Kitabı oku: «Centre of Gravity»
Vermin …
The All of Us race was unaccustomed to dealing with other sentient species. One of the primary reasons for this was, simply, their size; by almost any standards, the H’rulka were giants.
An adult H’rulka consisted of a floatation gas bag measuring anywhere from two to three hundred meters across, with brain, locomotion and feeding organs, sensory apparatus and manipulators clustered at the bottom. Most other sentient species with which they’d had direct experience possessed roughly the same size and mass ratio to a H’rulka as an ant compared to a human.
When the H’rulka thought of other life forms as “vermin,” the thought was less insult than it was a statement of fact, at least as they perceived it. Within the complex biosphere of the H’rulka homeworld, there were parasites living on each All of Us colony that were some meters across. H’rulka simply found it difficult to imagine creatures as intelligent that were almost literally beneath their notice in terms of scale.
“Commence acceleration,” Ordered Ascent directed. “We will move into the region of heavy radio transmission, and destroy targets of opportunity as they present themselves.”
The H’rulka warship, more than twenty kilometers across, began falling toward Sol, the inner system, and Earth.
To Brea, my guiding star
Table of Contents
Vermin …
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue
By Ian Douglas
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
12 December 2404
Emergence, Arcturus System
36.7 light years from Earth
0310 hours, TFT
The recon probe emerged from its Alcubierre bubble of tightly warped space, bleeding off excess velocity in a burst of high-energy photons. An artificial gravitational singularity the size of a small dust particle and as massive as a star flicked on and off a few meters beyond the craft’s bulbous nose, dragging it forward with an acceleration of nearly five thousand standard gravities. At that rate, the craft would be crowding the speed of light within another one hundred minutes.
Only slightly larger than a VG–10 Krait smart missile, the ISVR–120 probe was too small to carry sentient organics; its pilot was a Gödel 2500 artificial intelligence packed into the solid-state circuitry that filled the pod’s core and so, technically, could be said to take up no space at all. Certainly it needed none of the bulky life-support equipment necessary for organic life.
The AI was called Alan, named after Alan Turing, one of the giants in the development of the first computers four and a half centuries earlier.
Within seconds of the probe craft’s emergence from the warp bubble, Alan had scanned the system ahead, a volume of space dominated by a single bloated and brilliant orange star. The Confederation Naval Standard Ephemeris entry on the star resided within Alan’s surface memory.
STAR: Alpha Boötis
COORDINATES: RA: 14h 15m 39.7s Dec: +19˚ 10’ 56” D 11.24p
ALTERNATE NAMES: Arcturus, Alramech, Abramech, 16 Boötes
TYPE: K1.5IIIFe–0.5
MASS: 3.5 Sol; RADIUS: 25.7 Sol; LUMINOSITY: 210 Sol (Optical 113 Sol)
SURFACE TEMPERATURE: ~4300oK
AGE: 9.7 billion years
APPARENT MAGNITUDE (SOL): –0.04; ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE: –0.29
DISTANCE FROM SOL: 36.7 LY
PLANETARY SYSTEM: 6 planets, including 1 Jovian and 5 sub-Jovian gas giants, plus 47 dwarf planets and 65 known satellites, plus numerous planetoids and cometary bodies.
One gas giant satellite, Jasper, is of interest with somewhat earthlike conditions due to gravitational/tidal effects. …
Arcturus, depending on how one measured such things, was the third or fourth brightest star in the night skies of Earth, a bright orange point at the base of the kite-shape of the constellation Boötis. From Alan’s emergence point some eighteen astronomical units out, Arcturus was a dazzling gold-orange beacon 113 times brighter than Sol would have been at the same distance. At infrared wavelengths, Arcturus was even brighter, flooding ambient space with sullen heat.
Alan’s primary objective lay almost directly beyond the star from his emergence point. His final approach would be masked by the star’s glare … if everything went right.
By the time Alan had traveled a third of the distance toward Arcturus—some 900 million kilometers—he was moving at a hair better than 99 percent of the speed of light. Velocity transformed his view of the surrounding universe, compressing it into a circle of light dead ahead—most of it infrared light from Arcturus, blue-shifted into optical wavelengths. The AI’s sensory correction program, however, was able to untangle the flood of speed-distorted light into its separate components and correct for the distortion. His velocity also distorted time, by seven to one at this velocity. Each passing minute for Alan was seven in the universe outside; it created the illusion that he was hurtling deeper into the Arcturus system much faster than he actually was.
Some two hundred minutes objective after entering the Arcturus system, Alan passed the star, skimming the giant’s photosphere. The probe’s electromagnetic shielding deflected the worst of ionizing radiation but had little effect on radiant heat. Briefly, the probe’s hull struggled with temperatures approaching 900 degrees Celsius. Nanotechnic currents within the hull laminates helped distribute the heat, radiating much of it harmlessly astern.
And then the star—its monstrous, turbulent, and roiling girth nearly twenty-six times larger than Sol’s—fell away behind, red-shifting abruptly to a near-invisibility, illuminated at optical wavelengths solely by red-shifted X-rays.
Alan’s objective now lay directly ahead, 20 astronomical units out.
Long-range detectors were already picking up ships, enemy ships, though at this distance those images were more than two and a half hours old. As expected, most of the enemy targets were grouped closely around a Jupiter-sized gas giant, listed in the database as Alchameth, and its Earth-sized moon, Jasper. Orbiting the moon was Arcturus Station, a terraforming base established by the Confederation three years ago to begin the process of turning Jasper into a human-habitable world.
But fourteen months ago, the Turusch had come. A Confederation naval task force stationed here had been all but wiped out, the orbital station had been captured. So far as could be gathered, nearly six thousand technicians, planetologists, xenologists, terraform specialists, and first-down colonists on the station—men, women, and children—had been butchered.
The probe’s sensors were picking up the faint reflected gleams of Arcturus Station two hundred kilometers above Jasper, and two Beta-class Turusch battleships hanging close alongside, each a small asteroid, crater-pocked and immense. Numerous smaller vessels swarmed in the giants’ shadows—Juliet- and Kilo-class cruisers.
