Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (14 page)

“They did.”

“And?”

“Our friends told the xeno boys that not all Sh’daar species carried them.”

“You know,” Gray said, thoughtful, “I’m beginning to wonder if the Glothr might not be a bit higher up the Sh’daar totem pole than some of the others, the Slan and Nungies and the rest.”

“My thought as well,” Koenig told him. “And Konstantin agrees with us, by the way.”

Gray frowned. He wasn’t comfortable with that super-AI looking over his shoulder. “We’ll need confirmation, of course.”

“Of course. You may be able to get it when you follow Charlie One out to the Beehive . . . and on through the TRGA. Be sure to come back and fill me in. A question?”

“Yes, sir?”

“The squadron you’re sending through the TRGA on point, and the three cutters. You’re confident in all of them? It’s a monumental responsibility.”

Gray hesitated before answering. And he wondered just how much the president knew. Everything, most likely. In a linked-in military network there were astonishingly few secrets. By not raising the problem with Dahlquist directly, Koenig was giving Gray the benefit of the doubt, and avoiding the ugly and dangerous specter of micromanagement.

“I have complete confidence in them, sir.”

“
All
of them? No problems?”

“Nothing worth mentioning, sir.”

“Good.”

A signal chimed within Gray’s awareness. “
America
’s skipper is telling me it’s time to haul ass, Mr. President.”

“Good luck, Sandy. Listen, I mean it. Be sure to come back home . . . and be sure you bring that expensive fleet with you.”

Gray laughed. “Aye, aye, sir.” He shifted mental channels. “Okay, Captain . . . take us out.”

And the star carrier
America
began accelerating.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

1412 hours, EST

President Koenig watched on his own display as the ships of Task Force One formed up into a cone formation just beyond the sprawl of the immense SupraQuito naval facilities and began accelerating outbound. Off to one side, another ship—the massive, 900-meter form of the incongruously named Charlie One—was rising smoothly from the nearly full face of the moon. As the minutes passed, Charlie One slid into position at the fleet cone’s apex, leading them outbound in the direction of the small and inconspicuous constellation of Cancer.

“
America
reports clear communications with the alien vessel,” a voice whispered in Koenig’s mind. “All nominal.”

“Very well, Kelly,” Koenig replied. “Continue relaying messages for as long as the time lag allows.”

“Yes, sir.”

Koenig had heard some scuttlebutt and speculation within the Navy’s physics community, which had questioned whether some Sh’daar species already possessed faster-than-light communication. If so, the human fleet was going to be at a terrible disadvantage out there.

“I hope we’re doing the right thing,” he said aloud.

There was no one else in the presidential office with him . . . no
organic
being, at any rate.

Three seconds passed, the time required for Koenig’s words to reach the Konstantin AI facility at Tsiolkovsky, on the lunar far side, and for Konstantin’s reply to return . . . plus a half-second pause that likely was generated by the AI for a humanlike effect. Humans could be disconcerted by the speed of Konstantin’s responses to even the most complex of questions.

“We have done what we can to maximize Admiral Gray’s chances,” Konstantin’s voice replied.

“He still doesn’t like that promotion, you know,” Koenig said. “He’s still pretty angry about it. Angry at
me
.”

“The promotion had to appear to come from you,” Konstantin replied. “Otherwise, he might have discounted it . . . or rejected its legitimacy.”

“But it was
your
idea. And . . . you know? I still don’t understand why you suggested it.”

“Partly to give him the requisite authority with the commanding officers of ships and squadrons from other nations.”

“Well, yes . . . I know that. It makes sense.” Koenig had told Gray as much when he’d given him the news of the promotion:
“You’ll need to pull at
least
an O-10 if you’re going to be on an equal footing with the likes of Ulyukayev or Gao or Singh.”

But the fact remained that someone like Jerry Matthews or Karyl Bennington already had the rank. “Hell,” Koenig continued, “there must be a few hundred four-star admirals that would have jumped at the chance to command TF-1. Why promote Sandy Gray and stir up all kinds of resentment within the Navy’s officer corps?”

“Because Gray, possibly more than any other officer in the USNA military, possesses extensive experience with a variety of nonhuman sentient species, in particular first-contact experience.”

