B009NFP2OW EBOK

by Douglas, Ian

  But they also wanted strength and order and, above all else, security.

  And what they could never grasp was the fact that freedom and security were mutually contradictory. You couldn’t have them both, not completely. The best you could hope for was a half-assed balance between the two.

  Their latest election had demonstrated an alarming drift in the USNA population toward secession and full autonomy. Koenig appeared to be a moderate, politically, but he’d been calling for greater independence, greater self-determination, for all of the states of the Pax.

  And his speeches had sent shudders through the framework of the entire Confederation.

  It was time to end this farce, before American dissent tore the Confederation apart. Earth, the Terran Confederation, needed to be united now as never before, strong and with one voice in the face of a hostile galaxy.

  Seizing Konstantin was to have been the first step in the grand plan worked out by her military staff, and it had failed, but that was of little real importance. The capture of Tsiolkovsky base was to have been as much a diversion as anything else . . . and if it had gone as planned, it would have given Geneva some leverage in the coming negotiations.

  But right now, Roettgen thought, Atlantica gave the Pax all the leverage it was going to need. . . .

  Chapter Sixteen

  13 November 2424

  Washington, former District of Columbia

  USNA Periphery

  0710 hours, TFT

  Shay Ashton looked up from the controls of the logger and planned her next move. Once, this had been one of the deeper and softer-bottomed of the swamps filling what once had been the downtown area of the old United States capital. Most of the water had been drained—the seacrete dams grown across the lower Potomac had enabled the pumping project to move ahead and reclaim land that, until recently, had been under half a meter or more of water. The logger was a titanic machine—each of its six wheels stood 6 meters high—had been brought in to begin removing the thick groves of mangrove trees filling what once had been open streets, traffic circles, and plazas.

  Until a few years ago, the broad, central mall in the heart of the old city had been a swampy estuary under a meter of water at high tide, surrounded by the crumbling, clifflike ruins of ancient edifices and monuments shrouded in forests of kudzu. The city had been abandoned late in the twenty-first century. Sea levels had been steadily rising . . . and the First Sino-Western War has so thoroughly wrecked the U.S. economy that massive preservation efforts—sea walls and drainage pumps the size of skyscrapers—had been abandoned. Most of Florida had been gone by 2080, and still the seas kept rising. Eventually, the government in its new inland capital had decided to write off the wreckage of the coastal cities. Rebuilding them would have cost in the hundreds of trillions, and the nation, still recovering from the financial stress of the war, then wracked by the Blood Death plague of the next couple of decades, simply couldn’t afford it.

  The Periphery was abandoned . . . at least officially.

  And yet there were still people living there among the partially submerged buildings of Manhattan and D.C. and Boston—refugees with nowhere else to go, diehards who’d refused to leave, lawless gangs coming in from outside. Local government, at best, had been reduced to shifting alliances among warlords. At worst, there was no government, and tight-knit families had struggled for survival against anarchy in rooftop communes above the encroaching sea.

  And for the most part, they were ignored by the government. For the most part too, the residents of the Periphery wanted it that way . . . no taxes, no Big Brother, no surveillance, no intrusive government regulations, hell, the whole thing was a libertarian’s dream. True, no police protection; no high-tech computers or communications; few modern toys; no food distribution; no health care . . . but the inhabitants of the Periphery had been getting along just fine for more than three centuries, thank you very much. Life here could be hard, but most Prims—or “primitives”—preferred that to giving up their freedom in a squeaky-clean world changing too fast for healthy sanity.

  But change was coming in any case.

  Shay Ryan had escaped the Washington Swamp over twenty years before, joining the USNA Navy and becoming a fighter pilot. She’d done well, too, winning a Navy Cross for her part in the Sh’daar War . . . but a few years later she’d resigned. Navy Cross or not, the prejudice inherent in the naval service had just been too much. Periphery dwellers had, over the centuries, developed their own culture and their own way of life, and this often put them at odds with people from the USNA proper. For most of her squadron mates, it seemed, she would always be “monogie” or “Prim” or “swamp rat.”

  So she’d gotten out. She’d gone back to old D.C., married a swampy named Fred Ashton, and even taken his last name for her own—one of those cultural disconnects with USNA social norms that singled her out as something strange or dirty—a monogie, someone who believed in monogamous marriage.

  Ten years later, Fred had been killed in a skirmish with marauders from the Virginia side of the swamp. Shay had led a number of her neighbors on a raid into Northern Virginia, wiped out the bandits, then somehow struggled on.

  She’d been something of a celebrity with her neighbors, most of whom had never left the area. She also still had her military implants—nanotechnically grown circuitry inside her brain and various other parts of her body that allowed her to interface with a wide range of machines and computers. Various software packages and classified files had been deleted when she resigned, of course, but the hardware was hers. When Columbus had offered help in reclaiming the Washington Swamp, she’d volunteered, and her hardware had allowed her to link with and run heavy equipment like the Bunyan-425 logger.

  Hell, it was just like her old Starhawk fighter. Just smaller. And slower. And unable to fly . . .

