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“But that runs totally null, cybe. Like, they upgraded us, so we have to be jacked in tight and one-worlding it when they return….”
Kaitlin at last was beginning to take the kid’s measure. An Ancient Astronut.
There were literally hundreds of new cults and religions about, spawned by the recent discoveries elsewhere in the Solar System that were continuing the ongoing process of displacement for humankind’s place in the universe begun by Copernicus so long before. The Builders had tinkered with human DNA, and a few civilized members of that new species had died on Mars when the facilities there had been attacked by unknown enemies. The An had established bases on the Moon and colonies on Earth, enslaving large numbers of humans to help raise their monumental and still enigmatic structures at Giza, Baalbek, Titicaca, and elsewhere, before infalling asteroids deliberately aimed by another unknown enemy had wiped most of the An centers away in storms of flame and flood. Twice, it appeared, humans had narrowly escaped the fates of more advanced, alien patron races.
So much was known now, a revelation at least as stunning as the knowledge that humankind predated Bishop Usher’s date of special creation in 4004 BC. But so much was still unknown, and in the mystery, in the undiscovered, there was plenty of room for speculation…and for radical new forms of faith. From the sound of it, Hardcore was a member of one of the new denominations that actually gloried in the knowledge that humanity had once been engineered as slaves. It certainly made the question of existence simple: Humankind was here to serve the Masters. Obviously, the Masters weren’t about right now, but when They returned, they would expect an accounting of their faithful servants for the world they’d left in the servants’ care.
Kaitlin wondered what Hardcore would do if she posed as a member of one of the other cults and political spin-off groups—a Humanity Firster, say, who’d vowed to venture forth to the stars and eradicate the alien scum who’d once tried to enslave Mankind, and failed.
She decided that the Senator would probably prefer that she keep a low profile. In any case, members of the U.S. Armed Forces weren’t allowed to express political or religious opinions of any kind while in uniform.
“I can’t share your view of the aliens,” she told him, blunt, but as diplomatically as possible. “We do know that there might be…people out there we’re going to want to protect ourselves from. Isn’t it reasonable to want to find out all we can about them, as far from Earth as we can manage?”
“Hey, I can’t ’face with that, cybe. I mean, we can’t run different than our progamming, right? And we were made to serve the Masters.”
A tiny chirp in her left ear told her that her pinger had just detected one of the people on her tell-me list. “Who?” she subvocalized.
“Dr. Jack Ramsey,” her earpiece’s voice whispered. “He has just entered the palace of Illusion.”
“Thank God.”
“Sorry?” Hardcore said, puzzled. “I don’t ’face ya.”
“And a good thing it is, too,” she told him. “I’ve got to go. I’m meeting a friend.”
“But, like, we gotta ’face on the issue, cybe. Don’t log me off!”
“Please. Excuse me.” She turned and started to walk away. “Which way to Jack Ramsey?” she asked her pinger.
“Five degrees left, now sixteen-point-one meters, closing…”
“Like, we should clear this.” He was following her, matching her stride for stride.
“Hardcore!” another voice said. “Hey, you found her!”
“Found but not downed. She won’t ’face, Slick-Cybe.”
The newcomer was more conventionally dressed in a two-tone green tunic with a stiff, tight collar, but he sported many of the same technical accouterments Hardcore wore. He stepped in front of her, blocking her way. “Hey, Colonel. My des is Slick. We were hoping you’d give us a few moments of your time.”
“Who is ‘we’?” she demanded. She was losing patience with this crew.
“C’mon in,” the newcomer said, grinning…obviously speaking for someone else’s benefit. Kaitlin saw with alarm that several people were detaching themselves from various parts of the crowd around her and walking her way.
Ambush…
She couldn’t help but think of it in military terms. They’d pinpointed her location with a scout, called in a blocking force, and now the main body was closing in.
And, damn it, she couldn’t run in heels. She would have to stand and fight it out.
Their dress ran from Hardcore’s stylish nudity to an elaborate Elizabethan ball gown that looked heavier than the man wearing it. One woman had her head shaved, wore golden, slit-pupiled contacts, and had dyetooed her entire body in a green scale pattern that gave her a vague resemblance to an oversized and rather too mammalian-looking An.
The oldest of them was conservatively dressed and appeared to be in his late thirties.
“Colonel Garroway!” that man said. “I’m Pastor Swenson, of the Unified Church of the Masters. I was hoping to run into you this evening!”
“You must excuse me,” she told him. “There’s someone I have to meet.” She wished she was wearing a comlink right now, or at least a full-link-capable pinger. It would have been nice to punch in Jack’s ID right now and call for help.
“This will only take a moment, please! We’re afraid that the U.S. government and the CWS Planning Committee are making a serious mistake, one that could have the most serious repercussions for our entire species!”
“If they are, there’s not a damned thing I can do about it, Pastor. I’m just a soldier, not a politician or a government planner.”
