by Ian Douglas
The Consciousness would withdraw to its home cluster and consider what was to be done.
But it would return to continue the Great Work.
TC/USNA CVS America
Flag Bridge
Kapteyn’s Star
0235 hours, TFT
“Belay the abandon ship order,” Gray said. He was checking the damage control readouts. The ship was terribly hurt, but life support and power were still functioning. About half of her crew had made it off the ship so far. They would be safer back on the ship. “Bring our people back on board.”
“I’m not sure that’s wise,” Gutierrez said. “We have our work cut out for us, Admiral. According to these numbers, we’re falling toward Bifrost.”
“How long do we have?”
“Fifty hours . . . maybe more.”
“Hell, I thought you meant it was serious. We can work with that.”
“I thought we’d use the fighters . . . the ones that are left. Attach towlines and have them nudge us into Heimdall orbit.”
“We’ll have to kill this spin first.”
“We have enough reaction mass for that. We might even be able to use it to achieve a stable orbit, with some help.”
Gray nodded. America carried a vast reservoir of water in her shield cap, which served both the crew’s water needs and as reaction mass for the lower-tier maneuvering thrusters. Most of that water had vented to space, but the shield cap was partitioned, and some water remained.
“I can’t believe we won,” Gutierrez said, staring at the overhead screens. As America continued her tumble, Heimdall alternated with Bifrost and then the shrunken red glare of Kapteyn’s Star, one following the next through the slow-spinning sky.
“Have we?” Gray asked her.
“They ran. They left us in possession of the battlefield.”
“I think we surprised them,” Gray said. “But they still could have squashed us like bugs.”
“Konstantin says we won.”
“Konstantin is . . .” He stopped. He’d been about to say “a liar,” but that was scarcely diplomatic. “Konstantin sometimes tells us what we most want to hear,” he said instead.
The e-virus, Gray realized, was in many ways very much like the organic bacteria, Paramycoplasma subtilis, that had infected him. Artificial . . . designed to communicate with an alien species . . . and surprisingly intelligent. The Gaki-borne e-virus lived off machine technology as Paramycoplasma had lived off him.
That gave rise to an interesting thought. While he’d been in Bethesda, he’d downloaded an article from the hospital library Net about microorganisms and, specifically, about parasites—life forms that lived off host life forms without killing them as traditional predators did. On Earth, parasites ran the gamut from protozoa, viruses, and bacteria through to plants—mistletoe was an example—as well as animals, like flukes, tapeworms, and female mosquitoes. He’d been startled to learn that well over half of all organisms on Earth were parasites.
Was there any reason to assume that life throughout the galaxy wasn’t the same . . . that half of the organisms out there were somehow living on or inside or off of other creatures?
He remembered the Agletsch—highly intelligent, spidery, multi-legged beings . . . or at least the females were. The males were tadpole-sized external parasites growing on the female’s skin, living off her blood and completely devoid of intelligence.
There must be others like Paramycoplasma subtilis, and others stranger by far.
And how many of those, he wondered, might be intelligent?
Paramycoplasma subtilis and the Gaki-riding Omega Code might, in fact, be the rule, not the exception.
The thought gave him a shiver as he tried to imagine a liver fluke developing a star-faring technology. As he tried to imagine communicating with it.
That downloaded article, he recalled, had included a quote by British geneticist and evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane: “Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
The universe was a very strange place indeed.
“Admiral!” Gutierrez said, breaking his reverie. “We’ve got company!”
Gray snapped back to full awareness. Were the Rosetters coming back?
Gutierrez pointed, and Gray saw specks of light. As the screen magnified them, he saw familiar shapes—the Constitution . . . the Chinese Guangdong . . . the Pan-European Agosta . . .
. . . and the Lexington.
“America, America, this is the Lexington,” a familiar voice said in Gray’s mind. “Do you read?”
“Laurie?” Gray asked. “Laurie, is that you?”
“Hello, Trev. Welcome to Kapteyn’s Star. You look like you’ve been through a storm and a half.”
“Something like that. You look pretty badly shot up yourself.”
“Captain Bigelow is dead,” Taggart said. “We almost lost the whole bridge complex. We lost power for a while, but we drifted into the outer system and were able to patch ourselves up. What’s your situation?”
“Here’s the down-grudge list,” Gutierrez said. “We have power. We have life support. We have some weapons. All drives are out. Reaction mass at twenty percent. What’s your status?”
Taggart gave him a rundown, and for a while, it was simply good just to hear her voice.
Still, though, the butcher bill was tough to swallow. Altogether, fourteen ships had survived the battle . . . but so badly damaged that they’d not been able to engage their Alcubierre Drives and escape the system. Ten others had been able to drop into metaspace and make for Earth, bearing news of the destruction of the Grand Unified Fleet.
The casualties had been . . . horrendous.
