by Ian Douglas
Should be . . .
The alternative was to set course for Kapteyn’s Star and rejoin the fleet he’d abandoned a dozen days before—hopefully giving IT enough time to develop a virus that might actually do something against the Rosettes.
The problem with this second course of action, of course, was that Gray had no way of knowing what had been happening at Kapteyn’s Star during his absence. The Grand Unified Fleet might have engaged the Rosette intelligence and found a way to beat it . . . or, more likely, perhaps, the fleet might have been utterly destroyed and America would arrive at Heimdall to find herself facing the Rosetters alone.
Or they would find the fleet there attempting to negotiate with the Rosetters, with greater or less success depending on the events there of the past weeks.
Ultimately, Gray had chosen the second option. So far as his personal career was concerned, he would be in no worse trouble if they bypassed Earth and journeyed on to Kapteyn’s Star than he would be if he returned to SupraQuito and turned himself in . . . and it might save valuable time if the Unified Fleet was still trying to negotiate with the Rosetters.
Besides, something akin to guilt had been gnawing at him since he’d elected to give in to Konstantin’s suggestion and redirect the America out to Tabby’s Star. While it was unlikely that America’s absence had been significant when the fleet reached Heimdall, he couldn’t help but be concerned about what amounted to a gross dereliction of duty. He knew that if things had gone badly there for the human force, he was going to feel responsible . . . even though America represented only a small fraction of the Grand Unified Fleet’s total firepower. What it came down to, then, was simple:
Damn it, he had to know. . . .
“Admiral? I got a message—you wanted to see me?”
Gray blinked, then looked around. A young woman—painfully thin, stringy-haired, her face masked in technological shapes and strips of plastic, stood behind him. “Ah. Dr. Sanger.” He gestured at a seat. “Please.”
Carolyn Sanger was America’s senior Information Systems officer, at least in theory. Like many departments, America’s AI ran the show, with various humans serving as technological acolytes to their machine department head. Sanger was not military; like Truitt, she was a civilian working for the military. Her GS-13 rating made her the equivalent of a Navy lieutenant commander, though she was not in the shipboard chain of command.
She was also a class-3 cyborg, almost as much machine as she was human. Her eyes and much of her face were masked by a visor and partial helmet that appeared to be growing out of her pale skin.
“You wanted to see me?” she repeated.
“I did. Unofficially, at any rate . . .”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I want to know if the new torpedo is ready.”
“Sure. We’re good to go, lean and green. Ricky should’ve sent you the report. . . .”
“‘Ricky’?”
“The ship. You know . . . America.”
“Ah.” He’d not heard that nickname before. Was it a private in-joke among the computer techs? “Right. The alien virus has been isolated? It hasn’t had access to ship systems?”
“Absolutely not, Admiral.” She seemed to gain a little self-confidence that had been lacking before. He wished, though, that he could see her eyes.
“You’re absolutely sure? I don’t know what we would do if it got loose in the ship’s network.”
“We call it the Omega Code, Admiral,” Sanger told him. “And it’s perfectly safe.”
“According to who?” Gray said dryly. “This code annihilated a K-2 civilization, apparently without breaking a sweat.”
“It’s safe, Admiral,” she said again. “Konstantin is running nested emulations, and he can tell if the Omega Code is trying to slip through the firewall.”
What she was describing seemed simple enough. An emulation was a smaller clone of a computer network running on the larger one, for all intents and purposes a perfect, though smaller, copy. Nested emulation meant a series of copies in copies, each watching the firewall between itself and the next layer in.
“Uh . . . why are you asking me, Admiral?” Sanger asked. “The ship AI—”
“Might not tell me the truth if it has been . . . compromised.”
He felt her stiffen. “You don’t trust the ship?” She said the words as though she’d just heard sheerest, blackest blasphemy.
“Of course I do,” he lied. “I just want to hear it from a human as well as a machine.”
“You’re lying,” she told him. “You don’t like machine intelligence, do you?”
Her blunt response caught Gray off guard. He wasn’t used to that degree of social candor. Or was it a simple lack of social skills in someone who really didn’t get out very much?
“Whether I like them or not is not the point,” he told her. “AI systems tell us what they want us to know, and I need to know this thing is going to work as advertised.”
As he spoke, he pulled down Sanger’s personnel record. She was 35, he saw, though she both looked and acted considerably younger. The implants were permanent; she hadn’t seen anything with her organic eyes for ten years, and her other senses had been enhanced as well. She could maintain a continuous link with an AI network, had instant access to any data available on the Net, and could crank her equivalent clock speed up to 50 megahertz. . . .
“That’s way out of date,” she told him. “I’m currently configured for 700 gigahertz. Still not nearly as fast as Ricky, but it helps me keep up with her.”
He blinked, startled. How the hell was she following what he was doing in-head?
“I linked in through your service connections,” she explained, quite matter-of-fact and with what felt like a mental shrug of her shoulders. “They’re right there, after all. Here . . . let me . . .”
