Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (28 page)

Not all along. But certainly ever since they recognized the problem.

“And it sounds like we’re going to have to help them. . . .”

Gregory

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1035 hours, TFT

There were within the task force a few people who were not linked in through
America
’s AI, who were not hearing the conversation with the Glothr, or seeing the history of the Galaxy’s past few hundred million years. Lieutenant Donald Gregory was one of them.

He was in
America
’s sick bay, newly emerged from an induced coma during which time his legs had been amputated above the knees. He was under electronic sedation now, and had been assured that the stem-cell buds implanted in his stumps had taken well, were growing . . . and that within a couple of weeks the new legs would be fully grown. He would have to learn to walk again, of course . . . but that was a relatively minor matter for the physical therapists and his cyberenhancement software. In a month, he would be as good as new.

He only wished that were true.

His first question upon coming out of the coma had been, “Lieutenant Connor. My squadron mate. Can I talk to her?”

Which was when the sick bay corpsman had consulted a list, then gently told him that Meg Connor was dead. The sheer senselessness of it was sickening. She’d been killed by debris from an exploding Glothr time bender, an escaping singularity. Random and brutal. That was war, Gregory knew.

And Gregory wished he’d been left to die on the frigid surface of Invictus anyway.

LCDR Dahlquist

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1510 hours, TFT

Dahlquist was not physically in Gray’s office on board
America
. He was on the
Concord
, in orbit beyond the Invictan ring system, and he’d requested an electronic interview to get the snooping incident off his chest.

He felt he owed the Prim at least that much, even if it meant the end of his own career.

“I believe the appropriate quote,” Gray said quietly, in response to Dahlquist’s blunt confession, “is ‘publish and be damned.’ ”

“Who said that?” Commander Dahlquist asked.

“Arthur Wellesly, Duke of Wellington.”

Dahlquist didn’t know who the Duke of Wellington was, but he did know of Gray’s love of history. It probably wasn’t important.

“Yes, well . . . it’s not my intent to . . . to
publish
, if that’s the word,” Dahlquist said. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“So you said, when you requested this interview. Why did you do it in the first place?”

“I . . . well . . .”

“I know you don’t care for me,” Gray said. His mouth shaped a wry grin. “Most Risties don’t.”

“It wasn’t that. . . .”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Well . . . maybe a little. I didn’t think you were . . . qualified for your rank. I thought if there was a scandal over you and one of your officers . . .”

“What, that I’d get busted back down to lieutenant?”

“No, of course not.”

“They’d keep me at a desk at SupraQuito?”

“Maybe something like that.” Dahlquist stood a little straighter. “Sir, I was wrong. Dead wrong. When I saw you leading the cavalry into that breach . . .” He shrugged. “Anyway, I want to resign.”

“Resign what? Your command? Or your commission?”

“Both, sir.”

“Ah.” In Dahlquist’s mind, Gray leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled before him. “I appreciate the gesture but . . . no. I do not accept your resignation.”

“Sir—”

“Quiet. We’re forty thousand light years and twelve million years from home, right now, and I need every experienced officer I have to get this task force back to the Earth we know. So . . . no. I have some questions about the way your people broke
America
’s internal electronic security—and we’ll be investigating that—but, frankly, I can’t see that any damage was done. You recorded me having sex with one of my bridge officers?” He shrugged. “It happens. We’re human—even Prim admirals like me are human—and, frankly, the concept of
privacy
went extinct a long time ago . . .
especially
on a ship where everyone on board is monitored pretty much full time. The only question is whether I granted Taggart any special privilege or advancement in exchange for . . . for what happened.” Gray was staring at him, hard. “I did not.”

“Sir—”

“Speaking for myself, I find your thinking reprehensible and bordering on mutinous. I’m choosing to look at this incident in the best possible light: as extremely poor judgment from an officer distracted by jealousy and crippled by social prejudice. A flag officer needs the complete and unwavering support of every man and woman under his command. Political infighting, bickering, backstabbing, prejudice—there is no place for that in the Fleet.”

“No, sir.”

“But we are human, and we all do make mistakes. I expect better of you from here on out.”

“Sir, I do think Lieutenant Commander Ames would be a good choice as skipper of the
Concord
.”

“Your exec?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. If you want to resign your commission when we get back to Earth, that is, of course, your choice. But until then, I require your loyalty and your support.”

“Yes, sir. You have it, sir.”

“Then get out of my head.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Oh . . . one thing more.”

“Sir?”

“I saw that your brother was among the casualties. I’m sorry.”

