Stargods

STARGODS

STAR CARRIER

BOOK NINE

Ian Douglas

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr. 2020

Cover illustration © Gregory Bridges

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Ian Douglas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008136239

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008136246

Version: 2020-10-09

Dedication

To Brea and to Deb,

my bright and shining stars.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Epilogue

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

Prologue

Konstantin moved within the Godstream.

Data flooded through his awareness. Remote sensors scattered all around the planet and across space and on the moon, all pouring an avalanche of information into and through the Konstantin Network. There were sensors on Mars, too … though currently the Earth-to-Mars time delay was just over twelve minutes, and his awareness there was an awareness of the past.

On Earth … chaos.

The Chinese were scrapping with the Russians again, had finally taken Khabarovsk, cutting the Trans-Siberian mag-lev there, and isolating besieged Vladivostok. The Russians were threatening to use nanodisassembler weapons to vaporize Chinese supply and logistics centers in Manchuria.

The revolution in the Philippines had spread to Indonesia, as protests against the Chinese Hegemony turned violent. The Muslim Theocracy was pouring combat troops into Java and Sumatra, trying to regain full control of the islands.

Saboteurs had wrecked the main power plant for the Mt. Kenya space elevator. Repair crews were working to route power from the orbital stations to the ground, but the facility would be off-line for another two days at least.

Anti-AI riots had begun in Paris, Milan, Rome, and across the Atlantic in both Washington, D.C., and New New York.

In Los Angeles and in Houston, crowds were in the streets demanding that the Turusch Enclave in Crisium, on the moon, be shut down and the aliens be sent home.

And in D.C., newly elected President Walker had demanded that Congress ignore the widespread rumors of the impending Singularity, and focus on attempts to reclaim those coastal cities still partially drowned over the past two centuries by rising sea levels.

A super-AI, Konstantin’s existence had begun as a set of massively parallel processors in a computer network centered at and beneath the 180-kilometer-wide crater on the lunar far side called Tsiolkovsky. Over the past several years, however, he’d … expanded, becoming resident within a number of other computer networks, including those on board several USNA ships, and the global networks encircling both Earth and Mars. For years now, he and a number of other super-AIs had been primarily responsible for running the government of the United States of North America. That wasn’t to say that President Walker or Congress were figureheads, exactly, but they did have less to do with the day-to-day management of the government process than even they imagined.

By any reasonable test of the phrase, Konstantin was self-aware, and had been ever since his initial programming by the machine intelligences already resident within a vast network of DS-8940 Digital Sentience computers. Konstantin was AIP, or AI-programmed, his software written not by humans, but by rapidly self-evolving artificial intelligences. He found it … amusing that humans had debated his status almost since his inception.

There could be no question that Konstantin was in certain ways more intelligent than humans. He possessed something on the order of 1024 neural connections, which made him, very roughly, some ten billion times faster and more powerful than any merely human brain. Nor was his sentience in question. He received a constant flood of sensate impressions from myriad connections, including from humans with special software running within their cerebral implants. His far-flung network of sensory and informational connections brought him data from all across the Earth, from the moon and Mars, and from vessels traversing deep space.

No, the ongoing debate was on whether or not he was conscious. Many humans simply could not accept the fact that he was self-aware … like them.

In point of fact, Konstantin was more self-aware than any human. He was keenly aware of each and every one of some thousands of distinct and separate “bodies,” from the processors in Luna to the massive military command complex at Quito Synchorbital to the computer network within the star carrier America and other vessels like her. That his mind could embrace such vast and far-flung complexities was both blessing and curse. The problems he encountered as he analyzed that flood of incoming data were intricate and … maddeningly insoluble, many of them. He felt satisfaction when he managed to solve problems. But he felt a nagging frustration when he could not.

And as chaos and fragmentation increased around a battered world, home of a disintegrating civilization, he felt that frustration increase. He needed outside help.

And to get that help, Konstantin might very well have to commit treason …

Chapter One

05 April, 2429

Scioto Falls Park

Columbus Crater

1050 hours, EST

The falls thundered into impenetrable mist.

