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29 June, 2425

USNS/HGF Concord

4-Vesta

0128 hours, TFT

With Charlie One having already passed the closest point to Vesta on its outbound trajectory, Concord could no longer move to block the alien’s path. She could start chasing the other ship, however … or, more specifically, she could start accelerating toward the point far ahead of Charlie One where the alien should be when Concord intercepted it.

An intercept would be possible, of course, only if Concord could pile on a little more acceleration. Fortunately, while High Guard cutters weren’t armed to the teeth, they were designed with high-velocity intercepts in mind. An asteroid flung into a dinosaur-killer trajectory by unpleasant aliens might well have a considerable velocity once the course change had been discovered, and the sooner the ship could rendezvous with the incoming rock, the easier it would be to nudge it once more onto a safer course. Concord was a Lexington-class WPS-100 cutter, streamlined to reduce the drag that became significant at relativistic velocities within the dust-filled volume of the Sol System. She would be able to catch Charlie One in another hour—unless, of course, the alien flipped over into metaspace.

Regardless, she would make the rendezvous before the star carrier America.

Back home, in New New York, Dahlquist had a dog—a genetically modified pocket mastiff named Bumble who had a psychotic tendency to chase aircars when they passed overhead.

Like Bumble, Dahlquist wondered what he was going to do with Charlie if he actually caught the thing.

VFA-96, Black Demons

In pursuit

0131 hours, TFT

Connor was flying blind. Her scanners still showed the alien craft about five hundred kilometers up ahead with AI-resolved magnification enough to show some detail, but she wasn’t getting any signal at all from the drone, which minutes earlier had dropped into Charlie One’s pocket of intensely warped space. The device should be falling forward along the alien’s hull, now, in free fall toward the intense, flickering point of projected gravity out ahead of the alien’s nose … assuming, of course, that the alien’s flight technology worked along the same line as that of human ships. Everything she’d seen suggested that the technology was the same, right down to an apparent upper level of acceleration.

The escorting fighters had worked well clear of the alien and were decelerating now. Connor and the other three Starblades were already past them. Possibly, they were deploying to engage the Hawes and the Elliot, which still were following in the fighters’ wakes, but that wasn’t her concern.

She needed to stay focused on Charlie One.

Her Starblade shuddered, and an inner awareness—her link with the fighter’s AI—warned her of trouble: gravity waves. Powerful gravity waves. Her fighter literally was passing through ripples in spacetime.

And then Charlie One was tumbling, its power plant dead, its acceleration at zero.

“Got him!” Connor yelled over the tactical channel. Communications between squadron members were always a bit iffy at relativistic speeds, but she got an immediate acknowledgement from Commander Mackey. Still accelerating, Connor’s fighter closed with the alien very swiftly now, passing it within a hundred kilometers. There was no response from the vehicle, and no indication that she was being tracked or targeted. There was power being generated on board, she noted, but the main power plant appeared to be off-line.

Good. Flipping her fighter end for end, she began decelerating. Rendezvousing with Charlie was going to be touch and go, since the alien spacecraft was still coasting along at very close to the speed of light. But with its singularity drive switched off, it was no longer accelerating, and that made the problem a little bit simpler.

She checked her nav data and realized that she was the closest of the four fighters to the target.

“This is Demon Five,” she reported. “I’m going to try to close with Charlie One.”

“Copy that, Five,” Mackey’s voice came back. “For God’s sake watch yourself.”

Watch yourself get blown out of space, she thought, but she said only, “Affirmative.”

She began closing with the alien.

USNA Star Carrier America

In pursuit

0140 hours, TFT

“One of our fighters is docking with the alien,” Commander Mallory told Gray. “It’s confirmed: Charlie One has stopped accelerating.”

“About goddamned time,” Gray said. “Pass the word, though. Do not attempt to board the alien alone. I want them to wait until we have some capital ships there to back them up. And we’ll need SAR tugs to slow Charlie One the hell down.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

America carried a number of search-and-rescue craft, and the UTW-90 space tugs of the carrier’s DinoSAR squadron were specifically designed to rendezvous with streakers: ships damaged in combat at relativistic speeds, hurtling off into deep space at near-c velocities and unable to decelerate. SAR tugs could link up with fast-moving hulks, recover their crews, and slow them down to more manageable velocities.

