Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (18 page)

Better them than him. Gray thought again about those scarlet creatures rolling and squirming inside the living food animal and shuddered. He wanted no part of them.

“In the meantime, we’ve come into possession of some new intelligence. I needn’t remind you that this is classified at Blue-Two. No discussion of this stuff even with your staff until either I personally or CO-HQMILCOM Mars gives you direct clearance, okay?”

That
was interesting. What the hell was going down?

“A few hours ago,” Koenig went on, “we carried out a virtual military assault on the Pan-European computer net. The primary purpose of the raid was to plant recombinant memetic worms throughout the network, with the goal of undermining support for the war within the Confederation, and driving wedges between the various member states. It will take some time before we see the results of that action, of course . . . but the secondary goal of the raid has already born fruit. The raiders were able to tap into certain computer files in the Geneva Cloud, and steal top secret data on a recent ET contact—the Grdoch.”

Well, well. Interesting indeed. Maybe they wouldn’t need to start from square one in learning how to communicate with the things.

“What is of particular interest is that the Grdoch are
not
Grdoch va-Sh’daar,
not
members of the Sh’daar Collective. The Confederation apparently ran into them a year ago at Vulcan, made contact . . . and cut some sort of a deal with them. We’re . . . still studying the records we brought back from the Geneva Cloud. We’re not certain, but our analysts believe Geneva
may
have just turned over one of their extrasolar colonies to the Grdoch, and that that colony was destroyed.”

God! Gray felt an unpleasant twist in his stomach. What would the Grdoch
do
with a human colony . . . with thousands of men, women, and children?

He’d seen the hellish things eat, and he didn’t like the place where the thought was taking him.

“The carrier
Intrepid
, Captain Glover, was deployed to Vulcan two weeks ago along with three destroyers . . . and all four ships are now overdue and presumed destroyed.

“I don’t need to tell you, Sandy, that we—the USNA, I mean—need allies. Badly. We may be able to break up the Confederation if this RM plan succeeds . . . but we still need to stop the Sh’daar . . . and after that we have the Rosette Aliens out at Omega Centauri to worry about. The Grdoch offer us an enormous opportunity. I can’t stress this enough. They may be our one hope of survival,
if
we can pry them away from the Confederation and
if
we can enlist their help against the Sh’daar.”

“Oh, is
that
all?” Gray said out loud. Aliens were, by simple definition,
alien
. Their motivations, their goals, their very worldview all were unknown to the USNA, and might well be unknown or even
unknowable
to the Pan-Europeans and to the Confederation as a whole.

For a start . . . were the Grdoch helping the Confederation against North America in order to make peace with the Sh’daar, as Geneva wished? Were the Grdoch even aware of the Sh’daar . . . and would they be willing to ally with the United States against them?

“I have issued orders,” Koenig told him, “to assemble an expeditionary force to travel to 40 Eridani and make contact with the Grdoch fleet that has assembled there. I want you and
America
to lead it.

“Yes, I know
America
’s battlegroup is pretty badly dinged up,” Koenig said, and it felt like he was reading Gray’s mind across 3 AUs. “
Edmonton
and
Spruance
are destroyed . . . and
America
is badly damaged, with significant damage to the
Shenandoah
, the
Young
, and the
Ramirez
.

“But HQMILCOM Mars is assembling a new force—we’re calling it Task Force Eridani. Besides the
America
, it will include the carrier
Saratoga
and, if we can get her back here from Chiron in time, the
Constitution
as well. Your operational orders will direct you to proceed to 40 Eridani and there investigate the disappearance of the
Intrepid
battlegroup, but you’ll also be working under a set of secret orders . . . to make contact with the Grdoch and, for a start, enlist their aid against the Confederation. After that, we’ll see if they’ll help us against the Sh’daar.

“Time, obviously, is absolutely of the essence. You will bring
America, Young,
and
Ramirez
back to the dockyards at SupraQuito, where we will perform as much of a nano-refit as is possible, complete the refits on the
Sara
and on the
Indie
. . . and wait for the
Connie
to make it back from Chiron. HQ-Mars will release as many support vessels as they can—the
Long Island
, the
Calgary
, the
California
, and the
Maine
, at the very least. We also expect to bring in a Russian task force . . . and possibly smaller battlegroups from North India, China, and the Theocracy as well. Altogether, we hope to be able to deploy as many as twenty major warships.

