Earth Strike

by Ian Douglas

  The data stream intercepted by the communications relay was not translatable, of course. If it was possible—with less than satisfactory results—to understand Turusch speech when they were using Lingua Galactica, it was still impossible to understand their native language. Naval Intelligence hadn’t even been able to take a guess at whether the data stream captured and retransmitted by Echeclus was a language or a code.

  They couldn’t even be certain if there was one message imbedded in the stream or two; information heterodyned on the carrier wave appeared to be in two separate, parallel tracks at slightly different frequencies. Whether that meant two separate messages, or was an artifact of the code, it was impossible to tell.

  “Admiral Koenig?” Lieutenant Commander Cleary said, breaking into his thoughts. “Dr. Wilkerson wants to speak with you, from the lab.”

  “Put him through.”

  “Ah, Admiral. Thank you. I know you’re busy right now….”

  “Actually no, Doctor. Alea iacta est. We’ve crossed the Rubicon, and there’s not a lot for us to do now until tonight.”

  “Alea…what?”

  “Never mind, Doctor. A minor reference from ancient military history. What’s on your mind?”

  “I thought you should know, Admiral. We have the breakthrough we’ve been looking for on the Turusch language.”

  The announcement sent a thrill through Koenig’s body, like an electric jolt. “The Devil, you say.”

  “There’s more than one level to their speech.”

  Wilkerson had his full attention. He’d just been thinking about the nested signals in the Turusch transmission between Triton and Point Libra.

  “It was Dr. George who figured it out, actually. You see, the Turusch communicate by vibrating those tympani set into the bony shells behind their heads. And we’ve noticed that they always seem to speak in unison.”

  “Yes. Drove me crazy.”

  “Now, all audio speech, of course, is a series of vibrations moving through the atmosphere. Waves of various frequencies and amplitudes going out from the speaker, right?”

  “I’m with you so far.”

  “If you have one tone, it’s possible to play a second, differently modulated tone over the top of the first, with the result that you get resonances. Harmonics. Sympathetic frequencies. I’m…I’m not saying this well, I’m afraid….”

  “You’re doing fine, Dr. Wilkerson. You’re saying that when the two Turusch were speaking together…” Koenig’s eyes widened as the realization hit. “Good God. You’re saying there was a third line of dialogue from those things?”

  “Exactly!” Wilkerson’s icon said, nodding its head. “The Turusch must have absolutely incredible brains, incredible neural circuitry, to do it on the fly like that. The autopsies of their bodies bears that out. They appear to have two brains each, one above the other. Of course, in a sense the human brain is a stack of increasingly complex and more highly evolved brains…the brain stem, the cerebellum, the cerebral cortex—”

  “What about the Turusch language, Doctor?”

  “I’m getting to that, Admiral. We need to understand the Turusch neurological anatomy, however, and the way it contrasts with ours. In humans, the cerebral cortex is divided—left brain and right brain. Although this is an oversimplification, in very general terms the left side deals with analytical abilities, language, mathematics, and so on. The right side tends to deal with things like emotion and artistic expression, while the two halves communicate with one another through a nerve plexus called the corpus collosum—”

  “And what’s the point of all of this, Doctor?”

  “Sir, the division of the Turusch brain is far more pronounced than in humans. We don’t know for sure, yet, but we suspect that the Turusch may carry on a constant internal dialogue…as if there were two individuals sharing a single body. And that…that evolutionary development may have facilitated their social organization, to the point that two Turusch pair up as partners, as very close partners. A meta-Turusch, if you will.”

  “Like our friend Falling Droplets and his partner.”

  “It’s…a little more complicated than that, sir. Here. Look at this….”

  Another window opened in Koenig’s mind. Once again, he was in the carrier’s research Center, watching the two brown and black tendriled slugs on the deck from the vantage point of the NTE robots suspended from the overhead.

  “This one was Falling Droplet, of the Third Hierarchy,” one of the aliens said, the words printed out across the bottom of the window.

