Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (7 page)

Not that the carefully crafted image conversing with him inside his head would yield any clues. The lunar computer network had not been directly programmed by humans; Konstantin, he knew, was an artificial intelligence-programmed machine, an AIP. Given that, how much could Konstantin possibly know—or guess—of human behavior?

“I notice,” Koenig said carefully, “that you tend to emphasize the fact that you are not human. When you’re speaking with me, you always say ‘
your
war,’ ‘
your
nation,’ as if you’re not one of us.”

“A fact that should be self-evident,” Konstantin replied. “I am
not
human. This is not my war. And while, technically, this facility was funded primarily by the United States of North America, I was intended, I remind you, to work on problems affecting all of Humankind. War is the single most wasteful, tragic, and senseless of human activities, and is not within my purview.”

“But you
have
been helping us.” Konstantin had been instrumental in formulating strategies against the Confederation, and in using its data-mining capabilities to gather intelligence from the Global Net.

“I have,” the system replied. “My function—my higher purpose, a human might say—is to gather, assess, and provide information. It is up to human agencies such as your government to determine what to do with that information.”

Konstantin’s mandate was to provide information useful for all of humanity, or at least so ran the claim. So far as Koenig was aware, though, Konstantin had been providing intelligence to the United States of North America and
not
to the Confederation. Was that because Konstantin had been designed and funded primarily by the USNA government, and by USNA-based corporations like Bluetel and Simmons-AI? Or were there other, deeper motives . . . perhaps motives not even remotely comprehensible to brains of mere blood and tissue?

“And the Confederation government? Do you provide them with information as well?”

“I maintain covert links with certain Confederation communications and AI networks, of course. Doing so requires that I provide certain information, yes. IP eddresses and DNS registration, for instance, as well as synchronization pingpackets.”

“Okay, Konstantin,” Koenig said after a moment. He knew better than to try to get the hyperintelligent AI network to say
anything
it was not prepared to divulge. “But how are you planning on using memetics?”

That was the
real
question, he thought—how well could a silicon-based intelligence understand the complexities of recombinant memetics? A machine figuring out the most effective buttons to push, to change human cultures, to reshape Humankind . . .

That
, Koenig decided, was a truly chilling concept. . . .

If you had enough small and disparate bits of information, if you could conduct Big Data mining on a large-enough scale, could you accurately and consistently predict human behavior?

Koenig knew the
official
answer, of course. Predicting the actions of a handful of people or, worse, of an individual, was possible only in fairly limited situations—if the subject was a sociopath, for instance, and following the dictates of his disease, and even then, predictions could all too easily be lost in the randomness of background noise.

Large groups of people, however, were another matter altogether. As with large numbers of atoms or molecules acting within the rules laid down by quantum dynamics and basic chemistry, the actions of large populations were more predictable.

And where actions were predictable, it was possible—if you were both careful enough and skillful enough—to guide them, to change the shape and course of those actions to achieve a desired outcome. The science was called recombinant memetics, the science of using one set of memeplexes to alter another. In much the same way that recombinant DNA can change genetic structures and give rise to whole new types of life, it was possible to identify particular memes within a social unit and change them into something else entirely.

But identifying and targeting key memes within a given culture could be tricky, requiring data mining on a scale only possible for an AI as complex and as perceptive as Konstantin.

And changing them was trickier still, requiring selective manipulation of memes within the target culture.

The word
meme
had been coined four centuries before by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who first suggested them as units transmitting cultural practices, ideas and concepts, or as symbols passed from mind to mind through writing, speech, rituals, mass entertainment, or imitation. Like genes, memes spread from person to person, and like genes they compete, vary, select, mutate, and attempt to ensure their own survival. Put another way, a meme is like a virus, propagating through a population, infecting individuals, and spreading by means of the behaviors it generates in its hosts.

The question in Koenig’s mind was how a computer network, no matter how complex, could understand how memes worked, how memes could infect and affect human populations without possessing a key human ingredient—
emotion
.

