I A N D O U G L A S
For Brea, as always, my patient and loving muse
Contents
Timeline of the Inheritance Universe vii
Some three hundred fifty light years from
the exact center…
1
Marine General Trevor Garroway felt the
familiar jolt and retch…
7
Trevor Garroway leaned back in a reclining
seat grown by…
24
“According to this,” Garroway said
aloud, “the Xul have been…
39
“The Xul,” Garroway said, startled, “are acting
in a coherent…
55
Garroway tried to make sense of what
he was seeing.
70
“Gentlebeings, we have a problem.
A big problem.”
84
“Now reveille, reveille, reveille! All hands
on deck!” Marine Master…
100
“The bastards!” Lieutenant Bollan said,
quietly, but with deep and…
114
“Too bad Misek didn’t want to come
down here,” Maria…
128
The Marine OM-27 Eavesdropper Captain
Ana McMillan, code-name Zephyr, forced…
146
Master Sergeant Nal il-En Shru-dech
completed a final run-through, checking…
160
General Garroway watched the unfolding
battle as a fast-flashing series…
174
Hugin and Munin were figures out of ancient
Norse
mythology,…
190
For an instant, the sky burned a dazzling,
searing
white…and…
208
It was a long, long drop.
222
“Gentlemen, ladies, electronics,”
Garroway said to the group assembled in…
238
Time flows at different rates in different
circumstances. It crawls…
256
Lieutenant Garwe applied full lateral thrust
to his Starwraith as…
271
Lieutenant Garwe emerged from the fog
of the illusion, shaking…
286
“It’s not just some kind of projected illusion,”
Janis
Fremantle…
301
“It’s a kind of an attack,” Garroway told
Ranser
and…
316
“You want us to what?” Nal was thunderstruck.
The
bastards…
334
“Translation into the Quantum Sea in one minute,
thirty
seconds,”…
349
Within the throat of the funnel-shaped pit
beneath the Xul…
363
The Marine Corps would continue.
379
Timeline of the Inheritance Universe
Years before present
50,000,000–30,000,000: Galaxy dominated by the One Mind,
sentient organic superconductors with hive mentality. They
create the network of stargates across the Galaxy, and build
the Encyclopedia Galactica Node at the Galactic Core.
30,000,000–10,000,000: Dominance of Children of the Night,
nocturnal psychovores. They replace the One Mind, which
may have transcended material instrumentality.
10,000,000 to present: Dominance of the Xul, also known
as the Hunters of the Dawn. Originally polyspecifi c panto-
vores, they eventually exist solely as downloaded mentali-
ties within artificial cybernetic complexes.
Circa 500,000 b.c.e.: Advanced polyspecific machine in-
telligence later called variously the Ancients or the Builders
extends a high- technology empire across a volume of space
several thousand light years in extent. Extensive planoform-
ing of Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A, of Mars in the nearby
Sol System, and of numerous other worlds. QCC networks
provide instantaneous communications across the entire em-
pire. Ultimately, the Builder civilization is destroyed by the
Xul. Asteroid impacts strip away the newly generated Mar-
tian atmosphere and seas, but Earth, with no technological
presence, is ignored. A Xul huntership is badly damaged in
the battle over Mars; it later crashes into the Europan world-
sea and is frozen beneath the ice. Survivors of the Martian
holocaust migrate to Earth and upload themselves into gene-
tailored primates that later will be known as Homo sapiens.
viii
T I M E L I N E O F T H E I N H E R I TA N C E U N I V E R S E
10,000 b.c.e. – 7500 b.c.e.: Earth and Earth’s Moon colo-
nized by the Ahannu, or An, who are later remembered as
the gods of ancient Sumeria. Around 7500 b.c.e., asteroid
strikes by the Xul destroy An colonies across their empire.
Earth is devastated by asteroid strikes. One colony, at La-
lande 21185, survives.
Circa 6000 b.c.e.: Amphibious N’mah visit Earth and help
human survivors of Xul attack develop civilization. They are
later remembered as the Nommo of the Dogon tribe of Af-
rica, and as civilizing/agricultural gods by other cultures in
the Mideast and the Americas.
Circa 6000– 5000 b.c.e.: N’mah starfaring culture destroyed
by the Xul. Survivors exist in low-technology communities
within the Sirius Stargate and, possibly, elsewhere.
1200 b.c.e. [Speculative]: The Xul revisit Earth and dis-
cover an advanced Bronze Age culture. Asteroid impacts
cause devastating floods worldwide, and may be the root of
the Atlantis myth.
700 c.e.: The deep abyssal intelligence later named the Eul-
ers fight the Xul to a standstill by detonating their own stars.
This astronomical conflagration of artificial novae is seen
in the skies of Earth, in the constellation Aquila, some one
thousand two hundred years later.
The Heritage Trilogy
2039–2042: Semper Mars
2040: 1st UN War. March by “Sands of Mars Garroway.” Bat-
tle of Cydonia. Discovery of the Cydonian Cave of Wonders.
2040–2042: Luna Marine
2042: Battle of Tsiolkovsky. Discovery of An base on the
Moon.
2067: Europa Strike
2067: Sino-American War. Discovery of the Singer under
the Europan ice.
T I M E L I N E O F T H E I N H E R I TA N C E U N I V E R S E
ix
The Legacy Trilogy
2138–2148: Star Corps
2148: Battle of Ishtar. Treaty with An of Lalande 21185.
Earth survey vessel Wings of Isis destroyed while approach-
ing the Sirius Stargate.
2148–2170: Battlespace
2170: Battle of Sirius Gate. Contact with the N’mah, an am-
phibious species living inside the gate structure. Data col-
lected electronically fills in some information about the Xul,
and leads to a Xul node in Cluster Space, thirty thousand
light years from Sol. A Marine assault force uses the gate to
enter Cluster Space and destroy this gate.
2314–2333: Star Marines
2314: Armageddonfall
2323: Battle of Night’s Edge. Destruction of Xul Fleet and
world in Night’s Edge Space.
The Inheritance Trilogy
2877: Star Strike
2877 [1102 m.e..]: 1MIEF departs for Puller 695. Battle of
Puller 695 against Pan- Europeans. Contact with Eulers in
Cygni Space. Battle of Cygni Space. Destruction of star in
Starwall Space, eliminating local Xul node.
2886: Galactic Corps
2886 [1111 m.e.]: Raid on Cluster Space by 1MIEF. Discov-
ery of stargate path to major Xul node at Galactic Core.
2887 [1112 m.e.]: Operation Heartfire. Assault on the Galac-
tic Core.
4004: Semper Human
3152: Volunteer elements of the Marine third Division enter
extended cybernetic hibernation.
x
T I M E L I N E O F T H E I N H E R I TA N C E U N I V E R S E
3214: Formation of the Galactic Associative.
4004 [2229 a.m.]: Dahl Incursion. Contact with the Tarantu-
lae. Attack on Xul presence within the Quantum Sea. Xeno-
phobe Collapse.
4005 [2230 a.m.] Re-establishment of the United States Ma-
rine Corps.
Some three hundred fifty light years from the exact center
of the Milky Way Galaxy, the Marine OM-27 Eavesdropper
Major Dion Williams forced its way through the howling
storm.
The howl, in this case, was purely electronic in the vacuum
of space, a shrill screech caused by the fl ux of dust particles
interacting with the Williams’ magnetic shields. But since
the tiny vessel’s crew consisted of uploaded t-Human minds
and a powerful Artificial Intelligence named Luther, all of
them resident within the Williams’ electronic circuitry, they
“heard” the interference as a shrieking roar. The tiny vessel
shuddered as it plowed through the deadly wavefront of
charged particles.
“Sir! There it is again!” Lieutenant (u/l) Miek Vrellit indi-
cated a pulse of coherent energy coming through the pri-
mary scanner. “Do you see it?”
“Yeah,” Captain (u/l) Foress Talendiaminh replied. “Looks
like a gravitational lensing effect.”
“Yeah, but it’s not noise! There’s real data in there!”
“What do you make of it, Luther?”
“Lieutenant Vrellit is correct,” the AI replied, as the data
sang across the ship’s circuitry. “There is data content. I
cannot, however, read it. This appears to be a new type of
encryption.”
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“But the signal’s coming from inside the event horizon!”
Talendiaminh said. “That’s impossible!”
“I suggest, sir,” the AI said, “that we record what we can
and transmit it to HQ. Let them determine what is or is not
possible.”
“Agreed.”
But then, as seconds passed, Vrellit sensed something
else. “Wait a second! Anyone feel that?”
“What?”
“Something like . . .”
And then circuitry flared into a white-hot mist, followed
half a second later by a fast-expanding cloud of gas as the
Williams began to dissolve.
The monitor’s faster- than-light QCC signals were already
being received some twenty- six thousand light years away,
on the remote outskirts of Earth’s solar system. The last trans-
mission received was Lieutenant Vrellit’s electronic voice, a
shriek louder than the storm of radiation.
“Get! Them! Out! Of! My! Mind! . . .”
“Star Lord, you are needed.”
Star Lord Ared Goradon felt the odd, inner twist of shift-
ing realities, and groaned. Not now! Whoever was dragging
him out of the VirSim, he decided, had better have a damned
good reason.
“Lord Goradon,” the voice of his AI assistant whispered
again in his mind, “there is an emergency.” When he didn’t
immediately respond, the AI said, more urgently, “Star Lord,
wake up! We need you fully conscious!”
