Semper Human (18 page)

A hundred kilometers to Garwe's left, Javlotel's pod flared and vanished in a paroxysm of plasma energy. Garwe accelerated faster. That might have been blind luck on the part of the defenders…or their AIs might have better target identification protocols than Marine Intelligence believed. Either way, there was no backing out now. The War Dogs were committed to the attack.

One of the big guns fired, loosing a bolt of fusion fire, and two more Marine pods vanished like gnats wafted into the beam of a power cutter. Namura and Bakewin. The Dahlists were firing the big weapons blindly now, not tracking the incoming, but hoping to burn enough of them out of the sky by sheer chance and firepower.

Fifty kilometers, now…thirty…twenty. Garwe decelerated sharply, jogging hard to make it harder for the point defenses to nail him.

He cut out the optical magnification and the battle station loomed before him, stark in its blocky patterns of black and white, and every scanner, every weapon, so far as Garwe could see, aimed directly at him. His pod's electronics detected and painted in the beams and pulses of radiation stabbing up through the battle station's sky, an unnerving animation filling battlespace with deadly energies.

And then, somehow, he was through, the curve of the battle station's horizon flattening out at the last second and taking on the aspect of a black and white world, with a stark landscape of clean-edged cliff sides, flat-bottomed trenches, pyramidal and truncated mountains, domes, and towers—most of them bearing high-energy weapons.

He lashed out with three tentacles, anchoring his pod to the station's surface, and loosed a cloud of smart AM-missiles programmed to seek out the energy signatures of enemy weapons and blot them out. The lower half of his egg-shaped pod flowed like water, extended, and bit into the black surface of the station, pouring a stream of nano-disassemblers into the outer armor of the Dahlist base.

And the pod seemed to melt into the surface, slowly sinking into solid metal.

Company H, 2/9
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
0521 hours, GMT

Instead of crowding forward in ranks of four, the two Marines at the center of the front rank leaped through into the Dahlist base while the outer two held back, stepped together, then leaped through after them. The same procedure was repeated by the second rank, and the third. By sticking to the center of the ramp as they moved through, they avoided falling into the deadly fringes of the dimensional interface and repeating the confusion of the initial assault. Gunfire seared and snapped on the Dahlist command deck, followed by a thunderous boom as someone tossed a grenade.

All of Second Platoon was through, now, and Third Platoon was moving up the ramp.

Nal watched the firefight with keen interest. This was a first for the Marines of the 2/9, deploying through a teleport field directly into the middle of the battle. They'd had time to practice a few times in virtual reality simulations, but the reality was
nothing
like the sims.

Worst were the interpenetrations, when Marines entered the other space partially intersecting a console or, horribly worse, another person. The old popular wisdom that two bodies attempting to occupy the same space at the same time would explode wasn't true, it turned out, not when it happened through the agency of a dimensional overlap. There is
lots
of room between the individual atoms of most solids, but once a Marine had stepped into a console there was no way to sort the two out again afterward.

Few survived the experience for more than a few seconds, however.

The screams during those seconds were the worst things Nal had ever experienced.

There wasn't much to see now through the open gateway, so Nal tuned in on the camera feeds from several of the Marines already on the other side. The Marines had cleared the immediate area around the gateway, but were coming under fire now from heavy automatic weapons mounted on catwalks high up around the arching bulkheads of the compartment.

“Hot Fire, Green Five!” someone yelled. “We've got three…no
four
heavy guns above us! VK-2s and RmD-34s!”

Hot Fire was the call sign for the HQ element. Second Platoon was Green, Third was Gold.

“Green, Gold One-seven! I've got the VK-2 on the left!”

“Green, Green Two-two! I've got the Rum-dum on the right!”

VK-2s were light bipod-mounted machine guns firing explosive bullets at ten rounds per second. RmD-34s, “Rumdums,” for short, were fast-cycling tripod-mounted weapons firing bolts of high-energy plasma. Both were obsolete by Associative standards, but still deadly.

“I got him! Gold One-seven, target smoked!”

“Watch on your right, One-seven! Watch your right!”

“Green One, this is Hot Fire One,” Corcoran's voice said. “I suggest you get some people up on those catwalks!”

“Working on it, sir!” Fellacci replied.

“If I may suggest, Lieutenant,” Nal put in, “you might want to use the smart grenades. We're not worried about collateral damage.”

“Understood!”

Smart grenades were pencil-sized projectiles fired from launchers built into the left arms of the Hellfire suits, a little larger than AM-4s, but not as uncompromisingly destructive.
They could identify a target and determine the range down to a centimeter or two. If the target ducked behind a barrier, they would detonate when they were immediately above the target's hiding place.

