Lifting his hands in surrender, Absen said, “That’s a fascinating topic for a comfortable retirement, but right now, we have wars to fight. Back to what’s at hand: how can I be sure? How can I trust you?”
Rae held her hands out to him in supplication, gasping his arm. Pleading like Absen had never heard her before, she replied, “You can’t be sure. Not with any human being. That’s why they call it trust, not certainty. You have to take a leap of faith.”
Absen realized how eerily this echoed his misgivings about Michelle Conquest, giving the AI full power over military operations. On some level, these two were similar – women of extraordinary talents, in some ways so much more capable than he would ever be that he wondered what they saw in him.
With Michelle, he’d had to decide to give her incrementally increasing autonomy and responsibility, knowing there was no going back. Perhaps with Rae, he should do the same. In romance novels a moment always came where the protagonists threw themselves into each other’s hearts with abandon, but he knew the real world seldom worked that way – and especially not with him. He couldn’t transform himself from a tightly controlled warship commander into an openhearted lover with the flip of a switch, even if he was sure…and his primary mission always had to be command.
“All right, Rae,” he finally said, sliding toward her until their knees touched. He allowed his resolve to soften, just a little. The best he could do was put words to his intentions, even if he discarded them immediately. “I’ll take a few hops, if not the full leap. And…” he reached up to place a fingertip under her chin, “I’ve waited long enough.”
“Me too,” she sighed as her lips reached for his. Soon, he forgot everything.
Later, as Rae slept, Absen put on workout clothes and slipped out of his quarters, but he didn’t go to the gym. Instead, he entered the empty conference room, trailed by Steward Tobias. His head seemed clear, if he could be his own judge.
A moment later, Michelle appeared in her android guise, also in athletic dress.
“So,” Absen asked without preamble, “did I just sleep with an imposter?”
“My answer would be more accurate if you hadn’t ordered the visual feed turned off,” Michelle said with a hint of reproach.
“You think I’m going to let you watch as we make love?”
“Seems a small price to pay for security.”
“That’s what the NSA said when I was growing up in the twentieth century.”
“With all due respect, sir, how am I supposed to do my job when you handcuff me this way?”
“That also sounds eerily familiar. Just tell me what you’ve found.”
Absen noticed Michelle emulated irritation quite well. Could she be jealous? He’d have to keep an eye on her. Crushes on superior officers were far from unknown, and then there was the X factor of her AI mind. Now wasn’t the time to call her out on it, though.
As if sucking on lemons, Michelle said, “My analysis indicates a greater than ninety-eight percent chance that she is really Raphaela. But that does mean its almost one in fifty that she’s not.”
“That variation could easily be explained by the passage of time. People change. In fact, I’m surprised the difference isn’t larger.”
“You seem to want to believe her.”
“Oh, I do, I do. That’s why you’re playing devil’s advocate. But for now, we go ahead and act as if she’s for real.”
“You may be letting your personal feelings interfere with your judgment, sir.”
“Yes, I may be. Are you?”
Michelle didn’t answer, just saluted and stalked off.
Chapter 18
Captain Absen had to force himself to concentrate on Lieutenant Commander Fleede’s intelligence briefing. Besides his own brain’s well-honed reflex to avoid the avalanche of detail, he’d much rather think about the last three days and nights he’d spent with Rae. But every time he did that, worry threatened to intrude. He knew only she could really treat with the Meme, but always there was the nagging fear that her mission would end in disaster. He’d asked her if there was some other way to communicate, but she’d insisted that the Meme would only make a deal by in-person contact and that she had a better chance than any other Blend.
He knew she was almost to the rendezvous in interplanetary space just outside Mars’ orbit. Half the sensors on Conquest were focused on her ship, the other half on the approaching Meme shuttle. At least they had responded to Rae’s offer to meet. That was one thing EarthFleet had never achieved. That actually strengthened the case against her, for of course a Meme agent would get a meeting. Absen figured the Empire would be desperate to acquire the TacDrive technology, and they were devious.
Absen pushed it out of his mind once more. An encrypted broadcast for Ezekiel and his contact crew to return had gone unheeded, and until a Blend he trusted implicitly was available – and the Sekoi did not count – he couldn’t do anything about Rae. Hopefully by the time she came back Ezekiel would have returned.
But hope was not a plan.
For now, he had military matters to attend. He picked up Fleede’s monologue in mid-sentence, focusing on the artist’s rendering on the main screen. “– believe each Scourge mothership to hold between one hundred and two hundred million assault troops, along with at least one million assault shuttles and one hundred thousand aerospace fighters.”
“I’m sorry, could you say that again?” Absen said, his attention finally fully engaged. “Two hundred million troops per mothership – and how many motherships do they usually use in an invasion?”
“We only have the one Meme summary, which was of an incursion that was defeated. In that one, twelve motherships appeared, and were destroyed by a fleet of two Monitors and sixty-four Destroyers, as well as the native defensive emplacements, which were considerable.”
“Sixty-four destroyers and a heavily fortified system. And how well did they do?”
Fleede swallowed. “The Meme suffered approximately fifty percent casualties.”
