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“No. It was a direct e-link.”
“Did you record it?”
“Apparently, Mr. President, the link was one-view specific.”
“Ah.”
E-links allowed data to be downloaded directly into the hardware nanotechnically grown within most people’s brains. Neural connections allowed what amounted to telepathy, mind-to-mind, as well as the downloading of information from the Global Net, direct interfaces with AIs or with machines—anything from a spacecraft to a door. And anything that was downloaded, from a conversation to an encyclopedia reference, could be stored … usually. Private messages could be embedded with code that erased the data as it was being transferred to memory. The recipient retained his or her organic memory of the message—though this was often fuzzy and indistinct, like the fast-evaporating memory of a dream—but there was nothing on record, nothing that could be uploaded to a database as, say, evidence for criminal proceedings.
“That message could be interpreted as an attempt by a foreign government to manipulate the election,” Koenig said.
“‘Foreign government’? Sir, this is the Confederation we’re talking about! Earth’s government!”
“The relationship of the USNA to the Confederation is still … let’s just say it’s still being tested. What I’m saying is that interfering with a nation’s choice of its own government violates the provisions of the Confederation Charter.”
“We’ve been part of the Confederation for three hundred years! We were one of the founding states of the Pax!”
“Yes, and the original constitution stated that each nation within the Pax was sovereign, that it would determine its own form of government and that it would retain control of its own military forces. This First Right thing is something new … an abridgement, an erosion of our rights under that charter.”
“Sometimes, rights must be surrendered for the good of the whole,” Valcourt said. “An individual doesn’t have the right to kill another person, where a national government can wage war and kill millions.”
Koenig gave a mental shrug. “I know we don’t agree on this, Madam Speaker. Just how did you reply to the question?”
“About how our citizens would respond to Geneva taking control of our military? I told them to take a look at the celebrations going on outside in the Freedom Concourse,” she said. “It would appear that the citizenry approves of less interference from Geneva, not more.”
“And their response?”
“They said that things change, situations change … and that the people can be led. That, after all, is the whole purpose of government.”
“I would say that government is supposed to express the will of the people, and to secure and protect that people’s rights. ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ remember?”
“I would suggest, Mr. President, that you are a few centuries out of date. Those words were destroyed when the Chinese dropped Wormwood into the Atlantic Ocean.”
Koenig sighed. Sometimes he did feel out of date. “Shall we agree to disagree, Madam Speaker? Once again?”
“My apologies, sir. I didn’t intend that to sound impertinent.”
“Not at all.” He hesitated. “I’m curious, though. What were these … Europeans, you say? What did they want from you? Why did they approach you?”
“I think they genuinely wanted to know how we Americans would react to the invoking of the Military Rights Act. They approached me because I am the Speaker of the House … which means, technically at least, that I speak for the American people.” Her image gave a wan smile. “After this past election, I doubt that that will be so for much longer.”
Koenig nodded. Valcourt represented an uneasy alliance within the House—Unionists, Progressives, and a half dozen smaller parties, including the Reclamationists, the New Order Socialists, and the Popular Neodemocrats—and as such she’d been the face and the voice of the loyal opposition throughout most of his first term as president.
The term loyal opposition had just taken on a new, stronger meaning for Koenig. Valcourt had come to him with the warning, rather than seeking political advantage for herself or her party through some kind of alliance with Geneva. He was impressed. He’d not known Julie Valcourt was capable of passing up a political opportunity.
“I don’t know about that, Madam Speaker,” he told her. “There’s nothing like a threat from outside to pull a people together, and let them know they’re all working for the same goal.”
“We’ll have to see about that, Mr. President. For now, though … I must ask you. What are you going to do about this … this power grab? Will you risk a civil war?”
“I don’t know, Madam Speaker. Like I said, I only heard about it a few hours ago.”
“A delicate situation, sir.”
“Delicate doesn’t tell the half of it. If I give in, I set a precedent, and it’ll be all but impossible to reverse it. If I refuse, even if we don’t end up in a civil war, Earth will end up divided and scattered, unable to agree on a common front against the Sh’daar.”
“‘Who speaks for Earth?’” Valcourt quoted.
“You mentioned the Europeans. Do you think there’s a faction within the Confederation? A split we could use?”
“I’m not sure. I think Brazil has sided with the EU. Russia may be undecided. Ukraine is with the Europeans. I think North India and the EAS are sitting on the fence, waiting to see how it all shakes out.”
“Pretty much business as usual,” Koenig said. “China and the Theocracy will be watching closely too, but I suspect they’ll be siding with us.”
Neither China nor the Islamist Theocracy were members of the Confederation … the gulfs left by several world wars continued to exclude them from a world government.
Which, of course, meant that the Confederation wasn’t truly a world government, did not, in fact, represent a united Earth.
“I’m terrified, Mr. President, that this is going to end in world war. Humankind may not survive. If it does, it will not be able to resist the Sh’daar when they finally come.”
