by Ian Douglas
Disease cases. Him included, of course.
“Okay, Commander. I can be back in D.C.—”
“Begging your pardon, Admiral, but we’re hijacking a ship for you out of New New York. The space elevator will take too long. We can have you back on board inside of two hours.”
Someone was in a hell of a hurry.
And . . . who that someone might be was a real problem. He’d assumed that it would be either President Koenig or someone in USNA Naval Command—Admiral Armitage, maybe. But if that was the case, why not call him back to D.C. and set up a personal meeting? Why set up an encrypted high-security virtual conversation instead?
Gray thoughtclicked new orders into the navigational brain of his broom. In response, the machine twisted a few degrees to the left and began accelerating, angling due north up the Hudson River.
“What’s the ship status, Commander?”
“We’re just about ready to boost, Admiral. And the battlegroup has been assembling. By the time you get up here, we should have over thirty capital ships in orbit, set to go, including both the Constitution and the Declaration.”
“I thought the Declaration was undergoing trials?”
“She was, sir. But they brought her back, along with the Decatur and four other ships from Alpha Centauri space.”
Interesting. They were sending three star carriers to Kapteyn’s Star. That was almost unprecedented.
They were calling the assembled flotilla up there the Grand Unified Fleet, and he understood that the various military high commands had been working on the concept for quite a while. Technically, it was a Confederation fleet, since its primary objective was to rescue any survivors of the Confederation base out at Kapteyn’s Star, but that, Gray knew, was sheer political bravo-sierra. By far the largest contingent was USNA, and Washington hadn’t yet admitted that it was back in the Confederation as yet. There were also a substantial number of other vessels—Chinese Hegemony, North Indian, and Russian—who were allied with the USNA, but certainly not a part of the Confederation.
The High Command’s choice of a leader was interesting, Gray thought. There’d been talk, he knew, of making him the grand admiral, but he’d been taken off the short list when he’d contracted that alien disease in the N’gai Cloud. The final choice was Admiral Reed Franklin Gordon, on the Declaration. His politics had put him on the beach for a couple of years, but it seemed his star was again in the ascendancy. A USNA flag officer with Confederation-leaning convictions. He might be just the man for the job.
Lights rushed past him on his right, and immediately a warning signal flashed in his mind. The airspace above Manhattan was closed to civilian traffic nowadays, and he was being warned off by the local air traffic control. He felt his implant channel a high-priority override back at the challenger, then felt the response: he had clearance.
Wondering what the hell could be so all-fired important, Gray rode his broom through the night.
Probewalker 1
Heimdall Station
2214 hours, TFT
Celia Carter watched the bobbing, swaying terrain ahead as she guided the spider up the Temple steps, and decided that she was glad she wasn’t really packed inside the teleoperated machine’s body. Uneven terrain made for a rough ride and she had a tendency toward motion sickness.
So far as her brain was concerned, she was the spider, picking her way on jointed, stilting legs up the steps and across the shattered diamond remnants of the Temple. Her in-head software, though, was managing to keep her vestibular system quiet.
The top of the Temple platform was littered with the husks, shells, and broken fragments of fallen alien fliers. She ignored them and continued picking her way slowly across the field of rubble and smashed pillars. The spider’s sensor suite gave her a 360-degree view around her, but the software played to the limitations of her human brain and narrowed her effective field of vision down to what was ahead and to either side. She was aware, however, of the Lucas-bunker squatting on the horizon behind her, and of the loom of Bifrost in the sky beyond.
And then the flier was there, hovering silently ten meters ahead of her and two meters above the rubble, just as if it was trying to block her way. Where the hell had it come from?
Carter immediately stopped, and the two machines faced each other, holding themselves motionless for a long moment. At least, she thought, the alien machine hadn’t immediately attacked her.
“Okay, Command,” she said. “Are you getting this?”
“We see it,” Taggart’s voice responded, a whisper on her mind. “What do you intend to do?”
“It hasn’t opened fire,” Carter replied, “so I’m thinking the attack earlier was triggered by a whole shipful of armed and armored Marines.”
“It might recognize that you’re not armed,” Taggart replied.
“Perhaps. I’m going to try moving toward it,” Carter said.
Her walker took a small step toward the hovering flier . . . and then another. There was no response. The black sphere—actually a spheroid, flattened top to bottom—possessed a number of shiny, rounded lenses around its circumference, and Carter had the impression that they were lenses, regarding her narrowly. She took another cautious step.
A second flier rose from a small opening in the platform and took up a position next to the first. Carter could hear a faint buzzing, coming through her RF sensors. “Command, Spider One,” she said. “Are those things talking to each other?”
“We’re getting radio transmissions, One,” Taggart told her. “Very low power, very short-ranged. We haven’t cracked the code yet.”
“Okay . . . but are they talking to me? Or to each other?”
“Probably to each other, would be my guess. Looks like they’re trying to decide what to do.”
“I’m going to try walking around them and see what happens.”
“Copy that . . .”
