For Brea, as always, my patient and loving muse

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Timeline of the Inheritance Universe

Stranded …

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

Epilogue

By Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

Timeline of the Inheritance Universe
Years before present

50,000,000–30,000,000: Galaxy dominated by the One Mind, sentient organic superconductors with hive mentality. They create the network of stargates across the Galaxy, and build the Encyclopedia Galactica Node at the Galactic Core.

30,000,000–10,000,000: Dominance of Children of the Night, nocturnal psychovores. They replace the One Mind, which may have transcended material instrumentality.

10,000,000 TO PRESENT: Dominance of the Xul, also known as the Hunters of the Dawn. Originally polyspecific pantovores, they eventually exist solely as downloaded mentalities within artificial cybernetic complexes.

Circa 500,000 B.C.E.: Advanced polyspecific machine intelligence later called variously the Ancients or the Builders extends a high-technology empire across a volume of space several thousand light years in extent. Extensive planoforming of Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A, of Mars in the nearby Sol System, and of numerous other worlds. QCC networks provide instantaneous communications across the entire empire. Ultimately, the Builder civilization is destroyed by the Xul. Asteroid impacts strip away the newly generated Martian atmosphere and seas, but Earth, with no technological presence, is ignored. A Xul huntership is badly damaged in the battle over Mars; it later crashes into the Europan world-sea and is frozen beneath the ice. Survivors of the Martian holocaust migrate to Earth and upload themselves into gene-tailored primates that later will be known as Homo sapiens.

10,000 B.C.E.–7500 B.C.E.: Earth and Earth’s Moon colonized by the Ahannu, or An, who are later remembered as the gods of ancient Sumeria. Around 7500 B.C.E., asteroid strikes by the Xul destroy An colonies across their empire. Earth is devastated by asteroid strikes. One colony, at Lalande 21185, survives.

Circa 6000 B.C.E.: Amphibious N’mah visit Earth and help human survivors of Xul attack develop civilization. They are later remembered as the Nommo of the Dogon tribe of Africa, and as civilizing/agricultural gods by other cultures in the Mideast and the Americas.

Circa 6000–5000 B.C.E.: N’mah starfaring culture destroyed by the Xul. Survivors exist in low-technology communities within the Sirius Stargate and, possibly, elsewhere.

1200 B.C.E. [SPECULATIVE]: The Xul revisit Earth and discover an advanced Bronze Age culture. Asteroid impacts cause devastating floods worldwide, and may be the root of the Atlantis myth.

700 C.E.: The deep abyssal intelligence later named the Eulers fight the Xul to a standstill by detonating their own stars. This astronomical conflagration of artificial novae is seen in the skies of Earth, in the constellation Aquila, some one thousand two hundred years later.

The Heritage Trilogy

2039–2042: Semper Mars

2040: 1st UN War. March by “Sands of Mars Garroway.” Battle of Cydonia. Discovery of the Cydonian Cave of Wonders.

2040–2042: Luna Marine

2042: Battle of Tsiolkovsky. Discovery of An base on the Moon.

2067: Europa Strike

2067: Sino-American War. Discovery of the Singer under the Europan ice.

The Legacy Trilogy

2138–2148: Star Corps

2148: Battle of Ishtar. Treaty with An of Lalande 21185. Earth survey vessel Wings of Isis destroyed while approaching the Sirius Stargate.

2148–2170: Battlespace

2170: Battle of Sirius Gate. Contact with the N’mah, an amphibious species living inside the gate structure. Data collected electronically fills in some information about the Xul, and leads to a Xul node in Cluster Space, thirty thousand light years from Sol. A Marine assault force uses the gate to enter Cluster Space and destroy this gate.

2314–2333: Star Marines

2314: Armageddonfall

2323: Battle of Night’s Edge. Destruction of Xul Fleet and world in Night’s Edge Space.

The Inheritance Trilogy

2877: Star Strike

2877 [1102 M.E..]: 1MIEF departs for Puller 695. Battle of Puller 695 against Pan-Europeans. Contact with Eulers in Cygni Space. Battle of Cygni Space. Destruction of star in Starwall Space, eliminating local Xul node.

2886: Galactic Corps

2886 [1111 M.E.]: Raid on Cluster Space by 1MIEF. Discovery of stargate path to major Xul node at Galactic Core.

2887 [1112 M.E.]: Operation Heartfire. Assault on the Galactic Core.

4004: Semper Human

3152: Volunteer elements of the Marine third Division enter extended cybernetic hibernation.

3214: Formation of the Galactic Associative.

4004 [2229 A.M.]: Dahl Incursion. Contact with the Tarantulae. Attack on Xul presence within the Quantum Sea. Xenophobe Collapse.

4005 [2230 A.M.] Re-establishment of the United States Marine Corps.

Stranded …

Behind him, the Samuel Nicholas was fast dwindling to a lopsided disk as Garwe and fifteen other War Dogs hurtled toward Objective Reality. Fusion bursts and antimatter warheads, positron beams, gravitics disruptors, and lasers at x-ray and gamma frequencies crisscrossed the gulf of space between worldlet and asteroid-sized starship, eliciting dazzling flashes and twinkles of light, expanding clouds of dust and white-hot plasma on the surfaces of both. Chunks of molten rock and hull metal boiled off into hard vacuum. The Nicholas wouldn’t be able to take that kind of point-blank bombardment for long.

Which was why, several long seconds later, the Samuel Nicholas vanished, rotating back up into normal four-D space.

And the cloud of Marine fighters, strikepods, and twelve heavy naval vessels were left alone to confront the Xul world.

“Bastards!” Dravis Mortin said over the squadron channel.

“Belay that,” Captain Xander’s voice snapped. “Pay attention to your approach!”

Garroway knew, with the Samuel Nicholas gone, none of the Marines of 1MarDiv would be going home.

We are now on our own …

Prologue

Some three hundred fifty light years from the exact center of the Milky Way Galaxy, the Marine OM-27 Eavesdropper Major Dion Williams forced its way through the howling storm.

The howl, in this case, was purely electronic in the vacuum of space, a shrill screech caused by the flux of dust particles interacting with the Williams’ magnetic shields. But since the tiny vessel’s crew consisted of uploaded t-Human minds and a powerful Artificial Intelligence named Luther, all of them resident within the Williams’ electronic circuitry, they “heard” the interference as a shrieking roar. The tiny vessel shuddered as it plowed through the deadly wavefront of charged particles.

“Sir! There it is again!” Lieutenant (u/l) Miek Vrellit indicated a pulse of coherent energy coming through the primary scanner. “Do you see it?”

“Yeah,” Captain (u/l) Foress Talendiaminh replied. “Looks like a gravitational lensing effect.”

“Yeah, but it’s not noise! There’s real data in there!”

“What do you make of it, Luther?”

“Lieutenant Vrellit is correct,” the AI replied, as the data sang across the ship’s circuitry. “There is data content. I cannot, however, read it. This appears to be a new type of encryption.”

“But the signal’s coming from inside the event horizon!” Talendiaminh said. “That’s impossible!”

“I suggest, sir,” the AI said, “that we record what we can and transmit it to HQ. Let them determine what is or is not possible.”

“Agreed.”

But then, as seconds passed, Vrellit sensed something else. “Wait a second! Anyone feel that?”

“What?”

“Something like …”

And then circuitry flared into a white-hot mist, followed half a second later by a fast-expanding cloud of gas as the Williams began to dissolve.

The monitor’s faster-than-light QCC signals were already being received some twenty-six thousand light years away, on the remote outskirts of Earth’s solar system. The last transmission received was Lieutenant Vrellit’s electronic voice, a shriek louder than the storm of radiation.

“Get! Them! Out! Of! My! Mind! …”

“Star Lord, you are needed.”

Star Lord Ared Goradon felt the odd, inner twist of shifting realities, and groaned. Not now! Whoever was dragging him out of the VirSim, he decided, had better have a damned good reason.

“Lord Goradon,” the voice of his AI assistant whispered again in his mind, “there is an emergency.” When he didn’t immediately respond, the AI said, more urgently, “Star Lord, wake up! We need you fully conscious!”

Reluctantly, he swam up out of the warmth of the artificially induced lucid dream, the last of the sim’s erotic caresses tattering and fading away. He sat up on his dream couch, blinking against the light. His heart was pounding, though whether from his physical exertions in the VirSim or from the shock of being so abruptly yanked back to the rWorld, he couldn’t tell.

The wall opposite the couch glared and flickered in orange and black. “What is it?”

“A xeno riot, Lord,” the voice told him. “It appears to be out of control. You may need to evacuate.”

“What, here?” It wasn’t possible. The psych index for Kaleed’s general population had been perfectly stable for months, even with the news of difficulties elsewhere.

But on his wall, the world was burning.

It was a small world, to be sure—an artificial ring three thousand kilometers around and five hundred wide, rotating to provide simulated gravity and with matrix fields across each end of the narrow tube to hold in the air. Around the perimeter, where patchwork patterns of sea and land provided the foundation for Kaleed’s scattered cities and agro centers, eight centuries of peace had come to an end in a single, shattering night.

The wall revealed a succession of scenes, each, it seemed, worse than the last. Orange fires glared and throbbed in ragged patches, visible against the darkness of the broad, flat hoop rising from the spinward horizon up and over to the zenith, and down again to antispin. Massed, black sheets of smoke drifted slowly to antispin, above the steady turning of the Wheel, sullenly red-lit from beneath. That he could see the flames against the darkness was itself alarming. What had happened to the usual comfortable glare of the cities’ lights, to their power?

“Show me the Hub,” he ordered the room.

Cameras directed at Kaleed’s hub fifteen hundred kilometers overhead showed the wheelworld’s central illuminator was dead. The quantum taps within providing heat and warmth had failed, and the three extruded Pylons holding the Hub in place were dark. There appeared to be a battle being fought at the base of Number Two Pylon, two clouds of anonymous fliers, their hulls difficult to see as their nanoflage surfaces shifted and blended to match their surroundings, were swarming about the base and the column, laser and plasma fire flashing and strobing with each hit.

Damn it … who was fighting who out there?

“Administrator Corcoram wishes to see you, Lord,” his assistant told him as he stared at the world’s ruin. “Actually, several hundred people and aigencies have requested direct links. Administrator Corcoram is the most senior.”

“Put him through.”

The System Administrator appeared in Goradon’s sleep chamber, looking as though he, too, had just been roused from sleep. His personal aigent had dressed his image in formal presentation robes, but not edited the terror from the man’s face. “Star Lord!”

“What the hell is going on, Mish? There was nothing in the last admin reports I saw. …”

“It just came out of nowhere, sir,” Mishel Corcoram replied. “Nowhere!”

“There had to be something.”

The lifelike image of Kaleed’s senior administrator shrugged. “There was a … a minor protest scheduled for nineteen at the public center in Lavina.” That was Kaleed’s local admin complex.

Eight standard hours ago. “Go on.”

“Our factors were there, of course, monitoring the situation. But the next thing socon knew, people were screaming ‘natural liberty,’ and then the Administrative Center was under attack by mobs wielding torches, battering rams, and weaponry seized from Administratia guards dispatched to quiet things down.” The image looked away, as though studying the scenes of fire and night flickering in the nano e-paint coating Goradon’s wall. “Star Lord … it’s the end of Civilization!”

“Get a hold of yourself, Mish. Who are the combatants? What are they fighting about?”

“The stargods only know,” Corcoram replied. He sounded bitter. “Reports have been coming in for a couple of hours, now, but they’re … not making much sense. It sounds like r-Humans are fighting s-Humans … and both of them are fighting both Dalateavs and Gromanaedierc. And everyone is attacking socon personnel and machines on sight.”

“A free-for-all, it sounds like.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

Goradon shook his head. “But why?”

“Like I said, Lord. It’s the collapse of Civilization!”

Which Goradon didn’t believe for a moment. Mish Corcoram could be hyper-dramatic when the mood took him, and could pack volumes of emotion into the utterly commonplace. He was a good hab administrator—the effective ruler of the wheelworld known as Kaleed—but Ared Goradon was the administrator for the entire Rosvenier system … not just Kaleed, but some two thousand other wheelworlds, cylworlds, rings, troider habs, toroids, and orbital cols, plus three rocky planets, two gas giants, and the outposts and colonies on perhaps three hundred moons, planetoids, cometary bodies, and Kuiper ice dwarfs. His jurisdiction extended over a total population of perhaps three billion humans of several subspecies, and perhaps one billion Dalateavs, Gromanaedierc, Eulers, N’mah, Veldiks, and other nonhuman sapients or parasapients.

He could not afford to become flustered at the apparent social collapse of a single orbital habitat.

“Star Lord,” his AI assistant whispered in his ear. “Other reports are beginning to come through. There was some transmission delay caused by the damage to the Hub. It appears that similar scenes are playing out on a number of other system habs.”

“How many?”

“Four hundred seventeen colonies and major bases so far. But that number is expected to rise. This … event appears to be systemwide in scope.”

On the wall, a remote camera drone captured a single, intensly brilliant pinpoint of light against the far side of the Wheel, nearly three thousand kilometers distant … perhaps in Usila, or one of the other antipodal cities. Gods of Chaos … he could see the shockwave expanding as the pinpoint swelled, growing brighter. Had some idiot just touched off a nuke? …

“Star Lord,” his assistant continued. “I strongly recommend evacuation. You can continue your duties from the control center of an Associative capital ship.”

“What’s close by?”

“The fleet carrier Drommond, sir. And the heavy pulse cruiser Enthereal.”

Seconds ago, the very idea of abandoning Kaleed, of abandoning his home, had been unthinkable. But a second nuclear detonation was burning a hole through the wheeldeck foundation as he watched.

The fools, the bloody damned fools were intent on pulling down their house upon their own heads.

“Mish, on the advice of my AI, I’m transferring command to a warship. I recommend that you do the same.”

“I … but … do you think that’s wise?”

“I don’t know about wise. But the situation here is clearly out of control, yours and mine.”

“But what are we going to—”

The electronic image of the Kaleed senior administrator flicked out. On the wall, a third city had just been annihilated in a burst of atomic fury—Bethelen, which was, Goradon knew, where Mish lived.

Where he had lived, past tense.

Goradon was already jogging for the personal travel pod behind a nearby wall that would take him spinward to the nearest port. He might make it.

“What I’m going to do,” he called to the empty air, as if Mish could still hear him, “is call for help.”

“What help?” his AI asked as he palmed open the hatch and squeezed into the pod.

“I’m going to have them send in the Marines,” he said.

It was something Goradon had never expected to say.

1

2101.2229

Associative Marine Holding Facility 4

Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System

1542 hours, GMT

Marine General Trevor Garroway felt the familiar jolt and retch as he came out of cybe-hibe sleep, the vivid pain, the burning, the hot strangling sensation in throat and lungs as the hypox-perfluorate nanogel blasted from his lungs.

The dreams of what was supposed to be a dreamless artificial coma shredded as he focused on his first coherent thought. Whoever is bringing me out had better have a damned good reason. …

Blind, coughing raggedly, he tried to sit up. He felt as though he were drowning, and kept trying to cough up the liquid filling his lungs. “Gently, sir,” a female voice said. “Don’t try to do it all at once. Let the nano clear itself.”

Blinking through the sticky mess covering his eyes, Garroway tried to see who was speaking. He could see patterns of glaring light and fuzzy darkness, now, including one nearby shadowy mass that might have been a person. “Who’s … that?”

“Captain Schilling, sir. Ana Schilling.” Her voice carried a trace of an accent, but he couldn’t place it. “I’m your Temporal Liaison Officer.”

“Temporal … what?”

“You’ve been under a long time, General. I’m here to help you click in.”

A hundred questions battled one another for first rights of expression, but he clamped down on all of them and managed a shaky nod as reply. With the captain’s help, he sat up in his opened hibernation pod as the gel—a near-frictionless parafluid consisting of nanoparticles—dried instantly to a gray powder streaming from his naked body. He’d trained for this, of course, and gone through the process several times, so at least he knew what to expect. Focusing his mind, bringing to bear the control and focus of Corps weiji-do training, he concentrated on deep, rhythmic breathing for a moment. His first attempts were shallow and painful, but as he pulled in oxygen, each breath inactivated more and more of the nanogel in his lungs. Within another few seconds, the last of the gel in his lungs had either been expelled or absorbed by his body.

