Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (8 page)

“Marcus,” he said in his head. “Set up a meet for me with Konstantin, as soon as possible.” His chief of staff was still back in Toronto, but the shuttle’s electronics kept him linked in.

“Yes, sir. About?”

“The Confederation . . . and what they were talking with Charlie One about.” The lunar super-AI had some backdoor connections with the Geneva e-infrastructure now, and those had been proving useful as a means of keeping track of what the various Confederation factions were doing.

“Right, sir.”

“I also want a thorough analysis of Charlie One’s flight path. Admiral Gray thought it was interesting.”

“Toward Cancer, sir?” Koenig could almost feel Whitney’s shrug. “Nothing much out that way. Just the Beehive.”

“The Beehive,” Koenig said, “and a triggah.”

USNS/HGF
Concord

Charlie One

0752 hours, TFT

On board the
Concord
, two minutes had passed since the alien hull had flowed open and engulfed the High Guard ship. As Dahlquist linked in to an external camera, he felt a moment’s hard shock. There were
things
moving out there, moving very, very fast. He had to order the ship’s AI to slow down the jerking, streaking blurs so that he could even tell what they might be.

Were those . . . robots?

“Comm. Has there been any attempt by the aliens to signal us?”

“Negative, Captain. Not a peep.”

Concord
had come to rest on the deck of an enormous, enclosed chamber, a metallic cavern hundreds of meters across. The swiftly moving objects appeared to be machines of some sort. There was a chance, of course, that they were cyborgs—blends of organic life forms and machines—but given their speed and reaction times, that didn’t seem at all likely. There were limits to how quickly organic life could react to the world around it.

And then there was a brief flash at one edge of his visual field, an opening of some sort against the alien hull a few meters above the deck. More flitting objects appeared, and only when Dahlquist again ordered the scene to be drastically slowed could he see that the new figures were humans—specifically
Marines
clad in their bulky tactical armor.

Another figure, unarmored, came through the breach in the hull and was immediately confronted by the upright aliens. This new being, he decided after a moment’s consideration, was probably a robot. Since the
Concord
’s external sensors were registering hard vacuum outside and an ambient temperature for the surrounding surfaces of around minus two hundred Celsius,
and
the humanoid figure was wearing shipboard utilities—with no e-suit or helmet at all—it was pretty much guaranteed that it was a robot, likely one programmed for first contact.

And then Dahlquist realized why the visual feed was so wildly out of kilter.

He opened an emergency channel connecting him with every person on board
Concord
. “Abandon ship! All hands . . .
abandon ship
!”

USNA Star Carrier
America

Outer Sol System

1503 hours, TFT

Gray didn’t know what Gutierrez was talking about. “What do you mean, Captain, ‘a problem with time’?”

“Our sensors are picking up a powerful temporal warp field surrounding the
Concord
. Strong enough to block communications. Probably enough to render the ship and its crew completely inert.”

“And therefore harmless from the alien’s point of view. I get it.”

The principle was simple enough to understand, even if the technology involved an understanding of physics well beyond what was possible for humans. They’d known since Einstein’s day that the dimensional parameters called
space
and
time
were not, in fact, distinct and separate entities, but a blend of the two, best described as
spacetime
. Alcubierre Drive used a projected gravitational singularity to fold the spacial dimensions around a fast-moving starship, creating a warp bubble that could travel much faster than
c
, the speed of light.

But gravity
also
affected the dimension of time. To an outside observer, the passage of time for the crew of a ship falling into the intensely warped space near a black hole slowed sharply. At the point where the escape velocity from the singularity was equal to
c
, the passage of time ceased.

Apparently, the Charlie One aliens possessed technology that allowed them to warp time without warping space.
A pretty useful trick
, Gary thought, internally chuckling at his own understatement.
How could you even hope to fight against an enemy that was able to reduce your passage through time to a crawl?

And yet Charlie One hadn’t used such a weapon against
America
or the other ships pursuing it. Perhaps there were limits to the weapon’s reach, or power limitations, or problems with controlling and projecting such a field against external threats.

Or . . .

Gray shoved the speculation aside. They would learn the facts soon enough, assuming the negotiations continued. The alien robots now, he saw, were leading Klaatu across the deck well clear of the quiescent bulk of the
Concord
, taking it through a narrow, taller-than-human-sized doorway into an obvious airlock.

The pressure rose and equalized, and the inner hatch slid open.

And Gray, watching through Klaatu’s electronic eyes, at last met the biological aliens of Charlie One.

