Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (22 page)

“That’s right,” Secretary Sharpe said. “It’s just us against the whole damned universe!”

The Secretary of State, Gray had heard, favored at least some of the Global Union’s views about fighting the Sh’daar even though she was a Freedomist. Essentially, she was part of the faction that felt Humankind couldn’t fight something as big, as powerful, and as far ranging in space as the Sh’daar Collective.

“It’s not
quite
that bad, Pamela,” Admiral Armitage said. “Even if we can’t make friends with the Grdoch, perhaps we can point them at the Confederation.
De facto
allies, if not allies in fact.”

“I think it’s pretty obvious,” Koenig added, “that the opposition is divided and obviously having trouble communicating with one another.”

“Exactly my point, sir,” Armitage said. “We have the interior lines of communication, so to speak.”

“We’ve also had generally favorable information coming in about Operation Luther,” Delmonico said. “Besides the intelligence coup. Mr. McFarlane has the details.”

The director of Intelligence nodded. “Yes, though there’s no hard information just yet. There have been major demonstrations, yesterday and this morning, in a number of Confed cities—New London, Bonn, Paris, Geneva.
Anti-war
demonstrations. We’re beginning to hear news from over there about a spiritual movement calling itself Starlight.”

So it begins
, Gray thought.
Yet another new world religion
.

He’d not heard much in the way of details, but Gray had downloaded the briefing attached to the message from Koenig the day before.
Starlight
, he knew, was a new . . . not a religion so much as a spiritual and philosophical movement beginning to surface in major cities across Europe. Virtual raiders had penetrated the Pan-European computer networks successfully, planting a number of worms designed to infiltrate the Confederation’s news and information web with a complex of ideas, philosophies, and outright propaganda leading to the establishment of a new religious movement. The religion even had a leader, a
voice
. . . and a focus for all of the attention.

A charismatic philosopher-activist who called himself Constantine d’Angelo.

“You know, this Starlight thing could
really
backfire on us,” Vandenberg said. “What if it gains a foothold here, in the USNA?”

“We’ll have plenty of time before that happens,” Delmonico said. “
And
we have the cyber defenses against the Starlight worm already in place. We predict that the Starlight movement will primarily affect Northern Europe and Russia. It will move more slowly through traditionally Catholic countries in Southern Europe and Latin America, and probably make no headway at all in either the Theocracy or in South and East Asia.”

“A few demonstrations don’t mean the end of the war, Mr. President,” Sharpe said.

“No,” Koenig agreed. “But they could mark the
beginning
of the end. It’s going to take time to create such a complicated memeplex, especially pulling it out of hard vacuum like this. Dr. Lee? Do either you or Konstantin have any predictions about how long the meme change will take?”

“Assuming it works at all, Mr. President,” Valcourt said. She didn’t sound at all convinced.

“Dr. Lee?”

“Predictions? No, sir. As I’ve said, memetics is not a true science, not yet. Results are not reproducible, and the random and cumulative effects of human emotion will always skew the results from the optimum outcome. However, these demonstrations that we’re hearing about are certainly an encouraging sign, especially after so short an incubation period. It seems likely that the target population was already primed to accept a new religious movement, a new direction.”

“The larger the target population,” Delmonico added, “the better the chance of a positive response. Predicting the response of an individual is extremely difficult. A population of hundreds of millions is quite a different thing.”

“I find myself . . . uncomfortable,” Vandenberg said slowly, “with the idea of religion being nothing more than finding the right buttons to push inside people’s minds, and pushing them.”

“Now, Van, you know it’s not that simple,” Delmonico replied. “Especially with something as entrenched as religion tends to be. Especially in this case, where people in the target population, most of them, already have one of a number of pre-existing religions.”

Eskow made a face. “I find that hard to believe. No one believes in religion anymore. Myth and superstition. The White Covenant killed all of that.”

“You should get out more, Mr. Secretary,” Delmonico said. “The White Covenant drove
talk
about religion underground. It didn’t kill religion itself. It
can’t
. Religion is a part of being human.”

“The hell it is.
I’m
not religious,” Eskow said.

“I submit, Mr. Secretary, that atheism is as much a matter of
belief
as any traditional religion,” she said, spreading her hands. “It’s not something that can be
proved
either way.”

