of the Marine Era. Killed in action 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 temporal 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 confess, though, that I’m a little surprised there still is a Marine Corps. There was talk back in the early thirtieth about disbanding us. The Corpsman who put me under down in Noctis 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 disbanding. 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 budget 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.
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 relationships 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 records of Garroways 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 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 shadowed 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 astonishing was the sheer scale of the vista ahead and below; the opening in the cloud layer appeared to be dozens of kilometers 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 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 hydrogen.
“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 floatreef.
“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 replied. “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 nanoflage, 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 first place—with no mines, no metallurgy, no heavy industry, no fire—was the subject of ongoing xenosociotechnic debate, and the principal reason for the Associative Compound on Hassetas.
The twelve tiny pods comprising Blue Flight leveled off when they reached the expected Hassetasan depth. In popular 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