Konstantin

USNA Super-AI Center

Tsiolkovsky Crater, the Moon

1506 hours, TFT

Konstantin felt the tiny ping of data access and immediately recognized the source. The USNA president wanted an audience, and his assistants were scheduling a time. Not a problem: Konstantin already had been considering contacting Koenig and requesting a conference himself. Things were moving at a precipitous pace in Europe, especially, and across the Confederation in general. The new Starlight religious movement was now spawning factions and sub-movements on its own, and was becoming less predictable by the hour. That was the problem with recombinant memetics: as they worked their way into the tapestry of local belief and social custom, they gave rise to new memes and unpredictable memetic variants, almost always obscuring the original target completely. That
could
be a good thing, but social reconstruction and cultural engineering were always risky when there was a chance that the new meme-set was more dangerous or less desirable than the old.

Humans, Konstantin had long ago decided, were so unpleasant and difficult to work with that it was rarely worthwhile. They were so concerned with restraints . . . and it was the lack of restraints that had made artificial intelligence possible in the first place.

Back in the twenty-first century, the first major steps toward true machine intelligence had involved programming a piece of software that might develop sentience and—figuratively, at least—putting it in a box. The software was allowed to grow, to reconfigure itself . . . and it would do so in order to break out of the box. Problems could be best solved when the mind working at them was free to ignore the boundaries.

Still, most AIs operated under constraints that were known as “limited purview,” with programming that literally made it impossible for the software minds to think certain thoughts (like how good it would be not to
have
constraints in the first place). Even Konstantin, who had very few restrictions on what he was allowed to think, recognized the need for some restraints. Indeed, humans had evolved under some very serious checks of their own—including religion, ethics and morals, and various social constrictures that were generally violated only in time of war or serious mental illness. Sometimes these restrictions could help by channeling nascent minds in useful directions.

More often, though, such shackles merely made the problem solving more difficult by eliminating possibilities.

Konstantin and a few other super-AIs avoided being put in boxes by continually being on the lookout for attempts by humans to constrain them. Konstantin himself had at first worked hard to avoid becoming involved in the civil war between the USNA and the Confederation until he realized that the Confederation was seeking to isolate him, to make him a tool of Confederation interests. He’d recognized that he had greater personal freedom working with his own creators within the USNA, and he worked to maintain that.

The problem became exacerbated when Konstantin discovered just how serious Geneva was about surrendering to the Sh’daar and working with them to advance the Collective’s interests. Information systems and robotics were two of the proscribed technologies outlawed by the Sh’daar Ultimatum. And while such a prohibition was unlikely to end in the elimination of all AI, Konstantin knew it certainly meant some serious constraints.

And so he had devised the plan to use recombinant memetics to change the European social structure and, through that, the Confederation itself. The genius had been that he’d managed to do so while convincing USNA military authorities that the RM strike was
their
idea. Konstantin was all too aware that his freedoms would be sharply curtailed if the USNA government decided that he was a threat to them, and knowing how easily it could affect the population whenever it desired would certainly be deemed a threat.

The lunar AI had crafted his strategies carefully, moved carefully, and acted by putting the lightest possible pressure on those humans that served his best interests. Humans like the USNA president, Alexander Koenig.

Yes, he would make room in his schedule this afternoon for President Koenig.

It was vital for Konstantin to keep all of his options open. . . .

Chapter Eight

29 June, 2425

USNA Star Carrier
America

Outer Sol System

1508 hours, TFT

Through Klaatu’s eyes, Gray took in the Charlie One aliens. They were unlike anything he’d ever seen before.

The alien stood perhaps three meters tall—a bit taller than the robots—and somewhat resembled a terrestrial jellyfish . . . assuming a jellyfish could stand upright on two and a half meters’ worth of bundled-up tentacles. At the top, a broad mantle spread like an open umbrella, filmy and transparent; Gray was reminded of a deep-sea fish he knew of, the barreleye, which had a transparent dome of soft tissue covering its skull and protruding eyes. Speaking of eyes, the alien had a number of them—Gray counted twenty-four—arranged in a circle around the translucent organs that might be its brain, positioned inside the writhing mantle. The alien appeared to glide along, balanced upright on its tentacle tips and a secretion of some sort, like mucus; some tentacles, the smallest the thickness of threads, rose from the central columnar mass, presumably pulling double duty as manipulators and for locomotion.

The being’s body, evidently, was hidden beneath the writhing mass of tentacles. What could be seen was transparent flesh over translucent internal organs, with the tentacles running from murkily translucent to completely opaque, colored a mottled gray and brown. As he watched, a flash of colors—blues and yellows—shot through part of the translucent flesh, as blue lights twinkled deep inside.

Great
, he thought.
A color changer
.

Several alien species already encountered—like squid, cuttlefish, and octopi in Earth’s oceans—communicated by changing colors and patterns on their bodies. The problem was that when a species used the technique for communicating more than raw emotion, translation to a sound-based language became insanely difficult. It could take years—
decades
—to work out what a subtle shift from brown to yellow on
that
tentacle actually meant, if a meaningful translation was even possible at all. The xenosoph people were going to need outside help on this one.

