19

1902.2229

Blue Seven

Approaching Objective Reality

0849 hours, GMT

Lieutenant Garwe emerged from the fog of the illusion, shak-

ing his head. Where was he? For a moment, he’d been some-

where

else, some one else entirely, on a beach beneath a

brilliant subtropical sun, splashing ashore from a small boat

while trying to keep his powder dry. He remembered the

sand of the beach . . .

But what was beneath the whiplashing tentacles of his

Starwraith was not sand, quite, but the powdery gray rego-

lith of the Xul planet. He’d plowed into the surface in a spray

of dust, gouging a crater before regaining his senses.

What the hell was going on?

He called up a tactical display projected within his mind,

looking for other members of the squadron. There was no

one.

“Blue Squadron, Blue Seven,” he called. “Where is every-

one?”

A blip appeared on the tac display, IDed as Blue Two. That

was Maria Amendes. “Gar?” she asked. “Are you there?”

“Affirmative. Where the hell were you? Where were we?”

“I was . . . someplace else,” she told him. “I was on . . . on

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one of those funny ancient ships. A seagoing ship, not a star-

ship, with tall poles and sheets of cloth and lots of rope ev-

erywhere.”

Amendes, Garwe remembered, wasn’t much for history.

“You mean a sailing ship,” he said. “Eighteenth, maybe nine-

teenth century. . . .”

“I don’t know when it was. But I was a man in a blue and

red uniform. I was on this wooden platform high up on one

of those poles with a bunch of other men dressed like I was,

and we had these funny, long, heavy weapons, and—”

For just a moment, Garwe caught the echoes of what Amen-

des had experienced. She’d been a U.S. Marine on board a

vessel from the Age of Sail perhaps 2200 years earlier, part of

a squad assigned to the mizzentop during a broadside-to-

broadside battle with an enemy ship. The Marines were using

their muskets to try to pick off their opposite numbers in the

rigging of the ship alongside, then turning their fire on the en-

emy officers on the deck below. He could hear the thunder of

big guns, the rattle of musketry, taste the sharp bite of gun-

powder in the sulfurous and billowing clouds embracing both

ships.

He couldn’t see enough detail in that one glimpse to de-

termine exactly when that long- ago battle had taken place,

but it was close—within a few decades—of his own experi-

ence splashing ashore on a sun-drenched beach.

“What was it, Gar?” Amendes asked. “What’s happening

to us?”

“I’m not sure. It might be a Xul weapon. Close with me,

and let’s try to reach that opening up ahead. Looks like a way

inside.”

“What opening?”

“Bearing one-fi ve-fi ve.”

“Got it. On my way. I’ll meet you there.”

“Roger that.”

At optical frequencies, there was nothing to be seen but

gray rock and dust, the blue-violet mist in the sky, and a

thin slash of gold light marking the Xul world’s rings. His

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Starwraith, however, was processing data from the battlespace

net, a far-flung web of sensors, remote drones, and probes

that pulled in data from all wavelengths and presented it to

his tac display overlays.

Lifting from the ground on his gravitics, he began drift-

ing forward. His AI spotted a Xul point-defense weapon

three hundred meters away and he turned his X-ray laser on

it. Within his in- head display, a targeting cursor zeroed in

on the enemy gun, locking on to it. He thought-clicked the

triggering command. . . .

. . . as sand crunched beneath his shoes. The column had

been struggling ahead through soft beach sand beneath the

hot sun for an hour, now, muskets loaded and at shoulder

arms. Behind them came a column of fifty sailors off the

Cabot under the command of Lieutenant Weaver. Ahead,

Fort Montagu rose next to the emerald waters off New Prov-

idence Island, a low, deeply truncated pyramid with embra-

sures for cannon, and a red, white, and blue Union Jack

fluttering from a flagpole inside. The town of Nassau lay just

beyond, pastel-colored buildings gleaming in the sun. The

place, both town and fort, appeared unnaturally quiet, even

deserted.

The Marines had hoped to catch the fort by surprise, but a

signal gun had boomed out as they’d come ashore, sounding

the alarm. Bad luck, there. They would have to storm the

fort . . . unless the redcoats could be talked into surrender.

To that end, a short while before, Captain Nicholas had sent

a runner on ahead with a message for a Governor Montfront

Browne, advising him to avoid bloodshed and surrender the

town.

A puff of smoke appeared at one of the fort’s embrasures,

followed seconds later by the far-off boom of a cannon. Porter

saw something strike the beach a hundred yards ahead and to

the left, sending up a spray of sand between the column and

the sea. A second later, it hit again, farther up the beach, and

then a third time, the round skipping across the sand as it

flashed past. Several of the men in ranks bellowed derisively.

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“Damned lobsterbacks!” Private Dolby called out. “Y’ninnies

can’t hit a barn wall at arm’s length from yer noses!”

“Silence in the ranks!” Captain Samuel Nicholas called.

“Sergeant Prescott! Have the men deploy in line of battle, if

you please.”

“Aye, sir!” the sergeant, a grizzled old- timer off the Al-

fred, growled. “Awright, you men! You heard the Captain of

Marines! Column, halt! Battle formation, hut!”

The Marine drummer rattled off a long roll as the Conti-

nental Marines broke out of column formation and took up

two parallel lines, one behind the other, facing the fort. Por-

ter was in the front rank, feeling nakedly exposed and vul-

nerable. The fort was still several hundred yards away, well

beyond effective musket range.

“The men may fix bayonets, Sergeant.”

“Aye, sir! Awright, Marines! Horder . . . harms! ”

More or less as one, the lines of Marines brought their mus-

kets down off their shoulders, slapped them into port arms,

then dropped the buttstocks to the sand sharply alongside

their right legs. They’d been practicing and drilling these

maneuvers for weeks, getting them letter perfect, but in the

excitement of imminent battle, the execution this morning

was a bit ragged.

“Fix . . . bayo nets!”

Porter drew the slender, 14-inch steel blade of his bayonet

from its scabbard, fixed the locking ring over the muzzle of

his weapon, and snapped it home.

Captain Nicholas walked in front of the lines, his sword

drawn. “Men . . . no fancy speeches this morning. Right now,

up in New England, General Washington desperately needs

gunpowder for the Continental Army outside of Boston. Over

there is the British supply depot for the Bahamas . . . and

about six hundred barrels of black powder. We’re here to take

it away from those fellows. Sergeant, you may deploy the

men for the attack.”

“Yessir! Huzzah for the captain, lads!”

“Huzzah!” Porter and the rest of the 250 Marines and

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sailors shouted in shrill unison. With surprise lost at the

landing, they might as well let the British know they were

coming. “Huzzah! Huzzah! ”

“Marines! Charge . . . bayonets! At the walk . . . for’ard . . .

harch! ”

Right foot first as he’d been taught, John Porter stepped

forward, his musket held stiffly at his right side, bayonet lev-

eled at the enemy. He wondered if they would fire a volley

before they reached the wall . . . and how close that might

be. He wondered if they would have to storm those sloping

stone and wood walls with the bayonet, and how many men

might die in the attempt. He wondered . . .

A second puff of smoke erupted from the fort. Another

ball struck the sand just ahead, and Porter wondered if he

was about to die.

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines

Within Objective Reality

0847 hours, GMT

Nal wondered if he was about to die. For a moment,

he’d been locked in a terrible, life-or-death struggle with a

nightmare apparition of black metal-ceramic and lashing

tentacles . . . but the vision faded and he was back on the

barricades outside the city of Derna.

Musket fire crackled from behind the barricades, knock-

ing down several Greek and Arab mercenaries. Sergeant

Derek was caught now in a desperate, life-or-death struggle

with some hundreds of turbaned Barbary Coast pirates, and

for a horrible moment, when Eaton was shot and the assault

began to falter, it seemed as though the attack was doomed at

last. Derek recovered from his bayonet thrust, then whipped

the stock of his musket around to smash the jaw of another

pirate rushing him from the left. Just in front of him, a mus-

ket boomed and Private John Whitten caught the round high

in his chest, sprawling to the ground in an untidy splay of

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arms and legs and pooling blood. Derek lunged again with

his bayonet, cutting down the pirate who’d just fi red.

And then, suddenly, magically, the enemy was running,

running, turning their backs on the polyglot band of Ma-

rines and mercenaries and fleeing into the town. The men

began cheering, some of them throwing caps and turbans

into the air. Against all expectations, against all odds, the

rush had carried the barricades and broken the enemy line

of defense.

Nearby, the naval midshipman with the column was tying

off a rough ban dage around General Eaton’s wrist. The man

gave a thin-lipped smile and drew his pistol with his right

hand. “We’re not done yet!” he bellowed, pointing with the

weapon. “The fort, men!”

Flushed and panting with exertion and victory, the hand-

ful of Marines and mercenaries cheered more loudly. After

a mere sixty of them had stormed the barricades and set

hundreds of defenders to fl ight, anything seemed possible

now. As Derek began pulling the force back into order again,

though, he felt a dark flash of foreboding. Of the seven en-

listed Marines in the party, including himself, three—Thomas,

O’Brian, and Steward were wounded, Steward critically—

and one, John Whitten, was dead. Over half of the Marine

contingent was out of action, now . . . and the Marines had

been all that had held Eaton’s bizarre little army together for

the past seven weeks. Several Christian Greek mercenaries

lay dead as well, along with several Muslims, and a dozen

men out of the sixty were wounded. The victory at the bar-

ricades had come at a high price. One of the wounded men

insisted he was still able to fight, but the other two would be

left behind with some Greeks to watch over them.

