they have us catalogued as a threat. They know our home

world . . . hell, they bombarded Earth in 2314. How can they

not be aware of us?”

“We’ve been sending our AI probes into Xul nodes for

almost two thousand years, now, and we’ve done a lot of

listening. There are . . . call them different levels of aware-

ness. One Xul node might learn about us, but they were al-

ways slow to share with the others. Together, they were still

driven by their original xenophobia, but taken in isolation,

44 IAN

DOUGLAS

individual nodes don’t seem to really be conscious. Most of

their defenses are automated. We know that within one node,

or aboard one starship, they arrive at decisions through a kind

of chorus of thoughts and counterthoughts until they reach a

consensus.”

“The Singer,” he put in. “Europa.”

“Exactly. But individual Xul nodes tend to be pretty iso-

lated from one another—minimum internodal communica-

tion across a widely distributed net—and the Galaxy is too

big to allow that kind of consensus on a specieswide scale.

From the point of view of the species, of the CAS, they’re all

blissfully living a near-eternal existence in their own virtual

universe, and once in a while we run across their toe and

make it twitch.”

“That . . . is a rather uncomfortable image,” Garroway

said slowly. He’d been more comfortable thinking of the Xul

as a conventional enemy, an interstellar empire seeking to

exterminate Humankind. The mental picture Schilling in-

voked was of something much, much larger, more powerful,

and potentially far more dangerous than a mere alien inter-

stellar empire. The fact that the Xul as a Galaxy-wide CAS

hadn’t yet put all the pieces together implied that some day

they would.

If the Xul ever got their act together and thought and moved

as a species, there might be little that Humankind could do to

fi ght back.

“As we understand the Xul now,” Schilling told him,

“most of their original uploaded mentalities, the governing

choruses, are . . . aware of what goes on outside their virtual

worlds, but not really a part of it, do you see? The minds that

control their hunterships and probes, the minds we’ve been

up against in combat, all of those are either copies of the

original minds, or AI.”

“Artificial intelligence. What’s the difference between an

uploaded electronic mind and an artifi cial one?”

“Good question. Maybe none. The two may be completely

SEMPER

45

HUMAN

interchangeable within what passes for Xul society. Espe-

cially when the ability to upload a conscious mind brings

with it the ability to copy a conscious mind, to replicate it as

often as needed, and to tweak it, to change it from iteration

to iteration.”

“So the original Xul minds form the basis of the AI infra-

structure, but they fi ll in with copies and AIs.” He was still

thinking about it in classical military terms. No matter how

many casualties humans inflicted on the Xul, they could fi ll

in the gaps in an eye’s blink, simply by running off more

copies of themselves.

“We believe so.”

“How the hell do you fight an enemy like that?”

“Well, we’ve been using our own AI assault complexes

to take down Xul nodes as we discover them. They’re pro-

grammed to integrate themselves with the Xul AI software

within a target node and gradually take it over, substituting

our own virtual reality for theirs.”

“Really?” The concept was intriguing.

“So far as the Xul minds within the target node are aware,

everything’s going fine, they’ve stamped out all possible

threats to their existence, and there’s nothing out there to

upset their poor, xenophobic sensibilities. They get routine—

and negative—reports from their probes and listening sta-

tions, routine comm traffic from other nodes, everything’s

fine. And our AIs are in a position to intercept any incoming

data that says otherwise, or be aware of any decision by the

node’s chorus to go out looking for trouble. They could even

shut the node down completely, if need be. Literally cut their

power and turn them off.”

“Why don’t you? Turn them all off, I mean.”

She looked uncomfortable. “Genocide, you mean.”

“If it’s a matter of survival for Humankind . . . yes.”

“We can’t do that!”

“Why not? I’m not even sure electronic uploads qualify as

life.”

46 IAN

DOUGLAS

“Members of Homo telae would object to that, General.

So would most members of our AI communities.”

“But their survival is at stake, too, damn it!” He felt exas-

peration building up, threatening to emerge as raw fury. How

could he make her understand? No Marine he knew liked

the idea of wholesale genocide, but when your back was up

against the wall, you did what you had to do to survive.

She sighed. “That . . . option is debated from time to time.

It comes up from time to time as a possible strategy. But

there’s a strong egalatist faction within the Associative gov-

ernment—”

“ ‘Egalatist?’ ”

“All intelligence is equally valid, no matter what the shape

of the body that houses it. And many Associative species—

many human religious factions, too—think the Xul are a le-

gitimate sapient life form, and that wiping them out is the

same as genocide.”

“Hell,” Garroway said. “The bastards have tried to pull

the plug on humans often enough in the past few thousand

years. Maybe we should pull the plug on them. This is war.”

“The concept of war may be out of date, General,” Schil-

ling said. “If we can contain the Xul without switching them

off . . . wouldn’t that be better? Especially if we can eventu-

ally find a way to reason with them? Cure their xenophobia,

and bring them into the Associative?”

Garroway wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that.

“Maybe. . . .”

“The Xul aren’t evil,” Schilling said. “Very, very differ-

ent, yes. And they have a worldview that makes it tough to

reason with them on human terms. But they would have a lot

to contribute to Associative culture.”

“Listen, if you people are so all-fired eager to make friends

with those things, why’d you bring me out of cold storage?”

“Because the containment may be failing,” Schilling said.

“We have intelligence from several sources that suggests

that, just as we’ve been infiltrating their systems electroni-

cally, they’ve been infi ltrating ours.

SEMPER

47

HUMAN

“And just the possibility that they’ve begun reacting to us

coherently has scared the shit out of some of us. . . .”

Hassetas, Dac IV

Star System 1727459

1901 hours, GMT

The Krysni mob, a wall of gas bags and writhing tentacles,

lunged toward the Marine line. Garwe saw a telltale warning

wink on within his in-head displays, and read the data un-

scrolling beside it.

“I’m getting a power spike, Captain!” he shouted. “The

bastards are armed!”

“Weapons free!” Xander called.

With a thunderclap, a searing, violet beam snapped in

from the jungle wall to the left, washing across Lieutenant

Wahrst’s strikepod in coruscating sheets and arcing forks of

grounding energy. The smooth surface of her pod silvered,

then seemed to flow like water as internal fields and nano-

technics shifted to shunt aside the charge.

The attacking wall of gas bags struck an instant later,

carrying the Marines back a few steps by the sheer inertia of

their rush. Garwe found himself grappling with half a dozen

of the things. They appeared to be trying to grab his pod in

their tentacles; he responded by growing tentacles of his own,

silver-sheened whiplashes emerging from the active nano sur-

face of his pod.

Odd. The pod’s response was a bit sluggish. Garwe’s neural

interface with the pod’s AI and electronic circuitry was sup-

posed to be essentially instantaneous, but either the connec-

tion was running slow, or his brain was running way fast. It

wasn’t enough to cause major problems, but he was painfully

aware of the way time seemed to stretch around him as more

and more of the Krysni gas bags crowded in close. His hull

sensors felt them, a dead weight clinging to his armor, grow-

ing more and more massive with each dragging second.

48 IAN

DOUGLAS

He sent a mental command to his pod’s defense system,

and the outer surface crackled with electricity. Krysni fl oat-

ers in contact with his pod shriveled and twisted, their blue-

white skins crisping to brown and black in a second or two

of arcing fury.

A second high-energy bolt fired from the jungle, catching

Captain Xander’s pod as she tried to rise above the tangled

melee. Her pod shrugged off the attack, but as it rotated away

from the sniper, Garwe noticed that a dinner-plate-sized patch

of her outer nano had been burned away, leaving a ragged,

gray-white scar. If her pod couldn’t repair itself before an-

other shot hit in the same spot, she was dead.

Garwe lashed out with his tentacles, burning down an-

other eight or ten of his attackers. Free for the moment, he

increased power to his repulsors and moved his pod higher.

“Blue One!” he called. “Fall back! You’ve got a hole burned

through your nano!”

As if encouraged by the sniper’s partial success, other elec-

tron bolts began snapping out of the jungle. Dozens of the

Krysni shriveled and fell, or vanished in white puffs of vapor,

victims of friendly fire, but the unarmed mob kept moving

forward, ignoring casualties from both sides of the battle, try-

ing to overwhelm the twelve Marine battle pods by sheer weight

of numbers.

Garwe’s pod had already located each enemy shooter and

plotted them on his targeting matrix, revealing them on his

IHD as flashing, bright red reticules. He selected the one that

had hit the captain and triggered his pod’s primary weapon,

sending a megajoule pulse of X-ray laser energy slashing into

the jungle.

Purple and orange vegetation shriveled and died; the Reef’s

tentacles curled back from the high-energy caress, and the

compound’s support platform shuddered as the vast life form

that was Hassetas reacted to the heat.

“Skipper!” Garwe yelled! “Request permission to disen-

gage! If we can just maneuver—”

SEMPER

49

HUMAN

“Negative!” Xander snapped back. “We do it by the op-

plan!”

The opplan—the operations plan downloaded from the

squadron’s command constellation—required the War Dogs

to deploy on the compound platform and provide a kind of

barricade for the off-worlders, protecting them from the lo-

cals until a transport could make it down from orbit. The

Marines would hold the perimeter until the off-worlders

could evacuate, then pull out.

Ideally, no shots would have been fired, and the mere pres-

ence of the Marine battlepods should have kept the Krysni at

bay. Somehow, things hadn’t quite worked out that way, how-

ever.

Garwe kept firing into the jungle, targeting Krysni power

sources as his pod’s sensor suite picked them up and fl agged

them on his in- head display. The off-worlder compound was

trembling and bucking now as the fl oatreef moved the mas-

sive, main tentacle to which it was anchored.

“Trolischet!” Xander snapped on the general frequency.

“I suggest you get your people off of the compound plat-

form!”