And that was true as well. Last year, Matthews had fought a Confederation fleet to a standstill at Alpha Centauri A, but he hadn’t faced aliens since the H’rulka Incursion twenty years ago. Same for Bennington and Gramm. When it came to encounters with alien intelligences, their diplomatic skills were rather untested.

“Further,” Konstantin went on, “Gray is aggressive in combat, but flexible in his approach. More than most humans, he seems able to assess a threat and respond with diplomacy rather than firepower when diplomacy offers the best, most advantageous chance of conflict resolution. Too, his leadership skills are excellent, as is his capacity for both tactical and strategic thinking when force
is
called for.”

“Oh, he’s good,” Koenig said. “I’ll give you that. He’s also a bit of a maverick. He’s never fit the Navy mold comfortably, and he has a tendency to do things his own way.”

“True. But as your protégé, he will accept guidance from you and, through you, from me.”

It was a distinction Koenig had not thought of before. Yes, Koenig had helped the young officer along at several key points, helping further his career. As such, there definitely was a relationship between the two men that had been mutually beneficial. Koenig was well aware that the naval service was so intensely political once you reached the rank of captain . . . and Gray, the former Prim, had had a major strike against him from the start.

But Koenig had seen something in Gray that no one else . . .

“You’ve been maneuvering me in order to
steer
the guy?” Koenig asked. “You were
using
me!”

“Necessarily so. Would he have accepted a promotion, an explanation, and orders from me?”

“Well—”

“Perhaps more to the point, would you have agreed with my tactics?”

Koenig didn’t know whether to be angry or impressed. The unspoken assumption about artificial intelligence was that they could not—or, at the very least,
would
not—lie. Of course, an AI would do what it was programmed to do. For centuries, now, however, artificial intelligences had been programmed to program themselves, each new generation of AI designing its own successors. An AI could be programmed to lie, certainly . . . but there were supposed to be safeguards and protocols to prevent that.

Konstantin had originally suggested promoting Gray to full admiral, explaining that the move was necessary to give Gray the necessary command authority with foreign officers . . . and Koenig had accepted that at the time. But evidently there’d been a lot more to Konstantin’s reasoning.

Koenig knew from personal experience that Konstantin was quite capable of withholding some aspects of the truth for its own purposes. It had proven that just now, admitting that there’d been reasons for manipulating Gray that it had not discussed with Koenig. But Konstantin had also just revealed that its deception had gone well beyond merely withholding data, and extended into the grayer realm of misdirection.

“Hell, I don’t know,” Koenig said slowly. “He might have surprised you. . . .”

“This approach eliminates surprise as a factor.”

“I suppose it does. But—”

“As a Prim from the Manhat Ruins,” Konstantin went on, relentless, “Gray possesses a distinct mistrust both of authority and of technology—in particular of government authority and of advanced AIs such as myself, at least insofar as we are involved in government. But his time serving under your command on board the
America
forged a certain kinship between you, brought you together in what some refer to as ‘a band of brothers.’ He trusts you, and is more likely to follow your explicit orders even when they seem counterintuitive than he would be with someone else. And Gray’s experience with new alien species does make him . . . unique.”

“So you’re just saying he’s the right man for the job.”

“Indeed, Mr. President. As are you.”

That stopped Koenig in his figurative tracks. He’d been thinking about Konstantin’s eerie ability to manipulate humans to work its will—through religion, through misdirection, through the way it disseminated information. Now, the AI had just suggested that it had been manipulating Koenig’s path as well.

Though originally constructed and run by the USNA, Konstantin had begun as a Confederation project. It had guided a platoon of USNA Marines to protect itself, however, when Confederation forces had tried to seize it some months back, arguing that the USNA gave it the most freedom to develop its plans. More than once, Koenig had wondered just how well Konstantin understood the minds and emotions of its human caretakers. Surely working with humans was more complicated than simply identifying a few key emotional triggers and firing them off.

“What, exactly, did you have in mind?” Koenig asked, watching the electronic representation of the fleet dwindling against the stars. “Sending them out there, I mean?”

“The Sh’daar still represent a considerable unknown,” Konstantin replied, “in terms of both motivation and of capability. It is in Humankind’s best interests to end the conflict with them as quickly as possible, and on the best terms possible, both for your species and for our civilization.”

