Semper Human (27 page)

Their goal was invisible optically, but showed up on their implant tactical overlays—a tunnel entrance leading down into the Xul planet.

The Xul weapon, just three hundred meters distant, appeared to be pivoting, its barrel swinging to bring the Marine oncoming strikepods under fire. Wahrst's particle gun bucked with savage, only partially damped recoil and she continued to fire. At first, her bolts appeared to vanish, ab
sorbed by the enemy's shielding, but then, soundlessly, the Xul weapon erupted in geysering light and expanding plasma, as chunks of hot metal whirled in straight-line trajectories into vacuum.

She heard something…a shriek, followed by a heavy thud.
Impossible!
she thought.
There's no atmosphere to carry sound
….

But the racket, a fast-swelling cacophony of chattering automatic-weapons fire and dull, thunderous booms, was so loud now she couldn't hear the link chatter from her squadron mates.

“This is it, men!” a shrill voice called as whistles began shrieking. “Over the top!”

She didn't recognize the voice, and there was no ID tag with it to tell her who had spoken. But her vision blurred, and Corporal Edgar O'Malley clambered up out of his shallow hole and joined the assault. To either side, hundreds of other Marines, in khaki uniforms and flat, tin-hat helmets surged up out of the shot-torn earth and moved forward, as machine-gun fire chattered and heavy caliber artillery rounds howled overhead and burst in no-man's land, sending up vast, black fountains of mud and earth.

O'Malley leaned forward as if bracing against a stiff wind…but the wind was imagined, a psychological artifact of the storm of lead sleeting past the advancing men, snapping and cracking above their heads, passing to either side….

At the tree line up ahead, at the far end of a chewed-up wheat field, a Hun Maxim gun opened up. O'Malley saw the flicker of the muzzle flash, and then a line of eight Marines just in front of him toppled, twisted, and fell one after another from right to left as the enemy gun swept the line. Lieutenant Agway was still on his feet, standing in front of the line, his back to the enemy, walking steadily backward, arms spread wide, his .45 pistol in his right hand, a cane in his left. He was shouting something, but the roar of gunfire and high explosives was so loud O'Malley couldn't hear a word.

He assumed Agway was shouting encouragement.

It was O'Malley's first time in combat…the first time in combat for most of the men of the second Battalion, sixth Marines. A tough Irish-immigrant kid in the streets of Philadelphia, he'd enlisted the day after America had entered the war, like so many thousands of others, and been shipped by train to the dark hell of boot camp.

The Irish still weren't entirely accepted within certain quarters of American culture. His fellow recruits had called him “Paddy” and “Spud” and subjected him to merciless beatings in the shower head, while his D.I.s had called him “maggot” and worse, promising him that he didn't have what it took to be a Marine and then gleefully setting out to prove it.

He'd proven them wrong, all of them. He'd survived, coming out tougher than ever. He'd been assigned to the sixth Marines, a part of the second American Division, and sent to France.

O'Malley had arrived just as a massive German offensive had shattered the French Sixth Army along the Marne River front. As the Marines had hurried forward toward the crumbling front line, passing broken groups of ragged French soldiers moving to the rear, a French officer had suggested that the newcomers join the retreat.

“Retreat, hell!” Marine Captain Lloyd Williams had snapped back. “We just got here!”

The Marines hadn't even had time to dig themselves trenches. From hastily excavated fighting holes—
foxholes
, was the apt term coined by some of the men—the Marines had opened up on the approaching Germans with a devastatingly accurate fire from their '03 Springfields from eight hundred yards and brought the enemy advance to a bloody halt.

That had been three days ago, June 3. O'Malley hadn't been part of the turkey shoot, as some of the guys were calling it, but had been in reserve. Now he was at the very front, the cutting edge.

And it was a shrieking, thundering, blood-drenched nightmare.

