Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (16 page)

“We’ll take anything you can get,” Dahlquist had told him. “Conversations . . . the two of them having dinner together . . . whatever you can grab. Of course, if you could get them having sex together, that would be
incredible. . . .”

“Why?” Symington had asked, genuinely puzzled. “Sims and virsex rides aren’t enough for you?”

As had been the case for centuries, sex was very,
very
big business, especially with the rise of electronic media. Computer-generated sexual encounters played in-head, and virtual sex with partners over electronic links could be every bit as intense and as realistic as the real thing. There was an entire segment of the modern entertainment industry devoted to actors and actresses who allowed themselves to be “ridden” by millions of . . . not “viewers,” but “expers”—
experiencers
linked in through cerebral implants, seeing, feeling,
experiencing
everything that the actors did, either in real time or as recordings played back whenever the exper wished.

Tapping into someone’s in-head computer circuitry outside of the virsim industry was simple enough if you knew how to get around the security protocols. It was also illegal as hell. There
were
laws on the books to protect people’s privacy, even if perfect privacy was pretty much a thing of the past now.

There were also people who specialized in bootlegging the experiences of others . . . headhackers, as they were known. And Symington had been one of the best, while he’d been working at CMU and before he’d gone to work for Morovec Neuronics and the Konstantin Array Project.

Dahlquist had spun an interesting story, about how his brother, the CO of the
Concord
, had contacts earthside with a big virsim studio interested in doing a docudrama series on modern naval heroes. The problem was that the studio wouldn’t bite until his brother had something solid to show them. To that end, he was collecting virsim clips of a number of both former and active-duty naval officers, including no less a luminary than USNA president Alexander Koenig.

Symington was willing to bet that Dahlquist was smoking from his ass. Full virsim clips of the president? Not damned likely, not with the level of security that surrounded
that
guy’s electronic presence. Koenig had some serious AI shielding around him, especially during the recent war. The Secret Service was understandably paranoid about Confederation mind assassins and agents tapping into the president’s cerebral implants.

Gray, though, was different. It wasn’t that he was vulnerable, exactly, but there were ways in,
if
you were already on board the
America
. He interacted regularly with a dozen different AI agents on board the carrier and several other ships in the task force, and there were plenty of other points of non-sentient electronic access—when he opened doors, directed a room to grow furniture, opened a comm channel, or ordered a meal, for instance. There were some powerful shielding protocols up when he was in port, but on board ship the simple daily routines of interacting with his environment exposed him to a certain degree.

And it would be even easier to tap into Commander Taggart’s in-head circuitry.

Symington didn’t believe Dahlquist’s story of virsim documentaries, not for a moment . . . but at one point the young pilot had dropped perhaps the one line that no headhacker could resist: “My brother said you won’t be able to get anything useful. . . .”

And that made it a challenge, one that Symington simply couldn’t pass by. Of
course
he could get the clips. Nothing simpler.

Too, the price was certainly right. Commander Dahlquist, he’d been told, was willing to pay, and pay a lot—the money coming from the proceeds of the expected e-documentary.

Hell, Symington would have done it just for the bragging rights.

From Symington’s perspective, there was nothing at all wrong with headhacking someone else’s sex life . . . or anything else about them for that matter. Privacy was extinct, an obsolete outgrowth of a social morality that had been dead for centuries. Complete exposure in the lives of public figures—and military commanders certainly qualified as such, the same as politicians—was the only way to guarantee transparency in government, at the top levels of the megacorporations, and within the military hierarchy.

To that end, their so-called private lives were constantly on display, or should have been. It wasn’t the sex or nudity so much that was important as it was the secret deals and backroom agreements and even pillow talk . . .
that’s
where the scandal truly lay, available for recording and release to anyone who could get past the safeguards. Just the threat that someone might be listening in was enough, Symington thought, to keep the wheelers and dealers, the potential tyrants, the would-be conspirators in line.

And if Dahlquist wanted bedroom recordings of Admiral Gray and the ship’s weapons officer just because he had some weird fetish for “expering” naval officers having sex, why the hell not? More power to him. Symington would show the Dahlquist brothers what he could do . . . and that might lead to more business down the line.

Symington had gone to his workstation in the AI suite and sequestered himself, making certain he would not be interrupted. He’d also entered a program he’d designed himself years before, a routine that made him look like housekeeping activity to the monitoring AIs. Artificial Intelligences monitored everything on board a modern naval vessel, mostly so that they could find particular personnel or bridge staff, and handle the in-head communications among them and with different parts of the ship’s electronic group mind.

He’d watched the entrance to Gray’s quarters on the main screen, pulling the images from two passageway cameras and a roving drone. He’d watched Gray enter his quarters at 1831 hours.

