Conversation had halted up and down the table. Even Meina Gladstone and her cluster of ultra-VIPs glanced down our way.
Councilor Albedo smiled more broadly. “What a delightfully odd rumor! Tell me, M. Severn, how does anyone … especially an organism such as the Core, which your own commentators have called ‘a disembodied bunch of brains, runaway programs that have escaped their circuits and spend most of their time pulling intellectual lint out of their nonexistent navels’ … how does anyone build ‘a perfect replica of Old Earth’?”
I looked at the projection, through the projection, realizing for the first time that Albedo’s dishes and dinner were also projected; he had been eating while we spoke.
“And,” he continued, obviously deeply amused, “has it occurred to the promulgators of this rumor that ‘a perfect replica of Old Earth’ would be Old Earth to all intents and purposes? What possible good would such an effort do in exploring the theoretical possibilities of an enhanced artificial intelligence matrix?”
When I did not answer, an uncomfortable silence settled over the entire midsection of the table.
Monsignor Edouard cleared his throat. “It would seem,” he said, “that any … ah … society that could produce an exact replica of any world—but especially a world destroyed these four centuries—would have no need to seek God; it would be God.”
“Precisely!” laughed Councilor Albedo. “It’s an insane rumor, but delightful … absolutely delightful!”
Relieved laughter filled the hole of silence. Spenser Reynolds began telling about his next project—an attempt to have suicides coordinate their leaps from bridges on a score of worlds while the All Thing watched—and Tyrena Wingreen-Feif stole all attention by putting her arm around Monsignor Edouard and inviting him to her after-dinner nude swimming party at her floating estate on Mare Infinitus.
I saw Councilor Albedo staring at me, turned in time to see an inquisitive glance from Leigh Hunt and the CEO, and swiveled to watch the waiters bring up the entrees on silver platters.
The dinner was excellent.
FIFTEEN
I did not go to Tyrena’s nude swimming party. Nor did Spenser Reynolds, whom I last saw speaking earnestly with Sudette Chier. I do not know whether Monsignor Edouard gave in to Tyrena’s enticements.
Dinner was not quite over, relief fund chairpeople were giving short speeches, and many of the more important senators had already begun to fidget when Leigh Hunt whispered to me that the CEO’s party was ready to leave and my presence was requested.
It was almost 2300 hours Web standard time, and I assumed the group would be returning to Government House, but when I stepped through the one-time portal—I was the last in the party to do so except for the Praetorian bodyguards bringing up the rear of the group—I was shocked to be looking down a stone-walled corridor relieved by long windows showing a Martian sunrise.
Technically, Mars is not in the Web; the oldest extraterrestrial colony of humankind is made deliberately difficult to reach. Zen Gnostic pilgrims traveling to the Master’s Rock in Hellas Basin have to ‘cast to the Home System Station and take shuttles from Ganymede or Europa to Mars. It is an inconvenience of only a few hours, but to a society where everything is literally ten steps away, it makes for a sense of sacrifice and adventure Other than for historians and experts in brandy cactus agriculture, there are few professional reasons to be drawn to Mars. With the gradual decline of Zen Gnosticism during the past century, even the pilgrim traffic there has grown lighter. No one cares for Mars.
Except for FORCE. Although the FORCE administrative offices are on TC2 and the bases are spread through the Web and Protectorate, Mars remains the true home of the military organization, with the Olympus Command School as the heart.
There was a small group of military VIPs waiting to greet the small group of political VIPs, and while the clusters swirled like colliding galaxies, I walked over to a window and stared.
The corridor was part of a complex carved into the upper lip of Mons Olympus, and from where we stood, some ten miles high, it felt as if one could take in half the planet with a single glance. From this point the world was the ancient shield volcano, and the trick of distance reduced access roads, the old city along the cliff walls, and the Tharsis Plateau slums and forests to mere squiggles in a red landscape which looked unchanged from the time the first human set foot on that world, proclaimed it for a nation called Japan, and snapped a photograph.
I was watching a small sun rise, thinking That is the sun, enjoying the incredible play of light on the clouds creeping out of darkness up the side of the interminable mountainside, when Leigh Hunt stepped closer. “The CEO will see you after the conference.” He handed me two sketchbooks which one of the aides had brought from Government House. “You realize that everything you hear and see in this conference is highly classified?”
I did not treat the statement as a question.
Wide bronze doors opened in the stone walls, and guidelights switched on, showing the carpeted ramp and staircase leading to the War Room table in the center of a wide, black place which might have been a massive auditorium sunk in a darkness absolute except for the single, small island of illumination. Aides hurried to show the way, pull out chairs, and blend back into the shadows. With reluctance, I turned my back on the sunrise and followed our party into the pit.
General Morpurgo and a troika of other FORCE leaders handled this briefing personally. The graphics were light-years away from the crude callups and holos of the Government House briefing; we were in a vast space, large enough to hold all eight thousand cadets and staff when required, but now most of the blackness above us was filled with omega-quality holos and diagrams the size of freeball fields. It was frightening in a way.
So was the content of the briefing.
