STAR STRIKE
BOOK ONE OF THE INHERITANCE TRILOGY
IAN DOUGLAS

To CJ and Garin, good friends who saw me through rough times. And, as always, for Brea.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Keep it simple. Secure the spaceport. Hold until relieved.

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

Also by Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

Acknowledgments

My special thanks to David Plottel, friend, programmer, mathematician, and ubergeek, for his insights into Leonhard Euler and the God-equation known as Euler’s Identity.

Keep it simple. Secure the spaceport. Hold until relieved.

Nothing new there.

Remember your training.

The question was whether the landings would be enough. Alighan was a heavily populated world in the Theocracy of Islam, with over two billion people in the ocean-girdled world’s teeming cities. The Marine assault force consisted of the four companies of the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, a total of five hundred eighty men and women … against an entire world.

True, they were exceptionally well armed and armored men and women, and they seemed—for the moment at least—to have the element of surprise. Even so, fewer than six hundred Marines against a population of two billion who would fight to the death and take as many Marines with them as they could.

Impossible.

Ridiculously impossible.

But the United Star Marines specialized in the impossible, as they and their predecessors had done for the past eleven hundred years …

Prologue

Deep within the star clouds of the Second Galactic Spiral Arm, a sentient machine detected the blue-white shriek of tortured hydrogen atoms, and a program hundreds of thousands of years ancient switched from stand-by to active. Something was out there … something massive, something moving at very nearly the speed of light.

Even the hardest interstellar vacuum contains isolated flecks of matter—hydrogen atoms, mostly, perhaps one per cubic centimeter or so. The object’s high-speed passage plowed through these atoms, ionizing many, leaving a boiling hiss in its wake easily detectable by appropriately sensitive instrumentation. The disturbance was a kind of wake, created by a mass of some hundreds of millions of tons plowing through the tenuous matter of the interstellar void at near-c.

The sentry machine had taken up its lonely vigil half a million years before, during the desperate and no-quarter war of extermination against the Associative, a war that had laid waste to ten thousand suns and countless worlds scattered across a third of the Galaxy. Occasionally, it conversed with others of its kind—a means of staying sane through the millennia—but for most of its existence it had been asleep, dreaming the eldritch dreams of a being neither wholly mechanism, nor wholly biological.

The builders of the Sentry called themselves something that might have translated, very approximately, as “We Who Are.” Other species across light centuries of space and hundreds of millennia called them many other things. The inhabitants of Earth, once, had called them “Xul,” a name that in ancient Sumeria had come to mean “demon.”

A far older civilization had called them the Hunters of the Dawn.

However they were known to themselves or to others, how they were identified was less important for their view of themselves than was their evolutionary imperative, the drive, refined over millions of years, that made them what they were. For the Xul, existence—more, survival—was an absolute, the defining characteristic of their universe. In their worldview, survival meant eliminating all potential competition. Their culture did not have anything like religion, but if it had, their religion would have been a kind of Darwinian dogmatism, with the fact that they had so far survived serving as proof that they were, indeed, the fittest.

For the Xul, the first requirement for continued survival was the detection and identification of potential threats to existence. An object with the mass of a fair-sized asteroid traveling through the Galaxy at near-c velocities indicated both sentience and a technology that might represent a serious threat.

With an analytical detachment more characteristic of the computers in its ancestry than of organic beings, the Sentry tracked the disturbance through local space. A ripple twisted the fabric of space/time, and the Sentry shifted across light-years, emerging alongside the massive object, traveling at precisely the object’s velocity.

At this speed, a hair’s breadth short of the speed of light itself, the universe appeared weirdly and beautifully compressed, a ring of solid starlight encircling the heavens slightly ahead of the hurtling vessels. With the patient calm of a lifespan measured in millennia, the Sentry reached out with myriad senses, tasting the anomalous traveler.

Outwardly, the object was an ordinary asteroid, a carbonaceous chondrite of fairly typical composition, with a dusty, pocked surface of such a dark gray color as to be nearly coal black. Outwardly, there was no indication of intelligent design—no lights, no artificial structures on the surface, no thruster venturis or other obvious clues to the object’s propulsive system. Even the high velocity might be an artifact … a souvenir of a long-ago close-passage of a black hole or neutron star, with the resultant slingshot effect whipping a random, dead rock to within one percent of c.

But the Sentry’s gentle probings elicited other evidence, proof that the fast-moving object was both the product of technology and inhabited. A steady trickle of neutrinos proved the presence of hydrogen fusion plants, providing power for life-support and secondary systems. The tick and flux of even more subtle, virtual particles revealed the operation of a quantum effect power system, tapping the base state of space itself for the energies necessary to move that much mass at that high a speed. The drive was quiescent now, but the potential remained, a subtle aura of shifting energies representing fields and forces that might engage at any moment. Perhaps most telling of all, a powerful shield composed of interplaying gravitic and magnetic fields swept space far ahead of the starship—for starship is what the object was—clearing its path of stray subatomic particles lest they strike rock and cascade into deadly secondary radiation, frying the ship’s passengers as they slept away the objective decades.

For passengers there were—some fifty thousand of them, stored in a cybernetic hibernation that let them pass decades of subjective time without the need for millions of tons of food, water, and other expendables. At the moment, the only member of the starship’s crew that was actually awake was a being far more closely related, in its basic nature, to the Sentry than it was to the slumbering beings in its care, a sentient computer program named Perseus.

For over five hundred years, Perseus had overseen the routine operation of the asteroid starship and her refugee passengers, monitoring drive systems and power plant, life support and cybe-hibe stasis capsules. The ship, christened Argo, had fled distant Earth a few years after the devastating attack on that world by the Xul; her destination was another galaxy entirely, M-31, in Andromeda, something over two million light-years distant.

The voyage as planned would take almost 2.3 million years objective, but on board the clocks would record the passage of barely thirty years. Argo’s sleeping passengers, for the most part, were members of Earth’s political and economic elite. Many were representatives of the governments of the United States and of the American Union who’d felt Humankind’s only hope of survival lay in avoiding all-out war with the technologically advanced Xul, in escaping the enemy’s notice, in fleeing to another galaxy entirely and beginning anew.

Their decision proved to be a supreme exercise in wishful thinking. The Xul sentry engaged Perseus as the sentient program was still shifting to full operational mode. It had time to engage a single emergency comm channel before the Xul group-mind overwhelmed it in an electronic cascade of incoming data.

Parts of Perseus were hijacked by the alien operating system; others were wiped away, or simply stored for later exploration.

And within the Argo-planetoid’s heart, fifty thousand human minds cried out as one as they were patterned and replicated by the intruder. Moments later, the asteroid’s immense kinetic energy was instantly transformed into heat and light, bathing the Xul Sentry in the actinic glare of a tiny nova.

By the Xul way of thinking, the asteroid starship represented both a threat and unfinished business.

Neither could be tolerated.

1

0407.1102

Green 1, 1-1 Bravo
Alighan
0340/38:22 hours, local time

The Specters descended over the Southern Sea, slicing north through turbulent air, their hulls phase-shifted so that they were not entirely within the embrace of normal space. Shifted, they were all but invisible to radar, and little more than shadows to human eyes, shadows flickering across a star-clotted night.

On board Specter One-one Bravo, Gunnery Sergeant Charel Ramsey sat huddled pauldron-to-pauldron with the Marines locked in to either side of him. The squad bay was red lit and crowded, a narrow space barely large enough to accommodate a platoon of forty-eight Marines in full Mark 660 assault battlesuits. He tried once again to access the tacnet, and bit off a curse when all that showed within the open mindwindow was static. They were going in blind, hot and blind, and he didn’t like the feeling. If the Muzzies got twitchy and started painting their southern sky with plasma bolts or A.M. needlers, phase-shifting would not protect them in the least.

“They’re holding off on the drones,” Master Sergeant Adellen said over the tac channel, almost as if she were reading his mind. Likely she was as nervous as the rest of the Marines in the Specter’s belly. She just hid it better than most. “They don’t want to tip the grounders off that we’re on final.”

“Yeah, but it would be nice to see where the hell we’re going,” Corporal Takamura observed. “We can’t see shit through the LV’s optics.”

That was not entirely true, of course. Ramsey had a window open in his mind linked through to the feed from the Specter’s cockpit. Menu selections gave him a choice of views—through cameras forward or aft, in visible light, lowlight, or infrared, or a computer-generated map of the planet that showed twelve green triangles in a double-chevron formation moving toward the still-distant coastline. Ramsey had settled on the map view, since the various optical feeds showed little now but water, clouds, and stars.

The MLV-44 Specter Marine Landing Vehicles were large and slow, with gull wings and fusion thrusters that gave them somewhat more maneuverability than a falling brick, but not much. Each mounted a pair of AI-controlled high-speed cannon firing contained micro-antimatter rounds as defense against incoming missiles, but they relied on stealth and surprise for survival, not firepower, and certainly not armor. A Specter’s hull could shield those on board from the searing heat of atmospheric entry, but a mag-driven needle or even a stray chunk of high-energy shrapnel could puncture its variform shell with shocking ease. Ramsey had seen the results of shrapnel impact on a grounded Specter before, on Shamsheer and on New Tariq.

The Specter jolted hard, suddenly and unexpectedly, and someone vented a sharp curse. They were falling into denser air, passing through the cloud deck, and things were getting rougher.

“One more of those,” Sergeant Vallida said, her voice bitter, “and Private Dowers gets jettisoned.”

“Hey, Sarge! I didn’t do anything!”

“Don’t pick on Dowers,” Adellen said. “He didn’t know.”

“Yeah, but he should have. Fucking nectricots. …”

It was rank superstition, of course. Even if it went back over a thousand years. Maybe it was the sheer age of the tradition that gave it so much power. But somehow, back in the twentieth or twenty-first century, it had become an article of faith that if a Marine ate the apricots in his ration pack before boarding an alligator or other armored transport, the vehicle would break down. Over the centuries, the focus of the curse had gradually shifted from apricots to genegineered nectricots, but the principle remained the same.

And Ela Vallida had walked in on Dowers back on board the Kelley just before the platoon had saddled up that morning, to find him happily slurping down the last of the nectricots in his drop rats. Dowers was a fungie, fresh out of RTC, and not yet fully conversant with the bewildering labyrinth of tradition and history within which every Marine walked.

“Fucking fungie,” Vallida added.

“Belay that, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Jones growled. First Platoon’s CO wasn’t evenly physically present on the squad bay deck; the eltee was topside somewhere, plugged into the C³ suite behind the Specter’s cockpit, but she obviously was staying linked in on the platoon chat line. “Chew on him after One-one Bravo craps out, and you have something to bitch about.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Vallida replied. But Ramsey still heard the anger in her voice.

Likely, he thought, it was just the stress. This was always the roughest part of a Marine landing, the long, agonizing wait, sealed into a tin can that was flying or swimming toward God-knew what kind of defenses. Did the Alighani Muzzies know the Marines were coming? What was waiting for them at the objective?

How many of the men and women sealed into this Specter were going to be alive an hour from now? …

Don’t even think about that, Ramsey told himself. It’s bad ju-ju. …

Not that he actually believed in luck, of course … or in the power of nectricot curses. But he didn’t know anyone who’d survived the hell of modern combat who didn’t engage in at least a few minor superstitious behaviors, and that included Ramsey himself. He never went into combat without a neumenal image of his Marine father watching from a minimized mindwindow. Totally irrational, he knew.

His mental gaze shifted to the tiny, mental image of Marine Master Sergeant Danel Jostin Ramsey, resplendent in his dress blacks … an image recorded just days before the landings on Torakara.

The Specter gave another hard lurch. According to the feed from the cockpit, it was raining outside now, and lightning flared behind the clouds ahead. The mission planners had chosen to insert through a large, tropical storm, taking advantage of lightning and rain to shield the assault group’s approach for a precious few seconds longer.

“Listen up, people,” Lieutenant Jones’ voice said over the platoon net. “We’re three minutes out, and about to drop below the cloud deck. Remember your training, remember your mission downloads. Keep it simple! We secure the spaceport, and we hold until relieved. Ooh-rah?”

“Ooh-rah!” the platoon chorused back at her.

Seconds later, a loud thump announced the release of the battlezone sensor pods, and the main tactical feed came on-line as thousands of thumb-sized microfliers were shot-gunned into the skies ahead of the assault group. Ramsey opened a mental window, and entered a computer-generated panorama of ocean, and the coastline to the north. Red pinpoints illuminated the coast, marking generators, vehicles, and other power-producing facilities or units. The spaceport was marked in orange, the Fortress in white, with sullen red patterns submerged within the graphics, indicating the main power plants.

As he watched, more power sources winked on. That might be an illusion generated by the fact that more and more BZ pods were entering the combat area, but it also might mean the enemy had been alerted and was waking up.

But so far, the skies were quiet, save for the flash of lightning and the sweeping curtains of rain.

Remember your training. Yeah … as if that were a problem. Remember your downloads. Their mission parameters had been hard-loaded into their cephlink RAM. It wasn’t like you could freaking forget. …

Keep it simple. Secure the spaceport. Hold until relieved.

Nothing new there, either.

The question was whether the landings would be enough. Alighan was a heavily populated world in the Theocracy of Islam, with over two billion people in the ocean-girdled world’s teeming cities. The Marine assault force codenamed Green 1 consisted of the four companies of the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, a total of 580 men and women … against an entire world.

True, they were exceptionally well armed and armored men and women, and they seemed—for the moment at least—to have kept the element of surprise. Even so, fewer than six hundred Marines against a population of two billion …

Impossible.

Ridiculously impossible.

But the United Star Marines, once the United States Marines, specialized in the impossible, as they and their predecessors had done for the past eleven hundred years.

Alighan. The name was derived from the Arabic term for “God is Guardian,” and the name suited the place. The system of five rocky planets orbiting a K0 star was strategically positioned along the New Dubai trade route, a channel for ninety percent of the interstellar shipping between the Heart Worlds and the Theocracy. Control Alighan, and you controlled access to the Islamic state … or to the Heart Worlds, depending on which way your battlefleet was headed. Scuttlebutt had it that the Terran Military Command wanted Alighan as an advance base for deeper strikes into Theocratic space.

The key, of course, was the planetary starport, AI Meneh, “The Port,” which doubled as the system capital. The battle-ops plan called for the Marines to seize and hold the starport. Within a standard day—two at the most—the Navy transports would arrive from Kresgan, bringing with them the Army’s 104th Planetary Assault Division, the 43rd Heavy Armored Division, and elements of the 153rd Star Artillery Brigade and the 19th Interstellar Logistical Support Group.

And the Marines, those who’d survived, would be off to their next planethead.

Five hundred planetary assault Marines against two billion Muslim fanatics. …

Ramsey shook his head, a gesture unseen within the massive helmet of his 660-ABS. In fact, the vast majority of the local population would not be fanatics. Most of the population down there would be ordinary folks who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, especially by their own government.

But experience gained so far in the present war—and in other wars fought against the Theocracy and similar governments over the past eleven centuries—taught that the ones who did fight would do so with all their heart and soul, with no thought of quarter, and with no mind for the usual rules of war.

They would fight to the death, and they would take as many Marines with them as they could.

So far as the Marines of the 55th MARS were concerned, they would be happy to help the Muzzies find their longed-for medieval paradise.

Without going with them.

USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
0455/24:20 local time, 1513 hrs GMT

“Gods and goddesses, Jesus, Buddha, and fucking Lao Tse! Those fat-assed bastards up in Ring City are trying to fucking destroy my Corps! …”

Gunnery Sergeant Michel Warhurst stopped his pacing in front of the ragged line of recruit trainees and shook his head sadly. “You maggots are trying to fucking destroy my Corps! My beloved Corps! And I am here this morning to let you know that I will not stand for that!”

Recruit Private Aiden Garroway stood at a civilian’s approximation of attention, staring past the glowering drill instructor’s shoulder and off into the velvet, star-riddled blackness of the Martian night. After a brief flight down from the Arean Ring, he and his fellow recruits had been unceremoniously hustled off the shuttle, herded into line by screaming assistant DIs, and were now being formally inducted into Recruit Company 4102 by the man who would rule their lives for the next sixteen weeks.

He was actually enjoying the show, as the drill instructor paraded back and forth in front of the line of recruits. Three assistant DIs stood a few meters away, two glowering, one grinning with what could only be described as evil anticipation.

He’d been expecting this speech, of course, or something very close to it. For the past two years, ever since he’d decided to escape a dead-end jack-in and shallow friends by enlisting in the United Star Marines, he’d lived and breathed the Corps. Boot camp, he knew, would be rough, and it would begin with exactly this kind of heavy-handed polemics, a strategy honed over the centuries to break down the attitudes and preconceptions of a hundred-odd kids with civilian outlooks and build them back up into Marines. It was part of a tradition extending back over a thousand years … and it self-evidently worked.

And getting through boot camp, he’d decided, wouldn’t be all that tough, not for him. After all, he knew what it was all about. He knew …

“What the fuck are you daydreaming about, maggot!?”

The DI’s face had appeared centimeters in front of his own as if out of nowhere, contorted by rage, eyes staring, mouth wide open, blasting into Garroway’s face with hurricane force. The sheer suddenness and volume forced him to take a step back. …

“And where the fuck do you think you’re going, you slimy excuse for an Ishtaran mudworm? Get back here and toe that line! I am not done with you, maggot, not by ten thousand fucking light-years, and when I am done you will know it! Drop to the sand! Give me fifty, right here!”

