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Star Lord Ared Goradon felt the odd, inner twist of shifting realities, and groaned. Not now! Whoever was dragging him out of the VirSim, he decided, had better have a damned good reason.
“Lord Goradon,” the voice of his AI assistant whispered again in his mind, “there is an emergency.” When he didn’t immediately respond, the AI said, more urgently, “Star Lord, wake up! We need you fully conscious!”
Reluctantly, he swam up out of the warmth of the artificially induced lucid dream, the last of the sim’s erotic caresses tattering and fading away. He sat up on his dream couch, blinking against the light. His heart was pounding, though whether from his physical exertions in the VirSim or from the shock of being so abruptly yanked back to the rWorld, he couldn’t tell.
The wall opposite the couch glared and flickered in orange and black. “What is it?”
“A xeno riot, Lord,” the voice told him. “It appears to be out of control. You may need to evacuate.”
“What, here?” It wasn’t possible. The psych index for Kaleed’s general population had been perfectly stable for months, even with the news of difficulties elsewhere.
But on his wall, the world was burning.
It was a small world, to be sure—an artificial ring three thousand kilometers around and five hundred wide, rotating to provide simulated gravity and with matrix fields across each end of the narrow tube to hold in the air. Around the perimeter, where patchwork patterns of sea and land provided the foundation for Kaleed’s scattered cities and agro centers, eight centuries of peace had come to an end in a single, shattering night.
The wall revealed a succession of scenes, each, it seemed, worse than the last. Orange fires glared and throbbed in ragged patches, visible against the darkness of the broad, flat hoop rising from the spinward horizon up and over to the zenith, and down again to antispin. Massed, black sheets of smoke drifted slowly to antispin, above the steady turning of the Wheel, sullenly red-lit from beneath. That he could see the flames against the darkness was itself alarming. What had happened to the usual comfortable glare of the cities’ lights, to their power?
“Show me the Hub,” he ordered the room.
Cameras directed at Kaleed’s hub fifteen hundred kilometers overhead showed the wheelworld’s central illuminator was dead. The quantum taps within providing heat and warmth had failed, and the three extruded Pylons holding the Hub in place were dark. There appeared to be a battle being fought at the base of Number Two Pylon, two clouds of anonymous fliers, their hulls difficult to see as their nanoflage surfaces shifted and blended to match their surroundings, were swarming about the base and the column, laser and plasma fire flashing and strobing with each hit.
Damn it … who was fighting who out there?
“Administrator Corcoram wishes to see you, Lord,” his assistant told him as he stared at the world’s ruin. “Actually, several hundred people and aigencies have requested direct links. Administrator Corcoram is the most senior.”
“Put him through.”
The System Administrator appeared in Goradon’s sleep chamber, looking as though he, too, had just been roused from sleep. His personal aigent had dressed his image in formal presentation robes, but not edited the terror from the man’s face. “Star Lord!”
“What the hell is going on, Mish? There was nothing in the last admin reports I saw. …”
“It just came out of nowhere, sir,” Mishel Corcoram replied. “Nowhere!”
“There had to be something.”
The lifelike image of Kaleed’s senior administrator shrugged. “There was a … a minor protest scheduled for nineteen at the public center in Lavina.” That was Kaleed’s local admin complex.
Eight standard hours ago. “Go on.”
“Our factors were there, of course, monitoring the situation. But the next thing socon knew, people were screaming ‘natural liberty,’ and then the Administrative Center was under attack by mobs wielding torches, battering rams, and weaponry seized from Administratia guards dispatched to quiet things down.” The image looked away, as though studying the scenes of fire and night flickering in the nano e-paint coating Goradon’s wall. “Star Lord … it’s the end of Civilization!”
“Get a hold of yourself, Mish. Who are the combatants? What are they fighting about?”
“The stargods only know,” Corcoram replied. He sounded bitter. “Reports have been coming in for a couple of hours, now, but they’re … not making much sense. It sounds like r-Humans are fighting s-Humans … and both of them are fighting both Dalateavs and Gromanaedierc. And everyone is attacking socon personnel and machines on sight.”
“A free-for-all, it sounds like.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Goradon shook his head. “But why?”
“Like I said, Lord. It’s the collapse of Civilization!”
Which Goradon didn’t believe for a moment. Mish Corcoram could be hyper-dramatic when the mood took him, and could pack volumes of emotion into the utterly commonplace. He was a good hab administrator—the effective ruler of the wheelworld known as Kaleed—but Ared Goradon was the administrator for the entire Rosvenier system … not just Kaleed, but some two thousand other wheelworlds, cylworlds, rings, troider habs, toroids, and orbital cols, plus three rocky planets, two gas giants, and the outposts and colonies on perhaps three hundred moons, planetoids, cometary bodies, and Kuiper ice dwarfs. His jurisdiction extended over a total population of perhaps three billion humans of several subspecies, and perhaps one billion Dalateavs, Gromanaedierc, Eulers, N’mah, Veldiks, and other nonhuman sapients or parasapients.
