Semper Human (29 page)

For the most part, the Continental Marines had proven less of a force than Corps legend suggested. Though the modern Corps traced the birth of the Marines back to Tun Tavern and November 10, 1775, the Continental Marines had been dis
banded in 1785, and America's Marines had gone out of existence, along with the Continental Navy. They would not be resurrected until President John Adams signed a bill establishing the Marines in July of 1798.

Lieutenant Garwe came out of the simulation within the cavern beneath the surface of the Xul world. One moment he'd been wrestling with dark thoughts, somewhere else, and the next he was taking fire from a Xul position just ahead.

“Fuck!”
he screamed, and began returning fire….

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines
Within Objective Reality
0852 hours, GMT

Reality wavered, and Nal tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Sergeant Derek stood above one of the captured Muslim cannons, helping to aim it into the city of Derna. The defenders appeared to be fleeing everywhere, now that the fort was in Marine hands.

Fort Enterprise,
Eaton had named it.

Nal's thoughts and personality appeared to be emerging in control of the scenario, however, as Sergeant Derek faded into the background. He felt as though he was seeing the battle, the entire campaign, from an omniscient viewpoint. He was Sergeant Derek, and the date was April 26, 1805. But he was also someone else….

Derek tried to focus. He was…he was…

He was Master Sergeant Nal il-En Shru-dech, a
dumu-gir
of Enduru, the world called Ishtar.

He was an Associative Marine, proud of his line, of his heritage….

But he could see the Battle for Derna for what it was. Eaton and his tiny command had held off a Muslim counterattack. For a month they'd remained at Derna, with Eaton fretting over the delay.

And then a message from the American naval squadron's
commander had arrived on June 1, announcing that peace negotiations had begun in Tripoli. Back in the United States, President Jefferson—perhaps unaware of the success of the tiny American expeditionary force in North Africa—had agreed to pay the ransom for the
Philadelphia
's officers and crew.

The entire march across five hundred miles of desert, the wild battle at the eastern approaches to the city, the deaths of poor Steward and Whitten—Steward had died of his wounds two days after the battle, though the other wounded Marines had survived—all of it had been for nothing. The sudden shift in American foreign policy had been a particularly vicious blow for Hamet, who'd trusted Eaton's promises that he would rule Tripoli in his brother's stead.

Eaton died in 1811, in poverty and obscurity. In that same year, Presley O'Bannon was presented with a ceremonial sword for his services by the state of Virginia—a curved scimitar identical to one Hamet had given him. His name etched into the blade was misspelled:
Priestly
N. O'Bannon.

In all, a tawdry ending to a glorious page in the history of the Marine Corps….

No!
Nal's fist clenched, and he struggled to push the thought, the emotion, aside. It had
not
been for nothing, had not been tawdry.

Derna had been as meaningful, as
powerful
a symbol as the liberation of Ishtar.

But he was left shaken, as doubt clawed at the edges of his consciousness.

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

Garroway fell once more into the illusion, of men struggling across the barricades erected atop an ancient stone wall in the darkness. He could see fires scattered across the city to
the south, hear the shouts and screams of the Boxers, hear the polyglot battle cries of the legation defenders. The last volley of fire from the charging Marines had killed at least sixty of the Chinese, and swept them back from the barricades.

Captain Myers lay on the parapet, clutching his wounded leg. The Boxer who'd speared him lay sprawled nearby, dead. Some of the Russian and German defenders were picking up Chinese bodies and unceremoniously dumping them over the south side of the wall into the city below.

Curiously, though, Garroway no longer felt as though he
was
Captain Myers. The wall, the city, the armed men moving along the Tartar Wall parapet, all had taken on a kind of mental distance, with Garroway as the observer, watching events happening to someone else.

At the same time, he was aware of repeated, pulsing shudders passing through the simulation. It took him a few moments to realize that he was somehow sensing the volleys of high-energy lasers and particle beams, of near-
c
kinetic warheads and the detonation of antimatter missiles against the Xul worldlet.

The planet was badly damaged, and the alien electronic network was faltering. For a moment, Garroway was back on board the
Nicholas,
the QCC link slipping.

And then a new stream of simulation images and sensations were coursing through his mind.

He was climbing a mountain.

His name was Sergeant Michael Strank, USMC, and he was trudging up the steep slope of the volcano rising from the south end of the tiny, pork-chop-shaped island. Below him, the American fleet stretched away to the horizon, hundreds of ships, many still pounding the island with their big guns, as aircraft swept through the skies overhead.

