Star Carrier 6: Deep Time

by Ian Douglas

  Two USNA warships—a frigate and a destroyer—were still thirty minutes away from rendezvous. That Concord had managed the feat before them was due entirely to the High Guard cutter’s beefed-up maneuvering suite. The same held true for the three SAR UTW-90s—the cutter and the tugs were designed as intercept vehicles, and thus outpaced the warships.

  Each SAR vessel carried a crew of five under the command of a lieutenant or a lieutenant commander. Dahlquist was now the senior officer present.

  Opportunity presents itself, he thought.

  “Open a channel to the lead SAR tug,” he told his own communications officer.

  “Lieutenant Commander Mitchell is on the line, sir.”

  “Commander Mitchell?” he said. “This is Commander Terrance Dahlquist of the High Guard ship Concord. I am maneuvering to board the alien.”

  “Concord,” a voice replied in his head, “this is Fly Catcher. That’s negative on rendezvous, repeat, negative. We are under orders not to board the alien under any circumstances until America has joined us.”

  “I am disregarding those orders, Fly Catcher. Maintain deceleration. We’ll take it from here.”

  The alien was growing huge in Dahlquist’s inner mind’s-eye window.

  “Wave off, Concord! Wave off!”

  “Negative,” Dahlquist replied. “We’re going in.”

  And then things began to get exciting.

  Chapter Six

  29 June, 2425

  USNS/HGF Concord

  Charlie One

  0750 hours, TFT

  Concord had closed to within a hundred meters of the alien when the sleek gray-green hull directly ahead . . . changed.

  “Fire!” Dahlquist screamed. “All weapons . . . fire!”

  It was a response of pure and immediate panic. Concord’s weapons included lasers, particle beams, and missiles—these last tipped with variable-yield fusion warheads. Firing a spread of Krait missiles into a target that close would have meant incineration for the High Guard vessel.

  The command was overridden, however, both by Concord’s AI and by Lieutenant Jeffry Thomas, Concord’s chief weapons officer. The ship’s beam weapons, though, slashed into the alien with what looked like deadly effect. Portions of the hull melted and flowed like syrup, heavy and viscous.

  “Captain!” Concord’s helm officer yelled. “We’ve lost control!”

  “Damn it, what’s happening?”

  “We’re being dragged into that thing!”

  Concord drifted forward, accelerating . . . then plunging into that seething, flowing surface. The liquid peeled back like a blossoming flower, then closed around and over the Concord as Dahlquist’s view was submerged in darkness.

  And with a hard jolt, the Concord came to rest.

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  Charlie One

  0751 hours, TFT

  “They’re gone!” Connor screamed over the squadron’s tactical frequency. “That thing just fucking swallowed the Concord!”

  She felt a surge of panic—a churning, tumbling, empty feeling that had her weak and shaking. Too well, she remembered her fighter being swallowed by a Slan warship seven months ago, out at 36 Ophiuchi AIII.

  Damn, she’d thought she was over this. The psychs had probed and analyzed and, where possible, smoothed over her memories of the interrogation, separating the emotion from the simple facts of the events.

  “Take it easy, Five,” Mackey told her.

  “But what do we do?”

  “Get ahold of yourself, Connor! That’s first!”

  She gulped down several breaths, struggling to control herself, her fear. The psych sessions had taught her how to engage certain circuits within her cerebral implants.

  And the alien monster wasn’t coming after her. . . .

  “I’m . . . okay . . .” she managed to say.

  “Right. All fighters—nice and easy—start pulling back. No moves that can be considered hostile.”

  “Might be a little late for that, boss, don’t you think?” Lieutenant Gerald Ruxton pointed out. “Concord was letting loose with everything she had. Of course the aliens think we’re hostile!”

  “As long as they’re not shooting at us,” Mackey said, “I think we’re okay.”

  “They haven’t done anything yet,” Martinez observed.

  “Except eat the Concord!” Connor added.

  “Well,” Mackey said, “Concord’s captain was talking about boarding the alien. Looks like he’s just done precisely that. Everybody just keep it cool. And increase your distance. We’ll back off to a couple of hundred kilometers. Slowly . . .”

  It was, Connor thought, a damned peculiar problem. Were they under attack by the alien, or were they now in a peaceful, first-contact situation? There was no way to be sure.

  The four Starblades drifted out from the huge alien, which now appeared to have returned to its normal, enigmatic self. The portion along one flank that had momentarily flowed like water was whole again, and apparently solid. And the Concord had vanished.

  “So what do we do, Skipper?” Ruxton wanted to know.

  “We pass the word to America,” Mackey replied. “And then we wait.”

  The Mall

  Washington, D.C.