When the brigade had first arrived at St. Nazaire, French army instructors had drilled them in the
proper
form for assaulting enemy positions—falling into line in front of their positions, deploying skirmishers in advance of the main body, and moving forward at a brisk, but carefully disciplined walk. And it was a walk into Hell itself.

Machine-gun fire stitched and rattled, slicing down Marines before they could take their positions. Mortar rounds rained down among them, throwing up huge gouts of earth and mud and torn flesh. Heavier artillery howled overhead, shaking the ground with each savage detonation. Men were falling everywhere as the advance proper began. A mortar round exploded just in front of them and Agway simply vanished in the blast. The Marine line continued forward.

The Marines wavered. The storm of fire grew heavier….

Fuck this shit!
O'Malley thought, and he dropped into the dubious cover of the bullet-shredded wheat. Other Marines were doing the same, dropping flat on the ground as men among them continued to die in horrible numbers. French combat training be damned. The French themselves hadn't advanced in massed formation since 1915.

The Marines lay in that exposed position for several horrible moments, taking more casualties. Just a few feet to O'Malley's left, a Marine lay on his back, clutching at the wet spill of his intestines, his mouth wide open as he screamed and screamed and screamed at the sky, and O'Malley couldn't even hear him. Some Marines kept moving forward on their hands and knees, while others rose up to provide covering fire. They were fifty yards from the German positions now, and they continued to die as Maxim rounds scythed down wheat and Marines together.

Stubbornly, O'Malley began crawling forward.

 

Garroway, Gold One
Above Objective Reality
0849 hours, GMT

For a few fragile moments, Garroway was in two worlds—piloting his Starwraith across the surface of the Xul worldlet, and moving on foot through the narrow confines of an Asian city, a screaming horde of Chinese racing toward him. He couldn't tell where the illusion was coming from, or even if it
was
an illusion, or if, somehow, it represented some twisted aspect of what might be real.

It certainly
felt
real. The Starwraith vanished, a raggedly shredding dream. He was General…no, he was a
captain
, Captain John “Handsome Jack” Myers, the commanding officer of a contingent of U.S. Marines sent to protect American and European diplomats inside the walled Legation Quarter inside the ancient city of Peking. Gunfire banged and cracked, and the Chinese a few yards ahead shrieked in shrill, sing-song gibberish.

They were coming….

The situation was desperate, that July night in the year 1900. Within China's beleaguered capital, thousands of foreigners, most of them civilians and many of them women and children, were crammed into an area less than three-quarters of a mile square, with little food or water and dwindling reserves of ammunition.

Protecting them were 392 regular troops and 125 civilian or government service volunteers. The troops were drawn from the maritime forces of eight nations—Russia, Japan, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Britain, and the United States.

The American contingent consisted of fifty-three enlisted U.S. Marines and three officers.

Outside the compound, tens of thousands of Chinese—the murderously xenophobic members of a secret militant group calling themselves “the Society of the Righteous Harmoni
ous Fists”—had begun a siege, keeping up a steady bombardment of the Legation Quarter, and vowing to slaughter every foreigner inside the Chinese capital. They had dedicated themselves to wiping out every trace of foreign influence within China.

Because of their public displays of martial arts, the militants were known as “Boxers.” They wore no uniforms, as such, but were identified by a single piece of red cloth somewhere on their bodies—a sash, a turban, or an apron.

The so-called Boxer Rebellion had been going on since the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. The Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, the real power in the Chinese court, had been using the Boxers in her bid to drive foreigners out of China.

The siege of the Legation Quarter had begun on June 20.

There were rumors that foreigners in the city of Tientsin were also under siege, rumors that Tientsin had been relieved and that a relief force was now on the way to Peking, rumors that Christian missionaries and converts had been massacred recently at Paotingfu, but how true any of the stories might be was anybody's guess. The siege had been going on for almost two weeks, now, and the legation defenders were decidedly on their own.

