Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Chapter Twenty-Two

18 October 2404

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn

Annihilator Regrets of Parting

30-AU Shell, Sol System

0713 hours, TFT

“Deep Tactician!” a communicator throbbed from the console-shelf overhead. “Four enemy fighters, range ninety lurm’m and closing quickly!”

Emphatic Blossom’s forward tendrils curled with a distinctly Turusch emotion, part frustration, part surprise, part rigidly unyielding determination. The Turusch did not believe in luck, as such, since theirs was a harshly deterministic and mechanistic view of the universe, but the universe was known to be unpleasantly perverse at times. Everything had been riding on the premise that the Fleet of Raucous Driving would fully engage the enemy’s attention, permitting the much larger and more powerful Fleet of Objective Silence to move, cloaked behind their shields, deep into their star system.

How had the enemy discovered the ruse? How, in all of the near-infinite possibilities of a probabilistically determined cosmos, had the enemy been able to divine precisely where the main fleet had emerged?

“Have they detected us yet?” its bonded other asked.

The Turusch tactician speaking to Emphatic Blossom was Blossom’s twin, the other half of its life-pair, and it was, technically speaking, the combination of the two that was named Radiant Blossom. Others addressed it as a single unit, and Radiant Blossom itself always knew which of its halves was speaking, so there was no confusion…at least for those familiar with Turusch psychology; in a very real sense, Radiant Blossom was always in two places at once.

It watched the icon representing the approaching enemy ships for a moment. “That seems almost certain,” it replied. “Their course is directly toward us…an unlikely eventuality if this were random chance.”

“Agreement. Their mass sensors may have detected the curvature of local space around us.”

“Destroy them, then. Before they alert others to our presence.”

“That may already have happened. We detected radiofrequency transmission from those ships several url’i ago. They will have warned other vessels in the area.”

Emphatic Blossom considered this for a moment.

“Then gather what is available of the fleet so far. We will launch the attack at once.”

“We have yet to reestablish contact with two and a half twelves of our vessels.”

“They will join us eventually. As will the Fleet of Raucous Driving. When the time is right.”

“The crew is ready. Our weapons are prepared.”

“The threat is there. Kill!”

Red Bravo Flight

America Deep Recon

30-AU Shell, Sol System

0713 hours, TFT

“Fire missiles!” Allyn cried. “Dump everything!”

Thirty-two Krait missiles, two of them in the one-hundred-megaton range, streaked off her Starhawk’s launch rails, accelerating at maximum. With their closing velocity, they would impact in seconds.

“Now hard one-eighty,” she commanded as the last missile pair flashed from her rails. “And zorch it!”

There was no sense in holding back with the Kraits. The object bearing down on the four fighters was enormous-a dwarf planet some nine hundred kilometers in diameter and massing over nine times ten to the twenty kilograms-about 900 quadrillion tonnes. That put it roughly on a par with the dwarf planet Ceres, orbiting within Sol’s Asteroid Belt.

The four fighters all were turning now as tightly as they dared, swinging around their flank-projected drive singularities. Allyn could feel the unequal tug between her head and her feet now, a sure sign that she was riding right on the deadly edge of high-G destruction.

Some thousands of kilometers away, a beam from the oncoming monster ship brushed Cutler’s Starhawk…not enough to damage his shields, but explosive ablation kicked his fighter at the critical point of his turn.

“I’m hit! I’m hit!” Cutler cried…and then his Starhawk was in a helpless tumble, whipping in close around his drive singularity. The singularity winked out as his drive projectors failed, but his ship was already fragmenting.

The icon on the combat display flared and vanished.

“Stay with the turn, people!” Allyn called. “Stay with it!..”

And then the three remaining fighters had completed the 180-degree turn and were under full acceleration, fifty thousand gravities. She tensed, waiting for the first impact from astern…

And then the first Kraits were slamming home against the super-ship, nuclear fireballs blossoming silently in the night.

“I’m picking up other ships now, Skipper,” Walsh told her. “They’re powering up, starting to move…”

“I see them.”

Her AI picked out some seventy other vessels…with more appearing all the time as they received new orders from their flagship and began to power up. Allyn felt a cold prickling at the base of her neck; there might be hundreds of vessels out there, masked by their shields or still too far out to register on her fighter’s sensors. God in heaven, how were they supposed to fight that?

