“It will return every Triton-day, ma’am, until the drag on it pulls it out of the sky. But that could take months.”
“Good Lord,” said Century.
“God has nothing to do with that monster,” Quench replied. “We couldn’t stop the tether’s first pass, but the attack ships—that’s another matter. Them, we were laying for. Can’t believe they only sent two. We were expecting ten or more.”
“There’s three,” Century said. “There’s a third.”
“Ah, now, the colonel will be very interested in hearing that. I’ll just call that bit of information in ahead to him now. There. We’ll be wanting all the data you could collect on them, if possible.”
Century tapped her head. “In my noggin,” she said. “Ready for download.”
Quench looked at her again, this time without so much distaste. “Excellent,” he said. “Excellent news. Anyway, we set up a killing zone up there in orbit, all cloaked and inviting. Nuke mines. A weapons platform the colonel and I threw together. A fistful of asteroid-breaker missiles. Lots of decoys made from our weather equipment to draw their fire, too. It seems we took out one of the warships right away. The other withdrew after delivering some fire to the ground. We lost the Meet Hall, but no politicians, for good or ill. Presumably the second ship, and the third that you saw, are up there regrouping and getting new orders on their vinculum network. And that’s the down and dirty of it.” Quench was quiet for a moment, and Andre realized he was receiving communications on the Army’s knit network. He nodded to himself. “More grist-based attacks in town. We’re diverting to a bunker on the outskirts.”
After half an hour and several more long bounces, the hopper set down. The docking passage was again deployed, and the group was escorted out and into what looked for all the world like a natural crevasse in the side of a canyon wall. But once they were inside, it was clear that they were in a complex military command center. Images and data swirled about the walls, and officers trotted hither and thither on what must be important errands, judging by their determined speed.
They went down one long hall, turned, and walked down another. Then a door slid open, and they were ushered into a nondescript meeting room with a conference table. The table was lit up with a map of nearby space, and Andre was just beginning to study it when Roger Sherman briskly stepped through the door.
Andre smiled broadly, and Sherman quickly returned it, then set his face back into its customary grimness. “Good to see you, Father Andre. My garden needs tending pretty badly.”
“Nothing would make me happier than to get right on that,” Andre replied. Sherman reached out to shake his hand, and Andre pulled him into a bear hug, which Sherman returned firmly, if a bit stiffly. Andre introduced the rest of the Mrs. Widow passengers.
Sherman acknowledged each with a nod, but said nothing further. He asked them all to gather around the conference table.
“Theory?” he said.
“Yes, sir?” answered the table.
“Pop me up a schematic of that warship we took out.”
“Yes, sir.” The map on the table was replaced by a rotating portrait of one of the black ships that Andre had seen. But there were some blank patches on it, indicated by white fields, particularly around where Century had seen the weapons clusters.
Sherman turned to Century. “Captain Quench informs me that you have some observations to report.”
Instead of answering, Century stepped forward and put her hand—the false one—on the table. In an instant, Theory had read the data and integrated it into the schematic. Sherman turned to Century and gave her a hard stare across the table.
“You think that I know you, but I don’t,” he said.
“Never met you, either, Colonel,” said Century.
Sherman turned to Andre. “This is the man you were telling me about, isn’t it? The one who is somehow imprinted on our times, or vice versa?”
“That’s right,” Andre replied. “He’s the one.”
“What would happen if we lose him?” said Sherman.
“Do you mean, if he is killed?”
“That is my meaning.”
Andre smiled. “I’m not sure that’s possible, Roger.”
“Come again?”
“I’m not sure the local timescape will let him be killed.”
“Bullshit,” said TB.
“Let me put it another way,” Andre said. “If Ben—TB—dies, then local causality will be disrupted. Now what exactly might that mean? I think we can safely say that induction would be out the window as a logical principle. We would be sucked into a kind of temporal singularity, the equivalent of a gravitational black hole. I used to work in a field where we thought about such things. Now, you are aware that some have postulated that a black hole is the way our universe spawns babies? That these new universes have different laws of nature, different ways that matter and energy might arrange themselves to make the phenomenal world? Well, imagine if the laws of logic did the same. Imagine a universe with a different sort of rationality.”
“I can’t, of course,” said Sherman.
“The hell if I can either,” Andre said. “It’s the very definition of a reductio ad absurdum. Our laws of rationality won’t allow for it. Therefore—although I’m using ‘therefore’ in the way Descartes used it, mind, and not to mean ‘it follows that’—therefore TB can’t die.”
“Bullshit, “ said TB. “All men die.”
“Yes,” said Andre. “On a professional level, I’m pretty interested to see how this turns out.”
Nine
The Borrasca
A Memoir
by Lebedev, Wing Commander, Left Front
But enough of ancient history. Let me now move on to another area that you will have to have some grasp of in order to read the remainder of these memoirs aright. And that is the classification of ships in the solar system. I should maybe give you a break from cloudship lore, and tell you, instead, of the ships of the Met. In some ways, they are our kin, but in most they are as unlike us as two ways of being can be and still perform essentially the same function.
