base exploded.
Nicholas
would pick up all of the ships and men it could…
if
the Xul let them.

“Aye, sir.”

“Sir!” Carter said. “
Nicholas
' teleport department reports they've begun establishing viable links. They request permission to begin bringing our people aboard.”

“Do it,” Garroway said.

He was thinking about his many-times-great grand nephew.
Nicholas
' teleport crews would only be able to pick up Marines they could positively locate on the surface. Any Marine units that had penetrated the planet would be blocked by layers of rock.

There were nearly six thousand Marines on the surface of the Xul world now…and most of them would be underground. An hour ago, Carter had projected over five hundred electronic clones of himself to the various Marine commands down there, ordering them to unplug their implants and to begin making their way back to the surface. How many Marines had managed to do so was anybody's guess…and with their implants switched off,
Nicholas
couldn't ping them to establish contact or even to conduct a tacsit census.

Young Lieutenant Garwe had been with one of the groups underground, Garroway knew. He hoped his distant relative would be able to make it out.

“Teleport department reports we've begun bringing Marines back on board,” Carter reported.

“And Weapons Department reports the special package is ready for launch.”

“Good.” Now it was in the laps of the gods. He turned to Rame. “How about it, Lord Rame? What do your Conclave friends say? Are we going to do this or not?”

Rame drew in a ragged breath. Although they weren't being IDed through Garroway's implant, Garroway could sense other minds, other eyes, watching through Rame's. How many? There was no way to tell.

“I've not been able to reach everyone within the Conclave,” he said. “Only a few thousand…perhaps twelve percent?”

“Okay. And how do
they
vote?”

“Forty-three percent are in favor of delivering the antimatter warhead, as you suggest, General. Thirty-nine percent are against. Eight percent either have no opinion, or they are still debating the matter.”

Garroway wondered how any intelligent being could
not
have an opinion about the possibility of destroying all of
Reality. Some of the intelligences with whom Humankind had made contact across the Galaxy were pretty strange, with a philosophical detachment or simply with an alien point of view Garroway found difficult to understand, but even
so
….

Democracy, an ancient politician had once humorously noted, was absolutely the worst form of government in existence…except for all of the others. It had the advantage of being confused and disorganized enough that the freedoms of its citizens could be more easily preserved. The disadvantage, though, was that when something
had
to be done, and done quickly, it was almost impossible to create a consensus in time to do anything about it.

Historically, the Marines had carried out the government policies set by others, but this time, in the face of a clear and present danger as the ancient formula had it, Garroway was going to give the orders he knew to be right. “Forty-three to thirty-nine,” he said. “Time's up, Lord Rame. The ayes have it.”

Rame hesitated, then nodded. “I agree. What else can we do?”

“We could do nothing and die.” He turned to Carter. “How are we doing?”

“It's going to take a while, General. We have a lot of men out there, and not all of them are back at the surface.”

“Ten minutes,” Garroway said. “Then we launch.”

The order to teleport the antimatter warhead into the Xul worldlet might well be the death sentence for more Marines than Garroway cared to think about now.

The volume of fire from the Xul planet was greatly reduced, now, but still fierce.
Nicholas
was taking numerous hits as she drifted slowly toward the Xul base. The surviving ships of the squadron continued to fire as they moved slowly out toward the
Nicholas
, and began maneuvering to be taken aboard. Nicholas targeted the Xul batteries one after another, pounding them into hot plasma, and the enemy fire was reduced still more.

Garroway thought about other targets of the Marine Corps over the past two thousand years. There seemed to be a sharp escalation built into the history of the human-Xul war.

In 2170, a Naval task force with a Marine element embarked had gone through the Sirius stargate to emerge in Cluster Space, at a Xul node out beyond the rim of the Galaxy. They'd destroyed an asteroid there which housed another stargate, in order to keep the Xul from discovering Earth.