The harbor fort lay just ahead, ominously silent. The na-

val midshipman raised a pre- arranged signal flag from a city

wall parapet, and moments later the naval gunfire from the

flotilla offshore slackened, then died away.

“We take that fort and the city is ours!” Eaton declared.

“Victory or death!”

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Eaton, Derek had long since concluded, was a vainglorious

idiot with a penchant for melodrama. But the fort appeared

empty, almost inviting.

Gunsmoke clung to the streets of Derna like a thick, New

England fog as the ragged army, with four enlisted Marines

and one officer in the van, began making its way through

narrow streets toward Derna’s harbor fort.

Blue Twelve

Objective Reality

0849 hours, GMT

Lieutenant Kadellan Wahrst wondered what was happen-

ing. She’d been . . . on her belly in the wheat, as machine-

gun fire sliced the stalks inches above her back. Then she’d

been crawling, trying to work her way around the Hun gun

position. And then . . .

She guided her Starwraith up to the opening, a twenty-

meter triangular cavern mouth yawning in the gray surface

of the Xul world. Laser beams and particle cannon continued

to gouge huge chunks from Xul surface structures, silencing

the defensive weapons one by one. In the violet- blue mists

overhead, flights of Marine Maelstrom heavy fighters off of

the Nicholas flew dangerously low across the fi re- torn land-

scape, guided to Xul targets by strikepod Marines on the

surface, or by unmanned battlespace drones and recon AIs.

Captain Xander’s icon was gone from her in- head display.

No . . . there she was. Fifty meters distant and closing. What

was wrong with their tracking?

“Blue One! Blue Twelve! Where’ve you been?”

“I . . . I’m not sure what happened.” Captain Xander’s

voice sounded shaken. “I was . . . in Mexico. Mexico. A place

called Chapultepec. . . .”

“Fuck,” Blue Nine, Misek Bollan said. “I was in some

kind of small, open metal boat. Explosions in the water ev-

erywhere. And the beach was so far. . . .”

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HUMAN

“We may be under attack,” Xander said. “Psychic attack.

Or possibly through our implants. Shake it off!”

“We’ve got an entrance to the Xul underground here!”

“I’m coming.”

Xander, Bollan, and three other Marines joined Wahrst mo-

ments later. Their scanners showed no signs of life or move-

ment within, but that didn’t mean the Xul weren’t lying in wait,

their power systems damped down to near invisibility. Theory

said the Xul “pilots” of those war machines lived on their

equivalent of the Net, digital intelligences that could animate a

lifeless piece of metal with a thought and turn it deadly.

“Nicholas, Blue One!” Xander called over the main QCC

channel. “We are entering Objective Reality.”

And that was a misnomer if Wahrst had ever heard one,

she thought. Whatever was happening around her, it wasn’t

reality, objective or otherwise. As she entered the cavern’s

mouth, the darkness faded to bright sunlight, to waving stalks

of wheat, to pillars of climbing black smoke and the bellow

and howl of artillery rounds.

Corporal Edgar O’Malley was crawling fast now, on his

hands and knees, his Springfield awkwardly slung over his

back. His destination was the tree line to his left, now less

than twenty yards away.

All across the battlefield, tiny groups of Marines, their

numbers decimated in those first few bloody moments of the

advance, had abandoned their worse-than-

useless French

training and hit the deck, continuing to move forward but

taking advantage of every bit of cover the shell-ravaged fi elds

and woods had to offer. In a way, it was the supreme Ameri-

can military gesture, reverting to Indian tactics to defeat an

enemy that expected them to march and maneuver parade-

ground fashion in plain and easy- to-kill sight. American co-

lonials had used such tactics to drive the British column all

the way back from Concord to Boston in 1775. Now the U.S.

Marines were using them to gain a foothold in the woods.

Belleau Wood, the place was called, a tiny comma of for-

est two miles long and narrowly pinched at the middle. It

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IAN DOUGLAS

occupied the center of a triangle marked by three shell-blasted

villages—Belleau, Bouresches, and Lucy-Le-Bocage—and

its sole importance lay in the German high command’s de-

termination to teach the newly arrived Americans a bloody

lesson in the realities of Euro pean warfare.

Emerging from the wheat, O’Malley crawled over a low

hummock and slid down among a small clump of Marines

huddled in the scant shelter afforded by a smoking shell cra-

ter. Other Marines lay and crouched nearby, trying to return

fire against the incessant and deadly chatter of the German

Maxim guns. The mangled dead and dying lay scattered ev-

erywhere.

“Fuck this!” one of the men inside the crater shouted. He

rose to his feet, fully exposed now to the enemy fire. With a

start, O’Malley recognized him. He’d seen his photographs,

and even seen him in person at a military review a few

weeks before. He was Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly, one of

the old- breed leathernecks, a two-time Medal of Honor win-

ner from the Boxer Rebellion and Haiti.

Daly waved his bayoneted rifle over his head with a wild,

forward sweep. “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want

to live forever?”

With a roar, the Marines in the shell hole scrambled to their

feet and clambered out, rushing forward with Daly in the

lead. Elsewhere across the bloody wheat field, other Marines,

singly and in small, huddled groups saw the charge, rose up,

and joined it.

And O’Malley raced forward with the rest of them, shout-

ing wildly.

Garroway, Gold One

Above Objective Reality

0849 hours, GMT

The sharp, cold pain in his leg brought Garroway scream-

ing back to full consciousness. He was again on board the

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HUMAN

Nicholas, lying in his link couch, his Starwraith unattended

somewhere within the depths of the Great Annihilator’s

gravitational maw. A Navy corpsman bent over him, look-

ing concerned. “General? Are you okay? What happened?”

The pain was fading but its memory remained. He also

remembered his last glimpse of the battle, the screaming

mob of Chinese Boxers as they closed in on him, jabbing

and lunging at him with their spears and pikes. Sitting up,

he tugged at his trousers, exposing his left calf. An angry

red welt there was rapidly fading. “Son of a bitch.”

“What happened to your leg?” the corpsman asked. He

reached for a nanospray therapeutic unit. “Here, let me in-

ject you. . . .”

“Forget it, son,” Garroway told him, waving him off. “I

need to think about this.”

He dropped back on the link couch, but not to reconnect

with the Starwraith. He wanted to talk this over with So-

crates or one of the other high-level AIs, but if the Xul had

compromised the Associate Fleet’s electronic networks, the

AIs too might be compromised.

He began linking in with his command constellation. Two,

Geisman and Bamford, were still linked to other Starwraiths

at Objective Reality, but the other nine were merely linked in

at the Nicholas’ end of the data stream, managing the battle.

“Heads up, people!” he snapped over the circuit. “We

have a problem.”

Recon Zephyr

Objective Reality’s Ring

0849 hours, GMT

Lieutenant Amanda Karr was a part of the chorus. Through

Luther and a set of translation programs compiled over the

centuries by other penetrations of Xul ships and networks,

she could merge with the litany and follow it.

They were researching the Marines.

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These are ancient enemies. We have faced them be-

fore. . . .

We have faced them. We have beaten them, absorbed

them. . . .

And they have beaten us, time and time again.

Survival is paramount. We must survive.

To survive we must find their weaknesses and de-

stroy them.

Destroy them. . . .

Karr moved through a sea of chanting voices, unnoticed,

the penetrator program providing her with a software shell

that let her move through the alien electronic network, tast-

ing, listening, understanding. Hundreds, no, thousands of

distinct data streams carried encyclopedic volumes of infor-

mation that seemed to relate to the history of the Marine

Corps. As she sampled the streaming data packets, she caught

glimpses of ancient, seagoing sailing ships, of ranks of men

in stiff-necked uniform jackets carrying antique powder fi re-

arms, of men in cloth uniforms and steel helmets, of men in

various types of space suits and combat armor.

She merged with one stream. She saw a frozen, snow-

covered hillside. Gunnery Sergeant Donald Atkins crouched

in his fighting hole, aiming a primitive pulse laser at an ad-

vancing wave of dark-clad figures. To left and right, other

Marines in mid- twenty-first-century combat dress calmly

picked out their targets and fired. The heavy backpack bat-

teries powering their Sunbeam, Mk. IX lasers had been

placed in their holes by their feet; winking orange indicator

lights indicated that all of the power packs

were nearly

drained dry.

And the Chinese Hegemony hordes kept coming. . . .

Karr could hear Atkins’ thoughts. The year was 2061, and

the place was Hill 440 outside of Vladivostok, in east-

maritime Rus sia. The Marine Third Division had been called

in to help America’s Rus sian allies repel the Hegemony’s at-

tempt to take over the entire Rus sian Far East.

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The winking light on Atkins’ battery pack went red, then

faded, and his Sunbeam died.

“That’s it for my laser,” he called over the tactical comm

net. Setting the useless weapon aside, he drew his service

sidearm, a high-power 10mm Colt M2015 automatic.

“Same here,” Captain Norman said from a nearby posi-

tion. “We hold here, Marines. We hold! ”

The front ranks of the oncoming army were only fi fty me-

ters away, now. Atkins chambered a round and took aim. . . .

Karr jerked back out of the data stream. The simulation . . .

no, the alternate reality, the parareality within the fl ow was

powerful and compelling. But where was it coming from? It

was inconceivable that the Xul would have enough informa-

tion about human and Corps history to create such a detailed

illusion. The information had to be coming somehow from

the Marines’ own libraries.

A digital scout within an electronic jungle, she began to

investigate more deeply.

Blue Seven

Approaching Objective Reality

0849 hours, GMT

A third cannon shot boomed out from the fort, struck

sand, and skipped toward the Marine formation. At Nicho-

las’ shouted orders, the two ranks of Marines parted, divid-

ing left and right, and the near-spent ball rolled harmlessly

between them. Another order, and the ranks came together

again, continuing the relentless advance on the fort.

