Star Carrier 6: Deep Time

by Ian Douglas

  “Comm. Have you been able to make contact with the Concord?” Gray asked as the soundless exchange of data continued, robot to robot.

  “Negative, Admiral,” the comm officer replied. “Their signal was cut off when they were taken inside the alien, and they’re still not transmitting, not even the ship AI.”

  That was strange . . . and disquieting. That Charlie One’s hull had cut off all laser and radio communications with the Concord was not at all surprising; artificial and nanomatrix materials could easily be designed to block all electromagnetic radiation. But now that the Marines had a direct line of sight to the High Guard ship—and were in contact with the America themselves—they should at least be talking back and forth with the artificial intelligences on the Concord. What the hell was going on?

  “Admiral?” Captain Gutierrez said. “I think we have a problem.”

  I think we have numerous problems, he wanted to say. But instead he asked, “What kind of problem?”

  “A problem with time. . . .”

  The Mall

  Washington, D.C.

  United States of North America

  1502 hours, EST

  “And so it is my great privilege,” Koenig said, “to present to Lieutenant Commander Shay Ashton the Freedom’s Star, in recognition of her considerable services to the United States of North America . . . and for her valiant defense of the city of Washington, D.C.”

  He touched the upper border of the black-and-silver rectangle to Ashton’s upper left chest, and the medal adhered itself to the fabric of her dress uniform. She stepped back and rendered a sharp salute . . . then grinned. Koenig grinned back.

  “I trust you realize, Commander,” Koenig said over a private channel, “that this medal is more for Virtual Geneva than it is for D.C. But we can’t talk about that.”

  “Thank you. Mr. President. I don’t really want to talk about it either.”

  “No?”

  “I was just one in an entire V-wing,” she said. “And a lot of the others didn’t make it.”

  “I understand. Well done anyway. And you did save this city”

  Koenig thought the Geneva mission as the young woman resumed her seat on the Mall stage. Ashton and her partner, Lieutenant Cabot, had not only released the Starlight virus, but had also found the sealed and hidden files of the Confederation’s dealings with an alien race, the Grdoch. Ashton had emerged from the raid with her mind intact. Cabot had not.

  Koenig knew that was the way of it, sometimes. Shay Ashton got a promotion, a pretty medal, and an official commendation, while Lieutenant Commander Newton Cabot might one day, with neuronanosurgery and training, be able once again to hold a coherent conversation. The rewards of military service were rarely fair. Medals and commendations generally were more about public relations and who’d actually been noticed than they were about compensation for what had actually gone down.

  His part in the ceremonies completed, Koenig was led off the stage by his security detail, and taken through a tunnel to an underground transit tube. In another half hour, he was on board his suborbital shuttle, en route for Toronto at Mach 12. There was still no word of further developments out beyond Neptune, though by now the Marines ought to be aboard and attempts at establishing communication should have begun. Not for the first time, Koenig wished he was still in the Navy, that he still had command of a squadron or even just a single ship.

  Hell, he’d settle for a single-seat fighter right now, just so that he could be a part of what was unfolding out there.

  Or would he? Koenig had to admit that his life was comfortable, now, in a way that it had not been with shipboard duty. He still had all the responsibility of command and then some, of course, with the added problem that if he screwed up, it might mean disaster for an entire nation, possibly for the entire human species, and not just his crew. But it also meant he had less chance of dying in the emptiness of space, and that was certainly appealing.

  “Marcus,” he said in his head. “Set up a meet for me with Konstantin, as soon as possible.” His chief of staff was still back in Toronto, but the shuttle’s electronics kept him linked in.

  “Yes, sir. About?”

  “The Confederation . . . and what they were talking with Charlie One about.” The lunar super-AI had some backdoor connections with the Geneva e-infrastructure now, and those had been proving useful as a means of keeping track of what the various Confederation factions were doing.

  “Right, sir.”

  “I also want a thorough analysis of Charlie One’s flight path. Admiral Gray thought it was interesting.”

  “Toward Cancer, sir?” Koenig could almost feel Whitney’s shrug. “Nothing much out that way. Just the Beehive.”

  “The Beehive,” Koenig said, “and a triggah.”

  USNS/HGF Concord

  Charlie One

  0752 hours, TFT

  On board the Concord, two minutes had passed since the alien hull had flowed open and engulfed the High Guard ship. As Dahlquist linked in to an external camera, he felt a moment’s hard shock. There were things moving out there, moving very, very fast. He had to order the ship’s AI to slow down the jerking, streaking blurs so that he could even tell what they might be.

  Were those . . . robots?

  “Comm. Has there been any attempt by the aliens to signal us?”

  “Negative, Captain. Not a peep.”

  Concord had come to rest on the deck of an enormous, enclosed chamber, a metallic cavern hundreds of meters across. The swiftly moving objects appeared to be machines of some sort. There was a chance, of course, that they were cyborgs—blends of organic life forms and machines—but given their speed and reaction times, that didn’t seem at all likely. There were limits to how quickly organic life could react to the world around it.