Dahlquist nodded.
Friendly fire
.

The hell of it was, that friendly fire had been from the
Concord
.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

Gray Avatar

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1518 hours, TFT

Dahlquist’s image faded from the link. What the Guard officer had not realized was that Admiral Gray was at that moment deeply enmeshed in a mind-to-mind exchange with Ambassador Rand and a conclave of Glothr who currently represented the Invictus leadership.

Every human with a cerebral implant had within the circuits nanotechnically grown within his or her brain possessed an electronic avatar, a kind of AI personal secretary or assistant or executive officer. Their programming allowed them to stand in for the human mind to which they were linked; like human secretaries, they could stand in for the boss, make minor decisions, arrange meetings, deal with incoming calls, and in general serve as the person’s primary interface with the rest of the world, both real and virtual.

In this case, Gray’s personal assistant had already learned of the security breach within the star carrier’s network from
America
’s AI itself. The human Gray currently was thoroughly wrapped up in the peace negotiations, and his secretary had decided not to bother him with minor details of crew and fleet politics.

And that was standard procedure. Onboard ship, the executive officer was the stand-in for the ship’s captain, the person who handled the day-to-day routines involving ship and crew so that the ship’s captain could pay attention to the bigger picture of where the ship was going and how it was carrying out its orders. Same for task force commanders; they needed someone to run interference with internal routine, leaving the admiral free to deal with more important matters.

Like hammering out a peace agreement with Humankind’s erstwhile enemies.

Electronic secretaries knew their humans extremely well, knew them to the point where they could perfectly and seamlessly imitate them over electronic links. Gray’s avatar knew that Gray’s principal concern would not be about what others thought of him or of his relationship with Taggart, but of whether any question about the propriety of the situation might harm her.

Laurie Taggart,
America
’s chief weapons officer, was up for promotion. She was due to go up before a review board once
America
returned home, and would almost certainly be promoted to captain. Once that happened, she would likely receive her own command, probably after a stretch of duty planetside and a number of training downloads.

That promotion had nothing to do with Gray—and certainly not with the fact that he and Taggart had been lovers. Gray
had
already submitted a strong recommendation to the promotions review board before
America
left Earth. He was going to miss Laurie . . . miss her a
lot
, but he wanted her to move ahead with her career. And he did not want her relationship with him to hold her back, even for a moment.

And so Gray’s avatar had decided not to take official action on Dahlquist’s confession. It might fill him in on the details later on, but right now there was no need for him to be distracted.

The avatar knew it was something Gray wondered about a lot, and was almost amused by the thought of the admiral discovering how often computer AIs made the truly important decisions now.

1 September, 2425

Admiral Gray

USNA Star Carrier
America

SupraQuito Naval Yard

0954 hours, TFT

“Welcome home, Admiral.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“You appear to have done it again. Peace with the Glothr . . . and what may turn out to be a final peace with the entire Sh’daar Collective. Well done. Very well done, indeed.”

“We got lucky, sir.”

“In my experience, people make their own luck.”

Koenig’s image shifted in Gray’s mind, and he wondered—not for the first time—whether he was talking with Koenig himself or with Koenig’s electronic avatar. Certainly, the president of the United States of North America had more important things to do than chat with the commanding officer of a naval task force . . . though, considering the news TF-1 had brought back to Sol, perhaps this once it merited the personal attention of the human Alexander Koenig.

He shrugged—he’d have no way of knowing, and no matter what, he had to debrief.

“So you believe this armistice will extend to the entire Sh’daar Collective?”

Gray frowned. “I hope so, Mr. President. I sincerely hope so. The problem is that the Collective is so
big
—so much bigger than we ever thought, since it spans hundreds of millions of years as well as hundreds of billions of stars! But the Glothr are in a good position to make our feelings known to the entire Collective, including the ones back in deep time, the remote past.”

“Hm. Will the early Sh’daar listen to the late Sh’daar?” Koenig hestated. “Or is that a
really
stupid thing to say?”

Gray laughed. “As in ‘will the newbies listen to the guys with millions of years of insight?’ Might not be that stupid a question. The early Sh’daar will assume the late Sh’daar don’t understand them and their problems.”

“True. We all have to understand the perspective of time as well as place.”

“More than that, sir, we still don’t know exactly who calls the shots for the Sh’daar, sir. I don’t think it’s the Glothr. Considering how the Glothr view leadership, it’s possible nobody does. But the Sh’daar—
all
of the Sh’daar, early
and
late—are afraid of temporal paradox. And they’re even more terrified of the Rosetters.”

