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21 December 2404

Palisades Eudaimonium

New York State, Earth

1804 hours, EST

Lieutenant Trevor Gray cheered and applauded with the rest of the crowd, but he wasn’t applauding the body of the speech. No, the Old Man had slipped out just one line at the very beginning, something about the medal belonging to the America battlegroup, before the faintest of flickers ran through the holographic image hovering overhead, and it began sounding like some empty-headed acceptance speech at the Virtual Reality Entertainment Awards night. “I’d like to thank the Senate … I’d like to thank the president of the Senate …”

Nah, that wasn’t the Old Man. Not his style at all. Every man and woman in the Fleet knew Admiral Koenig had exactly zero time and zero tolerance for glad-handing or for sycophantic public relations. That was an electronic agent up there, a personal assistant programmed to look and sound like Koenig reciting the holy party line.

The image continued speaking, but Gray had already tuned it out. He reached for another appetizer, a Ukrainian tidbit consisting of a sausage covered in chocolate.

“Trevor? …”

Something jumped and twisted inside him. Dropping the sausage, he turned.

Angela. …

“You!”

She was wearing a conservative evening dress for this crowd, a flowing white something aglow with light that changed colors as she moved.

“Hello, Trevor. It’s been a long time.”

He nodded, numb. In the background, Admiral Koenig’s image rambled on about duty and honor.

“What are you doing here?”

She gave him a thin smile. “I live here, remember? Or in Haworth, anyway. Just ten, twelve kilometers north of here. I think just about everybody in New New York came down to see the Yule ceremony tonight. Are you … are you stationed on Earth now?”

He shook his head, a curt, sharp negative. “I’m a fighter pilot assigned to the Star Carrier America. They brought me down for the flyby earlier.”

“Were you flying one of those things?”

“I was flying an SG–92 Starhawk, yeah.”

“They told me you were joining the service. I didn’t know you were a pilot.”

Yeah, you didn’t ask what had happened to me, did you? he thought. The last time he’d seen her had been just before he’d been forced into military service in order to pay her hospital bill. He’d tried to look her up on several occasions after, while he’d still been in a training squadron at Oceana, but his e-calls had always been blocked.

“Are you still with Frank?”

“Fred.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m part of an extended family up in Haworth, yes.”

“Are you happy?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s okay, then.” Damn, this felt awkward.

“How about you?”

“Me what?”

“Are you happy?”

He wondered how to reply. His life turned upside down, the woman he’d loved horribly changed and taken from him. He was forced to live and work with people who laughed at his old life and called him “Prim” and “squattie” and “monogie,” forced to leave the place that had been home since his birth. … Was he happy?

“Sure, I’m happy. A laugh a minute, that’s my life.”

She looked at him uncertainly, as if trying to decide if he was being sarcastic or bitter. He looked down at the palms of his hands, where slender gold, silver, and copper threads were woven in an uneven mesh imbedded in the skin, exactly like her implants. He’d had to get his when they inducted him into the Confederation Navy; all personnel had to have them in order to control everything from meal dispensers to the locks on their personal quarters to the cockpit instrumentation in an SG–92.

But Angela had gotten hers as a part of the treatment after her stroke, class-three implants within the sulci of her brain. They’d also regrown sections of her organic nervous system. And it had changed her, changed her attitude, her feelings toward him.

Of course, he still loved her, though she’d lost all affection for him.

“So,” he said, wondering what to talk about. “You just happened to be here? You weren’t looking for me?”

“No, Trev. I was just … here. Small world, huh?”

A little too small. Gray found himself wishing he were back on the America. Life on board ship was so much simpler.

But then, she had been pinging him. His PA confirmed that it had been her electronic signal seeking him out of the crowd. Maybe she was still interested in him after all.

“I’ve got to go,” he said sharply. He turned and walked away, leaving her standing there by the food table.

High Guard Destroyer Qianfang Fangyu

Saturn Space, Sol System

1325 hours, TFT

“What the holy fuck is that?”

Jordan Reeves floated in the main control room of the High Guard destroyer, staring into the holographic display showing the long-range scan of the intruder.

Captain Liu Jintao glanced at the liaison officer with distaste, and then passed his hand across the display controls, increasing the magnification factor by another ten.

“I would say,” Liu replied in his slow and halting English, “that it is a problem.”

