Semper Human (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Continents.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eh?”

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

“What's this?”

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

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

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

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

“Oh, yeah. A lot. You'll be amazed.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Pardon, sir?”

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

“I'm
very
sure there is, General.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new century. A new millennium.

He was looking forward to that download.

Upper Stratosphere, Dac IV
Star System 1727459
1820 hours, GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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