He could not afford to become flustered at the apparent social collapse of a single orbital habitat.
“Star Lord,” his AI assistant whispered in his ear. “Other reports are beginning to come through. There was some transmission delay caused by the damage to the Hub. It appears that similar scenes are playing out on a number of other system habs.”
“How many?”
“Four hundred seventeen colonies and major bases so far. But that number is expected to rise. This … event appears to be systemwide in scope.”
On the wall, a remote camera drone captured a single, intensly brilliant pinpoint of light against the far side of the Wheel, nearly three thousand kilometers distant … perhaps in Usila, or one of the other antipodal cities. Gods of Chaos … he could see the shockwave expanding as the pinpoint swelled, growing brighter. Had some idiot just touched off a nuke? …
“Star Lord,” his assistant continued. “I strongly recommend evacuation. You can continue your duties from the control center of an Associative capital ship.”
“What’s close by?”
“The fleet carrier Drommond, sir. And the heavy pulse cruiser Enthereal.”
Seconds ago, the very idea of abandoning Kaleed, of abandoning his home, had been unthinkable. But a second nuclear detonation was burning a hole through the wheeldeck foundation as he watched.
The fools, the bloody damned fools were intent on pulling down their house upon their own heads.
“Mish, on the advice of my AI, I’m transferring command to a warship. I recommend that you do the same.”
“I … but … do you think that’s wise?”
“I don’t know about wise. But the situation here is clearly out of control, yours and mine.”
“But what are we going to—”
The electronic image of the Kaleed senior administrator flicked out. On the wall, a third city had just been annihilated in a burst of atomic fury—Bethelen, which was, Goradon knew, where Mish lived.
Where he had lived, past tense.
Goradon was already jogging for the personal travel pod behind a nearby wall that would take him spinward to the nearest port. He might make it.
“What I’m going to do,” he called to the empty air, as if Mish could still hear him, “is call for help.”
“What help?” his AI asked as he palmed open the hatch and squeezed into the pod.
“I’m going to have them send in the Marines,” he said.
It was something Goradon had never expected to say.
1
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1542 hours, GMT
Marine General Trevor Garroway felt the familiar jolt and retch as he came out of cybe-hibe sleep, the vivid pain, the burning, the hot strangling sensation in throat and lungs as the hypox-perfluorate nanogel blasted from his lungs.
The dreams of what was supposed to be a dreamless artificial coma shredded as he focused on his first coherent thought. Whoever is bringing me out had better have a damned good reason. …
Blind, coughing raggedly, he tried to sit up. He felt as though he were drowning, and kept trying to cough up the liquid filling his lungs. “Gently, sir,” a female voice said. “Don’t try to do it all at once. Let the nano clear itself.”
Blinking through the sticky mess covering his eyes, Garroway tried to see who was speaking. He could see patterns of glaring light and fuzzy darkness, now, including one nearby shadowy mass that might have been a person. “Who’s … that?”
“Captain Schilling, sir. Ana Schilling.” Her voice carried a trace of an accent, but he couldn’t place it. “I’m your Temporal Liaison Officer.”
“Temporal … what?”
“You’ve been under a long time, General. I’m here to help you click in.”
A hundred questions battled one another for first rights of expression, but he clamped down on all of them and managed a shaky nod as reply. With the captain’s help, he sat up in his opened hibernation pod as the gel—a near-frictionless parafluid consisting of nanoparticles—dried instantly to a gray powder streaming from his naked body. He’d trained for this, of course, and gone through the process several times, so at least he knew what to expect. Focusing his mind, bringing to bear the control and focus of Corps weiji-do training, he concentrated on deep, rhythmic breathing for a moment. His first attempts were shallow and painful, but as he pulled in oxygen, each breath inactivated more and more of the nanogel in his lungs. Within another few seconds, the last of the gel in his lungs had either been expelled or absorbed by his body.
And his vision was clearing as well. The person-sized mass resolved itself into an attractive young woman wearing what he assumed was a uniform—form-fitting gray with blue and red trim. The only immediately recognizable element, however, was the ancient Marine emblem on her collar—a tiny globe and anchor.
Gods … how long had it been? He reached into his mind to pull up the date, and received a shock as profound as the awakening itself.
“Where’s my implant?” he demanded.
“Ancient tech, General,” Schilling told him. “You’re way overdue for an upgrade.”