“You will command the USNA contingent, of course. The others will be under their own national commanders, but I have every confidence that you will be able to get them all to pull together and work with you. To give you the leverage you will need, I am granting you a
provisional
promotion to full admiral. Congratulations.”

“What the
fuck
?” Gray shouted.

“Yes, I know how you feel,” Koenig went on, again appearing to read Gray’s thoughts across half a billion kilometers of emptiness. “There are plenty of other four-star admirals running around here . . . Matthews, for a start. And Bennington. And Kinkaid. And not a damned one of them has your level of experience when it comes to First Contact. You’ll need to pull at
least
an Oh-ten if you’re going to be on an equal footing with the likes of Ulyukayev or Gao or Singh. I don’t want one of them calling the shots out at 40 Eridani.” He grinned at Gray from inside the window. “Call it the president’s prerogative.”

“
Damn
you,” Gray said, groaning. “How to win friends and influence people.” Damn it, president or not, Koenig couldn’t do this to him!

“I’ll need to see you here as soon as you get to SupraQuito. Be sure to file your engineering, damage control, and expendables reports with the orbital dock, so we can bring your contingent up to full strength. And . . . one thing more. I’m attaching a classified file to this message under the header
Starlight
. I want you to review it before you get here. It may have a bearing on your communications with the other fleet commanders.

“I know I’m asking a lot of you, Sandy. Of you
and
your crew. But I also know that if anyone can pull this off, it’s you.

“Koenig . . . out.”

The president’s face winked off, and Gray blinked at the top of his desk.

“Sandy? Are you okay? I heard you yell . . .”

He turned in his chair. Laurie stood in the office entryway, naked, looking worried.

“Sorry I woke you, dear,” he told her. “I got some . . . unexpected news.”

“What is it?”

Gray frowned. How secret was the news? Well . . . the fact of the promotion would be published soon, might already have been published, if Koenig was on the ball. He couldn’t talk about the upcoming mission yet, but he could tell about
this
lunacy.

“I’ve just been bumped up to four stars,” he said, angry. “By Koenig. Provisionally, of course. Presidential prerogative, he calls it. But it’s not like I
deserve
it.”

Taggart appeared to relax a bit, looking relieved. “Oh,
well
. . . do I bow in your presence? Or just kiss your ring?”

“It’s not funny, Laurie.”

“I thought you were having a nightmare.”

“This
is
a nightmare! And I can’t wake up! Damn it, I don’t deserve the provisional rank I have now . . . and the son-of-a-bitch is jumping me up by two pay grades!”

“Did he give you a reason?”

“Yes.” Gray hesitated . . . then decided that this would be common news soon as well. “He’s putting me in command of a joint fleet. USNA, Russian, Chinese, Indian. And he wants me to have enough mass to run the show.”

“Makes perfect sense, if he doesn’t want the fleet commanded by a Russian.”

“Ron Kinkaid is the man,” Gray said. “CO of CNHQ, Mars. Thirty years in the Navy, five of them as a full admiral.”

“Yes. And how many alien civilizations has he made First Contact with?”

Gray gave her a hard look. “What does First Contact have to do with anything?”

She sighed. “It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? You were with Koenig when
America
went back in time and met the ur-Sh’daar on their home ground. And last year you made First Contact with the Slan. First Contact,
and
you made them break off in their campaign against us!”

“My
people
did that. Lieutenant Connor. Dr. Truitt. Not me.”

“Exactly.
Your
people. They reported to you, and were guided by your decisions. And that’s what Koenig is looking for: experience in making key decisions in a first-contact situation. You’re the best person for the job. Koenig is just making sure you can
do
that job.”

Yeah, that he was. And by jumping outside the regular ladder of command and promoting him over how many thousands of rear and vice admirals, what was he doing to the Navy hierarchy—tradition-bound, aristocratic, and so weighed down by layers of seniority and flag-rank officers that promotion generally meant that someone above you had died? There would be insane jealousy just for a start, and that meant trouble just working with the men and women responsible for getting him the ships, repairs, and supplies he needed. There would be a perception of favoritism, with Gray cast in the role of teacher’s pet, and with it criticism of Koenig that he was playing favorites and interfering with military good order and discipline. Gray was already viewed as an outsider and as a maverick. His Prim background, the fact that he’d been a “squattie” in the swamps of the Manhattan Ruins until he’d been forced to seek medical attention for his wife—that would be held against him as well. He didn’t play the game, didn’t play well with others . . . and any naval officer with an anti-Prim prejudice—and that was most of them—would see him as a security risk, as immoral, even as a foreigner.

