Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5)

by Ian Douglas

  “I still find this whole idea . . . unlikely in the extreme,” Vandenberg said. His tone of voice sounded like he found the operation distasteful rather than unrealistic.

  Vandenberg and Caldwell both had opposed the RM program almost from the start. Both men had strong personal religious beliefs, Koenig knew. Were they resisting Operation Luther because of the idea of introducing a new—and therefore false—religion to an unsuspecting planet? Or was it that they technically would be violating the White Covenant?

  “Mr. President, we have absolutely no proof that something on this scale is going to work,” Caldwell said. “A religion, any religion, is an extremely powerful memeplex. Memeplexes like that are extremely resilient . . . and they have built-in defenses. Very strong defenses.”

  “Dr. Lee?” Koenig said. He’d not met the diminutive RM expert before, but knew him by reputation. His e-file listed him as a memetics consultant on Delmonico’s staff, but he also held a position as senior chair of the memetics program at the University of Chicago. “What do you have to say about it?”

  “Well, an entrenched memeplex does have defenses,” Lee said. “One of the defining characteristics of a memeplex, of an association of interrelated memes or sociocultural ideas, is the idea that—like genes—memes evolve through natural selection, and do so in order to protect and strengthen themselves from outside pressures. Successful memes became extremely stable, and resist any attempts to change them.”

  “I don’t understand how a meme can protect itself,” Koenig said. “A meme is just . . . an idea, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, it’s an idea, Mr. President, to be sure. But human nature makes it more. A lot more.

  “Take the idea that you must convert others to your religion out of duty or altruism. That injunction has long been one meme within the larger memeplex of certain religions—most notably radical Islam and some of the noisier fundamentalist sects within Christianity. The entire memeplex works together to protect individual memes within the system.

  “For example, a meme that values faith over reason serves to protect the overall memeplex from attack by societal or cultural forces outside of that belief set. So does the meme stating that this particular faith is the only way to reach heaven. People infected by those memes tend to close ranks against any and all others, outsiders, who are not infected by those memes. Arguments based on reason or science are automatically rejected since they don’t come from faith. Suggestions that other faiths might be acceptable to God are rejected because clearly my interpretation of the Bible or the Quran or the Book of Mormon is right. If it’s not, then I am wrong.

  “And being wrong is an unthinkable paradox, one leaving the disappointed believer vulnerable and adrift. He’ll cling to the original memeplex, and all of the internally consistent internal memes, at all costs, against all arguments, against all reason, even, rather than admit he was wrong.”

  “I see. Thank you.” Koenig reflected that in some ways, the White Covenant had sidestepped such issues by making any discussion or comparison of religions wrong . . . or, at the very least, an unconscionably bad breach of manners. Don’t attack another’s religious faith. Don’t try to convert him. Don’t attack him because he doesn’t believe what you believe. No matter what he believes in, he has an absolute and unalienable right to that belief . . . so long as he doesn’t try to harm others. For the majority of humans on the planet, the White Covenant had pushed religion into the background . . . something you believed or did but which you did not discuss with others not of your faith.

  But even after more than three centuries of enforcing a truce among competing religious memes, attacking a religion head-on was still almost unthinkably difficult. Lee was claiming that people who were immersed within their religion, no matter what it was, were shielded by that religion’s defensive memes, defenses that rendered true believers blind to logical fallacies, to mistaken assumptions, to bad research or impossible history, to any argument that denied or even questioned the rationality or the reality of that faith.

  What they were going to try to do with Operation Luther, however, wasn’t quite as head-on direct as attacking another religion. Instead, Konstantin had crafted a spiritual-humanistic movement called, variously, lumière des étoiles or Sternenlicht . . . in English, “Starlight.”

  Koenig still wondered if Konstantin understood humans or the way they thought well enough to create what amounted to a new religion, but the Starlight Movement was going to cause a stir, of that much he was certain.

  Assuming, of course, that Starlight worms could be planted within the Pan-European AI networks in the first place.

  “I don’t think it will work, Mr. President,” Caldwell said. “People’s beliefs . . . they’re just too strong to be taken apart overnight by advertising. This Starlight movement of Konstantin’s is going to be squelched from the very beginning.”

  “Do you agree, Dr. Lee?”

  The man shrugged. “Recombinant memetics is nowhere even remotely close to being an exact science, Mr. President. Predictions are impossible. But, given time, and good placement, there’s a chance. . . .”

  “It’s not perfect, Phil,” Koenig said after a long moment, replying to Caldwell’s blunt statement. “We don’t know if it will work. We can’t. But it’s the best weapon we have right now to reach inside the Confed government and grab them where it hurts.

  “Operation Luther will go as planned . . . tonight.”

  USNA CVS America

  Enceladus orbit

  Saturn space

  1640 hours, TFT

  “Admiral Gray? We have a . . . situation.”

  He checked the caller ID—and saw it was Dr. Tara Hallowell, calling him in-head. “Go ahead, Dr. Hallowell. Make it quick.”