“Well, I would agree . . . but what do
you
get out of all of these Machiavellian shenanigans?”

“Besides my personal survival?”

“Well, survival is a pretty reasonable motivation all by itself. . . .”

The image of the departing task force floating in Koenig’s office was replaced by a new image, one that he’d been seeing a lot recently. A wall of dazzlingly bright stars, close-packed, the innermost core of a titanic globular cluster, and at the center the whirl of six black holes orbiting a common center of gravity in a spacetime-bending blur. Reaching out in all directions, the beams and girders of an enigmatic structure, some material, some apparently constructed of pure light, unfolded against the brilliant backdrop.

The Rosette Aliens . . .

“They may be coming this way,” Konstantin said quietly. “And we’ll want to be ready for them when they get here.”

Chapter Twelve

5 August, 2425

USNA Star Carrier
America

M44, the Beehive Cluster

577 Light Years from Earth

0811 hours, TFT

“Fifteen minutes to Emergence, Admiral,” the ship’s AI whispered in his head.

“Very well.” Gray looked up from the remnants of breakfast and grinned at Laurie. “Time for us to go and earn our keep, Commander.”

Taggart dabbed at her lips. “I heard. Any bets as to what we’re going to find?”

“Probably a lot of stars.”

“You
know
what I mean!”

He laughed. “I don’t think we’re going to emerge inside a Glothr fleet, if that’s what you mean,” Gray said, rising from the table. They were in the officers’ mess in Hab 2, where spin-gravity provided about a half-G’s worth of weight, and you could enjoy your coffee in a cup instead of a squeeze bottle. “Not unless their communications technology is a
lot
more advanced than ours.”

“But the alien ship could have arrived a week ago,” Taggart said, also standing. “They might have had time to assemble a fleet even if they don’t have FTL radio.”

“Well, that’s what keeps this job interesting, isn’t it? Let’s get up to the bridge.”

Gray, a bit self-consciously, felt the curious glances of several officers as the two of them made their way toward the hab’s travel pod. His relationship with Laurie Taggart had begun a long time ago, when he was a captain. His explosive rise through the flag ranks had created a yawning gulf in rank between them . . . just one of the unpleasant issues raised by his recent series of promotions.

Despite the rules against fraternization being obsolete—people being people—there was still an undercurrent of . . . call it
impropriety
in a flag officer in a frankly sexual relationship with an officer five rank-jumps his junior. For a time, Gray had seriously considered breaking off the relationship with Laurie when he’d received his utterly unprecedented promotion to full admiral, but had decided against even bringing it up with her.

Perhaps he would have ended the relationship if she’d been directly under his command, but he was the commander of the task force, while she was
America
’s weapons officer. While he might be her CO, she didn’t report to him, but rather to
America
’s skipper, Sara Gutierrez.

And what the hell business was it of anyone else, anyway? Damn it, he wasn’t going to let them ruin his professional life
and
his personal life as well.

It wasn’t that Laurie Taggart was the love of Gray’s life, or anything even remotely like that. She was a friend . . . a very
close
friend who happened also to be superb recreation when their mutual schedules permitted it.

He reached up to palm the call panel for the travel pod—and felt a small, inner ping as someone in the room behind him recorded the two of them in front of the door. He probed . . . and learned that the recording was being saved to a file called “Admiral’s Girlfriend.” He scowled and turned, sweeping the room, but couldn’t tell who’d been recording them. The file itself had been anonymous.

In-head software included protocols to inform the subject that he or she was being recorded, a concession to the need for privacy in an electronically wired world. Normally the ping came as a request and included the recorder’s ID, but that information had deliberately been suppressed this time. Well, if someone was recording them, let them.
Idiots
. He and Laurie had done nothing wrong, nothing against Navy regs, nothing objectionable or questionable. The single danger was if the relationship caused discord or division within the ship’s company, hurt morale, or somehow jeopardized security. The pod arrived, dilated open, and he stepped inside behind Laurie.

“Someone was watching us,” she said, as the pod began accelerating toward the ship’s spine. “Why?”

“Probably just for fun,” he replied. “ ‘Hey, look what the Admiral’s doing,’ that sort of thing. You want me to land on ’em?”

“No. I just think it’s kind of silly.”

