Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (15 page)

“Target appears neutralized, Admiral,” Taggart told him.

“Send
Ramirez
and
Young
to secure that hulk,” Gray said.

He wanted to know who—what—was on board that alien vessel.

And what they were doing working with the Confederation.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

1140 hours, EST

“It appears, Mr. President, that we’re winning.”

Koenig looked up at his aide and acknowledged the news with a curt nod. “That’s good, Marcus,” he said. He felt no elation . . . not even an expected sense of relief. Instead, he felt . . . drained. “Do we have any word yet on losses?”

“The
Spruance
has been destroyed, sir,” Whitney replied. “And the
Edmonton
is badly damaged. They may lose her. The
Shenandoah
and
America
both took damage as well, but nothing their onboard damage repair systems can’t handle.”

Again, Koenig nodded. He knew too well the terror, the uncertainty, the sheer determination that would be unfolding out there now. A billion kilometers away, a ship was dying, her crew struggling to save her.

“There have also been heavy fighter losses, Mr. President,” Whitney told him. “Perhaps as high as fifty percent. We’ll know better once they’ve rounded up the streakers.”

“What about the aliens?”

“They did fire on our ships, and
America
shot back. Their fighters are scattering, but the large ship has been disabled.
America
is going to try to intercept it and board.”

“And the enemy? The
human
enemy?”

“In full retreat, sir. Our relief force is deploying to intercept them. We don’t yet know if they’ll succeed.”

It hardly mattered. So long as USNA bases and personnel out in Saturn space were safe.

The larger question remained, though. Why had the Confederation been trying to seize those bases? They were too far from Earth to be useful as strike or logistical positions.

And perhaps even more pressing were two other, related questions.

Who were the aliens who’d allied with the Confederation?

And why had they done so?

Virtual Combat Center

Colorado Springs, USNA

1155 hours, CST

“Sorry, people,” Major Corbett’s voice said above the murmur and tumble of incoming data. “We have to interrupt your DL.”

Shay Ashton blinked as the immense viewall within her head winked out, taking with it the cascade of raw data that had been flooding into her brain. God . . . how long had she been under? She checked her internal clock and was surprised to see that less than four hours had passed.

Around her, her classmates were looking up and looking around, some stretching, others blinking or rubbing their eyes. All looked exhausted and drawn.

“Hey, it’s time for lunch anyway,” one of the students said, raising his voice above the growing murmur from the class. “Man, I’m starved!”

“We’ll go to chow in a moment, Akerly,” Corbett said. “Right now, I need to give you all an update . . . and we’re going to ask for volunteers.”

That got their attention. The room went death silent.

“A few hours ago,” Corbett told them, “CBG-40, a star carrier task force, entered Saturn space and engaged Confederation forces at Titan and at Enceladus. At last report, our people had the upper hand. The Confeds appear to have broken, and are either surrendering or in retreat.”

Ashton felt a shiver of excitement at that. CBG-40 was
America
and her escorts . . . her old ship.

Corbett continued with the briefing. “This presents us with a unique and singular strategic opportunity. Konstantin, our super-AI at Tsiolkovsky, has been closely monitoring computer and communications traffic within the Confederation. It reports that the Confederation government is, for the moment at least, completely preoccupied with events out at Saturn.”

A virtual screen opened behind Corbett, stretching almost deck to overhead and spanning the room. On it, the camera perspective drew back from Sol to show the orbits of, first, the inner planets, then, as the distance increased, of Jupiter and then Saturn. Numerous curving paths were picked out in either red or green, showing the movements of the space fleets well over a billion kilometers out in space.

“The current time lag between Saturn and Earth is just over seventy-six minutes,” Corbett went on. “The Confeds appear to be scrambling to pull together additional ships in order to counterattack our forces. And Konstantin has suggested that this represents an ideal moment for an RM insertion.”

The murmurs picked up again, a low-voiced buzz of conversation. “Sir,” one woman said, raising her hand. “Are you talking about
us
?”

“We just started dee-elling this shit this morning, Major!” another student said. “We don’t know what the hell we’re doing yet!”

Corbett pursed his lips, then nodded, reluctantly it seemed to Ashton. “If we wait, we’ll lose the opportunity to take the Confeds by surprise. It’s not as bad as you might be thinking right now.”

Ashton wasn’t sure she saw how it could be worse. The schedule called for two weeks of training before going out virtual-hot. She and the other students all knew how to pilot fighters . . . but from everything she’d heard, virtual incursions were an entirely different breed of cat.