And his vision was clearing as well. The person-sized mass resolved itself into an attractive young woman wearing what he assumed was a uniform—form-fitting gray with blue and red trim. The only immediately recognizable element, however, was the ancient Marine emblem on her collar—a tiny globe and anchor.

Gods … how long had it been? He reached into his mind to pull up the date, and received a shock as profound as the awakening itself.

“Where’s my implant?” he demanded.

“Ancient tech, General,” Schilling told him. “You’re way overdue for an upgrade.”

For just a moment, panic clawed at the back of his mind. He had no implant! …

Sanity reasserted itself. Like all Marines, Garroway had gone without an implant during his training. All Marines did, during recruit training or, in the case of officers, during their physical indoctrination in the first year of OCS or the Commonwealth Naval Academy. The theory was that there would be times when Marines were operating outside of established e-networks—during the invasion of a hostile planet, for instance.

He knew he could manage without it. That was why all recruits were temporarily deprived of any electronic network connection or personal computer, to prove that they could survive as well as any pretechnic savage.

But that didn’t make it pleasant, or easy. He felt … empty. Empty, and impossibly alone. He couldn’t mind-connect with anyone else, couldn’t rely on local node data bases for information, news, or situation alerts, couldn’t monitor his own health or interact with local computers such as the ones that controlled furniture or environmental controls, couldn’t even do math or check the time or learn the freaking date without going through …

He started laughing.

Schilling looked at him with concern. “Sir? What’s funny?”

“I’m a fucking Marine major general,” he said, tears streaming down his face, “and I’m feeling as lost as any raw recruit in boot camp who finds he can’t ’path his girlfriend.”

“It can be … disorienting, sir. I know.”

“I’m okay.” He said it again, more firmly. “I’m okay. Uh … how long has it been?” He looked around the room. A number of other gray-clad personnel worked over cybe-hibe pods set in a circle about the chamber. Odd. This was not the storage facility he remembered … it seemed like just moments ago. His eyes widened. “What’s the date?”

Schilling leaned forward slightly, staring into his eyes. Her eyes, he noted, were a lustrous gold-green, and could not be natural. Genetically enhanced, he wondered? Surgical replacements? Or natural genetic drift? She seemed to be looking inside him, as though gauging his emotional stability.

“The year,” she said after a moment, “is 2229 Annum Manus, the Year of the Corps. Or 4004 of the Current Era, if you prefer, or Year 790 of the Galactic Associative. Take your pick. Does that help?”

He wasn’t sure. His brow furrowed as he tried to work through some calculations without the aid of his cerebral implant. The numbers were slippery, and kept wiggling out of his mental grasp. “I went under in … wait? I’ve been under for something over eight hundred years?”

“Very good, sir. According to our records, your last period on active duty was from 1352 through 1377 A.M.” Her head cocked to one side. “I believe you called it ‘M.E.’ in your day. The ‘Marine Era?’?”

“?‘A.M.’ means … meant something quite different. Antimatter. Or morning, if you were a civilian.”

She looked puzzled. “Morning? I don’t think I know that one.”

“From ‘antimeridian.’ Before the sun is overhead.”

“Ah. A planet-based reference, then.” She dismissed the idea with a casual shrug. “In any case, you were promoted to brigadier general in 1374, and were instrumental in the victory at Cassandra in 1376. The following year—that would be 3152 by the old-style calendar—you elected to accept a promotion to major general and long-term cybe-hibe internment in lieu of mandatory retirement.”

“Of course I did. I wasn’t even two centuries old.” His eyes narrowed. “How old are you, anyway, Captain?”

She grinned. “Old enough. Older than I look, anyway.”

“Genetic antiagathic prostheses?”

“Some,” she admitted. “There are a fair number of people alive in the Associative now who are pushing a thousand, and that’s not counting uploaders. Partly genetic prosthesis, partly nanogenetic enhancement. And I’ve spent two tours so far inside one of those pods.”

“Really?” He was impressed. “In the names of all the gods and goddesses, why?”

She shrugged again. “Cultural disjunct, I suppose.”

“Copy that.” The gulf between civilian life and life in the Marine Corps had been enormous even back in his day. It might be considerably worse now.

“The Corps is my home,” she added. “Most of my family was on Actinia.”

He heard the pain in her voice, and decided not to question her further on that. Evidently, he’d missed a lot of history. Eight centuries’ worth.

The numbers finally came together for him. “Okay. I’ve been out of it for 852 years. I take it there’s a crisis?”

Again, that perplexed look. “What makes you think that, sir?”

“An old expression, ancient even in my day,” he replied. “?‘In case of war, break glass.’?”

“I … don’t understand, sir.”

“Never mind.” He looked around the chamber that had changed so much in eight centuries. Eleven other pods rested quietly in alcoves around the oval space. His command constellation. The other waking personnel appeared to be working at reviving them. “What’d they do, rebuild the place around us?”

“Moved you to a larger facility, about three hundred years ago. You’re in Eris Ring, now.”

“Huh. We got hibed in Noctis Lab. On Mars.”

“That facility was closed, sir, not long after they brought you up here. The whole of Mars is military-free, now. The Associative’s been downscaling all of the military services for a long time, now.”

“I see.” He was looking forward to catching up on history. It promised to be very interesting indeed. “Eris? A planetoid?”

“Dwarf planet, Sir. Sol system … one of the scatter-disk objects.”

“TNO,” Garroway said, nodding. “I know.” Trans-Neptunian Objects was a catch-phrase for some thousands of worlds and worldlets circling Sol beyond the orbit of Neptune, most beyond even the Kuiper Belt. Eris, in fact, according to history downloads he’d scanned, had been responsible for downgrading another dwarf planet—Pluto—from its former status as a full-fledged planet. That had been over a thousand years ago—no. He stopped himself. Two thousand years ago.

He nodded toward the other personnel working on the silent cybe-hibe pods. “They’re recalling my people?”

“Yes, sir. But the orders were to wake you first. Then your command staff. Protocol. Your brigade will not be revived until you’ve received a full briefing, and give the appropriate orders.”

“Okay. You know, you didn’t answer my question, Captain.”

“Which one, sir?”

“Is there a crisis?”

“So I gather. I don’t have any details, though. You’ll get that in your briefing download.”

“I expect I will.” Carefully, he swung his legs out of the pod recess, his bare feet reaching for the deck. Most of the nanogel was gone, now. He glanced down at himself, then at Captain Schilling. “Hm. I trust there are no nudity taboos in this century.”

She smiled. “No, sir. Nothing like that. But I have a uniform for you, if you want to be presentable for your constellation when they come around.”

“Good idea. But food first, I think. Uh, no … maybe a shower …”

“Both are waiting for you, General. Do you feel like you can stand, yet?”

“Not sure. But I sure as hell intend to try.” His feet found the deck. He swayed alarmingly, but with Schilling’s help, he managed to stay on his feet. She had a floater chair waiting for him in case he needed it, but full muscular control reasserted itself swiftly and he waved it away, preferring to do this on his own if he could. The cybe-hibe procedure permeated the body with molecule-sized machines that did everything from arresting cell metabolism to keeping muscle groups healthy, if inactive. There was some stiffness, and a few unsteady moments as he relearned how to keep his balance, but surprisingly few aftereffects of an eight-century sleep.

Eight centuries? How much had the world, the Galaxy, changed? How much had Humankind changed? When he’d entered cybe-hibe—it seemed literally like just last night—there’d been the bright promise of a new, golden age. The dread, ancient enemy, the xenophobic Xul, had been defeated at last. Across a Galaxy that had seemed a desert in terms of sentient life—where only a handful of reclusive or unusually sequestered intelligent species had survived the Xul predations—more and more nonhuman cultures were being discovered, contacted, and invited to join the loose and somewhat freewheeling association that was then being called the Galactic Commonwealth.

Now it was being called the Associative? There would be other changes, of course, besides the name. He found himself anxious to learn them … as well as a bit afraid.

The shower proved to be a transparent cylinder giving him a choice of traditional water at any temperature, high-frequency sound waves, or total immersion in a thin, hazy nano-parafluid programmed to cleanse his skin while permitting him to continue breathing normally. He chose water, more for the stimulation of the pounding on his skin than anything else. Garroway found he needed the liaison officer’s help, though. Without his implant, he couldn’t interact with the damned shower controls.

When he was clean and dry, Schilling gave him a button-sized pellet that, when pressed against his chest and activated by her thought, swiftly grew into a skin-tight set of dark gray neck-to-soles utilities. It was, he thought grimly, downright embarrassing. Here he was a Marine major general, and he couldn’t even bathe or dress himself without the captain’s help.

Then she led him into the mess hall, and he realized just how much things had really changed as he’d slept down through the centuries. …

The compartment was large and spherical, with much of one entire half either transparent, or, more likely, a deck-to-overhead viewall with exceptional clarity. The view was … stunning, a blue and white swatch of dazzling light, a sharp-edged crescent, arcing away beneath a brilliant, pinpoint sun.

But for a moment, Garroway was utterly lost. It looked like Earth, with those piercing, sapphire blues and swirls of cloud-whites. But the sun was all wrong, far too tiny, far too brilliant, a spark, not a disk.

For just a moment, he wondered if something had happened to the sun during his long sleep. Then he wondered if he’d misunderstood the captain, that this Eris was not the frigid dwarf planet in Sol’s outer system, but an Earthlike world of some other, utterly alien star.

“That can’t be Earth’s sun,” he said, squinting at the pinpoint. “It’s way too bright.” He could see a distinct bluish tinge to the intense white of its glare.

“No, sir,” Schilling told him. She smiled.

“And since when do tiny little icebox planetoids have their own atmosphere and water?”

“Terraforming has come a long way, General,” Schilling told him. “That’s not Sol. It’s Dysnomia.”

“Dysnomia.” He blinked. In his day, Eris had been an ice, rock, and frozen methane worldlet 2500 kilometers in diameter, about eight percent larger than, and 27 percent more massive than, Pluto. Discovered in the early twenty-first century, it had a highly inclined, highly eccentric orbit, but he couldn’t remember the exact numbers without his implant. He knew the place was cold, though, down around twenty-five Kelvins or so, a scant twenty-five degrees above zero absolute. Dysnomia had been a tiny satellite of Eris, like Pluto’s Charon, but smaller, a rock only 150 kilometers across.

“The Eridian satellite,” Schilling told him. “About five hundred years ago, they planted a quantum converter on it and turned it into a microstar. It’s tiny, but it’s only about thirty-seven thousand kilometers from the planet. Orbits once in fifteen standard days. The converter provides enough heat to warm Eris, and the nanoforming matrix is doing the rest.”

“You’re losing me, Captain. They turned a 150-kilometer asteroid into a star, and then … what? Nanoforming?”

“Terraforming, using nanoreplicators and assemblers. Breaking methane, ammonia, and water ice into water, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon.”

“And the star goes around the planet, instead of the other way around?”

“Exactly. Eris still rotates beneath it, though, and has a day …” She paused, closing her eyes as she checked a data base through her implant, “of twenty-eight hours and some.”

He looked into the achingly beautiful blue of the planet’s crescent. “Terraforming a planet doesn’t happen overnight. How long before people are living there?”

“Oh, they’re living there now. Not many … a few hundred thousand. Mostly military at this point. Most of them are Eulers, actually, in the Deeps. The atmosphere won’t be breathable for another few centuries, and the storms are still pretty bad, but they started colonizing it as soon as stable continents emerged from the world ocean.”

“Continents.”

A globe appeared in the air as Schilling sent a request through her implant, blue and brown, without cloud cover.

“Three main continents,” she said, and each highlighted itself on the projection in turn as she named it. “Brown, Trujillo, and Rabinowitz. Those were the discoverers of Eris, way back when. Two minor continents over here … Xena and Gabrielle.” She paused, then frowned. “Strange. No data on where those names came from.”

Garroway thought about this as Schilling led him to a table and two chairs that seemed to grow out of the deck as they approached. The technology had changed, and changed tremendously if Humankind was able now to create stars, even small ones. That was only to be expected, of course. Human technology had been in a rapidly upward-lunging, almost logarithmic curve since the eighteenth or nineteenth century.

He took one of the chairs, as Schilling sat in the other. She placed one hand, palm down, on a colored patch on the table. “What would you like to eat?”

“Captain, I have no idea. Choose something for me.”

A white, plastic hemisphere materialized in front of each of them; seconds later, the hemispheres evaporated, revealing their meals. Garroway wasn’t sure what it was—there was something that might be meat, something else that might be starchy, a third thing that was brilliant green—but he decided not to ask questions. The stuff was edible—in fact, delicious—whatever it was, and that was all he needed to know for the moment.

Other Marine personnel were in the mess hall as well, though the cavernous room was not close to being filled. The others kept their distance, however, though he saw numerous glances and curious stares. He found himself trying to listen in on conversations at the nearest tables. He was curious. How much had Anglic changed in eight centuries? Did they even speak an Anglic-derived tongue, now, or had the vagaries of history brought some other language to the fore?

Again, he decided to wait rather than bombard Schilling with questions. While he could hear voices, the nearby conversations seemed muffled, somehow, and he suspected that some sort of privacy field was blanketing the compartment.

Thirty minutes or so later, he leaned back, watching his empty plate dissolve back into the table surface. “Well, if that was a sample of the food in the forty-first century, I could get to like this time.”

“You’ll like it more with your implant.”

“Eh?”

“You’ll find nanotech is a part of just about everything now, including what you eat. And your implant has programs that let you respond in subtle ways to nano-treated food. Speaking of which … here.” She handed him a small inhaler. He hadn’t seen where she’d been carrying it on that painted-on uniform, and wondered if she’d materialized it out of the table the same way as she’d summoned their meals.

“What’s this?”

“Your new implant. We needed you to get a meal into your stomach first, so the implant nano has some raw material to work with. Just press that tip into a nostril and touch the release.”

He followed her directions. A warm, moist puff of air invaded his sinuses, and he tasted metal.

“The nano is programmed to follow the olfactory nerve into the brain,” she told him. “It knows where to go, and will begin chelating into imbedded circuits almost immediately. You’ll find yourself coming back on-line within an hour or two. Full growth will be completed within twenty hours or so.”

“That’s good.” He was still feeling shaken at the emptiness he felt without an e-connect. Damn, what had people done before cerebral implants? “And this’ll be better than my old one, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. A lot. You’ll be amazed.”

“I don’t know. Takes a lot to amaze me. What about Lofty?”

She cocked her head again. “?‘Lofty?’ Who—”

“My essistant. Personal secretary and Divisional AI. Named for Major Lofton Henderson.”

“Oh, I see. Your personal software has all been backed up in the facility network. You’ll get it all back with the download. Who is Major Henderson?”

“Check your Corps history download, Captain,” he said with stern disapproval. “He was a Marine aviator in the pre-spaceflight era. He commanded VMSB-241 at the Battle of Midway in the year 167 of the Marine Era. Killed in action leading a glide-bomb attack against the aircraft carrier Hiryu. Won a posthumous Navy Cross.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Pardon, sir?”

“Nothing. I just realized that I rattled that off without consulting my implant data base. Maybe there’s hope for me yet.”

“I’m very sure there is, General.”

“So what does a … what did you call yourself? A temporal liaison do?”

“Lots of people are disoriented when they come out of cybe-hibe, sir. And even with the download, they can feel … isolated. Cut off. I’m here as a kind of a guide. I can answer questions. And, well, I know what you’re going through. What you’re feeling. I can reassure you that you’re not as alone as you might feel.”

“If there’s still a Corps, I won’t be alone,” he said. “I confess, though, that I’m a little surprised there still is a Marine Corps. There was talk back in the early thirtieth about disbanding us. The Corpsman who put me under down in Noctis Lab offered to bet me that he’d be waking me up again within the year … that I’d end up being retired, anyway. I take it that didn’t happen?”

“If you’ll check your Corps history, General, you’ll recall that the Marine Corps has always been threatened with disbanding. Why maintain a separate military organization when there’s the regular army?”

That, Garroway thought, was the absolute truth. Since the creation of the Continental Marines in 1775, the Corps had been a kind of bastard unwanted child—except when there was a war on. During peacetime, it was budget battles and second-line equipment, “Truman’s police force” and “in case of war, break glass.” Once the shooting started, though, it was send in the Marines.

