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Overwhelming numbers were beginning to tell at last. Garwe found it hard to believe, impossible to believe … but the Dac balloonists were attacking a squadron of modern Marine battle pods and winning. It simply wasn’t possible. …
Abruptly, his pod shifted to the right, then inverted … came upright, then inverted again. Slowly, clumsily, they were moving him. He could feel the scrape and roll of tightly packed bodies as they moved. Some hundreds, now, were clinging to the squirming mass of creatures on the inside of the ball, inflating their bodies to levitate the entire, cumbersome mass, while others vented hydrogen like tiny jets in frantic, rapid pulses, shoving him toward the edge of the platform.
Gods! A Starwraith massed almost half a ton under Dac’s gravity. How many of the creatures would it take to negate that weight and actually float him off the platform?
Or perhaps they weren’t actually trying to lift him, but simply to push or drag or roll him off the side. The edge of the tree house deck that was not bordered by the massive bulk of the floatreef tentacles and the surrounding aerial flora was protected by a relatively slender guardrail, and it was less than twenty meters away. If they could get him through the railing, he and some hundreds of clinging Krysni would plummet over the edge and into the black, hot, and crushing depths of the gas giant’s atmospheric deeps. His attackers seemed utterly unconcerned about their own casualties; those crushed up against his optic sensors appeared to be dead already. Evidently, they were willing to sacrifice themselves by the hundreds simply to ensure the destruction of a single Starwraith.
He tried triggering his repulsors, but nothing happened. His primary drive power feed had melted through and shorted out. If he could just take flight, drag this whole, squirming mass high enough into the thin, cold upper reaches of atmosphere, or pull them with him into the abyss until they lost their grip and fell away … but at the moment he wasn’t channeling enough power to lift a single one of these wrinkled, squirming little creatures, much less all of them and his battle pod.
“This is Blue Seven,” Garwe reported, his mental voice calm. “My drive systems are out. I think they’re trying to drag me to the edge of the platform and drop me off!”
More data flickered through his in-head display, more systems failing. There was a chemical agent in use—a concentrated fluoroantimonic acid. Apparently, the creatures crowded in against his Starwraith were injecting, not biological toxins, but acid. Where the acid could reach exposed fiber optic cables and electronic circuitry, it was causing massive internal damage.
He wondered how the creatures were carrying and injecting the stuff without having their own tissues begin to break down.
The Krysni continued to close in. Xander, Palin, Mortin, Wahrst, and Javlotel as well as Garwe all were enveloped, smothered in roughly spherical masses of writhing bodies. Amendes, Cocero, and Ewis all were out of action, their pods now totally inert, no longer transmitting status or comm feed signals. Bakewin, Radevic, and Namura continued to fight, burning away at the ponderous globes of creatures enveloping their fellow Marines as more and more and still more of the meter-long floaters descended from the sky or emerged from the surrounding jungle, filling the open space above the tree house platform with drifting, jostling, jetting Krysni.
Once, years before in a combat medical training feed, Garwe had seen a simulation based on an actual optic feed from a nanotech camera adrift within a human circulatory system. The sim had been about the human body’s internal defenses, its immune system and the response of antibodies to foreign invaders in the system … in this case a single, rod-shaped bacterium. The bacterium, smaller than a blood cell, was still enormous compared to the antibodies flocking to the injured region, swarming in through the pale yellow haze of the surrounding interstitial fluid in clouds, enveloping the bacterium, smothering it, adhering to it, hurling themselves against it in layer upon layer in an awesome spectacle eerily like what Garwe was seeing here and now. The individual antibodies, he recalled, looked like wrinkled, spiky, pale-translucent and roughly spherical bodies, with twisted strands of long-chain molecules extending like tentacles from their bodies. Their resemblance to the drifting Krysni was unsettling.
Antibodies, defending their host.
Then his optical feed cut out, suddenly, as Namura’s pod came under savage attack from four separate electron beam sources. All he could see now were the bodies of Krysni pressed in against his external pick-ups, glowing slightly at infrared wavelengths.
How long, he wondered, could the tough inner shell of his pod last against this concerted assault? His Starwraith’s on-board AI continued to report on the steadily deteriorating situation as circuit after circuit foamed into inert uselessness at the touch of that concentrated acid, as power reserves drained away, as the last of the active nano coating the machine lost power or programming or coherence and flaked away, dead. His pod was all but inert, now, though the sensors continued to feed him a trickle of optical and kinesthetic data.
He was falling. His battle pod’s kinesthetic feeds fed sensations directly to his inner ear, and he could feel himself dropping within the savage grasp of Dac’s gravitational field, better than two and a half times a standard Earth gravity. After the first few seconds, he wasn’t quite in free fall, he noted. The external atmospheric pressure and temperature were rising swiftly as he fell, and the battle pod and its ungainly cocoon of Krysni defenders rapidly hit a terminal velocity of perhaps twelve hundred kilometers per hour.