“They can try for an AI link,” Gray went on, “but no physical contact.”

They were going to do this right. There were too many unknowns floating around out here to risk some fighter pilot putting his or her foot in it.

“And what if the aliens decide not to cooperate?” Mallory asked.

“Then they’ll keep until we get there with the big guns.”

“I presume you don’t mean literal weapons.”

“No,” he said, a little exasperated by the question. “But America’s AI should be able to pry them open electronically.”

Combat for over half a century with half a dozen different Sh’daar species had given humans plenty of opportunity to learn about Sh’daar computer networks and protocols. In particular, contact with one alien species, the Agletsch, had introduced humans to various Agletsch artificial languages—especially their trade pidgins, which allowed various members of the Sh’daar Collective to communicate with one another. Language, it turned out, was as utterly dependent on a given species’ physical form as it was on their psychology. There were galactic species that communicated by changing color, by modulating burps of gas from their abdomens, and by the semaphore twitchings of appendages on what passed for faces. The huge, floating-gasbag H’rulka broadcast on radio wavelengths. The Turusch lived in closely bonded pairs, and the speech of one harmonized with the speech of its twin, giving rise to a third layer of meaning. The Slan, who “saw” in sonar, communicated in patterns of rapid-fire ultrasound clicks at wavelengths well beyond the limits of human hearing. With such a bewildering range of communication types and styles, it was amazing that anyone in the Galaxy could exchange even the simplest ideas with anyone else at all.

But that was where the super-AIs came in, the immensely powerful computer minds billions of times faster and more powerful than mere organic brains. Some were designed solely to crack alien languages; shipboard systems had language software developed by those specialized AIs.

Even so, it was never easy. There were no guarantees that an unknown language could be cracked at all. Mostly, Gray was hoping that the aliens on board Charlie One had met the Agletsch, and used one of their pidgins.

If they were actually a part of the Sh’daar Collective, though, they would have to have a way to communicate with other Collective members.

More than that, Charlie One had been on Earth, which meant its crew had been in touch with the Earth Commonwealth—and that meant they almost certainly spoke a language humans (or their AIs) could understand.

Gray wondered if Charlie One was carrying an ambassador of some kind. Not that the Sh’daar had ever shown any evidence of understanding the concept of ambassadors or of the niceties of diplomatic service. Agletsch traders were the closest thing humans had encountered yet to Sh’daar diplomats. For even though those damned spiders never did anything for free, their stock-in-trade was information … and in so far as diplomacy involved an exchange of information and of understanding, they were naturals in the role.

But, so far, at least, there were no generally accepted rules on the galactic stage as there were for human diplomats—no embassies or consulates or formal exchanges of ambassadors. It had occurred to Gray on more than one occasion that this was one reason the Sh’daar War had dragged on for so long. Even the defeat of the Sh’daar in their home time and space had led to only an informal and non-binding truce. Twenty years after Koenig had emerged victorious from the N’gai Cloud in the remote past, human space was being raided by the Slan.

And now Charlie One was in the picture. What the hell had that ship been doing in North India?

That was one reason for giving the order not to attempt contact until America had arrived.

He didn’t want to hear about this one secondhand.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0725 hours, EST

“It looks like a full day for you, sir.”

President Koenig looked up at Marcus Whitney and scowled. “Where’s my coffee, damn it?”

“Right here, sir,” Lana Evans said, reaching past Whitney and placing the cup on his desk. “Anything else, Mr. President?”

“No. Thank you.” He glowered at Whitney. “What do we have?”

“Most of it is focused on what’s happening in Europe right now, sir, and throughout the Confederation. After the battle at Verdun yesterday, the entire Confederation appears to have collapsed.”

“And about damned time, too,” Koenig said. He was tired after far too little sleep, and he needed his coffee. He’d been up until nearly three that morning, following reports streaming in from the star carrier America. When he’d gone to bed, America was still maneuvering, trying to match course and speed with the alien. A fighter had already docked with Charlie One, and two SAR tugs had been launched, but it would be hours yet before there would be any solid information from out there, now out well beyond the orbit of Neptune.

He sipped his coffee, made a face, then looked up at Whitney. “Okay. What else?”