The guns appeared to be silent, now. Far off in the dis-

tance, a bugle sounded and, moments, later, the fl ag hanging

from the fort’s fl agstaff lowered.

“Damn my eyes!” a sailor called out. “Th’ buggers’re sur-

rendering!”

With quickening excitement, John Porter and the rest of

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the Continental Marines swept toward the fort, as the gates

swung open to receive them.

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines

Within Objective Reality

0849 hours, GMT

And in the Tripolitean town of Derna, a handful of Ma-

rines rushed the gates of the harbor fort. Enemy re sistance

appeared to have collapsed entirely, and Mustafa’s troops

were scattering everywhere.

To the south and west, Hamet’s cavalry had swept into

Derna unopposed. The defenders on that side of the town,

apparently, had been drawn off by Eaton’s assault on the

eastern barricades, leaving the way wide open for Hamet’s

men. They’d occupied an empty castle on the outskirts of

town, then moved on to seize the governor’s palace.

Offshore, in the harbor, the guns of the tiny American

flotilla fell silent.

The harbor fort’s gates stood open, and Sergeant Derek

charged inside. . . .

Blue Twelve

Objective Reality

0849 hours, GMT

Beneath the eaves of Belleau Wood, Corporal Edgar

O’Malley followed Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly at a fl at-out

run, as German bullets zipped and buzzed like angry hornets,

and the ground trembled to the crump and thud of explosions.

The Maxim gun position that had driven O’Malley to ground

in the fi rst place was less than fifty yards to his right, on the

edge of the forest.

A gray shape rose from behind a tangle of logs and cut

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HUMAN

brush just ahead. O’Malley raised his Springfield and trig-

gered off a round, and the gray shape sprawled to the ground.

Still cheering, the other Marines swept into the forest, tak-

ing more casualties, but sweeping the startled Germans

from fighting holes and trenches.

Working his way to his right, O’Malley found himself a

scant twenty yards behind and to the right of the machine-

gun nest. A gunner, a loader, and three other men with the

characteristic coal-scuttle helmets of the Imperial German

Army crouched in a hole barricaded with timber, their full

attention still focused on the sun-drenched glare of the

wheat field in front of them. The gunner clutched the twin

grips of the deadly Maschinengewehr ’08 inches in front of

his face, squeezing off tight, professional bursts at the Ma-

rines still advancing across the open ground.

O’Malley leaned against a tree, took aim, and squeezed off

a single shot. The machinegunner dropped, his helmet drilled

at the temple by the .30-caliber round. O’Malley worked the

bolt of his rifle, sending spent brass spinning through the air

as he chambered a new round, took aim again, and fi red. One

of the Hun infantrymen, just turning to take the gunner’s

place behind the Maxim gun, jerked and fell. O’Malley trig-

gered a third round, and a third German lurched to one side,

sprawling face down over the barricade.

O’Malley was doing some fast calculating. His Spring-

field fed from a five- round internal magazine. He’d fi red

once when he entered the woods . . . and three times more

in fast succession just now. He had one round left, and two

Germans in front of him, both of whom had fi nally fi gured

out where the superbly accurate rifl e fire was coming from,

and who were turning now to face him. He could kill one of

the two, but not both.

For an agonizing couple of seconds, O’Malley and the

two German infantrymen faced one another. Then one of

the Germans dropped his Mauser rifle and raised his hands.

“Kamerad!”

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Coolly, O’Malley swung his aim to cover the second Ger-

man, who quickly dropped his rifle as well. “Ve zurrender! ”

the second man called in heavily accented English.

And then more Marines were swarming into the woods

out of the bloody fi eld beyond.

20

1902.2229

Marine Ops Center

Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas

0850 hours, GMT

“It’s not just some kind of projected illusion,” Janis Fremantle

was saying. “We’re getting reports that Marines are actually

dropping off the tactical scans, as if they really are teleport-

ing someplace else. Some when else.”

“And Zephyr doesn’t think the Xul are doing it?” Garro-

way asked.

“Oh, the Xul are involved somehow. All of our Zephyr

penetrators are tracking the data streams responsible inside

the Xul Net. But the Xul may not be aware of what they’re

doing.”

“Maybe they’re data mining,” Colo nel Jordan, the constel-

lation’s computer expert, said. “Trying to find out who’s at-

tacking them.”

“Or they’re using it as a distraction,” Major Allendes sug-

gested.

“It could be a damned effective weapon,” Colo nel Adri

Carter, Garroway’s Executive Officer, pointed out. “If our

people are simming as other people, in other situations, other

places, they can’t pay attention to where they are physically.”

Garroway thought again about how real, how all-consum-

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IAN DOUGLAS

ing the hallucination had been, and nodded agreement. He

really had been a Marine named Myers, really had been

wounded on the barricaded Tartar Wall above the Legation

Quarter in 1900 Peking. His leg was still throbbing with the

memory.

“And it’s possible the Xul don’t know how completely

they’re scrambling us,” he said. “If they did, they might have

put up a stronger counterattack. Either that, or we haven’t seen

their end game yet.”

“You mean they’re still setting us up for the kill?” Ranser

asked.

“Something like that.”

“Perhaps,” Rame suggested, “it’s an attempt to communi-

cate.”

“Also possible. But all we can go on now is the effect their

attempts are having on us. So far, it’s more like a weapon than

chit-chat. What kind of command control do we still have?”

Major Den Kyle was the command constellation’s se nior

QCC Network Controller . . . the se nior human, at any rate.

Garroway had ordered all AIs and digital humans to stand

down, just in case they’d been contaminated by Xul elec-

tronic infiltration. “At any given moment,” he said, “we have

solid links with perhaps half of our personnel over there. It’s

like Janis said. They keep popping in and out, as if they’re

going someplace else. When something happens—like you

getting stuck with that spear, sir—to jar them out of it, they

come back.”

“We need to put more pressure on the bastards,” Garroway

said. “How long until we can rotate again, Admiral?”

Ranser consulted an inner checklist. “We’re ready any

time, General. But we’re not scheduled to go back in for an-

other—”

“Pass the word to all hands, then execute our next rota-

tion,” Garroway said. “Remember, a lot more time is passing

out here than in there. The bad guys won’t be expecting us to

pop up again so soon.” He turned away suddenly.

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“General?” Ranser asked. “Where are you going?”

“Back inside,” Garroway replied. “I need to see this from

over there. . . .”

Blue Seven

Approaching Objective Reality

0850 hours, GMT

The gates opened as the Marines and sailors marched up

to the fort. Inside, there were only a handful of defenders.

The three cannon shots fired from the walls had been a token

defense, a means of preserving honor. Honor preserved, they

could now surrender.

A painfully young redcoat lieutenant was in charge of the

defenders. Nicholas accepted his sword, then returned it to

him. His men, Nicholas said, would be paroled on their word

of good behavior.

In any case, there weren’t enough Continentals there to

waste guarding prisoners.

One ceremony was crucial, however. As the Marines stood

in ranks at attention in the parade ground at the center of the

fort, as the Marine drummer rolled off a sharp tattoo, Samuel

Nicholas broke out the Grand Union flag . . . thirteen red and

white horizontal stripes, with the red, white, and blue Union

Jack inset at the upper corner of the hoist. It was the same

flag that had flown over the Providence and the other ships of

the tiny American Navy.

Porter watched the flag as it climbed the mast and felt a

peculiar, almost surging tug at heart and throat. Not the

British flag . . . his flag. America’s fl ag.

And as he watched, another presence grew stronger in his

mind. Porter was fading, Garwe growing stronger. It was

Marek Garwe standing there in Fort Montagu, watching the

flag-raising ceremony, feeling the sharp rush of pride even

though the people he was watching had been dead 2,200

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IAN DOUGLAS

years, and the flag of a long-vanished republic meant little

now save as a historical curiosity.

He was still powerfully moved.

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines

Within Objective Reality

0850 hours, GMT

Sergeant Derek raced through the open gates of the fort,

close behind O’Bannon, waving his sword, and Eaton, arm

ban daged, holding a cocked flintlock pistol in his good hand.

Many of the fort’s gunners had fled already, and several of

the nine-pounder carriages had been smashed by gunfi re

from the Argus and the other American ships, but several

cannon remained intact, and a number of Arab gunners still

manned them.

Derek bayoneted a Barbary soldier wielding a scimitar just

beyond the gate. Eaton raised his pistol and fired at one of the

gun crews on the platform behind the fort’s palisades. A tur-

baned soldier dropped his ramrod, slumping over the weap-

on’s muzzle. The other members of the gun crew scattered,

running for cover, and the fever caught among the other gun

crews as well. In moments, the Barbary troops were scram-

bling over the low walls, fleeing the fort and leaving it to the

cheering Americans, Greeks, and Arab mercenaries.

Most of the cannon had been reloaded in preparation for a

massed broadside at the American ships. Shouting, waving

his sword, O’Bannon began bullying the Greek Christians

and Arab Muslims, getting them to manhandle the heavy

guns around to face the opposite direction, down into the

heart of the city.

“Sir!” Derek called out. “The flag! . . .”

The Tripolitan flag still hung from the flagstaff in the cen-

ter of the fort, and firing from beneath those colors would be

a serious breach of military custom. “Right you are, Sergeant,”

O’Bannon replied. Trotting down the stone steps from the

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HUMAN

parapet, where his men continued to wrestle the captured

guns around to the south wall, he unfastened the lanyard and

quickly hauled down the fl ag.

He had another flag tucked away inside his blue jacket.

