Semper Human (16 page)

Briefly, Garroway mentally traced out the main spiral arms, a game he always played when confronted with this vision. Perseus Arm…Scutum-Crux…the Three Kiloparesec Arm blending into the sweep of the Norma Arm…Sagittarius…and right there was the faint and patchwork glow of the Local Arm, and the offshoot known as the Orion Spur. Sol was
there
, somewhere among those star clouds.

In fact, Earth's sun was so intrinsically faint as to be invisible to the naked eye at a distance of only thirty or forty light years, and he was looking for it across a gulf two thousand
times greater than that. Each and every one of the stars he could see was brighter by far than Sol, and for every star he could see there were tens of thousands that he could not.

Earth's sun, and its worlds, was lost within that unimaginable immensity.

“General?” Garwe said. He looked concerned.

“Excuse me,” Garroway replied. He waved toward the glowing spiral frozen beyond the transparency. “That sight always gets to me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Relax…Marek, is it?”

“Yes, sir. My friends call me ‘Gar.'”

“Mine did, too, before I became a general.”

“Yes, sir.” Garwe's eyes widened. “Oh, yeah! Right!”

“Have you wondered at all at the similarity in our names, Gar?”

“No, sir. Not really. Wait…are you saying…”

Garwe, Garroway was pleased to note, was sharp and he was quick. “I did some checking on your personnel records. It appears that you and I are related.”

“No shit? Uh…I mean…”

“‘No shit' indeed. My son, Jerret, was born in 2939, Old Calendar.” He did a quick translation through his implant processor. “That would be 1164 Corps Era. How long a generation is depends a lot on current medical science, of course, but forty years was the old Biblical standard, and it's still popular as the rule-of-thumb average nowadays. That's about thirty generations. Closer to forty-five, forty-six generations if you go by the more realistic span of twenty-five years.”

“You're saying you're my great-great-great—”

Garroway held up his hand. “Don't bother with all of those ‘greats,' son. You'll wear out your vocal cords.”

“—great-grandfather?” Garwe finished. He sounded as though he didn't quite believe it.

“Actually, you're a great-nephew, some number of times removed. But, yes. That's the gist of it.”

“I'm…honored. Sir.”

“Bullshit. You don't know me and have no reason whatsoever to feel honored by the relationship. In any case, after
that
many generations, you're going to have bits of DNA from a reasonable percentage of the entire Third-Millennium population of Humankind, not just me. But I do find the relationship intriguing.”

“Yes, sir! I…I never cared all that much for history, but it's kind of neat finding out I have a connection to it like this.”

Garroway made a face. “We
all
do, son. We're all products of history, and we all have generals in our family tree.
And
peasants.
And
scoundrels. And sometimes all three in one twig. That's the fun of it.”

“I'm surprised the name carried down like that, though, sir.”

“Not too surprising, actually. A couple of thousand years ago, women gave up their family names when they married.”

“‘Married?'”

“Ancient social custom where men technically owned women in order to ensure a stable family grouping for raising kids.” He shrugged. “It was pretty much on the way out when I was born and, in any case, women stopped giving up their names, oh, mid-thirty-hundreds? Maybe a bit before that, when they stopped being property. And when that happened, kids began choosing their own names—you still have Naming Day ceremonies these days?”

“Yes, sir. Usually when a kid gets to be about thirteen standard.”

“Yeah. Typical coming-of-age ritual. So even though half of the family members between your generation and mine were women, and lots of other names are being woven into the family line along the way, when kids decide to take another name than ‘Garroway,' in one thread of the family line the name was likely to remain fairly constant. It just seems to have mutated a bit along the way. After over a thousand years, that's scarcely surprising.”

“No, sir.”

“So, many-times-great-grand-nephew, do you know what that means for you?”

“Uh…no, sir.”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“I certainly wasn't expecting special treatment, sir.
Especially
after the extra duty I've been pulling.”

Garroway chuckled. He'd not handled the actual punishment mast for Garwe and his friends. That had been the responsibility of his immediate commanding officer, Captain Corolin Xander. He had linked with Xander, however, and made some suggestions.

