by Ian Douglas
“Why is that?”
“Simple. It’s likely to be a plot to get at you. They might have something new that our ICE can’t handle. Something dangerous.”
ICE, an old acronym for intrusion countermeasures electronics, was the catchall term for electronic software defenses, some of it artificially intelligent, some not.
“Konstantin says they do not,” Dr. Eskow said with a shrug. “And Konstantin should know. It monitors the Global Net closely, and would be aware of any such new developments.”
“I don’t see Konstantin running our antiviral software,” Vandenberg said.
“Of course not,” Koenig said. “The time lag from the moon and back is too long. God knows what could sneak through in three seconds.”
In fact, clones of Konstantin were already running on several USNA networks on Earth, though they were more closely circumscribed in operational procedures and restrictions than was the hyperintelligent AI on the moon’s far side. Most humans still didn’t fully trust AIs that were too intelligent . . . or too independent.
And Koenig didn’t fully trust any AI networks that might already have been compromised by Confederation hacks.
Still, there were times when you needed to take a chance. If you sat inside a sealed box doing nothing because someone out there might be trying to get you, you would never get anywhere.
“I’m going to take the call,” Koenig said, deciding. “I’m sick of working in the dark against these people. Maybe he’ll let something slip.”
“Stay behind your avatar, Mr. President,” Eskow said. “He’ll certainly be staying behind his.”
Avatar was the term given to a computer-created simulation based on the real person. With a decent AI behind it, it could even mimic the organic personality so closely that people linking in on the Net could not tell whether they were talking to the person or to their electronic secretary. Avatars could be a convenience or they could be a kind of personality fashion statement. They also could be designed to create a certain psychological impact. What Eskow was suggesting was that Koenig remain electronically masked by his avatar in the conversation. If the Confederation did manage to slip a nasty worm through the link, it would hit the electronic presence first, and, with luck and some very fast electronic reactions, be stopped there.
But that would also mean that Koenig would be isolated from the discussion, experiencing it secondhand and with little opportunity to guide it. He shook his head.
“I’ll be careful, Doctor. But there’s no point in my being here if I’m going to let an electronic puppet do my talking for me.” He looked at his SecState. “Pam? What’s the global lineup right now? Has anything changed I should know about?”
“Nothing substantial has changed since this morning’s PICKL, Mr. President,” she said. The PICKL was the President’s Intelligence ChecK-List, a data download prepared by the various USNA intelligence services for his review first thing each morning. “We have feelers out to Brasilia. They may pull out of the war over the Columbus atrocity, though they probably will stay with the Confederation. If they stay with the Confederation, Argentina may pull out. Those two are still at each other’s throats.”
“Russian Federation? North India?”
“They’re both solidly with us, now. But we’re not yet sure how much practical use those alliances might provide.”
“And Mexico?”
“Still solidly against us, sir. Confederation agents have been promising them the return of the old U.S. Southwest.”
“Aztlan,” Koenig said, frowning and nodding. “I know. Old news. Okay, let’s do this. Marcus?”
“The link is ready, sir. He’s waiting. Or his avatar is.”
“Right.” Koenig sank back in his chair, which responded to his thoughts, opening up, opening back, letting him lie back in a reclining position. He closed his eyes, and an inner window opened. A face formed out of static, and in Koenig’s mind’s eye, he was seated now in a large conference room, across an expensive mahogany table from President Christian Denoix de Saint Marc.
He was surprised at first that he wasn’t sitting opposite General Janos Matonyi Korosi who, according to USNA Intelligence, was currently the real head of both Pan-Europe and the Confederation. But Denoix’s presence was not, perhaps, all that surprising. The Confederation would be scrambling to put a legitimate face on their war—and that meant a civilian leader, not a military one. Denoix might well be little more than a figurehead. It would be good to keep that in mind.
The wallscreen behind the Confederation leader looked down on the Plaza of Light and, in the distance, beyond the skyward sweep of modernist buildings, the gray sheen of Lake Geneva.
