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1 February 2426

New White House

Washington, D.C.

1802 hours, EST

“Incoming message, priority red one-one, Mr. President.”

“Thank you, Pierre,” Koenig replied. “Decode and play.”

“Yes, sir.” The voice was that of a new AI built into the New White House. It had been named after Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French architect who’d designed the layout of the original Washington, D.C., in the late eighteenth century.

“Excuse me, Gene,” Koenig told the tall man with him in the Oval Office. “I need to take a call.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

Leaning back in his chair, Koenig closed his eyes and opened an inner window. The transmission was from the Joint Chiefs, and had been relayed from the Republic, now an hour outbound. Though made grainy and low res by distance, Koenig could see the image well enough. Light exploded out of empty space, unfolding like a flower, opening and expanding. Moments later, a faint haze appeared to be streaming from the effect’s central core.

“That smoke or fog is, we believe, a cloud of what our people call fireflies,” Lawrence Vandenburg, his secretary of defense, said in his mind. “Not nanotechnology, exactly, but extremely tiny machines operating according to a set series of programmed instructions. They can be used to build extremely large and complex structures in open space … or they can be used as nanodisassembler-type weapons. The cloud emerged some forty astronomical units from the sun and is now on a direct course to Earth. At their current velocity, they will be here in another two and a half hours.”

“You need to see this, Gene,” Koenig said as the message ended. Admiral Gene Armitage was senior of his Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“I thought we might have more time, Mr. President,” Armitage said after digesting the transmission. “I thought we had an agreement …”

“We were never sure the Rosette entity even understood what a treaty or an agreement was,” Koenig replied, grim. “All we could be certain of was that the Omega Code made that thing sit up and take notice. It may have developed some way of counteracting the virus.”

“It probably did that a couple of nanoseconds after it was exposed,” Armitage said. “Advanced AIs work on an entirely different experience of time than do humans.”

“So why did it wait? It’s been over a month since we stopped it at Kapteyn’s Star.”

“I don’t know, sir. Maybe it just had other things to think about.”

“Deploy all available ships, Gene,” Koenig told him. “Including anything we have in the naval yards … damaged ships, fighters, the works. We need to stop that cloud from getting to Earth.”

“Yes, sir.” He hesitated. “What about the Republic?”

Koenig checked his inner clock. “Unless Gray decided to turn around when he recorded this, he’s already gone into Alcubierre Drive.” Koenig didn’t add that Gray’s orders were to get to Deneb at all costs. He would not be returning immediately.

Not that a single light carrier would add much in a stand-up fight against that, he thought, watching the vid once more.

He opened another channel. “Konstantin?”

There was no reply, and that was profoundly troubling. Konstantin was arguably the most powerful super-AI in the solar system, and Koenig depended on the artificial mind’s guidance … especially when faced with existential threats.

“Konstantin?”

Pierre responded. “Mr. President, Konstantin is no longer on-line.”

“What? Where the hell did he go?”

“I’m guessing, sir, but it seems likely that he became aware of the threat posed by the Rosette entity and has made himself difficult to detect.”

Great. Just freaking great. The most strategic powerful mind in Humankind’s arsenal had taken one look at the threat and jumped into a cyber-hole … then pulled the opening in after him.

“Send a transmission to Fort Meade,” Koenig told the White House AI. “And Crisium … and Geneva. We need the Gordian Slash … and we need it now.”

He just hoped they had something, and that it could be deployed in time.

VFA-211, Headhunters

TC/USNA CVS America

Earth Synchorbit

1913 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Jason Meier braced himself as his SG-420 Starblade dropped into its launch bay. “Headhunter Three, ready for drop,” he announced.

“Copy Hunter Three,” a voice said in-head. “Stand by. America is pulling clear of the gantry.”

What was her name? Fletcher, right. His new Commander Air Group, or CAG; she sounded near-c hot, and he was looking forward to meeting her, really meeting her and not just listening to her give a standard “welcome aboard” speech to the squadron. Yeah … her mental voice was all business, of course, but Meier thought he could detect some warmth there, and maybe a need for exactly what he could provide.

