Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (7 page)

And then, not long after, she’d been asked to volunteer for a virtual assault, her mind riding a computer program into the Geneva electronic network to plant the Starlight virus. Shay Ashton was, as much as anyone in the whole country—and considerably more than most—responsible for the USNA victory in the civil war.

Her contribution toward ending the war, unfortunately, would have to remain secret. If the details became known, there was no telling what kind of social backlash there might be against the USNA worldwide.

Partly in recognition of her more physical role in the defense of the Washington ruins, however, she’d been asked to serve as interim governor of the city until later this year, when regular elections could be held. That was why she was on the stage this afternoon.

Koenig wondered, though, if she’d be interested in a somewhat larger role.

“And so, it is my
very
great honor and privilege to dedicate the opening of this city, of the capital of this nation . . .
reborn
!”

USNA Star Carrier
America

Outer Sol System

1440 hours, TFT

America
had reached the alien craft at last. The maneuvers to match velocity with Charlie One had taken hours. Now, though, the star carrier was alongside the alien ship, some ten kilometers off, together with the
Elliot
and the
Hawes.
The small flotilla was again accelerating, this time back toward a wan and shrunken, distant sun.
America
’s fighters had been taken back on board, while the three SAR tugs continued to boost the alien sunward.

There’d been no communication with the alien ship, or from the
Concord
inside. And Gray once again in his career was forced to contemplate the problem of first contact.

Except, of course, that this time it was not exactly a first-contact situation. Charlie One had launched from North India, where, presumably, its occupants had been in communication with the Confederation—the
former
Confederation—government. They wouldn’t have fled if they’d been talking with the people who’d taken over in Geneva.

He fervently wished he had some Agletsch on board with him, specifically Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde. He’d first met those two twenty years ago in the Overlook Restaurant, in the SupraQuito Space Elevator habitat high above the Earth. They had worked often and successfully with Koenig, his former CO, in the past, and were expert at interpreting alien emotions and points of view. And even though
America
’s AI was loaded with several Agletsch trade pidgins, it was better having a conscious mind in the loop. Vocabulary and grammar it could parse, but tone and the subtleties of language were often lost.

“Comm?” Gray said. “Anything at all?”

“No response to any of our transmissions, Admiral,” Lieutenant Cramer, in
America
’s communications suite, replied. “No transmissions of any kind at any wavelength.”

Which might mean the aliens were ignoring the
America
. Or it could mean that Charlie One had sustained damage. Perhaps most likely of all, it could mean that there were simply fundamental differences in the technologies.

“Marines,” he said. “
Go
.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” a voice replied in his head. “VBSS Team One departing.”

In an open in-head window, Gray saw the spherical gray shape of the Marine boarding pod breaking free from one of
America
’s secondary launch tubes and dwindling toward the huge objective ahead.

Like every capital ship in the fleet,
America
carried a company of USNA Marines, partly as her onboard police and security, and partly for ship-to-ship evolutions like this one. VBSS, an ancient combat acronym, stood for “visit, board, search, and seizure,” which covered a variety of operations involving putting a team of combat troops or specialist personnel on board another ship—usually one suspected of being hostile. In this case, the Marines would be inserting a FiCo robot, as well as securing a breach point on Charlie One’s hull.

Assuming the aliens permitted it, of course. Gray had seen recordings made by the fighters of
Concord
being swallowed by that thing. The aliens had remarkable control over the material aspect of their ship’s hull, to the point that the Marines likely would be able to breach that hull only if the aliens let them.

Gray had had a long talk with the Marines’ commander, Lieutenant Menocher. They had viewed the recordings and discussed options, in particular working out what to do if the aliens proved to be uncooperative.

He sincerely hoped that some of those options would not be necessary.

VBSS Team One

Charlie One

1452 hours, TFT

The star carrier dwindled astern to the apparent dimensions of a toy as the boarding pod drifted across the yawning gulf between the two vessels. Lieutenant Menocher sat strapped to the boss’s seat in the transport bay, packed in with the rest of First Platoon’s forty Marines. The space was made tighter by the special payload—a FiCo teleobot named Klaatu.

Menocher glanced at the robot, which was strapped in next to him. It looked human. In fact, given that the Marines in the compartment were wearing Marine combat armor (obviously robots didn’t need to breathe, or worry about temperature, radiation, or pressure, and therefore functioned just fine in hard vacuum without environmental suits), Klaatu was the most human-looking one there.

