by Ian Douglas
Another five seconds dragged past.
“Cease fire, America! Cease fire! Do not, repeat, do not continue to fire disassemblers at the target!”
Gutierrez hesitated. Technically, Ritter outranked her. If America had been assigned to Task Force Ritter she would have been legally able to give her orders. On the other hand, America had not received orders to join with Task Force Ritter, which meant that she could do as she damn well pleased. An interesting political and diplomatic situation . . .
But Wotan’s fighters were entering the combat zone, which meant they would be at risk from America’s nano-D fire. “Mr. Daly!” she called. “Cease fire.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“Com. Message headquarters. Update them . . . and request clarification of our command chain out here.”
“Right away, Captain.”
This far from Earth, it would be forty minutes for her request to reach HQ, and forty minutes more for their reply to get back to the America. Damn, she should have requested that clarification as soon as she knew Wotan’s battle group was going to join her.
It didn’t help, too, that she didn’t like the Euros . . . or trust them. Memories of the Confederation Civil War were still too damned fresh. She’d lost family in Columbus—her brother Steve, both of his wives, and her two young nephews. She wasn’t about to turn her ship over to the Pan-Euros without some very explicit orders indeed.
“Have your fighters reloaded,” Ritter told her, “and launch them in support of my battle group.”
“With respect, Admiral . . . no. Our fighters hit them with everything they had and didn’t even slow that thing down. We did get a reaction when we hit them with the nano-D, however.”
“We do not carry nanodisassembler weapons, Captain.” The words sounded stiff, a little awkward. The memetic engineering campaign that had ended the civil war, she knew, had been designed to create deep and widespread shame throughout the European community over their use of disassembler weapons on Columbus. Since then, she understood, Pan-European ships no longer deployed with nano-D weaponry. How much of that was engineered guilt and how much was public relations she had no idea, but the inevitable result was that Task Force Ritter had just shown up at a knife fight armed with marshmallows.
“If you do not join with us, America,” Ritter said, “then stay clear!”
“Admiral, I suggest that you recall your fighters, which are useless here. I will continue bombarding the enemy with nanotechnic disassemblers.”
The seconds dragged past. Ritter’s reply was blunt and to the point. “Nein, Captain. You had your chance. Now it is our turn.”
Task Force Ritter, consisting of the light carrier Wotan, a cruiser identified as the Kurst, and three destroyers, began moving toward the swiftly growing alien sphere behind a screen of fighters.
The fight began, evolved, and ended almost literally within the blink of an eye. Gutierrez and her bridge crew watched, horrified, as the Wotan suddenly crumpled as though in the grip of a titanic, invisible fist. Her shield cap ruptured with shocking abruptness, spraying glittering clouds of swiftly freezing water droplets across space as the broken remnants of a ship seven tenths of a kilometer long dwindled and twisted and was crushed down to nothing. Air sprayed into the vacuum, freezing along with the ice crystal cloud . . . and then the Wotan was gone, with nothing left whatsoever, save the ice clouds and a few spinning fragments of metal.
Kurst and the destroyers slowed their forward movement, but it took time to decelerate and reverse course . . . and the Rosette alien was not giving them that time. The Kurst died in precisely the same way as the Wotan, her hull wadding up as it collapsed until nothing was left but ice crystal clouds and glittering specks of metallic debris.
“What is that weapon?” Gutierrez demanded.
“Gravitic, Captain,” Mallory replied from the CIC. “I don’t know if it’s some sort of projected beam or maybe an artificial black hole, or if they’re using those ships’ gravitic drives against them . . . but whatever it is, it crushed them under the effects of several million gravities!”
“God in heaven . . .”
The destroyers succeeded, finally, in coming to a halt relative to the giant sphere, then flipped end-for-end and began accelerating. The sphere was following, though, looming vast against the night. The destroyer Rouen, lagging slightly behind the other two, was taken . . . crushed out of existence in an instant.
The survivors—two destroyers and a number of fighters, accelerated to fifty thousand gravities, fleeing as though hell itself was close on their heels. . . .
And the ebon black sphere pursued.
“Helm! Get us the hell out of here!” Gutierrez snapped. “Com! Send a full report to headquarters!”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
Earth needed to know what was bearing down on them out here, and they needed to know now.
“Mr. Mallory!”
“Yes, Captain!”
“Resume firing nanotechnic disassemblers into the path of that thing.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“Program them to detonate outside the range of those gravitics, if you can.”
“We’re estimating a range limit of around two hundred thousand kilometers,” Mallory told her. “That’s based on the ranges at which they killed Wotan and Kurst.”
“Good.”
“Not good, ma’am. At that kind of range, the individual nano-D particles will be so broadly dispersed they might not have much of an effect.”
“What I want, Commander, is to turn that whole volume of space between us and them toxic. Put so many hungry nano-Ds in there, they’re going to get bit if they step inside.”
“Well . . . it’s worth a try, Captain.”