Startled, Garroway swallowed, looked at Warhurst, and stammered out a “S-sorry, sir!”

The senior drill instructor’s face blended fury with thunderstruck. “What did you say?”

“I’m sorry, sir!”

“What did you just call me? Gods and goddesses of the Eternal Void, I can’t believe what I just heard!” Warhurst brought one blunt finger up a hair’s breadth away from Garroway’s nose. “First of all, maggot, I did not give you permission to squeak! None of you will squeak unless I or one of the assistant drill instructors here gives your sorry ass permission to squeak! Is that understood?”

Garroway wasn’t sure whether a response was called for, but suspected this was one of those cases where he would get into trouble whether he replied or not. He remained mute, eyes focused somewhere beyond Warhurst’s left shoulder.

“Give me an answer, recruit!” Warhurst bellowed. “Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir!”

“What?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Second of all, for your information my name is not ‘Sorry.’ So far as you putrid escapees from a toilet bowl are concerned, I am sir!” He turned away from Garroway and strode up the line, bellowing. “In fact, so far as you mudworms are concerned, I am God, but you will always address me as ‘sir!’ If you have permission to address me or any of the other drill instructors behind me, the first word and the last word out of your miserable, sorry shithole mouths will be ‘sir!’ All of you! Do I make myself abundantly clear?”

Several in the line of recruits chorused back with, “Sir, yes, sir!” A few, however, forgot to start with the honorific, and most said nothing at all, or else mumbled along.

“What was that? I couldn’t hear that!”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“What?!”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

Warhurst turned again to glower into Garroway’s face. “Third! Recruits will not refer to themselves as ‘I’! You are not an I! None of you rates an I! If for any reason you are required to refer to your miserable selves, you will not use the first person, but you will instead say ‘this recruit!’ That goes for all of you! Is that clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Fourth! If I give you an order, you will not say ‘sir, yes, sir!’ You will reply with the correct Marine response, and say ‘Sir, aye, aye, sir!’ You are not Marines and you may never be Marines, but by all the gods of the Corps you will sound like Marines! Is that clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” came back, though it was made ragged by a few shouted “Sir, aye, aye, sirs.” The recruits were all looking a bit wild-eyed now, as confusion and sensory overload began to overwhelm them.

Garroway thought Warhurst was going to explode at the company for using the wrong response. Reaching the left end of the line, he spun sharply and charged back to the right. “Idiots! I ask for recruits and they give me deaf, dumb, and blind idiots!” Turning again, he charged back to the left, raw power and fury embodied in a spotlessly crisp Marine dress black-C uniform. “Get the shit out of your ears! If I ask a question requiring a response of either ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ you will say ‘sir,’ then give me a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ as required, and then you will again say ‘sir!’” Stopping suddenly at the center of the line, he turned and bellowed, “Is that clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“And when I give you an order, you will respond with ‘sir, aye, aye, sir!’ Remember that! ‘Aye, aye’ means ‘I understand and I will obey!’ Is that understood?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

Garroway was impressed. Under the DI’s unrelenting barrage, the line of recruits, until moments ago a chaotic mélange of individually mumbled responses, was actually starting to chorus together, and with considerable feeling … but then the DI was back in his face once again, eye to eye, screaming at him. “What the hell are you doing on your feet, maggot? I gave you a direct order! I told you to give me fifty! That’s fifty push-ups!”

Damn! Garroway had been as confused as the rest, stunned into unthinking immobility by the DI’s performance. He dropped to the ground, legs back, arms holding his body stiffly above the sand, and started to perform the first push-up, but then Warhurst was hauling him upright by the scruff of his neck, dangling him one-handed above the sand, still screaming. “I did not hear you acknowledge the order I gave you, mudworm!”

“Sir, yes, sir! Uh, I mean, aye, aye, sir!”

“What was that?”

“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”

Warhurst released him. “Gimme those fifty goddamn push-ups!”

“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”

Garroway dropped again and began cranking out the push-ups. He’d worked out a lot over the past couple of years, knowing that this sort of thing would be routine. He’d also spent a lot of time recently working in the Recovery Projects back on Earth. There he massed a full 85 kilos, so he had a bit of an advantage of some of the other kids in the line. On Mars, he only weighed 32 kilos, compared to the 60 kilos he carried at his home level in the Ring.

So right now he weighed half what he normally did, and was feeling pretty strong, even competent. The push-ups came swiftly and easily as Warhurst continued to parade up and down the line of recruits, finding fault everywhere, screaming invectives at the other recruits. Before long, Garroway wasn’t the only one doing push-ups. He completed his count and stood at attention once more, surprised to find he was breathing harder, now. In fact, his chest was burning.

The Martian air was painfully thin, despite the nanochelates in his lungs that incrçased the efficiency of his breathing. The terraformers had been reshaping Mars for almost four centuries, now, hammering it with icebergs to begin with, but more recently using massive infusions of nanodecouplers to free oxygen from the planet-wide rust and restore the ancient Martian atmosphere. For the past two centuries, the air had been breathable, at least with nanotechnic augmentation, but it was still thin, cold, and carried a harsh taste of sand and chemicals.

Abruptly, as if at the throw of a switch, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst’s fury was gone. Instead, he seemed relaxed, almost paternal. “Very well, children,” he said, standing before them with his hands on his hips. “You have just had your first fifteen minutes of Marine indoctrination and training … an ancient and hallowed tradition we refer to as ‘boot camp.’ Each of you has volunteered for this. Presumably, that means each of you wants to be here. I certainly understand that desire. The Marines are the best there are, no question about it.

“However, I want each and every one of you to take a moment and think very hard about this decision you’ve made. Behind you is the shuttle that brought you down from the Arean Ring. If for any reason you are having second thoughts, I want you to turn around right now and plant your ass back on board that shuttle. You will be flown back up to the Arean Ring, where you can retrieve your civilian clothing, have a nice hot meal, and make arrangements to go home. No questions asked. No one will think the less of you.” He paused. “How about it? Any takers?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Garroway sensed movement down the line to his left. Someone was wavering … and then he heard the sound of footsteps in the sand, moving toward the rear. He didn’t dare look, however. The formation was still at attention, and he had a feeling that if he turned his head to look, Warhurst’s sudden nice-guy persona would vanish as abruptly as it had begun.

“Smart boy,” Warhurst said, nodding. “Anybody else? This will be your last chance. If you miss that shuttle … then for the next sixteen weeks you will be mine.”

Garroway thought he heard someone else leave the line, but he wasn’t sure. He knew he wasn’t going to quit, not now. He was going to be a Marine. …

“Handley!” Warhurst snapped, addressing one of the recruits. “Eyes front!”

“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”

A long silence passed. Warhurst stood before them, his head down, as if he were listening to something. Then he looked up. “I want each of you to open your primary inputs. Full immersion.”

Garroway did so. His neurocranial link implants opened to a local feed coming down from the Martian Ring. It was coded, but each had received the appropriate clearances up at the receiving station.

There was a moment’s mental static, followed by the always odd feeling of standing in two places at once …

… and then Garroway was standing on another world.

It was night there, as it was at Noctis Labyrinthus. It was also raining, though the link was not transmitting the feel of the rain on his skin, or the bluster of the wind.

He could see, however, a formation of Marine landing vehicles skimming in a few meters above the surf and spray of a beach, their black hulls shimmering as they phased into full solidity, their variform shells unfolding into landing configuration. Lightning flared … or perhaps it was a plasma bolt fired from the shore. It was tough sorting out exactly what was happening, because there was a great deal of noise and movement.

One of the landing vehicles crumpled with nightmare suddenness in midair, flame engulfing its gull-winged form, the wreckage tumbling out of the sky and slamming into the surf in a crashing fountain of spray and steam. Plasma bolt, Garroway thought. An instant later, a beam of dazzling incandescence struck down out of the black overcast, a white flash starkly illuminating the beach and the incoming formation as it lanced the squat building from which the plasma bolt had been fired. The explosion further lit the night, as the first of the shape-shifting landing craft began touching down.

In his mind, Garroway turned, watching as other craft passed overhead. There was a city behind the beach … and what looked like a large and sprawling spaceport. Beams of light continued to spear out of the angry heavens, vaporizing enemy hardpoints.

And now, individual Marines were appearing in their cumbersome combat armor, bounding through flame and smoldering wreckage and sand dunes to close with the enemy.

“This,” Warhurst’s voice said in Garroway’s head, “is taking place on a world called Alighan, about four hundred light-years from where you’re standing right now. There’s a slight delay in the feed, but, within the uncertainties imposed by the physics of FTL simultaneity and the time lag down from the Arean Ring, it is happening more or less as you see it. The image is being relayed from our battlefleet straight back to HQ USMC. Colonel Peters thought you should see this.”

More Marines surged across the beach, sweeping toward the outer Alighan beach defenses. Other landing craft had passed over those bunkers and gun emplacements and were settling to ground on the spaceport itself. Fire continued to lance out of the sky, pinpoint bombardments called down by Marine spotters. Garroway found he could hear some of the chatter in the background, a babble of call signs, orders, and acknowledgments.

“The Islamic Theocracy,” Warhurst went on, “has blocked several key trade routes into their territory. Worse, they have supported terrorist incursions into Commonwealth Space, seized Commonwealth vessels, and are suspected of holding Commonwealth citizens as slaves.

“As you should know by now, the sole purpose of the U.S. Marine Corps is to protect Commonwealth worlds and Commonwealth citizens. To that end, a naval battlefleet and a Marine Expeditionary Force have been dispatched to effect a change in the Theocrat government. Their first step is to capture the spaceport you see in the distance, so that Army troops can land and occupy the planet.

“The politics of the situation are unimportant, however. Marines go where they’re sent. They do what they’re told to do. They do so at the behest of the United Star Commonwealth, and the Commonwealth Command Authority. All very nice, neat, and clean. …

“But this, children, is what modern combat really is.”

The scene around Garroway was rapidly becoming a burning nightmare out of some primitive religion’s hell. With a mental command, his point of view drifted up from the beach toward the spaceport, where the heaviest fighting was now taking place. The landing craft all were down now—those that had survived the approach. Upon touching down, their fuselages had broken into sections, becoming automated mobile gun platforms; the wing, cockpit, and spine assemblies then each had lifted off once more, becoming airborne gunships that darted across the scene like immense, spindly insects, spewing plasma bolts and blazing streams of autocannon fire. And individual Marines, forty-eight to each LV, fanned out across the flame-tortured landscape, hunting down the enemy one gun position or hardpoint at a time. Overhead, Marine A-90 Cutlass sky-support attack craft darted and swooped like hideously visaged black hornets, locking in on ground targets and blasting them with devastating fire.

Clouds of gray fog swept over the landscape from different directions—combat nano and countemano, waging their submicroscopic battles in the air and on the ground. Disassemblers released by the Muzzies were seeking out Marines and vehicles, while the counter-clouds roiling off Marine armor and vehicles sought to neutralize them. The result was a deadly balance; in places, the ground was melting, the rain hissing into steam.

Almost in front of him, a Marine bounded in for a landing, his combat suit making him seem bulky and awkward, but the impression was belied by the grace of movement on the suit’s agrav packs. The Marine touched down lightly, aimed at an unseen target with the massive field-pulse rifle mounted beneath his right arm, then bounded again.

The armor itself, Garroway saw, was mostly black, but the surface had a shimmering, illusive effect that rendered it nearly invisible, an illusion due to the nanoflage coating which continually adapted to incoming light. In places, he saw blue sparks and flashes where enemy nano-D was trying to eat into the suit’s defenses, but was—so far—being successfully blocked by the suit’s counters.

Neither near-invisibility nor nanotechnic defenses could help this Marine, however. As he grounded again, something flashed nearby, and the man’s midsection vanished in a flare of blue-white light. Legs collapsed to one side, head and torso to the others, the arms still, horribly, moving. Garroway thought he heard a spine-chilling shriek over the link, mercifully cut off as the armored suit died. Rain continued to drench the hot ruin of the combat suit, steaming in the flare-lit night, and the armor itself, exposed to the relentless embrace of airborne nanodisassemblers, began to soften, curdle, and dissolve.

The arms had stopped moving. There was a great deal of blood on the ground, however, and slowly dissolving wet chunks of what might be …

Gods. …

Garroway struggled not to be sick. He would not be sick. He wrenched his mental gaze away from the feed, and stood once more in the Martian night.

“Being a Marine is one of the greatest honors, one of the greatest responsibilities available to the Commonwealth citizenry,” Warhurst said, his voice still speaking in his mind over the implant link. “But it is not for everyone. It requires the ultimate commitment. Fortitude. Courage. Character. Commitment to duty and to fellow Marines. Sometimes, it requires the ultimate sacrifice … for the Commonwealth. For your brother and sister Marines, For the Corps.

“You’ve all just seen what modern combat is like … what it’s really like, not what the entertainment feeds would have you believe. Do any of you want to see this thing through?”

Garroway heard others leaving the line; he didn’t know how many. He also heard someone retching off to his left.

After a long pause, Warhurst nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Get ‘em out of here.”

With a whine, the agrav shuttle at Garroway’s back lifted into the Martian night. He felt the flutter of wind as it passed overhead, and he watched its drive field grow brighter as it accelerated back to orbit, back to the Arean Rings that stretched now across the zenith like a slender, taut-pulled thread of pure silver.

“You maggots,” Warhurst growled, his former tough-DI persona slowly re-emerging, “you mudworms are even more stupid than I was led to believe. All right. Show’s over. Like I said earlier, from this point on, you are mine. I personally am going to eat you alive, chew you up, and spit your worthless carcasses out on these sands.

“But maybe, maybe, a few of you will have what it takes to be Marines.” Turning, he addressed one of the assistants—the evil-grinning one. “Sergeant Corrolly!”

“Yes, Drill Instructor Warhurst!”

“We need to find out what these worms are really made of. Let’s take them on a little run before breakfast!”

The evil grin grew wider. “Yes, Drill Instructor!”

“Move out!”

“Aye, aye, Drill Instructor!” The assistant DI turned to face the waiting survivors of the morning’s muster. “You heard the Drill Instructor! Recruit platoon … lef’ face! For’ard, harch! And … double time! Hut! Hut! Hut! …”

Garroway began to hut.

And within twenty minutes, as he dragged screaming leg muscles through the fine, clinging, ankle-deep sand of the Martian desert, he was wondering if he was going to be up for this after all.

What the hell had he been thinking when he’d volunteered? …

2

0407.1102

Green 1
Meneh, Alighan
0512/38:20 hours, local time

Ramsey kicked off, his 660-ABS armor amplifying his push and sending him in a low, flat trajectory across bubbling ground. Maneuvers like this always carried a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t risk. Jump too high and your hang time made you an ideal target; jump too low and flat and a miscalculation could slam you into an obstacle.

He came down next to a ferrocrete wall, his momentum carrying him into the half-collapsed structure with force enough to bring more of it down on top of him, but he was unhurt. A quick check around—he was a kilometer from the city’s central plaza. All around him, the skeletal frameworks of skyscrapers rose like a ragged forest, a clean, modern city reduced in minutes to ruin and chaos. Some of the damage was due to the Marine bombardment, certainly, and to the firefight raging now through the enemy capital, but much, too, had been self-inflicted by Muzzie nano-D.

In fact, Ramsey’s biggest tactical concern at the moment were the nano-D clouds, which were highlighted by his helmet display as ugly purple masses drifting low across the battlefield. Where they touched the ground or surviving fragments of building, rock, earth, and ferrocrete began dissolving in moments, as the submicroscopic disassemblers in the death clouds began pulling atom from atom and letting it all melt into a boiling and homogenous gray paste.

Where the cloud hit counter-nano, sparks flashed and snapped in miniature displays of lightning. Nano-D, much of it, possessed intelligence enough to attempt to avoid most countermeasures; victory generally went to the cloud with both the most numbers and the most sophisticated programming.

A Muzzie field-pulse gun opened up from a ferrocrete bunker two hundred meters ahead, sending a stream of dazzling flashes above his head. Almost automatically, Ramsey tagged the structure with a mental shift of icons on his noumenal display, which hung inside his thoughts like a glowing movie screen. His suit AI melded data from a wide range of sensory input into a coherent image. In his mind’s eye, he could see the bunker overlaid by the ghostly images of human figures inside, and the malevolent red glow of active power systems.

“Skyfire, I have a target,” he said, and he mentally keyed the display skyward, tagged with precise coordinates.

Seconds later, a voice in his head whispered what he’d been waiting to hear. “Target confirmed. Sniper round on the way.”

Several seconds more slipped past, and then the cloud deck overhead flared sun-bright, and a beam of light so brilliant it appeared to be made of solid, mirror-bright metal snapped on, connecting clouds with the bunker.

At the beam’s touch, the bunker exploded, ferrocrete and field-pulse gun and Theocrat soldiers all converted to fast-expanding vapor, blue-white heat, and a sharp surge of gamma radiation. The ground-support gunners out in Alighan orbit had just driven a sliver of mag-stabilized uranium-cladded antimatter into that gun emplacement at half the speed of light. The resulting explosion had vaporized an area half the size of a city block, leaving very little behind but hard radiation and a smoking hole in the ground.