In fact, the whole Marine cybe-hibe holding facility was an outgrowth of that millennia-old problem. Even well before the thirtieth century, what Schilling had casually referred to as “cultural disjunct” had been a serious issue within the Corps. Marines tended to stick together, to evolve their own unique culture with their own language and their own ways of looking at the world, and that culture was generally at sharp odds with the local civilian background. The problem had become even worse in the early days of interstellar military operations, when Marine units were packed away in cybe-hibe and deployed to star systems light years away; those units might return to Earth two decades or more after they’d left, aged—thanks to the combined effects of hibernation and relativistic time dilation—only a couple of years. Men and women already isolated from the civilian population by the Marine microculture found themselves even more isolated by twenty years of social change—and the aging or death of any friends or relatives left behind.

Small wonder that Marines tended to form bonded relationships with Marines, that there were traditional Marine family lines going back, in some cases, two thousand years. Garroway’s great-grandfather had been Gunnery Sergeant Aiden Garroway, who’d taken part in the op that had broken the back of the ancient Xul menace at the Galactic Core in the twenty-ninth century. And there were records of Garroways going much, much further back. There’d been a remote ancestor—immortalized in Corps legend as “Sands of Mars Garroway”—back in the mid-twenty-first, even before the first voyages to other stars.

He started to make a mental note to check and see if there were any Garroways around now. He’d had two kids, Ami and Jerret, before his first stint in cybe-hibe. Their mother had discouraged contact with him, damn her, and they’d been distant after the break-up. But maybe enough time had passed for their descendents. …

He shook off the thickening mood, electing instead to stare up at the impossibly blue and white curve of Eris and the tiny glare of Dysnomia, hanging in the sky above the mess deck.

A new century. A new millennium.

He was looking forward to that download.

Upper Stratosphere, Dac IV

Star System 1727459

1820 hours, GMT

The RS/A-91 strikepod plunged out of the upper haze deck into a calm and empty gulf, and Marine Lieutenant Marek Garwe shifted from tactical to optical. Salmon-pink cloud walls towered in all directions, like vast and fuzzy-looking cliffs with gently curved and wind-sculpted faces. The haze layer above was composed mostly of crystals of water ice, scattering the local star’s light, turning the sky a deep, royal blue, with a ghostly halo about the sun.

Below, the cloud canyon yawned into darkness. The next cloud deck was over forty kilometers below, deeply shadowed in the depths beyond the slanting reach of the rays of a distant sun. Intermediate cloud layers indicated updrafts, including a vast spiral in the distance of a storm. Most astonishing was the sheer scale of the vista ahead and below; the opening in the cloud layer appeared to be dozens of kilometers wide and deep, but Garwe’s instrument feeds showed the empty gulf to be nearly four hundred kilometers across.

Dac IV was a gas giant, a little smaller than Jupiter in the distant Sol system, but with the same wind-whipped cloud bands and rotating storm cells in an atmosphere that was 99 percent hydrogen and helium. The 1 percent or so left over was mostly methane and ammonia, plus the poisonous soup of chemical compounds constantly upwelling from the world’s interior that gave the planet’s clouds their spectacular range of color.

Characteristic of most gas giants, Dac IV had no solid surface, which meant that Garwe’s confused and constantly shifting altitude readings were irrelevant; below his hurtling RS/A-91 Starwraith’s hull, the atmosphere grew steadily denser and hotter until it was compressed into metallic hydrogen.

“Tighten up your formation, people,” a voice whispered in his mind. “Objective now reads as 150 kilometers ahead.” Captain Corolin Xander was the CO of Anchor Marine Strike Squadron 340, “The War Dogs,” currently operating as Blue Flight. Her Starwraith was somewhere ahead and off Garwe’s starboard sponson, invisible even to his amplified senses as the squadron plunged toward Hassetas floatreef.

“I’m being painted,” Lieutenant Amendes, in Blue Two, reported. “Intense EM scans, all bands.”

“They can’t be sure of what they’re seeing,” Xander replied. “They may not even be getting anything back.”

“Oh, they see us, all right,” Lieutenant Bakewin said. “They see something. Scans are increasing in power.”

Starwraiths were encased in the latest wrinkle in nanoflage, a layer of active nano designed to render the two-meter craft effectively invisible by bending all incoming electromagnetic radiation around the smoothly curved surfaces. Pod-to-pod communication was strictly quantum nonlocal, meaning there were no transmissions to give the sender away.

But Dac technology was still a major unknown. How the Dacs had even developed technology in the first place—with no mines, no metallurgy, no heavy industry, no fire—was the subject of ongoing xenosociotechnic debate, and the principal reason for the Associative Compound on Hassetas.

The twelve tiny pods comprising Blue Flight leveled off when they reached the expected Hassetasan depth. In popular human thought, gas giants like Dac IV, those located in their star’s outer system rather than in close to their star, were cold … and so they were at the thin, upper layers of their outer cloud decks. The deeper into the atmosphere a flier plunged, however, the thicker and hotter the gas mix became. At this depth, the atmospheric pressure was about eight times human standard, and the temperature outside the Starwraith’s hull hovered at around the freezing point of water. The day, by most human standards, was positively balmy … at least when compared to temperatures higher or lower in the intensely stratified volume of Dac’s turbulent atmosphere.

Ahead, a cloud wall rose like an impenetrable cliff, a vast pink-brown cliff with a looming, mushroom-shaped top, with wind-carved striations running along its face.

“Reduce velocity, Blues,” Xander ordered. “We’re going subsonic.”

The flight plunged into the face of the cloud-cliff, as the individual pods were buffeted somewhat by windstreams whipping around the cloud at 300 kilometers per hour. At eight atmospheres, with an H/He gas mix, the speed of sound was nearly 2400 kph, so the local winds were little more than zephyrs.

The clouds thickened until optical feeds were useless; Garwe shifted again to tactical, though there was little useful information the system could give him now—radiation flux, gas mix and pressure, temperature and windspeed, projected position of the other eleven pods of Blue Flight.

And, ahead, the beacon marking Hassetas.

Moments later, the flight emerged into another crystalline gulf, the interior of a vast spiral of clouds marking a hot updraft from below.

And ahead, an immense, gossamer bubble almost transparent in the sunlight, was the Dac living city called Hassetas.

“Hassetas airspace control,” Xander’s voice snapped out, crisp and concise, “this is Associative Marine Flight Blue on docking approach. Acknowledge.”

There was no immediate reply, and the silence was a palpable, imminent threat. Had the Hassetas crisis worsened during Blue Flight’s descent from Tromendet, Dac IV’s largest moon? There could be no doubt that weapons—highly advanced and lethal weapons—were trained on the tiny Marine pods now approaching the living floatreef.

The Marines had just called the Dacs’ bluff and sent their squadron into the heart of this latest crisis, and now it was up to the Krysni jellyfish—and the sapient floatreef they served—to decide how to respond.

Would it be peace, and an invitation to land?

Or the triggering of a savage curtain of high-energy weaponry?

Garwe found he was holding his breath, waiting for the reply. …

2

2101.2229

Associative Marine Holding Facility 4

Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System

1845 hours, GMT

Trevor Garroway leaned back in a reclining seat grown by Captain Schilling from the deck of the large compartment she called the Memory Room. “You sure we can start this so soon?” he asked her. “You said it would take twenty hours to grow a new implant.”

The easy stuff is already in place, she told him. It took Garroway a moment to realize that she hadn’t spoken aloud, that her mouth hadn’t moved as she’d said the words. His implant was already picking up the transmitted thoughts of others with his implant encoding.

So … can you hear this? he thought, forcing the words out one by one in his mind.

Ouch, yes, she replied. You don’t need to shout. We’re connected over your basic personal link-channel. Others will be added later. You can also use that channel to begin downloading library data. You don’t have much in the way of artificial storage, yet—only about a pic of memory so far—but the link will let you download the gist to your native memory. You’ll just need to review it to see what’s there.

So what memories are you giving me now? he asked.

A general history of the past two thousand years, she told him, with emphasis on the Xul wars and subsequent social and technological development within the sphere of Humankind … what you knew as the Commonwealth. The rise of the Associative. A little bit of Galactic history, as we now understand it. Not much detail, here, not yet … just what you’ll need to put things into context later.

When you finally tell me what the goddamn crisis is that warrants pulling a Marine Star Battalion out of cold storage, he said, nodding. Gotcha.

Exactly. Are you comfortable? Ready to begin?

He took a deep breath as he settled back into the too-comfortable chair. Ready as I can be, Captain. Shoot. …

And the images began coming down, a trickle at first, and then a flood.

It would, he realized, take him a long time to go through these new memories. Each distinct memory, each fact or date or historical event, did not, could not exist in isolation, but was a part of a much larger matrix. Until he had access to a lot more information, these bits and pieces would tend to remain discreet, unconnected, and essentially meaningless within the far vaster and more complex whole.

One thing, though, was clear immediately. The aliens were coming out of hiding.

He already remembered, of course, the history of the Xenophobe Wars. The Xul—electronically uploaded nonhuman sentients who’d apparently been around for at least the past ten million years—had been the dominant Galactic species, taking control of much of the Galaxy from a predecessor species known as the Children of the Night. The Xul had brought some evolutionary baggage forward in their advance to sapience—notably a hard-wired survival trait that led them, in rather overenthusiastically Darwinian fashion, to utterly obliterate any other species that might constitute a threat. The Xul, it turned out, had been the answer to the age-old question known as the Fermi Paradox. In a Galaxy ten to twelve billion years old, which, given the number of planets and the sheer tenacity and inventiveness of life, should be teeming with intelligent species, the sky was curiously empty. When Humankind had first ventured into its own Solar backyard, then on to the worlds of other nearby suns, it had encountered numerous relics indicating that various species had passed that way before—the Cydonian Face on Mars, the Tsiolkovsky Complex on Luna, the planetwide ruins of Chiron. …

Eventually, other species had been encountered, and communications begun: the An of Llalande 21185, low-tech remnants of an earlier, vanished stellar empire; the amphibious N’mah, living a precarious rats-in-the-walls existence inside the Sirius Stargate, again the survivors of a once far-flung network of interstellar traders; the Eulers, benthic life forms from the ocean deeps of a world twelve hundred light years from Sol, with a curiously mathematical outlook on Reality and the technology to detonate stars.

All three species had encountered the Xul scourge, and all three had survived, albeit barely. The Eulers had fought the Xul more or less to a standstill by exploding many of their own stars—creating funereal pyres visible as anomalous novae in Earth’s night skies in the constellation of Aquila, back in the early years of the twentieth century. The N’mah had gone into hiding, deliberately abandoning interstellar travel in favor of survival. The An colony on a gas giant moon had simply been overlooked, and without radio or other attention-getting technologies, had managed to stay overlooked for the next ten to twelve thousand years.

The Xul, it turned out, had possessed a singular blind spot. Though no longer corporeal, existing as arguably self-aware software within huge and complex computer networks, they’d obviously begun as biological life forms—quite possibly as a number of them—arising on worlds that must have been similar in most respects to Earth in terms of temperature range, gravity, and atmospheric composition. Their blind spot was an inability to see outside of the ecological box; they tended to overlook other possible environments that might harbor life. The current An homeworld, for instance, was an Earth-sized moon of a gas giant, heated from within by tidal flexing, but far outside the so-called habitable zone of the system’s cool, red-dwarf star. The N’mah lived inside entirely artificial but necessary structures, the ten- or twenty-kilometer-wide stargates constructed by a far older, long-vanished congeries of star-faring species. And the Eulers, six-eyed tentacled chemovores evolving near deep-ocean volcanic vents, lived under such crushing pressures that they might have remained forever unnoticed by the Xul hunterships if they hadn’t possessed minds brilliant enough, and curious enough, to develop—through artificially crafted intelligent life forms and a patience spanning perhaps millions of years—the technology to venture into interstellar space.

All of that had been well known and understood by the time Garroway had joined the Marine Corps, in the twenty-eighth century. During the next few hundred years of his Marine career, perhaps half a dozen other intelligent species had been discovered—the Vorat, the widely scattered Nathga, the Chthuli. Again, nonterrestrial habitats had kept them hidden from the Xul. The Vorat were thermic chemovores, dwelling on high-temperature, high-pressure worlds similar to Venus in Earth’s solar system. The Nathga were jelly-bag floaters that had evolved in the upper cloud levels of a world like Jupiter, eventually developing the technology that had allowed them to slowly migrate to some thousands of similar gas giants across a good third of the Galaxy. And the Chthuli, like the Eulers, were a benthic species that had colonized the ocean basins of several oceanic worlds.

But across the Galaxy, world after world showed the silent ruins marking the passing of sentient species akin to Humans, in terms of environmental preference and carbon chemistry if not outward form, all blasted into premature extinction by the xenophobic Xul.

Now, however, some twelve hundred years after the final defeat of the Xul at the Galactic Core, hundreds of nonhuman species had been discovered and contacted to one degree or another. Many had joined the original Terran Commonwealth in a kind of Galactic United Nations—the Associative.

Many of the more recently discovered species, however, were so alien that they shared little common ground with humans. Communications were difficult, even impossible, with species that communicated by smell or by changing patterns on their integuments or through subtle modulations of their bodies’ electrical fields, with beings that didn’t understand the concept of union, or with entities that thought so slowly they didn’t even appear to be aware of more ephemeral species flitting in and out about them.

Garroway’s curiosity was piqued as new memories surfaced of strange cultures and alien biologies. He tried querying the data base, hoping to get imagery of some of these beings … then realized his curiosity would have to wait until his implant had grown in fully. He didn’t have that capability yet.

His military training noticed one important difference between the Associative and the old Commonwealth. There no longer was such a thing as “human space” … or borders between stellar nations. While there were interstellar empires out there, few individual species competed for the same type of real estate, and the “territories” of dozens of different species overlapped. It had been centuries before the Nathga were discovered adrift within the atmospheres of gas giants inside star systems already colonized by humans. The concept of distinct borders had been lost over half a millennium ago.

How, Garroway wondered, did governments control their own volumes of space? Did they even try … and what changes did that mean for military strategy? For that matter, if there was little or no competition between governments, why was there a need for the military at all?

And why was there still such a thing as the Marine Corps?

Surprisingly, he found himself little impressed with the purely technological advances of the past eight hundred years. Most of what he was seeing as new memories continued to surface were further developments of old themes. Interstellar travel still required a mix of the Alcubierre Drive and the huge stargates left behind by a vanished, Galaxy-spanning culture. Quantum power taps, much smaller than the ones Garroway had known, still provided the vast quantities of energy necessary for FTL travel. Nanotechnology had continued its inexorable advance toward the ever-smaller, ever-smarter. Perhaps the most notable technological advances had come in the fields of health and medicine. Some of what he was seeing now he didn’t begin to understand. What the hell was mindkeeping, anyway? Or upload therapy? …

The Xul threat, he noted, had not entirely vanished after the climactic battle at the Galaxy’s core two decades before he’d been born. Xul nodes—local networks and fleet centers where they’d kept watch over the Galaxy for developing technic cultures—continued to be discovered from time to time, and had to be eliminated one by one. However, thanks to data retrieved from the Galactic center, Xul codes, software, and upload technology all were now well-enough understood that the ongoing mop-up had been turned over to AI assault units. Unmanned probes mimicking Xul hunterships would approach a target system and infect the local node with nanotech devices allowing the assault unit to literally reprogram the local Xul reality. When incoming data suggested that there was a threat that needed to be eliminated, the Xul virtual reality was simply rewritten on the fly to prove that the threat had already been eliminated.

And so far, the technique appeared to be working. There’d been no new Xul incursions in eight hundred years, and hundreds of Xul bases had subsequently been infiltrated and shut down from within. No new Xul nodes had been discovered in over two centuries, and most people thought that the last of the monsters had been found and destroyed.

Garroway knew better than to get too excited about that. The Galaxy was an extraordinarily huge place, and more Xul nodes could be—almost certainly were—still out there, lost somewhere within that vastness of four hundred billion suns.

How’s it going, General? Schillng’s voice said, overriding the torrent of memories.

Okay, I guess, he replied. Damn, there’s a hell of a lot. …

He felt her mental smile. A lot can happen in eight hundred fifty years, in a collective culture that numbers in the hundreds of trillions of entities. Do you have any questions?

Not yet. I don’t know enough to know what to ask.

Okay. I’ve got a new download here. This one is mission specific. See what you think.

A moment later, Garroway came up for air. “Oh, gods,” was all he could say.