“How's the extra duty coming along?”

It was Garwe's turn to make a sour face. “Twenty-one hours to go, sir. Three hours extra duty a night in the com stacks. Another week.”

“Your CO threw the proverbial book at you.”

“It could have been worse, sir.”

“It
will
be worse if you ever go drunk and disorderly again while you're on liberty. I promise you that, Marine.”

“Yes, sir. Aye, aye, sir.”

“Actually, I called you in this morning because of your extra duty assignment, not for a family reunion…and not to chew you a new one for your D and D. They have you sorting QCC feeds? Rating their priorities?”

“Yes, sir.
Millions
of them, sir.”

Garroway chuckled. One consequence of instantaneous communications across interstellar, even intergalactic distances, was the sheer, impossible volume of information traffic, especially that concerned with military, government, and exploratory organizations and services. Originally, Quantum-Coupled Communications networks, or QCCs, had allowed communications only between paired QCC units. Each pair consisted of large arrays of quantum particles—typically phase encapsulated photons—that had been initially created together, so that they were quantum-entangled.

Entanglement, and the technology required for reading coupled photons, permitted instant communications across
any conceivable distance thanks to the quantum property of nonlocality—what Einstein had referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” A change in spin of one photon generated an instantaneous and opposite change in the other, even when the two had subsequently been separated by many light years. Eventually, second-level entanglement had been achieved, allowing any number of receivers to tap in to a given QCC signal anywhere in the universe, provided they had the appropriate encryption key for that signal.

And assuming someone had sorted through the jungle of incoming messages. The six errant members of the 340th Strike Squadron had been assigned thirty hours of extra duty wading through the message buffers, or “stacks,” of incoming QCC traffic, sorting them by priority and filing them for later reference.

“There's one that should be coming through today,” Garroway told the younger man. “Might even already be in the stacks. I want you to flag it and route it through to me. Here's the locator code.” He passed an alphanumeric to Garwe, implant-to-implant.

Garwe looked uncertain, and seemed about to say something.

“What?” Garroway asked.

“Well, sir…if you have the locator code, you could check and see if it's in there for yourself.”

“True. But what I don't have is the encryption code, so I can't do anything with it. When you put a priority on it, I want you to forward a copy to me, with the encryption key.”

“Isn't that…illegal? Sir.”

“Let's call it a gray area. The information I'm looking for is a transmission from an OM-27 Eavesdropper entering the Great Annihilator at the Galactic Core. As such, it will include data vitally necessary to the planning of our next op, the
big
one, after this little side show in the Large Magellanic.”

“I…see….”

“Associative Supreme Command will relay the message to us eventually—they'd damned well better—but I want to
see the raw data, the intel coming through before the chair jockeys back home have a chance to clean it up.”

The ASC was the military council in overall command of Marine-Naval operations, and seemed to be pretty much in the collective pocket of the Council of Lords.

“You think the ASC would…would
lie
to us, sir?”

“Not lie. General Levingaller seems to be a good sort, and he wouldn't intentionally harm anyone in the Corps. But it's a highly politicized department, and the politicians are running everything back there. And the data is all going through electronic systems, being reviewed by AIs and digital t-humans…and one of the things we're watching out for is the possibility that the Xul have somehow compromised our electronic networks. I just don't want to take any chances, you understand?”

“Yes,
sir
! I'll get you what you need, sir.”

“Thanks. I know I can count on you.” Garroway stood up. “You're dismissed.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Garwe hurried out, and Garroway turned back to contemplate the Galaxy of Man.

The first op was on-track and on schedule, with the first assault scheduled for some twenty hours later. Most of the assault force was here at the first waypoint, a well-mapped and empty stretch of space roughly a quarter of the way between the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud. Tun Tavern, someone down in Ops had called it, after the place where the original Captain—later Major—Samuel Nicholas had first begun recruiting Continental Marines, and the name had stuck. The recon element, by now, was approaching the objective under Alcubierre Drive. Within the next few hours, data should be streaming back from the first-in gravmappers. When the final gravitometric plot was complete, the
Sam Nicholas
would rotate through the Quantum Sea and emerge within a few thousand kilometers of the Tavros-Endymion Cluster Stargate.