For just a moment, panic clawed at the back of his mind. He had no implant! …
Sanity reasserted itself. Like all Marines, Garroway had gone without an implant during his training. All Marines did, during recruit training or, in the case of officers, during their physical indoctrination in the first year of OCS or the Commonwealth Naval Academy. The theory was that there would be times when Marines were operating outside of established e-networks—during the invasion of a hostile planet, for instance.
He knew he could manage without it. That was why all recruits were temporarily deprived of any electronic network connection or personal computer, to prove that they could survive as well as any pretechnic savage.
But that didn’t make it pleasant, or easy. He felt … empty. Empty, and impossibly alone. He couldn’t mind-connect with anyone else, couldn’t rely on local node data bases for information, news, or situation alerts, couldn’t monitor his own health or interact with local computers such as the ones that controlled furniture or environmental controls, couldn’t even do math or check the time or learn the freaking date without going through …
He started laughing.
Schilling looked at him with concern. “Sir? What’s funny?”
“I’m a fucking Marine major general,” he said, tears streaming down his face, “and I’m feeling as lost as any raw recruit in boot camp who finds he can’t ’path his girlfriend.”
“It can be … disorienting, sir. I know.”
“I’m okay.” He said it again, more firmly. “I’m okay. Uh … how long has it been?” He looked around the room. A number of other gray-clad personnel worked over cybe-hibe pods set in a circle about the chamber. Odd. This was not the storage facility he remembered … it seemed like just moments ago. His eyes widened. “What’s the date?”
Schilling leaned forward slightly, staring into his eyes. Her eyes, he noted, were a lustrous gold-green, and could not be natural. Genetically enhanced, he wondered? Surgical replacements? Or natural genetic drift? She seemed to be looking inside him, as though gauging his emotional stability.
“The year,” she said after a moment, “is 2229 Annum Manus, the Year of the Corps. Or 4004 of the Current Era, if you prefer, or Year 790 of the Galactic Associative. Take your pick. Does that help?”
He wasn’t sure. His brow furrowed as he tried to work through some calculations without the aid of his cerebral implant. The numbers were slippery, and kept wiggling out of his mental grasp. “I went under in … wait? I’ve been under for something over eight hundred years?”
“Very good, sir. According to our records, your last period on active duty was from 1352 through 1377 A.M.” Her head cocked to one side. “I believe you called it ‘M.E.’ in your day. The ‘Marine Era?’?”
“?‘A.M.’ means … meant something quite different. Antimatter. Or morning, if you were a civilian.”
She looked puzzled. “Morning? I don’t think I know that one.”
“From ‘antimeridian.’ Before the sun is overhead.”
“Ah. A planet-based reference, then.” She dismissed the idea with a casual shrug. “In any case, you were promoted to brigadier general in 1374, and were instrumental in the victory at Cassandra in 1376. The following year—that would be 3152 by the old-style calendar—you elected to accept a promotion to major general and long-term cybe-hibe internment in lieu of mandatory retirement.”
“Of course I did. I wasn’t even two centuries old.” His eyes narrowed. “How old are you, anyway, Captain?”
She grinned. “Old enough. Older than I look, anyway.”
“Genetic antiagathic prostheses?”
“Some,” she admitted. “There are a fair number of people alive in the Associative now who are pushing a thousand, and that’s not counting uploaders. Partly genetic prosthesis, partly nanogenetic enhancement. And I’ve spent two tours so far inside one of those pods.”
“Really?” He was impressed. “In the names of all the gods and goddesses, why?”
She shrugged again. “Cultural disjunct, I suppose.”
“Copy that.” The gulf between civilian life and life in the Marine Corps had been enormous even back in his day. It might be considerably worse now.
“The Corps is my home,” she added. “Most of my family was on Actinia.”
He heard the pain in her voice, and decided not to question her further on that. Evidently, he’d missed a lot of history. Eight centuries’ worth.
The numbers finally came together for him. “Okay. I’ve been out of it for 852 years. I take it there’s a crisis?”
Again, that perplexed look. “What makes you think that, sir?”
“An old expression, ancient even in my day,” he replied. “?‘In case of war, break glass.’?”
“I … don’t understand, sir.”
“Never mind.” He looked around the chamber that had changed so much in eight centuries. Eleven other pods rested quietly in alcoves around the oval space. His command constellation. The other waking personnel appeared to be working at reviving them. “What’d they do, rebuild the place around us?”
“Moved you to a larger facility, about three hundred years ago. You’re in Eris Ring, now.”
“Huh. We got hibed in Noctis Lab. On Mars.”
“That facility was closed, sir, not long after they brought you up here. The whole of Mars is military-free, now. The Associative’s been downscaling all of the military services for a long time, now.”