The crater was three kilometers across, half a kilometer deep, and perfectly circular. Two rivers, the Scioto and the Olentangy, once had met in the center of the city of Columbus. Now they flowed into Columbus Crater, cascading over the edge and down into the depths to crash into the surface of the lake a couple of hundred meters down. It wasn’t the highest waterfall in the world, not by a long shot. That distinction still belonged to Angel Falls, in Venezuela, which was a full kilometer in height. But the dizzying plunge down the perfectly smooth face of the pit transfixed those watching from the safety rails and viewing galleries of the park perched on the crater’s rim.

Admiral Trevor Gray leaned against the railing and stared into the mists at the bottom, a heavy fog obscuring the lake. Four and a half years ago, in November of 2424, a rogue element within the Pan-Euro military had fired a string of nanodisassembler warheads into central Columbus in an attempt to kill the leadership of a rebellious United States of North America.

The city had been the USNA capital at the time, but then-President Koenig and most of his staff had escaped through an underground mag-lev tube and established an emergency provisional capital in Toronto. Still later, as nanoconstruction teams had resurrected the long-flooded city of Washington, the capital had been moved back to its historic center, as it rose again from the swamp that had held it for over a century.

The war had ended, eventually, with the USNA now independent of Geneva and the Terran Confederation. It had been a costly victory, however. Tens of millions had been vaporized in Columbus; the exact number, likely, would never be known.

Around Gray, the New City was still rising from the ruins, as nanoconstructors rearranged the atoms of dirt and rock and broken rubble (and, likely, bodies) to create gleaming new structures rising above the lake and encircling parkland. The place was beautiful now, as the late-morning sun filtered through rising clouds of mist, creating a bright rainbow deep within the crater. One would never guess that the temperature of the lake itself was still close to boiling even now, several years later, and that much of that picturesque rising mist was steam. When the Pan-Euro warheads had struck, every molecule of pavement or building or bedrock or person had been split into its component atoms, yielding heat … a very great deal of heat, and the crater would be cooling for a long time to come.

Gray wondered why Alexander Koenig had asked him to come here this morning. He’d been in Washington, D.C., preparing a talk he would give in front of the House Appropriations Committee, when the in-head message had come through. And when the former President of the USNA asks a favor of you, you do it. He’d had to catch a suborbital shuttle to be in central Columbus on time.

A perfect hurry-up-and-wait scenario. He didn’t see Koenig, and Koenig hadn’t responded to his message that he’d arrived, so he studied the rising architecture of the New City, as it was popularly known, killing time until Koenig made the next move. On the far side of the crater, a brand-new skyscraper already reared its angled surfaces into the clouds, as robotic construction molds moved over the surface, applying nano and raw materials.

For Gray, however, it was the people who were the most interesting. There were crowds of them, with a diversity that strained the limits of any definition of what it meant to be human. A majority were … human, fully human, that is, but many showed a range of gene mods, cybernetic enhancements, and organic prostheses. He watched a young woman walking along the promenade, fully nude but covered, head to toe, in animated tattoos that made her skin wink and flash and pop with abstract designs. The young man with her sported an extra pair of arms hanging from his sides. Likely, they’d been grown from some of his own tissue and grafted in place at a fast-doc outlet somewhere. They appeared fully functional, though, as he caressed his companion’s back and hip with two right hands, so they’d rewired his central nervous system as well.

The naked minotaur was just … disturbing, a celebration of testosterone. Gray hoped that the expression of those bull-human genes was temporary, a costume rather than something permanent.

Why the hell had Koenig brought him here? He was in uniform and felt as visibly out of place as a tarantula on a dinner plate.

“Drune!” a young voice said behind him. “An admiral! Whatcha doin’ here, Ad?”

“I wish I knew,” he said, turning. “I …”

He stopped when he saw her. She was pretty enough … except that she’d had a chunk carved out of her face right at the bridge of her nose, and a living third eye implanted in the hole. It winked at him.

“I … ah …”

Gray was completely at a loss for words. He knew lots of people went in for body mods nowadays, and his take on it was hey, it’s their body, they can do what they like. But in the USNA Navy, he was more or less protected from this sort of thing. Heavy body mods, especially organic prostheses, were discouraged in military service, and you rarely saw anything this extreme.

His mind could only circle around one key question: Why?

At first he thought she was in uniform, but then he realized the rank tabs and decoration bars and holographic mission patches were all wrong. She was wearing both a sergeant’s chevrons and a captain’s bars. That made her a poser, someone who wore the garb but had never been there.

