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“It’s okay, Gar,” she told him. “You’re out of there.”
He sat up slowly, head spinning. Amendes reached up and removed the brow circlet that had linked Garwe to the Starwraith battlepod through its on-board AI. It took him a moment to readjust after the sharp transition, to remember where he was.
The carrier, yeah. The Night’s Edge.
The compartment was circular and domed, with a close-spaced semicircle of twelve linkcouches, half of them still occupied by other members of the squadron. At the far side of the compartment was the main console, just beneath the glowing arc of a holofield.
“Won’t be long now,” Lieutenant Cocero said from the console. He was watching over a Marine technician’s shoulder. “The Skipper’s down. So’s Pal.”
Major Lasenbe, the squadron’s Wing Commander, punched his fist into his open palm. “Damn!”
On a linkcouch nearby, Captain Xander sat up abruptly as though coming wide awake out of a bad dream, her fists clenched. “No, no, no! Shit!”
“The gasbags are overrunning the compound now,” the Marine tech reported from the console. “They’re in among the buildings now, killing the off-worlders.”
Garwe slid out of his linkcouch, fighting against the shaking weakness in his legs. Above the console, within the holofield’s glowing depths, Garwe could see a terrified face—the high brow, dark skin, and contrasting golden eyes of a supie. A data block beside the image identified her as Vasek Trolischet, the xenosoph who, unlike the Marines of the 340th, was physically in the gas giant, and unable to escape. The sound was muted, too low for Garwe to hear what she was saying, but from the look on her face, she was terrified.
Abruptly, the holofield filled with static, and Trolischet’s fear-distorted features blinked out.
“We’ve lost contact with the Hassetas base, sir,” the technician reported.
Two more of the Blue Flight Marines emerged from their artificial comas, blinking in the soft lighting. On a viewall on the far side of the compartment, the disk of Dac, vast and striped in hues of brown, salmon, and pale cream flowed in banded serenity, the violence in its depths masked by the giant’s scale.
Major Lasenbe stood behind the technician, hands now at the small of his back. “A cluster fuck, Captain,” he told Xander without looking at her. “A Class-one cluster fuck.”
Xander rolled off the couch and came to attention, though she still looked drawn and pale, and seemed to be having difficulty suppressing a tendency to tremble. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’m … sorry, sir.”
Lasenbe turned. “At ease, Captain. I’m not chewing you out. They should have sent you in with the pick-up ship, not fifteen minutes ahead of it. Maybe those poor devils would’ve had a chance, then.”
“Is the transport still going in, Major?” Xander asked. “We could reinsert—”
“No point. The gas bags are wiping out the compound as we speak.”
It would take an hour or more to get back down to Hassetas. By then it would be too late.
“God damn it,” Xander said, slumping, her fists clenched.
Garwe was trembling as well, part of the after-effect of a particularly close linkride. Starwraith battle pods actually did serve as combat suits for living Marines, but it was also possible to link with them from the safety of a remote location, so long as non-local communications elements eliminated any speed-of-light time lag. The Marine Carrier Night’s Edge was in synchronous orbit for Dac, just over 180,000 kilometers out, an orbit that perfectly matched the planet’s rotational period of eleven hours, or, rather, which matched the period of Hassetas, since the different cloud belts circled the gas giant at different rates. Any closer, and the ship’s orbit would have carried her past the target and over the horizon, blocking the sensory and control feed signals transmitted from ship to pods and back. The time delay at that distance for conventional EM transmissions would have been impossible, six-tenths of a second for remote sensory signals to travel from pod to Marine, and another six-tenths of a second for the Marine’s responses to travel back down to the pod. Both the pods and the carrier, however, were equipped with quantum-coupled comm units, QCC technology that operated instantaneously, with no time lag. Without instantaneous transmission times, the Marines would have been bumping into things—or aiming at targets that had already moved on. Even at that, Garwe’s pod had felt … sluggish, not quite in synch with his mind. The effect hadn’t been much, but he felt that it had affected his combat performance.