In 2323, another Navy-Marine task force had accelerated a transport filled with Martian sand to close to the speed of light, releasing the cargo to literally sandblast an entire planet, and the Xul fleet nearby, at Night's Edge.

In 2877, with the help of the alien Eulers, Marines had used a faster-than-light ship to disrupt the core of a star, creating a supernova that wiped out a Xul node in Starwall Space.

And just ten years later, in 2887, Marines and a naval squadron had assaulted the Galactic Core itself, collapsing the Xul Dyson sphere into the supermassive black hole at the Galaxy's center, and initiating the Core Detonation itself.

With that kind of history, it seemed almost inevitable that now, twelve hundred years later, the Marines would be poised to end all of Reality itself….

Blue Seven
Objective Reality
0949 hours, GMT

Garwe struggled on across the broken metal-rock-crystal of the cavern floor. The boots built into the feet of his pressure suit were not thick-soled, and though the material was too tough to tear on the rough surface, fortunately, it was
not
comfortable to walk on. All of the War Dogs were slowing, as exhaustion and blistered feet became harder and harder to ignore.

Even so, it was tough to resist the urge to break into a run.
Purple-blue light was shining up ahead—a tiny patch marking the cavern opening.

The Xul began emerging from the walls and floor around them.

Garwe raised his carbine and began firing, burning down the black, biomechanical tentacles growing out of solid rock, a fast-growing mass of tendrils trying to reach the struggling Marines. The outer perimeter of armored Marines took the brunt of the first assault, but then the floor seemed to soften, to melt into the consistency of thick tar, and tentacles and less identifiable appendages began growing from the plastic mass at their feet.

For a time the battle was at knife-fighting range, as tentacles wrapped around individual Marines, lifting them from the ground, as Marines fired at the Xul mechanicals at point-blank range, as Xul plasma beams snapped and burned from the nearby walls with shrill bursts of static over the radios. One of the armored Marines was grabbed and pulled down by a mass of finger-thick tentacles like the business end of a sea anemone. As more and more tentacles closed over the Marine, they began merging together, encasing the armored form in a black mass that seemed to be dissolving back into the cavern floor. Garwe took three steps and reached the struggling Marine, firing his carbine into the black mass with his right hand, while using his left arm to haul the man free. Another armored Marine came up beside Garwe, and together they pulled the trapped man up and out of the tarry ooze.

Then, with blinding suddenness, Misek Bollan was lifted off the ground by a black, jointed tentacle as thick as Garwe's thigh, growing up out of the ground itself. For a horrible instant, Bollan was suspended above the other Marines, screaming, as his squadmates turned their fire on the shimmering thing coiled about his hips…and then the tentacle convulsed and tightened, pinching the Marine in half. It gave a shake, and Bollan's body flew apart, legs going one way, torso, arms and head the other, trailing blood and gore.

Before he could react to the sight, something grabbed Garwe by his right ankle and yanked him hard to the side, hoisting him. The biomechanical tentacle had flowed up out of the ground itself and wrapped itself around him, jerking him bodily from the ground. Dangling upside down, he tried to bring his weapon to bear, but the slender black arm writhed and pulsed and twisted, impossible to target. Garwe hesitated. If he fired too close to his own leg, he could breach his suit, and then it would be all over.

Then one of the armored Marines was there, throwing his arms around the lurching tentacle, using his suit's flamer to burn through the black, metallic coil. With a shock, the tentacle parted, and Garwe landed on his arm and shoulder. The piece of tentacle wrapped around his leg continued to move and tighten with a life of its own. The other Marine burned it away with an expertly timed pass of the flamer, melting most of the coil, but leaving Garwe's suit intact.

“Thanks!” Garwe called. Terror clutched at him. His heart was pounding; he was having trouble breathing.

“Not a problem,” the other replied. For the first time, Garwe was close enough to the other man to read the name stenciled on the chest of his armor:
NAL, S
.

He would remember that name, Garwe promised himself, so he could buy the guy a drink when this was over.