  Gray was on the flag bridge, going through the seemingly endless checklist required by regulations before breaking orbit and boosting for Earth. Of particular concern was America’s water tank, holed in numerous places during the battle. And besides that, as admiral of the battegroup, he had to make decisions about the readiness of every ship under his command. He didn’t really have time for civilians at the moment.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir, but we’ve found more Grdoch.”

  He sighed, exasperated. “Then put them under guard and file a report. I don’t need to be notified about every—”

  “Sir, it’s what they’re . . . what they’re doing. I think you should see.”

  He was about to chew her a new one . . . but something about the tone in her voice made him hold back. She sounded . . . not frightened, exactly. But she was stressed and she was worried. It almost sounded as though she was fighting back tears.

  “Do I need to fire up my Noter?”

  “No, sir. I can feed you vid straight from here. I’m afraid it’s not very pleasant. . . .”

  Now he was curious. “Do it.”

  “We only just found this compartment, Admiral,” she told him. “This ship is—is big!”

  An in-head window opened, and he saw . . . what the hell was it?

  It took him a few seconds to make sense of what he was seeing. Hallowell evidently was in a large, open compartment on board the alien vessel. A line of armored Marines partly blocked his view, but they also added a sense of scale to the life form rising in the background.

  The thing was . . . immense. It towered above the Marines at least fifteen meters away, and might have been ten or twelve meters tall and twenty long. At first glimpse, it was almost featureless, a blob, but it was alive. Things like stubby, useless flippers, three of them around that flabby mess of a body, waved and stretched, flapping helplessly against the air. It took Gray a moment to identify what might have been a face . . . puckered mouth . . . widely spaced, flaring openings that might have been for breathing . . . a circle of eight tiny, disturbingly human eyes that rolled and shifted in pain or terror or, quite likely
, both. The skin appeared rubbery and gray green . . . except where it had been gashed open and was leaking gray liquid and yellow-white froth. The mouth split open, and the thing screamed, a thunderous roar torn by agony.

  “Hallowell!” Gray snapped. “What the devil—”

  “It’s a food animal, Admiral! They’re eating it! They’re eating it alive!”

  He saw them, then, perhaps a dozen of the scarlet Grdoch wallowing and rolling inside the far larger creature’s wounds, or swarming up its sides. He watched as one extended a three-clawed limb and ripped at the huge beast’s flank. Others crawled up or clung to the screaming beast’s flesh as it shuddered and rolled, slashing to open ways inside. Once the wounds were open, the Grdoch used their limbs to peel the flaps of wound back, brace it wide open and squeeze themselves inside. Those hundreds of fleshy mouths or trunks fastened to glistening, weeping tissue and pulsed as they fed.

  “My God. . . .”

  “We—we think the food animal is either an artificially created genetic life form, or it’s something that’s been genetically manipulated. But the Grdoch . . . it’s like a feeding frenzy!”

  Gray had attended training seminars and downloads for military officers, designed to hammer home the lesson that alien cultures, customs, and biologies, while different from humans, were nonetheless valid for those alien species. Concepts like good and evil were human constructs, and should not be applied to beings that had evolved on other worlds, under radically different conditions, in alien environments and with alien cultures.

  But Gray was having a great deal of trouble remembering that as he watched the Grdoch consume the living animal literally from the inside.

  “Damn it,” Gray said, suddenly angry. “Can’t you put that creature out of its misery?”

  “No, sir!” Hallowell shot back. “The Grdoch clearly evolved as hunters on their home world . . . and they may need their prey to be alive!”

  Gray checked the list of people on that channel. Captain Kornbluth was there. Good.

  “Captain Kornbluth!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Kill that large creature. Burn it down!”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  “Admiral! No!”

  “That thing is suffering, Doctor.”

  Kornbluth gave an order, and laser light flared off the food animal’s head . . . if that’s what it was. The huge animal continued bellowing with agony-laced thunder.

  “I don’t think it keeps its brains in its head, Admiral!” Kornbluth told him.

  Great . . . just great. Gray realized he’d just made the situation worse.

  “Those things are riled, Captain!” a Marine yelled. “They’re gonna rush us!”

  Within the window, Gray could see more and more of the Grdoch emerging from the food animal’s bulk, wet and dripping. The one he’d seen earlier had seemed skittish, afraid . . . even cowardly. These appeared to be very, very angry, and fearless.

  Several in the front of the pack rushed the Marines, and the Marines opened fire. As Gray watched through the vid link, he saw the marines firing bolt after bolt of laser and plasma energy into the oncoming mass of rugose scarlet. Damn, but those things were hard to kill! One took five or six direct hits before it collapsed, shuddering, on the deck.

  And as the Marines covered the technicians backing out through the door, others began to collapse as well. Smoke boiled through the compartment. Dying Grdoch chittered and shrieked.

  “Kornbluth!” Gray shouted. “Get your people out of there!”

  “Aye, aye, sir! You heard the Admiral, Marines! Fall back! Fall back!”

  “Seal the doors,” Gray ordered as the last Marine reached safety. The door slid shut . . . and then Gray heard a massive thud as something heavy hit it on the other side. “Keep them locked up in there until we get them back to Luna.”

  And still the prey-beast thundered beyond the door. . . .

