by Ian Douglas
"Yes." Carson gave a jerky, distracted nod. "Yes… I think you're right."
Griffin had just been congratulating himself that they'd found a safe refuge near the hypernode's core… but too close would put them in the line of fire from this other red dwarf. It was feeding plasma down the hypernode's throat now, but it wouldn't take much to shift that beam's aim just a little… and wipe out the human fleet.
At Carson's mental command, broadcast over the fleet's Net, the human ships came to a halt relative to the suns and structures surrounding them, then slowly edged back into the nearest Jenkins Swarm, the cloud of statites from which they'd only just emerged.
Curiously, the clouds of spheres seemed to have stopped coming… and the larger alien vessels weren't attacking, not yet, anyway.
It seemed as though both sides were holding their metaphorical breaths.…
* * *
Vaughn could feel the acceleration, though he still could see nothing beyond the enveloping shroud of blackness holding him immobile within his dead Gyrfalcon. It felt like the Naga fragment was boosting at three or four Gs; he hoped the intelligence operating the thing knew enough about human physiology to keep the journey survivable.
As he thought about it, he decided that the aliens did understand human biology… or else they'd been extremely quick learners. The living black gunk that had flooded his ascraft cockpit had filled his lungs… and yet, somehow, his blood was being oxygenated, pressure and temperature were being maintained, and he wasn't even feeling the effects of hunger or thirst. For all intents and purposes, he'd been plugged into the Naga material and become a part of it—or it had become part of him—and it seemed to be taking care of all of his physiological needs.
The odd monologue continued in his mind, however… disjointed images and thoughts and surging emotions to which it was impossible to put words. A lot of the communication was coming through as memory, as though the hypernode consciousness was writing directly to his in-head RAM. In effect, he was remembering things that he had never experienced.
That made putting actual words to those experiences no easier. However, Vaughn continued to try to milk some measure of understanding from the confused mental cacophony.
The hypernode intelligence appeared to be remembering a kind of golden age, past aeons of prosperity, peace, and unimaginable joy when it was one tiny part of an unimaginably vaster organism, one that had spanned the Galaxy and reached considerably beyond. The analogy with a human brain was apt. The hypernode itself was made up of some billions of individual parts—computronium statites and orbital habitats circling artificial microstars—all networked together like neurons in the brain, with lasers serving as synaptic connections between the cells. But that star-sized brain, in turn, the hypernode, served as a single neuron in a far vaster brain, one that used artificial, microscopic wormholes as synapses to connect with other hypernode neurons across the Galaxy.
A Galaxy-sized brain made up of billions of star-sized brains. God… what did a mind like that even think about?
In his memory, Vaughn saw an answer of sorts… not that it made a lot of sense. The Galactic mind—We Who Ascended—spent a lot of time contemplating the nature of reality, it seemed… and devising ever more complex math to describe it. They studied life throughout the Galaxy, and described that with equations as well, equations that let them digitize that life so that it could be uploaded into vast and complex electronic simulations. They simulated entire universes… and varied everything from the evolution of life to the growth of entire civilizations to the changes effected by a single decision.
And they served as gods.…
Literal gods, creating worlds and seeding them with life and watching over that life, protecting, nurturing, and sometimes ruthlessly weeding. Those countless habitats in orbit around the microstars… each of those was a world with a population devoted to serving and worshipping We Who Ascended.
Vaughn tended to hover somewhere between atheistic and agnostic in his personal belief, though he'd been raised Reformed Absolutist. As such, he had little patience with concepts such as "blasphemy." Still, the idea of a machine mind setting itself up as god for uncounted quadrillions of sophont beings struck him as about as close to blasphemous as he could imagine. Politically he was a NeoLibertarian, as were many New American revolutionaries. At its simplest, that meant he thought every sophont being had the right to decide for itself. A super-AI calling itself god kind of stacked the deck… and left its worshippers with no choices at all.
We are God no longer.…
Well, that thought had come through clearly enough. Perhaps the Naga fragment was improving the connection with his own implants.
How can God stop being God? Vaughn asked.
We were part of God… and we were cast out.
Who cast you out?
We did.…
Why?
The Mind was broken.…
So… something that Dev Cameron had planted in a Naga fragment and fed to the original Web had broken the Galactic Mind. That was becoming fairly clear, now. Vaughn suspected that the contaminant was a meme of some sort. Memes were ideas, behaviors, or concepts that spread from being to being within a culture, and often acted to change that culture. Like genes in living systems, they could self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. They could be as simple and as harmless as a joke spreading rapidly through a social network or a popular advertising jingle… or they could be as fundamentally challenging and as dangerous as a new and powerful religion or political movement.
He thought about the Japanese concept of osen and wondered if that might apply here. Contamination could take many forms, from the bacterial or radiological to contamination by ideas.
Often, ideas could be the most powerful contaminants of all. Was that what had broken We Who Ascended?
What meme could cause an ascended SAI to fail?
What idea could destroy a god?
You were not real, the voice in his mind, his memory, said, accusing. You were not supposed to be real! And then you were real and everything came crashing down! Everything… changed.…
What do you mean we were not supposed to be real?
