by Ian Douglas
“Maybe,” St. Clair said. “But I don’t think I buy that. This is a big galaxy—two galaxies, in fact. If they obliterated this system and all its trillions of inhabitants, both physical and digital, I don’t think anyone in either galaxy would even notice. We’re dealing with technologies here that have nanotechnology, and from what we’ve seen, almost certainly much more advanced than ours. They can reshape planetary surfaces at will, dissolve an asteroid or a moon into raw materials for use elsewhere. We’ve seen evidence that they engage in star lifting, for God’s sake! In a universe this large and this rich, they don’t have to worry about a shortage of raw materials.”
“Yes—and?” asked Frazier.
“And that means there’s got to be some other reason for their policy of limited warfare.”
“You may be missing the obvious, Lord Commander,” Newton said, speaking out of the air above the conference table. “That it’s not the raw materials they are after. It’s the sapient life-forms.”
“Go on.”
“In my brief contact with the Andromedan Dark,” Newton told them, “I had the distinct impression that the Dark was confused by our unwillingness to cooperate. In a sense, it was offering us and the Cooperative a tremendous gift . . . salvation, I would call it. And we were rejecting it.”
“My God,” Dumont said. “We’re fighting an alien missionary?”
“Not precisely, Doctor,” Newton replied, “but the alien’s worldview, its ideology, if you will, does approach a kind of religious fervor. I can assure you that it emphatically believes in the rightness of what it does. In the logic of what it does. It envisions a universe where all sapient life is linked in to it, feeding it and under its control in exchange for the ineluctable benefits of such a union.”
“Benefits?” St. Clair said. “What benefits?”
“Those may not be knowable until we join with the Dark. A human might as well attempt to describe the color red to a life-form without vision, or a symphony to a being without hearing.”
“That almost makes sense,” St. Clair said. “That mobile planet of theirs . . . they bring it close enough to a target world to infest it with life-forms by way of the fourth dimension or whatever. Like they tried with us a little while ago, right?”
“I think so, Lord Commander.”
“Which means there is a range limit, right?”
“There appears to be, Lord Commander.”
“The Marines fighting those things belowdecks reported what sounded like a limit to how far they could reach,” Frazier said, agreeing. “We’re just not sure what that range might be. They can’t reach as far as, oh, say a kilometer from where they’ve come through. But they might be able to manage a hundred meters.”
“We need to know exactly, General.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And we need to know how they get their foothold. It appears to be through electronic neural links. That’s how they got to Francesca, Adler, and probably the technician belowdecks.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Alternatively, they fold the entire target—the ship, the planet, whatever they’re after—into their dimensional framework, like they did with the Vera Cruz. Then what?”
“They may absorb the physical bodies in some way,” Newton said. “Or repurpose them . . . like the Xam pilots we examined. Digital consciousness could be subsumed into the super AI virtual world. I don’t know if they have a way of subsuming organically based consciousness.”
St. Clair was thinking about the copying process he and the others had experienced in the Ki Ring. Step through a gate and an exact copy of your mind goes off to experience a virtual world, then comes back later and re-merges with the original.
Yeah. These critters could devour minds, and make them a part of whatever twisted reality the Dark was pushing over there.
“Okay. ExComm?”
“My lord?”
“How long before we can take the Vera Cruz back on board Ad Astra?”
Symms went blank for a moment as she consulted her data streams. “Another thirty minutes, my lord. Perhaps a little less. They are on approach now.”
“And our SAR ops?”
“The search-and-rescue operation is complete, but we do have several rescue vessels still to take back aboard.”
“Very well. The minute we have everybody back safe and sound, I want to take the Ad Astra out of here. I want to put as much distance between us and that . . . that mind-eating monstrosity out there as we can.”
St. Clair felt a rising terror that would not be denied. He’d known the Bluestar object was dangerous . . . but he was seeing it now in a new light, as a predator waiting to snap down Ad Astra and make everyone on board a part of that alien life he’d glimpsed through the remote cameras on the Bluestar’s surface a short while before.
“Are we just going to run, Lord Commander?” Jablonsky asked.
“For right now, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. This entity is far too powerful, too big, too strong, too everything for us to face it square on.”
“Lord Commander?” Noyer said from his seat at the far end of the table.
“I was wondering when we were going to hear from you, son,” St. Clair replied. “You’re going to remind us about Lloyd’s treaty, aren’t you?”
“We do have a responsibility to honor it, my lord.”
“Do we? When the locals appear to be unwilling to fight their own battles?”
“But—”
“Lord Noyer, I can appreciate what the Cybercouncil has done in attempting to secure peace and safety for our population. Suicide, however, doesn’t sound to me like a promising means of obtaining them. We will do our level best to avoid any engagement with the Andromedan Dark, at least for the time being. They want our military expertise as much as anything, and that’s what any expert would recommend.”
“The treaty negotiated by Lord Ambassador Lloyd suggests that the Tellus Ad Astra military might be able to assist local forces,” Noyer admitted. Continuing with that train of thought, he said, “I don’t think there was ever a plan to have us wage the war entirely on our own.”
