Netlink

by William H. Keith

  Embarkation parties were something of a tradition, however, at least aboard civilian vessels, and the science ship’s lounges had been adapted as party centers for the passengers, who gathered to watch the panorama of the Aquilan Expeditionary Fleet against the gold, green, and blue of New America, to eat the hors d’oeuvres provided by the ship’s nanoprocessors, and to make nervous jokes about the coming jump into the unknown.

  “You know as much about that as the rest of us, Kara,” Vic replied. He took a sip from his drink. “You were in on every staff meeting from the time you got back from Kasei on.

  Kara looked back over her shoulder at him. “I’m not talking about specific strategy. I just wonder if it’s at all clear what we’re getting into.”

  “Peaceful communication if we can pull it off,” Katya said. “With a civilization far older than our own. And if not, well, probably the best we can hope for is to let the Web know we won’t simply wait to be absorbed or integrated or whatever they think they can do to us.”

  “We’ve got a chance,” Vic added. “A good one.”

  Accommodations were not nearly so luxurious as those aboard the Teikoku, of course. Gauss was smaller by far, and space was at a premium, with some eight hundred passengers aboard a vessel designed to handle half that many. It was made even more cramped by the need for extra stores of raw material—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, especially—for the nanoprocessors that would be providing them with food, water, and air.

  Heat management was arguably the biggest problem on older vessels like the Gauss; everyone aboard agreed that it was a good thing they would be piggybacking it to their destination with a DalRiss cityship this time instead of taking the usual long, hot route through K-T space. A joke making the rounds of both the science teams and the warstrider squadrons held that the death of an Achiever was a small price to pay to avoid the indignity of being cooked in their own juices by the time they reached their destination.

  “This might not be the time to go into it,” Kara said quietly. “But I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. A lot worse than I had before Sandstorm.”

  “Is the Academy endowing our warriors with psychic powers now?” Katya asked.

  “Let her say it, Kat,” Vic said. “You know as well as I do about soldiers’ hunches.”

  “This isn’t like that,” Kara said. “I don’t have any grand premonition of death, or whatever.” She shook her head. “It’s just—well, this is a strange thing for a soldier to say, I know, but I wonder if we’re not going about this all wrong. Sun Tzu says to match your strength against your opponent’s weakness, not against his strength.” She waved an arm, taking in the massed fleet visible against the New American disk. “It looks as though the Web’s strength more than anything else is sheer weight of numbers. That’s what Dev seemed to be saying, anyway, that they won by sending millions and millions of machines against the DalRiss and overwhelming their defenses. And here we are trying to match them strength for strength.” She raised an eyebrow as she looked at her father. “Seems like a bad strategy, General.”

  Vic chuckled. “You could be right. We wrangled about that with the Imperial Ops staff for weeks.”

  “Who was arguing what?”

  “The Imperials were all for sending in the big guns. The ryu carriers and a flock of heavy cruisers. Admiral Munimori even suggested that the Imperials could handle the whole show by themselves, without our help. The rest of us—especially Dev—wanted a more subtle approach. Something less dependent on matching the Web, as you put it, strength against strength.”

  “The Confederation doesn’t have that powerful a warfleet, Kara,” Katya added. “We can’t afford to stretch ourselves too thin, or take risks too large.”

  “Like we weren’t taking risks with Operation Sandstorm?”

  Katya grimaced. “That was a case of doing what we had to do in order to survive as an independent government.…”

  “Agreed, Mums. I wasn’t really arguing the point. And I can understand that our survival as a species is at stake here. But if we can’t hope to beat them by matching their numbers, what approach can we use?”

  “Technology,” Vic said simply.

  “Technology.Against a technic civilization billions of years old. A civilization capable of energy-to-matter conversion, able to travel across half of the goking Galaxy, and possibly even able to pull off a little time travel now and again.” Kara raised a skeptical eyebrow. “This makes sense?”