“It’s all we have, Commander.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Other ships were arriving from different parts of the Sol System, coming in a few at a time. Most were smaller than the America—gunships and destroyers and a couple of heavy cruisers, Varyag and Komet. A Chinese Hegemony contingent of eight vessels was reported en route, but it wouldn’t arrive for another thirty minutes at best.
“Pass the word to every ship as they come in,” Gutierrez said. “I want a wall up between Earth and that sphere. And they’re to use nano-D weaponry if they have it.”
A wall was the three-dimensional equivalent of a line in naval surface warfare, a formation that would give every defending vessel a clear shot at the enemy . . . and just maybe project the message that the Earth ships were not going to let the Rosette entity pass without a fight. Gutierrez had come into this conflict thinking of the alien cloud as a swarm of tiny ships, but she was beginning to understand them differently now. All of those microvessels out there were part of a whole; the enemy was an artificial intelligence residing within the entire alien swarm. They were facing, not a fleet, but a titanic alien being.
A being that now was extending itself, projecting beams of light in a complex three-dimensional network with no clear pattern that she could comprehend. She’d seen it before, though. Then, the Rosette entity appeared to be anchoring itself in space using solid light.
Now, the alien mass continued to move . . .
. . . and it was heading directly toward Earth, only a few AUs distant.
Chapter Six
1 February 2426
New White House
Washington, D.C.
2142 hours, EST
“Mr. President?” Marcus Whitney said. “Incoming message for you, flagged ‘Most Urgent.’ Dr. Wilkerson, sir.”
“I’ll take it,” Koenig said. He was immersed in the holographic display showing the battle and could barely see Whitney through the glowing haze of imagery.
“This transmission is also going to the Joint Chiefs and secdef, and to Mars HQ, sir.”
With a thoughtclick, the projection showing America and several other ships facing off against the giant alien intruder faded out, replaced by the strained features of P
hillip Wilkerson, head of the ONI Xenosophontological Research Department at Mare Crisium, on the moon.
Koenig nodded. “Yes, Doctor. What is it?”
The almost three-second time delay for the there-and-back signal transmission between Earth and moon seemed to drag out forever. “Good evening, Mr. President. I thought you would want to know. We’re uploading a new Omega virus to the America.”
“New how?”
“It’s the basic AI-Omega structure, with layered quantum encryption in the matrix.”
“English, please, Doctor.”
“We Turusched the code. It may help us get past the Rosette entity’s immunodefenses.”
Koenig considered this. They’d used the Tabby’s Star Omega virus against that thing with at least some success once before. It had stopped, at least, and an AI clone of Konstantin had been able to talk with it.
But they’d been assuming that Omega was a one-shot weapon. The Rosette entity was an enormously fast and powerful AI, far more capable in all respects than Konstantin. It would have analyzed that first attack and would now have defenses—like an organic body’s immune system—solidly in place.
“Turusched the code?” Koenig frowned. What the hell did that . . . ah! He got it.
The Turusch were an alien species, a part of the Sh’daar Associative with an unusual means of communication. The beings lived in closely bonded pairs and they spoke simultaneously, but not in unison. One would say one thing, the other something else . . . and the sounds of the two voices blended in a series of harmonics that carried yet a third, amplifying meaning. “Turusched the code” meant Wilkerson had figured out how to write viral codes in layers, like the complex Turusch language.
A number of Turusch pairs were still living in the xenosophontological research labs beneath the Mare Crisium as a kind of diplomatic community, where Wilkerson and his people had been studying them for over twenty years, now.
“You think this will give us another shot at the Rosetter?” Koenig asked.
“It should help us,” Wilkerson said slowly, “to communicate with it. We’ve been able to nest three AIs on top of one another. The deeper minds monitor the ones above, support them, and watch out for signs that the top-level mind has been corrupted or compromised. We’re calling it Trinity.”
Koenig wondered if Wilkerson was talking about something like the way the human brain worked, with conscious and subconscious minds . . . or the Freudian idea of id, ego, and superego. More likely, he decided, Wilkerson was discussing AI-related technicalities—which Koenig had no clue about.
Warfare, Koenig thought, was rapidly evolving beyond the ken of humans. Whether that was necessarily a bad thing remained to be seen. But it appeared that artificial intelligence was more interested in talking with the opponent and not simply destroying it in flame and fury, and that was something Koenig—as president of almost a billion people—could understand.
The problem was, he wasn’t even sure he had a choice in the matter anymore, because weaponry was increasingly godlike in its scope and power, and the AIs wielding it were so far beyond human capabilities as to make humans completely irrelevant.
Sooner rather than later, we might just be along for the ride. For now, though . . .
“Keep me informed,” Koenig told Wilkerson. “Don’t let your new toy give away the farm. But if it can buy us some breathing space, let it!”
“Absolutely, Mr. President.”
Koenig cut the link, wondering again where Konstantin was. The Omega Code incorporated part of Konstantin’s matrix into its structure, and presumably Trinity did as well. But he wanted to hear from the super-AI he knew. He didn’t always trust Konstantin . . . but it had been a loyal advisor for years.
He could almost think of it as his . . . friend.