“And
I
submit,” Koenig said firmly, “that discussing it here and now is pointless. Let’s get this back on track. Dr. Lee . . . my understanding of recombinant memetics is that we try to replace select memes within a target memeplex . . . but that it’s more of a nudge than a kick. Is that correct?”

“Exactly, Mr. President,” Lee said, nodding enthusiastically. “Let’s say you’re trying to change . . . oh, let’s use Christianity, as an example, since we’re all familiar with its tenets. You can’t just barge in the front door proclaiming that Jesus was a myth or a mere anti-Roman rabble-rouser or anything so blatant. The built-in defenses of that memeplex—the antibodies, you might say—would cause the entire assertion, the memetic argument itself, to be rejected. No, you have to slip in through the church basement. Maybe you put out several stories in widely read news feeds that, just in passing, mention contradictions in the Bible—something about how God is love and compassion and light and yet casts sinners into eternal hellfire. You put out discussions or news stories about the church’s history of discriminating against women. Questions about why the Creator of the universe, God Almighty Himself, would demand blood sacrifice to cancel out sin.

“Now, the memeplex defenses will counter questions like that. It’s wrong to question the Bible, sin to use merely human understanding . . . but questions attacking the memeplex’s core beliefs still raise inner conflict, discomfort, dissonance, and, eventually, they bring about
doubt
. Maybe you float another story about how the early church apparently didn’t believe in hell, but accepted reincarnation as fact. Stories about how the Church has
changed
over the centuries, rewriting or editing scripture, torturing heretics, yielding to political necessity and to all-too-human greed, envy, wrath, pride, and the rest.

“At first you’re preaching to the choir. Atheists might accept these memes as self-evident fact, but the fundamentalists, the true believers, the fanatics, even ordinary churchgoers are all well-inoculated against those particular viruses. As doubt is planted, however, meme by meme, it begins to grow . . . and your new memes begin, eventually, to merge with existing memeplexes, to reshape human awareness, to change minds in more or less predictable ways.”

“I thought you couldn’t make predictions,” Vandenberg said.

“Not
precise
predictions. We can’t tell you exactly when a change will occur, or exactly how it will manifest. But as time passes, the trend becomes clear . . .

“. . . and ultimately,
eventually
, we transform the world.”

Horace Lee, Gray thought, would have made an exceptional preacher. He could infuse his enthusiasm into his words in a way that dragged his audience along, whether they wanted to follow or not.

And change of that scope, change that dramatic, certainly had happened before. The divine right of kings, the benefits of colonialism, the morality of slavery, the second-class status of women: all of those memeplexes and others once deeply woven into human belief and practice had long since either collapsed or changed so that they were no longer recognizable.

The kicker was that each and every one of those old memeplexes had taken years, even
centuries
to overturn.

“So we’re the
memgineers
,” Eskow said with a distinctly sarcastic tone, “tinkering away at the psychological, sociological, and cultural underpinnings of Humankind as we set out to save the world.”

“Whatever it takes,” Koenig replied. “Whatever it takes . . .”

“Ah, yes,” Admiral Armitage said. “On a more, ah,
practical
note, we have just received one piece of excellent news. It just came through this morning. The
Constitution
has arrived in-system, and is now on the deceleration leg into Mars. She’ll receive a quick refit and resupply there, before joining the new task force.”

“
Very
good news,” Koenig agreed. “Admiral Gray? How long before your task force is ready for boost?”

“That, Mr. President, depends on how complete we make the refit. Resupply is under way now, and we should be topped off and ready to go within forty-eight hours. The repairs, though, the
major
repairs, are something else. We took some heavy damage at Enceladus, and it’s going to take time to regrow some of the ship structure. The SupraQuito shipyard has parked both 2390 CC12 and 2410 NI17 alongside the
America
, and we’ve deployed the nanoswarm to begin repairs. I would say we’ll be at sixty percent in forty-eight hours. One hundred percent will take longer . . . perhaps a week.”

The two alphanumerics referred to a pair of small asteroids—CC12, a carbonaceous chondrite 200 meters across, and NI17, a nickel-iron asteroid about 120 meters across. They’d been jockeyed down the synchorbit months before to serve as convenient sources of raw materials in shipyard operations—specifically for the repair of battle damage to capital ships. The nanoswarm was a swarm of some hundreds of trillions of microscopic machines programmed to take those asteroids apart, literally atom by atom, and take them to the damaged area, literally regrowing missing sections of hull. CC12 was an excellent source of expendables—oxygen and nitrogen for the ship’s atmosphere, water to replace the drained reserves in the punctured shield cap, and carbon, hydrogen, and various trace elements to manufacture food.

