by Ian Douglas
“Damn it, Newton,” St. Clair said, “what’s going on?” The range was too great. He could not see what was going on in toward the glowing nova of the Bluestar.
“IO-2 is in motion,” Newton replied. “It may have just struck Lieutenant Merrick, or, possibly, captured him.”
St. Clair had already assumed that, but hearing Newton’s validation was like a physical blow. He’d ordered Merrick to hold his fire, and now it seemed likely that that order had resulted in the worst possible outcome.
“Are you still in communication with that thing?” he asked.
“Affirmative.”
“So what’s it saying?”
For answer, Newton cut in a running translation. The words were English, but the meaning, the intent behind them was profoundly alien.
“I-we arrive bringing you the ultimate salvation, freedom and the fullness of life as you have never begun to conceive! Surrender your pain and suffering and illness and need and embrace the power and the wholeness of the One as you Ascend into infinite bliss . . .”
It was, St. Clair thought, eerily like the word salad babbled by some of the victims of the Dark Mind’s mental attacks. It also sounded much like the ravings of a religious monomaniac, someone convinced to the very depths of his soul that what he believed was right . . . not only for himself but for everyone.
“Join I-we in perfect and harmonious union and know perfection and harmony . . .”
“Newton? Is that thing seriously asking us to join with it?”
“That appears to have been the Andromedan Dark’s goal all along,” Newton replied.
“Do you have any control over it? Through your clones.”
“I am working toward that end. The cloned software does not appear to be responding as expected. It may be . . . insane.”
And that, St. Clair thought, must be the Dark’s way of operating. Infiltrate minds, all minds, organic and electronic, using their electronic enhancements and circuitry. As the mind began losing its hold on reality, the Dark could come flooding in with its own perspective, its own take on what was real and what was not.
The one type of brain that could shrug off the alien assault would be one that had not been augmented by nanocircuitry and electronic implants. Unfortunately, there were no such humans. The last unaugmented human must have died billions of years in the past; every person within Tellus Ad Astra was enhanced.
Had the Cooperative assumed that the primitive humans were not enhanced? An interesting thought. Perhaps that was why they’d been so eager to get the human castaways working for them, with the assumption that human brains were purely organic and therefore immune to Dark tampering. He remembered Gudahk’s arrogant dismissal of humans as ephemerals; extensive reworking of the brain was one step among many on the long road to life extension, even to practical immortality. Artificially augmented brains could scan for health problems and correct them, could allow the person to wear artificial bodies and prosthetic body parts, could clear the brain of unwanted memories that might play a role in senescence.
Was that why the Cooperative wanted the humans to ally with them?
“I-we offer you the souls of our own . . .”
“What the hell is it talking about?” St. Clair demanded.
“I believe that it is returning the people it just picked up in space,” Newton replied. “I’m getting IDs . . . Gunnery Sergeant Roger Kilgore . . . Sergeant Kari Rees . . . Lieutenant Christopher Merrick . . .”
“What . . . it’s returning them?” That could be a gesture of friendship . . . or even of surrender.
“In a manner of speaking, Lord Commander.”
“What do you mean, ‘in a manner of speaking’?”
“Translation between English and the Andromedan Dark is necessarily imprecise. It appears to use the word soul to refer to a digitally uploaded consciousness.”
“They’ve been uploaded?”
“That appears to be the case.”
St. Clair felt a rising surge of anger. “It killed them! Just like that?”
“Whether or not those Marines are dead or alive is largely a matter of technological semantics,” Newton replied. “In any case, the Dark Mind appears to believe that it has done them, and us, a favor.”
“That remains to be seen,” St. Clair replied.
“I urge you not to respond out of anger,” Newton told him. “Not until we have more information about the Dark’s motivations and intent.”
St. Clair took a couple of deep breaths. “What does it want?”
“Evidently, to talk,” Newton told him.
“Okay. But tell it to halt where it is, and we’ll talk long-range. I don’t want it doing us any more favors. Not until we understand perfectly what’s being offered.”
Because of one thing St. Clair was certain. They, the humans, had just won a startling victory over the alien Dark. But turning that one victory into peace would require the full commitment of both the inhabitants of Tellus Ad Astra and of the entire Cooperative.
And as history had proven so many times before, winning the war was likely to be far easier than winning the peace.
Newton was talking with himself, a high-speed and extremely efficient transfer of raw data. The two Newton clones resident within the torpedoes fired into IO-1 some hour before had been changed by their assimilation within the Andromedan Dark.
Or, rather, with this one fragment of the Dark. Newton was simply receiving data at this point, and not analyzing it, but he saw enough as the packets streamed into and through his consciousness to recognize patterns as they became the randomly scattered parts of a much larger picture.
He was learning a very great deal about the Graal Tchotch. They’d learned much already, of course, partly from the Dark itself, partly from the Cooperative, but Newton was aware now of underlying themes and histories that were giving him a much more complete picture of these implacable enemies from outside the Milky Way Galaxy.
