by Ian Douglas
For just a moment he was tempted to blame Konstantin. Why had the damned AI dragged him out here, anyway? A hunch that hadn’t panned out?
But . . . no. Gray had gone along with Konstantin’s suggestion. He’d stepped into this with his eyes wide open. Recriminations now were pointless.
“A civilization capable of destroying a Kardashev Type Two civilization across a distance of one hundred seventy-three light years,” Konstantin continued, “is not to be taken lightly.”
“I suppose not. But we were out here looking for weapons—or allies—that we can use against the Rosetters, right? And we failed. . . .”
“Not entirely.”
Gray took a deep breath. “Well, it does sound like whoever or whatever is hanging out at Deneb would be a great candidate.”
“If Humankind survived the encounter, possibly,” Konstantin replied. “In any case, however, we may already have access to a viable weapon without the need to meet the Denebans directly.”
“What weapon?”
“The computer virus,” Konstantin told him, “that destroyed the Satori torus.”
VFA-96, Black Demons
Tabby’s Star
1553 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Gregory was in the van as the Black Demons vectored across space, skimming some thousand kilometers or so above the smooth, ebony canopies of the Satori statites. Ahead, almost invisible, a lurking translucence stirred. It was too distant to pick up optically, but his Starblade’s AI was feeding him an enlarged image.
“CAG, Demon Four,” he called. “I have the target in sight.”
“Copy that, Demon Five,” Captain Fletcher’s voice replied in his head. “Remember, do not, repeat do not engage. You’re there to protect the capture probe going in . . . and pick it up on the other side.”
“Copy that.” He hesitated. “Tell me, CAG, has anybody thought about what happens to us if we make that thing mad?”
“Don’t worry, Four. It won’t be mad at you.”
“I wish I had your confidence in the emotional state of something that’s completely weird-ass off-the-bulkhead alien,” Gregory replied.
“Stand by. Probe launch in thirty seconds.”
Gregory checked the range to the target—almost ten thousand kilometers. What was it they were calling those things now? Gaki, that was it. Hungry ghost. It seemed fitting.
He adjusted his Starblade’s course slightly to approach the filmy shape ahead while still giving it a wide berth. He could see now that it was partially expanded, using the star’s light to tack toward another of the statite sails. It was like the huge thing was grazing out there, devouring light sail canopies one by one.
“So what’s with this probe, Skipper?” Gregory asked. “Are they still trying to communicate with that thing?”
“I don’t know, Four,” Mackey replied. “The word I heard was that they’re prepping a sub-clone of the big lunar AI and sending that into the middle of it.”
“Konstantin, yeah. Okay. To do what?”
“Beats me.”
“They want to kick that hungry ghost in the ass,” DeHaviland said, “and make it mad.”
“Okay, we’re back to that. Right . . . just watch out if it starts throwing rocks.”
“No rocks out here,” Caswell put in. “I think we’re safe.”
Gregory seriously doubted that the word safe could be applied to living masses of dust or gas a hundred thousand kilometers across.
“Heads up, people,” Mackey warned. “Launch in five seconds . . .”
America had moved in to within a couple of thousand kilometers of the statite sail layer, her enormous round shield cap pointed directly at the alien organism now ten thousand kilometers ahead. Gregory could hear the countdown over the carrier’s PriFly channel: “. . . and three . . . and two . . . and one . . . launch!”
A black teardrop emerged from the center of the shieldcap, hurtling outward at fifty kilometers per second.
The teardrop was a standard Starblade fighter, but stripped of weapons and with much of its interior converted to particularly dense circuitry, the Earth equivalent of computronium. If Mackey had downloaded the straight shit, there was no human pilot. Instead, the AI on America—itself a clone of Konstantin—had copied a portion of itself and inserted that into the converted fighter. The clone’s clone would become Humankind’s emmissary to the bizarre life form ahead.
“Capture probe away,” PriFly called.
“Copy that, PriFly. We have it in sight. C’mon, Demons. Let’s keep up.”
At fifty kilometers per second, the magnetically accelerated probe would cross those ten thousand kilometers in three minutes, thirty-three seconds. The question was how the target would react to the probe’s approach. When Gregory had gotten too close to the Gaki before, close enough to enter its outer envelope of magnetically organized gas particles, it had seemed . . . irritated, to say the very least.
The seconds trickled away. The capture pod flew its straight-line course, not changing speed, not changing direction. Maybe they could convince the Gaki that the approaching probe was a meteor, an inert lump of cosmic debris.
In other words, lunch . . .
The Black Demons kept pace with the probe. Three and a half minutes after launch, it plunged into the Gaki’s dust-cloud central regions.
The reaction was startling. The far-flung wings and filmy pseudopods began flowing back to the center, as the core of the thing collapsed into a dense sphere. The probe seemed to merge with that core, its nanomatrix hull flowing like molten tar to penetrate and explore the Gaki organism’s heart. The entire organism twisted in space, collapsing, then exploding outward once more.
Gregory rolled his fighter sharply to avoid one outthrust pseudopod. He heard the sharp rattle of dust grains on his hull, felt the shudder as he brushed the alien body . . . and then he was clear. He didn’t know if it was a deliberate attack or a random flail by an injured beast, but he was taking no chances.
