Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (33 page)

What the Grdoch might have done had they found Earth simply didn’t bear thinking about.

Gray hadn’t offered any further information. After a long moment’s silence, Harmon added, “So, we’re headed back home?”

“Eventually, Captain. I want to make very sure that we’ve rounded up all of the Grdoch. I’ve dispatched a squadron to check out B and C.”

“I was wondering about that, sir.”

The two other stars in the system, 40 Eridani B and C, circled each other in an elliptical orbit averaging 35 astronomical units across some 400 AUs out—a distance of 53 light hours. The Grdoch ships had appeared to be trying to head in that direction, and Gray wanted to be damned sure there was nothing else out there . . . like a third Grdoch warship.

He would
not
underestimate the bastards again.

“I also want to see if we’re going to be able to carry out local repairs on the
America
, at least enough to let her limp home . . . or if we’re going to need to bring out a mobile nanufactory. Some of the other task force ships are in a bad way too. The
Slava
got pretty badly shot up. So did the
Long Island
. The
Constitution
took a hit too—”

“Nothing that can’t be regrown in pretty short order, Admiral.”

“I’m glad to hear it. But I want to bring the fleet back to full readiness—as full as we can manage out here, anyway. And we need to decide what we’re doing about the prisoners.”

“I heard they’re being kept in their own prison camps. Good solution.”

“For now. I ordered that they be herded into the walled enclosures that have some of their praedams inside.”

Gray made a face as he said it. It left a distinctly unpleasant taste in his mouth. He still remembered the horror of watching the Grdoch swarm a living food animal—a sight nasty enough to make anyone a confirmed vegetarian.

But starving Grdoch prisoners to death would be worse . . . and at least the enormous praedams weren’t sentient, so far as any XT personnel had been able to discover.

The Grdoch, Gray thought, were going to pose Humankind with some absolutely horrific ethical problems in the future. What did you do, how did you respond, when another sentient species—one with which you wanted to form an alliance, a partnership—held values and ideals so markedly different from your own?

Once, centuries before, a vicious, bloody, and long-fought war had divided Humankind between the West and the followers of religious doctrines that were antithetical to what the West thought of as
civilized
belief in almost every way. Even mainstream and moderate Islam believed with all the fervor of their faith in practices and punishments the West no longer accepted.

Never mind that the West’s sacred scriptures
also
called for death for homosexuals, for heretics, for witches, for disbelief, as well as promoting the subjugation of women and the use of slaves for pleasure. The difference was that Islam was still a young religion, youngest of the three great monotheistic faiths, and had simply not yet grown up enough to discard such childishness. Where the West preached—for the most part—tolerance, diversity, and inclusiveness, such attitudes could not be part of moderate Islam without seriously undercutting fundamentalist belief, an attack on Allah and on His Messenger.

And the West had come dangerously close, in the name of understanding and inclusiveness, to going under. Only military victory, the controversial White Covenant, and a united Earth Confederation willing to back it up, had given modern Islam the opportunity to grow up.

Had they not, utter destruction would have been the only possible outcome.

Something of the sort, Gray thought, would be necessary in dealing with the Grdoch. Would they be willing to engage in free and open communication, diplomatic recognition, scientific exchanges, even trade, with creatures they thought of as
food
?

And what was the alternative? Genocide?

Gray fervently hoped he wouldn’t be around to take part in that decision.

“The damned ’Dochs wouldn’t have done as much for us,” Harmon observed.

“Maybe not. But we have to set standards, draw lines, somewhere.”

The trick was knowing where to draw the line, though. Moderate Islam, four centuries ago, would have rejected utterly the idea that their religion was immature, that it was incomplete or barbaric or lacking in any way. They believed what they believed because they were convinced it came straight from God.

And it wasn’t just Islam. The same was true of fundamentalist Christians, of Orthodox Jews . . . of
any
belief system purportedly handed down by divine fiat. “God said it, that settles it” had been the motto for generation after generation of believers of all of the monotheistic faiths.

The Grdoch, Gray knew, would never accept the idea that their behavior was in any way uncivilized. He didn’t know if they believed in God, but they would argue, rightly, that they’d been made the way they were by the forces of evolution.

And they certainly wouldn’t change what they were—
could not
change what they were—just because another species found their behavior horrific.

Was it possible that some mutually alien species were so different from one another they could
never
communicate in any meaningful way?

Was it possible that the same was true for some purely human belief systems?

Or was the only solution something like the White Covenant, backed by military force?

It was not, Gray thought, a happy thought.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

2335 hours, EST

“You want to
get rid
of the White Covenant?” Deb Johnston sounded shocked. “My God, why?”

They lay in bed together, still entangled in each other’s arms. Koenig had brought her back to the EPCP and, eventually, asked her to spend the night. His security detail knew she was there, of course—how could they not?

But if he’d given them fits over the past six years by insisting on his own way, still, he trusted their discretion. There would be no leaks, not from
that
quarter.

Still, Gods . . . if his conservative Freedomist support base discovered that he was literally in bed with a Globalist, heaven help them all. . . .

“Well,” he said slowly, “the
political
reason is that we want to clear the way for an alliance with the Islamists.”

She nodded. “We’ve been pushing for that for years. It’s stupid to have a true global government when a billion people aren’t even allowed to be a part of it.”

“I know.”

“And I know you’re the most apolitical Freedomist I’ve ever met. What’s your
real
reason?”

