Star Strike

by Ian Douglas

  Alexander allowed himself a mental grin at the memory of an old joke. Perhaps it wasn’t an indicator of intelligent life, given the nature of much of the entertainment content of that bubble. Still, anyone with the appropriate technological know-how could hear that babble of noise, and know that technic civilization was responsible.

  And The Singer had broadcast something to the stars back in 2067 when it was freed from its icy tomb. No, there was no way Humanity could keep its existence secret much longer.

  And how was Humankind to survive in a contest against a technology half a million years more advanced?

  It was a problem the Marine Corps had been struggling to resolve since the twenty-first century. So far, for the most part, they’d been able to fight isolated and tightly controlled battles, applying tactics that emphasized Marine strengths while sidestepping Xul technology. As commanding officer of the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, Alexander was responsible for keeping on top of the Xul threat, and keeping the Commonwealth government informed of any changes in the situation.

  And the situation certainly had changed now, with the taking of the Argo.

  “General?” Cara said, interrupting increasingly grim thoughts. “Will you want your full filters for the meeting?”

  “Eh? What was that?”

  “Your e-comm filters, sir. The delegates will begin linking in before too long. How do you want to be dressed?”

  He grimaced. Personal filters were an important part of modern electronic communications. Within a noumenal setting—literally inside the participants’ heads—your personal icon could take on any appearance desired, anything within the programming range of the AIs giving the encounter substance. Filters allowed the image projected into the group mind’s virtual space to be of your own choosing, with apparent dress, body language, even inflection of voice under your control.

  He didn’t like it, though. He never had. Though e-filters had been around for centuries, a necessary outgrowth of noumenal projection, they still seemed…dishonest, somehow, a kind of social white lie.

  “You can’t,” Cara told him, a disapproving tone to her words, “receive the Defense Advisory Council like that.”

  Mentally, he looked down at himself. As usual, he was projecting his real-world appearance into the galactic imagery…which, at the moment, was of a lean, middle-aged man with graying hair and a dour expression. He was also naked.

  Causal nudity was perfectly acceptable within most modern social situations, but Cara was right. This was not the proper appearance to put before twenty-four of the more powerful and important of the arbiters of Commonwealth government policy.

  “What do you suggest?” he asked her.

  “Something,” she said, “more like this.” She gave his sim an electronic tweak, and his body morphed into something leaner, tauter, and with more presence, and wearing Marine full dress, his upper left chest ablaze in luminous decorations and campaign holos. The brilliant gold Terran Sunburst, awarded for his role at the Battle of Grellsinore as a very raw lieutenant, was emblazoned on his right breast. His head and shoulders were encased within a lambent corona flammae, another social convention granted to officially designated Heroes of the Commonwealth.

  “I think we can lose the decorations,” he said. He gave a commanding thought, and the medals vanished. His uniform dwindled a bit into plain dress blacks. “And the damned light show.” The corona faded away.

  “With respect, sir,” Cara told him, “you need the bric-abrac. The council’s chairperson is Marie Devereaux. She is impressed by proper formal presentation, and you will need to enlist her support for your plan.”

  He sighed. “Okay. Medals, yes. But not that damned glow. Makes me look like an ancient religious icon, complete with halo.”

  “The corona flammae is part of your sanctioned uniform, sir. For your service at and after the twenty-third Chinese War. And the delegation members will have their own.”

  “Fucking trappings of power. I hate this.”

  “Indeed, sir,” Cara said as the light came back on…but a trifle subdued, this time. “But how many times have you lectured me on the need to blend in with the local social environment? To do otherwise will elicit disapproval, and might well send conflicting signals or, worse, could alienate your audience.”

  Alexander looked sharply at Cara’s icon—which was presenting itself, as usual, as an attractive, dark-haired woman of indeterminate years wearing a Marine undress uniform. It was tough at times to remember that “Cara” was, in fact, an electronic artifice, an AI serving as his personal military aide and electronic office manager. A resident of the noumenon and virtual workplaces, she had no physical reality at all.