Pulling it out, he attached it to the lanyard, then swiftly hauled

the banner up the flagpole. It broke in the offshore breeze,

fifteen white stars on a blue fi eld, fifteen horizontal red and

white stripes along the fl y.

The Marines cheered, then, and, perhaps because it was

infectious, so did the Greek mercenaries . . . and then even

the Arabs were cheering as well. It took a few moments, but

as the cheers and huzzahs died away, Derek could hear more

cheering, this floating in across the harbor. The brig Argus

was close enough that he could see blue-jacketed sailors

crowding her ratlines and rails, waving their flat hats, and

cheering wildly. A similar commotion appeared to have bro-

ken out on board the more distant Hornet and Nautilus.

Only then did the real meaning, the real magic of the mo-

ment strike Derek.

The United States of America had been in existence for just

twenty-nine years. During that time, she’d fought a Revolu-

tion lasting seven years, as well as an undeclared and totally

maritime quasi-war with France. Now, America was fi ghting

for her right as a nation of the world, the equal of all others,

the right to unrestricted commerce on the high seas without

being forced to pay humiliating tribute to foreign princes.

And for the first time in her brief history, her flag had just

been hoisted above a bastion of the Old World.

The U.S. Marines had made their mark upon history, and

nothing, absolutely nothing, could possibly stop them now.

Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas

0851 hours, GMT

“Three . . . two . . . one . . . rotate!”

“Initiate dimensional translation.”

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IAN DOUGLAS

At Ranser’s command, the ten-kilometer bulk of the Sam-

uel Nicholas dropped out of normal space and into the el-

dritch otherness of the Quantum Sea. She materialized almost

exactly where she’d been before, perhaps fi ve hundred kilo-

meters from the Xul world- base. Although the Nicholas was

primarily a transport, she mounted massive X-ray and gamma

ray lasers in turrets on her outer hull, and possessed numer-

ous mag-accelerators capable of whipping antimatter war-

heads or simple lumps of dead mass to near-light velocities

and slam them into the target.

For perhaps a quarter of a second, the Nicholas hung in

empty space, unnoticed. With the difference in time fl ow

within this region, the ship had been gone for less than a min-

ute. Then the Xul began to take notice of her. At the same

time, her own fire control computers had located the tran-

sponders of Marines and Associative ships in the region,

and targeted areas of the worldlet where they could avoid

inflicting casualties through friendly fire. Gouts of light be-

gan sparking and flashing across the planet’s surface as the

Nicholas main weapons came to bear.

The Associative Fleet continued their ongoing bombard-

ment as well, and in seconds the entire face of the Xul world

appeared to be sparkling with a multitude of hits.

The enemy’s fi re didn’t slacken, however, and in seconds

both the battlecruiser Poseidon and the cruisers Hesperides

and Azuran were savaged by multiple beams from the Xul

worldlet. Multiple explosions ate through the vessel’s hulls,

leaving the Poseidon a drifting hulk, the other two as ex-

panding clouds of hot gas and debris.

The surviving Associative ships continued the bombard-

ment, however, working to suppress the Xul surface structures,

turrets, and weapons mounts and reduced the volume of en-

emy fire. After twenty seconds, the huge transport winked out

once more, vanished back to four- D space. And, seconds later,

it reappeared, drifting in a different direction, this time, ham-

mering the Xul world from a different quarter.

Xul combat machines emerged from caverns and shielded

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307

HUMAN

entrances in black, swarming clouds. They were met by

squadrons of heavy F/A-750 Nightstar fighters and A/S-4000

Maelstroms, cutting through the clouds instants after devas-

tating high-energy beams burned through them.

Many of the fighters lost their human components momen-

tarily, as the Marines in their cockpits shifted into simula-

tions coming through the combat Net, but the AIs continued

flying them. Some fighters winked off of tactical displays en-

tirely, to reappear moments later, as high- volume data streams

interacted with the strangely malleable pseudo- space of the

Quantum Sea.

Overall, the Marine and Navy forces were able to keep up

the pressure, however.

In the sky and beneath the ground, within the Quantum

Sea and at a thousand realities across time and space, the

Marine assault of Objective Reality continued.

Blue Seven

Objective Reality

0851 hours, GMT

The gun powder that was supposed to be in Nassau wasn’t

there.

It took fourteen days to load the supplies captured at Nas-

sau on board the tiny American squadron—eighty-eight can-

non, sixteen thousand shells, ten thousand rounds of musket

ammunition, and other supplies—but the majority of the pre-

cious gunpowder stored there had been moved elsewhere the

day before.

During the voyage back from Nassau, the flotilla had en-

gaged a British warship, the HMS Glasgow, and Nicholas’

Marines had helped man the broadside cannon. The fi ght was

inconclusive, but Lieutenant John Fitzpatrick and six Marines

had been killed—the first Marines ever to die in combat—

and four others had been wounded.

The powerful surge of emotion, of pride in the Corps and

308

IAN DOUGLAS

the Corps’ history, was giving way as Lieutenant Garwe

began slipping back into control of the simulation.

The raid on Nassau had been a spectacular success by any

measure, but there were ongoing debates that tended to cloud

the light of that bright victory. Commodore Esek Hopkins,

the commander of the little Continental Navy fl otilla that

had seized the Bahamian port, came under censure. His

orginal orders from Congress had been to clear the Chesa-

peake Bay of British raiders, but he’d disregarded those or-

ders to carry out the raid on Nassau. On his return, his fl eet

was blockaded helplessly inside Narragansett Bay, and there

were allegations of his incompetence and inaction, both at

Narragansett Bay and in the action with the Glasgow.

In January of 1778, he’d been permanently relieved of his

command.

And there were questions . . . questions. Tun Tavern, the

recruiting station so beloved of the Corps, might not in fact

be the actual place where the Marines had first been re-

cruited. The histories suggested that it had been another

tavern entirely, the Conestoga, owned by Nicholas’s family,

where the Marine Corps saga had actually begun. The rec-

ords from the era were so fuzzy and incomplete, it was im-

possible to be sure of what was real, what was myth.

Garwe felt himself tottering on the edge of a swirling, dark

depression. Who were the Marines, anyway? Their history

had all been a shabby lie. The landing at Nassau had been al-

most unopposed, and the powder they’d hoped to seize was

gone. Esek Hopkins had been disgraced, and the Marines

during the Revolution—aside from recruits enlisted and taken

directly on board naval vessels—had primarily served with

Washington’s army as artillerymen, though a handful had

sailed down the Mississippi in 1778 to deny New Orleans to

British merchants.

For the most part, the Continental Marines had proven less

of a force than Corps legend suggested. Though the modern

Corps traced the birth of the Marines back to Tun Tavern and

November 10, 1775, the Continental Marines had been dis-

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309

HUMAN

banded in 1785, and America’s Marines had gone out of exis-

tence, along with the Continental Navy. They would not be

resurrected until President John Adams signed a bill estab-

lishing the Marines in July of 1798.

Lieutenant Garwe came out of the simulation within the

cavern beneath the surface of the Xul world. One moment

he’d been wrestling with dark thoughts, somewhere else, and

the next he was taking fire from a Xul position just ahead.

“Fuck!” he screamed, and began returning fire. . . .

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines

Within Objective Reality

0852 hours, GMT

Reality wavered, and Nal tried to make sense of what he

was seeing. Sergeant Derek stood above one of the captured

Muslim cannons, helping to aim it into the city of Derna. The

defenders appeared to be fleeing everywhere, now that the

fort was in Marine hands.

Fort Enterprise, Eaton had named it.

Nal’s thoughts and personality appeared to be emerging in

control of the scenario, however, as Sergeant Derek faded

into the background. He felt as though he was seeing the

battle, the entire campaign, from an omniscient viewpoint.

He was Sergeant Derek, and the date was April 26, 1805. But

he was also someone else. . . .

Derek tried to focus. He was . . . he was . . .

He was Master Sergeant Nal il- En Shru-dech, a dumu- gir

of Enduru, the world called Ishtar.

He was an Associative Marine, proud of his line, of his

heritage. . . .

But he could see the Battle for Derna for what it was. Eaton

and his tiny command had held off a Muslim counterattack.

For a month they’d remained at Derna, with Eaton fretting

over the delay.

And then a message from the American naval squadron’s

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IAN DOUGLAS

commander had arrived on June 1, announcing that peace

negotiations had begun in Tripoli. Back in the United States,

President Jefferson—perhaps unaware of the success of the

tiny American expeditionary force in North Africa—had

agreed to pay the ransom for the Philadelphia’s offi cers and

crew.

The entire march across fi ve hundred miles of desert, the

wild battle at the eastern approaches to the city, the deaths

of poor Steward and Whitten—Steward had died of his

wounds two days after the battle, though the other wounded

Marines had survived—all of it had been for nothing. The

sudden shift in American foreign policy had been a particu-

larly vicious blow for Hamet, who’d trusted Eaton’s prom-

ises that he would rule Tripoli in his brother’s stead.

Eaton died in 1811, in poverty and obscurity. In that same

year, Presley O’Bannon was presented with a ceremonial

sword for his services by the state of Virginia—a curved

scimitar identical to one Hamet had given him. His name

etched into the blade was misspelled: Priestly N. O’Bannon.

In all, a tawdry ending to a glorious page in the history of

the Marine Corps. . . .

No! Nal’s fist clenched, and he struggled to push the

thought, the emotion, aside. It had not been for nothing, had

not been tawdry.

Derna had been as meaningful, as powerful a symbol as

the liberation of Ishtar.

But he was left shaken, as doubt clawed at the edges of his

consciousness.

