by Ian Douglas
Of one thing he was still certain: simply surrendering to the Sh’daar was not an option. This was especially true now there were two new players on the galactic stage—the Rosette Aliens, enigmatic and transcendently powerful; and the Grdoch. There didn’t appear to be any way to communicate with the Rosette Aliens—not yet—but the Grdoch were another matter.
A new carrier task force formed around the America might tell them what they needed to know.
And there was also the new information to add to the mix: the small supernova planted in the morning’s intelligence checklist.
“Mr. President,” Whitney said in his head, “the naval officers are on their way up.”
“Thank you, Marcus. I’ll be with the others.”
He opened a door in one wall with a thought, and walked into the main briefing room . . . a large, open area with transparent walls and an enormous conference table. The room gave an overwhelming sense of open space—so much better than that damned closet situation room down in the subbasement. A couple of dozen men and women at the table stood as he entered: Eskow, McFarlane, and Admiral Armitage were present physically, along with members of their staffs. Others—Caldwell, Vandenberg, Sharpe, Lee, and Delmonico—were virtually present, linked in through the Jefferson Building’s AI and appearing at the table by means of holographic projectors in the ceiling. One of the physical attendees was the single nonhuman in the room: Gru’mulkisch, her Sh’daar Seed carefully screened and blocked. A special seat had been arranged for her, a kind of slanted, narrow, padded shelf on which she was resting, belly-down.
Another person present physically was Congressperson Julie Valcourt, a Canadian, and the Speaker of the House. She would bear watching today . . . though Koenig had issued her a personal invitation to the briefing. Unfortunately, he needed her.
“Sit down, sit down,” Koenig said as he strode across the highly polished floor and took a seat at the head of the table. “They’re on their way up.”
“About damned time,” Armitage grumbled.
Koenig grinned at him. “They did have the farthest to travel to get here, General.”
“They could have telecommuted,” the slightly translucent image of Pamela Sharpe said. “Like some of the rest of us.”
“Not advisable, Pamela,” Delmonico’s projection said. She shot a hard look at the Agletsch. “Not with down links that might be . . . compromised.”
A number of the physical locations and bases now used by the USNA had started off as Confederation assets, and were therefore, of course, suspect. Complete cybersecurity was difficult under the best of conditions; it was damned near impossible if the other side had ever had access to a location’s infrastructure to the point where they might have built devices into the physical structure that gave access to local nets. Electronic devices nearly microscopic in size could penetrate computer networks, plant viruses, or open wide the same sort of back door that had admitted the Luther squadron. Not even quantum encryption could safeguard computer communications if the hardware at both ends had been compromised. AI software known as QC, or quantum crackers, could ferret out clues that could let outsiders listen in on almost anything.
For that reason, top-secret communications were not held over channels within structures built or once maintained by the Confederation. The space elevator and the naval bases up at Geosynch were a case in point. Though primarily funded and built by the United States of North America, those facilities had been used by the Confederation for centuries, and there might easily be QC software residing in the most innocuous of hiding places.
“I wonder if it might not be too late to worry about that,” Lawrence Vandenberg said. He, too, was staring at the small Agletsch at the table. “Mr. President, I still think it was a mistake to include . . . outsiders in this meeting.”
There was, of course, a high degree of suspicion among those present aimed at aliens carrying Sh’daar Seeds, aliens like Gru’mulkisch. In theory, with the block squirreled away inside her translator, she couldn’t even attempt to release a network-penetrating virus into the local network without the deed being detected . . . but no one in the room could be 100 percent assured that the Sh’daar didn’t have a technological wrinkle or three up their collective and nonexistent sleeves that humans didn’t know about and couldn’t detect.
“It’s perfectly safe, Mr. Secretary,” Neil Eskow said. “I promise you.”
“If we’ve learned one thing during this conflict,” Koenig said, “it’s that the Sh’daar are not gods. I assume we have no congregationists of the AAC present?”
A polite chuckle rose around the table, and Koenig felt a tiny stab of guilt. The White Covenant prohibited not only proselytizing, but also publically making fun of the religious beliefs of others.
“If there are stargods out there, Mr. President,” Speaker Valcourt said, “it’s all the more reason to end this futile war.”
“I honestly don’t follow you, there, Madam Speaker,” Koenig told her. “The Sh’daar make mistakes. We’ve found how to nullify certain of the technologies they employ. If there actually are godlike beings out there in the galaxy, I submit that the Rosette Aliens are far better candidates. No matter what the AAC says.”
There were a number of Ancient Alien Creationists in the fleet. Some—a few, but certainly not all—believed that the Sh’daar were the Stargods of the remote past, super-powerful beings who’d engineered the human species millions of years ago, or mingled with humans and accepted their worship back at the dawn of history. Most of them were in favor of Humankind accepting the Sh’daar Ultimatum and joining their galactic collective. Probably the only reason they didn’t make more of a protest against the war was the fact of the White Covenant.