“We can’t!” Trolischet replied, her voice shrill. “We have

no ship!”

“An evacuation ship is inbound,” Xander told her. “ETA

less than ten minutes! But you might not have ten minutes!

You need to get everyone into evacuation pods, fl iers, fl ight-

capable suits, whatever you have that will carry you. All you

need to do is to get off this damned reef before it decides to

scratch!”

“There are over two hundred of us, Captain! We couldn’t

save more than a quarter!”

“Well, then, save them, damn it! Or you’re all dead!”

Other Marines were targeting the snipers now as well,

those that could still move and had not been completely en-

gulfed by the advancing wall of balloon bodies and angry,

lashing tentacles. Garwe pivoted, targeting a second source

50 IAN

DOUGLAS

of high-energy electron beams, and then three bolts caught

him at once, slamming into his Starwraith in a searing deto-

nation of raw energy.

Warning lights winked on in his IHD, his defensive fi elds

flickering and dimming beneath the overload. A half- second

later, three more beams struck and his nanodefenses went

down, slabs of active nano burned from the Starwraith’s outer

shell, oily smoke boiling from a puncture in the foametal struc-

ture beneath.

Garwe cut his repulsors, dropping back into the relative

cover of the tentacle- to- tentacle melee below. His pod jos-

tled and bumped in the press of leathery balloon bodies and

lashing tentacles as he rerouted the majority of his power

flow to the task of repairing his outer-shell nano. He tried

discharging a few thousand volts through what was left of his

outer nano, but the attempt brought up more warning lights

and no other effect.

The Krysni appeared to be learning quickly. Captain Xan-

der’s Starwraith had been hit again repeatedly, and Palin,

Mortin, and Javlotel were down as well, large patches of their

nanoshells burned and peeled away, exposed portions of their

inner armor partly melted under the fierce heat of the enemy

fi re.

And it was all wrong. The two symbiotic sentient species

of Dac IV weren’t technic, and didn’t have manufactured

weaponry of any sort. Individual Krysni possessed a bio-

logical weapon—a toxin delivered through hollow, pressure-

fired barbs like a terrestrial jellyfish—which they used when

necessary against some of the mindless predators of Dac

IV’s deeper atmosphere layers, but those were useless against

a Starwraith, even one as badly damaged as Garwe’s. And

without a solid surface from which to mine and forge metals,

indeed, without fire, the Krysni and their immense and sapi-

ent floating cities had never developed anything remotely

like material technology at all.

Where in hell had they gotten electron beam weaponry?

Who had taught them how to use it?

SEMPER

51

HUMAN

At the moment, the press of Krysni balloons around him

were doing quite well without advanced technology. His

crippled Starwraith was now covered by leathery blue bod-

ies clinging tightly to his armor, their floater sacs defl ated,

with hundreds more Krysni clinging in layers on top of them.

He could see what they were doing by picking up a visual feed

from Blue Twelve—Lieutenant Namura’s wraith. It looked as

though some hundreds of the creatures were clinging to him,

with the outer layers inflating their bodies in an attempt to

lift him clear of the deck. More and more Krysni fl oaters were

hooking on, puffing up their bodies to well over a meter in

diameter, taut- skinned globes filled with biochemically heated

hydrogen.

He fired his X-ray laser, the beam punching through bodies

and releasing a roiling cloud of smoke. More Krysni drifted

in to replace the ones incinerated by his attack. He fi red

again . . . and then a third time, each shot burning away doz-

ens of the things, but then his power reserves plummeted and

the laser cut out after the third pulse.

“Blue Flight, this is Blue Seven!” he called out. “My

weapons are dead!”

“Same here!” Lieutenant Radevic shouted. “Weapon power

leads are burned through!”

“Blue, Blue Two!” Amendes said. “Repulsors out! Weap-

ons down! I’ve gone—”

And then static hissed through the comm feed, as Garwe’s

in-head display, with tiny icons for each of the Blue Flight

Marines, showed twelve symbols drop to eleven . . . then ten.

Overwhelming numbers were beginning to tell at last.

Garwe found it hard to believe, impossible to believe . . .

but the Dac balloonists

were attacking a squadron of

modern Marine battle pods and winning. It simply wasn’t

possible. . . .

Abruptly, his pod shifted to the right, then inverted . . .

came upright, then inverted again. Slowly, clumsily, they

were moving him. He could feel the scrape and roll of tightly

packed bodies as they moved. Some hundreds, now, were

52 IAN

DOUGLAS

clinging to the squirming mass of creatures on the inside of

the ball, inflating their bodies to levitate the entire, cumber-

some mass, while others vented hydrogen like tiny jets in

frantic, rapid pulses, shoving him toward the edge of the

platform.

Gods! A Starwraith massed almost half a ton under Dac’s

gravity. How many of the creatures would it take to negate

that weight and actually float him off the platform?

Or perhaps they weren’t actually trying to lift him, but sim-

ply to push or drag or roll him off the side. The edge of the

tree house deck that was not bordered by the massive bulk of

the floatreef tentacles and the surrounding aerial fl ora was

protected by a relatively slender guardrail, and it was less than

twenty meters away. If they could get him through the railing,

he and some hundreds of clinging Krysni would plummet

over the edge and into the black, hot, and crushing depths of

the gas giant’s atmospheric deeps. His attackers seemed ut-

terly unconcerned about their own casualties; those crushed

up against his optic sensors appeared to be dead already. Evi-

dently, they were willing to sacrifice themselves by the hun-

dreds simply to ensure the destruction of a single Starwraith.

He tried triggering his repulsors, but nothing happened.

His primary drive power feed had melted through and shorted

out. If he could just take flight, drag this whole, squirming

mass high enough into the thin, cold upper reaches of atmo-

sphere, or pull them with him into the abyss until they lost

their grip and fell away . . . but at the moment he wasn’t chan-

neling enough power to lift a single one of these wrinkled,

squirming little creatures, much less all of them and his bat-

tle pod.

“This is Blue Seven,” Garwe reported, his mental voice

calm. “My drive systems are out. I think they’re trying to

drag me to the edge of the platform and drop me off!”

More data flickered through his in-head display, more sys-

tems failing. There was a chemical agent in use—a concen-

trated fluoroantimonic acid. Apparently, the creatures crowded

in against his Starwraith were injecting, not biological tox-

SEMPER

53

HUMAN

ins, but acid. Where the acid could reach exposed fi ber optic

cables and electronic circuitry, it was causing massive inter-

nal damage.

He wondered how the creatures were carrying and inject-

ing the stuff without having their own tissues begin to break

down.

The Krysni continued to close in. Xander, Palin, Mortin,

Wahrst, and Javlotel as well as Garwe all were enveloped,

smothered in roughly spherical masses of writhing bodies.

Amendes, Cocero, and Ewis all were out of action, their pods

now totally inert, no longer transmitting status or comm feed

signals. Bakewin, Radevic, and Namura continued to fi ght,

burning away at the ponderous globes of creatures envelop-

ing their fellow Marines as more and more and still more of

the meter-long floaters descended from the sky or emerged

from the surrounding jungle, filling the open space above the

tree house platform with drifting, jostling, jetting Krysni.

Once, years before in a combat medical training feed, Garwe

had seen a simulation based on an actual optic feed from a

nanotech camera adrift within a human circulatory system.

The sim had been about the human body’s internal defenses,

its immune system and the response of antibodies to foreign

invaders in the system . . . in this case a single, rod- shaped

bacterium. The bacterium, smaller than a blood cell, was still

enormous compared to the antibodies flocking to the injured

region, swarming in through the pale yellow haze of the sur-

rounding interstitial fluid in clouds, enveloping the bacterium,

smothering it, adhering to it, hurling themselves against it in

layer upon layer in an awesome spectacle eerily like what

Garwe was seeing here and now. The individual antibodies, he

recalled, looked like wrinkled, spiky, pale-

translucent and

roughly spherical bodies, with twisted strands of long-chain

molecules extending like tentacles from their bodies. Their

resemblance to the drifting Krysni was unsettling.

Antibodies, defending their host.

Then his optical feed cut out, suddenly, as Namura’s pod

came under savage attack from four separate electron beam

54 IAN

DOUGLAS

sources. All he could see now were the bodies of Krysni

pressed in against his external pick- ups, glowing slightly at

infrared wavelengths.

How long, he wondered, could the tough inner shell of his

pod last against this concerted assault? His Starwraith’s

on- board AI continued to report on the steadily deteriorating

situation as circuit after circuit foamed into inert useless-

ness at the touch of that concentrated acid, as power reserves

drained away, as the last of the active nano coating the ma-

chine lost power or programming or coherence and fl aked

away, dead. His pod was all but inert, now, though the sen-

sors continued to feed him a trickle of optical and kinesthetic

data.

He was falling. His battle pod’s kinesthetic feeds fed sen-

sations directly to his inner ear, and he could feel himself

dropping within the savage grasp of Dac’s gravitational fi eld,

better than two and a half times a standard Earth gravity. Af-

ter the first few seconds, he wasn’t quite in free fall, he noted.

The external atmospheric pressure and temperature were ris-

ing swiftly as he fell, and the battle pod and its ungainly co-

coon of Krysni defenders rapidly hit a terminal velocity of

perhaps twelve hundred kilometers per hour.

He could feel the shudders and jolts as the enveloping shell

of dead and dying Krasni ripped away a few at a time.

Swathed in darkness, he plummeted into the abyss. . . .

4

2101.2229

Associative Marine Holding Facility 4

Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System

1907 hours, GMT

“The Xul,” Garroway said, startled, “are acting in a coher-

ent manner? You mean, all of them together, all across the

Galaxy?”