If more distant Turusch warships were positioned far enough from Alchameth that they could have observed the emergence flash of the probe on the far side of Arcturus, there was no sign … though he was picking information out of light that had left Arcturus Station less than an hour after his entry into the system. A warning might well be on its way to those docked warships from sentries more than a light hour away.
Long minutes crawled past. The probe was hurtling toward the enemy vessels out of the glare of the local star, invisible … but before long the Turusch sensors would detect the distortions in space caused by the probe’s enormous AGM, its artificial gravitational mass. For a time, Alan considered the possibility that they simply weren’t looking in his direction, that he was not going to be noticed at all … and then the smaller warships alongside Arcturus Station began accelerating. Moments later, a cloud of missiles streaked in his direction. Alan began shifting the singularity drive randomly in different directions, causing the speeding probe to jink unpredictably. The time lag between his position and theirs gave him an advantage, time to calculate incoming trajectories and arrange not to be at their endpoints when the missiles detonated.
Alan’s recon pod was unarmed.
He increased acceleration, tacking additional nines onto his current percent c. Anti-ship missiles closed with him, and for a few moments Alan engaged in a deadly game of tag, jinking hard this way and that to confuse enemy missiles and defense systems. A nuclear fireball flared to port, dazzling and intense, the hard radiation sleeting across his screens.
Alan survived.
The gas giant Alchameth showed a disk, now, swelling rapidly as Alan’s sensors continued correcting for the speed distortion, becoming a vast, ringed and banded gas giant almost directly ahead. Alan focused on Jasper, visible now, high and to one side. A final course correction put him squarely on target. At 99.99% c, he flashed through the final 10 million kilometers in just 4.8 seconds subjective, passing Arcturus Station at a distance of just 315 kilometers.
He was prepared for the passage, with certain sensor collection heads extruded through the nano-liquid outer hull of the probe, trained on the enemy-held base, on the surface of the planet-sized moon, and on a large volume of surrounding space.
There was something else there … something just emerging now, not from behind Alchameth, but from within the gas giant’s seething, turbulent atmosphere, something unseen until this moment. Something huge …
High-energy beams lanced toward him as he passed, one grazing his screens and melting a portion of his hull.
And then he was past, speeding outbound at just less than the speed of light itself, as enemy ships and missiles scrambled to pursue.
But they needed to accelerate first, and would never be able to catch him.
Alan was injured, however; the grazing near-miss had burned out critical sensors, parts of his lateral maneuvering projectors, and his energy screen itself. That last was serious, because it meant that incoming radiation would fry his circuitry within the next few subjective hours.
Somehow, though, he needed to get the accumulated data from his near-passage of the station back to Earth.
And he was going to need to commit the AI equivalent of suicide to do so. …
Chapter One
21 December 2404
TC/USNA CVS America
Approaching SupraQuito Fleet Base
Earth Synchorbit, Sol System
1235 hours, TFT
The star carrier approached the gossamer structure with a delicate grace that belied the vessel’s titanic mass. Her hemispherical forward shield, pitted and scarred by innumerable impacts with dust motes and radiation, bore her name in sandblasted letters ten meters high: America.
Mushroom-shaped, the ship was 1,150 meters long. The forward cap, 500 meters across and 150 deep, served as both radiation shielding and as holding tank for 27 billion liters of water, reaction mass for the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. The slender kilometer-long spine was taken up primarily by quantum-field power plants, maneuvering thrusters, and stores; twin counter-rotating hab rings tucked in just behind the shield cap carried the ship’s crew of nearly five thousand. Around her, escorting vessels paced themselves to their ponderous consort’s deceleration, minnows in the shadow of a whale.
Thirty-six thousand kilometers ahead, Earth gleamed at half phase—with dawn breaking across eastern North America, while the Atlantic, Europe, and Africa lay in full light between swirls and shreds of brilliant white cloud. At this distance, the planet spread across just 20 degrees of arc pole to pole, appearing delicate and impossibly fragile.
More fragile still, though, was the web of orbital structures just ahead in America’s path. SupraQuito hung suspended on the slender tether of its elevator cable in synch-orbit, directly above Earth’s equator some 35,783 kilometers above the top of the mountain to which it was anchored. The structure—or interconnected series of structures, actually—was an enormous collection of hab modules, shipyards, orbital factories, environmental facilities, power plants and collectors, agro spheres, and docking facilities suspended between the elevator dropping to Earth, and the support tether leading up to the anchor some thirty thousand kilometers farther out.
From here, SupraQuito—including the tangle of structures that housed the Earth Confederation government—was visible, barely, as a thread-slender gleam of reflected sunlight, with constellations of tiny stars showing in the shadows. Some day, a thousand years hence, perhaps, SupraQuito would join with the other two space elevators, at Singapore and at Tanganyika, and become a true, inhabited ring encircling the Earth. At the moment, the entire massive structure appeared gossamer and delicate, far too insubstantial to trap the oncoming bulk of the Star Carrier America.
America herself was at the helm. The powerful AI residing within the carrier’s electronic network possessed far more memory and processing power—by several orders of magnitude—than did a merely human brain. Exact comparisons between the relative brainpower of man and machine were meaningless, however, and probably impossible to calculate in any case. America’s mind, if that was the proper term, was wholly focused on the ship, its systems, its functioning, its navigation and control. At the moment, she was judging the remaining distance between her prow and Docking Tube One at the SupraQuito Military Fleet Base now just a few hundred kilometers ahead, and her own rate of deceleration. With a closing velocity of 8.64 kilometers per second, she needed to increase the gravitational mass currently being projected dead astern by 37 percent in three … two … one … now.
America kept up a running dialogue with her counterpart at Fleet Base Approach Control, with every aspect of her vector checked hundreds of times each passing second. The docking facility was not stationary, of course. Its omega, its angular velocity, kept it precisely above its attachment point in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador. At synchronous orbit, this worked out to 3.0476 kilometers per second.
For ten long seconds, America decelerated. With the ship enmeshed within the gravitational field of the projected singularity aft, the deceleration was unfelt by the vessel’s passengers and crew. For them, the slowly rotating hab rings provided spin gravity. America slowed … slowed …
A final, precisely timed nudge from singularities to starboard gave her the necessary 3.0476 kps lateral velocity.