“Sir, with respect,” he said.
“Who are you?” Lasenbe demanded.
“Sir! Lieutenant Garwe, Blue Seven. It might’ve been better if we’d gone in physically. I felt slow down there, like there was a time lag.”
“Nonsense. There was no lag. Besides, if you’d deployed physically, Lieutenant, you would now be dead. Your pod crushed and burned …” He paused, checking data pulled down through his implant. “Three minutes ago.”
“But if we’d been able to pull back and engage the enemy in the air, instead of trying to protect those buildings—”
“You did what you were ordered to do, Lieutenant. Hammet!”
“Sir!” the technician snapped.
“How many Marines are still e-deployed?”
“Three, sir. Namura, Rad—”
“Yank ’em out. We can’t do anything more down there.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Lasenbe was pointedly ignoring Garwe now, giving orders for the withdrawal of the rest of the squadron. On the couches at his back, the other Marines were beginning to revive, their links with the battlepods 180,000 kilometers below severed.
“What the hell was that chemical they were hitting us with?” Palin wanted to know. “Some kind of acid. …”
“Fluoroantimonic acid,” Hammet said. “We got a full read-out on the chemical composition up here.”
“Fluoro—what?” Misek Bollan asked.
“A mixture of hydrogen fluoride, HF, and antimony pentafluoride, SbF5,” Xander said, with the air of someone perfectly at ease with ungainly chemical formulae. “Nasty stuff. One of the strongest acids known.”
“Roughly 2?×?10
times stronger than one hundred percent sulfuric acid,” Hammet added. “No wonder it was eating through your internal circuitry.”
“Since when did you become a chemist, Skipper?” Wahrst asked. She was grinning.
“Since before I became a Marine,” Xander replied. “What I want to know is … how were those gas bags delivering the stuff? It protonates organic compounds, eats right through them. Why didn’t it dissolve the gas bags?”
“They’re supposed to have some kind of natural delivery system, aren’t they?” Mortin said.
“Right. A natural delivery system, which means made out of the local equivalent of organics, proteins, bone, cartilage, that sort of thing. When we handled HSbF6 in the lab, we needed either Teflon or field-shielded containers. It even eats through glass.”
“They must’ve had help,” Garwe said. “Some source of technology from the outside. But then, they were using electron beam weapons, too, weren’t they?”
“Yes, they were,” Xander said. “Someone has been running relatively high-tech weaponry to the locals. I wonder who?”
“Or why?” Palin put in. “What do the gas bags have that they could trade off-world for weapons?”
“There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense,” Major Lasenbe said. “We’re not here to sort it out, however. Xander, you and your people go grab some down-time. But I’ll want an after-action uploaded to my essistant tomorrow by thirteen hundred.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Lasenbe strode from the room. Xander appeared to relax a fraction.
“Asshole,” Mortin said, his voice low.
“Belay that, Marine,” Xander said. “Are all of you all right?”
There was a mutter of response, “Yes, Skipper,” and “Okay” and “Ooh-rah” predominating. The Marines sounded subdued, however
“Kind of a rough trip, Captain,” Garwe told her. “I think we’re still all in one piece, though.”
“Garwe,” Xander said, turning to face him, “what did you mean when you told the major about feeling a time lag?”
Garwe shrugged. “I’m not sure. It might have been psychodilation, I suppose.”
“Or you were speeding?”
“No, Skipper,” Garwe said. “I was linked with the rest of the squadron.”
Psychodilation was a natural effect of human perception, the apparent slowing of the passage of time during moments of great danger, stress, or, paradoxically, boredom. “How time flies when we’re having fun” was the opposite extreme of the effect. Both perceptions occurred when the brain entered an alpha altered state under different circumstances, and had to do with how much in the way of fine detail the person was actually perceiving.