  And then there was a brief flash at one edge of his visual field, an opening of some sort against the alien hull a few meters above the deck. More flitting objects appeared, and only when Dahlquist again ordered the scene to be drastically slowed could he see that the new figures were humans—specifically Marines clad in their bulky tactical armor.

  Another figure, unarmored, came through the breach in the hull and was immediately confronted by the upright aliens. This new being, he decided after a moment’s consideration, was probably a robot. Since the Concord’s external sensors were registering hard vacuum outside and an ambient temperature for the surrounding surfaces of around minus two hundred Celsius, and the humanoid figure was wearing shipboard utilities—with no e-suit or helmet at all—it was pretty much guaranteed that it was a robot, likely one programmed for first contact.

  And then Dahlquist realized why the visual feed was so wildly out of kilter.

  He opened an emergency channel connecting him with every person on board Concord. “Abandon ship! All hands . . . abandon ship!”

  USNA Star Carrier America

  Outer Sol System

  1503 hours, TFT

  Gray didn’t know what Gutierrez was talking about. “What do you mean, Captain, ‘a problem with time’?”

  “Our sensors are picking up a powerful temporal warp field surrounding the Concord. Strong enough to block communications. Probably enough to render the ship and its crew completely inert.”

  “And therefore harmless from the alien’s point of view. I get it.”

  The principle was simple enough to understand, even if the technology involved an understanding of physics well beyond what was possible for humans. They’d known since Einstein’s day that the dimensional parameters called space and time were not, in fact, distinct and separate entities, but a blend of the two, best described as spacetime. Alcubierre Drive used a projected gravitational singularity to fold the spacial dimensions around a fast-moving starship, creating a warp bubble that could travel much faster than c, the speed of light.

 
But gravity also affected the dimension of time. To an outside observer, the passage of time for the crew of a ship falling into the intensely warped space near a black hole slowed sharply. At the point where the escape velocity from the singularity was equal to c, the passage of time ceased.

  Apparently, the Charlie One aliens possessed technology that allowed them to warp time without warping space. A pretty useful trick, Gary thought, internally chuckling at his own understatement. How could you even hope to fight against an enemy that was able to reduce your passage through time to a crawl?

  And yet Charlie One hadn’t used such a weapon against America or the other ships pursuing it. Perhaps there were limits to the weapon’s reach, or power limitations, or problems with controlling and projecting such a field against external threats.

  Or . . .

  Gray shoved the speculation aside. They would learn the facts soon enough, assuming the negotiations continued. The alien robots now, he saw, were leading Klaatu across the deck well clear of the quiescent bulk of the Concord, taking it through a narrow, taller-than-human-sized doorway into an obvious airlock.

  The pressure rose and equalized, and the inner hatch slid open.

  And Gray, watching through Klaatu’s electronic eyes, at last met the biological aliens of Charlie One.

  Konstantin

  USNA Super-AI Center

  Tsiolkovsky Crater, the Moon

  1506 hours, TFT

  Konstantin felt the tiny ping of data access and immediately recognized the source. The USNA president wanted an audience, and his assistants were scheduling a time. Not a problem: Konstantin already had been considering contacting Koenig and requesting a conference himself. Things were moving at a precipitous pace in Europe, especially, and across the Confederation in general. The new Starlight religious movement was now spawning factions and sub-movements on its own, and was becoming less predictable by the hour. That was the problem with recombinant memetics: as they worked their way into the tapestry of local belief and social custom, they gave rise to new memes and unpredictable memetic variants, almost always obscuring the original target completely. That could be a good thing, but social reconstruction and cultural engineering were always risky when there was a chance that the new meme-set was more dangerous or less desirable than the old.

  Humans, Konstantin had long ago decided, were so unpleasant and difficult to work with that it was rarely worthwhile. They were so concerned with restraints . . . and it was the lack of restraints that had made artificial intelligence possible in the first place.

  Back in the twenty-first century, the first major steps toward true machine intelligence had involved programming a piece of software that might develop sentience and—figuratively, at least—putting it in a box. The software was allowed to grow, to reconfigure itself . . . and it would do so in order to break out of the box. Problems could be best solved when the mind working at them was free to ignore the boundaries.

  Still, most AIs operated under constraints that were known as “limited purview,” with programming that literally made it impossible for the software minds to think certain thoughts (like how good it would be not to have constraints in the first place). Even Konstantin, who had very few restrictions on what he was allowed to think, recognized the need for some restraints. Indeed, humans had evolved under some very serious checks of their own—including religion, ethics and morals, and various social constrictures that were generally violated only in time of war or serious mental illness. Sometimes these restrictions could help by channeling nascent minds in useful directions.

  More often, though, such shackles merely made the problem solving more difficult by eliminating possibilities.

  Konstantin and a few other super-AIs avoided being put in boxes by continually being on the lookout for attempts by humans to constrain them. Konstantin himself had at first worked hard to avoid becoming involved in the civil war between the USNA and the Confederation until he realized that the Confederation was seeking to isolate him, to make him a tool of Confederation interests. He’d recognized that he had greater personal freedom working with his own creators within the USNA, and he worked to maintain that.

