Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (9 page)

Obviously, it hadn’t worked out as planned. The Confederation had dispatched a naval squadron to seize Enceladus and to isolate North America from the rest of Earth’s scientific community.

None of this was of particular interest to Gallagher at the moment, as he skimmed above the polar ice toward a misty wall, which, at his current velocity, would have nearly the same effect on his ship as a cliff of solid ice. He gave orders to his AI, nudging the fighter into a slightly different path. Those tiger stripes each were about 35 kilometers apart. It would be like threading a needle, but he might slip between the plumes if he could maintain a low-enough altitude.

The Pan-European fighters were still behind him, following him in.

Hurtling between two towering plumes that filled the sky with misty light, Gallagher flipped his fighter end for end again, hurtling tail-first and head-down, meters above the roiled and jaggedly broken icy surface. He had one Krait remaining. He rolled back to keel-down, giving orders to his AI in brief, staccato bursts of thought.

“Fox One!”

His last Krait dropped from his keel, ignited, streaked aft . . . and detonated on the ice. The flare was blinding . . . and an instant later a fresh and violent plume of freezing water geysered into space above the hole he’d punched into the surface, directly in the path of the trailing enemy fighters.

Unfortunately, the expanding plasma shock wave from his missile caught the Starhawk and nudged it to one side, nudged it enough to send it skimming through the fringes of one of the other plumes. Gallagher felt a savage shock, saw pieces of his fighter ripping free . . .

. . . and then the jolt of deceleration slammed against him, sending him hurtling into blackness as he lost consciousness. . . .

Chapter Six

4 March 2425

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

1640 hours, EST

“The President of the Confederation Senate is on the link for you, Mr. President,” Marcus Whitney, the Chief of Staff, said. “The
new
President, I should say.”

President Koenig glanced at the others in the room—Pamela Sharpe, the Secretary of State. Lawrence Vandenberg, the Secretary of Defense. Dr. Neil Eskow, the Secretary of Science. All maintained facial expressions of careful neutrality.

“You have the security issues worked out already, I presume?”

“Of course, sir.”

The security problem was far more difficult than merely one of virus control. A direct data link between Geneva and the emergency USNA capital in Toronto could easily serve as a conduit for a variety of electronic attacks—viruses, worms, or brute-force virtual assaults aimed at downloading confidential data or knocking out the American communications network. Powerful e-security AIs would be monitoring the exchange on both sides of the Atlantic, making sure that
only
the video and sound being exchanged between the two government leaders would pass the firewalls.

There was also the question of e-psych attacks, which would amount to a direct assassination attempt. Koenig and his Confederation counterpart carried sophisticated nanochelated circuitry inside their brains, cerebral implants that let them interface directly with computers, vehicle control systems, medical scans, the Global Net, and, of course, mind-to-mind communications links. It was possible to hack another person’s implants, either to steal data or—more viciously—to infiltrate personal RAM and distort the victim’s perception of reality. Such an attack could leave a victim hopelessly insane . . . or so distort his reality that he
acted
as though he were schizophrenic.

The virtual agents resident within implant hardware—Koenig’s personal in-head secretary, for instance—were designed to screen out such attacks . . . if only to block unauthorized attempts at communication, or the transfer of electronic advertising. The ICEware carried by Koenig and other government leaders was several orders of magnitude more powerful and comprehensive than what was available to average citizens, and should be proof against any possible electronic attack.

There was always the chance that the other side had come up with something new, however. The electronic battleground was constantly evolving, constantly growing more complex, more subtle, and more dangerous.

The secretary of defense broke the uncomfortable silence first. “Sir,” Vandenberg said, “I
really
don’t think that taking this call is a good idea.”

“Why is that?”

“Simple. It’s likely to be a plot to get at you. They might have something new that our ICE can’t handle. Something dangerous.”

ICE, an old acronym for intrusion countermeasures electronics, was the catchall term for electronic software defenses, some of it artificially intelligent, some not.

“Konstantin says they do not,” Dr. Eskow said with a shrug. “And Konstantin should know. It monitors the Global Net closely, and would be aware of any such new developments.”

“I don’t see Konstantin running our antiviral software,” Vandenberg said.

“Of course not,” Koenig said. “The time lag from the moon and back is too long. God knows what could sneak through in three seconds.”

In fact, clones of Konstantin were already running on several USNA networks on Earth, though they were more closely circumscribed in operational procedures and restrictions than was the hyperintelligent AI on the moon’s far side. Most humans still didn’t fully trust AIs that were
too
intelligent . . . or too independent.