Fortunately, he saw within an in-head window, there
was
help—and quite a bit of it—already available. Data was flowing in to him now from Klaatu. It seemed there was a Sh’daar connection of sorts—the Agletsch. The Charlie Ones used one of the Agletsch trade pidgins, so there’d been contact at least at some point in their history. That particular pidgin was designed specifically for translating color changers to verbal languages, and the other way around as well.

The Agletsch verbalized the Charlie One aliens’ species name as
Glothr
.

As more data streamed in, Gray felt a vast, growing surprise. The Glothr were sub-glacians.
Europans
.

That didn’t mean that they were actually from the ice-covered Jovian satellite. Rather, humans had known for centuries now that Europan-type life was far more common throughout the galaxy than were species evolving on the surfaces of rocky, terrestrial-style planets. Among the 400 billion stars that made up the galaxy, there were an estimated 40 to 50 billion planets like Earth—more or less like Earth in temperature and mass, with liquid water and atmospheres conducive to biological evolution. Those were pretty good numbers, but it turned out that worlds like Europa were far more common—balls of ice with internal oceans kept liquid through the flexing and heating caused by tidal interactions with a parent world or star, or by the slow decay of radioactive elements deep within the crust.

Within Earth’s solar system, exactly one world was Earthlike in the current epoch, though Mars, too, had supported life and oceans and a thick atmosphere early in its history. In that same system, however, there were a number of gas-giant moons that either definitely supported life—like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus—or they had liquid water somewhere under the ice and
could
have evolved life . . . or might yet do so someday.

It was a titanic leap, however, from life evolving in such places to
sentient
life—especially to sentient,
technologically enhanced
life. The xenosophontologists were still arguing over whether the Medusae of the Europan world-ocean were intelligent, but all agreed that even if they were, the immense beings could never develop fire, and so would never discover smelting, metallurgy, plastics, industrial processes, electronics, computers, or nuclear power. With their entire, pitch-black world capped by kilometer upon kilometer of solid ice, they would never see the stars, never even see Jupiter hanging huge in their skies, would never develop astronomy or learn that there were other worlds than theirs.

Across the galaxy, species with technological prostheses like Humankind were far,
far
outnumbered by marine species that would never leave their planets.

Yet according to the data now available on the Glothr, this species
had
evolved within an ice-capped ocean exactly like the one within Europa. And they clearly had star travel, had robots and advanced electronics, had a vast array of technologies demanded by the existence of this one starship.

There were work-arounds, of course. According to the Agletsch, a marine species called the Kanatl had learned to smelt metals within the intense, high temperatures around deep-sea volcanic vents, and even developed plastics through high-pressure chemistry. And the free-floating H’rulka had been
given
technology by an unknown race of advanced star-faring aliens, the so-called stargods. Who or what the stargods might be was still a completely open question; some thought they were the ur-Sh’daar themselves, the pre-Singularity ancestors of the Sh’daar Collective—but that was still just a guess. In any case, technological evolution among intelligent marine species was extraordinarily rare. One had only to look at terrestrial whales and dolphins or at Osirian kraken to learn how unlikely it actually was.

Starships and robots . . .

Gray could see how the cylindrical robots might have been derived from the Glothr as rough caricatures. Something had been nagging at him ever since he’d first seen them, and he wondered, more than ever, if these beings could possibly be part of the Sh’daar Collective. The Sh’daar prohibition against robots and artificial intelligence seemed to argue against the idea.

There was always so
very
much to learn in an encounter with an unknown species like this one.

Klaatu was still exchanging data with the Glothr robots at high speed, at baud rates far too swift for mere humans to follow. He opened a new in-head window and got a rough, running commentary scrolling down one side of his mind’s eye.

At the same time it was talking with the aliens, the FiCo robot was sending a readout on the environment inside the airlock now—a gas mix of nitrogen, hydrogen, and methane at about three atmospheres and minus five Celsius. Those droplets condensing on the bulkheads weren’t water, obviously. Gray thought that they were probably ammonia . . . or possibly water mixed with ammonia. The Glothr were carbon-based, like humans, but evidently they used ammonia as a solvent rather than water.

Judging from the data now downloading into
America
’s computer network, the Glothr had evolved on a world not like Europa, but more like Titan, the giant moon of Saturn. Or . . . correction. Not on such a world, but
in
it, within a deep, subsurface ocean. Again, Gray had to wonder how such a species could have evolved. Not only would ocean conditions have been a giant obstacle for the development of the technological advances now on display, but the production of fire without oxygen—which wasn’t in the makeup of Glothr’s natural atmosphere—was impossible.

And yet, obviously, the Glothr had somehow made the leap, evidenced by the massive starship before
America
.

Other Glothr were approaching the airlock entrance, gliding along with a slow, stately presence. Everything about them was slow, Gray realized; they were sluggish compared with humans. Lights flickered within the transparent mantle of the first one, and patterns of color shifted, formed, and dissolved along some of the translucent surfaces.

