Semper Human (26 page)

“Are you mocking me, aigent?” Valoc demanded. “You steal my words.”

“I only point out what you yourself said of the Marines,”
Socrates said.

More hostility
, Rame thought.
More emotional abrasiveness
.
It
could
be a Xul weapon. If it's not, they're missing a bet.

The assembled Associative Conclave continued to bicker as the initial assault began.

Garroway, Gold One
Above Objective Reality
0846 hours, GMT

Garroway rode the RS/A-91 Starwraith through emptiness, seeking the best approach to the alien world. There was an excellent chance, he knew, that he would be killed or—infinitely worse—left hopelessly insane within the next handful of seconds.

Millennia ago, teleoperational systems had become possible, and Humankind's notions of
here
and
there
had forever been changed. Primitive motion pictures had been the start of it; viewers could see images projected on a screen that, temporarily, at least, could give them the illusion of being someplace else, of flying, of performing heroic deeds, of
being
someone else.

And as the centuries passed and technologies advanced, the illusion of being there had improved. In the early Third Millennium, a commercial venture had landed a small wheeled rover on the surface of Earth's moon. People on Earth could pay for the privilege of piloting the rover across the lunar surface from 400,000 kilometers away, this in the decades before most humans had regular and easy access to the moon, or even to Earth orbit.

The time delay for the images to travel from Luna to Earth, plus the time it took for control signals to go from Earth to the
rover—about two and a half seconds, altogether—had been annoying, certainly, but few people had minded. The solar-powered rover traveled slowly, there were few obstacles, and the sheer thrill of being the very first person in modern history to see what was behind
that
rock or over
that
rille had more than made up for the frustrations induced by the speed of light.

Humans had learned then that it didn't matter if optical images traveled a few centimeters from their retinas to the backs of their skulls, or if they had come from incomparably farther away. The technology allowed Earth-bound humans to
be
there.

And that had been with simple optical hook-ups, with images projected on screens or through heavy, three-D visors worn over the face. Before long, computer interface technology and nanotechnics had allowed images to be projected directly into a person's mind, for virtual-reality simulations to unfold for all of the senses, not just vision. Within a century or so of those first, crude sightseeing Lunar rovers, people had been remotely visiting the sulfurous, crushing pressure and searing heat of the Venusian surface; moving across the icy wastes of Europa and Pluto; or virtually inhabiting robotic bodies that allowed them to interact with people on the opposite side of the Earth…or on the surfaces of the other worlds of the Solar System.

The military uses of the technology were obvious. Remotely operated drones had beamed back reconnaissance images of the battlefield since the late twentieth century. Later versions had gone on their unmanned missions armed.

Garroway had no particular problem with the Anchor Marines who'd remotely flown their Starwraith strikepods from the safety of an orbiting transport. It took skill, training, and, yes, a measure of bravery to operate the things effectively in combat, if only because it was so damned hard to override the reactions of the human autonomic nervous system.

But a Marine's duty sometimes required him or her to leave the relative safety of the transport and deliberately go
into harm's way, as ancient naval tradition stated it.

He could feel the problems of mismatched time rates. Time within the Quantum Sea—at least in this niche of Dimension
⁰
—was sluggish in the extreme compared with the universe outside. He wasn't certain whether the effect was due to the relativity effects of the supermassive black hole “above” this region, or something inherent in the base state of reality itself. His mind still worked with lightning speed; the mechanical and electronic components of his strikepod, however, along with the mind of the aigent running it, oozed as if in special-effects slow motion.

The AI, fortunately, could operate at superhuman speed, and could speed its thoughts to the point where it could still communicate effectively with him over the QCC command channel.

Theoretically, signals from the Starwraith did not pass through intervening space back to the
Nicholas
, but appeared simultaneously at both. The accumulating effects of nearby gravitational distortion and temporal displacement, however, made the link less than certain. It could snap at any moment. When it did, Garroway should wake up whole and sound back on board the
Nicholas
in normal four-D space.
Should
. There were no guarantees, and operating a teleoperational link under these conditions had never before been attempted.

But it was vital, Garroway thought, that he be here, at least in virtual presence.

He was passing through the Xul world's ring system now, a gold-glowing plane of objects ranging from oddly shaped items the size of a man's fist to starships kilometers across. Each appeared linked into a far vaster network of electronic intelligence and data. He could sense the Xul Chorus, hear the Xul World thinking.

