Stargods

by Ian Douglas

  Koenig would have much preferred to get to Michaels’s residence at Midway by shuttle, but that would have involved greater scrutiny at the spaceport and considerably more red tape and expense.

  No matter. The E would get him there in a few hours. The two men went through check-in and security; travel on the E was free—it long ago had paid for itself not only in orbital industry and commerce but in the generation of free electricity—and the security check was pro forma, a stroll through a scanner that peered through clothing to the skin, then continued to image the body’s interior. “I guess they don’t want us smuggling any nukes up this thing,” Hinkley quipped.

  “Probably not a good idea to try,” Koenig replied. “Next up-E is in ten minutes. Let’s get on board.”

  They found their seats and settled in. The capsule was about two-thirds full—mostly businesspeople headed up-E to the industrial facilities at Quito Synchorbital or, farther out, at the anchor planetoid. Settling back in the seat’s automatic embrace, Koenig unfolded his pad and brought up a historical piece he’d been rereading, Vinge’s classic 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.” Historical essays from pre-starflight eras could be wildly amusing. Vinge had missed some points, but, surprisingly, not many. His anticipation of a future time when human technology would evolve beyond human comprehension was both prescient and apt.

  Minutes later, Koenig felt a gentle push back into his seat as the pod began accelerating upward. Had the capsule been propelled by grav drives, like those on spacecraft, he would have fallen into zero-G, but the linear magnetic acceleration of two Gs gave him the feeling of another person sitting on his lap.

  Two minutes later at a steady two gravities, the capsule was climbing past an altitude of 140 kilometers and moving at almost 8,500 kilometers per hour. The cabin bulkheads were configured to show an all-around view of surrounding space. In seconds, the deep blue of the Ecuadoran sky had deepened to black, and the stars came out.

  Anticipating a boring trip up-E, Koenig read his essay.

  Quito Space Elevator

  Port Ecuador

  1047 hours, EST

  Barry Wizewski felt old.

  The fact hardly surprised him. He was eighty-five, after all. But more to the point, he was a Purist in the Rapturist Church, and through much of his adult life he’d believed that when Jesus returned in the clouds to reclaim His own, He would not want to find His people weighed down with high-tech enhancements and implants and filled with nanodrugs, all of those vain attempts to cheat death and fend off old age. Damn it, he was proud of his white and thinning hair. And if he couldn’t live to be 200, so what? It just meant he would be with his Savior that much sooner.

  He’d come by the white hair honestly; he considered it a kind of badge of honor, much like the Medal of Honor on his wall at home. He’d been a USNA Marine and won that medal defending the super-computer facility at Tsiolkovsky on the moon.

  But sometimes, the aches and pains gnawed at him, and he wondered if just a little antiagnathic nano would be all that sinful.

  He stepped off the mag-tube pod and onto the broad plaza of Port Ecuador. He was meeting his daughter here today; she was the chief administrator of Skyport, a part of the orbital complex nearly 38,000 kilometers above his head. It would be good to see Susan again; he hadn’t seen her since she’d been back down the Beanstalk—another name for space elevators, though the origin was always lost on him—for Christmas.

  He checked his in-head for the time. Good—she’d be down-E in another few minutes.

  When he’d joined the Corps, they’d given him a basic military implant, and he doubted that God would object. It didn’t make him younger or change his looks; it did allow him to interface with the jungle of computers and machines within which he’d had to function as a Marine. For a time, he’d been stationed on board ship, and there you couldn’t even open a door without that interface.

  And in the meantime, it provided some conveniences, like always knowing the time and being able to do heavy math in your head.

  He looked up, his gaze following the sharp thrust of the Beanstalk to its vanishing point at the zenith. With a thought, he linked through to the Godstream to check her schedule.

  Yeah . . . it would be so good to see Susan.