  “Okay, boss,” he said at last. “Light me. But no parade or fireworks, okay? Even heroes of the Commonwealth should be granted a little dignity.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, sir,” she told him. “But no promises!”

  And then, with Cara serving as gatekeeper and announcer, the first of the council delegates began linking in.

  5

  0507.1102

  USMC Skybase

  Paraspace

  1005 hrs GMT

  It was, Alexander decided, a bit like being in an enormous fish tank. The delegates of the Defense Advisory Council appeared in the simulation as small and relatively unobtrusive icons, until one or another spoke. At that point, the icon unfolded into what appeared to be a life-sized image, standing on emptiness and aglow with its own corona. With a swarm of golden icons surrounding him, together with a larger swarm of smaller, dimmer icons representing the group’s cloud of digital secretaries and personal electronic assistants, he felt as though he were a large and somewhat clumsy whale immersed within a school of fish.

  There was also the feeling that the entire school was studying him intently, and not a little critically. They included, Cara had reminded him, eight delegates from the Commonwealth Senate, ten senior military officers from the Bureaus of Defense, five members of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Group, and Marie Devereaux, the President’s personal advisor and representative.

  Alexander shrugged off the feeling, and continued with his presentation. They were adrift in an absolute blackness relieved only by a fuzzy circle of light surrounding them all, a ring dividing the darkness into two unequal parts. Within the smaller part, the ring shaded into blue, the leading edge. The trailing edge shaded into red.

  This was how space had looked from the point of view of Perseus, the AI commanding the colony asteroid ship Argo during her flight across the Galaxy. The luminous ring was the bizarre and beautiful relativistic compression of space as seen at near-c velocities, a three-dimensional panorama overlaid here and there by the flickering alphanumerics of Perseus’s functional displays.

  “We don’t have a lot to go on,” Alexander was telling the watching delegates. “From the time the Xul ship materialized alongside the Argo, to the moment of Argo’s destruction, less than five seconds elapsed. The AI in command of the vessel was in time-extended mode. He did not have time to fully react.”

  Artificial sentients like Perseus were designed to control their own subjective passage of time. For machine intelligences that could note the passage of millionths of a second, the passage of a truly long period of relative inactivity—such as the subjective decades necessary for interstellar flight—could literally drive the AI insane. That, it was believed, was what had happened to The Singer, the Xul huntership trapped for half a million years beneath the ice of the Europan ocean.

  Perseus had been experiencing time at roughly a thousand to one—meaning that a year was the same as roughly nine hours for a human. At that setting, though, those four and a half seconds after the appearance of the Xul ship had been the human equivalent of 4.5 thousandths of a second; it was amazing that Perseus had managed to do as much as he had.

  In Alexander’s mind, and in the minds of the watching delegates, those last seconds played out in slow motion.r />
  “As you see,” Alexander continued, indicating one of the numeric readouts, “the time scale has been altered so that we can experience the encounter at a ratio of about ten to one…four seconds becomes forty. Perseus would have been perceiving this about one hundred times more slowly.”

  Abruptly, a shadow appeared against the eldritch starlight. One moment there was nothing; the next, it was there, immense against the luminous ring. With its velocity matched perfectly to that of Argo, the Xul huntership appeared undistorted, a convolute and complex mountain of curves, swellings, angles, spires, and sheer mass, the whole only slightly less black than the empty space ahead and behind, forbidding and sinister.

  In fact, Alexander reminded himself, the Intruder was somewhat smaller than the Argo—perhaps 2 kilometers long and one wide, according to the data now appearing on the display, where the Argo was a potato-shaped rock over 8 kilometers thick along its long axis. But most of Argo was dead rock. The totality of her living and engineering areas, command and defense centers, storage tanks, and drive systems occupied something like three percent of the asteroid’s total bulk. The asteroid-shell of the Argo itself was invisible in the data simulation. Without the asteroid as a reference, the Intruder, slowly drifting closer, felt enormous.

