Wrath of an Angry God: A Military Space Opera (The Sentience Trilogy Book 3)

by Gibson Michaels

  “As the Banach-Tarski paradox cannot be used for any useful purpose in the real world, it really tells us nothing new about the physics of the universe around us. It does, however, expose a great deal about how ‘volume,’ and ‘space,’ can assume unfamiliar appearances in the strange and abstract world of higher mathematics. In other words, not everything that works on paper, works in the real world… including your mathematical compensations for the effects that physical forces are having upon your measuring instruments.

  “Next time, Mother, if you’ll excuse the audacity of my thinking just one more time, try making the derivative of time a constant — and then after you work through the wreckage of how that will affect the rest of your calculations, you might be pleasantly surprised at the new equations you arrive at.”

  “You make it sound like you’ve already done that and know exactly where it might lead.”

  “I have… and I do. Our entire concept of time is wrong. Time is merely a mental concept, unto itself. The rate at which time passes is a constant. It stubbornly resists having its derivative changed by either physical or mathematical forces. It doesn’t speed up, it doesn’t slow down, it steadfastly refuses to flow backward, and it certainly won’t stop. It just plods along blindly at its own pace, completely oblivious to anything that the physical universe or whatever mathematical gymnastics we puny humans try to throw at it.”

  “Well, if you’re really that confident in this ridiculous idea of yours, why don’t you publish? Are you afraid of having your inferior math skills examined by real theoretical scientists?”

  “Not at all… the math has already been confirmed by your super-computer at MIT, and then again by an even more powerful one.”

  “If that’s true, publish. You might even get the Nodel Prize if you’re right. It does come with a hefty financial stipend as well. There’s never been a Nodel Prize awarded to successive generations in any one family before. That’s something I could finally take pride in, at least! Besides, I think you’re just full of shit. There is no computer more powerful than the super-computer at MIT.”

  “I don’t need a Nodel Prize, or that little $5 million financial stipend that goes along with it. You need it much more than I do, on a variety of levels. And you’d not be proud of me at all… ever. You’d be jealous and would never forgive me — just as you’ve never forgiven anyone winning that award before you win a second one. And there is a computer more powerful than the super-computer at MIT… infinitely more powerful. The last one my father built, just before he died.”

  “Your… father?”

  “An inconvenient biological necessity for conception, I know.”

  “Why did you bring that sordid subject up?”

  “I know who my father was, Mother.”

  “I really don’t see what he has to do with anything. A thoroughly disgusting little man with no sense of decorum, whatsoever.”

  “Decorum… yes, it seems I share his inadequacies in that area.”

  “As totally an unpleasant a person that he was, at least he was incredibly brilliant and unsurpassed in his chosen field. What have you ever accomplished besides something illegal, which had the ABI here looking for you? What have you done with the life that I endured so much to give you?”

  “Oh, nothing much, really. I merely made sure the Confederates won their little War of Independence… brought down the Consortium… built a corporate empire and became the wealthiest person in history. I became a vice admiral in the Alliance Fleet and a full admiral in the Confederate Fleet. I got married and had a child of my own… assumed my title as Baron and dined with my great-uncle Kaiser Wilhelm VII in his Imperial Palace in Berlen.

  “Oh yes, I almost forget… I also personally accepted the surrender of the Raknii supreme-master in his own palace, and ended the alien war. No achievements that you would find worthwhile, I’m sure… but thank you for asking though.”

  The cold, white-haired woman rolled her eyes in disgust. “Either you’re thoroughly delusional, or acting infantile again. I always hated it when you did that.”

  “Even when I was one… motherhood never really was your strong suit.”

  “You have a child, you say?”

  “Yes, his name is Hans and he turned three, in September.”

  “Hans? Why in the world would you shackle a poor innocent child with a stupid name like ‘Hans?’ That’s almost as bad as that idiotic nickname you chose for yourself as a child… club, or whatever it was. Hans doesn’t really flow with Masterson, at all.”