“We can’t be sure that all of the surviving nodes are in-

volved,” Schilling told him. “And the nodes we’ve already

isolated with AI virsim teams didn’t get the incoming mes-

sages, of course. But our node monitors have picked up what

appear to be coordinating messages through quantum nonlo-

cal channels. And incidents that we believe are Xul-instigated,

somehow, have been occurring throughout the Associative

volume.”

“Galaxywide?”

“The Associative has connections through about half of

the Galaxy, General. Maybe a bit less. A third?”

“That’s still a hell of a lot.”

“At least a hundred billion stars. A quarter or so have

planetary systems. And the incidents are very widely scat-

tered.”

“Okay. The question remains, though, Captain. Just what

is it that you expect me and my people to do? My Marines

56 IAN

DOUGLAS

have experience killing Xul, not containing them, not inte-

grating with them, not . . . not kissing up to them. It sounds

to me like it’s not the idea of war that’s out of date. It’s us.

The Marines.”

“And that’s why we need the Marines, General. Your gen-

eration of Marines. We haven’t engaged the Xul in a stand- up

fight for centuries. You and your people have the experience.

We don’t.”

“Well,” Garroway said, surprised. “That’s a fi rst.”

“What is, sir?”

He chuckled and shook his head. “Throughout the history

of our species, Captain, we humans have always been pre-

pared to fi ght the last war, not the next one. We go in with

tactics, attitudes, and training that are completely out of step

with the new threat, whatever it is.”

“Sir? I don’t understand.”

“The history of military history, Captain. We get brand-

new rifled weapons capable of killing men at a range of two

or three hundred meters, and we still form tightly packed and

ordered ranks and march in with the bayonet. We get machine

guns, we still try massed assaults into no-man’s land, or even

on horse back. We develop large-scale suborbital deployment,

and we still pretend that war has front lines. You’re saying we

need the old way of doing things, now?”

“In a way, yes, sir,” Schilling said. “When we started ex-

ploring out among the stars, we continued to think in terms

of the nation- states and countries we’d known on Earth. When

we met alien cultures, we tried to put them into the nice, neat

boxes with which we’d been familiar on our homeworld. Em-

pires and federations, unions and republics and common-

wealths.”

“And associatives?”

“The Associative is an attempt to think in bigger, less

exclusive terms,” she told him. “No empires. No borders. No

‘us’ and ‘them,’ just an all-embracing us. And no need to com-

pete for scarce resources in a Galaxy where resources like

planets and energy are all but boundless.”

SEMPER

57

HUMAN

“No borders. What does that mean? . . .”

Schilling gestured. A star turned bright on the projection of

the Galaxy, then expanded swiftly into an open window look-

ing down on an achingly beautiful, sapphire-blue and white

world. It was, Garroway realized, the same view of Eris he’d

seen upon emerging from cybe-hibe. “There are some hun-

dreds of thousands of species in the Associative,” she told

him, “and millions throughout the Galaxy. Relatively few of

them, though, have the same requirements when it comes to

habitable worlds.” Another window opened within the window,

and Garroway stared into six vast, black eyes set above and

below a squirming halo of tentacles. The overall impression

was of something like a giant squid, but it was difficult to pull

all the parts together into a coherent whole, into something

that made sense to his brain.

Even so, he recognized the species, for Humankind had

met them in 2877, three decades before he’d been born.

“The Eulers?” he asked.

“The Eulers,” Schilling agreed. “They prefer worlds like

Earth . . . but at extreme depths, a thousand meters or more

down in the deep benthic abyss. They genegineered a sym-

biotic species that could survive on land, to develop fi re and

industry and space travel. They helped us win the Battle of

Starwall, and since then they’ve been among our closest al-

lies. Incredible natural mathematicians. They’ve colonized

perhaps two hundred worlds scattered throughout Associa-

tive space. Their latest project is this one . . . Eris, a newly

terraformed world right here in Earth’s Solar System. Or,

here’s an even better example . . .” She gestured again, and

the images of Eris and the deep- sea Euler vanished, re-

placed by a world completely sheathed in dazzlingly white

clouds . . . with just a hint of a dirty yellow cast to them. A

second window opened within, showing . . . something. At

first, Garroway thought he was looking at a crust of black,

hardened lava, with streaks and veins of molten rock just

visible beneath, glowing dull red. After a moment, he real-

ized the black mass had a shape, albeit an irregular one, and

58 IAN

DOUGLAS

things like flexible branches weaving in a searingly hot

breeze.

If it was a sapient species, Garroway had never seen or

heard of anything like it. He wasn’t even immediately sure

that it was alive. The image shimmered and bent, as if viewed

at a great depth, or within the fiery hell of a blast furnace. The

background was a sulfurous red and yellow haze, obscuring

vaguely glimpsed shapes that might have been spires of na-

tive rocks, or buildings.

“We call them Vulcans,” Schilling explained. “We don’t

know what they call themselves. Their cultural conventions,

their view of self, their worldview, all are quite different from

ours. But they live within volcanic fissures on worlds like Ve-

nus. Surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, and an at-

mospheric pressure similar to what the Eulers enjoy. We were

actually looking at the feasibility of terraforming Venus—a

colossal project—but a couple of hundred years ago the Vul-

cans petitioned us to let them colonize instead. They live there

now and like it, at pressures equivalent to the ocean deeps.”

Garroway stared at the black mass, which was oozing now

into a slightly different shape. Did it have a native shape, or

was it more of a crust-locked amoeba? He couldn’t tell. Were

those branches manipulative members of some sort, or sen-

sory organs, or something else entirely? Again, he couldn’t

tell. “How can you trust them if you don’t even know what

they call themselves?”

“The point is, General, they don’t want our kind of real

estate. We have almost nothing in common with them. It’s

far, far easier to terraform an outer dwarf planet like Eris or

Sedna than it is to cool down a planet like Venus and give

it a reasonable surface pressure, an atmosphere we could

breathe. So they live on Venus, the Eulers live in Eris—they

even have a small colony now in Tongue-of- the-Ocean, on

Earth—and we’re scarcely aware of their activities. No bor-

ders. What would be the point?”

“Security. But I see what you mean about war being out

of date,” he told her.

SEMPER

59

HUMAN

He wasn’t convinced that that could be true, however. Gar-

roway tended to have a pessimistic view of human nature,

one forged within a long career as a combat Marine and, as a

general officer with dealing with politicians. In his opinion,

Humankind could no more give up war than he could give up

the ability to think.

“A war with the Eulers or the Vulcans is almost literally

unthinkable,” she told him. “But the Xul aren’t competing

for resources. They simply want us dead.”

“Of course. We’ve triggered their xenophobic refl ex.”

“Exactly, sir. If the containment strategy isn’t working . . .

and if they’re becoming more aware of us, well, we need

you and your people, General. Like never before.”

As she spoke, Garroway was scanning through more of

the download background and history. Civilians, including

humans, had been attacked by locals in a gas giant called

Dac IV. Anchor Marines had been sent in—the 340th Ma-

rine Strike Squadron. The situation was still unresolved, but

it must be desperate. A request for a Globe Marine detach-

ment had also been logged.

“What in hell,” he said slowly, “is an ‘Anchor Marine?’ ”

“Marines who stay with the time stream,” she told him.

“Like me.”

“And I’m a ‘Globe Marine?’ ”

“Yes, sir. Our reserves in cybe-hibe.”

“Who thought up that nonsense?”

“Sir?”

“Marines are Marines, Captain. I don’t like this idea of

two different sets of background, experience, or training.”

Here was another problem. Two months ago, a star lord at

a place, an artificial habitat called Kaleed, had run into some-

thing he couldn’t handle, and requested Marines. No Anchor

Marines had been available, and so the Lords of the Associa-

tive had decided to awaken a division of Globe Marines.

Apparently the third Marine Division was to be held on

stand- by as the Lords monitored the situation.

“It was necessary, General,” Schilling explained. “Globe

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Marines need cultural liaisons, other Marines who are, well,

anchored in the current background culture. Otherwise you’d

be lost. There have been a lot of changes in both cultural

norms and in technology since your day.”

“You’re making me feel positively ancient, Captain.”

But he understood the issue. When he’d last been active,

over eight centuries ago, there’d already been a sharply drawn

dichotomy between Marines and the civilian population they

protected. Neither group understood the other. Neither could

socialize well with the other. Neither could speak the other’s

language. No wonder most Marines tended to find both fam-

ily partners and sexual liaisons among others in the Corps.

Marines might visit the local hot spots and brothels for a quick

bit of fun, but longer and more solid relationships required a

degree of mutual understanding with civilians that had be-

come harder and harder to come by.

And it wasn’t just that Marines got into trouble with the

locals on liberty. The politicians who requested Fleet Ma-

rines to put down an insurrection or show the fist to a local

warlord didn’t understand them either. And that was where

the problems really started chewing up the machinery.

“Okay,” Garroway said after a moment. “I understand all

of that. We need babysitters. But why does the government

need us at all if they have you?”

“We’re a caretaker force, sir, nothing more. The adminis-

trators. The personnel offi cers and logistics staff who make

sure there is a Corps for you to wake up to.”

“But I see something here about Anchor combat units. . . .”

“Yes, sir. We have combat units, but they’re more place-

holders than anything else. You are the real Fleet Marine

Force.”

Garroway considered this. The Globe and Anchor was one

of the oldest and most sacred talismans of the Corps, a sym-

bol going back to the Royal Marines, who were the predeces-

sors of America’s Continental Marines of 1775. It was an

amusing idea, he decided, using globe and anchor to identify

two different kinds of Marine . . . but the concept behind it

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disturbed him. Throughout the history of the Corps he knew,

every Marine had known a single brotherhood, the Corps,

each man and woman undergoing the same training, with the

same traditions, the same language, the same background.

He found himself wondering if Captain Schilling was a

real Marine, or something else—an imitation, a temporary

stand-in for the real thing.