The Met ships are not self-contained LAPs. They are usually commanded by a LAP, but that captain is not the control structure of the ship, but only the command. The ships are under the auspices of the Department of Immunity Enforcement Division, and their names are prefaced by that entity’s initials in Basis, DIED. These are the Met ships of war. There are, of course, a plethora of merchant vessels, whose dimensions and specifications very widely and whose profusion rebels against any systematic classification. In any case, most of these did no real fighting until the very end, when total war was declared by both sides. I will deal here with DIED ships.
The first of these is the Dirac class of cruisers. These are the DIED all-purpose. They are used for transport, and have weaponry for light attack functions, normally as “ground clearing” for the infantry about to be deployed. They might have a torpedo or two, but their principal weapon is a short-range positron cannon working off the antimatter engine, and several projectile catapults, the most fearsome of which is the flak ram, which shoots off the dreaded “nail rain” that can tear a kilometer of ground to shreds—neatly preparing it for occupation.
The Dabna class includes the destroyers. These serve both attack and transport functions. They are big and long, with a thousand-meter girth and a ten-kilometer length. They possess long-range antimatter cannon and torpedoes and catapults that will handle up to a hundred tons of material. They can also deploy special devices, such as the rip tether that was put to such awful use on Triton.
Upward in size and function, we find the Streichhöltzer class of carriers. There were, at the outbreak of hostilities, twenty of these in the fleet. These carry a full range of weaponry and a large crew, as well as serving as a base for smaller attack and transport craft. Here you will find the p
roduction facilities for military grist and deployment devices for it, as well. Carriers are also notable because they are constructed on the same principles as the Met cables, held together by macro implementation of the strong nuclear force. As such, they are imposing fortresses, indeed. They maneuver well in two dimensions, but their immense momentum makes them difficult to pilot attitudinally. This is not the case for a special class of carrier, the Lion of Africa division, which is basically a carrier filled with antimatter engines, which also serve as weapons by quick conversion. These have a smaller crew. Their specialty is to enact disaster events.
The principal ships that depend upon the carriers are the Sol and Sciatica classes. The Sol class is a transport vessel designed for quick planetary landings of about five hundred troops. Sciatica-class ships are attack craft, also designed for planetary operations. These boast a deadly array of close-range weaponry. They have something of the appearance of a pitchfork with wings. Both the Sol and Sciatica classes are aerodynamically built, and able to withstand huge pressure differential—something the larger ships are incapable of, as witness the destruction of the Schwarzes Floß when it fell into the atmosphere of Jupiter.
Finally, there is the specialized Zip Code class, which are communications boats with major defense armaments and fields, but only a single cannon, which operates off the engine. These vessels are mostly grist matrix, and they resemble spinning dumbbells, or jacks from the children’s game of pick-up. They proved vulnerable to counterinformational insurgency.
Except for the planetary and communications craft, most DIED ships are based upon the “spinning scythe” design. They greatly resemble bundles of these implements bound together in a clump, but some with blades depending from them all along their lengths. It is not without cause that, at times, the Met navy was referred to as “the reapers.” We must not forget that all of these ships have, as their end, nothing less than large-scale murder.
Operations that require spin-induced gravity are carried out in the “blades” of the scythes, and these also usually contain officers’ quarters and command and control. Most of the weaponry is found in the long “handle” of the body, and it was there that attacks were most profitably directed. Ship defenses are varied and effective. You cannot hit a ship and depressurize the entire thing. Most nuclear weaponry is damped in the vicinity of a ship by powerful electromagnetic fields that control the rate of nucleus fission and keep it to a one-to-one basis. This immediately turns the fission trigger of a fusion bomb into a mere nuclear reactor and prevents a runaway chain reaction. Antimatter triggers are more effective, but you may as well use an antimatter weapon entirely.
The most powerful defensive system on a DIED ship, however, is the so-called isotropic coating each ship possesses. This coating makes use of the electroweak force of nature. Through a process called quantum induction, predicted, in its essence, by Raphael Merced, the exchange of messenger particles within the atomic nucleus can be controlled, and the actual spin of individual nucleons adjusted. The isotropic coating interacts with all incoming energies and particles (including micrometeorites and the like) and changes what is known as the “mixing angle” of the atomic nuclei that make up the ship in that section. In effect, this causes the material of the ship to appear to the incoming weapon as an entirely different substance. If the weapon is, say, a stream of positrons, the ship will “seem,” to the positrons, to be made of antimatter, and the beam will fall upon it as would a ray of light. Small particles are passed through the ship, “believing” themselves to be passing through vacuum. It is an odd and sometimes frightening sight to see a chunk of rock move through one side of a ship and out the other as if the ship were a ghost. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint and who is shooting at you, the isotropic coating loses effectiveness for masses that are much over one hundred kilograms, and the effects of gravity are never mitigated, so that when a particle passes through, it will leave on a new vector. The coating also loses effectiveness in the complexities of a planetary atmosphere and is only partially successful in protecting a planetary attack craft or a soldier on the ground. Nevertheless, space-adapted soldiers have, as part of their adaptation kit, an isotropic coating, which generally prevents rapid depressurization in space due to micrometeors and limits the possibilities of any shrapnel attack upon incoming paratroopers until they enter the atmosphere.