And if a silicon mind like Konstantin’s could understand memetics, it gave AI systems an absolutely incredible power with which to manipulate human civilization.

“Several possibilities present themselves,” Konstantin replied. “I could foment revolution within the Confederation by building upon the impetus already generated by the defections from the Confederation’s ranks—Russia and North India. Or I could create a new religion . . . one that would require Geneva to embrace peace.”

That statement rocked Koenig back on his figurative heels. A
religion
?

A cluster of related memes working together and supporting one another was a
memeplex
; religion was the perfect example. Religions evolve, spawn new and different offspring, become set or rigid in their ways, or they mutate under cultural pressures which are themselves memeplexes.

“I see. And how are you going to get around the White Covenant?”

“The White Covenant prohibits attempts to proselytize,” Konstantin replied, “and it directly prohibits the use or the threat of force to effect conversions as a basic violation of human rights. It does not prohibit the establishment of a new faith.”

Centuries before, late in the twenty-first century, a particularly nasty war between the West and radical Islam had ended . . . in part because Western psyops programs had created the White Covenant, a gentlemen’s agreement among the winners that proselytizing in
any
form was a violation of basic human rights to believe and to worship according to one’s own conscience. Ultimately, full membership in the newborn Earth Confederation for any nation had depended upon acceptance of the Covenant.

And at the same time, an early application of recombinant memetics, then in its infancy, had made proselytizing, the fear of hell or judgment, and even the very idea of fundamentalist acceptance of sacred writings as God’s literal word . . .
embarrassing
. Passé. Even insulting. Populations that rejected the Covenant were encouraged to practice their beliefs . . .
elsewhere
, in deep space colonies out beyond Pluto, or even on the worlds of distant suns. Mufrid, at Eta Boötis, had been one such colony, until its destruction twenty years ago by the Turusch.

What the hell did Konstantin have in mind?

“Good luck with that,” Koenig said. “People tend to take their religions seriously.”

“Some do, though for many it is more a matter of convenience. Very often, religion is an accident of where a person was born, or when.”

“True. But there’s going to be a lot of back-blast and noise when you launch it.”

“Secrecy will be essential,” Konstantin observed.

Konstantin had pulled off some miracles lately in its dealing with the Confederation, but Koenig thought that this time the system might have bitten off more than it could process. Propaganda always ran into the basic problem of knee-jerk rejection by the target society—called
back-blast
in RM terminology—and, more, there often were so many competing voices out there in the memetic ether that it was impossible for any one message to be heard over the noise. Basic commercial advertising starting back in the twentieth century had been a primitive form of RM, using jingles and product placement and sexy spokespersons to sell, say, a certain brand of ground car. But when a dozen other companies were countering with jingles and ads dripping with sex of their own, the result was . . . noise, and lots of it, enough to render such ads largely ineffective.

There were also defenses, AI agents that patrolled cyberspace in search of potentially dangerous memes, like antibodies.

The best way to get a memetic virus through the noise and the defenses was to do so without the target being aware.

“It is imperative that we end the civil war within the Confederation as swiftly as possible,” Konstantin went on. “A recombinant memetic attack on the Geneva leadership gives us a good chance of uniting Humankind before the Sh’daar or the unknown alien threat at Omega Centauri can act.”

“But we still don’t have a clue as to how to defeat the Sh’daar,” Koenig said. “And we know even less about the Rosette Aliens.” He hesitated, thoughtful. “It’s the time-travel aspect that bothers me, Konstantin,” he said at last. “With that one factor alone, they ought to be able to walk all over us.”

The Sh’daar Collective was a truly formidable enemy. No human knew just how big the Collective actually was. At the very least, it included within its far-flung embrace well over a thousand distinct star-faring species scattered across perhaps a quarter of the galaxy, and controlled the resources of thousands more that for one reason or another had never ventured into space.

