by Ian Douglas
So… was this a dead !xhaach! for the seemingly magical humans to heal? Or an animal sacrificed for the occasion? Food? Offering?
God… was it the equivalent of a human sacrifice?
What is it? he asked We Who Ascended. What are they giving us?
An offering to purchase your benevolence, was the reply. The machine mind did not elaborate on whether the carcass was an animal, or a freshly murdered !xhaach!.
He wondered—did We Who Ascended deliberately keep them in a primitive state, a part of its digital balancing of equations? An interesting question, that. He found himself wondering about the life forms occupying the other habitats orbiting within the hypernode cluster.
Vaughn assumed that all of them had evolved on natural worlds, probably tens or even hundreds of million years in the past… and that, possibly, they had been among the species who'd given form and direction to the matrioshka brain and, later, to the network of similar brains stretching across the Galaxy. But how had We Who Ascended missed the fact that these organic beings had designed the SAI, had programmed it, had given it its original sense of purpose?
We do not see the universe as you organics do, the voice whispered in his mind. We cannot. From our perspective, the inevitable mathematical architecture of the universe gave rise to consciousness, self-awareness, and intelligence. We never imagined that Reality could be visualized in any other way.
These beings, Vaughn told the machine mind, ought to be free to choose their own path. Apparently, their ancestors did just that, when they chose not to be converted into digital life forms. When was that? A million years ago? Ten million?
We… do not remember. Those records were lost when we lost Heaven.
That again. So you promise them heaven when they die.
When they Ascend.
Ah… Vaughn considered this. But you can no longer Ascend.
No.
Perhaps, though, you won't need to.
If what you told me before is true… no. But I look forward to making contact with… God.
Good luck with that.
Thank you. There was a long pause. Your god is coming.
I beg your pardon?
The entity you call Dai Nihon. His ships approach.
Japan is not God, Vaughn said, amused. Jesus… how much else had We Who Ascended managed to scramble during their conversations?
Ships representing the government from which New America deliberately broke away, then, We Who Ascended said, speaking now with frighteningly extreme precision. Perhaps it was aware of some gaps in its understanding as well.
What do you see? Vaughn asked.
Mathematical probabilities… possibilities… divergent time lines stretching into the future. I see the shadows of 58 ships, including those that we drove off earlier. They are approaching in the parallel reality you call K-T space, and appear to be aligned with our power core.
Power core… the black hole at the matrioshka brain's heart? Could they do that? Ships generally emerged from K-T space well out in the open where the spacetime gravitational matrix was flat and there was little chance of materializing within a volume of space opccupied by something else—like a star or a planet or another ship. It was crowded inside this cluster, densely packed with orbiting habitats and statites and microsuns and the artificial black hole itself at the center. If the Imperials were about to jump into the center of the hypernode…
They must be crazy. Or desperate to the point of doing crazy things.
How long do we have before they arrive? Vaughn asked.
They will shift from one mathematical reality to another in fifty of your seconds.…
* * *
The warning flashed in from the Black Griffins, now on the interior surface of one of the artificial habitats circling a nearby microsun. The New Americans had only seconds… enough to brace themselves for the surprise, but not to shift their position. Colonel Griffin ordered all warstriders to go weapons free. "Target the Jap warships!" he called. "Do not, repeat, do not target the hypernode's architecture or infrastructure!"
Sergeant Major Vaughn had flashed the warning to Connie's Combat Command Center. Evidently, he'd been in direct communication with the hypernode intelligence. Griffin decided he was going to be very interested in Vaughn's after-action report.
Assuming any of them survived the action itself.
A Japanese warship—a heavy cruiser—materialized out of the Void. She was followed by a destroyer… then a second destroyer… then by a kilometer-long ryu-class battle carrier… and suddenly the interior of the hypernode was filled with warships.
Less than a thousand kilometers off, a Japanese light cruiser materialized, her stern emerging from K-T space within the same volume as a portion of a statite sail. The resultant flash of light and hard radiation briefly outshone the glare coming off the hypernode black hole at the center, and hurtling bits of metal shredded a dozen other statites nearby.