“It looks like you mopped up after us,” Taggart told Gray. “How the hell did you manage that?”
“Long story. I’ll tell you later. Right now, we could use some assistance. It looks like we might be falling into Bifrost.
“Roger that.”
“Let’s get to work.”
There was a hell of a lot to do. America’s spin had to be stopped, and the ship had to be put into orbit. A suitable asteroid needed to be found to provide raw material for America’s nanofabrication units. SAR craft had to be dispatched to bring back the fighter pilots whose ships were adrift and powerless.
And one ship, at least, had to be repaired enough that she could make the faster-than-light passage back to Earth.
Earth needed to be updated on the situation at Kapteyn’s Star.
And after that?
It would be time to go home.
VFA-96, Black Demons
Kapteyn’s Star
0550 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Gregory wanted to kill himself, but his ship wouldn’t let him. It ought to be easy enough—remove his helmet and ripple open the Starblade’s hull, exposing himself to hard vacuum. But the narrow-minded AI that controlled the fighter wouldn’t allow it.
It was trying to get him to engage the fighter’s drive and return to the America. He could see the carrier out there, a tiny, gleaming mote in the weak red sunlight, but somehow he couldn’t make his brain function, couldn’t engage the cybernetic links with the fighter to order alignment and acceleration.
After a time, his AI switched on an emergency beacon. It knew something serious was wrong with its pilot, and that it needed to get him to sick bay fast.
Eventually, a large, yellow shape closed with the drifting fighter. Gregory became aware of it when its shadow fell across his fighter. He knew at once what it was—a Search and Rescue boat off the America, looking for stragglers like him.
“Oh, shit . . .”
TC/USNA CVS America
Admiral’s Quarters
Kapteyn’s Star
0940 hours, TFT
“That,” Gray said, “was incredible. A real toe curler.”
Laurie Taggart snuggled closer, and mmphed something that sounded like agreement. Awash in afterglow, Gray strok
ed her bare back.
The repairs were under way. America’s rotation had been arrested, she’d been gently nudged into orbit around Heimdall, and repair tugs were in the process of collecting both small asteroids and some of the wreckage drifting now through this volume of space—resources for the nanufactories that promised to get America shipshape once more. Repairs were proceeding on the other damaged ships as well. With luck, they might return to Earth as early as two weeks from now.
And then, Gray reflected, it would be time to try to repair his career . . . if that was even possible.
Somehow, right now, that part of things didn’t seem all that important.
“It’s good to be with you again,” he told Taggart. “Thank you for coming and rescuing us.”
She laughed, a delightful sound. “Any time, Admiral. Thanks for coming and joining the party.” She grew suddenly more serious. “Thank you for finding a way to stop those . . . those . . .”
“Alien gods?” he teased.
She made a face. “‘Dark mind’ seems more appropriate. I think they’re out to remake the whole galaxy in their image . . . and they don’t care much about the lesser life forms that might be in the way.”
“I think we’ve given them a setback,” Gray told her, “but it won’t be for long. We’ve still got to find a way to talk to them. To make them take us seriously. . . .”
“I think that’s exactly what you did.”
“Maybe . . .”
“What are you thinking?”
“That the deeper into the galaxy we go, the more we’re likely to meet . . . beings, civilizations, that are godlike in every way that counts. It’s inevitable, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been out among the stars for . . . what? Less than three hundred years. And more and more we’re encountering alien species that we can just begin to understand, but can’t possibly match in terms of technological development. They’re utterly beyond us . . . like gods.”
“The Agletsch? The Turusch? They’re at about our level of technology.”
“Don’t count. Turns out the various Sh’daar species were in a kind of technological holding pattern thanks to some intelligent germs afraid of the Singularity. Kind of humbling, actually.”
“We’ve encountered hundreds of species that don’t even have technology. Not as we understand it, anyway.”
“True. It’s hard to build spaceships if you live in an ice-covered planetary ocean and can’t discover fire or chipped flint. But the reality is that the galaxy belongs to species that have been developing science and technology for way, way longer than three centuries. We were kind of spoiled by interacting with a handful of alien races that were more or less at our stage of development. We didn’t realize that that was a very poor statistical sampling. On average, any new species we meet out here is going to be millions or billions of years more advanced than we are. They’ll be able to think rings around us . . . probably aren’t even organic any longer. And they’ll have motives and goals and plans that we can’t even begin to understand . . . any more than a six-week-old baby can understand politics or war.”
“Maybe,” she told him. “But the baby can grow up.”
“I hope so. We’ll have to grow up, learn to play nice with others . . . and maybe we can sit at the big people’s table someday.”
If we live that long, he added to himself. If we don’t piss them off and we live that long.
But at that moment he was not confident of Humankind’s future.