The automatic weapons on the catwalks were mounted atop improvised shields of metal or plasteel, the gunners out of sight. Volleys of smart grenades began snapping up from the main deck and exploding above and behind the shields, in one case hurling a Dahlist gunner over the catwalk railing and ten meters to the deck beneath, trailing smoke.

The blasts, though, savaged the bulkhead, opening fist-sized holes and starting several fires in the electrical wiring on the other side. There was always the chance of depressurization…but, as Nal had pointed out, the Marines weren't trying to capture the base so much as they were attempting to knock it out.

In fact, two of the Marines in the HQ section, Sergeants Dayton and Palmer, were equipped with backpack antimatter devices, just in case the decision was made to destroy the base rather than to capture it. The only reason they hadn't simply teleported an AM device or a small nuke into Objective Samar was the hope of taking Emperor Dahl alive.

A double doorway slid open at the far end of the compartment, admitting a swarm of black-armored Dahlist troopers. Nal recognized the armor type from his briefings…Mark XV heavy combat suits, a bit out of date but still murderously effective. The Marines swung their aim to take this new threat under fire, knocking down several of the advancing troopers, but they were taking heavy fire in return, and several more Marines were down, two dead, four wounded.

Then a portion of the bulkhead ninety degrees around to the left flared white, then dissolved in smoke and lightning. As the bulkhead collapsed, a massive something was just visible moving through the smoke, smashing its way through the freshly cut opening and into the command deck compartment.

A gunwalker, all silver and gleaming, with black trim, squat and ugly as it lurched from side to side on two stubby, broadly splayed feet. It looked something like an old RK-90, but bigger, and with different weapons housings, and there was a flat turret on top of the thing sending a lance of white-hot plasma flame into the compartment's interior. The walker likely was something new, an upgrade of older walker models with a much bigger punch.

Immediately, the Marines shifted their aim again, concentrating on this new monster, trying to focus their fire on weapons ports and possible weak points. The walker was shielded, however, and shed plasma bolts in sheets of high-energy pyrotechnics.

One Marine, Gunnery Sergeant Ernie Clahan, rose from the wreckage of the command deck holding a rotary cannon, however, and slammed a stream of high-yield antimatter rounds into the gleaming shell of the approaching beast.

The beast returned fire, plasma bolts cracking and snapping in the smoke-clotted air; Clahan's Hellfire suit shrugged off the energy flux in radiant, auroral sheets and jagged bolts of lightning, though the Marine staggered under the impact. He held his fire on the walker, however, pounding a ragged hole in the front of the thing just beneath the turret housing, then concentrating his fire on the fast-widening patch of damage.

Internal explosions began ripping through the robotic combat machine, just as a fusillade of plasma and explosive rounds finally overpowered Clahan's shields and drove him backward onto the deck. The walker gave a final lurch and exploded, huge, silvery fragments pinwheeling through the compartment, trailing smoke.

“Corpsman front! Marine down!”

Sergeant Ferris stepped forward, dropped his plasma rifle, and picked up Clahan's pulse-slammer, turning its buzz-saw destruction on the advancing ranks of Dahlist troops. Behind him, Doc MacKinnon, the Third Platoon corpsman, dropped to the deck and began working on Clahan's shud
dering, smoking form, inserting a suit catheter to flush the Marine's body with nanomedical microbots.

More Marines stepped up alongside Ferris, sending a searing fusillade of energy beams and high-yield explosive rounds into the advancing enemy ranks. Dahlist soldiers stumbled and fell, their Mark XV armor failing catastrophically in gouts of flame and blossoming flares of energy. The rest scattered, seeking cover behind junked and smoking instrument consoles, or fell back through the open doorway.

And the Marines followed. “Let's go, Marines!” Ferris yelled over the company net, and he led the others forward as smart grenades slashed and blasted, rooting out Dahlist soldiers hiding behind consoles with shotgun blasts of hot shrapnel.

For perhaps thirty seconds, the issue remained in doubt. Marines in Hellfire armor collided with Dahlist troops in massive, old-fashioned Mark XVs, engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Both armor types linked directly with the cerebral implants of their wearers, and both armor types acted as exo-skeletal enhancers, translating their wearers' movements into blocks, lunges, and blows of superhuman strength, agility, and speed.

And at that point, the battle began to shift in favor of the Globe Marines. Personal plasma rifles, man-portable fusion projectors, and smart antimatter grenades remained deadly no matter
when
the people wielding them had been born and raised, in the forty-first century, or in the thirty-first, and in the tight confines of Samar's command control deck there were few options for cover or concealment. It was a slug fest, pure and simple, of personal weapon against massively lethal personal weapon.

