Star Corps (14 page)

She was still having some trouble getting around on Earth, three weeks after her return from Mars, but she waved off the proffered arm and made the final walk to her seat on her own. She wore an earth-return EW suit, a utilitarian-looking green jumpsuit with an exoskeleton walker frame invisibly woven into the fabric. It helped her stand without falling, and supported the weight that, to her, still felt three times greater than normal. At least now she could stand. For
the first few days after her return, she'd been all but confined to a wheelchair. Now she could get around pretty well without any artificial aid at all, resorting to the EW suit only when she knew she was going to be standing or walking for long periods.

Rising with solemn formality, Allyn Buckner introduced himself and the others already seated.

“Dr. Hanson,” he said in a raspy voice. “So good of you to come. May I present Gavin Norris…Clarence Rafferty…Lee Soong Yi…Mary Pritchard…and I believe you already know Conrad Robinson and Marine Colonel Thomas Jackson Ramsey.”

She nodded to each in turn. Conrad Robinson was her department head at the American Xenoarcheological Institute, though she barely knew him. And Ramsey…

“Colonel Ramsey,” she said. “Yes. We shared the packet hop back to Earth.” She noted with a small stab of irritation that Ramsey was wearing a dress Marine uniform, with no sign of the braces at neck or wrists indicating that he was wearing a walker.

“Hello again, Dr. Hanson,” Ramsey said with a grin. “Gotten your Earth legs yet?”

“More or less,” she replied brusquely, in no mood for casual talk. She looked at Buckner as she sank into her seat, grateful to be off her feet. “So. I understand you want me to go out-system. Why? Or perhaps I should say, ‘Why me?'”

“Because you are one of our best xenoarcheologists, and an expert on the An or Ahannu or whatever they call themselves.”

“An,”
she replied in a clipped, offhand manner, “is what primitive humans in the Mesopotamian region called the species when they first arrived on Earth, some ten to twelve thousand years ago. Their name for themselves is
Ahannu
, which means, approximately, ‘the Holy People.'”

“Er, yes. Exactly,” Buckner said.

“You see, ladies and gentlemen,” Robinson said quickly, “why I said Dr. Hanson would be perfect for this mission.”

“But you haven't asked me if I want to go,” she said. “I am flattered, Mr. Buckner, but I am not prepared to sacrifice twenty years or more of my career…not when there is so much yet to do
here
and on Mars.”

“Sacrifice? Who said anything about sacrifice? Upon your return, you will only be some five years older, not twenty…and thanks to cryohibertechnics, you'll experience none of the actual voyage. And you will be able to study the Ahannu in person, on their homeworld.”

“Not their homeworld,” she said, correcting him. Damn the netnews media. With sloppy reporting and sheer carelessness, they'd perpetuated the popular misconception that Ishtar was the world where the An had originally evolved. “The world we call Ishtar was an An colony world, like Earth. The Hunters of the Dawn appear to have overlooked Ishtar when they—”

“Yes, yes, as you say. In any case, the chance to meet the Ahannu face-to-face would have to be the chance of a lifetime for a dedicated research scientist such as yourself.”

“A dedicated research scientist such as myself,” she said, “depends on the timely publishing of papers to stay current and to stay known in a highly competitive field. I will not waste twenty years
sleeping
while my colleagues are continuing to publish in my absence!”

“Not even for, say…fifty million newdollars, plus the chance at royalties from discoveries this corporation may make on Ishtar?”

She opened her mouth, then clamped it shut again. Had she heard right? “Fifty…million?”

“I would think, Doctor, that that much money might go a long way toward paying you back for any professional…inconvenience. And upon your return, you will, of course, be
the
expert on the Ahannu. I expect we could promise you a position with PanTerra Dynamics, in fact.”

“What happened to Nichole Moore?”

“Eh?”

“Nichole Moore is the xenoculturalist assigned to the Ter
ran Legation on Ishtar,” she said, “working under a government grant for the Smithsonian Institute. She's been in the New Sumer compound for five years now.
She
would be the leading expert on the Ahannu at the moment, unless…”

“We have…lost touch with Dr. Moore,” Buckner told her. “We are assembling an expedition to go to Ishtar, rescue any survivors, and reestablish a Terran presence in the Llalande system. Since it will be ten years before the relief mission can arrive, we must assume that Dr. Moore and the rest of
Emissary
's people are all dead or will be dead by the time you arrive.”

