Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5)

by Ian Douglas

  And there were the political issues as well. A sizeable fraction of the American population favored peace, both with the Confederation and with the Sh’daar. Not a majority, certainly . . . perhaps 40 percent, but enough to make trouble, to make themselves heard, maybe even to shake things up with a public renunciation of Koenig, his policies, and those close to him.

  If enough passed-over admirals or issue-hunting asshole politicians complained, there would be an investigation . . . and just possibly a call for the USNA Senate to do something about it—like institute impeachment proceedings. If anything happened to Koenig, his patron, Gray would be left twisting in the breeze. He would be lucky if they let him retire, and didn’t charge him with grave crimes and misdemeanors against the state just for being in Koenig’s good favor.

  Gray despised politics.

  Damn the man!

  “I don’t want the job, Laurie,” he said. He wanted to say more, wanted to explain . . . but he was just feeling too overwhelmed at the moment to put one word after another.

  “Well, it sounds like you’ve got it,” she told him. She came closer, slipped behind the desk, then sat on his lap, her arms encircling his neck. “You’ve got it, want it or not. And if anyone can pull success out of his ass against impossible odds, it’s going to be Sandy Gray.”

  They kissed. Gray wanted to argue, to tell her how foolish, how impossible the whole thing was . . . but there really wasn’t any point. Like she said, the job was his, want it or not. He supposed he could tell Koenig where to get off . . . but refusing a direct order from the president of the United States of North America would not exactly be a good career move.

  And Gray damned well wasn’t ready to retire from the Navy yet.

  Laurie broke the kiss, grinned mischievously, and wiggled her bottom against his lap. “Well! Feels like you’re not entirely ready to give up! You want to take me back to bed? Or do you want me right here?”

  As it happened, he chose both.

  Eventually.

  Chapter Twelve

  9 March 2425

  USNA CVS America

  Naval Dockyard, SupraQuito

  0825 hours, TFT

  Star carrier America pulled into the space dock at SupraQuito the next day, at the end of a largely uneventful run. Toward the end, there were reports of Confederation lurkers—lean, needle-slender ships with heavy stealth shielding and a couple of nuclear shipkillers on board. Like the submarines of warfare on and under Earth’s oceans centuries before, lurkers posed a serious threat, especially for ships coming into or leaving port.

  The Ramirez and the Young, however, fired salvos of high-yield nukes into the seemingly empty area of space where America’s scanner and deep space sensor operators had thought they’d detected an echo. If there’d been anything there, it never showed itself . . . and no nuclear fireballs blossomed among the incoming USNA ships.

  SupraQuito was a sprawling terminus at the synchorbital point on the Quito space elevator, almost 35,000 kilometers above the ice-clad top of Mt. Cayambe, in Ecuador. Since 2120, the space elevator had been Humankind’s key to space, providing swift and inexpensive access to geostationary orbit. SupraQuito now consisted of some hundreds of habitats, factories, and orbital structures, including several hotels, an enormous spaceport with docking facilities, a naval base, a long-obsolete solar power station that still provided electricity for the immense microgravity hydrophonics farms, and a permanent population of more than 150,000.

  Travel up and down the woven buckyfiber cable was by magnetically accelerated travel pods; a trip from synchorbit down to Earth still took hours, however, even with constant acceleration for the first half of the trip and deceleration for the rest. Gray elected to take America’s gig, which would get him to Toronto’s spaceport in just over an hour.

  He made the journey with his senior staff—Captain Gutierrez and Captain Fletcher, of course, as well as Commander Dean Mallory, heading up tactical-ops; Commander Roger Hadley, chief of Intelligence; Commander Harriman Vonnegut, the fleet logistics officer; and Dr. George Truitt, head of Xenosoph. Now that he was getting bumped up to four stars, he wondered if he would be getting a larger and fleet-dedicated staff. All five of the military personnel on the shuttle were wearing two hats at least, and all were part of America’s senior staff. Gutierrez was America’s skipper but served as Gray’s flag captain as well, and as his fleet exec. Mallory was head of America’s tactical department but was also filling in as fleet operations officer. In a similar vein, Hadley and Vonnegut both were department heads on board America, but had also stepped up to oversee Intelligence and Logistics for the entire battlegroup. It was a juggling act possible only with thanks to implant technology, in-head links, and massive AI, but it still meant a high-stress workload for all concerned.