Unfortunately, the enemy had weapons just as powerful, and as minute followed bloody minute, more and more of them were coming on-line. He needed to move … but first, this looked like a good place to leave one of his mobile weapons.

Working quickly, Ramsey pulled a KR-48 pack out of a storage compartment on his hip, extended its tripod legs with a thought, and placed the device atop what was left of the wall. Through its optics, the image relayed through his helmet AI to his brain, he checked its field of fire, giving it a clear view toward the city’s central plaza.

His 660-ABS had more than once been compared to a one-man tank, but so shallow an image wildly missed the point, and in fact was insulting to the battlesuit. In fact, tanks had become obsolete centuries ago thanks primarily to the rise of battlesuit technology. Wearing an ABS, a Marine could walk, run, or soar for distances of up to a kilometer, could engage a wide range of targets on the ground and in the air with a small but powerful arsenal of varied weaponry, and could link with every other ABS in the battle zone to coordinate attacks and share intelligence. An ABS allowed its wearer to shrug off the detonation of a small tactical nuke less than a hundred meters away, to survive everything from shrapnel to radiation to heavy-caliber projectiles to clouds of nano-D, and to function in any environment from hard vacuum to the bottom of the sea to the boiling hell-cauldron of modern combat.

In fact, any contest between a lone Marine in a 660 battlesuit and a whole platoon of archaic heavy tanks could have only one possible outcome.

What was important, however, was why, after a thousand years, individual and small-unit tactics were still of vital importance in combat. For centuries, virtual-sim generals had been predicting the end of the rifleman as the centerpiece of combat. The energies employed by even small-scale weapons were simply too deadly, too powerful, and too indiscriminate in their scope to permit something as vulnerable as a human being to survive more than seconds in a firefight.

Somehow, though, the venerable rifleman had survived, his technology advancing to extend his effectiveness and his chances of survival. The truth was, a planetary ground-assault unit like the 55th MARS could drop out of orbit, seize the starport, and hold it, where larger, faster, and more powerful AI-directed weaponry would simply have vaporized it.

Of course, by the time the Muzzies were through defending the port, most of it would be vaporized, wrecked, or otherwise rendered unusable anyway. That was the problem with war. It was so damned destructive … of personnel, of property, of entire cultures and societies. …

He completed setting up the KR-48 and keyed it to his helmet display. He switched on the weapon’s power shields, to keep it from being directly targeted by roving enemy combat drones or smart hunters, then bounded clear, making his way around the perimeter of the city plaza. Gunfire continued to crack and spit from the surrounding buildings, those that hadn’t been demolished yet, but the accuracy of the Marines’ orbital sniper fire seemed to be having a telling effect on the defenses. The instant a Marine came under fire, the attack was noted by Skyfire command and control, and the attacker would in moments be brought under counterfire, either by high-velocity rounds chucked from orbit, or from the A-90 ground-support aerospace craft now crisscrossing the skies above the port complex, or from other Marines on the ground linked into the combat net.

“Bravo one-one-five,” a voice whispered in his mind. His AI identified the speaker as Captain Baltis, his platoon commander, but he recognized the dry tones without his suit’s comm ID function. “Hostile gun position at six-one-three-Sierra. Can you neutralize it, Ram?”

He zoomed in on the indicated coordinates on his map window. The enemy fire was coming from the top of a forty-story structure two kilometers ahead. A drone feed showed the Muzzie gunners, clustered on a rooftop overlooking the plaza, clustered around a tripod-mounted high-velocity sliver gun.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Ramsey replied. “Why can’t we leave it to Sniper?”

“Because that would bring that whole tower down,” Baltis replied, “and we have civilians in there.”

Shit. The Muzzies didn’t seem to care whether their own civilians were caught in the line of fire or not. But the Marines were under standing orders to minimize collateral damage, and that meant civilian casualties.

“Okay. I’m on it.”

Rising, he bounded forward, covering the ground in long, low, gliding strides that carried him both toward the objective building and around toward the right. He was trying to take advantage of the cover provided by some smaller buildings between him and the target. As he drew closer, someone on the rooftop spotted him and swung the heavy-barreled weapon around to bear on him. He felt the snap of hivel rounds slashing through the air above his head, felt the impacts as they punched into the pavement nearby with bone-jarring hammerings and raised a dense cloud of powdered ferrocrete.

Dropping behind a plasteel wall, he connected with the KR-48 he’d left behind, using his suit’s link with the weapon to pivot and elevate the blunt snout toward the target building. On the window inset in his mind, he saw the KR-48’s crosshairs center over the top of the building; a mental command triggered a burst, sending a stream of thumb-sized missiles shrieking toward the rooftop gun emplacement.

The missiles vaporized chunks of cast stone, but the Muzzies’ armor damped out the blast effects. He’d been expecting it; he was using the weapon as a diversion, not for the kill.

Instantly, the Muzzie gunners swung their weapon back to the south, searching for the source of incoming fire. Ramsey watched the shift in their attention, and chose that moment to leap high into the air.

A mental command cut in his jump jets in midair, and he soared skyward, clearing the upper ramparts of the building, cutting the jets, and dropping onto a broad, open rooftop.

He used the flamer connected to his left wrist to spew liquid fire into the gun emplacement. The enemy troops were shielded against tactical heat, of course, but the suddenness of his appearance, arcing down out of the sky, surprised and startled them, and the torch blast melted the plastic mountings of the hivel gun and toppled it over onto its side.

Shifting his aim, he torched the floor of the rooftop enclosure, cutting open a gaping crater. Two of the Muzzie infantrymen were caught in the collapse of the roof, falling through in a shower of flaming debris; Ramsey shifted to the mag-pulse rifle mounted on his right arm and hammered away at five more Theocrat soldiers who were busily crowding back and away from his landing point.

One of the hostiles managed to open fire with a sliver gun at Ramsey, and the Marine felt the hammer of high-speed rounds thudding into his chest and helmet armor, but he held his ground and completed his targeting sweep with the pulse rifle, watching the barrage smash through enemy armor like a rapid-fire pile driver, shredding, rending, turning titanium laminate carballoy into bloody scrap.

The last of the hostiles collapsed on the blazing rooftop, or toppled through the gaping hole in front of them. The entire engagement had taken perhaps three seconds.

“Bravo one, Bravo one-one-five,” he reported. “Target neutralized.”

“Good deal,” Baltis replied. “Now get your ass forward! You’re behind sched!”

“On my way.”

Another leap, and he sailed off the burning building’s upper story, using his jump jets to brake his fall.

His suit AI was flagging another gun position just ahead. …

USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
0720/24:20 local time, 1738 hrs GMT

“Fall in! Fall in!”

Panting hard, Garroway stumbled up to the yellow line painted on the pavement. The run, which Warhurst had lightly declared to be a shake-down cruise, had lasted two hours and, according to his implant, had covered nearly 14 kilometers. A number of the recruits hadn’t made it; at least, they’d not kept up with the main body. Presumably, they were still straggling along out in the desert someplace, unless Warhurst had sent a transport out to pick them up.

Garroway had assumed that the meager third-G of Mars’ surface gravity would make calisthenics—no, PT, in the Marine vernacular—easy. He’d been wrong. Gods, he’d been wrong. The run across the rugged highlands of the Noctis Labyrinthus had left him at the trembling edge of collapse. His skinsuit, newly grown for him when he’d checked in at the Arean Ring receiving station, was saturated with sweat, the weave of microtubules straining to absorb the moisture and chemicals now pouring from his body. His leg muscles were aching, his lungs burning. He’d thought the implants he’d purchased two weeks ago would have handled the extra stress.

This was not going to be easy.

The worst of it was, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst had accompanied them on that run, and so far as Garroway could tell, the guy wasn’t breathing hard, hadn’t even broken a sweat. His uniform was still crisp, the flat-brimmed “Smokey Bear” hat of ancient Corps tradition still precisely squared above those hard, cold eyes.

“Okay, children,” he said, planting his hands on his hips. “Now that we’ve warmed up a bit, it’s time we got down to work. Hit the deck, push-up position! And one! And two! …”

By now, the sun was up, though much of the run had been through the foggy, pre-dawn darkness. Mars was a tangle of mismatched terrain, rendered both beautiful and twisted by the centuries of terraforming. The sky was a hard, deep, almost violet-blue, the sun shrunken and cold compared to back home. The ground was mostly sand, though patches of gene-tailored mosses and coldleaf added startling accents of green and blue. The run had brought them in a broad circle back to Marine RTC Noctis Labyrinthus, a lonely huddle of domes and quick-grown habs in a rocky desert. East, the tortured terrain of the Vallis Marineris glowed banded red and orange beneath the morning sun, and open water gleamed where the Mariner Sea had so far taken hold.

Damn it, he couldn’t breathe. …

“Come on, kiddies!” Warhurst shouted. “You can give me more than that! There’s plenty of oh-two in the air! Suck it down!”

What sadist, Garroway wondered, had decided that this was where Marine recruits would come to train? Centuries ago, of course, RTC had been on Earth … at a place called Camp Pendleton, and at another place called Camp Lejeune. Those places were no more, of course. The Xul Apocalypse had wrecked both bases, when tidal waves from the oceanic asteroid strikes had come smashing ashore. For a time, Marines had been trained on Luna, and then at one of the new LaGrange orbital bases, but almost two centuries ago, with the completion of the Arean Ring, the Corps had transferred much of its training command to Mars. The first recruits on the surface at Noctis Labyrinthus, Garroway had heard, had done their PT wearing coldsuits and oxygen masks. He was beginning to think someone had jumped the gun in deciding to forego the support technology.

“Okay! Okay! On your feet!” Warhurst clapped his hands. “How are we doing, kids? Eyes bright? Hearts pumping? Good! We have a very special treat in store for you now.” He pointed. “See that building? Fall in, single file, in front of that door! Move it! Move it!”

The platoon scrambled to obey, running fifty meters across the ’crete pavement and lining up outside the door. A sign beside the doorframe read sickbay.

That puzzled Garroway. They’d pumped him full of medinano at the receiving station, enough, he’d thought, to kill everything in his system that wasn’t nailed down. He’d already had several thorough physicals, back on Earth Ring, and in Mars orbit. What were they going to …

Realization hit him just as Warhurst began addressing the formation.

“This, children, is where we separate the real men and women from the sheep. You were all informed that this would be part of your recruit training, and you all agreed when you thumbed your enlistment contract. However … if any of you, for any reason, feel you cannot go through with this, you will fall out and line up over there.” He pointed across the grinder at one of the assistant DIs, who was standing in front of a transport skimmer. “You will be returned to the receiving station, and there you may make arrangements for going home. No one will think the less of you. You will simply have proven what everybody knows—that the Marine Corps is not for everyone. Do I have any takers?”

Again, Garroway thought he felt some of the recruits in line around him wavering. The terror was almost palpable.

“If you file through that door,” Warhurst continued, a tone of warning giving his edge a voice, “you will be given a shot of decoupling nano. It won’t hurt … not physically, at any rate. But after the shot takes effect, you will be unable to access your personal cerebral implants. Right now, each of you needs to think about what that means, and decide if being a Marine is worth the cost.”

The decoupler shot. Yeah, they’d told him about it, but he’d already known about it, of course. It was one of the things that set the Marines and a few other highly specialized elite military units apart from the Army, Navy, or the High Guard. Wonderingly, Garroway looked down at his right hand, catching the glint of gold and silver wires imbedded in the skin at the base of his thumb and running in rectilinear patterns across his palm.

He was going to lose his implants.

The vast majority of humans had cereblink implants, including palm interface hardware, quantum-phase neurocircuitry, and a complex mesh of Micronics grown layer by layer throughout the brain, especially in the cerebral sulci and around the hypothalamus. The first nano injections generally were given to the fetus while it was still in womb or in vitro, so that the initial base linkages could begin chelating out within the cerebral cortex before birth. Further injections were given to children in stages, at birth, when they were about two standard years old, and again when they were three. By the time they were four, they already possessed the hardware to let them palm-interface with a bewildering variety of computers, input feeds, e-pedias, and machines. Most basic education came in the form of electronic downloads fed directly into the student’s cerebral hardware. Adults depended utterly on hardware links for everything from flying skimmers to paying bills to experiencing the news to opening doors to talking to friends more than a few meters distant. The cereblink was one of the absolutely basic elements of modern society, the ultimate piece of technology that allowed humans to interface with their world, and interact with their tools.

And now, the recruits of Company 4102 were about to lose that technology and, for the first time in their lives, would face the world without it.

The thought was terrifying.

“Okay, recruits! First five in line! Through the hatch, on the double!”

The first five recruits stumbled up the steps as the door cycled open for them and vanished into the building. Garroway watched them go.

He thought about quitting.

This was the one part of recruit training that he’d wondered about, wondered whether or not he could make it through. Oh, he knew he would survive, certainly. Millions did, and most went on to be U.S. Marines. And if he could get through these next few weeks, his old hardware would be reconnected and he would get new implants as well. Marines were hardwired with internal gadgetry and high-tech enhancements that most civilians didn’t even know existed.

But the thought of being cut off like that …

Many of the humans now living on Earth, he understood, were pre-tech … meaning they went through their lives, from birth to grave, as completely organic beings. No technological chelates cradling their brains and brain stems, no nanocircuitry growing through their neural pathways.

No EM telepathy, so no way to talk to those around you unless you were actually in their presence or you happened to have a portable comm unit with you. No translator software; if your friend didn’t happen to speak your language, you were out of luck. No e-conferencing in noumenal or virtual space. No e-Net linking you with every other person and every electronic service across the Solar System.

No way to access news, or weather—assuming you were on Earth which actually had weather—or med access, or epedia information feeds, or travel directions, or life journals, or any of the hundreds of other data downloads necessary in today’s fast-paced life.

No sims. No download entertainment. No way to interact with either the stored or broadcast simvids that let you take the role of hero or villain or both.

No way to buy the most basic necessities. Or to find them, since most shops now were on-line.

No driving ground cars, piloting mag skimmers, or accessing public transit.

No books, unless you could find the old-fashioned printed variety … and that was assuming you could read them. No more educational feeds … and no access to personal e-memory. Gods, how was he going to remember anything? …

And there was Aide. For Garroway, that felt like the worst … losing access to Aide, the AI mentor, secretary, and personal electronic assistant he’d had since he was a kid.

Without his hardware, the world was suddenly going to be a much smaller, much more difficult, much narrower place … and knowing that he would survive that narrowing did not make the prospect any more bearable.

Cut off from technological civilization, from society, from everything that made life worth the living. …

“I know it seems extreme, kids,” Warhurst said, using a telepathic feed to whisper inside their minds. “You feel like we’re cutting you off from the universe. In boot camp we call it the empty time.”

Garroway wondered whether the DIs had some secret means of accessing their implants and hearing their thoughts … or if he just knew and understood what the recruits would be thinking now. Probably the latter. It was against the law to sneak into another’s private thoughts and eavesdrop, wasn’t it?

“The thing is,” Warhurst went on, “there will be times as a Marine when you won’t have the Net to rely on. Imagine if you’re on a combat drop and something goes wrong. You end up a thousand kilometers behind enemy lines. You don’t have the local Net access codes. Worse, if you try to link in, the local authorities will spot you. Somehow, you have to survive without the Net until you can make contact with your sibling Marines.

“Or maybe you just have to go into a hot DZ on a planet with no Net at all, and there’s a screw-up and the battlefleet Net isn’t up and running for, oh, a standard day or two or ten. Believe me, it happens. What can go wrong will go wrong. What are you going to do then?

“The answer, of course, is that you will be Marines, and you will act like Marines. You will be able to draw upon your own resources, your training, your experience, and you will survive. More than survive, you will kick ass and emerge victorious, because victory is the tradition of the Corps!”

Garroway felt a little better after Warhurst’s speech. Not good … but better. He gave a mental click to increase neural serotonin levels and help lift his mood. Hell, that was another thing he’d be missing in the next few weeks—the ability to alter his own emotional state as necessary. He felt a tiny, sharp stab of fear, and instantly suppressed it.

How did Marines control the fear if they didn’t have access to neural monitoring software or the ability to deliberately tailor their emotional state? Or were the wild stories true, stories to the effect that Marine combat feeds eliminated fear and boosted such emotions as rage and hatred for the enemy? He’d always assumed those tales were nonsense, the product of civilian ignorance. Still …

“If you children want to be Marines,” Warhurst’s whisper continued, “we have to know who and what you are. How you react under stress. We need to know your character. And we need to take you, all of you, down to your most basic, most elementary level and build you up, one painful layer at a time. At the end of these sixteen weeks, you will not be the men and women you were. You will be Marines … if you make it through.”

It made sense, of course, what Warhurst was saying. Boot camp always had required an initial breaking down, so that the drill instructors could mold recruits into Marines. And there were other factors besides … like cutting the recruits off from outside sources of information so that they were utterly dependent on their instructors. Like taking away anything that would distract them from the grueling physical and intellectual training ahead.

Like getting them to rely upon themselves.

“Believe me,” Warhurst added, and Garroway swore he could hear a grin in the man’s inner voice, “for the next few weeks you children won’t need your tech-toys, and you’ll be way too busy to miss ‘em! Besides, you’ll have me to tell you what you need to know! Next five in line! Through the hatch!”

Garroway thought one last time about quitting, and shoved the thought aside.

