Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  “We tried to make this clear from the beginning,” Dev said, “but let me restate it now, for the record. There are no guarantees here. It’s entirely possible that we’ll find ourselves unable to return… especially if our understanding of quantum physics, of the interplay of quantum universes, turns out to be less than accurate. This is strictly a volunteer mission. Anyone, any one of you, anyone in your departments who doesn’t want to come along, all you need do is speak up between now and zero-six-hundred hours tomorrow. Talk to me, or General Hagan, or Admiral Barnes, or have a word with your section or department leader. We’ll transfer you to one of the Confederation ships with the Unified Fleet, and not a thing will be said.”

  “Sir,” Captain Deverest said. “That was quite clear long before we started playing with whole universes. I know I speak for my whole company when I say, if there’s a chance here of beating the gokking Web once and for all, then we want in!”

  The assembly dissolved in a chorus of shouted agreements, cheers, and clapping hands.

  Eventually, the group returned to the briefing, which ultimately began to wind down into the drudge-work details of ship and crew preparation. When the assembly was dismissed an hour later, only Kara, Vic, and Dev remained.

  Dev looked at Vic. “You’re still not convinced about this, are you. Do you want out?”

  Vic sighed. “No. I’m in. I just… well…”

  “I’m still not convinced that we’re going to find help in the future,” Kara put in. “Whether the Web is still there or not, civilization a few thousand years from now is going to have plenty of troubles of its own.”

  “You’re probably right,” Dev said. “That’s why our emphasis will be on getting intelligence. Information. That, by itself, will be the most powerful weapon we could find.”

  “I’m not sure I see how,” Kara put in. “If we find out the Web is destined to win? What do we do? Give up, roll over, and die?”

  “Quantum theory doesn’t believe in destined,” Dev said. “Since all possible outcomes are inevitable, as part of the branching, many-universe hypothesis, there’s no inevitable outcome to anything.”

  “All of this kind of avoids a major question though,” Vic said. “Our operational orders for Gateway say we’re to conduct reconnaissance for the purpose of gathering intelligence. It doesn’t say how we’re supposed to do that.”

  “The Net,” Dev told him, “has become a necessary part of the human community. Quite apart from the Overmind, it’s a tool for human interaction, trade, education, and personal fulfillment as vital and as important as the creation of the family. Of agriculture. Of language. It may well mark the next significant step in our evolution.”

  Kara’s eyes widened. “Interesting thought. I never thought of it in quite those terms. The Net as another step in Man’s social evolution… on the same level as the invention of language. Pretty far-reaching stuff.”

  “It’s true. If any fact, no matter how obscure or how complex, is almost instantly accessible by anyone equipped to retrieve it, then we’ve entered a new evolutionary phase, one closer to Daren’s odd little Commune creatures, where we all become mobile extensions of a broadly distributed, information-based society.”

  “Put that way,” Vic said, “it sounds like the Web.”

  “Does it? Maybe it does, though I have a feeling the Web doesn’t perceive information the same way we do. For one thing, it seems to ignore things it doesn’t understand. Man is… built differently. He’s not exclusionary.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Kara said. “How often do we refuse to look facts in the face? Or reject an idea because it’s not what we were brought up with, or because it violates some cultural taboo?”

  “There’s a difference, I think, between censoring information because you don’t approve of it, and not being able to process it in the first place. Look at the Imperials and their bias against Companions. Some Nihonjin do use Companions, you know, despite the social prejudice against it. And people out on the Frontier nearly all have them now. There has been change. And I suspect the Imperials will come around to our way of doing things in a few more years. If they don’t, a synthesis will emerge, something involving both our way of doing things and theirs.”

  “You were talking about the Net being an important part of our lives,” Vic said. “That’s true whether you talk about us or the Imperials. What’s your point?”

  “That we can expect to find the Net existing up in the future. Or at least, we’ll find its descendant, something that does the same thing as the human network we know, only bigger and better and more powerful.”

  “The Overmind?”

  “Maybe.” His eyes were distant again. Kara was certain she saw a stark and cold fear there. God… what had happened to him? “I don’t know. But no matter what the Net is going to evolve into, I would expect to find some sort of information retrieval system. Some means of storing history and being able to download it. And that history, I would think, should feature our own struggle with the Web rather prominently.”

  “So we go into the future and download their equivalent of ViRhistory,” Vic said. “Something with a title like, How Humans Won the Web War. Of course, nothing says we’ll be able to access their system.”

  “The trend has been toward nonspecialization,” Dev reminded him. “That’s become especially important since we’ve begun meeting nonhuman species. The Gr’tak are excited about the Net, now that they’ve been able to adapt their artificials to access it. That job was made a hell of a lot easier by the Companions. And Companion biotech, of course, is compatible with the older cephlinks, like the Imperials still use, which is why we’ve been able to penetrate their systems. Likely, whatever system is in place a millennium or two from now, it’s going to be something just about anyone could use. Or could learn to use, with some help from the Naga we’ll take with us.”

  Vic smiled. “Even if what we find is a Web version of the Net? You know, if they win, they’re not likely to keep the network in place.”