  She was pulling a mangrove up by its tangled roots when Jeb Carstairs called to her over the logger’s radio. “Hey, Shay! What the hell is that?”

  “What’s what?” She turned in her seat. The machine’s high bubble canopy gave her a complete, 360-degree view. She saw it. “Shit!”

  It was a troop flier, a big one, and not a USNA model. She recognized it, of course, even though she no longer packed a warbook recognition series in her in-head. Three times the size of the old Columbia Stadium, blunt nosed and massive, the UTT-92 Jotun troop transport was the size of a large cruiser, drifting in over the city from the southeast on silent electrogravitic impellers. Advancing slowly, it blotted out the early-morning sun, its shadow rippling across ground and water and the towering logger like the relentlessly incoming tide.

  Stunned, Shay stared at the apparition for what seemed like minutes, though in fact it was only a few seconds. The markings on the slate-gray flanks identified the flier as Confederation, though Jotuns, she thought, were only used by the Europeans. It could carry a couple of thousand troops, and was heavily armed with turret-mounted lasers and particle cannons.

  It appeared to be swinging around in order to touch down on the open expanse of the mall.

  Ever since her husband’s death, Shay had kept a laser carbine with her when she was working. She pulled it from its holster now, switched on the energy pack, and opened the logger’s canopy.

  Captain’s Office

  TC/USNA CVS America

  Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  0813 hours, TFT

  “We have a channel?” Gray asked.

  “Affirmative,” the voice of America’s AI replied. “Certain aspects of the virtual environment may be difficult to interpret, however.”

  “That’s okay,” Gray replied, bracing himself. “What is that old poem? ‘To see ourselves as others see us’?”

  “ ‘To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church,’ ” the AI replied immediately. “By Robert Burns, 1768.”

  “ ‘To a Louse’?” Gray repe
ated, curious. “That’s some kind of parasite, isn’t it?”

  Data flowed through his awareness. There were three thousand and some species of lice—wingless insects of the order Phthiraptera, only three of which ever infested humans. Images accompanied the data, of crawling, short-legged ectoparasites as alien-looking as anything Gray had met among the stars.

  The human-feeding varieties—head, body, and pubic lice—were rarely encountered nowadays, thanks to full-body mediscans and sanitizer fields; they were still a nuisance in some of the Peripheries. Yeah, he remembered hearing about them, now, from his years growing up in Old Manhattan. He’d almost forgotten. In Burns’s day, though, they must have been fairly common.

  He scanned through the poem, written in an ancient Scots’ dialect that at times was almost impenetrable. He shifted to the translation to get a better sense of the thing. The subject of the poem, evidently, was a tiny louse seen by Burns crawling on the Sunday bonnet of a young and well-bred woman in church. At first, the poet scolded the minute creature for daring to set foot on “Such a fine lady.”

  The final stanza was the one most often quoted. Translated, it read:

  And would some power the gift to give us

  To see ourselves as others see us!

  It would from many a blunder free us,

  And foolish notion:

  What airs in dress and gait would leave us,

  And even devotion!

  A louse, it seemed, cared nothing for the difference between an aristocratic lady and a beggar. Both were sources of food, nothing more. To see Humankind through a louse’s eyes might show certain human pretenses for what they were.

  Gray chuckled at that. He’d never downloaded Burns before, but thought he might need to read more of the man, now. The man knew people.

  And right now, Gray was going to get to see himself as the Slan saw him, a deliberate exchange of imagery with the other side. He was hoping this might give him some insight into the aliens, help him understand them better.

  More important, for this exchange of data, both the Slan computers and America’s AIs would have access to at least portions of one another’s databases. Communicating with a previously unknown alien species was not simply a matter of hooking up a translation program and substituting your words for theirs. How you saw the universe was at least as important as the language used in describing it.

  “Are you ready, Captain?” the AI asked.

  “Go for it,” he replied. “Open the link.”

  The subdued lighting of Gray’s office winked out, replaced by blackness. Then, slowly, a picture began to build up, layer by layer, painted in pinpoints of sharp neon-blue light. The effect was . . . startling.

  He was seeing, not the alien Slan, but himself. The idea was that, for both of them, seeing an alien through alien perceptions might be overwhelming, the data unintelligible. So you started simply, with what you knew: yourself.

  He did not recognize himself, transformed, as he was, through the computer link with the Slan headquarters ship. The image in front of him was human-shaped, but lacked all detail and texture. He could see his nose—rounded and smooth—but the eyes were featureless swellings sunken within depressions in a blank face, the hair a vague, out-of-focus blur. There was no color save for the electric blue of the imaging. The entire body was frustratingly out of focus.

  When he stared harder, trying to bring the picture into sharper resolution, he found his point of view actually descending into the shape. He could focus first on his shipboard utilities, then on his skin, then on the layers of muscle beneath his skin, then on his internal organs and the bright, hard tracings of his skeleton. He recognized the rapid pulsing of his heart immediately, behind his ribs . . . but what the hell was that?

  It took him a queasy moment to recognize his own stomach, with a partially digested breakfast inside, reduced to semisolid sludge.