“It shook the probe off,” Ruxton reported. “I’ve got it in sight . . .”
The alien organism collapsed again into a tightly packed sphere and began dropping starward. It struck the expanse of black statite sail beneath it and punched cleanly through. The probe had emerged from the cloud on a new vector, tumbling end over end.
“Let the Gaki go,” Mackey ordered. “Catch the probe!”
“I’ve got it,” Gregory said. Easier said than done, though. He accelerated gently, flashing alongside the probe. Catching it was going to be tricky. . . .
“Do not under any circumstances communicate with the probe,” Mackey said. “They just passed the word from the CIC. If things went right, that probe’s been contaminated by one hell of a computer virus.”
“If things went right?” Gregory shook his head. “Whose bright idea was this, anyway?”
“Probably the boss computer,” DeHaviland said. “I’m ten kilometers off your starboard side, Don. I can help with the probe.”
“Right.” Gregory exchanged some terse, wordless messages with his fighter’s AI. Gently, under the AI’s control, his fighter edged closer to the tumbling capture probe. His Starblade took on its atmospheric configuration, with stubby, delta-shaped wings. Wings were useless in hard vacuum for flying, of course, but he was going to try to use his starboard wingtip to stop the probe’s spin.
DeHaviland’s Starblade appeared on the far side of the probe, gently edging closer.
“Slave your AI to mine,” she told him.
“You’ve got it.”
With both fighters now essentially being run by the same artificial intelligence, they closed together with smooth precision. Their wingtips connected with the tumbling probe at the same instant. Gregory felt the shock, felt a harsh grating vibration, and suppressed the urge to engage his gravitic drive.
Slowed by friction, the capture probe was drifting between the two fighters, now, its spin gone.
The two fighters moved closer, then, the nanomatrix
that made up their wing surfaces running like thick liquid to embrace the pod.
“We’ve got it,” DeHaviland reported.
“Right,” Gregory said. “Let’s take it home.”
He was feeling, he realized, a fierce exultation . . . and the depression that had been gnawing him was, not gone, exactly, but very much in the background.
He opened a private channel. “Hey, Cyndi?”
“Yeah?”
“Nice job.”
“Thank you.”
“Ah . . .”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. Just wondering if you’d care to see the space-ace when we get off duty later.”
He was more than half expecting her to tell him to drop dead. Instead, she said, “Absolutely!”
And the depression took another step into the background dark.
Chapter Twenty-four
25 December 2425
TC/USNA CVS America
Module 1 Gravity Lounge
En route to Kapteyn’s Star
2005 hours, TFT
“We’re . . . what?” Connie Fletcher asked him. “Another five hours out from emergence?”
Gray consulted his internal clock. “Five hours, ten minutes . . . and a few odd seconds,” he replied. He took a sip of his drink, a blue starshine from the lounge’s replicator. Gray normally didn’t drink on board ship, not when he was in command, but today, of all days, he found he needed the anesthetic effects of ethanol.
America’s gravity lounge was located in Hab Module One, its spin generating roughly half a G. Both officers and enlisted personnel were encouraged to spend several hours of off-duty time here each ship’s day as a means of holding off the degenerative effects of long-term microgravity. The ambiance was pleasant, if a bit on the sterile side, with smoothly curved white bulkheads, invisible lighting, and furnishings grown from the deck at a thought. Best of all, the compartment was large enough that even with the presence of thirty or forty other people, it felt almost empty, and the translucent light curtains and photon sculptures provided the illusion of both intimacy and privacy.
Gray was seated at a broad, low table with Connie Fletcher, America’s CAG, and they were watching the computer-generated simulation of the stars projected across the overhead as the last few hours of this leg of their voyage dwindled away.
“You got our opplan okay?” he asked her.
“Yup. We pop out forty AUs out, just like in the old days, so that we can have a good look around. And you want the fighters out as soon as we emerge.”
“Right. Our priority will be making contact with the fleet.”
“Assuming,” she said, “that the fleet is there.”
“My. Cheerful, aren’t we?”
“Hey . . . it’s been a week. Anything could have happened. Humankind might have declared peace and everyone went home.”
“That,” Gray said slowly, “would be wonderful.”
“You’re not buying it though, are you?”
“No. Things are never that easy. Especially when there are so damned many unknowns.”
“You still worried about what HQMILCOM is going to say about our little . . . side trip?”
“A little, I suppose.” He shrugged. “Whatever happens, it’s my side trip, not ours. My responsibility.”
“I would have to say that Konstantin bears some of that responsibility.”
“Not legally. He’s a machine. Or a program, rather. A very, very sophisticated program . . . but just a program. Humans are still in the loop, and it’s humans who call the shots.”
“You sure about that? Sometimes I think the AIs are running everything behind the scenes, and we don’t have much say at all. Just what they decide to let us have.”
“I didn’t know you went in for catAIstrophy theories, Connie.” The term was an old one, going back four centuries or so, to a time when Humankind had been seriously mulling over the possibility that human machines would soon be so much smarter than their creators that they would eliminate them . . . or put them in zoos.
