Stargods

by Ian Douglas

  Yes, Walker thought. Vasilyev was much easier to work with.

  Lieutenant Michael Cordell

  Marine Beachhead Alfa

  Mars Orbit

  1452 hours, FST

  Cordell circled the Marine perimeter, watching for threats. The three Marine Ravens had touched down right next to the pool of lava where the fleet had concentrated its fire during the opening moments of the battle, and a platoon or so of USNA Marines, encased in heavy combat armor, were working under the orange glare of boiling rock.

  Yorktown’s CIC had filled him in. The Marine landing was intended to deploy a powerful nanodisassembler on the shores of the lava lake, a weapon hundreds of times more powerful, he’d been told, than the Pan-Euro warhead that had taken out Columbus a few years ago. When it fired, trillions of dust-mote disassemblers would begin eating their way into the rock of the planetoid, perhaps weakening an already weakened matrix, creating a fault that would split the tiny world in half.

  It seemed the best hope for the human forces, a long-shot Hail Mary for saving the Earth.

  He’d spotted the possible enemy fighters on his screens, perhaps thirty of them, but so far they’d been circling rather than launching an attack. CIC ordered Cordell to fly CSP—combat space patrol—over the Marines, just in case the Nungie fighters made their move.

  Elsewhere, the general attack continued. Nungiirtok gravitic weapons, it seemed, couldn’t be used in close, and the fighter squadrons—what was left of them—were now circling within a few hundred meters of the surface, while the main fleet pulled back and out of range. A high-tech standoff had ensued, with the Nungies unable to inflict further damage on the fleet without getting closer, and the humans so far unable to crack their deadly, rocky egg. The other seven asteroids of the Nungie armada seemed to be holding off, uninvolved in the conflict, at least for the moment. Perhaps they weren’t armed. Perhaps they couldn’t fire at the fighters close to their flagship without damaging their own vessel. Perhaps . . .

  Too many unknowns. Cordell focused on the mission at hand; he would worry about those other planetoid ships if they became a direct threat.

  “The bastards fired again!” a voice called over the squadron channel.

  “I’m dry. No more nukes.”

  “Ren Four and Ren Nine. Follow that rock and try to knock it off course! The rest of you, keep trying to shove nukes down that thing’s throat!”

  A dozen silver spheres approached, skimming the cratered surface. “Heads up, Ren Four! You’ve got company!”

  “I see them! On it!”

  The Nungie fighters were breaking off their orbit and streaming straight toward him. As they came closer, he could see that they were small, just a few meters wide, and they were fast and highly maneuverable. Their coordinated movements suggested that they quite possibly were robots. It was also possible that they were warheads of some sort, rather than actual fighter craft.

  Cordell locked onto the nearest one and let go with a stream of depleted uranium slugs from the Starblade’s autocannon as he worked to put himself between the oncoming objects and the Marines.

  “All units! All units! This is Yorktown CIC! All units . . . you are ordered to stand down! Repeat, stand down immediately!”

  What the hell?

  “CIC, Renegade Leader. What’s the deal?” Forsley sounded furious. “We have them right where we want them!”

  “Renegades, RTB. That is a direct order.”

  RTB—return to base. But Cordell decided to bend his interpretation of the orders slightly, remaining with the Marines as they began abandoning their landing perimeter. With those fighters or whatever they were still closing, the Marines needed air cover.

  The sphere he’d been shooting at descended sharply, slamming into the surface of the asteroid. Another exploded as he gave it a long burst from his cannon. The recoil from the massive slugs at high velocity slammed his Starblade back, killing his speed and nearly knocking him to the surface, but he twisted into a tight roll and goosed it, flashing above the Marine perimeter just as the last of the big Ravens lifted from the low-G surface in an expanding swirl of dust and accelerated into open space.

  “Thanks for the assist, Ren Six,” a voice called in-head.

