Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (20 page)

Ashton wanted to ask Gonzales about her beliefs—specifically about why she was so old at a time when most humans lived healthy and relatively youthful lives well into their second or third century, thanks to nanoanagathic life extension.

But if she was avoiding life extension because of religious reasons, she might easily take offense. The White Covenant discouraged
any
questions about a person’s religious or spiritual beliefs.

She watched Cabot on the bed for a moment, the column of word-salad nonsense continuing to crawl silently up the screen as he babbled somewhere within the labyrinth of the center’s psych ward. Ashton didn’t believe in God, not as most people seemed to use the term, but she was familiar with the Gaia hypothesis . . . and with the newer idea of the Gaia matrix.

Centuries before, an environmentalist named James Lovelock had suggested that Earth—or, rather, Earth’s tightly interconnected biosphere—might in fact constitute a kind of higher order—self-regulating, internally consistent, an emergent phenomenon arising from the complexity of all life and the way it worked together. He’d called it the Gaia hypothesis, after the Greek goddess of Earth. Some after Lovelock had gone so far as to suggest that the system was self-aware or becoming so, that humans and their electronic communications networks were, in fact, Gaia’s nervous system, her means of becoming self-aware.

More recently, believers had pointed out that both human minds and the AIs they worked with tended to link together into higher and higher orders of awareness and consciousness. A crude example might be the tactical link for a fighter squadron, the electronic network tying together all of the pilots and their ship AIs and, when it was close enough, even the main AI back on board the carrier into a kind of physically dispersed but tightly organized single entity. Just as humans were made up of trillions of cells linked together, just as human consciousness could be seen as an emergent epiphenomenon from the neural net of the cerebral cortex, all interconnected humans and artificial intelligences might together comprise a far vaster, far more powerful, far more deeply aware entity called the Gaia matrix.

Ashton had seen no evidence that such an entity existed . . . but, then, was a single cell inside a human liver or in the skin on the tip of the nose or within the glia of the brain itself aware of the whole organism, the person? If it was true, that higher-level organism didn’t seem to take much interest in the cells that made up its being, no more than Ashton, most of the time, was aware of the tip of her nose. If Gaia didn’t bother her, she wouldn’t bother Gaia.

As she looked at the lone figure inside the psych ward, though, she was reminded of a poem, a snippet of verse from centuries ago, which made fun of the then-city of Boston and of the families that made up its rather closely knit aristocracy.

And this is good old Boston,

The home of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,

And the Cabots talk only to God.

Ashton didn’t know the poem’s background. She had no idea what a cod was, or why beans should be exclusively linked to Boston. She did know, however, that old Boston had been long dominated by several old and aristocratic families, the so-called Boston Brahmins, including the Cabots and the Lowells. That had been centuries ago, before rising sea levels and a couple of weapons impacts in the Atlantic—the fall of Wormwood in 2132, and a high-velocity impactor strike during the Turusch attack of 2405—had all but obliterated the low-lying city. The Cabots had included important industrialists, business leaders, politicians, and doctors, hence the joke.

But now Newton really was speaking “only to God.”

And Shay wondered again if modern medicine was making an unwarranted assumption here. What if he really was in direct contact with an emergent goddess arising from human electronic networks?

If the doctors managed to break that connection, would he be grateful? Or would he mourn the loss?

She doubted, somehow, that she would ever know the truth.

Chapter Thirteen

9 March 2425

York Civic Center

Jefferson Government Complex

Toronto, USNA

1345 hours, TFT

The York Civic Center was a sprawling metropolis in its own right, seated on the banks of Lake Ontario and extending on artificial terrain far out over the waters to the south. The Jefferson Tower rose in sweeping curves above the waterfront, offering an unparalleled view of the city and the lake.

