Star Carrier 6: Deep Time

by Ian Douglas

  “I don’t see how it could,” Koenig said. “Not unless the change here and now results in a change in humans who later travel to Andromeda. There has to be some direct, physical link, right?”

  “That, Mr. President, is still unclear. But it also sidesteps the point. Are you going to continue merely reacting to scattered and uncoordinated Sh’daar attacks, or will you take steps to end the threat permanently?”

  “Short of going back in time again and doing whatever it was that the Sh’daar were afraid we were going to do, I don’t see how ending the threat is an option.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that Sh’daar strategy is not poorly coordinated? That their scattered attacks are part of a long-term and carefully planned offensive?”

  “That doesn’t seem likely. What would be the point? They could’ve destroyed us any number of times in the last five decades if they’d just gotten their act together.”

  “Agreed. But perhaps—I should say obviously—they don’t want to eliminate the human species. Perhaps they simply want to keep humans weak and divided, as we are now.”

  Koening stared at the avatar on his in-head screen.

  “My God . . .”

  Chapter Nine

  15 July, 2425

  USNA Star Carrier America

  SupraQuito Naval Yard

  0915 hours, TFT

  “Give me one good reason, Commander, why I shouldn’t have you court-martialed.”

  Gray had ordered Dahlquist to report to him in his dayroom in person, an unusual demand in an era of instant in-head communications. Gray’s reasoning was that if you were going to chew a new one in an errant subordinate, it was more effectively done in the flesh, as it were. Besides, he preferred to be able to watch the person’s eyes, to gauge his emotional response and get a feel for what was going through his head. It was too easy to hide behind the mask of an electronic avatar when you were linked in-head. Hell, it was possible to have a personal secretary impersonate you in an in-head conference and have no one else the wiser (though the AIs running the link would know. Usually. There was software that would fool even them).

  Dahlquist stood at rigid attention in front of Gray’s desk. He was wearing his dress uniform—USNA Navy black and gold, but with the blue collar tabs and trim on the tunic identifying him as High Guard.

  “For a start . . . sir,” the man said, “I wasn’t under your command at the time.”

  “Excuse me, but you were,” Gray shot back. “High Guard vessels, officers, and crew are always subject to lawful orders by ranking naval personnel. Or are you telling me you were subject to Korosi’s orders at the time?”

  “No, sir! I am a loyal North American!”

  Dahlquist’s attitude, Gray thought, stopped just a micron or two short of insubordination. The man was hostile, and he was feeling put upon. And Gray was pretty sure he knew why.

  “Then would you mind telling me why you pulled such a dumb-ass stunt out there? According to the after-action reports—Commander Mitchell’s report in particular—you ignored orders to await the arrival of America and her escorts and took your ship in dangerously close to the alien vessel.”

  “I took the action that, in my professional judgment, seemed best. Sir.”

  There it was, then, the one defense most difficult to challenge, whether in the middle of an op or in a court-martial. The captain of a vessel was required—by naval regulations, by law, and by common sense—to do what he felt was best to ensure the success of his mission and the safety of his ship and crew . . . in that order. Other officers might question that judgment, but would do so in the knowledge that they hadn’t been there and couldn’t know the entire situation.

  Senior officers sitting on a court-martial board tended to give the accused the benefit of the doubt, if only because they would want the same leeway if the situation were reversed.

  It would have been so much simpler if Dahlquist had simply ignored Gray’s original order, as it appeared he’d done earlier in the op. He might have been charged then with cowardice, or at least with disobeying a lawful order and dereliction of duty. By taking the Concord into harm’s way, though, the man had certainly scuttled any possible charge of cowardice in the face of the enemy.

  “Okay, Commander,” Gray said quietly. “Suppose you explain to me just what your reasoning was. Why did you disregard my orders and lay Concord in close alongside the alien vessel?”

  “Sir. First of all, it wasn’t clear that you had jurisdiction over my ship. I received no formal orders putting me under your command.”

