B009NFP2OW EBOK

by Douglas, Ian

  The Intermundi Pleasure Club was an enormous structure, 100 meters across, rotating to provide about a half G of spin gravity at the outer deck, less on the elevated levels and walkways closer to the center. Outside the labyrinth of smaller privacy areas, the club’s interior opened up into a vast cavern. Transparencies in the floor looked out on the slow-wheeling stars of space punctuated occasionally by a blast of light from Earth or sun; multiple decks, verandas, and soaring arches gave a multilevel fairyland effect to the architecture, and at the exact center of the space a 10-meter bubble of water hung motionless as the club rotated around it. Gregory and Vaughn had chosen an open deck well above the main floor; spin gravity here was only about a quarter G, more than the moon but less than the surface of Mars, and the water was an easy climb overhead.

  “Want to go for a swim?”

  “No, I want something to eat. I’m hungry!”

  “Whatcha want?”

  “I’m feeling carnivorous. Surprise me.”

  “One surprise, coming up.” He palmed a contact on the entrance to their cube, scrolled through the menu that opened in his mind, and selected Steak Imperial for two. What arrived in the receiver a moment later, hissing and moist, had never been within 36,000 kilometers of the Brazilian Empire, but the program that had assembled the component atoms and heated them to palatability had been designed by world-class chefs—probably AI chefs—and could not be distinguished from tissue that once had been alive and roaming the pampas south of the Amazon Sea.

  “How do you think it’s going to end?” she asked him later, as they ate.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking . . . so many alien species out there, and most of them seem to be on board with the Sh’daar and out to get us. We can’t face them all.”

  Gregory shrugged. “Yeah, well, they seem pretty disjointed, don’t they? The Turusch attack us here . . . the H’rulka attack there . . . then the Nungies show up someplace else with their little Kobold buddies. They’re all as different from one another as any of them are from humans. Coordination, planning, even basic communication must be a real bear for them.”

  The thought was not original with Gregory, but had been circulating through the squadrons as a series of morale downloads from the Personnel Department. It was propaganda . . . but it was propaganda based on fact and that actually made sense.

  The Turusch were things like partially armored slugs that worked in tightly bound pairs and communicated by heterodyning meaning into two streams of blended, humming tones. The H’rulka were gas bags a couple of hundred meters across; they had parasites living in their tentacle forests that were larger than individual humans. The Nungiirtok were 3 meters tall and very vaguely humanoid . . . except that what was inside that power armor they wore was not even remotely human. The Jivad were like land-dwelling octopi that swarmed along on three tightly coiled tentacles, and used both speech and color changes in their skin patterns to communicate. The Slan used sonar as their primary sense, rather than a single weak, light-sensing organ, and apparently could focus multiple sound beams so tightly that they could “see” as well as a human; they couldn’t perceive color, of course, but according to the xenosoph people they could tell what you’d had for breakfast and watch your heart beating and your blood flowing when they “looked” at you. Communication for them appeared to be in ultrasound frequencies, patterns of rapid-fire clicks at wavelengths well beyond the limits of human hearing.

  “That shouldn’t matter that much, should it?” Vaughn said. “I mean . . . those translators the Agletsch wear seem to work pretty well. Communications wouldn’t be that much of a problem for them.”

  “No, it is a problem,” Gregory replied, “and a big one. Alien biology means an alien way of looking at the universe. Like the dolphins, y’know?”

  Centuries ago, attempts to communicate with the dolphins and whales of Earth’s seas had demonstrated that differences in biology dictated how a species might communicate—dolphins, for instance, simply could not form the sounds required for human speech. And different modes of speech shaped how their brains worked, how they thought of themselves and the world around them. There were, Gregory knew, AIs residing within implants in dolphin brains now designed to bridge the linguistic barriers between the species, but those translations had only proven that dolphin brains were as alien to humans as the group minds of the abyssal electrovores inhabiting the under-ice ocean of Enceladus.

  “Anyway,” Gregory went on, “the theory is that the different va-Sh’daar species have trouble cooperating militarily because of the biological differences among them. They’re so different from one another that the damned war has dragged on for fifty-seven years, now, and they still haven’t been able to get their act together enough to move in and swat us. And since we have the same trouble communicating with any of them, we can’t really negotiate an end to it.”

  “But there are so many of them. Sooner or later they will swat us. Nice image. And we can’t fight them all.”

  “Maybe not. But maybe we can keep fending them off one at a time. If they can’t work together, we can defeat them separately.”

  “Do you think we can?”

  He shrugged. “Beats me. But fighting the bastards is better than becoming their slaves, right? Humanity va Sh’daar.”

  No one knew how many species the Sh’daar controlled within the galaxy, not even the Agletsch. Estimates ranged from the thirty or so mentioned by various Agletsch data purchases—their so-called living Encyclopedia Galactica—to several thousands of civilizations scattered across half of the galaxy.