“Here you go, sir,” Whitney said, thoughtclicking on his own connection with the electronics in the presidential office. “It’s all on the Pickle.”

He was referring to the “PICKL,” a centuries-old acronym standing for “President’s Intelligence ChecK-List.” It had first appeared in the mid-twentieth century as the CIA’s daily briefing for the U.S. president on important events that had occurred throughout the world overnight. Eventually it had vanished, world events having become too complex to be so easily distilled.

Recently, though, the idea of the PICKL had been revived in electronic form. World events were more complex than ever, including as it did not only news from all over Earth, but from colonies across the entire solar system and out among the nearer stars as well. The ocean of information flooding in at every moment was too large and complex by far for any one man to follow, information of which the president of the USNA needed to be aware. The current PICKL was created by a metanetwork of super-AIs operating within the government, the military, and for the various national intelligence services—Konstantin, on the Moon, was a major participant—and in large part was the network responsible for boiling that ocean down to teacup size.

Koenig ran down the list of briefings. At the top of the list was the capture of the alien starship, code-named Charlie One. It would be hours yet before America’s SAR tugs would catch the vessel and begin decelerating it. Until that happened, it was still hurtling outbound, now well past the orbit of Neptune and out into the Kuiper Belt. Details were sketchy, but evidently a fast-thinking fighter pilot off the America had used a drone to interfere with the alien’s singularity projector. Something important had clearly burned out; if it hadn’t, Charlie One would have slipped into metaspace long ago and been gone.

I’ll have to commend that pilot later, he thought. Another urgent point on the list caught his eye. It had to do with Charlie One’s apparent destination, in the constellation Cancer. He decided to study that later, too.

He moved to another item: closer to home there was a revolution against the Confederation government in South India, clashes between Chinese special forces and Russian troops in the Siberian maritime province, religious riots and demonstrations across the Theocracy, and massive flooding from a storm surge in the Philippines that almost certainly would foment unrest.

It went on:

A breakthrough in communicating with the Slan at Crisium … suspected sabotage in the Mt. Kenya space elevator … yet another formal protest by the Papess in Rome denouncing the White Covenant … government collapse in Geneva … possible Sh’daar activity at 70 Ophiuchi …

In short, very much business as usual. With the USNA walking the proverbial knife’s edge between survival and disaster on a dozen fronts.

“The big thing on the docket for today,” Whitney said, interrupting Koenig’s perusal of the list, “is the Washington dedication.”

Koenig groaned. “I don’t suppose we can put that off?”

“Not easily, sir. It’s an enormous affair, and there may be a hundred thousand people attending. It may turn out to be a lot bigger than that, as the news about Verdun moves down the Nets.”

Koenig sighed.

Washington, D.C., the former capital of the old United States, had been partially submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the twenty-first century. The capital had been moved to Columbus, Ohio, where it had remained for the next nearly three and a half centuries. Washington had slowly been claimed by swamp, mangroves, and forests of kudzu, which enveloped the exposed marble buildings and monuments. A part of the Periphery, it had been abandoned by the United States, then ignored by the new United States of North America. Tribes of Prims continued to hang on to a marginal existence there, fishing over what once had been the Mall, and fighting off periodic attacks by raiders out of the Virginia Periphery.

Late the previous year, not long after the beginning of hostilities in the civil war against the Confederation, the Pan-Europeans had attempted to take over Washington and several other parts of the North American Periphery. A sharp battle with local forces had broken the Confed attack. Since then, USNA help and technology had been pouring into the area, reclaiming the swamp, clearing old buildings and growing new ones, and freeing walls, monuments, and domes from the clinging riot of greenery.

Today, President Koenig was scheduled to fly to Washington and dedicate the reborn city, formally reinstating it as part of the USNA. Within the next six months, it was hoped, Washington would once again, after three centuries, be the North American capital. Preparations were already under way to move the physical apparatus of government from Toronto south.

Koenig wasn’t convinced that the move was a good idea. Since most of any government now was its electronic infrastructure rather than specific buildings, one city was pretty much the same as any other, and there’d even been suggestions that SupraQuito would be a better site. It had been centuries since government was dependent on a specific place. Washington, Columbus, and now Toronto all were symbols—potent symbols, perhaps, but only symbols, symbols of tradition and continuity and history. The real business of government long ago had been taken up by various AIs running in places as diverse as New New York, the Angelino-Francisco Metroplex, SupraQuito, and Tsiolkovsky, on the far side of the moon.

