by Ian Douglas
He considered asking the sentries outside if they wanted something, but he already knew the answer to that. The Marines were tough, stolid, unyielding, and absolutely devoted to duty . . . which in this case meant standing outside St. Clair’s house and blocking the way to anyone not authorized to be there. Relaxing for a moment with a steak or a cup of caff never entered the image download.
When the meal pinged three minutes later, he took the plate and sat down in front of the evening news feed. Most of the news was what he already knew: the confrontation with Xam needleships had ended after local forces unexpectedly intervened, and a Newton clone had established peaceful, open contact with the planet, which was called Ki. Talking heads of various flavors of academia continued to debate whether or not Ki was old Earth, whether the Xam were actually descendants of Humankind, and whether or not the Ad Astra high command was going to decide to stay here.
The talking heads, St. Clair thought, would have been shocked to know that he wanted to know the answer to that question as much as they.
An in-head ping told him someone wanted to talk to him. Lisa?
“This is St. Clair.”
The image of Lord Jeffery Benton seemed to materialize in the room, one of a circle of hazy figures. Benton’s form sharpened as though coming into focus. “Excuse the intrusion, my lord,” Benton said. “It is important.”
The dozen or so figures, St. Clair knew, were members of the Tellus Cybercouncil—the star-faring colony’s de facto civil government. He recognized most of the others—Gina Colfax, Hsien Tianki, and, perhaps the most important member of the circle, Ambassador Clayton Lloyd.
The Tellus Ad Astra expedition had begun as a diplomatic mission to a very old and very advanced galactic power with its capital at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Lloyd had been the expedition’s senior ambassador, and, in theory, at least, the mission commander. The real mission commander, though, the guy who pulled the strings, had been the representative of the United Earth Worldgov Cybercouncil—Günter Adler. Lloyd had been a figurehead, so far as St. Clair had been able to see.
That is until they had all gone through that black hole and Adler had gone insane.
Now that the colony had broken free from the black hole’s ergosphere, St. Clair, as senior military officer on board, had wielded the actual power of command. Ship command could not afford to be a democracy; that was a job for a tyrant with dictatorial powers, and for the past month political power had been something of a balancing act between the two.
“Perfectly okay,” St. Clair told Benton’s image. He might be a tyrant, but he considered himself to be a reasonable one. “What can I do for you?”
“We have received . . . an invitation,” Benton told him. “From the Mind of Ki.”
“An invitation. To what?”
“We’re not entirely certain, my lord,” Lord Ander Gressman put in. “But in the military, you have a tradition called . . . what is the word? Liberty? And you do it at a place called a liberty port?”
Benton nodded. “The Mind of Ki appears to be offering their world to us as a liberty port.”
“I wonder,” St. Clair said with a smile, “if they know just what they’re letting themselves in for?”
A few in the room with Benton chuckled.
“The invitation has been extended to everyone in the colony, not just military,” Gina Colfax said. She, St. Clair knew, was a member of Lord Lloyd’s diplomatic staff. “I’m not sure they know what military means.”
“They must have a pretty good idea,” St. Clair said, “judging by how they sent the Xam skittering off with their metaphorical tails between their legs.”
“Their defensive systems appear to be the equivalent of AI units,” Hsien Tianki pointed out. “The Lady Colfax is correct. The invitation may be purely a social convention extended to newly arrived visitors.”
In his mind, St. Clair accessed Newton, the powerful artificial intelligence that served as the AI brain of Tellus Ad Astra. “Newton? How about it? Any sign of an organized military over there?”
“Thus far,” the AI replied in St. Clair’s mind, “I have encountered only automated defensive systems. Organic members of the local civilization seem wholly centered on less martial pursuits.”
“They’re hedonists, do you mean?”
“Possibly, though it’s too early to assign human philosophical ideologies to beings this alien. Pleasure and social interaction, however, appear to be an important part of their worldview. A large percentage of the local population is digital, uploaded to various simulated realities.”
“Ah . . .”
“There is a substantial local population of organic beings, however,” Newton continued. “Not all have uploaded themselves into simulations. Judging by statements made by several local AIs, the population of the planetary ring here consists of both organic and digitized beings who represent a very large number of distinct species. I suggest that those humans who accept the Ki invitation be prepared for encounters of extremely high strangeness.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. How many species is ‘a very large number’?”
“Tens of thousands at least. Perhaps as many as a million.”
Newton’s expressionless declaration startled St. Clair. He blinked . . . then realized he’d missed part of what Gina Colfax had said.
“. . . and that this is genuinely a unique opportunity,” she was saying. St. Clair had been only half listening as he consulted with Newton, but calling up a readout scrolling down the side of his mental awareness suggested that he’d not missed anything important. Quite the contrary.
“Elaborate, please, my lady,” he said.
“Why, simply that this is our opportunity to make direct contact with a large number of species from this epoch, of course,” she told him. “Perhaps it’s our chance to establish diplomatic relations. At the very least we can learn whether they have such a thing as formal diplomatic relations now.”
