Stargods

by Ian Douglas

  “Okay . . . but why don’t you believe them, Admiral?” Mackey asked.

  “For starters, what were those Nungiirtok doing on board the Moskva?”

  “They claimed they were being taken back to their home planet.”

  “That sound like something an anti-alienist would do? Give enemy combatants a free lift home?”

  Mackey thought about that. “Well, he might. There’s a Russian community on Osiris, and the Moskva might have been trying to help them . . . you know, get rid of the local riffraff.”

  “Ha! Riffraff is right!”

  “Or, according to Oreshkin, he’d gotten the Nungies to surrender by promising them a ride, then talked them into showing him where their homeworld was. We still have no idea where it might be. Knowing the identity of an actual or a potential enemy’s homeworld is always an important strategic consideration.”

  Gray had to agree. The Nungiirtok obviously had known the location of Earth, and look at what a disaster that had been. But was Yuri Oreshkin that creative? That diligent, when it would have been easy to simply space those twenty-five aliens with no one the wiser?

  Or had he been following orders from Moscow? Gray was willing to believe that the attack on America had been the result of orders handed down by an anti-alien faction at the Kremlin, but just how high up did the order-giving go?

  “I don’t know, Mack,” Gray said. “Based on what we know now about the Nungiirtok, they’re a warrior culture that doesn’t believe in surrendering . . . ever.”

  “We could be wrong about that, Admiral. They’d been stranded on Osiris for twenty years. That’s a long time to hold a grudge!”

  “True. And those Nungies didn’t have their Tok Iad with them for all that time. Maybe that made them more, I don’t know, amenable to the Russian offer. The thing is, I don’t buy the party line. I think Oreshkin was acting under orders. We don’t know the whole story yet, and I wish to hell we did.”

  “With respect, Admiral, I’d suggest that you’re overthinking this. Occam’s razor, right? The simplest explanation is probably the correct one.”

  “We have a carrier battlegroup—Moskva and four destroyers—coming back to Earth. Suddenly they divert and follow us out and back to the N’gai Cluster. That’s not simple. They were following orders!”

  “Sure. Oreshkin’s.”

  “I’ll grant you that Russian naval command doctrine is somewhat, ah, authoritarian. Disobey orders, even question orders, and you’re likely to find yourself taking a walk out the nearest airlock, sans spacesuit. But there were four thousand crew on the Moskva, another thousand on those destroyers. Are all of them going to quietly accept Oreshkin’s orders and launch what might well be the first attack of a new war?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mack . . .”

  “The Russians? Yeah, they’d obey, no question. Anyway, he could have told them the orders came from Moscow. How would they know otherwise?”

  Gray thought about that. “I suppose you’re right. But I still think we’re missing something.”

  “Well, Moskva’s crew is being offloaded to Skyport now, and I imagine the DD crews will join them there. Naval Intelligence is debriefing them. We might know something more soon.”

  Skyport was part—a very large part—of the formerly interconnected SupraQuito Synchorbital Station. A twenty-kilometer-long collection of living quarters, headquarters, spacedock admin, and supply, it was large enough and had the life-support infrastructure to house ten thousand people. A couple of USNA heavy cruisers, the San Francisco and the Memphis, had secured themselves to the structure to assist in station-keeping, and work to rejoin the structure to other parts of the military base was continuing.

  “That’s going to take a while. I understand Moscow is already demanding that we release both the crew and the ship.”

  “An interesting diplomatic situation, Admiral. The Russian Defense Minister is calling you a pirate.”

  “At least the Navy’s sending up Marines to take over while the diplomats wrangle over who owns that ship.”

  “And if that doesn’t start a new war,” Mackey said with wry, hangman’s humor, “I don’t know what will.”

  Gray reconnected the data feed. “Hey, Mack?”

  “Yes, Admiral?”

  “Take a look at this one target—one-one-five-niner.”

