by Ian Douglas
“We’d heard of PAs, of course, during our stay on Earth,” Dra’ethde said. “We did not realize that they were this . . . convincing.”
“You are Admiral Koenig’s PA, yes-no?” Gru’mulkisch asked. “And yet you do not look like Admiral Koenig.”
“That’s because when Karyn died,” Koenig said, “I took her PA—there were copies of it on my implant systems, and in my office here on the America—and overlaid it on my own. I preferred to use . . . her copy.”
He didn’t add that he’d done so because of how much he missed Karyn, how much he didn’t want to let her go.
“I can appear as Karyn,” she said, and then the virtual image morphed smoothly into a duplicate of Koenig, also in Confederation full dress. “Or as Admiral Koenig.”
“Then, you have no physical reality now, yes-no?” Dra’ethde asked.
“No,” Karyn said, the male image morphing back to hers.
“But are you alive?” Gru’mulkisch asked. She appeared to be disturbed by the revelation. “Or . . . perhaps I should ask instead, do you feel alive?”
“I am aware that I am a digital construct,” Karyn told them, “and that I do not have a biological existence of my own. I wonder sometimes, however, if Admiral Koenig is aware of this.”
It was a gentle dig, but it surprised Koenig. The PA frequently had suggested to him that using the Karyn Mendelson PA software was not . . . healthy for him, that he might be clinging to his dead lover’s memory in an unhealthy way. And in fact, though his PA still spoke to him in Karyn’s voice, he really hadn’t summoned her visible avatar for weeks.
“Admiral Koenig believes you to be alive?”
“Admiral Koenig is comforted by my appearance,” the PA replied.
“I do know the difference between a person and an avatar, damn it,” Koenig added, a bit more sharply than he’d intended. This discussion was becoming highly personal, when all he’d initially wanted was a demonstration of personality uploading. He disliked being embarrassed in front of aliens, even though he knew that they would not be upset by the same things that embarrassed humans.
“You are suggesting that the Sh’daar uploaded such digital personalities into their ships and computer networks,” Gru’mulkisch said, “yes-no? That these are the ‘ghosts’ we mention, again yes-no?”
“The word ghost has a religious connotation for us,” Koenig replied. “I don’t know what you Agletsch think of such things, but some humans believe in a noncorporeal aspect of intelligence or personality that survives the body after death.”
“Ah,” Dra’ethde said. “You refer to the tru’a, the dhuthr’a, and the thurah’a. You might say ‘soul’ or ‘spirit.’ ”
“You have three of them?”
“Oh, yes. The tru’a is—”
Koenig held up a hand and shook his head. “That’s okay. You don’t need to explain.”
Having three noncorporeal aspects, he thought, wasn’t all that strange a concept. Some modern human religions, he knew, distinguished between the soul and the spirit as two distinct entities, while the ancient Egyptians, depending on how one counted, had believed in either seven or nine—the ka, ba, akh, sheut, ib, and others.
But discussing this sort of thing, even with a nonhuman, made Koenig uncomfortable. The White Covenant, and years of social conditioning, made anything touching on religion or the paranormal feel wrong.
“For humans, a ghost is supposed to be the spirit or soul of a dead person,” Koenig explained. He tended to be pretty much of a materialist himself, though he tried to keep an open mind. “But uploading the electronic pattern of someone’s personality comes pretty close to that idea, I’d say.”
“We use the word in the same way,” Gru’mulkisch said, “to represent the dhuthr’a left behind at death. We believe that the Sh’daar, when they die, upload their dhuthr’a into electronic systems—computer networks, if you will. They pilot their ships, run their manufactories, indeed they see to the efficient running of the Sh’daar’s galactic empire.”
“Great,” Koenig said. “We’re fighting against ghosts. . . .”
Open mind or not, he did not believe that what Gru’mulkisch was saying could in any way be literally true.
Trevor Gray
Beyond the TRGA
1805 hours, TFT
Gray had emerged within a star cloud.
The sky ahead was packed with them, millions of suns crowded together so closely they appeared to form a single shining white wall ahead, thinning somewhat in other directions. Gray felt a sharp pang and looked about wildly. He didn’t know where he was . . . but he did know that there was no sky like that anywhere within many thousands of light years of Earth.
Switching to view aft, he saw the TRGA cylinder—or more likely it was a different cylinder identical to the first, connected with it by wormhole or some other space-bypassing gateway. The fighter was no longer moving at near-c, but appeared to have lost its velocity somehow as it emerged from the tube.
“AI,” he said, speaking between ragged breaths, “are you recording this?”
“Recording,” the fighter’s voice replied.
“We’re drifting away from that . . . that gate, or whatever it is. We’ll need to find our way back here if we’re to have a hope of getting home.”
“Agreed. Repairs necessary to maneuver and accelerate are now at fifty-three percent.”
“Good. . . .” Although Starhawk fighters were billed as self-repairing, that possibility was never a foregone conclusion. If too much of the active nanomatrix was lost, or if there was even minor damage to the AI system itself, or if the power plant was damaged, repairs were impossible. Apparently, Gray’s fighter had been only grazed by the enemy beam, and damage, while crippling, was superficial enough that he would be able to power up again soon.
