Authors: William H. Keith
“They’ve been traveling since something like 1500
B
.
C
.
E
.,” Taki said. She shook her head slowly, wonderingly. “They left the fiery wreck of their home planet a thousand years before Confucius was alive on Earth. They have been wandering for that long.”
“Looking for what?” Gresham wanted to know. “How many of these Gr’tak ships are there, anyway?”
“The fleet is… large,” Dev admitted. Sholai had told him it consisted of ten thousand ships, but he’d not yet admitted that officially. So far, only a few hundred had arrived at High Frontier, and he wanted to give them a chance to get reunited and to gather in stragglers before passing such alarming news on to others.
Particularly to the Imperials, who were already nervous about so many strangers turning up on the borders of the Shichiju.
“What weapons do they have?” Mishima demanded. “What new technology?”
“We’re still looking at that question, Ambassador,” Katya said.
“Their move into space was apparently prompted by a prevalence of comets in their home system,” Dev pointed out. “I’ve… lived some of their remote history. Civilization fell a number of times when comets or small asteroids hit their world. They never fought wars among themselves, apparently. The only weapons they developed were laser banks designed to protect their planet from infalling debris.”
“Pah.” Mishima made a dismissive gesture. “We have the same ourselves already, on Luna.” He was referring to
Fudo-Myoo,
the huge arrays of solar-power beam weapons based on Earth’s moon; deployed in the late twenty-first century against the remote but deadly chance of a comet impact on Earth such as the one that had annihilated the dinosaurs sixty-five million years earlier, the gigajoule laser and particle beam system had never been used… though it remained a formidable part of Earth’s defenses.
Dev studied Mishima. The ambassador looked troubled, his image frowning with the blank, far-away look that generally meant the person was accessing his personal RAM, or listening to some private message relayed through his Companion. No, Dev reminded himself, Mishima was
Kansai no Otoko,
a “Man of Completion,” a member of the Dai Nihon political-social-religious party advocating human purity and a single, united government for all Mankind. He would have one of the old-fashioned cephlinks, not an
isoro
Companion.
“Mr. Ambassador?” Katya said. “Are you all right?”
His face cleared, but he still looked troubled. “Please excuse me,” he said. “There is… something most urgent I must attend to.” His image vanished from the virtual setting.
“I wonder what that was all about?” Daren said.
But Dev was aware of something new, a quickening in the flow of information around him. Exactly what he sensed of that information was difficult to express in words, but living and moving within the electronic environment of the Net was often described in metaphor and simile, with the informational matrix likened to a sea, vast, three-dimensional, and alive with powerful currents of moving data and flashing, myriad schools of fish representing individual communications packets. Had the metaphor been given form and substance, Dev knew he would have just seen vast and crowded schools of fish in the clear, sunlit shallows wheel about in an explosion of color and activity… then swell in numbers as new schools came swarming in out of the deeps beyond the shadowy reef in the distance.
Reaching out, he sampled one of the nearer “fish.…”
… at this time still do not know where the intruders are coming from, but it is feared that these small vessels are representatives of the so-called “Web Intelligence” that was decisively defeated at Nova Aquila two years ago.…
Surprise jolted Dev, followed swiftly by a stab of fear. The language was Nihongo, the speaker a well-known ViRnews mede broadcasting on the Net from Singapore Synchorbital.
From Earth… and the very seat of the Imperial government.
Swiftly, Dev sampled another incoming packet of communications… then another… then a hundred more in rapid succession. Most were coded military or government communiqués, but others were being uploaded in the clear and relayed throughout the human network via I2C.
“Excuse me,” Dev told the others. “Something is happening. Something… very dangerous. I think. I’ve got to leave, too.”
“What is it, Dev?” Katya wanted to know. She’d picked up on the urgency in his voice, put it together with Mishima’s sudden departure, and sounded worried.
“Earth is under attack,” he told his startled listeners. “It sounds like the Web has come out to play.”
Before they could respond, Dev was gone.
Chapter 14
No man is an
Iland,
intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the
Continent,
a part of the
maine;
if a
Clod
bee washed away by the
Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a
Promontorie
were, as well as if a
Mannor
of thy
friends
or of
thine owne
were; any mans
death
diminishes
me,
because I am involved in
Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom the
bell
tolls; It tolls for
thee.
—
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,
XVII
J
OHN
D
ONNE
C
.
E
. 1624
Dev uploaded from the University of Jefferson, transmitting himself as a burst of digitized information across the thirty-six-light-year I2C linkage from the 26 Draconis system to Eridu, Chi Draconis V. From there, he routed to a commercial channel, waited 312 microseconds for the passage of a particularly large block of priority data flagged for ViRcom routing, then uploaded once again across the twenty-nine-light-year I2C link to Chiron. From Chiron, after another brief pause, it was just four and a half light years to Sol—less than the blink of an eye for the quantum-paired electron arrays of the communications facilities at Alpha Centauri A III and Earth.
His incoming pattern was routed through the commercial traffic buffers at the communications array on Luna, where Dev waited for several seconds, surveying the electronic ground. If message traffic had been growing stronger and more urgent than normal at New America, almost fifty light years away, it was frantic here. Reaching out with the downloaded pattern of his mind, Dev sampled some of the messages flooding through near-Earth space.
“… God, I’ve never seen anything like it! There must be hundreds of them coming out of K-T space, and they’re filling the sky.…”
“Negative! Negative! It’s not K-T space. We don’t know how they’re arriving, hut they’re coming in fast. “
“Mayday! Mayday! Am under attack by unknown forces! They’re just coming out of empty space, more ships than I can count!…”
“Imperial Fleet Command Control Center, this is Perimeter Defense Facility Evening Calm! The enemy is materializing out of empty space from the direction of Aquila. Bearing right ascension, one-nine hours, three-five minutes, zero-four seconds, declination plus one-four point two degrees, range three-one-point-seven a.u. They appear to be moving in-system at high acceleration. Can’t determine yet whether their target is Earth or the Sun.…”
“Hello! Hello! Is anyone reading me? Hello!…”
“Mayday! Mayday! This is the transport
Yoku Maru.
I’ve been hit by something! Power out. Life support down. I’m tumbling and losing pressure. Can anybody hear me?…”
Earth’s solar system was filled with spaceborne traffic, some military, most of it commercial shipping. Earth and Dai Nihon, after all, were the hub of a titanic commercial empire as well as a military one, an empire spanning the entire Shichiju and reaching all the way out into the Periphery states. As emergency and priority radio and I2C traffic flashed from ship to ship and among the various planetary and deep space communications facilities across the system, panic was spreading.
“Perimeter Defense Facility
Evening Calm,
this is Imperial Fleet Command Control Center. Can you identify the attackers? Over!”
“Cee-Three,
Evening Calm.
It’s the Web. Got to be. It’s just like the attack at Nova Aquila…!”
A large portion of the human race had seen, had
experienced
the Nova Aquila battle two years before by linking into the computer-communications network that interconnected all of the worlds inhabited by Man, and downloading the event—as seen through scanners and sensory suites throughout the Imperial-Confederation Combined Fleet—as it happened.
It had been a good many centuries since the advent of telecommunications—com satellites and old-fashioned two-D television—had brought the experience of war into civilian homes; since the development of ViRealities and direct cephlink feeds, news reporting had become a far more immediate, a more
personal
way of reaching people with current events. Even deep within the inner worlds of the Shichiju, where few citizens used the there-unpopular Naga Companions, virtually every citizen save the three percent or so of nullheads and technophobes had immediate access to online feeds from one or another of the news services, government, commercial, and private. As during the Battle of Nova Aquila, Dev could feel more and more citizens across the Shichiju linking in as the urgent communications from the outer reaches of the Solar System spread the panic further and further abroad.