“And there’s no follow-up report from that system?”
“No, sir. We presume the next attack must have overwhelmed them.”
“Do we know when and where this attack took place?”
“Yes, sir. At a star system about one hundred thirty light-years away, approximately that long ago, as the beamcast only recently reached the Meme here in normal space.”
“Does that help us locate the Scourges’ area of operations?”
“Not really, sir. We need more access to Meme data – any data, in fact.”
“All right, no matter,” Absen said with a sigh. “Back to the fight in front of us. Do we have any idea how many will be coming here?”
“No, sir. If you’ll allow me to continue, though, my team has made some confident estimates of their methods and tactics.”
Absen sat forward. “Now you’re speaking my language.”
Fleede smiled. “Thank you, sir.” He gestured. “On the screen you see a mothership shaped like a saucer, about twenty kilometers in diameter and five deep. The troops and, presumably, their commanders, ride the mothership during its FTL transit, but our estimates give them a maximum of one week of food, water and air, so they must not live aboard for long. As soon as they appear, they immediately launch their assault shuttles and attack, covered by their aerospace fighters and small gunships. There seems to be no method of easy recovery once launched. Reassembling the force would basically involve rebuilding the whole outer shell.”
“So the mothership is more of a barge, not a true assault carrier. They aren’t using a navy at all – their ships are one-use amphibious tubs.”
“On the outside, quite true, sir. However, there is a valuable, reusable core to the mothership. The cores don’t even mount capital-class weapons, only a few defensive systems apparently designed to allow them time to escape with their FTL drive. By this we deduce their commanders value themselves, but their armies are, in essence, suicide troops.”
>
“Do these suicide troops have capital weapons? Nukes, for example?”
“A few, sir, but not in large numbers. We believe they don’t like destroying things they want to eat.”
Absen stood up and took the podium, waving Fleede aside as his eyes swept across his staff. “Then we have essentially three problems to solve, people. One, the obvious, is how to keep this horde from winning in its first massive rush. Two, how to stop their motherships from escaping to tell of their defeat and bring more Scourges. Three, and most importantly, how to seize a mothership, so we can capture and exploit its FTL technology. I’m pretty confident we’re well on the way to solving number two, and if we don’t achieve number one, the rest will hardly matter. So listen to Fleede here and digest all his detail. Study these Scourges like you studied the Meme. Figure out how to beat them and avoid dying in the process. And find me answers to those three questions. Scoggins, you take the Red Team. Ford, you’re Blue. Ms. Conquest, you’re the impartial referee and simulations goddess. Oh, and figure how we’re going to get some warning before these things show up. Go on, get to work.”
“But sir,” Fleede protested as the conference room dissolved into a buzz of conversation, “I have a lot more slides…I know, package them up and shoot them to your desk, right?”
“Yes, Commander. Your reporting is very thorough, and I prefer to study it alone with the concentration it deserves.”
“Thank you…Commander, you said?”
“Absolutely. You’ve earned it.” Soon, Absen knew, promotions wouldn’t be hard to come by. Not if this was going to get as bloody as it looked.
Chapter 19
Rae Denham drummed her fingers nervously on the contoured arm of her chair, staring at the viewscreen. The small Meme ship, a twin to her own – at least externally – nosed forward sedately toward the scheduled rendezvous. She wasn’t worried about treachery or physical attack. This customized living boat she inhabited sported heavier weaponry, more armor and a lot bigger engines than the standard version, at the cost of endurance and a voracious appetite.
No, what she faced was far more frightening than mere injury or death. Four thousand years had passed since she had touched another Meme in the flesh. While rudimentary communication was possible using translation programs, a true dialogue would only take place via exchange of memory molecules, those packets of information that served the amoeba-like creatures as mind, voice and data storage.
Blends did this as well, but at a far shallower level. She remembered sharing with a Meme, as a Meme, was as intimate as sex, but not nearly as fun. What worried her more was what her contact might find out about her – about Raphael, and what he did so long ago.
How he was not merely a rebel, but a bald-faced, deliberate traitor to the Empire.
If they learned that, and realized she held more of humanity’s secrets in her mind than any other, would they even let her go? If the worst happened, she and her ship were prepared to fight, even detonate the suicide nuke.
So she prepared her mental defenses with all the skill she possessed.
Rae wished once more that Henrich had let her meet with Leslie, but as he’d pointed out, he had no definitive proof that either Blend was who she said she was, and until he did, they would remain apart. He’d allowed her a video chat, but no physical contact.
Back on Conquest, she’d considered trying to circumvent the security placed around her, but without understanding the capabilities of the ship’s AI, doing so seemed doomed to failure and would poison the relationship Henrich was allowing to grow between them. As his trust she had destroyed a century ago was only now rebuilding, she simply couldn’t take such a risk. At times, she’d waited years to see her children, and she could wait again.
Patience came a bit easier to an ageless being.