“Big government, government that has forgotten that it derives its power from its people, is one of the worst evils Humankind has managed to unleash on itself. Government has no business telling its citizens what to believe . . . or how to exercise their religious expression.”

“But mob rule—that’s what
true
democracy is, you know—can be as much of a tyranny as any other. That’s why we have a
representative
democracy. The people, the ordinary citizens, don’t know what’s best for themselves.”

“And a bunch of bureaucrats or elected officials
do
? Come on! You know, the old United States of America ran afoul of mommy-knows-best government in the twenty-first century, when it flirted with socialism. Universal education . . . run by the government. Universal health care . . . run by the government. Universal food rights . . . run by the government. Universal work rights . . . run by the government. By the middle of the century, the country was on the point of collective suicide. Suicide by taxation. By presidential edict. By legal entanglements. By wholesale corruption.

“The trouble is that government,
big
government, government from the top down is appallingly inefficient. It mostly exists just to keep itself going. In the old USA, all of the universal entitlement programs, all the free giveaways, all of the sheer corruption, from local township offices all the way up to the presidency itself, finally broke the bank . . . and the only thing that kept the country going was the Islamic Wars . . . and after that the First Sino-Western War. Then global sea levels rose, the Blood Death killed a billion and a half people, and the government was like a dinosaur confronted by a falling six-mile asteroid. What was left fell into anarchy, at least for a few decades.”

“But we came back. Unlike the dinosaurs.”

“In a sense, I suppose. The analogy only goes so far. The United States of North America rose from the ruins with a new constitution and a new start. But . . . you know? We went on making the exact same mistakes. Maybe that’s just human nature.

“The point is that big government, top-down government, government serving itself,
entrenching
itself, is never the answer.”

“What is?”

“Dam’fino. But separation of church and state is a good start. People need to take the responsibility for their own decisions . . . and their own belief.”

“You’re going to have a fight in the North American Senate.”

“I know.” He thought about it for a moment. “I think they’ll fall into line, though. The revelations about the Grdoch threat have people scared. It makes sense to ally with the Islamic Theocracy. And the Chinese Hegemony too. Humankind needs to be united,
really
united.”

“And what about the Sh’daar? You want to ally with them? Against the Rosette Aliens?”

“If we can find a way around their insistence that we give up our technology, why not? The Grdoch have proven to us that there are some
very
dark forces out there in the galaxy. Things a lot bigger than us, a lot nastier than us. If we don’t find a way to get along with one another—humans with humans, humans with Sh’daar, humans with anyone else we find we can communicate with—then we’re going to drift into slavery . . . and maybe extinction.
Probably
extinction, because if we stay static, if we don’t grow, we die.”

“Well, maybe if—”

“Damn!”
A signal was sounding in his head, the chirp alerting him to an urgent message. “Hold on a sec, love. . . .”

He opened the channel.

“Sorry to disturb you, Mr. President.” It was Marcus Whitney, his chief of staff.

“Tell me.”

“Intelligence has picked up a flurry of new reports from Europe. It looks like the Confederation is collapsing. The army has launched a coup. Denoix has fled. Korosi is in custody. England, Germany, and Ukraine have all announced they are seceding. Italy and Spain may be next.”

“Who the hell is in charge over there?”

“No one, at least right now. The Starlight movement is demanding an end to the war and free elections. They’re calling for Constantine d’Angelo as president. . . .”

“My God . . .”

“Konstantin—at Tsiolkovsky—is on it, Mr. President. He’ll be releasing a statement in a few hours. Mr. President. We’ve
won
!”

“So it would seem, Marcus.”

Koenig was stunned by the suddenness of the reversal. Oh, there’d been signs of discontent within Pan-Europe, certainly, but it had been only a week since the recombinant memetic virus had been unleashed into Geneva’s computer infrastructure.

The news did not exactly reassure him, however. The USNA might well have just won its independence, but a very great deal depended now on just what was going to replace the Earth Confederation. Would it be a new confederation led by the USNA? Or would the power vacuum in Europe be filled by something darker than a merely socialist government?

He wondered if Konstantin had any ideas on the matter.

“Okay, Marcus,” Koenig said. “Call me if anything more breaks.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“What is it, Alex?” Johnston asked him.

“I’m . . . not sure,” he told her, pulling her a little closer. He shivered a bit, with a terrible premonition. “A new world, certainly. But I’m not sure yet what kind of a new world it’s going to be. . . .”

Epilogue

The Consciousness was aware of life—of
Mind
—within this new reality. It was Mind, after all, that had called this universe into being, Mind that had organized its laws, its physics, and the life that now filled it.

And on some level, Mind always called to Mind.

It was aware of a cybernetic consciousness united across a vast span of time . . . aware of another cybernetic consciousness that opposed the first.

Division
. . .
Conflict
. . .
Extinction
 . . .

Something
would have to be done.

The Consciousness began to move, light years falling away in its wake.

The problem, as always, would be to find a means of establishing meaningful communication with the Minds of this reality.

About the Author

IAN DOUGLAS, one of the many pseudonyms for writer William H. Keith, is the
New York Times
bestselling author of the popular military SF series The Heritage Trilogy, The Legacy Trilogy, The Inheritance Trilogy, and the ongoing Star Carrier and Star Corpsman series. A former naval corpsman, he lives in Pennsylvania.

www.whkeith.com

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