The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ Semper fi. …”

      Green Family was a term out of the days before FTL, when Marines deployed starside might be gone for decades, objective. Over the course of the past eight centuries, the Marine Corps had been strongly shaped in certain key ways by the physics of interstellar travel.

      Back at the dawn of Humankind’s migration into space, all that had been known for sure about faster-than-light travel was that it was impossible. Einstein and relativity had convincingly demonstrated that converting all of the mass in the universe into energy would not be enough to accelerate a single atom to the speed of light, much less pass it. If humans wanted to travel to the stars, they would have to settle for decades-long voyages in cybernetic hibernation, on board ships that approached, but could never actually reach, the magic velocity of c. Relativistic time dilation slowed the passage of subjective time, but the fundamental way in which the universe was put together forbade the FTL warp drives of the popular fiction of the time.

      As a result, Marines deployed to the worlds of other stars would return to a culture that had changed dramatically during the intervening decades. Time dilation meant that the Marines might have aged five or six years, subjective, while twenty or thirty years objective had passed on Earth. The resultant temporal isolation had guaranteed that large numbers of Marines simply couldn’t fit in with the civilians they were sworn to protect; while they were out-system, most of the cultural markers they’d known and grown up with had changed. Music, language, fashion, art, politics, technology, everything that connected them with others had transformed, while the people they’d left behind were dead or changed by age.

      More and more, Marines had relied on the Corps as family. A Marine might return from the stars and find that Marines back on Earth possessed a different cultural background, true, but they were still Marines. Somehow, the similarities always outweighed the differences.

      Eventually, of course, Einstein was proved to be a special case within the broader scope of quantum physics, just as Newton had been a special case within the mathematics of relativity. The Stargates had demonstrated that it was possible to bypass enormous gulfs of interstellar space. Encounters with the Xul proved that FTL travel was possible without the Gates, though for centuries no one could figure out how they did it.

      What no one had ever imagined was that, when the problem was finally cracked, there would be not one solution, but many. It was still not known how the Xul hunterships bypassed light, but humans now possessed not one but two non-Gate modes of FTL travel of their own—the Alcubierre Drive and the much more recent paraspace phase-shift transitions, or PPST, used by large structures such as the Corps’ Skybase. And there were suggestions within the wilderness of theoretical physics that promised other modes of FTL travel as well.

      Neither the Alcubierre Drive nor PPST involved acceleration, and, therefore, time dilation didn’t enter into the equation. Voyages between the stars now required weeks or months rather than decades. It was with some surprisé, then, that Marine psychologists noted that Marines, enlisted Marines, especially, still failed to connect with the cultures from which they’d emerged.

      There were some who joked that Marines weren’t human to begin with, but the problem was becoming worse and needed to be addressed. The Marines possessed their own culture, their own societal structure, language, calendar and timekeeping system, heroes, economy, history, goals, and concerns.

      Most Marines would have pointed out that this had always been the case, going at least as far back as the global wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The psychs didn’t need to invoke star travel to suggest that Marines were different … or that most of them gloried in the difference.

      As an ancient Corps aphorism had it, there are only two kinds of people: Marines, and everyone else.

      Ramsey leaned back in his chair, watching the almost imperceptible drift of the nearest stars on the overhead. Thea’s death still burned in his gut, hot, sullen, and he still tended to flinch when he let his mind slip back to the final moments of the firefight on the skyscraper roof, to the sight of her battlesuit torn open and bloody as he cradled her, as he watched her consciousness slip away. He didn’t know if he could ever heal. …

      Awkwardly, he lifted his arm and placed it along the back of the reclining seat, behind Colver’s head. She moved a little closer to him, her leg touching his, and he let his arm drape over her shoulders. They continued to watch the illusion of stars.

      Whatever happened, he knew he had family—the Green Family—and, for the moment, at least, that was enough.

       PanEuropean Military Hospital Facility

       1530/31:05 hours, local time

      “Lieutenant?” a woman’s voice said in her head. “Lieutenant Lee? Can you hear me?”

      Lieutenant Tera Lee opened her eyes—then squeezed them tight once more as the blast of light speared its way into her skull. “Where the hell am I?”

      “You’re in the medical facility at Port-de-Paix.”

      “Where … where is that? …”

      “You’re at Aurore. Perhaps you know it as Theta Bootes IV? Actually, we’re on Aurore’s inner moon. We brought you here from the star system you call Puller.”

      The words were spoken within Lee’s mind, coming through her cranial implants, and that fact alone was … disturbing.

      Aurore, Lieutenant Lee knew, was deep in the heart of the PanEuropean Republic, the fourth planet circling a hot, F7 V star some 48 light-years from Sol, a world of broad oceans, rugged mountains, stunning auroral displays from which it took its name, and a trio of large moons. At least, that’s how it was described on the Worlds of Humankind database she’d studied back in the Naval Academy.

      It was also the capital of the Republic … and what the hell was she doing here when her last memories were of being adrift at Starwall, umpteen thousands of light-years from the listening post at Puller 659?

      “How … long? …” Her lips were cracked and dry, and her throat was sore. She was aware of terrible pain, but at a distance, held at bay, she imagined, by whatever anodynanomeds they’d given her.

      “Please don’t try to talk,” the woman’s voice said. “I’m using your implant channels to communicate with you directly. If you focus your words in your mind, I will hear you.”

      The security implications of that were ominous. How had the PEs gotten hold of her personal comchannels?

      For that matter, what the hell was she doing at the PE capital in the first place?

      “How long have you been here?” the voice in her head continued. “You were brought on board the Sagitta, one of our light cruisers, on the third of November. That was about three weeks ago. You arrived at the Theta Bootes system yesterday. You’ve been in deep cybernetic hibernation since your … exposure to radiation somewhere beyond the Puller Stargate.

      “You were very, very badly burned. I’m told your condition was beyond the scope of the small base where you were stationed. If our task force had not arrived when it did, if your commanding officer had not chosen to communicate with us, your condition would have deteriorated to the point where you would have been an irretrievable.”

      Major Tomanaga had called in the Europeans? СКАЧАТЬ