Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  After experiencing one impossible revelation after another, Vaughn felt as though his brain was going to explode. Humans, he thought, had no business peering into the doings of the gods.…

  But what if?…

  "Colonel… question?" Vaughn asked.

  "Shoot."

  "Sir, if this thing is a computronium node… a piece of the Web… is it one of these Mad Minds you mentioned?"

  "We don't know, Sergeant Major," Griffin replied. "Not for certain. But if you keep watching, you'll see something that might begin to answer your question. Something… disquieting, I'm afraid."

  The camera angle capturing the image in their heads panned again, centering on one of the other, nearer red dwarf stars. The view blurred… steadied… then zoomed in sharply. The star, they could now see, was ringed by glittering black and silver objects that looked like dust but which must be titanic machines or devices of some kind in orbit around the sun. There were millions of them, reduced to fuzzy rings by distance.

  And as they watched, the rings on the nearest star began rotating latitudinally, the plane of their orbit shifting until it took on the aspect of a titanic bullseye—a glowing red central target surrounded by a darker ring.

  "If I didn't know better," Falcone said quietly, "I'd swear that thing was being pointed at us!"

  Vaughn noticed that the numerals alongside the words "magnetic flux" were suddenly increasing… increasing fast. Incredibly powerful magnetic fields were reaching out from the star to the Nihongo spacecraft.

  "As a matter of fact—" Giffin began…

  And then the scene flared and went black. A babble of excited murmurs ran through the watching troops. "Christ!" Sergeant Wheeler said.

  "The Nihongo ship was destroyed by what appears to be a deliberately directed stream of plasma from that star."

  "If the ship recording those images was destroyed," Vanderkamp said, "how did we get them?"

  "The Shinsei had established a lasercom link with another ship ten light hours away," Griffin replied. "That other ship recorded the Shinsei's transmissions, and was able to escape into K-T space before the locals could reach her."

  "Gok, those bastards are starlifting," Falcone said, his mental voice incredulous. "Starlifting…"

  Starlifting was another of those hypotheticals, something described by the DalRiss but never encountered yet by humans. It involved using various advanced technologies to remove mass from a star—a very great deal of mass, which would then then be separated into its constituent elements and used in mega-engineering projects like Dyson spheres or matrioshka brains. The most common element, hydrogen, might be diverted into Jupiter-sized lumps and turned into microstars; if you happened to know the trick of elemental transmutation, you could squeeze the extracted matter into any element on the periodic table.

  According to DalRiss sources, starlifting could also be used to reduce the mass of very large suns—the O and B supergiants that burned so hot and fast that they used up their stores of fuel in a mere few hundred million years. Reduce a giant down to red dwarf size, and you had a star that would burn happily for trillions of years. The Web intelligences, it seemed, preferred to take the long view.

  Smaller stars were more efficient, too. Naturally burning suns used only a few percent of their mass as nuclear fuel. Artificially reducing a giant to sub-dwarf size ensured that much more of the fuel would be burned, and that would extend the star's lifetime even more.

  The intelligence now occupying the Ophiuchan hypernode evidently was so comfortable manipulating stars that they could use them as weapons. Those dusty looking rings, Vaughn thought, were probably devices designed to somehow squeeze the star's magnetic field—or generate a much more powerful field of their own. Squeeze the star hard enough, right down to its core, and a slender jet of white-hot plasma, probably running some tens of millions of degrees, would shoot out of the star with terrifying accuracy. They were using the system to feed something at the heart of the hypernode… probably a small black hole, Vaughn thought, if the local gravitational metrics were anything to judge by.

  And at need they could flip the jet around and turn it into a weapon powerful enough to turn a planet into a cinder… and instantly vaporize a Dai Nihon starship.

  And the Japanese were sending an expedition out there to try to talk to these beings, who might or might not be SAIco.

  "New America," Griffin said slowly, "wants us to get an expeditionary force out there… and fast. If we can beat the Japanese and get there first, well and good. If they get there first… well, we have to see if we can kick them out. Either way, it is imperative that they not be allowed to form an alliance with highly advanced aliens.

  "One way or another, Confederation Military Command wants us to make contact with these aliens, not the Japanese. That… or at least make certain that the Japanese don't manage to do so. The fact that the aliens shot first and didn't even bother talking about it suggests that we won't have to worry about Japanese first-contact. The Ophiuchan hypernode intelligence might be SAIco. It might just not be interested in talking with pre-Singularity knuckle-draggers.

  "But we don't know. So the 451st is going to go in and find out.…"

  Vaughn closed his eyes. Great. Just gokking great.…

  5

  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Profiles of the Future, C.E. 1973 revision

  The long-ranged Confederation heavy cruiser Constitution slipped along the hyperdimensional interface between normal fourspace and the deeper reality of the quantum sea, an eerily blue-lit non-space called the Kamisamano Taiyo, the "Ocean of God." Less poetically, it was the K-T Plenum, the space outside of space that allowed starships to seemingly violate the physics dictating that absolutely nothing could travel faster than light.