And with perfect choreography the massive carrier dropped into the sweet spot just five kilometers off the docking port, all singularities winking out before they could warp the delicate structure of the base. Grappling tethers, extended along the carrier’s length, reached toward the dock. America would be warped into her berthing space—an ancient seafaring term that had nothing to do with her space-bending Alcubierre faster-than-light drives. The tethers connected with grappling points along the berthing area and began to contract. A small fleet of powerful little tugs emerged from the base, taking up station and nudging the carrier toward the dock. Slowly, very slowly, the quarter-million-ton carrier was hauled into port.
While America’s AI was far more powerful in most respects than human intelligence, the ship possessed nothing like human emotion. She heard the cheers from personnel on her bridge and in her CIC, from lounge decks and ready rooms and flight decks where members of her crew had gathered to watch the docking. Most of them, evidently, were delighted to be home, though the carrier had only an academic understanding of what that might mean. America had been on extended patrol for the past six weeks, watching for evidence of further incursions by the enemy Turusch. Her admiral had been ordered home to attend a ritual that America did not understand at all, even in theory.
The tether cables continued to contract and the dockyard tugs continued to nudge, drawing the ship closer and closer to her berth. Braces gently swung out to arrest that movement with a jar barely felt by the humans on board. Magnetic clamps snapped home, and the debarkation tube extended from the berthing module to America’s quarterdeck, located in zero-G at her central spine, immediately abaft the shield cap and just forward of the still rotating hab modules.
“All hands, this is the Captain.” The voice was that of Captain Randolph Buchanan, America’s commanding officer. “Welcome home!”
But for the Star Carrier America, this certainly was not home.
This was a temporary waypoint, a momentary interruption of her duties, of her electronic life.
For America, home was always … out there.
Admiral’s Quarters, TC/USNA CVS America
SupraQuito Fleet Base
Earth Synchorbit, Sol System
1405 hours, TFT
“Why in a quantum-warped hell do I have to go to this thing?” Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig glared at his own image projected on the wall screen in his quarters.
“Your adoring public, of course,” a voice replied in his head. “They want to see you, shake your hand, and give you the worship due a conquering hero.”
“Bullshit,” Koenig growled. “I think it’s just more politics, and the sooner I’m back on America’s flag deck the better, so far as I’m concerned.”
“Harsh words from the man who saved Earth.”
He winced a bit at that. He’d saved Earth, yes, in what was now being called the Defense of Earth, a rare and hard-won naval victory just two months ago. But there’d been losses … terrible losses. And one of them …
“Let me see you, Karyn,” he said.
The room’s electronics projected a holographic image into the suite’s sunken living area, a smiling woman Koenig’s age in the black-and-gray dress uniform of a Confederation Navy rear admiral. She looked … perfect, exactly as he remembered her.
Exactly as she’d been before the high-velocity Turusch impactor had slashed through the military synchorbital base above Mars known as Phobia, wrecking Mars Fleet CIC, the fleet dockyard, and killing thousands of civilian, Marine, and Navy personnel … including Karyn Mendelson.
He’d recovered her PA, her personal assistant. Copies had resided within his own communications implants, and in his office on board the Star Carrier America, and elsewhere. When she’d been alive, it had been able to project an AI simulacrum, an avatar, of Karyn indistinguishable from the living person over any communications or virtual net links. PAs could project the owner’s image to field the flood of routine requests and calls received every day. Such avatars were smart enough to hold conversations and even make routine decisions for the original.
They weren’t the same, though, weren’t as responsive or as smart, and most important, they weren’t flesh and blood.
God, he missed her.
The image in front of him looked a little sad. “You really should see the psych department,” she told him. “You’re hanging on to the … memories, using them to keep yourself from having to grieve.”
“Since when did you get reprogrammed as a psytech?” he asked the image. He tried to keep the words light and bantering, and knew he’d failed.
“Karyn Mendelson had considerable psych experience,” the image told him. “She commanded the fleet at Arcturus Station last year, remember, before she was assigned to Admiral Harrison’s command staff.”
“I know, damn it, I know. I just … I just don’t want to lose you.” Again. …
“Alex, you have lost me. Lost her, rather. A PA simulacrum cannot substitute for a real human.”
“Maybe not,” he replied, stubbornly sullen. “And maybe you’re how I can … get used to the idea that she’s gone.”
“A psytherapy session would be better, Alex.”
“Look, I don’t want to talk about it now, okay? I’m supposed to be at this damned reception tonight. The Eudaimonium Arcology.”
“Yes, Alex.”
And that, he thought glumly, perfectly summed up the difference between a PA avatar and the real person—ignoring the fact that you couldn’t touch an avatar. The real Karyn would never have let things rest there, would have kept arguing with him if she thought he was doing something stupid. Her PA’s holographic projection, directed by certain software protocols, simply agreed with whatever he told it to do.
It didn’t help that the AI program, likely, was right. The Navy relied heavily on advanced psychiatric medicine these days, including the use of elaborate virtual psytherapeutic replays of traumatic events, to treat the casualties of modern warfare. He’d been through virtual simulations himself more than once. Nothing to it. …
He just didn’t want to forget her.
A comm signal chimed in his head. “Admiral?” It was his senior aide, Lieutenant Commander Nahan Cleary.
“Yes, Mr. Cleary.”
“It’s time to go ashore if you want to get there in plenty of time.”
“I’ll be right there.” He checked his inner time readout. Just past nineteen, Fleet Time, which was GMT for Earth. SupraQuito was in the same planetary time zone as the Eudaimonium Arcology, a five-hour difference; it was now 1409 EST.
Lieutenant Commander Cleary was stretching somewhat the need for urgency. Admirals did not ride the space elevator with the general public, which would have meant a two-hour trip down the express to Quito, and another hour in the subsurface gravtube to New New York. The admiral’s barge on board the America would get him to the Eudaimonium Arc in less than an hour. The invitation was for seventeen, local time, so he still had almost two hours before he absolutely had to leave. Cleary, however, like all good aides, tended to fuss worse than a nagging PA, and didn’t like to entertain even the possibility that his admiral would be late.
He wished he could blow off the invitation entirely, though. He was busy working on a set of tactical evaluations with Fleet HQ, and he didn’t have time for this nonsense.
