BOOK TWO OF
THE LEGACY TRILOGY
BATTLESPACE
IAN DOUGLAS

To CJ, who’s helped me with my own battle space.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

“I hope they’re friendly,” Lynnley said.

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9: Interlude

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

Epilogue

Also by Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

“I hope they’re friendly,” Lynnley said.

“Of course they’re friendly!” Paul replied. “All the legends about gods from Sirius emphasized that they were friendly, taught humans how to plant crops, that kind of thing. They’re just coming out to greet us!”

The shipboard alert clamored in their minds. Now hear this, now hear this, intoned the voice of the Marine detachment’s resident AI. Battle stations, battle stations. All hands man your battle stations.

A precaution only, she thought. Here, almost nine light-years from what was known and understood, it paid to be doubly cautious.

“Damn,” she said. “I sure hope you’re right.”

She began to disconnect from the noumenal feed. Battle stations for the Marines was in the squad bay aft, suited and armed, ready to repel an attack on the ship or to deploy planetside in their TAL-S Dragonflies to meet an enemy. There was no planetside here, and the golden ship, or whatever it was, had made no hostile moves as yet, had it?

Just a precaution … just a precaution. …

Then something made her hesitate, to look again at the approaching golden vessel.

And then she felt her soul and mind being dragged from her body. …

She began screaming. …

Prologue

15 AUGUST 2148

Star Explorer Wings of Isis Sirius System 1550 hours, Shipboard time

Lance Corporal Lynnley Collins, UFR/US Marines, drifted free within inexpressible beauty.

From her vantage point, she seemed to float in the depths of space, but a space turned glorious by the blue-silver-white beacons of two nearby stars: gleaming Sirius A and its tiny white-dwarf brother, Sirius B.

The Sirius system was thick with dust and debris that caught the starlight and twisted it into hazy knots of pale color. The noumenal display revealed the hard radiation searing the encircling sky as a faint purple background glow.

Noumenal space—such a bland and uninformative description of the sheer miraculous. If a phenomenon is something that happens in the world around us, within that collection of events and happenstance and knock-on-wood solid matter humans are pleased to call reality, then a noumenon is that which happens within a person’s mind.

Thought, wonder, visualization, imagination … such are the bone and sinew of the noumenal. With the appropriate nanochelates forming hypolinks and neural access stacks at certain points within the sulci of the brain, with implanted microcircuitry and perhaps twenty grams of other hardware grown nanobit by nanobit into key nerve bundles to provide sensory input, a human could link in to the data feed from a computer or an AI and become an organic SUI, a sensory user’s interface, experiencing downloads not on a computer monitor or wallscreen, but as unfolding visual and aural imagery within the mind itself.

Lance Corporal Collins, then, was not really adrift in open space, bathed in the fiercely radiant glare of Sirius A. Remote cameras and other sensors on the hull of the explorer ship Wings of Isis provided the cascade of data flooding through her brain by way of the ship’s communications systems. The sky around her was dramatically, impossibly beautiful, bands of dust and gas aglow in actinic Sirian light. Sirius A was distant enough that she didn’t even show a disk, yet still was so brilliant that even within the artfully massaged illusion of the noumenal sensorium it was difficult to look at the star directly.

Closer by some hundreds of millions of kilometers, Sirius B radiated its own hot light, illuminating the stellar debris within which it was imbedded in blues, silvers, violets, and harshly glaring white. A white dwarf, a shrunken star the size of Earth and so dense that a teaspoonful possessed the mass of a good-sized mountain, Sirius B was too small even at this relatively close range to show as more than a blinding spark embedded in its glowing cloud of dust.

Lynnley was not watching the stellar panorama, however. Opposite the two arc-brilliant suns—and harshly illuminated by them—drifted the Wheel.

Ten kilometers away from Wings of Isis, and at least twenty kilometers across, the thing was clearly an artifact, something deliberately created by intelligence, a hubless wheel of roughly the same proportions as a wedding band. Under magnification, the outer surface was black, cracked, and broken, which might indicate that the Wheel had been constructed from asteroidal debris. The inner surface was smooth, almost polished, marked by geometric shapes and lines, and here and there lights glowed like neatly ordered stars, indicating power usage and the possibility of life. Gravitometric readings, however, teased and confused. If they could be believed, the Wheel was incredibly dense, the mass of a large planet collapsed into an enigmatic, clearly artificial hoop.

In fact, there were no planets in the Sirian system. Sirius A was far too hot and bright a star to allow for a comfortably Earthlike planet, and it was young, too young for life to have evolved, even had there been such a world; once Sirius B had been nearly as bright as its big brother before it had vomited part of its mass and collapsed into its present shrunken state. The background radiation, barely held at bay by the Isis’s magnetic screens, would have fried any unprotected life-form in seconds. Whoever had built that structure had come here from somewhere else.

Why? What was the ring for?

And who had built it, here in the harsh and deadly glare of the Sirian suns?

Unseen, but sensed in the imaginal space at her side, Sergeant Paul Watson watched and wondered with her. Paul was a shipboard lover, but, more, he was a friend, a bulwark against the loneliness. John Garroway, the man she loved, was another Marine, one now even more distant from the Wings of Isis than was Earth. As much as she liked Paul, she wished John was here now instead.

“My God!” Paul said suddenly, his voice sharp in her mind.

“What?”

“Look! There in the center. You’ll need to magnify. …”

She set her attention on the center of that massive Wheel, giving the mental command to narrow in on the field of view. Yes, she saw it now … something drifting out from the center of the artifact. If the known diameter of the Wheel was any indication, the object must be a couple of kilometers long at least, as slender as a needle and gleaming in the hard starlight like pure gold.

“What … is it?” she said.

“A ship!” Paul replied in her thoughts. “Obviously, a ship!”

“Why obviously?” Lynnley said. “We don’t know who these people are. Or what they are. We can’t take anything for granted!”

“Bullshit,” Paul replied with a mental snort. “It’s a ship. That Wheel must be some sort of enormous habitat or space station. I think we’re about to meet Berossus’s friends!”

Berossus’s friends. The phrase at once chilled and excited.

The Wings of Isis had voyaged to Sirius—8.6 light-years from home, on a long-shot gamble. Berossus had been a Babylonian historian living about three centuries B.C.E. Only fragments of his writings remained, but from those fragments had come the story of Oannes, an amphibious being who’d appeared at the headwaters of either the Arabian Gulf or the Red Sea—there was some confusion as to which—and taught the primitive humans dwelling there the arts of medicine, agriculture, writing, and of reading the stars. Oannes, Berossus insisted, was not a god, but one of a number of beings he called semidemons or “animals with reason,” intelligent beings like men, but not human. The Greek word he used for them was Annedoti, “the Repulsive Ones,” and they were said to have the bodies and tails of fish with the heads and limbs of men.

The tale, like so many other fragments of lost or nearly lost history, from Quetzalcoatl to Troy to the Iberian Bronze Age copper miners of Lake Superior to the nuclear holocaust described in the Rig-Veda to lost Atlantis, had long been relegated to myth. The twenty-first- and twenty-second-century exoarcheological discoveries on the moon, Mars, and Europa, however, had demonstrated once and for all that many such myths were history in disguise.

The rise of human civilization was not what it long had seemed.

The Annedoti of Berossus were associated with the star Sirius, having claimed to come from there. The Nommo of the myths of the Dogon tribe in Mali also purportedly hailed from the Sirius system, which the primitive Dogon had described in intriguing, impossible detail. The Dogon traditions were so anachronistically detailed in fact that even in the twentieth century some writers had speculated that the Nommo might represent memories of an encounter between early humans and visiting extraterrestrials.

The only problem was the fact that Sirius couldn’t possibly have planets.

The Wings of Isis had departed Earth orbit late in the year 2138 and traveled for ten years, objective, most of that time at near-c. For the 245 men and women onboard, 30 of them the UFR/US Marines of the Shipboard Security Detachment, relativistic effects reduced ten years to four, and they were unaware even of that passage of time since they were in cybernetic hibernation in order to conserve food, air, and other consumables. Awakened out of cybehibe as they approached the Sirius system, most of the men and women not actively on duty at the moment were gathered now in noumenal space, linked in through the ship’s comm network, watching … and wondering.

“I hope they’re friendly,” Lynnley said after a moment. “The Wings of Isis wouldn’t make a decent lifeboat for that thing!”

“Of course they’re friendly!” Paul replied. “All the legends about gods from Sirius emphasized that they were friendly, taught humans how to plant crops, that kind of thing. They’re just coming out to greet us!”

The shipboard alert clamored in their minds. Now hear this, now hear this, intoned the voice of the Marine detachment’s resident AI. Battle stations, battle stations. All hands man your battle stations.

A precaution only, she thought. Here, almost nine light-years from what was known and understood, it paid to be doubly cautious.

“I hope to the Goddess you’re right, Paul,” she said. “But whoever they are, they must be damned old, and someone once said that the old are often insanely jealous of the young. And … there are the Hunters of the Dawn, remember?”

She felt his noumenal touch. “Nah. It’s Oannes’s descendents, and they’re coming out to see how their offspring have done. Everything’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

“Damn,” she said. “I sure hope you’re right.”

She began to disconnect from the noumenal feed. Battle stations for the Marines was in the squad bay aft, suited and armed, ready to repel an attack on the ship or to deploy planetside in their TAL-S Dragonflies to meet an enemy. There was no planetside here, and the golden ship, or whatever it was, had made no hostile moves as yet, had it?

Just a precaution … just a precaution. …

Then something made her hesitate, to look again at the approaching golden vessel.

And then she felt her soul and mind being dragged from her body. …

She began screaming. …

1

27 OCTOBER 2159

The NNN Interactive World Report WorldNet NewsFeed 0705 hours, PST

Visual: A heavy Trans-Atmospheric Transport slowly descends through a night sky on shrieking plasma thrusters, its blocky, massive outline wreathed in swirling clouds of steam and illuminated by searchlights from the ground.

“… and in other news today, UFR/US Marines of the First Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit returned to Earth early this morning, touching down at the Marine Spaceport Facility at Twentynine Palms, California, at just past midnight, Pacific Time. The First MIEU departed Earth twenty-one years ago in order to safeguard human interests on the planet Ishtar, in the star system designated Lalande 21185.”

[Thought-click on highlighted links for further information.]

Visual: Enormous cargo containers, each twenty meters long and massing a hundred tons, are lowered on hydraulic arms from the grounded TAT’s belly and onto ground-effect cargo carriers. Marines in full battle armor stand guard around the perimeter.

“The unit’s marines, numbering over a thousand men and women, were brought down while still in cybernetic hibernation from the EU stellar transport Jules Verne, the vessel which brought them back from Ishtar on a voyage lasting ten years. They were taken at once to a hibernation receiving facility at Twentynine Palms for revival.”

[Thought-click on highlighted links for further information.]

Visual: A succession of scenes of Marines in battle armor on the planet Ishtar—beneath a sullen, green-tinted sky and the swollen orb of the gas giant, Marduk, about which Ishtar orbits. In the distance, a stepped pyramid rises above purple and black vegetation. Other buildings, crude things of mud brick, are visible in the foreground.

Scenes of battle, the Marines firing their weapons at unseen enemies.

More scenes of battle, Marines holding off an oncoming wave of humanoid creatures waving spears and banners. Marine Wasp fighters twist through the green sky.

“Fighting on Ishtar was, reportedly, savage, and the First MIEU suffered heavy casualties. According to reports, the alien Ahannu inhabiting Ishtar were holding a number of humans as slaves, the descendents of humans taken from Earth when the Ahannu, or An, possessed a starfaring empire ten thousand years ago.

[Thought-click on highlighted links for further information.]

Visual: Images of Ahannu—primitive, carrying spears and wearing crude armor. They are humanoid, with elongated, crested heads, finely scaled green or brown skin, and enormous, golden eyes bearing horizontally slit pupils.

A scene shows several richly dressed Ahannu apparently in conversation with a number of Marines, one identified by a floating ID label as Colonel Ramsey. The Marines tower over the diminutive aliens, who appear submissive and afraid. A caption reads “Formalization of peace accord between the UFR and Ahannu leaders, June 30, 2148.”

“The Ahannu, primitives who no longer possess the advanced, starfaring technology of their ancestors, surrendered to the Marines after two days of hard fighting. The commanding officer of the First MIEU, Colonel T.J. Ramsey, reportedly established a treaty with the Ahannu guaranteeing the freedom of Ishtar’s human population.”

[Thought-click on highlighted links for further information.]

Visual: The scene shifts to Earth and an angry crowd numbering in the thousands, filling a street, shaking fists and hand-lettered signs, chanting slogans. A woman in an elegant green cloak speaks passionately into the NetCam. “The Ahannu are gods! As the An, they came to our world thousands of years ago and brought with them the seeds of civilization—agriculture, medicine, writing! The Ahannu are the An’s descendents. We should be worshipping them, not killing them!” A caption reads: “Live: Demonstration in Portland, Maine, by members of the Anist Church of the Returning Gods.”

“Reaction to the return of the Marines has been mixed. Many groups protest UFR involvement in the Lalande system, which has now fallen under joint EU–Brazilian–UFR control. Numerous religious groups here on Earth protest what many are calling heavy-handed interference in Ahannu affairs. And there are nations which disagree with UFR policies on Ishtar as well.”

[Thought-click on highlighted links for further information.]

Visual: Another mob, this one obviously Islamic, with a mosque visible in the background. An imam speaks to the NetCam in Arabic, which is translated by the broadcast’s AI. “These so-called ancient gods are demons and upset the order of God, may his name be blessed forever! It is a sin to have any traffic with them whatsoever!” A caption reads: “Imam Selim ibn Ali Zayid, speaking in Cairo, the Kingdom of Allah, earlier today.”

Visual: Another mob, many waving American flags. A prominent sign in the foreground reads humanity unite! A wild-eyed man shouts into the NetCam, “The An enslaved people! They set up a colony on our planet and took away people to be slaves on other planets! They should be nuked. What the hell are we doing signing treaties with these monsters, for God’s sake? They’re demons! Kill them! Kill them all!” A caption reads: “Fr. Ronaldo Carrera, Church of Humankind, La Paz, Baja, earlier today.”

“Meanwhile, tensions continue to mount between the UFR and the EU–Mexican–Brazilian Accord over the question of Aztlan independence. President DeChancey announced that …”

Cybernetic Hibernation Receiving Facility Star Marine Force Center Twentynine Palms, California 0920 hours, PST

Lance Corporal John Garroway, UFR/US Marine Corps, struggled upward toward light and consciousness. Tattered shreds of dreams clung to his awareness, already slipping away into emptiness. There were dreams of falling, of flame and battle and death in the night, and of an endless, empty gulf between the stars. …

He drew a breath and felt that terrifying no-air feeling you got when the wind was knocked out of you. He tried to inhale, harder, and a flash of white-hot pain stabbed at both sides of his chest.

He was drowning.

Garroway tried to breathe through the blockage and felt his body convulse in paroxysms of coughing and retching. A viscous jelly clogged his nose, mouth, and windpipe. A giant’s hand pressed down on his chest; another closed about his throat. Damn it, he couldn’t breathe. …

Then, with a final, explosive cough, the jelly was expelled from his lungs and he managed his first ragged, burning lungful of air. He managed a second breath, and a third. The pain and the strangling sensation faded.

There was something wrong with his vision, he thought. He could see … a pale, faint green glow that nonetheless hurt the eyes, but there was nothing to see, save a flat, smooth, plastic-looking surface a few centimeters above his face. For a moment claustrophobia threatened, and his breathing became harsh, rapid, and painful once more.

Something stung his arm at the angle of his elbow. A robotic injector arm pulled back, vanishing into a side compartment. “Lie still and breathe deeply,” a voice that was neither male nor female told him in his thoughts. “Do not try to leave your cell. A transition medical team will be with you momentarily.”

Memories began surfacing, as other sensations besides pain and strangulation returned to his body. He’d been through this before. He was in a cybehibe tube and he was awakening once more after years of cybernetically induced hibernation. The voice in his head was coming from his own cerebral implant, which meant they were monitoring his revival.

He was awake. He was okay. …

The gel that had moments before filled the narrow tube, providing, among other things, protection from several years’ worth of bed sores as well as a conduit for oxygen and cell-repair nano, was draining away now into the plastic padding beneath his back. Garroway concentrated on breathing, gulping down sweet air … and ignoring the stench that had collected inside the coffin-sized compartment for the past ten years or so. His empty and shrunken stomach threatened to rebel. He tried to focus on remembering.

