Semper Human (14 page)

“Well, I certainly have no problem with that,” Garroway said after a moment. “You'll need to get approval from Admiral Dravid, of course. And from Admiral Ranser.” Dravid was the
Nicholas
's commanding officer. Ranser was CO of the naval task force. Both owed their appointments to Rame's recommendations, so there would be no problem there.

“Of course. Thank you.”

“Don't thank me, my Lord. I think you're nuts, frankly. Going into combat when you could stay nice and safe and warm right where you're at is
not
a sane act.”

“As I said, I'm not going to be on the front lines.”

“My Lord, ‘the front' as a tactical concept has been dead for two thousand years. In space combat there
are
no rear or front lines. If you stay on board the
Nicholas
, you'll simply
be remaining on the biggest, fattest target in local battlespace. Are you sure you want to deal with that?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“On your own head be it, then,” Garroway said, shrugging. “Welcome aboard.”

“I'll be on board within twenty-four hours. Good-bye.”

The general's image winked out.

And Rame started thinking about what he would tell Brea.

Tranquility Base Monument
Luna, Sol System
2310 hours, GMT

The image of Star Lord Rame winked out, and Garroway was once more alone. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. Until this moment, Rame had seemed to be fairly typical for a politician…a decent enough sort, perhaps, but with little substance or backbone. Garroway had had plenty of experience with the type during his extended career. In a military service answering by law to the civilian government, major generals could spend as much time working with politicians and government appointees as they did with their subordinates in the chain of command.

He leaned forward, placing both hands on the safety railing in front of him. He was on the tourist overlook above Tranquility Base. He'd last been to the monument over nine hundred years ago; the place never failed to move him deeply.

Eight meters below, a portion of the raw, Lunar surface a kilometer across had been left undeveloped, unchanged, beneath a high, broad dome of transparent moonglass jutting out from the northern edge of the much larger Tranquility Promenade. From the overlook, he could see the descent stage of the Lunar Excursion Module, its crinkled foil panels gleaming in the overhead lights, its four splayed and spidery legs still resting on their pads in the ancient regolith. The dark gray soil around the lander was crisscrossed by hundreds of
footprints, each perfectly preserved in the dust after over 2,000 years. Here and there were scattered other artifacts—scientific instruments left behind by Armstrong and Aldrin, the first men to walk the Lunar surface in historic times.

Nearby, an odd-looking flag—red and white stripes, a blue field with fifty stars in the corner—hung from a staff planted in the ground, stretched out beneath a supporting wire. Garroway had heard that the flag had actually been knocked down by the exhaust of the LEM's upper stage when it had rocketed into the black Lunar sky two millennia before, but that it had been restored some seventy-five years later, when an American military expedition had returned to the site. According to the history downloads, Major Catharine Henderson and Lieutenant Peter Flores, both U.S. Marines, had set the flag back in place.

In the distance, low, rolling waves broke silently against the base of the sheltering dome. This portion of the Mare Tranquilitatis would have been under several meters of water had the moonglass dome not been erected over a thousand years earlier.

The patch of Lunar surface known as Tranquility Base was now a shrine, a sacred site, the place where modern men from Earth had first set foot on the soil of another world.

A silver plaque had been set into the safety rail close by the spot where Garroway stood, an exact replica of the original still affixed to the ladder on the Lunar lander's descent stage below. It showed the two side-by-side hemispheres of the Earth above the inscription, in Old Anglic capitals:

Beneath were the signatures of the three men who'd first made the journey, in a line above the signature of the then-President of the United States.

Garroway read the lower line, tracing it with his finger as his implant translated the unfamiliar words in his mind.

“We came in peace for all mankind.”

Not that there'd been peace in the two thousand years since. Those Marines who'd set up the American flag at Tranquility Base had been on the Moon as part of a military expedition. In 2042, the United States had been at the end of a shooting war with a political organization called the United Nations and, in particular, another country called France. At stake had been xenoarcheological remains discovered on Mars and here on the Moon, artifacts opening a new window onto Humankind's long and tortured past.

Most of the next thousand years had seen warfare—with the Chinese Hegemony, with the Islamic Theocracy, with the Pan-European Union, with so many others. And as Humankind had stepped out beyond the limits of his own Solar System, he'd found other enemies as well, waiting among the stars—the Ahannu of Ishtar, the N'mah at Sirius Gate…and the Xul.

Always
the Xul.

According to the histories he'd reviewed, the following thousand years, the Fourth Millennium, had been calmer, more rational, less war-torn than any previous time in the history of Humankind. Differences between competing human elements in philosophy or religion had become less important, less volatile as each was able to develop worlds of its own. Non-human civilizations, it turned out, rarely were in direct competition with humans over anything, so different, so
alien
were their psychologies and their worldviews, and most armed conflict between species generally turned out to arise from blatant misunderstanding. The Xul appeared to have been crushed with the destruction of their Dyson-sphere base at the Galactic Core, and their surviving interstellar nodes had been successfully contained, it seemed, by AI incursion modules.

By the closing centuries of the Fourth Millennium, there'd been a genuine hope that warfare might actually be a thing of the past, an artifact of Man's emotional adolescence.

And so much for that
, Garroway thought.
They still need us, need the Corps, after all
.

Garroway, somewhat to his own surprise, was not as upset by the change in orders as Lord Rame appeared to be. His briefing on the Tavros-Endymion situation had convinced him that something fundamentally was wrong with the Galactic Associative, that the Galaxy-spanning organization was suffering from a kind of disease or psychological breakdown—not a literal disease, perhaps, but a shift in world view that was both serious and accelerating.

The Galaxy, after a thousand shining years of relative peace, was descending into insanity once again.