  Venting Tube 18

  Quito Space Elevator

  Cayambe, Ecuador

  1049 hours, EST

  The awaited message came to Enrique Valdez down the line of communications relay drones he’d left strung out along the 2.5 kilometer length of the venting tube. He was not consciously aware of the message, but the nanobots residing within his brain and the implant electronics there were. Still within what amounted to a dream state, Valdez engaged the repulsor lift of his aircar and guided it forward, exiting the mouth of the venting tube and arrowing into the center of the vast cavern beyond.

  He felt a driving sense of urgency he couldn’t explain. He was late . . . late . . . almost two minutes late, but for what he didn’t know. There’d been an unanticipated delay in sending a message, and in his receiving it.

  No matter. He would carry out the instructions humming within his brain to the very best of his robotlike ability.

  Descending toward the cluster of domes marking the robotic observation station, he accelerated, ignoring a sudden barrage of radio messages demanding his identity . . . demanding that he stop . . . demanding that—

  Ten meters above the basaltic rock, Valdez triggered the 300-megaton nuclear device built into the frame of the vehicle.

  White light filled the cavern as Valdez and his aircar vaporized. In seconds, the fireball slammed against the cavern walls, ceiling, and floor, devouring solid rock, pushing up and out.

  The top of Cayambe rose in a thundering torrent of rock and ice. . . .

  Quito Space Elevator

  Port Ecuador

  1050 hours, EST

  “What the hell was that?” Hinkley asked, startled.

  Koenig looked up from his screen. He’d felt a solid thump through the bulkheads of the E-pod, a jolt transmitted, he thought, from the space elevator itself. “I don’t know. Felt like we jumped the rails.”

  Several of the passengers screamed. The pod had stopped accelerating, and the passengers were now in free fall.

  A screen set into the back of the seat in front of him showed an informational display of the flight: current speed, distance traveled, G-force, time from liftoff, time to arrival . . . but as he looked at the figures, they winked out, and the display went blank.

  That was more alarming than the thump.

  Koenig’s first impulse was to unstrap and head for the piloting compartment . . . but magnetic E-pods did not have human pilots or a bridge. A fairly simpleminded AI guided the craft up and down the cable, maintaining acceleration, adjusting velocity, and handling the docking with the receiving port. Koenig linked into the control network and brought up a series of external camera views.

  “My God . . .”

  “What is it, sir?”

  “We did derail! That’s the elevator!”

  The space elevator cable was meters thick, with inset grooves that gently cupped the pods. It should have looked like a solid wall moving swiftly past the pod’s keel . . . but a camera looking in that direction showed the beanstalk a dozen meters distant, the surface blurred by the pod’s velocity. The pod had been jolted free of the magnetic cradle carrying it upward. It was still rising at some 2.3 kilometers per second, the speed it had been traveling when it left the cable, but that velocity was decreasing now as Earth’s gravity took hold and began dragging the capsule back.

  “Mr. President! Are you there?”

  The voice, ragged and static-blasted, was Konstantin’s, speaking over the Godstream channel. Propagated up and down the space elevator by both radio and laser com, the pods could be linked into the network while they were moving up- or down-E, but Koenig’s craft was now far enough from the stalk th
at he was having trouble getting a clear signal.

  A check of the signal dynamics showed something more disturbing: signals from below, from Port Ecuador, had ceased. Evidently, there was a problem, a very serious problem, with the Cayambe facility.

  “The top of Cayambe has just collapsed,” Konstantin told him, as if reading his thoughts. “The collapse took the city with it, and the base of the space elevator has been cut free.”

  “Collapsed! How? What happened?”

  “We’re not sure, but seismic readings suggest that a fairly large fusion device has been exploded deep within the mountain.”

  “A nuke? It’s not a volcanic eruption?”

  “Volcanic eruptions do not release radioactivity into the surroundings.”

  “Ah . . .”

  Koenig switched from the camera showing the blurred image of the beanstalk and took a look aft, straight down the length of the space elevator. From nearly two hundred kilometers up, Earth’s surface was a beautiful mosaic of rugged mountains, green forests and agricultural lands, deep azure ocean, and the swirl and sweep of gleaming white clouds. The elevator itself dwindled to a silver thread lost within that landscape. From here, he could make out the pattern of streets and farmland marking Quito, but he couldn’t make out Cayambe itself.

