Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (9 page)

“The emphasis was on Pan-European atrocities—the nano-bombing of Columbus in particular.”

“There are wider perspectives, though, Mr. President. There always are in war. Remember that the first two nuclear strikes in history were carried out ostensibly to save the large numbers of lives that would have been lost on both sides in the event of an invasion of the home islands of Japan.”

Koenig felt a flash of anger. “Damn you! Are you justifying the Confederation attack on Columbus? That was mass murder!”

“No. However, from the point of view of Janos Korosi, the annihilation of Columbus may have seemed as necessary as Hiroshima seemed to the United States.”

“That’s . . . a rather disturbing analogy.”

The image of Constantine d’Angelo within Koenig’s in-head window gave an eerily human shrug. “Humans
always
justify their actions, however unjustifiable they might seem to others. My point, however, was that Starlight is taking hold within the North American union. Its two basic messages are peace and self-determination.”

Koenig nodded. “Stop the civil war and don’t force us to give up our technology and follow the Sh’daar. Exactly.”

“As a popular meme, the concept worked well. However, one should always remember a basic truism: memes change. The core beliefs of Starlight could mutate,
will
mutate, most likely gravitating toward an extreme.”

“What extreme?”

“Most likely would be total pacifism. War is wrong—the human concept would be
evil
—and it is wrong under
all
circumstances. Another possibility, though, would be a shift toward hyper-individualism. We might see a complete breakdown of the concept of government or the state.”

That startled Koenig. Despite being president of the USNA, he strongly disliked the idea of big, intrusive, or heavy-handed government. He believed that government had a natural tendency toward such heavy-handedness simply because people—government leaders—were unlikely ever to agree to give up any degree of power once they acquired it. That power was maintained by laws, and as a direct consequence, more and more laws were constantly added to the way a government governed. Only very rarely, though, were they repealed. As a result, laws became more complex, more intrusive, more demanding, the state bureaucracy grew more unwieldy and intrusive, and individual liberty inevitably dwindled until only a revolution— most likely a bloody one—allowed the population to start over.

And yet . . .
no
government—or any government that was weak, ineffective, or otherwise hamstrung—was just as much of a problem. When the USNA had abandoned the Periphery, the citizens living in those regions had been left in squalor and anarchy, without law or protection from brigands, without basic services like power or Global Net access, without health care or the most necessary of utilities. Koenig had always been fascinated by one historical fact—that when government collapsed within the Periphery, the people still living there had recreated it. Often, those new governments had been gang rule by whichever local mob of thugs was best-armed. But in each local region, the vacuum of power
had
been very swiftly filled . . . to the point where the USNA government was now having to negotiate with local leaders as it began reassimilating the Periphery.

The ideal, Koenig thought, must lie somewhere between the extremes of anarchy and tyranny. Finding that ideal, though, had always been difficult, but he knew that the anarchy Konstantin was envisioning was not something he wanted to see manifest.

“So what would you suggest?” he asked.

“That you remain focused on your original goal. Why was the United States of North America engaged in civil war against the Earth Confederation?”

Koenig did not reply immediately. He knew Konstantin was testing him, that the AI knew the answer—the
answers
—as well as he. Sometimes, the Tsiolkovsky network could be downright patronizing.

Finally he said, “The Confederation government was trying to take over USNA territory . . . and they wanted to give in to the Sh’daar demands.”

“More than that,” Konstantin added, “you were in effect declaring that Geneva does not speak for all of Humankind.”

“Well . . . no. They don’t.”

“Who does?”

“For something like dealing with aliens? Nobody does. Nobody
could
. . .”

“Which logically suggests that since we have just dismantled the Confederation as an instrument of human policy, it will be up to us to deal with the situation ourselves.”

“Konstantin, we’ve been trying to do exactly that for fifty-eight years.”

“No, you have not. You have been meeting threats, responding to isolated attacks and provocations. Beta Pictoris. Rasalhague. Anan. Sturgis’s World. Arcturus Station. Eta Boötis—”

“Okay, okay. We’ve been on the defensive all along. But what other choice has there been? Damn it, we’re up against a galactic polity that may number
thousands
of different species, most of them far more advanced technologically than we. Every time we fight off one set of alien badasses, another comes at us from someplace else.”