“Four days, Sandy,” Koenig said. The use of Gray’s first name was a kind of weapon, a point-blank statement that the president knew Gray could get done what needed to be done in the allotted time. “Four days, no more.”

“Aye, aye, Mr. President.”

There was nothing more than that to be said.

For thirty minutes more, they discussed fleet readiness, Confederation dispositions, and impressions about the Grdoch.

At last, though, Koenig stood, signaling that the briefing session was over at last. “We’ve handed you a damned tough nut, Admiral,” he said. “We need to deal the Confeds a serious bit of pain right now, to help drive home the expected effects of Operation Luther. We need to take the Grdoch out of the running if at all possible, one way or the other.
And
we need to preserve the fleet just in case none of this works and we find ourselves back on the defensive.”

Gray stood, looking grim, and his officers stood with him. “We’ll do our best, Mr. President.”

“I know you will, Sandy,” Koenig replied. “I have absolute confidence in you.”

And one of these days, Mr. President,
Gray thought,
that confidence will be misplaced. And
then
what?

Chapter Fifteen

13 March 2425

Pan-European News Feed

USNA Central Intelligence

York Civic Center

Toronto, USNA

0645 hours, EST

“I have been called the Messiah, returned to bring my people home!”

The features of Constantine d’Angelo filled the screen, powerful, focused, fierce, unstoppable. The voice was a translation, of course—the speech was being delivered in French—but the deep and sonorous baritone of the speaker still came through as undertones, hypnotic in their cadence and stress.

“I have also been called the Antichrist by those who reject my message, my truth! I tell you now, I am neither the Messiah, nor am I the Antichrist. I
am
a messenger, however, a messenger with a message of hope, of life, of renewal! A messenger come to tell you all that a new day, a new
era
, has dawned!”

Thomas McFarlane watched the face narrowly, searching for signs of . . . what? Fuzziness, perhaps, or burring, or a telltale disturbance in the pixels of the background . . . anything to suggest that the scene was artificial, created by computer rather than shot against a real-world background. He could see nothing, however, nothing whatsoever to suggest that Constantine d’Angelo was not what he claimed to be: a flesh-and-blood human somewhere in Geneva. The Confederation capital’s skyline was clearly visible behind him, with the green- and white-banded limestone cliffs of Mont Selève rising against the backdrop of the sky beyond.

McFarlane and only a handful of others knew that d’Angelo was not human at all, but an electronic construct, an avatar built up bit by bit by the super-computer Konstantin, at Tsiolkovsky base. A part, a very
small
part, of Konstantin’s intellect and database had been downloaded into some of the Geneva servers running the Confederation’s gov.net, and could now project itself as video and audio across any electronic media on the network. For days, now, “Constantine d’Angelo” had been appearing on news broadcasts, documentaries, and special broadcasts throughout the Confederation, castigating the government for its crimes against humanity, its unjust war against North America, and calling upon the population above all to question both the purpose and the morality of government.

And the rallies and political demonstrations by his Starlight movement had been growing exponentially just during the past week, both in numbers and in voice.

“The Geneva government,” d’Angelo was saying, “would have us all believe that
surrender
is Humankind’s only hope . . . surrender to the alien masters of this galaxy . . . masters, I might add, whom we have never seen, never met face-to-face, never communicated with save through their slaves.

“Is this, I ask all of you,
sane
? Our government would have us end our technological march forward into a brave future, would have us give up new medicines, new worlds, new ways of thinking and of expressing ourselves . . . and why? These mysterious and unseen masters of the galaxy, with whom we have warred off and on for sixty years, are afraid that we might transcend our own humanity and become more than what we are. . . .”

D’Angelo had been pushing that theme hard for days, now. The Sh’daar had been traumatized by the technological singularity of their own multi-species collective, and now refused to let others find their own path to transcendence. And the Geneva government, out of fear, wanted to acquiesce to the Sh’daar demands.