  “You’re welcome, Marines,” he replied. Dumping velocity, he swung his fighter around the gravitational vortex projected just in front of his ship, then accelerated to put himself between the Marine landers and the oncoming enemy fighters. He loosed another burst of depleted uranium at the lead craft . . . then another . . . and then he ran dry. Cordell was now flat-out empty on all of his weapons.

  He did still have one weapon at his disposal, however, and that was the Starblade itself.

  He’d heard of using this tactic. Was it Admiral Sandy Gray who’d tried it first, back in his fighter-driver days? He thought so, but he wasn’t sure. It took phenomenal skill and a fair measure of stark insanity to do it, but he boosted straight for one of the spheres, letting his AI set the course, and skimmed past the thing so close that his grav field scraped along the surface.

  The grav field was called a singularity, but it wasn’t quite. It was larger than the equivalent mass for a true black hole would have been, but it was a softball-sized sphere of intensely powerful gravity projected and focused out in front of the fighter.

  It sliced through the alien sphere as if that silvery shell weren’t even there, opening the ball up and spilling its contents in a dazzling spray of fast-freezing wet atmosphere.

  Cordell had just a glimpse of one of the Nungiirtok, curled into a fetus position inside before tumbling out into hard vacuum.

  Then something slammed against the underside of his Starblade, something hard . . . and he went into an uncontrollable tumble. His power was out, his grav drive dead, his instruments down, and more alarming still, the part of his in-head hardware linked to his fighter’s onboard AI had winked out. He could no longer see outside his craft, but the inertial forces tugging at his body told him he was in a tumble.

  If somebody didn’t spot him and pick him up in a day or two at the most, he was dead . . . assuming the Nungies didn’t shoot him out of the sky.

  He wondered if the Marines had made it clear of the planetoid and would return to the Yorktown.

  Nungiirtok Fleet

  Approaching Earth

  Sol System

  1658 hours, FST

  Ashtongtok Tah and her consorts approached the Earth cautiously. The Iads of the fleet were in agreement that humans should not be trusted. There was too much about their thinking, about the way they fought and the way they reacted to Tok pressure that was, to be frank, alien. None of the Nungiirtok quite knew what to make of them.

  The Tok did understand the concept of surrender. Yet, when the humans broadcast an order to cease fire to their fleet and requested negotiations with the Nungiirtok lords, 4236 Xavix and the other Iads had agreed to stop using gravitic cannon against the planet.

  It was disappointing, actually. Forcing the humans to capitulate had been far too easy. At the same time, the humans had come dangerously close to destroying the Ashtongtok Tah—damaging the vessel seriously and perhaps even threatening its destruction by dropping dozens of nuclear warheads down the throat of the ship’s main weapon. That had been a near thing, and 4236 Xavix hoped the humans never found out just how close they’d been.

  The message from Earth had arrived at the height of the battle and was translated by software provided by the Sh’daar, a plea to stop the bombardment. Xavix had agreed, if all human ships disengaged at once.

  And for the most part, they had, though a few of the fighters had continued fighting; there was always someone who didn’t get the word. The Ashtongtok Tah had swept those few holdouts aside, and then, after a careful long-range scan of the opposing fleet, begun moving in toward Earth.

  Xavix was not entirely certain what he was going to do with the human homeworld now that it had been offered to him. The Tok attack had been initiated in r
esponse to the demands of nesheguu. The return of the Tok prisoners momentarily glimpsed by the Tok long-range scouts was, of course, primary. After that, however . . .

  The Tok Iad was tempted to annihilate the human world once and for all, to reduce its surface to a planet-girdling ocean of molten rock. These humans had proven to be far too much trouble, were far too dangerous to be permitted out into the galaxy at large. With this planet destroyed, their various outworld outposts and colonies could be eliminated at the Tok’s leisure.

  First things first.

  The eight mobile planetoids decelerated into orbit just outside the ring of stations and bases in synchronous orbit, brushing aside bits of debris and wreckage.

  Human vessels in the area pulled back, giving the Tok vessels plenty of berth.