The name of the island was Iwo Jima, and it was February 23, 1945.

On the beaches immediately below the base of Suribachi, landing craft continued to run in up to the beach, and Marines
by the thousands moved about on the black sand. Suribachi, five hundred forty-six feet high, loomed over the tiny island, dominating it.

The Japanese had riddled the mount with tunnels, turning it into a fortress. The island was a part of the Tokyo Prefecture—the mayor of Tokyo was mayor of Iwo Jima—which meant this was the first speck of land in the Americans' long island-hopping strategy that was actually a part of the Japanese homeland, not a foreign possession, not a conquest. The Japanese commander on the island, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had decided against trying to stop the Americans at the beaches, but to turn the entire island into an interlocking network of strong, mutually supporting positions for an in-depth defense. Kuribayashi was convinced that Japan could not possibly win the war, but if he could make the invasion of Iwo costly enough, perhaps the Americans could be discouraged from attempting an actual invasion of the home islands.

So far, the strategy had been working well. The first of some thirty thousand Marines to wade ashore on the morning of February 19 had been greeted by an eerie and unnerving silence. As patrols began fanning out into the island's interior, however, they came under devastating fire from hidden gun positions, and naval artillery pieces hidden behind massive steel doors in the sides of Mount Suribachi began hammering the beaches below.

For four days, now, the Marines had been fighting this elusive and dug-in enemy, taking fearful casualties in the process. Even now, the mountain couldn't be called secure. Pillboxes and gun emplacements along the slopes had an annoying habit of coming alive again moments after they'd been cleaned out by grenades, high explosives, and flamethrowers, as enemy reinforcements came in through the tunnels.

Strank's squad in Easy Company, Second Battalion, Twenty-eighth Marines, Fifth Marine Division, had been laying telephone wire up Mount Suribachi when they'd been joined by PFC Rene Gagnon, a Marine runner charged with
carrying a flag to the mountain's summit. An hour and a half earlier, a patrol had reached the top of Suribachi and raised a 54" ´ 28" flag, but the banner was too small to be seen easily from the beaches far below. Down on the beach, Colonel Chandler Johnson, the Battalion Commander, had handed a larger flag to Gagnon and told him to take it up the mountain.

The squad of Marines reached the top of Suribachi at around noon—Strank, Corporal Harlon H. Block, PFC Franklin R. Sousley, PFC Ira H. Hayes, and PFC Gagnon. A number of Marines were already at the top, the first flag fluttering in the stiff, offshore breeze. Lieutenant Harold Schrier met them as they approached.

“Whatcha got there, son?”

Strank took the flag from Gagnon.

“Sir, Colonel Johnson wants this big flag run up high so every son of a bitch on this whole cruddy island can see it,” Strank replied.

Johnson chuckled. “You'd better do it, then.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The Marines found a length of water pipe and jury-rigged it into a flagpole. A Navy hospital corpsman, Pharmacist's Mate 2nd class John Bradley, joined the five Marines, helped them brace it into the earth with stones and raise it upright. This flag was much larger, measuring 96" ´ 56", easily visible from most of the island.

Thirty yards away, a Marine with a motion picture camera captured the whole event on film. Next to him, a war correspondent was stacking up rocks to provide a better vantage point for pictures of the beach. Catching the movement out of the corner of his eye, the man whirled, scooped up his camera, and snapped off a single shot.

And the raising of the
second
flag on Suribachi entered the Marine Corps legend.

Strank…no,
Garroway
. Garroway
knew
that simulation. It was one of the training and indoctrination sims routinely downloaded to Marine recruits. Though he'd never
experienced it himself, he was willing to bet that the Captain Myers scenario, during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, was a standard Corps training sim as well.

Again, the reality of the simulation seemed to waver for a moment, and Garroway found himself fully back in charge. For a moment, he was helping the others secure the flagpole upright by attaching lengths of white line and tying them off. But the reality within his mind was wavering,
thinning
, and he found himself wavering between the Starwraith strikepod and the link couch back in
Nicholas
' Ops Center.

The
Nicholas
was again in space outside of the Great Annihilator, which hung in the dome-projection overhead like a vast, angry blue eye. Garroway tried to sit up, tried to speak, as several staff officers hurried over.