For centuries, Marine culture had been a distinct and self-

contained entity in its own right. If cultural drift over the

centuries had made the old Marines alien to the rest of Hu-

mankind, wouldn’t that alienness extend to these caretaker

Marines as well?

“Every Marine is a rifleman, Captain,” he said.

“Pardon, sir?”

“Did you download that in training? I hope to hell you

did, because if you didn’t the Corps has changed out of all

recognition.”

“I don’t understand the word ‘rifleman,’ sir. Give me a

second . . . oh.”

“The rifle is the Marine’s primary weapon, Captain. I don’t

care what you use nowadays, the principle is the same. As for

the expression, it’s old. Pre-spaceflight, I think. Every Marine

is a combat infantryman first, a rifleman, and whatever else—

cook, personnel clerk, aviator, storekeeper, computer program-

mer, general—second.”

“Today we say, ‘every Marine is a weapons sysop fi rst.’ ”

“Somehow, Captain, that just doesn’t have the same ring.”

Garroway continued to scan lightly through a fl ood of

downloads. He was starting to get the hang of the new im-

plant as he used it. It was responsive and powerful, and he

was beginning to get the idea that he hadn’t even begun yet

to glimpse its full potential.

Here was another one, from a world called Gleidatram-

oro, a kind of trading center and interstellar marketplace in

toward the Galactic Core frequented by several hundred

races. It was, he noted, another artificial world, like Kaleed.

Didn’t people live on planets anymore? A human mob had

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formed in Gleidat’s capital city and attacked . . . that was

interesting. They’d attacked a number of s-Humans, what-

ever those were, then gone on to dismember several hundred

AIvatars. Cross-connecting on the unfamiliar terminology,

he learned that s-Humans were a superintelligent genegi-

neered species of human, while an AIvatar was the human,

humanoid, or digital vehicle for an advanced artifi cial con-

sciousness.

How, he wondered, was that different from a robot?

The riot on Gleidatramoro had spread when several non-

human species had intervened on behalf of the AIvatars.

Several thousand individuals of various species, human, non-

human, superhuman, and artificially sentient, had been killed,

many of them irretrievably. The humans currently were bot-

tled up within the capital city in a bloody stand-off, and both

they and the non-humans were calling for help.

Again, Anchor Marines had been sent in to regain con-

trol. The situation on Gleidatramoro was still fl uid.

And here was an invasion of Propanadnid space by a hu-

man warlord named Castillan, who’d launched his armada

under the ringing battle cry of “death to the Proppies!” And

another, a terrorist attack on an asteroid defense system in the

Sycladu system, an attack with, as yet, no known motive. And

still another, an attempt by the human population of Gharst to

unplug several million t-Humans . . . the Homo telae of the

local Net. So much for human sensibilities opposed to elec-

tronic genocide.

The list went on . . . and on, and on, hundreds of incidents

during the past thirty days alone. There were far too many,

scattered across far too large a volume of space and among

far too many worlds, for a single Marine division to have a

chance of coping with them all.

The total number of violent clashes and incidents—some

nineteen hundred during the past month, according to the

latest tally—was utterly trivial compared to the tens of bil-

lions of populated worlds and habitats that made up the As-

sociative. On the other hand, there’d been nine hundred such

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incidents reported the previous month, and four hundred

the month before that. There appeared to be a kind of back-

ground noise count of violent encounters, of riots, revolu-

tions, and bullying neighbors, but overall the numbers had

been low, perhaps two hundred a month, an indication, Gar-

roway thought, that this Associative might have it on the ball

so far as galactic governments were concerned. Lately, though,

there’d been a sharp increase in the numbers, and so far there

was no sign that the trend had peaked.

“Almost twenty thousand of these incidents,” he told her.

“That’s more than the number of men, women, and AIs in

my division. What are the Marines supposed to do about it?

We can’t invade all these worlds. And we can’t protect bil-

lions of planets that haven’t been hit.”

“No. But you can investigate this. . . .”

A virtual world enveloped Garroway, emerging from his

new implant. In an instant, he was surrounded by deep space,

within a blazing shell of brilliant stars.

There were millions of them, most red or orange in hue,

which contributed to an overall red and somber background.

Ahead, bathing nearby gas clouds in searing, arc- harsh blue

radiance, was the Core Detonation.

“The Galactic Core,” Garroway said, whispering. “The

center of the Galaxy.”

“We did do a number on it, didn’t we?”

She almost sounded proud.

Marine Assault Carrier Night’s Edge

Synchronous Orbit, Dac IV

Star System 1727459

1914 hours, GMT

Lieutenant Garwe snapped back to consciousness, bathed

in sweat, his breath coming in short, savage gasps. He was

falling . . . falling into the Abyss. . . .

No, not falling. He was on his back in a linkcouch, the

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DOUGLAS

overhead softly glowing. Lieutenant Amendes leaned over

him, a hand on his shoulder. “Easy does it, Gar. You’re safe.”

“The squadron—”

“It’s okay, Gar,” she told him. “You’re out of there.”

He sat up slowly, head spinning. Amendes reached up and

removed the brow circlet that had linked Garwe to the Star-

wraith battlepod through its on- board AI. It took him a mo-

ment to readjust after the sharp transition, to remember where

he was.

The carrier, yeah. The Night’s Edge.

The compartment was circular and domed, with a close-

spaced semicircle of twelve linkcouches, half of them still

occupied by other members of the squadron. At the far side

of the compartment was the main console, just beneath the

glowing arc of a holofi eld.

“Won’t be long now,” Lieutenant Cocero said from the

console. He was watching over a Marine technician’s shoul-

der. “The Skipper’s down. So’s Pal.”

Major Lasenbe, the squadron’s Wing Commander, punched

his fist into his open palm. “Damn! ”

On a linkcouch nearby, Captain Xander sat up abruptly

as though coming wide awake out of a bad dream, her fi sts

clenched. “No, no, no! Shit!”

“The gasbags are overrunning the compound now,” the Ma-

rine tech reported from the console. “They’re in among the

buildings now, killing the off-worlders.”

Garwe slid out of his linkcouch, fighting against the shak-

ing weakness in his legs. Above the console, within the holo-

fi eld’s glowing depths, Garwe could see a terrifi ed face—the

high brow, dark skin, and contrasting golden eyes of a supie.

A data block beside the image identifi ed her as Vasek Trolis-

chet, the xenosoph who, unlike the Marines of the 340th, was

physically in the gas giant, and unable to escape. The sound

was muted, too low for Garwe to hear what she was saying,

but from the look on her face, she was terrifi ed.

Abruptly, the holofi eld filled with static, and Trolischet’s

fear-distorted features blinked out.

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65

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“We’ve lost contact with the Hassetas base, sir,” the tech-

nician reported.

Two more of the Blue Flight Marines emerged from their

artificial comas, blinking in the soft lighting. On a viewall

on the far side of the compartment, the disk of Dac, vast and

striped in hues of brown, salmon, and pale cream fl owed in

banded serenity, the violence in its depths masked by the

giant’s scale.

Major Lasenbe stood behind the technician, hands now at

the small of his back. “A cluster fuck, Captain,” he told Xan-

der without looking at her. “A Class-one cluster fuck.”

Xander rolled off the couch and came to attention, though

she still looked drawn and pale, and seemed to be having

difficulty suppressing a tendency to tremble. “Yes, sir,” she

said. “I’m . . . sorry, sir.”

Lasenbe turned. “At ease, Captain. I’m not chewing you

out. They should have sent you in with the pick- up ship, not

fifteen minutes ahead of it. Maybe those poor devils would’ve

had a chance, then.”

“Is the transport still going in, Major?” Xander asked.

“We could reinsert—”

“No point. The gas bags are wiping out the compound as

we speak.”

It would take an hour or more to get back down to Has-

setas. By then it would be too late.

“God damn it,” Xander said, slumping, her fi sts clenched.

Garwe was trembling as well, part of the after-effect of a

particularly close linkride. Starwraith battle pods actually

did serve as combat suits for living Marines, but it was also

possible to link with them from the safety of a remote loca-

tion, so long as non-local communications elements elimi-

nated any speed-of-light time lag. The Marine Carrier Night’s

Edge was in synchronous orbit for Dac, just over 180,000

kilometers out, an orbit that perfectly matched the planet’s

rotational period of eleven hours, or, rather, which matched

the period of Hassetas, since the different cloud belts circled

the gas giant at different rates. Any closer, and the ship’s

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DOUGLAS

orbit would have carried her past the target and over the ho-

rizon, blocking the sensory and control feed signals trans-

mitted from ship to pods and back. The time delay at that

distance for conventional EM transmissions would have

been impossible, six-tenths of a second for remote sensory

signals to travel from pod to Marine, and another six-tenths

of a second for the Marine’s responses to travel back down

to the pod. Both the pods and the carrier, however, were

equipped with quantum-coupled comm units, QCC technol-

ogy that operated instantaneously, with no time lag. Without

instantaneous transmission times, the Marines would have

been bumping into things—or aiming at targets that had al-

ready moved on. Even at that, Garwe’s pod had felt . . . slug-

gish, not quite in synch with his mind. The effect hadn’t

been much, but he felt that it had affected his combat perfor-

mance.

“Sir, with respect,” he said.

“Who are you?” Lasenbe demanded.

“Sir! Lieutenant Garwe, Blue Seven. It might’ve been bet-

ter if we’d gone in physically. I felt slow down there, like

there was a time lag.”

“Nonsense. There was no lag. Besides, if you’d deployed

physically, Lieutenant, you would now be dead. Your pod

crushed and burned . . .” He paused, checking data pulled

down through his implant. “Three minutes ago.”

“But if we’d been able to pull back and engage the enemy

in the air, instead of trying to protect those buildings—”

“You did what you were ordered to do, Lieutenant. Ham-

met!”

