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And now they were dragging him back to base, out a hundred dollars and nothing to show for it but a wet crotch and a semen-soaked wrap!
Yeah…he thought about arguing. But there was something about Sergeant Major Kaminski’s bearing—not to mention the pressed-and-tailored perfection of his khakis and that incredible splash of colored ribbons on his shirt—that made even a veteran griper like Lucky Leckie think twice, then back down. It didn’t help that Kaminski was in full uniform while he was stark naked.
The real problem was that Kaminski was a lifer. Those campaign ribbons—for Mars and Garroway’s March and Cydonia, for Luna, Picard and Tsiolkovsky, for Vera Cruz and Cape Town and Havana, not to mention the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with cluster, the Purple Heart, Expert Rifleman—together they created a truly formidable barrier no mere corporal with nothing but a National Defense Ribbon and an SMEU qualification badge could stand against.
Hell, Kaminski would drop-kick him clear back to V-burg if he even tried.
“Aye, aye, Sergeant Major,” he said. Tossing the wet towel on the floor, he turned and followed Tone into the locker room, where they’d left their clothes. Koharu, who’d modestly turned away at his nudity, was already fastidiously scrubbing at his couch with a disinfectant spray.
Hell, he thought, it wasn’t like she hadn’t seen naked men before. Everyone knew you could get real girls at Mamasan’s, not just the computer-programmed ones. He’d even tried them a time or two, and they’d been okay. It was just that the fantasies made possible in the virtual reality spheres were so much better than anything any flesh-and-blood whore could possibly conjure for you. Especially with the newer equipment that let you experience full, all-body sensation without having to have surgically implanted jacks, gimmicks that had never been all that popular except with the most passionately devoted computer jocks. Better than the real thing.
Besides, linking in to an orgy with a roomful of computer-generated women guided by an entertainment AI was the absolute ultimate in safe sex.
Dressed in their civvies, he and Tone returned to the lounge at the building’s entrance, where several pleasant-looking hostesses sat at tables or at the bar. Kaminski was waiting for them.
“Here, you two,” he said, extending two plastic credit slips.
“What are these?” Tone asked.
“Your refunds. I talked Mamasan down to half price for both of you.”
“Shit,” Lucky said. “How’d you manage that?” Mamasan Koharu had the rep of a polite and civilized female dragon who didn’t back down on anything where her girls, her boys, or her business was concerned.
“I talked to her nice, Leckie. Something you wouldn’t know about.” He grinned. “And I told her it would be a shame if word spread among the personnel on the base about what happened to you. I guess she felt that losing a hundred was better than having her business go flatline.”
“Well, hey! Thanks!” He took the credit slip, unholstered his PAD, and slid the data strip end through the reader. His account credited him with fifty dollars as the plastic slip turned from green to black. He tossed the dead slip on the floor.
Kaminski stopped him with a twenty-kiloton-per-second look. “Pick it up.”
“But Sergeant Major—”
“Pick it up, shithead!” As Lucky obeyed, Kaminski growled, “Maintaining decent relations with the civilian population in the area is tough enough, asshole, without you vandalizing the neighborhood with your fucking attitude. Now shitcan your garbage and let’s get back aboard!” He nodded to the watching women. “Ladies.”
Outside, Kaminski’s car, a gray Ford-Toshiba Electric from the motor pool, was parked in the Virtuality lot, tapping a charge from the contact posts. Beyond, traffic whizzed by on Highway One. Tone’s car, a neon-red bubbletop Zephyr, was in the recharge slot nearby.
“So, what’s all the rush, Master Sergeant?” Lucky asked as they trotted down the steps. “Are we on alert?”
“Affirmative. They just passed the word. The launch date has just been moved up. We’re boosting, boys, probably late next week.”
“Holy shit!” Tone said. “I ain’t got any of my shit together.”
“Then you’d better take care of it ASAP, Marine. It’s a long way to Europa. The long-distance comlink charges’ll kill you!”
Europa! Lucky still found it hard to believe. He’d always dreamed of going to space; that was why he’d volunteered for the Space Marines, after all. He’d been hoping to get a chance to see Mars, or at least be posted at one of the naval orbital facilities now sprouting up in Earth orbit.