  “Never mind that, Dahlquist. Why did you approach Charlie One?”

  “Sir. The alien appeared to be out of action—no signs of life. Three SAR tugs had the thing under tow, and there were four fighters in the area. But the nearest capital ship was thirty minutes away. A lot can happen in thirty minutes, and I thought there was a possibility that the alien would repair the damage and get under way again. If it did . . .” Dahlquist shrugged while remaining at attention. “I just thought if I put Concord close alongside, the added threat of Concord’s weapons might keep the alien in check. Sir.”

  “I see. And of course you had no idea that the alien had technological capabilities that would completely outmatch those of the Concord.”

  “Yes, sir. Especially that trick they pulled with time. Everything happened so fast, at least from our perspective. I think they were warping time around the Concord as soon as we came within a few hundred meters of their hull.”

  Gray studied the officer before him, considering options. His first guess had been that Dahlquist was just another arrogant Ristie who hated Prims, that he hadn’t wanted to subject himself to the orders of a man he felt was unsuited to command. That would explain his reluctance to rendezvous with Charlie One early on, but that would have looked like cowardice, an extremely serious charge. Too, his display of misplaced bravado might have been intended to dispel that impression . . . and had gotten his ship into deep trouble.

  But perhaps he’d misjudged the man. Gray hadn’t been there, after all, and the political situation had been fuzzy.

  Besides, there were some practical issues at stake here. If Gray decided to press charges against Dahlquist—to have him court-martialed—it meant relieving him of command immediately. His choice, then, would be to put another officer from another ship in command of the Concord, or promote Concord’s first officer to that position. Who was it? Ah, yes. Lieutenant Commander Denise Ames. A transhuman . . .

  And here Gray’s Prim upbringing began to intrude itself, and he didn’t like that. Born and raised in the Periphery ruins of Manhatt, Gray shared the Prim attitude toward transhumans—that they were rigidly precise products of genetic engineering strong on math and logic but weak on emotion and being human. The stereotype held that all transhumans were OCD—deliberately afflicted with what amounted to obsessive compulsive disorder. The joke was that they should actually be labeled as CDO—with the letters in alphabetical order, the way they were supposed to be, damn it!

  And how, Gray wondered, was his mistrust of transhumans any different from a Ristie’s mistrust of a Prim?

  Putting that aside for a moment, he wondered who could he transfer? Right here in America’s bridge crew there were several line officers who would serve—Laurie Taggart or Dean Mallory, for starters.

  But there would be no time for a new skipper to get settled in and familiar with ship and crew, and no time for the crew to warm to a new CO. There was also the likelihood that Gray might be accused of favoritism, especially if Ames was at all popular with Concord’s crew. It was always better, when possible, to go with the existing chemistry in a crew’s makeup. Of course, if that chemistry was thoroughly fucked up to begin with . . .

  And therein lay the dilemma.

  Concord had already been reactivated as a Navy warship and assigned to Gray’
s command, along with two of her sister ships. Gray wanted officers whom he could trust.

  But just as important was the morale of those crews.

  Balancing those two things, Gray reached a decision. It wasn’t worth hauling the man before him up on charges. If he did, it was quite likely that Dahlquist’s best-judgment defense would get him off . . . and the man would be more insolent than ever.

  But Gray could put the fear of God into the man, and in the hierarchy of a naval task force, the commanding admiral was God.

  He leaned forward on his desk, riveting Dahlquist to the deck with his glare . . .

  . . . and let him have it, both barrels.

  The Long Way Down

  Midway

  Quito Space Elevator

  1955 hours, TFT

  “Here’s to fucking peace!”

  “To fucking peace!”

  Eight members of the Black Demons had taken over a back corner of the bar, ordered their first round of drinks, and over the course of the next hour had had the servebots bring more . . . and more . . . and still more. Megan Connor tossed back her drink, wondering as she did if she was going to need a shot of dryout just to make it back up-stalk to the ship.