But for military personnel an invitation from the president of the Confederation Senate himself was an order, not a suggestion, and Fleet Admiral Rodriguez would be there as well.
Better to go and get the damned thing over with.
Another chime sounded, and this time Karyn’s image appeared, his personal assistant serving now as his secretary.
“What is it, Karyn?” he asked.
“An incoming fleet communication, Alex,” she said. “You’re really going to want to see this.”
“Put it through.”
A window opened in his mind, and he felt the flow of the encrypted data feed. Keys within his implanted circuitry opened the message, and he found himself looking down on another world.
“ONI/DeSpaComCent to all units with Crystal Tower clearance and above,” an emotionless voice, probably an AI, said. “We have an incoming transmission from an ISVR–120 dispatched to the Arcturus system six weeks ago. Data is raw, with only preliminary analyses by this department. …”
Within his mental window, Koenig could see the planet and its moon. A cascade of printed data scrolled down one side of his awareness, but he didn’t need to read it to recognize the gas giant Alchameth and its largest satellite, Jasper. A bright blue targeting reticule marked a silvery pinpoint—Arcturus Station in orbit over a cloud-swathed moon. A dozen smaller reticules, each bright red, marked Turusch ships in orbit around Jasper.
His experienced inner eye took in the Turusch ships, each with its id tag giving type, mass, and readiness. Two Beta-class battlewagons, plus at least ten cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers. That was a fair-sized battle fleet, and suggested that the Turusch were waiting for a possible Confederation counterattack into the system.
Not that that was going to happen anytime soon. Confederation Fleet Command had been reluctant to re-engage the enemy. The Defense of Earth might technically have been a victory, but it had been a damned close-run thing.
The gas giant, simmering in the sea of radiation from giant Arcturus just 20 AU distant, showed the bright yellow, orange, red, and brown striations of atmosphere belts, whipped around the massive planet by violent high-altitude winds.
The scene moved jerkily, frame by frame, and the images were grainy and difficult to resolve. They would have been pulled from a seemingly uniform starbow of light by sensory correction software on the probe, and, as the voice had warned, hadn’t yet been massaged by the ONI analysts on Luna. But as the probe moved past planet and moon, the moon dropped from view outside of the camera angle and the probe’s optics began zooming in on Alchameth.
Another blue reticule appeared, highlighting something above the banded cloud tops. Koenig resisted the impulse to squint, patiently waiting as the images—drastically slowed by the relativistic time difference between the probe and the outside world—zoomed in frame by frame.
There was something there. …
Sunlight glinted, a silver-orange glitter above orange clouds. A spacecraft? The probe’s optical sensors zoomed in closer. It looked like a flattened balloon, but it must have been immense to be visible at this range, many kilometers across. And it was rising above the highest cloud layers, now, so it must be a ship … or possibly an aircraft.
A side window opened, showing schematics of a H’rulka ship, something encountered by humans only once so far.
Turusch and H’rulka ships together at Arcturus, just 37 light years from Sol.
The afternoon, suddenly, had become a lot more interesting.
VFA–44 Dragonfire Squadron
Approaching Columbia Arcology
United States, Earth
1655 hours, EST
Lieutenant Trevor Gray descended above the ocean, dropping toward the ruin of Old New York.
Linked in with the AI computer of his SG–92 Starhawk, his cerebral implants were receiving optical feeds from sensors grown temporarily all over the craft’s fuselage. From his point of view, his fighter was invisible—in fact, he was the fighter, hurtling through the early evening sky off the eastern seaboard of the United States. The winter sun had set twenty-five minutes before; the sky was still a crisp and brilliant blue, the twilight illuminating the dark rolling waves below.
Around him, in the crystalline sky, eleven other Starhawks traveled with him in close formation, each jet-black ship now morphed into atmospheric flight mode—broad delta shapes with down-curving wingtips carving through thin air at a sedate four times the speed of sound. They’d departed from the military spaceport at Oceana just five minutes earlier, swinging far out over the ocean to avoid disturbing coastal communities with their sonic boom. The Manhat Ruins now lay only a few kilometers ahead.
“Look smart,” the squadron leader said over the unit’s tactical channel. “They want a nice show down there. Cut back to fifteen hundred kph and descend to twelve hundred. Tighten it up, people.”
Commander Marissa Allyn was the CO of VFA–44, the “Dragonfires,” and flying the lead Starhawk, hull number 101. Until recently, she’d been the CAG of America’s Space Wing, though she’d never been confirmed and, just days ago, a new CAG had been brought on board. America’s fighter wing was still reorganizing, still licking its wounds after the terrible casualties suffered during the Defense of Earth.
In three groups of four flying wingtip to wingtip, the Starhawks dropped closer to the blur of blue-gray water beneath their keels.
“And … descending to eight hundred meters,” Allyn continued.
To port, Gray was aware of a smear of movement, the coastline of the old state of New Jersey, a stretch of ground until recently given over to swampland and mangrove but now swept clean, barren and forbidding. Still descending, they rocketed past the sweeping, broken curve of the Verrazano Narrows Dam, one of the megastructures raised in the twenty-first century in what had proven to be an expensive but unsuccessful bid to save the city ahead.
Still slowing, still descending, the squadron passed over what was left of New York City.
Forests of steel superstructure marking the largest building, the crumbling façade of the TriBeCa Tower, all rose above dirty, surging water. Vine-shrouded structures slowly eroding into the sea. Where once there had been a square-grid network of city streets, there were now narrow canals, canyons filled with water and the dark pockets of the coming night.
New York City had first been submerged three centuries before, when Hurricane Cynthia had smashed a half-kilometer gap through the Verrazano Narrows Dam and the sea—now twelve meters higher than the southern tip of Manhattan—had poured in. The vibrant metropolis had been smashed, then drowned; the shattered buildings still standing had rapidly crumbled into decayed ruins or been overgrown by green masses of porcelain-berry, kudzu, and other creeping vines, giving them the look of sheer-sided green islands rising with a curiously geometric orderliness from the sea.
Even so, the Ruins of Manhattan had been … home.