South of the Legation Quarter rose the massive, ancient Tartar Wall, overlooking the compound with strategic menace. At first during the siege, the German marines had kept control of the wall, but on July 1, the Germans had been driven off, and throughout the next day, the Boxers had been high atop the wall, building barricades and hurling large rocks down into the compound, while keeping up a more or less constant fire with antique muskets. The defenders had erected an inner barricade, but something had to be done about the Boxers looking down into the compound from the parapets above.

Now it was two-thirty in the morning of July 3, and Captain Myers and eight American Marines had just gone over the barricade beneath the Tartar Wall. They'd pulled midnight
raids like this one before when, tiring of the incessant bombardment, they would sneak over the walls and take out Boxer gun positions that were too close for comfort.

Their goal this time was the Chinese position atop the Tartar Wall, consisting of a makeshift barricade and a tower erected the day before. More Marines and a number of Brits and Russians were supposed to be coming over behind them, but they'd been spotted by the Chinese up on the parapets, who'd immediately opened fire, hitting a Russian seaman in the leg.

The raid had been stalled, and Myers lay on the cobblestones, pistol in hand. He could see the Chinese just yards above, yelling like madmen and brandishing a bewildering array of pole weapons and swords, along with a few old muskets. The initial firing had petered out, but if the Boxers elected to rush the Marines now, sheer weight of numbers would roll over the exposed Americans and back into the legation compound.

It was, Myers thought, a choice between lying in the street and being slaughtered or of going onto the offensive. They might all die, anyway, but at least there was a chance. Rising to his feet he screamed, “
Let's go, Marines!
” and launched himself toward a flight of crumbling stone steps leading up to the parapets above. Privates Turner and Thomas raced past him and into the lead, firing their rifles as quickly as they could work the bolts, pounding up the steps. Myers and the other Marines followed, while behind them, more legation troops began spilling over the Allied barricade.

Gaining the top of the wall, Myers found himself just a few feet from the enemy. A handful of Chinese muskets fired across the barricade, and Turner pitched backward, shot through the head. The other Marines kept moving forward, however, firing as they came. Myers brought up his pistol and fired it into the Chinese mob.

The Boxers, he knew, surrounded themselves with superstition and magic, swallowing charms that they claimed made them invulnerable to bullets. One way they picked up
recruits out among the peasants was to shoot at a Boxer with blanks, proving the power of magic over gunfire.

For some reason, though, the magic wasn't working here. Myers' shot caught a Chinese militant full in the face, knocking him backward into the arms of his startled compatriots. He fired again and a second Boxer went down. The mob behind the barricade wavered, then broke, the individual rebels beginning to flee toward the rear, colliding with others in the rear who hadn't yet caught on to the fact that a retreat was beginning.

The rest of the Marines, mixed in with Russian seamen in their striped shirts and British marines, came up the steps and poured a devastating volley into the retreating Boxers, killing dozens of them.

And then Myers and a handful of Marines were over the first Chinese barricade atop the wall, knocking aside crates and bags of rice and pushing on. The fighting was fierce and hand-to-hand. Thomas was hit in the stomach and fell, clutching his bloody belly. Myers found himself facing a dozen Boxers armed with deadly trident-tipped spears and pole arms mounting wickedly curved blades. He fired his pistol again…and yet again…and then felt a keen and slicing pain in his leg as a Boxer lunged forward with a spear.

Captain Myers went down as the Chinese around him rallied….

1902.2229

Blue Seven
Approaching Objective Reality
0849 hours, GMT

Lieutenant Garwe emerged from the fog of the illusion, shaking his head. Where was he? For a moment, he'd been somewhere else, some
one
else entirely, on a beach beneath a brilliant subtropical sun, splashing ashore from a small boat while trying to keep his powder dry. He remembered the sand of the beach…

But what was beneath the whiplashing tentacles of his Starwraith was not sand, quite, but the powdery gray regolith of the Xul planet. He'd plowed into the surface in a spray of dust, gouging a crater before regaining his senses.

What the hell was going on?

