12

0407 .1111 Atlantis Grotto
Sunken Miami, Earth
0125 hrs, local

“Hey!” Garroway said, startled as the realization hit him. “Do you guys know what the date is?”

“Oh-four-oh- seven,” Armandez told him. “Why? You having a problem with your internal timekeeper?”
“The Fourth of July,” Warhurst said. He lifted his glass. “Happy birthday, United States of America!”
“United States?” Kath said, wrinkling her nose. “What’s that . . . like the Commonwealth?”
“Not quite,” Lieutenant Ramsey told her. “The original United States was the forerunner of the Commonwealth, yeah. After it grew to sixty, seventy-some states, though, it was getting too big and unwieldy to be easily governed. The Commonwealth was created as a kind of over-government for the old U.S. and for the new states and territories that were coming in, especially out-system. Eventually, the sovereignty of the U.S. kind of faded as the power of the Commonwealth grew.”
“The Marines still remember, though,” Garroway said. The alcohol was wrapping itself around his brain, he realized, bringing feelings normally deep-buried to the surface. If this continued, he thought, he’d have to kick in the sobering circuitry pretty soon. “The Fourth of July . . . and the Tenth of November.”
“What’s the Tenth of November?” Traci wanted to know.

“You’re hanging out with this character,” Garroway said, nodding toward Warhurst, “and you don’t know?”
“It’s the anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Marine Corps,” Warhurst told her. “The Corps’ birthday.”
“Yup,” Ramsey said. “This coming November the Corps’ll be eleven hundred twelve years young. So there, Mr. Forrestal!”
Garroway and Warhurst both chuckled. Nine hundred forty-one years before, during a fiercely contested battle on a volcanic scrap of an island in the Pacific Ocean called Iwo Jima, five Marines and a Navy hospital corpsman raising the U.S. flag atop a mountain named Suribachi had been immortalized in the act by a chance- snapped photograph. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, then on the beach at the base of the mountain, had turned to Marine General Holland Smith and told him that the raising of that flag meant that there would be a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.

The incident, experienced in sim by all Marine recruits, was a point of Corps pride. Five hundred years? The Corps had endured over twice that, now.

One hundred eleven years ago, there’d been a mammoth party throughout the Corps celebrating the Marines’ one thousandth birthday—a thousand years since the Marine Corps had begun signing up recruits at the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, in the year 1775. There was talk of an even more enthusiastic Corps-wide celebration in fifty-nine more years, one thousand years after the raising of the flag on Suribachi.

Garroway wondered if he would still be here to join in the festivities. It was distinctly possible; he would only be eighty- seven then, and with nanoanagathics most people nowadays lived to be two hundred or more.

Most civilians, he thought, correcting himself. Unless he followed Gunny Warhurst’s example and retired, he stood a good chance of taking the Long Orbit—burial in space, assuming they’d recovered his body.

Of course, with the Xul threat, the same could be said of any one of the civilians here in the Atlantis Grotto. Earth and its delicate deep- space infrastructure and far-flung colonies remained horrifically vulnerable to a Xul strike.

He shook himself, thrusting the sudden and unexpected flow of gloom aside. He wondered if he should use his personal med implants to adjust his brain chemistry, then decided against it. Good friends and a pleasant eve ning out on the town should provide all the attitude adjustment he needed. He was actually feeling pretty good, though his new legs were sore. A full Earth gravity dragged at him, wore at his leg muscles, as the artificial gravity on board ship— usually set to around a half-G compromise between Earth and Mars—never did.

The six of them had come to the Grotto for a final eve ning together. Up- Ring transport had been so thoroughly snarled for the past thirty- six hours that there was no way they were going to make it to SupraQuito before noon tomorrow. They’d dressed up for the eve ning. Garroway, Armandez, and Ramsey were in Marine full-dress. Warhurst wore a pattern of fluorescent, animated tattoos, while Kath and Traci wore complementary, sensually shifting patches of liquid light.