He could remember … yeah … he could remember.

He remembered the shuttle flight up from the surface of Ishtar, and boarding a European Union transport—the Jules Verne. He remembered being told to remove all clothing and personal articles and log them with the clerk, of lying down on a metal slab barely softened by a thin plastic mattress, of a woman speaking to him in French as the first injection hit his bloodstream and turned the world fuzzy.

Ishtar. He’d been at Ishtar. And now … Now? They must be at Earth.

Earth!

The thought brought a sudden snap of energy and he thumped his head painfully against the plastic surface of the hybe tube as he tried to sit up.

Earth! …

Or … possibly one of the LaGrange stations. The pull of gravity felt about right for Earth, but that could be due to the rotation of a large habitat. He might even still be on the EU ship.

Gods and goddesses, no. He didn’t want to have to deal with them again. Let this be Earth!

The end of his hybe cell just above his head hissed open, and his pallet slid out into light. Two Marines in utility fatigues peered down at him. “What’s your name, buddy?” one asked him.

“Garroway,” he replied automatically. “John. Lance Corporal, serial number 19283-336-6959.”

“That’s a roger,” the other said, reading from a comp-board. “He’s tracking.”

“How ya feeling?”

“A bit muzzy,” he admitted. He tried to concentrate on his own body. The sensations were … odd. Unfamiliar. “Hungry, I think.”

“Not surprising after ten years with nothing but keepergel in your gut. You’ll be able to get some chow soon.”

“Ten years? What … what year is it?”

“Welcome to 2159, Marine.”

He held up both hands, turning them, looking at them a bit wonderingly. They were still wet with dissolving gel. “2159?”

“Don’t freak it, gramps,” the other Marine told him. “You’re all there. The nano even stopped your hair and nails from growing.”

“Yeah. It just feels … odd. Where are we?”

“The Marine Corps Cybernetic Hibernation Receiving Facility,” the Marine with the board said. “Twentynine Palms.”

“Then I’m home.”

The other Marine laughed. “Don’t make any quick judgments, timer. You’ll null your prog.”

“Huh?”

“Just lie there for a minute, guy. Don’t sweat the net. If you gotta puke, puke on the deck. The auts’ll take care of it. When you feel ready, sit up … but slow, understand? Don’t push your body too hard just yet. You need time to vam all the hibenano out of your system. When you feel like moving, make your way to the shower, get clean, and rec yourself some utilities.”

Garroway was already sitting up, swinging his legs off the pallet. “I’ve done this before,” he said.

“Suit yourself,” the Marine said. They were already moving away, beginning to cycle open the next cybehibe capsule in line, a few meters away. As the hatch cycled open and the pallet extruded itself from the bulkhead, Garroway could see the slowly moving form of Corporal Womicki half-smothered in green nanogel.

“What’s your name, buddy?” one of the revival techs asked.

“Wo-Womicki, Timothy. Lance Corporal, serial number 15521-119—”

“He’s tracking.”

“Welcome to 2159, Marine.”

The routine continued.

Elsewhere around the circular, fluorescent-lit compartment, other Marine revival techs were working with men and women emerging from cybehibe, dozens in this one room alone. Some, nude and pasty-looking, were already standing or making their way toward a door marked showers, but most remained on their pallets.

“Hey, Gare!” Womicki’s voice was weak, but he was sitting up. “We made it, huh?”

“I guess we did.”

“Whatcha think the pool number is?”

His stomach gave an unpleasant twist. “Dunno. Guess we’ll find out.”

The deathwatch pool was a kind of lottery, with the Marines betting on how many would die in cybehibe passage.

How many of their buddies had made it?

And then his head started swimming and he vomited explosively onto the deck, emptying his stomach of yet more of the all-pervading foamy nanogel.

A long moment later, his stomach steadied, and he began working on bringing some focus to his muddled thinking.

Twentynine Palms. This was the place where he’d been loaded into cybe-hibe preparatory to being shuttled up to the IST Derna like a crate of supplies. That felt like a year ago or so … not twenty years.

Well, his various briefings had warned him that he’d have some adjusting to do. Between the effects of relativity and the cybehibe sleep, he’d been just a bit out of touch with the rest of the universe.

He thought-clicked his cerebral implant. “Link. Query. Local news update.”

He expected a cascade of thought-clickable headers to scroll past his mind’s eye, but instead a red flash warned him that his Net access had been interdicted. “All shoreside communications have been restricted,” the mental voice told him. “You will be informed when it is permissible to make calls off-base or receive information downloads.”

A small flat automaton of some sort was busily cleaning up the mess he’d made on the deck.

So far, he thought, this is a hell of a welcome home. …

Headquarters Star Marine Force Center Twentynine Palms, California 1750 hours, PST

“Why,” Colonel Thomas Jackson Ramsey said as he took a seat at the conference table, “all the extra security? My people have calls they want to make, and they’re justifiably curious about the Earth they’ve just come home to. But we appear to be under quarantine.”

“Quarantine is a good word for it, Colonel,” General Richard Foss told him. “Operating policy now calls for a gradual insertion of returning personnel into ordinary life. Things have changed a lot in twenty years, you know.”

“How much?”

“The political situation is … delicate.”

“It usually is. Damn it, what’s going on?”

“The European Union has recognized the independent nation of Aztlan, along with Mexico, Brazil, and Quebec. All U.S. military bases are on full alert. The borders are closed. War may be eminent.”

“Jesus.” Ramsey frowned. “An EU ship brought us home.”

“The crisis flared up for the first time a year ago, about the time you were beginning deceleration, a half light-year out. Geneva recognized Aztlan independence, at least in principle, and was offering to broker talks. There was … concern, in some circles, that you people might be held hostage if war did break out.”

Ramsey nodded. The Aztlan question had been smoldering for some years, even before the Derna had left for Ishtar, and it really was only a matter of time before there was a final showdown. The Aztlanistas wanted a homeland—to be carved out of the southwestern states of the Federal Republic of North America, land they claimed had been unjustly taken from Mexico in the wars of 1848 and 2042. Since that homeland would consist of some of the United Federal Republic’s choicest and most populous real estate—southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Baja, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua—Washington flatly refused to negotiate.

Unfortunately, there were a number of players in the world arena, including China and the EU, who would like to see the UFR taken down a notch or three, and breaking away 8 of the Federal Republic’s 62 states would certainly accomplish that.

“Things were smoothed out,” General Foss continued. “Our AIs talked to their AIs, a summit conference was held at Pacifica, and things quieted down a bit.

“But two weeks ago, while you were still inbound out beyond the orbit of Saturn, Aztlanistas managed to smuggle a small AM bomb into the Federal Building in Sacramento. Twelve hundred dead—and the heart of the city leveled. At this point in time, Colonel, as you can imagine, there is considerable ill feeling toward people of Hispanic descent. Three days ago, anti-Latino rioting in New Chicago and in New York resulted in several hundred dead and over a thousand injured.”

“That still doesn’t explain why my people are being held incommunicado, sir.”

Foss didn’t reply for a long moment. His eyes seemed a bit unfocused and Ramsey waited. Possibly he was talking with someone else over his implant or downloading some key information.

“Colonel,” Foss said at last, “there are people in the current administration who were suggesting MIEU-1 shouldn’t be allowed back to Earth.”

“What?”

Foss held up a hand. “You were working with the EU on Ishtar,” Foss said. “And you pulled that cute stunt that pulled the rug out from under PanTerra. There are some who question your loyalty, Colonel, and the loyalty of the Marines under your command.”

Ramsey came to his feet. “Who?” he demanded.

“Take it easy, Colonel.”

“I will not take it easy. Sir. Who is accusing my men of disloyalty?”

“Sit down, Colonel!” As Ramsey grudgingly took his seat, Foss folded his hands on the table and continued. “You know how rumors spread, Colonel. And how poisonous they can be. They take on a life of their own, sometimes, and do some horrific damage.”

“That does not answer the question, General.” Ramsey was furious. “If I screwed up with the Ishtaran state, then court-martial me. But I was responsible, not my men!”

“No one is talking about courts-martial, Colonel. Not yet, at any rate. You did overstep your authority, true, but there were … extenuating circumstances.”

“Like the fact that my orders were coming from eight-point-three light-years away? And that something had to be done immediately?”

“Well, yes. More to the point, however, your mission required you to support the PanTerran representatives and their interests.”

“Which, it turned out, involved ‘liberating’ human slaves from the Ahannu, so they could be shipped to Earth as contract laborers. Slavery, in other words.”

“Not slavery, Colonel …”

“Oh? What are you calling it these days?”

“Liberational relocation.”

“Bullshit. Sir. The Sag-ura have been shaped by ten thousand years of Ahannu selective breeding and conditioning.” Sag-ura was the name for the descendents of humans removed from Earth thousands of years before and taken to other worlds of the Ahannu empire. “PanTerra was planning on shipping them in cybehibe tubes back to Earth to be trained and sold as ‘domestics.’ With no understanding of Earth–human culture, what chance would they have had for real freedom?”

“You made certain political decisions, Colonel.” He gave a grim, hard smile. “Do you realize that they’re calling it ‘Ramsey’s Peace’ now?”

“Yes, sir. We helped facilitate the creation of an independent Sag-uran state, which should be able to look out for the interests of humans living on Ishtar.”

“And it was not within the purview of the Marines to dabble in local politics.”

“No, sir. Except that the Ahannu had surrendered. Earth was eight-and-a-half light-years away, and the EU–Brazilian military expedition was due to show up in another five months. Do you think they would have tried to guarantee the safety of the Sag-ura?”

“Probably not. Especially since they have PanTerran connections as well.” Foss cleared his throat. “The point, Colonel, is that you did overstep yourself by making the decisions you did. But that’s not why I called you in here.”

Ramsey worked to control his anger. “Yes, sir.”

“There is widespread suspicion that MIEU-1 was working with the EU on Ishtar.”

“Reasonable enough. We were. Under orders.”

“Indeed. And by brokering that agreement with the natives and creating that sag-uran state, whatever it’s called …”

“Dumu-gir Kalam, sir.”

“Whatever. You did steal a march on the EU. They couldn’t very well abrogate treaties you’d written and signed, not without an incident and some very bad press back home.”

“So the Accord is holding up?”

“Has for the ten years since you left, Colonel, yes. As for the future? Who knows? The EU have established a diplomatic mission on Ishtar, now.”

“So they’re playing by the rules, at least.”

“For now. But my concern is what’s happening on this planet. On Earth. Specifically, we have people—both in the government and ordinary Joes and Janes on the streets—who think you were somehow collaborating with the EU on Ishtar. And they know that the EU brought you back to Earth on one of their transports.”

“Well, it was that or have us stay there with them.”

“It was decided to have MIEU-1 return to Earth, Colonel. Protecting UFR interests on Ishtar is the Army’s job now.” An Army occupational force consisting of elements of the First Extrasolar Special Operations Group had accompanied the EU and Brazilian joint expedition. “However, that has caused some serious problems for us here.”

“My men are loyal, General,” Ramsey said through clenched teeth. “You can’t lock them away without a fair hearing.”

Foss sighed. “Colonel, it’s not just the loyalty question. You should know that. The Ahannu are the focus of the biggest religious brouhaha since Adam and Eve got their eviction notice in Eden. Some people think they are gods—or the descendents of gods—and that our proper place is at their feet, worshipping them.”

“Crackpots.”

“Some think they’re demons and think it’s wrong to have any political dealings with them at all. Some think they’re the underdogs, poor, misunderstood little primitives, and the big, bad Marines are out to commit high-tech genocide. Some think they’re your stereotypical bug-eyed monsters lusting after human females, slave masters who must be punished. The Papessa is saying the Ahannu ought to be stopped from keeping slaves. The Anti-Pope is saying we have to treat the Ahannu as friends and equals and to respect their traditions. The list goes on and on.

“The point is, Colonel, you and your people have come back to Earth at a rather sensitive time. You can’t help but be caught up in the politics—and the religious controversy. You’ve just stepped off the boat, Colonel, and smack into quicksand.”

“If you’re looking for a scapegoat, General, you’re free to take a shot at me. I’ll fight it, but you can try. But it is a monstrous injustice to blame the men under my command for—”

“No one is blaming them, Colonel. Or you. But I needed to make sure you understood the … ah … delicate nature of your position here.”

“You’ve got my attention, sir. That’s for damned sure.”

“We have a new situation, one that calls for MIEU-1’s special, um, talents.”

“Another deployment, General?”

He nodded. “Another deployment.”

“To where?”

“To Sirius. Eight-point-six light-years out. The brightest star in Earth’s night sky.”

That pricked Ramsey’s interest. “The Wings of Isis, sir? She found something?”

“Link in, Colonel, and I’ll fill you in with what we know.”

Ramsey closed his eyes and felt the familiar inner shiver as data began to flow, downloading through his cereblink.

Visual: A wedding band adrift in space. Two stars, arc-brilliant and dazzling to look at, hung in the distance, suspended against wispy clouds of hazy light.

“These images were laser-transmitted to us as they were being made,” Foss said. “They arrived two years ago. The star on the left is Sirius A. The other is Sirius B, the white dwarf. And the Wheel. …”

Visual: The NetCam zooms in and the structure is revealed to be enormous. Data scrolls down one side of the visual, indicating dimensions and mass. The structure is titanic, twenty kilometers across, but massing as much as a small start. The density of the thing—better than 6 × 10¹⁸ grams per cubic centimeter—is astonishing.

“An alien artifact?”

Foss nodded.

“What is it? A space station? A space habitat of some kind?”

“No. At least … we don’t think so.”

“That density reading,” Ramsey said, examining the data. “That can’t be right.”

“According to gravitometric scans made by the Wings of Isis, it is,” Foss replied.

“Neutronium? Collapsed matter?”

“The density’s not that high. Most of that thing is actually hollow. But we think we know what’s going on. Think of that hoop as a kind of particle accelerator, like the hundred-kilometer supercollider at Mare Humorum on the moon.”

“Okay. …”

“Now imagine, instead of subatomic particles, what you have whirling around inside that giant racetrack are tiny black holes. And they’re moving at close to the speed of light.”

“Black holes? My God, why?”

“Best guess is that what we’re looking at here is an inside-out Tipler Machine.”

“A what?”

“Here’s the data.”

Frank Tipler had been a prominent physicist at the turn of the twenty-first century. Among other things, he’d suggested the mechanism for a means of bypassing space, of jumping from here to there without the tedious process of moving through the space in between. His scheme had called for building a very long cylinder, one hundred kilometers long, ten kilometers wide, and made of neutronium—the ultra-dense collapsed matter of a neutron star. Rotate the thing two thousand times a second, so the surface is moving at half the speed of light. Theoretically, according to Tipler, the rotating mass would drag space and time with it, opening paths through both above the surface. By following a carefully plotted course around the rotating cylinder, a starship pilot could cross light-years in an instant … and would be able to fly back and forth through time as well.

The whole thing was just a thought experiment, of course. No one seriously expected anyone to ever be able to squash neutron stars together in order to make their own time machine.

But someone, evidently, had figured out another way to do the same thing.

“So that thing’s a time machine?” Ramsey asked after he’d had a moment to digest the download.

“Space and time,” Foss replied. “Space-time equivalence, remember? We think this must be one of several identical gateways, constructed around different stars. You fly into one and come out another. We don’t know if they use the time travel component at all, though the smart money says they don’t. They would screw causality to hell and gone if they did. Now. Watch. …”

Visual: The stargate appears from a different angle, suspended against the background haze of the Sirian system. Something appears in the middle, a little off-center. One moment there is nothing there; the next, there is something, a golden object rendered tiny by the scale of the vast Wheel. The scene magnifies, zooming in for a closer look. The object appears to be a ship of some sort, needle slender, but somewhat swollen aft, golden-hued. Data readouts show the object to be over two kilometers long.

Ramsey felt his scalp prickle as he watched the ship grow rapidly larger. The vessel appeared to accelerate suddenly, leaping toward him. …

The image cut off in a burst of white noise and electronic snow.

He blinked. “Okay,” he said slowly. “We have first contact with a high-tech civilization. Who are they?”

“That,” Foss replied, “we don’t know.”

“What happened to the Wings of Isis?” The words were hard, grim.