The target was some 20 million kilometers out from Saturn—and at just about the same distance from Titan at this point in the giant moon’s orbit. That actually placed the intruder well within the outskirts of Saturn’s far-flung system of moons, within the retrograde Norse group, in fact.

And that made the intruder of supreme interest to the High Guard.

Within the display, the intruder appeared as a gleaming point of light, attended by a flickering sidebar of data giving mass and diameter, velocity and heading. The ship—it had just dropped out of the space-twisting bubble of Alcubierre Drive so it had to be a ship—was huge, two kilometers across and massing tens of billions of tons. At optical wavelengths, the object appeared … odd, a flattened sphere with a shifting surface that defied analysis.

“It’s highly reflective,” Liu said.

“It’s black.”

“Because it is reflecting the black of surrounding space. This data suggests that it is almost perfectly reflective … like a mirror, or a pool of liquid mercury.”

“So who are they, and what are they doing in the Norse group?”

The Norse group was the outer cloud of Saturnian moons, some dozens of bodies circling the planet retrograde and at high inclination. Phoebe, at 216 kilometers, was the biggest of these; the rest, named for figures from Norse mythology, were rubble, little more than drifting mountains. Ymir was just 18 kilometers wide.

“Is he trying to rendezvous with any of those rocks?” Reeves asked.

“Not yet,” Liu replied. “The nearest to the intruder’s position is S/2004 S 12 … at just over one hundred thousand kilometers. And the intruder is traveling prograde.”

The Norse group moons were retrograde, circling Saturn east to west. The intruder was currently flying against the flow, as it were, meaning it was not attempting to match course and velocity with any of those hurtling mountains.

Yet.

Over two and a half centuries before, the Second Sino-Western War had been fought both on Earth and in space. Toward the very end of the conflict, a Chinese ship, the Xiang Yang Hong, had used nuclear warheads to nudge three two-kilometer asteroids into trajectories that would have landed them in the Atlantic Ocean, one right after the other; the resultant tidal waves would have devastated both the eastern seaboard of the United States and much of the European Union, as well as much of Africa and South America. Had the attempt succeeded, there was little doubt but that the Chinese Hegemony would have emerged, not merely victorious, but as the single most powerful nation on the planet.

Beijing had claimed that Sun Xueju, the Xiang Yang Hong’s captain, had gone rogue, that he’d been operating independently of Beijing’s orders when he’d attempted what amounted to a global terror attack. The attempt had come uncomfortably close to success; a U.S.-European task force had destroyed the Xiang Yang Hong and two of the incoming asteroids … but the last, dubbed “Wormwood” by the media, had slammed into the sea between West Africa and Brazil, and half a billion people had died.

The Chinese Hegemony had been shamed by Sun’s act, and had been paying for that event ever since, blocked from joining the Earth Confederation, savaged by trade and commerce laws imposed by foreign governments, regarded as second-class representatives of Humankind …

… not to mention being forced, Liu thought bitterly, to accept foreign political observers on board Hegemony military vessels.

The Earth Confederation had started off three centuries before as little more than a loose trade alliance, but immediately after the Second Chinese War it had become the planet’s de facto government. Under the Confederation’s guidance, the High Guard—originally an automated deep-space system designed to track asteroids that might one day pose a threat to Earth—had been expanded into a small, multinational navy.

The High Guard was similar to the seagoing coast guards of earlier eras, but patrolled the outer solar system in search of asteroids that might threaten a populated world … or renegade ships like the Xiang Yang Hong attempting to change the orbit of an asteroid in order to create a planet killer. The High Guard paid special attention to possible sources of planet killers—the Kuiper Belt, the main asteroid belt, and the tiny, outermost moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

“We should warn SupraQuito,” Reeves said.

“We sent off an alert twelve seconds after the intruder appeared on our displays,” Liu told him. “The time lag at this distance is seventy-six minutes. The question is, what do we do about that … craft?” He pulled down another display, checking the ship’s library. “The only vessel ever encountered even remotely similar to this one was in 2392, at 9 Ceti. The Turusch call them …” He hesitated at the awkward, difficult name. “Heh-rul-kah.”

“An enemy?”

“A single ship wiped out a small Confederation battlefleet.”

“That thing is two kilometers wide,” Reeves said, shaking his head. “Too big for us. I suggest we follow it, perhaps try to get a closer look … but take no action.”

