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 command 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 senior administrator flicked out. On the wall, a third city had just been annihilated in a burst of atomic fury—Bethelen, which was, Goradon 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.
1
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 artificial 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 filling 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, Garroway 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 Temporal Liaison Officer.”
“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 managed 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, bringing 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 nanogel 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 officers, during their physical indoctrination in the first year of OCS or the Commonwealth Naval Academy. The theory was that there would be times when Marines were operating outside of established e-networks—during the invasion of a hostile planet, for instance.
He knew he could manage without it. That was why all recruits were temporarily deprived of any electronic network connection or personal computer, to prove that they could survive 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 information, 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 streaming 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. Genetically enhanced, he wondered? Surgical replacements? Or natural genetic drift? She seemed to be looking 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, 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 cerebral 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 records, your last period 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.