  “Then we’ll see how we can tap the Web’s communications network,” Dev said. “That’s essentially what we did at Nova Aquila, with the Overmind’s help. We can’t do it now because they’ve changed tactics in response to our tactics at Nova Aquila, but if we emerge deep in Web territory a few thousand years from now, well, they won’t be expecting us then, will they? Maybe we can tap their Net and learn what we need to learn—like where things went wrong for humans—before they even know we’re there.”

  “Like mice in the walls,” Vic said. He shook his head, then grinned. “I like that. I have to admit, I’m damned curious about what we’re going to find up there.” He stopped, his gaze going expressionless for a moment. “Uh oh.”

  “What is it?” Kara asked.

  “You two’d better see this.”

  The Stargate still hanging above their heads vanished. In its place, seven DalRiss transports and seven starships, just dropping free of their larger carriers, appeared. They were Imperials, without a doubt, a kilometer-long ryu dragonship, two cruisers, and four large destroyers. A voice began speaking, caught in mid-sentence.

  “… is Admiral Hideshi of the Syokaku Squadron, Imperial Third Navy. You are directed to surrender at once. All former Confederation vessels are now to place themselves at the disposal of Imperial forces. You will not be harmed, so long as there is no resistance to Imperial forces. I say again…”

  “They’ve made their move,” Vic said. “1 didn’t think it would be this fast, though.”

  “They have to move fast,” Dev said. “From their point of view, they can’t afford to let the Confederation stay independent, not in the face of the Web threat.”

  “But… I don’t understand,” Kara said. “If we can stop the Web, we’re helping them too, aren’t we?”

  “They won’t see it that way, Kara,” her father said. “What we’re about to try to do, we’ll be doing with help from the Naga, the DalRiss, even the Gr’tak. Tha
t’s unacceptable, from their point of view. They’d rather see all of mankind united… and finding his own answers.”

  “Part of it is the penetration of their part of the Net, too,” Dev said. “That was my fault, I’m afraid. Things… happened in there, during the battle, that must have scared the gok out of them, made them realize that their computer systems, their whole network, are wide open to us, and to the Overmind. Since they depend on the Net as much as we do, the only answer is to make sure they control the entire Net. Us. The Confederation. The Overmind. Everything.”

  “So what do we do?” Vic asked. He was staring at the Imperial ships, which were boosting now toward rendezvous. “Surrender? Or go out fighting?”

  “We have to go,” Kara said. Suddenly, she felt a surge of new inner strength. “This is what we’ve been fighting for. Why… why a lot of people have sacrificed everything they were. We can’t give up now. Not if there’s still a chance of beating the Web.”

  “I agree,” Dev said. His image was flickering now, fading almost to invisibility, before wavering back to something approaching a normal, solid image. “The Web is still our first concern, before the Empire. In the long run, it doesn’t matter whether the Empire rules humankind, or if the Frontier is independent. If the Web wins, humanity will become extinct.”

  “Agreed,” Vic said. “But what can we do?”

  “The Imperials have just made a decision,” Dev said, “and it’s gone a long way to limiting our possible futures.”

  “We still have some future left to us,” Kara said. “Damn it, let’s use it!”

  Chapter 21

  In war, there is but one favorable moment; the great art is to seize it.

  —from Maxim 95

  Military Maxims of Napoleon

  NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

  early nineteenth century C.E.

  They began boosting toward the Stargate.

  For months now, the Stargate had hung there in the sky, anchored between its two white-dwarf companions as millions of tons of plasma poured through the open conduits through space and time at either end of its silvery-gray length. Now, the Gate’s elongated needle shape swelled rapidly as they accelerated, the thread-slender length growing larger, thicker, more substantial. Had the Imperial ships with the Unified Fleet still been present, quite possibly they would have been able to intercept One-GEF before it had moved more than a few thousand kilometers, but they hadn’t returned from the Battle of Earth. Chance, it seemed, was favoring the GEF.

  How long that condition would last, though, was anybody’s guess.

  As the three DalRiss vessels Shrenghal, Gharesthghal, and Shralghal accelerated with their payloads, the starships Karyu, Independence, and Gauss, the Imperial squadron began boosting hard to put themselves in range to open fire. The move was countered at once by the other Confed ships of the Unified Fleet, which swung about to place themselves squarely between the Imperials and the fleeing GEF. The Imperials fired first, a burst of long-range active-tracking missiles, followed by a cloud of warstrider/warflyers from their carrier, the dragonship Soraryu—the Sky Dragon. The Confederation ships answered with missiles and warflyers of their own. As the GEF slid deeper and deeper into the twistings of warped space surrounding the Stargate, the battle was well and truly under way.

  Dev felt a heaviness, a depression unlike anything he’d known before, a loneliness more profound than he’d known even during his years as an electronic ghost self-exiled with a DalRiss explorer fleet. It was, he thought, a kind of culture shock: his Meeting encounter with the Overmind had left him feeling tiny, naked, and helplessly exposed; through the Overmind’s gaze, he’d seen himself for what he was in excruciating and accurate detail, a pattern of electrical charges in the matrix of a complex cybernetic/communications network.