Then the fun would begin.

The trouble was the demand by HQ that the Globe Marines use teleportation for their tactical deployment. By now, all Marines in 3MarDiv had received downloads on how teleportation worked and how it could most effectively be used, but Garroway knew well that having data in your head was a hell of a long way from
knowing
something.

He was afraid that he was going to lose some good Marines tomorrow because of their lack of familiarity with the technology, and he didn't like that, not one bit.

And he was going to do his best to prevent it from happening.

1002.2229

Company H, 2/9
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
Tavros-Endymion Stargate
0510 hours, GMT

Master Sergeant Nal il-En Shru-dech completed a final run-through, checking the weapon read-outs and health stats of each Marine in the company. Company H of the 3MarDiv's 2/9 was
ready
.

This was the part, however, that always made his mouth a bit dry and his palms slick with sweat, the long agony of minutes before the actual assault, waiting for the go-command.

And it didn't help that he and his Marines were about to use a device all but undreamed of eight and a half centuries before, when they'd last entered cybe-hibe.

He'd downloaded all the training material, of course, and knew the theories and the established techniques. Hell, a direct data download could make a man an expert on anything in seconds; what it didn't do was confer muscle memory or the confidence of solid experience.

“You think this thing's gonna work, Master Sergeant?” Captain Corcoran, the company commander, asked over the private channel.

“Damfino, sir,” Nal replied.

“Scares the shit out of me.”

“Of course it does, sir. Scares me, too. Teleportation is
not
a natural act.”

“Works okay for Stargates,” Corcoran said. It sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.

“Absolutely, sir. And phase-shifters, too. I figure some very smart people have been working on this stuff for a long time, for centuries while we were snoozing, y'know? And they've had plenty of time to get the bugs out.”

“You think it's safe, then?”

Hell, no!
he thought, but he knew that wasn't what the skipper wanted to hear. “Sure it is, sir. Just stick to the procedures we downloaded, and watch where you step. Don't do anything stupid. We'll come through just fine.”

Company H was formed up within one of the
Nicholas'
debarkation bays, 118 Marines in full HFR-7 Hellfire combat boarding armor facing the stark, elliptical gateway at the end of a gray steel ramp. These CBA units were a lot lighter and closer to form-fitting than the combat armor Nal had first trained with almost 900 years before. At the moment, it was actually difficult to see the individual Marines. The combat armor with which Nal had trained all those centuries ago had used a surface film of nanoflage particles which reflected the light levels, colors, and patterns of their surroundings. Hellfires, though, actually bent incoming light to create the illusion of partial invisibility.

It wasn't perfect, of course. Nal could still see his fellow Marines standing in their quietly expectant ranks, but each suit had a fuzzy, translucent look to it, at least around the edges, and pieces of each suit—arms, legs, weapons—kept shifting in odd ways, or vanishing outright. A Marine in a Hellfire suit wouldn't disappear completely, but if he or she held motionless in the shadows, they could become damned near invisible. And when they were moving, those suits provided a shifting, blurred, and
very
difficult target.

Not only that, but that light-bending facility also served
to shed or deflect a lot of the energy from incoming beams and projectiles.

Hotel Company had been practicing with these suits on the voyage out from Earth, learning how best to take advantage of the cover they offered. Their actual operation was simplicity itself, with the AI resident within the helmet circuitry handling all of the real work.

The technology, Nal thought, was nothing short of astounding. And it
worked
.

So why was he feeling such deep misgivings over teleportation? The technology was almost as old as that of the Hellfire suits. And at least as reliable.

Technically, he knew, there were five ways to achieve teleportation, jumping from one place to another instantaneously without crossing the space in between.

With a big enough power plant, you could reach all the way down into the Quantum Sea and bypass the local topology of spacetime, allowing you to move a ship from point A to point B. That was how the big phase-shifters like the
Major Samuel Nicholas
did it. That was called q-teleportation, q for “quantum,” and it didn't work on anything much smaller than a monster ship like the
Sam Nick
.