  “I see it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Russian,” Mackey said. “Light freighter Tomsk. Launched ten minutes ago from the carrier Vladivostok, at SupraSingapore. Four-man crew . . . 15,000 tons.

  “On a lunar insertion.”

  Mackey shrugged. “Resupply for the Russian base? Manifest says she’s carrying food, carbon rawmat, precision tool parts, and medical supplies.”

  “Plenty of rawmat on the moon already.”

  “Maybe their replicators are down.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” True. The Russians had several bases on the moon, actually, on both the near and the far sides. “Have Combat tag that one, though, okay?”

  “Yes, sir. You have a feeling?”

  “Let’s just say I’m not the trusting sort. Three alien planetoid ships in orbit around the moon a day after Earth nearly gets fried . . . and the Russkies were playing games with the Nungies? I want to keep an eye on that ship.”

  “You got it, Admiral.”

  Gray decided that he needed to discuss things with Konstantin.

  Gregory

  The Godstream

  1612 hours, FST

  They floated together in wonder. . . .

  Don Gregory clung to Julia, the frenetic urgency of their lovemaking now past, the afterglow warm and comfortable. That urgency had driven them both as Julia had awakened him, and neither had paid any attention at all to their surroundings.

  Now, however . . .

  “Where are we?” Gregory asked. The two of them seemed to be adrift in infinite light, hanging suspended among rainbow-hued clouds edged with silver and gold. Gregory couldn’t see a light source; the light seemed to be everywhere. Gravity was absent. The air was fresh, smelled of roses, and felt pleasantly cool on his naked skin. Obviously this was some sort of virtual reality, but he couldn’t tell where it was or why the two of them were here.

  “Where are we?” he asked Julia. “I remember being in my Starblade, making a pass over the planetoid . . .”

  “We’re in heaven, obviously.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. The Singularist Church of Humankind has its very own heaven, and this is it.”

  Gregory looked out at the enfolding sweep of clouds and colored light. “Very pretty. But doesn’t the view get pretty boring after the first million years or so?” He then remembered himself and looked into her eyes. “Except for the part with you, of course.”

  She laughed. “You were pretty muddled for a while. How are you feeling? What do you remember?”

  “Okay. I think I was in my fighter. Then I was . . . I don’t know, kind of warm and fuzzy. I opened my eyes and you were there. I didn’t . . . I didn’t question it. I just . . . I just . . .”

  Her smile was radiant. “Yes, you certainly did.”

  “But how—”

  “Your brain, your mind, was wired into your ship and connected to the Godstream, okay? We don’t understand how all of this works, but the short story is that your mind slipped through into the Godstream.”

  “I uploaded?”

  “Pretty much. The same thing is happening all over. Hundreds of millions of people. You took some time to pull yourself together—kind of like being in a deep, deep dream state. I came in to help you . . . reconnect.”

  “I’m glad you did. That was one hell of a way to reconnect!”

  “I liked it.”

  “This . . . this feels like a real body.”

  “It should. It’s based on your brain’s understanding of your real body, and frankly, your brain can’t tell the difference, right?”

  “I don’t know.
I’m not a neuroscientist. But still, there’s more to how the body acts and responds than just the brain, right? Hormones and peptides and all the stuff going on in your blood . . .”

  “Like I said, we don’t understand all of it yet. But apparently the human brain can do a pretty good job of extrapolating.” She reached down between his thighs and very gently squeezed. “Good enough that you knew what to do before you were fully awake.”

  Gregory frowned. “So . . . am I dead?” He had a sudden mental image of his fighter slamming into the surface of that alien asteroid.

  Her expression changed, became . . . not sadder, exactly, but more pensive. “Your physical body is still alive, Don. It’s just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  “You’re missing your legs.”

  Gregory looked down at his bare legs, entwined with Julia’s. Her hand caressed his thigh, and he felt the touch with a shivering thrill. “They feel okay.”