  “In fact,” Katya said, “we do have one big tech advantage. The I2C.”

  Kara had heard that idea bandied about during various of the planning sessions but had never quite trusted it. “It’s hard to believe. Is there really no evidence that they have faster-than-light communication?”

  “None,” Vic said. “Everything in the images Dev brought back shows they use really a rather mundane technology for all of their interior communications. Radio, maser, and laser, mostly. There may be some other channels Dev didn’t catch, because of the limitations of DalRiss biotech, but it looks like that’s all they have.”

  “And I have a theory about that,” a new voice said at Kara’s back.

  She turned. “Well, hello, Daren. I was wondering where you were,”

  “Taki and I were checking out the ViRcomm modules on Deck Three.” He grimaced. “Do you realize we’re going to have to use them in shifts?”

  “That’s how it is on a crowded ship,” Kara told him. “Most warships don’t have more than one module per one hundred crew and soldiers aboard. So they share, and everybody gets an hour every two or three days.”

  “Barbaric!”

  “Just be happy we’re going to get where we’re going in a matter of days,” Katya said with a smile. “If we were doing this the old-fashioned way, we’d crawl to our destination in K-T space. At a light year per day, we’d be locked up inside this metal can for over three years, and the only way to escape the heat is your hour-in-fifty in a ViRsimulation!”

  “Still, the scientists are going to need comm modules to continue their work. Taki and I need all the time we can get practicing with Charlie.”

  “Charlie” was actually a class of teleoperated flyers, KS-1090 Cutlasses with the weapons and life-support modules removed, the hull collapsed and folded to a more compact configuration, and the AI downgraded to receive teleoperational input. The device could be operated like a remote probe or hubot, in situations that might pose a risk to human researchers.

  “So how’s flight training coming along for you two?” Kara asked.

  “Oh, well enough. It’s a lot harder than teleopping a hubot on the ground.” He cocked a quizzical look at Kara. “What I want to know is why you military types don’t teleop your warstriders. Wouldn’t it be safer sitting aboard a ship in orbit and jacking the things around by remote?”

  “Sure would.”

  “Why don’t you do it, then?”

  Katya laughed. “Because the other guy’s trying to find ways to operate your machinery, too, and with AIs as good and as fast as they are at analyzing coded frequencies, he could do it.”

  “Imagine,” Vic added, “that you’re a general with a whole army of teleoperated striders moving in on the enemy. Suddenly his AI breaks your control codes, turns your army around, and sends it back at you, lasers and PACs blazing. Embarrassing. Doesn’t look at all good on your fitness report.”

  “There’s also jamming and local interference to worry about,” Kara said. “Sometimes, in a big battle, the actual pilot-against-pilot combat is the smallest part of the action. Both sides are throwing up fields of interference and jamming, trying to disable remote sensors and probes, trying to access AI and communications channels. Believe me, if it were possible to teleoperate a warstrider on the battlefield, we would!”

  Daren shook his head, eyes narrowed, trying to understand. “Even with tight-beamed feeds? I mean, with lasers or focused microwave input—”

  “Do you have any idea what smoke an
d dust in a surface battle does to a comm laser’s range?”

  “Oh. Well, I’ll take your expert word for it. You know, I’ve often wished I could teleoperate a hubot on Dante from New America.” He glanced at Katya. “With the polito prohibitions against traveling in the Shichiju, that sometimes seemed like the only way to get any useful work done.”

  Katya looked startled. “My God—”

  Daren held up his hand. “I know, I know. I’m sorry, Mother. I just meant—”

  “No, it’s not you,” Katya said. “I was just thinking. If we could jack through an I2C link—”

  Kara saw at once what her mother was getting at, and the idea was stunning. Quantum communications effects worked across interstellar distances precisely because there was no signal—at least none through normal space—between one set of electrons and the matched set elsewhere.