“I fear you are right,” Liu said. He was reluctant to agree with the liaison officer, but the Qianfang Fangyu measured just 512 meters from mushroom prow to plasma drive venturis, and massed 9,300 tons. Unlike many of the Guard’s older, Marshall-class destroyers, she still had a primary ranged weapon—a spinal-mount mass driver—but that would be of little use in combat against something as massive as a H’rulka vessel 20 million kilometers away.

“Captain!” his radar officer called in Guānhuà over his internal link. “The intruder is accelerating rapidly!”

Liu could see that for himself, as numbers on the display sidebar rapidly changed. The massive vessel was rapidly moving out of Saturn space.

It was moving sunward, toward the inner system.

“Helm!” Liu snapped. “Engage gravitics, five hundred gravities. Pursue the intruder!”

It would be like a mouse pursuing an ox. A dangerous ox. Liu wasn’t exactly sure what the Qianfang Fangyu could do if it actually caught the intruder, but they needed to pace it.

And to see to it that Earth was warned as quickly as possible.

But his oath as a High Guard officer—and his determination to see the ancient Middle Kingdom cleansed once and for all of the shame of the Wormwood Strike—made that pursuit imperative, no matter what the outcome.

The Qianfang Fangyu broke free from Titan orbit, accelerating toward a sun made tiny by distance.

Palisades Eudaimonium

New York State, Earth

1925 hours, EST

Admiral Koenig looked at Carruthers with surprise. “They’re doing what?”

“I know,” Carruthers said. “But the Senate majority feels that we don’t have a viable alternative.”

“But we do. Operation Crown Arrow.”

Carruthers gave a grim smile. “Not all of them see it that way. Especially if it turns out that these H’rulka are involved. They don’t wish to leave Earth open to attack. Not again.”

They were standing in a small temporary alcove within the concourse bowl. Carruthers and several of his aides, along with Rand Buchanan, Koenig’s flag captain, had retreated to the relative privacy and soundproof isolation of the alcove as the party outside continued to throb into high gear. Carruthers had asked Koenig to join them there. He’d ordered a martini from the local assembler, and was sipping it in an attempt to rid himself of the bitter taste of his electronic doppelganger’s speech earlier.

“But a special AI designed to negotiate with the Turusch? We’ve had Turusch POWs on Luna for two months now, and communicating with them is still a problem. What makes the Senate think we can pull off something like that?”

“I suppose,” Carruthers said slowly, “that they see it as an alternative to extermination.”

“The Sh’daar Ultimatum,” Koenig said, looking at his drink, “as delivered by their Agletsch toadies, made it pretty clear what the enemy wants of us. An absolute freeze on all technological development, especially GRIN technologies … and a limit to our expansion to other, new systems. Too high a price.”

“The Sh’daar Ultimatum was … what?” Carruthers said. “Thirty-seven years ago? And we’ve been steadily losing the war ever since it started. The Peace Faction is beginning to think that the price of admission may not be too high after all.”

“The Senate,” one of Carruthers’ aides put in, “is afraid.” Her name, Koenig could see from her id, was Diane Gregory, and she was a Navy captain. “The enemy got entirely too close to Earth last October,” she continued, “and the Peace Faction feels that it is only a matter of time before they succeed in an all-out attack on Earth’s technical infrastructure.”

No one was sure why the mysterious Sh’daar—the presumed overlords of an interstellar empire in toward the galactic core—had insisted that Humankind give up its love affair with a steadily and rapidly increasing technology. The presumption, of course, was that there were weapons just around the technological corner that might pose a threat even to the unseen masters of the galaxy, that the Sh’daar, through their subject races, were putting a cap on the technologies of emerging species in order to preserve their place at the top of the interstellar hierarchy.

But like so very much else about the Sh’daar, that was just a guess. So far as was known, no human had ever seen a Sh’daar; some human xenosophontologists had even suggested that they were a fiction, a kind of philosophical rallying point for diverse species like the Turusch, the Agletsch, the Nungiirtok, and the H’rulka.

But that, too, was just a theory … and not, in Koenig’s estimation, even a particularly likely one.