Marine Ops Center

Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas

0850 hours, GMT

Garroway fell once more into the illusion, of men strug-

gling across the barricades erected atop an ancient stone wall

in the darkness. He could see fires scattered across the city to

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311

HUMAN

the south, hear the shouts and screams of the Boxers, hear

the polyglot battle cries of the legation defenders. The last

volley of fire from the charging Marines had killed at least

sixty of the Chinese, and swept them back from the barri-

cades.

Captain Myers lay on the parapet, clutching his wounded

leg. The Boxer who’d speared him lay sprawled nearby, dead.

Some of the Rus sian and German defenders were picking up

Chinese bodies and unceremoniously dumping them over the

south side of the wall into the city below.

Curiously, though, Garroway no longer felt as though he

was Captain Myers. The wall, the city, the armed men mov-

ing along the Tartar Wall parapet, all had taken on a kind of

mental distance, with Garroway as the observer, watching

events happening to someone else.

At the same time, he was aware of repeated, pulsing shud-

ders passing through the simulation. It took him a few mo-

ments to realize that he was somehow sensing the volleys of

high-energy lasers and particle beams, of near- c kinetic

warheads and the detonation of antimatter missiles against

the Xul worldlet.

The planet was badly damaged, and the alien electronic

network was faltering. For a moment, Garroway was back

on board the Nicholas, the QCC link slipping.

And then a new stream of simulation images and sensa-

tions were coursing through his mind.

He was climbing a mountain.

His name was Sergeant Michael Strank, USMC, and he

was trudging up the steep slope of the volcano rising from

the south end of the tiny, pork-chop- shaped island. Below

him, the American fleet stretched away to the horizon, hun-

dreds of ships, many still pounding the island with their big

guns, as aircraft swept through the skies overhead.

The name of the island was Iwo Jima, and it was February

23, 1945.

On the beaches immediately below the base of Suribachi,

landing craft continued to run in up to the beach, and Marines

312

IAN DOUGLAS

by the thousands moved about on the black sand. Suribachi,

five hundred forty-six feet high, loomed over the tiny island,

dominating it.

The Japanese had riddled the mount with tunnels, turn-

ing it into a fortress. The island was a part of the Tokyo

Prefecture—the mayor of Tokyo was mayor of Iwo Jima—

which meant this was the first speck of land in the Ameri-

cans’ long island- hopping strategy that was actually a part

of the Japanese homeland, not a foreign possession, not a

conquest. The Japanese commander on the island, Lieuten-

ant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had decided against

trying to stop the Americans at the beaches, but to turn the

entire island into an interlocking network of strong, mutu-

ally supporting positions for an in-depth defense. Kurib-

ayashi was convinced that Japan could not possibly win the

war, but if he could make the invasion of Iwo costly enough,

perhaps the Americans could be discouraged from attempt-

ing an actual invasion of the home islands.

So far, the strategy had been working well. The fi rst of

some thirty thousand Marines to wade ashore on the morn-

ing of February 19 had been greeted by an eerie and unnerv-

ing silence. As patrols began fanning out into the island’s

interior, however, they came under devastating fi re from

hidden gun positions, and naval artillery pieces hidden be-

hind massive steel doors in the sides of Mount Suribachi

began hammering the beaches below.

For four days, now, the Marines had been fighting this elu-

sive and dug-in enemy, taking fearful casualties in the process.

Even now, the mountain couldn’t be called secure. Pillboxes

and gun emplacements along the slopes had an annoying

habit of coming alive again moments after they’d been cleaned

out by grenades, high explosives, and flamethrowers, as en-

emy reinforcements came in through the tunnels.

Strank’s squad in Easy Company, Second Battalion,

Twenty-eighth Marines, Fifth Marine Division, had been lay-

ing telephone wire up Mount Suribachi when they’d been

joined by PFC Rene Gagnon, a Marine runner charged with

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HUMAN

carrying a flag to the mountain’s summit. An hour and a half

earlier, a patrol had reached the top of Suribachi and raised

a 54" × 28" flag, but the banner was too small to be seen eas-

ily from the beaches far below. Down on the beach, Colo nel

Chandler Johnson, the Battalion Commander, had handed a

larger flag to Gagnon and told him to take it up the moun-

tain.

The squad of Marines reached the top of Suribachi at around

noon—Strank, Corporal Harlon H. Block, PFC Franklin R.

Sousley, PFC Ira H. Hayes, and PFC Gagnon. A number of

Marines were already at the top, the fi rst fl ag fluttering in the

stiff, offshore breeze. Lieutenant Harold Schrier met them as

they approached.

“Whatcha got there, son?”

Strank took the flag from Gagnon.

“Sir, Colo nel Johnson wants this big flag run up high so

every son of a bitch on this whole cruddy island can see it,”

Strank replied.

Johnson chuckled. “You’d better do it, then.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The Marines found a length of water pipe and jury-rigged

it into a flagpole. A Navy hospital corpsman, Pharmacist’s

Mate 2nd class John Bradley, joined the five Marines, helped

them brace it into the earth with stones and raise it upright.

This flag was much larger, measuring 96" × 56", easily visi-

ble from most of the island.

Thirty yards away, a Marine with a motion picture camera

captured the whole event on film. Next to him, a war corre-

spondent was stacking up rocks to provide a better vantage

point for pictures of the beach. Catching the movement out of

the corner of his eye, the man whirled, scooped up his cam-

era, and snapped off a single shot.

And the raising of the second flag on Suribachi entered

the Marine Corps legend.

Strank . . . no, Garroway. Garroway knew that simula-

tion. It was one of the training and indoctrination sims rou-

tinely downloaded to Marine recruits. Though he’d never

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IAN DOUGLAS

experienced it himself, he was willing to bet that the Cap-

tain Myers scenario, during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900,

was a standard Corps training sim as well.

Again, the reality of the simulation seemed to waver for a

moment, and Garroway found himself fully back in charge.

For a moment, he was helping the others secure the fl agpole

upright by attaching lengths of white line and tying them

off. But the reality within his mind was wavering, thinning,

and he found himself wavering between the Starwraith

strikepod and the link couch back in Nicholas’ Ops Center.

The Nicholas was again in space outside of the Great An-

nihilator, which hung in the dome-projection overhead like

a vast, angry blue eye. Garroway tried to sit up, tried to speak,

as several staff officers hurried over.

Then he was back on Iwo Jima, but with a kind of God’s-eye

overview of the entire battle. Emotion poured through the

link, paralyzing in its intensity. He knew what would hap-

pen, what did happen. Six days after the fl ag- raising, Michael

Strank would be killed . . . probably by friendly fire from an

American destroyer offshore. Two of the other Marines, Block

and Sousley, both were killed on Iwo as well, and the corps-

man, Bradley, was wounded.

And he felt the controversy over the invasion of Iwo itself

as well . . . a kind of depressing atmosphere or weight set-

tling across his thoughts. Theoretically, and according to

Marine Corps legend, Iwo had been targeted to provide

emergency landing facilities for B-29 bombers flying to and

from Japan from their base in the Marianas Islands, and, in

fact, over 2,200 B-29s touched down on the island during the

course of the rest of the war. The fi rst, Dyna Mite, had made

an emergency landing at one of Iwo’s landing strips on March

4, three weeks before the island was finally declared secure.

But there’d always been a question concerning the need to

capture the island at all. The battle had lasted from February

19 to March 26. A total of 70,000 Marines fought for the

island, and suffered almost 28,000 casualties—40 percent—

and including 6,825 dead, almost one man in ten. Most of

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HUMAN

those B-29s landing on Iwo had done so for minor technical

checks, for training, or for refueling, and there were other,

less fanatically defended islands in the region that could

have served the purpose just as well. The original invasion

plan had been put together because the Army Air Force

wanted to stage fi ghter escort missions off of Iwo to protect

the bombers . . . but such operations proved to be both im-

practical and unnecessary, and only one escort mission was

flown off the island before the end of the war.

All those dead and wounded . . . for nothing . . .

And in that instant Garroway saw what the Xul were

doing.

It was a deliberate and deadly attack, and he needed to

block it now.

21

1902.2229

Marine Ops Center

Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas

0855 hours, GMT

“It’s a kind of an attack,” Garroway told Ranser and the others.

He was again fully awake, mentally back in the Ops Center.

The dome overhead looked out into the tormented nebulae

of the Galactic Core, with the Great Annihilator a massive

blue spiral of gas and dust burning with eerie light.

Around him were the other eleven members of 3MarDiv’s

command constellation, as well as Admiral Ranser and his

staff, and Rame, representing, as always, the Conclave. At

least Garroway thought it was Rame. Other Conclave dele-

gates had been coming in and out of Rame’s body lately like

restless ghosts.

“An attack?” Carter, his Exec, asked. “What do you mean?

What are they attacking?”

“It’s . . . it’s a way of attacking our morale,” Garroway re-

plied. “A way to attack our core values as Marines. Somehow

they’re tapped in to our training sims, and they’re feeding

them back to us, but subtly altered.”

“Altered how?” Admiral Ranser wanted to know.

“I was at Suribachi,” Garroway told him. “For a Marine of

my generation, that was the holy of holies, the single defi ning

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HUMAN

image for the entire Corps. They were calling into question the

reason for what happened, for the flag- raising on Suribachi.”

“Never heard of it, General,” Rame said. “An ancient

battle?”

“A mountain on an island on Earth. The United States

Marines stormed that island over two thousand years ago,

and raised a flag at the summit. A photograph, a kind of vi-

sual image recorded at the time, became the icon of the old

Marine Corps.” He transmitted the image over the com-

mand constellation link so the others in the ops Center could

see: the red, white, and blue fl ag fluttering proudly from a

length of pipe, pushed up to a forty-fi ve degree angle by six

straining men. “Believe me,” he went on. “Marines do not

like to be told that what happened there was a mistake, or

that the battle was fought for no good reason.”

