Читать книгу Bright Light - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 12

1 February 2426

New White House

Washington, D.C.

2142 hours, EST

“Mr. President?” Marcus Whitney said. “Incoming message for you, flagged ‘Most Urgent.’ Dr. Wilkerson, sir.”

“I’ll take it,” Koenig said. He was immersed in the holographic display showing the battle and could barely see Whitney through the glowing haze of imagery.

“This transmission is also going to the Joint Chiefs and secdef, and to Mars HQ, sir.”

With a thoughtclick, the projection showing America and several other ships facing off against the giant alien intruder faded out, replaced by the strained features of Phillip Wilkerson, head of the ONI Xenosophontological Research Department at Mare Crisium, on the moon.

Koenig nodded. “Yes, Doctor. What is it?”

The almost three-second time delay for the there-and-back signal transmission between Earth and moon seemed to drag out forever. “Good evening, Mr. President. I thought you would want to know. We’re uploading a new Omega virus to the America.”

“New how?”

“It’s the basic AI-Omega structure, with layered quantum encryption in the matrix.”

“English, please, Doctor.”

“We Turusched the code. It may help us get past the Rosette entity’s immunodefenses.”

Koenig considered this. They’d used the Tabby’s Star Omega virus against that thing with at least some success once before. It had stopped, at least, and an AI clone of Konstantin had been able to talk with it.

But they’d been assuming that Omega was a one-shot weapon. The Rosette entity was an enormously fast and powerful AI, far more capable in all respects than Konstantin. It would have analyzed that first attack and would now have defenses—like an organic body’s immune system—solidly in place.

“Turusched the code?” Koenig frowned. What the hell did that … ah! He got it.

The Turusch were an alien species, a part of the Sh’daar Associative with an unusual means of communication. The beings lived in closely bonded pairs and they spoke simultaneously, but not in unison. One would say one thing, the other something else … and the sounds of the two voices blended in a series of harmonics that carried yet a third, amplifying meaning. “Turusched the code” meant Wilkerson had figured out how to write viral codes in layers, like the complex Turusch language.

A number of Turusch pairs were still living in the xenosophontological research labs beneath the Mare Crisium as a kind of diplomatic community, where Wilkerson and his people had been studying them for over twenty years, now.

“You think this will give us another shot at the Rosetter?” Koenig asked.

“It should help us,” Wilkerson said slowly, “to communicate with it. We’ve been able to nest three AIs on top of one another. The deeper minds monitor the ones above, support them, and watch out for signs that the top-level mind has been corrupted or compromised. We’re calling it Trinity.”

Koenig wondered if Wilkerson was talking about something like the way the human brain worked, with conscious and subconscious minds … or the Freudian idea of id, ego, and superego. More likely, he decided, Wilkerson was discussing AI-related technicalities—which Koenig had no clue about.

Warfare, Koenig thought, was rapidly evolving beyond the ken of humans. Whether that was necessarily a bad thing remained to be seen. But it appeared that artificial intelligence was more interested in talking with the opponent and not simply destroying it in flame and fury, and that was something Koenig—as president of almost a billion people—could understand.

The problem was, he wasn’t even sure he had a choice in the matter anymore, because weaponry was increasingly godlike in its scope and power, and the AIs wielding it were so far beyond human capabilities as to make humans completely irrelevant.

Sooner rather than later, we might just be along for the ride. For now, though …

“Keep me informed,” Koenig told Wilkerson. “Don’t let your new toy give away the farm. But if it can buy us some breathing space, let it!”

“Absolutely, Mr. President.”

Koenig cut the link, wondering again where Konstantin was. The Omega Code incorporated part of Konstantin’s matrix into its structure, and presumably Trinity did as well. But he wanted to hear from the super-AI he knew. He didn’t always trust Konstantin … but it had been a loyal advisor for years.

He could almost think of it as his … friend.

Charlie Berquist, head of Koenig’s Secret Service detail, entered the Oval Office without ceremony. “Excuse me, Mr. President. We need to move you out of here.”

“Why?”

“Now, Mr. President. If you please …”

Koenig sighed, then waved the display off. “They won’t be here for an hour at least. Plenty of time …”

“We don’t know that, Mr. President. They could be here any second, now.”