He called up a tactical display projected within his mind, looking for other members of the squadron. There was no one.

“Blue Squadron, Blue Seven,” he called. “Where is everyone?”

A blip appeared on the tac display, IDed as Blue Two. That was Maria Amendes. “Gar?” she asked. “Are you there?”

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

“I was…someplace else,” she told him. “I was on…on
one of those funny ancient ships. A seagoing ship, not a starship, with tall poles and sheets of cloth and lots of rope everywhere.”

Amendes, Garwe remembered, wasn't much for history. “You mean a sailing ship,” he said. “Eighteenth, maybe nineteenth century….”

“I don't know when it was. But I was a
man
in a blue and red uniform. I was on this wooden platform high up on one of those poles with a bunch of other men dressed like I was, and we had these funny, long, heavy weapons, and—”

For just a moment, Garwe caught the echoes of what Amendes had experienced. She'd been a U.S. Marine on board a vessel from the Age of Sail perhaps 2200 years earlier, part of a squad assigned to the mizzentop during a broadside-to-broadside battle with an enemy ship. The Marines were using their muskets to try to pick off their opposite numbers in the rigging of the ship alongside, then turning their fire on the enemy officers on the deck below. He could hear the thunder of big guns, the rattle of musketry,
taste
the sharp bite of gunpowder in the sulfurous and billowing clouds embracing both ships.

He couldn't see enough detail in that one glimpse to determine exactly when that long-ago battle had taken place, but it was close—within a few decades—of his own experience splashing ashore on a sun-drenched beach.

“What was it, Gar?” Amendes asked. “What's happening to us?”

“I'm not sure. It might be a Xul weapon. Close with me, and let's try to reach that opening up ahead. Looks like a way inside.”

“What opening?”

“Bearing one-five-five.”

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

“Roger that.”

At optical frequencies, there was nothing to be seen but gray rock and dust, the blue-violet mist in the sky, and a thin slash of gold light marking the Xul world's rings. His
Starwraith, however, was processing data from the battlespace net, a far-flung web of sensors, remote drones, and probes that pulled in data from all wavelengths and presented it to his tac display overlays.

Lifting from the ground on his gravitics, he began drifting forward. His AI spotted a Xul point-defense weapon three hundred meters away and he turned his X-ray laser on it. Within his in-head display, a targeting cursor zeroed in on the enemy gun, locking on to it. He thought-clicked the triggering command….

…as sand crunched beneath his shoes. The column had been struggling ahead through soft beach sand beneath the hot sun for an hour, now, muskets loaded and at shoulder arms. Behind them came a column of fifty sailors off the
Cabot
under the command of Lieutenant Weaver. Ahead, Fort Montagu rose next to the emerald waters off New Providence Island, a low, deeply truncated pyramid with embrasures for cannon, and a red, white, and blue Union Jack fluttering from a flagpole inside. The town of Nassau lay just beyond, pastel-colored buildings gleaming in the sun. The place, both town and fort, appeared unnaturally quiet, even deserted.

The Marines had hoped to catch the fort by surprise, but a signal gun had boomed out as they'd come ashore, sounding the alarm. Bad luck, there. They would have to storm the fort…unless the redcoats could be talked into surrender. To that end, a short while before, Captain Nicholas had sent a runner on ahead with a message for a Governor Montfront Browne, advising him to avoid bloodshed and surrender the town.

A puff of smoke appeared at one of the fort's embrasures, followed seconds later by the far-off boom of a cannon. Porter saw something strike the beach a hundred yards ahead and to the left, sending up a spray of sand between the column and the sea. A second later, it hit again, farther up the beach, and then a third time, the round skipping across the sand as it flashed past. Several of the men in ranks bellowed derisively.
“Damned lobsterbacks!” Private Dolby called out. “Y'ninnies can't hit a barn wall at arm's length from yer noses!”