The Xul he’d known had possessed one striking weakness. Different nodes were slow to share data, and individual nodes could be slow—centuries, sometimes—in responding to a perceived threat. They also didn’t change. Tactics that had worked for millennia were not discarded, not changed, when opponents learned how they worked. It was one of the very few advantages Humankind had enjoyed in the long conflict, and the Marines had used it to their tactical advantage time after time.

According to this new download, though, the very worst had happened.

At long last, the Xul were adapting to the new situation with radically new tactics.

Hassetas, Dac IV

Star System 1727459

1850 hours, GMT

Garwe’s RS/A-91 Starwraith strikepod was more than a space-capable fighter, and more than Marine combat armor. Just two meters long, it was just large enough inside to accommodate a single Marine in coffin-like closeness, packed in acceleration gel and hardwired into the unit’s AI hardware. It was shaped like an elongated egg, with smooth-flowing bulges and swellings housing drive components and weaponry. Each was powered by a tiny quantum power tap, and used base-state repulsor agrav both for propulsion and to allow the craft to hover in place. They could not travel faster than light—Alcubierre Drive technology still required far more power than a ten-kilo QPT could provide—but they had virtually unlimited range and endurance. In one celebrated instance, a piece of Marine lore, a Marine named Micuel Consales had been stranded in a hostile star system by the destruction of the Marine combat carrier Vladivostok. He’d programmed the capsule to put him into deep cybe-hibe and accelerate to near-light velocity. The pod had been retrieved ninety-eight years later as it approached the nearest friendly base, and Consales had successfully been revived.

That had been nearly four hundred years earlier, and the technology had improved since then. A strikepod couldn’t go up against a capital ship, but it was fast, maneuverable, and damned hard to track, which made it a key component in the modern Marine arsenal. They could also be handled remotely, in certain circumstances, which could be a real advantage.

At the moment, Garwe and fifteen other Marines, each wearing an RS/A-91 strikepod, were approaching the Hassetas floatreef, which filled the sky ahead of them.

One of the genuine shocks of galactic exploration had been the discovery that even gas giants like Sol’s Jupiter could harbor life. True, in an atmosphere that was mostly hydrogen, with no solid surface, with fierce electromagnetic radiation belts, and with wind speeds that could approach six or seven hundred kilometers per hour, that life was going to be radically different from anything humans were familiar with.

But being different had kept them undiscovered by the Xul and other predators.

Dac IV’s native civilization had arisen from a close symbiosis between two evolving life forms—the Krysni and the Reefs.

The Reef was a vast bubble of tough but extremely light tissue, thirty kilometers or more across, and from a distance appearing as insubstantial as a soap bubble. Hanging below like rain shadow beneath a thunderhead was the living part of the Reef, a kind of aerial jungle growing on and within the tangled mass of tentacles trailing beneath the main gas bag. Exothermic chemistries heated the hydrogen within the gas bag, providing lift; hydrogen jets provided some directional movement, enough, at any rate, to let the vast creature steer clear of downdrafts that would drag it into the ferociously hot, high-pressure depths of the atmosphere.

Within the floatreef’s remote evolutionary past, the tentacles would have evolved to capture smaller, more maneuverable fliers passing through the reef’s shadow. Now, they were an immense and inverted forest providing habitats for tens of thousands of species. Hanging among the thicker tentacles were feeder nets, sheets of closely woven tentacle-threads that filtered organic material out of the atmosphere. Modern floatreefs were skygrazers, inhaling clouds of sulfur- and phosphorus-rich, locust-sized drifters called irm, the Dac equivalent of plankton or krill in distant Earth’s oceans.

It was an evolutionary panorama relatively common throughout the Galaxy. A majority of Jovian-type gas giants possessed life, it had turned out, and the environmental constraints required that life to follow more or less similar patterns of form and function. The ten-kilometer montgolfiers of Jupiter had first been discovered late in the twenty-fourth century.

Far more rarely, gas giant ecosystems evolved intelligence. In Jupiter and most other gas giants, intelligence was an unnecessary luxury; grazers didn’t need much in the way of brains to inhale clouds of drifting organics. But in Dac and a few hundred other gas giants discovered so far across the Galaxy, competition, the need to anticipate and avoid storms and downdrafts, and the elusive nature of local food animals had led to sentience at least as great as that of the extinct great whales of old Earth, and often to minds considerably greater and more powerful.

In Dac, according to the mission briefing downloads, there were at least two intelligent species living in close symbiosis—the floatreefs themselves and the Krysni.

Lieutenant Marek Garwe hovered vertically now in his Starwraith, half a meter above the deck of the Hassetas visitor tree house. The platform, constructed entirely of materials imported from distant, more solid worlds, was a good two hundred meters across, anchored against one of the major trunk-tentacles, three-quarters shrouded by the tentacle forest, and including a ramshackle assortment of buildings designed to accommodate each of seven or eight major biochemistries. Officially, the tree house was the offworlder compound, the reception center and living quarters for official delegations from other worlds to Dac. Currently, there were 224 visitors to the gas giant, including 57 humans of various species. The offworlders included Associative representatives, cultural liaisons, xenosophontologists and other scientific researchers, and formal diplomats.

Facing the twelve Marine wraiths were some tens of thousands of angry Krysni. Exactly what they were angry about had yet to be established. The call from the Dac offworlder compound, though, had been urgent, almost panicky. Four offworlders, all of them humans, had been killed by a sudden rising among the Krysni, and the remainder were terrified that the same was about to happen to them. Anchor Marine Strike Squadron 340 had been deployed from Laridis, some three hundred light years distant, to Tromendet in the Dac IV satellite system two days before. As the situation in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere deteriorated, the War Dogs had been ordered in.

The Marines floated above the compound deck, now, facing the tentacle jungle, a near-solid wall of intertwining tubules ranging in size from main trunks nearly a hundred meters thick to slender threads, writhing and twisting in a constant background of motion. Within the net of tentacles were masses of Dacan—or, more properly, Hassetan—flora: pinkweed, Dacleaf, methane bloom, gas pods, and myriad others, most either orange or purple in color, with smaller amounts of pink and red. And it was within this wall of mottled and rustling vegetation that the Krysni mob had sequestered itself, shrieking in their piping, hydrogen-thin keenings and whistlings, the calls a cacophony of furious invective and hate. What the hell, Garwe wondered, had gotten into the simple-minded creatures?

“Hold your fire,” Captain Xander ordered. “Let’s see if they’ll talk to us.”

“I don’t know, Skipper,” Lieutenant Palin, Blue Five, said. “They don’t look very friendly.”

A single Krysni looked a bit like a terrestrial octopus about a meter long, but with a body that expanded or contracted at will like a variable-pressure balloon. Like their huge co-symbiote, the floatreef, they were balloonists, suspended from organic sacs of body-heated hydrogen that let them drift in the upper Dacan atmosphere, their three large, black eyes and cluster of feeding, sensory, and manipulative tentacles dangling below.

Garwe and the other Marines of Blue Flight had downloaded complete work-ups on the Krysni and the floatreefs, of course, as soon as they’d received their mission orders. One line of reasoning held that the Krysni were juvenile floatreefs, but few modern xenosophontologists accepted the notion. There were billions of Krysni, none more than a meter to a meter and a half in length, and perhaps twelve thousand floatreefs scattered through the vastnesses of the upper Dacan atmosphere, none less than ten kilometers across. If the one grew into the other, there ought to be a few intermediate sizes as well.

The likeliest theory was that the two were related but separate species, and that they existed in a close symbiosis. The floatreef took its name from terrestrial coral reefs, not because it looked like one, but because, like a marine reef, it provided a unique and stable habitat for a vast and complex ecology living within and around it. The reef provided food and shelter for the vulnerable Krysni, while the Krysni herded and cultivated the complex zoo of Dacan life within the floatreef’s inverted forest, protecting their vast and sapient habitat from attack like sentient white blood cells. While the Krysni could float free, their preferred habitat was within the forest, their float bags flaccid as they used their tentacles to move through the tangle of vegetation and living branches of the undereef.

“This is Captain Xander, Associative Marine Force,” the squadron CO said over the local Net frequency for the compound. “Who’s in charge here?”

“I don’t think any of us is in charge, exactly …” a voice replied.

“Then you are, now,” Xander replied. “Who are you?”

“Vasek Trolischet,” the voice said. “I’m the senior xenosoph here.”

Blocks of data came up in a window within Garwe’s mind, streaming through from the compound’s data base. There was a vid, too, of a bald, dark-skinned human male with dazzling golden eyes. No, Garwe corrected himself. Not completely human, but a genegineered subspecies, an s-Human, Homo sapiens superioris. And apparently she was female.

Shit, a supie, one of the Marines broadcast on the squadron backchannel. Just fucking great.

“What happened here?” Xander asked the compound spokesperson.

“I don’t know.” The supie’s words were clipped, tight, and rapid-fire, as though her time sense had been jacked into overdrive. “The baggies just went crazy! Attacked our research team while they were trying to get language samples, and tossed two of them over the edge! Then a whole mob swarmed in and got two more of our security team before anyone knew what was going on!”

“There had to be a reason,” Xander said, deliberately transmitting at a slower pace. “Do you have a translation frequency?”

“Yes, but their attempts at communication are still quite scrambled. Our heuristic algorithms are necessarily incomplete.”

Garwe had to pull a definition for “heuristic” from his implant AI, and even then wasn’t sure he understood how the person was using the word. The damned supies enjoyed talking above the heads of others, especially norms, and scuttlebutt around the barracks had it that they liked flaunting their so-called superiority.

An astronomical IQ hadn’t stopped this one from getting into bad trouble, though. The Krysnis were beginning to advance over the tree house deck, inflating their bodies to taut, pale-blue bubbles over a meter across and drifting slowly toward the Marine line.

“Hold your fire,” Xander repeated. “I don’t think they’re armed.”

“They have lots of arms, Skipper,” Lieutenant Malleta said, the nervousness in his voice at odds with the attempt at a joke. There were hundreds of the creatures in a mass in front of the Marines, now, their inflated bodies bumping and jostling with one another as they drifted forward.

“Halt!” Xander barked, speaking Standard, but the transmission translated to a sharp chirp by the translation algorithm from the compound. It sounded, Garwe thought, like the unpleasant squeak of a couple of rubber balloons rubbed together.

“Hey, Captain?” Lieutenant Bollan asked. “Those things are full of hydrogen, right? If we shoot ’em—”

“Use your head, Bollan,” Xander replied. “There’s no oxygen in the air to burn. No fire. No hydrogen explosion, okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

Garwe had been thinking about that unpleasant possibility as well, and was able to relax a bit. The captain was right. Shoot one of those gas bags with an electron arc and the thing might pop, but it wouldn’t go up in flames. The entire ecosystem within this world’s atmosphere relied on metabolic processes that took in methane and ammonia, metabolized them for carbon and the nitrogen, and gave off hydrogen. Oxygen was present, but only as a part of trace chemical compounds like water vapor, carbon dioxide, or sulfuric or nitric acids. Fires needed free oxygen to burn, and that just wasn’t going to happen in the reducing atmosphere of a gas giant.

The mass of Krysni continued to drift forward. “Shoot them, Xander!” the s-Human was shouting over the link. “Shoot the little gasbag smuggers!”

An indicator light went on in Garwe’s in-head display, indicating that Lieutenant Sanders was charging his primary weapon; a thought would trigger it. “Belay that, Sanders!” Xander snapped. “All of you! Primaries on safe!”

Reluctantly, Garwe safed his weapons. Marine battlepods should be strong enough to protect them from anything this crowd could throw at them.

Starwraith design, actually, was based on the robotic combat machines developed by the Xul. Normally the outer surface was smooth and unadorned, marked only by a dozen or so randomly placed lenses of various optical and electronic scanners. At need, Garwe could extrude a number of manipulative tentacles, heavier graspers, or weapons, the members growing out of the pod’s surface through nanotechnic hull flow and controlled directly by his thoughts. The pod was actually extraordinarily plastic, capable of assuming a wide range of shapes limited only by its total mass of about two hundred kilos, and the need to maintain a roughly human-sized and -shaped inner capsule to protect the wearer/pilot.

Each pod also possessed a number of high-tech defense systems, and Marine training included long hours of practice in the pod-encased equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.

Again, Xander addressed the crowd. “You are trespassing on diplomatic territory!” she called, the translation going out as shrill chirps and whistles. “Leave this area at once! Return to your reef—”

And then the jostling, bumping mob surged forward, each Krysni launching itself on a jet of hot hydrogen.

And the Battle of Hassetas had begun.

3

2101.2229

Associative Marine Holding Facility 4

Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System

1858 hours, GMT

“According to this,” Garroway said aloud, “the Xul have been caught counterinfecting our nets. How long has that been going on?” He opened his eyes, emerging from the sensory and data immersion of his new implant.

“A couple of centuries at least,” Schilling told him. “It’s been exploratory stuff, mostly, as if they weren’t quite sure who or what we were.”

“Nonsense! The bastards were at war with us. …”

“From our point of view, General, yes. But not from theirs.”

“Wait a sec, Captain. I’m missing something here. How could the bastards be waging an interstellar war and not be aware of it?”

Schilling cocked her head. “Just how much did your age know about the Xul, General?”

The bulkheads of the Memory Room were at the moment set to display a panorama of the Galaxy as viewed from somewhere just outside and above the main body. Garroway couldn’t tell if it was a high-resolution computer-generated image, or an actual camera view from out in the halo fringe, but either way it was breathtakingly beautiful. The soft glow of four hundred billion stars shone behind Schilling’s head, a radiant corona of stardust.

Watch yourself, Trevor, he told himself. You’ve just been hibed for way too long. A pretty girl, romantic lighting …

Then he wondered if he’d just transmitted that thought. This new hardware was going to take some getting used to.

If Schilling had mentally heard him, she gave no sign. She merely watched him, backlit by the eternal curves of the galactic spiral arms, waiting.

“The Xul?” he said. “Not a lot about their origins, really. Uploaded mentalities. They must have been a technic civilization like us, once, but at some point they embraced a kind of immortality by turning themselves into patterns of data—software, really—running on their computer networks. The xenosoph theory I was taught was that when they were biologicals, before they even achieved sentience, they evolved a hyper-Darwinian survival tactic—an extreme racial xenophobia that led them to wipe out anyone who might be or might become a threat. And when they uploaded themselves, they took with them their hardwired xenophobia. And that turned out to be the answer to the Fermi Paradox.”

Schilling nodded. “We know it as the ‘Galactic Null Set Problem.’ The Galaxy apparently empty of technic civilization.”

“Okay. Before we got off of our world, though, we didn’t know what the answer was. There were lots of possible explanations. Maybe civilizations routinely destroyed themselves as they developed bigger and badder weapons. Maybe the only way to survive for millions of years was to develop a completely static, non-expansive culture that stayed on the home planet contemplating its collective navel. Maybe all of the rest simply never developed technology as we understand it, or never moved out of the Stone Age. Or, just maybe, we humans were the first, the only civilization to make it to the stars.” He shrugged. “Somebody had to be the first.”

“And then we found out we weren’t the first.”

“Right. Ancient ruins on Earth’s moon, on Mars, on the earthlike worlds of nearby stars. And, buried beneath the ice covering one of Jupiter’s moons, we found The Singer. A Xul huntership, trapped in the Europan world-ocean for half a million years. And eventually we did encounter other civilizations. But apparently the Xul had been hovering over the entire Galaxy for … I don’t know. A million years?”

“We think at least ten million, General.”

“Okay, ten million years. So the Xul are sitting out there in their network nodes, just listening. When a radio signal suggestive of technic life comes in, they would trace it back to the source and smack the planet with a high-velocity asteroid.

“You people will be more up on this stuff than me. But we know a kind of Galactic Federation of beings we called the ‘Builders’ or the ‘Ancients’ were genegineering Homo sapiens and terraforming Mars half a million years ago, and had built planetwide cities on Chiron and a number of other extrasolar worlds. Along came the Xul and—” Garroway slapped the back of his hand, as though swatting a mosquito. “The Builders were wiped out. Then about ten thousand years ago, an enterprising interstellar empire had enslaved much of humankind and set themselves up as the gods of ancient Sumeria. Along came the Xul and—” He slapped his hand again. “And apparently the Xul have been doing this for most of their history, and across most of the Galaxy. Now tell me how they could do that and not be waging war against us and every other emergent technological civilization in the Galaxy.”