  Despite everything he’d managed to convince himself of before, he wasn’t really human at all.…

  Don’t think about that!

  Somehow, he clung to his awareness of self. He could feel other presences gathered about himself… the DalRiss, especially, who seemed so fascinated by every aspect of light and mind… and the Gr’tak.

  “This ‘loneliness,’ ” Sholai said in his mind. “I do not understand this. Not when your Associative is so vast and complex.”

  Dev still wasn’t sure he understood the Gr’tak term his Companion was translating as “Associative.” From what he’d been able to gather in his conversations with them so far, a number of mutually parasitic or symbiotic organisms formed an associative, what humans perceived as a single creature. Many of these associatives, in turn, formed a larger, close-knit group, an Associative. Dev still couldn’t tell if the slightly different stress on the word indicated some kind of group gestalt intelligence, something like the Over-mind on a vastly smaller scale, or simply a complex communications network like the human Net.

  “Humans can form remarkably complex interconnections with others,” Dev replied, “and still find themselves isolated. In my case, part of the problem is the realization that I am an alien to my own kind now.”

  “Because you live on what you call the Net?”

  “I guess so. Being a downloaded intelligence, a smart computer program… that kind of takes the fire out of life, you know?”

  “We do not know.” There was a pause. “We left our homeworld, we set off on this journey thousands of your years ago because the Grand Associative there had been destroyed by the entity you call the Web. We journeyed in the hope that we might find a similar, even a greater Associative with which we could interact.”

  Dev could not help an inner smile. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “This Grand Associative surpasses our most unrealistic expectations. There is a richness in this type of interconnective communication, a richness in complexity and depth and scope that increases manyfold with each addition. When we… how do you say it? Linked?”

  “When you linked in.”

  “Yes. When we linked in, it was as though we’d discovered, not a handful of new stars and worlds… but an entire universe, worlds within worlds within worlds. We experienced joy unlike anything within our collective experience. And perhaps the best part of all…”

  “Yes?”

  “It was the feeling of having found a new home, of having found an Associative with which we could have a meaningful exchange for untold numbers of years, of the realization that we need never be alone again.”

  “It’s more than just being… different,” Dev said. “I miss having a body. A real body, not one of these analogue projections in someone’s imagination.”

  “Is this not existence? And one even richer than that experienced in a physical body!”

  “We might dispute that,” a different, deeper mental voice said, and Dev recognized the characteristic timbre of a DalRiss. “Electronic life is at best a pale substitute for the flame and vigor of biological existence.”

  Why are all the aliens so interested in me? Dev thought, a little bitterly. Do they think I’m some kind of interesting case? Or do they just want to dissect my emotions?

  “The DalRiss cherish physical life,” he explained. “And while it was the DalRiss who made my download possible, I… 1 don’t think I want to continue in this way. I don’t think I can. I’ve seen myself, seen what I am.”

  “You are no less than you were as an organic creature,” Sholai said. “And to our way of thinking, you are considerably more.”

  “Because I have instant communications access to others of my own kind?” Dev asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “The trouble is finding others of my own kind,” Dev said. “Humans, real humans, have their physical lives to fall back on. I have nothing but this. Artificial Intelligences are conscious, intelligent beings only within certain rather narrow parameters, like steering starships or creating virtual worlds. I’m… alone.”

  “All living creatures are alone,” the DalRiss said. “Except insofar as they all are part of the Gr
eat Dance of life everlasting.”

  “There is no such thing as ‘alone,’ ” the Gr’tak said. “So long as we find community in Mind.”

  Dev was curious. Sholai and a number of other Gr’tak had come along with the GEF. The DalRiss cityship Shralghal had grown a special compartment for them somewhere within its cavernous depths, where air and humidity and temperature could be matched to their preferences more conveniently than aboard a human starship. But they’d done so at a cost, cutting themselves off from the rest of their kind, who’d been left behind in the twenty-sixth century.

  “Sholai?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you come along on this goose chase, Sholai?”

  “Goose… chase?”

  “Um… a possibly futile pursuit.”

  “Ah. Our artificials are still having some difficulty with Anglic slang and idiom.” He hesitated. “We come partly to participate in this plan to destroy the Web.” There was coldness there. “They have much to answer for, this rogue associative called the Web. For your people, for the DalRiss, for us. We are here, too, because you are now our Associative. We wish to… share in your collective experience.”

  “I hope you’re not disappointed,” Dev said.

  He turned away, then, focusing his attention not on the Gate, but the sensory readings that measured the local curvature of space. That wildly spinning, whirling mass had stretched space and time both to the breaking point. He could sense, he could see with something beyond vision, how the angle of their approach was sending them into one of the predicted myriad openings that would bypass space. Astern, the battle between Imperial and Confederation forces was speeding up, until the pinpoints of light that marked the different ships, the flashes of explosions as missiles connected, were darting and flickering like the images on a ViRdrama being presented at dozens of times faster than normal. Time, here in the gravitationally twisted fields about the Gate, was running more slowly; One-GEF was already moving into the future. Dev hoped that everyone who’d wanted off the GEF ships had been able to transfer elsewhere. There was no going back now, not until and unless they’d achieved complete success.