Koenig was perfectly willing to believe that some episodes lost in the darkness of human prehistory had been caused by alien visitors. The human genome showed subtle signs of tampering—and an otherwise inexplicable and sudden increase in brain size between Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens. And there was a handful of ruins that suggested at least the possibility that Someone Else had been there once, been there and gone: vast stone cities on the seafloor off Japan and Mexico and India that had not been above water since the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago; or dry-land sites like Puma Punku and the Nazca plains that simply could not be shoehorned into the acceptable outline of history . . . maybe . . .
But for the most part, so far as Koenig was concerned, AAC theories denied the self-evident facts of human creativity, engineering cleverness, and outright genius, and for that reason alone were unconvincing.
And none of that changed Koenig’s conviction that whoever those hypothetical alien gods might have been, they were not the Sh’daar. The Sh’daar Collective’s sole interest in other species appeared to be connected with their technology, advanced technology like nanotech and robotics, and not the more basic discoveries like flint-knapping or fire. The multi-specific trauma of the technological singularity suffered by the ancient ur-Sh’daar had left the survivors—the modern Sh’daar—with what amounted to an obsession: detecting civilizations throughout the galaxy that might be approaching their own singularities, and either redirecting them into safer pastimes or obliterating them, as they had the Chelk twelve thousand years ago.
It was distinctly possible that the Sh’daar saw themselves as Galactic benefactors promoting the public good.
But at the same time, their efforts tended to be scattered and often seemed downright ineffectual. Earth had endured attacks by two Sh’daar species at two different times—the Turusch and the H’rulka—while other species—the Slan and the Nungiirtok—had attacked human colonies and research stations on the worlds of other stars. The fact that those attacks had been less than successful suggested either that the collective was deliberately employing a strategy designed to put pressure on Humankind without destroying it . . . or that the collective was less than pe
rfectly coordinated, that its member species were poorly led and inefficiently deployed.
Koenig strongly believed the latter of the two. Waging something as dangerous and as expensive as a war demanded a commitment to total war . . . to victory rather than stumbling half measures or political statements.
A number of the men and women in this room, Koenig knew, were not convinced of this. Julie Valcourt, an outspoken member of the Global Union Party, was one—utterly committed to peace at any price. The hell of it was, Koenig agreed with much of what the Globalists said.
The Sh’daar Collective, by some conservative estimates, controlled a third, perhaps even a full half of the galaxy, and might number some millions of intelligent species and all of their teeming resources. If an empire with such overwhelming numbers had not swatted Earth like a bothersome insect in the fifty-eight years since the Sh’daar Ultimatum, they argued, it could only be because the Sh’daar puppet masters had wanted humanity to survive.
With an ideology like that, the only reasonable response was surrender—as the Confederation government and the North American Globalists both demanded—before the Sh’daar lost patience and did swat humanity into extinction.
For the moment, a majority of North America’s voting population appeared to agree with Koenig, but Koenig knew that this state of affairs was strictly temporary and subject to unexpected and largely unpredictable swings in the public mood. The war with the Sh’daar had been a long one, but except for the Turusch and H’rulka attacks twenty years ago, most humans other than those in the armed forces hadn’t been impacted much, or even inconvenienced. The ragged state of semi-peace that had existed since Koenig had forced the Sh’daar to agree to a truce two decades ago in the N’gai Cloud of Omega T-0.876gy had actually convinced most people that the threat from the Collective was nonexistent—or, at least, not all that serious. That state of affairs could change very quickly if another Sh’daar client species made it through Sol’s defenses and slammed Earth with another high-velocity impactor.
And then—waiting in the wings—there was always Julie Valcourt and her Global Union Party, looking for any opportunity to embarrass Koenig and the American Freedom party.
Koenig looked at Phillip Caldwell, the director of the National Security Council. Sitting next to him was Thomas McFarlane, the director of Central Intelligence. McFarlane, Koenig thought, looked nervous and ill at ease. Generally, presidential intelligence briefings were handled by the DSC. Koenig wondered why Caldwell had dragged him along.
“While we’re waiting,” Koenig said, “perhaps you gentlemen would care to fill us in on the planetbuster you dropped in the morning’s PICKL.”
McFarlane looked, if anything, even more uncomfortable. “Mr. President, I must stress that none of this has been confirmed as yet. The data are still . . . quite raw.”
“That’s okay, Mr. McFarlane. If true, your raw data will have a tremendous effect on the war. The sooner we start looking at it . . . working with it, the better.”
“Yes, sir. Well . . . as most of you know, we planted more inside the Confederation’s electronic networks than the Starlight Worm. There were the generic antinetwork viruses designed to convince Geneva that that was the point of the attack. As expected, their ICE and other electronic defenses blocked us from doing any major damage.
“But another subset of the offensive was a set of hackworms designed to give us information channels into the entire Pan-Europaan data net. Since our cyber attack four days ago, Konstantin has been eavesdropping on the Confederation with considerable success.”
“That,” Delmonico said, interrupting, “is an understatement. We’re reading quantum-encrypted stuff over there now almost as though it’s in the clear. Even if the religion thing doesn’t pan out, this could win the war for us! At least the human part. . . .”