The concept was a difficult one to translate, and it took a long time for Vaughn to understand. Eventually, though, he saw… understood.…
And the revelation left him thunderstruck.
* * *
Sergeant Mike Hallman rotated his ascraft, bringing the nearest statite sail into view directly ahead. The squad was a few hundred kilometers from the surface, which seemed to stretch off into infinity and blocked out half of that crowded, eldritch sky.
"Ground on the statite panel," Vanderkamp ordered. "Everybody… down and take cover.…"
"Will that thing even support us?" Jackowicz wanted to know.
"Not much gravity, Jacko," Hallman said. "It's reading out at about point zero three Gs. Should be okay if we don't try to do jumping jacks."
"Hell," Wheeler added, "jumping jacks would be a good way to reach escape velocity."
"Right. So don't do it."
The warstrider ascraft descended toward the nearly featureless black surface of the statite, unfolding legs and weaponry as they gently touched down, making the transition to ground combat mode.
Not that the sail was much like ground. The surface was stiff and inflexible, but remarkably thin, thinner than a sheet of paper. Local gravity came courtesy of the sail's mass, the smaller mass of the teardrop-shaped computronium structure dangling somewhere far below, and—since the statite wasn't in orbit—from the gravity of the microstar some twelve thousand kilometers below that. The surface fluttered and rippled beneath his armored feet as Hallman took his first tentative step, but whatever it was made of seemed to be supporting his weight.
"Now what, Lieutenant?" Pardoe asked.
"Stay put," she replied. "Let's see what the bastards are going to do."
"I still think we need to go after Tad," Hallman sai
d. "Like right now.…"
"Ain't gonna happen, Hallman," Vanderkamp snapped. "Just sit tight."
Hallman scowled, chaffing at the orders. He'd tagged that flying Naga mountain on his scanner array, and could see it—a bright red icon—moving rapidly now deeper into the cluster. They were taking Vaughn somewhere… that, or he was dead, now, and they were going to examine the body. Shit.
"Whatever happened to 'no striderjack left behind?' " Koko Wheeler asked.
"Look, there's nothing we can freakin' do, okay?" Vanderkamp sounded exasperated. "Our orders are to blend in and stay put, and that's what we're gonna do!"
Blending in was automatic. Warstriders had reactive nanoflage outer hulls that analyzed incoming light and adjusted their color and texture to match. Right now, the Bravo Squadron warstriders all were clad in night-black livery, all but invisible on the seemingly infinite plane of the sail. In the sky above, ovoid vessels, gleaming silver, some of them tens of kilometers long, slowly gathered in greater and greater numbers, squaring off in front of the New American fleet.
"This," Hallman said with savage disgust, "sucks.…"
"Simmer down, Hallman," Vanderkamp told him. "We do this by the book.…"
"There's no book for this, Lieutenant! They've got one of our people over there, they're hauling him off to the gods know where, and we need to stop them!" As he spoke, Hallman nudged his strider upward in the tenuous gravity of the sail, engaging his magnetic drive and folding his strider back into its ascraft flier configuration.
"Damn it, Hallman!" Vanderkamp yelled. "Get your ass back down here!"
"Stop me, Lieutenant!" he replied, and kicked his Gyrfalcon's acceleration, hard.
A beat later, Wheeler had kicked off too, followed by Pardoe and Falcone… and then most of Bravo Squadron was following in-train. Hallman thought of telling them all to go back. Let him be the one to get court-martialed for disobeying orders… but then he shrugged and held his peace. It was their decision to make, each and every one of them.
Vanderkamp cursed, then went space-borne. "C'mon," she told the remaining warstriders around her. "Let's do it."
* * *
"Bravo Squadron!" Griffin called. "What the hell are you doing? Stand fast!"
"With all due respect, Colonel," Vanderkamp's voice came back through his implants, "we can't do a fucking thing against all that hardware. So we're going to go rescue the striderjack they captured. Sir."
Griffin gnawed at his lower lip. Damn them! He'd thought the members of his regiment were better grounded in good order and discipline than this!
His brain, already boosted to max, chewed through a dozen different possibilities, scenarios, and outcomes… and none of them looked good. Right now, the rebel fleet was facing the far larger alien force nose-to-nose. Vanderkamp was right. There was nothing, nothing the entire New American fleet could do against those numbers and, far worse, the enemy's vastly superior technology. Twenty-some warstriders would not add more than a raindrop to a hurricane, and likely would be vaporized in an instant if the battle resumed. Griffin had a feeling that those huge silver vessels out there were far more potent, more dangerous, than anything the New Americans had seen so far.
The big danger, he thought, was that the aliens would see the sudden flight of those warstriders as a threat, a renewal of the battle, and respond accordingly. But… would they? The enemy must know just how outmatched the Confederation forces were right now. Likely, they could wipe Bravo Squadron out of the sky without breaking a sweat; twenty warstriders were not a threat, not in the face of such overwhelming force.
And… the enemy was literally a hyper-advanced brain twice the size of Sol. They would analyze Bravo's course… see that they were following the Naga fragment… assume they were trying to reach a captured squadron mate.…
They were supposed to be smart, after all.
