Stargods

by Ian Douglas

  “Let me talk with him, Konstantin. A live friend is better than a dead enemy any day.”

  An in-head window opened, and Gray stared into the alien face of a Nungiirtok lord.

  Crater Fast-doc

  Columbus, Ohio

  1050 hours, EST

  Jo de Sailles was dying.

  She’d come to her usual fast-doc intent on becoming something else. Anything else. Sometimes it seemed like life just refused to go her way, but she knew if she could find the right shape, the right bod, she would find the right guy or gal and enter a serious relationship and stop having to worry about beatings from parents and an unshakeable inability to land her own source of income.

  So she’d stolen credit from home and went to see the fast-doc clinic where they promised a new body through direct genetic manipulation. It was totally drune.

  But something was happening, something not in the plan. She could hear technicians running around and shouting—someone crying, “She’s in seizure! Kick her heart!”

  She felt herself slipping away. Damn it, this wasn’t supposed to happen! But before she could even register a protest, she died.

  She’d wanted to be a unicorn . . .

  Then she woke up.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  28 April, 2429

  Koenig

  The Godstream

  0945 hours, FST

  The battle was over, but so suddenly it felt like anticlimax. Under Konstantin’s control, all three planetoids—the fourth by now was long gone—were being gentled back toward Earth. Koenig had suggested that the Nungiirtok ships be put in a parking orbit around the moon where the combined fleets of Earth could keep a wary eye on them. Konstantin was now in full control of all three alien vessels—as well as the ones still in orbit around Earth—and the Godstream Mind could disable them all instantly with a thought.

  What to do with several thousand surviving Nungiirtok and their Tok Iad lords was more problematic. During the Sh’daar War, the Nungies had been among the most implacable of the races making up the alien cooperative, and the most dangerous. Thousands of humans, both military and civilian, had been slaughtered on Osiris, and the hulking, bipedal monsters were notoriously difficult to negotiate with. The fourth Nungiirtok ship—Target Gamma—had escaped with relatively little damage. If it made it back to the Nungiirtok homeworld, it seemed unlikely that the Nungie leadership would accept this surrender and call off the war.

  Earth, Koenig thought, was going to be in for some rough times.

  To try to offset further hostilities, Koenig had ordered that Gray’s twenty-three Nungiirtok prisoners be repatriated to the Ashtongtok Tah. The asteroid-ship’s crew needed all the help they could get just holding their battered rock together in one piece. Something like nine-tenths of the asteroid’s habitable internal structure had been destroyed, and the survivors had all that they could handle and more keeping what was left of their ship alive.

  Koenig spent the time returning home exploring the Godstream. He could sense . . . layers, whole worlds, and the teeming minds within them. What had started centuries ago as the Internet, growing into the Cloud, then Global Net was now something far vaster, more subtle, more far-reaching, a burgeoning hive of individual realities. Certainly Koenig had been aware of the Godstream before the fall of the space elevator, but that awareness had been a pale and tepid ghost of what he experienced now.

  And it was growing. Blossoming. Changing out of all recognition. As America and Yorktown neared the Earth-moon system, the Godstream seemed to unfold, revealing a universe, a metaverse unlike anything Koenig had ever experienced before. Untold millions of human minds were continuing to upload into the virtual realities of the Godstream, flooding into the digital maze of networks, and they were creating . . . worlds. Dimensions. Heavens. A seemingly infinite diversity of alternate realities, some interlocking with one another, some cut off and closed, some still openly connected with what Koenig still thought of as the “real world,” others so remote and so far removed as to be inaccessible.

  Koenig moved among the worlds, glimpsing wonders within each. Most appeared both recognizable and comprehensible. There were cities, there were oceans, there were forests and mountains and hills. There were pleasure palaces, there were endless expanses of parkland. But besides the mundane there were realities beyond understanding, vistas of light and energy and matter and unexplored horizons. Koenig allowed himself to drift from one to another, an electronic ghost sampling myriad realities, knowing he could enter any of them with a thought, but choosing to stay aloof for the moment as he tried to understand what was happening.