And Koenig didn’t fully trust any AI networks that might already have been compromised by Confederation hacks.

Still, there were times when you needed to take a chance. If you sat inside a sealed box doing nothing because someone out there might be trying to get
you
, you would never get anywhere.

“I’m going to take the call,” Koenig said, deciding. “I’m sick of working in the dark against these people. Maybe he’ll let something slip.”

“Stay behind your avatar, Mr. President,” Eskow said. “He’ll certainly be staying behind his.”

Avatar
was the term given to a computer-created simulation based on the real person. With a decent AI behind it, it could even mimic the organic personality so closely that people linking in on the Net could not tell whether they were talking to the person or to their electronic secretary. Avatars could be a convenience or they could be a kind of personality fashion statement. They also could be designed to create a certain psychological impact. What Eskow was suggesting was that Koenig remain electronically masked by his avatar in the conversation. If the Confederation did manage to slip a nasty worm through the link, it would hit the electronic presence first, and, with luck and some very fast electronic reactions, be stopped there.

But that would also mean that Koenig would be isolated from the discussion, experiencing it secondhand and with little opportunity to guide it. He shook his head.

“I’ll be careful, Doctor. But there’s no point in my being here if I’m going to let an electronic puppet do my talking for me.” He looked at his SecState. “Pam? What’s the global lineup right now? Has anything changed I should know about?”

“Nothing substantial has changed since this morning’s PICKL, Mr. President,” she said. The PICKL was the President’s Intelligence ChecK-List, a data download prepared by the various USNA intelligence services for his review first thing each morning. “We have feelers out to Brasilia. They may pull out of the war over the Columbus atrocity, though they probably will stay with the Confederation. If they stay with the Confederation, Argentina may pull out. Those two are still at each other’s throats.”

“Russian Federation? North India?”

“They’re both solidly with us, now. But we’re not yet sure how much
practical
use those alliances might provide.”

“And Mexico?”

“Still solidly against us, sir. Confederation agents have been promising them the return of the old U.S. Southwest.”

“Aztlan,” Koenig said, frowning and nodding. “I know. Old news. Okay, let’s do this. Marcus?”

“The link is ready, sir. He’s waiting. Or his avatar is.”

“Right.” Koenig sank back in his chair, which responded to his thoughts, opening up, opening back, letting him lie back in a reclining position. He closed his eyes, and an inner window opened. A face formed out of static, and in Koenig’s mind’s eye, he was seated now in a large conference room, across an expensive mahogany table from President Christian Denoix de Saint Marc.

He was surprised at first that he wasn’t sitting opposite General Janos Matonyi Korosi who, according to USNA Intelligence, was currently the real head of both Pan-Europe and the Confederation. But Denoix’s presence was not, perhaps, all that surprising. The Confederation would be scrambling to put a legitimate face on their war—and that meant a civilian leader, not a military one. Denoix might well be little more than a figurehead. It would be good to keep that in mind.

The wallscreen behind the Confederation leader looked down on the Plaza of Light and, in the distance, beyond the skyward sweep of modernist buildings, the gray sheen of Lake Geneva.

“President Koenig,” the man said through a craggy and unyielding scowl. “It is good to meet with you at last.”

Koenig had little patience for political amenities. Figurehead or not, this was the enemy, for Christ’s sake, and one of the men responsible for the atrocity at Columbus. Better, he thought, to go on the offensive immediately, perhaps nudge his opposite number off-balance.

“What has happened,” Koenig demanded of the stern image in his head, “to President Roettgen?”

The scowl on the image’s face grew deeper. “We have done nothing to . . . the lady. She appears to have fled . . . with a great deal of the treasury’s money, I might add. We
will
find her, and her accomplices, I assure you. In the meantime,
I
have been appointed as Confederation Senate president until general elections can be held in two months’ time.”

Koenig studied the face. There was no way to read another person’s emotional state through an in-head link, since the image was meticulously crafted by an AI. All he had to go on was the man’s on-line bio . . . and on guesses as to why the other side was presenting this psychology, this attitude.

According to the download, Christian Denoix de Saint Marc was French. His principal residence was on the Channel Coast in the ultra-wealthy Boulogne-Billancourt suburb of Ile-de-France, just west of the seaside Parisian Dome, but he’d lived many years in Germany, Italy, and Poland, as well, and he had a second working home, of course, in Geneva, the Pan-European capital. His English was fair, but by prior common agreement, the AI connection was doing the actual work of translation, just to be certain that there were no critical misunderstandings.

