Semper Human (12 page)

And unappreciated.

“Is it really the Xul again?” she asked.

“I don't know. I don't know anything any more. I'm going inside.”

“You can't save the Galaxy all by yourself,” she told him. “Not even the Americans could do that.”

“No. But we can try.”

Despite his hab address, forty thousand kilometers above Earth's surface, Lord Garrick Rame actually thought of himself as
American
.

And that was decidedly something of a peculiarity in the modern Solar political order, where the s/h population of the four concentric Earthrings—and that meant the standard-human population, without counting AIs or the various other genus
Homo
species—numbered perhaps five times the total population now inhabiting the entire Earth. For well over a thousand years now, and perhaps for longer than that, space had been the preferred environment for all of the branches of genus
Homo
, not the confined and dirty enclosure of anything so limited as a planetary surface. There were still nations and nation states on Earth's surface—far too many of
them, and in far too contentious a tangle—but none of them really
mattered
any longer.

As he stepped into the spacious interior of his hab, he was greeted, as always, by the floor-to-ceiling vista presented by his viewall, with Earth, small and vulnerable, deep blue swathed in swirls of white, suspended within the immensity of Solar Space.

As at SupraSingapore, the scene was achingly, hauntingly beautiful. A thought could enlarge the globe, rotate it to any quarter, even wipe away the clouds and zoom down for a close inspection of any spot on the planet with a resolution of half a centimeter or so, but he much preferred this view as the default setting, showing Earth a bit smaller than the fist at arm's length, set in the just-visible circlet of tightly clustered and artificial stars marking out the vast, fifteen-billion-kilometer sweep of her encircling rings.

The time was just past 2100 GMT, which meant that most of the Western Hemisphere was still in daylight. Rame's gaze sought out familiar topological landmarks on this side of the globe—the stubby remnants of long-drowned Florida, Louisiana, and Yucatan, the Nicaragua Canal, the Amazon Sea, the hard, tiny glitter of the marine Arcologies off both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Two millennia of rising sea levels had resulted in the mass migration of coastal populations, not inland, but to towering oceanic habitats rising from the sunken remnants of ancient coastal cities—Miami, Los Angeles, Washington, even Manhattan, which had lost its long rear-guard holding action against the relentless sea when the Verrazano Dam had been overwhelmed at last in the mid-2700s.

Of course, a far larger migration had been taking place steadily ever since the first of the space elevators had begun commercial operation. There were dozens of them now, invisibly slender cables extending from as many points on the planet's equator all the way out to Earthring, 40,000 kilometers above, and beyond to the planetoids tethered as transorbital counterweights. For a thousand years now, Earth's population had been steadily shrinking, as more and more
of her children streamed up the elevators to space. Demographics specialists predicted that if the trend continued, the world of Humankind's birth would be all but uninhabited in another thousand years or less.

Of the estimated three billion people now on Earth, the vast majority occupied the congeries of states and kingdoms stretching from Africa up through Asia, the squabbling remnants of the ancient Chinese Hegemony, of the Indian states, of the near-atechnic Islamic Theocracy.

The Americas, steadily drained over two millennia by low birthrates and off-world emigration, now had a population numbering just twenty million as of the last census; fewer than half of those lived in the regions historically connected with the old United States of America, including Canada and North Mexico. The terms
United States of America
and the
North American Commonwealth
were more curiosities now than political realities.

It couldn't be otherwise. Nations, empires, and cultures evolved, grew, decayed, dwindled. Attempts by others to absorb the remnants—the Chinese Hegemony's invasion of the American West Coast nine hundred years ago, for example—had been blocked repeatedly by off-world powers interested in maintaining the historical status quo. In point of fact, the Americas were now, as much as anything, dependencies of the Human Commonwealth and, by extension, of the Associative.

Much of North America had reverted to the wilderness that had claimed it at the end of the last ice age, fourteen thousand years before. Most of the people who still called themselves
American
now lived in the coastal arcologies and oceanic cities.

Lord Rame's fascination with the culture had arisen in his long-standing love of history. It had been Americans—specifically men from the ancient United States of America—who'd first walked Earth's Moon in the modern era.

And, of course, there were the Marines.
Always
, there were the Marines.

What would it be like, he wondered, to give up technology, to revert to a simpler, freer, earlier time when men had walked their world's surface, and nowhere else? When an instance of mob insanity twenty thousand light years away held neither threat nor responsibility?