And he’d watched Commander Taggart arrive at 2110, palm the door announcer. Gray had let her in.

So far, so good.

As Taggart stepped into Gray’s quarters, Symington had linked to her in-head circuitry, disguising the intrusion as a tracking packet, one of the innocuous bits of software designed to follow the whereabouts of each senior officer on the ship. If Gray had faradayed his quarters, it would be extremely hard to get inside . . . or, at least, to get a signal back out. But Gray didn’t seem to be worried about shipboard security, and Symington was able to open a data channel from Taggart’s in-head electronics to the AI suite mainframe.

Now that he had the link established, the real work could begin. It took another hour of painstaking labor, using quantum decryption protocols to winkle out pass codes and access locked-down caches of RAM. At this point, Symington’s biggest problem wasn’t
America
’s AI, but Taggart’s. Everyone with in-head circuitry carried within their skull a small and rather simple-minded AI that served as personal secretary, assistant, and electronic avatar. It ran in the background, handled the thousands of routine minutia of the everyday interactive life, and served as a kind of gatekeeper to a person’s private mental sanctum, a firewall against viruses and malware. In some ways, it was tougher to crack than a ship’s AI, because it tended to be defensive and narrowly single-minded. If it detected you and you didn’t belong, you would be summarily expunged.

Step by step, Symington built up his own electronic avatar, one that Taggart’s personal secretary would accept as a part of itself. It meant hiding the transmissions from Gray’s quarters . . . disguising them in plain sight behind a quantum-encrypted door as routine housekeeping.

He also needed to set up a carefully designed routine to block the normal two-way operation of the channel. He didn’t want his own thoughts tipping off the subject.

A final connection opened a primary channel. He expanded the data flow . . .

Got it!
A solid electronic channel open between Commander Taggart and the AI suite! This should let him in on the action. . . .

He switched the reception to his own in-head, thoughtclicked the record icon, and gave an involuntary gasp as Gray’s face loomed scant centimeters from his own, huge, sweat-sheened, now closer, now farther,
thrusting
with ancient and urgent rhythm.

Taggart wasn’t visible, of course. He was seeing the scene through her eyes, experiencing it through her brain, after all. But he could hear her voice clearly, a litany of “Gods . . . gods . . .
gods
!”

And the sensation between his legs and within his belly was unlike anything Symington had ever experienced before. . . .

Chapter Fourteen

6 August, 2425

VFA-96, The Black Demons

Unknown Spacetime

1550 hours, TFT

“This just gets weirder and weirder,” Megan Connor said.

“Roger that, Three,” Gregory said. “Not exactly prime real estate, is it?”

“The view is spectacular. But it’s lacking something in the way of amenities, you know?”

Twenty-two hours earlier, they’d come through the TRGA, entering this new and near barren volume of space. The stars were faint, few, and far, a thin scattering across empty night save in one direction, and in that direction 400 billion stars were gathered in a single vast, sweeping spiral of misty light.

The galaxy spanned a full one hundred degrees of sky, intricately delicate, hypnotically beautiful. From here, above the galactic plane, it was possible to see details of the galactic core—a swollen and slightly reddish bulge of ancient stars—and of the surrounding disk, tinted blue-white and shot through with spiraling streamers of inky nebulae. Connor could make out the barred internal structure of the core, the sharp glow of young stars, the sullen embers of old.

The galaxy, she thought, was breathtaking in its beauty, amazing in its intricacy, spectacular in its spiral immensity. You had to be
here
, some 25,000 light years above the galactic plane, to really appreciate its size and complexity.

Much closer at hand, a solitary world drifted in emptiness.

Connor and Gregory were flying toward the lone planet, their Starblades a few kilometers apart, having launched on patrol from the
Concord
an hour earlier. After emerging from the TRGA, one of the High Guard cutters had been left behind to protect their way back, while the other two,
Pax
and
Concord
, had followed Charlie One in to the planet, seven light-hours—some fifty astronomical units—distant. The two cutters were adrift now, 2 million kilometers from the world, waiting, while the fighters circled on constant patrol.

“So what’s with the name they came up with for that rock?” Gregory asked. “Invictus?”

“It’s Latin,” Connor told him. “It means ‘unconquered.’ ”

“I guess
anything
sounds better in Latin.”

“The language programs they have working on the Glothr language called it Unconquered, or maybe Unconquerable. I guess they figured Invictus sounds better.”

“Well, better than flashy lights and bioluminescent winking,” Gregory said.

“I’m looking it up,” she told him, pulling up the title on her in-head. There were several references, but William Ernest Henley was at the top of the list. “Huh. There was a poem by that name . . . nineteenth century.”

