B009NFP2OW EBOK (29 page)

For the moment, the important thing was that the Slan seemed to have responded positively to the bit of propaganda Gray had beamed at their command ship.
America
’s xenosophontological team had worked long and hard with the AIs studying recordings of the various communications with the Slan commander, extrapolating the alien psychology from what could be gleaned of their physiology and homeworld.

What they’d come up with, Gray thought, had been a masterpiece, playing on the Slan devotion to community, and their horror at having their perspective on reality distorted. By subtly presenting their human opponents as members of a community that had been attacked by the Slan themselves, the message had raised the possibility that the Slan were attacking beings like themselves rather than animals that knew no better.

At the very least, it would have raised questions within the Slan community about why they were serving the Sh’daar as cannon fodder.

The nature of the Sh’daar—the modern remnant of the left-behinds of the Omega Centauri star cloud 876 million years before—still was not well understood. They appeared to be primarily a virtual civilization, electronic life forms existing and interacting within computer and communications networks. That in and of itself represented a paradox; the Sh’daar, the xenosoph people believed, had been that part of the original ur-Sh’daar civilization that had not undergone their version of the Technological Singularity. For almost a billion years, they’d been trying to suppress technology in other, younger species. And yet, during those hundreds of billions of years, they themselves had transitioned to something else:
virtual life
, and apparently a virtual life still desperate to keep other species from undergoing their own transitions.

There was so much humans didn’t yet understand about the enemy. That lack of understanding could be fatal—fatal for all of Humankind. But maybe CBG-40 had managed to hold off the final day of reckoning by just a bit.

“Communications,” Gray called.

“Communications, aye, sir.”

“Prepare a message drone, and dispatch it to Earth.” He let out a sigh, unaware that he’d been holding his breath. “Tell them we’re on the way home.”

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

Osiris Space, 70 Ophiuchi AII

1111 hours, TFT

The Slan Onager had slipped away into metaspace long before Gregory could approach it. His vector, however, was carrying him past Osiris.

Past his old home.

He decelerated hard, braking his Starhawk’s velocity from tens of thousands of kilometers per second to five, allowing the planet’s gravity to pull him around its bulk at an altitude of less than 200 kilometers. It was a heaven-sent opportunity. He
had
to take a close look or else he would always wonder.

The first leg of his fly-around brought him in over Osiris’s night side, and the north-hemisphere ocean. His AI opened up all channels, listening for anything that might indicate human life. As he skimmed the planet’s atmosphere, he began broadcasting a query, in effect an electronic questing asking “Is anybody there?”

There was no reply as he skimmed around into a dazzling orange sunrise. Osiris’s cloud tops, marking the swirling vortices of enormous cyclonic storms, burst into full view beneath his keel.

Is anybody there?

A coastline appeared ahead and he accelerated slightly, slicing through the upper edges of atmosphere. Nuit Starport, the place from which he’d departed this world as an eight-year-old two decades earlier, was no longer there, the site marked now by an immense desert of glass, flashing and sparkling in the sunlight. New Egypt, the colonial capital, had been glassed over as well.

Is anybody there?

High-resolution imagery showed new construction along the shores of the Naucratis Coast. New Alexandria was still there, but the familiar domes were . . . gone. The squat, massive bunkers with slanted walls was characteristic, Gregory knew, of the Nungiirtok, the lumbering, 3-meter ground troops employed by the Sh’daar in their ongoing war against Humankind.

Is anybody there?

In answer, a trio of shipkiller missiles emerged from underground silos and climbed into the Osirian sky. The Nungiirtok were still down there.

Well, that stood to reason, didn’t it? The Sh’daar retreat had been on the precipitous side. No time for an evacuation of their personnel on the surface.

His AI recorded everything in high definition and with 3-centimeter resolution. Gregory’s thoughts nudged the fighter’s control systems, and he accelerated harder, rising clear of the last thin tatters of the atmosphere and boosting into deep space once again. Osiris dwindled rapidly astern. By the time the missiles got clear of the atmosphere, their target was long gone.