Resetting the cockpit display to view forward once more, he stared into that inexpressibly beautiful wall of stars once more.
“Where . . . where are we?” he asked after a long moment, as awe and terror grappled for possession of his thoughts. “Can you tell?”
“I am surveying the sky, seeking to match stellar spectra with known stars,” his AI replied. “This will take some time.”
Gray started to ask how much time, then thought better of it. AIs were inhumanly quick, but they also possessed an inhuman awareness—or, rather, a lack of awareness—of time in the human sense. “I . . . I was wondering if we were at the galactic core . . . at the center of the galaxy.”
If they were, that would explain the crowding of stars out there, of course. This region of space also appeared to be devoid of gas and dust, supporting that theory. According to downloads he’d pulled in from the ship’s library, the galactic core was supposed to be a region of densely crowded stars where intense radiation, frequent supernovae, and gravitational effects had swept away all traces of interstellar gas eons ago. It was also the location, he knew, of several bizarre objects—including at least two supermassive black holes.
“What we are seeing,” his AI informed him, “is consistent with the interior of a globular star cluster. However, if so, it is an unusually large one. I estimate that it contains approximately five million stars within a sphere that is at least two hundred thirty light years across.”
“How big is a normal globular cluster?”
“M-13, in Hercules, is typical. It measures approximately one hundred forty light years across and contains several hundred thousand stars.”
So this teeming hive of suns was large, but still within the range of globular star clusters. It was not the galactic core.
“But . . . that means you should be able to identify it, right? There can’t be that many globulars out there.”
“Approximately two hundred for our galaxy,” the fighter’s AI told him. “But we may not be within our home galaxy any longer.”
Gray hadn’t considered that possibility. Globular star clusters existed as satellites of most galaxies—the larger ones, at an
y rate—orbiting their centers like moons around a primary. Sol’s parent galaxy possessed nearly two hundred; M-31 in Andromeda, 2.3 million light years away, had around five hundred.
But he wasn’t ready to start worrying about which galaxy he might be in, now, not until he had good reason to assume they were a lot farther from home—millions of light years, instead of a few tens of thousands. Of more pressing concern was just why they’d ended up here, wherever “here” might actually be. Presumably, those thousands of silver-gray, tightly interconnected warships had come from here; presumably, too, the TRGA led somewhere important to the Sh’daar, or whoever had built the damned thing in the first place.
“Are you picking up any signs of technic civilization?” Gray asked. “Ships? Bases?”
“It is difficult to tell,” the AI replied. “There is intense radiation here—the result, perhaps, of frequent supernovae—as well as noise across all radio frequencies, which masks conventional radio transmissions. However, there does appear to be an anomalous infrared source almost directly ahead on our line of drift. Designating target as AIS-1.”
“Range?”
“Impossible to tell. It is not moving across our line of sight, and so triangulation methods are useless. I could use radar—”
“No!” Gray said sharply. Then, more gently, “No. Let’s not tell anyone we’re here just yet.”
“I concur. Within this context, the anomalous signal is not likely to represent friendly assets.”
“Why anomalous?” The sky was filled with heat sources—millions of stars.
“It appears to be a non-point source, and the radiation I am recording is consistent with an artificial object.”
“Let me see it.”
A window opened in Gray’s mind. At first, all he could see were stars, uncounted millions of them massed into a near-solid wall. His AI highlighted a point at the center with a red circle—a dark speck against the light.
“A ship?”
“Until the exact range can be determined, unknown.” The AI seemed to hesitate. “If I were to offer an unsubstantiated statement, however, it would be that AIS-1 appears to be considerably larger than a ship. It appears distant, but since it is still showing a disk, even a small one, that suggests that it is of considerable size . . . as large as a moon or a major planetoid, at the least. It has a relatively low albedo, which suggests a natural object.”
“And we’re moving toward it?”
“Within approximately seven tenths of a degree of arc, yes.”
Which suggested that the object, whatever it was, had been precisely and deliberately placed—quite possibly as a watch station or even a deep-space fortress for keeping track of anything that might emerge from the TRGA cylinder.
Anything like him.
“How close is the nearest sun?” Gray wanted to know.
“So far I have recorded nearly five hundred stars within two light years,” the AI said, “but calculating precise distances is difficult without a long observational baseline with which to calculate parallax. None of the stars observed so far is closer than an estimated tenth of a light year, however.”
“Which means we’re not inside a solar system. That . . . object isn’t part of a solar system.”
“Unlikely. Planetary systems would not be stable within a star cluster such as this. Gravitational interactions among member stars would tend to eject planets within a few millions of years.”
“Whatever they are, they could be tracking us,” Gray said. “We need to get the ship repaired fast. As in turn around now, go to max acceleration, and get the hell out of here.”
“I am working on that,” the AI told him. “Repairs now at sixty-one percent.”
It was taking too damned long. If the enemy was monitoring everything that came through the TRGA cylinder into this space . . .