“Sir!” the technician snapped.

“How many Marines are still e-deployed?”

“Three, sir. Namura, Rad—”

“Yank ’em out. We can’t do anything more down there.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Lasenbe was pointedly ignoring Garwe now, giving or-

ders for the withdrawal of the rest of the squadron. On the

couches at his back, the other Marines were beginning to

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67

HUMAN

revive, their links with the battlepods 180,000 kilometers be-

low severed.

“What the hell was that chemical they were hitting us

with?” Palin wanted to know. “Some kind of acid. . . .”

“Fluoroantimonic acid,” Hammet said. “We got a full

read-out on the chemical composition up here.”

“Fluoro—what?” Misek Bollan asked.

“A mixture of hydrogen fluoride, HF, and antimony pen-

tafl uoride, SbF ,” Xander said, with the air of someone per-

5

fectly at ease with ungainly chemical formulae. “Nasty stuff.

One of the strongest acids known.”

“Roughly 2 × 1019 times stronger than one hundred per-

cent sulfuric acid,” Hammet added. “No wonder it was eat-

ing through your internal circuitry.”

“Since when did you become a chemist, Skipper?” Wahrst

asked. She was grinning.

“Since before I became a Marine,” Xander replied. “What

I want to know is . . . how were those gas bags delivering the

stuff? It protonates organic compounds, eats right through

them. Why didn’t it dissolve the gas bags?”

“They’re supposed to have some kind of natural delivery

system, aren’t they?” Mortin said.

“Right. A natural delivery system, which means made

out of the local equivalent of organics, proteins, bone, carti-

lage, that sort of thing. When we handled HSbF in the lab,

6

we needed either Tefl on or fi eld-shielded containers. It even

eats through glass.”

“They must’ve had help,” Garwe said. “Some source of

technology from the outside. But then, they were using elec-

tron beam weapons, too, weren’t they?”

“Yes, they were,” Xander said. “Someone has been run-

ning relatively high- tech weaponry to the locals. I wonder

who?”

“Or why?” Palin put in. “What do the gas bags have that

they could trade off-world for weapons?”

“There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense,” Major La-

senbe said. “We’re not here to sort it out, however. Xander,

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DOUGLAS

you and your people go grab some down- time. But I’ll want

an after-action uploaded to my essistant tomorrow by thir-

teen hundred.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Lasenbe strode from the room. Xander appeared to relax

a fraction.

“Asshole,” Mortin said, his voice low.

“Belay that, Marine,” Xander said. “Are all of you all

right?”

There was a mutter of response, “Yes, Skipper,” and “Okay”

and “Ooh-rah” predominating. The Marines sounded sub-

dued, however

“Kind of a rough trip, Captain,” Garwe told her. “I think

we’re still all in one piece, though.”

“Garwe,” Xander said, turning to face him, “what did you

mean when you told the major about feeling a time lag?”

Garwe shrugged. “I’m not sure. It might have been psy-

chodilation, I suppose.”

“Or you were speeding?”

“No, Skipper,” Garwe said. “I was linked with the rest of

the squadron.”

Psychodilation was a natural effect of human perception,

the apparent slowing of the passage of time during moments

of great danger, stress, or, paradoxically, boredom. “How

time flies when we’re having fun” was the opposite extreme

of the effect. Both perceptions occurred when the brain en-

tered an alpha altered state under different circumstances,

and had to do with how much in the way of fine detail the

person was actually perceiving.

“Speeding,” on the other hand, more formally known as

PV, or psychovelocitas, was the artificial boosting of over-

all brain function to speed up reaction times, perception, and

thought. There were times when this was appropriate, and

carried out through the use of drugs or neural enhancement

software, but while linked in with a combat formation was

defi nitely not one of those times. Battle pod operations de-

manded precise coordination between squadron elements. If

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HUMAN

Garwe had been speeding, linked communications with him

would have been garbled, fire coordination would have be-

come chaotic, and unit cohesion might easily have broken

down completely.

Xander nodded. “I’ll check the telemetry rec ords up here.

It might have been a fault in your neural circuitry.”

“My pod checked out okay, Skipper.” Not that it could be

checked now. What was left of his pod was by now still drift-

ing slowly into the depths of the gas giant Dac, fl attened by

atmospheric pressure and subjected to the searing heat of the

planet’s depths. “I was probably just hyped on adrenaline.”

“Gar’s right,” Palin said. “I was pretty keyed up, too. I

think we all were.”

Xander nodded. “Still, all of you will report to sickbay for

a full neural series. I felt like I wasn’t quite in synch, either.

And I don’t like not being in control.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” several of the Marines chorused.

“Garwe.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You stay for a moment. I want to talk with you.”

“Sure, Skipper.”

She sounded angry, and that was never good.

He wondered where the hell this was going.

5

2101.2229

Associative Marine Holding Facility 4

Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System

1919 hours, GMT

Garroway tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The

central mass resembled nothing so much as an immense, im-

possible, blossoming rose of streaming, blue-white radiance,

imbedded within a confused tangle of blinding light, of far-

flung arcs and walls and swirls of hot clouds of molecular gas,

of stars showing comet tails streaming away from the central

blast, of nebulae torn asunder by ferocious stellar winds, of

objects set in such a titanic scale that stars and even clusters of

stars were dwarfed to insignificance. His implant began over-

laying what he was seeing with identifying blocks of text.

Humans had last visited the center of the Galaxy in 1111

of the Marine Era . . . the year 2887 by the old calendar.

Marine and naval forces had assaulted a major Xul base, a

number of bases, actually, located in and around the Core

structures. The largest and most important of these had been

a Dyson cloud, a swarm of trillions of Xul artifi cial wordlets

positioned around the supermassive black hole that marked

the Galaxy’s exact gravitational center. At the climax of the

battle, a red giant star called S-2, in close orbit around the

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central black hole, had been nudged from its high-velocity

path by inducing a partial and off-center collapse beneath its

surface, triggering an outrushing jet of stellar material that

had acted like an immense rocket blast. The fast-dwindling

star had fallen closer to the black hole than otherwise would

have been the case, sweeping through part of the Xul cloud,

then shredding as it whipped around the inner gravitational

singularity and down the cosmic drain at the center.

The Xul hyperstructure had been destroyed, the individual

elements of the cloud plunging into the black hole in an eye’s

blink because they’d been force-beam anchored in place,

rather than circling in orbit. Much of the infalling matter had

been swallowed of course, but much more had rebounded

outward, generating what had come to be known as the Core

Detonation, an out-rushing surge of tortured plasma so hot and

bright that a supernova would have been lost in the glare.

A nearby star cluster, young and hot, just a tenth of a light

year out, had been consumed in the fury weeks later, the stars

pop-pop-popping into a chain of supernovae as the fl ood of

radiant energy engulfed them. Other supergiant stars close to

GalCenter had been swept up as well, adding their mass as

fuel to the maelstrom of radiation.

That had been 1117 years ago. In those eleven centuries,

the blast wave had swept outward, the wavefront of electro-

magnetic radiation traveling 1117 light years in that time, the

somewhat slower, following squall of high-energy particles

crossing about 900 light years in the same period of time.

Stars, thousands of them caught in that deadly fi restorm of

energy, had exploded as they were engulfed, each adding its

own bit of fury to the storm. The Galactic Core was now a

seething ocean of blue-white hell, and it was still expanding.

Any Xul nodes located within that central, two-thousand-

light-year-wide pocket of hell, would have been swept up

and consumed. The question was how far the blast would

expand . . . how much of the Galaxy might it devour?

“So,” Garroway wanted to know, “is that stuff going to hit

72 IAN

DOUGLAS

us in another twenty, twenty-five thousand years?” The

thought that Humankind’s attack on the Galactic Core eleven

hundred years ago might actually have unleashed a beast that

was going to devour the entire galaxy was horrifying.

“It’s attenuating,” Schilling told him. “Twenty-six thou-

sand years, or a little less, after the original Core detonation,

the electromagnetic wavefront will pass Earth at the speed

of light. Long before that happens, the heavier charged par-

ticles and plasmas, the hard, dangerous stuff, will have been

absorbed by intervening clouds of dust and gas.”

“Even so, ” a new voice said, “the astrophysicists are calling

it a microquasar. It won’t scour the Galaxy of life, fortunately,

but they estimate the total light output from our Galaxy will

more than quintuple, and probably set the astronomers in

Andromeda to scratching whatever they use for heads.”

“General Garroway,” Schilling said, “this is Socrates.

He’s your AI liaison with the Council of Lords.”

“Pleased to meet you, General, ” Socrates said. The voice

was mellifluous and deep, a rich baritone. Where Schilling

spoke with a slight accent, Socrates’ Anglic was perfect.

Well, he was an AI. He would be perfect in every way

possible.

“Hello, Socrates,” Garroway said. “The pleasure is mine.

Or do AIs feel emotion now?”

The AI chuckled. Either it had a genuine sense of humor,

or was programmed to mimic one quite well. Garroway did

wonder how far artificial intelligence had developed in the

past eight centuries.

“If you can’t tell the difference, ” Socrates told him, “and

if I can’t tell the difference, what’s the difference between

my feelings being programmed or natural? ”

“Point.”

“Socrates is a Star-level artificial sentience,” Schilling

explained. “That means he’s at least as bright as the smart-

est s-Human, but much faster. We refer to them as our

archAIngels.” Schilling pronounced the word “archangel,”

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HUMAN

but Garroway sensed the neologism within, and the mean-

ing behind it. “Sometimes I think they are the real rulers of

the Human domain now.”

“We all do what we can,” Socrates said. Garroway blinked.

A modest AI? Or was that simply another aspect of its pro-

gramming?