“Indeed. The Turusch. The H’rulka. The Nungiirtok. The Slan—”

“Right! Earth against the galaxy.”

“Have you asked yourself what might have happened had all of those Sh’daar clients attacked Humankind in concert?”

Koenig hesitated. “Well . . . of course. There’s no way we would have been able to stand against anything like that. One attack by anything even approaching a unified Sh’daar fleet would have overwhelmed us. But our xenosoph people have explained why that didn’t happen. The different alien species are
so
different from one another—with such varied cultures and biologies and mutually alien forms of communication—that they can’t work with one another with anything like precision.”

“And do you believe that, Mr. President?”

It sounded like a challenge. “Well, I think luck had a lot to do with it, too. . . .”

“Exactly once,” Konstantin told him, “Humankind did not simply react, but took the fight to the enemy.”

“Twenty years ago,” Koenig said. “The N’gai Cloud.”

“And despite being significantly outnumbered, the Sh’daar sued for peace.”

“Yes.” He hesitated for a moment. “We kind of had them by the short hairs then, didn’t we?”

Konstantin ignored the colloquialism, and pressed on with his point. Artificial intelligence didn’t mean artificial sense of humor. “Specifically, they agreed to cease hostilities against us in the present, if we ceased operations against them in the past.”

“That worked for both sides, though,” Koenig pointed out. “We could have erased our own existence.”

The details were still highly classified, but Koenig knew them, both as president of the USNA now and as commander of the battlegroup that had forced the Sh’daar to negotiate in the remote past. Following enemy units through the complex hyperspatial twistings of a TRGA cylinder, the
America
battlegroup had emerged in a pocket-sized galaxy almost 900 million years in the past. The N’gai Cloud had proven to be the home galaxy for an association of some hundreds of technological species; when they’d entered a transition called the Technological Singularity, most individuals had vanished—apparently entering a completely new phase of existence—but many had been left behind. Traumatized by the Singularity, the stay-behind remnant had become the modern Sh’daar as the N’gai Cloud had been devoured and shredded by the Milky Way, its central core ultimately becoming the Omega Centauri globular cluster sixteen thousand light years from Earth.

Earth’s intelligence services believed that the Sh’daar capitulation had been due to their fear that the
America
battlegroup was going to do something in the N’gai Cloud of 876 million years ago that would change the future—Earth’s present. No one knew quite what the result would be if humans tampered with the past—especially in Deep Time, almost a billion years ago—but Koenig certainly didn’t want to experiment to find out. Eight hundred seventy-six million years ago, life on Earth was just beginning to discover a wonderful new way of passing genes on from one generation to the next: sex. Would destroying the Sh’daar that long ago alter or destroy the course of events on the young Earth?

No one knew. Not for certain. Koenig himself didn’t think modern Earth would be affected by the Sh’daar’s long-ago demise. There was no evidence that the ancient Sh’daar had ever reached Earth or had any effect on the evolution of life there . . . but there
was
one possibility. Suppose editing the Sh’daar out of existence by changing the past meant a complete reboot of the entire cosmos? The string of events leading to the Earth of today, and its biosphere, and its modern civilization all were such extraordinary long shots. Resetting the universe a billion years in the past might mean that every die roll on the evolving Earth since then was recast.

And Koenig didn’t want to play God with the Earth’s evolution.

“All of that depends on the true nature of time,” Konstantin told him. “Quantum theory is not clear on the matter. Does a change in time
here
and
now
change the entire universe? Does the fall of the Geneva government today affect, say, life evolving throughout the Andromeda galaxy a billion years from now?”

“I don’t see how it could,” Koenig said. “Not unless the change here and now results in a change in humans who later travel to Andromeda. There has to be some direct, physical link, right?”

“That, Mr. President, is still unclear. But it also sidesteps the point. Are you going to continue merely reacting to scattered and uncoordinated Sh’daar attacks, or will you take steps to end the threat permanently?”

“Short of going back in time again and doing whatever it was that the Sh’daar were afraid we were going to do, I don’t see how ending the threat is an option.”

