Semper Human (20 page)

“I see. Where do they want to send us?”

“An artificial world in closer to the Galactic Core. A place called Kaleed. The Star Lord for that sector is Ared Goradon. He is close friends with another star lord, Lelan Veloc.”

“I remember her.” An arrogant, condescending bitch.

“You should. And
she
is a member of the Military Operations Bureau, which gives you your orders.”

Garroway had downloaded information on Kaleed shortly after he'd come out of cybe-hibe, part of a long list of military crises throughout human space. Goradon, it seemed, had been chased off the wheelworld, and was now in Earthring. “Right.
You
had nothing to do with this at all, of course.”

“I find your tone insulting, General.”

“Good. That was my intent. Why the hell are
you
telling me this, anyway? Where's Socrates? I thought he was supposed to be my liaison with the Star Lords and their chain of command.”

“I
am
here, General,”
Socrates' voice said.
“I am part of the link-gestalt that is Star Lord Rame and Star Lord Valoc and several others, linked through their personal aigents.”

The new voice startled Garroway. There were aspects of forty-first century technology with which he still wasn't comfortable, but this was a new and even more unpleasant one. Humans had been closely linked with their implant personalities for almost two millennia. In Garroway's day, it was frequently impossible to tell whether you were speaking to the actual mind of a friend, or to his aigent.

But people nowadays not only accepted this, they accepted a blurring of personal boundaries that Garroway's generation found disturbing. Exactly who and what was an individual intelligence? Where did Rame stop, and Socrates begin? How much did Rame overlap with Valoc?

Worse, those boundaries, if they even existed at all, appeared to be constantly changing, depending on where the attention of the intelligences concerned were focused at the moment.

Garroway preferred to know with whom he was dealing.

“Lord Rame, Socrates…Valoc, too, if you're in there…the Commonwealth Marines are
not
your personal plaything.”

The image of Star Lord Rame blurred and shifted, morphing into the high forehead and imperious manner of Lelan Valoc.

“How
dare
you, Garroway?” she said. “You and your…people are here on our sufferance!”

“We are here because of the provisions of the Warrington Initiative. And I believe you will find that I and my command constellation have a say in things when you give us a military operation, mission, or target.”

“‘Warrington Initiative?'”

“Ancient history to you, I'm sure. But I'm sure it's still there for download.”

He knew it was. Among the first things Garroway had checked when he'd received his new implant software was the current standing of the legal document that had established the Marine cybe-hibe division in the first place. His orders came from the Military Operations Bureau of the Associative Conclave. But he had the right to refuse them if they seemed suicidal or otherwise destructive to his command.

He couldn't tell if Valoc had checked the history or not. Her expression was unreadable, the creation of software rather than of flesh, blood, and emotion.

“General. You were awakened in the first place because of Ared Goradon's request. You wouldn't be here at all if not for him.”

“No, we would be asleep in cybe-hibe, waiting for a
real
war.”

“Why do you say that? What would a ‘real war' be?”

“It wouldn't be pissing out small fires like this.” He gestured, in his mind, at the Stargate hanging suspended beyond the overhead dome, and the Associative ships still coming through one after another. “My Lord, we're here to fight your wars. We volunteered as a deep-time ready unit, and we owe the future…and I guess that means we owe
you,
two years of active duty, subjective time. You've got us. But for God's sake, don't
waste
us. We went into cybe-hibe under the provisions of the Warrington Initiative.
That's
what we're here for…not your fucking little brushfire wars
and uprisings, not tin-plated wannabes like ‘Emperor Dahl,' or displaced idiots like Ared Goradon!”

“You,” Valoc said, “are out of line, General!” Or was it Rame? Or Socrates?

And an instant later, the Stargate, the stars beyond, the gorgeous sheets and streamers of the Tarantula Nebula, all were blotted out by a burst of impossibly brilliant light.

And Garroway knew that something had just gone horribly wrong.

1002.2229

Command Deck
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
0612 hours, GMT

For an instant, the sky burned a dazzling, searing white…and then the dome overhead went black, either through a deliberate circuit interrupt to preserve human vision, or because the optical receptors on the
Nicholas
' hull had just burned out.

“What happened?” Garroway demanded.

The image of Valoc blurred and wavered. “General! What—”

“
Get the hell off this link!
” Garroway ordered. Internally, he closed a connection, severing the AI link with his visitors. “Lofty! What was that?”

“Still assessing the situation, General,”
his essistant told him,
“but it appears that the local Stargate has exploded.”

Garroway sensed the streams of communication moving through the Fleet, reports of ship damage, of ships lost, of Dahl Empire ships now moving to the attack.

He also sensed the aivatar representing Rame and Valoc still hovering on the fringes of his cybernetic awareness, unwilling to be summarily banished, demanding to speak. He
cut that channel entirely. There would be time later for talk—and, if necessary, for his court-martial.

Right now was
not
the time.

Then the overhead lit up once more. The Stargate now was in fragments, each of several dozen huge, curved segments glowing white-hot and tumbling as it hurtled away from the others in a raggedly expanding cloud of plasma. The two micro-black holes that had powered the thing were hurtling now in opposite directions at close to the speed of light, detectable by the stark trails of ionization they'd ripped through the thin soup of dust and gas permeating local space.