“When you hit your hand just now, General … like you were swatting a fly?”

“Yes.”

“When you swat a fly, are you at war with it?”

Garroway thought about this. “Oh. You’re saying they’re so advanced—”

“Not really,” she told him. “They might’ve been around for ten million years, but the Xul haven’t advanced technologically at anything like our pace. In fact, they’re actually not that far ahead of us in most respects today. We’ve begun uploading personalities into computers ourselves, did you know?”

He scanned quickly through some of the historical data he’d just downloaded. “Ah … I do now.” His eyebrows arched in surprise. “Shit! Humans who live on the Net. You’ve given them a species name of their own?”

“Homo telae,” she said, nodding. “?‘Man of the Web,’ which in this case means the electronic web of the Galactic Net. Actually, we learned how to upload minds partly from the Xul, inferring parts of the process from what we knew about their technology, and doing some reverse engineering from captured hunterships. In any case, we can pattern a person now and upload her to a virtual electronic world. Her body can die, but the mind, the personality, everything that made her her is saved, and lives on.”

“If you call that living,” Garroway said.

“So far as the uploaded individuals are concerned, they’re alive,” she told him.

Almost, he asked her if the uploaded personality really was the same as the living mind. As he saw it, the original mind died with the body; what was saved was a back-up, a replica that, with a complete set of memories, would think it was the original … but if that was immortality, it was an immortality that did not in the least help the original, body-bound mind. There’s been a lot of speculation about the process, though, back in the thirty-second and thirty-third centuries, he recalled, and some people tended to get pretty animated in their insistence that if the backed-up personality was the same as the original in every respect, it was the original.

Garroway had never understood the fine points of the theory, though, and had little patience with philosophy. Evidently, though, speculation had become reality, and enough people had opted for the technique to justify inventing a new species of humanity to describe them. That made sense, he supposed, given that one definition of species was its inability to interbreed with other species. A member of Homo telae, living its noncorporeal existence up on the Net, certainly wasn’t going to be able to produce offspring by mating with Homo sapiens.

“The point is,” Schilling told him, “the Xul are barely aware of us. Certain parts of the entire Xul body react to us the way your toe might twitch when an ant walks across it, or the way you might swat that fly without really thinking about what you’re doing.”

“So the Xul are some kind of group mind, a metamind?” That had been a popular theory about them back in his day.

“Not quite. They seem to function as what we call a CAS, a Complex Adaptive System. That’s a very large organization made up of many participants, or agents … like termite communities in Earth, or a hurricane.”

“You’re saying they’re not intelligent? They build starships, for God’s sake!”

“There are different kinds of intelligence, remember. Individual Xul may be what we think of as intelligent beings, but for the most part they’re locked into their virtual worlds and unaware of what we would call real. The group-Xul presence, the meta-Xul, if you will, is more an expression of the original Xul instincts, their xenophobia in particular. Even their construction of starships is probably completely automated by now—we’ve never found a Xul shipyard, remember—or they may all be relics of a much earlier age.”

“But … we’ve eavesdropped on them, Captain. We know they have us catalogued as a threat. They know our home world … hell, they bombarded Earth in 2314. How can they not be aware of us?”

“We’ve been sending our AI probes into Xul nodes for almost two thousand years, now, and we’ve done a lot of listening. There are … call them different levels of awareness. One Xul node might learn about us, but they were always slow to share with the others. Together, they were still driven by their original xenophobia, but taken in isolation, individual nodes don’t seem to really be conscious. Most of their defenses are automated. We know that within one node, or aboard one starship, they arrive at decisions through a kind of chorus of thoughts and counterthoughts until they reach a consensus.”

“The Singer,” he put in. “Europa.”

“Exactly. But individual Xul nodes tend to be pretty isolated from one another—minimum internodal communication across a widely distributed net—and the Galaxy is too big to allow that kind of consensus on a specieswide scale. From the point of view of the species, of the CAS, they’re all blissfully living a near-eternal existence in their own virtual universe, and once in a while we run across their toe and make it twitch.”

“That … is a rather uncomfortable image,” Garroway said slowly. He’d been more comfortable thinking of the Xul as a conventional enemy, an interstellar empire seeking to exterminate Humankind. The mental picture Schilling invoked was of something much, much larger, more powerful, and potentially far more dangerous than a mere alien interstellar empire. The fact that the Xul as a Galaxy-wide CAS hadn’t yet put all the pieces together implied that some day they would.

If the Xul ever got their act together and thought and moved as a species, there might be little that Humankind could do to fight back.

“As we understand the Xul now,” Schilling told him, “most of their original uploaded mentalities, the governing choruses, are … aware of what goes on outside their virtual worlds, but not really a part of it, do you see? The minds that control their hunterships and probes, the minds we’ve been up against in combat, all of those are either copies of the original minds, or AI.”

“Artificial intelligence. What’s the difference between an uploaded electronic mind and an artificial one?”

“Good question. Maybe none. The two may be completely interchangeable within what passes for Xul society. Especially when the ability to upload a conscious mind brings with it the ability to copy a conscious mind, to replicate it as often as needed, and to tweak it, to change it from iteration to iteration.”

“So the original Xul minds form the basis of the AI infrastructure, but they fill in with copies and AIs.” He was still thinking about it in classical military terms. No matter how many casualties humans inflicted on the Xul, they could fill in the gaps in an eye’s blink, simply by running off more copies of themselves.

“We believe so.”

“How the hell do you fight an enemy like that?”

“Well, we’ve been using our own AI assault complexes to take down Xul nodes as we discover them. They’re programmed to integrate themselves with the Xul AI software within a target node and gradually take it over, substituting our own virtual reality for theirs.”

“Really?” The concept was intriguing.

“So far as the Xul minds within the target node are aware, everything’s going fine, they’ve stamped out all possible threats to their existence, and there’s nothing out there to upset their poor, xenophobic sensibilities. They get routine—and negative—reports from their probes and listening stations, routine comm traffic from other nodes, everything’s fine. And our AIs are in a position to intercept any incoming data that says otherwise, or be aware of any decision by the node’s chorus to go out looking for trouble. They could even shut the node down completely, if need be. Literally cut their power and turn them off.”

“Why don’t you? Turn them all off, I mean.”

She looked uncomfortable. “Genocide, you mean.”

“If it’s a matter of survival for Humankind … yes.”

“We can’t do that!”

“Why not? I’m not even sure electronic uploads qualify as life.”

“Members of Homo telae would object to that, General. So would most members of our AI communities.”

“But their survival is at stake, too, damn it!” He felt exasperation building up, threatening to emerge as raw fury. How could he make her understand? No Marine he knew liked the idea of wholesale genocide, but when your back was up against the wall, you did what you had to do to survive.

She sighed. “That … option is debated from time to time. It comes up from time to time as a possible strategy. But there’s a strong egalatist faction within the Associative government—”

“?‘Egalatist?’?”

“All intelligence is equally valid, no matter what the shape of the body that houses it. And many Associative species—many human religious factions, too—think the Xul are a legitimate sapient life form, and that wiping them out is the same as genocide.”

“Hell,” Garroway said. “The bastards have tried to pull the plug on humans often enough in the past few thousand years. Maybe we should pull the plug on them. This is war.”

“The concept of war may be out of date, General,” Schilling said. “If we can contain the Xul without switching them off … wouldn’t that be better? Especially if we can eventually find a way to reason with them? Cure their xenophobia, and bring them into the Associative?”

Garroway wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. “Maybe. …”

“The Xul aren’t evil,” Schilling said. “Very, very different, yes. And they have a worldview that makes it tough to reason with them on human terms. But they would have a lot to contribute to Associative culture.”

“Listen, if you people are so all-fired eager to make friends with those things, why’d you bring me out of cold storage?”

“Because the containment may be failing,” Schilling said. “We have intelligence from several sources that suggests that, just as we’ve been infiltrating their systems electronically, they’ve been infiltrating ours.

“And just the possibility that they’ve begun reacting to us coherently has scared the shit out of some of us. …”

Hassetas, Dac IV

Star System 1727459

1901 hours, GMT

The Krysni mob, a wall of gas bags and writhing tentacles, lunged toward the Marine line. Garwe saw a telltale warning wink on within his in-head displays, and read the data unscrolling beside it.

“I’m getting a power spike, Captain!” he shouted. “The bastards are armed!”

“Weapons free!” Xander called.

With a thunderclap, a searing, violet beam snapped in from the jungle wall to the left, washing across Lieutenant Wahrst’s strikepod in coruscating sheets and arcing forks of grounding energy. The smooth surface of her pod silvered, then seemed to flow like water as internal fields and nanotechnics shifted to shunt aside the charge.

The attacking wall of gas bags struck an instant later, carrying the Marines back a few steps by the sheer inertia of their rush. Garwe found himself grappling with half a dozen of the things. They appeared to be trying to grab his pod in their tentacles; he responded by growing tentacles of his own, silver-sheened whiplashes emerging from the active nano surface of his pod.

Odd. The pod’s response was a bit sluggish. Garwe’s neural interface with the pod’s AI and electronic circuitry was supposed to be essentially instantaneous, but either the connection was running slow, or his brain was running way fast. It wasn’t enough to cause major problems, but he was painfully aware of the way time seemed to stretch around him as more and more of the Krysni gas bags crowded in close. His hull sensors felt them, a dead weight clinging to his armor, growing more and more massive with each dragging second.

He sent a mental command to his pod’s defense system, and the outer surface crackled with electricity. Krysni floaters in contact with his pod shriveled and twisted, their blue-white skins crisping to brown and black in a second or two of arcing fury.

A second high-energy bolt fired from the jungle, catching Captain Xander’s pod as she tried to rise above the tangled melee. Her pod shrugged off the attack, but as it rotated away from the sniper, Garwe noticed that a dinner-plate-sized patch of her outer nano had been burned away, leaving a ragged, gray-white scar. If her pod couldn’t repair itself before another shot hit in the same spot, she was dead.

Garwe lashed out with his tentacles, burning down another eight or ten of his attackers. Free for the moment, he increased power to his repulsors and moved his pod higher. “Blue One!” he called. “Fall back! You’ve got a hole burned through your nano!”

As if encouraged by the sniper’s partial success, other electron bolts began snapping out of the jungle. Dozens of the Krysni shriveled and fell, or vanished in white puffs of vapor, victims of friendly fire, but the unarmed mob kept moving forward, ignoring casualties from both sides of the battle, trying to overwhelm the twelve Marine battle pods by sheer weight of numbers.

Garwe’s pod had already located each enemy shooter and plotted them on his targeting matrix, revealing them on his IHD as flashing, bright red reticules. He selected the one that had hit the captain and triggered his pod’s primary weapon, sending a megajoule pulse of X-ray laser energy slashing into the jungle.

Purple and orange vegetation shriveled and died; the Reef’s tentacles curled back from the high-energy caress, and the compound’s support platform shuddered as the vast life form that was Hassetas reacted to the heat.

“Skipper!” Garwe yelled! “Request permission to disengage! If we can just maneuver—”

“Negative!” Xander snapped back. “We do it by the opplan!”

The opplan—the operations plan downloaded from the squadron’s command constellation—required the War Dogs to deploy on the compound platform and provide a kind of barricade for the off-worlders, protecting them from the locals until a transport could make it down from orbit. The Marines would hold the perimeter until the off-worlders could evacuate, then pull out.

Ideally, no shots would have been fired, and the mere presence of the Marine battlepods should have kept the Krysni at bay. Somehow, things hadn’t quite worked out that way, however.

Garwe kept firing into the jungle, targeting Krysni power sources as his pod’s sensor suite picked them up and flagged them on his in-head display. The off-worlder compound was trembling and bucking now as the floatreef moved the massive, main tentacle to which it was anchored.

“Trolischet!” Xander snapped on the general frequency. “I suggest you get your people off of the compound platform!”

“We can’t!” Trolischet replied, her voice shrill. “We have no ship!”

“An evacuation ship is inbound,” Xander told her. “ETA less than ten minutes! But you might not have ten minutes! You need to get everyone into evacuation pods, fliers, flight-capable suits, whatever you have that will carry you. All you need to do is to get off this damned reef before it decides to scratch!”

“There are over two hundred of us, Captain! We couldn’t save more than a quarter!”

“Well, then, save them, damn it! Or you’re all dead!”

Other Marines were targeting the snipers now as well, those that could still move and had not been completely engulfed by the advancing wall of balloon bodies and angry, lashing tentacles. Garwe pivoted, targeting a second source of high-energy electron beams, and then three bolts caught him at once, slamming into his Starwraith in a searing detonation of raw energy.

Warning lights winked on in his IHD, his defensive fields flickering and dimming beneath the overload. A half-second later, three more beams struck and his nanodefenses went down, slabs of active nano burned from the Starwraith’s outer shell, oily smoke boiling from a puncture in the foametal structure beneath.

Garwe cut his repulsors, dropping back into the relative cover of the tentacle-to-tentacle melee below. His pod jostled and bumped in the press of leathery balloon bodies and lashing tentacles as he rerouted the majority of his power flow to the task of repairing his outer-shell nano. He tried discharging a few thousand volts through what was left of his outer nano, but the attempt brought up more warning lights and no other effect.

The Krysni appeared to be learning quickly. Captain Xander’s Starwraith had been hit again repeatedly, and Palin, Mortin, and Javlotel were down as well, large patches of their nanoshells burned and peeled away, exposed portions of their inner armor partly melted under the fierce heat of the enemy fire.

And it was all wrong. The two symbiotic sentient species of Dac IV weren’t technic, and didn’t have manufactured weaponry of any sort. Individual Krysni possessed a biological weapon—a toxin delivered through hollow, pressure-fired barbs like a terrestrial jellyfish—which they used when necessary against some of the mindless predators of Dac IV’s deeper atmosphere layers, but those were useless against a Starwraith, even one as badly damaged as Garwe’s. And without a solid surface from which to mine and forge metals, indeed, without fire, the Krysni and their immense and sapient floating cities had never developed anything remotely like material technology at all.

Where in hell had they gotten electron beam weaponry? Who had taught them how to use it?

At the moment, the press of Krysni balloons around him were doing quite well without advanced technology. His crippled Starwraith was now covered by leathery blue bodies clinging tightly to his armor, their floater sacs deflated, with hundreds more Krysni clinging in layers on top of them. He could see what they were doing by picking up a visual feed from Blue Twelve—Lieutenant Namura’s wraith. It looked as though some hundreds of the creatures were clinging to him, with the outer layers inflating their bodies in an attempt to lift him clear of the deck. More and more Krysni floaters were hooking on, puffing up their bodies to well over a meter in diameter, taut-skinned globes filled with biochemically heated hydrogen.

He fired his X-ray laser, the beam punching through bodies and releasing a roiling cloud of smoke. More Krysni drifted in to replace the ones incinerated by his attack. He fired again … and then a third time, each shot burning away dozens of the things, but then his power reserves plummeted and the laser cut out after the third pulse.

“Blue Flight, this is Blue Seven!” he called out. “My weapons are dead!”

“Same here!” Lieutenant Radevic shouted. “Weapon power leads are burned through!”

“Blue, Blue Two!” Amendes said. “Repulsors out! Weapons down! I’ve gone—”

And then static hissed through the comm feed, as Garwe’s in-head display, with tiny icons for each of the Blue Flight Marines, showed twelve symbols drop to eleven … then ten.

Overwhelming numbers were beginning to tell at last. Garwe found it hard to believe, impossible to believe … but the Dac balloonists were attacking a squadron of modern Marine battle pods and winning. It simply wasn’t possible. …

Abruptly, his pod shifted to the right, then inverted … came upright, then inverted again. Slowly, clumsily, they were moving him. He could feel the scrape and roll of tightly packed bodies as they moved. Some hundreds, now, were clinging to the squirming mass of creatures on the inside of the ball, inflating their bodies to levitate the entire, cumbersome mass, while others vented hydrogen like tiny jets in frantic, rapid pulses, shoving him toward the edge of the platform.

Gods! A Starwraith massed almost half a ton under Dac’s gravity. How many of the creatures would it take to negate that weight and actually float him off the platform?