“The usual rule of thumb,” Corbett told them, “is twelve hours of download to twelve
days
of practice. You’ve all taken about thirty percent of the program . . . the nuts-and-bolts hard data you’ll need to operate in vir-sim. We can give you the rest this afternoon. What you’ll be lacking is
experience
—actually being able to practice the skills you’re learning. And”—he hesitated, looking unhappy—“we won’t have time to inoculate you against ICEscream.”

Again, the room was silent. They’d all heard of ICEscream, of course . . . a black-humor, even laughable term referring to the darker side of virtual combat.

Intrusion countermeasures electronics generally did their work in a purely defensive posture, detecting outside attempts to break into a network and blocking or isolating the threat. The nature of countermeasures, however, suggested something more direct, something stronger— the ability to strike back at an intruder to cause serious injury, insanity, or even death.

ICEscream
indeed . . .

Virtual simulations were generally regarded as being completely safe. After all, they were the most popular form of public entertainment by far, an industry worth hundreds of billions. Vir-sim recreation ranged from exploring dangerous environments to experiencing mind-bending hallucinations or dreams to having virtual orgies with sex-play stars . . . and just about everything else imaginable. Docuinteractives allowed a person to be an active part of a lecture, meeting with simulated historical personalities, asking questions, and experiencing a full spectrum of sensation in computer-generated environments as diverse as the bottom of the Jovian atmosphere or the Battle of Hastings or the surface of the sun. Draminteractives let people become a part of a fictional story, anything from role-playing in the distant past to science-fiction tales set in the remote future. Teleoperation let workers operate equipment in deadly environments—like the heart of a fusion reactor or the event horizon of a microsingularity—as if they were physically present. A person linked in to the computer network and experienced in-head the simulated or the remotely transmitted realms of other worlds, separated from the action by multiple buffering layers of electronics and the superhuman speed and watchfulness of the moderating AI software.

The important thing to remember with the technology, though, was that a vir-sim operator’s mind—his awareness—might be hurtling through artificially created electronic vistas, but his body and—most important—his
brain
were safely back in the virtual combat center.

At least, that was supposed to be the idea.

In practice, however, it wasn’t smart to put too much reliance on this promise of invulnerability. Commercial in-head dramas had built-in safeguards and generally were
not
trying to kill you. But most military networks and many government systems were protected by ICE software, usually through AI guardians watching for deliberate incursion attempts.

And some were quite heavily armed.

It took some seriously fussy programming, but it was possible to open a communications channel from the guardian to the intruder’s system and have it look like a normal data channel from the target computer. Rather than data, that channel could guide the equivalent of a small lightning bolt back to the intruder. Normally, this would result in the meltdown of the intruder’s system if his AI couldn’t disconnect in time, but it wouldn’t reach the system’s
organic
components.

But a truly sophisticated ICEscream AI could overwhelm and subvert the intruder’s software, hijack his hardware, and deliver a few million volts directly to his cerebral cortex. Such systems were illegal under international law, of course, but the simple threat that they might be out there—a threat encouraged by rumor and deliberately planted misinformation—was enough to forestall most attempts by organic hackers to penetrate secure systems.

But there was another threat flesh-and-blood hackers faced that was, if not as violent, more common . . . and ultimately nearly as dangerous, and that was the threat of PNS.

Perceptual neural shock was an effect experienced by people immersed in a virtual world who faced something sudden and life-threatening while in simulation. Their bodies might be quite safe and well protected, but in their minds they died. The shock could trigger a massive heart attack, stroke, traumatic apnea, or even a general shutdown of the conscious mind that left the person in a coma.

Perhaps even worse, at least to Shay’s way of thinking, was the danger of being left insane. The brain could do some astonishing things to protect itself, and by far the most extreme was to withdraw from reality entirely.

And yet modern virtual simulation was an extremely popular recreation, as well as a vital tool for dangerous or unpleasant work requiring a human presence . . . or telepresence. People linked in to NTEs—non-terrestrial environmental robots, or “Noters”—exploring the hellish surfaces of Venus or Triton or Pluto, or enduring the crushing depths of the ocean abysses of Earth or Europa, experienced sim-death all the time. Too, there were entertainment centers that offered customers the thrill of virtually falling to Earth from orbit or engaging in combat with other gamers, and they were at risk as well.

The best way to protect such explorers—or paying customers looking for a thrill, for that matter—was to
inoculate
them, a process that let them face life-threatening situations in progressively stronger and stronger doses over a period of time. That allowed their brains to cope, to adjust and come to terms with the realization that they were
safe
and that they weren’t going to die when they smacked into the pavement at hundreds of kilometers per hour.

