B009NFP2OW EBOK (19 page)

Something was happening. . . .

Marine Perimeter

Tsiolkovsky Crater North Rim

Lunar Farside

1615 hours, EST

“Koblesky! Hernandez!” Burnham shouted. “We’ve got motion at Number Twelve-Fifteen!”

The Marines had put out some hundreds of robot drones across the north face of the crater-rim slope. Some were stationary sentries, white pillars capped by particle gun turrets and sensor arrays monitoring the lunar panorama to the north. Others were crawlers, moving on spidery, jointed legs, or fliers kept aloft in the light gravity by electrostatic repulsion with the surface. Linked in with the Tsiolkovsky Net, the robotic swarm sent back constant updates on enemy positions and movements, on weapons, and on those communications that could be tapped. These last were, of course, encrypted, but the Marines had a code-cracking resource right next door that could turn the most opaque communications code transparent. Konstantin had been relaying updates to the Marines on intercepted radio and laser com chatter almost as quickly as it got the raw signals. There’d been nothing of great value so far, but it still gave the Tsiolkovsky defenders a decided edge.

And meanwhile, the robots had been carrying out their own war across the blasted lunar regolith. The Confederation troops had loosed their own robotic army, and now devices the size of a man’s hand were ambushing one another with lasers, with EMP discharges, and with self-guided bullets releasing clouds of submicroscopic nanodisassemblers.

Motion at one of the sentry positions probably meant the machine’s optics had picked up the approach of another robot. If so, Marine robots would be dispatched to deal with it. Burnham linked in with the signal feed, however, looking through the robot sentry’s electronic eye.

No . . .
not
another robot. Humans—a dozen soldiers in heavy Confederation armor. Like the Marines, the enemy’s armor had photoreactive nanomatrix surfaces, and it was almost impossible to make out the forms as they slipped from boulder to boulder, from shadow to shadow, working their way up the slope below the left side of the Marine positions.

Koblesky and Hernandez were on that part of the perimeter with a man-portable CPG. They were linked into the tactical net and should have seen the enemy themselves, but Burnham’s warning would also alert other Marines close by, let them know the Confederation troops were up to something.

Lightning flared, silent in hard vacuum, a focused beam of electrons striking regolith and boulders in an intense burst of energy hot enough to turn the silica in the ever-present dust to glass. The armor of the lead Confederation trooper turned black as its reactive nano died, then came apart in hurtling gobbets of molten metal, ceramic, and plastic.

The close-up view in her in-head window winked off as the enemy fired a directed EMP weapon, taking out the sentry robot. Without the remote imaging, she couldn’t see a damned thing except the flashes of energy bolts striking among the boulders a kilometer or more down-slope. No matter. The enemy troops were precisely plotted now on her tactical map, and more distant sensors were now locked onto them. She did a quick trigonometric calculation with her in-head, then ordered Duncan and Salvatore to lay down some KK fire on that area. Burnham reviewed the positions of her own people, trying to decide whether to shift any of them to meet this new threat. The problem, of course, was that the threat might be a diversion, a feint designed to get her to shift to the west and weaken the east side of her perimeter.

“Task Force Burnham, this is Captain Raleigh, USNAS
Pittsburgh
. I understand you people need some help.”

Burnham looked up involuntarily but, of course, the blackness overhead was empty except for the sun. She felt a sharp, almost savage thrill. Naval support! It was what they’d been praying for all day.

“This is Burnham. I copy you,
Pittsburgh
. Where the hell are you?”

“L-2. But I can see you just fine on your tactical.”

Located 67,000 kilometers above the moon’s equator above the center of the lunar farside, the gravitationally stable L-2 synchronous point was a convenient place to park the farside communications net station and some logistics depots . . . and apparently a USNA light cruiser as well.

And, just maybe, Koenig was protecting the comm net array as well. If the Confeds were crazy enough to try to snatch Konstantin from USNA forces, they might be willing to try for other American assets up here as well. The three big colonies on the lunar near side—Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke—technically belonged to the United States of North America, not the Confederation.

But Geneva seemed to be having some trouble lately reading the legal fine print.

“Excuse me,” a new voice said. “Captain Raleigh? This is President Koenig. I’ve been monitoring Lieutenant Burnham’s combat zone feeds.”

“Sir, yes,
sir
!”

“Think you can take out the remaining Confederation vehicles without hurting our Marines?”

“Sir, the Marine positions are clearly marked. Yes, we can do it.”

“Do so. Destroy the remaining vehicles, then hold your fire. I want to give these people a chance to surrender.”

“Aye, aye, Mr. President.”

