B009NFP2OW EBOK

by Douglas, Ian

  But for such a thing to work, the computer networks involved had to be able to communicate with one another. That implied a certain amount of standardization—an ability to match clock speeds and to handle data packets and peer-to-peer communications with some degree of commonality.

  Earth’s intelligence services still had no idea how such a thing might be accomplished, but evidently it had been done once, at least, probably a billion years or so ago within the Sh’daar home galaxy. The Agletsch and their pidgins hadn’t been around then, of course—the Spiders, almost certainly, were native to this galaxy and this time—but they had evidently taken Sh’daar translation protocols and implemented them for modern Sh’daar client species, from the Turusch and H’rulka to humans and the Slan.

  And as a result, intelligence software like Chesty2 had something to work on. In particular, they could find language files and compare them with known files, a kind of electronic Rosetta Stone that allowed an unknown alien language to be cracked.

  Initial data sent back from the Inchon suggested that the Slan did communicate by sound—specifically through modulations of rapid-fire clicks and chirps, many of them in the ultrasonic range, above the threshold of human hearing. Now, according to Villanova, Chesty2 had found language files including the primary Agletsch trade pidgin, the language used by the Sh’daar to speak with many of their clients. The Slan computers included a language file based on such sounds.

  What was more, the Inchon had just received a message in the Agletsch pidgin requesting direct communications . . . “Hive Master to Hive Master,” as the oddly worded text put it.

  The Slan, apparently, wanted to talk.

  Gray considered this carefully. Direct communications with an enemy could have dire consequences. They could use that channel to insert a virus into the USNA networks, just as the Marines had done with the Slan HQ ship. With an advanced-enough technology, they might even be able to take over America’s systems to an extent that would result in serious damage or destruction for the human vessel.

  On the other hand, America had quite good network security.

  And if there was even a small chance of ending the conflict with the Slan . . .

  “Open a channel to the Inchon,” Gray told Wilson.

  It was time to open negotiations with the Slan, before more fighting destroyed what was left of the human fleet.

  Executive Office, USNA

  Columbus, District of Columbia

  United States of North America

  1614 hours, EST

  “Our ships are on the way in, Mr. President,” Admiral Armitage told him. “Pittsburgh will be over Tsiolkovsky in another two minutes. The others should arrive within an hour.”

  “Thank you, Gene,” Koenig replied. “Keep your feed open and let me watch over your shoulder.”

  “Of course, Mr. President.”

  Military personnel never liked it when their superiors watched through their command links—especially when that superior was the commander in chief. Koenig made a habit of not micromanaging his officers, however, so he thought he could probably get away with it this time. Eugene Armitage had been head of his Joint Chiefs of Staff for two years, now, and this was the first time Koenig had used his high-G pull as president to intrude on one of his subordinates.

  He’d been following the battle on the moon for eight hours, now, linked in through the Marine tactical net. Not a lot had been happening for most of that time. Lieutenant Burnham’s handful of Marines, deployed along the northern rim of Tsiolkovsky Crater sixty-some kilometers from the underground base housing the Konstantin super-AI, had stopped the advance of fifteen heavy gunrafts carrying approximately six hundred Confederation troops. Several gunrafts had been destroyed, killing an unknown number of the enemy; at the same time, enemy vehicles had pounded the crater rim with antimatter warheads, killing twenty-two Marines.

  The ninety-eight Marines of Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion 2/3 still on their feet had dug in and were holding the high ground.

  In a second in-head window, Koenig maintained a link with the Hexagon office of Admiral Armitage. Hours ago, he’d received confirmation that USNA fleet elements were on the way—four High Guard ships normally stationed in the outer solar system, and a light cruiser, the USNAS Pittsburgh, from Mars. Their presence over Tsiolkovsky ought to end the standoff there, though Koenig was forced to admit that the Confederation forces, in particular the Pan-Europeans, were acting irrationally, had been acting irrationally for several years now. They’d successfully grabbed the mid-ocean seastead habitats, and for years now had been pushing hard to take control of the USNA Periphery states. Almost anything, he thought, was possible at this point, especially with enough ships in-system to back up their claims. As with the USNA warships, the bulk of Geneva’s fleet was out-system, but there were still at least thirty ships at Mars, on High Guard duty, or at Quito Synchorbital that might yet weigh in if things got really nasty.