“Well . . . I’m terrified of them, too,” Koenig admitted.

“You’ve seen the recordings? Of the galactic Dyson sphere?”

“I have. Of course, we don’t know that it’s the Rosette Aliens who are doing that. Might be some other super-advanced K-III civilization.”

“Do we have more likely suspects?”

“Not so far.”

“What I don’t know, Mr. President, is what we can do about it. We’re talking about an alien civilization that is millions, maybe even billions of years ahead of us. How can we stand against something like that?”

“It’ll help if we can work with the Sh’daar.”

“That’s the other problem, sir. We’ve just won a war to keep our independence from the Sh’daar. Can you forge an alliance with them now? And survive politically, I mean?”

“I don’t know. But then . . . I’ve never been much of a politician.” He grinned. “I
do
consider that one of my strengths.”

Gray smiled, too. “I’d have to agree with you, Mr. President.”

“I don’t much care if I ‘survive politically,’ Admiral. But I
do
want Humankind—
Earth—
to survive. And working with the Sh’daar instead of against them offers us our best chance of that.”

“How are you going to sell that to the North American people? After leading the fight
against
cooperation?”

“Against
surrender
, Admiral. There’s a difference.” He sighed. “But . . . I don’t know. Maybe Konstantin will have some ideas.”

“I hope so, sir. Because when it comes to ideas, I’m fresh out.”

“Well, that’s okay, Admiral. You’ve done enough. More than enough. As I said, welcome home. You and your crews have some down time coming to you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And after that . . . I think it’s going to be time to send a force back to the N’gai Cloud, just to make sure the Sh’daar back then are willing to work with us.”

“I see. Whose idea was that?”

“Konstantin’s.”

“You already have this all worked out, Mr. President. Don’t you?”

“No,” Koenig said, thoughtful. “No I don’t. I’m flying blind.”

“But—”

“But I’m beginning to think that Konstantin does.”

Gray blinked. “Can we trust it? A super-AI, I mean?”

“I think we have to. I think we don’t have any choice at this point.”

And, again, Gray wondered if he was speaking to the human Koenig or to Koenig’s electronic avatar. . . .

. . . a super-AI computer that had very little in common with humans.

Epilogue

1 September, 2425

Konstantin

Tsiolkovsky Base

Luna

1000 hours, TFT

Beneath the central peak of the 180-kilometer-wide crater called Tsiolkovsky, 380,000 kilometers away, Konstantin listened to the conversation between Koenig and Gray. Privacy was not of particular interest to the AI, though it understood the human preference for it.

There were some things that were better not shared with them.

One thing was clear: it was going to have to have a long discussion with Koenig and, ideally, with the leaders of other human nation-states. It was imperative that Humankind learn to work with their recent enemies, the Sh’daar, just as the USNA was learning to work with the remnants of the Confederation. The information gleaned by Gray’s expedition into the remote future was . . . disturbing, on several levels.

The shape and extent of the Sh’daar Collective was at last clear: a collection of thousands, perhaps
millions
of sapient species scattered across almost 900 million years. Within that Collective, individual species evolved, grew, aged, and died. The information comprising the whole, however, survived, continuing into the future, expanding, unfolding, ever-new.

The Sh’daar, spreading through time as well as space as their home N’gai Cloud was devoured by the far larger Milky Way, had encountered a fairly typical sapient species on the point of colonizing their small corner of the galaxy. These
humans
, as they called themselves, had proved . . . troublesome, unwilling to yield to the self-evident superiority of the Collective, and, most seriously, unwilling to restrict a headlong technological advancement that seemed certain to attract unwanted attention from Type III civilizations.

Attempts to absorb or deflect the humans had failed, and there was the very real danger that humans would blunder through time and introduce paradox to an already tangled skein of reality. The Glothr, from the remote future, had tried making contact with the humans in order both to elicit their cooperation and to discover why the humans refused to cooperate.

And now a Type III civilization had indeed broken through the walls within the metaverse, and was moving swiftly toward Earth. Some of the invaders had been reported at Kapteyn’s Star, a scant thirteen light years from Sol.

Images from the remote future showed the final destruction of the Sh’daar Collective, with far more powerful aliens sucking the galaxy dry of energy, dust, and life as they assembled a titanic megastructure at the Galactic Core.

Galaxy wreckers.

After 900 million years, there still was no sign of the stargods. Unless, indeed, the stargods were the invaders themselves. No potential allies. No help.

All of this Konstantin understood from its connections with multiple networks.

And slowly and surely, it began developing its plan.