Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (17 page)

“Operation Luther will go as planned . . . tonight.”

USNA CVS
America

Enceladus orbit

Saturn space

1640 hours, TFT

“Admiral Gray? We have a . . . situation.”

He checked the caller ID—and saw it was Dr. Tara Hallowell, calling him in-head. “Go ahead, Dr. Hallowell. Make it quick.”

Gray was on the flag bridge, going through the seemingly endless checklist required by regulations before breaking orbit and boosting for Earth. Of particular concern was
America
’s water tank, holed in numerous places during the battle. And besides that, as admiral of the battegroup, he had to make decisions about the readiness of every ship under his command. He didn’t really have time for civilians at the moment.

“Sorry to bother you, sir, but we’ve found more Grdoch.”

He sighed, exasperated. “Then put them under guard and file a report. I don’t need to be notified about every—”

“Sir, it’s what they’re . . . what they’re
doing
. I think you should see.”

He was about to chew her a new one . . . but something about the tone in her voice made him hold back. She sounded . . . not frightened, exactly. But she was stressed and she was worried. It almost sounded as though she was fighting back tears.

“Do I need to fire up my Noter?”

“No, sir. I can feed you vid straight from here. I’m afraid it’s not very pleasant. . . .”

Now he was curious. “Do it.”

“We only just found this compartment, Admiral,” she told him. “This ship is—is
big
!”

An in-head window opened, and he saw . . . what the hell
was
it?

It took him a few seconds to make sense of what he was seeing. Hallowell evidently was in a large, open compartment on board the alien vessel. A line of armored Marines partly blocked his view, but they also added a sense of scale to the life form rising in the background.

The thing was . . . immense. It towered above the Marines at least fifteen meters away, and might have been ten or twelve meters tall and twenty long. At first glimpse, it was almost featureless, a blob, but it was alive. Things like stubby, useless flippers, three of them around that flabby mess of a body, waved and stretched, flapping helplessly against the air. It took Gray a moment to identify what might have been a face . . . puckered mouth . . . widely spaced, flaring openings that might have been for breathing . . . a circle of eight tiny, disturbingly human eyes that rolled and shifted in pain or terror or, quite likely, both. The skin appeared rubbery and gray green . . . except where it had been gashed open and was leaking gray liquid and yellow-white froth. The mouth split open, and the thing screamed, a thunderous roar torn by agony.

“Hallowell!” Gray snapped. “What the devil—”

“It’s a
food
animal, Admiral! They’re eating it! They’re eating it
alive
!”

He saw them, then, perhaps a dozen of the scarlet Grdoch wallowing and rolling inside the far larger creature’s wounds, or swarming up its sides. He watched as one extended a three-clawed limb and ripped at the huge beast’s flank. Others crawled up or clung to the screaming beast’s flesh as it shuddered and rolled, slashing to open ways inside. Once the wounds were open, the Grdoch used their limbs to peel the flaps of wound back, brace it wide open and squeeze themselves inside. Those hundreds of fleshy mouths or trunks fastened to glistening, weeping tissue and
pulsed
as they fed.

“My God. . . .”

“We—we think the food animal is either an artificially created genetic life form, or it’s something that’s been genetically manipulated. But the Grdoch . . . it’s like a feeding frenzy!”

Gray had attended training seminars and downloads for military officers, designed to hammer home the lesson that alien cultures, customs, and biologies, while different from humans, were nonetheless valid for those alien species. Concepts like good and evil were human constructs, and should not be applied to beings that had evolved on other worlds, under radically different conditions, in alien environments and with alien cultures.

But Gray was having a great deal of trouble remembering that as he watched the Grdoch consume the living animal literally from the inside.

“Damn it,” Gray said, suddenly angry. “Can’t you put that creature out of its misery?”

“
No
, sir!” Hallowell shot back. “The Grdoch clearly evolved as hunters on their home world . . . and they may
need
their prey to be alive!”

Gray checked the list of people on that channel. Captain Kornbluth was there. Good.

“Captain Kornbluth!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Kill that large creature. Burn it down!”

“Aye,
aye
, sir!”

“Admiral! No!”

“That thing is
suffering
, Doctor.”

Kornbluth gave an order, and laser light flared off the food animal’s head . . . if that’s what it was. The huge animal continued bellowing with agony-laced thunder.

“I don’t think it keeps its brains in its head, Admiral!” Kornbluth told him.

Great . . . just great. Gray realized he’d just made the situation worse.

“Those things are riled, Captain!” a Marine yelled. “They’re gonna rush us!”

