Earth Strike (19 page)

He realized Fifer was still waiting for a response to his statement about Gray’s feeling marginalized, something the two of them had discussed a number of times during the past three weeks.

“I don’t know if I would call it feeling marginalized, sir,” he said. “It
is
good when I feel like I’m a part of something bigger, something important. Like being a member of the TriBeCa Family back home.”

“And how often do you feel that way, Lieutenant?”

He thought about this. “Not all that often, I guess. The other people in the squadron tend not to let me forget who I am…where I came from.”

“Understandable,” Fifer said. “Navy pilots tend to form a tight little circle, like a fraternity. Anyone not in the circle is an outsider, an unknown quantity. You get in only when you prove yourself.”

“I’ve
been
proving myself,” Gray insisted. “For a year now!”

“It can take longer than that, Lieutenant. And sometimes it can take forever.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

Fifer gave a gentle shrug. “You have several paths open to you, as we’ve discussed already. You can resign your commission and become an enlisted man. You can simply turn in your wings, become a non-flight officer. Or you can fold yourself in, hunker down, and ride it out where you are.”

Or I can go back to the Ruins
, Gray thought.
The hell with the Navy, with the government, with all of it
….

“That is certainly one option,” Fifer told him, “but I can’t recommend it. You would be found. You would be brought back. You would face a court martial for desertion, and you would either serve time in a military prison or you would be reconditioned.”

Gray started. He hadn’t spoken out loud about deserting. “You’re reading my thoughts!”

“Your personal daemon is linked in with the AI coordinating this session,” Fifer told him. “It can pick up surface thoughts, at least, yes. How else do you think I monitor your free-form regressions?”

Gray was trembling, though whether from fear, anger, or some other long-repressed emotion, he couldn’t tell. He was beginning to realize that what he resented most about the Navy was the constant high-tech monitoring, the fact that even when he wasn’t linked in, there were machines and AIs in the Net-Cloud that could follow where he was going, watch where he went, listen in on his conversations, even hear what he was thinking.

“I noticed a peculiar, extremely sharp spike in the intensity of your emotions just now,” Fifer told him. “Can you tell me about what you’re feeling?”

“There’s a lot of stuff,” Gray admitted. “I don’t like the constant snooping, the feeling that AIs and Authority monitors are always looking over my shoulder, watching what I do. And…”

“And what?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what? The monitoring?”

“No. I don’t like it, but I’m not
afraid
of it.”

“What then?”

Gray was trying to put it into words, but found he could not.

“I’m…not sure.”

“That’s okay. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to say some words and phrases, list them. Things I mentioned a moment ago, when you had that emotional spike. Just listen to each phrase, think about it. Tell me what you feel.”

Gray was sweating now. “Okay…”

“‘One option.’”

Gray felt nothing, and shrugged.

“‘You would be found.’”

He felt a quiver of emotional discomfort, but he shook his head.

“‘You would be brought back.’”

“No.”

“‘You would face a court martial.’”

Again, he shook his head, but his heart was pounding now. Damn, he
hated
this kind of probing.

“‘You would serve time in prison.’”

“No.”

“‘You would be reconditioned.’”

“
Damn
it, Doctor!” Gray was shouting now. “What does any of this have to do with—”

“It’s okay, Lieutenant. Just relax. Deep breath…”

Gray’s heart was pounding in his chest. He wanted to leave, wanted to
run
….

“You see, Trevor, as I told you at the beginning of these sessions, we’re recording everything as we proceed with the session. I can call up any part of our conversation, read it on my in-head display. And we can match each phrase with your emotional output. I notice an
extremely
strong response on your part to the idea of reconditioning. Is that true?”

“You can also tell when I’m lying,” Gray said, the words close to a snarl.

“Yes, but that’s beside the point.”

“I don’t like the idea of…of reconditioning. No.”

“And what is it that bothers you about it?”

“What is it that—” Gray broke off his reply. “Having my brains scrambled, my memories stolen…shouldn’t that bother anybody?”

“There are a lot of public misconceptions about the neural reconfiguration, Lieutenant. It’s not what you think.”

“No? Then explain that to my wife.”