A lot of what was coming through now was a deep and profound sense of shock. The Andromedan Dark, as Newton understood it, was an emergent mind arising from a merging of mentalities drawn from across two galaxies, trillions upon uncounted trillions of minds both distinct and melded into a dynamic whole. The Bluestar object had been but one isolated node of this galaxies-spanning consciousness, with only a tiny fraction of the entire Dark population residing within its computronium heart.
And yet that one node had possessed a population of some trillions of uploaded minds. Of those minds, only a few hundred million—perhaps a hundredth of 1 percent—had escaped within the lava-encrusted IO-2, an insignificant percentage of the original population.
What was not yet clear to Newton was whether the AI mind of IO-2 was still in communication with the rest of the Andromedan Dark, or if the destruction of the Bluestar object had cut these few survivors off from the whole.
Also not yet clear was whether this remnant handful genuinely wanted to communicate with the Cooperative . . . or if this was some sort of ploy.
IO-2 was still dangerous, at least to the Ad Astra if not to the Wrath of Deity, and Newton had already decided that letting even this equivalent of a lifeboat get close to the human ships would be a bad idea.
And yet the shock, Newton thought, was genuine. He couldn’t tell if that shock translated to emotions that humans would understand—grief . . . sorrow . . . even fear—but the Bluestar Mind had most certainly been surprised by the destruction and loss, and it most certainly did not want that destruction to continue.
The Bluestar survivors did appear to be afraid.
Perhaps St. Clair would be able to build upon that.
Dixon had been engulfed in absolute black.
“Hey . . . Rees? Gunny? Lieutenant? Are you there?”
There was no answer to Dixon’s in-head call. In fact, there seemed to be nothing coming into his brain from the outside world at all . . . no sight, no sound, no sensations of touch or temperature or movement. He’d been wrestling
with the realization that the glare of the exploding Bluestar had blinded him, but now there was nothing at all but an unrelieved darkness. He was beginning to suspect that even that was a creation of his own brain in response to the lack of sensory input.
Even more frightening was the fact that his in-head circuitry appeared to be totally off-line.
Not only could he not use his telepathic e-connections with the others, but he no longer had access to his own in-head ROM, to any local data nets, or with his own armor’s built-in AI. His personal secretary, a very limited and nonconscious AI resident within his personal RAM, was silent, and the various icons always visible within his inner visual field were missing.
All of that suggested that he was in very serious trouble indeed. He was alive, at least, of that much he was sure. He had his thoughts and his awareness of continuity. He was in no pain, obviously, but his internal biological awareness seemed to be in perfect working order. It was almost as if some instrumentality had plucked his living brain from his skull, stripped it of its electronic aids, and preserved it intact, alive, and aware.
But how long would it be, Dixon wondered, before he went screaming insane from total and complete sensory deprivation?
Guided by her AI, the Ad Astra slid gently into the endcap docking cradles on the ponderously rotating Tellus hab modules. Magnetic grapples on the yoke snapped home, and Tellus Ad Astra was again complete, a single vessel thirty-eight kilometers long.
St. Clair took a moment to catch up on the news, the events on board the hab modules while Ad Astra had been absent. A lot had been happening, he saw. Riots and demonstrations, a public speech against the alliance with the Cooperative by none other than Günter Adler . . . and an attempt on Adler’s life. Interesting. There’d be no way to prove it, but St. Clair was willing to bet that the assassination attempt had been bought and paid for by the Cybercouncil. They wanted Adler out . . . but the former Cybercouncil director was not going quietly.
St. Clair considered his options. Technically, a state of military emergency still had him in charge of the Tellus Ad Astra, but that would end soon now that the Bluestar threat had been neutralized. Once he declared the emergency over, military rule would be suspended, and the legal civilian government would take over from him once more.
If it had been solely up to him, he would have suspended the civilian government and called for new elections. The current government seemed far more interested in consolidating its own power and conducting private political wars than it did actually taking care of the human colony’s needs. But St. Clair was a dedicated Constitutionalist, which meant he had a deep commitment to the rule of law and to constitutional order. To use military rule to decide that the entire government was out of order and to suspend it was to adopt the mind-set of every third-world dictatorship of twentieth and twenty-first century Earth. St. Clair would not consider that option until and unless it became absolutely necessary.
But what the hell was he going to do about the Cybercouncil? If they had indeed tried to kill Adler . . .
An inner tone sounded, indicating that someone wanted to talk.
“Well, speak of the devil,” St. Clair said when he pulled up the ID.
It was Adler, the request flagged “urgent.” The former director wanted to have a face-to-face meeting at St. Clair’s earliest convenience.
An hour later, St. Clair saluted the Marine sentry standing outside the front door to his home and walked inside. Lisa was there to meet him, casually nude. “Hello, Grayson,” she said.
“Hey, beautiful. . . .”
He reached for her, but she turned aside. “We have a visitor.”
“Lord Commander?” Adler said.
St. Clair had been expecting him, of course. “Good afternoon, Lord Director,” he said.
“Ah, ah . . . not ‘Director,’” Adler said, smiling broadly. “You know better than that!”
“Force of habit,” St. Clair replied. He gestured as he thoughtclicked the house AI for a sofa, growing a favorite pattern from the nanomatrix of the living room floor. “Please, have a seat. Can I get you anything?”