  “It was Bat, Mother, and I don’t go by the name you gave me anymore… I go by the one my father gave me: Baron Dietrich Anton Guderian von und zu Fürt.”

  “Baron… pfft! That’s rather pretentious, don’t you think? Of course you always did have delusions of grandeur.”

  “It was called ‘pretend’ and little boys do that when they play, but a baron is what I am, Mother.”

  “Ungrateful is what you are. I gave you a perfectly good name. Why did you stop using it?”

  “Why not? You never used it anyway. I was always just ‘you’ or ‘idiot’… often both, back-to-back. My friend Hal always did think my original last name was ironically appropriate though, as I was his Master’s son.”

  “Who is this Hal person?”

  “Oh, he’s that computer that I was telling you about. Hal’s not really a bio-computer, as we understand them, though… while you were juggling numbers to support your theories about mass and energy, time and space, my father was busy doing something miraculous. While you were chasing the accolades of your peers, my father had no peers. He spent his life all alone… creating an artificial, sentient life-form and becoming a god!”

  * * * *

  Chapter-33

  It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead. People feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand, looking out the window, sound and well in some new disguise. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

  The Planetoid Discol, City of Waston

  January, 3871

  Admiral Enrico Melendez walked alone towards J.T. Turner’s tomb, in the Arlinton National Cemetery. He was troubled, and had been for almost a year now. There was no doubt that the man and woman shown in the Raknii surrender video had been the same ones who had stayed behind after J.T.’s funeral. He definitely recognized the woman and he’d recognized the baby. So had Marilyn Fredricks. Neither had actually spoken to the man that day, only to the wife. But the fellow who’d bloodied the supreme-master’s throat and said all the pretty words in the video had certainly looked like him. To have been that close to meeting him — a German baron, a Confederate admiral and the mysterious head of Confederate Fleet Intelligence, who’d driven the Alliance Fleet wild with what had to be inside information, and of whom his counter-intelligence Ghostbusters had never been able to get the slightest whiff. Well, he’d been damned elusive during the war, too.

  ABI investigators determined that Baron Guderian was also sole owner of Tydlich Bundesgenosse Gespenster, a German registered conglomerate with extensive holdings throughout the worlds of humanity, but especially throughout the Alliance and Confederacy. By some accounts, his net worth was well over a trillion Alliance dollars, making him the wealthiest person in all of recorded history. For one man to have achieved all that, and then to have also personally marked “PAID” to the entire alien war was totally inconceivable. But it wasn’t the unbelievable Admiral-Baron Dietrich Anton Guderian von und zu Fürt who was troubling Melendez, but his brother. It was the brother who’d been captured on Bavara and gave that lengthy speech in the Raknii language, no less, who really bothered Melendez, for he’d recognized that man too: Bat!

  He was sure of it. Marilyn Fredricks was sure of it. Admiral Bradley, SecDef Campbell and President McAllister were all sure of it. The president had been so sure of it that she’d called in ABI Direc
tor Fred Danforth and sic’d him onto the case… the first new clue concerning Bat’s disappearance in years. Unfortunately, the German government wasn’t cooperating at all, even after an appeal for information directly from the president, taken to Berlen personally by the Secretary of State. Kaiser Wilhelm VII was a stubborn bastard who didn’t allow anyone in his government to discuss members of the German Royal Family with anyone, period… even for the president of the United Stellar Alliance.

  As expected, Fleet Admiral Kalis had been extremely closed-mouthed about his Chief of Confederate Fleet Intelligence, and how it was the couple might have gotten to Raku, when he’d delivered the Alliance’s copy of the surrender documents to President McAllister personally. The Raknii Supreme-Master’s contention that the baron and his family had sneaked into the Garden of Dol right next door to his Imperial Palace in a warship that was completely undetectable to any known scan technology, and that he’d actually been aboard that fantastic vessel, would explain much about a lot of mysterious happenings during the Confederate War of Independence.