The Atlantis Grotto, in keeping with the dinner, dance, and sex club’s theme, was murkily lit by shifting patterns of undersea color. The main dining area was a domed transparency, some ten meters beneath the surface, on the coral- encrusted sea floor southeast of the central Miami pylons. Faux-Greek architecture had been erected around the dome— huge marble columns and pillars, many of them collapsed, and the eerie shadows of sunken temples, all lit from below by colored lights. By daylight, Garroway understood, the place looked quite different; at night, the light show was spectacular, but the subdued illumination meant that the light worn by the civilians was all the more brilliant. He could have read printed text by the silvery glow streaming off of Traci’s breasts.

High overhead, within the cavernous space beneath the dome, a focused and self-contained agrav field had been set up within a shifting, boiling sphere of green light. Couples, trios, and larger groups danced to the sensuous background music inside the sphere, or swam, or engaged in enthusiastically public sex. The figures twisted and turned and moved against the background of the aquatic glow.

Technically, Garroway, Ramsey, and Armandez were stranded. They’d tried to catch the up- Ring shuttle as scheduled on the 30^th, and found the civilian transport had over- booked and they’d been bumped. Miami and Orlando, both, were crowded with Navy and Marine personnel trying to get back to the Hermes at Ring SupraQuito.

Yesterday, the Hermes had left the dock at SupraQuito and moved to L-3, a gravitationally stable zone at Lunar orbit, directly opposite the Moon from Earth. From there, she was beginning the time-consuming process of shuttling 1MIEF warships and transports back out to Cluster Space, three and four at a time tucked into her cavernous cargo bay.

“So . . . you think we’re going to get into trouble for being AWOL?” Armandez asked.

“We may get an ass-chewing,” Garroway said. “Captain Black has been known to chow down on green Marine tail from time to time when they pushed recall too close to the wire.”
“Hell,” Ramsey said. “There must be three thousand Marines in the same fix right now, all trying to get back up- Ring at once. We all checked in on the Net. It’ll be all right.”
“Maybe if you’re lucky,” Warhurst growled, “they’ll leave without you!”
“I wouldn’t call that lucky,” Garroway said. “We could be looking at a captain’s mast—maybe even a general court.”
“Again, us and three thousand other Marines,” Ramsey said. “They won’t leave without us.”
“Why do you say we’d be lucky, Gunny?” Armandez asked Warhurst.

He shrugged. “Jesus. Dropping in on Xul Central? That’s not my idea of fun. It’s more like suicide, especially if you’re on board the first ship into battlespace. Have you seen an op- plan yet?”
“No,” Garroway replied.

“You think they’d tell us?” Ramsey said, laughing. “The grunts are always the last to know!”
“A couple of days ago I linked with a guy I know in Personnel,” Garroway said. “He said the plan was still holding on getting data back from our AIs. They’re supposed to send a bunch of probes through to the Core from Cluster Space. When they come back, if they come back, we’ll better know what to expect.”
“Makes sense,” Warhurst said. “Assuming this peace initiative of the Senate’s doesn’t get in the way.”
“It already has,” Ramsey said. He sounded bitter. “That ship should have been ours.”
“I heard the Pax is almost complete,” Armandez said. “She’s a sister to the Hermes. Just as big, with FTL capability and she can translate.”
Translation was the big advantage possessed by Hermes- class transports. Originally, a decade before, Hermes had been an immense military facility called Skybase, designed to lurk unobserved in the little-understood hyperdimensional realm variously called paraspace or the Quantum Sea. She had station-keeping drives and agravitics just powerful enough to nudge her slowly through normal space.

With a solid enough understanding of the metrics of local space and of those of a desired destination, however, Hermes could phase-shift—translate, in mathematical terms—from one point in normal space through paraspace to another point, even if those points were separated by tens of thousands of light years. The maneuver was called a Quantum Space Translation, or QST, and it had proven to be the most efficient means to bridge intragalactic distances, bypassing the usually guarded choke points of the stargates.

Enormous amounts of Zero- Point energy torn from the Quantum Sea were required for each translation, and only truly huge mobile facilities like the Hermes-Skybase could manage the feat. Hermes massed two million tons, a face- to- face double saucer structure measuring over five hundred meters from rim to rim, with an enormous, open docking bay giving the appearance of a deep bite taken from the edge. Similar to some of the mining bases and colonies used in Sol’s planetoid belt and out in the dark, cold reaches of the Oort Cloud, the UCS Hermes possessed ZPE power taps massive enough to manage QST travel.