And there were the political issues as well. A sizeable fraction of the American population favored peace, both with the Confederation and with the Sh’daar. Not a majority, certainly . . . perhaps 40 percent, but enough to make trouble, to make themselves heard, maybe even to shake things up with a public renunciation of Koenig, his policies, and those close to him.

If enough passed-over admirals or issue-hunting asshole politicians complained, there would be an investigation . . . and just possibly a call for the USNA Senate to do something about it—like institute impeachment proceedings. If anything happened to Koenig, his patron, Gray would be left twisting in the breeze. He would be lucky if they let him retire, and didn’t charge him with grave crimes and misdemeanors against the state just for being in Koenig’s good favor.

Gray despised politics.

Damn
the man!

“I don’t want the job, Laurie,” he said. He wanted to say more, wanted to explain . . . but he was just feeling too overwhelmed at the moment to put one word after another.

“Well, it sounds like you’ve got it,” she told him. She came closer, slipped behind the desk, then sat on his lap, her arms encircling his neck. “You’ve got it, want it or not. And if anyone can pull success out of his ass against impossible odds, it’s going to be Sandy Gray.”

They kissed. Gray wanted to argue, to tell her how foolish, how impossible the whole thing was . . . but there really wasn’t any point. Like she said, the job was his, want it or not. He supposed he
could
tell Koenig where to get off . . . but refusing a direct order from the president of the United States of North America would not exactly be a good career move.

And Gray damned well wasn’t ready to retire from the Navy
yet
.

Laurie broke the kiss, grinned mischievously, and wiggled her bottom against his lap. “Well! Feels like you’re not
entirely
ready to give up! You want to take me back to bed? Or do you want me right here?”

As it happened, he chose both.

Eventually.

Chapter Twelve

9 March 2425

USNA CVS
America

Naval Dockyard, SupraQuito

0825 hours, TFT

Star carrier
America
pulled into the space dock at SupraQuito the next day, at the end of a largely uneventful run. Toward the end, there were reports of Confederation lurkers—lean, needle-slender ships with heavy stealth shielding and a couple of nuclear shipkillers on board. Like the submarines of warfare on and under Earth’s oceans centuries before, lurkers posed a serious threat, especially for ships coming into or leaving port.

The
Ramirez
and the
Young
, however, fired salvos of high-yield nukes into the seemingly empty area of space where
America
’s scanner and deep space sensor operators had thought they’d detected an echo. If there’d been anything there, it never showed itself . . . and no nuclear fireballs blossomed among the incoming USNA ships.

SupraQuito was a sprawling terminus at the synchorbital point on the Quito space elevator, almost 35,000 kilometers above the ice-clad top of Mt. Cayambe, in Ecuador. Since 2120, the space elevator had been Humankind’s key to space, providing swift and inexpensive access to geostationary orbit. SupraQuito now consisted of some hundreds of habitats, factories, and orbital structures, including several hotels, an enormous spaceport with docking facilities, a naval base, a long-obsolete solar power station that still provided electricity for the immense microgravity hydrophonics farms, and a permanent population of more than 150,000.

Travel up and down the woven buckyfiber cable was by magnetically accelerated travel pods; a trip from synchorbit down to Earth still took hours, however, even with constant acceleration for the first half of the trip and deceleration for the rest. Gray elected to take
America
’s gig, which would get him to Toronto’s spaceport in just over an hour.

He made the journey with his senior staff—Captain Gutierrez and Captain Fletcher, of course, as well as Commander Dean Mallory, heading up tactical-ops; Commander Roger Hadley, chief of Intelligence; Commander Harriman Vonnegut, the fleet logistics officer; and Dr. George Truitt, head of Xenosoph. Now that he was getting bumped up to four stars, he wondered if he would be getting a larger and fleet-dedicated staff. All five of the military personnel on the shuttle were wearing two hats at least, and all were part of
America
’s senior staff. Gutierrez was
America
’s skipper but served as Gray’s flag captain as well,
and
as his fleet exec. Mallory was head of
America
’s tactical department but was also filling in as fleet operations officer. In a similar vein, Hadley and Vonnegut both were department heads on board
America
, but had also stepped up to oversee Intelligence and Logistics for the entire battlegroup. It was a juggling act possible only with thanks to implant technology, in-head links, and massive AI, but it still meant a high-stress workload for all concerned.