But the large asteroid-starship they’d just slammed with their missile barrage was half-molten now, its surface glowing white-hot in places, and it was trailing a faint, hazy stream of gas and debris. They’d clobbered the thing, all right, and hurt it, bad.

She hoped they would be seeing all of this back on Earth through the CCT.

She doubted that she’d be alive long enough to deliver the recordings in person.

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn

Annihilator Regrets of Parting

30-AU Shell, Sol System

0715 hours, TFT

The Turusch thought in terms of pairs, and of pairings, of joining two in such a way that they became one.

It was a biological imperative, with twinned individuals working closely together under the same name and designation, but the principle could be applied to ships and tactics as well. Emphatic Blossom at Dawn’s ship, the Radiant Severing, had been nested inside the far larger Annihilator Regrets of Parting, becoming a part of the much larger vessel. Now, though, with portions of the Parting’s external crust molten, Radiant Severing would become a lifeboat.

Emphatic Blossom-one of them-gave an order, and the Radiant Severing blasted through weakening crust in a geyser of loose rock, nanolaminates, and hot gasses. It would have been good if others of Parting’s crew could have been pulled off the dying ship as well, but there was no time. Several thousand Turusch might perish with Regrets of Parting’s demise…but such was the harsh reality of interstellar war.

In fact, the inhabitants of Regrets of Parting might yet be saved. The mobile planet’s power plants were down, its weapons melted into ruin, its drives useless, but the craft’s sheer bulk was still intact. If the enemy threw nothing more at it, it would continue to hurtle through this star system at its current velocity, something more than one-twelfth of the speed of light. Once the local system had been crushed, rescue transports could rendezvous with the Regrets of Parting and take off its crew.

Radiant Severing, free of the dying giant’s embrace, began accelerating starward now, taking up position with the other inbound ships. Some eight twelfths of the fleet had been gathered so far. The others, scattered across the outer reaches of this star system, would follow later as they got the orders Severing was broadcasting toward them now. On Blossom’s display, fed through cables implanted in its brain case, the Parting rapidly smaller and smaller, rapidly falling away behind until it was lost among the stars.

“We should be prepared for the possibility of further attacks,” Blossom’s twin said.

“Agreement. I do not understand how those fighters found us, lost in so vast an emptiness. They either have technological resources of which we have been unaware, or there are numerous enemy fighters in this area, operating in small groups.”

“Agreement. It seems unlikely that they could seriously hamper the Fleet of Objective Silence, however.”

“Obviously, single strikes, hit-and-run assaults like the one just past, can destroy or cripple even our largest vessels.”

“The high closing speed and short period of awareness worked against us. We could not deploy sand, or other defensive measures.”

“As has been noted before, we must not underestimate these creatures. The Sh’daar Seed has warned us that they are extraordinarily adaptable, resourceful, and tenacious, that they will surprise us if we do not exercise extreme care.”

“Agreement.”

Another surprise was in store for the Turusch strike force.

But it would be some minutes yet before that surprise revealed itself.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Outbound, Sol System

0721 hours, TFT

“Update coming through, Admiral!” the Comm Officer reported. “Sir…it’s the transmission from Triton!”

“What the hell?…”

Koenig checked the time. Of course. The transmission from the High Guard ships was due in now. The message would have reached Earth a few minutes ago, and been rebroadcast to the accelerating battlegroup. He opened a window in his mind….

He watched the five High Guard ships in their approach across the Neptunian pole. He watched the squadron of five ships, four unarmed ships, flash across the remaining distance to Triton, saw the enemy fleet orbiting the frigid moon.

The data acquired by the Gallagher, the Hatakaze, the John Paul Johns, the Jianghua, and the Godavari had been compiled, dissected, and analyzed by powerful AIs at Earth and Mars both before being redirected to the battlegroup. Koenig could look at the enemy fleet from any direction, at any level of detail, could separate out individual vessels and read pages of information concerning their mass, weaponry, maneuvering capabilities, and combat potency. There were thirty-six ships altogether, the largest a pair of small asteroids each several kilometers across, the rest designs Koenig had encountered before, or studied in training downloads.