Or perhaps they weren’t actually trying to lift him, but simply to push or drag or roll him off the side. The edge of the tree house deck that was not bordered by the massive bulk of the floatreef tentacles and the surrounding aerial flora was protected by a relatively slender guardrail, and it was less than twenty meters away. If they could get him through the railing, he and some hundreds of clinging Krysni would plummet over the edge and into the black, hot, and crushing depths of the gas giant’s atmospheric deeps. His attackers seemed utterly unconcerned about their own casualties; those crushed up against his optic sensors appeared to be dead already. Evidently, they were willing to sacrifice themselves by the hundreds simply to ensure the destruction of a single Starwraith.

He tried triggering his repulsors, but nothing happened. His primary drive power feed had melted through and shorted out. If he could just take flight, drag this whole, squirming mass high enough into the thin, cold upper reaches of atmosphere, or pull them with him into the abyss until they lost their grip and fell away … but at the moment he wasn’t channeling enough power to lift a single one of these wrinkled, squirming little creatures, much less all of them and his battle pod.

“This is Blue Seven,” Garwe reported, his mental voice calm. “My drive systems are out. I think they’re trying to drag me to the edge of the platform and drop me off!”

More data flickered through his in-head display, more systems failing. There was a chemical agent in use—a concentrated fluoroantimonic acid. Apparently, the creatures crowded in against his Starwraith were injecting, not biological toxins, but acid. Where the acid could reach exposed fiber optic cables and electronic circuitry, it was causing massive internal damage.

He wondered how the creatures were carrying and injecting the stuff without having their own tissues begin to break down.

The Krysni continued to close in. Xander, Palin, Mortin, Wahrst, and Javlotel as well as Garwe all were enveloped, smothered in roughly spherical masses of writhing bodies. Amendes, Cocero, and Ewis all were out of action, their pods now totally inert, no longer transmitting status or comm feed signals. Bakewin, Radevic, and Namura continued to fight, burning away at the ponderous globes of creatures enveloping their fellow Marines as more and more and still more of the meter-long floaters descended from the sky or emerged from the surrounding jungle, filling the open space above the tree house platform with drifting, jostling, jetting Krysni.

Once, years before in a combat medical training feed, Garwe had seen a simulation based on an actual optic feed from a nanotech camera adrift within a human circulatory system. The sim had been about the human body’s internal defenses, its immune system and the response of antibodies to foreign invaders in the system … in this case a single, rod-shaped bacterium. The bacterium, smaller than a blood cell, was still enormous compared to the antibodies flocking to the injured region, swarming in through the pale yellow haze of the surrounding interstitial fluid in clouds, enveloping the bacterium, smothering it, adhering to it, hurling themselves against it in layer upon layer in an awesome spectacle eerily like what Garwe was seeing here and now. The individual antibodies, he recalled, looked like wrinkled, spiky, pale-translucent and roughly spherical bodies, with twisted strands of long-chain molecules extending like tentacles from their bodies. Their resemblance to the drifting Krysni was unsettling.

Antibodies, defending their host.

Then his optical feed cut out, suddenly, as Namura’s pod came under savage attack from four separate electron beam sources. All he could see now were the bodies of Krysni pressed in against his external pick-ups, glowing slightly at infrared wavelengths.

How long, he wondered, could the tough inner shell of his pod last against this concerted assault? His Starwraith’s on-board AI continued to report on the steadily deteriorating situation as circuit after circuit foamed into inert uselessness at the touch of that concentrated acid, as power reserves drained away, as the last of the active nano coating the machine lost power or programming or coherence and flaked away, dead. His pod was all but inert, now, though the sensors continued to feed him a trickle of optical and kinesthetic data.

He was falling. His battle pod’s kinesthetic feeds fed sensations directly to his inner ear, and he could feel himself dropping within the savage grasp of Dac’s gravitational field, better than two and a half times a standard Earth gravity. After the first few seconds, he wasn’t quite in free fall, he noted. The external atmospheric pressure and temperature were rising swiftly as he fell, and the battle pod and its ungainly cocoon of Krysni defenders rapidly hit a terminal velocity of perhaps twelve hundred kilometers per hour.

He could feel the shudders and jolts as the enveloping shell of dead and dying Krasni ripped away a few at a time.

Swathed in darkness, he plummeted into the abyss. …

4

2101.2229

Associative Marine Holding Facility 4

Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System

1907 hours, GMT

“The Xul,” Garroway said, startled, “are acting in a coherent manner? You mean, all of them together, all across the Galaxy?”

“We can’t be sure that all of the surviving nodes are involved,” Schilling told him. “And the nodes we’ve already isolated with AI virsim teams didn’t get the incoming messages, of course. But our node monitors have picked up what appear to be coordinating messages through quantum nonlocal channels. And incidents that we believe are Xul-instigated, somehow, have been occurring throughout the Associative volume.”

“Galaxywide?”

“The Associative has connections through about half of the Galaxy, General. Maybe a bit less. A third?”

“That’s still a hell of a lot.”

“At least a hundred billion stars. A quarter or so have planetary systems. And the incidents are very widely scattered.”

“Okay. The question remains, though, Captain. Just what is it that you expect me and my people to do? My Marines have experience killing Xul, not containing them, not integrating with them, not … not kissing up to them. It sounds to me like it’s not the idea of war that’s out of date. It’s us. The Marines.”

“And that’s why we need the Marines, General. Your generation of Marines. We haven’t engaged the Xul in a stand-up fight for centuries. You and your people have the experience. We don’t.”

“Well,” Garroway said, surprised. “That’s a first.”

“What is, sir?”

He chuckled and shook his head. “Throughout the history of our species, Captain, we humans have always been prepared to fight the last war, not the next one. We go in with tactics, attitudes, and training that are completely out of step with the new threat, whatever it is.”

“Sir? I don’t understand.”

“The history of military history, Captain. We get brand-new rifled weapons capable of killing men at a range of two or three hundred meters, and we still form tightly packed and ordered ranks and march in with the bayonet. We get machine guns, we still try massed assaults into no-man’s land, or even on horseback. We develop large-scale suborbital deployment, and we still pretend that war has front lines. You’re saying we need the old way of doing things, now?”

“In a way, yes, sir,” Schilling said. “When we started exploring out among the stars, we continued to think in terms of the nation-states and countries we’d known on Earth. When we met alien cultures, we tried to put them into the nice, neat boxes with which we’d been familiar on our homeworld. Empires and federations, unions and republics and commonwealths.”

“And associatives?”

“The Associative is an attempt to think in bigger, less exclusive terms,” she told him. “No empires. No borders. No ‘us’ and ‘them,’ just an all-embracing us. And no need to compete for scarce resources in a Galaxy where resources like planets and energy are all but boundless.”

“No borders. What does that mean? …”

Schilling gestured. A star turned bright on the projection of the Galaxy, then expanded swiftly into an open window looking down on an achingly beautiful, sapphire-blue and white world. It was, Garroway realized, the same view of Eris he’d seen upon emerging from cybe-hibe. “There are some hundreds of thousands of species in the Associative,” she told him, “and millions throughout the Galaxy. Relatively few of them, though, have the same requirements when it comes to habitable worlds.” Another window opened within the window, and Garroway stared into six vast, black eyes set above and below a squirming halo of tentacles. The overall impression was of something like a giant squid, but it was difficult to pull all the parts together into a coherent whole, into something that made sense to his brain.

Even so, he recognized the species, for Humankind had met them in 2877, three decades before he’d been born. “The Eulers?” he asked.

“The Eulers,” Schilling agreed. “They prefer worlds like Earth … but at extreme depths, a thousand meters or more down in the deep benthic abyss. They genegineered a symbiotic species that could survive on land, to develop fire and industry and space travel. They helped us win the Battle of Starwall, and since then they’ve been among our closest allies. Incredible natural mathematicians. They’ve colonized perhaps two hundred worlds scattered throughout Associative space. Their latest project is this one … Eris, a newly terraformed world right here in Earth’s Solar System. Or, here’s an even better example …” She gestured again, and the images of Eris and the deep-sea Euler vanished, replaced by a world completely sheathed in dazzlingly white clouds … with just a hint of a dirty yellow cast to them. A second window opened within, showing … something. At first, Garroway thought he was looking at a crust of black, hardened lava, with streaks and veins of molten rock just visible beneath, glowing dull red. After a moment, he realized the black mass had a shape, albeit an irregular one, and things like flexible branches weaving in a searingly hot breeze.

If it was a sapient species, Garroway had never seen or heard of anything like it. He wasn’t even immediately sure that it was alive. The image shimmered and bent, as if viewed at a great depth, or within the fiery hell of a blast furnace. The background was a sulfurous red and yellow haze, obscuring vaguely glimpsed shapes that might have been spires of native rocks, or buildings.

“We call them Vulcans,” Schilling explained. “We don’t know what they call themselves. Their cultural conventions, their view of self, their worldview, all are quite different from ours. But they live within volcanic fissures on worlds like Venus. Surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, and an atmospheric pressure similar to what the Eulers enjoy. We were actually looking at the feasibility of terraforming Venus—a colossal project—but a couple of hundred years ago the Vulcans petitioned us to let them colonize instead. They live there now and like it, at pressures equivalent to the ocean deeps.”

Garroway stared at the black mass, which was oozing now into a slightly different shape. Did it have a native shape, or was it more of a crust-locked amoeba? He couldn’t tell. Were those branches manipulative members of some sort, or sensory organs, or something else entirely? Again, he couldn’t tell. “How can you trust them if you don’t even know what they call themselves?”

“The point is, General, they don’t want our kind of real estate. We have almost nothing in common with them. It’s far, far easier to terraform an outer dwarf planet like Eris or Sedna than it is to cool down a planet like Venus and give it a reasonable surface pressure, an atmosphere we could breathe. So they live on Venus, the Eulers live in Eris—they even have a small colony now in Tongue-of-the-Ocean, on Earth—and we’re scarcely aware of their activities. No borders. What would be the point?”

“Security. But I see what you mean about war being out of date,” he told her.

He wasn’t convinced that that could be true, however. Garroway tended to have a pessimistic view of human nature, one forged within a long career as a combat Marine and, as a general officer with dealing with politicians. In his opinion, Humankind could no more give up war than he could give up the ability to think.

“A war with the Eulers or the Vulcans is almost literally unthinkable,” she told him. “But the Xul aren’t competing for resources. They simply want us dead.”

“Of course. We’ve triggered their xenophobic reflex.”

“Exactly, sir. If the containment strategy isn’t working … and if they’re becoming more aware of us, well, we need you and your people, General. Like never before.”

As she spoke, Garroway was scanning through more of the download background and history. Civilians, including humans, had been attacked by locals in a gas giant called Dac IV. Anchor Marines had been sent in—the 340th Marine Strike Squadron. The situation was still unresolved, but it must be desperate. A request for a Globe Marine detachment had also been logged.

“What in hell,” he said slowly, “is an ‘Anchor Marine?’?”

“Marines who stay with the time stream,” she told him. “Like me.”

“And I’m a ‘Globe Marine?’?”

“Yes, sir. Our reserves in cybe-hibe.”

“Who thought up that nonsense?”

“Sir?”

“Marines are Marines, Captain. I don’t like this idea of two different sets of background, experience, or training.”

Here was another problem. Two months ago, a star lord at a place, an artificial habitat called Kaleed, had run into something he couldn’t handle, and requested Marines. No Anchor Marines had been available, and so the Lords of the Associative had decided to awaken a division of Globe Marines.

Apparently the third Marine Division was to be held on stand-by as the Lords monitored the situation.

“It was necessary, General,” Schilling explained. “Globe Marines need cultural liaisons, other Marines who are, well, anchored in the current background culture. Otherwise you’d be lost. There have been a lot of changes in both cultural norms and in technology since your day.”

“You’re making me feel positively ancient, Captain.”

But he understood the issue. When he’d last been active, over eight centuries ago, there’d already been a sharply drawn dichotomy between Marines and the civilian population they protected. Neither group understood the other. Neither could socialize well with the other. Neither could speak the other’s language. No wonder most Marines tended to find both family partners and sexual liaisons among others in the Corps. Marines might visit the local hot spots and brothels for a quick bit of fun, but longer and more solid relationships required a degree of mutual understanding with civilians that had become harder and harder to come by.

And it wasn’t just that Marines got into trouble with the locals on liberty. The politicians who requested Fleet Marines to put down an insurrection or show the fist to a local warlord didn’t understand them either. And that was where the problems really started chewing up the machinery.

“Okay,” Garroway said after a moment. “I understand all of that. We need babysitters. But why does the government need us at all if they have you?”

“We’re a caretaker force, sir, nothing more. The administrators. The personnel officers and logistics staff who make sure there is a Corps for you to wake up to.”

“But I see something here about Anchor combat units. …”

“Yes, sir. We have combat units, but they’re more placeholders than anything else. You are the real Fleet Marine Force.”

Garroway considered this. The Globe and Anchor was one of the oldest and most sacred talismans of the Corps, a symbol going back to the Royal Marines, who were the predecessors of America’s Continental Marines of 1775. It was an amusing idea, he decided, using globe and anchor to identify two different kinds of Marine … but the concept behind it disturbed him. Throughout the history of the Corps he knew, every Marine had known a single brotherhood, the Corps, each man and woman undergoing the same training, with the same traditions, the same language, the same background.

He found himself wondering if Captain Schilling was a real Marine, or something else—an imitation, a temporary stand-in for the real thing.

For centuries, Marine culture had been a distinct and self-contained entity in its own right. If cultural drift over the centuries had made the old Marines alien to the rest of Humankind, wouldn’t that alienness extend to these caretaker Marines as well?

“Every Marine is a rifleman, Captain,” he said.

“Pardon, sir?”

“Did you download that in training? I hope to hell you did, because if you didn’t the Corps has changed out of all recognition.”

“I don’t understand the word ‘rifleman,’ sir. Give me a second … oh.”

“The rifle is the Marine’s primary weapon, Captain. I don’t care what you use nowadays, the principle is the same. As for the expression, it’s old. Pre-spaceflight, I think. Every Marine is a combat infantryman first, a rifleman, and whatever else—cook, personnel clerk, aviator, storekeeper, computer programmer, general—second.”

“Today we say, ‘every Marine is a weapons sysop first.’?”

“Somehow, Captain, that just doesn’t have the same ring.”

Garroway continued to scan lightly through a flood of downloads. He was starting to get the hang of the new implant as he used it. It was responsive and powerful, and he was beginning to get the idea that he hadn’t even begun yet to glimpse its full potential.

Here was another one, from a world called Gleidatramoro, a kind of trading center and interstellar marketplace in toward the Galactic Core frequented by several hundred races. It was, he noted, another artificial world, like Kaleed. Didn’t people live on planets anymore? A human mob had formed in Gleidat’s capital city and attacked … that was interesting. They’d attacked a number of s-Humans, whatever those were, then gone on to dismember several hundred AIvatars. Cross-connecting on the unfamiliar terminology, he learned that s-Humans were a superintelligent genegineered species of human, while an AIvatar was the human, humanoid, or digital vehicle for an advanced artificial consciousness.

How, he wondered, was that different from a robot?

The riot on Gleidatramoro had spread when several non-human species had intervened on behalf of the AIvatars. Several thousand individuals of various species, human, non-human, superhuman, and artificially sentient, had been killed, many of them irretrievably. The humans currently were bottled up within the capital city in a bloody stand-off, and both they and the non-humans were calling for help.

Again, Anchor Marines had been sent in to regain control. The situation on Gleidatramoro was still fluid.

And here was an invasion of Propanadnid space by a human warlord named Castillan, who’d launched his armada under the ringing battle cry of “death to the Proppies!” And another, a terrorist attack on an asteroid defense system in the Sycladu system, an attack with, as yet, no known motive. And still another, an attempt by the human population of Gharst to unplug several million t-Humans … the Homo telae of the local Net. So much for human sensibilities opposed to electronic genocide.

The list went on … and on, and on, hundreds of incidents during the past thirty days alone. There were far too many, scattered across far too large a volume of space and among far too many worlds, for a single Marine division to have a chance of coping with them all.

The total number of violent clashes and incidents—some nineteen hundred during the past month, according to the latest tally—was utterly trivial compared to the tens of billions of populated worlds and habitats that made up the Associative. On the other hand, there’d been nine hundred such incidents reported the previous month, and four hundred the month before that. There appeared to be a kind of background noise count of violent encounters, of riots, revolutions, and bullying neighbors, but overall the numbers had been low, perhaps two hundred a month, an indication, Garroway thought, that this Associative might have it on the ball so far as galactic governments were concerned. Lately, though, there’d been a sharp increase in the numbers, and so far there was no sign that the trend had peaked.

