Into the Light

by David Weber

  “What kind of references?” Sharon asked, forgetting her designated martyr role and looking at him just as intently as their daughter.

  “Officially, the Hegemony was founded by four species: the Kreptu, the Liatu, the Hexali, and the Bokal. All the records agree on that. Except that we’ve found two references to the five founders. The other four … anomalies we’ve found are rather less obvious than that, but the shared implication seems to be that once upon a time, long, long ago, there really was a fifth founding member of the Hegemony. Somebody the rest of the family doesn’t talk about anymore.”

  “You’re serious,” Greg Lewis said after a second.

  “As death and taxes.” Dvorak nodded. “I probably wouldn’t have thought much about it if not for what Hosea, Nancy, and Maighread here—” he twitched his head at his daughter “—have turned up about the ‘vampires.’ I mean, it’s possible that what we’ve found in the histories represents the equivalent of typographical errors. In fact, on the face of it that’s a lot more likely than some sort of—you should pardon the expression—galaxy-wide conspiracy to suppress the truth. But then you look at these nanobots. They don’t match anything we’ve seen in the Hegemony’s tech base, and, frankly, they’re not something the Hegemony could build, given our understanding of their tech base.”

  He ended on a slightly questioning note, and Fabienne shook her head, her expression as troubled as it was intent.

  “No,” she agreed.

  “Well, in that case, assuming that I’m not completely out to lunch about what I’ve been thinking of as ‘the Other Guys,’ what if they’re the ones who built whatever turned Vlad into what he is? I’ve been thinking about that, too. And look at it from his perspective as a good fifteenth-century Transylvanian: What other conceptual model is he going to have for what he got himself turned into? Of course he’s going to assume he’s been cursed with vampirism, and, frankly, given some of the things he did before that happened, he probably saw it as an appropriate punishment!”

  “So he’s spent the better part of seven hundred years thinking he’s a member of the accursed undead when he’s actually the result of some kind of industrial accident?” Greg said.

  “More or less. I mean, that’s clearly what happened to him even if my ‘Other Guys’ isn’t a good explanation for how it happened. But think about everything we’ve seen in the Hegemony’s record base. These are a bunch of people who are super-cautious and in love with the status quo. If there’d been someone around that long ago who’d been capable of producing tech the Hegemony still can’t—or won’t—produce, wouldn’t they have to be seen as a really, really significant threat? And we know that the Hegemony was perfectly prepared to use the Shongairi to eliminate us before we became a threat, if for somewhat different reasons.”

  “You may be right about all of this,” Fabienne said thoughtfully. “But whether or not your ‘Other Guys’ are responsible for Vlad and the others, you’re definitely right about the difference between ‘Southern boys and girls’ and somebody like the Kreptu or Liatu when it comes to running and finding things out. Warren’s team isn’t the only one turning up some interesting possibilities inherent in their existing tech base. I use ‘interesting’ in the sense of the old Chinese curse, you understand.”

  “Such as?” Dvorak leaned back, wondering what fresh rabbit hole had just opened up.

  “Marcos Ramos’ project,” she said. “Or, rather, Brent Roeder’s part of it, anyway.”

  “What project would that be?”

  “You do occasionally speak to your daughter—I mean your other daughter—don’t you?” Fabienne asked quizzically.

  “Sharon and I had lunch with her yesterday, as a matter of fact,” Dvorak replied just a bit repressively. Maighread’s twin had also gone into the health profession, but in her case into psychiatry and not surgery. She was just as smart as her sister, though, and she’d become one of Marcos Ramos’ personal assistants.

  “And she didn’t mention Roeder to you? Repeatedly? With a martyred expression? I’m amazed.”

  “And just why should she have mentioned Mister Roeder to me?” Dvorak demanded, trying not to smile at Fabienne’s tone.

  “It’s Doctor Roeder, actually. And he’s driving Marcos crazy. Him and Damianos Karahalios both.”

  “I’m in favor of driving Karahalios crazy,” Dvorak said sourly. “But I kinda like Marcos. So what’s this Roeder doing to them?”

