Into the Stars (Rise of the Republic Book 1)

by James Rosone

  Riggs polished off the last of his sandwich. “Honestly, Admiral, I think some powerful corporations have made a case for why our country should withdraw. I understand their logic. They want to expand our footprint onto new planets and moons without having those communists in the Asian Alliance join us. You have to admit—they do tend to let us do all the hard work and then waltz right in and lay claim to their piece of the pie. You saw what happened in the Belt and on Io. We did all the work, and they got all the benefits.”

  Halsey drank the last of her coffee and finished her own sandwich. “I don’t disagree with you, Chief, but to be honest, I’m glad we won’t be here to deal with it. I have a feeling when the SET expires, we’re going to see a clash over these moons and planets we haven’t colonized yet.”

  Riggs’s left eyebrow rose at the blunt assessment. “Let’s hope not,” he said soberly. “Weapon technology has come a long way since the last Great War. Nearly two billion people were killed in the 2040s. I’d hate to see what kind of war we could wage with the weapons of today.”

  The two of them talked for a bit longer before they continued to make their rounds touring the ship. The rest of the crews and the soldiers would start to arrive in another week.

  Chapter Six

  Decisions

  Titusville, Florida

  Kennedy Space Center

  Republic Space Command HQ

  Vice Admiral Chester Bailey drummed his fingers on the table in front of him. The presentation was over, and he watched as Captain Miles Hunt and Dr. Katherine Johnson took their seats opposite him.

  Admiral Bailey liked Captain Hunt. He’d been an exceptional chief of staff; over the fifteen years they’d worked together, Bailey had even come to regard Hunt as a friend. When it had come time to select a captain for Space Command’s newest warship, Bailey had rewarded Hunt with the command of the Rook—the most powerful deep space warship ever built. It wasn’t a hard decision. Bailey was grooming Hunt to become an admiral one day, part of the little empire he was building.

  However, in that moment, Admiral Bailey felt blindsided by the information his protégé and Dr. Johnson had just presented. This secret mission Admiral Sanchez had sent him on threatened to derail decades of planning—planning he had spent the better part of the last ten years working on. Bailey looked around the room at the others. He could tell they were just as surprised—everyone except Admiral Sanchez. That old goat had probably had an idea of what they’d found days before it had been revealed to them in this room.

  When Hunt and Dr. Johnson took their seats, Bailey felt like he should say something before anyone else had a chance, gauge the room’s response to see how this news might change things.

  “This is incredible news, Dr. Johnson, and thank you, Captain Hunt, for safeguarding it,” Bailey began. “However, I don’t believe this should change our current plans.” Dr. Johnson was clearly bristling at his remarks; she looked like she wanted to challenge his assessment. Captain Hunt, for his part, kept a stoic face, shielding his thoughts on the matter.

  General Pilsner raised an eyebrow, but the Republic Army Commander was keeping his powder dry to see which way the wind would blow before he weighed in. Admiral Bailey watched Admiral Sanchez and President Roberts’s faces for any cues. They were the ones who’d ultimately decide what would happen.

  The President bit first. “How do you figure, Admiral? This is an incredible discovery. Surely you see that. Why wouldn’t we want to change our plans and move to lay claim to this planet?”

  Sticking his chin out a bit as he prepared his response, Admiral Bailey calmly explained, “Mr. President, if we deviate from the current Alpha Centauri expedition, the Asian Alliance and Europeans will not be pleased. They’ll swiftly piece together that we found something—something of high enough value that we’d be willing to give up a joint colony. Worse, it’ll kill any chance of us renewing the SET.

  “What’s more, we’ll lose out on any opportunities that may await us from this joint expedition. The Centaurus constellation is going to be a key launchpad to our further expansion and colonization of other worlds. If we deviate from our current plan, we’ll have lost out on that opportunity—possibly forever.”

  President Roberts shook his head. “The SET expires in a matter of months, and right now, there’s not an appetite within the government to renew it,” he countered. “Folks want to expand into space without having to partner with the Asian Alliance or the GEU. This is an opportunity for us to legally lay claim to an Earth-like planet that is only five percent larger than Earth. Do you realize the economic and colonization opportunities that would create for us?” He shook his head dismissively, adding, “I’m not sure we can pass on something like this, Admiral, nor do I think we should have to share it with the other alliances.”

  “Even if it means we sacrifice the SET?” Bailey asked pointedly. “It’s kept the peace for nearly fifty years. We’re stronger together as a race than fractured.”

  Admiral Jose Sanchez raised a hand. “If I may, Mr. President. Admiral Bailey brings up good points about the Centaurus constellation and the SET. If we leave the expedition, then we’ll lose out on any future exploration and expansion possibilities in that region of space. We’ll have ceded all future colonization of the region to the GEU and the Asian Alliance. We could also end up in a situation where they opt to renew the SET without us. That would be an even bigger problem for us strategically.” Something about Sanchez’s tone suggested he didn’t really believe what he had just said but had said it more for show.

