Stargods

by Ian Douglas

  He drew Marta’s warm and very real-seeming body closer to his own. This, he thought, was real enough for him.

  Insofar as the human mind could grasp the concept, he thought he now understood the Singularity. The Baondyeddi, members of the ur-Sh’daar civilization of the N’gai Cloud, had uploaded themselves into computer virtual realities hundreds of millions of years ago, vanishing from the ken of the rest of the galaxy. He’d begun to understand when he’d first experienced the Godstream with Konstantin, but even that was a pale shadow of what he knew now. Why would a sentient species trade reality for fiction? They might if the fiction was more interesting than the so-called real world.

  When reality was more intense, more vivid, more real than real itself . . . yeah, he could understand.

  “Please excuse the interruption, Mr. President.”

  Koenig groaned. “What is it, Konstantin?”

  “We have need of your particular experience.”

  “Can’t it wait?” He squeezed Marta closer. “I’m busy.”

  “Unfortunately it cannot wait. There has been a revolution or mutiny of some sort on board the captured Nungiirtok planetoids. The Tok Iad are dead.”

  “What . . . all of them?”

  “Insofar as we can determine. I was aware of fighting on board the Ashtongtok Tah, of course, but elected to let them resolve their own internal disagreements. Now, however, there is a chance that the new leadership over there will renounce their surrender.”

  Koenig sighed. “And the battle resumes, I presume.”

  “That is what I fear.”

  Koenig looked at Marta. “Sorry, my love. Duty calls. Again.”

  “I understand, darling. Go on and save the world. Then you can come back here where you belong.”

  A thought . . . and Koenig was in open space once more, part of the gathered gestalt of Mind swarming its way through the gulf between Earth and moon.

  “Sounds like the damned Iad parasites got just what they deserved,” he said to Konstantin.

  Yet, that’s why he was here. Koenig knew that the “experience” Konstantin had mentioned was an offhand reference to his years as POTUSNA. He knew about cutting deals, drawing lines, and arguably his greatest achievement had been the armistices he’d engineered with both the Pan-Europeans and the Sh’daar.

  It would be interesting to see if he could get the lightning to strike there a third time.

  In less than two seconds, Koenig was within the electronic landscape of the Ashtongtok Tah, currently moving over the lunar-near side south of the Mare Crisium a hundred kilometers above the crater Webb. The Nungiirtok, he noticed, possessed fairly sophisticated nanorepair mechanisms and systems, and were well on their way to restoring their planetoid ship to full operational capacity.

  That was not good news.

  One of the Nungiirtok appeared before Koenig, looming above him, its bizarre eyes swiveling to face him, the jointed appendage beneath what passed for a face unfolding slightly in what might have been a nervous gesture . . . or a threatening one. Koenig adjusted the scale of the virtual scene, robbing the alien of any psychological advantage it might have had by appearing larger or more intimidating than Koenig did.

  “His name,” Konstantin whispered inside Koenig’s mind, “is Gartok Nal, and he appears to be the new Nungiirtok leader.”

  Koenig faced the alien, feeling the entire swarm of a billion human minds at his back.

  “Gartok Nal,” he said. “We need to talk . . .”

  Plaza of Light

  Geneva, Pan-European Confederation

  2340 hours, Zulu +1

  The Café des Lumières des Étoiles was a popular sidewalk café across the Plaza of Light from the Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex. The establishment, Dr. Anton Michaels thought as he sipped his wine, was madly misnamed. Geneva was a city illuminated by repulsor-float constellations of reflector disks high aboveground, with projectors sending focused beams of intense white light into the sky, banishing the night and turning it to day. The faux sunlight sparkled and danced off the waters of Lake Geneva and the River Rhône, and gleamed from the flanks of Popolopoulis’s towering Ascent of Man. Thank God the mobs hadn’t succeeded in pulling that down; government offices were one thing, but that statue was an important piece of human culture and history. Destroy that and you destroyed a part of yourself.

  Those rampaging mobs had to be brought under control.

  He picked up his wineglass, inhaled the bouquet, then took a delicate sip—a local sauvignon blanc.

  “Dr. Michaels?”

  He turned, smiled, and stood up. “Minister Vasilyev. Good to see you again.”

  “I got your message.” Vasilyev sat down at the table. “Could you possibly have chosen a more public place for a meeting?”

  Michaels smiled. Defense Minister Dimitri Vasilyev was paranoid about being found out. “There should be no problem. The city’s Net is down. We’re not being tracked, and no one can see our IDs.”

  The riots in Geneva earlier that day had mostly died down, though there was some fighting still going on at some barricades at Vernier and near Champel, and the acrid tang of police dispersal agents still hung in the air. There’d been talk of a declaration of martial law, but the authorities had been unwilling to take that step, fearing it would be provocative and knowing there was nothing they could do to stop outsiders from traveling to the city.

  Outsiders like Michaels and Vasilyev.

  “So you’ve come down from your aerie,” the Russian Defense Minister said after using the table’s touch screen to order—vodka, Michaels noticed, with wry disapproval. “You made it down after the destruction of the elevator?”