  He wondered why Geneva hadn’t ordered the in-system ships to Tsiolkovsky . . . but decided that the Confederation leaders wanted to maintain something like plausible deniability. They were willing to sneak in and try to grab the base before USNA forces could respond, then argue the matter after they were already in control . . . but getting into a knock-down fleet action meant open civil war and no way to maintain the polite fiction of negotiations. Too, they wouldn’t want to start tossing nukes around above Tsiolkovsky. After all, they wanted an intact and cooperative Konstantin . . . not a radioactive crater. That may have been the main reason they’d stopped bombarding the Marines with antimatter warheads, in fact. A stray round passing over the crater’s north rim could travel far indeed in the moon’s one-sixth gravity—far enough, perhaps, to strike Konstantin’s mountain and wreck his subselenian base.

  How far would Konstantin cooperate with Geneva if Confederation forces managed to capture it? Koenig wasn’t sure. The super-AI didn’t seem to think of itself as North American, but as a free agent in the service of Humankind.

  Why this should be so when humans were pulling asshole stunts like fighting over it was beyond Koenig. Someday, he might get up the nerve to ask Konstantin . . . assuming he still had private access to it after this afternoon.

  He shifted channels again, looking now through a camera mounted on Lieutenant Burnham’s helmet. Sunlight glared off harsh white smoothly rounded slopes. He said nothing; lieutenants tended not to function at peak efficiency if they knew their commander-in-chief was looking on.

  Something was happening. . . .

  Marine Perimeter

  Tsiolkovsky Crater North Rim

  Lunar Farside

  1615 hours, EST

  “Koblesky! Hernandez!” Burnham shouted. “We’ve got motion at Number Twelve-Fifteen!”

  The Marines had put out some hundreds of robot drones across the north face of the crater-rim slope. Some were stationary sentries, white pillars capped by particle gun turrets and sensor arrays monitoring the lunar panorama to the north. Others were crawlers, moving on spidery, jointed legs, or fliers kept aloft in the light gravity by electrostatic repulsion with the surface. Linked in with the Tsiolkovsky Net, the robotic swarm sent back constant updates on enemy positions and movements, on weapons, and on those communications that could be tapped. These last were, of course, encrypted, but the Marines had a code-cracking resource right next door that could turn the most opaque communications code transparent. Konstantin had been relaying updates to the Marines on intercepted radio and laser com chatter almost as quickly as it got the raw signals. There’d been nothing of great value so far, but it still gave the Tsiolkovsky defenders a decided edge.

  And meanwhile, the robots had been carrying out their own war across the blasted lunar regolith. The Confederation troops had loosed their own robotic army, and now devices the size of a man’s hand were ambushing one another with lasers, with EMP discharges, and with se
lf-guided bullets releasing clouds of submicroscopic nanodisassemblers.

  Motion at one of the sentry positions probably meant the machine’s optics had picked up the approach of another robot. If so, Marine robots would be dispatched to deal with it. Burnham linked in with the signal feed, however, looking through the robot sentry’s electronic eye.

  No . . . not another robot. Humans—a dozen soldiers in heavy Confederation armor. Like the Marines, the enemy’s armor had photoreactive nanomatrix surfaces, and it was almost impossible to make out the forms as they slipped from boulder to boulder, from shadow to shadow, working their way up the slope below the left side of the Marine positions.

  Koblesky and Hernandez were on that part of the perimeter with a man-portable CPG. They were linked into the tactical net and should have seen the enemy themselves, but Burnham’s warning would also alert other Marines close by, let them know the Confederation troops were up to something.