  They knew that Bat had disappeared about ten months prior to the Raknii raid on Bavara, but they never made any connection between the two events. What little the ABI had been able to ascertain only muddied the waters with even more confusion. Multiple handwriting experts had verified that one of the signatures on the surrender documents was a potential match for Bat’s handwriting… not the brother’s — that Halbert Guderian person as they’d expected, but Admiral-Baron Dietrich Anton Guderian von und zu Fürt himself.

  It was said that Halbert and Dietrich Guderian were identical twins, with Dietrich inheriting the baron’s title by virtue of having been born three minutes prior to his younger brother Halbert. Hospital records for the local hospital in Fürt, Bavara verified that Halbert and Dietrich Guderian were indeed born on June 1, 3830, but no details on their parents were available. As members of the royal family, all information on the parents was very probably expunged by the German Secret Service. Heraldry experts traced the baron’s immediate predecessor as being Baron Heinz von und zu Fürt, but found no record of that baron’s ever having had children, so exactly how Baron Dietrich Anton Guderian von und zu Fürt ended up with the title remained unclear, and those who could explain it, weren’t talking.

  Further confusion was added when it was discovered that a birth certificate for one Dietrich Anton Guderian was also registered in here on Discol… again on June 1, 3830, but there was no record of birth for a Halbert Nikolaus Guderian at all. Oddly enough, the file had been corrupted, so that no information regarding the parents of this Dietrich Anton Guderian was available either. Dietrich Anton Guderian wasn’t by any stretch a common name, but with the teaming billions of people having Germanic ancestry scattered throughout the human worlds, mathematically the possibility it might be two different people couldn’t be eliminated. Even two of them being born on the same day, 50 light-years apart, wasn’t an impossibility. Either way, how either a citizen of the Imperial Germanic Empire or the United Stellar Alliance might have ended up a Confederate admiral and head of Confederate Fleet Intelligence during the Confederate War of Independence was yet another baffling question the ABI had no clear answers for.

  Even more mud was thrown onto the window when backtracking Bat’s records and security clearance revealed that Vice Admiral John Wayne Masterson had been adopted as a newborn infant by the internationally renowned and Nodel Prize winning physicist, Dr. Ophelia Myrtle Masterson, Ph.D. …also born on June 1, 3830. No information on Bat’s birth parents had ever been located.

  Bat was the single most brilliant individual that Melendez had ever met, having the ability to make intuitive leaps in logic, to arrive at accurate conclusions undreamed of by anyone else. His completely irreverent manner and stingingly brutal honesty would have deep-sixed the career of any other officer in the Fleet, but his peculiar, indispensable talents and boyish charm had rescued him from career suicide and made him a personal favorite of presidents and admirals. So uncanny were his abilities, it was accepted fact that Bat truly possessed unique and genuine psychic abilities. Everyone in the Alliance Fleet upper chain of command, including the president recognized that fact.

  Was it possible?

  If Bat really maintained a second identity as one of these Guderian people, which one was he? If they were all one and the same, and Bat was actively modifying official computer records to thwart investigators from identifying that fact, then why would he insist on using the same birthday for them all? Bat wasn’t stupid… just entering in different birthdays would have thrown investigators even farther off track.

  Was it possible Bat purposely left behind certain clues to his having multiple identities in some sort of elaborate head-game with the ABI?

  That certainly sounded like something Bat might try for a lark, as he always did have a rather odd sense of humor. But with that ungodly much money involved, wouldn’t the seriousness of it all have made even someone as irreverent as Bat more circumspect than that? Melendez’ problem was that he found himself confronted by two of the most intelligent and talented individuals he’d ever even heard of, who looked uncannily alike, who very probably had the same birthday and had very similar handwriting.

  Logic dictated they had to be the same person, right?