  “Because your brain is creating the image, using the Godstream. The meditechs don’t know if they can grow new legs from what’s left . . . or download you into an artificial body. Or you could simply continue to exist here, like this.”

  “Floating in the clouds?”

  “You can be anywhere, Don, be anything . . .” She closed her eyes, there was a blur, a brief sensation of rapid motion, and they stood together on a grassy hillside overlooking a lake. A choir somewhere in the background toned unintelligible beauty. “All it takes is a thought.”

  “Hello, there,” a new voice said.

  Gregory turned and saw a brightly glowing figure approaching. It was certainly humanoid, but it was hard to make out details through the light. It didn’t appear to be walking so much as floating.

  “Hello. Uh . . . what are you?”

  He couldn’t see the being’s face, but he felt the smile. “Name’s Barry Wizewski,” the figure said. “Welcome to heaven! One version of it, anyway.”

  Wizewski, the glowing figure explained, was a retired Marine who’d once been a member of a Christian fundamentalist group, the Rapturist Church of Humankind. His particular sect, the Purists, had renounced all artificial means to enhance or extend human life. After all, with Christ about to return soon, He would want His people to be fully human when He raptured them.

  “We didn’t renounce everything,” he told them. “When I joined the Marines, they gave me a lot of implants and stuff so I could operate all the equipment and computers and so on, y’know? Some Purists refused to take any enhancement, but I did.” He spread arms of light. “I guess it’s a good thing I did, ’cause here I am.”

  “You were connected with the Godstream when you . . . died?”

  “Not sure I died, exactly. My body certainly did. But there’s more to people than bodies, right?”

  “Dad, you know damned well that it’s technology that makes all of this possible!”

  A second figure of light had appeared next to the first . . . an ethereal and graceful female form.

  “Don . . . Julia . . . this stubborn atheist is my daughter, Susan.”

  Gregory felt the woman’s smile. “Good to meet you. So . . . this is all . . . technology?”

  “The Technological Singlarity,” Susan said. “Of course. What did you expect?”

  “I’m not sure.” He looked around at their surroundings. “I don’t think I was expecting wilderness. You came here with your dad?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Dad, here, was in Port Ecuador when Cayambe blew. I was in a space elevator pod coming down the tether just a few kilometers above. Turns out we both were linked to the Godstream when it happened.”

  “A lot of people died and woke up,” Wizewski said. “I think the sudden influx of minds through the Godstream is what kind of triggered things. Ha! Turns out you didn’t need to be in any particular religion after all. Or any religion, for that matter. I guess the Universal Salvationists were right after all! There are some folks in my church back home who would just hate to hear that.”

  “So this is it?” Gregory said. He looked around again, taking in lake and wooded hills and grassy meadows. “For all eternity?”

  “Don’t know about eternity, Don,” Wizewski said. “That’s an awfully long time. And it’s certainly not everything there is. The Singularity is bigger, by many, many orders of magnitude, than anything any one human mind could possibly conceive. Like Julianne says, just think of something and you’re there.”

  So they explored.

  Together, they walked the streets of Paris . . . and drifted outside the dome-enclosed city of Bahamia, ten meters beneath the Atlantic. He found they didn’t need sea suits or breathers for the undersea city and that they could enter the city proper like insubstantial ghosts. They visited the moon—the Tsiolkovsky Complex on the far side, and again, they didn’t need vac suits or life support while they drifted above the dusty crater floor. The stars, Gregory thought, had never appeared so sharp and bright.

  They visited Skyport, where people—both corporeal and ascended—were working to save the shattered orbital complex. There was an idea, he found, resident within the Godstream, for a few hundred thousand ascended minds to work together to reunite the base.

  They visited a newly created world that had the feel of an immense mag-tube station, with a domed ceiling so high there was weather inside, and a kind of plaza with sunken seating areas and gathering places.

  Beyond the dome was a galactic vista, the radiant glow of the Milky Way galaxy stretching across the sky. The scene was clearly imaginal; humans had glimpsed the Milky Way from outside the N’gai Cluster once . . . but this was at a different angle, one looking straight into the galaxy’s face. The effect was awe-inspiring, in the very real and considerably understated meaning of the word.

