Stargods

But as quickly as threats could be detected and neutralized, it seemed, new ones were being dreamed up. Foreign intelligence agencies, industrial concerns, and even agencies within the USNA government would all want to keep tabs on the former President.

It was even possible that Gray himself had been compromised. Those armored guards had checked him electronically outside Koenig’s home, but they might have missed something. His mind flashed back to that poser in the park … what was her name? De Sailles. She had touched his chest, he remembered, albeit very, very briefly. Had she passed on a nanovirus designed to turn his implants into listening and transmission devices?

He made a mental note to have a nanomedical expert give him a thorough scan, just to be sure. A chime sounded. “Enter.”

An attractive woman of about Gray’s age floated in through the door. She wore a blue utility suit that marked her as belonging to the astrophysics department, and collar tabs that identified her as the civilian equivalent of a full commander. America carried a lot of civilian specialists on board; there were a number of skill sets that just didn’t come up with any regularity in the military.

“Admiral Gray?” she asked. “I’m Carol Conyer.”

“I’m pleased to meet you.” He gestured at a seat. “Strap in and be comfortable.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I need your opinion about something, Doctor.”

“Certainly, Admiral.”

“Is the Omega Centauri triggah going to be passable?”

“Ah.” Then her eyes widened as what Gray had said sank in. “We’re going to the Omega Cluster?”

“That’s the idea. And from there to the N’gai Cloud 800 million years in the past.” He didn’t add they would be doing so if they could get away from the synchorbital facility.

“Well … it’s been three years since the hypernova. Even though the Denebans appear to have blocked most of the hypernova blast, the core of Omega Centauri will still be a mess of high-energy radiation and extremely hot plasma. I’d need to check with the engineering department to find out if the ship can stand up to that kind of abuse.”

“Actually, I was wondering more about the TRGA itself. Would the blast have hurt it in any way?”

“Hypernovae release extremely powerful bursts of gamma rays,” Conyer told him. “When we didn’t know what they were, we tagged them ‘gamma ray bursters’—point sources of gamma radiation lasting as long as a minute, or even more. We would have to pass through an expanding shell of very hard radiation when we emerged inside the Omega Centauri core. Once we were there, though … well, it’s hard to imagine the TRGA being damaged, if that’s what you mean. The plasma wavefront would have engulfed it several hours after the blast, but it would be tenuous enough that it shouldn’t harm the structure itself.”

“I understand that,” Gray said, nodding. “The hypernova, we know, didn’t quite make it through the Rosette. But enough might have leaked through to, I don’t know, vaporize the whole TRGA structure? Or part of it? I’m just wondering if it could be damaged enough that it was no longer working.”

She shook her head. “A TRGA’s walls are not as dense as the degenerate matter in a neutron star, but damned close. I don’t think even a hypernova could more than singe the outer surface of the thing.”

“Okay. So when we emerge from the Omega TRGA, we’ll find hot plasma, high radiation. Anything else, you think?”

“I’ll talk with Engineering about ship specs.”

He nodded. “Good. The ship’s magnetic shielding, along with her space-bending, ought to protect us from the rough stuff.”

“So … from Omega Centauri to the N’gai Cloud. What are we going to be doing in N’gai?”

“Chasing down the fleeing Sh’daar migratory fleet.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Yeah. Staving off planetwide chaos here on Earth.”

She nodded, pursing her lips. “Okay. Sounds reasonable.”

Oval Office

New White House

Washington, D.C., USNA

1235 hours, EST

President James Walker scowled at his Chief of Intelligence. “I don’t want excuses, Ron. I want results!”

“Of course, Mr. President. And we’ve given you results. America won’t be going anywhere with that fault in her nanoreplicators.”

“I still think you ought to just round up the whole big slimy bunch of ’em. Bring ’em up on charges of insubordination, maybe, or disturbing the peace, or … I don’t know, celebrating Christmas out of season!”