Koenig shot the director of Cybersecurity a hard glance, a gentle warning that she was out of line. “Go on, Mr. McFarlane.”
“This came through at oh nine thirty hours, GMT,” McFarlane said, opening a new window in the group’s virtual workspace. “That was at about oh four thirty our time. Konstantin sent it through to Central Intelligence as soon as the data came through.”
The message started off with versions in both French and German, then repeated in English. An AI voice accompanied the text, which scrolled through Koenig’s inner window.
Lasercom message received via unmanned interstellar message drone,
Type Hermes Mark VII
0127 GMT 09 Mar 2425
Message begins:
Urgent Urgent Urgent
Grdoch elements have attacked civilian population of Vulcan in second incident. Aliens must now be presumed hostile. Motives unknown, but may be related to USNA attack on Enceladus.
[SIGNED] PEILLON, Amiral d’ Flotte
Message ends
“The message,” McFarlane continued, “was being sent from Confederation Fleet Headquarters outside Geneva to Denoix’s private Geneva residence.”
“It says this is a second attack,” Valcourt observed. “What was the first?”
“We don’t have a good time line yet, Madam Speaker,” Caldwell told her, “but two of the files we managed to download during Operation Luther were labeled ‘The Massacre,’ and ‘The Report of Governor Delgado of Vulcan.’ We’re still studying both documents, of course, but apparently Confederation contact with the Grdoch started off with a particularly nasty and evidently unprovoked attack on the Vulcan colonies. Commodore Becker, commanding the Confederation Fleet at Vulcan, seems to have established a truce with the Grdoch.”
“A massacre?” Valcourt asked. “What kind of massacre?”
“We have no details. All we know are that several thousand colonists from the Argentinean side of the fence were either killed or captured and are now presumed dead. Becker reported destroying one of three Grdoch ships. After that, they began talking, negotiating . . . and some sort of peace treaty or truce was put together.”
“We can assume,” Koenig added, “that communications between humans and the Grdoch are still less than perfect. The alliance was fragile enough that things seem to have broken down since the Battle of Enceladus. Maybe the Grdoch think Confed forces attacked their ship there.”
“This might give us our chance to ally with the Grdoch,” Secretary Comb said. “We need allies in this business.”
“Maybe,” Vandenberg said. “Or maybe the Grdoch are so alien they don’t understand the idea of a civil war . . . that humans might be divided among themselves. It’s a possibility.”
“Do we have any idea where the Grdoch come from yet?” Koenig asked. “They’re obviously not native to Vulcan.”
“Of course not, Mr. President,” Eskow said. “There doesn’t seem to be any galactic record of these beings. Gru’mulkisch? Do the Agletsch know anything about them?”
“I regret no, Mr. Secretary, Mr. President,” the Agletsch representative replied. “They do not appear to be part of the Masters’ Collective, and we have no data on them. But the galaxy is excessively vast, yes-no?”
“Yes,” Koenig said. “Yes, to be sure.”
Even the Sh’daar didn’t know, couldn’t know, every technic civilization among the hundreds of billions of worlds scattered through the galaxy. In a way, that was comforting. The Sh’daar had limits . . . and they couldn’t know everything.
“That begs an interesting question, though,” Eskow pointed out. “Based on reports from the Battle of Enceladus, we estimate that the Grdoch are within a century or two of us in terms of advanced tehcnology. That puts us smack up against the Limited Tech paradox again.”
Koenig nodded, thoughtful. He’d already been wondering about that. “It doesn’t seem reasonable that the Grdoch are so close to us in technological levels.”
“Exactly,” Eskow replied. “If the Grdoch were part of the Sh’daar Co
llective, it would all be part of the same picture. But they’re not. And that’s a bit of a conundrum.”
The universe was 13.7 billion years old. Xenosophontologists generally assumed that the first technological civilizations within the galaxy could not have appeared before, say, 8 billion years ago. While it was possible that intelligent species had arisen earlier—life forms based on organized plasmas within the atmospheres of stars, for instance—civilizations comprehensible to humans—with fire, metallurgy, and spacecraft—could only evolve on the surfaces of rocky planets. Rocky, terrestrial-type planets, in turn, could only form around stars with a high degree of metalicity—that meant, in astronomical terms, they possessed elements heavier than hydrogen and helium—and that meant second- and third-generation stars born after the deaths of the galaxy’s first generation of stars. It was those early dying stars that had cooked heavier elements like carbon and oxygen from the primordial hydrogen and helium—everything on the periodic table up through iron, in fact—and exploding supernovae that had created everything heavier. Even life forms arising in the atmospheres of gas giants, like the enormous, free-floating H’rulka, needed elements like carbon, silicon, phosphorous, and iron to give them form and to run their biologies.
So . . . the first intelligent life, the xenosophontologists believed, must have appeared within the galaxy around 4 to 5 billion years ago—or at just about the same time that Sol and Earth were forming out of the dust and gas of their primordial stellar nursery. Four billion years ago, the first starships might have begun exploring the young galaxy, and the first alien colonies were appearing on countless worlds.