Gray had already made the decision that he was going to demand a full staff. If they were going to stick him with a full-admiral’s title and responsibilities, then by God, they could give him a decent staff as well. Gutierrez, Mallory, and the rest had been working their asses off since 36 Ophiuchi, and they damned well deserved a sane workload.

Or, at the very least,
one
insane workload apiece, instead of two or more.

The one civilian member of the flag team, Dr. Truitt, wore only a single hat. Even at that, it was damned tough getting any useful information out of the guy when he got into one of his grandstanding moods. Gray wondered if it might be possible to promote him out of the battlegroup—maybe send him with the captured Grdoch to Crisium, and promote someone else to take his place as director of XS.

Hallowell, maybe.

“Dr. Truitt,” Gray said. “Has your department made any progress with the prisoners?”

“You mean a language breakthrough?” he growled. “No. Thanks to
someone
giving orders to open fire on them in their mess hall!”

“I would have done the same,” Gutierrez put in. She visibly shuddered. “I’ve seen the vids.”

“We’ve provisionally named the food animals
Praedambestiari truitti
. . . praedams for short,” Truitt went on in a conversational manner, ignoring her. “We performed a detailed hand-scanner examination of one of them . . . there are fifteen locked into separate compartments on board that ship.”

Gray noted the man’s use of the word
we
. . . even though he’d been on board
America
the whole time, and not with Hallowell and other staff members on the alien ship.

“I saw the report, Doctor,” Gray replied.

“Yes, well, you know, the interesting thing about the praedams is that they have a massively distributed and non-centralized nervous system . . . several hundred neural nodes scattered throughout their bodies
instead
of a single brain. Your Marines, Admiral, would have had to stand there shooting at the thing all day before they actually killed it. A
very
bad call, I’m afraid.”

“I screwed up, Dr. Truitt,” Gray said. He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “It happens.”

“Ah . . . yes, well . . .”

Gray’s simple admission appeared to have derailed the xenosophontologist. He didn’t know how to respond.

“So we need to go on from here, and leave the recriminations to MILCOM. Do you agree?”

“Yes, of course. As you say.”

“Your report says that these praedams are most likely genengineered?”

“Yes, Admiral. Clearly, the Grdoch have bred the praedams into a form that would not survive in the wild. Those three flippers, for instance: useless. They may have originally been a large marine creature on the Grdoch home planet—something like the extinct whales of Earth—but they have been bred to produce meat and fat—a
lot
of it, and very quickly. They also appear to heal quickly. It’s possible that the Grdoch can keep one alive for
months
while continuing to feed off of it every few days—”

“God, Doctor,” Vonnegut said,
“enough!”
He looked like he was going to be sick.

“ ‘Nature red in tooth and claw,’ ” the xenosophontologist quoted with a shrug. “It’s not our place to judge the ways in which alien species have evolved, or their cultural mores.”

“Keep working on the language problem, Doctor,” Gray told him. “The Confeds were talking with them, certainly.”

“The Confeds must already have the translation software up and running,” Hadley pointed out. “That virtual raid on Geneva brought back a lot of hard intel. Maybe the Grdoch language is part of the package.”

America
’s intelligence department, Gray knew, had received its own reports from MILCOMINT since the Geneva raid. So far, though, USNA Intelligence hadn’t shared much of what they’d learned.

The news that
America
and an allied fleet were to be deployed to Vulcan was still a closely guarded secret, apparently, and none of the others on board the shuttle knew about that. Speculation—and scuttlebutt—about
America
’s next deployment had been rife ever since she’d broken out of Enceladus orbit and departed Saturn space.

The hyper-compartmentalization of military intelligence could be infuriating and, given the interpersonal connections of modern information systems and links, was more often than not an exercise in futility. If you could communicate with anyone on the planet with a thought, secrets became much harder to keep.

But there were limits, boundaries often set by common sense. Keeping secrets from your own people so that an enemy didn’t know what you were going to do was one thing. Tying yourself up in knots keeping secrets from yourself was something else entirely.

Hell, if his people weren’t fully briefed today, Gray thought, he was going to brief them himself. They
deserved
to know.

As the others continued to discuss the Grdoch and what might be learned from them, Gray leaned back in his cabin seat, closed his eyes, and opened the download on Vulcan, the battlegroup’s next destination.