  United States of North America

  1315 hours, EST

  “The men who first founded this city,” Koenig was saying, addressing a crowd that filled the entire Mall and spread out into the streets and steps on all sides, “the men who created it as a seat of government the first time around could not have envisioned the society rebuilding it today. News could travel from New England to the South in a week, perhaps, and buildings like those around us were pieced together by stacking stone blocks upon each other—one at a time—not grown from dirt and a pinch of submicroscopic nanomachines. The human lifespan was five or six decades if you were lucky, ending in pain and senescence if it didn’t end in violence. Transportation on land was by horse or by animal-drawn cart, or you walked. Traveling by sea meant sails and wind power, or oars. And travel by air? Impossible—save, perhaps, for the Montgolfiers’ balloon. Citizens—those who could vote—were exclusively male, exclusively white, and exclusively landowners, and, therefore, rich.

  “And yet the government those men established—uneven as it was, unequal as it was, unfair as it was in some few ways—saw the brilliant and masterful unfolding of true democracy. That of the greatest good for the greatest number, of a truly representative government that within just a few more decades became forever identified as the one government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ The instrument that those men created, the Constitution of the United States and its appended Bill of Rights, became the supreme expression of how government can and should work, of government where the rulers derive their power and authority from the governed, and not the other way around. A government with the various branches in balance with one another, checking one another, a barricade against tyranny, injustice, and from both mob rule and from dictatorial rule by a power-hungry elite.”

  Physically, Koenig was standing inside a huge plastic bubble grown just for the event, with a stage set up inside, a kind of theater in the round with the dome’s walls projecting a 360-degree view of the surrounding crowd. With him, on chairs grown from the stage itself, were the day’s other speakers. The ten-story-high projection screen rose above the crowd at Koenig’s back, and he was glad he wasn’t able to see it from the podium. There was something about watching your own image towering thirty meters high that could put you off your stride if you were the least self-conscious.

  Not that he was—you don’t spend a life as a fighter pilot and then run for office without supreme confidence in yourself. He continued on.

  “The men who built this city, who created that government—they were not perfect. But wh
at they created over six centuries ago remains today as a brilliant beacon of intelligence, of reason, of forethought, of far-reaching planning and vision, a beacon that has not been matched since.”

  Standing at the podium mid-stage, Koenig read the speech as the words scrolled up his in-head window. He scarcely needed them. He’d helped Frank Carraglio craft this speech, and it was a good one: powerful, moving—a speech Koenig implicitly and fundamentally believed in. One he could recite unaided from his heart.

  He wondered how the audience outside was receiving it, though: the physically present crowd—the AI estimates for the gathering exceeded 4 million people—and perhaps half a billion more that were linked in electronically from across the USNA and all over the world.

  Koenig tried not to think about that part.

  “It is to those men, to their memory, to their vision, and to their hopes for Humankind that we rededicate this city so recently rescued from the ocean’s grasp. . . .”

  As he spoke, an alert came through his in-head . . . a written message scrolling along the bottom of his mind’s eye from Marcus Whitney: Concord tried to initiate contact with Charlie One. Ship vanished inside alien. No further information.

  Shit! What the hell was going on there at the solar system’s ragged, far-out edge? What had Commander Dahlquist been thinking, approaching the alien without nearby backup and support? Idiot!

  “It was . . . uh . . . excuse me. It was a mistake for the government to abandon the Periphery, of course.” Finish the speech—worry about the situation later. He carried on. “It was a mistake to assume that when the sea had claimed our cities that no one remained behind, clinging to their homes.”

  Of course he kept on going with the speech. There was nothing he could do about the situation, in any case. The confrontation with the alien was taking place more than five light-hours out. America and her escorts were a hell of a lot closer to the action than he was.

  But in an offhand manner, he did wish he was still back in his office. His staff could keep him updated here almost as fast through his in-head links, but at least in his office he felt like he was in control. That was pure illusion, of course. His years commanding a star carrier and, later, a carrier group out among the stars had taught him time and time again that the thoughts and decisions of the senior policy makers back on Earth or at HQMILCOM Mars were largely irrelevant. They could set general policy, but micromanagement was an exercise in utter futility. It was the person in command on the scene who had to call the shots.

  At the time, Koenig had been convinced that this was a good thing. With the positions reversed, he wasn’t so sure.

  “Technology, however,” he continued, “has given us a chance to correct that old mistake, to take back what was ours, and even to bring forth something new.”

  But if this whole thing went bad because a junior High Guard officer had screwed up, he would skin that puppy alive when he got back to Earth.

  If he gets back at all.

  Koenig acknowledged one thing to himself, however. His speech underscored the vital need for advanced technology—and for the ongoing increase of that technology—to ensure the survival of Humankind. The whole problem between the USNA and the Earth Confederation, the root of the civil war now ending, was the issue of whether or not humans should accept Sh’daar limitations to technology and technological growth. But without nanotechnology—one of the proscribed technologies in the original Sh’daar Ultimatum—Washington, D.C. would have remained a swamp, with most of the old city submerged in a tidal estuary. Nanotech had grown new buildings. More important, it had grown the locks and tidal surge barriers downriver, at Mt. Victoria. It had repaired the sea barrier at the Verrazano Narrows, south of the Manhat Ruins, and the new Broad Sound Barrier off Boston.