  Lightning flared, silent in hard vacuum, a focused beam of electrons striking regolith and boulders in an intense burst of energy hot enough to turn the silica in the ever-present dust to glass. The armor of the lead Confederation trooper turned black as its reactive nano died, then came apart in hurtling gobbets of molten metal, ceramic, and plastic.

  The close-up view in her in-head window winked off as the enemy fired a directed EMP weapon, taking out the sentry robot. Without the remote imaging, she couldn’t see a damned thing except the flashes of energy bolts striking among the boulders a kilometer or more down-slope. No matter. The enemy troops were precisely plotted now on her tactical map, and more distant sensors were now locked onto them. She did a quick trigonometric calculation with her in-head, then ordered Duncan and Salvatore to lay down some KK fire on that area. Burnham reviewed the positions of her own people, trying to decide whether to shift any of them to meet this new threat. The problem, of course, was that the threat might be a diversion, a feint designed to get her to shift to the west and weaken the east side of her perimeter.

  “Task Force Burnham, this is Captain Raleigh, USNAS Pittsburgh. I understand you people need some help.”

  Burnham looked up involuntarily but, of course, the blackness overhead was empty except for the sun. She felt a sharp, almost savage thrill. Naval support! It was what they’d been praying for all day.

  “This is Burnham. I copy you, Pittsburgh. Where the hell are you?”

  “L-2. But I can see you just fine on your tactical.”

  Located 67,000 kilometers above the moon’s equator above the center of the lunar farside, the gravitationally stable L-2 synchronous point was a convenient place to park the farside communications net station and some logistics depots . . . and apparently a USNA light cruiser as well.

  And, just maybe, Koenig was protecting the comm net array as well. If the Confeds were crazy enough to try to snatch Konstantin from USNA forces, they might be willing to try for other American assets up here as well. The three big colonies on the lunar near side—Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke—technically belonged to the United States of North America, not the Confederation.

  But Geneva seemed to be having some trouble lately reading the legal fine print.

  “Excuse me,” a new voice said. “Captain Raleigh? This is President Koenig. I’ve been monitoring Lieutenant Burnham’s combat zone feeds.”

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “Think you can take out the remaining Confederation vehicles without hurting our Marines?”

  “Sir, the Marine positions are clearly marked. Yes, we can do it.”

  “Do so. Destroy the remaining vehicles, then hold your fire. I want to give these people a chance to surrender.”

  “Aye, aye, Mr. President.”

  “Carry on, then.”

  “How long were you riding me?” Burnham shouted. Her face burned then, as she saw, too late, the double meaning. Riding could mean linking into a remote camera and communications net.

  Or it could mean something quite different.

  She heard Koenig chuckle. “Just a few minutes, Lieutenant. I would have asked first, but I didn’t want you . . . distracted.”

  “No sir. I mean, yes sir. It’s okay, sir.”

  “You’ve been doing a superb job,” Koenig told her. “Semper fi.”

  And he was gone. Inside her helmet, Burnham shook her head. She knew that the president had been a Navy admiral—the hero of Arcturus and Texaghu Resch and the Six Suns of T-0.876gy.

  She was a little in awe of him.

  But she could indulge in the sappy reveries of teenage hero worship later. Right now, the Confederation troops were surging up the slope. There were still six Type 770s out there, hull down and well camouflaged, and an instant later one of them slammed an antimatter round into the ridge 200 meters to Burnham’s right and a little downslope. Harsh light seared the landscape around her, and her helmet optics blacked out to preserve her vision. When she could again see, the slope in front of her was alive with movement—the shift and crawl of active nanomatrix camouflage revealed only by minor imperfections in the visual effect as the armor bent light around the soldier inside.

  Burnham tried to calculate how long it would take for kinetic-kill rounds to fall from 67,000 kilometers, and realized that the speed depended on how hard the crowbars were boosted from the cruiser’s railguns.