“I see it,” Gregory replied. “Damn! The first verse is pretty much spot-on, huh?”

She was reading the entry.

Out of the pit that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

There were four verses in all, ending with the one well-known couplet from the piece that she remembered hearing out of context some time before.

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

“I don’t know, Don,” she replied. “Kind of sticky-sweet sentimental, if you ask me.”

“As was most Victorian poetry. The trouble is, my dear Lieutenant, that you have no soul.”

“Fuck you.”

He laughed.

The two High Guard watchships, following the Glothr ship after emerging from the TRGA, had been led across some fifty AUs. Here, they’d encountered this world—dark, icy, and solitary, with no sun of its own. The nearest star was perhaps a light century or so away.

Black as the pit from pole to pole
indeed. Connor wondered if the name had been chosen with that poem in mind, and if the choice had been by humans or by an AI running the translation program. Artificial intelligences tended to be aggressively literal in their interpretations of language, but often they could demonstrate depths of insight, emotion, or sheer
poetry
that humans found surprising.

Invictus was indeed black, a dark and frigid ice ball five times larger than Earth and with a surface temperature of minus 250 degrees Celsius. There was no air, of course. Any planetary atmosphere the body might once have possessed had been frozen out eons ago. Invictus was a rogue, a type of galactic world sometimes called a “Steppenwolf world” . . . though whether that was because it was a lone wolf wandering the steppes, after the novel by Hesse, or because it was a “wild thing” from the classical piece by an old musical group of that name was unclear. Billions of years before, a newborn star system somewhere inside the galaxy had given birth to a number of worlds, but in the jostle and bustle of that system’s formation, gravitational interactions had slingshotted some of those planets into deep space at high speed. It was a drama played out with startling frequency; astronomers currently believed that there were more sunless rogue planets adrift in the galaxy than there were stars within it—a number in the hundreds of billions.

More startling was the discovery that such worlds could hold on to their internal heat for a surprising length of time—and that that heat was enough to create vast subsurface oceans locked away beneath ice caps many kilometers thick. The internal heat generated by their formation and the heat arising from the radioactive decay of elements locked away in their cores could keep those oceans liquid for 5 or 6 billion years—or even longer.

Xenobiologists were quite aware of subglacial life within numerous worlds. Both Europa and Enceladus, gas giant moons in Earth’s own solar system, possessed ice-locked oceans with alien biologies, and other moons were strong candidates for life—Ganymede and Callisto, Titan and Triton, and even frigid and far-off Charon. There were also ongoing projects on two dwarf planets—Ceres and Pluto—looking for radioactively heated water and life deep below their frozen surfaces.

Other star systems, too, had frozen worlds and moons with subglacial oceans—at Alpha Centauri, at 70 Ophiuchi, at Arcturus . . . and a hundred other systems so far visited by Humankind.

In fact, most scientists by now were convinced that ice-locked biomes were the rule rather than the exception, that biospheres evolving on the surfaces of life-friendly worlds were far,
far
outnumbered by moons and planets harboring life in vast oceans locked away far beneath sheltering crusts of ice.

But Invictus was the first world humans had visited without a life-giving star and where they still had found . . . life.

And
technic
life at that.

“So . . . lonely,” Connor said, more to herself than to her wingman.

This Steppenwolf world had not only been flung from the star system that had given it birth. It was actually headed out of the galaxy, traveling with a velocity that would ultimately take it out into the thin, cold emptiness between the galaxies.

She shivered. Invictus would eventually freeze in the intergalactic void. It was a very good thing indeed that the intelligent species inhabiting it had developed star travel before that ultimate night set in. The local TRGA was close by, obviously positioned to serve this world and no others . . . itself an intriguing fact.

“That ring system is interesting,” Gregory observed. “It’s artificial.”

Connor agreed. The planet itself was almost coal black at the poles, regions illuminated solely by the glow from the immense sprawl of the galaxy. But encircling the black world’s equator perhaps three planetary radii out, was a broad, flat ring of light—
artificial
light bright enough to reflect a dim, blue-tinted glimmer from the ice.

“I think I can see space elevators,” Gregory said. “See them?”

“I do. Like very, very fine threads of light.”

Someone else, it seemed, had hit upon the same trick as Humankind, building elevators connecting the world’s surface with synchorbit, thousands of kilometers above. But Earth’s orbital facilities, while growing quickly out from three separate elevator towers, still were nowhere near numerous or massive enough to form an actual artificial ring around the planet. The Glothr, evidently, had been building their orbital structures for a long,
long
time.

How long, Connor wondered? There was no way to guess . . . but in her own mind she put a figure of tens of thousands of years as a lower limit . . . and hundreds of thousands as an upper one.