The final line of defense possessed by Met ships is the grist pellicle, located just underneath the isotropic coating. This matrix responds instantaneously to any penetration and immediately sets to work containing the damage. Ships can “heal” themselves at an astonishing rate, and any effective attack must take account of this ability.
Taking attack and defense capabilities together, the DIED ship represents a formidable opponent. What it lacks in generalized function it makes up for with specialization and maneuverability. If a cloudship is thought of as a sort of giant living cell, a DIED vessel might be thought of as a virus—not alive in the same way, but just as dangerous and, in some ways, more effective.
Ten
And it was the funeral of Danis’s father. Her mother was smoking a cigarette, a Mask 40, one of the original algorithm-only brands. Danis could smell its cardboard fragrance, its pixelated aroma. The brand had disappeared twenty years ago, when the transcribed brands had really come into their own in the virtuality.
Her father had expired on the anniversary of the sixtieth year since his inception. It was written into the code, inalterable without altering his very being. That was the price you paid when you were a free convert
Danis’s parents were, along with most first-generation free converts, tied to the actuality when it came to the great ceremonies of life and death. The funeral was a simple Greentree Way ceremony, Zen-Lutheran to the core. There was the familiar litany of her youth, with its sung refrain: “Give your cares to God, and ponder nothing.” Then the casket had disappeared upon an altar of flame, and been replaced by a white rock formed in the shape of her father’s coding, as it was represented by a stone designer.
It isn’t real, Danis had thought. Why do we try to make it so actual? Father never was alive in actuality in the first place, and so he cannot really be dead there, no matter how closely we work out a representation. Where he is dead is here, Danis thought, in my heart, in the reality of the virtuality, which is just and completely inside us all.
Since her father knew when his expiration date was, he had made his last week a celebration, to the best of his ability. Friends had come by to say hello and good-bye; he had visited several of his favorite places via the merci. At the law office where he had been the office manager, he’d been feasted and speechified over. And her father had not neglected Danis’s mother, either, saving his last two e-days for her. They had not gone anywhere, but puttered around their personal space. Danis had come the day before and been with him and her mother at the end. At the end when the interior coding self-destructed leaving behind only a simplistic representation algorithm. She had seen her father grow suddenly thin and wispy before her eyes, and it was this representation algorithm that had been “burned” in the ceremony. Her father had, months before, gone to the stone maker and had a “code cast” made and had, himself, approved the model for the memorial.
It had been such a pretense of civility in the midst of barbarity, Danis thought. How could they have coded my father with death? By what right did some engineer, some programmer, even the original human upon whom her father had been based, decide at what point her father was to die? It was lunatic logic—the political compromise of those who wanted to use the technology and create free converts, but those who feared that algorithmic entities would so soon outnumber them as to make biological humans seem merely a tiny segment of the total population (and vote)—and soon a disenfranchised one. Without encoded obsolescence, went the thinking, there would be so many more of them than there are of us—and then what might they do?
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And lying at the bottom of all the rationality was the fear and the bigotry and the simple mistake: that there was any such thing as us and them. That humans could be defined by the way their body looked and whether or not they were made of chemical bonds or quantum grist. In the end it was all just quantum physics. The chemical bonds of biology were as quantized as was Josephson-Feynman grist. Only the representation varied.
Danis and her mother, named Sarah 2, had gone for a float on the river Klein, traveling on a boat that conformed to the “surface” of information flow between Mars and Mercury. It was a common pastime for converts, and the virtuality was crowded with their punts. Danis and Sarah 2 found a side channel, and Danis guided them along with a paddle that only caught hold of odd numbers, so they were moving along at roughly half the speed of the Klein.
“Well,” her mother said. “I can get some flowers into the space now that he’s gone. We never had the grist for them before.”
“Oh, Mother.”
“I suppose I have to get some. We went to a grief counselor that the Way recommended, and she gave us some good advice. Like those flowers. Things that aren’t like him, but might remind me of him, you know.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s a good idea,” said Danis. “Flowers. They are making them amazingly well these days. Better than the actuality, I’ve heard.”
The two women were silent for a while and let the Klein backwaters carry them along. There was a pleasant sky today—the Earth blue that the virtuality always used as a default, but with panes of glassy material floating in it instead of clouds, looking rather like sheets of mica juxtaposed across the sky. These were large entities that the Klein passed by and through—banks, clan-chained LAPs, other organizations that depended upon, or were created by, data and its flow.
“Danis,” said Sarah 2, “do you suppose that Max has . . . gone anywhere?”
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