“We’re getting all these reports from other Marines in the

battle,” Fremantle said. “You think the Xul are doctoring

those feeds, trying to destroy morale?”

“If my experience is anything to go by, that’s exactly what

they’re doing.”

“What, are they lying about that stuff?” Rame asked, puz-

zled.

“No, it’s not lying, quite. But they certainly emphasized

the negative aspects of the histories. It’s all in how you tell

the story.”

Colo nel Fremantle nodded. “I don’t know about you folks

in the forty-first century,” she said, “but there used to be a lot

of controversy back in our day over news sims. The AIs who

put together compilations of data feeds on the daily news had

to select which news items to transmit, and how much time

and attention to allot to each. Even if you’re trying to be com-

pletely open and balanced in your pre sentation, you can slant

things pretty hard one way or another just by the focus of

your story. That’s been a basic problem of news feeds since

before the Age of Electronics. I think maybe the Xul are do-

ing that here.”

“Exactly,” Garroway said.

318

IAN DOUGLAS

“Any idea how they’re doing it?” Captain Yaren, a mem-

ber of Ranser’s staff, asked.

“I’m not sure,” Garroway replied. “But we’ve been receiv-

ing those reports of coded signals riding gravity waves out

of black holes and stargates. They might have accessed our

Net that way. How about it, Socrates?”

“Possible,” the archAIngel replied. The artifi cial intelli-

gence sounded almost subdued. “Sentient electronic sys-

tems, I remind you, would have no way of ascertaining if

they’d been corrupted, however. My judgment may not be

trustworthy.”

“Which is why we pulled you guys off-line on the combat

net,” Garroway said. “Nothing personal, but you wouldn’t

know.”

“We’re no different than they are,” Jordan said. “If our

Marines were being . . . tampered with, they wouldn’t know

it. Not while they were actually inside the sim.”

“Agreed. So we need to take them off-line, too.”

“Wait,” Carter said. “Sir, what do you mean?”

“I mean we need to pull the plugs on their implants. All of

them.”

“General!” Ranser sounded shocked. “You can’t do that!”

“That’s insane!” Rame put in.

“You could kill them!” Captain Yaren said.

“It won’t kill us,” Garroway replied.

Major Davenport, 3MarDiv’s CC technical expert, shook

his head. “No, it won’t kill us,” he said. “But it sure as hell

will scare the shit out of us. . . .”

“All of us old- time Marines trained without implants,”

Garroway told them. “Did you know that? In case we found

ourselves fighting somewhere without a local Net, or if our

local servers went down. First law of combat: if something

can go wrong it will, and probably in the worst possible way.

So we practice getting along without.” He grinned at a mem-

ory. “We all woke up out of cybe- hibe without the things,

too. We managed okay. Wasn’t pleasant, but we managed.”

“But all those Marines down there, Gar,” Ranser said,

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HUMAN

shaking his head, “they reply on their implants for . . . for

everything. Linking with their strikepods and weapons!

Communications. Navigation. Tactical feeds. Sensory data.

Everything!”

“I know,” Garroway said, his voice grim. “And I wish to

hell I could see some other way. But I don’t.”

“I don’t see how we can do that,” Carter said. “I mean, we

could lose people who are in the middle of a fi refi ght. Or

wounded Marines, who are on life support over the Net.”

Garroway nodded. Adri Carter cared a lot about the divi-

sion’s individual Marines, which was what made her such a

good Exec.

“I don’t like it any more than you do, Colo nel,” he told

her. “Maybe we can have them switch off voluntarily, rather

than kill the entire Net from here.”

“You’re talking about disabling every implant in your di-

vision?” Rame said, incredulous.

“Yes.” He thought about it. “We might get by with having

just the Marines on-planet pull the plug. I haven’t heard of any

reports of simulations or illusions in the Fleet, have you?”

“None, General,” Fremantle told him. “The effect so far

has been limited to personnel on or within the Xul world.”

“I can’t even imagine living without my implant,” Ranser

said, “much less trying to fi ght a battle.” His eyes narrowed

and he looked at Garroway with critical appraisal. “Wait a

second. Do you need psych support?”

Garroway gave a thin smile. “You think the Xul got to

me? Go ahead and have the psychs check me out. But we are

going to do this. . . .”

Blue Seven

Objective Reality

0855 hours, GMT

Garwe was fully back in reality, now, triggering burst af-

ter burst into what appeared to be a living, moving wall of

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machines. Xul instrumentalities within their base infra-

structures had the disconcerting property of shape-shifting.

Their combat machines, most of them, were roughly human-

sized and more or less fixed in their shape, save for the

tentacles that grew and dissolved from their surfaces. The

interior walls of their larger facilities, bases and ships, how-

ever, appeared to consist of millions of insect- sized devices

that joined with one another in constantly shifting three-

dimensional patterns. The digital intelligences behind them

seemed to move through the shifting surfaces and reshape

them at will, creating weapons, sensors, electronic systems,

and other less identifiable components at will.

At least the components were macro in scale, and not

nanotechnic. Though Xul employed nanotechnology, they

apparently used it on a limited scale, preferring the larger,

visible units in their massive construction projects.

Which meant that if you vaporized enough of the little

buggers, you could eventually wear them down to the point

where their electronic ghosts fled, which meant they were

no longer alive.

Garwe continued to burn through the shifting mass of

black robotic insects, but he was still wrestling with the

after-effects of his unexpected visit to Earth’s eighteenth

century. Had he really been there, or had it been entirely a

simulation, an illusion? And what had caused it?

He suspected the Xul had had a tentacle in it; there was no

other reasonable explanation, though the strange environ-

ment of the Quantum Sea could have been a factor. Dreams

here, they said, could become real. . . .

Space seemed to twist and shimmer to his right, and an

instant later Blue Twelve, Lieutenant Kadellan Wahrst, was

there, firing her particle weapon into the living wall.

“Where the hell were you, Kaddy?” he yelled.

“I’m . . . not sure. Ancient Earth . . . 1918, I think. God . . .

the futility. . . .”

“It doesn’t matter,” he told her. “We’re here. We’re now.

Keep fi ring!”

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321

HUMAN

The wall was beginning to dissolve, as thousands of black

constructs the size of Garwe’s thumb began dropping gently

to the deck. The Xul worldlet’s gravitational field was low—

less than a twentieth of a G—and things fell with agonizing

slowness.

The digital spirits animating this chamber appeared to be

fl eeing.

Captain Xander flicked into existence. “Jesus!” she said.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Some kind of Xul effect, Captain,” Garwe told her. “I

think they’re tapping into our simulation rec ords. Training

sims, but . . . they kind of take over, don’t they?”

“Yeah. I was at Chapultepec.”

“What’s that?” Wahrst wanted to know.

“A fortress outside of Mexico City. First Mexican-

American War, 1847. ‘From the Halls of Montezuma,’ re-

member?”

Every Marine, Globe and Anchor alike, knew the stanzas

of the Marine Corps Hymn. “From the Halls of Montezuma,

to the shores of Tripoli.” The first was a reference to forty U.S.

Marines who’d stormed Chapultepec along with over two

hundred other hand- picked American soldiers. The second

remembered Captain O’Bannon and his seven Marines at

Derna.

“It wasn’t like I thought from the general histories,” Xan-

der added. She sounded shaken. “There were kids there.

Some of the enemy soldiers were kids. . . .”

Garwe picked up some flashing images of the battle over

a side comm band from Xander’s implant, along with statis-

tical data as her AI tried to assimilate the data. Chapultepec

had been held by a few hundred Mexican soldiers—reports

varied from 400 to 832 in all. Once the initial storming

party had taken the walls, columns of American infantry,

thousands of men, had poured over and down into the for-

tress, moving through to seize the Belén and St. Cosmé

Gates leading into Mexico City itself. Most of the Mexican

soldiers had retreated, but six cadets from the Mexican

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IAN DOUGLAS

Military Academy on Chapultepec Hill refused the order

to retreat and fought to the last man. The last one alive,

Juan Escutia, had wrapped himself in a Mexican fl ag and

hurled himself from the castle parapet to keep the fl ag out

of foreign hands. Some of the cadets were as young as

thirteen.

For centuries they were remembered as Los Niños Héroes,

the heroic children.

“We killed them,” Xander said. “We killed them all. . . .”

“Not all,” Garwe reminded her. “The ones who chose to

stay behind and fight. They stood up against overwhelm-

ing odds and they died. That’s what war is all about, re-

member?”

“I . . . remember.” Xander joined the others as they con-

tinued burning out the nest of Xul machines. But she moved

slowly, almost hesitantly, and Garwe wondered if she was

all right.

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines

Within Objective Reality

0857 hours, GMT

Nal led a platoon- strength formation deeper into the Xul

world. Within the weak gravitational fi eld of the tiny planet,

terms like down and up were very nearly arbitrary, but there

was pull enough to create a sensation of depth, a yawning

cavern opening below the Marines as they descended the

uneven walls.

They’d followed a descending passageway for several kilo-

meters, fighting off several successive waves of Xul combat

machines. At last, they’d emerged within a vast, open space,

a kind of funnel extending far above their heads, and drop-

ping at least five kilometers into the depths.

Far beneath them, a massive Xul instrumentality was

coming together, swiftly growing as billions of insect- sized

SEMPER

323

HUMAN

machines flew in from every direction or oozed straight

out of the walls, melding together into a squat, vaguely

spherical mass unsuccessfully shrouding a dazzling inner

light.

