Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (21 page)

And then—waiting in the wings—there was always Julie Valcourt and her Global Union Party, looking for any opportunity to embarrass Koenig and the American Freedom party.

Koenig looked at Phillip Caldwell, the director of the National Security Council. Sitting next to him was Thomas McFarlane, the director of Central Intelligence. McFarlane, Koenig thought, looked nervous and ill at ease. Generally, presidential intelligence briefings were handled by the DSC. Koenig wondered why Caldwell had dragged him along.

“While we’re waiting,” Koenig said, “perhaps you gentlemen would care to fill us in on the planetbuster you dropped in the morning’s PICKL.”

McFarlane looked, if anything, even more uncomfortable. “Mr. President, I must stress that none of this has been confirmed as yet. The data are still . . . quite raw.”

“That’s okay, Mr. McFarlane. If true, your raw data will have a tremendous effect on the war. The sooner we start looking at it . . .
working
with it, the better.”

“Yes, sir. Well . . . as most of you know, we planted more inside the Confederation’s electronic networks than the Starlight Worm. There were the generic antinetwork viruses designed to convince Geneva that
that
was the point of the attack. As expected, their ICE and other electronic defenses blocked us from doing any major damage.

“But another subset of the offensive was a set of hackworms designed to give us information channels into the entire Pan-Europaan data net. Since our cyber attack four days ago, Konstantin has been eavesdropping on the Confederation with considerable success.”

“That,”
Delmonico said, interrupting, “is an understatement. We’re reading quantum-encrypted stuff over there now almost as though it’s in the clear. Even if the religion thing doesn’t pan out, this could win the war for us! At least the
human
part. . . .”

Koenig shot the director of Cybersecurity a hard glance, a gentle warning that she was out of line. “Go on, Mr. McFarlane.”

“
This
came through at oh nine thirty hours, GMT,” McFarlane said, opening a new window in the group’s virtual workspace. “That was at about oh four thirty our time. Konstantin sent it through to Central Intelligence as soon as the data came through.”

The message started off with versions in both French and German, then repeated in English. An AI voice accompanied the text, which scrolled through Koenig’s inner window.

Lasercom message received via unmanned interstellar message drone,

Type Hermes Mark VII

0127 GMT 09 Mar 2425

Message begins:

Urgent Urgent Urgent

Grdoch elements have attacked civilian population of Vulcan in second incident. Aliens must now be presumed hostile. Motives unknown, but may be related to USNA attack on Enceladus.

[
S
IGNED]
P
EILLON,
Amiral d’ Flotte

Message ends

“The message,” McFarlane continued, “was being sent from Confederation Fleet Headquarters outside Geneva to Denoix’s private Geneva residence.”

“It says this is a
second
attack,” Valcourt observed. “What was the first?”

“We don’t have a good time line yet, Madam Speaker,” Caldwell told her, “but two of the files we managed to download during Operation Luther were labeled ‘The Massacre,’ and ‘The Report of Governor Delgado of Vulcan.’ We’re still studying both documents, of course, but apparently Confederation contact with the Grdoch started off with a particularly nasty and evidently unprovoked attack on the Vulcan colonies. Commodore Becker, commanding the Confederation Fleet at Vulcan, seems to have established a truce with the Grdoch.”

“A massacre?” Valcourt asked. “What kind of massacre?”

“We have no details. All we know are that several thousand colonists from the Argentinean side of the fence were either killed or captured and are now presumed dead. Becker reported destroying one of three Grdoch ships. After that, they began talking, negotiating . . . and some sort of peace treaty or truce was put together.”

“We can assume,” Koenig added, “that communications between humans and the Grdoch are still less than perfect. The alliance was fragile enough that things seem to have broken down since the Battle of Enceladus. Maybe the Grdoch think Confed forces attacked their ship there.”

“This might give us our chance to ally with the Grdoch,” Secretary Comb said. “We need allies in this business.”

“Maybe,” Vandenberg said. “Or maybe the Grdoch are so alien they don’t understand the idea of a civil war . . . that humans might be divided among themselves. It’s a possibility.”

“Do we have any idea where the Grdoch come from yet?” Koenig asked. “They’re obviously not native to Vulcan.”

“Of course not, Mr. President,” Eskow said. “There doesn’t seem to be any galactic record of these beings. Gru’mulkisch? Do the Agletsch know anything about them?”

“I regret no, Mr. Secretary, Mr. President,” the Agletsch representative replied. “They do not appear to be part of the Masters’ Collective, and we have no data on them. But the galaxy is excessively vast, yes-no?”