Reluctantly, he swam up out of the warmth of the artifi -
cially induced lucid dream, the last of the sim’s erotic ca-
resses tattering and fading away. He sat up on his dream
couch, blinking against the light. His heart was pounding,
though whether from his physical exertions in the VirSim
or from the shock of being so abruptly yanked back to the
rWorld, he couldn’t tell.
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The wall opposite the couch glared and flickered in or-
ange and black. “What is it?”
“A xeno riot, Lord,” the voice told him. “It appears to be
out of control. You may need to evacuate.”
“What, here?” It wasn’t possible. The psych index for Ka-
leed’s general population had been perfectly stable for months,
even with the news of diffi culties elsewhere.
But on his wall, the world was burning.
It was a small world, to be sure—an artificial ring three
thousand kilometers around and five hundred wide, rotating
to provide simulated gravity and with matrix fi elds across
each end of the narrow tube to hold in the air. Around the
perimeter, where patchwork patterns of sea and land pro-
vided the foundation for Kaleed’s scattered cities and agro
centers, eight centuries of peace had come to an end in a sin-
gle, shattering night.
The wall revealed a succession of scenes, each, it seemed,
worse than the last. Orange fires glared and throbbed in
ragged patches, visible against the darkness of the broad, fl at
hoop rising from the spinward horizon up and over to the ze-
nith, and down again to antispin. Massed, black sheets of
smoke drifted slowly to antispin, above the steady turning of
the Wheel, sullenly red-lit from beneath. That he could see
the flames against the darkness was itself alarming. What had
happened to the usual comfortable glare of the cities’ lights,
to their power?
“Show me the Hub,” he ordered the room.
Cameras directed at Kaleed’s hub fifteen hundred kilo-
meters overhead showed the wheelworld’s central illumi-
nator was dead. The quantum taps within providing heat
and warmth had failed, and the three extruded Pylons hold-
ing the Hub in place were dark. There appeared to be a
battle being fought at the base of Number Two Pylon, two
clouds of anonymous fliers, their hulls difficult to see
as their nanoflage surfaces shifted and blended to match
their surroundings, were swarming about the base and the
4 IAN
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column, laser and plasma fi re flashing and strobing with
each hit.
Damn it . . . who was fighting who out there?
“Administrator Corcoram wishes to see you, Lord,” his
assistant told him as he stared at the world’s ruin. “Actually,
several hundred people and aigencies have requested direct
links. Administrator Corcoram is the most senior.”
“Put him through.”
The System Administrator appeared in Goradon’s sleep
chamber, looking as though he, too, had just been roused
from sleep. His personal aigent had dressed his image in
formal pre sentation robes, but not edited the terror from the
man’s face. “Star Lord!”
“What the hell is going on, Mish? There was nothing in
the last admin reports I saw. . . .”
“It just came out of nowhere, sir,” Mishel Corcoram re-
plied. “Nowhere!”
“There had to be something.”
The lifelike image of Kaleed’s se
nior administrator
shrugged. “There was a . . . a minor protest scheduled for
nineteen at the public center in Lavina.” That was Kaleed’s
local admin complex.
Eight standard hours ago. “Go on.”
“Our factors were there, of course, monitoring the situa-
tion. But the next thing socon knew, people were screaming
‘natural liberty,’ and then the Administrative Center was
under attack by mobs wielding torches, battering rams, and
weaponry seized from Administratia guards dispatched to
quiet things down.” The image looked away, as though study-
ing the scenes of fire and night flickering in the nano e-paint
coating Goradon’s wall. “Star Lord . . . it’s the end of Civili-
zation!”
“Get a hold of yourself, Mish. Who are the combatants?
What are they fi ghting about?”
“The stargods only know,” Corcoram replied. He sounded
bitter. “Reports have been coming in for a couple of hours,
now, but they’re . . . not making much sense. It sounds like
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r-Humans are fighting s-Humans . . . and both of them are
fighting both Dalateavs and Gromanaedierc. And everyone
is attacking socon personnel and machines on sight.”
“A free-for-all, it sounds like.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Goradon shook his head. “But why?”
“Like I said, Lord. It’s the collapse of Civilization!”
Which Goradon didn’t believe for a moment. Mish Cor-
coram could be hyper-dramatic when the mood took him,
and could pack volumes of emotion into the utterly com-
monplace. He was a good hab administrator—the effective
ruler of the wheelworld known as Kaleed—but Ared Gora-
don was the administrator for the entire Rosvenier system . . .
not just Kaleed, but some two thousand other wheelworlds,
cylworlds, rings, troider habs, toroids, and orbital cols, plus
three rocky planets, two gas giants, and the outposts and
colonies on perhaps three hundred moons, planetoids, co-
metary bodies, and Kuiper ice dwarfs. His jurisdiction ex-
tended over a total population of perhaps three billion humans
of several subspecies, and perhaps one billion Dalateavs, Gro-
manaedierc, Eulers, N’mah, Veldiks, and other nonhuman sa-
pients or parasapients.
He could not afford to become flustered at the apparent
social collapse of a single orbital habitat.
“Star Lord,” his AI assistant whispered in his ear. “Other
reports are beginning to come through. There was some
transmission delay caused by the damage to the Hub. It ap-
pears that similar scenes are playing out on a number of
other system habs.”
“How many?”
“Four hundred seventeen colonies and major bases so
far. But that number is expected to rise. This . . . event ap-
pears to be systemwide in scope.”
On the wall, a remote camera drone captured a single, in-
tensly brilliant pinpoint of light against the far side of the
Wheel, nearly three thousand kilometers distant . . . perhaps
in Usila, or one of the other antipodal cities. Gods of Chaos . . .
6 IAN
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he could see the shockwave expanding as the pinpoint
swelled, growing brighter. Had some idiot just touched off a
nuke? . . .
“Star Lord,” his assistant continued. “I strongly recom-
mend evacuation. You can continue your duties from the
control center of an Associative capital ship.”
“What’s close by?”
“The fleet carrier Drommond, sir. And the heavy pulse
cruiser Enthereal.”
Seconds ago, the very idea of abandoning Kaleed, of aban-
doning his home, had been unthinkable. But a second nu-
clear detonation was burning a hole through the wheeldeck
foundation as he watched.
The fools, the bloody damned fools were intent on pulling
down their house upon their own heads.
“Mish, on the advice of my AI, I’m transferring com-
mand to a warship. I recommend that you do the same.”
“I . . . but . . . do you think that’s wise?”
“I don’t know about wise. But the situation here is clearly
out of control, yours and mine.”
“But what are we going to—”
The electronic image of the Kaleed se nior administrator
flicked out. On the wall, a third city had just been annihi-
lated in a burst of atomic fury—Bethelen, which was, Gora-
don knew, where Mish lived.
Where he had lived, past tense.
Goradon was already jogging for the personal travel pod
behind a nearby wall that would take him spinward to the
nearest port. He might make it.
“What I’m going to do,” he called to the empty air, as if
Mish could still hear him, “is call for help.”
“What help?” his AI asked as he palmed open the hatch
and squeezed into the pod.
“I’m going to have them send in the Marines,” he said.
It was something Goradon had never expected to say.
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1542 hours, GMT
Marine General Trevor Garroway felt the familiar jolt and
retch as he came out of cybe- hibe sleep, the vivid pain, the
burning, the hot strangling sensation in throat and lungs as
the hypox-perfluorate nanogel blasted from his lungs.
The dreams of what was supposed to be a dreamless artifi -
cial coma shredded as he focused on his first coherent thought.
Whoever is bringing me out had better have a damned good
reason. . . .
Blind, coughing raggedly, he tried to sit up. He felt as though
he were drowning, and kept trying to cough up the liquid fi ll-
ing his lungs. “Gently, sir,” a female voice said. “Don’t try to
do it all at once. Let the nano clear itself.”
Blinking through the sticky mess covering his eyes, Gar-
roway tried to see who was speaking. He could see patterns
of glaring light and fuzzy darkness, now, including one nearby
shadowy mass that might have been a person. “Who’s . . .
that?”
“Captain Schilling, sir. Ana Schilling.” Her voice carried
a trace of an accent, but he couldn’t place it. “I’m your Tem-
poral Liaison Offi cer.”
8 IAN
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“Temporal . . . what?”
“You’ve been under a long time, General. I’m here to help
you click in.”
A hundred questions battled one another for first rights of
expression, but he clamped down on all of them and man-
aged a shaky nod as reply. With the captain’s help, he sat up
in his opened hibernation pod as the gel—a near-frictionless
parafluid consisting of nanoparticles—dried instantly to a
gray powder streaming from his naked body. He’d trained for
this, of course, and gone through the process several times,
so at least he knew what to expect. Focusing his mind, bring-
ing to bear the control and focus of Corps weiji-do training,
he concentrated on deep, rhythmic breathing for a moment.
His first attempts were shallow and painful, but as he pulled
in oxygen, each breath inactivated more and more of the nano-
gel in his lungs. Within another few seconds, the last of the
gel in his lungs had either been expelled or absorbed by his
body.
And his vision was clearing as well. The person- sized
mass resolved itself into an attractive young woman wearing
what he assumed was a uniform—form-fitting gray with blue
and red trim. The only immediately recognizable element,
however, was the ancient Marine emblem on her collar—a
tiny globe and anchor.
Gods . . . how long had it been? He reached into his mind
to pull up the date, and received a shock as profound as the
awakening itself.
“Where’s my implant?” he demanded.
“Ancient tech, General,” Schilling told him. “You’re way
overdue for an upgrade.”
