Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  Theory hoped he had them deployed effectively. They had taken their positions with a bit of grumbling—especially Carlyle, who felt that, being stationed in the orbit of the outer moons, he would miss most of the action. He wasn’t a soldier, and Theory didn’t upbraid him. He merely repeated his order. Still grumbling, the cloudship had moved to do his bidding.

  Each ship carried a retinue of troops—but far fewer than the DIED ships. Sherman had taken fifty-five thousand, including the better part of the veteran Third Sky and Light Brigade, with him to Pluto, leaving Theory with most of the Second Division of the Federal Army—a force that consisted almost entirely of new recruits. (The First Division was the designation claimed by the Federal forces at Jupiter.)

  So, at Neptune, it was the Second Division’s 113,000 against who knew how many DIED soldiers. DIED cruisers could carry twenty thousand in each ship, packed and unpacked. Twenty ships could hold half the civilian population of Triton! There were reportedly twenty-five ships on their way.

  If he had any hope of winning, Theory knew that the coming fight would have to remain a naval battle. It must be kept in space. The Federal Army hadn’t been laggards over the past year. If anything, they’d far outstripped the pace of the Met in the rate of their arms buildup. The only problem was, the Met had vast factories and several times the population of the outer system; the count, including LAPs and free converts, was roughly 90 billion Met citizens to 10 billion fremden.

  Fremden. There was that word again: German for stranger. It had started out as a slur from the other side, but more and more Federal troops were taking it up, using it proudly.

  Not only that, the general populace was taking to it. Jennifer Fieldguide had used it the other day, on another “park date” in Fork. When he questioned her, she said it was a matter-of-fact appellation among her friends at the bakery, and nobody meant any disrespect by it.

  Theory had been startled when Jennifer took instantly to his son. The boy was no more outgoing with Jennifer than he’d been with anyone else, but this didn’t seem to faze Jennifer. Instead, she’d been touched by the boy’s indifference—especially after Theory filled her in on the child’s horrible upbringing under Theory’s old lover, Constants.

  “He’s a little wounded bird who never had a nest,” Jennifer said to Theory. “He needs warmth and safety. Everything else will flow from that. You’ve given him the first safety he’s ever known.”

  “I’d like to give him more of my attention,” Theory had replied. “But I’m at a loss what to do.”

  “I can help,” Jennifer said. And she did. Theory gave her the keys to his “apartment” in the virtuality, and Jennifer began to spend much of her free time there, playing with the boy. Instead of acquiring a girlfriend, Theory was afraid he’d recruited a nanny. Yet they had continued going out, sometimes alone, sometimes with the boy, and she definitely seemed to be warming toward him. There had been no kiss as yet, much less anything more than that, but Theory was hopeful. For the first time in many years, he found that he had a private life. And instead of interfering with his duties, it seemed to make him a better soldier. He was definitely gaining more insight into the ways of biological humans—and they made up most of the people he was charged with defending, after all.

  So, despite his doubts as to the wisdom of his own temporary appointment as the military head of the system, he was going into battle with a great deal more emotional support—and a great deal more to lose—than he’d ever experienced before.

  Theory had his staff spread out on the six cloudships. His command center did not exist in the physical world, but was a virtual war room that every one participated in over the fremden knit. Captain Quench and his company were with Sherman. The remainder of the Third Sky and Light, along with another regiment’s worth of green soldiers—twenty thousand troops, all told—were concentrated in two cloudships—Austen and Twain—who were assigned to guard the Mill at all costs. If there was to be an infantry space battle, this would be the place to make that stand. The rest of the Second Division remained in defense and reserve on Triton.

  Completed ten e-years ago, the Mill consisted of a propeller-like blade, as wide as the Earth, that turned within the great central storm of Neptune’s atmosphere, the Blue Eye, and generated power that not only fueled the local system but provided energy that Neptune sold in the outer system—at least, that they had sold until Pluto, Saturn, Uranus, and half of the Jupiter system fell into Met hands. At the moment, the Mill was churning out much more production than Neptune had customers. Much of this excess energy had been tapped for the creation of a vast system of defense.