  Gray had already made the decision that he was going to demand a full staff. If they were going to stick him with a full-admiral’s title and responsibilities, then by God, they could give him a decent staff as well. Gutierrez, Mallory, and the rest had been working their asses off since 36 Ophiuchi, and they damned well deserved a sane workload.

  Or, at the very least, one insane workload apiece, instead of two or more.

  The one civilian member of the flag team, Dr. Truitt, wore only a single hat. Even at that, it was damned tough getting any useful information out of the guy when he got into one of his grandstanding moods. Gray wondered if it might be possible to promote him out of the battlegroup—maybe send him with the captured Grdoch to Crisium, and promote someone else to take his place as director of XS.

  Hallowell, maybe.

  “Dr. Truitt,” Gray said. “Has your department made any progress with the prisoners?”

  “You mean a language breakthrough?” he growled. “No. Thanks to someone giving orders to open fire on them in their mess hall!”

  “I would have done the same,” Gutierrez put in. She visibly shuddered. “I’ve seen the vids.”

  “We’ve provisionally named the food animals Praedambestiari truitti . . . praedams for short,” Truitt went on in a conversational manner, ignoring her. “We performed a detailed hand-scanner examination of one of them . . . there are fifteen locked into separate compartments on board that ship.”

  Gray noted the man’s use of the word we . . . even though he’d been on board America the whole time, and not with Hallowell and other staff members on the alien ship.

  “I saw the report, Doctor,” Gray replied.

  “Yes, well, you know, the interesting thing about the praedams is that they have a massively distributed and non-centralized nervous system . . . several hundred neural nodes scattered throughout their bodies instead of a single brain. Your Marines, Admiral, would have had to stand there shooting at the thing all day before they actually killed it. A very bad call, I’m afraid.”

  “I screwed up, Dr. Truitt,” Gray said. He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “It happens.”

  “Ah . . . yes, well . . .”

  Gray’s simple admission appeared to have derailed the xenosophontologist. He didn’t know how to respond.

  “So we need to go on from here, and leave the recriminations to MILCOM. Do you agree?”

  “Yes, of course. As you say.”

  “Your report says that these praedams are most likely genengineered?”

  “Yes, Admiral. Clearly, the Grdoch have bred the praedams into a form that would not survive in the wild. Those three flippers, for instance: useless. They may have originally been a large marine creature on the Grdoch home planet—something like the extinct whales of Earth—but they have been bred to produce meat and fat—a lot of it, and very quickly. They also appear to heal quickly. It’s possible that the Grdoch can keep one alive for months while continuing to feed off of it every few days—”

  “God, Doctor,” Vonnegut said, “enough!” He looked like he was going to be
sick.

  “ ‘Nature red in tooth and claw,’ ” the xenosophontologist quoted with a shrug. “It’s not our place to judge the ways in which alien species have evolved, or their cultural mores.”

  “Keep working on the language problem, Doctor,” Gray told him. “The Confeds were talking with them, certainly.”

  “The Confeds must already have the translation software up and running,” Hadley pointed out. “That virtual raid on Geneva brought back a lot of hard intel. Maybe the Grdoch language is part of the package.”

  America’s intelligence department, Gray knew, had received its own reports from MILCOMINT since the Geneva raid. So far, though, USNA Intelligence hadn’t shared much of what they’d learned.

  The news that America and an allied fleet were to be deployed to Vulcan was still a closely guarded secret, apparently, and none of the others on board the shuttle knew about that. Speculation—and scuttlebutt—about America’s next deployment had been rife ever since she’d broken out of Enceladus orbit and departed Saturn space.

  The hyper-compartmentalization of military intelligence could be infuriating and, given the interpersonal connections of modern information systems and links, was more often than not an exercise in futility. If you could communicate with anyone on the planet with a thought, secrets became much harder to keep.