  Crowbars. She smiled at the ancient word, a reference to a straight, heavy length of steel used as a tool centuries ago. In the earliest years of the Space Age, kinetic-kill projectiles had been suggested as a deadly orbit-to-ground weapon precise enough to hit individual vehicles, powerful enough to punch through the armor of underground bunkers. A simple bar of metal, the weapon was as dumb as a crowbar . . . but if you could aim it precisely and accelerate it at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour or faster, it didn’t have to be smart. Whatever it hit was dead.

  She didn’t have enough information to calculate the drop time. She considered calling Raleigh and asking for an ETA . . . and then the slope below blossomed in a line of incandescent white flowers, hot as the surface of the sun, expanding, unfurling, reaching into the blackness of the sky. There was no sound, of course, but seconds later she felt the shudder ripple beneath her boots as the shock wave passed.

  Six Type 770s, six explosions.

  She opened a comm channel to one of the command frequencies on which Konstantin had been eavesdropping. “Attention, Confederation soldiers,” she said. “Your vehicles are destroyed, and it’s a very long walk back to Giordano Bruno. I suggest that you consider disabling your weapons and coming up the slope slowly, with your hands up.”

  She spoke English, but the enemy’s translator software would give them her message in their own language. There was no answer at first. There was a serious danger here, Burnham knew. The destruction of their vehicles might encourage the enemy troops to fight all the harder, knowing they had no other alternatives beyond surrender, taking the Tsiolkovsky base, or dying in the pitiless, harsh glare of the lunar sun.

  And then there was the unpleasant possibility that the Confederation had naval forces on the way as well. Losing their Type 770s wouldn’t matter much if they knew they had a ride home no matter what. Pittsburgh’s KK strike might simply up the ante . . . and call down a rain of Confed KK or antimatter rounds on the Marine positions in return.

  “Hold your fire, American,” a voice—a woman’s voice—said at long last. “We surrender. We’re coming up.”

  “Excellent!” Koenig’s voice said. “A very good job indeed.”

  Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex

  Geneva, European Union

  2240 hours, local time

  Ilse Roettgen scowled at the data scrolling through her in-head display. The battle on the moon, evidently, was over, with nearly two hundred Confederation troops killed and over four hundred captured by a mere hundred American Marines.

/>   It was not to be tolerated.

  And now the American president wanted to talk with her. She dismissed the winking in-head flag with a thoughtclick. Let him wait. Let him sweat. In another few hours, it wouldn’t matter. . . .

  She opened her eyes, returning to the diplomatic reception in the stadium-sized central oval of the Plaza of Light. The immense and iconic statue by Popolopoulis, Ascent of Man, towered overhead, one muscular arm stretched out to the heavens. Several thousand people were gathered in the plaza this evening, a glittering swarm of the Confederation elite, mingling, seeing, and being seen. The weather was perfect, the sky ablaze with stars—the fingernail crescent of the moon having set hours before. Attire ran the gamut from traditional-formal to nude, with many of the guests—especially the women—tastefully ablaze in liquid light.

  The reception was for Chidambaram, the new ambassador-delegate from North India. He and his entourage were gathered at the foot of the giant statue, talking at the moment with Carol Spelman, the American ambassador.

  The problem with the Americans, Roettgen decided, was their inconstancy. They whined and scrabbled for their precious independence like puppies in a box . . . but give them a measure of freedom and self-determination and they cried for Mother’s comforting presence.

  Chidambaram and Spelman had just been joined, Roettgen saw, by a pair of those horrible spider-bug things . . . what were they called? Agletsch. That was it. She didn’t like them, didn’t like most aliens, but she did recognize political necessity when she saw it. For 287 years, the Pax Confeoderata had spoken for all of Humankind in a hostile and bewildering galaxy. The Americans—the old United States, at any rate—had helped create the Pax in the aftermath of the Second Sino-Western War and the cataclysmic Wormwood Fall.

  And for 287 years, the Americans had bitched and complained about being part of a one-world government. A true planetary government? No . . . they wanted their freedom. July 1st and July 4th and Cinco de Mayo . . . fireworks and Bill of Rights and free speech and self-determination.