“President Koenig,” the man said through a craggy and unyielding scowl. “It is good to meet with you at last.”
Koenig had little patience for political amenities. Figurehead or not, this was the enemy, for Christ’s sake, and one of the men responsible for the atrocity at Columbus. Better, he thought, to go on the offensive immediately, perhaps nudge his opposite number off-balance.
“What has happened,” Koenig demanded of the stern image in his head, “to President Roettgen?”
The scowl on the image’s face grew deeper. “We have done nothing to . . . the lady. She appears to have fled . . . with a great deal of the treasury’s money, I might add. We will find her, and her accomplices, I assure you. In the meantime, I have been appointed as Confederation Senate president until general elections can be held in two months’ time.”
Koenig studied the face. There was no way to read another person’s emotional state through an in-head link, since the image was meticulously crafted by an AI. All he had to go on was the man’s on-line bio . . . and on guesses as to why the other side was presenting this psychology, this attitude.
According to the download, Christian Denoix de Saint Marc was French. His principal residence was on the Channel Coast in the ultra-wealthy Boulogne-Billancourt suburb of Ile-de-France, just west of the seaside Parisian Dome, but he’d lived many years in Germany, Italy, and Poland, as well, and he had a second working home, of course, in Geneva, the Pan-European capital. His English was fair, but by prior common agreement, the AI connection was doing the actual work of translation, just to be certain that there were no critical misunderstandings.
That avatar face, Koenig knew, was designed to give away nothing.
Fair enough. In his office, Koenig himself was wearing nano-grown utilities, as close, as light, as comfortable, as informal as his own skin, but Denoix would be seeing him through the link in his formal black-and-gray admiral’s full dress uniform from fifteen years earlier. The uniform was a deliberate reminder, on Koenig’s part, that he’d been a military man before being elected to public office. Once Navy, always Navy, ran the old saying, and it was particularly true of Koenig.
The clear message was that he’d beaten the Pan-Europeans before, and he would do it again if they didn’t back down.
“I don’t believe you, you know,” Koenig said. “People don’t just disappear. Not these days.”
Well, he thought to himself . . . not unless they were willing to disable their in-head circuitry and go live in some godforsaken periphery region without modern technology. Most of the world’s population now was so wired in that anyone could be found and tracked anywhere on or near the planet . . . one of the advantages—and curses—of modern personal nanoelectronics.
And that was most especially true of heads of state. Koenig knew that he was always under the electronic eyes of his own security apparatus, as was every man, woman, and robot within the Toronto emergency CP.
“It doesn’t much matter what you believe, President Koenig,” Denoix said with a nicely crafted shrug of his shoulders. “The truth of the matter is that you must now deal with me . . . and with my party.”
On the in-head, the Pan-European leader was wearing an elegant scarlet cloak over black skintights. Koenig wondered what he was really wearing.
Hell, it was even possible that the image was being run by an AI—that Denoix was doing office work or off on holiday with his mistresses and leaving this call to his personal AI secretary. There was no way to tell, really, though there were supposed to be electronic tags indicating that an avatar’s image was being worn by a flesh-and-blood human, or by an AI.
“ ‘My party?’ ” Koenig repeated. “That would be Tout le Monde?”
“Of course.”
Tout le Monde—All the World—was Europe’s major opposition party to President Roettgen’s Globalist party. Both were leftist/socialist in economic outlook—the Mondes a bit further left than the Globalists—and both had called for peace with the Sh’daar. The big difference between the two, Koenig had decided, was in how far each group was willing to go in pursuit of their goals. USNA Intelliegence was more than half convinced that the destruction of Columbus, D.C., had been carried out by a pro-Monde cabal within the Pan-European government, and Koenig was inclined to agree. The Globalists, generally, advocated wearing down the opposition with talk along with some military pressure . . . not committing large-scale atrocities in order to force compliance with the world order. The fact that Roettgen had seemed genuinely surprised by the nano-annihilation of Columbus a few months ago suggested that it had been carried out by rogue elements of her own government.