Planetary Data Download

Vulcan

P
LANET:
40 Eridani A II

N
AME:
Vulcan

C
OORDINATES
:
RA 04h 15m 16.32s, Dec -07
o
39’ 10.34”, distance 16.45 ly

T
YPE:
Terrestrial/rocky; oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere

M
EAN OR
BITAL RADIUS:
0.68 AU;
O
RBITAL PERIOD:
223d 2h 07m

Inclination:
04.1
o
15’ 10.1”;
Rotational period:
25h 17m 15s

M
ASS:
1.05 Earth
;
E
QUATORIA
L
D
IAMETER:
12,883 km = 1.001 Earth

M
EAN PLA
NETARY DENSITY
:
5.63 g/cc = 1.02 Earth

S
URF
ACE
G
RAVITY:
1.0 G;
E
SCAPE
V
ELOCITY:
11.2 km/sec

H
YDROSPHERE PERCENTA
GE:
47.4%;
C
LOUD
C
OVER:
30%;
A
LBEDO
:
0.39

S
U
RFACE TEMPERATURE RA
NGE:
~-10
o
C — 40
o
C.

S
URFACE ATM
OSPHERIC PRESSURE:
~900 millibars = 0.89 atmospheres

P
ERCENTAGE COMPOSITION
:
N
2
81.8; O
2
18.1; Ar 0.2; SO
2
< 300 ppm; CO
2
< 300 ppm; others < 200 ppm

A
GE:
5.6
billion years

B
IOL
OGY:
C
,
N
,
O
,
H
,
S
,
H
2
O
,
PO
4
; Mobile Heterotrophs, photosynthetic autotrophs. Dextrose, levo-amino acids, terrestrial biochemistry.

C
OLONIAL
H
ISTORY:
Among the earliest truly earthlike worlds to be discovered, the Keid Colonial Administration was established in 2270 under auspices of the Confederation Xenoplanetological Directorate. In 2275, the world was opened to full colonization by WeiteWelt, a joint Germano-Argentinean cooperative. Colony cities were established along the west coast of Neubavaria and Las Pampas, the two principal continents, and by 2420, the population totaled more than 80 million
. . . .

Vulcan was that rarest of jewels, a genuinely Earthlike world, a near twin of Earth right down to the breathable atmosphere and essentially terrestrial biochemistry. Oceans of liquid water shone gold and purple beneath the K1-type star, which, though smaller than Sol, appeared twenty percent larger in Vulcan’s sky than the Sun did from Earth. The other two members of the triple star system, B and C, gleamed in the sky as a pair of bright stars, one ember red, one white and diamond brilliant, some 400 astronomical units away. The main star of the trio was visible from Earth to the naked eye. The Arabs had named it Keid, from their word
qayd
, which had the unlikely meaning of “the broken eggshells,” but that ancient name was rarely used now. The star was also known as o2 Eridani.

Gray found the origin of the planet’s popular name amusing.
Vulcan
, of course, originally had been the Roman form of the Greek god Hephaestus, the god of the forge, his name the root of the word
volcano
. For a time, during the nineteenth century, astronomers had been convinced that a planet orbited Sol inside the orbit of Mercury, and given the name to that world. Eventually, of course, the oddities in Mercury’s orbit blamed on the gravitational effects of an inner planet turned out to be perturbations better explained by Einstein and relativity, and Vulcan had been relegated once again to mythology.

In the middle of the twentieth century, however, the name was revived in a popular science fiction drama broadcast over the two-D entertainment systems of the day, with one of the program’s characters being an alien from that world. The writer of some of the print media supporting the broadcast program had suggested the nearby star 40 Eridani as Vulcan’s sun, and the show’s creator had agreed. Vulcan as a habitable world orbiting 40 Eridani had become canon.

Telescopic evidence in the early twenty-first century had suggested that there in fact
were
several planets orbiting the star; when a robotic probe in the 2120s revealed a desert world with water oceans and a breathable atmosphere, John Piccard, a virtual actor who specialized in historical dramas and who knew about the old science fiction program, had jokingly suggested Vulcan as the world’s name.

Joke or not, the name had stuck.

The real-world Vulcan was not, as it turned out, home to a humanoid race of xenosophs with a penchant for remarkably human logic. Over a billion years older than Earth, Vulcan had evolved its own ecosystem while Sol was still forming its planets. There were tantalizing hints that intelligence had evolved on Vulcan eons ago when the planet was largely covered by oceans, but apparently, like many marine species throughout the galaxy, that culture had never developed fire or a technic civilization. Vulcan was in its long twilight now, its oceans shrinking and becoming steadily more salty, the interiors of its two vast supercontinents turning to desert, its ecology well adapted to current conditions but fighting a steadily losing battle as the planet slowly died.