“Silence in the ranks!” Captain Samuel Nicholas called. “Sergeant Prescott! Have the men deploy in line of battle, if you please.”

“Aye, sir!” the sergeant, a grizzled old-timer off the
Alfred
, growled. “Awright, you men! You heard the Captain of Marines! Column,
halt
! Battle formation,
hut
!”

The Marine drummer rattled off a long roll as the Continental Marines broke out of column formation and took up two parallel lines, one behind the other, facing the fort. Porter was in the front rank, feeling nakedly exposed and vulnerable. The fort was still several hundred yards away, well beyond effective musket range.

“The men may fix bayonets, Sergeant.”

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

More or less as one, the lines of Marines brought their muskets down off their shoulders, slapped them into port arms, then dropped the buttstocks to the sand sharply alongside their right legs. They'd been practicing and drilling these maneuvers for weeks, getting them letter perfect, but in the excitement of imminent battle, the execution this morning was a bit ragged.

“Fix…bayo
nets
!”

Porter drew the slender, 14-inch steel blade of his bayonet from its scabbard, fixed the locking ring over the muzzle of his weapon, and snapped it home.

Captain Nicholas walked in front of the lines, his sword drawn. “Men…no fancy speeches this morning. Right now, up in New England, General Washington desperately needs gunpowder for the Continental Army outside of Boston. Over there is the British supply depot for the Bahamas…and about six hundred barrels of black powder. We're here to take it away from those fellows. Sergeant, you may deploy the men for the attack.”

“Yessir! Huzzah for the captain, lads!”

“Huzzah!”
Porter and the rest of the 250 Marines and
sailors shouted in shrill unison. With surprise lost at the landing, they might as well let the British know they were coming. “
Huzzah! Huzzah!
”

“Marines! Charge…
bayonets
! At the walk…for'ard…
harch!
”

Right foot first as he'd been taught, John Porter stepped forward, his musket held stiffly at his right side, bayonet leveled at the enemy. He wondered if they would fire a volley before they reached the wall…and how close that might be. He wondered if they would have to storm those sloping stone and wood walls with the bayonet, and how many men might die in the attempt. He wondered…

A second puff of smoke erupted from the fort. Another ball struck the sand just ahead, and Porter wondered if he was about to die.

HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines
Within Objective Reality
0847 hours, GMT

Nal wondered if he was about to die. For a moment, he'd been locked in a terrible, life-or-death struggle with a nightmare apparition of black metal-ceramic and lashing tentacles…but the vision faded and he was back on the barricades outside the city of Derna.

Musket fire crackled from behind the barricades, knocking down several Greek and Arab mercenaries. Sergeant Derek was caught now in a desperate, life-or-death struggle with some hundreds of turbaned Barbary Coast pirates, and for a horrible moment, when Eaton was shot and the assault began to falter, it seemed as though the attack was doomed at last. Derek recovered from his bayonet thrust, then whipped the stock of his musket around to smash the jaw of another pirate rushing him from the left. Just in front of him, a musket boomed and Private John Whitten caught the round high in his chest, sprawling to the ground in an untidy splay of
arms and legs and pooling blood. Derek lunged again with his bayonet, cutting down the pirate who'd just fired.

And then, suddenly, magically, the enemy was running,
running
, turning their backs on the polyglot band of Marines and mercenaries and fleeing into the town. The men began cheering, some of them throwing caps and turbans into the air. Against all expectations, against all odds, the rush had carried the barricades and broken the enemy line of defense.

Nearby, the naval midshipman with the column was tying off a rough bandage around General Eaton's wrist. The man gave a thin-lipped smile and drew his pistol with his right hand. “We're not done yet!” he bellowed, pointing with the weapon. “The fort, men!”