“On that, Madam Speaker, you and I are in complete agreement,” Koenig told her. “I just wish I could see a third alternative …”
TC/USNA CVS America
USNA Naval Base
Quito Synchorbital
1315 hours, TFT
“Here they come, Captain,” Connie Fletcher told him. “They’re making the most of it, aren’t they?”
“You think that display is just to impress us?” Gray replied.
“Maybe they just want to impress themselves,” Admiral Steiger observed. “Kind of like team spirit, y’know?”
The Confederation flotilla was decelerating into synchronous orbit, inbound from Mars after a two-hour passage. Those warships, Gray knew, had been assembled from all across the Sol System, and several had arrived over the past few days from the nearer extrasolar colonies—Chiron, Hel, New Earth, Bifrost Orbital, Santo Iago, and Thoth.
In the van were four star carriers—the British Illustrious, the North Indian Kali, the European Union’s Klemens von Metternich, and the EAS Simon Bolivar—light carriers measuring from 600 to 850 meters from their mushroom caps to the ends of their drive stems.
In a loose swarm of vessels moving astern and on the flanks were fifty-one additional Confederation warships, from fleet gunboats and light bombardment vessels to Admiral Delattre’s flagship, the massive railgun cruiser Napoleon. With tightly controlled bursts from their plasma maneuvering thrusters, the Confederation fleet began edging toward the open gantries of the synchorbital military docking complex.
“Fifty-five warships,” Gray observed. “That’s a hell of a lot of team spirit. They outnumber us, that’s for sure.”
The America battlegroup currently numbered just twenty-four vessels, though eight more USNA warships were docked at the Quito Synchorbital, undergoing repairs or refits. The Confederation fleet was trying deliberately to overawe the North-American squadron, of that Gray was certain. He wondered if Steiger was going to roll over and play dead on this one. Steiger had commanded a number of vessels before his appointment as CO CBG-40, but it had been a long time since he’d seen combat. Word was he’d been a lieutenant commander in the CAG office on board America during Crown Arrow twenty years ago. He might be pretty rusty.
But then, it had been twenty years since Gray had seen combat, and he was rusty as well. The Sh’daar Truce had been two decades of quiet … no raids, no planetary assaults, and even potential human enemies—the Islamists and the Chinese Hegemony, for instance—had been keeping a non-confrontational profile.
Training sims helped maintain basic skills, but they were no substitute for the real thing.
The big question about Steiger was how aggressive he might be. Where Gray had been wearing a Starhawk at Alphekka and Omega Cent, Steiger had been driving a console in PriFly—not at all the same thing.
Gray frowned at the thought as soon as it arose and pushed it aside. Steiger was the CO, and that meant he required the loyalty and the full support of every officer in the battlegroup. His normally laid-back attitude didn’t mean he wasn’t a fighter; look at Koenig, the CO of CBG-18. The man certainly wasn’t a coward, not with something like twenty-five years in the service.
But would the man be able to stand up to what amounted to a naked Confederation power play?
Gray didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he would be able to refuse direct orders from Geneva, not when doing so might well result in civil war.
What he did know was that the parade of Confederation warships sidling up to the docking gantries out there was nothing less than a cold-blooded threat.
Chapter Six
10 November 2424
Intermundi
Civilian Sector Green 7,
Quito Synchorbital
1915 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Donald Gregory leaned back in his seat, taking another deep inhale of firedust from the golden sphere in his left hand. The nanometer-sized particles were absorbed directly through his sinus cavities and into his bloodstream, triggering a release of dopamine in his brain and a sharp, rippling wave of pleasure surging through his body. He gasped, then went rigid for a moment as the wave peaked, then ebbed. “Oh, yeah …”
His right hand was clasped tight around the bare waist of Lieutenant Jodi Vaughn, who giggled as he started to come down from the hit. “Good stuff, huh?”
“Babe, right now I’m flying! Wrapped up in metaspace and ’cubing at max!”
They were in the Intermundi, a club located just outside the synchorbital naval base catering mostly to military personnel. Gregory had had the duty tonight, but Teddy Nichols had been willing to swap with him, allowing him to keep his date with Jodi. Located within a huge, rotating wheel, the club featured numerous small rooms heavily draped and cushioned, providing privacy and comfort, and with hidden arrays of netlink connections to cater to every pleasure need.
Firesmoke was not addictive … not physically, at least, though Gregory had heard of pilots who’d developed emotional dependencies and needed partial memory wipes to shake them. Smoke worked through cerebral implants, which meant you could fine-tune the effect and clear the neural pathways afterward. The registered forms, served in joints like the Intermundi, were completely legal, though shipboard regulation frowned on using the stuff. They came down hard on you if you let it knock you off the duty roster.
But it felt good … BETS, as the slang put it, Better Than Sex. And you could hit it again and again and …
“You want some more?” he asked her.
She accepted the sphere, held the sweet spot up to her face, and breathed in, her eyes closed. Firesmoke actually consisted of artificially manufactured receptor-key molecules tucked away inside C
buckyballs … carbon spheres so tiny they formed a nearly invisible mist. They were absorbed straight through the mucus lining of the sinus cavities, hitched a ride on blood vessels leading into the brain, and then unfolded inside the pleasure centers for a quick, hard jolt of pure ecstasy.
