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Authors: Ian Douglas

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And the Sh’daar remnant had set out to make certain that a technological rapture of that sort could never again occur. GRIN technologies—Genetics, Robotics, Information Systems, and Nanotechnology—were targeted as the driving forces behind the Singularity. Block those, and the Singularity would not take place.

The war with the Sh’daar was essentially one of self-determination, with Humankind determined to continue developing all available technologies, with the Sh’daar equally determined to suppress those technologies that they considered to be threats.

But if the Sh’daar mistrusted technology that much, if they wanted to limit it, why would they assist younger, less advanced cultures in developing it? Why would they put atechnic species like the H’rulka onto the path of spaceflight at all . . . or help the Slan discover that they lived in a much vaster universe than they knew, and help them navigate the empty vacuum to other worlds? There was, Gray thought, a lot more to it than met the eye.

It was a seemingly insoluble mystery, but if there was a solution, that solution might be vital for Humankind’s long-term survival.

“Have we uncovered any other information that might point to the Starborn?” Gray asked.

“No,”
America
’s AI replied. “Nothing, at any rate, that we’ve been able to recognize.”

“Continue your explorations of the Slan databases, then,” Gray said. “ ‘Know your enemy . . .’ ”

“ ‘. . . and yourself, and you will win a hundred battles without a single loss,’ ” the AI said, completing the ancient truth. The aphorism was drawn from Sun Tzu’s
Art of War
. Gray wondered if the AI was trying to give him a not-so-subtle reminder that it was equally important to know
yourself
in order to win.

Right now, the intent of the fifty-two surviving Confederation ships under the command of Justin Lavallée was as unknown to Gray as the identity of the mysterious Starborn.

And he didn’t like being so deeply in the dark.

Executive Office, USNA

Columbus, District of Columbia

United States of North America

1235 hours, EST

The conference in Koenig’s office had been going on for almost half an hour, now. Present were Koenig’s chief of staff, the secretary of state, and the Executive Office chief counsel.

“I hope you realize, Mr. President,” Pamela Sharpe said, “that by escalating this situation, we may well be looking at open war with the rest of the Confederation.”

Sharpe was the USNA secretary of state, which meant that it was her job to advise the president on matters relating to foreign policy . . . including war.

“I’m
quite
aware of that, Pamela,” Koenig replied. “But they’re the ones attacking us, okay? We
do
have a right to defend ourselves.”

“But . . . naval forces?” she said. “A small assault team on the back side of the moon is one thing, but—”

“They have troops on the ground in our Periphery. We need naval support to block them.”


Missouri
and
Amazon
are approaching Washington now,” Admiral Gene Armitage told Koenig.

“And
Pittsburgh
?”

“Still at L-2, sir, keeping an eye on Bruno Base. The Marines are redeploying there.”

Koenig considered this. Bruno Base was probably of minor importance, especially since Lieutenant Burnham’s platoon had pulled the Confederation’s fangs lunarside. They might be able to bring the ’
Burgh
to Earth . . . or possibly to SupraQuito in case the Confederation was planning a grab there as well. SupraQuito was technically a Confederation synchorbital facility . . . but it was staffed primarily by USNA naval personnel and civilians.

No. One problem at a time . . .

Missouri
and
Amazon
were Mississippi-class High Guard sentinel ships, designed to patrol the outer solar system in search of planetoids that might one day threaten Earth . . . and ships seeking to change the orbit of planetoids to turn them into weapons.

Wormwood had been the first such attack, an asteroid nudged into a collision course with Earth by a rogue Chinese Hegemony ship. Despite efforts to turn the incoming body aside, a part of the rock had fallen into the Atlantic, smashing the coastlines of Europe and the Americas.

There’d been a second Atlantic tsunami in 2405, generated by a Turusch one-kilogram high-velocity impactor streaking in past the sun and exploding in the atmosphere. The shock had been as savage as if the incoming mass had been a small asteroid, and something on the order of 50 million people had died. The disaster had underscored the need to stop asteroids on intercept orbits, whether those orbits had been set by chance or by design.

High Guard sentinels did not possess Alcubierre Drives, so they could not travel between the stars. They did pack the armament of a naval destroyer, however, and their gravitic singularity drives gave them a fair degree of maneuverability. Koenig hoped they could take on the Confederation forces now moving into several of the coastal Peripheries—Washington, D.C., Manhattan, Baltimore, and Boston. There were reports of Confederation spacecraft in low orbit, and of troops coming ashore from immense Jotun transports.