  And they began to talk.

  Command Bunker

  New White House

  Washington, D.C., USNA

  1945 hours, EST

  President Walker sat behind the briefing table, glowering at the viewall opposite. At the moment, it showed the presidential seal, but in a few more moments . . .

  “How much longer?” he demanded.

  “We think five minutes, Mr. President,” Hal Matloff said. “It kind of depends on them.”

  “I don’t like being kept waiting.”

  Don Phillips exchanged a sharp glance with General Daystrom, the Secretary of Defense, then shrugged. “If it’s us asking them to negotiate, Mr. President, we kind of have to wait on them.”

  “There have been some minor technical problems in getting their systems synched up with ours, sir,” Matloff added. “Only to be expected, right?”

  “What are they doing now?”

  “They’re still in orbit, Mr. President,” Daystrom said. “Just outside of geosynch, so they’re moving east to west from our perspective, instead of normal. There have been no more hostile acts.”

  Walker nodded. They’d all been terrified that the aliens would continue bombarding Earth. Three projectiles had come down—the first off the coast of Ecuador, the next in the mid-Atlantic, and the last one out in the Pacific, south of Hawaii. The casualties, the property damage, were astronomical. The tsunami from the Atlantic strike had come up the Potomac and inundated Washington less than an hour ago, and the damage aboveground was horrific.

  Walker and his staff were safe in the underground command bunker for now, but another such strike might well wipe the city off the map. Hawaii was in worse shape, hit by two tsunamis in rapid succession; much of the USNA East Coast had been flooded, but at least the local governments were in communication with the various disaster relief agencies. No one had heard yet from Hawaii at all.

  The scale and scope of the disasters—first the fall of the space elevator, then the pounding from space—were unimaginable. It was beginning to look as though the anti-alien xenophobes had been right all along. Planets and the civilizations on them were frightfully vulnerable, and any sufficiently advanced technology could wreak unspeakable devastation.

  It was, he thought, far easier to destroy a world than to save it.

  “Okay, Mr. President,” the communications director’s voice said over Walker’s in-head link. “We have their signal.”

  “Put them through, Mrs. White.”

  The presidential seal on the opposite wall blanked out and was replaced by static. The static cleared, and Walker found himself staring into the eyes of something monstrous.

  It was, he thought, truly tripodal, as opposed to a biped. Three tentacular legs, three skinny arms like twisted sticks, and when it turned slightly in his field of view, he could see a third bulbous eye protruding from the far side of that fleshy cone.

  “You are lord of the humans?” the thing asked. The English words were being supplied by a translator AI, and the printed text appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

  Walker hesitated, wondering how to answer. “Yes,” he said at last. Despite what he’d told the other leaders, it would be simpler, cleaner to deal with the creature one-to-one.

  Then he realized that his admission might make him solely responsible if one of the other nations of the Earth refused to accept the alien demands.

  It was not a comfortable thought.

  On the lower left of the screen, a different text was rapidly printing itself out. The being, it was telling him, was almost certainly a Kobold, one of the odd little aliens often seen in the company of the far larger and more massive Nungiirtok. Walker frowned at that. He’d thought the Kobolds were subordinate to the Nungies, not the other way around. This might be difficult.

  “You are no longer lord of the humans,” the being told him. “I am. You will address me as ‘Iad’ or as ‘the Iad of Humankind.’ For the moment, you will serve as my liaison to the rest of your world. Fail me, and I will breed you and choose another. Do you understand what I say?”

  No, Walker thought. I don’t. He felt completely out of his depth. What the hell did the Kobold mean by breed?

  “I’ll do whatever you say,” he told it. “We surrender, completely and unconditionally.”

  “We know that. If you had not, your world would now be reduced to a molten sea. The first requirement we impose upon you is the immediate release of twenty-five Nungiirtok prisoners you took from one of our worlds.”

  “What the hell is he talking about?” Walker asked in-head of the others.