Did that mean that peace itself was an aberration, that there would
always
be war, conquest, and violence as an outgrowth of civilization? Or did it mean that someone was interfering with what Humankind and so many other civilizations had created?

Garroway wanted to know. The answer might determine well the future of the Marine Corps, of Humankind itself, and of every other intelligent species in the Galaxy.

He heard a clatter, and a bellowed shout. Turning, he saw a group of people coming up the stairway out of the Tranquility Promenade—six of them, three men, three women. Two were in civilian clothing, the other four nude save for their feet, but there was something about them—age, mannerisms—short-cropped hair—
something
that suggested that all six were military.

They also appeared to be drunk.

“Yah…right up here,” one of the women said, her voice pitched louder than was necessary or appropriate, especially in this sacred place. “Been here b'fore, long time.”

“Geeze, this is the place, huh?” one of the men said, looking around as he reached the observation deck. He saw Garroway
and his eyes widened slightly. “Oh, 'scuze us, sir. We came to see…to see…”

“The first spaceship!” another of the men said loudly. “Very
first
spaceship!”

“First time humans reached the Moon!” a woman said. She scratched absently under one bare breast. “First time
ever
!”

“Non…nonsense,” a man replied. “People were on the Moon with the An, right? Slaves from their colony in Meso…Mesopo…from Earth.”

“They were the first humans to reach the Moon in modern times,” Garroway told them, keeping his voice low. “At the very end of the pre-Space Era.”

As he spoke, he was querying the local Net for implant bios. If these yahoos were military, their personnel records ought to be readily available—
there
!

All six were lieutenants in the Anchor Marines, the Marines anchored behind in the world while the Globe Marines slept through the centuries. The first woman who'd spoken was named Amendes, the other was Palin. The man who'd had trouble with the word “Mesopotamia” was Mortin. Namura and Wahrst hadn't yet spoken.

The man who'd excused himself when he'd seen Garroway was Marek Garwe.

The similarity in names tugged at Garroway's curiosity. He'd noticed already that Anglic pronunciation had shifted a bit in the eight hundred fifty years since he'd gone into hibernation, and numerous family names had contracted. He'd been wondering if he had any descendents in this new, distant world. Garwe? Garroway? It was possible.

Garroway was also out of uniform, wearing a one-piece gray jumper from the
Nicholas
' ship's store. He saw Garwe's eyes widen, however, as the lieutenant did some Net-bio checking of his own.

“
Attention on deck!
” Garwe shouted, drawing himself up to a ragged approximation of attention.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Namura asked.

“
This is Major General Garroway,
” Garwe said in a loud and urgent whisper heard by all. “
Damn it, straighten up
!”

“You people are not in uniform,” Garroway said with mild distaste. “And neither am I. No saluting. And no coming to attention.”

“Yes, sir!”

Mortin looked like he was about to fall over. Palin was clinging to his arm, bracing him upright. “Jesus Mohammed! A fuckin' general!…”

“You people are also falling-down drunk,” Garroway observed. He was scanning through the bio data. “I see you're all with the 340th Strike Squadron.”

“Yes,
sir
!” Garwe snapped. “The fightin' War Dogs,
sir
!”

“Thash right!” Namura said. “Fightin' War Dogs! Never been defeated,
sir
!

“Well…not until fucking Dac IV,” Palin added. “
Sir
!”

“Can the kay-det crap,” Garroway said. “You're too drunk to do it right. If you're with the 340th, you're under
my
command now. I want you back on board the
Sam Nicholas
. Now.”

“S'okay,” Amendes said. She leaned possessively against Garwe, her elbow on his shoulder. “Got into a fight th' last place. Kinda busted it up, some. Sir.”

“I think the Shore Patrol's after us, sir,” Garwe said.

“Shuddup, Gar!” Mortin said, his voice low and intense. “Don't tell him that!”

Garroway noticed a couple of spy-floaters high up off the deck. The things had probably followed the six here, and were probably bringing the SPs in already.

It was okay. He'd already opened an implant link to the
Nicholas
' Security Office. “Send me an escort to get some Marines back to their quarters,” he said in his mind, adding the link to his own coordinates. “Double quick!”

The local Shore Patrol would answer to the Navy Yard Facility up in the Ring, or, possibly, to a naval base here on the
surface. Either way, they weren't part of the
Nicholas
' chain of command, and getting these six Marines out of the brig and out of legal trouble would be a problem. If he could get them back to the
Nicholas
, though, he could have Adri Carter, his Exec, deal with the civil authorities directly, and take care of any damages these idiots had inflicted on the local infrastructure.

He'd briefly, only briefly, considered leaving them to the locals, but dismissed the thought immediately. These six were his. He would take care of them.

And that included disciplining them as well.

“Just how badly did you bust that place up?” he asked. “What was the place, anyway?”

“Th' Lunatic,” Wahrst said. Her nude body showed an impressive array of skin art, much of it animated. Garroway tried not to stare at the display, which included various extraterrestrial animals, a streaming Associative flag, and several scenes of couples having sex. “Th' place was called th' Lunatic. Sir.”

“Bunch of Navy shits in there,” Mortin said. “
They
started it!”

“Really? And how did they do that?”

“We were quietly discussing the…the relative merits of our respective services, sir!” Garwe said. The kid seemed to be making a real effort to focus his mind.

“Oh? That sounds harmless enough.” He had a feeling, though, that he knew what was coming. The rivalry between the Navy and the Marines went
way
back, back to pre-spaceflight days.

“Sure!” Wahrst said brightly. “They…they said they had Midway and Sirius Gate, greatest naval victories ever! And, of course, we said, well, we had Iwo Jima an' Cydonia! Greatest
Marine
victories ever! An' they said they had John Paul Jones! An' we said we were born at Tun Tavern!”