That datum itself was of interest. Intelligence suggested that the Jotuns had come from the floating seasteader city of Atlantica, currently riding the Gulf Stream north 100 kilometers off the coast of Virginia. It was possible that the Confederation had moved in and taken over the seasteads eighteen months earlier expressly to use them as staging points for an invasion of the USNA Peripheries.

“Do we have any Marines in a position where they could board those seasteads?” Koenig asked.

“Marines and SEALS Team Twelve, Mr. President. At Oceana.”

Koenig nodded, thoughtful. SEALS—the acronym stood for the elements within which those elite naval commandos operated: sea, air, land, and space. They were among the best close-combat forces available to the USNA—highly trained, superbly motivated, and possessing exceptional cybernetic and nanomedical enhancements.

If they were stationed at Oceana, though, they might be vulnerable. Oceana had started as a naval air station in tidewater Virginia, a base slowly submerged by rising sea levels late in the twenty-first century. It now was an oceanic complex, built partly on the sea floor and partly on massive pylons above the surface, providing support for American combat naval air and space units. It was less than 150 kilometers from Atlantica’s current position, however, and the Confederation would be well aware that it was there. If the enemy decided to escalate, Oceana would be an early target.

“Good,” Koenig said. “I want the SEALS off of Oceana and on their way to Atlantica as soon as possible. The Marines . . . let’s hold them for the Periphery . . . especially New York and D.C.”

“I would recommend one battalion of Marines be reserved for follow-on at Atlantica, sir,” Armitage told him. “As follow-on after the SEALS get on board . . . and as reinforcements in case the place is more heavily defended than we think.”

“Do it. Can you provide air cover out of Oceana?”

“We have three aerospace squadrons there now, Mr. President. They can be over Atlantica in minutes.”

“Okay. Send one to cover our forces at D.C., one on CAP to protect Oceana, and one to hit Atlantica.” He thought for a moment. “What are we missing?”

“If I might suggest, sir . . . the
political
side of things.”

Koenig gave a grim smile. He’d dropped back into admiral mode, giving orders about military deployment and strategy, and not addressing the fact that war is, ultimately, the pursuit of politics by other means.

“Ilse Roettgen isn’t talking to me at the moment,” he said. “We’re going to need to get her attention.”

“If beating those troop carriers out of Bruno Base doesn’t get it, Mr. President, I don’t know what will.”

“Let’s see if grabbing Atlantica back from the bastards will turn up the volume for her. Meanwhile . . . I want the Periphery protected.”

“We’re not on solid legal ground with that, Mr. President,” the other man in the room pointed out. He was Thomas St. James, and he was the president’s executive counsel. He was a true cyborg, with the top of his head artificially enlarged to create space for additional components, both organic tissue cloned from his own stem cells and silicon. A network of gold and silver wires appeared to be etched into his hairless scalp in rectilinear patterns, allowing him a constant interface with several very powerful AIs, experts in both international and extraplanetary law.

“What’s the problem, Tom?” Koenig asked.

“Great Britain versus Falklands, 2233. Russian Federation versus Ukraine, 2280. Manhattan versus New New York, 2301. Confederation versus Belgium, 2342. The United States of North America formally abandoned those territories now called the Periphery.”

“Well, yeah . . . but we still own those territories, even if we don’t control them.”

“Not exactly. After the Blood Death, the Second Chinese War, and the Nanotech Economic Collapse, the government simply could not afford to provide basic services like police or medical help, much less reclaim or rebuild flooded cities. Article 31 of the Confederation Constitution, dating from 2133, declares that Geneva has both the right and the responsibility to assume full government control of territories abandoned by local government or which have otherwise slipped into anarchy.”

Trying to talk with St. James was like in-heading a law text download, a bit of self-torture guaranteed to give you a headache. “Is that the pretext they used for taking over the Atlantic seasteads?”

“No, sir. That was carried out under the Confederation Oceanic Crisis Management Act of 2412.”

“And Tsiolkovsky?”

“The databases have not yet been updated, but they have publically declared Konstantin to be a world heritage treasure serving all Humankind. I expect that they will defend their actions today by appealing to the World Heritage Act.”

“The bastards
attacked
us,” Armitage growled. “On the Lunar farside, and now along our East Coast! We can’t just . . . just surrender to their damned lawyers!”