“All squadrons, this is
America
Primary Flight Control,” a voice called. “RTS, repeat, RTS.”

RTS. Return to ship. They were being recalled.

There’d been no reply to his broadcasts as he’d swung past Osiris. He had to assume that everyone he’d known, everyone living there, was dead.

“
America
, Demon Four, on my way,” he acknowledged. He hesitated, then added, “Fly-by of Osiris negative for human settlements.”

“Hey, Nu . . . Gregory,” Kemper’s voice cut in. “It might not be that bad, y’know?”

“That’s right,” Connor added. “If they’re out in the bush, no radios, no advanced technology . . .”

“Or there might be a camp somewhere,” Nichols pointed out. “They could still be alive down there somewhere. . . .”

The others in the squadron must have been linked in with his fighter. He checked his comm settings, and saw that the squadron tactical link had been open during his passage over the planet.

“With the Shaddy fleet kicked out,” Kemper told him, “it’s a cinch we’ll be sending in the Marines, right? Don’t give up on us, man.”

“Thanks,” Gregory replied. “We’ll see what the high-def scans show.”

“Let’s go home, people,” Mackey said.

And the image of the star carrier
America
grew large in their in-heads.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto,

United States of North America

1125 hours, EST

“Damn it, where’s our communications?” Koenig demanded. “The bastards could be plastering the entire country with nano-D right now, and we wouldn’t know!”

“No reports of further attacks off-net, sir,” Whitney reassured him. “We’d know if there were.”

Koenig nodded. Normally, the office of the president of the USNA was at the center of a staggeringly rich, complex, and information-dense web of high-tech communications, connecting it to cities and military bases across the North American continent, to embassies and consulates around the globe, to SupraQuito and to bases on the moon and on Mars. At any given time, Koenig could access a Net as detailed and as intricate as the one employed by Geneva or, for that matter, by Konstantin up at Tsiolkovsky.

He felt utterly lost and isolated without that supra-global connectivity. Right now, a handful of ships and High Guard sentinels were fighting the Confederation in near-Earth space, and he had no idea how the fight was going. Hand-to-hand fighting had been reported on the ground in Washington, D.C., in Baltimore, and in the Manhat Ruins, as Geneva tried to assert its control over parts of the USNA Periphery. Americans had been dying in the mud just 500 kilometers from Toronto, and he didn’t know the outcome there, either, or if the battle had even yet been resolved. On the far side of the moon, a Marine assault force had been dispatched to Giordano Bruno. Again, the battle might be over, it might still be raging, and the president of the USNA had no clue as to what was happening.

His only connection with the outside world, right now, was through the global Net, the non-government portion of the communications and computer web that served as a kind of electronic nervous system for Earth. He could look in on various cities through security drones or corporate offices. He could watch the major news nets, though most of them were focused right now on the enormous crater that was Columbus; for the most part, they were still hours out of date. Even the big one, TNN, the TerraNews Network, still didn’t seem to realize that the Earth Confederation had just crumbled into the jerking, spasmodic collapse of full-scale civil war.

And he could link in through person-to-person in-heads. Whitney had set up a bank of aides in a nearby room who were doing nothing but contacting people they knew on the outside by private link, as the intelligence people sorted through the data and tried to make sense of it, to distill it down to something the president would find useful.

Koenig was amused even while he was feeling frustrated. They were using technology centuries out of date in order to try to put the USNA government back in control.

And if they managed to achieve that control . . . what, Koenig wondered, would he do with it? USNA fleet elements were sharply outnumbered. Without CBG-40 or other fleet elements stationed at other systems, the USNA defenses would soon lose any control of the high ground of space whatsoever.

And when that happened, there was little Koenig could do but surrender.

What the hell was happening with the fleet? Attempts to contact officers or crew on ships like the
Pittsburgh
so far had failed.

And then a possible answer hit him.

He put through a private call, opening a channel by commercial relays from Toronto to Synchorbit to L-2 above the lunar farside . . .