Gregory watched Vaughn inhale the nanodust, watched the bright red flush spread down her throat and shoulders and across her breasts. They’d been sex partners now for more than four months, ever since just after she’d joined the squadron. What had started as a casual recreational fling had been … changing lately, growing into something deeper.
He still wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
Gregory liked Jodi Vaughn, liked her a lot. In a service that tended to attract aristocratic hotshots and fast burners, she was an attractive brunette from the Chicago megalopolis with neither money nor political connections. Rumor had it she’d started off as a Prim, an inhabitant of the half-submerged badlands of the Periphery in what once had been the city of Baltimore.
Rising sea levels had flooded the city in the late twenty-first century; Wormwood Fall in 2132 had sent a tidal wave up the Chesapeake that had largely destroyed Baltimore’s remains, along with Washington, New York, Miami, and other low-lying East Coast metropoli.
Over the next few decades, the old United States had abandoned the drowned and wrecked cities, vast coastal swamplands, for the most part, that became known as the Periphery. People continued to live there, and more had arrived from the more civilized reaches of the interior … criminals, scavengers, religious zealots escaping the laws of the White Covenant, and antitech Prims, primitives who didn’t care for the ways that modern technology was transforming the very definition of the word human.
Most people didn’t care for the Prims. To be antitechnology alone meant you weren’t going to fit in with most people. It meant you were different. An outsider.
And maybe that was why the Prim Jodi Vaughn had accepted Gregory when she’d been assigned to be his wingman. He was an Osirian colonial, perhaps the ultimate outsider, at least as far as the North Americans were concerned. She’d become his friend, and, before long, his lover. The two shared a lot in common. They’d not gone out of their way to flaunt their relationship, but some of the others in the squadron knew. Nichols, for instance. And probably that bastard Kemper as well.
With considerable affection, he watched her take another hit from the sphere.
“Full thrust engaged!” she said, then handed the sphere back, gasping a little.
“How you feeling, Wing?”
“Like I could spit in a Slan’s eye.”
“The Slan don’t have eyes.” He frowned. “At least we don’t think they do.”
“Okay … a Nungie’s eye, then.”
“Nope. They have sensor clusters that process light—well, red and orange light, anyway, and short infrared—but they’re not really eyes. Squishy-looking tentacles and spongy tissue, more like.”
“Okay! Okay!” She laughed. “What are those three-legged octopus things?”
He had to pull down a list of known alien species inside his head and scan through an array of photographs. There it was.
“Jivad Rallam? Okay. They have eyes a lot like ours, agreed. Just more of them.”
“Fine. I could spit in its eyes. All of them!”
“Outstanding!”
Gregory stood up, stretching. The nanodust had left him feeling a bit light-headed and weak, almost trembling. He stepped to the entrance of their privacy area and looked up at the swimming sphere, internally lit with shifting, colored lights and hanging 20 meters above his head. Nude couples, threesomes, and a few larger groups cavorted within the shimmering globe of water.
The Intermundi Pleasure Club was an enormous structure, 100 meters across, rotating to provide about a half G of spin gravity at the outer deck, less on the elevated levels and walkways closer to the center. Outside the labyrinth of smaller privacy areas, the club’s interior opened up into a vast cavern. Transparencies in the floor looked out on the slow-wheeling stars of space punctuated occasionally by a blast of light from Earth or sun; multiple decks, verandas, and soaring arches gave a multilevel fairyland effect to the architecture, and at the exact center of the space a 10-meter bubble of water hung motionless as the club rotated around it. Gregory and Vaughn had chosen an open deck well above the main floor; spin gravity here was only about a quarter G, more than the moon but less than the surface of Mars, and the water was an easy climb overhead.
“Want to go for a swim?”
“No, I want something to eat. I’m hungry!”
“Whatcha want?”
“I’m feeling carnivorous. Surprise me.”
“One surprise, coming up.” He palmed a contact on the entrance to their cube, scrolled through the menu that opened in his mind, and selected Steak Imperial for two. What arrived in the receiver a moment later, hissing and moist, had never been within 36,000 kilometers of the Brazilian Empire, but the program that had assembled the component atoms and heated them to palatability had been designed by world-class chefs—probably AI chefs—and could not be distinguished from tissue that once had been alive and roaming the pampas south of the Amazon Sea.
“How do you think it’s going to end?” she asked him later, as they ate.
“What?”
“I was just thinking … so many alien species out there, and most of them seem to be on board with the Sh’daar and out to get us. We can’t face them all.”
Gregory shrugged. “Yeah, well, they seem pretty disjointed, don’t they? The Turusch attack us here … the H’rulka attack there … then the Nungies show up someplace else with their little Kobold buddies. They’re all as different from one another as any of them are from humans. Coordination, planning, even basic communication must be a real bear for them.”