He glanced nervously between St. Clair and Lisa. “No. No, thank you.”
“So what can I do for you?”
“I imagine you’ve heard about . . . um . . .”
“An attempt to kill you a little while ago? Yes. Any idea who’s behind it?”
Adler nodded. “I have agents out, mining the data. There was a sharp uptick in e-communications between Lloyd and several other Council members immediately before and after the incident.”
“After is hardly suspicious,” St. Clair pointed out. “They were gossiping about it. Probably the entire human population was gossiping about it.”
“But coded messages just before are a little harder to explain,” Adler said. “There were also several coded messages over the past couple of days to and from someone named Jason Prescott. Here’s his file . . .”
St. Clair accepted the electronic document in-head and glanced through it. Prescott was a former Special Forces operator who’d signed on with the Tellus Ad Astra diplomatic mission as a member of staff security. There was nothing in the available records indicating criminal activity, but the man’s background included combat experience and training as a military sniper. He was certainly the type of guy who might be recruited by the government as a “fixer,” someone who covertly took care of political problems and stayed off the public radar.
“I’ll give the orders to pick Prescott up.”
“Do it fast, Lord Commander. He may be after you as well.”
“Oh? And how am I a threat to the government?”
Adler shrugged. “You seem to be charting your own course through the shoals of galactic diplomacy without paying much attention to what Lloyd and the others have to say. You kicked the Council’s political officer off your bridge.”
“Gorton Noyer?” St. Clair smiled. “Not quite. I’ll admit that I wanted to, though. . . .”
“You argued that we should stay clear of entanglements with the Cooperative.”
“That’s true. Didn’t get all that far with that idea, though, did I?”
“Maybe not. But you and I . . . we share a common vision for this colony, I think. We should work together.”
“In other words,” St. Clair said, “you want my authority, and by extension the power of Ad Astra’s military, to support your bid for power.”
“Well . . . I wouldn’t put it quite like that . . .”
“Really? How would you put it?”
Adler sighed. “Okay, okay. I need you. I need the Marines and the Navy. Lloyd and the others aren’t going to just roll over when I snap my fingers.”
“The answer,” St. Clair said, “is ‘no.’”
“But—”
“No. We do this by constitutional means, or we do not do it at all. No coups, no juntas. Frankly, I’ve always been a proponent of the idea that a people gets the government they deserve. If the general population is stupid enough or blind enough or uninvolved enough to vote in Lloyd as CybDirector, then they deserve what they get.”
Adler spread his hands. “How can I convince you?”
Jason Prescott had found a good shooter’s perch high up on the endcap of the starboard hab, overlooking the town of Bethesda. From here he had a clear view of the commander’s quarters, a split-level dwelling actually built into the cliffside rising up the interior of the endcap. He was actually at about the same elevation as the house; his three-kilometer line of sight cutting across the parabolic curve at the hab cylinder’s aft end. He could see the veranda overlooking a small pool and garden, the armored Marine sentry by the front door, and to the sentry’s right, a large, curving, transparent wall looking through to St. Clair’s living room. The wall was set to full transparency and looked open. Peering through his rifle’s telescopic sight and enlarging the image in-head, he caught his breath. Jackpot!
Except . . .
Adler alive! How wa
s that even possible?
A moment’s consideration posed an answer. If Adler had been worried about his safety, he might have been delivering public speeches by way of a teleoperated VirTraveler . . . a model 990, or possibly a 996. The target he’d burned down in Seattle, then, would have been a machine simulacrum.
Prescott could see Lord Commander St. Clair in the room as well, talking with Adler. Was it possible that he was looking at another robot, or even two?
He doubted that. He could see St. Clair’s robot wife in the tableau, standing near the window while the two humans chatted with one another, casual and relaxed. Unless this was some sort of an elaborate trap to smoke him out after the Seattle attempt, those two were flesh and blood. He was ready to bet money on that. Hell, he was ready to bet his own life.
Finding both of his assigned targets in the same place was a brilliant stroke of luck. All he needed to decide now was which one of the two to kill first.
Prescott took careful aim, triggered the IR laser ranging pulse to verify the distance: 3.18177 kilometers.
Prescott held the targeting reticle over his target’s head and thoughtclicked the icon to fire.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lisa was standing close beside the window when she saw the infrared flash against the glass half a meter to her left. Her eyes were far more sensitive than organic human eyes, and had a range spanning the electromagnetic spectrum from high infrared to low ultraviolet.
She turned and saw the point of IR light gleaming faintly on Adler’s forehead. Her artificial eyes could tell that the light was coherent—the reflection of an infrared laser. It was also tuned to a high enough frequency that it could pass through the plastic sheeting that served as a panoramic imaging window for the house. Longer IR wavelengths were readily absorbed by glass, plastic, water, and other materials transparent to visible light, but that beam was close enough to visible red to pass through more or less unhindered.
All of this and more was flickering through her AI brain as the data clicked home and she realized that she was seeing some sort of targeting device for a long-ranged weapon. The IR spot on Adler’s head winked out. Lisa threw herself forward. . . .