He could feel the shudders and jolts as the enveloping shell of dead and dying Krasni ripped away a few at a time.
Swathed in darkness, he plummeted into the abyss. …
4
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1907 hours, GMT
“The Xul,” Garroway said, startled, “are acting in a coherent manner? You mean, all of them together, all across the Galaxy?”
“We can’t be sure that all of the surviving nodes are involved,” Schilling told him. “And the nodes we’ve already isolated with AI virsim teams didn’t get the incoming messages, of course. But our node monitors have picked up what appear to be coordinating messages through quantum nonlocal channels. And incidents that we believe are Xul-instigated, somehow, have been occurring throughout the Associative volume.”
“Galaxywide?”
“The Associative has connections through about half of the Galaxy, General. Maybe a bit less. A third?”
“That’s still a hell of a lot.”
“At least a hundred billion stars. A quarter or so have planetary systems. And the incidents are very widely scattered.”
“Okay. The question remains, though, Captain. Just what is it that you expect me and my people to do? My Marines have experience killing Xul, not containing them, not integrating with them, not … not kissing up to them. It sounds to me like it’s not the idea of war that’s out of date. It’s us. The Marines.”
“And that’s why we need the Marines, General. Your generation of Marines. We haven’t engaged the Xul in a stand-up fight for centuries. You and your people have the experience. We don’t.”
“Well,” Garroway said, surprised. “That’s a first.”
“What is, sir?”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Throughout the history of our species, Captain, we humans have always been prepared to fight the last war, not the next one. We go in with tactics, attitudes, and training that are completely out of step with the new threat, whatever it is.”
“Sir? I don’t understand.”
“The history of military history, Captain. We get brand-new rifled weapons capable of killing men at a range of two or three hundred meters, and we still form tightly packed and ordered ranks and march in with the bayonet. We get machine guns, we still try massed assaults into no-man’s land, or even on horseback. We develop large-scale suborbital deployment, and we still pretend that war has front lines. You’re saying we need the old way of doing things, now?”
“In a way, yes, sir,” Schilling said. “When we started exploring out among the stars, we continued to think in terms of the nation-states and countries we’d known on Earth. When we met alien cultures, we tried to put them into the nice, neat boxes with which we’d been familiar on our homeworld. Empires and federations, unions and republics and commonwealths.”
“And associatives?”
“The Associative is an attempt to think in bigger, less exclusive terms,” she told him. “No empires. No borders. No ‘us’ and ‘them,’ just an all-embracing us. And no need to compete for scarce resources in a Galaxy where resources like planets and energy are all but boundless.”
“No borders. What does that mean? …”
Schilling gestured. A star turned bright on the projection of the Galaxy, then expanded swiftly into an open window looking down on an achingly beautiful, sapphire-blue and white world. It was, Garroway realized, the same view of Eris he’d seen upon emerging from cybe-hibe. “There are some hundreds of thousands of species in the Associative,” she told him, “and millions throughout the Galaxy. Relatively few of them, though, have the same requirements when it comes to habitable worlds.” Another window opened within the window, and Garroway stared into six vast, black eyes set above and below a squirming halo of tentacles. The overall impression was of something like a giant squid, but it was difficult to pull all the parts together into a coherent whole, into something that made sense to his brain.
Even so, he recognized the species, for Humankind had met them in 2877, three decades before he’d been born. “The Eulers?” he asked.
“The Eulers,” Schilling agreed. “They prefer worlds like Earth … but at extreme depths, a thousand meters or more down in the deep benthic abyss. They genegineered a symbiotic species that could survive on land, to develop fire and industry and space travel. They helped us win the Battle of Starwall, and since then they’ve been among our closest allies. Incredible natural mathematicians. They’ve colonized perhaps two hundred worlds scattered throughout Associative space. Their latest project is this one … Eris, a newly terraformed world right here in Earth’s Solar System. Or, here’s an even better example …” She gestured again, and the images of Eris and the deep-sea Euler vanished, replaced by a world completely sheathed in dazzlingly white clouds … with just a hint of a dirty yellow cast to them. A second window opened within, showing … something. At first, Garroway thought he was looking at a crust of black, hardened lava, with streaks and veins of molten rock just visible beneath, glowing dull red. After a moment, he realized the black mass had a shape, albeit an irregular one, and things like flexible branches weaving in a searingly hot breeze.
If it was a sapient species, Garroway had never seen or heard of anything like it. He wasn’t even immediately sure that it was alive. The image shimmered and bent, as if viewed at a great depth, or within the fiery hell of a blast furnace. The background was a sulfurous red and yellow haze, obscuring vaguely glimpsed shapes that might have been spires of native rocks, or buildings.