“Good. Because we are not going to do so. What we will do is, first, return the Tellus habitats to full military control. The Cybercouncil is hereby suspended until further notice.”
“My lord! You can’t—”
“I can. I just did. My charter provides for military command of both the Ad Astra and the Tellus colony for as long as a specific military need exists.
“Next, we will make contact with the locals—those Tchagar ‘gods’ for preference, or the Kroajid ‘Gatekeepers of Paradise’ if the Tchagar won’t talk with us. I want to set up a meeting, and I want the Cooperative to have representatives here. Newton, will you transmit a message to that effect?”
“I will, Lord Commander. I would suggest that we don’t yet know these beings—their attitudes, their mores, well enough to predict how they will respond.”
“I guess I don’t really much care how they respond. They will either do what we fucking say,” St. Clair said, “if they want our help, or they won’t. If not, then the treaty is null and void, and we take our toys and go . . . elsewhere.”
He’d almost said “home,” but that was the real problem, wasn’t it? The human castaways couldn’t go home, not when home was lost in the mists of time 4 billion years in the past.
He wondered if Tellus Ad Astra could make it across the intergalactic gulf to some other island universe in that black and awful night?
And, if that was an option, would things be any better—any safer—there?
“Gray!”
“Lisa! My God! I thought—”
They embraced, and for a long time no words were spoken.
“I was so worried!” Lisa said after the kiss.
“You were worried? How about me? I couldn’t ping you, couldn’t even guess where you’d gone!”
“I’m sorry. I know you must have been worried, too. But I
needed . . . to . . .”
“To what?”
“I don’t know. Figure out what I was . . . who I was . . . without you.”
“Did you find out?”
“Not . . . really. Not explicitly, I should say. But I learned a lot about myself along the way.”
“That’s always good. Upsetting, sometimes . . . but good.” Reluctantly, St. Clair disentangled himself. He’d just entered his home an hour after the returning Ad Astra had docked once again with Tellus above the myriad sparkling rings of Ki. As he’d stepped through the door, he’d been met by a blur of motion and a soft, warm body blow that had nearly knocked him down—Lisa, waiting for him like an impatient teenager. “So why were you worried about me? That sort of thing isn’t really in your job description, is it?”
“I can allow myself to feel worry,” she told him. “Or at least I can feel an analogue of that emotion. I don’t know how it compares with what you feel.”
“Of course not. None of us know what anyone else is ever really experiencing inside.”
“I knew you’d taken the Ad Astra off to meet with the Bluestar object. I assumed that it was some sort of Andromedan Dark ship or construct. Was it?”
“We think so. There’s a lot we still don’t know.”
“And the political situation here. It’s getting out of hand.”
“In what way? I’ve heard some rumors, but I’ve been a little busy . . .”
“The Cybercouncil is . . . I think the American expression is ‘circling the wagons.’ They’re calling for closer connections with the Galactic Cooperative. But Lord Adler has started calling for a break with the Council, a popular revolt. I think he wants to find some isolated spot in the Galaxy and dig a very deep hole that he can pull in after himself.”
St. Clair smiled. “I know the feeling. So the politicians are polarizing. What about the general population?”
“Going both ways. There’ve been riots in some of the cities, the Humanists against the Cooperativists.”
“Let me guess. Humanists are for Humankind—first, last, and always?”
“And the Cooperativists see us as a part of the galactic order, as saviors, really. The Cooperativists are calling the Humanists xenophobes. And the Humanists are calling the pro-Cooperative people alienists, and worse. The thing is, neither group is listening to what the others have to say at all! There’s no debate . . . just screaming and name-calling. It makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense—as a description of Humankind. Sounds like standard operating procedure,” St. Clair said. He pulled back a little, looking Lisa up and down. “You don’t have any clothes on, I notice.”
“I knew you’d be home when I heard Ad Astra was docking with the habs. I thought—”
“You thought very right. C’mon . . .”
“One other thing first?”
“What’s that?”
“Gray . . . I met someone while I was gone. Someone I like a lot.”
“Good. It’ll do you good to get out and explore.”
“Yes, but . . . well, he’s a Marine. And he went out with the Ad Astra. And I haven’t heard . . .”
“What’s his name?”
“Gunnery Sergeant Roger Kilgore.”
St. Clair closed his eyes a moment, searching an internal database. “Ah, yes! Got him. First Platoon, Bravo Company, 1/3 Marines.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. In fact, he’s a hero. He boarded a crashed gunship looking for survivors.”
“I don’t care about hero. I’m just glad he’s alive.”
“How did you meet him?”
“It was before the Ad Astra left. He . . . played the part of the dashing knight in armor.”
“To your fair maiden?”
“Something like that. We talked. I like him. I’d like to see him again.”
“The Marines are still on full alert,” St. Clair told her. “It may be a while before he can get liberty.”
“You’re expecting the Andromeda aliens to attack?”
“I don’t know what I expect out of them. But I just set the match to the fuse with the political situation here. You think it’s bad now with these factions, but I’ve just told the Cybercouncil that the military is going to be running things for a while. They won’t like that, not one little bit, and the Marines and Navy will be stepping in to keep the peace.”