  That meant there was absolutely no way an enemy could jam, intercept, or override a communications beam. A war-strider pilot could sit in comfort and safety on a world light years away, her mind jacked into her machine, her senses there in the battle.

  No more casualties. Machines could be smashed into scrap, but their pilots would awaken inside their command centers, with nothing bruised save their egos. She’d been thinking of the I2C in such a limited way—simply as a means of coordinating warships over interstellar distances. There were so many other possibilities, though.…

  Kara looked at her mother. “Kuso, Mums. Were the Imperials working on that?”

  “I don’t know. All they admitted to was connecting their larger ships, their colonies, and their embassies.”

  “The Imperial leadership has a pretty traditional mind set,” Vic pointed out. “Teleoperated warstriders might not have occurred to them yet.”

  “But it would have,” Kara said. “Sooner or later, it would have. God, this is going to utterly rewrite everything we know about war!”

  Katya nodded, looking glum. “War could become some kind of game. No muss. No dirt. No pain or blood… except in the city you just leveled on some world light years away!”

  Daren laughed. “Well, maybe that would be a good thing. End war once and for all.”

  “How do you figure that?” Kara asked him.

  “If war becomes too horrible, or too destructive, maybe we’ll finally give it up. It could turn into a balance of terror, like during the early years of the nuclear age. I don’t bomb you because I can’t stop you from bombing me.”

  “The evidence of history,” Katya pointed out, “is that weapons are always used sooner or later. The rules of war and the way it’s waged may change, but the fact of it never does.”

  “Well, I2C will certainly be a boon for scientists. No more begging for appropriations. No more expensive expeditions. Just equip a small, unmanned starship with a good AI and a few teleoperated probes, and you could send it anywhere in the Galaxy and never even leave your own home.”

  Vic grimaced. “Takes all the fun out of it, though. What’s going to happen to the human race? We all lose our arms and legs and become machine-tended brains, stored away in the basement?”

  “Wouldn’t matter,” Daren said. “Our minds would be free. Assuming we could get time on the comm module to practice with our remotes! Seems like a nullheaded way to do things, not having enough mods to go around.”

  “Don’t worry, Dar,” Kara said, patting his shoulder. “I’m sure you and your little friend will survive.”

  Daren gave her a hard look, as though wondering just what was behind the amused irony of her voice, then shrugged. “We’ll do what we have to do,” he said. “But I’d have felt a hell of a lot better if this expedition hadn’t been literally thrown together at the last moment. We’re going into this unprepared. We could miss some fantastic opportunities here.”

  Katya brought her hands to her temples, shaking her head slowly. “Daren, for years now you’ve been downloading on me every day about the need to get out in the field, to experience things for yourself, to meet an alien civilization in the flesh… or in this case, I guess, the metal. Well, take a look around! You’ve got it! Everything you wanted! Why aren’t you happy?”

  “Kuso, Mother. I—”

  Katya reached out and grabbed his shoulder. “I’m jo-king,” she said, pronouncing each syllable separately and distinctly. “Sometimes, Daren, you take things a little too seriously.”

  He sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Still, I wonder if we’re going about this whole thing right… and that’s nothing to joke about.”

  “No,” Vic said thoughtfully. “It’s not. I’m thinking how wonderful it would be if we had the luxury of sending this fleet out to Nova Aquila without any humans along.”

  Kara could hear the pain in his voice. If they couldn’t talk to the Web, there were going to be casualties in the battle that would follow. No military officer enjoys the prospect of losing the people under his command. Kara knew that much from bitter experience.

  “I don’t suppose there’s time to reequip all of the ships with I2C remotes?” Daren asked.

  “Not a chance. The redesign of the ship interfaces alone could take years. And I don’t think the Web is going to give us that much time.”

  “Well,” Daren said. “I’m not sure we’ll be able to understand the Web, or even begin trying to talk to it, simply by throwing large numbers of scientists at it.”

  “Depends on how hungry it is,” Kara said. “Especially for xenologists.”