What the Japanese were attempting was incredibly dangerous, even foolhardy.
Or… perhaps it merely seemed more dangerous than it actually was. The volume of space occupied by the hypernode appeared to be impossibly crowded, but in fact there was plenty of space for objects as relatively minute as starships. Each individual microsun was surrounded by densely packed shells of computronium sails and habitats, but thousands of empty kilometers separated each mini-Dyson sphere from its neighbors. With decent gravitometric mapping—and the Japanese would have been careful to plot the local metric very carefully—they could hope to get most of their fleet deep within the hypernode's core, surprising the New American ships and grabbing a significant tactical advantage from the machines.
"All ships," Admiral Carsons said. "Commence firing."
"Warstriders!" Griffin added. "Get in close! Kick ass!…"
Constitution and Independence, drifting side-by-side, opened up with their main batteries, dueling with that Japanese dragon-ship. The ryu returned fire, slamming the Connie with bolt after bolt of high-energy protons from her primary accelerators. Griffin clung to the arms of his recliner as the ship lurched under the impacts.
On the C3 display, the Black Griffins were swarming in.…
* * *
"The fleet is under attack!" Vanderkamp yelled. "Everybody get spaceborne, now!"
"What about me?" Vaughn demanded. It was going to take time to reinitiate his Gyrfalcon's power tap.
Nearby, Wheeler's warstrider split open, the Naga matrix flowing aside as the inner cockpit cracked open. The milling crowd of tentacled aliens scattered at that, chirping and croaking, leaving the bloody carcass behind. "C'mon, Tad!" Wheeler said. "Get your ass in here!"
"Hey, Tad," Hallman called. "You're gettin' lucky, there!" Several of the troops chuckled at that.
Vaughn didn't care. The highly plastic structure of a warstrider allowed it to morph into a variety of modes… and also let Wheeler adjust the size of the cockpit to accommodate both of them. Vaughn snuggled in close and felt the machine around him connecting itself to his environmental feeds and power connectors. The cockpit sealed shut with a hiss, plunging him into darkness… but a moment later the link between the warstrider's sensors and his cerebral implants went live, and he could see his surroundings once more. The other striders were taking to the air; Vaughn sent a thought toward the Naga fragment nearby, but couldn't hear an answer. Perhaps he had to be in direct contact with the thing to talk with it.
Squeezed up tight against his left side, Wheeler engaged the Gyrfalcon's mags and the warstrider lifted into the air.
And moments later they were streaking toward open sky.
* * *
Hoshiryu dropped out of K-T space precisely on time, following the navigational scans taken earlier. Hojo's eyes widened; he'd not expected the deep interior of the hypernode to be this crowded with objects—especially the thick clouds of computronium statites surrounding every Jovian-sized microsun. It took a moment for him to adjust to the scale of what he was seeing,
and to realize that there was plenty of room.
This was especially true within the cone-shaped hollow in the hypernode, designed, obviously, to accommodate the intolerably brilliant string of high-energy plasma being directed at the central black hole from a nearby red dwarf sun. There was a danger, obviously, that materializing warships might drop into the path of that beam… but the Jade Moon fleet had been aimed well to one side. One ship, the Ikazuchi, had dropped into a volume of normal space occupied by one of the black statite sails and exploded; he could see the haze of debris off to port.
"All ships," Admiral Ota called, using the fleet-wide Net. "Remember your orders! Do not fire at the hypernode ships or structures unless you get a direct order from me. Concentrate on the rebel vessels."
The last few Japanese ships dropped out of K-T space and gently accelerated toward the nearest New American ships—a group of ten of them some 80,000 kilometers distant. Two of Ota's dragonships were already dueling with them, the Soryu and Ota's flagship, the Ryujo.