Then he was back on Iwo Jima, but with a kind of God's-eye overview of the entire battle. Emotion poured through the link, paralyzing in its intensity. He
knew
what would happen, what
did
happen. Six days after the flag-raising, Michael Strank would be killed…probably by friendly fire from an American destroyer offshore. Two of the other Marines, Block and Sousley, both were killed on Iwo as well, and the corpsman, Bradley, was wounded.

And he felt the controversy over the invasion of Iwo itself as well…a kind of depressing atmosphere or weight settling across his thoughts. Theoretically, and according to Marine Corps legend, Iwo had been targeted to provide emergency landing facilities for B-29 bombers flying to and from Japan from their base in the Marianas Islands, and, in fact, over 2,200 B-29s touched down on the island during the course of the rest of the war. The first,
Dyna Mite
, had made an emergency landing at one of Iwo's landing strips on March 4, three weeks before the island was finally declared secure.

But there'd always been a question concerning the need to capture the island at all. The battle had lasted from February 19 to March 26. A total of 70,000 Marines fought for the island, and suffered almost 28,000 casualties—40 percent—and including 6,825 dead, almost one man in ten. Most of
those B-29s landing on Iwo had done so for minor technical checks, for training, or for refueling, and there were other, less fanatically defended islands in the region that could have served the purpose just as well. The original invasion plan had been put together because the Army Air Force wanted to stage fighter escort missions off of Iwo to protect the bombers…but such operations proved to be both impractical and unnecessary, and only one escort mission was flown off the island before the end of the war.

All those dead and wounded…for
nothing
…

And in that instant Garroway saw what the Xul were doing.

It was a deliberate and deadly attack, and he needed to block it
now
.

1902.2229

Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
0855 hours, GMT

“It's a kind of an attack,” Garroway told Ranser and the others. He was again fully awake, mentally back in the Ops Center. The dome overhead looked out into the tormented nebulae of the Galactic Core, with the Great Annihilator a massive blue spiral of gas and dust burning with eerie light.

Around him were the other eleven members of 3MarDiv's command constellation, as well as Admiral Ranser and his staff, and Rame, representing, as always, the Conclave. At least Garroway
thought
it was Rame. Other Conclave delegates had been coming in and out of Rame's body lately like restless ghosts.

“An attack?” Carter, his Exec, asked. “What do you mean? What are they attacking?”

“It's…it's a way of attacking our morale,” Garroway replied. “A way to attack our core values as Marines. Somehow they're tapped in to our training sims, and they're feeding them back to us, but subtly altered.”

“Altered how?” Admiral Ranser wanted to know.

“I was at Suribachi,” Garroway told him. “For a Marine of my generation, that was the holy of holies, the single defining
image for the entire Corps. They were calling into question the reason for what happened, for the flag-raising on Suribachi.”

“Never heard of it, General,” Rame said. “An ancient battle?”

“A mountain on an island on Earth. The United States Marines stormed that island over two thousand years ago, and raised a flag at the summit. A photograph, a kind of visual image recorded at the time, became
the
icon of the old Marine Corps.” He transmitted the image over the command constellation link so the others in the ops Center could see: the red, white, and blue flag fluttering proudly from a length of pipe, pushed up to a forty-five degree angle by six straining men. “Believe me,” he went on. “Marines do
not
like to be told that what happened there was a mistake, or that the battle was fought for no good reason.”

“We're getting all these reports from other Marines in the battle,” Fremantle said. “You think the Xul are doctoring those feeds, trying to destroy morale?”

“If
my
experience is anything to go by, that's exactly what they're doing.”

“What, are they lying about that stuff?” Rame asked, puzzled.

“No, it's not lying, quite. But they certainly emphasized the negative aspects of the histories. It's all in how you tell the story.”

Colonel Fremantle nodded. “I don't know about you folks in the forty-first century,” she said, “but there used to be a lot of controversy back in our day over news sims. The AIs who put together compilations of data feeds on the daily news had to select which news items to transmit, and how much time and attention to allot to each. Even if you're trying to be completely open and balanced in your presentation, you can slant things pretty hard one way or another just by the focus of your story. That's been a basic problem of news feeds since before the Age of Electronics. I think maybe the Xul are doing that here.”

“Exactly,” Garroway said.

“Any idea how they're doing it?” Captain Yaren, a member of Ranser's staff, asked.