Koenig stood up behind his desk and waited as Berquist activated one of his in-head apps. A portion of the interior wall on the left side of the office vanished, revealing a small travel cylinder imbedded in its vertical tube.

“You boys come with me,” Koenig said. “There’s room.”

“I need to get back to the Pentagon, Mr. President,” Armitage told him. “They’ll be beginning their evacuation as well. But I’ll see you downstairs.”

“Okay. Godspeed.”

Koenig and Whitney followed Berquist to the escape pod and stepped inside. The door rematerialized … and then gravity vanished as the pod went into free fall.

He looked at the Secret Service man. Berquist looked human enough, but Koenig knew that he was in fact more machine than organic, a cyborg packed with high-powered communications and sensor equipment, plus some powerful if currently invisible weaponry.

“Are they evacuating Congress?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. And the Supreme Court, the State Department, and several other agencies.”

“You realize that this is all an exercise in futility, don’t you?”

“I don’t know anything, Mr. President … except that we need to get you to the ’proof.”

Koenig had been through this before. When the Pan-Europeans had evaporated central Columbus, he and most of the USNA government had escaped just ahead of the attack, relocated by high-speed tube to Toronto, where they’d re-established the government and continued the war.

When the government had reclaimed and rebuilt Washington, D.C., they’d used disassemblers to bore out new tunnels and subterranean transit networks, creating a vast city beneath the city, some ten kilometers down. Called the ’proof, for bombproof, the subterranean facility was supposed to be safe from nuclear weapons up to a thousand megatons, to impacts by asteroids several hundred meters across, or to another nano-D attack like the one that had vaporized central Columbus.

The city was ringed by anti-space defenses, including high-velocity AMSO launchers, railguns, nano-D canisters, and high-powered beam weapon emplacements in Arlington, Georgetown, Silver Spring, Bladensburg, and the brand-new planetary defense facility at Spaceport Andrews.

And if anything came through that these defenses couldn’t handle, high-velocity mag-tubes could whisk key members of the government elsewhere—to Toronto, again … or to Denver or Mexico City or a dozen other fortified retreats.

The problem though, Koenig thought as the pod dropped through the hard vacuum of the tube, was that this time it wasn’t just the North-American capital city that was in danger, but the whole fucking planet. If the Rosette Consciousness wanted to wipe out Earth, then, given the advanced technology witnessed so far, they would be able to do so without much effort and no place would be safe.

But certain protocols had been put into place, and certain procedures had to be observed. If he put up a struggle, his own Secret Service people would simply anesthetize him and carry him off bodily.

That seemed needlessly confrontational, not to mention awkward. No, he would play along.

And pray that Wilkerson’s upgraded code was able to stop the approaching entity.

Ready Room, VFA-211

TC/USNA CVS America

Outer Asteroid Belt

2227 hours, TFT

“Do you think they’re going to send us out again?” Lieutenant Schaeffer asked. She sounded … not worried, exactly, but stressed. Concerned, maybe.

Meier gave a listless shrug. He was still dealing with the shockingly abrupt deaths of three of his squadron mates, and was having a lot of trouble coming to grips with what had happened.

They were seated in the squadron ready room, a large open space just above the fighter launch bays. Spin gravity here from the rotating hab section was about half a G, enough to allow them to have a couple of open cups of coffee on the table in front of them. One long wall showed local space—a shrunken sun and a light scattering of stars. Too few were visible to allow Meier to pick out any constellations.

Somewhere out there in that empty darkness was a planet-sized monster …

“They say we’re in the Asteroid Belt,” Schaeffer said. She seemed eager for conversation. “I thought the sky out here would be full of rocks.”

He gave her a hard look. You expected better from a fellow fighter pilot.

“Ah … another victim of the entertainment sims,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Asteroids a kilometer or more across are scattered real thin out here … something like two million kilometers between one asteroid and the next. Even counting rocks just ten meters across or more, the average distance between them is over six thousand kilometers. You could live your whole life on one and never see another rock in your sky, not even as a faint point of light.”