Gray had been a Prim, one of some thousands of people living in the Ruins outside the all-encompassing embrace of modern technology. For him, until five years ago, home had been the shattered shell of the old TriBeCa Tower Arcology, a torn and battered mountain passing now to port.
The scene, spread out around and below him now, however, illuminated by the pale glow of twilight, seemed alien now. The place was changed, shockingly so. During the Defense of Earth two months earlier, a Turusch high-velocity impactor had generated a tidal wave that had smashed north through the Narrows. Hundreds of the remaining buildings sticking up out of the water had been toppled, and a vast forest of tangled debris was now strewn across Morningside Heights, Yonkers, and the swamps of Harlem. Most of the building-islands, once covered by lush vegetation, were naked now, stripped of all life by the passing wave two months before.
Thousands of people—Prims and squatties, like Gray in his former life—had lived within the ruins, comprising a modern-day hunter-gatherer society largely ignored by the civilized folk inland.
Gray wondered how many had survived the tidal wave … how many of the people he’d once called family and friends survived.
And the civilized communities here had suffered as well. The tidal wave had swept across Morningside Heights, bringing down the kilometer-high tower of the Columbia Arcology. An instant after crossing the shoreline between the Manhat Ruins and Morningside Heights, Gray saw the mountain of rubble that was all that was left of Columbia.
Angela. …
She hadn’t been there when the tower had fallen. At least, he didn’t think so.
But he hadn’t heard, not for sure.
He forced his thoughts from that pain, focusing instead on his flying. At just above the speed of sound, the twelve spacecraft thundered across the Hudson River and past the Palisades Eudaimonium precisely on schedule.
The eudaimonium—the name came from the ancient Greek philosophical concept of perfect and complete happiness—was part of the Greater New New York complex north of Manhattan. Protected from the impactor tidal wave two months before by the towering walls of the Palisades overlooking the Hudson, it was the heart of the New City, a cluster of arcology towers, arches and skyways, domes, slabs, and floater habs housing 5 million people. Tonight, the local population had increased by at least a third. As the Starhawks roared past, Gray could see the lights and thronging crowds below, an ocean of people celebrating what had been rather grandiloquently billed as the “Yule of the Millennium.” The central Eudaimon Plaza appeared to be packed with celebrants; lasers arced across the sky amid the flicker and pop of fireworks. Tens of thousands of decorative lights created the impression of a galaxy picked out in reds, greens, and golds.
“Landing lights, people!” Allyn commanded, and the squadron lit up, twelve dazzling stars streaking across the darkening sky at five hundred meters. The sonic boom of the squadron’s passing must have rattled walls and transplas windows ten kilometers away.
The squadron over-flight had been timed to rattle those windows at seventeen precisely, kicking off the festivities at the arcology complex. Confederation Senate President Regis DuPont was down there, somewhere, as were the presidents of the North American Union, America del Sur, and Europe; a dozen Confederation senators; a host of VIPs from the military, from the Union capital at Columbus, Ohio; and even a handful of governors from extrasolar colony worlds—from Chiron, from Thoth, and even from Bifrost.
The party tonight was a very big affair.
Mission accomplished, the squadron banked and decelerated, making for the Giuliani Spaceport northwest of the city. A flotilla of civilian pubtran fliers was waiting for them there; the Dragonfires, too, had also been invited, though they’d be arriving at the party a few minutes late.
As he peeled off for final approach, morphing his Starhawk into landing configuration, Gray could only think about the person he’d left behind …
… About Angela.
ONI Special Research Division
Crisium, Luna
1201 hours, TFT
“What the hell do we know about the H’rulka?” Dr. Kane demanded.
“Not enough,” Wilkerson replied. “Not enough by about fifteen hundred parsecs.”
“Maybe your pets can shed some more light on the subject.”
“They are not,” Wilkerson replied evenly, “my pets.”
Until two months before, Dr. Phillip Wilkerson had been the head of the neuropsytherapy department on board the Confederation Star Carrier America. After the return from Eta Boötis, however, he’d been summarily transferred to the Office of Naval Intelligence—specifically to the xenosophontological research department, headquartered beneath the Mare Crisium on Earth’s moon. He’d brought with him eighteen Turusch POWs, and almost two thousand more had arrived shortly after—survivors of one of the big enemy asteroid-battleships disabled in the Defense of Earth.
The Turusch community now comprised a de facto alien colony occupying a former warehouse excavation two kilometers beneath the main Crisium dome, sealed off by airlocks and pumped full of a high-pressure atmosphere composed of CO2, sulfur dioxide, carbonyl sulfide, water vapor, sulfuric acid droplets, and a mist of sulfur. The mist constantly cycled between its liquid and solid phases at temperatures close to the boiling point of water. The Turusch home planet was hypothesized to be, as Wilkerson himself had once suggested, a less extreme version of the planet Venus, with a thinner atmosphere bathed in heavy ultraviolet radiation from its parent star. For almost two months, Wilkerson had been working with the colony, leading a small army of xenosophontologists, linguists, and ETC AIs, trying to learn how the Turusch thought.
The task, he’d long ago decided, would not be complete anytime in this century.
Dr. Howard Kane was one of his project specialists, on loan from the ONI’s XS department. An unpleasant man with an acidly sarcastic attitude, he seemed to specialize in finding exactly the wrong thing to say to his colleagues. Wilkerson so far had managed to keep him from communicating directly with the Turusch. That task was difficult enough without bringing ego and attitude into the mix.
“This Crustal Tower message,” Kane said, “says a H’rulka ship has been spotted at Arcturus Station. “But as far as I can see, we don’t know jack about them.”
“The Turusch have mentioned the H’rulka during a number of sessions,” a third voice put in. “They state that the two species share key philosophical concepts.”
The invisible speaker was a specialist AI variously called Noam or, sometimes, “Chom,” after the twentieth-century linguist, cognitive scientist, and philosopher Avram Noam Chomsky.
“There was nothing else in Alan’s recording?” Wilkerson asked.
“No. The AI known as ‘Alan’ effectively ceased to exist upon partition.”