“Yes,” Koenig said. “Yes, to be sure.”

Even the Sh’daar didn’t know,
couldn’t
know, every technic civilization among the hundreds of billions of worlds scattered through the galaxy. In a way, that was comforting. The Sh’daar had
limits
. . . and they couldn’t know everything.

“That begs an interesting question, though,” Eskow pointed out. “Based on reports from the Battle of Enceladus, we estimate that the Grdoch are within a century or two of us in terms of advanced tehcnology. That puts us smack up against the Limited Tech paradox again.”

Koenig nodded, thoughtful. He’d already been wondering about that. “It doesn’t seem reasonable that the Grdoch are so close to us in technological levels.”

“Exactly,” Eskow replied. “If the Grdoch were part of the Sh’daar Collective, it would all be part of the same picture. But they’re not. And that’s a bit of a conundrum.”

The universe was 13.7 billion years old. Xenosophontologists generally assumed that the first technological civilizations within the galaxy could not have appeared before, say, 8 billion years ago. While it was possible that intelligent species had arisen earlier—life forms based on organized plasmas within the atmospheres of stars, for instance—civilizations comprehensible to humans—with fire, metallurgy, and spacecraft—could only evolve on the surfaces of rocky planets. Rocky, terrestrial-type planets, in turn, could only form around stars with a high degree of metalicity—that meant, in astronomical terms, they possessed elements heavier than hydrogen and helium—and that meant second- and third-generation stars born after the deaths of the galaxy’s first generation of stars. It was those early dying stars that had cooked heavier elements like carbon and oxygen from the primordial hydrogen and helium—everything on the periodic table up through iron, in fact—and exploding supernovae that had created everything heavier. Even life forms arising in the atmospheres of gas giants, like the enormous, free-floating H’rulka, needed elements like carbon, silicon, phosphorous, and iron to give them form and to run their biologies.

So . . . the first intelligent life, the xenosophontologists believed, must have appeared within the galaxy around 4 to 5 billion years ago—or at just about the same time that Sol and Earth were forming out of the dust and gas of their primordial stellar nursery. Four billion years ago, the first starships might have begun exploring the young galaxy, and the first alien colonies were appearing on countless worlds.

If those aliens were still around in any form that humans could recognize, they would possess technologies billions of years in advance of Humankind.
Stargods
. . . .

Such species would have had time to colonize the entire galaxy—every habitable world—many times over. That was the basis of Enrico Fermi’s famous paradox: If technological civilizations had begun exploring the galaxy billions of years ago,
where are they now
? Why don’t we see evidence of their existence? A technology that advanced might be capable of anything—including reshaping the order and arrangement of the sky itself.

Fermi’s paradox had been formulated at the very beginning of Humankind’s search for neighbors among the stars. Eventually, a few centuries later, humans had encountered the Agletsch, and from them they’d acquired access to the Encyclopedia Galactica, a nested set of electronic records lising and describing many thousands of alien species scattered across both space and time.

While the E.G. hinted at more-advanced civilizations (the so-called Stargods), however, all of the technologies encountered so far—in particular the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Slan, the Nungiirtok, and the Agletsch themselves—possessed technologies that were, at most, a handful of centuries in advance of humans.

This was . . . mathematically preposterous. Against just the last billion years of galactic history, every civilization studied so far was within something like .0000005 of 1 percent of modern human technological levels.

And that was generally agreed to be statistically impossible.

Clearly, some unknown, unseen factor was at work constraining technological growth throughout the galaxy—and over the past five decades, the assumption had been that that factor was the Sh’daar. By limiting the technologies available to their client races, they ensured that everyone stayed at roughly the same level, to within a century or two.

Eight hundred million years ago, in the N’gai Cloud, a dwarf galaxy about to be devoured by the Milky Way, the ur-Sh’daar, a civilization consisting of hundreds or perhaps thousands of separate species, had vanished in such a transcendence, leaving behind a remnant unwilling or unable to follow them . . . a remnant that had become the racially traumatized Sh’daar. Entering Humankind’s galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago, they’d set about creating their collective, spreading out slowly, conquering world upon world, and suppressing those technologies that might lead to another round of Transcendence.

It made sense. There were no higher technologies—the mysterious Stargods and the Rosette Aliens were the exceptions that proved the rule—because the Sh’daar had enforced their rules against the tech that might lead to technological singularities.