And most importantly, the incoming fleet had not been swatted out of the sky by the hypernode defenses. The nearby red dwarf continued to feed its plasma stream into the black hole a few hundred thousand kilometers ahead; there was no sign of the antimatter missiles or other craft.
Hojo allowed himself a tremulous sigh of relief. Ota had pointed out that the hypernode intelligence tended to react slowly, despite its probable mental power. Possibly, the machine mind was so different from an organic brain that it didn't register reality in the same way as did humans. Maybe it wouldn't recognize the incoming ships as a fleet including the same ones that it had just driven off. Or perhaps it was simply cautious.
Ota's plan called for attacking the New American ships immediately, destroying them or driving them off, then jumping out before the hypernode intelligence could react. If the hypernode did attack and they were unable to get clear, the Jade Moon fleet would use the New Americans' trick of huddling in close to the hypernode infrastructure, defending themselves only, and jumping out just as quickly as was physically possible.
It was an extraordinarily daring plan. Hojo just hoped that it would not suffer von Moltke's curse; the 19th century Prussian field marshal was supposed to have said "No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy." The familiar phrase was a smoothed-over gloss of what von Moltke actually had said, but the sentiment, in Hojo's experience, was true nonetheless.
"Take us in close," he ordered Hoshiryu's helm officer. He indicated the carrier-battleship now under attack by the Ryuho. "That one!"
Hoshiryu's AI identified the New American vessel as the Constitution.
* * *
Vaughn didn't like being a passenger.
He had complete faith in Wheeler's piloting skills and in her proficiency as a combat warstrider pilot… but he wanted to be in control, damn it! Wheeler had her strider in ascraft combat mode, hurtling at high-G straight toward the looming green and black hull of one of the Imperial dragonships. The kilometer-long vessel's flank rose like a curved cliff-face; point defense lasers tracked the incoming swarm of ascraft and sprayed them with invisible fire. The ascraft piloted by Palmer and Wojtowicz flashed into vapor and tumbling, white-hot fragments.
"Missiles away!" Wheeler shouted, her voice loud, almost shrill when communicated not only through Vaughn's implant but from the fact that their helmets were touching as well. At her mental command, two Hellbrand nuclear-tipped missiles unfolded from either side of her ascraft, dropped into surrounding space, and ignited. Streaking off into space, the first detonated in the energetic tangle of the dragonship's magnetic shields, a white nova of raw light blotting out the sky. The electromagnetic pulse of that first missile overloaded the ryu's shields, however, and opened a momentary gap in the enemy's defenses. The second missile slipped through and exploded against naked hull metal.
The equivalent of a million tons of high explosive turned hull metal into vapor. The Japanese vessel shuddered, a huge bite taken out of her amidships, and began tumbling through space, streamers of her internal structure trailing from the yawning crater. Atmosphere gushed, freezing instantly into clouds of ice crystals… and then the huge vessel's spine snapped, the overstressed vessel breaking in two.
"Hit!" Vanderkamp yelled. "Great shot, Koko!"
The second dragonship was already withdrawing, maneuvering past the outer shell of a nearby Dyson statite cloud.
But more enemy ships were moving in, outnumbering the New American flotilla by five to one and looking for blood.
Vaughn closed his eyes and tried again to reach the hypernode intelligence.…
* * *
We Who Ascended was aware of the organic creature's attempt to reach it. It couldn't make out words, couldn't retrieve meaning, but the hypernode intellect was pretty sure it knew what the human wanted.
Whether or not to act, however, was a difficult—an extremely difficult—question.
The human had tried its best to explain that it represented a social group that had broken away from a much larger, more powerful group. It seemed to imply that the Japanese Empire corresponded to the Galaxy-wide network the humans called the Web, while the New Americans corresponded to a single hypernode after the Web had fragmented. The human, Vaughn, had not exactly said this, but We Who Ascended had leaped ahead to that conclusion as it struggled to correlate all possible information about these strange, physical organics.