“Don’t worry, Aiden,” his inner AI whispered in his mind. “I’ll be back. You’ll see.”

Together with four other recruits, he bounded up the steps and into the unknown.

3

0407.1102

Green 1, 1-1 Bravo
Meneh, Alighan
0824/38:22 hours, local time

“Okay, Marines. How are we going to do this?”

Ramsey considered the question. Staff Sergeant Thea Howell rarely asked for advice. When she did, the problem was certain to be a certified bitch.

With the vantage point of the gods, he looked down on the city. In the noumenon, the imaginal inner space of his mind’s eye, he was hovering above the city center and starport as if from a giant’s towering perspective. Physically, in fact, he was crouched in what had been a basement, shielded from view by several tons of rubble, and the closest Marine to his current position was nearly five hundred meters away, but he was only distantly aware of any of that. His cereblink and the fleet’s SkyNet, however, allowed them to share a noumenal conference space, complete with tiny red icons marking the position of each known Muzzie soldier, gun, and vehicle, green for Marines, white for civilians or unknowns.

The tacsit was clear enough. Theocrat riflemen had holed up in another skyscraper, an eighty-three-floor tower at the edge of the central plaza, and they’d turned the place into a fortress, with portable rocket launchers and at least one light plasma cannon. Life scans had revealed a heavy concentration of civilians in the smaller buildings clustered about the tower’s base; smash the tower with close-air ground support or orbital fire, and several hundred civilians would die.

So rather than standing off and bombing the Theocrats, the Marines would have to do this the old-fashioned away, with a direct CQB assault.

And it was going to get damned messy.

“From the top down,” Ramsey said after a moment, answering Howell’s question. Under his control, green lines of light flicked across the imaginal landscape, taking advantage of available cover, then vaulting into the sky to converge on the tower roof from four directions. “Has to be. Otherwise we fight our way up that tower one floor at a time.”

“Agreed,” Howell said. “But that rooftop is over 250 meters straight up. Too far for jumpjets.”

“Then we’ll need to ride Specter guns,” Sergeant Chu pointed out. “And we’ll need to move straight up and fast.”

“Roger that,” Corporal Ran Allison said. “Looks like a lucky two-fiver.”

The slang referred to twenty-five percent casualties … if they were lucky. It was a grim and chillingly sobering assessment.

“Ten of us,” Howell said, noting the green icons surrounding the tower, a kilometer distant. The icons flashed, one after another, as she ran through the names. “Me, Beck, and Santiago on one. Hearst and Daley on two. Rodriguez and Gertz on three. Ramsey, Allison, and Chu on four. Coordinate on me. I’ve put the call out, and our rides will be here in two mikes. Everyone get set.”

Ramsey dropped out of the noumenal link and began shouldering upward through the layer of debris above him, his combat suit’s paramusculature allowing him to move aside several tons of debris as he climbed. Heaving aside a 3-meter chunk of ferrocrete, he emerged again into the smoke-stained light of the Alighan morning.

The pace of the battle had slowed considerably, now that the defenders had been reduced to a few isolated pockets of resistance scattered across a ruined city. In less than the promised two minutes, a Specter gun hissed overhead, an awkward-looking fragment of one of the landing vehicles that had brought the Marines down to the planet’s surface hours before. Piloted by an independent AI, kept aloft by agrav pods and protected by a ball-turret plasma gun, the flier looked like a black insect, complete with gangly, slender legs equipped with powerful grapples. Reaching up, he grabbed hold of one of those legs and locked on; the jointed member retracted partially, pulling him clear of the wreckage and into the air.

Corporal Allison and Sergeant Chu were already on board the tactical carrier, grappled to the aircraft’s other legs and retracted up into the partial shelter of the machine’s body. The rubble dropped away as the vehicle swiftly ascended, rotating and banking toward the distant tower.

The helplessness and the sense of being exposed were sharper now than during the landing craft descent earlier. The gun was sharply maneuverable, however, and the artificial intelligence piloting it possessed inhumanly fast reflexes. It was easier on the stomach not to watch. Ramsey closed his eyes and merged with the assault team gestalt, watching again from the gods’ perspective as four green icons representing the fast-moving Specter guns converged on the objective.

All four aircraft street-skimmed in toward the tower, zig-zagging all the way to take every possible advantage of buildings, trees, and rubble. Hivel rounds snapped past the flier, and once Ramsey felt the solid shock of a heavy detonation close by. His helmet readout warned of a gamma pulse; someone was firing antimatter rounds at them. He felt another thump as the gun’s plasma weapon fired, knocking down an incoming rocket that had targeted them.

He saw a sudden flare as one of the incoming Specter guns took a direct hit despite its evasive maneuvering. According to his link, both Daley and Hearst jumped clear as the aircraft crumpled and slammed into the rubble-clogged street below.

The remaining three tactical carriers reached the base of the skyscraper at the same instant, changing vectors to travel straight up the sides of the tower in a stomach-wrenching maneuver that was only partly eased by the inertial dampers in Ramsey’s armor.

Three seconds, the pilot AI whispered in his mind, and he opened his eyes in time to see of blur of ferrocrete and structural ornamentation flashing past.

Two seconds … one second …

Another gut-twisting shift in vector, and the Specter gun slipped over the rampart encircling the top of the tower. A mental command, and he was released from the craft’s unfolding leg, dropping onto the roof, striking, rolling, coming up with his mag-pulse rifle raised, his helmet electronics already tracking the nearest threat. The weapon was set to AI control, and he let his suit guide him; the weapon triggered as soon as it had a solid targeting lock.

The first Muzzie rifleman went down, his armor hammered by a rapid-fire barrage of magnetic pulses. The top of the building became a bewildering and rapidly unfolding blur of motion and weapons fire, as two of the other Specter guns came up over the ramparts and released their payloads of Marines.

The Specter gun carrying Howell, Beck, and Santiago took a direct hit as it hovered above the rampart, an antimatter blast flashing with deadly brilliance at the edge of the tower. Ramsey overrode his weapon control and shifted aim to the Muzzie gunner—a low threat because he was facing away from Ramsey as he manhandled the massive A.M. accelerator for a second shot, but he was trying to target the three Marines on that side of the tower as they fell from the burning transport. Ramsey triggered his weapon, and the enemy soldier folded backward around the kinetic impulse slamming into his spine, his weapon cartwheeling across the roof with the impact.

A warning went off in his mind; gunners were targeting him. He cut in his jumpjets and sailed across the roof, pivoting in midair to target one of the Muzzie gunners who was standing up behind a waist-high ferrocrete barrier, tracking Ramsey as he sailed through the air.

The stricken Specter gun slammed into the edge of the tower, metal burning furiously, catching and holding for a moment before rocking back and off the roof, crashing to the street eighty-four-stories below. The remaining two guns hovered above opposite sides of the building, ninety meters apart, coordinating their plasma weaponry with the fire from the eight Marines now fanning out across the roof.

A transparent wall overlooked the rooftop, a penthouse or upper story of some sort, enveloped in hanging plants, and with a sunken interior that formed a well-protected redoubt. The transparency—plastic and shatterproof—melted as someone inside detonated a thermal charge. An instant later, a swarm of APerMs emerged and arced into the sky before descending on hissing contrails—antipersonnel missiles, each the size of a man’s forefinger, each with an on-board AI smart enough to identify an enemy’s armor signature and home on it relentlessly, each with a dust-speck’s worth of antimatter in magnetic containment. Ramsey’s armor fired a countermeasures charge, and flashes of actinic brilliance from the hovering guns picked individual missiles out of the air with hivel kinetic-kill rounds each the size of a grain of sand. The sky turned to white fire. …

At first he thought the threat had been neutralized, and he started moving forward once more. In the next instant, his helmet display flashed warning; there were still APerMs in the air.

He triggered another countermeasure burst … but it was too little, too late, and he couldn’t get them all. APerMs slashed into Howell and Beck, who was bounding alongside her, blasting gouts of molten laminate from their armor, knocking the two Marines backward.

“Thea!” Ramsey screamed, and then he was standing twenty meters from the open penthouse, hosing the low, cavern-like opening in front of him with his flamer. One of the hovering Specter guns with a good line of sight added lance after flaring lance of plasma energy to his fire; Ramsey could see figures writhing and incinerating within the flames.

Turning, he bounded across the rooftop to the two fallen Marines. Corporal Gerry Beck was dead, his helmet punctured, then exploded from within. There was a lot of blood, and only smoking, blackened shards remained of helmet and skull.

Staff Sergeant Thea Howell, however, was still alive. The AP round had struck her in the chest, shattering ribs, rupturing a lung, flooding her torso with hard radiation, but her diagnostic feed showed she was still alive as her armor struggled to control the damage. She was already deep in medical support stasis.

Thea. …

Crouching above her body, he turned his fire against a last remaining clump of Muzzie gunners behind a ferrocrete wall. One of the Specter guns burned down the last of them, and the firefight came to an abrupt end.

But Ramsey continued to hold the broken body of Thea Howell, letting his own armor make automatic feed connections and linkages so that he could bolster her suit’s damaged support systems.

Besides being a fellow Marine and the platoon’s senior NCO, Thea was an old friend, and frequently his lover.

She was family.

And he didn’t want to see her die. …

USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
1045/24:20 local time, 2003 hrs GMT

Garroway felt … alone. Alone and utterly empty.

And he couldn’t even mind-click himself a serotonin jolt to lift the settling black mist of depression … or ask Aide for help.

“I know you’re all feeling a bit low right now,” Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst said, smiling. “But I have just the ticket! We’re going to run. Comp’ney, lef’ face! For’ard harch! Double time, harch! …”

Garroway still felt dazed and lost. After his ten-minute session with the Navy corpsmen in the sickbay, he’d been led back out into the weak sunshine of the Martian morning and marched to chow.

He’d barely tasted the food, and ate it automatically. After that there’d been an indoctrination class, with an assistant DI lecturing the company on Corps tradition, and on what it meant to be a Marine.

And now, they were out in the cold once more, running. Who the hell was he trying to kid? His first six hours in the Corps, and already he wanted to quit.

Something, though, was keeping him going … one tired foot after the other.

Aiden Garroway had been born and raised in the 7-Ring orbital complex in Earth orbit, a son of an extended line marriage, the Giangrecos; on his Naming Day, he’d taken his name from Estelle Garroway, the woman who’d also passed on to him his fascination with the Corps.

It had been Estelle who’d told him about other Garroways who’d been Marines. There was one, a real character who’d fought in the UN War of the mid-twenty-first century, who was still remembered in Marine histories. “Sands of Mars Garroway,” he was known as, and he’d led a grueling march up the Vallis Marineris only a couple of thousand kilometers from this spot to attack a French invasion force.

And later there’d been John Garroway, a gunnery sergeant who’d made first contact with the N’mah, an alien civilization at the Sirius Stargate a century later … and General Clinton Vincent Garroway who’d fought and won the critical Battle of Night’s Edge against the Xul in 2323. And other Garroways had served in the Corps with distinction ever since, first in the old United States Marines, then, with the gradual assimilation of the old U.S. into the United Star Commonwealth, in the old Corps’ modern successor, the United Star Marine Corps.

It had been Estelle who’d suggested he join the Corps. She’d known how unhappy he was at home.

Not that home life had been abusive or anything like that. Most of his mothers and fathers were okay, and he deeply loved his birth mother. But with twenty-five spouses and one hundred eighty-three children and grandchildren underfoot, along with numerous aunts, uncles, in-laws, and cousins, the living quarters allotted to the Giangreco line family, though spacious enough, tended to be something of a zoo. There was always someone to put him down, tell him what to do, or shove him out of the way. His job in the aquaculture farms was boring and dead-end. There were no better options for educational downloads until he specialized in a career, and farming water hyacinths for the Ring filtration matrices decidedly was not what he intended to do for the next century or two. Hell, life at home with that many parents and sibs was like life in a barracks, anyway; the Marines seemed a logical option.

The problem was Delano Giangreco, the patriarch of the line, and a committed pacifist. A member of the Reformed Church of the Ascended Pleiadean Masters, he didn’t quite insist that everyone in the family follow Church doctrine regarding diet, luminous tattoos, or ritual nudity, but he did insist on observance of the Masters’ Pax. No mention of war within the house, no downloads touching on military history, battles, or martial arts. Garroway had been twelve before he’d even heard of the Marines, and then only because of the electronic emancipation laws. Once you were twelve and had chosen your name, no one else could censor your thoughts or your data feeds, even for religious purposes.

But those feeds could be monitored by parents or guardians until a person was eighteen, and Garroway had received almost weekly lectures on the evils of war and the falsity of such historical lies as military glory, honor, or duty.

Somehow, though, the lectures had only increased his determination to learn about the Corps, and about all those other Garroways who’d served country and, later, Commonwealth. By the time he was sixteen, he’d picked up some semi-intelligent software, with Aide’s help, which let him partition his personal memory storage, and keep parts of it secret from even the most determined morals-censoring probes.

But the need to do so, to keep his guard up against his senior father’s intrusions, had been a powerful incentive to get himself out of the home and off on his own.

His senior father had disowned him when he learned Garroway had enlisted. No matter. He had a new family now. …

If he could keep up with it. If he quit, if he gave up, he would be right back in the Rings looking for work—probably in one of the environmental control complexes or, possibly, the nanufactories.

Hell, he’d rather run himself to death.

“Christ,” Mustafa Jellal muttered at Garroway’s side. “Is the bastard gonna run us all the way up Olympus?”

The recruit company had been running steadily west for almost an hour, now, slogging uphill almost all the way. Somewhere over the western horizon was the staggering mass of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System, though its peak was still far over the curve of the Martian horizon. Jellal’s mutterings were purely fictional, of course. The mountain known as Olympus Mons was five hundred kilometers across at the base, and reached twenty-one kilometers above the surrounding terrain; the raw, new, artificially generated atmosphere on Mars was still only a step removed from hard vacuum at the summit.

The Noctis Labyrinthus lay at the eastern rim of the Tharsis Bulge, the vast, volcano-crested dome marking a cataclysmic upwelling of the Martian mantle 3.5 billion years before. The broken, canyon-laced terrain of the Noctis Labyrinthus—the “Labyrinth of Night”—was the result of floods released by the sudden melting of permafrost during that long-ago event. The ground, as a result, was a difficult tangle of rocks and channels that made footing treacherous and the climb exhausting.

“Save your … wind … for running,” Garroway muttered between pants for breath. His side was starting to shriek pain at him, and the thinness of the incompletely terraformed atmosphere was dragging at his lungs and his endurance. How much farther? …

Jellal suddenly fell out of the formation, stepping to the side, hands on his knees as he started to vomit. Garroway maintained his pace, staring straight ahead. Behind him, he could hear one of the assistant DIs talking to Jellal, though he couldn’t hear what was being said. In a moment, the column had continued up a dusty hill covered in patches of gene-tailored dunegrass, and passed well beyond earshot of what was being said.

A minute or two later, however, just over the crest of that hill, Warhurst bellowed for the company to halt. The recruits had become strung out over a half kilometer of ground, and it took minutes more for the trailing runners to catch up with the main body. Garroway stood at attention as more and more recruits fell in to either side, breathing hard, savoring the chance to suck down cold gulps of air and try to will his racing heart to slow.

After a few heavy-breathing minutes, he was glad to see Jellal jog past and take a place farther up the line. He’d met the young Ganymedean Arab at the receiving station up in the Arean Ring. Mustafa Jellal had been friendly, cheerful, and outgoing, and seemed like a good guy. Garroway had started talking with him at chow last night, partly out of a sense of isolation kinship. There was a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment throughout the Sol System right now, had been ever since the outbreak of hostilities against the Theocracy, and during the conversation Garroway had had the sense that Jellal was feeling lonely, a bit cut off.

Garroway had been wrestling with loneliness as well—he wasn’t prepared to call it homesickness just yet—and felt a certain kinship with the dark-skinned Ganymedean recruit. After chow, they’d gone back to the center’s temporary barracks, and there they’d opened a noumenal link and shared bits of home with each other—Jellal taking him on a virtual tour of the Jellal freestead complex at Galileo, on Ganymede, with Jupiter looming banded and vast just above the horizon, and Garroway showing him Sevenring, with Earth huge and blue and white-storm-swirled through the arc of the Main Gallery’s overhead transparency.

He wondered how the guy was feeling now, with his implants switched off.

It was actually a pleasant respite, a chance to simply stand and breathe. Warhurst waited a few minutes more, until the last tail-end Charlie straggled over the top of the ridge and took his place in line.

“Glad you could join us, Dodson,” the DI said with a sour growl to his voice. “Okay, recruits, listen up. A few hours ago, we let you see a Marine action now taking place on Alighan, a few hundred light-years from here. We’ve just received a feed from USMC Homeport. The Marines on Alighan report both the starport and planet’s capital city are secure. Army troops are now deploying to the surface to take over the perimeter.

“Lieutenant General Alexander, in command of the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, has reported that the op went down according to plan and by the book. He singled out the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, which spearheaded the assault on the planethead, saying that despite heavy casualties, they distinguished themselves in the very best traditions of the Corps.

“So let’s give a Marine Corps war-yell for the Fighting Fifty-fifth! Ooh-ra!”

“Ooh-ra!” the company yelled back, but the response was ragged and weak, the recruits still panting and out of breath.

