Authors: William H. Keith
“… is Admiral Hideshi of the
Syokaku
Squadron, Imperial Third Navy. You are directed to surrender at once. All former Confederation vessels are now to place themselves at the disposal of Imperial forces. You will not be harmed, so long as there is no resistance to Imperial forces. I say again…”
“They’ve made their move,” Vic said. “1 didn’t think it would be this fast, though.”
“They have to move fast,” Dev said. “From their point of view, they can’t afford to let the Confederation stay independent, not in the face of the Web threat.”
“But… I don’t understand,” Kara said. “If we can stop the Web, we’re helping them too, aren’t we?”
“They won’t see it that way, Kara,” her father said. “What we’re about to try to do, we’ll be doing with help from the Naga, the DalRiss, even the Gr’tak. That’s unacceptable, from their point of view. They’d rather see all of mankind united… and finding his own answers.”
“Part of it is the penetration of their part of the Net, too,” Dev said. “That was my fault, I’m afraid. Things… happened in there, during the battle, that must have scared the gok out of them, made them realize that their computer systems, their whole network, are wide open to us, and to the Overmind. Since they depend on the Net as much as we do, the only answer is to make sure they control the entire Net. Us. The Confederation. The Overmind. Everything.”
“So what do we do?” Vic asked. He was staring at the Imperial ships, which were boosting now toward rendezvous. “Surrender? Or go out fighting?”
“We
have
to go,” Kara said. Suddenly, she felt a surge of new inner strength. “This is what we’ve been fighting for. Why… why a lot of people have sacrificed everything they were. We
can’t
give up now. Not if there’s still a chance of beating the Web.”
“I agree,” Dev said. His image was flickering now, fading almost to invisibility, before wavering back to something approaching a normal, solid image. “The Web is still our first concern, before the Empire. In the long run, it doesn’t matter whether the Empire rules humankind, or if the Frontier is independent. If the Web wins, humanity will become extinct.”
“Agreed,” Vic said. “But what can we do?”
“The Imperials have just made a decision,” Dev said, “and it’s gone a long way to limiting our possible futures.”
“We still have some future left to us,” Kara said. “Damn it, let’s
use
it!”
Chapter 21
In war, there is but one favorable moment; the great art is to seize it.
—from Maxim 95
Military Maxims of Napoleon
N
APOLEON
B
ONAPARTE
early nineteenth century
C
.
E
.
They began boosting toward the Stargate.
For months now, the Stargate had hung there in the sky, anchored between its two white-dwarf companions as millions of tons of plasma poured through the open conduits through space and time at either end of its silvery-gray length. Now, the Gate’s elongated needle shape swelled rapidly as they accelerated, the thread-slender length growing larger, thicker, more substantial. Had the Imperial ships with the Unified Fleet still been present, quite possibly they would have been able to intercept One-GEF before it had moved more than a few thousand kilometers, but they hadn’t returned from the Battle of Earth. Chance, it seemed, was favoring the GEF.
How long that condition would last, though, was anybody’s guess.
As the three DalRiss vessels
Shrenghal, Gharesthghal,
and
Shralghal
accelerated with their payloads, the starships
Karyu, Independence,
and
Gauss,
the Imperial squadron began boosting hard to put themselves in range to open fire. The move was countered at once by the other Confed ships of the Unified Fleet, which swung about to place themselves squarely between the Imperials and the fleeing GEF. The Imperials fired first, a burst of long-range active-tracking missiles, followed by a cloud of warstrider/warflyers from their carrier, the dragonship
Soraryu
—the
Sky Dragon.
The Confederation ships answered with missiles and warflyers of their own. As the GEF slid deeper and deeper into the twistings of warped space surrounding the Stargate, the battle was well and truly under way.