  Sh’daar client species, in the Agletsch lingua franca known to humans, were properly referred to with the suffix va Sh’daar tacked on to the ends of their names—“Turusch va Sh’daar,” for instance—a term that seemed literally to denote ownership. The fact that Sh’daar clients had tiny implants of some sort, called Seeds, might be a means of unifying the otherwise disparate species and cultures, but Confederation Intelligence had not yet been able to determine what these Seeds were capable of, or how they worked. Apparently, they gathered information and periodically uploaded it to Sh’daar communications nets, but how they might control Turusch and H’rulka and Slan forces or individuals was still unknown.

  So many, many unknowns . . .

  “We know they don’t want us to explore certain technologies,” Vaughn said after a time.

  “GRIN,” Gregory said, nodding. “Genetics, Robotics, Information systems, and Nanotechnology. They’re afraid we’re about to hit the Technological Singularity and really take off.”

  “Become stargods,” Vaughn said, repeating a popular theme from various entertainment downloads.

  Gregory was impressed. Lots of Prims didn’t know much about high-tech issues—the Sh’daar Ultimatum and the Technological Singularity. But then, he’d never asked her about her Prim background. Some Prims knew a lot about modern tech; they just chose to ignore it, especially the ones who opted out of having electronic implants nanochelated inside their brains for whatever reason. Some Prims joined the military—“came in from the wet,” as the old saying had it—and their training downloads required that they have the same implants as everyone else. Not for the first time, he wondered what her childhood history was . . . how she’d grown up, why she’d been a Prim, and what had led her out of that life to join the Navy.

  “Problem is,” Gregory said after a thoughtful moment, “we don’t know exactly what it is the Sh’daar really want, or why. They want to block us from the Singularity, yeah . . . but why should what happens to us affect them? It’s a damned big galaxy. . . .”

  “We’re not going to go along with those demands, are we?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. The Confederation might be willing to negotiate with the bastards . . . but I can’t see President Koenig giving in by one millimeter. He’ll fight before he agrees to lose our tech.”<
br />
  “Yeah. But can we win?”

  “Maybe the best we can hope for is a standoff. Hold them at bay until . . .”

  “Until what?”

  “I don’t know. Until we become stargods? After that, all bets are off.”

  For a time, they ate in silence, finishing their meals and dropping the plates and utensils into a recycler in the wall.

  “That was good,” Vaughn said. “I’m glad they allowed liberty again.”

  “Sandy Gray might have had a mutiny on his hands if he didn’t,” Gregory laughed. “With the Marines, especially, it being their birthday and everything. What I’m wondering, though, is if those Confed warships that pulled in this afternoon are the reason our departure was delayed.”

  “Scuttlebutt says that Geneva scrubbed the mission to Omega Cent.” Playfully, she punched his shoulder. “Hey! Maybe you’re headed for Osiris after all.”

  “About freakin’ time if we are.”

  It was, Gregory thought, the uncertainty that was the worst part of military service. You were always waiting, it seemed. Someone higher up in the hierarchy was always making the decisions, calling the shots . . . and more often than not the decisions were changed at the last moment, with the result that flight officers and enlisted personnel never knew where or when they were deploying next.

  A return to Osiris. An invasion of Osiris, to liberate his homeworld.

  He scarcely dared hope . . .

  A familiar tone sounded inside his head. “Aw, shit . . .”

  “Not now!” Vaughn cried. “Damn them!”

  “Attention, all America personnel,” he heard. “Liberty is cancelled. Repeat, liberty is cancelled. Return to the ship immediately. I say again . . .”

  The two of them had had plans for a long and lingering evening at the pleasure club, but, once again, the Navy had intervened.

  “Speaking of all BETS being off,” he said with a wry smile. He rummaged inside the small hip bag he’d brought on liberty, pulled out a uniform pellet and slapped it against his chest. The contents spread out from under his hand, activated by the pressure, spreading swiftly to cover him head to toe in skin-tight Navy black, complete with rank tabs and a gold sunburst on his left chest. He picked up another pellet and tossed it to Vaughn. “Get dressed, love,” he told her. “Duty calls.”

  It would take them perhaps fifteen minutes to get back on board the America.

  Bridge

  TC/USNA CVS America

  USNA Naval Base

  Quito Synchorbital

  2028 hours, TFT

  America was coming alive.

  Sandy Gray relaxed into the virtual reality projected into his mind by the ship’s AI network. He’d put in a request to link with President Koenig, and at the moment he was within the Executive Office waiting area, a virtual room equipped with chairs, a table, and floor-to-ceiling viewall imagery of space and distant worlds. One wall was particularly spectacular, showing a view taken from one of America’s high-velocity mail packets twenty years ago from a vantage point just outside of the dwarf galaxy that was home to the ancient Sh’daar. Visible was the sweeping expanse of the Milky Way galaxy imaged from about ten thousand light years above one outer spiral arm, looking in toward the red-orange beehive swarm of the galactic core.

  America’s packet was, so far, the only vessel of humanity that had looked back at the home galaxy from the outside. The vista was spectacular—billions of stars swept up together in the curves of spiral arms, interlaced with the sinuous twists of dark nebulae and the scattered blue-white gleam of rarer, brighter suns.

  Gray wondered if Koenig had posted that image here to overawe visitors, to remind them of the America battlegroup’s visit to the remote past . . . or simply because he loved the panorama’s beauty and wanted to share.