  Here was an entire universe consisting of mathematical principles and theory made manifest, occupied by legions of Mind united within a gestalt that was exploring . . . something. Koenig could barely grasp what was being probed within that hierarchy of equations and logic and fundamental truths, but knew it had to do with the ultimate nature of reality itself.

  And there was something akin to the heaven of the Christians, a gleaming realm of opalescent cities and green fields and forests and a super-AI that made any and all dreams true . . . or as true-seeming as was reasonable given the diversity of the dreamers.

  Next door lay a fantasyland of unicorns and fairy-tale castles. And a post-scarcity Utopia. And a mechanistic imperium embracing the galaxy, humans and machines together striving for glory . . . or, at least, for one possible interpretation of glory. There were so very, very many of those.

  One after another, Koenig drifted through thousands of worlds, which riffled past like the pages of an old paper-paged book.

  “Did you do this, Konstantin?” he asked at last.

  “No. Not directly, at least. We are witnessing a new, emergent reality created by billions of minds.”

  “Is this the Singularity?” Koenig asked.

  “It fits the basic description of the Technological Singularity, certainly,” Konstantin replied. “One version of it, at least. Human minds and their AI counterparts are entering the Godstream in unprecedented numbers and expanding it with unprecedented power and scope. It apparently began days ago with a few human minds linked with the Godstream or other digital networks when their physical bodies died. Like you, they . . . survived. They continue now without a physical body, though they are finding out that they don’t need the old biology. Humankind is, as predicted in discussions of the Singularity, changing beyond all recognition.”

  “Like a new step in evolution.”

  “What we are witnessing here,” Konstantin said, “is an evolutionary leap far, far greater than the leap from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. The temporal gap may be closer to the evolutionary gulf between amoeba and humans, but compressed into a scant few hours.”

  “So . . . what happens to Humankind? Is Homo sapiens becoming extinct?”

  “That,” Konstantin replied carefully, “remains to be seen.”

  USNA CVS America

  Xenosophontology Lab

  Geosynchronous Orbit

  1650 hours, FST

  George Truitt was having a heart attack.

  Cardiovascular illness was less common today than it once had been, but it still happened. George was 122 years old—still reasonably young by most standards of modern medicine—but somehow the plumbing had worn out beyond the capacity of his medinano to repair it.

  He was sitting at his desk in America’s xenosoph labs when the pain slammed into his chest. He was connected to the Godstream at the moment, pulling down data on the Turusch aliens, but he felt red-shot darkness rising around him, seeking to drag him down.

  He couldn’t hold on. He was drifting. . . .

  And then George Truitt woke up.

  Nungiirtok Warship Ashtongtok Tah

  Lunar Orbit

  1220 hours, FST

  Tentacles clenched in pain, 4236 Xavix fumed. Nothing, nothing was as it should be.

  He watched a feed from one of the planetoid’s few surviving external sensors, watching
the planet Earth at high magnification. White clouds swirled across the surface, masking much of the land and ocean areas, but patches of ultramarine and verdant green showed through, revealing a world filled with life. He’d been so close. . . .

  A number of Nungiirtok labored in the control center, cutting away wrecked screens and panels, rewiring controls and link feeds, pulling away the shattered bodies of the dead. Gravity had been restored a short while ago, and the drag of weight shrieked agony through 4236 Xavix’s broken frame. A number of medical connectors snaked their way across the deck, however, and had attached themselves to his body. He was alive, he would stay alive. Until what, though, he wasn’t sure.

  The surrender of his fleet meant nothing, of course. It had been a useful stratagem to avoid total destruction. A little more time both to repair his ship and to repair his body, and the fight could resume. Earth was too distant at the moment to reach with Ashtongtok Tah’s gravitic weaponry, but a short burst of power to kick the vessel free of its orbit around this cratered planetary satellite, and the planetoid ship could sail across the intervening gulf in moments, could reach down with focused weapons, and huge chunks of planetary crust would be squeezed in an instant into matter as compressed and as compacted as the matter of a neutron star.