That surprise might have been a ruse on her part, of course, but Koenig didn’t think so. Her disappearance from the world stage suggested that this was much more than politics as usual.
So . . . why have you called me?” Koenig asked. “Do you wish to surrender? We can offer generous terms—”
“Most amusing. I am calling, President Koenig, to inform you personally that a Sh’daar delegation is arriving in-system in two weeks’ time. We are welcoming them . . . and if you wish to have any role at all in deciding the content . . . the shape of the peace, you will agree to an armistice at once and make arrangements to attend the meeting.”
“In person?” Koenig asked, with an ironic lift to an eyebrow. Showing up in person at a designated conference site would be a great opportunity for the Confederation to take Koenig, the leader of the rebel opposition, prisoner. They would just love that. . . .
“Of course not.” The voice oozed scorn, coupled with a bitingly aristocratic disdain. “Virtual. We will provide the link-in data and eddresses.”
It occurred to Koenig that Denoix would be as careful about being set up by the other side as was Koenig. With a virtual conference, however, just as with this one between Toronto and Geneva, there was no need for the participants to be in the same room . . . or even on the same continent.
“And what would be the purpose of this meeting?” Koenig asked.
“Peace, of course, and open communion with the Sh’daar Collective before they squash us like insects. Even you must see and understand that continued human resistance against the long-time rulers of this galaxy can only lead to Humankind’s extinction.”
There’d been a time, Koenig knew, centuries before, when the government leaders of two countries at war with each other could not possibly have talked directly like this, virtual face to virtual face. Messages, peace feelers, requests for formal negotiations all would have been relegated to back channels, to the embassies of neutral nations, and to the efforts of third parties, or, in a few notorious cases, to teletype, telephone, or Internet hotlines. Koenig liked to believe that free and open communication, leading to better mutual understanding, was the best hope Humankind had for peace.
There were times, however, such as now, when he was convinced that he was wrong. Too often, good communication led simply to more and bigger opportunities for misunderstanding. Christian Denoix de Saint Marc sounded arrogant and firmly convinced of the rightness of his own cause.
“I take it, then,” Koenig said carefully, “that you’ve already been in touch with Sh’daar agents. Who? The Agletsch?”
“That is not your concern, President Koenig. Suffice to say that the Sh’daar are willing, in principle, to forego their proxy campaigns against us in return for our . . . cooperation.”
“ ‘Peace in our time,’ eh?”
“I beg your pardon?” The image in Koenig’s mind hesitated, no doubt as the Pan-European leader downloaded the reference. “Ah. Neville Chamberlain, 1938 . . .”
The fact that the European leader of the Earth Confederation had not known that historical datum offhand was . . . disturbing. Koenig was immediately reminded of another ancient quote. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The Santayana quote was usually taken out of context, with the assumption that it applied to history rather than to the way a man, an individual, learned from experience and memory, but it still was apt. As Koenig listened to the Confederation president, another line from Santayana came to mind: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
Ilse Roettgen and Koenig might not have agreed on much politically, but she was not a fanatic. He wasn’t so sure about this arrogant aristocrat, however. And if his guess was right that it was the Karosi-Denoix faction that had ordered the horrific destruction of Columbus, then the man was the worst possible type of fanatic—utterly dedicated to his own twisted view of right and wrong, and willing to go to any lengths to preserve and advance it no matter how many died in the process.
“I’m not here to discuss ancient history with you, Koenig,” Denoix told him. “This . . . this petty rebellion of yours needlessly squanders lives and resources. Fighting the Sh’daar Collective is futility itself—you must see this! Fighting such a power is hopeless, useless, and doomed to draw down the full and inescapable wrath of the rulers of this galaxy, a civilization that is millennia beyond us in terms of its technology—quite possibly more. The Sh’daar have their roots within a technic civilization that stretches back in time nearly a billion years! We must make peace and join their collective. It is the only sane course of action for our species, especially now that the Rosette Aliens have shown themselves to be hostile.”