  An adjoining wall displayed a live view of America, still tethered to her docking gantry. Another reminder, perhaps . . .

  What Gray was doing—trying to get a direct mind-to-mind link with the president of the United States of North America, was technically illegal, a blatant and straightforward attempt to bypass the usual chain of command entirely. Admiral Steiger was his commanding officer . . . and normally the hierarchy went up through CO to USNA Naval Command, to the Joint Chiefs, and finally to the USNA secretary of Space Defense. The arrival of Admiral Delattre at Quito Synchorbital had dropped even more buffering layers between him and the president, including the Confederation Bureau of Extraplanetary Affairs in Geneva, but Gray was ignoring all of that and going straight to the top.

  He had the right. Not one recognized by Geneva or USNANC, perhaps, but the right of warrior to commanding officer. They’d both been at Arcturus and Eta Boötis, at Alphekka and Texaghu Resch . . . both had been through the TRGA to another galaxy 900 million years in the past to face the Sh’daar in their home space and time. Both of them had commanded the CVS America, and that alone counted for a hell of a lot.

  Even so, his decision had surprised him a little. Gray was still a Prim, an outsider from the Manhat Ruins, even if his decision to join the USNA Navy twenty-three years ago had conferred upon him full citizenship. And with the universal access afforded by modern neural-link communications, the barriers afforded both by differences in rank and by social status simply no longer existed. The president could refuse his link request, of course . . . but Gray didn’t think that was going to happen.

  They’d both been in the figurative trenches all those years ago. He looked again at the view of Earth’s galaxy seen from outside and almost a billion years ago. They’d both been out there, so distant in time and space that you were to all intents and purposes alone, beyond the reach of orders from Earth, beyond anything save your own personal concept of duty.

  “Captain Gray!” a remembered voice said, as the electronic avatar of President Koenig snapped into view. “It’s good to see you again!”

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. President.”

  “Not a problem. You’re here because of the Confederation orders, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. Admiral Steiger appears . . . committed to following those orders. The new orders. But I’m not convinced that those orders are in the best interest of the United States.”

  “Obviously.” Koenig gave a wry grin. “You’re stepping way outside of the proper chain of command here. You must think it’s pretty serious.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Serious enough to commit an act of mutiny?”

  “I . . . no, sir.” Gray felt . . . flustered. Off balance. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected Koenig to say, but he hadn’t expected that. “Not mutiny. Sir, I’m here to ask your advice, not go against my oath.”

  “What do you think we need to do?”

  “Well, for a start, something damned big and scary came out of the Black Rosette. We need to know what it is.”

  “Right now, I think Geneva doesn’t want to know,” Koenig said. “And whatever it is, it’s a long way away.”

  “If our drive technology can ’cube a capital ship cross sixteen thousand light years in less than six months, I expect that Sh’daar technology can as well. Whatever destroyed the Endeavor could be here sometime in March. Maybe sooner. We don’t know.”

  “If it’s the Sh’daar who destroyed the Endeavor,” Koenig reminded him. “And if it wasn’t the Sh’daar . . . and there are reasons for doubting that it is . . . then it’s somebody else, and we have no reason to assume they know where Sol is.”

  “What reasons, sir?”

  “That we doubt the Sh’daar came out of the Black Rosette?” Koenig shrugged. “Mostly the fact that we haven’t been able to ID the ships.”

  One of the viewalls cut to a recorded image, one taken, the block of text in one corner reported, from one of the scout vessels off of the destroyer Herrera and transmitted to the HVK-724 high-velocity courier that ha
d returned to Sol with the news of the attack.

  Blue-white beams snapped out from the center of the Rosette, riddling the Endeavor, the Herrera, and the Miller, shredding their forward water-storage tanks in expanding clouds of ice crystals, puncturing sponsons and hab modules and drive blisters. An instant later, all three vessels were enveloped in expanding plumes of plasma as hot as the core of a star. The plumes grew and merged, forming what looked like a miniature and grossly misshapen sun surrounded by minute and outward-tumbling bits of debris.

  And then the ships began emerging from the soft-glowing orifice of the Black Rosette . . . tens of them—no, hundreds—a cloud of highly polished ovoid shapes visible only because they were reflecting the glare from the destroyed ships in their mirror-perfect reflective hulls.

  And the silver objects continued to swarm as something larger, something much larger, slowly emerged from the Rosette. The shape looked organic—egg shapes partially overlapping one another or partially merged together—its hull mirror-smooth like the tiny spheres traveling in its shadow.

  And then the vid broke off as the ship recording and transmitting the images went off-line, presumably destroyed.

  “Those ships,” Gray said, “what were they? I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  “Exactly. They’re not Turusch, H’rulka, or any other technology with which we’re familiar. And the weapon they used . . .”

  “Yeah, what was that?”

  “Antiprotons accelerated to near-light speed. They do damage by both kinetic impact and by matter-antimatter reaction.”

  “An AM explosion would also cause damage from the X-ray and gamma radiation it released,” Gray said, thoughtful.

  “Exactly. We’ve not run into this kind of weapons technology before. If the Sh’daar had it, they never used it on us.”