For just a moment, panic clawed at the back of his mind.
He had no implant! . . .
Sanity reasserted itself. Like all Marines, Garroway had
gone without an implant during his training. All Marines
did, during recruit training or, in the case of offi cers, during
their physical indoctrination in the first year of OCS or the
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Commonwealth Naval Academy. The theory was that there
would be times when Marines were operating outside of es-
tablished e-networks—during the invasion of a hostile planet,
for instance.
He knew he could manage without it. That was why all re-
cruits were temporarily deprived of any electronic network
connection or personal computer, to prove that they could sur-
vive as well as any pretechnic savage.
But that didn’t make it pleasant, or easy. He felt . . . empty.
Empty, and impossibly alone. He couldn’t mind-connect with
anyone else, couldn’t rely on local node data bases for infor-
mation, news, or situation alerts, couldn’t monitor his own
health or interact with local computers such as the ones that
controlled furniture or environmental controls, couldn’t even
do math or check the time or learn the freaking date without
going through . . .
He started laughing.
Schilling looked at him with concern. “Sir? What’s
funny?”
“I’m a fucking Marine major general,” he said, tears stream-
ing down his face, “and I’m feeling as lost as any raw recruit
in boot camp who finds he can’t ’path his girlfriend.”
“It can be . . . disorienting, sir. I know.”
“I’m okay.” He said it again, more firmly. “I’m okay.
Uh . . . how long has it been?” He looked around the room. A
number of other gray-clad personnel worked over cybe-
hibe pods set in a circle about the chamber. Odd. This was
not the storage facility he remembered . . . it seemed like
just moments ago. His eyes widened. “What’s the date?”
Schilling leaned forward slightly, staring into his eyes.
Her eyes, he noted, were a lustrous gold-green, and could not
be natural. Gene tically enhanced, he wondered? Surgical re-
placements? Or natural gene tic drift? She seemed to be look-
ing inside him, as though gauging his emotional stability.
“The year,” she said after a moment, “is 2229 Annum
Manus, the Year of the Corps. Or 4004 of the Current Era,
10 IAN
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if you prefer, or Year 790 of the Galactic Associative. Take
your pick. Does that help?”
He wasn’t sure. His brow furrowed as he tried to work
through some calculations without the aid of his cere bral
implant. The numbers were slippery, and kept wiggling out
of his mental grasp. “I went under in . . . wait? I’ve been
under for something over eight hundred years?”
“Very good, sir. According to our rec ords, your last pe-
riod on active duty was from 1352 through 1377 a.m.” Her
head cocked to one side. “I believe you called it ‘m.e.’ in
your day. The ‘Marine Era?’ ”
“ ‘A.M.’ means . . . meant something quite different. An-
timatter. Or morning, if you were a civilian.”
She looked puzzled. “Morning? I don’t think I know that
one.”
“From ‘antimeridian.’ Before the sun is overhead.”
“Ah. A planet- based reference, then.” She dismissed the
idea with a casual shrug. “In any case, you were promoted to
brigadier general in 1374, and were instrumental in the vic-
tory at Cassandra in 1376. The following year—that would
be 3152 by the old- style calendar—you elected to accept a
promotion to major general and long- term cybe- hibe intern-
ment in lieu of mandatory retirement.”
“Of course I did. I wasn’t even two centuries old.” His
eyes narrowed. “How old are you, anyway, Captain?”
She grinned. “Old enough. Older than I look, anyway.”
“Ge ne tic antiagathic prostheses?”
“Some,” she admitted. “There are a fair number of people
alive in the Associative now who are pushing a thousand,
and that’s not counting uploaders. Partly gene tic prosthesis,
partly nanogene tic enhancement. And I’ve spent two tours
so far inside one of those pods.”
“Really?” He was impressed. “In the names of all the
gods and goddesses, why?”
She shrugged again. “Cultural disjunct, I suppose.”
“Copy that.” The gulf between civilian life and life in the
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Marine Corps had been enormous even back in his day. It
might be considerably worse now.
“The Corps is my home,” she added. “Most of my family
was on Actinia.”
He heard the pain in her voice, and decided not to ques-
tion her further on that. Evidently, he’d missed a lot of his-
tory. Eight centuries’ worth.
The numbers finally came together for him. “Okay. I’ve
been out of it for 852 years. I take it there’s a crisis?”
Again, that perplexed look. “What makes you think that,
sir?”
“An old expression, ancient even in my day,” he replied.
“ ‘In case of war, break glass.’ ”
“I . . . don’t understand, sir.”
“Never mind.” He looked around the chamber that had
changed so much in eight centuries. Eleven other pods rested
quietly in alcoves around the oval space. His command con-
stellation. The other waking personnel appeared to be work-
ing at reviving them. “What’d they do, rebuild the place
around us?”
“Moved you to a larger facility, about three hundred years
ago. You’re in Eris Ring, now.”
“Huh. We got hibed in Noctis Lab. On Mars.”
“That facility was closed, sir, not long after they brought
you up here. The whole of Mars is military-free, now. The
Associative’s been downscaling all of the military services
for a long time, now.”
“I see.” He was looking forward to catching up on history.
It promised to be very interesting indeed. “Eris? A plane-
toid?”
“Dwarf planet, Sir. Sol system . . . one of the scatter-disk
objects.”
“TNO,” Garroway said, nodding. “I know.” Trans-Neptunian
Objects was a catch- phrase for some thousands of worlds and
worldlets circling Sol beyond the orbit of Neptune, most be-
yond even the Kuiper Belt. Eris, in fact, according to history
12 IAN
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downloads he’d scanned, had been responsible for down-
grading another dwarf planet—Pluto—from its former status
as a full-fledged planet. That had been over a thousand years
ago—no. He stopped himself. Two thousand years ago.
He nodded toward the other personnel working on the si-
lent cybe-hibe pods. “They’re recalling my people?”
“Yes, sir. But the orders were to wake you first. Then your
command staff. Protocol. Your brigade will not be revived
until you’ve received a full briefing, and give the appropriate
orders.”
“Okay. You know, you didn’t answer my question, Cap-
tain.”
“Which one, sir?”
“Is there a crisis?”
“So I gather. I don’t have any details, though. You’ll get
that in your briefi ng download.”
“I expect I will.” Carefully, he swung his legs out of the
pod recess, his bare feet reaching for the deck. Most of the
nanogel was gone, now. He glanced down at himself, then at
Captain Schilling. “Hm. I trust there are no nudity taboos in
this century.”
She smiled. “No, sir. Nothing like that. But I have a uni-
form for you, if you want to be presentable for your constel-
lation when they come around.”
“Good idea. But food first, I think. Uh, no . . . maybe a
shower . . .”
“Both are waiting for you, General. Do you feel like you
can stand, yet?”
“Not sure. But I sure as hell intend to try.” His feet found
the deck. He swayed alarmingly, but with Schilling’s help,
he managed to stay on his feet. She had a floater chair wait-
ing for him in case he needed it, but full muscular control
reasserted itself swiftly and he waved it away, preferring to
do this on his own if he could. The cybe- hibe procedure
permeated the body with molecule- sized machines that did
everything from arresting cell metabolism to keeping mus-
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HUMAN
cle groups healthy, if inactive. There was some stiffness, and
a few unsteady moments as he relearned how to keep his bal-
ance, but surprisingly few aftereffects of an eight-century
sleep.
Eight centuries? How much had the world, the Galaxy,
changed? How much had Humankind changed? When he’d
entered cybe- hibe—it seemed literally like just last night—
there’d been the bright promise of a new, golden age. The
dread, ancient enemy, the xenophobic Xul, had been de-
feated at last. Across a Galaxy that had seemed a desert in
terms of sentient life—where only a handful of reclusive or
unusually sequestered intelligent species had survived the
Xul predations—more and more nonhuman cultures were be-
ing discovered, contacted, and invited to join the loose and
somewhat freewheeling association that was then being called
the Galactic Commonwealth.
Now it was being called the Associative? There would be
other changes, of course, besides the name. He found him-
self anxious to learn them . . . as well as a bit afraid.
The shower proved to be a transparent cylinder giving
him a choice of traditional water at any temperature, high-
frequency sound waves, or total immersion in a thin, hazy
nano- parafluid programmed to cleanse his skin while per-
mitting him to continue breathing normally. He chose water,
more for the stimulation of the pounding on his skin than
anything else. Garroway found he needed the liaison offi -
cer’s help, though. Without his implant, he couldn’t interact
with the damned shower controls.
When he was clean and dry, Schilling gave him a button-
sized pellet that, when pressed against his chest and acti-
vated by her thought, swiftly grew into a skin- tight set of
dark gray neck- to- soles utilities. It was, he thought grimly,
downright embarrassing. Here he was a Marine major gen-
eral, and he couldn’t even bathe or dress himself without the
captain’s help.
Then she led him into the mess hall, and he realized just
14 IAN
DOUGLAS
how much things had really changed as he’d slept down
through the centuries. . . .
The compartment was large and spherical, with much of
one entire half either transparent, or, more likely, a deck- to-
overhead viewall with exceptional clarity. The view was . . .
stunning, a blue and white swatch of dazzling light, a sharp-
edged crescent, arcing away beneath a brilliant, pinpoint
sun.
But for a moment, Garroway was utterly lost. It looked
like Earth, with those piercing, sapphire blues and swirls of
cloud-whites. But the sun was all wrong, far too tiny, far too
brilliant, a spark, not a disk.