He could hear its thoughts and layered awareness turning toward him.

 

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines
Within Objective Reality
0846 hours, GMT

His Hellfire armor took the brunt of a Xul particle beam, shedding torrents of energy as crackling bolts of lightning grounding to the alien structure's deck. Nal staggered under the impact, but kept his footing and fired back with the X-ray laser mounted in the right forearm of his combat boarding suit, carving through one of the nightmare horrors now detaching itself from a cavern wall.

Xul combat forms looked a lot like Starwraith armor—vaguely egg-shaped, glossy black, and bearing multiple lenses and weapons ports at random points over their surfaces. Tentacles grew at will and at need, again from seemingly random points. The Xul possessed nanotechnology or something very like it, and built systems that could regrow themselves to repair damage or to fit a specific need.

The chamber into which the Marine assault team was d-teleporting appeared rough-hewn, like a cavern with black basaltic walls. Xul combat machines were emerging from those walls, however, though whether they'd been hanging there all along, were somehow traveling through the rock from someplace else, or were being grown from the rock as Nal watched was impossible to say. There was so much about Xul technology and capability that was still unknown.

At the moment, about two hundred Marines had made it into the chamber, dropping down through the open teleport gateway from the
Nicholas
in the moment or two before the transport had shut down the teleport gateway and rotated out of the Quantum Sea. They were alone, now, most of Alpha and Hotel companies plus the HQ Section, battling for their lives with alien monsters emerging from the dark.

“They're coming from the walls!” Nal shouted over the command channel. “Get some smart grenades on them!
Now
!”

His head felt fuzzy, his thoughts scattered. He wondered if the shock of jumping into a time-dilated relativistic field had scrambled them somehow.

A swarm of ten-centimeter projectiles flashed through the darkness, their micro-AI circuitries searching out patterns of shape, movement, and energy matching known Xul combatants. The first one slapped into the side of a Xul combat machine and flashed white-hot…then hotter…then still hotter, as the stubborn metal and ceramic composite of the machine's side softened, then flowed, and finally exploded in a burst of plasma. Other smart grenades found targets as well, more and more of them, until mutilated and half-molten Xul combat machines were burning and falling from the air everywhere.

Nal took three steps forward, firing into the enemy. A half-melted Xul body lashed at his legs with fast-growing tentacles, and a gamma-wavelength laser seared across the heavy armor over his chest. He lowered his hand and returned the fire, sending his own laser pulse into the exposed wiring and circuitry of the writhing enemy machine. Even damaged and in fragments, the Xul combatants could be deadly.

Sergeant Anthony Ferris staggered as five tightly focused beams of energy struck him in his helmet. Ferris shrieked, arms pinwheeling as he toppled backward, his helmet exploding in a nightmare spray of molten metal and burning organics and ending the screams.

Nal's AI had already identified the five shooters, and he targeted the nearest one, burning the Xul horror in a rapid-fire volley of x-ray bolts. The Xul squirmed, twisted, then exploded in molten chunks and smoking fragments, and Nal swung his weapon to take the second target in line, joining his fire with Boyd's and Zollinger's.

Close by, PFC Ander Brisard struggled within the whiplashing grasp of a large Xul machine that had reached out of a cavern wall to grapple with him. Nal turned his laser on this new threat, trying to fire past Brisard's shoulder, but Brisard had already brought the flamer mounted in his ar
mor's left wrist to bear, burning through the tough Xul composite until he could reach in, grab a fistful of optical network cable, and pull.

The Xul shuddered and lurched backward, and a large mass of the thing's internal wiring ripped free. The machine twisted away, tentacles snapping and twisting wildly as it fell to the deck, its gravitics killed. Nal put two more bolts into the gaping wound, watching the machine's interior glow suddenly white-hot under the assault.

“What the fuck are they doing?” Captain Corcoran yelled, pointing.

Nal turned. Against the far wall, dozens of elongated Xul machines were floating together, appeared to be merging, their surfaces softening and flowing and running together as they physically joined into a single unit twenty meters long and a third that in breadth.

“Get the slammers up here and bring them to bear!” Nal shouted. Marines lugging the massive rotary antimatter cannons pushed through into the open, targeting the massive enemy construct while it was still forming.