He was thinking about the AI socon guardian outside the hab compound. Like others of its class, it held little in the way of practical sentience, but it could read the minds of organic humans coming and going through the gates, and alert the authorities if someone tried to gain entrance without proper authorization. Like most other AIs, the Guardians were permanently linked in with the Solar Net. Some millions of times each second, they scanned themselves for signs of software-distorting electronic intrusion; they were supposed to be safe.

But suppose the Xul had compromised them somehow, broken their security codes, invaded and subverted their electronic minds?

The thought was nothing less than terrifying. Humankind was so utterly dependent upon its AI minds, its interlinked networks, its near-instant access to data libraries and direct communications with any of a hundred billion other minds within the Solar System alone.

Talia was right. People would never give that up, not voluntarily.

But suppose the Xul could subvert Humankind's information and communications technology. How long would it take them to shut down human civilization itself?

What could be done in the face of such a threat?

An ancient line played itself out in Rame's mind, a fragment from one of the historical downloads he so favored. It was a bit of trivia associated with the ancient Marines.

Send in the Marines
.

But without a clear target, a defined enemy, a precise plan of operations…how?

The problem, he thought, had no solution, none, at least, based on the limited information available. That last probe
in toward the Great Annihilator had been intercepted and destroyed before it could send back any useful data.

Would the ancient Commonwealth Marines be enough to carry this off?

“They at least possess a determination, the
spirit,
to see the situation through to a successful resolution,”
a voice said in Rame's mind. He felt the mental touch of an archAIngel, cool, powerful, and brilliant.
“It remains to be seen whether spirit and determination will be enough.”

“Hello, Socrates,” he said. He'd only worked directly with a few archAIngels during his career, and the touch of each was distinctive. Ancient thought, religion, and philosophy once had linked four named archangels with the four classical elements—earth, air, fire, and water. To Rame, Socrates always felt like
air,
clear, clean, and the embodiment of cool intellect.

“Good evening, my Lord. The last of the awakened Marines are being briefed.”

“Good. Not that we know enough to let them know what they're going to face.”

“Their morale appears to be good,”
Socrates told him.
“Surprising, considering their psychological isolation.”

Rame shook his head. “They're all volunteers,” he said. “And the Corps is everything to them.”

“So I've been given to understand. How do you intend to deploy them?”

“A megatransport equipped with phase-shift capabilities. Here, have a look.” A coded thought shifted the viewall scene, swinging the viewer's point of view around sharply to the right. Earth and the glitter of its rings slid off to the left, and Earth's moon drifted in from the right, expanding swiftly as the optical magnification system kicked in.

Luna, after five centuries of terraforming, was a beautiful sight…shrouded in the haze of her newborn atmosphere. The dark, ancient maria mottling her face now were blue and cloud-swathed, and patches of green showed along the edges of the shallow, freshwater seas.

The magnification factor continued to grow, causing the moon to swell rapidly, filling all of the viewall. Like Earth, like Mars and Venus, Luna was encircled now by a system of artificial rings and stress-anchored habs. Since the moon's rotation, tide-locked to its twenty-eight-day revolution around Earth, was so slow, the rings obviously could not be in selenostationary orbit. Instead, the entire structure had been gravanchored just 120 kilometers above the moon's surface, low enough that the envelope of the newly nanufactured atmosphere extended well past the structure's delicate arc.

As the image continued to expand, it centered on one of the Lunar ring's largest modules, a shipyard manufactory some fifty kilometers long and massing billions of tons. Cradled atop the structure was a military transport, itself two kilometers long, bulky and wedge-shaped, appearing tiny only by comparison with the titanic structure with which she was docked.

“The
Major Samuel Nicholas,
” Rame said. “She's been designed with phase-shift generators that will let her pop in and out of the Quantum Sea and, we hope, safely enter the Great Annihilator's ergosphere.”

“To approach a Xul base there?”

“Yes. The Xul
must
have some sort of base or facility within the Annihilator. They still need physical instrumentality—a base or fortress of some sort—in order to exist. We pack the Marines into the transport, shift them into the black hole, and attempt to dock with whatever is in there. The Marines will take it from there.”

“Indeed.”
Socrates sounded disapproving.
“It might help if we could gain some intelligence ahead of time. Images, at the very least, of whatever is in there waiting for them.”

“We've been trying. So far, none of our recon craft have gotten close enough to deploy sensor drones or remotes.”