“We don’t know that, either. Whatever happened, of course, happened ten years ago, while you were still on Ishtar. We have to assume that the Wings of Isis was destroyed, since two more years passed after these images were recorded and transmitted, and we’ve heard nothing from them. That might have been an accident or …”

“Or enemy action. The Hunters of the Dawn?” Ramsey’s heart was beating a little faster now and he felt cold.

“Again, Colonel. We don’t know. But we hope you and your people will be able to tell us.”

“Huh. You don’t believe in easy assignments, do you, sir?”

“This is the Marine Corps, son,” Foss told him. “The only easy mission was the last one.”

2

27 OCTOBER 2159

Marine Receiving Barracks Star Marine Force Center Twentynine Palms, California 1825 hours, PST

“So what’s the dope, Gare?” Lance Corporal Roger Eagleton asked. “You hear anything?”

“Nope,” Garroway said around a mouthful of steak-and-cheese. “You think they tell me anything?”

“You’re the one with the famous Marine ancestor,” Kat Vinton told him.

“I guess. So why would that mean they’d tell me what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. With your name, we figured they were grooming you for a recruiting tour, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Corporal Bill Bryan added. “Just to keep you happy, so’s you can be convincing with your sales pitch. You know. ‘Join the UFR/US Marines! Travel to exotic climes! Explore strange new cultures! Meet fascinating people! Kill them.’”

“Ooh-rah.”

They were seated at a long mess table, showered, dressed in newly issued utilities, and packing in their first meal in ten years. The chow was first-class and there was lots of it, but now that their stomachs had gotten rid of the last of that damned packing gel and had some time to settle, they were hungry. Even three-lies-in-one field rations would have seemed like food of the gods under the circumstances.

“How about you, Sarge?” Kat asked the big man at the end of the table. Staff Sergeant Richard “Well” Dunne was acting platoon sergeant now and the platoon’s liaison with all higher authority. “They tell you what’s going on?”

“Negative,” Dunne said. “The word is to sit tight and all will be revealed.”

“Hurry up and wait,” Garroway said. “The litany of the modern Marine Corps.”

“Fuck that shit,” Sergeant Wes Houston said. “It’s been that way since Sargon the Great was a PFC.”

Garroway continued to eat, but he was somewhat unsettled. Kat’s crack about his famous ancestor had caught him by surprise. His great-grandfather had been Sands of Mars Garroway, a tough old-Corps Marine who’d led his men on a grueling march through the Vallis Marineris during the U.N. War of 2042 to capture an enemy-held base. The man was one of the legends of the Corps, another live-forever name like Dan Daily, Smedley Butler, and Chesty Puller. When he’d gone through his Naming Ceremony, he’d deliberately chosen his mother’s maiden name—Garroway—hoping, perhaps, that some of the luster of that name would rub off on him.

Now that he was a Marine himself, though, he frequently found himself wishing it wouldn’t rub off quite so much. Officers and NCOs tended to expect more from him than of others, and everyone else assumed the name meant he had things easy.

The fact was that there was no favoritism in the Corps—not below the rank of colonel, at any rate, not that he’d been able to detect.

“There’s one piece of good news,” Dunne said. “The TIG promos are probably gonna go through. That’s something, at least.”

Appreciative claps, whistles, and cheers sounded from around the mess table. It was good news.

In the service, being promoted from one rank to the next required passing advancement tests, but more it required TIG—time-in-grade. Garroway had boarded the Derna right out of boot camp as a wet-behind-the-ears private first-class, pay grade E-2. The voyage out to Lalande 21185 had taken ten years, objective time, though relativistic effects contracted that to four years, ship’s time.

His promotion to E-3, lance corporal, had been pretty much automatic. Technically, he’d needed six months as an E-2 and four years subjective counted, even if he’d slept through most of it in cybehibe. He’d received his chevron above crossed rifles while serving on Ishtar.

He’d been on Ishtar for less than a year, however, before being packed onboard the Jules Verne and popped back into cybehibe for the return voyage. The promotion to the next rank, corporal, required a year in-grade plus a test. He would be an NCO, a noncommissioned officer, at E-4, with more responsibility and higher expectations regarding his performance.

So here he was … ten years objective and four years subjective later. Technically, he had the time in grade. What he did not have was the experience.

Still, it was embarrassing to be a Marine with—according to his Earthside records—twenty-one years in, and he was only an E-3. If he’d not gone to the stars, if he’d stayed in and stayed out of trouble, he would be a goddamned sergeant major by now, at the exalted pay grade of E-9.

Scuttlebutt had it that the brass was considering a blanket set of promotions for the men and women of Operation Spirit of Humankind, with everyone bumped up a pay grade and given a hefty out-system combat bonus to boot. There was talk of a special download training session to implant the necessary skills and knowledge that went with the rank.

Of course, if they kept that up, they’d have a whole platoon of gunnery sergeants. He wondered how they would handle the tendency for units to go top-heavy like that.

“There’s also some other news,” Sergeant Dunne went on, “though I can’t vouch for it. Word is they may be about to offer us another deployment.”

That brought shocked silence to the table. “Another deployment?” Kat asked. “Where?”

Dunne shrugged. “I was talking to the senior revival tech a while ago. All he knew was that we were being kept here for a while, possibly with the idea of letting us volunteer to go out-system again.”

Out-system again? Garroway thought about it, and he didn’t care for it. He’d just gotten back, and there were things he wanted to do, damn it. Like see how things had changed in twenty years. And, oh yeah … see if he could find his father and kill the bastard.

Anyway, the usual routine in both the Navy and the Marines was to rotate personnel between ship and shore assignments or between overseas or off-world duty stations and duty back in the World.

“This is just gonna be for volunteers, right, Sergeant?” he asked.

“I’d imagine so,” Dunne said. “Unless the Corps’s changed one hell of a lot in the past twenty years.”

“On the other hand,” Houston said thoughtfully, “we are all Famsit one or two. I’d imagine that’s a resource kind of scarce in the Corps, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Corporal Regi Lobowski said. “Maybe there’s no one else to send.”

“The question is,” Kat said, “send where? Any idea, Sarge?”

“Nope. Not that there are that many possibilities.”

Garroway had already uplinked to the platoon net, with a search query. How many out-system missions were going on right now?

And the choices were fairly limited. Marine detachments had been assigned to several extrasolar archeological missions, but most of those had been recalled due to budgetary constraints. The Chiron mission, at Alpha Centauri A, had been reopened two years ago after a ten-year suspension, and the Diego Vasquez, with exoarcheologists, planetologists, and Marines, was now en route to begin again the exploration of that desert world’s dead cities, but Kali/Ross 154 and Thor/61 Cygni A both remained abandoned. There were Marines stationed at Rhiannon/Epsilon Eridani and at Poseidon/Tau Ceti, both worlds with ruins apparently going back to the long-vanished Builders.

And there was a detachment onboard the Spirit of Discovery, a deep explorer now en route for 70 Ophiuchi, and another on the Wings of Isis expedition to Sirius. That brought a wistful pang to Garroway. Lynnley was assigned to that shipboard detachment. He wondered where she was now … en route home? She ought to be by now. He hoped so.

What else? Outposts on Janus, on Hecate, and on Epona. There were no Marines stationed on those desolate worlds, but if there was trouble, Marines might be sent—assuming the need justified the colossal expense of an interstellar military expedition.

“Betcha it’s Rhiannon,” Corporal Anna Garcia said. “I heard the Builder ruins there are even bigger and more extensive than on Chiron, and the EU would just love to snatch that little gem right out from under our noses.”

“Nah,” Lobowski said. “Gotta be Chiron. Makes sense, right? I mean, we have a base there, we’re diggin’ up all kinds of cool shit, and then we pull out when the money dries up. But now we’re sending out another expedition to the place. Either there’s some highly classified shit goin’ down out there, stuff the big boys don’t want to talk about, or the EU is about to make a grab for the place. And the Feds want the Marines to handle it.”

Womicki laughed. “Shee-it. Y’wanna know what I think?”

“Not really.”

“I think they’re sending us back to Ishtar. Wouldn’t that be just like the Corps? Send us out there to fight the Frogs, haul us back, and then as soon as we’re back, they ship us out to the same place again. SOP—standard operating procedure.”

“You’re full of it, Wo. Your eyes are brown.”

Garroway wasn’t sure what to think. Alpha Centauri … Epsilon Eridani … Tau Ceti … Sirius. Which was it?

Sergeant Houston’s comment about famsits was a good one. Where possible, the Corps only sent Famsit one and two personnel to the stars … men and women who had no close family on Earth. That was for the simple fact that travel between the stars took years objective; between relativity and cybehibe, a starfaring Marine might age a few months while a wife or parents back home aged a decade or two. Military service had always placed a strain on families, but time-lagging brought a whole new level of complexity to the problem.

How do you find Marines who have no family attachments at home?

“I’d sign on for another cruise,” Womicki said.

“Fuck, not me,” Houston said. “I’ve put in six years subjective—and twenty-six objective. Done my time, and now this gyrine’s gonna be an ex-gyrine.”

“There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine, asshole,” Dunne said good-naturedly. “Once in the Corps, always in the Corps!”

“Yeah,” Kat put in. “They own you, body and soul, for all eternity. Didn’t you read the fine print on your enlistment contract?”

“Anyway, Sarge,” Lobowski said. “Maybe they won’t give you a choice. Maybe they just say ‘Jump,’ and you say ‘Aye aye, and how high, sir!’”

“Aw, they ain’t gonna ship us out without us sayin’ they can,” Corporal Matt Cavaco said. “It’s against the law.”

“The law,” Dunne said slowly, “is what the brass says the law is. They want us to go fifteen light-years and tromp on some bug-faced locals, then that’s what we’ll do.”

“Semper fi,” Kat said.

“Do or die,” Garroway added.

He wondered if they would at least be allowed leave before being shipped out-system again.

He had an old debt to settle with his father, and if another twenty years passed on Earth before he returned again, it might well be too late.

Virtual Conferencing Room 12 Star Marine Force Center Twentynine Palms, California 1904 hours, PST

“Colonel Ramsey? Thank you for nouming in for this meeting. I know it’s late there … and you must be tired after your long journey.”

The others in the noumenal space laughed. “My pleasure, General,” Ramsey said. “Not as late for me as for some of you.”

In point of physical reality, Ramsey was lying on a padded recliner in a small room behind Foss’s office. To his mind’s eye, however, he stood—if that was the word, since there was no trace of a floor—in Sirius space, surrounded by the illusion of glowing gas and dust. Sirius A and B were hard, brilliant pinpoints beneath his feet. Ahead and above hung the enigmatic Wheel.

“Gentlemen,” the welcomer said, “ladies, this meeting will initiate Operation Battlespace. This information is classified, of course. Code Seven-Orange.”

General Foss stood beside him. They were being addressed by Major General Franklin Kinsey, a man with the unwieldy title of CO-USMCSPACCOM, the commanding officer of the UFR/US Marine Space Command, based in Quantico, Virginia. Also in attendance were Brigadier General Harriet Tomasek, the coordinator of SMF space transport assets; Brigadier General Cornell Dominick, SPACCOM’s liaison with the Joint Chiefs; and Colonel Gynger Kowalewski, SPACCOM’s senior technical advisor. Two civilians were present as well, a Dr. James Ryerson, from the Federal Exoarcheological Intelligence Department, or XID; and Franklin T. Shugart from the President’s Federal Advisory Council. Other men and women, some in uniform, others in icon-civvies, hovered in the near distance, staff members, aides, and advisors.

Their images—computer-generated—hung in a semicircle in space, watching the immense Wheel. To one side, the explorer ship Wings of Isis appeared to be drifting toward the artifact, a long and slender assembly of hab and cargo modules topped by the broad, full mushroom cap of the water tank that served as both reaction mass and shielding against deadly impacts of particulate radiation encountered at near-c velocities. The star transport’s deceleration drive had been deployed, rising up through the center of the shielding cap to keep the hab modules safe in the cap’s shadow.

“Is this a computer simulation of the ship’s approach?” Dominick wanted to know. “Or the real thing?”

“Actually, it’s built up from data transmitted from a half-dozen robot probes deployed as the Isis entered the Sirius system,” Kowalewski said. “It’s a sim, yes, but it’s based on direct data, not extrapolation.”

“It’s the real thing, Corny,” Tomasek said with a laugh. “In so far as we can know what is real.”

“Here comes the hostile,” Kinsey pointed out. The golden needle of the alien spacecraft appeared. Under heavy magnification, it seemed to materialize out of empty space, but a ripple of movement visible against the background stars visible through the opening suggested that space itself was being warped out of shape within the center of the ring.

“We are pretty sure that the ring is serving as a kind of artificial wormhole,” Kowalewski said, “connecting two distant points in space. The mass readings suggest that black holes are being accelerated through the lumen of the ring and that this is radically distorting both space and time.”

The needle changed course slightly, as though aligning on the Wings of Isis. They watched it accelerate in silence, growing large … growing huge. At the last instant, the alien vessel seemed to shimmer slightly, and then it was gone, everything was gone, stars, Wheel, alien vessel, and the Wings of Isis. The watchers hung in blackness absolute.

There was a long silence, and then the scene reappeared—Isis drifting toward the Stargate, with Sirius A and B gleaming in the distance.

“So where do these guys come from?” Dominick wanted to know.

“There’s no way to tell,” Kowalewski replied.

“Can we use this, this gateway?” Foss asked.

“Again, we don’t know … though the physics of the thing suggest that the answer is yes. A ship would just fly right through, like threading a needle. But there’s also the possibility, if this thing works like a Tipler Machine, as some have suggested, that we would have to fly a very precise, specific course through the gate. The problem, though, is that we have no way of knowing what that course is—or where it will take us.”

“So how do we learn how to use the damned thing?” Kinsey asked. “Trial and error?”

“Essentially, yes,” Kowalewski replied. “It may be possible to send remote probes into the gateway on different trajectories and record the results. The bad news, though, is that coming back is not as simple as retracing your steps. It may be a completely different course into the gateway on the other side that brings you home.”

The group watched in grim silence for several moments more. The scene repeated itself and again they watched Wings of Isis attacked by the huge alien.

Or was it an attack? “We don’t really see the Isis being destroyed,” Foss pointed out. It looks like the alien is still some five hundred meters away when the transmission ends. Maybe the alien took the Isis onboard.”

“It’s possible,” Tomasek said. “Isis wouldn’t even make a decent lifeboat for that behemoth.”

“The fact that we’ve had no transmissions from the Isis since suggests that she was destroyed,” Ryerson said. “At the very least, our people are being held prisoner. Not exactly a friendly act.”

“Which brings us back to the billion-dollar question,” Kinsey said. “Who are these guys? Are they the Hunters of the Dawn?”

The question hung in the virtual conference space for a long and cold moment. During the course of the last two centuries, exoarcheologists had uncovered the debris left behind by several sets of alien visitors to Earth’s solar system in ages past. The Builders had raised awe-inspiring structures on Mars and on Earth’s moon. They’d terraformed Mars, briefly bringing shallow seas and a decent atmosphere back to that arid world, and they’d evidently set their mark on the genome of the primate that later would be called Homo erectus. All of that had transpired some half million years ago.

The Ahannu—also known as the An in the myths they sparked in ancient Sumer—came along much later. A starfaring culture, but one not nearly so advanced as the godlike Builders, the Ahannu had colonized Earth and enslaved several human populations between twelve and ten thousand years before. They’d introduced mathematics, agriculture, medicine, writing, metallurgy, and other important skills to their slaves, who came to worship them as gods.

The gods had been helpless, however, before the onslaught of yet another alien race which they referred to as the Hunters of the Dawn.

Almost nothing was known about the Hunters. An expedition to Europa in 2067 had uncovered an immense robotic warship, the Singer, trapped deep beneath the Jovian moon’s ice-locked ocean, the only Hunter relic so far discovered. In almost a century of intense study, very little had been learned about them.

What was known was that the Hunters of the Dawn had eradicated the Builders from Earth, Mars, and the moon half a million years ago, as well as Builder colonies on half a dozen worlds of several neighboring star systems. Presumably, they’d also, five hundred millennia later, destroyed the An empire as well, though that idea was still hotly debated. Someone had dropped several large asteroids onto Earth eight or ten thousand years ago, however, wiping out the An colonies and leaving a few human survivors to pick up the fragments of civilization and press forward. They’d also wiped out An colonies on numerous other worlds; the surviving Ahannu outpost on Ishtar evidently had been overlooked because the world was an unlikely place for them—the moon of a gas giant far beyond its star’s habitable zone, kept warm by the flexing of tidal forces.