High-velocity antimatter rounds sliced through Xul metal laminates, flaring blue-white as they struck, gouging vast craters out of the enemy machine. Other Marines joined in with x-ray lasers, with pulse rifles, with smart grenades and particle beam weapons, trapping the alien structure in a spider web of living, shifting, dazzling white energy.

As it died, the Xul machine fired once, loosing a bolt of plasma energy that vaporized PFC Reyman Colby. The Xul turned, the beam playing across the cavern wall and catching several of its own in the flame. Nal fired his laser at the machine as it crumpled under the savage onslaught of Marine fire, huge fragments falling from it in half-molten chunks as it sagged to the deck, then collapsed.

But the Marine companies were taking heavy casualties. Sergeant Patricia Dayton, with the HQ element, caught a beam that burned away the right side of her armor and body in an instant, dropping her to the deck and leaving what was
left of her smoking. PFC Tollindy stooped over her, trying to engage her savaged armor's automatic mindsave, and four energy beams caught him from behind, holing his suit, knocking him down in a thrashing tangle of limbs.

Thirty seconds had passed since the
Nicholas
had dropped them here and vanished.

Nal doubted that they would survive for another thirty seconds.

1902.2229

Blue Seven
Approaching Objective Reality
0847 hours, GMT

Lieutenant Garwe applied full lateral thrust to his Starwraith as he pulled the craft into a tight, hard trajectory flashing scant meters above the surface of the Xul worldlet. At this altitude, the big enemy beam weapons couldn't track him, couldn't depress to hit him, and his only real concern was Xul point defense weapons.

Those were bad enough, though, as the sky above and around him filled with flickering, darting points of light, pulsed weapons, and near-
c
kinetic kill warheads trying to knock him and the other War Dogs out of existence.

He was looking for a way inside.

The surface below him blurred, a gray-white softness that reminded him of sand on an ocean beach.

An ocean…

A beach…

Low ocean waves broke to either side of the longboat. He could smell the salt in the air…feel the jolt and the rock of the boat as the wave swelled past beneath its keel. He was in a small, white-painted boat with a number of other men, all of them wearing brimmed, cocked hats, clutching their muskets
close. Each man wore a green jacket with white facings—lapels, cuffs, and facings—with white waistcoats and breeches and black gaiters worn for the wade ashore. Each had an uncomfortably high, stiff, leather collar intended to protect the throat from sword cuts.
Leathernecks
, some of the men were calling themselves, because of those damned collars.

Private of Marines John Porter was deathly seasick, and each jounce and roll of the small boat threatened to set him vomiting again. Somehow, he managed to hold his rebellious stomach in place. The others in the boat wouldn't appreciate another round of heaves. The beach, thank God, was not far now. Palm trees waved in a fitful offshore breeze; the sky was a deep and impossible blue punctuated by small, fluffy clouds. It was hot, even though it was only early March.

Behind him were the ships of the small Continental Navy squadron—
Alfred, Hornet, Wasp, Providence, Cabot,
and several others…including two loyalist sloops captured the day before when they'd arrived off Nassau. A number of other small boats rode the waves in toward the beach around him. The landing force, he'd been told, consisted of over two hundred and fifty Continental Marines and sailors.

His stomach gave another twist. God, were they
ever
going to make it ashore?

Porter was not new to the sea. His father was a merchant who operated a small coastal vessel, the
Mary
, out of Wilmington, Delaware, and John had worked on board her ferrying dry goods between Wilmington and Dover. Three months before, John Porter had seen a broadside proclaiming the Continental Marine Act of 1775, which called for the raising of two battalions of Marines, and for which “particular care be taken that no persons be appointed to offices, or enlisted into said battalions, but such as are good seamen, or so acquainted with maritime affairs as to be able to serve for and during the present war with Great Britain and the Colonies….”

So he'd signed up, receiving the princely sum of seventeen dollars as an enlistment bonus. His two older brothers
were already with the army, serving with General Washington up in the siege of Boston.

Unfortunately, his stomach didn't seem to be as acquainted with maritime affairs as his work on board the
Mary
had suggested.

Rumor had it that the two battalions were being raised for a planned invasion of Nova Scotia, but the arrival of British regulars and three thousand Hessian mercenaries at the British naval base at Halifax had put paid to
that
idea pretty damned quick. Instead, the operation had been redirected to the Bahamas. Commodore Esek Hopkins intended to seize large stores of weapons and powder reportedly stored at Nassau, on the island of New Providence.