Within the window, Gray could see more and more of the Grdoch emerging from the food animal’s bulk, wet and dripping. The one he’d seen earlier had seemed skittish, afraid . . . even cowardly. These appeared to be very,
very
angry, and fearless.

Several in the front of the pack rushed the Marines, and the Marines opened fire. As Gray watched through the vid link, he saw the marines firing bolt after bolt of laser and plasma energy into the oncoming mass of rugose scarlet.
Damn
, but those things were hard to kill! One took five or six direct hits before it collapsed, shuddering, on the deck.

And as the Marines covered the technicians backing out through the door, others began to collapse as well. Smoke boiled through the compartment. Dying Grdoch chittered and shrieked.

“Kornbluth!” Gray shouted. “Get your people out of there!”

“Aye, aye, sir! You heard the Admiral, Marines! Fall back! Fall back!”

“Seal the doors,” Gray ordered as the last Marine reached safety. The door slid shut . . . and then Gray heard a massive thud as something heavy hit it on the other side. “Keep them locked up in there until we get them back to Luna.”

And
still
the prey-beast thundered beyond the door. . . .

Chapter Eleven

7 March 2425

Virtual Reality

0230 hours, Geneva Time

Her body was back in Colorado Springs, but Shay Ashton’s mind hurtled through an alien landscape that scrolled beneath her in a speed-blurred rush. From her inner perspective, she was in her old SG-92 Starhawk, flying wingtip to wingtip with Newton Cabot’s ship. Both had morphed into sperm mode for the sake of greater speed and maneuverability.

There was something about that which struck Ashton as just a little silly; it wasn’t as though they were flying through a real planetary atmosphere where they had to worry about lift or drag or friction. They weren’t even maneuvering through interplanetary space, where near-
c
impacts with dust grains and stray molecules of gas could generate enough radiation to cook you. Virtual combat took place in your
mind
, within a shared reality generated and moderated by a powerful AI.

But
belief
was an important factor in the generation of that reality, and the more realistic the simulation, the more completely the sim-warriors could buy in to the visual and tactile in-head story being woven by the AI. The intruding cyberforce needed speed to trace its way through the Confederation’s computer networks, through their outer shells of defense and access, and so the Starhawks in Ashton’s mind were in sperm mode. It helped the illusion.

And the illusion, Ashton thought, was pretty damned good. It was night, starless and black above, but with the ground below showing as a vast and sprawling landscape of geometric patterns picked out in light. Skyscrapers marked junction routers, major server clusters, and shared distributed processing loci, and circuit networks were vast fields of straight-line highways, while logic gates and ports to external interfaces looked like tunnels or like literal gates outlined in light and vanishing toward a distant horizon of blackness and blue-white light. Data traffic on the Confederation network appeared as other aircraft flying from point to point across that landscape . . . or as luminous monorails or mag-lev travel pods swiftly zipping from node to node below.

In fact, the Starhawks themselves were software, as was Ashton’s viewpoint from the cockpit of one of them. Very complex software, to be sure, created and supported by the super-AI Konstantin on the moon, but software nonetheless. It wasn’t like it was
real
. . . .

It certainly
felt
real. Skimming above a bundle of circuit lanes, feeling the flow of electrons and photons within the dynamic matrix, she could not tell that she wasn’t actually piloting her Starhawk through alien wonder, that she—or her body, rather—was actually back beneath Cheyenne Mountain.

The other Starhawks in the flight were branching off, vanishing into other gateways, other ports. She and Cabot continued hurtling through vistas of pure light.

By glancing at individual buildings as she approached, then passed, and by focusing a part of her awareness, she could see ID tags pop into view, identifying the structure in question. She was searching for a particular physical repository of system firmware—the EPROM holding the BIOS, or basic input/output system. From her current vantage point, she was looking down on a variety of computer architectures, a vast and complex forest of interlinked computers and advanced AI.

First, though, she had to find the right computer network, then the right set of servers. There were so
many
of them. . . .

PANEURO.GOV 83723-669-945
 
. . .

GENEVA.GOV 83736-444-735
 
. . .

GENEVA.ADMIN 84736-839-335
 
. . .

Network defenses spread across the sky, a blue-black cloud, like an onrushing thunderhead, seeking to drag them down. Ashton triggered her own countermeasures . . . answering clouds of viral antisoftware eating through the ICE like acid.