“There was quite a bit of speculation about how serious

the Core Detonation was,” Schilling said, picking up on the

earlier topic. “That was, oh, four or five centuries ago, when

we started getting hard data about the expanding Core wave-

front. Created a bit of a minor panic, in fact, according to

the history downloads.”

“If we managed to turn our own Galaxy into even a small

quasar,” Garroway said, “I’d think a little judicious panic

might be called for.”

A quasar was a galaxy with an exceptionally bright nu-

cleus, an active core that outshone the rest of the galaxy by

a hundred times or more. Quasars were also extremely dis-

tant. The closest known was three-quarters of a billion light

years away . . . which meant it was also a glimpse of some-

thing that had happened three-quarters of a billion years in

the past, ancient cosmic history. Accepted astrophysical the-

ory suggested that many or, perhaps, all large galaxies had

gone through a quasar phase early in their evolution, some

billions of years ago, as the supermassive black hole at their

cores devoured suns by the millions, spewing out the residue

as fantastic bursts of high-energy radiation, a blazing bea-

con visible across all of time and space. Eventually, the core

of the galaxy would be pretty well cleaned out, except for

the central black hole itself, of course, and the galaxy would

settle down to being a normal, well- behaved member of the

cosmic community.

Presumably, the Milky Way Galaxy had been through

such a phase some billions of years ago; the supermassive

black hole at the Core was an ancient quasar, slumbering

and quiescent now that much of the matter at GalCenter had

74 IAN

DOUGLAS

been devoured. But then the Commonwealth Fleet and the

Fleet Marines had come along late in the twenty-ninth cen-

tury and upset the delicately balanced megastructure the Xul

had constructed at the Core.

And a shadow, at the very least, of the ancient monster

had awakened once again.

“It should be spectacular, though,” Schilling told him.

“When the light gets this far out, our night skies will be in-

credible in the direction of Sagittarius. We think there will

be enough light streaming out from the Core that you’ll be

able to read by it.”

“The slower, heavier particles will pile up into the gas

clouds that surround the Galactic Hub and create shock

waves over the next five to ten thousand years,” Socrates

added, “triggering an incredible burst of star formation.

The Galaxy, in toward the Core, is going to be an amazing,

beautiful sight for ten thousand years or more afterward. ”

“Maybe I should go back into cybe-hibe,” Garroway said.

“Wake me when the show starts.”

“We’ll go you one better,” Socrates told him. “The Lords

of the Associative, or one important facet of them, at any

rate, want you and your Marines to go in there.”

“Say what?” He looked into that blue-white hell. The sim-

ulation carried no sensation of temperature, but he could

swear his face felt hot as he looked into that searing blaze of

light.

“We had assumed that the Xul presence at the Galactic

Core had been burned out by the Core Detonation over a

thousand years ago,” Socrates told him.

“Seems like a reasonable assumption,” Garroway said.

“Do you mean to tell me they survived in that?”

“We’re attempting to verify that now. We’ve deployed AI

probes to investigate. As you can imagine, the environment

poses certain . . . diffi culties.”

The view of the luminous rose of light expanded, the

viewpoint rushing in toward the inner Core. The sheer mag-

nificent beauty of the scene was overwhelming, and Garro-

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75

HUMAN

way had to remind himself that the environment must be as

hostile, in terms of radiation and temperature, as the surface

of a star.

“It is,” Socrates told him. “Keep in mind, though, that we

have encountered no fewer than twenty distinct species of

intelligent life dwelling either in the photospheres or within

the cores of their stars. Life evolves, develops, and adapts

everywhere, when given the chance.”

“Socrates,” Garroway said aloud, “did you just read my

mind?”

There was a slight hesitation. “I did, General. Excuse me,

please.”

“General Garroway hasn’t been exposed to the concept of

full access yet,” Schilling told the AI.

“So I understand now. It won’t happen again, General.

At least, not until you authorize it.”

“Full access?”

“High-end AIs, like Socrates, have what we refer to as

full access to human mentation. They can pretty much pick

up and track anything you’re thinking, without interfacing

through your implant.”

“I see. Why?”

“Social control, of course. And universal data access for

the Disimplanted.”

The way she said the words “social control” felt so natu-

ral, so completely matter-of-fact that Garroway wasn’t cer-

tain he’d heard her correctly at first. This, he refl ected, might

be the biggest gap between his own time and culture and

this one that he’d yet encountered.

Humankind had been working with direct man-machine

neural interfaces for the major part of the species’ technic

history—nineteen hundred years at least—and with various

forms of artificial intelligence for longer than that. Implant

technology had begun as crude molecular arrays of 2K pro-

tein processor nodes that facilitated direct downloads of data

from primitive computer nets. Eventually, those early implants

had evolved into nanochelated structures of complex design,

76 IAN

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organic-machine hybrids residing within the brain and run-

ning an enormous variety of software that usually included

a resident personal AI. These personal secretaries or “essis-

tants” could so perfectly mimic their fully organic host that it

was possible to hold a conversation with one on any topic and

be unaware that you were speaking with a machine—the fi -

nal evocation of the ancient proposal known as the Turing

Test.

Such essistants were considered vital in modern commu-

nications and interface technologies, and more and more in-

teractions with machines, from accessing research data banks

or piloting spacecraft to growing furniture or opening doors

or turning on a room’s illumination system, required an im-

plant.

Which left people without implants, the Disimplanteds,

or “Disimps,” out in the cold and dark, often literally.

But the AIs of Garroway’s day had been designed to pick

up only on those thoughts that were appropriately coded, pre-

ceded by a mental symbol that told the AI that it was wel-

come. The idea of allowing any intelligence, even a manmade

one, into his thoughts without permission was profoundly

disturbing.

And allowing machines to read minds for purposes of

“social control” was, to Garroway’s way of thinking, horri-

fying. Did that mean they had artifi cial intelligences prowl-

ing the streets of human worlds and habs, listening for stray

thoughts that might lead to social unrest, crime, or dissi-

dence?

And how did you tell the difference between an artifi cial

intelligence and a member of that new species Schilling had

mentioned . . . what had she called them? The Homo telae?

Could they read minds as well?

“I don’t think I like this full- access idea,” he told them.

“I don’t imagine you do,” Schilling said. “It probably feels

pretty strange . . . even creepy. It’s not a bad thing, however.

Crime—at least outside of the free zones—is almost un-

known. Intraspecies war—both civil war and war between

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separate human governments or religious groups—is all but

obsolete. Humankind has never known such an era of peace

and general well- being.”

“So what do the AIs do in this utopia of yours?” Garroway

said. “Eavesdrop on street corners, and call the cops when

they hear the random, disgruntled rant against the govern-

ment?”

“Not ‘cops,’ ” Socrates told him. “That’s antiquated ter-

minology. We refer to socons. Agents of social control.”

“This is sounding worse and worse.”

“Most socons are AIs,” Schilling said. “Though there are

human agents, of course. In most cases, they can correct

aberrant behavior directly and immediately, and the person

involved—whether he’s a criminal, a political dissident, or

mentally ill—can be adjusted, healed . . . and never even

know the adjustment has taken place.”

“Captain,” he replied slowly, “you are scaring the hell out

of me. Who decides what is dissident, and what is just an

expression of a less-than-mainstream opinion? Who deter-

mines what mentally ill is? What are the standards? It’s not

like you can diagnose mental illness by pulling a throat cul-

ture, damn it!”

“Gently, General,” Socrates told him. “It’s not as bad as

you think. Our system has worked, and worked well, for

over five centuries.”

Garroway started to reply, then thought better of it. Until

he had a better feel for this culture, and for its rules and regu-

lations both written and unwritten, he was going to need to

keep his mouth shut and his eyes, ears, and implant open.

Something he said now, in ignorance, might well prejudice

these people against both him and his own Marines.

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said, but his reservations

remained. “You were telling me, though, about alien intelli-

gences inhabiting stars.”

“Indeed. They seem to be relatively rare, but several spe-

cies, existing as coherent plasmas, have evolved within stel-

lar atmospheres, or, in two cases of which we know, deep

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within the stellar core. Obviously, our communications with

such beings are somewhat . . . limited. ”

The view of the Core Detonation had continued to grow

and change as they talked. The scene now appeared to be

centered on a glowing disk, a pinwheel of light shading from

red at the outer rim to an intense, eye-watering violet at the

center.

“Is that the Galactic Core?” Garroway asked. The pin-

wheel, obviously, was an accretion disk. At its center was a

tiny void, an emptiness, into which compressed gas and stel-

lar material appeared to be funneling, a large and massive

black hole. Dying matter shrieked its death scream in X-rays

and the far ultraviolet.

“No,” Socrates told him. “The Core is about 350 light

years in that direction.” Garroway sensed the gesture, deeper

into an impenetrable haze of blue-white radiance beyond.

“This is the Great Annihilator.”

Garroway had heard of it. A black hole, yes . . . but not, as

once had been imagined, the supermassive black hole at the

Galaxy’s exact center. The true Galactic Core consisted of a

black hole of about two million solar masses, but, until the

Core Detonation wavefront reached the vicinity of Earth, there

would be no physical evidence pinpointing it from Earth’s vi-

cinity save for the observed movements of core stars, no light,

no radiation of any sort.

The Great Annihilator, on the other hand, was a black

hole of only about fifteen solar masses, but it was far noisier—

as heard from Earth, at any rate—than its far larger brother

nearby. Twin shafts of high-energy radiation speared in op-

posite directions from the poles of its central hub, streams of

positrons emerging from the turbulent areas above the black

hole’s north and south poles. The interaction of antimatter

with normal matter hundreds of light years from the singu-

larity filled the Core with radio noise—the 511 keV screech

of positronium annihilating its normal- matter counterpart—

electrons. The object had been detected and named “The

Great Annihilator” by Earth astronomers millennia ago, but

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the discovery had only deepened the mystery of the actual

nature of the Galactic Core. By measuring the velocities of

stars in the Annihilator’s immediate vicinity, astronomers

had proven that it was a black hole, but not the far more mas-

sive one at the exact center that they’d been looking for.

