“Did we just surrender then?” Kara wondered.
“Lieutenant?” the freighter’s skipper called. “I have a call for you. Comm mod linkage, private.”
“What?” Kara was taken aback. “From who?”
“Senator Alessandro, of the Confederation Free Senate.”
The captain stressed the phrase as though carefully repeating what he’d just heard word for word. Kara heard the emphasis and recognized that that wording held a message for her, an assurance that despite what it looked like, the Confederation, and its government, continued to exist.
But what were Imperial ryu carriers doing in orbit over New America? Damn… you take the long way home, with two months of being out of touch, and everything changes on you.…
She opened a communications room for the meeting, a virtual reality modeled after the gathering room in the house at Cascadia. She stood there, in the same room where she’d talked with her mother during the party… how many months ago now?
That Japanese woman walked in with Daren right over there.
She shook herself, trying to order her thoughts. She would be dignified and reserved. She would not let her upset show. She was trembling with excitement, with worry, with a burning and barely suppressed curiosity, and more than anything else with a dawning horror that everything had been for nothing, nothing.…
Her mother entered the room.
“Mums!” Kara cried. “What the gok is going on?”
So much, she thought with an embarrassed, wry stab of self-criticism, for dignified…
“Hello, Kara. I know this all must be quite a surprise—”
“That doesn’t describe it by one percent! My God, the Imperial Navy is in orbit. What happened? Is the war over already?”
Katya looked uncomfortable. “Kara, there was no war.”
“No… war…” Kara didn’t understand. “Excuse me, but I thought I just went and started one!”
“A lot has happened since you left—”
“I should goking well think so!”
“First of all, Dev Cameron has returned.”
Kara’s jaw dropped. “Dev… Cameron.” The universe seemed to tilt and whirl around her head. “Daren’s biofather…”
Her mother closed her eyes, took a breath, then opened them again. “Yes. He came back a few weeks ago.”
Kara shook her head, running a hand through her short hair. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I thought he was dead.…”
Katya sighed. “Come and sit with me. This is going to be difficult.…”
Half an hour later, Kara had heard the whole story. It would take a while to get all of the pieces settled in and properly cataloged, but she knew now about the threat posed by the Web.
And, if half of what her mother had told her about that alien intelligence were true, she could understand the need to patch things up with the Impies.
But kuso…!
“What’s the matter?” her mother asked, watching her expression as she balled her hand into a fist and brought it down on the sofa. “Did you want a war so much?”
“Want—” Kara stopped, forced herself to cool. “No one, especially a soldier, ever wants a war,” she said quietly, with deadly intensity.
“You wouldn’t know it from the way you’re acting.”
“Mother… someone I cared about, a comrade, died at Aresynch. He died right there in front of me, in a firefight. He may have saved my life, for all I know. Other good men and women died at Noctis Labyrinthus. Why?”
“Kara, if you would let me finish—”
“Why the hell did they have to die, if you politos were going to turn around and make peace with the goking Impies while we were still out there…?”
“They died because we made the best decisions we could, with the survival of our people and our government and our way of life at stake. They died doing their duty, which was to follow the orders the government and ConMilCom HQ gave them. They died buying us a chance at survival. Isn’t that enough?”
Kara still felt weak and… betrayed, somehow.
There were precedents in history. She remembered downloading an account of the Battle of New Orleans during her training at the Academy. The battle, on January 8th of 1815, had been fought between the British under General Sir Edward Packenham and troops of the then brand-new American Republic, under the command of General Andrew Jackson. The threat to the city of New Orleans had been very real; the victory of the American forces had been real as well. Packenham’s veterans had aligned their scarlet ranks and walked steadfastly into a hail of American fire, falling in droves. By battle’s end, the casualty figures showed an astonishingly unbalanced flavor: eight Americans killed and fourteen wounded behind their cotton bale ramparts, against something like two thousand casualties all together for the British.
None of the men fighting before the city of New Orleans that foggy January morning had any idea that the Treaty of Ghent, ending hostilities between the United States of America and the British Empire, had been signed two weeks before, on Christmas Eve of 1814. In those days, before radio or telegraph, before ViRnews medes and comm modules, the fastest means of communication across the sea was—as with the twenty-sixth-century sea of space—by ship. News of the treaty didn’t reach the Americas until mid-February. The most splendid American victory of the war—what some historians marked as one of the more important battles of the war—had been fought after the war itself was already over.
This wasn’t quite that bad, Kara told herself. But it was disconcerting, nonetheless.
“Your raid was not a wasted effort,” Katya said, continuing. “Far from it. You captured the I2C prototype, and the data on how to build it. Our techs already have Naga replicators going, turning out new ones.”
“You have a communications network already up and running?”
“Actually, it turns out that the Imperials had a working net pretty much in place already. As we suspected, they have the units—they call them denwa, by the way. ‘Telephones.’ ”
“I assume they’ve tied at least some of their major warships into the net as well.”