“Have you considered the possibility that Sh’daar strategy is not poorly coordinated? That their scattered attacks are part of a long-term and carefully planned offensive?”

“That doesn’t seem likely. What would be the point? They could’ve destroyed us any number of times in the last five decades if they’d just gotten their act together.”

“Agreed. But perhaps—I should say
obviously
—they don’t want to
eliminate
the human species. Perhaps they simply want to keep humans weak and divided, as we are now.”

Koening stared at the avatar on his in-head screen.

“My God . . .”

Chapter Nine

15 July, 2425

USNA Star Carrier
America

SupraQuito Naval Yard

0915 hours, TFT

“Give me one good reason, Commander, why I shouldn’t have you court-martialed.”

Gray had ordered Dahlquist to report to him in his dayroom
in person
, an unusual demand in an era of instant in-head communications. Gray’s reasoning was that if you were going to chew a new one in an errant subordinate, it was more effectively done in the flesh, as it were. Besides, he preferred to be able to watch the person’s eyes, to gauge his emotional response and get a feel for what was going through his head. It was too easy to hide behind the mask of an electronic avatar when you were linked in-head. Hell, it was possible to have a personal secretary impersonate you in an in-head conference and have no one else the wiser (though the AIs running the link would know.
Usually
. There was software that would fool even them).

Dahlquist stood at rigid attention in front of Gray’s desk. He was wearing his dress uniform—USNA Navy black and gold, but with the blue collar tabs and trim on the tunic identifying him as High Guard.

“For a start . . . sir,” the man said, “I wasn’t under your command at the time.”

“Excuse me, but you
were
,” Gray shot back. “High Guard vessels, officers, and crew are
always
subject to lawful orders by ranking naval personnel. Or are you telling me you were subject to Korosi’s orders at the time?”

“
No
, sir! I am a loyal North American!”

Dahlquist’s attitude, Gray thought, stopped just a micron or two short of insubordination. The man was hostile, and he was feeling put upon. And Gray was pretty sure he knew why.

“Then would you mind telling me why you pulled such a dumb-ass stunt out there? According to the after-action reports—Commander Mitchell’s report in particular—you ignored orders to await the arrival of
America
and her escorts and took your ship in dangerously close to the alien vessel.”

“I took the action that,
in my professional judgment
, seemed best. Sir.”

There it was, then, the one defense most difficult to challenge, whether in the middle of an op or in a court-martial. The captain of a vessel was required—by naval regulations, by law, and by common sense—to do what he felt was best to ensure the success of his mission and the safety of his ship and crew . . . in that order. Other officers might question that judgment, but would do so in the knowledge that they hadn’t been there and couldn’t know the entire situation.

Senior officers sitting on a court-martial board tended to give the accused the benefit of the doubt, if only because they would want the same leeway if the situation were reversed.

It would have been so much simpler if Dahlquist had simply ignored Gray’s original order, as it appeared he’d done earlier in the op. He might have been charged then with cowardice, or at least with disobeying a lawful order and dereliction of duty. By taking the
Concord
into harm’s way, though, the man had certainly scuttled any possible charge of cowardice in the face of the enemy.

“Okay, Commander,” Gray said quietly. “Suppose you explain to me just what your reasoning was. Why did you disregard my orders and lay
Concord
in close alongside the alien vessel?”

“Sir. First of all, it wasn’t clear that you had jurisdiction over my ship. I received no formal orders putting me under your command.”

“Never mind that, Dahlquist. Why did you approach Charlie One?”

“Sir. The alien appeared to be out of action—no signs of life. Three SAR tugs had the thing under tow, and there were four fighters in the area. But the nearest capital ship was thirty minutes away. A lot can happen in thirty minutes, and I thought there was a possibility that the alien would repair the damage and get under way again. If it did . . .” Dahlquist shrugged while remaining at attention. “I just thought if I put
Concord
close alongside, the added threat of
Concord
’s weapons might keep the alien in check. Sir.”

“I see. And of course you had no idea that the alien had technological capabilities that would completely outmatch those of the
Concord
.”

“Yes, sir.
Especially
that trick they pulled with time. Everything happened so fast, at least from our perspective. I think they were warping time around the
Concord
as soon as we came within a few hundred meters of their hull.”