The discovery that at least one TRGA cylinder gave direct access from the Milky Way at time
now
to the N’gai Cloud some 876 million years in the past added the dimension of time to the problem. What passed for a Sh’daar galactic government appeared to be based in what Confederation intelligence called Omega Centauri T
-0.876gy
, the designation for the N’gai Cloud as it was almost 0.9 of a gigayear before time
now
, but it evidently had spread through time as well as space. How such a possibility could be made to work without endless complications from temporal paradox remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of galactic history.

And with that kind of strategic advantage, one would think that the Sh’daar could have intervened at any point in Humankind’s history or even prehistory and written humanity out of existence. Suppose a Sh’daar battlefleet had showed up over the Earth of 876 million years ago, when terrestrial life—still limited to bacteria and protists and blue-green alga—was confined to the sea. They could have glassed over the Earth, boiled away the ocean, bombarded what was left with high-energy neutrons . . .

Exterminated the life in those ancient terrestrial seas and Humankind would never have appeared.

The fact that the Sh’daar had
not
eradicated all life on Earth by rewriting history suggested that there was more to the problem than was immediately obvious.

The problem, Koenig thought, likely had to do with a key aspect of what it meant for species to be mutually alien. The Turusch, the H’rulka, the Nungiirtok, the Slan . . . all were client species of the Collective and all, at one time or another, technic species that had attacked human forces in T
prime
, meaning time
now
, captured human interstellar colonies, and even launched assaults on Earth herself. And while there’d been attempts at joint operations—the Nungiirtok were specialists in ground warfare, for example, and had invaded the colony on Osiris in conjunction with Turusch fleet elements—the different Sh’daar clients were so different from one another—in physiology, yes, but especially in
psychology
—that they apparently had trouble coordinating military operations with one another. The Sh’daar guided their clients, or tried to, through the Seeds . . . but either the distances were too vast or the number of Seeds sending back data was too large. Whichever it was—and it might well be both—the Sh’daar Empire was not particularly efficient in the ways it dealt with ambitious upstarts like Humankind.

Humankind, Koenig believed, possessed one vital advantage in its struggle with the Sh’daar, something he privately thought of as the
Greek advantage
. Koenig was a thoroughgoing student of history, and was among other things fascinated by the spectacular victories of the ancient Greeks over the far larger and more diverse Persian armies at Marathon, at Plataea, and, later, by Alexander the Great over Darius. Like the Greek city states of 2900 years earlier, modern Earth was far from united . . . but the member species of the Sh’daar Collective had so little in common with one another that communications—even facilitated by Agletsch pidgins—must be very nearly impossible.

So far, Humankind had managed to use that essential disunity, beating Sh’daar client species in turn rather than en masse. The question, though, was whether the enemy would learn from those defeats and get their collective act together. If they did,
when
they did, humanity would be in very serious trouble indeed.

Somehow, Earth needed to unite, and then end the Sh’daar threat once and for all. If Konstantin could pull that off with memegeneering, well and good. If he could not, then Humankind’s long-term survival was very much in doubt.

And so far as Koenig could tell, Humankind was running out of useful options.

Chapter Five

12 February 2425

Washington, D.C.

USNA Periphery

1220 hours, EST

“Damn it, Lieutenant, we need trained pilots! Lots of them! You were one of our best! It’s your
duty
to volunteer!”

Shay Ashton looked the small, gray man up and down, almost openly sneering. “If service is mandatory, how the hell can I volunteer?” she said. “You can go to hell!”

“Lieutenant Ryan—”

“It’s
Ashton
, not Ryan,” she snapped. She’d married after she’d returned to the D.C. Ruins, though Fred had been killed ten years later by marauders from across the broad and tide-swollen Potomac. This USNA government agent wouldn’t understand. To him, taking the name of the person you married was
quaint
, a holdover from a long-gone era . . . or, worse, that she was a filthy “monogie”—a pervert who dared to believe in monogamous marriage.