  “Being obsessed with the notion of a neural computer interface.”

  “I can see why that could be a good thing.”

  “Of course it could, and it should probably be possible. After all, we have NET, which means we already have an interface that lets us directly record and implant knowledge—experiences and memories, really—and it runs a checking process during an education session, which requires a two-way loop. So we already know how to send what you might call mental data files back and forth. There’s a bit of a difference between that and figuring out how to actually neurologically—cognitively—link the human mind to a computer, though. We’ve already produced tech that will let us control external systems through a neural link—we’re incorporating it into the next-generation Heinlein suits—but that’s a matter of what you might call physiological response. We can train our brains and the link to perform functions the same way that we train our hands or our fingers. But you don’t actually have intense mental soliloquies with your pinky. And that’s what Roeder wants to do.”

  “He actually wants to ‘talk to the hand’?” Dvorak asked innocently, then jerked in his chair.

  “Ouch!” he said, reaching down to the kneecap his beloved wife had just kicked under the table.

  “One more like that, and you’ll need Hosea to give you new knees, not just a shoulder,” she said, shaking that deadly warning finger at him again.

  “I’ll be good!”

  “For now, maybe.” She gave him one more glower, then looked back at Fabienne. “So this Roeder that Morgana didn’t tell us about wants to go a step farther?”

  “He’s positive it’s possible. Nobody’s actually cognitively aware of the information she’s receiving during a NET session. We just sort of blank out while the information is recorded in a convenient corner of our brain. It’s only when we have to ‘find’ the new knowledge that we actually begin thinking about it or interacting with it. Roeder is focused on what happens during that blanked out period. He’s been likening it to a dream state we simply can’t recall when we wake up, and he wants to experiment with what happens during his hypothetical dream.”

  “Doesn’t sound like such a terrible idea to me,” Dvorak said thoughtfully.

  “There are certain risks attendant upon it,” Fabienne said dryly.

  “What sort of risks?”

  “I’m not the expert on this that Morg is, Dad,” Maighread said, “but I can think of a few. For example, I know there are about a bazillion safety interlocks built into the neural educators to prevent significant neurological damage.” She grimaced. “One of the reasons the Shongairi first exposed Base Commander Shairez’ human ‘subjects’ to neural education was to see whether or not the existing safeties would prevent it from frying our brains. Apparently the Hegemony’s had some bad experiences with that.”

  “Exactly.” Fabienne nodded. “Roeder’s fully aware of that, too. But he wants to push forward with human experimentation anyway, and he’s … sort of bouncy.”

  “Bouncy? You just seriously called one of your lead researchers ‘bouncy’?”

  “Of course I did, Dave. Why, in a great many ways, he reminds me a lot of you.”

  “Well, if he’s that brilliant, then obviously you should be listening to him,” Dvorak said, and lifted his beer stein in salute as his wife covered her eyes with both hands.

  . XI .

  FORT SANDERS, NORTH CAROLINA,

  UNITED STATES

  The Starfire assault shuttle fell to the Earth like a meteor, a trail of smoke beh
ind it as some of the ablative coating on its wings burned off. Just when Abu Bakr was sure the shuttle’s journey would end in a fiery impact, it pulled up in an exhibition of G-force loading that would have been suicidal twenty years earlier. The shuttle came to a hover three feet above the ground, then settled to the earth, its ramp already in motion.

  Heinlein-suited troopers poured from the craft before it touched the ground, and the company of troops established a perimeter that expanded as a second shuttle touched down and disgorged its troopers, followed by a third, then a fourth. The empty shuttles scattered in different directions—anywhere but straight up—and in under a minute, one hundred and twenty troopers were in place. They used their jumpjets to bounce over obstacles as they continued outward, with the scouts bouncing even higher so their sensor suites could find and categorize targets.