But Europa! Why anyone would want to attack such a place—or defend it from attack—was beyond him. The briefings he’d had so far emphasized the unbearable hostility of the place—an environment where the temperature never crawled higher than 140 degrees below zero, with no atmosphere to speak of, and intense radiation delivered by the far-flung magnetic fields centered on giant Jupiter. The word was that a small scientific outpost was there, and there were rumors that they’d found something in the ice. Something important.
It was hard to imagine just what could be so damned critical in such a God-forsaken place.
From the way the scuttlebutt was flying, though, the scientists had found anything from one of the ancient ET visitors to a working faster-than-light starship to God Himself. Lucky, a bit jaded by his two years in the Corps, knew better than to pounce on any single rumor and absorb it as fact.
Meeting aliens wouldn’t be so bad, he thought. Hell, it’d be a short ticket to fame and fortune for everyone on the expedition who pulled it off. But he didn’t for a minute believe that there actually were aliens at Europa. Scuttlebutt, pure and simple. The real action in the solar system was on Mars, where scientists from a dozen nations were sorting through the relics left by the enigmatic Builders. That was where he’d been hoping to go.
Shit. He’d joined the Marines to see Mars, and here they were sending him to a radiation-drenched ball of ice in the cold and dark of the Outer System.
Tone swung the Zephyr into Vandenberg’s Main Entrance. The usual demonstrations were under way, and Tone had to drive slowly through a corridor in the road kept open by police and Air Force MPs. IT’S BABEL AGAIN! one prominent sign read. MAN WAS CREATED IN GOD’S IMAGE TO TEND THE EARTH! read a long banner held aloft by six scraggly-looking youngsters. Many waved miniature palm trees, the unofficial symbol of the Keepers of the Earth. An enchantingly bare-breasted young woman with a laurel crown sat astride a miniature woolly mammoth gesturing with a sign that read HEAVEN ON EARTH NOW. The better-dressed members of the congregation wore helmet cams and recording gear. It looked like the newsies were out in full force.
Despite the chanting, jeering mob, the sentries looked bored, and Lucky had the feeling this was all pretty routine. Another day, another back-to-the-Earth demonstration.
At the gate, past the lines marking the secure perimeter, they handed over their pads for a security check and pressed their thumbs against DNA reader screens proffered by the Air Force Blue Beret sentries. Security at the base was very high; Vandenberg was one of only three primary launch centers in the United States, and there were entirely too many people about, both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens, with reasons to sabotage America’s space access capability.
Lucky turned in the seat for another look at the woman on the dwarf mammoth. Funny how the antitechies were always so selective about the technologies they wanted banned. This bunch obviously didn’t mind cloning frozen mammoth carcasses, but they wanted humankind out of space. There were others who didn’t mind space travel, but who thought tampering with genetics was blasphemy. You could usually find them demonstrating outside major theme parks that maintained genetically tailored and resurrected herds.
He wondered what would happen if both groups tried demonstrating on the same day at the same gate. Might be amusing.
Through the gate, then, and into the base. Vandenberg was still officially an Air Force base, even though the U.S. Navy seemed to have positioned itself as the principal builder and operator of deep spacecraft. Congressional and intra-Pentagon warfare continued over funding and jurisdictional disputes, but in general, the Air Force controlled airspace up to the 100-kilometer mark, and operated the military shuttles carrying men and materiel to Low Earth Orbit. The Navy, with its long history of procuring, building, and operating large ships at sea for long periods of time, had responsibility for everything beyond the 100-km line. The Marines—the Navy’s police force, as one misguided former U.S. president had called them—had followed the Navy into deep space, despite ongoing attempts by the Army to establish an Army Space Operations Group.
There were rumblings, as always, over the possible creation of a military space arm independent of all of the older armed forces. Lucky didn’t think that would ever happen, though. Too many high-rankers and politicians had too much invested in too many past decisions to yield on such a politically charged and expensive issue. The arguments would continue, nothing critical would be decided, and Lucky would get to go to space.