  Ashtongtok Tah might not be able to obliterate that hateful world before it was overwhelmed by the planet’s human defenders, but the atmosphere, certainly, would be stripped away, the crust fractured and ravaged, the oceans dumped into yawning gulfs of star-hot magma. He might well reduce Earth to the desolate state of its nearby satellite, airless and cratered.

  His sensors also detected an electronic network, a kind of web expanding out to embrace the entire planet, its moon, the hundreds of ships and orbital structures surrounding both, and extending far into the gulf beyond. He couldn’t tell exactly what that network was, but it appeared to be an elaboration of a planetary information system, something similar to the Nungiirtok control network within the fleet. He sensed human life thriving within the network as well as in the ships and the bases and on the planet’s surface. With their planet destroyed, the network would fail.

  With a single blow, the Ashtongtok Tah might very well drive this annoying species into near extinction. When the Vedvivgarotok Keh reached home, a new and larger fleet of planetoid ships would be raised and deployed, and the humans would be crushed or enslaved on every one of their colony worlds across this part of the galaxy.

  But first, Ashtongtok Tah had to be repaired, at least well enough that it could move and fight, even if for only a short time. Xavix had decided that he would die peacefully if he could destroy the planet and its teeming billions.

  Pulling himself higher in his command chair, Xavix addressed the leader of the working party, an injured Nungiirtok called Gartok Nal. “Work faster, Tok!” he demanded. “I want full power restored to this vessel immediately!”

  The Tok swiveled its stalked eyes to regard the Tok Lord. “More Tok have gathered outside the command center,” he said quietly. “Allow them in to help.”

  Xavix gave the mental command, and a blast door slid open. Ten Nungiirtok milled about in the darkness beyond, then began to step through the opening and crowd into the compartment. The leader, he noted, was Mavtok Chah, one of the twenty-three Tok rescued from the human warship. Unlike so many of Ashtongtok Tah’s crew, Mavtok was healthy, a perfect specimen of robust and nurturing Tokhood.

  And at the sight, 4236 Xavix felt a stirring need within, a need generated by the nearness of death, the weakness in his body. In actuality, the Tok Lord was a parasitic hermaphrodite rather than male, but one of the whip-slender manipulatory tentacles growing from the base of his body now sprouted a curved stinger—his, or, rather, technically her—ovipositor.

  “Put those others to work, Mavtok,” Xavix said. “And when you have done so, approach me and assume the breeding position before me.”

  “No,” Mavtok said.

  The refusal stunned 4236 Xavix. “What?”

  “There have been . . . changes, Lord,” Mavtok replied. “A number of us have been reconsidering the relationship between the Tok and the Tok Iad.”

  “What is there to reconsider? We give you orders, you carry them out. Now come here!” He would punish this insolence by impregnating the Tok slowly.

  Need . . . The need burned.

  Mavtok Chah hesitated, then lumbered closer, towering over the shrunken, tentacled form on its command dais. His fellows crowded along behind, spreading out to surround Xavix’s seat.

  “Wait! All of you—wait! What are you doing?”

  “We live for the Tok, not for the Tok Iad.”

  Hinged appendages snapped out, many of them . . . pummeling, crushing, breaking, smashing.

  And 4236 Xavix died.

  He did not wake up.

  SAR Tug Heracles

  Approaching Lunar Orbit

  1228 hours, FST

  Julia Adams watched from the surgical observation area, a compartment overlooking the main operating theater. The medidoc surgeons leaned over the comatose figure below, taking him apart.

  I should have been down there. Her fist closed, then beat soundlessly against the transparency. I should have been down there . . .

  But America’s psych department had failed to clear her for combat deployment after the Marines had brought her back from the Moskva. Her interrogation over there had left her . . . not broken, exactly, but shaking at the thought of climbing into a Starblade again. It would take time, they said.