She saw emotion flicker across the man’s face—disdain, possibly disgust. But in the lawless territories of the Periphery, cast off centuries ago by the rest of the country, monogamy had carried a certain survival value . . . two people so closely bonded that each could watch the back of the other in a way not possible for complicated line marriages, polyamories, or
ménages a politique
.

Behind her, a city, at once ancient and newly born, was growing skyward from mangrove swamp and muck. The relentless global rising of the oceans four centuries ago had finally flooded the low-lying regions along the U.S. coast, forcing their evacuation. But not everyone had been willing to leave their home. . . .

For centuries since then, the stay-behinds, the “swampies,” had inhabited the former capital of the old United States, fish-farming among the tangled mangrove swamps now growing along what once had been the Washington Mall. When the US had reorganized itself as the United States of North America and as a founding member of the Earth Confederation, the Periphery—including low-lying and flooded coastal areas like Manhattan, Boston, and Washington, D.C.—had been abandoned by a government unable to afford the massive costs and effort of beating back the encroaching sea. The people still living in those areas had adapted, as people do, living in the ruins without modern technology or medical care, making their own law, and becoming fiercely independent in the process.

The Periphery had become a major political issue, however, when Geneva had attempted to seize those regions, to take them over as a trust. The inhabitants had fought back an assault three months ago; the massive, broken shell of a Confederation Jotun troop flier still lay on its side in the shallow waters of the Washington Mall, partially obscured by the enthusiastic tangle of mangroves around it. Ashton had somehow found herself in command of the ragged band that had defended the Ruins, holding out until USNA aerospace forces had arrived to turn the tide decisively in the defenders’ favor.

Since then, USNA troops and equipment had been pouring into the areas around both D.C. and Baltimore, and reportedly up in the Manhattan Ruins too. Ashton was grateful for the help . . . but gratitude did have its limits. She hadn’t
asked
for the government’s help.

“Whether you like it or not,” the government man said, “the USNA has taken over direct control of the Peripheries. You
are
citizens of the USNA now, and as such you have both rights and responsibilities. That is
especially
true of former military personnel such as yourself.”

She held a middle finger up under his nose. “See this, Government Man?” she snapped. “Sit and rotate!”

“Lieutenant Ashton—”

“I retired, damn it! I put in my time, and I
retired
, okay? You do
not
own me!”

The man nodded toward the downed Jotun. “Looks like you’ve been doing a pretty good job of it since your retirement.”

In fact, that troop flier had been brought down by a flight of USNA Starhawk fighters. But she wasn’t going to mention
that
.

“This is my home, okay? I have a right to defend it.”

“Granted. And we’re offering you a chance to make sure the Confederation doesn’t try to grab your home from you again.”

“You can fight your own damned war. I’m not playing.”

The man sighed. “Well, I’m not going to force you. USNA jurisdiction is still . . . a bit fuzzy out here in the Periphery, and will be until we formally re-annex it. I will ask you why you won’t help us, though. You were an outstanding Starhawk pilot. Excellent record . . .”

“Like I said . . . I put in my time. And they need me
here
. This is . . . home.”

“Okay. Let’s leave it at this.” He focused a thought, sending Ashton a mind-to-mind eddress, which her in-head circuitry dutifully recorded and logged. “We want you to volunteer for an electronic incursion into Geneva. It’s a no-risk op; you’ll go in clean and virtual. Your fighter skills are very much needed in this operation, and if you succeed, you will ensure Washington’s freedom from the Confederation. If you can see clear to changing your mind, give me a yell. Fair enough?”

She nodded, but reluctantly. “Ain’t gonna happen, though.”

“The USNA is taking back the Periphery, Lieutenant,” the agent said. “Sooner or later, all of this will be under our control, our
full
control, again. Since the destruction of Columbus, there’s even been . . . talk of bringing the nation’s capital back here. Like it was a few centuries ago. It’ll mean unprecedented prosperity for your people . . . medical coverage . . . full access to the Global Net. There
are
some major advantages for you in this deal.”

“There’re advantages in staying independent, too.”