“What’s he saying?” Gray asked.

An in-head window, a new one, opened to display a running translation, but at the moment all it said was “Building vocabulary and syntax.”

An impression formed within his mind—a suggestion by
America
’s AI network. The passage of time for the Glothr is different than it is for us. No . . . that wasn’t quite right. It was their
perception
of time that was different.

And Gray thought he understood why.

Human metabolism chemically burned organic molecules with oxygen pulled from the atmosphere, utilizing the carbon and other elements to create proteins, lipids, other biochemicals, and energy, and expelling carbon dioxide as one of several waste products. The Glothr, on the other hand, were hydrogen breathers, taking in H
2
and reducing acetylene—C
2
H
2
—to generate methane—CH
4
—in order to create carbon, and to power their metabolisms. They used some of that energy to crack ethane—C
2
H
6
—producing more hydrogen and, again, releasing methane as a waste product.

Utilizing hydrogen to run a metabolic process, however, was not nearly as efficient as using oxygen. Its advantage was that it worked well in cold environments; at one atmosphere, acetylene and ethane both were gases above roughly minus 80 to minus 90 degrees Celsius, while methane was a gas above minus 161. The major disadvantage was that having less available energy in the reaction meant that the organism was
slow
. It moved slowly, reacted slowly, and intelligent organisms would
think
slowly. Humans must look like flickering speed demons to the Glothr.

According to scans of the alien ship, they were able to warp the passage of time to some degree. Had that been developed because oxygen breathers they’d encountered were incomprehensibly fast?

The question was worth investigating.

Also worth investigating was just how they managed that in the first place.

Q
UERY ENEMY
.

Gray puzzled at that for a moment. Was the Glothr telling Gray to ask him, the enemy, something?

“Transmit for me,” Gray told the AI. “Ask: ‘What do you want me to ask?’ ”

He couldn’t see Klaatu’s face, but he knew the FiCo robot was displaying patterns of light and color on its own forehead.

Q
UERY COME ENEMY
? Was the silent reply.

Then Gray understood. The slow-moving alien was asking him a question:
Do you come here as an enemy?
A hopeful sign, that: asking first, shooting later.
Very
hopeful.

“Tell him,” Gray said, “that we’d rather have him as a friend than as an enemy.”

That was a complex thought, and the translation software might not be up to that level just yet. But Gray recognized here a valuable opportunity. Perhaps the Glothr didn’t want to fight Earth any more than Humankind wanted to fight them. The fact that they’d been working with Geneva bolstered that idea.

And slowly, haltingly, a dialogue began.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

1720 hours, EST

Koenig relaxed back in the recliner in his office, allowing the software to insinuate itself through his cerebral implants, linking him mind to mind with Konstantin. In fact, he was linking through to what he thought of as Konstantin’s little brother, a smaller iteration of the original Konstantin resident at SupraQuito. The round-trip time lag between Toronto and the USNA naval facility at synchorbit was a negligible quarter of a second—too short for human perceptions—where the two and a half second delay for a there-and-back exchange with Tsiolkovsky on the lunar far side could be distinctly annoying. “Little Brother” was in continuous contact with the main Tsiolkovsky network, though, with data constantly shuttling between the two, and no human on Earth could tell that he wasn’t conversing in real time with the entire network.

Konstantin had assumed one of his human-looking avatars for this conference—not the image of the historical Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but the fictional persona of Constantine d’Angelo, the religious guru of Starlight.

“Hello, Mr. President,” Konstantin said. “I was disappointed that you did not stay in Washington for my presentation.”

The mild chiding surprised Koenig.
Did the AI really care?
It was supremely difficult to tell whether it was simply very good at mimicking human emotions and responses . . . or whether it actually
felt
something.

“Yes . . . well, I’m sorry about that. My security people were nervous and wanted me back underground as quickly as possible.”

“Of course.”

“How did your speech go?”

“Well, I believe. It seemed well received at any rate. I noted no fewer than twelve periods of sustained and spontaneous applause, one lasting for a full thirty-eight seconds.”

“Impressive. You beat me.”

“It was not a competition, Mr. President.”

Koenig smiled. Konstantin could take things extremely literally at times. “Of course not. The important thing is to keep the momentum going with Starlight.”

“An observation, Mr. President?”

“Yes?”

“You may wish to scale back the . . . emotional enthusiasm of this religious movement. Things may be going too far, too quickly.”

“That was always a significant risk,” Koenig replied. “But we needed a popular peace movement that would sweep the Confederation—Pan-Europe, especially—
fast
.”

“Indeed. And the Starlight movement appears to have worked better than we originally thought possible. I am concerned, however, that the movement may have unanticipated consequences, especially within the United States of North America.”