Protecting the town were two British forts, Fort Montagu and Fort Nassau. Those needed to be taken if the prize was to be won. The tiny armada of ship's boats was coming to shore about two miles east down the beach from Fort Montagu.

The longboat's keel scraped on coral sand.
Thank God!
Another incoming wave picked the craft up and carried it a few feet closer, and then Porter and the others were vaulting over the sides, holding their muskets and powder horns high to keep them dry as they started splashing toward the beach. Captain Nicholas bellowed orders, and the men began falling into marching column. In the distance, a signal gun boomed from the fort.

Some small and deep-seated portion of John Porter's mind marveled at the fact that this was the very first Marine amphibious assault in history….

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines
Within Objective Reality
0847 hours, GMT

Nal rose from the partial cover afforded by a smashed Xul combat machine, laying down a heavy fusillade of fire
with his main weapon. The Xul were forming up along the far wall of the cavern, possibly massing for an attack.

The best way to foil an enemy attack, Nal knew, was to hit them first, and harder. “Let's go, Marines!” he called, and he leaped over the wrecked machine, charging the enemy….

Musket fire banged and cracked, and Sergeant of Marines William Derek waved his men on. “
Let's go, Marines!
”

This was it, the climax of a brutal, 500-mile march across the desolation of North Africa, a march marked by sand-storms, desperate food and water shortages, and the repeated near-mutinies of the filthy Greek and Arab mercenaries who made up the main body of the expeditionary force.

General Eaton—the dandy was calling himself
general
now—had picked up a musket and was leading the rush. Derek and the rest of the blue-and-red-jacketed Marines followed, screaming a long, drawn-out battle cry, raw noise and passion from eight throats picked up and amplified by the rest of the force. Ahead, gunfire blazed from the barricades protecting the eastern approaches to Derna. Contrary to the rumors passing through the American camp for the last two days, the Barbary pirates were putting up a fight.

Since 1801, the United States had been locked in a savage little war with the North African Barbary city-state of Tripoli, fighting to end the Arab pirates' demands for tribute and their predations on American merchant ships in the Mediterranean. In particular, a number of Americans, the officers and crew of the frigate
Philadelphia
, were now languishing in Tripolitean prisons since their capture two years before. Eaton, the former U.S. consul at Tunis and now bearing the title of “Naval Agent to the Barbary States,” had conceived this bizarre plan to overthrow the pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, replacing him with Hamet Karamanli, Yusuf's deposed brother. Eaton had scraped together a ragtag army of Greek, Arab, and Levantine mercenaries, and several hundred Arab cavalry loyal to Hamet—about five hundred men in all. America, he'd told Hamet, would help him regain his throne in exchange for a pledge of friendship with
the United States. Hamet, despite a weak and vacillating nature, had accepted the offer.

There were just eight Marines and one navy midshipman in the American contingent holding the tiny and wavering army together. Under the command of Marine Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon, they'd been detached ashore off the brig
Argus
at Alexandria seven weeks ago. Two days ago they'd reached Derna, Tripoli's easternmost outpost and roughly half of the distance to Tripoli itself. Eaton had requested permission to peacefully enter Derna, but Mustafa, the governor, had refused, scrawling simply “My head or yours” across the bottom of Eaton's message and returning it.

Despite the defiant reply, Derek had been convinced that Derna's defenders would flee at the army's approach. Now they would have to take the place by storm.

Perhaps two-thirds of the town's inhabitants supported Hamet. The remaining third were staunchly loyal to Mustapha, however, and had mustered perhaps eight hundred heavily armed men. A fort overlooking the harbor mounted eight nine-pounder cannons, while makeshift barricades protected the approaches to the city.

Eaton had divided the force, sending Hamet and his cavalry around to the western approaches of the city to cut the coast road to Tripoli and to storm the governor's palace, if possible. He'd also worked to bring a cannon and its carriage ashore from the
Argus,
hauling it with blocks and tackle up a twenty-foot precipice and dragging it into position east of the city. Eaton, the mercenaries, and the Marines, a force of fifty or sixty men all told, had remained on the east side of the city, studying the barricades and the swelling ranks of the defenders behind them. Three American brigs offshore—the
Hornet
,
Argus,
and
Nautilus
—had opened fire an hour ago, raining shot into the city's defenses.