A major upgrade eight years ago had installed an Alcubierre Drive module as well, so she was no longer a tug-towed hulk with translation capabilities. All things considered, Hermes gave the Commonwealth one of its few advantages in the war against the Xul.

The trouble was, 1MIEF needed more such monster ships. Hermes could tuck three or four warships into her docking bay—more if they were as small as escorts or patrol vessels—and make the translation to a battle zone. She would drop her ships off as though she were a titanic fleet carrier, then translate back to her origin point to take on another load of warships.

But there were currently 135 vessels of all types in 1MIEF, so each full fleet translation required twenty or more separate trips to transport the entire fleet, an operation that could take several days. The requirement sharply limited the fleet’s tactical options. Those first three or four drop-offs would be all alone in hostile battlespace once Hermes phaseshifted out for the second load, so long-range fleet ops had to be staged through secure rendezvous points.

And no Marine enjoyed the thought of being in that first combat drop.

Ever since the first use of QST transport ten years before, the Corps had been urging the Senate to approve the construction of at least ten more fleet transports, of Hermes’ mass or better. Six years ago, the Senate—after lengthy battles in the Appropriations Committee—had approved two new hulls, to be named Brynhldr and Anubis.

The ship names were those of mythological psychopomps or “guides of souls”—deities or angelic beings, like the Greek Hermes, charged with conducting the souls of the dead to the afterlife. The Brynhldr had been scheduled to enter service this month, but, just weeks ago, the Senate had announced that she would be launched under direct senatorial command, and that her name would be changed to Pax Galactica.

Like Ramsey, most Marines felt bitter about what seemed to be a betrayal by the government. As Ramsey had said, that ship should have gone straight from the AresRing shipyards to service with 1MIEF, to cut translation times for the fleet in half.

“Tell me something, Gunny,” Garroway said to Warhurst.

“Shoot.”
“Why’d you get out? I mean, I hear you griping about the Pax shit and the government and all of that, but that’s no different from just about every other Marine I know. Back when I was in boot camp, you seemed to me to be about the most gung- ho Marine ever spawned, the official image of a fighting Marine. I just can’t picture you retired.”
“Jesus, Gare!” Armandez laughed. “He’s sitting there naked between Traci and Kath and you ask him that? The guy might be a Marine, but he’s not crazy!”
“Hell, I thought being crazy was part of the Marine job description,” Ramsey put in.

“You don’t have to be crazy to join up,” Armandez said, taking a sip of her drink, “but it sure helps.”
But Warhurst was looking thoughtful. “I guess you could say it was a crisis of faith,” Warhurst said after a moment. “Living the Corps life, I was . . . I don’t know. Falling out of touch with the people back home. We have our own little microsociety in the Corps, you know.”
Garroway noticed Warhurst’s casual use of the present tense, but said nothing. An ancient adage had it that there were plenty of former active-duty Marines, but no ex- Marines.

“I found I don’t have much use for the Ringers,” he continued. “The fucking down- Ring tourists. Native Earthers, though, they’re something different.”
Garroway looked up at the illuminated air overhead. Fifteen or twenty dancers had apparently abandoned the music and were engaging in a mass orgy. “Different how?” he asked. “These people seem as much in love with themselves as any Ringer.”
“Who . . . them?” Warhurst said, indicating the tangle of limbs and smooth bodies writhing overhead. “Those are Ringers. Most native locals can’t afford a tourist Mecca like the Grotto.”
“Figures,” Ramsey said. “Business and capital has been flowing off-planet ever since Armageddonfall.”
“Right. Earth’s whole population now is less than . . . I don’t know. Two, three billion? Five hundred years ago, before Armageddonfall, it was something like sixteen billion.”
“I heard the people left on Earth are called The Caretakers,” Armandez said.

Warhurst snorted. “As if they could do a damned thing to protect Earth if the Xul showed up tomorrow. The Belt and the Rings are where most of the system’s population lives, now, and that’s where the money and the major corporate facilities and the big population centers all are.”
“Stands to reason,” Ramsey said. “Commerce follows opportunity. The Inner Belt is where things are happening now.”
“Yeah, there, and more and more out in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. If the Xul ever do show up, they’ll have their job cut out trying to track down millions of individual habs and orbital colony complexes.”
“Do you think they couldn’t?” Garroway asked.