But then . . . why were the Grdoch so close to human tech levels? Their military and spaceflight technologies were somewhat beyond human abilities, to be sure; humans had experimented with X-ray lasers, but problems in focusing and directing them had blocked their deployment. If the Grdoch had never crossed paths with the Sh’daar Collective, the chances that they just happened to be so close to human technology were quite literally something like one in a million, or even less.

“Obviously,” Eskow told the group, “there have been other factors at work besides the Sh’daar. Our best guess at the moment is that there’ve been multiple technological singularities among countless races as they progressed technologically through the course of their histories. Millions of civilizations across the galaxy must have reached technological apotheosis, transcending physical evolution and instrumentality and developing into . . . something else.”

“So in other words,” Koenig said, “there are no
really
advanced aliens out there, either inside Sh’daar space or beyond it, because the older ones all left to play someplace else.”

Which led relentlessly to another, related and very interesting thought. Might it be that technological species tended to enter the Singularity as soon as they reached a roughly human equivalence?

The answer to that question was vital. If the answer was yes, than humans could expect to enter their own singularity very soon, now.

A chime sounded, and a door slid open in the middle of what appeared to be one of the conference room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, admitting six naval officers and a single, sour-looking civilian.

“Ah, Admiral Gray!” Koenig said. “Welcome to the briefing. I think you’re going to find this . . . interesting. . . .”

Chapter Fourteen

9 March 2425

York Civic Center

Jefferson Government Complex

Toronto, USNA

1410 hours, TFT

As he walked into the large, open conference room, Admiral Gray was a bit taken aback by the crowd in the room, people both present and virtual. “Mr. President,” he said, facing Koenig. “Sorry to take so long. Building security.”

“Understood. My security people are convinced that someone is going to sneak in here with a nuke stuck up their ass.”

It was an exaggeration, given the minimum mass of fissionable material necessary for a nuclear device, but only a small one. There
had
been reports of suicide bombers using antimatter conversion units a few centimeters long, surgically implanted inside their stomachs, though that sort of thing was more a mark of the Rafadeen and the Islamic Theocracy than it was of the Confederation government. The scanning process in the Jefferson Building’s lobby had been excruciatingly and intimately thorough, including backscatter X-rays, soft-tissue fluoroscopy, and handheld MRI medical imaging scans.

Gray came to rigid attention. “Sir! Command Constellation, CBG- 40, reporting as ordered, sir.”

“At ease, Admiral, and shit-can the
kay
-det crap,” Koenig said. The President grinned at his discomfiture. “You
are
among friends here.”

Gray wasn’t quite sure whether to believe him. “If you say so, sir.” He looked at the crowd around the table, pinging their electronic IDs one after another. Some he knew, but only from the newsfeeds. God . . . the Secretary of State, the Speaker of the House—what was
she
doing here? And SecSci, SecDef, the DSC
and
the DCI. Others he didn’t know . . . Dr. Lee, for instance. But his credentials were impressive. “I just wasn’t expecting such . . . such an august assembly.”

“Grow yourselves seats and let’s get started,” Koenig said. “We need to decide how best to apply Task Force Eridani.”

Gray and the others found empty spaces around the big table and thoughtclicked chairs out of the carpeted floor.

“Phillip?” Koenig said, addressing the director of the Security Council. “You have something for us?”

“Some background, Mr. President.”

A large virtual screen shimmered into visibility at the end opposite Koenig’s place, and a world, the illuminated portion of the crescent enticingly blue, white, and orange-gold, swam into view.

“Vulcan,” an AI’s voice intoned. “A world so Earthlike that humans can actually live and work unprotected on its surface . . .”

Alphanumerics on the lower right-hand corner of the display showed that the image had been shot by the carrier
Intrepid
only a couple of weeks ago, then sent back to Sol by messenger drone. Vulcan’s sun, 40 Eridani A, showed in the distance to the right. Far to the left of the screen, almost out of the panorama, two closely paired stars gleamed brightly—one ruby red, the other diamond white.

“At last count,” the AI went on, “Vulcan was home to some eighty million humans, most of either German or Argentinean descent. The capital is the twin city of Himmel-Paradisio, on the southeastern coast of Neubavaria, the principal continent on the planet. . . .”

“Mr. President,” Valcourt said, petulant, “do we really need to sit through this . . . this melodramatic travelogue?”

“We need to know what we’re stepping into, Madam Speaker. And we all need to be downloading the same page.”