It was, Koenig thought, a relief to be back up and in the light, natural light rather than the glowing light panels of the bunker kilometers below. For months, with only occasional respites on ceremonial occasions, President Koenig and his staff had been squirreled away in the Emergency Presidential Complex far beneath the streets of Toronto, sheltering from the possibility of another Confederation nano-D attack like the one that had vaporized a three-kilometer-wide crater into the heart of downtown Columbus, the former capital of the USNA. His security detail could fuss and fidget; he was going to make the most of this, and had arranged for the staff meeting with Gray and his people in a broad, open briefing room in the sky over a third of a kilometer above Toronto’s central business and government center.

There were military units surrounding the city, of course, and on the Atlantic coast, and in orbit, all watching for another attack. If an alarm came through, Koenig and those with him could be in the bunker complex within a few minutes, thanks to dedicated high-velocity mag-rail elevators in the building’s spine.

He didn’t think it was going to happen. There’d been no repeat of the atrocity, and despite President Denoix’s disquieting remarks a few days before—about the possibility of more nano-D attacks—the new Confederation government had been backpedaling on the issue, blaming a cabal or rogue element of some sort within the Confederation military.

Koenig looked down from the Jefferson Building’s 194th floor on the crowded expanse of York Plaza and prayed that the Confederation continued to behave . . . continued to abide by the commonly accepted terms and restrictions of
civilized
warfare. Despite Denoix’s vague threats, the Confederation seemed to have received enough of a backlash from the rest of the world, even from the nation-states that were still members of the Confederation, to have renounced nano-deconstructor warfare as a weapon.

The whole idea of
civilized
warfare was a colossal oxymoron, of course. War by its very nature couldn’t be civilized. Centuries ago, the advent of nuclear weapons had forced certain restrictions on warfare, if only to avoid the unthinkable—a nuclear holocaust on a global scale. Certain lines could not be crossed, certain borders could not be violated even when the enemy was operating freely on both sides. The notion of limited warfare had cost lives and even eventual victory in some of those wars. “There is no substitute for victory” had been a quote by General Douglas MacArthur—but in one way, perhaps, MacArthur was wrong. The human species had survived, after all, when the increasingly deadly weapons of modern warfare had threatened Humankind with utter extinction. If it hadn’t been
victory
, at least, it had been an accomplishment more important than mere military or even political success. Extinction is appallingly permanent.

The stakes had become higher since humans had encountered alien civilizations out among the stars . . . and especially since the Sh’daar Ultimatum. It was almost impossible for humans to understand alien motivations or cultural limitations. Worse, when the survival of the entire species was at stake, it made no sense whatsoever to put limits on what could and could not be done in war. The Confederation and the United States of North America had to share the planet, no matter what the outcome of the civil war; the various Sh’daar client species that had attacked Earth over the past decades weren’t concerned with such niceties. Presumably, they would save a habitable garden world for their own use if possible . . . but if they had to boil away Earth’s oceans and turn the surface into glass they would do so. Koenig remembered the object lesson of a species known to the Agletsch as the Chelk, and suppressed a shudder. Their world, and every living creature on it, had been destroyed twelve thousand years ago by the Sh’daar. The Chelk homeworld’s fate might well become Earth’s if humans couldn’t get their act together and present the Sh’daar with a unified front.

Of one thing he was still certain: simply surrendering to the Sh’daar was not an option. This was especially true now there were two new players on the galactic stage—the Rosette Aliens, enigmatic and transcendently powerful; and the Grdoch. There didn’t appear to be any way to communicate with the Rosette Aliens—not yet—but the Grdoch were another matter.

A new carrier task force formed around the
America
might tell them what they needed to know.

And there was also the new information to add to the mix: the small supernova planted in the morning’s intelligence checklist.

“Mr. President,” Whitney said in his head, “the naval officers are on their way up.”

“Thank you, Marcus. I’ll be with the others.”