  There was a minute, dark cloud spreading out from where the thread seemed to vanish. Though small, little more than a speck, it was rapidly growing larger.

  He enhanced the image. There . . . A circle rippling out from the base of the elevator . . . The shock wave of a very large blast.

  A volcanic eruption? He knew Cayambe was an extinct volcano . . . probably extinct. He also knew there were safeguards in place to anticipate an eruption and allow the elevator to be reconnected elsewhere. An eruption would have given some warning.

  Which made him wonder if Port Ecuador had just been annihilated by a very large nuclear detonation.

  Who the hell would nuke the space elevator? And why?

  Lieutenant Cordell

  The Overlook

  Quito Synchorbital

  1056 hours, FST

  Lieutenant Michael Cordell was seated in the Earthview Lounge of the Overlook, a moderately priced bar and restaurant in one of the spin-gravity wheels attached to the Quito Synchorbital complex. Despite the wheel’s slow and steady rotation, providing a constant 0.5 G, the floor-to-ceiling viewall curving across half of the lounge showed a half Earth motionless against the blackness of space.

  Obviously the scene was being transmitted by non-rotating cameras, Cordell thought. Except for the lack of motion, it was impossible to tell that he was not looking through a transparency.

  His companion touched the sleeve of his jumper. “Lost again?” she asked with an evil grin.

  Cordell grinned back. Lieutenant Katya Golikova was keenly intelligent, sharp-witted, and fun. She was also very much forbidden fruit at this point. When he’d met her almost five years ago, Russia and the USNA had been friends and allies, fighting a common Pan-European enemy. Lately, though, the political situation had changed. She wasn’t an enemy, exactly, but the word had come down through the brass hierarchy that fraternizing with Russians was forbidden.

  “No,” he told her. “Just woolgathering.”

  “And wool,” she said, teasing him, “is that much more interesting than me?”

  “Of course not.” He reached out, picked up his wineglass, and raised it. “To us.”

  She touched her glass to his. “Na zdorovie.”

  He was damned if he was going to report his relationship with her. He might be ordered to break it off, or worse, to carry a microtransmitter up his butt or under his skin every time he got together with her. That sort of thing would have a distinctly chilling effect in bed. But it still might not have stopped him.

  And so they both had in-head software running designed to spot nanotech security devices or pickups, and they were very careful about being followed. Of course, the various security forces could hack his own in-head systems without him even being aware, seeing everything he saw, listening in on everything he heard. The trick was to stay off their radar to begin with; if they didn’t suspect him of anything, they wouldn’t monitor him.

  He hoped.

  Her jab about him getting lost referred to the last time they’d met, when he’d led her into a seldom-used and heavily shielded warehousing unit in the synchorbital facility within Skyport, lost contact with the Net, and lost his directional cues. They’d found their way back to a wired section eventually, but he’d been afraid they were going to have to call for help, and that would have put him on that radar screen big-time.

  He reached across the table and took her hand. “How long do you have?” he asked.

  “Forty-eight hours. More like forty-one now.”

  Katya piloted a Yastreb fighter deployed on board the Russian carrier Vladivostok. Cordell was stationed on board the slightly larger Yorktown. Finding time together—and getting downtime schedules to mesh—was a real challenge, one worthy of a super-AI.

  “Well, that’s plenty of time,” Cordell told her.

  She arched one perfect eyebrow. “For what?”

  “I thought we might go back to our room and—”

  A distinct shudder ran through the restaurant. Cordell had been born and raised in San Francisco, and he’d been through more than his fair share of earthquakes. This was like that—a kind of wave coming up through the deck. Several other patrons in the Overlook made startled comments.

  “What the hell . . .”

  “What was that?” Katya asked, looking around.

  “I’m not—”

  “All Navy and Marine personnel, all Navy and Marine personnel,” a voice sounded inside his head, a transmission over the fleetnet. “Return to your ships and other stations immediately, repeat, immediately. This is not a drill!”