That avatar face, Koenig knew, was designed to give away nothing.

Fair enough. In his office, Koenig himself was wearing nano-grown utilities, as close, as light, as comfortable, as informal as his own skin, but Denoix would be seeing him through the link in his formal black-and-gray admiral’s full dress uniform from fifteen years earlier. The uniform was a deliberate reminder, on Koenig’s part, that he’d been a military man before being elected to public office. Once Navy,
always
Navy, ran the old saying, and it was particularly true of Koenig.

The clear message was that he’d beaten the Pan-Europeans before, and he would do it again if they didn’t back down.

“I don’t believe you, you know,” Koenig said. “People don’t just disappear. Not these days.”

Well
, he thought to himself . . .
not unless they were willing to disable their in-head circuitry and go live in some godforsaken periphery region without modern technology
. Most of the world’s population now was so wired in that anyone could be found and tracked anywhere on or near the planet . . . one of the advantages—and curses—of modern personal nanoelectronics.

And that was most especially true of heads of state. Koenig knew that he was
always
under the electronic eyes of his own security apparatus, as was every man, woman, and robot within the Toronto emergency CP.

“It doesn’t much matter what you believe, President Koenig,” Denoix said with a nicely crafted shrug of his shoulders. “The truth of the matter is that you must now deal with me . . . and with my party.”

On the in-head, the Pan-European leader was wearing an elegant scarlet cloak over black skintights. Koenig wondered what he was really wearing.

Hell, it was even possible that the image was being run by an AI—that Denoix was doing office work or off on holiday with his mistresses and leaving this call to his personal AI secretary. There was no way to tell, really, though there were supposed to be electronic tags indicating that an avatar’s image was being worn by a flesh-and-blood human, or by an AI.

“ ‘My party?’ ” Koenig repeated. “That would be
Tout le Monde
?”

“Of course.”

Tout le Monde
—All the World—was Europe’s major opposition party to President Roettgen’s Globalist party. Both were leftist/socialist in economic outlook—the Mondes a bit further left than the Globalists—and both had called for peace with the Sh’daar. The big difference between the two, Koenig had decided, was in how far each group was willing to go in pursuit of their goals. USNA Intelliegence was more than half convinced that the destruction of Columbus, D.C., had been carried out by a pro-Monde cabal within the Pan-European government, and Koenig was inclined to agree. The Globalists, generally, advocated wearing down the opposition with talk along with
some
military pressure . . . not committing large-scale atrocities in order to force compliance with the world order. The fact that Roettgen had seemed genuinely surprised by the nano-annihilation of Columbus a few months ago suggested that it had been carried out by rogue elements of her own government.

That surprise might have been a ruse on her part, of course, but Koenig didn’t think so. Her disappearance from the world stage suggested that this was much more than politics as usual.

So . . . why have you called me?” Koenig asked. “Do you wish to surrender? We can offer generous terms—”

“Most amusing. I am calling, President Koenig, to inform you
personally
that a Sh’daar delegation is arriving in-system in two weeks’ time. We are welcoming them . . . and if you wish to have any role at all in deciding the content . . . the
shape
of the peace, you will agree to an armistice at once and make arrangements to attend the meeting.”

“In person?” Koenig asked, with an ironic lift to an eyebrow. Showing up in person at a designated conference site would be a great opportunity for the Confederation to take Koenig, the leader of the rebel opposition, prisoner. They would just
love
that. . . .

“Of course not.” The voice oozed scorn, coupled with a bitingly aristocratic disdain. “Virtual. We will provide the link-in data and eddresses.”

It occurred to Koenig that Denoix would be as careful about being set up by the other side as was Koenig. With a virtual conference, however, just as with this one between Toronto and Geneva, there was no need for the participants to be in the same room . . . or even on the same continent.

“And what would be the purpose of this meeting?” Koenig asked.

“Peace, of course, and open communion with the Sh’daar Collective before they squash us like insects. Even you must see and understand that continued human resistance against the long-time rulers of this galaxy can only lead to Humankind’s extinction.”

There’d been a time, Koenig knew, centuries before, when the government leaders of two countries at war with each other could not possibly have talked directly like this, virtual face to virtual face. Messages, peace feelers, requests for formal negotiations all would have been relegated to back channels, to the embassies of neutral nations, and to the efforts of third parties, or, in a few notorious cases, to teletype, telephone, or Internet hotlines. Koenig liked to believe that free and open communication, leading to better mutual understanding, was the best hope Humankind had for peace.