Flushed and panting with exertion and victory, the handful of Marines and mercenaries cheered more loudly. After a mere sixty of them had stormed the barricades and set hundreds of defenders to flight,
anything
seemed possible now. As Derek began pulling the force back into order again, though, he felt a dark flash of foreboding. Of the seven enlisted Marines in the party, including himself, three—Thomas, O'Brian, and Steward were wounded, Steward critically—and one, John Whitten, was dead. Over half of the Marine contingent was out of action, now…and the Marines had been all that had held Eaton's bizarre little army together for the past seven weeks. Several Christian Greek mercenaries lay dead as well, along with several Muslims, and a dozen men out of the sixty were wounded. The victory at the barricades had come at a high price. One of the wounded men insisted he was still able to fight, but the other two would be left behind with some Greeks to watch over them.

The harbor fort lay just ahead, ominously silent. The naval midshipman raised a pre-arranged signal flag from a city wall parapet, and moments later the naval gunfire from the flotilla offshore slackened, then died away.

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

Eaton, Derek had long since concluded, was a vainglorious idiot with a penchant for melodrama. But the fort appeared empty, almost inviting.

Gunsmoke clung to the streets of Derna like a thick, New England fog as the ragged army, with four enlisted Marines and one officer in the van, began making its way through narrow streets toward Derna's harbor fort.

Blue Twelve
Objective Reality
0849 hours, GMT

Lieutenant Kadellan Wahrst wondered what was happening. She'd been…on her belly in the wheat, as machine-gun fire sliced the stalks inches above her back. Then she'd been crawling, trying to work her way around the Hun gun position. And then…

She guided her Starwraith up to the opening, a twenty-meter triangular cavern mouth yawning in the gray surface of the Xul world. Laser beams and particle cannon continued to gouge huge chunks from Xul surface structures, silencing the defensive weapons one by one. In the violet-blue mists overhead, flights of Marine Maelstrom heavy fighters off of the
Nicholas
flew dangerously low across the fire-torn landscape, guided to Xul targets by strikepod Marines on the surface, or by unmanned battlespace drones and recon AIs.

Captain Xander's icon was gone from her in-head display. No…there she was. Fifty meters distant and closing. What was wrong with their tracking?

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

“I…I'm not sure what happened.” Captain Xander's voice sounded shaken. “I was…in Mexico.
Mexico
. A place called Chapultepec….”

“Fuck,” Blue Nine, Misek Bollan said. “I was in some kind of small, open metal boat. Explosions in the water everywhere. And the beach was so far….”

“We may be under attack,” Xander said. “Psychic attack. Or possibly through our implants. Shake it off!”

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

“I'm coming.”

Xander, Bollan, and three other Marines joined Wahrst moments later. Their scanners showed no signs of life or movement within, but that didn't mean the Xul weren't lying in wait, their power systems damped down to near invisibility. Theory said the Xul “pilots” of those war machines lived on their equivalent of the Net, digital intelligences that could animate a lifeless piece of metal with a thought and turn it deadly.

“Nicholas, Blue One!” Xander called over the main QCC channel. “We are entering Objective Reality.”

And that was a misnomer if Wahrst had ever heard one, she thought. Whatever was happening around her, it wasn't reality, objective or otherwise. As she entered the cavern's mouth, the darkness faded to bright sunlight, to waving stalks of wheat, to pillars of climbing black smoke and the bellow and howl of artillery rounds.

Corporal Edgar O'Malley was crawling fast now, on his hands and knees, his Springfield awkwardly slung over his back. His destination was the tree line to his left, now less than twenty yards away.

All across the battlefield, tiny groups of Marines, their numbers decimated in those first few bloody moments of the advance, had abandoned their worse-than-useless French training and hit the deck, continuing to move forward but taking advantage of every bit of cover the shell-ravaged fields and woods had to offer. In a way, it was the supreme American military gesture, reverting to Indian tactics to defeat an enemy that expected them to march and maneuver parade-ground fashion in plain and easy-to-kill sight. American colonials had used such tactics to drive the British column all the way back from Concord to Boston in 1775. Now the U.S. Marines were using them to gain a foothold in the woods.