“Almost twenty thousand of these incidents,” he told her. “That’s more than the number of men, women, and AIs in my division. What are the Marines supposed to do about it? We can’t invade all these worlds. And we can’t protect billions of planets that haven’t been hit.”

“No. But you can investigate this. …”

A virtual world enveloped Garroway, emerging from his new implant. In an instant, he was surrounded by deep space, within a blazing shell of brilliant stars.

There were millions of them, most red or orange in hue, which contributed to an overall red and somber background. Ahead, bathing nearby gas clouds in searing, arc-harsh blue radiance, was the Core Detonation.

“The Galactic Core,” Garroway said, whispering. “The center of the Galaxy.”

“We did do a number on it, didn’t we?”

She almost sounded proud.

Marine Assault Carrier Night’s Edge

Synchronous Orbit, Dac IV

Star System 1727459

1914 hours, GMT

Lieutenant Garwe snapped back to consciousness, bathed in sweat, his breath coming in short, savage gasps. He was falling … falling into the Abyss. …

No, not falling. He was on his back in a linkcouch, the overhead softly glowing. Lieutenant Amendes leaned over him, a hand on his shoulder. “Easy does it, Gar. You’re safe.”

“The squadron—”

“It’s okay, Gar,” she told him. “You’re out of there.”

He sat up slowly, head spinning. Amendes reached up and removed the brow circlet that had linked Garwe to the Starwraith battlepod through its on-board AI. It took him a moment to readjust after the sharp transition, to remember where he was.

The carrier, yeah. The Night’s Edge.

The compartment was circular and domed, with a close-spaced semicircle of twelve linkcouches, half of them still occupied by other members of the squadron. At the far side of the compartment was the main console, just beneath the glowing arc of a holofield.

“Won’t be long now,” Lieutenant Cocero said from the console. He was watching over a Marine technician’s shoulder. “The Skipper’s down. So’s Pal.”

Major Lasenbe, the squadron’s Wing Commander, punched his fist into his open palm. “Damn!”

On a linkcouch nearby, Captain Xander sat up abruptly as though coming wide awake out of a bad dream, her fists clenched. “No, no, no! Shit!”

“The gasbags are overrunning the compound now,” the Marine tech reported from the console. “They’re in among the buildings now, killing the off-worlders.”

Garwe slid out of his linkcouch, fighting against the shaking weakness in his legs. Above the console, within the holofield’s glowing depths, Garwe could see a terrified face—the high brow, dark skin, and contrasting golden eyes of a supie. A data block beside the image identified her as Vasek Trolischet, the xenosoph who, unlike the Marines of the 340th, was physically in the gas giant, and unable to escape. The sound was muted, too low for Garwe to hear what she was saying, but from the look on her face, she was terrified.

Abruptly, the holofield filled with static, and Trolischet’s fear-distorted features blinked out.

“We’ve lost contact with the Hassetas base, sir,” the technician reported.

Two more of the Blue Flight Marines emerged from their artificial comas, blinking in the soft lighting. On a viewall on the far side of the compartment, the disk of Dac, vast and striped in hues of brown, salmon, and pale cream flowed in banded serenity, the violence in its depths masked by the giant’s scale.

Major Lasenbe stood behind the technician, hands now at the small of his back. “A cluster fuck, Captain,” he told Xander without looking at her. “A Class-one cluster fuck.”

Xander rolled off the couch and came to attention, though she still looked drawn and pale, and seemed to be having difficulty suppressing a tendency to tremble. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’m … sorry, sir.”

Lasenbe turned. “At ease, Captain. I’m not chewing you out. They should have sent you in with the pick-up ship, not fifteen minutes ahead of it. Maybe those poor devils would’ve had a chance, then.”

“Is the transport still going in, Major?” Xander asked. “We could reinsert—”

“No point. The gas bags are wiping out the compound as we speak.”

It would take an hour or more to get back down to Hassetas. By then it would be too late.

“God damn it,” Xander said, slumping, her fists clenched.

Garwe was trembling as well, part of the after-effect of a particularly close linkride. Starwraith battle pods actually did serve as combat suits for living Marines, but it was also possible to link with them from the safety of a remote location, so long as non-local communications elements eliminated any speed-of-light time lag. The Marine Carrier Night’s Edge was in synchronous orbit for Dac, just over 180,000 kilometers out, an orbit that perfectly matched the planet’s rotational period of eleven hours, or, rather, which matched the period of Hassetas, since the different cloud belts circled the gas giant at different rates. Any closer, and the ship’s orbit would have carried her past the target and over the horizon, blocking the sensory and control feed signals transmitted from ship to pods and back. The time delay at that distance for conventional EM transmissions would have been impossible, six-tenths of a second for remote sensory signals to travel from pod to Marine, and another six-tenths of a second for the Marine’s responses to travel back down to the pod. Both the pods and the carrier, however, were equipped with quantum-coupled comm units, QCC technology that operated instantaneously, with no time lag. Without instantaneous transmission times, the Marines would have been bumping into things—or aiming at targets that had already moved on. Even at that, Garwe’s pod had felt … sluggish, not quite in synch with his mind. The effect hadn’t been much, but he felt that it had affected his combat performance.

“Sir, with respect,” he said.

“Who are you?” Lasenbe demanded.

“Sir! Lieutenant Garwe, Blue Seven. It might’ve been better if we’d gone in physically. I felt slow down there, like there was a time lag.”

“Nonsense. There was no lag. Besides, if you’d deployed physically, Lieutenant, you would now be dead. Your pod crushed and burned …” He paused, checking data pulled down through his implant. “Three minutes ago.”

“But if we’d been able to pull back and engage the enemy in the air, instead of trying to protect those buildings—”

“You did what you were ordered to do, Lieutenant. Hammet!”

“Sir!” the technician snapped.

“How many Marines are still e-deployed?”

“Three, sir. Namura, Rad—”

“Yank ’em out. We can’t do anything more down there.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Lasenbe was pointedly ignoring Garwe now, giving orders for the withdrawal of the rest of the squadron. On the couches at his back, the other Marines were beginning to revive, their links with the battlepods 180,000 kilometers below severed.

“What the hell was that chemical they were hitting us with?” Palin wanted to know. “Some kind of acid. …”

“Fluoroantimonic acid,” Hammet said. “We got a full read-out on the chemical composition up here.”

“Fluoro—what?” Misek Bollan asked.

“A mixture of hydrogen fluoride, HF, and antimony pentafluoride, SbF5,” Xander said, with the air of someone perfectly at ease with ungainly chemical formulae. “Nasty stuff. One of the strongest acids known.”

“Roughly 2?×?10¹⁹ times stronger than one hundred percent sulfuric acid,” Hammet added. “No wonder it was eating through your internal circuitry.”

“Since when did you become a chemist, Skipper?” Wahrst asked. She was grinning.

“Since before I became a Marine,” Xander replied. “What I want to know is … how were those gas bags delivering the stuff? It protonates organic compounds, eats right through them. Why didn’t it dissolve the gas bags?”

“They’re supposed to have some kind of natural delivery system, aren’t they?” Mortin said.

“Right. A natural delivery system, which means made out of the local equivalent of organics, proteins, bone, cartilage, that sort of thing. When we handled HSbF6 in the lab, we needed either Teflon or field-shielded containers. It even eats through glass.”

“They must’ve had help,” Garwe said. “Some source of technology from the outside. But then, they were using electron beam weapons, too, weren’t they?”

“Yes, they were,” Xander said. “Someone has been running relatively high-tech weaponry to the locals. I wonder who?”

“Or why?” Palin put in. “What do the gas bags have that they could trade off-world for weapons?”

“There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense,” Major Lasenbe said. “We’re not here to sort it out, however. Xander, you and your people go grab some down-time. But I’ll want an after-action uploaded to my essistant tomorrow by thirteen hundred.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Lasenbe strode from the room. Xander appeared to relax a fraction.

“Asshole,” Mortin said, his voice low.

“Belay that, Marine,” Xander said. “Are all of you all right?”

There was a mutter of response, “Yes, Skipper,” and “Okay” and “Ooh-rah” predominating. The Marines sounded subdued, however

“Kind of a rough trip, Captain,” Garwe told her. “I think we’re still all in one piece, though.”

“Garwe,” Xander said, turning to face him, “what did you mean when you told the major about feeling a time lag?”

Garwe shrugged. “I’m not sure. It might have been psychodilation, I suppose.”

“Or you were speeding?”

“No, Skipper,” Garwe said. “I was linked with the rest of the squadron.”

Psychodilation was a natural effect of human perception, the apparent slowing of the passage of time during moments of great danger, stress, or, paradoxically, boredom. “How time flies when we’re having fun” was the opposite extreme of the effect. Both perceptions occurred when the brain entered an alpha altered state under different circumstances, and had to do with how much in the way of fine detail the person was actually perceiving.

“Speeding,” on the other hand, more formally known as PV, or psychovelocitas, was the artificial boosting of overall brain function to speed up reaction times, perception, and thought. There were times when this was appropriate, and carried out through the use of drugs or neural enhancement software, but while linked in with a combat formation was definitely not one of those times. Battle pod operations demanded precise coordination between squadron elements. If Garwe had been speeding, linked communications with him would have been garbled, fire coordination would have become chaotic, and unit cohesion might easily have broken down completely.

Xander nodded. “I’ll check the telemetry records up here. It might have been a fault in your neural circuitry.”

“My pod checked out okay, Skipper.” Not that it could be checked now. What was left of his pod was by now still drifting slowly into the depths of the gas giant Dac, flattened by atmospheric pressure and subjected to the searing heat of the planet’s depths. “I was probably just hyped on adrenaline.”

“Gar’s right,” Palin said. “I was pretty keyed up, too. I think we all were.”

Xander nodded. “Still, all of you will report to sickbay for a full neural series. I felt like I wasn’t quite in synch, either. And I don’t like not being in control.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” several of the Marines chorused.

“Garwe.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You stay for a moment. I want to talk with you.”

“Sure, Skipper.”

She sounded angry, and that was never good.

He wondered where the hell this was going.

5

2101.2229

Associative Marine Holding Facility 4

Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System

1919 hours, GMT

Garroway tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The central mass resembled nothing so much as an immense, impossible, blossoming rose of streaming, blue-white radiance, imbedded within a confused tangle of blinding light, of far-flung arcs and walls and swirls of hot clouds of molecular gas, of stars showing comet tails streaming away from the central blast, of nebulae torn asunder by ferocious stellar winds, of objects set in such a titanic scale that stars and even clusters of stars were dwarfed to insignificance. His implant began overlaying what he was seeing with identifying blocks of text.

Humans had last visited the center of the Galaxy in 1111 of the Marine Era … the year 2887 by the old calendar. Marine and naval forces had assaulted a major Xul base, a number of bases, actually, located in and around the Core structures. The largest and most important of these had been a Dyson cloud, a swarm of trillions of Xul artificial wordlets positioned around the supermassive black hole that marked the Galaxy’s exact gravitational center. At the climax of the battle, a red giant star called S-2, in close orbit around the central black hole, had been nudged from its high-velocity path by inducing a partial and off-center collapse beneath its surface, triggering an outrushing jet of stellar material that had acted like an immense rocket blast. The fast-dwindling star had fallen closer to the black hole than otherwise would have been the case, sweeping through part of the Xul cloud, then shredding as it whipped around the inner gravitational singularity and down the cosmic drain at the center.

The Xul hyperstructure had been destroyed, the individual elements of the cloud plunging into the black hole in an eye’s blink because they’d been force-beam anchored in place, rather than circling in orbit. Much of the infalling matter had been swallowed of course, but much more had rebounded outward, generating what had come to be known as the Core Detonation, an out-rushing surge of tortured plasma so hot and bright that a supernova would have been lost in the glare.

A nearby star cluster, young and hot, just a tenth of a light year out, had been consumed in the fury weeks later, the stars pop-pop-popping into a chain of supernovae as the flood of radiant energy engulfed them. Other supergiant stars close to GalCenter had been swept up as well, adding their mass as fuel to the maelstrom of radiation.

That had been 1117 years ago. In those eleven centuries, the blast wave had swept outward, the wavefront of electromagnetic radiation traveling 1117 light years in that time, the somewhat slower, following squall of high-energy particles crossing about 900 light years in the same period of time. Stars, thousands of them caught in that deadly firestorm of energy, had exploded as they were engulfed, each adding its own bit of fury to the storm. The Galactic Core was now a seething ocean of blue-white hell, and it was still expanding.

Any Xul nodes located within that central, two-thousand-light-year-wide pocket of hell, would have been swept up and consumed. The question was how far the blast would expand … how much of the Galaxy might it devour?

“So,” Garroway wanted to know, “is that stuff going to hit us in another twenty, twenty-five thousand years?” The thought that Humankind’s attack on the Galactic Core eleven hundred years ago might actually have unleashed a beast that was going to devour the entire galaxy was horrifying.

“It’s attenuating,” Schilling told him. “Twenty-six thousand years, or a little less, after the original Core detonation, the electromagnetic wavefront will pass Earth at the speed of light. Long before that happens, the heavier charged particles and plasmas, the hard, dangerous stuff, will have been absorbed by intervening clouds of dust and gas.”

“Even so,” a new voice said, “the astrophysicists are calling it a microquasar. It won’t scour the Galaxy of life, fortunately, but they estimate the total light output from our Galaxy will more than quintuple, and probably set the astronomers in Andromeda to scratching whatever they use for heads.”

“General Garroway,” Schilling said, “this is Socrates. He’s your AI liaison with the Council of Lords.”

“Pleased to meet you, General,” Socrates said. The voice was mellifluous and deep, a rich baritone. Where Schilling spoke with a slight accent, Socrates’ Anglic was perfect.

Well, he was an AI. He would be perfect in every way possible.

“Hello, Socrates,” Garroway said. “The pleasure is mine. Or do AIs feel emotion now?”

The AI chuckled. Either it had a genuine sense of humor, or was programmed to mimic one quite well. Garroway did wonder how far artificial intelligence had developed in the past eight centuries.

“If you can’t tell the difference,” Socrates told him, “and if I can’t tell the difference, what’s the difference between my feelings being programmed or natural?”

“Point.”

“Socrates is a Star-level artificial sentience,” Schilling explained. “That means he’s at least as bright as the smartest s-Human, but much faster. We refer to them as our archAIngels.” Schilling pronounced the word “archangel,” but Garroway sensed the neologism within, and the meaning behind it. “Sometimes I think they are the real rulers of the Human domain now.”

“We all do what we can,” Socrates said. Garroway blinked. A modest AI? Or was that simply another aspect of its programming?

“There was quite a bit of speculation about how serious the Core Detonation was,” Schilling said, picking up on the earlier topic. “That was, oh, four or five centuries ago, when we started getting hard data about the expanding Core wavefront. Created a bit of a minor panic, in fact, according to the history downloads.”

“If we managed to turn our own Galaxy into even a small quasar,” Garroway said, “I’d think a little judicious panic might be called for.”

A quasar was a galaxy with an exceptionally bright nucleus, an active core that outshone the rest of the galaxy by a hundred times or more. Quasars were also extremely distant. The closest known was three-quarters of a billion light years away … which meant it was also a glimpse of something that had happened three-quarters of a billion years in the past, ancient cosmic history. Accepted astrophysical theory suggested that many or, perhaps, all large galaxies had gone through a quasar phase early in their evolution, some billions of years ago, as the supermassive black hole at their cores devoured suns by the millions, spewing out the residue as fantastic bursts of high-energy radiation, a blazing beacon visible across all of time and space. Eventually, the core of the galaxy would be pretty well cleaned out, except for the central black hole itself, of course, and the galaxy would settle down to being a normal, well-behaved member of the cosmic community.

Presumably, the Milky Way Galaxy had been through such a phase some billions of years ago; the supermassive black hole at the Core was an ancient quasar, slumbering and quiescent now that much of the matter at GalCenter had been devoured. But then the Commonwealth Fleet and the Fleet Marines had come along late in the twenty-ninth century and upset the delicately balanced megastructure the Xul had constructed at the Core.

And a shadow, at the very least, of the ancient monster had awakened once again.