“I suggest that we await the return of the America task force,” Koenig told him. “The Rosette Aliens destroyed the Endeavor and her escorts, yes, but it’s possible that the destruction was an accident.”
“Three of your ships obliterated, Koenig! How do you reconcile that with an accident?”
“Quite simple, actually. When we drop the programmed nanosubstrate onto a patch of ground and start growing a structure, converting dirt and rock and whatever else might be there into the walls and floors of a new building, the ants and earthworms and mice and anything else that might be living there are all just shit out of luck, aren’t they?”
“Humans—and humans on board starships, no less—are not ants! They are manifestly of a far higher order of intelligence, reason, and capability!”
“And I submit, sir, that the difference between you or me and an ant may simply be completely beneath the notice of a technic species that may be a million—or a billion—years ahead of us! They might not even have known that the Endeavor was there.”
Denoix gestured with his hand, a dismissive wave. “Nonsense. According to my sources, it is far more likely that what has emerged from the Black Rosette is the ur-Sh’daar, which the modern Sh’daar have ample reason to fear. They are the reason for the Collective’s emphasis on limiting technology. I strongly suspect that such limitations will be lifted indefinitely if we join the modern Sh’daar in the defense of this galaxy against their ancient . . . ah . . . selves.”
“And what are your sources, monsieur? The Sh’daar themselves? Or one of their client races?”
“That, sir, is none of your business. I say only that the Sh’daar may well
find that they need our help . . . and that it may be particularly advantageous for us if we give it. But they will not be inclined to accept our offer if we as a species are divided by civil war.”
“I see. And you would offer the United States of North America . . . what, exactly, to elicit our cooperation?”
“To begin with, we might not need to obliterate you utterly!”
Koenig shook his had. “There has to be more than that, Chris. All in all, I’d say we’ve been holding our own pretty well. Washington and Manhattan? Dushanbe? Atlantica? And off world . . . there’s Tsiolkovsky.”
“Minor setbacks at worst. And I remind you that there have been Confederation victories lately as well: Venus, Bangkok . . . and Enceladus, of course. The Earth Confederation’s forces, you must admit, are in the ascendant.”
It was true. The Confederation had scored some significant victories lately, and the USNA was feeling the pinch as her forces were stretched to their very limit, and well beyond. Confederation raids against Deimos had forced the USNA to group the majority of her naval forces around Mars, to protect the USNA’s military command center there—HQMILCOM. If the Pan-Europeans made a determined push in that direction, Koenig wasn’t sure how he was going to block it.
Ship losses had been heavy of late too; he wished now that he’d not dispatched the America and her escorts to Omega Centauri, because he could have used the carrier battlegroup to strike the Confederation’s orbital base at LEO, or to put Marines down at their space naval headquarters at Copernicus, on the moon.
But immediately after the USNA victory at Tsiolkovsky last year—followed by the spectacular win over the Slan va-Sh’daar at Osiris—it had seemed like a reasonable bet. Damn it, the war had been going well! To use the quaint and ancient term drawn from an old and particularly barbaric blood sport, it had looked like the Confederation was on the ropes!
Koenig knew all too well that in war nothing is certain except the grief and loss, the destruction, and the dread. He hated war, as only a war veteran could hate it. Bad enough that Humankind was locked in this struggle with the alien Sh’daar; Denoix was absolutely right about one thing: the civil war between North America and the Confederation was a needless waste of lives and resources. People were dying by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, in this three-month-old conflict stretching from across the face of the Earth to the moons of Jupiter to extrasolar colonies tens of light years distant. The Confederation was still in the fight, and evidently Geneva was not as convinced that they were losing as was Koenig.