Though for her two dead children, Rae would wait forever. Or at least until she died, and thus found out for sure that no afterlife existed. Before Andrew and Stephanie’s deaths, she’d neither believed nor cared about anything as ridiculous as the supernatural, but now…now she understood one simple reason other people did. They just wanted to be reunited with their loved ones. The hopeful fantasy of a Heaven or Paradise or Nirvana was preferable to facing cold, eternal oblivion.
Now the Meme ship swelled on her screen, even with no magnification, and soon Rae felt the soft bump as the two craft nudged together and joined, skin to skin. Openings grew in both, forming a short tunnel through their outer integuments, growing into a chamber. The meeting place would be a floored bubble composed half of each ship, under the watchful eyes of both.
Standing up, Rae adjusted the formal yellow silk robe she wore, more akin to a genuine Japanese kimono than anything – not the flimsy robe Westerners associated with that name, but ten kilos of cloth in several layers. It was something she’d had made for the meeting, in imitation of the traditions of the first-generation Blends familiar to the pure Meme.
When she entered the chamber, a Meme was already there, resting in its shallow, Jacuzzi-sized bowl that helped it retain its shape without strain. Next to the receptacle a chair squatted like a low throne, and without ceremony she strode over to sit in it, all of her senses alert. Maintaining contact with her ship using the bioradio and chip she’d installed in her own head, she waited for the other to make the first move.
When the Meme extended a pseudopod toward her, a stream of pale flesh like jelly within a translucent skin, she almost got up and ran. Instead, she steeled herself and reached out her bare hand. Its touch felt light, warm, and dry, not the moist thing she had expected, and slowly, slowly, she began to hear its thoughts, carried by billions of sophisticated molecules even now penetrating her skin and making their way through her bloodstream to her brain.
Rae met those thoughts with her own, just as she had done with Blends over the last fifty years of the Empire’s occupation, and she found it not so difficult to erect a barrier to hold them away from her core. If she could maintain and project the image of a childish, cruel and debauched first-generation Blend to fool her own kind, with life and death in the balance, she could certainly manage this apparently benign contact. As far as she could tell, the other did not push or probe.
I am SystemLord One, the Meme said. I have come here without even my trium to speak with you, something that has not been done with Underlings in millennia.
“I am no Underling, SystemLord,” Rae returned. “I reject the Empire’s artificial divisions and political system. I am the designated ambassador from Humans to Meme.”
You are not the Human SystemLord?
“No. I am its representative. The Human SystemLord is not able to speak as we do.”
Are you part of its trium?
Rae hesitated. “Yes,” she finally answered, but the damage had been done. The Meme abruptly withdrew its pseudopod, lapsing back into the bowl.
Rae folded her hands into her lap, nonplussed. She’d felt it important to establish her equality with any Meme, but the creature had a point. She was not its political equal. Apparently it had expected a summit between supreme leaders, not a diplomatic exchange. Watching calmly even while clutching her fingers tightly together, she waited for the Meme to flow back into its ship and abandon the dialogue.
And she waited.
It neither left, nor reestablished contact, for almost three hours, but Rae knew how to be patient. To one that had waited for years, even decades, for just the right moment to introduce some concept or influence on human history, three hours was nothing. As long as the amoeba did not leave the chamber, she had hope.
Without warning, the Meme stirred and, from within itself, lifted an eyeball the size of a grapefruit on a stalk to peer at her for a moment. Then it reached and she met its touch once more.
I have decided to condescend to have congress with you despite your lower rank, if you can assure me you are a close associate of your SystemLord.
“Our organization is different, but my rank and status is eq
uivalent to the Human SystemLord, save that not I, but he, is in charge.”
Your ways are alien to us. I fail to understand how you can claim equivalence if it commands and not you, but I am not intolerant or unsophisticated. I will accept your assertion. At least you speak the Pure Language.
Rae exulted within herself then, for it seemed that this SystemLord failed to detect, or even realize, that she was a defector. Perhaps it did not care, as once a Meme blended, to other Meme it lost its identity and status. Despite her extensive research of the lords of the Empire, interacting with one in the flesh showed her how little she really understood about them – rather like the difference between studying a human culture in a university and living among its people – and similarly, how little the Meme understood about the aliens they attacked, plagued, and enslaved.
“Let’s put aside the details of protocol, SystemLord, for I believe we have more important things to talk about. I speak of the Scourge.”
Yes. If not for the Scourge, all would be as it should be in the universe. The Scourge upsets the natural order of things, so that even the Pure Race must humble itself to speak with such as you. If rightness is to be restored, we will accept your willing assistance and sacrifice on the part of the Empire.
Rae chuckled to herself at SystemLord’s instinctive arrogance. “Thanks so much, SystemLord. Let’s talk practicalities. First, we must agree on a truce, and hopefully an alliance. We are not to be your vassals or underlings. My SystemLord and you will each command his own forces, and all such forces will refrain from taking any hostile action against the others until a minimum of thirty Earth days after the Scourge is driven from this system.”
I agree.
This simple, immediate declaration surprised Rae, but she refused to show it, and pressed on. “Second, we need all intelligence, all information of any sort you have about the Scourge. If we are to fight it, we must understand it. We will also share all we have with you.”
I agree.
Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) Page 10