Semper Human. Ian Douglas

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 plunged, however, the thicker and hotter the gas mix became. At this depth, the atmospheric pressure was about eight times human standard, and the temperature outside the Starwraith’s hull hovered at around the freezing point of water. The day, by most human standards, was positively balmy … at least when compared to temperatures higher or lower in the intensely stratified volume of Dac’s turbulent atmosphere.

      Ahead, a cloud wall rose like an impenetrable cliff, a vast pink-brown cliff with a looming, mushroom-shaped top, with wind-carved striations running along its face.

      “Reduce velocity, Blues,” Xander ordered. “We’re going subsonic.”

      The flight plunged into the face of the cloud-cliff, as the individual pods were buffeted somewhat by windstreams whipping around the cloud at 300 kilometers per hour. At eight atmospheres, with an H/He gas mix, the speed of sound was nearly 2400 kph, so the local winds were little more than zephyrs.

      The clouds thickened until optical feeds were useless; Garwe shifted again to tactical, though there was little useful information the system could give him now—radiation flux, gas mix and pressure, temperature and windspeed, projected position of the other eleven pods of Blue Flight.

      And, ahead, the beacon marking Hassetas.

      Moments later, the flight emerged into another crystalline gulf, the interior of a vast spiral of clouds marking a hot updraft from below.

      And ahead, an immense, gossamer bubble almost transparent in the sunlight, was the Dac living city called Hassetas.

      “Hassetas airspace control,” Xander’s voice snapped out, crisp and concise, “this is Associative Marine Flight Blue on docking approach. Acknowledge.”

      There was no immediate reply, and the silence was a palpable, imminent threat. Had the Hassetas crisis worsened during Blue Flight’s descent from Tromendet, Dac IV’s largest moon? There could be no doubt that weapons—highly advanced and lethal weapons—were trained on the tiny Marine pods now approaching the living floatreef.

      The Marines had just called the Dacs’ bluff and sent their squadron into the heart of this latest crisis, and now it was up to the Krysni jellyfish—and the sapient floatreef they served—to decide how to respond.

      Would it be peace, and an invitation to land?

      Or the triggering of a savage curtain of high-energy weaponry?

      Garwe found he was holding his breath, waiting for the reply. …

      2

       2101.2229

       Associative Marine Holding Facility 4

       Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System

       1845 hours, GMT

      Trevor Garroway leaned back in a reclining seat grown by Captain Schilling from the deck of the large compartment she called the Memory Room. “You sure we can start this so soon?” he asked her. “You said it would take twenty hours to grow a new implant.”

      The easy stuff is already in place, she told him. It took Garroway a moment to realize that she hadn’t spoken aloud, that her mouth hadn’t moved as she’d said the words. His implant was already picking up the transmitted thoughts of others with his implant encoding.

      So … can you hear this? he thought, forcing the words out one by one in his mind.

      Ouch, yes, she replied. You don’t need to shout. We’re connected over your basic personal link-channel. Others will be added later. You can also use that channel to begin downloading library data. You don’t have much in the way of artificial storage, yet—only about a pic of memory so far—but the link will let you download the gist to your native memory. You’ll just need to review it to see what’s there.

      So what memories are you giving me now? he asked.

      A general history of the past two thousand years, she told him, with emphasis on the Xul wars and subsequent social and technological development within the sphere of Humankind … what you knew as the Commonwealth. The rise of the Associative. A little bit of Galactic history, as we now understand it. Not much detail, here, not yet … just what you’ll need to put things into context later.

      When you finally tell me what the goddamn crisis is that warrants pulling a Marine Star Battalion out of cold storage, he said, nodding. Gotcha.

       Exactly. Are you comfortable? Ready to begin?

      He took a deep breath as he settled back into the too-comfortable chair. Ready as I can be, Captain. Shoot. …

      And the images began coming down, a trickle at first, and then a flood.

      It would, he realized, take him a long time to go through these new memories. Each distinct memory, each fact or date or historical event, did not, could not exist in isolation, but was a part of a much larger matrix. Until he had access to a lot more information, these bits and pieces would tend to remain discreet, unconnected, and essentially meaningless within the far vaster and more complex whole.

      One thing, though, was clear immediately. The aliens were coming out of hiding.

      He already remembered, of course, the history of the Xenophobe Wars. The Xul—electronically uploaded nonhuman sentients who’d apparently been around for at least the past ten million years—had been the dominant Galactic species, taking control of much of the Galaxy from