“What the hell kind of war-yell is that?” Warhurst demanded. “The Marines fight! They overcome! They improvise! And they fucking kick ass! Let me hear your war-yell!”

“Ooh-ra!”

“A good war-yell focuses your energy and terrifies your opponent! Again!”

“Ooh-ra!”

“Again!”

“Ooh-ra!”

“Oh, I am so terrified.” He sighed, shaking his head. “Children, I can tell we have a lot of work to do. Down on the deck! One hundred push-ups! Now!”

The respite was over.

Green 1, 1–1 Bravo
Meneh Spaceport, Alighan
1158/38:22 hours, local time

An enemy sniper round cracked overhead, striking the side of a building a hundred meters away with a brilliant flash and a puff of white smoke. Ramsey looked up without breaking stride, then glanced at Chu. “Five,” he said. “Four … three … two …”

Before he could reach “one,” a blue-white bar of light flashed out of the heavily overcast sky and speared a building nearly two kilometers away. Six seconds passed … and then another, much louder crack sounded, a thunderous boom with a time delay. By this time, remote drones and battlefield sensors had scattered across some hundreds of square kilometers, and any hostile fire or movement was instantly pinpointed, tracked, and dealt with—usually with a high-velocity KK round from orbit.

“You’re a little off on your timing,” Chu told him. “Count faster.”

“Ah, the guys in orbit just want to make liars out of us.”

“Not guys,” Chu said, correcting him. “AIs. That response was too fast for organics.”

“Even worse. We’re into the game-sim phase of the op, now. No combat. Just electronic gaming. The bad guys poke a nose out of hiding, the AIs in orbit draw a bead and lop it off.”

“You sound bitter.”

“Nah. I just wonder how long it’ll be before they don’t need us down here on the ground at all. Just park a task force in orbit and pop bad guys from space, one nose at a time.”

“Never happen,” Chu said. “Someone’s gotta take and hold the high ground, y’know?”

“That’s what they taught us in boot camp,” Ramsey agreed. “But that doesn’t mean things won’t change.”

Despite the scattered sniper fire, the worst of the fighting appeared to be over, and the Marines of the 55th MARS had emerged victorious. Not that there’d been doubt about the outcome, of course. The enemy’s technological inferiority, tactical and logistical restrictions, surprise, and morale all had been factored into the initial ops planning. The only real question had been what the butcher’s bill would be—how many Marines would be lost in the assault.

The two Marines were walking across the ferrocrete in front of one of the shuttle hangars at the spaceport, still buttoned up in their 660 combat cans. Off in the distance, an enormous APA drifted slowly toward the captured starport, hovering on shrill agravs. Another APA had already touched down; columns of soldiers were still filing down the huge transport’s ramps.

Smoke billowed into the sky from a dozen fires. The damage throughout this area was severe, and they had to be careful picking their way past piles of rubble and smoldering holes melted into the pavement. Nano-D clouds had drifted through on the wind hours before, leaving ragged, half-molten gaps in the curving walls and ceiling, and the shuttle itself had been reduced to junk. A large area of the floor had been cleared away, however, and the structure was being used as a temporary field hospital, a gathering point for casualties awaiting medevac to orbit. Several naval corpsmen were working in the hangar’s shadowed interior, trying to stabilize the more seriously injured.

Staff Sergeant Thea Howell was in there someplace. After that last firefight atop the tower, Ramsey had crouched beside his wounded friend until a combat medevac shuttle had arrived, then helped load her aboard. That had been three hours ago. As soon as Army troops had started filtering in from the starport, Ramsey and the others from 1–1 Bravo had hiked back to the port. Ramsey had located Howell on the platoon Net, and was hoping to see her.

“Ram! Chu! What the hell are you guys doing here?”

The two Marines turned, startled. Captain Baltis had a way of appearing out of nowhere. “Sir!” Ramsey said. Neither he nor Chu saluted, or even came to attention; standard Marine doctrine forbade ritual in the field that might identify officers to enemy snipers. “One of our buddies, sir. Howell. We’d like to know if—”

“Haul your ass clear of here and let the docs do their work,” Baltis snapped. “We’ll post the status of the wounded when we get back to the ship.”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“We will post their status when we get back aboard ship.”

Ramsey sagged. “Aye, aye, sir.”

“Get your asses over to the Fortress. We’ll be disembarking from there.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

The Fortress—what was left of it—loomed above the skyline of Meneh not far from the ocean. It was called El Kalah, which in the creole-Arabic spoken throughout the Theocracy meant “fortress.” Originally a vast dome half a kilometer across bristling with ball turrets, each turret mounting plasma, A.M., or hivel accelerator weapons, El Kalah had been the first target in the pinpoint orbital bombardment of the planet, and there was little left of the complex now save the shattered, jagged fragments of dome enclosing a smoking ruin open to the sky. The weapons turrets had been neutralized in rapid succession, and the remaining complex pounded for hours with everything from antimatter to tunneler rounds to knock out any deeply buried bunkers. Much of what was left had melted in the nano-D clouds.

Close by the Fortress was an area that had been a residential zone, stone and cast ‘crete housing set in orderly rows among parkland and market squares. At least that was how the downloaded maps described the area. Though the region had not been deliberately targeted, it was now an almost homogenous landscape of rubble and partially melted stone.

As they picked their way through the wreckage, Ramsey and Chu came upon a scene of nightmare horror.

Several Marines in armor were clearing rubble, revealing what had been a basement. On the basement floor, dimly visible in smoky light …

“Jesus,” Chu said … and then Ramsey heard retching sounds as the Marine turned away suddenly. Ramsey continued staring into the pit, unable to stop looking even as he realized that he would never be able to purge his brain of the sight. There must have been thirty or forty people huddled in the basement, though the nano-D cloud had made sorting one body from another difficult. The tangled, tortured positions of the bodies suggested they’d known what was happening to them, and that death had not been quick.

They were civilians, obviously. The Islamic Theocracy did not permit female soldiers, and there’d been children down there as well. Clearly, they’d been trying to find shelter inside the basement.

Equally clearly, the deaths had been inflicted by Theocrat weapons; the assault force had not employed nano-D.

It was said that the life expectancy of an unarmored person on a modern battlefield was measured in scant seconds. These people had never had a chance. Ramsey felt a sullen rage growing within—rage at the Muzzies for their blind use of indiscriminate weaponry and their placement of military targets close beside civilian enclaves, rage at the op planners who’d targeted a heavily inhabited planet, rage at the very idea of war, of doing this to innocent bystanders.

Turning away, finally, he grasped Chu’s elbow and steered him clear of the scene.

He didn’t think he was going to be able to get rid of the memory.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

And at the same time, he wasn’t certain he could live with the nightmare.

4

0507.1102

USMC Skybase
Paraspace
0946 hrs GMT

Lieutenant General Martin Alexander completed the final download encompassing the Alighan operation. Casualties had been God-awful high—almost twenty percent—and a disproportionate percentage of those were irretrievables, men and women so badly charred by heat or radiation or so melted by nano-D that they could not be brought back to life. Those were the tough ones, the ones requiring a virtual visit to parents or spouses.

With a mental click, he shifted his awareness to the Map Center, a noumenal chamber with a three-D navigable representation of the entire Galaxy. For a moment, his mind’s eye hovered above the broad, softly radiant spiral, taking in the nebulae-clotted spiral arms, pale blue and white, unwinding from the ruddier, warmer core, a vast and teeming beehive of suns surrounded by gas-cloud ramparts, like luminous thunderheads at the Core’s periphery. Four hundred billion stars across a spiral a hundred thousand light-years across.

How many of those pinpoint stars making up those banked, luminous clouds and streaming arms were suns, with worlds and life and civilizations?

An unanswerable question.

A majority of stars had planets, of course. That fact had been certain as far back as the twenty-first century or before, when extrasolar planets had first been discovered. Worlds with life were common as well; wherever there was liquid water or, more infrequently, liquid ammonia or liquid sulfur, life, of one kind or another, seemed to arise almost spontaneously.

How many of those worlds with life developed intelligence, however, and communicative civilizations, was a much more difficult, and darker question. Once, the answer would have been “millions” or even “tens of millions,” a guess based partly upon statistical analyses and partly upon xenoarcheological discoveries within the Solar System and elsewhere that showed technic civilization, starfaring civilization, exploding across the Galaxy in wave upon wave.

But that was before the discovery of the true nature of the Xul.

“General Alexander?”

“Yes, Herschel.”

Herschel was the artificial intelligence controlling the Galaxy display.

“Your aide wishes to link with you.

Damn. Never a moment’s peace. “Very well.”

Cara, his electronic assistant, entered his noumenal space, her EA icon materializing out of the void. “Excuse the interruption, General.”

“Whatcha got?”

“Sir, we have a final plot on the Argo. And a partial synch with the ship’s AI.”

“Only partial?”

“Whatever happened out there happened very quickly.”

“I see.” He sighed. “Okay. Feed it through. And let’s see the plot.”

A white pinpoint winked brightly within the depths of one of the spiral arms. At the same time, he felt the surge of incoming data, an e-brief, only, representing the synch with the Argo’s AI.

Perseus. The name of the AI had been Perseus.

“A group of delegates from the Defense Advisory Council wants to link with you to discuss the Xul threat,” his aide continued as he skimmed the brief.

“I’ll just bet they do. Okay. When?”

“Fourteen minutes. Ten-hundred hours.”

“Huh. The Argo incident has them worried.”

“Terrified, more like it. And can you blame them, sir? There hasn’t been another peep out of the Xul for five hundred years.”

Alexander completed the brief, then stared into the sea of teeming suns hanging before him. “I wouldn’t call the bombardment of Earth by high-velocity asteroids a ‘peep,’ Cara. Earth was nearly destroyed.”

“Yes, sir. But they didn’t finish us. In fact, they seem to have lost track of us entirely.”

“Garroway’s attack at Night’s Edge—” He stopped himself. He had a tendency, he knew, to slip into lecture mode, and his aide knew the history of Night’s Edge as well as he did. Better, perhaps.

“Exactly, sir,” she said. “Garroway gambled that information about our whereabouts in the Galaxy had not been disseminated yet beyond the Xul base that launched the attack on us. And apparently his gamble paid off. Only now …”

“Now the Xul appear to have picked up the trail again.”

“We have to assume that if they captured the Argo, they know where we are. And they’ll be better prepared next time. Stronger, more careful, and in greater numbers.”

“We damned near didn’t survive their last attack,” Alexander pointed out. “And that was just one Xul huntership!”

In the year 539 of the Marine Era, or in 2314 c.e. as the Commonwealth measured the passing years, a single kilometer-long Xul vessel had appeared out of the emptiness between the stars, destroyed several human ships, then proceeded to fling small chunks of asteroidal debris at the Earth. The fragments were small, but somehow the Intruder had boosted them to very high velocities—on the order of half the speed of light—giving them the kinetic energy of much larger bodies when they struck.

Deep space facilities designed as part of the High Guard asteroid defense network had succeeded in destroying many of the infalling rocks, but enough pieces had struck Earth to do terrible damage, obliterating much of Europe and eastern North America in firestorms and tidal waves and plunging the rest of the planet into an ice age—what the histories persisted in calling a “nuclear winter,” even though the impacts were purely kinetic, and not nuclear at all.

The only thing that had saved civilization from complete collapse had been the fact that Humankind possessed a considerable off-world presence—numerous space stations, factories, colonies, and military bases in Earth orbit, on Luna and Mars, in the Asteroid Belt, and farther out, among the satellites of Jupiter. Billions died on the Motherworld, first in the holocaust of falling debris, then of starvation and exposure as the snows deepened and the oceans began icing over. But technological help had begun pouring in from the space-based colonies, especially from the orbital nanufactories, untouched by the devastation wrought on Earth. Nanufactured food, power plants, and constructors had been loaded into immense one-trip gliders by the megaton and deorbited for recovery in the ice-free equatorial zones of Earth’s oceans. Within another century, one, then dozens of space elevators had been lowered into place, connecting points along the equator with matching points in geostationary orbit, after which the supplies had really begun flowing down the pipelines from space. Ground-based agricultural nanufactories had begun producing food locally, then, along with nano designed to break down ice, lower the skyrocketing planetary albedo, and clean up the detritus of a wrecked technic civilization.

Slowly, then, the recovery had begun.

And five centuries later, that recovery was continuing. New cities were growing now along the shockingly altered Atlantic coastlines. Most of the gangs and local warlords had long since been suppressed, or incorporated into the new government. North America and most of Europe were no longer dependent on supplies from space.

Of course, the former United States was now a special protectorate of the Commonwealth, a necessary adjustment in the face of the aggressive expansion of the Chinese Hegemony. And the Islamic Theocracy continued to be a perennial problem, ruled from the Principiate of Allah, at Mecca. Sharp wars had been fought with both states to protect both the Americas and Europe.

Alexander allowed himself an inner, unvocalized sigh. The real enemy, as always, remained the Xul, and for half a millennium Humankind had continued its divided, petty squabblings among its various fragmented religious, political and economic factions. This current unpleasantness with the Theocracy was only the latest in eight hundred years of bloodshed that stretched all the way back to WWIII, and which some historians insisted went back even further, to the Crusades of the Middle Ages.

Still adrift just above the galactic plane, Alexander gave a mental command and allowed his mind’s eye to descend into the sea of stars, moving out toward the spiral arms, toward one spur of a spiral arm in particular, about 23,000 light-years from the center. The vast majority of the stars in this simulation were approximations only, with no hard information about the stars or the worlds that might be circling them. Some day, perhaps … but for now Humankind’s knowledge of its celestial neighborhood was sharply restricted to an unevenly shaped blot perhaps 800 light-years across in its longest dimension, less than one percent of the vast and pinwheeling whole.

Ahead, the stars embraced by the Commonwealth and the other governments of Humankind glowed within a soft, green haze of light. Individual star systems were labeled with alphanumerics giving names and provenance—with Sol imbedded roughly at the center. Another mental click, and the green light fragmented into various shades of yellow, blue, and green, identifying the Islamic Arm, the Chinese Arm, the Pan-European Arm, the Latino Arm, the Commonwealth, and the rest.

He brought up a red icon marking the position of the lost Argo … 500 light-years from Sol, and on a direct line with the Andromedan Galaxy. She’d been well outside of human space when the Xul had discovered her; the outer fringes of Islamic space lay a light-century or so in her wake.

Orange pinpoints marked those outposts and garrisons of the Xul that had been identified over the past few hundred years, a fuzzy and diffuse cloud outside of human space; none lay close to Argo’s outbound route, but that was scarcely surprising. The Xul empire spanned the Galaxy and stretched well beyond it; Humankind thus far had identified only a few hundred Xul outposts and bases, and the best guess suggested that the Xul held a million star systems, or more.

“We now have a candidate star for another Xul base,” Herschel whispered in Alexander’s ear. “Here …”

A star was highlighted in blue, and Alexander zoomed in on it. Nu Andromedae, a type B5 V blue-white sun some 440 light-years from Earth. From Earth’s perspective, the star by chance appeared just to the east of M-31.

“The Argo must have passed quite close to Nu Andromedae,” Herschel added. The AI painted a red contrail streaming from the Argo, like a thin, taut thread stretching all the way back to Sol, and the line skimmed past Nu Andromedae, almost touching it. “Less than three light-years, in fact.”

“Maybe. But that was still over a hundred years ago. Why should the Xul wait that long before pouncing?”

“For the same reason the Xul have not found Earth, General. The term once in use was ‘a needle in a haystack.’”

Alexander had never seen either a sewing needle or a haystack, but the phrase was descriptive enough in its own right. Even the Xul, powerful and technologically advanced as they were, couldn’t be everywhere, couldn’t watch every star system or world where life might have evolved. The Galaxy was far too large for that level of omnipotence, even for beings with powers indistinguishable from those of gods.

“Herschel’s right, General,” his aide pointed out. “The Argo was a hollowed-out asteroid. Its passengers were in deep cybe-hibe. Even at close to the speed of light, it wouldn’t have been giving off much in the way of anomalous radiation.”

“I don’t buy it, Cara. We know now it would have been giving off a kind of wake as it plowed through the dust and hydrogen atoms floating around in its path—the interstellar medium. We can detect that sort of thing ourselves. If we can do it, the Xul can as well.” He studied the display a moment longer, rotating the display and studying the contrail. “Herschel … check distances from the contrail to nearby stars, and correlate with the one-way time lags. Assume radio noise expands from the Argo at the speed of light, and a more or less immediate response from the target star once the RF wave front reaches it.”

“Yes, General.” Angles and geometric designs flickered from star to star, touching the contrail at various points as the artificial intelligence searched for a better fit.

“Actually … that star is a better candidate,” Alexander said after a moment, indicating a particular geometry.

“Epsilon Trianguli,” Cara said, calling up the data window on the indicated star. “Type A2 V. Four hundred fifty light-years from Earth—”

“And 110 lights from the contrail at its closest passage,” Alexander said. “The Argo streaks by, disturbing the interstellar medium. The radio noise spreads out, like the wake of a boat on a calm lake, and reaches Epsilon Trianguli 110 years later. A Xul ship or base takes note and dispatches a force to investigate.”

“There are twenty-five other stars with corresponding distances, angles, and lag times,” Herschel told them, “albeit with lesser probabilities.”