“Of course they could,” Warhurst said with a shrug. “Next time won’t be 2314. They’ll be here in force.”
“Which beings us back to the question. Why are you here?”
“Maybe I’m trying to remember Earth the way it was. Before all the damned tourists started coming down- Ring. Or maybe I just figure the natives need someone to speak up for ’em. They’re not as wedded to high tech down here as up in the Ring, and sometimes the techie- toys from orbit tend to drown them out.”
“Our savior,” Traci said with mockingly overstated gratitude, like a ste reo typical damsel in distress.

“What would we ever have done without him?” Kath added, putting her head on his shoulder.

“Aw, knock it off,” Warhurst growled. “Happens I like Earth and Earth locals, okay?”
“It’s the Ringers he can’t stand,” Ramsey said.

“Well, speaking as a Ringer,” Garroway said, grinning, “fuck you very much.”
“You’re not a Ringer, Garroway,” Warhurst told him. “You’re a Marine. There’s a difference, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Oh, I’ve noticed.” Garroway continued to watch the erotic show overhead. “Those people don’t even know they’re at war.”
“When it comes down to it,” Ramsey observed, “isn’t that why we’re here? To keep them safe enough that they can enjoy at least the illusion of peace?”
“That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.”
“What the hell?” Ramsey said. He looked around the room. “Someone’s snooping.”
“Interrogator?”
“Yeah. I think I see him. Over there.”
Every person with an implant and a personal secretary possessed a cache of public data, which could be accessed by anyone else through an implant function called an interrogator. If you saw someone you were interested in, you could interrogate their cache electronically without approaching them, learning a name, a contact code, or anything else you didn’t mind giving to strangers on the street. Most Marines kept their caches empty or nearly so. Garroway’s read gnysgt. garroway, ucmc and the legend semper fi. If anyone wanted to know more, he reasoned, they could come up and ask him in person.

Ramsey fed him a targeting cursor marking the source of the interrogation, one of two young men seated at a table on the far side of the Grotto.

“Hey!” Armandez said. “He just pinged me, too.”
“Curious civilian, you think?” Warhurst asked.

“More than that. He just sent me an e,” she said.

“What does he want.”
“Me,” Armandez said. “In bed with him. I’ve locked him out.”
“Mm. Maybe we should call it an eve ning, folks,” Ramsey said.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll have my dinner and a pleasant evening interrupted by a damned snoop,” Warhurst said. “Uhoh. He’s coming over.”
“Low profile, people,” Ramsey said. “We don’t want trouble.”
“And if that character does?” Garroway asked.

As he strutted toward them, the guy made an impressive display. He was essentially nude, but with most of the left side of his body, from scalp to boots, covered by implanted decoration, nanotechnically grown whorls and loops and filigree in gleaming silver, like liquid metal, and ebon black. The style, Garroway had heard, was called technorg, and emphasized the blend of the natural organic with the artificial.

The effect was somewhat clumsily highlighted by the size of the man’s penis, gene tically enhanced so that, in its flaccid state, it hung nearly to the guy’s knees. The organ was purely for show, of course. No human female could have accommodated that thing sexually. When aroused, the outsized member was actually designed to shrink to more normal, though still generous, proportions. At least that was the theory.

This casual biological reworking of the human body was something Garroway found vaguely disturbing. His own body possessed hundreds of upgrades, of course, from his cerebral implants to his partly machine, partly biological new legs, to artificial pigments in his skin that helped shed ionizing radiation, to buckytube carbon weave grown around each of his bones to make them stronger. Every one of those enhancements, however, was Marine Corps issue, designed to make him a better Marine—faster, smarter, stronger, harder to kill. This guy’s hardware—not to mention his grotesquely oversized software—were purely for ego gratification and for show.

“Well, well,” the kid said as he approached the table. “What’ve we got here . . . pretty- boy marines? And a very pretty girl Marine!” He reached for Armandez. “How about you and me blow this hab and find us some privacy, baby?”
“Get lost, civilian,” Armandez said. Garroway was amazed at how much disinterest mingled with nitrogen ice Nikki could pack into those three words. As his hand reached for her shoulder, she shifted slightly, and pushed it aside.