Gray didn’t
know
that the docbots at the Columbia Arcology had planted new memories in Angela’s brain. The medtechs hadn’t told him much of anything. But he’d known that the Angela he’d spoken to after her stroke treatment had
not
been the Angela he’d married. Oh, she’d looked the same, had the same body, the same face…but when she’d looked at him she’d been…different. The love he’d always seen in her eyes was gone, and her conversation seemed…distant. As though she were speaking to a stranger.

The Angela he’d married never would have turned him away, never would have told him she never wanted to see him again.

Fifer had a faraway look on his face as he reviewed records he was calling up within his mind. “Angela Gray,” he said. “I see. A serious stroke. Partial paralysis.”

“And she changed,” Gray said. The words were hard. Bitter. “She changed toward me.”

“That can happen. A stroke can destroy established neural pathways. Those that control movement in muscles. And also those that govern memory, recognition, even attitude and belief.”

“They told me they had to
adjust
her,” Gray said.

“Adjustment isn’t the same as neural reconfiguration,” Fifer told him. “It’s not reconditioning.”

“No? It made Angela different. It changed her.”

Fifer sighed. “Without direct access to Columbia Arcology’s medcenter, I can’t really say this for sure, but I suspect that what changed her was the delay in getting her to competent treatment. It says here it was almost twenty-four hours before you got her to a medcenter.”

“It took that long to get them to look at her.”

“Yes, well…there
were
social considerations.”

“Yeah. To them I was a damned filthy primitive, a squattie, with a
wife
, of all obscene things.”

“That might have been part of it. So was the lack of med insurance, though. That’s how you came to join the Navy, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Fifer nodded. “Lieutenant…I think we may have identified a key focus of your embitterment disorder.”

“Oh, really?” Gray’s tone was biting and sarcastic. “Do you think. Maybe? Damn it, of
course
I’m bitter about what happened!”

“And I don’t blame you. What happened had a serious, a terrible impact on your life. But you
don’t
have to let what happened at the Columbia Arcology control you, control your thoughts and actions, for the rest of your life.

“As with everything else in life, Lieutenant Gray, you have a choice—to be done to, or to
do
. And we’re here to determine which it’s going to be.”

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America
Mars Synchorbit, Sol System
0916 hours, TFT

Koenig felt the faint shudder as
America
finally nestled into the docking facility gantry, the boarding tubes nestling against the access hatchways in the zero-G sections of her spine. Magnetic clamps locked and nanoseals formed impenetrable, airtight connections. Buchanan had already passed orders that the first off the ship would be the Mufrid passengers. The transports that would take them to Earth were already moving toward
America
’s berth.

They were home.

He could hear the steady stream of orders from the bridge as some of the ship’s systems were shut down. The hab modules would continue their rotation for a time, providing artificial gravity, at least until the Mufrids were off. And wasn’t that going to be fun…herding more than a thousand people down to the zero-G regions of the ship and floating them out through the boarding tubes?
America
’s Marine contingent and the Master-at-Arms Division were going to be busy for the next several hours, keeping the civilians moving, keeping them from panicking and thrashing about and possibly hurting themselves. Ship’s crew would be responsible for cleaning up after those who got sick in the passageways, though at least they would have robotic help in that unpleasant task. The ship’s quartermaster’s department was already deploying cleanerbots to the ship’s zero-gravity hab areas.

With
America
back in spacedock, Admiral Koenig now was technically off duty. Other ships in the carrier battlegroup were still arriving—though a few had been redirected to Earth Synchorbital—but they were now under the individual commands of their respective commanding officers, no longer maneuvering or fighting as a fleet. Now, he thought, might be a good time to go back to his quarters and try to catch some sleep. He’d been awake through much of the inbound passage from Sol’s Kuiper Belt, and dead tired. He already knew he would have to appear in person before a review board of the Senate Military Directorate early tomorrow, ship’s time…and likely face a Board of Inquiry shortly after that.

It might be his last appearance before his peers as a flag-rank officer, and he wanted to be sharp for that meeting.

“I have an incoming communication from Dr. Brandt,” his personal AI informed him. “It is flagged ‘urgent.’”

“Put it through.”

“Admiral Koenig? Brandt, down in med-research!”

“Yes, Doctor. What can I—”

“We’ve got a problem here! The Turusch are killing each other!”