Gray studied the officer before him, considering options. His first guess had been that Dahlquist was just another arrogant Ristie who hated Prims, that he hadn’t wanted to subject himself to the orders of a man he felt was unsuited to command. That would explain his reluctance to rendezvous with Charlie One early on, but that would have looked like cowardice, an extremely serious charge. Too, his display of misplaced bravado might have been intended to dispel that impression . . . and had gotten his ship into deep trouble.

But perhaps he’d misjudged the man. Gray hadn’t been there, after all, and the political situation
had
been fuzzy.

Besides, there were some practical issues at stake here. If Gray decided to press charges against Dahlquist—to have him court-martialed—it meant relieving him of command immediately. His choice, then, would be to put another officer from another ship in command of the
Concord
, or promote
Concord
’s first officer to that position. Who was it? Ah, yes. Lieutenant Commander Denise Ames. A transhuman . . .

And here Gray’s Prim upbringing began to intrude itself, and he didn’t like that. Born and raised in the Periphery ruins of Manhatt, Gray shared the Prim attitude toward transhumans—that they were rigidly precise products of genetic engineering strong on math and logic but weak on emotion and being human. The stereotype held that all transhumans were OCD—deliberately afflicted with what amounted to obsessive compulsive disorder. The joke was that they should actually be labeled as CDO—with the letters in alphabetical order, the way they were
supposed
to be, damn it!

And how, Gray wondered, was his mistrust of transhumans any different from a Ristie’s mistrust of a Prim?

Putting that aside for a moment, he wondered who could he transfer? Right here in
America
’s bridge crew there were several line officers who would serve—Laurie Taggart or Dean Mallory, for starters.

But there would be no time for a new skipper to get settled in and familiar with ship and crew, and no time for the crew to warm to a new CO. There was also the likelihood that Gray might be accused of favoritism, especially if Ames was at all popular with
Concord
’s crew. It was always better, when possible, to go with the existing chemistry in a crew’s makeup. Of course, if that chemistry was thoroughly fucked up to begin with . . .

And therein lay the dilemma.

Concord
had already been reactivated as a Navy warship and assigned to Gray’s command, along with two of her sister ships. Gray wanted officers whom he could trust.

But just as important was the morale of those crews.

Balancing those two things, Gray reached a decision. It wasn’t worth hauling the man before him up on charges. If he did, it was quite likely that Dahlquist’s best-judgment defense would get him off . . . and the man would be more insolent than ever.

But Gray could put the fear of God into the man, and in the hierarchy of a naval task force, the commanding admiral was God.

He leaned forward on his desk, riveting Dahlquist to the deck with his glare . . .

. . . and let him have it, both barrels.

The Long Way Down

Midway

Quito Space Elevator

1955 hours, TFT

“Here’s to fucking peace!”

“To fucking peace!”

Eight members of the Black Demons had taken over a back corner of the bar, ordered their first round of drinks, and over the course of the next hour had had the servebots bring more . . . and more . . . and
still
more. Megan Connor tossed back her drink, wondering as she did if she was going to need a shot of dryout just to make it back up-stalk to the ship.

The Long Way Down was popular with fighter pilots and ship crews. Most of the people in there were military, though recently the star-carrier pilots had been noisily making it their own.
We’re a noisy bunch
, Connor thought,
but why the hell not? Damn it, we’ve earned the right to cut loose a bit on our down time.

The most recent toast delivered, they clinked their emptied glasses back down on the tabletop. Earth, at half phase, glowed in magnificent blue-and-white radiance at their feet.

The Long Way Down was a bit unusual as space-elevator businesses went. It wasn’t positioned at geostationary orbit with the naval base and the rest of the synchorbit facilities, but at Midway, perched halfway up, at the 17,900 kilometer level. At geosynch, 35,800 kilometers above the summit of a mountain in Ecuador, the rotational forces balanced those of gravity perfectly, and the facilities were at zero-G, or free fall, and making one orbit around the planet below in exactly one day. At an altitude of 17,900 kilometers, however, which was known informally as either “Midway” or “Level 17-9,” centrifugal force didn’t quite balance the force of gravity, and structures experienced one eighth of a gravity, a bit less than on the surface of the moon.