  Admiral Sanchez was the overall Fleet Commander for Space Command, an extremely powerful position given that all Republic forces fell under his command and control. He was also starting to get up there in age, so there was a lot of speculation on who might take his place.

  Chiming into the discussion for the first time, General John Pilsner asked, “What if our ship had a mechanical failure and was unable to make the journey?”

  Admiral Bailey turned to scowl at the ground pounder. “Not possible. Even if we did have a problem, they’d just postpone the trip to wait for us if that was the issue.”

  “We could put together a second mission,” Dr. Johnson offered. “Let the group heading to the Centaurus constellation go ahead, but send a second mission to this new planet.”

  Everyone glared at her. She was here to brief them on what her team had found, not set policy. She’d spoken out of turn, but she had a point.

  “Is that possible?” asked the President, looking at Admiral Sanchez for confirmation. Roberts was in a tight reelection race; if he could somehow manage to appease all sides on this, he probably would.

  Admiral Sanchez sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment. Bailey figured he was using the neurolink to bring up an inventory of ships either in service or soon to be in service to see what they had available.

  Sanchez returned his gaze to the President. He said, “It is—but only if we scrub a couple of other missions.”

  “You’re not serious about scrubbing Venus or Europa, are you?” Admiral Bailey blurted out. He was barely able to contain himself at the thought of eliminating those essential missions.

  Holding a hand out to silence his second-in-command, Sanchez continued, “We’re supposed to launch the Europa mission in a couple of months and Venus a few months after that. I propose we use those ships for the expedition to Alpha, and we use the Voyager and Rook for this new mission.”

  Bailey shook his head in frustration. “As much as I’d like this idea to work, it won’t,” he insisted. “Those ships aren’t fitted with the FTL drives yet. We’re still close to a year away from having them ready.”

  “What?” Sanchez snapped, clearly surprised by this sudden announcement. “I thought we had retrofitted them already.”

  “They’re being retrofitted right now,” Bailey went on to explain, “but we hadn’t anticipated them being needed for the Centaurus expedition, so that hadn’t been
a priority.” He paused for a moment and sighed. “Mr. President, we’re incredibly short on FTL-equipped freighters and transports right now. Our shipbuilding emphasis was on establishing a military force able to defend our colonies and Sol. We’re still a few years away from having a small fleet of FTL-equipped transports and freighters, so we’re limited in what we can do right now.”

  Admiral Bailey was still annoyed that his proposal to build heavy transport ships for deep space fleet operations had been overruled in favor of warships. He had argued that without a transport fleet, the warships would have a hard time staying supplied, and it would slow down the shipyard’s ability to keep up with the grueling production demands. He was now being proven right.

  Having heard the various pros and cons, President Roberts leaned forward. “History may judge me poorly for making this decision, but I’m the President, and it’s my call. We’re going to cancel our participation in the expedition to Alpha Centauri and move forward with sending an expedition to this new planet Dr. Johnson’s team has discovered. The fact that there are signs of intelligent life on that planet only reinforces my decision.”

  Admiral Bailey quickly pounced. “Mr. President, we have to think about the balance of power in Sol and beyond,” he insisted, making an impassioned plea. “We shouldn’t throw away the SET or the opportunity of the Centaurus constellation. We can do both missions if you give us some time.”

  “Enough, Bailey!” Sanchez interjected angrily. “You may be in charge of fleet operations, but I’m still in charge of Space Command. If the President wants us to scrub the Centaurus expedition in favor of this new discovery, then that’s what we’ll do.”

  Admiral Bailey didn’t say anything further. He did his best to control his temper and emotions. So much for renewing the SET, he thought. The bastard never did like that agreement. He hoped that their leaving wouldn’t spawn a new arms race or worse, another war.

  “Then it’s settled,” declared President Roberts. “Admiral Sanchez, please inform the SET members that we are canceling our participation in the upcoming expedition. Tell them we’re running into some technical challenges with the Voyager, and as such, we’re not going to be able to deploy with them. Wish them the best of luck and tell them we stand ready to help them further down the road should they need it. In the meantime, let’s put together a first contact diplomatic mission to head to this new system.” He spent a few more minutes issuing some additional orders before concluding the meeting.

  As Captain Hunt stood, he saw Admiral Sanchez give Dr. Johnson a brief nod and smile. Why do I have a feeling this entire discussion was a setup? he asked himself.

  Chapter Seven

  Almost Human

  Alamogordo, New Mexico

  Walburg Technologies

  Dr. Alan Walburg looked at a string of code, examining it for what might have been the hundredth time. It just might work…

  Fifty years ago, when Alan was a robotics engineering student at the University of South Florida in Tampa, he’d had a vision. Maybe it was the psychedelic drugs he had tried at a frat party the night before, but he’d had a dream of what the future would hold. Robots and humans worked together for the good of the world; it was utopia.

  Then he had been drafted, like nearly everyone under the age of forty when World War III had broken out between the United States and China. Being a PhD student in robotics, Alan had caught the attention of some folks at DARPA and had immediately been selected to be a part of the Department of Defense’s revolutionary new surrogate program.