“Carry on, then.”

“How long were you riding me?”
Burnham shouted. Her face burned then, as she saw, too late, the double meaning. Riding could mean linking into a remote camera and communications net.

Or it could mean something quite different.

She heard Koenig chuckle. “Just a few minutes, Lieutenant. I would have asked first, but I didn’t want you . . . distracted.”

“No sir. I mean, yes sir. It’s okay, sir.”

“You’ve been doing a superb job,” Koenig told her. “Semper fi.”

And he was gone. Inside her helmet, Burnham shook her head. She knew that the president had been a Navy admiral—the hero of Arcturus and Texaghu Resch and the Six Suns of T
-0.876gy
.

She was a little in awe of him.

But she could indulge in the sappy reveries of teenage hero worship later. Right now, the Confederation troops were surging up the slope. There were still six Type 770s out there, hull down and well camouflaged, and an instant later one of them slammed an antimatter round into the ridge 200 meters to Burnham’s right and a little downslope. Harsh light seared the landscape around her, and her helmet optics blacked out to preserve her vision. When she could again see, the slope in front of her was alive with movement—the shift and crawl of active nanomatrix camouflage revealed only by minor imperfections in the visual effect as the armor bent light around the soldier inside.

Burnham tried to calculate how long it would take for kinetic-kill rounds to fall from 67,000 kilometers, and realized that the speed depended on how hard the crowbars were boosted from the cruiser’s railguns.

Crowbars
. She smiled at the ancient word, a reference to a straight, heavy length of steel used as a tool centuries ago. In the earliest years of the Space Age, kinetic-kill projectiles had been suggested as a deadly orbit-to-ground weapon precise enough to hit individual vehicles, powerful enough to punch through the armor of underground bunkers. A simple bar of metal, the weapon was as dumb as a crowbar . . . but if you could aim it precisely and accelerate it at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour or faster, it didn’t
have
to be smart. Whatever it hit was dead.

She didn’t have enough information to calculate the drop time. She considered calling Raleigh and asking for an ETA . . . and then the slope below blossomed in a line of incandescent white flowers, hot as the surface of the sun, expanding, unfurling, reaching into the blackness of the sky. There was no sound, of course, but seconds later she felt the shudder ripple beneath her boots as the shock wave passed.

Six Type 770s, six explosions.

She opened a comm channel to one of the command frequencies on which Konstantin had been eavesdropping. “Attention, Confederation soldiers,” she said. “Your vehicles are destroyed, and it’s a
very
long walk back to Giordano Bruno. I suggest that you consider disabling your weapons and coming up the slope slowly, with your hands up.”

She spoke English, but the enemy’s translator software would give them her message in their own language. There was no answer at first. There was a serious danger here, Burnham knew. The destruction of their vehicles might encourage the enemy troops to fight all the harder, knowing they had no other alternatives beyond surrender, taking the Tsiolkovsky base, or dying in the pitiless, harsh glare of the lunar sun.

And then there was the unpleasant possibility that the Confederation had naval forces on the way as well. Losing their Type 770s wouldn’t matter much if they knew they had a ride home no matter what.
Pittsburgh
’s KK strike might simply up the ante . . . and call down a rain of Confed KK or antimatter rounds on the Marine positions in return.

“Hold your fire, American,” a voice—a woman’s voice—said at long last. “We surrender. We’re coming up.”

“Excellent!” Koenig’s voice said. “A very good job indeed.”

Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex

Geneva, European Union

2240 hours, local time

Ilse Roettgen scowled at the data scrolling through her in-head display. The battle on the moon, evidently, was over, with nearly two hundred Confederation troops killed and over four hundred captured by a mere hundred American Marines.

It was not to be tolerated.

And now the American president wanted to talk with her. She dismissed the winking in-head flag with a thoughtclick. Let him wait. Let him sweat. In another few hours, it wouldn’t matter. . . .

She opened her eyes, returning to the diplomatic reception in the stadium-sized central oval of the Plaza of Light. The immense and iconic statue by Popolopoulis,
Ascent of Man
, towered overhead, one muscular arm stretched out to the heavens. Several thousand people were gathered in the plaza this evening, a glittering swarm of the Confederation elite, mingling, seeing, and being seen. The weather was perfect, the sky ablaze with stars—the fingernail crescent of the moon having set hours before. Attire ran the gamut from traditional-formal to nude, with many of the guests—especially the women—tastefully ablaze in liquid light.

The reception was for Chidambaram, the new ambassador-delegate from North India. He and his entourage were gathered at the foot of the giant statue, talking at the moment with Carol Spelman, the American ambassador.