  Vaughn knew little of the physics describing K-T space, and, frankly, cared less. The Constitution was nearing the end of her nine-week transit. In another ten hours they would emerge at their destination… and what might happen then was anyone's guess.

  He was laying in his bunk in the Connie's aft troop compartment, with Kokoro Wheeler nestled close under his arm. He'd paid off his three bunkmates to be elsewhere tonight so that he and Koko would have some privacy. The compartment's overhead and one bulkhead had been set to show the shifting blue currents of the godsea—a computer simulation, actually, of energies that could not be directly apprehended by human senses. The moving light had a restful, almost hypnotic effect.

  "What I want to know," Wheeler said, her voice barely above a sexy whisper, "is what happened to the Overmind. Maybe that could stand up to one of these renegade nodes."

  Vaughn looked at her sharply. "How do you know about the Overmind?"

  She laughed. "I might ask you the same thing."

  Knowledge of the Overmind was still classified. Vaughn knew about it, though, because he'd been a clerk in the Intelligence Division at ConMilCom in New America synchorbit before transferring first to the infantry, then to warstriders. His security clearance level back then had been yellow-two—high enough that he'd once seen briefing material on the emergent AI within the Sol System Net.

  As classified military information went, the Overmind was not that well-kept a secret. Hell, he'd been a lowly itto hei at the time, a private first-class. He'd had the classified clearance only because he was working with personnel files. If a yellow-two clerk could see that stuff, plenty of other enlisted personnel could as well.

  "It was my job," he told Wheeler. "I had the clearance. A posting for a briefing came through my head one morning, and it was… intriguing enough that I dug up some more intel on it. Not much… but enough to put the pieces together. How did you find out?"

  She laughed. "Strictly scuttlebutt. I had a girlfriend in C-Corp HQ. She told me about it, and some of what I heard I was able to confirm from other sources. It's not really much of a secret, is it?"

  "Not really,
I suppose. But the government would rather that sort of thing not get out, y'know?"

  "Why not? We keep hearing about emergent AIs and how they're going to take over the next step in human evolution… the tech singularity, and all of that. I never understood why they tried keeping it under wraps."

  "Well… that's the military for you." He thought a moment. "Actually, it's not the military so much as the government."

  "Which government?"

  "Any government. They don't want it known that super-intelligent minds might pop up out of the internet whenever Nakamura's Number is reached."

  "Because… why? Panic in the streets?"

  "Something like that. Some people would be terrified and flee… or riot and loot. Some would think it was God and try to worship it. Some would try to package it and sell it. Some might decide that it was time to kick out the old government in favor of… whatever it was. With enough disorder, the economy might collapse. Maybe civilization as well."

  "So what's Nakamura's Number?"

  "Basic AI theory. It's not so much a number as it is a measure of the complexity of an electronic information system. At a point very roughly equivalent to the complexity of a human brain, systems might wake up, achieving at least a form of consciousness and self-awareness."

  "Like the Net on Earth?"

  "Sort of." Vaughn frowned into the blue light. "Consciousness is a… a spectrum, a range of values, not just a matter of you have it or you don't. Any system—organic or artificial—with enough integrated complexity has at least a modicum of what we call consciousness. By that definition, earthworms are conscious, at least after a fashion. Not self-aware, perhaps… but they're more than data processing machines. They're aware of what they interact with around them. Dogs are conscious, way more so than worms. They're not really self-aware—if they see their reflection in a mirror they usually think it's another dog, not themselves. But they experience a broad range of positive or negative emotions, can anticipate the future, at least after a fashion, and they'll perform complex tasks for the promise of a reward. Some apes show genuine self-awareness, though. Put a spot of paint on their faces and let them see themselves in a mirror. They know at once that there's something on their own face."

  "What does any of that have to do with the Net waking up? Or… what did you call it? Nakamura's Number?"

  "Relating conscious thought to the complexity of an information-processing system has always been pretty dicey. The old Internet—and before that, the global telephone network—were more complex than a human brain, at least in terms of the number of transistors six hundred years ago—late 20th century. Complex… but not well integrated.

  "Actually, some sophonotologists today think the old Internet was aware, but laying low. We don't have any evidence of that, however. We developed the first genuine AIs in the mid-21st century, with networks that were very roughly as complex as the human brain. A neuroscientist named Christof Koch had already predicted a number—designated as phi—representing both a system's complexity and its level of integration."

  "The golden ratio?"

  "Uh-uh. Different phi. A couple of centuries later, Nakamura was able to predict that the Net in his day was—in theory, at least—conscious and self-aware. Since the Japanese were running things by that time, Koch's phi became known as Nakamura's number."

  "Was it?"

  "Was what?"

  "Was the Net aware?"

  Vaughn shrugged. "It still didn't show any sign that it was any of those things… not until Cameron felt it waking up and taking an interest during the Web crisis twenty years ago. The Sol System had been under extreme threat—a titanic space fleet deployed by the Web. The Net woke up and dealt with it… with some guidance from Cameron."

  "But then it disappeared, right?"

  "Well… let's just say that it didn't interact with humans any more… at least not that we know of. It might have had better things to do."