Dev felt a heaviness, a depression unlike anything he’d known before, a loneliness more profound than he’d known even during his years as an electronic ghost self-exiled with a DalRiss explorer fleet. It was, he thought, a kind of culture shock: his Meeting encounter with the Overmind had left him feeling tiny, naked, and helplessly exposed; through the Overmind’s gaze, he’d seen himself for what he was in excruciating and accurate detail, a pattern of electrical charges in the matrix of a complex cybernetic/communications network.
Despite everything he’d managed to convince himself of before, he wasn’t really
human
at all.…
Don’t think about that!
Somehow, he clung to his awareness of self. He could feel other presences gathered about himself… the DalRiss, especially, who seemed so fascinated by every aspect of light and mind… and the Gr’tak.
“This ‘loneliness,’ ” Sholai said in his mind. “I do not understand this. Not when your Associative is so vast and complex.”
Dev still wasn’t sure he understood the Gr’tak term his Companion was translating as “Associative.” From what he’d been able to gather in his conversations with them so far, a number of mutually parasitic or symbiotic organisms formed an
associative,
what humans perceived as a single creature. Many of these associatives, in turn, formed a larger, close-knit group, an Associative. Dev still couldn’t tell if the slightly different stress on the word indicated some kind of group gestalt intelligence, something like the Over-mind on a vastly smaller scale, or simply a complex communications network like the human Net.
“Humans can form remarkably complex interconnections with others,” Dev replied, “and still find themselves isolated. In my case, part of the problem is the realization that I am an alien to my own kind now.”
“Because you live on what you call the Net?”
“I guess so. Being a downloaded intelligence, a smart computer program… that kind of takes the fire out of life, you know?”
“We do not know.” There was a pause. “We left our homeworld, we set off on this journey thousands of your years ago because the Grand Associative there had been destroyed by the entity you call the Web. We journeyed in the hope that we might find a similar, even a greater Associative with which we could interact.”
Dev could not help an inner smile. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“This Grand Associative surpasses our most unrealistic expectations. There is a richness in this type of interconnective communication, a richness in complexity and depth and scope that increases manyfold with each addition. When we… how do you say it? Linked?”
“When you linked in.”
“Yes. When we linked in, it was as though we’d discovered, not a handful of new stars and worlds… but an entire universe, worlds within worlds within worlds. We experienced joy unlike anything within our collective experience. And perhaps the best part of all…”
“Yes?”
“It was the feeling of having found a new home, of having found an Associative with which we could have a meaningful exchange for untold numbers of years, of the realization that we need never be alone again.”
“It’s more than just being… different,” Dev said. “I miss having a body. A real body, not one of these analogue projections in someone’s imagination.”
“Is this not existence? And one even richer than that experienced in a physical body!”
“We might dispute that,” a different, deeper mental voice said, and Dev recognized the characteristic timbre of a DalRiss. “Electronic life is at best a pale substitute for the flame and vigor of biological existence.”
Why are all the aliens so interested in me?
Dev thought, a little bitterly.
Do they think I’m some kind of interesting case? Or do they just want to dissect my emotions?
“The DalRiss cherish physical life,” he explained. “And while it was the DalRiss who made my download possible, I… 1 don’t think I want to continue in this way. I don’t think I can. I’ve seen myself, seen what I am.”
“You are no less than you were as an organic creature,” Sholai said. “And to our way of thinking, you are considerably more.”
“Because I have instant communications access to others of my own kind?” Dev asked.
“Exactly.”
“The trouble is finding others of my own kind,” Dev said. “Humans, real humans, have their physical lives to fall back on. I have nothing but this. Artificial Intelligences are conscious, intelligent beings only within certain rather narrow parameters, like steering starships or creating virtual worlds. I’m… alone.”
“All living creatures are alone,” the DalRiss said. “Except insofar as they all are part of the Great Dance of life everlasting.”
“There is no such thing as ‘alone,’ ” the Gr’tak said. “So long as we find community in Mind.”
Dev was curious. Sholai and a number of other Gr’tak had come along with the GEF. The DalRiss cityship
Shralghal
had grown a special compartment for them somewhere within its cavernous depths, where air and humidity and temperature could be matched to their preferences more conveniently than aboard a human starship. But they’d done so at a cost, cutting themselves off from the rest of their kind, who’d been left behind in the twenty-sixth century.