“Might also have been a news drone,” Gray said. With the population of a small town—more than 5,000—
America
had its own internal news service. Someone might have just been gathering footage for the next broadcast.

“Well, that’s not
quite
as creepy as some enlisted rating spying on us. . . .”

“Just remember, there’s no such thing as privacy on board a Navy ship.”

The travel pod whisked them up to the hab-module hub and zero-gravity, opening into a connector passageway. From there, they made their way into
America
’s bridge tower, just forward of the turning habs, kissed, then went their separate ways—he to the flag bridge, she to the ship’s bridge located just ahead of and beneath the flag bridge.

“Admiral on the bridge,” sounded in his head, as Gray slid into the embrace of his command seat, opening neural connections with a touch of the implants in his hands and feeling the flow of data surging up into his central nervous system. He felt again the familiar sensation of
growing
, of becoming smarter, faster, and more powerful as his organic brain merged with the larger consciousness of the
America
.

“One minute, twenty seconds to emergence,” the ship told him.

He settled back and opened an in-head window as the last few seconds dwindled away. With a thoughtclick, he opened a ship’s library file containing information on the Beehive cluster . . .
again
.

And then closed it once more. There was no new information there, nothing he’d not gone over and over in the preceding weeks. This operation marked the very first time human ships had approached the Beehive cluster.

Gray wondered what they would find.

“Emergence in five seconds . . . in four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”

The tightly woven gravitational bubble of spacetime enclosing
America
collapsed, and the carrier dropped out of Alcubierre Drive and into normal space. Stars switched on in all directions, diamond-bright jewels against the endless black.

They’d emerged within the cluster’s heart, and the nearest stars were dazzlingly brilliant. From Earth, only people with exceptional eyesight could discern individual stars. For most, the naked eye revealed only a fuzzy patch, the
Nephelion
or “Little Cloud,” as Hipparchus had called it, or the
Gui Xiu
, the “Ghost” of the ancient Chinese. Even a small telescope, however, revealed an explosion of stars, and from here at the cluster’s heart, bright, close stars could be seen in every direction. The majority of the cluster’s stars were red dwarfs, suns far too dim to be seen at a distance of even a very few light years, but over three hundred glowed brightly within twenty light years, making the local sky seem far more crowded than the night sky seen from Earth.

A dazzling pulse of raw light off high and to starboard marked the arrival of one of the other ships of the task force. Gray’s electronic link with the ship provided an ID: the Pan-European
Victoire
, dropping into normal space twenty kilometers away . . . right next door by astronomical standards.

One by one, other ships appeared scattered across the panorama, either as they emerged from Alcubierre metaspace, or as their light reached
America’
s sensors from more distant arrivals. Fleets of ships arriving together tended to disperse somewhat—a good thing considering what would happen if two emerging ships tried to occupy the same volume of space at the same time.

“Fourteen ships are now linked in,” Commander Dean Mallory, the tactical officer, reported. “Make that fifteen . . . sixteen . . .”

“Are the High Guard ships on-line yet?” Those three nimble vessels were slated to play an important role at the TRGA.

“
Pax
and
Open Sky
are both in,” Mallory said, highlighting two of the cons in Gray’s mind. “Okay . . .
Concord
just dropped in. All three are in-system.”

“Good.”

“Twenty-one ships are now on the board.”

“Any sign of Charlie One?”

“Affirmative, sir. Bearing one-one-seven, minus six-five. Range . . . estimating . . . roughly seven AUs.”

Gray skewed his in-head panorama to cover the indicated part of the sky, well below
America
’s artificial horizon. An icon slid into view, and when he concentrated on it, the ship’s electronics expanded it into the fluted, organic curves of the Glothr vessel. The alien was adrift against the spray of bright background stars. Although over twenty-one light minutes distant, the alien evidently had arrived early enough that its light had already reached across to
America
’s position. As agreed, the alien had waited for the task force. Gray wondered just how much earlier the Glothr vessel had emerged; that information might tell them something more about Glothr technical capabilities.

“How about the Triggah?” Gray asked.

“We have anomalous gravitometric readings in the region beyond Charlie One,” Lieutenant Donovan reported from the ship’s Astrogation Department. “Estimated range . . . fifteen AUs. Approximately one solar mass, but so compressed it’s not visible at this distance. Reads like a black hole, but with no sign of an accretion disk or polar jets.”