He was certainly looking forward to trying.

Jason Meier was still getting used to the changes in personnel since the Headhunters had been transferred over to the America several days before. VFA-211 originally had been attached to the Lexington, but that star carrier had suffered badly in the fight out at Kapteyn’s Star, and her fighter squadrons—what was left of them—had been transferred. Several of America’s own squadrons had been shuffled off to the Republic earlier, and Meier wondered if anyone in the Fleet had a clear idea of what was supposed to be going on.

He felt the gentle acceleration as the kilometer-long carrier pulled back from the gantry. His in-head showed a choice of views, both from America’s external vid cams and from the gantry structure itself.

God … the old girl is a mess, he thought. He had a particular affection for the carrier even though he hadn’t been attached to her for even twenty-four hours yet. It had been the America that had shown up at the last possible moment at Kapteyn’s Star and saved the collective ass of the Lexington and everyone on board her.

America, he thought, studying her as she pulled free of her docking slip, wasn’t in much better shape than the Lex, but at least she could still limp along under her own power. When their drives had failed on the way back to Sol, a small fleet of SAR tugs had come out and towed both America and the Lady Lex into the synchorbital port. There was some question, however, whether the Lex could even be repaired, or if she was going to end up being scrapped.

It was possible that the whole question was moot. The entity that had wrecked both ships at Kapteyn’s Star had just popped up in the outer Sol System, and reportedly was headed straight for Earth. Every ship that could be thrown in the thing’s path was being mustered.

The trouble was that the muster list of Earth’s warships had been badly depleted lately … by the fight at Kapteyn’s Star, by the long-standing war with the Sh’daar Empire, and by the savage little civil war that had torn the Earth Confederation apart. The USNA Navy was desperately short of ships.

If indeed, any number of the ships of Earth’s various navies stood any chance at all against an enemy as technologically advanced, as overwhelmingly powerful as the Rosette entity. Hell, much of what they’d been seen doing—manipulating space and time in ways completely beyond human understanding—didn’t even seem to count as technology.

As a well-known writer and scientific philosopher of several centuries earlier had put it, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

“VFA-211,” the sexy voice said, “stand by for immediate launch. By the numbers …”

The squadron began sounding off. “Hunter One, ready for drop.”

“Hunter Two, ready.”

“Headhunter Three,” Meier announced, “ready to go!”

One by one, the rest of the pilots reported their readiness. There were twelve ships in the squadron. Three of those were replacements newly arrived from Earth.

“All squadrons,” Fletcher called. “You’re clear for boost at five thousand gravities. Two minutes to drop …”

“Well,” Lieutenant Lakeland, Hunter Seven, said, “we’re going somewhere in a hell of a hurry!”

“Yeah, but what the hell are we supposed to do when we get out there?” Hunter Eight, one of the newbies, asked. Her name was Lieutenant Veronica Porter, and she was someone else Meier wanted to get to know better.

“Don’t you worry about that, Eight,” Meier said. “The bastards’ll see us coming in at near-c, and they’ll turn tail and run so fast that God’ll arrest them for breaking the laws of physics!”

“Knock it off, Meier,” Commander Victor Leystrom, the squadron’s CO, said. “Try to behave yourself.”

“Hey, I always behave myself, Commander!”

But he knew what Leystrom meant—he had a … reputation both within the squadron and back on the Lex: ladies’ man, playboy, the stereotypical hot fighter jock with a nova-hot tailhook. And he did his best to uphold that rep with bravado and confident flirting, though even he admitted that the details of his sex life tended to be somewhat exaggerated. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day—or in the night, for that matter—to rack up the scores he liked to claim.

But that small intrusion of reality into his life couldn’t slow down his swagger.

Leystrom, who was something of a prude, seemed to take every opportunity to shoot the hotshots in his squadron down. Professionals, he insisted, didn’t need to brag.