“Indeed.
If
you can keep that independence.” He didn’t add that to win independence, Ashton and her neighbors would have to fight against the USNA.

He didn’t need to.

As he walked away, Ashton wondered if he’d really meant that last unspoken thought as a threat. As far as she was concerned, there wasn’t a decidollar’s difference between the United States of North America and the Earth Confederation. She’d served both when the USNA had been a part of Geneva’s global hegemony, and her loyalties had been to the other members of her squadron and to her shipmates on board the
America
, not to such abstract concepts as duty, country, or even freedom.

Hell, what had the USNA done for her or her fellow swampies of late?

Well, other than showing up at the last possible second and helping to drive off the Confederation invasion three months ago. . . .

And it was true that the government—the
USNA
government, not the ragged committee of swampies who’d been making decisions here for the past few centuries—
had
been sending a lot of high-tech help after the precipitous departure of the Confeds. The old Capitol dome had been freed from the enveloping shrouds of kudzu and tropical vines, water levels were down so far that most of the Mall was now dry land, and three-meter dikes had been grown along the ancient shores of the Potomac, allowing the standing water to the east to be pumped out. There was even a detachment of USNA Marines in place across the river, now, guarding what to them was a sacred site . . . the ancient Iwo Jima Memorial, which now flew, not the flag of the USNA, but the old U.S. flag under which the Marines once had fought during centuries past. As a side benefit of that deployment, there’d been no more marauder raids on the D.C. Ruin settlements from the Virginia side of the river. Ten years ago, Ashton had led an armed team across the river to avenge Fred’s death, and had wiped out one nest of those snakes, but new marauder clans had shown up during the past few years.

Maybe there were advantages to having the USNA government renew its claims along the coast after all.

Angrily, she shook off the thought. The government was the proverbial camel with its nose worming in under the side of the tent. Let it in just a little, and pretty soon the whole damned camel was in there, shouldering you out into the desert cold.

No
. . . .

Blue Seven, VF-910

Saturn Space

1315 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Frank Gallagher accelerated at nearly 10,000 Gs, streaking up from the tiny white, icy moon and into open space. Above him, Saturn hung huge and vast and beautiful, filling half the sky, her rings a diamond-hard and ruler-straight white scratch across all of heaven.

“Enceladus Base!” he called. “Blue One clear and accelerating!”

“Copy, Blue One,” the voice of Enceladus Flight Control replied in his head.

“Joining formation.” The three other Starfighters of Blue Flight drifted in open formation a few thousand kilometers ahead and he moved to join them. “Okay, Blues,” he said. “Keep it tight.”

“Blue Two, affirmative.” That was Lieutenant Karyl Joyce.

“Blue Four, ready to boost.” Lieutenant Dwayne Tanner.

“Blue Three, ready.” Lieutenant Victor Truini.

“Blue Flight formed up and ready for formation intercept,” Gallagher announced.

“Copy, Blue Flight. Unknowns now bearing at one-seven-three plus twelve, range two-niner-five thousand. Unknowns have fired on Red Flight, and are confirmed hostile. You have weapons free, I say again, weapons free.”

“Copy weapons free. Coming to one-seven-three plus one-two.”

“Go get ’em, Frank.”

“No prob, Salad Bowl. Keep the coffee warm for us back there.”

“Will do.” The voice hesitated. “We’re reading the hostiles now as twelve Krag-sixties. Range now two-five-zero thousand. The big boys are moving in, range one-point-seven-seven million.”

Not
good. “Copy.”

The Pan-European Krag-sixties—KRG-60 Todtadlers, or Death Eagles—were as fast, as maneuverable, and as heavily armed as modern USNA Velociraptors, which meant that they were much better than Blue Flight’s older Starhawks, especially at long range.

They would have to get in tight to make a difference.

But
twelve
of them! Blue Flight consisted of four Starhawks, and Red Flight of four more, assuming they were all still operational. The USNA defensive contingent at Enceladus was going to be badly outclassed in this engagement—and there were still the “big boys,” the Confederation capital ships, to contend with.