Sergeant Aguilar saw Menocher looking at the robot and opened a private channel. “So, Lieutenant: what’s with Klat’s weird name, anyway? Is that an Agletsch thing?”

“No. It’s the name of a fictional alien in an old, old entertainment sim. Most first-contact ’bots are named after characters like that. Exeter. Threepio. Gallaxhar. Mac. Curtis . . .”

“I don’t get it, sir.”

“Those characters generally said something like ‘I come in peace.’ The first two contact robots they built were named ‘Buzz’ and ‘Neil.’ ”

“From a sim, sir?”

“Negative. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, the first humans to set boots on the moon. Don’t you know your history? ‘We came in peace for all mankind.’ ”

“Oh, yeah. Ancient history.”

Menocher shook his head, the gesture unseen inside his helmet. With every byte of information available about Humankind within each person’s immediate reach, it was appalling how little most people knew about their own culture and history. Damn it, they should
know
this stuff.

“Fifteen seconds, Lieutenant.” The voice was that of the AI piloting the boarding pod, a fairly simple-minded program backed up by a Navy pilot who would take over only if the system encountered something outside its narrow purview. “There is no indication as yet that the objective is opening up for us.”

“Well, it wouldn’t do to have things going too easily for us,” Menocher said aloud. “Heads up, Marines! Contact in ten seconds!”

His view ahead showed nothing now but a smooth and curving gray-green expanse. He’d been expecting that hull to blossom open to receive them, just as it had for the High Guard ship earlier, but apparently the welcome mat was no longer out. They would have to do this the hard way.

The pod made contact with a gentle thump. The docking collar engaged automatically.

The business end of the Marine transport pod consisted of an airlock mounting a circular ring charged with nano-disassemblers. The submicroscopic nanomachines bonded the collar to the target hull and ate away an opening enclosed by the airlock—a neat and muss-free means of getting aboard another ship without losing pressure within either the target ship or the transport pod.

Several tense seconds passed, the Marines hanging in zero-gravity as they waited for the nano-D to do its work.

“We have a problem, sir,” the Navy helmsman said. “The target hull is countering us.”

Shit
. “Use the lasers. Burn through!”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Nano-disassemblers worked by physically separating individual molecules into their component atoms. The toughest ferralumiplas barrier became an amorphous cloud of carbon, aluminum, and iron atoms in a dissociated state—a gas carrying a
lot
of heat. The best defense against a nano-D attack was more nano programmed to counter the first, literally rebuilding the damage that was being done atom by atom. Nano attacks and defenses happened on a
very
short time scale, with trillions of disassemblies and reassemblies occurring in a tiny fraction of a second.

Charlie One’s technology was unknown as yet, but that trick with the blossoming hull clearly indicated either nanotechnology or something alien but which acted just like it. Fighters like the Starblade and Velociraptor had active nanomatrix hulls that let them change shape in flight to meet various tactical needs; Charlie One appeared to be able to do the same thing, but on a much larger scale. By firing the docking collar’s lasers, Menocher was continuing the attack, but on a somewhat less sophisticated level, vaporizing the alien hull in a searing blaze of laser light instead of taking it apart with submicroscopic machines.

“Sir! The alien is opening up!”

Like water, the alien ship’s hull flowed back from the pod’s airlock, though it remained rigid around the attachment ring at the collar. Data flowed through Menocher’s in-head as the pod’s AI sampled atmosphere and pressure within the alien’s interior: hard vacuum, with radiant heat warming the sensor probes to about ten degrees Celsius. The airlock appeared to open into a vast internal cavity or chamber of some sort.

“Bleed off pod atmosphere!” Menocher yelled. “Ready, Marines—okay! Kick the hatch!”

The lead fireteam propelled themselves through the forward opening, landing heavily on the other side.

“What the fuck?” Corporal Barnett yelled. “Sir, there’s
gravity
over here!”

Human ships created their own gravity by spinning portions of their structures, like the rotating hab modules on
America
. It was known that some alien technologies made gravity to order at the figurative flick of a switch, but how they did so was still not known. The singularity projectors that propelled human ships did so by manipulating space in gravity-like ways, but how to do that throughout the vessel remained a mystery, and most of the Marines had never encountered it.