Where was the fun in that, though?

The minutes dragged by. At 7,000 gravities, America would be pushing the speed of light in 71 minutes, but that wasn’t the point here. The Headhunters’ Starblade fighters could hit 50,000 gravities and reach c in less than ten minutes. If the carrier dropped her fighters relatively late in her approach to the objective, however, the enemy would have less time to track them, less time to lock on their weapons. Meier doubted that those tactics would be very effective in this case. Their target was—according to the best xenosophontological guess—an extremely powerful and highly developed artificial intelligence, possibly an AI that had been around for hundreds of millions or even billions of years. It could probably think rings around anything humans could bring to bear and come up with countertactics and unexpected attacks in nanoseconds.

Still, a guy with a stone knife and the element of surprise could kill a man with a high-tech handgun, if he could get in the first blow. It was that sizeable if that the squadron would be working on.

“Headhunters,” CAG called over the squadron’s tactical net. “You are clear to commence your drop in thirty seconds.”

“Okay, people,” Leystrom added. “There is a chance that the Rosies are coming in to talk. Keep your weapons offline, I repeat, off-line until either I or C3 gives you the word. Understand?”

A ragged chorus of assents came back. “What’re the chances the bastards want to talk, Skipper?” Lieutenant Greg Malone asked.

“When the Joint Chiefs see fit to tell me, I’ll let you know,” Leystrom replied. “Just stay the hell alert, and don’t Krait ’em until you get orders. Understand?”

“Copy that, Commander.”

The seconds dragged past. “VFA-211, commence drop sequence in three … and two … and one … drop!”

Centrifugal force tossed Meier’s Starblade from the carrier’s launch tube. As he dropped clear of America’s shieldcap, he could see the objective dead ahead … a small and fuzzy patch of pale light.

“CIC,” Leystrom said. “Handing off from PriFly. Headhunters are clear of the ship and formed up.”

“CIC copies that, Hunters, and thank you. Accelerate and close with the objective.”

“CIC, Headhunters, we copy. Boosting in three … two … one … kick it!”

The flight of Starblades hurtled outward, their view of space ahead turned strange as their velocity inexorably crowded that of light. For Meier, it was as though he was suspended somehow in time, with all of the visible stars crowded into a ring of light forward, with everything else enveloped in total black emptiness, and with no feeling of movement at all.

Moments later, the fighter AIs linked and in synch gave rapid-fire commands that flipped the Starblades end for end and began deceleration.

“Headhunters!” Leystrom snapped. “Arm Kraits and Boomslangs!”

Meier thoughtclicked an in-head icon, arming his fighter’s complement of missiles—thirty-two VG-92 Krait space-to-space shipkiller missiles, plus six of the far more powerful VG-120 Boomslangs.

Light exploded around him.

The Consciousness

Outer Sol System

1932 hours, TFT

In much the same way as the human mind emerged from tightly interlinking networks of individual neurons, the Consciousness was an emergent phenomenon arising from some hundreds of billions of lesser units. That subset of itself that had just entered the Sol System was only a tiny fraction of the Whole. Other iterations of the Consciousness were back within the depths of the Omega Centauri cluster, at Kapteyn’s Star, and scattered throughout the galaxy, some in communication with one another via microscopic wormholes, some operating completely independently.

This Consciousness had made the jump from Kapteyn’s Star some twelve light years away, using data lifted from various human-ship AIs to find the human home system. As it closed on Earth, it sensed the approaching objects, but only as material abstractions bearing low-level minds of questionable sentience. For the Rosette Consciousness, aware of individual hydrogen atoms singing within the Deep, enmeshed within the etheric beauty of intertwining magnetic fields and a complex sea of electromagnetic radiation, the merely material was of little importance. Sensate to the warp and woof of spacetime itself and the interplay of gravitational ripples across the underlying fabric of myriad dimensions, the Rosette had little interest in solid objects, however swiftly they might be hurtling across the Void.