Inside an open window in Gray’s mind, Carolyn Sanger’s personnel record changed, as various technical descriptions were updated.
Gray closed the document.
“Wait!”
“I would appreciate it,” he told her gently, “if you would stay the hell out of my head unless I invite you in. Good manners, right?”
She sniffed. “Never had much use for those.”
Gray had known there were people like Sanger, but some people had taken the concept to what Gray thought were insane extremes. Were people like that even human anymore?
“We think so,” Sanger told him. She shrugged. “Of course, in another decade or two, everyone will be at least this wired, right? And people like me won’t even have orgie bits anymore. No wetware at all.”
She sounded proud of that.
“Okay, Carolyn,” he said, shuddering. “Just tell me about the torpedo.”
“Standard Mark XXII hypervelocity shell with a core configured as Level Four computronium,” she said. “The Konstantin clone we used to contact the Gaki was loaded inside along with the Omega Code.”
“It has the virus?”
“The Omega Code. Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“We budded off another Konstantin clone and had it emulate a portion of Ricky’s processor network. We watched the virus begin to rewrite the operating-system software, then shut it down. The code is there, all right.”
“Do you think it will be effective against the Rosetters?”
“That I couldn’t tell you. A whole different computer language . . . written within a completely alien technic culture. We’ll need some sort of handshake protocol, y’know. . . .”
“Meaning we can’t just upload our software into an alien network.”
“Right. Well . . . sort of. There’re a lot of variables. The Konstantin clone is smart enough to handle most of those, I think.”
“That’s what I wanted to know.”
“The biggest problem is the tech discrepency.”
“Meaning what?”
“The aliens at Deneb . . . we don’t know how advanced they are, but we can gu
ess that they were pretty much at the same level as the Tabby’s Star natives, right? The ones who built the Dyson toroid and the Matrioshka brain? They’re K-2.”
“Yes.”
“But the Rosetters may be borderline K-3. If they’re the folks we glimpsed up in the future, they’re on their way to building a galactic Dyson sphere. That’s so far beyond what a K-2 culture would be able to do, it’s dunkers.”
Gray blinked. “‘Dunkers?’”
“DNC—does not compute. Sorry. A very old nonsense phrase. What I mean is that a K-3 culture might not even be slowed down by a K-2 technology, right?”
Gray smiled. “I remember seeing a cartoon once. A shaggy, naked barbarian in the woods with a big club sneaking up behind a modern, combat-armored soldier holding a laser rifle. I forget the caption, but it was something like ‘Once again, strength and sneakiness overcome high-tech—’”
“I’ve seen it,” she said. “Complete nonsense, you know.”
Gray was amused by her self-assuredness when it came to things technical. “Oh?”
“Sure. It’s the Savage Teddy Bear Myth.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s this old two-D virdrama from a few centuries ago,” she explained. “It had these soldiers in high-tech combat armor, helmets, lasers, spaceships, powered walkers, all of that . . . but in this one story they were wiped out by alien stone-age teddy bears with clubs and rocks.”
“Okay . . .” Where was this going?
“In fact, those soldiers would have had all sorts of IR gear, motion detectors, drones, and perimeter sensors . . . all the high-tech equipment that would have let them see or hear the alien teddy bears coming ten kilometers away. Their armor would have protected them against clubs, arrows, and rocks . . . assuming the teddy bears could even get close enough to use them. Could never happen in real life. I mean, it was really stupid. . . .”
“Maybe the lesson is just that we shouldn’t let ourselves become too dependent on our technology.”
“Why not?” she asked, genuinely puzzled. “Organic systems fail as easily as artificial ones. Maybe more. Our technology is what makes us human.”
“Because it’s up to us, not our machines?”
She shook her head, still puzzled, and Gray decided that the two of them simply were not speaking the same language.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Point taken, I guess. But I want to have a channel to you when we emerge off Heimdall, okay? I’ll be linked in with Konstantin and with America, sure, but I want a human on the line as well. I want you.”
“Sure. But I don’t understand . . . sir.”
It was, he noted, the first time during their conversation that she’d used an honorific.
“It’s not necessary that you do, Sanger. I just want to know that when I have to make certain tactical decisions, I can rely on the AIs, but have a good human brain that knows them and works with them backing me up.”
“You want a checksum.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A checksum. A small datum from a large block of data used to detect errors that might have crept in during transmission or storage.”
“If you like.” He didn’t add that what he wanted was a human check on a machine mind . . . when he didn’t fully understand or completely trust that mind or what it might tell him.
But after his conversation with the woman, he was wondering just how human Carolyn Sanger might be. . . .
Sanger wandered off, and Gray spent another half hour listening to the Solstice songs coming from the other table. At last, though, he couldn’t take it any longer . . . songs about returning light and bringing light into people’s lives and welcoming the new sun. Nice sentiments . . . but he just wasn’t feeling them right now.
What was that phrase, that marvelous expression of holiday spirits out of Dickens? He had to do a quick search.
Ah. That was it.
Bah! Humbug!