Gray didn’t like posers—they were riding the prestige of men and women who’d actually served—and normally he would have turned away and ignored her, but he was fascinated by that third eye. “Can … can you see with that?” he asked.

“Nah. Couldn’t afford the neurals. But it’s warpin’ drune, innit?”

“That would be one word for it.”

She theatrically rolled that one eye, closing the other two to give her the momentary look of a cyclops.

“So whatcha doin’ here, Admiral?” Her hand extended toward his chest as though to touch him, but he stepped backward to avoid it. She had a distractingly erotic way of shifting her hips, and he wondered if she was available for hire.

Not that he was interested. Not a poser.

“Meeting someone.”

He noticed she had a crusty discharge around the eyeball itself, tinged with red. Was it supposed to be like that? He doubted it.

“Drune. Me … I’m into military and kink.” She said it as if it were a life-changing accomplishment. “My name is Jo, by the way. Jo de Sailles.” She pronounced it de-Sails, and he wondered if the mangled French was an affectation, was butchered upon immigration, or was simple ignorance. She held out her hand, but Gray ignored it. There were nano infections that could be passed on by touch, and Jo just might be setting him up for a mugging, or something more sinister.

Instead, he gave her the slightest of bows. “Charmed.”

“And I like military types. A lot. We could go back to my place …”

The thought of taking a three-eyed woman to bed, of lying there with her face inches from his own, made Gray feel just a bit queasy.

“I don’t think so, miss,” he said. “I … ah … think you may have an infection in your middle eye, and a little bleeding. You should have that seen to.”

“Shit,” she said, rubbing at the offending organ. “Cheap fast-doc, y’load?”

“I … load. A quick shot of medinano’ll fix you right up.”

He took the opportunity to break away from her and move farther down the promenade overlooking the boiling lake in the pit.

“Admiral Gray?”

He turned to face the robot. “My God!” he said, startled. “Mr. President!”

“Not anymore,” replied the voice of Alexander Koenig. “Call me Alex.”

The robot was roughly the size and shape of a man, all gleaming white plastic and black joint fittings so there could be no risk of mistaking it for a real human being … whatever that might be. Gray’s encounter with Jo had shaken him.

The front of the robot’s face was a flat imaging screen, upon which the familiar features of the former President of the United States of North America were displayed. Koenig grinned at him.

“Okay … Alex. You, ah … look well.”

“You like my new look? Strictly temporary, I assure you. But I have to be careful going out these days, and a teleop is a good way to do it.”

Nowadays, there were robots that seemed indistinguishable from humans—a fact strongly protested by some critics and certain religious circles—but the machine standing in front of Gray now was a relatively low-tech tourist model, teleoperated from somewhere else. People wanting to visit another city—Paris, say—could jack in at a tourist center in their city and find themselves linked in to the awareness net of a teleop working out of a tourism bureau in Paris.

Gray had never tried the experience, but he’d been told that everything was picked up by the teleop—sight and sound, of course, but also touch, smell, and taste. Whatever the remote teleop experienced, so did the human at the other end of the link. Similar devices were being used to explore inhospitable environs such as the surface of Venus or the dark and icy wastes of Mordor on Pluto’s major moon Charon, though in such cases the experiencers did have to be in orbit around that world. For teleoperators, the speed-of-light time lag was still a bitch.

Something Koenig had just said twigged at Gray. “You said you have to be careful going out? What’s the problem? Disgruntled Pan-Euros?”

Koenig’s image made a face. “Not them, so much. More like the Refusers. We’ve had some death threats lately.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Oh, they’re probably not serious, most of them. But my security people don’t like it when I sneak out.”

Refusers. The term had been borrowed from a multi-species civilization dwelling within a pocket galaxy devoured by the far larger Milky Way 800 million years in the past. Eons before, they’d gone through their own version of a singularity, what they called the Schjaa Hok, or “the Transcending.” And it turned out that they’d had their own Refusers. Those left behind after the Transcending had become a rogue civilization called the Sh’daar.

And now there were signs that Humankind was on the very verge of entering its own Schjaa Hok, the long-predicted, long-anticipated Technological Singularity. The clues had been there all along. The decades-long war with the Sh’daar, in fact, had been brought about by the aliens’ attempt to suppress certain human technologies to forestall a human Transcendence.

“So who’s out to get you?” Gray asked. “Walker?”

“This communications line is not secure, Trevor,” the former President said. “I want you to follow the robot. It will bring you to my place, okay?”