He opened a door in one wall with a thought, and walked into the main briefing room . . . a large, open area with transparent walls and an enormous conference table. The room gave an overwhelming sense of open space—
so
much better than that damned closet situation room down in the subbasement. A couple of dozen men and women at the table stood as he entered: Eskow, McFarlane, and Admiral Armitage were present physically, along with members of their staffs. Others—Caldwell, Vandenberg, Sharpe, Lee, and Delmonico—were virtually present, linked in through the Jefferson Building’s AI and appearing at the table by means of holographic projectors in the ceiling. One of the physical attendees was the single nonhuman in the room: Gru’mulkisch, her Sh’daar Seed carefully screened and blocked. A special seat had been arranged for her, a kind of slanted, narrow, padded shelf on which she was resting, belly-down.

Another person present physically was Congressperson Julie Valcourt, a Canadian, and the Speaker of the House. She would bear watching today . . . though Koenig had issued her a personal invitation to the briefing. Unfortunately, he needed her.

“Sit down, sit down,” Koenig said as he strode across the highly polished floor and took a seat at the head of the table. “They’re on their way up.”

“About damned time,” Armitage grumbled.

Koenig grinned at him. “They
did
have the farthest to travel to get here, General.”

“They could have telecommuted,” the slightly translucent image of Pamela Sharpe said. “Like some of the rest of us.”

“
Not
advisable, Pamela,” Delmonico’s projection said. She shot a hard look at the Agletsch. “Not with down links that might be . . . compromised.”

A number of the physical locations and bases now used by the USNA had started off as Confederation assets, and were therefore, of course, suspect. Complete cybersecurity was difficult under the best of conditions; it was damned near impossible if the other side had ever had access to a location’s infrastructure to the point where they might have built devices into the physical structure that gave access to local nets. Electronic devices nearly microscopic in size could penetrate computer networks, plant viruses, or open wide the same sort of back door that had admitted the Luther squadron. Not even quantum encryption could safeguard computer communications if the hardware at both ends had been compromised. AI software known as QC, or quantum crackers, could ferret out clues that could let outsiders listen in on almost anything.

For that reason, top-secret communications were not held over channels within structures built or once maintained by the Confederation. The space elevator and the naval bases up at Geosynch were a case in point. Though primarily funded and built by the United States of North America, those facilities had been used by the Confederation for centuries, and there might easily be QC software residing in the most innocuous of hiding places.

“I wonder if it might not be too late to worry about that,” Lawrence Vandenberg said. He, too, was staring at the small Agletsch at the table. “Mr. President, I still think it was a mistake to include . . .
outsiders
in this meeting.”

There was, of course, a high degree of suspicion among those present aimed at aliens carrying Sh’daar Seeds, aliens like Gru’mulkisch. In theory, with the block squirreled away inside her translator, she couldn’t even attempt to release a network-penetrating virus into the local network without the deed being detected . . . but no one in the room could be 100 percent assured that the Sh’daar didn’t have a technological wrinkle or three up their collective and nonexistent sleeves that humans didn’t know about and couldn’t detect.

“It’s perfectly safe, Mr. Secretary,” Neil Eskow said. “I promise you.”

“If we’ve learned one thing during this conflict,” Koenig said, “it’s that the Sh’daar are
not
gods. I assume we have no congregationists of the AAC present?”

A polite chuckle rose around the table, and Koenig felt a tiny stab of guilt. The White Covenant prohibited not only proselytizing, but also publically making fun of the religious beliefs of others.

“If there
are
stargods out there, Mr. President,” Speaker Valcourt said, “it’s all the more reason to end this futile war.”

“I honestly don’t follow you, there, Madam Speaker,” Koenig told her. “The Sh’daar make mistakes. We’ve found how to nullify certain of the technologies they employ. If there actually
are
godlike beings out there in the galaxy, I submit that the Rosette Aliens are far better candidates. No matter what the AAC says.”