Koenig watched the destruction of the tiny High Guard flotilla.

“Comm, this is Koenig.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Patch this through the fleet memories. Everyone should see this.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

There was a theory prevalent in some of the upper hierarchies of the military, a bit of nonsense to the effect that it was better not to let the rank-and-file access to the truth about the enemy-like how strong he was, how dangerous, how ruthless. Information was disseminated strictly on a need-to-know basis. After all, robots didn’t need to know the details…and the odds of not coming back.

Koenig was an officer of the old school, descended from the military traditions of the old United States. Soldiers, Marines, and sailors were not robots, and they fought better when they had a stake in the matter. Their morale was better, and they pulled together better as a unit. And sometimes bad news, even desperation, could rally them, boost them to greater levels of determination, courage, and will.

They needed to know what they were fighting for, and why.

He studied the images from Triton for several minutes more. Right now, the armchair strategists at the Directorate were going to be fixated on them. It would be up to Caruthers and a few others like him to keep them focused on the likelihood that Triton was a diversion, that a larger force would be coming in from another direction.

The prophesied message from Echeclus had come through at just past 0515 that morning, just a little more than two hours earlier. Assuming the outbound fighter squadrons off the America had, indeed, intercepted that message wave front, they would have continued out to the thirty-AU shell, and would be searching for the enemy there now, perhaps even engaging him.

The data stream intercepted by the communications relay was not translatable, of course. If it was possible-with less than satisfactory results-to understand Turusch speech when they were using Lingua Galactica, it was still impossible to understand their native language. Naval Intelligence hadn’t even been able to take a guess at whether the data stream captured and retransmitted by Echeclus was a language or a code.

They couldn’t even be certain if there was one message imbedded in the stream or two; information heterodyned on the carrier wave appeared to be in two separate, parallel tracks at slightly different frequencies. Whether that meant two separate messages, or was an artifact of the code, it was impossible to tell.

“Admiral Koenig?” Lieutenant Commander Cleary said, breaking into his thoughts. “Dr. Wilkerson wants to speak with you, from the lab.”

“Put him through.”

“Ah, Admiral. Thank you. I know you’re busy right now….”

“Actually no, Doctor. Alea iacta est. We’ve crossed the Rubicon, and there’s not a lot for us to do now until tonight.”

“Alea…what?”

“Never mind, Doctor. A minor reference from ancient military history. What’s on your mind?”

“I thought you should know, Admiral. We have the breakthrough we’ve been looking for on the Turusch language.”

The announcement sent a thrill through Koenig’s body, like an electric jolt. “The Devil, you say.”

“There’s more than one level to their speech.”

Wilkerson had his full attention. He’d just been thinking about the nested signals in the Turusch transmission between Triton and Point Libra.

“It was Dr. George who figured it out, actually. You see, the Turusch communicate by vibrating those tympani set into the bony shells behind their heads. And we’ve noticed that they always seem to speak in unison.”

“Yes. Drove me crazy.”

“Now, all audio speech, of course, is a series of vibrations moving through the atmosphere. Waves of various frequencies and amplitudes going out from the speaker, right?”

“I’m with you so far.”

“If you have one tone, it’s possible to play a second, differently modulated tone over the top of the first, with the result that you get resonances. Harmonics. Sympathetic frequencies. I’m…I’m not saying this well, I’m afraid….”

“You’re doing fine, Dr. Wilkerson. You’re saying that when the two Turusch were speaking together…” Koenig’s eyes widened as the realization hit. “Good God. You’re saying there was a third line of dialogue from those things?”

“Exactly!” Wilkerson’s icon said, nodding its head. “The Turusch must have absolutely incredible brains, incredible neural circuitry, to do it on the fly like that. The autopsies of their bodies bears that out. They appear to have two brains each, one above the other. Of course, in a sense the human brain is a stack of increasingly complex and more highly evolved brains…the brain stem, the cerebellum, the cerebral cortex-”

“What about the Turusch language, Doctor?”

“I’m getting to that, Admiral. We need to understand the Turusch neurological anatomy, however, and the way it contrasts with ours. In humans, the cerebral cortex is divided-left brain and right brain. Although this is an oversimplification, in very general terms the left side deals with analytical abilities, language, mathematics, and so on. The right side tends to deal with things like emotion and artistic expression, while the two halves communicate with one another through a nerve plexus called the corpus collosum-”

“And what’s the point of all of this, Doctor?”

“Sir, the division of the Turusch brain is far more pronounced than in humans. We don’t know for sure, yet, but we suspect that the Turusch may carry on a constant internal dialogue…as if there were two individuals sharing a single body. And that…that evolutionary development may have facilitated their social organization, to the point that two Turusch pair up as partners, as very close partners. A meta-Turusch, if you will.”

“Like our friend Falling Droplets and his partner.”

“It’s…a little more complicated than that, sir. Here. Look at this….”

Another window opened in Koenig’s mind. Once again, he was in the carrier’s research Center, watching the two brown and black tendriled slugs on the deck from the vantage point of the NTE robots suspended from the overhead.

“This one was Falling Droplet, of the Third Hierarchy,” one of the aliens said, the words printed out across the bottom of the window.

“Speak we now with the Mind Here or the Mind Below?” said the other.

And beneath the two lines, a third sentence wrote itself: “Together I am Falling Droplet.”

“They’re both Falling Droplet?” Koenig asked. “I thought they just neglected to tell us the other one’s name.”

“The third sentence was there, Admiral, imbedded in the resonant frequencies created by the first two overlaying one another.”

There was a slight jump in the image, where Wilkerson had edited out some of the conversation.

“Why do you work for the Sh’daar?” Koenig’s voice asked.

“The Sh’daar reject your transcendence and accept you if it is only you,” one Turusch said.

“The Seed encompasses and arises from the Mind Below. How would it be otherwise?” said the other.

“We work with them, our minds in harmony with theirs,” the third line read. “They fear your rapid technological growth.”

“What do you mean, they reject our transcendence?” Koenig’s voice asked. “What is that?”

“Your species approaches the point of transcendence,” one said.

“Transcendence is the ultimate evil that has been banished,” said the other.

“Technic species evolve into higher forms. When they pass beyond, they leave behind…death.”

“Are your needs being looked after?” Koenig’s voice asked. “Are your nutritional needs being met?”

“We require the Seed,” said one.

“We are the Seed,” said the other.

The third line read, “We are dying alone.”

“My God,” Koenig said.

“Their meaning is still a bit opaque in places,” Wilkerson said. “Their psychologies are very different.”

“But they’re making a hell of a lot more sense now than they did the other day.” He shook his head. “It must have been terribly frustrating for them. They were holding what they thought was a perfectly normal conversation with us…and we didn’t understand, didn’t have a clue to what they were actually saying. ‘We are dying alone’?”

“Yes. We think-this is still all speculation, understand-we think that the internal dialogue predisposes them to working in groups. First with their twins…but then in successively higher and higher groupings. It’s possible that the meta-Turusch I mentioned is a kind of group mind created by superimposing tens or hundreds or even thousands of separate conversations, all going on at once, and having new meaning arising from the background hash of separate voices.”

“You said they had to have incredible brains to think on so many different levels at once. I think I’m beginning to understand.”

“By comparison, we’re very slow,” Wilkerson agreed. “Just think about it. This concept of multiple layers in their conversation, even in their thinking, that’s something they evolved over the course of millions of years, probably, as they evolved speech. But what Falling Droplet was doing was communicating on three levels-one from each individual Turusch and a third arising from the two at once-and it was doing that in a language that was alien to it, in Lingua Galactica.”

Koenig blinked, confused for a moment by Wilkerson’s use of the singular to refer to the two Turusch together…but it did make sense in an eldritch way. Turusch concepts of “them” and “me,” of “others” and “self,” must be quite different from the way humans thought of those concepts.

He wondered if there was a way the difference could be used against them.

Or if greater understanding would facilitate better communication…and an end to the war.

“I’ll want you to put this together into a report, Doctor. Something we can broadcast to Earth and Mars. The Directorate needs to see this. So does Naval Intelligence. This could be what we need to put a stop to this war.”

“I don’t think I see how, Admiral.”

“Know your enemy, Doctor. One of the oldest and most basic of military dictums. If we know the enemy, that’s half of the battle. Half of the victory.”

“Ah. And the other half?”

“Knowing ourselves.”