As she penetrated the network, she was bringing with her the cold and vast intellect of the Tsiolkovsky AI, Konstantin. Excluded from standard access to the Pan-European networks by firewalls and physical barriers, Konstantin could use the swift-moving software fighters as a back door to piggyback itself into the system, penetrating, exploring, revealing . . . and changing.

“They know we’re here,” Cabot’s voice said over their private link. “The alarm is spreading.”

“I see it.” One after another, systems around them were releasing countermeasures . . . or else going dark as the physical connections between networks were broken. More thunderheads gathered in the distance . . . searching . . . questing. . . .

“Releasing RM,” Cabot announced.

“Copy.” She wanted to hold on for a few more moments, wait until they were deeper inside, before releasing her own viral warhead.

Ah!
There
it was. That was what they were looking for.

OERE.ADMIN 89749-783-003 . . .

Thunderheads, dozens of them, guarded the portal.

The
Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Extraterrestrienne
had been spawned by the much earlier European Council for Nuclear Research, better known by the acronym CERN. The modern OERE had been designed to study both extraterrestrial cultures and biologies as they were encountered. The port yawned below them as Ashton and Cabot peeled off and accelerated. Light blurred past them, their illusion of velocities too great to properly measure. In fact, their brains were in drug-induced and implant-manipulated overdrive, with nanoseconds passing for them like seconds. There would otherwise be no way for human awareness and perception to experience the light-speed interactions among computer networks on-line.

The target system opened around them, a bewildering maze of three-dimensional towers and lattices and geometric frameworks of dazzling light. Twisting sharply, the two Starhawks sped deeper into the labyrinth. A tunnel yawned—a major virtual-memory array. Thunderstorms reached for them, lightning jabbing and exploding across a black sky, but the two fighters dodged and wheeled, their own countermeasure software engaging the enemy ICE, holding it at bay, sometimes distracting it, sometimes melting it away . . . or even convincing it that there was no threat all.

They were inside.

Konstantin, invisible but ever present, led them in, questing ahead for metadata tags of interest. Code numbers and file names flickered and rippled around Ashton. Several flashed brightly, highlighted in red . . .

Grdoch
 
. . .

La Connaisance d’étrangere
 
. . .

L’Affaire Vulcan
 
. . .

40 Eridani A II
 
. . .

This was why
human
minds were necessary in this sort of virtual assault. AIs were very good at following orders, and perhaps one as powerful as Konstantin could have made its own decisions about which data to tag, what to ignore. “Grdoch” was self-evident, so much so that it was quite possibly a false front, something placed there to distract virtual raiders. Konstantin would be examining that very closely indeed, searching for signs of viral land mines. Same for a file labeled, in French, “Alien Contact.”

Others, though, tugged at Ashton’s intuition. “Vulcan,” for instance, was the name of an Earthlike planet only 16.5 light years from Sol, the location of an important German-Argentinean colony, while “40 Eridani” was the name of Vulcan’s star. Somehow, they called to her, so she tagged those as well.

Keid
 
. . .

La Massacrer
 
. . .

Le Rapport d’Gouverneur Delgado de Vulcan
 
. . .

She had no idea what those were, but they seemed important. She could see the hyperlinks, channels of light, connecting those with the other more obvious data structures.

As she tagged each highlighted data structure with a thought, Konstantin was able to open each file and siphon off the contents, shunting them via a high-speed Global Net pipeline back to Cheyenne Mountain, to USNA Intelligence headquarters, to USNA Naval headquarters on Mars, and to its own data banks at Tsiolkovsky, on the far side of the moon. Within seconds, the data would be backed up in so many different secure locations that there would be no chance of having it tracked and destroyed by Confederation counterintelligence.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Ashton called.

“Rog! Just a sec . . .”

Ashton still had her own software bomb. An immense building loomed to her left and below:
OERE7746.gov.com
, a massive cluster of quantum encryption servers. Thoughtclicking the structure, she released her worm. “Missile away!” she cried. “Okay, Newt! Let’s unjack.”

Withdrawing from the Pan-European network should have been as simple as cutting the connection, but with their minds heavily invested in the fantasy of flying in a particular three-dimensional space, it was better—safer—to extract gradually, following the trail they’d blazed deep into the core of the OERE network. It didn’t take long . . . no more than a few seconds of perceived time . . .

But Newt screamed in her ear.

She glanced right just in time to see an amorphous blue-gray cloud, a thunderhead shot through with flickers of lightning and the dark gray shadow of rain as it engulfed Cabot’s fighter. There was a flicker . . . and Cabot was
gone
.