“Store the data, Hersch,” Alexander said. “We may want to do a careful analysis, maybe even send a sneak-and-peek team out there for a look around.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

For centuries, the Marines and Navy had dispatched scouting forces out from human space—sneak-and-peek teams, as they were popularly known—in order to try to identify specific stars where the Xul maintained a presence. The idea was that if Xul bases or colonies could be found, they could be watched, with an eye to noting any sudden activity that might presage a new assault against human space.

The sheer vastness of space, the grains-of-sand numbers of stars, worked both ways, however. For centuries, they’d hidden Sol from the Xul, protecting the existence of Humankind, but those same numbers allowed the vast majority of the Xul outposts to remain hidden as well.

But the further into interstellar space Humankind probed, the greater the chance, the more certain the inevitability, that it would once again trip the Xul sentries, as it had on several occasions already. And it seemed all but certain that, when the Xul returned to the Motherworld of Humankind, they would come with sufficient force to finish the job they’d begun several times before.

Humans had been lucky so far … lucky despite the fact that half a millennium ago Earth had so nearly been rendered uninhabitable. Only during the past few centuries had they begun piecing together the full history of human-Xul interactions, a relationship that extended back, it was believed, as far as half a million years.

As Cara and Herschel began preparing the virtual space for the electronic arrival of the Advisory Council, Alexander allowed his implant processors to cull through the data, reviewing past, present, and several darkly disturbing possible futures. As the data fell into place, he allowed himself a moment’s reverie, induced by the electronic flow from the local AI through the mingling of organic and inorganic regions of his brain.

Some five hundred thousand years ago, an advanced non-human intelligence—robotic intelligences unimaginatively dubbed variously the “Builders” or “the Ancients” by popular histories and the entertainment and news sims—had created an empire spanning all of today’s human space, and presumably extending far beyond. The Builders had terraformed Mars, and, for a brief time, at least, employed reasonably bright bipedal creatures imported from the third planet as workers—genetically altering them to boost their intelligence, and in doing so creating the species that later would call itself Homo sapiens.

But the Xul had attacked the Builders, however, the Xul or their militant predecessors. Ruins on Mars and on Earth’s Moon, on Chiron in the Alpha Centauri system, and on numerous other worlds attested to the violence and the completeness of the genocidal Xul campaign. One of their enormous ships, part machine and part downloaded intelligence, had been badly damaged in the conflict and crashed into the ice-locked world-ocean of Europa. The Builders, who called the invaders “The Hunters of the Dawn,” were destroyed, their empire reduced to broken ruins and rubble on a thousand far-strewn worlds. Of the Builders themselves, apparently, nothing had survived. Their genetically altered creations, however, had escaped the notice of the Xul, and survived, even flourished, on Earth.

Half a million years later, and some ten to fifteen thousand years ago, another spacefaring civilization had entered Earth’s Solar System. The An were in the process of establishing a much smaller, more modest interstellar empire, one embracing a few score star systems scattered across perhaps fifty light-years. They’d planted colonies on Earth and on Earth’s Moon, mined precious metals, and enslaved human nomads to raise food and work the mines. In making slaves, farms, and stone cities, they’d managed to become the prototypes of the gods and goddesses of ancient Mesopotamia. But then the An had attracted the notice of the Xul—the name itself had survived in the Sumerian language as one meaning “demon”—and the An, too, were annihilated.

The Xul had missed one Earthlike world populated by the An, however. The satellite of a gas giant well outside its sun’s habitable zone, perhaps it had been overlooked. On Ishtar, in the Lalande 21185 system eight and a half light-years from Sol, a few An and their human slaves had survived, remaining unnoticed in the holocaust when their technological infrastructure collapsed. On Earth, again, the An all were killed, but humans had survived to wonder about the cyclopean and monolithic ruins at places like Baalbek, submerged Yonaguni, and Tiahuanaco, and to tell stories of a universal deluge and the wrath of the gods.

Thousands of years passed, and humans on Earth again developed high technologies, this time on their own, and again they walked on other worlds. They found mysterious ruins on Mars and on Luna, and a few devices miraculously intact. They found the lost Xul ship, poetically dubbed “The Singer” for its eerie and insane radio transmissions, submerged deep beneath the Europan ice, and on Ishtar they found descendents of both An and humans.

From that time on, late in the twenty-second century, Humankind had existed in a kind of secretive balance with the Xul, who, it turned out, were still very much in existence after all those millennia. Like mice or cockroaches living in the walls of a very large dwelling, human starfarers sought to improve their own lot while avoiding the notice of the heavy-footed giants living nearby. Archeological teams spread out among the nearer star systems, seeking remnants of lost technologies left by the Builders, by the An, and by other civilizations. Eventually, another alien species had been discovered, the amphibian N’mah, living within an enigmatic Ancient-built stargate in the Sirius system.

In 2170, Marine and Navy forces at the Sirius Stargate had destroyed a Xul ship as it came through the Gate. In 2314, another Xul ship had appeared, this time within Earth’s solar system … and Earth had very nearly died. In 2323, a Navy-Marine task force had proceeded through the Sirius Gate to another, unknown and distant star system, Night’s Edge, using a freighter-load of sand scooped from the surface of Mars and accelerated to close to the speed of light to eliminate a Xul fleet and planetary base. As Cara had pointed out, the obliteration of that Xul outpost appeared to have wiped out any data the Xul had acquired pertaining to Humankind or Sol … and bought Earth a precious few more centuries to prepare for her next encounter with the Xul threat.

That there would be another encounter, Alexander had no doubt whatsoever. Since the early twentieth century, Earth had been broadcasting her presence; Sol now rested at the center of a sphere over 1,700 light-years across, a pulsing, restless bubble of electromagnetic radiation at radio wavelengths expanding outward at the speed of light—a certain indicator of intelligent, technic life at its center.

Alexander allowed himself a mental grin at the memory of an old joke. Perhaps it wasn’t an indicator of intelligent life, given the nature of much of the entertainment content of that bubble. Still, anyone with the appropriate technological know-how could hear that babble of noise, and know that technic civilization was responsible.

And The Singer had broadcast something to the stars back in 2067 when it was freed from its icy tomb. No, there was no way Humanity could keep its existence secret much longer.

And how was Humankind to survive in a contest against a technology half a million years more advanced?

It was a problem the Marine Corps had been struggling to resolve since the twenty-first century. So far, for the most part, they’d been able to fight isolated and tightly controlled battles, applying tactics that emphasized Marine strengths while sidestepping Xul technology. As commanding officer of the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, Alexander was responsible for keeping on top of the Xul threat, and keeping the Commonwealth government informed of any changes in the situation.

And the situation certainly had changed now, with the taking of the Argo.

“General?” Cara said, interrupting increasingly grim thoughts. “Will you want your full filters for the meeting?”

“Eh? What was that?”

“Your e-comm filters, sir. The delegates will begin linking in before too long. How do you want to be dressed?”

He grimaced. Personal filters were an important part of modern electronic communications. Within a noumenal setting—literally inside the participants’ heads—your personal icon could take on any appearance desired, anything within the programming range of the AIs giving the encounter substance. Filters allowed the image projected into the group mind’s virtual space to be of your own choosing, with apparent dress, body language, even inflection of voice under your control.

He didn’t like it, though. He never had. Though e-filters had been around for centuries, a necessary outgrowth of noumenal projection, they still seemed … dishonest, somehow, a kind of social white lie.

“You can’t,” Cara told him, a disapproving tone to her words, “receive the Defense Advisory Council like that.”

Mentally, he looked down at himself. As usual, he was projecting his real-world appearance into the galactic imagery … which, at the moment, was of a lean, middle-aged man with graying hair and a dour expression. He was also naked.

Causal nudity was perfectly acceptable within most modern social situations, but Cara was right. This was not the proper appearance to put before twenty-four of the more powerful and important of the arbiters of Commonwealth government policy.

“What do you suggest?” he asked her.

“Something,” she said, “more like this.” She gave his sim an electronic tweak, and his body morphed into something leaner, tauter, and with more presence, and wearing Marine full dress, his upper left chest ablaze in luminous decorations and campaign holos. The brilliant gold Terran Sunburst, awarded for his role at the Battle of Grellsinore as a very raw lieutenant, was emblazoned on his right breast. His head and shoulders were encased within a lambent corona flammae, another social convention granted to officially designated Heroes of the Commonwealth.

“I think we can lose the decorations,” he said. He gave a commanding thought, and the medals vanished. His uniform dwindled a bit into plain dress blacks. “And the damned light show.” The corona faded away.

“With respect, sir,” Cara told him, “you need the bric-a-brac. The council’s chairperson is Marie Devereaux. She is impressed by proper formal presentation, and you will need to enlist her support for your plan.”

He sighed. “Okay. Medals, yes. But not that damned glow. Makes me look like an ancient religious icon, complete with halo.”

“The corona flammae is part of your sanctioned uniform, sir. For your service at and after the twenty-third Chinese War. And the delegation members will have their own.”

“Fucking trappings of power. I hate this.”

“Indeed, sir,” Cara said as the light came back on … but a trifle subdued, this time. “But how many times have you lectured me on the need to blend in with the local social environment? To do otherwise will elicit disapproval, and might well send conflicting signals or, worse, could alienate your audience.”

Alexander looked sharply at Cara’s icon—which was presenting itself, as usual, as an attractive, dark-haired woman of indeterminate years wearing a Marine undress uniform. It was tough at times to remember that “Cara” was, in fact, an electronic artifice, an AI serving as his personal military aide and electronic office manager. A resident of the noumenon and virtual workplaces, she had no physical reality at all.

“Okay, boss,” he said at last. “Light me. But no parade or fireworks, okay? Even heroes of the Commonwealth should be granted a little dignity.”

“I’ll see what I can do, sir,” she told him. “But no promises!”

And then, with Cara serving as gatekeeper and announcer, the first of the council delegates began linking in.

5

0507.1102

USMC Skybase
Paraspace
1005 hrs GMT

It was, Alexander decided, a bit like being in an enormous fish tank. The delegates of the Defense Advisory Council appeared in the simulation as small and relatively unobtrusive icons, until one or another spoke. At that point, the icon unfolded into what appeared to be a life-sized image, standing on emptiness and aglow with its own corona. With a swarm of golden icons surrounding him, together with a larger swarm of smaller, dimmer icons representing the group’s cloud of digital secretaries and personal electronic assistants, he felt as though he were a large and somewhat clumsy whale immersed within a school of fish.

There was also the feeling that the entire school was studying him intently, and not a little critically. They included, Cara had reminded him, eight delegates from the Commonwealth Senate, ten senior military officers from the Bureaus of Defense, five members of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Group, and Marie Devereaux, the President’s personal advisor and representative.

Alexander shrugged off the feeling, and continued with his presentation. They were adrift in an absolute blackness relieved only by a fuzzy circle of light surrounding them all, a ring dividing the darkness into two unequal parts. Within the smaller part, the ring shaded into blue, the leading edge. The trailing edge shaded into red.

This was how space had looked from the point of view of Perseus, the AI commanding the colony asteroid ship Argo during her flight across the Galaxy. The luminous ring was the bizarre and beautiful relativistic compression of space as seen at near-c velocities, a three-dimensional panorama overlaid here and there by the flickering alphanumerics of Perseus’s functional displays.

“We don’t have a lot to go on,” Alexander was telling the watching delegates. “From the time the Xul ship materialized alongside the Argo, to the moment of Argo’s destruction, less than five seconds elapsed. The AI in command of the vessel was in time-extended mode. He did not have time to fully react.”

Artificial sentients like Perseus were designed to control their own subjective passage of time. For machine intelligences that could note the passage of millionths of a second, the passage of a truly long period of relative inactivity—such as the subjective decades necessary for interstellar flight—could literally drive the AI insane. That, it was believed, was what had happened to The Singer, the Xul huntership trapped for half a million years beneath the ice of the Europan ocean.

Perseus had been experiencing time at roughly a thousand to one—meaning that a year was the same as roughly nine hours for a human. At that setting, though, those four and a half seconds after the appearance of the Xul ship had been the human equivalent of 4.5 thousandths of a second; it was amazing that Perseus had managed to do as much as he had.

In Alexander’s mind, and in the minds of the watching delegates, those last seconds played out in slow motion.

“As you see,” Alexander continued, indicating one of the numeric readouts, “the time scale has been altered so that we can experience the encounter at a ratio of about ten to one … four seconds becomes forty. Perseus would have been perceiving this about one hundred times more slowly.”

Abruptly, a shadow appeared against the eldritch starlight. One moment there was nothing; the next, it was there, immense against the luminous ring. With its velocity matched perfectly to that of Argo, the Xul huntership appeared undistorted, a convolute and complex mountain of curves, swellings, angles, spires, and sheer mass, the whole only slightly less black than the empty space ahead and behind, forbidding and sinister.

In fact, Alexander reminded himself, the Intruder was somewhat smaller than the Argo—perhaps 2 kilometers long and one wide, according to the data now appearing on the display, where the Argo was a potato-shaped rock over 8 kilometers thick along its long axis. But most of Argo was dead rock. The totality of her living and engineering areas, command and defense centers, storage tanks, and drive systems occupied something like three percent of the asteroid’s total bulk. The asteroid-shell of the Argo itself was invisible in the data simulation. Without the asteroid as a reference, the Intruder, slowly drifting closer, felt enormous.

“That looks nothing like the Intruder,” Senator Dav Gannel said. “The ship that attacked Earth … and the hunterships we encountered at the Sirius Stargate, they were shaped like huge needles. That thing is … I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s a lot fatter, more egg-shaped. How do we know it’s Xul?”

Alexander didn’t answer. The slow-motion seconds dragged by as the monster drew closer, until it blotted out a quarter of the light ring. The flickering alphanumerics indicated that Perseus was aware of the threat, and attempting to open a communications channel.

“They’re not responding,” another Council delegate said. “Of course they might not understand Anglic.”

“English, Senator,” Alexander said. “When Argo was launched, the principal language of trade and government was English. Perseus is signaling on several million channels, using microwave, infrared, and optical laser wavelengths. Remember, we’ve at least partially interfaced with a number of Xul vessels, and we were able to study The Singer, the one we recovered on Europa eight centuries ago. We know the frequencies they use, and some of their linguistic conventions. You can be sure the Intruder hears, and it understands enough to know Argo is trying to communicate. It’s just not listening.”

“Shouldn’t the Argo be trying to get away?” Devereaux asked.

“Madam Devereaux, the Argo is traveling at within a tenth of a percent of the speed of light. At that velocity, it would take a staggering amount of additional power to increase speed by even one kilometer per hour. She could decelerate or try moving laterally, adding a new vector to her current course and speed, but that means rotating the entire asteroid, and that would take time. And … the Intruder clearly possesses some type of faster-than-light drive, to have been able to overtake Argo so easily. No, Madam Chairman, there’s not a whole lot Perseus can do right now but try to talk.”

“Does she have any weapons at all?”

“A few. Beam weapons, for the most part, designed to reduce stray rocks and bits of debris in her path to charged plasmas that can be swept aside by the vessel’s protective mag fields. But if any of you have seen the recordings of the defense of Earth in 2314, you know that huntership shrugged off that kind of weaponry without giving it a thought. It took whole batteries of deep-space anti-asteroid laser cannons just to damage the Intruder, plus a Marine combat boarding party to go in and destroy it from the inside.”

“At the Battle of Sirius Gate,” General Regin Samuels pointed out, “the Earth forces used the thrusters from their capital ships as huge plasma cannons. What if—”

“No,” Alexander said. “Argo is employing a magnetic field drive we picked up from the N’mah, not plasma thrusters.” He didn’t add the obvious—that this wasn’t a problem-solving exercise, damn it, and it wasn’t happening in real time. What was revealed by this data sim had already happened.

The government delegates, he reflected, were a little too used to, and perhaps a little too reliant on, instantaneous communications.

There was no indication that the alien vessel even heard Perseus’ communications attempts. One point seven three seconds after the Intruder appeared, large portions of the AI’s circuitry began to fail—or, rather, it appeared to begin working for another system, as though it had been massively compromised by a computer virus.

“At this point,” Alexander explained, “the Argo is being penetrated by the alien’s computer network. It is very fast, and apparently evolving microsecond to microsecond, adapting in order to mesh with Perseus’s operating system. The pattern is identical to that employed by Xul hunterships in other engagements.”

It was as though the alien virus could trace the layout of Perseus’ myriad circuits, memory fields, and get a feel for the programs running there, to sense the overall pattern of the operating system before beginning to change it.

Beams and missiles stabbed out from the Argo, focusing on a relatively small region within the huge Intruder’s midship area. So far as those watching could tell, the result was exactly zero. Beams and missiles alike seemed to vanish into that monster structure without visible effect.

More alphanumerics appeared, detailing massive failures in the Argo’s cybe-hibe capsules. The Intruder was now infecting the colony ship’s sleeping passengers by way of their cybernetic interfaces.

“We’re not sure yet how the Xul manage this trick,” Alexander went on, “but we’ve seen them do it before. The first time was with an explorer vessel, Wings of Isis, at the Sirius Stargate in 2148. It apparently patterns or replicates human minds and memories, storing them as computer data. We believe the Xul are able to utilize this data to create patterned humans as virtual sentients or sims.”