“And you think the transport will do better, will give you more of a chance?”

“With enough support. Other ships. Electronic decoys. Yes.”
I hope
.

“Your Marines will still need some sort of reconnaissance capability,”
Socrates said.
“You can't expect them to storm the Great Annihilator without knowing what's going on in there.”

“We are working on that,” Rame told the AI. “That will be the responsibility of some of your relations, I'm afraid.”

“Artificial intelligences?”

“We hope to use self-copying to retrieve the data we need.”

“That makes sense. Of course, that could be a little rough on the AIs involved.”

“Yes. Is that a problem for you?”

Socrates seemed to hesitate.
“No,”
the voice said after a moment.
“The threat posed by the Xul threatens my kind as well as yours. The only question is whether the sacrifice will be sufficient to gain the intelligence your Marines will need.”

“There'll be another question after that,” Rame said.

“Yes. Whether or not your Marines are able to complete this mission at all. You are asking a great deal of men and women who were not even born to this age.”

“They'll do it if anyone can.”

But Rame thought again of Lieutenant Vrelit's last transmission, and shuddered.

“Get! Them! Out! Of! My! Mind!
…”

Even the ancient Commonwealth Marines might be helpless in the face of what was waiting for them within the black grip of the Annihilator.

2901.2229

Marine Assault Carrier
Night's Edge
Approaching Lunar Ring
Sol System
1440 hours, GMT

“The bastards!” Lieutenant Bollan said, quietly, but with deep and powerful emotion. “The filthy, terradestructing bastards!”

“What are you bitching about, Bol?” Garwe demanded. A number of the Marines were in the main squad bay on board the
Night's Edge
. One entire bulkhead was displaying the view forward as the huge Marine carrier gentled down toward the Fleet docking area set within the outer Lunar Ring. Beyond, behind the knife-edge silhouette of the Ring, Earth's Moon glowed with the mottled greens of forests, the azure and cerulean blues of shallow seas, the stark white and silver of unreclaimed regolith and ice-locked mountain.

“Aw, he's just pissed because they went and dumped a bunch of water on his precious moon,” Maria Amendes said, laughing. “He doesn't like it now with seas and an atmosphere.”

“There've been seas on the Moon for centuries,” Garwe said, puzzled. “What's the big deal?”

“The big deal,” Bollan said, scowling, “is that they screwed up some of our best archy sites. The Mare Crisium was a
damned treasure trove of An artifacts, and they went and submerged them under a hundred meters of comet water!”

“Ah,” Garwe said, nodding. “You're a preservationist?”

“Of course. We're systematically destroying the truth about Humankind's past.”

Preservationists were fairly common throughout human space, and Garwe had known several of them in the Corps. Some protested the wholesale terraforming of worlds simply because there was a chance that there was native life. Mars, for instance, had been a living world once; the fossil record there proved it. But the main reason to keep Mars and Luna, especially, in their original states had been the existence of extensive archeological sites and artifacts. On Mars, there'd been the so-called “City” and “Face,” the site of Builder colonizers who'd briefly made the planet warm and wet, and transplanted a number of newly genegineered members of archaic
Homo sapiens
to the fourth planet as workers. The Cave of Wonders discovered beneath the Face had provided xenotechnoarcheologists with the clues they'd needed to reverse engineer faster-than-light communications, modern QCC. And on Luna, a colony of the ancient An had built a number of bases, including the big one at Tsiolkovsky on the side facing away from Earth, and another in the Mare Crisium on the near side. Reportedly, there'd been places there where you could scarcely take a step without treading on bits and pieces of shattered technology, destroyed by the xenocidal Xul attacks of some eight to ten thousand years earlier.

The knowledge that nonhuman colonizers from the Builder Empire had genegineered the human species half a million years ago had deeply marked the human psyche. Many people dismissed the evidence out of hand, preferring to cling to other, more comforting, more uplifting religions and myths. For many, the knowledge that the An had colonized Earth itself and enslaved the proto-Sumerian peoples of the Fertile Crescent had been even worse, suggesting that much of modern human religion had had less to do with a special creation by
a loving god than it did with a brutal enslavement by alien masters. For many, the An were demons.

Some people had gone too far the other way; there were a number of modern religions focusing on the An as gods, unbelievably enough. There was actually, Garwe knew, a thriving business in fragments of An technology recovered from the Moon and elsewhere as holy relics. Garwe, an atheist, thought the whole idea was pretty silly…but he'd long ago stopped being surprised at the stupid things his fellow humans did occasionally.