For just a moment, he wondered if something had hap-
pened to the sun during his long sleep. Then he wondered if
he’d misunderstood the captain, that this Eris was not the
frigid dwarf planet in Sol’s outer system, but an Earthlike
world of some other, utterly alien star.
“That can’t be Earth’s sun,” he said, squinting at the pin-
point. “It’s way too bright.” He could see a distinct bluish
tinge to the intense white of its glare.
“No, sir,” Schilling told him. She smiled.
“And since when do tiny little icebox planetoids have
their own atmosphere and water?”
“Terraforming has come a long way, General,” Schilling
told him. “That’s not Sol. It’s Dysnomia.”
“Dysnomia.” He blinked. In his day, Eris had been an ice,
rock, and frozen methane worldlet 2500 kilometers in diam-
eter, about eight percent larger than, and 27 percent more
massive than, Pluto. Discovered in the early twenty-fi rst
century, it had a highly inclined, highly eccentric orbit, but
he couldn’t remember the exact numbers without his im-
plant. He knew the place was cold, though, down around
twenty- five Kelvins or so, a scant twenty-five degrees above
zero absolute. Dysnomia had been a tiny satellite of Eris,
like Pluto’s Charon, but smaller, a rock only 150 kilometers
across.
“The Eridian satellite,” Schilling told him. “About fi ve hun-
SEMPER
15
HUMAN
dred years ago, they planted a quantum converter on it and
turned it into a microstar. It’s tiny, but it’s only about thirty-
seven thousand kilometers from the planet. Orbits once in
fi fteen standard days. The converter provides enough heat to
warm Eris, and the nanoforming matrix is doing the rest.”
“You’re losing me, Captain. They turned a 150-kilometer
asteroid into a star, and then . . . what? Nanoforming?”
“Terraforming, using nanoreplicators and assemblers.
Breaking methane, ammonia, and water ice into water, oxy-
gen, nitrogen, and carbon.”
“And the star goes around the planet, instead of the other
way around?”
“Exactly. Eris still rotates beneath it, though, and has a
day . . .” She paused, closing her eyes as she checked a data
base through her implant, “of twenty-eight hours and some.”
He looked into the achingly beautiful blue of the planet’s
crescent. “Terraforming a planet doesn’t happen overnight.
How long before people are living there?”
“Oh, they’re living there now. Not many . . . a few hun-
dred thousand. Mostly military at this point. Most of them
are Eulers, actually, in the Deeps. The atmosphere won’t be
breathable for another few centuries, and the storms are still
pretty bad, but they started colonizing it as soon as stable
continents emerged from the world ocean.”
“Continents.”
A globe appeared in the air as Schilling sent a request
through her implant, blue and brown, without cloud cover.
“Three main continents,” she said, and each highlighted
itself on the projection in turn as she named it. “Brown, Tru-
jillo, and Rabinowitz. Those were the discoverers of Eris,
way back when. Two minor continents over here . . . Xena
and Gabrielle.” She paused, then frowned. “Strange. No data
on where those names came from.”
Garroway thought about this as Schilling led him to a ta-
ble and two chairs that seemed to grow out of the deck as
they approached. The technology had changed, and changed
tremendously if Humankind was able now to create stars,
16 IAN
DOUGLAS
even small ones. That was only to be expected, of course.
Human technology had been in a rapidly upward-lunging,
almost logarithmic curve since the eighteenth or nineteenth
century.
He took one of the chairs, as Schilling sat in the other.
She placed one hand, palm down, on a colored patch on the
table. “What would you like to eat?”
“Captain, I have no idea. Choose something for me.”
A white, plastic hemi sphere materialized in front of each
of them; seconds later, the hemi spheres evaporated, revealing
their meals. Garroway wasn’t sure what it was—there was
something that might be meat, something else that might be
starchy, a third thing that was brilliant green—but he decided
not to ask questions. The stuff was edible—in fact, delicious—
whatever it was, and that was all he needed to know for the
moment.
Other Marine personnel were in the mess hall as well,
though the cavernous room was not close to being fi lled. The
others kept their distance, however, though he saw numer-
ous glances and curious stares. He found himself trying
to listen in on conversations at the nearest tables. He was
curious. How much had Anglic changed in eight centuries?
Did they even speak an Anglic-derived tongue, now, or had
the vagaries of history brought some other language to the
fore?
Again, he decided to wait rather than bombard Schilling
with questions. While he could hear voices, the nearby con-
versations seemed muffled, somehow, and he suspected that
some sort of privacy field was blanketing the compartment.
Thirty minutes or so later, he leaned back, watching his
empty plate dissolve back into the table surface. “Well, if
that was a sample of the food in the forty-fi rst century, I
could get to like this time.”
“You’ll like it more with your implant.”
“Eh?”
“You’ll find nanotech is a part of just about everything
SEMPER
17
HUMAN
now, including what you eat. And your implant has pro-
grams that let you respond in subtle ways to nano- treated
food. Speaking of which . . . here.” She handed him a small
inhaler. He hadn’t seen where she’d been carrying it on that
painted-on uniform, and wondered if she’d materialized it
out of the table the same way as she’d summoned their
meals.
“What’s this?”
“Your new implant. We needed you to get a meal into
your stomach first, so the implant nano has some raw mate-
rial to work with. Just press that tip into a nostril and touch
the release.”
He followed her directions. A warm, moist puff of air in-
vaded his sinuses, and he tasted metal.
“The nano is programmed to follow the olfactory nerve
into the brain,” she told him. “It knows where to go, and will
begin chelating into imbedded circuits almost immedi-
ately. You’ll find yourself coming back on-line within an
hour or two. Full growth will be completed within twenty
hours or so.”
“That’s good.” He was still feeling shaken at the empti-
ness he felt without an e-connect. Damn, what had people
done before cerebral implants? “And this’ll be better than
my old one, huh?”
“Oh, yeah. A lot. You’ll be amazed.”
“I don’t know. Takes a lot to amaze me. What about
Lofty?”
She cocked her head again. “ ‘Lofty?’ Who—”
“My essistant. Personal secretary and Divisional AI.
Named for Major Lofton Henderson.”
“Oh, I see. Your personal software has all been backed up
in the facility network. You’ll get it all back with the down-
load. Who is Major Henderson?”
“Check your Corps history download, Captain,” he said
with stern disapproval. “He was a Marine aviator in the
pre- spaceflight era. He commanded VMSB-241 at the Battle
18 IAN
DOUGLAS
of Midway in the year 167 of the Marine Era. Killed in ac-
tion leading a glide-bomb attack against the aircraft carrier
Hiryu. Won a posthumous Navy Cross.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Pardon, sir?”
“Nothing. I just realized that I rattled that off without
consulting my implant data base. Maybe there’s hope for me
yet.”
“I’m very sure there is, General.”
“So what does a . . . what did you call yourself? A tempo-
ral liaison do?”
“Lots of people are disoriented when they come out of
cybe- hibe, sir. And even with the download, they can feel . . .
isolated. Cut off. I’m here as a kind of a guide. I can answer
questions. And, well, I know what you’re going through.
What you’re feeling. I can reassure you that you’re not as
alone as you might feel.”
“If there’s still a Corps, I won’t be alone,” he said. “I con-
fess, though, that I’m a little surprised there still is a Marine
Corps. There was talk back in the early thirtieth about dis-
banding us. The Corpsman who put me under down in Noc-
tis Lab offered to bet me that he’d be waking me up again
within the year . . . that I’d end up being retired, anyway. I
take it that didn’t happen?”
“If you’ll check your Corps history, General, you’ll recall
that the Marine Corps has always been threatened with dis-
banding. Why maintain a separate military organization when
there’s the regular army?”
That, Garroway thought, was the absolute truth. Since the
creation of the Continental Marines in 1775, the Corps had
been a kind of bastard unwanted child— except when there
was a war on. During peacetime, it was bud get battles and
second-line equipment, “Truman’s police force” and “in case
of war, break glass.” Once the shooting started, though, it was
send in the Marines.
SEMPER
19
HUMAN
In fact, the whole Marine cybe- hibe holding facility was an
outgrowth of that millennia-old problem. Even well before
the thirtieth century, what Schilling had casually referred to
as “cultural disjunct” had been a serious issue within the
Corps. Marines tended to stick together, to evolve their own
unique culture with their own language and their own ways of
looking at the world, and that culture was generally at sharp
odds with the local civilian background. The problem had
become even worse in the early days of interstellar military
operations, when Marine units were packed away in cybe-
hibe and deployed to star systems light years away; those
units might return to Earth two decades or more after they’d
left, aged—thanks to the combined effects of hibernation and
relativistic time dilation—only a couple of years. Men and
women already isolated from the civilian population by the
Marine microculture found themselves even more isolated by
twenty years of social change—and the aging or death of any
friends or relatives left behind.
Small wonder that Marines tended to form bonded rela-
tionships with Marines, that there were traditional Marine
family lines going back, in some cases, two thousand years.
Garroway’s great-grandfather had been Gunnery Sergeant
Aiden Garroway, who’d taken part in the op that had broken
the back of the ancient Xul menace at the Galactic Core in
the twenty-ninth century. And there were rec ords of Garro-
ways going much, much further back. There’d been a remote
ancestor—immortalized in Corps legend as “Sands of Mars
Garroway”—back in the mid- twenty-first, even before the
first voyages to other stars.
He started to make a mental note to check and see if there
were any Garroways around now. He’d had two kids, Ami
and Jerret, before his first stint in cybe- hibe. Their mother
had discouraged contact with him, damn her, and they’d been
distant after the break-up. But maybe enough time had passed
for their descendents. . . .