Gray suppressed a chuckle. In fact, the presentation, a piece prepared by Central Intelligence and put out over Govnet,
was
somewhat melodramatic, almost embarrassingly so. As the interior voice continued, Gray turned down the volume inside his head. He knew the basic stats of the place, had been studying them now ever since the place had popped in the set of highly confidential advance orders he’d received out at Enceladus. The world, though nominally a Confederation colony, was in fact politically independent, and seemed to have provided very little to the Confeds’ struggle with the breakaway USNA. Industry appeared to be limited to what was necessary just to support the world’s population—no shipyards, no weapons nanufactories, no shipments of scarce minerals or biotics, no large standing army. Vulcan’s principal export, apparently, was
information
. . . mostly on its alien biology.

And, in fact, information was by far the main item of all interstellar trade. There was very little in the way of goods or raw material worth the cost of shipping it across light years, especially when nanufactories could grow almost anything conceivable from the rocks freely available in every star system. The Agletsch, he reflected, had become experts at finding, quantizing, and shipping information across large swaths of the galaxy. The Encyclopedia Galactica was a well-known result of this trade. Increasingly, now, human traders were doing the same.

The travelogue wound to a close, and the scene shifted to a computer graphic detailing the outline of the entire 40 Eridani system. Alphanumerics identified the light star carrier
Intrepid
and her three escorts as they entered 40 Eridani space. Planets followed blue orbital paths—six of them—as red trajectories arced out from the second planet and closed on the four green icons identifying
Intrepid
and the destroyers with her. Each missile followed a separate, far-arcing path, so that they came in on the USNA Task force from all directions.

“We don’t have a clear idea of what happened, exactly,” Phillip Caldwell’s holographic image said. “
Intrepid
’s squadron appears to have been hit hard, however, shortly after it entered the 40 Eridani system.”

On the screen, one destroyer, the
Emmet
, vanished in a white flare of light. Moments later, the second destroyer,
Fitzpatrick
, died as well. The
Intrepid
took several hits as she struggled to accelerate, to break free of the system. The last destroyer,
Tomlinson
, hung back, apparently trying to shield the far larger carrier and give her time to get clear.

The image froze, then, at the instant that
Intrepid
stopped recording battlespace data and launched it Solward in a message drone.

“We presume that both
Intrepid
and the
Tomlinson
were destroyed moments later,” Admiral Armitage said. “The Joint Chiefs are recommending that we send the new task force directly to 40 Eridani, with orders to find and rescue survivors, if any, to launch a retaliatory strike against Confederation assets in the system, and . . . to deal with
this
.”

On the screen, the image of the star system shifted left and down, centering, after a moment, on a bright scarlet dot hanging above the blue-and-white icon representing Vulcan, then zoomed in, the magnification increasing thousands of times. An instant later, the view locked onto an egg-shaped, bright scarlet ship apparently identical to the one captured at Enceladus.

“That’s the same alien ship,” Sharpe said, “the one that showed up at Enceladus.”

“Actually, no,” Eskow said. The secretary of science brought up a series of shifting bars next to the image, a graph of power usage. “The energy readouts transmitted from
Intrepid
suggest that this is a different Grdoch ship . . . larger, more powerful. It may be over a kilometer long.”

Gray studied the magnified image with mingled interest and concern. Star carriers like
America
were about a kilometer long overall . . . but their bodies were long and slender, a pencil of a spine extending aft 800 meters from beneath an umbrella-shaped shieldcap. There was nothing slender about the Grdoch ships, however. Massive, bulky, and squat, they contained hundreds of times the volume of a star carrier, and massed many hundreds of millions of tons. This one was more smooth-polished asteroid than it was starship. Koenig could well understand how a number of Grdoch—and the titanic beasts they’d been feeding on—had not been discovered within the ship captured at Enceladus until long after the fact. A ship that big was a small and self-contained world, like a human O’Neill cylinder, or some of the colonies constructed within hollowed-out asteroids.

“And of course now we know that that Grdoch ship has attacked its erstwhile allies,” Koenig said.

Gray looked up sharply at that. “Sir? They’ve changed sides?”

“We have some hot new intel, Admiral. Here you go.”

Gray opened the download window in his mind, and saw the intercepted message from Geneva. As a kind of footnote, Koenig appended a message listing what was known about the
first
Grdoch attack on Vulcan, information derived from a cyberaid made a few days ago.

There was a lot there to digest.

“So, Mr. President,” Gray said slowly, “the Grdoch. Are they our friends now? Or are they still . . . foes?” He’d almost said targets, but stopped himself at the last moment. There was too much heavy-lift rank in this room to let him be flip or casually humorous.