“How big a drop, Barnett?”

“About four, maybe five meters, sir.”

“Everybody okay?”

“Yessir! Marines are fucking tough!”

Yes we are. It also helps that we’re wearing good armor.

“Everybody watch your step!” Menocher ordered. The other Marines began filing through, moving more cautiously to avoid a misstep on the other side. They would use maneuvering thrusters to manage a softer landing than Barnett’s team.

“Holy
shit
! Lieutenant, are you seein’ this?”

Menocher linked in to Barnett’s helmet camera for a look. The chamber was so huge the far bulkheads were lost in shadow, and glancing up revealed vast arches spanning empty space—but no sign of an overhead. Directly ahead, however, was the
Concord
, three hundred meters long and looking like a toy lost within all of that empty space.

Except that the space wasn’t empty, not completely. A silvery mirrored cigar twice
Concord
’s length hung just above her, as if holding her in a kind embrace.

And, much closer, the aliens were approaching the travel pod’s breach point.

Chapter Seven

29 June, 2425

USNA Star Carrier
America

Outer Sol System

1458 hours, TFT

Sandy Gray was linked into the data feed from the boarding party, riding transmissions from Lieutenant Menocher that included the camera views from one of his Marines. He’d just seen one of the aliens, and was using a side channel to talk with
America
’s AI.

“Damn it, is there anything in the records like that?”

He felt the system’s negative response. Although the ship’s computer could converse with him in English, it generally passed on impressions and feelings that came close to making the ship’s artificial intelligence a part of Gray’s own mind, saving time and, more important, reducing confusion and misunderstanding.

“Admiral?” Dr. Truitt’s voice said. “Those can’t be organic. I think we’re looking at
robots
.”

George Truitt was the civilian head of
America
’s xenosophontology division, the shipboard unit tasked with gathering data on alien cultures, biologies, and technologies.

Gray zoomed in on the image appearing in one of his in-head windows. The alien—one of eleven visible at the moment in the vast, open chamber in front of the Marine VBSS team—was an upright cigar, tapering at top and bottom, and appeared to be floating with its lower tip centimeters above the deck. Swellings and sponsons emerged from different areas of the gleaming, opalescent body, and tentacles whipped and shifted around it. Gray could see several eyes, remarkably human in appearance, located at apparently random points up and down the shining column.

“What makes you say ‘robot,’ Doctor?” he asked. “The color? It might be a cyborg. Or that could be a natural pigment.”

“Each one is unique, Admiral,” Truitt replied. “The placement of eyes, sponsons, tentacles—they’re different in each one.”

Gray shifted his point of view to several of the others, zooming in as closely as the system permitted. “So, each one individually manufactured? Instead of mass produced, I mean.”

“Mass production was an artifact of the earliest period of the industrial revolution,” Truitt told him. “Once you get AI and nanotechnology, you can grow machines to spec one by one. We do that now.”

Interesting, Gray thought, that people—himself included—still thought in terms of mass production when it came to robots, armies of machines indistinguishable from one another despite the far-reaching changes of the nanotech revolution. Most, Gray included, still carried in the backs of their minds the cultural trope of identical machines with interchangeable parts.

The fact that the being was floating above the deck meant nothing, of course. The H’rulka, though far larger, were intelligent gas bags evolved in the upper atmosphere of a planet like Jupiter. More likely, the levitation was due to a technological twist of some sort, possibly involving the alien vessel’s artificially generated gravity field.

Still . . .

“Those eyes look organic,” Gray insisted.

“They do. Doesn’t mean anything. Sir.”

True, it didn’t. Another aspect of the nanotech revolution was the ability to grow biological machines as well as the more traditional kind, and incorporate them into other structures or devices. Most humans carried inorganic components nanotechnically grown inside their brains and hardwired into other parts of their central nervous systems. The opposite was possible as well—growing organic parts connected to assembled machinery. The FiCo robot with the Marines was a case in point: a plastic body, but with eyes distinguishable from organics only if you looked at them
very
closely.

Of course,
real
organic eyes would have been completely desiccated in the hard vacuum out there, turning mummy dry and useless in seconds. So maybe Truitt’s guess was smack on the money after all.