“Don’t be like that, baby! I can show you a real good time!”
“Back off, kid,” Garroway told him. “You don’t know what you’re messing with.”
“Don’t I? Fuck off, jarhead. This little gyrene slut deserves to find out what a real man is like!”
Garroway sighed, stood up, and turned to face the civilian. He’d run into this kind of testosterone-sodden display before, and always with the same outcome. There were civilians who just felt they had to prove their machismo by taking on a Marine. The surprise was that each time one of the idiots was shown the error of his ways, three more seemed to pop up and try the same nonsense.

“Don’t, Gare,” Armandez told him, standing up as well. “I need the practice.”
“You?” The civilian snickered, leering at her. “What’s a pretty bit of fluff like you gonna do?”
“Well,” she said thoughtful, “I could jam that ugly thing dangling between your legs so far up your ass it comes out your nose, then tie a knot in the end to hold it in place in case you need a blow job. But I really don’t want to get your slime on my hands. . . .”
The civilian’s leer turned to a snarl, but before he could move, Armandez snapped her arm out too fast for the eye to follow, two slim fingers thumped against the civilian’s forehead, above and squarely between his eyes. The weiji-do strike, backed by the Marine’s augmented physiology, delivered the energy of a hammer’s blow. The civilian, who outmassed Armandez by at least two and a half to one, staggered backward, arms flailing, and collapsed across a nearby table with a crash. The two elegantly clad diners at the table screamed and knocked their chairs over trying to get back.

Stooping next to him, Garroway touched his left palm to the man’s wrist. Public access data flowed—name, address, health status. Lennis Tarwhalen. SupraSingapore Complex, EarthRing 1.

“He’s just unconscious,” Garroway told the others. “Nice targeting, Nikki.”
“Thanks.”
“The little shit’s from EarthRing!”
“You sound surprised,” Warhurst said.

Garroway shrugged. “I figured he was a local.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, the locals are pretty laid back and, like I was saying, most of ’em don’t have the money for fancy electronics. Look at that metalwork. That guy has tribal affiliations. He’s down- Ring slumming.”
“Slumming?” Garroway had not heard the word before.

“Some of the tribes like to come down- Ring and play tourist,” Warhurst said. “They get kicks making trouble, going after targets of opportunity. They cruise joints like this, pick up girls for some fast sex, pick fights, bust places up, and they know their tech is far enough ahead of Earth standard that it’ll warn them if the local police are on the way.”
“So what’s the idiot doing rousting Marines?” Garroway asked.

“Interesting,” Ramsey observed, “that the little SOB zeroed in on Nikki. Not Traci or Kath.”
“That display wasn’t about sex,” Warhurst pointed out. “The jerk was cruising on ego and testosterone. If he could put the moves on Nikki, he’d have bragging rights with his tribe. He’s bound to have visual and physiological recorders worked into that fancy metalware. He was either recording for later playback, or transmitting to his buddies. Most likely both.”
Garroway scanned for the kid’s companion, but the table was now empty. He did see another civilian, however, a powerfully muscled civilian in black armor, bearing down on them like an incoming hovertank. “Heads up,” he warned. “Trouble! . . .”
“What do you jarhead grunts think you’re doing to my place?” the man screamed, his face a bright red. “You think you can just come in and bust it up like it was nothin’?”
“The guy was getting out of line with one of my people, sir,” Ramsey said. “He started it. We finished it.”
“What are you, some kind of smart mouth? Who’s gonna pay for the damage? Eh?”
Garroway saw three other men in armor moving in from different directions. The speed of the response and the fact that they were wearing a civilian grade of light combat armor both were interesting. It suggested a set- up, probably a deliberate plan to shake credits out of the Marines. A quick interrogation of the Grotto own er identified him as Jerard Usher, and indicated that the florid-faced man was, indeed, the own er of the Atlantis Grotto. His address, however, was listed as an apartment in Ring 5.

Music and conversation in the Grotto had ceased. Even the orgy overhead had, momentarily, at least, come to a halt as the revelers peered down at the confrontation on the main floor.