“Damn it! Separate them!”

“It’s…too late for that. You might want to link down here and see for yourself.”

“Stand by. I’m coming down.”

He connected directly with the NTE robots hanging from the ship’s overhead in the compartment holding the two Turusch. The two aliens appeared locked in a deadly embrace, heads split wide open, the harpoons and feeding tubes within imbedded in each other’s bodies. Several medtecs in red e-suits were there, trying to separate the two, but the aliens continued to thrash about weakly, pushing the humans away with flailing black tentacles. A pair of white Noters suspended from the overhead were trying to help, but were knocked away with ease.

Shit!
“Get them apart!” he barked.

“We’re
trying
, Admiral!” Brandt said. “Those rigid spears are like injection needles. They squirt digestive juice—sulfuric acid—into whatever they’re eating. Then they suck up the soup through those soft tubes.”

“They’re
eating
each other?”

“That’s about the size of it, Admiral.”

Moments later, the humans and robots together managed to get a firm grip on both of the alien combatants and drag them apart. Acid dripped from the harpoons as they slipped free, steaming on the deck.

But by then both of the aliens were dead.

17 October 2404

Senate Military Directorate Chambers
Phobos Space Elevator, Sol System
1010 hours, TFT

The preliminary Board of Inquiry was relatively relaxed and laid-back, a session designed simply to explore Koenig’s actions at Eta Boötis, and to determine whether any formal charges even needed to be made. The meeting was held virtually, since two of the board members—Admiral Jason Barry and Vice Admiral Michael Noranaga—were linking in from elsewhere. Barry currently was at Noctis Labyrinthus, on the Martian surface. Noranaga was a selkie who at the moment was swimming somewhere within one of Earth’s oceans; the current twenty-minute time delay between Earth and Mars meant that he would be represented on the Board of Inquiry by his avatar, uploaded from Quito Synchorbital to Phobia by electronic transfer several days before.

Koenig had already checked the flag officer listings for circum-Mars space, and found that no fewer than thirty-seven admirals were present within easy realtime link distances; why Noranaga was on the board, rather than someone closer at hand, was a mystery. Koenig’s best guess was that the genetically enhanced admiral—who held dual flag rank in both the Human Confederation Star Navy and in the surface navy of the North American Confederal Union—had pulled some strings in Columbus, DC. He held considerable authority in C3—the Confederation Central Command—and might have a political reason for taking part in Koenig’s hearing.

The third member of the board was an old friend of Koenig’s, Rear Admiral Karyn Mendelson, with whom he’d served back when she’d commanded the
Lexington
. She’d been waiting for him in the meeting chamber, offering him a recliner with the link pad already open and waiting.

“You don’t look so hot, Alex,” she told him as he walked in. “Are you that worried about this morning?”

“Not about the board, no,” he told her. “We have another problem. I’ll fill you all in once we get started.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Shall we go in?”

He nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”

He sat in the recliner, placing the network of gold and silver threads visible on the palm of his hand against the link pad. Immediately, he was in a different room, a virtual construct, facing Mendelson, Noranaga, and Barry across a broad, heavy table.

“Very well,” Barry said without other preamble. As the senior officer present, he would serve as the board’s voice. “These proceedings, an official Board of Inquiry into the command decisions of Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig at the Battle of Eta Boötis, 25 September, 2404, are now open. Admiral Koenig…do you have legal representation?”

He tapped his head. “Legal AI.”

There were still human lawyers, but most legal matters were handled by highly specialized artificial intelligences. Koenig’s was resident within his cerebral hardware. At this level of inquiry, fact-finding more than anything else, legal representation probably wasn’t necessary, but it was good to have one linked in just in case things went further, to a full-fledged court martial.

“Will your legal AI be fully on-line, or in observer mode only?”

“Observer mode, sir.”

“So noted. And do you have a statement for the board, Admiral Koenig?”

“Not a formal statement, sir, no…but I do have information that has a bearing on these proceedings. You should be aware of it before this goes any further.”

“And what is the information?”