Epilogue
25 January 2426
Court-Martial Board
SupraQuito Fleet Base
Geosynchronous Station
Earth Orbit
1545 hours, TFT
When he was summoned, Admiral Trevor “Sandy” Gray walked between the two Marine sentries and into the spacious room located in the fleet HQ perched at the geosynch point of Earth’s space elevator. The base occupied a slow-turning habitat wheel, providing spin-gravity equal to about one G; the deck-to-overhead viewalls in the compartment showed the scene outside—a three-quarters-full Earth swathed in the dazzling sweep and stippling of white clouds—with the rotation corrected.
Three senior Naval officers in full-dress sat behind the low table at the far end of the room—the men who would determine the future of Gray’s naval career.
They were surprisingly senior. Admiral Kelly Andrews was the commanding officer for DeepSpaceNet, which handled all naval communications. Admiral William Norton was the second-in-command of Naval Intelligence.
But the real surprise was Admiral Gene Armitage, head of the USNA Joint Chiefs of Staff, the number-one military advisor to the president.
There were others quietly waiting in the room—his lawyers and the prosecuting attorney and his staff, both present courtesy of the Judge Advocate General Corps.
As Gray took his place on the invisible mark in front of the desk, a bit of military historical trivia tugged at his awareness. Back in the days of wooden ships and iron men—the sailing vessels that had beaten Napoléon’s empire and struggled for mastery of Earth’s seas—an officer brought before a court-martial board surrendered his sword at the beginning of the proceedings. Once deliberations were complete and he was called back into the room to hear the board’s verdict, he could immediately tell whether he’d been found guilty or not guilty before a word was spoken. His sword, sheathed in its scabbard, would be lying on the table in front of the board. If he’d been exonerated, the hilt of the sword would be toward him; if he was guilty, the hilt would be toward his judges.
That had been another era, of course, one lost some six centuries in the past. Naval officers no longer wore swords, even for dress occasions. Gray had no clue how the deliberations had gone.
He had reason to be confident, of course. President Koenig had put in a good word for him, as had Konstantin. Armitage, he knew, was a close friend and confidant of the president.
And, after all, events had worked out for the good . . . for as much good as was possible under the circumstances, at any rate.
But Gray was enough of a realist to know that the outcome was not a foregone conclusion.
“Admiral Gray,” Armitage said as Gray came to attention. “You have been charged with one count each of disobedience to lawful orders and of command negligence. During the deliberations of this board, we have taken into account your exceptional record, your personal character, and the support of people outside this court, including the president and one of his most important personal advisors.
“By taking your vessel to the star system KIC 8462852 you significantly weakened the force deployed to Kapteyn’s Star, a force subsequently largely destroyed in combat with the so-called Rosette entity. However, we recognize various extenuating circumstances that brought you to the point of making certain command decisions necessary to the successful completion of your mission.”
They’re going to let me off! Gray thought.
“It is the decision of this court,” Armitage continued, “that the charge of command negligence be dropped. However, we do find you guilty of willful disobedience to lawful orders. It is the decision of this court that you be reduced in rank to captain, and that you tender your resignation from the USNA naval service, effective immediately. . . .”
There was more . . . a lot more, but Gray scarcely heard any of it. After more than twenty-five years of service, he was being kicked out, “on the beach” as the old Navy liked to say.
Disobedience to orders wasn’t usually subject to a penalty as harsh as being cashiered, either. A slap on the wrist, a “don’t do that again . . .” He would have understood that, and he would have understood harsher punishments had things not worked out as well as they had at Kapteyn’s Star.
But, damn it, he’d done the right thing. And they were all but throwing the book at him.
At least he wasn’t going to reprogramming therapy.
He thanked the court. He saluted smartl
y. He turned in a sharp about-face and marched out the door.
What else was there to do?
It wasn’t until several hours later, while he was going through his desk on board America in her spacedock berth, that Konstantin’s voice spoke in his mind.
“Admiral Gray?”
“Not anymore,” he said, the words sounding more bitter than he’d meant. “What do you want?”
“We need to talk,” the AI told him, “about the next phase of your career. . . .”
And despite his anger, Gray listened.
About the Author
IAN DOUGLAS is one of the pseudonyms for writer William H. Keith, New York Times bestselling author of the popular military science fiction series The Heritage Trilogy, The Legacy Trilogy, The Inheritance Trilogy, The Star Corpsman, and the ongoing Star Carrier series. A former naval corpsman, he lives in Pennsylvania.
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By Ian Douglas
Star Carrier
Earth Strike
Center of Gravity
Singularity
Deep Space
Dark Matter
Deep Time
Dark Mind
Andromedan Dark
Altered Starscape
Star Corpsman
Bloodstar
Abyss Deep
The Galactic Marines Saga
The Heritage Trilogy
Semper Mars
Luna Marine
Europa Strike
The Legacy Trilogy
Star Corps