Were the Hunters of the Ahannu the same as the beings who wiped out the Builders? It seemed unlikely that a civilization could remain intact for half a million years, and yet clues linking the two genocides had been uncovered on both the moon and in the Europan world-ocean. If they were the same race, might that race still exist today, somewhere among the stars?

The Singer had released a powerful signal of some kind when it reached the surface of its icy prison. Even at the crawl of light, the signal had crossed over ninety light-years already and would still be traveling starward today. The possibility existed that the beings who’d destroyed both the Ahannu and Builder cultures yet survived, and that it now knew of the existence of humankind, or would, very soon.

That single chance, no matter how remote, continued to cause sleepless nights for those charged with Earth’s defense. The main reason xenoarcheology continued to be well-funded and—for the most part, at least—strongly supported by several Earth governments was the hope that a dig somewhere would uncover more clues to the Hunters, to where they came from and what they were. The evidence suggested they were out to eradicate all possible competitors in the galactic arena.

If that were true, and if the Hunters of the Dawn still existed, Earth was in terrible danger.

“Obviously,” Dominick said after a long silence, “that is something we need to learn. If the Sirian Wheel is a Hunter artifact, or a base, or a way back to their home worlds, we need to know that as well. And that is why we are authorizing Operation Battlespace.”

The term battlespace was a relatively new Marine concept with some very old roots. As far back as the twentieth century, combat was seen in terms of control of the battlefield, which included the terrain, approaches, and the airspace above the combat zone. Control all of those factors tactically through fire, force, and movement, and a commander dominated the battlefield.

Modern combat made the concept a bit trickier than it had been back in the days of the Old Corps. Space was a completely three-dimensional medium and controlling the approaches to the battlefield when you had to take into account the possibilities of a strike from space was a lot tougher than worrying about air strikes from a carrier at sea or from the other side of the mountains. The MIEU-1’s attack against the Ahannu on Ishtar had been carried out by troop transports approaching from the opposite side of the planet, then skimming in from over the horizon.

Ramsey looked up at the huge ring floating in the middle of a vast emptiness above him and wondered how they would approach that target.

It wasn’t going to be easy.

“Colonel Ramsey,” Dominick went on, “it is the consideration of the Joint Chiefs that your group would be best for this mission. They have experience taking a fortified enemy-alien position, the Legation Compound on Ishtar, and they have experience deploying in a hostile alien environment. They were superb on Ishtar. More, they have already been screened for Famsit one and two considerations.”

“Sir,” Ramsey said, “with respect … is this a voluntary deployment? Or are you just shipping us out?”

“Well, consideration will be given to each Marine’s personal wish, of course,” one of Kinsey’s aides said. She was a colonel, and her electronic ID label read CHENG. Ramsey mentally requested further information, and a window opened in his awareness, silently scrolling words identifying Cheng as an expert in sociopsychological engineering.

“Forgive me, Colonel Cheng,” Ramsey said, “but in the Corps that doesn’t mean squat. I want to know if you plan on shipping these boys and girls out again without even hearing what they have to say about the matter. These people have fought hard for their country and for the Corps. They deserve to be treated right.”

“I think what Colonel Cheng is saying,” Franklin Shugart told him, “is that we will listen to what your people have to say. Those who wish to remain on Earth should be able to, after … appropriate retraining.”

“‘Appropriate retraining,’” Ramsey repeated. He didn’t like the sound of that. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Earth has changed in twenty years, Colonel,” Shugart told him. “You don’t yet know how much it’s changed. The culture. The language. The political spectrum. The religious splintering.”

“Twenty years isn’t so much.”

“No? You haven’t been here. We have. I sub you not glyph us on our n-state stats until you’ve DLed the gamma-channa.”

Ramsey mentally checked his noumenal link and saw that Shugart had disengaged a consecutive translation function for his last few words.

“Okay, so your speech patterns have shifted a bit. We can learn. People who’ve been alive for more than twenty years have learned.”

“Yes, but gradually,” Shugart pointed out, restoring the translation function.

“Right,” Kinsey added. “We didn’t get hit with it all packed into one incoming warhead. I was … what? Thirty-eight when Operation Spirit of Humankind set out for the Lalande system. There’ve been astonishing changes in the years since, but I adapted to them incrementally, step by step, like everyone else. Like everyone except the Marines of MIEU-1.”

“The truth of it, Colonel,” Cheng said, “is that there are certain, well, legal problems with simply loosing your men and women on the country, unprepared. It’s not fair to them. It’s not fair to the civilian population.”

An old, old joke about cybernetic hibernation for Marines spoke of keeping them frozen in glass tubes with sign plates reading: IN CASE OF WAR, BREAK GLASS. Marines were warriors—arguably the best damned warriors on the planet—and their skills could be embarrassing, even disruptive, in peacetime.

But it was still wrong to treat them that way.

“So you’re keeping them prisoner?” Ramsey asked. He could feel the anger rising within, a burgeoning red tide. “Lock them up and then ship them out? What kind of shit are you trying to shovel at us?”

“Colonel Ramsey,” Shugart scolded. “Some decorum, if you please. No one is going to be locked up, as you put it. But we will have to introduce certain safeguards. It’s for their own good, as well as for the protection of the civilian populace.”

“And as for shipping them out right away,” Tomasek observed, “why don’t we wait and see what they would prefer?” Her noumenal icon shrugged. “With no family attachments, with Earth changed so much, they might actually prefer another going back to space.”

“Gentlemen … ladies,” Ramsey said, “you’re asking them to give up another twenty years objective for the dubious pleasure of facing the Hunters of the Dawn. It’s too much!”

“Too much for the Marines?” Shugart said with an unpleasant smile. “I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“They’ll go as volunteers,” Ramsey told him, “or not at all.” He owed that much to his people, at least.

“I have to agree, Mr. Shugart,” Kinsey said. “These are Marines, people, we’re dealing with. Not chess pieces.”

“I don’t believe you or the colonel fully understand,” Shugart said. “This will be a direct presidential order. The Federal Directorate has precedence over national interests.”

And that, Ramsey had to admit, was one aspect of modern politics he did not understand, and it was becoming more confusing by the decade. The sudden growth of the old United States of America during the collapse of Canada and the wars with the U.N. and Mexico in the last century had resulted in huge, new territories added to the continental United States. To manage those territories, and to prepare them for admission as new states, the United Federal Republic of America had emerged as an organizational step above the United States.

And so, technically, the Corps was now the UFR Marines. Still, tradition dies hard in the Corps. So far as most Marines were concerned, they were still the United States Marines, a title no leatherneck would surrender without a fight. While the President of the United States was also President of the Federal Republic, technically the two were not the same, and, legally, it was the United Federal Republic that called the shots now … in the name of organizational efficiency.

Not that bureaucrats ever seemed that concerned about efficiency.

Ramsey didn’t like the change, which had been well under way before the MIEU’s departure for Ishtar, and which was now very well entrenched with the new Federal capitol being constructed in New Chicago. He felt, he imagined, much as an advocate of states’ rights might have felt as the Federal government superseded mere state governments around the time of the American Civil War.

The upshot of it was that the political situation—always something of concern for the Corps—was becoming damned hard to understand.

“We can offer inducements for volunteers,” Kinsey suggested. “Surely that is preferable to simply ordering them to turn around and keep marching off into the future.”

“Perhaps,” Shugart said. “The Federal Advisory Council will leave those decisions to the Marine brass and to the American Congress. But Mr. Ramsey and his people are going to Sirius. One way or another.”

Ramsey wondered if the phrase United States of America even had meaning any longer. Just who was the Corps supposed to be fighting for now?

3

5 NOVEMBER 2159

Starstruck Condecology Tower Raphael Level 486 East Los Angeles, California 2028 hours, PST

The magflier public transport deposited them on the landing shelf of the tower, almost five hundred stories above the brilliantly lit sprawl of Greater Los Angeles. Garroway, Anna Garcia, Roger Eagleton, Regi Lobowski, Tim Womicki, and Kat Vinton stepped onto the platform, resplendent in newly issued Class A dress uniforms. A stiff wind off the ocean chilled and Garroway pulled his formal cloak a little closer about him. Eagleton paid off the transport with a wave of his newly issued asset card.

“You sure we belong here, Gare?” Kat asked him.

“I gave the flier’s AI the address,” Garroway told her. “This must be it.”

“It” was a graceful series of curving walls and partial domes built into the side of one of Greater LA’s newer skytowers. The landing platform was broad and edged with walled gardens and gene-tailored landscaping. Several other skytowers gleamed in the night in the near-distance, self-contained arcologies, some 5 kilometers high and each holding a small city in its own right. The one named Raphael, an implant download told Garroway with a whispering in his mind, had been completed ten years ago and packed 950 stories into a column 3.8 kilometers tall. It housed 15,000 people in spacious luxury, as well as hundreds of shops, stores, restaurants, theme malls, indoor parks and plazas, recnexi, and tobbos … whatever those were. People could live out their entire lives in Raphael or one of the other condecologies and never set foot outside.

To Garroway, that seemed a sterile kind of life, hardly worthy of the name. Still, different people, different customs. …

“Hey, even if it’s the wrong address, it’s worth it just getting offbase for a bit,” Anna Garcia said. “I didn’t think they were going to let us go.”

“I sure don’t know what the hassle is, that’s for damned sure,” Womicki said. “With all the form screens we had to thumb, you’d’ve thought we were trying to smuggle in ancient high-tech artifacts or something.”

“Whoa,” Eagleton said, nudging Garroway in the ribs. “Look at this!”

A woman walked out to meet them in a swirl of luminescence. She was strikingly nude; nanoimplants within her skin glowed in constantly shifting colors visible through the translucence of her skin, pulsing between deep ultramarine blue and emerald green. Her delicate tuft of neatly coiffed pubic hair had been treated as well; it glowed brightly, cycling from bright yellow to orange to red to gold to yellow again, creating interesting contrasts of hue against the deeper, inner glow of her thighs and belly. Her face and hair, however, were masked behind a silver, visorless helm. A spray of optical threads created a dazzling cascade of moving green and amber light rising over her head and spilling down each side to the ground.

“You didn’t tell us we had to dress for dinner, Gare,” Anna whispered at his side.

“Johnny!” the woman cried. “So glad you downjacked!”

“Uh … Tegan?”

“Who else?”

He gave an awkward grin. “Sorry. I didn’t recognize you … uh … dressed like that. I appreciate your asking us out here tonight.”

“Hey, no skaff.” The cold didn’t appear to bother her. “The mere the meller, reet? These your hangers?”

He blinked. Her speech was quite rapid and laced with unfamiliar words. “I guess so. Uh … these are my friends, the ones I told you about. This is Corporal Kat Vinton, Corporal—”

“Vix the IDs,” Tegan said, waving a glowing hand. “Leave it for the noumens.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You don’t expect me to downrem names, do you?” She laughed. “Grampie, you are synched out! C’mon!”

“Does ‘grampie’ mean what I think it does?” Anna asked.

“‘Grandparent’?” Eagleton replied sotto voce. “‘Grandpa’? That’s my guess.”

“Are you understanding any of this, Gare?” Kat asked him in a whisper as they followed the woman toward the building entrance.

“Oh, a word here and there,” Garroway admitted.

“‘Johnny’?” Eagleton said and snickered.

“That was my civvie name,” he said. “John Garroway Esteban. But I dropped the Esteban on my naming day, and I lost the John in boot camp.”

He wondered just how much in common he had with Tegan now. He’d given her a netcall as soon as they’d been informed that the com interdict had been lifted, and she’d sounded happy to hear from him. She’d invited him and anyone he cared to bring along to a numnum … whatever the hell that was. They’d approached Staff Sergeant Dunne and, after a few frustrating hours of red tape and a lot of questioning, received passes. Garroway had the impression that there were some high-level complications in the request, but he didn’t care about the details. Just so long as they could get out of Twentynine Palms for a few precious hours.

“So who is this Tegan?” Anna wanted to know.

He shrugged. “A friend. I met her down in Hermisillo a few years ago. A few years before I joined the Marines, I mean. She was on winter vacation at a resort down there.”

“Just a friend?” Womicki asked.

“Well, no. More than that.” That had been before he’d started seeing Lynnley.

“I got news for you. She’s too old for you now, son,” Lobowski said. “‘Out of synch,’ huh?”

“Oh, she looks pretty well-preserved,” Eagleton said, eyeing her glowing back as she led the way through a high, curved archway and into the party proper.

“Yeah,” Womicki said. “Almost as well-preserved as us.”

Garroway shook his head. The objective-subjective time difference was taking some getting used to. Cybehibe did not entirely stop aging, but it did drastically slow all bodily processes by a factor of something like five to one. That, coupled with the effects of time dilation, meant that Garroway and his fellow Marines had aged less than a year biologically, while Tegan had aged twenty.

Of course, anagathic treatments were becoming more common and less expensive on Earth. At the base, Garroway had already met people who were over a hundred years old, but who looked no older than fifty. Someday, perhaps, thanks to nanomedical prophylaxis, age might not matter at all.

But in the meantime, it could be disconcerting. Tegan had been a year younger than he when he’d left Earth.

Inside the doorway, the floor dropped away in a large, roughly circular room sunken in the middle, with alcoves and balconies at various levels on all sides. A warm, indirect ruby-hued lighting made walls and ceilings hard to discern, a dreamscape of subtle, sensuously curving forms. Everything appeared to be made of moving red light, and it was tough to see what was solid wall or floor and what was not.

And the place was packed.

The six Marines stopped and stared, their mouths comically open. There must have been hundreds of people present, standing, sitting, or lying a-sprawl on the thickly scattered divans that appeared to have grown out of the floor. Many, men and women both, were nude or nearly so, though most wore bangles and elaborate high-tech helmets that completely masked their faces, and their skin glowed with myriad inner hues. Those not stripped down were wildly dressed up. Garroway wondered if there was a competition under way for the most elaborate and eye-popping costume.

“Is this your home?” Kat asked the woman.

“What? Are you seerse? This is a sensethete, of course! It’s called the Starstruck, and it’s part of the conde. Part of the service, y’know?”

“Take your cloaks?” a gleaming, streamlined machine floating above the floor asked. Garroway and the others removed their cloaks, draping them across the robot’s waiting and multiple arms. “And your clothing, ladies and sirs?”

“I beg your pardon?” Womicki asked.

“When in Rome, Mick,” Garroway said, gesturing at the crowd.

“I think I’ll keep my uniform on, thank you,” Kat said.

Garroway agreed. “We’re fine,” he told the hovering robot. It hummed in what seemed a disapproving manner, but then floated off into the encircling red mist. Casual and social nudity had long been accepted throughout most of the southern and western states, and there was little privacy for males or females in a Marine squad bay or on board ship. Privacy wasn’t an issue.

However, this was different. The other guests weren’t completely bare, but were adorned in myriad ways, with nanoinduced internal lighting, with devices that appeared to be grown into the skin itself and with various items of jewelry. There was, Garroway thought wryly, a large difference between nude and naked. The six Marines would have looked somewhat akin to plucked chickens in this gaudy company, and at least their blue with red and white trim Class A’s gave them some ornamentation.

“You’ll need these, grampies,” Tegan said, returning to them. She held out a pair of delicately shaped and filigreed helmets. A helmed, winged angel with fluorescent violet tattoos and a handsome man wearing a low-cut seventeenth-century ball gown handed them four more.

“What are these for?” Lobowski wanted to know, turning one uncertainly in his hands.

“You don’t viz techelms?” the angel asked. He laughed.

“G’wan!” the guy in the ball gown told them. “Put ’em on and down ’em! You’ll jack!”

Hesitantly, Garroway slipped the helmet he’d been given onto his head. The visor was opaque, blocking all vision. He felt a warm tingle at the back of his skull and at the temples.

And then …

Color and light exploded around him, and he heard a murmuring ripple of multiple conversations in his head. He could see now, despite the opaque visor. Somehow, the helmet was taking in his surroundings and transmitting them directly to his implant. He could see more clearly, more crisply than before, and was aware of a tumbling avalanche of detail.

It was, in fact, a little like being linked into a tactical net in combat, except that this was accompanied by an odd, very deep, and very sensuous inner movement of feeling and emotion. It took him a moment to identify it: pleasure.

“How’s that feel?” Tegan asked him, her voice sliding into his mind like liquid silk. “Nice?”