“Sholai?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you come along on this goose chase, Sholai?”
“Goose… chase?”
“Um… a possibly futile pursuit.”
“Ah. Our artificials are still having some difficulty with Anglic slang and idiom.” He hesitated. “We come partly to participate in this plan to destroy the Web.” There was coldness there. “They have much to answer for, this rogue associative called the Web. For your people, for the DalRiss, for us. We are here, too, because you are now our Associative. We wish to… share in your collective experience.”
“I hope you’re not disappointed,” Dev said.
He turned away, then, focusing his attention not on the Gate, but the sensory readings that measured the local curvature of space. That wildly spinning, whirling mass had stretched space and time both to the breaking point. He could sense, he could see with something beyond vision, how the angle of their approach was sending them into one of the predicted myriad openings that would bypass space. Astern, the battle between Imperial and Confederation forces was speeding up, until the pinpoints of light that marked the different ships, the flashes of explosions as missiles connected, were darting and flickering like the images on a ViRdrama being presented at dozens of times faster than normal. Time, here in the gravitationally twisted fields about the Gate, was running more slowly; One-GEF was already moving into the future. Dev hoped that everyone who’d wanted off the GEF ships had been able to transfer elsewhere. There was no going back now, not until and unless they’d achieved complete success.
Then the warring fleets astern vanished, and the stars themselves were crawling slowly across the sky, their wavelengths wildly redshifted by the GEF’s fall until they, too, vanished in Night Absolute. For long moments, there was only the Gate, looming huge now, just ahead, a wall that filled half of the heavens. Then, the silvery shape blurred. Light bouncing from its sides and reflected toward the fleet was being distorted.
Distortion became blackness, an impenetrable night.
In the last instant, Dev had the impression that they were falling into a long and utterly death-black tunnel.
Linked into
Gauss’s
main navigation system, Kara watched as the line of three DalRiss cityships—starfish-shapes each the size of a mountain, their tapering arms curled protectively around the frail, human-built vessels tucked away in their ventral grooves—moved in perfect line-ahead formation, following the path that would take them across eighteen hundred light years in space and nearly a thousand years forward in time. The DalRiss had never developed the fine navigational control that humans employed routinely on their vessels. For that reason, human navigators, jacked into the DalRiss computers through their Naga Companions, were steering the huge cityships, following computer graphic simulations that kept them on the correct approach path. In Kara’s mind, the ordinarily invisible path had been painted as a blue-walled tunnel, with the seething flux of blue light to left and right, above and below representing the tortured space that existed within a few hundred meters of the continent-sized spinning cylinder.
Kara, like Dev, felt a heaviness unlike any she’d known before. It always hurt when comrades were killed or wounded, but Ran Ferris haunted her. Though she’d never let herself closely examine her feelings for him—company COs, she was convinced, didn’t have time for romantic liaisons—she knew now that she loved him, and his loss… no, the uncertainty, the not knowing whether she’d lost him forever or not… was tearing her apart.
Damn the war.
Her thoughts were a hard, staccato litany.
Damn the military. Damn what we’ve done to ourselves.
Burning first and foremost in her mind now was what striderjacks called the JonahSim, the wicked bit of self-torture common to most military personnel who’d survived when those around them, comrades and subordinates and friends, had died. She’d already been terribly conscious of the deaths of Vasily Lechenko at Kasei and of Phil Dolan at Nova Aquila, the brain death of Miles Pritchard and the reduction of Willis Daniels to a ghost at Core D9837. And now, Ran was a ghost too. She still couldn’t get the image of his Falcon exploding in front of her out of her mind.
Something bad happens to everyone who gets close to me,
she thought. The ancient, biting cliché would have made her laugh, except that right now that was precisely the way she felt. She recognized the tired, grating tone of self-pity, but she was no longer able to keep it safely stowed and locked down.