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? That didn’t sound right.
“Who are you?” Lee asked. “And why the hell should I want to talk to you?”
“I am Monique Sainte-Jean. You may think of me as your … your therapist. You have been unconscious for a very long time, and we want to be sure you awake with your mind, memories, and personality intact, non?”
Alarm bells were figuratively ringing in Lee’s mind, now. As a rule, she’d paid scant attention to interstellar politics, but she had been thoroughly briefed before her deployment to the Puller star system. The Puller system, she knew, was uninhabited and of zero importance to anyone, with the single exception of the Puller Gate.
The Gate’s connections had been explored in the half-dozen years following its discovery, some three decades earlier. A total of twelve established gatepaths had been uncovered there, one of them the route to the large Xul base at Starwall.
The problem with the stargates was that the multiple paths to other stars they provided never seemed to go to anyplace known or useful. All appeared to open at gates circling other stars scattered across the Galaxy, from the outer halo to the Galactic Core itself, but until more was known about those possible destinations—and whether or not entering them would alert the Xul to Humankind’s presence—it had been decided to avoid using them entirely.
Ever since the discovery of the very first gate at Sirius, astronomers, cosmologists, and physicists from every human starfaring government had been clamoring for the chance to use the Gates as research tools—opportunities to explore close-up such cosmic wonders and enigmas as black holes, neutron stars, the large-scale structure of the entire Galaxy, and the weird zoo of mysterious phenomena ticking away at the Galaxy’s heart. Since a significant number of those paths—two-hundred or so—led to Xul-occupied systems, and since the Xul appeared to use the far-flung network of Gate connections for their own long-range movement through the Galaxy, the various interstellar governments had agreed at the Treaty of Chiron in 2490 not to permit any human movement through the gates for any reason, without the fully informed consent of all starfaring governments.
And that was why the Puller Listening Post, and all of the others like it, were illegal, at least within the often murky arena of international treaty law. Under the auspices of the DCI2, the Department of Commonwealth Interstellar Intelligence, the Marines had been tapped to build and operate the system of listening posts … and as part of that operation, they routinely sent robotic probes and even—upon occasion and when necessary—manned surveillance spacecraft to keep an eye on the various identified Xul bases.
“My therapist, huh?” Lee replied. “Since when is the Direction Général interested in the emotional health of junior Marine officers?”
The DGSE—Direction Général de la Sécurité Extraterrestrial—was the Franco-PanEuropean counterpart to the DCI2. It was a guess on Lee’s part, but Ste.-Jean had to be either military or Federal-Republic civilian intelligence, and the DGSE was the largest and best funded of all of the Republic’s intelligence organizations.
The long silence that followed her jab suggested that she’d been on-target, or close to it. She might be consulting with her superiors on a different channel, or with a military intelligence AI.
“Very well,” Ste.-Jean said after a moment. “Perhaps we should play this in a more, ah, straightforward fashion. As it happens, I am DST, not DGSE, but it was a good guess on your part.”
The DST was the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire,