Netlink

by William H. Keith

  Sometimes there would be only the single explosion, and the white-dwarf remnant of the younger star would continue circling the older—which frequently seemed rejuvenated for a time, possibly with a fresh influx of hydrogen as death-gift of its companion. Often, though, the explosion of one star triggered the explosion of the second as thermal balances were irrevocably thrown out of kilter, and the end result was a pair of white dwarfs circling one another, as at Nova Aquila.

  With the natural unfolding of stellar evolution, then, neither Alya A nor Alya B could be expected to light the skies of Earth someday with a nova’s brilliance. But—as Dev had discovered at Nova Aquila—not all of the novae scattered along the Galaxy’s Orion Arm were natural.

  The swarm of machine-ships materialized out of otherspace in a glittering plastic and metallic spray. They numbered in the tens of millions, these machines, and all were part of the local expression of the Web’s collective consciousness. Isolated from the rest of the Web by distances inconceivable, it was an associative of communicative machine nodes, none of which was intelligent or self-aware in its own right but all of which were tightly linked with other nodes by radio, microwave, and laser to form a far-flung and keenly tuned mind. The total number of Web machine units within this one cluster was much less than Nakamura’s Number, but that particular footnote of arcane biomathematical law applied to a kind of transcendence, where the intelligence was far more than the sum of its hundred billion-odd parts. This association had intelligence of a sort—enough to do the job they’d been programmed to do.

  The machines’ exit point had been calculated with precision by the Central Web, based on information ripped from the heart of a DalRiss ship before it died. None of the machines blindly sprayed into the target system was expected to return to the Galactic Core; none felt anything like disappointment or protest at ill-use. They had, after all, been designed and built expressly for this purpose. A variety of DalRiss cityships and even a few human vessels were on hand to note the sudden appearance of the horde. None was in a position to intercept its members, however, as the Web Associative, wheeling together like an immense flock of birds or insects, swung into a course that would plunge them into Alya B.

  The Starminers’ senses detected the worlds of both ShraRish and GhegnuRish, but since DalRiss civilization had evolved along strictly biological lines rather than mechanical or industrial, they took no note of the cities growing on their surfaces. Machines were their sole measure of intelligence or worth… and even then only machines of specific intelligence and purpose could be clearly recognized as part of the Web’s gestalt consciousness. Indeed, organic life of any kind, while recognized as self-replicating and self-organizing ongoing chemical processes, occupied no higher a niche in the Web’s concept of an ordered universe than did the bacteria living within in a city built by Man.

  Ignoring the cityships and the worlds alike, ignoring the incomprehensible signals at various radio and laser wavelengths, the Starminers plunged into the photosphere of Alya B, while the smaller Guardians and Swarmers and Eaters danced above the searing tongues of vast, stellar prominences. Composed of alloys and fields of magnetic force designed to resist pressures of billions of kilograms per square centimeter and temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees Kelvin, the Starminers plunged deeper and yet deeper into the star’s ultra-dense core. There, they initiated the process that would destabilize the star, opening a rift in space and time—a rift at first microscopically small, but joined by means of a thread-slender wormhole to one of the hellfurnaces at the Galactic Core, a place in which they gathered the resources of an entire galaxy and reshaped them in matter and in energy to their own purposes.

  The rift widened… becoming a crack in space. Energy appeared inside the star, the energies associated with the star-death radiance of an erupting quasar leaking from that microscopic prick in space and time and flooding into the stellar core.

  Normally it would have taken millennia for that buildup of energy to work its way up through layer upon layer of the star’s inner heart, but the continued influx of energy at the center continued to press outward, relentless, ballooning, irresistible. A star, any star, is a constant compromise between the tendency to collapse under its own gravity and the tendency to fly apart into space, an ongoing fusion explosion restrained by its own mass from expanding further.

  And the Starminers had just irreversibly revoked the contract of that compromise, pouring a steady flood of energy into the core that even the tremendous, crushing mass of Alya B could not long contain. In scant hours, then, Alya B began growing brighter in the green-tinted GhegnuRish sky.

  DalRiss natural organs for perceiving light accomplished little more than simple recognition of light and dark, allowing them to establish the difference between day and night. Only those few individuals who happened to be symbiotically linked with Perceivers, then, could look up and note that their star’s face had become somewhat blotchy. Though it was as radiant across its entire disk as ever, some small portions of the star’s surface had grown brighter by far in scant seconds; as with sunspots, which appear dark only because of the comparison with the rest of a star’s surface, the bright patches made the rest of Alya B turn dim.

  But the bright patches spread, and soon the entire sky was a searing ocean of white flame… and the DalRiss who happened to be outside and placed to see the phenomenon were already dying.

  Atmosphere, superheated, exploded outward in swirling windstorms. Organic material caressed by that deadly light burst into flame, or shriveled and blackened where it died. Before long, the heat had reached the planetary Naga, which extended throughout the world’s crust, a living, thinking, communicating network. At first, instinctively, it drew life from the sudden radiance falling on the world’s day side. Soon, though, the heat became so intense that the Naga was retreating from that hemisphere, seeking cooler refuge deep within the comforting, sheltering rock.

  Ten hours after the first intimation of disaster, the upper few hundred meters of rock on GhegnuRish had already become molten, a planet-wide ocean of crusted-over lava and crumbling continents of white-hot rock. Beneath the molten rock, the Naga was everywhere beginning to disassociate into separate, subintelligent fragments.

  Then the shock wave of the exploding star reached the planet, stripping away what was left of the searing atmosphere and crust alike in a white hot hurricane of particles—protons, hot plasma, hard radiation. By the time GhegnuRish had completed another rotation, its diameter had dwindled by nearly twenty percent, and what was left was a glowing, molten sphere rapidly boiling away into space.

  Five days later, the light of Alya B’s detonation reached its companion sun, Alya A, and the fifth world, ShraRish.

  Millennia before, the DalRiss had abandoned their home-world to the Naga that occupied it, after a long and bitter fight. ShraRish, their sole colony, now was more thickly populated by the immense, squat, starfish organisms that served as DalRiss cities than their homeworld. For twenty-five human years now, those cities had been abandoning the Alyan system, choosing instead to seek other partners in the Great Dance among the stars, but the remaining cities still numbered in the tens of thousands.

  Traveling just behind the flash and dazzle of dying GhegnuRish, the Web’s scouts drifted in at just beneath the speed of light, decelerating suddenly at thousands of gravities, a maneuver impossible to any organic, cellular-based life form. Again, the Starminers plunged into the star’s depths.

  And within another few days, Alya A, like its brother, was flaring into the deadly, blossoming brilliance of a nova. Most of the DalRiss and human ships orbiting one or the other of the two doomed worlds were able to escape.

  But ten billion DalRiss who’d chosen to remain on their worlds of their birth perished in the dual funeral pyres of their suns.

  Chapter 24

  No plan of operations can look with any certainty beyond the first meeting with the major forces of the enemy. The commander is compelled
to reach decisions on the basis of situations which cannot be predicted.

  —HELMUTH VON MOLTKE

  nineteenth century C.E.

  Until the Aquilan Expeditionary Force reached the staging area at the Nebula, all of the messages passing back and forth across the new I2C network had been strictly routine… daily reports on mission status, on personnel, equipment, and supplies, navigational and communications checks, nothing out of the ordinary save for the fact of faster-than-light communication itself. The arrival point was carefully swept by flights of warstriders reconfigured in their warflyer mode—there was some concern that the machines that had followed Dev Cameron and the DalRiss out from Nova Aquila might still be around—but the patrols turned up nothing. That was not surprising, of course. The North American-Penguin nebula complex was vast, encompassing many thousands of cubic light years, so even if the Web machines were still operational and able to pick up the AEF’s arrival, they wouldn’t be able to contest it unless they possessed their own faster-than-light capability independent of the Device. And, apparently, that wasn’t the case.

  Not long after the fleet had materialized in the soft, blue glow of the nebula, however, the first I2C reports came in telling of trouble in another, more distant quarter, of disaster in the Alyan system. Ships—human and DalRiss—that had been able to jump clear in time had carried word to the Shichiju of millions of alien machines appearing out of empty space and attacking the Alyan suns… word of stars exploding, of worlds gone molten, empty of life.

  The news was still being digested throughout the fleet. Few of the humans, at any rate, felt powerful attachments to the destroyed alien worlds, but it was all too easy to imagine the same thing happening to 26 Draconis, or 70 Ophiuchi, or 36 Ophiuchi.

  Or Sol.

  Dev had contacted Vic in linkage aboard the Karyu, passing on the interesting piece of news that the vice admiral commanding the AEF had just received an emergency broadcast direct from the Tenno Kyuden, the Palace of Heaven in Earth Synchorbit. The content of the message had been coded and Dev had been unable to break the code without alerting security programs traveling with it, but it was easy enough to guess what the contents must be. Within ten minutes, a ViRcomm meeting had been scheduled for all ship commanders in the combined fleet.

  Now Vic was standing in the office of Chujo Haruo Tanaka aboard the flagship Shinryu. One entire bulkhead was an impressive viewall that looked now into the nebula, a vast, blue and white translucency cold against the stars. Ships—DalRiss star-shapes, and the long, cluttered, spearpoints of the ryu carriers—were silhouetted against curtains of pale light.

  Tanaka looked pale, stressed to the breaking point. Vic sat in a low, swivel chair across the room, studying the man. He’d shuttled across to the expedition’s flagship from the Karyu rather than using a comm module. The news from home was grave enough that a personal visit was required, and he’d needed to talk to the man in private before the scheduled gathering of the fleet’s senior officers.

  “Two stars,” Tanaka said, shaking his head in disbelief. He stood before the viewall, hands clasped behind his back. “Two stars brighter and larger than our own, simply exploded.…”

  “And ten billion DalRiss snuffed out,” Vic added, “apparently without even a nod from the Web.”

  “Horrifying.”

  “The question is, sir, what are you going to do about it?”