Wilkerson nodded understanding. An artificial intelligence like Noam, or like the smaller and more mission-specific AI on the Arcturus recon probe, required a certain size, a certain complexity of internal circuitry and processing power in order to maintain the electronic version of consciousness. Details were still sketchy, but the ISVR–120 interstellar probe apparently had elected to split itself into four separate parts. The probe hardware was designed to allow such a division in order to guarantee that its memory made it back home … but the circuitry carrying those memories simply wasn’t adequate to maintain something as complex as a Gödel 2500 artificial intelligence.
The AI Alan Turing had in effect committed suicide in order to get its information back to Sol.
Kane dragged down a virtual window, which glowed in the air in front of him and Wilkerson. The data file with what little was known about the H’rulka scrolled down the screen. “Floaters!” Kane said, reading. “The presumption is that they’re intelligent gas bags that evolved in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.”
“Interesting, if true,” Wilkerson said, reading. “I’d like to know how they managed to develop a technology capable of building starships without access to metals, fire, smelting, solid raw materials, or solid ground.”
“What is it they’re supposed to share with the Tushies, Chom?” Kane asked.
“It is difficult to express,” Noam replied, “as are most Turusch concepts. It appears, however, to be a philosophy based on the concept of depth.”
“Yeah, yeah. They order things higher to lower, instead of the way we do it.”
“It’s no different than when we say something is second class,” Wilkerson said, “and mean it’s not as important or as high-up as first class.”
“It’s still bass-ackward,” Kane said.
“The three conscious minds of a Turusch are considered by the Turusch to range from ‘high’ to ‘here’ to ‘low,’” Noam pointed out, “with ‘high’ being the most primitive, most basic state of intelligence, and ‘low’ the most advanced and complex. For the Turusch, something called the Abyss represents depth, scope, danger, and tremendous power. We think the Turusch evolved to live on high plateaus or mountaintops on their world, with lower elevations representing sources of wealth or power—maybe a food source—as well as deadly windstorms. Abyssal whirlwinds, they call them.”
“So, if the H’rulka are Jovian-type floaters,” Wilkerson mused, “they might relate to the idea of the Abyss as the depths of a gas giant atmosphere. Hot, stormy, high energy, and definitely dangerous. A point of cognitive contact or understanding between them and the Turusch.”
“Sounds far-fetched to me,” Kane said. “Besides, intelligence couldn’t develop in a gas giant atmosphere. Absolutely impossible.”
“I’ve learned in this business to mistrust the phrase ‘absolutely impossible,’ Doctor,” Wilkerson said. “Why do you think that?”
“Because the vertical circulation of atmospheric cells in a gas giant atmosphere would drag any life form in the relatively benign higher levels down into the depths in short order,” Kane replied. “They would be destroyed by crushing pressures and searing high temperatures. There’d be no way to preserve culture … or develop it, for that matter. No way to preserve historical records … art … music … learning. And, as you just said, they wouldn’t get far without being able to smelt metals or build a technology from the ground up.” He smirked. “No ground.”
“But we do have lots of examples of Jovian life,” Wilkerson said.
“None of it intelligent,” Kane replied. “It can’t survive long enough.”
“Maybe.” Wilkerson moved his hand, and the columns of writing on the virtual window were replaced by the image received by the ONI a few hours before … a transmission from a burned-out interstellar probe that had dropped into the outskirts of the Sol System and beamed its treasure trove of data in-system that morning.
An alert with raw-data footage had been passed on to a number of government offices and military commands a few hours ago; the fact that the H’rulka were at Arcturus was big news. It meant, potentially, disaster. …
“Whether they’re gas bags from a Jovian atmosphere, or something more substantial,” Wilkerson observed, “they mean trouble. We’ve only met them once, but that was enough.”
The ongoing exchange of hostilities known as the First Interstellar War had been proceeding off and on for the past thirty-six years. It had begun in 2368 at the Battle of Beta Pictoris, with a single Terran ship surviving out of a squadron of eight. In the years since, defeat had followed defeat as the Turusch and their mysterious Sh’daar masters had taken world upon human-colonized world, as the area controlled by the Terran Confederation had steadily dwindled.
Most of those defeats were suffered by Earth’s navies at the hands the Turusch va Sh’daar, a species that appeared to be the equivalent of the Sh’daar empire’s military arm. Once, however, a dozen years ago, a Confederation fleet approaching a gas giant within the unexplored system of 9 Ceti, some 67 light years from Sol, had been wiped out by a single enormous vessel rising from the giant’s cloud layers. A single message pod had been launched toward the nearby human colony of Anan, just seventeen light years away, at 37 Ceti.
The Agletsch, the spidery sentients who’d been Humankind’s first contact with other minds among the stars, had looked at images from that pod and identified the lone attacking ship as H’rulka. The name was an Agletsch word meaning, roughly, “floaters.” They’d claimed that the aliens were huge living balloons that had evolved within the upper atmosphere of a distant gas giant like Sol’s Jupiter. The term H’rulka va Sh’daar suggested that the H’rulka, like the Turusch and like the Agletsch, were part of the galaxy-spanning empire of the Sh’daar.
No one knew what the H’rulka called themselves, what they looked like, or anything at all about them. Many human researchers, like Kane, were convinced that even the information about a gas giant homeworld was either mistaken or deliberate misinformation.
What was known was that a few weeks after the fleet at 9 Ceti was lost, all contact with Anan was lost as well.
If the H’rulka were at Arcturus, apparently working with the Turusch, it suggested that the Sh’daar had just upped the ante, bringing up some big-gun support for their Turusch allies.
“We could start talking to our Turusch about whether they’ve worked with the H’rulka before,” Wilkerson suggested. “It might give us some insight into how they fit in with the Sh’daar hierarchy.”
Three millennia earlier, Sun Tse had pointed out that a man who knew both himself and his enemy would be victorious in all of his battles. That might have worked for the ancient Chinese, but complete knowledge simply wasn’t possible—certainly not of beings as completely alien as the Sh’daar, the H’rulka, or the Turusch.
“Do you think that’s important?” Kane asked.
Wilkerson shrugged. “At this point, every datum is important. We’re not even sure why they’re attacking us.”
“I thought it was because the Sh’daar wanted to limit our technological growth.”
“So the Agletsch told us. But how accurate is that? And if it is, why? We call the Sh’daar polity an empire … but is it? Do the Sh’daar really control all of their client species, tell them what to do, who to trade with, who to attack? Or are the Turusch, and now the H’rulka, attacking us on their own? We don’t know.”