If only it wasn’t a damned tech-null hole like Europa!
The Zephyr swung into a curve, then crested a long, low ridge. Beyond, almost at the horizon, Launch Center Bravo sprawled across 8,000 hectares of scrub brush and rock. Their timing couldn’t have been better. Seconds after they came over the ridge, an intensely brilliant strobe of blue-white light pulsed from one of the dozen launch towers bristling from the landscape like thick, white whiskers. Tone pulled the car over so they could both watch.
The strobe winked rapidly, ten times a second, a fluttering pulse of light from the base of the tower. A cargo transport rose into the sky, a squat, white cone with a broad and oddly flared base. As it cleared the tower, four more strobes began flashing at widely separated points scattered across the landscape. The effect was a warning, not the glare of the lasers themselves.
The sound, a far-off roll of thunder, didn’t reach the two Marines for a number of seconds. The transport, its circular base now glowing white-hot, accelerated rapidly into the clear, deep blue of the early evening sky.
“Whee-oo!” Tone said, excited. “What a ride! What you think, Luck? They’re pulling maybe eight Gs?”
“Cargo launch,” he replied. “Betcha it’s unmanned and pulling twelve Gs, easy!”
The hurtling transport began arching overhead as it slid into an easterly launch path. When Vandenberg had first been converted to launch operations in the last century, all launches had been into polar or high-inclination orbits, since an east or southeasterly launch path would take the vehicle over the dangerously crowded urban areas of Greater Los Angeles. Low-inclination launches from V-berg had become possible—if not exactly politically acceptable—with the development of single-stage-to-orbit boosters and, later, the Laser Launch System, or LLS. Launches routinely passed over Greater LA every day now…though that, too, was yet another cause for periodic demonstrations.
The cargo transport was now nothing but a star, brighter than Venus, sliding rapidly down the eastern sky. The ground-based lasers, playing their steady, invisible tattoo against the water reaction mass in the transport’s plasma chamber, could boost it to orbital velocity in less than 120 seconds. Downrange lasers, at Edwards and San Clemente, would pick up the vehicle when it passed beyond Vandenberg’s laser-launch horizon and see it safely past LA. Once it was in orbit, conventional onboard engines would kick in and guide it to its final destination—almost certainly the U.S. Deep Space Orbital Facility at L-3.
It was a bit eerie for Lucky, imagining himself riding that invisible laser fire into space in another few days.
Space. Yeah…even if it was Europa, he would be in space at last.
19 SEPTEMBER 2067
Space Tracking and Navigation
Network (STAN-NET)
Widely Distributed, Earth and
Near-Earth Space
0238 hours (Zulu)
They called him Stan, although, like most artificial intelligences, he never thought of himself in terms of names or self-identity. Even the pronoun he wasn’t appropriate, though it didn’t matter to him one way or another. It was simply part of the persona assigned him by his human handlers for their own comfort and convenience.
“He” could not even be said to have a particular location in space. Like all AIs, he was the product of software—interconnected programs running on over three hundred different pieces of hardware, and those machines were scattered across space, from the TCC-5000 still coordinating space tracking operations from Cheyenne Mountain to the fifteen different Honeywell-Toshiba IC-1090s aboard each satellite in the TrackStar Geosynch constellation. His primary task was to monitor all spacecraft, satellites, and orbital facilities in cis-Lunar space; his secondary tasks changed periodically, but frequently involved alerting other AIs in the Global Network of specific events within his purview.
Such an event, linked to such a task, was occurring now.
One of Stan’s remote trackers, a twelve-ton Argus-Hera satellite in high Earth orbit, had just registered an unscheduled burn and funneled the observation through to all of Stan’s extended and massively parallel processor sites.
The source was KE26-GEO, the Chinese industrial/construction park in geosynch, at 108° East.