Those minds it sensed ahead promised larger, more powerful mentalities within this system, however. Reaching out with its senses, the Consciousness recognized aggregates of mass as planets, all orbiting a single star. One rocky planet in particular, directly ahead, was the focus of an extremely complex concentration of electromagnetic frequencies, gravitic anomalies, and encrypted transmissions that could not possibly be natural. If there were higher minds in this star system, they would be physically present there, on the world the human systems had identified as Earth.

Destruction of Earth, the Consciousness estimated, and the assimilation of all minds of worthwhile caliber, should require only a few minutes …

Three of the entity’s components, traveling well out in advance of the main cloud, struck material objects with combined velocities approaching that of light, kinetic energy flaring into miniature suns of appalling destructive power …

VFA-211, Headhunters

Outer Sol System

1921 hours, TFT

Meier and the other Headhunters didn’t see the oncoming projectiles. They couldn’t, not with combined velocities approaching that of light itself. Not even the fighter AIs could react in time.

Porter’s Starblade flashed into star-hot plasma an instant before the ships piloted by Malone and Judith Kelly blossomed into light and hard radiation. “Christ!” Lakeland exclaimed; his fighter brushed the expanding wavefront of what had been Porter’s fighter and went into a savage tumble.

For a stunned instant, Meier stared into the triplet of rapidly fading stars displayed in-head. No …

“CIC, Hunter One!” Leystrom yelled. “Headhunters are under attack! Request permission to fire!”

“Permission to fire granted, Hunter One.”

“Hunters! Let ’em have it with everything we’ve got! Wide dispersion, proximity detonation! Put up a fucking wall!”

Meier thoughtclicked a blinking icon, loosing a pair of VG-92 pulse-focused variable-yield Krait shipkillers. “Fox One away!” Meier yelled over the tactical channel, the battle code for a smart-AI missile launch.

“And Fox One!” Lieutenant Pamela Schaeffer called out. Other Headhunter pilots chimed in as the sky ahead filled with fast-moving proximity-fused warheads.

White flashes silently strobed against the darkness. Even one-hundred-megaton detonations were not particularly vivid in space; the flash was bright, but unless the warhead vaporized part of a ship or other large target, there was little plasma to balloon outward in a fireball, and no atmosphere to transmit a shock wave. By using proximity fusing, though, the warheads turned thousands of the incoming firefly microships into expanding clouds of hot gas, and those clouds caught more and more of the tiny craft as they swept in. At relativistic speeds, even a few stray atoms of gas could superheat the alien microships and flare them into hot plasma. In moments, there were enough expanding gas clouds that they acted like solid walls as additional fireflies slammed into them.

The human fighters continued their deceleration, avoiding the white-hot volume of destruction spreading across open space. The cloud of alien fireflies kept coming, seemingly oblivious … and in moments half of the sky was lighting up in rapid-fire pulses of heat and radiation as they slammed into hot gas and debris.

Meier fought as though he was in a trance, pulling up in-head icons and thoughtclicking them, sending missile after missile into the growing wall of white flame. He was vaguely aware of the other fighters in his squadron, vaguely aware of three other squadrons off the America adding their firepower to the melee. He couldn’t think … didn’t want to think; not about the three deaths he’d just witnessed.

And then the thoughts began flowing and he couldn’t turn them off. Malone had been a buddy, a drinking partner on liberty and an interesting guy in late-night bull sessions on board ship. As for Kelly and Porter … they were all wingmates. And that’s a bond that forms tightly, no matter if he had known them for years, like Kelly, or had only recently met them, like Porter.

Every military pilot knew this was a dangerous job, one of the most hazardous assignments on the board for naval personnel. They knew the risks and they knew the odds, and sudden death by fireball—or worse, by frozen suffocation—were constant specters tucked into the cockpit each and every time a pilot launched.

But it still was a shock each time you encountered it.