  By concentrating in a different way, he found he could increase the level of detail. He could also get a strong three-dimensional sense, created, he guessed, by changing the positions of the paired Slan sonar organs. When he looked more closely this way, his implants showed up as bright threads woven over and through his brain, down his arms, and in the palms of his hands.

  And there was more. Even when he focused on the outer layers—clothing or skin—he was aware of surging movement along narrow channels visible through the blue translucence, just underneath the skin and, in some cases, muscle. The sounds made by blood surging through veins and arteries, he decided, were adding an additional level of detail.

  The Slan, by this point, Gray decided, must be fairly confused. The alien commander was receiving computer-generated images of itself as humans would see it, completely opaque. It occurred to him that the Slan might constantly be aware of other individuals as multilayered, as sum totals of skin together with everything inside.

  It might also be difficult for the aliens, he thought, not to understand a species that didn’t have this three-dimensional understanding of another being as somehow lacking something. Seeing them as crippled, or even blind.

  It took him a while to see it, but he did notice that the Slan were not completely blind to optical wavelengths. One of the levels of information he was receiving was a kind of dull, fuzz glow superimposed on the audio image. The scant data available on Slan physiology mentioned a primitive light-sensing organ on the central hump.

  Gray wondered what they used it for, why it had evolved at all. They certainly got a great deal of information through sonar alone.

  He allowed himself to pull back and examine their virtual surroundings. The two of them, human and Slan, were in a tube of some sort, smooth, with ripples on the walls that gave it a distinctly organic feel. With Slan sonar vision, he could peer a little way into the wall, seeing fuzzy layers and, beneath that, the bright traceries of deeply embedded electronics, the more massive pipes of the plumbing.

  The effect was amazing in its scope and depth, especially in that the Slan and human were not really facing each other physically inside the tunnel. The computers—both on board America and on the Slan ship—were working together closely enough to reproduce a detailed virtual reality between them, one that would allow human and Slan to see each other as if they were only a few meters apart.

  “Okay,” Gray told the AI. “I’ve seen enough, and it’s giving me a headache. Let’s switch back . . . whenever my opposite number is ready.”

  “It’s been ready, Captain.”

  Gray’s vision blurred, and then he was back in his own body, looking at the alien through human eyes.

  In the aftermath of the alien vision, this was almost a relief. The Slan stood a meter and a half tall, but was almost twice that in diameter, most of its mass a large, wet mantle. He couldn’t tell if the thing moved on legs or tentacles, or simply slid along the deck like a slug. The perimeter of the thing, sweeping along the deck, was a roil of writhing tentacles, most of them slender and thin, like spaghetti, but six were somewhat longer, and three of them, evenly spaced around the body, were each 2 meters long and powerfully muscled. A translucent flap opened to either side of the upper body, creating broad, membranous cups when open. Ears?

  The thing looked a little like a terrestrial jellyfish, but far more substantial and massive. The skin—more like a rubbery hide—was a dark slate-gray, and the movements of the peripheral tentacles suggested tremendous strength.

  “Okay, let me see it through its way of seeing things,” Gray told the AI.

  The being in front of him blurred, then shifted into the other way of seeing, a painting in harsh blue light. Letting his gaze move into the creature, Gray saw closely packed internal organs, but there was no way of telling what was what. Five muscular lumps each the size of a human head were spaced in a ring around the body’s central core, and these were pulsing in a way analogous to a human heart . . . but more slowly,
and in succession.

  He didn’t see any legs beneath the fleshy skirt. The Slan glided about on a single large, muscular “foot,” like a terrestrial gastropod.

  Presumably, the Slan was now looking at Gray through its own sonar sense. It, at least, Gray thought, had already had the chance to see a human that way . . . the prisoner rescued yesterday from their headquarters ship.

  Lieutenant Megan Connor was on board America, now, and was still being debriefed on her experiences. Her initial descriptions of the strangeness of the Slan had been the factor that had led Gray to suggest this visual swap in the first place, a means of literally stepping into each other’s shoes.

  Okay, the Slan didn’t wear shoes, or anything else, for that matter. But the metaphor still worked.

  The AI referred to the being as it, apparently a direct translation of how they thought of themselves. America’s xenobiology department believed that the Slan were either hermaphroditic or, as with terrestrial ants and bees, that only a few members of the species could reproduce, that most individuals were of the neuter caste.

  “!kt’kt’!’kt’cht’!k,” sounded in Gray’s mind, a rapid rattle of clicks and pops and clucking sounds. The Slan was speaking.

  “I thought we had the translation program working,” Gray said, annoyed. “What’s with that noise?”

  “Some concepts,” the AI reminded him, “simply cannot be translated. That might have been a greeting, or an exclamation. Or both.”

  Great, Gray thought. Then he gave an inward shrug. How many expressions in English were little more than polite noise? Or depended on cultural or even biological context to make sense? On the other hand made sense only if you knew what a hand was . . . and knew that a person had only two of them.

  “I am Captain Gray,” he said in his mind. The AI would pick up his unvoiced thoughts and translate them for the Slan. “I hope we can arrive at a mutual understanding.”