  In fact, it was proving to be more difficult to reintegrate the inhabitants of the Periphery into the USNA than it was reclaiming the submerged coastal cities. That was a social problem that they would be dealing with for a good many more decades yet to come. Natives of the Periphery—especially the Prims who continued to reject modern technology—distrusted the government that had abandoned them long ago, while many within the USNA continued to think of Prims as all but subhuman. But that was what he was hoping to change, starting with this speech. As much as he hated to admit it—and as much as he wished he was back in his command center—he was glad he had come here in person.

  “Washington, D.C.,” he said, “was founded in 1791 as the capital of a new nation, a nation imbued with the then radical philosophy that there should be no distinction between social classes. . . .”

  Which, of course, had always itself been something of an illusion, he thought. At the time, women had been second-class citizens, people had owned slaves, and wealthy property owners maintained a kind of aristocracy of wealth. Today, the technical haves held the new wealth, and with it had forced the technological have-nots into occupying a lower social strata.

  A law, an executive order, even a whole new city could not erase human nature.

  And this old city had been buried in a lot of muck before, more than the rising Potomac ever could have dumped in its streets. The men who’d run this city and this country had succumbed more than once to power hunger, to corruption, to idiot fads and fallacies, to the socialistic abrogation of basic rights, to greed, to deception, to outright theft by means both legal and otherwise. Presidents had been disgraced, impeached, and even murdered; congressmen had ignored or betrayed the rule of law, justices had reinterpreted the Constitution. It was as dark and muddy a history as had ever swallowed this town.

  Often, Koenig had wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to leave the city where it was, sunken in the mud, choked by mangrove swamp and entangling kudzu.

  And yet, the idea of Washington remained, despite the corruption, lies, and villainy.

  As with his speech, Koenig held out hope, knowing that it was the symbol that was important, not the facts of history.

  So he went on with his speech. Talked more about those symbols, about the concepts and hopes that the United States had always represented and he—naïve or not—felt still existed in this world. As he did, he looked around at the other speakers for the ceremonies, who were seated around the periphery of the stage. He caught the eye of one young woman and winked. Her name was Shay Ashton, and she was a former fighter pilot from the America. Her story was fascinating, and he remembered it well. After getting out of the Navy, she’d gone back to her home here in old D.C., and ended up taking command of an ad hoc force defending the city against a Confederation assault. The skeletal wreckage of a Confederation Jotun transport she’d destroyed still loomed against the sky over Georgetown, to the north.

  And then, not long after, she’d been asked to volunteer for a virtual assault, her mind riding a computer program into the Geneva electronic network to plant the Starlight virus. Shay Ashton was, as much as anyone in the whole country—and considerably more than most—responsible for the USNA victory in the civil war.

  Her contribution toward ending the war, unfortunately, would have to remain secret. If the details became known, there was no telling what kind of social backlash there might be against the USNA worldwide.

  Partly in recognition of her more physical role in the defense of the Washington ruins, however, she’d been asked to serve as interim governor of the city until later this year, when regular elections could be held. That was why she was on the stage this afternoon.

  Koenig wondered, though, if she’d be interested in a somewhat larger role.

  “And so, it is my very great honor and privilege to dedicate the opening of this city, of the capital of this nation . . . reborn!”

  USNA Star Carrier America

  Outer Sol System

  1440 hours, TFT

  America had reached the alien craft at last. The maneuvers to match velocity with Charlie One had taken ho
urs. Now, though, the star carrier was alongside the alien ship, some ten kilometers off, together with the Elliot and the Hawes. The small flotilla was again accelerating, this time back toward a wan and shrunken, distant sun. America’s fighters had been taken back on board, while the three SAR tugs continued to boost the alien sunward.

  There’d been no communication with the alien ship, or from the Concord inside. And Gray once again in his career was forced to contemplate the problem of first contact.

  Except, of course, that this time it was not exactly a first-contact situation. Charlie One had launched from North India, where, presumably, its occupants had been in communication with the Confederation—the former Confederation—government. They wouldn’t have fled if they’d been talking with the people who’d taken over in Geneva.

  He fervently wished he had some Agletsch on board with him, specifically Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde. He’d first met those two twenty years ago in the Overlook Restaurant, in the SupraQuito Space Elevator habitat high above the Earth. They had worked often and successfully with Koenig, his former CO, in the past, and were expert at interpreting alien emotions and points of view. And even though America’s AI was loaded with several Agletsch trade pidgins, it was better having a conscious mind in the loop. Vocabulary and grammar it could parse, but tone and the subtleties of language were often lost.

  “Comm?” Gray said. “Anything at all?”

  “No response to any of our transmissions, Admiral,” Lieutenant Cramer, in America’s communications suite, replied. “No transmissions of any kind at any wavelength.”

  Which might mean the aliens were ignoring the America. Or it could mean that Charlie One had sustained damage. Perhaps most likely of all, it could mean that there were simply fundamental differences in the technologies.

  “Marines,” he said. “Go.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” a voice replied in his head. “VBSS Team One departing.”

  In an open in-head window, Gray saw the spherical gray shape of the Marine boarding pod breaking free from one of America’s secondary launch tubes and dwindling toward the huge objective ahead.