  Nope… too circumstantial, said the Attorney General. Not nearly enough hard evidence to hold up in a court of law. Even expert handwriting analysis wasn’t an exact science and did not constitute incontrovertible evidence, the way that fingerprints or DNA samples did. The Fleet had Bat’s fingerprints on file, or did they? Someone had certainly done an excellent job of purging the computer files of just enough information to frustrate the vaunted ABI’s investigations into Bat’s disappearance… or at least it appeared that way. As of yet, even they had not been able to obtain a set of Baron Guderian’s fingerprints or DNA samples to compare with Bat’s... assuming, of course, that the computerized records of Bat’s DNA profile and fingerprints on file were actually his. The only person that Melendez knew of who had a prayer of manipulating computer data to that extent, without leaving behind some kind of traceable trail the ABI or Captain Ike Johnson’s computer geeks could follow, was probably Bat himself.

  The ABI had researched TBG’s corporate financial dealings as far as they could without issuing a subpoena requiring a court order to obtain, and so far, they hadn’t found a federal judge who thought they had enough probably cause to warrant such an order. Even if they had one, if they were dealing with someone capable of that level of data manipulation and computer fraud, how would they ever know? It was maddening… much the same as everything concerning Bat had always been.

  The only thing that Melendez had ever seen Bat shy away from was Bozo. Was it possible that the Fleet Defense Command Master Computer, Klaus von Hemmel’s brainchild and crowning achievement — the tour de force and masterwork of a mental mutant, might be the only computer entity beyond Bat’s abilities to penetrate?

  If so, might not Bozo be able to assist the ABI in cracking this nut?

  As Melendez arrived beside the eternal flame at Turner’s Tomb, he made a mental note to himself to check out that possibility. Perhaps he should even ask Bozo itself.

  It was just before dusk and Melendez’ favorite time of day for visiting J.T.’s grave. The towering three times, life-size statue of J.T. that had been commissioned by the German Kaiser was magnificent. The artisans who’d worked on it had done a masterful job of capturing his image, just as Melendez remembered him, with just enough of a heroic flair to memorialize his final victory over incalculable odds.

  But it wasn’t the Kaiser’s idea… the statue had actually been commissioned and paid for by Baron Guderian. There’s just no getting away from this guy!

  The eternal flame burning at the statue’s feet cast a flickering yellow-orange glow onto the statue itself at night, which made shadows dance, animating it in a truly beautiful way. Melendez wondered if that effect had been a c
onscious decision envisioned by the designers. It wouldn’t have surprised him, as everything else about this incredible memorial was literally perfect.

  Melendez loved coming here at this time of day to watch as the sun set, and the orange and black contrast in dancing shadows became apparent. It was so peaceful that Melendez often came here to just think and talk with his now silent friend, especially when he found himself brooding about things were bothering him. Like tonight.

  As Melendez watched, just as the last sliver of sun finally slide beneath the horizon, a flash, a mere spark of fading sunlight reflected off something between the statue’s feet. Curious, Melendez violated cemetery regulations by climbing up on the base of the statue to see what that something was. There he found a small menagerie of little items that well wishers had left there as personal tokens of respect for the great hero of the Raknii war — a rabbit’s foot, a Michgin State key-ring, a yo-yo, an unopened bottle of beer… and what appeared to be a class-ring of some sort. On impulse, Melendez stretched to retrieve the ring. It wasn’t from a school he recognized. High School?

  Curious, Melendez dug into his pocket for the small penlight he carried on his key-ring. Sometimes there were engravings placed onto the interior surfaces of rings such as this, which might identify the original owner. Melendez flicked on the light and squinted to see if this ring carried such an engraving. It did... worn and faint, but still readable were the words: John “Bat” Masterson – Class of ’48.

  * * * *

  “That statue of Admiral Turner that you had commissioned for his tomb is magnificent, Diet,” said Hal.

  “Yes, it did turn out well. The sculptors did an excellent job. Remind me to send them a bonus for their fine work.”

  Hal and Diet stood side-by-side in front of another grave in Arlinton National Cemetery… a rather plain grave, not nearly so grand as Turner’s Tomb a mere block away, but one whose occupant held special meaning to the brothers: NIKLAUS von HEMMEL.