“Speeding,” on the other hand, more formally known as PV, or psychovelocitas, was the artificial boosting of overall brain function to speed up reaction times, perception, and thought. There were times when this was appropriate, and carried out through the use of drugs or neural enhancement software, but while linked in with a combat formation was definitely not one of those times. Battle pod operations demanded precise coordination between squadron elements. If Garwe had been speeding, linked communications with him would have been garbled, fire coordination would have become chaotic, and unit cohesion might easily have broken down completely.
Xander nodded. “I’ll check the telemetry records up here. It might have been a fault in your neural circuitry.”
“My pod checked out okay, Skipper.” Not that it could be checked now. What was left of his pod was by now still drifting slowly into the depths of the gas giant Dac, flattened by atmospheric pressure and subjected to the searing heat of the planet’s depths. “I was probably just hyped on adrenaline.”
“Gar’s right,” Palin said. “I was pretty keyed up, too. I think we all were.”
Xander nodded. “Still, all of you will report to sickbay for a full neural series. I felt like I wasn’t quite in synch, either. And I don’t like not being in control.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” several of the Marines chorused.
“Garwe.”
“Yes, sir?”
“You stay for a moment. I want to talk with you.”
“Sure, Skipper.”
She sounded angry, and that was never good.
He wondered where the hell this was going.
5
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1919 hours, GMT
Garroway tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The central mass resembled nothing so much as an immense, impossible, blossoming rose of streaming, blue-white radiance, imbedded within a confused tangle of blinding light, of far-flung arcs and walls and swirls of hot clouds of molecular gas, of stars showing comet tails streaming away from the central blast, of nebulae torn asunder by ferocious stellar winds, of objects set in such a titanic scale that stars and even clusters of stars were dwarfed to insignificance. His implant began overlaying what he was seeing with identifying blocks of text.
Humans had last visited the center of the Galaxy in 1111 of the Marine Era … the year 2887 by the old calendar. Marine and naval forces had assaulted a major Xul base, a number of bases, actually, located in and around the Core structures. The largest and most important of these had been a Dyson cloud, a swarm of trillions of Xul artificial wordlets positioned around the supermassive black hole that marked the Galaxy’s exact gravitational center. At the climax of the battle, a red giant star called S-2, in close orbit around the central black hole, had been nudged from its high-velocity path by inducing a partial and off-center collapse beneath its surface, triggering an outrushing jet of stellar material that had acted like an immense rocket blast. The fast-dwindling star had fallen closer to the black hole than otherwise would have been the case, sweeping through part of the Xul cloud, then shredding as it whipped around the inner gravitational singularity and down the cosmic drain at the center.
The Xul hyperstructure had been destroyed, the individual elements of the cloud plunging into the black hole in an eye’s blink because they’d been force-beam anchored in place, rather than circling in orbit. Much of the infalling matter had been swallowed of course, but much more had rebounded outward, generating what had come to be known as the Core Detonation, an out-rushing surge of tortured plasma so hot and bright that a supernova would have been lost in the glare.
A nearby star cluster, young and hot, just a tenth of a light year out, had been consumed in the fury weeks later, the stars pop-pop-popping into a chain of supernovae as the flood of radiant energy engulfed them. Other supergiant stars close to GalCenter had been swept up as well, adding their mass as fuel to the maelstrom of radiation.
That had been 1117 years ago. In those eleven centuries, the blast wave had swept outward, the wavefront of electromagnetic radiation traveling 1117 light years in that time, the somewhat slower, following squall of high-energy particles crossing about 900 light years in the same period of time. Stars, thousands of them caught in that deadly firestorm of energy, had exploded as they were engulfed, each adding its own bit of fury to the storm. The Galactic Core was now a seething ocean of blue-white hell, and it was still expanding.
Any Xul nodes located within that central, two-thousand-light-year-wide pocket of hell, would have been swept up and consumed. The question was how far the blast would expand … how much of the Galaxy might it devour?
“So,” Garroway wanted to know, “is that stuff going to hit us in another twenty, twenty-five thousand years?” The thought that Humankind’s attack on the Galactic Core eleven hundred years ago might actually have unleashed a beast that was going to devour the entire galaxy was horrifying.