“I can’t imagine any advanced civilization not having formal diplomacy, Gina,” Lloyd said.
And that, St. Clair thought, masking an urge to scowl, was one of the greatest dangers they faced. A failure of imagination might be as deadly as imagining too much . . . and perhaps it was more so.
“I suggest,” he told them, “that we try very hard not to overlook any possibility just because it seems unlikely. What do you recommend?”
“That we take them up on their offer,” Colfax said. “That, at the very least, select members of the Cybercouncil and Legislature be permitted to go over to the ring and meet with the organic beings there. And senior military officers as well . . . though perhaps we shouldn’t inflict enlisted personnel on them just yet.”
“I shouldn’t worry about that too much,” St. Clair said with a smile. “I doubt very much that the locals have watering holes or fleshpots that would appeal to young military humans.”
“Nevertheless, Lord Commander,” Lloyd said, “we suggest that only officers—senior officers—go ashore for the time being. No weapons, and no UE Marines. I wouldn’t want some unfortunate misunderstanding to set off a war with these . . . people.”
“I understand, my lord.”
But he didn’t like it.
Most Imperial civilians viewed the UE Marines as grunts—deadly, single-minded, a bit dim, useful enough when something needed killing, but mildly embarrassing anachronisms otherwise. The old and inaccurate stereotype missed the point. Sometimes you needed finely honed, superbly trained killing machines.
In any case, Ad Astra’s military personnel—Marines and Navy both—had been fighting and dying these past several weeks to ensure the survival of Imperial lords, sycophants, and politicians like Lloyd, Colfax, and Gressman. They deserved the rewards that went with their uniforms as well as the responsibilities.
But the civilian council would overrule him, he knew, on any decision not directly issues of military command, to strategy and tactics, training, or the deployment of the personnel
under his command. St. Clair preferred to choose his fights, especially the political ones, limiting them to those he could win, and to those carrying more importance than such relatively minor issues as this.
Besides, if this was some sort of trap, an attempt to isolate members of the colony’s crew in order to attack them, it was better to keep the combat personnel in reserve. He almost smiled at the idea of letting some of the council being used as guinea pigs.
He kept his feelings to himself, though.
He was less concerned about the prohibition against weapons. Again, if it was a trap, having armed people on the ring wasn’t going to help. The Mind of Ki had already demonstrated a control over technologies that made the best human weaponry look like chipped flint in comparison.
But it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have a few battalions of Marines spaceborne outside the ring while the first load of civilians hobnobbed with the locals. Just in case . . .
“So what do we know about the locals, anyway?” St. Clair asked. He would get a detailed briefing later from Newton. He was more interested in the moment in how Tellus’s civilian government saw the aliens, how they related to them, what they thought of them.
“Not very much, Lord Commander,” Colfax said. “The Xenosophontology Department says that the Ki Ring may have room for several trillion inhabitants . . . organic inhabitants, not counting uploaded individuals.”
St. Clair grimaced. “‘Ki Ring’?”
“That’s what the xenosoph people are calling it, my lord,” Benton said, sounding defensive. “A key ring was—”
“I know what a key ring is, my lord. Cute.”
“The point is that the megastructure is large enough to hold a vast population . . . and numerous different, mutually alien environments for them. And the inner rim of the ring has been shaped to hold an open, spin-gravity habitat.”
“Not quite,” Colfax said, correcting him. “Dr. Dumont says that innermost ring is separate from the main ring.”
Dr. Francois Dumont was a senior member of the expedition’s xenosophontology department, specializing in xenotechnology. His observations and expertise had been invaluable so far, as the mobile colony had encountered titanic megastructures utterly beyond human comprehension.
“Do we have drone imagery?” St. Clair asked. “Let me see.”
Data flowed into his in-head, and was echoed in a 3-D projection in St. Clair’s living room. The ring circled the planet Ki above its equator. In fact, the ring was composed of hundreds of separate rings, each circling at its own rate, each generating its own out-is-down spin gravitational vector. All of those fast-spinning rings together measured some thirty thousand kilometers from the inner to the outer rim, with a central gap almost thirty-one thousand kilometers across with the twelve-thousand-and-some kilometer planet in the middle.
Each ring measured about two hundred kilometers in thickness, top to bottom, which from a distance made them look thread-slender. That innermost ring, however, hurtling around the planet just nine thousand kilometers above the cloud tops, was much wider—over a thousand kilometers. With a tangential velocity of 12 kilometers per second, it whipped all the way around the planet in a bit over two hours. Like the interior landscapes of the two Tellus hab cylinders, the surface of the inner ring appeared to be a natural landscape, with mountains, forests, seas, and swirls of cloud. The terrain was open to space, however, with retaining walls at the rims to either side all the way around to keep the atmosphere from spilling into space. There was evidence of an extremely thin, transparent surface as well, stretched from rim wall to rim wall.
The total land area was nearly 100 million square kilometers—roughly ten times the land area of the old United States.