“Blue Flight, engage sperm mode,” Gallagher ordered. The external hulls of the SG-92 Starhawks softened and flowed, morphing into their high-velocity configuration—a rounded body with a long, slender spike at the tail. Streamlining wasn’t normally a factor in spaceflight—at least, not at normal planetary velocities. But minute flecks of debris—stray hydrogen atoms, for the most part—were definitely a consideration at higher velocities.

And, more to the point, the region of space close to Enceladus was not hard vacuum. The dazzlingly white moon was imbedded inside the thickest part of Saturn’s E ring; in fact, specks of frozen water streaming out from Enceladus were responsible for creating the E Ring, and for keeping it in existence. Though local space was still hard vacuum by terrestrial standards, flying through that blizzard of ice particles at high-G accelerations would be like plowing through an atmosphere of molasses.

“On my mark, boys and girl,” Gallagher told his flight. “Fifty-kay gees in three . . . and two . . . and one . . . and
boost
!”

Powerful, tightly wrapped balls of warped space flickered into existence off each Starhawk’s bow. In existence for only a tiny fraction of a second, each microsingularity lasted just long enough to bend space ahead, allowing the fighter to fall forward. By continuing to flicker on and off, the drive allowed the craft to bootstrap itself to higher and higher velocities . . . and since the fighter was in freefall, following the local curvature of space itself, there were none of the unpleasant side effects of acceleration—like having the pilot smeared across his acceleration couch in a thin, red stain. At 50,000 gravities, a Starhawk could nudge up against the speed of light in about ten minutes. They wouldn’t be boosting for that long, however. The idea was to engage the incoming enemy, not blow right past him at a high percentage of
c
. The fighters’ AIs cut off acceleration when the closing velocity was up to 5,000 kilometers per second, and the enemy was thirty seconds away.

“Prepare to engage,” Gallagher called. “Arm Kraits. Spread for area effect . . . but watch out for our Red Flight. Blue Four, hold yours in reserve.”

“Copy, Blue Leader.”

Kraits
were nuke-tipped VG-10 antiship missiles. They were particularly effective against capital ships, but a near miss would fry a fighter’s circuitry and the expanding plasma sphere might shred hull matrix if the detonation was close enough. They weren’t as powerful or as long-ranged as the newer Boomslangs or Taipans, but they could do the job well enough with good tactics.

Gallagher watched the red points of light representing the enemy fighters drift across an in-head window, each accompanied by a small block of text describing the target’s mass, direction, speed, and acceleration. The friendlies out there were in full retreat . . . three of them dropping back toward Enceladus at high-G. A white sphere of light blossomed . . . and then there were
two
friendlies left. The hostiles kept closing.

Damn it, they should have ordered Red Flight to open up on the unknowns as soon as they’d become visible. Who the hell else had the Salad Bowl—the squadron’s pet slang name for Enceladus Station—been expecting out here?

He selected four Kraits, marked detonation points on his in-head to create a spread across the expected paths of the Confederation fighters, and triggered the release. “Fox One!” he announced. “Blue One, missiles away!”

“Blue Three! Fox One!”

“Blue Two! Fox One!”

Fox One
was the code phrase indicating the launch of smart missiles—fire-and-forget warheads equipped with AIs to guide them to their targets. Released from the fighters’ bellies, the missile drives switched on an instant after they were clear to avoid changing the fighters’ vectors, sending them streaking into darkness. One vanished two seconds later, wiped from the sky by a Todtadler’s particle beam, but the others detonated in a pulsing one-two-three blossoming of white light. The enemy fighters had scattered off their path as soon as they’d detected the launch . . . but the spreads launched by Truini and Joyce had been placed to box the Todtadlers in, and as additional fireballs flared in the distance, two of the enemy fighters vanished, while a third, torn by an expanding plasma fireball, tumbled helplessly out of control.