And not even the super-weapon idea managed to explain the Sh’daar concern with human science, specifically with genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology—the so-called GRIN technologies. GRIN had been the driving forces of human technical progress for four centuries, now, so much so that in many ways they defined human culture, technology, and economic growth. That was why it had been unthinkable, at least to the Confederation leaders of thirty-seven years ago, that Humankind surrender its fascination with those particular technologies.

It was difficult to imagine a weapon system relying on all four technologies that might pose a threat to godlike aliens inhabiting some remote corner of the galaxy. Nanotechnology? Absolutely. Robotics? Possibly, but not very likely. Genetics? Again, possibly … though what kind of biological weapon could threaten a species that itself must long ago have mastered the most intimate secrets of biology? Information, computer, and communications technologies? Certainly a necessity, at least for controlling such a hypothetical super-weapon.

But … why those four? Why not another “G”—gravitics? Projected singularities made possible both inertia-free acceleration and the space-bending Alcubierre Drive, which reduced a 4.3-year voyage to Alpha Centauri at the speed of light to something just less than two and a half days. Being able to make micro black holes to order might well lead to some interesting weapons systems one day.

Or how about adding an “E” for energy? Artificial black holes within a starship’s quantum-tap power plant extracted seemingly unlimited amounts of raw energy from the vacuum fluctuation of the zero-point field. If it could be harnessed, that kind of energy release could almost certainly be developed somehow into a truly nasty super-weapon.

No, there was something specific about GRIN technologies that the Sh’daar didn’t like, that they feared. But what?

Koenig had always opted for the super-weapon theory. Think-tank study groups, he knew, had been working on that angle ever since the Sh’daar Ultimatum had been delivered, but with no solid leads so far. The notion that advanced technologies a century or two hence might enable humans to snuff out a star or transform the nature of reality itself would remain sheer fantasy until some idea could be developed showing where GRIN was taking the human species. The exact nature of the innovative leaps, the inventions, the unexpected technological advances of even the next fifty years simply could not be anticipated.

There was no way, even with the most powerful virtual simulations, to predict what was going to be discovered, and when.

“So … tell me about this virtual diplomat,” Koenig said.

“They’re calling it ‘Tallyrand,’” Carruthers told him. “They’re supposed to be programming him now at a facility on Luna.”

“Tallyrand?”

“A historical diplomat. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century … France.”

“They called him the ‘Prince of Diplomats,’” Gregory said. “Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord is widely regarded as the most versatile and influential diplomat in Earth’s history.”

“You seem to be up on your history, Commander.”

She grinned. “The admiral has had me over on Luna as an observer at the software labs where they’re writing him. So, yeah. I downloaded a lot on the original Tallyrand, at any rate.”

“I suppose they’re being hopeful with that name,” Carruthers said.

“They can be as hopeful as they like,” Koenig said. “How do they expect this … this virtual diplomat to communicate with the Sh’daar?”

“It will be an advanced AI residing within a starship,” Carruthers said with a shrug, “probably something like an ISVR–120 or a 124. No organic crew, just the software. The idea would be to send it into Agletsch space, out in the direction of Canopus, where we think their stellar polity is centered. And the Agletsch would pass it on to the Sh’daar.”

Koenig chuckled at that. “Good luck to them, then. Considering that computer technology is part of what the Sh’daar want to restrict, I’d say that Tallyrand would be a great way not to impress them. Or, maybe a better way to say it … it would impress them, but in exactly the wrong way!”

The others laughed.

“But how can they even consider caving in to the Sh’daar?” Buchanan asked. “Hell, nanotech alone is wrapped up one way or another in just about everything we do, in medical science, in assemblers, in retrievers, in nanufactories. …”

“Even more so for information systems and computers,” Koenig said. “We’ve been inextricably entangled with our computers for four centuries now. Giving up computers would be to give up being human!”

“Not entirely, sir,” another of Carruthers’ aides said. His id identified him as Commander Jesus Vasquez. “There are people out there today who don’t rely on computer technology.”

“Squatties,” Gregory said, making a face. “Prims.”

“Exactly. In any case, the Sh’daar seem to just want us to stop further technological development.”

“This far and no further, eh?” Carruthers said.

Koenig shook his head. “And I would argue, Commander, that that means giving up an essential part of our humanity as well. We’re always going to be tinkering. We find a way to make a hotter fire … and that in turn leads to discovering copper and tin when they ooze out of the rocks around the campfire. We play with those, find we can mix them, and we discover bronze. Meanwhile, someone builds an even hotter fire and learns how to smelt iron. Technological innovation started with knocking chips off the edge of a piece of flint, and it hasn’t stopped since.”

