by Ian Douglas
Damn . . . so much blood . . .
Valdez and Courtland were met by three more Marines, one of them in another gun walker, who began firing into the flier swarms behind them as they jogged down the steps. The rest of the Marines had fallen back to establish a defensive perimeter between the ruins and the assault craft-turned-bunker, and now, again, were able to coordinate their fire with one another.
The Lucas gun turret began slamming bolt after high-energy bolt into the ruins, blasting the fliers by the tens . . . by the hundreds . . .
And then the enemy was gone. The remaining fliers reversed their flights, swooped back to the opening at the center of the stone platform, and vanished inside.
The Battle of Heimdall seemed to be over, at least for the moment.
But Donahue died on the way back to the ship.
USMA Lander Lucas
Heimdall
1745 hours, TFT
“Do we even know who was controlling these things?” Taggart asked. “The people who built this place? Or the Rosette entity?”
The debriefing was taking place in Lucas’s wardroom, a small compartment—as were most of the habitable spaces on the assault lander—one level down and aft of the bridge. Colonel Jamison and his platoon leaders were present, as were Taggart’s shipboard department heads. On the table at the center of the compartment lay one of the alien fliers, a charred shell, more or less complete but burned through by a near hit from a Marine particle beam.
“We’re assuming that these are Baondyeddi devices,” Dr. Celia Carter said. “They’re almost certainly an automatic defense system triggered when the Marines got too close to something sensitive.”
“We concur,” Jamison said. “These things don’t exhibit anything close to the technologies we’ve seen demonstrated by the Rosetters.”
“That would make a lot of sense,” Taggart said, thoughtful. “If the Beyondies were going to duck into their virtual reality hole and seal it off after themselves, they’d want to have a watchdog left on this side of the door . . . just to make sure clumsy strangers didn’t come along and break things.”
“Do you seriously believe that’s what they did?” Major David Hardy, Jamison’s exec, asked. He sounded as though he didn’t hold with such nonsense.
“Oh, there’s no doubt that that’s what happened to a lot of the Baondyeddi,” Carter told him. “And a lot of other Sh’daar as well.”
“Yes, but for a whole sapient species to just shut themselves off from the rest of the universe . . .”
“We estimate that, at best, only about ten percent of the Baondyeddi took the virtual-reality option,” Carter said. “And probably fewer than two percent of any one of the other species.”
“Why the hell would they do that, though?” Jamison asked, shaking his head.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Lieutenant Benton Meyers said. He was Lucas’s senior computer tech, and the man in charge of the expedition’s shipboard AI. “Virtual reality, at the scale the Beyondies are using, is far more varied, rich, diverse, entertaining, and just plain interesting than non-virtual life could ever be. For a while, we thought the answer to Fermi’s paradox—the whole question of why we didn’t see evidence of advanced civilizations in the universe around us—was that technic species tended to develop computers, then complex and immersive virtual reality, then decide they could have more fun living in a computer net than they could puttering around in the dirt outside.”
“That,” Jamison said, the disapproval sharp in his voice, “sounds like the proverbial thirty-something son playing with the virtual-reality network in his family’s basement instead of moving out and getting a life.”
“If life is more rewarding, more positive, safer, and more interesting inside a virtual-reality network,” Meyers said with a shrug, “why not take advantage of it? It’s no different, really, than early humans deciding to make use of fire . . . or giving up hunting and gathering in favor of living in settlements.”
“Humankind is going to have to make that decision before too long,” Taggart said. “Our technology isn’t good enough yet to build electronic networks big enough to create a whole, virtual universe on this kind of scale, but as a species, we’re close.”
“Hurray for us,” Hardy said. “For me, I would not opt for that course.”
“Well,” Carter added, “it’s the same here, with the Sh’daar species. Not all of them took that route.”
Jamison’s eyebrows rose. “Yes? And what did the rest do?”
“They Transcended. Schjaa Hok.”
“But what does that mean?”
“We don’t know what happened to them exactly. Some went into computer networks like this, yes, but most . . . we don’t know.” Carter shrugged. “They moved into higher dimensions? Built their own separate universe? Became gods?”
“Makes me wonder,” Jamison said, “about the Sh’daar back in the N’gai Cloud. They seem terrified of the Sh’daar that went through the Tech Singularity and disappeared?”
“Yes?”
“Maybe they’re just afraid of what the rest of them became.”
“Well, obviously—” Meyers said.
“I don’t mean they think the Transcended Sh’daar are going to come back and attack them, or anything. I wonder if they just saw what their own species was capable of—vanishing down the rabbit hole and pulling it in after them, running out on real life—and were disgusted, revolted, and maybe just plain horrified at that tendency in their own kind. Like humans horrified that other humans could commit mass genocide, or kill other humans over crap as stupid as religion. Something like that can ruin your whole day.”
“I rather doubt that they think about things like that the same way we do,” Carter said.
“More to the point, the real question,” Taggart said, “is, where do we go now? The confrontation with these things . . .” She reached out and tapped the burned-out flier. “It looks to me like it was a stalemate.”