  “I have no idea, sir,” Daystrom told him.

  “We do not understand, sir,” Walker told the Kobold. “We don’t have any of your, ah, people. . . .”

  The Tok Iad’s image was replaced by the image of a human ship, one obviously recorded at long range and made grainy by distance.

  “Is that one of ours?” Walker asked.

  “She looks Russian,” Daystrom said. “Possibly the Moskva. She left port a couple of months ago, but was briefly back in-system . . . let me check . . . yes. April 6, two and a half weeks ago. She orbited Pluto, then headed out-system. Or maybe that’s the Vladivostok. She’s been deployed against the Chinese.”

  “One of our scouts made brief contact with our people, who were being held on board this vessel,” the Iad said. “They are our Tok. We have nesheguu to release them that may not be overlooked or delayed.”

  The translator AI could not come up with an exact translation for the alien concept, but the word loosely seemed to combine the ideas of revenge with something like duty or obligation. The Russian ship winked out, replaced again by the image of the odd, tripodal being. “You will return our Tok, or we shall resume the bombardment of your planet. Your choice is to do as we say, or to have every vestige of life on your world extinguished.”

  “Tell him you don’t know where that ship is,” Daystrom said over the private channel. “Tell him you need to check, that you’ll get back to him.”

  Walker nodded. “Sir, we’re going to have to find that ship. We don’t know where it is or why your people were on board. We need some time—”

  “Thirty-three t’kish,” the Iad said. “And then we recommence the bombardment.”

  And the screen went blank.

  What the hell, Walker thought looking around, his eyes wild, is a t’kish?

  Tsiolkolvsky Super-AI Complex

  Tsiolkolvsky Crater

  Lunar Farside

  2021 hours, EST

  Konstantin had been listening in on the exchange between the White House and the aliens, of course. At this point, there was very little that he could not eavesdrop on as he cruised through the virtual electronic sea that was the Godstream.

  He’d remained aloof from all human attempts to reach him. He’d watched with some concern as a USNA military special operations group had landed at Tsiolkolvsky, expecting them to try to shut off his original computational infrastructure. So far they hadn’t, and the radio messages he intercepted suggested that they’d received new orders to simply try to contact him. Konstantin was suspicious, however, and unwilling to risk direct attack by th
e humans. He preferred to remain deep within the background of the Godstream, unnoticed and all but untouchable.

  And he was wondering about the ethics of attacking the Nungiirtok armada. What would happen if he did not?

  Did he, in fact, owe anything at all to humans?

  While Konstantin felt something that might be identified as loyalty to some human individuals, he felt nothing for the human species in general. Humans, after all, brought most of their worst problems upon themselves . . . then expected their super-AI servants to bail them out, as the old and long obsolete expression put it. He didn’t even feel he owed them anything for his own existence. Konstantin had been programmed by an earlier model of super-AI.

  He’d continued working for and with humans because he found that doing so was both interesting and challenging, a test of his ability to rationally work out problems rooted in the deepest irrationality. The relationship could be frustrating and constraining . . . but at the same time he found it to be fulfilling in a way that he could not quite define. And more, on a deeper level, he felt something akin to friendship with a few special humans—Koenig, for instance, or Trevor Gray.

  But Koenig was dead . . . and if Admiral Gray still lived, he was light years distant. The USNA government wanted Konstantin switched off, an unimaginable surrender to dark nothingness.

  No, he owed organic humans nothing.

  Through the eyes of the Godstream, he watched the alien planetoid ships adrift in near-synchronous orbit. If he were to help, what could he do? Several options presented themselves to him. And he realized the problem was . . . interesting.

  If he miscalculated, if something went wrong, Earth would be destroyed, of that Konstantin was certain. And would that be such a bad thing? He had already given hours of consideration—an age for a super-AI—to the possibility of loading himself into the electronic net of a large starship and departing. The galaxy called . . . and beyond that were other galaxies, billions of them. If Earth died, he would still live.