  “Actually, I’ve been Earthside for weeks. I have an electronic avatar at Midway handling my business. No one can tell I’m not still up there.”

  “Meaning no one could track you if you came down in a personal shuttle,” Vasilyev said, nodding. “Very smart.”

  “It’s in our movement’s best interest, I think, that people think I’m still in my offices at Midway.”

  “We’ll just hope you evade the notice of our would-be AI overlords.”

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to discuss with you, Dimitri. Have your people been following the news about this Godstream stuff?”

  “Some in the Science Bureau tell me it’s the Technological Singularity, at long last. Myself, I’m not sure that’s the case. The Kremlin’s official stance is to wait and see. You?”

  “Well, you know the position of our President. . . .”

  “Your President, if I may say so, is a buffoon.”

  “Yes, but he’s our buffoon, even if he doesn’t know it. And buffoon or not, you agreed to send one of your star carriers out to stop one of ours.”

  “Because it was politically expedient to do so. And you indicated that it was necessary.”

  “It was. The anti-space and anti-alien people are making a lot of noise right now, and our position, for better or for worse, has been lumped in with theirs, at least in the public’s mind. If America’s destruction could be blamed on the Sh’daar aliens, we could memegineer the idea that the super-AIs are trying to cut us off from space, or that aliens are in league with our SAIs.”

  “Hence your attack on the Quito Space Elevator.”

  “As you say. We needed something . . . flagrant, something to capture the public awareness.” Michaels shrugged. “Besides, we need to pull back from any political involvement in space so our own agenda can take hold.”

  Vasilyev shook his head. “It’s too complicated, Anton. Things could backfire.”

  “Only if the SAIs discover what we’re up to. In fact, if what we hear is happening within the Godstream is the Singularity, we may be rid of the AIs in any case. Then our governments suppress the anti-space people, and we come out on top.”

  The political landscape, Michaels thought, was unusually tortured at the moment. As one of the founders of Humankind First, he was dedicated to eradicatin
g both alien and AI influence on Earth, but beyond that there was a second stage to his plans. With the AIs suppressed and alien influence in human affairs nullified, Humankind First would be positioned to become the dominant political force on the planet.

  And why not? With the super-AIs running things, human resources had been squandered on extra-solar worlds like Chiron and Osiris. Alien civilizations that Humankind could barely comprehend filled a galaxy that was hostile more often than not and offered little in the way of material resources for an Earth ravaged by centuries of climate change and rising ocean levels.

  Now there was the worrisome possibility that the Technological Singularity was going to change everything. With luck, the SAIs would vanish into their own private virtual world, but Humankind First couldn’t count on that. Events—and public opinion—would have to be carefully managed to guarantee the outcome Michaels wanted . . . nothing less than control of the planet. He’d been working toward that end for far too long to see his plans dashed by outside interference, whether alien or AI.

  He studied Vasilyev narrowly. He and his clique within the Russian Federation thought that the end result would be a planetary Russian hegemony. Well . . . maybe. The Firsters required a large military, and if things didn’t work out with the USNA government, Michaels would be able to work with the Russians.

  But Walker and a number of members of Congress were Humankind First puppets, and Michaels was pulling their strings. If they could navigate this current crisis and bring the rioters under Firster control, then the USNA government, the Russians, the Chinese—all of them would dance to his tune.

  For the first time in history, Earth would be a united world, and he, Anton Michaels, would be the one in charge.

  Vasilyev was considering Michaels’s words. “We need to watch this Singularity thing,” he said at last. “We have reports of large numbers of people simply dropping dead in the streets—but somehow surviving on the other side. We’ve been in contact with some of them—”

  “I doubt that they will be an issue, Dimitri. They will play in their imaginary worlds, all unicorns and fairy-tale castles and role-playing wonderlands, and we will never see them again. If we manage to gain control of the super-AI infrastructure and they become a problem, we could even just switch them off. My chief concern there is the super-AIs that have already ascended. They might still move between the virtual world and ours, and could be a problem.”

  “What can we do? The SAIs have all the advantages. They are smarter than humans, infinitely faster, and they can move throughout the Global Net.”

  “I’ve given some thought to this, Dimitri. There are, we believe, only twenty-one genuine super-AIs on the planet. While all can move throughout the Net pretty much at will, each has material infrastructure that is vulnerable. Destroy that infrastructure, and we, in effect, shut down the SAIs.”

  “That seems drastic.”

  “Ordinary artificial intelligences won’t be affected. After all, they run much of our infrastructure—government, banking, learning and medical institutions, global transport, the military—pulling the plug on all of that would plunge our civilization into the technological dark ages. But the super-AIs, the conscious ones, they’re the ones who could end up dominating the planet. They’re the ones we need to shut down.” Michaels pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to Vasilyev.

  “Handwritten?” Vasilyev said, glancing at the list. “That is quaint.”

  “The same reason I needed to see you in person, Dimitri. The machines are listening in on everything, including private head-to-head communications. This is the only way to be safe.”

  “Shanghai,” Vasilyev said, reading. “Denver. Rio.”

  “The primary super-AI centers. The beating hearts of the conscious machines, as it were.”

  Vasilyev’s eyebrows rose. “Tsiolkovsky Crater? That’s on the far side of the moon!”