“We’re not going to surrender, Gene,” Koenig said.

“If we fight, it will give the Confederation the pretext they need for declaring us in rebellion. It means civil war, Mr. President, and a nasty one.”


All
civil wars are nasty,” Koenig replied. “But the worst part about this one is the timing. If the Sh’daar are making a new move . . .”

“Geneva’s pulling this shit now on purpose, Mr. President,” Armitage said. “They want us to fold right away so we’re not divided and fighting each other when the Sh’daar get here.”

“Possibly,” Koenig replied. He moved his hand over a contact plate on his desk, calling up a virtual display screen that floated in the air between them. The imagery was from a robotic security drone in D.C., peering from a mangrove tree at the ponderous mass of a Confederation Jotun. Armored troops were pouring down the lowered ramps and splashing through the shallow water still covering the National Mall. In the distance, the ancient gray dome of the old Capitol Building rose from a mass of trees and clinging kudzu.

“This is not going to stand,” Koenig said. “I want those people taken down, Gene.
Now
.”

“Mr. President,” St. James said. “I really must advise—”

“I’ve
heard
your advice, damn it. We stop them. We stop them before the Sh’daar get here. And we’ll worry about the legality of it all later.”

He switched off the robot-eye view. “You gentlemen are dismissed.”

Chapter Eighteen

13 November 2424

Washington, former District of Columbia

USNA Periphery

1440 hours, TFT

Shay Ashton took careful aim at the lead armored figure struggling up the muddy flats below her position, perched on the slope of a hill still called the Georgetown Heights. The targeting data fed from her laser carbine appeared in her in-head, showing the magnified image of the Confederation soldier with a bright red targeting reticule superimposed on his chest. Battlespace sensors were relaying data about the target’s radio and laser-com linkages and data crossloading; he or she was an officer, and a fairly high-ranking one at that, if the amount of radio traffic was any indication.

She thoughtclicked the trigger . . .

A puff of vapor high on the soldier’s chest marked a direct hit. The figure staggered . . . but the armor, its surface almost perfectly reflecting the colors and shapes of the surrounding swamp, was already healing itself. Ashton’s carbine, more than powerful enough to deal with Virginian cross-river raiders, simply didn’t have the oomph to penetrate modern combat armor.

She ducked back behind the cover of a low concrete wall, then began crawling to her left. Seconds later, the patch of wall where she’d been hiding shattered in smoke and hurtling fragments of stone.

Before long, they were going to run out of places to hide.

Picking away at the invaders this way was all but useless.
Sometimes
you got lucky, but it didn’t happen often. She’d racked up eight kills so far in as many hours, and probably hurt another dozen in the running firefight through the old Washington ruins. You had to hit the enemy’s armor
just
right; the joint between helmet and chest plastron, just below the ear, was a good aim point. Another was the visor strip on the helmet. Hit that right, and you might overload the circuitry and blind the soldier, at least temporarily.

But if your aim wasn’t perfect, the chances were good that the armor would just shrug the bolt off.

Shay’s people had no armor, and had already died by the hundreds.

“We’ve got the popper set up!” a voice called over her in-head. “We’re gonna try for the Jotun!”

Ashton shifted her attention to the nearest of five Jotun transports, just a kilometer away, hovering over the swampy ground of what once, centuries before, had been called the Ellipse. Local folklore still called it that, though no one remembered what it was, or why part of the mangrove swamp had been given a name drawn from geometry.

“Okay,” she replied. “Make it count!”

“Popper” referred to a K-40 antiarmor warhead fired from a tripod-mounted launcher. The things were a century out of date and probably wouldn’t make it past a Jotun’s point defense lasers, but they had to try.

Where they’d dug the antique up in the first place Ashton couldn’t even begin to guess.

The weapon fired, a streak of light snapping from the hillside to Ashton’s right. She saw the missile, a tiny point of light weaving and jinking as it closed on the immense transport . . . but then it flared and vanished, still 300 meters from its target. Turrets on the Jotun’s dorsal surface pivoted, seeking the location of the launcher.

“Get the hell out of there!”
she yelled, and then a portion of the Georgetown hillside vanished in a cascade of flame and hurtling debris.

She didn’t have an in-head tactical display, but the lack of response over her com told her she’d just lost a couple more members of her dwindling army.