  “Speak we now with the Mind Here or the Mind Below?” said the other.

  And beneath the two lines, a third sentence wrote itself: “Together I am Falling Droplet.”

  “They’re both Falling Droplet?” Koenig asked. “I thought they just neglected to tell us the other one’s name.”

  “The third sentence was there, Admiral, imbedded in the resonant frequencies created by the first two overlaying one another.”

  There was a slight jump in the image, where Wilkerson had edited out some of the conversation.

  “Why do you work for the Sh’daar?” Koenig’s voice asked.

  “The Sh’daar reject your transcendence and accept you if it is only you,” one Turusch said.

  “The Seed encompasses and arises from the Mind Below. How would it be otherwise?” said the other.

  “We work with them, our minds in harmony with theirs,” the third line read. “They fear your rapid technological growth.”

  “What do you mean, they reject our transcendence?” Koenig’s voice asked. “What is that?”

  “Your species approaches the point of transcendence,” one said.

  “Transcendence is the ultimate evil that has been banished,” said the other.

  “Technic species evolve into higher forms. When they pass beyond, they leave behind…death.”

  “Are your needs being looked after?” Koenig’s voice asked. “Are your nutritional needs being met?”

  “We require the Seed,” said one.

  “We are the Seed,” said the other.

  The third line read, “We are dying alone.”

  “My God,” Koenig said.

  “Their meaning is still a bit opaque in places,” Wilkerson said. “Their psychologies are very different.”

  “But they’re making a hell of a lot more sense now than they did the other day.” He shook his head. “It must have been terribly frustrating for them. They were holding what they thought was a perfectly normal conversation with us…and we didn’t understand, didn’t have a clue to what they were actually saying. ‘We are dying alone’?”

  “Yes. We think—this is still all speculation, understand—we think that the internal dialogue predisposes them to working in groups. First with their twins…but then in successively higher and higher groupings. It’s possible that the meta-Turusch I mentioned is a kind of group mind created by superimposing tens or hundreds or even thousands of separate conversations, all going on at once, and having new meaning arising from the background hash of separate voices.”

  “You said they had to have incredible brains to think on so many different levels at once. I think I’m beginning to understand.”

  “By comparison, we’re very slow,” Wilkerson agreed. “Just think about it. This concept of multiple layers in their conversation, even in their thinking, that’s something they evolved over the course of millions of years, probably, as they evolved speech. But what Falling Droplet was doing was communicating on three levels—one from each individual Turusch and a third arising from the two at once—and it was doing that in a language that was alien to it, in Lingua Galactica.”

  Koenig blinked, confused for a moment by Wilkerson’s use of the singular to refer to the two Turusch together…but it did make sense in an eldritch way. Turusch concepts of “them” and “me,” of “others” and “self,” must be quite different from the way humans thought of those concepts.

  He wondered i
f there was a way the difference could be used against them.

  Or if greater understanding would facilitate better communication…and an end to the war.

  “I’ll want you to put this together into a report, Doctor. Something we can broadcast to Earth and Mars. The Directorate needs to see this. So does Naval Intelligence. This could be what we need to put a stop to this war.”

  “I don’t think I see how, Admiral.”

  “Know your enemy, Doctor. One of the oldest and most basic of military dictums. If we know the enemy, that’s half of the battle. Half of the victory.”

  “Ah. And the other half?”

  “Knowing ourselves.”

  Wilkerson cut the electronic connection, and Koenig was alone with his thoughts once more in the CIC. The others of the CIC watch manned their stations in the pit, but, as Koenig had said, there wasn’t a lot for any of them to do now except to stay alert. The carrier battlegroup was now four hours into her 16.64-hour voyage out to the thirty-AU shell, approaching the orbit of Saturn and traveling now at a bit under 75,000 kilometers per second. At a quarter of the speed of light, there wasn’t yet any visible aberration in the view of the stars ahead. Boötis and neighboring Corona Borealis maintained their familiar shapes—a kite to the right, with bright Arcturus at the base, and a broad U shape of stars, like an upraised arm, to the left.