  This was, Gregory realized, a kind of receiving area for the newly arrived.

  Everywhere, there were people, teeming throngs with whom he could interact—or ignore—as he chose.

  It took a while for Gregory to fully accept what had happened. Evidently, he was fully alive even though his body had been wrecked. He was living, thinking, loving—Julia certainly had proven that—and enjoying an intensely real experience in what Wizewski had assured him was the Purist sect’s afterlife. Evidently Susan was right; the Technological Singularity had indeed at last taken place, and people all over the planet were now ascending. He could sense the vast unfolding of the Godstream, a multidimensional tesseract of unimaginable complexity, depth, and scope.

  He had a bewildering array of choices ahead of him—choices of new bodies or a repaired original or simply of staying right here . . . here, or in another virtual reality of his and Julia’s choosing.

  “Damn,” Julia said.

  “What is it?”

  “An alert. I have to get back.”

  He felt an icy chill. “What . . . back to the ship?”

  “My squadron is going on ready-five. Don’t worry, love. I’ll be back.”

  And then she was gone.

  Gregory was left dreading what might happen next. He’d lost people he cared for, people he loved, before.

  And he felt all alone once more.

  Koenig

  The Godstream

  1703 hours, FST

  Tomsk, a light short-hop freighter designated as Target 1159, was swinging around toward the far side of the moon, but was decelerating too fast to enter Lunar Orbit. Konstantin had noted the discrepancy, alerted Koenig, then sounded the alert on board both America and Yorktown, requesting fighter support.

  Koenig’s focus of presence currently was on the bridge of the America, where he was watching the Tomsk’s descent on the carrier’s long-range scan. He couldn’t tell simply by looking that the Tomsk was descending toward the surface of the lunar far side, but he took Konstantin’s word for it. As he watched, the ship changed course by several degrees, then vanished behind the curve of the lunar horizon. He checked the vector. The course change had put the Tomsk on a direct heading for Tsiolkov
sky, at a range of about 3,500 kilometers.

  “Konstantin . . . are there any Russian assets beneath that new path? Any at all?”

  “Negative, Mr. President. The new course appears to be bringing the Tomsk straight to our base at Tsiolkovsky.”

  “To you, you mean.”

  “A large part of my material infrastructure is located there, of course. If this is an attack, they could do me serious harm, though I should be able to survive independently within the fleet.”

  “Like you operate on board the America?”

  “Yes, or within the Godstream. However my mainframe infrastructure contributes heavily both to my awareness and my main memory.”

  “Let’s save that, then. What’s on that ship?”

  “The target is heavily shielded,” Konstantin told him. “I cannot get a reading on the cargo.”

  “That’s suspicious all by itself. Admiral Gray?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “I recommend you launch fighters. That freighter’s vector is taking it smack toward Tsiolkovsky.”

  “On it, sir.”

  “Target is a freighter, Tango-1159, now passing over the far side of the moon, altitude 200 kilometers and descending. It’s targeting Tsiolkovsky and may have a WMD on board.”

  A weapon of mass destruction—an old term that included nukes, and which more recently applied to some newer hell-weapons like nano-D city-burners.

  “Aye, aye, Mr. President. Launching now.”

  Why the hell would anyone want to take out Konstantin, or even just knock him down a peg? Koenig knew the answer even as he thought the question: Konstantin was the most powerful and the most intelligent of all of the super-AIs currently on Earth, which alone made him a target for the anti-AI crowd, and probably for the anti-alienists as well. For years he’d been instrumental in translating alien languages, negotiating with alien governments, and establishing workable agreements with beings so different from Humankind there was a question whether they even understood the concept of treaty.

  If nothing else, destroying Konstantin’s figurative body would be a serious psychological victory for the factions currently seeking to unplug the AIs.