He shook off the thickening mood, electing instead to
20 IAN
DOUGLAS
stare up at the impossibly blue and white curve of Eris and
the tiny glare of Dysnomia, hanging in the sky above the
mess deck.
A new century. A new millennium.
He was looking forward to that download.
Upper Stratosphere, Dac IV
Star System 1727459
1820 hours, GMT
The RS/A-91 strikepod plunged out of the upper haze deck
into a calm and empty gulf, and Marine Lieutenant Marek
Garwe shifted from tactical to optical. Salmon-pink cloud
walls towered in all directions, like vast and fuzzy-looking
cliffs with gently curved and wind- sculpted faces. The haze
layer above was composed mostly of crystals of water ice,
scattering the local star’s light, turning the sky a deep, royal
blue, with a ghostly halo about the sun.
Below, the cloud canyon yawned into darkness. The next
cloud deck was over forty kilometers below, deeply shad-
owed in the depths beyond the slanting reach of the rays of a
distant sun. Intermediate cloud layers indicated updrafts,
including a vast spiral in the distance of a storm. Most as-
tonishing was the sheer scale of the vista ahead and below;
the opening in the cloud layer appeared to be dozens of kilo-
meters wide and deep, but Garwe’s instrument feeds showed
the empty gulf to be nearly four hundred kilometers across.
Dac IV was a gas giant, a little smaller than Jupiter in the
distant Sol system, but with the same wind-whipped cloud
bands and rotating storm cells in an atmosphere that was 99
percent hydrogen and helium. The 1 percent or so left over
was mostly methane and ammonia, plus the poisonous soup
of chemical compounds constantly upwelling from the world’s
interior that gave the planet’s clouds their spectacular range
of color.
Characteristic of most gas giants, Dac IV had no solid
SEMPER
21
HUMAN
surface, which meant that Garwe’s confused and constantly
shifting altitude readings were irrelevant; below his hurtling
RS/A-91 Starwraith’s hull, the atmosphere grew steadily
denser and hotter until it was compressed into metallic hy-
drogen.
“Tighten up your formation, people,” a voice whispered in
his mind. “Objective now reads as 150 kilometers ahead.”
Captain Corolin Xander was the CO of Anchor Marine Strike
Squadron 340, “The War Dogs,” currently operating as Blue
Flight. Her Starwraith was somewhere ahead and off Garwe’s
starboard sponson, invisible even to his amplified senses as
the squadron plunged toward Hassetas fl oatreef.
“I’m being painted,” Lieutenant Amendes, in Blue Two,
reported. “Intense EM scans, all bands.”
“They can’t be sure of what they’re seeing,” Xander re-
plied. “They may not even be getting anything back.”
“Oh, they see us, all right,” Lieutenant Bakewin said.
“They see something. Scans are increasing in power.”
Starwraiths were encased in the latest wrinkle in nanofl age,
a layer of active nano designed to render the two-meter craft
effectively invisible by bending all incoming electromagnetic
radiation around the smoothly curved surfaces. Pod- to-pod
communication was strictly quantum nonlocal, meaning there
were no transmissions to give the sender away.
But Dac technology was still a major unknown. How the
Dacs had even developed technology in the fi rst place—with
no mines, no metallurgy, no heavy industry, no fi re—was the
subject of ongoing xenosociotechnic debate, and the princi-
pal reason for the Associative Compound on Hassetas.
The twelve tiny pods comprising Blue Flight leveled off
when they reached the expected Hassetasan depth. In pop u-
lar human thought, gas giants like Dac IV, those located in
their star’s outer system rather than in close to their star,
were cold . . . and so they were at the thin, upper layers of
their outer cloud decks. The deeper into the atmosphere a
flier plunged, however, the thicker and hotter the gas mix
became. At this depth, the atmospheric pressure was about
22 IAN
DOUGLAS
eight times human standard, and the temperature outside the
Starwraith’s hull hovered at around the freezing point of
water. The day, by most human standards, was positively
balmy . . . at least when compared to temperatures higher or
lower in the intensely stratified volume of Dac’s turbulent
atmosphere.
Ahead, a cloud wall rose like an impenetrable cliff, a vast
pink- brown cliff with a looming, mushroom- shaped top, with
wind-carved striations running along its face.
“Reduce velocity, Blues,” Xander ordered. “We’re going
subsonic.”
The flight plunged into the face of the cloud-cliff, as the
individual pods were buffeted somewhat by windstreams
whipping around the cloud at 300 kilometers per hour. At
eight atmospheres, with an H/He gas mix, the speed of sound
was nearly 2400 kph, so the local winds were little more than
zephyrs.
The clouds thickened until optical feeds
were useless;
Garwe shifted again to tactical, though there was little useful
information the system could give him now—radiation fl ux,
gas mix and pressure, temperature and windspeed, projected
position of the other eleven pods of Blue Flight.
And, ahead, the beacon marking Hassetas.
Moments later, the flight emerged into another crystalline
gulf, the interior of a vast spiral of clouds marking a hot
updraft from below.
And ahead, an immense, gossamer bubble almost transpar-
ent in the sunlight, was the Dac living city called Hassetas.
“Hassetas airspace control,” Xander’s voice snapped out,
crisp and concise, “this is Associative Marine Flight Blue
on docking approach. Acknowledge.”
There was no immediate reply, and the silence was a pal-
pable, imminent threat. Had the Hassetas crisis worsened
during Blue Flight’s descent from Tromendet, Dac IV’s larg-
est moon? There could be no doubt that weapons—highly
advanced and lethal weapons—were trained on the tiny Ma-
rine pods now approaching the living fl oatreef.
SEMPER
23
HUMAN
The Marines had just called the Dacs’ bluff and sent their
squadron into the heart of this latest crisis, and now it was
up to the Krysni jellyfish—and the sapient fl oatreef they
served—to decide how to respond.
Would it be peace, and an invitation to land?
Or the triggering of a savage curtain of high-energy
weaponry?
Garwe found he was holding his breath, waiting for the
reply. . . .
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1845 hours, GMT
Trevor Garroway leaned back in a reclining seat grown by
Captain Schilling from the deck of the large compartment
she called the Memory Room. “You sure we can start this so
soon?” he asked her. “You said it would take twenty hours to
grow a new implant.”
The easy stuff is already in place, she told him. It took
Garroway a moment to realize that she hadn’t spoken aloud,
that her mouth hadn’t moved as she’d said the words. His
implant was already picking up the transmitted thoughts of
others with his implant encoding.
So . . . can you hear this? he thought, forcing the words
out one by one in his mind.
Ouch, yes, she replied. You don’t need to shout. We’re
connected over your basic personal link-channel. Others
will be added later. You can also use that channel to begin
downloading library data. You don’t have much in the way
of artificial storage, yet—only about a pic of memory so
far—but the link will let you download the gist to your na-
tive memory. You’ll just need to review it to see what’s
there.
SEMPER
25
HUMAN
So what memories are you giving me now? he asked.
A general history of the past two thousand years, she
told him, with emphasis on the Xul wars and subsequent
social and technological development within the sphere of
Humankind . . . what you knew as the Commonwealth. The
rise of the Associative. A little bit of Galactic history, as we
now understand it. Not much detail, here, not yet . . . just
what you’ll need to put things into context later.
When you finally tell me what the goddamn crisis is that
warrants pulling a Marine Star Battalion out of cold stor-
age, he said, nodding. Gotcha.
Exactly. Are you comfortable? Ready to begin?
He took a deep breath as he settled back into the too-
comfortable chair. Ready as I can be, Captain. Shoot. . . .
And the images began coming down, a trickle at fi rst, and
then a fl ood.
It would, he realized, take him a long time to go through
these new memories. Each distinct memory, each fact or
date or historical event, did not, could not exist in isolation,
but was a part of a much larger matrix. Until he had access
to a lot more information, these bits and pieces would tend
to remain discreet, unconnected, and essentially meaning-
less within the far vaster and more complex whole.
One thing, though, was clear immediately. The aliens
were coming out of hiding.
He already remembered, of course, the history of the Xe-
nophobe Wars. The Xul—electronically uploaded nonhu-
man sentients who’d apparently been around for at least the
past ten million years—had been the dominant Galactic
species, taking control of much of the Galaxy from a prede-
ces sor species known as the Children of the Night. The Xul
had brought some evolutionary baggage forward in their ad-
vance to sapience—notably a hard-wired survival trait that
led them, in rather overenthusiastically Darwinian fashion,
to utterly obliterate any other species that might constitute a
threat. The Xul, it turned out, had been the answer to the
age-old question known as the Fermi Paradox. In a Galaxy
26 IAN
DOUGLAS
ten to twelve billion years old, which, given the number of
planets and the sheer tenacity and inventiveness of life,
should be teeming with intelligent species, the sky was curi-
ously empty. When Humankind had first ventured into its
own Solar backyard, then on to the worlds of other nearby
suns, it had encountered numerous relics indicating that var-
ious species had passed that way before—the Cydonian
Face on Mars, the Tsiolkovsky Complex on Luna, the planet-
wide ruins of Chiron. . . .
Eventually, other species had been encountered, and com-
munications begun: the An of Llalande 21185, low-tech rem-
nants of an earlier, vanished stellar empire; the amphibious
N’mah, living a precarious rats-in- the-walls existence inside
the Sirius Stargate, again the survivors of a once far-fl ung
network of interstellar traders; the Eulers, benthic life forms
from the ocean deeps of a world twelve hundred light years
from Sol, with a curiously mathematical outlook on Reality
and the technology to detonate stars.