  What was it about transcendence that the Turusch—or, more likely, their Sh’daar masters—so feared? For that matter, what was transcendence, as they understood the term? That was the real problem here…knowing what completely alien cultures meant by the term.

  Hell, Koenig wasn’t certain he understood what the word meant. And beings with such different brains as the Turusch likely meant something very different, very alien.

  What was it the Turusch had said, their third-line description of transcendence? “Technic species evolve into higher forms. When they pass beyond, they leave behind…death.”

  That was it. The first half of that statement was transparent enough. For centuries now, humankind had speculated about its relationship with its technology, and about where that technology might be taking it. Humans today, human technology today, would be comprehensible—barely—to humans of three or four hundred years ago. But the GRIN technologies, especially, were rapidly going a long way toward changing what it meant to be human.

  Genetics. People like Michael Noranaga had engaged genetic prostheses to change their somatypes. Noranaga had done so in the line of duty, becoming a semi-aquatic selkie with more in common with marine mammals than with unaltered humans. But on Earth there were humans who changed their body shapes as a form of cultural or artistic expression…shapeshifters, they called themselves. The very idea of a human who looked like an elf or a mixture of wolf and human challenged the very concept of what it meant to be human.

  Robotics. Robots had become ubiquitous throughout human culture. The teleoperation of NTE robots let human minds explore toxic and deadly environments like the surface of Venus or the nitrogen-ice plains of Triton…human minds temporarily taking on bodies of plastic and nanolaminate alloys. And non-sentient robotic intelligences were everywhere, from smart clothes to smart buildings to smart missiles.

  Information Systems. Perhaps the biggest changes had occurred in that field. Through cerebral implants, any human in any civilized location could have instant access to all available information through the Net-Cloud. He could talk to anyone anywhere, limited only by the speed of light, and at great distances he could converse with another person’s AI-generated avatar. AIs, artificial intelligences of greater than human capability, operated everywhere throughout the myriad Net-Clouds, gathering and storing information, transmitting it, reshaping it, editing it, artificial minds that had already transcended the merely human.

  And Nanotechnology. Ships that reshaped themselves in flight, buildings that grew themselves from piles of debris, those were the most visible applications of the technology. Less visible but even more powerful were examples such as the trillions of nanorobotic devices pumping through Koenig’s circulatory system, cleaning out arteries, maintaining key balances within his metabolic processes, even repairing damaged chromosomes and guarding against cancers, disease, even the effects of aging. Alexander Koenig could expect to live to see the age of five hundred, they told him—theoretically, given ongoing nanomedical advances, there was no way to even guess how long he might live—assuming he survived the next day or so.

  The more far-reaching effects, though, the most transforming ones, appeared when various technologies mingled—the use of nanotechnology to grow the cerebral implants that gave people their links with the Net-Cloud, and which allowed people to have their own personal AI software running on their internal hardware. The four technologies designated as GRIN interacted with one another, multiplied one another’s effects and potencies.

  And where, and what, were they all leading to?

  Of greater concern right now, though, to Koenig’s mind, was the second half of the Turusch statement: “When they pass beyond, they leave behind death.”

  How did transcendence equate with death?

  Why would human transcendence be of concern to an alien species…in particular, an alien species like the Sh’daar, which might be half a billion years old?

  Humans had just taken the first step in beginning to understand the Turusch; they didn’t yet know what the Sh’daar looked like, much less understand how they thought.

  Somehow, Koenig thought, humans were going to have to come to grips with those questions, to begin to understand who and what the Sh’daar were and how they thought.

  And they would have to do so very swiftly indeed, if humankind was going to survive….

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  18 October 2404

  Starhawk Transit

  Fleet Rendezvous Point

  1.3-AU Orbit, Sol System

  0735 hours, TFT

  Hurry up and wait.