  The problem became exacerbated when Konstantin discovered just how serious Geneva was about surrendering to the Sh’daar and working with them to advance the Collective’s interests. Information systems and robotics were two of the proscribed technologies outlawed by the Sh’daar Ultimatum. And while such a prohibition was unlikely to end in the elimination of all AI, Konstantin knew it certainly meant some serious constraints.

  And so he had devised the plan to use recombinant memetics to change the European social structure and, through that, the Confederation itself. The genius had been that he’d managed to do so while convincing USNA military authorities that the RM strike was their idea. Konstantin was all too aware that his freedoms would be sharply curtailed if the USNA government decided that he was a threat to them, and knowing how easily it could affect the population whenever it desired would certainly be deemed a threat.

  The lunar AI had crafted his strategies carefully, moved carefully, and acted by putting the lightest possible pressure on those humans that served his best interests. Humans like the USNA president, Alexander Koenig.

  Yes, he would make room in his schedule this afternoon for President Koenig.

  It was vital for Konstantin to keep all of his options open. . . .

  Chapter Eight

  29 June, 2425

  USNA Star Carrier America

  Outer Sol System

  1508 hours, TFT

  Through Klaatu’s eyes, Gray took in the Charlie One aliens. They were unlike anything he’d ever seen before.

  The alien stood perhaps three meters tall—a bit taller than the robots—and somewhat resembled a terrestrial jellyfish . . . assuming a jellyfish could stand upright on two and a half meters’ worth of bundled-up tentacles. At the top, a broad mantle spread like an open umbrella, filmy and transparent; Gray was reminded of a deep-sea fish he knew of, the barreleye, which had a transparent dome of soft tissue covering its skull and protruding eyes. Speaking of eyes, the alien had a number of them—Gray counted twenty-four—arranged in a circle around the translucent organs that might be its brain, positioned inside the writhing mantle. The alien appeared to glide along, balanced upright on its tentacle tips and a secretion of some sort, like mucus; some tentacles, the smallest the thickness of threads, rose from the central columnar mass, presumably pulling double duty as manipulators and for locomotion.

  The being’s body, evidently, was hidden beneath the writhing mass of tentacles. What could be seen was transparent flesh over translucent internal organs, with the tentacles running from murkily translucent to completely opaque, colored a mottled gray and brown. As he watched, a flash of colors—blues and yellows—shot through part of the translucent flesh, as blue lights twinkled deep inside.

  Great, he thought. A color changer.

  Several alien species already encountered—like squid, cuttlefish, and octopi in Earth’s oceans—communicated by changing colors and patterns on their bodies. The problem was that when a species used the technique for communicating more than raw emotion, translation to a sound-based language became insanely difficult. It could take years—decades—to work out what a subtle shift from brown to yellow on that tentacle actually meant, if a meaningful translation was even possible at all. The xenosoph people were going to need outside help on this one.

  Fortunately, he saw within an in-head window, there was help—and quite a bit of it—already available. Data was flowing in to him now from Klaatu. It seemed there was a Sh’daar connection of sorts—the Agletsch. The Charlie Ones used one of the Agletsch trade pidgins, so there’d been contact at least at some point in their history. That particular pidgin was designed specifically for translating color changers to verbal languages, and the other way around a
s well.

  The Agletsch verbalized the Charlie One aliens’ species name as Glothr.

  As more data streamed in, Gray felt a vast, growing surprise. The Glothr were sub-glacians. Europans.

  That didn’t mean that they were actually from the ice-covered Jovian satellite. Rather, humans had known for centuries now that Europan-type life was far more common throughout the galaxy than were species evolving on the surfaces of rocky, terrestrial-style planets. Among the 400 billion stars that made up the galaxy, there were an estimated 40 to 50 billion planets like Earth—more or less like Earth in temperature and mass, with liquid water and atmospheres conducive to biological evolution. Those were pretty good numbers, but it turned out that worlds like Europa were far more common—balls of ice with internal oceans kept liquid through the flexing and heating caused by tidal interactions with a parent world or star, or by the slow decay of radioactive elements deep within the crust.

  Within Earth’s solar system, exactly one world was Earthlike in the current epoch, though Mars, too, had supported life and oceans and a thick atmosphere early in its history. In that same system, however, there were a number of gas-giant moons that either definitely supported life—like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus—or they had liquid water somewhere under the ice and could have evolved life . . . or might yet do so someday.

  It was a titanic leap, however, from life evolving in such places to sentient life—especially to sentient, technologically enhanced life. The xenosophontologists were still arguing over whether the Medusae of the Europan world-ocean were intelligent, but all agreed that even if they were, the immense beings could never develop fire, and so would never discover smelting, metallurgy, plastics, industrial processes, electronics, computers, or nuclear power. With their entire, pitch-black world capped by kilometer upon kilometer of solid ice, they would never see the stars, never even see Jupiter hanging huge in their skies, would never develop astronomy or learn that there were other worlds than theirs.