It was a logical guess. There’d not been time for the back-and-forth of negotiations between Earth and New America, the working out of details, the assembly of such a fleet as the one now in orbit if the maximum speed of communications between star systems was still limited to one or two light years per day. Those ryus must have already been on the way to New America.…
Kara felt a cold chill at that. The Imperials had been that close to crushing New America with almost their full might.
“That’s right. They also have them connecting their principal embassies on various worlds, both in the Shichiju and in the Confederation. That was a good thing, actually, a real lucky break. With the comm network already in place, it’s turning out to be easier than expected to wire in more units and extend the overall system. Pretty soon, we’ll be able to use a comm module to have a face-to-face ViRconference with someone on the other side of the Shichiju.”
“Then how did Operation Sandstorm help a damned thing?”
“Perhaps it gave us more credibility in the eyes of the Empire. Or maybe it just gave us more credibility in our own eyes. In any case, the Imperials are taking us on as full partners here. The Aquilan Expeditionary Force will be a joint Confederation-Hegemony mission. Imperial warships. Hegemony science vessels. Much of the Confederation fleet, of course. The DalRiss have been gathering, coming through from Alya as the survivors of the fight at Nova Aquila make it back. We have about fifty cityships so far. They’ll be carrying the human fleet piggyback, with their Achievers. That will let us cover the distance between here and Nova Aquila in a few quick jumps instead of something like three years.”
“Where does this leave us? The Black Phantoms, I mean?”
“Oh, you’ll be in the thick of it, I imagine,” Katya said. She looked away, as if wanting to say more… and suppressing the urge.
“Come on! Tell me
!”
“We don’t have all of the details settled yet,” Katya said. “But as things are going now, the Black Phantoms who volunteer for this will be assigned to the Carl Friedrich Gauss. I can’t tell you more than that.”
“The Carl—” Kara’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a research ship!”
“That’s right.”
“What is a warstrider unit supposed to do aboard a research ship?”
“We don’t really know yet what to expect of Operation Nova,” Katya said. “It could become a military op.”
“Operation Nova. That’s what you’re calling it?”
“It seemed appropriate. The Expeditionary Force will be visiting Nova Aquila first. It’s supposed to be strictly a scouting mission, with the objective of learning as much about the Web as possible, but we’re going in ready for anything. You’ll be protecting Gauss’s passengers, a small army of scientists, mostly xenologists and linguists, but also programmer techs and artificial intelligence specialists.”
“Huh. Who’s running that show?”
“Dr. Jason Sanders, from the Xenobiology Department at the University of Jefferson. Your brother’s going along too.”
“Daren?On the Gauss?”
“Yes. And Dr. Oe. You remember her? She was with him at the party.”
“The Nihonjin woman from the University.” She felt cold inside. “I remember.”
“She is a New American citizen, Kara. As loyal as you or me. I doubt they would have let her go if she wasn’t.”
“Why not? We’re bringing half of the Empire along with us anyway. A few more won’t hurt.”
Katya stared hard at her daughter. “This is strictly a volunteer mission, Kara.”
“What does that mean? What are you saying?”
“Just what it sounds like. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
“What about my unit? Have they been asked to go?”
Katya nodded. “This is an unusual mission, one that’s going to go farther into unknown space than we’ve ever gone before. This one had to be a volunteer mission for all personnel.”
“And they’re going?
“Some of them have signed on already, but most of the people in your squadron are waiting to hear what you decide.” She smiled. “You seem to be popular with your unit, Kara.”
“Kuso, I don’t try to be. Half the time I’m working their tails off. The other half, like recently, I’m not even around.”
“Well, I’ve been hearing good reports on you. From your unit. From your commanders. I’d like to have you along, if we can.”
Kara started to nod, then looked up, sharply, eyes widening. “Wait a minute. Along? You’re coming too?”
“That’s right.”
“But… but you’re a senator!”
“So?”
“You’re supposed to stay here. With the government!”
“Seems to me this is one time when the government had better know exactly what’s going on out there, and what the consequences of its acts are.”
“I don’t know if I want my mother going out into a shooting war.” She folded her arms. “You could get hurt out there!”
“I think I’ve been in combat enough to know what I’m risking. And your father’s going, too.”
Kara tried to suppress the wild scramble of fright. The whole family was going to be there, and from what she’d heard of the situation so far, it wasn’t going to be fun.
“Somebody’s got to stay and run the government, right?” she said weakly.
Katya shrugged. “Hardly matters, does it? We’ll have an I2C communications linkup, so I won’t be out of touch with New America. In fact, the whole Shichiju will be able to participate in this one. We’ll have medes along, aboard the Gauss and several of the other civilian vessels. The whole human race will be linked in on this, watching.”
“Good God! The medes are coming?”
“It was my idea, actually,” a new voice, a man’s voice, said from the empty air overhead. “May I join you?”
Katya looked up. “Come in, Dev.”
Empty air shimmered nearby, taking on texture and form. Kara had seen images of Dev Cameron, of course. His exploits were closely studied at the Academy, and that included simulations narrated and monitored by an analogue patterned closely after the original.
But this man, gray-eyed, tall, not much older than herself—this was the original.