She nodded slowly. “I see.” She'd suspected as much, of course, both from what she'd picked up at the Cydonian complex and from her conversations with the Marine women on board the
Osiris.
Geremelet's Destiny Faction had won considerable power among the Ahannu, and there'd been growing danger of a coup or at least of a civil war on Ishtar, one that would threaten the tiny human contingent stationed at New Sumer. “They killed Dr. Moore, and now you're sending me?”

“You'll have considerably more firepower behind you than Dr. Moore did,” Buckner said. “A full Marine Expeditionary Unit, in fact. One of its primary tasks will be to protect you.”

“No,” she said. “Find another victim.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She looked at her boss. “Mr. Robinson, the institute is largely funded by the federal government, but we are not soldiers to be ordered about! They can't just pack me off to another goddamn star for twenty years!”

“Actually, Dr. Hanson,” Robinson said, “I put your name in the running. You will be ideal for this mission. And you must admit that the financial remuneration package is, well, quite generous.”

“I don't care about that! You can't transfer me eight light-years! What about my work here?”

“Carter and Jorgenson will be more than able to fill in for you at Cydonia, Dr. Hanson.”

“Carter and Jorgenson! Carter is a second-rate hack who can't see beyond his fringie religious beliefs! And Jorgenson is so determined to try and prove that some mythical ancient human culture was the Hunters of the Dawn that—” She stopped, eyes widening. So that was it. Jorgenson was her chief rival within the institute. She'd crossed academic swords with the man more than once, and was convinced that he owed his current power and prestige more to the people he knew in government than to any real ability in his field. He'd also failed more than once to get her into his bed, and had taken to twisting her words whenever he had the opportunity, as if in petty revenge. Hell, he'd delivered one paper that had made
her
look like the fringie nutcase, by misrepresenting her contention that the An had introduced the concept of religion to the early native population of Earth.

He'd been silent ever since she threatened to expose him as a fraud. Was this his way of getting even?

“If I were you, Doctor,” Robinson went on, “I would give some thought to my future with the institute and where else you might be able to apply your considerable talent and experience.”

She blinked. “Is that a threat?”

“There are no threats here, Dr. Hanson,” Buckner said gently. “Think of it as…an incentive.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Fifty million newdollars?” Buckner chuckled. “Compounding interest at ten percent over ten years? Or…let's make it seventy-five million.
And
a contract with PanTerra Dynamics naming you research director of your own exo-studies department upon your return to Earth. You will be extraordinarily rich…and able to apply your talents toward any area of research you might desire. Who knows? Working with the Ahannu directly…you might open up whole new, undreamed of areas of study….”

Traci felt light-headed, almost dizzy. This was everything she could ever have dreamed of. Freedom of research, and the money to let her pursue that research wherever it took her. No longer dependent on the institute, or anyone else. It seemed almost too good to be true….

Which in her book meant that it
was
too good to be true.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait just a damned minute. How can you afford to throw money around like that? Fifty million, seventy-five million. What's your annual salary, Buckner? About ten, maybe twenty million, at a guess? Hell, I don't care if seventy-five million is nothing but loose credit chips to you, even a company as big as PanTerra has to show a profit. And you won't show a profit spraying newdollars around like water.”

“Believe me, Dr. Hanson, when I say that there is a great deal of profit to be made in a new market, an entire new
world
market, for this company. I can offer you, oh, let's say an even one hundred million. That's five million per objective year, and I assure you that the profit potential for an entire world is
many
times greater than that.”

“That is an interesting point, Mr. Buckner,” Ramsey, the Marine colonel, said. His hands were clasped together on the desk before him, and his eyes were like gray ice. “A fascinating point. What is it about a planet that makes it so worth PanTerra's attention?”

“What do you mean? An entire
planet.
Do you have any idea what the gross domestic product of the Earth is right now, Colonel?”

The Marine showed a cold smile. “Large. But that's not the point. I've done some research, sir, into the economics of interstellar trade. I think both Dr. Hanson and I would be most interested in just what it is you expect to find in the Llalande system that could be worth such a whopping big investment on your part.”

“Well, the trade alone with the Ahannu—”

“Isn't enough, sir. The Llalande system has no raw mate
rials that our own system doesn't have in vast abundance. We've barely begun to tap the raw material resources of our own asteroid and Kuiper belts, and the nickel, iron, and heavy metals we find right here in our own backyard are just as good as anything we could haul back across eight light-years, and a hell of a lot cheaper. Native products? The Ahannu are primitives, millennia behind us in technology. There would certainly be a market for Ahannu artwork and crafts…but nothing worth the cost of shipping them eight light-years.”