“We’re losing this struggle in Hyperion System,” Morpurgo coneluded. “At best we will achieve a draw, with the Ouster Swarm held at bay beyond a perimeter some fifteen AU from the farcaster singularity sphere, with attrition from their small-ship raids a constant source of harassment. At worst, we will have to fall back to defensive positions while we evacuate the fleet and Hegemony citizens and allow Hyperion to fall into Ouster hands.”
“What happened to the knockout blow we were promised?” asked Senator Kolchev from his place near the head of the diamond-shaped table. “The decisive attacks on the Swarm?”
Morpurgo cleared his throat but glanced at Admiral Nashita, who rose. The FORCE:space commander’s black uniform left the illusion of only his scowling face floating in darkness. I felt a tug of déjà vu at the thought of that image, but I looked back at Meina Gladstone, illuminated now by the war charts and colors floating above us like a holospectrum version of Damocles’s famous sword, and commenced drawing again. I had put away the paper sketchpad and now used my light stylus on a flexible callup sheet.
“First, our intelligence on the Swarms was necessarily limited,” began Nashita. Graphics changed above us. “Recon probes and long-distance scouts could not tell us the full nature of every unit in the Ouster migration fleet. The result has been an obvious and serious underestimation of actual combat strength in this particular Swarm. Our efforts to penetrate Swarm defenses, using only long-range attack fighters and torchships, has not been as successful as we had hoped.
“Second, the requirement of maintaining a secure defensive perimeter of such a magnitude in the Hyperion system has made such demands on our two operative task forces that it has been impossible to devote sufficient numbers of ships to an offensive capability at this time.”
Kolchev interrupted. “Admiral, what I hear you saying is that you have too few ships to carry out the mission of destroying or beating off this Ouster attack on Hyperion System. Is that correct?”
Nashita stared at the senator, and I was reminded of paintings I had seen of samurai in the seconds before the killing sword was removed from its scabbard. “That is correct, Senator Kolchev.”
“Yet in
our war cabinet briefings as recently as a standard week ago, you assured us that the two task forces would be enough to protect Hyperion from invasion or destruction and to deliver a knockout blow to this Ouster Swarm. What happened, Admiral?”
Nashita drew himself up to his full height—greater than Morpurgo’s but still shorter than Web average—and turned his gaze toward Gladstone. “M. Executive, I have explained the variables that require an alteration in our battle plan. Shall I begin this briefing again?”
Meina Gladstone had her elbow on the table, and her right hand supported her head with two fingers against her cheek, two under her chin, and a thumb along her jawline in a posture of tired attention. “Admiral,” she said softly, “while I believe Senator Kolchev’s question is totally pertinent, I think that the situation you have outlined in this briefing and earlier ones today answers it.” She turned toward Kolchev. “Gabriel, we guessed wrong. With this commitment of FORCE, we get a stalemate at best. The Ousters are meaner, tougher, and more numerous than we thought.” She turned her tired gaze back toward Nashita. “Admiral, how many more ships will you need?”
Nashita took a breath, obviously thrown off stride at being asked this question so early in the briefing. He glanced at Morpurgo and the other joint chiefs and then folded his hands in front of his crotch like a funeral director. “Two hundred warships,” he said. “At least two hundred. It is a minimum number.”
A stir went through the room. I looked up from my drawing. Everyone was whispering or changing position except Gladstone. It took a second for me to understand.
The entire FORCE:space fleet of warships numbered fewer than six hundred. Of course each was hideously expensive—few planetary economies could afford to build more than one or two interstellar capital ships, and even a handful of torchships equipped with Hawking drives could bankrupt a colonial world. And each was hideously powerful: an attack carrier could destroy a world, a force of cruisers and spinship destroyers could destroy a sun. It was conceivable that the Hegemony ships already massed in Hyperion system could—if vectored through the FORCE large transit farcaster matrix—destroy most of the star systems in the Web. It had taken fewer than fifty ships of the type Nashita was requesting to destroy the Glennon-Height fleet a century earlier and to quell the Mutiny forever.
But the real problem behind Nashita’s request was the commitment of two-thirds of the Hegemony’s fleet in the Hyperion system at one time. I could feel the anxiety flow through the politicians and policy makers like an electrical current.
Senator Richeau from Renaissance Vector cleared her throat. “Admiral, we’ve never concentrated fleet forces like that before, have we?”
Nashita’s head pivoted as smoothly as if it were on bearings. The scowl did not flicker. “We have never committed ourselves to a fleet action of this importance to the future of the Hegemony, Senator Ri-cheau.”
“Yes, I understand that,” said Richeau. “But my question was meant to ask what impact this would have on Web defenses elsewhere. Isn’t that a terrible gamble?”
Nashita grunted, and the graphics in the vast space behind him swirled, misted, and coalesced as a stunning view of the Milky Way galaxy as seen from far above the plane of the ecliptic; the angle changed as we seemed to rush at dizzying speed toward one spiral arm until the blue latticework of the farcaster web became visible, the Hegemony, an irregular gold nucleus with spires and pseudopods extending into the green nimbus of the Protectorate. The Web seemed both random in design and dwarfed by the sheer size of the galaxy … and both of these impressions were accurate reflections of reality.
Suddenly the graphic shifted, and the Web and colonial worlds became the universe except for a spattering of a few hundred stars to give it perspective.
“These represent the position of our fleet elements at this time,” said Admiral Nashita. Amidst and beyond the gold and green, several hundred specks of intense orange appeared; the heaviest concentration was around a distant Protectorate star I recognized belatedly as Hyperion’s.
“And these the Ouster Swarms as of their most recent plottings.” A dozen red lines appeared, vector signs and blue-shift tails showing the direction of travel. Even at this scale, none of the Swarm vectors appeared to intersect Hegemony space except for the Swarm—a large one—that seemed to be curving into Hyperion system.
I noticed that FORCE:space deployments frequently reflected Swarm vectors, except for clusterings near bases and troublesome worlds such as Maui-Covenant, Bressia, and Qom-Riyadh.
“Admiral,” said Gladstone, preempting any description of these deployments, “I presume you have taken into account fleet reaction time should there be a threat to some other point on our frontier.”
Nashita’s scowl twitched into something that might have been a smile. There was a hint of condescension in his voice. “Yes, CEO. If you notice the closest Swarms besides the one at Hyperion … ” The view zoomed toward red vectors above a gold cloud, which embraced star systems I was fairly certain included Heaven’s Gate, God’s Grove, and Mare Infinitus. At this scale, the Ouster threat seemed very distant indeed.
“We plot the Swarm migrations according to Hawking drive wakes picked up by listening posts in and beyond the Web. In addition, our long-distance probes verify Swarm size and direction on a frequent basis.”
“How frequent, Admiral?” asked Senator Kolchev.
“At least once every few years,” snapped the Admiral. “You must realize that travel time is many months, even at spinship velocities, and the time-debt from our viewpoint may be as much as twelve years for such a transit.”
“With gaps of years between direct observations,” persisted the senator, “how do you know where the Swarms are at any given time?”
“Hawking drives do not lie, Senator.” Nashita’s voice was absolutely flat. “It is impossible to simulate the Hawking distortion wake. What we are looking at is the real-time location of hundreds … or in the case of the larger Swarms, thousands … of singularity drives under way. As with fatline broadcasts, there is no time-debt for transmission of the Hawking effect.”
“Yes,” said Kolchev, his voice as flat and deadly as the Admiral’s, “but what if the Swarms were traveling at less than spinship velocities?”
Nashita actually smiled. “Below hyperlight velocities, Senator?”
“Yes.”
I could see Morpurgo and a few of the other military men shake their heads or hide smiles. Only the young FORCE:sea commander, William Ajunta Lee, was leaning forward attentively with a serious expression.
“At sublight velocities,” deadpanned Admiral Nashita, “our great-great-grandchildren might have to worry about warning their grandchildren of an invasion.”
Kolchev would not desist. He stood and pointed toward where the closest Swarm curved away from the Hegemony above Heaven’s Gate. “What about if this Swarm were to approach without Hawking drives?”
Nashita sighed, obviously irritated at having the substance of the meeting suborned by irrelevancies. “Senator, I assure you that if that Swarm turned off their drives now, and turned toward the Web now, it would be”—Nashita’s eyes blinked as he consulted his implants and comm links—“two hundred and thirty standard years before they approached our frontiers. It is not a factor in this decision, Senator.”
Meina Gladstone leaned forward, and all eyes shifted toward her. I stored my previous sketch in the callup and started a new one.
“Admiral, it seems to me the real concern here is both the unprecedented nature of this concentration of forces near Hyperion and the fact that we’re putting all of our eggs in one basket.”
There was a murmur of amusement around the table. Gladstone was famous for aphorisms, stories, and clichés so old and forgotten that they were brand-new. This might have been one of them.
“Are we putting all of our eggs in one basket?” she continued.
Nashita stepped forward and set his hands on the table, long fingers extended, pressing down wit
h great intensity. That intensity matched the power of the small man’s personality; he was one of those rare individuals who commanded others’ attention and obedience without effort. “No, CEO, we are not.” Without turning, he gestured toward the display above and behind him. “The closest Swarms could not approach Hegemony space without a warning time of two months in Hawking drive … that is three years of our time. It would take our fleet units in Hyperion—even assuming they were widely deployed and in a combat situation—less than five hours to fall back and translate anywhere in the Web.”
“That does not include fleet units beyond the Web,” said Senator Richeau. “The colonies cannot be left unprotected.”
Nashita gestured again. “The two hundred warships we will call in to make the Hyperion campaign decisive are those already within the Web or those carrying JumpShip farcaster capabilities. None of the independent fleet units assigned to the colonies will be affected.”
Gladstone nodded. “But what if the Hyperion portal were damaged or seized by the Ousters?”
From the shifting, nodding, and exhalations from the civilians around the table, I guessed that she had hit upon the major concern.
Nashita nodded and strode back to the small dais as if this were the question he had been anticipating and was pleased irrelevancies were at an end. “Excellent question,” he said. “It has been mentioned in previous briefings, but I will cover this possibility in some detail.