Not all elements of Humankind’s myriad cultures agreed with the idea of unbridled technological innovation and progress, of course, and those tended to fall in line with Geneva’s program. The Rapturist Church of Humankind was strong and well established throughout Northern Europe, especially in France. The Purist sect of that church held that any change to the basic genome of
Homo sapiens
was a sin, an act of defiance against God, and the political faction of that church, known as the
Pureté de Humanité,
was a powerful supporter of the Confederation’s peace initiative despite the White Covenant’s restrictions against religious activism.

In the south, the Catholic Church remained both cautious and conservative. The Papess in Rome had recently issued an encyclical railing against what she called a blind growth of human technology without equal growth in ethics, spirituality, and love. The Antipope, in Marseilles, was less accommodating. Technology needed to be carefully managed, even rationed by the Bureau of Science and Technology, to avoid the utter degradation of the human condition.

Of course, most people, constrained by the White Covenant, offered no specifically
religious
opinion, not when mingling religion with politics brought with it the risk of fine or even imprisonment for individuals, and military sanctions for nation-states. In any case, most people, aware that human technology alone made possible their comfort, convenience, general lifestyle, and often their very
lives
, approved of pretty much whatever might come along.

D’Angelo kept stressing the importance of Humankind finding its own path, of guaranteeing its independence among the stars without surrendering sovereignty to alien civilizations. One of several popular new memes appearing throughout Confederation news and entertainment feeds lately was that of da Vinci’s famous drawing
The Measure of Man
, multiple arms and legs outstretched across a globe, with an encircling legend reading
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
, the ancient French national motto.

Constantine d’Angelo kept hammering at another theme as well, hammered at it until it became a nearly ubiquitous meme:
war atrocity
. The Geneva government continued to prosecute an unpopular war in the Americas, and far worse, had stooped to using nano-D, a proscribed weapon of mass destruction, in order to obliterate a North American city, an unspeakable war crime. Exactly who had ordered that horrific assault—Ilse Roettgen, President Denoix, General Korosi, or someone else entirely within the Confederation leadership—was still a big unknown.

No matter what, the destruction of Columbus was the ultimate horror for any government.

“Enough is enough,”
d’Angelo said. “Enough childishness! Enough hurt feelings and immature feelings and feelings run amuck! It is time to put away nationalist and jingoist infantilism! It is time to abandon fear of the dark, to embrace the offspring of human imagination and creativity and determination, time to stand together as a species united—in short it is time and
past
time to
grow up
and assume our rightful place with the lords of this galaxy
as equals
, not as slaves. . . .”

Powerful words, McFarlane thought.

And judging by the intelligence reports flooding in, those words appeared to be falling on fertile ground.

USNA CVS
America

Naval Dockyard, SupraQuito

0708 hours, TFT

The star carrier
America
was leaving port.

Nudged clear of the SupraQuito dockyard by tugs and out into open space, she drifted free for a long moment, illuminated first by work lights, then by the hard, bright glare of the sun emerging slowly from behind the bulk of the orbital docking complex. Her hull was largely resurfaced and repainted in blocks of gray and black. Her shield cap drank the sunlight, though the newly painted leading surface now once again bore the legend USNA CVS
America
and her hull number. The two asteroids, now towed well clear of the dockyard area, had each contributed several tens of tons of material to nanoresurface the star carrier’s hull after its brutal scouring by the rings of Saturn.

Other ships gathered about her, gleaming in the sun: the star carriers
Saratoga
and
Constitution,
plus the smaller Marine carrier
Inchon.
The Russian light carrier
Slava
and the North Indian light carrier
Shiva
had joined the formation as well, together with the line-of-battle ships
Long Island
and
California
, the heavy cruisers
Calgary
and
Maine
, plus a swarm of light cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and a pair of railgun cruisers, the
Porter
and the
Decatur
. Four warships of the Chinese Hegemony had joined the group earlier that morning, led by the carrier
Shi Lang
. Altogether, Task Force Eridani was composed of twenty-four ships. Together, in close formation, they began accelerating out-system.

Accelerating at 1 gravity, they fell out-system, plunging toward the constellation of Eridanus, just 14 degrees west of the blue-white diamond of Rigel.

“Coded message coming through, marked personal and confidential, Admiral,” Lieutenant Kepner said over a private channel. “From the EPCP.”