The problem with the Americans, Roettgen decided, was their inconstancy. They whined and scrabbled for their precious independence like puppies in a box . . . but give them a measure of freedom and self-determination and they cried for Mother’s comforting presence.

Chidambaram and Spelman had just been joined, Roettgen saw, by a pair of those horrible spider-bug things . . . what were they called? Agletsch. That was it. She didn’t like them, didn’t like most aliens, but she did recognize political necessity when she saw it. For 287 years, the
Pax Confeoderata
had spoken for all of Humankind in a hostile and bewildering galaxy. The Americans—the old United States, at any rate—had helped create the Pax in the aftermath of the Second Sino-Western War and the cataclysmic Wormwood Fall.

And for 287 years, the Americans had bitched and complained about being part of a one-world government. A true planetary government? No . . . they wanted their
freedom
. July 1st and July 4th and Cinco de Mayo . . . fireworks and Bill of Rights and free speech and self-determination.

But they also wanted strength and order and, above all else,
security
.

And what they could never grasp was the fact that freedom and security were mutually contradictory. You couldn’t have them both, not completely. The best you could hope for was a half-assed balance between the two.

Their latest election had demonstrated an alarming drift in the USNA population toward secession and full autonomy. Koenig appeared to be a moderate, politically, but he’d been calling for greater independence, greater self-determination, for all of the states of the Pax.

And his speeches had sent shudders through the framework of the entire Confederation.

It was time to end this farce, before American dissent tore the Confederation apart. Earth, the Terran Confederation, needed to be united now as never before, strong and with one voice in the face of a hostile galaxy.

Seizing Konstantin was to have been the first step in the grand plan worked out by her military staff, and it had failed, but that was of little real importance. The capture of Tsiolkovsky base was to have been as much a diversion as anything else . . . and if it had gone as planned, it would have given Geneva some leverage in the coming negotiations.

But right now, Roettgen thought, Atlantica gave the Pax all the leverage it was going to need. . . .

Chapter Sixteen

13 November 2424

Washington, former District of Columbia

USNA Periphery

0710 hours, TFT

Shay Ashton looked up from the controls of the logger and planned her next move. Once, this had been one of the deeper and softer-bottomed of the swamps filling what once had been the downtown area of the old United States capital. Most of the water had been drained—the seacrete dams grown across the lower Potomac had enabled the pumping project to move ahead and reclaim land that, until recently, had been under half a meter or more of water. The logger was a titanic machine—each of its six wheels stood 6 meters high—had been brought in to begin removing the thick groves of mangrove trees filling what once had been open streets, traffic circles, and plazas.

Until a few years ago, the broad, central mall in the heart of the old city had been a swampy estuary under a meter of water at high tide, surrounded by the crumbling, clifflike ruins of ancient edifices and monuments shrouded in forests of kudzu. The city had been abandoned late in the twenty-first century. Sea levels had been steadily rising . . . and the First Sino-Western War has so thoroughly wrecked the U.S. economy that massive preservation efforts—sea walls and drainage pumps the size of skyscrapers—had been abandoned. Most of Florida had been gone by 2080, and
still
the seas kept rising. Eventually, the government in its new inland capital had decided to write off the wreckage of the coastal cities. Rebuilding them would have cost in the hundreds of trillions, and the nation, still recovering from the financial stress of the war, then wracked by the Blood Death plague of the next couple of decades, simply couldn’t afford it.

The Periphery was abandoned . . . at least officially.

And yet there
were
still people living there among the partially submerged buildings of Manhattan and D.C. and Boston—refugees with nowhere else to go, diehards who’d refused to leave, lawless gangs coming in from outside. Local government, at best, had been reduced to shifting alliances among warlords. At worst, there
was
no government, and tight-knit families had struggled for survival against anarchy in rooftop communes above the encroaching sea.

And for the most part, they were ignored by the government. For the most part too, the residents of the Periphery wanted it that way . . . no taxes, no Big Brother, no surveillance, no intrusive government regulations, hell, the whole thing was a libertarian’s dream. True, no police protection; no high-tech computers or communications; few modern toys; no food distribution; no health care . . . but the inhabitants of the Periphery had been getting along just fine for more than three centuries, thank you very much. Life here could be hard, but most Prims—or “primitives”—preferred that to giving up their freedom in a squeaky-clean world changing too fast for healthy sanity.

But change was coming in any case.