“Excuse me for eavesdropping,” he said. “But I was eager to meet you, Kara.”
“Uh… it’s nice to meet you. Why’d you vanish off into the great unknown and leave my mother hanging?”
“Kara!” Katya flared.
“Honest question. The honest answer is I needed the DalRiss just to exist at that point. I’m still… I suppose ‘alive’ is still the right word, still alive more in their Naga fleet computer than I am here.
“But there was more to it than that. I thought I could be useful to the DalRiss. They wanted me to accompany them. And, well, your mother never did care that much for virtual relationships. After I, ah, misplaced my body, I couldn’t very well offer her anything else. Right?”
Kara nodded. “I guess. It just seems so… cold.”
“You don’t know how cold,” Dev said. “Believe me. It wasn’t just your mother who suffered.”
“So, um, what’s happening now?” Kara looked from Dev to Katya and back again. “Are you back for good now? Or what?”
Dev broke the eye contact, turning his head toward the window that overlooked the mountains. “I imagine that depends on what happens with Operation Nova.”
“Oh.” Kara looked at Dev’s image and decided she could get to like the guy after all. He really wasn’t quite the macho hero type she’d imagined, based on what she’d read and what she’d heard from Katya. This was the man who’d linked with a planetary Naga, throwing one-ton boulders from a mountaintop to claw ryu-class carriers from the sky? He actually seemed kind of cute, and she could see why her mother had been attracted to him.
He was a lot like her father in some ways, only much younger. Well… that was the effect of being downloaded, of course. And when she looked at his eyes, they seemed much, much older than the rest of him.
“Okay,” she said. “Then tell me why the medie circus is in on this. I’d think this sort of thing would be better being done in secret.”
“Why?” Dev asked, turning to face her again. “Not to hide it from the Imperials, certainly. They’re on our side.”
“So I’ve just been informed.”
“And we’re not even trying to hide anything from the Web. Quite the contrary, in fact. If what we think we understand about them is accurate, it might well be the only way to get them to perceive us as another intelligence, a mind separate from their shared mind, if they see our equivalent of a shared mind. The linked minds of much of the human race.”
The thought was dizzying. “Kuso! How many is that?”
“There are thirty or forty billion people on Earth alone,” Dev said. “I don’t know what the exact figure is. Plus almost eighty colony worlds, with populations of a half billion or so, like New America, on up to Chien V, with, what? Three billion? Something like that. The total population must be well over a hundred billion or so, though. And anyone who wants to will be able to link in.”
“Everybody but genies and nullheads,” Kara couldn’t help adding. Genies, of course, were forbidden by law from carrying computer-link hardware, save in certain, specialized cases. “Nullheads” was slang for the disenfranchised millions—how many millions, no one could say—who for one reason or another, political, economic, religious, moral, or simple fear—didn’t have cyberlink hardware of any kind.
“Technic civilization will be able to participate, Kara,” Dev said quietly. “In fact, it’s vital that it does, or as much of it as can. What we do out there could determine the future course of evolution—or extinction—for the entire human species.”
“Just so you re
alize that the whole species isn’t one nice, neat, small package. Some of it’s got warts. Some of it doesn’t have access to high-tech toys.”
“Some don’t want that access. We’ll work with what we have to work with.”
“And the idea is still to try to reason with the Web?”
“If we possibly can,” Katya said. “We don’t even know if communication, real communication is possible. If it is, the xenologists on the Gauss and other research vessels should be able to learn how to do it. We’re going in armed with everything Dev picked up, everything we’ve learned since. We have Naga fragments that may be able to reveal some of the past, give us common ground for a dialogue.”
“But if they can’t talk,” Dev said, “yes, we’ll have to fight.” Kara gave a wry grin. “From what you guys’ve told me, that’s not going to be easy. Odds of millions to one? And against an opponent who may just be as far ahead of us as we are ahead of mice?”
“It won’t be that bad, Kara,” Dev said. “We’ll be going back better prepared this time.”
“We’ve been studying the records Dev brought back,” Katya added. “We’ve found what may be some weaknesses in the Web’s position. And ways that we can exploit those weaknesses.”
“I’d like to see what you have.”
“Certainly.”
“Are you with us, then?” Dev asked.
“Of course I’ll be coming along,” Kara said. “If my people are going, you don’t think anything could keep me away from this dustup, do you?”
Dev looked at Katya, smiled, and gave a small shrug. “She is your daughter, Katya.”
Katya smiled at him. “I’ve known that for a long time.”
Chapter 21
The universe is not only queerer than we imagine. It is queerer than we can imagine.
—J. B. S. HALDANE
mid–twentieth century C.E.
“Just what is it we’re hoping to accomplish out there, anyway?” Kara asked.
She stood in front of the viewall, looking out at the vast assembly of starships gathered in New American orbit. Both her mother and father were there, Vic resplendent in his Confederation general’s full-dress grays, Katya in a simple coverall with a tasteful holographic animation of kaleidoscope shapes and colors running down the border of the torso seal. A number of others were there as well; space was in short supply aboard the Gauss, and most compartments were both too small and too crowded.
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