“There is one commodity, Colonel, that always pays in the long run,” Buckner said. “
Knowledge.
Information. You're right, of course. We may never have merchant ships plying the galactic trade routes. But the knowledge we could pick up from an entire new, alien culture is staggering, and literally incalculable.

“Consider. Knowledge of the fact that there has already been contact between the Ahannu and humans, in our own prehistory, has utterly transformed the way we think about ourselves, how we think about our place among the stars. The new philosophical insights, the new religions—”

“Have already been more trouble than they're worth,” Traci put in. “I'll grant you that knowledge is the one transportable resource that might make interstellar trading worthwhile. But you can send information by FTL comm or even laser or old-fashioned radio. Why do you need to send people out there?”

“To get the information, of course.” Buckner sighed, crossing his arms. “AIs are still limited in what they can do, especially in a situation involving an alien species. If you don't want the job, there's nothing more we can do about it. I have other contacts, other agencies. Perhaps we could approach Dr. Chaumont, at the Institute Française Xenobiologique….”

“Damn it, Dr. Hanson,” Robinson said, half rising from his chair. “Consider what you're doing!”

Traci could see that her department head had a pretty hefty stake in this affair as well. If PanTerra went to the EU, the institute might lose grant money…or worse, prestige.

She still didn't like it. Colonel Ramsey had a point: PanTerra was being just a little too free with their money, and she had the feeling there was more to the corporate giant's interest in Ishtar than they were willing to admit.

On the other hand…a hundred million newdollars, and the chance to write her own ticket when she returned? There was such a thing as too good to be true…and such a thing as too good to pass up. This was literally the chance of a lifetime.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Don't get your underwear in a twist. I can hardly pass this one up, can I?”

“Excellent,” Buckner said. “I knew we could count on you, Dr. Hanson. You
won't
be sorry.”

Traci smiled as she shook his hand, but the smile was forced. She found herself trusting Buckner about as far as she could throw him in a ten-g field.

Just how long would it be before she
was
sorry?

25
JUNE
2138

Recruit Sick Bay
U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center
Parris Island, South Carolina
0800 hours ET

“Sir, Recruit Garroway, reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Have a seat, recruit,” the Navy corpsman, a hospitalman first class, said, gesturing at the white-draped table. “We'll be right with you.” The man's data badge gave his name as
HM
1
D. LOGAN
.

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Drop the ‘sir' crap,” Logan said. “I work for a living.”

Garroway sat on the table, watching apprehensively as the corpsman passed a small, handheld device in front of his head and torso. A monitor on the console nearby displayed Garroway's vital signs: temperature, pulse, respiration, blood pressure, EEG output, and cyberneural feed frequencies.

“Corrective optic nano?”

“Yes…”

“We'll write you a scrip for glasses.”

Garroway had no idea what that word meant, though the context suggested something to correct his nearsighted vision. He suppressed an urge to do a search on the net; Parris Island was shielded from regular library services, and he
didn't have the codes to navigate the base military data stores.

“Your heart rate's a bit high,” Logan said. “And your BP is up.”

“Of course they are,” Garroway replied stiffly. “I'm…scared.”

It was an honest response, at least. He'd thought about what he was doing thoroughly, as his DI had suggested, and in the end decided he had no choice but to go through with this. But of course he had second thoughts…and third…and fourth. He'd spent the last thirty minutes standing in formation outside the medcenter, waiting as one member of his company after another vanished into the building.

Thirty minutes to reflect on whether he really wanted to go through with this.

But the thought of pulling out now, of transferring to another service—or, infinitely worse, of going back home to Guaymas—was far more disagreeable. Besides, if he wanted to be a Marine,
this
was his path.

“Scared? Of the procedure?” The corpsman grinned. “I thought you wanted to be a big, rough, tough Marine?”

“Hey—”

Logan shrugged. “Don't sweat it. Most guys make it through okay. Just remember that…if you feel strange, y'-know? It's all up here.” He tapped the side of his head. “You can
think
your way through and come out fine. How many channels you got?”

“Four hundred eighty.”

“Library feed?”

“Local Hermosillo Node, and a direct feed from GlobalNet Data.”

“Ow. That'll hurt, losing all that. Pretty hot stuff. Full graphic capability? Visual overlay?”

“Yes…”

“And comm, of course. What kind of math coprocessor?”

“Sony-TI 12000. Series Two, with nonlinear math pro
cessing. Extensions for hypertrig, Calculus Four, and polylogmatics.”

“Well, I'm afraid you're going to be counting on your fingers and toes for a while.” Garroway watched as the corpsman picked out the injector and loaded it with a vial of what looked like clear water. Placing the device on the table, the man then looked toward the wall and said, “Right. He's ready.”