“Meier!” Leystrom’s voice called. “Watch your vector! Break right!”

He’d let his attention wander for just a moment and had been falling toward a fading blossom of plasma. “Copy,” he called back. His fighter’s AI had been nudging at him, he saw, trying to get his attention. He let the fighter’s electronic mind flip the flickering drive singularity around and sharply change his course.

The fighters continued firing Krait missiles, hurling warhead after nuclear warhead into the oncoming swarm of glowing microvessels. At the same time, the thickest part of the alien firefly swarm slammed into the wall of glowing plasma, adding fresh and rapidly moving debris to the deadly cloud.

Abruptly, however, the aliens shifted their tactics as the swarming vessels, most only a centimeter or two long, altered course to move around the wall of detonations and expanding gas clouds rather than through. In a matter of seconds, the human fighters went from holding the line to being in imminent danger of being bypassed or surrounded.

“Fall back, Hunters!” Leystrom called. “Everyone fall back!”

TC/USNA CVS America

Outer Sol System

1920 hours, TFT

Captain Sara Gutierrez sat on America’s bridge, watching the computer-generated graphics on the main screen in front of her. A similar image was showing on an in-head window, but she’d pushed that to the back of her awareness. She preferred seeing things through her own eyes rather than directly through her brain. She wasn’t certain why … though she suspected that some perverse part of her preferred to keep the data at arm’s length, in some sense, to give her brain time, distance, and a much-needed objectivity to process it. Trevor—Admiral Gray—would have called her old-fashioned … but, then, he’d had a Prim’s mistrust of implants and AI feeds, so who was he to talk?

Damn … she missed having the admiral on the flag bridge behind her. Why the hell had the top brass seen fit to yank him off the America?

The graphics in front of her were painting the Rosette swarm as a vast, angry red hand, the fingers reaching past and around the small blue cons marking the fighter squadrons. The fighters were in very real danger of being surrounded.

“CAG!” she called. “Get our people out of there!”

“Working on it, Captain! Those things are fast.”

“I would remind the Captain,” Commander Dean Mallory, the ship’s senior tactical officer aft in the CIC, said, “that what we’re seeing here is almost twenty minutes out of date.”

“I know, I know,” she grumbled. “Damn it, Keating, get us in closer!”

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” the helm officer replied. “Another few minutes subjective.”

The twists and turns of relativistic combat tended to make Gutierrez’s eyes cross, and it was a damned good thing, she thought, that the ship’s AI could handle that stuff without blinking. America had released the fighters when she was just under five astronomical units away from the objective. Those fighters would have crossed that gulf in a bit over forty minutes, reaching the target at around 1720 hours. During that forty minutes, America herself had closed the range to just under 2 AUs—say, fifteen light-minutes.

Fair enough. But that meant that America was now picking up telemetry beamed from her fighter squadrons fifteen minutes ago, letting her literally see the recent past.

But what was happening now was still hidden and would not be revealed for another fifteen minutes.

And so Captain Gutierrez and her bridge crew had seen the destruction of three fighters out of VFA-211 and were watching now as the Headhunters conducted a skillful fighting withdrawal. The outcome likely had already been decided, one way or another, but America wouldn’t see what that outcome was for another … make it another eight minutes. America was still hurtling toward the far-off firefight at a bit under seven-tenths c.

“Captain?” Mallory said, his voice steady and calm in her head. “CIC. We don’t know how our fighters will stand up against those … things. We have to be prepared to try a different set of tactics when we get there. I recommend using nano-D.”

The idea shocked … though she’d been thinking about it herself. “That’s on the proscribed list, Commander!”

“Yeah, and it may be the only damned thing we have that can touch those things!”

“Point. Do we have any?”

“Affirmative, Captain. A few thousand rounds. We were scheduled to offload it at SupraQuito, but events … ah … kind of overtook us.”