“The term empire serves well enough,” Kane said. “We may not need to know the details.”
“Maybe not … but we won’t know what we need to know until we winkle it out, translate it, and analyze it.”
“Well, let’s see what the slugs have to say,” Kane agreed.
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
“Enthusiastic? No. Those big gastropods give me the creeps. I keep wanting to reach for the salt shaker … a very large salt shaker. …”
Chapter Two
21 December 2404
Palisades Eudaimonium
New York State, Earth
1725 hours, EST
The spaceport’s pubtran flier touched down lightly on the landing platform, a broad concourse suspended several hundred meters above the ground in front of the Grand Concourse. Trevor Gray stepped out of the flier and stopped, momentarily transfixed by the spectacle below, a dazzling constellation of lights stretching from horizon to horizon. Near at hand, concentric circles of lights, illuminated buildings, glowing red and green holiday decorations and animations, and the shifting displays of adwalls all combined to create a bewildering tangle of moving light. In the distance, toward the southeast, lay an ominous swath of darkness punctuated by the light—Columbia, Manhattan, and on the horizon, the ocean.
Someone thumped his shoulder hard from behind.
“Move it, Prim,” Lieutenant Jen Collins snapped. “You’re blocking progress.”
Gray turned sharply, fists clenched, but then stepped aside as the others filed out of the flier. Lieutenant Commander Allyn was coming off the flier last, and was watching him. “Uniform, Lieutenant,” she reminded him. “This is a formal affair.”
“Ah, you should have let the Prim wear his jackies,” Collins said with a bitter laugh.
“Yeah,” Lieutenant Kirkpatrick added, grinning. “The dumb-ass doesn’t know any better. It’ll be fun watching him try to mix with our kind.”
“Hey, back off,” Lieutenant Ben Donovan said. “We’re all a bit nervous tonight.”
Gray looked down at his uniform, which was currently configured for flight utility—the plain and unadorned dark gray skinsuit worn by pilots jacked into their fighters—“jackies,” in flight-line slang. Angrily, he slapped the set-patch on his left shoulder, calling up a menu within his inner display. Mindclicking on Full Dress, Formal engaged the nanotechnic interface. With a somewhat tingling sensation, his clothing rearranged itself, tightening, unfolding, and taking on texture and color.
Confederation Navy formal full dress was a glossy black skinsuit, throat to soles, with an intricate layer of bright gold knotwork sheathing the left third of his body—arm, side, and outer leg, extending all the way from shoulder to ankle. His rank tabs glowed to either side of his throat, and a panel over his left breast displayed a fluorescent animation of awards and decorations. He’d only been in for five years, so the cycling award display was a short one: Confederation Military Service, the Battles of Everdawn and of Arcturus Station, and the newly awarded Legion of the Defense of Earth, with cluster for distinguished service.
“That looks better!” Donovan said, grinning.
“I feel like a damned adwall,” Gray replied, referring to the ubiquitous multistory display panels serving as animated or live-action advertising displays on the walls of arcologies and city buildings.
“But a squared-away, Navy adwall,” Donovan said. He slapped Gray on his gold-entwined arm. “C’mon! Let’s check out the party!”
The Grand Concourse was an immense, domed-over plaza of light, crowds, and color. At the near end, the boulevard wrapped around a depression, a terraced bowl well over two hundred meters across, with standing, sitting, and reclining room for some thousands of people at once. A touch and a thought could grow a chair from the floor, soften to a sunken lounger, or extrude tables complete with a seemingly endless variety of food and drink. Everywhere there was light; the Yule celebrations marked the holy seasons of at least three major religious groups, all of them festivals of light, and the air was filled with twisting, cascading, and shimmering veils of liquid radiance and starbow hues.
“Best behaviors, Dragonfires,” Allyn’s voice whispered in their heads. “Corders, secmons, and deets on at all times, and we will know if you switch them off.”
Several of the pilots nearby grumbled at that. Corders were recording sensors grown within the weave of military uniforms. If anyone got into trouble tonight, there’d be a full audiovisual record of the incident for the court-martial afterward. Secmons were security monitors, non-AI software routines designed to warn personnel about possible security breaches. Deets were detoxifiers. There were quite a few sense-altering drugs, scents, and beverages on display, but the micrometabolic processors nano-grown within each pilot’s brain would sample chemicals in the bloodstream, monitor sensory input, and harmlessly filter out the offending chemical before he or she developed more than a light buzz.
For the Navy, professionalism and decorum were the watchwords. Always.
As Gray descended into the crowded concourse bowl, he felt momentarily disoriented. Walls were grown as easily as chairs or appetizers, and could be called into being to create small and cozy alcoves or private spaces, creating a labyrinthine effect, and as walls and rooms came and went, it became difficult to navigate. Some walls appeared to be solid, carved stone; others were screens apparently of wickerwork or painted panels, or of woven vines or other vegetation. The air seemed to grow hazier, the deeper into the bowl he traveled. At the moment, the air glowed with a deep red light, though an ultraviolet component was making the black of his uniform fluoresce with a deep, electric shimmer of ultramarine. Overhead, constellations of lights gleamed brightly, mostly in red and green, for some reason.
There seemed to be no particular theme, save that of people.
The crowd within that one hall must have numbered five thousand—roughly the same as the crew on board America. He saw a few other military uniforms, most of them the richly patterned black and gold of senior naval officers, or the ancient red, white, and blue of Marine full dress. They stood out within the far, far larger number of civilians, who wore a bewildering array of costumes, from brilliant, swirling plumage, much of it glowing under the UV light, to swirling patterns of iridescent skin nano to complete nudity.
The men seemed to be more conservatively dressed, he noticed—formal skinsuits or robes, though there were a few bright-colored ones aglow in light or with pulsing animations writhing about their bodies. The women, though, all were spectacular in their multihued displays. One strikingly attractive woman in front of him was wearing a startling, meter-high headdress that appeared to be a spray of suspended fiber-optic threads, the light shimmering in a halo effect around her—and nothing else. She saw him looking at her, raised her glass in a mock toast, and winked.