“But the young men and women who are going to Jupiter are under your command, after all. You must have some say in how they’re being used. And the news media would listen to your opinions. We believe these are extraordinarily critical and dangerous times, you see, and we—”
“As I told this gentleman, Pastor,” she said, nodding at Hardcore, “I don’t agree with your opinions about extraterrestrials. I certainly don’t believe that something that happened thousands of years ago to tribes of primitives living thousands of kilometers from here requires us to somehow surrender our minds and integrity and will.’
“Ah, well, Colonel,” Swenson said with an ingratiating smile, “you must accept that the Bible tells us about these things, that it told us a long time ago! Signs and wonders in the heavens, and blood upon the Moon! You fought a battle on the Moon, Colonel! You know that the prophecy is being fulfilled right here in our lifetimes! Prophecy written down two thousand years ago, telling us that—”
“Telling us nothing, Pastor, except that some people have either a remarkable imagination or an astonishing will to believe.”
Slick reached out and took her arm. “You mustn’t say things like that, Colonel! We’ve formed a kind of delegation, if you like, to—”
Reaching down with her left hand, she grasped his hand, her thumb finding the nerve plexus at the base of his thumb. As she turned his hand back and over, his face went white and he started to sag at the knees.
“Don’t ever do that,” she told him pleasantly. “And get out of my way, now, or I’ll turn something else numb…permanently.”
“Are you having any trouble, Colonel?” a familiar voice asked. Jack Ramsey walked over to the group, a man in his early forties in civvies, a red and black close-collar smartsuit.
“I don’t know,” she said. She looked at Slick. “Am I having any trouble with you?”
Slick shook his head in a vigorous ‘no.’ She increased the pressure slightly, and he gasped and dropped to his knees.
“Good,” she said, smiling. She released him. “How about you, Hardcore?”
“I…ah…was just gonna go ’face with the food table. ’Scuze.” He bobbed his head and vanished into the crowd, followed closely by his friend. The others—Swenson, the scaled woman—all drifted off into the crowd.
“And what was that all about?” Jack asked her.
“Astronuts,” she replied. “Don’t like the idea of us Neanderthal military types making First Contact.”
He made a face. “I’ve heard that one before. This particular bunch thinks the An gene-engineered Moses, the Buddha, and Jesus Christ as special avatars in order to civilize us. They say they’re waiting for proof that we’ve given up our savage, warlike ways before letting us join them in heaven.”
“How do you know all this?”
He tapped the left arm of his smartsuit, where stylish threads of gold and silver were worked into the black synthetic fabric like a tiny map of an overgrown inner city. The suit was one of the later models, with over fifty gig of access and automatic comlink to any local node or net server. When she looked more closely into his eyes, she saw they were a bit greener than usual; he was wearing contact displays. “They’ve been dropping electronic tracts on anyone they can get an eddress for.”
“Try that again with me and I’ll drop something on them. Why the hell are they here?”
“Swenson is a minor celebrity. On all of the talk shows and media interviews he can swing. I guess the others are part of his entourage.”
“Well, thanks for coming to my rescue.”
“You didn’t look like you needed rescuing.”
“Oh, but I did.” She grinned. “When you arrived, I was in the process of chewing my leg off at the ankle.”
“And such a lovely ankle, at that. I’m glad. How’s the general? And your kids?”
“Rob’s still at Quantico, and I wish I were there with him instead of playing socialite and sometime target for religious activists. Rob Junior’s had his first assignment off-world. Peaceforcer duty. And Kam and Alan are growing up too fast and I don’t get to see them enough by half. You know, I honestly think they’re going to go through life thinking that their cissie is their mother, not me.”
“It’s tough, I know. You thinking about getting out?”
“Who told you that?”
“It’s been around. If you don’t want to say—”
“Oh, it’s no secret. I haven’t decided, but it’s damned tempting. It would be nice to have a life again. Get to see my family.”
“It’s funny. When I think of you, Colonel, I think of the Corps as being your family.”
“It is. That’s what makes being caught in between so damned hard.” She gave him a cross look. “And speaking of which, Major…where’s your uniform?”
He made a face. “I thought I would be a bit less conspicuous in civvies.”
“You just don’t like showing off the blue button.” She grinned. “Shame on you!”
Jack Ramsey, then Corporal Ramsey, had won the Medal of Honor at Tsiolkovsky twenty-five years before. Kaitlin had been there, with the Marines that had secured the UN base, allowing a team of Marine AI experts—including Jack—to come in and crack a UN computer and stop the detonation of an antimatter stockpile.
“The way they have me running around with the professorial crowd, I’m not sure whether I’m in the Marines anymore or not.”
“You’re still drawing service pay, right?” She fingered the eagle of her rank tab on her lapel. “And you answer to a guy who wears one of these. You’re still in the Corps, believe me.”
“It’s nice to know some things remain constant. And I guess I do have to pay them back for my education!” After Tsiolkovsky, the Corps had sent him to college—including a graduate program at the Hans Moravec AI Institute in Pittsburgh—then given him a commission and put him to work designing better AIs. Artificial intelligence promised to be the big field of technological innovation in the next few years, a means of creating some very powerful friends and fellow workers for humankind, minds at least as good as any organic brain—and much, much faster.