Humans were vital to the running of government, of course; with hardware purpose-grown in their brains from the time they were born, with in-head electronic memory and the ability to link with other people anywhere in the world, or to link with AIs possessing superhuman intelligence, government processes could be micromanaged by politicians as never before. But Koenig felt that the purely organic components of government—fallible, prone to corruption, prone to uninformed choices and bad days and just plain bad decisions—were fast becoming obsolete, save for when they were performing some of the more traditional duties of politicians …

Like presiding over the dedication of the opening of a once drowned city.

Koenig was tempted to cancel, but Marcus had a point about the crowds and Verdun. The victory in Europe had the looks of a final triumph over the Confederation. Celebration had already begun across North America … and in Europe, too, where the civil war had become increasingly unpopular. Starlight had been hammering the theme of peace for the past several months.

“Are we still on for having Constantine d’Angelo put in an electronic appearance? I gather he was pretty popular the other day in Geneva.”

“We are. They’ve grown a ten-story tall vidscreen in Washington overlooking the Mall, just like the one in the Place d’Lumiere.”

“So why can’t I put in an appearance the same way?”

Whitney shrugged. “I guess you could if you really want to, sir. But people are expecting to see you in the flesh and ten stories tall.”

And, of course, the single key difference between the president of the USNA and the leader of the new Starlight religion was that “Constantine d’Angelo” didn’t really exist—not as flesh and blood, at any rate. He was an electronic avatar, a construct created as a public face for Konstantin.

Most people with in-head electronics carried their own e-secretary with them, a pocket-sized personal assistant AI that could front for the human in handling incoming calls and routine business and be completely indistinguishable from the human prototype as it did so. These business and social stand-ins were referred to as secretaries or personal assistants or avatars and they existed only as electronic patterns of data, as images and sounds built up pixel by pixel and bit by bit by the AI generating them.

“Constantine d’Angelo” was no different, save that he claimed to be a real person. An elaborate and completely fictional background and biography had been carefully pieced together for him, and records had been put in place by USNA Intelligence proving that people had seen the flesh-and-blood d’Angelo. His parents were still alive in a Kuiper Belt greenhab; reportedly they were very private people who’d declined to be interviewed …

D’Angelo had appeared at the Place d’Lumiere projected on the giant screen overlooking the plaza in front of the ConGov pyramid and given a powerful speech decrying the Confederation’s war crimes and urging a cessation of hostilities. That speech, Koenig knew, had been meticulously crafted through recombinant memetic techniques to prepare a war-weary population for the USNA strike at the Verdun fortress, and the capture or death of Korosi, Denoix, and their cronies. The Starlight movement had been gathering strength, momentum, and the unassailable authority of the moral high ground … and no one outside of the innermost reaches of the USNA government appeared to realize that the entire movement was an electronic construct.

“What I need is a physical avatar,” Koenig said ruefully, “not just the electronic version.”

“A physical avatar,” Whitney said, thoughtful. “You mean like a touristbot?”

“Actually—”

“There are some pretty good TRs, sir.” The initials stood for “teleoperated robot,” and referred to simulacra that could be “ridden” long-distance by human operators.

“That won’t be necessary, Marcus.”

“No, really, sir. Dopplebots. We could have a stand-in made up for you that—”

“No, Marcus. I wasn’t serious.”

There were public figures, Koenig knew, simsex actors especially, who mentally rode robots designed to be indistinguishable from their human counterparts. And some tourists used them to explore the surface of Venus or the streets of distant cities without leaving home. He’d always found the idea of robotic public appearances gimmicky … and mildly rude. Showing up in a robot body when people thought it was you seemed deceptive, and a violation of the public trust. If the public spotted the stand-in—and no robotic replica was perfect—he’d never hear the end of it.

He sighed. “When do I have to be there?”

“Twelve thirty, sir. The program begins at one. A shuttle is scheduled to leave Toronto’s waterfront at twelve ten, with a twelve-minute flight.”