There were a number of Ancient Alien Creationists in the fleet. Some—a few, but certainly not all—believed that the Sh’daar were the Stargods of the remote past, super-powerful beings who’d engineered the human species millions of years ago, or mingled with humans and accepted their worship back at the dawn of history. Most of them were in favor of Humankind accepting the Sh’daar Ultimatum and joining their galactic collective. Probably the only reason they didn’t make more of a protest against the war was the fact of the White Covenant.

Koenig was perfectly willing to believe that some episodes lost in the darkness of human prehistory had been caused by alien visitors. The human genome showed subtle signs of tampering—and an otherwise inexplicable and sudden increase in brain size between
Homo erectus
and early
Homo sapiens
. And there was a handful of ruins that suggested at least the possibility that Someone Else had been there once, been there and gone: vast stone cities on the seafloor off Japan and Mexico and India that had not been above water since the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago; or dry-land sites like Puma Punku and the Nazca plains that simply could not be shoehorned into the acceptable outline of history . . .
maybe
 . . .

But for the most part, so far as Koenig was concerned, AAC theories denied the self-evident facts of human creativity, engineering cleverness, and outright genius, and for that reason alone were unconvincing.

And none of that changed Koenig’s conviction that whoever those hypothetical alien gods might have been, they were
not
the Sh’daar. The Sh’daar Collective’s sole interest in other species appeared to be connected with their technology,
advanced
technology like nanotech and robotics, and not the more basic discoveries like flint-knapping or fire. The multi-specific trauma of the technological singularity suffered by the ancient ur-Sh’daar had left the survivors—the modern Sh’daar—with what amounted to an obsession: detecting civilizations throughout the galaxy that might be approaching their own singularities, and either redirecting them into safer pastimes or obliterating them, as they had the Chelk twelve thousand years ago.

It was distinctly possible that the Sh’daar saw themselves as Galactic benefactors promoting the public good.

But at the same time, their efforts tended to be scattered and often seemed downright ineffectual. Earth had endured attacks by two Sh’daar species at two different times—the Turusch and the H’rulka—while other species—the Slan and the Nungiirtok—had attacked human colonies and research stations on the worlds of other stars. The fact that those attacks had been less than successful suggested either that the collective was deliberately employing a strategy designed to put pressure on Humankind without destroying it . . . or that the collective was less than perfectly coordinated, that its member species were poorly led and inefficiently deployed.

Koenig strongly believed the latter of the two. Waging something as dangerous and as expensive as a war demanded a commitment to
total
war . . . to victory rather than stumbling half measures or political statements.

A number of the men and women in this room, Koenig knew, were not convinced of this. Julie Valcourt, an outspoken member of the Global Union Party, was one—utterly committed to peace at any price. The hell of it was, Koenig agreed with much of what the Globalists said.

The Sh’daar Collective, by some conservative estimates, controlled a third, perhaps even a full half of the galaxy, and might number some millions of intelligent species and all of their teeming resources. If an empire with such overwhelming numbers had not swatted Earth like a bothersome insect in the fifty-eight years since the Sh’daar Ultimatum, they argued, it could
only
be because the Sh’daar puppet masters had wanted humanity to survive.

With an ideology like that, the only reasonable response was surrender—as the Confederation government and the North American Globalists both demanded—before the Sh’daar lost patience and
did
swat humanity into extinction.

For the moment, a majority of North America’s voting population appeared to agree with Koenig, but Koenig knew that this state of affairs was strictly temporary and subject to unexpected and largely unpredictable swings in the public mood. The war with the Sh’daar had been a long one, but except for the Turusch and H’rulka attacks twenty years ago, most humans other than those in the armed forces hadn’t been impacted much, or even inconvenienced. The ragged state of semi-peace that had existed since Koenig had forced the Sh’daar to agree to a truce two decades ago in the N’gai Cloud of Omega T
-0.876gy
had actually convinced most people that the threat from the Collective was nonexistent—or, at least, not all that serious. That state of affairs could change very quickly if another Sh’daar client species made it through Sol’s defenses and slammed Earth with another high-velocity impactor.