“It’s … interesting.”

And it was going to take some getting used to. It wasn’t that he minded the sensation of pleasure itself. It was the fact that these pleasurable sensations were coming and going, emerging, building, exploding all without any thought, movement, or input from him.

In fact, the sensation was like what he’d always imagined a nano-induced high might be like, one that involved all of his senses. As he looked about, he realized that the bodies of the people around him were subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—enhanced. The men seemed more handsome, more muscular, more athletic, while the women were slimmer, more beautiful of face, more generous and perky of bosom. The man in the ball gown was now a lovely woman, and the gown itself an explosion of blue and silver starlight. Many of the guests were no longer even human; a radiantly green and golden lion with eagle’s wings stared at them from a nearby dais. Other shapes were more outlandish—zoomorphic, angelic, demonic, or mixtures of the three. Were they real? Or illusion? Or some subtle combination of the two? Some shapes morphed and shifted from one thing to another as he watched.

And he could hear things, conversations he’d not been able to hear before, and it was impossible to tell whether he was hearing actual sound or picking up on a mingling interchange of surface thoughts.

“Oh sure, and the flam did the jug out of a whiter, reet? …”

“And so she was neg way, and then I was yeah, way, and then she was neg way, and then …”

“So’dja hear the zit on Chollin and Vashti? …”

“Well, Ran and Silva and me, we all vammed down to Cancun for a bit of a vaccshi, and …”

“So I was getting bored, totally weed, and there was this new religion, Galaninism, and I thought, reet, why not, it can’t be as moomy as the Church of the Mindful Stars …”

“So why’d Teeg invite them? Fascists. …”

That last had cut through the other conversations with a peculiar bitterness. He tried to focus on it, and picked up a few more words.

“Ah, you know how the Army is, always narbing in and invading places where it’s not wanted. …”

“Hey, did you hear that?” Eagleton said aloud, looking about.

“Ignore it, Rog,” Garroway told him. “We’re guests here, remember?”

“Besides,” Kat added judiciously, “they’re obviously talking about someone else. We’re not Army.”

Garroway took a cautious couple of steps, feeling for the deck beneath his feet. It was, he thought, like stepping into a dream, one where nothing was quite as it seemed.

“Here,” someone said in his mind. “Groz this, grampie.”

A silver and black metallic sphere was placed in his hand. As he looked at it, trying to get an idea of both what it was for and what its true form might be, it twisted itself in his palm, opening itself. A thick lavender mist spilled out and he caught the tang of cinnamon. And … something else. As he inhaled, he felt the rush exploding out of his lungs and throat and tingling all the way down to his toes and back up his spine to the crown of his head. The helmet took the sensation, amplified it, twisted it … and fed it back to him in rippling pulses of feeling.

“Is this stuff legal?” he heard Lobowski say.

“What a ridic question!” a woman’s voice replied, a sensuous gliding of thoughts. “This is a numnum, mem?”

Garroway tried to meditate on this self-evident truth, but was having some trouble focusing.

“What the hell happened to the floor?” Eagleton asked.

Good question. When Garroway looked down, he could see the floor beneath his feet as swirling patterns of rainbow-hued pinpoints of light. Each hesitant step he took sent out widening ripples of flickering color, ripples that interlaced with other ripples in spectacular moving moirés of colored light.

And the voices. Something similar was happening with all of the voices in the room. Garroway could no longer be sure which were voices he was hearing in his head, and which were actual, audible sound. He was hearing more and more, however, and the words and sentences seemed to be weaving together into an incoherent yet meaningful whole. Behind it all was … was that music? Not quite. It was a kind of rhythmic pulse or ticking, but with something else unidentifiable beneath, a kind of deep and somehow musical longing without any actual notes.

That was interesting. Several couples were engaged in sex play on a round divan off to one side of the sunken room. Garroway found that when he watched them, he could actually feel some of what they must be feeling … touches and caresses and warm, moist, sliding pressures. The helmets, he realized, were somehow letting everyone in the room share in an overpowering gestalt of emotion and sensation.

The blending of heightened sensations was having a marked physiological effect on him, as well. Garroway could feel a familiar pressure building in his loins, and an intense and unscratchable itch.

But more, his feelings were oddly jumbled, melding one into another and transforming as they did so. Deliberately turning his back on the lovemaking tableau so he could concentrate, he tried to tap into his implants for a download on what was happening, but couldn’t access his system. At that, Garroway began to feel genuine alarm.

“What the hell’s going on here,” he heard himself say, his voice sounding very far away.

“What’s the downskaff, grampie?” A woman hovered in front of him, hugging-distance close. How had she gotten there? “Don’tcha rax with it? Isn’t it a flittering rish?” Her voice curled sensuously through his brain.

Garroway wasn’t certain whether it was whatever had been in the sphere or the helmet—or both working together—but he was beginning to feel as though all of his senses were blurring together. He was seeing sound, hearing color, tasting the pressure of his feet on the unseen floor and of his uniform on his skin. The conversation swirled around him, caressing him, a living thing experienced rather than merely heard.

“You’re del says you were actually, like, in the body on another planet,” the woman’s voice continued in his mind. “Is that, like, for real?”

Funny how that one voice stood out from the others, obviously addressed to him, yet somehow intertwined with all of the other conversations going on. It was like being both an individual and some kind of communal, many-in-one intelligence.

“Sorry … ‘del’?”

“You know! Download! From your implant!”

The woman was staring at him with eyes brilliant as blue-white stars. Who was it? Not Tegan … someone else, someone he’d not met before. He tasted her hand on his shoulder. She was gorgeous, an ethereal creature of radiant light.

“So? Howz’bout it? Were you really on another planet?”

“Uh … yeah. Ishtar. I was there.”

“Ishtar … yeah? What a zig! I been there too!” A rapid-fire barrage of images flickered through Garroway’s mind—scenes of Ishtar, with Marduk vast and swollen in a green sky; of the native An, like tailless, erect lizards with huge golden eyes; of the stepped pyramids of New Sumer so reminiscent of the ancient Mayan structures in Central America; of the vast and eerily artificial loom of the mountain they’d called Krakatoa; of a claustrophobic sprawl of mud huts and city walls, of dense purple-black jungle.

“Wait a minute. What do you mean, you were there too?” This glowing woman was neither a Marine nor a scientist, of that he was sure. She hadn’t been onboard the Jules Verne, either, and no other ships had returned from Ishtar since the original voyage of discovery thirty years ago.

“Sure! In sim, y’know? Most of the folks here grozzed a simtrip to Epsilon Eridani right here just last week!”

“Oh. A sim …” Well, that made more sense. With the right hardware and AI programming and decent sensory records of the target, a direct download to your cerebral implants could make it seem as though you were actually there … at the bottom of the ocean, walking the deserts of Mars, or exploring the jungles of distant Ishtar.

“Well, yeah,” the woman said. She sounded exasperated. “Why vam it in the corp, y’know? And it takes so long. A numnum feed is much better. Don’t send the mass. Just send information, reet?”

He was beginning to gather that numnum must be a corruption of noumenon. The techelms, apparently, allowed everyone wearing them to share not only surface thoughts, but emotions and sensations as well.

He must have been broadcasting some of his bemusement. “Don’t you Army types groz numnum feeds?” she asked.

“Not … Army …” he managed to say. Speech was difficult. “Marines. …”

She shrugged. “Whatever.”

“No, damn it. It’s important. Marines.”

What were they doing to him? Reaching up, he fumbled with the helmet, then pulled it off.

Instantly, the falsely heightened colors and sensations dropped away. The woman of light was now … just a woman, a bit overweight and sagging despite the efforts of some decades, he thought, of anagathic nano. She was wearing nothing but sandals, jewelry, and a silver techelm. Without the light show she was not as disconcerting to look at, and from what he could see of her mouth and hair, he guessed she was rather plain behind that opaque visor. He actually liked her better this way.

But she was already turning away, losing interest.

Where were his friends? Funny. He’d thought they were still right there next to him, but they appeared to have dispersed through the crowd.

He slipped the helmet back on, hoping to spot them. The explosion of color and thought hit him again, but he found he was now able to zero in on their location.

“I wasn’t talking to you, creep! Back off!” Was that Anna’s thought? It sounded like her. He tried to locate her in the crowd.

Ah! There she was, halfway across the room, easy enough to spot now in her Class A’s, surrounded by several helmeted men and women.

“So who invited you, Teenie?” one of the men was saying. The conversation did not sound pleasant.

“Hey, I said back off,” Anna said aloud. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“Well, you got trouble, lady,” one of the women told her. “We don’t like your kind around here.”

“Hey, hey,” Garroway said, wading into the small crowd gathering around Anna. “What the hell is this all about?”

A waspish-looking man with an ornate silver and gold helmet shaped to represent a dragon turned the visor to face him. “This little Aztlanista thought she could grope our party, feo. Who the hell are you?”

“I’m a U.S. Marine, like her. And I happen to know she’s no Aztlanista.”

“Her del says her name’s Garcia,” the woman said. “Latina, reet?”

“So? My family name was Esteban,” Garroway told them. “And I was born in Sonora. You have a problem with that?”

“Yeah, we have a problem with that. You Teenies are freaming bad news, revolutionaries and troublemakers, every one of you!” The woman reached out and grabbed for the front of Anna’s uniform.

Faster than the eye could see, Anna blocked the grab, snagged the arm, and dropped it into a pressure hold that drove the woman to her knees, screaming. One of the men moved to intervene, and Garroway took him down with a sharp, short kick to the side of his knee. Spinning about, he took a fighting stance back to back with Anna. The crowd glowered, but came no closer.

“I think you milslabs better shinnie,” a man said.

“Yeah,” another agreed. “Ain’t none of you welcome here, zig? Vam out!”

Garroway looked around, searching the room for the rest of the Marines. Kat and Rog were coming fast, both tossing aside their helmets as they shouldered through the crowd. And there were Tim and Regi. All right. Semper fi. …

For a moment, he wondered if they would get into trouble—fighting in a civilian establishment. Fuck it! They started it! …

But then a sharp, hissing static filled Garroway’s ears … his mind and thoughts. Staggered, he raised his hands to his ears, trying unsuccessfully to block the literally painful noise. His vision began to fuzz out as well, blurring and filling with dancing, staticky motes of light.

An implant malfunction? That was nearly unthinkable, but he didn’t know what the civilian techelms might have done to his Marine system.

“What’s … happening? …” he heard Eagleton say. The other Marines, too, had been stricken. That elevated the static from malfunction to enemy action.

But who was the enemy? The civilians surrounding them? That didn’t seem likely.

“You are in violation of programmed operational parameters. Hostile thought and/or action against civilians is not permitted. Desist immediately.”

The voice, gender-neutral and chillingly penetrating, rose above the static.

“Huh? Who’s that?”

“This is the social monitor AI currently resident within your cereblink. Hostile thought and/or action against civilians is not permitted. Desist immediately.”

“What AI?” Womicki demanded loudly. “What’s goin’ on?”

The shrill hiss grew louder and louder, driving Garroway to his knees. Anna Garcia collapsed beside him, unconscious.

And a moment later he joined her. …

Police Holding Cell Precinct 915 East Los Angeles, California 2312 hours, PST

It had been, Captain Martin Warhurst thought, inevitable. Marines back from a deployment—especially one as long and as rugged as the mission to Lalande 21185—needed to go ashore and let off some steam. His people had fought damned hard and damned well on Ishtar; they deserved a bit of downtime.

But downtime too often turned to fighting, chemical or nanoincapacitation, and rowdy behavior frowned upon by the civilian establishment.

The guard led him down a curving passageway to one of a number of holding cells, bare rooms walled off by thick transplas barriers. This one was occupied by twenty or thirty men, with expressions ranging from dazed to sullen. Four, however, recognized him immediately and came to their feet.

“Captain Warhurst!”

“You boys okay?”

“A little fuzzy yet, sir,” Garroway said.

“Yeah,” Womicki added. “Sir, you gotta get us out of here. These civilians are freakin’ crazy!”

“What happened?”

Garroway tapped the side of his head. “Not sure, sir. Things got a little tight at a party we were at. Next thing I know, a voice in my head is telling me I’m in violation. And then … lights out.”

Warhurst nodded. “Social monitor.”

“Yeah, but what is it, sir?” Eagleton wanted to know. “I don’t remember giving permission to have anyone tamper with my ’link!”

“It was part of your agreement when you got to leave the base. Remember thumbing a nonaggressive clause?”

“Sure,” Lobowski said, leaning up against the transparency. The plastic was several centimeters thick, but the speaker system let them talk and be heard. “It said to stay out of trouble. We figured, ‘Hey, no sweat. We’re not lookin’ for trouble.’”

“Did you read the fine print?”

“What fine print?” Womicki said. “It was a download.”

“Well, you should have heard someone telling you that you were being given Class 5 nanoingests.”

“You mean when they gave us something to drink?” Garroway asked. “I didn’t hear anything about nano in the stuff.”

“Mm. Well, we’ll check that out later.”

“What kind of nano, sir?” Womicki asked.

“Short-term autodegradable. Chelates with your current implant and creates a temporary low-grade AI that acts as a kind of watchdog. You get out of line, it puts you to sleep.”

“Shit!”

“Things have changed a bit since we were out on Ishtar,” Warhurst told them. “The brass is concerned about how we behave in public.”

“So they feed us monitor nano?” Garroway said, bitter. “Such a splendid reflection of civilian respect for us. Sir.”

“Like I said, things have changed.”

“There were two women with us, sir,” Garroway said. “Vinton and Garcia.”

“Staff Sergeant Dunne is springing them, Garroway. I’m here for you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. You’ll be facing a mast for disorderly conduct.”

“But sir, they started it!”

“Freeze it down, Garroway. You boys put your foot in it. Part of my agreement with the authorities is that you go up before the Man. Copy?”

“Yes, sir. Copy.” He swallowed. “Sir?”

“Yeah?”

“Did they make you take that monitor nano for you to come down here?”

Warhurst grinned. “What do you think, Marine?”

“I don’t know, sir. You’re an officer and a gentleman and all that.”

“I had to take it, son. No exceptions. If the Marine Commandant was coming down here, they’d make him take a drink of the stuff. I don’t think they trust the devil dogs out of the kennel without a leash.”

“No, sir.”

“Don’t worry. It’ll dissolve and be out of your system within forty-eight hours.”

“I’m very glad to hear that, sir.”

“Open it up,” Warhurst growled at the guard.

The guard touched a control at his belt, and a panel in the transparency slid aside. Garroway, Womicki, Lobowski, and Eagleton all walked out of the cell.

The Marines were wearing bright lime-green prison utilities, unlike the civilians in the holding cell. “Sir, about our uniforms. …” Womicki began.

“I know. They told me at the front desk.”

“Sir, we were robbed!”

According to the report he’d seen coming in, Raphael security forces had arrived at the Starstruck to find all six Marines unconscious and naked. There was nothing unusual in that, perhaps, so far as the condecology police were concerned, and they’d turned them over to the East LA police without comment. The Marines had regained consciousness an hour later in the police infirmary, insisting that someone at the party had taken their things, including their asset cards.

The police had already put a stop on the cards. As for the uniforms, there wasn’t much that could be done. Warhurst shook his head. What the hell did civilians want with Marine Class A’s? Costumes for a costume ball?

Or maybe it had just been a damned prank.

The guards led them back to the front receiving area, where a clerk offered a screen panel for Warhurst’s thumbprint. “Thumb here, sir. And here.”

“I’ll have someone return the prison uniforms later.”

“Don’t bother,” a beefy police sergeant said. “They’re disposables.”

“Okay. These people have any effects to sign out?”

“No, sir, They came in stripped bare.” The man smirked. “You Marines really like to party, huh?”

“These Marines were robbed, Sergeant. I will be filing a report to that effect.”

The man shrugged massive shoulders. “Suit yourself. But maybe next time your boys and girls won’t come where they’re not wanted, tendo?”

“Yeah.” Warhurst said, his voice tight. “We tendo.”

He’d been warned. Things had changed in the twenty years they’d been away.

And in some ways, things hadn’t changed much at all.

4

7 NOVEMBER 2159

Navy/Marine XT Training Facility Fra Mauro, Mare Imbrium, Luna 0920 hours GMT

Hospitalman Second Class Phillip K. Lee was trying to run, but he was having a bit of trouble. His feet kept leaving the ground, turning him into a small low-altitude spacecraft, and he was having a hard time controlling his vector.