  The interlude, Cordell thought, was over. Why, he didn’t know.

  USNA CVS America

  CIC

  N’gai Cluster

  1105 hours, FST

  Gray was still shaken by his experience in the Godstream. Coming back had felt like a terrible dwindling, a loss of substance and assurance and knowledge that had at the time seemed godlike. This time was worse, if that was possible, than his first experience at the Omega Rosette three years ago.

  In his mind’s eye now, he floated outside the enormous McKendree cylinder, speaking with the exquisitely alien Ghresthrepni. He felt utterly drained but forced himself to push ahead, asking the strange being the questions he’d worked out in advance during the trip from Earth. Other humans had gathered with him—Truitt and Kline from Xenosoph, and Mallory, the expedition’s head of xenotechnology.

  “We would like to know,” Greg Mallory was saying to the alien, “exactly what happened to the ur-Sh’daar at the time of the Schjaa Hok.”

  The alien phrase meant approximately “The Transcending” and referred to the Sh’daar equivalent of the Technological Singularity. It was not, Gray knew, something the modern Sh’daar liked to talk about. In fact, it terrified them.

  “They . . . left us,” the Adjugredudhra told them, essentially repeating itself for the fifth or sixth time. The humans had been talking with the Adjugredudhra for nearly two hours now, and the alien representative remained reluctant to discuss what it insisted was “old history . . . another time.”

  The conversation was proving to be circular and frustrating.

  “You’ve already told us that they disappeared,” Gray said. “We know that. We’ve even seen it, or at least a part of it.”

  Years before, Gray had seen what they now believed to be a kind of computer-generated simulation of the moment of Schjaa Hok, images of a bright and golden civilization composed of dozens of different alien species. Those CGIs had been recorded at the time, even though Gray and others had been receiving the images directly in their brains. While telling the bare-bones story of what had happened, Gray believed the actual events had been shad
ed somewhat in the retelling, perhaps even edited to the point of completely changing the story.

  “You are referring to the Memories,” Ghresthrepni said. “Those were created by the Baondyeddi and the Sjhlurrr.”

  Its translated voice betrayed nothing like impatience or irritation at the repetitive questioning. Gray wished he could interpret the being’s emotions as it spoke. The chirps and tinkling bells heard in the background—the being’s actual speech—told him nothing about the Adjugredudhra’s feelings.

  But this was new information, Gray thought—at long last. The images he’d seen had been CGI, as he’d suspected. The Baondyeddi—huge pancakes on dozens of tiny feet—were masters of computer technology. They had, Gray knew, uploaded themselves into a planet-sized computer on Heimdall, living out the eons in virtual worlds of their own creation.

  At least until the Consciousness had found them. . . .

  Gray knew less about the Sjhlurrr, save that they were eight-meter-long slugs colored in gorgeous patterns of red and gold. Perhaps they were experts in computer technology as well.

  “We need to know the reality of what happened,” Gray said, pressing the issue. “What happened in the Technological Singularity? Did the ur-Sh’daar really just vanish?”

  “That was long ago,” Ghresthrepni told him. “None of that matters now.”

  “It matters to us, Ghresthrepni,” Truitt said, blunt. “Humanity is approaching its own Schjaa Hok, and we need to know what to expect.”

  “Then we sorrow for you humans, for your species will know devastation beyond your deepest imaginings.”

  “What kind of devastation?” Mallory wanted to know.

  For answer, the universe folded back around them, and they found themselves in a starkly realistic virtual reality. They stood on a rocky ledge overlooking the sprawl of a vast and alien metropolis, a city fully as large as Gray’s Manhatt Ruins, but alive and rich and vibrant with light and activity. Aircraft filled the sky, vehicles like mag-lev pods whipped through transparent tubes, viewalls twenty stories high displayed glimpses of multiple alien species engaged in incomprehensible activities. The technology, Gray thought, was roughly on a par with where Humankind was now.