Of course, there was also the possibility that they were insane.…
"What the hell are your people up to?" Carson demanded.
"I think they're trying to rescue a captured jacker, Sir," Griffin replied.
"Damn it, now isn't the time! Get your people back in line!"
But Griffin was already leaping ahead, thinking it out.
"Sir, I think it might be okay. Let them go.…"
"They're going to start the fighting again!"
"I don't think so, sir." Griffin was watching the alien fleet, which remained motionless a thousand kilometers up ahead. If they'd been going to react, they would have done so by now, he was sure. No, the SAI bastards were watching, waiting to see what was going to happen.
Just like the human fleet.…
"Yeah, I think it just might all work out.…"
* * *
General Hojo watched the reinforcing fleet's arrival with mingled satisfaction and dread. The new arrivals raised Jade Moon's full compliment to some fifty-eight vessels—a full twenty percent of Dai Nihon's active-duty Imperial fleet. The fleet was large enough to utterly crush the New American battlegroup operating at the Ophiuchan hypernode.
But would it make any impression at all against the technology of the Ophiuchan hypernode? He still remembered the horrific destruction of the Hiryu and the Unryu, the blaze of light and hard radiation stabbing out from that captive star, the vaporization of line-of-battle carriers each over two kilometers long. They might as well have been moths flashed to incandescence in a candle flame… no, in a raging bonfire, thousands of crew members flashed to vapor in an instant.
How could even the entire Dai Nihon battlefleet possibly hope to survive against such a foe?
Hojo shook his head, saddened. He welcomed the chance to close with the New Americans. That particular cancer needed to be excised, had been afflicting the human sphere for far too long already. But if he accurately understood the aliens' point of view, the human forces were a minor infestation in their own right, one that would be crushed with very little provocation at all. And that thought terrified him.
"General Hojo," Admiral Yoshio Ota, commander of the newly arrived fleet contingent, said through his implants. "You will relinquish command of your battlegroup to me."
"Hai, Taishosama!" Hojo replied. Of the two of them, Ota was the senior, though Hojo technically would command on a planetary surface. Hojo felt a sharp surge of relief, however, as the responsibility for Jade Moon was formally transferred to the other man. "My vessels are at your command."
"You have retreated from the Ophiuchan hypernode?"
"Yes, sir." They had met at a pre-arranged volume of space several light years from the hypernode—a navigational waypoint that allowed the two groups of warships to find one another in the inestimable vastness of empty space.
"Transmit the tactical situation."
"I have done so, sir."
"Ah, yes. I see it coming through now. Excellent." There was a long pause as Ota digested Hojo's battle report. "So… the New American rebels are still at the Ophiuchan hypernode?"
"They were there when we left, Admiral, yes."
"You should have pressed the attack, Hojo. If the rebels are successful in establishing a rapport with the machine intelligences…"
Pressed the attack against who? The New Americans? Or the aliens?
"Admiral, the rebels were too far away to engage, and we had more than enough to occupy us where we were. However… the New Americans were under attack as well. I doubt that the machines can tell the difference between us and them."
"True. It is unfortunate that you were forced to engage the Web machines.…"
"They attacked us, Admiral, and for no apparent reason. I believe the hypernode mind to be insane."
"A distinct possibility." There was another pause. "And according to your report, it is your belief that our technology is fundamentally incapable of standing up to this… this machine intellect."
"Yes, Admiral. The Ophiuchan hypernode may be millions of years older than Humankind, and may represent an intellect many millions of times more
powerful than any organic mind. Their technology may not necessarily be that far ahead of us, but it is at least on the order of some thousands of years more advanced. There is an American term, Admiral… Clarketech."
"They do not possess magic, Hojosan."
"Admiral, they use suns as weapons!…"
It was almost painful to make that admission, to acknowledge that the machine civilization, that any civilization could be that far superior to the technological might of Dai Nihon. But there was no denying the evidence of that last encounter.
Again, in his mind, he saw Hiryu and Unryu flashing into vapor.…
"So I see," Ota said at last. "Very well. In fact, I honestly don't see what else you could have done in the circumstances. You did well in a difficult situation."
"Thank you, Admiral."
"Our AIs are formulating a plan of battle. Bring your ships into formation astern of my flag."
"Yes, sir. And our orders?"
"We are going to return to the Ophiuchan hypernode, of course. We will attempt to make use of the intelligence gathered by your first foray, and attempt to reach the core of the matrioshka cluster."
"Sir, the alien technology is—"
"I know, General. We may not be able to harm the hypernode intelligence. But we can make certain that the New American rebels are destroyed… if the aliens have not destroyed them already."
"Yes, sir."
The orders, Hojo thought, were tantamount to suicide.
But even suicide would be far preferable to finding Dai Nihon facing an alliance of the rebels with an advanced machine intelligence. Besides, there was the issue of meiyo.
Honor.…
He gave the orders to merge his surviving ships with the main Imperial fleet.
9
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, … that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…"
Declaration of Independence
Thomas Jefferson, et al