“We’re going quietly,” Garroway said. “We don’t want any trouble.”
“Yeah? Well, you got trouble, gyrene! You owe me five thousand for that busted table!”
“What . . . for this cheap crap?” His leg moved, a blindingly fast side kick into the central support of the table they’d been sitting at. The material was a tough, nanopolymer, but it tended to shatter under a strong enough impact. It shattered now, toppling the table and sending their drinks crashing to the floor.

Warhurst stepped up close to Usher, grasping the front of the man’s armored vest and lifting him off the deck one- handed. In his other hand, he brandished a shard of black plastic from the table. “Perhaps you weren’t aware, sir, that while this stuff looks like mahogany, it is, in fact, a kind of plastic easily and cheaply grown from landfill mines. See? No splinters. At a guess, I’d say your table is worth no more than, oh, five newdollar creds or so.”
The two Grotto employees, tough-looking bouncers, approached the tableau, but they stopped as Garroway, Armandez, and Ramsey dropped into weiji-do combat stances, facing them.

“Now, I can understand your trying to take advantage of some simple Marines visiting your establishment on liberty,” Warhurst went on, his growl loud enough to carry throughout the listening room. “Watered-down drinks, the meat nanoconstituted from seaweed and scraps . . . and maybe you figure your hired help can pick a fight with ’em and shake ’em down for a few newdollars, right? But I’m a civilian, and I live right here in Miami. I know you, Usher . . . and I know the local law enforcement monitors.”
“Hey, boss?” one of the bouncers said. He evidently didn’t like the cold look he was getting from Armandez. “Whatta we do?”
“Uh . . . maybe . . .” Usher gurgled. “Maybe there was . . . a misunderstanding? We . . . uh . . . we thought the Marines here had started a fight.”
“No, the Marines did not start a fight. As the lieutenant there told you, they finished it, but they didn’t start it. Now . . . do you want to start a fight with us?”
“N-no.”
“What?”
“No . . . sir.”
Warhurst dropped the plastic shard, then slapped his free hand across a data pad on the man’s left arm, triggering a credit transfer. “There’s ten creds,” he said. “To pay for two tables. I suggest you take it out of Mr. Tarwhalen’s paycheck. He is one of your employees, yes?”
“Uh . . . no . . . I mean . . . I don’t know . . .”
“We’re leaving, now,” Warhurst told him. Gently, almost lovingly, he lowered the man back to the deck. “We’ll be passing the word to our friends that the Grotto doesn’t care for service personnel as clientele.”
“But . . . wait! No!” Usher’s eyes went wide. “I . . . uh . . . told you, there was just a misunderstanding!”
“Well, there won’t be any more of those, will there? C’mon, people.”
Warhurst led the others out of the club.

“I think he really wanted to apologize,” Armandez said.

“Of course he did. When the fleet’s in, half his revenues must come from Marines and Navy personnel down- Ring on liberty. He can’t afford to lose us.”
“So why the shake-down?”
Warhurst shrugged. “Hell, it’s always been that way. Navy towns, Army towns, they grow up outside of bases like weeds, and their main source of income is military. Some treat their guests good. Others figure they can roust you because you don’t want trouble, don’t want the SPs hauling your ass off to the brig, don’t want to maybe face a captain’s mast for conduct prejudicial. Damned civilians . . . what? What’s happening?
Garroway, Armandez, and Ramsey all had suddenly frozen in mid- stride, far-away looks on their faces. Garroway listened for a moment to a message streaming in through his implant.

“Sorry, Gunny,” he said. “We’re getting a special recall.”
“Yeah,” Ramsey said. “A transport is touching down outside of Miami. They want us aboard now.”
Warhurst nodded. “Sent you an official ride, did they? Well . . . thanks for coming down and looking me up, Marines.”
“Thanks for your hospitality,” Ramsey replied. “Gunny . . . ladies . . .”
“Hey, come back next time you rotate through,” Traci told them. “Please?”
She sounded . . . not scared, exactly, but very, very earnest. Like she genuinely wanted to see them again, but knew there was a chance that they would not be coming back.

“We’ll take you up on that, Traci,” Ramsey told her. He grinned. “Right now, we have some Xul to take down. After the Atlantis Grotto, it should be easy!”
They boarded a local commuter submarine that would get them to Miami proper in ten minutes.

And Garroway wondered if he would ever feel the tiring drag of Earth’s gravity again.