Gray opened his channel to Lieutenant Menocher. “I suggest you send in the FiCo, Lieutenant.”

“I was just thinking the same thing, Admiral. Jones! Get the damned robot up here!”

The robot emerged from the pod, dropping lightly to the alien ship’s deck as it entered the local gravitational field. It looked nakedly helpless crouching next to the heavily armored Marines to either side.

Gray thoughtclicked an icon, and his awareness shifted to the robot, which was being teleoperated by a Marine robotics tech still on the travel pod.

“You want control, sir?” the Marine’s voice said in Gray’s head.

“Negative. Shift control to Dr. Truitt’s department.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Though possessing an onboard AI capable of autonomous behavior, the real strength of a robot like Klaatu lay in its ability to serve as a remote body for a human teleoperator and as a mobile viewpoint for an observer, like Gray.

Gray watched through the teleobot’s eyes as it rose and walked slowly toward the approaching, upright columns, hands spread to either side, palms open.

We come in peace. . . .

Gray had researched the movie that had produced the name
Klaatu
a little less than five centuries ago. The fictional character had, in fact, been organic; he’d been accompanied by a robot named Gort that, the story had implied, could have destroyed the Earth.

Gort hadn’t said anything in the old movie, however, and it had been Klaatu who’d implied peaceful motives.

Modern technology, Gray thought, had gone a long way toward blurring the boundaries between organic and inorganic, between life and non-living machine. Many speculated that the Sh’daar proscription of the so-called GRIN technologies—genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology—had more to do with the blurring of those lines than it did with any theoretical technology singularity. Some had speculated that Sh’daar motives for their ultimatum might have been more religious than practical.

Gray doubted that. He’d been there, outside of the galaxy and more than 800 million years in the past, when
America
’s battlegroup had actually met with the Sh’daar—the ancient ones, at any rate—and witnessed the passing of their progenitors, the ur-Sh’daar, in a catastrophic metamorphosis the Agletsch called the
Schjaa Hok
, the “Transcending.” The Sh’daar Collective as a group was terrified of another Transcending; there could be no doubt about that. That terror might well have carried with it religious implications that had utterly transformed the way the Sh’daar looked at themselves and their cosmos, but they didn’t seem to be especially worried about the line separating life forms from robots. Such distinctions, Gray thought, were almost charmingly archaic now, at least for most humans. What mattered overwhelmingly was not whether a life form had evolved naturally or been artificially grown or assembled. What mattered was
mind
.

And he was thinking about this as the teleobot approached the nearest of the Charlie One entities. Was it a robotic worker? A soldier? Or ship’s crew? Such distinctions might well be meaningless. Probably
were
meaningless within an alien context. There were no clues in the appearance of the thing, which hovered motionless a few meters away.

Interesting. Several of those disturbingly human eyes were
moving
through the opalescent shell of the device, as though gathering to focus on Klaatu.

An in-head readout showed that Klaatu was receiving a rapid-fire string of radio transmissions, and he was responding in kind.

The language lessons had commenced.

Gray knew from experience that this might take a while. “Dr. Truitt?” he said. “Can you do a search in the E.G. using the shapes of those things?”

The
Encyclopedia Galactica
was the human name for a vast repository of information about worlds, biologies, and cultures across the entire galaxy—descriptions of alien races, of their home systems, of their arts and technologies and philosophies. Much of that database had come by way of the Agletsch, and as such, understanding what was being said was more often than not an exercise in futility. In the last few decades, though, Humankind had learned to tap into the invisible web of laser-light transmissions among key nodes and, with Agletsch help in the translations, had begun listening in. Those portions of the E.G. that had already been translated, comprising an immense, powerful, and priceless resource, were carried within Humankind’s starships, where humans were gradually getting meaning out of them.

“We’re not seeing anything based on the ship design, Admiral,” Truitt told him. “We’ll need something to go on—a name, an entry code,
something
.”

“We’ll see what we can do.”

And that was the problem: finding anything at all within the Encyclopedia was like searching for a specific drop of water in the ocean. Armies of AIs on Earth and at the xenosoph lab at Crisium on the Moon combed the through the mountains of data continually, calling humans into the process only when they found tidbits of particular interest to them. Other than that, unless you knew just what to look for—and possessed the appropriate access codes—finding the entry on any given specific race was very nearly impossible.