Part of the wall unfolded then into a tangle of gleaming tubes, arms, and sensors. Cables with EEG contacts touched Garroway lightly at various points on his scalp. Thoughts flickered through his consciousness, downloading through his cerebralink…a burst of violet light, a chord of organ music, and words, a gentle, female voice saying, “Please relax.”

Garroway had been in AI-doctor treatment rooms before—each time he'd been given an injection of medical nano, in fact—but the experience always verged on the unsettling. A pair of robotic arms gently clasped his head and shoulders, immobilizing them in thick-padded fingers. A third hand, lighter and more delicate, reached down with glittering fingers and plucked the loaded injector off the table, then approached his neck with the injector clasped tightly in its metallic grip. Garroway felt a brief stab of fear…but then a gentle current flowing through the link dispersed the emotion, replacing it with a sense of quiet, placid euphoria. He barely felt the touch of the jet spray against his throat, just below the angle of his jaw at the left carotid artery.

He imagined he could feel the antinano fizzing up inside his brain, seeking out the nanochelates clustered within the deeper rifts of his cranial sulci and dissolving them. It was imagination, of course, since he had no sensory nerves inside his brain, but the feeling was real and distinctly odd nonetheless. In another moment he thought he could feel the chelated contact points in the palms of his hands softening
as well, as the silver-gold-carbon alloy of the palmlinks was absorbed back into his bloodstream.

One feeling that was decidedly not in his imagination, though, was the sense of diminishment…a kind of shrinking of mind and awareness. For one confused and near-panicky moment, it felt as though he was somehow being muffled in layers of unseen insulation. His hearing felt…
dead,
as well as his sense of touch, and something like a translucent gray mist dropped across his vision. Dozens of separate sensations shriveled, as though drawing back from his consciousness…smells, sounds, sensations of touch and temperature, and even vision itself becoming less intense, less there.

“Goddess…” he said, his voice sounding distant in his ears. He felt a little dizzy, a bit light-headed, and he might have fallen over if the robotic doctor hadn't been gently but firmly holding him upright on the table.

“Kind of rocks you, doesn't it?” the corpsman said. “How ya doing?”

“I'm…not sure….”

“Can you stand?”

“I think so.” He slid off the table, then braced himself as the dizziness returned, threatening to drop him to his knees. He swayed, then steadied, trying to clear his head.
Damn it, where had the room gone?

No, the room was still here, but he felt so oddly detached. He remembered what Logan had said about it all being inside his head and tried to focus on what he
could
see and sense around him, not on what was no longer there.

Damn, he had never realized that the cybernanochelates in his brain had added so much to his perception of his surroundings. With his cerebralink operating, he'd been aware of everything within his range of vision. Now he found his visual focus only included a relatively limited area directly in front of his eyes, that he had to consciously shift his awareness to notice objects at his visual periphery. A moment before, he'd been aware of dust motes hanging in the
air, of a scuff mark on the otherwise brilliant finish of the sick bay deck, of a three-K-cycle low frequency hum from the lighting panels overhead, of a small scrap of paper in the sick bay's far corner…all without consciously focusing on them. They were simply
there
. Now, to his increasing dismay, he had to really look to see something and note what it was. The corpsman's data badge no longer automatically transmitted rank and ID; he had to actually
read
the printed letters that spelled out
HM
1
D. LOGAN
.

And…what had happened to his vision? Everything was slightly fuzzy now, though he found he could tighten things up a bit by squinting. Ah. His corrective optic nano, that was it. He no longer had microsilicate structures reshaping his eyeballs to give him perfect focus.

Was this really what it was like without cyber enhancement?

“Man, where'd the world go?” he asked.

“It's still there,” Logan told him. “You just don't have the sensory enhancement or the electronic processing tied into your cerebral cortex anymore. Don't worry about it. You'll be amazed what you can do with the equipment nature gave you.”

Garroway blinked, trying to assimilate this. He'd been expecting something more or less like this, of course, but the reality carried a lot more impact than the expectation. Damn, he felt so slow, so muzzy-headed.

He suddenly realized that he didn't know which way was north…and he no longer carried a small, internal map of where he was and where he'd been for the past several minutes.

For that matter, he no longer had an internal clock. He'd walked into the sick bay at 0800 hours…but how long had he been there? Several minutes, at least…but how long exactly?

He didn't know, had no way of knowing.

“Go out that way,” Logan told him, jerking a thumb at a different door than the one he'd entered through. “Follow
the blue line and join the rest of your company on the grinder.”