“I don’t . . . not really,” Fletcher told him. “But you’ve got to wonder. Machines like Konstantin are so much faster than we are, with access to so much more data. They can’t be spending more than a tiny fraction of their clock speed on critters as comparatively slow as we are. What are they thinking about in all of their spare time? What are they doing?”
“I don’t know. Konstantin seems to be a good sort. I think he’s genuinely concerned about the future of humans and intelligent machines.”
“You don’t think he gets . . . I don’t know . . . frustrated by how slow we are on the uptake?”
“Maybe. A little. But then, the difference between us and machines was there when he first came on-line, wasn’t it? It might just be a fact of life for him.”
“Hm. So were cholera and cancer, once upon a time. Sometimes I wonder how much longer beings like Konstantin will need us.”
Gray laughed. “They don’t need us now. Sometimes I think . . .” He let the thought trail off.
“What?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think we amuse them.”
She shuddered. “That’s what’s terrifying about it.”
“Well . . . for better or worse, machine intelligence is here to stay. If we’re lucky, we’ll evolve along with it. If not . . .” He spread his hands. “We can just hope they’ll make humanity’s golden years comfortable, out of nostalgic fondness, if nothing else.”
A dozen personnel were gathered at another table nearby, singing Solstice songs to the accompaniment of a computer-generated orchestra. The carols’ sentiments—about new light and a new day—seemed wildly out of phase with Gray’s and Fletcher’s dark musings.
Fletcher grinned suddenly, as if throwing a switch, and leaned forward. “Want to go join them?”
“Not particularly.”
“C’mon, Admiral. You’ve been as glum and out of sorts as an AI unjacked from its data input lately.”
“Hey, you’re the one worried about AIs wiping out humans!”
“Oh, I figure we still have a century or two left. So let’s enjoy it while we can! Besides, you really do need to get out more.”
“You go on ahead, Connie,” Gray told her. “I’ve got some thinking to do.”
She looked like she was going to give him an argument . . . probably something along the lines of it being good for shipboard morale, but he shut it down with a sharp side-to-side shake of his head. “No. Thanks . . . but it’s not my thing.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Excuse me.” She stood, picked up her drink, and walked through a misty red light curtain to join the holiday choristers. “Hey, it’s Cap’n CAG!” someone called out, and there was a burst of laughter.
Gray took another sip of his drink. He felt decidedly ambiguous about the holiday known as Solstice, and around this time of the year that sense of ambiguousness could churn unpleasantly into something deeper and darker.
Solstice? It was Christmas, damn it!
The implementation of the White Covenant had pretty much ended all public celebrations of religious holidays. In fact, tendencies in that direction had been noted well before the twenty-first century’s bloody Islamic Wars that had led to the White Covenant’s adoption.
Even so, people clung to their need to let loose and party now and again no matter what the law might say. The winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice for the southern, remained a relatively religion-neutral excuse for a seasonal holiday.
Gray was not religious in the usual sense, but he mourned the loss of social and historical connections that once had helped define human cultures. An epoch or two ago, when he’d been a Prim living in the Manhatt Ruins with Angela, the White Covenant had not been that much of a concern. Angela had been a Christian believer, and they’d often celebrated the Solstice holiday with a decorated tree and some of the other trappings of what once had been called Christmas. And why the hell not? Hell, ev
en the word holiday had been derived from “holy day.”
Survival in the Manhatt Ruins hadn’t left much time or energy for celebrations, of course . . . and there the White Covenant existed only as a dim memory of the late twenty-first century’s often heavy-handed attempts at social engineering on a monumental scale. Even when he’d moved across the line out of the Periphery and into North America proper, the White Covenant was less a legal club held over people’s heads than it was a faintly disapproving sneer of contempt. A religious holiday? How . . . distasteful . . .
He still missed Christmas, however. He wondered how much of that had to do with missing Angela.
Once more, he wondered how she was getting on with her new life. Was she still a believer? Or had the stroke and the cerebral therapies that had repaired the damage killed that, in the same way it had killed her love for him?
Damn. It always happened. This time of the year he always found himself getting depressed to the point where he couldn’t stand himself . . . and the gods knew what it was like for the people around him.
It had taken almost a week for America to make the passage between what Gray had come to think of as the Two Stars: Tabby’s and Kapteyn’s. The Boyajian TRGA located at the edge of the KIC 8462852 system had taken them back to Penrose easily enough. Once they’d emerged at Penrose, however, Gray had faced a difficult if not almost impossible choice.
America could return home the way she’d come, traversing almost eighty light years of normal space to return to Earth, or she could set a slightly different course and travel the eighty-three light years to her original destination—Kapteyn’s Star and the ancient moon Heimdall. Which course would be the best one had kept him gnawing at the problem for days. If he returned to Earth, it would be to surrender his ship and turn himself in for court-martial. He would be able to turn over the considerable trove of data acquired at Tabby’s Star, and know that it would be put to good use . . . at least eventually. His IT people were convinced that they’d been able to extract the code defining the alien program hidden away inside the Gaki, and that there should be a way of applying that code to hack into the Rosette intelligence.