  The Neptune system was heavily mined and layered with military grist. In addition, large amounts of material from the rings and moon had been added to the six cloud-ships over the course of a three e-month period. All of them had doubled in size now—a task that would have taken several years before had they not been bathed in energy and packed with material maneuvered to them by mechanical rocketry grist.

  Neptune had become Fortress Neptune. Theory only hoped it was enough. Every military and political mind knew that Amés was after the Mill. He’d promised to destroy it before if he met any resistance. Sherman had defeated the DIED’s first attempt at invading the system, and denied Amés the Mill. Now it was a matter not just of expediency, but of honor, for Amés to take it or incapacitate it. No one expected him to destroy it outright—it was far too valuable a commodity in the long term to whoever possessed it.

  Theory turned his attention to the war room.

  “What have you got for me, Monitor?” he asked his sensor chief.

  Major Monitor, a free convert, was normally a taciturn man. But he, like many of Theory’s old friends, could not help getting a gibe in on Theory’s new appearance. This had been going on for weeks. Theory supposed it helped to ease the growing tension.

  “Nothing yet, Captain Brawny Legs,” Monitor replied. Then he did a dramatic double take. “Oh, that’s you, Colonel. Mistook you for a superhero, I did. That fellow from the merci show. The one who sails the ocean blue and rescues the weak while the ladies give him their knickers on a silver platter…”

  “Very funny,” Theory replied.

  Ever since he’d shown up at work in his newly bulked- up form with his freshly grown full beard, the ranking had been ceaseless. Even Sherman had joined in for a while, cautioning Theory to be careful with doors and hatchways, less he rip them off their virtual hinges.

  He was constantly tempted to return to his old visual representation, but a promise was a promise. He’d told Jennifer he would retain his “heroic” form even while at work, and he meant to do it. It was a sort of penance for having fooled her before, and when he thought the matter through, he supposed there could be far worse things she might have called upon him to do to make up for his duplicity.

  So he kept his newly minted chiseled, muscular good looks, didn’t blank the beard, bore the comments of his colleagues as gamely as possible—and generally considered himself lucky to be getting off so easily, after all.

  “Grist jamming detected, sir,” reported Major Monitor, suddenly all business. “We’re cut off in the direction of Saturn.”

  No one was sure how the DIED forces accomplished the merci jamming, although Forward Laboratories and a group on Callisto were working hard on the problem. It had something to do with those strange LAPs known as time towers, but no one knew what precisely. Cracking through this advantage would greatly improve the outer system’s chances. The merci was, by definition, a network, taking its existence from the grist spread across the entire solar system. It wasn’t supposed to be possible to isolate portions of it. And yet Amés had found a way to do just that. It played havoc with communications.

  But the jamming signaled one fact clearly and distinctly: The DIED navy was approaching. The blockage had a certain range—mapped out by Sherman and Theory when they used the captured Boomerang to attack the Met cruise Montserrat. Whatever the de
vice was, it was carried on a ship and created a barbell-like signature, blooming out from the ship. At the time of the invasion, Triton had been utterly isolated from the larger merci. Since then, they’d put several work-arounds in place.

  There were electromagnetic relays interspersed throughout the system so that, if a local portion of the knit were isolated, it could still communicate at light speeds with command. The DIED had e-m jamming equipment, too, of course, but Gerardo Funk had designed new high-wattage transponders that operated on coded bursts of extreme power.

  There was another backup of last resort. If the e-m relays didn’t work, there was a series of nuclear devices set up on the small moon, Naiad. If need be, Theory could order mass blown from that moon in one of several agreed-upon series, and communicate with his forces through gravimetric disturbances. Gravity changes, too, would propagate at light speed, and not at the instantaneous rate of the merci. All of the work-arounds were a far-from-perfect substitute for the merci and the Federal Army’s dedicated portion thereof, the knit.