Three point one seconds after the attack had begun, Perseus realized that all of its electronic barriers and defenses were failing, that electronic agents spawned by the Intruder’s operating system were spilling in over, around, and through every firewall and defensive program Perseus could bring into play. Perseus immediately released a highly compressed burst of data—a complete record of everything stored thus far—through Argo’s QCC, the FTL Quantum-Coupled Comm system that kept Argo in real-time contact with Earth.

Abruptly, the record froze, the alphanumeric columns and data blocks halted in mid-flicker.

“Four point zero one seconds,” Alexander said. “At this point, Perseus flashed the recording of Argo’s log back to Earth.”

“But … but everyone has been assuming that the Argo was destroyed,” Senator Kalin said, a mental sputter. “We don’t know that. They could still all be alive. …”

“Unlikely, Senator,” Alexander replied dryly. “First of all, of course, there’s been no further contact with the Argo during the past three days. There is also this. …”

Mentally, he highlighted one data block set off by itself—an indication of Argo’s physical status. Two lines in particular stood out—velocity and temperature. The asteroid starship’s velocity had abruptly plummeted by nearly point one c, and its temperature had risen inexplicably by some 1,500 degrees.

“When Perseus sent off the burst transmission, these two indicators had begun changing during the previous one one-thousandth of a second. We’re not sure, but what the physicists who’ve studied this believe is happening is that Argo’s forward velocity was somehow being directly transformed into kinetic energy. A very great deal of kinetic energy. And liberated as heat. A very great deal of heat.”

“These data show Argo is still completely intact,” Marie Devereaux noted. She sounded puzzled. “Senator Kalin is right. That doesn’t prove that the Argo was destroyed.”

“Look here, and here,” Alexander said, indicating two other inset data blocks. “The temperature increase is still confined to a relatively small area—a few hundred meters across, it looks like … but the temperature there in that one spot has risen 1,500 degrees Kelvin in less than a thousandth of a second. The physics people think the Xul simply stopped the Argo in mid-flight—and released all of that kinetic energy, the energy of a multi-billion-ton asteroid moving at near-c, as heat in one brief, intense blast. Believe me, Senator. That much energy all liberated at once would have turned the Argo into something resembling a pocket-sized supernova.”

“But why?” Kalin wanted to know.

“Evidently because the Xul had copied all of the data they felt they needed. They’re not known, remember, for taking physical prisoners.”

There was evidence enough, though, of their having uploaded human personalities and memories, however, and using those as subjects for extended interrogation. He’d seen some of the records taken from a Xul huntership, of what had happened to the crew of the Wings of Isis in 2148. He suppressed a cold shudder.

“If it’s the Xul,” Devereaux added.

He hesitated, wondering how forceful to make his response. It was vital, vital that these people understand. “Madam Chairperson, Senator Gannel asked a while ago how we could know that Argo was destroyed by a Xul huntership. The answer is we don’t.” He indicated the vast, convoluted ovoid hovering close by Argo in the frozen noumenal projection. “It’s not as though they’ve hung banners out announcing their identity. But I’ll tell you this. If that vessel is not Xul, then it’s being operated by someone just as smart, just as powerful, just as technologically advanced, and just as xenophobic as the Xul. If they’re not Xul, they’ll do until the real thing comes along, wouldn’t you say?”

“If it’s Xul,” Devereaux continued, “how much does this … incident hurt us?”

He sighed. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Fifty thousand twenty-fourth century politicians, plutocrats, bureaucrats, specialists, and technicians. How much damage could they do?”

That asteroid colony ship presented an interesting window into the politics of Humankind’s past. Shortly after the Xul attack on Earth, many of the survivors—especially those wealthy enough or politically powerful enough to buy the privilege—had elected to flee the Motherworld rather than remain behind to face a second attack that all knew to be inevitable. At that time, Humankind had not yet unraveled the secrets of faster-than-light travel. With N’mah help and technology, however, they’d constructed four asteroid starships each capable of carrying tens of thousands of refugees and which could accelerate to nearly the speed of light using the reactionless N’mah space drive.

From Alexander’s point of view, the decision to flee the Galaxy entirely, to travel over two million light-years to reach another galaxy, seemed to be a bit of overkill. Still, he had to admit that, judging by the interstellar vistas recorded at Night’s Edge and elsewhere, the Xul did appear to have a presence embracing much of the Galaxy. Two of their known bases—Night’s Edge and a Stargate nexus known only as Cluster Space—were actually located well outside of the Galactic plane, where the Galaxy’s spiral arms curved across the sky much as they did in Alexander’s noumenal simulation. Their empire, if that’s what it could be called, might well extend across the entire Milky Way—four hundred billion suns, and an unknown hundreds of billions of worlds.

The refugees of the twenty-fourth century had desperately hoped to find a new home well beyond even the Xul’s immensely long reach through space and time. It would take over two million years to make the trip, but relativistic time dilation would reduce that to something like thirty years; with the prospective colonists in cybe-hibe stasis, even that brief subjective time would vanish as they fled into the remote future.

The only question had been whether or not the refugee ships could slip out of the Galaxy without being spotted by the Xul. That hope, unfortunately, had failed.

“Our problem, of course,” Alexander went on, “is that we must assume that the Xul now know exactly where we are, and who we are. Most of the people on board probably didn’t have useful information that would lead the Xul back to Earth. A few would have, however, though I’m actually more concerned about the data Perseus might have been carrying. He probably had a complete record of the 2314 attack, for instance, and would have had the galactic coordinate system we use for navigation.

“The Xul are smart. They’ll put that data together with the elimination of their base at Night’s Edge, and know we were responsible. They might also be able to see enough of the stellar background in any visual records to positively locate Sol. And … there’s also Argo’s path. The refugee ships were supposed to make a course correction or two on the way out, so they didn’t draw a line straight back to Earth, but doing that sort of thing at relativistic speeds is time consuming and wastes energy. I doubt the changes were enough to throw the Xul off by very much. At the very least, they’ll figure the Argo set out from someplace close to the Sirius Stargate. That bit of data alone might be enough. It’s only eight and a half light-years from Earth.”

In fact there was so much Humankind didn’t know about the Xul or how they might reason things through. No one could explain why, for instance, they didn’t share data more freely among themselves. The only reason the Xul hadn’t identified Humankind as a serious threat centuries ago was the fact that the Night’s Edge raid did appear to have obliterated any record of the Xul operation against Earth nine years earlier.

“What about the other three refugee ships?” Navin Bergenhal, one of the Intelligence Advisory Group members, asked. “They’re all in danger now.”

“We’ll need to send out QCC flashes to them, of course,” Alexander said. “I doubt there’s anything they can do, though, since it’ll take a year of deceleration for them to slow down, and another year to build back up to near-c for the return trip. If they wanted to return.” He shrugged. “Their escapist philosophy may prove to be the best after all. If the Xul find Earth and the rest of our worlds, the only hope for Man’s survival might well rest in one or more of those surviving colony ships making it to M-31.”

“The destruction of the Argo is tragic, yes,” Devereaux said. “But I still don’t see an immediate threat. This all took place five hundred light-years away, after all. And the Xul have always been glacially slow in their military responses.”

Alexander nodded. “Agreed. If they behave as they have in the past, it might be some time before that information disseminates across all of Xul-controlled space. But, Madam Devereaux, we would be foolish to assume they won’t disseminate it, or that they won’t act upon it eventually. Our best xenopsych profiles so far suggest that the Xul are extreme xenophobes, that they destroy other technic races as a kind of instinctive defense mechanism. We’ve bloodied them a couple of times now, at Sirius, at Night’s Edge, and at Sol, so you can bet that they’re going to sit up and take notice.”

“We’re going to need to … consider this,” Devereaux said. “In light of the current difficulties with the Islamic Theocracy, we must proceed … circumspectly. Perhaps Intelligence can run some simulations plots, and come up with some realistic probabilities.”

Damn. He was going to have to turn up the heat. “With all due respect, Madam Devereaux,” he said, “that is fucking irresponsible. It’s also stupid, playing politics with the whole of Humankind at stake!”

There was a long pause. Devereaux’s head cocked to one side. “With all due respect what, General Alexander?”

“Eh?”

“Your filter blocked you,” Cara whispered in his mind.

“Oh, for the love of …” Angrily, he cleared part of the filter program, dropping it to a lower level. The software had decided that his choice of language left a lot to be desired, and had edited it.

“Excuse me, Ms. Devereaux,” he said as the program shifted to a lower level. He glanced down at himself. At least he was still in uniform. “Social convention required that I have my e-filters in place, lest I … give offense. But we don’t have time for that nonsense now. What I said, ma’am, was that delay, any delay—giving the matter further study, running numbers, whatever you wish to call it—is irresponsible and stupid. I believe the term my e-filter didn’t like was ‘fucking irresponsible.’”

“I see.” Her own e-filters were in place of course, but they didn’t stop a certain amount of disapproval from slipping through in those two short words. “And just what do you expect us to do about this, General Alexander?”

“A raid, Madam Devereaux.” At a thought, the frozen view from the Argo at the moment of the ship’s destruction vanished, and was replaced by the galactic map he’d been studying before the delegates had arrived. The viewpoint zoomed in on the irregular green glow of human space, on the path of the Argo, and on a tight scattering of red pinpoints marking the nearby systems from which the huntership might have emerged—Nu Andromeda, Epsilon Trianguli, and a few others. “What the Marines call a sneak-and-peek.”

The display continued to animate as he spoke, the viewpoint zooming in until Epsilon Trianguli showed as a hot, white sphere rather than as another star. An A2 type star, Epsilon Trianguli appeared imbedded in a far-flung corona of luminous gas, and even in simulation was almost too brilliant to look at directly.

A hypothetical planet swung into view, a sharp-edged crescent bowed away from the star, attended by a clutter of sickle-shaped moons. A swarm of dark gray and metallic slivers materialized out of emptiness and scattered across the system. Other planets appeared in the distance, along with the gleaming, wedding-band hoop of a stargate.

“First in are AI scouts, to show us the terrain. We also need to know if there’s a stargate in the target system. The scouts will find out if there is a Xul presence in the system, and map it out so we’re not going in blind.”

Obedient to his lecture, a Xul station revealed itself, menacing and black, positioned to guard the stargate. A swarm of new objects entered the scene, dull-black ovoids, descending toward the Xul structure in waves. Pinpoints of white light flickered and strobed against the surface in a silent representation of space combat.

“The Marines go in hot, wearing marauder armor and accompanied by highly specialized penetrator AIs,” Alexander went on. “Details depend on what the scouts turn up, of course, but the idea will be to insert a Marine raiding party into the Xul, grab as much information as we can, and blow the thing to hell.”

On cue, the camera point of view pulled back sharply, just as the Xul base in the scene, in complete silence, detonated—a searing, fast-expanding ball of white light that briefly outshone the brilliant local sun.

“Very pretty,” Devereaux said as the display faded into darkness once more. The noumenal scene flowed and shifted once more, becoming a more conventional virtual encounter space. “But just what would be the point?”

They now appeared to be seated around the perimeter of a sunken conversation pit three meters across, the representation of the Galaxy as seen from above spiraled about itself at their feet. Here, the individual icons all expanded into images of people, though their electronic secretaries and EAs remained visible only as tiny, darting icons of yellow light orbiting their human masters. The walls and ceiling of the room appeared lost in darkness.

“The point, Madam Devereaux, is to avoid being put on the defensive again. We were on the defensive in 2314. You know what happened.”

“Yes,” General Samuels said. “We beat them.”

“At a terrible cost, sir. Earth’s population in 2314 was … what?” Alexander pulled the data down from the Net. “Fifteen point seven billion people. Four billion died within the space of a few hours during the Xul bombardment. Four billion. Exact numbers were never available, given the chaos of the next few decades, but an estimated one to two billion more froze during the Endless Winter, or starved to death, or died of disease or internal electronics failure or just plain despair.”

“We know our history, General,” Devereaux said.

“Then you should know that the human race came within a hair’s breadth of becoming extinct. Over a third of the human race died, murdered by one Xul huntership. One! We were lucky to be able to destroy it. And if General Garroway hadn’t backtracked the Intruder through the Sirius Stargate to Night’s Edge and found a way to take out the base there, we wouldn’t be sitting here now discussing it!”

“And you know, General,” Devereaux said, “that the current political situation may preclude a major operation such as you seem to be suggesting. The Monists and the Starborn both are threatening to side with the Islamic Theocracy. If they do, the Commonwealth will fall.” She spread her hands. “If that happens, how are we supposed to defend ourselves if the Xul do come?”

“I submit, Madam Devereaux, that the Human species right now has more to worry about than the exact nature of God. If we do not take a stand, an active stand, against the Xul threat, if we don’t deal with it now, while we have a chance of doing so, then none of the rest matters. We’ll be settling the question of God’s nature by meeting Him face to face!”

“He does have a point, Marie,” another delegate in the circle said. He wore the uniform and the corona of a Fleet admiral, and the alphanumerics that popped up when Alexander looked at him identified him as Admiral Joseph Mason. As he spoke, the light brightened around him, drawing the eye. “We can’t ignore what’s happened out there.”

“Five hundred light-years, Admiral. It’s so far away.”

“It’s a very short step for the Xul, Marie. We’ve survived so far only because we’ve been lost within … what? Ten million stars, or so. Even the Xul can’t pay close attention to every one. But we know the Xul. We know what they did to the Builders. And to the An. And probably to some ungodly number of other civilizations and species scattered across the Galaxy over the past half million years or so. If they locate Sol and the other worlds of human space, they will do the same to us.”

The light brightened around another delegate. “And I concur, Madam Devereaux.” The speaker was a civilian, his noumenal presentation wearing the plain white robes of a Starborn Neognostic.

“You do, Ari?” Devereaux said, surprised. “I’d have thought you would be solidly opposed to this kind of … of interstellar adventurism.”

“I may be a Starbom,” Arimalen Daley said, inclining his head, “but I’m not stupid. Lieutenant General Alexander is right. We need to be careful in setting our priorities. I believe even our Theocrat friends would agree that there are times when religious or philosophical differences must be set aside for the sake of simple survival.”

Alexander was startled by Daley’s statement, but pleased. He had little patience with religion, and tended to see it as a means of denying or avoiding responsibility. Daley’s response was … refreshing.

He opened a private window in his mind, accessed an epedia link, and downloaded a brief background on the Starborn, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. No … he’d remembered correctly. The Starborn had been around for two or three centuries, but had arisen out of several earlier belief systems centered on The Revelation. For them, all intelligence was One … and that included even the Xul. They opposed all war in general, and most especially war based on a clash between opposing faiths. Within the Commonwealth Senate, they’d been the most vocal of the opponents of the military action against the Islamist Theocracy, for just that reason.

Alexander wondered why Daley had sided with him.

For himself, Alexander had no patience whatsoever with religion of any type. Beginning in the twentieth century, Humankind had been wracked by religious mania of the most divisive and destructive sort. World War III had been brought on by Islamic fundamentalism, but other sects and. religions demanding rigid boundaries and unquestioning obedience to what was imagined to be God’s will had added their share of terror, insanity, and blood to the chaos of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And then had come the discoveries on Mars, of buried cities and the Builders, of the mummified bodies of anatomically modern humans beneath the desiccated sands of Cydonia and Chryse.

Science fiction and the more sensationalist writers of pop-science had long speculated that extraterrestrials had created humans, but now there was proof. The Builders had tinkered with the genetics of Homo erectus in order to create a new species—Homo sapiens. It had always been assumed that if such proof was ever uncovered, it would once and for all end the tyranny and the comfort of religion. If God was a spaceman, there scarcely was need for His church. Religion would die.

Surprisingly, the opposite had happened. Though the older, traditional faiths had been badly shaken, the discoveries on Mars and elsewhere, far from destroying religion, had before long fostered new sects, religions, cults, and philosophies by the dozens, by the hundreds, some of them bizarre in the extreme. Throughout the first half of the new millennium, new faiths had spawned and vied and warred with one another, some accepting the vanished Builders or even the still-extant An or N’mah as gods, creators of Humankind, if not the cosmos. Others—in particular the stricter, more fundamentalist branches of Christianity and Islam—had adhered even more closely to the original texts, and condemned the nonhumans as demons.

Things had stabilized somewhat over the past few centuries. The attack on Earth had killed so many, had so terribly wounded civilization as a whole, that few religions, old or new, could deal with it, save in apocalyptic terms. And when Earth had, after all, survived, when Humankind began to rebuild and the expected second Xul attack had not materialized, many of the more extreme and strident of the sects had at last faded away.

There remained, however, some thousands of religions … but for the most part they fell into one of two major branches of organized spirituality, defined by their attitude toward the Xul. The Transcendents, who represented most of the older faiths plus a number of newer religions emphasizing the nature of the Divine as separate and distinct from Humankind, either ignored the Xul entirely, or associated them with the Devil, enemies of both Man and God.

The Emanists embraced religions and philosophies emphasizing that god arose from within Man, as a metasentient emanation arising from the minds of all humans, or even of all intelligence everywhere in the universe. For them, the Xul were a part of the Divine … or, at the least, His instrument for bringing about the evolution of Humankind. For most Emanists, the key to surviving the Xul was to follow the lead of the An on Ishtar—keep a low profile, roll with the punches, abjure pride and any technological activity that might attract Xul notice. The hope was that, like the Biblical Angel of Death, the Xul would “pass over” humanity once more, as it had before in both recent and ancient history.