“So, Bol,” he said, “you think the An are gods?”

“No,” Bollan replied, but Garwe could hear just a whisper of uncertainty or discomfort in the word. “No, of course not. But if we want to learn about who we are, about where we came from, we need to preserve our past.”

“Right.”

Garwe was pretty sure there was more to it than that for Bollan. He downloaded Bollan's bio from the company data base, scanning the text as it scrolled past his inner vision. Yeah. He'd thought so. Bollan's mother had been a priestess in the Church of the Ascendant Masters…a popular sect that believed that Humankind's evolution and destiny were controlled by spiritually advanced and angelic beings from the stars. The entry for Bollan's own religion was simply given as “unspecified deistic,” meaning he believed in God…though
that
could mean almost anything.

On the squad bay viewall, Luna Ring was swelling rapidly, most of it sharply backlit by the radiant clouds and seas of the Moon behind it.

“Well, it's true, damn it,” Bollan insisted. “It's a lot harder to find bits of alien structure when it's at the bottom of a damned sea!”

“You know, Bol,” Garwe said, “they've been combing the Lunar regolith for almost two thousand years, hunting for any stray bits of xenotech the tourists missed. It's all handled by robots, right? I'll bet they have a whole army of search-bots still crawling around on the sea floor looking for stuff.”

“Including stuff that dissolves in water? Or corrodes?”

“The XTAs know what they're doing.”

“The xenotechnoarchaeologists don't know shit! We probably know less today about our origins than we
thought
we did before Humankind ever left Earth!”

Garwe shrugged, unwilling to pursue the argument. “Maybe.”

“You know…we
still
don't know who built the Giza Complex on Earth…or the Baalbek foundations, or the Yonaguni Pyramid in the ocean off Okinawa, or Tiotihuacan in South America. We know the Builders genegineered
Homo sapiens
. We know the An had their little two-bit empire in Mesopotamia…and we know the N'mah helped us back on our feet after the An overlords had been chased off by the Xul. But that's about it. A whole, long chapter of our history—half a million years' worth if we go back to the Builders—and we don't know shit about it, about who we are, about where we came from! They're stealing our heritage with the big terraforming projects, and no one even
cares
!”

“Give it a rest, Bol,” Amendes said, rolling her eyes. She looked at Garwe. “He's a Colonial Edenist,” she told him.

“Ah,” he said. “That explains it.”

Edenist
was the name given to a small but vocal cluster of human religions that believed that the Builders had been either gods, or the angelic architects of the one
true
God. Colonial Edenist was an offshoot of that movement believing that humans
were
the Builders, that they'd arrived in the Sol System half a million years before, and that modern humans were the survivors of a destroyed Builder colony.

In other words, humans were gods, temporarily lost, and seeking now to regain their former place or glory, power, and destiny in the cosmos.

Colonial Edenists had a reputation as troublemakers, which might have been why the entry for religion on Bollan's electronic bio had been marked as it was.

“You
are
aware, aren't you, Bol,” Garwe said, “that humans evolved on Earth? That old turkey about Adam and Eve being
space travelers shipwrecked here hasn't flown since we discovered DNA. Humans share…what is it? Ninety-eight percent plus of our DNA with chimpanzees? Something like sixty percent with
starfish
? We evolved on Earth, Marine. We're part of Earth's biosphere and evolution, and always have been.”

Bollan shrugged. “And maybe we don't know all there is to know about human genetics.”

“Well, if we don't, medical science is taking some damned good guesses at how we work.” Gene therapy had been standard medical practice for two millennia. Genetic enhancement, for everything from eye color to mathematical ability to various cosmetic fads had been popular for almost as long. And then there were the various physical species derived from basic genus
Homo
stock, the supies, the vacmorphs, the selkies, the jovies, the calorics. All of the species and subspecies other than the tallies, the t-human
Homo telae
, who had no corporeal existence at all. You couldn't play games like that with the human genome without having a
very
good idea of how it worked.

“All I'm saying is they shouldn't have drowned all those archy sites,” Bollan said. “Humankind's living in space now. We don't
need
planets. Leave 'em alone. Leave 'em as God intended them to be.” Turning sharply, he walked away.

“You can't argue with that kind of logic,” Amendes said, watching him go.