“Can you do that?” She sounded shocked.
“I did do that. My orders say I’m in charge whenever the colony is under military threat. The Cybercouncil kind of jumped the gun by taking back command authority before we were out from under that threat. I’ve taken steps to resume military control.”
“Isn’t that a military dictatorship?”
“That would be one term, yes. But another would acknowledge that a ship is not a democracy, that the captain’s word is absolute law, and that it has to be that way if the passengers and crew are to survive. A ship at sea—or in space—can never be a democracy. Not really.”
“I can see that.”
“The Tellus Constitution was designed to allow for civilian control once Ad Astra delivered the colony to the galactic center and dropped them off there. The framers had no idea that we would be cast adrift out here, in a different time.
“Between you and me, I don’t like the idea of a military dictatorship—I hate everything about it—but I hate more the idea of a political free-for-all stumbling around every which way depending on whether the politicians happen to be blowing cold or hot. That is guaranteed to get every human, robot, and AI in this colony killed sooner or later, and that is not going to happen on my watch.”
She pulled him closer. “You don’t have to convince me, Lord Commander.”
“Well, I’ve had to convince me. And I’m not sure I’ve succeeded yet.”
Her hands wandered. “Well, maybe there’s something I can do to help your mind relax . . .”
“I thought you wanted to see your new buddy Gunnery Sergeant Kilgore?” he said, smiling.
“Oh, I’ll want to see him. But first things first.”
“You saw?” Ambassador Lloyd demanded of the other Council members seated around the outdoor table.
“We saw, my lord,” Gina Colfax said.
“The news is blaring from every display in every city,” Jeffery Benton said, scowling. “It would be hard to miss!”
“We’re going to have to do something,” Ander Gressman said. “This little tin-pot dictator is going to destroy everything we’ve worked for!”
A dozen of the Tellus Cybercouncil members had gathered in an outdoor park on the spinward fringes of Jefferson, a pleasant, quiet recreational green surrounded by thick forest alongside a sparkling river. They’d grown a lounge table from the nanotech matrix in the ground, and now sat or reclined around it. The venue had been selected for reasons of privacy . . . and because it seemed unlikely that there were microphones or vids set up nearby. A hundred meters over their heads, several wingsail gliders banked and turned in the lower gravity that existed up toward the hub, their colorful wing membranes catching the light of the kilometers-distant suntube.
“Is Adler behind St. Clair’s proclamation?” Benton asked. “Are they working together?”
“No, my lord,” Gorton Noyer said. “I was at the meeting of department heads when St. Clair made the decision. It was before Ad Astra returned to Tellus and . . . well, it seemed spontaneous.”
“He still might have been talking with Adler.”
“I doubt it,” Broden Medinsky said. He was a big, massively muscled man, a former law enforcement officer who’d become the Cybercouncil’s chief of security. “Adler was here in Tellus at the time.”
“You’re sure?” Benton asked.
“My people have been shadowing him,” Medinsky replied. “Of course I’m sure.”
“Maybe Adler was using more subtle means of control,” Benton suggested. “Or he was using an avatar.”
“No, Adler
was here physically,” Colfax confirmed. “If he was using an avatar, it was through a robot aboard the Ad Astra with St. Clair, and would have had to have been directed by an independent AI. Otherwise, there would have been over an hour of time lag.”
A peal of laughter from high above them interrupted her, and they all looked up at the gamboling wing-gliders.
“You wouldn’t know we were at war with alien monsters, would you?” Marc Steiner said. The others laughed.
“A majority of the population is still . . . unsettled,” Lloyd said. “Not panicked, yet, but definitely nervous. We need to calm them.”
“Adler has been behind the xenophobe demonstrations here in Tellus,” Colfax told them. “He’s been using memetic engineering to create a popular consensus.”
“What . . . those advertising campaigns?” Steiner asked.
“Public service announcements, mostly,” Colfax explained. “And public appearances on news programs and interview shows.” She pulled a display cloth from her thigh pouch, snapped it once to turn it rigid, and held it up so they could all see. “You’ve all seen this one, haven’t you?”
She opened a feed from her internal RAM, and Adler’s face appeared on the cloth, red and glowering. “We must renounce this evil treaty and find our own safety within this distant and alien epoch within which we now find ourselves. . . .”
“That was just two days ago,” Lloyd said. “They had me on a news show to give a rebuttal.”
“Adverts like this one have been running on every colony network,” Colfax continued. “Have you seen this?”
A young woman holding an infant stumbled down a dark alley, backlit by the city lights behind her. The lights were obscured suddenly, and she turned, the view zooming in for a close-up of the naked fear on her face.
“There’s a reason we mistrust the stranger . . . the alien . . .” a voice-over—Adler’s voice—intoned.
The shadow behind the woman resolved into something dark and spidery, with long, questing legs and a bloated body the size of a small horse. The scene faded out with the woman’s shriek of raw terror.
“Isn’t it reasonable to hold the alien at a distance until we know more about who he is . . . and what he wants?”