“I hate to admit it,” Jamison said, “but that’s the way I’d tag it. I certainly prefer that to ‘we got our asses kicked.’”
“Our operation objectives,” Taggart went on, “are to see if we can make peaceful contact with the uploaded Baondyeddi, and then attempt to make peaceful contact with the Rosette entities. Does anyone have any ideas how we accomplish either of those?”
“The Rosette Aliens are ignoring us,” Lieutenant Kaitlyn Grant, Lucas’s communications officer, said. “We’ve been beaming stuff at them since we arrived, RF and UV laser, in every Agletsch contact pidgin in the book. No response.”
“And we’ve seen how the Baondyeddi responded,” Jamison said.
“Not necessarily,” Carter replied. “We’ve seen how their automatic defense system responded. I’m wondering if I approach that central opening alone, teleoperating a spider . . . maybe they won’t feel threatened and they’ll keep the heavy firepower at home.”
“I don’t know,” Meyers said, grinning. “Your spider scares the hell out of me.”
“Yes,” Carter said, “but you’re an arachnophobe.”
“Very well,” Taggart said. “See what you can dig up with your spider. Lieutenant Grant, stop active communication attempts. Put out your ears and listen. Hard.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I mean it. Listen to every frequency you can think of, maintain a visual watch, and go ahead and put Lucas’s AI on it. If anything even twitches out there, if it could be a signal, I want to know about it.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“And where do you want my Marines, Madam Captain?” Jamison asked.
Taggart wondered if he was deliberately being provocative, or was simply being himself. Probably both. “I’d say keep your perimeter up outside the ship. Lieutenant Hagelund will be nanoconstructing a larger habitat outside the ship. You can move your men into that as soon as it’s grown.”
“I’m just wondering what we’re supposed to do if the Rosetters decide to pay us a visit.”
Taggart considered the options, and decided not to bring them up. If the Rosette Aliens proved to be hostile instead of merely aloof, there was nothing the Marines or anyone else would be able to do about it. From the technologies she’d seen ascribed to the Rosette entities, they could blink all of Heimdall out of existence with a figurative snap of the fingers.
She found herself wondering, yet again, if they were the Stargods. Don’t go there, girl, she told herself. Things are complicated enough.
But it didn’t stop her from wondering what Trev Gray would recommend.
“Keep your heads down,” Taggart told the Marine colonel, “and pray it’s a friendly visit.”
“Amen to that,” Jamison replied.
Orbital Dockyards
Quito Synchorbital
1810 hours, TFT
Cyndi DeHaviland set her tray down on the mess deck table. “So, did you hear the scuttlebutt?”
Gregory looked up from his own meal. At the moment, he was having difficulty generating much enthusiasm for anything, but he shook his head. “What’s going down?”
“It’s going to be a major fleet action at Kapteyn’s Star,” she told him. “They’re assembling three star carriers for this one, and the Lady Lex is already there. The Chinese are supposed to be sending a carrier too. It’s going to be big.”
He shrugged, then picked at his meal. “Okay . . .”
“Don . . . are you all right?”
“Yah. No problem.”
“You don’t sound okay. You’ve been moping around for weeks now, ever since I came on board. You stick to yourself, you don’t join in the bull sessions—”
“Look, I just want to be left alone, okay?”
DeHaviland stared into his face for a long moment, then shrugged. “Suit yourself, space-ace. But if you need to talk . . .”
She let the sentence trail off, but he didn’t reply.
Don Gregory had been suffering from major depression for three months now. He knew he was depressed, and he knew he should report himself to the psychs in sick bay. When he slept, when he could sleep, he was back on the bleak and frigid surface of Invictus.
With Meg . . .
The problem with severe depression, though, was that you just didn’t fucking care. He continued to go through the automatic motions, carrying out his duty to the letter, but even admitting to someone else that he had a problem was just too much effort to be worthwhile.
Besides, if he turned himself in to the medicos and psychs, he’d be grounded, relieved of duty. You couldn’t have mentally unstable types strapping on expensive SG-420s and putting the whole squadron, to say nothing of the sacred mission, at risk.
Sooner or later, they’d catch him, probably the next time they pulled a routine brain diagnostic from his in-head hardware. But he saw no reason to make things easy for the bastards.
The last time America had been in port, he’d held the depression at bay with a couple of brainstim binges portside. He’d been hungering for a couple of whiffs since they’d gotten back to the Sol System, but all leave and liberty had been cancelled because of the bug, whatever it was, they’d picked up in the N’gai Cloud. That issue had been resolved, apparently, and America had been guided from her quarantine orbit around Luna to her berth at SupraQuito . . . and, just his luck, he had the duty.
Damn it all!
He and Cyn DeHaviland ate their meals in silence. The officers’ mess overhead dome showed the scene outside—the gantries and orbital facilities and bustling work pods of the SupraQuito dockyards, an enormous bundle of habs and nanufactories perched at the top of the Quito space elevator. The mess deck was in the carrier’s rotating carousel of hab modules, but the computers managing the image overhead had compensated for the motion.