  Lieutenant Gray had heard that ancient military axiom often enough during the past five years. Likely it had been invoked by grizzled NCOs in the army of Sargon the Great forty-eight centuries before. But this was ludicrous.

  Starhawk Transit had boosted from Oceana at 0414 hours. It had taken nine minutes to get up to whispering range of c, a coasting phase of just three minutes, and another nine minutes of deceleration to reach Rendezvous Point Defender, roughly halfway between the current positions of Earth and Mars. By 0445, Gray and the other twenty-three Starhawk pilots were drifting in an empty sector of space, waiting. There was no one else there.

  Other naval vessels had begun arriving a few at a time. The destroyers Trumbull and Nehman and Ishigara. A heavy monitor out of Earth Synchorbit, the Warden. A Russian heavy cruiser, the Groznyy. One light fleet carrier from the European Federation, the Jeanne d’Arc. Others would be coming, but they were scattered across much of the Inner System—or they were still docked at synchorbital bases circling Earth or Mars, their crews still in the process of returning aboard, their power plants still off-line, some even with their weapons or drive systems partially disassembled for routine maintenance.

  It took time to get a capital ship under way unless, like America and her consorts, the quantum taps were already running and the ship rigged for space.

  Three fucking hours, Gray thought. We could have been out there by now….

  Just over an hour and a half earlier, at 0600 hours, he’d transmitted a request to the America, now outbound. At that time, the America battlegroup had been about one AU out from Mars, about two from the fleet rendezvous point, so they would have received the transmission at around 0615.

  It had been over an hour now, and still no response. By now, the battlegroup, accelerating at 500 gravities, would be three and a half AUs from Mars, about four and a half from the fleet rendezvous point, and traveling at around 72,000 kps. Even with the thirty-six-minute time lag one-way, he should have gotten a reply—if one was coming—at some point in the
last forty-five minutes.

  “What the hell are they doing out there?” Gray said.

  “Don’t sweat it, Skipper,” Lieutenant j.g. Alys McMasters told him. “They’re probably arguing about it with Earth, and the time lag’s a killer!”

  Gray started, then bit off a curse. He’d not realized the channel was open, that he’d transmitted his exasperated comment over the fighter commnet.

  “I’m seriously considering boosting anyway,” Gray replied. “We’re useless here.”

  “A great way to end a promising career, Boss,” Lieutenant Frank Osterman said. “Last I heard, we go where we’re told, when we’re told. We don’t make strategy.”

  “Roger that,” Gray replied.

  But that didn’t make the wait easy.

  During the past hours, information had been moving across the solar system like expanding ripples from stones chucked in a lake. Limited by the speed of light, representing only small portions of the total picture, that information only slowly reached all of the people involved, all of the decision makers, all of the ships. The picture was complicated by retransmission delays, and by decisions by various officers and politicians along the way to pass the data along only to certain command levels.

  Which meant that units like the Starhawk transit squadron were operating in the dark. For all Gray and the newbie pilots in his command knew, the enemy fleet was zorching in at this moment, only a few minutes out…and no one had bothered to tell them. They knew that a Turusch signal beam had been intercepted some three hours earlier, confirming that there were at least two groups of enemy ships out at the thirty-AU shell, knew that the America battlegroup was headed for Point Libra, away from Triton.

  But they knew precious little else.

  “Incoming transmission,” Gray’s AI announced. “Source TCN America.”

  “Let’s hear it!”

  “Starhawk Transit Squadron, this is America CIC,” a woman’s voice said, static hissing and crackling behind the transmission as the Starhawk’s communication suite up-shifted the frequency to compensate for the Doppler effect. “Your provisional op plan is approved. Initiate immediately. You are designated Green Squadron, and are now under America CIC control. Lieutenant Gray is confirmed as Green Squadron Leader. Please note attached transmission, and acknowledge receipt. Transmission ends.”