“I'm not sure,” Garroway replied. “But we've been receiving those reports of coded signals riding gravity waves out of black holes and stargates. They might have accessed our Net that way. How about it, Socrates?”

“Possible,”
the archAIngel replied. The artificial intelligence sounded almost subdued.
“Sentient electronic systems, I remind you, would have no way of ascertaining if they'd been corrupted, however. My judgment may not be trustworthy.”

“Which is why we pulled you guys off-line on the combat net,” Garroway said. “Nothing personal, but you
wouldn't
know.”

“We're no different than they are,” Jordan said. “If our Marines were being…tampered with, they wouldn't know it. Not while they were actually inside the sim.”

“Agreed. So we need to take them off-line, too.”

“Wait,” Carter said. “Sir, what do you mean?”

“I mean we need to pull the plugs on their implants.
All
of them.”

“General!” Ranser sounded shocked. “You can't do that!”

“That's insane!” Rame put in.

“You could kill them!” Captain Yaren said.

“It won't kill us,” Garroway replied.

Major Davenport, 3MarDiv's CC technical expert, shook his head. “No, it won't
kill
us,” he said. “But it sure as hell will scare the shit out of us….”

“All of us old-time Marines trained without implants,” Garroway told them. “Did you know that? In case we found ourselves fighting somewhere without a local Net, or if our local servers went down. First law of combat: if something
can
go wrong it will, and probably in the worst possible way. So we practice getting along without.” He grinned at a memory. “We all woke up out of cybe-hibe without the things, too. We managed okay. Wasn't pleasant, but we managed.”

“But all those Marines down there, Gar,” Ranser said,
shaking his head, “they reply on their implants for…for everything. Linking with their strikepods and weapons! Communications. Navigation. Tactical feeds. Sensory data.
Everything
!”

“I know,” Garroway said, his voice grim. “And I wish to hell I could see some other way. But I don't.”

“I don't see how we can do that,” Carter said. “I mean, we could lose people who are in the middle of a firefight. Or wounded Marines, who are on life support over the Net.”

Garroway nodded. Adri Carter cared a lot about the division's individual Marines, which was what made her such a good Exec.

“I don't like it any more than you do, Colonel,” he told her. “Maybe we can have them switch off voluntarily, rather than kill the entire Net from here.”

“You're talking about disabling every implant in your division?” Rame said, incredulous.

“Yes.” He thought about it. “We might get by with having just the Marines on-planet pull the plug. I haven't heard of any reports of simulations or illusions in the Fleet, have you?”

“None, General,” Fremantle told him. “The effect so far has been limited to personnel on or within the Xul world.”

“I can't even imagine living without my implant,” Ranser said, “much less trying to fight a battle.” His eyes narrowed and he looked at Garroway with critical appraisal. “Wait a second. Do you need psych support?”

Garroway gave a thin smile. “You think the Xul got to me? Go ahead and have the psychs check me out. But we
are
going to do this….”

Blue Seven
Objective Reality
0855 hours, GMT

Garwe was fully back in reality, now, triggering burst after burst into what appeared to be a living, moving wall of
machines. Xul instrumentalities within their base infrastructures had the disconcerting property of shape-shifting. Their combat machines, most of them, were roughly humansized and more or less fixed in their shape, save for the tentacles that grew and dissolved from their surfaces. The interior walls of their larger facilities, bases and ships, however, appeared to consist of millions of insect-sized devices that joined with one another in constantly shifting three-dimensional patterns. The digital intelligences behind them seemed to move through the shifting surfaces and reshape them at will, creating weapons, sensors, electronic systems, and other less identifiable components at will.

At least the components were macro in scale, and not nanotechnic. Though Xul employed nanotechnology, they apparently used it on a limited scale, preferring the larger, visible units in their massive construction projects.

Which meant that if you vaporized enough of the little buggers, you could eventually wear them down to the point where their electronic ghosts fled, which meant they were no longer
alive
.

Garwe continued to burn through the shifting mass of black robotic insects, but he was still wrestling with the aftereffects of his unexpected visit to Earth's eighteenth century. Had he really been there, or had it been entirely a simulation, an illusion? And what had caused it?

He suspected the Xul had had a tentacle in it; there was no other reasonable explanation, though the strange environment of the Quantum Sea could have been a factor. Dreams here, they said, could become
real
….

Space seemed to twist and shimmer to his right, and an instant later Blue Twelve, Lieutenant Kadellan Wahrst, was
there
, firing her particle weapon into the living wall.