More explosions erupted among the crumbling ruins further up the heights. The defenders had no way to more than scratch the invaders; the Jotun, now, was drifting ponderously toward the hill, climbing out of the swamp, brushing aside trees and the occasional stone tower with contemptuous ease.

It was time, Ashton thought, recalling the military slang she’d learned twenty years earlier, to “get the hell out of Dodge.”

“All units,” she said over the tactical channel. “We’re not doing any good here. Pull back . . . pull back. . . .”

“Boss, these are our
homes
here!” someone cried.

“Yeah, and they’re going to be our fucking tombs if we hang around much longer! Fall back! That’s an order!”

Ashton wasn’t sure who had put her in command. It had just . . . happened. She had the in-head hardware, of course, to set up a tactical net, and that was a big part of it. More, she had combat experience—something more than fighting off Periphery raiders from across the Potomac Estuary.

But it was not a job she’d looked for. She’d
had
it with the military two decades ago, when she’d resigned from the USNA Navy and returned to the D.C. swamp.

They’d made good progress over the past few years, draining parts of that swamp and putting up the Potomac levees, but there sure as hell wasn’t anything here worth fighting for.
Dying
for . . .

For God’s sake, let the bastards have it.

The Jotun was a lot closer, now. Its turrets shifted this way and that, picking out tiny running figures ahead of it and burning them down. It would reach her position in another minute or two.

She felt a cold stab of fear. If she got up and ran now, the gunners in that transport would see her and burn her down as well. If she stayed where she was, those columns of armored soldiers advancing up the slope would reach her and kill her or worse. If she found a place to hide—inside a wreckage-covered basement or hole, perhaps—they would pick her up sooner or later with their sonic mikes or heat sensors and the result would be the same.

She’d waited too fucking long. . . .

Best, then, to go out fighting. She shifted her position so she could see the troops in the Jotun’s shadow, and again took aim. Her in-head showed a target lock and she thoughtclicked the trigger. . . .

The landscape was blotted out by a white flare of light, and a violent shock picked her up and flung her backward. Blinking, trying to clear her head, she saw the Jotun’s dorsal surface slashed open, saw flames erupting from its exposed interior.

“What the fuck?” she asked aloud.

Then a pair of Starhawks shrieked overhead, cleaving the sky on white-slash vapor trails ripped from tortured air. Two more Starhawks followed, and Ashton’s mouth dropped open at the sight of the spacecraft—fighter craft that she once had piloted herself. For a moment, she was stunned, uncomprehending, but then the reality began to assert itself, and she realized that reinforcements had arrived over ancient Washington at last.

“Hit ’em!” she screamed. Not thinking, she picked herself up and stood, staring, gaping . . . then waving her carbine.
“Get the bastards!”

And the defenders of Washington began to advance once more.

Captain’s Quarters

TC/USNA CVS
America

Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

2315 hours, TFT

Gray had just removed his uniform and tossed it in the disposal when a chime in his in-head announced a visitor. He opened a window to the door’s security link. It was
America
’s weapons officer, Commander Laurie Taggart.

He opened the door through the link; taboos against social nudity had long since evaporated, especially in the Navy, where men and women had to live and work together in quarters that could verge on the claustrophobic. “Hello, Commander,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering . . . um . . .”

She was staring. “Sorry, Commander. Do you want me to get dressed?”

“No, sir. It’s not that. There’s something . . .
personal
that’s been bothering me. I wondered if we could talk.”

Interesting. Most personal problems on board ship were handled by one of the chaplain psychs . . . or by Commander Sara Gutierrez,
America
’s executive officer. Traditionally, a ship’s XO was responsible for handling a ship’s internal issues, including any personnel problems, leaving the skipper free to focus on mission, strategy and tactics. Gray tried to be accessible to his crew, however, and wasn’t going to order her to leave. He did, however, go to the uniform dispenser and order a new utilities pack. He slapped the wad against his chest, and let the nanoweave flow across his body, growing a fresh uniform in seconds. Social nudity was fine, but there was a certain propriety demanded by his station if not by society. He ordered a couple of chairs to grow out of the deck, the white carpeting blurring and flowing to become soft black leather, and gestured to one. “Have a seat.”

“Thank you. I know I should probably see Chaplain Carruthers about this, sir . . . but you were
there
.”

“I was where?”

“At the Sh’daar galaxy. Eight hundred million years ago.”

“Ah.”

“You . . . you know that I’m Church of AAC.”