Some thought the AIs would ultimately be man’s replacement rather than his assistant. Those working in the field rebutted the doomsayers by pointing out that the future belonged to both types of mind, that each needed the other to reach its full potential.
Jack had a natural flair for AI design. He’d started off before he’d joined the service, reconfiguring some limited commercial AI software into an impressively interactive program he called Sam, which he still used as his personal secretary. A descendent of Sam’s, Sam Too, had been installed aboard humankind’s first genuine star ship, the unmanned probe Ad Astra, now, after six years of voyaging, decelerating into the dual planetary system of Alpha Centauri.
“So…how goes your part of the mission?” she asked. That was Project Chiron, one small but extremely important, and classified, portion of the Ad Astra program.
He nodded. “Braking and final course correction maneuvers are almost complete. She’ll be entering orbit in another three days. But then, that’s also been on the news, so you must’ve heard. It can’t all be preempted by the latest news from China.”
She sighed. “Haven’t had much chance to watch, though. Or even read my daily high-points download. But I know it must be exciting for you.”
“It is. I’ll be going to Mars at the end of the week. That’s almost the best part of all, to be at Cydonia when the link is made.”
They were still trying to piece together the scope of the discovery beneath the war-and weather-torn ruins on Mars—in particular, the Cave of Wonders, the colossal sphere of holographic displays that appeared to show tantalizing glimpses of hundreds of alien worlds beneath other stars.
“Well, I wish you luck with it. And Sam too, of course.” She twinkled at the pun.
“Thank you.” If he’d heard the joke, he didn’t react to it. In fact, Kaitlin thought as she watched him, he seemed a bit preoccupied.
“Problem?”
“Eh? Oh, no. Not really. Was wondering if you’d heard anything about the Chinese mystery ship. I mean, anything you could tell me.”
“I don’t know much, and none of it is classified,” she admitted. “It’s called Heavenly Lightning, and it used a gravitational slingshot assist to put it into a retrograde solar orbit between Mars and Earth. The Chinese haven’t released much, except that it’s on a peaceful mission of a scientific nature.”
“From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s not going near Mars, though.”
“Uh-uh. Mars is on the far side of the sun right now. If they were trying to stop you from getting to Cydonia and carrying out Project Chiron, they’re about 400 million kilometers off course.”
“Well, that’s a relief, at least.”
“There’s been a lot of buzz about the Lightning and what she might be up to. The CMC was afraid it was headed for Europa.” Confederation Military Command was the ad hoc committee charged with unifying the disparate elements of the various CWS armed forces—an impossible task, but one that in Kaitlin’s opinion was good for occasional moments of comic relief. “Turns out the Chinese are worried about us making contact with whatever is at Europa first. But the Lightning’s headed in the wrong direction for that. So we don’t know what they’re up to.” She shrugged. “Maybe they’re telling the truth. Research.”
“Maybe…”
“You don’t look convinced.”
“Colonel, Europa and Mars are the two keys to the biggest, most important puzzle the human race faces right now. A breakthrough at either site is going to completely transform both us and the way we think about the universe—more than the An revelations, more than the discovery that we’re not alone in the universe. The Beijing government knows that, and they’d be nuts not to try to grab a piece of the action. We know they’re interested. We know they’ve been getting their big A-M ships ready to boost. And they did a quick refit of the Lightning and launched her in a hell of a hurry. It’s just damned hard not to believe they’re all connected somehow.”
“Well, the Peaceforcer cruisers are in place,” she said. “They’ll be watching every Chinese launch, you can be sure of that. And they’ll be positioned to act if the Chinese ships make a move in either direction. Beijing’s only hope at this point is to play the game our way. Join the CWS, make nice, and take a cut of the profits.”
“Beijing,” he replied, “isn’t exactly known for how well they play with others. Especially barbarians like us.”
He was right, of course. A struggle was shaping up, a struggle that might well determine the nature of humanity for the next ten thousand years.
And Kaitlin and Jack and the rest of the U.S. Marines were going to be at ground zero—the proverbial eye of the storm.
As usual.
Squad Bay
1 MSEF Barracks
2135 hours Zulu
“Bumfuq!” Lucky exploded. “We’re bein’ sent to Bumfuq!”
Bumfuq, Egypt, was an old, old expression current throughout all branches of military service, referring to a place, a duty station so far removed from the civilized amenities that you might as well be on another planet.
Which, in stark, cold point of fact, was exactly where they were going.
“Aw, c’mon, Lucky!” Staff Sergeant BA Campanelli said, laughing. “How bad can it be? Anyway, you always said you wanted to go to space!”
“Shit,” Lance Corporal Dick Wojak said. “He just doesn’t want to lose access to his virtual girlfriends!”
“Hell,” Sergeant Dave Coughlin said. “He should just download one of ’em into his PAD and bring her along! Then we could all share in the wealth!”