She smiled at him. “So … no daring flights through fields of tumbling asteroids?”

“That’s complete garbage. What I don’t get is how sim presenters have been getting away with that kind of crap since the twentieth century.”

“Well, it was just fiction …”

“They did it in documentaries too. I’ve seen some of them. Science programs where the presenters should have known.”

She laid a hand on his arm. “Yes, but how do you really feel about it, Jason?”

His voice had been getting loud. Things like that did irritate him, but his emotional state was letting it come out as anger.

Suddenly, though, he realized that Schaeffer had been deliberately prodding him, trying to get an emotional response. “You were trolling me,” he said, his tone sharp and accusing.

“Maybe a little,” she admitted. “You were so wrapped up in yourself … so intense. Brooding. It didn’t look healthy.”

“I suppose you’re right.” He looked away, taking in the other Headhunters seated in the room. Walther … Lakeland … they seemed steady enough. Esteban was okay. Dougherty looked nervous … but he was just a kid, another newbie, like Veronica. Kraig looked angry.

Damn, Meier thought. Was he the only one of the squadron’s survivors who felt this way?

“You’ve been thinking of the people we lost?”

“Yeah.”

“Kelly, Malone … who was the new one?”

“Porter.” He said the name with more anger than he’d intended. “Veronica Porter.”

“Were you two close?”

“No. I’d just met her.” He sighed. “You’d think I’d be used to it by now … the butcher’s bill, I mean. We all know the odds. Someone calculated that fighter squadrons lose on average between one and three pilots every time they go into combat. That’s eight percent casualties in your unit if you’re lucky. Twenty-five percent if you’re not. And that’s every fucking time you drop into hot battlespace!”

“Well, we did know what we were getting in for when we volunteered, right?”

“I don’t know about you, Lieutenant. But all they told me was about the glory.”

That, Meier thought as soon as he’d spoken the words, was not entirely true. His recruiter had told him it was dangerous when he’d been selected for fighter training and decided to volunteer.

Maybe he simply wasn’t cut out for this.

“Attention on deck!”

Commander Leystrom strode into the ready room, accompanied by Lieutenant Commander Brody, his adjutant. Schaeffer and Meier came to their feet, along with the other five Headhunters in the room. Three more pilots, a woman and two men, walked in behind them and took positions standing near the front.

“As you were,” Leystrom said. He gestured at the new pilots as the others resumed their seats. “I want you to meet three Pan-Euro fighter pilots. Leutnants Ulrike Hultqvist, Karl Maas, and Jean Araud. They were among the people off the Wotan we recovered after their carrier was destroyed. They’ve been assigned to VFA-211 to … ah … make up for our losses.”

Meier felt a sharp slap of anger. Damn it, you couldn’t just shoehorn new people into a combat squadron like that, not and expect them to fit in smoothly from the get-go. What the hell was America’s CAG thinking?

Leystrom continued, “I know I speak for the whole squadron when I say, ‘Welcome aboard.’”

The three gave a mumble of assent as they took seats.

“Normally, of course,” the commander went on, “we’d all want a period of joint training to integrate new personnel into the unit. We do not, however, have the luxury of time. The Rosetter is out there just a couple of AUs distant, and we are the only thing standing between them and Earth.”

A holographic field switched on at Leystrom’s thought, showing CGI graphics of America and the handful of ships with her, drifting opposite the enigmatic and highly protean alien vessel. Other ship icons were moving up in support … but then Meier remembered that the Rosetter was bigger, more massive than the planet Jupiter. How were they supposed to face a thing like that? It was insane.

The representation shifted to a real-time image from a battlespace drone just a few tens of thousands of kilometers from the monster. The alien device seemed to fill the entire front of the ready room. No longer spherical, it had unfolded somehow into a much larger series of nested shapes, more like a geometric form sculpted from a cloud of dark gas than anything solid. The central core of the thing was illuminated, but the shapes around that glowing core were so complex and so ordered that Meier was having trouble understanding what he was seeing. The patterns looked fractal in nature, with each set of curves and angles and projections repeated again and again at smaller and smaller levels. A tiny speck of gleaming silver debris tumbled past, hinting at the vast scale of the monster beyond.