Another means was designated g-teleportation, g for “gravitational.” That was how the Stargates managed to link one bit of space with another, using as portals twenty-kilometer rings within which Jupiter-mass black holes orbited at near-light velocities. The gravitational tides created by paired counterrotating singularities rippled out through normal space at the speed of light, but also crossed through higher dimensions as well, bypassing normal space and interacting with other ripples from other gates. Those gravitational waves could be tuned with the tides at other, far-distant Stargates, opening a hyper-dimensional gateway between the two.

Again, though, that type of teleportation worked only on a very large scale. Originally constructed by a long-vanished galactic intelligence, using technologies still far beyond those
of Humankind, Stargates formed a web of long-distance transit routes across the Galaxy and beyond. They were superb for strategic movement, and, indeed, made Galaxywide travel a reality, but they were not at all mobile, which meant they weren't exactly useful on a tactical level.

P-or psychic-teleportation had been demonstrated in the laboratory, but never made reliable enough for practical use. It had long been known that the human mind could open pathways through higher dimensions, and mental disciplines such as the weiji-do martial arts form practiced by Marines could help some individuals achieve it, at least for relatively small masses. Some day, a company of Marines might be able to use the mind alone to step through a doorway and cross thousands of kilometers in an eye blink, but it wasn't possible yet.

Theoretically, it was possible to break down the atoms and molecules of a man or a starship, convert them to energy, and beam them somewhere else at the speed of light for reassembly. That brute-strength method was called beam-or b-teleportation, but it had never been successfully demonstrated on anything larger and more complex than a very small diamond—pure carbon with a well-understood crystalline matrix. The computational power necessary for a b-teleport of organic matter—to say nothing of a living being—was far beyond even the most powerful Fifth Millennium AIs.

Besides, what was built back into corporeal solidity at the far end of a b-teleport transmission was essentially a
copy
, not the original, and that put a serious stumbling block in the way of using such a system to move humans. There were remarkably few people around who were willing to die so that their exact twin could materialize a thousand kilometers away.

Finally there was d-teleportation, d for “dimensional.” It used the space-bending technologies of the Alcubierre FTL drive, though on a much smaller and shorter-ranged scale, to grab two pieces of the spacetime matrix and fold them together, overlapping two distant points through one or more higher dimensions. Once an overlap was achieved, men or
small vehicles could move directly from one to the other, again without traversing intervening space.

The gateway opened was only a few meters across, and the range was limited to about one hundred thousand kilometers, but it did provide military forces with an unstoppable and unpredictable means of delivering assault troops to a precise tactical location. The equipment necessary for a d-teleport massed a few thousand tons, and required a fairly large quantum power tap to generate the flood of energy necessary for the folding process, but it could be carried easily enough on a carrier-sized warship…or on board a Marine transport.

Hotel Company was organized into three thirty-six-man platoons plus a twelve-Marine headquarters constellation—one hundred and twenty in all, though in fact they were minus the two they'd lost in cybe-hibe. Nal was the senior NCO in the HQ unit, and as such was the man the entire company looked to, enlisted and officers alike, for solid, practical experience and guidance.

But he had no experience to offer here, and no guidance beyond “remember the downloads” and “don't do anything stupid.”

He felt the faint inward shudder that meant the
Nicholas
was translating through the Quantum Sea, making the instantaneous passage from Waypoint Tun Tavern to Objective Samar.

And who in all the bloody hells of the Corps had chosen
Samar
as an inspirational name for the mission objective? The name was still remembered with reverence. Back in the opening years of the twentieth century, during the Philippine Insurrection, fighting on the island of Samar had been so fierce that for years afterward, when a veteran of that fight entered wardroom or mess deck, he would be toasted by officers and enlisted men alike with the words, “Stand, gentlemen! He served on Samar!” Both the campaign and the toast were remembered still, parts of the ever-growing legend of the Corps.