He glanced at Cyndi. She was nice—a newly arrived replacement to the Black Demons. He liked her okay . . . would have liked her more if he didn’t keep thinking that she was here as a replacement for Meg.
Damn it.
Briefly, he considered asking DeHaviland to swap duty with him so that he could go binge again. There was this little bar in the main hab over there. . . .
But somehow he couldn’t make himself reach out that far.
“Catch you later, Cyn,” he said, standing suddenly and picking up his half-finished meal. “I’ve got the duty in CIC.”
“See ya.”
He wanted to apologize for his sharpness of a moment before, but . . .
Nah. He walked out.
Chapter Seventeen
12 December 2425
South of Manhatt Ruins
2025 hours, TFT
It had been a long time since Gray had been here. The cityscape to the north was utterly alien to him. The novelist, he decided, had been right: you can’t go home again.
He was drifting slowly, a hundred meters above the black waters of New York’s Upper Bay, just off the remnants of Governor’s Island. To his left, the Statue of Liberty still stood tall, though most of her pedestal was underwater. Her upraised arm was back in place, fished up out of the water where it had fallen years ago and reattached. She looked good. . . .
Gray had requested some time off when they discharged him from Bethesda, and SupraQuito had okayed it. He was riding a rented broom—a Mitsubishi-Rockwell gravcycle—from a tour agency in New New York a few kilometers up the river. Three meters long, silver, and held aloft by a pair of fore-and-aft grav-impeller blocks, you rode it like a motorcycle . . . a flying motorcycle with a ceiling of about a thousand meters. He’d had one of his own, once, an eon or two ago; he wondered what had become of it.
Ahead of him, the lights of a reborn Manhattan gleamed and winked, reflected in the dark waters. He’d lived there once . . . been quite happy there, though it had been a hand-to-mouth scrabble for survival much of the time. But everything had changed when Angela had had her stroke. And now, he was an admiral, commander of a star carrier battlegroup.
He would have been painfully out of place trying to fit in again down there among those partially submerged towers.
Trevor Gray looked down on the lights of Manhatt and thought of the Prims still down there and about where AIs were taking the human species. It was quite possible that Humankind only seemed to be guiding itself. He thought of how Konstantin had recently carried out a memetic attack on Pan-Europe—creating there a desire for peace and a popular revulsion against Geneva’s government policies at the time . . . and so helped end the Confederation Civil War.
With that kind of power, it seemed likely that Konstantin was leading Humankind on a social path of its own choosing, and not the other way around.
Of course, Konstantin had been doing a lot to reclaim the Periphery . . . and, ultimately, that might prove to be a bigger job than creating peace between the Confederation and the USNA. Washington, D.C. had been reclaimed and rebuilt already, and now Konstantin had turned its attention to the flooded ruins of Old Manhattan. Nine and a half kilometers south of his current position, massive machines were drawing calcium carbonate and other minerals from seawater, creating the substance called “seament” and using it to regrow the failed Verrazano Narrows Dam. When that was completed, and with the building of a second dam at Locust Point at the entrance to the Long Island Sound, all of Manhattan would be sealed off from the ocean, and the job of lowering the sea level around the old city could begin. It was a titanic project, but now that the war was over, President Koenig had given orders for the reclamation to begin.
And in the meantime, USNA troops had occupied Manhattan, and the social reclamation of the population there had already begun. Those lights up ahead—the Manhatt Ruins had never had that kind of power available since the place had been abandoned over three centuries before. Buildings were being renovated, and whole blocks of old city towers were being grown together, creating a new city thirty meters above the current water level.
New York City was coming alive once more.
Gray hoped he would be able to come back an
d see the place when the dams were in place and the city infrastructure complete.
But even then, he didn’t think he would fit down there.
What, exactly, had Thomas Wolfe written? Gray downloaded the quote from his in-head RAM.
You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood . . . back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame . . . back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
Thomas Wolfe had died in 1938, and he would have been utterly unable to comprehend the world, the New York City, of almost five centuries later.
But damn, the man had gotten it exactly right.
An in-head window opened in Gray’s mind. “Admiral?”
Gray sighed. Just when you get a free moment . . .
It was Pam Wilson, America’s chief communications officer. “Yes, Commander. What do you have?”
“Orders, Admiral. I have a high-priority comm request for you, personally. Security status Gold-One.”
Damn. Gold-One meant that he needed to take it on a securely encrypted channel, not through his own private in-head floating a hundred meters above New York Harbor.
“Okay. Who’s it from?”
“Classified, Admiral. Gold-One. Even I’m not cleared to know.”
“Okay. It’s going to take some doing, though.”
“Captain Gutierrez has taken the liberty, sir, of sending down a high-priority clearance request to get you back up here.”
“Is the America still in Lunar Orbit?” Gray had deliberately been kept out of the loop during his stay at Bethesda, to the point that he wondered if they still trusted him. Damn it, it wasn’t right that an admiral didn’t know where his ship was.
“Negative, sir. We moved down to SupraQuito a couple of days ago, as soon as the disease cases were shipped out and the rest of the crew had been vaccinated.”