All three species had encountered the Xul scourge, and
all three had survived, albeit barely. The Eulers had fought
the Xul more or less to a standstill by exploding many of
their own stars—creating funereal pyres visible as anoma-
lous novae in Earth’s night skies in the constellation of
Aquila, back in the early years of the twentieth century. The
N’mah had gone into hiding, deliberately abandoning inter-
stellar travel in favor of survival. The An colony on a gas
giant moon had simply been overlooked, and without radio
or other attention-getting technologies, had managed to stay
overlooked for the next ten to twelve thousand years.
The Xul, it turned out, had possessed a singular blind
spot. Though no longer corporeal, existing as arguably self-
aware software within huge and complex computer net-
works, they’d obviously begun as biological life forms—quite
possibly as a number of them—arising on worlds that must
have been similar in most respects to Earth in terms of tem-
perature range, gravity, and atmospheric composition. Their
blind spot was an inability to see outside of the ecological
SEMPER
27
HUMAN
box; they tended to overlook other possible environments
that might harbor life. The current An homeworld, for in-
stance, was an Earth- sized moon of a gas giant, heated from
within by tidal flexing, but far outside the so-called habit-
able zone of the system’s cool, red-dwarf star. The N’mah
lived inside entirely artificial but necessary structures, the
ten- or twenty-kilometer-wide stargates constructed by a far
older, long-vanished congeries of star-faring species. And
the Eulers, six-eyed tentacled chemovores evolving near
deep-ocean volcanic vents, lived under such crushing pres-
sures that they might have remained forever unnoticed by
the Xul hunterships if they hadn’t possessed minds brilliant
enough, and curious enough, to develop—through artifi -
cially crafted intelligent life forms and a patience spanning
perhaps millions of years—the technology to venture into
interstellar space.
All of that had been well known and understood by the
time Garroway had joined the Marine Corps, in the twenty-
eighth century. During the next few hundred years of his
Marine career, perhaps half a dozen other intelligent species
had been discovered—the Vorat, the widely scattered Nathga,
the Chthuli. Again, nonterrestrial habitats had kept them
hidden from the Xul. The Vorat were thermic chemovores,
dwelling on high-temperature, high- pressure worlds similar
to Venus in Earth’s solar system. The Nathga were jelly-bag
fl oaters that had evolved in the upper cloud levels of a world
like Jupiter, eventually developing the technology that had
allowed them to slowly migrate to some thousands of similar
gas giants across a good third of the Galaxy. And the Chthuli,
like the Eulers, were a benthic species that had colonized the
ocean basins of several oceanic worlds.
But across the Galaxy, world after world showed the si-
lent ruins marking the passing of sentient species akin to
Humans, in terms of environmental preference and carbon
chemistry if not outward form, all blasted into premature
extinction by the xenophobic Xul.
Now, however, some twelve hundred years after the fi nal
28 IAN
DOUGLAS
defeat of the Xul at the Galactic Core, hundreds of nonhuman
species had been discovered and contacted to one degree or
another. Many had joined the original Terran Common-
wealth in a kind of Galactic United Nations—the Associa-
tive.
Many of the more recently discovered species, however,
were so alien that they shared little common ground with hu-
mans. Communications were difficult, even impossible, with
species that communicated by smell or by changing patterns
on their integuments or through subtle modulations of their
bodies’ electrical fields, with beings that didn’t understand the
concept of union, or with entities that thought so slowly they
didn’t even appear to be aware of more ephemeral species fl it-
ting in and out about them.
Garroway’s curiosity was piqued as new memories sur-
faced of strange cultures and alien biologies. He tried query-
ing the data base, hoping to get imagery of some of these
beings . . . then realized his curiosity would have to wait un-
til his implant had grown in fully. He didn’t have that capa-
bility yet.
His military training noticed one important difference
between the Associative and the old Commonwealth. There
no longer was such a thing as “human space” . . . or borders
between stellar nations. While there were interstellar em-
pires out there, few individual species competed for the same
type of real estate, and the “territories” of dozens of different
species overlapped. It had been centuries before the Nathga
were discovered adrift within the atmospheres of gas giants
inside star systems already colonized by humans. The con-
cept of distinct borders had been lost over half a millen-
nium ago.
How, Garroway wondered, did governments control their
own volumes of space? Did they even try . . . and what changes
did that mean for military strategy? For that matter, if there
was little or no competition between governments, why was
there a need for the military at all?
And why was there still such a thing as the Marine Corps?
SEMPER
29
HUMAN
Surprisingly, he found himself little impressed with the
purely technological advances of the past eight hundred years.
Most of what he was seeing as new memories continued to
surface were further developments of old themes. Interstel-
lar travel still required a mix of the Alcubierre Drive and the
huge stargates left behind by a vanished, Galaxy- spanning
culture. Quantum power taps, much smaller than the ones
Garroway had known, still provided the vast quantities of
energy necessary for FTL travel. Nanotechnology had con-
tinued its inexorable advance toward the ever- smaller, ever-
smarter. Perhaps the most notable technological advances
had come in the fields of health and medicine. Some of what
he was seeing now he didn’t begin to understand. What the
hell was mindkeeping, anyway? Or upload therapy? . . .
The Xul threat, he noted, had not entirely vanished after
the climactic battle at the Galaxy’s core two decades before
he’d been born. Xul nodes—local networks and fl eet centers
where they’d kept watch over the Galaxy for developing tech-
nic cultures—continued to be discovered from time to time,
and had to be eliminated one by one. However, thanks to
data retrieved from the Galactic center, Xul codes, software,
and upload technology all were now well-enough understood
that the ongoing mop-up had been turned over to AI assault
units. Unmanned probes mimicking Xul hunterships would
approach a target system and infect the local node with nano-
tech devices allowing the assault unit to literally reprogram
the local Xul reality. When incoming data suggested that
there was a threat that needed to be eliminated, the Xul vir-
tual reality was simply rewritten on the fly to prove that the
threat had already been eliminated.
And so far, the technique appeared to be working. There’d
been no new Xul incursions in eight hundred years, and hun-
dreds of Xul bases had subsequently been infiltrated and shut
down from within. No new Xul nodes had been discovered in
over two centuries, and most people thought that the last of
the monsters had been found and destroyed.
Garroway knew better than to get too excited about that.
30 IAN
DOUGLAS
The Galaxy was an extraordinarily huge place, and more Xul
nodes could be—almost certainly were—still out there, lost
somewhere within that vastness of four hundred billion suns.
How’s it going, General? Schillng’s voice said, overriding
the torrent of memories.
Okay, I guess, he replied. Damn, there’s a hell of a lot. . . .
He felt her mental smile. A lot can happen in eight hun-
dred fifty years, in a collective culture that numbers in the
hundreds of trillions of entities. Do you have any questions?
Not yet. I don’t know enough to know what to ask.
Okay. I’ve got a new download here. This one is mission
specific. See what you think.
A moment later, Garroway came up for air. “Oh, gods,”
was all he could say.
The Xul he’d known had possessed one striking weak-
ness. Different nodes were slow to share data, and individual
nodes could be slow—centuries, sometimes—in responding
to a perceived threat. They also didn’t change. Tactics that
had worked for millennia were not discarded, not changed,
when opponents learned how they worked. It was one of the
very few advantages Humankind had enjoyed in the long
conflict, and the Marines had used it to their tactical advan-
tage time after time.
According to this new download, though, the very worst
had happened.
At long last, the Xul were adapting to the new situation
with radically new tactics.
Hassetas, Dac IV
Star System 1727459
1850 hours, GMT
Garwe’s RS/A-91 Starwraith strikepod was more than a
space- capable fighter, and more than Marine combat armor.
Just two meters long, it was just large enough inside to ac-
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31
HUMAN
commodate a single Marine in coffin-like closeness, packed
in acceleration gel and hardwired into the unit’s AI hardware.
It was shaped like an elongated egg, with smooth-fl owing
bulges and swellings housing drive components and weap-
onry. Each was powered by a tiny quantum power tap, and
used base- state repulsor agrav both for propulsion and to al-
low the craft to hover in place. They could not travel faster
than light—Alcubierre Drive technology still required far
more power than a ten-kilo QPT could provide—but they had
virtually unlimited range and endurance. In one celebrated
instance, a piece of Marine lore, a Marine named Micuel
Consales had been stranded in a hostile star system by the
destruction of the Marine combat carrier Vladivostok. He’d
programmed the capsule to put him into deep cybe-hibe and
accelerate to near-light velocity. The pod had been retrieved
ninety-eight years later as it approached the nearest friendly
base, and Consales had successfully been revived.
That had been nearly four hundred years earlier, and the
technology had improved since then. A strikepod couldn’t
go up against a capital ship, but it was fast, maneuverable,
and damned hard to track, which made it a key component
in the modern Marine arsenal. They could also be handled
remotely, in certain circumstances, which could be a real
advantage.
At the moment, Garwe and fifteen other Marines, each
wearing an RS/A-91 strikepod, were approaching the Has-
setas floatreef, which filled the sky ahead of them.
One of the genuine shocks of galactic exploration had been
the discovery that even gas giants like Sol’s Jupiter could har-
bor life. True, in an atmosphere that was mostly hydrogen,
with no solid surface, with fierce electromagnetic radiation
belts, and with wind speeds that could approach six or seven
hundred kilometers per hour, that life was going to be radi-
cally different from anything humans were familiar with.