  “That looks nothing like the Intruder,” Senator Dav Gannel said. “The ship that attacked Earth…and the hunterships we encountered at the Sirius Stargate, they were shaped like huge needles. That thing is…I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s a lot fatter, more egg-shaped. How do we know it’s Xul?”

  Alexander didn’t answer. The slow-motion seconds dragged by as the monster drew closer, until it blotted out a quarter of the light ring. The flickering alphanumerics indicated that Perseus was aware of the threat, and attempting to open a communications channel.

  “They’re not responding,” another Council delegate said. “Of course they might not understand Anglic.”

  “English, Senator,” Alexander said. “When Argo was launched, the principal language of trade and government was English. Perseus is signaling on several million channels, using microwave, infrared, and optical laser wavelengths. Remember, we’ve at least partially interfaced with a number of Xul vessels, and we were able to study The Singer, the one we recovered on Europa eight centuries ago. We know the frequencies they use, and some of their linguistic conventions. You can be sure the Intruder hears, and it understands enough to know Argo is trying to communicate. It’s just not listening.”

  “Shouldn’t the Argo be trying to get away?” Devereaux asked.

  “Madam Devereaux, the Argo is traveling at within a tenth of a percent of the speed of light. At that velocity, it would take a staggering amount of additional power to increase speed by even one kilometer per hour. She could decelerate or try moving laterally, adding a new vector to her current course and speed, but that means rotating the entire asteroid, and that would take time. And…the Intruder clearly possesses some type of faster-than-light drive, to have been able to overtake Argo so easily. No, Madam Chairman, there’s not a whole lot Perseus can do right now but try to talk.”

  “Does she have any weapons at all?”

  “A few. Beam weapons, for the most part, designed to reduce stray rocks and bits of debris in her path to charged plasmas that can be swept aside by the vessel’s protective mag fields. But if any of you have seen the recordings of the defense of Earth in 2314, you know that huntership shrugged off that kind of weaponry without giving it a thought. It took whole batteries of deep-space anti-asteroid laser cannons just to damage the Intruder, plus a Marine combat boarding party to go in and destroy it from the inside.”

  “At the Battle of Sirius Gate,” General Regin Samuels pointed out, “the Earth forces used the thrusters from their capital ships as huge plasma cannons. What if—”

  “No,” Alexander said. “Argo is employing a magnetic field drive we picked up from the N’mah, not plasma thrusters.” He didn’t add the obvious—that this wasn’t a problem-solving exercise, damn it, and it wasn’t happening in real time. What was revealed by this data sim had already happened.

  The government delegates, he reflected, were a little too used to, and perhaps a little too reliant on, instantaneous communications.

  There was no indication that the alien vessel even heard Perseus’ communications attempts. One point seven three seconds after the Intruder appeared, large portions of the AI’s circuitry began to fail—or, rather, it appeared to begin working for another system, as though it had been massively compromised by a computer virus.

  “At this point,” Alexander explained, “the Argo is being penetrated by the alien’s computer network. It is very fast, and apparently evolving microsecond to microsecond, adapting in order to mesh with Perseus’s operating system. The pattern is identical to that employed by Xul hunterships in other engagements.”

  It was as though the alien virus could trace the layout of Perseus’ myriad circuits, memory fields, and get a feel for the programs running there, to sense the overall pattern of the operating system before beginning to change it.

  Beams and missiles stabbed out from the Argo, focusing on a relatively small region within the huge Intruder’s midship area. So far as those watching could tell, the result was exactly zero. Beams and missiles alike seemed to vanish into that monster structure without visible effect.

  More alphanumerics appeared, detailing massive failures in the Argo’s cybe-hibe capsules. The Intruder was now infecting the colony ship’s sleeping passengers by way of their cybernetic interfaces.