Ron Lehner closed his eyes. “Sir … we do have to observe due process.”

“And they have to obey the chain of command!” He shook his head. “I know, I know. But don’t we have enough to indict them from what we overheard at Koenig’s place yesterday?”

“That recording was made without a legal warrant, Mr. President. And Koenig is a former President and a retired admiral, while Gray is an admiral and a naval hero. We’re going to have to be very careful to make any charge stick, much less actually try them for it.”

“Koenig is just pissed off that I closed down his precious SIRCOM. Useless waste of time.”

“Maybe. But it wasn’t illegal. Spying on our citizens is.”

“Damn it, Ron, don’t talk to me about legal. We really need to sideline this crazy expedition to the dwarf galaxy or whatever it is.”

“May I ask, sir … why?”

“Why what? Why sideline their expedition?”

“Why this antipathy toward anything having to do with the Technological Singularity?”

Walker shrugged. “It’s all nonsense, you know.”

“There’s plenty of hard scientific data that it’s a real possibility.”

“Scientists! What do they know?”

“Quite a lot, actually, Mr. President. You can’t simply dismiss inconvenient facts.”

“I can when they’re false facts, Ron. Facts pulled out of someone’s ass!”

“Sir—”

“C’mon, you know as well as I do that the science wonks have been talking about this Singularity thing happening any day now ever since the twentieth century! You know my feelings about it. If the Singularity is real, it already happened three hundred years ago when they invented the Internet!” He tapped his desk with a forefinger. “In fact, you know what I think? This talk about a Singularity is more religion than science. Stands to reason. Radical Christians have been saying for centuries that any day now, all good Christians are gonna get caught up into the sky to be with God, right? They call it the Rapture! How is that one bit different from the Singularity thing?”

“Okay, Mr. President. Assume you’re right. It’s still harmless. There’s no reason to harass people who believe in it, right? Or sabotage our own star carriers!”

“No reason? No reason? Ron, your people have been filling my in-box with reports every day for the last two years: Revolts all over the world. Minor wars. Breakdowns in food and rawmat deliveries. Riots. Whole populations suddenly refusing to work. And apparently all because a few idiots are convinced that the sky is falling, that we’re all going to be … I don’t know … raptured by the sky gods! People need to pay attention to work, to fixing what needs fixing now, not to this pie-in-the-sky religious crap.”

“I don’t think things are quite that simple, Mr. President. A lot of the global unrest is centered on the aftereffects of the wars we’ve been through … both our civil war with the Confederation and six decades of war with the Sh’daar … and the attack by the Consciousness. That really shook people!”

“Bullshit,” Walker said. “The problem is that if people believe the Stargods are gonna come down and transform the world—or that all humans are gonna get caught up into some kind of alien paradise—then they don’t want to work! Look at this.”

He used his implants to bring up a vid on the Oval Office wall screen. An angry mob filled the Place d’Lumiere, the enormous plaza in front of the ConGov pyramid in Geneva. Riot police in heavy armor lined the approach to the government complex. One waved a sign toward the vid pickups: La Singularité est proche!

The Singularity is near.

“And there’s this.”

The scene shifted to another mob, this one in Hudson Park in downtown New New York, just outside the city’s financial district. Signs read Lose Your Chains and Ascend! and Slaves Can’t Fly!

“We are suffering a major economic downturn, Ron,” Walker said. “We need people working, not worrying about something that’s never gonna happen! These mindless protests are bullshit. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“If you say so, Mr. President.”

“I do say so. Now, if I understand this right, Koenig wants to send one of our carriers back in time a billion years to find out about their Singularity, right? The Sh’daar Singularity?”

“Actually it was the ur-Sh’daar, Mr. President, but, essentially, yes.”

“Sh’daar, ur-Sh’daar, all the same. The carrier’ll come back with all kinds of information about what the Sh’daar went through, and the science wonks and news media feeds and memegineering hacks’ll pick it up and start chewing on it: ‘Oh, what can we do? What are we gonna do?’ And everybody’ll be focused on that instead of what they’re supposed to be doing! I won’t have it!”