“Carrier battlegroup
America
was operating under two principle mission orders—to retrieve General Gorman’s Marine Expeditionary Force from the surface of Haris, Eta Boötis IV, and to retrieve two alien POWs, a couple of Turusch fighter pilots shot down during the ongoing fighting on Haris before we got there. While the two missions were given equal weight in my operational orders, I was told verbally by Vice Admiral Menendez that it was
imperative
that I bring the aliens safely back to Mars, that that mission should be my primary concern. In his words, ‘If you don’t get the Trash back to Mars, everything Gorman’s grunts have gone through will be for nothing.’”

“Was this statement on or off the record?” Noranaga’s avatar asked. The virtual image looked fully human in the simulation, right down to the details of the man’s naval dress uniform. The reality, Koenig knew, was quite different.

“Off the record, Admiral. It was unofficial. What I need to tell the board, however, is that the two aliens are dead. That part of the mission was a failure.”

“Dead?” Mendelson said. “How?”

“I have the recordings here.”

He opened a new window in the virtual room. The four stood as silent and unseen observers in the compartment in
America
’s research lab, watching as the Turusch speared and murdered each other, as the medtechs and robots attempted to separate them.

Afterward, back in the meeting chamber, Noranaga shook his head. “Suicide, obviously.”

“We don’t know enough about the species, about their psychology or their physiology, to know that for sure, Admiral,” Mendelson said. “They might have been…hungry. Just that.”

“So hungry they couldn’t help trying to eat each other?” Barry said. “That doesn’t seem likely.”

“The research department told me they get at least some of their nutritional needs from light,” Koenig said, “through a process in their skins similar to photosynthesis. Their report suggests that the Turusch can go a
long
time without food.”

“They’re plants?” Noranaga asked.

“Words like ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ don’t have much meaning when it comes to the truly alien, Admiral,” Koenig replied. He was still getting used to that truth himself.

“It’s not even that alien, Admiral Noranaga,” Mendelson put in. “There are one-celled creatures on Earth—
Euglena
—that move and act like animals, but they use chlorophyll to manufacture food in addition to what it can catch.”

There remained, Koenig knew, an ongoing debate among biological scientists about how to divvy up the world of life. One popular scheme called for plants, animals, and four other “kingdoms,” including fungi and the protista—which included the genus
Euglena
that Mendelson had mentioned. More recent attempts to describe and group life forms discovered on other worlds than Earth during the past 350 years had so far succeeded only in bogging the entire process down in a morass of conflicting classification schemes.

None of which helped describe what the hell the Turusch were, or how they thought.

“We
do
have additional information on the Turusch, however,” Koenig went on, “and possibly about the Sh’daar as well. Brandt and George were questioning them shortly before they…died.”

Again, a new window opened above the virtual conference table. This time, the two aliens slumped side by side on the deck, apparently watching the robot camera hanging from above. Date and time stamps showed the session as having taken place just over twenty-six hours earlier, an hour before the aliens had killed each other.

Dr. George’s voice could be heard in the background. “But why are you attacking us?”

Again, the two spoke together, their buzzing speech creating peculiarly ringing harmonics as running translations appeared at the bottom of the window.

“We do not attack you,” said one.

“The Seed attacks to save you,” said the other.

“And just what is the Seed saving us from?” George asked.

“The Seed saves you from yourselves and poor choice,” said one.

“Too swiftly you grow and lose your balance,” said the other.

“I don’t understand,” George said. “How are we a threat to ourselves?”

“Transcendence looms near.”

“Transcendence blossoms.”

“Transcendence destroys.”

“Transcendence abandons.”

“Transcendence of what? Help us understand.
What
is transcending?”

Both Turusch writhed for a moment. Though it was impossible to read anything like emotion in the two, their movements seemed to project frustration, perhaps anger.

“You transcend into darkness,” one said, its tentacles lashing.

“You change, change, change,” insisted the other.

Abruptly, both turned away from the robot, buzzing at each other.

“Why isn’t there a translation of what they’re saying now?” Mendelson asked.

“The xenopsych people think they’re speaking their own language there,” Koenig told her. “Keep in mind that our translations of their speech are based on an artificial language—LG—which we learned from the Spiders. We don’t have a clue as to how to break the original Turusch language.”

The recording ended, and Koenig again faced the members of the preliminary board across the empty table.