But when the incoming tide of Globe Marines actually smashed their way into the defending ranks, personal weapons became less important than the abilities and training of individual men and women.

The Marines of Nal's day had trained extensively in a martial arts form known as weiji-do, which translated roughly as
the
Way of Chaos
. Developed in the mid-Third Millennium as an outgrowth of Shaolinquan and Tai chi chuan, weiji-do was a synthesis of the most prominent
wai chia
, or outward, and
nei chia
, or inward Chinese martial arts forms. Combining traditional hand-to-hand combat techniques with certain meditational forms and with programming uploaded into the brain through cranial implants, it purported to give adepts near superhuman abilities in terms of creating reality out of the static of background chaos. The philosophy blended well with the traditional can-do gung-ho attitude of the Marines, and had shaped them extensively. In Nal's experience, weiji-do had never turned Marines into the superhuman warrior-magicians imagined by holovid sagas and sim-sotted civilians in general, but the rep alone contributed to the Marine mystique.

There was no way of knowing whether Dahl's troops, inhabitants of one of the farthest-out outposts of Humankind anywhere, knew anything about the Marine mystique, or cared. But in the hand-to-hand tangle on the Samar command deck, the Marines clearly had the advantage. Their Hellfire armor, lighter-weight and stronger than the Mark XV combat suits of their opponents, gave the Marines a decided advantage in speed and maneuverability. He watched with growing surprise as Sergeant Cori Ryack ducked under a heavy-handed swing by a Dahlist trooper who must have outmassed her by over fifty percent, guided the bigger man's arm to the side, and almost casually ripped it from his shoulder.

Armored joints, it seemed, no matter how tough and well protected, were weak spots and easy targets, or the man wearing the armor wouldn't be able to move.

More Dahlist troopers were spilling onto the command deck, but enough Marines had entered the battlespace that they were able to maintain their advantage now. At the beginning, the Dahlists had been well positioned and able to gun down Marines as they came through the teleport field a few at a time. Now the Marines had reversed the situation, and it was they who held a good tactical position, gunning
down the Dahlist troops as they came bursting through doors and the gaping, wreckage-filled opening in one bulkhead.

“Captain?” Nal said over their private link. “I think this might be the time to send in Hugin and Munin. We won't have a better opportunity.”

He felt Corcoran's nod of agreement. “Give the order.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

It was the tactical instant the Marines had been waiting for.

1002.2229

Command Control Deck
Objective Samar
0523 hours, GMT

Hugin
and
Munin
were figures out of ancient Norse mythology, a pair of ravens, the companions of the god Odin. Their names meant
thought
and
memory
. Each day they flew throughout the entire world, returning to Odin all-father each evening to tell him all they'd seen.

In their modern incarnation, they were a highly sophisticated cybernetic organism. Hugin was the actual hardware, an elongated egg-shaped device of gleaming black plastic-steel alloy that looked almost exactly like an RS/A-91 Starwraith, but considerably smaller, less than half a meter long. The external surface blurred and refracted light, making it difficult to see, and it could extrude long and flexible tentacles at need.

Munin was the AI portion of the system, a narrowly focused artificial intelligence resident within the military intelligence network on board the
Nicholas
. Before an operation, an exact copy of Munin was downloaded into the Hugin hardware. Hugin was designed to find and attach itself to targeted enemy computer systems or network nodes, penetrate them,
and inject a portion of Munin into the data stream. Munin would record what it found and, one way or another, transmit the data back to headquarters for reintegration with the original Munin. Old memories were compared with new, and hard data extracted for analyses. The Hugin/Munin system had been developed specifically to target Xul nodes almost seven hundred years before, an evolution of earlier AI probes and penetrators.

Gunnery Sergeant Andrew Boyd, with the Company HQ element, used a specially modified KV-12 man-portable rail-gun to launch the Hugin probe from
Nicholas
' debarkation deck through the open gateway and into Objective Samar's C/C deck. The probe streaked through open air above the heads of the incoming Marines, materializing inside the enemy fortress' command center and crashing in for a more or less uncontrolled landing. Too small to mount its own grav drive, the Hugin probe relied on tiny mag-impeller thrusters for maneuvering in zero-gravity, and its tentacles for moving anywhere else. As soon as it skidded across the deck, banging into chunks of scattered wreckage and smashed consoles, a half-dozen tentacles grew from its shell and it began whiplashing with blinding speed across the deck and into a gaping hole in a nearby bulkhead, where the enemy gunwalker had made its rather dramatic entry minutes before.