  But there were limits, boundaries often set by common sense. Keeping secrets from your own people so that an enemy didn’t know what you were going to do was one thing. Tying yourself up in knots keeping secrets from yourself was something else entirely.

  Hell, if his people weren’t fully briefed today, Gray thought, he was going to brief them himself. They deserved to know.

  As the others continued to discuss the Grdoch and what might be learned from them, Gray leaned back in his cabin seat, closed his eyes, and opened the download on Vulcan, the battlegroup’s next destination.

  Planetary Data Download

  Vulcan

  PLANET: 40 Eridani A II

  NAME: Vulcan

  COORDINATES: RA 04h 15m 16.32s, Dec -07o 39’ 10.34”, distance 16.45 ly

  TYPE: Terrestrial/rocky; oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere

  MEAN ORBITAL RADIUS: 0.68 AU; ORBITAL PERIOD: 223d 2h 07m

  Inclination: 04.1o 15’ 10.1”; Rotational period: 25h 17m 15s

  MASS: 1.05 Earth; EQUATORIAL DIAMETER: 12,883 km = 1.001 Earth

  MEAN PLANETARY DENSITY: 5.63 g/cc = 1.02 Earth

  SURFACE GRAVITY: 1.0 G; ESCAPE VELOCITY: 11.2 km/sec

  HYDROSPHERE PERCENTAGE: 47.4%; CLOUD COVER: 30%; ALBEDO: 0.39

  SURFACE TEMPERATURE RANGE: ~-10o C — 40o C.

  SURFACE ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE: ~900 millibars = 0.89 atmospheres

  PERCENTAGE COMPOSITION: N2 81.8; O2 18.1; Ar 0.2; SO2 < 300 ppm; CO2 < 300 ppm; others < 200 ppm

  AGE: 5.6 billion years

  BIOLOGY: C, N, O, H, S, H2O, PO4; Mobile Heterotrophs, photosynthetic autotrophs. Dextrose, levo-amino acids, terrestrial biochemistry.

  COLONIAL HISTORY: Among the earliest truly earthlike worlds to be discovered, the Keid Colonial Administration was established in 2270 under auspices of the Confederation Xenoplanetological Directorate. In 2275, the world was opened to full colonization by WeiteWelt, a joint Germano-Argentinean cooperative. Colony cities were established along the west coast of Neubavaria and Las Pampas, the two principal continents, and by 2420, the population totaled more than 80 million. . . .

  Vulcan was that rarest of jewels, a genuinely Earthlike world, a near twin of Earth right down to the breathable atmosphere and essentially terrestrial biochemistry. Oceans of liquid water shone gold and purple beneath the K1-type star, which, though smaller than Sol, appeared twenty percent larger in Vulcan’s sky than the Sun did from Earth. The other two members of the triple star system, B and C, gleamed in the sky as a pair of bright stars, one ember red, one white and diamond brilliant, some 400 astronomical units away. The main star of the trio was visible from Earth to the naked eye. The Arabs had named it Keid, from their word qayd, which had the unlikely meaning of “the broken eggshells,” but that ancient name was rarely used now. The star was also known as o2 Eridani.

  Gray found the origin of the planet’s popular name amusing. Vulcan, of course, originally had been the Roman form of the Greek god Hephaestus, the god of the forge, his name the root of the word volcano. For a time, during the nineteenth century, astronomers had been convinced that a planet orbited Sol inside the orbit of Mercury, and given the name to that world. Eventually, of course, the oddities in Mercury’s orbit blamed on the gravitational effects of an inner planet turned out to be perturbations better explained by Einstein and relativity, and Vulcan had been relegated once again to mythology.

  In the middle of the twentieth century, however, the name was revived in a popular science fiction drama broadcast over the two-D entertainment systems of the day, with one of the program’s characters being an alien from that world. The writer of some of the print media supporting the broadcast program had suggested the nearby star 40 Eridani as Vulcan’s sun, and the show’s creator had agreed. Vulcan as a habitable world orbiting 40 Eridani had become canon.