In Garroway’s day, of course, it had been well understood

that the Xul Dyson cloud had been masking the radiation

leakage from the actual Core, and would continue to do so

until the Core Detonation crawled out into the Galactic sub-

urbs and impinged upon waiting detectors and sense organs.

The Great Annihilator, though, had become a footnote to

Galactic cosmography, a little- brother satellite of the larger,

better known singularity at GalCenter.

The Core Detonation would have swallowed the Great

Annihilator centuries ago. Evidently, the object had not been

destroyed, as might have been expected. Clouds of dust and

gas sweeping out from the Core explosions had spiraled into

the Annihilator’s accretion disk, which glowed now as

brightly as a supernova. So much matter continued to fall

into the singularity itself that vast quantities, instead of being

swallowed, were flung outward as radiant plasmas, and the

radio shriek of annihilating matter was far louder now than it

had been twelve hundred years before. Garroway could hear

that shriek overlaid upon the visual image. Inset windows

gave scrolling blocks of data describing the energies explod-

ing from the brilliant object. Radiation levels, he noticed,

were high enough to instantly fry any organic matter.

He watched the glowing object for a moment. Through fi l-

ters raised by the software controlling the imagery, he could

actually see the movement of the inner edge of the accretion

disk as it whipped across the singularity’s event horizon.

“We have detected signals emerging as nonlocal events

from within the Great Annihilator,” Schilling told him. “The

physics are . . . diffi cult. Suffice to say that phase-shifted habi-

tats may have been inserted into the black hole’s ergosphere.”

“Are you telling me,” he said slowly, “that there’s some-

thing alive inside that Hell?”

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“Something, yes,” Socrates said. “The Xul, or a part of

them. And they’re using their base within the Great Annihi-

lator to attack us.”

“Inside a black hole?”

“Within the ergosphere, yes.”

“That’s impossible,” Garroway said, shaking his head.

“Nothing can escape a black hole’s gravitational field if it

gets too close, not even light. That’s part of the thing’s defi -

nition.”

“You’re aware of phase shifting, aren’t you, sir?” Schil-

ling asked.

“Yes. We have . . . sorry, had bases and ships back in my

day that could rotate out of phase with four-dimensional

spacetime. They existed at the base state of Reality, what we

called the Quantum Sea.”

“The Xul apparently can do that as well,” Socrates said,

“and from the Quantum Sea, it’s possible to manipulate

gravity.”

“The quantum converters?” Schilling added. “The devices

we use to provide microsuns for our terraform projects in the

Kuiper Belt and beyond? We phase- shift those into the Quan-

tum Sea, where they can draw as much energy as we need

directly from the Reality base state. The Xul are doing some-

thing similar inside the Great Annihilator.”

“What?”

“We’re not sure,” Socrates said. “It’s possible that they

hope to affect the entirety of the Reality base state . . . to, in

effect, rewrite what we’re pleased to think of as reality.”

“Editing us out of existence?”

“It’s a possibility. That, at least, is one of the scenarios our

Xul iteration programs have developed. But it’s also possible

that they’re using singularity- identity nonlocality to infect

our AI and computer networks with alien emomemes.”

“Whoa,” Garroway said. “You just lost me . . . about eight

hundred years ago.”

“Singularity-identity nonlocality?” Schilling asked. Gar-

roway nodded.

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“The theory can be a bit murky,” Socrates told him. “Do

you know how stargates work?”

“Not the technical details, but yes,” Garroway said. “In

principle, at least.”

Stargates were immense artifacts scattered across the Gal-

axy and beyond, ten- to twenty-kilometer-wide rings within

which pairs of planetary-mass black holes revolved in oppo-

site directions. The interplay of moving gravitational fi elds

opened direct links between one gate and another, light years

distant, with which it was tuned. Exactly who had built them,

or when, was a mystery, but stargates were still the principal

means of long- range travel throughout the Galaxy.

“Stargates work,” Socrates told him, “because the move-

ment of singularities within two stargates can be tuned to

one another so that they essentially become congruent, a

fancy way of saying they are the same. Identical. The same

gate, but located in two widely separated places at once . . .

orbiting Sirius, say, and the Galactic Core. The theory de-

pends on quantum states and an aspect of quantum dynam-

ics called nonlocality, which says that two objects or particles

entangled at the quantum level remain connected to one

another, as though there was no space, no distance, between

them.”

“I know about that one,” Garroway said. “Albert Einstein

called it ‘spooky action at a distance,’ and refused to accept

that it described the universe realistically.”

“Albert . . . who?” Schilling asked.

“Einstein,” Socrates told her. “A pre- spaceflight phi los o-

pher.”

“Physicist, actually,” Garroway said. “At least according

to the history downloads I’ve seen.”

“Physicist, then,” Socrates agreed, “though physicists and

phi los o phers are much the same thing when it comes to de-

scribing aspects of the metaverse that can only indirectly be

apprehended, and which can only be described by myth and

metaphor. In any case . . . if you have access to base-state

reality in one black hole, you theoretically have direct access

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to all black holes . . . and to the star gates as well, since they

depend on artificial singularities for their operation.”

“We don’t know if they’re really trying to change reality,”

Schilling said. “That may be too much of a stretch even for

them. But we have detected signals emerging from several

stargates that suggest they’re broadcasting emomemes.”

“And what the hell is an emomeme?”

“ ‘Meme’ is an old term for a transmissible unit of cul-

tural information,” Socrates told him. “Especially one that

can be passed on from mind to mind verbally, by repeated

actions, or through general cultural transmission. Religions

are memes. So are fashions in bodily adornment. Or popu-

lar sayings or slogans or tunes or fads in entertainment or

advertising.”

“Right,” Schilling said. “If I say ‘va voob!’ That probably

doesn’t mean much to you.”

“ ‘Vavoob.’ Nope.” He shook his head. “Can’t say that it

does.”

“But it’s a pop ular saying in Sol-System cities right now.

It means . . . I don’t know. Sexy. Smart. Well integrated.”

“ ‘With it?’ ”

“With what?”

“Never mind. Your point is taken.”

“The expression is one of the current memes in human pan-

urban culture,” Schilling told him. “Comes from a routine by

Deidre Sallens, a well- known eroticomic VirSim personal-

ity. You haven’t been exposed, so it’s meaningless to you.”

“Memes tend to pass from person to person or group to

group like a virus,” Socrates added.

“I’ve heard the term before,” Garroway said. “Even in my

day. How is that different from an emomeme?”

“Emomemes are emotional memes . . . specifi cally those

affecting how people feel about other people, about ideas or

situations or groups. Things like racial stereotypes. Or preju-

dices against a given group of people or beings. A partic ular

religion. A partic ular cultural worldview. A partic ular sexual

practice or preference. They can also affect how strongly we

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respond to such impulses. Turning belief in a certain religious

worldview into fanati cism, for instance. Or anger into rage.”

“And . . . you’re saying the Xul are beaming these things

to us through the stargates?”

“There is intelligence to support this, General,” Socrates

told him. “Yes.”

“How? I mean, how do these emomeme things affect hu-

mans? I always thought of ‘meme’ as a kind of meta phor,

another word, maybe, for ‘idea.’ Not something with a phys-

ical reality.”

“In this case,” Socrates said, “they are quite objectively

real.”

“Think of extremely efficient, self-contained, and well-

camoflaged software,” Schilling told him, “viruses, if you

will, infecting the personal AIs resident in people’s implants.

Through the infected AIs, people’s attitudes, the strength of

their emotional responses, even their very belief structures

can be . . . changed.”

“Oh,” Garroway said. Then his eyes widened as the im-

plications became clear. “Oh! . . .”

6

2201.2229

Associative AI Net Access

Government Node

Earthring, Sol System

2245 hours, GMT

“Gentlebeings, we have a problem. A big problem.”

Star Lord Garrick Rame looked out from his electronic

viewpoint across the other representatives of the Associative

Conclave. The stadium- sized chamber appeared to be fi lled

with them, though only a handful were physically present.

Most appeared within translucent pillars of light; some of

them occupied luminous pillars that looked hazy or even

murky with their native atmospheres. The Eulers, for in-

stance, seemed to float within cylindrical columns of dark

and nearly opaque water, while the one Veldik present was

almost lost in the nearly impenetrable yellow mists of its

sulfurous world. A few pillars were night black, their occu-

pants nocturnal beings who shunned visible light.

“If you mean, Lord Rame, that the Xul group entity poses

a threat to the Associative, the evidence suggests otherwise.

We have no proof of these emomemonic manipulations you’ve

described.”

The speaker was Lelan Valoc, a transfi gured s-Human,

her enlarged and elongated skull encased in the nano en-

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hancement sheath hardwiring her into the Galactic Net. Her

image addressed the Conclave from the speaker’s dais a few

meters from Rame’s viewpoint.

In fact, each being linked into the Conclave saw the as-

sembly from the same electronic viewpoint. The AI running

the room simulation took care of projecting each image onto

the speaker’s dais as that representative was recognized.

Overhead, within the vast dome of the room’s interior, a

piercingly brilliant blue rose hung suspended in emptiness,

backdrop to a multi-hued spiral disk of infalling starstuff.

Rame had just completed his pre sentation, a virtual sim of

the final moments of the OM-27 Eavesdropper Major Dion

Williams, as it approached the Galactic Center. Together, the

assembled Conclave had witnessed the doomed craft’s ap-

proach toward the Great Annihilator, had witnessed the eerie

bending of light and beamed transmissions in a gravitational

lensing effect, had watched the vessel shudder, fl are, and

disintegrate.