  “We’re not sure yet how the Xul manage this trick,” Alexander went on, “but we’ve seen them do it before. The first time was with an explorer vessel, Wings of Isis, at the Sirius Stargate in 2148. It apparently patterns or replicates human minds and memories, storing them as computer data. We believe the Xul are able to utilize this data to create patterned humans as virtual sentients or sims.”

  Three point one seconds after the attack had begun, Perseus realized that all of its electronic barriers and defenses were failing, that electronic agents spawned by the Intruder’s operating system were spilling in over, around, and through every firewall and defensive program Perseus could bring into play. Perseus immediately released a highly compressed burst of data—a complete record of everything stored thus far—through Argo’s QCC, the FTL Quantum-Coupled Comm system that kept Argo in real-time contact with Earth.

  Abruptly, the record froze, the alphanumeric columns and data blocks halted in mid-flicker.

  “Four point zero one seconds,” Alexander said. “At this point, Perseus flashed the recording of Argo’s log back to Earth.”

  “But…but everyone has been assuming that the Argo was destroyed,” Senator Kalin said, a mental sputter. “We don’t know that. They could still all be alive….”

  “Unlikely, Senator,” Alexander replied dryly. “First of all, of course, there’s been no further contact with the Argo during the past three days. There is also this….”

  Mentally, he highlighted one data block set off by itself—an indication of Argo’s physical status. Two lines in particular stood out—velocity and temperature. The asteroid starship’s velocity had abruptly plummeted by nearly point one c, and its temperature had risen inexplicably by some 1,500 degrees.

  “When Perseus sent off the burst transmission, these two indicators had begun changing during the previous one one-thousandth of a second. We’re not sure, but what the physicists who’ve studied this believe is happening is that Argo’s forward velocity was somehow being directly transformed into kinetic energy. A very great deal of kinetic energy. And liberated as heat. A very great deal of heat.”

  “These data show Argo is still completely intact,” Marie Devereaux noted. She sounded puzzled. “Senator Kalin is right. That doesn’t prove that the Argo was destroyed.”

  “Look here, and here,” Alexander said, indicating two other inset data blocks. “The temperature increase is still
confined to a relatively small area—a few hundred meters across, it looks like…but the temperature there in that one spot has risen 1,500 degrees Kelvin in less than a thousandth of a second. The physics people think the Xul simply stopped the Argo in mid-flight—and released all of that kinetic energy, the energy of a multi-billion-ton asteroid moving at near-c, as heat in one brief, intense blast. Believe me, Senator. That much energy all liberated at once would have turned the Argo into something resembling a pocketsized supernova.”

  “But why?” Kalin wanted to know.

  “Evidently because the Xul had copied all of the data they felt they needed. They’re not known, remember, for taking physical prisoners.”

  There was evidence enough, though, of their having uploaded human personalities and memories, however, and using those as subjects for extended interrogation. He’d seen some of the records taken from a Xul huntership, of what had happened to the crew of the Wings of Isis in 2148. He suppressed a cold shudder.

  “If it’s the Xul,” Devereaux added.

  He hesitated, wondering how forceful to make his response. It was vital, vital that these people understand. “Madam Chairperson, Senator Gannel asked a while ago how we could know that Argo was destroyed by a Xul huntership. The answer is we don’t.” He indicated the vast, convoluted ovoid hovering close by Argo in the frozen noumenal projection. “It’s not as though they’ve hung banners out announcing their identity. But I’ll tell you this. If that vessel is not Xul, then it’s being operated by someone just as smart, just as powerful, just as technologically advanced, and just as xenophobic as the Xul. If they’re not Xul, they’ll do until the real thing comes along, wouldn’t you say?”

  “If it’s Xul,” Devereaux continued, “how much does this…incident hurt us?”

  He sighed. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Fifty thousand twenty-fourth century politicians, plutocrats, bureaucrats, specialists, and technicians. How much damage could they do?”