. . . and down to Tsiolkosky base, and the super-AI Konstantin.

“Ah, Mr. President,” the AI’s voice said after a long moment as the connections were established. “I’ve been trying to call you, but your normal communications channels appear to be down.”

“Tell me about it,” Koenig growled. “We’re having to use the civilian networks.”

“Which are adequate to the purpose. I have news for you.”

“First, I want to know if we can use these civilian networks to link in to your Net. We’re almost blind down here, since Columbus was wiped out.”

“I saw the TNN feeds, yes,” Konstantin replied. “Where are you now?”

“I would rather not say,” Koenig said. “We’re trying to keep this end of the conversation shifting between a few hundred sites across the country, to keep Geneva guessing. I’d rather not lose another city.”

“Understood, though I am sure you realize that your problems in establishing a clear channel lie in your attempts to maintain anonymity.”

“Yes, but right now I have a hundred people trying to use the phone service to see what’s happening all over the world, and that’s what’s making us blind. I want to see through your network.”

“I am establishing the connections now,” Konstantin said. “There. You have direct access to my data feeds now.”

Behind him, Koenig heard several people cheering. Wallscreens that had previously shown static were switching on, now. Koenig glanced at them. One showed ragged-looking men and women with a miscellany of weapons rushing past some sort of titanic air- or spacecraft, grounded in mud. The background looked like the D.C. swamp. Another showed Ilsa Roettgen’s face as she spoke earnestly with a number of Confederation military officers. A third was being relayed from a battlespace drone. Koenig could see a large warship, a cruiser, he thought, moving through space. Mars lay in the distance, ruddy and small. The cruiser, black with scarlet trim on shield cap and drive pods, looked like an old Jianghu class, flanked by a trio of Sújué fighters—Chinese Hegemony.

“May I draw your attention to the cruiser, Mr. President?”

“I see it. What’s it doing off Mars?” The Chinese had major space-military bases at Synchorbit, at Grimaldi on the moon, and at Mercury, but nothing anywhere close to Mars.

And then a thrill of realization clicked for Koenig.

“I noted that our forces were severely restricted in scope and number,” Konstantin said, “our space-navy forces especially. After witnessing the attack on Columbus, I took the liberty of talking to some other military powers.”

Koenig felt a cold chill. Taking liberties was not something AIs were able to do, generally. Millions of times faster than humans, they nevertheless operated within what programmers referred to as “limited purviews,” meaning that they could follow orders . . . but not give them, and they were unable to make important decisions independent of the humans who’d created them.

“What military powers?” Koenig asked slowly.

“The Chinese Hegemony,” Konstantin replied, “and the Islamic Theocracy.”

Neither power was a member of the Confederation. Indeed, they’d been blocked from full membership consistently for centuries.

“I see,” Koenig said. “And what do they want in return?”

“The Hegemony desires full membership within the Confederation, assuming, of course, that our faction wins the current power struggle. They have, as you are seeing on the screen in front of you, agreed to extend military help to the USNA, specifically to block incoming fleet elements under Geneva’s command.”

“Captain Lavallée.”

“His flagship, the
Napoleon
, and a number of other Confederation warships entered the outskirts of the Sol System eight hours ago. He has received a promotion to rear admiral, and his command of the Pan-European battlegroup has been confirmed by Geneva.”

“I see. And what do the Islamists want?”

“They are unwilling to provide military assistance until they receive a personal assurance from you to the effect that the White Covenant will be rescinded, again assuming our faction is victorious.”

That rocked Koenig back a bit. The Chinese had been refused membership in the Terran Confederation because of Wormwood Fall, the small asteroid nudged out of orbit in 2132 by the Chinese vessel
Xiang Yang Hong
. Beijing had always claimed that the disaster had been caused by a rogue captain and, who knew? Their claim might well be accurate. The ship’s skipper, they’d reported, had been enraged by the destruction of Fuzhou, his home city. That had been almost three centuries ago. Maybe it was time to incorporate the ancient Middle Kingdom into interstellar politics.