  "So… if we're facing a new threat— mad minds from the Web—maybe the Overmind will wake up again and protect us."

  Vaughn chuckled at that. "How very… Arthurian. In our time of greatest need, he rises from sleep and leads his knights forth." He shook his head. "Maybe, but I really don't think we can count on it. For one thing, the Overmind must be restricted to the Solar System. It has a body—all of the servers and nodes and networks inside the Solar System. Presumably it can't just wander off from the computer network that spawned it."

  "I hadn't thought of that."

  "I imagine ConMilCom is thinking about how they might use the Overmind to communicate with any Web nodes we encounter… but I'm afraid I don't see how we could use it as a weapon."

  "In other words, it'll protect the Sol System," Wheeler said, "but can't leave its home network."

  "Exactly. At least that's what the sophontologists think. Hey!" She'd just nibbled on his ear. "You want to talk, or you want to play?"

  "Both." They snuggled deeply for a few moments. Kokoro Wheeler and Vaughn had been jacking in together for about six months, now. She was, he thought, superb recreation… but lately she'd become something more. Vaughn wasn't sure how he felt about that. Sexual relations between soldiers were not… discouraged, exactly, but they weren't encouraged either. Fraternization between officers and enlisted personnel was discouraged because of the perceived differences in levels of power and free will… but both he and Wheeler were noncoms and flight leaders, and the issue was irrelevant.

  But there was the danger that he or Koko might be killed in combat, and he was increasingly concerned about that.

  What would he do without her?…

  "I wonder…" Wheeler said after a long and delicious interlude, "what do the Japanese think about the Overmind?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, they control the Sol System, right? The Overmind is right in their back yard. They must have known what happened during the Web attack. They must be trying to communicate with it."

  "Hadn't thought about that, but I guess so. They need Dev Cameron, or someone like him."

  The Overmind had been an emergent AI, an accident, though apparently only the legendary Dev Cameron in his ascended, digital form had been able to interact with it. It had brought the first phase of the civil war between Dai Nihon and the Confederation to an abrupt and rather unsatisfactory end… a truce that did little to resolve the differences between the two.

  The truce had held—more or less—for twenty years, until the disagreement over the status of Abundancia and several other colony worlds had led to the fighting breaking out once more.

  "Dev Cameron was… unique," Vaughn continued after a moment's thought. "He was a human who'd… well… 'ascended' is as good a word as any. Somehow he was digitized and managed to enter the Net. We're not sure how he did it, but chances are good it had to do with his symbiotic relationship with a bit of Naga living inside his brain."

  "Ah. And the Japanese are fussy about things like that."

  "Exactly. Osen, they call it. Contamination."

  "And since Cameron was a westerner, an American, he was able to sense the Overmind, while the Japanese could not."

  "Uh-huh."

  "So what happens now that the Japanese have overcome their inhibitions and brainjacked with the Naga?"

  He pulled her closer. "We hope to hell we can get to the hypernode in Ophiucus before they do," he told her. "And that we can find a way to talk to them without having them squirt star plasma at us."

  "And if we can't?"

  "Then we work on our star-tans," he said, "just as quickly as we can." Then he kissed her and pulled her closer still.

  * * *

  Chujo Yoichi Hojo stood on the bridge of the dragon-battleship Hoshiryu, as blue currents of simulated light whipped and curled toward his face from the point of perspective directly ahead of the ship. The forward bridge gallery was an enormous open space, the simulated window a viewall two stories tall. Taisa Shinzo Shiozaki climbed the steps to the gallery sta
ge, gave a deferential bow, and saluted. "Daimyo Hojosama…"

  "Yes, Taisasan." The rank was that of first-rank captain; Shiozaki was Hoshiryu's commanding officer.

  "We are twenty-five minutes from breakout, Lord."

  "Very well. You may take the ship to battle stations."

  "Hai, Daimyo Hojosama!" Again, he bowed. Shiozaki was a conservative naval officer of Dai Nihon, absolutely formal and correct in all matters of protocol. He was also, however, a brilliant tactician and a creative and inventive ship commander… which was why Hojo had specifically requested him as his flag captain.

  A warning chime sounded as Shiozaki transmitted a thought through his cerebral implant. Throughout the enormous battleship, men would be manning their stations.

  Somewhere out there in all of that blue light, three other carrier-battleships, Ryujo, Hiryu, and Unryu, plus six cruisers and a dozen destroyers, would likewise be preparing for breakout. Communication through the godsea Void was difficult to the point of impossibility, however, so no attempt was being made to coordinate the entire squadron from the flagship.

  Those captains, too, had been personally selected by Hojo. He trusted them completely to do what was necessary… and according to schedule.

  "I know it is difficult to anticipate exactly where we will emerge from the godsea," Hojo began.

  "Yes, sir. But we can be confident of dropping out of the Kamisamano Taiyo within ten astronomical units of the objective. The Shinsei was able to extensively map the gravitational matrix of the local space during her approach and transmit the data before she was destroyed. Even across two thousand light years, our trajectory should be accurate to within an astronomical unit or so."