But being different had kept them undiscovered by the
Xul and other predators.
32 IAN
DOUGLAS
Dac IV’s native civilization had arisen from a close sym-
biosis between two evolving life forms—the Krysni and the
Reefs.
The Reef was a vast bubble of tough but extremely light
tissue, thirty kilometers or more across, and from a distance
appearing as insubstantial as a soap bubble. Hanging below
like rain shadow beneath a thunderhead was the living part
of the Reef, a kind of aerial jungle growing on and within the
tangled mass of tentacles trailing beneath the main gas bag.
Exothermic chemistries heated the hydrogen within the gas
bag, providing lift; hydrogen jets provided some directional
movement, enough, at any rate, to let the vast creature steer
clear of downdrafts that would drag it into the ferociously
hot, high-pressure depths of the atmosphere.
Within the floatreef’s remote evolutionary past, the tenta-
cles would have evolved to capture smaller, more maneuver-
able fliers passing through the reef’s shadow. Now, they were
an immense and inverted forest providing habitats for tens of
thousands of species. Hanging among the thicker tentacles
were feeder nets, sheets of closely woven tentacle- threads
that filtered organic material out of the atmosphere. Modern
floatreefs were skygrazers, inhaling clouds of sulfur- and
phosphorus-
rich, locust-
sized drifters called irm, the Dac
equivalent of plankton or krill in distant Earth’s oceans.
It was an evolutionary panorama relatively common
throughout the Galaxy. A majority of Jovian- type gas giants
possessed life, it had turned out, and the environmental con-
straints required that life to follow more or less similar pat-
terns of form and function. The ten-kilometer montgolfi ers
of Jupiter had first been discovered late in the twenty-fourth
century.
Far more rarely, gas giant ecosystems evolved intelli-
gence. In Jupiter and most other gas giants, intelligence was
an unnecessary luxury; grazers didn’t need much in the way
of brains to inhale clouds of drifting organics. But in Dac
and a few hundred other gas giants discovered so far across
the Galaxy, competition, the need to anticipate and avoid
SEMPER
33
HUMAN
storms and downdrafts, and the elusive nature of local food
animals had led to sentience at least as great as that of the
extinct great whales of old Earth, and often to minds consid-
erably greater and more powerful.
In Dac, according to the mission briefing downloads, there
were at least two intelligent species living in close symbiosis—
the floatreefs themselves and the Krysni.
Lieutenant Marek Garwe hovered vertically now in his
Starwraith, half a meter above the deck of the Hassetas visi-
tor tree house. The platform, constructed entirely of materi-
als imported from distant, more solid worlds, was a good two
hundred meters across, anchored against one of the major
trunk-tentacles, three-quarters shrouded by the tentacle forest,
and including a ramshackle assortment of buildings designed
to accommodate each of seven or eight major biochemistries.
Officially, the tree house was the offworlder compound, the
reception center and living quarters for offi cial delegations
from other worlds to Dac. Currently, there were 224 visitors
to the gas giant, including 57 humans of various species. The
offworlders included Associative representatives, cultural li-
aisons, xenosophontologists and other scientifi c researchers,
and formal diplomats.
Facing the twelve Marine wraiths were some tens of thou-
sands of angry Krysni. Exactly what they were angry about
had yet to be established. The call from the Dac offworlder
compound, though, had been urgent, almost panicky. Four
offworlders, all of them humans, had been killed by a sudden
rising among the Krysni, and the remainder were terrifi ed that
the same was about to happen to them. Anchor Marine Strike
Squadron 340 had been deployed from Laridis, some three
hundred light years distant, to Tromendet in the Dac IV sat-
ellite system two days before. As the situation in the gas gi-
ant’s upper atmosphere deteriorated, the War Dogs had been
ordered in.
The Marines floated above the compound deck, now, fac-
ing the tentacle jungle, a near-solid wall of intertwining tu-
bules ranging in size from main trunks nearly a hundred
34 IAN
DOUGLAS
meters thick to slender threads, writhing and twisting in a
constant background of motion. Within the net of tentacles
were masses of Dacan—or, more properly, Hassetan—fl ora:
pinkweed, Dacleaf, methane bloom, gas pods, and myriad oth-
ers, most either orange or purple in color, with smaller amounts
of pink and red. And it was within this wall of mottled and
rustling vegetation that the Krysni mob had sequestered itself,
shrieking in their piping, hydrogen-thin keenings and whis-
tlings, the calls a cacophony of furious invective and hate.
What the hell, Garwe wondered, had gotten into the simple-
minded creatures?
“Hold your fire,” Captain Xander ordered. “Let’s see if
they’ll talk to us.”
“I don’t know, Skipper,” Lieutenant Palin, Blue Five, said.
“They don’t look very friendly.”
A single Krysni looked a bit like a terrestrial octopus about
a meter long, but with a body that expanded or contracted
at will like a variable-pressure balloon. Like their huge co-
symbiote, the floatreef, they were balloonists, suspended from
organic sacs of body- heated hydrogen that let them drift in
the upper Dacan atmosphere, their three large, black eyes and
cluster of feeding, sensory, and manipulative tentacles dan-
gling below.
Garwe and the other Marines of Blue Flight had down-
loaded complete work- ups on the Krysni and the fl oatreefs, of
course, as soon as they’d received their mission orders. One
line of reasoning held that the Krysni were juvenile fl oatreefs,
but few modern xenosophontologists accepted the notion.
There were billions of Krysni, none more than a meter to a
meter and a half in length, and perhaps twelve thousand
floatreefs scattered through the vastnesses of the upper Dacan
atmosphere, none less than ten kilometers across. If the one
grew into the other, there ought to be a few intermediate sizes
as well.
The likeliest theory was that the two were related but sepa-
rate species, and that they existed in a close symbiosis. The
floatreef took its name from terrestrial coral reefs, not be-
SEMPER
35
HUMAN
cause it looked like one, but because, like a marine reef, it
provided a unique and stable habitat for a vast and complex
ecology living within and around it. The reef provided food
and shelter for the vulnerable Krysni, while the Krysni herded
and cultivated the complex zoo of Dacan life within the
floatreef’s inverted forest, protecting their vast and sapient
habitat from attack like sentient white blood cells. While the
Krysni could float free, their preferred habitat was within the
forest, their float bags flaccid as they used their tentacles to
move through the tangle of vegetation and living branches of
the undereef.
“This is Captain Xander, Associative Marine Force,” the
squadron CO said over the local Net frequency for the com-
pound. “Who’s in charge here?”
“I don’t think any of us is in charge, exactly . . .” a voice
replied.
“Then you are, now,” Xander replied. “Who are you?”
“Vasek Trolischet,” the voice said. “I’m the se nior xeno-
soph here.”
Blocks of data came up in a window within Garwe’s mind,
streaming through from the compound’s data base. There
was a vid, too, of a bald, dark- skinned human male with daz-
zling golden eyes. No, Garwe corrected himself. Not com-
pletely human, but a genegineered subspecies, an s-Human,
Homo sapiens superioris. And apparently she was female.
Shit, a supie, one of the Marines broadcast on the squad-
ron backchannel. Just fucking great.
“What happened
here?” Xander asked the compound
spokesperson.
“I don’t know.” The supie’s words were clipped, tight, and
rapid- fire, as though her time sense had been jacked into over-
drive. “The baggies just went crazy! Attacked our research
team while they were trying to get language samples, and
tossed two of them over the edge! Then a whole mob swarmed
in and got two more of our security team before anyone knew
what was going on!”
“There had to be a reason,” Xander said, deliberately
36 IAN
DOUGLAS
transmitting at a slower pace. “Do you have a translation
frequency?”
“Yes, but their attempts at communication are still quite
scrambled. Our heuristic algorithms are necessarily incom-
plete.”
Garwe had to pull a definition for “heuristic” from his
implant AI, and even then wasn’t sure he understood how the
person was using the word. The damned supies enjoyed talk-
ing above the heads of others, especially norms, and scuttle-
butt around the barracks had it that they liked fl aunting their
so-called superiority.
An astronomical IQ hadn’t stopped this one from getting
into bad trouble, though. The Krysnis were beginning to ad-
vance over the tree house deck, inflating their bodies to taut,
pale- blue bubbles over a meter across and drifting slowly to-
ward the Marine line.
“Hold your fire,” Xander repeated. “I don’t think they’re
armed.”
“They have lots of arms, Skipper,” Lieutenant Malleta said,
the nervousness in his voice at odds with the attempt at a
joke. There were hundreds of the creatures in a mass in front
of the Marines, now, their inflated bodies bumping and jos-
tling with one another as they drifted forward.
“Halt!” Xander barked, speaking Standard, but the trans-
mission translated to a sharp chirp by the translation algo-
rithm from the compound. It sounded, Garwe thought, like
the unpleasant squeak of a couple of rubber balloons rubbed
together.
“Hey, Captain?” Lieutenant Bollan asked. “Those things
are full of hydrogen, right? If we shoot ’em—”
“Use your head, Bollan,” Xander replied. “There’s no ox-
ygen in the air to burn. No fire. No hydrogen explosion,
okay?”
“Oh, yeah. Right.”
Garwe had been thinking about that unpleasant possibility
as well, and was able to relax a bit. The captain was right.
SEMPER
37
HUMAN
Shoot one of those gas bags with an electron arc and the
thing might pop, but it wouldn’t go up in flames. The entire
ecosystem within this world’s atmosphere relied on meta-
bolic processes that took in methane and ammonia, metabo-
lized them for carbon and the nitrogen, and gave off hydrogen.