“Honestly, Mr. President, I don’t think there’s anything we should do about that. I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. People are still free to think for themselves.”

“Yeah. People think too much, that’s the problem. Keep it short, sweet, and simple—that’s what I say!”

“Yes, sir. So … what is it you want Intelligence to do? We’ve bought a little time with that nanoreplicator trick. But that’s not going to keep them in port for long.”

“How long?”

“I can’t say. Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight?”

“They can’t be planning on going out in just the one carrier.”

“As I understand it, Mr. President, the America task force will consist of two destroyers, a cruiser, and a resupply tanker. And the America herself, of course.”

“Okay. So see if you can keep that resupply ship from undocking, too. They can’t go anywhere without their rawmat, right?”

“No, sir.”

“And in the meantime, there might be some markers I can call in. Keep me informed.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“Just remember, Ron. I’m the one sitting at the big desk, so what I say goes! I will not have this government wasting time and money on chasing moonbeams when there’s work to be done right here!”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Lehner stood and left the room. Walker sat behind his desk for a long moment, before opening a secure channel in his cranial hardware. It took several minutes for various AIs to establish the hypersecure back channel.

Then a familiar voice sounded in Walker’s mind. “Vasilyev. Mr. President Walker? This is a surprise. What can I do for you?”

“Dimitri? I have a very special job for you. But you’ve got to keep it hushed up …”

Within the Godstream

Earth Virtual Space

1630 hours, EST

Alexander Koenig flew …

Golden light streamed past him as he plunged into a maelstrom of illumination and color and movement, a kind of lucid dream of astonishing depth and clarity, and more sensation than a human could experience in real life. He could hear the whisper of minds around him, like a kind of angelic chorus.

In fact, he—his physical body, at any rate—was still back in the room set aside as his office in his home outside Columbus. His mind, however, had joined with Konstantin’s in the vast, deep river of the Godstream, a kind of shared universe within the Global Net created and maintained by some of the most powerful SAIs in existence.

This, he thought, was why alien civilizations like the Baondyeddi had crawled into their artificial universes and pulled the ladder up after themselves. Within the Godstream, anything—any manifestation of any thought—was possible, a realm of both intellect and sensation unfolding as a kind of artificial heaven more real and more powerful and more exciting and infinitely more interesting than the pale husk of what passed for reality.

It also provided a superb means of gathering electronic intelligence.

The joy and thrill coursing through his being were addictive, quite literally. Millions had taken up residence within the virtual reality of the Godstream permanently. Konstantin would monitor his brain chemistry closely and let him know when it was time to emerge back in the real world.

When he’d been President, he’d not … indulged, preferring to take verbal and visual reports from Konstantin to keep him aware and up to date. Besides, back then the Godstream had been relatively small and simple, an outgrowth of the Global Net at large. But it had grown, both in scope and in function, and for several years now—as a part of his work with SIRCOM—he’d been going straight to the source and experiencing Earth’s electronic noosphere personally.

The sensation of movement ceased, and Konstantin indicated a virtual file, a repository of visual files and information. “Here …”

Images rippled, then flowed over and through Koenig’s consciousness, a flood of awareness and being. Koenig, a bright point of consciousness, swam among turbulent clouds of similar points as Konstantin revealed to him the recent past.

Everything taking place within virtual reality was recorded and stored, and those with the appropriate passwords could see the past in unprecedented detail. Events within the Godstream were largely shown in icons and symbols, but greater detail was always possible. Privacy was increasingly a quaint and outmoded perversion.

Two points of light, each attended by identifying tags of data and layered imagery, appeared to be releasing a black mass, like tangled eels, into the virtual sea. The mass rippled, shifted into something more like a snake, then flashed into the distance with the speed of thought. Without moving from their virtual vantage point, Koenig and Konstantin watched it reach a distant, structured complex and vanish inside.