  The first of the gigantic Starlanders touched down as the soldiers reached two hundred meters from the debarkation point, almost completely filling the area behind them. Like its smaller brethren, the Starlander’s ramps were already down, and troopers poured from its forward ramps—one on each side. Eschewing the ramps, they rode their jumpjets to the ground as massive vehicles of war hovered down the Starlander’s enormous rear ramp in a stream two vehicles wide.

  Tanks led the first wave, their massive railguns locked at full elevation to keep from digging into the ground as they went planet-side; as soon as they were off the ramp, the barrels unlocked as their targeting systems searched for enemies. The tanks joined the men as they enlarged the perimeter, although they stayed in the “safe” lanes marked out with their blue force identifiers. Similar to the “blue force trackers” of the pre-Shongairi U.S. military, the blue force identifiers not only kept the tanks from firing at known-friendly units, but kept them from driving over them, as well.

  A variety of other vehicles followed the tanks off the Starlander—antiaircraft systems, drone carriers, and infantry fighting vehicles for the follow-up forces—until the massive craft was empty. Nine minutes after the first trooper stepped off the first assault shuttle, the Starlander lifted and was replaced by two more, the circle having been reinforced and expanded to a diameter of over six hundred meters. More personnel and weapons of war poured from the two transports, which were pointed in opposite directions to facilitate dispersal.

  “Impressive,” Colonel Rob Wilson said from where he stood next to Abu Bakr on the observation platform. “Isn’t it?” He pointed to the impact area, fifteen kilometers away, where two simulated KEWs had landed. Although built to mimic the flight profile of a full-size KEW, they hit with a tiny fraction of the energy. While that distinction was a moot point to anyone who happened to be under an errant one—they wouldn’t be around to care—it did help minimize the clean up after the rounds landed on the target range, as well as the number of resulting forest fires that had to be put out.

  Two of the new transatmospheric fighters zipped past the observation platform on their way to drop their ordnance on the target range. Abu Bakr noticed they avoided the mushroom cloud the KEWs created.

  “Impressive?” Abu Bakr asked. He shrugged, more worried about the implications than he was the display of military strength and prowess. “Sure, it’s neat that we can do this … that we have this kind of power. We’ve come a long way in the past couple of decades; we may even be able to take the fight to the Hegemony at some point in the future.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ coming,” Wilson said, looking at him quizzically. The two of them had known each other since the invasion, but they’d become close friends in the five years since Naya Islamabad.

  “You’re right. But just because we can do this—put forces ashore on some far-flung planet—doesn’t necessarily mean we should.” He shrugged again. “I take it that you support this? Going to other worlds and looking for new allies?”

  “Absolutely,” Wilson said. “Very much so.”

  Abu Bakr turned to look at the Marine.

  “I’m sure you do,” he said with a smile, “but I have a couple of … issues with the plan. First, President Howell wants to go out and look for allies among the systems the Hegemony hasn’t explored. That’s great … but what if we go somewhere and find out there are worse things than the Hegemony? Aliens bent on conquest and destruction? Ones that make the Shongairi look like plant-eaters? And what if they’re more powerful than the Shongairi, and they don’t even try to negotiate? What if they just try to wipe us out from the start?”

  “Well,” Wilson smiled and flexed a bicep, “first we send in the Space Marines.”

  “You do realize that not everyone even right here on Earth has a positive response to the words ‘send in the Marines,’ don’t you?” Abu Bakr inquired with a crooked smile.

  “Sure, I guess,” Wilson acknowledged, recalling Abu Bakr’s pre-invasion attitudes and political activism. “I’ll even grant that some of those people have a valid reason to feel that way. But after the Puppies, I don’t think anybody’s going to object to a little proactiveness on our part.”

  “Maybe not,” Abu Bakr said. “But what if we send in the Space Marines, and even their fancy Heinlein suits and their tanks with their enormous guns aren’t good enough?”

  “Then I guess we send in the vampires.” Wilson’s eyebrows knitted momentarily. “Hey, weren’t you offered ‘the vampire transition’? You could do that, and then you wouldn’t need the little ’ol PAFSM folks to protect you.”