“Logic,” Garwe said. “Is
that
what you call it?”

She shrugged. “It is for him. No matter what you say, he has a counter. But anything you bring up that counters his arguments is ‘not proven' or ‘we don't know that.' Even when we damned well do!”

“So what's it hurt?” Garwe asked her. “Lots of Anchor Marines have some pretty far-out belief systems. Weird religions. Arcane brotherhoods. The Knights of the Corps?”

The Knights were Marines who'd created a kind of virtual fantasy, one they could link with through their implants, and in which they could share a Medieval brotherhood of warrior
priests. More popular with enlisted personnel than with officers, it had been prohibited by regulation for several hundred years, then grudgingly tolerated. The brass saw it as a kind of role-playing game—essentially harmless, but with the potential of becoming addictive.

“What's weird or arcane about the Knights?” she demanded.

He dropped his gaze to her left little finger, and saw the white-silver of a ring. Not
all
Knights were enlisted personnel.

“It's just entertainment,” he told her. “You have to understand, I see all religions as a kind of game. Made-up worlds with their own rules and backgrounds, promoting fantasy as entertainment and a means of purging emotional baggage.”

“The Knights of the Corps are
not
a religion,” she said firmly. “Or a game.”

“If you say so.” He shrugged, unconvinced. “It doesn't bother me one way or another. I don't care how you spend your free time…or who Bollan prays to. Just so long as both of you are present and functioning in reality,
this
reality, when it counts.”

On the viewall, they could see now another ship, a huge one, docked against the upper surface of the ring. Since the Lunar Ring didn't orbit the Moon, gravity was in full force here, drawing the
Night's Edge
in at just a hair under one-sixth G. The carrier was drifting down on her repulsors, which twisted local gravity around to her benefit. A docking cradle was opening alongside the far larger ship already on the Ring. Garwe recognized the other vessel as a megatransport, a heavy hauler capable of carrying a full division, some sixteen thousand Marines. His implant link brought up the huge vessel's name:
Major Samuel Nicholas
.

He plugged the name into his implant, pulling down a block of data from the platoon net's data base. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

“What?” Amendes asked.

“Samuel Nicholas. The first Marine.”

“Who?”

He pointed. “That transport. It's named after the very first
Marine in history. The very first commission issued by the Continental Naval Service, under the direction of the Second Continental Congress. Fifth of November, 1775 Old Style. The Year One of the Corps. Samuel Nicholas was commissioned as ‘Captain of Marines.' First thing he did was set up shop in the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia.”

Amendes shook her head, confused. “Wait. What's Philadelphia?”

“One of the sunken cities on the old U.S. coast. Damn it, Amendes, it's where the Corps was born! And Nicholas was the first of us all!”

“Okay, so that fat-ass transport is named after an old Marine. They do that, you know.”

“Maria, you have no soul. The man commanded the first landing by the Continental Marines on an enemy beach—at Nassau. He was promoted to major, and became the very first Commandant of the Marine Corps. The man is a Corps legend!”

“That's nice, Garrick. I wonder what she's here for?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look for yourself. A docking bay just opened in the main dorsal fairing of that monster. I think it's going to swallow us. I think that monster may be our next ride.”

“Fuck. You're right.”

A minnow to the
Nicholas
whale, the carrier
Night's Edge
descended into the cavernous opening of the larger vessel's main docking bay.

Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas

Lunar Ring
Sol System
1825 hours, GMT

“Attention on deck!”

“As you were!” Garroway snapped as he strode through
the entranceway into the Ops Center. A half-dozen enlisted Marines standing guard at the high-arched doorway relaxed.

Beyond, the compartment, huge by most shipboard standards, had been set aside as the planning and mission control center for the upcoming deployment. Waiting for him in the circular rows of seats inside were his own command staff, Admiral Aron Pol Ranser and his staff, and a small army of politicians—representatives and star lords of the Associative government.

“General Garroway,” Admiral Ranser said. “Welcome to your headquarters.”

Garroway glanced up at the three-dimensional illumination of the Galaxy suspended in space above the room, a thickly planted forest of stars. A two-thousand-light-year sphere at the center glowed brighter than the rest, representing the Core Detonation.

“Thank you, Admiral. My command constellation has been reviewing plans for our deployment into the Core. Since our principal need right now is hard intel on what we can expect at the Great Annihilator, I'd like to discuss with you some of our Fleet options.”