“Sharp spikes in gamma radiation and analyses of debris trajectories indicate at least three sizeable and simultaneous antimatter explosions inside the Stargate. The destruction was deliberate sabotage.”

Garroway's immediate concern was for his Marines, Golf and Hotel Companies, plus an Anchor Marine strike element, which had been on board the fortress orbiting the gate moments before.

“What's the situation on Samar?” he demanded.

“Still trying to re-establish communications, General,”
Lofty told him.
“Objective Samar appears to be structurally sound, but is tumbling now.”

He closed his eyes. “How many of our people are over there?”

“Two platoons of Golf Company, Second Regiment. Two platoons plus the headquarters element of Hotel. The HQ section had just completed transiting to Samar when the explosion occurred.”

At least that meant senior command and communications staff were already over there. He pulled down the relevant data in his mind. Captain Corcoran. A decent officer, with a
very
good command constellation.

“Keep trying to raise them.”

“Yes, sir. We are also receiving telemetry indicating an impending attack. It appears that the Dahlist surrender was a ruse.”

“No. You think?”

His mock-surprise tone was lost on the AI, however.
“Affirmative. The Associate fleet has taken heavy losses. The battlecruiser
Pleiadean
was emerging from the Gate at the moment of detonation, and has been lost with all hands. Three cruisers and six destroyers were close enough to the blast to have been destroyed or incapacitated. Numerous other ships are reporting major damage, and at least five have been disabled.”

“I assume both Admiral Dravid and Admiral Ranser are on this.”

“Affirmative, General.”

Both men had their own command centers on board the
Nicholas
. At this point, the battle had become a purely naval engagement, and there was little Garroway could add or do. Except…

“Lofty, patch through to Admiral Ranser, back channel. Tell him the Marines are available for d-teleport deployment into the enemy vessels, should that become a viable tactic. Then pass the word to First and Third Battalions. Have them stand ready for possible ship-to-ship action, both offensive and defensive.”

“Aye, aye, General.”

And that, quite simply, was all that he could do. In the ancient days of sailing ships, a vessel's Marines would take to the rigging and mastheads and pour sniper fire down on the decks of enemy vessels, attempting to take out their senior officers. A century later, ships no longer had rigging, and the Marines were there solely as an amphibious assault force, ready to storm ashore and take an objective beachhead, but all but useless in a ship-to-ship action.

Centuries later, Marine boarding parties had again come into their own, with specially designed assault craft—and eventually one-man assault pods—that could carry Marines up to an enemy ship, breach her hull, and allow the Marines to carry the ship by storm. With the advent of teleport technology, Marine boarding parties could jump straight from
the deck of one ship to another, bypassing force fields and point-defense batteries entirely.

Garroway also wanted to have the Marines on board the
Samuel Nicholas
ready in case the enemy tried the same tactic. The
Nicholas
was a huge and inviting target, would be the principal target for the Dahlists in the coming battle, and they might well have large numbers of troops ready to teleport into the transport's cavernous bays and passageways.

Either way, there were over fifteen thousand Marines still on board the
Nicholas
, and they would be a powerful weapon in any fleet engagement, not simply as shore parties or a landing force. The tactics of ship-to-ship action, however, were entirely in the hands of the naval command, in this case Pol Ranser, the CO of the Associative Task Force.

Which left Garroway as little better than a passive observer, a tourist along for the ride. “Lofty! Damn it, can you raise our people on Samar?”

“Negative, General.”
Lofty's voice was infuriatingly calm.
“Still trying.”

The enemy squadron was approaching fast, twelve ships to the twenty the Associative had already put through the Gate…but half of those twenty were crippled to one degree or another, and several appeared dead in space.

Garroway sensed the storm of communications sweeping through the Associative Fleet, and in moments more the battle was joined.

Company H, 2/9
Command Deck
Objective Samar
0617 hours, GMT

“What the hell happened?” Corcoran demanded.

Nal clung to a twisted stanchion emerging from one bulkhead as the compartment very slowly, almost lazily rolled over. Down was no longer toward the deck with a pull of
roughly one gravity. It was
that
way, toward the opposite bulkhead, a weak tug barely felt. He was in the dark, a darkness relieved only by the lights on the Marines' Hellfire suits, a hundred moving gleams, mostly at the down end of the compartment, throwing weird and shifting shadows across bulkheads and shattered equipment.

So the lights, all power, were out. Artificial gravity was out, and the rotation of the Dahl orbital fortress was creating a weak spin-gravity as it tumbled through space. The acceleration wasn't more than a few centimeters per second squared—Nal could easily hang on one-handed against its pull—but it was a
long
way down through a compartment filled with torn and broken wreckage, jagged sheets of metal, and ripped-open consoles. Even at a hundredth of a gravity, a fall through that maze could be deadly if you landed badly. Some of the loose material in the compartment—chairs, personal effects and weapons, pieces of armor, fragments of debris, dead bodies, living Marines—were still striking the opposite bulkhead in a stately and drawn-out clatter.