Which meant that places like The Long Way Down didn’t need to build rotating habs to simulate gravity. Things fell slowly, but they
did
fall, and you could walk on the decks at this level if you were careful not to lose your footing. The owners of the bar had put in real transplas for the deck of the main lounge, not viewalls or vids. Patrons had the giddy sensation of walking on an actual window looking straight
down
almost 18,000 kilometers. From here, Earth spanned a full forty degrees, though at the moment the eastern half was cloaked in night. The sunset terminator cut across the Atlantic Ocean, with the North American coastline still in daylight. The megopoli of Brazil, however, were aglow with golden-orange light, frozen starbursts of illumination picking out the ruin of vanished rain forests and the heavily populated coastline of the Amazon Sea.

Connor could see the elevator cable off to one side, vanishing with the sharp perspective into the depths below. A flash of motion out of the corner of her eye caught her attention: a silvery pod traveling down-line, on its way to the sprawling metropolis at Mt. Cayambe on Earth’s equator.

Lieutenant Don Gregory placed an open hand on the tabletop, bringing up a menu glowing in the air in front of him. He closed his eyes, thoughtclicking for a refill on his drink. “What I want to know,” he said, “is whether the Genies are gonna stay peaceful.”

Genies
was a joking reference to the Confederation’s government in Geneva.

“They’d better,” Connor said, laughing, “or we’re gonna kick their asses
again
.”

“Tha’s the problem,” Lieutenant Ruxton said, morosely studying his half-empty glass. “We didn’t really kick their asses the first time, did we? We’ve just been holding . . . holding th’ bastards off . . . at, at arm’s length, right?”

It sounded, Connor thought, as though Ruxton was the one who needed the dryout.

“Oh, we beat ’em fair and square, all right,” Lieutenant Fred Dahlquist said. “Zapped ’em with recombinant memetics and gave ’em a dose of religion!”

“Aw, not
that
crap again,” Lieutenant Chris Dobbs said. “You conspiracy theorists—”

“Hey!” Dahlquist snapped back. “I got it from a girlfriend who works at Cheyenne Mountain! She said we sent a team of cyber-commandos into the Geneva network and planted Starlight as a peace movement, to turn the Pan-Euros against their own government.”

“And risk having it spread over here?” Dobbs said. “I don’t buy it!”

“Who cares where it came from?” Connor said, shrugging. “If it means not having to fight the bastards, I’m all for it. We shouldn’t be killing other humans anyway. We’ve got enough problems with the Sh’daar.”

“The scuttlebutt
I
heard,” Lieutenant Sara Hathaway said, “is that pretty soon we’ll have peace with the Sh’daar, too. They say the Glothr are turning out to be the good guys.”

“Not likely,
chica
,” Lieutenant Martinez said. “They were negotiating with the Confeds, fer cryin’ out loud.”

“We don’t know for sure
which
Confeds, Enrique,” Connor pointed out. “Korosi’s gang? Or the peace-and-love Starlighters? Maybe they came to Earth as part of a peace overture.”

“Shit. We had peace with the damned Sh’daars once,” Gregory said. “Twenty years ago. But
that
didn’t last long, did it?”

“The problem,” Connor said carefully, “is that the system is too big. War is no longer a simple matter of good guys fighting bad guys. Hell, maybe it was
never
that simple. But what we call the Sh’daar is such a . . . such a huge . . . entity. So many separate species, with such wildly different views of the cosmos. It’s a wonder they could ever coordinate themselves as a group to attack us at all . . . and it might be that controlling all of them, getting a number of them to attack at the same time, or to
stop
attacking at the same time, is simply impossible.”

“Well
that’s
a hell of a note,” Dahlquist said. “They want to surrender, and bits and pieces of them keep on attacking! That could cause some real diplomatic problems, y’know?”

“I don’t think diplomacy comes into the picture,” Hathaway observed. “I mean, how could it? The very concept of diplomacy is a complicated one, and none of the species we’ve encountered so far thinks the same way as we do. We may never be able to talk with some of them—the Turusch or the H’rulka, for instance. Not as clearly and openly as we talk with the Agletsch.”