Nal didn’t know what the thing was, but at a kilometer

across, as big as many Xul warships, it spelled trouble.

“Are you getting this, sir?” he called. “Sir! Captain Corc-

oran!”

There was no reply, and his tacsit readout showed no sign

of the company commander.

“Lieutenant Haskins!” Again, no response. Damn it, where

were they?

He still couldn’t quite credit the idea that when individual

Marines began engaging in those training sims, they actually

vanished. That seemed to violate all the laws of physics—the

rational and intuitive ones, anyway.

But there was no denying that Marines were popping in

and out of existence like virtual particles in the Quantum Sea.

Master Sergeant Nal il- En Shru-dech was, at least for the mo-

ment, in command of the company.

“Nicholas!” he called. “This is Company H of the 2/9! We

have a target for you!”

Marine Ops Center

Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas

0858 hours, GMT

“We have a class-1 priority QCC message coming through,

General,” Major Tomas Allendes reported. “A master ser-

geant on command of a company. Requesting a spacial

delivery. . . .”

Companies normally were commanded by captains, some-

times by fi rst lieutenants, but in combat the unexpected, the

disastrous, and the confusion were the rule. Se nior enlisted

personnel did the real work of running small units in any

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IAN DOUGLAS

case, and any officer worth his insignia listened to his NCOs

and trusted their judgment.

“Spacial delivery” was the outrageous pun some joker in

the ops planning constellation had invented as the designa-

tion for d-teleported nuclear and antimatter weapons. When

the Nicholas was inside Quantum Space and within 100,000

kilometers or so of the Xul world, she could use dimensional

teleportation to toss high-yield weapons through to key tar-

get areas inside the objective.

The technique had been practiced in sim, but had never

been attempted in the real world. To make it work, a spotter

team had to be inside the target taking precise measure-

ments of position and local gravitational metrics so that the

teleport crews on the Nicholas could lock in on the target

zone.

It should work in theory, if Nicholas could get in close

enough, and if the spotter team could come up with accurate

positional numbers. The tricky part was getting the spotters

out before the warhead blew . . . and being careful that prox-

imity to other Marine elements within the objective didn’t

become friendly fi re statistics.

“Patch him through.”

“Aye, aye, General.”

A moment later, Garroway saw a grainy image fi ltering

up through his implant. It was tough to decide exactly what

it was he was looking at. The image appeared to be originat-

ing from a helmet camera on a Marine clinging to the side of

a black, metallic cliff. Other Marines in Hellfire armor were

nearby, some coming down the walls, some crouched on a

narrow ledge.

“Nicholas! ” a voice called. “We need a fire mission! Pri-

ority triple-zero!”

“This is General Garroway.” He glanced at the transmis-

sion ID. Master Sergeant Nal il- En Shru-dech, HQ element,

H Company, 2/9. The man had a good record. A good Ma-

rine. “What’s the target?”

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325

HUMAN

The voice hesitated, surprised, perhaps, at a connection

with the senior-ranking Marine in the operation.

“Uh . . . yessir! I don’t know exactly what the damned

thing is, but it’s big! And I think it’s important!”

“Show us.”

The helmet-cam view wavered and swung as the Marine

let go of the wall and slowly drifted down to the ledge. “I

think . . . I think I can give you a view, here . . .”

It looked, Garroway thought, like a black sun.

No . . . more like an ordinary, luminous sun, but one

shrouded inside of black armor, with openings here and there

that let the radiance shine through.

“We’ve got remotes going down, General,” Nal’s voice

said. “Should have a better view in a minute. But I’m reading

that thing at a kilometer-plus across, and scans show power

readings off the scale. I think it may be their power core, sir!

A quantum power tap!”

Garroway considered this. The Xul possessed QPT tech-

nology, of course. In fact, Humankind had developed its own

QPT technologies by studying captured Xul ships like the

Europan Singer. A power tap pulled energy from the Quan-

tum Sea by using a small, artificially generated black hole;

what was unusual about this set- up was having the black hole

technically inside another black hole—the Great Annihila-

tor. Simply having the tap physically located inside the Quan-

tum Sea instead of safely within the normal realm of four-D

spacetime was enough to give a physicist nightmares.

But he remembered learning how humans had used a quan-

tum converter to turn a 150-kilometer moon of Eris into a mi-

crostar bright enough to heat a world from near zero- absolute

to warm enough for liquid oceans. This technology might be

similar, a source of staggering power.

That black shell surrounding the central furnace, he thought,

was a lot like the Dyson shell the Xul had built around the

supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center in order to

control it and generate power, though on a far smaller scale.

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IAN DOUGLAS

Yeah, it made sense. Nal’s unit might have stumbled upon

the Xul power generator, or one of them. Take it out and

the Associative strike force would do a lot of damage to

the enemy.

“Okay, Master Sergeant,” he said. “You’ve convinced me.

Do you have the targeting data?”

“Yes, sir. It should be coming through now!”

“Then get your ass out of there, Master Sergeant. Unless

you want to see Hell up close and personal!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Garroway looked at the circle of men and women with

him in the Ops Center. The harsh blue glow of the Great An-

nihilator shone down from the overhead dome, illuminating

them in cold, electric light.

“You all get that transmission?”

“Yes, General,” Ranser said. “I’ve relayed the request

through to Nicholas’ weapons center.”

“There may be a problem here, sir,” Captain Kyrsti Xin

said. She was Admiral Ranser’s se nior tech specialist.

“What is it?”

“What, exactly, is going to happen if we blow that con-

struct up?”

“We’ll cripple the Xul base,” Allendes told her.

“Maybe. But what if the detonation runs out of control?”

“You mean like the Galactic Core Detonation?” Garro-

way asked.

“Something like that. The blast could engulf the entire

world, maybe take on an extra kick if there are other power

centers down there. But the real question is . . . if it explodes,

what happens to Reality? ”

“I don’t think we quite follow, Captain,” Rame said.

“Look, the whole Quantum Sea is the base state for what

we think of as Reality, right?” Xin told them. “Atoms, elec-

trons, photons, the fundamental building blocks for all mat-

ter and energy are essentially standing waves within the fl ux

of virtual particles within the Quantum Sea. What happens

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327

HUMAN

when we trigger something that might easily be as big as a

supernova down there? Will it wipe out all of those waves?

Or a significant number of them? Damn it, we could wipe out

our whole Galaxy—stars, planets, civilizations, us— in an

instant!

“How long will it take you to set up a sim to estimate our

chances?” Garroway asked.

“I’m not sure. Thirty minutes to an hour, maybe. . . .”

“Jordan?” Garroway caught the eye of his constellation’s

computer expert. “Link with her and help.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“General,” Rame said, “if there is even a tiny chance that

this action would erase the Reality of a significant portion of

the Galaxy, perhaps we—”

“I know,” Garroway said, cutting the Conclave delegate off.

“And I don’t like it either. But we don’t have much of a choice,

do we?”

“There’s always a choice,” Rame told him.

“I’m not sure there is this time. What if what the Xul are

trying to do down there in the first place is create some kind

of doomsday device?”

“Interesting thought,” Ranser said.

Rame looked puzzled. “You mean they could use it as a

kind of super- bomb, to wipe out Reality?”

“Exactly. We know that the flux of virtual particles within

the reality base- state represents a staggering amount of en-

ergetic potential. Enough potential energy within a volume a

few centimeters across, the physicists say, to destroy a gal-

axy. Our Galaxy.”

“And that Dyson object they’re building down there could

be the trigger,” Ranser said. “My God.”

“If we don’t find a way to disarm or safely detonate that

device, the Xul may do it themselves. Deliberately.”

“ ‘To save the village we had to destroy it,’ ” Ranser said,

quoting an ancient military adage. “Shit. I don’t think I want

to write up the after-action report on this one.”

328

IAN DOUGLAS

Blue Seven

Objective Reality

0903 hours, GMT

The wall collapsed, the individual machine-elements dis-

solving as they came apart in the intense heat. Garwe rose

from cover and moved forward. “Let’s go, Marines!”

Captain Xander, Lieutenant Wahrst, and several others

followed across the broken, metallic floor of the cavern.

And then Garwe was someplace else.

No, not Garwe. Garroway. He was Major Mark Allan

Garroway, and he was on Mars, back in the Solar System.

Red-ocher desert, broken rock and sand dunes, stretched off

to every horizon beneath a pale, pink- tinted sky that dark-

ened to deepest ultramarine at the zenith.

Crouching in a gulley behind the sheltering crest of a sand

dune with a number of other Marines, Garroway held his

M-29 ATAR assault rifle above his head, using the weapon’s

optics to transmit a camera image to his helmet’s HUD with-

out exposing his head. The next dune in line was 185.4 me-

ters distant, according to the weapon’s range finder. He could

make out black spots along the crest of the dune opposite that

might be the helmeted heads of the enemy. Beyond them

were the microwave tower, several habs, the grounded shuttle

Ramblin’ Wreck, and the pale blue of the UN fl ag hanging

listless in the near-vacuum that was the Martian atmosphere.

High-velocity rounds slashed silently into the sand, throw-

ing up gouts of dust.

The year was 2040, during the UN War, and Garroway was

in charge of the small Martian Marine Expeditionary Force,

the MMEF. The enemy troops over there, crouched in a trench

just behind the top of the dune, were UN troops—French,

most of them— and they’d captured the American base at

Cydonia.

“They’re dug in and they’re waiting for us,” Garroway said.

He pulled his assault rifle back down. “We can’t take them

frontally.”