Wilkerson cut the electronic connection, and Koenig was alone with his thoughts once more in the CIC. The others of the CIC watch manned their stations in the pit, but, as Koenig had said, there wasn’t a lot for any of them to do now except to stay alert. The carrier battlegroup was now four hours into her 16.64-hour voyage out to the thirty-AU shell, approaching the orbit of Saturn and traveling now at a bit under 75,000 kilometers per second. At a quarter of the speed of light, there wasn’t yet any visible aberration in the view of the stars ahead. Boötis and neighboring Corona Borealis maintained their familiar shapes-a kite to the right, with bright Arcturus at the base, and a broad U shape of stars, like an upraised arm, to the left.

What was it about transcendence that the Turusch-or, more likely, their Sh’daar masters-so feared? For that matter, what was transcendence, as they understood the term? That was the real problem here…knowing what completely alien cultures meant by the term.

Hell, Koenig wasn’t certain he understood what the word meant. And beings with such different brains as the Turusch likely meant something very different, very alien.

What was it the Turusch had said, their third-line description of transcendence? “Technic species evolve into higher forms. When they pass beyond, they leave behind…death.”

That was it. The first half of that statement was transparent enough. For centuries now, humankind had speculated about its relationship with its technology, and about where that technology might be taking it. Humans today, human technology today, would be comprehensible-barely-to humans of three or four hundred years ago. But the GRIN technologies, especially, were rapidly going a long way toward changing what it meant to be human.

Genetics. People like Michael Noranaga had engaged genetic prostheses to change their somatypes. Noranaga had done so in the line of duty, becoming a semi-aquatic selkie with more in common with marine mammals than with unaltered humans. But on Earth there were humans who changed their body shapes as a form of cultural or artistic expression…shapeshifters, they called themselves. The very idea of a human who looked like an elf or a mixture of wolf and human challenged the very concept of what it meant to be human.

Robotics. Robots had become ubiquitous throughout human culture. The teleoperation of NTE robots let human minds explore toxic and deadly environments like the surface of Venus or the nitrogen-ice plains of Triton…human minds temporarily taking on bodies of plastic and nanolaminate alloys. And non-sentient robotic intelligences were everywhere, from smart clothes to smart buildings to smart missiles.

Information Systems. Perhaps the biggest changes had occurred in that field. Through cerebral implants, any human in any civilized location could have instant access to all available information through the Net-Cloud. He could talk to anyone anywhere, limited only by the speed of light, and at great distances he could converse with another person’s AI-generated avatar. AIs, artificial intelligences of greater than human capability, operated everywhere throughout the myriad Net-Clouds, gathering and storing information, transmitting it, reshaping it, editing it, artificial minds that had already transcended the merely human.

And Nanotechnology. Ships that reshaped themselves in flight, buildings that grew themselves from piles of debris, those were the most visible applications of the technology. Less visible but even more powerful were examples such as the trillions of nanorobotic devices pumping through Koenig’s circulatory system, cleaning out arteries, maintaining key balances within his metabolic processes, even repairing damaged chromosomes and guarding against cancers, disease, even the effects of aging. Alexander Koenig could expect to live to see the age of five hundred, they told him-theoretically, given ongoing nanomedical advances, there was no way to even guess how long he might live-assuming he survived the next day or so.

The more far-reaching effects, though, the most transforming ones, appeared when various technologies mingled-the use of nanotechnology to grow the cerebral implants that gave people their links with the Net-Cloud, and which allowed people to have their own personal AI software running on their internal hardware. The four technologies designated as GRIN interacted with one another, multiplied one another’s effects and potencies.

And where, and what, were they all leading to?

Of greater concern right now, though, to Koenig’s mind, was the second half of the Turusch statement: “When they pass beyond, they leave behind death.”

How did transcendence equate with death?

Why would human transcendence be of concern to an alien species…in particular, an alien species like the Sh’daar, which might be half a billion years old?

Humans had just taken the first step in beginning to understand the Turusch; they didn’t yet know what the Sh’daar looked like, much less understand how they thought.

Somehow, Koenig thought, humans were going to have to come to grips with those questions, to begin to understand who and what the Sh’daar were and how they thought.

And they would have to do so very swiftly indeed, if humankind was going to survive….