Shay Ryan had escaped the Washington Swamp over twenty years before, joining the USNA Navy and becoming a fighter pilot. She’d done well, too, winning a Navy Cross for her part in the Sh’daar War . . . but a few years later she’d resigned. Navy Cross or not, the prejudice inherent in the naval service had just been too much. Periphery dwellers had, over the centuries, developed their own culture and their own way of life, and this often put them at odds with people from the USNA proper. For most of her squadron mates, it seemed, she would
always
be “monogie” or “Prim” or “swamp rat.”

So she’d gotten out. She’d gone back to old D.C., married a swampy named Fred Ashton, and even taken his last name for her own—one of those cultural disconnects with USNA social norms that singled her out as something strange or dirty—a monogie, someone who believed in monogamous marriage.

Ten years later, Fred had been killed in a skirmish with marauders from the Virginia side of the swamp. Shay had led a number of her neighbors on a raid into Northern Virginia, wiped out the bandits, then somehow struggled on.

She’d been something of a celebrity with her neighbors, most of whom had never left the area. She also still had her military implants—nanotechnically grown circuitry inside her brain and various other parts of her body that allowed her to interface with a wide range of machines and computers. Various software packages and classified files had been deleted when she resigned, of course, but the hardware was hers. When Columbus had offered help in reclaiming the Washington Swamp, she’d volunteered, and her hardware had allowed her to link with and run heavy equipment like the Bunyan-425 logger.

Hell, it was just like her old Starhawk fighter. Just smaller. And slower. And unable to fly . . .

She was pulling a mangrove up by its tangled roots when Jeb Carstairs called to her over the logger’s radio. “Hey, Shay! What the hell is that?”

“What’s what?” She turned in her seat. The machine’s high bubble canopy gave her a complete, 360-degree view. She saw it.
“Shit!”

It was a troop flier, a big one, and not a USNA model. She recognized it, of course, even though she no longer packed a warbook recognition series in her in-head. Three times the size of the old Columbia Stadium, blunt nosed and massive, the UTT-92 Jotun troop transport was the size of a large cruiser, drifting in over the city from the southeast on silent electrogravitic impellers. Advancing slowly, it blotted out the early-morning sun, its shadow rippling across ground and water and the towering logger like the relentlessly incoming tide.

Stunned, Shay stared at the apparition for what seemed like minutes, though in fact it was only a few seconds. The markings on the slate-gray flanks identified the flier as Confederation, though Jotuns, she thought, were only used by the Europeans. It could carry a couple of thousand troops, and was heavily armed with turret-mounted lasers and particle cannons.

It appeared to be swinging around in order to touch down on the open expanse of the mall.

Ever since her husband’s death, Shay had kept a laser carbine with her when she was working. She pulled it from its holster now, switched on the energy pack, and opened the logger’s canopy.

Captain’s Office

TC/USNA CVS
America

Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

0813 hours, TFT

“We have a channel?” Gray asked.

“Affirmative,” the voice of
America
’s AI replied. “Certain aspects of the virtual environment may be difficult to interpret, however.”

“That’s okay,” Gray replied, bracing himself. “What is that old poem? ‘To see ourselves as others see us’?”

“ ‘To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church,’ ” the AI replied immediately. “By Robert Burns, 1768.”

“ ‘To a Louse’?” Gray repeated, curious. “That’s some kind of parasite, isn’t it?”

Data flowed through his awareness. There were three thousand and some species of lice—wingless insects of the order Phthiraptera, only three of which ever infested humans. Images accompanied the data, of crawling, short-legged ectoparasites as alien-looking as anything Gray had met among the stars.

The human-feeding varieties—head, body, and pubic lice—were rarely encountered nowadays, thanks to full-body mediscans and sanitizer fields; they were still a nuisance in some of the Peripheries. Yeah, he remembered hearing about them, now, from his years growing up in Old Manhattan. He’d almost forgotten. In Burns’s day, though, they must have been fairly common.

He scanned through the poem, written in an ancient Scots’ dialect that at times was almost impenetrable. He shifted to the translation to get a better sense of the thing. The subject of the poem, evidently, was a tiny louse seen by Burns crawling on the Sunday bonnet of a young and well-bred woman in church. At first, the poet scolded the minute creature for daring to set foot on “Such a fine lady.”

The final stanza was the one most often quoted. Translated, it read:

And would some power the gift to give us

To see ourselves as others see us!

It would from many a blunder free us,

And foolish notion:

What airs in dress and gait would leave us,

And even devotion!

A louse, it seemed, cared nothing for the difference between an aristocratic lady and a beggar. Both were sources of food, nothing more. To see Humankind through a louse’s eyes might show certain human pretenses for what they were.

Gray chuckled at that. He’d never downloaded Burns before, but thought he might need to read more of the man, now. The man knew
people
.