“It’s attenuating,” Schilling told him. “Twenty-six thousand years, or a little less, after the original Core detonation, the electromagnetic wavefront will pass Earth at the speed of light. Long before that happens, the heavier charged particles and plasmas, the hard, dangerous stuff, will have been absorbed by intervening clouds of dust and gas.”
“Even so,” a new voice said, “the astrophysicists are calling it a microquasar. It won’t scour the Galaxy of life, fortunately, but they estimate the total light output from our Galaxy will more than quintuple, and probably set the astronomers in Andromeda to scratching whatever they use for heads.”
“General Garroway,” Schilling said, “this is Socrates. He’s your AI liaison with the Council of Lords.”
“Pleased to meet you, General,” Socrates said. The voice was mellifluous and deep, a rich baritone. Where Schilling spoke with a slight accent, Socrates’ Anglic was perfect.
Well, he was an AI. He would be perfect in every way possible.
“Hello, Socrates,” Garroway said. “The pleasure is mine. Or do AIs feel emotion now?”
The AI chuckled. Either it had a genuine sense of humor, or was programmed to mimic one quite well. Garroway did wonder how far artificial intelligence had developed in the past eight centuries.
“If you can’t tell the difference,” Socrates told him, “and if I can’t tell the difference, what’s the difference between my feelings being programmed or natural?”
“Point.”
“Socrates is a Star-level artificial sentience,” Schilling explained. “That means he’s at least as bright as the smartest s-Human, but much faster. We refer to them as our archAIngels.” Schilling pronounced the word “archangel,” but Garroway sensed the neologism within, and the meaning behind it. “Sometimes I think they are the real rulers of the Human domain now.”
“We all do what we can,” Socrates said. Garroway blinked. A modest AI? Or was that simply another aspect of its programming?
“There was quite a bit of speculation about how serious the Core Detonation was,” Schilling said, picking up on the earlier topic. “That was, oh, four or five centuries ago, when we started getting hard data about the expanding Core wavefront. Created a bit of a minor panic, in fact, according to the history downloads.”
“If we managed to turn our own Galaxy into even a small quasar,” Garroway said, “I’d think a little judicious panic might be called for.”
A quasar was a galaxy with an exceptionally bright nucleus, an active core that outshone the rest of the galaxy by a hundred times or more. Quasars were also extremely distant. The closest known was three-quarters of a billion light years away … which meant it was also a glimpse of something that had happened three-quarters of a billion years in the past, ancient cosmic history. Accepted astrophysical theory suggested that many or, perhaps, all large galaxies had gone through a quasar phase early in their evolution, some billions of years ago, as the supermassive black hole at their cores devoured suns by the millions, spewing out the residue as fantastic bursts of high-energy radiation, a blazing beacon visible across all of time and space. Eventually, the core of the galaxy would be pretty well cleaned out, except for the central black hole itself, of course, and the galaxy would settle down to being a normal, well-behaved member of the cosmic community.
Presumably, the Milky Way Galaxy had been through such a phase some billions of years ago; the supermassive black hole at the Core was an ancient quasar, slumbering and quiescent now that much of the matter at GalCenter had been devoured. But then the Commonwealth Fleet and the Fleet Marines had come along late in the twenty-ninth century and upset the delicately balanced megastructure the Xul had constructed at the Core.
And a shadow, at the very least, of the ancient monster had awakened once again.
“It should be spectacular, though,” Schilling told him. “When the light gets this far out, our night skies will be incredible in the direction of Sagittarius. We think there will be enough light streaming out from the Core that you’ll be able to read by it.”
“The slower, heavier particles will pile up into the gas clouds that surround the Galactic Hub and create shock waves over the next five to ten thousand years,” Socrates added, “triggering an incredible burst of star formation. The Galaxy, in toward the Core, is going to be an amazing, beautiful sight for ten thousand years or more afterward.”
“Maybe I should go back into cybe-hibe,” Garroway said. “Wake me when the show starts.”