A portion of Nal's mind registered the fact that there
was
sound. The hurricane of air escaping the compartment had ceased some time ago. No doubt Samar's automated damage-control systems had sealed off the breaches in the station's hull. And whatever had just happened apparently had not ripped the hull open further.

He was trembling inside at how
close
it had been. Nal and the rest of the HQ section had only
just
come through the d-teleport gateway when suddenly all contact with the universe outside of Objective Samar had been cut off, when lights, power, and gravity had vanished with a sudden, jarring shock, and the fortress had begun its slow tumble. He felt the pounding of his heart, the sickness at the pit of his stomach. Had the teleport doorway been interrupted while he or one of his Marines had been making the transit…

“Damn it, Master Sergeant!” Corcoran snapped. “I
asked
you what happened?”

Nal dragged his mind back from the emptiness of numbing shock. “We're…working on it,” he told the platoon commander. They didn't have QCC units with them, and any FTL comm units here on Objective Samar were off-line at the moment. “We're obviously cut off from Fleet. I suggest, sir, that we deploy our people for a possible counterattack. If the Dahlies are responsible for this…”

“Point taken, Master Sergeant. See to it.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The Marines were off the Fleet Net, but still had communication at company levels. Nal began issuing orders to the Marines of Hotel and Golf Companies, using Corcoran's electronic persona, while Corcoran continued to try to re-establish contact with other electronic networks higher up on the chain of command.

Nal had a feeling, though, that he knew what had happened. The blast—there was no better word for it—had come as a sharp, violent shock accompanied by a surge in gamma radiation, but with no sound. If there'd been an explosion somewhere within the Samar fortress, they would have heard it, the sound conducted through both the air and the orbital base's internal structure.

The utter silence, however, save for a deep-voiced background thunder, almost a gong's tone that had emerged from the deck and bulkheads with the shock as the shockwave smashed through Objective Samar, suggested that there'd been a titanic explosion, not within the base, but in the Stargate next door.

Stargates, Nal knew, contained tens of thousands of kilometers of tunnels and inner chambers within their ring-shaped structures. Besides the twin racetracks that channeled the two Jupiter-mass black holes in their space-twisting, light-speed circles, there were plenty of empty spaces within which one or more antimatter bombs or large nuclear devices could be hidden.

Hell, one of the earliest nonhuman civilizations encountered
by Humankind in times, the N'mah, had been encountered inside the empty spaces of the Sirius Stargate. An entire civilization, numbering tens of millions of individuals, complete with cities and a small enclosed ocean, had been surviving in there for thousands of years, hiding from the relentless searches of the xenophobic Xul.

The Dahlists must have been insane—or scared witless—to do something as psycho as blowing up a Stargate.

Of course, that sort of thing
did
happen. Marines had blown up a Gate or two in their history, centuries ago, in order to keep the Xul from tracking back to Sirius and finding Earth just eight and a half light years away. But Stargates represented a technology far more ancient than Humankind, quite possibly more ancient than the Xul, and once broken they could
not
be reassembled.

So far, only the single Stargate, Tavros-Endymion, had been discovered within the Large Magellanic Cloud. The next nearest Gate was the one designated Tun Tavern, halfway back to the Home Galaxy.

And that began to explain the Dahl Empire's strategy. Even under Alcubierre Drive, Associative ships would need the better part of a century to make it all the way out here from Tun Tavern. By destroying the local Gate, Warlord Dahl must have been hoping that the Associative would decide it was too much trouble sending a fleet large enough to bring his egomaniac's little empire to heel. By blowing the Gate when they did, the Dahlists had struck a savage blow against the gathering Associative Fleet, and balanced the disparity in numbers. Again, that might make the Associative government think twice about sending out an expedition to put down the Dahlist insurrection.

The wild cards were the big phase-shifter ships like the
Nicholas
. They were large enough to carry several sizeable Alcubierre warships, and could translate in from the Home Galaxy without benefit of a Stargate. All they needed was a decent metric of local space; the actual distance for the
jump theoretically didn't matter. Nal suspected that the enemy had held off on destroying the ring in hopes that
Nicholas
would move closer. Now, of course, they would need to take out the
Nicholas
by other means—ship-to-ship, or by d-teleporting assault troops into the transport's command and weapons bays.

And then the power switched back on. Down again became down, and Nal released his handhold and dropped his boots to the deck. The overhead shimmered, then came to life once more, looking out into a shockingly changed starscape.

The Stargate was, indeed, gone, a white clot of fast-expanding plasma marking where it had been. The Samar fortress had been engulfed; its sky now was filled by a ragged white cloud that blotted out most of the background stars and the tangle of nebulae. The AI controlling the image projection was painting the locations and vector trails of ships nearby, creating a scrawl of green and red lines across the virtual depths of the overhead dome. Smaller, more fleeting streaks marked the paths of missiles, fighters, and assault pods; white flares of light blossomed on both sides as high-energy particle beams and fusion cannon, antimatter warheads and plasma weapons struck home.

“We have QCC communications with the
Nicholas,
” Lieutenant Fellacci reported. “They're still there, thank God!”