  Chapter Eleven

  7 March 2425

  Virtual Reality

  0230 hours, Geneva Time

  Her body was back in Colorado Springs, but Shay Ashton’s mind hurtled through an alien landscape that scrolled beneath her in a speed-blurred rush. From her inner perspective, she was in her old SG-92 Starhawk, flying wingtip to wingtip with Newton Cabot’s ship. Both had morphed into sperm mode for the sake of greater speed and maneuverability.

  There was something about that which struck Ashton as just a little silly; it wasn’t as though they were flying through a real planetary atmosphere where they had to worry about lift or drag or friction. They weren’t even maneuvering through interplanetary space, where near-c impacts with dust grains and stray molecules of gas could generate enough radiation to cook you. Virtual combat took place in your mind, within a shared reality generated and moderated by a powerful AI.

  But belief was an important factor in the generation of that reality, and the more realistic the simulation, the more completely the sim-warriors could buy in to the visual and tactile in-head story being woven by the AI. The intruding cyberforce needed speed to trace its way through the Confederation’s computer networks, through their outer shells of defense and access, and so the Starhawks in Ashton’s mind were in sperm mode. It helped the illusion.

  And the illusion, Ashton thought, was pretty damned good. It was night, starless and black above, but with the ground below showing as a vast and sprawling landscape of geometric patterns picked out in light. Skyscrapers marked junction routers, major server clusters, and shared distributed processing loci, and circuit networks were vast fields of straight-line highways, while logic gates and ports to external interfaces looked like tunnels or like literal gates outlined in light and vanishing toward a distant horizon of blackness and blue-white light. Data traffic on the Confederation network appeared as other aircraft flying from point to point across that landscape . . . or as luminous monorails or mag-lev travel pods swiftly zipping from node to node below.

  In fact, the Starhawks themselves were software, as was Ashton’s viewpoint from the cockpit of one of them. Very complex software, to be sure, created and supported by the super-AI Konstantin on the moon, but software nonetheless. It wasn’t like it was real. . . .

  It certainly felt real. Skimming above a bundle of circuit lanes, feeling the flow of electrons and photons within the dynamic matrix, she could not tell that she wasn’t actually piloting her Starhawk through alien wonder, that she—or her body, rather—was actually back beneath Cheyenne Mountain.

  The other Starhawks in the flight were branching off, vanishing into other gateways, other ports. She and Cabot continued hurtling through vistas of pure light.

  By glancing at individual buildings as she approached, then passed, and by focusing a part of her awareness, she could see ID tags pop into view, identifying the structure in question. She was searching for a particular physical repository of system firmware—the EPROM holding the BIOS, or basic input/output system. From her current vantage point, she was looking down on a variety of computer architectures, a vast and complex forest of interlinked computers and advanced AI.

  First, though, she had to find the right computer network, then the right set of servers. There were so many of them. . . .

  PANEURO.GOV 83723-669-945 . . .

  GENEVA.GOV 83736-444-735 . . .

  GENEVA.ADMIN 84736-839-335 . . .

  Network defenses spread across the sky, a blue-black cloud, like an onrushing thunderhead, seeking to drag them down. Ashton triggered her own countermeasures . . . answering clouds of viral antisoftware eating through the ICE like acid.

  As she penetrated the network, she was bringing with her the cold and vast intellect of the Tsiolkovsky AI, Konstantin. Excluded from standard access to the Pan-European networks by firewalls and physical barriers, Konstantin could use the swift-moving software fighters as a back door to piggyback itself into
the system, penetrating, exploring, revealing . . . and changing.

  “They know we’re here,” Cabot’s voice said over their private link. “The alarm is spreading.”

  “I see it.” One after another, systems around them were releasing countermeasures . . . or else going dark as the physical connections between networks were broken. More thunderheads gathered in the distance . . . searching . . . questing. . . .

  “Releasing RM,” Cabot announced.

  “Copy.” She wanted to hold on for a few more moments, wait until they were deeper inside, before releasing her own viral warhead.

  Ah! There it was. That was what they were looking for.

  OERE.ADMIN 89749-783-003 . . .

  Thunderheads, dozens of them, guarded the portal.

  The Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Extraterrestrienne had been spawned by the much earlier European Council for Nuclear Research, better known by the acronym CERN. The modern OERE had been designed to study both extraterrestrial cultures and biologies as they were encountered. The port yawned below them as Ashton and Cabot peeled off and accelerated. Light blurred past them, their illusion of velocities too great to properly measure. In fact, their brains were in drug-induced and implant-manipulated overdrive, with nanoseconds passing for them like seconds. There would otherwise be no way for human awareness and perception to experience the light-speed interactions among computer networks on-line.

  The target system opened around them, a bewildering maze of three-dimensional towers and lattices and geometric frameworks of dazzling light. Twisting sharply, the two Starhawks sped deeper into the labyrinth. A tunnel yawned—a major virtual-memory array. Thunderstorms reached for them, lightning jabbing and exploding across a black sky, but the two fighters dodged and wheeled, their own countermeasure software engaging the enemy ICE, holding it at bay, sometimes distracting it, sometimes melting it away . . . or even convincing it that there was no threat all.