There were many such parks—in LEO, HEO, GEO, and in the various LaGrange points of the Earth-Moon system. Most had started off as small space stations for research, communications, or small-scale microgravity industrial sites, then grown, often haphazardly, into collections of fuel tanks, pumping apparatus, construction shacks, solar cell arrays, habitat and lab modules, and spacecraft. A few—like the U.S. facility at L-3, or the Chinese KE26 station in geosynch—included the high-energy processing and containment facilities necessary for the manufacture and storage of antimatter.
Stan knew the location of each spacecraft within his sphere of attention—from 100 kilometers above the Earth to the orbit of the Moon—whether they were in orbit or under thrust. His primary programming had him functioning as a kind of space traffic controller—not that collision was a major threat; usually, the only times ships were in danger of collision was during approach or departure from a space station or other orbital facility, and at those times, ship vectors and delta-V burns were the responsibility of the ship and station personnel and AIs.
Still, there was considerable danger from the cloud of debris released by human activities in space since the beginning of the space age over a century before, everything from spent boosters and payload protective fairings to flecks of paint, which could be deadly if they impacted with, say, the visor of a pressure suit at several kilometers per second. Stan couldn’t track individual paint flecks, but his database of stray objects included things as small as two-centimeter bolts and a stray canister of exposed infrared film. Stan’s warnings of potential vector conflicts had resulted in 408 minor course corrections in the 12.37634912 years since his initialization. Space faring powers nearly always queried Stan on the possible outcome of specific boosts, vector changes, and time-distance-acceleration problems.
The Chinese had stopped making such requests three months ago. Technically, by treaty they were required to announce all launches in advance, but the requirement was strictly one of courtesy, not enforcement.
In fact, it was possible that they were operating their own deep-space tracking network. Stan was interested, however, in the politics of the situation. He did not understand the current tension between the Chinese and the newly created Confederation of World States, a loose trade and defense organization headed by the United States, Russia, and Japan that included all of the other space-capable powers. That such tension existed was self-evident from the news broadcasts of both sides, and from the fact that Stan’s secondary program tasks had increasingly involved surveillance of Chinese space assets for DODNET, the complex of AIs running much of the U.S. military’s command, control, and communications networks.
There were, at the moment, no fewer than nineteen spacecraft of various types at KE26-GEO…most of them cargo craft boosted from Xichang. Two were the antimatter-powered cruisers Xing Shan (the Star Mountain) and her sister ship, the Xing Feng (the Star Wind). A third was a research vessel, the Tiantan Shandian, which DOD-NET translated roughly as the Heavenly Lightning.
Stan had received numerous requests for updates on the Star Mountain’s status in the past few weeks, and he’d dutifully passed on all observations. There had not been much to report; the huge spacecraft remained inert, though thermal and radiation readings suggested that its fusion power plant was being brought to full output, probably in anticipation of a launch. He could make out little detail, however; the Argus-Hera tracking satellites, of all his assets, came closest at periodic intervals to the Chinese facility—but that was never closer than some 20,000 kilometers.
Still, standing orders required that any change in the status of either the Xing Shan or the Xing Feng be reported to the Pentagon at once.
Now, though, three of his Argus-Heras had picked up the bright, hot flare of a burn at KE26-GEO. Interestingly, it was not the Star Mountain that was accelerating, but the much older Heavenly Lightning.
The Lightning was listed as a deep space research vessel—415 meters long, massing 25,300 tons. The vessel was currently mounted on a two-stage stack, with a heavily modified Liliang ground-to-orbit booster as a strap-on first stage.
Stan monitored the burn for five seconds before arriving at any decisions. His orders did not explicitly mention the Heavenly Lightning, but he had considerable discretionary flexibility—a large part of the reason for artificially intelligent systems, after all. He noted that the Liliang booster’s flare included high levels of gamma radiation—a sure sign that the vehicle’s thrust had been upgraded through the simple expedient of adding a small quantity of antimatter to the reaction chamber, increasing the specific impulse of the booster’s hydrogen-oxygen fuel mix.
After five seconds, Stan had assembled enough data to make a good guess on the craft’s intended vector—a close pass of Earth to achieve a gravitational slingshot onto a new course. The ultimate vector could not be determined now, of course; he wouldn’t be able to estimate that until he’d measured the Lightning’s perigee burn. But it appeared, with 85 percent certainty, that the Heavenly Lightning was bound for a retrograde solar orbit—one that seemed to be going nowhere in particular.