“That was the virus attacking the nanoreplicator software on board the America,” Konstantin told him. “Watch the two who released it.”

The two were not, Koenig realized, within the Godstream itself, but working on the fringes, within the main body of the Global Net.

“The time stamp shows this happening two days ago,” Koenig said.

“The malware is not particularly sophisticated,” Konstantin observed. “But it is well camouflaged as environmental control software. Antiviral programs within America’s OS missed seeing it completely.”

“So … it wasn’t Marta,” Koenig said. He felt a surge of relief. He’d not believed his companAIon was responsible … but it was very good to have that fact confirmed.

“No,” Konstantin agreed. “I never seriously believed that to be true. It would be rather obvious for an AI robot to be the source of the security breach.”

Gray watched silvery cords flashing out in different directions as their cerebral implants made connections within the electronic web. Koenig traced the connections from node to node to node, and finally …

“Walker!”

“We did suspect as much.”

The former President bit off an angry curse. “Doesn’t make it better. Or right!”

Chapter Four

06 April, 2429

USNA CVS America

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1725 hours, EST

Admiral Gray settled back in his command chair on the flag bridge. The area was located just aft of the main bridge and a couple of meters above it—insofar as anything in microgravity could be said to be “above” or “below.” From this vantage point, Gray could look “down” into the bustle of the main bridge, where Captain Rand was overseeing final preparations for getting under way.

Gray opened a mental channel. “Konstantin?”

“Here, Admiral.”

“You’re sure that virus is eliminated?”

“Yes, Admiral. The actual solution was fairly simple once we identified the problem. I copied the environmental control software without the virus, and then made a substitution. I would recommend, however, that you cut electronic connections with the port facility as quickly as you can, to prevent other viruses from being transmitted on board.”

“Any idea as yet where the thing came from?”

“Software viruses rarely have serial numbers or ID code, Admiral. I can say with some confidence that it has the earmarks of an intelligence operation.”

“Intelligence! Whose?”

“Unknown, Admiral. A number of agencies within our own government have the capability of launching such an attack. Indeed, a private individual could have been responsible. We can make some educated guesses, however.”

“Our own government? I think I’m way ahead of you.”

“It was not foreign, no. I should say, however, that the intrusion appears to have been someone simply wishing to delay our departure.”

“Does it go as high as the Oval Office?”

“President Koenig believes it does. I, however, see no proof as yet of Walker’s direct involvement. This could be a case similar to Henry II asking, ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ His knights then murdered Thomas Becket, leaving the king’s hands clean.”

“Understood. Captain Rand!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Are we ready for space?”

“Ready in all respects, Admiral. All members of the crew are accounted for, all systems are green.”

“Very well. You may take us out of dock at your discretion.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Over his in-head, Gray sent a command to the other ships of the small squadron—the destroyers Arlington and Seare, the cruiser Birmingham, and the supply tanker Acadia. Initiate departure …

“Cast off all magnetics and grapples,” Rand commanded. “Maneuvering aft, one-tenth G …”

Gray felt the gentle nudge of acceleration as the immense ship moved backward, pushed along by plasma thrusters and several port tugs. Starships could not use their gravitic drives anywhere in the vicinity of orbital structures like Quito Synchorbital, not without causing serious structural damage, so considerable caution was employed in maneuvering close aboard.

A dozen cameras threw as many different views of the ship up on large screens around the flag bridge. On one screen to his left, the camera view was from the prow of one of the port tugs. As the ship edged out of the shadow cast by the dock and into full sunlight, Gray could see a spacesuited figure jetting off toward the bottom of the screen, getting clear … a perfect visual reference speaking to the sheer size of the carrier. Her sandblasted shield cap was emblazoned in letters ten meters high: America.

Beyond, two shark-lean destroyers were edging out of port in tandem, the Arlington and the Seare.

