been active, over eight centuries ago, there’d already been a sharply drawn dichotomy between Marines and the civilian population they protected. Neither group understood the other. Neither could socialize well with the other. Neither could speak the other’s language. No wonder most Marines tended to find both family partners and sexual liaisons among others in the Corps. Marines might visit the local hot spots and brothels for a quick bit of fun, but longer and more solid relationships required a degree of mutual understanding with civilians that had become harder and harder to come by.
And it wasn’t just that Marines got into trouble with the locals on liberty. The politicians who requested Fleet Marines to put down an insurrection or show the fist to a local warlord didn’t understand them either. And that was where the problems really started chewing up the machinery.
“Okay,” Garroway said after a moment. “I understand all of that. We need babysitters. But why does the government need us at all if they have you?”
“We’re a caretaker force, sir, nothing more. The administrators. The personnel officers and logistics staff who make sure there is a Corps for you to wake up to.”
“But I see something here about Anchor combat units. …”
“Yes, sir. We have combat units, but they’re more placeholders than anything else. You are the real Fleet Marine Force.”
Garroway considered this. The Globe and Anchor was one of the oldest and most sacred talismans of the Corps, a symbol going back to the Royal Marines, who were the predecessors of America’s Continental Marines of 1775. It was an amusing idea, he decided, using globe and anchor to identify two different kinds of Marine … but the concept behind it disturbed him. Throughout the history of the Corps he knew, every Marine had known a single brotherhood, the Corps, each man and woman undergoing the same training, with the same traditions, the same language, the same background.
He found himself wondering if Captain Schilling was a real Marine, or something else—an imitation, a temporary stand-in for the real thing.
For centuries, Marine culture had been a distinct and self-contained entity in its own right. If cultural drift over the centuries had made the old Marines alien to the rest of Humankind, wouldn’t that alienness extend to these caretaker Marines as well?
“Every Marine is a rifleman, Captain,” he said.
“Pardon, sir?”
“Did you download that in training? I hope to hell you did, because if you didn’t the Corps has changed out of all recognition.”
“I don’t understand the word ‘rifleman,’ sir. Give me a second … oh.”
“The rifle is the Marine’s primary weapon, Captain. I don’t care what you use nowadays, the principle is the same. As for the expression, it’s old. Pre-spaceflight, I think. Every Marine is a combat infantryman first, a rifleman, and whatever else—cook, personnel clerk, aviator, storekeeper, computer programmer, general—second.”
“Today we say, ‘every Marine is a weapons sysop first.’?”
“Somehow, Captain, that just doesn’t have the same ring.”
Garroway continued to scan lightly through a flood of downloads. He was starting to get the hang of the new implant as he used it. It was responsive and powerful, and he was beginning to get the idea that he hadn’t even begun yet to glimpse its full potential.
Here was another one, from a world called Gleidatramoro, a kind of trading center and interstellar marketplace in toward the Galactic Core frequented by several hundred races. It was, he noted, another artificial world, like Kaleed. Didn’t people live on planets anymore? A human mob had formed in Gleidat’s capital city and attacked … that was interesting. They’d attacked a number of s-Humans, whatever those were, then gone on to dismember several hundred AIvatars. Cross-connecting on the unfamiliar terminology, he learned that s-Humans were a superintelligent genegineered species of human, while an AIvatar was the human, humanoid, or digital vehicle for an advanced artificial consciousness.
How, he wondered, was that different from a robot?
The riot on Gleidatramoro had spread when several non-human species had intervened on behalf of the AIvatars. Several thousand individuals of various species, human, non-human, superhuman, and artificially sentient, had been killed, many of them irretrievably. The humans currently were bottled up within the capital city in a bloody stand-off, and both they and the non-humans were calling for help.
Again, Anchor Marines had been sent in to regain control. The situation on Gleidatramoro was still fluid.
And here was an invasion of Propanadnid space by a human warlord named Castillan, who’d launched his armada under the ringing battle cry of “death to the Proppies!” And another, a terrorist attack on an asteroid defense system in the Sycladu system, an attack with, as yet, no known motive. And still another, an attempt by the human population of Gharst to unplug several million t-Humans … the Homo telae of the local Net. So much for human sensibilities opposed to electronic genocide.
The list went on … and on, and on, hundreds of incidents during the past thirty days alone. There were far too many, scattered across far too large a volume of space and among far too many worlds, for a single Marine division to have a chance of coping with them all.
The total number of violent clashes and incidents—some nineteen hundred during the past month, according to the latest tally—was utterly trivial compared to the tens of billions of populated worlds and habitats that made up the Associative. On the other hand, there’d been nine hundred such incidents reported the previous month, and four hundred the month before that. There appeared to be a kind of background noise count of violent encounters, of riots, revolutions, and bullying neighbors, but overall the numbers had been low, perhaps two hundred a month, an indication, Garroway thought, that this Associative might have it on the ball so far as galactic governments were concerned. Lately, though, there’d been a sharp increase in the numbers, and so far there was no sign that the trend had peaked.
“Almost twenty thousand of these incidents,” he told her. “That’s more than the number of men, women, and AIs in my division. What are the Marines supposed to do about it? We can’t invade all these worlds. And we can’t protect billions of planets that haven’t been hit.”
“No. But you can investigate this. …”
A virtual world enveloped Garroway, emerging from his new implant. In an instant, he was surrounded by deep space, within a blazing shell of brilliant stars.
There were millions of them, most red or orange in hue, which contributed to an overall red and somber background. Ahead, bathing nearby gas clouds in searing, arc-harsh blue radiance, was the Core Detonation.
“The Galactic Core,” Garroway said, whispering. “The center of the Galaxy.”
“We did do a number on it, didn’t we?”
She almost sounded proud.
Marine Assault Carrier Night’s Edge
Synchronous Orbit, Dac IV
Star System 1727459
1914 hours, GMT
Lieutenant