The woman she was talking with appeared to be wearing nothing but white light, as though her skin has become brilliantly luminous, with stars set in her hair and hovering about her head.
“Someone is pinging you,” his personal assistant told him.
“Who?”
“I’m sorry. Her id is blocked.”
“‘Her’? A woman? Where is she?”
An inner tug gave him a direction. That way. “Range: eighty-seven meters,” his PA said.
Odd. Personal ids—the term was pronounced as a word, rhyming with “lid”—were normally open to all within the electronic world of personal assistants and implanted communications and information hardware. The ping might mean she was interested in him, or it might mean she was just curious, tagging his personal information. That she was not revealing her own personal data, though, meant she wanted to remain anonymous, at least for now.
Who would be looking for him here? If it was Allyn or another shipmate, their military ids would have registered with his PA immediately, a kind of personal IFF. A civilian, then … but he didn’t know anyone at this gathering.
Nor, really, did he care to. The only time in his life when he’d actually sought out civilians in the civilized parts of New York had been when he’d taken Angela to the Columbia Arcology in a desperate attempt to save her when she’d had a stroke. The inhabitants of the Periphery—the fallen-away outer fringes of the old United States, which included the Manhat Ruins—weren’t considered to be full citizens, and normally they didn’t have access to modern medical services. All but the most severe cardiovascular emergencies were easily treated in a modern medical center like the one in Columbia; in a Prim community in the Periphery, a stroke could kill you or leave you helplessly paralyzed.
He’d gotten Angela to the med center while she was still alive … and they’d repaired her. The cost, however, had been him, a ten-year term with the Confederation military.
Of course, the treatment had also cost him Angela. They’d done something to her brain while saving her … something that had shut down her affection for him. Or, maybe that had been an effect of the stroke. That’s what they’d told him, anyway, that that sort of thing often happened when old neural pathways were burned out, new paths channeled in. Whichever it had been, his once-wife had chosen to leave him rather than going back to the canals and vine-covered islands of the Ruins.
Hell, he couldn’t even blame her for that. She’d downloaded the skill sets allowing her to become a compositor, a career classification completely unknown to him. She’d moved north to New New York City’s Haworth District, he’d heard, and was living with an extended family there.
At least she hadn’t been in Columbia when the impactor wave had brought the arcology tower down. Or at least, so he hoped. He hadn’t heard from her since he’d left for the Naval Training Center five years earlier. He’d been told she’d moved to Haworth and that she didn’t want to see him … but he didn’t know.
“Shall I reply?” his PA asked.
“Negative,” he said. He couldn’t imagine this crowd having anything pleasant to say to him.
He’d tried to get out of coming tonight. Lieutenant Commander Allyn had told him yesterday, in the squadron ready room on board America, that he’d been volunteered for the fly-by show, with attendance at the Yule Festival afterward.
“Why me?” he’d asked. “I’ve got nothing to do with Earthies anymore.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the Dragonfires’ skipper had replied. “Maybe because you had something to do with saving all of their asses?”
That again. “Fuck that, sir,” he said, using the Navy’s preferred gender-neutral honorific, though ma’am would have done as well. “I was doing my job.”
“And maybe your job includes being a visible symbol of the Confederation Navy,” she’d told him. “Don’t give me grief, Gray. You’re on the flight roster, like it or not.”
And here he was.
In a nearby temporary alcove, Donovan was holding a young woman very closely indeed. She was wearing a sheath of golden, rippling light, and appeared to have extended the field to include Ben in her embrace. Gray looked away, embarrassed, and found himself looking into another alcove, this one with two men and a woman on a round sofa bed, engaged in some extremely passionate foreplay.
Angry, he turned his head again and strode forward, determined to find something to eat. He felt so damned out of place here. …
Within the Periphery, the necessities of survival tended to draw people into close, monogamous couples. Elsewhere, at least through much of North America, family groupings tended to be larger and extended, polyamorous, and impermanent. Throughout much of the background culture of the Confederation, the half-barbaric denizens of the Periphery were seen as amusingly quaint, or worse: as narrow-minded or even sexually perverted. They were commonly called “Prims,” which was short for “primitives,” of course, but the epithet held the double meaning of someone who was self-righteously prudish or closed sexually. “Monogies” was another derogative term for Prims who preferred a monogamous lifestyle; why would anyone want to restrict their life and their love to a single person?
Gray was neither prudish nor self-righteous. He knew other communities did things differently when it came to sex and marriage, and had no problem with the fact. Extended social group marriages and sexcircles simply weren’t for him. The thought of casually coupling with a woman he didn’t know—and couldn’t trust—left him vaguely uneasy.
A table extruded from the floor beneath an enormous transparency overlooking the Hudson was covered by dishes of various kinds, all of them pretty, few of them things he actually recognized. America had a decent mess deck and good food-processing software, but nothing as fancy as this. Some of the items actually looked as though they’d started out as vegetation growing in the ground or an aerophonics module rather than a collection of CHON turned appetizing by a molecular assembler.
He tried something green and crunchy with an orange paste spread across the top. Interesting …
“You are being pinged again by the same person,” his PA told him. His internal direction sense said, That way, toward an outside veranda. “Range: thirty-one meters and approaching.”
“Let her,” Gray said.
He kept eating.
H’rulka Warship 434
Saturn Space, Sol System
1242 hours, TFT
The H’rulka didn’t name their starships. A name suggested an individual personality, and the concept of the individual was one only barely grasped by H’rulka psychology. The H’rulka were, in fact, colony organisms; a very rough terrestrial analogue would have been the Portuguese Man of War … though the H’rulka were not marine creatures, and each was composed of several hundred types of communal polyps, rather than just four. Even their name for themselves—which came across in a hydrogen atmosphere as a shrill, high-pitched thunder generated by gas bags beneath the primary flotation sac—meant something like “All of Us,” and could refer either to a single colony, in the first person, or to the race as a whole.
Individual H’rulka colonies took on temporary names, however, as dictated by their responsibilities within the community. Ordered Ascent was the commander of Warship 434, itself until recently a part of a larger vessel, Warship 432. The species didn’t have a government as humans would have understood the term, and even the captain of a starship was more of a principal decision maker than a leader.
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