And, as before, he could feel the Overmind stirring.
Overmind
was Dev’s term for that giant, half-sleeping intelligence that still lay, quiescent, beneath the crisscrossing babble of communications on the Net, a noncorporeal intelligence derived from the complex interconnectivity of all human communications. It had come into being during Nova Aquila, when a critical threshold of minds had actively joined the Net. He’d not been able to reach it during the battle, though in some still ill-defined way he’d been aware of having been a part, a very
small
part, of the entire intelligence.
The Overmind’s intervention at Nova Aquila had won the battle for Humanity… and probably been responsible for the past two years of relative peace. Its intervention was the obvious answer to this attack as well… but as hard as Dev tried reaching for that enigmatic meta-intelligence, he could not seem to connect with its awareness.
So he reached outward once more, seeking a vantage point from which he could study the developing battle for Earth and Earth’s star system. He found that vantage point accelerating out toward the site of the incursion, past the orbit of Mars and moving above the plane of the asteroid belt—the flagship of the Imperial Navy’s Home Defense Fleet, the INS
Yamato.
A relic of a century before, bearing a name sacred to Nihonjin history and tradition, the Imperial battleship was vastly outclassed by the two larger, more powerful, and more modern dragonship carriers accelerating with her in her squadron,
Soryu
and
Tennoryu;
but her communications suite had been updated with the most powerful I2C apparatus, and originally she’d been designed around the concept of a combat coordination center, a heavily armed and armored space-mobile combat headquarters. The squadron, designated
Ida-Ten
after the swiftest of the ancient Japanese gods, had left Phobos three days before on routine patrol and by chance had been heading in roughly the right direction when the
Evening Calm’s
alert had come through. They had now fine-tuned their heading and were accelerating at a bone-rattling three and a half Gs, racing to meet the oncoming intruders.
Dev’s penetration of
Yamato’s
systems went unnoticed. There were security programs aboard, of course, guard-dog routines set loose within the vast and tangled virtual space of the huge vessel’s complex electronic network, as well as linked-in human operators assigned to monitor the system and watch for unauthorized entry. Had
Yamato
been quietly moored in spacedock, Dev might have had some trouble coming aboard, especially since the incoming data streams would be carefully monitored at such times to prevent personality or AI downloads from would-be spies or saboteurs.
Dev had chosen a good time to make his move, however, sequestering himself within the data banks of a navigational relay station in Earth orbit and downloading into
Yamato’s
waiting storage capacity when the relay was electronically tagged for a navigational update feed. No one noticed that the feed was several seconds longer than it should have been; at that moment, all minds were on the coming battle and the threat to home and Emperor… not to mention the very real possibility of death within the next few hours. Dev set a small portion of his mind to monitoring his immediate surroundings for the approach of an electronic guardian, and another part to the largely automatic task of constructing a shell for himself, the appearance of a small and routine housekeeping program set loose within the network as a part of the normal operating procedure. Kara, Dev recalled, had used a similar approach to penetrate the far more heavily defended computer system at Phobos in her raid on Kasei a couple of years back.
Seconds after his arrival, Dev had become part of the computer system’s routine, accepted as one of the sub-AI programs constantly running on the network. He had no authorization for access to subsystems coded at level three or higher, but he wasn’t seeking to penetrate the ship’s secure areas in any case. All he needed was a place to eavesdrop on the electronic communications filling space around him.
Even so, he learned a fair amount just by linking in. The ship’s captain was
Shosho
Chuichi Iijima, while the CO for the Ida-Ten squadron was
Chujo
Yatsuhiro Ubukata. And a surprise: Ubukata’s boss was along, the Commander of the Home Defense Fleet,
Taisho
Nobutaki Kurebayashi. All three men, Dev was well aware, were traditionalists, confirmed members of the
Kansai no Otoko
who reportedly had scant respect for the battle tactics of mindless, soulless machines.