And right now, Gray was going to get to see himself as the Slan saw him, a deliberate exchange of imagery with the other side. He was hoping this might give him some insight into the aliens, help him understand them better.

More important, for this exchange of data, both the Slan computers and America’s AIs would have access to at least portions of one another’s databases. Communicating with a previously unknown alien species was not simply a matter of hooking up a translation program and substituting your words for theirs. How you saw the universe was at least as important as the language used in describing it.

“Are you ready, Captain?” the AI asked.

“Go for it,” he replied. “Open the link.”

The subdued lighting of Gray’s office winked out, replaced by blackness. Then, slowly, a picture began to build up, layer by layer, painted in pinpoints of sharp neon-blue light. The effect was . . . startling.

He was seeing, not the alien Slan, but himself. The idea was that, for both of them, seeing an alien through alien perceptions might be overwhelming, the data unintelligible. So you started simply, with what you knew:
yourself
.

He did not recognize himself, transformed, as he was, through the computer link with the Slan headquarters ship. The image in front of him was human-shaped, but lacked all detail and texture. He could see his nose—rounded and smooth—but the eyes were featureless swellings sunken within depressions in a blank face, the hair a vague, out-of-focus blur. There was no color save for the electric blue of the imaging. The entire body was frustratingly out of focus.

When he stared harder, trying to bring the picture into sharper resolution, he found his point of view actually descending into the shape. He could focus first on his shipboard utilities, then on his skin, then on the layers of muscle beneath his skin, then on his internal organs and the bright, hard tracings of his skeleton. He recognized the rapid pulsing of his heart immediately, behind his ribs . . . but what the hell was
that
?

It took him a queasy moment to recognize his own stomach, with a partially digested breakfast inside, reduced to semisolid sludge.

By concentrating in a different way, he found he could increase the level of detail. He could also get a strong three-dimensional sense, created, he guessed, by changing the positions of the paired Slan sonar organs. When he looked more closely this way, his implants showed up as bright threads woven over and through his brain, down his arms, and in the palms of his hands.

And there was more. Even when he focused on the outer layers—clothing or skin—he was aware of surging movement along narrow channels visible through the blue translucence, just underneath the skin and, in some cases, muscle. The sounds made by blood surging through veins and arteries, he decided, were adding an additional level of detail.

The Slan, by this point, Gray decided, must be fairly confused. The alien commander was receiving computer-generated images of itself as humans would see it, completely opaque. It occurred to him that the Slan might constantly be aware of other individuals as multilayered, as sum totals of skin together with everything inside.

It might also be difficult for the aliens, he thought, not to understand a species that didn’t have this three-dimensional understanding of another being as somehow lacking something. Seeing them as crippled, or even blind.

It took him a while to see it, but he did notice that the Slan were not
completely
blind to optical wavelengths. One of the levels of information he was receiving was a kind of dull, fuzz glow superimposed on the audio image. The scant data available on Slan physiology mentioned a primitive light-sensing organ on the central hump.

Gray wondered what they used it for, why it had evolved at all. They certainly got a great deal of information through sonar alone.

He allowed himself to pull back and examine their virtual surroundings. The two of them, human and Slan, were in a tube of some sort, smooth, with ripples on the walls that gave it a distinctly organic feel. With Slan sonar vision, he could peer a little way into the wall, seeing fuzzy layers and, beneath that, the bright traceries of deeply embedded electronics, the more massive pipes of the plumbing.

The effect was amazing in its scope and depth, especially in that the Slan and human were not really facing each other physically inside the tunnel. The computers—both on board
America
and on the Slan ship—were working together closely enough to reproduce a detailed virtual reality between them, one that would allow human and Slan to see each other as if they were only a few meters apart.

“Okay,” Gray told the AI. “I’ve seen enough, and it’s giving me a headache. Let’s switch back . . . whenever my opposite number is ready.”

“It’s been ready, Captain.”

Gray’s vision blurred, and then he was back in his own body, looking at the alien through human eyes.

In the aftermath of the alien vision, this was almost a relief. The Slan stood a meter and a half tall, but was almost twice that in diameter, most of its mass a large, wet mantle. He couldn’t tell if the thing moved on legs or tentacles, or simply slid along the deck like a slug. The perimeter of the thing, sweeping along the deck, was a roil of writhing tentacles, most of them slender and thin, like spaghetti, but six were somewhat longer, and three of them, evenly spaced around the body, were each 2 meters long and powerfully muscled. A translucent flap opened to either side of the upper body, creating broad, membranous cups when open. Ears?