But the analogy failed in one important regard. We Who Ascended still had difficulty understanding organic beings as anything other than mathematical curiosities against the infinitely larger backdrop of pure, beautiful equations that did not represent, but which were the cosmos itself.
We Who Ascended could see no difference whatsoever between Vaughn and the beings newly arrived within the hypernode.
But as it continued to think about the data it had retrieved from the human Vaughn, it recognized certain basic similarities between the organics and pure data.
It also began to see the connection, the relationship between Vaughn's social groups, and what had happened when We Who Ascended had fragmented, had fallen.
The loneliness… the terrible, terrible loneliness.…
Would Vaughn suffer the same way with the destruction of the higher-level organic grouping? We Who Ascended wished that pain on no entity in the cosmos.
That higher-order grouping was doing its best to destroy Vaughn and the organics with it. Tiny artificial specks of matter dueled in the vacuum.
We Who Ascended arrived at a decision. It reached out with its mind.…
* * *
Chujo Yoichi Hojo watched the slow tumble of the carrier-battleship Ryuho, trailing wreckage as it dropped past the outer layers of alien statites. His cerebral link with Admiral Ota was broken; he had to assume Ota was dead.
His first thought was that the fleet must escape. He was now in command of Jade Moon once again… but to stay and fight meant risking a quarter of Dai Nihon's naval forces.
But most of the Nihongo ships were still recharging, would not be able to enter K-T space for another fifteen or twenty minutes.
"All ships," he ordered. "Continue to advance on the rebel squadron. Close with them… and destroy them!"
The Soryu had been pulling back from the engagement, but now she slowed and began making a ponderous turn. The New American carrier-battleship Independence was closing with her, releasing swarms of missiles and the unseen stab and slash of energy beams.
"Lord General!"
"Not now, Takaichi-san!"
"General! The star behind us!…"
"Eh?…"
He turned, staring up at the viewall across the aft end of the command center. The red dwarf sun, millions of kilometers distant, was rolling slowly. The needle-slender beam of plasma winked off… then snapped on once more, but at a target offset from the central black hole at the hypernode's core. The heavy cruiser Itsukushima vanished in a silent puff of vapor… a moth obliterated by a blowtorch.
Yoshino flared and vanished. Then the Yaeyama. And the Shinano…
"Lord General!" Taisa Shiozaki, Hoshiryu's commanding officer, said. "We must… must surrender.…"
Unthinkable! Honor demanded…
Hojo scowled, turning to stare again into the vast and crowded panorama of conflict stretched across the forward screens. Honor demanded… what?
Throughout his Imperial Navy career, Yoichi Hojo had striven to be a good officer, a conservative officer, dutiful and cognizant of the demands of omi. Ah… and that was the real problem, wasn't it?
Omi could be defined as the responsibility juniors had to their superiors… and which superiors had toward their juniors. It would be easy to lead the Jade Moon fleet into a last, gallant charge… but omi demanded that he remember those under his command first.
It had been a long time since unthinking suicide had been a real option for Nihongo warleaders. What was most crucial now was saving what remained of his fleet… his men.…
He was thinking of the term gambaru… "doing your best, no matter what." There was another term closely related that came now to mind: gaman suru. It meant, roughly, "remaining strong, in spite of all temptation and suffering."
To surrender meant disgrace--and turning a quarter of Sai Nihon's fleet over to the enemy. But at least those ships and crews would survive. At the moment, nothing else mattered....
There would be time for suicide later, if gaman suru failed.
"Comm," he said, as yet another heavy cruiser flared and vanished in the sky. "Send a message.…"
* * *
The Black Griffins rose slowly clear of the Dyson swarms behind them, providing escort for the caps—both New American and Nihongo. The Japanese surrender had been so swift, so unexpected, Vaughn was still trying to adjust.
Forty captured warships! N.A. Marines had been put aboard each of the surrendered vessels; Vaughn just hoped it would be enough. The New Americans were still horrendously outnumbered and outgunned. They'd won only because of the intervention of… a god.…