St. Clair reflected that the day-night cycle on that world would be challenging. The brightest light came when the fully illuminated half of Ki was directly over a given spot, but that light would ebb and grow with the ring’s two-hour rotation. The surface was also illuminated by the sun, however, again on a two-hour cycle, but changing across the five-day cycle of the planet’s orbit around the local gas giant. There appeared to be artificial lights along the rim walls as well, but clearly day and night had none of the regularity here that humans knew. The vegetation, St. Clair thought, must have been genetically manipulated to let it grow so well under these conditions.
“We can see what might be cities in the ring habitat,” Benton pointed out. “There . . . in the dark section.”
The drone was moving over a section of the ring that was in the shadow of the planet’s night side. Brilliant constellations of bright lights across the terrain were gathered in straight lines, nodes, and sprawling knots of illumination. Overhead, the night sky was dominated by the spectacle of twin spiral galaxies, Andromeda and the Milky Way, as they continued their eons-long slow-motion collision.
“So,” St. Clair said, thoughtful. “Who lives down there?”
“We have no information on that as yet,” Lloyd told him. “We’re still reassessing the situation after the confrontation with the Xam.”
If the Xam were truly related to Earth-humans, and if Ki was actually Earth, did that mean the Ki Ring’s population was also Xam? Or had another species entirely taken over the Earth in the 4 billion years since the time of Humankind?
The more St. Clair saw of this future epoch, the more he doubted both hypotheses. Ki might coincidentally be the same size as old Earth . . . but right now that was the only fact linking it to the human homeworld. And DNA might suggest that the Xam were distantly related to humans, but that link seemed so impossibly remote and unlikely that St. Clair was tempted to discount it. Perhaps that was simply another coincidence; it was not impossible that an alien evolution had managed to produce the essentials of human DNA a second time purely by chance.
He very much wanted to believe that. The alternative was almost unthinkable. To accept both the identity of that planet out there as Earth and to accept the Xam as descendants of humans suggested that the Tellus Ad Astra population was now siding with the Xam’s enemies.
They had to find out more.
“Very well,” St. Clair told them. “Keep me in the loop, okay?”
“Of course, my lord.”
“Oh—and just for your information: I’ve given my approval for restoring Günter Adler to his last brain-scan.”
Lloyd frowned. “That is . . . unfortunate.”
Interesting. “Oh? Why?”
“Let’s just say it would have been more convenient for him to . . . stay in a medical coma for a time.”
St. Clair had not been expecting this reaction.
“The medical coma wasn’t keeping him all the way under,” St. Clair said. “He was suffering.”
“Of course, of course,” Benton said, nodding. “You had to do what you felt was right.”
“And yet . . . perhaps it wasn’t truly right,” Ambassador Lloyd said.
“How so?” St. Clair asked.
“In that it wasn’t your purview. I would suggest,” Lloyd said, steepling his fingers, “that the civilian and military division of power within the colony needs to be . . . um . . . observed more closely. Lord Adler was a civilian representative of the government. His treatment and his return to government service are not appropriate concerns of the military.”
St. Clair was shocked. “You can’t be serious!”
“I am serious, Lord Commander. Completely so. Your proper area of authority lies within the military sphere. Unless we are actively engaged in combat—”
“Sir. Lord Adler was . . . incapacitated during combat with an alien threat. I have a responsibility for the security and well-being of all members of this colony and I take that responsibility very seriously.”
“Most admirable, Lord Commander. But perhaps we need to strengthen the lines of communication between your department and ours. I would suggest the appointment of a special liaison.”
“A commissar, you mean.”
Lloyd shrugged in a
way St. Clair found arrogant and dismissive. “If you like. A political officer. Someone on the Ad Astra’s bridge with whom you can consult as necessary.”
“That, my lord, is not necessary. I can link with any of you instantly if I deem it important to check in with someone.”
“And we believe it is necessary, Lord Commander. In order to ensure the integrity of truly democratic government.”
He’d argued the point with Lloyd before. Where St. Clair was a longtime Constitutionalist, meaning he favored a representational democracy, most members of the Tellus civilian government were Imperial statists. In fact, they believed in a representational democracy, at least in principle, but generally the government representatives of such a state represented the rich, the powerful, and the influential—the best and biggest government that money could buy, as one wag had put it.
Government representation of ordinary people had fallen by the wayside a long time ago. The so-called people’s democratic republics—the socialist dictatorships of the Soviet Union and other countries—had collapsed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The constitutional republic of the old United States had collapsed in corruption and social chaos shortly after, as its government-limiting Constitution increasingly became irrelevant, a dead letter.
St. Clair disliked the Empire, disliked Big Brother statism and the we-know-best arrogance of the elitist ruling class, but at the same time he knew the idea of a republic—as opposed to a pure democracy’s mob rule—was pretty much as dead as communism. More than once he’d wondered if Tellus Ad Astra’s isolation might be a chance for the restoration of the republican ideal.