“We call them Vulcans,” Schilling explained. “We don’t know what they call themselves. Their cultural conventions, their view of self, their worldview, all are quite different from ours. But they live within volcanic fissures on worlds like Venus. Surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, and an atmospheric pressure similar to what the Eulers enjoy. We were actually looking at the feasibility of terraforming Venus—a colossal project—but a couple of hundred years ago the Vulcans petitioned us to let them colonize instead. They live there now and like it, at pressures equivalent to the ocean deeps.”
Garroway stared at the black mass, which was oozing now into a slightly different shape. Did it have a native shape, or was it more of a crust-locked amoeba? He couldn’t tell. Were those branches manipulative members of some sort, or sensory organs, or something else entirely? Again, he couldn’t tell. “How can you trust them if you don’t even know what they call themselves?”
“The point is, General, they don’t want our kind of real estate. We have almost nothing in common with them. It’s far, far easier to terraform an outer dwarf planet like Eris or Sedna than it is to cool down a planet like Venus and give it a reasonable surface pressure, an atmosphere we could breathe. So they live on Venus, the Eulers live in Eris—they even have a small colony now in Tongue-of-the-Ocean, on Earth—and we’re scarcely aware of their activities. No borders. What would be the point?”
“Security. But I see what you mean about war being out of date,” he told her.
He wasn’t convinced that that could be true, however. Garroway tended to have a pessimistic view of human nature, one forged within a long career as a combat Marine and, as a general officer with dealing with politicians. In his opinion, Humankind could no more give up war than he could give up the ability to think.
“A war with the Eulers or the Vulcans is almost literally unthinkable,” she told him. “But the Xul aren’t competing for resources. They simply want us dead.”
“Of course. We’ve triggered their xenophobic reflex.”
“Exactly, sir. If the containment strategy isn’t working … and if they’re becoming more aware of us, well, we need you and your people, General. Like never before.”
As she spoke, Garroway was scanning through more of the download background and history. Civilians, including humans, had been attacked by locals in a gas giant called Dac IV. Anchor Marines had been sent in—the 340th Marine Strike Squadron. The situation was still unresolved, but it must be desperate. A request for a Globe Marine detachment had also been logged.
“What in hell,” he said slowly, “is an ‘Anchor Marine?’?”
“Marines who stay with the time stream,” she told him. “Like me.”
“And I’m a ‘Globe Marine?’?”
“Yes, sir. Our reserves in cybe-hibe.”
“Who thought up that nonsense?”
“Sir?”
“Marines are Marines, Captain. I don’t like this idea of two different sets of background, experience, or training.”
Here was another problem. Two months ago, a star lord at a place, an artificial habitat called Kaleed, had run into something he couldn’t handle, and requested Marines. No Anchor Marines had been available, and so the Lords of the Associative had decided to awaken a division of Globe Marines.
Apparently the third Marine Division was to be held on stand-by as the Lords monitored the situation.
“It was necessary, General,” Schilling explained. “Globe Marines need cultural liaisons, other Marines who are, well, anchored in the current background culture. Otherwise you’d be lost. There have been a lot of changes in both cultural norms and in technology since your day.”
“You’re making me feel positively ancient, Captain.”
But he understood the issue. When he’d last been active, over eight centuries ago, there’d already been a sharply drawn dichotomy between Marines and the civilian population they protected. Neither group understood the other. Neither could socialize well with the other. Neither could speak the other’s language. No wonder most Marines tended to find both family partners and sexual liaisons among others in the Corps. Marines might visit the local hot spots and brothels for a quick bit of fun, but longer and more solid relationships required a degree of mutual understanding with civilians that had become harder and harder to come by.
And it wasn’t just that Marines got into trouble with the locals on liberty. The politicians who requested Fleet Marines to put down an insurrection or show the fist to a local warlord didn’t understand them either. And that was where the problems really started chewing up the machinery.
“Okay,” Garroway said after a moment. “I understand all of that. We need babysitters. But why does the government need us at all if they have you?”
“We’re a caretaker force, sir, nothing more. The administrators. The personnel officers and logistics staff who make sure there is a Corps for you to wake up to.”
“But I see something here about Anchor combat units. …”
“Yes, sir. We have combat units, but they’re more placeholders than anything else. You are the real Fleet Marine Force.”
Garroway considered this. The Globe and Anchor was one of the oldest and most sacred talismans of the Corps, a symbol going back to the Royal Marines, who were the predecessors of America’s Continental Marines of 1775. It was an amusing idea, he decided, using globe and anchor to identify two different kinds of Marine … but the concept behind it disturbed him. Throughout the history of the Corps he knew, every Marine had known a single brotherhood, the Corps, each man and woman undergoing the same training, with the same traditions, the same language, the same background.