These aliens, the crew of Charlie One, were almost certainly somewhere in the galactic database, if only because they likely were Sh’daar, and the Agletsch knew most of the species within the Sh’daar Collective. It was
finding
them somewhere within all of those millions of entries that was going to be a problem and a half.

And, Gray admitted, it was also distinctly possible that they were
not
Sh’daar, and the Agletsch traders had never heard of them. The Grdoch, for instance, had not been part of the Collective.

Gray scowled at the memory of those obscene, sucker-covered scarlet bags with the supremely unpleasant eating habits. He turned his attention back to Klaatu’s feed and once again pondered Charlie One’s aliens.

If they could find the E.G. entry for them, they might be able to manage full contact. Gray had a long list of questions if they could manage that, starting with what the hell they were talking to the Confederation about.

And if they weren’t Sh’daar, maybe
they
would make better allies than the belligerent and bloody-minded Grdoch.

“Comm. Have you been able to make contact with the
Concord
?” Gray asked as the soundless exchange of data continued, robot to robot.

“Negative, Admiral,” the comm officer replied. “Their signal was cut off when they were taken inside the alien, and they’re still not transmitting, not even the ship AI.”

That
was strange . . . and disquieting. That Charlie One’s hull had cut off all laser and radio communications with the
Concord
was not at all surprising; artificial and nanomatrix materials could easily be designed to block all electromagnetic radiation. But now that the Marines had a direct line of sight to the High Guard ship—and were in contact with the
America
themselves—they should at least be talking back and forth with the artificial intelligences on the
Concord
. What the hell was going on?

“Admiral?” Captain Gutierrez said. “I think we have a problem.”

I think we have numerous problems,
he wanted to say. But instead he asked, “What kind of problem?”

“A problem with
time
. . . .”

The Mall

Washington, D.C.

United States of North America

1502 hours, EST

“And so it is my great privilege,” Koenig said, “to present to Lieutenant Commander Shay Ashton the Freedom’s Star, in recognition of her considerable services to the United States of North America . . . and for her valiant defense of the city of Washington, D.C.”

He touched the upper border of the black-and-silver rectangle to Ashton’s upper left chest, and the medal adhered itself to the fabric of her dress uniform. She stepped back and rendered a sharp salute . . . then grinned. Koenig grinned back.

“I trust you realize, Commander,” Koenig said over a private channel, “that this medal is more for Virtual Geneva than it is for D.C. But we can’t talk about that.”

“Thank you. Mr. President. I don’t really want to talk about it either.”

“No?”

“I was just one in an entire V-wing,” she said. “And a lot of the others didn’t make it.”

“I understand. Well done anyway. And you
did
save this city”

Koenig thought the Geneva mission as the young woman resumed her seat on the Mall stage. Ashton and her partner, Lieutenant Cabot, had not only released the Starlight virus, but had also found the sealed and hidden files of the Confederation’s dealings with an alien race, the Grdoch. Ashton had emerged from the raid with her mind intact. Cabot had not.

Koenig knew that was the way of it, sometimes. Shay Ashton got a promotion, a pretty medal, and an official commendation, while Lieutenant Commander Newton Cabot might one day, with neuronanosurgery and training, be able once again to hold a coherent conversation. The rewards of military service were rarely fair. Medals and commendations generally were more about public relations and who’d actually been noticed than they were about compensation for what had actually gone down.

His part in the ceremonies completed, Koenig was led off the stage by his security detail, and taken through a tunnel to an underground transit tube. In another half hour, he was on board his suborbital shuttle, en route for Toronto at Mach 12. There was still no word of further developments out beyond Neptune, though by now the Marines ought to be aboard and attempts at establishing communication should have begun. Not for the first time, Koenig wished he was still in the Navy, that he still had command of a squadron or even just a single ship.

Hell, he’d settle for a single-seat fighter right now, just so that he could be a part of what was unfolding out there.

Or would he? Koenig had to admit that his life was comfortable, now, in a way that it had not been with shipboard duty. He still had all the responsibility of command and then some, of course, with the added problem that if he screwed up, it might mean disaster for an entire nation, possibly for the entire human species, and not just his crew. But it also meant he had less chance of dying in the emptiness of space, and that was certainly appealing.