  He smiled as he pronounced the acronym. It came out “paff-sim,” and the Space Marines’ native English speakers found the pun amusing as hell, since anything less pacifistic than a Space Marine in Heinlein armor was impossible to imagine. Abu Bakr flashed a brief answering smile, but his expression segued into a frown as he recalled an unpleasant evening in Naya Islamabad.

  “Not that it matters to you,” he said, after a moment, “but yes, they did offer to turn me into a vampire.”

  “And you turned them down.” It wasn’t a question.

  Abu Bakr nodded.

  “I did. I didn’t feel that was what Allah wanted from me. I show my worth by doing good deeds—by doing the hard deeds—and being a vampire obviates all of that. Where’s the value of the struggle, if there is no struggle? No danger? There’s no virtue in attacking the infidel, if the infidel can’t possibly hurt you. Nor do I particularly want to live forever. I’d like to go to heaven at some point … although I’m hoping it won’t be anytime soon.

  “Besides,” he continued, “if what they say is true, being converted to a vampire would mean giving up my soul. Do nanobots have souls? I don’t know … but I suspect they don’t. Thank you, but I’ll hold on to mine for a while longer yet.”

  “Okay, I understand that, but there are people who’d like to be vampires and, more importantly, people who already are vampires. If the Space Marines can’t do the job, the vampires certainly can. I’m not aware of anything that can take one of them down.”

  “If they’re nanobots, then they’re machines, and there’s something that can defeat them; we just don’t know what it is yet. I don’t care how well shielded they are; I’ll bet a strong enough EMP will cause them to disassociate, or something.”

  Wilson smiled. “I’m sure you’re trying to confuse the Marine with big words, but, as a military person, I’m passingly familiar with weaponry, and I’m pretty sure that dropping a nuke on a vampire to stop him is contraindicated if the people you’re trying to save are anywhere close to the vampire.”

  “There is that, I guess.” Abu Bakr shrugged. “Regardless, let’s just say I have ‘reservations’ about going into the big, uncharted black looking for potential allies to help us stand up to the Hegemony. On ancient maps, they put ‘Here there be dragons’ on the areas they hadn’t explored … and if it comes right down to it, I’m worried about what we might find.”

  “Well, that point’ll be moot pretty soon. We’ve already started building starships, and President Howell intends to send them out.”

>   “I know. He’s asked me to be on one of the initial diplomatic teams.”

  “I see,” Wilson replied. “So the question of how we’re supposed to defend the diplomatic teams on an alien planet hits close to home for you.”

  “It does, especially after Naya Islamabad, thank you very much.” The two men smiled at each other, but then Abu Bakr shrugged. “But, to be honest, that’s my second concern. While all of this—the tanks and orbital KEW fire support—is awesome, the purpose of the mission is supposed to be diplomacy, and it’s hard to develop alliances when your first greeting card is a spread of KEWs that levels their cities and announces your presence with authority.” He shrugged and waved towards the deployment site. The Starlanders had lifted and a veritable army of robots was assembling the first buildings. “That’s not how you develop a friendship.”

  “Well … no, not really,” Wilson was forced to admit.

  “However,” Abu Bakr said, “there has to be some sort of military support to the diplomatic teams, despite what some of Howell’s advisors are advocating.”

  Wilson rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I see where you’re going now, and I agree. You should hear Dave when he gets going on the re-emergence of professional arm-chair diplomats and political scientists. I guess that applied to him, too, when he got started, but it’s been twenty years now, and he’s worried that the influx of folks who’ve received all their knowledge from books or their neural educators—who’ve never gone anywhere or done anything—is going to put us in a bad place.”

  “It isn’t quite that bad,” Abu Bakr pointed out. “As you say, it’s been twenty years—but, looking at it another way, that’s only twenty years. It’s going to take a while for the human race to forget what happened when the Shongairi came to call, so I’m not saying anyone’s going to object to our developing the capabilities you’re demonstrating right here.” He nodded in the ongoing exercise’s direction. “But it is true that the bureaucracy’s growing and that a certain type of personality is beginning to reemerge.”