He found himself wondering if Captain Schilling was a real Marine, or something else—an imitation, a temporary stand-in for the real thing.
For centuries, Marine culture had been a distinct and self-contained entity in its own right. If cultural drift over the centuries had made the old Marines alien to the rest of Humankind, wouldn’t that alienness extend to these caretaker Marines as well?
“Every Marine is a rifleman, Captain,” he said.
“Pardon, sir?”
“Did you download that in training? I hope to hell you did, because if you didn’t the Corps has changed out of all recognition.”
“I don’t understand the word ‘rifleman,’ sir. Give me a second … oh.”
“The rifle is the Marine’s primary weapon, Captain. I don’t care what you use nowadays, the principle is the same. As for the expression, it’s old. Pre-spaceflight, I think. Every Marine is a combat infantryman first, a rifleman, and whatever else—cook, personnel clerk, aviator, storekeeper, computer programmer, general—second.”
“Today we say, ‘every Marine is a weapons sysop first.’?”
“Somehow, Captain, that just doesn’t have the same ring.”
Garroway continued to scan lightly through a flood of downloads. He was starting to get the hang of the new implant as he used it. It was responsive and powerful, and he was beginning to get the idea that he hadn’t even begun yet to glimpse its full potential.
Here was another one, from a world called Gleidatramoro, a kind of trading center and interstellar marketplace in toward the Galactic Core frequented by several hundred races. It was, he noted, another artificial world, like Kaleed. Didn’t people live on planets anymore? A human mob had formed in Gleidat’s capital city and attacked … that was interesting. They’d attacked a number of s-Humans, whatever those were, then gone on to dismember several hundred AIvatars. Cross-connecting on the unfamiliar terminology, he learned that s-Humans were a superintelligent genegineered species of human, while an AIvatar was the human, humanoid, or digital vehicle for an advanced artificial consciousness.
How, he wondered, was that different from a robot?
The riot on Gleidatramoro had spread when several non-human species had intervened on behalf of the AIvatars. Several thousand individuals of various species, human, non-human, superhuman, and artificially sentient, had been killed, many of them irretrievably. The humans currently were bottled up within the capital city in a bloody stand-off, and both they and the non-humans were calling for help.
Again, Anchor Marines had been sent in to regain control. The situation on Gleidatramoro was still fluid.
And here was an invasion of Propanadnid space by a human warlord named Castillan, who’d launched his armada under the ringing battle cry of “death to the Proppies!” And another, a terrorist attack on an asteroid defense system in the Sycladu system, an attack with, as yet, no known motive. And still another, an attempt by the human population of Gharst to unplug several million t-Humans … the Homo telae of the local Net. So much for human sensibilities opposed to electronic genocide.
The list went on … and on, and on, hundreds of incidents during the past thirty days alone. There were far too many, scattered across far too large a volume of space and among far too many worlds, for a single Marine division to have a chance of coping with them all.
The total number of violent clashes and incidents—some nineteen hundred during the past month, according to the latest tally—was utterly trivial compared to the tens of billions of populated worlds and habitats that made up the Associative. On the other hand, there’d been nine hundred such incidents reported the previous month, and four hundred the month before that. There appeared to be a kind of background noise count of violent encounters, of riots, revolutions, and bullying neighbors, but overall the numbers had been low, perhaps two hundred a month, an indication, Garroway thought, that this Associative might have it on the ball so far as galactic governments were concerned. Lately, though, there’d been a sharp increase in the numbers, and so far there was no sign that the trend had peaked.
“Almost twenty thousand of these incidents,” he told her. “That’s more than the number of men, women, and AIs in my division. What are the Marines supposed to do about it? We can’t invade all these worlds. And we can’t protect billions of planets that haven’t been hit.”
“No. But you can investigate this. …”
A virtual world enveloped Garroway, emerging from his new implant. In an instant, he was surrounded by deep space, within a blazing shell of brilliant stars.
There were millions of them, most red or orange in hue, which contributed to an overall red and somber background. Ahead, bathing nearby gas clouds in searing, arc-harsh blue radiance, was the Core Detonation.
“The Galactic Core,” Garroway said, whispering. “The center of the Galaxy.”
“We did do a number on it, didn’t we?”
She almost sounded proud.
Marine Assault Carrier Night’s Edge
Synchronous Orbit, Dac IV
Star System 1727459
1914 hours, GMT
Lieutenant Garwe snapped back to consciousness, bathed in sweat, his breath coming in short, savage gasps. He was falling … falling into the Abyss. …
No, not falling. He was on his back in a linkcouch, the overhead softly glowing. Lieutenant Amendes leaned over him, a hand on his shoulder. “Easy does it, Gar. You’re safe.”
“The squadron—”