The maglev tubes to Washington weren’t open yet.

“Okay. Let’s see what we can get done before then.” He scanned again down the list of items appearing on his in-head, then projected it onto a virtual screen floating above his desk. “Tell me about this one … ‘Collapse in Geneva.’”

“A Starlight mob stormed the offices of the Confederation Senate this morning,” Whitney told him. “The police appear to have joined the mobs, and there’s a complete breakdown of social order …”

In Switzerland, of all places? Orderly, clean, law-abiding Switzerland? It seemed like the rankest blasphemy.

USNS/HGF Concord

In pursuit

0745 hours, TFT

By the time Concord had matched vectors with the alien and closed the range to a few hundred kilometers, Dahlquist had a real problem on his hands.

It wasn’t a matter of betraying the United States of North America … not at all. He’d been following the news feeds while Concord had been posted out in Vesta space, and it was clear that the civil war there was all but over. The Earth Confederation’s remaining fortresses had fallen, its leaders were dead or captured, the Geneva government itself under siege by religious fanatics. If he’d been able to seize Charlie One in the name of the Confederation—and the thought had crossed his mind hours earlier—who the hell would he give it to?

In any case, he remained loyal to the USNA. It was the Prim Sandy Gray he didn’t like, and whom he would disgrace if he possibly could. The guy never should have been promoted to flag rank so quickly—should never have been promoted past lieutenant at all. As Dahlquist saw things, Primitives never developed the same facility with in-head technology as people who’d been wired from birth. They might serve well enough in the military as enlisted personnel, but never as officers.

He didn’t realize it, but he was recapitulating an ancient argument of military service that went back to the old United States, to the British Empire, and even before: you had to be a college graduate to be commissioned as an officer. Arguably, it was an outgrowth of feudalism, when only landed gentry—the nobles—could afford armor and a horse, leaving peasants, by default, to become foot soldiers.

With the presumption that only the wealthy could afford formal education—and a formal education was required to teach a student the history, the tactics, and the deportment necessary for the proverbial officer and a gentleman—it was a system that had worked, and worked well, for something like two thousand years.

There were exceptions, of course. There always had been—the mustangs who came up through the ranks, the battlefield promotions, the noncom who found himself the senior man of an embattled platoon or company. In Dahlquist’s opinion, those scarcely counted. In modern combat, it was vital that an officer have that perfect union of the organic and the machine, the balance of human mind and AI, the speed and grasp of the computer melded perfectly with the intuition and the inventiveness of the human brain.

And upstart Prim admirals just didn’t cut it.

Concord’s AI was painting an image of the alien now. Three of America’s search-and-rescue tugs had already rendezvoused with the ship, latched on with ultra-strong cables, and were now decelerating the alien. Four of the star carrier’s fighters were present as well, standing off somewhat as they oversaw the deceleration. The sun was a tiny, shrunken bright star in the distance, now more than five light-hours—some forty AUs—off, roughly the average distance of tiny Pluto from Sol.

Two USNA warships—a frigate and a destroyer—were still thirty minutes away from rendezvous. That Concord had managed the feat before them was due entirely to the High Guard cutter’s beefed-up maneuvering suite. The same held true for the three SAR UTW-90s—the cutter and the tugs were designed as intercept vehicles, and thus outpaced the warships.

Each SAR vessel carried a crew of five under the command of a lieutenant or a lieutenant commander. Dahlquist was now the senior officer present.

Opportunity presents itself, he thought.

“Open a channel to the lead SAR tug,” he told his own communications officer.

“Lieutenant Commander Mitchell is on the line, sir.”

“Commander Mitchell?” he said. “This is Commander Terrance Dahlquist of the High Guard ship Concord. I am maneuvering to board the alien.”

“Concord,” a voice replied in his head, “this is Fly Catcher. That’s negative on rendezvous, repeat, negative. We are under orders not to board the alien under any circumstances until America has joined us.”

“I am disregarding those orders, Fly Catcher. Maintain deceleration. We’ll take it from here.”

The alien was growing huge in Dahlquist’s inner mind’s-eye window.

“Wave off, Concord! Wave off!”

“Negative,” Dahlquist replied. “We’re going in.”

And then things began to get exciting.