Ashton felt a shudder run through her body . . . and then she was lying on her back, strapped down in an acceleration couch in the Ops Room at the Virtual Warfare Center. Cabot was in the couch next to hers, screaming, shrieking in an unholy mix of terror, rage, and agony as white-gowned technicians tried to restrain him.

“Are you okay, Lieutenant?” It was Aldridge, standing next to her couch.

“Y-yeah. Fine. What happened to—”

“ICEscream. Poor devil . . .”

She tried to rise, clawing at the safety straps.

“Stay put, Lieutenant,” Aldridge told her. “Stay still. We need to check you out.”

But there were other people screaming in the room as well, a shrill cacophony of horror and madness.

“Get them off me! Get them off me!”
Cabot was screaming, going on and on.

And Shay Ashton wondered if she was going mad as well.

Admiral’s Quarters, USNA CVS
America

En Route, Enceladus to Sol

0425 hours, TFT

“Admiral Gray. Please wake up.”

Gray blinked himself awake out of a deep sleep. “Whazzat?”

“Admiral Gray, I have an incoming communication for you. Comm department.”

He checked his internal clock. Almost zero four thirty. Beside him, Laurie Taggart stirred, then reached for him, her hand gliding up his chest. His in-head personal assistant rarely spoke to him directly, but when it did there was good reason.

“Okay,” he said in his head. “Put it through.”

An in-head window opened, and he saw the face of Lieutenant Gary Kepner, one of
America
’s communications officers. “Sorry to wake you, Admiral,” Kepner said, “but we have an incoming laser com, marked urgent and personal for you.”

“Who from?”

“Uh . . . It’s flagged Office of the CIC, sir.”

Meaning President Koenig. Zero four thirty . . . damn! The star carrier was on Eastern time, same as the president. Didn’t the guy ever sleep? A quick check on ship’s status showed him that
America
was currently accelerating at 0.7 gravities, boosting toward Earth . . . and was currently approaching the halfway point, just over 500 million kilometers out. The time delay on the incoming message would be about half an hour.

“Put it through.”

“The message requires a security release, Admiral. Blue-Two.”

Ah. Gray swung his legs out of bed and sat up. Laurie stirred, but didn’t wake. Good. As the message window opened in his head, he got up and padded naked to the small office adjoining his sleeping quarters so that he could take the call without waking Laurie.

He’d not been getting much sleep anyway. The sight . . . the sound of that alien food animal being devoured by that pack of Grdoch haunted him, banishing sleep. He might as well get up and be productive.

In his office, he sat down at his workstation and touched a contact, raising a retinal scanner from its recess in the desktop.
America
’s AI knew who he was and where he was on board the ship at all times, of course. It could tell from his brain waves that he was who he claimed to be, but the ancient amenities still had to be observed. “Gray, Trevor, Admiral, one-nine-six-six-five-one-eight-zero-three Bravo,” he said.

“Identity confirmed, Admiral,” the voice of the ship’s network said in his head. “Incoming message released.”

“Admiral Gray, this is President Koenig.”

Gray didn’t reply. It would take half an hour for any response to get back to Koenig. If necessary, computers could edit two halves of a conversation together for the records later.

“I’ve been following your progress out there with great interest, Admiral,” Koenig went on. “Congratulations on your victory at Enceladus. Well done. Very well done indeed.”

You didn’t call me in the middle of the night to congratulate me for
that
, though, Gray thought. Was he in for a reprimand over trying to kill the Grdoch food animal? He’d sent that report off hours ago, just before the moment when
America
broke orbit over Enceladus and started boosting for Earth.

“Crisium XRD is looking forward to meeting your prisoners,” Koenig went on. “Have the
Shenandoah
take the captured alien directly to Luna. A cargo heavy-lift hauler will be there in orbit waiting to help get it down to the surface.”

That made sense. The controls on the alien vessel were utterly beyond human comprehension—spongy cabinets large enough to hold a single Grdoch in a claustrophobic embrace; possibly they used their flexible, trunklike mouths to control the ship . . . or it was possible that they used some sort of direct neural linkage, as with human fighter pilots. Either way, there was no way for humans to control the captured alien transport independently, so the
Shenandoah
had taken the vessel under tow. Hallowell and two platoons of Marines were still on board, making certain the captured aliens stayed under lockdown. Once at the xenosophontological research department base beneath the dusty, crater-pocked plain of the Mare Crisium, the XRD staff would be able to address the problem of communicating with the Grdoch, and they’d be able to bring many more tools to bear on the problem than were available to
America
’s overworked xenosoph department.