But Samar had been a literal hell of blood, jungle, malnu
trition, and disease, a premonition of later wars against native uprisings and popular revolutions in the tropics. The Marine officer in charge, one Major Littleton Waller, had been accused of war crimes after ordering the execution of eleven native porters who'd attacked his men. He'd been acquitted at his trial…but the news media of the day had branded him the “Butcher of Samar.”

“Objective Samar” did not inspire Nal with any particularly heroic or gung-ho feelings. It felt, in fact, like something about to go horribly wrong.

The gate was still closed, with nothing visible within that squat ellipse of metal and ceramic at the top of the ramp except the gray bulkhead beyond. The transit opening, the interior of the ellipse, was some five meters wide and three high, big enough for Marines to go through four abreast without crowding. The thirty-five men and women of First Platoon, who would be the first ones through, stood at the bottom of the ramp in eight ranks of four, with the last three bringing up the rear. Their CO was Lieutenant Grigor Haskins. Second Platoon under Lieutenant Fellacci would be next, followed by Captain Corcoran and the HQ constellation, and with Third Platoon in reserve.

Their actual target was a rebel command and control center in the orbital fortress guarding the Magellanic Stargate. According to Intelligence, the compartment was large, open, and high, with at least two catwalk or promenade levels high up on the bulkheads, and banks of communications equipment. Once the alert was sounded through the Tavros-Endymion Cluster with the arrival of the Associative naval task force, the local warlord who'd styled himself Emperor Dahl would come
here
to oversee operations.

Hotel Company had been tasked with capturing Dahl if at all possible, with killing him if necessary, and with taking out the command-control center at the earliest possible opportunity in the assault. Each Marine had downloaded a holo of Dahl, as well as news media clips of the man taken at a recent political rally, and knew exactly what he looked like.

The strategy was simplicity. Take out the man at the top and any people under him giving orders, and the enemy's defenses might collapse in short order.

Might.
Nothing
, Nal knew, was certain in combat.

Nal wondered why Dahl had declared war on the local non-human culture, the Tarantulae. From all accounts, they were peaceful enough, and offered Humankind a valuable source of informational exchange—new art, new culture, new technologies, a new worldview…all of the good reasons to embrace a new sentient contact.

The Marine briefings hadn't gone into the politics of the situation, however. There was no need. The Marines would take out Dahl, knock out the Imperial defenses, and open the way for the Associative Fleet to move in and take over.

“Marines, stand ready!”
the sharp-edged voice of Lofty Henderson, the divisional AI, sounded in Nal's head. “
We have successfully translated to our assault point. Objective Samar is five thousand kilometers ahead, and has just gone on full alert. We are making the final calibrations on the d-teleport system now. We estimate gateway opening within three minutes
….”

No merely human mind, Nal knew, could handle the calculations involved in a d-teleport. Not even the superintelligent s-humans could handle that level of math. There were far too many variables of mass, gravity, and magnetic moment, and each one had to be addressed with better than ten-place decimal accuracy. He wondered if Lofty had absorbed the skills necessary to make the critical transition calculations, or if the entire show was being run by AI minds native to this era. In a way, Nal hoped that Lofty was in charge; he wasn't sure he trusted the AIs of the forty-first century, and Lofty was a fellow 3MarDiv Marine.

Briefly, he thought about the other Marines on board the
Sam Nick
, waiting to begin the assault. They included a large number of these so-called “Anchor Marines,” Marines recruited and trained in
this
era. Like fellow Marines throughout the recorded history of the Corps, Nal was imbued with
the sense that the Marines of his day had been tough, well trained, superbly experienced…and that, frankly, they just didn't make them like that any more. The technology was shiny, to be sure. But how good were the Marines of this pacifistic and—it seemed to him—degenerate future epoch?

They would know soon enough. Globe Marines were being teleported in to the inner sanctums of Dahl's imperium, but Anchor Marines would be using RS/A-91 Starwraith pods to secure Imperial gun emplacements and sensor emplacements throughout Tavros-Endymion battlespace.

Don't worry about them
, he told himself savagely.
Worry about
your
objectives, about what
you
have to do!