“A wonderful question, Admiral, and one that I’m sure we’d all like to resolve. You’ve received your full orders for this operation from HQMILCOM?”

Gray nodded. “They came through yesterday, Mr. President.”

“And they are?”

“I am to take command of Task Force Eridani,” Gray replied, his tone as crisp and as no-nonsense as he could make it. “Four or possibly five star carriers, with a large number of warships in support, twenty or twenty-five, if we can manage it.

“Task Force Eridani will investigate Vulcan, at 40 Eridani. Our immediate priority will be to find and rescue survivors from the
Intrepid
’s task force, if any. If we encounter Confederation Fleet elements, we are to engage those, unless, in my judgment, the enemy forces in-system are so strong that attacking them would result in unacceptable casualties. We are also to survey Vulcan itself, to determine if the Confederation has posted fleet or surface elements there.”

“And if you encounter Grdoch forces?” Koenig prompted.

“That, Mr. President, HQMILCOM seems to be leaving to my best judgment. Yesterday, the presumption was that they are allies of the Confederation and therefore hostile. But . . . this new intel changes that, doesn’t it?”

“We don’t know yet, Admiral,” Koenig told him. “Assuming the old adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, there may now be room to consider forging an alliance of our own with the Grdoch. But it’s equally possible that the Grdoch can’t really distinguish among Earth-human political factions.”

“In other words, we all look alike to them,” Vandenberg put in. Several at the table chuckled.

“If I may, gentlemen, ladies,” Dr. Truitt put in, “I have had some small experience with the Grdoch . . . at least with the Grdoch we captured at Enceladus. Their psychology is . . . unusual, to say the least, despite their being so similar to us.”

“Excuse me, Dr. Truitt,” Koenig said. “What do you mean, ‘so similar’? The reports I’ve seen suggest that they
define
the word
alien
.”

“Their biochemistry is nearly identical to ours, Mr. President. We’ve run biochem studies on them with a portable lab on the captured ship. Their biochemistries are based on dextro-sugars and levo-amino acids, just like terrestrial life, and that alone is a one-in-four possibility. They use RNA, like life on Earth, which isn’t completely surprising, since RNA is a fairly common organic building block. They also use DNA. Different sequences, obviously, but the same base pairs: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine. I’ve searched our databases. We haven’t yet encountered
any
exobiologies as similar to ours as these.”

“The Agletsch,” Eskow pointed out, “they can eat our food. . . .”

“But require certain elements in larger than trace amounts,” Truitt said, “including cadmium, nickel, and selenium. They can’t survive for long if they are limited strictly to terrestrial food.”

“Interesting,” Eskow said. “That might explain their interest in Vulcan. Compatible biochemistries.”

“It might explain their interest in Earth,” Sharpe said. “For the same reason.”

“Indeed,” Koenig said. “So your orders, Admiral, will be amended. If you encounter Grdoch forces, again, use your best judgment . . . attempt to make contact with them independently of the Confederation. But if they prove hostile, you are clear to engage and destroy them, if possible.”

The recitation was dry and without emotion. Gray could guess what was going on behind Koenig’s flat expression. Both men had been faced with hostile alien forces before, in situations where they’d had to overcome that hostility and attempt to communicate.

“Sir.”

Koenig must have heard reluctance in the tone of Gray’s single word. “You have a problem with your orders, Admiral?”

“Not as such, Mr. President. I
am
concerned that we’re missing a serious opportunity for KISS, here. It could turn around and bite us in the ass. Sir.”

KISS—keep it simple, stupid. There was always a tendency, especially within the higher levels of the naval command structure, to overcomplicate orders with multiple objectives layered one upon another. Needless complexity turned straightforward operations into deadly, high-casualty traps, and Gray was gently reminding Koenig of the fact . . . without directly challenging his authority.

“I understand that, Admiral,” Koenig said. “But until we clarify the Grdoch situation . . . why they’re here in human space, what they want, who they’re mad at, and
why
, we’re going to be tiptoeing over eggs.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“It may be too late for tiptoeing, you know,” Valcourt told Koenig. “We attacked their ship at Enceladus, captured it. We’re holding a number of them prisoner now at Crisium! These are acts of
war
, Mr. President . . . as if we needed another war on our hands.”

“Actually, things may be considerably simpler now,” Koenig replied. “If the Confederation wants to ally with the Sh’daar, and is now fighting against the Grdoch, it all becomes one war, doesn’t it?”