And the city batteries in the fort at the town's harbor had replied, firing on the ships rather than the shore party, fortunately. While the
Argus
and
Nautilus
fired into the town,
Hornet
had concentrated on the harbor fort, knocking out its
guns one at a time. Before long, the fort's defenders had broken and run, joining the governor's troops on the east side of the city. Worse, the cannon Eaton had brought ashore fired one round…but a too-eager gunner had accidentally left the ramrod in the weapon's barrel when he fired it. The cannon was useless, now, and the fire from the city's defenders was growing heavier moment by moment. The tiny force of Greek and Arab mercenaries had wavered, had begun falling back.

Characteristically, then, at the most crucial point of the battle, Eaton had given the order to charge.

Now, Sergeant Derek was racing across uneven ground as the bugler sounded the attack. O'Bannon was just ahead, brandishing his sword, as Eaton in his blue general's uniform waved them on with a musket. After a moment's confused hesitation, the Arab and Greek troops had rallied, then surged forward, sixty men racing wildly into a storm of fire from an army numbering hundreds. Derek could see several of the defenders up on the walls behind the barricades, shooting down at them.

And then they were clambering over the barricades. Derek raised his musket to his shoulder and fired, the flash and sharp bang of the flint in the powder pan coming a half second ahead of the deeper, throatier boom of the weapon as it discharged. Just ahead, a mustached face beneath a white turban contorted as the ball slammed into the man's forehead and toppled him backward. Derek kept moving up, his musket unloaded now, but sporting a bayonet over the muzzle that flashed in the sun.

Eaton paused at the top of the barricade, waving his musket over his head. From somewhere beyond, one of the defenders fired, and the shot shattered the former consul's wrist, knocking the musket from his grasp.

O'Bannon, his sword drawn, pushed past the wounded man and ran an Arab soldier through the throat. More musket fire rattled from the city walls behind the barricades. At
Derek's side, Private Edward Steward stumbled and fell, dead or wounded, Derek didn't know.

And then he was over the barricade and plunging down into the streets of Derna. An Arab soldier swung a scimitar, and Derek—in approved, by-the-book response—parried the blow with his musket, recovered, and lunged, putting the bayonet through the screaming man's belly. And from then on the fight was hand-to-hand….

No, hand to
tentacle
. Nal burned down a Xul machine rising up in front of him, then blinked and shook his head. What the hell had just happened? For a moment, he'd been…someone else, in strange clothing and carrying a strange weapon, storming the ramparts of a desert fortress….

Garroway, Gold One
Above Objective Reality
0848 hours, GMT

General Garroway was having trouble controlling his Starwraith. The time slip between Objective Reality and the
Nicholas
now drifting in outside universe was proving more than his link systems could handle. He was approaching the surface of the Xul world, intent on touching down what appeared to be the gaping door to an underground hanger or weapons bay…but he kept losing the image. The weapons bay shimmered, then winked out, momentarily replaced by a towering stone wall. It was night, and
they
were just ahead….

“What the hell?…”

Garroway blinked, then sat up in his link couch back on board the
Samuel Nicholas
. For just a moment, he'd been…
somewhere
. Not on the transport. And not in the Starwraith above Objective Reality. He'd been in a city, crouching in a narrow, cobblestone street beneath a brooding, ancient stone wall set with stone steps.

Now, he was back on board the
Nicholas
, and the vast, angry whirlpool of the Great Annihilator hung suspended in the projection overhead.

“Give me a wider channel!” he demanded of the techs running his QCC link with the Starwraith still within the Quantum Sea.

“Aye, aye, sir!” one of the techs replied. “We still have your pod….”

“Put me back in there!
Move it!
”

And again, Garroway was within the Annihilator's maw, dropping precipitously over the rugged surface of the Xul worldlet…

And then with shrill, sing-song cries, the Chinese mob opened fire from above.

Blue Twelve
Above Objective Reality
0848 hours, GMT

“We've got heavy gun positions,” Captain Xander was shouting, “bearing one-five-niner, one-eight-three, and two-one-one!”

“Copy that! I'm on one-eight-three! Firing!” Lieutenant Kadellan Wahrst opened up with her particle weapon, slamming bolts of blue-white lightning into the Xul weapon mount ahead.

“I'm moving for the door!” Javlotel called. “Cover me!”

“Got your back!” Palin replied.