She moved slowly and with great deliberation, expecting an attack at any moment. The lasers those things carried were more than capable of melting her robotic body in a literal flash.
Did they recognize, she wondered, that there was no organic life inside the spider’s shell? Did they respond to robots or teleoperated machines differently than they did to life forms encased in armor?
More of the hovering guardians emerged from underground, but still, all they did was watch her. She counted twelve of the machines, now; it would take only one to destroy her fragile walker.
She could see the main entrance to the inside of the Temple platform fifteen meters ahead. She continued her slow walk toward the opening, as her silent entourage drifted in a loose perimeter around her. They literally had her surrounded; two even paced her from five meters overhead.
Were these things truly robotic, controlled, perhaps, by a guardian AI? Or were they, like her spider, teleoperated by flesh-and-blood beings somewhere below? She wished she knew. She would have preferred to have an idea about what type of intelligence she was dealing with.
Record everything. Everything . . .
What in the hell?
“Command, One,” she called. “Did you just transmit?”
“Negative, One.”
Mein Gott!
“There! Did you hear that?”
“Negative, Probe One. We have your transmissions, and we’re getting what sounds like RF static from your little friends out there. Nothing else. What do you hear?”
“Sounded like a very brief audio transmission. ‘Record everything,’ and something that sounded like ‘my God’ in German.”
“We’re not reading that, One.”
She could hear what sounded like a rapid-fire conversation in the background now, pilots speaking to each other in a near frenzy of gutteral voices.
What the hell? For a moment, Carter felt a sharp sense of dissociation. She knew she was safe and protected, tucked into her couch back on board the Lucas, but the illusion of being outside, alone, surrounded by impenetrable mystery, was overwhelmi
ng. What didn’t make sense was the fact that if her spider had picked up signals from something speaking German, then everyone monitoring her feed on board the Lucas would have heard it too.
That raised the uncomfortable possibility that she was hallucinating. She checked her mental readouts, but there were no red flags or alarms indicating the presence of something that might be causing her to hear things that weren’t there.
She reached the edge of the opening in the platform. Broad steps led down into darkness. Her entourage gathered about her a bit more closely, and she had the impression that they were guiding her . . . herding her along.
With a mental shrug, she let them.
USNA CVS America
Admiral’s Office
SupraQuito Orbital Naval Base
2240 hours, TFT
The shuttle had docked directly with the America, hooking up with one of the carrier’s spinal airlocks. He’d been the only passenger on board, an indication of the importance of this trip. Somebody wanted to talk with him very quickly indeed. Captain Gutierrez had met him at the lock, but there was no formality, no official welcome.
“Welcome back, Admiral.”
“Thank you, Captain. I gather everything is squared away and pretty much ready for boost?”
“Yes, sir. We’re waiting for three more ships to arrive—Paladin, Dockery, and a Chinese Hegemony heavy carrier, the Guangdong. They’re in-system, and will rendezvous here tomorrow.”
“The Guangdong? That makes four star carriers.”
“Five, Admiral. The Jiangsu arrived alongside this afternoon from Ta Yu.”
Ta Yu was the Hegemony extrasolar colony at Epsilon Ceti IV, a double star some seventy-nine light years from Sol. The name, drawn from the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, meant “wealth,” and the place was a cornerstone of China’s exosolar colonization program. That they were willing to divert one of their star carriers from the Ta Yu colony to participate in the effort at Kapteyn’s Star was an indication of how seriously they were taking the Rosetter threat.
As well they should, he thought.
He sank into the couch in his office and slapped his hand down on the contact plate. “Okay,” he said. “Ready to link.”
He felt the software of America’s comm system probing his mind, verifying his identity.
Then there was a brief burst of static, and he was . . . where? A wooden schoolhouse?
The virtual image of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky peered at him through antique pince-nez. Elderly, austere, with receding white hair and a white goatee, the AI’s avatar looked the very picture of a reclusive Russian schoolteacher. The virtual surroundings, Gray knew, were a kind of window dressing—the interior of an early-twentieth-century Russian schoolhouse, updated slightly by anachronistic computer screens and monitors. Gray had spoken with Konstantin—or with one of Konstantin’s sub-clones—several times, most recently at Bethesda; but before, the superbright AI had always been a disembodied voice in his head. He’d heard that the president occasionally conversed with the machine intellect in a virtual environment, and assumed that it was this one.
“Hello, Admiral. How are you feeling?”
“Hello, Konstantin.” What did you say to a machine intelligence reputed to be several million times smarter than a typical human? Gray wondered if the inquiry about his health was genuine concern, or simply mimicry of the polite social noises of human interaction. He answered anyway. “They tell me the alien bacteria have been completely eliminated from my body, and the medical nanobots they pumped into me will keep it that way.”
“I am delighted to hear it. There has been considerable concern about your ability to continue as commander of the America battlegroup.”
That stung. “If there is any doubt about my abilities—”
“There are not, Admiral, insofar as I, the president, or the Joint Chiefs are concerned. If there were you would be . . . I believe the naval slang term is ‘on the beach.’”