Overhead, Earth hung half-full in a midnight sky, an achingly beautiful glory of blue and white; the sun was just above the horizon at Lee’s back, and the shadows he and the dust cloud cast stretched for long meters across a flat and barren plain.

“Slow down, damn it!” he heard over his helmet headphones. “What are ya tryin’ to do, bounce into orbit?”

His feet hit powdery gray dust, kicking up a spray of the stuff. He tried to stop, overbalanced, and tumbled onto the ground. For a moment, he lay there, listening to the rasp of his own breathing. Readouts beneath his visor showed the workings of both his suit and his body. His heart rate and respiration were up, but otherwise he was okay. His armored suit, built to take rough usage in the field, was intact.

Good. Because if it wasn’t, he was in deep trouble.

Awkwardly, he tried to roll over. He was wearing Mark VIII vac armor, bulky and massive. In some ways, it was a self-contained spacecraft. And he was having some trouble developing the coordination and skills he needed to fly the damned thing.

“Lee, you fucking idiot!”

“Sorry, Gunnery Sergeant,” he said. “Got a bit carried away there.”

“You get carried away in this environment, sailor,” the voice told him with a growl, “and you are dead. Move slow. Move deliberate. Move methodical. Know what the fuck you’re doing, and why.”

Well, he knew what he was doing. He was trying to reach the form of a space-suited Marine sprawled in the dust eighty meters ahead. And why?

Well, he was a Navy hospital corpsman. And that’s what corpsmen did, even if this was a particularly realistic bit of training, rather than a real combat deployment.

Carefully, he rose on unsteady feet and began moving forward again, more cautiously this time. Under lunar gravity, his body weight plus his armored suit and equipment weighed less than 24 kilos … but it still massed 144, which meant that once he got himself moving in any direction, stopping or turning could be a bit tricky. He’d done this sort of thing plenty of times in simulation … but this was his first time in a suit working in hard vacuum.

It was tough to see his target. Marine chamelearmor responded to ambient lighting and reflected the colors and forms of the environment, allowing it to blend in with the background to an amazing degree. The effect wasn’t perfect in a complicated environment like a city or forest, but the surroundings here were simple: stark black sky and gray powder dust. At this range, Lee couldn’t see his target at all with his own eyes; his helmet display, responding to a suit transponder, threw a bright green reticule onto his visor to mark the target’s position.

Moving more deliberately now, he crossed the gently rolling regolith, following his own leaping shadow. Ahead, a featureless mound, one among many, resolved itself into a space-suited male figure, lying on his side.

He put on the metaphorical brakes before he reached the body, dropping to a kneeling position as he came to a halt in a spray of powder-fine dust. The patient had his back to Lee. He pulled the man over, peering down into the helmet visor. A fist-sized hole high in the right shoulder was leaking air; Lee could see the sparkle of ice crystals dancing above the tear and see crimson blood bubble as it welled up into a vacuum and froze. An ugly mass of frozen blood partly filled the wound.

“You’re gonna be okay, mac,” he called over the combat frequency. “Hang on and we’ll get you patched right up!” There was no response—not that he was really expecting one. The patient’s suit display on his chest showed winking patterns of red, green, and yellow. The suit breach was sealed around the wound, but the heaters were out, commo was out, and O₂ partial pressure was dropping fast.

The suit’s AI was still working, though. Lee pulled a cable connect from the left sleeve of his own armor and snicked it home in the receptacle at the side of the patient’s helmet. A second later, a full readout on the patient’s condition was scrolling down through his awareness, the words overlaid on the lower-right side of his visual field. The wound, he learned, had been caused by a probable laser hit estimated at 0.8 megajoule. The bolt had burned through his shoulder armor, which had scattered much of the energy. There was no exit hole, so the energy that had not been dispersed by armor or the explosive release of fluid from superheated tissue had stayed put, cooking muscle and bone. Nasty.

Lee began going through the oft-practiced checklist. The challenge with giving combat field first-aid to someone in a vacuum was that you had to work through the guy’s suit. On Earth—or in an Earthlike environment—the order of medical priorities was fairly straightforward: restore breathing, stop catastrophic bleeding, treat for shock … and only then tend to such lesser concerns as immobilizing broken bones or bandaging wounds. The old mnemonic “ABC” established the order of treatment: airway, breathing, circulation. First establish an open airway, then restore breathing, and finally stop the bleeding and treat the shock caused by blood loss and trauma.

That order held true in space as well, but things became a lot more complicated. Suit integrity was the first concern; the larger the hole in a Marine’s vac armor, the faster and more explosive the loss of air. In space combat, a corpsman also had to be part suit mechanic. Keeping a Marine’s space armor alive was vital to keeping the Marine inside alive as well.

Mark VIII vac armor was smart enough to seal off a hole to prevent pressure loss. A spongy, inner layer of the armor laminate was a memory plastic designed to press tightly around the man’s body at the point of a leak, serving both as tourniquet and as a seal against further air loss. Sometimes, though, a complete seal just wasn’t possible. This one, for instance. The suit had formed a seal around the hole in order to maintain internal pressure, but the laser burst had punctured the Marine’s thoracic cavity … and penetrated the left lung as well. Air was spilling from the Marine’s bronchial tubes into his chest cavity—a condition called pneumothorax—and the air, mixed with blood, was bubbling away into space through the punctured suit. As the air drained away, the condition became the opposite of pneumothorax—vacuthorax—and massive lung tissue trauma.

And suddenly, things were getting much worse very quickly. As Lee rolled the armored form over, a crusty, glittering patch of frozen blood and water clinging to the wound suddenly dissolved in a spray of red vapor. He caught his mistake immediately. When he’d changed the Marine’s position, he’d moved the wound from shade into direct sunlight. The wound had been partly plugged with blood-ice, but in the harsh light of the sun just above the eastern lunar horizon, the temperature on that part of the armor soared from around −80° Celsius to almost boiling. In seconds, the ice plug had vaporized, reopening both the wound and the partly plugged hole in the armor.

There was no time for anything but plugging that leak. Reaching into the case mounted on his right thigh, he pulled out a loaded sealant gun, pressed the muzzle up against the hole, and squeezed the trigger. Gray goo, a quick-setting polymer heavily laced with programmed nano, squirted over the hole and wound together, almost instantly firming to a claylike consistency, then hardening solid. He checked the Marine’s suit readout again. Internal pressure was low, but steady.

But the guy was still bleeding internally—probably hemorrhaging into his thoracic cavity—and his heart was fluttering, atrial fibrillation. The patient was on the verge of going into arrest.

Lee reached for another tool, a Frahlich Probe, and slammed the needle down against the armor, directly above the heart. The probe’s tip was housed in a nano sheath, which literally slipped between the molecules of the man’s vac armor, then through skin, muscle, and bone to penetrate the patient’s chest while maintaining an almost perfect air-tight seal. Leaving the needle in place, he pulled off the injector, then attached a reader. The device fed his implant a noumenal image of a glistening red, pulsating mass—the beating heart—and let him position the tip of the needle more precisely, at the sinus node at the top of the right atrium. Easy … easy … there!

Now he could program the probe to administer a rapid-fire series of minute electric shocks directly into the sinus node, regularizing the beat. He watched the readout a moment longer as the probe’s computer continued to feed electrical impulses into the patient’s heart. The fibrillation ceased, the heartbeat slowing to a fast but acceptable 112 beats per minute.

The patient’s breathing was labored. He couldn’t tell, but he suspected that the left lung had collapsed. Certainly, it had been badly damaged by both wound and vacuum trauma. With the wound sealed over, the best Lee could do for the patient now was evacuate him.

“Nightingale, Nightingale,” he called. “This is Fox-Sierra One-niner. I need an emergency evac. Patient has suffered massive internal vacuum trauma. Suit leak is plugged and wound is stable. Heart monitor in place and operational. Over!”

A voice came back through his implant a moment later. “Copy that, Fox-Sierra. This is Alpha Three-One, inbound to your position, ETA two-point-five mikes. Ready your patient for pickup, and transmit suit data, over.”

“We’re ready to go at this end. Uploading data now.”

He spent the time checking for other wounds, monitoring the patient’s heart and vitals, and entering the computer code that caused the man’s armor to go rigid, locking him immobile against the chance of further injury. The patient’s condition continued to deteriorate, and Lee was beginning to guess that he’d made a wrong choice, a wrong guess somewhere along the line.

His patient was dying.

Two and a half minutes later, a silent swirl of lunar dust marked the arrival of Alpha 3/1, a UT-40 battlefield transport converted to use as a medevac flier. Bulbous and insect-faced, it settled to the lunar regolith on spindly legs. A pair of space-suited men dropped from the cargo deck and jogged over to Lee and the patient.

Lee stepped back as they attached a harness to the rigid armor. He was already scanning for another casualty. His suit scanners were giving him another target, bearing one-one-seven, range two kilometers. …

“Belay that, Lee,” Gunnery Sergeant Eckhart’s voice told him. “The exercise is concluded.”

“But Gunnery Sergeant—”

“I said belay that! Mount up on the Bug and come on home.”

“Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant,” he replied. From the sound of Eckhart’s voice, he’d screwed this one up pretty badly. He looked over one of the Marine’s shoulders at the patient and saw the deadly wink of red lights: PATIENT TERMINATED.

Damn, what had he missed? He’d followed procedure right down the list.

He mounted the UT-40, popularly known as a “medibug,” or “bug” for short. The passenger compartment wasn’t much more than an open framework of struts, with a bit of decking underfoot. The two Marines were strapping the patient onto a carry stretcher slung portside outboard, but without the usual formalities of connecting life support and condition monitors. The exercise was over.

The patient, of course, wasn’t really dead, had never been alive to begin with in the traditional sense. It was a high-tech dummy, a quite sophisticated robot, actually, with a very good onboard AI that let it realistically simulate a wide range of combat wounds, injuries, traumas, various diseases, and even potentially fatal conditions such as drop-sickness-induced vomiting, followed by choking inside a sealed helmet. He was called “Misery Mike,” and he and his brothers had helped train a lot of Navy corpsmen for SMF duty. He couldn’t really die of vacuthorax because he wasn’t alive to begin with … but how Lee had treated his problems could mean life or death for Lee’s hopes to ship out with the Marines.

The UT-40’s plasma thrusters fired, the blasts both silent and invisible in the lunar vacuum. Dust billowed out from beneath the bug’s belly as the ugly little vehicle rose into the black sky. After a moment’s acceleration, the thrusters cut out, and the medibug drifted along on a carefully calculated suborbital trajectory, the cratered and dust-cloaked terrain slipping smoothly past a hundred meters below.

He spent the time going over his treatment of the last casualty. He knew he should have been more careful about moving the suit. If he’d left the wound in the shade, kept it below freezing, he might not have damaged the patient’s lungs as badly. But the lungs had already been damaged and vacuthorax would still have been an issue. Damn, what had he missed?

Minutes later, the medibug was descending over the powdery desert of Fra Mauro. Ahead, the Navy–Marine Lunar Facility was spread out in the glare of the early morning sun, its masts, domes, and Quonset cylinders casting oversized shadows across the surface.

The Fra Mauro facility had started life a century and a half ago as a U.N. base, with attendant spaceport. Taken over by U.S. Marines in the U.N. War of 2042, it had been converted into a joint Navy–Marine lunar base. It now consisted of over one hundred habitat and storage modules clustered about the sunken landing bay, including the blunt, pyramidal tower of the Fra Mauro Naval Hospital, ablaze with lights. A secondary landing dome at the base of the hospital was already open to receive the bug, which bounced roughly—still in complete silence—as the pilot jockeyed the balky little craft in for a landing.

Twenty minutes later, Lee, shed of his armor but still wearing the utility undergarment with its weave of heat-transfer tubes and medinano shunts, palmed the access panel to a door marked GSGT ECKHART. “Enter,” sounded in Lee’s thoughts over his implant and the door slid aside.

The room was small and tightly organized, as were all work spaces in the older part of the facility. Deck space was almost completely occupied by a desk and two chairs. Most of the bulkheads were taken up with storage access panels, though there was room for a holoportrait of President Connors, another of Commandant Marshke, and a framed photograph of an FT-90 in low orbit, the dazzling curve of Earth’s horizon below and beyond its sleek-gleaming hull.

“Hospitalman Second Class Lee, reporting as ordered, Gunnery Sergeant.”

“At ease, at ease,” Eckhart waved him toward the chair. “I’m not an officer and we don’t need the formal crap. Copy?”

“Uh … sure, Gunnery Sergeant. Copy.” He took the offered seat. Was this the prelude to a chewing out? Or to his being booted out of the program?

“Relax, son,” Eckhart told him. “And call me ‘Gunny.’”

“Okay, Gunny. Uh, look. I’ve been reviewing my procedure for that last casualty and I see what went wrong. I shouldn’t have rolled the wound into sunlight—”

Eckhart waved him to silence. “Your dedication is duly noted, son. And we’ll debrief your session later, with the rest of the class. Right now I want to review your request for SMF.”

Lee went cold, as cold as the shade on the Lunar surface, inside. “Is there a problem?”

“Not really. I just think you need to have your head examined, is all. What the hell do you want to ship out-system for, anyway?”

Lee took a deep breath, hesitated, then let it out again. How did you answer a question like that?

“Gunny … I just want to go, that’s all. I’ve been space-happy since I was a kid, reet? ‘Join the Navy and see the stars.’”

“You’re in space now, in case you haven’t noticed. Most space-happy kids never get as far out as the moon. Or even low-Earth orbit. You know that.” He leaned forward, hands clasped on the desktop before him. “You made it! You’re in space. Why are you so all-fired eager to take the Big Leap?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call the moon space, Gunny.” He pointed at the overhead. “I mean, Earth’s right there, and everything, in plain view.”

“There are always billets on Mars. Or Europa. Or on Navy ships on High Watch patrol. I want to know why you want to go to another fucking star. That’s what you put in for on your dreamsheet, right?”

He sighed. “Yes, Gunny. I did.”

“You want to sign on for a deployment that might last twenty to thirty years objective. You come back home aged maybe four years and find yourself completely out of pace with everything. Everyone you knew is thirty years older. Your implant is out of date. You don’t understand the language. Hell, the culture might seem as alien to you as anything you’ll run into XT. You won’t fit in anymore.”

“Gunny, I don’t really have anything here, on Earth, I mean. Nothing but the Corps.”

“Uh-huh.” Eckhart’s eyes glazed over as he reviewed some inner download of data. “It says here you just went through a divorce.”

“Yes, Gunny.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “My wife and husband both filed for divorce. I came home from my last deployment and found the locks had been changed on my condhome. They didn’t recognize my palmprint any longer. I found out later they’d filed a couple of months earlier, but the formal DL hadn’t caught up with me yet.”

“Why the split? They tell you why?”

“‘Irreconcilable differences,’ but what the fuck does that mean?”

“Problems with you in the service?”

“Well, yeah, I guess. I know Nance didn’t like me always going on long deployments. Egypt. Siberia. That last six months at the LEO spaceport. Still, she could’ve waited, could’ve talked to me, damn it! Ten years of marriage, zip! Down the black hole. I know now that Chris is a slimy, two-faced, twisted sick-fuck bastard who’s in love with melodrama and the sound of his own voice. I’m not sure how he convinced Nance, though. I … I thought we really had something. Something permanent.”

“Right. So you find it’s not permanent and you figure twenty years or so out-system will let you get away from your problems. Or … maybe you’re in it for the revenge? Come back four years older, when your siggos, your significant others, are twenty years older?”

“What’s the point of that? We’d all still be middle-aged. But I guess I do want to get away from everything, yeah.”

“Well, I damn well guess you do. But is cutting yourself off from every soul you’ve known on Earth, cutting yourself off from the ties you were born to, is that all really worth it? You can’t run away from yourself, you know.”

“I’m not running away from myself. If anything, I’m running away from them.”

“Son, I’ve heard this story before, you know. Maybe about a thousand times. You’re not the first poor schmuck to get shit-canned by a dearly beloved siggo or kicked in the teeth by people he believed in and trusted. And it hurts, I know. Gods of Battle, I know. And I also know you’re carrying the pain here.” He pointed at Lee’s chest. “That’s what you really want to get away from, and that’s what you’re going to carry with you. You can run all the way to Andromeda, son, and the pain will still be there. Question is, is the attempt worth losing everything else you know on Earth as well?”