He checked his internal clock and decided that it was about time he got back to the flag bridge. They were coming up on their planned emergence point—another three and a half hours, about—and he wanted to be ready.
For what, he wasn’t at all certain.
The Consciousness—the part of the vast Mind enshrouding tiny Kapteyn’s Star, at any rate—could feel the approach of . . . others. The vehicle was approaching at faster-than-light velocity, which suggested Mind, of course, but was no guarantee. Mind could be expressed in myriad ways, including powerful intellects that manifestly were not conscious. Consciousness and intellect, after all, were not the same thing.
The Consciousness had entered this universe specifically seeking conscious thought . . . not the organic vermin so often associated with minor technologies, but true Mind, Mind aware of itself and the nature of the cosmos.
Mind worth uniting with . . . augmenting . . . learning from . . . and teaching.
The Consciousness reached out in a manner incomprehensible to four-dimensional life and . . . sampled.
Yes. Almost certainly . . .
With infinite care and precision, the Consciousness began folding local space. . . .
Chapter Twenty-five
26 December 2425
TC/USNA CVS America
Flag Bridge
Kapteyn’s Star
0115 hours, TFT
Emergence. . . .
America dropped from the embrace of tightly folded space in an avalanche of photons . . . and into raw chaos.
The ship shuddered and bucked, as an alarm Klaxon shrilled. “What the hell?” Gray shouted as he tried to make sense of an incoming storm of data. One thing was clear immediately. They were not where they were supposed to be.
He’d instructed America to bring them out of Alcubierre Drive forty astronomical units from Kapteyn’s Star—almost 6 billion kilometers, a distance close to the semi-major axis of the orbit of Pluto around the sun. At that range, Kapteyn’s Star would have been a dim red dot . . . if indeed it were visible at all to the naked human eye.
More important, that star would have been five and a half light-hours away, giving America plenty of time to observe the inner system, look for signs of the human fleet, and watch for enemy activity, all well before the burst of light announcing their arrival at Kapteyn’s Star had time to reach Heimdall or the other planets circling that star.
But there, looming huge on the flag bridge screens, was Bifrost, the sweep of its rings rainbow-hued and vast, with Heimdall glittering tiny beneath them. There’d been a mistake, a miscalculation, there must have been, for Bifrost was less than nine AUs from its star, and the glowing masses of colored light filling the sky suggested that they’d emerged well within the Rosette entity’s inner sanctum.
“Okay,” Gray said, reaching out for data. “How did we end up in here?”
“The local spacetime matrix, Admiral,” Mallory said. “It’s been . . . bent somehow.”
“That’s called gravity, Dean,” Gutierrez said.
“No, I mean the whole area has been deeply warped. Like they saw us coming and folded local space into a pocket to catch us.”
“I don’t think I like the sound of that,” Gray said. If the Rosetters had seen them coming . . .
“Where the hell did that come from?” Blakeslee yelled, and then Gray saw it too, coming in toward the ship from dead astern . . . a vast dark planet with distinctly artificial-looking geometric patterns seemingly etched across its surface.
“Is that one of Bifrost’s moons?” Gray asked.
“Negative!” Blakeslee shot back. “Diameter forty-eight hundred kilometers, maybe a bit more! Heimdall is larger, but it’s the only Bifrost moon anywhere near that big! This is . . . something else.”
The artificial surface had already convinced Gray of that fact. “Helm! Full power!”
America surged forward just as a beam of antiprotons seared past the ship’s stern.
“That was too close!” Gutierrez said.
“Helm! Get u
s the hell out of here!”
“Helm, aye!” A tense couple of seconds passed as America accelerated.
“Sir . . . that thing out there is chasing us!” Mallory said.
It seemed impossible, but Gray could read the data cascading through his in-head windows now. An artificial world the size of the planet Mercury was using powerfully focused gravitational fields to maneuver like a starship. They’d already somehow twisted the local gravity fields to pluck America out of metaspace.
“The Rosetters appear to have come up with something new in their bag of tricks. Helm . . . try to loop us past Heimdall, then on in past Bifrost. Close a pass as you can manage.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
America pitched and shuddered.
“What was that?”
Mallory shook his head. “Some kind of gravitic weapon, Admiral. They just collapsed a pocket of space a few hundred meters off our aft dorsal spine.” The ship lurched again, sickeningly. “And some kind of antimatter beam. Antiprotons, looks like.”
“Evasive maneuvering. Don’t let them get a solid lock! Shields at max.”
“Yessir. Screens are handling the antiproton stream. I don’t think there’s anything we can do about that gravity cruncher, though.”
It was clear America didn’t stand a chance in hell of fighting that thing straight-up. Maybe, though, they could take advantage of what amounted to the local terrain . . . the gas giant and its coterie of moons, including the Earth-sized Heimdall.
“Sir! Incoming communications! It’s the Lucas!”
Gray had to think a moment. Lucas? That was the stealth assault-lander with the Lexington. Lieutenant Zhou. “Let’s hear it.”
“It’s not a voice transmission, Admiral. Automatic datastream.”
“Route it through ship’s AI.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”