  DARPA had been collaborating with Boston Dynamics for decades to create a fully immersive unmanned humanoid combat drone. The humanoid could be operated by a human operator, called a surrogate, from a remote location or set to function autonomously through a complex AI.

  When this new technology was unleashed on the battlefield, the result was… horrific. Man’s killing of his fellow man had now become so detached that governments had humanoids to do the fighting for them. That was, until the fighting spread and consumed the whole world.

  When the war ended eight years later, many nations lay in complete ruin. Between the war and the famine and economic collapse that followed in its wake, twenty percent of the global population, a total of 1.8 billion people, were dead.

  Alan had somehow survived the slaughter. Most of his friends hadn’t. In the aftermath of the war, many Republic cities were in ruins. There was a critical shortage of skilled labor and able-bodied people needed to rebuild the nation and the world.

  A short while after Alan had left the military, he climbed to the top of the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico one weekend. While camping at the summit, he remembered the dream he had had at USF before the war.

  It was at that moment, with all the destruction the war had wrought, that he saw an opportunity to help his country. Alan moved to Alamogordo, New Mexico, and established Walburg Technologies; then he went to work developing the first-ever synthetic humanoid civilian worker. Unlike the military versions of similar design, his looked uniquely human. The only significant difference he incorporated into them was their eyes. While they otherwise looked human, they had a yellow circle around the iris, which helped to delineate them as synthetics. At first, he only made one copy, a man that looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. Later, he would go on to develop seven more versions: three more in the likeness of men and four resembling women.

  While the military had created humanoid surrogates to use as combat soldiers, Alan had finally figured out how to code and create a fully functional synthetic humanoid worker that could function and act just like a human, not a surrogate operated by a human. The first prototype he built was a construction worker. The Synth, as he called it, was programmed with all the pertinent knowledge needed to produce nearly any structure it was instructed to build. It understood plumbing, electrical, carpentry, electronics, cement working, and bricklaying.

  When he debuted his new humanoid worker to the world, it took off. In his first month, Alan had orders for more than two thousand units for a construction firm in Chicago, three thousand units for a firm in California, and two thousand units for a firm in Florida.

  What really astonished the country and the world was that Alan’s entire factory had been built by his own humanoid workers. Then his synthetics began self-replicating: working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, his robotic army was cranking out human worker replacements at an astonishing rate.

  Soon, he coded his synthetic humanoids to do more than just build buildings. He began to code them to cook, to clean, to handle all sorts of routine daily tasks in addition to the more dangerous and difficult work humans used to do. Within ten years, nearly every business in the Republic had at least one synthetic.

  By the mid-2060s, synthetics were working the farm fields of the Midwest and California, cultivating more food than the country could possibly use. When Alan had received permission to export his humanoid helpers, Walburg Technologies became the most valuable firm in the world.

  During a meeting with NASA, BlueOrigin, and SpaceX, which later became Musk Industries, Alan proposed using the synthetics in space. That’s when the whole idea of landing a man on Mars and establishing a colony on the moon really went into high gear.

  With several thousand of Alan’s synthetic workers, Musk Industries completed the space elevator near Walburg Technologies’ main factory in New Mexico in 2064, which paved the way for not only near-earth mining of asteroids but also deep space travel and the colonization of the moon and Mars.

  Just two years after the space elevator’s completion, BlueOrigin completed the first shipyard in high orbit with the assistance of more than three thousand humanoid workers. The Synths began building a fleet of ships that would help to colonize the moon and beyond, and as they say, the rest was history.

  Alan looked again at the newest piece of code; he was onto something. If he pursued this much further, he’d probably solve the problem. That was the b
enefit of living longer—he had retained such a wealth of information he could draw on. The question Alan was struggling with was a moral question he wasn’t sure he had the authority to answer. He had seen how autonomous humanoid combat drones had been unleashed in Beijing, and later Los Angeles, and it was something he never wanted to happen again. He was still haunted by the nightmares of the last war. But he was playing God with this new code, and he wasn’t sure what its unintended consequences might be.

  Alan had been the godfather of the synthetic humanoids that had revolutionized the world, but his latest project, fully autonomous artificial intelligence—not just AIs, but fully living AIs—presented new ethical and moral questions. These synthetics would be, for all intents and purposes, fully conscious, fully independent and able to think beyond their programming. They would be able to choose their own responses to questions, commands, situations, and anything else they encountered.

  How would the synthetics respond if they were suddenly conscious? How would they integrate into a society that, for better or worse, had used them as little more than slaves or serfs? What would they think of their former masters—a race of people who had tried on countless occasions to wipe each other out? What if he gave his creation this fantastic gift, the gift of free thought and will, and they suddenly turned on their human masters?

  No. He couldn’t risk it. Not yet. He needed to code in more safeguards. That would take time, but if he was going to one day give his creations the gift of life, he needed to make sure he didn’t doom his own species in the process.

  Chapter Eight

  Nefarious Intentions

  John Glenn Orbital Station