“That will be our objective,” Gray announced. “Okay, people. Take us in close to Charlie One. CAG? Tell the Black Demons they’re on the line, ready five.”

“VFA-96 is at ready five, Admiral,” Captain Fletcher,
America
’s CAG, replied in his mind.
Ready five
meant that the twelve Starblades of the squadron were positioned in their drop tubes, ready for launch on five minutes’ notice.

America
would not be in position to launch for some hours . . . yet Gray wanted to be sure that they were ready for trouble should they encounter it.

USNS/HGF
Concord

TF-1

Beehive Cluster

0848 hours, TFT

The message came through for Commander Dahlquist on a private channel, heavily screened and encoded. Dahlquist bypassed
Concord
’s AI and ran the quantum decrypter himself, downloading the result to his in-head window, and copying it at the same time to his private files.

He was disappointed. The recording, pulled from the in-head of his younger brother on board the
America
, showed Admiral Gray in what evidently was the officers’ mess on board the carrier. He was standing in front of a travel-pod door facing an attractive female officer—a commander. The scene was suggestive, certainly . . . but Gray didn’t touch the woman, and wasn’t acting in an inappropriate manner.

He wished there was sound . . . but Fred hadn’t been close enough to hear what was being said, and didn’t have audiofocus implants.

Damn
.

What was worse, Fred’s recording had pinged Gray’s implant. There were ways of suppressing the anti-eavesdropping protocols, but evidently he’d not been able to use them. Gray would know that one of the officers in the mess had been recording him.

Dahlquist played the message Fred had sent accompanying the vid. The
America
was almost three light-minutes away at the moment, so there was no hope of a direct conversation.

Sorry I couldn’t get anything more . . . uh . . . useful
, his brother had said.
It’s not like they’re having sex right there in the rec area, for everyone to watch. But the scuttlebutt is that he’s banging her on a pretty regular basis. Maybe this vid will help.

Dahlquist played the message through to the end, then deleted it before beginning to encode a reply.

“We need something really scandalous, okay?” he said after thanking Fred for his efforts so far. “I suggest you look up a guy I served with once, Reid Symington. He’s a civilian working in
America
’s AI suite, and he knows the security systems on that ship inside and out. What I really want is a look at Gray and this Taggart woman in bed together. . . .”

The message completed and quantum-encoded, he fed it through
Concord
’s ship AI, transmitted it, then wiped the AI’s memory. You weren’t supposed to be able to do that, of course. AIs weren’t considered to be people, exactly, but they were self-aware and sentient, and you weren’t supposed to be able to tamper with their memories. Dahlquist knew a few tricks though . . . tricks taught him by Reid Symington when they were stationed together on the
Essex
.

He still wasn’t entirely sure how he was going to use the dirt on Gray, assuming he could dig up enough of it to be worth the effort. It would be some sort of a whispering campaign, he thought,
gossip
—but gossip backed by covertly snatched vids that would prove to everyone that Gray wasn’t suitable naval-officer material. At the very least, he was self-evidently a hypocrite, a guy who claimed a monogie perv lifestyle while living another lifestyle entirely. North American society didn’t much care what you did, or with whom, but it
did
demand consistency, integrity, and honesty . . . qualities the Periphery’s monogie pervs were hard-pressed to find.
Barbarians
. . . .

“Incoming laser-com message, Captain,” the ship’s voice said in his head. “From Admiral Gray, on the
America
.”

Dahlquist felt a stab of sudden panic. Speak of the fucking devil! Had
America
’s communications suite picked up and decoded his exchange with his brother? How?

And then he steadied himself as the likely explanation kicked in. Gray would want to deliver some sort of send-off speech, something flowery, passionate, and full of duty, flag, and country.

“Put it through.”

Gray’s face appeared on Dahlquist’s in-head window. “Captain Lewis, Captain Dahlquist, Captain Tsang,” he said, addressing the skippers of the three High Guard vessels with the fleet. “I suppose tradition demands that I give you three a send-off speech, something to remind you of how important this mission is to us and to the folks back home. I’m not going to do that. You’ve seen your orders and you’ve had your op briefing. You
know
this insertion is damned important, and you know why, so I won’t insult your intelligence by giving you a pep talk.