“You can say that again.” Gutierrez thought furiously. The use of nano-D was not illegal … not exactly, not yet. Use of the stuff was strongly restricted, however, bound up in red tape and prohibitions, to the point where Gutierrez would quite literally be putting her career on the line if she gave the order to use it.

Weapons-grade nanotechnic disassemblers were molecule-sized machines that attached themselves to any material substance with which they came in contact and took it apart atom by atom, releasing a very great deal of heat in the process. Just over a year earlier, in November 2424, a rogue element in the Pan-European military had launched a string of nano-D warheads at the USNA capital of Columbus, Ohio, in an attempt to decapitate the rebellious North-American government. Buildings, pavement and subsurface infrastructure, vehicles, and people all had been reduced to their component atoms in the space of seconds. The heart of the city had been cored cleanly into oblivion, replaced by a perfectly circular lake three kilometers across and half a kilometer deep. Millions had died.

After that atrocity, many had demanded a retaliatory strike against Geneva. President Koenig had managed to deflect the call for vengeance, launching instead a memetic engineering raid in cyberspace … a purely data-oriented attack that ultimately had won USNA independence from the Earth Confederation.

But after the Columbus attack, some within the government had begun calling for a ban on all nano-D weaponry. The stuff was deadly; there was always the possibility that it would escape human control. Nano-D was programmed to shut down after a certain period of time or a certain number of disassembly cycles, but if that programming failed, the cloud of hungry molecular machines might keep on going, gobbling up everything in their path. Worse, a small twist to the programming code could have the nanoD take disassembled atoms and reassemble them as more nano-D. The cloud would grow, and might easily expand to devour the planet.

Back in the late twentieth century, some people had argued against the entire idea of nanotechnology. All of Earth, they’d warned, might be transformed into a mass of “gray goo” if nanotech disassemblers began taking matter apart and building new disassemblers in a never-ending spiral of destruction.

However, like fire, nanotechnology had proven to be far too useful for human industry, medicine, and economics, despite its obvious dangers. With careful safeguards in place to control the disassembly process, gray goo had never become a serious threat. Despite those safeguards, though, nano-D weaponry had been refined and improved over the years until its potential for mass destruction in warfare had become unrivaled.

As well as fatal for some millions of the citizens of Columbus.

What, Gutierrez thought, a little desperately, would Admiral Gray have done here? America carried nano-D weaponry. Earth was under the gravest threat it had ever faced. Would he have ordered its use if he’d been the one calling the shots?

Sara Gutierrez was fairly certain she knew the answer. Gray had always been an unorthodox tactician, using what was available in new, decisive, and often astonishing ways. Hell, twenty years ago, as a young fighter pilot, he’d won the nickname “Sandy” Gray by launching AMSO rounds—anti-missile shield ordnance—at attacking Sh’daar vessels. AMSO warheads were little more than packages of sand fired into the paths of incoming missiles; Gray’s tactical innovation had been to launch that sand at capital ships at close to the speed of light.

Damned few enemy ships had survived that encounter.

Was using nano-D any less moral or ethical than throwing near-c sand at someone?

She doubted very much that Gray would have seen much of a difference there.

“Okay,” she said. “Load the first two nano-D rounds, spinal mount,” she said. “CAG! Tell our people out there what’s happening and make sure they get the hell out of the way!”

“Yes, Captain.”

According to the most recent set of regulations, ship captains were supposed to get permission from higher military authority to launch nano-D weaponry. There was a loophole, though. Sometimes, the speed-of-light time lag was just too long to make checking in with headquarters possible.

But … heaven help you if you were wrong.

“Okay. How far is the objective from Earth?”

“It’s currently crossing the orbit of Jupiter, Captain,” the helm officer reported. “But at an oblique angle. Call it eight light-minutes.”

Too far, in other words, for her to ask permission.

She took a deep breath. “Notify Earth of my intent to launch nanotechnic disassembler warheads at the target once the tactical situation is clear.”

It would have to be a case of shooting first and asking permission later. But such was the nature of deep-space combat.