“There was some discussion,” Gray said carefully, “of leaving the bugs in me and using me to communicate with them . . . maybe sending me back to the N’gai Cloud.”
“Others can do that,” Konstantin replied. “And a ship has already been dispatched to inform Dr. McKennon and Deep Time One of the situation. I asked you to come to a secure communications node for a different reason.”
“I got back to the ship as quickly as possible.”
“I appreciate that. I needed to have this conversation with you—in private—before your departure from Earth.”
“It must be damned important.”
“It is.” The image leaned forward, holding Gray with its gaze. “I needn’t remind you, I’m sure, that this conversation is secret. You will need to share its contents with members of your staff, certainly, but with no one else until after your return.”
“My return. From Kapteyn’s Star?”
“No. From rather more distant a destination than that.”
“Omega Centauri, then.”
Gray’s current operational orders were somewhat open-ended. America’s battlegroup, augmented by several other battlegroups into a single large international task force, was going to make the passage to Kapteyn’s Star and there confront the Rosette entity. Depending on the outcome of that encounter, the fleet would then proceed to the Omega Centauri globular cluster and further confront the Rosette entity there, at what was believed to be its operational headquarters for whatever the hell it was doing in the galaxy.
“Once again, no.”
Gray sat up at that.
“Your destination, Admiral, is what I wish to discuss with you. It is vitally important that you, that the America, take another path . . . a different option.”
“Go on.”
“You have been briefed on Tabby’s Star.”
“Yes . . . well, more or less. Not a formal briefing. Just scuttlebutt. I know that they were considering sending us out there. The Agletsch recommended that we go.”
“Yes. And I agree with them.”
“I see.” Truth was, though, he had no idea what Konstantin was talking about.
“USNA naval forces currently are stretched thin. There is competition within the military and political leadership over how those assets would be best deployed.”
“But if you—”
“I am not in your government’s chain of command, Admiral. At best, I am considered an advisor to the president. I make recommendations, but those recommendations are not always accepted or acted upon.”
“Wait a minute, Konstantin,” Gray said. “Are you suggesting that I disobey my orders? That I take my battlegroup to Tabby’s Star instead of Kapteyn’s Star?”
“The battlegroup will not be necessary. I would like you to take America to Tabby’s Star, search for signs of sapient life and technology, and report back to Earth.”
“Where I will promptly be arrested and court-martialed for disregarding legal orders.”
“That is a possibility, of course. The lid of secrecy will have been lifted by then, however. I will recommend, of course, that charges be dropped.”
“And if we find nothing useful out there?”
“The Agletsch are convinced otherwise.”
“They’ve shown you something? Proof?”
“No. Let us say merely that their arguments were convincing.”
“Konstantin . . . this just isn’t right. The chain of command exists for a reason. We can’t just ignore it whenever it gets in the way.”
“Indeed. Nor can the human species afford to ignore the threat posed by the Rosette entity. But your leaders are too closely focused on the problems immediately in front of them. They are, as humans like to say, ‘failing to see the big picture.’ They are simply reacting to the Rosette Aliens’ actions, and failing to develop progressive and long-term strategies. This, ultimately, could be fatal for your species.”
“So talk to the president.”
“I have. But in a democratic government, the leader
s are restricted by constitutional guarantees against the abuse of power. There are things he simply cannot do without the consent and active participation of the Legislative branch.”
“Then talk to them.”
“Admiral, the fact of the matter is that there simply is no time to build a consensus. Courier packets have returned from Kapteyn’s Star with data suggesting that the situation there is critical. The Pan-European expedition there was all but wiped out within a space of seconds.”
“I was briefed.” But he was still coming to grips with the news.
“The president has accepted the counsel of Admiral Armitage and others. They fear that the presence of the Rosette Aliens a mere twelve light years from Sol means that these aliens will be here at any moment, and that nothing is more important than stopping them at Heimdall.”
“Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t ask the obvious question: Stop them with what? The Rosette Aliens have already demonstrated that they are able to eliminate our largest ships with little or no apparent effort. Simply sending more ships into that system cannot change the current balance between their technology and ours.”
“This . . . this is just plain crazy, Konstantin. Even admirals don’t have that kind of leeway. You are essentially asking me to set policy, and that is so wrong on so many levels I don’t know what to say.”
“You fear repercussions to your career?”
“Of course I do.” Gray shrugged. “And those of my officers, and the safety of my crew.” He struggled with what he was hearing. What the AI was talking about wasn’t just dereliction of duty, but possibly treason. More than that, he still wasn’t sure if he could trust an AI to begin with. And yet the logic of it was—if not infallible—very convincing. What could one more star carrier do? He had seen images sent back from the Lucas of the destruction of the Himmelschloss, read the reports. The size of the ship—the size of the group—couldn’t possibly matter. His orders were coming from a place of fear, and a place of comfort. Not just that of politicians far away from the front lines, but the comfort of “this is what we know how to do.” What Konstantin was suggesting could end with his court-martial. But it could also lead to a solution to the Rosette problem.