The door had a touch pad, but it didn't open when he laid his palm across the slick, black surface. He had to
push
and engage the manual control so that the door slid open to let him out.

The blue line was painted on the wall, and if it had a cyber component to it, he couldn't feel it, not anymore. It led him down a corridor, through several lefts and rights, depositing him at last on the steps below the sick bay's back door. The rest of Company 1099, those who'd already gone through the process ahead of him, were waiting in ranks. Sergeant Dolby, one of 1099's three assistant DIs, motioned him into line without comment.

The other recruits appeared as dazed as he felt. Most, he knew—the ones who'd not been able to afford more than a basic-level cerebralink system or who'd had to rely on government-issue implants—weren't feeling nearly as dazed as he was, but all of them looked stunned, and several looked like they were about to be sick or pass out. Dolby walked up one rank and down the next, pausing occasionally to stop and talk quietly to a recruit who looked particularly bad off. The sergeant passed him without stopping, so perhaps, Garroway reasoned, he wasn't as bad off as he felt.

He tried to remember what it had been like before he'd gone to the medical center at Hermosillo on his fourteenth birthday and received the injections for his Sony-TI 12000. Before that he'd had a government-issued school model, of course, implanted when he was…what? It must have been around age four or so, but school models weren't sensory-enhanced, as a rule, and didn't store detailed memories unless a teaching code was downloaded in order to store a specific lesson. He remembered being taught how to read, how to research any question he could imagine on the WorldNet, even how to feel good about himself, but his day-to-day memories from that time were pretty hazy.

It took him a moment or two to realize that an hour ago, those memories
would
have been crystal clear. His cerebralink helped access memories, even those that had not been cataloged in downloading. He felt…diminished…shrunken, somehow…barely present.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the pavement, looking up into the less than appealing features of Sergeant Dolby. He felt dizzy and sick, light-headed and cold. Dolby slapped him lightly on the face a couple of times. “You okay, recruit?”

“S-Sir.” He tried to formulate the correct response—
This recruit is okay
—but failed. “Yes, sir.”

“Stay put. A doc'll be along in a second.”

Five other recruits of Company 1099 had passed out as well. They were helped back into the sick bay by unsympathetic corpsmen, who laid them out on cots, took their vitals, and gave them spray injections in their arms. There was no autodoc or treatment room; without cerebralinks, they couldn't be hooked into a diagnostic system. That thought alone was enough to leave Garroway wondering what could
possibly
have possessed him to voluntarily give up his cyberimplants.

After receiving the injection and being allowed to rest for twenty minutes, he felt well enough to return to the rest of the group. Another hour dragged by as the rest of Company 1099—those who'd agreed to lose their cybernano, at any rate—passed through the sick bay and the ministrations of the AI examination room. Out of the original complement of ninety-five men in Company 1099, fifteen had refused to allow their nanochelates to be removed, and three more had been rejected by the AI treatment room for one reason or another. Most of them were on their way back to civilian life by that afternoon, processed out on a DD-4010—“Subject unsuitable for Marine Corps service,” a convenience-of-the-government discharge. Two volunteered instead for a transfer to the Navy, and three others elected to join the Aerospace Force.

“Why,” Gunnery Sergeant Makowiecz bellowed at the ranks later that morning, “did we take away your implants? Anyone!” Several hands went up, and Makowiecz chose one. “You!”

“S-Sir, this recruit believes that you will issue Marine implants,” Murphy, a kid from Cincinnati, said. “Civilian implants may not be compatible with military-issue gear or with each other. Sir.”

“That,” Makowiecz replied, “is part of the answer. But not
all
of it. Anyone else?”

Garroway raised his hand, and Makowiecz snapped, “You!”

“Sir,” Garroway said, “it is Marine Corps policy to have all recruits begin at the same level, with no one better or worse than anyone else, sir!”

“Again, a piece of the answer, but not all of it. And not the most important part. Anyone else?” No one moved in the ranks. “All right, I'll tell you.” Makowiecz pointed at the sky. “Right now, there are some 2,491 communications satellites in Earth orbit, from little field relays the size of your thumb in LEO to the big library space stations at L-4 and L-5. They all talk to one another and to the Earth stations in all of the major cities down here. As a result, the air around us is filled with information, data streams moving from node to node, access fields, packets uploading and downloading so thick if you could see 'em with your eyes you'd think you were in a snowstorm.

“With the right hardware chelated into your brains, all you have to do, anywhere on the surface of the Earth, is think a question with the appropriate code tag, and the answer is there. You want to talk to another person, anywhere between here and the moon, all you do is think about them and
bang
, there they are inside your head. Right?