Emergency Presidential Commmand Post might mean President Koenig himself, or, just possibly, either his chief of staff or someone on the Joint Chiefs. “Decode it and put it through.”

A moment later, the window opened and Admiral Armitage’s face appeared in Gray’s mind. So . . . something from the Joint chiefs of staff.

“Good morning, Sandy.”

Gray checked a time readout. They were already five light minutes from Earth, so this would be a monologue rather than a true conversation.

“Sorry I missed boost-time, but this has only just come through from Crisium, and I thought you should see it.” An icon winked in Gray’s consciousness, showing an attached file. “The upshot is that between the records grabbed by Operation Luther and what you snagged for us out at Enceladus, we now have working translation software for the Grdoch language. That should make things a bit easier for you out at Vulcan.”

Gray nodded to himself. That
was
good. Figuring out a completely alien language from scratch was a damned tough prospect even on Earth, where researchers had the full power of Konstantin and other advanced AIs on which they could draw.

Most breakthroughs with alien languages so far had been possible only because the Agletsch had been doing this sort of thing for centuries, developing a number of interstellar pidgins to facilitate their trade of information among wildly diverse species. The problem became all but insurmountable when an alien language involved things like changes in color, movements of various body parts, skin patterns, electrical fields, or even odor. Worse by far, however, when it came to interspecies communications, was the fact that alien mind-sets and attitudes, worldviews, and ways of thinking could be so different that two species might be mutually and forever incomprehensible to one another.

With a working translation program, though, that shouldn’t be a problem. Gray wondered how the Confederation xenolinguists had managed the job in such a relatively short time.

“However, we have some other information developed from the files garnered by Operation Luther,” Armitage continued. “Very . . .
disturbing
information. It substantially changes the scope of your orders.”

Gods!
that was all Gray needed right now . . . a last-second rewrite of task-force orders to reflect HQMILCOM’s penchant for micromanagement.

Armitage looked uncomfortable. He might be thinking the same thing.

“We heard at the briefing session the other day,” Armitage said, “about how Grdoch biochemistry is the same as ours. That’s . . . unusual, of course, given the remarkable diversity of life and life chemistries across the galaxy, but not at all impossible. RNA arises fairly easily from precursors like TNA—threose nucleic acid—and DNA is an almost inevitable evolutionary product of RNA. DNA-based life will involve proteins and amino acids similar to terrestrial life, with a one-in-four chance that that life will be made up of left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars.”

Gray scowled. Why the damned lesson in elementary exobiology?

“What this means, of course, is that the Grdoch can eat our kind of food . . . could derive nourishment from terrestrial life.

“And according to the reports we’ve seen from Vulcan, in particular
Le Rapport d’Gouverneur Delgado de Vulcan
, and another called
La Massacrer
, the Grdoch think of us, of
humans
as—as food animals. . . .”

In fact, Gray had already suspected as much. After watching the Grdoch feed on those huge prey animals on board their ship at Enceladus, he’d become convinced that the aliens possessed a cultural imperative—perhaps even an
evolutionary
imperative—toward both the hunt and devouring their prey.

Humans had a tendency to add ritual to basic, biological functions—sex, elimination, feeding. Although sex was far freer now that it was no longer bound up with reproduction or with the possibility of disease, there remained age-old conventions regarding where and when couples could indulge in it. Not even the cultural tension between monogamy and polyamory could completely change that . . . or the ritual of marriage. Eliminating bodily wastes was still done in private, at least for the most part, and mealtimes could still become special occasions for celebration, for socializing, or for courtship.

Those were human rituals, of course. The Agletsch had a cultural taboo against eating in public, even with their own kind, while the primitive Habu of Psi Cancri III defecated in public in order to mark territory for any type of transaction or conversation.

The Grdoch, with their numerous multiple mouths—those tooth-rimmed sucker-snouts located all over their bodies—seemed designed for feeding literally from the inside out, and the attack on the prey animal he’d witnessed appeared to be highly stylized—a ritual of attack, burrow, and feed. A human, Gray thought, wouldn’t make much of a meal, but as with many behavioral rituals, it might not be the details that mattered, but the simple fact.

Yes, if they could feed on humans without being poisoned by them, the only thing preventing them from indulging their gastronomic enthusiasm might be the knowledge that the prey in question was rational—an intelligent star-faring species like themselves.