Oxygen was present, but only as a part of trace chemical
compounds like water vapor, carbon dioxide, or sulfuric or
nitric acids. Fires needed free oxygen to burn, and that just
wasn’t going to happen in the reducing atmosphere of a gas
giant.
The mass of Krysni continued to drift forward. “Shoot
them, Xander!” the s-Human was shouting over the link.
“Shoot the little gasbag smuggers!”
An indicator light went on in Garwe’s in-head display,
indicating that Lieutenant Sanders was charging his primary
weapon; a thought would trigger it. “Belay that, Sanders!”
Xander snapped. “All of you! Primaries on safe!”
Reluctantly, Garwe safed his weapons. Marine battlepods
should be strong enough to protect them from anything this
crowd could throw at them.
Starwraith design, actually, was based on the robotic com-
bat machines developed by the Xul. Normally the outer sur-
face was smooth and unadorned, marked only by a dozen or
so randomly placed lenses of various optical and electronic
scanners. At need, Garwe could extrude a number of manip-
ulative tentacles, heavier graspers, or weapons, the members
growing out of the pod’s surface through nanotechnic hull
fl ow and controlled directly by his thoughts. The pod was ac-
tually extraordinarily plastic, capable of assuming a wide range
of shapes limited only by its total mass of about two hundred
kilos, and the need to maintain a roughly human- sized and
-shaped inner capsule to protect the wearer/pilot.
Each pod also possessed a number of high- tech defense
systems, and Marine training included long hours of prac-
tice in the pod-encased equivalent of hand- to- hand combat.
Again, Xander addressed the crowd. “You are trespassing
38 IAN
DOUGLAS
on diplomatic territory!” she called, the translation going
out as shrill chirps and whistles. “Leave this area at once!
Return to your reef—”
And then the jostling, bumping mob surged forward, each
Krysni launching itself on a jet of hot hydrogen.
And the Battle of Hassetas had begun.
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1858 hours, GMT
“According to this,” Garroway said aloud, “the Xul have been
caught counterinfecting our nets. How long has that been go-
ing on?” He opened his eyes, emerging from the sensory and
data immersion of his new implant.
“A couple of centuries at least,” Schilling told him. “It’s
been exploratory stuff, mostly, as if they weren’t quite sure
who or what we were.”
“Nonsense! The bastards were at war with us. . . .”
“From our point of view, General, yes. But not from
theirs.”
“Wait a sec, Captain. I’m missing something here. How
could the bastards be waging an interstellar war and not be
aware of it?”
Schilling cocked her head. “Just how much did your age
know about the Xul, General?”
The bulkheads of the Memory Room were at the moment
set to display a panorama of the Galaxy as viewed from
somewhere just outside and above the main body. Garroway
couldn’t tell if it was a high-resolution computer-generated
image, or an actual camera view from out in the halo fringe,
40 IAN
DOUGLAS
but either way it was breathtakingly beautiful. The soft glow
of four hundred billion stars shone behind Schilling’s head,
a radiant corona of stardust.
Watch yourself, Trevor, he told himself. You’ve just been
hibed for way too long. A pretty girl, romantic lighting . . .
Then he wondered if he’d just transmitted that thought.
This new hardware was going to take some getting used to.
If Schilling had mentally heard him, she gave no sign.
She merely watched him, backlit by the eternal curves of the
galactic spiral arms, waiting.
“The Xul?” he said. “Not a lot about their origins, really.
Uploaded mentalities. They must have been a technic civili-
zation like us, once, but at some point they embraced a kind
of immortality by turning themselves into patterns of data—
software, really—running on their computer networks. The
xenosoph theory I was taught was that when they were bio-
logicals, before they even achieved sentience, they evolved
a hyper-Darwinian survival tactic—an extreme racial xeno-
phobia that led them to wipe out anyone who might be or
might become a threat. And when they uploaded themselves,
they took with them their hardwired xenophobia. And that
turned out to be the answer to the Fermi Paradox.”
Schilling nodded. “We know it as the ‘Galactic Null Set
Problem.’ The Galaxy apparently empty of technic civiliza-
tion.”
“Okay. Before we got off of our world, though, we didn’t
know what the answer was. There were lots of possible expla-
nations. Maybe civilizations routinely destroyed themselves
as they developed bigger and badder weapons. Maybe the only
way to survive for millions of years was to develop a com-
pletely static, non-expansive culture that stayed on the home
planet contemplating its collective navel. Maybe all of the
rest simply never developed technology as we understand it,
or never moved out of the Stone Age. Or, just maybe, we hu-
mans were the fi rst, the only civilization to make it to the
stars.” He shrugged. “Somebody had to be the fi rst.”
“And then we found out we weren’t the fi rst.”
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41
HUMAN
“Right. Ancient ruins on Earth’s moon, on Mars, on the
earthlike worlds of nearby stars. And, buried beneath the
ice covering one of Jupiter’s moons, we found The Singer. A
Xul huntership, trapped in the Europan world-ocean for half
a million years. And eventually we did encounter other civi-
lizations. But apparently the Xul had been hovering over the
entire Galaxy for . . . I don’t know. A million years?”
“We think at least ten million, General.”
“Okay, ten million years. So the Xul are sitting out there in
their network nodes, just listening. When a radio signal sug-
gestive of technic life comes in, they would trace it back to the
source and smack the planet with a high-velocity asteroid.
“You people will be more up on this stuff than me. But we
know a kind of Galactic Federation of beings we called the
‘Builders’ or the ‘Ancients’ were genegineering Homo sapi-
ens and terraforming Mars half a million years ago, and
had built planetwide cities on Chiron and a number of other
extrasolar worlds. Along came the Xul and—” Garroway
slapped the back of his hand, as though swatting a mosquito.
“The Builders were wiped out. Then about ten thousand years
ago, an enterprising interstellar empire had enslaved much
of humankind and set themselves up as the gods of ancient
Sumeria. Along came the Xul and—” He slapped his hand
again. “And apparently the Xul have been doing this for most
of their history, and across most of the Galaxy. Now tell me
how they could do that and not be waging war against us
and every other emergent technological civilization in the
Galaxy.”
“When you hit your hand just now, General . . . like you
were swatting a fl y?”
“Yes.”
“When you swat a fly, are you at war with it?”
Garroway thought about this. “Oh. You’re saying they’re
so advanced—”
“Not really,” she told him. “They might’ve been around
for ten million years, but the Xul haven’t advanced techno-
logically at anything like our pace. In fact, they’re actually
42 IAN
DOUGLAS
not that far ahead of us in most respects today. We’ve begun
uploading personalities into computers ourselves, did you
know?”
He scanned quickly through some of the historical data
he’d just downloaded. “Ah . . . I do now.” His eyebrows arched
in surprise. “Shit! Humans who live on the Net. You’ve given
them a species name of their own?”
“Homo telae,” she said, nodding. “ ‘Man of the Web,’
which in this case means the electronic web of the Galactic
Net. Actually, we learned how to upload minds partly from
the Xul, inferring parts of the process from what we knew
about their technology, and doing some reverse engineering
from captured hunterships. In any case, we can pattern a
person now and upload her to a virtual electronic world. Her
body can die, but the mind, the personality, everything that
made her her is saved, and lives on.”
“If you call that living,” Garroway said.
“So far as the uploaded individuals are concerned, they’re
alive,” she told him.
Almost, he asked her if the uploaded personality really was
the same as the living mind. As he saw it, the original mind
died with the body; what was saved was a back- up, a replica
that, with a complete set of memories, would think it was the
original . . . but if that was immortality, it was an immortality
that did not in the least help the original, body- bound mind.
There’s been a lot of speculation about the process, though,
back in the thirty-second and thirty-third centuries, he re-
called, and some people tended to get pretty animated in their
insistence that if the backed- up personality was the same as
the original in every respect, it was the original.
Garroway had never understood the fine points of the
theory, though, and had little patience with philosophy. Evi-
dently, though, speculation had become reality, and enough
people had opted for the technique to justify inventing a new
species of humanity to describe them. That made sense, he
supposed, given that one definition of species was its inabil-
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HUMAN
ity to interbreed with other species. A member of Homo te-
lae, living its noncorporeal existence up on the Net, certainly
wasn’t going to be able to produce offspring by mating with
Homo sapiens.
“The point is,” Schilling told him, “the Xul are barely
aware of us. Certain parts of the entire Xul body react to us
the way your toe might twitch when an ant walks across it,
or the way you might swat that fly without really thinking
about what you’re doing.”
“So the Xul are some kind of group mind, a metamind?”
That had been a pop ular theory about them back in his day.
“Not quite. They seem to function as what we call a CAS,
a Complex Adaptive System. That’s a very large organiza-
tion made up of many participants, or agents . . . like termite
communities in Earth, or a hurricane.”
“You’re saying they’re not intelligent? They build star-
ships, for God’s sake!”
“There are different kinds of intelligence, remember. Indi-
vidual Xul may be what we think of as intelligent beings, but
for the most part they’re locked into their virtual worlds and
unaware of what we would call real. The group-Xul presence,
the meta-Xul, if you will, is more an expression of the original
Xul instincts, their xenophobia in particu lar. Even their con-
struction of starships is probably completely automated by
now— we’ve never found a Xul shipyard, remember—or they
may all be relics of a much earlier age.”
“But . . . we’ve eavesdropped on them, Captain. We know