  “Amusing, Kara.Twisted, but amusing.”

  “So what’s the big theory?” Kara asked him.

  “About what?”

  “About Web comm technology. You said you have a theory about it.”

  “Ah! Yes. Some of us at the University have been working on the idea that the Web doesn’t know about quantum physics. In fact, it probably can’t.”

  “I’ve heard that but don’t understand it.” Vic took a sip of his drink. “These people build goking great rings around black holes. Doesn’t that mean they’re harnessing Hawking radiation?”

  “It’s possible,” Daren said with a smug grin, “that they are doing exactly that but have no idea what it is they’re doing.”

  Much of the basis for twenty-sixth-century technology lay in the twentieth-century formulation of the bizarre mathematics of quantum mechanics. The Quantum Power Tap, for example, used finely tuned pairs of oscillating singularities to provide literally unlimited streams of clean, raw energy. Depending on the set of equations used, there were two ways of interpreting where that energy came from. One way of describing the source was to say the energy was flowing from the K-T plenum, the underlying hyperdimension of pure energy on which the entire universe rode like a bubble on an ocean of froth. A second description, however, held that virtual particle pairs—particle and antiparticle—were constantly being formed out of empty vacuum and almost instantly mutually annihilated. Hawking radiation, named for the brilliant twentieth-century physicist who predicted it, occurred when one of the virtual particles was trapped inside the event horizon of a black hole while the other escaped into the universe—energy apparently leaking from the black hole. Early speculations had suggested that energy-hungry civilizations in the far-future might derive the energy they needed from Hawking radiation captured at the event horizon.

  Bizarre as such concepts were, they all were solidly based on the even more bizarre twistings of quantum physics, a magical, Alice-in-Wonderland world where Schrodinger’s proverbial cat could be both alive and dead, until an observer called one possibility or the other into existence.

  Yet it was that magic that made possible such everyday and taken-for-granted wonders as the QPT and faster-than-light travel along the K-T interface. The prediction of Hawking radiation had pointed the way toward the practical development of the Quantum Power Tap, a source of energy far more potent than trapping half of each virtual particle pair.

  “How could they possibly not know what they were doing?” Katya asked. “Technolog
ical development is basically linear. It builds on advances in theory and on previous levels of technologies, one step at a time.”

  “And in ten billion years,” Kara put in, “I’d guess they’d have taken one hell of a lot of steps.”

  “It was Dev Cameron’s observation that got us thinking about the inconsistencies in what he’d seen,” Daren said. “You know, he’s really a great guy when you get to know him. It’s still hard thinking of him as my father, though, especially when his ViRpersona looks as young as I do.”

  “What was his idea?” Katya prompted.

  “Well, we were working on some of the images he brought back, and he pointed out what you just did, Kara. That you’d expect the Web to have gotten a lot farther in eight or ten billion years. In some ways, of course, materials processing and manufacturing and the really weird stuff like the Stargates, they’re way beyond us, yes… but in practical terms, they’re not nearly far enough, you know what I mean?”

  Kara nodded. “We might be building Stargates ourselves in another thousand years. That suggests they’re only a millennium or so ahead of us.”

  “Exactly. Hell, in a thousand years, the way things are going, we’ll have come up with something even better.” He snapped his fingers. “Here to Andromeda, zip! And there are some areas where we’re ahead of them. The I2C, for one. And the K-T drive for another. It looks like they have to rely on the Stargate for faster-than-light travel. Even for a super race, a thousand-kilometer-long cylinder must be a hell of a lot of trouble to build, and it’s not easy to take one along with you on long jaunts.”

  “Hard on your explorers,” Kara said, “if they have to build a Stargate to get back from wherever they’ve been.”

  “In fact,” Daren said, “the Web shows all the signs of being a basically static technic culture. Long ago they reached a plateau where things worked well enough, and stayed there. They didn’t need to change, so they didn’t.”