“Where the hell were you, Kaddy?” he yelled.

“I'm…not sure. Ancient Earth…1918, I think. God…the
futility
….”

“It doesn't matter,” he told her. “We're
here
. We're
now
. Keep firing!”

The wall was beginning to dissolve, as thousands of black constructs the size of Garwe's thumb began dropping gently to the deck. The Xul worldlet's gravitational field was low—less than a twentieth of a G—and things fell with agonizing slowness.

The digital spirits animating this chamber appeared to be fleeing.

Captain Xander flicked into existence. “Jesus!” she said. “What the hell is going on?”

“Some kind of Xul effect, Captain,” Garwe told her. “I think they're tapping into our simulation records. Training sims, but…they kind of take over, don't they?”

“Yeah. I was at Chapultepec.”

“What's that?” Wahrst wanted to know.

“A fortress outside of Mexico City. First Mexican-American War, 1847. ‘From the Halls of Montezuma,' remember?”

Every Marine, Globe and Anchor alike, knew the stanzas of the Marine Corps Hymn. “From the Halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.” The first was a reference to forty U.S. Marines who'd stormed Chapultepec along with over two hundred other hand-picked American soldiers. The second remembered Captain O'Bannon and his seven Marines at Derna.

“It wasn't like I thought from the general histories,” Xander added. She sounded shaken. “There were
kids
there. Some of the enemy soldiers were
kids
….”

Garwe picked up some flashing images of the battle over a side comm band from Xander's implant, along with statistical data as her AI tried to assimilate the data. Chapultepec had been held by a few hundred Mexican soldiers—reports varied from 400 to 832 in all. Once the initial storming party had taken the walls, columns of American infantry, thousands of men, had poured over and down into the fortress, moving through to seize the Belén and St. Cosmé Gates leading into Mexico City itself. Most of the Mexican soldiers had retreated, but six cadets from the Mexican
Military Academy on Chapultepec Hill refused the order to retreat and fought to the last man. The last one alive, Juan Escutia, had wrapped himself in a Mexican flag and hurled himself from the castle parapet to keep the flag out of foreign hands. Some of the cadets were as young as thirteen.

For centuries they were remembered as
Los Niños Héroes,
the heroic children.

“We killed them,” Xander said. “We killed them
all
….”

“Not
all,” Garwe reminded her. “The ones who chose to stay behind and fight. They stood up against overwhelming odds and they died. That's what war is all about, remember?”

“I…remember.” Xander joined the others as they continued burning out the nest of Xul machines. But she moved slowly, almost hesitantly, and Garwe wondered if she was all right.

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines
Within Objective Reality
0857 hours, GMT

Nal led a platoon-strength formation deeper into the Xul world. Within the weak gravitational field of the tiny planet, terms like
down
and
up
were very nearly arbitrary, but there was pull enough to create a sensation of depth, a yawning cavern opening below the Marines as they descended the uneven walls.

They'd followed a descending passageway for several kilometers, fighting off several successive waves of Xul combat machines. At last, they'd emerged within a vast, open space, a kind of funnel extending far above their heads, and dropping at least five kilometers into the depths.

Far beneath them, a massive Xul instrumentality was coming together, swiftly growing as billions of insect-sized
machines flew in from every direction or oozed straight out of the walls, melding together into a squat, vaguely spherical mass unsuccessfully shrouding a dazzling inner light.

Nal didn't know what the thing was, but at a kilometer across, as big as many Xul warships, it spelled trouble.

“Are you getting this, sir?” he called. “Sir! Captain Corcoran!”

There was no reply, and his tacsit readout showed no sign of the company commander.

“Lieutenant Haskins!” Again, no response. Damn it, where were they?

He still couldn't quite credit the idea that when individual Marines began engaging in those training sims, they actually vanished. That seemed to violate all the laws of physics—the rational and intuitive ones, anyway.

But there was no denying that Marines were popping in and out of existence like virtual particles in the Quantum Sea. Master Sergeant Nal il-En Shru-dech was, at least for the moment, in command of the company.

“
Nicholas
!” he called. “This is Company H of the 2/9! We have a target for you!”

Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
0858 hours, GMT

“We have a class-1 priority QCC message coming through, General,” Major Tomas Allendes reported. “A master sergeant on command of a company. Requesting a spacial delivery….”