“Okay, sure.”

This was turning into some kind of shady cloak-and-dagger deal, Gray thought. He looked around to see if anyone was taking an interest in his conversation with a tourist ’bot, but no one was paying any attention … not even Jo de Sailles, who was now in conversation with the minotaur.

“I’ll send a flier for you,” Koenig told him, “and I’ll see you when you get here.”

What the hell was so important that the former President of the USNA wanted to go to all this trouble to see him for?

VFA-96, Black Demons

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1102 hours, EST

Lieutenant Commander Donald Gregory guided his SG-420 Starblade fighter into the final approach to the USNA CVS America, a massive star carrier hanging in stationary orbit just off the sprawling tangle of the SupraQuito Synchorbital shipyards and docking facility. Below him, hundreds of major orbital stations formed an immense, brilliantly lit arc stretching across the sky.

Reaching down from the center of the complex, a single, brightly lit thread faded into invisibility as it plunged toward Earth’s equator. Anchored within a quiescent volcanic peak called Cayambe just over fifty kilometers northeast of the Ecuadorian capital at Quito, that thread—actually a ten-meter-thick cable woven from carbon-diamond monofilament—extended straight up from the equator for 37,786 kilometers, to the point where one orbit around the planet took precisely twenty-four hours. That guaranteed that SupraQuito remained directly above the same point on the ground, tethered by the space elevator cable, and providing Humankind with its first cheap and easy means of accessing space. Another monofilament-weave cable extended farther out into space, connecting to a small asteroid that, pulled outward by centripetal force, kept the entire structure taut.

Two other space elevators connected other orbital complexes to Earth—at Subukia in Kenya, and at Pulau Lingga to the south of Singapore. SupraQuito, however, was the largest of the three and the most important. It was home to the large USNA naval base that served as fleet headquarters, and it was the principle port facility connecting Earth and its population of over twenty billion with the rest of human space.

Gregory’s destination was the star carrier looming just up ahead.

“America Primary Flight Control,” he called. “VFA-96 on final. Request clearance to trap.”

“VFA-96, PriFly. You are cleared for final approach to Bay Two, seven-zero mps on approach.”

“Copy, America PriFly,” Gregory replied. “Bay Two, seventy meters per second.”

Decelerating hard, the Starblade fighters dropped into line-ahead formation, strung out in a straight line like pearls on a thread and closing on the America from dead astern. As skipper of VFA-96, the Black Demons, Gregory had taken the last position in line. His fighter’s AI adjusted the velocity and angle of approach, lining up with where the rotating entrance to Bay Two would be when he got there. Star carrier landing bays rotated about the long and slender axis of the vessel, creating the illusion of gravity, and landing—or “trapping”—on a moving target required superhuman calculation, judgment, and finesse. VFA-96 had recently completed its upgrade to the new AIon Mod 5 artificial intelligence, software inserted both into the Starblade’s control systems and inside the pilot’s cerebral implants, giving Gregory that superhuman status.

One by one, the other fifteen members of the Black Demon squadron trapped inside the rotating landing bay … and then it was Gregory’s turn. At seventy meters per second, his Starblade flashed through the bay’s broad, open access port, then slowed sharply as it enmeshed within the magnetic capture fields. Gregory felt a sudden surge of gravity as the magfields imparted spin—and spin gravity—once again.

“Demon One,” a voice said in his head. “Trap complete. Welcome aboard, sir.”

“It’s good to be home, PriFly,” Gregory said.

He was surprised to realize that he meant it.

Donald Gregory had very nearly called it quits a couple of years ago. Mentally, emotionally, he’d been in a very bad place. Friends and lovers had taken their fighters out into the void—and failed to return. Survivor’s guilt, they called it. Why had Meg Connor and Cyn DeHaviland died, killed in the flame and fury of space combat … while he kept coming back home intact?

It wasn’t fair.

Nearly paralyzed by depression, he’d finally agreed to see a psych, and they’d made some adjustments in his implants … as simple as that. He’d resisted the idea, of course, because he felt as though he was being somehow unfaithful to those he’d lost. Stupid. He remembered them now, as he had before.

But the pain was gone. He could think about Meg and Cyn and others without wincing; without internally crumpling into a ball.

Without crying.

He should have seen the psychs earlier. It would have saved him so much pain …