That, more than rumors of time control, was as sobering as a slap across the face. If they had to fight these beings, so far . . . so
very
far from home. . . .

“What gets me,” Gregory said, thoughtful, “is how the Glothr were evolving all along in their subglacial biome and never would have seen all of . . . this. Not until they emerged from their icy shell. It must have been quite a shock, don’t you think?”

“The xenosoph people are still chewing on the fact that they evolved eyesight at all,” Connor replied. “Evolving in absolute darkness, why do they even have eyes?”

“Well . . . they needed eyes to see luminescent displays,” Gregory replied. “And eventually their own light displays became language.”

“And then the stargods came down and freed them from their icy prison.”

“That’s what they’re claiming.”

“Maybe the stargods gave them eyes.”

Gregory laughed. “That’s the problem with religions. You can blame
everything
on the gods.”

“Well, we can assume that the civilization we’re calling stargods intervened here in some pretty major ways, right? They gave them enough technology—including things like metals smelting—so that they could move out of their dark ocean and into the ice layers above. And maybe later they would have helped the Glothr deal with the cold and vacuum at the surface of their world.”

“And it looks like they’ve developed a solid space-faring civilization since then. I wonder how long that took?”

“That ring took a
long
time to build, if it went up piece by piece, like synchorbit back home. I’d also be willing to bet a lot of raw material was imported.”

“Why’s that?”

“Just a feeling. We don’t know how rich Invictus’s subocean crust is in metals or in fossil fuels for plastics. But any marine species is going to have major problems if they can’t use fire.”

“Gotcha. You’re right. And . . . I think we can finally safely say that the stargods, whoever they are, are the ones responsible for the TRGAs.
Not
the Sh’daar.”

“
Probably
.”

“You’re not convinced?”

“Not a hundred percent.”

It was an old debate, one waged with considerable heat ever since the discovery of the first TRGA two decades before. According to Agletsch records, there were thousands of TRGA cylinders scattered across much of the galaxy, creating a kind of instantaneous transport system across hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of cubic light years. For a long time, the Sh’daar were presumed to have been the builders, if only because it was known that they used them, and
America
had spotted a number of them at the core of the N’gai Cloud, the home space of the original ur-Sh’daar.

Over the years, however, that identification had become more and more unlikely. That either the Sh’daar or their ur-Sh’daar forebears used the cylinders didn’t mean that they’d
built
them. More and more, circumstantial evidence acquired over the decades suggested that whoever had constructed those enigmatic artifacts had done so long before the arrival of the Sh’daar, and with a technology light years beyond anything the Sh’daar had revealed in almost sixty years of contact.

Connor wasn’t completely convinced, though. There were other ways, she thought, of explaining the appearance of the cylinders without invoking yet another culture of god-powerful aliens. Perhaps the ur-Sh’daar had been powerful enough to create them almost a billion years ago, but their cultural offspring—the Sh’daar remnant that had failed to achieve Singularity—had lost the technical know-how.

In the long run, though, it didn’t matter. The TRGA had brought the
Concord
and the Black Demons here, to this volume of space beyond the edge of the galaxy, and it was up to them to make the best of this new alien contact.

Together, the two Starblade fighters skimmed in toward the dark and alien world. The Glothr ship, Charlie One, had vanished hours ago into the geometric complexities of the artificial ring, taking Ambassador Rand and his staff of volunteers with it. Connor’s AI was holding a targeting reticule on the spot, though whatever structure the ship had entered was vanishingly small.

Sweeping past the planet, they bent their vectors around to take them on a long, curving arc back toward the
Concord
.

“What about the time factor, Don?” she asked her wingman. “Everybody’s talking about it. When the hell are we?”

“Beats me, Meg. The problem may be beyond
Concord
’s computers. But when
America
comes through, her AI ought to crack it in pretty short order.”

There’d been endless speculation in the squadron ready room about that. Since TRGA cylinders worked through time as well as space, the question of
when
they’d emerged here, out beyond the galaxy’s edge, was at least as important as the question of where.

Connor hoped that
America
would be coming through soon.

It was so damned lonely out here on the empty edge of Forever. . . .

USNS/HGF
Concord

Unknown Spacetime

1619 hours, TFT

The question of time—the
when
of the spacetime where the squadron had emerged, was very much on Dahlquist’s mind as well.

“Launch courier,” Captain Tsang’s voice ordered. And the telemetry playing in Dahlquist’s head showed the HVK-724 high-velocity scout-courier robot streaking from
Open Sky
’s Number 2 launch bay and dwindling toward the twisting, golden haze of the TRGA.