“Transcendence,” Admiral Barry said. “That seems to be an ongoing theme with these creatures.”

“Yes, sir. In particular, we think they’re talking about the GRIN Singularity.”

Since the twentieth century—some would say earlier—human technology had been advancing in exponential leaps, each advance in science spawning new advances in dizzying and fast-accelerating profusion. It wasn’t just the technology that had been growing; it was the
pace
of that growth, the ever-increasing speed of technological innovation and development. Just five centuries ago, humans had made their first successful heavier-than-air flight in a fabric-and-spruce glider powered by a gasoline engine, a voyage lasting all of twelve seconds and covering 120 feet. Thirty years later, aviator Wiley Post flew a Lockheed Vega monoplane around the world, the first man to do so solo, making eleven stops along the way and logging the total time in the air at 115 hours, 36 minutes.

And thirty years after that, humans were riding rockets into low Earth orbit, circling the globe in ninety minutes, and were just six short years from walking on the Moon.

In the late twentieth century, a science fiction writer, math professor, and computer scientist named Vernor Vinge had pointed out that if the rate of technological change was graphed against time, the slope representing that change was fast approaching a vertical line—what he called the “technological singularity” in an essay written in 1993. Human life and civilization, he’d pointed out, would very quickly become unrecognizable, assuming that humans weren’t replaced entirely by their technological offspring within the next few decades.

Other writers of the era had pointed out that there were four principle drivers of this exponential increase in high-tech wizardry: genetics, robotics, infotechnology, and nanotechnology, hence the acronym “GRIN.” The GRIN Singularity became a catchphrase for the next four centuries of human technological progress.

“GRIN wasn’t quite the apotheosis people thought it would be,” Noranaga pointed out.

“That’s kind of a strange statement coming from a guy who breathes with gills and can outswim a dolphin,” Barry pointed out.

“He’s right, though,” Mendelson said. “The way the pace of things was picking up in the twenty-first century, it looked like humans would become super-sentient god-machines before the twenty-second. The surprise is that we didn’t.”

“Well,” Koenig said, “we did kind of get distracted along the way.”

As Mendelson had pointed out, the only surprising thing about any of this was that the rate of increase hadn’t already rocketed into the singularity sometime in the late twenty-first century. Various factors were to blame—the Islamic Wars, two nasty wars with the Chinese Hegemony culminating in an asteroid strike in the Atlantic, the ongoing struggle with Earth’s fast-changing climate and the loss of most of Earth’s coastal cities, the collapse of the global currency and the subsequent World Depression. The Blood Death of the early twenty-second century had brought about startling advances in nanomedicine…but it had also killed one and a half billion people and brought about a major collapse of civilization in Southern Asia and Africa.

Those challenges and others had helped spur technological advances, certainly, but at the same time they’d slowed social change, redirected human creativity and innovation into less productive avenues, and siphoned off trillions of creds that otherwise would have financed both technological and social change. Human technological advance, it seemed, came more in fits and starts than in sweeping asymptotic curves.

Admiral Barry shrugged. “There
are
those who still claim that the exponential increase in technological growth can’t be sustained indefinitely, that the rate of growth has actually been slowing over the past three centuries. They say that eventually, things will level off onto a mathematically stable plateau.”

While Koenig was aware of the arguments—he
had
to be, to keep track of the rapid-fire advances in military technology—he had no opinion one way or the other. Technology simply
was
; you lived with it, grew up with it, depended upon it to integrate with the modern world. From virtual conferences such as this one to interfacing with the NTE robots in
America
’s research facility to Noranaga’s genetic prostheses to the nanufacture techniques used to construct Phobia, GRIN technologies were a part of each and every aspect of modern life.

Of course, the big question was what the technological singularity actually meant.
How
would life become unrecognizable? Modern commentators frequently used the word
transcendence
, without explaining what that might mean. The suggestion was that Humankind would turn into something else. But what?

“I wonder, though,” Koenig said, “if what the Sh’daar are worried about is the technological transcendence of humanity. If we
did
become half-machine, half-god hybrids, we might pose a threat to them.”

“Maybe,” Mendelson said. She didn’t sound convinced. “But if we had truly godlike technologies, why would we want to fight or conquer anyone?”