  Telescopic evidence in the early twenty-first century had suggested that there in fact were several planets orbiting the star; when a robotic probe in the 2120s revealed a desert world with water oceans and a breathable atmosphere, John Piccard, a virtual actor who specialized in historical dramas and who knew about the old science fiction program, had jokingly suggested Vulcan as the world’s name.

  Joke or not, the name had stuck.

  The real-world Vulcan was not, as it turned out, home to a humanoid race of xenosophs with a penchant for remarkably human logic. Over a billion years older than Earth, Vulcan had evolved its own ecosystem while Sol was still forming its planets. There were tantalizing hints that intelligence had evolved on Vulcan eons ago when the planet was largely covered by oceans, but apparently, like many marine species throughout the galaxy, that culture had never developed fire or a technic civilization. Vulcan was in its long twilight now, its oceans shrinking and becoming steadily more salty, the interiors of its two vast supercontinents turning to desert, its ecology well adapted to current conditions but fighting a steadily losing battle as the planet slowly died.

  There was something else about Vulcan that made it a rarity. The local ecology was biochemically similar to Earth’s. Specifically, it had evolved right-handed sugars and left-handed amino acids.

  Sugars and amino acids each could occur in either “left-” or “right-handed” versions, a reference to the way the atoms of the molecules fit together. A mirror image of a given molecule was called its isomer.

  There was no guarantee that a world would evolve sugars and amino acids; across billions of worlds there were so many options, so many alternatives. But when it did, there was only a one-in-four chance that the result would include both dextro-sugars and levo-amino acids. Any other combination, and the local biochemistry would be incompatible with that of human colonists. Vulcan had proved to be one of those rare planets where humans could actually eat the local flora and fauna and derive nutrition from it. On other worlds colonized by Humankind, food was either modified or created from scratch in large nanufactories. Without them, humans would starve to death even if they were surrounded by organic bounty; human chemistries simply couldn’t derive nourishment from dextro-aminos or levo-sugars.

  The Keid Colonial Administration had been created in the late 2200s with the expectation that Vulcan might become a major exporter of food back to Earth. The full impact of the nanotech revolution, however, and the collapse of Earth’s economic systems as a result, was only just being realized at that time. When nanagriculture could conjure unlimited supplies of food from the raw materials in carbonaceous chondrites—a type of asteroid rich in carbon, water, and the various elements of biochemistry—there was no
need to grow crops on distant worlds and ship them back to Earth. With Earth in economic chaos, Vulcan had become an independent state, still a part of the Confederation, but only nominally tied to either Germany or Argentina.

  But now something had happened out there, something unexpected. An alien ship had arrived and a deal of some kind had been struck. It was vital that the USNA learn exactly what that agreement had entailed.

  The shuttle began shuddering as it plunged into the atmosphere, and Gray felt the sharp tug of deceleration. Through the shuttle’s viewalls, the swiftly expanding planet beneath them had swelled from a globe to a curving horizon, brilliant with sunlight and the swirl of clouds. Their voyage was nearly complete.

  He did hope that there were some answers waiting for them when they reached the ground.

  Emergency Presidential Command Post

  Toronto

  United States of North America

  0910 hours, EST

  “Mr. President,” Whitney said. “The morning PICKL just came through.”

  “Very well.”

  Koenig finished with what he’d been working on—a speech to be delivered virtually to Congress in another two days. A vitally important speech, calling for national unity in the face of both the war with the Confederation and the ongoing fight with the Sh’daar. He hated the need for politics . . . for nudging the opposition along, cajoling them into his camp, instead of simply giving the appropriate orders.

  He missed the Navy. Things had been so much simpler then.

  Okay, he was ready. Koenig checked the time. The President’s Intelligence ChecK-List was supposed to be ready for download first thing in the morning, 0730 at the latest. When it was late, as today, it generally meant there was some important, last-minute intel tucked into the thing. What the devil are they going to throw at me today? he wondered.

  He leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and opened the inner datastream channels with his personal code. Information flooded his brain, taking the form of a particularly vivid and detailed memory . . . a memory that hadn’t been there before.