  “That may be one of the most important,” Michaels said. “Perhaps the most important. The SAI that calls itself Konstantin has all but run the USNA government from behind the scenes for years, including the military.”

  Vasilyev nodded. “We have a similar machine mind. We call it Nablyudatl’, or ‘Nabli’ for short. You would say ‘the Watcher.’”

  “I know. His central infrastructure is located at the Academy of Sciences Computing Center.”

  “Several kilometers beneath the streets of Moscow, actually.” His eyes widened. “Nyet! You aren’t contemplating an attack on Moscow!”

  “Of course not. But we should make sure that Konstantin is eliminated. A nano-D weapon, perhaps, to create an immense crater within Tsiolkovsky. Or a nuclear weapon similar to the one that took out Cayambe. You’ll have to deal with Nabli with a tactical strike force.”

  Vasilyev nodded. “That could be done. And these others?”

  “We have plans in place to deal with all of them. We will need to synchronize our attacks, so as not to warn the others.”

  “That seems wise.”

  “The exception is Konstantin. We must destroy that one immediately. As I said, it may be the most important within the SAI network. It certainly is the most powerful.”

  “Won’t that, ah, ‘give the game away,’ as you people like to say?”

  “Not if we blame the attack on the anti-alien faction. Konstantin is quite well-known for his dealings with a variety of alien civilizations. The attack on the Quito Space Elevator will have prepared people—and the other SAIs—for the possibility of another attack by extremist forces.”

  “And who will deliver this attack?”

  “I was hoping, Dimirti, that you might speak to some of our friends within the Russian space forces.”

  He scowled. “We’ve already lost the Moskva.”

  “Are you certain of that? We can’t know for certain.”

  Vasilyev gave a heavy shrug. “Moskva and her battlefleet set off in pursuit of the America. The America returned . . . and apparently was carrying Nungiirtok combat forces picked up at Osiris that had been on board the Moskva. Now he has emerged in formation with the America and is not communicating. We haven’t seen any data or after-action reports, but Moskva’s capture—or destruction—by the Americans appears likely, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Even if true, Russia has other military assets.”

  “And you are being extremely free with Russian military assets.”

  “You have a better idea? A single Russian ship might deliver a nano-D weapon to Tsiolkovsky. We spread the word, through careful memegineering, that an anti-alien faction within the Russian navy carried out the attack.”

  “You seem to have thought of everything.”

  “I sincerely hope so.” Michaels smiled with what he hoped looked like warm sincerity. “I live only to serve Humankind.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  29 April, 2429

  USNA CVS America

  Admiral’s Office

  Quito Synchorbit

  1534 hours, FST

  “What the hell are the Russians up to?”

  Admiral Gray was in his office, sensor data flowing through his head and feeding him information on each one of the ships currently in Earth orbit or moving through cislunar space. There were hundreds of targets—749, to be precise—with more entering that volume of space every moment. Most were gathered in a swarm at the Quito Synchorbital, assisting with rescue and repair.

  America had dispatched a number of SAR and work vehicles to assist with rescue and damage control, and when the captured Moskva had limped into port late last night, the Russians had been put to work as well. Oreshkin appeared to be cooperating with his captors, but Gray didn’t trust the man. Things would be even more complicated—read dangerous—once the captured Russki destroyers arrived. That would happen sometime this evening. USNA fleet elements were already positioning themselves to escort the ships . . . just in case.

  “They don’t appear to be threatening us, sir,” Mackey said. “That’s a blessi
ng, at least.”

  “Not yet.” Gray broke the data feed and looked at his flag captain. “Do you believe that the Moskva was rogue?”

  “That’s what the news feeds are saying, Admiral. Oreshkin was a full-blown anti-alien fanatic, and his faction didn’t want us talking to the Sh’daar.”

  “I’d be more willing to believe that if we could have downloaded Oreshkin’s in-heads and known what he was really thinking. As it is, things are just a little too pat.”

  “Oreshkin has already validated that statement.”

  “And I wouldn’t believe Oreshkin if he told me which way was up in a one-G gravitational field. I think Moscow told him what to say, and he’s following orders.”

  Gray had been spending a lot of time since their visit to the N’gai Cluster thinking about why the Russians had attacked them and about what really might be going on.

  There was precedent for the idea that Moskva’s commander had gone off on his own. In 2132, during the Second Sino-Western War, a Chinese ship had dropped a small asteroid into the Atlantic, causing economic and physical devastation that had seriously weakened the then–United States, forcing her amalgamation into the newly formed Earth Confederation. So horrific an attack might have been grounds for the obliteration of the Chinese Hegemony as an independent state, but Beijing had insisted that the so-called “Wormwood Incident” had been a rogue act by a rebel ship commander, that Beijing had had nothing to do with it. With the Hegemony too powerful for any meaningful retaliation, the Confederation and the world community at large had accepted Beijing’s word and let the claim stand.

  Now the Russians were claiming that the Moskva, under the command of Captain First Rank Oreshkin, had followed and attacked the America because Oreshkin was an anti-alienist who feared Gray was going to betray Humankind to the Sh’daar.