  The Long Way Down was popular with fighter pilots and ship crews. Most of the people in there were military, though recently the star-carrier pilots had been noisily making it their own. We’re a noisy bunch, Connor thought, but why the hell not? Damn it, we’ve earned the right to cut loose a bit on our down time.

  The most recent toast delivered, they clinked their emptied glasses back down on the tabletop. Earth, at half phase, glowed in magnificent blue-and-white radiance at their feet.

  The Long Way Down was a bit unusual as space-elevator businesses went. It wasn’t positioned at geostationary orbit with the naval base and the rest of the synchorbit facilities, but at Midway, perched halfway up, at the 17,900 kilometer level. At geosynch, 35,800 kilometers above the summit of a mountain in Ecuador, the rotational forces balanced those of gravity perfectly, and the facilities were at zero-G, or free fall, and making one orbit around the planet below in exactly one day. At an altitude of 17,900 kilometers, however, which was known informally as either “Midway” or “Level 17-9,” centrifugal force didn’t quite balance the force of gravity, and structures experienced one eighth of a gravity, a bit less than on the surface of the moon.

  Which meant that places like The Long Way Down didn’t need to build rotating habs to simulate gravity. Things fell slowly, but they did fall, and you could walk on the decks at this level if you were careful not to lose your footing. The owners of the bar had put in real transplas for the deck of the main lounge, not viewalls or vids. Patrons had the giddy sensation of walking on an actual window looking straight down almost 18,000 kilometers. From here, Earth spanned a full forty degrees, though at the moment the eastern half was cloaked in night. The sunset terminator cut across the Atlantic Ocean, with the North American coastline still in daylight. The megopoli of Brazil, however, were aglow with golden-orange light, frozen starbursts of illumination picking out the ruin of vanished rain forests and the heavily populated coastline of the Amazon Sea.

  Connor could see the elevator cable off to one side, vanishing with the sharp perspective into the depths below. A flash of motion out of the corner of her eye caught her attention: a silvery pod traveling down-line, on its way to the sprawling metropolis at Mt. Cayambe on Earth’s equator.

  Lieutenant Don Gregory placed an open hand on the tabletop, bringing up a menu glowing in the air in front of him. He closed his eyes, thoughtclicking for a refill on his drink. “What I want to know,” he said, “is whether the Genies are gonna stay peaceful.”

  Genies was a joking reference to the Confederation’s government in Geneva.

  “They’d better,” Connor said, laughing, “or we’re gonna kick their asses again.”

  “Tha’s the problem,” Lieutenant Ruxton said, morosely studying his half-empty glass. “We didn’t really kick their asses the first time, did we? We’ve just been holding . . . holding th’ bastards off . . . at, at arm’s length, right?”

  It sounded, Connor thought, as though Ruxton was the one who needed the dryout.

  “Oh, we beat ’em fair and square, all right,” Lieutenant Fred Dahlquist said. “Zapped ’em with recombinant memetics and gave ’em a dose of religion!”

  “Aw, not that crap again,” Lieutenant Chris Dobbs said. “You conspiracy theorists—”

  “Hey!” Dahlquist snapped back. “I got it from a girlfriend who works at Cheyenne Mountain! She said we sent a team of cyber-commandos into the Geneva network and planted Starlight as a peace movement, to turn the Pan-Euros against their own government.”

  “And risk having it spread over here?” Dobbs said. “I don’t buy it!”

  “Who cares where it came from?” Connor said, shrugging. “If it means not having to fight the bastards, I’m all for it. We shouldn’t be killing other humans anyway. We’ve got enough problems with the Sh’daar.”

  “The scuttlebutt I heard,” Lieutenant Sara Hathaway said, “is that pretty soon we’ll have peace with the Sh’daar, too. They say the Glothr are turning out to be the good guys.”

  “Not likely, chica,” Lieutenant Martinez said. “They were negotiating with the Confeds, fer cryin’ out loud.”

