Semper Human. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ aren’t they?” Mortin said.

      “Right. A natural delivery system, which means made out of the local equivalent of organics, proteins, bone, cartilage, that sort of thing. When we handled HSbF6 in the lab, we needed either Teflon or field-shielded containers. It even eats through glass.”

      “They must’ve had help,” Garwe said. “Some source of technology from the outside. But then, they were using electron beam weapons, too, weren’t they?”

      “Yes, they were,” Xander said. “Someone has been running relatively high-tech weaponry to the locals. I wonder who?”

      “Or why?” Palin put in. “What do the gas bags have that they could trade off-world for weapons?”

      “There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense,” Major Lasenbe said. “We’re not here to sort it out, however. Xander, you and your people go grab some down-time. But I’ll want an after-action uploaded to my essistant tomorrow by thirteen hundred.”

      “Aye, aye, sir.”

      Lasenbe strode from the room. Xander appeared to relax a fraction.

      “Asshole,” Mortin said, his voice low.

      “Belay that, Marine,” Xander said. “Are all of you all right?”

      There was a mutter of response, “Yes, Skipper,” and “Okay” and “Ooh-rah” predominating. The Marines sounded subdued, however

      “Kind of a rough trip, Captain,” Garwe told her. “I think we’re still all in one piece, though.”

      “Garwe,” Xander said, turning to face him, “what did you mean when you told the major about feeling a time lag?”

      Garwe shrugged. “I’m not sure. It might have been psychodilation, I suppose.”

      “Or you were speeding?”

      “No, Skipper,” Garwe said. “I was linked with the rest of the squadron.”

      Psychodilation was a natural effect of human perception, the apparent slowing of the passage of time during moments of great danger, stress, or, paradoxically, boredom. “How time flies when we’re having fun” was the opposite extreme of the effect. Both perceptions occurred when the brain entered an alpha altered state under different circumstances, and had to do with how much in the way of fine detail the person was actually perceiving.

      “Speeding,” on the other hand, more formally known as PV, or psychovelocitas, was the artificial boosting of overall brain function to speed up reaction times, perception, and thought. There were times when this was appropriate, and carried out through the use of drugs or neural enhancement software, but while linked in with a combat formation was definitely not one of those times. Battle pod operations demanded precise coordination between squadron elements. If Garwe had been speeding, linked communications with him would have been garbled, fire coordination would have become chaotic, and unit cohesion might easily have broken down completely.

      Xander nodded. “I’ll check the telemetry records up here. It might have been a fault in your neural circuitry.”

      “My pod checked out okay, Skipper.” Not that it could be checked now. What was left of his pod was by now still drifting slowly into the depths of the gas giant Dac, flattened by atmospheric pressure and subjected to the searing heat of the planet’s depths. “I was probably just hyped on adrenaline.”

      “Gar’s right,” Palin said. “I was pretty keyed up, too. I think we all were.”

      Xander nodded. “Still, all of you will report to sickbay for a full neural series. I felt like I wasn’t quite in synch, either. And I don’t like not being in control.”

      “Aye, aye, sir,” several of the Marines chorused.

      “Garwe.”

      “Yes, sir?”

      “You stay for a moment. I want to talk with you.”

      “Sure, Skipper.”

      She sounded angry, and that was never good.

      He wondered where the hell this was going.

      5

       2101.2229

       Associative Marine Holding Facility 4

       Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System

       1919 hours, GMT

      Garroway tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The central mass resembled nothing so much as an immense, impossible, blossoming rose of streaming, blue-white radiance, imbedded within a confused tangle of blinding light, of far-flung arcs and walls and swirls of hot clouds of molecular gas, of stars showing comet tails streaming away from the central blast, of nebulae torn asunder by ferocious stellar winds, of objects set in such a titanic scale that stars and even clusters of stars were dwarfed to insignificance. His implant began overlaying what he was seeing with identifying blocks of text.

      Humans had last visited the center of the Galaxy in 1111 of the Marine Era … the year 2887 by the old calendar. Marine and naval forces had assaulted a major Xul base, a number of bases, actually, located in and around the Core structures. The largest and most important of these had been a Dyson cloud, a swarm of trillions of Xul artificial wordlets positioned around the supermassive black hole that marked the Galaxy’s exact gravitational center. At the climax of the battle, a red giant star called S-2, in close orbit around the central black hole, had been nudged from its high-velocity path by inducing a partial and off-center collapse beneath its surface, triggering an outrushing jet of stellar material that had acted like an immense rocket blast. The fast-dwindling star had fallen closer to the black hole than otherwise would have been the case, sweeping through part of the Xul cloud, then shredding as it whipped around the inner gravitational singularity and down the cosmic drain at the center.

      The Xul hyperstructure had been destroyed, the individual elements of the cloud plunging into the black hole in an eye’s blink because they’d been force-beam anchored in place, rather than circling in orbit. Much of the infalling matter had been swallowed of course, but much more had rebounded outward, generating what had come to be known as the Core Detonation, an out-rushing surge of tortured plasma so hot and bright that a supernova would have been lost in the glare.

      A nearby star cluster, young and hot, just a tenth of a light year out, had been consumed in the fury weeks later, the stars pop-pop-popping into a chain of supernovae as the flood of radiant energy engulfed them. Other supergiant stars close to GalCenter had been swept up as well, adding their mass as fuel to the maelstrom of radiation.

      That had been 1117 years ago. In those eleven centuries, the blast wave had swept outward, the wavefront of electromagnetic radiation traveling 1117 light years in that time, the somewhat slower, following squall of high-energy particles crossing about 900 light years in the same period of time. Stars, thousands of them caught in that deadly firestorm of energy, had exploded as they were engulfed, each adding its own bit of fury to the storm. The Galactic Core was now a seething ocean of blue-white hell, and it was still expanding.

      Any Xul nodes СКАЧАТЬ