Gray nodded. Though personnel could keep their religious affiliations, if any, secret, many chose to have it recorded in their files. Gray had seen Taggart’s file data months before while reviewing the histories of the officers on board
America
.

“My church believes that aliens created
Homo sapiens
something like half a million years ago. And those of us in the Navy . . . well, everyone in the congregation kind of looks to us for . . . for confirmation.”

“And you’re all wondering if the Sh’daar are God.”

“Well . . . we wouldn’t put it quite that bluntly, sir, but, well, yes.”

“Why the Sh’daar?”

“Sir?”

“There are thousands of technic species scattered across the galaxy, Commander. We know that much from the Agletsch
Encyclopedia Galactica.
Some of them have been around for a half million years, easy. The Dhravin, for instance.”

“But what if it
is
the Sh’daar?”

“Would that make a difference, Commander?”

“Well . . . yes, sir. It would. Of
course
.” She shook her head, shoulder-length red hair tossing impatiently. “If the Sh’daar are renewing their war against us, it puts us in the position of waging war against our creators.”

“A
defensive
war, Commander. They attacked us, remember.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gray thought for a moment, then said, “AI . . . cease recording.” An acknowledgement winked on in his in-head. Normally, everything senior officers in the fleet said and did was recorded and stored, but he didn’t think there was a need here.

And he didn’t want Taggart to jeopardize her career.

“Okay, Commander. We’re now off the record. And you can drop the ‘sir’ stuff. I’m Trev. Or Sandy.”

“Thank you . . . Trev.

“Why does it matter if the Sh’daar
are
our creators?”

“Well, they must have had a reason. . . .”

“Maybe. Or maybe they just needed some convenient slaves to do their dirty work.”

Gray was thoroughly acquainted with the Ancient Alien Creationist myth. Lots of people in the Manhattan Periphery had believed those stories when he was growing up. The idea had been floating around at least since the twentieth century—that aliens had come to Earth half a million years or so ago and tinkered with the human genome. The most popular story took off on ancient Sumerian myth, with legends that beings called Anunnaki had tried to colonize the Earth, and created humans as slaves. Other stories, however, emphasized that the visiting aliens had been benevolent, uplifting Humankind for more noble reasons.

In this, Gray was a dogmatic agnostic. There
were
archeological mysteries that centuries of human investigation had not yet explained. Baalbek: a platform in Lebanon that included thousand-ton blocks of stone in its makeup. Yonaguni, Dvaraka, and others: monolithic structures discovered on the sea bottom off Japan and India and submerged for thousands of years. Pumapunku: the incredibly massive, intricate and apparently machine-tooled stone architecture of a temple group in the Andes Mountains apparently scattered by something as powerful as a nuclear blast. There were plenty of other sites around the Earth, enigmatic, ancient, and sadly uncommunicative about who had built them, and how.

Gray was willing to believe that Earth might once have had visitors from Somewhere Else, though he was suspicious of claims that early humans were incapable of building large and complex structures, that places like Giza or Teotihuacan
must
have been built with alien technology.

But had aliens created humanity? The jury was still out on that one.

“My church doesn’t accept the Anunnaki hypothesis,” Taggart said. “For us, the extraterrestrial gods elevated humans from the apes because they wanted companionship.”

“I see. And then they left us on our own?”

She frowned. “Captain, I’m not trying to convert you.”

“I know. If you were, it would be a clear violation of the White Covenant, and we would not be able to have this conversation.”

She smiled. “The Covenant is Confederation Law. Are we still bound by that?”

Gray frowned. “You know? I’m honestly not sure. I think we’ll need to have the lawyers sort that one out once we get back to Earth.” He thought a moment more. “I’d have to say, though, that we’re officially still part of the Confederation, even if Lavallée did take off and abandon us. At least until we’re told otherwise.”

Justin Lavallée’s desertion was a sore point throughout the USNA flotilla. The Confederation ships had burned past Arianrhod at near-
c
, abandoned their own fighters, and kept on going, accelerating for the far side of the system. Some hours ago, word had come through that the Confederation ships had dropped into Alcubierre Drive. Likely, they would head into emptiness for a few light years, re-emerge and re-orient themselves, then head for Earth. That would put them back in Earth orbit in another two days . . . maybe three.

And God knew what they would tell Geneva about Gray’s unwillingness to surrender command of the USNA contingent.

We’ll worry about that later
, he thought.

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