Most of what a virtual combat warrior needed to know in terms of mere data could be downloaded in a day or two. But working with that data, both integrating raw information and learning how to control your fight-or-flight reflexes when confronted with what looked and felt like certain death, took longer—generally a couple of weeks at least.

But now it looked like the class wasn’t going to get any practice time at all.

“How many here,” Major Corbett went on, speaking into the shocked silence, “have experience with Class One virtual threats?”

Class Ones were the most dangerous type of simulation, the sort of perceived threat that could kill a person, or leave her comatose or insane. Two hands went up, and Ashton heard their voices over her in-head,
“Yo!”
and “Here.” Senior Chief Raymond Blaine had been a deep-sea construction worker on Atlantica before his enlistment in the Navy. And Major John Aldridge was a Marine officer, a fact that all by itself said a lot about his experience.

“Okay,” Corbett said. “Major Aldridge, you’ll be team leader. Blaine, you’re his Number One. You two will help coordinate this afternoon’s training . . . and you’ll be leading the team in when we attack Geneva.

“The assault will be initiated tomorrow morning, at 0900 hours.”

Ashton felt a whisper of dread at that.

She
knew
she wasn’t ready. . . .

Chapter Ten

6 March 2425

USNA CVS
America

Enceladus orbit

Saturn space

0810 hours, TFT

In Admiral Gray’s mind, he was drifting down a broad internal passageway with a low overhead, a Marine in full combat armor to either side. Ahead, two more Marines stood guard at a closed doorway of squat design. Light panels suffused the corridor with bloody glow. The door dilated open, and Gray moved through.

He was floating a meter and a half off the deck on a pair of grav-impellers, drifting along at a man’s pace with a tiny hum in his ears. Gray’s telepresence was being conveyed by an ATD-90 robot drone, a sophisticated device that was feeding everything he was seeing, hearing, and feeling back to his organic brain, which was still back on board
America
. Both Colonel Harold Martin, his security officer, and Captain Gutierrez had
strongly
recommended that he not go on board the captured alien vessel or meet with the nonhuman prisoners in person. The admiral commanding CBG-40 was too valuable an asset to risk, Martin had told him, while Sara Gutierrez had simply looked him up and down and said, “Admiral, with respect, are you fucking
crazy
?”

And so Gray had allowed them to convince him to use a telepresence robot to make the crossing from
America
to the captured alien vessel. In fact, the technology was good enough that it was tough to tell that he wasn’t actually on board the captured vessel. It
felt
as though he was right there, in the hovering robot’s metal and plastic shell. After all, in the human body, the optic nerves are several inches long, extending from the eyes to the visual cortex at the back of the brain, and sensations of hot, cold, touch, pressure, and pain travel as much as a meter or two, but the mind is blissfully unaware of the distance. With the signals relayed back to
America
’s primary AI, and with the two ships close enough to each other that there was no noticeable time lag, the incoming sensory data bypassed Gray’s normal sensory processes and fed directly into his brain. His body was lying comatose, strapped to a couch in sick bay; his mind, as near as he could tell, was in the small, grav-floating robot navigating the bowels of an alien starship.

Every now and then, someone in the government back home would submit a scheme to have all naval warships—especially the fighters—be teleoperated in order to preserve the lives of their crews. What those schemes couldn’t address, however, what they didn’t seem to understand, was the fact that space combat tended to sprawl across a very large volume of space. The speed-of-light delay between
America
’s sick bay and the captured alien ship was, at the moment, something on the order of 3 × 10
-5
, or .00003, of a second—the time it took for any speed-of-light signal to cross one kilometer. There was a slight additional delay as the signal was processed by
America
’s comm suite and vetted by her AI, but the actual time delay was far shorter than any human mind could perceive. A typical distance for combat between starships was on the order of three to four hundred thousand kilometers—about the distance between Earth and Earth’s moon—which meant a time lag of over a second. That
was
noticeable to the human mind—and insurmountable if you were trying to pilot a fighter across that distance in combat.

“You ready for this, Admiral?” one of the Marines asked him. He was Captain James Kornbluth, from
America
’s detachment of Marines. “These things are pretty ugly!”

“Let’s have a look, Captain.”

“Doc Hallowell is already inside, sir.” He touched the center of the door, which dilated open, and for the first time Gray saw one of the aliens.