The information was not what DODNET and the Pentagon were most interested in at the moment, but Stan felt sure they would want to know.
He linked into the Global Net and began uploading his observations.
THREE
20 SEPTEMBER 2067
The Palace of Illusion
Burbank, California
2130 hours (Zulu minus 8)
Why, Colonel Kaitlin Garroway asked herself, do I come to these damned functions?
The answer was obvious, of course. Because the Corps wants well-rounded, well-balanced, socially ept officers and it wouldn’t look good if you turned down too many invitations. She had to ask the question nonetheless. She always felt so damned out of place at these affairs; at least the proverbial fish out of water had managed to evolve legs and lungs after a few million years. She held no such hopes for herself.
Once upon a time, social gatherings of this sort had been held in private homes—well-to-do private homes, to be sure, but homes all the same. If the guest list was simply too big for the living room, a reception hall might be rented for the occasion.
Nowadays, an entire minor industry thrived to provide suitable ambiance for the evening. The Palace of Illusion was run by a major area theme park to cater expressly to formal social events. She wondered how much all of this had cost—the lighting and special effects, the live music, the endless tables of food, the sheer space: the grounds and gardens outside on a hilltop overlooking the dazzling horizon-to-horizon glow of Greater Los Angeles; a Grand Hall so large the walls were lost in the artificial mists and play of laser holography designed to create a sense of infinite space; and elsewhere, private rooms, conversation bubbles, or even private VR spheres designed to accommodate social and conversational groupings of every size and taste.
Several thousand people were in attendance. Kaitlin felt completely lost. She wished Rob, her husband, was here, but the lucky bastard was on the other end of the continent right now, CO of the Marine Space Training Command at Quantico, and he’d been able to plead schedule and a meeting with the Joint Chiefs to duck the invitation. It was harder for Kaitlin. Her current assignment had her in command of the 1st Marine Space Regiment, which consisted of the 1st and 2nd Marine Space Expeditionary Forces, and various support elements. Normally, she was in Quantico too, but for the past month she’d been stationed at Vandenberg, commuting by HST on those few weekends she had free.
All of which had left her without an acceptable excuse for being here tonight.
She wandered the fringes of the Great Hall, looking for someone she knew. She had her personal pinger on, set to alert her if she came within fifty meters of any other pinger broadcasting an interest in things that interested her: the Corps, recovered ET technology, science fiction, programming—especially cryptoprogramming—chess, anything involving Japanese language or culture. It was also searching for any of a handful of people she knew who might be here. So far, no luck. Senator Fuentes was here, of course; it was her party. Twenty-five years ago, Colonel Carmen Fuentes had been her CO in the desperate fight for Tsiolkovsky on the Lunar far side. Unfortunately, the senator was surrounded five deep just now by well wishers, sycophants, politicians, and social climbers. Kaitlin didn’t have a chance in hell of breaching those defenses.
She wandered through the crowd, amusing herself by observing the variations in dress and social custom. Kaitlin was wearing the new formal Blue Dress Evening uniform—long skirt, open jacket with medals and broad red lapels over ruffled white blouse, and the damned silly gold braid epaulets that made her feel like she was walking around with boards balanced precariously on her shoulders. And heels. She hated heels. Heels had been abandoned by progressively thinking women fifty years ago. All she needed to feel a perfect fool was a sword and scabbard.
There were quite a few of those in the room. Most of the male Marine officers were in full Blue Dress A uniform, with swords—the famous Mameluke blade first presented to Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon for the capture of Derna in 1805—at their sides.
Corps tradition. It was everywhere she looked. Those red stripes on the legs of their pants, for instance, symbolized the bloody Battle of Chapultepec in the Mexican War, the “Halls of Montezuma” immortalized in the Marine Corps Hymn.