“It should be spectacular, though,” Schilling told him. “When the light gets this far out, our night skies will be incredible in the direction of Sagittarius. We think there will be enough light streaming out from the Core that you’ll be able to read by it.”

“The slower, heavier particles will pile up into the gas clouds that surround the Galactic Hub and create shock waves over the next five to ten thousand years,” Socrates added, “triggering an incredible burst of star formation. The Galaxy, in toward the Core, is going to be an amazing, beautiful sight for ten thousand years or more afterward.”

“Maybe I should go back into cybe-hibe,” Garroway said. “Wake me when the show starts.”

“We’ll go you one better,” Socrates told him. “The Lords of the Associative, or one important facet of them, at any rate, want you and your Marines to go in there.”

“Say what?” He looked into that blue-white hell. The simulation carried no sensation of temperature, but he could swear his face felt hot as he looked into that searing blaze of light.

“We had assumed that the Xul presence at the Galactic Core had been burned out by the Core Detonation over a thousand years ago,” Socrates told him.

“Seems like a reasonable assumption,” Garroway said. “Do you mean to tell me they survived in that?”

“We’re attempting to verify that now. We’ve deployed AI probes to investigate. As you can imagine, the environment poses certain … difficulties.”

The view of the luminous rose of light expanded, the viewpoint rushing in toward the inner Core. The sheer magnificent beauty of the scene was overwhelming, and Garroway had to remind himself that the environment must be as hostile, in terms of radiation and temperature, as the surface of a star.

“It is,” Socrates told him. “Keep in mind, though, that we have encountered no fewer than twenty distinct species of intelligent life dwelling either in the photospheres or within the cores of their stars. Life evolves, develops, and adapts everywhere, when given the chance.”

“Socrates,” Garroway said aloud, “did you just read my mind?”

There was a slight hesitation. “I did, General. Excuse me, please.”

“General Garroway hasn’t been exposed to the concept of full access yet,” Schilling told the AI.

“So I understand now. It won’t happen again, General. At least, not until you authorize it.”

“Full access?”

“High-end AIs, like Socrates, have what we refer to as full access to human mentation. They can pretty much pick up and track anything you’re thinking, without interfacing through your implant.”

“I see. Why?”

“Social control, of course. And universal data access for the Disimplanted.”

The way she said the words “social control” felt so natural, so completely matter-of-fact that Garroway wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly at first. This, he reflected, might be the biggest gap between his own time and culture and this one that he’d yet encountered.

Humankind had been working with direct man-machine neural interfaces for the major part of the species’ technic history—nineteen hundred years at least—and with various forms of artificial intelligence for longer than that. Implant technology had begun as crude molecular arrays of 2K protein processor nodes that facilitated direct downloads of data from primitive computer nets. Eventually, those early implants had evolved into nanochelated structures of complex design, organic-machine hybrids residing within the brain and running an enormous variety of software that usually included a resident personal AI. These personal secretaries or “essistants” could so perfectly mimic their fully organic host that it was possible to hold a conversation with one on any topic and be unaware that you were speaking with a machine—the final evocation of the ancient proposal known as the Turing Test.

Such essistants were considered vital in modern communications and interface technologies, and more and more interactions with machines, from accessing research data banks or piloting spacecraft to growing furniture or opening doors or turning on a room’s illumination system, required an implant.

Which left people without implants, the Disimplanteds, or “Disimps,” out in the cold and dark, often literally.

But the AIs of Garroway’s day had been designed to pick up only on those thoughts that were appropriately coded, preceded by a mental symbol that told the AI that it was welcome. The idea of allowing any intelligence, even a manmade one, into his thoughts without permission was profoundly disturbing.

And allowing machines to read minds for purposes of “social control” was, to Garroway’s way of thinking, horrifying. Did that mean they had artificial intelligences prowling the streets of human worlds and habs, listening for stray thoughts that might lead to social unrest, crime, or dissidence?

And how did you tell the difference between an artificial intelligence and a member of that new species Schilling had mentioned … what had she called them? The Homo telae? Could they read minds as well?

“I don’t think I like this full-access idea,” he told them.

“I don’t imagine you do,” Schilling said. “It probably feels pretty strange … even creepy. It’s not a bad thing, however. Crime—at least outside of the free zones—is almost unknown. Intraspecies war—both civil war and war between separate human governments or religious groups—is all but obsolete. Humankind has never known such an era of peace and general well-being.”

“So what do the AIs do in this utopia of yours?” Garroway said. “Eavesdrop on street corners, and call the cops when they hear the random, disgruntled rant against the government?”

“Not ‘cops,’?” Socrates told him. “That’s antiquated terminology. We refer to socons. Agents of social control.”

“This is sounding worse and worse.”

“Most socons are AIs,” Schilling said. “Though there are human agents, of course. In most cases, they can correct aberrant behavior directly and immediately, and the person involved—whether he’s a criminal, a political dissident, or mentally ill—can be adjusted, healed … and never even know the adjustment has taken place.”

“Captain,” he replied slowly, “you are scaring the hell out of me. Who decides what is dissident, and what is just an expression of a less-than-mainstream opinion? Who determines what mentally ill is? What are the standards? It’s not like you can diagnose mental illness by pulling a throat culture, damn it!”

“Gently, General,” Socrates told him. “It’s not as bad as you think. Our system has worked, and worked well, for over five centuries.”

Garroway started to reply, then thought better of it. Until he had a better feel for this culture, and for its rules and regulations both written and unwritten, he was going to need to keep his mouth shut and his eyes, ears, and implant open. Something he said now, in ignorance, might well prejudice these people against both him and his own Marines.

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said, but his reservations remained. “You were telling me, though, about alien intelligences inhabiting stars.”

“Indeed. They seem to be relatively rare, but several species, existing as coherent plasmas, have evolved within stellar atmospheres, or, in two cases of which we know, deep within the stellar core. Obviously, our communications with such beings are somewhat … limited.”

The view of the Core Detonation had continued to grow and change as they talked. The scene now appeared to be centered on a glowing disk, a pinwheel of light shading from red at the outer rim to an intense, eye-watering violet at the center.

“Is that the Galactic Core?” Garroway asked. The pinwheel, obviously, was an accretion disk. At its center was a tiny void, an emptiness, into which compressed gas and stellar material appeared to be funneling, a large and massive black hole. Dying matter shrieked its death scream in X-rays and the far ultraviolet.

“No,” Socrates told him. “The Core is about 350 light years in that direction.” Garroway sensed the gesture, deeper into an impenetrable haze of blue-white radiance beyond. “This is the Great Annihilator.”

Garroway had heard of it. A black hole, yes … but not, as once had been imagined, the supermassive black hole at the Galaxy’s exact center. The true Galactic Core consisted of a black hole of about two million solar masses, but, until the Core Detonation wavefront reached the vicinity of Earth, there would be no physical evidence pinpointing it from Earth’s vicinity save for the observed movements of core stars, no light, no radiation of any sort.

The Great Annihilator, on the other hand, was a black hole of only about fifteen solar masses, but it was far noisier—as heard from Earth, at any rate—than its far larger brother nearby. Twin shafts of high-energy radiation speared in opposite directions from the poles of its central hub, streams of positrons emerging from the turbulent areas above the black hole’s north and south poles. The interaction of antimatter with normal matter hundreds of light years from the singularity filled the Core with radio noise—the 511?keV screech of positronium annihilating its normal-matter counterpart—electrons. The object had been detected and named “The Great Annihilator” by Earth astronomers millennia ago, but the discovery had only deepened the mystery of the actual nature of the Galactic Core. By measuring the velocities of stars in the Annihilator’s immediate vicinity, astronomers had proven that it was a black hole, but not the far more massive one at the exact center that they’d been looking for.

In Garroway’s day, of course, it had been well understood that the Xul Dyson cloud had been masking the radiation leakage from the actual Core, and would continue to do so until the Core Detonation crawled out into the Galactic suburbs and impinged upon waiting detectors and sense organs. The Great Annihilator, though, had become a footnote to Galactic cosmography, a little-brother satellite of the larger, better known singularity at GalCenter.

The Core Detonation would have swallowed the Great Annihilator centuries ago. Evidently, the object had not been destroyed, as might have been expected. Clouds of dust and gas sweeping out from the Core explosions had spiraled into the Annihilator’s accretion disk, which glowed now as brightly as a supernova. So much matter continued to fall into the singularity itself that vast quantities, instead of being swallowed, were flung outward as radiant plasmas, and the radio shriek of annihilating matter was far louder now than it had been twelve hundred years before. Garroway could hear that shriek overlaid upon the visual image. Inset windows gave scrolling blocks of data describing the energies exploding from the brilliant object. Radiation levels, he noticed, were high enough to instantly fry any organic matter.

He watched the glowing object for a moment. Through filters raised by the software controlling the imagery, he could actually see the movement of the inner edge of the accretion disk as it whipped across the singularity’s event horizon.

“We have detected signals emerging as nonlocal events from within the Great Annihilator,” Schilling told him. “The physics are … difficult. Suffice to say that phase-shifted habitats may have been inserted into the black hole’s ergosphere.”

“Are you telling me,” he said slowly, “that there’s something alive inside that Hell?”

“Something, yes,” Socrates said. “The Xul, or a part of them. And they’re using their base within the Great Annihilator to attack us.”

“Inside a black hole?”

“Within the ergosphere, yes.”

“That’s impossible,” Garroway said, shaking his head. “Nothing can escape a black hole’s gravitational field if it gets too close, not even light. That’s part of the thing’s definition.”

“You’re aware of phase shifting, aren’t you, sir?” Schilling asked.

“Yes. We have … sorry, had bases and ships back in my day that could rotate out of phase with four-dimensional spacetime. They existed at the base state of Reality, what we called the Quantum Sea.”

“The Xul apparently can do that as well,” Socrates said, “and from the Quantum Sea, it’s possible to manipulate gravity.”

“The quantum converters?” Schilling added. “The devices we use to provide microsuns for our terraform projects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond? We phase-shift those into the Quantum Sea, where they can draw as much energy as we need directly from the Reality base state. The Xul are doing something similar inside the Great Annihilator.”

“What?”

“We’re not sure,” Socrates said. “It’s possible that they hope to affect the entirety of the Reality base state … to, in effect, rewrite what we’re pleased to think of as reality.”

“Editing us out of existence?”

“It’s a possibility. That, at least, is one of the scenarios our Xul iteration programs have developed. But it’s also possible that they’re using singularity-identity nonlocality to infect our AI and computer networks with alien emomemes.”

“Whoa,” Garroway said. “You just lost me … about eight hundred years ago.”

“Singularity-identity nonlocality?” Schilling asked. Garroway nodded.

“The theory can be a bit murky,” Socrates told him. “Do you know how stargates work?”

“Not the technical details, but yes,” Garroway said. “In principle, at least.”

Stargates were immense artifacts scattered across the Galaxy and beyond, ten- to twenty-kilometer-wide rings within which pairs of planetary-mass black holes revolved in opposite directions. The interplay of moving gravitational fields opened direct links between one gate and another, light years distant, with which it was tuned. Exactly who had built them, or when, was a mystery, but stargates were still the principal means of long-range travel throughout the Galaxy.

“Stargates work,” Socrates told him, “because the movement of singularities within two stargates can be tuned to one another so that they essentially become congruent, a fancy way of saying they are the same. Identical. The same gate, but located in two widely separated places at once … orbiting Sirius, say, and the Galactic Core. The theory depends on quantum states and an aspect of quantum dynamics called nonlocality, which says that two objects or particles entangled at the quantum level remain connected to one another, as though there was no space, no distance, between them.”

“I know about that one,” Garroway said. “Albert Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance,’ and refused to accept that it described the universe realistically.”

“Albert … who?” Schilling asked.

“Einstein,” Socrates told her. “A pre-spaceflight philosopher.”

“Physicist, actually,” Garroway said. “At least according to the history downloads I’ve seen.”

“Physicist, then,” Socrates agreed, “though physicists and philosophers are much the same thing when it comes to describing aspects of the metaverse that can only indirectly be apprehended, and which can only be described by myth and metaphor. In any case … if you have access to base-state reality in one black hole, you theoretically have direct access to all black holes … and to the star gates as well, since they depend on artificial singularities for their operation.”

“We don’t know if they’re really trying to change reality,” Schilling said. “That may be too much of a stretch even for them. But we have detected signals emerging from several stargates that suggest they’re broadcasting emomemes.”

“And what the hell is an emomeme?”

“?‘Meme’ is an old term for a transmissible unit of cultural information,” Socrates told him. “Especially one that can be passed on from mind to mind verbally, by repeated actions, or through general cultural transmission. Religions are memes. So are fashions in bodily adornment. Or popular sayings or slogans or tunes or fads in entertainment or advertising.”

“Right,” Schilling said. “If I say ‘vavoob!’ That probably doesn’t mean much to you.”

“?‘Vavoob.’ Nope.” He shook his head. “Can’t say that it does.”

“But it’s a popular saying in Sol-System cities right now. It means … I don’t know. Sexy. Smart. Well integrated.”

“?‘With it?’?”

“With what?”

“Never mind. Your point is taken.”

“The expression is one of the current memes in human pan-urban culture,” Schilling told him. “Comes from a routine by Deidre Sallens, a well-known eroticomic VirSim personality. You haven’t been exposed, so it’s meaningless to you.”

“Memes tend to pass from person to person or group to group like a virus,” Socrates added.

“I’ve heard the term before,” Garroway said. “Even in my day. How is that different from an emomeme?”

“Emomemes are emotional memes … specifically those affecting how people feel about other people, about ideas or situations or groups. Things like racial stereotypes. Or prejudices against a given group of people or beings. A particular religion. A particular cultural worldview. A particular sexual practice or preference. They can also affect how strongly we respond to such impulses. Turning belief in a certain religious worldview into fanaticism, for instance. Or anger into rage.”

“And … you’re saying the Xul are beaming these things to us through the stargates?”

“There is intelligence to support this, General,” Socrates told him. “Yes.”

“How? I mean, how do these emomeme things affect humans? I always thought of ‘meme’ as a kind of metaphor, another word, maybe, for ‘idea.’ Not something with a physical reality.”

“In this case,” Socrates said, “they are quite objectively real.”

“Think of extremely efficient, self-contained, and well-camoflaged software,” Schilling told him, “viruses, if you will, infecting the personal AIs resident in people’s implants. Through the infected AIs, people’s attitudes, the strength of their emotional responses, even their very belief structures can be … changed.”

“Oh,” Garroway said. Then his eyes widened as the implications became clear. “Oh! …”

6

2201.2229

Associative AI Net Access

Government Node

Earthring, Sol System

2245 hours, GMT

“Gentlebeings, we have a problem. A big problem.”

Star Lord Garrick Rame looked out from his electronic viewpoint across the other representatives of the Associative Conclave. The stadium-sized chamber appeared to be filled with them, though only a handful were physically present. Most appeared within translucent pillars of light; some of them occupied luminous pillars that looked hazy or even murky with their native atmospheres. The Eulers, for instance, seemed to float within cylindrical columns of dark and nearly opaque water, while the one Veldik present was almost lost in the nearly impenetrable yellow mists of its sulfurous world. A few pillars were night black, their occupants nocturnal beings who shunned visible light.

“If you mean, Lord Rame, that the Xul group entity poses a threat to the Associative, the evidence suggests otherwise. We have no proof of these emomemonic manipulations you’ve described.”

The speaker was Lelan Valoc, a transfigured s-Human, her enlarged and elongated skull encased in the nano enhancement sheath hardwiring her into the Galactic Net. Her image addressed the Conclave from the speaker’s dais a few meters from Rame’s viewpoint.

In fact, each being linked into the Conclave saw the assembly from the same electronic viewpoint. The AI running the room simulation took care of projecting each image onto the speaker’s dais as that representative was recognized.

Overhead, within the vast dome of the room’s interior, a piercingly brilliant blue rose hung suspended in emptiness, backdrop to a multi-hued spiral disk of infalling starstuff. Rame had just completed his presentation, a virtual sim of the final moments of the OM-27 Eavesdropper Major Dion Williams, as it approached the Galactic Center. Together, the assembled Conclave had witnessed the doomed craft’s approach toward the Great Annihilator, had witnessed the eerie bending of light and beamed transmissions in a gravitational lensing effect, had watched the vessel shudder, flare, and disintegrate.

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