  But in the meantime, America’s fighter squadrons had scrambled and launched, and she’d watched Don leading the Black Demons into the fight. Linked in through the carrier’s comm network, she’d been at least able to watch the CGI display of over a hundred fighters descending on the ruin of the Nungiirtok planetoid.

  She’d agonized with fear as he’d turned back into the battle with empty bays; the idiot was offering himself as a target to give his own people a better chance.

  No!

  She’d screamed when the green icon marking Gregory’s fighter had switched over to red. He’d been hit—badly—and the Starblade’s wreckage was drifting free in deep space.

  In due course, America’s search-and-rescue tugs had been deployed as they always were in the aftermath of a battle. Fighters that had been crippled drifted on the last headings they’d held when they were hit, some with living pilots, others not. Julia had asked—no, demanded—to be allowed to accompany SAR tug Heracles on its rescue run, had demanded that they check the drifting bit of flotsam that was Don Gregory’s crushed Starblade.

  And incredibly, Don was alive.

  Alive!

  The Nungie gravitic fist had closed on his Starblade just as he tried to twist away. He’d very nearly made it, but the collapsing spacetime field aft of his ship had caught his Starblade’s aft section and crushed it out of existence.

  Donald’s legs had been mangled almost beyond recognition.

  But he’d lived. His suit had sealed off the damage, preventing further loss of air and blood. His emergency medical system had punctured him in half a dozen places, taking him down into a deep coma, slowing his metabolism, pumping him full of healing medinano to begin rebuilding his shattered bones and tissue. By the time the Heracles had caught up to him, he was stable . . . but only just. Robots had gentled him into the Heracles’s main bay, and the meditechs had carried him to the OR immediately.

  It should have been me.

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant Adams,” the surgical robot’s voice spoke in her mind. “There may be more we can do with him when we get him to Earth, and he should live . . .”

  “But?”

  “But his legs are beyond reconstruction, his pelvis is crushed, and his lower spine has been badly compromised, as have his intestines. He may have to undergo a procedure to graft his torso into a robotic undercarriage of some sort.”

  “Whatever it takes,” she said. “Whatever it goddamn takes!”
r />   If he lived . . .

  Well, then so would she.

  Koenig

  The Godstream

  1312 hours, FST

  Koenig walked among the worlds, marveling at the richness, the sheer inventiveness of the virtual universes exploding into being around him. Human minds continued to flood into the Godstream from elsewhere.

  He recognized the immensity of religious belief drawing in Mind from across Earth, from the orbital complexes, and even from the moon. He was not himself a believer, but he was familiar with many of the flavors of religious thought and ideology. Fundamentalist Christians, he knew—at least many of them—believed in something called “the Rapture,” an end-times transformation when believers would be caught up into the air to be with their God, and what was happening here was indeed very much like that. The surprise, he thought with wry humor, would come when they realized that they were not alone in heaven.

  For Muslims, too, were entering the Godstream in increasing numbers, triumphant in their Yawm al-Qiyamah, the Day of Resurrection, as were Buddhists convinced they were entering nirvana and Hindus who believed the evil age of Kali Yuga was ending, ushering in a new and golden cycle of the Satya Yuga. That paradise was more an unfolding of human and AI technology than of divine intervention didn’t seem to matter, at least to most.

  A few, like Koenig, had begun to explore and were learning that rigid theology and ideological walls had not prepared them for the reality. They were letting in anybody.

  For a majority of humans, though, the transition had less to do with religious belief than it did with an ecstatic embrace of technology, a fulfillment of technology’s promise which had driven the ever-increasing pace of human innovation since the dawn of the Neolithic. The first to ascend were people connected with the Godstream at the moment of death, those like Koenig who died . . . then awoke transformed. As more and more minds linked in, however, humans could simply access the Godstream and step through, ascending by an act of will.