“Gunny,” Lee said, “I’d still have the Corps. Even in Andromeda. Semper fi.”

“Ooh-rah,” Eckhart said, but with a flat inflection utterly devoid of enthusiasm. “Son, it’s my job to talk you out of this, if I can.”

“Huh? Why?”

“To stop you from screwing up your life.”

“Well, you’ve got my request, Gunny. All you need to do is add your request denied to the form, and it’s as good as shit-canned.”

“I may still do that, Lee, if you don’t convince me pretty quick. Trouble is, I have to tell you that we need volunteers for SMF. And we need them bad. We have a big one coming up soon, a big deployment. And your class, frankly, is all we have to work with. It’s worse than that, actually. Three of you have a Famsit rating of one, out of a class of thirty-eight, and seven have a rating of two. Everybody else has close family.”

“So, let me get this straight. You need Corpsmen for SMF, but you have to try to get us to back out after we volunteer? That doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.”

Eckhart sighed. “This is the Marine Corps, son. It doesn’t always make sense. I’ll approve your request—if you can convince me that you are not making the big mistake of your sorry young life.”

“I … see. …”

And he did. His heart leaped. Eckhart was just giving him a chance to back out of this.

Yes! He was going to the stars! …

“I’m not sure what you want to hear, Gunny. I want to go. I have nobody I’m attached to on Earth. You said the culture here would be different, that I might have trouble fitting in when I got back. Well, you know what? I’ve never fit in, not really. Not until I joined the Navy. Hell, maybe I’ll like what I find here better in twenty years, fit in better than I do now, y’know?”

Eckhart nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I do know. Tell me something. Why did you become a corpsman?”

“Huh? Well, when I first enlisted, I had this idea of going on someday and becoming a doctor. I figured what I learned in Corps School would give me a leg up, know what I mean? And then there was the fact that my dad was a Marine. He used to tell me stories about the company’s ‘Doc,’ that special relationship between the Marines and their corpsmen. I’d always been interested in biology, physiology, stuff like that, and I was good at them in school. It just seemed like the right choice.”

Damn it, he wanted to go Space Marine Force. As a Navy Hospital Corpsman, the equivalent of an Army medic for Navy and Marine personnel, he’d enjoyed working with the Marines already. Going SFM simply took things a step or ten farther.

A century or two back, the equivalent of today’s SMF had been assignment with the Navy’s FMF—the Fleet Marine Force. The force included Navy doctors and corpsmen who shipped out with the Marines, sailed with them on their transports, and went ashore with them in combat. It was a long and venerable tradition, one that went back at least as far as the Navy pharmacy mates who hit the beaches in the Pacific with the Marines during World War II, and arguably went even further back to the surgeon’s mate’s loblolly boys of the sailing ships of a century before that.

He’d volunteered for SMF almost two months ago, just after the completion of his six-month deployment to LEO.

Just after the divorce became final.

Damn it, the hell with Earth. He wanted to go to the stars.

“Gunny, the Navy … and, well, now the Marines, if I go SMF, they’re my family now. I’ve been taking overseas and off-world deployments for the last four years, since I joined up. It’s time for me to re-up. I want to re-up. I’ve always wanted the Navy to be my career.”

Eckhart grinned. “A lifer, huh?”

“Yeah, a lifer. And it’s my life.”

“The government might point out that your life belongs to it.”

“Okay, but in so far as I do have a free choice, this is what I want to do with my life. ‘Join the Navy and see other worlds,’ right? So why can’t I re-up with a shot at really seeing some new territory?”

“How does Sirius sound to you, son?”

“Sirius? I thought there were no planets there?”

Eckhart grinned. “There aren’t. But there’s … something. An artifact. A space habitat. They didn’t tell me much in the report I saw, but there’s something. And the word is, a full MIEU is being sent out there. And they need Corpsmen. A bunch of ’em.”

An artifact. Another remnant of one of the ancient civilizations that had been kicking around this part of the galaxy thousands of years ago. Maybe the An. Or maybe it was something really special … something left by the Builders at about the same time that Homo erectus was in the process of making the transition to Homo sapiens.

“Sirius sounds just fine, Gunny.”

Okay, there wouldn’t be a planetfall. But a chance to see a high-tech artifact left by a vanished, starfaring civilization? And whatever the thing was, it would have to be damned huge if they were sending a whole Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit—a force that would number over a thousand men and women, all told. What the hell had they found out there?

“Does that mean I’m in?”

Eckhart grinned. “You’re in, Doc.”

I’m going to Sirius! I’m going to another star! …

He almost didn’t hear what Eckhart said next.

“You’ll continue your training here for the rest of the month,” Eckhart was saying. “After that, you and the other Corpsmen from this class who make the grade, the ones who’ve volunteered for extrasolar deployment, will ship for L-4 for your XS training and final assignment. And just let me say, Doc … welcome aboard!”

“Thanks, Gunny! Uh, does that mean you’re coming too?”

“Yes, it does. The brass is doing some scrambling right now, looking for famsit ones and twos.” He grinned. “I figured you damned squids’d need me to keep an eye on you!”

“That sounds decent, Gunny.”

“Now get your sorry ass down to debrief. We’re gonna want to hear, in exacting detail, just what you did wrong on that last field exercise!”

Vacation over. “Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”

“For one thing, you could’ve used a thermalslick.” He grinned. “Chief Hart is gonna tell you all about that!”

Lee blinked. He hadn’t even thought of that. Thermal-slicks were part of each corpsman’s field kit—a tough, polymylar sheet like aluminum foil on one side, jet black on the other. It could reflect sunlight or absorb it and the black side had the added trick of a layer of carbon buckyball spheres that made it almost frictionless—great for dragging the dead weight of an injured man.

But then, he hadn’t even thought about the problem of sunlight melting the wound’s clot until it was too late.

At the moment, none of that mattered.

I’m going to Sirius. …

Alpha Company Headquarters Office Star Marine Force Center Twentynine Palms, California 1535 hours, PST

“Comp’ny … atten … hut!”

Sharply dressed in newly issued green utilities, Garroway and his five fellow Marines came to attention. They were standing in Captain Warhurst’s office at Twentynine Palms, a fairly Spartan compartment made warm by the desert sunlight streaming through the transparent overhead. Staff Sergeant Dunne had marched them in; Warhurst himself was behind his low, kidney-shaped desktop, hand on a palm reader as he downloaded a report in his noumenal space.

After a moment, his glazed expression cleared, and he looked up. “Staff Sergeant?” he said.

“Sir!” Dunne rasped. “Corporals Garcia, Lobowski, Vinton, Lance Corporals Womicki, Garroway, and Eagleton, reporting for captain’s nonjudicial punishment, sir!”

“Very well, Staff Sergeant.” Warhurst folded his hands and looked at the six, studying each of them in turn. “Will all of you accept nonjudicial punishment? You all have the option of requesting formal courts-martial, at which time you would be entitled to legal representation.”

“Sir,” Garroway said. They’d agreed earlier on that he would be their spokesperson. They’d been invited to the party by his friend, after all. “We accept the NJP.”

“Very well. We’ll keep this short and simple then.” He leaned back in his swivel chair. “What the hell were you young idiots thinking, getting into a brawl ashore? Were you, each of you, aware of the delicate nature of the relationship between Marines and civilians here just now?”

“Yes, sir,” Garroway replied.

“What about the rest of you? You all downloaded the spiel before you went on liberty? The one about being good ambassadors for the Corps while ashore?”

All of them nodded, with a few mumbled “Yes, sirs” mixed in.

“I didn’t hear that.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Right now, ladies and gentlemen, the Marines can not afford a major firefight with the civilian sector. Brawling in a bar in downtown San Diego is one thing. Smashing up a condecology in the high-rent district of East Side LA is something else entirely.”

As Warhurst spoke, Garroway wondered what was in store for them. Warhurst had told them they were on report when he’d bailed them out of that police holding tank. “Captain’s nonjudicial punishment” was an old tradition within both the Navy and the Marines, a means of noting and punishing minor infractions short of the far more serious proceedings of an actual court-martial. It was more commonly called “captain’s mast,” from the ancient practice of holding these proceedings in front of the mast on board old-time sailing ships at sea.

But when Warhurst had said they were going up “before the man,” they hadn’t realized that “the man” would be Warhurst himself. Captain Warhurst must know what had really happened that night. …

“Liberty, as you all have heard many times since you enlisted, is a privilege, not a right. I know that was the first liberty in some years subjective, but that is no excuse! Do you read me?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“What happened?”

“Sir,” Garroway said. “First of all, we didn’t smash up anything. And besides, they started it. …”

“Excuses are like assholes, Marine. Everyone has one, and they all stink.”

“But someone grabbed Anna … I mean, Corporal Garcia. All she did was break the hold. Some guy started to rush her, then, and I took him down … pretty gently, I thought.”

“Pretty gently? Martial arts as adapted for close-quarters battle tactics are not gentle. You dislocated his knee cap and tore some tendons. The medical report says he is not seriously injured. He’ll be walking again after a few days of medinano treatment. But you are very fortunate, Marine, that that man is not pressing charges. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You said they started it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Well, they were on about Garcia being Aztlanista.”

“Start from the beginning. What were you doing at a private party in the first place, Garroway?”

And so he began describing that evening, starting with his calling up Tegan and getting her invitation to the sensethete … or was that the name of the room, rather than the party? He wasn’t sure.

Warhurst heard him out, asking questions from time to time to flesh out the picture. When he was done, Warhurst leaned back again in his chair. “Very well. There are extenuating circumstances—including one hell of a high-voltage bit of culture shock. That, however, is no excuse for attacking civilians … even if you thought it to be in self-defense.

“Lobowski, Womicki, Vinton, and Eagleton. I’m dropping all charges against you. You went to the aid of your fellow Marines, but you did not strike or assault civilian personnel in any way. Downloads from your implant recorders supports this assessment. A record will be sent to the civilian authorities, with my recommendation that no further action be taken against you.

“Garcia, you struck a civilian, but both Garroway’s testimony and implant recordings show that you did so only to break her hold on your uniform. Fourteen days’ restriction to base.

“Garroway. Your testimony and the download record show that you kicked a civilian in the knee, injuring him. It is clear you did so because you felt he was about to attack a fellow Marine. The next time you find yourself in a similar situation, I recommend that you consider tripping him, rather than crippling him with CQB tactics. Thirty days’ restriction to base, and five hundred newdollars’ fine, to be deducted from your pay in equal installments over the next five months. A record of these proceedings will be uploaded to the civilian authority with jurisdiction in this case. Should further civilian complaints be filed, you will be subject to further charges, but I have been given to understand that this disciplinary hearing should end the matter here and now. Understood? Any of you have problems with my decision?”

There were none.

“Very well. You are dismissed.”

Thirty days’ restriction and five hundred newdollars? A bit steep, Garroway reflected … but not a serious hit. There was no way he was going to mingle with civilians ashore any longer … so the restriction and even the fine didn’t hurt him that much.

The principle of the thing still burned. He and his friends had been insulted and attacked. Worse, the damned watchdog nano had then incapacitated them, rendering them helpless.

At least they hadn’t also been fined for the loss of their uniforms. Those were cheap enough—they were grown right on the spot from raw synthewool to spec—but they’d expected to be gigged for the thefts as well.

Mostly, he kept remembering his conversations at that party … his difficulty even understanding what was being discussed. Oh, sure, there were translation programs that could be run in his implant, but the attitudes he’d seen seemed as alien as the language, or more so.

It was a bit disconcerting to know that he’d come home … and not to feel at home after all. …

5

10 NOVEMBER 2159

Alpha Company Barracks Star Marine Force Center Twentynine Palms, California 1420 hours, PST

“All right, Marines. Listen up!”

Garroway looked up from his LR-2120, partially disassembled on the table before him, to hear what Staff Sergeant Dunne had to say. Around him, the steady buzz of conversation among other Marines in the company died away.

“Gentlemen, ladies,” Dunne went on, “first off … happy fucking birthday!”

The announcement was met with cheers and shouts of Ooh-rah! and fists pounding on tables. The tenth of November was the anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Marines—originally the Continental Marines—by an act of Congress in 1775, a date celebrated by Marines around the world and far, far beyond.

“Festivities begin at 1900 hours tonight at the mess hall. Cake, ice cream, and pogey bait will be the order of the day.”

He waited for a fresh round of cheers to die down. “Okay, okay, simmer down. Next order of business. The waiting is over. The Nergs are going to war.”

That raised a low-voiced murmur of excitement. Nergs was a new battlename for the Marines, another in the long list of nom d’guerres bestowed by enemies and friends alike—devil dogs, leathernecks, jarheads, gyrines. Nerg, or Nergal may-I, was from the phrase, identical in both An and in ancient Sumerian, nir-gál-mè-a, which meant something like “respected in battle.” The Fighting Forty-fourth had won that accolade from the Ahannu warriors on Ishtar immediately after the desperately fought action that had ended in Ramsey’s Peace.

“Now,” Dunne went on, “the really good news. Authorization has come through for promotions for all personnel who were on the Ishtar op. You have all received an automatic advancement by one pay grade. Personnel advancing to sergeant or higher will still be expected to take the test for your new rank, but the time-in-grade requirement has been satisfied.”

There was some more cheering and a rattle of applause at that. Garroway grinned. He’d just made corporal. Decent!

“A new download is available,” Dunne went on, “coded White Star-one-one. Please open it up and take a look.”

Garroway brought up the code phrase and thought-clicked it. Immediately, he was in a noumenal space. …

Visual: Star-strewn night, gas clouds, a pair of intensely brilliant pinpoint-stars, and the vast and enigmatic loom of a ring-shaped structure, obviously huge. …

“The ring is our objective,” Dunne went on, his voice sounding in their thoughts as they studied the alien construct. “It is located in the Sirius star system, 8.6 light-years from Earth. We believe it to be a stargate, a device floating in deep space that allows instantaneous travel between stars. Those patterns of light along the rim suggest that it is inhabited. We do not know by who.”

Sirius. Garroway felt the word strike hard, like a blow to the stomach. Lynnley!

The Marine company watched in silence as the golden needle-shape emerged from the ring, accelerated, and the image was suddenly and disconcertingly lost.

“These images were transmitted ten years ago by the explorer ship Wings of Isis,” Dunne’s voice went on as the blast of static was replaced by another view of the ring. “We do not know what happened to the Isis, but we must assume she was destroyed. There’s been no word from her since these images were received.

“The Wings of Isis had a crew of 245, 30 of them Marines, as well as several AIs. We have no real hope that any of them are still alive out there—or, if they are, that they will still be alive ten years from now when we arrive in-system. However, the Marines do not abandon their own. Accordingly, MIEU-1 is being prepared to deploy to the Sirius system. Once there, we will recon the area and assess the situation. We will attempt to make contact with whoever or whatever is operating that stargate. If necessary, we will organize a boarding party, enter the artifact, rescue human survivors if any, and maintain a beachhead, providing security for a science team which will perform a threat evaluation of the structure.”

Profound silence attended this announcement. Garroway found himself grappling with a dozen questions. How big was that wheel? How were they supposed to get inside, ring a chime at the front door? What kind of defenses did the thing have? How the hell were the Marines supposed to draw up a battle plan when they didn’t even know the nature of their enemy?

But more pressing still were the unanswered—and unanswerable—questions about Lynnley.

In subjective terms, the time he’d actually been awake and not crowding the speed of light, it had been less than a year since he’d seen her last, just before he’d entered cybehibe for the voyage to Ishtar. He missed her. In his mind, she was still very much alive, alive in his recent past. The knowledge that it had been eleven years since whatever had happened out at Sirius had happened seemed completely surreal.

Dead eleven years? No. He couldn’t get his mind wrapped around that one.

The images from Sirius faded out. Garroway sat, once again, at a table in the barracks, his laser rifle partially disassembled in front of him.

“Questions?” Dunne snapped.

“Gunnery Sergeant?” Sergeant Houston said. “What if we don’t want to go?”

“Come again?”

“What if we don’t want to go? I’ve got six years in sub, twenty-six ob. I‘ve done my bit. I want out, man.”

“This is not a volunteers only mission,” Dunne replied slowly. “The brass is treating this like an ordinary deployment, with two exceptions.

“First, if you’re within one year of your scheduled retirement, you can request an exemption. Since your expected OTIS—that’s your objective time-in-service—since your OTIS will be on the order of six months to one year for this mission, you may opt for taking an early out instead.