  “We don’t know for sure which Confeds, Enrique,” Connor pointed out. “Korosi’s gang? Or the peace-and-love Starlighters? Maybe they came to Earth as part of a peace overture.”

  “Shit. We had peace with the damned Sh’daars once,” Gregory said. “Twenty years ago. But that didn’t last long, did it?”

  “The problem,” Connor said carefully, “is that the system is too big. War is no longer a simple matter of good guys fighting bad guys. Hell, maybe it was never that simple. But what we call the Sh’daar is such a . . . such a huge . . . entity. So many separate species, with such wildly different views of the cosmos. It’s a wonder they could ever coordinate themselves as a group to attack us at all . . . and it might be that controlling all of them, getting a number of them to attack at the same time, or to stop attacking at the same time, is simply impossible.”

  “Well that’s a hell of a note,” Dahlquist said. “They want to surrender, and bits and pieces of them keep on attacking! That could cause some real diplomatic problems, y’know?”

  “I don’t think diplomacy comes into the picture,” Hathaway observed. “I mean, how could it? The very concept of diplomacy is a complicated one, and none of the species we’ve encountered so far thinks the same way as we do. We may never be able to talk with some of them—the Turusch or the H’rulka, for instance. Not as clearly and openly as we talk with the Agletsch.”

  “And it’s only because the Agletsch are so good at creating artificial languages and have such a good working knowledge of other Sh’daar species that we can talk with any of them at all,” Gregory said, “including the Agletsch. You’re right, though. The human species has survived the last few decades only because the enemy has as much trouble talking to each other as they do talking to us.”

  “I don’t think that’s it at all,” Lieutenant Bruce Caswell said. “From the sound of it, the Genies were getting along with the Sh’daar just fine.”

  “If by ‘getting along’ you mean ‘sell out the human race,’ ” Gregory said, “sure!”

  A servebot glided up with Gregory’s drink, floating on magnetic fields working against the superconductors buried in the deck. Connor actually preferred establishments with live waitstaffs. Most such places that catered to the military, however, were heavy into nudes and live sex.

  To be clear, Connor was no prude. She’d been born and raised on Atlantica, one of the free-floating seasteads riding the global currents outside of any territorial waters—places where naturism was pretty much a way of life. But the constant emphasis on sex
performances in bars catering to the military had been boring at first, annoying after a time. A few places like The Long Way Down focused on drinks, food, and high-altitude ambiance, pretty much in that order. She finished her own drink and, after a moment’s thought, ordered another.

  “So the question remains,” Martinez said. “Is the fucking war really over?”

  “Of course it is,” Dobbs said. “The Genie government’s fallen apart. Korosi is under arrest. The Starlighters are taking control. It’s over.”

  “It would be really nice to believe that,” Connor said quietly.

  “So what do we know about these new aliens?” Hathaway asked. “I know they’re at Crisium now. Can we talk to them yet?”

  “They’re working on it,” Martinez said with an expansive shrug. “It’s tough ’cause they talk by flashing at each other, y’know?” He wiggled his fingers in the air in demonstration. “At least their computers have translations for Bug.”

  “Yeah, the damned Bugs talk to everyone,” Lieutanant Jon “Messer” Schmitt said. “But remember that the Glothr were talking to someone in North India without Agletsch help. I find that very interesting.”

  “I’d be willing to bet that Intelligence is all over that right now,” Gregory said. “Maybe the Glothr are the new Sh’daar mouthpieces.”

  “What,” Hathaway said, “replacing the Aggies?”

  “Why not?” Connor said. “It kind of makes sense, too, given where the Glothr might be coming from. Or when . . .”

  “Hey, that’s right,” Gregory said. “You reported that their outbound course was lined up on the Beehive, didn’t you?” He looked at her with an intensity that might have been interest in the topic, but might also have been something else. Interest in her, possibly . . . ?

  Connor shook her head, but didn’t dismiss the thought outright.