  Tanaka turned from the viewall. “Do? You are no doubt aware that I have just received new orders.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Those orders are quite clear, General. We are to return to the Shichiju at once.”

  Vic nodded. He’d expected no less. That was why he’d wanted to grab Tanaka first, before the staff meeting, to talk to him.

  To convince him.

  “Sir,” Vic said. “With all due respect, this may be one time when duty requires that we ignore our orders. At least for the moment.”

  “Duty never countenances disobedience.”

  “Even when obedience clearly leads to defeat? Admiral, I submit that this campaign is far too important to let the bureaucrats run it from home.”

  There was a supreme irony in this, Vic thought. Until now, the commander of a starfleet was completely on his own once he left his home system; headquarters depended on couriers for periodic reports on his progress, and those could usually be dispatched at the commander’s convenience. He had to answer for his decisions when he returned, if he returned, but at least he didn’t have his superiors second-guessing those decisions every step of the way. The quantum communications net might be the most important development in space military tactics since the development of the K-T drive, but it could also end up crippling innovation and the initiative of individual leaders.

  Maybe the Web had the better idea after all, ignoring faster-than-light communication and the nullheaded bureaucratic idiocy of tightly controlled central planning in military operations. He remembered the conversation aboard the Gauss with his family, a short time before. If warfare someday did become a clean, antiseptic exercise in pure tactics, the rear-area kibitzers and chair warmers and bureaucrats could become the soldiers of the future, teleoperating their war machines across interstellar distances.

  There would be no reining in the horror of war then, when there were no soldiers right there to experience the horror firsthand, or the danger. What would someone like Munimori care about another dozen cities wiped out, more or less?

  Or worlds, for that matter.…

  Tanaka considered Vic for a long moment through narrowed eyes. “I am a soldier,” he said after a time. “I believe that I have a responsibility to use my own judgment in the field… but I also bear the responsibility of duty. I see no clear alternatives here.”

  “Our first duty is to protect the Shichiju, all the worlds of humanity, from the threat we’ve perceived in the Web. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But we’re not going to be able to do that if we scamper back home.”

  “Tell me more, Hagan-san.”

  Haruo Tanaka, Vic knew from the man’s official biography, was one of the more innovative and inventive of the Imperium’s naval commanders. He’d started in the marines, a war-strider jacking a Daimyo during the revolution. He’d switched over to the Imperial Navy after the war ended, eventually rising to the rank of shosho—the equivalent of a Confederation rear admiral—and the command of the commanding officer of the ryu carrier Funryu.

  Five years ago he’d been promoted to chujo—vice admiral—and given command of the Third Provincial Fleet, but he’d lost that command, and a certain amount of status, by advocating the complete overhaul of the Imperial Navy’s current tactics. Ryu carriers, he claimed, were anachronisms; the future of naval warfare belonged to smaller, more maneuverable vessels, operating under widely distributed and detached independent commands.

  Vic wasn’t sure what twistings of Imperial politics had put Tanaka back in favor and in command of the AEF. Possibly it represented a rearrangement of the current political alignments back on Earth. Or possibly the command had been seen as a way of getting him out from underfoot. Either way, he would have plenty of Imperial Naval staff officers, from Munimori on down, all looking carefully over his shoulder.

  And with the I2C, that constant inspection must become damned near microscopic at times.

  “Your orders are for us to report where? Earth?”

  “Earth’s solar system is being covered by the First Fleet,” Tanaka said carefully. “Under the command of Gensui Munimori himself. We are to return to 26 Draconis.” He seemed to be measuring Vic’s response to his words, watching for fear or anger. “The Imperial Staff feels that the New American system might be facing the greatest threat of attack, since it is on the very fringe of human-occupied space and in the same general direction as Alya.”

  “Uh-huh. Right.”

  Vic’s tone was sarcastic. It was entirely possible that this sudden change of orders was part of some lar
ger plan, a plan that had nothing to do at all with the Web except for using it as an excuse. With the Imperial fleet concentrated and at full war preparedness, it would be so easy to take over all of the nominally independent states scattered along the Shichiju’s border.…

  “Look. You’ve seen the same reports, the same records I have. You know what the Web is like. What the threat is like. You know that if you’re there protecting 26 Draconis, the Web could just as easily strike somewhere else. Even the Imperial Navy isn’t big enough to protect all of the Shichiju’s worlds. Especially if the Imperial Command Staff is more interested in settling old scores than it is in stopping the Web.”

  That last was a guess, but a reasonable one. The fact that an out-of-favor officer had been placed in command of the expeditionary force strongly suggested that Tenno Kyuden’s attention was focused on other interests just now. The negotiations of the past few weeks that had led to the creation of the AEF could well have been a sham, a way of slipping in and grabbing lost territories in a practically bloodless coup.

  He also knew that Tanaka was both a good officer and a brilliant tactician, not the sort of man to turn his back on the real threat just to take part in the petty politics of Empire.

  “Politics,” Tanaka said, closing his eyes, “and politicians are the bane of soldiers.” He opened his eyes, impassive again. “Believe me when I say I’ve already argued exhaustively that we should continue the mission. To no avail.”