SEMPER

329

HUMAN

“Hey, you think the beer-

bombing idea’s gonna work,

Major, sir?” Corporal Slidell was lying on his stomach, just

beyond Lieutenant King.

“It damned well better, Slider,” Garroway said. “If it doesn’t,

we’re in a hell of a fix . . . and we’ll have thrown away the

only beer within a hundred million miles.”

“You can say that again,” Slider replied. “Sir.” His tone

stopped just short of insolence. The beer Garroway was re-

ferring to had been smuggled up from Earth by Slider Slidell,

and Garroway had taken charge of the contraband at Slidell’s

disciplinary hearing.

Now the beer was being put to a use somewhat different

from that which its brewers had intended.

Lieutenant King raised his rifle for a look. “Hey, Major!”

he called. “Have a peek!”

Garroway lifted his rifle once more, careful not to expose

too much of his arms to French fire. The Martian environ-

ment was a deadly arena for combat. One nick from a bullet

anywhere on your pressure suit meant rapid and explosive

decompression.

There it was, silhouetted against the sky just beyond the

enemy lines—a spindly-legged craft balanced atop pale

plasma flame, one of the point-to-point Martian suborbital

shuttle craft affectionately known as lobbers. As he watched,

a black speck fell from the open cargo hatch, tumbling as it

slowly fell, spilling dozens of smaller objects in a broad

footprint across the surface below.

The reaction was immediate and animated. Men in com-

bat armor with blue- painted helmets were leaping from their

trench behind the far dune, some slapping at themselves,

some shooting their rifles at the lobber overhead, most run-

ning as fast as their cumbersome suits would allow, scatter-

ing across the desert.

“You know,” King said, “I think we’ve just added a new

secret weapon to the Corps’ inventory. Beer bombs!”

“Yeah,” Slidell said. “My beer! . . .”

“Sacrificed in a good cause, Slider,” Garroway told him.

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IAN DOUGLAS

“We were not issued ordnance sufficient to the needs of this

mission. We therefore improvise, adapt, and overcome!”

“Yeah, I guess. Look at them blue- tops run!”

Silent gunfire volleyed from the Marine line, targeting the

French troops who were shooting at the lobber. Several top-

pled over, falling back into their trench. More of them dropped

their rifles and began running.

“Let’s go, Marines!” Garroway called, struggling to rise in

the yielding sand. A bullet struck his combat armor with a

sharp spang audible within the suit. He turned, targeted the

French soldier who’d fired, and took him down with a short

burst.

French soldiers still in their trenches opened up on the

charging Marines. Marchewka was hit and flung back down

the back slope of the ridge. Then Hayes took a round through

his visor, his helmet exploding in a burst of pink and white

vapor.

But another case of contraband beer came spilling across

the French trench line, and the remaining UN troops sud-

denly broke and fl ed.

Marines were known for their use of close- air support in

combat, but this was the first time that the weapon had been

aluminum cans filled with beer. The thin containers were un-

der considerable pressure in the almost nonexistent Martian

atmosphere, and punctured very easily. When they ruptured,

the beer exploded in a sticky, golden cloud that covered ev-

erything it landed on, freezing almost instantaneously.

French soldiers stood in the open, desperately trying to

clean visors suddenly iced over and opaque. Everywhere

the stuff landed and froze, it steamed, the ice sublimating

into near-vacuum. The UN troops had no idea what was hit-

ting them, and could only imagine that it was some sort of

chemical attack, an acid, perhaps, eating away at their com-

bat armor.

By the time they figured out what was really happening,

the U.S. Marines were there, disarming them and herding

SEMPER

331

HUMAN

them into small groups of POWs. The base fell swiftly to the

Marine assault.

Nearby, at the base, several Marines knocked down the

mast bearing the blue UN flag, and raised an American fl ag

attached to a five-meter length of pipe.

As Garroway stood to attention and saluted the fl ag, Gar-

we’s personality began reasserting itself. The suddenness and

the clarity of the sim had caught him completely by surprise.

That had been Mark Garroway? His Marine ancestor two

thousand years back in the past?

“Sands of Mars Garroway,” they’d called him, and he’d

passed into Corps legend with Samuel Nicholas and Dan

Daly and Smedley Butler and Lewis “Chesty” Puller and so

many others. And he’d been there, been him. It didn’t seem

possible.

He felt, too, a strong and negative emotional load linked

somehow with the simulation imagery. The fighting on Mars

had been to secure certain artifact fields and archeological

digs on the planet—the very beginning of xenoarcheology.

Shortly after the first manned landings on the Red Planet,

the first Builder artifacts had been discovered, evidence that

extraterrestrials had colonized Mars and performed their

equivalent of terraforming, transforming Mars, briefl y, into

a warm, wet world half a million years ago.

The xenoarcheologists had also discovered the mummi-

fied remains of beings from Earth—not modern humans, but

members of the species now known as Homo erectus, still

wearing uniforms of some sort. Evidently, they’d been trained

by the aliens, and some had been transported to Mars as a

labor force.

Later, scientists had proven that the aliens had tampered

with the Homo erectus genome, creating the species later

called Homo sapiens.

Modern man. Human roots extended farther back in time,

and farther out into the universe, than had been imagined.

Humans had been created as a slave species. Not long after,

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IAN DOUGLAS

the Xul had destroyed the Builders, and wiped out the tiny

and fragile terraform colony on Mars. A small colony of

Homo sapiens still on Earth, though, had been overlooked.

And their distant, distant descendents had eventually re-

turned to the frozen desert that was Mars and found those

remains. The Americans had tried to grab the fragments of

advanced technology still hidden beneath the sand . . . and

the attempt had triggered the UN War.

Children, squabbling over advanced technology they

couldn’t possibly understand, determined only to keep any

possible benefits away from anyone else. . . .

“That’s not the way it happened!” Garwe shouted, staring

up at the cavern’s ceiling high above his head. “They were

trying to take it away from us! We shared, with the whole

planet, later! What happened on Mars made us what we are

today! ”

“Gar?” Xander said. “Are you okay?”

“Uh, yeah. Sorry, sir. Was I out long?”

“A few seconds.”

“Was that all? It felt like half an hour!”

“Downloads register as memories,” Warhst reminded him.

“You know, a typical dream you have at night only lasts a

few seconds, but it seems much longer. I think this is like

that.”

“There’s also the fact that time is running slower in here

than . . . outside,” Xander said. “You could slip out for a quick

drink, spend half an hour chatting, and be back a few seconds

after you’d left. Where were you, anyway?”

“Mars,” he said. “Cydonia. Get this. I was Sands of Mars

Garroway!”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

Garwe looked around. They were not under fire at the mo-

ment, and seemed to have a long stretch of cavern to them-

selves. Ahead, the tunnel seemed to open up into a pit leading

down. His tac display showed other Marines ahead and be-

low them . . . members of the 2/9.

SEMPER

333

HUMAN

“We’re going to join up with them,” Xander said. “They’re

pulling up out of that pit, and we’re going to help.”

The ragged column of Marine Starwraith strikepods—

nine of them left, now—drifted across the black surface to-

ward the pit.

22

1902.2229

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines

Within Objective Reality

0904 hours, GMT

“You want us to what?” Nal was thunderstruck. The bas-

tards couldn’t mean it!

“We want you to cut your implant feeds, take your implants

off-line,” the voice of Colo nel Jordan said with a maddening

calm that could not possibly be real. “It’s imperative that you

do so.”

“By the Ahannu of my fathers, are you trying to fucking

kill us?”

It wasn’t the way to talk to a colonel—especially a colo nel

in the division’s command constellation. The old man him-

self was probably listening in.

“Master Sergeant, the Xul are using a psychological weapon

against us. They’re feeding our own training sims back at us,

but with emotional baggage attached that may be designed to

impair the division’s combat effi ciency. The only way to pre-

vent that is to disconnect from the Net. And that means un-

plugging your implants. Now.”

“How are we going to coordinate the special delivery

with you? QCC requires a Net link to operate.”

“By radio.”

SEMPER

335

HUMAN

“This deep underground? It won’t penetrate.”

“Then get your ass and your Marines up to the surface,

Master Sergeant!”

“With respect, sir. We won’t be able to navigate. Sir!”

“We’re tracking another group of Marines to the top of

that tunnel you’re in. They have a navigational lock on the

way they came in. You’ll hook up with them and follow them

out.”

“Sir, this won’t—”

“Do not argue with me, Master Sergeant! Get the hell out

of there any damned way you can! The quicker the better!

But kill those implants! Ops Center out!”

Nal was stunned. He remembered going without an im-

plant for several weeks during boot camp, about 875 or so

years ago. And, of course, on Ishtar, he’d not even had an

implant until he was nearly seventeen standard. Enduri kids

didn’t. But he’d come to rely on the thing in the twenty- three

waking years he’d experienced since boot camp, and he

didn’t like the idea of going without again. It had been bad

enough when he’d woken up from cybe- hibe on that station

orbiting Eris, and found his regulation implant gone. Those

hours before the new one had grown into place had been

damned miserable.

And that had been in the security of an Associative or-

bital, not in the middle of a Xul world twelve hundred kilo-

meters across and packed with Xul hardware and weapons.

This was not going to be pretty.

“Okay, Marines,” he said. The order had gone out over the

Net to every Marine in the division. “You heard the man! Dis-

able the implants.”

“Fuck no, Master Sergeant!” Garcia said.

“That’s suicide, man!” Corporal Donovan said. “Suicide is

against regulations!”

“How can we trust them?” Sergeant Cori Ryack put in.

“Don’t give me any of your lip, people!” Nal was furi-

ously angry. He didn’t want to take it out on the Marines in

his command, but the anger had a way of spilling over from