The echoes of Lieutenant Vrellit’s shrill last words, broad-

cast over the vessel’s QCC unit, still hung in the air of the

chamber.

“Get! Them! Out! Of! My! Mind! . . .”

If the AI-crafted sim wasn’t proof, what was?

“My Lord, if there is a threat, as suggested by our simu-

lations,” Rame replied slowly, “we, this Conclave and the

many cultures it represents, would be at direct and terrible

risk. The Xul would have access to our memories, and to

the Metamind itself. They might even be able to infl uence

our deliberations without our knowing it. We must improve

our electronic security . . . and we must directly address the

Xul threat.”

“And I say the threat is overstated,” Valoc replied. “One

ship approaching a black hole at the Galactic Core destroyed?

There’s no indication that the Xul caused this. We might sim-

ply be seeing the accidental failure of that ship’s radiation

shielding within an unforgiving environment.”

“If that were all we were dealing with, my Lord,” Rame

86 IAN

DOUGLAS

said carefully, “I might agree with you. But we’ve had evi-

dence for centuries that the Xul have been learning how to

infiltrate our electronic networks.”

“And there has never been the slightest indication that our

security has been compromised,” Valoc replied, dismissive.

“Even if it had been, the internal protective measures al-

ready in place are more than adequate. These . . . these ru-

mors of Xul ghosts within our e-systems have persisted for

centuries, now. Specters. Chimeras. Surely, if they were able

to reach us, they would have done more to us by now than

give rise to idiot rumor and ghost stories!”

“And what,” Rame said, “if this rising tide of sociocultural

disturbances is due to Xul interference, Xul contamination,

Xul attacks through our own electronic nets? Maybe all we’ve

seen so far have been reconnaissance probes as they’ve tested

our systems, our defenses. Maybe it’s taken them this long to

learn enough about us to be able to attack us in this way! If

there’s even the slightest chance they are loose within the

Galactic Net . . . Lords of the Conclave, can we afford to take

that chance? ”

Rame felt an inner tug, and a voice whispered at the back

of his mind that another lord had been recognized. The new

speaker materialized, apparently suspended in emptiness be-

tween the flower of the Core Detonation and the crowd be-

low. It was a G’fellet, hunched and massive, its body encased

in a chitinous, segmented shell.

“The problem-difficulty,” it said, its two-throated voices

giving an odd, mismatched echo to the words as the Con-

claves translators attempted to keep up with the doubled and

not-quite-synchronous streams of thought, “lies-rests with

the lower ranks- the nadhre. Quell-end the rising-disobedience,

and the problem-difficulty is-will be solved.”

As it spoke, Rame accessed a background channel, check-

ing the Conclave library for data on the new speaker. He

thought he remembered this one, but it was always best to be

certain of your data.

Yes. He’d remembered correctly. The G’fel, from most

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human perspectives, were obsessed with hierarchy and the

chain of command. Nadhre was one of their words for the

lower castes within their culture—slaves, cleaners, social

guardians, and both male sexes of their species. G’fellet—a

neuter subspecies bred to facilitate communications—tended

toward a somewhat aristocratic detachment, an attitude Rame

thought of as “it’s not my problem.” Working productively

with the hard-shelled xenomalacostracans— they physically

resembled an uncomfortable mix of land crab and shrimp—

could be an adventure at times.

“These reported disturbances,” Rame said, “are the symp-

toms, my Lord. Not the disease.”

Another figure replaced the G’fellet—this one the icon

for a t-Human community representative identified as Ra-

dather. With no physical form to display, it used an avatar,

an image of a young man with green- slit eyes, cat’s ears, and

a tail. “The warriors Lord Rame called for should be suffi -

cient,” the uploaded personality said, “if their reputation is

to be believed.”

“How long,” Lord Valoc asked, “before these human Ma-

rines arrive?”

“The Globe Marines have been revived, Lord Valoc,” a

resonant voice said. The speaker, known only as the First

Associate, was an AI moderator resident within the govern-

ment Net. Without either a physical avatar or an electronic

icon, it was invisible, but its presence could be felt by all

linked into the system, huge, deep, powerful, and all but

omniscient. “Against my best judgment, but they have been

revived. I still fail to see what a handful of ancients can do

against this new threat.”

“We are not yet in agreement that there is a major threat,”

Valoc pointed out. “A threat, yes. But the Galaxy is large, the

Associative stable. I see no possibility of these . . . attacks, if

that is what they are, being more than a nuisance.”

“We would prefer to see hard proof that these phenome-

non are real, and that they in fact constitute a threat,” an-

other delegate put in, a paraholothurid from a world deep

88 IAN

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within the Sagittarian star clouds in toward the Galactic

Core. The taxonomical name indicated that the being’s mor-

phology in some ways was similar to that of a terrestrial sea

cucumber, though in fact it was heavily scaled, giving it the

appearance of a three-meter-long pine cone with a single red

eye glaring from within a nest of slender, branching manipu-

lators at the tip. They lived in seaside mounds of their own

excrement, communicated through bursts of radio noise, and

were arrogant egoists, certain of their privileged place in the

cosmos. Humans knew them as Cynthiads, presumably after

the person who’d first contacted them.

“And just what would you accept as a threat?” Rame

asked.

The being hesitated as though thinking about the ques-

tion, though it was of course impossible to read feeling or

intent into those alien features.

“The Master’s Eye is ever upon us,” it said after a mo-

ment, “and in fact we have nothing to fear from any of His

servants. There is always the possibility of misunderstand-

ing or accident, but the Master will keep us alive for His

plea sure.”

Which didn’t quite answer the question.

There was no personal name attached to the image; like the

Vulcans and numerous other species, Cynthiads either had no

concept of names for individuals, or their personal identifi ers

were meaningless to outsiders. A screech of broad- spectrum

radio static was tough to translate into syllables that could be

reproduced by the human voice. Even translating the general

meaning of their speech presented unusual problems, simply

because of the way they saw Reality.

Another being—an amphibious juvenile N’mah—was

speaking now, but Rame was no longer paying attention. His

essistant would catch anything of which he needed to be

aware and bring it to his attention later. For the moment, he

was interested in the Cynthiads, and in the problems of mu-

tual understanding.

According to their entry in the Conclave library, their

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view of the night sky, for half of each long, long year, looked

Coreward into a flattened, dust- mottled mass of stars and

nebulae that, ages ago, their ancestors had interpreted as the

principle sensory organ of their God. The Cynthiads viewed

themselves as the slaves of an ever-watching God, and for

thousands of years had been broadcasting their version of

the Gospel out into the Galaxy. They’d been extremely fortu-

nate that the Xul had never zeroed in on those transmissions.

Their homeworld was the tide- stressed moon of a superjo-

vian gas giant well outside of their star’s habitable zone, and

had, therefore, been repeatedly overlooked by searching Xul

hunterships.

Cynthiads took this as yet another sign of divine provi-

dence; Rame had decided that they were in for a rude shock

when the Core Detonation reached their system, perhaps eight

thousand years from now. The Cynthiads had an annoying

tendency to twist the words and realities of other species into

bizarre caricatures of what others accepted as fact, and it was

always a challenge to follow their lines of thought.

And that, Rame thought, was the big difficulty in all in-

terspecies communication within the Associative Conclave.

With a few notable exceptions, group minds like the Havod

and hive species like the Saarin Queen, no two members of a

single species thought in precisely the same way, or saw their

surroundings in exactly the same way. When you brought to-

gether the individual representatives of some thousands of

mutually alien species, not even the best translation AIs could

bridge the gap between one view of the cosmos and the next.

Humans with their narrow sensory range and monkey curios-

ity; placid, gas-giant balloonists suspended above bottomless

and storm-wracked gulfs; knots of organized plasmas riding

the magnetic loops of stellar coronae; tentacled, mathemati-

cally oriented Eulers lurking within the eternal night of the

benthic abyss; scaly, invertebrate Cynthiads squirming in

their own shit . . . true understanding between such mutually

alien beings demanded far more than simple translation. The

general meanings of concepts expressed through separate

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languages might come across more or less precisely . . . but

the worldviews of the creatures expressing them could be so

bizarrely shifted in meaning that they made no sense to oth-

ers whatsoever.

In most cases, difficulties in communication could be ig-

nored. The Associative was designed to be gently inclusive;

membership was completely voluntary, and there was little in

the way of government in the traditional sense. The Conclave

itself existed for the most part strictly as an advisory group

on matters of interspecies trade, information exchange, and

defense. The wildly differing ecologies, biochemistries, and

cultural preferences of the member races guaranteed that no

one species would try to dominate the others.

At least, that had been the idea behind the Associative in

the eight centuries of its existence so far. None of the mem-

ber races really cared about the worlds of other species; the

benefits of trade and data exchange far outweighed any pos-

sible profit arising from invasion, conquest, or coercion.

But the Xul presented the Galactic community with a spe-

cial challenge. Hardwired to see any sentience other than itself

as a threat, crafted by evolutionary imperatives to eliminate

anything perceived as a threat, the Xul were uninterested in

trade or data; their worldview demanded xenocide on a galac-

tic scale, which to human sensibilities was about as serious a

threat as it was possible to imagine.

Unfortunately, not all members of the Associative could

see it that way.

The N’mah had finished speaking, and Rame’s essistant

gave him a quick, catch- up synopsis. The N’mah had survived

for almost ten thousand years as rats in the walls, occupying

the internal structures of several stargates, escaping the Xul’s

notice by giving up star travel and much of their once highly

advanced technology. The answer, the N’mah representative

had just suggested, was simply to lie low, adopt a low techno-

logical profile, and wait for the Xul threat, if any, to pass.

Rame shook his head. For humans, that would mean giving

up their implants, which appeared to be how the Xul were

SEMPER

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HUMAN

transmitting their emomemes. And that simply was not a vi-

able option for the far-flung worlds of Humankind.