“But progress can’t keep going on forever, can it?” Gregory asked. “There has to be a point where there’s nothing more to be discovered. No more inventions, no more improvements to be made.”

“Can’t it? I wonder. Have you ever heard of the technological singularity?”

“No, sir. What’s that?”

“Old idea, late twentieth century. Back then, science and technology were improving at a steadily increasing rate, at an exponentially increasing rate.” Koenig moved his hand as though following a line on a graph, going up gradually, then more steeply, then straight up. “At some point, it was theorized, technological advancement would be accelerating so quickly that life, that humanity itself, would become completely unrecognizable within a very short span of time. It was called the technological singularity … or sometimes the Vinge Singularity.”

Carruthers got the faintly glassy, distant look of someone pulling data down from the local Net. “Ah,” he said. “Vernor Vinge, right?”

“That’s the guy. Of course, we haven’t hit the singularity yet … at least not to that extent. Someone from five hundred years ago would still be able to relate to the world we know today. Nanassemblers might seem like magic, sure, but with a little training and some minor surgery to give them the necessary implants, they’d get along in our society just fine. Life hasn’t changed fundamentally, not to the extent some theorists envisioned.”

“I’m beginning to think some sort of new super-weapon is going to be our only hope,” Carruthers said. “But we’re going to need to develop it damned fast, because if the Sh’daar Empire doesn’t take us down pretty soon, I’m beginning to think the politicians will.”

“So what is the current status of Crown Arrow?” Koenig asked with blunt directness.

“On hold in committee in the Military Directorate,” Carruthers told him. “The vote has been delayed again, indefinitely, this time. I was told two days ago that we don’t want to provoke the Sh’daar into hasty action.”

“What, they don’t want us to make them mad?” Koenig asked. He laughed. “I’d say they’ve been royally pissed at us for thirty-seven years!”

“Maybe. And maybe an empire of some billions of worlds is so big they move slowly.”

“And maybe we need to buy ourselves time, which is what Crown Arrow was supposed to do in the first place!”

Operation Crown Arrow was a strategic concept originally presented by Koenig to the Senate Military Directorate ten months earlier, shortly after the previous year’s twin defeats at Arcturus Station and Everdawn. The ONI had tentatively identified a major Turusch staging base at Alphekka, a star that, from Earth, was the brightest star in the constellation Corona Borealis, the “Northern Crown.” Koenig’s plan called for a large-scale carrier strike against the enemy base there, seventy-two light years from Earth. By taking the war deep into enemy-held space, the Sh’daar’s timetable might be thrown off, and forces now being gathered for an assault against Sol and its inner colonies might be drawn off.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had given the oplan their unqualified support, but for the past ten months, the Military Directorate had dithered, passing it through various committees and subcommittees, requesting clarifications and revisions, running it through virtual simulations to determine likely military, political, and economic outcomes, and always failing to bring it to a final vote.

Carruthers palmed a contact on the table next to them, and the assembler inside produced another drink, which seemed to rise up out of the table as though extruded from the hard black surface itself. He picked up the glass, studied it for a moment, and then downed it in a single gulp.

“I hear you, Admiral,” Carruthers said after a moment. “Believe me, we all do. We have allies in the Senate who are doing their best, but …” He shrugged and set the glass back on the table. After a moment, it seemed to dissolve back into the tabletop from which it had been nanufactured. “We’re going to have to be patient,” he said, finally.

“Just so long as the Sh’daar and their allies are patient as well,” Koenig said. “I do know one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“We humans are a technic species. Our technology, the pace of our technological advance, is a part of us, a part of everything we do. If we surrender our ability to make our own technological decisions to the Sh’daar …”

“We can’t do that, damn it,” Buchanan put in.

“No,” Koenig agreed. “For us, that would be racial suicide. Extinction. …”

“Slow extinction if we surrender to the Sh’daar Empire,” Carruthers said, “and quick extinction if we keep fighting them, and lose. It seems our species has damned few alternatives open to it.”

“Very few,” Koenig said.

Outside the light and noise of the eudaimonium, the night seemed very dark indeed.