“Second, there will also be a case review board. Anyone with special needs or hardships arising from this deployment can talk to them. I’m given to understand they will not be unreasonable, and that they will consider each application on a case-by-case basis.

“However, I would ask you to think very carefully before deciding to remain on Earth. Things are different here, now, than we knew them twenty-some years ago. If you elect to stay behind, you will be given psychological assistance, including special programming for your implants to help you … adjust.”

Again, low-voiced murmurs sounded in the room. By now, every man and woman in the room had heard about the watchdog program that had taken out six of their number the other night at the condecology in ELA, and they didn’t like it, not one bit.

“I don’t know about all of you,” Dunne added, “but I’m gonna be damned glad to get back out there!”

“We’re with you, Gunny!” Corporal Bryan called out, using Dunne’s new rank for the first time. It sounded a bit strange … but right.

“I’ve also been told to tell you,” Dunne went on, “that for those of you who stay with the MIEU, there will be an additional rank increase immediately upon returning. They’re also in the process of putting through a special payment incentive. The word is it’ll be fifty percent of your standard paycheck, above and beyond combat pay, hazardous-duty pay, and XS-duty pay.”

And that, Garroway thought, would come to a very nice sum. He took a quick moment to download the appropriate pay scale tables in his mind. Yeah … very sweet. As a corporal with over three years’ subjective in, his base pay would come to n$1724.80 per month. Fifty percent of that was an additional n$862 plus change per month. That, plus the bonus for hazardous duty, extrastellar duty, and combat …

He gave a mental whistle and wondered if that kind of money made the Marines into modern-day, high-tech mercenaries.

“Is that ob or sub, Gunny?” someone asked.

“Yeah,” someone else added with a laugh. “It does make a difference!”

“Strictly subjective time, people, just like your base pay.” There were groans in response. “Can it!” Dunne added. “It’s bad enough the government pays you while you’re sleeping your sorry lives away in cybehibe! They’re not paying you for time that shrinks to no time at all while you’re traveling at near-c!

“Any other questions?” There were none. “Carry on,” Dunne said, leaving the Marines to discuss the news.

A few—Sergeant, now Staff Sergeant, Houston and Corporal, now Sergeant, Matt Cavaco—felt that arbitrarily ordering the Marines to go to Sirius, rather than making it a volunteer-only mission—was just flat wrong. Most, though, were excited by the prospect, both for the extra pay, and because of the distinct alienation many of them were feeling from Earth. Those few who’d gotten passes to go ashore in the past few days had returned with less than happy news about the planet, and about its inhabitants. Damn, but Dunne was right. The background culture of North America had changed and in some unpleasant ways.

There was a lot else about the local scene Dunne had not mentioned, but the other Marines in the company had been discussing it endlessly for the past several days.

It wasn’t just the shifting jargon and language, the strange new religions and philosophies, or the everchanging buzz about numnum persies or zaggers, whatever the hell those were. Where to begin?

Politics were one issue. The voices calling for separation were louder, more strident, than ever. Aztlanistas had been calling for independence since well before Garroway had been born, but the debate now approached open warfare in some of the Latino slums of LA, and in the borderlands of southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Strife was building with the Québecois, too, as the Canadian winters worsened. Their claim to western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley was less viable even than that of the Aztlanistas, since it had been the British Empire, not the United States of America, that had taken their old territories in the French and Indian Wars. Still, it made for amusing and often virulent name-calling on the public forums and news feeds.

There were more rules and regulations. Most states could now arrest and prosecute people for breaking one or another of the citizenship laws, dictums prohibiting any behavior that might disturb good social order and public decency. That sounded so much like the articles of the Uniform, Code of Military Justice—specifically the one about “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline”—that some Marines were speculating that America was now a military state. And with far more convicted criminals than prison space, more and more felons were being turned loose with specially programmed watchdog nano injected into their bloodstreams, nano that could evaluate their behavior against certain narrow parameters and administer punishment—even death—in the event of a violation. That was police-state stuff.

Scary.

And there were other problems, some of them not man-made. The weather was worse, a lot worse, than when Garroway had left Earth twenty-one years ago. Sea levels were higher, ultraviolet in the sunlight harsher, storms bigger and more dangerous. Most major coastal cities—Washington, D.C., coastal Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans—all were enclosed now by high thick seawalls, and at least partly covered over by transparent domes to keep out both the worsening ultraviolet and the periodic storm surges that otherwise would have flooded them completely. Despite that, there was serious talk about abandoning the original cores of those cities and rebuilding inland. Some coast cities, because of their terrain, could not be completely protected; New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle were in grave danger.

Manhattan, in particular, offered such a tangled and problematical geography with its rivers and associated borough-cities that the seawall and dome offered only partial protection. Fifteen years earlier, Hurricane Trevor had come ashore at the mouths of the Hudson and East rivers, causing tens of billions of newdollars’ damage. The next year, the state of New Jersey had, against riotous protests, finally moved the Statue of Liberty to artificial high ground near Secaucus before her copper body deteriorated any further.

Most forms of cancer were treatable through various nanomedical techniques—one did not go into direct sunlight any longer without nanotechnical augmentation to eyes and skin!—but skin cancer in particular cost Americans tens of billions per year in both treatment and prophylaxis.

And the ongoing deterioration of the planet’s climate appeared to be accelerating. Temperatures in the equatorial zones were rising steadily, fueling migrations of local populations to the north and south—but especially into the north. All across the globe, equatorial peoples were on the move as local government broke down and whole populations became migratory.

Scuttlebutt around the barracks had it that much of the furor over tracking down ancient alien technology among the stars was centered now on learning how to control climate on a planetary scale.

But was such an audacious goal even possible?

And then there were the religions. Always the religions. Dozens of new ones seemed to appear almost weekly, the majority of them either claiming the An were gods or that they were hell-born demons. Each new exoarcheological revelation on Earth, the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere seemed to spawn more ways of dividing humankind in the name of faith, peace, and spiritual brotherhood.

Established sects continued to splinter, sometimes violently. Within the Catholic world, Papessa and Anti-Pope continued to snipe at one another over issues ranging from how to think about the An to the use of nanomedical anagathics. Most Baptists believed the An were demonic; several new Baptist offshoots, however, continued to disagree on whether the An, like Lucifer, were fallen, or if Lucifer had somehow created them—an important theological question, since if they were fallen, then Christian missionaries sent to Ishtar might bring a few of that deluded race to the light.

Even within Garroway’s own Wiccan tradition—as easygoing and nonjudgmental faith as existed anywhere—there were bewildering new branches and offshoots disagreeing over such burning issues as whether or not the An were ancient gods, whether use of nanotechnology for special effects within ritual circles could be considered true magic or not, whether or not Christians should be held accountable for the Burning Times, and over the Rede-ethics of weather-witching, using magic to control the weather.

And finally there were the wars. Everywhere wars and more wars. Any Marine of the forty-fourth who did end up staying on Earth—if he didn’t take an early out—was going to find himself much in demand. Temperature extremes were driving many inhabitants of far-northern or equatorial regions into the somewhat more habitable latitudes in between. Anti-migration laws had resulted in open warfare and in border massacres. In just the past thirty years, Marines had deployed to Mexico and Egypt, to Siberia and the Chinese coast, to a dozen other shores and climes, fighting at one time or another troops of the Kingdom of Allah, the Chinese Hegemony, the European Federation, the Ukrainian Nationalists, Mexicans, Québecois, Brazilians, Colombians, and forces of the Pan-African Empire. The Great Jihad War of 2147 was now being called World War V. Already there was talk of a World War VI, as migrating populations, spreading famine and disease, and the collapse of national economies propelled desperate people into paradoxically suicidal bids for a better life.

The black forces of War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death were abroad in the world, and it seemed that not even the UFR/US Marines could possibly hold them in check much longer.

Earth had become as scary and as strange a place as Ishtar … worse, perhaps, since Garroway and his fellow Marines thought it was as familiar as, well, as home.

Sirius couldn’t possibly be any more alien—or more disappointing—than Earth.

Garroway was ready to go. He wanted to go, since the only people he knew—his brother and sister Marines—were also going, or most of them were. The one thing standing in his way was what he was thinking of now as unfinished business with his father.

“Hey, Gare?” Kat Vinton said, interrupting black thoughts. “What’s with the ten-thousand-meter stare?”

He blinked, then looked up at her. “Hey, Kat.”

“Hey yourself. What’s going on? Why the intense glare?”

“Sorry. I’m feeling … a bit torn.”

“Your girlfriend was onboard the Isis, I know. You told me. I’m sorry. …”

He nodded. He looked past her at the other Marines in the barracks. He felt as though he were barely holding on.

“Thanks, Kat. I still can’t believe she’s dead.” Trying to conceal the unsteady emotions within, he turned his attention, part of it, at any rate, back to the disassembled laser rifle before him. He’d already cleaned the optical connector heads and replaced both the pulse-timer chip and the circuit panel pinpointed as dead by his initial diagnostic check. All that remained was to put the thing together, a task Marine recruits were drilled at until they could do it, quite literally, blindfolded.

“Maybe she isn’t. We rescued the Marines and scientists on Ishtar after they’d been hiding out in the mountains for ten years, right?”

“I guess,” he told her. He concentrated for a moment on connecting the barrel to the charge assembly. “Pretty grim stuff.”

“But this is different. You saw those downloads.”

“Yeah.” he snapped home the final piece, the pistol grip clicking firmly into the base housing. He set the completed rifle aside. “Grim isn’t half of it. If we haven’t heard from them in all this time, I don’t think we ever will.”

She reached out and touched his shoulder. “Oh, Gare. I’m so sorry.”

It was passing strange, talking to Kat about this. Lynnely had been his lover, and they’d reached the point of discussing marriage before he’d shipped out onboard the Derna for Ishtar. Kat had been his fuck-buddy since Ishtar … his lover, yes, but without the romantic overtones or plans for a serious long-term social connection. When your entire list of social contacts—those you could talk to, at any rate—were fellow Marines, such arrangements became common. Standing regulations frowned on sexual fraternization among enlisted personnel, but in practice both officers and NCOs alike ignored the affairs and relationships that inevitably blossomed among the lower ranks.

Marines were only human, after all, even if they rarely cared to admit it.

“Well, at least we can go out there and kick the ass of whoever did it,” Garroway told her.

“Assuming they have asses to kick,” Kat replied. “Yes.” She cocked her head to one side. “What else is going on behind those gray eyes of yours?”

She knew him too well.

“I told you about my father, right?” Damn it, the place was just too damned crowded for this kind of conversation, Garroway thought.

“Ah. The light dawns.” Kat looked around the crowded barracks, then at Garroway, and seemed to read his mind. “Say, Gare?” She jerked her head toward the door. “As long as we have some downtime, I need to show you something. Outside.”

“’Kay.”

He returned the assembled LR-2120 to its position in a rack with forty-seven other laser rifles, then followed her down the steps, through the building lobby to the front desk where they checked out with a bored sergeant and then out through the front doors into the harsh glare of the sun. It was midafternoon and Garroway felt his exposed skin tingling as the nano imbedded there began reacting to the influx of ultraviolet. The glare lessened to comfortable levels as his eye implants darkened.

The sunlight reminded Garroway once again—and forcefully—of all of the recent barracks chatter about Earth’s worsening climate. Every religion was different, of course, but his own Wiccan beliefs held that the Earth herself was alive, the Goddess in material form, Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis of two centuries earlier given spiritual shape and meaning. To see the Earth in Her current condition genuinely hurt. Could he turn and walk away for another twenty years or more? What would She be like upon his return?

Could She be dying and was it his responsibility to stay with Her and try to help?

But what could one person do to stop the drawn-out ecological death of a planet?

“Where the hell are you taking me?” he asked her as he followed her down the front steps.

“I just wanted to find a place where we could talk,” she replied. “I thought the LVP ready line. …”

Across from the gleaming white building housing the barracks, a number of vehicles had been drawn up in a rigidly straight line along the side of a paved parade ground. The large hangars housing vehicle maintenance and the flight assembly building rose around the perimeter of the field.

The vehicles were LVPs, the acronym standing for landing vehicle, personnel. Specifically, they were M-990 Warhammers, so called for the blunt, crescent-shaped nose assemblies, like the business end of a double-headed hammer, mounting plasma guns housed in turret blisters at each tip.

The vehicles were ugly, their hulls behind the nose section heavily armored and as streamlined as a misshapen brick. Though they could fly, in an ungainly fashion, they were designed to be ferried from orbit to ground slung from the wasp-waist belly of a TAL-S Dragonfly, one of the Corps’ space-capable transatmospheric landing vehicles. They were heavily armed, too; besides the plasma guns, they had laser point-defense weapons, and turreted railgun mounts at the chin and aft-dorsal hardpoints. Each Warhammer was designed to carry two squads—twenty men—plus their weapons and gear, with a two-man/one-AI crew up front.

They walked across the tarmac to the nearest Warhammer. Kat touched an access panel, and the hatch unfolded from the hull, providing them with steps up into the cargo bay.

“This is a lot roomier than the old TAL-S lander modules,” Garroway said, stepping inside and letting his hand slide along the white-painted overhead. “Wish we’d had these on Ishtar.”

“Yeah, the Corps is always coming up with improvements,” Kat told him. “New and better ways to kill things. Anyway, I thought we could talk here without being … disturbed.”

“Did you think I was going to lose it?”

“No. But I didn’t want you clamping down on what you were feeling. C’mon, Gare. Your dad. You don’t really want to kill him, do you?”

He sighed. “Kill him? I guess not. I wouldn’t like going to prison. Or getting a charge of watchdog nano. Another charge, I mean, worse than what we got.”

“Your mother did go back to him, you know, after she’d gotten away. In a way, she has some of the responsibility too.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t fair. I wish I had a newdollar for every time I’ve heard of abused women either going back to their abusers, thinking they would change, or just because they didn’t know what else to do … or going on to hook with up someone else just as abusive, or worse. It makes me sick.”

“Sounds like you have a personal stake in it.”

“I do. My sister. Her third husband beat her to death. Her first and second husbands tried to.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “So am I. I hear the bastard’s on nanocontrolled release now, out in Detroit. I hope he screws up and gets fried. I truly, truly do. But I’m not going to hurry him along.”

“They haven’t caught my father,” Garroway said. “Not yet. In fact, he’s probably with the Aztlanista underground. He certainly held Azzy sympathies when I knew him.”

“Yeah, and that’s just it, Gare. You don’t know him. Not now. It’s been twenty-one years, right? He’s a completely different man. I’m not saying he isn’t any better now. I’m not even saying the bastard doesn’t deserve to die. But you’ve been away from Earth too long to get caught up in that.” She grinned at him. “Even if it only feels like a year for you.”

“Damn it, Kat. He killed my mother! …”

“So … somehow you track him down, find him wherever he’s hiding out. What do you do?”

“I alternate between wanting to put a bullet through his brain and wanting to blow out his kneecaps, leave him crippled.”

“With meditech the way it is nowadays, he wouldn’t stay crippled. Look what they did to the asshole you side-kicked. And how would you carry it out, when the watchdog nano in your system is watching you all the time, watching for you to just think a violent thought before putting you out?”

Garroway’s eyes were burning. He was having trouble swallowing.

“You wake up in jail, with a charge of attempted murder hanging on you. No captain’s mast this time. You end up in front of a civilian judge. Dishonorable discharge. Prison or worse. Is the revenge, is the attempted revenge, really worth it?”

Then the tears began to flow freely. A low moan escaped from his throat and then he was crying. He hadn’t cried like this in years, not since he’d been living at home with an out-of-control abuser for a father and a mother terrified of being her own person.

A long time later, Kat held him close. A pull-down storage shelf in the cargo bay had become their bed, a thick roll of foam padding their mattress. Their lovemaking had been hard and needy, almost desperate. At last, though, they clung to one another, sweat turning their bare skin slick and soaking the pad beneath them. With the power off, the interior of the Warhammer had grown stiflingly hot, but that hadn’t mattered, somehow.

Garroway breathed in the delicate scent of Kat’s hair, mingled with the smells of sweat, sex, and machine oil. Reluctantly, he consulted his internal clock. “We’d better get back,” he whispered.

“I know. But this was … good. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he told her.

“So, what’s it gonna be? Are you going to ditch the Corps and try to hunt down your father? Maybe do hard time?” She gave him a wicked grin, barely visible in the half-light filtering aft from the Warhammer’s cockpit. “Or are you coming with me to the stars?”

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