“Maneuver us clear,” Rand said. “Nav … lay in a course for our first way point.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Had someone within the USNA government tried to delay them? Gray wondered. A distinct possibility … and not a pleasant one. It raised again the old question of treason, and of disregarding orders.

But they were committed now. No matter what.

Long minutes passed, and then the word came through from each of the ships in the squadron. Clear of the dock. Ready in all respects to engage drive.

“Admiral?” Rand asked.

Gray nodded. “Punch it.”

And the flotilla slid forward into the night.

CIS CV Moskva

Pluto Space

2312 hours, GMT

Kapitan Pervogo Ranga Yuri Yuryevich Oreshkin read the orders appearing within his mind again, and scowled. This made no sense whatsoever. Was Defense Minister Vasilyev trying to start a war with the Americans?

The star carrier Moskva was the most recent addition to the Russian Federation’s space fleet, a kilometer-and-a-half-long monster, a needle-slender spine behind a blunt, bullet-shaped shield cap. Carrying eight squadrons of brand-new Yastreb space fighters, plus six destroyer-sized escort vessels riding in a bundle close against the Moskva’s spine, she’d been launched eight months ago as a direct response to the attack by the Consciousness utility fog on Earth in 2426.

Now he—Russian ships were always referred to in the masculine—was returning to the Sol System from the colony world of Osiris, bringing along a handful of alien warriors trapped there during the fighting two decades ago. The Russian carrier had just checked in at Pluto on a routine show-the-flag call. On the vast, heart-shaped Sputnik Planitia, a joint American, Pan-Euro, and Chinese expedition funded by the IBRI was boring for water. The damned Chinese, Oreshkin thought with a grim smile, had probably shit their environmental suits when the Moskva had shown up in their sky!

But Moskva had simply made a few orbits, exchanged pleasantries with the radio watch on the surface, then accelerated once more into the empty void between Pluto and Neptune. On Earth, Russia was at war with the Chinese … but Moskva’s orders were to stay clear of Chinese assets in space, not to interfere with them unless they posed a clear threat to the Russian state.

Now, however, before he could carry his load of prisoners to a receiving base on Mars, Moskva’s orders were abruptly being changed. Defense Minister Dimitri Vasilyev himself had transmitted them from the Kremlin, across a gulf that had taken six hours to bridge by laser com. An American carrier battlegroup would be departing very soon from Quito Synchorbital, along with several escorting vessels, en route to the Penrose TRGA. Moskva was to intercept that battlegroup and destroy it, leaving no survivors.

The risk, Oreshkin thought, was enormous. If there were survivors, if any ships of the American battlegroup managed to escape, the repercussions could well lead to war with the USNA both on Earth and across space.

But Vasilyev’s orders could not be ignored or disobeyed. Moskva’s sensors had detected the acceleration of the America … though those signals by now were six hours old.

“Captain Oreshkin,” Mikhail Kulinin said. “You have reviewed these … orders?”

As Moskva’s Executive Officer, Kulinin would have received the transmission as well, a guarantee of obedience. Oreshkin’s rank was kapitan pervogo ranga—captain, first rank—while Kulinin was kapitan vtorogo ranga, captain, second rank. Should Oreshkin fail in his duties, Kulinin was there to relieve him and step into his place. It wasn’t quite the same as the kommissar system employed by the old-time Soviet military, but it served the same purpose.

In any case, it was not Oreshkin’s place to question orders, and these were specific and emphatic.

The CVS America and her battlegroup would have to be destroyed.

USNA CVS America

Outer Sol System

1935 hours, FST

Admiral Gray sat in his office, deep in conversation with Konstantin.

Or, rather, with the machine intelligence he referred to as “Konstantin Junior,” a somewhat abridged version of the powerful SAI running on the networks between Earth and the moon. America’s electronic net, though large and quite sophisticated, was cramped compared to the remote descendent of Earth’s old Internet, and this version of Konstantin had to share it with America’s original AI and a dozen lesser operating systems running individual ship systems.