  “Group One is slow and steady at approximately 50 K,” Monitor said. Fifty K meant fifty thousand kilometers per hour. “Group Two out of the jam cloud now. Full run speed, 1.1 MK.”

  One-point-one million kilometers per hour, thought Theory. One-hundredth of light speed. As fast as you could go. No one could maneuver or fight in a planetary system at such a velocity, however. These ships would necessarily blaze through the system at their relativistic rate, then use Neptune’s angular momentum and atmospheric drag for a brake-assist to slow them down to fighting speed. They would have to make several dozen elliptic orbits around Neptune, each orbit having a slower speed and more circular orientation. Theory hoped to take at least one of the ships out with his minefields as they made their initial loops near the planet.

  The real trick—they’d know shortly if they’d pulled it off—was to see that several of these ships kept going. That would mean the diversionary attack on Pluto had succeeded in drawing off those ships as reinforcements. And if every plan fell into place, there would be another set of ships using the planet not to slow down, but to change vectors for Uranus in order to meet the carefully constructed decoy threat in that system. It had all been designed by Sherman to break the concentration of the Met’s attack force and whittle them off into manageable chunks. Or at least chunks small enough that the Federal forces had some chance of defeating them.

  Monitor was feeding identifications into the war room of the various DIED ships as the signals began coursing in from the e-m detectors.

  “Group One is… Aztec Sacrifice Group, as reported by intelligence drone Maria-Alpha,” said Monitor. “Configuration an exact match,” Monitor continued, with a trace of pride in his voice.

  The little semisentient spy drone they’d shot on a passive course to Saturn had certainly done itself proud, reflected Theory. If they got out of this battle alive, he would have to see about upgrading the thing to full free-convert status and giving it a promotion. For service like that, the drone deserved a really good personality template. Perhaps Monitor would volunteer his. Sending the drone had been his idea in the first place.

  “Group Two crossing Nereid orbital plane,” Monitor reported. They were communicating instantaneously, but time was still required to form thoughts, to speak words. By Monitor’s second report, they were one-quarter of the distance between the outer moon and the planet. One-half.

  This area was where the heaviest concentration of mines were placed. There was no way to form a globe around the entire planet—such a construction would be as large as Jupiter—but there were several likely vectors that the ships would use for their braking maneuver. Theory himself had spent many days plotting and refining these likely routes. He was still in full communication with the minefields. The merci jamming was coming from the Aztec Sacrifice group.

  “7sxq688N, detonating,” came the dull voice of a mine, this one a female.

  “Strike one strike,” said a male voice mine, this one a bit more agitated. These mines were fully sentient free-convert copies, as were all armed antimatter devices as a matter of law. The mines were all volunteers, and they knew they were expected to die. They seldom made much rhetorical fuss about it. “7sxq688N has a strike one strike. Godspeed, 7sxq688N.”

  Captain Allsky, who was physically with his company on Cloudship Austen, supplied the missing emotion. “We got the fucker!” Allsky yelled to everyone. “We blew it to hell, we did!”

  A small cheer erupted in the war room. A DIED cruiser had been taken out.

  “Give me a status report, Monitor,” said Theory.

  “I’ve got…I’ve got…some of Group Two is peeling off. We’ve either got an overshot or…”A millisecond delay. Theory knew Monitor was correlating billions of readings simultaneously. “I’ve got three vectors. One Pluto-bound. One assist-braking.” Another pause. “Confirmed. One slingshotting toward Uranus.”

  We fooled them, Theory thought. Sherman’s attacked Pluto, and they fell for the ruse on Uranus. We’ve divided the enemy.

  “How many ships?” Theory spoke urgently. “I need to know how many ships I’m facing.”

  “I’m on it,” said Monitor. “Working…four. Four cruiser-class. Identifications shortly.”

