The creature confronting her now was a case in point. He was clad in the new technorganic-look, half hardware appliqué, half dyetooed skin. He wore a visible pinger on his right shoulder which was pulsing orange light at the moment, an indicator that he was interested in sexual diversions of any kind. Orange dyettooes covered half his body in what looked like Sanskrit characters, including his genitals—just to make sure that everyone knew he was available for play.
Kaitlin preferred the old days, when there’d always been a hint of mystery, even suspense, with any new and casual meeting.
The times, the culture, were simply changing too damned fast.
“Blue stellar!” the dyed apparition said. “You’re Colonel Kaitlin Garroway, First Marine Space Force! Your pat was Sands of Mars Garroway, your—”
“I do know who I am,” she said, a bit more sharply than she’d intended. She still couldn’t get used to the new habit people had of announcing themselves by announcing you…an ostentatiously irritating means, basically, of proving they had a good Farley program running in their PAD assistants.
“Tek! Been progged to ’face with ya, Colonel. Saw you on the list when I dunelled it and nearly maxed.”
Kaitlin blinked. She had the general idea that the kid—he couldn’t have been older than his early twenties—was glad to see her, but she still wasn’t sure why. He had a decided technological edge on her. He was wearing some pretty sharp-edged tech, including a partial sensory helmet—it covered only the left side of his head, leaving the primitive right half free and “natural”—with a flip-aside monocular for his data HUD. He was probably tapping all the data on her that he could find at this moment, while she had nothing to query but the AI secretary resident in her PAD. She was damned if she would let herself appear interested, though, by opening her personal access device just to electronically query the local net server for a Farley on this guy’s name, background, and interests.
“And you are?” she asked, her voice cool.
“Oh, vid. Handle’s Hardcore. Wanted to link with ya on some prime throughput. Like what the milboys are runnin’ landing on Jupiter. I run, like, the Masters might get the wrong feed, c’nect?”
Kaitlin was abruptly conscious of just how many people in the room around her were wearing sensory communications gear of some sort, from appliqués like Hardcore’s to full helmets with darkened visors and internal HUD displays. Resident AIs with the appropriate dialect and slang interpreters made talking cross-culture a lot easier than trying it null-teched.
“To begin with,” she said slowly, trying to sort her way through the tangle of techculture slang, “the Marines aren’t landing on Jupiter. A Marine Space Expeditionary Unit is deploying to Europa. That’s one of Jupiter’s moons. As for the Masters…I suppose you mean one or another of the A-Squared cultures?”
“Absopos, cybe! Like, I run the An made us what we are, linkme? And, like, I run they might not log our peaceful nature with the mils goosestepping into their domain.”
A-Squareds. Thank the newsies for that bit of cuteness, meaning Ancient Aliens. There were two known, now, and a third inferred, thanks to xenoarcheological digs on Mars, the Moon, and even, lately, on Earth, now that the diggers knew what to look for. The Builders had left the enigmatic structures and fragments on Mars half a million years ago, and presumably had tinkered with human genetics at the same time, creating archaic Homo sapiens from the earlier populations of Homo erectus. The An had been something else entirely, a nonhuman spacefaring species that had enslaved a fair-sized fraction of humanity ten thousand years ago, and left their imprint in human myth, legend, and architecture across the Fertile Crescent, in parts of Africa, and in both South and Central America before being annihilated by the presumptive third Ancient Alien culture, the Hunters of the Dawn.
“The Builders have been extinct for half a million years,” she told Hardcore. “The An appear to have been wiped out ten thousand years ago. If the Hunters of the Dawn are still out there, we haven’t seen any sign of them. I can’t see that any of them would mind us going to Europa. And the Marines are going there to protect American interests.” As always. First to fight. Too often, the first to die.
“But that runs totally null, cybe. Like, they upgraded us, so we have to be jacked in tight and one-worlding it when they return….”
Kaitlin at last was beginning to take the kid’s measure. An Ancient Astronut.
There were literally hundreds of new cults and religions about, spawned by the recent discoveries elsewhere in the Solar System that were continuing the ongoing process of displacement for humankind’s place in the universe begun by Copernicus so long before. The Builders had tinkered with human DNA, and a few civilized members of that new species had died on Mars when the facilities there had been attacked by unknown enemies. The An had established bases on the Moon and colonies on Earth, enslaving large numbers of humans to help raise their monumental and still enigmatic structures at Giza, Baalbek, Titicaca, and elsewhere, before infalling asteroids deliberately aimed by another unknown enemy had wiped most of the An centers away in storms of flame and flood. Twice, it appeared, humans had narrowly escaped the fates of more advanced, alien patron races.