Samar's command/control deck was
the
central network node for the Dahlist battle station. Every optical feed and circuit in the area not involving the lighting or life support was part of the command/control system, giving direct access to the entire Dahlist computer network.

Plasma bolts snapped and banged to either side, as enemy gunners noticed the intruder and tried to bring it down, but the unit was well shielded and very fast, operating at speeds impossible for any merely organic neural network. Slipping past the wreckage of the gunwalker, it used that shattered bulk for cover as it made its way toward the opened bulkhead. Its tentacles were coated with nanotechnic sheaths that
adhered to the deck or not, on command, giving it perfect traction and superb maneuverability both on the slick deck and on the tangled wreckage over which it navigated.

Enemy troops were crouched at the opening, firing into the command center, and one of them yelled and pointed at the Hugin's approach.

They scattered, possibly thinking it was some sort of Marine smart-weapon; in any case, it was moving too quickly and too erratically to bring it down with small-arms fire. As they bolted, the little machine swerved abruptly to the left and burrowed into the fiber-optic and wire-crammed space between the inner and outer bulkhead walls. Besides being fast, the Hugin's shell was supremely malleable. Like the mythical Proteus, it could change shape in a blur of softening and reforming, reconforming itself to fit into tight and narrow spaces. Tentacles found a set of severed fiber-optic cables…and within the primary data bus. Nanotechnic surfaces flowed like water, reforming themselves and passing through outer sheathing and into the data flow.

The Munin component sensed the surge of moving data packets and stretched out through connecting tentacles and leads…sampling…tasting…
drinking
…

Company H, 2/9
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
0524 hours, GMT

“Captain Corcoran! We're in!” Lieutenant Mendoza was the platoon HQ intelligence analyst, the company “minispook,” as she was known. A platoon was too small—and a captain too junior—to warrant its own G-2 intelligence department, or an S-2 staff officer, but a minispook on the command constellation allowed Corcoran to link directly with higher-level intel organizations all the way up to the ancient and
venerable Office of Naval Intelligence itself, now a bureau within the Associative Fleet Command.

At the moment, though, she was linked with the stay-at-home Munin on board the
Nicholas
, watching the data as it streamed back from the Hugin imbedded within Objective Samar's bulkheads.

Nal heard the excitement in the junior officer's mental voice, and couldn't help smiling. Like most officers of her breed and calling, she tended to be pragmatic, meticulous, and even plodding, and rarely given to bursts of excitement…but he knew she'd been sweating the details of working with modern intelligence systems, and success appeared to have bypassed her normal reserve.

“Simmer down, Mendoza,” Corcoran told her. “What do you have?”

“Sir! Munin has a solid link with the Dahlist network. We can go in whenever you want.”

“Very well. You may initiate THRP transmission.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Nal's inner grin faded. This part made him uneasy, almost queasy if he thought too hard about it. There was something about the process that just wasn't
right
. Not human, somehow.

But, of course, t-humans weren't quite human to begin with, were they?

Of all the changes and differences between the thirty-second century and the forty-first, the deliberate creation and evolution of
Homo telae
was, to Nal's mind, the strangest and the least defensible. Were minds uploaded into a computer network really alive? More to the point, were they the same individuals who'd uploaded themselves in the first place? Or mere copies?

And did
that
make them real…or electronic fictions?

Millennia ago, a similar debate had existed over cloning, and whether or not clones were legitimate life forms. The question was nonsense, of course; it didn't matter whether
an individual had been generated by the meeting of egg and sperm, or by the biological manipulation of a single cell. The resultant life form was in every way a living creature. Its only difference lay in the fact that it was identical to its parent—and usually considerably younger.

Speaking generally, and from a certain point of view, a human being wasn't so much blood and bone and tissue as it was patterns of information. Nal knew that his physical self was in a constant state of flux; the oldest cells in his body were living bone tissue, which died and were replaced on the order of every seven years or so. The youngest were his blood cells, which had an expected life span of perhaps three weeks. His body was not the same as it had been even a few years ago; it was constantly tearing itself apart and building itself back, one cell at a time, in a process that extended from conception to death, and there likely wasn't a single molecule in his body that was the same as those that had made up his physical form the day he'd enlisted in the Corps twenty-three subjective years ago, to pick one example.

And yet he
felt
like the same individual he'd always been—born and raised on Enduru/Ishtar, living nineteen standard years in the
e-duru
of Vaj beneath the sullen glow of the Face of God. And twenty-three more waking years in various Marine duty stations or on board ships in the course of his long career, from Marine Recruit to Master Sergeant. All told, Nal could remember over forty years of life, and the Nal il-En Shru-dech of today was the same as the Nal il-En Shru-dech of then, wasn't he? Older, more experienced, a bit more worn and tired, but the same
person
, even though every molecule of his body had by now been broken down and rebuilt many times over. It was the
pattern
of Nal il-En Shru-dech that counted, not the physicality of his component atoms and molecules.

The
Homo telae
had become what they were by uploading the patterns of their minds onto electronic networks. Though many liked to claim otherwise, the original bodies
and minds of those individual human originators of the species had gone on, then, to age normally and eventually to die. It was the
copies
that lived on in what was supposed to be a blissfully eternal and completely noncorporeal life.

And that was the problem. What Lieutenant Mendoza was doing right now was transmitting several hundred t-humans into the Dahl electronic net as electronic agents, but in electronic terms, what
transmission
actually meant was
copying
. The original t-human entities were still here on board the
Nicholas
. Their exact reproductions would be inside the Dahl network.

Well,
almost
exact. “THRP” stood for “T-Human Restricted Purpose.” The copies, popularly called “thurps,” were deliberately edited by special AI software so that the new individuals could not think about anything but the mission, were not particularly inclined to preserve their existence, and had no problem with being switched off when their mission was over. Limited Purview suggested a restricted, tightly narrowed and focused consciousness, one that didn't worry about such niceties as survival or death.

And that, to Nal, seemed nothing less than horrible, a means of turning people into disposable use-once software.

It didn't really help that he had trouble picturing
Homo telae
as human in the first place.
They
thought they were human, and the ones he'd interacted with over the past few weeks seemed to believe they were human, complete with emotions, moods, creativity, and personal motivations.

Nal was the product of a human culture, the
dumu-gir
, which for something like ten millennia had been a
slave
culture. Their liberation in the mid-twenty-second century, Old Style had been extremely difficult for them, if only because by that time it was almost impossible for them to think of themselves as
free
.

Those who'd been able to embrace the concept, however, had taken freedom very seriously indeed, and the idea had grown stronger with each passing generation. The idea of
copying yourself, but editing the copy so that everything that made you free was missing, seemed positively blasphemous to the Free Men of Enduru.

Nal and the thousand or so other
dumu-gir
in the 3MarDiv didn't like the idea at all, but they were Marines, and they did what they were told. In this case, doing what they were told meant to shut up and follow orders…and don't worry about the tellies because they're doing what they want to do, the way they want to do it. When Nal had first complained about the idea weeks ago, Corcoran had told him personally to shut the hell up. “The tallies aren't like us, Master Sergeant,” Corcoran had said. “They see life—and death, for that matter—completely differently, okay? If the thurps don't mind this restricted purpose thing, than neither should you.”

“But they
can't
mind it,” Nal had said, almost crying with exasperation. “Damn it, sir, they're designed not to!”

“Exactly. So don't worry about it. That's an order, Master Sergeant.”

Reluctantly, very reluctantly, Nal had managed an “Aye, aye, Sir.”

But that hadn't kept him from
thinking
about it.

And after a lot of thought, he'd finally decided he knew why he had such a strong gut reaction to t-Human downloads. If they—the unnamed but powerful and all-pervasive
they
of the high command and the Associative government—could allow the t-Humans to edit copies of themselves, in effect creating slaves designed not to care about their condition, how long would it be before the same thing was happening to normals?

Normals
. That was the term, almost contemptuous, applied by many of the new forms of Humankind in this brave new world of the forty-first century, the supies, the tellies, and others. The physical bodies of humans, even of old-fashioned
Homo sapiens
, the normals, had become nearly infinitely variable over the course of the past two millennia. Gene tailoring was used as a matter of course by normals to select for intelligence, endurance, good looks, and resis
tance to disease in their children. Nanotechnology could resculpt the body as easily as putting on a new set of clothing or coronae; it was called nanocosmetology. Nanobiology could rewrite an individual's genome, letting him grow new features or develop gene-controlled traits that his or her parents had overlooked.

And the mind could be edited just as easily. Nano-grown cerebral implants had changed the ways humans thought and reasoned since at least the twenty-second century. What was downloading a new skill set, an alien language, for instance, but a reworking of the mind?

What was to stop
them
from offering a download to all normals that would make them happier, healthier, and better able to cope with modern life?

A new thought tugged at him unpleasantly. What if they already had done just that? Nal still didn't understand how people could accept those Socon Guardian things reading peoples' minds like that.