And then the silver-gray ships were there, all around him, flashing and turning in the dazzling light of millions of stars. His PBP was still down. Firing his Gatling cannon might take out one, even two or three . . . assuming he could maneuver enough to aim. Might.
No. Better to watch . . . and wait. Play dead.
The way the ships had effortlessly appeared, without warning, suggested that they possessed acceleration enough to reach near-c speeds within extremely short periods of time. There’d been no warning of their approach. They must have sailed in just behind the wavefront announcing their approach, matching velocities with the disabled fighter in an instant. For long seconds, they wheeled, flashed, and maneuvered in perfect unison.
Then, abruptly, shockingly, they were gone.
“Where the hell did they go?” Gray asked.
“In the direction of the TRGA,” his AI replied. “I was unable to measure their rate of acceleration.”
Which meant it was high indeed.
“They . . . they must have assumed we were just wreckage.”
“That, or that we were not worth spending time or effort on our destruction. They would certainly have picked up infrared radiation from the hull, and picked up the special distortion of our power plant singularities.”
That the aliens had simply ignored the wreckage of Gray’s fighter seemed, somehow, like an insult. A calculated and contemptuous dismissal.
“It may also be,” the AI continued, “that they have summoned other means of dealing with us.”
“Something to . . . to capture us, then.” The flattened, leaf-shaped vessels, as small as fighters themselves, weren’t large enough to take the damaged Starhawk on board. “Did you detect a signal?”
“Negative. But that does not mean that one was not transmitted.”
“How long until we can accelerate?”
A pause, almost a hesitation. “Between five and six minutes more.”
“Keep at it, then. I don’t think I want to meet the Sh’daar face-to-face.”
He found the idea terrifying, eliciting the sweat-drenched horror of the starkest of nightmares. Unknown and unknowable things clutching and snapping at him, faceless and remorseless. He felt his self-control evaporating, felt stark panic rising like an incoming black tide.
He considered taking the final option.
It was not often discussed by America’s pilots, but there was that final way out—a coded command to the AI that would collapse the fighter and its occupant into the fast-circling microscopic black holes of the power plant. If a fighter was disabled and about to be captured, the data stored within the AI system and within the pilot’s brain could be erased in a silent, merciful instant. The system had been put in place early in the Sh’daar war, when Confederation strategists thought it might still be possible to keep Earth’s location secret from the enemy.
It had turned out that the Agletsch had already known about Earth, and the Sh’daar would have learned the location from them.
But the system had remained in place ever since. Too many fighters crippled in combat became streakers, hurtling off into space too badly damaged for self-repair. If a SAR tug couldn’t find you, an instant death was preferable to slow freezing or asphyxiation as your life support gave out. The pilots didn’t talk about it much, but if things really got bad, there was always that final option.
Right now, Gray was the ultimate in streakers, drifting through space unknown, tens of thousands of light years away from either Earth or the fleet.
He would end this soon . . . much sooner if it looked like they were going to try to take him alive. The one thing keeping him from pulling the plug right now was the knowledge that he might yet be able to get back to the other side of the wormhole. If he could, the fleet would need to now what was here on the other side.
The problem was going to be getting back to Texaghu Resch.
“Lieutenant Gray,” his AI said. “We may have a problem.”
“Whatcha got?”
“I’m passively tracking a large object heading directly toward us at high speed.”
“Let me see.”
There wasn�
��t much to see as yet—a black speck against the dazzling backdrop of massed stars, but it was growing larger moment by moment.
“A ship?” Gray asked.
“A large ship,” the AI replied. “It appears to have left the vicinity of AIS-1 some twenty seconds ago, and is approaching at an estimated twenty kilometers per second.”
“Do you have a range?”
“Estimated only . . . but based on the changing light curve and albedo estimates, approximately two thousand kilometers.”
One hundred seconds, then, less than two minutes.
“Okay,” Gray said. Resignation pressed down on him, dragging at his thoughts. “We need to let the fleet know what we’ve found. Reconfigure a battlespace drone as a message torpedo.”
“Affirmative.”
“Download enough of yourself that you’ll be able to answer questions.”
That was one of the more useful aspects of artificial intelligence—the ability to have one clone itself, to hive off an exact copy of the original, and transfer that copy to a different platform. In this case, the platform was a VR-5 remote-scan sensor probe, one of the programmable, mobile recon units deployed in combat to give an overall view of the battlespace.
“Include a complete log of everything up to launch.”
“Affirmative.”
The problem was that a recon drone didn’t have nearly as much onboard memory as a Starhawk fighter. The AI copy would necessarily be quite limited in its scope and intelligence.
But it would remember. . . .
“Unknown ship is accelerating,” the AI reported. “Time to intercept now estimated at fifteen seconds.”
“Launch!”
The fighter abruptly came to life, rotating a full one hundred eighty degrees, then loosing the probe in an intense diamagnetic surge. Recoil shoved the fighter back with a savage jolt. The probe’s drives switched on, then, accelerating the messenger at two thousand gravities.