There were two more armored Marines inside the compartment, plus another human in a standard environmental suit. The blond head inside the fishbowl helmet turned as he drifted in, and Gray felt her ping his ID.

“Oh, good morning, Admiral! I wasn’t expecting
you
. . . .”

Gray checked her ID. Tara Hallowell was a civilian, one of the scientists with
America
’s xenosophontology department. He wondered why
she
was here, and not the head of xenosoph, George Truitt.

“Carry on with what you’re doing, Doctor,” he told her. “Forgive me for not coming in person. I just wanted to see this thing up close. Well . . . as close as they’d let me get, anyway.”

She smiled. “According to some of the human prisoners we’ve talked to, they call themselves
Grdoch
.” She gave the final
ch
the German rasp, as in
Bach
. “At least that’s as close as we’ve been able to shape the sound in our speech. Isn’t it magnificent?”

Magnificent
was not quite the word Gray would have used. It
was
large . . . and it was utterly inhuman, unlike any life form he’d ever seen.

What struck him first was how it resembled the starship itself. He’d heard a description of the things when the Marines had first boarded the alien warship, but words simply hadn’t prepared him for the full, direct shock of the thing. The Grdoch was soft-bodied and surprisingly imposing, perhaps two meters tall when at rest, but able to puff itself up to three meters high or more when it was alert or surprised, as seemed to be the case now. Varying between egg-shaped and a fleshy mound wider than it was high, its deep scarlet surface was covered by hundreds of fleshy tubes, like short elephant’s trunks, attached to the body at one end, and with toothed suckers or mouth openings at the other, alternately gaping and puckering like the heads of so many blood-sucking lampreys. The skin was wrinkled and convoluted, and looked quite soft.

Three evenly spaced, jointed limbs stuck a meter out from the center of that pulsing mass—legs or arms, Gray couldn’t tell—each ending in three splayed, clawed digits. Those appeared to be tougher, covered with scales or plates of something resembling an insect’s chitin, black and shiny. As he entered the compartment, the creature flailed those legs wildly, scrabbling against the deck, and the body rolled back a couple of meters. It came up against a bulkhead and stopped there, quivering. Was it afraid? What was it
feeling
?

There were no eyes or other sense organs visible, no other features at all that he could see. How did the being perceive him?
What
did it perceive?

Gray thought about the alien Slan, another Sh’daar client race, beings that possessed eyes, but which relied more on tightly focused beams of sound to examine their surroundings, like the dolphins of Earth’s seas. “Is this another damned sonar race?” he asked aloud.

“We’re not sure yet, Admiral,” Hallowell replied. “We’ve been recording all of the sounds in this compartment, and while it’s making a lot of noise, none of it is at frequencies that would be useful for sound imaging.”

Gray was aware of sounds coming from the creature. He boosted his audio gain, listening. Squeaks . . . chirps . . . whistles . . . pops . . . a kind of background wail or groan . . . but all at audible frequencies. Sound had to be up in the ultrasonic range, with short, short wavelengths—as for dolphins or terrestrial bats—in order to carry echoes with enough detail to be useful in a visual sense.

And yet Gray had the distinct impression that the creature was
studying
him, and closely. He also had the feeling that it was frightened . . . something about the way it was trembling, as though it were terrified.

Of what? Of
him
? The being was larger and more massive than any human—even than one of the Marines clad in massive combat armor. And at the moment, Gray was a rather unprepossessing black-and silver sphere the size of a basketball, perhaps, with various slender metallic appendages and lenses for seeing.

“The Confeds must have been communicating with them,” Gray said. “What have you learned . . . anything?”

“We have AIs going through the Enceladus Station computer system,” she told him. “It looks like they released a worm into the base network, trying to destroy the translator program, but our people are working to reconstruct it now. And G-2 is looking for records of human interaction that might help us.”

That made sense. Gray didn’t know when the Confederation had first made contact with the Grdoch, but they would have kept meticulous records of each meeting since, and copies of those records—some of them, at least—would have been stored within Confed networks. Even such basic information as the planetary environment the Grdoch had evolved in could be tremendously useful in acquiring a basic understanding of them . . . their language, their culture, the way they saw the universe around them, both physically and emotionally.

“Does it have eyes?” Gray asked, bemused. Clearly, the thing could sense him somehow—was reacting to his presence—but there was nothing like a face or obvious organs of sight.