Most of the people at the gathering, however, were civilians, and Kaitlin found herself feeling quite out of place with the creatures—as alien to her way of thinking as the Builders or the An or any of the myriad species glimpsed from the Cave of Wonders at Cydonia. Their dress ran the colorful gamut from full traditional formal to almost nude; complete nakedness was still frowned upon in most social circles in all but small and informal gatherings, but donning nothing but footwear, suitably fashionable technological accessories, and skin dyes or tattoos was customary for larger parties, if still mildly daring.
The creature confronting her now was a case in point. He was clad in the new technorganic-look, half hardware appliqué, half dyetooed skin. He wore a visible pinger on his right shoulder which was pulsing orange light at the moment, an indicator that he was interested in sexual diversions of any kind. Orange dyettooes covered half his body in what looked like Sanskrit characters, including his genitals—just to make sure that everyone knew he was available for play.
Kaitlin preferred the old days, when there’d always been a hint of mystery, even suspense, with any new and casual meeting.
The times, the culture, were simply changing too damned fast.
“Blue stellar!” the dyed apparition said. “You’re Colonel Kaitlin Garroway, First Marine Space Force! Your pat was Sands of Mars Garroway, your—”
“I do know who I am,” she said, a bit more sharply than she’d intended. She still couldn’t get used to the new habit people had of announcing themselves by announcing you…an ostentatiously irritating means, basically, of proving they had a good Farley program running in their PAD assistants.
“Tek! Been progged to ’face with ya, Colonel. Saw you on the list when I dunelled it and nearly maxed.”
Kaitlin blinked. She had the general idea that the kid—he couldn’t have been older than his early twenties—was glad to see her, but she still wasn’t sure why. He had a decided technological edge on her. He was wearing some pretty sharp-edged tech, including a partial sensory helmet—it covered only the left side of his head, leaving the primitive right half free and “natural”—with a flip-aside monocular for his data HUD. He was probably tapping all the data on her that he could find at this moment, while she had nothing to query but the AI secretary resident in her PAD. She was damned if she would let herself appear interested, though, by opening her personal access device just to electronically query the local net server for a Farley on this guy’s name, background, and interests.
“And you are?” she asked, her voice cool.
“Oh, vid. Handle’s Hardcore. Wanted to link with ya on some prime throughput. Like what the milboys are runnin’ landing on Jupiter. I run, like, the Masters might get the wrong feed, c’nect?”
Kaitlin was abruptly conscious of just how many people in the room around her were wearing sensory communications gear of some sort, from appliqués like Hardcore’s to full helmets with darkened visors and internal HUD displays. Resident AIs with the appropriate dialect and slang interpreters made talking cross-culture a lot easier than trying it null-teched.
“To begin with,” she said slowly, trying to sort her way through the tangle of techculture slang, “the Marines aren’t landing on Jupiter. A Marine Space Expeditionary Unit is deploying to Europa. That’s one of Jupiter’s moons. As for the Masters…I suppose you mean one or another of the A-Squared cultures?”
“Absopos, cybe! Like, I run the An made us what we are, linkme? And, like, I run they might not log our peaceful nature with the mils goosestepping into their domain.”
A-Squareds. Thank the newsies for that bit of cuteness, meaning Ancient Aliens. There were two known, now, and a third inferred, thanks to xenoarcheological digs on Mars, the Moon, and even, lately, on Earth, now that the diggers knew what to look for. The Builders had left the enigmatic structures and fragments on Mars half a million years ago, and presumably had tinkered with human genetics at the same time, creating archaic Homo sapiens from the earlier populations of Homo erectus. The An had been something else entirely, a nonhuman spacefaring species that had enslaved a fair-sized fraction of humanity ten thousand years ago, and left their imprint in human myth, legend, and architecture across the Fertile Crescent, in parts of Africa, and in both South and Central America before being annihilated by the presumptive third Ancient Alien culture, the Hunters of the Dawn.
“The Builders have been extinct for half a million years,” she told Hardcore. “The An appear to have been wiped out ten thousand years ago. If the Hunters of the Dawn are still out there, we haven’t seen any sign of them. I can’t see that any of them would mind us going to Europa. And the Marines are going there to protect American interests.” As always. First to fight. Too often, the first to die.