While not as widespread as the Transcendents, Emanist religions were popular with large segments of the population on Earth, especially with the Antitechnics and the various Neoprimitive and Back-to-Earth parties. Neognostics like Daley even advocated a complete renunciation of all activities off the surface of the Earth, especially now that the ice was retreating once more.

That was why Alexander—and Devereaux too, evidently—were surprised at his position.

As Alexander closed the e-pedia window, he realized Daley was still speaking, and that he was looking at him as he did so. “Whatever the tenets of my faith might be,” the Neognostic was saying, “Humankind cannot evolve, cannot grow to meet its potential, and can never contribute to the idea we know as God if we as a species become extinct. So long as we remained beneath Xul notice, survival and growth both were possible. But now?” He spread his hands. “I dislike the idea. My whole being rebels against the very idea of war. But … if there is to be war, better it be out there, five hundred light-years away, than here among the worlds of Man.”

“Good God,” General Samuels said in the silence that followed this speech. “I thought it was nuts including a Paxist on the Advisory Council, Ari.” The Paxists included those who believed in peace-at-any-price. “But you’re okay!”

“The Paxists,” Devereaux said sternly, “were invited because they represent the views of a large minority of the Commonwealth population. Very well. General Alexander, thank you for your presentation. The Council will retire now to its private noumenon and vote the question.”

And the Council was gone, leaving Alexander alone in the imaginal room.

If the reaction to Daley’s speech was any indication, though, he would need to begin preparations.

The Marines would be going to war.

6

0810.1102

USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
1512/24:20 local time, 0156 hrs GMT

Garroway opened his eyes, blinked, and flexed his hands. This was … wonderful. The crisp reality of the sensations coursing through his imaginal body was almost overwhelming.

The hellish empty time was over.

“Pay attention, recruit! This is important!”

Warhurst’s order snapped his attention back to the exercise. He tried to let the feelings flow through his mind, but to keep his focus on the scene around him.

The landscape was barren and unforgivingly rugged, a volcanic mountain of black rock and sand cratered and torn by a devastating firestorm and draped in drifting patches of smoke. He was standing in the middle of a battle … an ancient battle, one with unarmored men carrying primitive firearms as they struggled up the mountain’s flank. Gunfire thundered—not the hiss and crack of lasers and plasma weapons, but the deeper-throated boom and rattle of slug-throwers, punctuated moment to moment by the heavy thud of high explosives.

Something—a fragment of high-velocity metal—whined past his ear, the illusion so realistic he flinched. He reminded himself that he had nothing to fear, however. This panorama of blood, confusion, and noise was being downloaded into his consciousness from the RTC historical network, the sights and sounds real enough to convince him he really was standing on that tortured mountainside. But the Marines around him were noumenal simulations—literally all in Garroway’s head. Two days earlier he’d received the nano injections which had swiftly grown into his new Corps-issue headware, and this was his first test of its capabilities.

“Move on up the slope,” Warhurst whispered in his ear. He obeyed, feeling the gritty crunch of black gravel beneath his feet. A Marine lay on his back a few meters away, eyes staring into the sky, a gaping, bloody hole in his chest. Garroway could see bare ribs protruding from the wound.

It’s not real, he told himself. It’s a sim.

“Yeah, it’s a simulation, recruit,” Warhurst told him. Garroway started. He hadn’t realized that the DI could hear him. “But it is real, or it was. These Marines are members of the 28th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division. They really lived—and died—to take this island.”

From the crest of the volcanic mountain, Garroway could see the whole island, a roughly triangular sprawl of black sand, rock, and jungle extending toward what his inner compass told him was the north to northeastern horizon. Offshore, hundreds of ships—old-style seagoing ships, rather than military spacecraft—lay along the eastern horizon. A few moved closer in, periodically spewing orange flame and clouds of smoke from turret-mounted batteries, and the beaches near the foot of the mountain were littered with hundreds of small, dark-colored craft like oblong boxes that had the look of so many ugly beetles slogging through the surf.

“The date,” Warhurst told him, “is 2302, in the year 170 of the Marine Era. That’s 23 February 1945, for you people who still think in civilian. The mountain is Suribachi, a dormant volcanic cone 166 meters high at the southern end of a place called Sulfur Island—Iwo Jima in Japanese. For the past four days the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions, plus two regiments of the 3rd, have been assaulting this unappealing bit of real estate in order to take it away from the Japanese Empire. For two years, now, the United States has been island-hopping across the Pacific Ocean, closing toward Japan. Iwo Jima is the first territory they’ve reached that is actually a prefecture of Japan; the mayor of Tokyo is also the mayor of Iwo. That means that for the Japanese defending this island, this is the first actual landing on the sacred soil of their homeland. They are defending every meter in one of the fiercest battles in the war to date.

“Yesterday, the 28th Marines started up the slope of Suribachi which, as you can see, has a commanding view of the entire island, and looks straight down on the landing beaches. In an entire day of fighting, they advanced perhaps 200 meters, then fended off a Japanese charge during the night. They’ve suffered heavy casualties. Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander, has honeycombed the entire island, which measures just 21 square kilometers, with tunnels, bunkers, and spider holes. The defenders, 22,000 of them, have been ordered to fight to the death … and most of them will.

“This battle will go down as one of the most famous actions in the history of the Corps. In all of World War II, it was the only action in which the Americans actually suffered more casualties than the enemy—26,000, with 6,825 of those KIA. The Japanese have 22,000 men on the island. Out of those, 1081 will survive.

“The battle will last until 2503, a total of thirty-seven days, before the island is declared secure. Almost one quarter of all of the Medals of Honor awarded to Marines during World War II—twenty-seven in all—were awarded to men who participated in this battle.

“Ah. There’s what we came up here to see. …”

Warhurst led the recruits farther up the shell-blasted slope. At the landward side of the summit, a small number of Marines were working at something, huddled along a length of pipe.

“The mountain now, after a fierce naval and air bombardment, appears cleared of enemy soldiers, and several patrols have reached the top. Half an hour ago, a small flag was raised on the summit of the mountain to demonstrate that the mountain has been secured, but now a larger flag has been sent to the top. The men you see over there are part of a forty-man patrol from E Company, Second Battalion, 28th Marines, of the 5th Marine Division, under the command of Lieutenant Harold Schrier.

“Those men over there are Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, PFC Rene Gagnon, PFC Ira Hayes, and PFC Franklin Sousley, all United States Marines. The sixth man is Navy, a Pharmacy Mate—what they later called Navy Hospital Corpsmen, P.M./2 John Bradley.

“Of those six men, three—Strank, Block, and Sousley—will be killed a few days from now, in heavy fighting at the north end of the island. P.M./2 Bradley will be wounded by shrapnel from a mortar round.”

The men completed doing whatever it was they were doing to the pipe. Grasping it, moving together, they dug one end into a hole in the gravel and lifted the other end high. A flag unfurled with the breeze; nearby, one man turned suddenly and snapped an image with a bulky, old-style 2-D camera, while another man stood filming the scene.

The whole flag raising took only seconds. As the flag fluttered from the now upright pipe, however, Garroway could hear the cheering—from other Marines on the crest of Suribachi and, distantly, from men on the lower reaches of the island to the north. The rattle of gunfire seemed to subside momentarily, replaced by a new thunder … the low, drawn-out roar from thousands of voices, so faint it nearly was lost on the wind.

“Have a peek down there on that beach,” Warhurst told them. As Garroway turned and looked, it seemed as though his vision became sharply telescopic, zooming in precipitously, centering on a party of men wading ashore from one of the boxlike landing craft. Two of the figures appeared to be important; they were unarmed, though they wore helmets and life preservers like the others around them. One took the elbow of the other, pointing up the slope toward Garroway’s position. He appeared jubilant.

“That,” Warhurst continued, “is the secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, just now coming ashore with Marine General Holland ‘Howlin’ Mad’ Smith. When they see the flag up here, Forrestal turns to the general and says ‘Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.’”

There was a surreal aspect to this history lesson—especially in the way Warhurst was describing events in the present and in the future tense, as though these scenes Garroway was experiencing weren’t AI recreations of something that had happened 937 years ago, but were happening now.

“As it happens, the future of the Marine Corps was far from secure,” Warhurst told them. “Only a couple of years after this battle, the President of the United States attempted to enact legislation that would have closed the Corps down. He referred to the Marines as ‘the Navy’s police force,’ and sought to merge them with the Army. The public outcry over this plan blocked it … but from time to time, cost-cutting politicians looked for ways to slash the military budget by eliminating the Marines.”

The simulation had continued as Warhurst spoke, the primitively armed and equipped Marines on that volcanic slope continuing to move about as the flag, an archaic scrap of cloth with red and white stripes and ranks of stars on a blue field, continued to flutter overhead.

Gradually, though, the scene began to fade in Garroway’s mind. He was sitting once again in a simcast amphitheater back at the training center on Mars, his recliner moving upright along with all of the others arrayed in circles about a central stage. The image of six men raising a flag continued to hover overhead, a holographic projection faintly luminous in the theater’s dim light.

Warhurst paced the stage, lecturing, but with an animated passion. This, Garroway thought, was not just information to be transmitted to another class of recruits, but something burning in Warhurst’s brain and heart.

“As Forrestal predicted, however,” Warhurst went on, “the Corps did endure for the next five hundred years—and then for over three hundred years after that. For most of that time, the politicians tended to dislike us … or at least they never seemed to know what to do with us. We’ve been on the budgetary chopping block more times than we can count. Civilians tend to like us, however. They see us as the holders of an important legacy—one embracing duty, honor, faithfulness. Semper fi. Always faithful.

“In fact, though, the raising of the flag on Suribachi probably had less to do with the Corps’ survival than did certain other factors. A century after the Battle of Iwo Jima, we left the shores of our home planet, and discovered the Ancient ruins on Mars and on Earth’s moon, and later at places like Chiron and Ishtar. Both the Builders and the An left a lot of high-tech junk lying around on worlds they visited in the past … the Xul, too, for that matter, if you count what we found out on Europa. Started something like a twenty-first-century gold rush, as every country on Earth with a space capability tried to get people out there to see what they could find. Xenoarcheology became the hot science, since it was thought that reverse-engineering some of that stuff could give us things like faster-than-light travel or FTL radio. The Navy, logically enough, became the service branch that ran the ships to get out here … and where the Navy went, the Marines came along. The Battle of Cydonia. The Battle of Tsiolkovsky. The Battle of Ishtar. The Battles of the Sirius Gate, and of Night’s Edge. ‘From the Halls of Montezuma, to the ocher sands of Mars.’ We’ve written our legacy in blood across a thousand years and on battlefields across two hundred worlds.

“And in all that time, and on all those worlds, the Marine Corps has done one thing … what we’ve always done. We win battles!

“And you, recruits, have come here to Mars in order to learn how to do just that.”

Garroway felt a stirring of pride at that—not at the promise that they would win battles, but at the way Warhurst was addressing them now. This was now the twelfth week of training, with just four more weeks to go. At some point during the last couple of months—and Garroway honestly could not remember when—Warhurst had stopped calling the men and women of Recruit Company 4102 children, and started calling them recruits.

Step by step, their civilian individuality had been broken down; step by step Warhurst and the other DIs had been building them back up, forging them into … something new. Garroway wasn’t sure what the difference was yet, but he felt the difference, a sense of confidence, of belonging that he’d never before known.

The feeling that he belonged had just taken a major boost skyward, of course. The nano injected into his system on 0710 had grown into standard-Corps issue cereblink hardware, and now, for the first time in three months, he was again connected.

It had been a rough time without connections—no downloads, no direct comm. Or, rather, downloads and incoming comm messages had entered his brain via his ears and his eyes, without mediation or enhancement by AI software. It had been like starting all over again, learning how to learn, rather than allowing headware and resident AIs to sort and file his memories for him.

He had a new personal electronic assistant, too … or, rather, a Corps platoon EA guide he shared with everyone else in the company. The EA’s name was Achilles; Warhurst had told them to think of him as a kind of narrowly focused platoon sergeant. Achilles was a bit short in the personality department, but the system was very fast, very efficient, and was working hard at its first task, helping him learn how to get the most out of the new headware.

Later, at evening chow, he discovered one down side to Achilles.

“So, whatcha think of the new headware?” he asked Sandre Kenyon, a recruit who’d been born and raised in one of the new arcologies off the coast of Pennsylvania. She’d been a vir-simmer, a programmer of simulation AIs, before she’d joined the Corps. He followed her out of the chow line and toward a couple of empty seats at one of the tables. Noise clattered and echoed around them; meals were among the very few times when recruits were free to socialize with other recruits, at least after the first month of training.

“It’s okay, I guess,” she said. “It’s gonna take some getting used to, though.”

“I know. It’s so damned fast. …”

“It’s also damned creepy,” she told him.

“What do you mean?”

“Having your platoon sergeant perched on your shoulder every minute of every day? Watching everything you do? Even everything you think? And reporting it all back to HQRTC, complete with images in glorious color and infrared? I don’t know about you, Aiden, but there are a few things I do or think about doing that I don’t care to share with half the base, y’know?”

“Oh …”

He’d not thought about that aspect of things, at least not before now.

In fact, privacy was an alien concept in boot camp. Male and female recruits trained together, shared the same barracks, and used the same head. Toilets had stalls but no doors, and no recruit was ever really alone for more than a few moments at a time. In fact, come to think of it, standing barracks fire watch in the middle of the night was probably the closest any recruit came to having some private time—but then you never knew when the sergeant of the guard was going to show up on one of his rounds.

Mostly, it wasn’t a hardship. The recruits were too damned busy, moving at a flat run from reveille to taps every day, for it to be a problem … and most human cultures accepted casual social nudity as the norm.

“Is Achilles listening to you gripe about it now?”

She shrugged. “I asked it. It told me it monitored everyone in the company for breaches of regulations and compliance to orders … but that it didn’t record or transmit anything else. It … it’s a machine. A program, rather, so I guess it shouldn’t bother me. Still … how do we know?”

Garroway began digging into his meal—a nanassembled steak indistinguishable in taste and texture from live steaks culture-grown in the Ring agros. One thing you had to say about the Marines: they fed well.

He assumed Sandre was talking about sex. Technically, fraternization between recruits was forbidden, though in fact the authorities didn’t seem to pay much attention to occasional and harmless breaches of the rules. If a recruit on fire watch was caught in the rack with a fuck buddy, they both would probably be bounced out of the Corps and back to Earth or wherever they’d come from so fast their eyes would be spinning in their heads, but Garroway knew that several recruits in Company 4102 were enjoying one another’s physical companionship—at least if their break-time war stories could be believed.

His only question was how they found the time—or the energy—with the daily schedule that ruled their lives—up at zero-dark thirty, followed by eighteen hours of marching, drilling, classroom work, lectures, testing, and downloading, with lights out at 2200 hours.

Having a personal daemon was nothing new. Most humans had them, the only hold-outs being the various neoluddite or neoprimitive cultures which had abandoned high-tech for religious, esthetic, or artistic reasons. Achilles was a daemon, nothing more. In fact, he seemed just like Aide, except that he was more powerful, faster, and he linked all of the recruits in Company 4102 into a close-knit electronic network.

But he had to admit that Sandre had a point. Having Achilles watching him was just like having Warhurst watching him, except that the watching was taking place every second of every day. His stomach tightened at the thought.

“Recruit Kenyon is correct,” a voice whispered in his mind.

Garroway looked up, startled. “Achilles?”

“What?” Sandre asked. Garroway hadn’t realized he’d spoken the name aloud. He waved his hand back and forth, requesting her silence.

“Affirmative,” the voice continued. “Think of me as a part of yourself not as a spy for your superiors.”

But you do report to the DI shack, don’t you? This time, Garroway thought the question silently, employing the mindspeak he’d always used with Aide.

“Technically, yes, but only in matters involving gross negligence of duty. In any case, Marines are supposed to be of superior moral character. By this point in your training, those with serious moral flaws have already been weeded out.”

“Oh …”

Company 4102 had dwindled a lot in the past few weeks, it was true. Only forty-five recruits remained out of the over one hundred who’d originally mustered at Noctis Labyrinthus. But he’d assumed the DORs—the Drop Out Requests—had quit because they couldn’t get along without their headware.

“That is a large part of it,” Achilles agreed. “One aspect of moral character is the ability to rely on yourself rather than on technology.”

Carefully, Garroway took another bite of faux steak and chewed, thoughtful. Achilles seemed to be a bit more dominant than Aide had been. And the damned thing was reading his thoughts, rather than waiting for him to encode them as mindspeak.

“You will simply have to learn to trust me, Garroway,” Achilles told him. “Trust that I am not sharing your thoughts with others.”

“Unless I deserve it.”

“Do you always talk to yourself?” Sandre asked him.

Achilles, tell her I’m holding a conversation with you.

A moment later, Sandre’s eyes grew very large. “Did you send that?”

He nodded. “Pretty slick, huh?”

“Damn it, Garroway!” she snapped. “Get out of my head!” Abruptly, she stood, picked up her tray, and walked away. Garroway considered calling to her, but decided that using telepathy would just make matters worse.

They were all going to have to work with the new technology for a bit, in order to get used to it.

Exactly, Achilles told him. He could have sworn the AI sounded smug.

Married Enlisted Housing

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