Charlie Berquist, head of Koenig’s Secret Service detail, entered the Oval Office without ceremony. “Excuse me, Mr. President. We need to move you out of here.”
“Why?”
“Now, Mr. President. If you please . . .”
Koenig sighed, then waved the display off. “They won’t be here for an hour at least. Plenty of time . . .”
“We don’t know that, Mr. President. They could be here any second, now.”
Koenig stood up behind his desk and waited as Berquist activated one of his in-head apps. A portion of the interior wall on the left side of the office vanished, revealing a small travel cylinder imbedded in its vertical tube.
“You boys come with me,” Koenig said. “There’s room.”
“I need to get back to the Pentagon, Mr. President,” Armitage told him. “They’ll be beginning their evacuation as well. But I’ll see you downstairs.”
“Okay. Godspeed.”
Koenig and Whitney followed Berquist to the escape pod and stepped inside. The door rematerialized . . . and then gravity vanished as the pod went into free fall.
He looked at the Secret Service man. Berquist looked human enough, but Koenig knew that he was in fact more machine than organic, a cyborg packed with high-powered communications and sensor equipment, plus some powerful if currently invisible weaponry.
“Are they evacuating Congress?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. And the Supreme Court, the State Department, and several other agencies.”
“You realize that this is all an exercise in futility, don’t you?”
“I don’t know anything, Mr. President . . . except that we need to get you to the ’proof.”
Koenig had been through this before. When the Pan-Europeans had evaporated central Columbus, he and most of the USNA government had escaped just ahead of the attack, relocated by high-speed tube to Toronto, where they’d re-established the government and continued the war.
When the government had reclaimed and rebuilt Washington, D.C., they’d used disassemblers to bore out new tunnels and subterranean transit networks, creating a vast city beneath the city, some ten kilometers down. Called the ’proof, for bombproof, the subterranean facility was supposed to be safe from nuclear weapons up to a thousand megatons, to impacts by asteroids several hundred meters across, or to another nano-D attack like the one that had vaporized central Columbus.
The city was ringed by anti-space defenses, including high-velocity AMSO launchers, railguns, nano-D canisters, and high-powered beam weapon emplacements in Arlington, Georgetown, Silver Spring, Bladensburg, and the brand-new planetary defense facility at Spaceport Andrews.
And if anything came through that these defenses couldn’t handle, high-velocity mag-tubes could whisk key members of the government elsewhere—to Toronto, again . . . or to Denver or Mexico City or a dozen other fortified retreats.
The problem though, Koenig thought as the pod dropped through the hard vacuum of the tube, was that this time it wasn’t just the North-American capital city that was in danger, but the whole fucking planet. If the Rosette Consciousness wanted to wipe out Earth, then, given the advanced technology witnessed so far, they would be able to do so without much effort and no place would be safe.
But certain protocols had been put into place, and certain procedures had to be observed. If he put up a struggle, his own Secret Service people would simply anesthetize him and carry him off bodily.
That seemed needlessly confrontational, not to mention awkward. No, he would play along.
And pray that Wilkerson’s upgraded code was able to stop the approaching entity.
Ready Room, VFA-211
TC/USNA CVS America
Outer Asteroid Belt
2227 hours, TFT
“Do you think they’re going to send us out again?” Lieutenant Schaeffer asked. She sounded . . . not worried, exactly, but stressed. Concerned, maybe.
Meier gave a listless shrug. He was still dealing with the shockingly abrupt deaths of three of his squadron mates, and was having a lot of trouble coming to grips with what had happened.
They were seated in the squadron ready room, a large open space just above the fighter launch
bays. Spin gravity here from the rotating hab section was about half a G, enough to allow them to have a couple of open cups of coffee on the table in front of them. One long wall showed local space—a shrunken sun and a light scattering of stars. Too few were visible to allow Meier to pick out any constellations.
Somewhere out there in that empty darkness was a planet-sized monster. . . .
“They say we’re in the Asteroid Belt,” Schaeffer said. She seemed eager for conversation. “I thought the sky out here would be full of rocks.”
He gave her a hard look. You expected better from a fellow fighter pilot.
“Ah . . . another victim of the entertainment sims,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Asteroids a kilometer or more across are scattered real thin out here . . . something like two million kilometers between one asteroid and the next. Even counting rocks just ten meters across or more, the average distance between them is over six thousand kilometers. You could live your whole life on one and never see another rock in your sky, not even as a faint point of light.”
She smiled at him. “So . . . no daring flights through fields of tumbling asteroids?”
“That’s complete garbage. What I don’t get is how sim presenters have been getting away with that kind of crap since the twentieth century.”
“Well, it was just fiction. . . .”
“They did it in documentaries too. I’ve seen some of them. Science programs where the presenters should have known.”
She laid a hand on his arm. “Yes, but how do you really feel about it, Jason?”
His voice had been getting loud. Things like that did irritate him, but his emotional state was letting it come out as anger.
Suddenly, though, he realized that Schaeffer had been deliberately prodding him, trying to get an emotional response. “You were trolling me,” he said, his tone sharp and accusing.