“Those appendages,” Hallowell told him. “It has about a thousand of them growing all over its body. Most are . . . mouths, though it seems to use them as manipulators too. They apply suction to pick things up, you know? But we think about five percent of those tubes absorb EM radiation at various wavelengths. That’s our working theory, anyway, until we can put some nanoprobes into its body and take a closer look at its nervous sysem.”

“You’re saying it has over nine hundred
mouths
? What the hell does it eat?”

“Unknown, sir. The . . . bodily fluids of some kind of prey animal is our best guess.”

“There must be food for it on board this ship,” Gray said.

“Yes, sir. We’re looking. It’s a damned big ship.”

“How many Grdoch are there?”

“We’ve found twenty-three so far. They’re being kept under close watch, in separate compartments like this one.”

“Any trouble from them?”

“Negative, Admiral,” Kornbluth replied. “I think they know their only hope of seeing home again is to cooperate with us. Wherever the hell
home
is . . .”

Twenty-three individuals wasn’t much of a crew for a ship 700 meters long—not unless they’d elevated robotics and automated control systems to a remarkable degree. Gray wondered about the alien fighters. Were those robots? Or were they crewed? At last report, there’d been about a hundred of the red fighters remaining. Most had fled with the Confederation ships; a few were still in orbit around Saturn or Enceladus, either shut down or . . . waiting.

The Grdoch, Gray realized,
did
look like something he’d seen before. Certain marine sponges in Earth’s oceans had that same rugose surface and bodies comprising multiple tubes through which they filtered seawater. Sponges, however, had no nervous systems and were not exactly promising candidates for building starships . . . or even fire. The similarity, he thought, likely was a product of parallel evolution—a case of dolphins looking like sharks even though they were not related.

He drifted closer, hoping for a better look, and the creature erupted in a series of chirps, chitters, and squeaks, together with an oddly harmonious blend of separate voices from a number of those pulsing mouths, a kind of wailing that sounded like a human vocal choir.

“They don’t like it when we get too close,” Hallowell warned. “And I don’t think they like machines, either. Your Noter . . .”

“Understood,” Gray said, letting the NTE robot drift back again. The creature quieted somewhat. “You know, we may get more information from the human prisoners. They’ve been working with these things for a while, obviously.”

Hallowell nodded inside her helmet. “I agree, sir. We’re working on the idea that they must speak LG.”

LG—
Lingua
Galactica
—was an artificial language, one of several, in fact, created by the nonhuman Agletsch during their explorations of the galaxy. “The Agletsch,” he replied.

“Well, if they’re working for the Sh’daar, then the Agletsch probably know them.”

“I’m curious, Doctor. Have you scanned yet for a Seed?”

“Yes, sir. Nothing, not even way down deep.”

Interesting. It didn’t confirm that the Grdoch were not a Sh’daar client species, part of their immense and far-flung empire, but it didn’t rule it out, either. Sh’daar Seeds were minute—about the size of a BB pellet—but humans had learned how to detect them using non-intrusive microwave scans. What to
do
about them, especially in the case of friendly ETs like the Agletsch, was still an open—and extremely worrisome—question.

“We need to get these . . . these people to the XRD at Crisium,” Gray said. “President Koenig is just going to
love
this. . . .”

The xenosophontological research department, occupying a vast subsurface facility in the Mare Crisium on Earth’s moon, was Humankind’s premier scientific facility for the study of nonhuman intelligences. They had a number of Nungiirtok POWs there, along with their odd little Kobold symbiotes. They had Slan as well . . . and a colony of several thousand Turusch. Technically, Earth was currently at war only with the Nungiirtok, since armistice pacts had been hammered out with the others.

At least, they were armistices from Humankind’s perspective. What they thought of them was still open to question.

Because of the uncertainty, many in both the USNA’s government and military disliked having that many nonhumans so close to Earth, especially since many carried the Sh’daar Seeds. Koenig wasn’t concerned about any danger the aliens might represent, but he did have to deal with senators, district congressional representatives, and generals who were.

In fact, now that the civil war with the Confederation had turned decidedly
un
civil, and with Geneva actively seeking an alliance with the Sh’daar, the Crisium facility was probably a Confed target for liberation. Something to think about.

Fortunately, that was Koenig’s problem now, Gray thought. In war, knowing your enemy was of supreme importance. Sun Tzu had stated that deceptively simple fact almost three thousand years ago. When the enemy wasn’t even human, when he didn’t think in human terms and didn’t react to emotional stimuli like humans might, the problem became much,
much
worse. That was why the Crisium facility was so vital—to learn how ETs like the Slan or the Turusch looked at the cosmos, to find out what motivated them, and why.