  Add the eight accompanying the Aztec Sacrifice , which were approaching at normal speeds. One blown away by the mine. Twelve in all to contend with. Started out with twenty-five.

  Too damned many, thought Theory. But not an impossible number. Especially considering that he was defending and not attacking. They had learned a great deal by analyzing the battle and death of Cloudship Sandburg. Cloudships were powerful weapons if used correctly. More powerful than any single DIED cruiser.

  “Sir, the remainder of Group Two will slow to maneuvering speed in eight minutes if they take expected actions, leaving them in position near Triton.”

  Eight minutes. A two-pronged attack to ward off. And should he succeed in that, he could only hope for a protracted siege.

  His son’s and Jennifer Fieldguide’s lives in the balance. His troops. His friends. His world.

  He was the one who was in charge of protecting them.

  “All right then,” Major Theory said to all in the war room. “Let’s get to work.”

  Eight

  NEPTUNE SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 16:05, THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 3017

  TRITON HOME FRONT

  On Triton, Jennifer Fieldguide was visiting the boy. They seldom ventured out in the virtuality. The boy was extremely shy. Not shy, exactly. Shell-shocked. Verging on autistic, Jennifer sometimes thought.

  So she met him at Theory’s apartment—or rather, at the virtual home space Theory had created for himself, and now for the boy. It was an austere representation, and each time Jennifer visited, she brought along something to liven and brighten the place up. She’d taken to shopping in the markets of Fork for decorative algorithms and interesting virtual objects of various sorts. Yesterday she’d made a real find. She’d gone into what had become her favorite antique shop and discovered an “aspect” lamp. This was an algorithm that had both a virtual and actual existence. It resided locally in the grist of a real lamp in Jennifer’s living room and simultaneously mirrored itself in Theory’s apartment. It was thus a lamp that was in two places at once.

  The vintage lamp was three hundred years old. It came from a time when humanity was first coming to terms with its new threefold nature. Many people had at first wanted their virtual surroundings to be an exact copy of the actual, physical environment in which their aspects lived. The algorithm didn’t have to make matching lamps per se. It could link up actual and virtual representations for any uncomplicated appliance or piece of furniture. The lamp was merely the default mode. Jennifer had no intention of sitting through the two-hour tutorial for use or paging through the instruction manual. She let the lamp stay a lamp.

  The boy had watched her wordlessly as she found a place for it and set it up. The boy
had, in fact, never uttered a word to her in the several months she’d known him. Sometimes he spoke to Theory—but only in short, declarative sentences. Yet he watched everything Jennifer did with rapt attention. His eyes were not pupils, but a swimming sea of symbols, some mathematical, most of them squiggles and swirls that Jennifer did not recognize. The only way she could really tell he was looking was that he turned his head as she moved, always following her actions. When she walked from room to room, he would go behind her at a short distance, and sit back down only if it was clear she wasn’t going to be leaving the immediate vicinity anytime soon.

  “See here,” she said, after she’d flicked on the lamp. “Now you and I both have the exact same light. If I turn mine on at home, this one will shine. If you turn it on, mine will flick on at my house. You’ll always know whether I’m in my living room, because my house turns off all the lights when I’m not in a room.”

  The boy said nothing, but Jennifer was certain he understood exactly what she was talking about. He was quite capable of doing things around the apartment, and you never had to explain any process to him more than once. What she wasn’t so clear about was whether or not it mattered to the boy that the lamp had a dual existence. Did he care about her? Did he care about anything at all, for that matter?

  Could he?

  Theory assured her that he could. After he’d rescued the boy from his awful convert mother, Theory had run a full diagnostic on him. The boy was an extremely complex free convert—a top-of-the-line artificial intelligence. As with all free converts, he incorporated human personality traits along with his computational and analytic algorithms. All free converts were not only descendants of semisentient computer programs, they also had portions of real people in their makeup.